A pyrocumulonimbus cloud, a looming thunderstorm generated by an intensely hot wildfire, has been observed with radar in France for the first time. These deadly “fire clouds” of rising hot air, smoke and moisture, which accelerate blazes with strong winds and soaring embers, are expected to become more common in Europe as wildfires there get bigger.  

“You have this tilted column that is sucking air and then propagating embers in front, and it also creates lightning. That’s another way of lighting up fuels in front of the fire, so these cells are unstoppable,” says at the University of Corsica, France. “You cannot stop a thunderstorm, and neither can you stop a firestorm, a strong pyrocumulonimbus.”

Alongside huge blazes in Spain, France has been suffering a wildfire in the Gironde region, which President Emmanuel Macron has called the country’s most severe crisis since the second world war. The fire has burned more than 420 square kilometres since last week, coming within 15 kilometres of the city of Bordeaux and forcing around 220,000 people to evacuate. It generated a pyrocumulonimbus cloud on 24 July and another on 25 July, according to regional officials. Embers and lightning ignited new fires around the original inferno.

“We faced another firestorm, the same incredible, unprecedented, unknown phenomenon as the one we saw on Friday, when we realised we were entering a new dimension,” Gironde prefect Sophie Brocas told journalists.

It is a miracle this pyrocumulonimbus-fuelled fire hasn’t claimed any casualties, Filippi says.

Sometimes the “fire-breathing dragon of clouds”, pyrocumulonimbus are typically generated by massive wildfires in the forests of North America, Siberia and Australia. They’ve spurred on infamous fires like the that killed 173 people in Australia in 2009 and the conflagration that in 2016. Canada’s record-breaking wildfires in 2023 142 of these storms.

In Europe, however, there have been only a handful of confirmed pyrocumulonimbus in Spain and Portugal, including one during Portugal’s devastating Pedrógão Grande fire in 2017, which destroyed hundreds of homes and killed 66 people. But that appears to be changing.

“You have to have two things happening at the same time: an extreme heat source and an unstable atmosphere that interacts with the fire,” says at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts. “If
 the heat from the fire increases, like it’s projected to increase from our studies, then yes, you should see more of these events.”

This firestorm begins to take shape when temperatures as high as 800°C send a plume of smoke into the sky. As the hot air rises and cools, water vapour condenses onto the ash to form pyrocumulus clouds, like the fluffy white clouds you might see on a summer day, only brown or grey.  

If the plume is hot enough and the atmosphere is unstable enough, the cloud can keep rising to reach the upper troposphere at 10,000 metres, the cruising altitude of a passenger plane. It sometimes reaches the stratosphere, as much smoke as a moderate volcano. It becomes a pyrocumulonimbus when the static electricity from colliding ice particles sparks thunder and lightning.

Although rain from the cloud often evaporates in the hot air, this kind of thunderstorm nonetheless creates its own weather system. The cloud’s updraft pulls in air, fanning the flames with winds reaching 160 kilometres per hour and accelerating the fire’s spread by up to five times, according to Filippi.

Meanwhile, strong downdrafts create erratic gusts that carry embers off to start new fires. Dozens of lightning strikes can blazes as far as 100 kilometres ahead of the main fire. It can also create fire tornadoes of twisting flames. As the winds, embers and lightning strengthen and expand the wildfire, it releases more heat and smoke, a feedback loop that can amplify the rising cloud for many hours.

Both wind shear higher in the atmosphere and erratic gusts at the ground can take the fire in unpredictable directions, making it nearly impossible to contain its acceleration or plan targeted evacuations.

“The fire front is constantly shifting. We cannot fight it directly. It’s a David-versus-Goliath scenario,” Eric Brocardi of the National Firefighters Federation of France local media about the Gironde fire on 2 August.  

Wildfire plumes have expanded in height since 2003 in the western US, creating more pyrocumulonimbus clouds, an increase that’s projected to continue.

