California is on fire, again 2025 Jan 10
Linked is a set of phenomenal photos of Pacific Palisades burning to the ground by LA-based Ethan Swope (who is still a student). It's stunning, shocking, horrifyingly beautiful stuff – the best I've seen of this latest round of fires.

Meanwhile, in other fire-related things, a firefighting plane had to be grounded after hitting a drone flying where it shouldn't be, and this person on Bluesky who is a fire scientist and former firefighter created this thread about why these fires are so big (we gave them fuel) and burning so many structures (we like plants next to our homes). Also, check out Tag Christof's Flickr stream for more fire photos.

Burn, baby, burn.

The Once-Great Salt Lake 2024 Oct 13
Utah's Great Salt Lake is going away. Like so many other salt lakes across the world, such as the Aral Sea, a combination of less precipitation, higher heat, and greater diversion of its sourcewaters to irrigation have cost the lake to the point that it's near to going away. And as salt lakes go away and leave dry lakebeds in their wake, those dry lakebeds turn into dust bowls with far-reaching harms.

It's ok, though, Utah is working on plans to save their lake. Water conservation is one obvious answer, you'd think. There's also plans to steal water from other watersheds, robbing Peter to pay Paul, basically, and some cockamamie idea to just pump in the Pacific Ocean. But Utah's favorite answer, of course, is to pray for rain:

the most common strategy echoed by the Utahans interviewed for this story: Pray for snow

As Asteroid hit the Earth today 2024 Jan 25
It was very small and burned up in the sky near Berlin. This isn't wholly remarkable, except for that teams of international astronomers (powered by NASA and JPL) spotted this asteroid a full 95 minutes prior to it hitting Earth, and were able to track it through multiple sources of observation. This may not seem like much, but it's evidence of a solid step forward in humanity's ability to predict other, larger, potentially life-impacting asteroids.

Antarctic sea-ice at 'mind-blowing' low alarms experts 2023 Sep 17

The sea-ice surrounding Antarctica is well below any previous recorded winter level, satellite data shows, a worrying new benchmark for a region that once seemed resistant to global warming.

Ocean heat record broken, with grim implications for the planet 2023 Aug 5
Good news!

The oceans have hit their hottest ever recorded temperature as they soak up warmth from climate change, with dire implications for our planet's health.