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    How powdered rock could help slow climate change

    On a banana plantation in rural Australia, a second-generation farming family spreads crushed volcanic rock between rows of ripening fruit. Eight thousand kilometers away, two young men in central India dust the same type of rock powder onto their dry-season rice paddy, while across the ocean, a farmer in Kenya sprinkles the powder by hand onto his potato plants. Far to the north in foggy Scotland, a plot of potatoes gets the same treatment, as do cattle pastures on sunny slopes in southern Brazil.

    And from Michigan to Mississippi, farmers are scattering volcanic rock dust on their wheat, soy and corn fields with ag spreaders typically reserved for dispersing crushed limestone to adjust soil acidity. More

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    In ‘Warming Up,’ the sports world’s newest opponent is climate change

    Warming UpMadeleine OrrBloomsbury Sigma, $28

    It’s easy to think of sports as an escape from reality, removed from the glaring problems of our world. Researcher Madeleine Orr shatters that illusion in Warming Up: How Climate Change Is Changing Sport. In her debut book, Orr shepherds readers through an at-times overwhelming deluge of all the ways climate change is disrupting sports around the world, providing a compelling case for action from athletes, sports leagues and fans alike. More

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    A heat dome is baking the United States. Here’s why that’s so dangerous

    June is the new July. Or maybe even August. At least it feels that way, as summer heat has already soared to record highs.

    In the United States, West Coast residents sweltered earlier in the month as a high-pressure weather system called a heat dome trapped record-breaking high temperatures over the region (SN: 7/19/23). Now, another heat dome is bringing another wave of extreme heat to swaths of the Midwest and East Coast, with temperatures forecasted to reach close to 38° Celsius (100° Fahrenheit) in many cities. More

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    The Arctic is warming rapidly. These clouds may hold clues as to why

    In the Arctic, a mysterious atmospheric phenomenon generates some of the oddest clouds on Earth.

    Up there, streaky wisps can swiftly transform into towering thunderstorms. These strange clouds are not just visually mesmerizing. Nor are they just drivers of powerful storms. They may also play a role in the Arctic’s breakneck pace of warming, researchers say, a pace about four times as fast as that of the rest of the planet (SN: 8/11/22).

    But climate simulations of the region can’t accurately incorporate the birth and evolution of these clouds: There’s simply too little known about the forces that shape them. More

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    ‘The High Seas’ tells of the many ways humans are laying claim to the ocean

    The High SeasOlive HeffernanGreystone Books, $32.95

    The ocean is a rich, fertile and seemingly lawless frontier. It’s a watery wild west, irresistible to humans hoping to plunder its many riches.

    That is the narrative throughout The High Seas: Greed, Power and the Battle for the Unclaimed Ocean, a fast-paced, thoroughly reported and deeply disquieting book by science journalist Olive Heffernan, also the founding chief editor of the journal Nature Climate Change.

    The book begins by churning rapidly through the waves of history that brought us to today, including how we even define the high seas: all ocean waters more than 200 nautical miles from any country’s coastline. In many ways, the modern ocean grab was set in motion some 400 years ago. A bitter feud between Dutch and Portuguese traders culminated in a legal document called the Mare Liberum, or the “free seas,” which argues that the ocean is a vast global commons owned by no one. More

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    As the Arctic tundra warms, soil microbes likely will ramp up CO2 production

    Climate change is warming the Arctic tundra about four times faster than the rest of the planet. Now, a study suggests that rising temperatures will spur underground microbes there to produce more carbon dioxide — potentially creating a feedback loop that worsens climate change.The tundra is “a sleepy biome,” says Sybryn Maes, an environmental scientist at Umeå University in Sweden. This ecosystem is populated by small shrubs, grasses and lichen growing in cold soils rich with stored organic carbon. Scientists have long suspected that warming will wake this sleeping giant, prompting soil microbes to release more of the greenhouse gas CO2 (SN: 8/11/22). But it’s been difficult to demonstrate in field studies.

    Maes’ team included about 70 scientists performing measurements in 28 tundra regions across the planet’s Arctic and alpine zones. During the summer growing season, the researchers placed clear, open-topped plastic chambers, each about a meter in diameter, over patches of tundra. These chambers let in light and precipitation but blocked the wind, warming the air inside by an average of 1.4 degrees Celsius. The researchers monitored how much CO2 microbes in the soil released into the air, a process called respiration, and compared that data with measurements from nearby exposed patches. More

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    A ruinous hailstorm in Spain may have been supercharged by warming seas

    A torrent of giant hailstones in northeast Spain may have been fueled by climate change.

    On August 31, 2022, a brutal hailstorm struck the small Spanish city of La Bisbal d’Empordà. The storm unleashed balls of ice up to 12 centimeters wide, causing widespread damage to property and crops, injuring dozens of people and killing a 20-month-old toddler. Computer simulations now suggest that in a preindustrial climate, the storm could not have generated hailstones this big, researchers report in the March 28 Geophysical Research Letters.   More

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    Ximena Velez-Liendo is saving Andean bears with honey

    In 1998, at the age of 22, conservation biologist Ximena Velez-Liendo came face-to-face with South America’s largest carnivore on her first day of field research in Bolivia. Her life changed forever when she turned around to see “this beautiful, amazing bear coming out of the forest,” Velez-Liendo says. “It was like love at first sight.” She thought in that moment: “If I can do anything for you, I’ll do it.”

    Also known as spectacled bears, Andean bears are easily recognized by the ring of pale fur that often encircles one or both eyes. Bolivia is home to about 3,000 adult bears, or roughly one-third of the world’s total Andean bears, whose range arcs through five countries along the western edge of South America. Listed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, the species (Tremarctos ornatus) suffers mainly from habitat loss and conflicts with humans, who sometimes kill the bears in retaliation when bears raid crops or hunt livestock. More