Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is rapidly losing its coral, to the point that UNESCO may soon place the natural wonder on its “in danger” list. Climate change is one culprit, but so is the country’s booming extraction industry. Environmentalists warn that time is running out for the reef.
Man-made climate change is ruining the planet, and here are the before and after pictures that prove it.
Initially, access to water defined where humanity could grow and develop. But now the opposite is true, and we’re the ones directing the future of our global water system. Watching that transition unfold is as sobering as it is stunning.
Surreal Street Art Explodes Inside a London Room during the Dulwich Festival
Just wrapped up in London was the Dulwich Festival, an event that brought together the biggest names in street art to create huge murals inspired by classic works found in England’s oldest art gallery, the Dulwich Picture Gallery. Old Masters like Rembrandt van Rijn, Nicholas Poussin and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo were given a special homage as the current leaders in street art remixed their esteemed predecessors’ works. For nine days, visitors flocked to south London to see how contemporary street art and classical art could combine to create something groundbreaking.
unicorn-meat-is-too-mainstream:
“transparent” boxes are part of a series titled “Trompe L’Oeil; Petite Maison” by Elise Victoria Windsor
on tumblr
Water from the world’s shrinking glaciers was responsible for almost a third of the rise in sea levels between 2003 and 2009, shows new research.An international team of scientist compared data gleaned from two NASA satellites as well as traditional ground measurements from glaciers around the world.
Their work, published in the journal Science , is the most accurate estimation of how glaciers contribute to sea level rises to date.
“For the first time, we’ve been able to very precisely constrain how much these glaciers as a whole are contributing to sea rise,” says lead author Assistant Professor Alex Gardner, assistant geography professor at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.
“These smaller ice bodies are currently losing about as much mass as the ice sheets.”
The most significant ice losses occurred in Arctic Canada, Alaska, coastal Greenland, the southern Andes and the Himalayas, the study found.
The glaciers outside of the Greenland and Antarctic sheets lost an average of roughly 260 billion metric tons of ice annually during the period, leading to a rise in ocean levels of about 0.7 millimeters per year.
By contrast the glaciers in Antarctica, smaller ice masses that are not connected to the ice sheet, made scarcely any contribution to sea-level rise over the study period.
Note that sea level rise is uneven, and effects coastlines with high degrees of variability. Some coast will experience more rise and erosion, some less.
Via ABC.AU h/t Marcacci Comm.
