The revelation by the Caribbean Youth Environmental Network (CYEN) that the bulk of plastic waste it collected from clean-up campaigns around the island came from areas most frequented by tourists, is a worrying disclosure.Rhonda Ward, the Integrated management systems coordinator of Barbados Bottling Company, who is a part of CYEN, made the disclosure to members of the media, though it did not grab the public’s attention in the way such an important development should have garnered.We suggest it also reflects an apparent diminishing concern for our physical environment.The group said it collected some 10,000 pieces of plastic from south coast beaches. This was twice as many removed from collections on the east, north and west coasts of the island combined.Though Ward chose not to ascribe blame to visitors to the island, we know that where the visitors congregate usually results in commercial activity occurring in those areas as locals hustle for precious income during these challeng
New method for determination of past climate data on land applied comparatively for the first time / Ice Age summers in Central Europe were at times warmer than previously known Scientists from an international research project led by Johannes.
Researchers have succeeded in reconstructing changes in rainfall in Central Asia over the past five million years. The information preserved within the sedimentary succession provides the missing link for understanding land-water feedbacks for global climate.
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IMAGE: Charlotte Prud homme is abseiling to collect soil samples. The 80-meter-thick sedimentary sequence in Charyn Canyon, Kazakhstan, documents climate change over the past 5 million years. view more
Credit: Charlotte Prud homme, MPI for Chemistry
Paleo researcher Charlotte Prud homme, who until recently worked at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and is now a researcher at the Université Lausanne, explains: The 80-meter-thick sedimentary sequence we found at Charyn Canyon in southeast Kazakhstan provides us with a virtually continuous record of five million years of climate change. This is a very rare occurrence on land! The alternating dust and soil layers provide the first reliable evidence, in one place, of long-term interactions between major climate systems on the Eurasian continent. Over the past five million years, the land surfaces of Eurasia appear to have more actively contributed to the land-atmosphere-ocean water-cycle than previously ac