Big storms can leave oyster beds bare and vulnerable to predators. Several of these channels, called atmospheric rivers , dumped particularly heavy storms on California in early 2011. The resulting freshwater influx probably left part of the San Francisco Bay without enough salt for oysters to survive. When there is huge storms that fall into oceans the amount of salt in the oceans decreases. To some organisms this drop of salinity could be deadly. Oysters worldwide have been struggling in recent years because of climate change, ocean acidification and over harvesting. Their disappearance hurts the coastal ecosystems they inhabit. “Oysters build habitat on the coast for other species. They’re kind of like a coral reef in that regard,” says study coauthor Brian Cheng, an ecologist now at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Md. Cheng’s team charted the oyster population’s sudden plummet and then gradual rebound over the next few years. Then the researchers examined how water and atmospheric conditions fluctuated over the same time period
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Ryan Zinke exaggerated the Trump administration's vow to open up America to fossil fuels development while disregarding renewables and the need to act on climate change. He said that Trump didn't mean global warming was a hoax but the science revolved around it is not enough. He also stated that we should move away from energy policies should heavily favor coal. If chosen, eould oversee all the nation's national parks and more than 500 million acres of federal public lands, mostly in the West. He would be responsible for all the coal mining, fracking and oil drilling on public lands and waters off of all U.S. coastlines, and for permitting all new offshore wind power development.With the findings of 12 new tombs discovered in Gebel el Silsila, Egypt, we will be able to answer alot of questions and create new questions. The findings have revealed a wealth of material culture, including nicely dressed sandstone sarcophagi, painted cartonnage, sculptured and sometimes painted pottery coffins, textile and organic wrapping, ceramic vessels and plates, as well as an array of jewellery, amulets and scarabs. Recent studies have shown a large amount of healthy humans, they are skeletons of course. Studies indicate that many of the injuries appear to be in an early stage of healing. This makes us come to the conclusion that new techniques and way of medicine were slowly starting to form and actually work. During this time, little evidence of malnutrition and infection has been discovered. We know for sure that the people went through lots of labor intensive jobs in the envrionment. These finding are important because we can further understand our historys past, socially and environmentally.
Ancient DNA research has now shown that Ice Age cave artists recorded a previously unknown hybrid species of bison and cattle in great detail on cave walls more than 15,000 years ago. These Hybrid originated over 120,000 years ago in the cold grassland stretching from Europe to Mexico. Recent studies have revealed that the mystery hybrid species eventually became the ancestor of the modern European bison. The University of California, Santa Cruz, Polish bison conservation researchers, and palaeontologists across Europe and Russia, studied ancient DNA extracted from radiocarbon-dated bones and teeth found in caves across Europe, the Urals, and the Caucasus to trace the genetic history of the populations. The researchers found a distinctive genetic signal that was differen't from any species of bison previously examined. The cave paintings demonstrate bison with either long horns and large forequarters or with shorter horns and small humps, more similar to modern European bison.
Storms have always been around but recently in the past 35 years they have become dramtically more intense. These intense power stroms usually happen in the Great Plains or Midwest. Although these stroms are much larger and powerful than smaller ones, no model can stimulate these storms. Recent research has found more heavy springtime rain falling in the central United States in recent years, but scientists did not know what types of storms were causing the increase. Differen't storms respond to the climate in differen't way so each storm is very unique and needs to be examined closely and monitored. Mesoscale convective systems are a type of storm that develops from smaller convective storms that fight to form the largest type of convective storms on Earth. These storms are the easiest to be detected by in space. A new technique called for a well-established satellite detection method that gave scientists alot of answers. The results showed the frequency of very long-lasting ones increased by about 4 percent per decade, most notably in the northern half of the central region -- just below the Great Lakes. The researchers rated the storms that produced the top five percent of rainfall as extreme events and saw that extreme events have become more frequent in the last 35 years.
