Author Archives: JoeannCoghlan

Congress might allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

In parts of the United Kingdom Monday morning, people woke up to a blood-red sun — a phenomenon seen around the globe this year.

The color was caused by smoke that blew in from wildfires across Portugal and Spain. Hurricane Ophelia deepened the reddish hue by dragging up dust from the Sahara.

Red skies have haunted the western U.S. recently as wildfires burned in Montana and ash rained down in Seattle. This month in Northern California, 20,000 people evacuated from massive wildfires under a red-orange sky.

Anadolu Agency / Contributor / Getty Images

On the other side of the world, wildfires burned in Siberia all summer long, covering the sun with enormous clouds of smoke and ash.

REUTERS/Ilya Naymushin

To understand why this happens, you need to know a bit of optics. Sun rays contain light from the whole visible spectrum. As the sun’s white light beams into the atmosphere, it collides with molecules that diffuse some of the wavelengths. On a normal day, short wavelength colors, like purple and blue, are filtered out, making the sun look yellow.

But high concentrations of light-scattering molecules in the air (like smoke particles from a wildfire) crowd out more of those short-wavelength colors, leaving behind that hellish red color.

Since climate change makes wildfires worse, we’ll be seeing a lot more of it.

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Congress might allow drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

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Rome, once known for flowing water, is now running dry.

The Eternal City’s water utility, Acea, had proposed cutting off water to 1.5 million residents for eight hours a day starting on Monday. The city avoided that fate on Friday when the central government allowed the city to keep drawing from a drought-ravaged lake.

The summer heat is partly to blame for the water shortage. Much of Western Europe has been sweltering, with heatwaves stoking fires in Portugal and setting record temperatures in France. Italy is suffering through one of its hottest, driest, wildfiriest times in history. Several regions have declared a state of emergency or asked for relief from the climate change–fueled drought, which has already taken a $2.3 billion toll on the country’s farming industry.

Rome’s other problems are making things worse. The city’s aqueducts are chronically leaking. Diminished snowpack on nearby mountains means less meltwater to replenish its aquifers. Rome had planned to stop drawing from one of its big sources of fresh water, Lake Bracciano, which has sunk nearly six feet in the last two years.

City officials have switched off iconic fountains and lowered water pressure, causing residents to lug buckets up the stairs to their apartments. Nearby small towns have already resorted to rationing, the New York Times reports.

Minus a drought in the Dark Ages, clean drinking water has been constantly flowing through Rome for millennia. Now, it looks like things are changing (the climate certainly is).

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Rome, once known for flowing water, is now running dry.

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Tons of BP Oil Is Still on the Bottom of the Gulf of Mexico

Mother Jones

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We all saw the images of oil-coated birds and shorelines in the wake of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill. These were the most visible impacts of the catastrophe, but much of the oil that gushed from the busted Macondo wellhead 5,000 feet underwater never made it to the surface. Of the estimated 5 million barrels that spilled, approximately 2 million stayed trapped in the deep ocean. And up to 31 percent of that oil is now lying on the ocean floor, according to a new study.

Based on an analysis of sea-floor sediment samples collected from the the Gulf of Mexico, geochemists at the University of California-Santa Barbara were able to offer the first clues about the final resting place of hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil. Their results were published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The data, which was gathered as part of the ongoing federal damage assessment, shows “a smokingly clear signal, like a bulls-eye” around the Macondo well, said lead author David Valentine.

When oil first began to shoot out of the broken well, some 2 million barrels’ worth broke up into microscopic droplets before reaching the surface and became suspended in the deep ocean, Valentine said. His goal was to discover the fate of that oil, beyond the reach of any cleanup efforts, four years after the spill. The researchers combed through the sediment samples for traces of hopane, a chemical compound found in crude oil that doesn’t break down over time. Hopane was also used as a indicator of oil distribution following the Exxon-Valdez spill in 1989.

To test whether traces of hopane originated from the Macondo blowout—rather than from a natural seep or some other well—Valentine scrutinized both where they appeared in individual sediment cores and how concentrations changed at varying distances from the well. Both indicators strongly implicate the Macondo well, the study found. Close to the well, hopane concentrations were very high in the top half-inch of sediment, a sign that the chemical had been deposited recently and in great volumes. Even more telling was the spacial distribution: Within 25 miles of the well, hopane concentrations were 10 times higher than outside that boundary, Valentine said. A further clue was the distinctive splatter pattern in which hopane concentrations were found, which matched the pattern that would be expected from oil leaking from a well.

Add it all up, the study finds, and between 4 and 31 percent of the oil that originally was suspended in the deep ocean (roughly 80,000 to 620,000 barrels) has now come to rest on the ocean floor. The remainder, Valentine said, is still unaccounted for: It could still be suspended in the water column; it could have risen to the surface; it could have been eaten by bacteria, etc.

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Tons of BP Oil Is Still on the Bottom of the Gulf of Mexico

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