Wildfires rage as China’s Chongqing suffers unrelenting record heat wave

From: CNN       August 23, 2022

Thousands of emergency responders are battling to     1     fast-spreading wildfires in China’s southwestern city of Chongqing amid a weeks-long, record heat wave in the region.

The fires, which have been visible at night from parts of the downtown area, have     2     forests and mountains around the mega city in recent days. On social media, residents in downtown Chongqing complained of smelling smoke inside their apartments, while others posted pictures of burning embers from the fires reaching their balconies.

Municipal authorities have not yet reported any casualties and said the fires are being kept under control, according to an update on Tuesday morning. More than 1,500 residents have been     3     to safe zones, while 5,000 firefighters, police, local officers and volunteers, and seen firefighting helicopters have been dispatched to help combat the blazes, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.

The fires in Chongqing were the result of “spontaneous combustion” mainly caused by     4     high temperatures, Bai Ye, a professor at China’s Forest and Grassland Fire Prevention and Extinguishing Research Center told state-run Beijing Daily.

The wildfires are another knock-on effect of a crippling heat wave China’s worst since 1961 -that has swept through southwestern, central and eastern parts of the country in recent weeks, with temperatures crossing 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in more than 100 cities.

They are also part of a global trend of wildfires that have ravaged areas from Australia to California, with scientists saying     5     global temperatures due to human-driven climate change increase the risk of these events.

China’s heat wave has also brought     6     demand for air conditioning and reductions in hydropower capacity due to drought conditions that have     7     the country’s     8     critical Yangtze River and connected waterways.

Earlier this week, Sichuan province, neighboring Chongqing, extended temporary power outages at factories in 19 of the region’s 21 cities. The power cuts will now run until at least Thursday, in a move the local government says will ensure residential power supplies. Last week, the province’s capital city Chengdu began     9     lights in subway stations in a bid to save electricity. Chongqing enacted an order for factories to suspend operations for seven days starting last Wednesday, according to state media.

On Tuesday morning, China issued a red alert heat warning, the highest of four color-coded levels, to at least 165 cities and counties across the country. Chinese authorities have     10     said more than 900 million people across the country have been affected by the heat wave this summer.

4 . An earthquake happens when two plates rub together. The earth plates travel in different directions and at a different speed. If one plate is slowly forced underneath the other，pressure(压力)builds up until the plates break apart. This process(过程)causes the ground to move. It is an earth-quake. In other words，earthquakes are the shaking of the earth’s surface caused by the earth’s rocky outer layer as a result of the energy stored within the earth. The strain within the rocks is suddenly released(释放).

The damage an earthquake causes depends on where it is and when it is happening. If an unpopulated region is struck, there will be low loss of life or property(财产). If it hits a large city，there may be many injuries and much destruction. Many of the areas at risk are largely populated now. Major earthquakes hitting those areas today could produce terrible damage.

Actually, there are several million small earthquakes every year. Large earthquakes, such as the 1964 Alaska earthquake that measured 9.2 on the Richter scale, caused millions of dollars in damage. In the last 500 years, millions of people have been killed by earthquakes around the world-including over 240,000 in the 1976 Tangshan earthquake in China.

A60-second or less earthquake can cause devastation that continues for years after the first tremor. In 1972, a series of severe earthquakes struck Managua, Nicaragua. Fifteen years later, the city still looked the way it had a week after the earthquake hit, because the country did not have the necessary money to rebuild it.

The shaking of the earth is sometimes not the greatest disaster. It is in the ensuing fires and floods that often the greatest damage occurs. In the 1906 earthquake, it was the fires caused after it that did the majority of the damage. An earthquake can also destroy dams high above a city or valleys, causing floods to sweep down and sweep away everything in their path.

With few trees left to slow the wind in southern Madagascar, red sand is blowing everywhere: onto fields, villages and roads, and into the eyes of children     1    (wait) for food aid parcels. The area has been transformed     2     a dust bowl because of the facts that the weather is     3    (extreme) dry and forest is cleared to make farmland.

