News
December 22, 2016
China launched a satellite to monitor its greenhouse gas emissions early on Thursday, the latest step in efforts to cut its carbon footprint, the official Xinhua news agency said. The launch follows the United States joining China in formally ratifying the Paris agreement to curb climate-warming emissions. It also comes as large sections of northern China have been shrouded in near-record levels of air pollution for most of the past week, disrupting flights, closing factories and schools, and forcing authorities to issue red alerts.
December 21, 2016
President Obama bans oil drilling in large areas of Atlantic and Arctic oceans. President Obama moved to solidify his environmental legacy Tuesday by withdrawing hundreds of millions of acres of federally owned land in the Arctic and Atlantic Ocean from new offshore oil and gas drilling. Obama used a little-known law called the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act to protect large portions of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas in the Arctic and a string of canyons in the Atlantic stretching from Massachusetts to Virginia.
December 17, 2016
Researchers find roads shatter the Earth's surface into 600,000 fragments. A new global map of roadless areas shows that the Earth's surface is shattered by roads into more than 600,000 fragments. More than half of them are smaller than 1 km2. Roads have made it possible for humans to access almost every region but this comes at a very high cost ecologically to the planet's natural world. Roads severely reduce the ability of ecosystems to function effectively and to provide us with vital services for our survival.
December 16, 2016
The total shoreline of the world's lakes is more than four times longer than the global ocean coastline. And if all the water in those lakes were spread over the Earth's landmass, it would form a layer some four feet (1.3 metres) deep. Those are just two of the big-picture findings to emerge from the most complete global database of lakes to date, compiled by geographers at McGill University.
December 14, 2016
The Dakota Access Pipeline has been stopped in a huge victory for thousands of Native American protestors who have withstood barbaric treatment at the hands of militarized police and corporate thugs during a months-long campaign to protect their land and water. The Army Corps of Engineers has informed the Oceti tribe that it will stop work on the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline in order to conduct an environmental impact study, according to reports.
December 13, 2016
Strong eruption of the Bezymianny volcano can occur in the near future on the Kamchatka Peninsula (Russia), said the head of the Kamchatka Volcanic Eruption Response Team (KVERT) of the Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Far Eastern Branch of Russian Academy of Sciences) and seismology Olga Girina. According to data by KBGS RAS, seismic activity of the Bezymianny volcano (Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia) began increasing from 18 November, 2016. Satellite data by KVERT showed an increase of the thermal anomaly temperature from 05 December, 2016.
December 09, 2016
For the past several years, anomalous lifting of surface that conceals gas bulbs inside and large depressions have been encountered in the northern territories of Russia. All these sites are located in permafrost zones, in areas with high greenhouse gas contents, partly, carbon dioxide, and methane. According to scientists, this gives evidence to general cause of the bulbs and depression. Occurrence of anomalous gas bulbs and depressions is caused by global warming, and more likely, as the time passes the depressions turn into bulbs.
December 08, 2016
The death toll from a powerful earthquake that struck off Indonesia’s Sumatra island at dawn on Wednesday has risen to 97, with more people feared trapped in collapsed buildings. Search and rescue teams in Aceh province, an area previously devastated by a massive quake and tsunami on 26 December 2004, used tractors to shift the rubble in attempts to reach people buried in their houses.
December 08, 2016
Swiss scientists ran an assessment of change of the land areas, occurred on the planet for the past 32 years, partly, in the territories of the Siberian Yenisei and Ob River basins. Resultant expansion of dewatered territory area for the entire world was dozens of thousand square kilometres. The survey report was published in Nature magazine.
December 03, 2016
Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set by the UN in 2015 for the period up to 2030 would lead to a global population of between 8.2 to 8.7 billion by 2100, according to a new study from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and the Asian Demographic Research Institute (ADRI) at Shanghai University. According to the study published in the journal PNAS, achieving the SDGs would lead to population growth below even the lower bound of recent UN probabilistic population projections.