Blog Archives

Colossal Crater Found in Siberia. What Made It?

9/30/2020

This is just the latest in a series of such curious craters discovered in the Siberian Arctic, after the first was identified in 2014. Scientists believe they form from blasts of methane and carbon dioxide gas trapped within mounds of dirt and ice—a phenomenon that may be increasingly common as the climate warms. - National Geographic

We Made Wildfire an Enemy for 110 Years. It Could Have Been an Ally.

9/26/2020

Starting with the Big Blowup of 1910, the U.S. Forest Service’s strategy mostly has been to put out fires as fast as possible. With climate change and shifting populations, we’re losing that war. - NYTimes

The efforts to suppress wildfires, particularly in the American West — as seen here in Oregon in 1955 — have often resembled military campaigns, in both their approach and equipment. Image Credit J. R. Eyerman / The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images

40% of O'ahu, Hawai'i Beaches Could be Lost by Mid-Century

9/25/2020

If policies are not changed, as much as 40% of all beaches on O'ahu, Hawai'i could be lost before mid-century, according to a new study by researchers in the Coastal Geology Group at the University of Hawai'i (UH) at Manoa. In an era of rising sea level, beaches need to migrate landward, otherwise they drown. Beach migration, also known as shoreline retreat, causes coastal erosion of private and public beachfront property. Shoreline hardening, the construction of seawalls or revetments, interrupts natural beach migration -- causing waves to erode the sand, accelerating coastal erosion on neighboring properties, and dooming a beach to drown in place as the ocean continues to rise. - Science Weekly

Meteorite Crater Discovered Drilling for Outback Gold Estimated to Be 100MY

9/25/2020

Geologists say they have discovered a large meteorite crater in outback Western Australia, which could be up to five times bigger than the famous Wolfe Creek Crater in the state's remote north. A team of geologists led by geological consultant Dr Jayson Meyers is behind the discovery in WA's Goldfields Initial estimates suggest the asteroid that created the crater collided with the Earth 100 million years ago. It is not visible from the surface but electromagnetic surveys, which map the rocks below, suggest the crater has a diameter of around 5 kilometres. - ABC (Australia)

Rat That Sniffs Out Land Mines Receives Award for Bravery

9/25/2020

Note - This has nothing to do with geology, but it is so cute that I had to share this happy distraction.

Magawa, a 5-year-old African giant pouched rat, was recognized with a prestigious honor for his work detecting mines and explosives in Cambodia.

Using Dirt to Clean Up Construction

9/25/2020

Concrete ranks as the most popular construction material in the world. But its key ingredient, cement, is responsible for 8% of global carbon dioxide emissions each year. Scientists want to replace concrete with a more environmentally friendly material, and one candidate is soil. In one of the most recent iterations of these efforts, the Banerjee Research Laboratory at Texas A&M University has created a tool kit for using local soil to make construction materials. - EOS

New Climate Maps Show a Transformed United States

9/23/2020

Warming temperatures and changing rainfall will drive agriculture and temperate climates northward, while sea level rise will consume coastlines and dangerous levels of humidity will swamp the Mississippi River valley. Taken with other recent research showing that the most habitable climate in North America will shift northward and the incidence of large fires will increase across the country, this suggests that the climate crisis will profoundly interrupt the way we live and farm in the United States. See how the North American places where humans have lived for thousands of years will shift and what changes are in store for your county. - ProPublica / PNAS

Earth Barreling Toward 'Hothouse' State Not Seen in 50 Million Years - Study

9/23/2020

"Now that we have succeeded in capturing the natural climate variability, we can see that the projected anthropogenic warming will be much greater than that," study co-author James Zachos, professor of Earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in a statement. "The IPCC projections for 2300 in the 'business-as-usual' scenario will potentially bring global temperature to a level the planet has not seen in 50 million years." - Live Science / Science

