A virus brought on by loss of habitat is wiping out an Australian icon By Tanalee Smith in Cudlee Creek The koala, Australia’s star symbol, is dying of stress. The marsupial is found only along the coastal areas of eastern Australia where it feeds off the leaves of the eucalyptus tree. But, as more and […]
A wall of dust stretched from northern Queensland to the southern tip of eastern Australia on the morning of September 23, 2009, when the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this image. The dust is thick enough that the land beneath it is not visible. The storm, the worst in 70 […]
By Michael Perry SYDNEY (Reuters) – A huge outback dust storm swept eastern Australia and blanketed Sydney on Wednesday, disrupting transport, forcing people indoors and stripping thousands of tonnes of valuable farmland topsoil. The dust blacked out the outback town of Broken Hill on Tuesday, forcing a zinc mine to shut down, and swept […]
By ARJUN RAMACHANDRAN, September 21, 2009 – 1:25PM Hundreds of fish have died and the lives of dozens of eels and turtles have been threatened apparently after an outbreak of algae in the duck pond at Centennial Park. Park patrons described as “tragic” the sight of hundreds of European carp lying on the surface of […]
RESIDENTS should ready themselves for possibly the worst bushfire season the state has seen, the NSW Premier, Nathan Rees, says. Hazard reduction burns continued across the greater Sydney area after more than 60 bushfires that broke out on September 13 threatened homes and scorched properties. Mr Rees declared yesterday that fire authorities were ready […]
By Ben Sharples Sept. 18 (Bloomberg) — An oil spill from a leaking well off Western Australia that has polluted the Timor Sea with 1,200 metric tons of oil may worsen and is a “major ecological disaster in the making,” a conservation group says. “This is a disaster that risks blowing out further in terms […]
By MALCOLM BROWN, September 18, 2009 FREDDI MARTIN, who has often been a lone voice warning about fire catastrophe, looks out from her balcony across the East Killara bushland and despairs of the prospects of the Ku-ring-gai area getting through the next long, hot summer. For years Ms Martin has sat as the community representative […]
By DEBORAH SMITH, SCIENCE EDITOR NSW faces a dangerous bushfire season, with hot, dry spring weather and abundant fuel predicted to result in a higher than average risk of major fires breaking out across the state, scientists have warned. Large swathes of the country, including all of Victoria, also have a greater than normal chance […]
Canberra, Australia (SPX) Sep 02, 2009 – New analysis shows that the water scarcity being experienced in southeast Australia started up to 15 years ago. While the results from the work by senior CSIRO researcher, Dr Albert van Dijk, may not surprise many people, it provides scientific evidence of the shift. New analysis shows that […]
This graph shows an overall decrease in the rate of calcification in Porites corals on the Great Barrier Reef since 1900. Since 1980, there has been a dramatic decrease in the calcification rate, which has been attributed to increasing acidification and increasing sea temperature stress. The light blue bands indicate 95 per cent confidence intervals […]
