Rome (AFP) — Hundreds of people awoke in emergency shelters in Italy on Thursday after fleeing their homes following a series of strong quakes in the same region struck by a devastating tremor two months ago.

After a night of heavy rain, rescuers workers were trying to assess the full extent of the latest disaster in central Italy, which toppled buildings and injured dozens.

A series of aftershocks rattled the area through the night after two quakes with a magnitude of 5.5 and 6.1 struck on Wednesday evening and sent people fleeing their houses in terror.

"Many houses have collapsed. Our town is finished," Marco Rinaldi, mayor of the mountain town of Ussita, told Sky Italy television. "The second quake was a long, terrible one." One man was reported to have died of a heart attack, and dozens of people were injured, the authorities said.

The tremors struck an area northeast of the capital Rome near Amatrice, the town flattened by a 6.0-6.2 quake which killed almost 300 people and injured hundreds more in August.

The first 5.5 magnitude quake Wednesday sent people out of their residences, likely saving lives when the second, more destructive, 6.1 magnitude one struck two hours later. In both cases the epicenter was near the village of Visso in the central Marche region.

"I've felt a lot of earthquakes but that was the strongest I've ever felt. Fortunately, everyone had already left their homes after the first quake so I don't think anyone was hurt," Rinaldi said.

Several dozen people were treated for light injuries or shock, civil protection chief Fabrizio Curcio told a news conference, but no serious injuries had been reported. "Ultimately, the situation is not as catastrophic as might have been expected" given the strength of the tremors, he said. 

Bad weather

The quakes were felt in the capital Rome, where  residents also ran into the streets. The second was felt as far away as Venice in the far north, and Naples, south of the capital.

Visso is just 70 kilometers (45 miles) from Visso and also not far from L'Aquila where a powerful earthquake killed more than 300 in 2009. Italian television channels broadcast images of collapsed buildings and people standing dazed in front of their ruined houses.

"It is not very easy to make assessments in the dark and the weather is bad in the whole region. We will have to see more precisely in the light of day," said Curcio. Across the region, hospitals, a university residence, a retirement home and even a prison had to be evacuated.

"Tonight we're going to go. But tomorrow I don't know. The tents, I can't go there, it's too cold," a resident of Visso said on television.

For people who are unable to return home immediately, civil protection has arranged accommodation in gyms and prepared to reopen some of the tent camps which were set up after the August earthquake. 

"I want to thank those working in the rain in the earthquake zones. All of Italy is wrapping its arms around the communities that have been hit once again," Prime Minister Matteo Renzi tweeted.

In Rome, the quakes rattled windows and doors. The imposing foreign ministry headquarters was temporarily evacuated. A Serie A football match between Pescara and Atalanta was halted for several minutes when the first tremor hit.

'Like bombs falling' 

The mayor of Serravalle del Chienti, Gabriele Santamarianova, said the quake felt "like bombs were falling. We saw a cloud of dust, we don't yet know what has fallen down. We'll see once the sun comes up."

Castel Sant'Angelo's mayor Mauro Falcucci told Sky: "There is no electricity. There are bound to be house collapses. On top of this there are torrential rains."

The little town of some 300 people is near Arquata del Tronto, one of the areas worst hit in the August 24 earthquake. In Ascoli, another town hit hard in August, the mayor said spooked residents were fleeing by car.

Schools here and around the affected region will not open Thursday to allow officials to carry out safety checks.

Italy's national geophysics institute said the latest quakes were linked to the August one, which was followed by thousands of aftershocks, some of them very strong. "Aftershocks can last for a long time, sometimes for months," geologist Mario Tozzi said. 

Visso's mayor Giuliano Pazzaglini said telephone links in his town had been restored. But television images showed rubble piled outside a local church.

Dozens of aftershocks were recorded, with the strongest measuring 4.6, according to the Italian national geophysics institute.

In their first editions Thursday morning, several Italian newspapers headlined "The unending nightmare". August's disaster caused an estimated four billion euros ($4.5 billion) of damage, with 1,400 people still living in temporary accommodation.

Around two-thirds of the deaths occurred in Amatrice, a popular tourist destination packed with holiday-makers when the quake struck at the height of the summer season.

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The number of wild animals living on Earth is set to fall by two-thirds by 2020, according to a new report, part of a mass extinction that is destroying the natural world upon which humanity depends.

The analysis, the most comprehensive to date, indicates that animal populations plummeted by 58% between 1970 and 2012, with losses on track to reach 67% by 2020. Researchers from WWF and the Zoological Society of London compiled the report from scientific data and found that the destruction of wild habitats, hunting and pollution were to blame.

The creatures being lost range from mountains to forests to rivers and the seas and include well-known endangered species such as elephants and gorillas and lesser known creatures such as vultures and salamanders.

The collapse of wildlife is, with climate change, the most striking sign of the Anthropocene, a proposed new geological era in which humans dominate the planet. "We are no longer a small world on a big planet. We are now a big world on a small planet, where we have reached a saturation point," said Prof Johan Rockström, executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, in a foreword for the report.

Marco Lambertini, director general of WWF, said: "The richness and diversity of life on Earth is fundamental to the complex life systems that underpin it. Life supports life itself and we are part of the same equation. Lose biodiversity and the natural world and the life support systems, as we know them today, will collapse."

He said humanity was completely dependent on nature for clean air and water, food and materials, as well as inspiration and happiness.

The report analyzed the changing abundance of more than 14,000 monitored populations of the 3,700 vertebrate species for which good data is available. This produced a measure akin to a stock market index that indicates the state of the world’s 64,000 animal species and is used by scientists to measure the progress of conservation efforts.

