4 September 2015 (Insurance Journal) – The monthly report for August from Aon Benfield’s Impact Forecasting catastrophe model development team cites the “severe drought conditions” in the western U.S. as resulting in “economic losses expected to reach at least $3.0 billion – mostly attributable to agricultural damage in California.” Several Caribbean and Central American nations […]
By Mareesa Nicosia13 September 2015 Five Points, California (The Atlantic) – It’s 7:50 on a hot, dry August morning when the buses rumble past a barren field— normally filled with broccoli this time of year — and creak to a stop in front of a flat-topped school, dust blooming up from under their wheels. Children […]
By Scott Smith6 September 2015 TULARE, California (AP) – Looking for water to flush his toilet, Tino Lozano pointed a garden hose at some buckets in the bare dirt of his yard. It’s his daily ritual now in a community built by refugees from Oklahoma’s Dust Bowl. But only a trickle came out; then a […]
By Stanislaw Waszak 4 September 2015 Warsaw (AFP) – Archaeologists are having a field day in Poland’s longest river, the Vistula, which because of a drought has hit a record low water level allowing them to uncover a treasure trove of historic artifacts. “There are pieces of marble and stoneware and fragments of fountains, window […]
By Lynn Jenner21 May 2015 (NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center) – The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite collected this natural-color image which detected dozens of fires burning in southwestern Africa on May 21, 2015. The location, widespread nature, and number of fires suggest that these fires were deliberately set to manage land. […]
By Michael E. Miller 27 August 2015 (Washington Post) – The killers came from the forest, the very same forest Raimundo Santos Rodrigues so loved. The environmentalist had spent years defending one of the last pristine swathes of the eastern Amazon rain forest from loggers, miners and farmers. But his activism had earned him enemies […]
By Vincent Bevins10 July 2015 (Los Angeles Times) – Carrying guns and wearing jungle fatigues, the three men don’t look like scientists as they push their way through the thick foliage of the Amazon. They’re trying to reach a clearing they’ve seen on satellite images. When they finally get there, they discover that the largest […]
19 August 2015 (JPL) – As Californians continue pumping groundwater in response to the historic drought, the California Department of Water Resources today released a new NASA report showing land in the San Joaquin Valley is sinking faster than ever before, nearly 2 inches (5 centimeters) per month in some locations. The report, Progress Report: […]
By Sean Breslin10 August 2015 (weather.com) – One of America’s 10 largest cities is swiftly losing its river, and the loss is having major effects on the ecosystem around it. The San Jose Mercury News said eight miles of the 14-mile long Guadalupe River that runs through San Jose, California, has now dried up, another […]
By William Yardley18 July 2015 (Los Angeles Times) – The Colorado River begins as snowmelt in the Rocky Mountains and ends 1,450 miles south in Mexico after making a final sacrifice to the United States: water for the farm fields in this powerhouse of American produce. Throughout the winter, perfect heads of romaine, red-and-green lettuce, […]
