Earthweek: a diary of the planet
Record melt
Last month’s record-setting temperatures in parts of Greenland set the stage for its ice cap to lose 12.5 billion tons of ice to surface melting on Aug. 1 alone — a new single-day record.
Temperatures of 15 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit above normal this summer also led to more than 11 billion tons of ice melting on the last day of July across the world’s largest island. It was followed by 12 billion tons melting on Aug. 2. The heat arrived after baking North Africa and Europe earlier this summer. The last time that Greenland saw a massive daily melt was in 2012, when more than 10 billion tons of ice were lost to the rising seas.
Hottest year ever
July followed June as Earth’s hottest months on record, possibly leading to 2019 becoming the hottest year ever observed.
The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service calculated that last month narrowly edged out July 2016 as the hottest month on record, beating that month by about 0.07 degrees Fahrenheit.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says that nine of the 10 warmest Julys in the climate record have occurred so far this century.
“We have lived always through hot summers. But this is not the summer of our youth. This is not your grandfather’s summer,” United Nations Secretarygeneral António Guterres told reporters.
Tropical cyclones
Typhoon Francisco lashed Japan’s southern main island of Kyushu as a Category 1 storm, leaving several injured and disrupting transportation. A weaker Francisco later drenched the Korean Peninsula.
Also this past week, Northern Taiwan received high winds and downpours as Typhoon Lekima skirted the island. Typhoon Krosa churned the open Pacific Ocean north of Guam. And Tropical Storm Gil formed for a few hours in the eastern Pacific.
Plastic coral
A team of divers cleaning up the waters off Greece’s Andros Island said they found a “gulf full of plastic coral.”
Waving on the ocean floor like a forest of kelp, the plastic debris probably wound up there eight years ago when a nearby makeshift landfill collapsed into the sea. It was “like the paradise of the Caribbean Sea, where you find coral reefs everywhere of every color. It was the exact same thing, but instead of coral, it was bags,” said diver Arabella Ross with the group Aegean Rebreath.
Food vs. climate
A new report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that it will be impossible to keep temperatures down under climate change unless there is a transformation in the way the world feeds itself and manages land use. How we now grow crops and livestock causes a third of total greenhouse gas emissions to come from the soil. The report says land
Five people were killed and 200 homes damaged when a strong earthquake struck western Java. Earth movements also were felt in the eastern Philippines, northeastern Japan, southwestern Iran, central Chile, Costa Rica, southwestern Montana and Anchorage, Alaska.
Oceanic heat
A new study finds that marine heat waves are now disrupting the ocean’s ecosystems and the lives of those humans who depend upon them for food and livelihood far more frequently. Researchers examined 65 large marine ecosystems from 1854 to 2018 to identify the frequency of surprisingly warm ocean waters. They found that warming events are now at nearly double the rate that scientists had expected.
©2019 Earth Environment Service