The biggest cause of tumbling animal numbers is the destruction of wild areas for farming and logging: the majority of the Earth’s land area has now been impacted by humans, with just 15% protected for nature. Poaching and exploitation for food is another major factor, due to unsustainable fishing and hunting: more than 300 mammal species are being eaten into extinction, according to recent research.

Pollution is also a significant problem with, for example, killer whales and dolphins in European seas being seriously harmed by long-lived industrial pollutants. Vultures in south-east Asia have been decimated over the last 20 years, dying after eating the carcasses of cattle dosed with an anti-inflammatory drug. Amphibians have suffered one of the greatest declines of all animals due to a fungal disease thought to be spread around the world by the trade in frogs and newts.

Rivers and lakes are the hardest hit habitats, with animals populations down by 81% since 1970, due to excessive water extraction, pollution and dams. All the pressures are magnified by global warming, which shifts the ranges in which animals are able to live, said WWF’s director of science, Mike Barrett.

Some researchers have reservations about the report’s approach, which summarizes many different studies into a headline number. "It is broadly right, but the whole is less than the sum of the parts," said Prof Stuart Pimm, at Duke University in the US, adding that looking at particular groups, such as birds, is more precise.

The report warns that losses of wildlife will impact on people and could even provoke conflicts: "Increased human pressure threatens the natural resources that humanity depends upon, increasing the risk of water and food insecurity and competition over natural resources."

However, some species are starting to recover, suggesting swift action could tackle the crisis. Tiger numbers are thought to be increasing and the giant panda has recently been removed from the list of endangered species.

In Europe, protection of the habitat of the Eurasian lynx and controls on hunting have seen its population rise fivefold since the 1960s. A recent global wildlife summit also introduced new protection for pangolins, the world’s most trafficked mammals, and rosewoods, the most trafficked wild product of all.

But stemming the overall losses of animals and habitats requires systemic change in how society consumes resources, said Barrett. People can choose to eat less meat, which is often fed on grain grown on deforested land, and businesses should ensure their supply chains, such as for timber, are sustainable, he said.

"You’d like to think that was a no-brainer in that if a business is consuming the raw materials for its products in a way that is not sustainable, then inevitably it will eventually put itself out of business," Barrett said. Politicians must also ensure all their policies - not just environmental ones - are sustainable, he added.

"The report is certainly a pretty shocking snapshot of where we are," said Barrett. "My hope though is that we don’t throw our hands up in despair - there is no time for despair, we have to crack on and act. I do remain convinced we can find our sustainable course through the Anthropocene, but the will has to be there to do it."

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For the past million years or so, the Earth has gone through an ice age every 100,000 years. Nobody knows precisely why. Before that, colder summers occurred about every 40,000 years until the Earth entered a phase called the middle Pleistocene transition in which the intervals became over twice as long.

Researchers at Cardiff University have just put forward a new theory — published in the journal Geology— about why this cycle changed so dramatically. As it turns out, some of the answers may lie at the bottom of the ocean.

The team studied the fossils of tiny marine algae, small photosynthetic organisms that act like the trees of the ocean by sucking up carbon dioxide. Algae in the different layers of sediment were shown to have stored varying levels of carbon dioxide, and there were much higher levels in the particular layers that were formed every 100,000 years.

This means there was probably less carbon dioxide left in the atmosphere at these points, and this could have influenced lower temperatures, potentially allowing vast sheets of ice to engulf North America, Europe, and Asia.

The team looked toward the ocean for answers because of the vast amount of information that can be gained there relative to other sources.

"It's really difficult to get good records of past climate changes on land, especially from this time period, because the ice sheets themselves are really good at destroying their own geological record," lead researcher Carrie Lear, a professor of earth science at Cardiff University, told Business Insider. "But there is a continuous accumulation of sediment on the seafloor, which we can study."

As for why this happens in a 100,000-year cycle, Lear said the most likely cause is a combination of factors. For example, ocean circulation patterns — the movement of water through the seas — adjust the amount of carbon dioxide that can be trapped underwater because they affect the water's salinity and temperature.

Ocean temperatures can have a huge impact on the planet

When oceans are colder, they can absorb more carbon dioxide. As the temperature increases, more gas molecules leave the water than enter it. This theory also provides an explanation for how global warming is related to the increase of carbon in the atmosphere.

"You can start with a small change in climate, which changes the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and then leads to a bigger change in climate," Lear said.

The Earth is currently in a warm spell, as the most recent ice age occurred about 11,000 years ago. There is no particular temperature that signifies an ice age; they are just defined as periods of time when large ice sheets cover the planet.

"Technically we are still in an ice age now, as we have a large ice sheet on Antarctica and Greenland," Lear said.

SEE ALSO: One of the world's biggest archaeological mysteries is melting away before our eyes

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Oil-well fires have raged for months near Mosul, Iraq, and US soldiers in the region are choking on the toxic smoke and haze.

ISIS chose Mosul as its stronghold in the country about two years ago and have prepared for an assault ever since, according to Peter Bergen at CNN.

But as part of more recent efforts to slow the advance of Iraqi and Kurdish forces backed by a US-led coalition, which aims to take back the city and nearby towns and villages, ISIS militants torched oil wells and a sulfur mine near Qayyarah, located about 40 miles south of Mosul.

The plumes of fumes are so large that NASA can see them spreading into nearby countries from space. Meanwhile, soldiers and civilians on the ground are breathing it in. (Although the US has no ground troops in the Mosul advance, they are stationed nearby to provide air and intelligence support.)

