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Category: Environment

How America’s war devastated Afghanistan’s environment

How America’s war devastated Afghanistan’s environment

Lynzy Billing writes: Birds dip between low branches that hang over glittering brooks along the drive from Jalalabad heading south toward the Achin district of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province. Then, the landscape changes, as lush fields give way to barren land. Up ahead, Achin is located among a rise of rocky mountains that line the border with Pakistan, a region pounded by American bombs since the beginning of the war. Laborers line the roadside, dusted with the white talc they have…

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Giant fracking is threatening America’s fragile aquifers

Giant fracking is threatening America’s fragile aquifers

The New York Times reports: Along a parched stretch of La Salle County, Texas, workers last year dug some 700 feet deep into the ground, seeking freshwater. Millions of gallons of it. The water wouldn’t supply homes or irrigate farms. It was being used by the petroleum giant BP to frack for fossil fuels. The water would be mixed with sand and toxic chemicals and pumped right back underground — forcing oil and gas from the bedrock. It was a…

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We thought we were saving the planet, but we were planting a time bomb

We thought we were saving the planet, but we were planting a time bomb

Claire Cameron writes: At first, it looked like a sunset. It was just after five o’clock in June. I was running in Toronto beside Lake Ontario when I stopped to glance at my watch and noticed that the sky was no longer blue but a rusted orange. It took only a few breaths to realize the bonfire smell in the air was the drifting product of faraway wildfires. It’s quite possible you had a similar experience this summer: The plumes…

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From carbon sink to source: the stark changes in Arctic lakes

From carbon sink to source: the stark changes in Arctic lakes

Cheryl Katz writes: A family of muskox rumbles along craggy hilltops overlooking the small parade of humans crossing the West Greenland tundra. Ecologist Václava Hazuková, in the lead, sets a brisk pace as we bushwhack through knee-high willow and birch. Leaning forward under an equipment-filled pack nearly half her size, she high-steps over “pillows and mattresses” — hummocks of plants interspersed with troughs of rain-soaked permafrost. The twin blades of a kayak paddle protrude from Hazuková’s pack, pointing to our…

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Giant cracks in the ground emerging across U.S. Southwest, scientists warn

Giant cracks in the ground emerging across U.S. Southwest, scientists warn

Science Alert reports: The United States has been pumping so much groundwater that the ground is beginning to split open across southwestern parts of the country for miles on end. These giant cracks, aka fissures, have been spotted in states including Arizona, Utah, and California. Groundwater is one of the main sources of freshwater on Earth – it provides almost half of all drinking water, and about 40% of global irrigation. But humans are pumping groundwater faster than Earth can…

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Fungi could be the answer to breaking down plastic junk

Fungi could be the answer to breaking down plastic junk

Ars Technica reports: Plastic is becoming a plague on Earth. Not only are landfills bursting with it, but it has also polluted our oceans to the point that a tiny creature that had apparently made microplastics part of its diet was named Eurythenes plasticus. Can we possibly hold back the spread of a material that piles up faster than it could ever decay? There might be an answer, and that answer is fungus. Researchers from the University of Kelaniya and…

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Antarctica warming much faster than models predicted in ‘deeply concerning’ sign for sea levels

Antarctica warming much faster than models predicted in ‘deeply concerning’ sign for sea levels

The Guardian reports: Antarctica is likely warming at almost twice the rate of the rest of the world and faster than climate change models are predicting, with potentially far-reaching implications for global sea level rise, according to a scientific study. Scientists analysed 78 Antarctic ice cores to recreate temperatures going back 1,000 years and found the warming across the continent was outside what could be expected from natural swings. In West Antarctica, a region considered particularly vulnerable to warming with…

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All lifeforms, from worms to corals, transform the planet

All lifeforms, from worms to corals, transform the planet

Olivia Judson writes: I want to start with a proposition: if Earth had never come alive, it would be a profoundly different world. Conversely: the planet of today has, to a remarkable extent, been made what it is by the activities of lifeforms. Over the course of the planet’s long history, a history that extends back more than 4.5 billion years, lifeforms have shaped the rocks, the water, the air, even the colour of the sky. A Never-Life Earth would not even…

