First cuckoo of the spring heard on this morning’s run. 47.5N 2.6W. Serin finch, black redstart, chiff-chaffs and thrushes everywhere.

Red fiery sky over the Statsraad Lehmkuhl in Dublin City this morning.

La France va de nouveau vivre des journées exceptionnelles avec des 30°C entrant dans le cercle très restreint des plus précoces jamais observés. 1/3

Easter Sunday tradition observed of watching Flanders, then a couple of hours fishing at the Lifeboat Quay. Nice bass came along at sunset.

North Sea Friday Folk #8 — lives shaped by the shallow sea on our doorstep Today it's the turn of scientist & illustrator Dorothy Thursby-Pelham (1884–1972), who in the early 20th century made extensive surveys of the plaice population in the southern North Sea 📷At work in Lowestoft, Cefas (OGL 3)

This month's North Sea dispatches looks back at the UK's very first offshore wind farm at Blyth, in my home patch of Northumberland

Cetacean experts - eyes on these two videos for an ID please.

Sighting of a young whale on our final station in the Humber today, but was not in the best of health. Would not be surprised if a stranding is reported in coming days. Hard to tell if a minke or beaked whale.

Humber sampling day with a clear blue sky. Following the salinity gradient from Hull to Grimsby.

First day of this year's Humber oceanography course with a shake-down station inside Spurn then a run out to the windfarm, taking samples and doing CTDs along the way.

First day of this year's Humber oceanography course with a shake-down station inside Spurn then a run out to the windfarm, taking samples and doing CTDs along the way.

🍀Chocolate Guinness Cake is #RecipeOfTheDay! Sure, what else could it be on St Patrick’s Day? www.nigella.com/recipes/choc...

A good demonstration of how small the past few days of neap tides have been. Tidal calculators show this set to have the smallest tidal range of the 21st century!

Have you wondered "If all of the North Sea nations built as much offshore wind as their govs have announced, what would the Sea look like"? Do you need a plausible scenario for farm and turbine locations in 2050, based on that premise? If so, read this new paper! www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/19...

here is today's #crapbirdpic. The mystery bird was singing merrily at the top of a bush on the bank of the Humber estuary.

the focus is on environmental impacts of offshore wind here at #osm26 this afternoon. Please come along to Ben Whitcombe's poster at 16:00 to hear about measurements around the world's largest offshore windfarm.

Speeding northwards towards #OSM26 in Glasgow. Poster session tomorrow @16:00 CB14C 0701 showing progress with low cost CO2 sensors for intertidal productivity. Click on online poster for a demo video.

For those attending #OSM26 in Glasgow, the five days unlimited rail travel on all ScotRail services within the Conference Zone for just £5 looks like a super deal. 🌊

Repost with a photo of yours that would make a good album cover.

ICES Secretariat is hiring an Information Officer. Join ICES as an Information Officer and play a key role in supporting editorial excellence in marine science, preserving our legacy & administrating our publications database. 🔔Submit your application by 22 February 2026 www.ices.dk/about-ICES/J...

One from the archives. A sea urchin larva moving very gracefully across my slide. Did you know sea urchins started life like this? #marineplankton 🦑

The brackish water boddens of north-eastern Germany are frozen in this Sentinel-2 image from last week. Ice break-up in the Spring was often followed by a short and intense bloom of crytophyte cells. Had some fun trying to sample water from under a metre of ice, back in the day.

What is at about these non-existent giant Chinese offshore windfarms? So well hidden that Trump's intelligence sources can't spot them, yet I can find them with two mouse clicks.

Zoology building at Liverpool closed down. First year practicals in the lab on the left mainly doing repeated dissections of dogfish. No wonder I turned vegetarian.

anyone doing the January 100 push-ups a day challenge for @cancerresearchuk.org ? I'm on track so far.

Magic of the FA Cup not working at the MKM. There’s only about 5,000 here.

Saturday shopping and a million other things on hold until the end of Macc v Palace.