Bill Duncan, a US soldier stationed in the region, has been photographing the scene from his base and posting the images to National Geographic's "Your Shot" photography site. Duncan gave Business Insider permission to republish his photos here, along with captions he wrote, yet declined to comment further on his situation.

Here are some of Duncan's arresting photos, plus other images from war photographers and satellites that reveal what Duncan describes as a problem that could "haunt us for years to come."

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ISIS militants set fire to oil wells months ago near Qayyarah. A more recent sulfur plant fire (white smoke) has since been extinguished.

Source: Business Insider

However, such blazes release clouds of a noxious gas called sulfur dioxide. On contact with moisture — including wet skin and a person's lungs — it turns to sulfuric acid. The damage can persist in soil and people for years.

Source: Business Insider

Civilians and soldiers in the region are suffering through the fumes.

Warm, salty water laps against a frozen ceiling in the dark.

Each brush against the glacier's bottom leaves its ice a little thinner, and adds a few drops to a pool hidden miles beneath the Antarctic surface.

The Smith Glacier, part of a complex of ice flows in Antarctica's Amundsen Sea, is melting.

Smith and the other Amundsen Sea glaciers are part of a complex of ice flows in the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet that together lock away enough water to raise global sea levels by about ten feet.

Sea level rises of just millimeters have already wiped out islands and threatened whole nations. An increase on the order of feet, which scientists expect in the next century due to Antarctic melting, would pose an existential risk to low-lying coastal cities from New York to Mumbai.

For the last decade and a half, the Amundsen Sea glaciers have been in retreat. Smith, along with Pope Glacier, Kohler Glacier, and the larger Pine Island Glacier and Thwaites Glacier have all moved backward from their 20th Century extents.

These are massive blocks of ice, their thickness measured in kilometers and miles, not feet. Walk along the surface of one, and it will look still and solid.

But far from view, warm water has opened cavities beneath regions that were once frozen all the way to the rocky bottom. Undermined, the glaciers retreat faster and sink, losing their thickness.

A paper published in Nature on Monday shows that the worst period for glacial retreat was sometime between 2002 and 2009. Airborne radar systems showed rapid ice loss and thinning, the result of an influx of ocean heat breaking through beneath the local ice sheets.

But flyovers between 2009 and 2014 show the ice seems to have been pushed to higher ground, where less warm water can fit underneath. So melting across several glaciers has slowed — for the moment.

But Smith Glacier is the exception. Smith's retreat left it suspended over a trench, more than 6,000 feet deep. That's allowed warm water to continue to flow beneath it. Its melting and thinning has scarcely slowed, even as the ice around it has relaxed in the high-speed rearward march.

That leaves Smith Glacier the tip of the spear of Antarctic glacial ice loss in the Amundsen Sea, one of the fastest-melting regions in the West Antarctic. Its future is still uncertain, but the glacier is a big part of the larger story of rapid melt at the South Pole — a process with repercussions all around the world.

SEE ALSO: Earth's atmosphere now has carbon dioxide levels unseen for 15 million years, and we might be past the point of no return

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NOW WATCH: Receding ice caps may expose a top-secret US nuclear project that could poison the Atlantic

It's been four years since Hurricane (or Superstorm) Sandy made landfall, causing nearly $50 billion in damage across just New York City and New Jersey.

But researchers are still only just beginning to reckon with how historic and rare a storm Sandy was. The giant, slow moving monster hung around New York City for three days, pushing water onto land. The result was levels of flooding unseen in the modern era, swamping the subway system and causing damage that still hasn't been entirely repaired.

A new paper accepted for publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans October 21 shows that Sandy-level storm floods are intensely rare, probably only happening once in every 260 years.

Orton's model used present sea level conditions, and didn't directly account for climate change. In the future, he said, rising seas make the risk of a Sandy-like event significantly more likely.

Head researcher Philip Orton, who studies ocean physics at the Stevens Institute of Technology, collected data on past storms to create a model that estimated how often a storm like Hurricane Sandy would happen. In the process Orton showed that no hurricane, tropical storm, or northeaster had caused as much flooding in the New York City area since at least 1700.

Before that date, we simply don't know what happened, Orton told Business Insider.

Two hurricanes, in 1788 and 1821, probably hit New York and New Jersey as Category 3 storms. But they were smaller and faster-moving, and didn't stick around long enough to push anywhere near as much water onto land as Sandy did.

While the risk of a Sandy-like flood will creep upward over time, Orton said, it's important that people understand that the risk in the next is still fairly low. More urgent is the task of preparing for more common, mid-sized floods in the area. Down the road, with rising sea levels, the threat of a Sandy-like event will grow.

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Hurricane Sandy was a freak storm.

The massive system was the costliest storm to strike the US since Katrina.

When it made landfall four years ago on October 29, 2012, it impacted a region from Florida to Ontario, Canada, flooded the New York subway system and wreaked havoc on coastal New Jersey. The total damage to New York City was worth $19 billion and to New Jersey $29 billion.

Now, the big question is: How likely is it that a Sandy-level storm will happen again in our lifetimes?

In the past, studies have pegged Sandy as anywhere from a 100-year storm to a 1,500 year storm. That means that in any given year there's a 1/100 to 1/1,500 chance of a storm causing Sandy-level flooding.

A new paper accepted for publication in the Journal of Geophysical Research October 21 offers a more precise estimate: Sandy was a 260-year storm, based on current ocean conditions. That includes tropical cyclones like Sandy as well as winter storms like northeasters, lead author Philip Orton, who studies ocean physics at the Stevens Institute of Technology, told Business Insider.

