Earth out of sync: Rising temperatures throwing off seasonal timing

By Janet LarsenMarch 25, 2010 …With global average temperatures up 0.5 degrees Celsius since the 1970s, springtime warming is coming earlier across the earth’s temperate regions.  A number of organisms have responded to the warming temperatures by altering the timing of key life-cycle events. The problem, however, is that not all species are adjusting at […]

Graph of the Day: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

By now, most of us are aware that there is a large patch of floating plastic in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. What you may not know is that it’s not made up of plastic bags and empty bottles. It’s made up of billions of tiny pieces of plastic, and it’s basically invisible unless […]

High Arctic biodiversity down 26 percent since 1970

By John Platt Mammals, birds and fish living in the High Arctic experienced an average 26 percent drop in their populations between 1970 and 2004 due to the loss of sea ice, according to a new report from The Arctic Species Trend Index (ASTI), Tracking Trends in Arctic Wildlife [pdf]. The 2010 report, commissioned and […]

Largest seabirds in the world threatened by ‘hundreds of thousands’ of fishing hooks

By ANDREW DARBY IN HOBARTMarch 15, 2010 – 4:52PM To save Australia’s biggest seabirds, first go to the South Atlantic. Albatrosses, which breed on Australian islands, specifically Tasmanian islands in Bass Strait and the sub-Antarctic Macquarie Island, face greater peril off South America than they do at “home”. The challenge of saving these birds from […]

Climate change ‘makes birds shrink’ in North America

Songbirds on the US east coast are becoming smaller, a trend thought to be driven by climate changes.  By Matt WalkerEditor, Earth News Songbirds in the US are getting smaller, and climate change is suspected as the cause. A study of almost half a million birds, belonging to over 100 species, shows that many are […]

Climate change threatens migratory birds

By JAY ROOT, Associated Press Writer Jay Root, Associated Press Writer   – Thu Mar 11, 6:50 pm ET AUSTIN, Texas – Global climate change poses a significant threat to migratory bird populations, which are already stressed by the loss of habitat and environmental pollution, according to a report released Thursday. U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar […]

The Crude in Syncrude: ugliness at the tar sands duck trial

  By Josh MogermanSenior Media Associate, Chicago Posted March 3, 2010 You want to know just how tone-deaf the tar sands industry and their Big Oil backers are? Yesterday, in a trial over the death of 1600+ ducks that had landed in a toxic mining runoff lake, lawyers for the Canadian tar sands company Syncrude […]

New floating garbage patch found in Atlantic Ocean

Researchers have found a high concentration of plastic debris is floating in the Atlantic Ocean north of the Caribbean, months after concerns were raised over a vast patch of rubbish floating in the Pacific Ocean. The study’s principal investigator said that the findings were based on more than 64,000 tiny bits of plastic collected over […]

What is sickening and killing California's brown pelicans?

By John Platt Hundreds of brown pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis) have been found sick or dead off the coasts of California in the past month, the victims of a mysterious ailment that has scientists baffled. When found alive, the birds appear hungry and disoriented. But necropsies performed on dead pelicans found that they had been eating, […]

Tour of the toxic chemical soup in the North Pacific Gyre

By Thomas Morton, Online Editor, Vice Magazine February 17, 2010 4:16 p.m. EST Brooklyn, New York (VBS.TV) — Back in the mid-zeroes, I remember reading a lot of stories about a buildup of trash in the Pacific Ocean so massive that it had formed a floating island of waste the size of Texas. Its colorful […]

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