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Kenya could soon get its first coal-fired power plant, courtesy of China. The plant is projected to help meet the country's fast-growing demand for electricity, and draw investment, according to Kenyan officials. But, of course, there are downsides to this proposal. Some worry that it will damage the fragile marine ecosystem, pollute the air, and threaten fishing communities. While China's coal projects shrink at home, China is turning outward in search of new markets. A Chinese multinational is tapped to build the $2 billion, 975-acre project, and a Chinese bank is helping to finance it. This project is one of the hundreds that Chinese companies are helping finance or build around the world. The energy is reliable and cheap, but Kenya is seeking to become a renewable energy hub, with large wind projects in the works, and promises to cut greenhouse emissions 30% by 2030. The plant will be built in the port town of Lamu, which is one of the oldest continually inhabited places on Africa's Indian Ocean coast. No cars are allowed there, and donkeys are used as taxis. Tourism in the city has declined sharply due to attacks by a Somalian terrorist group. The transportation of coal is an arduous task that has potential to affect the crops nearby. As for its carbon footprint, Mr. Kirima was eager to point out that Kenya’s greenhouse gas emissions are a fraction of the levels of industrialized countries. For its part, Amu Power said that the plant would offer what Kenya needs most to attract investment: electricity to power a big road-and-rail project to connect its landlocked neighbors to a new port, also under construction in Lamu. The plant would use seawater for cooling. The discharged water, said Cyrus Kirima, the company’s chief operating officer, would be warmed by about 5 degrees Fahrenheit but would not harm marine life.

The coal would initially be imported, then a Kenyan coal mine would be used later. The top government of Kenya backs the project despite the critics. The project contradicts the promises made to use renewable energy, and will harm the environment, habitat, and way of living in the town. The plant will, provide jobs, cheap energy, and grow the economy for the country.
I chose this article because I am familiar with Kenya and the lifestyles of the citizens there. Electricity is scarce in Kenya. If you are not in one of the major cities, chances are that you do not have electricity, or there is solar lamps being used as the main source of light. The cheap energy that this plant would provide would benefit the population significantly, but at a cost. Farmers would be affected because of the environmental damage the plant will have on the town of Lamu. Air pollution will harm the children, and the rate of deaths of infants is already extremely high. Progress towards sustainable and renewable energy is put on hold due to the harm that the new coal plant will provide. The plant will provide a large quantity of jobs for the locals, which will grow the economy significantly.

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LAMU, Kenya - Across a narrow channel from this historic port town, where baobabs tower over the forest and tiny crabs skitter in and out of the mangroves, Kenya could soon get its first coal-fired power plant, courtesy of China.

The plan's champions, including senior Kenyan officials, say the plant will help meet the country's fast-growing demand for electricity and draw investment. Its critics worry that it will damage the area's fragile marine ecosystem, threaten the livelihoods of fishing communities and pollute the air.

The battle over the project, which is frozen pending the outcome of a court case, reverberates far beyond Lamu, a 700-year-old Indian Ocean port town of coral-lime houses and carved wooden doors that has been designated a Unesco world heritage site.

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Schoolchildren in one of Lamu's narrow streets. The town, a Unesco world heritage site, was established in the 14th century. Credit Joao Silva/The New York Times

The plan embodies a contradiction of Chinese global climate leadership: The country's huge coal sector is turning outward in search of new markets as coal projects contract at home. A Chinese multinational is tapped to build the $2 billion, 975-acre project, and a Chinese bank is helping to finance it. The project is among hundreds of coal-fired power plants that Chinese companies are helping to build or finance around the world.

It represents a test for Kenya as well. While its leaders describe the Lamu plant as a source of cheap, reliable electricity, the country is also seeking to become a renewable energy hub, with huge solar and wind projects in the works and a promise to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by 2030.

Coal could upend those goals.

"I see no reason for them to do it," said Erik Solheim, head of the United Nations Environment Program, which is based in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. "They should invest heavily in hydro, solar, wind. They are already, but they could do even more."

Not least, Mr. Solheim said in an interview, the rapidly falling price of renewable energy sources makes a coal-fired power project "much less viable."

The port town of Lamu, established in the 14th century within an archipelago of small islands near Somalia, is among the oldest continually inhabited places on Africa's Indian Ocean coast. Arab traders sailed here in their wooden dhows on their way south to Zanzibar. They brought dates and steel utensils from Arabia; they took back mangrove logs and cowrie shells.

All morning long, along the old town seafront, men unload mangrove logs and palm fronds. Fishers bring in their catches. No cars are allowed in the old town. The only taxis in its narrow lanes are donkeys. The once-thriving tourism industry has shrunk sharply because of a series of attacks by the Somalia-based terrorist group known as the Shabab.

To get to the coal plant site from Lamu town, you have to hire a boat to cross the channel and then drive along a sandy path. Cashews grow amid the wilderness. There are patches of sesame, kitchen gardens of watermelon and papaya, and a lot of uncertainty in the air. No one here has seen a coal plant before. No one really knows how it will affect them.

Shebwana Mohammed, an 18-year-old who was riding his bicycle near the project site, said he felt a mixture of worry and hope. "If it comes with a job I'm ready to take it," he ventured.

An older man, Mohammed Shee, who grows cassava and cashews on the edges of the plant site, said he had lost a few trees when the road was built. He didn't know what to make of the project, though he said he worried about the forest. "If the trees dry up how will a farmer survive?" he wondered aloud.

Whether Kenya needs coal-fired electricity is a matter of dispute, with some energy analysts concluding that wind and geothermal sources could generate enough electricity and be more cost-effective.

Then, there is the matter of where the coal would come from. The plant developer, a Kenyan consortium called Amu Power, plans to import coal initially; only later would a Kenyan coal mine, far in the country's interior, come online.

The environment secretary at the Kenyan Environment Ministry, Alice Akinyi Kaudia, was skeptical of the project's utility, saying that it would be "counterproductive" to her country's commitment to reduce emissions under the Paris climate accord.

The Lamu project has backing at the top of the government, though.

A lawsuit by a local group, filed in November 2016 in Kenya's National Environmental Tribunal, has stopped construction in its tracks. For now, no smokestacks tower over the baobabs; the only signs of construction are concrete discs that demarcate the forest and farmland acquired for the plant.

In court documents, the national environmental management authority, a semiautonomous agency within the Environment Ministry that reviews the impact of development projects, said it had approved the proposal. It maintained that "all environmental concerns were considered and mitigation measures were recommended," and asked that what it called the "misconceived" lawsuit be dismissed.

For its part, Amu Power said that the plant would offer what Kenya needs most to attract investment: electricity to power a big road-and-rail project to connect its landlocked neighbors to a new port, also under construction in Lamu.

The plant would use seawater for cooling. The discharged water, said Cyrus Kirima, the company's chief operating officer, would be warmed by about 5 degrees Fahrenheit but would not harm marine life.

As for its carbon footprint, Mr. Kirima was eager to point out that Kenya's greenhouse gas emissions are a fraction of the levels of industrialized countries.

"You need to do business," Mr. Kirima said. "You need investment. It's not as though Kenya is out in top gear to build coal plants."

The same cannot be said for China, though.

According to the Global Coal Tracker, a monitoring group, more than 200 coal-fired power plants are being developed or financed by Chinese companies from Mongolia to Zimbabwe, including in countries that, like Kenya, had previously burned no coal.

Power China, the Chinese multinational in line to build the Lamu plant, has also constructed coal plants in Indonesia and Pakistan. Urgewald, a tracking group that pushes for divestment from the coal sector, lists Power China as the 12th-largest developer of coal plants in the world.

"As China has reduced its dependence on coal domestically it has expanded overseas, to relieve excess domestic capacity," said Katharine Lu, who researches energy investments at Friends of the Earth, an environmental lobby group.

Beyond excess coal, geopolitics is also a key factor in that expansion. China's Belt and Road Initiative is a central part of President Xi Jinping's strategy to increase his country's global influence through infrastructure projects abroad. The United States, for its part, continues to export coal, as coal-fired power plants shrink at home.

In Lamu, another constituency stands to gain, at least in the short-term: An estimated 600 households whose land has been acquired for the project are in line for financial compensation, which helped to explain why Abdul Rahman Abdi, a local mangrove timber dealer, was bullish on the idea.

Mr. Abdi bought 19 acres within the project site three years ago. He said he had been reassured by government officials - the deputy president, William Ruto, came to Lamu to speak to residents - that the project would enrich rather than damage the area. "They assure us they're going to bring a lot of money with this project," he said. "They assure us that they're not crazy."

Mr. Abdi has paid a personal price in the fight over the plant. He has fallen out with a lifelong friend, Walid Ahmed Ali, who has spent the last two years roaming from island to island with Save Lamu, the group that is suing to stop the project, telling people that a coal plant could ruin their air and water and ultimately their livelihoods.

It is not a popular position, Mr. Ahmed Ali and his colleagues acknowledge. People call them names. Friends dismiss them as enemies of progress. Even a few relatives turn their backs.

Compared to the compensation money on the table, their warnings about the future seem vague.

"This is the only place we call home, the only place we have relatives and families," Omar Elmawi, the national liaison officer of Save Lamu said in his second-floor office. Its walls are plastered with maps of the region, marked by symbols of natural riches: coral, lobster, sea cucumber.

"You can never get enough compensation to evacuate everyone," he said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Why Build Kenya's First Coal Plant? Hint: Think China. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Boats and boating--Equipment and supplies

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Why Build Kenya's First Coal Plant? Hint: Think China

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LAMU, Kenya - Across a narrow channel from this historic port town, where baobabs tower over the forest and tiny crabs skitter in and out of the mangroves, Kenya could soon get its first coal-fired power plant, courtesy of China.

