This week in environmental news: the maintenance backlog for national parks and federal public lands continues to grow, with more than $680 million in repairs needed in Florida alone. Plus, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers halted work on an offshore sand trap near Port Everglades after confirming damage to endangered coral.

Up first, the nation’s growing repair bill for parks and public lands.

The ballooning repair bill at national parks and public lands

The wear and tear on Florida’s national parks and public lands, regularly hammered by increasingly intense hurricanes, throngs of visitors and cuts in funding, has fueled a ballooning statewide maintenance backlog that has swelled to $687 million in the last five years.

In South Florida alone, deferred maintenance work for three national parks and Big Cypress Preserve nearly tripled from $136 million to $346 million.

To tackle the growing to-do list, park supporters say Congress needs to re-up the Great American Outdoors Act, a measure passed in 2020 that funneled $9 billion over five years into projects from sewer repairs to seawalls, trails and housing. Otherwise, they say the nation could lose ground on its costly effort to chip away at repairs across underfunded national parks and public lands.

The backlog is just the latest blow after park staff was slashed, rules for drilling rolled back and environmental protections weakened.

Work halted on Broward sand trap

Work on a massive sand trap near Port Everglades to help restore Broward County beaches will stop after the U.S. Army Corps found damage to nearby endangered coral met or exceeded what a permit allowed.

The decision comes less than a week after environmentalists and divers asked a judge to halt the project, arguing the ongoing dredge churned up plumes of silt that can smother coral.

In a joint motion filed this week in federal court, a U.S. Justice Department attorney said the Army Corps will temporarily suspend the permit for the work while it asks federal wildlife officials to reconsider potential damage to wildlife.

“The speed at which they conceded that they had to do this under the law really shows just how strong our arguments were that these corals were at risk,” said Rachel Silverstein, CEO of Miami Waterkeeper, one of the groups to sue the Corps.

Broward officials say it’s not clear what the delay will mean for the project. They paused work in late July for coral spawning season and planned to resume at the beginning of November. Unfinished work, they said, is critical to the sand trap’s success: removing a rubble pile and preventing sand from filling up the trap.

This week in environmental news: a law that weakened local protections on farm land could reap big wins for the home-building business. Plus, how a surging El Niño could supercharge heat.

First, developers cash in.

Advance to go

When a new measure to fast track replacing farmland with houses came up in the Florida legislature late last year, developers who contributed heavily to lawmakers got a Monopoly advantage. The law, the nonprofit land-planning advocacy group 1000 Friends of Florida warned, would allow the home-building business to “leapfrog” local comprehensive development rules to protect shrinking farmland by automatically approving plans unless local officials acted within 90 days.

As Seeking Rents Jason Garcia now reports, the race is on to cash in before the law expires in 2028.

In the month since it went into effect July 1, Garcia estimates developers have applied to pave over 10,000 acres of ag land in five counties in the fastest growing parts of the state.

Legislators who backed the law argue it protects property rights. It’s also part of a growing effort, the Florida Trib reported, to free developers from local rules and prevent local governments from expanding measures to protect lands.

“There’s been so much legislation in the last few years to help developers develop more quickly, with less public oversight and we would say more recklessly, while undermining local community planning processes,” Friends of the Everglades policy director Gil Smart told the Trib.

According to the Florida Farm Bureau, between 2017 and 2022, the state lost more than 30,000 acres of farmland. The bureau estimated another two million acres could be lost by 2070, or about a quarter of what remains, and that’s before factoring in the new agricultural enclave law. “This land loss means less farmland available for food production, wildlife habitat, groundwater recharge and open spaces,” the farmers wrote.

Feeling the heat from El Niño? It’s just the beginning.

If you think it’s hot now, just wait. What’s expected to be a record-breaking El Niño could supercharge the heat even more. “Because of a one-two punch of accelerated human-caused global warming and a supersized El Niño, there’s an increasing chance that by the end of the year, 2026 could eke out the crown for the hottest year on record, eclipsing 2024,” the Associated Press reported this week.

In its July update, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted El Niño conditions could last into 2027, meaning next year could be hotter.

The El Niño will steer weather patterns around the planet, the World Meteorological Association warned, combining with climate change to trigger severe drought conditions and intensifying rainfalls. Average sea surface temperatures could climb to more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit above normal, the meteorologists said.

That’s bad news for coral battling warmer oceans, wildfire and flooding. (A new tide predictor created by the South Florida Water Management District and University of Miami Rosenstiel School now incorporates climate-driven sea rise into predictions.)

“El Niño is not just on our doorstep,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned, according to E&E News. “It is inside the house and turning up the heat.”

This week in environmental news it’s all about beaches. First, a plan to mine sand to restore beaches near Port Everglades and alongside what may be the largest remaining stand of endangered staghorn coral has alarmed environmentalists and recreational divers. Plus, the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt has reached a point of no return.

Let’s start with sand v. coral.

The sand trap

Months of work by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to construct a giant sand trap near Port Everglades to provide eroding beaches with a steady supply of sand has environmentalists, dive groups and residents crying foul.

As work proceeds, plumes of sand have clouded waters near endangered coral and conchs while noisy excavators drown out waves along the popular beach next to Port Everglades.

“It goes on 24/7,” Maria  Buchsbaum, whose beachfront Point of Americas condominium overlooks the work, told WLRN. “It was so bad when they would sometimes start at two in the morning that I’d wake up and I thought maybe a plane hit the building.”

Environmentalist and dive groups say the Corps is violating the Endangered Species Act by not incorporating recent findings by researchers on the alarming condition of endangered staghorn following a massive 2023 ocean heat wave. In October, researchers, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, declared staghorn functionally extinct after finding what may be the largest remaining stand of wild staghorn coral growing near the work. They say the work also puts a nearby herd of protected queen conch at risk. The conchs are one of only two documented reproducing aggregations.

The groups have warned Corps officials that they intend to sue if no changes are made before Aug. 4.

The self-sustaining sargassum problem

In ye olde days, South Florida’s annual sargassum season was mostly an inconvenience for beachgoers, tiptoeing through crunchy dead seaweed and shaking it loose from trapped bathing suits after a swim in weedy waters. That annoyance has now blossomed into an annual mountainous invasion so intense that bulldozers are needed to clear beaches.

In April, NOAA amped up its sargassum tracker to provide daily reports down to a half mile, an upgrade from weekly forecasts with a three-mile resolution. Mexico announced this week that it plans to spend $115 million on ships to trawl waters for seaweed before it chokes beaches.

Now, a new study from University of Georgia researchers suggests that the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt fueling the season has reached a tipping point. Behold, the sargassumsphere.

In explaining the findings, researchers wrote that previous theories, blaming the rise on increasing nutrients from fertilizers flowing down the Amazon and Congo, Saharan dust or changing temperatures and currents driven by a warming planet failed to fully explain year to year variations. They instead argue that winds in 2010 that drove seaweed from the Sargasso Sea into the Atlantic seeded a patch. Those winds then continued for several years, acting like a mixer that stirred up deeper, nutrient-rich waters to fertilize the patch. That attracted sea life, which then added even more nutrients.

