Subterms
Allison Fong dangles over the edge of a “river” running through a massive chunk of sea ice floating between the North Pole and Russia’s Komsomolets Island. The river cracked open in the ice just a few days ago, exposing the Arctic Ocean below. Already starting to freeze over, the river’s surface is a dark scar […] More
A curious confluence of atmospheric events has produced the largest ozone hole ever measured over the Arctic. A powerful polar vortex has trapped especially frigid air in the atmosphere above the North Pole, allowing high-altitude clouds to form in the stratosphere, where the ozone layer also sits. Within those clouds, chlorofluorocarbons and hydrochlorofluorocarbons already high […] More
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is currently experiencing its third mass bleaching in just five years — and it is the most widespread bleaching event ever recorded. Results from aerial surveys conducted along the 2,000-kilometer-long reef over nine days in late March, and released April 7, show that 25 percent of 1,036 individuals reefs surveyed were […] More
Once upon a time, there was a swampy rainforest near the bottom of the world. Buried sediment extracted from the seafloor off West Antarctica contains ancient pollen, fossilized roots and other chemical evidence of a diverse forest that flourished millions of years ago, less than a thousand kilometers from the South Pole. The sediment offers […] More
“Waiter, there’s a worm in my sushi.” Diners may be more likely to utter those words today than in decades past, as the abundance of parasitic Anisakis worms infecting fishes around the globe is now 283 times what it was in the 1970s, researchers report March 19 in Global Change Biology. Worms of the genus […] More
Hilde Fålun Strøm and Sunniva Sorby are taking citizen science to the extreme. In August, the two women moved into a tiny hunting cabin on the high-Arctic Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. The hut, dubbed Bamsebu, is the only shelter for 140 kilometers. Polar bears prowl the area. It’s not unusual for the winter chill to […] More
If you’ve ever had the misfortune of stepping on a Lego, you know the plastic building blocks have absolutely no give. Now, scientists have discovered another unpleasant consequence of the toys’ indestructibility: A single Lego could take hundreds of years to break down in the ocean. Earth’s oceans are littered with plastic of all kinds […] More
Wind may be the usual suspect for knocking down trees during hurricanes, but a new survey of forest damage in Puerto Rico after back-to-back hurricanes in 2017 highlights the power of a strong downpour. When Hurricane Irma passed off the coast of Puerto Rico on September 6, 2017, the storm brought heavy rains but minimal […] More
