Environment

Environment
Greenland Cooled for Four Decades Before It Began Warming Fast
For most of the second half of the twentieth century, Greenland did something the rest of the planet was not doing. It got colder. While global mean temperature climbed, the annual mean at the…
By Anna Kotlyar3w ago4 min read
Environment
Fire and Fertilizer Push Alaskan Tundra the Same Way, at Different Speeds
Tussock tundra looks, from the air, like a lumpy green carpet. Up close it is something more particular: a dense mat of mosses and lichens with sedge tussocks rising out of it, a community that…
By Andreja Jezernik4w ago5 min read
Environment
Better Forecasts, or Better-Value Ones? What Happens When You Put a Price on an AI Weather Model
A drainage crew has until Thursday evening to decide: put the flood barriers out, or leave them in the depot. The forecast offers a probability of heavy rain, not a promise of it. Deploying costs a…
By Oli Kotyk4w ago5 min read
Environment
US Mainland Honey Was as Clean as Certified Organic Imports; 30% of Hawaii's Certified Organic Honey Was Not
Pick up a jar labeled USDA organic honey in an American supermarket and the label is almost certainly describing a farm somewhere else. Brazil, Argentina, or one of a handful of apiaries in Hawaii.…
By Andreja Jezernik4w ago3 min read
Environment
The Diet Target That Cuts Emissions in Rich Cities and Raises Them in Poor Ones
There is a number in this study that is true of the world and true of almost no city in it. Ask a global food model what would happen if every urban population on Earth switched to the reference diet…
By Anna Kotlyar4w ago5 min read
Environment
Nowhere Left to Climb: A Volcano's Beetles Run out of Mountain
Climb Volcán Cacao in northwestern Costa Rica and the forest changes under your feet. At the bottom is seasonally dry lowland forest that bakes. About 1,500 vertical meters higher, at the top, is…
By Andreja Jezernik4w ago5 min read
Environment
The Seafloor Vault: Once Permafrost Carbon Settles Into Arctic Nearshore Mud, Less Than a Tenth of It Is Breathed Back Out
Qikiqtaruk is a small, treeless island off the Yukon coast, and every summer it gets smaller. Waves undercut its ice-rich bluffs, thawed ground slumps, and slabs of Pleistocene permafrost drop into…
By Oli Kotyk4w ago5 min read
Environment
Arctic Sea Ice Holds Nanoplastics and Releases Back While It Is Still Freezing
Pull a litre of seawater from beneath the ice north of Svalbard and hold it up to the light. It looks like the cleanest water anywhere on the planet, and by most measures it is. What it also carries,…
By Andreja Jezernik4w ago6 min read
Environment
Tire Rubber in a Place With No Roads: Nanoplastics Turn up in Antarctic Soil
There is a corner of Antarctica where it does not snow enough to bury anything. The McMurdo Dry Valleys are a polar desert of bare gravel and frozen ground, kept ice-free by winds that strip away…
By Oli Kotyk4w ago5 min read
Environment
Spy Satellites, Survey Flights and the Svalbard Glaciers Nobody Was Watching
In the summers of 1936 and 1938, two Norwegian expeditions led by the geologist Adolf Hoel flew cameras over Svalbard and came home with 5,507 photographs. They were taken to make maps. Twenty-six…
By Andreja Jezernik1mo ago5 min read
Science
How Whole-Genome Sequencing Caught a Contagious Cancer Passing Between Catfish
The lesions were the easy part. For more than a decade, biologists had watched brown bullhead catfish in Lake Memphremagog turn up with patches of blackened, malignant skin; by 2014, nearly one in…
By Gabriela Szalayová1mo ago3 min read

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Environment

Greenland Cooled for Four Decades Before It Began Warming Fast

Fire and Fertilizer Push Alaskan Tundra the Same Way, at Different Speeds

Better Forecasts, or Better-Value Ones? What Happens When You Put a Price on an AI Weather Model

US Mainland Honey Was as Clean as Certified Organic Imports; 30% of Hawaii's Certified Organic Honey Was Not

The Diet Target That Cuts Emissions in Rich Cities and Raises Them in Poor Ones

Nowhere Left to Climb: A Volcano's Beetles Run out of Mountain

The Seafloor Vault: Once Permafrost Carbon Settles Into Arctic Nearshore Mud, Less Than a Tenth of It Is Breathed Back Out

Arctic Sea Ice Holds Nanoplastics and Releases Back While It Is Still Freezing

Tire Rubber in a Place With No Roads: Nanoplastics Turn up in Antarctic Soil

Spy Satellites, Survey Flights and the Svalbard Glaciers Nobody Was Watching

How Whole-Genome Sequencing Caught a Contagious Cancer Passing Between Catfish