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Icebergs that calve off giant ice shelves can create “deserts” in the ocean by blocking sunlight from reaching marine life. An iceberg 20 miles wide and 124 miles long named C-19, that broke off from the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica last year, is wiping out marine wildlife. It’s killing phytoplankton, which is a key element in the Antarctic food chain. Entire colonies of penguins have disappeared.

Geophysicist Kevin Arrigo says, “It’s absolutely horrendous.” An earlier iceberg, called B-15, that broke loose from the Ross Ice Shelf in 2000, also had a giant impact. Arrigo thought that one was “really big?But it was just dwarfed by what we saw this past year.
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Scientists who measured the mercury levels in Yellowstone National Park recently were surprised by what they found at the base of Roaring Mountain: one of the highest levels of mercury ever found in an undisturbed natural area. Mercury is a highly toxic pollutant often associated with volcanoes, and recent reports say Yellowstone is overdue for an supervolcano eruption.
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Fifteen-year-old photographer Jonathan Burnett snapped a digital photo of a bright light sailing through the sky, and another amateur photographer caught the same image from a different angle. These photos have scientists around the world mystified about what the mysterious light was, since it turns out it wasn’t a meteor.
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In The Communion Letters, we collected some of the extraordinary letters we received from readers of Communion over 15 years ago. The letters havent stopped we get amazing e-mails every day. Weve decided to begin posting some of the best of them in our Insight section (with the writers permission). Our first one is from Patty from Ohio, who talks about a mysterious round grave found over 100 years ago in her area.
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