Pyrocumulonimbus will have more chances to occur in Europe as well, as the fastest-warming continent experiences more extreme heat, such as the record-breaking heatwave in June, and wildfires. could also contribute, such as when a wet spring last year boosted vegetation growth on the Iberian peninsula, only for record summer heat to dry it out. This led to Europe’s worst-ever wildfires, including a in Spain.

“We need to adapt, so get prepared,” Filippi says. “Burn-proof and reduce the amount of fuel around your house.”

±ő’m terrified by how fast weather extremes are ramping up as the world heats up, and there’s much, much worse to come unless we leave fossil fuels in the ground. The only way to do that is to end our dependency on oil and gas – and all the fuss about whether the UK will allow more drilling in the North Sea is a distraction from this.

Some people talk about the UK government’s current policy of not approving more licences for exploration in the North Sea as if it will reduce the amount of oil and gas that is burned, and thus help limit how much more carbon dioxide ends up in the atmosphere. But it won’t. All it will do is change where the oil and gas that gets burned comes from.

What does matter is burning less fossil fuel. That means things such as getting more electricity from renewable sources, and more vehicles and heat pumps running on that electricity.

So I won’t be judging the climate credentials of the UK’s new prime minister, Andy Burnham, on whether or not his government decides to in the North Sea. It’s what is done to further reduce our use of fossil fuels that’s crucial in climate terms. And here Burnham has already made a good start by cutting the value-added tax (VAT) on electricity, which will make .

±ő’m not saying bans on drilling are a complete waste of time – they have a part to play in protecting vulnerable environments, such as the Amazon rainforest. But I don’t see how they will ever help limit emissions.

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At this point, you might be thinking, “but if enough countries ban drilling, it will make a difference”. There are already nearly 60 restrictions on fossil fuel production in 25 countries, . But many of these are regional restrictions to protect places such as the Arctic, or bans on production methods such as fracking. And 15 have already been repealed. No major producers are planning to completely stop producing oil and gas, and the known reserves of fossil fuels are way more than enough to trash the climate. The bottom line is that some countries will keep on churning out fossil fuels as long as they can sell them, so the key is to reduce demand, not supply.

That said, most of the arguments used by supporters of further North Sea gas and oil exploration . For starters, more drilling is not going to bring down energy prices in the UK. North Sea oil and gas is sold at global market prices, and there’s not enough oil or gas left in the North Sea to make a dent in those prices.

Going all out on renewables, by contrast, would break , and help bring down energy bills. This is what is Spain .

Another dubious claim is that more drilling is going to make oodles of money for the UK. But production in the North Sea already has to be supported by tax breaks and subsidies, and is declining year on year. of the oil and gas has already been extracted, so further drilling will, at most, slow the rate of decline. And what remains is harder to get out, so costs are higher. If the wars pushing up oil prices come to an end, it might not even be profitable – until recently, the world was building up .

Then there’s the exaggerated claim that North Sea gas is “four times cleaner” than imported liquid natural gas, or LNG. The emissions associated with producing LNG are around four times higher than those for North Sea gas, because of the energy required to liquefy it. But what matters are the total emissions, including those from burning the gas, and on this count .

LNG now accounts for . If that could be reduced by more North Sea gas production, there should be a little less CO2 emitted. It would also mean less money going to countries that obstruct climate action – the UK now gets 37 per cent of its gas from the US, for instance.

But the UK also gets gas from Norway via pipelines, and the production emissions of this are even lower than those of North Sea gas. So in climate terms, buying more Norwegian pipeline gas would be better than increasing North Sea production.

Overall, then, what happens in the North Sea just doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things – more drilling is neither a climate catastrophe, nor an economic panacea. Instead, the UK and other countries need to focus on what really matters – much more drastic action to replace fossil fuels or discourage their use. You only need to look at to see why it’s so vital.

Meltwater flushed frozen methane hydrates out of the sediment at the edge of the Greenland ice sheet after the last glacial maximum, which occurred 29,000 to 19,000 years ago, raising fears that melting glaciers could soon release huge amounts of this planet-warming gas.

