environment

A small town in southern Ecuador has solved the drought problem by using an ancient rainwater collection system used in the past by the indigenous people of the pre-Inca era, the Paltas.We are talking about Catacocha, a town located in a province known for its extremely dry conditions.The rains only appear two months a year, between January and February, and climate change is only exacerbating this.The unexpected solution therefore arrived by looking at the past, a an ancient system of artificial lagoons which the native peoples used to cope with the already intense aridity.The local historian who discovered it, Galo Ramón, convinced the inhabitants of Catacocha to apply it and the results were surprising.Nine years later, the change that has taken place is visible. In 2005, the community recreated, on one of the highest points of Catacocha, Cerro Pisaca, this water collection and supply system created by the Palta, an indigenous community that lived in the area more than a thou...

Starting today, if all humanity consumed like Italians, we would have run out of natural resources produced by the Earth for the whole of 2024, and we would be using those planned for 2025.May 19th is in fact theOvershoot Day Italian, that is, that day in which, by comparing global biocapacity with the ecological footprint of our country, we would virtually run out of all available resources for the current year.The inauguration day of ecological deficit is slightly late compared to last year, in which theOvershoot Day Italian had fallen on May 15th, and it is anyway better than that of the European Union, given that the day of overexploitation has already fallen on May 3rd.In any case, according to the international organization Global Footprint Network, if everyone consumed like Italy, more than 2.5 planets would be needed to meet our annual consumption. THE'Overshoot Day it is a date that changes every year established by Global Footprint Network, an organization that deals wit...

“Anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases constitute a form of pollution of the marine environment”.This is what the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (Itlos), an independent body of the United Nations, established in an advisory opinion released on 21 May.The opinion is not binding, but the decision has the potential to influence case law.In other words, the decision can be used in future climate litigation at any level to force governments to improve their policies against the climate crisis.The advice comes in response to a group of small island states particularly threatened by climate change.The increase in the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere means that a greater quantity reacts with sea water, causing an increase in the acidity of the oceans with absolutely non-negligible consequences on marine life and the balance of ecosystems. Such a decision comes out from a historic hearing, staged in the court in Hamburg, Germany, last September, when small...

According to a new analysis, sperm whales use a significantly more sophisticated communication system than previously known by exploiting a multitude of sounds called the "phonetic alphabet", which in some ways is managed in significantly similar even to human language.This is reported by a new peer-reviewed study, published in Nature communications and conducted by a team of researchers including some of the team of machine learning of the CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) project, which studied the sounds of dozens of whales recorded and processed for years.«Research shows that the expressiveness of calls it is much broader than previously thought», commented Pratyusha Sharma, PhD student in robotics and machine learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-author, who added that the next studies will address what sperm whales could actually communicate with each other. THE sperm whales are a group of cetaceans from the Fiseteridae family.The...

Venezuela's Humboldt Glacier, also known as "the Crown", has melted much faster than expected.Scientists have reclassified it as ice field, or snowfield, probably making Venezuela the first country in the world to have lost all its glaciers in modern times.Until 2011, the country was home to six in the Sierra Nevada de Mérida mountain range:five melted that year, leaving only the Humboldt glacier alive, located near the second highest mountain in the country, Pico Humboldt.Now, this too is gone forever. According to forecasts the glacier – which is past to have 337 hectares of ice in 1910 to 4 hectares in 2022 – was supposed to last at least another decade, but melted away much faster than expected, shrinking to an area of ​​less than 2 hectares.It is currently only losing surface area, without any longer recording any accumulation zones or expansion dynamics.For this reason it was reclassified as a snowfield.The proposal made a few months ago b...