Coast

2007 – 2020Critical infrastructure is threatened as sinking land amplifies global sea level rise.In many parts of the U.S. East Coast, rising seas driven by melting ice and the thermal expansion of warming water is only part of what threatens coastal areas. The land is also sinking. This geologic two-step is happening rapidly enough to threaten infrastructure, farmland, and wetlands that tens of millions of people along the coast rely upon, according to a NASA-funded team of scientists at Virginia Tech’s Earth Observation…

A combination of cable cuts, resulting in equipment faults on the major undersea cables along the West African Coast, have negatively impacted data and fixed telecom services in several countries of West Africa, including Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Cote de Ivoire, among others. The cuts occurred somewhere in Cote de’Ivoire and Senegal, with an attendant disruption in Portugal. Cable companies – West African Cable System (WACS) and African Coast to Europe (ACE) in the West Coast route from Europe have…

U.S. aerospace company Stratolaunch conducted the first powered test flight of a new unmanned craft for hypersonic research on Saturday and called it a success.Hypersonic describes flights at speeds of at least Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound. Chief Executive Officer Zachary Krevor said in a statement that the Talon-A-1 vehicle “reached high supersonic speeds approaching Mach 5 and collected a great amount of data at an incredible value to our customers.” Also read: 5 things about AI you may have missed today:…

As It Happens6:291st images humpback whale sex is between 2 malesWhen biologist Stephanie Stack first saw the photographs of two humpback whales mating in the warm waters of Hawaii, she says her mind was "completely blown.""When I realized that it was two males, it was not what I was expecting," she told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. "I thought, oh my gosh, this is incredible."Stack, chief biologist at the Pacific Whale Foundation in Maui, says this is the first time humpback whale sex has been documented. She…

As It Happens6:08This rare loon brought the Bellagio Hotel's famous Vegas fountain show to a haltWhile it's common to see crowds of people gathered outside the Bellagio Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, they're not usually there for birdwatching. But recently, a rare juvenile yellow-billed loon took up residence in the hotel's artificial lake, putting the Bellagio's famous fountain show on temporary hiatus. "He's been big news for the last week," Kurt Buzard, senior recreation assistant at the Henderson Bird Viewing…

Federal authorities have closed Canada's only known live coral reef in the Pacific Ocean to all commercial and recreational bottom-contact fishing.Fisheries and Oceans Canada says the indefinite closure came into effect on Feb. 14 for the Lophelia Reef, located in the Finlayson Channel of British Columbia's Central Coast, about 500 kilometres northwest of Vancouver and 200 kilometres directly east of Haida Gwaii.The department says the reef was first discovered in 2021 and is the "first and only" known live coral reef in…

Quirks and Quarks17:24How documenting the disappearance of the great auk led to the discovery of extinctionWhen species cease to exist, we often say they went "the way of the dodo." But it might be more fitting to say they went "the way of the great auk" because it was the Icelandic bird's disappearance that led to the discovery that humans activities could make a species go extinct.In his book The Last of Its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction, Gísli Pálsson retraces a 1858 trip two…

The U.S. Coast Guard is investigating an oil spill off the coast of Huntington Beach in Orange County, with initial estimates of an oil sheen visible on the surface of the water stretching about two miles wide, officials said Friday.County Supervisor Don Wagner’s office confirmed by phone that “details are scant,” but officials have confirmed that the oil sheen visible about 1.5 miles off the coast is not from natural causes. Wagner and her colleague Supervisor Katrina Foley both tweeted about the incident Friday morning…

As It Happens6:13More than 100 possible new marine species discovered in a single deepsea expeditionDuring a research expedition off the coast of Chile, Erin Easton says her colleagues were constantly showing her some amazing new sea creature they'd just discovered."It would just be, like, 'Erin, Erin, Erin, look!'" Easton, a marine scientist at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal."It is beyond my wildest dreams of what we could have expected. It felt like every time we went…

As the new year dawned, I recalled what a friend, John, had mentioned a few years ago. You could walk, he’d said, all the way from Bandra to Versova. This, by road, is around 11 kilometres, a good 45 minutes in peak traffic. It is quite a journey in logistical and aspirational terms. In my coastal home town, Mumbai, you hang out at the seashore. The sea is part of your existence if you live anywhere within whiffing distance of it. The idea that you could commute on foot as a novelty awakened in me a primal urge to…