Jakarta, Indonesia's capital, is home to over 10 million people and developing a huge trash problem. One local entrepreneur is trying to change this, and is turning trash into fuel.

Story by Ian Phillips and editing by A.C. Fowler

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The rewards of being right about climate change are bittersweet.

James Hansen should know this better than most — he warned of this whole thing before Congress in 1988, when he was director of NASA’s Institute for Space Studies. At the time, the world was experiencing its warmest five-month run since we started recording temperatures 130 years earlier.

Hansen said, “It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.”

Fast forward 28 years and, while we’re hardly out of the Waffle House yet, we know much more about climate change science. Hansen is still worried that the rest of us aren’t worried enough.

Last summer, prior to countries’ United Nations negotiations in Paris, Hansen and 16 collaborators authored a draft paper that suggested we could see at least 10 feet of sea-level rise in as few as 50 years. If that sounds alarming to you, it is— 10 feet of sea-level rise is more than enough to effectively kick us out of even the most well-endowed coastal cities. Stitching together archaeological evidence of past climate change, current observations, and future-telling climate models, the authors suggested that even a small amount of global warming can rack up enormous consequences — and quickly.

However the paper, publicized before it had been through peer review, elicited a mix of shock and skepticism, with some journalists calling the news a“bombshell” but a number of scientists urging deeper consideration.

Now, the final version of the paper has been published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. It’s been reviewed and lightly edited, but its conclusions are still shocking — and still contentious.

So what’s the deal? The authors highlight several of threats they believe we’ll face this century, including many feet of sea-level rise, a halting of major ocean circulatory currents, and an outbreak of super storms. These are the big threats we’ve been afraid of — and Hansen et al. say they could be here before we know it — well before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sanctioned climate models predict.

Here we help you understand their new paper:

Sea-level rise

The scientists estimate that existing climate models aren’t accounting well enough for current ice loss off of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. Right now, Antarctica and Greenland ice sheets both contribute under or near 1 millimeter to sea-level rise every year; they each contain enough stored ice to drive up ocean levels by 20 and 200 feet, respectively.

This study suggests that, since the rate of ice loss is increasing, we should think of it not as a straight line but as an exponential curve, doubling every few years. But how much time it takes to double makes a big difference. Right now, measurements of ice loss aren’t clear enough to even make a strong estimate about how long that period might be. Is it 10 years or is it 40? It’s hard to say based on the limited data we have now, which would make a big difference either way.

But then again, we don’t even know that ice loss is exponential. Ian Joughin — a University of Washington researcher unaffiliated with the paper and who has studied the tipping points of Antarctic glaciers — put it this way: Think about the stock market in the ’80s. If you observed a couple years of accelerating growth, and decided that rate would double every 4 years — you’d have something like 56,000 points in the Dow Jones Industrial by now.

Or if stocks aren’t your thing, think about that other exponentially expanding force of nature: bacteria. Certain colonies of bacteria can double their population in a matter of hours. Can they do this forever? No, or else we’d be nothing but bacteria right now (and while we’re certainly a high percentage of bacteria, there’s still room for a couple other things).

Nature tends to put limits on exponential growth, Joughin points out — and the same probably goes for ice loss: “There’s only so fast you can move ice out of an ice sheet,” Joughin explained. While some ice masses may be collapsing at an accelerating rate, others won’t be as volatile.

This means, while some parts of ice sheet collapse may very well proceed exponentially, we can’t expect such simple mathematics to model anything in the real world except the terror spike of the Kingda Ka.

Ocean turnover

Mmm mm, ocean turnover: Is it another word for a sushi roll or a fundamental process that keeps the climate relatively stable and moderate?

That’s right — we’re talking the Atlantic Meridonal Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, and other currents like it.

As cold meltwater flows off of glaciers and ice sheets at enormous rates, it pools at the ocean’s surface, trapping the denser but warmer saltwater beneath it. This can seriously mess with the moving parts of the ocean, the so-called “conveyor belts” that cycle deep nutrient-rich water to the surface. These slow currents are driven by large-scale climate processes, like wind, and drive others, like the carbon cycle. But they also rely on gradients in temperature and density to run; if too much cold water from the glaciers pools at the surface, the whole conveyor belt could stutter to a stop.

In the North Atlantic, this would mean waters get colder, while the tropics, denied their influx of colder water, would heat up precipitously. Hansen says we’re already seeing the beginnings of AMOC’s slowdown: There’s a spot of unusually cool water hanging out off of Greenland, while the U.S. East Coast continues to see warmer and warmer temperatures. Hansen said it plainly in a call with reporters: “I think this is the beginning of substantial slowdown of the AMOC.”

