When millions of voters fill out their ballots in November, they won’t just be choosing elected representatives. Many states are offering the chance to impact conservation and wildlife as well, through ballot measures focused on things like dedicating more money to habitat protection or mitigating the impacts of climate change. One could even reshape wildlife management in one of the country’s most picturesque mountain states — and also lead to the indiscriminate deaths of all kinds of wild animals. 

And while ballot measures might seem like small potatoes in the grand scheme of electoral politics, they could have an outsized impact this year. The Trump administration has been systematically rolling back protections for endangered species, taking a hammer to longstanding pillars of climate regulation, and cutting funding to agencies like the National Park Service and National Forest Service, both of which oversee vast stretches of wildlife habitats. In many cases, states have had to step up, putting more resources into conserving the habitats and species within their borders, and ballot measures can help shape those decisions. 

Here are the seven ballot measures that could transform ecosystems across the country this election: 

California — Proposition 45: Cutting pesky environmental reviews, also maybe cutting habitats  

This ballot measure would shorten environmental review periods for “essential projects” like housing, water systems, clean energy, and medical facilities, among others. In a state that’s been struggling to build what it needs fast enough, this could help speed essential clean energy projects that could help slow climate change. On the other hand, reducing California Environmental Quality Act review time, as this proposition would do, could also lead to increased habitat destruction, leading advocacy organizations like the Sierra Club to oppose it. 

Georgia — Amendment 1: Tax breaks for conservation land (maybe)

This amendment might seem a little in the weeds — and mostly in the interest of farmers and ranchers looking for tax breaks. But it would double (from 2,000 acres to 4,000 acres) the amount of land an owner can get tax breaks from if they protect it under the state’s Conservation Use Valuation Assessment program. As Yanshu Li, an Associate Professor of Forest Economics at the University of Georgia, told me, the amendment could incentivize landowners to set aside larger tracts of their property for wildlife habitat conservation, which would benefit species like the nine-banded armadillo and the northern bobwhite quail that call these habitats home. 

Massachusetts — Question 6: A fund for nature

Question 6 would create a “Nature for All Fund,” routing existing taxes on sporting goods, recreational vehicles, and money spent at golf courses to conservation. That fund could then be used on natural resource conservation, making it the first time the state has a dedicated funding source for conservation projects.

Colorado — Proposition 137: More money for restoration and wildfire prevention

This proposition, similar to Massachusetts’, would direct existing sales taxes on sporting goods to a state fund dedicated to conservation and wildfire prevention. In a state where wildfires have torn through more than 2 million acres in the past decade, dozens of conservation groups are supporting this measure to protect habitats and species.

Arkansas — Issue 4: Waterworks and waterways 

Here, voters are being asked to approve up to $500 million in bonds that can be used to fund water-related infrastructure projects like water treatment, waste disposal, and wetlands infrastructure. A boost to wetlands under the Arkansas proposal could help animals that live in those habitats, which are often overlooked in this region. 

Rhode Island — Question 5: New money for climate resilience and habitat protection

This measure would allow for $55 million in bonds to fund environmental and recreational projects. The largest chunk of this change — $25 million — would go to helping to protect the state from the impacts of climate change. Another $7 would be devoted to protecting Narragansett Bay and its watersheds, which would include funding to “restore natural habitats and control invasive aquatic plants,” according to the Rhode Island Current. 

These ballot measures are all relatively straightforward so far, but there’s one question up to voters this fall that puts wild animals front-and-center — and is splitting hunters and anglers down an ethical centerline. Which takes us back to Colorado: 

Colorado — Amendment 83: A constitutional right to hunt…traditionally

On its surface, this amendment seems fairly innocuous. It asks voters to enshrine “the right to hunt, fish, and harvest fish and wildlife by traditional methods” in the state’s constitution. Hunting and fishing are already big in Colorado, and they’re protected by statute, so this may not seem like a major change. But, as Rebecca Niemiec, co-director of Colorado State University’s Animal-Human Policy Center and a Colorado Parks and Wildlife commissioner, speaking for herself, told me, neither the text of the bill nor its proponents define what “traditional methods” of hunting and fishing would be allowed under this amendment.

