EARTHWEEK
La Niña ends
The La Niña ocean cooling in the tropical Pacific has ended, according to the U.S. Climate Prediction Center. Climate experts there also say a fresh El Niño warming may soon return.
La Niña appeared last year for the first time since 2012, but was among the weakest and shortest on record.
“Even though it was fairly weak and short-lived ... it did leave impacts,” said CPC Deputy Director Mike Halpert, pointing to unusual cold in Alaska, western Canada and the U.S. Northern Plains in December and January.
African cyclone
Tropical Cyclone Dineo brought flash flooding and wind damage to parts of Mozambique and Zimbabwe after moving ashore from the Mozambique Channel.
Monarch losses
The number of monarch butterflies has dropped by 27 percent during recent months at the insects’ winter home in western Mexico.
The plunge followed last year’s apparent recovery from the historically low numbers two years ago.
Experts at the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Michoacán state say some of the decline could be due to storms late last winter that felled more than 100 acres of forests where the colorful butterflies winter.
The monarchs also suffered a high level of mortality due to the same cold, wet and windy storms.
Drought conflict
The worsening drought across East Africa threatens to trigger more human-wildlife conflict as animals begin to suffer and starve without water or food.
International Fund for Animal Welfare’s East Africa Regional Director James Isiche told reporters that lack of rainfall and withered grazing lands will force wildlife to move out of protected areas in search of water, leading to more contact with the human population.
Wildlife officials say that crocodiles and hippos are already dying as Kenya’s Mara and Talek rivers, which traverse the Maasai Mara game reserve, dry up.
Earthquakes
A powerful temblor killed eight people across the Philippines province of Surigao del Norte and wrecked about 1,000 homes.
• Earth movements were also felt in New Zealand’s Canterbury region, Bali, northern Sumatra, Guam and southern Taiwan.
Winged extinction
The buzzing wings of crickets and grasshoppers could fall silent across the European landscape if action isn’t taken to protect the insects’ habitats, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
The grassland inhabitants are an important food source for birds and reptiles, but more than a quarter of their species have been driven to extinction in recent decades.
The disappearance has mainly been due to loss of habitat to wildfires, intensive agriculture and tourism development, according to the conservation group.
Human climate
Human activities are changing Earth’s climate and otherwise altering its ecology 170 times faster than natural forces, according to a new mathematical equation developed at the Australian National University.
Chemist and climate change expert Will Steffen says that for the past 4.5 billion years, astronomical and geophysical influences have driven Earth’s evolution.
But he found that during the past six decades, human forces “have driven exceptionally rapid rates of change in the Earth system.”
Steffen writes in the journal The Anthropocene Review that greenhouse gas emissions caused by humans “have increased the rate of temperature rise to 1.7 degrees Celsius per century, dwarfing the natural background rate.”