Superstorms

Pointing to giant hunks of rock that litter the shore of the Bahamas, among other evidence of ancient climates, the study’s authors suggest that past versions of Earth may have featured superstorms capable of casually tossing boulders like bored Olympians.

And as the temperature gradient between the tropic and the polar oceans gets steeper, thanks to that slowing of ocean-mixing currents, we could see stronger storms, too.

This is surprisingly intuitive: Picture a temperature gradient like a hill, with the high temperatures up at the top and the low temperatures down at the bottom. As the highs get higher and the lows get lower, that hill gets a lot steeper — and the storms are the bowling balls you chuck down the hill. A bowling ball will pick up alot more speed on a steep hill, and hurt a lot more when it finally runs into something. Likewise, by the time these supercharged storms are slamming into coasts in the middle latitudes, they will be carrying a whole lot of deadly force with them.

So what does it all mean?

Whether other scientists quibble over these results or not — and they probably will — the overall message is hardly new. It’s bad, you guys. It might be really, truly, deeply bad, or it might be slightly less bad. Either way, says Hansen, what we know for sure is that it’s time to do something about it. “Among the top experts, there’s a pretty strong agreement that we’ve reached a point where this is truly urgent,” he said.

So Hansen is frustrated once more with the failure of humanity to respond adequately. The result he’d hoped for when he released an early version of the paper online last summer was to get world leaders to come together in Paris to agree on a global price on carbon. As he told Grist’s Ben Adler at the time, “It’s going to happen.” (It didn’t happen, but some other stuffdid.)

Still, true urgency would require more of us than just slowing the growth of emissions — it requires stopping them altogether. In a paper published in 2013, Hansen found that we have to cut 6 percent of our use of carbon-based fuels every year, if we want to avoid dangerous climate change.

Carbon prices and emissions cuts are more the purview of politicians and diplomats, but if anything, Hansen has shown he is unafraid to stray beyond the established protocol of academic science.

“I think scientists, who are trained to be objective, have something to offer by analyzing the problem all the way to the changes that are needed in order to address it,” he said on a press call. “That 6 percent reduction — that’s not advocacy, that’s science. And then I would advocate that we do that!”

And to pre-empt the haters, Hansen wants you to remember one thing. “Skepticism is the life blood of science. You can be sure that some scientists will find some aspects in our long paper that they will think of differently,” he said. “And that’s normal.”

So while scientists continue their debate over whether the ice sheets are poised to collapse in the next 50 years or the next 500, the prognosis is the same: The future is wetter, stranger, stormier unless we make serious moves to alternative energy sources now. Will we? Maybe. We’ve started but we still have a long, long way to go. If it’s a race between us and the ice sheets, neither I nor James Hansen nor anyone else can tell you for sure who will win.

Hey, no one said telling the future was easy.

This post was originally published at Grist.org. Read the original article.

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The Rockefeller Family Fund, a US-based public charity led by the Rockefeller family, announced on Wednesday that it's intending to completely divest from fossil fuels.

"While the global community works to eliminate the use of fossil fuels, it makes little sense — financially or ethically — to continue holding investments in these companies," the fund said in a statement posted on its website.

The Rockefeller Fund specifically called out ExxonMobil.

In November 2015, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman began an investigation into whether Exxon deliberately lied to the public about the risks nonrenewable energy posed to climate change.

The attorney general's office is reviewing whether Exxon's statements to investors were consistent with the company's in-house scientific research, according to The New York Times.

When CNBC first reported the Rockefeller Fund's divestment early on Wednesday afternoon, shares of Exxon slipped 0.47%, but they have since rebounded.

The Rockefeller Fund also said that it intends to ditch its holdings in coal and Canadian tar-sands oil. The fund didn't disclose the size of its fossil-fuel holdings.

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In the 1980s as more and more people flocked to poorly ventilated offices, they began to notice a worrying trend: people were coughing, getting headaches and even having trouble breathing — and the problem appeared to let up only when they left work.

Now known as Sick Building Syndrome, the findings were the first to suggest that our indoor air — just like our outdoor air — could contain harmful pollutants. More info about each of these pollutants can be found beneath the graphic below.

