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Category: Environment

A mystery in the Pacific is complicating climate projections

A mystery in the Pacific is complicating climate projections

Yale Climate Connections reports: Nothing has a bigger influence on year-to-year variations in the global climate than the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, commonly called ENSO. And the tropical waters at the heart of ENSO aren’t behaving exactly as climate scientists expected they would in a warming world, with potentially major implications for Atlantic hurricane seasons, droughts in the U.S. Southwest and the Horn of Africa, and other weather phenomena around the world. ENSO is a recurring ocean-and-atmosphere pattern that warms and…

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More than 19,000 undersea volcanoes discovered

More than 19,000 undersea volcanoes discovered

Science reports: The U.S. submarine fleet’s biggest adversary lately hasn’t been Red October. In 2005, the nuclear-powered USS San Francisco collided with an underwater volcano, or seamount, at top speed, killing a crew member and injuring most aboard. It happened again in 2021 when the USS Connecticut struck a seamount in the South China Sea, damaging its sonar array. With only one-quarter of the sea floor mapped with sonar, it is impossible to know how many seamounts exist. But radar…

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Photos: Glimpses of a changing Earth, as seen from above

Photos: Glimpses of a changing Earth, as seen from above

The Associated Press reports: Charred, drained or swamped, built up, dug out or taken apart, blue or green or turned to dust: this is the Earth as seen from above. As the world commemorates Earth Day on Saturday, the footprints of human activity are visible across the planet’s surface. The relationship between people and the natural world will have consequences for years to come. In Iraq, lakes shrivel and dry up as rain fails to fall, weather patterns altered by…

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Phosphorus saved our way of life — and now threatens to end it

Phosphorus saved our way of life — and now threatens to end it

Elizabeth Kolbert writes: In the fall of 1802, the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt arrived in Callao, Peru’s major port, just west of Lima. Humboldt had timed his visit to coincide with a transit of Mercury, which he planned to observe through a three-foot telescope, in order to determine Lima’s longitude. He set up his instruments atop a fort on the waterfront, and then, with a few days to kill before the event, wandered the docks. A powerful stench emanating…

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As world warms, droughts come on faster, study finds

As world warms, droughts come on faster, study finds

The New York Times reports: Flash droughts, the kind that arrive quickly and can lay waste to crops in a matter of weeks, are becoming more common and faster to develop around the world, and human-caused climate change is a major reason, a new scientific study has found. As global warming continues, more abrupt dry spells could have grave consequences for people in humid regions whose livelihoods depend on rain-fed agriculture. The study found that flash droughts occurred more often…

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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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