Sunday, Feb 15th
Last update10:45:48 PM GMT
Environmental News Archive
On March 11, 2011, a 9.0 magnitude earthquake off the coast of northeastern Japan triggered a tsunami that led to the meltdown of three nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant.
While immediate health consequences are yet to be determined, more than 159,000 people were evicted from areas deemed too radioactive for human habitation. The World Health Organization has warned about “increased risk of certain cancers” for people in the most contaminated areas.
From the ground of this extreme northern part of Antarctica, a spectacular white and blinding ice seemingly extends forever. What can't be seen is the battle raging below to reshape Earth.
Water is eating away at the Antarctic ice, melting it where it hits the oceans. As the ice sheets slowly thaw, water pours into the sea, 130 billion tons of ice (118 billion metric tons) per year for the past decade, according to NASA satellite calculations. That's enough ice melt to fill more than 1.3 million Olympic swimming pools. And the melting is accelerating.
Brazilian police have arrested the "biggest deforester" of the Amazon jungle, identified as Ezequiel Antonio Castanha, officials said.
Castanha was arrested last Saturday in a joint operation of Federal Police and the National Security Force in the Amazonian town of Novo Progresso in Para state, the Brazilian Environmental Institute (Ibama) said Monday.
Federal prosecutors have filed criminal charges against Duke Energy with years of illegal pollution from coal ash dumps at five North Carolina power plants.
The three U.S. Attorney's Offices covering the state on Friday all charged Duke with felony violations of the Clean Water Act. The prosecutors say the nation's largest electricity company engaged in unlawful dumping since at least 2010 at coal-fired power plants in Eden, Moncure, Asheville, Goldsboro and Mt. Holly.
The long and severe drought in the U.S. Southwest pales in comparison with what’s coming: a “megadrought” that will grip that region and the central Plains later this century and probably stay there for decades, a new study says.
Thirty-five years from now, if the current pace of climate change continues unabated, those areas of the country will experience a weather shift that will linger for as long as three decades, according to the study, released Thursday.
In a year the Republican-controlled Congress is expected to take a significant whack at President Barack Obama’s environmental agenda, GOP lawmakers on Wednesday told top environmental officials they should scrap what was once a fairly obscure proposal to define what is and isn’t considered a body of water by federal law.
In an unusual joint hearing involving the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, the Republican majority that now controls both houses of Congress showed it is intent on trying to derail the president’s environmental agenda in his last two years in office.
Today the second major oil “bomb train” derailment occurred in Philadelphia, risking residents’ lives, endangering drivers on one of the nation’s busiest highways, I-95, and putting waterways at risk. One year and eleven days ago, early on Martin Luther King Day 2014, seven cars carrying Bakken Shale crude derailed over the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia in a “near miss from disaster.”
That derailment put the entire University of Pennsylvania medical complex, the Schuylkill Expressway, the Veterans Administration, Children’s Hospital, and other major institutions at risk, along with a chunk of Philadelphia’s residential population too big to safely evacuate.
Two subglacial Greenland lakes thought to be stable -- pockets of icy water accumulated over many years -- are now gone, drained in a matter of weeks. And scientists aren't exactly sure why or what it means.
In one spot along Greenland's massive ice sheet, what was once a holding cell for more than 7 billion gallons of water (supplied by melting ice caps), is now a cold, empty crater, stretching some 1.2 miles wide and 230 feet deep.
The official numbers are in, and they confirm what most already suspected: 2014 was the hottest year on record. Temperature records were shattered in places across the globe, including in much of Europe, parts of South America, as well as in China and portions of Russia and the Far East.
As NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced Friday, average global temperatures on land and sea surfaces collected across the planet were 1.24 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th century average.
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