Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries enforcement agents cited two men in separate cases for alleged deer hunting violations in Plaquemines Parish.
Agents cited Daniel W. Boehle, 43, of Belle Chasse, on Oct. 2 for taking a deer during a closed season. Agents cited Eneas Mayorga, 37, of Braithwaite, on Oct. 21 for hunting deer without basic hunting and big game hunting licenses, and failing to tag and validate the deer.
Agents received a tip about Boehle harvesting a deer on the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base in Belle Chasse on Oct. 2. Agents interviewed Boehle that day and found him in possession of a freshly harvested doe deer. The legal take for does in this area opened on Oct. 16.
Agents also received a complaint about Mayorga shooting a deer without the required licenses on Oct. 18. Agents interviewed Mayorga on…
These fascinating glimpses of organisms from Earth’s long distant past are revealing the history of ancient ecosystems, including details of the environments in which they existed.
But the melt has also created some concerns aboutancient virusescoming back to haunt us.
“Melting will not only lead to the loss of those ancient, archived microbes andviruses
Scientists warn world ‘is heading in wrong direction’ amid rise in nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide and methane
Waste piles up at a temporary dumpsite near high rise buildings in downtown Hanoi. Methane gas is released from decomposing organic waste.Photograph: Nhac Nguyen/AFP/Getty Images
Helena Horton Environment reporterWed 26 Oct 2022 11.00 EDT
Atmospheric levels of all three greenhouse gases have reached record highs, according to a study by the World Meteorological Organization, which scientists say means the world is “heading in the wrong direction”.
The WMO found there was the biggest year-on-year jump in methane concentrations in 2020 and 2021 since systematic measurements began almost 40 years ago.
Russia’sStrategic Deterrence Forces conducted a successful training exercise Wednesday aimed at delivering a “massivenuclear strike” in the event of anuclear attack, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu said.
The exercise, overseenby President Vladimir Putin, involvedmobile ground-based missile systemsand the strategic missile submarine Tulaof Russia’s Northern Fleet.The Kremlin said in a statement that all the test-fired missiles reached their targets.
Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov on Wednesday pressed his country’s narrative – vehemently denied by Ukraine and the West–that Kyiv is preparing to strike with a “dirty bomb”and then blame Russia.
U.S. experts have theorized that Russia is either considering its own “false flag” dirty bomb explosion or is using the narrative to drum up more support for the war at home.
Montana on Tuesday detailed several recent incidents involving grizzly bears, including one in which two hunters fired multiple handgun rounds at a charging bear in self-defense.
The “defensive encounter” occurred Oct. 14. The hunters were walking on a trail in the Madison Range when they heard brush breaking and saw a large bear emerge. Both hunters fired repeatedly and the bear fled without apparent signs of injury.
The Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks Department stated in a news release that the female bear probably was caught by surprise because of the wind direction, and that her charge was in defense of her two cubs.
Remarkably, the bullets seem to have missed the large target.
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GAINESVILLE, Fla. (WCJB) – The body of a man last seen fishing in an Alachua County waterway was recovered on Monday after a search by the Florida Wildlife Commission and the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office.
The Alachua County Sheriff’s Office confirms that ASO officers located the body of Glenn Lamar Carter, 36 on Monday evening. He was last seen fishing on Newnan’s Lake that morning.
Authorities say an autopsy will be performed to determine the exact cause of the death.
A press release from the City of Airdrie this weekend indicates the municipality is going to temporarily halt lethal trapping of beavers in Nose Creek and other local bodies of water, following backlash from the public about the issue.
“We’ve heard clearly from residents that they have concerns with the current wildlife management strategies,” said Mayor Brown in the news release. “We have also heard from residents that we need to properly manage wildlife and protect mature trees in the City.”
Nearly 3,000 hunting and fishing licenses were revoked in 2021 because of past-due child support payments. 494 of those individuals are now compliant with the new law.
