Tag: environment
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India snow leopards: First-ever survey puts population at 718
India is home to 718 snow leopards, according to the first-ever survey of the animal in the country, the federal environment ministry has said. This means that Indian snow leopards account for roughly 10-15% of the big cat’s global population. The snow leopard is classified as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.…
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Invasive ants leave lions scrambling for prey on the savannah in an ecological chain reaction
Lions, elephants, zebras, buffalo, ants, and trees are all locked in an intricate ecological web in one Kenyan nature preserve. But that web is unraveling as a small invader disrupts the natural balance of things, according to a study published January 24 in the journal Science. The spread of an invasive insect across the savannah habitat of Ol…
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Ubiquitous acceleration in Greenland Ice Sheet calving from 1985 to 2022
Nearly every glacier in Greenland has thinned or retreated over the past few decades, leading to glacier acceleration, increased rates of sea-level rise and climate impacts around the globe. To understand how calving-front retreat has affected the ice-mass balance of Greenland, we combine 236,328 manually derived and AI-derived observations of glacier terminus positions collected from…
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Norway to allow mining waste to be dumped in fjords
Norway is to allow mining waste to be dumped in its fjords after the government won a court case against environmental organisations trying to block the plan. After a 15-year dispute, the private company Nordic Mining has been given the go-ahead to dispose of 170m tonnes of mining waste at the bottom of the Førde fjord, which…
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Bottled water contains 100 times more plastic nanoparticles than previously thought
The average litre of bottled water has nearly a quarter of a million pieces of microplastics and tiny, invisible nanoplastics, new research has found. These have been detected and categorised for the first time by a microscope using dual lasers. Scientists had long figured there were lots of these microscopic plastic pieces, but until researchers at…
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Study finds microplastics in nearly all American proteins: meat, fish and plants
An Environmental Pollution study published on Monday reviewed a wide range of meat, fish and vegetarian meat alternatives — and found that 88 percent of them contained some form of microplastics. Microplastics are tiny pieces of plastics the approximate size of a grain of sand or a human hair, which carry a host of potential health risks. Based on…