Earth Wise

The wildfires that burned vast amounts of Canada’s boreal forests in 2023 produced enormous amounts of smoke that found its way into American cities, working its way down the eastern seaboard and even producing unsafe air in Florida. Researchers at Cal Tech and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory analyzed the carbon emissions associated with these fires […]

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is one of the foremost natural wonders of the world and is a major tourist attraction.  It is well-known that the changing climate is threatening the survival of the Great Barrier Reef as well as other coral reefs around the world.  A recent study by researchers at the University of Queensland […]

Natural disasters continue to be major threats for people, just as they always have been.  But modern technology has greatly improved our ability to prepare for and, in many cases, escape from the worst effects of these events.  A good example is hurricane forecasting.  Nowadays, there is plenty of warning when a major hurricane is […]

The Thwaites Glacier is an enormous Antarctic Glacier.  Its area is larger than that of Florida – in fact, larger than 30 other U.S. states – and it is melting.  It has been retreating for 80 years but has accelerated its pace in the past 30.  Its shedding of ice into the ocean already contributes […]

Rooftop solar power in the United States has increased by a factor of ten over the past decade and the majority of that growth has been in the past six or seven years.  At this point, about 7% of American homes have solar panels on their roofs – about 5 million in total.  Rooftop solar […]

Scientists from the CICERO Center for International Climate Research in Norway along with researchers at the University of Reading in the UK have analyzed how global warming can combine with normal variations in the weather to produce decades-long periods of very rapid changes involving both extreme temperatures and extreme amounts of rainfall. Many parts of […]

There are seven species of sea turtles that inhabit the world’s oceans. Six of the seven sea turtle species – all of them except the flatback – are present in U.S. waters, and are listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act.  Sea turtles, which have been around for more than 100 million […]

Glaciers around the world are shrinking or disappearing.  Melting glaciers and ice sheets are the biggest contributors to global sea level rise and ice loss rates are continuing to increase.  Even if the world somehow manages to meet the climate goal of limiting warming to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, the world will still […]

Glass has been used for thousands of years to make everything from windows to bottles to microscope slides.  For all that time, most glass has been in the form of soda lime silicate glass, which is made by melting quartz sand with carbon-based ingredients – soda ash and limestone – at high melting temperatures of […]

The sights of coffee plantations in California and vineyards in Britain are becoming more common as the climate changes. But behind what sounds like a success story is a sobering one: climate change is shifting the regions suitable for growing food all around the world.  According to a new study by researchers from the University […]