News
July 26, 2016
Climate disasters like heat-waves or droughts enhance the risk of armed conflicts in countries with high ethnic diversity, scientists found. They used a novel statistical approach to analyze data from the past three decades. While each conflict is certainly the result of a complex and specific mix of factors, it turns out that the outbreak of violence in ethnically fractionalized countries is often linked to natural disasters that may fuel smoldering social tensions.
July 25, 2016
The second edition of my book "Geoethics: Theory, Principles, Problems" has been published. The first edition of the monography was published in relatively small run (of just 300 copies) and only in Russian language, which significantly limited access to accumulated and systematised geoethical knowledge. Exactly for this reason, the second modified and extended edition is presented to the readers now in English language.
July 21, 2016
Radioactive contamination in the seabed off the Fukushima coast is hundreds of times above pre-2011 levels, while contamination in local rivers is up to 200 times higher than ocean sediment, according to results from Greenpeace Japan survey work released today.
July 18, 2016
The mass extinction of life 66 million years ago at the Cretaceous/Paleogene boundary, marked by the extinctions of dinosaurs and shallow marine organisms, is important because it led to the macroevolution of mammals and appearance of humans. Proposed by Japanese scientists hypothesis for the extinction is that an asteroid impact in present-day Mexico formed condensed aerosols in the stratosphere, which caused the cessation of photosynthesis and global near-freezing conditions. The stratospheric aerosols did not induce darkness that resulted in milder cooling than previously thought.
July 15, 2016
A new study is warning that a volcano may be awakening in Italy in the Colli Albani Volcanic District, on the outskirts of Rome. A new Geophysical Research Letters study, authored by Fabrizio Marra and others, reports that over four million people could be at risk if the Colli Albani volcano complex, bordering the Rome metropolitan area, goes into a full-scale eruption.
July 13, 2016
In the most detailed picture to date, information from ESA’s CryoSat satellite reveals how melting ice in Greenland has recently contributed twice as much to sea-level rise as the prior two decades.
Between 2011 and 2014, Greenland lost around one trillion tonnes of ice. This corresponds to a 0.75 mm contribution to global sea-level rise each year – about twice the average of the preceding two decades.
July 12, 2016
China's South China Sea Claims Dashed by Hague Court Ruling. China’s prestige as a rising global power suffered a blow as an international court said its efforts to assert control over the South China Sea exceeded the law.
“There was no evidence that China has historically exercised exclusive control over the waters or their resources,” the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague said Tuesday in a statement. As such there was no legal basis for the country’s claim, it said.
July 12, 2016
Russia Stalls China’s $1 Billion Hydropower Loan for Mongolia. Russia’s concern about water rights is holding up a $1 billion loan package Mongolia is seeking from China to build a hydroelectric dam that would help the landlocked central Asian nation ensure independent supplies of energy.
July 08, 2016
As farmers in Nepal prepare for a fruitful monsoon season, NASA scientist Dalia Kirschbaum anticipates a different impact of the torrential rains— the loosening of earth on steep slopes that lead to landslides.
Kirschbaum oversees a team of scientists who are using data from NASA satellites to design an automated system to quickly identify landslides that often go undetected and unreported. The system scans satellite imagery for signs that a landslide may have occurred very recently. The software is now open source and available to the public.
July 01, 2016
Climate scientists: Australian uranium mining pollutes Antarctic
Uranium mining in Australia is polluting the Antarctic, about 6,000 nautical miles away.
University of Maine climate scientists made the discovery during the first high-resolution continuous examination of a northern Antarctic Peninsula ice core.