So NASA partnered up with America’s foremost landscape association in to study what types of plants were best for absorbing these harmful particles. Here are five of the best plants for sucking up pollutants in indoor air:

Benzene: used to make glues, paints, furniture wax, and detergents

Formaldehyde: found in building materials, insulation, and wood resins

Trichloroethylene (TCE): used to make building materials, electronics, and furniture

Xylene: used to make polyester, dyes, paints, lacquers, and insecticides

Toluene: used to make paints, finishes, adhesives, and car products

Ammonia: used to make household cleaners, refrigeration units, fertilizers, and fuels

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The Denver metropolitan area got walloped with snow on Wednesday, just one day after temperatures hit 70 degrees in the city.

Traffic came to a standstill in the Mile High City, and schools and government offices closed. More than 100,000 customers experienced power outages from Denver to Fort Collins, AccuWeather reported on Wednesday afternoon.

Interstate 70 remained closed on Wednesday afternoon. Interstate 25 was also closed on Wednesday from Denver north to Loveland, and Castle Rock south to Colorado Springs, according to The Denver Post.

Interstate 76 was closed from Denver to Nebraska, and Interstate 25 was closed in both directions, according to Denver7.

Denver International Airport also closed on Wednesday, and hundreds of flights were canceled.

The Colorado National Guard was deployed to Denver to assist those stranded in the storm.

Snow was accumulating at up to 3 inches per hour on Wednesday, and the Denver metropolitan area was due to remain under a winter weather advisory until Wednesday evening, according to the National Weather Service (NWS).

Forecasters are expecting more than 2 feet of snow before the storm moves on, said the NWS.

The storm will continue to move eastward throughout the week, dumping springtime snow over the Midwest and New England.

Check out what it's like on the ground in Denver:

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You're cooking dinner and a piece of food drops onto the floor. You snatch it up quickly. It's okay to eat because it was only on the floor for a few seconds, right?

Wrong, microbiologist Philip Tierno of the New York University School of Medicine told Tech Insider.

"If you drop some food stuff there [on the floor], don't eat it," Tierno said. "A lot of people do stupid stuff, and they have the three second rule, which is nonsense." (So is the five-second rule, or whatever-second-rule you might follow.)

Unless you're religiously sanitizing your floor, Tierno continued, you shouldn't eat any food that touches it because it's teeming with all kinds of viruses and bacteria.

Not only does this include nasty germs you've tracked into your home from your shoes, but also lingering germs that have hopped onto the floor from your toilet, your pets, and even food from your own kitchen (raw chicken is by far one of the worst offenders).

This isn't to say that all food that you eat from the floor will make you sick.

"For the most part nothing will happen," Tierno continued, "but if you step in dog doo or vomitus infected with the norovirus [a very contagious virus that causes intestinal distress] and bring that in on your shoes, and then you drop a piece of salami or whatever onto the floor and then eat it, you may ingest that particular germ and get sick."

Studies have found that potentially dangerous pathogens such as campylobacter, salmonella, and E. coli can live on hard surfaces for days — all of which can cause mild to severe gut infections.

When some bacteria touch a hard surface, they produce a slimy material called a "biofilm," which helps them stick to the surface and multiply. And guess what, it also helps them stick to your food.

Wet foods, such as tasty pieces of salami, are more likely to pick up germs than dry ones.

And considering that one in six people are sickened by food-borne illness every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it's probably in your best interest to scrap any piece of fallen food — wet or dry — for the sake of your health.

"It's not worth it," Tierno said.

And while you're at it, make sure you're regularly cleaning your sponge as well. It's disgusting and there's only one good way to clean it.

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NOW WATCH: Your kitchen sponge is disgusting, and here's the only good way to clean it

When a helicopter pilot spotted the first crater in summer 2014, everyone was baffled.

The 100-foot-wide hole appeared on the Yamal Peninsula seemingly out of nowhere, during a tense season of Russian military action in Ukraine and international sanctions.

And then more appeared. Lacking a better explanation, aliens and underground missiles were floated as possible theories, according The Washington Post.

But the truth is that the holes might come from a threat not even Mulder and Scully are equipped to handle: climate change.

Scientific American reports that Arctic zones are warming at a breakneck pace, and summer 2014 was warmer than average by an alarming 9 degrees Fahrenheit, according to another story in Nature. As a result, scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) think that permafrost, the permanently frozen ground that covers the tundra, is starting to thaw in these warmer temperatures.

So how does frozen methane blow a 100-foot-wide hole in the ground?

Given low-enough temperatures and high-enough pressure, methane and water can freeze together into what's called a "methane hydrate." Permafrost keeps everything bottled up, but when it thaws, so does the hydrate. Methane is released as a gas, building up pressure — until the ground explodes.

