If you're doomscrolling, guess what? So far there are 51 kākāpō chicks hatched and thriving this season, the same number of birds as we had in TOTAL in the 90s! Only one chick has died and there are still fertile eggs waiting to hatch!
Honestly if NZ parties don’t front up about their plans for climate & basic infrastructure we should be deeply ashamed -NZ has a sewerage crisis in all our major cities, we have flooding & landslides causing loss of life & critical failure s- thinking we can cap rates & manage this, is crazy
An impression of a fossil leaf showing details of the veination. The apical and lower parts of the leaf are missing
A piece of Glossopteris leaf from the late Permian of Antarctica ~260 million years old 🌳⛏️. Broken but showing nice detail of the veination. Glossopterids are seed plants that were found on all of today's southern continents during the Permian. Happy #FossilFriday! #paleobotany #botany
The second #kakapo chick of the #kakapo2026 breeding season hatched this morning: Hine Taumai-A1-2026 on Ako's nest on Te Kākahu. We transferred the egg from Anchor two nights ago. This is Ako's first-ever chick, which is just a few hours old in this video. #conservation #birds #parrots
Some good news for anyone depressed about the world right now: the kakapo are getting it onnnnn thespinoff.co.nz/science/13-0...
There's a lot of useful numbers in this post.
Crises in the cryosphere keynote session this morning #CLIC2026 - talks by Lauren Vargo, Petra Heil, Nick Golledge, Chris Stokes. Topics ranging from mountain glaciers, ice sheets, sea ice - using images, observations, and models. Great talks - depressing session. 🥶🌊@clic
William Nordhaus received the Nobel Memorial Prize for these flawed economic models, and Bjorn Lomborg built a highly lucrative career on them.
They told rich and powerful people what they wanted to hear.
While helping to consign us all to catastrophe.
www.theguardian.com/environment/...
If the rest of us were fretting, the Prime Minister seemed determined to stay blithe. On the Wednesday evening, with five active states of emergency in place, hundreds evacuating their homes and one poor man already missing in the floodwaters, Christopher Luxon’s Facebook account posted pictures of him having “great fun” while “out campaigning across Christchurch with our National MPs today”. It seemed unfathomably tone-deaf. What next? A disaster-themed Spotify playlist? The following morning, part of Mauao collapsed into the Mt Maunganui campground and six bodies lay under the rocks and soil.
97% of central govt expenditure was on responding to and recovering from natural disasters, only 3% spent on risk reduction and resilience.
Yet…“the Government cannot commit to providing financial support for the business case at this stage”.
#nzpol
www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/3609...
The current reforms of the research system are now on track for another failure. They double down on mistakes that undermine long-term growth, well being & safety. We must ask for accountability and transparency about three key issues as we go into the election year.
scientists.org.nz/news/13593197
good riddance to Minister Judith Collins, who orchestrated the present gutting of New Zealand's science funding establishment
I've not seen or heard any coverage today that mentions this tiny detail, affecting 100s of millions of public dollars and endangering NZ's entire intellectual community
By cancelling the Climate Emergency Response Fund, the government was telling us there was nothing to see here. The past week has shown they could not have been more wrong. We need a government that takes climate change seriously because it's only going to get worse. #nzpol
4,500t is emitted in New Zealand every half-hour.
And the extra emissions if New Zealand reneges on our current Paris Agreement target - 84Mt - would cause 19,000 extra deaths around the world.
It's tempting to look away when disasters and deaths are overseas, but sometimes they're here.
3/-
People. are. dying.
A negotiator friend used to say that in the Paris Agreement carbon markets negotiations when the debate veered into obstructionism and game-playing.
There were sometimes embarrassed laughs: it was hard to equate the bean-counting work being done there to life and death.
1/-
The tragic loss of lives in NZ flooding events this week are climate change deaths. Media and govt are avoiding the topic.
Leaders and commentators must acknowledge the emerging reality of ordinary summer rainstorms carrying volumes of water akin to tropical cyclones of previous decades.
