EARTHWEEK
Antibiotic rivers
The first-ever global study of antibiotic pollution in the world’s rivers finds that some waterways are awash with up to 300 times the levels considered safe by experts at a global pharmaceutical alliance.
High levels of 14 antibiotics such as ciprofloxacin and metronidazole in the water are not only a threat to wildlife, but they also threaten to accelerate antimicrobial resistance, experts say.
The countries with the highest levels of waterborne antibiotics were Bangladesh, Kenya, Ghana, Pakistan and Nigeria. Austria had Europe’s highest concentration.
Climate die-off
Changes in the ocean ecosystems off Alaska under global heating appear to be behind a massive die-off of seabirds in the Bering Sea.
Researchers found that the thousands of tufted puffins and a smaller number of crested auklets perished from starvation.
Citizen scientists from Alaska’s Pribilof Islands tribal communities joined with local officials and the University of Washington to document the bird deaths and the environment in which they occurred.
A new report in the journal PLOS One, which used their observations, says warmer weather and decreasing winter sea ice beginning in 2014 have led to declines in some of the marine species the seabirds feed on.
A stormy future
The type of stalled jet stream pattern that brought almost daily rounds of severe storms to North
America and parts of the Mediterranean during the latter half of May is linked to the record warming of the Arctic.
Researchers from Germany’s Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI) combined two models that use machine learning to realistically reproduce the observed changes in the jet stream. They say it’s the first time artificial intelligence has been used in climate modeling.
Earthquakes
Two people perished and hundreds of buildings were wrecked when a massive temblor rocked Peru’s Amazon Basin.
• Earth movements were also felt in El Salvador, metropolitan Tokyo and the SwissFrench
border region.
Fall of the wild
The genetic identity of European wolves is slowly being eroded by swarms of wolf-dog crossbreeds, which scientists warn could drive the purebred canines out of existence.
Valerio Donfrancesco, of the University of Exeter’s Penryn Campus, says there is strong disagreement on how to remove the hybrids and freeroaming dogs to prevent them from breeding with the wolves.
Some argue they could be captured or sterilized and released, while others advocate killing them. There are an estimated 17,000 wolves living across Europe from Spain and Greece to Finland.
Testing legacy
Cracks in a dome built over a crater left by a 1958 nuclear blast in the Marshall Islands may now be leaking radioactive contamination around Enewetak Atoll.
The Runit dome was built by the United States in 1977, designed to also contain radioactive debris from other nuclear tests in the Pacific between 1946 and 1958. But the new cracks and rising sea levels threaten to inundate the atomic dump, further contaminating the Pacific atoll. Some of the Enewetak residents evacuated before the blast were finally allowed to return in 1980 after the dome was completed and the Marshall Islands government accepted the U.S. cleanup efforts as final. Bali blast Flights in and out of the Indonesian resort island of Bali were briefly halted again following an eruption of Mount Agung, which spewed out lava, incandescent rocks and a plume of ash. The volcano has produced frequent mild eruptions since powerful blasts in 2017 halted air traffic around Bali for several days.