The majority of U.S. drinking water systems rely on groundwater, as do America’s farms.  Even though groundwater is a crucial resource for the country, there is no central oversight or even monitoring of its status across the country.  The health of the country’s aquifers is difficult to gauge. The New York Times spent months amassing […]

In the northern part of Yellowstone National Park, an historically large bison herd is hampering the comeback of quaking aspen trees, whose numbers were greatly diminished by decades of over-browsing by elk.  Restoring the balance of ecosystems at Yellowstone is proving to be a complicated matter. Long ago, the bison population in the Great Plains […]

The European heatwave in the summer of 2003 resulted in at least 30,000 deaths with more than 14,000 in France alone. At the time, such a heatwave was considered to be a once-in-a-hundred-year event. But the warming climate is dramatically changing the odds for deadly heatwaves. A new study by the ETH Institute in Zurich has […]

As wind and solar energy play a growing part in our energy system, the need for grid-scale energy storage is growing as well.  An historic form of energy storage and still the largest in installed capacity is pumped hydro storage, which makes use of the potential energy contained in having water sitting at a higher […]

Emperor penguins are the tallest and heaviest of all living penguin species.  The loss of sea ice in Antarctica last year has led to unprecedented breeding failure in some emperor penguin colonies. In a study published by the British Antarctic Survey, researchers found that no chicks survived from four of the five known emperor penguin […]

Last year, the monarch butterfly was officially designated as endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.  Estimates are that the overall population of the species has dropped between 20% and 90% over the past several decades.  The migratory western population of monarchs is at the greatest risk of extinction, having declined by as […]

Many of us are careful to put our plastic trash into the appropriate recycling bins hoping that we are helping to stem the global tide of plastic waste.  But many plastics are not recyclable at all and recycling those that are is not even always a good thing.  Breaking down plastics can generate polluting microplastics […]

There have been three offshore wind projects previously approved by utility regulators in New Jersey.  New Jersey is vying to become an East Coast leader in the fast-growing offshore wind industry and now developers have proposed four new projects off the New Jersey Shore. Two of the projects would be located far out to sea […]

Climate change is taking its toll on forests, farms, freshwater sources, and the economy, but ocean ecosystems remain the epicenter of global warming.  In fact, oceans have absorbed more than 90% of the excess heat from greenhouse gas emissions since the 1970s. As a result, many marine fish species are responding to ocean warming by […]

A study by the University of Colorado Boulder has found that more than half of the world’s largest lakes have shrunk over the last three decades.  This is a very big problem because about one-quarter of the Earth’s population lives in the basin of a drying lake.  People depend on lakes for drinking water and […]