Tag Archives: peru

Ancient shellfish remains rewrite 10,000-year history of El Niño cycles

The planet’s largest and most powerful driver of climate changes from one year to the next, the El Niño Southern Oscillation in the tropical Pacific Ocean, was widely thought to have been weaker in ancient times because of a different configuration of the Earth’s orbit. But scientists analyzing 25-foot piles of ancient shells have found that the El Niños 10,000 years ago were as strong and frequent as the ones we experience today. (more…)

Read More

Ocean’s most oxygen-deprived zones to shrink under climate change

As the complex story of climate change unfolds, many of the endings are grim. But there are exceptions. Predictions that the lowest-oxygen environments in the ocean would get worse may not come to pass. Instead, University of Washington research shows climate change, as it weakens the trade winds, could shrink the size of these extreme low-oxygen waters.

“The tropics should actually get better oxygenated as the climate warms up,” said Curtis Deutsch, a UW associate professor of oceanography. He is lead author of the study published Aug. 8 in Science. (more…)

Read More

NASA Releases Earth Day ‘Global Selfie’ Mosaic

For Earth Day this year, NASA invited people around the world to step outside to take a “selfie” and share it with the world on social media. NASA released Thursday a new view of our home planet created entirely from those photos.

The “Global Selfie” mosaic was built using more than 36,000 individual photographs drawn from the more than 50,000 images tagged #GlobalSelfie and posted on or around Earth Day, April 22, on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Google+ and Flickr. The project was designed to encourage environmental awareness and recognize the agency’s ongoing work to protect our home planet. (more…)

Read More

„Das Geheimnis der Bäume“

NABU International verlost Fan-Pakete

Es braucht nur wenige Minuten, um einen Baum zu fällen – aber Hunderte von Jahren, bis ein Regenwald gewachsen ist. Der Film „Das Geheimnis der Bäume“ erzählt die Geschichte vom Wachsen und Gedeihen eines Urwaldes. Der Botaniker Francis Hallé hat viele Jahre damit verbracht, die Geheimnisse der Regenwälder zu erforschen – von einer auf der Höhe der Baumkronen schwebenden Plattform aus. Hallé, dem in der deutschen Synchronisation der Schauspieler Bruno Ganz seine Stimme leiht, stieß dabei auf faszinierende Zusammenhänge zwischen der Tier- und der Pflanzenwelt. (more…)

Read More

With Fewer Hard Frosts, Tropical Mangroves Push North

COLLEGE PARK, Md. – Cold-sensitive mangrove forests have expanded dramatically along Florida’s Atlantic Coast as the frequency of killing frosts has declined, according to a new study based on 28 years of satellite data from the University of Maryland and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Md.

Between 1984 and 2011, the Florida Atlantic coast from the Miami area northward gained more than 3,000 acres (1,240 hectares) of mangroves. All the increase occurred north of Palm Beach County. Between Cape Canaveral National Seashore and Saint Augustine, mangroves doubled in area. Meanwhile between the study’s first five years and its last five years, nearby Daytona Beach recorded 1.4 fewer days per year when temperatures fell below 28.4 degrees Fahrenheit (-4 degrees Celsius). The number of killing frosts in southern Florida was unchanged. (more…)

Read More

Lateinamerika: zerstörte Hoffnungen – und neue!

Zwei Päpste haben sie gefördert, zwei bekämpft: die «Theologie der Befreiung». Jetzt dürfen Lateinamerikas Gläubige wieder hoffen.

«Der Kirche ist erst seit einiger Zeit bewusst geworden, dass sie einen anderen Auftrag hat als nur ‚geistlich’ zu predigen, spirituell oder wie immer man das nennen mag. Sie hat zum Beispiel das Privateigentum verteidigt, als ob es sich dabei um ein absolutes Recht handelte. Mit der Soziallehre ist nun bewusst geworden, dass es kein absolutes Recht auf Eigentum gibt.»

Genau 25 Jahre ist es her, seit der deutschstämmige Kardinal Aloysio Lorscheider mir diesen Satz – auf deutsch – im Rahmen eines Interviews aufs Tonband sagte. Lorscheider war damals, im Jahr 1988, Erzbischof von Fortaleza im nordostbrasilianischen Bundestaat Ceara. Und er war in Basilien und ganz Lateinamerika einer der bekanntesten und einflussreichsten Geistlichen überhaupt, war er doch schon von 1975 bis 1979 Vorsitzender der Lateinamerikanischen Bischofskonferenz «Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano» CELAM gewesen. Lorscheider war also alles andere als nur irgend ein Aussenseiter. (more…)

Read More

Gold Mining Ravages Perú

Washington, DC—For the first time, researchers have been able to map the true extent of gold mining in the biologically diverse region of Madre De Dios in the Peruvian Amazon. The team combined field surveys with airborne mapping and high-resolution satellite monitoring to show that the geographic extent of mining has increased 400% from 1999 to 2012 and that the average annual rate of forest loss has tripled since the Great Recession of 2008. Until this study, thousands of small, clandestine mines that have boomed since the economic crisis have gone unmonitored. The research is published in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of October 28, 2013.

The team, led by Carnegie’s Greg Asner in close collaboration with officials from the Peruvian Ministry of Environment, used the Carnegie Landsat Analysis System-lite (CLASlite) to detect and map both large and small mining operations. CLASlite differs from other satellite mapping methods. It uses algorithms to detect changes to the forest in areas as small as 10 square meters, about 100 square feet, allowing scientists to find small-scale disturbances that cannot be detected by traditional satellite methods. (more…)

Read More