Ten years on, Japan mourns victims of earthquake and “profoundly man-made” Fukushima disaster

A Geiger counter shows a radiation level of 231 microsieverts per hour near the damaged No. 3 reactor building at the tsunami-crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Okuma town, Fukushima prefecture, Japan, 1 March 2021. Photo: Sakura Murakami / REUTERS

March 11, 2021

Ten years on, Japan mourns victims of earthquake and “profoundly man-made” Fukushima disaster

By Eimi Yamamitsu 10 March 2021 IWAKI, Japan (Reuters) – With a moment of silence, prayers, and anti-nuclear protests, Japan on Thursday mourned about 20,000 victims of the massive earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan 10 years ago, destroying towns and triggering nuclear meltdowns in Fukushima. Huge waves triggered by the 9.0-magnitude quake – one […]

Snow covers an oil field as pump jacks operate in the Permian Basin in Midland, Texas, U.S, on Saturday, 13 February 2021. Photo: Matthew Busch / Bloomberg / Getty Images

February 22, 2021

Texas freeze led to release of tons of air pollutants as refineries shut – “These emissions can dwarf the usual emissions of the refineries by orders of magnitude”

By Laura Sanicola and Erwin Seba 21 February 2021 NEW YORK/HOUSTON (Reuters) – The largest U.S. oil refiners released tons of air pollutants into the skies over Texas this past week, according to figures provided to the state, as refineries and petrochemical plants in the region scrambled to shut production during frigid weather. An arctic […]

Return rates for Cedar River Sockeye salmon, 2014-2020. In 2020, the number of returning salmon declined to a record low. Data: Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. Graphic: Mark Nowlin / The Seattle Times

January 1, 2021

Lake Washington sockeye salmon hit record low – “In a generation, we have gone from times of plenty to these fish being on the brink of extinction”

By Lynda V. Mapes 1 January 2021 (The Seattle Times) – They are as Seattle as the Space Needle. But Lake Washington sockeye, once the largest run of sockeye in the Lower 48, are failing. The smallest run on record returned to the Cedar River in 2020, a bottoming out after years of declines. There […]

GOES-17 satellite view of the largest known stratospheric smoke injection, from Australia wildfires, 2 January 2020. This photo shows the first phase (29-31 December 2019) of the Australian New Year Super Outbreak (Anyso), which had unprecedented fire and pyrocumulonimbus cloud (pyroCb) activity. this event was the first known pyroCb “super outbreak”, with 32 updrafts over ~45hrs (day and night). Previous events recorded less than 10 updrafts in less than 24 hours. Photo: CIRA

December 16, 2020

Towering pyrocumulonimbus clouds can spew as much aerosol as volcanic eruptions – The Australian 2019-2020 outbreak exceeded previously unprecedented events “on almost every level”

By Carolyn Gramling 15 December 2020 (Science News) – A massive tower of smoke generated by Australian wildfires in late 2019 set a new record for the loftiest and largest fire-spawned thunderstorms ever measured. It also may represent a new class of volcanic-scale “pyrocumulonimbus” events, scientists said in an online news conference 11 December 2020 at […]

Environmental relevance of 6PPD-quinone. (A) Using retrospective UPLC-HRMS analysis of archived sample extracts, 6PPD-quinone was quantified in roadway runoff and runoff-impacted receiving waters. Each symbol corresponds to duplicate or triplicate samples, boxes represent first and third quartiles. For comparison, the 0.8 pg/L LC50 value for juvenile coho salmon and detected 6PPD-quinone levels in 250 and 1000 mg/L TWP leachate are included. (B) Predicted ranges of potential 6PPD-quinone mass formation in passenger cars (e.g., 4 tires, -36 kg tire rubber mass) and heavy trucks, (e.g., 18 tires, -900 kg of tire rubber) (represented in orange) and measured 6PPD-quinone concentrations in affected environmental compartments (represented in blue, with experimental data italicized). Predicted ranges reflect calculations applying 0.4-2% 6PPD per total vehicle tire rubber mass followed by various yield scenarios (1-75% ultimate yields) for 6PPD reaction with ground-level ozone to form 6PPD-quinone. Graphic: Tian, et al. / Science

December 4, 2020

Tire dust killing coho salmon returning to Puget Sound, new research shows – “I find it incredibly sad to watch the adults when they are sick”

By Lynda V. Mapes 3 December 2020 (Seattle Times) – First they circle. Then they gasp at the surface of the water. Soon they can’t swim. Then they die. For decades now, scientists have known something was killing beautiful, adult coho salmon as soon as they hit Seattle’s urban waters, ready to spawn. They had […]

