Page 42 - Burning Planet News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

For years a bleak island chain sandwiched between the Laptev and East Siberian seas off Russia’s Arctic coast has been viewed as one of the most difficult-to-reach places in the northern hemisphere. If it has been viewed at all.  With winter temperatures habitually plunging to -30oC or lower, it is also one of the more inhospitable tracts on the Northern Sea Route.   Now, as world attention is consumed by developments in the US, Daily Maverick/Our Burning Planet can confirm that an event with repercussions likely to echo down the generations quietly took place elsewhere, in the heart of...

Speaking to Daily Maverick’s Our Burning Planet unit on Saturday, Rob Erasmus of Enviro Wildfire Services, the park’s independent fire investigator, said the Thursday fire had been started by a homeless person on private property near the park. “The Oudekraal fire investigation has been completed and the person responsible has been identified,” said Erasmus. “It was caused by an unattended vagrant fire,” he added. “The cause of the fire is regarded as accidental negligence. We have photographs of the origin of the fire and the person’s photograph and name. He has admitted to ...

Covered in sandy, nutrient-starved soils, scorched by fire, and pummelled by the prevailing gale-force southeaster in summer, the Cape Floral Kingdom has persisted as a land of extreme paradoxes for millenniums. Given the harsh conditions that assail life here, this world seems to have every reason not to be a botanical number cruncher’s wet dream: the untrained eye may hardly conceive that it gives refuge to nearly 20% of Africa’s flora on less than 0.5% of the continent’s surface. It seems implausible that some 9 000 plant species should thrive in these coastal extremities, 70% of whi...