cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/4394432

Archived

A giant oil slick that leaked into the Black Sea near the port city of Novorossiysk in southern Russia’s Krasnodar region on Friday is nearing the shores of the Russian-annexed Crimean Peninsula, according to Greenpeace.

Dmitry Markin, an expert at Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe, told Russian investigative news outlet IStories on Wednesday that the spill demonstrated that profiting from oil sales was “more important for the current Russian regime than the safety of nature and its citizens.”

The oil spill, which took place at a marine terminal belonging to the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) near Novorossiysk on Friday, was the twelfth known leak off Russia’s Black Sea coast this year, according to independent news outlet Agentstvo.

The leak is also the largest since the wreck of the Volgoneft 212 and Volgoneft 239 tankers in December, each reportedly carrying over 4,000 tonnes of oil, Agentstvo added.

[...]

“Another oil spill off the coast clearly shows that in Russia environmental safety is increasingly being sacrificed for the sake of the oil industry,” Markin told IStories, accusing the authorities of “turning a blind eye to violations and helping oil companies cover up incidents” and noting that environmental monitoring efforts had weakened sharply amid the increase in political oppression in the country.

[...]

According to Greenpeace, the pollution forms a continuous film, which poses a great risk to living organisms, as the film instantly blocks contact with oxygen. Birds will be the first to suffer, as they will come into contact with petroleum products when landing on the water and diving (for example, in search of food). In addition to birds, marine mammals and other marine animals will also fall victim to the oil spill.

The seasons set the rhythm of life. Living things, including humans, adjust the timing of their annual activities to exploit resources and conditions that fluctuate through the year.

The study of this timing, known as “phenology”, is an age-old form of human observation of nature. But today, we can also watch phenology from space.

With decades-long archives of satellite imagery, we can use computing to better understand seasonal cycles of plant growth. However, methods for doing this are often based on the assumption of simple seasonal cycles and distinct growing seasons.

This works well in much of Europe, North America and other high-latitude places with strong winters. However, this method can struggle in the tropics and in arid regions. Here, satellite-based estimates of plant growth can vary subtly throughout the year, without clear-cut growing seasons.

New research suggests that the atmosphere will become more turbulent as climate change makes the air less stable.

The University of Reading used 26 of the latest global climate models to study how warming temperatures affect jet streams at around 35,000 feet, a typical cruising altitude for a passenger airline.

As jet streams change they create stronger wind shear, the differences in wind speed at different heights.

PhD researcher at the University of Reading and lead author, Joana Medeiros said: "Increased wind shear and reduced stability work together to create favourable conditions for clear-air turbulence - the invisible, sudden jolts that can shake aircraft without warning.

"Unlike turbulence caused by storms, clear-air turbulence cannot be seen on radar, making it difficult for pilots to avoid." she said.

The cooling La Niña weather phenomenon may return between September and November, but even if it does, global temperatures are expected to be above average, the United Nations has said.

La Niña is a naturally occurring climate phenomenon that cools surface temperatures in the central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. It brings changes in winds, pressure and rainfall patterns.

Conditions oscillate between La Niña and its opposite, El Niño, with neutral conditions in between.

After a brief spell of weak La Niña conditions, neutral conditions have persisted since March, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said.

The project’s four development blocks are owned by two consortia, which include the British-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto, a number of Chinese and East Asian companies and the Guinea government.

A fault line on the Canadian border, thought to be dormant for tens of millions of years, could cause a major earthquake, a new study has revealed.

The Tintina fault stretches about 600 miles from northeastern British Columbia into Alaska. It was previously thought to have last been active around 40 million years ago.

But a study published in Geophysical Research Letters earlier this month found signs of more recent activity.

New topographic data collected from satellites, airplanes and drones showed about an 80-mile-long segment of the fault where 2.6 million-year-old and 132,000-year-old geological formations are laterally shifted across the fault.