“A floating sargassum mat is much more than just seaweed. It is like a floating city,” populated with sea life, they write. “They form an ecosystem that we call the sargassumsphere. It’s much like a mobile reef or forest.”

This week in environmental news: The state of Florida says it can speed up a major plumbing project in Everglades restoration by taking over from the U.S. Army Corps. Plus, an orange-tailed skink and two tiny snakes exist only in South Florida’s shrinking beaches and rock pineland. Now they’re on the endangered species list.

First, unclogging the Everglades

The Everglades unplugged

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Florida finalized a deal Tuesday for the state to take over and speed up work on a critical piece of Everglades restoration needed to deliver water to chronically dry marshes.

Called the Blue Shanty Flow-way, the project essentially provides the plumbing needed to move freshwater from Lake Okeechobee to the Everglades and into Florida Bay.

Cleaning and moving water from the lake – the headwaters for the shallow River of Grass – and into the bay was the primary goal of the sprawling restoration plan approved by Congress in 2000. But over the years, as conditions changed — including a booming population, rapid development and shifting politics — work has ebbed and flowed. That’s left the marshes often too dry and Florida Bay vulnerable to seagrass die-off, algae blooms and fish kills.

Two months into this year’s rainy season, when water levels should be brimming, extreme drought conditions still remain in parts of the wetland, meaning little freshwater is flowing into the bay.

“ I don’t want to alarm anybody, but the salinity levels at Florida Bay have been spiking. Those of us in the game have been paying attention to that,” Everglades National Park Superintendent Pedro Ramos said at this week’s signing ceremony for the deal. “This is exactly what we need to be doing in order to avoid having to be concerned about what happens downstream every single year when we have events like this: drought and water not getting to the right places at the right time.”

A skink, two snakes and the Endangered Species Act

Three small reptiles that live among South Florida’s beach dunes or pine rockland forests were added to the nation’s endangered species list on Monday, following a decade-long struggle to better protect them from over-development and sea rise.

All three — the Keys mole skink, rim rock crown snake and Key ringnecked snake — can now only be found in parts of the Keys or Miami-Dade County.

 ”It’s taken years, with a lot of heel-dragging from the government,” said Ragan Whitlock, an attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, which first petitioned to have the animals listed in 2010 and 2012. “Once they’re gone, they are gone forever.”

The listings follow a February settlement reached by the center and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to make a final determination by this week.

Federal wildlife managers have long said they weren’t ignoring the animals as they struggled to work down a list of hundreds of animals needing protection. But under the Trump administration, that job has gotten harder. The Service’s staff has been cut by nearly 20%, according to records obtained by the center. The administration has also weakened rules for protecting plants and animals. It made economic impacts a factor in determining critical habitat to protect species and tossed a rule that automatically gave comprehensive protections to newly listed species.

This month, the Service announced it would no longer consider damage to a species’ habitat as potential harm that could cause its extinction, putting South Florida species in vanishing habitats at even more risk. Environmentalists have sued to undo the decision.

This week in environmental news: Over the last few years, a rare event has unfolded in Miami. One of the planet’s rarest bats started to rebound. Plus, an epic AI fight ends with Palm Beach County rejecting plans for a sprawling data center on hundreds of acres bordering its farm fields.

First, the miraculous bats.

At Zoo Miami, a rarest of bats is making a comeback

Across the planet, in ecosystems squeezed nearly out of existence, rare bats are losing ground. In the Seychelles, the sheath-tailed bat may number less than 100. The insect-sized bumblebee bat, the world’s smallest mammal, has only been found in a few dozen caves along the Thailand-Myanmar border. And the “flying foxes” of the bat world, the Livingstone’s fruit bats, have nearly lost their forests on islands off Madagascar to timber and farms.

That makes the rise of Florida’s very rare bonneted bat around Zoo Miami an unusual feat.

 ”They are like this incredible miracle of Miami,” said Elise Bennett, a senior attorney and the Florida and Caribbean director at the Center for Biological Diversity, the nonprofit that worked to protect the bat under the Endangered Species Act.

While risk of extinction remains, a network of bat houses erected by Zoo Miami vet Frank Ridgley and Bat Conservation International has now documented more than 200 bats, making it the largest population of bonneted bats found on the planet. When the team started their work less than a decade ago, Ridgley said no roosts had been confirmed.

“We had acoustic evidence of some around the zoo, but they were all flying into the zoo, so they were probably living in people’s homes in, around the neighborhoods here,” Ridgley said. “So we knew they were all at risk. Any construction project, any roofing project especially, could potentially wipe them out.”

With the regularly monitored roosts, researchers have been able to build a treasure trove of new findings, from breeding habits to tracking data on far-flung flight patterns. That information will help propel recovery. The zoo’s bat houses that overlook Larry and Penny Thompson Park have also provided the public with a way to view the secretive, high-flying bats. Ridgley is also working on a livestreaming bat cam. Eagle influencers make room for the bat squad.

Palm Beach County says no to Project Tango

Following months of mounting tension, Palm Beach County commissioners voted to deny a controversial expansion for Project Tango, officially blocking plans for the contentious hyperscale data center that has led to opposition from residents and court fights.

WLRN’s Wilkine Brutus covered the marathon daylong meeting to decide the vote this week and reported that a large turnout meant crowds packed into overflow rooms. Tempers also flared, leading officers to escort a few residents out of the meeting.

A final decision landed at a 5-1 vote against the project, with Commissioner Maria Marino casting the lone vote in favor. The decision effectively halts the 3.6-million-square-foot artificial intelligence data campus as counties around the state mount opposition, largely over their excessive use of water and power. Just days before the vote, Palm Beach County commissioners froze all new data center applications until better regulations can be put in place.

In April, the Pew Research Center ranked states by their number of planned and operating data centers. Florida came in 12th, with 120 centers operating and another eight planned. Virginia led the nation, with 398 in operation and 287 planned, making it the world’s first “digital capital.”

In a warning of what’s to come, the Sierra Club compiled a report tallying impacts in Virginia: 2.1 billion gallons of water used by data centers and a 50% spike in carbon emissions in the county where most are located. The centers are also fueling fights over who should shoulder the heavy demand for energy, although last month the state failed to pass clean energy requirements. Meanwhile on Thursday, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission moved to have reliability standards put in place for data centers nationwide while Meta, the New York Times reported today, is in talks for a $10 billion deal with Anthropic to feed its growing need for power.

This week in environmental news, it’s all about the ocean. Plans for a new marina at the Seaquarium in Biscayne Bay could accommodate mega yachts. That’s raising concern over the shallow bay and the critters that inhabit it. Plus, coral bleaching season is getting an early start in South Florida. And, a genealogist goes in search of slave ship wrecks in the Florida straits.

First, mega yachts.

