Since 1988, a mere 100 companies have been responsible for 71% of the entire world's industrial greenhouse gas emissions.

This data comes from an inaugural report published by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), an environmental non-profit. Charting the rapid expansion of the fossil fuel industry in the last 28 years, they have now released some truly staggering numbers on the world's major carbon polluters.

Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are typically assessed by country, with China, the US and India ranking as the top emissions producers in the world. But the new CDP report takes a different approach, tracing emissions back to specific entities it dubs 'carbon majors'.

The report focuses on carbon and methane emissions from industrial activity by fossil fuel producers, accounting for a whopping 923 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions since 1988, the year when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established.

If it sounds like a lot, that's because it really is a huge amount. In fact, it's more than half of all global industrial GHG emissions since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in 1751, according to the report.

What's even more crazy is the fact that a mere 25 corporate and state-owned entities have produced over half of all industrial emissions in the time period between 1988 and 2015.

The top emitter amongst these is the Chinese state-owned coal industry, followed by the Saudi Aramco. The third biggest emitter is the Russian Gazprom, with the Russian state-owned coal industry not far behind.

Amongst public investor-owned firms, ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and Chevron are responsible for the most industrial greenhouse gases.

But this is not just a naming and shaming exercise. The goal of this report is to equip investors with a comprehensive breakdown of the carbon emissions associated with their financial ties in the fossil fuel industry. Public investment back about one fifth of industrial GHG emissions, according to the report.

"That puts a significant responsibility on those investors to engage with carbon majors and urge them to disclose climate risk," CDP technical director Pedro Faria told Tess Riley at The Guardian.

Having these numbers on hand gives us a much clearer picture of the main influencers when it comes to enforcing the goals stated in the landmark Paris Climate Agreement.

"Climate action is no longer confined to the direction given by policy makers; it is now a social movement, commanded by both economic and ethical imperatives and supported by growing amounts of data," Faria writes in the report.

"Those that ignore this reality do so at their own peril."

The report also presents a vision for the future, outlining the key steps companies can take to successfully transition to a business model in which emissions are capped, decoupling them from economic growth in order to stop us from digging up more fossil fuels.

"If the trend in fossil fuel extraction continues over the next 28 years as it has over the  previous 28, then global average temperatures would be on course to rise around 4ºC above preindustrial levels by the end of the century," states the report.

The resulting changes to our planet would put us on track for a climate that no human that's ever lived has experienced, threatening our food security and rendering whole regions of Earth unsuitable for living.

And even though we can't go back to the way things were in the preindustrial era, now is the time to intensify our global efforts to curb emissions and switch over to more sustainable energy sources.

"Fossil fuel companies are also going to have to demonstrate leadership as part of this transition," states Faria.

"We should all be conscious of our shared responsibility, which implies learning from the past while keeping our eyes on the future."

You can see a full list of the 100 companies and read the full report here.

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• Antarctica has shed an iceberg that's big enough to fill Lake Erie more than two times.
• It weighs about 1 trillion metric tons.
• It may be the third-largest iceberg recorded since satellites began taking photos of Earth.
• Human activity most likely isn't responsible for this event, but carbon emissions are driving other changes to Antarctic ice.

The image is a bit fuzzy, but to scientists it's unmistakable: One of the largest icebergs ever recorded has broken free of Antarctica.

A crack in an Antarctica's Larsen C ice shelf is responsible for calving the colossal new iceberg, which has roughly the area of Delaware state and more than twice the volume of Lake Erie.

Researchers noticed the distinctive rift in Antarctica's ice in 2010, and it had grown rapidly since 2016. The iceberg calved as early as Monday, researchers said.

"Breaking news! The iceberg has fully detached from Larsen C - more details to follow soon," Martin O'Leary a glaciologist at Swansea University, wrote in a tweet early Wednesday morning for the Antarctic research program Project Midas.

A NASA Earth-observing satellite called Modis was among the first to photograph the colossal ice block freed of Antarctica's grasp.

Based on the image above, and another created by Adrian Luckman, also a glaciologist at Swansea University and a Project Midas member, it appears the iceberg has largely stayed intact.

That size could make it the third-largest iceberg recorded since satellite measurements began, according to a tweet last Thursday by The Antarctic Report.

In a Wednesday blog post, Luckman and O'Leary said it was "one of the biggest ever recorded" at a weight of roughly 1 trillion metric tons, or 1.1 trillion tons, and said its name would most likely be dubbed A68.

"The calving of this iceberg leaves the Larsen C Ice Shelf reduced in area by more than 12%, and the landscape of the Antarctic Peninsula changed forever," they said.

How big the new iceberg is, and where it's going

The ice block's area is roughly comparable to the US state of Delaware. But CryoSat — Europe's ice-monitoring satellite — recently took the most precise measurements to date of its thickness, allowing scientists to gauge its volume.

Days before the iceberg broke free, Noel Gourmelen, a glaciologist at the University of Edinburgh, and his colleagues estimated that it would be about 620 feet (190 meters) thick and harbor some 277 cubic miles (1,155 cubic kilometers) of frozen water.

That's big enough to fill more than 460 million Olympic-size swimming pools with ice, or more than twice the volume of Lake Erie — among the world's largest freshwater reservoirs.

Gourmelen and the European Space Agency on July 5 released this 3D animation that shows the iceberg's dimensions:

And here's Lake Erie for a size comparison:

Scientists previously said they weren't sure what would happen after the iceberg's breakaway, since such large calvings are rarely seen.

"It could, in fact, even calve in pieces or break up shortly after. Whole or in pieces, ocean currents could drag it north, even as far as the Falkland Islands," Anna Hogg, a glaciologist at the University of Leeds, said in a July 5 press release by the ESA.

Those islands lie more than 1,000 miles away from Larsen C in Antarctica.

This illustration of hundreds of icebergs' paths, from 1999 through 2010, shows how that drift might play out before it melts.

An ice block thousands of years in the making

The Larsen C ice shelf is one of the largest such shelves in Antarctica.

