Desdemona Despair

Blogging the End of the World™

Fatal cloudburst devastates Himalayan desert town

By Anil Ananthaswamy 17 August 2010 15:12 Even as the world’s attention was focused on the floods in Pakistan, a rare and extreme cloudburst devastated the Himalayan town of Leh in Ladakh, India – normally one of the driest regions on Earth. Heavy rainfall is common elsewhere in the Himalayas, but not in Ladakh. The […]

Graph of the Day: Greenland’s Top Glacier ‘Losers’ 2000-2010

By Jason Box with assistance from David Decker The recent ice island detachment at Petermann glacier is part of a larger pattern of deglaciation observed at 31/34 glaciers (91%) in our survey. We just updated our survey to include year 2010. Retreat continues at the 110 km (68 mi) wide Humboldt glacier and at the […]

Survey finds BPA present in 91 percent of Canadians

Teens carry 30 per cent more BPA than rest of population By Martin Mittelstaedt From Tuesday’s Globe and Mail Published on Monday, Aug. 16, 2010 8:57AM EDT Teenagers may carry the highest levels of bisphenol A – about 30 per cent more than the rest of the population, according to the first national survey about […]

Warming oceans reduce range of Carolina mussels

  ScienceDaily (Aug. 16, 2010) — Climate change is causing higher air and water temperatures along the east coast of the United States. These changes have shrunk the geographic region where blue mussels are able to survive, according to findings by University of South Carolina researchers published in the Journal of Biogeography. Mytilus edulis, or […]

Humans reverse carbon cycle on Texas river

(Rice University) A new study by geochemists at Rice University finds that damming and other human activity has completely obscured the natural carbon dioxide cycling process in Texas’ longest river, the Brazos. “The natural factors that influence carbon dioxide cycling in the Brazos are fairly obvious, and we expected the radiocarbon signature of the river […]

Tropical glaciers in Indonesia may disappear by the end of the decade

By Douglas Fischer and The Daily Climate    August 16, 2010 Glaciers in one of the world’s last tropical ice caps will be gone within a matter of years, rather than the decades thought previously, according to an Ohio State University researcher who has spent his career probing the world’s ice fields. When they go, a […]

Corals bleached and dying in overheated South Asian waters

BANDA ACEH, Indonesia, August 16, 2010 (ENS) – The rapidly rising temperature of south Asia’s Andaman Sea has triggered coral bleaching and die-off that scientists working in Indonesia are calling one of the most rapid and severe coral mortality events ever recorded. The coral die-off was indentified though monitoring by marine ecologists from the Wildlife […]

Ice sheet in Greenland melting at record rate

The Greenland ice sheet is melting at a record rate due to global warming, according to a British-led expedition currently taking measurements from the treacherous glaciers. By Louise Gray, Environment CorrespondentPublished: 7:00AM BST 13 Aug 2010 The University of St Andrews team said 106 square miles broke away from the Petermann Glacier at the beginning […]

Image of the Day: Smoke and Fires Across Western Russia, 15 August 2010

A veil of gray shrouds western Russia as plumes of thick smoke pour from numerous fires blazing in the region on August 15, 2010, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard the Terra satellite captured true-color images as the satellite passed overhead. Two images have been merged to illustrate the expanse of the fires […]

Trojan Horse attack on native lupine

  (Washington University in St. Louis) At Point Reyes National Seashore in Marin County, Calif., a fierce battle is taking place under the oblivious, peeling noses of beachgoers. It’s a battle between an invasive plant and a native plant, but with a new twist. The two plants, European beachgrass and Tidestrom’s lupine, are not in […]

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