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Category: Environment

Researchers parse the future of plankton in an ever-warmer world

Researchers parse the future of plankton in an ever-warmer world

Nicola Jones writes: Across the world’s oceans, an invisible army of tiny organisms has a supersized impact on the planet. Plankton are at the base of the ocean food chain, feeding fish that feed billions of people. They are responsible for half of the world’s oxygen supply and half of our planet’s annual carbon sink. Miniscule but powerful, their presence can help or hinder ecosystems — by soaking up greenhouse gas, for example, or by spewing toxins. Where plankton live,…

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Navigation strategies studied in a lab may not replicate in real life

Navigation strategies studied in a lab may not replicate in real life

Sujata Gupta writes: On a trip to Siberia in 2019, cognitive scientist Pablo Fernandez Velasco attended a raffle drawing with the region’s Evenki reindeer herders. Prizes included a soccer ball, tea, a portable radio, a GPS unit and other knickknacks. A herder in Velasco’s group won the GPS. “I thought [that] was one of the fancier prizes,” says Velasco, of the University of York in England. “He was crestfallen.” The herder, who had been eyeing the radio, had no use…

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The Northern Lights make music

The Northern Lights make music

Caspar Henderson writes: Old stories about the Northern Lights, or aurora borealis, show the full play of human imagination at work across the sky. In Greenland some said the lights were the spirits of children who had died at birth but were now dancing in the heavens. Others said they were made by spirits playing ball with the skull of a walrus—or by walrus spirits kicking around human skulls. To the Algonquin people of eastern Canada, the lights were the…

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Hurricane Helene aftermath: Untold stories from the mountains

Hurricane Helene aftermath: Untold stories from the mountains

Since Hurricane Helene hammered Western North Carolina, media coverage of the aftermath has focused on the impact felt in Asheville. Having lived there from 2002 until 2020, I know the area very well. The stories from Asheville, Swannanoa, Black Mountain, and all the small towns dotted around Buncombe and the surrounding counties are heartbreaking. But beyond the towns, there are so many communities that are even smaller — places that might catch some momentary media attention because of an heroic…

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Hurricanes like Helene are deadly when they strike and keep killing for years to come

Hurricanes like Helene are deadly when they strike and keep killing for years to come

The Associated Press reports: Hurricanes in the United States end up hundreds of times deadlier than the government calculates, contributing to more American deaths than car accidents or all the nation’s wars, a new study said. The average storm hitting the U.S. contributes to the early deaths of 7,000 to 11,000 people over a 15-year period, which dwarfs the average of 24 immediate and direct deaths that the government counts in a hurricane’s aftermath, the study in Wednesday’s journal Nature…

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In the aftermath of Helene, many rural communities begin the recovery effort on their own

In the aftermath of Helene, many rural communities begin the recovery effort on their own

Chris Moody writes: We knew something had gone terribly wrong when the culverts washed up in our backyard like an apocalyptic art installation splattered with loose rock and black concrete. The circular metal tubes were a crucial piece of submerged infrastructure that once channeled water beneath our street, the primary connection to town for our small rural community just outside Boone, North Carolina. When they failed under a deluge created by Hurricane Helene, the narrow strip of concrete above didn’t…

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Is the idea of a ‘climate haven’ under water?

Is the idea of a ‘climate haven’ under water?

Bob Henson writes: Asheville, North Carolina, seemed like a good place to escape the worst of a warming world. The city’s appealing four-season climate includes summers with a typical daily high around 84°F – unusually low for the Southeast U.S. – and winters that aren’t too frigid. There’s typically plenty of moisture throughout the year, but with a mountain rain shadow that keeps Asheville a bit less wet than most of its neighbors. And the city takes climate seriously: findings…

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Devastation in Western North Carolina shows nowhere is safe from climate change

Devastation in Western North Carolina shows nowhere is safe from climate change

Marina Koren writes: When Helene swept through western North Carolina late last week, the rain fell heavy and fast enough to start washing away mountainsides. Rivers overflowed, and a chunk of one of the state’s major highways collapsed, cutting off communities; floods slung mud and muck into buildings. Cars, trucks, dumpsters, entire homes and bridges—these and more were carried away in the floods as if they weighed nothing. Much of what managed to stay in place became submerged in brown…

