News
August 19, 2025
Unprecedented Arctic heatwave melted 1 per cent of Svalbard's ice. A six-week period of extraordinary heat in 2024 melted 62 gigatonnes of ice on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, obliterating all previous melt records.
During the summer of 2024, six weeks of record-smashing heat led to a record-obliterating amount of ice melting on the islands of Svalbard in the Arctic. By the end of the summer, 1 per cent of all the land ice on the archipelago had been lost – enough to raise the global average sea level by 0.16 millimetres.
August 18, 2025
Exceeding functional biosphere integrity limits: Study finds 60% of the world's land area is in a precarious state. A new study maps the planetary boundary of "functional biosphere integrity" in spatial detail and over centuries.
August 17, 2025
Putin decree sets conditions for ExxonMobil return to Sakhalin-1. Russia has approved a new legal framework that may allow foreign shareholders to reclaim their stakes in the Sakhalin-1 oil and gas project.
President Vladimir Putin signed Decree No. 559 on August 15, 2025, amending the 2022 order that had transferred the project to a new Russian operator.
July 8, 2025
People with higher cognitive ability have weaker moral foundations, new study finds. People with higher cognitive ability tend to endorse moral values less strongly across the board, according to new research published in the journal Intelligence. The pattern held across two independent studies and did not differ by gender. These findings challenge popular assumptions that smarter people hold stronger or more “enlightened” moral values.
July 3, 2025
Scientists Just Found Earth’s Pulse – And It’s Tearing a Continent Apart. Deep beneath Ethiopia’s Afar Rift, scientists have detected rhythmic surges of molten mantle rock—geologic heartbeats powerful enough to thin Earth’s crust, pry Africa apart, and seed a future ocean.
June 27, 2025
Another large lithium deposit in Donbas has come under Russian control. Ukraine has lost control of two of its four lithium deposits. According to the French edition of Le Figaro, the Shevchenko and Krutaya Balka fields in the DPR and the Zaporizhia region are now controlled by Russia.
Shevchenko is located about ten kilometers from the urban-type settlement of Velikaya Novoselka.
June 20, 2025
Offsetting fossil fuel reserves by planting trees is not a viable strategy, analysis finds. New forests larger than the land area of North America would need to be planted to offset the potential carbon dioxide emissions from the fossil fuel reserves currently held by the world's 200 largest fossil fuel companies.
June 20, 2025
Russia has updated its maritime borders in the Baltic. The Russian government has invalidated the list of coordinates of points defining the position of the baselines from which the width of the territorial sea, the adjacent zone of the country off the mainland coast and the islands of Russia in the Baltic Sea are measured. The updated list has been approved, and the relevant document has been published on the portal of regulatory legal acts.
June 19, 2025
Ukraine has refused to challenge the claims about the energy blockade of Crimea, the head of the Crimean parliament, Vladimir Konstantinov, said in an interview with RIA Novosti at the SPIEF 2025. "A huge amount of work has been done. The court's decision on our claims has never been challenged. But our work has not been completed yet, new lawsuits are being prepared," the agency's interlocutor said.
June 18, 2025
Ukraine Takes First Step Toward Carrying Out Minerals Deal With U.S. The government is trying to show the Trump administration that it can deliver on the agreement. More than a month after Ukraine signed a landmark agreement granting the United States a stake in its mineral reserves, Kyiv is striving to show the Trump administration that the deal can deliver swift, tangible results.