AFP UK

A beluga whale that swam up France’s Seine river appears to be underweight and officials are worried about its health, regional authorities said Thursday.

The protected species, usually found in cold Arctic waters, had made its way up the waterway and reached a lock some 70 kilometres (44 miles) from Paris.

The whale was first spotted Tuesday in the river that flows through the French capital to the English Channel, and follows the rare appearance of a killer whale in the Seine just over two months ago.

French rescue services as well as firefighters and biodiversity officials mobilised swiftly and kept a close eye on the whale throughout the day to evaluate the “worrying” health of the mammal, the local prefecture said.

It added the whale seemed to have “skin changes and to be underweight”.

It is “currently between the Poses dam and that of Saint-Pierre-la-Garenne”, around 70 kilometres (43 miles) northwest of Paris.

Gerard Mauger, deputy head of French Marine Mammal Research Group GEEC, said the mammal spent “very little time on the surface” and appeared to have “good” lung capacity.

But Mauger said rescuers were struggling to guide the whale to the mouth of the Seine.

Officials did not specify the size, but an adult beluga can reach up to four metres (13 feet) in length.

Authorities in Normandy’s Eure department urged people to keep their distance to avoid distressing the animal.

Lamya Essemlali, head of the non-profit marine conservation organisation Sea Shepherd, said some of her team would arrive with drones in the evening to locate the whale more easily.

“The environment is not very welcoming for the beluga, the Seine is very polluted and cetaceans are extremely sensitive to noise,” she said, adding that the Seine was “very noisy”.

In late May, the killer whale — also known as an orca, but technically part of the dolphin family — was found dead in the Seine between Le Havre and Rouen.

The animal had found itself stranded in the river and was unable to make its way back to the ocean despite attempts by officials to guide it.

“The urgency is to feed the whale to prevent it from suffering the same fate as the orca who died after starving to death,” Essemlali said.

The prefecture said it would assist and monitor Sea Shepherd’s efforts.

The Eure authorities said lone belugas do sometimes swim further south than usual, and are able to temporarily survive in fresh water.

While they migrate away from the Arctic in the autumn to feed as ice forms, they rarely venture so far south.

A blanket of magma reaching temperatures of 1,200 degrees Celsius (2,192 degrees Fahrenheit) has spread into the valley

The ground rumbles underfoot, then roars as red-orange lava fountains shoot up from the ground, the intense heat cloaking the nearby crowd awestruck by Iceland’s latest volcanic eruption.

“It’s indescribable”, says 40-year-old French tourist Magalie Viannisset, one of the curious onlookers gazing in wonder on Thursday at the fissure that opened up a day earlier in an uninhabited valley just 40 kilometres (25 miles) from Iceland’s capital Reykjavik.

“You feel it in your heart. Imagining it or seeing it on TV is nothing compared to seeing it in real life — there is heat, smells, the sound of the lava flowing”, she tells AFP. 

As the lava fountains hit the ground, a blanket of magma reaching temperatures of 1,200 degrees Celsius (2,192 degrees Fahrenheit) spreads into the valley, plumes of smoke giving off an odour of rotten eggs from the sulphur.

Occasionally, helicopters whirring overhead interrupt the roar of the lava.

Some intrepid visitors walk right up to the cooling magma, including scientists measuring its thickness and taking samples to study in their labs. 

Others, both locals and tourists overjoyed at being in the right place at the right time, keep a safer distance, taking in the dramatic views from nearby hilltops.

“It’s absolutely stunning,” says Theo, a 14-year-old Norwegian visiting with his family. 

The Icelandic Meteorological Office has estimated the fissure is around 360 metres long, with lava fountains about 10-15 metres high.

The lava covers an area of about 74,000 square metres, it said.

– ‘Feel Earth’s power’ –

Visitors must make a strenuous trek to reach the site on the Reykjanes peninsula, around two hours from the nearest car park.

Walking along the trail, people can be heard speaking English, French, Spanish, Italian, and of course Icelandic.  

The winding trail runs near the lava fields created last year by the nearby Mount Fagradalsfjall eruption, which spewed up molten rock for six months.

Like scars, cracks in the ground along the trail serve as reminders of the seismic activity that has been stirring underfoot in the region for the past year and a half.

Known as the land of fire and ice, Iceland has 32 volcanic systems currently considered active, the highest number in Europe. The country has had an eruption every five years on average.

However, until last year, the Reykjanes peninsula had not experienced one since the 13th century, when a volcano erupted for 30 years from 1210-1240.

