By David Sim 7 July 2015 (IBT) – Every summer, the Yellow Sea turns green as a thick carpet of algae covers the beaches of Shangdong Province, eastern China. People living in Qingdao and nearby coastal towns have grown accustomed to their beaches looking more like verdant meadows every July. Children play in a carpet […]
By Susan Wyatt5 July 2015 (KING 5 News) – Smoke from wildfires in British Columbia was streaming into Western Washington on Sunday, causing an eerie yellow cast to the skies. More than 50 new wildfires were sparked over this weekend alone. Officials with the Paradise Fire said local 911 dispatchers in the Port Angeles area […]
By Adam Voiland1 July 2015 (NASA) – The 2015 fire season got off to an unusually early start in Canada when blazes broke out in the Northwest Territories, British Columbia, and Alberta in late May. As the season has progressed, the air in western Canada—as well as large swaths of the United States—grew gray and […]
By Adam Voiland24 June 2015 (NASA) – People living in polluted areas inhale vast quantities of fine particulate matter, which is called PM2.5 because the pollution particles have diameters less than 2.5 micrometers. Such particles are so small—30 times smaller than the width of a human hair—that they can easily infiltrate human respiratory and circulatory […]
By Margaret Cronin Fisk, Laurel Calkins, and Del Quentin Wilber2 July 2015 (Bloomberg) – BP will pay a record $18.7 billion to resolve claims by the U.S. and five states along the Gulf of Mexico related to the 2010 oil spill. The payments will be spaced out over as long as 18 years, according to […]
3 July 2015 (Desdemona Despair) – Will world agriculture be able to support a human population of 12 billion people in the year 2100? The answer largely turns on how much land is available for growing crops. Unfortunately, the world’s arable land area is declining at an enormous rate. The UN Convention to Combat Desertification […]
By Brandi Morin24 June 2015 (APTN) – Just outside of the Fort McKay First Nation, sitting behind a chain-link fence is a dark lake dotted with scare-crow like structures dressed in bright orange suits and hard hats bobbing up and down in the water. This is a tailings pond. There are warning signs, “Danger” and […]
By Sharon Kelly25 June 2015 (DeSmog) – When EPA’s long-awaited draft assessment on fracking and drinking water supplies was released, the oil and gas industry triumphantly focused on a headline-making sentence: “We did not find evidence of widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States.” But for fracking’s backers, a sense of […]
By Rusty Surette18 June 2015 COLLEGE STATION (KBTX) – Record rainfall totals in many parts of Texas the past few weeks means a record amount of freshwater pouring into the Gulf of Mexico – as high as 10 times the normal rate – and that could lead to huge problems for marine life and commercial […]
By Sandi Doughton15 June 2015 (Seattle Times) – A team of federal biologists set out from Oregon Monday to survey what could be the largest toxic algae bloom ever recorded off the West Coast. The effects stretch from Central California to British Columbia, and possibly as far north as Alaska. Dangerous levels of the natural […]
