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This is some of the newest land on the planet: Marker Wadden. Taking sand and mud from the lake floor, ecological engineers created seven islands enveloped by dunes and beaches. Now, a rich variety of plants, fish and insects have settled into that protected environment, along with vast numbers of breeding birds.
Spain is running out of water. It suffered a long ‘mega drought’, lack of rainfall and record temperatures. Now their water reservoirs are depleting. Over-exploitation and climate change are causing it to turn into a desert. 75% of their land is under the process of desertification. Can Spain come out of this?
Ocean creatures soak up huge amounts of humanity’s carbon mess. Should we value them like financial assets? Governments could confer legal rights on nature, effectively giving ecosystems the right to sue for damages—and incentivizing polluters to not damage them.
The harassment, abuse, and sometimes death of the marine observers who uphold sustainable seafood standards are the industry’s worst-kept secrets. Critics say the people and companies that earn the most money on tuna aren’t doing enough to secure their well-being.
This Hotel lists hotel, hostel and bed & breakfast recommendations from trusted experts like New York Times, Lonely Planet, Fodor’s, Frommers, CNN and many more.
The Overview Effect is a phenomenon chronicled by astronauts to describe a sudden sense of awe or divine recognition that they feel when they depart from the planet and then turn and look back at it. A space tourism industry is being built on the proposition of personal and existential transformation. But at what cost?
All too frequently, activists, politicians, and scientists reduce the all-consuming crisis of global warming to a question of greenhouse gas emissions: what drives them up, and how best to bring them down. The natural world and its nonhuman inhabitants are reduced to a series of models and equations.
Many of our coastal cities are imperiled, but none have plotted an escape quite as audacious as Jakarta’s. President Joko Widodo plans to pick up and move the capital, along with 7 million people.
Ocean water is saturated with salt, and undrinkable. Most of the freshwater is locked away in glaciers or deep underground. Less than one percent of it is available to us. So why can’t we just take all that seawater, filter out the salt, and have a nearly unlimited supply of clean, drinkable water?
Huge amounts of rice straw are left over after the harvest in Thailand. Farmers often burn it, which is terrible for the environment. A young entrepreneur has found a new use for the material. Turned into paper, it can replace plastic food packaging.
Life Without Plastic’s Dilutable Laundry Bar, packaged in a recyclable paper sleeve, can be broken down and dissolved in a 64-ounce bottle you already have on hand, filled with water from your own tap. The resultant mixture will handle up to 125 loads, the company says.
It’s a utopian fantasy, discover a ghost town and rebuild it in line with your ideals, but in Spain where there are nearly 3000 abandoned villages, some big dreamers have spent the past 3 decades doing just that. One of the first towns to be rediscovered was a tiny hamlet in the mountains of northern Navarra.
Infiltrating a pack of Silverback Mountain gorillas might seem like an impossible task, but a team of filmmakers did just that with the help of a robot baby gorilla. Nicknamed “spy gorilla,” the lifelike replica recorded never-before-seen footage of apes singing, fighting, and even farting in the jungles of Uganda.
As the climate warms, heat waves are growing longer, hotter, and more frequent. Since the 1960s, the average number of annual heat waves in 50 major American cities has tripled. They are also becoming more deadly. Humans have never lived on a planet this hot, and we’re totally unprepared for what’s to come.
Thwaites Glacier has long been the subject of dark speculation. If this mysterious glacier were to break down into icebergs and eventually collapse into the ocean—it might be more than a scientific curiosity. It might be the kind of event that changes the course of civilization.
By 2050 there could be more plastic in the ocean by weight, than fish. Plastic pollution is definitely one of the largest threats our oceans face today. Meet the engineers who are using rubbish-guzzling boats to stem the flow at its source.
Warmer temperatures lead to more air conditioning; more air conditioning leads to warmer temperatures. The problem posed by air conditioning resembles, in miniature, the problem we face in tackling the climate crisis. The solutions that we reach for most easily only bind us closer to the original problem.
China was praised for a law it passed in 2002 — the world’s first integrated law dedicated to combating desert expansion. With this goal in mind, China has carried out several projects that have been successful, including at one desert in northern China.
Operating far past its expected life span, the telescope captures data that answer some of space’s biggest questions—and make glorious images. “One of Hubble’s lasting achievements will be how it showed the public the wonders of the universe.”
While Iceland as a whole is experiencing the negative effects of climate change stronger than many other nations, Finnafjord actually aims to profit from the changing climate. The construction of a large container port is supposed to turn Iceland into a new hub for international merchant shipping.
