(Updated Feb 26 15:30 PST to reflect current numbers) Although it is not yet declaring the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) has announced that the world’s nations need to prepare to deal with the spread of the fast-spreading disease, now that outbreaks have occurred outside of Mainland Chinaread more
July 2019 was the hottest month on record for the planet, a period that saw numerous heat waves smash regional records around the globe, including one in the Arctic that triggered massive ice loss in Greenland. Although July only narrowly beat the previous record holder, July 2016, by a narrowread more
Earth had a close brush with a large “city-killer” asteroid on July 25, when a pyramid-sized rock whizzed by at less than one-fifth the distance to the Moon at nearly 25 km per second (15.5 miles per second). While not big enough to be a civilization ender, this asteroid hadread more
Over the past six weeks more than 100 intense and long-lived wildfires have been recorded burning north of the Arctic Circle, an “unprecedented” event since record-keeping began on such events. The fires have been most severe in Alaska and Siberia, and since the start of June have been responsibleread more