California Fire Map, Bobcat Blaze 'Continues to Advance,' Burns Over 100,000 Acres

9/23/2020

California wildfires have burned over 3.6 million acres of the state so far this year, with 26 reported deaths and more than 6,400 structures destroyed since August 15, according to the latest report Monday from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire). Over 19,000 firefighters are currently battling 27 major fires in California, according to Cal Fire's report Monday, including the Bobcat Fire in Los Angeles County, which has burned over 100,000 acres. - Newsweek

How Beavers Became North America's Best Firefighter

9/23/2020

A new study concludes that, by building dams, forming ponds, and digging canals, beavers irrigate vast stream corridors and create fireproof refuges in which plants and animals can shelter. In some cases, the rodents’ engineering can even stop fire in its tracks.
“It doesn't matter if there’s a wildfire right next door,” says study leader Emily Fairfax, an ecohydrologist at California State University Channel Islands. “Beaver-dammed areas are green and happy and healthy-looking.” - National Geographic / Apple News

Climate Disruption is now Locked In: The Next Moves Will Be Critical

9/23/2020

Last month, before the skies over San Francisco turned a surreal orange, Death Valley reached 130°F, the highest temperature ever measured on the planet. Dozens of people have perished from the heat in Phoenix, which in July suffered its hottest month on record, only to surpass that milestone in August. The questions are profound and urgent. Can this be reversed? What can be done to minimize the looming dangers for the decades ahead? Will the destruction of recent weeks become a moment of reckoning, or just a blip in the news cycle? - NYTimes

Trump’s Rollbacks Could Add Half an EU’s Worth of Climate Pollution by 2035

9/21/2020

US President Donald Trump has successfully moved the nation backwards on climate change, even as the world grapples with increasingly devastating fires, heat waves and droughts. His rollbacks of major environmental policies, should they survive legal challenges and subsequent administrations, could pump the equivalent of 1.8 billion additional metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by 2035, according to a new Rhodium Group analysis. That’s a little more than Russia’s total annual fossil-fuel emissions, or more than half the European Union’s in recent years. - MIT Technology Review

Charleston Sues Fossil Fuel Companies to Pay $2bn to Combat Climate Crisis

9/21/2020

Charleston recently became the first city in the US south to sue large oil firms for damages, claiming they concealed knowledge that their product would heat up the planet and cause the sort of inundation that now bedevils many coastal cities around the world. Internal documents show oil companies knew from at least the 1960s that burning oil and other fossil fuels would cause the global temperature to rise, triggering heatwaves and causing the seas to rise due to rapidly melting glaciers. Charleston’s lawsuit claims that by obscuring these findings and funding a campaign of misinformation, the oil companies are liable for damage caused due to deception. “It’s tragic, just imagine what we could’ve done to avoid all this if they didn’t deceive everyone,” said John Tecklenburg, Charleston’s mayor, who said the world hasn’t seen such flooding “since Noah built the Ark”. - Guardian

Walmart Outlines Climate-Friendly Goal to Decarbonize Operations Within 20 Years

9/21/2020

Walmart plans to power all of its 11,500 locations worldwide with renewable energy sources such as wind and solar by 2035. So far, the company powers around 30% of its operations from renewable energy. The company is targeting 50% by 2025, before hitting its newest target of 100% by 2035. "That's the biggest part of our emission footprint today, so it's really important for us to make sure and get to that target," Zach Freeze told Yahoo Finance. According to Freeze, another critical area for the company is electrifying and zeroing out emissions from its vehicles, including its fleet of long-haul trucks, by 2040. - Yahoo Finance

Google Pledges to Be 100% Carbon-Free by 2030

9/17/2020

Google already is 100% carbon-free on a net yearly basis, but by 2030, the massive company will produce enough carbon-free electricity each hour of every day to match its usage. - Google

