Caribbean Sea – Desdemona Despair

Homes destroyed by Hurricane Beryl lie in Clifton, Union Island, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Thursday, 4 July 2024. Photo: Lucanus Ollivierre / AP Photo

July 5, 2024

Hurricane Beryl batters Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula as Texas officials urge coastal residents to prepare – 11 dead across the Caribbean – “This is a determined storm that is still strong”

By Martín Silva and John Myers Jr. 5 July 2024 TULUM, Mexico (AP) – Beryl battered Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula on Friday after hitting near the resort town of Tulum, whipping trees and knocking out power, while officials in Texas urged coastal residents to prepare as the storm moves toward the Gulf of Mexico. Beryl hit Mexico as […]

Map showing sea surface temperatures in the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean on 2 July 2024. The track and intensity of Hurricane Beryl is indicated. Data: U.S. National Hurricane Center / NASA. Graphic: BBC

July 4, 2024

How record-breaking Hurricane Beryl is a sign of a warming world – “What makes Beryl particularly notable is that it intensified the fastest from a tropical depression to a hurricane of any Atlantic hurricane in June or early July”

By Mark Poynting 4 July 2024 (BBC News) – Hurricane Beryl is wreaking havoc in parts of the Caribbean – and putting the role of climate change under the spotlight. With maximum sustained wind speeds of more than 160mph (257km/h), it became the earliest category five Atlantic hurricane in records going back around 100 years. […]

Satellite view of Hurricane Beryl, 30 June 2024. The first Atlantic hurricane of 2024 produced dangerous winds and life-threatening storm surge as it barreled into the Caribbean’s Grenadine Islands. On the morning of July 1, Hurricane Beryl made landfall on Carriacou Island as a Category 4 storm with maximum sustained winds of 150 miles (240 kilometers) per hour. This image, captured by the VIIRS (Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite) on NOAA-21, shows Hurricane Beryl at 12:50 p.m. Atlantic Standard Time on 30 June 2024, when the eye of the storm was about 300 miles (490 kilometers) southeast of Barbados. An hour before the image was captured, the National Hurricane Center upgraded Beryl to a Category 4 hurricane with sustained winds of 130 miles per hour. Photo: Michala Garrison / NASA Earth Observatory

July 4, 2024

How the hot water that fueled Hurricane Beryl foretells a scary storm season – “It is so far outside the climatology that you look at it and you say, ‘How did this happen in June?’”

By Seth Borenstein 1 July 2024 (AP) – Hurricane Beryl’s explosive growth into an unprecedented early whopper of a storm shows the literal hot water the Atlantic and Caribbean are in right now and the kind of season ahead, experts said. Beryl smashed multiple records even before its major-hurricane-level winds approached land. The powerful storm is acting […]

Geographical pattern of the primary drivers of deteriorating status among amphibians. a,b, The primary drivers of deteriorating status among amphibians during 1980–2004 (482 species; a) and 2004–2022 (306 species; b). Cell colour was determined by the primary driver impacting the most species. Where two primary drivers equally contribute to a cell, an intermediate colour is shown. The stars indicate where the primary driver is undetermined or there are numerous primary drivers. The cell area is 7,775 km2. Graphic: Luedtke, et al., 2023 / Nature

October 29, 2023

Climate change emerges as major driver of amphibian declines, new research finds – “It’s a gut punch and an awakening”

By JoAnn Adkins 4 October 2023 (FIU) – Amphibians are in trouble and in desperate need of conservation action, according to a new global assessment of the world’s amphibian population. Salamanders are experiencing the greatest decline in numbers, but frogs, toads, newts, and salamanders throughout the Neotropics — extending from South Florida and Caribbean islands […]

Aerial view of the Panamanian island of Carti Sugdupu. Hundreds are preparing to leave the island in the face of rising sea levels. Photo: Luis Acosta

September 10, 2023

“We’re going to sink”: hundreds abandon Caribbean island home – “Almost all the islands are going to be abandoned by the end of this century”

By Juan José Rodríguez 6 September 2023 (AFP) – On a tiny Caribbean island, hundreds of people are preparing to pack up and move to escape the rising waters threatening to engulf their already precarious homes. Surrounded by idyllic clear waters, the densely populated island of Carti Sugtupu off Panama’s north coast has barely an […]

A beachgoer walks through sargassum seaweed that washed ashore on 18 May 2023, in Key West, Florida. A huge mass of sargassum seaweed formed in the Atlantic Ocean is headed for the Florida coastlines and shores in the Gulf of Mexico. Photo: Joe Raedle / Getty Images

June 3, 2023

Seaweed full of flesh-eating bacteria hitting Florida, creating a “perfect pathogen storm”

By Jess Thomson 30 May 2023 (Newsweek) – The massive blob of seaweed creeping across the Atlantic Ocean toward Florida may contain deadly flesh-eating bacteria. The 5,000-mile wide clump of seaweed is made up of sargassum seaweed, which has bloomed massively to form the “Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt.” A study from Florida Atlantic University published […]

This image based on satellite photos shows the massive belt of sargassum seaweed blooming across the Atlantic Ocean and drifting onto beaches in Florida and the Caribbean in February 2023. Graphic: Chuanmin Hu / University of South Florida

March 30, 2023

Record-breaking algae bloom takes aim at Florida beaches – “This year could be the biggest year yet”

By Dinah Voyles Pulver 14 March 2023 (USA TODAY) – Beachgoers in Florida and the Caribbean could be greeted by heavy blankets of smelly seaweed in the weeks ahead as a 5,000-mile swath of sargassum drifts westward and piles onto white sandy beaches. Sargassum, a naturally occurring type of macroalgae, has grown at an alarming rate this winter. The […]

Satellite view of Hurricane Fiona at 1 p.m. on Monday, 19 September 2022. Photo: NOAA

September 19, 2022

Hurricane Fiona unleashes “catastrophic” damage, Puerto Rico governor says

By Arelis R. Hernández, Jason Samenow, Praveena Somasundaram, and Reis Thebault 19 September 2022 (The Washington Post) – Puerto Rican Gov. Pedro Pierluisi said Monday that Hurricane Fiona has caused “catastrophic” destruction in urban areas, killing at least one person and leaving nearly the entire island archipelago without power. The slow-moving Category 1 storm could drop upward […]

A car and home damaged by Hurricane Dorian show the extent of the damage to the island of Great Abaco even six months after the storm in February 2020. Photo: David Common / CBC

March 2, 2020

Six months after Hurricane Dorian levelled Bahamas, in places it still looks like it just hit – “What do people do? They have nowhere to come back to. When they do come, there is nothing.”

By David Common and Melissa Mancini 1 March 2020 (CBC News) – Ten minutes away from the restored and gleaming cruise ship terminals on Grand Bahama island, just beyond the multi-millionaires’ beach compounds, is the real Bahamas — and it lies in ruins. It’s six months since Hurricane Dorian made landfall on the island nation, […]

People break into a warehouse with supplies believed to have been from when Hurricane Maria struck the island in 2017 in Ponce, Puerto Rico on 18 January 2020, after a powerful earthquake hit the island. Photo: Ricardo Arduengo / AFP / Getty Images

January 19, 2020

Discovery of unused disaster supplies from Hurricane Maria angers Puerto Rico

By Danica Coto 19 January 2020 SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) – People in a southern Puerto Rico city discovered a warehouse filled with water, cots and other unused emergency supplies, then set off a social media uproar Saturday when they broke in to retrieve goods as the area struggles to recover from a strong […]