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A lightning-caused wildfire that led to an evacuation of the Kitt Peak National Observatory southwest of Tucson is 40% contained, authorities said.

More than 300 firefighters were working the wildfire Saturday. If all goes as planned, authorities said the blaze could be fully contained by next Sunday.

The wind-whipped fire started June 11 on a remote ridge on the Tohono O’odham Indian Reservation, about 8 miles (13 kilometers) southeast of Kitt Peak.

Around 300 secret polar bears have been secluded from other bear populations in Greenland for about 200 years, scientists said Thursday when they published a new study in the journal Science.

The bears live in sea-ice conditions that reserachers say mimic what other parts of the Arctic will look like as climate change progresses. Their territory lacks ice more than 100 days over the previous limit known to sustain polar bears because they have adapted to use freshwater glacial ice instead. The population is now the world’s 20th polar bear subpopulation.

“Polar bears are one of the most mentioned—and iconic—potential victims of climate change,” co-authors wrote in the study. “Most polar bears rely on sea ice to hunt. Discovery of this population suggests both that such environments might serve as refugia for polar bears and that conservation of this new population is essential.”

Researchers at Imperial College London have developed a new dual drone that can both fly through air and land on water to collect samples and monitor water quality. The researchers developed a drone to make monitoring drones faster and more versatile in aquatic environments.

The ‘dual robot’ drone, tested at Empa and the aquatic research institute Eawag in Switzerland, has successfully measured water in lakes for signs of microorganisms and algal blooms, which can pose hazards to human health, and could in the future be used to monitor climate clues like temperature changes in Arctic seas.

Continue reading “MEDUSA‘ dual robot’ drone flies and dives to collect aquatic data” »

Greenhouse gas emissions need to be significantly reduced to avoid potentially catastrophic effects of climate change, with access to clean and affordable energy needed to eliminate our reliance on fossil fuels. Many researchers and companies are working to address this issue and replace fossil fuels through the use of hydrogen, a storable fuel.

When used in a fuel cell, hydrogen does not emit any greenhouse gasses at the point of use and can help decarbonize sectors such as shipping and transportation, where it can be used as a fuel, as well as in manufacturing industries. However, most hydrogen produced today is almost entirely supplied from natural gas and coal, producing greenhouse gases. And therefore, green hydrogen production is urgently needed.

New research led by the University of Strathclyde suggests that solar energy can be accessed and converted into hydrogen – a clean and renewable fuel.

Climate change is slowing down the conveyor belt of ocean currents that brings warm water from the tropics up to the North Atlantic. Our research, published today in Nature Climate Change, looks at the profound consequences to global climate if this Atlantic conveyor collapses entirely.

We found the collapse of this system—called the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation—would shift the Earth’s climate to a more La Niña-like state. This would mean more flooding rains over eastern Australia and worse droughts and bushfire seasons over southwest United States.

East-coast Australians know what unrelenting La Niña feels like. Climate change has loaded our atmosphere with moister air, while two summers of La Niña warmed the ocean north of Australia. Both contributed to some of the wettest conditions ever experienced, with record-breaking floods in New South Wales and Queensland.

Here are the safety precautions Wirecutter recommends taking ahead of the 2022 Atlantic hurricane season, from making sure you have the right gear to completing a few relatively simple home improvements.

How to plan and protect yourself in areas at risk of hurricanes.

Duisburg, a massive inland port in Germany, is building a new container terminal on a former coal island. The port will reportedly become climate neutral via a hydrogen-based supply network that is set for operation by 2023. “Our mtu fuel cell solutions for electrical peak load coverage as well as mtu hydrogen heat and power generation station will supply the future terminal with electrical energy and heat in a sustainable way,” said Rolls-Royce Power Systems. The hydrogen-powered mtu fuel cell solutions will supply electrical power as soon as the public grid reaches its limits, while waste heat will partly be used to heat buildings around the port.

CWP has signed a framework agreement with the government of Mauritania to develop a planned 30 GW green hydrogen project. The $40 billion AMAN project will include 18 GW of wind capacity and 12 GW of solar. It will generate approximately 110 TWh per year at full capacity.

The floor of California’s arid Central Valley is sinking as groundwater pumping for agriculture and drinking water depletes aquifers. A new remote sensing study from Stanford University shows land sinking—or subsidence—will likely continue for decades to centuries if underground water levels merely stop declining. To stop the sinking, water levels will need to rise.

“If you don’t get these water levels to come back up, then the land is going to sink, potentially tens of centimeters per year, for decades. But if they go up, you can get rewarded very quickly. You almost immediately improve the situation,” said Matthew Lees, a geophysics Ph.D. student and lead author of the study, which appears June 2 in Water Resources Research.

The research comes amid worsening drought in a state where climate change is tipping the odds toward hot conditions with more precipitation extremes. The first four months of 2022 marked California’s driest start to a year since 1895. Reservoir levels are so low that, for a second year in a row, many irrigation districts are poised to receive none of their usual allocations of water from the Central Valley Project, the federally managed network of reservoirs and canals that conveys water to some 3 million acres of farmland.

Imagine we could do what green plants can do: photosynthesis. Then we could satisfy our enormous energy needs with deep-green hydrogen and climate-neutral biodiesel. Scientists have been working on this for decades. Chemist Chengyu Liu will receive his doctorate on 8 June for yet another step that brings artificial photosynthesis closer. He expects it to be commonplace in fifty years.

In fact, we can already achieve photosynthesis as green plants can. Solar energy converts CO₂ and water into oxygen and chemical compounds that we can use as fuel. Hydrogen for example, but also carbon compounds like those found in petrol. But the costs are higher than the value of the fuel it yields. If that changes, and we can scale up this artificial photosynthesis gigantically, then all our energy problems will be solved. Then CO₂ emissions from energy production will become negative.