Out with the Seaquarium, in with the mega yachts?

As we reported this week, Miami-Dade County has quietly submitted an application to state regulators for a new marina at the shuttered Seaquarium on Virginia Key. If approved, it could rank as the largest county-owned marina, located amid a patchwork of vanishing seagrass flats and trampling a spot favored by kayakers, tarpon and other wildlife.

With space for boats up to 200 feet long, the marina would be one of just a handful in Miami-Dade able to accommodate mega yachts. Nearly 90 out of 325 boat slips could accommodate boats over 80 feet long.

“The reason we don’t have a mega yacht industry in Biscayne Bay and it’s in Fort Lauderdale is they’re too deep,” said Laura Reynolds, the policy advisor for Friends of Biscayne Bay. “As much as we may want to have deep wet slips, that’s not Biscayne Bay. It’s a shallow, beautiful estuary and we can’t change that.”

To accommodate so many vessels, the county wants to build floating docks and finger piers stretching more than halfway across a channel separating Virginia Key from nearby flats. In the last decade, Biscayne Bay has lost between 70% and 90% of the flats that once made it a haven for sea turtles, bonefish, lobsters and wading birds. A wave break that doubles as a fishing pier would also curve around the docks, extending more than four football fields in length. A fuel dock would cover more than 19,000 square feet.

“It’s a terrible idea,” said Capt. Bob Branham, a champion fishing guide who retired after 50 years fishing primarily in Biscayne Bay. “You put all these big yachts in there, they might as well dredge those flats right now because they’re going to be wiped out.”

Coral bleaching season is off to an early start

Folks tending to South Florida’s ailing coral started organizing a rescue plan this week as sea surface temperatures continued to rise faster – and earlier – than three years ago when an ocean heat wave decimated offshore nurseries and wild staghorn and elkhorn. At the University of Miami Rosenstiel School, experts assembled after the 2023 heat wave convened and mapped a basic strategy: coral specially bred to endure heat would be left in place to test their limits while rescued wild coral would be moved to deeper, cooler water or into land-based facilities.

“Practicioners will have a different equation based on the number of people and funding they have,” UM professor Andrew Baker, the program’s lead, told WLRN. “So everybody will have a different solution to that equation.”

In the Keys, where Florida nurseries are concentrated offshore, Reef Renewal technical director Ken Nedimyer and his team had begun organizing and labeling elkhorn. The nursery holds the largest collection of rescued wild elkhorn. Following the 2023 blitz, federal wildlife managers declared elkhorn, along with staghorn, functionally extinct. The two fast-growing species are critical to reef building. They once blanketed Florida reefs, providing a powerful barrier to hurricane storm surge. Except for a few rare spots, including near Port Everglades, they have largely vanished.

In search of slave ship wrecks in the Florida Straits

With a measuring tape and waterproof notepad in hand, Shellie Baxter recently swam around a shipwreck embedded into the ocean’s floor in the Florida Keys. The water is warmer than the San Diego shores she’s used to, but this is still her most challenging dive yet – she is learning how to document slave shipwrecks.

As a genealogist, Baxter has helped over 150 people trace their ancestral roots through her organization Our Genetic Legacy, a nonprofit that researches the hidden histories of Black and Indigenous people. Now she’s trained her focus on the seas.

Historians estimate that as many as a thousand ships sank during the Middle Passage, during a 400-year-long transatlantic slave trade that killed an estimated two million African captives at sea. Fewer than 20 of those wrecks have ever been documented. Baxter got her start diving and documenting the wrecks with Diving With a Purpose, a nonprofit that trains divers to investigate archeological sites in partnership with Biscayne National Park and the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary.

“Our end goal here is to do archeological research underwater to help find sunken slave ships and document them.” Baxter said after a recent dive. “It’s a whole ‘nother level of diving. You’re taking measurements, writing them down underwater, and then coming back up and creating schematic drawings so that they can create a recreation of that shipwreck.”

This week in environmental news: A proposal to cut property taxes headed to voters in November could take a bite out of mosquito control. Also, ocean surface temperatures hit a new record high as peak coral bleaching season draws near.

First, skeeters.

‘The marvels of mosquito control’

As Florida voters consider a dramatic cut to property taxes in this November’s election, they may overlook an unintended consequence of those savings: more mosquitoes.

As WLRN reported this week, under the current proposal, mosquito control districts that depend solely on ad valorem taxes would see about a third of their budgets slashed, according to the Florida Mosquito Control Association. That would cripple the state’s 15 independent mosquito control districts fighting on the frontlines of the state’s most infested counties, where seasonal rains bring vicious swarms. Those districts, the association says, also serve as hubs for mosquito intel across the state in county-run programs, which could also see cuts under the proposal.

 ” Most people don’t think about mosquito control every day,” said Sherry Burroughs, the association’s vice president. “But when it’s absent, the community feels it very quickly.”

Others are also sounding the alarm over additional services that may suffer without funding from property taxes, including libraries, transportation and public medical care.

Ocean surface temps hit record high

This week, surface ocean temperatures outside polar regions hit a new record high for June, The Guardian reported, beating a previous record set in June 2023. Floridians may remember that summer: a blazing marine heat wave rolled through South Florida waters triggering widespread coral deaths. Afterwards, both staghorn and elkhorn coral - two species critical to building reefs in Florida - were declared functionally extinct. Scientists racing to rescue elkhorn coral by cross-breeding them with more resilient coral from Honduras, have been busy planting their offspring on reefs. Last year, they planted several dozen off Key Biscayne and hundreds more this year in the Dry Tortugas.

Around South Florida, waters are already hovering above 87 degrees, the temperature when coral can begin bleaching. With the peak in coral bleaching season arriving this month, those corals and other species bred to be more resilient to warming oceans, will likely be tested.

This week in environmental news: With the governor officially decommissioning the Alligator Alcatraz detention center in the Big Cypress National Preserve, Miami-Dade’s mayor wants to have the site, finally, permanently protected. Decades ago, the old jetport where the center was erected ignited a larger effort to save the River of Grass. Plus, phosphorus. Friend or foe?

Let’s start with Alligator Alcatraz. National Park Service, have we got a deal for you.

What a steal

In a surprise move, Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava told county commissioners this week she planned to recommend selling the old jetport transformed into a steamy, cage-filled immigration detention center to the National Park Service.

The “decommissioning of the Alligator Alcatraz facility would present a historic opportunity to permanently protect these lands,” she wrote in a memo Thursday, noting that the county-owned site in the Big Cypress National Preserve is “no longer operationally or economically optimal for continued County ownership and operation.”

Back in June 2025, Levine Cava rebuffed efforts by the Florida Department of Emergency Management to buy the land for $20 million. At the time, Director Kevin Guthrie said the state had identified the land as “a critical asset for ongoing and future emergency response.”

