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Arctic Dispatches, part 1: The past winter was the warmest on record in the Arctic, putting a lifestyle that has endured for millennia at risk: ‘The magnitude of change is utterly unprecedented’

‘Amazing but also concerning’: weird wildlife ventures to northern Alaska

A few days before Christmas last year, Harry Brower, mayor of Alaska’s North Slope Borough, was at home when he heard a stunning noise – the sound of waves lapping at the shore.

The sound was as wrenching and misplaced as hearing hailstones thud into the Sahara. Until fairly recently, the Arctic ocean regularly froze up hard up against the far north coast of Alaska by October. In 2017, it wasn’t until the final few days of the year that the ice encased the waves.

The world may have warmed by around 1C (1.8F) over the past century but the Arctic far outstrips this global average and is warming at around twice the rate of the rest of the world.

Related: Arctic spring is starting 16 days earlier than a decade ago, study shows

Related: Arctic warming: scientists alarmed by 'crazy' temperature rises

Electric vehicles’ share of new UK registrations rises to 2%, still falling far short of Norway’s 48%

Sales of electric cars in the UK have risen 11% on last year, putting the country in the premier league of those ditching petrol and diesel engines, though it is still miles behind Norway and China.

An analysis of the latest global sales of electric vehicles found that nearly half the vehicles registered in Norway in the first three months of 2018 were electric (48%), compared to just over a third (35%) during the same period in 2017. The vehicles are run almost exclusively off the nation’s hydropower resource, underlining Norway’s claim as the world leader.

Report chronicles ‘mass mortality’, the extent and severity of which has shocked scientists • Sign up to receive the top stories every morning

Scientists have chronicled the “mass mortality” of corals on the Great Barrier Reef, in a new report that says 30% of the reef’s corals died in a catastrophic nine-month marine heatwave.

The study, published in Nature and led by Prof Terry Hughes, the director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, examined the link between the level of heat exposure, subsequent coral bleaching and ultimately coral death.

Related: Coral reefs 'at make or break point', UN environment head says

Related: The Great Barrier Reef: a catastrophe laid bare

As climate scientists predicted, glaciers are vanishing due to rapidly warming temperatures.

With global warming, we can make predictions and then take measurements to test those predictions. One prediction (a pretty obvious one) is that a warmer world will have less snow and ice. In particular, areas that have year-round ice and snow will start to melt.

Alpine glaciers are large bodies of ice that can be formed high in mountains, typically in bowls called cirques. The ice slowly flows downwards, pulled by gravity, and is renewed in their upper regions. A sort of balance can occur where the loss of ice by melting or flowing at the bottom is equal to the gain of snow and ice by precipitation.

This research shows that peaks in the Alaska Range sustain additional summertime warming through links with rising ocean temperatures in the tropics. Not only have we learned that summers are much warmer on Mt. Hunter than they were hundreds of years ago, but our research also demonstrates how connected the climate system is, with changes in certain parts of the world affecting places thousands of miles away.