Kristen Villebrun and Wendy Bush hoped they wouldn't have to pray for Chedoke Creek, but four years after they first raised alarm about the water's condition, they were part of an Indigenous full moon ceremony to do just that. About 50 people showed up near Princess Point on the dark and frigid Monday evening for the monthly ceremony, which was particularly special as it focused on Chedoke Creek. The body of water that runs into Cootes Paradise had about 24 billion litres of sewage and storm water runoff leak into it due to a gate being left open.
A new study in the journal Ecology suggests that last year's heat dome over the west coast of B.C. and Washington state may have "far-reaching" effects on the ecology of beaches, bluffs, inlets and river deltas, in addition to the impact on fisheries and cultural connections that the land, sea and sea life provide. The heat that descended on the West Coast last June not only killed 619 people, but also roughly a billion sea creatures, which baked to death as temperatures soared.
Greenland is experiencing its most significant melting event of the year as temperatures in the Arctic surge. The amount of ice that melted on Tuesday alone would be enough to cover the entire state of Florida in two inches of water. It's the third instance of extreme melting in the past decade, during which time the melting has stretched farther inland than the entire satellite era, which began in the 1970s.
Damage to Earth’s oceans and glaciers from climate change is outpacing the ability of governments to protect them, a new report from an international scientific panel concludes. “The capacity of governance systems in polar and ocean regions to respond to climate change impacts has strengthened recently,” says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “But this development is not sufficiently rapid or robust to adequately address the scale of increasing projected risks.”
