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Category: Environment

Ocean treaty: Historic agreement reached after decade of talks

Ocean treaty: Historic agreement reached after decade of talks

BBC News reports: Nations have reached a historic agreement to protect the world’s oceans following 10 years of negotiations. The High Seas Treaty aims to place 30% of the seas into protected areas by 2030, to safeguard and recuperate marine nature. The agreement was reached on Saturday evening, after 38 hours of talks, at UN headquarters in New York. The negotiations had been held up for years over disagreements on funding and fishing rights. The last international agreement on ocean…

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The toxic legacy of the Ukraine war

The toxic legacy of the Ukraine war

BBC Future reports: On 6 June, satellite images captured hundreds of craters made by artillery shells and a 40m-wide (131 ft) hole left by a bomb in fields around the village of Dovhenke, in eastern Ukraine. It is just one site left scarred by Russia’s invasion of its neighbour. And as the war continues to wreak a devastating humanitarian toll on the people caught up in the fighting, the conflict is leaving a far less obvious, toxic legacy on the land itself….

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Night skies are getting 9.6% brighter every year as light pollution erases stars for everyone

Night skies are getting 9.6% brighter every year as light pollution erases stars for everyone

All human development, from large cities to small towns, shines light into the night sky. Benny Ang/Flickr, CC BY By Chris Impey, University of Arizona and Connie Walker, National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory CC BY-ND For most of human history, the stars blazed in an otherwise dark night sky. But starting around the Industrial Revolution, as artificial light increasingly lit cities and towns at night, the stars began to disappear. We are two astronomers who depend on dark night skies…

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All living cells could have the molecular machinery for a magnetic ‘sixth sense’

All living cells could have the molecular machinery for a magnetic ‘sixth sense’

Science Alert reports: Every animal on Earth may house the molecular machinery to sense magnetic fields, even those organisms that don’t navigate or migrate using this mysterious ‘sixth sense’. Scientists working on fruit flies have now identified a ubiquitous molecule in all living cells that can respond to magnetic sensitivity if it is present in high enough amounts or if other molecules assist it. The new findings suggest that magnetoreception could be much more common in the animal kingdom than…

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What Denmark’s North Sea coast can teach us about the virtues of respecting the planet

What Denmark’s North Sea coast can teach us about the virtues of respecting the planet

Kiley Bense writes: When the writer Dorthe Nors was a little girl in Denmark, she had a formative encounter with the North Sea, a moment that would stay with her for the rest of her life. “I was holding my mother’s hand,” she writes, in “A Line in the World,” her book of essays about the North Sea coast that was published in English in November. “As we walked along the beach, letting the waves splash around our ankles, one…

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Ukraine counts war’s cost for nature

Ukraine counts war’s cost for nature

The Guardian reports: Toxic smoke, contaminated rivers, poisoned soil, trees reduced to charred stumps, nature reserves pocked with craters: the environmental toll from Russia’s war with Ukraine, which has been detailed in a new map, might once have been considered incalculable. But extensive investigations by Ukrainian scientists, conservationists, bureaucrats and lawyers are now under way to ensure this is the first conflict in which a full reckoning is made of environmental crimes so the aggressor can be held to account…

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In East Palestine, Ohio, where train derailed, anxiety and distrust are running deep

In East Palestine, Ohio, where train derailed, anxiety and distrust are running deep

14 miles from my house, in East Palestine Ohio. Norfolk Southern assures us that the vinyl chloride spilling from the tanks of their derailed train and burning and turning into hydrogen chloride as it rises into the atmosphere and mixes with water vapor and turns into …… pic.twitter.com/Rc8wbpXU8R — 𝐑𝐨𝐛𝐞𝐫𝐭 𝐂 𝐀𝐭𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐨𝐧 𝐉𝐫 🦺🌍🔥🌹 (@blckndgldfn) February 8, 2023 The New York Times reports: All around the once-thriving industrial town in the quiet hills of eastern Ohio, there were signs this…

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Warming seas are carving into glacier that could trigger major sea level rise

Warming seas are carving into glacier that could trigger major sea level rise

The Washington Post reports: Rapidly warming oceans are cutting into the underside of the Earth’s widest glacier, startling new data and images show, leaving the ice more prone to fracturing and ultimately heightening the risk for major sea level rise. Using an underwater robot at Thwaites Glacier, researchers have determined that warm water is getting channeled into crevasses in what the researchers called “terraces” — essentially, upside-down trenches — and carving out gaps under the ice. As the ice then…

