Climatic and Environmental Convulsions
GPS devices find huge water loss in western US
08/24/2014 17:30
About 63 trillion gallons of water have been lost to drought in the western United States, enough to blanket the region with 4 inches of water, according to a study published Thursday.
Researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, arrived at the...
Greenland ice melting at record speed
08/24/2014 17:21
Satellite data shows ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are declining at record speed. The annual loss of ice has doubled in the case of Greenland and tripled in the West Antarctic compared to figures from 2009.
Melting ice flows into Greenland's Ilulissat fjord.
Scientists from the Alfred...
Drought leaves California homes without water
08/24/2014 17:13
Hundreds of rural San Joaquin Valley residents no longer can get drinking water from their home faucets because California's extreme drought has dried up their individual wells, government officials and community groups said.
The situation has become so dire that the Tulare County Office of...
Persistent drought is causing Earth’s crust to rise in the West
08/23/2014 23:25
CALIFORNIA – The record-breaking California drought is so bad that monitoring stations used to study earthquakes can detect the drying ground rising up. Measurements of these subtle movements, made using GPS instruments, suggest that the western United States is missing some 62 trillion...
Alaska's Shrinking Glaciers Seen from Space
08/16/2014 16:11
In a remote corner of southeastern Alaska, two glaciers are retreating at a rapid pace. Compared with a vintage satellite photo of the region, an image taken from space last year reveals just how much the glaciers have shrunk over the past 26 years.
The Novatak and East Novatak glaciers in...
Nicaraguans told to eat iguanas as drought threatens food crisis
08/15/2014 19:17
A boy holds up an iguana for sale on the highway in the north of Managua. Nicaraguans are being encouraged to eat the reptiles as a nutritious alternative to more conventional meat. Photograph: Oswaldo Rivas/Reuters
Nicaraguans struggling to afford meat as the country suffers its worst drought in...
Thinning Arctic Snow Could Alter North Pole Ecosystem
08/14/2014 21:30
Spring snow in the western Arctic has thinned by about a third and, in some regions, is less than half as thick as it was in the 1950s, decades of research has revealed.
A team of researchers analyzed data from NASA's IceBridge air surveys from 2009 to 2013, data from U.S. Army Corps of...
Kerry: Climate Change ‘Biggest Challenge of All That We Face Right Now’
08/14/2014 21:23
The global impact of climate change is “the biggest challenge of all that we face right now,” Secretary of State John Kerry told an audience in Hawaii Wednesday, putting an issue he feels passionately about at the center of a speech entitled “U.S. Vision for Asia-Pacific Engagement.”
“The science...
Panama Canal chief: drought could limit shipping
08/11/2014 22:04
The head of the Panama Canal Authority says officials might be forced to limit the draft of ships by the end of this year or early in 2015 if a drought continues and lowers the level of lakes that feed the waterway's locks.
Jorge Luis Quintano tells Panama's Channel 2 television station that...
32 Tornadoes in a Day! Twister Clusters on the Rise
08/09/2014 21:55
Less means more, when it comes to tornadoes in the United States.
There are fewer days with tornadoes compared with 60 years ago, but when storms do hit, there are more tornadoes per day, according to a study published Aug. 6 in the journal Climate Dynamics.
"We may be less threatened by...
3-D Image of Joplin's 2011-05-22 Tornado