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Idaho will take over regulating pollution discharge into the state's lakes and rivers from the federal government under an agreement signed Tuesday by the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

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BOISE, Idaho - Idaho will take over regulating pollution discharge into the state's lakes and rivers from the federal government under an agreement signed Tuesday by the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said the agreement was the culmination of a tremendous amount of work and partnership between the state and the federal agency.

"Congratulations to the state of Idaho," he said. "We are excited to sign this and look forward to working with Idaho as we go forward on these issues."

Pruitt signed the agreement at the Idaho statehouse with Gov. C.L. "Butch" Otter. It shifts control of permitting and enforcement aspects under the federal Clean Water Act to the state starting July 1.

"It's good to have Idahoans making decisions about Idaho issues," Otter said.

Idaho is one of only four states where federal authorities manage pollution discharge into surface waters. The others are: New Mexico, New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

Idaho officials say a state-run program will be more responsive, and local experts who are better acquainted with Idaho will be making decisions.

However, Idaho can't write permits that are less stringent than the EPA permits, and the EPA retains oversight of the program.

The Idaho Department of Environmental Quality will acquire additional responsibilities through 2021 for issuing pollution discharge permits to cities, industrial businesses, mining operators, animal feedlots and others.

"I have no reservations about us having the people and the resources to be able to administer this program effectively and appropriately," said John Tippets, director of the state agency.

The change delegates authority to Idaho to implement its Idaho Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, a goal set in the late 1990s.

Idaho lawmakers in 2014 directed the state Department of Environmental Quality to seek authorization from the EPA for a state-run program. A public process followed, culminating with a 325-page application last August and Tuesday's signing by Pruitt.

The added duties mean the state has to more than double the number of workers in the program to have the equivalent of 29 full-time positions at a projected cost of $3 million annually. Idaho lawmakers in recent years have been approving funding.

About two-thirds of the cost of the program will come from the state's general fund, with the rest from fees on those seeking permits, said Mary Anne Nelson, the system's program manager.

She said 22 workers are on board, with four more being hired this summer and three more next year. She said workers have been in the field with EPA permit writers and compliance officers.

"We've been doing all of this job shadowing in preparation for taking on the program in July," she said.

Justin Hayes of the Idaho Conservation League, an environmental watchdog group, said the group overall backed the change.

The main benefit, he said, is that more permits will be examined by the state rather than administratively approved without much review by the EPA, which Hayes said is understaffed and underfunded in Idaho.

"There is some real upside in the state doing this," he said but added the group was wary of the potential of pressure being put on the state agency to favor polluters.

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Idaho to Take Over Regulating Water Pollution From EPA

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BOISE, Idaho - Idaho will take over regulating pollution discharge into the state's lakes and rivers from the federal government under an agreement signed Tuesday by the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt said the agreement was the culmination of a tremendous amount of work and partnership between the state and the federal agency.

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President Donald Trump is standing by his embattled Environmental Protection Agency chief, even as the scandals and federal investigations continue to mount.

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The Latest: Trump Hails EPA Chief Despite Scandals

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The Latest on Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt (all times local):

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Chip and Joanna Gaines, stars of HGTV's "Fixer Upper" series, have settled with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on allegations that they used inadequate protection while removing lead paint during renovations.

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'Fixer Upper' Stars Settle With EPA on Lead Paint Violations

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Chip and Joanna Gaines, stars of HGTV's "Fixer Upper" series, have settled with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on allegations that they used inadequate protection while removing lead paint during renovations.

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The Environmental Protection Agency said Friday that it plans to deny Maryland and Delaware petitions seeking emissions reductions from power plants in five upwind states.

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ANNAPOLIS, Md. - The Environmental Protection Agency said Friday that it plans to deny Maryland and Delaware petitions seeking emissions reductions from power plants in five upwind states.

The petitions sought to reduce emissions of ozone-forming nitrogen dioxide from power plants in Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

"The Agency has concluded that neither Delaware nor Maryland has met their burden to demonstrate that the sources they named emit or would emit ozone forming pollutants at levels that violate the Clean Air Act's good neighbor provision for the 2008 and 2015 ozone standards," the EPA said in a statement.

The federal agency said it will accept comment on the proposed action for 45 days, and a public hearing will be held in Washington.

Maryland Environment Secretary Ben Grumbles said Gov. Larry Hogan's administration strongly disagrees with the proposed denial.

"We will testify in opposition to the proposal and use all available tools, including litigation, to ensure we can keep our commitment to upholding aggressive air quality standards and protecting the Chesapeake Bay," Grumbles said in a statement.

Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh said it's "clear and undeniable" that emissions from the power plants are polluting Maryland's air and violate the law.

"Requiring power plants to implement commonsense standards to reduce harmful emissions is the responsibility of the EPA," Frosh said. "Time and time again, it has failed to do its job."

Maryland filed its petition in 2016, seeking to require 36 power plants in upwind states to run their air pollution controls more in the summer to reduce emissions.

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EPA to Deny Maryland, Delaware Petitions Against Emissions

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ANNAPOLIS, Md. - The Environmental Protection Agency said Friday that it plans to deny Maryland and Delaware petitions seeking emissions reductions from power plants in five upwind states. The petitions sought to reduce emissions of ozone-forming nitrogen dioxide from power plants in Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

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ZIMBABWE is expected to be one of the major global players in the production of processed lithium, a main component in the manufacturing of electric car batteries with Zimbabwean mining concern, Prospect Resources having set sights at extracting and processing the mineral this year.

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ZIMBABWE is expected to be one of the major global players in the production of processed lithium, a main component in the manufacturing of electric car batteries with Zimbabwean mining concern, Prospect Resources having set sights at extracting and processing the mineral this year.

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By Bulawayo News with commentary by Jennifer Delony

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Zimbabwe to Become a Global Lithium Player

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ZIMBABWE is expected to be one of the major global players in the production of processed lithium, a main component in the manufacturing of electric car batteries with Australian (ASX) listed Zimbabwean mining concern, Prospect Resources having set sights at extracting and processing the mineral this year.

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New Jersey finally has the impetus it needs to move forward on a plan to develop offshore wind that was placed into law eight years ago.

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New Jersey finally has the impetus it needs to move forward on a plan to develop offshore wind that was placed into law eight years ago.

Gov. Phil Murphy yesterday signed an executive order directing the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (BPU) to fully implement the Offshore Wind Economic Development Act (OWEDA) and begin the process of moving the state toward a goal of 3.5 GW of offshore wind energy generation by 2030.

"Little progress has been made on offshore wind development in New Jersey despite a pledge from the previous administration to facilitate our growth of offshore wind," Murphy said in a statement. "We cannot allow for stagnation in this growing sector of our energy economy, and we cannot lose sight of the tremendous opportunity for offshore wind at the Jersey Shore."

Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie signed OWEDA in 2010. OWEDA called for the BPU to develop an offshore renewable energy certificate (OREC) program supporting about 1.1 GW of generation from offshore wind projects. Since then, there has been no movement on creating the mechanisms necessary to develop an offshore market for the state.

Murphy's Executive Order directs the BPU to begin the rulemaking process to fill the gaps in the current regulations governing the OREC program. The order also directs BPU President Joseph Fiordaliso and New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Catherine McCabe to work together to establish an Offshore Wind Strategic Plan for New Jersey.

Under the order, the BPU will implement the OREC program by approving financial plans submitted by offshore wind developers. After the BPU creates a process to approve those plans, it will issue a solicitation calling for proposed offshore wind projects for the generation of 1.1 GW of power. The order also calls for a study of the potential benefits to regional collaboration on offshore wind.

"This is clearly the best news of offshore wind in New Jersey since the Department of Interior moved forward on the federal auctions of offshore wind leases in late 2015," Environment New Jersey Director Doug O'Malley said in a statement. "[The auction resulted in]the subsequent successful bids by U.S. Wind and Orsted for nearly $2 million for the rights to construct offshore wind over 344,000 acres of the Atlantic Ocean off the Jersey Shore."

According to O'Malley, the proposed offshore wind lease area (WEA), when fully developed, could power roughly 1.5 million homes. The WEA begins about seven nautical miles off the coast from Atlantic City (A map can be found here) and extends 21 nautical miles off the shore.
Lead image credit: CC0 Creative Commons | Pixabay

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New Jersey Gets the Spark It Needs to Move Offshore Wind Forward

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New Jersey finally has the impetus it needs to move forward on a plan to develop offshore wind that was placed into law eight years ago. Gov.

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Xcel Energy Colorado unveiled a new power plan that the utility estimates could save customers $215 million, cut carbon emissions by half and lift renewable energy sources to 55 percent of its electricity portfolio by 2026, according to a filing submitted Wednesday with the Colorado Public Utilities Commission.

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Xcel Energy Colorado unveiled a new power plan that the utility estimates could save customers $215 million, cut carbon emissions by half and lift renewable energy sources to 55 percent of its electricity portfolio by 2026, according to a filing submitted Wednesday with the Colorado Public Utilities Commission.

The filing, known as the 120-day report, would retire 660 megawatts of coal generation from the Commanche 1 and Commanche 2 plants in Pueblo and add 1,100 megawatts of new wind capacity, 750 megawatts of solar generation, and 380 megawatts of flexible gas sources.

And in a new twist, the utility has asked to add 275 megawatts of battery storage capacity that would allow it to store power from solar sources to use when the sun isn't shining.