“Read plainly, traditional methods could be interpreted to include practices like poisoning, leg hold traps, gill nets, or baiting and hounding,” Niemiec said. Many of these practices injure or maim animals, including ones that aren’t targeted: Steel-jawed traps and poisons don’t discriminate between, say, a deer, a wolf, and a lynx. All of these practices have been outlawed in Colorado over the years, either through other ballot measures or regulatory changes; in 1992, for example, Coloradans voted to ban hunting bears using bait and hounds, and four years later they banned leg-hold traps and snares. 

The new amendment also continues on to propose: “establishing hunting and fishing as the preferred means of managing fish and wildlife populations.” This would leave far less room for wildlife agencies like CPW to make nuanced decisions or roll out alternative programs, like birth control or animal relocation. It also reduces their ability to take into account the preferences of people who value wildlife for reasons other than hunting. 

“Biological science can inform decisions about how many animals can be killed without threatening a population,” Niemiec said. “But it can’t tell us what hunting practices are ethical, or how to balance hunting opportunities with the public’s desire to see wildlife alive — and protected from unnecessary suffering.” 

The push for these constitutional protections, Niemiec told me, is part of a larger backlash against conservation groups. But in this case, it’s not as simple as hunter vs. non-hunter: Plenty of hunters and anglers support taking ethical considerations into account when making decisions about how to manage wildlife, and some hunting groups in Colorado have publicly spoken out against the amendment. 

“If we’re going to enshrine anything in the Constitution, it should say we should be balancing the diversity of public interest in wildlife in all of our management decisions,” Niemiec said. “We need innovative methods, not traditional methods, if we’re going to deal with the complex challenges that our wildlife is facing moving forward in the state and throughout the country.”

Earth’s core is leaking, and it has been for a long time.

Earth’s core, frankly, sounds insane. It’s a molten ball covered in a lava ocean that spews lethal gases and occasionally ejects some of itself through volcanoes. It used to be so wild that the planet was uninhabitable, but it eventually settled down enough for humans to exist on it.

According to a study in Science Advances by researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China, that core is constantly oozing chemical leftovers from the birth of our Solar System. For years, scientists have debated whether these weird deep-Earth ingredients get trapped in the mantle when the planet first cooled, or whether Earth’s core is slowly leaking material into the outer layers.

The Center of Earth Is Leaking Ancient Material, and Scientists Are Trying to Understand Why

To figure it out, scientists used computer simulations to model how hydrogen moves. Like sodas or cigarettes, hydrogen comes in a “light” version and a “heavy” version. The heavy one is called deuterium. If early Earth froze, the heavy and light versions would be mixed pretty evenly everywhere. But when scientists look at lava from volcanic hotspots in Iceland and Baffin Island, they find way more of the superlight version of hydrogen.

This means that the original cooling process couldn’t have caused this current setup. Instead, light hydrogen trapped in the planet’s metal core billions of years ago, when the Sun was forming, is actively leaking into the mantle like air from a punctured tire.

This light hydrogen, along with ancient helium and tungsten, rides hot lava streams to the planet’s surface, meaning that for the past several billion years ancient gases trapped in Earth’s core have been slowly burping their way out.

The post Scientists Just Discovered That Earth’s Core Is Leaking, and It Has Been for Billions of Years appeared first on VICE.

This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

The world’s largest penguin colony has declined by two-thirds since 2011, most likely because of the climate crisis, a study has revealed. Scientists said the rapid demise of chinstrap penguins on Zavodovski, the northernmost of the South Sandwich Islands in Antarctica, increased the risk of a wider ecosystem collapse.

“It is an enormous population crash, equivalent to half a million breeding individuals being lost from that island,” said the leader of the research, professor Norman Ratcliffe, a penguin ecologist at the British Antarctic Survey.

The Guardian reported in 2020 that chinstrap penguin populations were decreasing on Low in the South Shetland Islands, prompting concerns among scientists that “something is broken” in the world’s wildest ecosystem. The new study, published on Wednesday in the journal Current Biology, indicates that the speed of collapse may be accelerating so rapidly that the distinctive bird — which gets its name from a black line that runs below the beak from cheek to cheek — may need to be classified as an endangered species.