I've had some frustrating conversations with council over this. We need an actual long term plan (decades not election cycles) and hard decisions, instead of an expensive and ultimately futile exercise of fixing the same stuff repeatedly and hoping it won't happen again for a bit (spoiler it will).
life ending and infrastructure destroying floods are now an annual occurrence in new zealand. there is no political recognition of this new reality, and thus there is no resourcing for its prevention. we are not ready
A graph showing daily temperature anomalies since the 1940s
Not a single day in 2025 was cooler than the 1991-2020 average, on a global scale. @copernicusecmwf.bsky.social
We’ve wrapped up drilling at Crary Ice Rise with 228m of sediment core. This is an unprecedented record of the history of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet stretching back millions of years. Initial observations indicate the core includes periods of environmental change during past times of warming.
New paper out in @natgeosci.nature.com in which we combined marine sediment core analysis with models to show spatial differences in how #Antarctica responded to warmer #climate during the Pliocene:
phys.org/news/2026-01...
We have successfully drilled 200 metres of sediment core from beneath the ice sheet at Crary Ice Rise! The pipe is still spinning - with a bit of time up our sleeve, we’re not stopping drilling yet, as we continue to drill back through the geological archive hidden beneath the ice. 📷 Ana Tovey
We’ve hit a century! 100m of core! Our night-shift crew took us past this milestone – we’re now more than halfway towards our target. Reaching this point is testimony to the skill and hard work of our drillers, who are clocking up long runs and cores of up to 3.1m 👉https://bit.ly/4aHvt5e
A bit late in sharing, but we've successfully rotary-cored sediment under 523m of the ice sheet at Crary Ice Rise! This was a whole team effort, with special mention to our drillers and hot water crew. Watch the moment we got our first glimpse of the sediment we’ve been waiting on for so long.
It’s a very Crary Christmas for our on-ice team in Antarctica!
After several weeks of weather delays preventing them getting out to our deep-field camp at Crary Ice Rise, on Christmas Eve the team received the best possible present – a Basler flight to Crary! Crary Christmas from SWAIS2C!
I know sometimes crafters like to be able to show what they've made, so if Santa wants to reveal themselves then they're welcome, but also no pressure if they would prefer to stay secret 😊 #SecretSantaAoNZ
A beach scene made from driftwood, rocks, paua, wool with penguin, cat and dog figurines representing the members of our family.
Here's the scene out of it's packaging and in pride of place on the cabinet!! Thanks so much Santa, it's the most thoughtful and special gift and will be treasured. The boys rushed in the door this afternoon to point out who each penguin represented 🥰 #SecretSantaAoNZ
The scene described in the previous photo, with rocks, wool and paua making a beach scene with penguin kids playing and a cat and a dog.
Here is the absolutely incredible scene! I'll remove the packaging later so will post another photo then too! The kids have loved spotting themselves and the penguins are the perfect touch! It will be a treasured part of our family Christmas forever! Thank you so so much!!! #SecretSantaAoNZ
Sheets of paper with this text and a photo the text describes. Merry Christmas Bella, My apologies for the late dispatch of your gift, the elves in the present factory were having some problems with the assembly of your gift, and they were also very concerned that it wouldn't survive the delivery process because NZ post are not as careful as I am when I deliver presents so there was some additional gluing and packing required before I could send it. I hope you like it, it was mostly created from things we gather from the beach here at Santa's village. I know it is a little odd, so I added some chocolate just in case you didn't like it, because we all know that chocolate makes everyone feel better. The idea is that this is a little Chrismas scene with you and your whanau at the beach, I don't know too much about the kids and I didn't want to creepy stalk you so I had to use my imagination. My vision was: your furry friends have come to the beach with you of course. You have chosen this beach because there are all kids of different rocks there and you want to share this with the kids, your little one is keen on exploring the rock pools, so they're swimming in one near where the waves (paua) are splashing all the white water(wool) around while you watch closely. Another child (maybe the middle one maybe the eldest) is watching all the going on with an ice cream, they are a bit less adventurous as the youngest. The football mad child had to bring their football (of course) and your dog just wants to play with them and the ball. The cat (being a cat) is far too cool and aloof to join in the fun, so they are lying on a warm rock observing the action. And just in case there was some rough handling on the journey, or my packing wasn't good enough, or the glue wasnt strong enough this is what it is meant to look like if it has become disassembled. I hope you and yours have a wonderful Christmas and like if good to you all. Merry Chrismas, Santa Claus
Wow Santa!!! This is so so special!! And has survived the journey perfectly. Here's the letter that it came with, and....
A large box under a Christmas tree
Opening time!!! What can be in this big box??? The kids have been very curious too!! #SecretSantaAoNZ
