Blogging the End of the World™
14 August 2019 (The Siberian Times) – Territory covered with wildfires across Russia has reached its peak for the year so far, with some 5.4 million hectares ablaze mostly in Siberia and the country’s far east. The total land destroyed by flames will soon exceed 2018 with weeks of the burning season still to go. […]
By Laura Kusisto and Peter Grant 21 August 2019 (The Wall Street Journal) – Cities around the world, from New York to London to Stockholm to Sydney, are struggling to solve growing affordable housing crises. [cf. How the 2008 financial crash made cities unaffordable worldwide – Property markets in the world’s major cities have “synchronised”, […]
By Bob Yirka 15 August 2019 (Phys.org) – A large international team of researchers has found evidence of a connection between an increase in the atmospheric vapor deficit and worldwide vegetation loss. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes their analysis of climate datasets and the correlation of an increase in […]
By Adam Voiland 16 August 2019 (NASA) – In the Amazon rainforest, fire season has arrived. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured these images of several fires burning in the states of Rondônia, Amazonas, Pará, and Mato Grosso on August 11 and August 13, 2019. In the Amazon region, fires are rare for much […]
By Jennifer Chu 8 July 2019 (MIT News) – In the brain, when neurons fire off electrical signals to their neighbors, this happens through an “all-or-none” response. The signal only happens once conditions in the cell breach a certain threshold. Now an MIT researcher has observed a similar phenomenon in a completely different system: Earth’s […]
By Bob Henson 14 August 2019 (Weather Underground) – You’ll have to forgive the Arctic. It’s had a rough summer. Sea ice is running neck and neck with 2012 for the lowest values on record for this time of year. Wildfires are ringing the Arctic, pouring more carbon dioxide into the air than in any comparable period in 17 […]
By Meghan Walker 15 August 2019 (My Ballard) – The number of sockeye salmon passing through the Ballard Locks Fish Ladder is at all-time low, according to yearly counts dating back to the 1970s. According to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife’s daily count, just 18,000 sockeye have been counted at the fish ladder during […]
By Toby Luckhurst 18 August 2019 (BBC News) – Mourners have gathered in Iceland to commemorate the loss of Okjokull, which has died at the age of about 700. The glacier was officially declared dead in 2014 when it was no longer thick enough to move. What once was glacier has been reduced to a […]
By Chris Martin 31 July 2019 (Bloomberg) – Wind turbines may be carbon-free, but they’re not recyclable. A photograph of dozens of giant turbine blades dumped into a Wyoming landfill touched off a debate Wednesday on Twitter about wind power’s environmental drawbacks. The argument may be only beginning. Fiberglass turbine blades — which in some […]
12 August 2019 (British Antarctic Survey) – A new study published this week reveals the first evidence of a direct link between human-induced global warming and melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. UK-US researchers say that curbing greenhouse gas emissions now could reduce the future sea-level contribution from this region. Ice loss in West […]