"Our recommended plan secures long-term and low-cost renewable power, stimulates
economic development in rural Colorado, and substantially reduces greenhouse gas emissions - all at a savings to customers. It is a solid plan that moves Colorado forward," Alice Jackson, president of the state's largest utility, said in a news release.

Xcel estimates its plan, which must undergo public review and regulatory approval, would generate $2.5 billion in new investment across eight mostly rural Colorado counties. The counties set to benefit include Adams, Baca, Boulder, Kit Carson, Morgan, Park, Pueblo and Weld.

Late last year, Xcel Energy was confronted with an overwhelming response - 450 bids - when it put out requests for future power supply under its 2016 Electric Resource Plan. The wind and solar bids, in particular, were the lowest ever received by a utility in the country, and several came in below the cost of coal, even with the inclusion of battery storage.

The utility had 120 days to make its preferred list but asked state regulators for two month-long extensions to sort out logistical issues, such as the best locations so it could carry the new electricity on its grid.

It also appears that Xcel Energy went to extra lengths to ensure that Pueblo County, which is losing two coal plants ahead of schedule, one in 2022 and the other in 2025, would receive significant investment. Pueblo County is slated to host 525 megawatt of solar generation across three locations. In a first for the state, two of three locations are coming with battery storage, a combined 225 megawatts.

"Xcel's Colorado Energy Plan is a true testament to how fast the cost of clean energy is dropping. This plan makes clear that we can power our communities with reliable, affordable and clean power made in Colorado for Colorado," Zach Pierce, senior campaign representative for Sierra Club's Beyond Coal Campaign in Colorado, said in a statement.

Although more analysis is needed, he said the plan was a step in the right direction.

One concern for environmental groups was how much gas-powered generation Xcel would add in its future mix. Given how rapidly renewable-energy prices are falling, they feared the utility could quickly find itself with an uneconomic and carbon-emitting power source, especially if volatility returned to natural gas prices.

But the gas-fired generation that the utility will turn to represents existing capacity rather than the construction of new plants, and it will own them outright.

The proposal takes coal - responsible for 44 percent of electricity generation last year - down to 24 percent by 2026. That reduction, however, could run into opposition from the Trump administration, which has given instructions to the Department of Energy to preserve the nation's coal and nuclear power capacity with a moratorium on plant retirements.

Natural gas would drop from 28 percent to 23 percent of the mix, while wind would rise from 23 percent to 39 percent. The biggest gainer would be solar, which is slated to move from 3 percent to 13 percent of Xcel's generation in the state.

The PUC will hold public hearings on the 120-day plan before ruling on it in the early fall.

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Xcel Energy power plan would cut carbon emissions by half, use renewable sources for 55 percent of power

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Xcel Energy Colorado unveiled a new power plan it estimates could save customers $215 million, cut carbon emissions by half and lift renewable sources to 55 percent of its electricity portfolio by 2026, according to a filing submitted Wednesday with the Colorado Public Utilities Commission.

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The United States has exported energy sources like coal, natural gas, petroleum and electricity for decades, so Mr. Trump is wrong that this is happening for the first time.

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Fact Check of the Day

The United States has been exporting energy for decades, and is not projected to become a net exporter until 2022.

what was said

"We're now exporting energy for the first time. Never did it. Now we're exporting energy."

- President Trump, speaking at a briefing at FEMA headquarters on Wednesday.

the facts

False.

The United States has exported energy sources like coal, natural gas, petroleum and electricity for decades, so Mr. Trump is wrong that this is happening for the first time.

Asked on Wednesday for clarification, the White House referred to the Energy Information Administration's latest annual outlook, which projected that the United States would become a net energy exporter by 2022 - meaning that at that point, the country will export more energy than it imports.

That's neither "now" nor the "first time." Currently, the United States is still a net importer. Additionally, data from the energy statistical agency shows that the United States was a net exporter for several years before 1953.

The White House also cited a March report from the House Committee on Energy and Commerce that said the United States became a net exporter of liquefied natural gas in 2017 - the first time since 1957.

The United States is and has been a net energy exporter of coal since at least 1949. Conversely, the country has relied on foreign oil imports since the 1950s.

Sources: White House, Energy Information Administration, House Committee on Energy and Commerce

Linda Qiu is a fact-check reporter, based in Washington. She came to the Times in 2017 from the fact-checking service PolitiFact.

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Trump Falsely Claims 'We're Now Exporting Energy for the First Time'

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Fact Check of the Day The United States has been exporting energy for decades, and is not projected to become a net exporter until 2022. what was said "We're now exporting energy for the first time. Never did it. Now we're exporting energy." - President Trump, speaking at a briefing at FEMA headquarters on Wednesday.

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The speed of the anti-pollution drive has raised important questions about its human costs.  But if China sustains these reductions, recent research by my colleagues and me indicates that residents will see significant improvements to their health, extending their life spans by months or years.

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Research gives estimates on the longer lives that are now possible in the country.

On March 4, 2014, the Chinese premier, Li Keqiang, told almost 3,000 delegates at the National People's Congress and many more watching live on state television, "We will resolutely declare war against pollution as we declared war against poverty."

The statement broke from the country's longstanding policy of putting economic growth over environment, and many wondered whether China would really follow through.

Four years after that declaration, the data is in: China is winning, at record pace. In particular, cities have cut concentrations of fine particulates in the air by 32 percent on average, in just those four years.

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The performance artist Kong Ning in a gown depicting black granules during a recent street performance to raise awareness of air pollution in Beijing. Credit Ng Han Guan/Associated Press

The speed of the anti-pollution drive has raised important questions about its human costs.But if China sustains these reductions, recent research by my colleagues and me indicates that residents will see significant improvements to their health, extending their life spans by months or years.

How did China get here? In the months before the premier's speech, the country released a national air quality action plan that required all urban areas to reduce concentrations of fine particulate matter pollution by at least 10 percent, more in some cities. The Beijing area was required to reduce pollution by 25 percent, and the city set aside an astounding $120 billion for that purpose.

To reach these targets, China prohibited new coal-fired power plants in the country's most polluted regions, including the Beijing area. Existing plants were told to reduce their emissions. If they didn't, the coal was replaced with natural gas. Large cities, including Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, restricted the number of cars on the road. The country also reduced its iron- and steel-making capacity and shut down coal mines.

Some of the actions went from aggressive to extraordinary. For example, the ministry of environmental protection released a 143-page "battle plan" last summer that included removing the coal boilers many homes and businesses used for winter heating - even though replacements were not yet available everywhere. This left some homeowners, businesses and even students without heat this winter.

Over the past few months, news began to trickle in that the efforts were working. So I decided to dig deeper. Using data from almost 250 government monitors throughout the country, which closely matches monitors maintained by the United States Embassy in Beijing and consulates around the country, I found major improvements.

Although most regions outpaced their targets, the most populated cities had some of the greatest declines. Beijing's readings on concentrations of fine particulates declined by 35 percent; Hebei Province's capital city, Shijiazhuang, cut its concentration by 39 percent; and Baoding, called China's most polluted city in 2015, reduced its concentration by 38 percent.

To investigate the effects on people's lives in China, I used two of my studies (more here and here) to convert the fine particulate concentrations into their effect on life spans. This is the same method that underlies the Air Quality-Life Index that can be explored here. These studies are based on data from China, so they don't require extrapolation from the United States or some other country with relatively low concentrations of pollution.

The results suggest that China's fight against pollution has already laid the foundation for extraordinary gains in life expectancy. Applying this method to the available data from 204 prefectures, residents nationally could expect to live 2.4 years longer on average if the declines in air pollution persisted.

The roughly 20 million residents in Beijing would live an estimated 3.3 years longer, while those in Shijiazhuang would add 5.3 years, and those in Baoding 4.5 years. Notably, my research suggests that these improvements in life expectancy would be experienced by people of all ages, not just the young and old.

To put the astounding scale and speed of China's recent progress in context, it's useful to think back to the severe pollution levels in many American cities in the 1950s and 1960s, especially in the Rust Belt.

The U.S. Clean Air Act is widely regarded as having produced large reductions in air pollution. In the four years after its 1970 enactment, American air pollution declined by 20 percent on average. But it took about a dozen years and the 1981-1982 recession for the United States to achieve the 32 percent reduction China has achieved in just four years.

Of course, air pollution levels still exceed China's own standards and far surpass World Health Organization recommendations for what is considered safe. Bringing all of China into compliance with its own standards would increase average life expectancies by an additional 1.7 years (as measured in the areas where data is available). Complying with the stricter World Health Organization standards instead would yield 4.1 years.

Whether Chinese citizens can expect to capture these additional improvements - and even sustain the existing gains - comes back to the balance between economic growth and environmental quality. China's early reductions in air pollution have been achieved through an engineering-style fiat that dictates specific actions, rather than relying on markets to find the least expensive methods to reduce pollution.

It's an approach that has come with some real costs - as the many people left without heat this winter could attest. Yet further improvements will also be much costlier than necessary if they too are pursued by fiat, particularly with many of the easier fixes having already been made.

In the decades after enactment of the Clean Air Act, American policymakers have used many tools to reduce pollution, with market-based regulations having proved the most cost-effective. Although China is experimenting with a cap-and-trade system for carbon dioxide, it has not yet turned to such policies to fight conventional pollution.

It would be quite a twist if so-called Communist China ultimately wins the war against pollution by embracing market-based regulations, while the United States continues to use them only intermittently.

For a detailed analysis of the calculations in this piece, the technical document is available here. A report with a fuller set of calculations is available here.

