AFP

Hopes of saving a malnourished beluga whale that has swum up the Seine river were receding on Sunday, as rescuers said they were in a race against the clock to find a solution.

The whale was first spotted on Tuesday in the river that runs through Paris to the English Channel. Since Friday it has been between two locks some 70 kilometres (44 miles) north of the French capital.

But leaving it in the warm stagnant water between the lock gates is no longer an option.

“He has to be moved in the coming 24-48 hours, these conditions are not good for him,” Sea Shepherd France head Lamya Essemlali told AFP.

Specialists held out “little hope” for the visibly underweight whale as they were “in a race against the clock” to save the creature, Essemlali said.

“We are all doubtful about its own ability to return to the sea,” she said. “Even if we ‘drove’ it with a boat, that would be extremely dangerous, if not impossible”.

Before swimming between the two locks, “he had the tendency to be heading toward Paris. It would be catastrophic if he reached there,” Essemlali said.

However, “the euthanasia option has been ruled out for the moment, because at this stage it would be premature”, she said.

The whale still has “energy … turns its head, reacts to stimuli”, she said after a meeting of experts and French officials.

Although rescuers have tried feeding it frozen herring and then live trout, the animal was refusing the food.

“His lack of appetite is surely a symptom of something else… an illness. He is malnourished and this dates back weeks, if not months. He was no longer eating at sea,” Essemlali said.

On Saturday veterinarians had administered “vitaminsand products to stimulate its appetite,” said a statement on Sunday by the police in Normandy’s Eure department, which is overseeing the rescue effort.

The small spots that were reported on its pale skin on Saturday were due to the fresh water, it said.

Another option under consideration would be to take it out of the water, give it vitamins, check the cause of the illness and eventually ship it out to sea once it regains its strength.

Another is “to let it end its life peacefully, like someone who is very ill and who does not have much chance to live”, said Isabelle Dorliat-Pouzet, a senior police official in Evreux.

– Rare sighting –

Belugas are normally found only in cold Arctic waters, and while they migrate south in the autumn to feed as ice forms, they rarely venture so far.

An adult can reach up to four metres (13 feet) in length.

According to France’s Pelagis Observatory, specialised in sea mammals, the nearest beluga population is off the Svalbard archipelago, north of Norway, 3,000 kilometres (1,800 miles) from the Seine.

It is only the second recorded sighting of a beluga in a French river since 1948, when a fisherman in the estuary of the Loire river found one in his nets.

The sighting comes just a few months after a killer whale — also known as an orca, but technically part of the dolphin family — became stranded in the Seine and was later found dead between Le Havre and Rouen in late May.

A post-mortem found the animal, more than four metres long, had likely suffered exhaustion after being unable to feed.

Officials said they had also discovered a bullet lodged in the base of its skull — though it was far from clear that the wound played a role in its death.

After months of negotiations, the US Senate looks poised to pass Joe Biden’s grand climate and health care plan, channeling billions toward ambitious clean energy goals in a hard-won victory for the president ahead of midterm elections.

“I think it’s going to pass,” the Democratic president, who recently recovered from a second bout of Covid-19, told journalists Sunday morning in a brief appearance on the White House lawn. 

The $430 billion plan, crafted in arduous talks with members on the right wing of his Democratic Party, would include the biggest US investment ever on climate — $370 billion aimed at effecting a 40 percent drop in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. 

That would give Biden a clear victory on one of his top agenda items and go some way toward restoring US leadership in meeting the global climate challenge.

Democrats hold a razor-thin majority in the Senate — just enough to pass spending bills like this with no Republican support.

If the package is approved, likely within days, it will move on Friday to the House of Representatives, where the majority Democrats expect to pass it. It would then go to Biden’s desk for his signature. 

– Electric cars –

The bill would provide ordinary Americans with a tax credit of up to $7,500 when purchasing an electric car, plus a 30 percent discount when they install solar panels on their roofs. 