Calling Sandy a 260-year event doesn't mean it'll take 260 years to see another storm like it.

What that 260-year-storm label means is that in any given year there is a 1/260 chance of a Sandy-like storm flood happening. That's about the same chance that the 2016 presidential election will end in a tie, according to the website Fivethirtyeight.

To get this result, Orton fed data on past storms into a flood model of the area from Maryland to Cape Cod, then simulated thousands of storms to see what kind of flooding they would cause.

Severe hurricanes in the New York City area are pretty rare, so to make sure he had enough data he dug into the histories of storms dating back to 1700. In the process, he showed that no storm has caused as much flooding as Sandy in recorded history.

Two Category 3 hurricanes, in 1788 and 1821, packed more of a wind punch than Sandy. But they were smaller and faster moving, so they caused less flooding. Sandy stands out because it remained in the area for about three days, pushing waving after unrelenting wave onto land to cause historic floods.

Orton set the model to generate results for conditions as they exist today, not accounting for future sea level changes due to climate change. The goal, he said, was to get a baseline for major flood risks in the area in the next decade

Future studies can run the same model with adjusted sea levels to see how bad things might get in our changing world.

His results, he said, show that people should take the threat of major storms like Sandy seriously, and work to protect against them in a changing world. But they also show that people shouldn't panic, and that smaller, more common floods are the more immediate concern.

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NOW WATCH: Watch time-lapse video of a massive storm flooding a DC Metro station

Dying isn't always an Earth-friendly business.

Decomposing bodies in coffins buried in the ground can emit large amounts of methane, a harmful greenhouse gas.

That, along with the formaldehyde that's used to get the body preserved for burial makes for not-so-sustainable burial practices.

And while the vast majority of people opt for either traditional burial or cremation, there are other ways to be memorialized that do less damage to the planet.

1. Turn your body into a tree

Developed by Italian designers, this sustainable burial practice will turn your remains into tree food. Anna Citelli and Raoul Bretzel, the creators of Capsula Mundi (pictured here) want to change the way Italy buries its loved ones with their pod-like design using eco-friendly materials.

You're buried inside a biodegradable egg-shaped pod while in the fetal position. When you're buried, a tree gets planted on top. Then the idea is that as the pod begins to decompose, the body can turn into minerals that feed the tree. Bretzel and Mundi hope to change the traditional cemetery into a "sacred forest."

2. Use dry ice 

Traditionally, families burying their loved ones will have them embalmed, so that the decomposing process doesn't start right away. Usually, this is done with formaldehyde, a known human carcinogen (which, of course doesn't affect those being embalmed, but rather those doing the embalming).

Instead, some people are turning to dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide) as a way to keep bodies preserved until they are interred. This keeps the body from decomposing without needing embalming, though you do have to change out the ice every day. Though carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, the amount released from the dry ice used in body preservation is a pretty small percentage of overall CO2 emissions.

3. Furnish your home with a shelf that doubles as a coffin

Instead of using your wooden coffin only as your final resting place, William Warren had the idea of making a set of shelves that can be converted to a coffin when the time is right. This upcycled version makes the wood useful for longer, and as Warren remarks on his website, "the wood will colour, the surfaces will mark and stain and over the years and the furniture will become a part of you." Warren designed the shelves and debuted them at the 2005 London Design Festival, though you can ask him for directions on how to may your own set of shelves-turned-coffin.

Plus, you get the added fun of telling all your guests about it while giving them a tour of your house and seeing their bewildered expressions.

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You have to admit, it doesn't sound like must-watch TV: a National Geographic Channel documentary about climate change starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Mixing together the science of our damaged planet and the guy who fought the bear in the movie "The Revenant" seems like a bit of an odd choice.

But the combination works. DiCaprio steps into the role of science journalist, interviewing researchers, innovators, and people living in parts of the world where severe impacts of climate change are already being felt. The film trades in charts and jargon for stunning images of climate catastrophes already underway.

"Before the Flood" is so powerful because it presents climate change as it a really is: a global threat that links together people separated by class and geography.

The film was directed by the Academy Award-winning documentarian Fisher Stevens (of "The Cove").

Stevens told Business Insider that he isn't trying to change the minds of people who are convinced of the myth that climate change is part of some strange global hoax. Rather, he wants to offer children and young people access to science, and give them the tools to fight to protect the planet.

"Before the Flood" will air on the National Geographic Channel at 9 pm ET Sunday, and is available in full on YouTube below.

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NOW WATCH: A photographer reveals how climate change ruins people's lives

If you've felt warm this week — too warm for the end of October — you're not alone. Much of the United States is experiencing record-breaking Halloween temperatures that are expected to continue through at least Wednesday.

As Weather.com reports, the record-breaking highs will likely cover an area from Arizona to the Southeast and Midwest. Atlanta, Phoenix, Louisville, Nashville, and Cincinnati could all break records for heat this late in the year.

The record-breaking early-November weather comes after an already record-breaking October.

On Sunday alone, temperature records fell in Atlanta, Georgia (86 degrees), Meridian Mississippi (90 degrees), Birmingham, Alabama (87 degrees), Knoxville, Tennessee (83 degrees), New Orleans (87 degrees), Austin (88 degrees), Washington DC (84 degrees), Harrisburg, Pennsylvania (81 degrees), and Atlantic City, New Jersey (80 degrees) according to Weather.com's report.

On Thursday, October 27, Phoenix, Arizona reached 100 degrees, another record.