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How tensions with Russia are jeopardizing key Arctic research

How tensions with Russia are jeopardizing key Arctic research

Ed Struzik writes: Biologist Eric Regehr and his colleagues at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service began studying polar bears from the American side of the Chukchi Sea, which stretches from Alaska to Russia, in 2008. But as the region warmed, and the increasingly thin spring sea ice off the Alaskan Coast made helicopter landings unsafe, he knew he would need to find another base from which to survey the health and size of the population. Russia’s remote Wrangel Island…

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What the end-Triassic mass extinction tells us about our planet’s current condition

What the end-Triassic mass extinction tells us about our planet’s current condition

Ars Technica reports: The end-Triassic extinction, which happened 201 million years ago, was Earth’s third most severe extinction event since the dawn of animal life. Like today, CO2 rise and global warming were present, but the similarities don’t end there. As with today, it was a time of wildfires, deforestation, downpours, erosion, ocean acidification, marine dead zones, vanishing coral reefs, sea-level rise, and even insect plagues. There was also pollution by mercury, sulfur dioxide, halocarbons, and methane—and possibly even a…

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Microplastics are filling the skies. Will they affect the climate?

Microplastics are filling the skies. Will they affect the climate?

Nicola Jones writes: Plastic has become an obvious pollutant over recent decades, choking turtles and seabirds, clogging up our landfills and waterways. But in just the past few years, a less-obvious problem has emerged. Researchers are starting to get concerned about how tiny bits of plastic in the air, lofted into the skies from seafoam bubbles or spinning tires on the highway, might potentially change our future climate. “Here’s something that people just didn’t think about — another aspect of…

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Protecting endangered species necessitates protecting threatened cultures

Protecting endangered species necessitates protecting threatened cultures

Science News reports: In shallow coastal waters of the Indian and Pacific oceans, a seagrass-scrounging cousin of the manatee is in trouble. Environmental strains like pollution and habitat loss pose a major threat to dugong (Dugong dugon) survival, so much so that in December, the International Union for Conservation of Nature upgraded the species’ extinction risk status to vulnerable. Some populations are now classified as endangered or critically endangered. If that weren’t bad enough, the sea cows are at risk…

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Native seed banks in the U.S. have insufficient supplies to mitigate the effects of climate change

Native seed banks in the U.S. have insufficient supplies to mitigate the effects of climate change

NPR reports: In the wake of wildfires, floods and droughts, restoring damaged landscapes and habitats requires native seeds. The U.S. doesn’t have enough, according to a report released Thursday. “Time is of the essence to bank the seeds and the genetic diversity our lands hold,” the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) report said. As climate change worsens extreme weather events, the damage left behind by those events will become more severe. That, in turn, will create greater…

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Elephants, the gardeners of Africa’s rainforests, play a vital role in promoting carbon retention

Elephants, the gardeners of Africa’s rainforests, play a vital role in promoting carbon retention

Anthropocene magazine reports: Elephants been called a lot of things: the world’s largest land creatures, imperiled, majestic, charismatic. Now scientists have a few more terms for describing them: foresters and climate champions. In the jungles of equatorial Africa, scientists report that forest elephants play an important role in shaping the forest around them as they vacuum up as much as 200 kilograms worth of plants every day. Their appetites influence not just what trees survive but how much carbon the…

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Has Earth’s inner core stopped its strange spin?

Has Earth’s inner core stopped its strange spin?

Nature reports: Thousands of kilometres beneath your feet, Earth’s interior might be doing something very weird. Many scientists think that the inner core spins faster than the rest of the planet — but sometime in the past decade, according to a study, it apparently stopped doing so. “We were quite surprised,” say Yi Yang and Xiaodong Song, seismologists at Peking University in Beijing who reported the findings today in Nature Geoscience. The results could help to shine light on the…

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Depleted under Trump, a ‘traumatized’ EPA struggles with its mission

Depleted under Trump, a ‘traumatized’ EPA struggles with its mission

The New York Times reports: The nation’s top environmental agency is still reeling from the exodus of more than 1,200 scientists and policy experts during the Trump administration. The chemicals chief said her staff can’t keep up with a mounting workload. The enforcement unit is prosecuting fewer polluters than at any time in the past two decades. And now this: the stressed-out, stretched-thin Environmental Protection Agency is scrambling to write about a half dozen highly complex rules and regulations that…

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