This long tongue of ice in Alaska's Prince William Sound is one of the fastest-moving glaciers in the world thanks to rapid warming in the far north. But does Wyoming coal have a future in a climate-conscious world? The Powder River Basin produces more than 40% of America's coal, and the land bears the scars of all that mining.
As the Arctic warms, will glaciers become a thing of the past? Is the economic benefit worth the environmental cost?Ī warming climate has helped cause this Alaskan glacier to retreat by nearly 2 miles over the past few decades. The once quiet forests of northeastern Alberta have been transformed by the boom in unconventional oil. The financial capital of China was always a major city, but over the past 30 years it has metastasized across the Yangtze River Delta, building skyscrapers over what were once farming villages. Once little more than a fishing village, this Middle Eastern megacity has blown up in recent years, even extending onto new land in the Persian Gulf. The city has exploded over the past few decades, sprawling into the desert-even as a growing population and worsening drought shrink nearby Lake Mead.
