global briefs
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Plog On
Picking Up Litter While Jogging Becomes a Winning Trend
Sweden’s latest fitness craze, plogging, is a mashup of jogging and the Swedish plocka upp, meaning pick up, in this case, litter. There are plogging groups in Scandinavia, Germany and other parts of Europe. According to the Swedish fitness app Lifesum, which makes it possible for users to track plogging activity, a half-hour of jogging while picking up trash will burn 288 calories for the average person, compared with 235 via jogging alone. A brisk walk expends about 120 calories. The Washington Post reports that in the U.S., it’s just starting to catch on among exercisers fed up with rubbish along their routes. They carry trash bags and pluck litter and recyclables off sidewalks and bushes wearing gardening gloves for safety. The environmental organization Keep America Beautiful recently started promoting plogging to encourage trash-free communities, putting out the #plogging message to its 600 affiliates. Spokesman Mike Rosen reports that response has been surprisingly robust.
Sinking City
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Rising Sea Levels Threaten San Francisco
A paper published in the journal Science Advances reports sea-level rise projections for San Francisco and the Bay Area in California that had not previously factored in a geological phenomenon called subsidence—the settling or sinking of the land. When too much groundwater is pumped out of aquifers, the land on top sinks. In San Francisco, subsidence is occurring in areas developed atop artificial landfill and mud deposits. The area around the bay is in jeopardy of being underwater by 2100, and factoring in subsidence increases the projected amount of land underwater from 46 to 166 square miles, including half the runways at San Francisco International Airport.
Our knowledge is a little island in a great ocean of nonknowledge.~Isaac Bashevis Singe
Big Melt
North Pole Rises Above Freezing
March 20 is normally close to the coldest season at the North Pole, but an extraordinary thaw swelled over the tip of the planet this year. Analyses show that the temperature warmed to the melting point as an enormous storm pumped an intense pulse of heat through the Greenland Sea. Temperatures may have soared as high as 35 degrees, reports the U.S. Global Forecast System model. Such extreme warm intrusions in the Arctic, once rare, are becoming routine, research has shown. A study published in Geophysical Research Letters in July 2017 found that since 1980, these events are becoming more frequent, longer-lasting and more intense. Study author Robert Graham, from the Norwegian Polar Institute, says, “Previously, this was not common. It happened in four years between 1980 and 2010, but has now occurred in four out of the last five winters.” The events are related to the decline of winter sea ice in the Arctic, with last January’s the lowest on record.
Events and happenings can also be found in the calendar beginning page 44, online at NWFNaturally.com and delivered to your inbox monthly. To join the NA News email list,
Text MyNAmag to 22828 August 2018
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