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Known as ‘white gold’, lithium is among the most important mined elements on the planet – ideal for the rechargeable batteries used in tech products. Can Europe’s largest deposit bring prosperity to the local community?
It looks more like the past than the future. A vast chasm scooped out of a scarred landscape, this is a Cornwall the summer holidaymakers don’t see: a former china clay pit near St Austell called Trelavour. I’m standing at the edge of the pit looking down with the man who says his plans for it will help the UK’s transition to renewable energy and bring back year-round jobs and prosperity to a part of the country that badly needs both. “And if I manage to make some money in the process, fantastic,” he says. “Though that is not what it’s about.”
We’ll return to him shortly. But first to the past, when this story begins, about 275-280m years ago. “There was a continental collision at the time,” Frances Wall, professor of applied mineralogy at the Camborne School of Mines at the University of Exeter, explained to me before my visit. This collision caused the bottom of the Earth’s crust to melt, with the molten material rising higher in the crust and forming granite. “There are lots of different types of granite that intrude at different times, more than 10m years or so,” she says. “The rock is made of minerals and, if you’ve got the right composition in the original material and the right conditions, then within those minerals there are some called mica. Some of those micas contain lithium.”
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A shortlist of 24 images has been selected for the wildlife photographer of the year people’s choice award. You can vote for your favourite image online. The winner will be announced on 25 March and shown from that date as part of the overall wildlife photographer of the year exhibition, which runs until 12 July at the Natural History Museum in London
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Researchers say waste dumping and climate breakdown have contributed to rise in brick, concrete and glass on beaches
As much as half of some British beaches’ coarse sediments may consist of human-made materials such as brick, concrete, glass and industrial waste, a study has suggested.
Climate breakdown, which has caused more frequent and destructive coastal storms, has led to an increase in these substances on beaches. Six sites on the Firth of Forth, an estuary on Scotland’s east coast joining the River Forth to the North Sea, were surveyed to better understand the makeup of “urban beaches”.
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Inkpen, Berkshire: We’re paying the price now for a poor grass harvest, and the concern is that it isn’t a one-off bad year
At this point in the year, when the growing season seems so far away, last summer’s hay harvest is most remembered, sometimes rued. The hottest summer followed the driest spring in over 100 years in southern England. And although making hay while the sun shines is genuinely crucial, rain is critical to growth. Last year produced a very poor harvest, and hay is now running out.
Traditionally, two cuts are made, in late spring and summer, doubling the yield. It’s an ancient, ingenious and hopeful system, and in the case of meadow hay (rather than single-species ryegrass) it benefits nature, removing nutrient‑laden grass and encouraging biodiversity. But long-term studies show that as our weather patterns change, grass-growing potential has declined greatly over the last 80 years.
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Paying attention to the calls of our avian neighbours can reduce stress, find scientists in Germany
Feeling stressed? Try a dose of birdsong to lift the spirits. A new study shows that paying attention to the treetop melodies of our feathered friends can boost wellbeing and bring down stress levels.
Previous research has shown that people feel better in bird-rich environments, but Christoph Randler, from the University of Tübingen, and colleagues wanted to see if that warm fuzzy feeling translated into measurable physiological changes. They rigged up a park with loudspeakers playing the songs of rare birds and measured the blood pressure, heart rate and cortisol levels (a marker of stress) of volunteers before and after taking a 30-minute walk through the park. Some volunteers experienced the birdsong-enriched environment, some heard just natural birdsong, and some wore noise-cancelling headphones and heard no birdsong. Half of the recruits were asked to pay attention to the birdsong.
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My dad, John Barkham, who has died aged 82, was an inspirational teacher of ecology and a lifelong naturalist. As the first ecologist to join the new University of East Anglia in 1969, he taught students over three decades in the pioneering School of Environmental Sciences.
After studying the person-centred theories of Carl Rogers, whom he visited in California, John experimented with bold new teaching techniques, one year informing baffled students that they would design their own syllabus and teach themselves.
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Ministers’ proposals to tackle ‘forever chemicals’ fail to match tougher stance taken in Europe, say experts
Environmental campaigners have criticised a “crushingly disappointing” UK government plan to tackle “forever chemicals”, which they warn risks locking in decades of avoidable harm to people and the environment.
The government said its Pfas action plan set out a “clear framework” of “coordinated action … to understand where these chemicals are coming from, how they spread and how to reduce public and environmental exposure”.
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With government action stalled and living in ‘inhumane’ conditions, families in San José are making plans to relocate
In Emilio Peña Delgado’s home, several photos hang on the wall. One shows him standing in front of a statue with his wife and oldest son in the centre of San José and smiling. In another, his two sons sit in front of caricatures from the film Cars. For him, the photos capture moments of joy that feel distant when he returns home to La Carpio, a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Costa Rica’s capital.
Delgado migrated with his family from Nicaragua to Costa Rica when he was 10, as his parents sought greater stability. When he started a family of his own, his greatest hope was to give his children the security he had lacked. But now, that hope is often interrupted by the threat of extreme weather events.
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Support from more than 20 countries propels National Trust to its target to protect chalk figure and local wildlife
It feels like a very British monument: a huge chalk figure carved into a steep Dorset hillside that for centuries has intrigued lovers of English folklore and legend. But an appeal to raise money to help protect the Cerne giant – and the wildlife that shares the landscape it towers over – has shown that its allure stretches far beyond the UK.
Donations have flooded in from more than 20 countries including Australia, Japan and Iceland, and on Tuesday, the National Trust confirmed it had reached its fundraising target to buy land around the giant.
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With some of Ukraine’s most valuable biodiversity sites and science facilities under occupation, experts at Sofiyivka Park in Uman are struggling to preserve the country’s natural history
In the basement laboratory of the National Dendrological Park Sofiyivka, Larisa Kolder tends to dozens of specimens of Moehringia hypanicabetween power outages. Just months earlier, she and her team at this microclonal plant propagation laboratory in Uman, Ukraine, received 23 seeds of the rare flower.
Listed as threatened in Ukraine’s Red Book of endangered species, Moehringiagrows nowhere else in the wild but the Mykolaiv region of Ukraine. Of those 23 seeds, only two grew into plants that Kolder and her colleagues could clone in their laboratory, but now her lab is home to a small grove of Moehringiaseedlings, including 80 that have put down roots in a small but vital win for biodiversity conservation amid Russia’s war with Ukraine.
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