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A quick-moving wildfire is churning through the foothills of Southern California, forcing local authorities to issue mandatory evacuations for some 100,000 people in the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles.

The blaze, which officials have named the Saddleridge Fire, ignited late Thursday in the city of Sylmar. By Friday morning, it had torched roughly 4,700 acres, according to the latest alert by the Los Angeles Fire Department.

"This is a very dynamic fire," Los Angeles Fire Chief Ralph Terrazas said at a Friday morning press conference.

At least 25 structures have been destroyed and more property assessments are planned throughout the day.

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One of the nation’s leading climate change scientists is quitting the Agriculture Department in protest over the Trump administration’s efforts to bury his groundbreaking study about how rice is losing nutrients because of rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Lewis Ziska, a 62-year-old plant physiologist who’s worked at USDA’s Agricultural Research Service for more than two decades, told POLITICO he was alarmed when department officials not only questioned the findings of the study — which raised serious concerns for the 600 million people who depend on rice for most of their calories — but also tried to minimize media coverage of the paper, which was published in the journal Science Advances last year.

An image showing sled dogs ankle deep in water where thick ice would normally be has gone viral.

The image, taken by Steffen Olsen, a scientist with the Danish Meteorological Institute, shows the devastating extent of ice melt in Greenland.

The water the dogs are walking through, according to CNN, is due to flooding from excessive melting of Greenland’s ice sheet, the second largest in the world.

Olsen was reportedly on a mission to retrieve climate monitoring tools his colleagues placed on the sea ice when he snapped the now-viral photo.

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The developer of the Dakota Access oil pipeline missed a year-end deadline to plant thousands of trees along the pipeline corridor in North Dakota. The company said it was still complying with a settlement of allegations it violated state rules during construction.

Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners (ETP), which built the $3.8bn pipeline that is now moving North Dakota oil to Illinois, is falling back on a provision of the September 2017 agreement that provides more time should the company run into problems. The company must provide 20,000 trees to county soil conservation districts along the pipeline’s 359-mile route in North Dakota.

A House panel passed four GOP-backed bills Thursday to amend the Endangered Species Act (ESA), making compliance easier for industries, states and landowners.

The Natural Resources Committee’s bills would give priority to science submitted by state and local governments when federal officials decide whether to protect species, require the Interior Department to consider conservation actions that could happen in the future when making ESA decisions and let Interior prioritize or discharge petitions for species protections under some circumstances.

Taken as a whole, the bills would represent the biggest changes to the ESA in decades.

Republicans on the panel, led by Chairman Rob Bishop (R-Utah), said the changes would make the ESA work better for industry and landowners, as well as the imperiled species themselves.

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More than 1.5 million people were ordered to evacuate their homes along the U.S. southeast coast as Hurricane Florence, the most powerful to menace the Carolinas in nearly three decades, barreled closer on Tuesday.

Florence, a Category 4 storm packing winds of 130 miles per hour (210 kph), was expected to make landfall on Friday, most likely in southeastern North Carolina near the South Carolina border, the National Hurricane Center in Miami said.