In Alaska, a glacier hurtles downhill in a rare exhibition

The hummocky hills of ice at the "toe" of Alaska's Muldrow Glacier have sat undisturbed and covered by tundra for more than 60 years. Soon they will be overtaken by a force that scientists are scrambling to understand - even as they wonder whether climate change will one day halt it completely.

The rare phenomenon began last fall some 12 miles uphill. That's where the glacier initially started sliding, its smooth surface ice cracking under tremendous, hidden stresses. New crevasses opened and ice cliffs were pushed up in a chaotic jumble. The first witness was a pilot who spied the scene in March as he flew around the north side of Denali, the continent's tallest mountain.

The Muldrow has been "surging" forward ever since, at speeds up to 100 times faster than normal.

"That's like Mach 4," said glaciologist Sam Herreid, who has worked extensively in the Alaska Range. "Imagine you drive to work through a school zone, and it's 30 miles per hour. Then one day, out of nowhere, you're sitting in your Honda Civic, and all of a sudden you start to go 3,000 miles per hour."

He and others are racing to keep pace. Surges are one of the last mysteries for those who study glaciers, in part because they happen so infrequently and in just a fraction of places around the world. The activity is different from a glacier actually growing in size, and it can take decades for the right conditions to develop.

In normal, quiescent years, the Muldrow moves only about three inches a day. Scientists estimate it is now gaining 30 to 60 feet daily. A time-lapse video reveals the accumulation of ice, rock, snow and dirt churning forward like a giant blob. Audio equipment has also been deployed, although snow has acted as a natural insulator and muffled the intense sounds of ice cracking and crashing.

Canada may see more 'zombie fires' as climate warms and winters shorten: experts

Blazes that continue to burn through the winter in Canada were once thought to be a myth, but the so-called zombie fires may become more common as temperatures get warmer and less snow falls, experts say.

Steven Cumming, an associate professor at Laval University's department of wood and forest sciences, said those working in fire management had heard stories of the underground smouldering blazes over winter but there was no way of counting them until a recent study.

"All I know in Canada is that their existence has been reported more as a matter of folklore," he said in an interview. "And what this paper does is give us some idea how often these things might be happening."

The paper, published in the science journal Nature, said increasing summer temperatures associated with climate warming may promote the survival of overwintering fires in the future in the boreal regions. Blazes that burn over winter are also known as holdover or zombie fires.

I think I read somewhere that The 'Beast', the fire that ripped through Fort McMurray in 2016 was not extinguished until sometime in 2017 in northern Saskatchewan.

Carbon Dioxide, Which Drives Climate Change, Reaches Highest Level In 4 Million Years

The amount of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere reached 419 parts per million in May, its highest level in more than four million years, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced on Monday.

After dipping last year because of pandemic-fueled lockdowns, emissions of greenhouse gases have begun to soar again as economies open and people resume work and travel. The newly released data about May carbon dioxide levels show that the global community so far has failed to slow the accumulation of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, NOAA said in its announcement.

"We are adding roughly 40 billion metric tons of CO2 pollution to the atmosphere per year," said Pieter Tans, a senior scientist with NOAA's Global Monitoring Laboratory, in a statement. "If we want to avoid catastrophic climate change, the highest priority must be to reduce CO2 pollution to zero at the earliest possible date."

The May measurement is the monthly average of atmospheric data recorded by NOAA and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at an observatory atop Hawaii's Mauna Loa volcano. NOAA's monthly average from its measurements came to 419.13 parts per million, and scientists from Scripps calculated their average as 418.92. A year ago, the average was 417 parts per million.

The last time the atmosphere held similar amounts of carbon dioxide was during the Pliocene period, NOAA said, about 4.1 to 4.5 million years ago. At that time, sea levels were 78 feet higher. The planet was an average of 7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer, and large forests might have grown in what is today's Arctic tundra.

Homo erectus, an early human ancestor, emerged about two million years ago on a much cooler planet. At the time, atmospheric carbon dioxide levels averaged about 230 parts per million — a bit over half of today's levels.

‘It was sad having to leave’: Climate crisis splits Alaskan town in half

All of Newtok’s 400 residents will have to move to higher ground but funding shortages and Covid means some are being left behind
Julia Ilhardt
Tue 8 Jun 2021 16.12 BST

Last modified on Tue 8 Jun 2021 16.18 BST

Two years ago, Lisa Charles and her family moved from their lifelong home in the town of Newtok, Alaska, to Mertarvik, a 30-minute trip by boat or snow machine depending on the season.

Lisa is a member of one of the US’s first communities of climate transplants, though she is also Yup’ik, a mother of seven, a nonprofit employee, and a political volunteer. Melting permafrost has rapidly accelerated the erosion of the land under Newtok, bringing houses precariously close to the water’s edge.

All of the town’s nearly 400 residents will eventually have to make the move to Mertarvik, but a lack of funding and the global pandemic have left the village split in half, both in population and in spirit.

“I think of Newtok as a little island, as swampy ground,” says Lisa. “The ground has gotten so bad that all the light poles are leaning over, the boardwalks are getting crooked and breaking apart.”

Hoover Dam reservoir hits record low, in sign of extreme western U.S. drought



.S. June 9, 2021. Picture taken June 9, 2021. REUTERS/Bridget Bennett

The reservoir created by Hoover Dam, an engineering marvel that symbolized the American ascendance of the 20th Century, has sunk to its lowest level ever, underscoring the gravity of the extreme drought across the U.S. West.

Lake Mead, formed in the 1930s from the damming of the Colorado River at the Nevada-Arizona border about 30 miles (50 km) east of Las Vegas, is the largest reservoir in the United States. It is crucial to the water supply of 25 million people including in the cities of Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, Tucson and Las Vegas.

As of 11 p.m. PDT Wednesday (0600 GMT Thursday), the lake surface fell to 1,071.56 feet above sea level, dipping below the previous record low set on July 1, 2016. It has fallen 140 feet (42.7 meters) since 2000 - nearly the height of the Statue of Liberty from torch to base - exposing a bathtub ring of bleached-white embankments.

The drought that has brought Lake Mead low has gripped California, the Pacific Northwest, the Great Basin spanning Nevada, Oregon and Utah, plus the southwestern states of Arizona and New Mexico and even part of the Northern Plains.

It's awful that it has become this critical though it seems to me that there have several alarm bells over the years that all pointed to this eventuality.