According to a tweet from Project Midas, "most of the ice that calves off fell as snow on the ice shelf in the past few hundred years, but there's an inner core that's a bit older."

Project Midas announced in early June that satellite images showed the rift had split, turned north, and begun moving toward the Southern Ocean.

Luckman, who has closely monitored the ice shelf with his colleagues at Project Midas, previously released an animation of the rift's rapid growth (below).

It shows how the rift "jumped" as it sliced through bands of weak ice and slowed when it met stronger, thicker ice. The ocean is shown in emerald green (top right), the Larsen C ice shelf is the light blue patch, and the glacier behind it is depicted in white.

The final frame shows an image of the rift's tip breaking in multiple directions — a sign of imminent calving of the iceberg.

A close-up from the ESA's Copernicus satellite more clearly showed the chaos of the crack's tip on Thursday:

Are humans behind this?

The iceberg won't noticeably raise sea levels, since it was already floating in the ocean as part of Larsen C and displacing water. But Luckman and O'Leary previously said that once Larsen C lost its iceberg, the rest of the shelf "will be less stable than it was prior to the rift."

Put another way: There's a very slim chance that new iceberg could cause the entire Larsen C ice shelf, and an ancient glacier behind it, to slowly disintegrate and fall into the sea.

The chaos wouldn't be unprecedented. In 2002, a neighboring ice shelf called Larsen B collapsed and broke up in the Southern Ocean. This animation captures that event unfolding from January 31 through April 13, 2002:

Some scientists think that if and when Larsen C and its accompanying glacial ice eventually collapse, sea levels may rise by up to 4 inches.

But experts on Antarctic ice say that such a loss is exceedingly unlikely and would be due mostly to natural processes.

"Large calving events such as this are normal processes of a healthy ice sheet, ones that have occurred for decades, centuries, millennia — on cycles that are much longer than a human or satellite lifetime,"Helen Amanda Fricker, a glaciologist who studies Antarctic ice for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, wrote in The Guardian last month. "What looks like an enormous loss is just ordinary housekeeping for this part of Antarctica."

But Fricker warned that we shouldn't be complacent about climate change, which is being driven mostly by human activity.

"Antarctic ice shelves overall are seeing accelerated thinning, and the ice sheet is losing mass in key sectors of Antarctica," she said. "Continuing losses might soon lead to an irreversible decline."

Correction: In a previous version of this story, we misstated the iceberg's volume as comparable to that of Lake Michigan. The iceberg's size is closer to double the volume of Lake Erie.

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NOW WATCH: A 1.1-trillion-ton iceberg has broken off Antarctica, and scientists say it's one of the largest ever recorded

A planet devastated by climate change may seem like a distant future. But Earth is already experiencing the effects of rising global temperatures today.

Worldwide, the mean rate of sea level rise increased 50% in the last two decades. In 2017, temperatures have already reached their highest levels in history in some areas, from California to Vietnam. The past three years were the hottest on record. 

These changes are caused by increasing levels of carbon dioxide and methane in the Earth's atmosphere, a product of human activity. And as New York Magazine's David Wallace-Wells recently noted, no single emissions reduction program we have today is enough to prevent climate disaster — not even the Paris agreement.

Even if every signatory country in the accord meets its current pledge for reducing emissions — including the US, though Trump has pledged to pull the country out of the agreement— the world is still projected to warm over 2 degrees Celsius by 2050. The Paris agreement points out this reality in a section titled, "Notes with concern."

Two degrees may not seem like much, but the rise would have substantial impacts. Scientists say that places that supply the world's food, including Southern Europe and much of the Middle East, Australia, Africa, South America, and China, would be in permanent, extreme drought by 2080. Flooding would become a serious issue near the coasts, where a third of the world's major cities are located, since sea levels are projected to rise by at least 10 feet by the end of the century.

Experts also warn that if the Arctic ice continues to melt, ancient diseases trapped in glaciers could get released. Plus, the world would face the extinction of many animal species and rising human mortality.

The planet has already warmed nearly 1 degree Celsius, and James Hansen, a renowned climate scientist at Columbia University, suggested in a recent paper that keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees is nearly impossible. Hansen suggested that hitting the goal would require negative emissions levels, which would mean capturing carbon and taking it out of the atmosphere. 

To make matters worse, our best protection against the effects of rising carbon dioxide levels comes from so-called "carbon sinks"— patches of land and ocean that absorb large chunks of the carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere. But now those sinks may be at capacity, prompting the Earth to continue cooking even as emissions get curbed.

In a recent open letter, six prominent scientists and diplomats, including former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres and physicist Stefan Rahmstorf, wrote that the world has approximately three years before the worst effects of climate change take hold.

Published June 28, the letter urges governments, businesses, scientists, and citizens to address the world's greenhouse-gas emissions now. If emissions can be permanently lowered by 2020, they wrote, global temperatures will likely avoid reaching that irreversible threshold. 

In the letter, the scientists propose six goals to hit by 2020:

• Increase renewable energy to 30% of electricity use.
• Draft plans for cities and states to ditch fossil fuel energy by 2050, with funding of $300 billion annually.
• Ensure 15% of all new vehicles sold are electric.
• Cut net emissions from deforestation.
• Publish plan for halving emissions from deforestation well before 2050.
• Encourage the financial sector to issue more "green bonds" toward climate-mitigation efforts.

But those aims are at odds with the priorities of the Trump administration, which has signaled that climate change mitigation is not on its agenda. Because of that conflict, the authors call for US cities and businesses to fight emissions and meet the Paris accord goals without the help of the federal government.

"We stand at the doorway of being able to bend the emissions curve downwards by 2020, as science demands, in protection of the UN sustainable development goals, and in particular the eradication of extreme poverty," Figueres said in a press release.

"This monumental challenge coincides with an unprecedented openness to self-challenge on the part of sub-national governments inside the US, governments at all levels outside the US, and of the private sector in general. The opportunity given to us over the next three years is unique in history."