Michael Greenstone runs the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and is the Milton Friedman professor of economics at the university.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Four Years After Declaring War on Pollution, Record Progress. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Four Years After Declaring War on Pollution, China Is Winning

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Research gives estimates on the longer lives that are now possible in the country. On March 4, 2014, the Chinese premier, Li Keqiang, told almost 3,000 delegates at the National People's Congress and many more watching live on state television, "We will resolutely declare war against pollution as we declared war against poverty."

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The plant will help meet the country’s fast-growing demand for electricity and draw investment. Its critics worry that it will damage the area’s fragile marine ecosystem, threaten the livelihoods of fishing communities and pollute the air.

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LAMU, Kenya - Across a narrow channel from this historic port town, where baobabs tower over the forest and tiny crabs skitter in and out of the mangroves, Kenya could soon get its first coal-fired power plant, courtesy of China.

The plan's champions, including senior Kenyan officials, say the plant will help meet the country's fast-growing demand for electricity and draw investment. Its critics worry that it will damage the area's fragile marine ecosystem, threaten the livelihoods of fishing communities and pollute the air.

The battle over the project, which is frozen pending the outcome of a court case, reverberates far beyond Lamu, a 700-year-old Indian Ocean port town of coral-lime houses and carved wooden doors that has been designated a Unesco world heritage site.

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Schoolchildren in one of Lamu's narrow streets. The town, a Unesco world heritage site, was established in the 14th century. Credit Joao Silva/The New York Times

The plan embodies a contradiction of Chinese global climate leadership: The country's huge coal sector is turning outward in search of new markets as coal projects contract at home. A Chinese multinational is tapped to build the $2 billion, 975-acre project, and a Chinese bank is helping to finance it. The project is among hundreds of coal-fired power plants that Chinese companies are helping to build or finance around the world.

It represents a test for Kenya as well. While its leaders describe the Lamu plant as a source of cheap, reliable electricity, the country is also seeking to become a renewable energy hub, with huge solar and wind projects in the works and a promise to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by 2030.

Coal could upend those goals.

"I see no reason for them to do it," said Erik Solheim, head of the United Nations Environment Program, which is based in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. "They should invest heavily in hydro, solar, wind. They are already, but they could do even more."

Not least, Mr. Solheim said in an interview, the rapidly falling price of renewable energy sources makes a coal-fired power project "much less viable."

The port town of Lamu, established in the 14th century within an archipelago of small islands near Somalia, is among the oldest continually inhabited places on Africa's Indian Ocean coast. Arab traders sailed here in their wooden dhows on their way south to Zanzibar. They brought dates and steel utensils from Arabia; they took back mangrove logs and cowrie shells.

All morning long, along the old town seafront, men unload mangrove logs and palm fronds. Fishers bring in their catches. No cars are allowed in the old town. The only taxis in its narrow lanes are donkeys. The once-thriving tourism industry has shrunk sharply because of a series of attacks by the Somalia-based terrorist group known as the Shabab.

To get to the coal plant site from Lamu town, you have to hire a boat to cross the channel and then drive along a sandy path. Cashews grow amid the wilderness. There are patches of sesame, kitchen gardens of watermelon and papaya, and a lot of uncertainty in the air. No one here has seen a coal plant before. No one really knows how it will affect them.

Shebwana Mohammed, an 18-year-old who was riding his bicycle near the project site, said he felt a mixture of worry and hope. "If it comes with a job I'm ready to take it," he ventured.

An older man, Mohammed Shee, who grows cassava and cashews on the edges of the plant site, said he had lost a few trees when the road was built. He didn't know what to make of the project, though he said he worried about the forest. "If the trees dry up how will a farmer survive?" he wondered aloud.

Whether Kenya needs coal-fired electricity is a matter of dispute, with some energy analysts concluding that wind and geothermal sources could generate enough electricity and be more cost-effective.

Then, there is the matter of where the coal would come from. The plant developer, a Kenyan consortium called Amu Power, plans to import coal initially; only later would a Kenyan coal mine, far in the country's interior, come online.

The environment secretary at the Kenyan Environment Ministry, Alice Akinyi Kaudia, was skeptical of the project's utility, saying that it would be "counterproductive" to her country's commitment to reduce emissions under the Paris climate accord.

The Lamu project has backing at the top of the government, though.

A lawsuit by a local group, filed in November 2016 in Kenya's National Environmental Tribunal, has stopped construction in its tracks. For now, no smokestacks tower over the baobabs; the only signs of construction are concrete discs that demarcate the forest and farmland acquired for the plant.

In court documents, the national environmental management authority, a semiautonomous agency within the Environment Ministry that reviews the impact of development projects, said it had approved the proposal. It maintained that "all environmental concerns were considered and mitigation measures were recommended," and asked that what it called the "misconceived" lawsuit be dismissed.

For its part, Amu Power said that the plant would offer what Kenya needs most to attract investment: electricity to power a big road-and-rail project to connect its landlocked neighbors to a new port, also under construction in Lamu.

The plant would use seawater for cooling. The discharged water, said Cyrus Kirima, the company's chief operating officer, would be warmed by about 5 degrees Fahrenheit but would not harm marine life.

As for its carbon footprint, Mr. Kirima was eager to point out that Kenya's greenhouse gas emissions are a fraction of the levels of industrialized countries.

"You need to do business," Mr. Kirima said. "You need investment. It's not as though Kenya is out in top gear to build coal plants."

The same cannot be said for China, though.

According to the Global Coal Tracker, a monitoring group, more than 200 coal-fired power plants are being developed or financed by Chinese companies from Mongolia to Zimbabwe, including in countries that, like Kenya, had previously burned no coal.

Power China, the Chinese multinational in line to build the Lamu plant, has also constructed coal plants in Indonesia and Pakistan. Urgewald, a tracking group that pushes for divestment from the coal sector, lists Power China as the 12th-largest developer of coal plants in the world.

"As China has reduced its dependence on coal domestically it has expanded overseas, to relieve excess domestic capacity," said Katharine Lu, who researches energy investments at Friends of the Earth, an environmental lobby group.

Beyond excess coal, geopolitics is also a key factor in that expansion. China's Belt and Road Initiative is a central part of President Xi Jinping's strategy to increase his country's global influence through infrastructure projects abroad. The United States, for its part, continues to export coal, as coal-fired power plants shrink at home.

In Lamu, another constituency stands to gain, at least in the short-term: An estimated 600 households whose land has been acquired for the project are in line for financial compensation, which helped to explain why Abdul Rahman Abdi, a local mangrove timber dealer, was bullish on the idea.

Mr. Abdi bought 19 acres within the project site three years ago. He said he had been reassured by government officials - the deputy president, William Ruto, came to Lamu to speak to residents - that the project would enrich rather than damage the area. "They assure us they're going to bring a lot of money with this project," he said. "They assure us that they're not crazy."

Mr. Abdi has paid a personal price in the fight over the plant. He has fallen out with a lifelong friend, Walid Ahmed Ali, who has spent the last two years roaming from island to island with Save Lamu, the group that is suing to stop the project, telling people that a coal plant could ruin their air and water and ultimately their livelihoods.

It is not a popular position, Mr. Ahmed Ali and his colleagues acknowledge. People call them names. Friends dismiss them as enemies of progress. Even a few relatives turn their backs.

Compared to the compensation money on the table, their warnings about the future seem vague.

"This is the only place we call home, the only place we have relatives and families," Omar Elmawi, the national liaison officer of Save Lamu said in his second-floor office. Its walls are plastered with maps of the region, marked by symbols of natural riches: coral, lobster, sea cucumber.

"You can never get enough compensation to evacuate everyone," he said.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A8 of the New York edition with the headline: Why Build Kenya's First Coal Plant? Hint: Think China. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Boats and boating--Equipment and supplies

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Why Build Kenya's First Coal Plant? Hint: Think China

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LAMU, Kenya - Across a narrow channel from this historic port town, where baobabs tower over the forest and tiny crabs skitter in and out of the mangroves, Kenya could soon get its first coal-fired power plant, courtesy of China.

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Acute respiratory infection of the lungs and airways, usually caused by viruses, are a leading cause of illness and death in young children.

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Air Pollution May Pose Serious Risks to Young Children

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Air pollution increases the number of lower respiratory infections, a leading cause of illness and death in children under 2.

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Poland has some the most polluted air in all of the European Union, and 33 of its 50 dirtiest cities. Not even mountain retreats are immune.

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ZAR MOUNTAIN, Poland - High atop the ski lift at Zar Mountain in southern Poland, the villages below disappear. At first, they seem obscured by morning fog. But the yellow haze does not lift. It hangs heavy, the contrast with the white snow making it clear that something is off.

What is off is the air. Poland has some the most polluted air in all of the European Union, and 33 of its 50 dirtiest cities. Not even mountain retreats are immune.

The problem is largely a result of the country's love affair with coal. Like elsewhere in Poland, most of the homes in the villages below Zar Mountain are still heated by coal. Some 19 million people rely on coal for heat in winter. In all of the European Union, 80 percent of private homes using coal are in Poland.

Coal, commonly referred to as "black gold," is seen as a patriotic alternative to Russian gas in this country, which broke away from Soviet control three decades ago and remains deeply suspicious of its neighbor to the east. Burning coal is part of daily life.

Many street corners, near bus and tram stops, feature containers known as braziers that burn coke, a coal derivative that is chiefly carbon. On a recent morning in Swietochlowice, to the north, children threw in sticks and paper, sucking in the fumes.

Outdated furnaces burn coal, too. Andrzej Machno, who lives in the small city of Skawina, northeast of Zar Mountain, has used the same furnace for more than three decades.

He has been waiting for local government funding to change to a newer, cleaner-burning model. But it is not clear when the money will arrive, or if he will qualify.

