Plants and animals race for survival as climate change creeps across the globe

By David Adamwww.guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 23 December 2009 18.20 GMT Lowland tropics, mangroves and deserts at greater risk than mountainous areas as global warming spreads, study finds Global warming creeps across the world at a speed of a quarter of a mile each year, according to a new study that highlights the problems that rising temperatures […]

Year of the Tiger dawns with only 3,200 wild tigers left

KATHMANDU, Nepal, December 28, 2009 (ENS) – To mark 2010 as Year of the Tiger, the government of Nepal has announced the expansion of Bardia National Park in the Terai Arc landscape by 900 square kilometers (347 square miles), which will increase critical habitat for wild tigers. Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal says the government […]

Chernobyl Exclusion Zone radioactive longer than expected

Radioactive Material Isn’t Disappearing From the Environment as Quickly as Predicted By ALEXIS MADRIGALDec. 20, 2009 Chernobyl, the worst nuclear accident in history, created an inadvertent laboratory to study the impacts of radiation — and more than twenty years later, the site still holds surprises. Reinhabiting the large dead zone around the accident site may […]

Time-lapse video of Arctic coastline eroding, ‘orders of magnitude’ faster than historical rates

The northern coastline of Alaska midway between Point Barrow and Prudhoe Bay is eroding by up to one-third the length of a football field annually because of a “triple whammy” of declining sea ice, warming seawater and increased wave activity, according to new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder. The conditions have […]

Graph of the Day: Deforestation in Paraguay, 1990-2000

Paraguay lost nearly 40 percent of its Atlantic Forest between 1990 and 2000 By Rebecca Lindsey. Sandwiched between Argentina to the southwest and Brazil to the northeast, landlocked Paraguay possesses remarkable ecological richness for its relatively small (about the size of California) area. The northwestern part of the country is occupied by the dry woodlands […]

Species feeling the heat: Connecting deforestation and climate change

Polar bears, long recognized as the poster child for climate change, are not the only species feeling the impacts of climate change. The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) has released a list of animals facing a host of related threats, in some strange and unexpected ways. In a new report titled “Species Feeling the Heat: Connecting […]

Image of the Day: Athabasca Oil Sands from Orbit

By Holli Riebeek In the ranking of the world’s proven oil reserves, Canada stands behind only Saudi Arabia. Canada possesses an estimated 178.6 billion barrels of crude oil accessible using current technology. Of this reserve, 174 billion barrels are in Alberta’s oil sand fields, which cover 140,200 square kilometers (54,132 square miles) of the province. […]

Starving polar bears turn to cannibalism

By Jonathan LiewPublished: 2:40PM GMT 08 Dec 2009 New pictures show that polar bears are beginning to cannibalise each other as global warming destroys their hunting grounds.  The images, taken in Hudson Bay, Canada, around 200 miles north of the town of Churchill, Manitoba, show a male polar bear carrying the bloodied head of a […]

Thai village disappearing as sea advances 20m per year

From correspondents in Khun SamutchineDecember 07, 2009 1:35PM AROUND 60 families have already been forced away from the once idyllic fishing community of Khun Samutchine, as the sea that local people rely on for their livelihood advances inland by more than 20m a year. “I live on somebody else’s land, I can’t escape the village […]

Image of the Day: Toxic Algae Bloom in Lake Atitlán, Guatemala, Nov 2009

Caption by Holli Riebeek with information provided by Kenneth Duda, USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science (EROS) Center. Normally a picturesque blue lake surrounded by steep volcanoes and Mayan settlements, Guatemala’s Lake Atitlán acquired a film of green scum in October and November 2009. A large bloom of cyanobacteria, more commonly known as blue-green algae, […]

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