Climate: Earth Day

Earth Day 2025’s theme is “Our power, our planet.” An idea centered on taking action through education, advocacy, and community support. Climate experts say action is urgently needed. The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) said in 2024 that countries are not doing enough to lower emissions and are on course to completely miss the targets set in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.

President Donald Trump on the first day of his second term pledged to pull the United States from the agreement. International efforts to curb the growing problem of plastic pollution failed to reach an agreement after two years of discussion. More than 1 in 3 tree species are threatened with extinction, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Against this backdrop comes Earth Day, which will be marked on April 22 2025. Earth Day was first celebrated in 1970. While those in the highest seats of power are struggling to enact real change, there are online networks carving out their own sustainable solutions. These online networks have grown organically for years, championing nature and wildlife and strengthening community bonds along the way.

Stick Nation is a community of nature lovers showing off sticks they found and inventing ways to rank them.

It was formed by Boone Hogg and Logan Jugler, two friends who sort through thousands of submitted videos from all over the world and post them to their social media accounts. To celebrate Earth Month, Hogg and Jugler are trying to mobilize their community of millions to raise money for nature-helping nonprofits. Hogg and Jugler are trying to see how big of an impact Stick Nation can make and see how much good they can put out into the world throughout the month of April.

Sticks come from trees, you cannot have sticks without trees. So the Earth needs more trees. Profits will go directly to One Tree Planted, World Wildlife Fund, EARTHDAY.ORG, and the National Forest Foundation. The nonprofits were picked because of their efforts to improve forests and the natural world. Alarmed by all the plastic waste washing up on the shores of Washington state’s Bainbridge Island, Liesl Clark and her friend Rebecca Rockefeller wanted to show their kids they could make a difference.

Clark and Rockefeller discovered the plastics came from all types of products: pens, water bottles, car bumpers, even the signs in convenience stores that list prices. Of the three Rs, there are “reduce”, “reuse”, and “recycle”. But how about “refuse”? So refusing to actually buy products new and seeing if people had enough in the materials economy to create a circular economy.

Clark and Rockefeller created a small, private Facebook community of neighbors who could share the items they no longer needed.

From that group in 2013 sprouted a global movement of the Buy Nothing Project, with millions of members in roughly 128,000 groups worldwide and a bespoke app. People give away clothes, coffee pots, furniture, and children’s toys. The app allows people to borrow things even when they are visiting other cities on vacation, like swim floaties for their kids.

The positive feedback loop helps build community. What happens is, just that kind of dopamine, that feel good experience spurs others to participate. If people had a good experience from giving something away or acquiring something, then they will post again and again. Garden Exchange Stands Org relies on a network of volunteers and neighborhood plant stands where people can pick up and drop off plants, seeds, cuttings, agave pups, and other garden-related items.

Garden Exchange Stands Org holds educational workshops on planting, supporting local wildlife, and gardening sustainably. In times of high grocery store prices, this knowledge allows people to grow healthy food in their own backyards. Plus, it builds community. It is nice to just be able to bike down to your neighborhood stand, get your books, get your plants and seeds, and then share what you have.

People donate pineapple plants, eggs, rosemary, boysenberry plants, and tomato plants.

Growing your own food is the ultimate way to eat locally and sustainably. In 2024, Antarctica’s “doomsday glacier” was melting faster than we thought thanks to climate change. The glacier had gotten its nickname because of how much ice it had and how much seas could rise if it all melted. Doomsday glacier was melting faster because of warmer sea water passing below it.

Thwaites was on Antarctica’s western half, east of the jutting Antarctic Peninsula, which used to be the area scientists worried most about. For years, experts had worried about the possible demise of the Thwaites, whether by ocean water melting it from below, the glacier unmooring from its attachment to the seabed, or the ice mass cracking and breaking apart. Using satellites and a technique called radar interferometry to track changes in surface elevation, the team found that doomsday glacier appeared to be lifting several centimeters as pressurized tide water moved below it across many miles, further inland than previously thought.

