Fires, dust storms, COVID impacted air quality in 2020

Important implications for food production and environmental monitoring.

Atlantic hurricanes don’t just come and go. They leave clues to their passage through the landscape that last centuries or more. Rice University scientists are using these natural archives to find signs of storms hundreds of years before satellites allowed us to watch them in real time.

The first comprehensive list of the threats to Australia’s most endangered plants and animals reveals blunt news about the future for some of the country’s favourite species.

Many of the worst-hit areas in Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York saw 6 to 10 inches of rain fall in just a few hours.

Wildfires in the western United States have been spreading to higher elevations due to warmer and drier conditions.

The most significant Arctic oasis is susceptible to climate change – researchers say that global warming is threatening the region’s ecosystem, and predict that the oasis will cease to exist.

The same clean air policies that can reduce fossil fuel emissions and help rein in climate change can also add up to 5 years onto people’s lives in the most polluted regions, while globally adding more than 2 years onto lives on average.

Although there are some important differences, rhesus macaques are considered a useful animal model for human pregnancy.

Setting fire to forest and agricultural land in Southeast Asia to prepare it for cultivation or grazing contributes to an estimated 59,000 premature deaths a year, say scientists.