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Category: Environment

How plants react to climate change could make floods a whole lot worse

How plants react to climate change could make floods a whole lot worse

Chad Small writes: Tree-planting is a cornerstone of numerous environmental and climate campaigns, and for seemingly good and logical reasons: When plants photosynthesize, they exchange carbon dioxide for oxygen. The reality of planting trees to combat climate change is a bit more complicated. Planting the wrong trees in the wrong places can do more environmental harm than good. There is an ongoing debate as to whether reforestation will compete too much with necessary agriculture, or if trees—which can take a…

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It’s not just oceans that are rising. Groundwater is, too

It’s not just oceans that are rising. Groundwater is, too

Grist reports: Beneath our feet there is an invisible ocean. Within the cracks of rock slabs, sand, and soil, this water sinks, swells, and flows — sometimes just a few feet under the surface, sometimes 30,000 feet below. This system of groundwater provides a vital supply for drinking water and irrigation, and feeds into rivers, lakes, and wetlands. Across the globe, it contains 100 times as much fresh water than all of the world’s rivers and lakes combined. As Earth…

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‘Rewilding’ parts of the planet could have big climate benefits

‘Rewilding’ parts of the planet could have big climate benefits

Bob Berwyn writes: Restoring populations of land and marine animals in targeted “rewilding” zones would speed up biological carbon pumps that remove carbon dioxide from the air and sequester the greenhouse gas where it doesn’t harm the climate, new research shows. An international team of scientists focused the study on marine fish, whales, sharks, gray wolves, wildebeest, sea otters, musk oxen, African forest elephants and American bison as species, or groups of species, that accelerate the carbon cycle. Collectively, they “could facilitate…

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Why the world needs a fire department

Why the world needs a fire department

Douglas P. Fry writes: The threats posed by extreme wildfires are a global challenge that require a global response. Wildfires are increasing in frequency and severity on all inhabited continents. Writing in Science this month, Bo Zhang and colleagues note that an “increase in fire emissions poses a widening threat to climate.” For example, the record-breaking 2020 fire season in California negated more than 18 years of carbon dioxide reductions in the state. Wildfires fuel climate change, and climate change…

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How Europe’s first wild river national park saw off the dams

How Europe’s first wild river national park saw off the dams

The Guardian reports: The fast-moving Vjosa River in Albania curves and braids, sweeping our raft away from the floodplain towards the opposite bank, and back again. The islands that split the waterway in two are temporary, forming, growing, then dissipating so that this truly wild river, one of the last in Europe, never looks the same. “There’s a saying, ‘you can’t step in the same river twice’,” says Ulrich Eichelmann, the head of Riverwatch, a Vienna-based NGO for river protection,…

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Seabirds that swallow ocean plastic waste have scarring in their stomachs – scientists have named this disease ‘plasticosis’

Seabirds that swallow ocean plastic waste have scarring in their stomachs – scientists have named this disease ‘plasticosis’

Scientists have identified a condition they call plasticosis, caused by ingesting plastic waste, in flesh-footed shearwaters. Patrick Kavanagh/Wikipedia, CC BY By Matthew Savoca, Stanford University As a conservation biologist who studies plastic ingestion by marine wildlife, I can count on the same question whenever I present research: “How does plastic affect the animals that eat it?” This is one of the biggest questions in this field, and the verdict is still out. However, a recent study from the Adrift Lab,…

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‘Everything living is dying’: Environmental ruin in modern Iraq

‘Everything living is dying’: Environmental ruin in modern Iraq

Lynzy Billing writes: It’s 6PM and the pink-tinged skies turn black above Agolan, a village on the outskirts of Erbil in the Kurdistan region of northern Iraq. Thick plumes of smoke have begun to billow out of dozens of flaring towers, part of an oil refinery owned by an Iraqi energy company called the KAR Group. The towers are just about 150 feet from where 60-year-old Kamila Rashid stands on the front porch of her house. She looks squarely at…

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The toxic threat in thawing permafrost

The toxic threat in thawing permafrost

Christian Elliott writes: Covering nearly the same area as Norway, the Hudson Bay Lowlands in northern Ontario and Manitoba is home to the southernmost continuous expanse of permafrost in North America. Compared with many marine waterways this far south, Hudson Bay stays frozen late into the summer, its ice-covered surface reflecting sunlight and keeping the surrounding area cold. The influence of Hudson Bay on the weather is crazy, says Adam Kirkwood, a graduate student at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario….

