The World Meteorological Organization’s State of the Climate in Asia 2024 report warns that the region is warming nearly twice as fast as the global average, driving more extreme weather and posing serious threats to lives, ecosystems, and economies. In 2024, Asia experienced its warmest or second warmest year on …
Of the West Antarctic ice shelves, those in the Amundsen Sea sector have given the most cause for concern. Ocean modelling of the Weddell Sea region, together with a detailed survey of the ice bed morphology, indicates that this region, too, may change soon.
The World Bank released its annual book compiling environmental data, which includes information from more than 200 countries relating to agriculture, forests, energy, water, sanitation, and ocean health. The 2012 Little Green Data Book functions as a compilation of information allowing countries to value and organize their natural capital. The …
Fundamental thermodynamics and climate models suggest that dry regions will become drier and wet regions will become wetter in response to warming. Efforts to detect this long-term response in sparse surface observations of rainfall and evaporation remain ambiguous. We show that ocean salinity patterns express an identifiable fingerprint of an …
New research suggests that global warming is causing the cycle of evaporation and rainfall over the oceans to intensify more than scientists had expected, an ominous finding that may indicate a higher potential for extreme weather in coming decades. By measuring changes in salinity on the ocean’s surface, the researchers …
But the country lacks a tidal energy policy. The Gujarat government is all set to develop India’s first tidal energy plant. The state government has approved Rs 25 crore for setting up the 50 MW plant at the Gulf of Kutch. It will produce energy from the ocean tides. The …
PARIS: The European Space Agency said on Thursday it had lost contact with Envisat, the biggest Earth-monitoring satellite in history. Designed to operate for only five years, Envisat was launched in March 2002, carrying 10 instruments to monitor the planet's oceans, ice, land and atmosphere. The giant 8.2-tonne, 10.5-metre (34.1-foot) …
Our present understanding of ocean acidification (OA) impacts on marine organisms caused by rapidly rising atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration is almost entirely limited to single species responses. OA consequences for food web interactions are, however, still unknown. Indirect OA effects can be expected for consumers by changing the nutritional …
A reconstruction of temperature from proxy records shows that the rise in global mean temperature closely resembled, but slightly lagged, the rise in carbon dioxide concentration during the last period of deglaciation.
Countries of the Far North are set to be the new players in the emerging Arctic frontier. The polar ice cap is melting at much faster rates than previously predicted, and may be completely ice free by the summer of 2040 or sooner. There are vast untapped resources in the …
Climate change could reduce the economic value of the services the oceans provide to mankind by almost US$2 trillion a year by 2100, according to a study presented at the Planet Under Pressure conference this week (26—29 March). The analysis, conducted by the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), relates to loss …
The “State of the Planet” declaration was issued by scientists at a major gathering of experts on global environmental and social issues in advance of the major UN Summit Rio+20 in June. The declaration states that consensus is growing that we have driven the planet into a new epoch, the …
The coldest deep ocean water that flows around Antarctica in the Southern Ocean has been strangely disappearing at a high rate for the past few decades, a new study has revealed. This mass of water is called Antarctic Bottom Water, which is formed in a few distinct locations around Antarctica, …
Human activity kept global temperatures close to a record high in 2011 despite the cooling influence of a powerful La Nina weather pattern, the World Meteorological Organization said on Friday. On average, global temperatures in 2011 were lower than the record level hit the previous year but were still 0.40 …
The cost of damage to the world's oceans from climate change could reach $2 trillion a year by 2100 if measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions are not stepped up, a study by marine experts said on Wednesday. The study found that without action to limit rising greenhouse gas emissions, …
As the seas rise, so will the costs associated with them. The impact of climate change on oceans alone could cost $2 trillion by the end of the century, according to a report by the Stockholm Environment Institute in Sweden.
PARIS: Greenhouse gases are on track for inflicting costs of nearly $2 trillion annually in damage to the oceans by 2100, according to a Swedish study published on Wednesday. The estimate by the Stockholm Environment Institute is based on the assumption that climate-altering carbon emissions continue their upward spiral without …
The finding that reactive iron species may have a role in stabilizing organic matter in ocean sediments underlines the tight coupling between the biogeochemical cycles of carbon and iron.
About one-fifth of organic carbon in sediments is bound to reactive iron phases, which are metastable over geological timescales and may therefore serve as a sink for the long-term storage of organic carbon.
Washington: The world’s oceans are turning acidic at what could be the fastest pace of any time in the past 300 million years, even more rapidly than during a monster emission of planet-warming carbon 56 million years ago, scientists have said. Looking back at this warm period in Earth’s history …
Atomic Energy Authority officials, along with other stakeholders, collected samples in the deep sea upto four kilometres in the Beruwala area, to check whether they were contaminated due to the radiation leak in Japan. Atomic Energy Authority Sectional Head Wijeya A. Waduge told The Island yesterday that the earlier test …