"I think all the promises come with elections," Mr. Machno said. But once the campaigns are over, he said, all the grand ideas fade away.

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In the meantime, the smog is everywhere.

Driving through small villages near Rybnik, about two hours to the northwest of the mountain and one of the cities ranked as the European Union's most polluted, smoke poured out of the houses that hug the main road.

It was evening, but strangely bright as smoke particles diffused the light from street lamps, creating an eerie orange glow. "This doesn't look right," a father said as he hurried past with his son, his jacket pulled above his mouth.

In Krakow, with its majestic castle looming over the old town, many of the buildings are still equipped with furnaces dating back decades. At the beginning of the winter, coal deliverymen make the rounds.

But now so do eco-consultants for the local government, which has undertaken one of the most ambitious projects in the country to wean people off burning coal or wood.

The Krakow government has outlawed the use of the cheapest, most polluting coal, and by 2019, aims to ban all burning of coal and wood.

The government workers try to help residents with the transition to cleaner fuel and furnaces, and guide them to available funds to pay for it.

If the effort succeeds, it may provide a model for other cities around the country. Already it has cut the number of outdated furnaces to about 10,000, from more than double that several years ago.

Other municipalities, like Katowice, about an hour's drive west of Krakow, are using drones to monitor household emissions.

But overall action has been lacking from the national government of the Law and Justice party, which has long championed the politically powerful coal industry.

In December, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki used one of his first speeches to announce plans to build two new coal mines in Silesia, the industrial region in southwest Poland.

As the toll mounts from the pollution problem, especially for children, the government is also coming under greater pressure, including the prospect of fines for violating European Union standards.

Some 48,000 Poles are estimated to die annually from illnesses related to poor air quality. Greenpeace estimated that 62 percent of Poland's kindergartens are in heavily polluted areas.

In response, the government announced that it will spend $8.8 billion by 2028 to combat smog.

"We don't want our children to associate winter with masks on their faces, but with snow and sleds and snowmen," Mr. Morawiecki said.

Industry and transportation are also big contributors to the smog. Poland is infamous for having the oldest cars in the European Union, with the average age of the car 13 years.

A social movement has sprung up across the country to combat pollution and educate people, especially children.

A physiotherapist by profession, Jolanta Sitarz-Wojcicka became an activist two years ago, when she had a baby and realized that the air outside was so bad she could not leave her home without risking the health of her newborn.

She took up the cause in her hometown of Zakopane, the southeast of the mountain, and now it is her sole focus. Winning the war on smog requires changing habits deeply embedded in the culture. She starts with educating school children.

At a primary school in Nowe Bystre near Zakopane, she showed the kids different pictures of trash and asked them which is O.K. to burn in a furnace.

"The smaller the village, the more interesting the responses," she said. It is not what they are taught, she said, but what they see. And they often see people burning anything that will burn.

Thanks to a grant from the European Union, she can dedicate herself full time to the cause. But she is worried.

If the situation does not improve in the next few years, she said, she plans to move to Sweden.

Others already move to escape the pollution. Andrzej Bargiel, a well-known Polish mountaineer, used to live in downtown Zakopane, where the air gave him constant headaches. He feels better since relocating above the city, he said.

Aneta Seidler, a local leader of a Smog Alert group in Nowy Targ, in southern Poland, who has one child and is pregnant with a second, tries not to let her family leave the house, where they have plenty of air filters. They often leave the country in the winter.

"To breathe," she said.

Oliwer Palarz, an activist with the Rybnik Smog Alert group, makes his children Antoni and Tymon wear anti-smog masks while outside. He is suing the Polish government, claiming that its lack of action on pollution has violated his civil rights.

Many are not optimistic things are headed in the right direction. The European Court of Justice ruled that Poland infringed air quality laws between 2007 and 2015 by continuously exceeding pollution values.

While the European Union continues to play a leading role in action to limit global warming, Poland is likely to be an outlier for some time.

Poland's appetite for coal is so great, it is even importing more and more of it from the United States, where the Trump administration has been trying to revive its own coal industry.

In Belchatow, Poland maintains Europe's largest coal-fired utility plant, at the edge of a coal mine eight miles long and two miles wide.

It shows no signs of slowing, and continues to belch out carbon at an astounding rate. It is the largest carbon emitter in Europe.

Correction:

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of a picture caption with this article mischaracterized where a well-known Polish mountaineer moved. He moved above Zakopane, not to Zakopane.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Coal Warms Poland's Hearths, and Fouls Its Skies. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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Smothered by Smog, Polish Cities Rank Among Europe's Dirtiest

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ZAR MOUNTAIN, Poland - High atop the ski lift at Zar Mountain in southern Poland, the villages below disappear. At first, they seem obscured by morning fog. But the yellow haze does not lift. It hangs heavy, the contrast with the white snow making it clear that something is off.

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The European Commission on Monday proposed an ambitious set of measures to clean up Europe’s beaches and rid its seas and waterways of disposable plastics, and urged the European Union to lead the way in reducing marine litter worldwide.

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BRUSSELS - The European Commission on Monday proposed an ambitious set of measures to clean up Europe's beaches and rid its seas and waterways of disposable plastics, and urged the European Union to lead the way in reducing marine litter worldwide.

The measures, which will need to be approved by the European Union's 28 member states, would reduce or alter the consumption and production of the top 10 plastic items most commonly found on beaches, including straws, cotton swabs, disposable cutlery and fishing gear.

"We are at risk of choking our oceans in plastic, with a knock-on effect on our food chain and human health," said Frans Timmermans, the vice president of the European Commission, which is the bloc's executive arm responsible for proposing legislation. "It's in the air, it's in our oceans, it's in our food and also in our bodies."

"We will ban single-use plastics," he said, and "lead the way" in a "global race to the top" to clean up the world's oceans.

Several European countries, like Denmark, France, Belgium, Italy and Portugal, have already taken steps to reduce waste from plastics on a national level in recent years, and more than 85 percent of respondents in a European Union survey expressed strong support for the measures.

Although the process could take a year or more, if adopted, the proposal will impose different kinds of measures for different products. Where viable alternatives exist, single-use plastic products will be banned from the European single market. In other cases, member states will be directed to set national reduction targets.

For some plastics, producers will help cover the costs of waste management and raising awareness about the threats posed by plastic waste. Deposit-refund systems will be further encouraged, and member states will aim to collect for recycling 90 percent of all plastic bottles by 2025.

"What this means in practice is that you won't see single-use plastic cotton buds on your supermarket shelves, but ones made with more environmental friendly materials instead," Mr. Timmermans said. "The same will go for straws, drink stirrers, sticks for balloons, cutlery and plates."

"You can still organize a picnic, drink a cocktail and clean your ears, just like before," he said. "And you get the added bonus that when you do so, you can have a clear conscience about the environmental impact of your actions."

Taken together, the measures would also contribute significantly to the achievement of the European Union's climate goals, avoiding about 3.4 million metric tons, or about 3.7 million tons, of carbon dioxide emissions by 2030, according to the European Union.

Forty-six billion bottles, 36 billion straws, 16 billion coffee cups and two billion plastic takeout containers are consumed annually in the European Union, according to a 2017 report from Seas at Risk, an organization of environmental groups across Europe that promote marine protection.

The report also stated that about 580 billion cigarettes are consumed and their butts discarded annually in the European Union. Under the proposed measures, each country would have to conduct awareness-raising educational campaigns about the disposal of "tobacco product filters," and producers would have to share the costs of waste management.

Stakeholders from the plastics production industry and the fishing gear industry generally favored the European Commission's proposal and indicated that further action was necessary, and even urgent. They particularly welcomed measures that urged producers to share responsibility for raising awareness and managing waste.

But some lobbyist watchdog groups warned that the efforts to approve the commission's proposed measures would be met with resistance from some quarters of the plastics and packaging industry, which view the proposed regulations as "a horror prospect," said Vicky Cann of the Corporate Europe Observatory, a nonprofit group that aims to expose the effects of corporate lobbying campaigns.

"We expect to see a big backlash from producers in the next months, who have already been very vocal against bans and financial obligations on producers, and who insist voluntary initiatives are enough to end the plastic crisis," Ms. Cann said. "In the end, today's proposal is only as good as its eventual implementation, which will follow after what is sure to be a fierce lobby battle."

Many European countries have already introduced measures banning plastics in recent years. France banned ultralightweight plastic bags in 2015, and Italy did so in 2016. This year, Belgium, Denmark and Scotland are planning to ban several single-use plastic products, and Italy, Portugal and Spain are expected to introduce similar measures in the coming years.

Asked whether the European Union was planning to ban balloons, Mr. Timmermans insisted, "We're not going to ban balloons."

"I want to be very clear, these products won't disappear," he said, "they will just be made with different materials."

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: E.U. Proposes Plastics Ban To Cut Down Sea Pollution. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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E.U. Proposes Ban on Some Plastic Items to Reduce Marine Pollution

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BRUSSELS - The European Commission on Monday proposed an ambitious set of measures to clean up Europe's beaches and rid its seas and waterways of disposable plastics, and urged the European Union to lead the way in reducing marine litter worldwide.

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A beach-ball-size jellyfish that looks like a cross between an alien ghost and a pinkish cosmetic bag was captured in a rare video taken by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) in the inky depths of the Pacific Ocean.

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A beach-ball-size jellyfish that looks like a cross between an alien ghost and a pinkish cosmetic bag was captured in a rare video taken by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) in the inky depths of the Pacific Ocean.

