West Antarctic ice shelf melt 'unavoidable'

These floating tongues of ice extend from the main ice sheet into the ocean, and play a key role in holding back the glaciers behind. But as ice shelves melt, it can mean that the ice behind speeds up, releasing more into the oceans. The study's findings suggest that future sea-level rise may be greater than previously assumed.

The last remaining Northern Greenland ice shelves bracing the region's vast ice sheet have lost a third of their volume in the last four decades, researchers said on Tuesday, warning of the risk of "dramatic" sea level rise.

over 1000 gigatons (1 gigaton is equivalent to 1 billion tons), or 20 percent, of ice around the edges of Greenland had been lost over the past four decades and not been accounted for.

Even Minor Volcanic Eruptions Could Trigger Global Catastrophe

"We need to move away from thinking in terms of colossal eruptions destroying the world, as portrayed in Hollywood films. The more probable scenarios involve lower-magnitude eruptions interacting with our societal vulnerabilities and cascading us towards catastrophe."

Major climate changes inevitable and irreversible

Within the next two decades, temperatures are likely to rise by more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, breaching the ambition of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, and bringing widespread devastation and extreme weather.

New Covid vaccines needed globally within a year

Survey of experts in relevant fields concludes that new variants could arise in countries with low vaccine coverage

Ageing Water Storage Infrastructure: An Emerging Global Risk

The Report provides an overview of the current state of knowledge on the ageing of large dams –an emerging global development issue as tens of thousands of existing large dams have reached or exceeded an “alert” age threshold of 50 years, and many others will soon approach 100 years. These aged structures incur rapidly rising maintenance needs and costs while simultaneously declining their effectiveness and posing potential threats to human safety and the environment

Welcome to the Pyrocene Age

the areas burning, the areas needing to be burned, the off-site impacts with damaged watersheds and airsheds, the unraveling of biotas, the pervasive power of climate change, rising sea levels, a mass extinction, the disruption of human life and habitats – and you have a pyrogeography that looks eerily like an ice age for fire. You have a Pyrocene. The contours of such an epoch are already becoming visible through the smoke.

How 5 People Survived Nagasaki’s Nuclear Hell

Truman and the Secretary of War, made a concerted effort to publish articles justifying the use of the bombs, excluding any information about what happened to the people beneath the atomic clouds.

August 9, 1945

At 11:02 A.M., their morning was broken by a blinding white flash in the sky. The plutonium bomb dropped by the United States unleashed more than 21 kilotons of firepower, ripping through Nagasaki and killing as many as 70,000 people almost instantly. Ikeda was only one of 47 survivors from his elementary school; 1,400 students were killed, and 50 others were missing.

The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

A mushroom cloud is seen over Nagasaki, Japan, after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city on August 9, 1945

Beirut explosion: death toll rises to 137 as army takes control of site

Lebanese officials have started blaming each other for leaving the highly explosive substance sitting so close to residential neighbourhoods for six years. The ammonium nitrate was taken from a ship that docked in Beirut in 2013 and was apparently abandoned by its Russian owner and mostly Ukrainian crew.

The attack on Hiroshima: Remembering the dead, praying for peace

Bells have tolled in Japan's Hiroshima for the 75th anniversary of the world's first atomic bombing, with ceremonies downsized due to the coronavirus pandemic and the city's mayor urging nations to reject self-centred nationalism and commit to nuclear disarmament more seriously