Wildfires light up a hillside behind the Bidwell Bar Bridge on 9 September 2020, as the Bear Fire burns in Oroville, California, in this photo taken with a slow shutter speed. Photo: Noah Berger / AP Photo

December 1, 2020

Photo gallery: In 2020, AP photographers captured a world in distress

By Jerry Schwartz 1 December 2020 (AP) – Behold, a world in distress: A 64-year-old woman weeps, hugging her husband as he lay dying in the COVID-19 unit of a California hospital. A crowded refugee camp in Lesbos, Greece, engulfed in flames, disgorges a string of migrants fleeing this hell on Earth. Rain-swept protesters, enraged […]

The Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS) and the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the NOAA-NASA Suomi NPP satellite captured this extremely think blanket of smoke along the West Coast on 9 September 2020. OMPS measured smoke clouds over the western U.S. with higher aerosol index values than anything Colin Seftor, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, says he has ever seen with the instrument. Graphic: Joshua Stevens / NASA Earth Observatory

September 12, 2020

California’s wildfire smoke plumes are unlike anything previously seen – California fire carbon emissions in 2020 exceed previous record by nearly 2 times

By Matthew Cappucci 12 September 2020 (The Washington Post) – More than 3.1 million acres have burned in California this year, part of a record fire season that still has four months to go. A suffocating cloud of smoke has veiled the West Coast for days, extending more than a thousand miles above the Pacific. And the […]

On 9 September 2020, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this natural-color image of thick smoke streaming from a line of intense fires in Oregon and California. Many communities in the region are facing extremely poor and sometimes hazardous air quality. Data: NASA EOSDIS/LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Photo: Lauren Dauphin / NASA

September 10, 2020

Autumn could deliver the worst of California’s 2020 fire season – A scorching Labor Day weekend brought an all-time record heat and unprecedented fire spread, but fire risks climb in the fall

By Bob Henson 8 September 2020 (Yale Climate Connections) – Temperatures reached ghastly levels in southern California and wildfire carved a path close to two of the state’s iconic national parks as a historic heat dome gripped the western United States during the traditional end-of-summer Labor Day weekend. The heat had eased somewhat by Tuesday, […]

Total summer (yellow bars; 1 April – 1 October), winter (gray; 1 October – 1 April), and annual (orange bars; 1 October – 1 October) honey bee colony loss rates in the United States across years of the Bee Informed Partnership’s national honey bee colony loss survey, 2007/2008-2019/2020. Results from the inaugural survey commissioned by the Apiary Inspectors of America and performed in 2006-07 are not included. Graphic: The Bee Informed Partnership

June 22, 2020

Annual U.S. honey bee survey shows Summer 2019 marked highest colony losses ever recorded

22 June 2020 (The Bee Informed Partnership) – The western honey bee, the species used across the country to support food production, to provide a natural sweetener, and to quite simply contribute to our leisure and free time, is among the most important of pollinators. To mark Pollinator Week, the Bee Informed Partnership (BIP) recently […]

Annual Greenhouse Gas Index (AGGI), 1750-2019. For 2019, the AGGI was a record high 1.45, representing an increase in total direct radiative forcing of 45% since 1990. The increase in radiative forcing from CO2 alone since 1990 was 60.6%. Pre-1978 changes in the CO2-equivalent abundance and AGGI are based on the ongoing measurements of all greenhouse gases reported here, measurements of CO2 going back to the 1950s from C.D. Keeling (Keeling et al., 1958), and atmospheric changes derived from air trapped in ice and snow above glaciers (Machida et al., 1995, Battle et al., 1996, Etheridge, et al., 1996; Butler, et al., 1999). Equivalent CO2 atmospheric amounts (in ppm) are derived with the relationship between CO2 concentrations and radiative forcing from all long-lived greenhouse gases. Graphic: Butler and Montzka, 2020 / NOAA

May 30, 2020

NOAA Annual Greenhouse Gas Index reached another record high in 2019 – Total direct radiative forcing has increased 45 percent since 1990

14 May 2020 (NOAA) – […] The NOAA monitoring program provides high-precision measurements of the global abundance and distribution of long-lived greenhouse gases that are used to calculate changes in radiative climate forcing. Air samples are collected through the NOAA/GML global air sampling network, including a cooperative program for the carbon gases which provides samples […]

Desdemona Despair

Tag: pollution