The ROV, dubbed Hercules, recorded the unusual jellyfish - named Deepstaria enigmatica after the Deepstar 4000, a deep-sea submersible designed by the French explorer Jacques Cousteau - off the coast of Mexico's San Benedicto Island in the Pacific Ocean in November 2017, according to a new study published in the May 9 issue of the journal American Museum Novitates.

"It's just this crazy, weird alien thing," lead study researcher David Gruber, a professor of biology at the City University of New York and a Radcliffe fellow at Harvard University, told Live Science. "We barely know anything about it." [ Image Gallery: Jellyfish Rule!]

Scientists have published studies on D. enigmatica only about a dozen times since 1966, when three researchers aboard the Deepstar 4000 captured the first specimen. Unfortunately, this specimen was incomplete; the jellyfish was so large, it couldn't be completely sucked up by the submersible's suction sampler, the researchers said.

Although that jellyfish was incomplete, "much of the existing information about D. enigmatica is from this specimen," which now resides at the British Natural History Museum, the researchers wrote in the study.

Here's what researchers do know about the odd creature. First, D. enigmatica has no tentacles, so it hunts by encapsulating prey within its gelatinous, umbrella-like body. And there aren't any reports on the species' diet, but like other jellyfish, it probably eats small fish, crustaceans and other jellyfish, Gruber said.

As Hercules began to film the jellyfish - a large jelly more than 2 feet (68 centimeters) long with a diameter of 1.8 feet (56 cm) - it closed its body in a rapid ripple. Gruber said the jellyfish may have mistaken the vibrations from the ROV as tasty prey and thus tried to bag it.

"[The jellyfish] sensed that maybe it had something potentially inside of it, and it closed," Gruber said.

This time-lapse series of Deepstaria enigmatica closing in response to the ROV Hercules, as if it were trying to "bag" prey.

Credit: Brennan Phillips & David Gruber

After recording the mysterious jellyfish for about 10 minutes at nearly 3,200 feet (974 meters) below sea level, Hercules took a dive to the ocean floor - this time, at about 2,900 feet (899 m) below sea level, east of Mexico's Socorro Island.

Among the dense forest of sponges and corals, Hercules filmed bright-red crabs feasting on a dead Deepstaria, making it the first scientific record of a Deepstaria "jelly fall," which is akin to animals eating a dead whale after a whale fall, the researchers said. (There are two known species of Deepstaria: D. enigmatica and D. reticulum, and it's not clear which species the crabs were eating, Gruber noted.)

A deep-sea crab ( Paralomis) scavenges the carcass of the jellyfish Deepstaria.

Credit: D. Fornari (WHOI-MISO Facility) and the Ocean Exploration Trust/NautilusLive

"There was a little crab party going on around this jelly," Gruber said. Food is so scarce in the deep sea, it's no wonder that animals down there were gobbling up this jellyfish, he said.

Gruber and his colleagues plan to explore more of the ocean with ROVs like Hercules, which can carry high-tech cameras (in this case, the Canon ME20F-SH) and whose spotlights can be dimmed to that of a mere penlight.

"Usually when submarines go down, they go down with these big, powerful lights because they don't want to bump into things and crash," Gruber said. "It's like being at a party outside and the cops come and shine a flashlight in your face. That's the kind of way we normally approach deep-sea life."

The low-light Hercules even managed to film a blue, bioluminescent creature known as Tomopteris swimming around the jellyfish.

"That's a feature that's normally missed using other cameras," Gruber said.

Original article on Live Science.

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This Mysterious, Deep-Sea Jellyfish Looks Like the Ghost of an Alien

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A beach-ball-size jellyfish that looks like a cross between an alien ghost and a pinkish cosmetic bag was captured in a rare video taken by a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) in the inky depths of the Pacific Ocean.

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A pilot whale that swallowed more than 80 plastic bags is seen in this still image from a June 1 video taken by Thailand's Department of Marine and Coastal Resources.Credit: Thailand's Department of Marine and Coastal Resources/Social Media/REUTERS/NewscomMore than 80 plastic bags were found clogging the stomach of a small male pilot whale that died in Thailand on Friday (June 1), just days before World Ocean Day on June 8.

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A pilot whale that swallowed more than 80 plastic bags is seen in this still image from a June 1 video taken by Thailand's Department of Marine and Coastal Resources.

Credit: Thailand's Department of Marine and Coastal Resources/Social Media/REUTERS/Newscom

More than 80 plastic bags were found clogging the stomach of a small male pilot whale that died in Thailand on Friday (June 1), just days before World Ocean Day on June 8.

Veterinarians tried to save the whale for five straight days after spotting it in a Thai canal by the Malaysian border, according to National Geographic. When rescuers first spotted the whale, it was struggling to swim and breathe. So, rescuers used buoys to keep it afloat and opened red umbrellas to keep the whale from getting a sunburn.

Although the whale spit up five plastic bags, that wasn't enough to save it. A necropsy (an animal autopsy) revealed that it had more than 17 lbs. (8 kilograms) of plastic bags and other human-made trash in its stomach, according to Reuters. [ Photos: Pilot Whales in Trouble off Everglades]

The whale likely mistook the plastic bags for food, said Regina Asmutis-Silvia, the executive director of Whale and Dolphin Conservation's North American operation. As the bags piled up in its stomach, the animal would have felt full and may have stopped hunting for its natural diet of squid, fish and octopus.

"At some point, their stomach fills up with trash and they can't eat real food," Asmutis-Silvia told National Geographic. "You're not getting any nutrients in, and you've basically completely clogged your digestive system."

This pilot whale is hardly the only creature that has mistakenly dined on plastic with fatal consequences. At least 300 marine animals die in Thai waters each year after gulping down too much plastic, Thon Thamrongnawasawat, a marine biologist and lecturer at Kasetsart University in Bangkok, told Agence France-Presse. Worldwide, seabirds also mistake plastic trash for food, as do turtles, other whales, dolphins, seal pups and tiny crustaceans living in the Mariana Trench, the deepest place in the ocean, Live Science previously reported.

Some 18 billion lbs. (8 million kg) of plastic waste end up in the oceans annually, according to National Geographic. In the United States, the average person discards 185 lbs. (84 kg) of plastic trash, but this number can be reduced if people avoid single-use products - such as plastic bags and straws - and by properly recycling plastic products.

Original article on Live Science.

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Pilot Whale Dies After Eating More Than 80 Plastic Bags

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More than 80 plastic bags were found clogging the stomach of a small male pilot whale that died in Thailand on Friday (June 1), just days before World Ocean Day on June 8. Veterinarians tried to save the whale for five straight days after spotting it in a Thai canal by the Malaysian border, according to National Geographic.

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In his paper, Kossin found yet another way changes in storm patterns are sparking greater devastation. He showed that from 1949 to 2016, tropical cyclones across the globe slowed their movement by 10 percent on average.

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Tropical cyclones, including hurricanes and typhoons, are now crawling across the planet at a slower pace than they did decades ago, dragging out and amplifying their devastation, new research published Wednesday shows.

At the same time, related research published just last month suggests that warming temperatures from climate change will slow storms more in the future.

While having a cyclone travel with less speed may seem like a good thing, it's actually just the opposite. Wind speeds within the storm remain high, but the whole system itself moves slower across the landscape, allowing punishing rains to linger longer over communities.

Taken together, these two studies suggest that climate change is already increasing the dangers posed by hurricanes and typhoons in far more ways than previously thought, and it will continue to compound many of the hazards, especially the threat of severe flooding.

"Nothing good comes out of a slowing storm," says James Kossin, with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Center for Weather and Climate in Madison, Wisconsin, and author of the first paper, published today in the journal Nature. "It can increase storm surge. It can increase the amount of time that structures are subjected to strong wind. And it increases rainfall."

In the wake of Hurricane Harvey's torrential rains, which dumped several feet of water on sections of Houston, Texas, last August, scientists showed that warmer sea and air temperatures pumped more moisture into the storm-which then fell as rain. Climate change increased both the intensity of the rainfall and the likelihood that the storm would occur.

In his paper, Kossin found yet another way changes in storm patterns are sparking greater devastation. He showed that from 1949 to 2016, tropical cyclones across the globe slowed their movement by 10 percent on average. In some regions, the pace of those storms slowed even more as they hit land. In the western North Pacific, the decline was almost a third. That means a storm that may already hold more moisture will have time to drop more of it in each spot.

With the exception of the Indian Ocean region, which tends to behave differently, "all the other regions show this consistent slowing," Kossin says. "The trend is always in one direction."

Kossin's work was based on details of almost 70 years' worth of storms, but he made no attempt to determine what was causing the slowdown. Still, the shift is precisely what he and other cyclone experts said would be expected from climate change. With polar regions warming faster than other parts of the globe, that is altering pressure gradients, reducing the winds that push these storms.

"Tropical cyclones are just carried along by the wind, so it makes sense," Kossin says. "The storms will stay in your neighborhoods longer."

Christina Patricola, a scientist with the climate and ecosystem sciences division of California's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, called Kossin's work "important and new" and says she found it "pretty convincing."

"I was not surprised by his findings," she says. "But I was surprised by the magnitude of the slowdown."

In an editorial accompanying Kossin's work, she points out that it raises several new questions. For instance, if exceptionally slow-moving storms have grown more likely in recent years, does that mean "stalled" storms like Harvey-which seemed to get stuck in place for days-are increasing, too?

Kossi hopes that scientists will begin building models that show which communities are likely to face the most risk. Given that storms in some regions are migrating poleward and already increasing in intensity, cyclones delivering unusually powerful bouts of rain may threaten places not normally in their path. "These are not good things to be combining," he says.

In the second study, published in the Journal of Climate, a team led by Ethan Gutmann, with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, tried to see how 22 hurricanes that hit in the last 13 years might be different if they hit in the future under a warmer climate.