Levine Cava noted that her administration has consistently voiced concerns over use of the site for the detention center and risks it poses to ongoing Everglades restoration efforts. Located near the center of Everglades marshes south of Lake Okeechobee, the land is situated amid the massive Shark River Slough that the state and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers hope to resurrect to save wildlife habitat, fend off saltwater intrusion worsened by sea rise and keep southern marshes from collapsing.

If a deal goes through, it would achieve a longstanding goal sought by environmentalists. In the 1960s, county planners wanted to make the site the world’s largest airport. But brash Everglades champion Joe Browder famously lured Marjory Stoneman Douglas out of retirement, the Miami Herald reported in his obituary, to cofound Friends of the Everglades and successfully stop the jetport. The fight to protect the land was later picked up by Sean McCrackine, by contrast a “quiet warrior,” who served as an advisor to Levine Cava until his death from cancer in 2024.

How did the Devil’s Element get so bad?

In Florida, we hear a lot about phosphorus. It helps grow our food andpollute our water. The steady flow of phosphorus-loaded water from Lake Okeechobee and about a half million acres of sugarcane fields has shaped nearly all the major Everglades restoration projects expected to cost $23 billion as they march toward the finish line.

But it’s not just a Florida problem. Across the country, communities are dealing with excess phosphorus and its damage to freshwater ecosystems.

A few months ago, the folks at WWNO’s Sea Change podcast decided to break down the problem, taking a look not just at phosphorus but nitrogen and carbon as well. Their thinking: how did three elements so basic to life become our mortal enemy?

WLRN pitched in by taking a stab at the phosphorus episode and, to our surprise, discovered a new chapter in the devil’s element. Domestic phosphorus supplies are limited – those vast mines on the Gulf Coast will likely get tapped out in the next half century – so scientists are now trying to find ways to recycle phosphorus. Because we’ve already spread too much phosphorus across the planet, they aim to find a way to recycle and reuse. We could start at the reflecting pool!

This week in environmental news: For at least the last five years, Hard Rock stadium has been curbing its plastics pollution. Then came the World Cup. Plus, as climate change heats the planet, hurricane dynamics are changing. Researchers at the University of Miami are trying to figure out what that means for forecasts and how we can build to stay safe.

First up, plastic. Not so fantastic.

With the World Cup, Hard Rock Stadium goes back to plastic

As the World Cup plays out in Miami over the next month, matches in Miami Gardens could generate a stadium-sized deluge of plastic bottles, cups and other utensils.

With no plans to curb plastic that Hard Rock Stadium officials usually try to limit, World Cup games played at the 65,000-plus seat venue could produce twice the amount normally flowing from the stadium, ocean conservation nonprofit Oceana estimates. That’s based on attendees buying at least one drink and another item, like a bag of chips.

Even more could come from fans allowed to bring water, but only in sealed plastic bottles — a decision made just days before the opening match.

 ”Events like these create just such a tremendous amount of plastic waste,” said  Hunter Miller, deputy field director for Oceana’s U.S. field team. “The responsible thing to do is to find ways that we can experience these events, but also have more sustainability.”

The waste produced by these mega-sized events can be enormous. A 2024 study reported a typical Super Bowl, played on a single day, can produce 40 tons of waste, with plastic cups and plates dominating trash piles. In 2018, the United Nations estimated a single sporting event can generate up to 750,000 plastic water bottles.

Oceana and county officials say they urged FIFA to follow stadium reuse programs at various matches. Hard Rock Stadium and the Dolphins, for example, launched a reuse program in 2019 and say that by the 2020 Superbowl, they’d eliminated 99.4% of single-use plastics. In 2024, the stadium received a LEED Gold certification for its efforts. FIFA officials did not respond to WLRN requests for comment.

The changing dynamics of hurricanes

As the first named storm popped up in the Gulf of Mexico Wednesday morning, scientists are racing to understand the changing dynamic of increasingly intense storms on a warming planet.

“ We know that conditions are changing. We know that our storms are intensifying,” Landolf Rhode-Barbarigos, an engineering professor at the University of Miami who specializes in designing more resilient structures told WLRN. “This will bring a different type of demand to our structures.”

To better understand that, Rhode-Barbarigos has been subjecting dollhouse-sized structures — a tiny red stilt house and a plexiglass model meant to replicate one of South Florida’s plentiful concrete block houses — to the furious winds and waves generated in the hurricane wave tank at UM’s Rosenstiel School on Virginia Key.

At about 175-feet long and capable of holding 38,000 gallons of seawater, the Sustain tank can whip up Cat 5 storm conditions. And so far, cranking up the wind and water is producing some unexpected findings.

As climate change warms the planet, hurricanes are expected to become more intense. Forecasters, armed with more warning tools, are also seeing a growing number of storms rapidly intensify. Teasing out changes, however, has always been complicated by a short period of record to study. Geology provides some clues, but many records rely on old mariner reports or accounts once storms make landfall. In modern times, satellite tracking and improved technology has vastly changed what we know, allowing researchers to peek inside storms.

But proposed cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration threaten to undermine that work, including eliminating vital satellite data and a decade-old ocean monitoring system now being dismantled by the Trump administration.

This week in environmental news: As the planet warms, a new study has found data collected by sharks and other animals monitored by scientists could help improve climate forecasts. Also, an El Niño expected to dampen the Atlantic hurricane season arrived this week. That’s good news for Florida and the eastern seaboard, but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration warns it could go down as one of the strongest on record, with dangerous ripple effects.

First up, we’re gonna need a bigger boat.

Data mining sharks

For this week’s Etudes in Science, we took a look at a mighty predator of the sea, capable of traveling vast distances and diving thousands of feet deep. Their travels, according to a new study, may become a valuable tool in helping forecast climate change.

University of Miami Rosenstiel School researchers found that sensors usually attached to sharks to investigate their behavior can also allow scientists to track temperature changes in parts of the oceans often inaccessible to satellites and drifters pulled by currents. Using mako and blue sharks, among the most nomadic of sharks, scientists were able to fill in data gaps and improve some forecasts by as much as 40%.

 ”What we ended up seeing is what we’re calling model improvements in shallow areas, in the Slope Sea [in the Northwest Atlantic] and along the continental shelf,” said Laura McDonnell, lead author and now a researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Researchers say this new tool won’t replace existing monitoring systems, including the decade-old Ocean Observatories Initiative that the Trump administration is planning to shut down. Democrats in Congress have vowed to fight the move.

Hello El Niño

An El Niño that forecasters say could become the largest on record arrived this week, NOAA announced, launching expected ripple effects around the planet.

At Colorado State University, hurricane researchers revised their forecast for an even slower Atlantic hurricane season, decreasing their April forecast of 13 named storms to 11. “While the intensity of the El Niño remains uncertain, the CSU team anticipates that a moderate to strong El Niño is very likely by the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season,” they wrote.

The news may not be so good for the rest of the planet. Droughts are likely in southern Africa, Australia and India, the Washington Post reported. Peru’s winter is already turning into beach weather. At the United Nations, Secretary General António Guterres warned, “El Niño conditions will pour fuel on the fire of a warming world,” AP reported. Several climate scientists, AP said, have predicted 2027 could become the hottest year on record for the planet because of El Niño’s lingering effects.