These frogs have been steady declining in population due to human cause and non native fish have been preying on them. In recent studies, it has been shown that these little creatures have rapidly been increasing dispite all the things going bad for them. Chief among the culprits in Rana sierrae's once-stark decline is deadly fungal disease called chytridiomycosis, which affects amphibians worldwide and has caused at least 200 species of frogs and salamanders to become extinct within the last 30 years. This fungal disease has believed to be a huge factor in their close to extinction experience. This lead us to a conclusion that frogs have evolved at least partial resistance to the disease. This finding is a huge boost in science because these little guys and others affected by this fungal disease are showing resistance and are evolving.
Over the years, The biodiversity-productivity relationship (BPR) has conducted many experiments and studies on biodiversity in forests.To gain more insights into BPR on a global scale, Jingjing Liang et al compiled data from 777,126 sample plots across 44 countries and 13 ecoregions. In total, more than 30 million trees across 8,737 species were tallied and measured. This study recently caught the attention of scientists and policy makers. On a global scale, a 10% decrease in tree species richness would cause a 2 to 3% decline in productivity, which is the rate of biomass production in an ecosystem. A 99% decrease in tree species richness, would result in productivity decline of 62 to 78%. While productivity trends consistently decrease with increased biodiversity loss across nearly all regions of the world, the areas that would experience the greatest productivity decline in absolute terms include the Amazon, West Africa's Gulf of Guinea, Southeastern Africa, Southern China, Myanmar, Nepal, and the Malay Archipelago.
The GRAPES-3 muon telescope recorded a burst of galactic cosmic rays of about 20 GeV, on 22 June 2015 lasting for two hours. The burst occurred when a giant cloud of plasma ejected from the solar corona, and moving with a speed of about 2.5 million kilometers per hour struck our planet, causing a severe compression of Earth's magnetosphere from 11 to 4 times the radius of Earth. It triggered a severe geomagnetic storm that generated aurora borealis, and radio signal blackouts in many high latitude countries. Earth's magnetosphere extends over a radius of a million kilometers, which acts as the first line of defence, shielding us from the continuous flow of solar and galactic cosmic rays, thus protecting life on our planet from these high intensity energetic radiations. Solar storms can cause major disruption to human civilization by crippling large electrical power grids, global positioning systems, satellite operations and communications.
Long-term exposure to air pollution is linked to a greater incidence of high blood pressure, according to the largest study to investigate the effects of both air pollution and traffic noise by following over 41,000 people in five different countries for five to nine years. Traffic noise is associated with an increase in cases of hypertension as well. This is an important finding because there are differing ways of reducing air pollution and noise. Both of the data was collected separately and then joined later as one. Nobody who started the experiment had hypertension when they joined the study, but during the follow-up period 6,207 people (15%) reported that they developed hypertension or started to take blood pressure-lowering medications. Professor Barbara Hoffmann, Professor of Environmental Epidemiology at the Centre for Health and Society at Heinrich-Heine-University of Düsseldorf, Germany, who led the analysis, said: "Our findings show that long-term exposure to particulate air pollution is associated with a higher incidence of self-reported hypertension and with intake of anti-hypertensive medication.I think this is really something to think about because there is traffic noise and air pollution everywhere. People could have high blood pressure and not even know and that could lead to serious health risks.
Severe hurricanes, storm surges and an increase in the number of icebergs are just some of the changes planet Earth has experienced due to warming oceans over the last 20 years, according to a new report. The report, Explaining ocean warming: causes, scales, effects and consequences, which was presented at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Hawaii recently (5 September 2016), has found the upper depths of the world's oceans have warmed significantly since 1995. Hurricanes have even been observed in the South Atlantic for the first time since satellite records began in the 1970s. The area was traditionally viewed as an unlikely region for hurricane formation because of its cooler sea surface temperatures, however in 2004 conditions were more favourable than normal due to warmer ocean temperatures, spawning Hurricane Catarina off the coast of Brazil.
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