Radioactive Material Isn’t Disappearing From the Environment as Quickly as Predicted By ALEXIS MADRIGALDec. 20, 2009 Chernobyl, the worst nuclear accident in history, created an inadvertent laboratory to study the impacts of radiation — and more than twenty years later, the site still holds surprises. Reinhabiting the large dead zone around the accident site may […]
(Reuters) FOR CENTURIES a monastic fortress in Bhutan’s Himalayas has sheltered ancient Buddhist relics and scriptures from earthquakes, fires and Tibetan invasions. Now the lamas here may have met their match – global warming. At least 53 million cubic metres of glacier melt is threatening to break the banks of a lake upstream in the […]
Organic carbon (OC) concentrations in the Zuoqiupu ice core for the monsoon (June–September) and nonmonsoon (October–May) seasons, and for the annual mean. Fig. 3 shows the Zuoqiupu data broken down by monsoonal and nonmonsoonal periods. The monsoonal period has lower BC and OC concentrations because of the high precipitation rate, but the source is unambiguously […]
On the Tibetan Plateau, temperatures are rising and glaciers are melting faster than climate scientists would expect based on global warming alone. A recent study of ice cores from five Tibetan glaciers by NASA and Chinese scientists confirmed the likely culprit: rapid increases in black soot concentrations since the 1990s, mostly from air pollution sources […]
(NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center) Black soot deposited on Tibetan glaciers has contributed significantly to the retreat of the world’s largest non-polar ice masses, according to new research by scientists from NASA and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Soot absorbs incoming solar radiation and can speed glacial melting when deposited on snow in sufficient quantities. Temperatures […]
For decades, ‘development’ has meant allowing industrial parks to discharge untreated wastewater directly into millions of local residents’ water supplies. The Dong Nai River supplies water to some 15 million people in southern Vietnam, but that has not stopped callous companies from dumping so much toxic sludge in the river that scientists say it will […]
Reporting by Nizam Ahmed; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani, DHAKAFri Dec 11, 2009 8:49am EST DHAKA (Reuters) – Rising sea levels, triggered by global warming, will displace about 20 million people in low-lying Bangladesh, a study by a state-run think-tank said on Friday. “The sea level will rise at least by three meters (yards) submerging some […]
From correspondents in Khun SamutchineDecember 07, 2009 1:35PM AROUND 60 families have already been forced away from the once idyllic fishing community of Khun Samutchine, as the sea that local people rely on for their livelihood advances inland by more than 20m a year. “I live on somebody else’s land, I can’t escape the village […]
Rhino poaching worldwide is on the rise, according to a new report [pdf] by TRAFFIC and IUCN. The trade is being driven by Asian demand for horns and is made worse by increasingly sophisticated poachers, who now are using veterinary drugs, poison, cross bows and high caliber weapons to kill rhinos, the report states. Since […]
HANOI (AFP) – Vietnam, the world’s second-biggest rice exporter, said Wednesday it needs help to safeguard the world’s food supply from the consequences of global warming. “The rice bowl of Vietnam will be severely affected” without action, Nguyen Khac Hieu, deputy director general of the government’s climate change agency, told reporters before key global climate […]