Wallace-Wells emphasized in his recent New York Magazine piece that an enormous effort from the world's governments and citizens is crucial for staving off the worst effects of climate change. Whether the world will succeed in addressing emissions in a serious way, however, remains to be seen.

SEE ALSO: These 20 images of Earth over the past 70 years show why countries signed the Paris Agreement

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NOW WATCH: 'I'll ask it one more time': Kellyanne Conway won't say whether Trump thinks climate change is a hoax

• A 1.1-trillion-ton iceberg has calved off Antarctica, into the Southern Ocean.
• The block of ice is roughly the area of Delaware and more than twice the volume of Lake Erie.
• Scientists aren't sure where it will go, but Business Insider mapped all known iceberg paths from 1999-2016 to see where it may float.

Antarctica has birthed one of the largest icebergs ever recorded, scientists announced Wednesday morning.

A crack in an Antarctica's Larsen C ice shelf calved the colossal new iceberg, which is roughly the area of Delaware state and more than double the volume of Lake Erie.

Researchers first noticed the rift in Antarctica's ice in 2010, but it had been growing rapidly since 2016. The iceberg calved between July 10 and July 12, researchers said.

"The iceberg weighs more than a trillion tonnes," Adrian Luckman and Martin O'Leary, two glaciologists at Swansea University, wrote in a July 12 blog post for the MIDAS Project, which has been monitoring the ice.

"The calving of this iceberg leaves the Larsen C Ice Shelf reduced in area by more than 12%, and the landscape of the Antarctic Peninsula changed forever."

Luckman and O'Leary said the iceberg will probably be named "A68," and that it's one of the largest ever recorded — possibly the third-largest iceberg since satellite measurements began, according The Antarctic Report. However, Luckman said its enormous size makes its fate tough to predict.

"It may remain in one piece but is more likely to break into fragments," he said. "Some of the ice may remain in the area for decades, while parts of the iceberg may drift north into warmer waters."

Where the iceberg may go

Although the iceberg's path is uncertain, Anna Hogg, a glaciologist at the University of Leeds, previously said that "ocean currents could drag it north, even as far as the Falkland Islands."

Those islands lie more than 1,000 miles away from the Larsen C ice shelf in Antarctica.

To see which paths the iceberg will be most likely to take, Business Insider reached out to David G. Long of Brigham Young University, who works on a data project that tracks all recorded icebergs. The database goes back to 1978 with some gaps, Long wrote in an email, but is continuous from 1999 to today.

Business Insider compiled the data from June 1999 through April 2016 to show all the paths of known Antarctic icebergs in one image:

As the illustration shows, many icebergs that break off the Antarctic Peninsula drift north and east of that location.

Few are large enough to stay intact until they reach the warmer waters of the Falkland Islands, but many reach the South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands, which lie farther east.

Wherever iceberg A68 wanders, warmer ocean waters north of Antarctica will eventually melt it away.

Thankfully, this won't contribute much to rising waters, since the ice "was already floating before it calved away," Luckman said, and thus "has no immediate impact on sea level."

To learn more about Antarctica's gigantic iceberg, read our full story about its calving.

Correction: In a previous version of this story, we misstated the iceberg's volume as comparable to that of Lake Michigan. The iceberg's size is closer to double the volume of Lake Erie.

SEE ALSO: Here's what Earth might look like in 100 years — if we're lucky

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NOW WATCH: A 1.1-trillion-ton iceberg has broken off Antarctica, and scientists say it's one of the largest ever recorded

There seems to be an ever-growing list of ominous consequences of melting ice— especially when it's the kind scientists expected would remain frozen forever. 

"Until recently, permafrost was not a major concern of climate scientists, because, as the name suggests, it was soil that stayed permanently frozen," New York Magazine's David Wallace-Wells wrote in a recent piece about climate change.

Permafrost is a combination of ice, soil, plants, and other materials that stays frozen all year round, even as layers on the very top thaw out seasonally. The United States Geological Survey compared it to a "sponge" that soaks up carbon and nutrients.

But by the middle of this century, scientists project that the area of permafrost in the Northern Hemisphere will decrease between 20-35%.

The most obvious challenge of melting permafrost is flooding, which poses a threat to sea levels as well as facilities in the Arctic circle like the "doomsday" vault, which stores seeds for every known crop on the planet. Melted ice water recently flooded the vault, but ultimately the water was kept away from the seeds. 

But melting permafrost can also lead to unanticipated effects that humans haven't had to worry about for thousands of years. 

"Arctic permafrost contains 1.8 trillion tons of carbon, more than twice as much as is currently suspended in the Earth’s atmosphere," Wallace-Wells wrote.

As the permafrost in the Arctic melts, it could release that carbon dioxide, along with methane, an even more potent gas that traps in 30 times as much heat as carbon dioxide. Such a release could influence the global climate, researchers concluded in 2014. 

Even more daunting, scientists working in the Arctic circle in recent decades have unearthed several massive viruses that some say could be re-awakened if the permafrost that imprisons them dissolves.

Some researchers have suggested that these enormous viruses could thaw out, escape, and make lots of people sick. There's even a possibility that some infections that were a problem in Siberia around the 18th and 19th centuries could make a comeback as well.

It sounds like something out of a horror film, but you shouldn't get too concerned — at least not yet.

What thawed-out viruses could mean for humans

In 2015, researchers in Siberia uncovered the Mollivirus sibericum, a 30,000-year-old behemoth of a virus that succeeded in infecting a rather defenseless amoeba in a lab experiment. About a decade earlier, scientists discovered the first Mimivirus, a 1,200-gene specimen measuring twice the width of traditional viruses, buried beneath layers of melting frost in the Russian tundra. (For comparison, HIV has just nine genes.)

The likelihood that these viruses will break free and sicken humans is slim, according to New York Times science columnist Carl Zimmer, whose recent book, "A Planet of Viruses," digs into what we know about viruses and the diseases they cause.

