A new discovery in the bacteria world may solve the problem of the increasing amount of plastic found in the oceans. Yet, it may not all be good news. After studying some of the plastic debris from the Sargasso Sea, an area in the North Atlantic, researchers found that the tiny organisms burrow into the plastic and “live in pits.” They appear to be feeding on the plastic items as well. “They look like you took a hot barbecue briquette and threw it into the snow,” said Tracy Mincer, a marine microbiologist of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. “You see this melting bit all around the...

Environment – Pine Island Glacier (PIG), Antarctica’s fastest-melting glacier, is getting closer to losing a chunk of ice that’s 350 square miles – an area large enough to cover Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx combined, according to NASA. While the crack itself is apparently normal for these types of glaciers, it is beginning to spread further upstream than what was indicated in earlier reports. Glaciologist Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) told National Geographic when “that point of rifting starts to climb upstream, generally you see some acceleration of...