In his Eye on the Tropics blog, WPLG hurricane specialist and former National Hurricane Center forecaster Michael Lowry said this year’s El Niño is already setting up to outpace past events, including 2023. That year’s El Niño’s was partly to blame for a blistering marine heat wave that swept through South Florida and killed coral, causing stands of wild endangered staghorn and elkhorn to become functionally extinct.

This week in environmental news: Two decades ago, a landmark settlement between environmentalists and the state required Florida to fully reach pollution limits for waters running from farm fields and into the Everglades beginning in 2026. Time’s almost up, but the water is not clean. Plus, checking the books on Alligator Alcatraz.

First up, the Everglades.

Now or Neverglades

Nearly 40 years after Gov. Bob Graham vowed to wind back the clock on the Everglades and return the River of Grass to a healthy wetland, Florida continues to struggle to clean water loaded with phosphorus from fertilizer running off sugarcane fields. In 2023, WLRN dove into the matter on Episode 3 of the podcast Bright Lit Place.

To fix the problem and settle a lawsuit with environmentalists and the Miccosukee Tribe, the state has invested billions on sprawling treatment marshes covering about 57,000 acres that scrub water clean. But in 2023, the National Academies of Sciences warned the state was dangerously close to not meeting the deadline, which requires the state to fully begin meeting phosphorus rules between May 2026 and April 2027. So the clock started ticking last month. Failing to meet the limit could interfere with operating what Florida deems the crown jewel of restoration: a massive reservoir south of sugarcane fields meant to store polluted water before sending it south into the Everglades.

Also a footnote: the state was originally supposed to get water clean by 2006, but former Gov. Jeb Bush pushed back the deadline to 2016, prompting the lawsuit that the state settled by agreeing to spend $880 million to meet the new deadline.

In March, Friends of the Everglades, a plaintiff in that lawsuit, published a report again warning that as the deadline draws near, the state is likely to fail.

“The state has learned how to build and operate man-made wetlands. We simply don’t have a large enough area of them to handle the 400,000 acres of sugarcane that are polluting water in the Everglades,” Friends Executive Director Eve Samples told Inside Climate News in April.

“We’ve been kicking the can down the road for 30 years,” Samples told the Florida Phoenix columnist Craig Pittman this week.

If the Everglades is to survive, with its radiant sawgrass marshes and marl prairies amid one of the world’s largest wetlands, phosphorus in water must remain very low.

“The process of degradation is very much slowed down, but not stopped,” Friends’ science advisor and longtime Everglades hydrologist Tom Van Lent told the Florida Tributary. “It will get you to the same endpoint, just slower.”

Accounting for Alligator Alcatraz

Florida has so far refused to provide a full accounting for the cost of a detention camp in the Big Cypress Swamp, but back in September the DeSantis administration came out with a stunning estimate: about $1 billion over two years. Now a slew of accountings of those costs reveals the devil lurking in the details.

“Enough has been disclosed to enable some basic math,” the Atlantic reported this week. “It would have been less expensive to buy each of the men detained at Alligator Alcatraz his own one-bedroom condo in Orlando and pay for a personal, full-time guard to keep an eye on him.”

Money originally meant to deal with hurricane recovery — like hauling away debris and rebuilding critical infrastructure — has instead paid the company Doodie Calls at least $92 million to haul away waste from portable toilets. Another $35 million went to a Miami couple who donated $1 million to a political action committee that supports the governor and were hired to help build the camp and run its medical unit. In the Atlantic’s breakdown, Florida is spending about $500,000 on each detainee for a year, far more than the $30,000 the state spends for an inmate in a state prison.

By the Miami Herald’s estimate, the state has signed at least 55 contracts amounting to $1 billion in the last year related to state-run immigration detention centers. Most went to Alligator Alcatraz, the Herald said.

Gov. Ron DeSantis has said he expects the federal government to reimburse the state at least $608 million. According to the Florida Phoenix, the first check for $58.2 million arrived this month but was limited to operational costs, including staff salaries, janitorial services or medical supplies.

This week in environmental news: South Florida’s high water table doesn’t just worsen flooding hazards, it may also be spreading pollution in groundwater. Plus, is Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava pulling the plug on contentious plans for a much-needed incinerator?

Let’s start with water pollution.

Stormwater everywhere, all at once

On a sun-battered stretch of the Miami River canal wedged between U.S. 27, the old cross-state truck route, and an industrial area of Medley, the water looks brown, murky and inhospitable.

For Ali Ebrahimian, a Florida International University engineer specializing in water resources, the location is perfect.

“Basically, these are our rivers,” Ebrahimian said.  “We’re trying to see what is being discharged into this water, and then what happens. All these pollutants have a journey.”

As WLRN reported this week, the location is just one data point in a pollution hotspot map Ebrahimian is building to better understand how stormwater is polluting groundwater across South Florida. It’s also part of a plan to understand how hundreds of miles of specialized drainage pipes – enough to stretch from Miami to St. Augustine – may be affecting pollution. The pipes were created to control stormwater and help filter pollution as it moves through soil. That works in areas with deeper groundwater. But South Florida’s high water table can leave little space for filtering and keep stormwater from being cleaned.

That matters because as climate change warms the planet in bustling South Florida, more stormwater and all the stuff running off streets, parking lots, yards and more is mingling with the region’s shallow groundwater.

An incinerator up in the air

In a memo reported this week by the Miami Herald, Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava warned she will have to abandon plans to replace the county’s incinerator after commissioners rejected a rate hike in garbage collection. The much-debated incinerator, needed to replace the Doral facility damaged by fire in 2023, is expected to cost $2 billion. Without the fee hike to cover costs, Levine Cava said the county “cannot responsibly continue spending ratepayer dollars and staff resources to plan a waste-to-energy (WTE) facility.”

Since the incinerator shut down, Miami-Dade has been shipping its trash out of county while it struggles to find a replacement site for a new facility. Miami-Dade is not alone in its mounting trash woes. Across South Florida, local governments are running out of space for trash. In Broward County, where a regional landfill is getting short on space and the regional incinerator is at capacity, commissioners this month backed a master planto address the problem. Monroe County also ships its trash out of county.

In Miami-Dade, commissioners say they want to do “more with less,” the Herald reported. The county is currently in talks with two contractors, but so far has no way to foot the bill.

This week in environmental news: Federal forecasters are calling for another below-average hurricane season but with a caveat: steamy waters around Florida and the Gulf Coast could still deliver a whopper. And just in time for hurricane season, the World Cup arrives in South Florida next month. Warning: it will be hot.

Not to be redundant, but let’s start again with hurricanes this week.

Hide from the wind, run from the water

On Thursday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration called for another relatively quiet hurricane season, with between eight and 14 named storms and up to six hurricanes. One to three of those hurricanes, they say, could blossom into major storms with winds topping 111 mph.

