Even in a world increasingly battered by weather extremes, the summer 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest stood out. For several days in late June, cities such as Vancouver,…
Category: Earth
This eco-friendly glitter gets its color from plants, not plastic
All that glitters is not green. Glitter and shimmery pigments are often made using toxic compounds or pollutive microplastics (SN: 4/15/19). That makes the sparkly stuff, notoriously difficult to clean…
50 years ago, corporate greenwashing was well under way
Environmental advertising: A question of integrity— Science News, November 27, 1971 A new report published by the Council on Economic Priorities clearly outlines facts showing that much corporate advertising on…
Deep-sea Arctic sponges feed on fossilized organisms to survive
In the cold, dark depths of the Arctic Ocean, a feast of the dead is under way. A vast community of sponges, the densest group of these animals found in…
A UN report shows climate change’s escalating toll on people and nature
Neither adaptation by humankind nor mitigation alone is enough to reduce the risk from climate impacts, hundreds of the world’s scientists say. Nothing less than a concerted, global effort to…
Freshwater ice can melt into scallops and spikes
Water’s wacky density leads to strange effects that researchers are still uncovering. Typically, liquids become denser the more they cool. But freshwater is densest at 4° Celsius. As it cools…
Satellites have located the world’s methane ‘ultra-emitters’
A small number of “ultra-emitters” of methane from oil and gas production contribute as much as 12 percent of methane emissions from oil and gas production every year to the…
The past’s extreme ocean heat waves are now the new normal
Yesterday’s scorching ocean extremes are today’s new normal. A new analysis of surface ocean temperatures over the past 150 years reveals that in 2019, 57 percent of the ocean’s surface…
Intense drought or flash floods can shock the global economy
Extremes in rainfall — whether intense drought or flash floods — can catastrophically slow the global economy, researchers report in the Jan. 13 Nature. And those impacts are most felt…
Rice feeds half the world. Climate change’s droughts and floods put it at risk
Under a midday summer sun in California’s Sacramento Valley, rice farmer Peter Rystrom walks across a dusty, barren plot of land, parched soil crunching beneath each step. In a typical…