“There’s nothing to harvest. That’s     4     we have nothing to eat. As a result, we’ re suffering from     5    (hungry),” said mother-of-seven Tarira, standing at a remote World Food Programme (WFP) post near Anjeky Beanatara, where children are examined for signs of malnutrition (营养不良) and given food. It is reported that at     6     present time more than one million people in southern Madagascar need food handouts from the WFP, a United Nations agency.

The world’ s fourth     7    (large) island and one of its most diverse ecosystems, Madagascar     8    (regard) as a natural paradise (天堂) at one time. However, in parts of it, such as its far southern regions, the reality on the ground has changed. “When you look in the villages, you see children running left and right. That     9    (be) not the case before. We used to call Madagascar the green island.     10     now it is more of a red island, which makes us very sad,” said Soja Lahimaro Tsimandilatse, governor of the southern Androy area.

Feeding nine billion

When we think about threats to the environment, we tend to picture cars-not dinner. But the truth is, our     1    for food causes one of the biggest dangers to the planet.

Agriculture is among the greatest     2     to global warming. It emits more greenhouse gases than all our cars, trucks, trains, and airplane     3    —largely from methane released by cattle and rice farms, nitrous oxide from fertilized fields and carbon dioxide from the cutting of rain forests to grow crops or raise livestock. Farming is the     4     user of our precious water supplies and a major polluter, as runoff from fertilizers and manure pollute lakes, rivers, and coastal ecosystems across the globe. Agriculture also     5    up the loss of biodiversity: As we’ve cleared areas of grassland and forest for farms, we’ve lost crucial habitat making agriculture a major     6     of wildlife extinction

The environmental challenges caused by agriculture are huge, and they’ll only become more     7     as we try to meet the growing need for food worldwide. We’ll likely have 2 billion more mouths to feed by mid-century-more than 9 billion people. But population growth isn’t the     8     reason we’ll need more food. The spread of     9     across the world is driving an increased need for meat, eggs, and dairy, boosting pressure to grow more corn and soybeans to feed more cattle, pigs, and chickens. If these     10     continue, the population growth and meat-and-dairy-intensive diets will require us to roughly double the amount of crops we grow by 2050.

8 . After erupting almost continuously for over three decades — from 1983 to 2018 — Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano finally seemed to lose steam , producing no lava (岩浆) for nearly two years. The stillness ended on the night of December 20, 2020, when the active volcano began erupting lava fountains, gas and steam from a crack in the northwest wall of the Halema’uma’u crater (火山口).

By December 31, 2020, the volcano had erupted over 27 million cubic meters of molten rock — enough to fill more than 8000 Olympic-sized swimming pools — and replaced the existing water lake with a nearly 600-foot-deep lava lake. Fortunately, the magma (岩浆) is contained inside the volcano’s crater and does not bring a risk to people or property as it did in 2018, when the molten rock flowed through a residential neighborhood, destroying over 700 homes.

Residents have, however, been asked to limit outdoor activities in areas with high volcanic smog, which is a form of air pollution created when sulfur dioxide and other pollutants sent out from volcanic activity interact chemically with atmospheric steam, oxygen, dust, and sunlight. While not deadly, it can bring unpleasant feelings to skin, eyes, nose and throat, and it can be particularly harmful to individuals with breathing problems.

Now recognized as one of the world’s youngest and most active volcanoes, Kilauea was initially believed to be one offshoot of a bigger volcano. It was only after researchers discovered a magma system extending over 37 miles inside its crater in 1884 that the volcano was finally accepted as a separate unit.

Many locals believe that Kilauea’s eruptions are caused by Pele, a Hawaiian volcano goddess who lives in the mountain. According to a popular folk story, the goddess was forced to leave Tahiti. Upon arriving at Hawaii, she burst with anger, creating destructive fire caves and volcanoes. While Pele was killed during an historic battle with her sister Nāmaka on the island of Maui, her spirit lives on inside the Halema’uma’u crater.