Mexicos

The petition contains the first estimate of total acreage of piñon-juniper habitat currently treated by the Bureau of Land Management and the US Forest Service in states with pinyon jay populations. The estimate “suggests extensive loss of suitable pinyon jay habitat on federal lands,” with over 440,000 acres impacted, according to the petition.Bird said that’s why listing the pinyon jay as endangered is critical: “It would require them to take a really hard look at what the impacts are to the bird” and consult with the…

Mexico has long struggled with a history of kidnapping. As of October 5, there were 105,984 people officially listed as disappeared in Mexico. More than a third have vanished in the past few years, during the current government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, commonly known as AMLO. Many of those missing are thought to have been kidnapped or forcibly recruited by criminal organizations. Most are likely dead, their remains buried in clandestine graves in rural areas, neighborhoods, and farmlands or scattered in…

TIJUANA —  After hearing that her 44-year-old son had been murdered in downtown Tijuana, Guadalupe Aragón Sosa went searching for him.She gave police a sample of her DNA, but they said they found no hits when they checked it against a database of unidentified bodies. She spent hours at the local morgue, flipping through black-and-white photographs of unclaimed corpses, but her Carlos was not among them. Guadalupe Aragón Sosa holds a photo of her late son Carlos in Tijuana in 2019.(Verónica G. Cárdenas /…

Last Monday, September 19, a 7.6 magnitude earthquake shook the Pacific coast of Mexico at 11.05 am local time.Five minutes later and 2,400 kilometers (1,500 miles) away, a researcher at Death Valley National Park in California noticed something strange.Biological science technician Ambre Chaudoin was peering down into the famous limestone cavern known as Devils Hole when the usually calm entrance to the desert aquifer began to churn and swirl."This is a big earthquake, wherever it is," Chaudoin can be heard saying in…

Pemex, Mexican state-owned petroleum firm, says only 22% of the gas release was methane, and the rest was innocuous nitrogen but scientists reiterate the leak contained only methane — about 40,000 tonnes of it. Researchers say the sensors they used to detect the methane leak at the Ku-Maloob-Zaap oil field…

A huge oilfield in the Gulf of Mexico, which caused a hellish fire in the ocean last year, has been releasing massive amounts of planet-warming methane. Reuters reported last week on satellite data that shows that the Ku-Maloob-Zaap oilfield leaked 44,064 tons of methane into the atmosphere over the course of 24 days in August. That’s the equivalent of 3.7 million tons of carbon dioxide—what 653,106 homes emit by using electricity over the course of one year. Researchers with the European Space Agency found that the…

Photo: Mario Taima (Getty Images)Like Lake Mead and Lake Powell along the Colorado River, New Mexico’s largest reservoir has reached alarmingly low levels. Photos taken last week at Elephant Butte Reservoir, which is located along the Rio Grande, show stark “bathtub rings”—mineral lines that show where the water levels previously sat—and huge swathes of newly exposed shore as the water keeps dropping.As of Thursday, the water level in the reservoir sat at just above 4,291 feet (1,308 meters)—well below the August monthly…

Another person has died in New Mexico flash floods. The state has been grappling with flooding in the aftermath of its largest ever recorded wildfire. Three people were found killed in flash floods on July 21, according to the Associated Press. The victims were a family from West Texas visiting their cabin in New Mexico. Now, police have reported a fourth death.Reuters reported that the most recent victim, an unidentified man, drowned on Sunday in Mora Countyin the northern part of the state after being swept away by…

Mexico’s president is headed to the White House for a bilateral meeting with President Biden on Tuesday as both administrations face a surge in migration and growing differences on energy, trade and WikiLeaks co-founder Julian Assange’s extradition to the U.S.Mr. Biden and Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador are expected to announce multiyear, joint projects to modernize border infrastructure, senior administration officials said. Those efforts are focused on improving the flow of people…

In the past, summer has marked the beginning of wildfire season. Colorado would see four months of fires; California’s fires usually burned between July and October. But that was the past. This year, the US has already seen 29,966 wildfires burn through 2,790,609 acres across the country, far above the 10-year averages of 23,212 wildfires and 1,125,002 acres by this point in the year — and it’s only June. One of those wildfires, the largest in New Mexico’s history, took shape on April 22. Or, to be more accurate, that…