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Along California’s sunbaked Pacific coastline, a quiet ecological crisis is unfolding beneath the waves, driven by an extended marine heat wave that has already begun reshape marine life patterns and threaten vulnerable species. As climate change amplifies extreme ocean warming and overlaps with a projected record-breaking El Niño event, scientists and conservationists are sounding the alarm over cascading harm to coastal ecosystems.

Sara Lesser, a 39-year-old naturalist at Long Beach’s Aquarium of the Pacific, has witnessed the shift firsthand during daily whale-watching excursions. This summer, she told AFP, the playful pods of dolphins and pods of whales that once drew tourists to the waters are increasingly hard to find. Rising surface ocean temperatures have pushed the small schooling fish that cetaceans depend on — anchovies and sardines — to retreat to deeper, cooler waters or migrate much farther north than their typical ranges. With their food source gone, whales and dolphins have followed, leaving fewer sightings for onlookers and signaling a far larger disruption to the coastal food web. For Lesser, the drop in encounters is not just a disappointment for tourists; it is an early warning sign of more systemic damage underway.

Data from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirms the severity of the current warming event: surface water temperatures along California’s coast are currently 3 to 4 degrees Celsius above the long-term average, and the heat wave has persisted for roughly six months, according to NOAA research oceanographer Andrew Leasing. What makes this event particularly worrying is its overlap with a developing El Niño, the climate pattern that warms equatorial Pacific surface waters and alters global weather systems. Scientists project this El Niño could rank among the strongest ever recorded, potentially outpacing the destructive 2015–2016 event that devastated California’s marine ecosystems.

That 2015 event, which followed an earlier marine heat wave that started in 2014, offers a grim preview of what may come. Thousands of seabirds starved when fish moved out of accessible surface waters, and the bodies of emaciated sea lions and whales washed up on public beaches. Today, early signs of the same collapse are already appearing. In recent months, dozens of dead pelicans and cormorants have been recovered near San Diego. One of California’s most iconic native species, sea lions, face growing risk: Leasing explained that warming waters force female sea lions to abandon their pups to travel farther for food, leaving young pups to starve. Additionally, higher ocean temperatures fuel the growth of toxic algal blooms that produce domoic acid, a neurotoxin that accumulates in anchovies and sardines, which then poison marine mammals that eat them. In early June, two juvenile humpback whales washed up dead on the shores of Monterey Bay from domoic acid poisoning — a mass poisoning event so large it has not been seen in a decade, according to Elliott Hazen, an adjunct professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “These are such large predators, it just highlights how much domoic acid there has to be in the ecosystem for it to affect them,” Hazen told AFP.

The ecological shift is also bringing unexpected changes to human activity along the coast: warming near-shore waters have pushed juvenile great white sharks much closer to shore than is typical, as younger sharks prefer warmer temperatures. Recent months have brought multiple high-profile encounters: a Malibu resident filmed a great white swimming just meters from unsuspecting children playing in the surf, and Huntington Beach was forced to close swimming areas three times this spring after aggressive sharks were spotted close to shore, putting beachgoers on edge.

Marine heat waves along California have become an annual event since 2019, and experts warn that these anomalous conditions will become the new norm if current warming trends continue. “We know that climate change is adding more fuel to the fire,” Hazen said. The long-term risk extends far beyond iconic marine mammals: repeated heat waves erode the ability of coastal ecosystems to sustain the fish populations that both wildlife and human communities rely on for food. “If we have these marine heat waves over and over again, and we lose the ability to sustain the ecosystem the way we have in the past, we’re going to lose some of the fish species that we rely on for food. So that’s the big concern,” he added.

A catastrophic wildfire burning through central Spain has become the largest blaze in the nation’s recent history, scorching tens of thousands of hectares of land and forcing thousands of rural residents to flee their homes with only minutes to grab their most precious belongings.

Evacuation orders dropped with little warning as flames advanced rapidly across dry terrain, leaving local communities scrambling to prioritize what to save and what to leave behind as emergency services closed off entire affected regions. For many, the rushed evacuation meant abandoning cherished possessions, beloved pets, and critical daily items that they would only later recover through brief, closely monitored return trips.

On a highway cordoned off by police blocking access to her locked-down commune of Robledo de Chavela, 50-year-old Olga Congacha described the chaotic fear that gripped the village as the evacuation order came through. “Everyone had to get out of the village quickly — it was a critical situation and people were scared,” she told Agence France-Presse. She and her husband only managed to grab their most vital legal documents and a small stack of clothing before fleeing. It was not until Sunday that authorities allowed her a short trip back to her home to retrieve medication required for an upcoming surgery, where she discovered her property already coated in a thick layer of wildfire ash.

At an emergency evacuation centre set up inside a sports hall north of Madrid, 84-year-old Roberto Velasco recounted his split-second decision of what to save from his Navalagamella home. After living in Spain for 50 years, he brought only a small suitcase and a single hard drive loaded with digital copies of decades of old family letters and heirloom mementos from his relatives in Chile. “I didn’t know what to bring. I thought the whole house was going to burn,” he explained, sitting weary on a temporary camp bed in a stained grey t-shirt. He had initially planned to pack his favourite books and a collection of music, but in the rush, he left even those behind – and forgot to pack so much as a towel.

West of Madrid, at another shelter in Villamanta, 81-year-old Jose Luis (who requested his full name not be published to protect his privacy amid the crisis) can now monitor his abandoned Aldea del Fresno home remotely via smart cameras installed around his property. When the evacuation alert blared on his phone, he and his wife fled in minutes, leaving almost everything behind. Authorities later granted them a 30-minute window to return for essential medication, and the couple took the opportunity to leave extra food for their pet canary, Pavarotti, whom they were forced to leave behind. “He has the voice of an angel,” Jose Luis said of the bird. “When you put music on for him he won’t stop singing — bachata, rock ‘n’ roll, anything noisy.” During his quick return, he also watered his houseplants and grabbed his electric razor, the only other item he had space to take.

For 56-year-old Rosa, also a resident of Robledo de Chavela, abandoning her two rescued feral cats was a heartbreaking choice she tried desperately to avoid. “They are feral — you can’t pick them up without a net,” she explained. She reached out to local animal protection groups for help, but rescuers were not permitted to enter the restricted fire zone. Police eventually had to compel her to evacuate, and she was one of the final residents to leave as flames reached the village edge. “They kind of tricked me, saying they were going to get the cats out, so I said OK. But of course, they had no intention of getting the cats out. They came for me,” she said. Still, she holds out hope her pets are unharmed: “The cats are alright — they are in the house and have things to eat. I left it all for them. The only thing that will be wrong is the floor will be dirty.”

At the Villamanta sports hall shelter, 70-year-old Margarita has worn the same stained t-shirt for four straight days, after she and her 45-year-old daughter Helena fled with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. The pair assumed they would be able to return home within 24 hours, so they packed nothing extra. Margarita also suffered a swollen ankle after a fall at the evacuation centre, but the pair say emergency workers have provided adequate care, including regular meals and access to paracetamol for pain. On Sunday, Spain’s King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia visited the shelter to meet with evacuees from Aldea del Fresno. “The queen came to say hello to us — and I was wearing this dirty thing,” Margarita laughed.

Ecology Minister Sara Aagesen confirmed Sunday that the wildfire burning near the capital Madrid is the largest recorded in Spain in recent memory, highlighting the growing severity of wildfire risk across southern Europe amid rising global temperatures and prolonged summer droughts.