http://www.enn.com/ ENN RSS News http://www.enn.com/ecosystems/article/40160 Besides the obvious benefits they bring, it looks like we owe our very existence to plants, which helped prevent the Earth from freezing over during the past 25 million years. http://www.enn.com/wildlife/article/40157 Scientists from Texas are batty over a new discovery which could lead to the single most important medical breakthrough in human history—significantly longer lifespans. http://www.enn.com/wildlife/article/40156 The rain band near the equator that determines the supply of freshwater to nearly a billion people throughout the tropics and subtropics has been creeping north for more than 300 years, probably because of a warmer world, according to research published in the July issue of Nature Geoscience. If the band continues to migrate at just less than a mile (1.4 kilometers) a year, which is the average for all the years it has been moving north, then some Pacific islands near the equator -- even those that currently enjoy abundant rainfall -- may be drier within decades and starved of freshwater by midcentury or sooner. The prospect of additional warming because of greenhouse gases means that situation could happen even sooner. http://www.enn.com/ecosystems/article/40153 http://www.enn.com/wildlife/article/40152 The extremely well-preserved remains of a 66-million-year-old hadrosaur, known as a "dinosaur mummy," have just yielded soft-tissue skin structures and organic molecules, according to a new study. While research on other dinosaurs has led to the identification of organic material linked to bones, co-author Roy Wogelius told Discovery News that "this is the first dinosaur to reveal intact skin structure and associated organic molecules." http://www.enn.com/wildlife/article/40144 Dust in the wind is rewriting the cycle of life in the mountains. Throughout memory the warmth of spring has begun the mountain snowmelt, bringing life-giving water to greening plants so they can blossom and renew their species. But now, scientists say, the timing is being thrown off by desert dust stirred as global warming dries larger areas and human activity increases in those regions. http://www.enn.com/ecosystems/article/40140 The Amazon rainforest, one of the planet's most precious and besieged natural resources, is even more fragile than realized. http://www.enn.com/ecosystems/article/40139 Desperate to halt the erosion of Louisiana’s coast, officials there are talking about breaking Mississippi River levees south of New Orleans to restore the nourishing flow of muddy water into the state’s marshes. But in a new analysis, scientists at Louisiana State University say inland dams trap so much sediment that the river no longer carries enough to halt marsh loss, especially now that global warming is speeding a rise in sea levels. http://www.enn.com/wildlife/article/40136 The Sahara Desert is crossing the Mediterranean, according to Italian environmental protection group Legambiente which warns that the livelihoods of 6.5 million people living along its shores could be at risk. "Desertification isn't limited to Africa," said Legambiente Vice President Sebastiano Venneri. "Without a serious change of direction in economic and environmental policies, the risk will become concrete and irreversible." http://www.enn.com/wildlife/article/40120 Though it sounds at first like a marine biologist’s take on political correctness, respecting the cultural diversity of whales may be essential to saving them. http://www.enn.com/wildlife/article/40110 The new Climate Change, Wildlife and Wildlands Toolkit for Formal and Informal Educators is an updated and expanded version of the award-winning (2001 Public Relations Society of America Bronze Anvil Award for Interactive Communications and 2002 Telly Award) and very popular (over 40,000 kits distributed in all 51 states and territories and over a dozen countries across the world) Climate Change, Wildlife and Wildlands Toolkit for Teachers and Interpreters first published in 2001. http://www.enn.com/wildlife/article/40105 University of Alberta researchers conducting a water study in the Mackenzie River Delta have found a dramatically higher delivery of mercury from the Mackenzie River to the Arctic Ocean than determined in previous studies. http://www.enn.com/ecosystems/article/40102 An amazing new picture from space reveals a volcanic eruption in its earliest stage, with a huge plume of ash and steam billowing skyward and creating a shock wave in the atmosphere. http://www.enn.com/ecosystems/article/40101 Arctic nations are promising to avoid new "Cold War" scrambles linked to climate change, but military activity is stirring in a polar region where a thaw may allow oil and gas exploration or new shipping routes. http://www.enn.com/wildlife/article/40099 The ancient plants are dying in the park, the southern-most boundary of their limited growing region, scientists say. Already finicky reproducers, Joshua trees are the victim of global warming and its symptoms -- including fire and drought -- plus pollution and the proliferation of non-native plants. Experts expect the Joshuas to vanish entirely from the southern half