Environment & Weather Clips

This Nonprofit Is Trying to Restore One Billion Oysters to New York Harbor

Environment

New York harbor was once the oyster capital of the world. In fact, what lobsters mean to Maine today, oysters meant to New York just a few centuries ago.

Archeologists have found middens — ancient piles of shells — dating back to 6950 B.C, suggesting that oysters thrived in the brackish waters around New York harbor for millennia, providing bountiful food to the Lenape people who lived in the region. Later, British explorer Henry Hudson found 350 square miles of oyster reefs when he sailed into the harbor in 1609 and as you would expect, it didn’t take long for European settlers to establish a booming oyster industry in the harbor shortly thereafter.

Spring Along the Minnesota-North Dakota Border Often Brings Floods. Here's How They’re Working To Protect Residents

Weather

After a winter of heavy snowfall (up to 117 inches in Fargo), warm weather in March of 1997 began to melt the snow across the Valley of the Red River of the North that runs along the border of Minnesota and North Dakota into Southern Manitoba. Many of the river’s tributaries soon began to flood, especially in flat and low-lying farmland areas.

Then Blizzard Hannah hit in April, bringing with it up to 70 mph winds, a frigid drop in temperatures, and dumping an additional 20 inches of snow. In some areas, the blizzard was preceded with wind-driven rain and sleet.

“The wet snow clung to the power poles and lines turned to ice," said Al Leiran, an insurance agent and resident of Ada, Minnesota, a small town just north of Fargo that is located next to one of the larger tributaries to the Red River, the Wild Rice River. "The wind and weight of the ice snapped the power poles like toothpicks causing a complete loss of power for many days. Many people had no heat and the cold was brutal.”

Everything You Need to Know about Hail Storms

Weather

In 1981, massive thunderstorms brought 100 mph winds, tornadoes, flash floods and grapefruit-sized hailstones of over 4.5 inches in diameter to Texas and the surrounding region, including Oklahoma, Kansas and Alabama.

20 people died. The total estimated damage was estimated to cost $1.2 billion.

This is not the first time that storms with hail have been deadly. In fact, history is full of accounts of deadly hailstorms. For example, in 1360 on “Black Monday,” a hail storm killed around 1,000 English soldiers in Chartres, France — a frightening development in the Hundred Year’s War between the two countries. In 1888, a bad hail storm with orange-sized hail in Moradabad, India killed 246 people.

Hail storms are relatively frequent in the United States. According to NOAA’s Severe Storms database, there were 5,396 major hail storms in 2019.

Why Adventurers are Joining scientists in tackling environmental issues

Environment

As the lead technician in a Virology lab, Sarah Horak had always loved her work in science. Her job didn’t actually allow her to be out in the field very much though, which was disappointing, as  she and her husband, Justin, both loved the outdoors and were always trying to find more ways to spend time there. So when she found out that there was a nonprofit called Adventure Scientists looking for volunteers to help other scientists gather data in the outdoors, she was immediately intrigued.

“They were looking for volunteers to help collect water samples for [a] microplastics study,” she says. “I signed up, met with the project manager on the study, and was immediately hooked.”

The project allowed her to combine her two loves — science and the outdoors — which is why the microplastics project was only her first foray into Adventure Scientists projects. After two years of volunteering on that first one, she and her husband became volunteers for a large, important pollinator project that was gathering information about butterflies in remote, backcountry areas.

Insects are the foundation of biodiversity, and yet, very little is known about most of their populations, especially in wilderness areas. 

A Storm Chaser Shares Her Experience of Living in Tornado Alley

Weather

In the late afternoon on May 31st, 2013, a massive supercell thunderstorm formed southwest of El Reno, Oklahoma.

“It was really ominous from the beginning, before the storm had even formed a tornado,” remembers Jana Houser, a storm chaser from that day who is now an associate professor of Meteorology at Ohio University. “It was a really big, black, menacing-looking supercell. You just sort of felt it — you felt that this storm was going to produce a really big tornado.”

And that it did: The tornado it spawned was 2.6 miles wide — about the width of Manhattan — making it the widest tornado ever recorded. It was also incredibly violent and was classified as an EF3. It traveled 16.2 miles over 40 minutes.

These Special Forces Veterans Are on a Mission to Rescue Florida’s Threatened Coral Reefs

Conservation

Approximately six miles off the coast of Southern Florida and stretching 360 miles from Miami to Dry Tortugas National Park is North America’s only living coral barrier reef.

This Florida reef tract is home to over 50 species of coral, over 150 species of fish — including snapper, colorful parrotfish, barracuda, angelfish, and grouper — and numerous wildlife species, including species listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. This reef acts as a natural buffer for Florida’s shoreline, lessening wave strength from storms, and it is incredibly important to the local economy. According to NOAA, it is estimated that it generates $3.4 billion in sales every year and supports 36,000 jobs.