Archived link of the article

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5710118

The Arctic island of Svalbard is so reliably frigid that humanity bet its future on the place. Since 2008, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault — set deep in frozen soil known as permafrost — has accepted nearly 1.4 million samples of more than 6,000 species of critical crops. But, the island is warming six to seven times faster than the rest of the planet, making even winters freakishly hot, at least by Arctic standards. Indeed, in 2017, an access tunnel to the vault flooded as permafrost melted, though the seeds weren’t impacted.

This February, a team of scientists was working on Svalbard when irony took hold. Drilling into the soil, they gathered samples of bacteria that proliferate when the ground thaws. These microbes munch on organic matter and burp methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas and significant driver of global warming. Those emissions are potentially fueling a feedback loop in the Arctic: As more soil thaws, more methane is released, leading to more thawing and more methane, and on and on.

Full Article

This year, Australia has experienced record-breaking floods, tropical cyclones, heatwaves on land and in the ocean, drought, coral bleaching, coastal erosion and devastating algal blooms. Over the past five years, insured losses from extreme events have risen to A$4.5 billion annually – more than double the 30-year average.

But even as damage from climate change intensifies, political change overseas is threatening Australia’s ability to track what’s happening now, and predict what will happen next.

The United States has historically been a world leader in earth observation systems and freely sharing the gathered data. Sharing of data, expertise and resources between scientists in the US and Australia makes possible the high-quality weather, climate and ocean monitoring and forecasting we rely on.

But this is no longer guaranteed. Under the Trump administration, key US scientific institutions and monitoring programs are facing deep cuts. These cuts aren’t just cosmetic – they will end essential data gathering. Australia has long relied on these data sources. When they dry up, it will make it much harder for scientists to look ahead.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/39422499

Archived

• China's proposed coal mine developments risk creating an oversupply and derailing climate goals, according to Global Energy Monitor.
• The scale of China's coal ambitions threatens to overwhelm its own, and global, climate goals, with the country accounting for 60% of all proposed mine capacity worldwide.
• Without drastically scaling back plans for new mine capacity, the world could see a massive rise in potent methane emissions that would make it all but impossible to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement, said Dorothy Mei, project manager of the Global Coal Mine Tracker at GEM.

[...]

More than 450 sites are in development across China, with nearly 40% under construction or in test operation, according to the California-based researcher, which promotes clean energy use. If they are all built, their combined capacity of 1.35 billion tons a year would surpass that operating in Indonesia and Australia, the biggest exporters of the fuel for power generation and steelmaking.

The scale of China’s coal ambitions threatens to overwhelm its own, and global, climate goals. The country accounts for 60% of all proposed mine capacity worldwide, and its buildout alone would generate 80% of the methane emissions tied to planned projects, GEM said. Methane is more than 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.

“Without drastically scaling back plans for new mine capacity, the world could see a massive rise in potent methane emissions that would make it all but impossible to reach the goals of the Paris Agreement,” said Dorothy Mei, project manager of the Global Coal Mine Tracker at GEM.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/39085412

Archived

The global landscape of energy investment is experiencing a significant shift, with coal-fired power plants receiving unprecedented attention despite international climate commitments. Global approvals for coal-fired plants have reached their highest level since 2015, marking a dramatic reversal of the anticipated decline in fossil fuel investments.

China stands at the forefront of this coal renaissance, having commenced construction on approximately 100 gigawatts of new coal plants in 2024 alone. This massive expansion represents a capacity equivalent to the entire existing coal fleet of countries like Germany and Japan combined.

[...]

In 2024, a “resurgence” in construction of new coal-fired power plants in China is “undermining the country’s clean-energy progress”, says a joint report by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) and Global Energy Monitor (GEM).

[...]

This surge in coal investment presents a stark contradiction to global climate goals. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), coal remains the largest source of energy-related emissions, accounting for a staggering 45% of the global total. The continued expansion of coal capacity threatens to undermine international efforts to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

[...]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/39026396

Archived

China needs to cut steel output from the coal-powered blast furnace process by more than 90 million metric tons from 2024's level to achieve its green steel target this year, researchers said in a report published on Tuesday.