Even with those lower numbers, officials warn slow seasons and weak storms can still wreak havoc, especially with an uptick in more intense hurricanes and storms that can rapidly intensify with little warning.

A potentially record-breaking El Niño is driving the forecast. But warmer than normal waters around Florida and the Gulf of Mexico have added some uncertainty. So let’s unpack that. Forecasters put the probability of this year’s forecast for a slow season at just 55%. Last year’s outlook calling for an above-average season came with a 60% probability. But it wound up being below average (although it still delivered Melissa, one of the most powerful hurricanes on record). By contrast, 2024’s forecast was both more confident and more accurate: with a probability of 85%, forecasters correctly called for a busy season that ultimately delivered seven tropical storms and 11 hurricanes, with five of those becoming major storms.

Given those odds, officials stressed the need to be ready for the season that begins June 1 and ends Nov. 30.

 ”Right now there’s no lines. Stock up. Stock up now,” National Weather Service Director Ken Graham said Thursday. And importantly, he said, make an evacuation plan. The general rule of thumb: hide from the wind, run from the water.

“You don’t have to get away very far. So where do you go? Five, 10, 20 miles,” he said. “People don’t have to go to Atlanta if you live in Fort Myers, right? Go stay somewhere, maybe in Orlando.”

The hottest event in Miami this year? Probably the World Cup

When soccer’s World Cup arrives in South Florida next month, there will be a new player on the pitch: meteorologists.

The National Weather Service’s Miami office, with back-up from around the country, will be staffing matches at Hard Rock Stadium, along with training centers, transportation hubs and other soccer events to track steamy temperatures and other hazards. Starting in June and through the high-priced tournament’s end, the agency will be providing daily briefings with a focus on soccer events along with updates as needed.

 ”Anyone that’s there can come to the meteorologists and ask questions and get the information they need rapidly,” said Robert Molleda, Meteorologist-in-Charge for the Miami Office. “ For a critical event like this where there’s tens of thousands of people, safety is super important.”

The increased staffing comes amid a call by players for better heat protocols, the Associated Press reported this week. Last year, climate scientists took a look at heat in host cities and found temperatures in four cities, including Miami, fell above what’s considered safe for play. This month, World Weather Attribution climate scientists said a quarter of matches would likely be played in conditions exceeding safety thresholds.

This week in environmental news: with a Godzilla-sized El Niño shaping up in the Pacific, this year’s Atlantic hurricane season could again be slower than seasons over the last decade. Forecasters say don’t let your guard down. Plus, the sargassum blues.

Let’s start with hurricanes.

Stormy weather for hurricane forecasting

With the Atlantic hurricane center just weeks away, hurricane forecasters are preparing to launch a new suite of tools as a looming budget cut threatens to slash research efforts.

For the upcoming season, the National Hurricane Center will be testing a forecast cone that ups the certainty of track predictions from just under 70% to 90%. A new mobile-friendly forecast page will make it easier to read information on phones. And forecasts, as last year’s lethal Hurricane Melissa demonstrated, continue to dramatically improve, National Hurricane Center Director Michael Brennan said Wednesday.

“These are forecasts that we simply were not able to make more than five or 10 years ago,” Brennan said during the Governor’s Hurricane Conference in West Palm Beach.

With an El Niño shaping up, early pre-season forecasts are calling for another slower season. Colorado State University has projected just 13 named storms, slightly below the average, with just two named storms. But even a slow season can deliver a punch: last year’s below-average season produced Melissa, one of the strongest storms on record. Three hurricanes climbed to fierce Cat 5 strength.

Meanwhile, the White House has again proposed slashing NOAA’s budget by $1 billion and eliminating the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research. That office oversees hurricane research, including the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Lab on Virginia Key, which plays a critical role in improving forecasts and got slammed with layoffs last year.

Mt. Sargassum rises in Florida

Winds and currents are again hammering Florida beaches with one of our least favorite springbreakers: sargassum. Sargassum that started to pile up in the Western Atlantic and Caribbean in February is now expected to deliver another record-breaking year to Florida.

“In the last two or three years, more and more historical records are being reached,” University of South Florida researcher Chuanmin Hu, who pioneered tracking sargassum with NASA satellite data, told the Miami Herald.

To keep up, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration launched a new tracker last month. New research from the University of Miami also found Florida’s sargassum originates in West Africa not the Sargasso Sea in the western North Atlantic Ocean. That research also revealed improved tracking potential, USA Today reported. By determining where and under what conditions sargassum grows — in this case when ocean upwelling delivers nutrients in cooler waters, along with a sprinkling of Saharan dust — scientists can better predict the invasion along beaches in Florida and throughout the Caribbean.

This week in environmental news: the attention-grabbing Alligator Alcatraz immigrant detention camp that Florida built in the middle of protected Everglades could be shuttered. Sources told the New York Times the Trump administration now considered it “ineffective.” Plus, a century of David Attenborough.

First, Camp Swamp.

Not so efficient. Not so effective

In July 2025, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier posted on X: “Alligator Alcatraz = efficient and cost effective. It’s a one stop shop for immigration enforcement.”

The Trump Administration, the New York Times reported this week, now appears to disagree. “Officials at the Department of Homeland Security have concluded that it is too expensive to keep operating the center, known as Alligator Alcatraz. Homeland security officials have also come to consider the center ineffective,” the Times reported.

In the 10 months the center has operated, it has cost Florida taxpayers an estimated $640 million and launched three lawsuits. Environmentalists sued after federal environmental assessments required to protect endangered wildlife were disregarded. The state argued that because Florida was operating and paying for the camp, federal rules didn’t apply.

The camp sits on an old landing strip in the Big Cypress National Swamp where endangered Florida panthers and bonneted bats have repeatedly been spotted. The site is also located in the midst of Everglades restoration, the massive effort to restore the River of Grass that Florida has so far spent more than $7 billion to help complete.

In confirming talks of shutting down the site this week, Gov. Ron DeSantis said Alligator Alcatraz has had “a major impact” and was always intended to be temporary.

At a Lakeland press conference, he said the center was created at the request of Homeland Security and insisted the costs of the camp would be reimbursed. “That will happen. I know the media has made a big deal. It’s FEMA. It takes a while. We’re getting it.”

The David Attenborough epoch

Today, the famed adventurer and voice of the Earth — if mother nature spoke in baritone — turns 100. And the accolades are pouring in.

In London, NPR reported, fans gathered in Trafalgar Square dressed as lions and tigers, while school kids arrived for class in safari garb. The Royal Family sent birthday wishes. In tandem with his centennial, remarkably, Attenborough is airing a new five-part series further cementing his place in history. “Attenborough, more than anybody, has established the link between the patch of glass in our living rooms and the wide world beyond,” the New Yorker wrote.

As technology and science have changed, Attenborough also pivoted, Mongabay reports, widening his lens to explore not just the wonder of nature, but the threats.