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Burying wood in ‘vaults’ could help fight global warming

Burying wood in ‘vaults’ could help fight global warming

Science reports: The discovery of an eastern red cedar log, buried in eastern Canada for millennia and nearly perfectly preserved, illustrates the potential of a new kind of carbon storage scheme in the fight against climate change: wood “vaults.” The log shows how burying wood—rather than letting it decay on the surface—could keep billions of tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the atmosphere, advocates say. The unusual conditions that preserved the log, described today in a paper in…

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Earth may have breached seven of nine planetary boundaries, health check shows

Earth may have breached seven of nine planetary boundaries, health check shows

The Guardian reports: Industrial civilisation is close to breaching a seventh planetary boundary, and may already have crossed it, according to scientists who have compiled the latest report on the state of the world’s life-support systems. “Ocean acidification is approaching a critical threshold”, particularly in higher-latitude regions, says the latest report on planetary boundaries. “The growing acidification poses an increasing threat to marine ecosystems.” The report, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), builds on years of research…

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Mega El Niños kicked off the world’s worst mass extinction

Mega El Niños kicked off the world’s worst mass extinction

Science News reports: A barrage of intense, wild swings in climate conditions may have fueled the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history. A re-creation of how ancient sea surface temperatures, ocean and atmosphere circulation, and landmasses interacted revealed an Earth plagued by nearly decade-long stints of droughts, wildfires and flooding. Researchers knew that a spike in global temperatures — triggered by gas emissions from millions of years of enormous volcanic eruptions in what is now Siberia — was the likely…

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The search for what shook the Earth for nine days straight

The search for what shook the Earth for nine days straight

Robin George Andrews writes: On September 16, 2023, the world began to rumble. A gargantuan rock-ice avalanche tumbled into the deep waters of a fjord in eastern Greenland, unleashing a megatsunami whose initial waves reached a height of 200 meters. The waves scoured the walls of the fjord before flowing into the open sea. Even for this avalanche-prone corner of Greenland, the collapse and subsequent megatsunami were shocking for their speed and ferocity. But what followed was considerably stranger. The…

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Americans misunderstand their contribution to the deteriorating environment

Americans misunderstand their contribution to the deteriorating environment

Inside Climate News reports: Roughly one in two Americans said they are not very or not at all exposed to environmental and climate change risks. Those perceptions contrast sharply with empirical evidence showing that climate change is having an impact in nearly every corner of the United States. A warming planet has intensified hurricanes battering coasts, droughts striking middle American farms and wildfires threatening homes and air quality across the country. And climate shocks are driving up prices of some…

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Surveying trees to better understand how much planet-warming carbon the Amazon actually stores

Surveying trees to better understand how much planet-warming carbon the Amazon actually stores

The New York Times reports: With the help of a small rope tied around his ankles, Eugenio Sánchez, lithe at age 50, shimmied himself all the way up a towering tree like a human inchworm, his chest heaving from the exertion, just to pick a few leaves. The leaves, found only on the highest branches, would help the scientists waiting below identify the species. And that, along with the tree’s exact size (or at least as close as one can…

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In California’s Park Fire, an indigenous cultural fire practitioner sees beyond destruction

In California’s Park Fire, an indigenous cultural fire practitioner sees beyond destruction

Sarah Hopkins writes: Where others might see only catastrophe, Don Hankins scans fire-singed landscapes for signs of renewal. Hankins, a renowned Miwkoʔ (Plains Miwok) cultural fire practitioner and scholar, has kept an eye on the Park Fire’s footprint as it sweeps through more than 429,000 acres across four Northern California counties. It started late last month and became one of the largest fires in state history in a matter of days, fueled by dry grasslands. The fire has since risen…

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The asteroid-in-spring hypothesis

The asteroid-in-spring hypothesis

Kerry Howley writes: It remains a matter of dispute when and where and with what antecedent Melanie During came up with the idea for determining the season the asteroid killed the dinosaurs. But the idea was this: Sturgeon bones grow like tree rings, and the bone cells grow thickest in summer, when food is most plentiful. A slice of bone, then, should reveal a succession of seasons. Months of plenty would be thicker, as the fish grew fat on plankton….

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