Laser Mapping Recalculates the True Size of Brazil’s Tucuruí Reservoir
A high-precision engineering operation using LiDAR and bathymetry is mapping the Tucuruí reservoir in Pará to recalculate its true water storage capacity.
Anne Silva
Hypertropical Climate: The Amazon Faces Droughts Unseen in Millions of Years
Scientists call it the hypertropical climate: droughts more severe than any record of the past millions of years, tree mortality up to 55 percent higher, and a rainfall service worth 104 billion reais a year that is starting to fail.
Naturalist’s book records 100 Amazon plant discoveries
Naturalist João Batista Fernandes launches in Brasília the book Onde andei valeu a pena, gathering 100 Amazonian plant species he identified across more than four decades of expeditions in the world’s largest tropical rainforest.
Somalia Drought: UN Warns 6.5 Million People Face Severe Hunger
Nearly 6.5 million people in Somalia face severe hunger as worsening drought, conflict and aid cuts deepen the crisis, the federal government and UN agencies warned. The report estimates 1.84 million children will face acute malnutrition in 2026.
Earth’s Green Wave Is Drifting Northeast, and Scientists Finally Have a Way to Measure It
Scientists at iDiv, UFZ and Leipzig University built a method to track the center of mass of the planet’s vegetation. The result: the green wave is migrating north and east, in measurable miles per decade.
Extreme Fire Weather Is Now Hitting Continents on the Same Day
Hot, dry, windy fire days are increasingly striking many regions of the world at once. A new UC Merced and University of East Anglia study, published in Science Advances, finds that synchronized extreme fire weather has more than doubled in most regions since 1979, straining the international cooperation that firefighting depends on.
Ambitious Climate Action Could Save 1.32 Million Lives a Year by 2040
A Cardiff University study in Nature Communications finds that the most ambitious climate pathway would avoid 1.32 million deaths a year by 2040, and that developing nations depend most on emissions cuts made beyond their own borders.
Plants Hit a Ceiling on How Much Water They Can Evaporate, Redrawing the Map of Floods and Droughts
A Weizmann Institute study shows evapotranspiration saturates at around 480 mm per year. The finding leaves wet regions more exposed to floods and pushes dry ones closer to their ecological limit.
The Sea Has Risen Far More Than We Thought, and Latin America Is Among the Worst-Calculated Regions
A Nature study reviewing 385 scientific papers concludes that sea level rise was underestimated by about 30 centimeters on average. In Southeast Asia and the Pacific, the gap reaches 1.5 meters.
A Sun- and Wave-Powered Buoy Cools and Oxygenates the Sea to Save Marine Life
Australian startup Blue Carbon won KPMG’s Nature Positive prize with the oPod, a floating device that uses solar and wave energy to monitor, cool and oxygenate ocean water.