It would also provide millions to help protect and conserve forests — which have been increasingly ravaged in recent years by wildfires during record heat waves that scientists say are linked to global warming.

Billions of dollars in tax credits would also go to some of the country’s worst-polluting industries to help their transition to greener methods — a measure bitterly opposed by some liberal Democrats who have, however, accepted this as a least-bad alternative after months of frustration.

Biden, who came to office with promises of sweeping — and expensive — reforms, has seen his hopes dashed, then revived, then dashed again. 

Democrats’ narrow edge in the Senate has given a virtual veto to moderates like Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who earlier had used that power to block Biden’s much more expansive Build Back Better plan. 

But in late July, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer managed to wangle a compromise with the West Virginian, whose state’s economy depends heavily on coal mining. 

And on Saturday, senators finally opened their debate on the text.

– ‘Vote-a-rama’ –

Late in the day, senators kicked off a marathon procedure known as a “vote-a-rama,” in which members can propose dozens of amendments and demand a vote on each one.

That has allowed both Republicans, who view Biden’s plan as too costly, and liberal Democrats, who say it does not reach far enough, to make their opposition clear.

Influential progressive senator Bernie Sanders used that platform through the evening to propose several amendments aimed at strengthening social planks in the legislation, which were considerably weakened during the months of negotiation.

As it stands, the bill would provide $64 billion for health care initiatives and ensure a lowering of some drug costs — which can be 10 times more expensive in the US than in some other rich countries.

But progressive Democrats long ago had to give up their ambitions for free preschool and community colleges and expanded healthcare for the elderly.

“Millions of seniors will continue to have rotten teeth and lack the dentures, hearing aids or eyeglasses that they deserve,” Sanders said from the Senate floor. 

“This bill, as currently written, does nothing to address it.”

But fellow Democrats, eager to pass the legislation well ahead of November midterms when control of Congress is much at stake, have rejected any change in the text.

To help offset the plan’s massive spending, it would reduce the US deficit through a new 15-percent minimum tax on companies with profits of $1 billion or more — a move targeting some that now pay far less.

Hopes of saving a malnourished beluga whale that has swum up the Seine river were receding on Sunday, but rescuers said they have ruled out “euthanasia” for now.

The whale was first spotted on Tuesday in the river that runs through Paris to the English Channel. Since Friday it has been between two locks some 70 kilometres (44 miles) north of the French capital.

But leaving it in the warm stagnant water between the lock gates is no longer an option.

“He has to be moved in the coming 24-48 hours, these conditions are not good for him,” Sea Shepherd France head Lamya Essemlali told AFP.

Specialists held out “little hope” for the visibly underweight whale, Essemlali said.

“We are all doubtful about its own ability to return to the sea,” she said. “Even if we ‘drove’ it with a boat, that would be extremely dangerous, if not impossible”.

However, “the euthanasia option has been ruled out for the moment, because at this stage it would be premature,” she said.

The whale still has “energy … turns its head, reacts to stimuli”, she said after a meeting of experts and French officials.

Although rescuers have tried feeding it frozen herring and then live trout, the animal was refusing the food.

“His lack of appetite is surely a symptom of something else… an illness. He is malnourished and this dates back weeks, if not months. He was no longer eating at sea,” Essemlali said.

Small spots that were reported on  its pale skin on Saturday were likely due to the fresh water, Sea Shepherd said.

Another option under consideration would be to take it out of the water, give it vitamins, check the cause of the illness and ship it out to sea to feed.

– Rare sighting –

Belugas are normally found only in cold Arctic waters, and while they migrate south in the autumn to feed as ice forms, they rarely venture so far.

An adult can reach up to four metres (13 feet) in length.

According to France’s Pelagis Observatory, specialised in sea mammals, the nearest beluga population is off the Svalbard archipelago, north of Norway, 3,000 kilometres (1,800 miles) from the Seine.

It is only the second recorded sighting of a beluga in a French river since 1948, when a fisherman in the estuary of the Loire river found one in his nets.