A law in Utah denying hunting and fishing licenses to those with past due child support has contributed to an increase of child support payments and compliance in the past year.
H.B. 197Fishing and Hunting Restrictions for Nonpayment of Child Supportwas passed during the 2020 General Session. After it went into effect in 2021, individuals who had over $2500 in unpaid child support for a year were restricted from getting a hunting or fishing license.
According to Liesa Stockdale, director of the Office of Recovery Services (ORS) for Utah, this type of law is meant to catch the attention of non-paying…
This image shows a methane plume 2 miles (3 kilometers) long that NASA’s Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation mission detected southeast of Carlsbad, New Mexico. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that is much more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Built to help scientists understand how dust affects climate, the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation can also pinpoint emissions of the potent greenhouse gas.
NASA’s Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) mission is mapping the prevalence of key minerals in the planet’s dust-producing deserts – information that will advance our understanding of airborne dust’s effects on climate. But EMIT has demonstrated another crucial capability: detecting the presence of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
In the data EMIT has collected since being installed on the International Space Station in July, the science team has identified more than 50 “super-emitters” in Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Southwestern United States. Super-emitters are facilities, equipment, and other infrastructure, typically in the fossil-fuel, waste, or agriculture sectors, that emit methane at high rates.
“Reining in methane emissions is key to limiting global warming. This exciting new development will not only help researchers better pinpoint where methane leaks are coming from, but also provide insight on how they can be addressed – quickly,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “The International Space Station and NASA’s more than two dozen satellites and instruments in space have long been invaluable in determining changes to the Earth’s climate. EMIT is proving to be a critical tool in our toolbox to measure this potent greenhouse gas – and stop it at the source.”
East of Hazar, Turkmenistan, a port city on the Caspian Sea, 12 plumes of methane stream westward. The plumes were detected by NASA’s Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation mission and some of them stretch for more than 20 miles (32 kilometers).
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Methane absorbs infrared light in a unique pattern – called a spectral fingerprint – that EMIT’s imaging spectrometer can discern with high accuracy and precision. The instrument can also measure carbon dioxide.
The new observations stem from the broad coverage of the planet afforded by the space station’s orbit, as well as from EMIT’s ability to scan swaths of Earth’s surface dozens of miles wide while resolving areas as small as a soccer field.
“These results are exceptional, and they demonstrate the value of pairing global-scale perspective with the resolution required to identify methane point sources, down to the facility scale,” said David Thompson, EMIT’s instrument scientist and a senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages the mission. “It’s a unique capability that will raise the bar on efforts to attribute methane sources and mitigate emissions from human activities.”
Relative to carbon dioxide, methane makes up a fraction of human-caused greenhouse-gas emissions, but it’s estimated to be 80 times more effective, ton for ton, at trapping heat in the atmosphere in the 20 years after release. Moreover, where carbon dioxide lingers for centuries, methane persists for about a decade, meaning that if emissions are reduced, the atmosphere will respond in a similar timeframe, leading to slower near-term warming.
A methane plume at least 3 miles (4.8 kilometers) long billows into the atmosphere south of Tehran, Iran. The plume, detected by NASA’s Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation mission, comes from a major landfill, where methane is a byproduct of decomposition.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Identifying methane point sources can be a key step in the process. With knowledge of the locations of big emitters, operators of facilities, equipment, and infrastructure giving off the gas can quickly act to limit emissions.
EMIT’s methane observations came as scientists verified the accuracy of the imaging spectrometer’s mineral data. Over its mission, EMIT will collect measurements of surface minerals in arid regions of Africa, Asia, North and South America, and Australia. The data will help researchers better understand airborne dust particles’ role in heating and cooling Earth’s atmosphere and surface.
“We have been eager to see how EMIT’s mineral data will improve climate modeling,” said Kate Calvin, NASA’s chief scientist and senior climate advisor. “This additional methane-detecting capability offers a remarkable opportunity to measure and monitor greenhouse gases that contribute to climate change.”
