Nitrogen cycle in coastal waters: Hamburg Harbor becomes a nitrate hotspot

By Tim Schröder 3 August 2017(Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht) – Nitrogen compounds are an important factor in the production of algal biomass. The team led by biologist Kirstin Dähnke from the Institute of Coastal Research at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht has been carrying out extensive Elbe nitrogen measurements for this reason.These measurements have shown that regions upstream from […]

Collapse at salmon farm in Puget Sound renews debate about fish farming

By Phuong Le 28 August 2017 SEATTLE (Associated Press) – A marine net pen holding 305,000 farmed Atlantic salmon collapsed recently, releasing thousands of fish into Puget Sound and renewing concerns that a new proposed salmon farm could harm wild salmon stock and cause other environmental damage. The release at Cooke Aquaculture’s facility comes as […]

Global warming projected to increase harmful algal blooms in U.S. freshwaters significantly – “The impact of climate change goes way beyond warmer air temperatures, rising sea levels, and melting glaciers”

MEDFORD/SOMERVILLE, 15 August 2017 (Tufts Now) – Harmful algal blooms known to pose risks to human and environmental health in large freshwater reservoirs and lakes are projected to increase because of climate change, according to a team of researchers led by a Tufts University scientist. The team developed a modeling framework that predicts that the […]

Electric cars are not the answer to air pollution, says top UK adviser

By Damian Carrington 4 August 2017 (The Guardian) – Cars must be driven out of cities to tackle the UK’s air pollution crisis, not just replaced with electric vehicles, according to the UK government’s top adviser. Prof Frank Kelly said that while electric vehicles emit no exhaust fumes, they still produce large amounts of tiny […]

Gulf of Mexico dead zone is the largest ever measured

2 August 2017 (NOAA) – Scientists have determined this year’s Gulf of Mexico “dead zone,” an area of low oxygen that can kill fish and marine life, is 8,776 square miles, an area about the size of New Jersey. It is the largest measured since dead zone mapping began there in 1985.The measured size is […]

NOAA’s greenhouse gas index up 40 percent since 1990 – Carbon dioxide increase is accelerating

11 July 2017 (NOAA) – NOAA’s Annual Greenhouse Gas Index, which tracks the warming influence of long-lived greenhouse gases, has increased by 40 percent from 1990 to 2016 — with most of that attributable to rising carbon dioxide levels, according to NOAA climate scientists. [cf. Graph of the Day: NOAA annual greenhouse gas index (AGGI), […]

Decades of data on world’s oceans reveal a troubling oxygen decline

ATLANTA, Georgia, 3 May 2017 (Georgia Tech) – A new analysis of decades of data on oceans across the globe has revealed that the amount of dissolved oxygen contained in the water – an important measure of ocean health – has been declining for more than 20 years. Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology looked […]

Global hydropower boom will add to global warming – “Reservoirs are major emitters of methane, a particularly aggressive greenhouse gas”

By Claire Salisbury14 February 2017 (Mongabay) – From the Amazon Basin to boreal forests, and from the Mekong to the Himalayan foothills, rivers worldwide are being targeted for major new dams in a global hydropower boom that also aims to supply drinking water to exploding human populations and to facilitate navigation on the planet’s rivers; […]

Industrialised societies driving climate change 170 times faster than the natural rate – New paper formalises mathematically the change rate of Earth’s life support system

10 February 2017 (Stockholm Resilience Centre) – A paper recently published in the journal The Anthropocene Review puts the current rate of change of Earth’s life support system in the context of the last 4-billion-year evolution of the biosphere. The paper, which is written by the centre’s Owen Gaffney and senior research fellow Will Steffen, […]

Depleted fish stocks and huge dead zone signal tipping point in the Bay of Bengal

By Amitav Ghosh and Aaron Savio Lobo31 January 2017 (The Guardian) – The Bay of Bengal’s basin contains some of the most populous regions of the earth. No less than a quarter of the world’s population is concentrated in the eight countries that border the bay1. Approximately 200 million people live along the Bay of […]

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