Earthweek: a diary of the planet
Polar lightning
Lightning strikes were detected within 300 miles of the North Pole during the closing weeks of an Arctic summer that has seen record warmth, fire storms and a possible record ice melt.
A forecaster at the U.S. National Weather Service in Fairbanks, Alaska, said they were the farthest north lightning strikes in memory. The lightning was detected by a global network of Gpssynchronized radio receivers that pick up static created by lightning that’s even thousands of miles away.
Fracking methane
A new study concludes that the recent boom in fracking to extract shale gas, largely composed of methane, is responsible for a surge in the atmospheric concentration of the powerful greenhouse gas over the past decade.
Robert Howarth, of Cornell University in New York, says he estimates that fracking in the United States and Canada is responsible for more than half of the increase in the global fossil fuel emissions seen over the past 10 years. His report warns that if shale gas extraction continues to rise, it will make the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement even more difficult to achieve.
Bumpier rides
Climate change is likely causing airline passengers to suffer more turbulence as they fly across the North Atlantic and on other high-altitude routes, according to researchers from the University of Reading in England.
Writing in the journal Nature, co-author Paul Williams and colleagues say there has been a 15 percent increase in vertical wind shear between 1979 and 2017. Such wind shear is when wind speeds increase with height. The additional turbulence also is likely to mean planes will have to steer clear of it, increasing fuel costs and flight times, Williams said.
Tropical cyclones
Former Super Typhoon Lekima left at least 56 people dead in China’s Zhejiang, Shandong and Anhui provinces. The storm inflicted more than $3.7 billion in damage as the country’s second-most costly cyclone.
At least one person died and 40 were injured as Tropical Storm Krosa made landfall around Hiroshima, Japan, on Thursday. Transportation in Japan also was widely disrupted by the storm during the peak of a late summer holiday when many travel to their ancestral hometowns to honor their deceased family members.
Also this past week, Tropical Storm Henriette formed briefly to the southwest of Baja California.
Airborne plastic
Tiny bits of microplastics have been discovered in recent months in rainwater and snowfall from Colorado to the Arctic. They join similar plastic pollution that has shown up in groundwater, rivers and lakes, and at the deepest depths of the sea. Scientists from the Northwest Passage Project, taking ice core samples this summer in Arctic Canada, say they also found visible plastic beads and filaments of various shapes and sizes in the ice.
Earlier studies have found that plastic has fallen from the sky in Europe’s Pyrenees Mountains, a region near Hong Kong, the Iranian capital of Tehran and Paris.
Japan eruption
Japan’s Mount Asama spewed ash and vapor more than a mile into the sky in the heart of Honshu Island during the volcano’s first eruption in four years. Authorities scrambled to get warnings to visitors and residents as Asama threatened to shoot out super-heated rocks and send pyroclastic flows down its slopes.
Earthquakes
One woman was killed by a magnitude 5.9 earthquake that was widely felt across Taiwan. Also this past week, about 24 people were injured in southwestern Turkey by a damaging magnitude 5.7 quake. Earth movements also were felt in southwestern England, South Asia’s Hindu Kush region, southern New Zealand, western Sumatra, the Virgin Islands and the Big Island of Hawaii.
©2019 Earth Environment Service