Methane hydrates form when gas molecules are trapped in a cage of water molecules, freezing into an ice-like substance. They are sometimes called “fire ice” because they can despite being 85 per cent water.

They form under the high pressure and low temperature found in sediments beneath the ocean, permafrost or glaciers. Some suggest methane hydrates contain twice as much carbon as all coal, oil and conventional gas on Earth.

But global warming is disrupting some of the cold, pressurised conditions in which methane hydrates exist. For example, some scientists think a mysterious 50-metre-deep discovered in the Russian Arctic in 2014 was caused when permafrost thaw suddenly relieved the pressure on a methane hydrate. This would have released it in a “violent physical explosion”, wrote the authors of .

Now, researchers have found that flows of glacial meltwater in Greenland can also unleash methane hydrates. “We found a new way of releasing methane that we thought was in the bank,” says at the University of Manchester, UK, who led the research. “It is methane we thought was stable.”

Huuse and his colleagues knew methane hydrates were common in the spaces between grains of sediment at the bottom of Melville Bay in north-western Greenland. In seismic surveys done by oil and gas companies in 2011 and 2013, they noticed 50 large pockmarks in the seafloor, each up to 37 metres deep, clustered near a long berm of earth called a grounding zone wedge. During the last glacial maximum, this wedge was where the floating tongue of the ice sheet met the ocean bottom.

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The researchers initially thought the pockmarks had been scoured by overturning icebergs. But when they drilled sediment cores in the area, they found the top layers of sediment were mostly free of methane, even though the temperature and pressure were perfect for methane hydrates.

They also found large volumes of fresh water in the sediments, rather than the seawater they expected. This could only have come from ice sheet melt. The team thinks that during the last glacial maximum, meltwater flowing under the glaciers in Melville Bay was forced through the grounding zone wedge, flushing out the methane hydrates.

In the future, meltwater could wash out hydrates at the edges of other glaciers as they retreat under climate change, says Huuse. Similar grounding zone wedges exist across the Arctic.

“In the not-so-distant past – could be 12,000, could be 15,000 years ago – a large amount of methane was released, and that same thing could happen tomorrow or in the next century, basically, of receding ice sheets,” he says. “And that’s bad news, because it’s not something we’d considered before.”

The research didn’t include an estimate of how much methane was released in Melville Bay, but Huuse figures it could have been on the order of 130 million tonnes. That’s the equivalent of about two years of from the US, although he notes this methane could have been released over the course of a century, rather than a year or two, and it was a one-time emission.

In addition, the methane would have been dissolved in seawater and, depending on the saturation, it may not all have been emitted to the atmosphere, he says.

The Antarctic ice sheet probably sits on top of even more methane hydrates than Greenland. The polar regions as a whole are to hold anywhere between 100 billion to 760 billion tonnes of methane in subglacial and marine hydrates. The release of even a fraction of that could rival the 48.7 million tonnes of methane currently released by the Arctic and boreal biomes each year – mostly from wetlands, lakes and streams – and speed up climate change.

Methane is already being unlocked from under the Greenland ice sheet. A published this month found meltwater streams across western Greenland are emitting an estimated 715 tonnes of methane per year. While some of this could be coming from hydrates, it is more likely to come from ancient plant carbon converted to methane gas by bacteria under the ice, says at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, who led the study. This will probably increase.

“If you’re getting enhanced melt, you’re potentially tapping into areas of subglacial system that
 have got well-preserved organic carbon stocks that then have the potential to be converted into methane,” she says. “There is the potential of relatively large future release.”

The illegal trade in live and dead animals funds crime and political corruption and threatens biodiversity. Sadly, prosecutions are rare.

Alexandra Thomas and Louise Gibson at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) Wildlife Forensic Lab are working on techniques to change that.

