Breaking Waves: Ocean News

French authorities order evacuation of almost 4,000 people from Lacanau resort amid return of heatwave Europe live – latest updates The evacuation of nearly 4,000 people from tourist sites on France’s Atlantic coast is under way as the return of winds and extreme heat jeopardised firefighters’ battles to contain wildfires raging to the west of Bordeaux. The precautionary evacuation order, which covers campsites, holiday villages and other tourist accommodation around the resort of Lacanau, exacerbated a wildfire emergency described by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, as the “toughest” situation the country had dealt with “since the second world war”. Continue reading...

Matthew Myerscough’s remarkable find is one of many detailed in his new book. But his journey into fossil hunting began years earlier, when he was caught in an avalanche When Matthew Myerscough walks along a beach, he cannot help hunting for fossils. “I think my fossil radar is always on – even if I’m not looking, it’s hard sometimes to not see things,” says the 40-year-old civil engineer, who has discovered thousands of fossils on British beaches. It was while he was “not looking” on Lavernock beach near Penarth, south Wales, that he recently stumbled across the fossilised bone of an early type of plesiosaur, a marine reptile that roamed the oceans while dinosaurs stalked the land during the early Jurassic period. Continue reading...

The signs are there See more of Fiona Katauskas’s cartoons here Continue reading...

At a time when the quickening pace of global heating has never been clearer, climate policies are being deprioritised A new and ominous word has entered the vocabulary of firefighters struggling to cope with the vast wildfire sweeping through south-west France. A pyrocumulonimbus is a fire-generated thunderstorm that can whip up winds in unpredictable ways, making the containment of a blaze and assessment of its likely course far more difficult. A known phenomenon in North America and Australia, firefighters believe France is suffering its first in the Bordeaux region, as the country endures the consequences of the third major heatwave of the summer and prepares for a fourth. The dire statistics of the ongoing fires in France and Spain tell a story of deepening devastation and human misery. A far greater expanse of French land has already been burnt this year, compared with the 30,000 hectares during the whole of 2025, while 220,000 people have been evacuated from their homes in the Gironde. In Spain, the environment ministry has calculated that over 170,000 hectares have been affected, compared with 29,000 last year. Over 100,000 people have been forced to flee. Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...