There were places where the water was almost at the pressure of the overlying ice, so just a little more pressure was needed to push up the ice. The water was then squeezed enough to jack up a column of more than half a mile of ice. Warmer seawater working its way under the glacier might help explain the rapid, past, and present changes in ice sheet mass and the slower changes replicated by ice sheet models.

Pressurized seawater would create a vigorous melt that would further imperil doomsday glacier.

Thwaites was the most unstable place in the Antarctic and contained the equivalent of 60 centimeters of sea level rise. The worry was that we were underestimating the speed that the glacier was changing, which would be devastating for coastal communities around the world. It was still not clear how much time was left before the ocean water’s damage to the glacier was irreversible, but hopefully the discovery would lead to more accurate models.

It would take many decades, not centuries, for the Thwaites to fully melt. Part of the answer also depended on whether our climate kept getting warmer or not, which depended completely on us and how we managed the planet. And for the first time, there was visible evidence that showed warm seawater pumping underneath doomsday glacier. The Thwaites, part of the vast West Antarctic Ice Sheet, was one of the world’s fastest-changing and most unstable glaciers.

It had been studied for years as an indicator of human-caused climate change. Study results also suggested the Antarctic Ice Sheet was more vulnerable to a warming ocean than previously thought, and, worryingly, might require a reassessment of sea-level rise projections. To conduct the study, scientists used high-resolution satellite radar data to find evidence of the intrusion of warm, high-pressure seawater many miles beneath the grounded ice of Thwaites.

There was much more seawater flowing into doomsday glacier than had been previously thought.

These intrusions made the glacier more sensitive to ocean warming, and more likely to fall apart as the ocean got warmer. Future projections of global sea-level rise would have to include this new data. The projections would go up. As it melts, Thwaites could cause ocean levels to rise as much as 2 feet. But doomsday glacier was also a natural dam to other ice in West Antarctica.

If that ice was released into the oceans, levels could rise 10 feet. Such a rise would put many of the world’s coastal cities underwater. It would gravely impact populations in many low-lying areas like Vancouver, Florida, Bangladesh, and low-lying Pacific islands, such as Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands. In 2020, a research had suggested that climate change was the culprit that woolly rhinos went extinct at the end of the last ice age in Siberia about 14,000 years ago.

Ancient DNA helped to shed light on what really happened to the woolly rhinos and other large mammals. Previously, it was believed that humans hunted these giant animals as they spread across the globe. It was amazing that the researchers could read the DNA sequences, even the entire genomes, from these long-extinct animals. It was a bit like having a time machine where the researchers traveled back through time and studied evolutionary change as it was happening in real-time.

Given the climate where these animals lived and died, the cold conditions helped preserve their DNA.

While obtaining high quality DNA was difficult, the researchers were lucky to work on specimens that had been preserved in the permafrost for thousands of years. In a way, it was like opening a freezer that was closed during the last Ice Age. Rather than disappearing due to overhunting by early humans, woolly rhino populations actually seemed to thrive and remained incredibly diverse before they went extinct.

Research also shifted back the timeline for humans living in Siberia. Originally, it was believed humans arrived between 14,000 and 15,000 years ago. Evidence pushed human occupation back to sites that were at least 30,000 years old, so the arrival of humans no longer coincided with the demise of woolly rhinos. Instead, the DNA the researchers studied revealed more of a population boom for woolly rhinos during that time.

The DNA was retrieved from tissue, bone, and hair samples from 14 woolly rhino specimens that lived across Siberia. The scientists were able to determine information about the population sizes and genetic diversity of these woolly rhinos stretching back for tens of thousands of years before they went extinct. The researchers were surprised to discover that woolly rhinos had a much higher genetic diversity than any living rhino, woolly mammoths, or even modern humans.

The woolly rhinos also appeared to go extinct suddenly, rather than gradually, and did not experience much inbreeding.

