EcocentricEcocentric
Personally, I was in the bathroom in TIME’s midtown Manhattan office building, and I didn’t feel a thing—until I got on Twitter. The news moved faster digitally than it did geologically: southwestern Virginia had suffered a 5.8-magnitude earthquake, one apparently strong enough to be felt from Georgia up to Ontario. [Update: USGS …
EcocentricHealth
Call it slipper security. To get clearance into the food radiation testing center at Fukushima Agricultural Technology Center, you have to change shoes three times. The first time, you get a black pair. The second time, after your heels are scanned by a Geiger counter and deemed radiation-free, you change into a pair of plastic house …
EcocentricWater
The effects of this spring’s extreme flooding of the Mississippi River have been – pardon the pun – spilling over into every possible corner of the area’s residential, commercial, and agricultural life over the last two months. And it looks like the environment hasn’t escaped either: researchers from the University of …
EcocentricEcocentric
Perhaps the biggest wild card in the response to last year’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico was the threat of a major hurricane. The Gulf is a locus for major tropical storms (remember a little downpour called Katrina?), and any time a large storm even threatened the area of water near the spill—where complex operations to shut …
EcocentricUncategorized
As the middle of the country weathers a truly historic string of tornadoes—see TIME’s David Von Drehle’s moving story from Joplin, Mo.—another battle has opened up over climate change’s possible role in these record-breaking disasters. For many environmentalists, the twisters of 2011 are an ominous sign of things to come—and …
EcocentricEcocentric
About a month ago, we posted an item about GoDaddy CEO Bob Parson’s elephant-hunting safari in Zimbabwe. (You can find it here.) Parsons came under a little criticism, though as he told us later, he wasn’t the least bit sorry. He claimed that the hunt was an act of charity, killing an elephant that had been destroying crops for hungry …
EcocentricEcocentric
There are storms and then there is what happened to the town of Sanford, North Carolina on the night of April 16. A boisterous storm system had begun in Oklahoma on April 14, bringing flash floods, tornadoes and thunderstorms from the Midwest through the Southeast, part of a massive weather system that could be felt as far as the New …
EcocentricUncategorized
Though some of you have expressed a desire to see Ecocentric move past the ongoing nuclear crisis in Japan, we’re not quite there yet. The good news is that crews have begun to restore power to the reactors, which should help accelerate the efforts to restore cooling to the still hot—and radioactive—nuclear fuel. Elevated …
EcocentricUncategorized
It’s worth stating at the outset: while more than 10,000 people have almost certainly died in the March 11 quake and tsunami in northeastern Japan, not a single person has been killed in the ongoing nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. As Abrahm Lustgarten reported in ProPublica yesterday, most experts believe that even in the …
EcocentricUncategorized
Update 3/16/11 3:03 PM: The news doesn’t get better. At an afternoon Congressional hearing, Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman Gregory Jaczko said that the all the water in the spent fuel pod in the number 4 reactor at Fukushima Daiichi has almost certainly boiled away:
We believe that radiation levels are extremely high, which
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