of the state within a century. http://www.enn.com/ecosystems/article/40098 In the 1960s, a group of businessmen bought 16,000 acres of swampy bottomland along the Ouachita River in northern Louisiana and built miles of levee around it. They bulldozed its oak and cypress trees and, when the land dried out, turned it into a soybean farm. Now two brothers who grew up nearby are undoing all that work. In what experts are calling the biggest levee-busting operation ever in North America, the brothers plan to return the muddy river to its ancient floodplain, coaxing back plants and animals that flourished there when President Thomas Jefferson first had the land surveyed in 1804. http://www.enn.com/wildlife/article/40094 The ocean is warming about 50 per cent faster than reported two years ago, according to an update of the latest climate science. A report compiling research presented at a science congress in Copenhagen in March says recent observations are near the worst-case predictions of the 2007 report by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. http://www.enn.com/ecosystems/article/40092 A team of NOAA-supported scientists from the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, Louisiana State University, and the University of Michigan is forecasting that the “dead zone”� off the coast of Louisiana and Texas in the Gulf of Mexico this summer could be one of the largest on record. The dead zone is an area in the Gulf of Mexico where seasonal oxygen levels drop too low to support most life in bottom and near-bottom waters. http://www.enn.com/ecosystems/article/40079 The US Federal government released a major report today. The report summarizes the science and the impacts of climate change on the United States, now and in the future. It focuses on climate change impacts in different regions of the U.S. and on various aspects of society and the economy such as energy, water, agriculture, and health. The report is the work of 12 federal agencies including the EPA, DOD,COMMERCE, NASA, and others.It’s written in plain language, with the goal of better informing public and private decision making at all levels. http://www.enn.com/ecosystems/article/40074 Ancient Australian forests are key to fighting climate change and contain the world's most dense carbon store, eclipsing tropical rainforests as efficient greenhouse gas absorbers, scientists said on Tuesday. http://www.enn.com/ecosystems/article/40073 Conservation projects in California's state parks face a bleak future, if cuts proposed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger go through. http://www.enn.com/ecosystems/article/40071 Researchers here have used sediment from the deep ocean bottom to reconstruct a record of ancient climate that dates back more than the last half-million years. The record, trapped within the top 20 meters (65.6 feet) of a 400-meter (1,312-foot) sediment core drilled in 2005 in the North Atlantic Ocean by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, gives new information about the four glacial cycles that occurred during that period. New research was presented June 15th at the Chapman Conference on Abrupt Climate Change at Ohio State University's Byrd Polar Research Center. The meeting is jointly sponsored by the American Geophysical Union and the National Science Foundation. Harunur Rashid, a post-doctoral fellow at the Byrd Center, explained that experts have been trying to capture a longer climate record for this part of the ocean for nearly a half-century. "We've now generated a climate record from this core that has a very high temporal resolution, one that is decipherable at increments of 100 to 300 years," he said. http://www.enn.com/ecosystems/article/40065 A Purdue University study shows that introducing a new hybrid of the American chestnut tree would not only bring back the all-but-extinct species, but also put a dent in the amount of carbon in the Earth's atmosphere. http://www.enn.com/wildlife/article/40064 The annual melting of Arctic sea ice is trending toward another record-low. While it's still too early to say whether the 2009 melt will exceed the record 2007 melt -- the annual low-point isn't reached until September -- the trend line for 2009 for the first time has dipped below 2007, according to the latest data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center. http://www.enn.com/wildlife/article/40059 The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will host public meetings and accept public comments on its proposed Preferred Alternative plan that addresses the risks to human health and the environment at the Palos Verdes Shelf, located near Los Angeles, Calif. The Palos Verdes Shelf site is a large area of DDT- and PCB-contaminated sediment located in the ocean off the coast of the Palos Verdes peninsula south of Los Angeles. The offshore site stretches from Point Fermin in the southeast to Redondo Canyon in the northwest, a distance of about 9 miles. The EPA’s Preferred Alternative plan is an interim remedy that proposes institutional controls, monitored natural recovery and a containment cap. Construction is expected to take 3 years and cost an estimated $36,000,000.