As the climate warms and sea ice retreats, the North is changing. An ice-covered expanse now has a season of increasingly open water that is predicted to extend across the whole Arctic Ocean before the middle of this century. Storms thus have the potential to create Arctic swell – huge waves that could add a new and unpredictable element to the region. (more…)
Neue Weltkarte der Wälder: Der Mensch zerstört im rasanten Tempo die weltweit verbleibende intakte Waldwildnis.
Die Zahl ist schwer vorstellbar: Über 104 Millionen Hektar (8,1 Prozent) der letzten weltweit verbliebenen intakten Waldwildnisflächen wurden innerhalb der letzten dreizehn Jahre zerstört. Eine Fläche, dreimal so groß wie Deutschland. Das enthüllt eine neue Untersuchung von Greenpeace, der Universität von Maryland (UMD) und dem World Resources Institute (WRI) zum Zustand der sogenannten Intact Forest Landscapes (IFL), der letzten intakten Waldwildnisflächen. (more…)
LONG BEACH, Calif.—Scientists working together on Kelp Watch 2014 announced today that the West Coast shoreline shows no signs of ocean-borne radiation from Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster, following their analysis of the first collection of kelp samples along the western U.S. coastline.
Kelp Watch 2014 is a project that uses coastal kelp beds as detectors of radioactive seawater arriving from Fukushima via the North Pacific Current. It is a collaborative effort led by Steven Manley, marine biology professor at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), and Kai Vetter, head of applied nuclear physics at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and a nuclear engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley. (more…)
Results Could Aid Future Efforts to Monitor Health
Bacteria are invisible to the naked eye, but they reside on nearly every surface humans encounter—including the skin. Uncovering the role these microorganisms play in human health is a major focus of research in skin microbiology, but little is known about the identity or function of skin bacteria in other mammals.
In a paper published in the open access journal PLOS ONE, researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and colleagues identified a core skin bacterial community that humpback whales share across populations, which could point to a way to assess the overall health of these endangered marine mammals. (more…)
Das Wetter im Dezember 2013 kann, was Deutschland angeht, durchaus
als “ungewöhnlich” bezeichnet werden. Mit durchschnittlich nur 42
l/m² fiel er deutlich zu trocken aus (im vieljährigen Klimamittel
sind es 70 l/m²). Zudem leistete die Sonne ganze Arbeit und bescherte
uns – gemittelt über alle Stationen – 52 Stunden (Klimamittel 38
Stunden). Dabei war es im Alpenvorland mit bis zu 140 Stunden am
sonnigsten, das Nachsehen hatte man im hohen Norden. So konnten Teile
Schleswig-Holsteins nicht einmal 10 Stunden auf dem
“Sonnenscheinkonto” verbuchen. (more…)
Schutzkonferenz: Arktis-Staaten wollen Eisbär retten
Berlin/Moskau – Auf der am Freitag in Moskau zu Ende gegangenen Eisbär-Konferenz haben sich die arktischen Anrainerstaaten auf die Eckpfeiler eines umfassenden Aktionsplans verständigt. Die Naturschutzorganisation WWF erklärte, die wichtigsten Ziele auf dem Ministertreffen seien erreicht worden und die internationalen Schutzbemühungen für den Eisbär und seinen Lebensraum hätten politische Rückendeckung erhalten. (more…)
Human activities, a changing climate and natural disasters are rapidly altering the face of our planet. Now, with NASA’s Images of Change iPad application, users can get an interactive before-and-after view of these changes.
The app presents pairs or sets of images of places around the world that have changed dramatically. Some of these locations have suffered a disaster, such as a fire or tsunami, or illustrate the effects of human activities, such as dam building or urban growth. Others document impacts of climate change such as persistent drought and rapidly receding glaciers. (more…)
It is not unusual for swarms of small earthquakes to precede a volcanic eruption. They can reach a point of such rapid succession that they create a signal called harmonic tremor that resembles sound made by various types of musical instruments, though at frequencies much lower than humans can hear.
A new analysis of an eruption sequence at Alaska’s Redoubt Volcano in March 2009 shows that the harmonic tremor glided to substantially higher frequencies and then stopped abruptly just before six of the eruptions, five of them coming in succession. (more…)
