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A new study from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Tsinghua University in Beijing has found that the global warming pause that was supposed to have occurred between 1998 and 2012 didn’t actually happen. The discrepancy was apparently due to incomplete data, making it appear that worldwide temperature increases had plateaued.

"We recalculated the average global temperatures from 1998-2012 and found that the rate of global warming had continued to rise at 0.112ºC per decade instead of slowing down to 0.05ºC per decade as previously thought," explains UAF professor and atmospheric scientist Xiangdong Zhang.
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In September 2017, a large iceberg roughly four times the size of Manhattan calved off of the Pine Island glacier in Antarctica (not to be confused with last July’s massive iceberg that originated from the Larcen C ice shelf further east). While the event itself isn’t that unusual — the Pine Island Glacier accounts for 25 percent of all of Antarctica’s annual ice loss — this iceberg began to break up shortly after separating from its host glacier, instead of doing so after drifting far out into the Southern Ocean, as ‘bergs from Pine Island typically do.read more

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An increase in the number of devastating earthquakes around the world is being predicted for 2018, according to the University of Colorado’s Roger Bilham and Rebecca Bendick of the University of Montana. The two geologists have made a detailed study on earthquake activity recorded since 1900, and found that increases in the number of major earthquakes tend to follow predictable cycles, and 2018 happens to fall in one of those years.
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The infamous hole in Earth’s ozone layer has shrunk down to 7.6 million square miles wide (12,200,000 square kilometers), the smallest the gap has been since 1988. This healing of Earth’s main shield against ultraviolet radiation is due largely to efforts initiated in the mid-1980s, when the use of ozone-harming CFCs was phased out. Not only is this positive news in regards to our atmosphere’s ability to filter out harmful UV radiation, it also stands as an example of how humanity can make a positive, large-scale impact when efforts to reduce ecological harm are required, such as in the case of our need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
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