【推荐3】The past two years, instead of my favourite maple-frosted donut (枫糖霜甜甜圈) cake, I had one birthday request from my family — hiking (远足) and a picnic together. Thankfully, it was my special day, so they only rolled their eyes and sighed once and then agreed to come along — exploring new places and discovering hidden waterfalls.

That was the past two years. That’s not today.

Today is my birthday, and I’m on the other side of the world. I wish that I could hang out with my family and friends in the US. Just for today — on my birthday.

We are “lonely internationals.” It’s hard. I won’t pretend (假装) it’s not.

My mother, “Nana” to my four boys, tells me regularly how she has missed almost all of her grandsons’ birthday celebrations. She intentionally (有意地) connects with them through texts and FaceTime on their birthdays so that she can join us for the time of singing “Happy Birthday” and SEE the kids blow out their candles.

However, that is not the same as “being there” physically — together. She feels like she misses our major life milestones called “birthdays.”

Today, I’m okay. My mother had made an e-card for me, sent to my email box early this morning. She never forgets. My in-laws, my sister and her family, my sweet friend in France, and my dear friends here in Spain and over there in the US have already wished me “Happy Birthday” online. Some even mailed me cards and gifts across the sea.

The only “gifts” I’m missing are maple-frosted donuts for a birthday cake. My mother tried to bring them to me in Europe when she travelled to visit me. However, after a 20-hour trip across the sea, they weren’t so fresh anymore.

Tonight, we will have a special dinner outside on our back porch in the cool, evening air. I will blow out A LOT of candles on my birthday cake.

I am happy. I have breath, life, a heartbeat, and deep inner joy from the love of my family and friends around the world.

【推荐1】Polar bears normally feed on ringed seals that they catch on ice floes (浮冰) offshore. But as the ice disappears in a warming world, many bears are spending greater amounts of time on shore, eating birds’ eggs, berries and grass. However the animals rapidly lose weight on land, increasing the risk of death. The polar bear has become the victims for global climate change, but the reality of the impact on this species is complicated.

Increasing global temperatures are now seen as their biggest threat. That’s because the frozen Arctic seas are key to their survival. The animals use the sea ice as a platform to hunt ringed seals, mostly in late spring and early summer. But during the warmer months many parts of the Arctic are now increasingly ice-free.

To understand how the animals survive as the ice disappears, researchers carried out a study, where they followed the activities of 20 polar bears during the summer months over a three-year period. As well as taking blood samples, and weighing the bears, the animals were fitted with GPS-equipped video camera collars. This allowed the scientists to record the animals’ movements, their activities and what they ate.

In the ice-free summer months, the bears adopted different strategies to survive, with some essentially resting and conserving their energy. The majority tried to search for vegetation or berries or swam to see if they could find food. Both approaches failed, with 19 of the 20 bears in the study losing body mass, by up to 11% in some cases. On average they lost one kilogramme per day. “Regardless of which strategy they were trying to use, there was no real benefit to either approach as far as being able to prolong the period that they could survive on land,” according to lead author Dr Anthony Pagano, from the US Geological Survey in Alaska.

“It is likely that polar bears will disappear from areas where sea ice will be lost in future, but difficult to say just when and where,” said Jon Aars from the Norwegian Polar Institute who was not involved in the study.

【推荐2】The WMO says Earth just had its hottest summer ever. August of this year was the hottest August ever recorded with modern equipment since 1979. It was also the second hottest month ever recorded, behind only July 2023.

August was about 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial averages (平均). That is the highest one that world leaders have said the world must not pass. Scientists, however, are more worried about temperature increases over many years and not just a few months.

So far, scientists said 2023 has been the second hottest year that it has recorded, behind only 2016. But daily August temperatures are higher than those recorded for the same period in earlier years. The WMO also said the world’s oceans were the hottest ever recorded at nearly 21 degrees Celsius. Water covers more than 70 percent of the Earth’s surface.

Scientists blame (把……归咎于) the heat on the burning of coal, oil and natural gas and the added influence from El Niño for the warming climate. El Niño is a warming of the southern Pacific Ocean that affects weather worldwide. It changes weather around the world and even more so in its second year.

Climatologist Andrew Weaver was not surprised by the numbers. He said governments have not taken global warming seriously enough. He expressed worry that the public will forget the problem when temperatures fall again.

While the world’s air and oceans are setting records for heat, Antarctica (南极) continues to set records for low amounts (数量) of sea ice. “Antarctic sea ice cover is actually an area that has not been developed, and the global sea surface temperature is once again at a new record,” WMO’s secretary-general, Petteri Taalas, said in a statement. Taalas added, “It is worth noticing that this was happening before we see the full warming influence of the El Nifio event.”

【推荐3】An international team of researchers, led by Dr Christine Batchelor of Newcastle University, UK, used clear pictures of the seafloor to show just how quickly a former ice cover retreated (退去) at the end of the last Ice Age, about 20,000 years ago.

The team mapped more than 7,600 small-scale landforms across the seafloor. The ridges (山脊) are less than 2.5m high and are spaced between about 25 and 300 metres apart. These landforms are understood to have formed when the ice cover’s retreating edge moved up and down with the tides (潮汐), pushing seafloor into a ridge every low tide. Given that two ridges would have been produced each day, the researchers were able to work out how quickly the ice cover retreated. Their results, reported in the journal Nature, show the former ice cover rapidly retreats at a speed of 50 to 600 metres per day.

The seafloor landforms also give light into the way in which such rapid retreat can happen. Dr Batchelor and co-workers noted that the former ice cover had retreated fastest across the flattest parts of its bed.

“An ice can go away from the seafloor and retreat quickly when it becomes buoyant (有浮力的),” explained co-author Dr Frazer Christie. “This retreat only happens across relatively flat beds, where less melting (融化) is required to thin the overlying ice to the point where it starts to float (漂浮).”

The researchers believe that the quick retreat could soon be observed in parts of Antarctica. This includes at West Antarctica’s vast Thwaites Glacier. The authors of this new study suggest that it could go through quick retreat because it has recently retreated close to a flat area of its bed.

“Our findings suggest that present-day rates of melting are enough to cause quick short retreat across flat-bedded areas of the Antarctic Ice Sheet, including at Thwaites,” said Dr Batchelor. “Satellites (卫星) may well know this ice-cover retreat in the near future, especially if we continue our climate warming.”