"These particular viruses infect amoeba. So if you're an amoeba, yeah you should be really scared," Zimmer told Business Insider in a 2015 interview. "There are no human pathogens that have burst out of the Siberian permafrost. That's not to say that viruses won't emerge, but there are so many viruses circulating in living animals, I think we should put these frozen viruses very low on our list of concerns."

Zimmer added in a recent email that most of these massive viruses have been found after samples of Arctic ice were melted in a lab — they're not currently crawling along the the Russian tundra like some microscopic Frankenstein.

They "didn't just thaw themselves out," he says. "They were carefully processed in labs. That's yet another clue that the odds of an ancient outbreak are very low."

But that doesn't mean the recent discoveries are useless. They're currently teaching us about the nature of viruses, which we previously assumed to be fairly small and simple. These ancient viruses, on the other hand, are about 30 times bigger than our average virus, and rival the size of a bacterium.

Mollivirus sibericum, for example, looks like this under a microscope:

In addition to its unusual size, Mollivirus sibericum differs from the majority of viruses in that it has more than 500 genes that give instructions for making proteins. If we're ever going to reevaluate the characteristics of viruses, these ancient thawed-out ones could help us take a fresh look.

"They're in and of themselves fascinating and they really challenge us to think about what viruses are," Zimmer said.

Between the threats of thawed-out viruses and greenhouse gases from melting permafrost, climate scientists have a lot to consider when confronting the consequences of rising global temperatures. 

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A crack in an Antarctica's Larsen C ice shelf birthed one of the largest icebergs ever recorded, scientists announced Wednesday morning.

"The calving of this iceberg leaves the Larsen C Ice Shelf reduced in area by more than 12%, and the landscape of the Antarctic Peninsula changed forever,"Adrian Luckman and Martin O'Leary, two glaciologists at Swansea University, wrote in a July 12 blog post for the MIDAS Project, which has been monitoring the ice.

They also said the iceberg weighs more than a trillion metric tonnes.

The following size comparisons will give you a sense of just how colossal this new iceberg is.

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DON'T MISS: Antarctica just shed a 1.1-trillion-ton iceberg — here's where it may float

The iceberg weighs almost as much as 20 Titanics.

Its surface area is roughly equivalent to the state of Delaware.

It could fill Lake Erie twice.

Humans have only been on Earth for a minute fraction of the time the planet has existed. Yet everywhere you look, we have left a trace of our presence.

We've reshaped the landscape by clearing forests and building new islands, altered the makeup of the atmosphere by driving cars and running factories, and even modified the types of rocks that will be found millions of years from now.

According to a recent study, our impact has been so extreme that it makes the appearance of oxygen — an event that geologists call the Great Oxidation — look trivial.

Scientists call our geologic epoch the Anthropocene — it began around the time we detonated the first atomic bomb and coated the planet with radioactive particles.

"If the Great Oxidation ... was a 'punctuation event' in Earth's history, the rapid and extensive geological impact of the Anthropocene is an exclamation mark,"Robert Hazen, a mineralogist and astrobiologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science's Geophysical Laboratory, told Business Insider.

While there is plenty of evidence of humans' impact on the planet that we can easily observe — the construction of cities, a changing global climate, the extinction of other species — one of the most dramatic effects is invisible to most people. 

Disturbing the Earth's surface

Hazen helped write a recent paper that catalogued for the first time the hundreds of new minerals that humans have left behind. The scientists' work suggested that humans are responsible for roughly 4% of all the minerals on Earth — the most new materials to show up in the geologic record since oxygen appeared more than 2.2 billion years ago.

These materials will be visible for millions or even billions of years and will "mark our age as different from all that came before," said Edward Grew, a professor of earth and climate sciences at the University of Maine and one of Hazen's co-authors.

Human activities are responsible for at least 208 brand-new minerals. Many of those have formed along the walls of mines, where cool, moist air reacts with sooty particles of iron ore. 

"When one looks at a mine, it’s really a disturbance of the Earth’s surface," Grew said.

In a mine, dozens of activities can give rise to new minerals — including the dumping of large amounts of iron or copper ore, the build-up of water along mine tunnel walls, and even fires inside mines.

Some of the new minerals that have resulted from human activity are eye-catchingly beautiful. On a copper mining tool at the Rowley Mine in Maricopa County, Arizona, Hazen and his colleagues found a glowing, sea-colored mineral called simonkolleite.

"You’re just stirring a pot in a way, exposing ores to a different environment and getting these new minerals to form," Grew said.

In addition to creating new minerals, humans are also moving around existing ones and shifting how they are distributed globally.

Minerals like abhurite, which are essentially the result of corrosion that happens after a shipwreck or another human-made disaster, can be found across the planet. Hazen and his colleagues found a piece of abhurite from the wreckage of the SS Cheerful, which sunk in 1885 near Cornwall, England.

"What we're seeing...these are things that’ll persist in the geologic record that a million years from now people will find," said Hazen. "It's this incredibly rapid pulse caused by human activity."

Hazen's log, while extensive, still doesn't cover all of the mineral-like materials that humans have created. These additional materials include magnets, alloys, and building materials like bricks and concrete. Hazen estimates that there are hundreds or even thousands more of these materials that researchers have yet to officially classify.

"We're talking about a pervasive layer of Earth's surface which humans have changed in fundamental ways," said Hazen.

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A heat wave slammed the southwestern US in June, with temperatures climbing well into the triple digits in states like Arizona and Nevada seeing. The heat was so severe, in fact, that multiple flights were cancelled in Las Vegas and Phoenix.

High temperatures often cause flight issues because, as commercial airline pilot Patrick Smith explained, hotter air is less dense than cooler air. That means planes' wings produce less lift when it's hot out, and jet engines don’t perform as well.

Together, these issues mean planes are less aerodynamic, can't get as high, and must take off and land at higher speeds, which in turn requires more runway space.

Some planes simply aren’t allowed to fly if temperatures pass a certain threshold — typically somewhere around 120 degrees. As temperatures continue to rise around the globe due to climate change, this could pose a major problem for air travel.   