The sighting comes just a few months after a killer whale — also known as an orca, but technically part of the dolphin family — became stranded in the Seine and was later found dead between Le Havre and Rouen in late May.

An autopsy found the animal, more than four metres long, had likely suffered exhaustion after being unable to feed.

Officials said they had also discovered a bullet lodged in the base of its skull — though it was far from clear that the wound played a role in its death.

Jumping from rock to rock to rock over a creek formed off Austria’s Jamtal glacier,  scientist Andrea Fischer worries that precious scientific data will be irreversibly lost as the snow and ice melt faster than ever.

“I couldn’t have imagined that it would ever melt as dramatically as this summer… Our ‘archive’ is melting away,” says the glaciologist. 

Fischer — vice director of the Institute for Interdisciplinary Mountain Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences — has spent more than 20 years surveying Jamtal and four other Alpine glaciers across Austria’s highest peaks for the oldest areas of ice.

For scientists looking to reconstruct the Earth’s climate in the distant past, such ice formations are a unique time capsule stretching back thousands of years.

The glaciers contain an invaluable treasure trove of data — as they grew, the ice encapsulated twigs and leaves, which can now be carbon-dated, Fischer explains.

And based on the age of such material and the depth where it was found, scientists can infer when ice grew during colder periods, or when warmer conditions caused it to melt. 

But now the glaciers are melting rapidly — including the one in the remote and narrow Jamtal valley, not far from where tourists found the stunningly preserved 5,300-year-old mummy of Oetzi, the Iceman, in the 1990s.

Temperatures in Europe’s highest mountains have risen by nearly two degrees Celsius in the past 120 years — almost double the global average, according to the International Commission for the Protection of the Alps (CIPRA). 

The Alps’ roughly 4,000 glaciers have since become one of the starkest signs of global warming.

– Disappear completely? –

The Jamtal glacier has been losing about one metre (three feet) from its surface annually, but this year it has already lost more than a metre, Fischer says.

“And we’ve got at least two months of summer left… where the glacier is entirely exposed to the sun,” she warns. 

Snow usually protects most of the glacial ice from the sun until September, but the little snow that fell last winter had already melted by early July.

“This year is outrageous compared to the average of the past 6,000 years,” says Fischer. 

“If this continues, in five years, Jamtal glacier won’t be a glacier anymore.”

By the end of the summer, Fischer fears that about seven metres of depth will have melted off the surface — or about 300 years of climate “archives”. 

“We need the data the glaciers hold to understand the climate of the past — and to create models of what awaits us in the future,” she says.

Fischer and her team have drilled on both the Jamtal and other nearby glaciers to extract data, taking out ice samples up to 14 metres deep.

As temperatures rise and the glaciers become more unstable, they are compelled to take additional safety precautions — 11 people died in a glacial ice avalanche in the Italian Dolomites in July, the day after temperatures there rose to new records. 

– ‘My heart is bleeding’ –

In Galtuer, the nearest village to Jamtal with 870 residents who are mostly dependent on tourism, the Alpine Club is already offering a “Goodbye, glacier!” tour through the once ice-filled valley to raise awareness about the effects of climate change.

Where the ice has retreated, scientists found that within three years about 20 species of plants, mostly mosses, have taken over. In some areas, larches are growing, according to Fischer.

“If the glacier is gone in five years, that’s a pity, because it’s part of the landscape,” says Sarah Mattle, who heads the Alpine Club.

“But then there’ll also be new paths, and maybe there’ll be an easier hike over the mountains than over the ice. It’ll all be a matter of adapting,” the 34-year-old adds.

Other locals like Gottlieb Lorenz, whose great-grandfather was the first manager of the 2,165-metre-high Jamtal cabin set up as a refuge for mountaineers, are heartbroken.

“My heart is bleeding when I think about how magnificent and mighty the glacier was and what a miserable tiny pile it is today,” the 60-year-old says.

He points at a black-and-white photo taken in 1882 showing a thick ice sheet flowing past the cabin.

Today, the ice is a 90-minute hike away.