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The water in the Mississippi River has dropped so low that barges are getting stuck, leading to expensive dredging and at least one recent traffic jam of more than 2,000 vessels backed up.

The Mississippi River Basin produces nearly all – 92% – of US agricultural exports, and 78% of the global exports of feed grains and soybeans. The recent drought has dropped water levels to alarmingly low levels that are causing shipping delays, and seeing the costs of alternative transport, such as rail, rise.

In Vicksburg, western Mississippi, residents have seen less than an inch of rain since the start of September.

The mayor, George Flaggs, told WAPT-TV that the river was lower than he had seen it in nearly 70 years.

“It’s definitely having an impact on the local economy because the commercial use of this river has almost stopped,” Flaggs said.

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Powerful storm Fiona ripped int  eastern Canada on Saturday with hurricane-force winds, forcing evacuations, knocking down trees and power lines and reducing many homes on the coast to 1just a pile of rubble in the ocean."

The U.S. National Hurricane Center (NHC) said the center of the storm, downgraded to Post-Tropical Cyclone Fiona, was now in the Gulf of St. Lawrence after racing through Nova Scotia.

After taking its toll on Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island (PEI), the storm battered Newfoundland and Eastern Quebec, but is now likely to weaken, the NHC said.

Port aux Basques, on the southwest tip of Newfoundland with a population of 4,067, declared a state of emergency and evacuated parts of the town that suffered flooding and road washouts, according to Mayor Brian Button.

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Tropical Storm Ida formed in the Caribbean Sea on Thursday, and forecasters are warning it could rapidly strengthen into one of the strongest storms of the Atlantic hurricane season.

The system is taking aim at the U.S. Gulf Coast, but conditions appear right for the storm to cause extreme weather for inland regions as well, according to a Thursday afternoon AccuWeather briefing. Senior meteorologist Dan Kottlowski said parts of Tennessee still reeling from deadly floods are at risk for more heavy rain.

The storm is shaping up to be "probably be the strongest storm of the season thus far,” Kottlowski said. It could make landfall before the end of the weekend as a hurricane, giving people in its path little time to prepare or evacuate, Kottlowski said.

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The planet is hotter now than it has been for at least 12,000 years, a period spanning the entire development of human civilisation, according to research.

Analysis of ocean surface temperatures shows human-driven climate change has put the world in “uncharted territory”, the scientists say. The planet may even be at its warmest for 125,000 years, although data on that far back is less certain.

The research, published in the journal Nature, reached these conclusions by solving a longstanding puzzle known as the “Holocene temperature conundrum”. Climate models have indicated continuous warming since the last ice age ended 12,000 years ago and the Holocene period began. But temperature estimates derived from fossil shells showed a peak of warming 6,000 years ago and then a cooling, until the industrial revolution sent carbon emissions soaring.

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Gray wolves, one of the first animals shielded by the Endangered Species Act after Americans all but exterminated them in the lower 48 states, will no longer receive federal protection, officials announced Thursday.

“After more than 45 years as a listed species, the gray wolf has exceeded all conservation goals for recovery,” Interior Secretary David Bernhardt said in a statement.

Environmentalists condemned the decision as dangerously premature and vowed to take the Fish and Wildlife Service back to court, where they have successfully blocked previous attempts to strip wolves of federal protections. “Wolves just occupy a fraction of their former range,” said Jamie Rappaport Clark, president and chief executive of Defenders of Wildlife, an environmental group. “There’s so much work that needs to be done.”

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Greenland’s ice sheet will melt at its fastest rate in 12,000 years this century, a new study projects.

The study, published in the journal Nature, said the melt rate of the ice sheet between 2000 and 2018 was about 6,100 gigatons tons per century — a similar rate to that of the pre-industrial Holocene era, when the melt rate was up to 6,000 gigatons tons per century.

But, researchers estimate that the rate over the course of the 21st century will be between 8,000 gigatons and 35,900 gigatons tons per century, nearly six times faster than the early-Holocene era rate. A gigaton is equal to 1 billion tons.

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