If you're doomscrolling, guess what? So far there are 51 kākāpō chicks hatched and thriving this season, the same number of birds as we had in TOTAL in the 90s! Only one chick has died and there are still fertile eggs waiting to hatch!

Honestly if NZ parties don’t front up about their plans for climate & basic infrastructure we should be deeply ashamed -NZ has a sewerage crisis in all our major cities, we have flooding & landslides causing loss of life & critical failure s- thinking we can cap rates & manage this, is crazy

A piece of Glossopteris leaf from the late Permian of Antarctica ~260 million years old 🌳⛏️. Broken but showing nice detail of the veination. Glossopterids are seed plants that were found on all of today's southern continents during the Permian. Happy #FossilFriday! #paleobotany #botany

The second #kakapo chick of the #kakapo2026 breeding season hatched this morning: Hine Taumai-A1-2026 on Ako's nest on Te Kākahu. We transferred the egg from Anchor two nights ago. This is Ako's first-ever chick, which is just a few hours old in this video. #conservation #birds #parrots

Some good news for anyone depressed about the world right now: the kakapo are getting it onnnnn thespinoff.co.nz/science/13-0...

There's a lot of useful numbers in this post.

Crises in the cryosphere keynote session this morning #CLIC2026 - talks by Lauren Vargo, Petra Heil, Nick Golledge, Chris Stokes. Topics ranging from mountain glaciers, ice sheets, sea ice - using images, observations, and models. Great talks - depressing session. 🥶🌊@clic

William Nordhaus received the Nobel Memorial Prize for these flawed economic models, and Bjorn Lomborg built a highly lucrative career on them. They told rich and powerful people what they wanted to hear. While helping to consign us all to catastrophe. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

97% of central govt expenditure was on responding to and recovering from natural disasters, only 3% spent on risk reduction and resilience. Yet…“the Government cannot commit to providing financial support for the business case at this stage”. #nzpol www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/3609...

The current reforms of the research system are now on track for another failure. They double down on mistakes that undermine long-term growth, well being & safety. We must ask for accountability and transparency about three key issues as we go into the election year. scientists.org.nz/news/13593197

good riddance to Minister Judith Collins, who orchestrated the present gutting of New Zealand's science funding establishment I've not seen or heard any coverage today that mentions this tiny detail, affecting 100s of millions of public dollars and endangering NZ's entire intellectual community

By cancelling the Climate Emergency Response Fund, the government was telling us there was nothing to see here. The past week has shown they could not have been more wrong. We need a government that takes climate change seriously because it's only going to get worse. #nzpol

4,500t is emitted in New Zealand every half-hour. And the extra emissions if New Zealand reneges on our current Paris Agreement target - 84Mt - would cause 19,000 extra deaths around the world. It's tempting to look away when disasters and deaths are overseas, but sometimes they're here. 3/-

People. are. dying. A negotiator friend used to say that in the Paris Agreement carbon markets negotiations when the debate veered into obstructionism and game-playing. There were sometimes embarrassed laughs: it was hard to equate the bean-counting work being done there to life and death. 1/-

The tragic loss of lives in NZ flooding events this week are climate change deaths. Media and govt are avoiding the topic. Leaders and commentators must acknowledge the emerging reality of ordinary summer rainstorms carrying volumes of water akin to tropical cyclones of previous decades.

I've had some frustrating conversations with council over this. We need an actual long term plan (decades not election cycles) and hard decisions, instead of an expensive and ultimately futile exercise of fixing the same stuff repeatedly and hoping it won't happen again for a bit (spoiler it will).

life ending and infrastructure destroying floods are now an annual occurrence in new zealand. there is no political recognition of this new reality, and thus there is no resourcing for its prevention. we are not ready

Not a single day in 2025 was cooler than the 1991-2020 average, on a global scale. @copernicusecmwf.bsky.social

We’ve wrapped up drilling at Crary Ice Rise with 228m of sediment core. This is an unprecedented record of the history of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet stretching back millions of years. Initial observations indicate the core includes periods of environmental change during past times of warming.

New paper out in @natgeosci.nature.com in which we combined marine sediment core analysis with models to show spatial differences in how #Antarctica responded to warmer #climate during the Pliocene: phys.org/news/2026-01...

We have successfully drilled 200 metres of sediment core from beneath the ice sheet at Crary Ice Rise! The pipe is still spinning - with a bit of time up our sleeve, we’re not stopping drilling yet, as we continue to drill back through the geological archive hidden beneath the ice. 📷 Ana Tovey

We’ve hit a century! 100m of core! Our night-shift crew took us past this milestone – we’re now more than halfway towards our target. Reaching this point is testimony to the skill and hard work of our drillers, who are clocking up long runs and cores of up to 3.1m 👉https://bit.ly/4aHvt5e

A bit late in sharing, but we've successfully rotary-cored sediment under 523m of the ice sheet at Crary Ice Rise! This was a whole team effort, with special mention to our drillers and hot water crew. Watch the moment we got our first glimpse of the sediment we’ve been waiting on for so long.