According to a new study from the Earth Institute at Columbia University, maximum temperatures at airports are expected to rise by 7.2 to 14.4 degrees Farenheit (4 to 8 degrees Celsius) by 2080. That's because the Earth's temperature is projected to increase by 3 degrees Celsius unless greenhouse gas emissions are radically reduced in the coming years, and tarmac absorbs heat, making temperatures at airports significantly higher. 

The new research, published Thursday in the journal "Climatic Change," predicts that 10 to 30% of fully loaded planes may have to remove some fuel, cargo, or passengers in order to deal with these increasing heat levels. The authors calculated that airplanes might have to reduce 4% of their fuel capacities and payload weights in order to take off on hot days.

If adjustments aren't made, more and more flights could be at risk of getting canceled during the hottest parts of the day.

"This points to the unexplored risks of changing climate on aviation," coauthor Radley Horton, a climatologist at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said in a press release.

Until now, most studies on the relationship between climate change and aviation looked into the impact air travel has on greenhouse gas emissions. The new research, however, does the reverse — and suggests a worrisome cycle.

"As the world gets more connected and aviation grows, there may be substantial potential for cascading effects, economic and otherwise," Horton said.

The study also warns that the aviation industry could face severe financial setbacks from rising temperatures. Serious heat can damage a plane's internal components, and more cancelled flights, of course, create a host of difficulties for airlines and passengers.

Plus, small or old airports with shorter runways would also suffer disproportionately, since planes need more space when temperatures climb. For example, the authors projected that on the hottest days, a Boeing 737 scheduled to take off from one of LaGuardia airport's short runways would have to unload weight as much as half the time.

"Our results suggest that weight restriction may impose a non-trivial cost on airline and impact aviation operations around the world," lead author Ethan Coffel, a Columbia PhD. student, said in a press release.

According to Reuters, heat waves can also be dangerous for ground crews exposed on the tarmac, since temperatures there can reach up to 150 degrees Farenheit when the air temperature climbs above 120 degrees.

Alex Davies contributed to an earlier version of this article.

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Antarctica this week shed an iceberg of mind-boggling size from its Larsen C ice shelf.

The block of ice will likely be given the unceremonious name of A68 by the US National Ice Center, whose abbreviations denote both an iceberg's location and order of discovery.

Iceberg A68 now begins a long journey into the Southern Ocean and toward its doom: as liquid in Earth's vast and complex system of water.

Here's how scientists discovered the giant iceberg, how it calved, and how it will eventually die — and be reborn.

SEE ALSO: 25 photos that prove we're all stowaways on a tiny, fragile spaceship we call Earth

DON'T MISS: Here's what Earth might look like in 100 years — if we're lucky

In 2015, glaciologist Daniela Jansen discovered a growing crack in Antarctica's Larsen C ice shelf, which was then the fourth-largest ice shelf on the continent. The shelf is hundreds of years old, maybe more.

Sources: The Conversation (via Business Insider); The Cryosphere

Ice shelves like Larsen C, and their icebergs, come from snow that's covered Antarctica over thousands of years and compacted into ice. In many places, the ice is a mile thick down to bedrock.

Source: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

But the ice doesn't sit there. Gravity tirelessly pulls it toward the sea, where it floats on the water to form gigantic ice shelves.

President Trump likes to vacation at Mar-a-Lago, an estate and beach resort in South Florida that he purchased in 1985. Since being elected, he has frequently stayed in the private quarters of the property's 126-room mansion, dubbed his "winter White House."

But Mar-a-Lago is under threat from climate change. That's according to a 2017 report by the National and Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which says that rising sea levels are increasingly damaging South Florida's coasts. 

The NOAA predicts that flooding caused by climate change will only worsen in coming years. The organization projects South Florida could see a 10- to 12-foot rise in sea level by 2100.

Since water surrounds most of Florida, sea level rise will affect the state (by total population) more than anywhere else in the US. Other at-risk states include New York, California, Virginia, and New Jersey, the researchers say.

Below is a satellite photo from Climate Central of what Miami could look like by 2100 if the worst climate change predictions come true. Though Miami is about 70 miles south of Mar-a-Lago, researchers say flood risks are similar since they are both coastal cities in South Florida.

In 2016, the Guardian reported that water is already overflowing into the Mar-a-Lago property, as well as the bridges and roads needed to access it. And as Vox recently noted, another 2016 paper found that, since 2006, the average rate of sea-level rise had tripled from 3 millimeters annually to 9 millimeters in South Florida. 

If sea levels rise just two feet, the estate's western lawns would completely flood, according to the Associated Press. South Florida roads also already flood periodically during storms or high tides, and in recent years, cities like Miami and Titusville have installed expensive pumping systems to drain the water.

Later this year, Miami Beach will begin a $100 million flood prevention project, which includes raising roads, installing pumps and water mains, and re-building sewer connections. Many scientists say that a combination of polar melting, carbon emissions, and ice-sheet collapses could cause severe flooding that overwhelms the city by 2100.

"If the beaches are gone or the streets are flooded, it’s going to affect the value of his property," Jim Cason, the Republican mayor of Coral Gables, Florida, told the AP. "So as a prudent businessman, he ought to conclude that the science is right and we need to prepare and plan."

Scientists say that climate change will greatly contribute to future sea-level rise. As the planet warms, land ice melts, which contributes to the expansion of oceans.

In June, the Trump administration announced that the US will withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change by 2019. Established in 2015, the accord sets greenhouse-gas emission goals that signatory countries vow to meet.

After Trump's Paris Agreement announcement, White House officials refused to answer if Trump believed in the scientific consensus that humans are causing climate change.

SEE ALSO: Even if every country on the planet cuts emissions, the climate would still be screwed

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NOW WATCH: This animated map shows what's directly across the ocean if you're in North and South America

Earlier this week, a crack in Antarctica's Larsen C ice shelf caused a 1.1-trillion-ton block of ice to calve, forming a colossal iceberg roughly the area of Delaware.

Just days after breaking off the continent, the iceberg, now dubbed A68, has broken into two pieces.

