An oil well in southern Niger has been spewing crude oil and gas into the air since Sept. 25, damaging nearby installations and raising concerns about the potential impact on wildlife. Authorities reported the situation was still not fully under control four weeks later.

“An environmental incident of exceptional severity occurred at the Goumeri W8 oil well,” Abdoulkarim Mohamed Ali, general secretary of Niger’s Ministry of Petroleum, said in a statement broadcast on Oct. 12. The disaster was “characterized by the ejection of large quantities of crude oil and gas to heights of more than 10 meters,” or 33 feet.

As the statement was read on state TV, striking images showed crude oil erupting from the well like a geyser and spilling across the site. According to Ali, the situation was still “not fully under control” and could even get worse. “The platform, shared with the Goumeri W3 and W4 oil wells, has sustained significant damage, also compromising the integrity of these two neighboring installations,” the statement added.

Initial findings ruled out the possibility of a criminal or terrorist act, though the cause of the eruption remains unknown, the statement said.

A field mission including the petroleum minister and the environment minister was deployed on Oct. 14 to assess the situation. The team was able to meet the engineers working on the disaster, as well as a team sent by the Algerian government to assist.

The Goumeri W8, W3 and W4 wells are part of the Agadem oil block, operated primarily by CNPC Niger Petroleum SA, a local subsidiary of state-owned Chinese oil company China National Petroleum Corporation.

Agadem is located in the south of the country, close to the border with Chad and Nigeria.

The desert region provides important habitats for three threatened species of Sahara Desert antelope: the Egyptian dorcas gazelle (Gazella dorcas dorcas), the slender-horned gazelle (Gazella leptoceros), and the addax (Addax nasomaculatus).

Although the true environmental impact of the disaster is not yet known, the massive release of crude oil could have negative consequences for threatened biodiversity. An investigation has been opened to determine the exact causes of the accident and establish responsibility.

Mongabay contacted Niger’s Ministry of Petroleum and CNPC Niger Petroleum SA for comment, but did not received a response by the time this story was published.

Banner image: Gas flaring at an oil installation of the China National Petroleum Corporation Niger in the Agadem block, 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) north of the hamlet of Melek. Image by NigerTZai via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Fifty automated recording units scattered across the backcountry of Yellowstone National Park in the U.S. gather roughly 500,000 hours of ambient sound each year. Computer models then sift through those recordings for wolf vocalizations, reports Justin Catanoso for Mongabay.

Jeffrey Reed, a linguist and former software engineer, helped launch the Cry Wolf Project in 2023 within the long-running Yellowstone Wolf Project. It uses machine learning to pick out and analyze wolf calls. It turns the audio into spectrograms that reveal the structure of individual calls. So far, the project has isolated more than 8,000 continuous hours of wolf recordings, creating what researchers say is the largest database of wild wolf communication.

Tracking wolves has generally meant catching them and fitting them with radio collars. Dan Stahler, Yellowstone’s chief wildlife biologist, told Catanoso that doing so is expensive and carries risks for both wolves and people. Recorders can simply be left in the field. Researchers are testing whether differences in wolves’ voices can identify individuals and help track their movements.

The idea is also being tested in Europe. In northern Italy’s Po Valley, Osservatorio Lupi — “Wolf Observatory” — has deployed a dozen recording units near farms and towns. It hopes eventually to use the recordings to warn communities when wolves approach livestock. Researchers are exploring similar uses for brown bears and along wildlife migration corridors.

Reed has annotated roughly a fifth of the archive by hand to check the models’ results. For now, listening to wolves still involves a fair amount of human listening.

Read the full story here.

Banner image: Two wolf puppies from the Junction Butte Pack in Yellowstone National Park captured in a 2025 photo. Pups learn to howl early on by mimicking the vocalizations of their mothers. Image by Jeremy SunderRaj, National Park Service, courtesy of Jeff Reed.

Typhoon Champi has moved from the western Pacific into the Philippine Sea and has become a Category 5 super typhoon, according to the U.S. National Weather Service.

It had maximum sustained winds of 160 mph (258 kph) by late Monday Asia time, and was not near land.

Champi earlier passed close to Guam, and the governors of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands requested emergency disaster declarations Friday.

U.S. President Donald Trump approved the emergency declaration for Guam. The Federal Emergency Management Agency said federal assistance was available for the territory to supplement local response efforts.

Airports, harbors and some health facilities in the territories were closed. Relief supplies were unlikely to reach the islands for three to five days, FEMA said Saturday.

Meanwhile, former hurricane Trudy weakened to a tropical storm early Monday after it lashed parts of Mexico’s Pacific coast with rain and winds.

The storm had maximum sustained winds of 60 mph (100 kph) and was moving west at 6 mph (9 kph), according to the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami.

Trudy was moving away from the coast and its center was forecast to pass south of the Baja California Peninsula on Monday and Tuesday.

Some further rainfall was possible in the region where the ground has been saturated by successive storms.

