Arctic
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Why less arctic ice means more mercury in your babies
Thin sea ice leads to a "bromine explosion" that turns gaseous mercury in the atmosphere into a toxic pollutant that falls on snow, land and ice and can accumulate in fish.
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Watch a jaw-dropping northern lights display
Here's the upside to a massive solar storm: Absolutely astonishing aurora borealis.
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Critical List: EU bans Iranian oil; snowy owls descend from Arctic
The European Union won’t be importing any more oil from Iran. President Obama’s going to lay out an energy agenda on Tuesday at the State of the Union. Thousands of snowy owls are descending from the Arctic to fly over places like Kansas and Missouri (and to deliver messages from Arctic Circle-based wizards, of course). […]
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Critical List: No Grand Canyon uranium mining; Supreme Court case on wetlands
The Obama administration will announce today that it's limiting uranium mining near the Grand Canyon.
And the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a major environmental case in which the Sacketts, a couple backed by the conservative property rights group Pacific Legal Foundation, claim the EPA unfairly restricted their use of the property by determining that it was a wetland.A Japanese whaling ship is holding three activists who boarded it to protest its activities.
Is there a bubble in shale gas stakes? -
Critical List: Toxic chemicals on the rise; baby seals in trouble
The EPA may retest water in Dimock, Pa., where residents have linked polluted water to fracking operations. In its first round of testing the town's water, the EPA declared it safe.
GM is fixing up the Volt in order to avoid in real-life battery fires like the ones that started during testing.
As winter sea ice disappears in the Arctic, fewer baby harp seals are making it.
The amount of toxic chemicals shunted into the environment went up 16 percent between 2009 and 2010, according a new EPA report.
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Feds approve Shell’s plan to spill oil in the Arctic
The Obama administration just approved Shell Oil's plan to drill for oil in the Arctic, and even though it got its way, the company is still whining about "unwarranted restrictions" attached to this approval (it can't drill when winter ice is present, boo fucking hoo). Drilling for oil is challenging even under "normal" circumstances, so […]
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Arctic methane turns out to be a huge problem after all
While the nerd herd was busy declaring the threat posed by gigantic new plumes of methane from the Arctic Ocean to be a non-starter, we all managed to miss the real methane menace, highlighted by climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe: surprise. Surprise and fear. The two real methane menaces are fear and surprise. The bottom line: […]
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Methane in the Arctic: The end of the world, or what?
Russian scientists have discovered that the Arctic is releasing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of enormous plumes of methane from the seafloor directly into earth's atmosphere. The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern […]
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Polar bears may be driven to cannibalism by climate change
If you watch nature shows, you know that male bears see cubs as tasty little McNuggets with fur, so it's not like one bear eating another is a big deal. Except that in the Arctic, polar bears are increasingly deprived of the sea ice they rely on to access seals and other tasty mammalian treats. […]