Fast fashion’s core business model is fueled by low prices, rapid consumption and fast-changing trends — all of which are in direct tension with its sustainability mission. The global fashion industry generates a huge amount of waste – one full garbage truck of clothes is burned or sent to a landfill every second.
The lake was built by the British for irrigating nearby farmlands. But gradually it became a dumpsite for Salem’s municipal solid waste. In 2010 the Salem Citizen’s Forum (SCF) took over the work of cleaning the lake. Using the silt of the lake, the SCF created 45 small islands.
Once we trade dirty fossil fuels for clean energy, there’s no reason we can’t keep expanding the economy forever. This narrative may seem reasonable enough at first glance, but there are good reasons to think twice about it. One of them has to do with clean energy itself.
Taiwanese startup Space Apes has designed a solar-powered, reusable and sustainable water generator that extracts, purifies and condenses water from the air to make it ready to drink. The unit produces between 11 and 15 liters of water a day, covering the drinking water needs of six to eight adults.
Like her school-skipping compatriot Pippi Longstocking, the classic of children’s literature created by Swedish author Astrid Lindgren, Greta Thunberg loves calling bullshit on adults, their “nuanced” worldview and self-congratulating conspiracies.
Malibu homeowners banded together to address sea level rise. A decade later, they are at war with the city, the surfers, and each other. The choices are clear: Do nothing and lose the coast. Stall by dredging in sand, bouldering up revetments and emergency sea walls. Or look at long-term solutions.
Utah Division of Wildlife Resources drops hundreds of thousands of fish out of airplanes into their mountain lakes every summer to restock them for fishing and hiking season. Without these aerial fish dumps, the state’s high-altitude southern and central lakes would be fishless.
The climate crises will spell our doom, a disaster that’s not merely on its way—it’s already here. Rosecrans Baldwin embeds with the government agents and the doomsday experts preparing now for the plagues, and the panics, and the fast-approaching day when life on our warming planet finally falls apart.
Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is so remote that only 28 human beings have ever set foot on it. In the farthest reaches of Antarctica, a nightmare scenario of crumbling ice – and rapidly rising seas – could spell disaster for a warming planet.
Octopus-hunting freedivers, mounds of shark fins, and a close encounter with a leopard seal are among the judges’ selections for Oceanographic Magazine’s ocean photography awards.
Months of drought and high temperatures pushed the country to one of its worst-ever wildfire seasons. On New Year’s Eve the terrified citizens of New South Wales saw a glimpse of Australia’s new future.
The Veryovkina Cave is the deepest known cave on Earth. It took half a century and about 30 expeditions for Russian cave explorers to reach its record depth of 2,212 meters. Speleologists still think there is more to be discovered.
Before this underwater forest in the Gulf of Mexico disappears, scientists recently raced to search for shipworms and other sea life that could serve as incubators of unexpected medicines, churning out new lifesaving formulas and compounds that may not be found anywhere else on the planet.
One potential alternative food source – both for humans and the animals we eat – is algae. Microalgae is rich in protein, amino acids, fatty acids, and vitamins. Could the green stuff that appears on ponds and lakes after a particularly warm spell be the answer to the planet’s food security problems?
In 1988, Sabarmatee and her father Radhamohan bought an acre of degraded land in Nayagarh district of Odisha. They wanted to set up an experiment to see if a forest using organic techniques. Organic farming was not widespread in India at that time, therefore they had to rely on trial and error.
Is recycling worth it? When it first took off recycling was seen as one of the environmental movement’s great successes. But recent market forces have made more and more countries reconsider the cost of going green.
As National Geographic showed us, sea levels would rise by 216 feet if all the land ice on the planet were to melt. This would dramatically reshape the continents and drown many of the world’s major cities.
We were listening to air escaping up through water. We were so close to the ice that this ancient fizz was surprisingly loud. Though we humans never hear it above the surface, this is the sound the Antarctic makes every summer. And as the planet heats, the sound is getting louder.
In 2016, NASA used the Suomi NPP weather satellite to create a high resolution image of the earth at night. It can help us better understand the current developments and conflicts underway. The amount of light pollution is most severe in heavily populated areas, as well as in regions of high prosperity.
Even if nothing about our energy infrastructure or transportation system changed—and even if people kept eating chicken and pork and eggs and cheese—this one dietary change could achieve somewhere between 46 and 74 percent of the reductions needed to meet the target.
