By Deborah Zabarenko; editing by Doina ChiacuMon Aug 2, 2010 1:36pm EDT WASHINGTON (Reuters) – This year’s low-oxygen “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico is one of the largest ever, about the size of Massachusetts, and overlaps areas hit by oil from BP’s broken Macondo well, Louisiana scientists report. The area of hypoxia, […]
This map shows trends in snow water equivalent in the western United States and part of Canada. Negative trends are shown by red circles and positive trends by blue. • From 1950 to 2000, April snow water equivalent declined at most of the measurement sites (see Figure 1), with some relative losses exceeding 75 percent. […]
By SOPHIA KISHKOVSKYPublished: August 2, 2010 MOSCOW — President Dmitri A. Medvedev on Monday declared a state of emergency in seven regions as forest and peat bog fires raged across Russia, killing dozens and leaving thousands homeless in a heat wave that has badly hurt Moscow and many other parts of the country. Moscow was […]
This figure shows how average temperatures in the lower 48 states have changed since 1901. Surface data come from land-based weather stations, while satellite measurements cover the lower troposphere, which is the lowest level of the Earth’s atmosphere (see diagram on p. 20). “UAH” and “RSS” represent two different methods of analyzing the original satellite […]
Data on wildland fires in the United States show that the number of acres burned per fire has increased since the 1980s. In the western United States, both the frequency of large wildfires and the length of the fire season have increased substantially in recent decades, due primarily to earlier spring snowmelt and higher spring […]
ABSTRACT — Climate change is expected to cause mass human migration, including immigration across international borders. This study quantitatively examines the linkages among variations in climate, agricultural yields, and people’s migration responses by using an instrumental variables approach. Our method allows us to identify the relationship between crop yields and migration without explicitly controlling for […]
Total annual river discharge to the Arctic Ocean from the six largest rivers in the Eurasian Arctic for the observational period 1936–2008 (updated from Peterson et al. 2002) (red line) and from the four large North American pan-Arctic rivers over 1970–2008 (blue line). The least squares linear trend lines are shown as dashed lines. Provisional […]
Scientific evidence that our world is warming is unmistakable has been released today in the 2009 State of the Climate report, issued by US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The report draws on data from 10 key climate indicators that all point to that same finding — the world is warming. The 10 indicators […]
Fingers crossed: it looks like the cap on BP’s Macondo well will hold until the relief well intercepts and permanently plugs it, and no more oil from this blowout will enter the Gulf. So here’s a map showing the cumulative oil slick footprint for the BP / Deepwater Horizon oil spill, created by overlaying all […]
Freshwater coastal wetlands are more vulnerable to erosion during hurricanes than habitats with higher levels of salinity, a study suggests. US researchers say freshwater marshes have shallower root systems, leaving them at risk from wave erosion during storm surges. They added that the results could have implications for wetland restoration projects in hurricane-prone areas. The […]
