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Fires Cost Russia '300 Billion Dollars' In Deforestation
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August 26, 2010 - Yahoo! News
| | Moscow -- Wildfires have cost Russia 300 billion dollars in forest loss, environmentalists said on Thursday, explaining the scale of the disaster by Vladimir Putin's "absurd" changes to forestry law. The economic damage amounts to 25,000 dollars per hectare (2.4 acres), or at least 300 billion dollars, according to estimates based on the market value of timber and the cost of reforestation, said Alexei Zimenko, general director of the Biodiversity Conservation Centre. According to Russian environmentalists, citing data from the Global Fire Monitoring Centre, the fires have covered an area of 10 million to 12 million hectares in Russia since the start of the year.
| | | By Anna Smolchenko © 2010 Agence France Presse © 2010 Yahoo! Inc.
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New Microbe Discovered Eating Gulf Oil Spill
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August 24, 2010 - MSNBC
| | A newly discovered type of oil-eating microbe suddenly is flourishing in the Gulf of Mexico and gobbling up the BP spill at a much faster rate than expected. Scientists discovered the new microbe while studying the underwater dispersion of millions of gallons of oil spilled since the explosion of BP's Deepwater Horizon drilling rig. Also, the microbe works without significantly depleting oxygen in the water, researchers reported in the online journal Sciencexpress.
| | | © 2010 MSNBC.com
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Far North Greenland Glacier Cracking Up
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August 22, 2010 - CBS News
| | In northern Greenland, a part of the Arctic that had seemed immune from global warming, new satellite images show a growing giant crack and an 11-square-mile chunk of ice hemorrhaging off a major glacier. The crack is 7 miles long and about half a mile wide. It is about half the width of the 500 square mile floating part of the glacier. Other smaller fractures can be seen in images of the ice tongue, a long narrow sliver of the glacier.
| | | © 2010 The Associated Press © 2010 CBS Interactive Inc.
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Ice Island Separated From Petermann Glacier
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August 10, 2010 - The Huffington Post
| | An island of ice more than four times the size of Manhattan is drifting across the Arctic Ocean after breaking off from a glacier in Greenland. Few images can capture the world's climate fears like a 100-square- mile (260-sqare-kilometer) chunk of ice breaking off Greenland's vast ice sheet, a reservoir of freshwater that if it collapsed would raise global sea levels by a devastating 20 feet (6 meters).
| | | © 2010 HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.
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New Garbage Patch Discovered in Indian Ocean
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August 3, 2010 - Yahoo! Green
| | Scientists previously mapped huge floating trash patches in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, but now a husband-wife team researching plastic garbage in the Indian Ocean suggest a new and dire view. "The world's oceans are covered with a thin plastic soup," says Anna Cummins, cofounder of 5 Gyres Institute. Cummins and her husband, Marcus Eriksen, established the 5 Gyres Institute to research plastic pollution in the world's oceans. The team works in collaboration with Algalita Marine Research Foundation and Pangaea Explorations, two nonprofit scientific organizations devoted to marine preservation. They report that all of the 12 water samples collected in the 3,000 miles between Perth, Australia, and Port Louis, Mauritius (an island due East of Madagascar), contain plastic.
| | | By Lori Bongiorno © 2010 Yahoo! Inc.
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Congressman: Too Much Dispersant Used In Oil Spill
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August 1, 2010 - CBS News
| | New Orleans -- As BP inched closer to permanently sealing the blown-out oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, congressional investigators railed against the company and Coast Guard for part of the cleanup effort, saying too much toxic chemical dispersant was used.
| | | © 2010 The Associated Press © 2010 CBS Interactive Inc.
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Plankton, Base Of Ocean Food Web, In Big Decline
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July 28, 2010 - CBS News
| | Washington -- Despite their tiny size, plant plankton found in the world's oceans are crucial to much of life on Earth. They are the foundation of the bountiful marine food web, produce half the world's oxygen and suck up harmful carbon dioxide. And they are declining sharply. Worldwide phytoplankton levels are down 40 percent since the 1950s, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature. The likely cause is global warming, which makes it hard for the plant plankton to get vital nutrients, researchers say.
| | | © 2010 The Associated Press © 2010 CBS Interactive Inc.
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Methane's Hidden Impact in Gulf Oil Spill
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June 30, 2010 - The Christian Science Monitor
| | The BP oil blowout, now into its 11th week, is releasing large quantities of methane into the ocean, most of which is remaining dissolved in the waters deep beneath the surface.
| | | By Pete Spotts © 2010 The Christian Science Monitor
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