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Category: Environment

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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Does exposure to nature really help reduce negative emotions?

Does exposure to nature really help reduce negative emotions?

Neuroscience News reports: You probably heard it from your mom a thousand times – fresh air and sunshine; it’s the cure for most anything. Now scientists at the University of Houston concur, measuring the impact of mother’s advice on mother nature to find that exposure to nature is associated with reductions in negative emotions. Given that nearly 90% of the U.S. population is projected to reside in urban areas by 2050, researchers say integrating nature into urban design and public…

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Scientists have found an alarming environmental impact of vast data centers

Scientists have found an alarming environmental impact of vast data centers

CNN reports: The vast data centers that power artificial intelligence guzzle huge amounts of energy but they also have another alarming impact, according to new research. They are creating “heat islands,” warming the land around them by up to 16 degrees Fahrenheit, and making life hotter for more than 340 million people. There are still big gaps in our understanding of the impacts of data centers, even as they boom in number, said Andrea Marinoni, associate professor with the Earth…

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U.S.-Israeli war on Iran is a disaster for the environment, analysis shows

U.S.-Israeli war on Iran is a disaster for the environment, analysis shows

The Guardian reports: The US-Israel war on Iran is a disaster for the climate, according to an analysis that finds it is draining the global carbon budget faster than 84 countries combined. As warplanes, drones and missiles kill thousands of people, level infrastructure and turn the Middle East into a gigantic environmental sacrifice zone, the first analysis of the climate cost has found the conflict led to 5m tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in its first 14 days. The analysis,…

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What happens to your brain in nature? The neuroscience explained

What happens to your brain in nature? The neuroscience explained

Yoho National Park, Field, Canada. (Unsplash/Hendrik Cornelissen) By Mar Estarellas, McGill University Have you ever felt calmer almost as soon as you step into the woods? Or maybe noticed your busy mind soften as you look out at the sea? We have known for some time, and many of us sense it intuitively, that spending time in nature is good for us. Neuroscience is now enabling us to understand why, and what the brain is actually doing in those moments….

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Attacks on ME desalination plants highlight risks of near-total dependence on ‘fossil fuel water’

Attacks on ME desalination plants highlight risks of near-total dependence on ‘fossil fuel water’

Inside Climate News reports: Recent attacks in the Middle East on desalination plants, facilities that remove salt from seawater, raise the potential for a humanitarian crisis if the region’s freshwater production facilities are subjected to more widespread destruction. The attacks also underscore the region’s heavy reliance on an energy-intensive method of producing drinking water that is powered almost entirely by fossil fuels. On Saturday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi accused the United States of striking a desalination plant in southern…

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How the harsh icy world of Snowball Earth shaped life today

How the harsh icy world of Snowball Earth shaped life today

Graham Shields writes: As Scotland’s west coast recedes from view, the ocean resembles a mirror, broken only by the swash of the boat and the dolphins chasing us. We’re headed to the craggy, uninhabited islands known as the Garvellachs. Only reachable during Scotland’s short summer, there is nothing between here and North America, and so landing – or rather jumping hopefully onto slippery rocks – is dependent on the kindness of the Atlantic swell. We’ve come to see a globally…

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China has planted so many trees around the Taklamakan Desert that it’s turned this ‘biological void’ into a carbon sink

China has planted so many trees around the Taklamakan Desert that it’s turned this ‘biological void’ into a carbon sink

Live Science reports: Mass tree planting in China is turning one of the world’s largest and driest deserts into a carbon sink, meaning it absorbs more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits, new research reveals. The Taklamakan Desert (also spelled Taklimakan or Takla Makan) is slightly larger than Montana, stretching across about 130,000 square miles (337,000 square kilometers). It is encircled by high mountains, which block moist air from reaching the desert for most of the year, creating extremely…

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Nature’s ‘engine is grinding to a halt’ as climate change gains pace, says study

Nature’s ‘engine is grinding to a halt’ as climate change gains pace, says study

Phys.org reports: Many ecologists hypothesize that, as global warming accelerates, change in nature must speed up. They assume that as temperatures rise and climatic zones shift, species will face local extinction and colonize new habitats at an ever-increasing rate, leading to a rapid reshuffling of ecological communities. A new study by researchers at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and published in Nature Communications shows this is emphatically not the case. The researchers analyzed a massive database of biodiversity surveys,…

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We need Greenland. But not in the way Trump imagines

We need Greenland. But not in the way Trump imagines

A year ago, Paul Bierman wrote: Donald Trump has a thing for Greenland. First, he wanted to buy the Arctic island. Then, his son visited for a photo-op. Now, he refuses to rule out using the U.S. military to seize it. Decades ago, the value of Greenland was indeed its strategic location between superpowers and its unique mineral resources. No longer. Today, Greenland’s value is the ice that covers 80 percent of the island. Keeping Greenland’s ice frozen preserves at…

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Hundreds of iceberg earthquakes detected at the crumbling end of Antarctica’s Doomsday Glacier

Hundreds of iceberg earthquakes detected at the crumbling end of Antarctica’s Doomsday Glacier

Copernicus / ESA, CC BY By Thanh-Son Pham, Australian National University Glacial earthquakes are a special type of earthquake generated in cold, icy regions. First discovered in the northern hemisphere more than 20 years ago, these quakes occur when huge chunks of ice fall from glaciers into the sea. Until now, only a very few have been found in the Antarctic. In a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters, I present evidence for hundreds of these quakes in Antarctica…

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The Amazon is shifting into a ‘hypertropical’ state unseen for millions of years

The Amazon is shifting into a ‘hypertropical’ state unseen for millions of years

Science Alert reports: A new study of the Amazon rainforest has found the region is shifting toward a ‘hypertropical’ state as droughts become longer, hotter, and more frequent. These conditions have “no current analogue” according to the international team of researchers behind the study. Trees are becoming exposed to whole new levels of stress, and the Amazon’s capacity to absorb carbon dioxide is being reduced, too. So drastic are the contemporary and impending changes, based on data gathered across the…

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How rare and vulnerable our temperate moment is

How rare and vulnerable our temperate moment is

Peter Brannen writes: Some 4 billion years after its creation, a small planet circling an unexceptional star in the outlying Orion-Cygnus spiral arm of the Milky Way enjoyed a brief and bustling season of complex life. The planet blushed with a breathable atmosphere, and for a few hundred million years it also hosted temperatures that somehow stayed within a surprisingly narrow window — one amenable to a biosphere that now teemed with energetic, multicellular creatures. For its entire prior history,…

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America’s biggest oil field is turning into a pressure cooker creating a huge toxic mess

America’s biggest oil field is turning into a pressure cooker creating a huge toxic mess

The Wall Street Journal reports: Shale drillers have turned the biggest oil field in the U.S. into a pressure cooker that is literally bursting at the seams. Producers in the Permian Basin of West Texas and New Mexico extract roughly half of the U.S.’s crude. They also produce copious amounts of toxic, salty water, which they pump back into the ground. Now, some of the reservoirs that collect the fluids are overflowing—and the producers keep injecting more. It is creating…

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Antarctica’s ‘Doomsday Glacier’ is getting closer and closer to irreversible collapse

Antarctica’s ‘Doomsday Glacier’ is getting closer and closer to irreversible collapse

Wired reports: Known as the “Doomsday Glacier,” the Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica is one of the most rapidly changing glaciers on Earth, and its future evolution is one of the biggest unknowns when it comes to predicting global sea level rise. The eastern ice shelf of the Thwaites Glacier is supported at its northern end by a ridge of the ocean floor. However, over the past two decades, cracks in the upper reaches of the glacier have increased rapidly, weakening…

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