Sibi,Pakistan

Amanda

Cristobal

Nisarga

6.8

4.83.2

5.5 5.3

4.7

4.7

6.4

Earthweek: Diary of a Changing WorldWeek ending Friday, June 5, 2020

By Steve Newman

A team of researchers from Colorado State Univer-sity say they have found an area of the world were the at-mosphere is pristine and free of pollution.

In the air just above the surface of the Southern Ocean south of 40 degrees south latitude, they found no evidence of particles, or aerosols, produced by hu-man activities and trans-ported around the planet in weather patterns.

What microbes they did find were determined through DNA analysis to have been tossed up by the seething ocean, meaning that pollution and soil particles caused by land use far away were not traveling south into the air around Antarctica.

A desert mining region in northern Chile was rocked by a magnitude

6.8 temblor.• Earth movements were

also felt in California’s Mo-jave Desert, western Texas, Guam, northeastern Japan, New Zealand’s lower North Island, Indonesia’s North Su-lawesi province, central Ne-pal and southwestern Iran.

Earth’s Cleanest

Earthquakes

Tropical CyclonesWildebeest Move

Verge of Extinction

Hydrogen Time

Volcanic Tsunami

The Indian finan-cial hub of Mum-bai was raked by Nisarga, its first

tropical cyclone since 1891. The city escaped significant damage, but the storm killed at least three people as it also lashed areas of Maharashtra state to the south.

• At least 20 people were killed when Tropical Storm Amanda drenched a swath of central America from El Salvador to Mexico’s Yuca-tán Peninsula.

• Tropical Storm Cristob-al formed in Amanda’s wake and was taking aim on parts of the U.S. Gulf Coast late in the week.

Officials in the southern African nation of Botswana say they are relocating about 1,000 wildebeests from an area where they are coming into contact with livestock and infecting them with a deadly disease.

There is currently no treatment for malignant ca-tarrhal fever spread by the migratory animals, and there have been 74 deaths from it in cattle since March.

Helicopters and a team of 40 on the ground will help move the wildebeests to a conservation area away from the affected farms by late July.

Governments from Eu-rope to Japan have scaled up efforts during the pan-demic to develop hydrogen as a clean alternative to fos-sil fuels, with some using their economic stimulus pro-grams to fund the research.

While hydrogen has long been touted as the way to rid the world of a large por-tion of its carbon emissions, it has proven to be very dif-ficult and expensive to gen-erate with renewable energy sources, such as sunlight.

But scientists at Japan’s Shinshu University say they have successfully split water into hydrogen and oxygen using light and newly devel-oped catalysts that achieve almost 100% efficiency with no undesired side reactions.

They say their findings open the door to scalable and economically viable so-lar hydrogen production.

An Indonesian sulfur miner was killed on the shore of a volcanic lake at

East Java’s Mount Ijen when a tremor triggered a 10-foot wave, or seiche.

With fewer than 1,000 Sumatran rhinos remaining in the wild, the species is nearing extinction. Photo: Barney Long/Global Wildlife Conservation

Dist. by: Andrews McMeel Syndication©MMXX Earth Environment Service

More than 500 species of land animals could be lost within 20 years as Earth’s sixth mass extinction of wildlife acceler-ates, scientists warn. They say that such losses could pass the tipping point for the collapse of civilization as we know it.

“When humanity exterminates other creatures, it is sawing off the limb on which it is sitting, destroying working parts of our own life-support sys-tem,” said Stanford University’s Paul Ehrlich.

An international research team writes in the Proceed-ings of the National Academy of Sciences: “Extinction breeds extinctions.” They say that wildlife trade and oth-er activities have already wiped out hundreds of species.

-89°Vostok,

Antarctica