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The land of the Somali people, much of it arid and inhospitable, has been close to civilization and international trade for thousands of years. Situated on the Horn of Africa, jutting out into the India Ocean, Somalia’s harbors are natural ports of call for traders sailing to and from India. Somalia’s coastline is frequented by many foreigners, in particular Arabs and Persians. But, in Somalia’s interior, the Somali are on their own.
In the 1920s, farmers succeeded in conquering The Great Prairie Plains of the Midwest. The plains were then transformed into the “amber waves of grain” we know today. However, this transformation came with a heavy price. In fact, the agricultural triumph over The Plains was the tipping point that changed a typical La Nina-type drought cycle into an enormous environmental disaster that we now know as the Dust Bowl.  In this NASA Imagery you can see the ice bridge, in fragments. The Wilkins Ice Shelf, on the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula, used to have an ice bridge connecting it to nearby Charcot Island, until that ice bridge collapsed in early April, 2009. Continue reading Wilkins Ice Shelf Breaks from Charcot Island
For the people of the densely populated city of Bhopal, India, December 2 and 3 of 1984 mark a very dark anniversary — a time that left thousands dead and thousands more deathly ill and clinging to life. It all started in the late 1970s when Union Carbide India Limited constructed a pesticide plant in Bhopal. Their initial goal was to produce pesticides that would help increase production on local farms. However, the sale of pesticide did not pan out and the plant soon began losing money. Then in 1979, the factory began producing huge amounts of the highly toxic methyl isocyanate, or MIC, because it was a cheaper way to make a pesticide known as carbaryl. In an attempt to further trim the company’s budget, employee training and factory maintenance were radically cut. This is when many factory employees began complaining about working in potentially dangerous conditions. Many warned of possible deadly disasters, but management appeared to turn a deaf ear to these warnings. Late in the evening of December 2, 1984, something began going desperately wrong in storage tank E610. E610 just happened to be the tank that contained some 40 tons of MIC. Water leaked into the tank, which ultimately caused the MIC’s temperature to rise dangerously high.
In the 1930s and 1940s people and businesses did not pay a lot of attention to what happened to toxic chemicals produced during industrial processes. While there have long been regulations for the handling of these dangerous chemicals, enforcement of these laws was virtually nonexistent or haphazard at best. Large corporations, such as Hooker Chemical and Plastics Corporation in Niagara Falls, New York, made a variety of chemicals, pesticides and plastics. This type of company would typically seal the contaminated substances in 55-gallon metal drums and leave them someplace nearby. For Hooker, Love Canal was a convenient place to store these metal drums. |
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