"A68 is starting to lose some chunks already! Still an enormous berg though," Martin O'Leary a glaciologist at Swansea University, wrote in a tweet early Friday morning for the Antarctic research program Project MIDAS.

After years of lengthening and widening, the rift in the Larsen C ice shelf grew rapidly in the past year, and birthed the iceberg sometime between July 10 and July 12. When it calved, the iceberg was the third largest ever recorded. 

The US National Ice Center tracks and unceremoniously assigns icebergs their names based on location and order of discovery. When sizable icebergs break off a main iceberg, they take the same name with added letters.

"Just as A68 gets its official name, Suomi ... shows that it has broken into two pieces — A68a and A68b I guess?" Adrian Luckman, also a glaciologist at Swansea University and member of Project MIDAS, said in a tweet. Luckman also posted the recent Suomi satellite image of the new fragment shown on the right.

When it calved, iceberg A68 had more than double the volume of Lake Erie in the Great Lakes.

Where A68 goes from here — and when it melts — is anyone's guess at this point. However, the process could take years, as it has for similarly large icebergs.

Read more about the Larsen C iceberg's birth and fate here.

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NOW WATCH: A 1.1-trillion-ton iceberg has broken off Antarctica, and scientists say it's one of the largest ever recorded

Bogota (AFP) — The area devoted to coca cultivation in Colombia grew by more than half last year, with cocaine production up by a third, the UN said Friday in an annual report on the subject.

The total coca-growing area rose from 96,000 hectares in 2015 to 146,000 hectares in 2016 (from 237,000 acres to 361,000 acres), a 52 percent year-to-year rise, the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Bo Mathiasen, told reporters.

Coca is the key ingredient in cocaine.

Cocaine production meanwhile rose from 646 metric tons in 2015 to 866 metric tons in 2016, a 34 percent rise, he said.

But while the increases were significant, Mathiasen said, he held out hope for improvement now that Colombia has signed a peace agreement with the biggest rebel group in the country, which controls much of the drug-producing land.

The production increases came in traditional coca-producing regions — and did not reflect expansion into new areas — said Leonardo Correa, coordinator of the UN's Integrated Illicit Crops Monitoring System, known as SIMCI.

The UN Security Council recently decided unanimously to create a new mission for Colombia to help the former rebels of FARC, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, rejoin society as a step to securing the peace process.

For decades FARC guerrillas controlled many of the country's key coca-growing zones.

Under the peace deal, farmers will receive subsidies to switch from coca to other crops.

Colombia is the leading coca producer in Latin America, followed by Peru and Bolivia, according to the UN report.

A UN mission currently in the country has begun monitoring the destruction of weaponry surrendered by FARC militants starting June 27 as part of the historic peace accord.

SEE ALSO: Holding a baby can make you feel bodaciously high — and it's a scientific mystery

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NOW WATCH: This is how long drugs actually stay in your system

• An iceberg the size of Delaware broke off of an Antarctic ice shelf between July 10 and July 12.
• Scientists aren't sure exactly what caused the crack that birthed iceberg A68, as it's called.
• One explanation could be summer surface melt water that acted like a wedge on small cracks, eventually opening them into a large rift.

The Roman poet Ovid once quipped that "dripping water hollows out stone, not through force but through persistence."

When it comes to buckling ancient, thousand-foot-thick ice shelves — and perhaps the 1.1-trillion-ton, Delaware-size piece of ice that Antarctica just shed into the sea— Ovid may have been wise beyond his years.

The iceberg, dubbed A68 by the US National Ice Center, took years to form as the result of a crack in the Larsen C ice shelf. The crack formed around 2010 but grew rapidly starting in 2016.

A68 is already starting to fall apart, though its journey toward melting could take years.

While the world watches it slowly disintegrate, many are left wondering: What caused the iceberg to break off?

"There are lots of reasons," Martin O'Leary, a glaciologist with Swansea University and the Antarctic research program Project Midas, wrote in a Reddit ask-me-anything session on July 14. "[E]ither something is pulling the ice apart, or something has got into a gap and is pushing it open."

A liquid wedge

One driving, Ovid-like force may be similar to what doomed Larsen B, a nearby ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula. Over the past 50 years, this region has experienced warming that is three times greater than the global average.

In 2002, scientists looked on as nearly the entire Larsen B ice shelf fell into the sea after a large piece calved into the Southern Ocean.

"For events like the breakup of Larsen B, it was melt water filling all the surface cracks and [slowly] pushing them open," he said. (Melt water that appears primarily in the summer can sink into and weaken ice shelves over several seasons.)

"In places like Alaska you often get ocean water undercutting a glacier," he added, "which destabilizes the ice at the front, and it gets pulled apart by gravity."

The animation bellow, by NASA's Earth Observatory, shows the collapse of Larsen B over the course of a few months.

O'Leary said no one can be certain what caused iceberg A68 to break off, or at least yet; it's far too cold in the Antarctic winter to fly in a crack research team. We may have to wait until November, when the southern hemisphere waxes toward summer and it becomes safe to fly airplanes over Antarctica again.

For now all we can rely on for now are satellite images and aerial photos taken by NASA in late 2016.

"We've got some theories, but nothing that we've got good evidence for," he said. "Icebergs like this are so rare that it's hard to develop any kind of comprehensive theory — you end up focusing on the details of each individual berg."

How much are humans to blame?

Scientists say this particular calving won't raise sea levels, since the ice was already floating in the water. (The effect is similar to why melting ice cubes in a drink don't overflow a glass.)

O'Leary and his colleague Adrian Luckman, who's also with Swansea University and Project Midas, previously suggested that A68's calving was "a natural event". After all, ice shelves have been cracking off huge icebergs for eons.

Yet other scientists say this perspective is akin looking at the situation "through a microscope" instead of acknowledging the bigger, inevitable picture of human-driven global warming and climate change.

"To me, it's an unequivocal signature of the impact of climate change on Larsen C," Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at NASA JPL, told writer John D. Sutter for a July 15 column at CNN. "This is not a natural cycle. This is the response of the system to a warmer climate from the top and from the bottom. Nothing else can cause this."

