14 August 2015 (Viral Hog) – Amateur footage shows a large oil fire on the surface of the Moscow river after an underwater pipeline reportedly burst on Wednesday. The Moscow oil refinery, owned by Gazprom Neft, told Reuters it was unaffected by the fire, and did not own the pipeline where the incident occurred. Local […]
10 August 2015 (The Siberian Times) – Summer wildfires ignited in areas close to Lake Baikal, the vast Siberian lake, at the height of the vacation season, causing breathing problems in some areas. Campers reported their tents and cars caked in ashes from the huge fires. Some 45 people were evacuated from the Baikal shore […]
By David Mcfadden10 August 2015 KINGSTON, Jamaica (Associated Press) – The picture-perfect beaches and turquoise waters that people expect on their visits to the Caribbean are increasingly being fouled by mats of decaying seaweed that attract biting sand fleas and smell like rotten eggs. Clumps of the brownish seaweed known as sargassum have long washed […]
By Kathryn Hansen4 August 2015 (NASA) – On July 28, 2015, the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 captured these images of algal blooms around the Great Lakes. The bloom is visible as swirls of green in western Lake Erie (top) and in Lake St. Clair (bottom). Earlier in July, NOAA scientists predicted that […]
28 July 2015 (Institute of Physics) – A global “gold rush” has led to a significant increase of deforestation in the tropical forests of South America. This is according to a study published in IOP Publishing’s journal Environmental Research Letters, which has highlighted the growing environmental impact of gold mining in some of the […]
BANG PLA MA, Thailand, 9 July 2015 (AFP) – Ms Ranong Rachasing would normally be in her fields at this time of the year, toiling in ankle-deep water to make her rice paddies bloom through knowledge honed by years of cultivating Thailand’s most celebrated export. Now the wizened 57-year-old’s fields lie fallow, baking under a […]
By Olga Gertcyk14 July 2015 (The Siberian Times) – Humans are having a dire impact on the lake, which Russians have long boasted as one of the cleanest – if not the cleanest – on the planet, says expert Dr Oleg Timoshkin, researcher from the Limnology Institute of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy […]
By Brad Plumer 7 July 2015 (Vox) – If you only focused on the United States, you might think coal’s days were numbered. The dirtiest of all fossil fuels once provided more than half of America’s electricity. That has since dropped to 39 percent, thanks to competition from cheap natural gas, a tireless campaign by […]
By Richard Gray7 July 2015 (Daily Mail) – It has been found inside the digestive tracts of turtles, sea birds and whales, but it appears plastic litter in our oceans is also clogging up the insides of the tiny plankton that many larger sea creatures feed on. For the first time copepods – tiny creatures […]
By Paul Huttner 6 July 2015 (Minnesota Public Radio) – What next, locusts? Monday morning’s downpours (and flash floods in the east metro) got our attention early. Just when you thought it was safe, the core of the dense smoke plume from over 600 wildfires in Alaska and western Canada arrived. The dense white smoke […]