Globally speaking, 2016 was already the hottest year ever recorded — and the third record-breaking year in a row. (Next year should be a respite from the cascade of historic heat records, due to La Niña.)

There's no longer any debate among researchers (and hasn't been for a long while) that these changing climate patterns are a consequence of human emissions creating atmospheric conditions not seen on our planet for 15 million years.

It's a powerful and sharp deviation from our planet's natural cycles, and we're already living through the early consequences.

All of which is to say: You might want to get used to a lot more record-breaking heat in the future.

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NOW WATCH: Here's what could happen to Earth over the next 500 years

Thousands of protesters have been camping out for months in Cannon Ball, North Dakota, to protest the building of the Dakota Access Pipeline, a proposed 1,172-mile oil project that would shuttle half a million barrels of North Dakota-produced oil to refining markets in Illinois.

The protesters, which include representatives from more than 100 Native American tribes, have camped out on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation nestled along the border between North Dakota and South Dakota along the Missouri River.

They are there because the proposed pipeline would pass through North Dakota's Lake Oahe, a burial site sacred to the Standing Rock Sioux and a major source of drinking water for the community. "The main reason it's such a big deal here is that it's going to affect our water supply," Aries Yumul, an assistant principal at North Dakota's Todd County School District and a self-identified water protector with the Oceti Sakowin, the proper name for the people commonly known as the Sioux, told Business Insider.

Should the pipeline leak or burst, the impact could be devastating.

And leak pipelines do. Since 1995, more than 2,000 significant accidents involving oil and petroleum pipelines have occurred, adding up to roughly $3 billion in property damage, according to data obtained by the Associated Press from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration. From 2013 to 2015, an average of 121 accidents happened every year.

Actors Shailene Woodley, Susan Sarandon, and Rosario Dawson are among celebrities who have joined thousands of activists in nearby rallies and demonstrations in support of the Standing Rock Sioux. The project has been halted since last month, when the Obama administration blocked construction on federal land and asked the company behind the project, Dakota Access, a subsidiary of Energy Transfer Partners LLP, to suspend work nearby.

Contaminated water is a massive health problem

An in-depth 2010 report from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, which looked at the effects of three major oil spills, found increased incidences of cancer and digestive problems in people who had ingested the oil directly (in drinking water) or indirectly (through eating the meat of livestock exposed to the oil).

In addition, people who had used contaminated water for bathing or laundry appeared to experience a higher incidence of skin problems, ranging from mild rashes to severe and lasting eczema and malignant skin cancers.

With risks this high, most large-scale environmental projects require extensive legal review

To build the pipeline, the Army Corps of Engineers, the group in charge of the project, must comply with several environmental laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act. Passed in 1970, NEPA's basic policy is to ensure that the government considers the potential environmental impacts of any federal project, like a new highway or airport, before building it.

The Standing Rock Sioux claim this review process, in the case of the Dakota Access Pipeline, was not done properly. In a lawsuit it filed in July against the Army Corps of Engineers, the group claims the permitting process was rushed and undertaken largely without its input.

If the pipeline were to leak or burst, it would send oil deep into the Missouri River, the Standing Rock Sioux's single source of water— water the group relies on for everything from bathing to drinking. For that reason, the Standing Rock Sioux say the Army Corps of Engineers could violate not just one but two laws: NEPA as well as the Clean Water Act. The 1972 Clean Water Act makes it unlawful to discharge any pollutant from single identifiable source — such as a pipe — into certain bodies of water without a permit.

"The Missouri River is the tribe's only source of water. If this leaks, it is going to spill into the river. So the tribe's legal stance — that they were not adequately consulted, that there are potential water issues here — their legal concerns are strong,"Devashree Saha, a senior policy associate at Brookings Institution, told Business Insider.

Dakota Access responded to Business Insider's request for comment by stating in an email, " Crude pipelines in the country have a very specific review and approval process that must be followed. Crude/oil lines are approved at the state level, which is why all of the review and environmental analysis was done by the four states through which this pipeline passes. The exception to that is the crossing of waterways and federally-owned land, which are under the jurisdiction of the Army Corps of Engineers to review and approve."

The pipeline was originally designed to run much farther north, near the North Dakota capital of Bismarck. But as Bill McKibben writes in The New Yorker, officials rerouted it when people there raised concerns that it could put that community's water supply in jeopardy.

But now, instead of risking Bismarck, the new route could threaten the Standing Rock Sioux.

"Our aquifers and rivers are fed by this river," Yumul, the assistant principal, said. "If it were to get contaminated, it would affect all of the tribal nations. The idea of that ... it would be a death sentence at this point."

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With so many stunning natural wonders in the world and a small number of vacation days in which to see them, there’s an argument to be made for prioritizing the places that might not be around in 40 years.

Some of the planet's most awe-inspiring destinations are at risk of being destroyed or irrevocably altered by increased population, climate change, pollution, and ecological extinction. And it's not the just low-lying islands that are in danger of vanishing. From national parks inGuatemala and Florida to areas in Alaska, here are six other places you should visit ASAP before they’re gone. 

SEE ALSO: People at the front lines of the battle over the Dakota Access Pipeline are calling it a 'death sentence'

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More than 10 million elephants roamed the forests and savannas of Africa at the beginning of the 20th century. There are now fewer than 500,000 in the wild. The total remaining population of African savanna elephants decreased by nearly a third between 2007 and 2014, according to a recent survey, while African forest elephants are in even worse shape, with populations dropping 60% between 2002 and 2011.

