Environment Archive

Researcher Alex Hanna, of Distributed AI Research Institute and previously of Google, reflects on what might come next:

The Biden administration is investing $20 million in a program to use the GOES-R satellite for wildfire detection. The hope is that the satellite will spot blazes before 911 calls start, and see through a haze of smoke to point to where a fire ignited. That could help officials and firefighters respond more quickly and give them a leg up on fighting the fire.

It shows carbon dioxide pollution moving through Earth’s atmosphere. We can’t usually see the pollution causing climate change, but NASA was able to illustrate it using a a high-resolution weather model and supercomputers. It incorporates data from billions of ground and satellite observations.

That’s according to preliminary data from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. The world has been smashing records lately thanks to climate change: 2023 was the hottest year on record. Last summer was the hottest in the Northern Hemisphere in at least 2,000 years. And there’s still time to break more records this summer.

Mining companies want to harvest polymetallic nodules — which are rich in metals that can be used to make batteries — from the deep sea. But scientists just discovered that these so-called “batteries in a rock” might be creating oxygen through seawater electrolysis. It’s a wild revelation that poses new questions about the consequences of mining the deep sea before fully understanding what’s down there.