Scientists gained more evidence for this theory after an expedition to the bottom of the crater. It revealed that the air had an extraordinarily high concentration of methane.

It's not just explosions and melting permafrost that we should worry about, either. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) states that methane is a greenhouse gas that could have 25 times the impact of carbon dioxide over the next century.

A significant addition to methane emissions would likely have a disastrous impact on our already-troubling atmospheric warming, since it's 21 times better at trapping heat, according to Live Science.

Several outlets have even gone so far as to call this problem a "timebomb."

And it gets worse: One of the craters is just 6 miles from a natural-gas field. The Siberian Times reported that the combination of the two flammable materials in such close proximity is a huge safety concern for the area. At least two of the craters have since turned into lakes.

There may be an alternate explanation, though. Land can collapse without a burst of methane in something called a pingo, which forms when ice is trapped between layers of earth and distorts the top layer into a sort of mound. Thawing can make those mounds suddenly collapse.

Even if the craters are the result of collapsing pingos, they're still likely the result of climate change and still dangerous.

What's more, Slate reports, the same thing could happen in Alaska.

Whether pingo or exploding crater, it's clear that climate change is affecting the Arctic more rapidly than any other place on earth, but researchers are only beginning to grasp how unprecedented warming will effect northern ecosystems.

During his visit to Alaska in September 2015, US President Barack Obama echoed the common sentiment that the Arctic is "ground zero" for climate change.

These mysterious Siberian craters seem to be yet another warning sign that human-caused climate change is quickly spinning out of control, causing new and unpredictable changes along the way.

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London's air was contaminated with record-breaking levels of harmful pollutant earlier this month.

According to The Evening Standard, all air quality monitoring sites in the city hit “high” or “very high" between Thursday March 10 and Sunday March 13 — the peak being on Saturday when 11 out of the 18 measuring sites in the capital hit "very high."

The microscopic particles, known by experts as PM2.5, can penetrate deep into lung tissue and are too minute to be filtered out by the human body’s normal defences.

The smog was an accumulation of dirty air from industrial regions of Germany, Poland, and Holland which gradually drifted towards south-east England, where it was made even filthier by the emissions of London's vehicles, the Standard reports.

These new readings are the most severe since PM2.5 levels in the capital were first measured due to health concerns in 2012.

A report published that year said the spikes in the particle were linked to increased hospital admissions and the premature death of the old and sick, and a relationship was found between long-term exposure and lung cancer. 

The report, published by the Air Quality Expert Group, also said that no known safe level of the particle had been identified. 

Simon Birkett, founder of the Clean Air in London campaign, told the Evening Standard:

It’s a national disgrace that it’s taken an investigation by the Evening Standard to unearth the worst air pollution episode in recent years. Worse, Sadiq Khan and Zac Goldsmith both refused to share our tweeted smog warnings at the time.

Professor Sir Malcolm Green, founder of the British Lung Foundation, has compared inhaling high levels of the PM2.5 particle to breathing in "little particles of tar" and said they are capable of entering the lungs and finding a way into the bloodstream. 

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It shouldn't come as a shock to you that your home is teeming with all kinds of gnarly things.

You track in grime on your shoes; your bed sheets and mattress are literally teeming with debris; and don't even get me started on how nasty your bath towel is.

But by far, the most disgusting room in your home is actually the one that you might expect to be the cleanest: Your kitchen.

Why? Because food is a vector of some of the most vile, putrid substances. Bacteria on raw poultry and red meat are by far the worst offenders here, and they're hiding everywhere in your kitchen.

"You have a drain that's there, you have counter tops, refrigerators, appliances — all of which have been cross-contaminated with debris," microbiologist Philip Tierno of the New York University School of Medicine told Tech Insider.

And the dirtiest object in not just your kitchen, but your entire home is — drum roll please — your kitchen sponge, according to Tierno.

"That thing is very dirty," Tierno said. "Mainly because you're cleaning up vegetables, carcasses of meat, and all sorts of food stuff that can potentially contain pathogenic [disease-causing] bacteria that will grow in numbers over time."

These food items include all kinds of nasty bacteria, including campylobacter, salmonella, staphylococcus, E. coli, and listeria — all of which can cause mild to severe gut and skin infections.

Most people don't realize this, but there's a right way and a wrong way to clean your sponge. According to Tierno, you should be soaking it in a simple bleach solution after every use (check out our guide on how to do that here). This kills all germs on contact, leaving little room for cross-contamination.

