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Archive for October 2nd, 2014
Court Blocks West Virginia Mountaintop Removal Coal Mine
Posted by Environment News Service: None Given on October 2nd, 2014
Environment News Service: A long court battle came to an end Tuesday when a federal judge upheld the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's denial of a permit for a large, contentious mountaintop removal coal mine in Appalachia, the Spruce No. 1 Mine.
Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia found no merit in the coal industry's arguments that Mingo Logan coal company should be allowed to remove a West Virginia mountaintop to get at coal deposits and dump the waste soil and rock...
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Drought Drains Already Diminished Aral Sea
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 2nd, 2014
Climate Central: The Aral Sea has been dying a long, slow death. This summer, another nail was driven into its coffin.
Starting in the 1950s, when Soviet authorities began programs that diverted water from its tributaries, the inland lake in Central Asia -- once the fourth largest in the world, bigger than Lake Huron -- has been shrinking. This summer, the eastern lobe of the remnant lake completely dried up for the first time in modern history.
While the diversion of river water is the main culprit behind...
Large Sediment Plumes Flowing from Greenland Glaciers, NASA Images Show
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on October 2nd, 2014
Yale Environment 360: Plumes of sediment-laden meltwater from southwest Greenland’s glaciers are easily recognizable in this NASA satellite image captured in early September. Meltwater at the top of the ice sheet starts out relatively clean, but as it flows through glacial channels down to the ground and out into the ocean, it picks up large amounts of sediment — a byproduct of the glacier scraping the bedrock. As a result, plumes, like the ones that appear light-blue in this photograph, are good markers for estimating...