The groundwater that supplies farms, homes, industries and cities is being depleted across the world, and in many places faster than in the past 40 years, according to a new study that calls for urgency in addressing the depletion.

The declines were most notable in dry regions with extensive cropland, said researchers whose work was published Wednesday in the journal Nature. On the plus side: they found several examples of aquifers that were helped to recover by changes in policy or water management, they said.

Colombia's government has declared a disaster and asked for international help to combat raging wildfires that are expected to worsen in coming days due to warm, dry conditions associated with the El Niño weather phenomenon.

Officials raised the number of fires from 25 to 31, and said nine of them were under control. They did not order mandatory evacuations despite some fires burning in the mountains that surround some municipalities.

Strong winds hit Australia's northeast coast Friday, leaving thousands without power, but the area was spared heavy damage as Tropical Cyclone Kirrily weakened into a tropical storm.

Wind gusts of up to 170 kilometers an hour (105.6 miles per hour) battered coastal cities and towns, while fallen trees caused property damage. Weather officials warned of continuing heavy rain and strong winds.

Human-induced global warming, and not El Niño, was the primary driver of last year's severe drought in the Amazon that sent rivers to record lows, required deliveries of food and drinking water to hundreds of river communities and killed dozens of endangered dolphins, researchers said Wednesday.

Both climate change and El Niño contributed about equally to a reduction in rainfall. But higher global temperatures were the biggest reason for the drought, according to World Weather Attribution, an initiative that brings together climate scientists to rapidly analyze extreme events and their possible connections to climate change.

A rhinoceros was impregnated through embryo transfer in the first successful use of a method that conservationists said might later make it possible to save the nearly extinct northern white rhino subspecies.

In testing with another subspecies, the researchers created a southern white rhino embryo in a lab from an egg and sperm that had been previously collected from other rhinos and transferred it into a southern white rhino surrogate mother at the Ol-Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya.

Thirty-one people were confirmed dead while several remained missing Tuesday after a landslide in a remote, mountainous part of China's southwestern province of Yunnan, Chinese state media reported.

The disaster struck just before 6 a.m. on Monday in the village of Liangshui in the northeastern part of Yunnan.

A motorist was killed, tens of thousands of people were without electricity and hundreds of trains were canceled Monday after the latest in a wave of winter storms lashed Britain and Ireland with heavy rain and wind gusts of almost 100 miles (160 kilometers) an hour.

The U.K.'s Met Office weather service issued an unusual blanket wind warning for the whole country before Storm Isha, which reached its peak overnight.

A landslide buried 47 people in a remote village in mountainous southwestern China on Monday, state media said. Hours later, two survivors were rescued amid freezing temperatures and falling snow.

The disaster struck just before 6 a.m. in the village of Liangshui in the northeastern part of Yunnan province. By evening, nine bodies were retrieved and about 500 people were evacuated from the area.

The Defense Department will install solar panels on the Pentagon, part of the Biden administration's plan to promote clean energy and "reestablish the federal government as a sustainability leader."

The Pentagon is one of 31 government sites that are receiving $104 million in Energy Department grants that are expected to double the amount of carbon-free electricity at federal facilities and create 27 megawatts of clean-energy capacity while leveraging more than $361 million in private investment, the Energy Department said.

Heavy snow and freezing rain hit parts of northern and central Europe on Wednesday, bringing transport to a halt in some Scandinavian regions and causing major disruption at airports in Frankfurt and Oslo.

At Frankfurt Airport, Germany's busiest, freezing rain forced a halt to takeoffs, German news agency dpa reported. The airport cited a danger of de-iced aircraft icing up again as they taxied toward the runway. Some departures resumed in the afternoon as the rain subsided. Hundreds of flights already had been canceled.