Atmosphere

After a year of record-breaking wildfires across Canada and the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth, it likely comes as no surprise that 2023 was the hottest year on record.According to the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), 2023 was 1.48 C warmer than the pre-industrial average from 1850-1900, beating out 2016's record of 1.25 C. Do you have a question about climate change and what is being done about it? Send an email to [email protected] As we continue to burn fossil fuels and pump greenhouse…

Our planet is changing. So is our journalism. This weekly newsletter is part of a CBC News initiative entitled "Our Changing Planet" to show and explain the effects of climate change. Keep up with the latest news on our Climate and Environment page.Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox every Thursday.This week: Electric garbage trucks clean up in a variety of ways Hot enough for ya? 2023 shattered planetary heat records Carbon offsets are helping protect B.C.'s Great Bear Rainforest. Is that sustainable?…

After 15 years of waiting, Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen will have to wait at least one more year before his first flight in space.NASA announced Tuesday that the launch date of the Artemis II mission to the moon, originally scheduled for later this year, has been pushed back nearly a year to September 2025. The Artemis program is a plan to return humans to the moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972. Unlike the Apollo program, during which astronauts explored the moon for a few hours or days, Artemis is meant…

In 2020 it was Ricky Gervais and at the 2024 Golden Globes, the atmosphere took an unexpected turn when an award presenter, in an attempt at humor, made a controversial joke involving a “new category” named after the notorious figure Jeffrey Epstein. Amidst numerous awkward jokes that fell flat during the Golden Globes, such as Taylor Swift's NFL jest and a remark directed at Barbie that caught Selena Gomez's awkward reaction, the comedian's mention of the term "paedophile" added to the discomfort among the audience,…

A volcano that had rumbled for weeks erupted in southwestern Iceland, spewing semi-molten rock into the air in a spectacular show of Earth's power in the land known for fire and ice.The eruption that started Monday night occurred about four kilometres from the town of Grindavik, the Icelandic Meteorological Office said. The town near Iceland's main airport was evacuated in November after thousands of earthquakes damaged homes and raised fears of an imminent eruption.On Tuesday, fountains of orange lava shot into the…

Thirty years ago, an 11-day space shuttle mission involving seven veteran astronauts performed the first servicing mission to correct the Hubble Space Telescope's blurred vision.The unprecedented flight involved five spacewalks and would not have been possible without the assistance of the shuttle's robotic Canadarm.The multi-billion dollar Hubble Space Telescope was a crown jewel of NASA's space program. At the time, it was the largest and most capable astronomical observatory in orbit, with a clear view of the universe…

The weather is colder and the nights are longer, which makes it a great time to look for "shooting stars."And this week is the peak of the annual Geminid meteor shower, one of the best shows of the year.A major meteor shower occurs nearly every month, where we can expect anywhere from five to 150 meteors an hour, under ideal conditions. And that's what makes the Geminids so special: in ideal conditions, under dark skies, there could be upward of 100 to 150 meteors an hour.We get meteor showers when Earth passes through a…

Carbon removal techniques come in two main flavors—the technological and the natural—but also increasingly a melding of the two. The dominant technology at the moment is direct air capture, or DAC. This involves giant machines sucking in air and filtering out the CO2. Like an air purifier filters dust out of your indoor air, DAC facilities scrub the atmosphere of carbon. Technically, carbon removal is distinct from carbon capture, which intercepts the gas at the source, such as a power plant, before it reaches the…

A void left in the wake of a particularly powerful gust of solar wind caused the atmosphere of Mars to dramatically balloon outwards.As the MAVEN spacecraft in orbit around Mars recorded a sudden, sharp drop in solar particles when the wind passed on 26 December 2022, it simultaneously recorded a bizarre and startling change in the Martian atmosphere. The planet's magnetosphere and ionosphere expanded thousands of kilometers, more than tripling in size.The last time we saw this phenomenon was in 1999, when a sudden drop…

As Hurricane Larry lashed Newfoundland in 2021, university students from Halifax headed to a rural area in its track to find out whether the ocean might whip microplastics up into the atmosphere then transport them by air to otherwise pristine communities.The results, you could say, blew their socks off."It was such, like, an astonishing result that we weren't really expecting," said Anna Ryan, a Dalhousie University environmental science masters student and the study's lead researcher. To test their theory, the…