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Category: Environment

Undersea internet cables can detect earthquakes — and may soon warn of tsunamis

Undersea internet cables can detect earthquakes — and may soon warn of tsunamis

Jeffrey Marlow writes: Somewhere beneath the Adriatic Sea, a rogue block of the African tectonic plate is burrowing under southern Europe, stretching Italy eastward by a few millimetres each year. On October 26, 2016, the stress triggered an earthquake in the Apennine Mountains, one in a series of quakes which toppled buildings in Italian towns. On the day of the tremor, Giuseppe Marra, a principal research scientist at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, England, was running an experiment that…

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Caring about the unborn should mean caring about the future of our planet

Caring about the unborn should mean caring about the future of our planet

William MacAskill writes: Humanity, today, is in its adolescence. Most of a teenager’s life is still ahead of them, and their decisions can have lifelong effects. Similarly, most of humanity’s life lies ahead – an estimated 118 billion people have already lived, but vastly more people, perhaps thousands or even millions of times that number, are yet to be born. And some of the decisions we make this century will impact the entire course of humanity’s future. Contemporary society does…

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We are moving into an era defined by homesickness

We are moving into an era defined by homesickness

Madeline Ostrander writes: From above, an open-cut coal mine looks like some geological aberration, a sort of man-made desert, a recent volcanic eruption, or a kind of terra forming. When the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht first gazed at a series of such mines while driving through his home region in southeast Australia, he stopped and got out of his car, overcome “at the desolation of this once beautiful place,” he wrote in his book, Earth Emotions. As a scholar, Albrecht…

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Sustainable cities made from mud

Sustainable cities made from mud

BBC Future Planet reports: In Yemen’s ancient walled city of Sana’a mud skyscrapers soar high into the sky. The towering structures are built entirely out of rammed earth and decorated with striking geometric patterns. The earthen buildings blend into the nearby ochre-coloured mountains. Sana’a’s mud architecture is so unique that the city has been recognised as a Unesco World Heritage site. “As an outstanding example of a homogeneous architectural ensemble reflecting the spatial characteristics of the early years of Islam,…

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American Scar: The environmental tragedy of the border wall

American Scar: The environmental tragedy of the border wall

  Murat Oztaskin writes: In a remote and rugged expanse of southern Arizona, between the vast stretches of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts, a straight line runs. It cuts through mountaintops, across the foothills and valleys. At one time, the line was conceptual: the border between one country and another, a geopolitical abstraction real mainly to those who ached to cross it and to others who wished to prevent that. Now, in the past few years, much of it has…

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CDC finds notorious weed killer tied to cancer in over 80% of urine samples collected in the U.S.

CDC finds notorious weed killer tied to cancer in over 80% of urine samples collected in the U.S.

The New Lede reports: In fresh evidence of the pervasive nature of pesticides, more than 80 percent of urine samples drawn from children and adults participating in a US health study contained a weedkilling chemical linked to cancer and other health problems. The report by a unit of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that out of 2,310 urine samples collected, 1,885 were laced with detectable traces of glyphosate, the active ingredient in herbicides sold around the…

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Pollen and heat — a looming challenge for global agriculture

Pollen and heat — a looming challenge for global agriculture

Carolyn Beans writes: Last June, Aaron Flansburg felt the temperature spike and knew what that meant for his canola crop. A fifth-generation grower in Washington state, Flansburg times his canola planting to bloom in the cool weeks of early summer. But last year, his fields were hit with 108-degree Fahrenheit heat just as flowers opened. “That is virtually unheard of for our area to have a temperature like that in June,” he says. Yellow blooms sweltered, reproduction stalled, and many…

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Explosion of life on Earth linked to heavy metal act at planet’s center

Explosion of life on Earth linked to heavy metal act at planet’s center

The Observer reports: At the centre of the Earth, a giant sphere of solid iron is slowly swelling. This is the inner core and scientists have recently uncovered intriguing evidence that suggests its birth half a billion years ago may have played a key role in the evolution of life on Earth. At that time, our planet’s magnetic field was faltering – and that would have had critical consequences, they argue. Normally this field protects life on the surface by…

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The norms the Supreme Court targeted this term all came from the same era