Zavodovski Island had by far the biggest penguin colony in the world, with about 600,000 chinstraps and 90,000 macaroni penguins when the population was measured in 2011. Given the decline between then and 2025, it is likely to have lost that title to Cape Adare in the Ross Sea.

Scientists believe the most likely cause is climate disruption. Human-driven heating has pushed up winter temperatures on and around the Antarctic Peninsula to 5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, one of the fastest rises in the world. On 6 June, the Argentinian Esperanza base on the Trinity Peninsula registered a record winter high of 15.4°C, about 20°C above normal for the time of year — a margin that scientists described as “absolutely crazy.”

Chinstrap penguins are struggling to adapt because they have special diets and specific ocean temperature preferences. Tracking data shows they prefer to forage in cooler waters to the northwest of the island, where they would expect to find Antarctic krill, which make up the bulk of their diet. But as the waters warm, the krill have moved south into the Weddell Sea.

Macaroni penguins, by contrast, are less fussy eaters and their numbers rose 30 percent — though not nearly enough to make up for the loss of chinstraps. Ratcliffe said this was only small comfort because if current trends continued, all penguins would run out of space.

He said the loss of chinstrap penguins would have wider repercussions for food webs. “Each ecosystem could be regarded as like a giant Jenga set, and every component that you remove increases the risk of ecosystems collapsing completely.”

The scientists ruled out several other possible causes of decline. There was no sign that chinstrap and macaroni penguins were in competition for food. The nearest humans lived thousands of miles away.

Although the island is volcanic and had a major eruption in 2016, prompting a “Penguin Pompeii hypothesis” of a sudden population fall, this theory was not borne out either by the data, which showed a steady linear decline, or by observations that showed the chinstraps avoided the main “asphyxia plain” area where the ash and lava were deposited.

A grove of coast redwood trees is a forest of forests. Individual trees can live for thousands of years, and as they grow, their canopies develop mats of soils and ferns, creating something like a second forest floor hundreds of feet above the ground.

These elevated ecosystems are home to creatures like the wandering salamander, which can spend its entire life cycle on top of a single tree, and the marbled murrelet, a seabird whose nesting habits were a mystery until one day in 1974, when a tree-trimmer stumbled upon a nest 150 feet above the ground. Sometimes a stray seed — a sitka spruce or oak or even another redwood — finds its way up a massive redwood and grows into another tree entirely, nestled among the branches of a giant. 

For millennia, redwoods have been the anchors of this incredibly stable ecosystem; they can even survive wildfires that devastate other tree species. They’ve also been the source of plenty of human inspiration and drive millions of dollars to California’s tourist economy. But like other living things, they aren’t immune to warming temperatures, and it turns out these trees have a particular weak spot. 

A new study from researchers at University of California Davis, using measurements taken twice a month for two years, found that coast redwood leaves essentially dial down their photosynthesis during periods of extreme heat. This means trees are slowing their “breathing” and “eating” because they can’t cool down fast enough when temperatures rise. It’s a problem that’s only going to get worse as climate change continues to drive global temperatures up, and it raises urgent questions about the future of these iconic trees and the layers of life that live on and around their shadow-dappled lengths. 

How a redwood fasts

To understand what’s happening to the redwoods — and what that may mean for the species that rely on them — first we need to take a quick foray into tree anatomy. Trees use the pores in their leaves, stomata, to do two things: take carbon dioxide in, and let water out. Open stomata mean the tree is “breathing” in carbon dioxide and photosynthesizing, but probably also letting water out. Closed stomata mean the tree is conserving water but also slowing down its photosynthesis, since it isn’t taking in any carbon dioxide. 

“Because leaves are a physical, light-absorbing object, they heat up just like asphalt would in the sun,” said Lily Klinek, a PhD student at UC Davis who was the lead author on the study. 

“They’re heating up faster than the air around them,” she said. “And one way that they can cope with this is by opening their stomata and allowing water to transpire out of the leaf, which is kind of like the way that humans sweat. When water evaporates off our skin, it cools us down, and it’s the same for leaves. But they can only really do that if they have enough water to lose.”

