By Becky Oskin, Senior Writer5 May 2014 (LiveScience) – Mile for mile, there are almost as many earthquakes rattling Oklahoma as California this year. This major increase in seismic shaking led to a rare earthquake warning today (May 5) from the U.S. Geological Survey and the Oklahoma Geological Survey. In a joint statement, the agencies […]
By Holli Riebeek25 April 2014 (NASA) – A wall of dust was barreling across northern China on 23 April 2014, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) acquired these images from NASA’s Aqua and Terra satellites. The top image was taken at 12:35 p.m. local time, and the lower image is from 2:20 p.m. Turn […]
6 April 2014 (The Siberian Times) – The past week saw record warm weather in western Siberian cities including Novosibirsk, Tomsk, Kemerovo, Barnaul, and Gorno-Altaisk. Natural Resources Minister Sergei Donskoi warned a conference chaired by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev: ‘The forest fire situation is tense in Russia this year. Due to a shortage of precipitation […]
By Svati Kirsten Narula28 April 2014 (The Atlantic) – The deadly avalanche on Everest earlier this month wasn’t technically an avalanche. It was an “ice release”—a collapse of a glacial mass known as a serac. Rather than getting swept up by a rush of powdery snow across a slope, the victims fell under the blunt […]
23 April 2014 (NASA) – A new analysis of NASA satellite data shows Africa’s Congo rainforest, the second-largest tropical rainforest in the world, has undergone a large-scale decline in greenness over the past decade. The study, led by Liming Zhou of University at Albany, State University of New York, shows between 2000 and 2012 the […]
By Yoko Wakatsuki and Sophie Brown25 April 2014 (CNN) – Japan is set to go ahead with some of its whaling activities even though a recent international court ruling ordered the country to end its whale hunt in the Antarctic. The East Asian nation halted its annual Antarctic whaling mission after the U.N.’s International Court […]
By Michael Forster Rothbart (Mother Jones) – Photojournalists often distort the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion. They parachute in, expecting danger and despair, then leave after a few brief days with photos of deformed children and abandoned buildings. This sensationalist approach obscures the more complex stories about how a displaced community […]
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD26 APRIL 2014 (The New York Times) – At long last, the Koch brothers and their conservative allies in state government have found a new tax they can support. Naturally it’s a tax on something the country needs: solar energy panels. For the last few months, the Kochs and other big polluters […]
By Lee Fang26 April 2014 (Republic Report) – Does burning coal, one of the most carbon-intensive fuel sources on the planet, contribute to climate change? That simple question stumped the industry’s most prominent advocate, Robert “Mike” Duncan, at a Colorado mining conference last week. Asked twice by Republic Report, Duncan first said that a “lot […]
By David Shukman, Science editor25 April 2014 (BBC News) – Plans to open the world’s first mine in the deep ocean have moved significantly closer to becoming reality. A Canadian mining company has finalised an agreement with Papua New Guinea to start digging up an area of seabed. The controversial project aims to extract ores […]
