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Toxic Toledo Algae Bloom Seen from Space
Posted by LiveScience: Stephanie Pappas on August 11th, 2014
LiveScience: An algae bloom in Lake Erie that left hundreds of thousands of people in Toledo, Ohio, and its surroundings without water for two days is visible in new satellite imagery.
The bloom appears as a cloudy green mass in the blue of Lake Erie. Toledo is in the lower left of the image, along the lake's shore.
The mayor of the city lifted a ban on drinking Toledo's water on Monday (Aug. 4), after two days in which residents were warned that water from the Collins Park water treatment plant was contaminated...
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Amazon rainforest once looked more like savannas of Africa than a jungle
Posted by LiveScience: Stephanie Pappas on July 8th, 2014
LiveScience: A series of square, straight and ringlike ditches scattered throughout the Bolivian and Brazilian Amazon were there before the rainforest existed, a new study finds. These human-made structures remain a mystery: They may have been used for defense, drainage, or perhaps ceremonial or religious reasons. But the new research addresses another burning question: whether and how much prehistoric people altered the landscape in the Amazon before the arrival of Europeans. "People have been affecting...
Why Australia’s wildfires are so bad
Posted by LiveScience: Stephanie Pappas on October 23rd, 2013
LiveScience: A dry, warm winter set the stage for dozens of wildfires currently threatening populated areas in New South Wales, Australia. The fires have destroyed hundreds of homes and sent smoke and ash into the air over Sydney. The region, which is now entering summer, also experienced hundreds of fires this January during a catastrophic heat wave. The past three months have been among the driest 10 percent on record in New South Wales (NSW), said Todd Lane, a meteorologist at the University of Melbourne....
Antarctica’s ecosystem is 33 million years old
Posted by LiveScience: Stephanie Pappas on May 28th, 2013
LiveScience: he modern ecosystem of icy Antarctica is some 33.6 million years old, new research finds, with a system dating back to the formation of the polar ice caps. The date is revealed by fossilized remnants of plankton found in Antarctic sediments, which show how plankton diversity plummeted when a big chill came along at the end of the Eocene Epoch and the beginning of the Oligocene Epoch. Before the transition, Earth was a toastier place, and a wide array of plankton survived even at the poles. The...
Big Melt Expected for Canadian Arctic Glaciers
Posted by LiveScience: Stephanie Pappas on March 7th, 2013
LiveScience: A fifth of Canada's Arctic Archipelago glaciers may disappear by the end of the century, contributing 1.4 inches (3.5 centimeters) to sea-level rise, new research finds. For the study, published online Thursday (March 7) in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, scientists used computer models to predict how the glaciers would respond to future climate change. The results were not reassuring. "Even if we assume that global warming is not happening quite so fast, it is still highly likely that...
Maya Collapse, Climate Change Linked In New Study That Points To Rainfall, Droughts
Posted by LiveScience: Stephanie Pappas on November 10th, 2012
LiveScience: Much has been made of the so-called 2012 Mayan apocalypse. But for the real Maya people, the end of the world came slowly and timed with historic droughts.
A new, ultra-detailed climate record from a cave in Belize reveals Classic Maya civilization collapsed over centuries as rain dried up, disrupting agriculture and causing instability that led to wars and the crumbling of large cities. A final major drought after the political collapse of the Maya may be what kept the civilization from bouncing...
Cloud Confusion Swirls at Center of Climate Debate
Posted by LiveScience: Stephanie Pappas on September 16th, 2011
LiveScience: This summer, a widely derided study claiming to overturn the scientific consensus on clouds and climate change kicked off a mini-whirlwind in the climate science community. This wasn't because the findings were revolutionary, but rather because of the public ruckus that arose around the study's publication. By the time the dust settled weeks later, the editor of the journal that carried the original study resigned, saying the paper should not have been published.
The paper, which had been published...
Climate Change Debunked? Not So Fast
Posted by LiveScience: Stephanie Pappas on July 28th, 2011
LiveScience: New research suggesting that cloud cover, not carbon dioxide, causes global warming is getting buzz in climate skeptic circles. But mainstream climate scientists dismissed the research as unrealistic and politically motivated.
"It is not newsworthy," Daniel Murphy, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) cloud researcher, wrote in an email to LiveScience.
The study, published July 26 in the open-access online journal Remote Sensing, got public attention when a writer for The...