Oil slick threatens 'frightening' impacts

At the moment, the only completely accurate answer would appear to be: we do not know.

For David Kennedy from the US National Ocean Service, it is "a very very significant event, and of great concern".

"I'm frightened," he adds.

But Clifford Jones, an oil and gas engineering specialist from the UK's Aberdeen University, suggests it should not be considered in the same category as the Exxon Valdez spill of 1989, with which it is regularly being compared.

It is a threat to the ecosystem, he allows, but says that Exxon Valdez was a supertanker holding 11 million gallons of crude, and exit of oil from it was simply by gravity.

Locals plea for Tongass rainforest to be spared from Native-owned logging corporation

The Tongass temperate rainforest in Alaska is a record-holder: while the oldest and largest National Forest in the United States (spanning nearly 17 million acres), it is even more notably the world's largest temperate rainforest. Yet since the 1960s this unique ecosystem has suffered large-scale clearcutting through US government grants to logging corporations. While the clearcutting has slowed to a trickle since its heyday, a new bill put forward by Senator Lisa Murkowski (Rep.) gives 85,000 acres to Native-owned corporation Sealaska, raising hackles among environmentalists and locals who are dependent on the forests for resources and tourism.

Complicating the issue is that Sealaska is owned by 20,000 members of Native communities, from the Tlingit, Haida and Tsimshian tribes. Government officials are acutely sensitive to the demands from these tribes, since they lost their lands from the federal government when the Tongass was appointed a National Forest in 1907 by then president, Teddy Roosevelt. Yet, Sealaska has a long-time reputation for clearcutting forests and selling the logs to Asia—to fetch a higher price—versus employing local mills and using sustainable logging practices.

Despite promises, world governments failing to save biodiversity

In 2002 world leaders committed to reducing the global rate of biodiversity loss within eight years time: 2010. While many have noted that world governments have largely failed on their promises, a new study in Science looks at the situation empirically and agrees that their has been no significant reduction in biodiversity loss and, at the same time, pressures on the world's species have risen, not fallen.

"Although nations have put in place some significant policies to slow biodiversity declines, these have been woefully inadequate, and the gap between the pressures on biodiversity and the responses is getting ever wider," said Dr Stuart Butchart the paper's lead author. Butchart works with the United Nations Environment Program World Conservation Monitoring Centre, as well as BirdLife International.

Biodiversity: try as we might, things just keep dying

The world is about to miss another deadline. By 2010 there was supposed to be "a significant reduction" in the speed at which varieties of life are disappearing.

Both the 1993 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the United Nations' 2000 Millennium Development Goals call for it. But the most wide-ranging analysis of global biodiversity ever attempted has found that it's not happening – despite what seem to be massive government efforts.

Never before has anyone produced a single measure of biodiversity across the thousands of species and habitats on Earth. Scientists working with CBD have developed 31 different surveillance schemes to track the loss of species, ecosystems or genetic variants in mammals, marine life, birds and other broad categories of life. This week, for the first time, they have put them together.