Breaking Waves: Ocean News

Researchers in North Carolina used underwater sonar to map a system created by enslaved people centuries ago As a former deputy state underwater archaeologist, Mark Wilde-Ramsing can’t help but look down. While rowing around North Carolina’s Eagles Island, at the tip of the Gullah Geechee corridor, he noticed signs of human-made structures, visible at low tide. Though he’d retired, he was still active in the field and knew his former agency hadn’t recorded the structures – which meant he had come across something previously undocumented. The next step was figuring out exactly what he’d found. Wilde-Ramsing knew the area had once been full of rice fields. His neighbor, Joni “Osku” Backstrom, was an assistant professor in the department of environmental sciences at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington whose specialty was shallow-water sonar, and he had the skills and technology to explore the area. Using a sonar device, the duo detected 45 wooden structures in the river, and the remote sensing tool allowed Backstrom and Wilde-Ramsing to acoustically map the canal beds. Continue reading...

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State’s energy and carbon management commission said fraudulent pollution data was reported for at least 344 wells Oil and gas companies operating in Colorado have submitted hundreds of environmental impact reports with “falsified” laboratory data since 2021, according to state regulators. Colorado’s energy and carbon management commission (ECMC) said on 13 December that contractors for Chevron and Oxy had submitted reports with fraudulent data for at least 344 oil and gas wells across the state, painting a misleading picture of their pollution levels. Consultants for a third company, Civitas, had also filed forms with falsified information for an unspecified number of wells, regulators said. Continue reading...

Labour seems gripped by a form of denialism. The danger is real and incremental change won’t avert it Jeremy Corbyn is independent MP for Islington North and was leader of the Labour party from 2015 to 2020 There is no need to overcomplicate things: a rise in global temperatures of 3.1C is not compatible with human survival. That is where we are heading, unless we act now. On our current path, the world will exceed 1.5C of warming, and could reach a rise of 2.6-3.1C by the end of the century. For you, today, that might make the difference between wearing a jumper or a jacket. For humanity, it is the difference between survival and extinction. Paris and Berlin will bake under heatwaves. New York will be hit by frequent storm-surges. Coastal towns will be submerged; 800 million people are living on land that will be underwater. Jeremy Corbyn is independent MP for Islington North and was leader of the Labour party from 2015 to 2020 Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. Continue reading...