Background Articles

This rural part of the island of Oahu is not connected to city sewers — and waste from toilets, sinks and showers is mostly collected in hundreds of pits called cesspools. Rising seas are also pushing groundwater closer to the surface, allowing cesspool effluent to mix with the water table and flow into the ocean.

Rick Thoman is thinking hard about the cost of climate change and the benefits of better tracking, potentially influencing Alaska’s response to extreme weather and more.

The state’s rural areas lead the world in renewably powered microgrids. So if the grid of the future is being incubated in rural Alaska, can urban Alaska, like the Railbelt, benefit from some of these strategies and lessons learned?

Heat waves like the one that engulfed parts of parts of the South and Midwest and killed more than a dozen people are becoming more common.

Scientists say worsening heat waves have a clear link to climate change. This year, a seasonal El Niño pattern will also be adding fuel to the fire.

A long-running television show, "Alaska Weather" unique to Alaska that provides detailed weather, aviation and marine forecasts across the state will stop airing at the end of June. Especially in rural communities where many residents rely on the show for weather and safety information that's vital to coordinating flights and planning subsistence hunts or commercial fishing trips.

Northern Europe is experiencing an unusual heat wave and drought, making the region more vulnerable to forest fires, with firefighters battling wildfires in Portugal, Spain, Croatia, and southern France, and temperatures expected to hit 86 degrees Fahrenheit in Finland, rare for a country straddling the Arctic Circle.

"Global-mean surface air temperatures for the first days of June 2023 were the highest in the ERA5 data record for early June by a substantial margin", said Copernicus. Some of the unit's data goes back as far as 1950.

The Bering Sea region is front and center for federal fisheries researchers after the 2019 heatwave produced extreme change in the marine ecosystem.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has declared this year’s climate to be an El Niño year, based on Pacific Ocean conditions.

Such a large, sudden die-off and a lack of sea ice were a red flag for scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

State officials say Unalakleet will see work to improve conditions on its water system in the near future.

Charitie Ropati, 21, wants to reimagine scientific research to include her traditional values, like community and collective wellbeing.

At the world’s northernmost year-round research station, scientists are racing to understand how the fastest-warming place on Earth is changing — and what those changes may mean for the planet’s future.

Scientists are studying the diets of the oceans’ top predators as they change in response to their environments. This is because how much and what they eat can affect how ecosystems function.

All the birds were gone. Now there is full life in the bird cliffs again. The researchers believe they have found the explanation for the mystery.

The region of Catalonia, northeastern Spain, is in its worst drought since measurements began. The sheep reservoir supplies water to the city of Barcelona.

Climate change has been observed for hundreds of years by the plant specialists of three Odawa Tribes in the Upper Great Lakes along Lake Michigan. Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore is the focus of two National Park Service (NPS) studies of Odawa Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) of plants, ecosystems, and climate change. Data collected during these studies contributed to developing Plant Gathering Agreements between tribes and parks. This analysis derived from 95 ethnographic interviews conducted by University of Arizona (UofA) anthropologists in partnership with tribal appointed representatives. Odawa people recognized in the park 288 plants and five habitats of traditional and contemporary concern. Tribal representatives explained that 115 of these traditional plants and all five habitats are known from multigenerational eyewitness accounts to have been impacted by climate change. The TEK study thus represents what Native people know about the environment. These research findings are neither intended to test their TEK nor the findings of Western science.

World leaders already have many options to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and protect people, according to the United Nations report.

The Barents area is the fastest warming place on the planet. A new study shows that the warming is happening twice as fast as previously thought.