Sweltering temperatures are shattering records across Europe, as the continent battles a deadly heatwave.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, France endured its hottest days in history, with western regions reaching highs of between 39°C and 43°C. Wednesday was the United Kingdom’s warmest June day on record, with the mercury climbing to 36.1°C. And according to early data, Spain, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and Switzerland have all broken June temperature records at several sites. And the event is not over yet.
Tragically, lives have already been lost, including dozens of people who have drowned in France in the past week, while trying to cool down in the punishing heat.
But this historic heatwave is not happening in isolation. It comes days after the global sea surface temperature again reached record levels. Meanwhile, Australia’s weather bureau has declared El Niño active, making a hotter, drier year in Australia, Asia and the South Pacific much more likely. And since April, India and Pakistan have been battling a sustained and ultimately deadly heatwave.
So what’s driving this latest heatwave? And why is it so severe?
An unusual heatwave
A heatwave occurs when the average temperature is unusually hot for three or more days in a row. That’s compared to past weather data taken from the same location.
But scientists are losing sleep over the current European heatwave, for two main reasons.
1. Timing
In Europe, the hottest time of year comes in mid- to late July, about a month after the summer solstice. However, recent research suggests days of intense heat stress are now starting to arrive in June. Since 1950, only one other major heatwave has arrived earlier than the current heatwave, which is unfolding weeks before the peak of the European summer.
Current evidence shows climate change is making heatwaves more frequent and intense. One study examined the heatwave that hit southeast England in June 2025. It found that without the effect of human-made greenhouse gas emissions, such a heatwave would only happen once every 50 years. But when the researchers accounted for the temperature increase of 1.3°C caused by human-induced climate change, this became at least once every five years.
In a world without climate change, this extreme heatwave would rarely if ever happen so early in the year. And it also would not be toppling temperature records, and by such staggering amounts.
Tuesday and Wednesday were France’s hottest days since records began in 1947, with an average temperature of 29.9°C across the country. On Tuesday, 147 French towns hit all-time highs for June, with 41 local weather stations recording figures above 43°C.
France also slept through its warmest night ever from Tuesday into Wednesday, with a national average temperature of 21.6°C. The overnight heat was enough to make some rivers so warm they could not be safely used to cool nuclear power plants.
In the same week, Spain also set multiple daytime and nighttime records, with one location enduring three consecutive nights of 30°C or above. Parts of Spain have seen temperatures surpass 45°C.
In western Europe, the heatwave is expected to peak in the middle of this week before shifting east, with forecasts suggesting Poland and Germany will bear the brunt over the weekend.
At the local scale, heatwaves occur when a high-pressure system settles over a region. These systems act as “lids” that trap heat and push it closer to the surface. They also disperse clouds to allow more sunlight to stream in.
On a broader scale, climate change from the burning of oil, coal and gas is reshaping how and when heatwaves form. This is because the additional heat trapped in the atmosphere also changes large-scale weather patterns, which typically move east to west, allowing more slow-moving high-pressure systems to form. This in turn increases the risk of heatwaves.
Research shows in the five decades between 1950 and 1999, Europe endured five intense heatwaves. Between 2000 and 2021, there were 18 such heatwaves. Add to that the extreme heatwaves of 2022, 2023 and 2025, and this figure rises to more than 20 severe heatwaves in just 25 years. So the evidence is clear – European heatwaves are happening far more often.
How are people coping?
This heatwave has already tragically claimed dozens of lives in France, where people have drowned.
According to the European Climate Risk Assessment, heatwaves already pose a critical health risk to people across southern Europe. And in coming years, communities in southern and western-central Europe will be most at risk of heat-related illness and death.
What makes this heatwave so severe is the combination of extreme temperatures and high humidity, which is completely unlike the typical dry summers experienced in southern Australia.
Children and the elderly are most at risk of heat-related illness. Their bodies are less able to evaporate sweat and regulate their internal temperature. For these populations, extreme heat coupled with humidity can be life-threatening.
Historically, heatwaves in Europe aren’t related to heatwaves in the following southern hemisphere summer.
However, climate change is increasing the risk of extreme heat in any given year. Combine this with the effects of El Niño, and global average temperatures will be at near-record levels for both 2026 and 2027.
In our changing climate, the risk of extreme heat – Australia’s deadliest natural hazard – is now a global reality.
Andrew B. Watkins is a Climate Councillor with the Climate Council.
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Australia is home to unusual mammals not found anywhere else – consider the platypus, Tasmanian devil or the red kangaroo.