Aside from this, the most important thing you can do to keep your kitchen clean is to practice good food prep hygiene. Don't fondle your cabinets after you've been working on a raw chicken. Don't cut your vegetables on the same board that you've been forming patties of ground beef on.

And most important of all, according to Tierno, is to religiously wash your hands. Not surprisingly, there's an art to that, too.

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NOW WATCH: Your kitchen sponge is disgusting, and here's the only good way to clean it

Whether you prefer a straight shot of tangy espresso or a few sweet sips of a blended coffee drink, chances are you love coffee.

Not only is this bittersweet drink one of the most widely consumed beverages in the world, its active ingredient — caffeine — is the most popular psychoactive drug.

We recently visited a coffee farm in Costa Rica, one of the world's most desirable locations for growing and harvesting the crop.

The coffee plants here, just like those across the globe, face a big challenge: All of them are sourced from just a handful of original Ethiopian plants, meaning they're genetically similar and highly vulnerable to climate change.

Take a walk through a Costa Rican coffee farm and see how the threatened but valued crop goes from berry to brew:

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Our drive to a coffee farm called Cafe Monteverde took us up a mountain on a dirt road for about an hour and a half. On our way, we got some breathtaking views of the area's rugged, hilly terrain and gorgeous forest cover.

The region of Monteverde, where a lot of Costa Rica's coffee is grown, is a misty, cloud-enshrined area about three hours from San Jose, the capital. The humid, shady climate is ideal for growing coffee plants, but the drive to reach it can be a challenge if you're not familiar with the roads.

My partner (right) and I were introduced to the farm by Felix Salazar (left), a nature photographer born and raised in Monteverde who also works on the farm and gives tours in his free time. Felix walked us through the rolling green fields where the coffee for Cafe Monteverde is grown.

P-22, the mountain lion that rose to stardom after gracing the covers of National Geographic in December 2013 while prowling in front of Los Angeles' infamous Hollywood sign, has once again made headlines, but as the main suspect in the death of a koala at the LA Zoo.

But P-22 is far from the only wild animal sighting that's been made far outside of parks and other areas we've come to associate with the wild.

Dozens of wild animals are quickly adapting to city life, from cougars in Mumbai, India, to coyotes in Chicago and baboons in Cape Town. Check them out:

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P-22 began his rise to stardom after gracing the covers of National Geographic in December 2013. He'd been spotted prowling in front of the infamous Hollywood sign in Los Angeles, which is nestled on the edge of Griffith Park and the Universal Studios theme park.

Source: National Geographic, 2013

In 2012, researchers began tracking P-22. Last year, he was found hiding under a house in the residential Los Feliz neighborhood (located just south of the Hollywood sign). Data from his tracker showed that he visited that spot regularly. Here he is!

Source: Los Angeles Times, 2015

But it wasn't the last time P-22 would be seen in the area. According to results of genetic tests, the lion was probably born in the Santa Monica mountains. But in 2012, he was spotted in the 4,000-acre Griffith Park, located just north of Los Feliz. It was estimated that he was 3 years old at that time, which would make him around 7 years old today.

Seismic activity is no longer dependent on natural causes. Human activity is playing a role as well.

The US Geological Survey recently mapped all the places that are most likely to be damaged by human-induced earthquakes in 2016. This is the first time the USGS has accounted for the quakes we are causing.

For the most part, human-induced earthquakes are caused by the injection of wastewater deep beneath the Earth's surface. It typically comes from oil and gas mining sites. Fracking — or the process of using high-pressured water to release oil and natural from rocks — isn't causing most of the induced earthquakes, according to the USGS.

The states at the most risk for potentially disastrous human-induced quakes (from highest to lowest risk) are:

1. Oklahoma
2. Kansas
3. Texas
4. Colorado
5. New Mexico
6. Arkansas

Of that group, Oklahoma and Texas have the largest populations that would be directly affected by the induced earthquakes, the report said. Particularly, the risk for Dallas is ten times higher than it was in 2008, The Dallas Morning News reports. 

The results came from reports of shaking and damage in those areas from the last five years, as well as self-reported data from people who felt shaking in their state.

The West Coast, which sits on a number of naturally-occurring quake fault lines, wasn't included in USGS' most recent study, since the majority of its quakes have natural causes. Here's how its 2016 quake risk compares to the rest of the country:

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If you’re a fan of sugar — and let’s face it, you probably are — 2016 is going to be an expensive year, because recent El Niño events have brought on a worldwide sugar shortage that's becoming a whole lot bigger than analysts initially thought. 

