By Antonia Juhasz 12 March 2015 (Rolling Stone) – On January 27th, as the U.S. Justice Department expounded upon the catastrophic harms of offshore oil drilling in the trial against BP for the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, President Obama reneged on a 2008 campaign pledge by proposing to open up a vast stretch […]
By Tristram Korten 8 March 2015 (Miami Herald) – The state of Florida is the region most susceptible to the effects of global warming in this country, according to scientists. Sea-level rise alone threatens 30 percent of the state’s beaches over the next 85 years. But you would not know that by talking to officials […]
By Oliver Milman24 February 2015 (The Guardian) – Corals such as those found on the Great Barrier Reef are at risk from the estimated 5 trillion pieces of plastic in the world’s oceans because researchers have discovered they digest tiny fragments of plastic at a significant rate. A study led by the ARC centre of […]
By Jane J. Lee13 January 2015 (National Geographic) – We’re not talking about a few dead fish littering your local beach. Mass die-offs are individual events that kill at least a billion animals, wipe out over 90 percent of a population, or destroy 700 million tons—the equivalent weight of roughly 1,900 Empire State Buildings—worth of […]
By Craig Welch, Seattle Times environment reporter29 November 2014 (Seattle Times) – The shellfish pathogen that hit California’s Channel Islands in the 1980s began to quickly kill one of the tideland’s most important animals — black abalone. But what unnerved scientists was what they learned next: Whenever ocean waters grew warmer, the deadly infection known […]
By James Urton, special to mongabay.com 24 November 2014 (mongabay.com) – Images from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster endure, from the collapsing platform to oil-fouled coastline. But beneath the surface is a story photographers cannot as easily capture. Two days after the April 20, 2010 explosion that killed 11 and injured 16, the Deepwater Horizon […]
By Kati Moore30 September 2014 DURHAM, N.C. (Duke Environment) – Pollution in urban and farm runoff in Hawaii is causing tumors in endangered sea turtles, a new study finds. The study, published Tuesday in the peer-reviewed open-access journal PeerJ, shows that nitrogen in the runoff ends up in algae that the turtles eat, promoting the […]
By Alister Doyle; Editing by Rosalind Russell14 September 2014 OSLO (Reuters) – Tiny marine algae can evolve fast enough to cope with climate change in a sign that some ocean life may be more resilient than thought to rising temperatures and acidification, a study showed. Evolution is usually omitted in scientific projections of how […]
15 September 2014By Amy Remeikis (Brisbane Times) – It’s the 35-year plan designed to stave off UNESCO’s “in danger” rating and save the reef, but conservationists are already doubting it will work. Queensland Environment Minister Andrew Powell announced the Reef 2050 plan on Monday while the government was in Yeppoon for community cabinet. The plan, […]
By Jeremy Hance2 September 2014 (mongabay.com) – A consortium of companies—North Queensland Bulk Ports, GVK Hancock and Adani Group—have announced they are giving up on a hugely-controversial plan to dump five million tonnes of dredged sediment in the Great Barrier Reef. The plans ran into considerable opposition from environment, conservation, and tourism groups who feared […]
