Arctic sea ice reached its smallest extent of the year on 12 September 2026, joint tenth lowest since satellite measurements began. In the Barents Sea near Svalbard, September ice is shrinking by 28.9 per cent per decade. What that means for polar bears, walruses and fjords.
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An aircraft carrying a laser scanner counted more than six million trees in the Scottish national park. Over 40 per cent are young saplings, and they are largely growing there without planting. The key lies with the deer.
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The level of the Rhine at Kaub in Germany is falling to a very low point once again. What the best-known gauge on the Middle Rhine measures, why the river runs low in late summer and how low it has been before.
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From 20 to 27 September 2026, Germany's Bodden coast spends a week celebrating the crane, as the birds gather here in huge numbers before their flight to southern Spain and southern France.
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Lakes lie in steps behind one another, separated by barriers nobody built. They are still growing, and they can also give way.
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On the border of Poland and Belarus stands one of the last pieces of primeval forest on the European plain. The difference from an ordinary forest shows in what lies on the ground, not in what stands.
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Flamingos, white horses and salt flats where the Rhone meets the sea. Almost everything you see there has been shaped partly by human hands.
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A fjord is not a valley that happened to fill up. It is a valley scoured so deep that its floor lies far below sea level, and at the exit there is a sill.
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The pale towers above South Tyrol consist of dolomite. The material is largely Triassic and belongs more to a warm sea than to an Alpine summit.
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Where the Danube disappears into the Black Sea lies the best-preserved delta in Europe. A large part of it is attached to nothing.
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Forty thousand columns that fit together so neatly they look man-made. The legend turns them into a causeway to Scotland; geology tells a different, at least as fascinating story.
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Between Dresden and the Czech border sandstone pillars stand in a forest. Their material once lay on the bottom of a sea.
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Where the Guadalquivir reaches the Atlantic lies a wetland of great importance for migratory birds. Its protection was given impetus by a land purchase in 1963; the national park followed in 1969.
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