Klinek and her colleagues studied coast redwoods in Mendocino County, near the southern part of their range, where the researchers used specialized instruments to measure whether or not individual leaves were photosynthesizing. During heat waves, they found, coast redwoods hit a point where they can’t cool down fast enough, and they just keep their stomata closed. While that saves water, it also means the tree isn’t taking in more carbon — which means it’s not “eating” or building up energy stores it can use to keep growing. 

This may sound like a technicality of tree physiology. But it could have a big impact on these forests, creating a vicious cycle where trees don’t have enough carbon stored to replenish their leaves in the future, which means they won’t be able to photosynthesize as efficiently, which will starve them even further, repeating until trees eventually die. And while this sort of behavior has been observed in tropical trees, it’s the first time anyone has studied how coast redwoods respond to the same heat stress. 

“The term people use is carbon starvation,” said Chris Still, a forest ecologist at Oregon State University who didn’t participate in the study. “Leaves can be expensive to build for a plant.” 

Most of the redwoods in California and the Pacific Northwest nowadays are new-growth forests planted in the last couple of centuries. That means the trees are relatively hungry, like growing adolescents, compared to their old-growth cousins, so they need to suck in lots of carbon dioxide to grow taller. 

Redwoods are also incredibly good at storing carbon. Thanks to their bulk and long lives, they store more carbon dioxide per acre than any other forest in the world. “Not only is it negative feedback on the climate system itself, with less carbon sequestration from these trees and forests, but the trees themselves are going to obviously not grow as big,” said Anthony Ambrose, a plant physiological ecologist and co-founder of the Ancient Forest Society. So even if the trees survive, they might not have as much space for fern and soil mats, which means less habitat for the creatures that live in them, and they may not grow as tall as they once used to, which could hurt them in another way. 

The fog of old forests

A central threat to these trees, Klinek explained, is that in addition to the heat stress, they may also lose a crucial source of hydration and protection: Coast redwoods have an intricate relationship with the fogs of their native Northern California and the Pacific Northwest. The trees are so tall that their canopies reach high into fog layers, where they can sip water directly from the sky. The fog also shades the trees from the sun and helps coast redwoods create their own microclimate, which is why these forests are noticeably cooler than the areas adjacent to them. But warmer oceans and drier air are making fog more sporadic, which means the trees are missing a crucial source of relief from heat that is only getting more intense. 

“It’s kind of a double whammy,” said Todd Dawson, a plant ecophysiologist at the University of California Berkeley, who also didn’t participate in the study. “They’re running out of water and also getting this heat stress,” he said. “They’re used to living in a very narrow temperature range of 8 to 27 degrees Celsius (about 46 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit). California, like everywhere, has been getting long periods of much warmer days than we’ve ever experienced, and now the fog, which is normally kind of like an air conditioner, has also declined between 30 and 40 percent.” 

These temperature swings also impact the organisms living high up in the trees. “If they experience really excessive heat throughout the summer,” Ambrose said, “then the soil mats and ferns will probably dry out much faster. And then those salamanders and birds might not be able to live there. So we’ll see cascading effects through the whole ecosystem at that point.”

Klinek said, the trees seem to be doing okay after the heat passes; while the leaves she and her team looked at over their two-year study didn’t acclimate to the heat, they also didn’t lose their capacity to photosynthesize after the heat passed. While that’s a bit of hopeful news, it doesn’t reduce the urgency of the need to better understand the impact of climate change on these trees, and to reduce the warming itself. 

“Right now the temperatures are coming back to normal in the fall and winter and letting the trees recover,” Klinek said. “But in five or 10 years, if temperatures are even hotter and heat waves are even more frequent, we don’t really know if there would be a recovery.”

For now, the salamanders and seabirds still have their homes high atop the coast redwoods. But we’re a part of the redwoods’ larger ecosystem too, even if we don’t live near them — they, like all trees, are key to keeping our planet hospitable. The trees Klinek studied have the potential to live for more than a thousand years. The question is if we’ll let them.