The norms the Supreme Court targeted this term all came from the same era

Bill McKibben and Akaya Windwood write: The supreme court, thank heaven, finally adjourned on Thursday, after a week of decisions that blew up much of the framework of American policy and politics. And a key thing to notice about that assault on American norms was how many of their targets were adopted in a few short years in the 1960s and 1970s. Roe v Wade, of course, dates to 1973, the fruit of many year’s work by committed feminists. Thursday’s…

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The genetic power of ancient trees

The genetic power of ancient trees

Jim Robbins writes: In 2005, several of the centuries-old ponderosa pine trees on my 15 acres (0.06 sq km) of forest in the northern Rocky Mountains in Montana suddenly died. I soon discovered they were being brought down by mountain pine beetles, pernicious killers the size of the eraser on a pencil that burrow into the tree. The next year the number of dying trees grew exponentially. I felt powerless and grief-stricken as I saw these giant, sky-scraping trees fading…

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Life helps make almost half of all minerals on Earth

Life helps make almost half of all minerals on Earth

Joanna Thompson writes: The impact of Earth’s geology on life is easy to see, with organisms adapting to environments as different as deserts, mountains, forests and oceans. The full impact of life on geology, however, can be easy to miss. A comprehensive new survey of our planet’s minerals now corrects that omission. Among its findings is evidence that about half of all mineral diversity is the direct or indirect result of living things and their byproducts. It’s a discovery that…

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Viruses survive in fresh water by ‘hitchhiking’ on plastic, study finds

Viruses survive in fresh water by ‘hitchhiking’ on plastic, study finds

The Guardian reports: Dangerous viruses can remain infectious for up to three days in fresh water by hitchhiking on plastic, researchers have found. Enteric viruses that cause diarrhoea and stomach upsets, such as rotavirus, were found to survive in water by attaching to microplastics, tiny particles less than 5mm long. They remain infectious, University of Stirling researchers found, posing a potential health risk. Prof Richard Quilliam, lead researcher on the project at Stirling University, said: “We found that viruses can…

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Russia’s invasion could cause long-term harm to Ukraine’s prized soil

Russia’s invasion could cause long-term harm to Ukraine’s prized soil

Science News reports: By now, wheat planted late last year waves in fields across Ukraine. Spring crops of sunflowers and barley are turning swaths of dark earth into a fuzz of bright green. But with Russia’s war being waged in some of the most fertile regions of Ukraine, uncertainty looms over summer harvesting. Ukrainian farmers braved a war zone to carry out close to 80 percent of spring planting, covering roughly 14 million hectares. Still, Russia’s invasion has raised fears…

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How humans impact the perceptual world of other animals

How humans impact the perceptual world of other animals

Ed Yong writes: In the Tetons, as I watch [a sensory ecologist, Jesse] Barber tagging bats, mosquitoes bite me through my shirt, attracted by the smell of the carbon dioxide on my breath. While I itch, an owl flies overhead, tracking its prey using a radar dish of stiff facial feathers that funnel sound toward its ears. These creatures have all evolved senses that allow them to thrive in the dark. But the dark is disappearing. Barber is one of…

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How fashion giants rebrand plastic as good for the planet

How fashion giants rebrand plastic as good for the planet

The New York Times reports: It’s soft. It’s vegan. It looks just like leather. It’s also made from fossil fuels. An explosion in the use of inexpensive, petroleum-based materials has transformed the fashion industry, aided by the successful rebranding of synthetic materials like plastic leather (once less flatteringly referred to as “pleather”) into hip alternatives like “vegan leather,” a marketing masterstroke meant to suggest environmental virtue. Underlying that effort has been an influential rating system assessing the environmental impact of…

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Catastrophe drives evolution, but life resides in the pauses

Catastrophe drives evolution, but life resides in the pauses

Renée A Duckworth writes: In certain places around the world – in the Badlands near Drumheller in Alberta, Canada, in the Geulhemmergroeve tunnels in the Netherlands, or in the Hell Creek formation in eastern Montana – you can touch a thin line of rock, and know you are touching the most famous mass extinction event on Earth. This Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary layer is a seam of clay found all over the world, enriched with iridium – an element that appears…

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