Inbreeding tends to increase as populations decline, and it occurred in the last woolly mammoths before they went extinct. The researchers also found genetic mutations in the woolly rhino DNA that helped them adapt to life in the bitterly cold weather of the last ice age, including a receptor in the skin that could sense temperature variations. Woolly mammoths also had this adaptation.

About 29,000 years ago, the woolly rhino population swelled as the ice age intensified and remained stable with little inbreeding. The data provided by the DNA followed the woolly rhino population until about 18,500 years ago, which was about 4,500 years before they went extinct. This told the researchers that the cause for their extinction occurred during that 4,500-year gap.

A sudden but brief period of warming temperatures occurred toward the end of the last ice age. This event, called the Bølling-Allerød interstadial, happened between 12,890 and 14,690 years ago. The temperature change was fast. Some records from ice cores taken on Greenland suggest an increase in temperature by 18 degrees Fahrenheit, possibly within as little as a few decades.

The large grasslands where the woolly rhinos roamed, called a steppe environment, would have been replaced by trees and shrubs in response to the warming as well.

Like woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos were covered in thick fur and perfectly suited to their cold environment, grazing across the Siberian tundra. Both had adaptations that helped them thrive during the last ice age. But mammoths were about three times bigger, had a more flexible diet, and lived in matriarchal herds. The woolly rhinos were likely more solitary.

And the woolly mammoths did not experience an increase in population size as the woolly rhinos did 29,000 years ago. The researchers wanted to study DNA from woolly rhinos that lived during those last 4,500 years before they went extinct. The scientists also wanted to investigate other large animals that had adapted to such cold conditions to see how they were affected by a warmer and less stable climate.

This includes cave lions, wolves, mammoths, horses, and steppe bison. The researchers were coming away from the idea of humans taking over everything as soon as they come into an environment. Although the researchers cannot rule out human involvement, they suggested that the woolly rhinoceros’ extinction was more likely related to climate change. The climate science community was mourning the loss of a pioneering scientist and glaciologist, Konrad Steffen.

Steffen apparently fell to his death in a deep opening in the ice called a crevasse while doing research in Western Greenland.

With nearly 15,000 academic citations to Steffen’s name, he dedicated his life to studying the rapidly melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. Ironically, it was the perils created by melting around Swiss Camp in Greenland, a research outpost Steffen founded in 1990, that claimed his life. Jason Box, a well-known ice climatologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, had spent many years working alongside Steffen and was with him right before he disappeared.

Box said the snowy, windy weather at the time was disorienting. Steffen ultimately went beyond the safety perimeter in low visibility, windy conditions. Steffen fell into a water based crevasse while the rest of the team were working nearby, unaware. The last thing Steffen said was that he was going to look at data. The team organized a lengthy search and eventually found evidence in the thin ice.

The team found a 2.5 meter long busted through hole in the 3 cm thick floor of the crevasse 8 meters down. Since Steffen was not found, he might be 8 meters down in the water. Steffen was like a father to Box. In a tweet citing Steffen’s dedication to his craft, Box invoked a quote from Abraham Lincoln, “It is for us the living to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”

This sentiment was shared widely by the science community.

The Swiss Polar Institute, where Steffen served as scientific director, said in a statement on its website, “We will deeply miss Konrad Steffen, but are committed to continuing his mission towards making a contribution, big or small, to create a difference.” Swiss Polar Institute’s statement included a link to a video about Steffen and his work. The statement went on to say, “We lost a wonderful person and true friend way too early.”

An outpouring of memories on social media paid tribute to Steffen’s kindness, warmth, and generosity. Steffen started his career in 1977 when he graduated from ETH Zurich, an institute with which he still collaborated. With Steffen’s death, ETH Zurich has lost a uniquely kind and committed colleague. Through the years Steffen held many leading positions in climate science.

Former United States vice president and Nobel laureate for his work in climate change, Al Gore, praised the influence Steffen had. Steffen’s renowned work as a glaciologist had been instrumental in the world’s deepened understanding of the climate crisis.