By Julia Whitty7 May 2012 Something awful is happening in the waters off Peru’s northern coast, where some 3,000 dolphins have died and washed ashore since January. This rates as one of the worst, if not the worst, Unusual Mortality Event (UME) ever recorded. (I’ve been writing about the UME with marine mammals in the […]
By SIMON ROMERO3 May 2012 RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil is deploying more than 8,500 troops to the far reaches of the Amazon rain forest this month in an operation aimed at cracking down on drug smuggling, gold mining and illegal deforestation, officials said. The troop mobilization sends a clear message ahead of the United […]
23 April 2012 – Flooding hit rural areas in Colombia and Peru on Sunday, driving hundreds from their homes, flooding crops and taking at least three lives in the Boyaca province. In the Colombian town of La Parada, southwest of the capital Bogota, the Tachira River overflowed its banks and flooded some 200 homes. Water […]
The Amazon has reached record breadth, width, and height this rainy season. According to Peru’s Health Ministry, the river has grown at least 6.5 feet during the floods, with the Marañón River, which feeds the Amazon, increasing some 13 feet. Neither river has swelled this much since the 1970s, when a similar flood affected the […]
By Marilia Brocchetto, CNN30 April 2012 (CNN) – Authorities in Peru are investigating the death of over 538 pelicans, along with other birds, on the northern coast of the country, the Peruvian ministry of production said Sunday. The new environmental investigation comes on the heels of an incident earlier in April when 877 dolphins washed […]
By Meg Weaver19 April 2012 Though writer Robert Earle Howells adds greater fuel to our wanderlust fires with his round-up of five Peruvian jungle lodges in National Geographic Traveler’s new issue, now’s unfortunately not the time to visit the Amazon Basin. Super-floods continue to inundate the region — a situation that has been underreported in […]
By Luzi Ann Javier and Ranjeetha Pakiam17 April 2012 Demand for edible oils is climbing to a record as drought damages crops across South America, leaving buyers with the smallest stockpiles in three decades. The use of soy, palm, rapeseed and six other oils will rise 3.9 percent this year, reducing the ratio of reserves […]
By Tim Wall9 April 2012 Several mass deaths of dolphins have occurred over the past few years and while experts are worried about the die-off they say we are not witnessing a global population crash. But what is behind the recent mass strandings and deaths is complicated and, inevitably, involves humans. For example, the bottlenose […]
SANTIAGO, Chile, 5 April 2012 (AP) – Chile’s Supreme Court on Wednesday rejected challenges by environmental groups to a hydroelectric dam project in the wilds of Patagonia. The ruling upheld an earlier decision by an appeals court in the southern city of Puerto Montt, which decided the project doesn’t violate the constitutional rights of those […]
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy [As always, apologies for the advertising.] By Miguel Llanos, msnbc.com6 April 2012 Conservationists counted 615 dead dolphins along a 90-mile stretch of beaches in Peru, a wildlife group said Wednesday, and the leading suspect is acoustic testing offshore by oil companies. “If you […]