But did you know our understanding of this continent’s incredible mammalian diversity is still incomplete?
We have discovered a new species in one of Australia’s cutest and fiercest mammal groups: planigales. And we also unearthed a second new planigale species, from a 100-year-old specimen held in a Swedish museum.
In the past five years alone, there have been 20 new mammals added to Australia’s mammal species list. So how is it we are still discovering new species of mammals in the 21st century? Let me explain.
Tiny, ferocious marsupials
But first, what is a planigale?
Planigales are the world’s smallest marsupials. Some species weigh just over two grams (the same as a couple of paper clips) and are about half the size of a house mouse.
With flattened heads, planigales can squeeze themselves into cracks and crevices to hide from predators and extreme weather conditions. They are tiny but fearsome predators that emerge at night to hunt for insects, spiders and vertebrates, such as small lizards and even young mammals. They generally live in varied habitats that overlay cracking clay soils in central and northern Australia.
Because planigales are so small, with subtly varying shades of brown fur, they are very difficult to tell apart. They are also difficult to catch, weighing so little that conventional small metal box traps are often not effective. We have to dig holes called “pitfall” traps instead. Most species live in remote areas, so it has been difficult to understand their diversity until now.
New mammal species awaiting discovery
There are several reasons we are still discovering new mammals in Australia.
First, many mammal species have suffered declining populations, and are now very difficult to find. Also, we are using more advanced technologies to help us tell mammals apart, including sophisticated genetic methods.
But over time, perhaps what has changed most is the amount of information we can draw on. Museum collections hold more than 200 years of specimens and data — an irreplaceable scientific record that helps us recognise species we may no longer detect in nature.
It was through studies of marsupial genetics we first realised the number of planigales in Australia was likely an underestimate.
A small number of genetic samples we previously studied suggested there were probably undescribed species of planigales in Australia. But we needed to gather more samples to work out exactly where they lived.
To do this, we partnered with organisations that survey for mammals in remote Australia, such as Australian Wildlife Conservancy, and pored over museum collections for extra genetic samples. This way, we gathered hundreds of genetic samples of planigales and were finally able to work out if there were more species in this group.
A planigale hiding among the rocks
In 2017, a genetic study first identified a unique planigale found in Kakadu National Park, in the Northern Territory. These results were based on only two genetic samples from preserved specimens held in the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.
We exhaustively checked more than 2000 planigale specimens held in Australian museums and found a single specimen that matched the existing two. It was in the Queensland Museum, collected during the 1970s.
These three planigale specimens, two males and one female, are genetically distinct from all other planigale species and have their own unique appearance. They are large (well, for a planigale) with dark grizzled fur and a very long tail – longer than other planigale species.
And they were found in an unusual location, on top of a rocky plateau. Most other species of planigales tend to live in swampy habitats, or areas with heavy clay soils.
These factors confirmed we were dealing with a new species. We described it [https://doi.org/10.1093/zoolinnean/zlag082] as the Arnhem plateau planigale, Planigale petrophila (meaning “rock-lover”). Since it is only known from three specimens, we urgently need to do more work to determine whether it is rare or under threat of extinction.
This is Planigale ‘petrophila’, the ‘rock lover’.Martin Armstrong
But wait, there’s more
And that’s not all. During our study, we found specimens thought to represent a known species, Planigale ingrami, in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, were genetically distinct from those in the NT, Queensland and South Australia, even though they looked very similar.
This genetic information indicated these specimens were a “cryptic” species – something that can be identified by genetics but is difficult to tell apart based on appearance alone. By consulting historical research papers, we found these Kimberley planigales were in fact already described more than 100 years ago from a specimen collected in Australia that ended up in Sweden. With help from curators at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, we were able to confirm this old specimen matched the new ones from the Western Australian Museum.
We have called this the Kimberley planigale –Planigale subtilissima– as most of its range occurs in the Kimberley. Unlike the Arnhem plateau planigale, Kimberley planigales have been detected frequently by Australian Wildlife Conservancy and partners on recent surveys, so there is less concern for their future.
From five to nine species
Our work has so far added four new species of planigales to Australia, as we had previously identified the orange-headed Pilbara planigale and the cracking-clay Pilbara planigale.
This has increased the diversity of this group of tiny mammals in Australia to eight species in total, with an extra one known in Papua New Guinea.
It makes you wonder – how many more planigales and other mammals are out there waiting to be recognised?
