Page 14 - Land Surface News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

A new satellite. the satellite makes direct measurements of the soil moisture every few days. do you understand how much water's in the land surface that can really help you forecasting and monitoring droughts and floods we're seeing here the red and yellow colors represent precipitation and the orange and blue colors are the changes in swimwear sure on the average blue color spread percent wetter areas and red colors represent drier areas so if you have a direct observation of the amount of moisture in the land surface and you can improve your undersea. think of the amount of moisture in the ...

Regions are sinking faster than others one example is the coastline of the u.s. state of louisiana. is the mississippi delta new orleans is located in this area in here and most of the land surface has been disappearing over the last thirty years and our projections are as this will disappear in the next ten twenty thirty years it will be gone and so. when this disappears water from a hurricane can more readily impact the city of new orleans so the cities on the delta are at risk all of them. i mean without question and they're part of the list of one hundred thirty six areas at risk if we loo...

Now the biologists say we are on the verge of the sixth. what are we doing to cause this and is it too late to stop? >> that is the key question. john sutter, whose voice you heard in that report. are we causing this? >> reporter: it's clear that humans are causing this and a few factors. one of them is climate change. the way on we produce our energy by burning fossil fuels and other elephants and rhinos and giraffes and body parts sold on the black market and causing the species to crash. it's how we use land all around the world as odd as that sounds. 40% of the land surface of the surface ...

There by the time that happens. >> it's a problem and the different water agencies will have to work together to figure that out. maybe we need to do something about this sooner than 20 or 25 years from now. >> in a perfect world, if we stop lowering ground water levels, subsidence will stop, but the land surface is not coming back up. >> stephanie said it. you have to know where to look. interesting story. we thank you for joining us this hour. i'm george howell at the cnn center. i will be back after the break with another hour of news from around the world. you are watching cnn, the world's...

The enormous search area. >> right. >> as long as it's such a long area, it's going to be real hard to find something. >> on that note, andrew, china is moving 21 of its satellites into position to search for the plane. talk to us about how satellite images are shared between their different agencies. would you say the more help the better from different nations? or does this further complicate the search? >> no. in this situation, the more data, the better. it's always more welcome. i told you before, there is actually an international agreement, the u.s. geological survey right now is sharin...