14 September 2016 (AFP) – Floods in North Korea that have left hundreds dead or missing are the “worst disaster” to hit the country since World War II, state media said on Wednesday. The official KCNA news agency did not give exact numbers of those killed or unaccounted for, but a UN report said 138 […]
9 September 2016 (UQ News) – A University of Queensland-led international study released today reports catastrophic declines in wilderness areas around the world over the past 20 years. UQ School of Geography, Planning and Environmental Management and Wildlife Conservation Society in New York researcher Associate Professor James Watson said findings demonstrated alarming losses comprising a […]
31 August 2016 (Siberian Times) – The Yamalo-Nenets region has suffered not one but three separate outbreaks of lethal anthrax since 7 July 2016, with bloodsucking insects – especially gadflies and mosquitoes – playing a key role in the spread, we can confirm. A strong new warning from scientists suggests that there is a ‘dangerous’ […]
By Olga Gertcyk7 September 2016 (Siberian Times) – The disturbing images are from an river close to Norilsk, in Kransnoyarsk region. Locals say it is far from the first time the waters have turned bright red. The river is said to be polluted by a discharge from Nadezhdinsky factory, also known as Nadezhda Metallurgical Plant, […]
By David McKenzie and Ingrid Formanek 31 August 2016 Linyanti Swamp, Botswana (CNN) – Scanning Botswana’s remote Linyanti swamp from the low flying chopper, elephant ecologist Mike Chase can’t hide the anxiety and dread as he sees what he has seen too many times before. “I don’t think anybody in the world has seen the number […]
By Timothy Brown23 August 2016 (Yale) – A new Yale-led study published in the journal Nature Communications sheds light on the surprising role that haze in China plays in promoting the urban heat island effect [UHI], a process whereby city centers tend to be significantly warmer than surrounding rural areas. Scientists have always suspected that […]
By Andrew H. MacDougall22 August 2016 (Nature Geoscience) – Between 17,500 and 14,500 years ago, a period sometimes referred to as the Mystery Interval1, atmospheric CO2 concentrations began their post-glacial rise from about 190 ppm in glacial times to approximately 270 ppm by the beginning of the Holocene. The rise in CO2 during the Mystery […]
By John Vidal21 April 2016 (Guardian) – A documentary about the murder of a rainforest activist has been viewed tens of thousands of times online after being banned by the Cambodian government. The film, I Am Chut Wutty, was due to be shown this week in a Phnom Penh cinema to coincide with the fourth […]
25 July 2016 (Siberian Times) – The mountain of sawdust is the size of more than 800 Olympic swimming pools at a site in the Ust-Kutsky district of Irkutsk region. A council spokesman said: ‘It is now impossible to extinguish dump with such an amount of sawdust. ‘Obviously, it will keep burning for a few […]
By Arthur Neslen 11 August 2016 Ljubljana, the Upper Kolpa valley, and Zagreb (Guardian) – The death toll of animals killed by a razor wire fence designed to stop migrants crossing into Europe is mounting, amid warnings that bears, lynx, and wolves could become locally extinct if the barrier is completed and consolidated. The rising […]