By Denise Chow 9 June 2019 (NBC News) – Anote Tong can remember when Tebunginako, on the central Pacific island nation of Kiribati, was a thriving village. But beginning in the 1970s, the tide started inching closer to the houses in the village. Over the years, as strong winds whipped up monster waves and climate […]
26 May 2019 (AFP) – As nuclear explosions go, the U.S. “Cactus” bomb test in May 1958 was relatively small — but it has left a lasting legacy for the Marshall Islands in a dome-shaped radioactive dump. The dome — described by a UN chief Antonio Guterres as “a kind of coffin” — was built […]
By Natasha Gilbert 26 May 2019 (The Guardian) — Hundreds of rivers around the world from the Thames to the Tigris are awash with dangerously high levels of antibiotics, the largest global study on the subject has found. Antibiotic pollution is one of the key routes by which bacteria are able develop resistance to the […]
By Dr. Jeff Masters 25 February 2019 (Weather Underground) – Super Typhoon Wutip underwent an impressive burst of rapid intensification on Monday morning in the waters about 300 miles west of Guam, topping out as Category 5 super typhoon with a central pressure of 915 mb and sustained winds of 160 mph at 2 am […]
8 February 2019 (BBC) – Huge chunks of ice have broken off the Tasman Glacier, New Zealand’s largest. They have filled up at least a quarter of the meltwater lake at the foot of the glacier in the Aoraki/Mount Cook National Park, reports say. The lake started to form in the 1970s as the glacier […]
By Jim Salinger and James Renwick 29 January 2019 (The Conversation) – As the Australian heatwave is spilling across the Tasman and pushing up temperatures in New Zealand, we take a look at the conditions that caused a similar event last year and the impacts it had. Last summer‘s heatwave gave New Zealand its warmest […]
17 January 2019 (Radboud University) – Currently approximately 600 species might be inaccurately assessed as non-threatened on the Red List of Threatened Species. More than a hundred others that couldn’t be assessed before, also appear to be threatened. A new more efficient, systematic and comprehensive approach to assess the extinction risk of animals has shown […]
By Petra Löw8 January 2019 (Munich Re) – When compared with the record losses of the previous year from Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria, the indications at the start of 2018 were that it would be a more moderate year. However, the second half of the year saw an accumulation of billion-dollar losses from floods, […]
28 October 2018 (The Weather Channel) – Typhoon Yutu has weakened but remains a powerful Category 3 storm as it moves westward en route to a direct strike on the northern Philippines. Yutu is expected to continue weakening as it moves westward toward the Philippines but should still be a potent Category 2 or 3 […]
By Nathan Eagle 23 October 2018 (Honolulu Civil Beat) – Hurricane Walaka, one of the most powerful Pacific storms ever recorded, has erased an ecologically important remote northwestern island from the Hawaiian archipelago.Using satellite imagery, federal scientists confirmed Monday that East Island, a critical habitat for endangered Hawaiian monk seals and green sea turtles, was […]