While the debate over A68 continues, so does the seemingly uninterruptible march of climate change and its disruptive and potentially disastrous effects.

If we're lucky, our children won't see too many major cities disappear under rising seas or lush regions of planet Earth warmed to uninhabitable wastelands.

SEE ALSO: Antarctica's colossal new iceberg is doomed — here's what will happen next

DON'T MISS: I've studied Antarctica's giant iceberg for years — and it's not a simple story of climate change

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NOW WATCH: A 1.1-trillion-ton iceberg has broken off Antarctica, and scientists say it's one of the largest ever recorded

PARIS (AP) — A boat that fuels itself is setting off around the world from Paris on a six-year journey that its designers hope will serves as a model for emissions-free energy networks of the future.

Energy Observer will use its solar panels, wind turbines and a hydrogen fuel cell system to power its trip.

The 5 million-euro ($5.25 million) boat heads off Saturday from Paris toward the Atlantic.

The futuristic-looking 30.5-meter (100-foot) boat will rely on sun or wind during the day and tap into its hydrogen reservoirs at night. It produces its own hydrogen through electrolysis of sea water.

Originally designed in 1983, the boat enjoyed a successful career in open-sea sailing races before skippers Frederic Dahirel and Victorien Erussard and a French research institute converted it into the Energy Observer project.

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Achieving energy independence in the US is one environmental issue Democrats and Republicans can agree on.

It's easy to see why we should produce our own energy — relying on other countries for oil, natural gas, and coal (the biggest sources used today) can get complicated. It can lead to wars, or compromise our relationships with foreign powers.

President Trump is focusing not just on energy independence, but what he calls "energy dominance," vowing to "unleash" American natural gas and coal exports on the world.

The rise of fracking has unlocked vast natural gas reserves, allowing the US to import less natural gas in 2016 than in any year since the US Energy Information Administration started keeping track in 1973. Gas imports, most of which arrive in pipelines from Canada and Mexico, peaked in 2007 at 3.8 trillion cubic feet. But after fracking became popular, imports plummeted to 671 billion cubic feet last year.

Fossil fuels will eventually run out around the world, however. Experts estimate that the US only has enough natural gas reserves to last 93 more years, and enough coal to last about 283 years.

Putting politics aside, there is only one surefire way to be completely and indefinitely energy independent: adopt 100% renewable energy.

The US will always have its wind, sunlight, and water.

In 2016, energy produced from harnessing these renewables only made up 15% of the electricity generated in the United States. Hydropower was responsible for 6.5% of that, while wind made up 5.6%, and solar represented a scant 0.9%.

They're on the rise, though. The world added more energy from renewable sources than from fossil fuels in 2015 and 2016 — because they finally became cost effective. The plummeting price of clean energy has allowed the US to decrease its carbon emissions over the last three years while the country's GDP has increased.

Some countries are already pursuing this fossil fuel-free strategy. Costa Rica powered its small Central American nation on 98.1% renewables in 2016. It will take more time for a massive country like the US to achieve that, but Costa Rica has demonstrated that it can be done.

True energy independence can only be unlocked when America wholeheartedly embraces renewables. The good news is that we're on our way. The question now is, "When?"

SEE ALSO: Just don't call it 'climate change': What Republicans in Dallas can teach us about saving the planet

DON'T MISS: Here's how much of the world would need to be covered in solar panels to power Earth

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At the height of North American summer, many plants are at their most dangerous.

We don't normally think of plants as particularly scary organisms. But this rather entertaining Reddit thread will make you reconsider that assumption.

"Botanists of reddit, what are the scariest plants in the world?"user Zipzapadam asked. And Reddit delivered.

We're not talking about common poison ivy or run-of-the-mill carnivorous plants. Some of these plants could actually kill you.

As one Redditor put it, "This post just makes me want to stay indoors and hide from plants."

You probably will, too. Here are nine terrifying plants to stay away from:

SEE ALSO: Just don't call it 'climate change': What Republicans in Dallas can teach us about saving the planet

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Aconitum napellus, "Monkshood,""Wolfsbane"

It looks beautiful and harmless, but all parts of the Monkshood plant are poisonous.

In ancient times, people would use it on arrow tips and as bait to kill wolves, which is why it's also called Wolfsbane.

A 33-year-old gardener allegedly died after touching (or possibly eating) the plant in 2014, the BBC reported.

Monkshood can cause vomiting, diarrhea, and numbness if it's eaten.

Ricinus communis, "Castor Bean"

Castor beans are high in ricin, the effects of which can escalate quickly.

Symptoms of ingestion can include "stomach irritation, vomiting, bloody diarrhea, abdominal pain, increased heart rate, low blood pressure, profuse sweating, collapse, convulsions, and death within a few days," according to Union County College biology professor Tom Ombrello.

Redditor Rabzozo said their boss spent a week in the hospital after he set a fire in his yard and inhaling smoke that happened to contain compounds from castor plants. But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that "unintentional exposure to ricin is highly unlikely, except through the ingestion of castor beans."

Don't eat them.

Cicuta, "Water Hemlock"

Water hemlock looks a lot like Queen Anne's Lace, another plant with small white flowers.

To tell the difference, remember that Queen Anne's Lace has a single red blossom at the heart of its bunch of white flowers.

Water hemlock is one of the most common poisonous plants throughout the US and UK.

If you eat it, the plant can cause seizures that may lead to death.

If the world keeps burning fossil fuels and releasing carbon emissions indefinitely, climate change will eventually melt all the ice at the poles and on mountains, according to National Geographic.

This would raise global sea levels by approximately 216 feet, engulfing oceanside cities like Miami, Buenos Aires, and Cairo.

Business Insider made an animated map that shows what the world would look like if this doomsday future came true.

Take a look at the highlights below.

