Aurelia Butler

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    Squall line tornadoes are sneaky, dangerous and difficult to forecast

    Meteorologist Thea Sandmael watched the storm close in. It was near enough for her to spot a rotating dome of clouds emerging from its dark underbelly — the quickening of a tornado. By the time the spinning mass was 10 minutes away, Sandmael and her colleagues had shut down their radar instruments and evacuated their post.

    “Just keep going,” she advised her colleague behind the wheel, who was rightly focused on maneuvering their SUV down the remote Alabama road. Following behind was another colleague in a truck carrying their cumbersome radar equipment. Evacuating was a good decision, she reflects: “We were sitting on the west side of the road, and the tornado touched down in our exact location.” More

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    Record-breaking Coral Sea temperatures threaten the Great Barrier Reef

    Australia’s Great Barrier Reef faces critical danger from back-to-back bouts of extreme ocean heat.

    Ocean heat in the Coral Sea is at its highest in four centuries, scientists report in the Aug. 8 Nature. The researchers drilled into coral skeletons from in and around the region and analyzed the chemical makeup of those samples to reconstruct sea surface temperatures from 1618 to 1995, alongside modern instrumental sea surface measurements spanning 1900 to 2024.   

    Before 1900, ocean temperatures in the region were relatively stable. But from 1960 to 2024, those temperatures have climbed relentlessly. That upward climb is linked to humans’ greenhouse gas emissions, the team found.

    Five of the six hottest years in the record were in the last decade: 2016, 2017, 2020, 2022 and 2024, with temperatures as much as 1 degree Celsius hotter than average. Each year had a mass bleaching event during the warmest months, from January to March (SN: 4/29/24).

    Scientists drilled into corals in the Great Barrier Reef (shown) to collect core samples. The chemical makeup of the corals reveals changing water conditions, including temperature, over the corals’ lifetime.Tane Sinclair-Taylor

    Researchers have long sounded the alarm about mass bleaching, in which corals stressed by extreme heat or pollution expel symbiotic algae living in their tissues, leaving them stark white (SN: 8/9/23). Corals can bounce back, given time. But back-to-back bleaching can ultimately kill a reef.

    “The Great Barrier Reef is iconic,” climate scientist Benjamin Henley of the University of Melbourne in Australia said at an Aug. 6 news conference. UNESCO designated the reef as a World Heritage Site in 1981. More

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    Climate change is driving the extreme heat baking France’s Olympics

    Il fait trop chaud. The Paris Olympics officially opened on July 26, just in time for athletes to compete in a hellish heat wave.

    Last week, Olympians in the French capital faced daytime temperatures reaching 35° Celsius (95° Fahrenheit), and in southern France temperatures climbed up to 40° C (104° F). Other countries in the Mediterranean region also felt the heat wave. In Spain, the city of Barcelona recorded its highest-ever temperature — 40° C — on July 31. And in Italy, the sweltering weather helped fuel a wildfire in the Monte Mario natural reserve in Rome. 

    This extreme heat would not have happened without climate change, researchers from the World Weather Attribution Network reported on July 31.  “If the atmosphere wasn’t overloaded with emissions from burning fossil fuel, Paris would have been about 3 [degrees] C cooler and much safer for sport,” said climatologist Friederike Otto of the Imperial College London in a statement. 

    “Yesterday, climate change crashed the Olympics.“The world watched athletes swelter in 35°C heat. If the atmosphere wasn’t overloaded with emissions from burning fossil fuel, Paris would have been about 3°C cooler and much safer for sport” – @FrediOtto— World Weather Attribution (@WWAttribution) July 31, 2024

    Other parts of the world sweltered, too. In California, Death Valley set the record for the hottest month ever recorded on Earth, averaging 42.5° C (108.5° F) across July. A major heat dome also settled in over the southern United States (SN: 6/21/24). The extreme heat swept across much of the country by the end of the week, with the National Weather Service placing more than 150 million people under extreme heat advisories on August 1. Antarctica’s eastern region also experienced a major heat wave, with ground temperatures rising beyond 28° C. More

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    Some ‘forever chemicals’ may be absorbed through our skin

    Forever chemicals are everywhere. 

    They’re in school uniforms, food packaging, cosmetics and personal care products (SNE: 11/18/22; SN: 6/4/19; SN: 6/15/21). They seep into our food and drinking water. And now new research suggests that some can move through the skin, posing yet another avenue through which humans are intimately exposed to these chemicals, which have been linked to harmful health issues.     

    When 3-D human skin models were exposed to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, the chemicals could cross the skin barrier, environmental chemists from the University of Birmingham in England report in the June Environment International. That suggests the compounds can be absorbed through the skin and may even travel into the bloodstream.  More

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    Earth keeps breaking global heat records

    Earth now is hotter than it’s been at any time in recorded history.

    Average global temperatures shattered records on two consecutive days last week, reaching 17.09° Celsius on July 21 and then inching up still more the next day, to 17.15° C, or nearly 63° Fahrenheit. That’s almost an entire degree Celsius hotter than the planet’s average temperature of 16.25° C for every July 22 from 1990 to 2020.

    Those new heat records come amid 13 months in a row of record-breaking temperatures on Earth — not just over land, but in the oceans too (SN: 4/29/24). Before 2023, the record highest temperature was 16.8 °C, set in August 2016. Since mid-2023, the planet has broken that 2016 threshold 58 times. More

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    In a seafloor surprise, metal-rich chunks may generate deep-sea oxygen

    In an unexpected twist, metal-rich nodules found on the seafloor are generating oxygen, new research suggests. This meager but steady supply of the vital gas may help support seafloor ecosystems in areas currently targeted for deep-sea mining, scientists say.

    Scientists have long presumed that much of the dissolved oxygen in the deep sea was transported there from surface waters. It can be generated at the surface by plant life via photosynthesis or diffuse from the atmosphere as a result of wave action, says Andrew Sweetman, a deep-sea ecologist at the Scottish Association for Marine Science in Oban. More

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    Can bioluminescent ‘milky seas’ be predicted?

    BURLINGTON, Vt. — For the first time, a researcher has found a “milky sea” without relying on happenstance.

    For centuries, sailors have been amazed and mystified by a rare phenomenon: the water around their ship glowing as far as the eye can see. Scientists have struggled to study such milky seas because they had no way of knowing when and where one would occur.

    But now, using weather and ocean temperature data, atmospheric scientist Justin Hudson of Colorado State University in Fort Collins has successfully predicted — or rather, postdicted — an occurrence of the phenomenon. More