By plugging storm data into computer models representing a future with temperatures that are up to five degrees warmer, they found that these cyclones moved 9 percent slower and were far, far wetter. Rainfall, on average, increased 24 percent.

"We're showing that it not only slows down, but that it's more intense," Gutmann says. "That has serious implications for inland flooding and urban infrastructure."

Gutmann and Kossin took entirely different approaches-one looking at historical data; the other using modeling to see how storms would behave under predicted warming scenarios. And there are limits to each approach. No storm from today will reproduce in quite the same way in the future.

But both scientists say the importance is in the bigger picture. The fact that their results show quite similar trends should be a wake-up call.

"We're both pushing the work forward and adding additional lines of evidence," Gutmann says. "And when you start getting more and more lines of evidence that all point in the same direction, you get more confident in the answers."

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Hurricanes Are Moving Slower-And That's a Huge Problem

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Tropical cyclones, including hurricanes and typhoons, are now crawling across the planet at a slower pace than they did decades ago, dragging out and amplifying their devastation, new research published Wednesday shows. At the same time, related research published just last month suggests that warming temperatures from climate change will slow storms more in the future.

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The study found that variations in cloud cover sharply delineated the boundaries of ecological bio mes relevant to many unique species.

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Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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Much of Earth's biodiversity is concentrated in areas where not enough is known about species habitats and their wider distributions, making management and conservation a challenge. To address the problem, scientists at the University at Buffalo and Yale University used NASA satellite data to study cloud cover, which they found can help identify the size and location of important animal and plant habitats.

Clouds influence such environmental factors as rain, sunlight, surface temperature and leaf wetness-all of which dictate where plants and animals can survive. As part of their study, researchers examined 15 years of data from NASA's Earth-orbiting Terra and Aqua satellites and built a database containing two images per day of cloud cover for nearly every square kilometer of the planet from 2000 to 2014.

The study found that variations in cloud cover sharply delineated the boundaries of ecological biomes relevant to many unique species.

A green violet-ear hummingbird flies in the Monte Verde cloud forest in Costa Rica. A new study by University at Buffalo and Yale University researchers finds that satellite observations of cloud cover can be used to map the boundaries of ecosystems such as cloud forests. Credit: Adam Wilson.

The study was published in the journal PLOS Biology on March 31.

"When we visualized the data, it was remarkable how clearly you could see many different biomes on Earth based on the frequency and timing of cloudy days over the past 15 years," said lead scientist Adam Wilson, who conducted the majority of the research at Yale University and is now an assistant professor of geography at the University at Buffalo. "As you cross from one ecosystem into another, those transitions show up very clearly, and the exciting thing is that these data allow you to directly observe those patterns at 1-kilometer resolution."

Cloud cover also helped the researchers better predict where specific species live. By taking cloud patterns into account, the team was able to determine the size and location of habitats for the montane woodcreeper (a South American bird) and king protea (a South African shrub) in unprecedented detail and accuracy. That finding is particularly exciting because the technique could be used to research the habitats of threatened plants and animals, said co-author Walter Jetz, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale University.

"Understanding the spatial patterns of biodiversity is critical if we want to make informed decisions about how to protect species and manage biodiversity and its many functions into the future," Jetz said.

A king protea blooms in the Cape Floristic Region of South Africa. A new study finds that satellite data can be used to map the boundaries of ecosystems that teem with unique forms of life. Credit: Adam Wilson.

The study demonstrates how remote sensing can be a powerful tool in those efforts, Wilson said. "That's one of the really exciting developments in the field today. We now have decades of satellite observations that we can pull together to characterize the global environment," he said, noting that Aqua and Aura have been collecting two images per day everywhere on Earth for well over a decade. "It is exciting to now be able to tap into this large stack of detailed data to support global biodiversity and ecosystem monitoring and conservation."

Related links:
Read the paper at PLOS Biology NASA's website for Earth science news

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Study shows cloud patterns reveal species habitat - Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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Much of Earth's biodiversity is concentrated in areas where not enough is known about species habitats and their wider distributions, making management and conservation a challenge. To address the problem, scientists at the University at Buffalo and Yale University used NASA satellite data to study cloud cover, which they found can help identify the size and location of important animal and plant habitats.

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NASA tests in flight conditions show that blending standard jet fuel with bio fuel reduces emission of soot particles from jet engines.

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Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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When you see long, white streamers trailing behind a jet plane high in the sky, you're watching clouds in the making.

The streamers are called "contrails" (short for condensation trails) and consist of ice crystals that form when water vapor from jet-engine exhaust condenses and freezes in the frigid air where these planes cruise.

Depending on atmospheric conditions, a contrail may evaporate quickly or it may last. The persistent ones, buffeted by wind, can spread out into diffuse cirrus clouds. As delicate as these clouds appear, they have a significant warming effect on the planet.

Although cirrus clouds serve as cooling sunshades during the day, they also act as warming blankets both day and night, preventing the Earth from cooling off after the day's sunbathing as much as it would without the clouds. In fact, the cirrus clouds formed by the world's aircraft on an average day have a greater warming impact than all the carbon dioxide that aircraft have emitted since the Wright Brothers made the first powered flight in 1903.

That eye-opening comparison is according to a colleague cited by Bruce Anderson and Richard Moore, the project scientist and deputy project scientist, respectively, of NASA's Alternative Fuel Effects on Contrails and Cruise Emissions Study (ACCESS). Their experiments were designed to see what effect a half-and-half blend of standard jet fuel and a biofuel derived from camelina oil would have on jet-engine emissions.

Jet exhaust includes water vapor, carbon dioxide and soot, the carbon left over from incomplete combustion. Soot particles can provide the surfaces that water vapor requires before it can condense and freeze into ice crystals. So, according to current theory, reducing the number of soot particles that jet engines emit should reduce the density of contrails and the cirrus clouds they form, degrading their ability to warm the planet.

The scientists found that the biofuel blend they tested reduced the amount of soot by a range of 50 percent (when the engines were set to high thrust) to 70 percent (at lower thrust).

Does that mean a 50 to 70 percent reduction in contrails and the resulting cirrus clouds? These experiments couldn't directly answer that question, but they're a good start.

Uncertainty

"It's a complicated process," Anderson said. "There is speculation that even if you did not have soot coming out of the back of an aircraft engine, in many cases a contrail would still form." That's because airborne dust, pollen, sea salt and other kinds of naturally occurring particles are also able to provide surfaces that enable water vapor to condense and form clouds.

And there's another twist: Biofuel contains more hydrogen than standard jet fuel and the hydrogen is converted to water vapor as the fuel burns. If using biofuel creates more water vapor, it's possible that it will create more contrail than standard jet fuel, not less.

A research plane samples exhaust from NASA's DC-8 to compare emissions from standard jet fuel with those from a biofuel blend.

On the other hand, the added water vapor might simply condense around the smaller number of available soot particles, making larger, heavier ice crystals. And heavier crystals are likely to sink to lower, warmer altitudes more quickly than their lighter counterparts. "A lot of air traffic routes are right at the bottom of the (level of the) atmosphere where it's cold enough to form contrails," Anderson said. "So if a contrail falls to lower altitudes, it evaporates and goes away much more quickly."

Also, he added, the soot particles from biofuel tend to be smaller than those from standard jet fuel. A significant portion may be too small to seed ice crystals.

So how much effect would reducing soot emissions from jet engines actually have on formation of cirrus clouds? "That's really hard to tease out observationally," Moore said.

"We obviously can't measure behind every aircraft," Anderson said. "And so, a lot of the work we are doing is to gather data to validate model predictions."

"We really need models, particularly large-scale climate models that incorporate aviation, to unravel some of those effects," Moore said. "We are providing the input, and the hope is that modelers will take this data, simulate the clouds and try to understand what the impact of reduced particles associated with biofuel blending would be on contrail frequency, lifetime and climate effects."

The flight experiments

Before ACCESS, the scientific literature showed few direct measurements at cruise altitudes of emissions from jet engines burning standard fuel and none at all of jets burning biofuel.

Testing in actual flight conditions is essential because the conditions of both engines and atmosphere are quite different at altitude than on the ground.

Anderson and Moore conducted their experiments at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in Palmdale, California, in 2013 and 2014. After lengthy analysis and running the gauntlet of the peer-review process, they reported the study's results in the journal Nature in spring 2017.

The NASA team that Anderson and Moore led went it alone in the 2013 tests. In 2014, they were joined by researchers from the German Aerospace Center (DLR) and the National Research Council (NRC) of Canada.

Inside one of three chase planes, NASA scientists Richard Moore (front) and Bruce Anderson (back) analyze exhaust from the DC-8 ahead.

In those tests, NASA, the DLR and NRC-Canada each provided research aircraft equipped with state-of-the-art instruments capable of sniffing and analyzing the exhaust of NASA's DC-8 as it sequentially burned two kinds of conventional jet fuel and a 50-50 blend of standard fuel and biofuel.

The research planes took turns sampling the DC-8's exhaust at distances as close as 100 feet (30 meters) behind the turbofan engines. "It was kind of a tightly choreographed dance," Moore said. All this, as the planes soared above the Mojave Desert at 30,000 to 36,000 feet (about 9,100 to 11,000 meters), altitudes common for commercial airliners.

The dry desert air reduced the chances that contrails would form, which the scientists considered an advantage in this round of tests. "By not measuring in contrail-forming conditions, we have a more accurate assessment of the number of particles that came out," Moore said. "Because once you form the cloud, the soot particles start to interact with each other and it actually changes the properties of the soot and the contrail as that system evolves."

