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'Green Riyadh' to Improve Environment in Saudi Capital

FILE PHOTO: Cars drive past the King Abdullah Financial District, north of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, March 1, 2017. REUTERS/Faisal Al Nasser/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Cars drive past the King Abdullah Financial District, north of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, March 1, 2017. REUTERS/Faisal Al Nasser/File Photo
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'Green Riyadh' to Improve Environment in Saudi Capital

FILE PHOTO: Cars drive past the King Abdullah Financial District, north of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, March 1, 2017. REUTERS/Faisal Al Nasser/File Photo
FILE PHOTO: Cars drive past the King Abdullah Financial District, north of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, March 1, 2017. REUTERS/Faisal Al Nasser/File Photo

"Green Riyadh" is one of the most ambitious afforestation projects in the world that would help reduce some of the harms of urbanization, and make the city more capable of coping with the environmental changes.

The first phase of the project consists of planting around 31,000 trees over 144 meters of main routes in Riyadh, including King Salman Road, King Khalid Road, King Fahd Road, Airport Road, Makkah Road, the Northern Ring Road, and the Eastern Ring Road.

The Saudi project, one of the Grand Riyadh Ventures established by King Salman bin Abdulaziz in March, 2019, would contribute to increasing the individual share of greenery, expanding green spaces by spreading and growing more trees across the city, and ensuring the best exploitation of irrigation water.

The planned afforestation will help improve the quality of air, drop the city's temperatures, and encourage inhabitants on adopting a more active lifestyle in line with the goals of the "Vision 2030".

Urban Planner Fouad Al-Asiri believes that cities' afforestation is of great importance, especially in the deserted areas which need more green spaces given their high temperatures, nature of the soil, and growing pollution.

Since the 1970s, most of the urban planning projects have focused on facilitating vehicle transportation and neglected people's need for more spaces that allow them to use bicycles or walk to accomplish their daily tasks, he told Asharq Al-Awsat over a phone interview.

Al-Asiri noted that weather conditions in all seasons should not prevent people from walking, but the modern urban planning has focused on constructing more buildings instead of considering the human need for more spaces.

Urban afforestation aims at enhancing the quality of life and humanizing the cities by allowing people to meet their needs without using a car.

Al-Asiri said the "Green Riyadh" project highlights the importance of planting more trees instead of "grass surfaces," because the latter provides little urban benefits, and consumes large quantities of water.

He added that one of the project's main goals is to surround all kind of buildings with long shade trees to help reduce the temperatures, absorb the sunlight that reflects on the buildings, and reduce the surface's temperature by 10-12 degrees and the air currents around the buildings to 5-7 degrees.

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The Sea Beneath Arctic and Antarctic Ice Holds Many Secrets. These Scientists Dive Deep to Find Out

Ruari Buijs, a marine biology and oceanography student, right, and Caroline Chen, a scientific diver and research assistant, prepare to dive during a Polar Scientific Diving class in Kilpisjärvi, March 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Kostya Manenkov)
Ruari Buijs, a marine biology and oceanography student, right, and Caroline Chen, a scientific diver and research assistant, prepare to dive during a Polar Scientific Diving class in Kilpisjärvi, March 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Kostya Manenkov)
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The Sea Beneath Arctic and Antarctic Ice Holds Many Secrets. These Scientists Dive Deep to Find Out

Ruari Buijs, a marine biology and oceanography student, right, and Caroline Chen, a scientific diver and research assistant, prepare to dive during a Polar Scientific Diving class in Kilpisjärvi, March 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Kostya Manenkov)
Ruari Buijs, a marine biology and oceanography student, right, and Caroline Chen, a scientific diver and research assistant, prepare to dive during a Polar Scientific Diving class in Kilpisjärvi, March 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Kostya Manenkov)

As bubbles rippled across the frigid Finnish lake, diver Daan Jacobs emerged from a hole carved out of the thick, crackling ice.

The journey had taken him 8 meters (26 feet) beneath the surface, where sunlight filtered through the Arctic ice and fish swam around a rock formation. It's a remote place few will ever see, especially in winter, when snow blankets the ice and temperatures on land approach minus 40 degrees in both Celsius and Fahrenheit.

But Jacobs, a biodiversity adviser in the Netherlands, is one of a growing number of fortunate underwater explorers, The Associated Press said.

He was part of the Polar Scientific Diving class in the far north of Finland earlier this month, a program designed by the Finnish Scientific Diving Academy to train the next generation of scientists and researchers to dive beneath the Arctic and Antarctic ice to study the flora and fauna below.

“The view is beautiful,” Jacobs said, gulping for air following his 45-minute dive.

The Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet. From impacting worldwide weather patterns to making the polar bear population smaller, weaker and hungrier, because they rely on the sea ice to hunt from, higher temperatures at the North Pole spell disaster for the entire globe.

In Antarctica, meanwhile, global warming is leading to melting of ice sheets, prompting sea level rise and disrupting ocean ecosystems.

