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Environmental News Network -- Know Your Environment
A few years before NASA astronaut Jessica Meir began learning to fly a spacecraft for her upcoming trip to the International Space Station, she was in flight-training of a different kind: teaching bar-headed geese how to fly in a wind tunnel at the University of British Columbia.
Sediments on the surfaces of a glacier in eastern B.C. and elsewhere in the world are acting as a sponge and absorbing large amounts of contaminants that are contained in glacial meltwater.
Late in the prehistoric Silurian Period, around 420 million years ago, a devastating mass extinction event wiped 23 percent of all marine animals from the face of the planet.
For years, scientists struggled to connect a mechanism to this mass extinction, one of the 10 most dramatic ever recorded in Earth’s history. Now, researchers from Florida State University have confirmed that this event, referred to by scientists as the Lau/Kozlowskii extinction, was triggered by an all-too-familiar culprit: rapid and widespread depletion of oxygen in the global oceans.
Their study, published today in the journal Geology, resolves a longstanding paleoclimate mystery, and raises urgent concerns about the ruinous fate that could befall our modern oceans if well-established trends of deoxygenation persist and accelerate.
Unlike other famous mass extinctions that can be tidily linked to discrete, apocalyptic calamities like meteor impacts or volcanic eruptions, there was no known, spectacularly destructive event responsible for the Lau/Kozlowskii extinction.
Read more at: Florida State University
For years, scientists struggled to connect a mechanism to this mass extinction, one of the 10 most dramatic ever recorded in Earth's history. Now, researchers from Florida State University have confirmed that this event, referred to by scientists as the Lau/Kozlowskii extinction, was triggered by an all-too-familiar culprit: rapid and widespread depletion of oxygen in the global oceans. (Photo Credit: Stephen Bilenky)
An indigenous farming technique that’s been around for thousands of years provides the basis for restoring rain forests stripped clear of trees by gold mining and other threats.
Arctic sea-ice has decreased rapidly during the last decades in concert with substantial global surface warming.
As Hurricane Dorian was upgraded to a Category 3 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, NASA’s fleet of satellites were gathering data during the day to assist weather forecasters and scientists.
