Subsiding land is a bigger immediate problem for the world's coastal cities than sea level rise, say scientists. In some parts of the globe, the ground is going down 10 times faster than the water is rising, with the causes very often being driven by human activity.
Decades of ground water extraction saw Tokyo descend two metres before the practice was stopped.
Speaking at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly, researchers said other cities must following suit.
Megacities contend with sinking land
Report: Over 4 percent of U.S. death row inmates innocent
Over 4 percent of people sentenced to death are innocent, according to what authors of a report published Monday say was a “conservative,” statistics-based estimate.
Advocates against the death penalty told Al Jazeera that number is astoundingly high. But for one exonerated death row inmate, the figure seems incredibly low — and he believes he’s more qualified to estimate the number of innocents on death row than professors and analysts.
Newfoundland Oil rigs moved due to iceberg threat
The province's offshore regulator sent a short tweet to signal some big movements at sea on Sunday.
The C-NLOPB, or Canada-Newfoundland and Labrador Offshore Petroleum Board, said two large oil rigs were taking evasive action against some equally massive structures off the east coast of Newfoundland.
Vancouver: Fracking comes to the world’s ‘greenest city’
From a plane landing in Vancouver, the city shimmers below. Skyscrapers sheathed in glass reflect water that lies on three sides of downtown. Forested mountains serve as a backdrop that has made it easy for politicians to brand Vancouver the world’s “greenest city.”
There is more to that reputation than just PR. Vancouver’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are among the lowest of any urban center in North America. The city council has made bicycling infrastructure a priority. And in 2008, the government of British Columbia enacted a relatively steep carbon tax that has earned international praise for lowering the province’s per capita consumption of fossil fuels to well below Canada’s average.
Texas: When fracking comes to town
For northern Texans who live near gas wells, fracking's promise of cleaner energy is overshadowed by drilling, pollution and fears for their health. Some residents have started to fight back.
Alyse and Lance Ogletree moved to the Meadows at Hickory Creek, a subdivision of modest houses in this fast-growing city 40 miles north of Dallas, in the fall of 2011. They found the home prices attractive and thought the well-regarded school district would be a good fit for their son, Kyle, who had suffered brain damage after contracting encephalitis when he was 8 months old.
American injustice: He got life for selling LSD
"I did not really realize I was getting life until the date of sentencing. When my attorney told me, I told him that I wanted to take back my guilty plea... they denied me."
Timothy Tyler says his life ended when he was 23-years-old. That was two decades ago, when he was arrested and later sentenced to a mandatory double-life term in prison without the possibility of parole for conspiracy to possess LSD with intent to distribute. A self-described "Deadhead," Tyler was busted after mailing five grams of the hallucinogenic drug to a friend who was working as an informant for the federal government.
Radon: The silent killer in your home
Tobacco smoke in a home is easy to detect as it drifts through the air or leaves its odor in clothes or furniture. Its health toll is equally as obvious as the leading cause of lung cancer in the U.S.
Less obvious and almost as deadly is radon, an odorless gas that causes 21,000 lung cancer deaths a year. Radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer in the U.S. and the leading cause of lung cancer in non-smokers. It's a bigger concern during cold winters like the one we've just experienced when radon levels sky rocket in well-sealed homes.
Paleontologists discover oldest known pterodactyloid
By the end of the Jurassic period, most primitive species of the order Pterosaurs became extinct. But one lineage of the order evolved rather quickly into pterodactyloids, and managed to survive.
These were some of the largest creatures ever to take to the skies, says University of South Florida paleontologist Brian Andres.
A 162.7 million-year-old fossil of the oldest pterodactyloid species unearthed in northwest China sheds light on how such species adapted to their environments.
Chris Sloan, formerly with National Geographic and now president of media company Science Visualization, first spotted the fossil in 2001.
Second radioactive oil waste site found in North Dakota
North Dakota this week confirmed the discovery of a new radioactive dump of waste from oil drilling. And separately, a company hired to clean up similar waste found in February at another location said it had removed more than double the amount of radioactive material originally estimated to be there.
The twin disclosures highlight a growing problem from North Dakota's booming Bakken oil development, and for other oil and gas operations across the country: the illegal disposal of radioactive material from drilling sites.
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