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Environmental News Network -- Know Your Environment
Hydropower dams may conjure images of the massive Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state or the Three Gorges Dam in Hubei, China — the world’s largest electricity-generating facility. But not all dams are the stuff of documentaries. Tens of thousands of smaller hydroelectric dams exist around the world, and all indications suggest that the number could substantially increase in the future.
Mining on the ocean floor could do irreversible damage to deep-sea ecosystems, says a new study of seabed mining proposals around the world.
Facing a climate crisis, we may someday spray sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to form a cloud that cools the Earth, but suddenly stopping the spraying would have a severe global impact on animals and plants, according to the first study on the potential biological impacts of geoengineering, or climate intervention.
It’s said on sticky summer days: “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.” That holds true in the winter too, and could hold the key to the future of snowpack and water resources in the American West.
An international team of researchers studying globally declining shark populations report today that they used carbon isotopes as biochemical markers in shark muscle tissue to identify where in the oceans the mobile predators have been feeding, in the hope that such analyses provide a useful tool for conservation. Details appear in the current issue of Nature Ecology & Evolution.
New research from a Florida State University scientist has revealed a surprising relationship between surging atmospheric carbon dioxide and flower blooms in a remote tropical forest.
