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Environmental News Network -- Know Your Environment
As severe weather brewed in the Texas panhandle late in the afternoon of May 16, NOAA’s National Weather Service forecasters alerted residents in parts of western Oklahoma about the potential for large hail and damaging tornadoes that evening, particularly in the area around Elk City.
Ninety minutes later, a dangerous, rain-wrapped EF2 tornado struck the small town. It killed one, injured eight and destroyed about 200 homes and more than 30 businesses.
It’s been a few years of soul-searching for Tim Duncan, the CEO of Talos Energy. The Houston-based oil company has long specialized in the shallow waters of the Gulf of Mexico off Louisiana and Texas. Yet the oil bust that began in 2014 has made the region deeply unpopular. Facing dwindling prospects for big new finds offshore, companies have instead flocked to the Permian basin of west Texas, where layer upon layer of oil-saturated rock promises decent returns even at stubbornly low oil prices.
“We resisted the temptation to join the land race onshore,” says Duncan. But Talos did go somewhere new: Mexico.
Slight increases in temperature in Mediterranean regions from global warming could potentially result in labour, productivity and economic losses for the European wine industry, an article in the journal Temperature suggests.
A SEAS researcher helped develop technology that could become the most efficient solar cell in the world.
In 2015, a rural community in southeastern California approached Daniel Winkler and his doctoral advisor, Travis Huxman, for help with an invader that was hurting their local economy. An Old World annual plant called Sahara mustard (Brassica tournefortii) was spreading rapidly through the deserts of the southwestern U.S., carpeting the local Anza-Borrego Desert in spring, and smothering the native wildflowers that draw tourists to the region. Loss of native plants put the animals that depend on them for food and shelter at risk. The mustard was disrupting the entire desert ecosystem.
It lurks in hospitals and nursing homes, surviving cleaning crews’ attempts to kill it by holing up in a tiny, hard shell. It preys upon patients already weak from disease or advanced age.