Geophysicists have said the 2021 eruption could signal the beginning of a new period of eruptions lasting centuries. For now, the craters it left behind remain silent.

As the trail approaches the Meradalir Valleys (the Valleys of the Mares), the latest eruption comes into view, enthralling trekkers with nature’s raw force.

“You feel the power of the Earth. You look at the stone and you see it melting, it is not a usual thing”, marvels Agusta Jonsdottir, a 52-year-old Icelandic woman.

Icelanders never seem to tire of watching volcanoes.

“We came early and we were sitting in the moss, watching and enjoying for a couple of hours. And it was so calm”, says Audur Kristin Ebenezersdottir, 53.

“Just you and the nature — it’s very nice.”

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The affected area of 15,000 square metres (161,500 square feet) includes a storage site for police ammunition.

An “unprecedented” fire broke out Thursday around a German police munitions storage site in a popular forest in western Berlin, sending plumes of smoke into the skies and setting off a series of explosions.

The fire began in the Grunewald forest in the early hours of the morning, with residents reporting a series of explosions. 

Firefighters were initially unable to tackle the blaze directly due to the danger of further blasts, with emergency services setting up a 1,000-metre (3,280-foot) safety zone around the site. 

Around 250 emergency personnel were deployed to the site.

The fire had spread across 50 hectares by the evening, according to police, but the emergency services were hoping to bring it under control overnight.

The most dangerous zones have been identified and firefighters have been cleared to proceed to within 500 metres of the blaze in some areas, they said.

The army had earlier sent in a tank aimed at evacuating munitions at the affected storage site as well as remote-controlled de-mining robots, while drones circled the air to assess the emergency.

– Heatwave –

Water cannons were also deployed around the safety zone to prevent the fire from spreading.

But authorities said no firefighting helicopters were available as they were already in use to tackle forest fires in eastern Germany.

They also said the 1,000-metre safety zone applied to the air, so there was a limit to how useful it would be to drop water on the fire from above.

Berlin mayor Franziska Giffey interrupted her holiday to visit the scene, calling the events “unprecedented in the post-war history of Berlin”.

Giffey advised Berliners to close their windows but said the danger was minimal as there were no residential buildings within a two-kilometre (1.2-mile) radius and so no need to issue evacuation orders.

Road and rail traffic had been disrupted but was expected to return to normal in the course of the evening. 

The fire came as a heatwave swept across Germany, with temperatures hitting 39 degrees Celsius (102 Fahrenheit) on Thursday.

Scientists say climate change is making heatwaves around the world more frequent and more intense, which increases the risk of fires.

Germany has suffered a series of forest fires this summer, with Brandenburg — the state that surrounds Berlin — among the hardest hit areas, along with the mountainous parts of Saxony state.

– Unexploded bombs –

Police said they were investigating what set off the fire in Grunewald.

The store holds munitions uncovered by police, but also unexploded World War II-era ordnance which is regularly dug up during construction works.

German media questioned the wisdom of having a bomb disposal site located in a major city.

“At least 25 tons of World War II ammunition and illegal fireworks were hoarded at the munitions site there, in the middle of the forest. How can this be?” Berlin newspaper BZ asked.

Cyclist Hellmut Schmidt, 64, who commutes through the forest to work, told AFP that “when you see all these fires, of course you worry”.

“But I don’t know where else you could have (a munitions site) in Berlin… If it was further from the city, then it would also be dangerous with the transport because something could explode,” he said.

Giffey said local authorities would “have to think about how to deal with this munitions site in the future and whether such a place is the right one in Berlin”.

The German capital is rarely hit by forest fires, even though its 29,000 hectares of forests make it one of the greenest cities in the world.

Heavy thunderstorms are expected to sweep into the country from the west on Friday, the German weather service said.

A cold front is predicted to bring temperatures down by more than 10C overnight in western Germany, falling to around 20-25C on Friday.

More than half of species whose endangered status cannot be assessed due to a lack of data are predicted to face the risk of extinction, according to a machine-learning analysis published Thursday.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) currently has nearly 150,000 entries on its Red List for threatened species, including some 41,000 species threatened with extinction. 

These include 41 percent of amphibians, 38 percent of sharks and rays, 33 percent of reef building corals, 27 percent of mammals and 13 percent of birds.

But there are thousands of species that the IUCN has been unable to categorise as they are “data insufficient” and are not on the Red List even though they live in the same regions and face similar threats to those species that have so far been assessed. 

Researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology used a machine learning technique to predict the likelihood of 7,699 data deficient species being at risk of extinction. 

They trained the algorithm on a list of more than 26,000 species that the IUCN has been able to categorise, incorporating data on the regions where species live and other factors known to influence biodiversity to determine whether it predicted their extinction risk status.

“These could include climatic conditions, land use conditions or land use changes, pesticide use, threats from invasive species or really a range of different stressors,” lead author Jan Borgelt, from the university’s Industrial Ecology Programme, told AFP.

After comparing the algorithm’s results with the IUCN’s lists, the team then applied it to predict the data deficient species’ extinction risk. 

Writing in the journal Communications Biology, they found that 4,336 species — or 56 percent of those sampled — were likely threatened with extinction, including 85 percent of amphibians and 61 percent of mammals. 

This compares to the 28 percent of species assessed by the IUCN Red List.

“We see that across most land areas and coastal areas around the world that the average extinction risk would be higher if we included data deficient species,” said Borgelt.

A global United Nations biodiversity assessment in 2019 warned that as many as a million species were threatened with extinction due to a number of factors including habitat loss, invasive species and climate change.

Borgelt said the analysis revealed some hotspots for data-deficient species risk, including Madagascar and southern India. He said he hoped the study could help the IUCN develop its strategy for underreported species, adding that the team had reached out to the union.

“With these predictions from machine learning we can get really sort of pre-assessments or we could use those as predictions to prioritise which species have to be looked at by the IUCN,” he said.

Head of the IUCN’s Red List Craig Hilton-Taylor said the organisation was continuously harnessing new technology with a view to reduce the number of data deficient species.

“We also understand that a proportion of data deficient species are at risk of extinction, and include this in our calculations when we estimate the proportion of threatened species in a group,” he told AFP.

An “unprecedented” fire broke out Thursday around a German police munitions storage site in a popular forest in western Berlin, sending plumes of smoke into the skies and setting off explosions.

Firefighters were unable to tackle the blaze directly due to the danger of further blasts, with emergency services setting up a 1,000-metre (3,280-foot) safety zone around the site. 

Berlin fire brigade spokesman Thomas Kirstein said the situation was “under control and there was no danger for Berliners” but that the fire was expected to last for some time.

Around 250 emergency personnel were deployed to the site.

The army sent in a tank aimed at evacuating munitions at the affected storage site as well as remote-controlled de-mining robots, while drones circled the air to assess the emergency.

Water cannons were also deployed around the safety zone to prevent the fire from spreading.

Berlin mayor Franziska Giffey interrupted her holiday to visit the scene, calling the events “unprecedented in the post-war history of Berlin”.

Giffey advised Berliners to close their windows but said the danger was minimal as there were no residential buildings within a two-kilometre (1.2-mile) radius and so no need to issue evacuation orders.

– Heatwave –

“It would be much more difficult if there were residential buildings nearby,” she said.

Firefighters called to the site in the middle of the night were confronted with intermittent blasts that sent debris flying and hindered their work. 

No one has been hurt by the fires, which came as a heatwave enveloped Germany. 

Scientists say climate change is making heatwaves around the world more frequent and more intense, which increases the risk of fires.

Police said they were investigating what set off the fire.

The store holds munitions uncovered by police, but also unexploded World War II-era ordnance which is regularly dug up during construction works.

Giffey said local authorities would “have to think about how to deal with this munitions site in the future and whether such a place is the right one in Berlin”.

Authorities appealed for the public to avoid the forest, popular with both locals and tourists, as several regional rail lines have been halted.

– Forest fires –

But authorities said no firefighting choppers were available as they were already in use to calm forest fires in eastern Germany.

They also said the 1,000-metre safety zone applied to the air, so there was a limit to how useful it would be to drop water on the fire from above.

The German capital is rarely hit by forest fires, even though its 29,000 hectares of forests make it one of the greenest cities in the world.

Brandenburg, the region surrounding Berlin, as well as parts of eastern Germany have for days been battling forest fires.

Temperatures are expected to climb as high as 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) across parts of Germany on Thursday. In Berlin, they are predicted to reach 38C.

Heavy thunderstorms are then due to sweep into the country from the west on Friday, the German weather service said.

A cold front is predicted to bring temperatures down by more than 10C overnight in western Germany, falling to around 20-25C on Friday.

