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A harsh winter storm has hit the world’s largest butterfly sanctuary in southern Mexico, killing upwards of 1.5 million monarch butterflies, ahead of their annual migration north. The Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, a designated World Heritage Site, has a comparatively cool climate due to it’s 2,700-meter (8,860-foot) elevation, typically seeing winter temperatures near the freezing mark, however this storm dropped temperatures to -12ºC (10.5ºF) and left up to a foot of snow in some areas.
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A new study has highlighted an acceleration in the rise of global sea levels over the past 3 millennia, showing a dramatic increase in those levels over the 20th century.

This new study, conducted at Rutgers University, charted sea level increases over the past 28 centuries, using geological data gathered from marshes, coral atolls and archaeological sites. When compiled, the data showed that sea level increases not only accelerated in the 20th century, but that this acceleration has increased even further since the 1990s.
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The warming trend continues: both NASA and NOAA report that the month of January 2016 was one for the record books yet again. Hot on the heels of the hottest year on record, January broke yet another record for global average temperatures for that month, the ninth straight month to do so, at 1.04ºC (1.87ºF) above the 1951-1980 average. This January’s temperature departure was surpassed only by the previous month (December 2015, at 1.11ºC (2.00ºF) above average); this marks the first time on record that two back-to-back months surpassed the 1.0ºC temperature departure.
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Bolivia has officially declared that their second-largest lake, Lake Poopó, has disappeared. While long-term water diversion for mining and agricultural use has been cited as a partial culprit, an El Niño-driven drought, along with the disappearance of the Andean glaciers that fed the lake, are being blamed for the lake’s disappearance.

While Lake Poopó’s size historically sees large fluctuations due to it’s relative shallowness, this is the first time it has essentially disappeared, now being at only 2% of it’s former maximum water level of 5 meters (16.4 feet). A recent study showed that the water the lake received in 2013 wasn’t enough to maintain it’s equilibrium, short by 161 billion liters (42.5 billion gallons).
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