Atlantic Ocean
Polyester fibres traced from laundry machines in North America and Europe have been discovered in Arctic seawater. The microplastics are thought to have drifted into the Arctic from the Atlantic ocean.
Scientists do not yet know the impact of these microplastics on the Arctic, its marine life, and the communities that live there.
"This is a completely unique discovery," said Erik Seiffert, the study's lead author and Professor of Clinical Integrative Anatomical Sciences at Keck School of Medicine of USC. "We're suggesting that this group might have made it over to South America right around what we call the Eocene-Oligocene Boundary, a time period between two geological epochs when the Antarctic ice sheet started to build up and the sea level fell," said Seiffert.
When Seiffert was asked to help describe these specimens in 2016, he noticed the similarity of the two broken upper molars to an extinct 32 million-year-old parapithecid monkey species from Egypt he had studied previously. Fossils discovered at the same site in Peru had earlier offered the first proof that South American monkeys evolved from African primates.
The British South Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha has created the world's fourth-largest marine reserve and has banned deep-sea mining and fishing with beam trawls over an area of 627,000 km². This created the largest protected area in the Atlantic Ocean and the fourth largest in the world.
The protected area is part of the so-called blue belt, a protection program for British overseas territories, which the British government is funding with 27 million pounds (approx. 30 million euros). So far, a total of 11.1 million square kilometers have been protected - that is one percent of the world's ocean area.
Globally, September 2020 had the highest temperatures since the beginning of modern weather recording. It was 0.63°C above average, which is 0.05°C hotter than even September 2019, which previously held this record.
As of now, it is virtually certain that 2020 will be among the five hottest years on record, with a 98% propability.
2020 has been accompanied by many climate disasters. The rising global temperatures have brought record-setting wildfires in the U.S. West, one of the most active hurricane seasons on record in the Atlantic and the second-lowest Arctic sea ice levels ever recorded.
SpaceX successfully launched a Falcon 9 rocket with 60 more Starlink internet relay satellites Sunday from the Kennedy Space Center. The company plans another launch for October 21.
Sunday's was the 14th Starlink launch, with 835 satellites put in orbit so far.,
The booster's first stage landed without problems on the "Of Course I Still Love You" drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.
Earlier today SpaceX successfully launched its first rideshare mission into orbit, lofting a new batch of 58 Starlink internet satellites along with three Planet SkySats before landing the Falcon 9 rocket on the Of Course I Still Love You drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.
The Planet satellites are part of that company’s existing SkySat constellation, which includes just over a dozen washing machine-sized craft that generate high-resolution images of our home planet.
The launch was the second Starlink mission so far this month, with one more on the schedule for no earlier than June 22.