Human divers still needed

So scientists need to study what's underneath the remaining Arctic — and Antarctic — ice, and determine how climate change is affecting the plants and animals that have traditionally survived along the seafloor with little to no sunlight. But carrying out such research requires specialized scuba diving skills plus the proper scientific background — qualifications that experts say only a few hundred people in the world currently have.

The Finnish Scientific Diving Academy’s class aims to not only train more divers, but also to convince the world that the polar ice crisis requires additional research.

“Because it is melting so fast, we need to have more people deployed there — more science to be done — to understand better what happens,” said Erik Wurz, a marine biologist and one of the class's scientific diving instructors. “We have to do more and we need to be fast to save this unique ecosystem in the Arctic, but also the Antarctic.”

And in a world that’s increasingly outsourcing work to artificial intelligence and robots, British Antarctic Survey marine biologist Simon Morley said that human hands are still necessary for this. Dragging nets across the seafloor would destroy the habitat, and a remotely operated submersible or robot can usually only pick up one specimen at a time.

“A diver can go down and pick up 12 urchins, put them in a bag and not affect the rest of the system,” said Morley, who isn't part of the course.

Challenging conditions

During each 10-day session, the academy's instructors drill a dozen experienced divers on a frozen lake at the University of Helsinki's Kilpisjärvi Biological Station. The program began in 2024 and the demand has allowed them to add a second session per year.

The participants range from marine and freshwater biologists and other scientists to highly skilled recreational divers and documentary filmmakers.

Ruari Buijs, a marine biology and oceanography student at the University of Plymouth in England, ultimately wants to work in Antarctica and research marine megafauna. He enrolled in this month's polar diving class in an effort to be more employable upon graduation.

“I thought this would be a very good stepping stone toward that goal,” he said.

Meanwhile, Caroline Chen, a scientific diver and research assistant in Germany, said it’s her dream to dive in the polar regions. She believes that her experience in this course will help her design future experiments in such challenging conditions.

The students must learn more than just diving under ice that's nearly a meter (around three feet) thick and into water temperatures that hover just above freezing. For starters, there's the frigid air temperatures and whipping winds over Lake Kilpisjärvi.

That challenges the topside support team, which must operate equipment to keep the diver safe while fending off their own risk of frostbite. They also have to learn how to become safety divers in case of an emergency, like if the primary diver can't find the hole in the ice to surface after 45 minutes below.

But once they're underwater, the divers say it's an incredible experience. During this month's session, the group dived beneath ice roughly 80 centimeters (around 2½ feet) thick. Chen spotted some fish along the sea floor and then took a moment to look to the surface as sunlight streamed through the ice, seemingly mimicking another Arctic phenomenon.

“It looks insane from the bottom up,” Chen said. “It changes all the time, like the Northern Lights.”

Buijs said that the cold doesn't affect the covered parts of a diver's body. But the area around their mouth remains exposed underwater.

“I think the worst thing is like your lips feel very numb afterward and they like stick out a lot,” he said, laughing. “You kind of get Botox lips a little bit.”

Varieties

Germany’s WWII Munitions a Toxic Legacy on Baltic Sea Floor

This handout photo taken on March 16, 2026 and released by the Kiel-based GEOMAR oceanographic research center on March 23, 2026 shows a scientist looking at digital scans highlighting munitions and various spots of interest on the seabed aboard the scientific research vessel Alkor in the Eastern Baltic Sea. (Lauren Peck / GEOMAR / AFP)
This handout photo taken on March 16, 2026 and released by the Kiel-based GEOMAR oceanographic research center on March 23, 2026 shows a scientist looking at digital scans highlighting munitions and various spots of interest on the seabed aboard the scientific research vessel Alkor in the Eastern Baltic Sea. (Lauren Peck / GEOMAR / AFP)
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Germany’s WWII Munitions a Toxic Legacy on Baltic Sea Floor

This handout photo taken on March 16, 2026 and released by the Kiel-based GEOMAR oceanographic research center on March 23, 2026 shows a scientist looking at digital scans highlighting munitions and various spots of interest on the seabed aboard the scientific research vessel Alkor in the Eastern Baltic Sea. (Lauren Peck / GEOMAR / AFP)
This handout photo taken on March 16, 2026 and released by the Kiel-based GEOMAR oceanographic research center on March 23, 2026 shows a scientist looking at digital scans highlighting munitions and various spots of interest on the seabed aboard the scientific research vessel Alkor in the Eastern Baltic Sea. (Lauren Peck / GEOMAR / AFP)

Below the waves off Germany's northern tourist beaches, a toxic time bomb lurks on the Baltic Sea floor -- enormous quantities of World War II munitions that are slowly rusting away.

Scientists warn that as salt water corrodes the metal casings on rockets, artillery shells and bombs, they will release contaminants such as the explosive TNT into the marine environment.

To better map the dangers, a research vessel set sail this month from the port city of Kiel, whose bay is among the most polluted with unexploded ordnance.

