Zoë Schlanger

Less than a year ago, the scientific community thought the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was about the size of France. As tends to be the case with bad news about plastic pollution, the reality is worse than we thought. The massive floating agglomeration of plastic debris between California and Hawaii is actually the size of three Frances. Put another way, it’s twice the size of Texas.

Modern water infrastructure is a lot of concrete: dams, canals, reservoirs. But as the world warms and population grows, those old approaches won’t be enough to stave off drinking-water catastrophe, according to a 100-page United Nations report released this week. Humanity will have to start embracing techniques that mimic natural processes.

There is the kind of lead poisoning that creeps into water supplies, builds up in children’s blood streams, and, if sustained, will impair their brains. And then there is the kind, much rarer, that makes fully grown adults drop dead.

The Flint water crisis was the product of government inaction, mostly attributed to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. Now, the same state agency is in the spotlight for a delay in responding to another drinking water scandal, this time involving waterproofing chemicals and Hush Puppies shoes.

The US Food and Drug Administration issued an “advance notice of proposed rulemaking” on Thursday (Mar. 15) that it is embarking on a quest to “explore” the possibility of lowering nicotine in cigarettes to “minimally or non-addictive levels.”

Policies based on dangers of low-level lead exposure normally focus on children, and the IQ points they stand to lose when too much of the heavy metal reaches their developing brains. But lead also poses a less-discussed threat to adults: It attacks and damages a number of organs, especially the heart. And adult exposure to lead even at levels so low that they’ve been considered relatively benign is actually deadly enough to be considered a leading cause of death in the US.

When a glacier shrinks by 85%, would you say it shrank “dramatically”?

A paper published in the journal Science Advances this week has some bad news for San Francisco and the Bay Area in California: Sea-level rise projections for the area had not previously factored in a geological phenomenon called subsidence.

Flooding from ever-higher high tides may become a weekly reality for parts of the coastal US by the middle of this century, and a daily occurrence for major coastline cities by 2100, according to a report published this week by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

A Federal Emergency Management Agency official had a frank message for Floridians at an insurance conference, the Miami Herald reports.

Every summer for the last eight years, people who live in the Swiss Alps have been wrapping a beloved glacier in blankets.

Cape Town announced on Feb. 21 that it would be pushing back its dreaded “Day Zero” by a month, from June 4 to July 9, thanks to a lesser-than-expected drop in water levels over the preceding week.

New data analysis confirms what scientists have suspected for a while now: West Antarctic ice melt is speeding up.

A new analysis of climate change across Europe found that under several probable future climate scenarios, European cities will be hit harder by floods, droughts, and heat waves than previously understood.

A study published today (Feb. 12) used satellite data to confirm the predictions of the best climate computer models: The global average sea level is not rising by a steady increment each year, but is accelerating. Decades from now, the annual rate of ocean level rise is likely to be much more dramatic than in recent years.

Today (Feb. 10) is the first day of the Winter Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea. NBC will be airing figure skating and snowboarding live tonight, as well as taped broadcasts of men’s Alpine skiing and the USA vs. Finland curling match.

There’s a chance a frog who lives in a tank in a Bolivian museum is the last of his species. But he reportedly hasn’t given up hope, if one can ascribe hope to a frog. The male Sehuencas water frog continues to make mating calls from within his confinement at Bolivia’s Cochabamba Natural History Museum.

After a devastating earthquake struck Haiti in 2010, Britain’s largest charity Oxfam sent workers to the island to assist in disaster relief. But some staff at the international humanitarian organization used the trip to do more than just help.

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft just took the farthest-ever images from Earth, breaking an earlier record set by Voyager 1’s “Pale Blue Dot” image taken almost exactly 28 years ago.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the federal agency responsible for weather predictions, ocean science, and climate research, has been threatened with major budget cuts by the Trump administration over the last year. But it got a nice chunk of funding today (Feb. 9) when Trump signed a stopgap government spending deal passed by Congress.

As the Frozen North becomes, well, less-frozen, plenty of ancient and unsettling things could emerge from the great permafrost thaw, like giant viruses and vast stores of greenhouse gases. Apparently we need to add the neurotoxin mercury to that list.

American scientists released two new major studies investigating whether or not there’s connection between cancer risk and cell phone use and the much-awaited answer is…*drumroll, please*…we still don’t really know anything for certain.

Houston is home to the largest petrochemical complex in the US. Often nestled within residential neighborhoods, chemical plants, oil refineries, and the myriad businesses that support them often operate with little oversight.

Chemical plants and sites of heavy industry are often located near coasts and waterways; they were originally placed to take advantage of the ease of shipping products by water, and the proximity to water for cooling. But what was once a practical choice is now becoming a hazard.