SEE ALSO: Even if every country on the planet cuts emissions, the climate would still be screwed

As soon as the end of this century, climate scientists say that parts of the Earth will become inhospitable. Risks brought on by climate change include mass famine, drought, severe flooding, plagues, poisoned oceans, and record heat waves.

As David Wallace-Wells noted in his recent New York magazine feature, researchers predict that these kind of disasters make war and permanent economic collapse more likely.

The increasingly rapid melting of ice sheets and glaciers is raising sea levels and changing the world's coastlines. Miami, along with the entire eastern seaboard, would be underwater if all the world's ice melted.

Source: National Geographic

Europe would say goodbye to London, Venice, and the Netherlands.

Geologist Andrew Snelling is hunting for evidence of Noah’s great flood. His pursuit has brought him to the deepest gorge in the United States, Grand Canyon National Park, which he sued in May for rejecting his bid to collect around 50 fist-sized rocks for research purposes. In his suit, Snelling quoted President Donald Trump’s executive order expanding freedom of religion, arguing that it was unconstitutional to forbid him from collecting rocks from the land.

The U.S. Park Service has finally relented. In early July, it approved Snelling’s research permit and allowed him to gather these protected cobbles for deep scrutiny. The move is not unprecedented but is highly unusual, given Snelling’s dubious scientific objectives.

If all goes his way, the rocks will show telltale signs of having been tossed about during the aftermath of a flood so massive, it was only survivable for species that hitched a ride on Noah’s nearly 500-foot long ship.

For most people, taking anything from a national park is prohibited. “Take pictures, leave footprints,” is the famous ranger adage. Even swiping a flower will earn the pilferer a $100 ticket (which can end up costing as much as $5,000). The only way around this rule is to obtain a research permit, which allows researchers to remove artifacts or natural resources from a national park. Getting one isn’t — or shouldn’t — be easy: Usually, people must prove that their research will benefit science or improve the stewardship of the park. Interested applicants, like Snelling, must be prepared to answer questions like these:

Will the proposed activity result in degradation of the purposes, resources, and values of the park?

Could the proposed research be performed outside the park?

What are the potential benefits of the research to science?

Has the proposed research been peer-reviewed for scientific integrity by recognized experts?

Snelling apparently answered these questions well enough to justify research into a “catastrophic erosion” event that formed the Grand Canyon in what he presumes to be a violently swift event.

National Parks regularly approve research permits, for both its own scientists and outside researchers. The Grand Canyon approves around 80 such projects a year. At Point Reyes National Seashore, scientists clip GPS tags to elephant seals, and in Alaska they shoot bears with harmless darts, in hopes of gathering DNA for genetic studies.

The uniqueness of Snelling’s research, of course, is that it conflicts with the natural history and earth science taught by park rangers and independently verified by outside geologists, which suggest that, some five million years ago, the dominant Colorado River began carving through thousands of feet of layered sediments. This process continues its course today, as the same river continues to snake through the canyon.

Snelling’s views of a young Earth, created less than 10,000 years ago by divine forces, is far different from the conceptions of natural history held by most geologists, who have found no evidence that today’s natural features can be explained by any sort of globe-encompassing super-event, like a flood.

Indeed, there are geologic curiosities around the world that young-earth creationist geologists argue were placed there during a great flood — specifically, massive, out-of-place rocks. But today’s receding glaciers reveal that these rocks, called glacial erratics, were pushed there by the indomitable forces of local glaciers, not a great flood.

In the end, the Park Service’s decision to approve Snelling’s research permit may not have been based upon any reasonable scientific merit, but the simple desire to move on. It’s been a three-year bureaucratic tussle, and the 50 rocks — which park scientists still contend could be easily found outside the park — will ultimately be returned to their park home.

Getting these geologic features outside the boundaries of Grand Canyon National Park was no easy task for Snelling, but he did it legally. So, for all the scientific disagreement that may arise, he didn’t violate national park laws in his attempt to prove the word of God.

SEE ALSO: Antarctica's colossal new iceberg is doomed — here's what will happen next

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A new study by the Union of Concerned Scientists offers us the best look yet into how coastal communities will experience debilitating inundation this century.

SEE ALSO: What the world would look like if all the ice melted

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Kimbal Musk, the brother of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, is trying to change the way we eat by creating what he calls a "real-food revolution."

For over a decade, Kimbal Musk has run two restaurant chains, The Kitchen and Next Door, which serve dishes strictly made with locally sourced meat and veggies. Since 2011, his nonprofit program has installed so-called Learning Gardens in over 300 schools to teach kids about agriculture.

Musk's latest food venture delves into the world of local urban farming.

In early November, he and fellow entrepreneur Tobias Peggs launched Square Roots, an urban-farming incubator program in Brooklyn, New York. The setup consists of 10 steel shipping-container farms where young entrepreneurs work to develop vertical-farming startups. Unlike traditional outdoor farms, vertical farms grow soil-free crops indoors and under LED lights.

On Tuesday, Square Roots opened applications for its second season, which will start in October and last 13 months.

"Graduates are uniquely positioned to embark on a lifetime of real food entrepreneurship — with the know-how to build a thriving, responsible business," Musk wrote on Medium. "The opportunities in front of them will be endless."

Six weeks into the first season, just after the entrepreneurs completed their first harvests, Business Insider got a tour of the farms. Take a look:

SEE ALSO: The world's largest vertical farm will produce 2 million pounds of lettuce every year

The Square Roots farms in Brooklyn sit between an old Pfizer factory and the apartment building where Jay-Z grew up.

Everything grows inside 320-square-foot steel shipping containers. Each container can produce about 50,000 mini-heads of lettuce a year.

The US Department of Agriculture gave the Square Roots entrepreneurs small loans to cover preliminary operating expenses. Other investors include Powerplant Ventures, GroundUp, Lightbank, and FoodTech Angels.

On four parallel walls, leafy greens and herbs sprout from soil-free growing beds filled with nutrient-rich water. Instead of sunlight, they rely on hanging blue and pink LED rope lights.

About the size of the standard one-car garage, each shipping container can produce the same amount in crops as two acres of outdoor farmland.