1 . A huge section of the Milne Ice Shelf, located on Ellesmere Island in the northern Canada, collapsed into the Arctic Ocean, according to the Canadian Ice Service. This created an “ice island” which is about 30 square miles in size. As a comparison, Manhattan Island is about 23 square miles.

“Entire cities are that size. These are big pieces of ice,” Luke Copland, a glaciologist at the University of Ottawa who was part of the research team studying the ice shelf, told Reuters. “This was the largest remaining intact (完整的) ice shelf, and it’s collapsed, basically. ”

The Canadian Ice Service said on Twitter that “above-normal air temperatures, offshore winds and open water in front of the ice shelf are all part of the recipe for the ice shelf to break up.” A huge section of the Milne Ice Shelf has collapsed into the Arctic Ocean, producing a 30-square-mile ice island.

The ice shelf has now been reduced in area by about 43%. An ice shelf is a thick slab of ice, attached to a coastline and extending out over the ocean, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. “Some shelves have existed for thousands of years,” the center said.

So what’s going on up there? Though the planet is warming worldwide due to climate change, the Arctic has been warming at a rate twice that of the rest of the world. This summer has been particularly warm: Arctic sea ice melted to its lowest July level on record and in June, a town in Siberia soared (急升) to 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit, believed to be a record high for the Arctic.

“When I first visited those ice caps, they seemed like such a permanent fixture of the landscape,” Mark Serreze, director of the NSIDC and geographer at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said in a statement. “To watch them die in less than 40 years just blows me away.”

When Zhou Longshan started filming birds 10 years ago at Baiyangdian Lake,     1     major wetland in northern China, he just wanted to record his favorite species—egrets (白鹭).

Then things snowballed. In the following years, the teacher became a bird watcher, a volunteer ranger at the lake, a photographer     2    (document) over 110 bird species, and an     3     (education) popularizing bird-related knowledge among students.

“Sharing bird-protection knowledge with children can make them feel the     4    (beautiful) of their hometown and the importance of birds, and help them cultivate the habit of protecting birds from an early age,” he said.

Growing up in a local village, Zhou,60, has fond childhood memories     5    (associate) with the wetland.

“When I was a child, the water in Baiyangdian was limpid. The fish and aquatic plants in the water could be seen clearly,” he said. “I often caught fish with my friends, rowed boats and drank the lake water     6     I was thirsty.”

Between the 1960s and 1980s,     7    , Baiyangdian suffered severely from industrial pollution. Chemicals poisoned the water and lake beds, decimating the aquatic life. In the 1990s, the lake     8    (near) dried up due to climate change.

When Zhou became a teacher in the 1990s, the stink from the lake could sometimes be smelled from his village. “The lake became stinking, the population and species of fish and birds decreased, and the locals were unwilling to go near the lake,” he recalled.

Since the Xiong’an New Area was established in 2017, Baiyangdian’s rehabilitation and protection activities     9    (improve) greatly. The water quality has improved from Level Ⅴ-the     10    (low) in China’s five-tier water assessment system-to Level Ⅲ.

Zhou will retire in June. “I will continue patrolling the lake and photographing the birds, to contribute to the protection of birds in my hometown,” he said.

5 . About 40% of all food grown in the world goes uneaten each year, according to a World Wildlife Fund report from last year. And when food ends up in landfills, it produces huge amounts of greenhouse gases. So it’s no surprise that the app Too Good to Go designed to be opposed to this problem—by giving consumers the opportunity to purchase leftover, out-of-date or ugly food at discount prices—has become increasingly popular in recent years.

Users of the Too Good to Go app can search for local restaurants, bakeries and grocery stores—and purchase surprise bags filled with whatever food is left over at the end of the day. The bags range in price from about $3 to $5, but they’re stocked with food about three times that value. So customers are also getting a steep discount.

Too Good to Go first launched in Europe in 2015 and opened in the US in October 2020.Today it’s available in cities including Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle and Philadelphia. And the app saves 300,000 meals a day from ending up in landfills around the world.

Besides saving meals from ending up in the trash, Too Good to Go’s primary aim is to increase awareness of food waste, eventually encouraging consumers to effect policy change in their local communities.

“The whole food chain is wasting food. So we need to help,” said Lucie Basch, co-founder of the app Too Good to Go.” But for us, starting with the consumers and raising awareness with a super simple app that anyone can download and start using today was really the opportunity to make a difference for us.”

The World Earth Day

7 . The cotton harvest is about to get underway in the Texas High Plains, the windswept region that grows most of the crop in the nation’s top cotton-producing state. But Barry Evans, a third-generation cotton grower, has already walked away from more than 2,000 acres (英亩) of his bone-dry fields. “It just didn’t come up. We hardly had anything,” said Evans.

Extreme heat and a lack of rainfall have severely damaged much of this year’s cotton harvest in the U.S., which produces about 35% of the world’s crop. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) forecast that more than 40% of what U.S. farmers planted in the spring would be abandoned because of drought. Nowhere is this more apparent than the flat, dry stretch of Texas. The USDA says Texas cotton farmers are likely to abandon nearly 70% of their spring planting. That has been the worst harvest since 2009.

The region normally receives around 18 to 20 inches of rain per year, but saw less than three inches of rain from August through the summer, as nearly all of Texas baked under drought. Much of the cotton grown in the region needs rain. Even those with irrigated (灌溉的) fields are expecting low yields (产量) this year.

The losses in cotton could cost the Texas High Plains $1.2 billion after farmers receive federal (联邦的) crop insurance payments, estimates Darren Hudson, director of the International Center for Agricultural Competitiveness at Texas Tech University. That leaves out others who depend on the crop, such as cotton gins (轧棉机) and storehouses. “Any time you have a bad year in cotton, it has a role to play in the overall economy,” Hudson said.

Fortunately, most cotton farmers in this part of Texas plan to use cotton seed varieties that can resist drought. Varieties are continuously developed and will be adjusted to generate high yields if dry conditions continue. “Even though it’s drought resistant,” Hudson added, “we still have to have a little bit of help from Mother Nature.”

10 . Malin Pinsky had the first of two lightbulb moments in 2003 while crossing Drake Passage. He was then standing on the bridge of a research ship and was scanning the sky for seabirds, which was one of his duties as a research technician on the cruise (海上航游). Just five months earlier he had finished college, where he studied biology and environmental science.

As the ship entered nutrient-rich Antarctic waters, whales suddenly showed up all around the ship. That moment on the bridge helped him realize that the ocean looks featureless from the top, but there’s so much going on underneath.

The second lightbulb moment hit him several months later. Pinsky was then an intern (实习生) in Washington, D.C. His job was making photocopies. It was around the time when two big reports had come out. Both focused on what policies might best preserve U.S. ocean resources. “I realized we have all these laws and policies that determine how we as a society interact with the ocean. But they’re far out of date. We don’t yet have the science to know what the new policy should be,” Pinsky said.

Today he runs a lab with about 20 workers. His team wants to seek how our changing climate, as well as overfishing and habitat destruction, might be driving changes in fish and other animals in the sea. To find out, team members travel each year to coral reefs near the Philippines. There, they carefully catalog populations of different fish. They collect data on the growth and mating of these fish, their diversity and other factors.

“Pinsky’s broad approach to the problem — looking at species, where they live and how fisheries are managed — is setting the pace for other scientists,” says Kimberly Oremus, a fishery economist at the University of Delaware in Newark. “Pinsky is pushing the whole field to respond to his growing body of research.”