Environment and Health

A person’s health is partially determined by the environment that he or she lives in.

4 . Sea ice around Antarctica reached a record low for the second straight year this month, scientists from the National Snow and Ice Data Center announced. “Antarctic sea ice has likely reached its minimum extent for the year, at 691,000 square miles on February 21, 2023,” the data center said.

The 2023 ice minimum is the lowest since records began in 1979. This year’s minimum extent beat the previous record low set last year by 52,500 square miles, an area about the size of the state of Alabama. “Antarctica’s response to climate change has been different from the Arctic’s,” said Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Environmental Sciences and contributor to the data center’s Arctic Sea Ice News and Analysis page.

“The downward trend (趋势) in sea ice may be a signal that global warming is finally affecting the floating ice around Antarctica, but it will take several more years to be confident of it,” Scambos said, adding that, “lower sea ice extent means that ocean waves will strike the coast of the giant ice sheet, further reducing ice shelves around Antarctica.”

Sea ice loss—especially in the Arctic and less so in the Antarctic—is one of the clearest signals of global warming, the National Climate Assessment reported in 2018. In addition to human-caused warming of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans, many factors—including the geography of Antarctica, the region’s winds, as well as air and ocean temperatures—affect the ice around Antarctica.

Although the sea ice around Antarctica has been undergoing a downward trend over the past ten years or so, it’s not sharp, the data center said. This is in clear contrast to the Arctic, where the trend in the sea ice minimum is larger in magnitude (程度). The data center said that even though sea ice occurs mainly in the polar regions, it influences our global climate and weather patterns around the world.

5 . One company in Japan is working with farmers in the coastal town of Namie. Nearby is the Fukushima nuclear (原子能的) center, closed since a nuclear disaster there in March 2011.

Jinichi Abe is a local rice farmer. He says people do not want to buy his rice because they worry it is polluted. The farmer has been trying for years to recover from the effects of the disaster.

Now, he has a new way to sell his rice. Tokyo-based company Biomass Resin opened a factory in Namie in November, 2022. It turns locally grown rice into materials that can be made into all kinds of products, including plastic tools, food containers and shopping bags.

“Without growing rice, this town can’t recover, the 85-year-old Abe said, adding that in the years since the disaster, he has tried selling rice as animal feed, among other things. “Even now, we can’t sell it as Fukushima rice,” Abe said. “So having Biomass come is a huge help. We can grow rice without worries.”

In 2011, officials ordered people in the area to retreat when the nuclear disaster happened. In 2017, the government allowed some people to return to their lives in Namie after a cleanup of the area. But about 80 percent of the town’s land remains off-limits and currently about 2,000 people live there, while about 21,000 people lived in Namie before the accident.

Biomass Resin now employs 10 people in Namie, including a 20-year-old who returned, and the company hopes to expand (扩大). It uses only about 50 tons of Namie rice. The rest of the 1,500 tons needed is mainly from elsewhere in Fukushima. But the company says it will buy a larger amount from Abe and his cooperative (合作社) next year, grown on the freshly cleared fields.

6 . An English mother, Liz Pinfield-Wells, has recycled more than 2,600 pounds (1,200 kg) of trash (垃圾) through a DIY recycling center in her garden shed (棚) in Dawley Shropshire. Pinfield-Wells established the recycling center after the birth of her third child when she discovered that her town’s roadside recycling program did not accept certain items.

The recycling center accepts 30 different categories of recyclable waste. Pin field-Wells encouraged the public to leave their mixed recycled items at the end of her driveway, and dozens of residents have since dropped off their trash in her shed. She has even accepted Pringles tubes, which have metal and plastic components and should not be placed in the roadside bin. “Setting up the recycling drop-off center, in my front garden has hopefully helped the community to recycle more. It can sometimes seem a little difficult knowing where to start but with every small step, it gets that little bit easier,” she said.

Every month, she sends the collected items in vacuum-packed (真空包装的) bags to TerraCycle, a firm that turns the waste into small plastic balls for use in other products, such as watering cans and benches. The weight of the trash is then changed into points for money, which can be paid out twice a year to a charity or sports organization of her choice.

In the last three years, Pinfield-Wells has raised more than £1,000, which she has donated to her 14-year-old daughter Zoe’s gymnastic group to buy new equipment. She has also donated money to another local charity to buy woodchips for their community garden.

