On August 11, 1676, sister Maria Crocifissa della Concezione, a Benedictine nun with the Palma di Montechiaro convent in Italy, was found unconscious in her room, her face smeared with ink, with an undecipherable letter written in an unknown script clutched in her hand. Although she did not remember the origin of the letter, nor could she and her sisters decode the cryptic writing on it, they concluded that Sister Maria had survived a battle with Satan, having refused to sign a letter written by the demon denouncing her faith.
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A recently-published study from NASA has revealed that glaciers in West Antarctica’s Marguerite Bay have increased their flow rate, speeding up by up to 25 percent, an event that has accelerated ice loss in the region from 2 to 3 meters (7 to 10 feet) per year to 10 meters (33 feet). Prior to 2008, the flow rates of the four affected glaciers had been stable for two decades, but a major calving event in 1989 left the bay with little to no ice shelf, leaving them with only grounded ice on dry land — a precarious position for its potential to affect sea level rise.
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Two 6.1 earthquakes struck in the Pacific, one near the island of Vanuatu and the other off the coast of Japan uncomfortably near the damaged Fukushima power plant. At the same time, frantic rescue efforts have brought out a citizen army in Mexico city who are helping overstressed emergency services. Meanwhile, Hurricane Maria is causing a catastrophe on the island of Puerto Rico, where all electric power has failed and 155 MPH sustained winds are destroying infrastructure and gigantic flash floods are roaring down the mountainsides.
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A new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience has found that the goal of the Paris climate accord of keeping global warming levels below 2ºC (3.6ºF) may be easier to achieve than originally anticipated, allowing humanity a much larger carbon budget to work with. One of the major reasons certain parties have rejected the Paris Accord was the perceived difficulty in attaining that goal, but this new finding, if correct, should help encourage more action in regards to what we need to do to curtail global warming.
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