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Category: Environment

Arctic ocean passes ‘irreversible’ chemical tipping point

Arctic ocean passes ‘irreversible’ chemical tipping point

Oceanographic reports: A new study spanning two decades reveals that the loss of sea ice has triggered an irreversible chemical shift in the Arctic Ocean. By exposing shallow coastal waters to intense sunlight, the melting ice has accelerated a process that destroys nitrate, the foundational fertiliser required for marine life to survive. The study, published in Communications Earth & Environment, suggests the Arctic passed a critical ecological tipping point in 2009. The resulting nutrient famine is already affecting the whole…

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How ecotypes harbor the genetic memory of a species’ past

How ecotypes harbor the genetic memory of a species’ past

Marlowe Starling writes: When she was a graduate student in the 1970s, the evolutionary biologist Kerstin Johannesson regularly walked the shores of a Swedish archipelago, scanning the ground for pebbles that moved: marine snails. Her adviser, a taxonomist, had tasked her with describing the species present there by documenting their traits. She noticed that snails with thicker shells stayed on the shore, while those with thinner shells seemed to prefer wave-battered rocks, and in between the two habitats were snails…

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A utility mega-merger is all about data centers

A utility mega-merger is all about data centers

Inside Climate News reports: A proposed merger of the largest utility in the country by market value, NextEra Energy, with the sixth-largest, Dominion, would create a megacompany at a time when data centers and rapid increases in electricity demand are reshaping the industry. The proposal, announced Monday morning and contingent on state and federal regulatory approval, would result in a company that leads in nearly every aspect of the U.S. power and utility industry, including overall electricity generation, natural gas…

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A vast meshwork of soil-bound fungi governs life aboveground

A vast meshwork of soil-bound fungi governs life aboveground

Max G. Levy writes: One Tuesday in June 2025, a white Chevy Suburban set off down the northernmost highway in North America. The sun of Alaska’s polar summer hadn’t set in 40 days, and it wouldn’t set again for another 35. But for Michael Van Nuland, the biologist in the driver’s seat, time was already running out. The SUV, packed with four days of fieldwork essentials — rubber boots for mucking in marshes, GPS for centimeter-level precision, a steel tube…

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A super El Niño killed millions of people in 1877. Are we better prepared now?

A super El Niño killed millions of people in 1877. Are we better prepared now?

The Washington Post reports: As chances rise for one of the strongest El Niño events on record later this year, the potential for dangerous conditions has prompted comparisons to 1877, when such an event drove catastrophe around the globe. El Niño is a warming of ocean waters in the east-central tropical Pacific that develops every few years. This year, ocean temperatures there could surge 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) above average and break records. The climatic shift devastated crops…

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Backlash as Utah approves datacenter twice the size of Manhattan

Backlash as Utah approves datacenter twice the size of Manhattan

The Guardian reports: A plan to create one of the world’s largest datacenters, a gargantuan project spanning an area more than twice the size of Manhattan, has provoked a furious public backlash in Utah amid concerns over its vast energy use and impact upon the state’s stressed water supplies. The Stratos artificial intelligence datacenter footprint will cover more than 40,000 acres (62 sq miles) over three sites in Box Elder county in north-western Utah. The facility will require about 9GW…

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What does the Anthropocene look like from below the Earth’s surface?

What does the Anthropocene look like from below the Earth’s surface?

James Dinneen writes: When Soviet engineers began to drain the Aral Sea in the 1960s, they could hardly foresee the scale on which their handiwork would alter the planet. The goal was to irrigate large areas of what is now Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to grow cotton, part of a utopian project stretching back to czarist Russia to civilise the ‘backward’ regions of central Asia. Achieving this meant diverting most of the two rivers that fed the Aral Sea, which was…

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The oldest river in the world ran through Pangea

The oldest river in the world ran through Pangea

ZME Science reports: Rivers are poor archivists of their own past. They don’t sit still like fossils, or record a single birthdate like volcanic rock. Instead, they wander across floodplains, cut into rock and often move around or even abandon their channels. A river can spend millions of years destroying the very evidence that would prove how long it’s been there. That makes the question of the world’s oldest river surprisingly difficult. When geologists ask which river is the oldest…

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Thoreau the scientist – how environmental research informed ‘Walden’ and later works

Thoreau the scientist – how environmental research informed ‘Walden’ and later works

Henry David Thoreau investigated the Sudbury River as America’s first river scientist. Robert M. Thorson By Robert M. Thorson, University of Connecticut The steam locomotive chugged its way toward Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Aug. 15, 1859. On board was an impatient young scientist wanting to understand the math and science governing how river channels should behave. After disembarking at Harvard College and searching the stacks of its library, Henry David Thoreau checked out “Principes D’Hydraulique,” a three-volume tome of hydraulic engineering….

