Environmental News

I stated this thread because I work to stay current in this topic. @eaglesight333 fine weekly summaries don't cover it all.
This thread suffers perhaps because I make choices on what to include. It is improved by others' additions and discussions. I would not intend it to cross political divides because there people believe what they will, and attend less to things coming from other published research and analyses.
Right now I'm attending more to stomatal conductance vs. vapor pressure deficits published for all plant species. It is important whether or not climate is changing, and sadly lacks previous compilation. That work is kicking my butt and will limit any updates from me here. May be seen as good news or bad.
Pro tip: using SCOPUS search to reveal publications on your topic of interest may provide 80% garbage that you will need to individually sort through. That would be of interest to few or none here I suppose.
If this thread devolves towards 'political' I may not have free time to oppose that immediately. How it proceeds is in hands of others for now.

 

The 1958 Lituya Bay Alaska landslide was triggered by a large earthquake and its tsunami had a peak runup of 530 m. Runup means how high the water went on (nearby) land. That was the largest such event known.

On August 10th, 2025, a landslide above the toe of the South Sawyer Glacier failed into the waters of Tracy Arm, south of Juneau, Alaska, producing a tsunami. Satellite and digital elevation model analysis indicate a runup height of 470–500 m (preliminary subject to revision).

These are remarkable local events, see:

2025 Tracy Arm Landslide-Generated Tsunami | U.S. Geological Survey

Newsworthiness of Tracy Arm event is that there was a cruise ship almost close enough to experience upset. 150 passengers on board. A very ‘CNN’ type event:

https://us.cnn.com/2025/10/22/climate/glacier-cruises-tsunami-landslide-risk-vis

This described in terms of climate-change and that’s all well and good. Fact remains that many cruise ships cruise several Alaskan fjords with a lot of ice perched high nearby. Such events occur without warning and if a ship happens to be close enough and takes a broadside, then there will be real news.

Where there is ice, landslides will be a mix of ice and underlying rocks. Water displacement will be more where %rock is higher. Because ice is somewhat floaty and rocks are not.

 

Dinosaurs may have been 'on the wane' before Chicxulub. Link from @bisco refers to a new study of a place on NM New Mexico where they were not.

Always interesting to read about Earth's largest and longest persisting animals. For me particularly, the long-necked ones (including Alamosaurus) described in Science. Presumably described, I'm still awaiting download.

Giraffes are currently those that 'stick their necks out' farthest and they are wonders of blood-pressure management. We may never know how dinosaurs did that almost 10-fold better. That is, unless we extract dino DNA from mosquitoes in amber and insert it into frog-egg DNA.

You know the rest of that plot. I read it as "never unextinct carnivores".

 

Michael Crichton (1942 - 2008) deserves much praise for writing imaginative fiction. He deserves anti kudos for monetizing misunderstanding of climate change and those who would act to minimize it. State of Fear, 2004.

In a way, disrespectfully, he was the 'CNN' of Sci Fi.

 

I enjoyed reading State of Fear, but Wth*?

A remarkable number of great minds have found off ramps from reality in the matter of climate change and its obvious causes. Crichton isn't the most influential among them. The best thing I could claim is that more have not offramped recently.

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Edit: PriusChat disallows some distasteful words. More cognizant I would have said Wth as 'what the F?'
or 'so very peculiar?'.