Not among the first to sound the alarm, Attenborough still became a persuasive voice warning about the risks from climate change. “I think it’s very easy for a lot of people to say, ‘He should have done it sooner. Why didn’t he act 20 years, 30 years, 40 years ago?’” one biologist told the Associated Press, and then asked: “Why didn’t we?’’

Florida fans will appreciate how the twice-knighted conservationist launched his career on the BBC by capturing a Burmese python.

This week in environmental news: the ocean can be a perilous place for sea turtles. Red tides, massive invasions of sargassum and oil spills can foul water. Rising temperatures mess with their food. Now, a new study has found a way to track the impact of those hazards using the shells on their backs. Plus, what happens when a data center comes to a small town.

Let’s start with our beloved tortugas.

Lives and misfortunes etched on their backs

As measures to protect sea turtles ebb and flow, the turtle’s “lost years” spent out at sea after they hatch on beaches along Florida and around the tropics have remained a tricky factor in conservation efforts.

A new study has now found a surprising place where their secret lives can be archived: the shells on their backs.

 ”The reason we’re interested in how fast the scutes grow is because if you take a biopsy, you essentially can obtain a record of diet and movement through time,” said Bethan Linscott, one of the study’s lead authors and an assistant professor at the University of Miami Rosenstiel School. “The missing element for a long time has been knowing what that timescale represents.”

This latest episode of WLRN’s Etudes in Science takes a look at the unusual research and what’s discovered when a geochemical archaeologist — who started her career studying Neanderthals — teams up with University of Florida sea turtle researchers.

Okeechobee County says no to a data center. Others agree

Plans for a 205-acre data campus in rural Okeechobee County were scrapped last week after county commissioners opposed it. The state also pulled its funding.

Could this be the beginning of a trend?

As WLRN’s Wilkine Brutus reported, a petition objecting to the Okee-One data center gathered more than 3,000 signatures just before the meeting.

Indian River State College proposed converting the site near Lake Okeechobee into a “learning living lab.” The site once housed a detention center for boys connected to the notoriously brutal Dozier School for Boys.

“Let’s not be hypocrites and stand here and pass proclamations about water management and then invite these creatures in,” resident Shelly Glazer told commissioners.

The vote comes as local communities nationwide have begun pushing back, with both liberals and conservatives finding rare common ground. In one small Pennsylvania community, developers plan to build campuses, with 51 Walmart-sized data warehouses, that would cover 14% of the town’s land.

“All that construction has to happen in someone’s backyard — or, at least, on someone’s drive to work or school,” the New York Times reported on the growing backlash. “And as conflicts over building housing and renewable energy have shown, Americans have a prodigious ability to stop things that they believe will impinge on their quality of life.”

This week in environmental news: a Florida river that feeds more than 300 springs is seriously sick. Plus, plans by a heavy equipment operator to build on wetlands outside Miami-Dade’s urban development boundary get deferred again.

First, is the Suwannee dying?

The winding Suwannee River is in trouble

This month, the nonprofit American Rivers published a new list for the most endangered rivers in the U.S. Coming in at number 10 was the Suwannee River, Florida’s famed river that once formed a narrow strait separating the state from the rest of North America. According to American Rivers, run-off from fertilizer and livestock across the 11,000-square mile watershed draining into the river have turned the Suwannee into a polluted mess. In places, levels of nitrogen are 10 times the state’s recommended limits, while overpumping has slowed the river so drastically that some springs are running dry.

Florida is contemplating a fix, but as Craig Pittman with the Florida Phoenix writes, “One flaw in the flow restoration plan: Lots of unanswered questions.”

To help fix the problem, state and local water management districts want to pipe treated wastewater from Jacksonville. In a video, Water First North Florida says that treated water will then be flushed into nearby wetlands to recharge the aquifer.

“There’s not been nearly enough research on what the negative effects might be,” a local commissioner told Pittman. Local residents have also opposed the project, WUFT reported.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has advocated for reusing treated wastewater to boost freshwater supplies as demand grows. In South Florida, treated wastewater is used on golf courses, some non-food crops and to cool power plants. The South Florida Water Management District says 16 counties in the district produce nearly 300 million gallons a day of treated wastewater that can be reused. Most goes to landscape irrigation while about 35 million gallons a day is used to recharge the aquifer. (Some counties, including Glades, Orange and Polk, reuse nearly all of their wastewater.)

But where that water goes matters, especially when it feeds rivers and estuaries where nitrogen and phosphorus can wreak havoc. Wastewater used to recharge aquifers undergoes less treatment before being flushed into the ground than wastewater used for drinking, according to FDEP.

Miami-Dade commissioners defer vote to build on wetlands. Again

A heavy equipment dealer hoping to build new headquarters on wetlands outside Miami-Dade County’s urban development boundary will now have to wait until May for a vote.

County commissioners again delayed voting on the controversial project after Miami-Dade Mayor Daniella Levine Cava, who issued a rare veto blocking the commission’s January approval, said Kelly Tractor had still failed to show why sprawling new headquarters need to be built outside the boundary. The 246-acre project would be more than 10 times bigger than its existing headquarters, with 2.2 million square feet for inside storage, more than 500 spots for truck parking, gas pumps, a helicopter pad and mechanics bays.

 ”The urban development boundary exists for a reason,” Levine Cava said at the meeting. “It’s there to protect our environment, protect our residents and protect our economy from the consequences of overdevelopment. These guidelines are not bargaining chips.

This week in environmental news: a pivotal permit for the Port Everglades dredge has been withdrawn while the Army Corps reconsiders work that would blast through a chunk of Florida’s imperiled reef. Plus, Florida’s attorney general investigates the “climate cartel.”

First, another dredge.

Rethinking the dredge

In the shadow of the PortMiami dredge that smothered hundreds of acres of coral, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been under pressure to proceed more cautiously with work at Port Everglades. In 2017, a year after Congress authorized the project to lengthen and deepen the port channel, the Corps paused work when environmentalists sued. The groups argued the Corps used the same faulty assessment for Port Everglades that miscalculated the damage to coral at PortMiami.

Earlier this month, the Corps paused work again when it withdrew an environmental resources permit application to the state of Florida. A Corps public affairs officer told WLRN the Corps is talking to other government agencies that might change how the Corps executes the project.

That execution could hinge on protecting the fragile reef that will need to be blasted through to lengthen the channel by about six football fields. Turns out that stretch of reef has quietly been harboring two iconic — and increasingly rare — Florida species: staghorn coral and queen conchs. Staghorn, along with elkhorn, were declared functionally extinct following a blistering 2023 marine heat wave. But to scientists’ surprise, what might be the largest last stand of wild staghorn survived near the busy port. A rare herd of inshore queen conchs also lives nearby.

The dredge, now expected to cost at least $1.35 billion, has also drawn the scrutiny from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The agency described the Corps report on environmental impacts as “unintelligible.” If approved, NOAA’s regional administrator warned that the project “would result in the largest impact to coral reefs permitted in U.S. history.”