This image of a green sea turtle (Chelonia mydas) shows a glowing handprint, revealed by a special fluorescent powder dye photographed under ultraviolet light, which may serve as forensic evidence to help catch poachers and animal traffickers. Under UV, certain chemicals can also reveal blood and other bodily fluids, and gunpowder residues.

The image, taken by Britta Jaschinski, is the overall winner in this year’s Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation’s Environmental Photography Award.

Jaschinski says the dead turtle was confiscated at London’s Heathrow Airport and transported to ZSL, but that details about how the handprint was left on the turtle, and by whom, are “highly confidential”.

“Many species, from well-known animals like elephants and rhinos to lesser-known ones like pangolins, are pushed toward extinction by illegal hunting, causing lasting damage to global biodiversity,” says Jaschinski. “Beyond environmental harm, the illegal wildlife trade fuels organised crime and poses risks to people. It is one of the world’s largest illegal industries, often linked to corruption and criminal networks. It also contributes to the spread of diseases that can jump from animals to humans, increasing the risk of pandemics.”

Sergio Pitamitz, a conservation photographer who chaired the prize, said in an announcement about Jaschinski’s win that her approach when documenting crimes against wildlife “avoids graphic or sensational imagery, instead producing photographs that communicate clearly and effectively to a wide audience”.

The competition’s ocean category was won by Henley Spiers for his shot of a wedge-tailed shearwater (Ardenna pacifica) plunging into a football pitch-sized school of lanternfish, shown above.

The bird surfaced without catching anything and circled back for another dive. Lanternfish are thought to be the most numerous vertebrates on Earth, accounting for up to 65 per cent of deep-sea fish biomass.

The prize for the polar regions category went to Vadim Makhorov for his photograph of a group of Pacific walruses (Odobenus rosmarus divergens), below. These are the largest of the two species of walrus, with males reaching up to 4 metres in length and weighing as much as 1.5 tonnes.

Makhorov’s photograph was captured on Ratmanov Island, or Big Diomede, the easternmost part of Russia. The island’s entire southern coastline is occupied by walruses, most of them males. Female walruses only come ashore during the breeding season.

Runner-up in the changemaker category is Maud Delaflotte’s image of black soldier flies (Hermetia illucens), shown below. Feeding insect protein to farmed animals could be a more environmentally friendly alternative to traditional sources like fishmeal and soya.

David Attenborough is inarguably one of the UK’s national institutions. He consistently tops polls for the most popular and trustworthy celebrity in the country. There will never be another broadcaster quite like him – but that’s OK.

Attenborough, who turns 100 on 8 May, began his career in nature broadcasting in 1954 with , in which staff from London Zoo went to tropical countries to capture exotic animals and return them to the UK. It was very much a product of its time, but so was Attenborough. He was at the forefront of a new medium (only a third of UK households had a TV when Zoo Quest was first broadcast) and defined the template for nature documentaries, most notably with his 1979 series.

People often ask who might replace him, but the truth is, the niche that allowed him to evolve – a dominant broadcaster in the BBC and a cohesive culture enforced by a lack of choice in viewing material – no longer exists. Instead, the rise of social media has seen a Cambrian explosion in science communicators, each adapting to their environment.

The truth is, the niche that allowed Attenborough to evolve no longer exists

There are pros and cons to this. From TikTok to YouTube to podcasts, we are now able to find a format that works for us, freed from a linear TV schedule. A far more diverse range of voices have been able to flourish, and people who are turned off by Attenborough (even if they don’t want to admit it in polite company) have many more presenters to choose from.

But this fragmentation also has its downsides. TV editors no longer determine what we see on our screens. They have been replaced by algorithms that often reward dopamine quick-hits rather than more in-depth work. While many science creators are a stickler for facts, like Attenborough, misinformation can also bloom unchecked. Plus, with no one ever watching quite the same thing, we have lost part of our shared culture.

Thankfully, Attenborough’s programmes remain available today, with many still as relevant as ever. Check out this round-up of our favourites, and pick something to watch in celebration of his centenary.