This work would not have been possible without the help of my colleagues Linette Umbrello (WA Museum), Kenny Travouillon (WA Museum), Mike Westerman (La Trobe University), Mark Blacket (Agriculture Victoria), Skye Cameron (Australian Wildlife Conservancy) and Eridani Mulder (formerly Australian Wildlife Conservancy), and funding from the Australian Biological Resources Study and the Queensland University of Technology.
Andrew M. Baker has received funding from the Australian Biological Resources Study (ABRS) and the Australian government.
After a heatwave, we crave relief, not more extreme weather. But increasingly, we have to contend with a succession of extremes – ricocheting from extreme heat to intense storms to flooding waterways.
We saw this in the Victorian Otways region last summer, when extreme heat, fires and floods all occurred in the space of two weeks.
We studied this sudden “weather whiplash”, where a heatwave is followed by heavy rainfall, in more detail to understand which parts of Australia are affected, why this occurs and how this phenomenon is changing as the world warms.
The results were sobering. Not only are weather whiplashes a repeating feature of Australia’s climate, but they are becoming more frequent and affecting larger areas of the country than a century ago.
A land of extremes
Australians know extreme weather, and many of us have experienced its repercussions firsthand. Heatwaves are a “silent killer”, responsible for more deaths than all other natural hazards combined, while extreme rainfall can bring either cooling relief or destruction through flash flooding. Climate change is increasing their frequency, and they do not always occur in isolation.
It’s common to think of weather extremes as separate events: a heatwave is a heatwave, and a storm is a storm. But we found heatwaves and heavy rainfall often come within days of each other, creating “weather whiplashes”. This means communities, landscapes, ecosystems and infrastructure are already under stress when the next extreme weather event arrives.
Our new paper identified hundreds of whiplash events where extreme rainfall immediately followed heatwaves, using Australian climate data starting in 1910. Of most interest were whiplashes that happened in the warm season, from October to April, because it’s the time of year when you would expect to see swings from heat to extreme rain.
It showed south-eastern Australia is a whiplash hotspot, where cold fronts often replace heatwaves with heavy rain, affecting large areas at once. Southern Queensland recorded the highest number of whiplash events – being on the east coast leaves it vulnerable to heavy rain pushed inland by winds travelling across the sea. In the tropical north, thunderstorms flush out heat.
More frequent, and more widespread
Next, we wanted to understand whether these whiplash events had changed over the past 110 years. Many people feel as though the weather is becoming more rapidly changeable, but is this supported by the data?
Overall, yes. Weather whiplash events are more frequent and affect larger areas of the country than they did a century ago. More Australians are now exposed to whiplash weather.
We zoomed into big cities with big populations. The north of Australia, including Cairns and Darwin, has experienced the biggest increases, mainly driven by more frequent and intense heatwaves, combined with a wetter climate. And temperatures don’t drop as much after heatwaves as they once did.
Melbourne’s four seasons in a day is here to stay too – while cities in the south may have weaker whiplash trends, these cover much larger areas.
The expanding area affected by whiplash weather means more locations are facing simultaneous hazards, potentially straining the capacity of local government areas and states to support one another.
Australia has just experienced its second ‘whiplash summer’ in a row.
Other studies in Europe, and over shorter time periods in Australia, have also shown weather is becoming more volatile.
These events are linked, not random
Extreme rainfall follows heatwaves too often to be coincidence, suggesting a physical connection between the events.
In parts of southeastern Australia, more than 20% of heatwaves resulted in a whiplash. We think this is because the termination of heatwaves is associated with an unstable atmosphere. The hot conditions also allow the atmosphere to hold more moisture, so when it rains, it pours.
Over southern Australia, the high-pressure systems that allow heatwaves to form are replaced by low-pressure systems. These can sweep in like a bulldozer, pushing surrounding air upwards and forcing out moisture that falls as heavy rain in big cold fronts.
Heat and fire can also pre-condition the land, making it dry, barren and more prone to flooding when rain hits directly afterwards.
Colliding weather
No two weather whiplashes will be the same. Each brings unique impacts and there are many other types of weather that can collide in different combinations, on different timescales.
We need to be better prepared for this whiplash as we head further into an ever-warming world.
And one thing is clear: it’s not enough to understand individual extremes, we have to understand how they interact with each other.
Juliana Neild receives funding from Australian Research Council.
Andrew King receives funding from receives funding from the Australian Research Council (Centre of Excellence for the Weather of the 21st Century and a Future Fellowship) and the Australian government's National Environmental Science Program.
Linden Ashcroft has received funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC) and is affiliated with the ARC Centre of Excellence for 21st Century Weather. Linden is a Fellow of the Climate Council.
Alexander Borowiak does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
