Two banned insecticides known to linger in the atmosphere have been all but eliminated from North America’s Great Lakes region, a study finds.

High in a narrow, seawater-filled crevasse in the base of Antarctica’s largest ice shelf, cameras on the remotely operated Icefin underwater vehicle relayed a sudden change in scenery.

A new study from Tulane University which compared popular diets on both nutritional quality and environmental impact found that the keto and paleo diets, as eaten by American adults, scored among the lowest on overall nutrition quality and were among the highest on carbon emissions.

Midwestern agriculture contributes the vast majority of nitrogen in the Gulf of Mexico, causing an oxygen-starved hypoxic zone and challenging coastal economies.

East Africa is much drier than other tropical land regions, including the Amazon and Congo rainforests.

Dr Anran Cheng (Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford), lead author of the study, said: ‘Our model shows the importance of factoring in the high diffusivity of helium and the long timescales needed to accumulate significant gas quantities, and the fact that the entire geological system acts dynamically to affect the process.

Even in their dark isolation from the atmosphere above, caves can hold a rich archive of local climate conditions and how they’ve shifted over the eons.

With the arrival of spring, bumblebee queens take their first wing beat of the season and set out to find new nesting sites.

The oceans help to limit global warming by soaking up carbon dioxide emissions.

The researchers created maps showing where warmer weather has left trees in conditions that don’t suit them, making them more prone to being replaced by other species.