Sunday, Nov 24th
Last update08:57:41 AM GMT
Environmental Glance
Easter Sunday has been confirmed as the coldest Easter day on record, with the lowest temperature recorded as -12.5C in Braemar, in the Scottish Highlands .
The previous coldest Easter day since modern records began in 1960 was Easter Monday in 1986, which dipped to -9.8C, the Met Office said. Average temperatures for this time of year are between 10C and 13C.The prolonged cold spell covering the UK could last until mid-April, forecasters say.
The Headley family built their house a few years ago, just before the gas-drilling boom hit. They had a chance to buy the gas rights but chose not to. Now, they wish they had, because they're sharing their 115-acre farm with the Marcellus Shale industry.
A puddle along a country road in southern Fayette County is a natural spring, an artesian well, but it's not the spring that's making it bubble.
David Headley told Action News investigator Jim Parsons that he wasn't really sure when he first noticed it, but he said, "We've seen it bubbling now for the last couple of years."
Such seismic activity isn't normal here. Between 1972 and 2008, the USGS recorded just a few earthquakes a year in Oklahoma. In 2008, there were more than a dozen; nearly 50 occurred in 2009. In 2010, the number exploded to more than 1,000.
These so-called "earthquake swarms" are occurring in other places where the ground is not supposed to move. There have been abrupt upticks in both the size and frequency of quakes in Arkansas, Colorado, Ohio, and Texas. Scientists investigating these anomalies are coming to the same conclusion: The quakes are linked to injection wells. Into most of them goes wastewater from hydraulic fracking, while some, as those in Prague, are filled with leftover fluid from dewatering operations.
st week, investigators studying methane leakage levels in Manhattan reported alarming preliminary findings. The gas industry and Con Edison estimate 2.2% leakage in its distribution systems, and at leakage above 3.2%, according to the Environmental Defense Fund, natural gas ceases to have any climate advantage over other fossil fuels.
But the study found an average cumulative leakage of over 5% in natural gas production and delivery. At these levels, natural gas—93% of which is methane—has a far more potent greenhouse gas impact than burned coal or oil, the authors stated.
Widely used pesticides have been found in new research to block a part of the brain that bees use for learning, rendering some of them unable to perform the essential task of associating scents with food. Bees exposed to two kinds of pesticide were slower to learn or completely forgot links between floral scents and nectar.
These effects could make it harder for bees to forage among flowers for food, thereby threatening their survival and reducing the pollination of crops and wild plants. The findings add to existing research that neonicotinoid pesticides are contributing to the decline in bee populations.
Scientists have linked the underground injection of oil-drilling wastewater to a magnitude-5.7 earthquake in 2011 that struck the US state of Oklahoma. Wastewater injection from drilling operations has been linked to seismic events in the past, but these have typically been much smaller quakes.
They also have tended to occur in the first weeks or months of injection. The study in Geology suggests that "induced seismicity" can occur years after wastewater injection begins.
More than half of U.S. rivers, streams and other waterways are in too poor of a condition for aquatic life, the Environmental Protection Agency said. The EPA said most the nation's streams, rivers and other waters were in poor health.
EPA analysis said that 27 percent of the nation's waterways have high levels of nitrogen and 40 percent have high levels of phosphorus. Those chemicals lead to algae blooms that can deprive water of oxygen.
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