It’s a very Crary Christmas for our on-ice team in Antarctica! After several weeks of weather delays preventing them getting out to our deep-field camp at Crary Ice Rise, on Christmas Eve the team received the best possible present – a Basler flight to Crary! Crary Christmas from SWAIS2C!

Here's the scene out of it's packaging and in pride of place on the cabinet!! Thanks so much Santa, it's the most thoughtful and special gift and will be treasured. The boys rushed in the door this afternoon to point out who each penguin represented 🥰 #SecretSantaAoNZ

Opening time!!! What can be in this big box??? The kids have been very curious too!! #SecretSantaAoNZ

Excited for opening day #SecretSantaAoNZ!! And very curious about what's in the rather large parcel Santa has sent.. 🤔 To get in the spirit here's one of my fav (and most on brand) decorations from our Christmas tree!

Gosh, I'm somewhere in there. I'd only heard the guys name for the first time about a week before and thought I'd head along and see what all this hype was about. 10 years of water under the bridge and it feels a very weird moment to reflect on now.

Eeeee got home to a very exciting parcel! Thank you so much Santa, it's safely ensconced under the tree for opening day 🥰 #SecretSantaAoNZ

TIL about a memorial ceremony in Iceland in 2019 to mark the end of a glacier, changing the place name from Okjökull to Ok (jökull = glacier). Uncompromising wording on the bronze plaque: "This is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it".

So many!! And I can't choose one so here's three. First, the end of 'No ordinary sun' by Hone Tuwhare. Written under the threat of nuclear war, and carved into the mind of a teenage me first becoming aware of the threat of climate change.

Analysis: Finance Minister Nicola Willis effectively confirmed Tuesday that New Zealand will not meet its 2030 climate target under the Paris Agreement under the current Government’s policies. newsroom.co.nz/2025/12/03/g...

Our new preprint review on archaeal lipids (GDGTs) led by @lipidorama.bsky.social and @climategordon.bsky.social are live! Fresh updates on these amazing lipids and their environmental applications, from the 2nd int'l GDGT workshop (led by @cindydejonge.bsky.social, Francien Peterse & David Naafs).

Happy Antarctica Day! On December 1 in 1959, 12 nations signed the Antarctic Treaty, which established #Antarctica as a "natural reserve, devoted to peace and science". Images from my season with @swais2c.bsky.social - good luck for this season!

Hey Bluesky, I need a Christmas idea for a tricky to buy for relative. What's a popular science book out recently that you've enjoyed? 🧪⚒🥼🌊

Franz Josef Glacier - Kā Roimata o Hine Hukatere ca 1867 | 2022 Impressive comparison between the first known photograph taken of one of the most iconic NZ glaciers and current situation! 🧊🔥 The rock on the right is Sentinel Rock, one of the roches moutonnées in the glacier forefield 1/

They’ve made it across the Ross Ice Shelf! Huge congrats to the Antarctica NZ traverse crew, for completing a 13-day journey to our drilling site at Crary Ice Rise. They towed sleds with fuel, equipment and supplies, to keep our deep-field camp cranking. Now it's time to set up camp!

We have two very fluffy pets, grand Dame of the house Tonka, and excitable fluff ball Olly, alongside secondary Olly i.e. the mass of fur that comes off him at the start of his summer moult 😅 #SecretSantaAoNZ

Also re-upping my incredibly beautiful mid winter Secret Santa gift because it's so amazing it needs another showing! #SecretSantaAoNZ

Reupping my hints list from mid winter, super excited for #SecretSantaAoNZ! Also don't feel like you have to spend money, I love homemade/crafty/found/op-shopped stuff and if you think it's special then I'm sure I will too 🥰

The cost. My @smh @theage cartoon.

Super happy to have this published! This is a big team effort to create a 'cookbook' of best practices for marine GDGT paleothermometry. As GDGT work becomes ever more widely applied this is a really important step to future proof data and create more consistency within the field!

I'm sure it's totally coincidental that the AoNZ government's changes to the Marsden Fund have been followed by successful applications led by female investigators dropping from 55% to 33%, and successful applications led by Māori investigators dropping from 13% to 5%. 🫠 🧪

Asked whether he’s sure technology will allow the Government to meet its climate goals, Climate Change Minister Simon Watts replies: ‘Can we be sure about anything in life?’ newsroom.co.nz/2025/11/06/g...

I appear to have spoken to a reporter who took seriously the gravity of NZ's science crisis does anybody have a newsroom pro subscription so that I can learn what other choice phrases I used on the record? newsroom.co.nz/2025/10/29/w...

I'm not 100% sure but I think Newsroom may have omitted a 'f*cking' from my phrase "Do these people read the news?"

i think this is the thing I find so frustrating / depressing about how our govt works. there's a complete dissociation between what they say "we love science its great" and what they spend on basic science

#Melissa has made landfall in #Jamaica, and has preliminarily tied the record for the lowest pressure of any landfalling hurricane in Atlantic history: 892 mb. That was last observed 90 years ago with the 1935 Labor Day hurricane. The storm does not look like it even notices Jamaica being there.