Some elephants are killed by people who don't want them near villages or farms (though this is less common now than in the past and may happen more frequently to Asian than to African elephants). Others are hunted so their meat can be sold. But by far, the vast majority of these creatures are killed so their ivory tusks can be cut off and sold by organized crime syndicates, usually to consumers in Asia.

And while there are plenty of reasons one might find the mass killing of incredibly intelligent animals for their tusks disturbing, a study newly published in the journal Nature Communications provides additional motivation to fight back against poaching: It makes economic sense.

Right now, poaching costs African economies about $25 million a year in lost tourism dollars — and driving creatures to extinction would make this situation even worse.

"We know that within parks, tourism suffers when elephant poaching ramps up. This work provides a first estimate of the scale of that loss, and shows pretty convincingly that stronger conservation efforts usually make sound economic sense even when looking at just this one benefit stream," study co-author Professor Andrew Balmford, from the University of Cambridge's Department of Zoology, said in a press release emailed to Business Insider.

Where the money goes

More people visit nature reserves that have more elephants, according to the analysis done by the researchers. This is especially true in Southern, Eastern, and Western Africa. In those regions, the money you'd have to spend to stop poachers is less than the return on investment you'd see from tourism dollars, according to the study.

Stopping poachers is not easy. First, poaching operations can be highly coordinated and well armed, with some poachers even killing elephants from helicopters using automatic weapons. That's because the international ivory market is massive, dwarfing even the "tourism value" of the elephants. From 2010 to 2012, the researchers write, the value of poached elephant ivory on Chinese black markets is estimated at $597 million.

But that black market money only goes to crime syndicates, who buy ivory in places like Kenya for about $3 a kilo and sell it for more than $1,100 a kilo. The tourism value of elephants might represent less money overall, but it's still a significant amount of money that would go to local residents instead of to organized crime.

In the forests of Central Africa, where there's less tourism to see harder-to-spot elephants that reproduce more slowly than their savanna kin, it may cost more to stop poaching than countries would see in return from tourism. Stopping poachers in dense, hard-to-traverse regions like the Congo presents additional challenges. This means that an alternative funding mechanism to capture public attention for anti-poaching efforts there may be needed, the authors write. Still, they argue that the $25 million lost to poaching overall is a very conservative estimate at the moment, especially since it doesn't measure how much a diverse ecosystem is worth.

Frequently, doing the thing that's of greater global benefit is worth it. Researchers have argued that— for example — pushing to eliminate malaria is costly, but the net benefit in improved health and ability to work still comes out to be more than $200 billion from 2013 to 2035. That's a big value, but it's still not easy to muster the necessary political will. It seems that elephant conservation can fit into a similar bucket — hard to do, but worth it if it can be done.

"While there have always been strong moral and ethical reasons for conserving elephants, not everyone shares this viewpoint," said Dr. Robin Naidoo, lead wildlife scientist at WWF and lead author on the study, in the press release. "Our research now shows that investing in elephant conservation is actually smart economic policy for many African countries."

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The INSIDER Summary:

• A study suggests that the production and distribution of single-use plastic bags produces less pollution than reusable bags. 
• People never actually reuse their bags. 

Reusable tote bags are like the Bourne movies. At first they were the best. A way to eliminate disposable plastic bags? YES. A film about a broody and resourceful assassin with amnesia? Sign me up for three. But then things went off the rails, and all of a sudden we were inundated with unneeded tote bags that we consistently forgot to take to the store, and Jeremy Renner was there for some reason, and no one was having fun anymore. There are now simply too many tote bags (and too many Bourne movies) in existence.

Think of it like this. There’s, what, 300 million people in the United States? Let’s suppose the average person consumes enough groceries to fill two reusable tote bags per week. If that’s the case, only 600 million reusable tote bags need to exist in this country at any given time.

Now, this is just a guess, but I suspect there’s at least 600 million reusable tote bags out there, which means we can stop making them. I hate to call for the layoff of thousands of workers at the tote mills, but, guys, we have a sufficient amount of bags. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

The problem is that caring about the environment has become a look, and that look has been co-opted by the Titans of Industry and turned for a profit. Target selling trendy canvas totes is the same as Target selling Nirvana T-shirts—they’ve taken something that used to have real meaning and turned it into an aesthetic. Tote bags look chic and progressive, and so businesses and nonprofits and publishers and museums are selling them or handing them out for free, and now they’re so abundant they’re basically disposable.

Which is problematic, because tote bags can actually be way worse for the environment than disposable bags.

Per a study by the UK Environmental Agency in 2008, the production and distribution of single-use plastic bags produces less carbon and other pollution than paper bags, recycled plastic totes, and cotton totes. To achieve the same emissions-per-use ratio as a disposable plastic bag, you’d have to use your cotton tote 131 times just to break even. Say you go shopping once a week: It’ll take you more than three years of using that classic Trader Joe’s canvas bag to be as efficient as using and throwing away 131 disposable bags.

Those plastic totes, though, like the Lululemon bags everyone seems to have, are actually much more efficient, requiring only 11 uses to break even with the impact of using 11 disposable plastic bags. So, yes, shopping with a tote bag can be better than using and throwing away disposable plastic bags—but only if you really commit.

Since we’re forgetful people, though, we’re never not going to leave our reusable bags at home from time to time. In that case taking a single-use plastic bag is a better bet than than grabbing a paper bag or, God forbid, yet another reusable bag. At this point, it seems we may as well vote no on Prop 67, lift the plastic bag ban, and at least ensure that our irresponsibility has a minimal impact on the climate. Pumping out more and more reusable bags is certainly getting us nowhere. And maybe, someday, we’ll actually use the tote bags we have stockpiled in the cupboard below the sink—because odds are we already have enough of them to last the rest of our lives.

