In patches all over the US, an ancient layer of sediment in the Earth’s crust is rich in arsenic, a chemical element toxic to humans. And some 2 million people drawing water from private wells in the US may be getting exposed to it in levels above the legal limit, according to research published Wednesday (Oct 18) in Environmental Science & Technology.
The cause of the California wine country fires is still under investigation, but a California power utility is emerging as a possible culprit. On the same evening that reports of the wildfires began to crop up in Sonoma County, local fire crews were called to at least 10 different locations along Pacific Gas & Electric’s power lines after 911 calls reported sparking wires and and other problems while the area was pummeled by heavy winds.
More than three weeks since Hurricane Maria, more than a third of Puerto Ricans still don’t have access to drinking water. So some are turning to wells at Superfund sites on the island—areas designated the most toxic in US territory.
A hole the size of Maine—or larger than the Netherlands, depending on which geographic mass means more to you—has opened up in the Weddell Sea in Antarctica. In an otherwise thick layer of sea ice, still frozen from the Antarctic winter, the hole is an aberration.
The US agency in charge of protecting consumer safety just took the first step towards banning a class of flame retardants that were, up until very recently, nearly ubiquitous. So ubiquitous—mostly in children’s clothes, baby toys, and upholstered furniture—that the vast majority of the US population has measurable quantities of it in their blood.
Since humans began to worry about having put too much carbon in the atmosphere, we’ve considered tropical forests an important “carbon sink.” Their fast growth rate, dense vegetation, and rich soils sucked more carbon out of the atmosphere then they produced. In other words, tropical forests were a natural greenhouse-gas vacuum. Except now, just when the world most needs them to be, they’re not.
Facebook and WhatsApp can be a migrant’s best tools on a perilous journey from North Africa to Europe. Or they can be a threat to their life.
A piece of ice two and a half times the size of Paris (or roughly four-and-a-half Manhattans) broke off from West Antarctica over the weekend. It’s not unprecedented, but it has ice scientists worrying.
Jamie McGoldrick, the United Nation’s point person for humanitarian work in Yemen, is all out of hope.
The #TakeAKnee movement is spreading beyond American football.
Each year, an estimated 12.6 million people die from pollution, according to the UN’s World Health Organization.
During US president Donald Trump’s first month in office, the Department of Homeland Security saw a 40% drop in “apprehensions and the prevention of inadmissible persons” at crossings between the border of Mexico and the US; after the Trump administration threatened to separate children from their parents at the border, the number of parents and children apprehended at crossings dropped by 93%.
Commander Justin Kibbey flies planes into hurricanes for a living.
In an effort to combat the swarms of mosquitoes apparently making mating grounds out of the standing water left behind from Hurricane Harvey, Texas has called in the big planes. The state asked the US Air Force to spray 6 million acres in the state with insecticide from in its low-flying C-130 cargo planes. The Air Force has long used its planes in mosquito-control missions.
Millions of people are currently without power across Florida after Hurricane Irma swept through the state. The US Environmental Protection Agency sent a letter to all power plants in the state of Florida on Sunday (Sept. 10) granting them permission to temporarily ignore limits on pollution while they try to fix that.
Extremely small pieces of plastic, too tiny to be removed by water filtration systems, are turning up in the vast majority of tap-water systems globally.
NASA has a likely new head, and like other people the Donald Trump administration has put in top science-related jobs, he’s not a big fan of climate-change research.
The person who makes the final decision on grant funding at the US Environmental Protection Agency agency is a political operative who doesn’t want to see “the double C-word”—climate change—in grant applications, according to EPA staff who spoke with the Washington Post.
In addition to devastating cities, harbors, and oil refineries, Hurricane Harvey also barreled directly into a cluster of decades-old toxic-waste sites. The US Environmental Protection Agency has confirmed that 13 of the 41 Superfund sites in the region hit by Harvey—areas designated the most toxic in the country—were flooded in the storm.
Oil refineries and chemical plants are 24-hour operations. They’re not designed to be turned off. But when a hurricane barreled through the refinery and chemical plant capital of the United States, many didn’t have a choice.
Hurricane Harvey’s rainfall is, quite literally, off the charts. The US National Weather Service needed to add two colors to its flood maps—a dark purple hue to represent “20 to 30” inches (51-76 cm) rainfall, and a lighter purple to indicate “greater than 30 inches.”
Less than two weeks before Hurricane Harvey brought a flood emergency to the Texas Gulf coast, US president Donald Trump signed an executive order allowing federal agencies to get permits to build without sea-level rise in mind.
As climatologist Katharine Hayhoe points out, seasonal hurricanes are a natural part of the weather system in the Gulf coast, and attributing the cause of a single storm entirely to climate change is currently an impossible task. “Once you get down to a small regional level, hurricanes are so rare and random that you would not be able to detect a robust trend even if there was one,” says John Nielsen-Gammon, Texas’ state climatologist.
Hurricane Harvey intensified overnight, becoming a Category 2 storm as it gathered force over the Gulf of Mexico. The speed at which it developed shocked national forecasters.
