Climate and Environment
11 October 2019
The French falconer Jacques-Olivier Travers has surveyed the glaciers of the Alps using a camera attached to a white-tailed eagle.
The nine-year-old eagle Victor began his five-section journey from the Piz Corvatsch peak in Switzerland with a 360-degree camera and a GPS tracker on his back. The bird flew through Germany, Austria and Italy before finishing his tour of the mountains in France.
At the start of each section, the bird was launched from a peak by one of Travers’ colleagues. Victor, who flew slower than usual because of the burden of the camera, flew 3 to 5 kilometres each time, until he found Travers.
While travelling along the route, the falconer saw the melting of Alpine glaciers with his own eyes. One glacier in Germany, for instance, which was covered by thick snow last year, has turned into slush by now.
Source: MTI – Hungarian News Agency
For the first time ever, living polyps were discovered in Mediterranean coral colonies that were previously thought to be completely dead by researchers who published their finding in the periodical Science Advances.
The oceans play a very important role in controlling Earth’s climate. New research has shown that the planet’s five oceans absorb much more carbon dioxide, one of the gases responsible for the greenhouse effect, than previously thought.
According to a study published in the International Journal of Climatology, Israel’s average temperature has been rising continuously since the proclamation of the Middle Eastern state in 1948, but over the last thirty years the rate of warming has also increased.
Temperatures are rising much faster than the global average in the region of the Mediterranean Sea, and this represents a threat to the food and water resources of the region, researchers have warned in a new study.
The news about climate refugees are alternating sequences of frightening numbers and apocalyptic landscapes that obscure the real face of the problem: the disfigured human fates.
More than a quarter of all mammals are threatened with extinction.
Between 1 May and 30 August, higher than ever temperatures have been measured in 29 countries, on almost 400 occasions in the Northern Hemisphere.
The ice floe that the German research boat will be attached to as it drifts around the Arctic for almost a year on the most important Arctic expedition ever has been selected.
Data from European climate researchers indicates that this year’s was the warmest September since the Copernicus Climate Change Service began keeping regular records of meteorological data in 1981.
If the current trend continues, oceanic wildlife is in grave danger.
