As the calendar pages turn, every weather enthusiast finds one constant news on their feed over the past five years—the records broken by the previous month's average temperature.
Apart from the strong El Niño year of 2016, the current year (2020) and the last year (2019) has been unusually hot, shattering the decades of temperature records across the globe. And the streak has continued in June 2020 as well.
➡️According to the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), last month, the global average temperature was 0.53°C warmer than the average June temperatures from 1981 to 2010.
This figure makes June 2020 the second warmest June on record after June 2019.
#Verkhoyansk—a Siberian small town located in the Arctic Circle recorded a whopping 38°C (100° F) on June 20, 2020, which is the highest temperature ever recorded in the polar region.
The Copernicus report also adds that temperatures averaged over the 12-month period between July 2019 to June 2020 are also well above average.
#CentralCanada and #NorthernIndia, however, were the few land areas where the average temperatures were lower than average.
The last decade was the warmest decade on record. In fact, every decade since the 1960s has been warmer than the one before. And the start of this decade has seen the trend continue.
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While searching for life in the Gulf of Mexico, researchers pulled out a new bizarre-looking species of isopod, whose head resembles the Darth Vader from Star Wars!
This new-found crustacean, named Bathonymus yucatanensis, has 14 legs and is around 26 cm long — approximately 25 times larger than its closest relative, the common woodlouse.
While these blonde creatures seem pretty scary, the "Vanilla Vaders" are, in fact, harmless to humans.
Their huge size is only due to deep-sea gigantism — a phenomenon wherein ocean dwellers grow bigger than their terrestrial relatives due to lack of sunlight.
This super-Earth is a rocky world, on which a year is equal to just 11 Earth days.
The short orbit is down to the red dwarfs being a lot smaller than the Sun that centres our solar system. But the smaller sizes also make their gravitational fields less expansive than the Sun's.
Therefore, Ross 508b revolves around its red dwarf at a distance of just 5 million km. Mercury, in comparison, is about 60 million km from the Sun.
The short distance between this super-Earth & its red dwarf begs the question: how could it possibly be habitable?
#Japan is making grand plans of creating interplanetary #trains and champagne flute-like glass habitats in its bid to send and host humans on the #Moon and #Mars!
An interplanetary transportation system dubbed the 'Hexatrack', which maintains a gravity of 1G during long-distance travel to mitigate the effects of prolonged exposure to low gravity, has been proposed by #Japanese researchers.
The #trains will also possess 'Hexacapsules', which are essentially hexagon-shaped capsules with a moving device in the middle.
In 2012, the almost-complete skeleton of a new kind of #dinosaur was found in the northern Patagonia region of #Argentina.
The dinosaur has been christened #Meraxes gigas. The generic epithet is an ode to a dragon in the #GameOfThrones series.
Standing at the height of 11 m (36 ft) and weighing roughly 4000 kgs, the #dinosaur sported several crests, bumps and horns on its skull, which lent it a menacing appearance.
But the highlight of the findings is that the dinosaur had teeny-tiny arms, just like the #Trex!
Dr Jose, along with an international research team from the US, UK and Australia, will be examining the Galactic Centre Cloud (GCC) — the central molecular zone of our Milky Way — in April 2023.
They have been allotted 27.3 hours over the access period of 12 months.