A great carbon reckoning comes to architecture
Practitioners have finally begun taking a more nuanced approach to the carbon emitted by new buildings. Are they too late?
Concrete: the most destructive material on Earth
After water, concrete is the most widely used substance on the planet. But its benefits mask enormous dangers to the planet, to human health – and to culture itself.
A Special Beach: Nauthólsvík Geothermal Beach, Iceland; By Norma J. Longo & Orrin H. Pilkey
Iceland is a land of black beaches, usually with a large gravel component. But one Icelandic beach near Reykjavík is different.
Bits of the Sahara on the Move
Scientists estimate that winds and storms pick up roughly 180 million tons of dust from the Sahara Desert each year and deposit it in the Atlantic Ocean and on the Americas. In the past week, active weather systems made a big deposit toward the 2018 total, as relentless storms lofted vast plumes of dust for days.
The global resource shortage you have never heard about
If someone were to ask you to name the most-extracted materials on Earth, you might answer with fossil fuels or biomass. However, by weight, the answer is actually sand and gravel.
How to Steal a River
To feed an enormous building boom, India’s relentless sand miners have devastated the waterways that make life there possible.
The Conservation Crisis No One Is Talking About
Beaches around the world are disappearing. No, the cause isn’t sea-level rise, at least not this time. It’s a little-known but enormous industry called sand mining, which every year sucks up billions of tons of sand from beaches, ocean floors, and rivers to make everything from concrete to microchips to toothpaste.
West Bengal: Green hopes run dry as rampant mining goes unchecked
Rampant illegal sand mining and excavation of boulders from river beds are threatening the ecology of several rivers and all the three major river basins in West Bengal. Estimates suggest that there are at least 500 quarries in Darjeeling, Jalpaiguri and Alipurduar and Cooch Behar districts alone.
Life is Not a Beach
Mining for beach sand minerals poses a threat to the economic and social fabric of fishing villages along Tamil Nadu’s coast.