Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Thunderstorms and high winds forecast for San Francisco Bay while southern California under flood watch A powerful atmospheric river storm was set to wallop California on Wednesday evening, drenching large swaths of the state with rain and bringing several feet of snow to the mountains – the latest in a wave of intense storms that new research shows are getting worse. Much of northern California was under a winter storm warning because of the gusty winds and heavy snow in the forecast that the National Weather Service (NWS) said would lead to “difficult to impossible travel conditions”. Severe thunderstorms and high winds were predicted across the San Francisco Bay area, according to reports. Continue reading...

EPA takes aim at almost every major pollution rule in what environmentalists call act of ‘malice toward the planet’ Donald Trump’s administration is to reconsider the official finding that greenhouse gases are harmful to public health, a move that threatens to rip apart the foundation of the US’s climate laws, amid a stunning barrage of actions to weaken or repeal a host of pollution limits upon power plants, cars and waterways. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued an extraordinary cavalcade of pollution rule rollbacks on Wednesday, led by the announcement it would potentially scrap a landmark 2009 finding by the US government that planet-heating gases, such carbon dioxide, pose a threat to human health. Continue reading...

Large, undisturbed forests are better for harboring biodiversity than fragmented landscapes, according to recent research. Ecologists agree that habitat loss and the fragmentation of forests reduces biodiversity in the remaining fragments. But ecologists don't agree whether it's better to focus on preserving many smaller, fragmented tracts of land or larger, continuous landscapes. The study comes to a clear conclusion.

As energy firms race to meet challenges of storing power, critics worry about fluctuations in the depth of the loch Brian Shaw stood at the edge of Loch Ness and pointed to a band of glistening pebbles and damp sand skirting the shore. It seemed as if the tide had gone out. Overnight, Foyers, a small pumped-storage power station, had recharged itself, drawing up millions of litres of water into a reservoir high up on a hill behind it, ready for release through its turbines to boost the UK’s electricity supply. That led to the surface of Loch Ness, the largest body of freshwater in the UK, falling by 14cm in a matter of hours. Continue reading...