The second-largest tropical cyclone on record, Typhoon Lan, made landfall early on Monday, leaving 7 people dead and 100 injured as it passed near Tokyo. The storm was fueled by warm sea surface temperatures (86ºF/30ºC), and caused extensive flooding and mudslides, dumping nearly 32 inches of rain over 48 hours on Wakayama Prefecture alone.
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A massive hole the size of Lake Superior has opened in the ice that covers Antarctica’s Weddell Sea, a phenomenon that hasn’t been seen since the mid-1970s. This hole, called a polynya, opens up 80,000 square kilometers (31,000 square miles) of ocean in the middle of the Weddell Sea’s ice pack, hundreds of miles from shore. "This is hundreds of kilometers from the ice edge. If we didn’t have a satellite, we wouldn’t know it was there," explains professor Kent Moore, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Toronto.
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If the news of a major hurricane tearing for the coast of Ireland seems odd, as was the case for Hurricane Ophelia, that’s because the phenomenon of hurricanes surviving as organized storms that far east in the Atlantic Ocean is extremely rare. As it is, Ophelia now holds the record for the easternmost major hurricane in the Atlantic, and if it had maintained its strength it would have been only the third known tropical storm to make landfall in Europe, following 2005’s Hurricane Vince, making landfall in Spain, and Hurricane Debbie, brushing the west coast of Ireland in 1961.
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A new study has found that a 2011 estimate of methane emissions generated by the planet’s livestock was incorrect, with the new finding indicating that they were actually 11 percent higher than the numbers used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), leading to the guidelines and targets set out in the Paris climate accord. Methane (CH4) is produced from the decomposition of biological matter, such as livestock manure, and is a potent greenhouse gas, retaining up to 86 times more heat energy than the same mass of carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.
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