Earthweek: a diary of the planet
Climate sick
Man-made climate change is now so pervasive that it is making people sick, a leading expert warns. Beyond the heat-related deaths and illnesses around the Northern Hemisphere this summer, Dr. Sandro Galea, dean of the Boston University School of Public Health, says the warming climate also is sending disease-carrying insects into new territories.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that ailments caused by flea and tick bites tripled in the United States between 2004 and 2016, with Maine seeing a 20-fold increase in cases of tick-borne Lyme disease. Writing in HuffPost, Galea describes climate change as acting like a disease, with its symptoms including polluted air, flooded streets, burning forests and death.
Sicilian eruption
Italy’s Mount Etna produced a colorful eruption that sent fountains of lava shooting hundreds of feet into the Sicilian sky.
Lava also snaked down the volcano’s slopes, accompanied by plumes of ash. Porpoise chat
A lone common dolphin believed to be separated from its group along western Scotland’s Firth of Clyde might have learned to “talk” with a group of local harbor porpoises. Researcher Mel Cosentino of the University of Strathclyde has been recording sounds from the dolphin, dubbed “Kylie,” and finds it has changed the frequency of its communication clicks to closely match those of the new porpoise companions.
“We want to see whether he is imitating the porpoises, like when we bark back at a dog, or there is something else going on,” said Cosentino. She tells the BBC that further studies will soon reveal whether Kylie is really communicating or just imitating. Tropical cyclones
Hurricane Lane drenched parts of Hawaii, becoming the second- wettest tropical cyclone on record. A rain gauge on Hawaii’s Big Island measured 52.02 inches of rain during the hurricane. The rainfall unleashed widespread flooding. Also this week, Tropical Storm Miriam and Hurricane Norman churned the Pacific between Mexico and Hawaii. Norman was upgraded to a Category 4 storm late in the week and headed toward the southern tip of Baja California, Mexico.
Typhoon Jebi moved steadily across the open waters of the western Pacific, heading for Japan. It was expected to lash the largely unpopulated far Northern Mariana Islands and Iwo Jima.
Earthquakes
Two people were killed and about 300 were injured by a magnitude 6.0 earthquake centered in far western Iran, near the border with Iraq.
Earth movements also were felt around the Timor Sea, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, New Caledonia, southeastern Peru and Southern California.
Kelp allure
Undersea kelp forests are being transformed by warming oceans, affecting the species that rely on them for food and shelter.
“The warm-water kelp Laminaria ochroleuca was actually first detected in the U.K. in the late 1940s, but is now a common sight along the southwest coast,” said Dan Smale of Britain’s Plymouth University.
The warmer water and resulting northward expansion of the kelp is causing warm-water fish to move north, too. It’s also allowing the cool-water species they are displacing to migrate into Arctic waters that are rapidly becoming warmer.
CO2 capture
A Swiss company has received a $31 million investment to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in an expensive process that uses high-tech filters and fans. Climeworks AG says it costs about $600 to extract a ton of carbon from the air, but the company hopes to bring down the cost enough to pull out 1 percent of man-made CO2 emissions by 2025. Scientists now believe that only a combination of eliminating greenhouse gas emissions and extracting existing CO2 from the air can reduce the effects of climate change brought on by the burning of fossil fuels.