21 October 2019 (AFP) – At least 55 elephants have died in a month in Zimbabwe due to a lack of food and water, its wildlife agency said Monday, as the country faces one of the worst droughts in its history. More than five million rural Zimbabweans — nearly a third of the population — […]
By Olga Gertcyk 16 October 2019 (The Siberian Times) – ‘Blooming’ might be the last word to associate with the Arctic, yet pictures below show meadows bursting with life as brightly-coloured flowers blossom in lush green grass. And while vegetation in khasyreis, basins of drained Arctic lakes, is less of a surprise, researchers discovered ‘bursts […]
3 October 2019 (NSIDC) – Arctic sea ice began its autumn regrowth in the last 12 days of September, with the ice edge expanding along a broad front in the western Arctic Ocean. Overall, the summer of 2019 was exceptionally warm, with repeated pulses of very warm air from northern Siberia and the Bering Strait. […]
By Olga Gertcyk 30 September 2019 (The Siberian Times) – More than 40,000 wild reindeer perished since the last count in 2017, said scientists who returned from a major expedition to the Taymyr Peninsula. The Yenisei group of reindeer has disappeared entirely while the westernmost group living along the Tareya River has dramatically shrunk in […]
By Steven Mufson 16 October 2019 DOHA, Qatar (The Washington Post) – It was 116 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade outside the new Al Janoub soccer stadium, and the air felt to air-conditioning expert Saud Ghani as if God had pointed “a giant hair dryer” at Qatar. Yet inside the open-air stadium, a cool breeze was blowing. […]
Bu Vivian Ho 8 October 2019 SAN FRANCISCO (The Guardian) – Two years ago, they lost everything – their homes, baby photos, family heirlooms, keepsakes, jewelry, mementos – in a flurry of wildfires that ripped through California’s wine country. Now, on the second anniversary of these fires that killed 44 and destroyed thousands of buildings, survivors are […]
5 October 2019 (Copernicus Climate Change Service) – In Europe, temperatures were above average over most of the continent, especially in the south and south-east. Below-average temperatures occurred over much of Norway and Sweden, and over the far east of the continent. Globally September 2019 was 0.57°C warmer than the average September from 1981-2010, making […]
By Andrew Freedman 14 October 2019 (The Washington Post) – Typhoon Hagibis proved to be extraordinarily devastating for northern Japan when it struck this weekend, unleashing more than three feet of rain in just 24 hours in some locations, causing widespread flash flooding as well as river flooding. The storm has killed at least 58, according […]
15 October 2019 (Swiss Academy of Sciences) – During the summer heatwaves of 2019, glacier melt rates reached record levels. This led to another year of major losses of ice volume, as reported by the Cryospheric Commission of the Swiss Academy of Sciences. Switzerland’s glaciers have thus shrunk by 10 per cent over the past […]
By Georgia Rose Grant and Timothy Naish 2 October 2019 (The Conversation) – We know that our planet has experienced warmer periods in the past, during the Pliocene geological epoch around three million years ago. Our research, published today, shows that up to one third of Antarctica’s ice sheet melted during this period, causing sea levels to rise […]
