By ROGER BRADBURY13 July 2012 It’s past time to tell the truth about the state of the world’s coral reefs, the nurseries of tropical coastal fish stocks. They have become zombie ecosystems, neither dead nor truly alive in any functional sense, and on a trajectory to collapse within a human generation. There will be remnants […]
Caption by Adam Voiland10 July 2012 More than 30 taiga wildfires burned in the Far East of Russia on 10 July 2012. According to the ITAR-TASS news agency, the fires had burned more than 2,200 hectares (9 square miles) in Yakutia and 2,000 hectares in Khabarovsk Territory. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s […]
By Brandon Keim6 July 2012 The vast wildfires of this summer and last represent a new normal for the western United States. They may signal a radical landscape transformation, one that will make the 21st century West an ecological frontier. “These transitions could be massive. They represent the convergence of several different forces,” said Donald […]
Discards, the proportion of total catch that is returned to the sea (in most case dead, dying, or badly damaged), represent a significant part of the world’s marine catches and are generally considered to be a wasteful misuse of marine resources. The first global assessment was published in 1994 and it identified a total discard […]
By Mark Lubell6 July 2012 Last week, my parents had to pack their belongings and flee as the Waldo Canyon fire barreled toward their house in Colorado Springs. They were among 32,000 people forced from their houses by the fire, which has destroyed nearly 350 homes. My parents were lucky. Despite the trauma and fear […]
By Robert Krier3 July 2012 The fires that are burning throughout the country offer a window into what we can expect in the future as the climate heats up. That grim assessment comes from Steve Running, a wildfire expert, ecologist and forestry professor at the University of Montana. Running was among the scores of scientists […]
Caption by Tassia Owen7 July 2012 Kalimantan, the Indonesian portion of Borneo, was once a lush tropical landscape full of some of the most sought-after timber in the world. In recent years, a combination of logging and agriculture has contributed to a rapidly changing landscape. Forests are gradually being cleared and replaced by palm oil […]
By Miguel Llanos, msnbc.com5 July 2012 Coral reefs along Panama’s Pacific coast completely collapsed for 2,500 years due to natural climate cycles, researchers reported in a study Thursday, adding that there’s a lesson in the data for man-made climate change: ease up on greenhouse gasses and reefs will restore themselves. “We can prevent coral reefs […]
By CHARLES LYONS30 June 2012 A confrontation between the insatiable appetite for energy and the enduring need for habitability is under way in Brazil as it moves aggressively to harness the power of its rivers with plans for dozens of hydroelectric dams. Such projects are engineering and aesthetic marvels that provide hydroelectric power and can […]
By Matt Peckham 29 June 2012 As an uncontrolled “super fire” near Colorado Springs rages, feeding off parched terrain and forcing tens of thousands from their homes and businesses, high-tech mapping tools are dishing up highly detailed, bird’s eye views of the fire’s scope. Such tools offer everything from perimeter reports and pictures of the […]