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Gregory Mankiw is a Harvard professor, one of the most influential economists in the world, and a Republican. He served as Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors under President George W. Bush, and advised both the 2008 and 2012 Mitt Romney campaigns for president.

And he thinks the US needs a carbon tax.

In an interview with National Geographic — conducted, incidentally, by actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who stepped into the role of science reporter for "Before the Flood"— Mankiw explained why he believes a carbon tax is the best option for curbing US emissions.

A "carbon tax" is actually a series of taxes that increases the cost of activities like burning coal or buying gasoline that pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

"You want to tax bad activities that have negative effects on other people in society," he said. "We raised the price of cigarettes by putting a tax on cigarettes, people then consume fewer cigarettes."

Carbon dioxide is a key contributor to climate change — accounting for 80.9% of all US greenhouse gas emissions. It gets released into the atmosphere when fossil fuels, wood, and solid wastes burn, and absorbed by plants.

Scientists agree that human activity has caused atmospheric carbon dioxide to spike dramatically in the last half-century to levels not seen on Earth in 15 million years, leading tosevereconsequences the world over.

(Donald Trump, the chosen presidential nominee of Mankiw's party, does not seem to accept this observable reality.)

"I think trying to appeal to people's social responsibility [to reduce emissions] is really very very very hard, because people have lives and they have lots of things to worry about. They don't want to think about climate change every time they do every decision. They can't," Mankiw said.

"What a carbon tax does is it nudges them in the direction of doing the right thing," he said.

DiCaprio said he was surprised a Republican would support a new tax.

"Well one of the important things to keep in mind is that if you have a carbon tax, you can turn around and cut other taxes in response," Mankiw said. "For example, the payroll tax. So this is a tax shift, rather than a tax hike."

Given that Mankiw has served so prominently in a presidential administration, DiCaprio asked, "how come we don't have a carbon tax already?"

"Well, politicians don't always do what professors want them to do," Mankiw said.

He compared the issue to gay marriage. Obama ran in 2008 opposing gay marriage, but came around once the polls (and Vice President Joe Biden) did.

"We need to preach to the American people," Mankiw said. "Once the American people are convinced, politicians fall in line very quickly."

Watch the documentary "Before the Flood" below.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama has weighed in on the ongoing protests against the construction of an oil pipeline in North Dakota, saying the U.S. government is examining ways to reroute it and address concerns raised by Native American tribes.

Obama's comments late on Tuesday to online news site Now This were his first to directly address the escalating clashes between local authorities and protesters over Energy Transfer Partners' $3.8 billion Dakota Access pipeline project.

"My view is that there is a way for us to accommodate sacred lands of Native Americans. And I think that right now the Army Corps is examining whether there are ways to reroute this pipeline," Obama said in the video interview.

The U.S. Justice and Interior Departments along with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers halted construction of part of the pipeline in September due to protests by Native American tribes who contend the pipeline would disturb sacred land and pollute waterways supplying nearby homes. The affected area includes land under Lake Oahe, a large and culturally important reservoir on the Missouri River where the line was supposed to cross.

Construction is continuing on sections of the pipeline away from the Missouri River, U.S. refiner Phillips 66 said.

Obama said government agencies will let the situation "play out for several more weeks and determine whether or not this can be resolved in a way that I think is properly attentive to the traditions of First Americans."

The fight against the pipeline has drawn international attention and growing celebrity support amid confrontations between riot police and protesters.

The 1,172-mile (1,885-km) pipeline, being built by a group of companies led by Energy Transfer Partners, would offer the fastest and most direct route to bring Bakken shale oil from North Dakota to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries.

At a Sept. 27 White House summit for tribal nations, Obama did not directly comment on plans to deal with the pipeline protests but acknowledged the swell of support for the Standing Rock Sioux tribe.

"This moment highlights why it's so important that we redouble our efforts to make sure that every federal agency truly consults and listens and works with you, sovereign to sovereign," he said at the event. 

(Reporting by Valerie Volcovici; Editing by Will Dunham)

SEE ALSO: People at the front lines of the battle over the Dakota Access Pipeline are calling it a 'death sentence'

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The climate is changing and the seas are rising. But some of the trends are easier to predict than others.

Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere reached levels not seen for 15 million years just as scientists predicted, and all but one of the warmest years ever recorded have happened since 2000. (The exception? 1998.)

This is bad news for a long list of reasons. But here's a big one: Melting ice sheets threaten to radically raise sea levels, leading to increased flood disasters and disappearing coastal cities. And we know that global sea levels have already begun to rise. Just ask the peoples of the several low-lying nations that are disappearing beneath the waves.

Sea level is more complicated to precisely measure and predict than other climate factors, however. And a new study suggests that global sea level rise is happening at roughly twice the rate that previously models envisioned.

The ocean, much like the atmosphere, is a giant churning mass — not the same temperature or level at any point. And we have a lot fewer data points by which to measure it, for the simple reason that water isn't where most of the people are.

In fact, most of our historical data on sea levels comes from devices call tide gauges. Tide gauges bob and dip with the rising and lowering sea, marking the changing levels as they go. And there are continuous gauge records going back hundreds of years.

But there's reason to believe those records may not tell the full story of how sea levels have changed.

A study published October 9 in the journal Geophysical Research suggests a simple reason tide gauge records may lead scientists to underestimate sea level rise: There aren't enough of them, and they're in the wrong places.

Current estimates of sea level rise, drawn from tide gauge records, have the oceans gaining 1.5 to 1.8 millimeters per year — already enough to flood major cities in living lifetimes without any acceleration. (And we know it will accelerate.) 