Why California Communities Are Becoming More Fire-Aware

Weather

In late October 2007, ongoing drought, low humidity, warm weather and strong Santa Ana winds over 50 mph had much of Southern California on high alert: Conditions were primed for wildfires.

“We knew the weather was bad,” remembers Kevin Crawford. Although he has now retired after 13 years in the fire service, Crawford was the Carlsbad Fire Chief and the area fire coordinator at that time, a position that activates whenever there is a large-scale emergency like a firestorm.

“We were very much on the balls of our feet and we knew [a fire] was probably coming.” he continues.

Everything You Need To Know About Mudslides

Weather

On December 4, 2017, the Thomas Fire — the largest wildfires in California’s modern history — broke out, scorching 282,000 acres of land in the Los Padres National Forest and across Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.

Barely a month later and before the wildfire was even fully out, a once-in-500-year storm cell dumped more than a half-inch of rain in five minutes in the middle of the night in Montecito, a seaside community east of Santa Barbara.

This dissolved the hills and triggered a dangerous river of mud and rocks that flowed through Montecito and all the way out to the ocean. Over 130 homes were ripped apart, boulders and debris came crashing down the valley, killing 23 people. The destruction was so devastating that even a year after the mudslide, two bodies still hadn’t been found.

These mayors are leading the way to a fair and green recovery from COVID-19

Environmental justice

Since COVID-19 was identified in December 2019, it has spread around the world, wreaking havoc on our daily lives.

As of July 6, 2020, there have been over 11.5 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 reported across 216 countries and territories.

Over 500,000 people have died.

Cities and countries instituted strict lockdowns or issued shelter-in-place orders, but as we retreated indoors to flatten the curve, economies ground to a halt. Millions of people have lost their jobs. Hospital ICUs hit capacity. Inequality has been made painfully obvious as the most marginalized communities are forced to bear the worst impacts. Never before has it been more clear just how interconnected our health and the health of the planet truly is.

Experts have been warning of a coming pandemic for decades and yet, we weren't ready when the reality hit.

When Polar Bears Are Your Neighbors, Climate Change Brings Risk

Climate Change

Halloween night in Churchill, Manitoba looks a little bit different from anywhere else:

A helicopter flies over town, looking for dangerous creatures with a spotlight. Community volunteers and firefighters are posted around the perimeter of town, doing visual scans of the horizon. Emergency vehicles are scattered around the community, their lights flashing to scare away threats.

Volunteers and conservation officers, armed with “scare” shotguns, patrol the streets. Throughout the night, pops from those shotguns might be heard as the officers try to scare away hungry bears trying to enter town.

Baited culvert traps filled with seal meat lie in wait on streets, ready to trap any bear that the patrols miss.

Fog harvesting is real — and it's bringing clean drinking water to communities in need.

Water Crisis

The Berber people, also called the Imazighen, have lived in scattered settlements across Morocco and its surrounding countries for thousands of years. As the descendants of the pre-Arab inhabitants of North Africa, their history dates back to prehistoric times. They have preserved their own language and culture despite numerous attempts to colonize them throughout history. Today, about 14 million Berber people live in Morocco.

Over the past 30 years, life has become increasingly difficult for the Berbers living in the Anti-Atlas mountains because of desertification and abnormally intense droughts, including one in 1986 that dried out the region so much that it has never fully recovered.

Dangerous Straight-line Winds Are More Common Than Tornadoes. Here’s What You Should Know About Them.

Weather

Andrew Kling was home in his Kansas City apartment talking on the phone to his partner when a strong storm kicked up.

Curious, he went to the living room to get a better look out the window when he heard a loud crash. Then there was a flash of light, then the power went out.

Because of the light flash, he assumed there must have been a lightning strike nearby, but when he walked back into his bedroom, he realized it was something altogether different: : A massive wooden bean had shot through the brick wall of his apartment and landed right in his bedroom. Later he would learn that it wasn’t just this beam — half the apartment building’s roof had been torn off and some of it had landed on a power transformer, causing the outage.

This is the first mammal to go extinct because of manmade climate change

Climate Change

Rising sea levels appear to have wiped out a rodent species living on an island in the Great Barrier Reef. This is the first documented case of a mammal species going extinct due to manmade climate change.

The mammal, called the Bramble Cay melomys, was a long-tailed, whiskered critter, with reddish-brown fur that was about the same size as a small rat. It was considered the only mammal endemic — or native — to the Great Barrier Reef, living on a tiny island in the northeast Torres Strait between Queensland, Australia and the southern shores of Papua New Guinea.