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With 2023’s El Niño – a recurring sample of maximum climate throughout the pacific basin – nonetheless leaving a nasty style in individuals’s mouth, 2026 sees an El Niño stirring within the Pacific Ocean and there are warnings that this shall be one of many strongest but.
Roland Pease speaks with Amanda Maycock, a climatologist from Leeds College, to debate what this local weather phenomenon is and the way it will impression the world from October to early subsequent yr.
He additionally hears from Scott Evans from the American Museum of Pure Historical past, who has been exploring the Mackenzie mountains of Canada’s Northwest Territory to higher perceive the biology and ecology of life on earth earlier than something we would acknowledge – from the Ediacara period. This was earlier than the explosion of various animal varieties with exhausting shells and bones within the later, Cambrian, time. In sure locations around the globe, a lot older rocks from the traditional ocean flooring reveal an ecosystem abounding with comfortable, squidgy animal wierdness.
In Canada Scott has discovered a brand new trove of those fossils, however from far deeper under the floor of these historical seas. Did animal life start deep within the darkest depths slightly than paddling in swimming pools nearer the land?
Right this moment, over half a billion years later, backside trawling, a typical fishing methodology involving dragging heavy nets throughout the underside of the seafloor, is an environmentally harmful course of that rips up every little thing in its path to maximise catch. We talked to Amanda Vincent, a professor on the Institute for the Oceans and fisheries of the British Columbia college and founding father of the worldwide Challenge Seahorse conservation group, about what bottom-trawl bans can obtain, within the mild of outcomes printed a few renaissance of biodiversity off the coast of Scotland in an space the place trawling has been banned for a number of years.
Plus, we discuss to science journalist Gareth Mitchell, who explains how backside trawling can even have unfavorable penalties on know-how, in addition to different science information you might have missed, together with updates on photo voltaic storms and robotic wolf shortages in Japan.
Presenter: Roland Pease
Producers: Alex Mansfield and Dan Welsh
Editor: Martin Smith
Manufacturing Co-ordinator: Jana Bennett-Holesworth
Programme Web site
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