Hawaii faces rare threat from major hurricane – Pacific waters around the islands are about 1°C warmer than usual

By Brian Resnick 22 August 2018 (Vox) – The state of Hawaii is facing a rare threat: A Category 4 hurricane is moving toward it, with hurricane watches and warnings in effect for most of the islands.The state of Hawaii is facing a rare threat: A Category 4 hurricane is moving toward it, with hurricane […]

New probabilistic model predicts 2018-2022 will be abnormally hot years

PARIS, 14 August 2018 (CNRS) – This summer’s world-wide heatwave makes 2018 a particularly hot year. As will be the next few years, according to a study led by Florian Sévellec, a CNRS researcher at the Laboratory for Ocean Physics and Remote Sensing (LOPS) (CNRS/IFREMER/IRD/University of Brest) and at the University of Southampton, and published […]

Video: Albatrosses suffer agonizing deaths from ingested plastic

By Matthew Turner 21 June 2018 (Greener Ideal) – If images and videos of whales, dolphins, fish, seals, turtles, and other marine life consuming plastic wasn’t enough to make us feel sick to our own stomachs, we humans have another equally disturbing reality to contend with.Birds are eating it too.The messages from both World Environment […]

A mother orca’s dead calf and the grief felt around the world

By Lynda V. Mapes 2 August 2018 (The Seattle Times) – Is it her grief … or ours? As she carried her dead calf for the ninth straight day, Tahlequah the mother orca whale has captured the world’s attention. People have responded to her plight with poems. Paintings. Songs. Cascades of phone calls, emails and […]

Greenhouse gases emitted by degrading plastic

By Marcie Grabowski 1 August 2018 (UH News) – Several greenhouse gases are emitted as common plastics degrade in the environment, according to researchers from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST).Mass production of plastics started nearly 70 years ago, and the production rate is expected to […]

Orca whale continues grieving ritual for a sixth day – “You can’t help see it as a message”

By Lynda V. Mapes 30 July 2018 SAN JUAN ISLANDS (The Seattle Times) – She carries it delicately, carefully, by the fin, or on her head, so as not to make a mark on the tiny body of her calf that lived only half an hour. J35, a mother orca in the southern-resident clan, was […]

Seabirds are pooping out plastic – Study shows seabirds may be transporting ocean microplastics to land – “Almost all of the birds had plastics in their stomachs”

By Cheryl Katz 25 July 2018 (Hakai Magazine) – Plastics, those indestructible relics of our throwaway culture, are omnipresent in the oceans, making their way into everything from sea salt to seabirds. Now, a new study finds seabirds may be giving back, shuttling particles from ocean garbage gyres back to shore in their poop. Around […]

A mother grieves: Orca whale continues to carry her dead calf into a second day – “We don’t have five years to wait, we really don’t”

By Lynda V. Mapes 25 July 2018 (The Seattle Times) – For two days she has grieved, carrying her dead calf on her head, unwilling to let it go.J35, a member of the critically endangered southern resident family of orcas, gave birth to her calf Tuesday only to watch it die within half an hour. […]

Wave after wave of garbage hits the beaches of the Dominican Republic – “Everybody uses the rivers and the beaches as dump sites”

By Palko Karasz 23 July 2018 (The New York Times) – Come for the beaches, say tourism ads for the Dominican Republic.But it has some beaches you might want to skip right now.The Caribbean nation is known for sapphire seas and ivory beaches, but it is grappling with waves of garbage washing up on its […]

Northern Barents Sea warms dramatically – Sea-ice area around Svalbard lowest ever recorded

By Thomas Nilsen 5 July 2018 (The Barents Observer) – The northern Barents Sea is an Arctic warming hotspot, says Sigrid Lind with the Marine Research Institute in Tromsø, Norway. Changes go from Arctic to Atlantic climate, concludes a study Lind and other scientists have made. The results are published in a recent article in […]

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