A dozen scientists from Germany, Poland and Lithuania, backed by an 11-strong crew, are to spend three weeks on the Alkor, operated by the Kiel-based GEOMAR oceanographic research center.

The voyage will take them past a sunken torpedo boat, a destroyer, a minesweeper and a submarine, all identified from naval logbooks and other records in the German military archives.

"One of the goals of the project is to develop some new tools for cleaning it up," Aaron Beck, a scientist leading the expedition, told AFP aboard the ship.

"The idea is, what can we do to prevent this before the pollution comes out?"

Along the German coast, about 1.6 million tons of munitions litter the seafloor, especially near the ports of Kiel and Luebeck, making it one of the world's most contaminated areas.

Most munitions were hastily dumped there by the victorious Allied powers after Germany's 1945 surrender, to quickly eliminate what remained of the Nazi war machine.

- Traces found in shellfish -

Almost 80 years on, traces of carcinogenic explosives have been detected in shellfish and other sea life throughout the area.

The Baltic is shallow, with only a narrow passage between Sweden and Denmark leading to the open ocean, meaning pollution tends to linger.

A modern-day boom in undersea construction of pipelines, telecom cables and offshore wind farms has cast a new spotlight on the issue.

The scientists on the ship are using an underwater robot to film the seabed, as well as probes to collect sediment and water samples.

They are also dispersing packets of mussels, which they will later retrieve to study the levels of contamination ingested.

Beck, however, reassured that the pollution does not pose an immediate danger to humans.

"For a human being to ingest, at current concentrations, a concerning amount of explosive compounds, they would have to consume seven kilos (15 pounds) of fish a day for more than a year," he said.

Ammunition on the sunken warships is not the only environmental danger.

"On some of these ships, you have 10 tons of ammunition, but 200 tons of fuel. That's undoubtedly the biggest problem," Beck said.

One wreck still holding fuel is the Franken, a German navy tanker torpedoed by Soviet forces on April 8, 1945. It sank off what is now the Polish city of Gdansk, at the time still the German city of Danzig.

Uwe Wiechert, 70, a former German naval officer and part of the research team, called it a "time bomb".

The Franken also poses a legal conundrum, he said: who will pay to pump this fuel from a German ship, sunk by the Soviets, that now rests in Polish waters?

- Slow disposal efforts -

Seafloor munitions dumps are a global problem, with other major sites located along the coasts of the United States, Britain, Japan and Australia and even in Swiss lakes.

Germany has been at the forefront of European efforts to deal with unexploded underwater ordnance, says the European Commission.

Beyond mapping the problem, Germany has taken first steps toward munitions disposal.

In Luebeck Bay, a pilot project to destroy WWII munitions on a specially built floating disposal platform has begun.

Some contractors working on the project have experience of clearing munitions for large offshore wind farms along the Baltic and North Sea coasts.

Divers and underwater robots have sorted through tons of dumped munitions at four sites in the bay as part of the project, funded with an initial 100 million euros ($115 million).

But it remains unclear whether the pilot project could become a model for cleanups elsewhere.

So far, at least, no government has committed the long-term funding needed to tackle the problem.

When a similar project might start in waters off Kiel, said Beck, "is anybody's guess".

Varieties

413,793 KitKat Candy Bars Stolen en Route from Italy to Poland

FILE - A KitKat chocolate bar in Rugby, England, on July 25, 2018. (AP Photo/Martin Cleaver, File)
FILE - A KitKat chocolate bar in Rugby, England, on July 25, 2018. (AP Photo/Martin Cleaver, File)
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413,793 KitKat Candy Bars Stolen en Route from Italy to Poland

FILE - A KitKat chocolate bar in Rugby, England, on July 25, 2018. (AP Photo/Martin Cleaver, File)
FILE - A KitKat chocolate bar in Rugby, England, on July 25, 2018. (AP Photo/Martin Cleaver, File)

Swiss food giant Nestlé says about 12 tons, or 413,793 candy bars, of its KitKat chocolate brand were stolen after leaving its production site in Italy earlier this week for Poland.

The company, based in Vevey, Switzerland, said in a statement Friday that “the vehicle and its load are still nowhere to be found.”

The shipment of the crunchy bars, made of waffles covered with chocolate, disappeared last week while en route between production and distribution locations. The chocolate bars were to be distributed throughout Europe.

The missing candy bars could enter unofficial sales channels across European markets, the company said, but if this does happen, all products can be traced using the unique batch code assigned to individual bars.

A spokesperson for KitKat said that as a result, consumers, retailers and wholesalers would be able to identify if a product is part of the stolen shipment by scanning the on-pack batch numbers. If a match is found, the scanner will be given clear instructions on how to alert the company, which will then share the evidence appropriately.

“Whilst we appreciate the criminals’ exceptional taste, the fact remains that cargo theft is an escalating issue for businesses of all sizes," The Associated Press quoted KitKat as saying in a statement.

“With more sophisticated schemes being deployed on a regular basis, we have chosen to go public with our own experience in the hope that it raises awareness of an increasingly common criminal trend,” the statement added.