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A starfish walking back to the water.

Green burial practices could help the environment

Traditional caskets are hundreds of pounds of wood, metal and whatever cushioning goes inside.. Burial vaults, the enclosures that barricade each casket from the elements, can be around 3,000 pounds of cement, sometimes steel. One gallon of toxic embalming fluid  is used per 50 pounds of body. Add it all up and you’ve got around two tons of material per body chilling in the earth forever.

Despite the downsides of burial, not everyone wants to be cremated. Plus, there’s plenty of evidence suggesting the energy it takes to burn a body down wreaks significant damage on the environment.

Green burial could be the solution. The idea is to make as little an impact on the natural environment of the burial site as possible.

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First U.S. Climate Refugees Forced to Leave Their Vanishing Island Home

Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana is vanishing into the sea and its residents must relocate. 

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) awarded $48 million to the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe who lives on this sinking island 80 miles southwest of New Orleans so that they may reestablish community further north. 

Their home — or what was once a 22,000-acre island — has been reduced to a 320-acre strip where only 25 houses remain. 

This makes members of the Louisiana tribe the first official climate refugees in the United States as rising sea levels have swallowed 98% of their land. 

Find out more in this Huffington Post piece. 

(Map via Google Maps. Sinking house photo by Karen Apricot via Flickr.) 

What Life On A New Planet Will Mean

Diving with a Great White: Not so frightening after all

Sharks are fucking metal!

The Ocean Turnover

These are brachiopods, a type of filter-feeding organism that first evolved in the Cambrian era oceans. Although they look a lot like modern-day bivalves (clams), they are a very different organism, found in a totally different phylum. They can readily be distinguished by their shell shapes; brachiopods have sort of a “kink” in their shells whereas bivalves have more rounded shapes. Clams are molluscs, while brachiopods come from the phylum brachiopoda. These two types of filter-feeding organisms have an interesting interplay in the geologic record; if you pick up a limestone from the Paleozoic it is likely to be dominated by brachiopods, while Mesozoic and Cenozoic bivalve shells dominate limestones.

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DON’T GO IN THE WATER: NEW EVIDENCE THAT SOME DINOSAURS WERE STRONG SWIMMERS

Claw marks left on a river bottom in Sichuan, China are evidence for dinosaurs’ ability to swim relatively long distances. According to an international team of scientists in the journal Chinese Science Bulletin, theropod species of dinosaurs were able to travel in relatively deep bodies of water.

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