Graph of the Day: World Groundwater Depletion Rates, 2010

AGU Release No. 10–3023 September 2010For Immediate Release WASHINGTON—In recent decades, the rate at which humans worldwide are pumping dry the vast underground stores of water that billions depend on has more than doubled, say scientists who have conducted an unusual, global assessment of groundwater use. These fast-shrinking subterranean reservoirs are essential to daily life […]

Gulf oil spill: Steel boom for Perdido Pass disassembled, lying in Orange Beach storage yard

By Guy Busby, Press-Register Wednesday, September 22, 2010, 8:00 AM ORANGE BEACH, Ala. — Thousands of feet of steel pipe intended to protect Perdido Pass from the Gulf oil spill lie in a city storage yard off Canal Road. Crews dismantled the multimillion-dollar boom project just two weeks after it was completed. The floating steel […]

Colossal coral bleaching kills up to 95 percent of corals in the Philippines

By Pierre Fidenci, president of Endangered Species InternationalSpecial to mongabay.com September 23, 2010I It is one of the most worrisome observations: fast massive death of coral reefs. A severe wide-scale bleaching occurred in the Philippines leaving 95 percent of the corals dead. The bleaching happened as the result of the 2009-2010 El Niño, with the […]

Degraded oil from BP spill coats Gulf seafloor

By Brett Israel, www.LiveScience.com  Tue Sep 21, 8:31 pm ET NEW YORK – Now that BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil well has been sealed, the long, hard work of assessing the damage begins even as the oil is dispersing throughout the Gulf. A research team from Columbia University in New York returned this past weekend (Sept. […]

U.S. government: No sign of undersea plume from BP Gulf oil spill

By Chris Baltimore; editing by Mohammad ZarghamTue Sep 21, 2010 5:17pm EDT HOUSTON (Reuters) – The government is unable to confirm reports of a miles-long plume of oil lurking beneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico from BP Plc’s giant oil spill, a government scientist said on Tuesday. The government confirmed on Sunday that […]

Louisiana authorities report oil sightings from Gulf of Mexico spill

Times-Picayune StaffMonday, September 20, 2010, 4:53 PM     Plaquemines Parish Tuesday Heavy oil sheen 1.6 miles east-southeast of Bay La Mer. An area of tar patties with sheen, 30 feet long, 1.4 miles east of Bay La Mer. An area of tar balls, 20 feet long by 2 feet wide, in Bayou Chaland 0.65 mile west  […]

Advocates of Gulf oil spill berms not deterred by environmental regulators’ misgivings

By Mark Schleifstein, The Times-Picayune Monday, September 20, 2010, 11:15 PM Despite serious questions raised by federal regulators about the project’s environmental impacts, Louisiana coastal officials will continue to build six barrier berms to capture oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill, a building effort that will result in about 25 miles of 6-foot-high sand and […]

The battle to save Russia’s Pavlovsk seed bank

Scientists and conservationists are waging an international campaign to save Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov’s Pavlovsk seed bank from being turned over to housing developers • Russia launches inquiry into Pavlovsk seed bank after Twitter campaign• Pavlovsk seed bank faces destruction By Fred Pearce for Yale Environment 360, part of the Guardian Environment Network, www.guardian.co.uk Monday […]

Little-known gibbons face imminent extinction

By Jeremy Hance, www.mongabay.com September 19, 2010 It’s not easy to be a gibbon: although one of the most acrobatic, fast, and marvelously loud of the world’s primates, the gibbon remains largely unknown to the global public and far less studied than the world’s more ‘popular’ apes. This lack of public awareness, scientific knowledge, and, […]

BP oil spill: Disaster by numbers

The scale of the BP oil spill can be hard to take in. Now, five months on, these shocking figures reveal the extent of the devastation. Compiled by Alice-Azania Jarvis14 September 2010 11 platform workers were killed when the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded on 20 April. Their bodies have never been found, despite a […]

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