Florida’s attorney general takes aim at the ‘climate cartel’

This week, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier aimed the power of his office at what he described as “the climate cartel.” Uthmeier issued subpoenas to the nonprofit Environmental Law Institute, the Florida Phoenix reported, demanding records on how it interacts with judges.

The move, he said, was part of an investigation under the state’s unfair practice law created in 1973 to mimic federal laws and protect consumers from businesses that lure the public into purchasing products with misleading practices. In January, Uthmeier, joined by five other states, issued a warning to Ceres, a Boston nonprofit that works with businesses to make their operations more sustainable, demanding it explain how it complied with antitrust laws.

Using antitrust laws to stop climate strategies appears to be an unintended consequence and growing manipulation of a law intended to protect consumers, according to Yale Environment Review.

The Environmental Law Institute has been working to clarify the paradoxbetween antitrust laws and sustainability efforts. The nonprofit provides pro bono research and offers free training, but does not litigate cases.

But its Climate Judiciary Project has drawn scrutiny from the right. In January, the U.S. House of Representatives’s Judiciary Committee opened a probe. That led to a chapter on climate change in a federal legal manual used by judges to be removed.

This week’s environmental news will be a little bit of a look back because I’m out of the office. But it’s no less timely. First, a new book looking at the deep-sea floor sheds light on oil and gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, explaining how we could potentially destroy things before we even know they exist. Plus, the dark side of the moon.

Let’s start with drilling.

Fouling our nest

Last week, we told you about a decision by the Trump administration to remove protections for endangered species to make way for expanded drilling. U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made the request, arguing drilling was necessary to ensure the security of the nation. The administration has also streamlined permitting, approved drilling in ultra deep water and signed off on a new round of lease sales.

This week, The New Yorker published an excerpt from geobiologist Jeffrey Marlow’s new book The Dark Frontier. It offers a different take.

Marlow studies microbes in the planet’s most hostile environments, like 5,000-feet deep at the bottom of the Gulf. Not much is known about life so deep. Ripple effects from BP’s Deepwater Horizon 2010 rig explosion, which damaged more than 700 square miles of the deep ocean habitat when it spilled at least three million barrels of oil, will take years to fully understand.

Before the explosion, a deep-sea biologist who Marlow talked to had only just discovered a vast garden of deep-water corals later smothered by the spill. Those corals can be thousands of years old, teeming with life. More than 15 years after the explosion, the American Geophysical Union reported deepwater corals in the oil’s path continue to decline.

And it’s not just coral. While there were immediate impacts to mahi, sea turtles and hundreds of thousands of sea birds, not much was known about the habits of some whales that swim at extreme depths. Both whales and dolphins are also long-lived, so the full toll of the spill remains unknown.

Nearly 25 years after the BP spill, the deep-water coral biologist told Marlow he’d just recently encountered new coral species at the bottom of the Atlantic off North Carolina. “He often wonders how many hidden coral ecosystems could be destroyed,” Marlow writes, “and how many were lost before we even knew they existed.”

Why exactly are we going back to the moon?

Last week, NASA sent a manned mission back to the moon, a half century after the last one. With a flawless launch, and one faulty toilet, the four-person crew flew into new territory as they journeyed to the far side of the moon, breaking the old Apollo 13 distance record.

Aside from seeing parts of the moon never before viewed by human eyes, the astronauts will be able to detect colors not captured by satellite imaging. Those colors can tell scientists what secrets the moon might still hold in its geologic formations.

But parts of the mission have also been met with skepticism, like positioning the return as a race with China. The war with Iran also casts a shadow.

“We are rightfully in awe and proud of the fact that we can now launch spacecraft beyond the solar system and humans to the moon. Yet that same technology produced the V-2 and the ICBM,” astrobiologist David Grinspoon told the New York Times. “We humans are not living up to the promise I saw as a kid enthralled by Apollo, and so I dearly hope, but am not convinced, that this can help re-spark more than just cool rocket rides.”

This week in environmental news: can Caribbean crabs help revive reefs? Plus, the Trump administration is drastically reorganizing the U.S. Forest Service and also invoked the “God Squad” to lift rules that protect endangered species from oil drilling in the Gulf.

Let’s start with crabs.

Crabs to the rescue

This week, Mote Marine Lab announced it had made the first successful release of hatchery-bred Caribbean king crabs on reefs in the Lower Keys. Like sea urchins, parrot fish and other reef dwellers, the native crabs gobble up seaweed and algae to keep reefs tidy and make room for coral. It’s part of a shift by scientists who are taking a more holistic approach to reef restoration and the balance of inhabitants.

The idea of using voracious crabs has been an ongoing effort. Scientists at Florida International University and the College of the Florida Keys reported in 2021 that the spiny crabs had a “powerful grazing capability” to fight seaweed smothering reefs. The team, which includes a scientist leading the Mote effort, found the crabs even eat seaweed that other marine life avoid.

While this initial release is small — just 24 crabs — Mote says it plans to significantly expand its army of seaweed eaters. The crabs came from a broodstock housed at Mote’s Sarasota aquaculture research park, where a clutch of crabs was successfully hatched in 2022. To be successful, a few hurdles remain: crabs are tasty prey to other marine life. That means releases need to be plentiful. Crabs can also wander. The next step will be ensuring the nursery-bred crabs adapt to the wild reef and stay on the job.

U.S. Forest Service gets a makeover. Not everyone is happy

The U.S. Forest Service is undergoing a major makeover, including shuttering all nine of its regional offices and moving its headquarters from Washington, D.C. to Utah, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said this week. Back in July, when the plan was first floated, response was overwhelmingly negative, Mother Jones reports. (The first Trump administration moved the Bureau of Land Management to Colorado, which the Biden administration moved back.) Critics worry the move will create chaos and thin the ranks of experienced staff at a time when forests face deepening threats from wildfires and increased logging.

“The decentralization process in this guise is an attempt to destroy the capacity and effectiveness” of agencies like the Forest Service, Char Miller, a professor of environmental analysis and history at Pomona College, told the Washington Post.

The ‘God Squad’ gets sued

A coalition of environmental groups sued the Trump administration this week over its decision to remove endangered species protections from wildlife that could be harmed by expanded oil drilling in the Gulf. The decision was made by a panel within the administration dubbed “the God Squad.” The panel has only met four times since the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973 and convened after U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth made the request.

“This is not just about gas prices; it’s about our ability to power our military and protect our nation.” Hegseth told the six-member committee.

The committee voted unanimously to waive all regulations on drilling that protect species like the critically endangered Rice’s whale, which was only just identified in 2021. The 2010 BP Horizon oil spill polluted much of the whale’s habitat, killing or sickening more than 30% of the whales that remained. In addition to the rare whale, a menagerie of other species would face increasing risk from drilling, including Kemp’s Ridley and loggerhead sea turtles, manatees and coral.