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How microplastics are likely contributing to heating the planet

How microplastics are likely contributing to heating the planet

The Washington Post reports: Microplastics lurk in nearly every corner of the globe. Scientists have found the tiny particles in rivers and lakes, in agricultural soil and in the oceans. They have infiltrated our food and water, cleaning products and cosmetics, even our own bodies. But do they also play a role in hastening the warming of the planet? It’s a question researchers inch closer toward answering in a new study published Monday that finds these minuscule pieces of plastic…

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The race to mine critical minerals for AI and clean energy is creating ‘sacrifice zones’ that harm water and health of world’s poor

The race to mine critical minerals for AI and clean energy is creating ‘sacrifice zones’ that harm water and health of world’s poor

An artisanal miner holds a cobalt stone at a mine near Kolwezi, Congo, in 2022. About 20,000 people work there among toxic materials. Junior Kannah/AFP via Getty Images By Abraham Nunbogu, United Nations University and Kaveh Madani, United Nations University There is a troubling contradiction at the heart of the global transition to a cleaner, greener, tech-driven future: Modern technologies – everything from AI to wind turbines, as well as cellphones, electric vehicles and defense systems – depend on critical…

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How the Trump administration ended independent science at the EPA

How the Trump administration ended independent science at the EPA

The New York Times reports: For more than a half-century, a prestigious scientific arm of the federal government did groundbreaking research aimed at saving American lives. It studied fertility, asthma, wildfires, drinking water, climate change and myriad other health threats. In just one year, it has been almost completely dismantled. One scientist, a doctor and expert in lung health, has recently been reassigned to a finance office. Another, an epidemiologist, has been told she has a new job issuing permits…

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Critical Atlantic current significantly more likely to collapse than thought

Critical Atlantic current significantly more likely to collapse than thought

The Guardian reports: The critical Atlantic current system appears significantly more likely to collapse than previously thought after new research found that climate models predicting the biggest slowdown are the most realistic. Scientists called the new finding “very concerning” as a collapse would have catastrophic consequences for Europe, Africa and the Americas. The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is a major part of the global climate system and was already known to be at its weakest for 1,600 years as…

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Apollo vs Artemis: How the Earth changed in 58 years

Apollo vs Artemis: How the Earth changed in 58 years

Richard Hollingham writes: After the Apollo 8 crew captured the iconic Earthrise photo in 1968, Artemis astronauts have recreated the image, revealing changes to our fragile blue planet. When the commander of Apollo 8, Frank Borman, first saw the far side of the Moon from his spacecraft window in 1968 he was struck by its desolate appearance. “The lunar surface was terribly distressed with meteorite craters and volcanic residue,” he told me during a BBC interview in 2018. “It was…

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Evolution before life

Evolution before life

Dyna Rochmyaningsih writes: A story about the origins of life in the cosmos starts at Earth’s equator, where Dian Fiantis, a professor of soil science at Andalas University in Indonesia, investigated how seemingly dead environments come back to life. In 2018, she traveled to Mt. Anak Krakatoa (which emerged after the famous Krakatoa’s eruption) to collect the volcanic ash it ejected two months before. In her lab, she found out that volcanic glass (SiO2), the dominant chemical found in the…

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Mass drowning of chicks puts emperor penguins at risk of extinction

Mass drowning of chicks puts emperor penguins at risk of extinction

The Guardian reports: The mass drowning of emperor penguin chicks as sea ice is melted by the climate crisis has led the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to declare the species officially in danger of extinction. Emperor penguins rely on “fast” ice – sea ice that is firmly attached to the coast – for nine months of the year. It is where their fluffy chicks are hatched and grow until they have their waterproof feathers. Adults moult every…

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