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    Losing a key U.S. climate report would hurt future disaster prep

    This year may already be on track to be the second hottest on record, after 2024. Floods and tornadoes are wracking wide swathes of the United States. And more wild weather is expected to be on the horizon.

    But the federal government’s ability — and long-standing charge — to warn the nation about the future impacts of climate change is in jeopardy. On April 28, the Trump administration abruptly dismissed the hundreds of U.S. scientists working on the sixth National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated interagency report. The latest report was expected to be released in 2028, but now its future is in doubt. And that could greatly hobble the nation’s ability to prepare for future climate-related extreme events. More

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    Cool water could protect sea stars from a mysterious disease

    A mysterious disease that has plagued sea stars for more than a decade may have met its match in the fjords of British Columbia.

    Sunflower sea stars discovered thriving in the frigid waters suggest that cooler temperatures provide protection from sea star wasting disease, or SSWD. The finding, reported in the April Proceedings of the Royal Society B, is a valuable clue about what causes SSWD in the first place, researchers say.

    Sea star wasting disease has stumped scientists since the first big outbreak emerged in 2013 off North America’s Pacific coast. “We initially thought it was a virus, but went back on that, because the data was either flawed or the results couldn’t be repeated,” says Ian Hewson, a marine ecologist at Cornell University who was not involved in the new study. His follow-up research into possible microbial or environmental causes has been inconclusive. More

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    The axolotl is endangered in the wild. A discovery offers hope

    Despite capturing hearts around the world, the wild axolotl — an aquatic salamander with feathery frills and a soft smile — faces extinction. Fortunately, for both axolotls and their fans, a new conservation method shows promise.

    In captivity, axolotls abound as household pets and research subjects. But wild axolotls, endemic to a single lake in Mexico, are critically endangered due to degradation of their native wetlands, with only 50 to 1,000 individuals left in the wild. Introducing captive-bred axolotls to restored and artificial wetlands may be a promising option for conserving these charismatic critters, researchers report April 30 in PLOS One. More

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    Wetland bacteria could make more methane in a warming world

    Warming temperatures may cause methane emissions from wetlands to rise — by helping methane-producing bacteria thrive. Higher temperatures favor the activity of wetland soil microbes that produce the potent greenhouse gas, at the expense of other microbes that can consume it, researchers report April 23 in Science Advances.

    The scientists, led by microbiologist Jaehyun Lee of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology in Seoul, conducted a summer field study in coastal wetlands near the Chesapeake Bay, analyzing soil conditions in a set of marshy plots with differing environmental conditions. The findings may offer clues to a puzzling and worrisome spike in wetland emissions of methane over the last decade. More

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    Earth’s landmasses lost trillions of tons of water this century

    Earth’s landmasses are holding onto a lot less water than they used to — and this loss is not just due to melting ice sheets. Terrestrial water storage, which includes water in underground aquifers, lakes, rivers and the tiny pore spaces within soil, declined by trillions of metric tons in the early 21st century, researchers report in the March 28 Science.

    This sharp decrease in freshwater stores is driven by rising temperatures on land and in the oceans, which in turn are linked to an increased global incidence of drought. And given the projected warming of the planet, this trend isn’t likely to change any time soon, say geophysicist Ki-Weon Seo of Seoul National University and colleagues. More

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    Hidden Antarctic lakes could supercharge sea level rise

    Beneath the great, white expanse of the Antarctic Ice Sheet, a mysterious realm of streams and lakes lies out of sight. Much about this hidden water world remains poorly understood. But a new study suggests that if scientists continue to overlook it, they might greatly underestimate global sea level rise.

    Factoring this subglacial water into computer simulations could boost projections of sea level rise over the next two centuries by about two meters, researchers report April 7 in Nature Communications. For context, scientists estimate that climate warming has raised sea levels by about 0.2 meters over the last century. More

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    Fires in the Amazon forest may melt sea ice in Antarctica

    Soot from forest fires in the Amazon might play a role in the melting of faraway ice in Antarctica.

    For decades, scientists have known that black carbon from burning fossil fuels or forests accelerates ice melt in different parts of the world. According to remote sensing researcher Sudip Chakraborty, the slash-and-burn practices encouraged by Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro, who held office from 2019 to 2023, inspired his team to investigate whether black carbon from the Amazon affected ice melt in Antarctica. More