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      ‘He took five bullets and returned to work on plankton’: the double lives of Ukraine’s Antarctic scientists

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Friday, 29 March - 08:00

    When the research team at Vernadsky base are not defending their homeland, they are on the frontline of the climate crisis

    When Ukraine’s Antarctic research and supply vessel Noosfera left Odesa on its maiden voyage on 28 January 2022, it passed Russian warships in the Black Sea. A month later, Vladimir Putin launched Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbour. Noosfera has not been back since.

    “A few weeks later, and Noosfera would have been an important symbolic target for Russia,” said Vadym Tkachenko, a biologist who recently completed his second Antarctic winter at Ukraine’s Vernadsky base. The ship now supplies both Ukrainian and Polish Antarctic bases from Chile and South Africa twice a year, at the start and end of the winter.

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      Past environmental threats didn’t just disappear

      news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 22 July, 2022 - 14:41 · 1 minute

    Image of the earth with a blue area over Antarctica.

    Enlarge / We have pretty clear evidence that declining ozone levels were something more than liberal scare tactics. (credit: NASA )

    Conservative political commentator Matt Walsh took to Twitter last Wednesday to say that the widely held belief that humans are causing climate change is, in fact, a crock. The podcaster and Daily Wire columnist apparently knows this because previous environmental issues we were concerned about in the past—namely acid rain and holes in the ozone layer—disappeared, never to be heard about again.

    “Remember when they spent years telling us to panic over the hole in the ozone layer and then suddenly just stopped talking about it and nobody ever mentioned the ozone layer again?” Walsh tweeted . “This was also back during the time when they scared school children into believing that "acid rain" was a real and urgent threat,” Walsh tweeted again .

    It’s true that you don’t hear much about acid rain anymore, and discussions about humanity’s long-standing propensity to metaphorically kick the planet in the groin have largely moved away from the ozone layer to newer, flashier issues like sea level rise, rising global temperatures, and mass species die-offs served with a side of ecosystem collapse . (Although, if you know where to look , you can still find mention of the ozone hole.)

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