A new monthly record for atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations has been recorded in February 2019, at 411.66 parts per million. Although this new record, observed at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory, isn’t much higher than the previous record of 411.31 ppm, the fact that this new record happened nearly three monthsread more
An enormous cavity two-thirds the area of Manhattan and nearly 1,000 feet (300 meters) deep has been discovered growing under West Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier. Considered to be the world’s most crucial glacier due to its sheer size and importance to the stability of the vast ice sheets that surroundread more
The growing international ban on the trade of ivory from elephant tusks has been increasing the focus on harvesting the illicit material from an unusual source: the tusks of long-extinct mammoths, preserved in the frozen Siberian tundra. Out of the 72 tons of mammoth ivory exported by Russia in 2017, 80 percent was to China–the world’s largest market for the substance–and now that China has instituted a ban on their ivory trade, the market for frozen mammoth tusks may be heating up.
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Meteorologists with the National Weather Service are predicting that the northern polar vortex is likely to split once again later this month, into not just two, but three separate vortices that are expected to bring unseasonably cold and stormy weather to parts of Europe and North America.
The polar vortex is a low-pressure area of air that resides over both of Earth’s poles, with the vortex at each pole spinning in a counter-clockwise direction, and bordered around their edges by the jet stream. Occasionally, the Northern Hemisphere’s vortex splits into a number of separate gyres that drift south, bringing colder Arctic air along with them.
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