Australia's Great Barrier Reef, under severe stress in a warmer, more acidic ocean, has returned from near-extinction five times in the past 30,000 years, researchers said Monday.

And while this suggests the reef may be more resilient than once thought, it has likely never faced an onslaught quite as severe as today, they added.

Subtropical Storm Alberto gained the early jump on the 2018 hurricane season as it headed toward anticipated landfall sometime Monday on the northern Gulf Coast, where white sandy beaches emptied of their usual Memorial Day crowds.

Though the Atlantic hurricane season doesn't officially start until Friday, Alberto has become the first named storm this year, throwing disarray into long holiday weekend plans up and down Florida's Gulf Coast. And just as Memorial Day marked summer's unofficial start in the U.S., Alberto gave it the unofficial start of what forecasters recently predicted would be an active hurricane season.

In a wooden canoe on the waters of the Mono River in southwest Benin, a strange cone-shaped effigy in purple raffia and topped with horns sails back and forth through the mangroves.

Cyclone Mekunu was downgraded to a tropical storm Saturday, a day after lashing the southern coast of Oman and killing at least two people, authorities said.

Ten families from Europe, Kenya, and Fiji have filed suit against the European Union, seeking to limit global warming's threats to their homes and livelihoods, their lawyers said Thursday.

Seven people were missing and hundreds of others evacuated from their homes after Cyclone Mekunu hit the Yemeni island of Socotra Wednesday night, causing severe flooding and damage to houses, officials said.

Failing to cap global warming at two degrees Celsius or less could cost the world economy tens of trillions of dollars over the next 80 years, researchers warned Wednesday.

A pair of identical, sportscar-sized satellites are poised to zoom around the Earth and track changes in water and ice, offering new insights into global warming and sea level rise, NASA said Monday.

Groundwater, oceans, lakes, rivers and ice sheets will be monitored by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO), a joint mission between the U.S. space agency and German Research Center for Geosciences (GFZ).

Authorities in Hawaii have warned of dangerous "laze" fumes as molten lava from the erupting Kilauea volcano reached the Pacific Ocean.

Two lava flows "reached the ocean along the southeast Puna coast overnight," on Hawaii's Big Island, the US Geological Survey, which monitors volcanoes and earthquakes worldwide, said in a statement Sunday.

Entire communities living under the shadow of a smouldering volcano on an island in Vanuatu will be permanently relocated to another island from next week, the Pacific nation's government has decided.