Detecting Methane Plumes
The mission’s study area coincides with known methane hotspots around the world, enabling researchers to look for the gas in those regions to test the capability of the imaging spectrometer.
The cube (left) shows methane plumes (purple, orange, yellow) over Turkmenistan. The rainbow colors are the spectral fingerprints from corresponding spots in the front image. The blue line in the graph (right) shows the methane fingerprint EMIT detected; the red line is the expected fingerprint based on an atmospheric simulation.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
“Some of the plumes EMIT detected are among the largest ever seen – unlike anything that has ever been observed from space,” said Andrew Thorpe, a research technologist at JPL leading the EMIT methane effort. “What we’ve found in a just a short time already exceeds our expectations.”
For example, the instrument detected a plume about 2 miles (3.3 kilometers) long southeast of Carlsbad, New Mexico, in the Permian Basin. One of the largest oilfields in the world, the Permian spans parts of southeastern New Mexico and western Texas.
In Turkmenistan, EMIT identified 12 plumes from oil and gas infrastructure east of the Caspian Sea port city of Hazar. Blowing to the west, some plumes stretch more than 20 miles (32 kilometers).
The team also identified a methane plume south of Tehran, Iran, at least 3 miles (4.8 kilometers) long, from a major waste-processing complex. Methane is a byproduct of decomposition, and landfills can be a major source.
Scientists estimate flow rates of about 40,300 pounds (18,300 kilograms) per hour at the Permian site, 111,000 pounds (50,400 kilograms) per hour in total for the Turkmenistan sources, and 18,700 pounds (8,500 kilograms) per hour at the Iran site.
The Turkmenistan sources together have a similar flow rate to the 2015 Aliso Canyon gas leak, which exceeded 110,000 pounds (50,000 kilograms) per hour at times. The Los Angeles-area disaster was among the largest methane releases in U.S. history.
With wide, repeated coverage from its vantage point on the space station, EMIT will potentially find hundreds of super-emitters – some of them previously spotted through air-, space-, or ground-based measurement, and others that were unknown.
“As it continues to survey the planet, EMIT will observe places in which no one thought to look for greenhouse-gas emitters before, and it will find plumes that no one expects,” said Robert Green, EMIT’s principal investigator at JPL.
EMIT is the first of a new class of spaceborne imaging spectrometers to study Earth. One example is Carbon Plume Mapper (CPM), an instrument in development at JPL that’s designed to detect methane and carbon dioxide. JPL is working with a nonprofit, Carbon Mapper, along with other partners, to launch two satellites equipped with CPM in late 2023.
EMIT was selected from the Earth Venture Instrument-4 solicitation under the Earth Science Division of NASA Science Mission Directorate and was developed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed for the agency by Caltech in Pasadena, California. It launched aboard a SpaceX Dragon resupply spacecraft from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 14, 2022. The instrument’s data will be delivered to the NASA Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC) for use by other researchers and the public.
The International Space Station hosts seven instruments for NASA Earth Science that are providing novel information for understanding our changing planet.
65-year-old fatally shoots woman while they were deer hunting, Georgia officials say
BY MOIRA RITTER OCTOBER 24, 2022 6:11 PM
Sherrie Hutto, 41, was shot and killed while deer hunting, Georgia officials say. Getty Images/iStockphoto
A man was arrested and charged in the death of a woman who was fatally shot on a deer hunting trip, Georgia officials say. State officials arrested Donald Wayne Kuni, 65, on Oct. 18, according to an Oct. 24 Georgia Bureau of Investigation news release. Kuni is charged him with felony murder, aggravated assault, possession of a firearm during the commission of felony and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon in the death of 41-year-old Sherrie Hutto. Hutto and Kuni, both from Eastman, were deer hunting in the woods on Brown Street in Chauncey, about 70 miles southeast of Macon, early Thursday, Oct. 13, when Hutto was shot by Kuni, the GBI’s investigation…
Bacteriophages on a bacterium.
Exposing the Big Game 