According to a report by The Independent, raw sugar prices are up 45% since last August, and researchers say it's because El Niño has dealt a one-two punch to the areas of the world where most sugar is produced.

 For India, Thailand, and China, droughts have devastated this year's production, and will likely affect next year’s yield as well.

The world’s second largest sugar-producing region, India, has experienced decreased rainfall that has limited the number of crops farmers were able to plant.

To make matters worse, the areas that have received rain, such as Brazil, got too much to properly harvest cane.

All of this means that there isn’t enough sugar to fulfill the 4.95 million tonnes the world is expected to consume this year. 

Demand for the natural sweetener is expected to exceed new supply by 7.6 million metric tonnes this season — a 2.5 million-tonne increase over its previous estimates, The Wall Street Journal reports.

On the plus side, this year’s shortage comes at a time when sugar was at its lowest price in many years thanks to a surplus of production. "After five years of surplus that sent prices to the lowest since 2008, supply is expected to fall short of demand in the 2015-16 season," Rudy Ruitenberg reports for Bloomberg. 

"The fact is that we’ve had four to five years of too much sugar — four or five years of feast, and we’re now looking for the first time at a sizeable deficit," Tim Worledge from Platts Agriculture, an independent commodities analysis organization, told The Wall Street Journal.

Economic repercussions aside, what actually happened to cause this shortage? To answer that, we need to talk about El Niño, which, in its most basic summary, is simply a climate cycle.

As the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) puts it: "The term El Niño refers to the large-scale ocean-atmosphere climate interaction linked to a periodic warming in sea surface temperatures across the central and east-central Equatorial Pacific."

When in full swing, El Niño affects weather all over the place. For some areas, this means more rain, and for others, that means less. This year and last, the cycle has affected sugar producing regions of the world harder. There’s not really any specific reason for this — it’s just really bad luck. 

So, for the foreseeable future, get ready to spend more on sugar at the store and hope that the weather favors the regions responsible for its production next year. 

SEE ALSO: Legislators want to try doing for candy what they did with tobacco — and it’s already having a surprising effect

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A fleet of Japanese ships returned from Antarctic waters on Thursday, March 24, after more than three months at sea.

The sailors' bounty: hundreds of dead Minke whales, more than 200 of which were females pregnant with calves, according to Reuters.

The four vessels, subsidized in part by Japan's government, are considered by many a violation of both a global ban on whale hunting and a recent ruling by an international court of law.

Japan claims these expeditions are scientific in nature. However, many researchers outside the nation strongly disagree.

Here's why Japan keeps sponsoring whale hunts in spite of intense global outcry working against the practice.

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On December 1, 2015, a whaling fleet subsidized by the Japanese government left on an expedition that ended 115 days later, on March 24, 2016.

Source: BBC

The fleet's goal was to kill 333 Minke whales...

...In these waters off the Antarctic coast.

Einstein reveals how to manipulate time.

Produced by Delano Samuels

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An aerial survey of 520 sites across the 1,500-mile stretch of delicate coral reefs in north-east Australia found that the most pristine sections had been “fried” and were facing some of the worst bleaching in recorded history.

Scientists say an underwater heat wave in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has led to devastating coral bleaching — the worst in history — which has damaged or killed 95% of the northern reefs.

An aerial survey of 520 sites across the 1,500-mile stretch of delicate coral reefs in north-east Australia found that the most pristine sections had been “fried” and were facing some of the worst bleaching in recorded history.

Long stretches of the famously colourful reef, which is world heritage-listed and one of the country’s top tourist destinations, have turned “snow-white” following bleaching which began six months ago, according to the researchers.

"This will change the Great Barrier Reef forever," Professor Terry Hughes, from James Cook University, told ABC News.

“We're seeing huge levels of bleaching in the northern thousand-kilometre stretch of the Great Barrier Reef. It's too early to tell precisely how many of the bleached coral will die, but judging from the extreme level even the most robust corals are snow white, I'd expect to see about half of those corals die in the coming month or so."

Scientists believe the bleaching was triggered by a temperature spike due to the El Niño weather pattern, which added to already warmer waters caused by climate change. Warmer temperatures can kill the tiny marine algae which are required to maintain the health of coral and give it colour.

It is the third and worst bleaching phenomenon since 1998 but there is no evidence of any other events in history.

"The north has fried," said Professor Hughes. "This is an ongoing, slow-motion train wreck."

The bleaching has affected virtually all species of the reef’s coral.