The problem is those estimates come from gauges that weren't built to track global sea levels. Instead, they're clustered around North Atlantic coastal cities, where they were initially installed to help monitor shipping lanes. Unfortunately, the North Atlantic may not be the best place to measure sea level rise. Meltwater from major ice sheets actually tends to flow away from there, often toward the southern hemisphere.

In other words, the dramatic sea level increases already measured may not account for the real surge going on across the world.

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California is in the middle of its fifth year in drought. Experts say it has been the worst the state has seen in 1,200 years.

Dwindling reservoirs, shrinking lakes, and dried-up farm fields dot the state's landscape — and despite some recent signs of recovery, the overall outlook is still ominously dry.

Across the state, reservoirs remain far below their capacity and, more importantly, far below their historical average. And California isn't alone. Last year, Dean Farrell of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill made a stunning interactive graphic showing the shrinking state of reservoirs across the western US. Still, California stands out, with its reservoirs at roughly 46% of their total capacity.

These images, taken by the USGS and NASA Landsat 7 and 8 satellites and collected by the online lake reference site Lakepedia, show what 10 California reservoirs looked like in September or October of 2001 ("before") and what each reservoir looked like in the same month of 2016 ("after").

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Lake San Antonio: Before (Sept. 2001)

Lake San Antonio: After (Sept. 2016)

Together with Lake Nacimiento, Lake San Antonio is key to recharging the aquifers that provide water to Southern Monterey County. In January of this year, Lake San Antonio sat at just 3% of capacity, according to the Monterey Herald. Engineers call reservoirs that are this decimated "dead pools" because gravity can't draw any water from them at such low quantities.

Sources: Lakepedia; Monterey County Water Resources Agency Dam and Reservoir Daily Data 2016; Monterey County Water Resources Agency San Antonio Storage Chart 2014; Monterey Herald 2016

Lake Cachuma: Before

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) — President Barack Obama has raised the possibility of a reroute of the four-state Dakota Access oil pipeline in southern North Dakota to allay the concerns of American Indians and others who have demonstrated against the project for months. The president says the US. Army Corps of Engineers is examining alternatives but the agency has not disclosed them and a spokeswoman declined comment.

Some questions and answers about a possible reroute:

What's the current route, and what's the problem?

The 1,172-mile, $3.8 billion pipeline being built by Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners would carry oil from North Dakota through South Dakota and Iowa to a shipping point at Patoka, Illinois. It will skirt the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation that straddles the North Dakota-South Dakota border.

The Standing Rock Sioux object to the project, saying it could threaten drinking water and destroy sacred sites.

About 350 miles of the pipeline would pass through North Dakota at a cost of about $1.4 billion, making it the longest and most expensive leg of the project. It crosses the Missouri River twice and the Little Missouri once in North Dakota.

Construction of the pipeline is nearly done across North Dakota, with the exception of about a mile-long section across federal land and beneath Lake Oahe, a Missouri River reservoir. The company is still awaiting an easement from the US Army Corps of Engineers to start work there.

Did the company look at other routes in North Dakota?

Yes. The company said in documents to North Dakota regulators that it considered other possible routes but none of them were considered a "viable alternative." The route picked in North Dakota parallels the existing Northern Border Pipeline, which crosses the Dakotas as it carries natural gas from Canada and the US to the Chicago area.

The Dakota Access pipeline uses a nearly identical route as the natural gas pipeline to cross Lake Oahe near the Standing Rock reservation. The company did consider — but did not propose — deviating from the natural gas route, through a crossing of the Missouri River north of Bismarck, and about 50 miles upstream of the current location. But the Corps said in an environmental review that the crossing wasn't viable since it was more than 10 miles longer and required crossing more water, wetlands and real estate, and posed a potential threat to Bismarck's water supply.

Is the tribe opposed to any route?

Not necessarily. Standing Rock Sioux Chairman Dave Archambault has said that the tribe does not oppose oil pipelines if they do not threaten water sources, environmentally sensitive areas or sacred sites. He said a route that would follow existing west-east and north-south oil pipeline corridors that avoid Missouri River crossings would be acceptable to him.

What's the company's position?

Energy Transfer Partners isn't eager to embrace a reroute.

The company warned in court documents months ago that a one-year delay in construction would mean $1.4 billion in lost revenue. On Wednesday, it said in a statement it's not aware of any plans for a new route in North Dakota, and it remains "confident we will receive our easement in a timely fashion."

The company has been confident of building the pipeline since it was first announced about two years ago and days after Republican Gov. Jack Dalrymple called on the industry and government officials to build more pipelines to keep pace with the state's oil production.

Energy Transfer Partners was so eager to build the pipeline that it began staging mountainous piles of steel pipe across the four-state route before it had gotten all necessary easements and regulatory approval from federal regulators, as well as those in North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa and Illinois.

What have North Dakota regulators said?

North Dakota's Public Service Commission, a state regulatory agency with jurisdiction over everything from pipelines to auctioneers, doesn't like the idea of a reroute or going through the permit approval process again.

Chairwoman Julie Fedorchak said Wednesday she has "grave concerns" about requiring more regulatory hoops for "a company that has already completed the process and received the permits. I just don't think that's good public policy."

Commissioner Brian Kalk said the concerns of the Standing Rock Sioux are legitimate but "this is a very good route. If you're going to build a pipeline, this is as safe as it can be built."

SEE ALSO: People at the front lines of the battle over the Dakota Access Pipeline are calling it a 'death sentence'

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