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Overuse is draining and damaging aquifers nationwide

Overuse is draining and damaging aquifers nationwide

The New York Times reports: Groundwater loss is hurting breadbasket states like Kansas, where the major aquifer beneath 2.6 million acres of land can no longer support industrial-scale agriculture. Corn yields have plummeted. If that decline were to spread, it could threaten America’s status as a food superpower. Fifteen hundred miles to the east, in New York State, overpumping is threatening drinking-water wells on Long Island, birthplace of the modern American suburb and home to working class towns as well…

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Teaching endangered ibises a new and safer migration path

Teaching endangered ibises a new and safer migration path

The New York Times reports: Johannes Fritz, a maverick Austrian biologist, needed to come up with a plan, again, if he was going to prevent his rare and beloved birds from going extinct. To survive the European winter, the northern bald ibis — which had once disappeared entirely from the wild on the continent — needs to migrate south for the winter, over the Alps, before the mountains become impassable. But shifting climate patterns have delayed when the birds begin…

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Human activities — not volcanic eruptions — are the primary cause of climate change

Human activities — not volcanic eruptions — are the primary cause of climate change

Patrick Pester writes: The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption in January 2022 was one of the biggest volcanic eruptions in recorded history. Detonating underwater with the force of 100 Hiroshima bombs, the blast sent millions of tons of water vapor high into the atmosphere. Some commentators have speculated in recent weeks that the volcano is to blame for searing summer temperatures and are even using the volcano to cast doubt on the role humans are playing in climate change, as reported…

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What happens when the heat repeats?

What happens when the heat repeats?

Kylie Mohr writes: For two years now, scientists, shellfish managers, and tribes have been working to understand how the heat dome that settled over the Pacific Northwest in the summer of 2021 affected the places where the ocean and land meet. That heat wave was like nothing in memory. Temperatures soaring as high as 121 degrees Fahrenheit buckled roads, melted power cables, and scorched forests. By the time the heat subsided, 650 people had died in the U.S. and Canada,…

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Environmental activists are fleeing Elon Musk’s Twitter

Environmental activists are fleeing Elon Musk’s Twitter

Quartz reports: Scientists and environmental activists have been fleeing Twitter—now called X—after Elon Musk bought the social platform and took a wrecking ball to its innards. A study (pdf) published in a journal called Trends in Evolution and Ecology on Aug.15 showed, that out of a sample of 380,000 environmentally oriented X users, “nearly 50% became inactive” after Musk’s acquisition. This rate, the researchers found, was “much higher than a control sample.” By April 2023, only 52.5% of sampled environmental activists on X were still active. The study was conducted between Dec. 2022 and May 2023. Days after…

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Light pollution and drought are pushing fireflies toward extinction

Light pollution and drought are pushing fireflies toward extinction

CBS News reports: Fireflies are the romantics of the insect world. In the summer months, they emerge from the ground with love on the brain. They only live for two to three weeks once they’ve become full adults and in that time they don’t even eat. They’re too busy flirting. Fireflies — or lightning bugs, depending on where you grew up — are one of the only insects with elaborate courtship dialogues, said Avalon Owens, a research fellow at Harvard….

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Dead trees around the world are shocking scientists

Dead trees around the world are shocking scientists

Katarina Zimmer writes: As we hang far above the ground on a sunny October day, it would be easy to focus on the blue crests of hills and the small towns tucked in between. But Richard Peters, who’s with me inside a metal gondola mounted onto the maneuverable arm of a crane, points me instead to the tree canopy below, flushed with the gold and copper shades of fall. “That guy is definitely on his way to die,” he says…

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Ancient fires, spurred by human activity, drove large mammals extinct, study suggests

Ancient fires, spurred by human activity, drove large mammals extinct, study suggests

The New York Times reports: Wildfires are getting worse. Parts of the United States, scientists say, are experiencing wildfires three times as often — and four times as big — as they were 20 years ago. This summer alone, smoke from Canadian blazes turned North American skies an unearthly orange, “fire whirls” were seen in the Mojave Desert and raging flames in Maui led to disaster. Records of the distant past can reveal what once drove increased fire activity and…

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