By Associated Press

Banner image: This GOES-19 GeoColor satellite image provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and taken on Thursday, Oct. 15 2026, shows Hurricane Trudy in the Pacific. Image courtesy of NOAA via Associated Press.

Every year, Amazonian rivers spill over their banks and flood the forests around them for months. These wetlands cover around 30% of the Brazilian Amazon and are often home to riverine families, who live in adapted homes built on stilts. They fish and plant crops with the natural ebb and flow of the rivers.

But a new study has found that more than 6% of the total area of Amazon floodplain forests and other wetland areas has been cleared over the last 40 years. Nearly a third of that destruction occurred between 2015 and 2024.

“When we think about 6%, we may get the impression that it’s small, but the converted area is basically the size of Belgium,” lead author Guilherme Lobo, a researcher at the State University of Campinas in Brazil, told Mongabay by phone.

Researchers compared wetland clearing across 13 types of land designations and found huge differences.

Public land not yet assigned by the government to any specific use had the largest share of human-converted wetland: a median of nearly 14% had been deforested.

According to Lobo, people burn these lands to show they’re in use, hoping to claim a land title later. According to a 2026 study by Imazon, a Brazil-based research institute, federal and state land laws create incentives for such land-grabbing practices, locally called grilagem. Undesignated public land is routinely granted to the people who clear it, with deforestation used as proof of the productive use of the land to justify the land title claim.

Military-controlled areas are the least deforested wetland areas, the report found, with land conversion there under 0.01%.

Indigenous lands, whether formally recognized or not, also had very low rates of wetland conversion. In formally recognized Indigenous territories, land conversion was 0.2%, while in Indigenous lands still awaiting demarcation, the figure was 0.3%.

“In other words, those people already lived there and already protected it. It was a matter of formalization,” Lobo said. Other strictly protected areas also had very low wetland conversion rates, under 0.3%.

Government agrarian reform settlements, plots of land given to farming families, recorded the fastest yearly clearing. Within five years of being created, settlements cleared 1.4% of their wetlands, compared to 0.9% before settlement. After 15 years, 24% of wetlands with these settlements were converted for human uses, up from 8.5% before settlement.

According to the study, these settlement programs require their occupants, typically smallholders, to put land to productive use, while offering little environmental monitoring or support for other types of livelihoods.

Land designed for sustainable agrarian reform settlements, where families hold land collectively and harvest forest products, also saw wetland conversion, but more gradually, from 2.4% to about 3.5% over the same time frame.

“The problem is in the design,” Lobo said. “What separates the categories that conserve from those that don’t isn’t only having an owner, it’s having rules.”

Banner image: Seasonally flooded Igapó forest near Manaus, Brazil. Image courtesy of Alexey Yakovlev via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has fallen to the lowest level on record.

Data released today by Brazil’s national space research institute, INPE, shows that forest clearing in Earth’s largest rainforest over the 12 months ended July 31, 2026, amounted to 3,335 square kilometers (1,288 square miles), an area smaller than the Spanish island of Mallorca. That is 42% below the previous year’s figure.

Deforestation in the Cerrado, the wooded savanna next to the Amazon rainforest, fell 24% to 5,516 sq km, also the lowest tally on record. The Cerrado has been the fastest-deforested biome in Brazil in recent decades, as vast areas have been converted to ranchland and industrial agriculture.

 The reduction has accelerated since President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office in 2023. Lula restored environmental law enforcement, expanded conservation programs, and resumed efforts to establish protected areas and recognize Indigenous territories. He faces a tough re-election bid later this month, raising concerns about whether recent progress in reducing Amazon forest loss will continue. Seven of the nine governors of Amazon states are allied with Flávio Bolsonaro, the frontrunner, who has campaigned on reducing protections for the Amazon.

Beyond the political dynamics, the near-term outlook for the Amazon is challenged by the super El Niño brewing in the Pacific. El Niño events are associated with drought in the southern Amazon, and fires typically increase in the year after a strong event.

Deforestation in the Amazon now amounts to about 15% of the biome, according to research by Amazon Conservation, a nonprofit. Scientists estimate that if it reaches 20-25%, the evapotranspiration system that drives rainfall across the region could fail, leading to drier conditions. That would make the forest more vulnerable to fire and could cause tropical species to die off. Models suggest that such a disruption could reduce rainfall in southern South America, the continent’s agricultural heartland.

Brazil accounts for just over 60% of the Amazon rainforest.

Promises by nations to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to finance nature and increase protections for oceans around the globe are falling short ahead of a key U.N. biodiversity conference. The warnings from the head of the conference and environmental groups comes as the countries gather Monday in Yerevan, Armenia for the United Nations Biodiversity Conference, or COP17. The conference running from Oct. 19 to Oct. 30 is a chance for countries to take stock of their progress after agreeing to a historic deal in 2022. Countries agreed to protect 30% of land and water considered important for biodiversity by 2030 and raise at least $200 billion by 2030.

By Michael Casey, Associated Press

Banner image: Flamingos feed at Duden Lake near the town of Kulu, in Konya province, Turkey, Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2026. Image courtesy of Emrah Gurel