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The Ordovician mass extinction: Our planet’s first brush with death

The Ordovician mass extinction: Our planet’s first brush with death

Cody Cottier writes: Some mass extinctions unfold like a sloppy murder, leaving clear fingerprints for the keen investigator to uncover. (Asteroids are no masters of subtlety.) The Late Ordovician mass extinction, the oldest of all and the second most lethal, isn’t one of them. Though there is a standard explanation for this granddaddy of death — involving an ancient ice age — the evidence is cryptic enough that experts are still submitting new theories for how 85 percent of all…

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Why East Antarctica is a ‘sleeping giant’ of sea level rise

Why East Antarctica is a ‘sleeping giant’ of sea level rise

BBC Future reports: Jan Lieser had just started going through the dozens of satellite images he looks at every day when he realised something was missing. As a glaciologist at the University of Tasmania’s Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies, he knew the shape of every ice shelf sticking out from the coast of East Antarctica. And on 17 March 2022, there was a gap where most of the Conger glacier’s ice shelf had broken off into an iceberg the…

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Climate is changing too quickly for the Sierra Nevada’s ‘zombie forests’

Climate is changing too quickly for the Sierra Nevada’s ‘zombie forests’

NPR reports: Some of the tall, stately trees that have grown up in California’s Sierra Nevada are no longer compatible with the climate they live in, new research has shown. Hotter, drier conditions driven by climate change in the mountain range have made certain regions once hospitable to conifers — such as sequoia, ponderosa pine and Douglas fir — an environmental mismatch for the cone-bearing trees. “They were exactly where we expected them to be, kind of along the lower-elevation,…

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The creeping threat of the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt

The creeping threat of the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt

The Guardian reports: Seaweed has been having a moment. Eco-influencers and columnists rave about its benefits, in everything from beauty products to biofuels. Jamie Oliver has embraced it as a recipe ingredient; Victoria Beckham uses it to keep off the pounds. And they’re right: seaweed is packed with nutrition, it sucks up carbon and is an amazingly versatile addition to the green economy. But one type of seaweed is not a benign force. Vast fields of sargassum, a brown seaweed,…

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How wildfires deplete the Earth’s ozone layer

How wildfires deplete the Earth’s ozone layer

Carolyn Gramling writes: Towering clouds of smoke sent into the stratosphere by ferocious wildfires can eat away at Earth’s ozone layer thanks to a potent mix of smoke, atmospheric chemistry and ultraviolet light, a new study finds. During late 2019 and early 2020, Australia’s skies turned black, darkened by thick columns of wildfire smoke that reached into the stratosphere. In the aftermath, satellite data revealed that the smoke was somehow reacting with atmospheric molecules to eat away at Earth’s ozone…

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Plastic entering oceans could nearly triple by 2040 if left unchecked, research indicates

Plastic entering oceans could nearly triple by 2040 if left unchecked, research indicates

Reuters reports: Plastics entering the world’s oceans have surged by an “unprecedented” amount since 2005 and could nearly triple by 2040 if no further action is taken, according to research published on Wednesday. An estimated 171 trillion plastic particles were afloat in the oceans by 2019, according to peer-reviewed research led by the 5 Gyres Institute, a U.S. organisation that campaigns to reduce plastic pollution. Marine plastic pollution could rise 2.6 fold by 2040 if legally binding global policies are…

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Ocean treaty: Historic agreement reached after decade of talks

Ocean treaty: Historic agreement reached after decade of talks

BBC News reports: Nations have reached a historic agreement to protect the world’s oceans following 10 years of negotiations. The High Seas Treaty aims to place 30% of the seas into protected areas by 2030, to safeguard and recuperate marine nature. The agreement was reached on Saturday evening, after 38 hours of talks, at UN headquarters in New York. The negotiations had been held up for years over disagreements on funding and fishing rights. The last international agreement on ocean…

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The toxic legacy of the Ukraine war

The toxic legacy of the Ukraine war

BBC Future reports: On 6 June, satellite images captured hundreds of craters made by artillery shells and a 40m-wide (131 ft) hole left by a bomb in fields around the village of Dovhenke, in eastern Ukraine. It is just one site left scarred by Russia’s invasion of its neighbour. And as the war continues to wreak a devastating humanitarian toll on the people caught up in the fighting, the conflict is leaving a far less obvious, toxic legacy on the land itself….

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