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Climate Change Impacts on Mountain Plant Life
Mountains are great places to go to see nature in its most pristine state. The mountains of the northwestern United States are particularly beautiful because they are home to outstanding trees and vegetation. According to a new study, that mountain vegetation has been significantly impacted by climate change in the past 60 years. Unlike what…
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How Do Scientists Know a Volcano Is About to Erupt?
Mount Merapi in Indonesia is expected to erupt at any moment, and Indonesian government officials have begun to evacuate the people living in villages near the volcano. The volatile mountain’s last eruption was in 2006, and two people were killed when a plume of scorching gas, rocks and volcanic ash spewed down its slopes, according…
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Space tourism will worsen climate change
Have $200,000 to spend on a seat into space? You may want to re-think the expenditure given a new study in Geophysical Research Letters that shows space tourism will likely aggravate global climate change. Using sophisticated modeling, the researchers found that the biggest impact of a rise in space tourism on global temperatures won’t be…
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Deforestation takes center-stage at U.N. talks
Delegates at a global U.N. meeting to preserve natural resources were on Tuesday trying to agree on ways to deploy about $4 billion in cash to help developing nations save tropical forests. The talks in the Japanese city of Nagoya are aimed at setting new 2020 targets to protect plant and animal species, a protocol…
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Great Marine Protection Areas
The Pacific Island nation of Kiribati has established the world’s largest marine protected area of coral reefs and fish populations, but both of which are threatened by overfishing and climate change. The Phoenix Islands Protected Area conserves one of the world’s last intact coral reef archipelago ecosystems with eight coral reefs, two submerged reef systems…
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Microbes Rapidly Consume Methane from Gulf Oil Disaster
The Deepwater Horizon spill was a horrible environmental disaster which caused the release of massive amounts of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Methane, a natural greenhouse gas, was also released during the catastrophe. However, researchers have found that the methane is being consumed by microbes at a rate 10 to 100 times faster…
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Yemen’s capital ‘will run out of water by 2025’
[SANA’A, YEMEN] Water shortages in Yemen will squeeze agriculture to such an extent that 750,000 jobs could disappear and incomes could drop by a quarter within a decade, according to a report. Poor water management and the enormous consumption of water for the farming of the popular stimulant khat are blamed for the predicted water…
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Island nation announces Mongolia-sized sanctuary for whales and dolphins
Dolphins, whales, and dugongs will be safe from hunting in the waters surrounding the Pacific nation of Palau. At the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Nagoya, Japan, Palau’s Minister of the Environment, Natural Resources and Tourism, Harry Fritz, announced the establishment of a marine mammal sanctuary covering over 230,000 square miles (60,000 square kilometers)…
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Naples dump on hold, garbage piles up in the streets
The Italian government has put the opening of a new waste dump near Naples on hold after weeks of protests by residents, but demonstrators said the proposal was not enough and garbage continued to pile up in the streets. The head of the civil protection authority, sent to Naples by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to…
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Tropical Storm Richard aims for Belize, may become hurricane
Tropical Storm Richard dumped rain on Honduras on Sunday and was seen becoming a hurricane before hitting Belize and Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula later in the day. Richard had top sustained winds near 70 miles per hour and was expected to barrel through southern Mexico and emerge in Mexico’s oil-rich Bay of Campeche on Tuesday as…