Cloudy weather is believed to have kept temperatures down and prevented heavy damage in the southern parts of the reef.

The damage has raised fresh questions about whether UNESCO may list the marine park as “in danger”. The organisation last year decided not to downgrade the park’s listing but expressed concern about the damage caused by mining and coastal pollution.

Conservationists and scientists urged Malcolm Turnbull, the prime minister, to visit the reef and limit mining in the region and to take action to reduce carbon emissions.

"The reef is one of the wonders of the world,” Imogen Zethoven, from the Australian Marine Conservation Society, told Fairfax Media.

“It is being ruined by global warming in front of our eyes."

Scientist in Australia have warned for years that climate change has led to warmer waters which threaten the long-term future of the reef.

"What we're seeing now is unequivocally to do with climate change," Professor Justin Marshall, from the University of Queensland, told ABC News.

"The world has agreed, this is climate change, we're seeing climate change play out across our reefs."

Greg Hunt, the federal environment minister, flew over the area earlier this month and pledged to add further resources to monitor the health of the reefs.

“There's good and bad news — the bottom three quarters of the reef is in strong condition," he said.

"[But] as we head north of Lizard Island it becomes increasingly prone to bleaching." 

This article was written by Jonathan Pearlman in Sydney from The Daily Telegraph and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

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NOW WATCH: Devastating photos show lakes vanishing around the world

When Disney River Country opened in 1976, visitors flocked to ride the winding slides and traverse the wooden bridges.

25 years later, the park closed down. It's still abandoned today.

A Cleveland-based photographer who works under the pseudonym Seph Lawless documented the abandoned park in his photo series "Dismaland." (This is also the name of Banksy's 2015 art exhibition, a fake apocalyptic theme park near Bristol, England.)

Lawless captures ghostly portraits of the once-busy attraction. Take a look.

River Country in Orange County, Florida was Walt Disney World's first water park. June 2016 will mark 40 years since its opening.

It is only one of two Disney parks, along with Discovery Island in Orange County, to close permanently. Both parks were left to deteriorate.

Lawless took about 150 photos of the decaying park, he tells Tech Insider.

A record expanse of Arctic sea never froze over this winter and remained open water as a season of freakishly high temperatures produced deep – and likely irreversible – changes on the far north.

Scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center said on Monday that the sea ice cover attained an average maximum extent of 14.52m sq km (5.607m sq miles) on 24 March, the lowest winter maximum since records began in 1979.

The low beats a record set only last year of 14.54m sq km (5.612m sq miles), reached on 25 February 2015.

“I’ve never seen such a warm, crazy winter in the Arctic,” said NSIDC director Mark Serreze. “The heat was relentless.”

It was the third straight month of record lows in the sea ice cover, after extreme temperatures in January and February stunned scientists.

The winter months of utter darkness and extreme cold are typically the time of maximum growth in the ice cap, until it begins its seasonal decline in spring.

With the ice cover down to 14.54m sq km, scientists now believe the Arctic is locked onto a course of continually shrinking sea ice – and that is before the 2016 melt season gets underway.

“If we are starting out very low that gives a jump on the melt season,” said Rick Thoman, the climate science manager for the National Weather Service’s Alaska region.

“For the last few years, we have had extremely low ice cover in the summer. That means a lot more solar energy absorbed by the darker open water. That heat tends to carry over from year to year.”

After this winter’s record ice lows, scientists now expect more than ever that the Arctic will be entirely ice-free in the summer months within 20 or 25 years.

“Sometime in the 2030s or 2040s time frame, at least for a few days, you won’t have ice out there in the dead of summer,” said Dr John Walsh, chief scientist of the International Arctic Research Center.

Those changes are already evident on the ground. In 1975, there were only a few days a year when ships could move from Barrow to Prudhoe Bay off the north coast of Alaska. Now that window lasts months.

The Arctic will always have ice in the winter months, Walsh said. But it will be thinner and more fragile than the multi-year ice, and less reliable for indigenous peoples who rely on the ice as winter transport routes or hunting platforms.

“It’s not just about how many hundreds of thousands of square kilometres covered by the ice. It’s about the quality of that ice,” Thoman said.

The extent of ice cover is a critical indicator of the changes taking place in the Arctic – but the shrinking of the polar ice carries sweeping consequences for lower latitudes as well.

The bright white snow-covered ice reflects about 85% of sunlight back into the atmosphere, compared to the dark surfaces of the open water which absorb most of the heat energy.

