By Dan Collyns5 March 2015 Lima (The Guardian) – Members of the indigenous Achuar tribe from the Peruvian Amazon have won an undisclosed sum from Occidental Petroleum in an out-of-court settlement after a long-running legal battle in the US courts. They sued the company in 2007, alleging it knowingly caused pollution which caused premature deaths, […]
By Kelly April Tyrrell2 March 2015 (UW-Madison News) – In a high carbon dioxide world, the trees would come out ahead. Except for the munching bugs. A new study published today [Monday, March 2, 2015] in Nature Plants shows that hungry, plant-eating insects may limit the ability of forests to take up elevated levels of […]
By Duncan McCue 2 March 2015 (CBC News) – It was by chance that Camille Seaman first travelled north — a bumped flight on Alaska Airlines led to a free trip to Kotzebue on the Bering Strait. Little did the San Francisco-based photographer know it was the beginning of a decade-long quest, an unshakable compulsion […]
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 Gwynn Guilford13 February 2015 (Quartz) – Trillions of microscopic plastic bits litter the oceans of Earth, converging in huge trash vortexes before becoming lodged in the seabed and getting gobbled up by tiny fish. But since countries don’t report how much plastic they’re flushing, it’s been impossible to tell how much there is—or where […]
By Ali Mirchi, Kaveh Madani, and Amir AghaKouchak for Tehran Bureau23 January 2015 (The Guardian) – In the late 1990s, Lake Urmia, in north-western Iran, was twice as large as Luxembourg and the largest salt-water lake in the Middle East. Since then it has shrunk substantially, and was sliced in half in 2008, with consequences […]
By Joel Achenbach 15 January 2015 (Washington Post) – At the rate things are going, the Earth in the coming decades could cease to be a “safe operating space” for human beings. That is the conclusion of a new paper published Thursday in the journal Science by 18 researchers trying to gauge the breaking points […]
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 Javier Panzar 2 January 2014 (Los Angeles Times) – The carcasses of thousands of small birds called Cassin’s auklets have been washing ashore over the last few months from Northern California up to the north coast of Washington. Scientists along the Pacific Coast have been trying to determine what is causing the large die-off […]
By Oliver Milman10 December 2014 (The Guardian) – More than five trillion pieces of plastic, collectively weighing nearly 269,000 tonnes, are floating in the world’s oceans, causing damage throughout the food chain, new research has found. Data collected by scientists from the US, France, Chile, Australia and New Zealand suggests a minimum of 5.25tn plastic […]