A cloudy future

In 2015, the ACCESS team took part in a German-sponsored study that, Anderson said, provided evidence that cutting down on soot reduces formation of ice crystals. And NASA plans to collaborate with the DLR still further.

"We hope to take the DC-8 to Germany in January 2018 and repeat some of the things that we did in ACCESS with a much better suite of instruments," Anderson said.

"We're going to do the experiments where conditions are a little more right for forming contrails (in air that is more humid)," Moore said, "in a way that doing flights over Armstrong in the middle of the Mojave Desert is perhaps not."

"We will get into situations where we have persistent contrails," Anderson said. "We also plan to fly through the North Atlantic Flight Corridor and sample ice particles forming downwind (of flight paths) to see whether they have black carbon cores, which would verify that they are caused by aircraft emissions."

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NASA test: Jet biofuel may reduce climate-warming clouds - Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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When you see long, white streamers trailing behind a jet plane high in the sky, you're watching clouds in the making. The streamers are called "contrails" (short for condensation trails) and consist of ice crystals that form when water vapor from jet-engine exhaust condenses and freezes in the frigid air where these planes cruise.

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An iceberg about the size of the state of Delaware split off from Antarctica’s Larsen C ice shelf sometime between July 10 and July 12, 2017. The U.S. National Ice Center will monitor the trajectory of the new iceberg, which is likely to be named A-68. The currents around Antarctica generally dictate the path that the icebergs follow.

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Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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By Maria-Jose Viñas,
NASA's Earth Science Team

An iceberg about the size of the state of Delaware split off from Antarctica's Larsen C ice shelf sometime between July 10 and July 12. The calving of the massive new iceberg was captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on NASA's Aqua satellite, and confirmed by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite instrument on the joint NASA/NOAA Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi-NPP) satellite. The final breakage was first reported by Project Midas, an Antarctic research project based in the United Kingdom.

Larsen C, a floating platform of glacial ice on the east side of the Antarctic Peninsula, is the fourth largest ice shelf ringing Earth's southernmost continent. In 2014, a crack that had been slowly growing into the ice shelf for decades suddenly started to spread northwards, creating the nascent iceberg. Now that the close to 2240 square-mile (5800 square kilometers) chunk of ice has broken away, the Larsen C shelf area has shrunk by approximately 10 percent.

"The interesting thing is what happens next, how the remaining ice shelf responds," said Kelly Brunt, a glaciologist with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland and the University of Maryland in College Park. "Will the ice shelf weaken? Or possibly collapse, like its neighbors Larsen A and B? Will the glaciers behind the ice shelf accelerate and have a direct contribution to sea level rise? Or is this just a normal calving event?"

Thermal wavelength image of a large iceberg, which has calved off the Larsen C ice shelf. Darker colors are colder, and brighter colors are warmer, so the rift between the iceberg and the ice shelf appears as a thin line of slightly warmer area. Image from July 12, 2017, from the MODIS instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite. Credit: NASA Worldview. Download additional imagery from NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio.

Ice shelves fringe 75 percent of the Antarctic ice sheet. One way to assess the health of ice sheets is to look at their balance: when an ice sheet is in balance, the ice gained through snowfall equals the ice lost through melting and iceberg calving. Even relatively large calving events, where tabular ice chunks the size of Manhattan or bigger calve from the seaward front of the shelf, can be considered normal if the ice sheet is in overall balance. But sometimes ice sheets destabilize, either through the loss of a particularly big iceberg or through disintegration of an ice shelf, such as that of the Larsen A Ice Shelf in 1995 and the Larsen B Ice Shelf in 2002. When floating ice shelves disintegrate, they reduce the resistance to glacial flow and thus allow the grounded glaciers they were buttressing to significantly dump more ice into the ocean, raising sea levels.

Scientists have monitored the progression of the rift throughout the last year was using data from the European Space Agency Sentinel-1 satellites and thermal imagery from NASA's Landsat 8 spacecraft. Over the next months and years, researchers will monitor the response of Larsen C, and the glaciers that flow into it, through the use of satellite imagery, airborne surveys, automated geophysical instruments, and associated field work.

Throughout the sunlit months of late 2016 and early 2017, scientists watched closely as a crack grew across the Larsen C ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula. On June 17, 2017, the Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) on Landsat 8 captured a false-color image of the crack and the surrounding ice shelf. It shows the relative warmth or coolness of the landscape. Orange depicts where the surface is the warmest, most notably the areas of open ocean and of water topped by thin sea ice. Light blues and whites are the coldest areas, spanning most of the ice shelf and some areas of sea ice. Dark blue and purple areas are in the mid-range. Credit: NASA's Earth Observatory. Read more.

In the case of this rift, scientists were worried about the possible loss of a pinning point that helped keep Larsen C stable. In a shallow part of the sea floor underneath the ice shelf, a bedrock protrusion, named the Bawden Ice Rise, has served as an anchor point for the floating shelf for many decades. Ultimately, the rift stopped short of separating from the protrusion.

"The remaining 90 percent of the ice shelf continues to be held in place by two pinning points: the Bawden Ice Rise to the north of the rift and the Gipps Ice Rise to the south," said Chris Shuman, a glaciologist with Goddard and the University of Maryland at Baltimore County. "So I just don't see any near-term signs that this calving event is going to lead to the collapse of the Larsen C ice shelf. But we will be watching closely for signs of further changes across the area."

The first available images of Larsen C are airborne photographs from the 1960s and an image from a US satellite captured in 1963. The rift that has produced the new iceberg was already identifiable in those pictures, along with a dozen other fractures. The crack remained dormant for decades, stuck in a section of the ice shelf called a suture zone, an area where glaciers flowing into the ice shelf come together. Suture zones are complex and more heterogeneous than the rest of the ice shelf, containing ice with different properties and mechanical strengths, and therefore play an important role in controlling the rate at which rifts grow. In 2014, however, this particular crack started to rapidly grow and traverse the suture zones, leaving scientists perplexed.

The blue hue of the crack indicates that relatively warm ocean water is not far below the ice surface. No part of the crack appears as warm as ocean areas, likely because there is a soup of floating, broken ice pieces from the rift's walls and bits of sea ice sitting atop the water-filled crack. (This mixture can act as a weak glue, but it also prevents the rift from healing.) Credit: NASA's Earth Observatory. Read more.

"We don't currently know what changed in 2014 that allowed this rift to push through the suture zone and propagate into the main body of the ice shelf," said Dan McGrath, a glaciologist at Colorado State University who has been studying the Larsen C ice shelf since 2008.

McGrath said the growth of the crack, given our current understanding, is not directly linked to climate change.

"The Antarctic Peninsula has been one of the fastest warming places on the planet throughout the latter half of the 20 th century. This warming has driven really profound environmental changes, including the collapse of Larsen A and B," McGrath said. "But with the rift on Larsen C, we haven't made a direct connection with the warming climate. Still, there are definitely mechanisms by which this rift could be linked to climate change, most notably through warmer ocean waters eating away at the base of the shelf."

While the crack was growing, scientists had a hard time predicting when the nascent iceberg would break away. It's difficult because there are not enough measurements available on either the forces acting on the rift or the composition of the ice shelf. Further, other poorly observed external factors, such as temperatures, winds, waves and ocean currents, might play an important role in rift growth. Still, this event has provided an important opportunity for researchers to study how ice shelves fracture, with important implications for other ice shelves.

The U.S. National Ice Center will monitor the trajectory of the new iceberg, which is likely to be named A-68. The currents around Antarctica generally dictate the path that the icebergs follow. In this case, the new berg is likely to follow a similar path to the icebergs produced by the collapse of Larsen B: north along the coast of the Peninsula, then northeast into the South Atlantic.

"It's very unlikely it will cause any trouble for navigation," Brunt said.

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Massive iceberg breaks off from Antarctica - Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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By Maria-Jose Viñas, NASA's Earth Science Team An iceberg about the size of the state of Delaware split off from Antarctica's Larsen C ice shelf sometime between July 10 and July 12.

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This past April was the third warmest April in 138 years of modern record-keeping, according to a monthly analysis of global temperatures by scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York.

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Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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In spite of the low temperatures in parts of the United States last month, 2018 experienced globally the third warmest April in 138 years of modern record-keeping, according to a monthly analysis of global temperatures by scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York.

Last month was +0.86 °C warmer than the average April of the 1951-1980 period; this value is in line with the 1.8 °C/century rate of increase of the past 40 years. Only April 2016 (+1.07 °C) and April 2017 (+0.92 °C) were warmer than the past month, and April 2010 (+0.84 °C) was only insignificantly cooler than this year's April.

The GISTEMP monthly temperature anomalies superimposed on a 1980-2015 mean seasonal cycle. View larger image or PDF.

The monthly analysis by the GISS team is assembled from publicly available data acquired by about 6,300 meteorological stations around the world, ship- and buoy-based instruments measuring sea surface temperature, and Antarctic research stations.

The modern global temperature record begins around 1880 because previous observations didn't cover enough of the planet. Monthly analyses are sometimes updated when additional data becomes available, and the results are subject to change.

Related links

For more information on NASA GISS's monthly temperature analysis, visit data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp.

For more information about NASA GISS, visit www.giss.nasa.gov.

Media contact

Leslie McCarthy, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, New York, N.Y., 212-678-5507, leslie.m.mccarthy@nasa.gov

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NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies

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April 2018 was third warmest April on record - Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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In spite of the low temperatures in parts of the United States last month, 2018 experienced globally the third warmest April in 138 years of modern record-keeping, according to a monthly analysis of global temperatures by scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York.