environment

Tropical Storm Debby was moving so slowly, Olympians could have outrun it as it moved across the Southeast in early August 2024. That gave its rainfall time to deluge cities and farms over large parts of Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas. More than a foot of rain had fallen in some areas by early Aug. 7, 2024, with more days of rain forecast there and into the Northeast. Mathew Barlow, a climate scientist at UMass Lowell, explains how storms like Debby pick up so much moisture, what can cause them to slow or stall, and what climate change has to do with it. What causes hurricanes to stall? Hurricanes are steered by the weather systems they interact with, including other storms moving across the U.S. and the Bermuda High over the Atlantic Ocean. A hurricane may be moving slowly because there are no weather systems close enough to pull the hurricane along, or there might be a high-pressure system to the north of the hurricane that blocks its forward movement. In this case,...

Each summer, nearly 25,000 acres (10,000 hectares) of rice is cultivated in the Florida Everglades Agricultural Area, a roughly 1,100-square-mile (2,800-square-kilometer) area south of Lake Okeechobee. Farming here requires a delicate touch. The area has lost nearly 6 feet (1.8 meters) of soil in the past century through a process called subsidence. One way to slow down this subsidence and preserve the nutrient-rich soil is to flood the area during Florida’s rainy season and use the fields to grow rice. The fields are flooded using water from adjacent canals. Once the water dries up or seeps away, the rice is harvested. The Conversation asked Associate professor Jehangir Bhadha, an expert in soil sustainability at the University of Florida, how the university got involved with growing rice and what environmental benefits it’s produced. What is the history behind growing rice in the Everglades? Rice was grown in the Everglades Agricultural Area for a brief period...

Rats thrive around humans, for good reason: They feed off crops and garbage and readily adapt to many settings, from farms to the world’s largest cities. To control them, people often resort to poisons. But chemicals that kill rats can also harm other animals. The most commonly used poisons are called anticoagulant rodenticides. They work by interfering with blood clotting in animals that consume them. These enticingly flavored bait blocks are placed outside of buildings, in small black boxes that only rats and mice can enter. But the poison remains in the rodents’ bodies, threatening larger animals that prey on them. My colleagues and I recently reviewed studies from around the world that sought to document wild mammal carnivores’ exposure to anticoagulant rodenticides. Many animals tested in these studies were already dead; others were alive and a part of other studies. Researchers detected rodenticides in about one-third of the animals in these analyses, i...

Since the 1940s, there has been a broad shift away from public transit across the U.S., and service has declined in many cities, including New York, Boston, Denver, Orlando and St. Louis. A look back at the last national mass transit boom helps explain the challenges that confront modern transit agencies. Starting in the 19th century, transit companies worked closely with real estate developers to develop “streetcar suburbs” for a growing population. The companies kept fares low, thanks to corporate consolidation, government regulation and thrifty management. During World War II, producing weapons and supplies for troops fighting abroad became the nation’s top priority. Gasoline, tires and autos were strictly rationed, so most commuters had few ways to get to work other than public transit. In Baltimore, for example, people could ride a streetcar anywhere in the city in 1943 for 10 cents. With wartime production booming, the city’s Baltimore Transit C...

Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier got its nickname the “Doomsday Glacier” for its potential to flood coastlines around the world if it collapsed. It is already contributing about 4% of annual sea-level rise as it loses ice, and one theory suggests the glacier could soon begin to collapse into the ocean like a row of dominoes. But is that kind of rapid collapse really as likely as feared? A new study of Thwaites Glacier’s susceptibility to what’s known as marine ice cliff instability offers some hope. But the findings don’t mean Thwaites is stable. Polar scientist Mathieu Morlighem, who led the study, explains the results. Why is the Thwaites Glacier so important? Thwaites Glacier drains a huge area of Antarctica’s ice sheet – about 74,000 square miles (192,000 square kilometers), an expanse bigger than Florida. If a snowflake falls within that drainage system, it will eventually end up as part of an iceberg in the ocean off Thwaites....