The global steel industry is responsible for around 8% of the world's carbon dioxide emissions and China accounts for more than half of global steel output.

[...]

China has lagged far behind its global peers in terms of electric arc-furnace steel share. The average share is around 30% globally, 71.8% in the United States, 58.8% in India and 26.2% in Japan, [a report by the Helsinki-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air] said.

From 2021 to the first half of 2025, China's blast furnace capacity utilisation rose from 85.6% to 88.6%, while electric-arc furnace utilisation fell from 58.9% to 48.6%, it added.

[...]

"A credible strategy to curb emission-intensive production and rein in excess capacity would not only tackle the sector's structural issues but also ease global tensions," said Belinda Schaepe, an analyst at the Helsinki-based centre.

[...]

Preliminary data from a NASA-funded Greenland survey point to a two-degree centigrade rise in regional ocean water temperatures in less than a decade.

For the first time ever, a team of researchers took the data from a subglacial Greenland channel in February of this year using a custom-built, remotely operated vehicle equipped with sonar, laser-ranging and a mass spectrometer.

Preliminarily, what we've been able to show is, at least during this year, ocean water in this region is almost two degrees warmer than it was less than 10 years ago, Britney Schmidt, a Cornell University astrobiologist and the ongoing Icefin project’s principal investigator, tells me in Reykjavik. It's crazy amounts of warming; we're losing this ice very rapidly and it’s much warmer than I would have expected; two degrees in 10 years is insane, she says.

One of the last wild zones on the planet, the sea floor is a coveted frontier for companies and countries eager to access minerals that are in high demand for emerging technologies such as electric cars.

Particularly coveted are potato-sized nodules containing cobalt, nickel, copper and manganese, that are found in abundance on the seabed in the central Pacific Ocean.

Companies eager to vacuum up these polymetallic nodules say they can do it with minimal risk to the deep-sea environment.

But ocean defenders have battled against what they see as the advent of an industry that will threaten isolated ecosystems that are not yet well understood.

That threat was underscored by European scientists who presented findings this week on the sidelines of a meeting in Kingston, Jamaica of the International Seabed Authority, which is trying to finalize future rules for seabed mining.

A first-of-its-kind video showing the ground cracking during a major earthquake is even more remarkable than previously thought. It not only captures a ground motion never caught on video before but also shows the crack curving as it moves.

This curvy movement has been inferred from the geological record and from "slickenlines" — scrape marks on the sides of faults — but it had never been seen in action, geophysicist Jesse Kearse, a postdoctoral researcher currently at Kyoto University in Japan, said in a statement.

"Instead of things moving straight across the video screen, they moved along a curved path that has a convexity downwards, which instantly started bells ringing in my head," Kearse said, "because some of my previous research has been specifically on curvature of fault slip, but from the geological record."

Scientists have discovered a long-lost landscape that's been preserved beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet for 30 million years.

Erosion by ancient rivers appears to have carved large, flat surfaces beneath the ice in East Antarctica between 80 million and 34 million years ago. Understanding how these features formed, and how they continue to affect the landscape, could help refine predictions of future ice loss, researchers reported July 11 in the journal Nature Geoscience.

"We've long been intrigued and puzzled about fragments of evidence for 'flat' landscapes beneath the Antarctic ice sheets," study co-author Neil Ross, a geophysicist at Newcastle University in the U.K., said in a statement. "This study brings the jigsaw pieces of data together, to reveal the big picture: how these ancient surfaces formed, their role in determining the present-day flow of the ice, and their possible influence on how the East Antarctic Ice Sheet will evolve in a warming world."

The 2025 Atlantic hurricane season officially began on June 1, yet we've seen remarkably little activity compared to the hyperactive seasons of recent years. By this point in 2024, we had already tracked five named storms, including two hurricanes. This year, three named storms, Andrea, Barry and Chantal, have reached tropical storm strength. Only Chantal had impact on the U.S. mainland, causing minor coastal flooding and brief power outages along parts of the Southeast coast. So, despite record global sea surface temperatures, why have storms failed to form?