Pinfield-Wells hopes that her recycling center will raise awareness about the importance of recycling and encourage others to take small steps to reduce their carbon footprint. She has created a Facebook group for here eco-center recycling shed, which now has over 1,000 members.

7 . When it comes to cooling the planet, forests have more than one trick. The effect is largely from forests’ ability to catch and store carbon. But around one-third of that tropical cooling effect comes from several other processes, such as the release of water vapor and aerosols (气溶胶).

Researchers already knew that forests influence their local climates through various physical and chemical processes. But on a global level, it wasn’t clear about other cooling benefits compared with the cooling provided by forests’ capturing of carbon dioxide, Lawrence said.

So she and her colleagues analyzed how the complete deforestation of different regions would impact global temperatures，using data gathered from other studies. For instance, the researchers used forest biomass data to determine how much the release of carbon stored by those forests would warm the global temperature. They then compared those results with other studies’ estimates of how much the loss of other aspects of forests — such as vapor release, uneven canopies (树蓬) and aerosol production — affected regional and global temperatures.

The researchers found that in forests at latitudes from around 50°S to 50°N, the primary way that forests influenced the temperature was through carbon sequestration (封存). Forests located from 30°N to 30°S, the most of that cooling, around 0.2 degrees C, came from forests in the core of the rainforest. Canopy features of the region generally provided the greatest cooling, followed by vapor release and then aerosols.

Forests in the far north, however, appear to have a net warming effect, the team reports. The far northern forests would expose more snow cover during the winter. This would decrease ground level temperatures because snow reflects much of the incoming sunlight back into the sky. Still, the researchers found that altogether, the world’s forests cool the global average temperature about 0.5 degrees C.

The findings suggest that global and regional climate action efforts should avoid focusing only on carbon emissions. Lawrence says, “It’s cool to see beyond carbon dioxide, but it’s also very important to see beyond deforestation.”

With the continuous changes of road signs and the presence of fire prevention warnings, Saihanba, known as the “miracle on earth”, begins to come    1    view. However, Saihanba was a wasteland 59 years ago, which nowadays    2    (visitor) to Saihanba can hardly imagine. Watchmen Liu Jun and Wang Juan are observing the forest area on a watchtower in Saihanba Forest Farm in Hebei Province. Simple    3    it looks, the job is quite a burden(负担)on their shoulders. Since the establishment of the forest farm, over 20 couples    4    (guard)the watchtower, and there has been no fire reported in the farm.

Today, Saihanba is not only    5    “green Great Wall” for windbreak and sand fixation(固定), but also a wood source for factories. Whythe trees here are to be cut down in a planned way is     6    people would doubt. A staff member explains the cutting of plantation forests is more like     7    (thin) when farmers plant crops. Although doing this is profitable,the people of Saihanba do not value immediate benefits. Saihanba’s success has allowed this “miracle on earth”    8     (copy)across the country. The construction of the “three more Saihanba” project    9    (launch)in 1999 has already seen green barriers built in Chengde Yudaokou, Qiansongba, and Zhangjiakou Saibei,    10    (effective)preventing sand and dust from going south.

Researchers say they have found microplastics (微塑料) -tiny pieces of plastic that come as a result of the disposal of industrial waste-deep in the lungs of living     1     (human) for the first time.

The research, which     2     (publish) in the journal Science of the Total Environment last week, is the first study     3     (identify) the plastics in the lungs of living people. The plastics have     4     (previous) been found in human blood, waste and in the depths of the ocean.

In the study, researchers     5     (collect) lung tissue from surgical procedures on patients as part of their routine medical care. Researchers identified 12 types of microplastics,     6     are commonly found in bottles, packaging, and clothing, along with other manufacturing processes.

The study notes     7     “increasing concern” with the harm that could come with swallowing and breathing in microplastics.

The world produces about 300 million metric tons of plastic a year and about 80% ends     8     in landfills and other parts of the environment. Microplastics can range from 10 nano-meters-    9     (small) than the human eye can see-to 5 millimeters in diameter, about the size of the eraser on the end of a pencil. Researchers have found them     10     (float) in the air, in tap or bottled water, and in the sea or soil.