Environmental Glance
The last rays of sun filter through the snow-covered spruces along the shore of Goldstream Lake, just outside Fairbanks, Alaska. Out on the lake Katey Walter Anthony stares at the black ice beneath her feet and at the white bubbles trapped inside it.
Large and small, in layer upon layer, they spread out in every direction, like stars in the night sky. Walter Anthony, an ecologist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, grabs a heavy ice pick and wraps the rope handle around her wrist. A graduate student holds a lighted match above a large bubble; Walter Anthony plunges the pick into it.
The first time Bill Ferullo saw the white plumes drifting from a natural gas fracking site, he got out of his car to take pictures. "I didn't know what it was," he recalled. "But two minutes later my chest was burning. It burned all night."
At 6:11 p.m. on September 6, 2010, San Bruno, Calif. 911 received an urgent call. A gas station had just exploded and a fire with flames reaching 300 feet was raging through the neighborhood. The explosion was so large that residents suspected an airplane crash.
The mystery of the expansion of sea ice around Antarctica, at the same time as global warming is melting swaths of Arctic sea ice, has been solved using data from US military satellites.
Filled with nostalgia for hot days and salty sweet Cracker Jacks, each year hundreds of thousands of baseball fans make the pilgrimage to this tiny village in the northern Catskill Mountains to celebrate America's oldest past time.