2026 Training Grants are now open! 📢🕊️ Are you: 📏 Hoping to gain experience with #seabirds via unpaid work? 🧑 From a BAME background? (though others may apply too) 💸 A grant of up to £250 could help! (to cover travel, accommodation or food) Info: www.seabirdgroup.org.uk/grant Apply by 28 Feb 💌

looking at a loop on netweather of the 15 minute radar data for this extraordinary storm. Savage beauty. The remaining clifftop homes in Norfolk will get absolutely battered again when the wind and waves go north-easterly during the night and through tomorrow.

Newish paper (i.e. it was out last summer and just now seeing it) out on Alicella gigantea, the world’s largest amphipod. Long thought to be rare because we almost never see it. Turns out it may occupy ~59% of the global ocean. royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article...

29 years and a day since the last Elfstedentocht. Will the Dutch ever see another one?

All signs point to Trump’s second term creating a hotter and less affordable future for Americans. Without new offshore turbines going up, millions of households across the Northeast will soon pay more money for dirtier and less reliable electricity. My latest 👇

Tried and true tactic of fossil fuel disinformation machine. An excerpt from #ScienceUnderSiege:

🌊 Funded PhD: Advancing Plankton Imaging & Machine Learning to Transform Marine Biodiversity Monitoring 🔬🌍 @plymuni.bsky.social Bring together AI-powered image analysis, innovative sensors, and real-world policy frameworks. Two funding options: 1. lnkd.in/e566f8RR 2. lnkd.in/eKPRGhsP

If people could just intuitively understand the difference between a million, a billion, and a trillion, we’d all be better off. That applies to dollars. To tons of carbon. And so on. Math. It matters.

All sounds very familiar to those who took part in campaigning before brexit. We had one paid volunteer for the whole of Yorkshire from Leeds to the coast, a rickety table and a few leaflets. UKIP had a complete stage, sound systems and a WW2 tank driving around. www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

It appears that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has, within the past week, scrubbed a large amount of climate change content from its official website, as well as *removed human-caused warming* from the discussion on its "causes of climate change" page.

I won a thing! I’m so honoured to have won the NBN newcomers award at the @nbntrust.bsky.social conference today, for the work I’m doing around plankton sampling and data collection. #marineplankton 🦑

#uksnow HU17 6/10 snow since 07:45, starting to lie

Reminder: If it's snowing where you are, post with the hashtag #uksnow, the first-half of your postcode and a snow-rating out of 10 (x/10) and help draw a real-time map of where it's snowing right now on uksnowmap.com ❄️

Mission confirmed ✅ #CopernicusEU Sentinel-6B is now in orbit and ready to begin its Launch & Early Operations phase with @operations.esa.int. The satellite is ready to continue a decades-long mission to track the height of the planet’s seas – a key measure of climate change.

Now that the Sept and Oct data are (belatedly) in, it looks like 2025 will be the second warmest year in the record (~80% probability). The last three years are in a class of their own.

Today's challenge is to try once again to get into the Canvas system of neighbouring Bantchester University, to do my external examiner role. Involving burner phones, burner laptops, incognito mode, multiple email accounts and long calls with their IT desk.

Les températures observées cette après-midi sont tout simplement délirantes : les 30°C ont été approchés mi-novembre. Je répète au cas où : mi-novembre. Boosté par un vent de foehn dans un air surchauffé par le changement climatique, on a atteint 29.8°C à Trois-Villes et 29,5°C à Aicirits 1/2

Leitmotif through this year's Coastal Seas field course is for the students to use their own data to decide whether the Clyde is ecologically dead (T&R, 2010), or whether it is alive, but different, and likely to have a cetacean-rich future (L&F,2021). Final hour of today's survey was like this:

I wondered why there were so many people doing the litter pick on the beach yesterday.

Nice optics this morning looking south from FSC Millport to a floating Ailsa Craig. Pods of dolphins in the far distance.

Millport field trip week, with an unusually fantastic weather forecast ahead of us.

that's three full weeks clean from twitter now, onwards to the next milestone at three months.

I have a little side-hustle to monitor changes in wildlife at a local site. I've installed a Song Meter in the grounds with dawn/dusk monitoring, analysis with Chirpity. Here's the data showing the arrival and build-up of the spectacular skeins of pink-foot that are now filling the evening sky.