The wildfire was apparently started deliberately

Firefighters backed by more than 20 aircraft battled a wildfire in northwestern Spain which appears to have been started deliberately, local authorities said on Thursday.

Fanned by strong winds and a heatwave, the blaze has already destroyed some 600 hectares (1,500 acres) of forest and scrubland in Galicia, the regional government said in a statement.

“Everything indicates it was started intentionally,” it said.

The fire started out on Wednesday in several spots near the town of Verin near the border with Portugal, which is experiencing its worst drought in a century.

They authorities said the blaze did not currently pose a threat to “inhabited areas”.

Scientists say human-induced climate change is making extreme weather events including heatwaves and droughts more frequent and more intense. They in turn increase the risk of fires, which emit climate heating greenhouse gases.

Spain has battled 354 wildfires since the start of the year, fuelled by scorching temperatures and drought conditions.

The flames have destroyed nearly 230,000 hectares, more than in any other nation in Europe, according to the European Union’s satellite monitoring service EFFIS.

Since the weekend, much of Spain has been in the grip of its third heatwave since June. 

Temperatures are set to soar above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) on Thursday in the south and east.

A beluga whale, a protected species usually found in cold Arctic waters, has swum into France’s Seine river and reached a lock some 70 kilometres (44 miles) from Paris, officials said Thursday.

The whale was first spotted Tuesday in the waterway that flows through the French capital to the English Channel, and follows the rare appearance of a killer whale in the Seine just over two months ago.

It is currently near Vernon, about halfway between Paris and the port city of Le Havre, with authorities in Normandy’s Eure department urging people to keep their distance to avoid distressing the animal.

“In order to carry out the necessary observations… an operation to keep it in place at the lock will be carried out this afternoon,” the regional authorities said.

They did not specify the size, but an adult beluga can reach up to four metres (13 feet) in length.

While they migrate away from the Arctic in the autumn to feed as ice forms, they rarely venture so far south.

“Studies of its health are underway to determine the best measures to take to ensure its chances of survival,” the Eure authorities said late Wednesday.

In late May, a killer whale — also known as an orca, but technically part of the dolphin family — was found dead in the Seine between Le Havre and Rouen.

The animal found itself stranded in the river and was unable to make its way back to the ocean despite attempts by officials to guide it.

The Eure authorities said lone belugas do sometimes swim further south than usual, and are able to temporarily survive in fresh water.

A huge fire  broke out Thursday in a popular forest in western Berlin next to a police munitions storage site, sending plumes of smoke into the skies and setting off intermittent explosions. 

The army sent in a tank aimed at evacuating munitions at the affected storage site as well as remote-controlled de-mining robots, while drones were circling the air to help assess the emergency.

The situation is “extremely extraordinary with munitions,” said Berlin fire brigade spokesman Thomas Kirstein, adding that it was “under control and there was no danger for Berliners.” 

The fire was however expected to last for some time, he said.

Firefighters called to the site in the middle of the night were confronted with intermittent blasts that sent debris flying and hindered their work. 

They have so far been able to begin tackling only two of the four hotspots across the affected area of 15,000 square metres (161,500 square feet), as explosions at the munitions store were still rocking the area.

No one has been hurt by the fires, which came on a day when a new heatwave was due to envelop Germany.

Officials have built a security cordon to allow firefighters to start working around a kilometre from the ammunition storage zone. 

The store holds munitions uncovered by police, but also unexploded World War 2-era ordnance which is regularly dug up during construction works.

Police said they were investigating what set off the fire.

Authorities appealed for the public to avoid the forest, popular with both locals and tourists, as several regional rail lines have been halted.

But authorities said no firefighting choppers were available as they were already in use to calm forest fires in eastern Germany.

– Heatwave –

The German capital is rarely hit by forest fires, even though its 29,000 hectares of forests make it one of the greenest cities in the world.

Brandenburg, the region surrounding Berlin, as well as parts of eastern Germany have for days been battling forest fires.

Scientists say climate change is making heatwaves around the world more frequent and more intense, which increases the risk of fires.

Temperatures are expected to climb as high as 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) across parts of Germany on Thursday. In Berlin, they are predicted to reach 38C.

After a scorching Thursday, heavy thunderstorms are due to sweep into the country from the west on Friday, the German weather service said.

A cold front is predicted to bring temperatures down by more than 10 degrees overnight in western Germany, falling to around 20-25 degrees on Friday.

A red ball of spicy fire with luminous patches glowing menacingly against a black background.