Dispatch from an Irreversibly Changed New Mexico

9/17/2020

Surface water supplies are heavily impacted by warming, and we've spent 80, 100 years relentlessly pumping groundwater. Albuquerque and Santa Fe have tried to diversify their water portfolios. They have a mix of Rio Grande water, imported Colorado River Basin water, and groundwater. The Rio Grande is so low this year, Albuquerque has already had to switch to exclusive groundwater pumping, and Santa Fe had to consider ceasing its diversions from the Rio Grande (groundwater pumping depletes aquifers). Because we've never treated our groundwater like a savings bank for bad times, we're not going to have those supplies to rely on in the future. People in New Mexico, whether they are business leaders or water managers, want to be optimistic about the water situation. I think that that's not realistic. - High Country News

BP Report: Oil is Dying, Long Live Green Energy

9/15/2020

BP stated in a forecast published today that oil may have reached its peak due to the pandemic and that renewables will take the place of fossil fuels. BP has released its 2020 Energy Outlook, which is remarkably different from its 2019 report, when BP’s base case only expected oil consumption to grow over the next decade, reaching a peak in the 2030s. The report looks at three scenarios to explore energy transition to 2050. BP writes that “the scenarios help to illustrate the range of outcomes possible over the next 30 years, ‎although the uncertainty is substantial and the scenarios do not provide a comprehensive ‎description of all possible outcomes.‎" - Elektrek & BP Energy Outlook Report

Historic Fires Devastate the U.S. Pacific Coast

9/15/2020

Climate and fire scientists have long anticipated that fires in the U.S. West would grow larger, more intense, and more dangerous. But even the most experienced among them have been at a loss for words in describing the scope and intensity of the fires burning in West Coast states in September 2020. Lightning initially triggered many of the fires, but it was unusual and extreme meteorological conditions that turned some of them into the worst conflagrations in the region in decades. Record-breaking air temperatures, periods of unusually dry air, and blasts of fierce winds—on top of serious drought in some areas—led fires to ravage forests and loft vast plumes of smoke to rarely seen heights. - NASA Earth Observatory

California Heatwave Fits a Trend

9/15/2020

In early September 2020, an intense heatwave broke temperature records in several locations in Southern California. The dry, hot conditions helped fuel new and existing fires, which have consumed tens of thousands of acres of land. According to recently published research, these extremes fit a long-term trend toward longer and more intense heatwaves in Southern California. - NASA Earth Observatory

When Home is Next to an Oil Refinery

9/11/2020

Wilmington doesn’t have a single five-star resort, but my city, with a population that is 97% people of color, has five local refineries, the largest concentration in all of California. These refineries — owned by BP, ConocoPhillips, Tesoro and Valero — have helped turn my home into “Cancer Alley.” Young children and adults here die of lung and throat cancer at a rate up to three times higher than the surrounding areas, according to a report by Communities for a Better Environment. Wilmington is also home to the nation’s third-largest oil field and hundreds of active oil wells — all wedged in by three freeways and the nation’s largest trading hub. - HCH

Study: U.S. Fossil Fuel Subsidies Exceed Pentagon Spending

9/11/2020

The US spent more subsidizing fossil fuels than on defense spending, according to a new report from the IMF which found that direct and indirect subsidies for coal, oil and gas in the U.S. reached $649 billion in 2015. Pentagon spending that same year was $599 billion. The study defines “subsidy” very broadly, as many economists do. It accounts for the “differences between actual consumer fuel prices and how much consumers would pay if prices fully reflected supply costs plus the taxes needed to reflect environmental costs” and other damage, including premature deaths from air pollution. These subsidies are largely invisible to the public, and don’t appear in national budgets. Broken down to an individual level, fossil fuel subsidies cost every man, woman and child in the United States $2,028 in 2015. - Rolling Stone

