Shale Gas Boom Now Visible From Space
Oil companies at the heart of the US shale oil boom are burning off enough gas to power all the homes in Chicago and Washington combined in a practice causing growing concern about the waste of resources and damage to the environment.
Cities Affect Temperatures for Thousands of Miles
In a new study that shows the extent to which human activities are influencing the atmosphere, scientists have concluded that the heat generated by everyday activities in metropolitan areas alters the character of the jet stream and other major atmospheric systems. The world’s most populated and energy-intensive metropolitan areas are along the east and west coasts of the North American and Eurasian continents…
California Fracking Lawsuit Charges State Has Done Insufficient Job Of Regulating Practice
An environmental group has filed suit against the state of California for doing what it deemed an insufficient job of regulating the controversial process of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.”
Record High Radiation Found in Fukushima Fish: TEPCO
A fish contaminated with radiation levels more than 2,500 times the legal limit has been caught near Japan’s crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
A River of Haze
Air quality has emerged as a significant problem for India and Bangladesh in the past decade. A recent study found that levels of air pollution in large Indian cities increased at some of the fastest rates in the world between 2002 and 2010, faster even than rapidly-growing Chinese cities.
In Japan, a Painfully Slow Sweep
More than a year and a half since the nuclear crisis, much of Japan’s post-Fukushima cleanup remains primitive, slapdash and bereft of the cleanup methods lauded by government scientists as effective in removing harmful radioactive cesium from the environment.
A Rising Tide of Noise Is Now Easy to See
The oceanic roar originates because of the remarkable, and highly selective, way in which different kinds of waves propagate through seawater. While sunlight can penetrate no more than a few hundred feet, sound waves can travel for hundreds of miles before diminishing to nothingness. In recent decades, raucous clatter have been added to the primal chorus…
Mercury in Coastal Fog, A Study
An ongoing investigation of elevated mercury levels in coastal fog in California suggests that upwelling of deep ocean water along the coast brings mercury to the surface, where it enters the atmosphere and is absorbed by fog.
Tell the BLM: Don’t Frack California
California still has zero regulation to protect our health and water from dangerous fracking, but that’s not stopping the Bureau of Land Management from auctioning off almost 18,000 acres of land for oil drilling and fracking next week.