By arevamirpal::laprimavera 6 August 2012 As one of the readers noted in the other post, the radiation contamination in Tochigi and Gunma Prefectures (northern Kanto) has been little noted. The highest official measurement for wild mushrooms was last year, when 28,000 Bq/kg of radioactive cesium was found in wild mushrooms in Fukushima Prefecture. The reason […]
Record drought across the United States in 2012 followed a year of record flooding in the Mid-West in 2011, producing two very different areas of hypoxia, or oxygen deficient water, on the Louisiana continental shelf. The 2012 area of low oxygen, commonly known as the ‘Dead Zone,’ measured 7,480 square kilometers (= 2,889 square miles) […]
MOSCOW, 3 August 2012 (RIA Novosti) – Fires are spreading across vast Siberian forests in a flashback to the summer of 2010, when the worst drought on record sparked fires that killed dozens of Russians. The total area of forests gripped by fire in Russia has increased to 11 million-12 million hectares, Grigory Kuksin, head […]
Caption by Adam Voiland7 August 2012 For more than a decade, scientists have used data from instruments on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites to map the locations of wildfires burning around the globe. Now researchers have a new tool for observing fire. The Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite (S-NPP) carries an instrument so sensitive to […]
By BERNIE KRAUSE28 July 2012 Glen Ellen, California. YEARS ago, when selective logging was first introduced, a community near an old-growth forest in the Sierra Nevada was assured that the removal of a few trees here and there would have no impact on the area’s wildlife. Based on the logging company’s guarantees, the local residents […]
2 August 2012 (Japan Times) – Prosecutors opened converging criminal probes Wednesday into the March 2011 triple-meltdown disaster at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, looking to hold people in positions of power accountable, including then Prime Minister Naoto Kan. The Tokyo District Public Prosecutor’s Office and two other district prosecutor’s offices […]
By KELLY SLIVKA2 August 2012 In yet another display of the inexorable interdependence of Earth’s ecosystems, a bad summer for Midwestern farmland has turned out to be a good one for life in the Gulf of Mexico. Researchers from the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium have found that this summer’s hypoxic zone in the Gulf of […]
By COREY WILLIAMS 3 August 2012 DETROIT – From the street, the two decomposing bodies were nearly invisible, concealed in an overgrown lot alongside worn-out car tires and a moldy sofa. The teenagers had been shot, stripped to their underwear and left on a deserted block. They were just the latest victims of foul play […]
[cf. Earth’s greatest mass extinction caused by coal: study] By Robert Bryce27 July 2012 Standing in the dispatch office of the North Antelope Rochelle Mine near Gillette, Wyo., Scott Durgin pointed at a flat-panel display. The regional vice president for Peabody Energy smiled. The most productive coal mine in the world was on target. Since […]
By MARI YAMAGUCHI, Associated Press23 July 2012 TOKYO (AP) – The operator of Japan’s crippled nuclear power plant is still stumbling in its handling of the disaster 16 months later, by dragging its feet in investigations, and trying to understate the true damage at the complex, investigators said Monday. The report by a government-appointed panel […]