This, prominent French scientist Etienne Klein declared, was the latest astonishing picture taken by the James Webb Space Telescope of Proxima Centauri, the closest star to our Sun.

Fellow Twitter users marvelled at the details on the picture purportedly taken by the telescope, which has thrilled the world with images of distant galaxies going back to the birth of the universe.

“This level of detail… A new world is revealed every day,” he gushed.

But in fact, as Klein later revealed, the picture was not of the intriguing star just over four light-years from the Sun but a far more modest slice of the lip-sizzling Spanish sausage chorizo.

“According to contemporary cosmology, no object belonging to Spanish charcuterie exists anywhere but on Earth,” he said.

Klein acknowledged that many users had not understood his joke which he said was simply aimed at encouraging us “to be wary of arguments from people in positions of authority as well as the spontaneous eloquence of certain images”.

However, at a time when battling fake news is of paramount importance for the scientific community, many Twitter users indicated they were unamused by Klein, director of research at France’s Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and a radio show producer.

On Wednesday, he said sorry to those who were misled.

“I come to present my apologies to those who may have been shocked by my prank, which had nothing original about it,” he said, describing the post as a “scientist’s joke”.

He was shortly back on surer ground posting on Twitter an image of the famous Cartwheel Galaxy taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. This time, he assured users, the photo was real.

Curious onlookers made their way Thursday to the site of a volcano erupting near Iceland’s capital Reykjavik to marvel at the bubbling lava, a day after the fissure appeared in an uninhabited valley.

The eruption was around 40 kilometres (25 miles) from Reykjavik, near the site of the Mount Fagradalsfjall volcano in southwestern Iceland that spewed magma for six months between March and September 2021.

While last year’s eruption was easily accessible on foot and drew more than 435,000 tourists, the new eruption is trickier to access, requiring a strenuous 90-minute hilly hike from the closest car park. 

Despite that, more than 1,830 people visited the site on the first day of the eruption, according to the Icelandic Tourist Board, and more visitors were seen trekking to the scene early Thursday.

Among them was American tourist Hather Hoff, 42, for whom seeing lava was “a life goal”.

“I had to sit down and have a little cry because it is so beautiful, so emotional — this is the raw power of our planet,” she told AFP.

Anita Sauckel, a 40-year-old German living in Iceland, visited last year’s eruption and could not resist witnessing the latest volcanic activity.

“This is special with the lava, huge fountains popping out in the middle, and I love that a lot,” she said.

The fissure was estimated to be around 360 metres (1,181 feet) long, the Icelandic Meteorological Office said Thursday, with lava fountains about 10-15 metres high.

Wednesday’s eruption was preceded by a period of intense seismic activity, with about 10,000 earthquakes detected since Saturday, including two with a magnitude of at least 5.0.

The frequency of the earthquakes has slowed since the magma burst through the ground.

The average lava flow in the first hours was estimated at 32 cubic metres per second, according to measurements done Wednesday at 1705 GMT — 3.5 hours after the eruption began — by scientists from the Institute of Earth Sciences.

That is about four or five times more than at the beginning of last year’s eruption.

“The current eruption is therefore much more powerful,” the Institute wrote in a Facebook post.

The lava covered an area of about 74,000 square metres (around 800,000 square feet), it said. 

By comparison, last year’s six-month eruption saw 150 million cubic metres of lava spilled over 4.85 square kilometres.

– Gas risk –

Officials had initially urged people to refrain from visiting the site until a danger assessment had been conducted.

But on Thursday, the Department of Civil Protection and Emergency Management said only that young children should not walk up to the eruption site.

Gases from a volcanic eruption — especially sulphur dioxide — can be elevated in the immediate vicinity, may pose a danger to health and even be fatal.

Gas pollution can also be carried by the wind.

Mount Fagradalsfjall belongs to the Krysuvik volcanic system on the Reykjanes peninsula in southwestern Iceland.

Known as the land of fire and ice, Iceland has 32 volcanic systems currently considered active, the highest number in Europe. The country has had an eruption every five years on average.

However, until last year, the Reykjanes peninsula had not experienced an eruption since the 13th century, when a volcano erupted for 30 years from 1210-1240.

Geophysicists have said that the 2021 eruption could signal the beginning of a new period of eruptions lasting centuries.

A vast island near the Arctic Circle, Iceland straddles the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a crack on the ocean floor separating the Eurasian and North American tectonic plates.

The shifting of these plates is in part responsible for Iceland’s intense volcanic activity.