https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/blob-back-new-marine-heat-wave-threatens-pacific ] Source:   By Warren Cornwall, Science Magazine. Excerpt: In the fall of 2014, marine ecologist Jennifer Fisher was stunned when jellyfish and tiny crustaceans typically found in warmer waters filled her nets off the coast of Oregon. The odd catch was just one sign of the arrival of a vast patch of warm water that came to be known as “The Blob”—a massive marine heat wave that lasted 3 years and dramatically disrupted ecosystems and fisheries along North America’s Pacific coast. Now, with oceanographers warning that a new Blob could be forming in the Pacific Ocean, Fisher is again preparing for strange encounters when she heads out on a research cruise later this month. ...When The Blob arrived 5 years ago, “we didn’t realize the impact” it would have, recalls Toby Garfield, a physical oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) Southwest Fisheries Scie...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/17/world/asia/indonesia-fires-photos.html Source:   By Richard C. Paddock and Muktita Suhartono, The New York Times. Excerpt: JAKARTA, Indonesia — Brazil has captured global attention over deliberately set fires that are burning the Amazon rainforest, often called the earth’s lungs. Now Indonesia is compounding the concern with blazes to clear forest on the other side of the world. Hundreds of wildfires burned across Indonesian Borneo and Sumatra on Tuesday, producing thick clouds of smoke that disrupted air travel, forced schools to close and sickened many thousands of people. Poorly equipped firefighters were unable to bring them under control. Officials said that about 80 percent of the fires were set intentionally to make room for palm plantations, a lucrative cash crop that has led to deforestation on much of Sumatra. The slash-and-burn conflagrations, which tore through sensitive rainforests where dozens of endangered species live, immediat...

https://eos.org/articles/climate-change-is-coming-for-our-fish-dinners Source:   By Jenessa Duncombe, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: Your fish fillet may have less omega-3 fatty acids, an important nutrient for brain health, by the end of the century. Omega-3 fatty acids could be one reason that human brains evolved to be so powerful, but changing water conditions associated with climate change may reduce the amount of omega-3 available for human consumption. A new global tally of the omega-3 fatty acid docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) found it will drop in availability by 10%–58% depending on how aggressively humans curb greenhouse gas emissions over the next century....

https://eos.org/research-spotlights/a-new-proxy-for-past-precipitation Source:   By Kate Wheeling, Eos/AGU. Excerpt: To understand our rapidly changing climate, researchers often look back at how Earth’s climate has behaved in the past. Marine sediment cores, like tree rings, can provide a log of former environmental conditions, allowing scientists to infer everything from the temperature and salinity of the oceans to precipitation rates on land. ...Here Mendes et al. [ https://doi.org/10.1029/2019PA003691 ] describe a new proxy for determining past precipitation from marine sediment cores using luminescence signals from feldspar and quartz grains. Together with other reconstructive methods, the new technique can provide a more complete picture of precipitation and continental erosion, the team notes. ...The team showed that the results from the new proxy generally agree with those from other proxies of precipitation in marine cores, as well as model simulations. The authors al...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/16/science/chinook-salmon-columbia.html Source:   By Jim Robbins, The New York Times. Excerpt: Warming waters and a series of dams are making the grueling migration of the Chinook salmon even more deadly — and threatening dozens of other species. ...NORTH FORK, Idaho ...Some 45,000 to 50,000 spring-summer Chinook spawned here in the 1950s. These days, the average is about 1,500 fish, and declining. And not just here: Native fish are in free-fall throughout the Columbia River basin, a situation so dire that many groups are urging the removal of four large dams to keep the fish from being lost. ...Before the 20th century, some 10 million to 16 million adult salmon and steelhead trout are thought to have returned annually to the Columbia River system. The current return of wild fish is 2 percent of that, by some estimates. While farming, logging and especially the commercial harvest of salmon in the early 20th century all took a toll, the single gre...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/11/us/midwest-flooding.html Source:   By Sarah Almukhtar, Blacki Migliozzi, John Schwartz and Josh Williams, The New York Times. Excerpt: This year's flooding across the Midwest and the Southg affected nearly 14 million people, ...To measure the scope of the spring floods, The New York Times analyzed satellite data from the Joint Polar Satellite System using software, developed by government and academic researchers for flood detection, that is frequently used in disaster response. The data covers the period from Jan. 15 to June 30 and shows an interconnected catastrophe along the Missouri, Mississippi and Arkansas Rivers, a system that drains more than 40 percent of the landmass of the continental United States. ...The causes of flooding are complicated, but climate change is increasingly an exacerbating factor. Warmer air can hold more moisture, and that moisture can fall back out of the sky, whether as rain or snow, in greater amou...

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/global-warming-has-made-iconic-andean-peak-unrecognizable Source:   By Tim Appenzeller, Science Magazine. Excerpt: On 23 June 1802, German geographer Alexander von Humboldt and his companions could climb no higher. ...they faced a final obstacle in their quest to climb Chimborazo, a 6268-meter-high volcano in Ecuador then thought to be the world's highest mountain. ...But they had to turn back, some 400 vertical meters short of their goal. ...Not long after his descent from the mountain, he sketched a spectacular diagram that used the slopes of Chimborazo to depict a concept that had crystallized during his climb: that climate is an organizing principle of life, shaping the distinct communities of plants and animals found at different altitudes and latitudes. The diagram—Humboldt called it his Tableau Physique—has become what one recent paper described as "an iconic milestone, almost a foundation myth, in the history of ecology....