Ancient “Pickled” Leaves Give a Glimpse of Global Greening

9/11/2020

Reichgelt and his colleagues analyzed the carbon composition in 72 fossil leaves found in Foulden Maar, representing 18 tree species. They also mapped the density of their stomata: When CO2 levels are higher, plants get the carbon they need from fewer stomata, meaning they also lose less water through the open pores and can grow in drier locations. The results indicated that in the early Miocene, atmospheric CO2 shifted from 450 to 550 parts per million and then back to 450 parts per million over the 100,000 years represented in the Foulden Maar deposit. “That seems like a smoking gun to us: an increase in carbon dioxide that was responsible for a temperature increase that then led to the Antarctic deglaciation,” Reichgelt said. - EOS

How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled

9/11/2020

The industry sold the public on an idea it knew wouldn't work — that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled — all while making billions of dollars selling the world new plastic. The industry's awareness that recycling wouldn't keep plastic out of landfills and the environment dates to the program's earliest days, we found. "There is serious doubt that [recycling plastic] can ever be made viable on an economic basis," one industry insider wrote in a 1974 speech. Yet the industry spent millions telling people to recycle, because, as one former top industry insider told NPR, selling recycling sold plastic, even if it wasn't true. - NPR

How Transforming Riverbanks Can Clean Contaminated Waterways

9/11/2020

Rivers throughout the eastern United States are well known for their high banks and steep, winding courses. But in 2008 scientists proposed that years of damming rivers had transformed them from marshy streams good at filtering waste to the pollution chutes they can often be today. In 2011, they removed 22,000 tons of sediment from the banks of a small Pennsylvania stream; its success has since spurred more than a dozen similar restoration projects. Watch to learn how researchers forged a new path for shaping rivers by challenging a long-held assumption about riverbanks in the eastern United States. - Science

How Apocalyptic This Fire Season Is — In 1 Flaming Chart

9/11/2020

It’s hard to overstate how really, terribly bad this fire season has been. In California alone, wildfires have blown through 2.5 million acres of land since the beginning of the year — about 10 times more than last year, and much more than 2018’s previous record of 1.8 million acres. Meanwhile, in Washington state, fires erupted over Labor Day weekend, scorching 330,000 acres in just 24 hours. The smoke led cities across the West Coast to warn their residents to stay inside and keep windows closed to avoid breathing some of the dirtiest air in the world. - Grist

<<Previous

Colossal Crater Found in Siberia. What Made It?

We Made Wildfire an Enemy for 110 Years. It Could Have Been an Ally.

40% of O'ahu, Hawai'i Beaches Could be Lost by Mid-Century

Meteorite Crater Discovered Drilling for Outback Gold Estimated to Be 100MY

Rat That Sniffs Out Land Mines Receives Award for Bravery

Using Dirt to Clean Up Construction

New Climate Maps Show a Transformed United States

Earth Barreling Toward 'Hothouse' State Not Seen in 50 Million Years - Study

California Fire Map, Bobcat Blaze 'Continues to Advance,' Burns Over 100,000 Acres

How Beavers Became North America's Best Firefighter

Climate Disruption is now Locked In: The Next Moves Will Be Critical

Trump’s Rollbacks Could Add Half an EU’s Worth of Climate Pollution by 2035

Charleston Sues Fossil Fuel Companies to Pay $2bn to Combat Climate Crisis

Walmart Outlines Climate-Friendly Goal to Decarbonize Operations Within 20 Years

Google Pledges to Be 100% Carbon-Free by 2030

Dispatch from an Irreversibly Changed New Mexico

BP Report: Oil is Dying, Long Live Green Energy

Historic Fires Devastate the U.S. Pacific Coast

California Heatwave Fits a Trend

When Home is Next to an Oil Refinery

Study: U.S. Fossil Fuel Subsidies Exceed Pentagon Spending

Ancient “Pickled” Leaves Give a Glimpse of Global Greening

How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled

How Transforming Riverbanks Can Clean Contaminated Waterways

How Apocalyptic This Fire Season Is — In 1 Flaming Chart

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