Deserts

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…

In a desolate stretch of California desert off U.S. Highway 395, Franklin Noel Bonilla made one last desperate plea to save his life. “I’ve been shot,” he told 911 dispatchers in Spanish, according to authorities. “I don’t know where I am.” Officials tracked the coordinates of the phone call to a dirt road in the remote desert community of El Mirage, about 50 miles northeast of Los Angeles.There they made a horrific discovery: six men with gunshot wounds, four of them with severe burns, and two abandoned vehicles, one of…

Credit: cottonbro studio from Pexels A new report has highlighted how a decline in local and community media is producing a growing trend of "media deserts" across Europe that is undermining local democracy and inclusivity. For centuries local news has played a key political role in safeguarding local democracy through their…

The 5 As and Children’s PAD index in the US. Credit: ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information (2023). DOI: 10.3390/ijgi12030134 You've heard of food deserts, areas where healthy and nutritious food is all but impossible to find. But now experts are concerned about another public health problem: play deserts. Play deserts are…

The spectacular, hexagonal shapes texturing salt deserts such as the Badwater Basin in Death Valley, California, and Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia have long mystified travelers and scientists alike.Considered by some to be the result of cracks forming as the briny surface dries out or pushes against itself as the salt precipitates and expands, no one explanation satisfies the uniform size and arrangement of the ridged cells.A new study provides the most plausible explanation yet. Based on a mix of field research and…

Salt deserts are among the most extreme and inhospitable places on the planet. Credit: Dr Lucas Goehring Salt deserts are among the most extreme and inhospitable places on the planet and their bizarre and other-worldly polygon-shaped structures attract hundreds of thousands of tourists every year. They occur in areas including the…

In a recent study, UGA researchers found that many states in the Southeast and Midwest qualify as financial advice deserts. States identified as certified financial planner deserts (CFPDs) and/ or personal financial advisor deserts (PFADs) included Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Hawaii, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, South Carolina, West Virginia and Wyoming. Credit: University of Georgia…

America is already littered with maternity care deserts — places without a hospital that contains a labor department and practicing OB/GYNs — and these deserts are expanding. According to a new report from the March of Dimes, the number of counties in the United States that meet their definition of a care desert had grown in 2022 compared to 2018, the last time the group surveyed the maternity care landscape. Nearly 7 million American women of childbearing age now live in a county with either no maternity care…

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has been traversing over a transitional region between a clay-rich region to a sulphate-rich region. In the process, the rover has been capturing images of rocks that had once been at the bottom of multiple stream beds on the red planet. Harkening to a distant past when water was found on the planet, the images and further observations are helping scientists piece together the mysteries of ancient Mars and how its once vibrant landscape became arid. Capturing a view of the sulphate-rich region,…

(a) Geography and geopolitical boundaries of Central Asia. (b) Distribution of climate types in Central Asia for the period 1960–1979. (c) Distribution of climate types in Central Asia for the period 1990–2020. (d) Changes of climate types in the region from (b) to (c). The arrow in the color code in (d) means “changed to.” Credit: Geophysical Research Letters (2022). DOI: 10.1029/2022GL098895 A pair of researchers at the…