“Basically the polar regions are the refrigerator for the Earth,” said Dr Donald Perovich, a researcher at Dartmouth University. “They are extremely important for being able to keep the Arctic colder, and in turn help keep the rest of the planet colder.”

Since 1980, however, the summer sea ice cover over the Arctic has gone into a drastic decline, from 7.8m sq km to 4.4m sq km in 2012, before rebounding slightly. “It would be as if the entire United States east of the Mississippi melted away plus the states from Minnesota down to Louisiana, past North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma. It’s huge,” Perovich said.

This winter scientists said the Arctic freeze stalled early on, across the polar seas. The sea ice extent was exceptionally low both in the Barents and the Bering seas – which in past years has been one of the most prolific producers of ice. And it was thinner, especially in the Beaufort sea north of Alaska, scientists said.

There were a number of causes, in addition to the record high temperatures and carry-over effects of earlier ice loss.

The El Niño weather system produced more warming, and the Arctic saw influxes of exceptionally warm water from the Pacific as well as the Atlantic side.

In any event, Walsh said it was becoming increasingly clear the Arctic would never return to its previous frozen state, even if there are small gains in ice cover in a single year.

“The balance is shifting to the point where we are not going back to the old regime of the 1980s and 1990s,” he said. “Every year has had less ice cover than any summer since 2007. That is nine years in a row that you would call unprecedented. When that happens you have to start thinking that something is going on that is not letting the system go back to where it used to be.”

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NOW WATCH: This 30-mile-wide crack in Antarctica is headed for a massive breaking point

Since I discovered Google's Earth Engine timelapse tool (thanks, reddit!), I've been playing with it all morning. (The feature debuted in 2013.)

Google has a dozen locations highlighted to show how they've changed from 1984 until 2012, using satellite images.

You can plug any location into the search bar at the top, too. It only works on desktop, but I've put together some GIFs here so you can watch some of the most interesting changes on any device.

These timelapse images are incredible to watch. But they're also a visceral way of capturing the sweeping impact that human beings have on this planet.

See for yourself:

SEE ALSO: Giant holes found in Siberia could be signs of a ticking climate 'time bomb'

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Cape Cod's shoreline morphs over time.

The Aral Sea in between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan dries up.

Saudi Arabia builds massive cities in the sand.

If the thought of spending a summer aboard a ship alongside 1,700 other passengers in freezing cold weather is your idea of a vacation, well, you're in luck. But the environment may not be.

Starting in August, the Crystal Serenity will set sail from Seward, Alaska, transit Roald Amundsen's fabled Northwest Passage through the Arctic Ocean, and dock in New York City.

It will be the largest and most luxurious ship to cross the passage — staterooms on the ship will start at $22,000 — and this summer's journey is already sold out, reports The Guardian. 

It took Amundsen and his hardy crew three years to complete same route. The Crystal Serenity will make the trip in only 32 days. 

That's because the Northwest Passage is melting.

Scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are predicting that the Arctic Ocean will be entirely ice free during the summer by 2040, according to The Guardian. 

And, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, Arctic sea ice hit area a record low for the second year in a row in 2015. 

Because of all this warming, the Northwest Passage became accessible to shipping traffic (without ice-breaking hulls) in 2007. But the traffic is still low: In 2015, just 17 ships crossed the passage, the US Coast Guard told The Guardian. 

This number is set to increase.

There are vast reserves of oil trapped under the Arctic Ocean, with huge geopolitical implications as Russia, the US, Canada, Norway, and Denmark compete to develop these resources, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

"Yes, we are concerned about this cruise ship [Crystal Serenity] going through but we have been concerned for a number of years because during the summer time Shell has been going up there to drill, other companies have been exploring, there has been an increase even in recreational sailors or adventure sailors going up there," Robert Papp, a former coast guard admiral and the State Department’s special envoy to the Arctic, told The Guardian. 

And as sea ice further declines in the Arctic, these new shipping lanes will increase pressures on local communities and wildlife — not to mention rescue operators — to handle the influx of people. 

The waters of the southern Arctic ocean are an important breeding ground for marine mammals, and the birds and fish they prey on. Shipping traffic will pose a huge threat to this "sensitive" ecosystem, according to the World Wildlife Fund. 

"An oil spill would mean our main food source would be contaminated and not suitable for consumption," Niore Iqalukjuak,  the manager of the Clyde River (a community in Nunavut, Canada) Hunters and Trappers Organization told Al Jazeera. "It would mean our way of life would basically change forever."

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NOW WATCH: Watch a US Navy submarine rise through the ice in the Arctic Circle