CNX 104: Nature, Red in Tooth and Claw

In 2008, three years after Hurricane Katrina cut a deadly path along the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico, researchers J. Steven Picou and Keith Nicholls conducted a survey of the survivors in Louisiana and Mississippi, receiving more than twenty-five hundred responses, and followed up two years later with their than five hundred of the initial respondents.

There is a growing crisis in our oceans as rates of infectious disease outbreaks are on the rise. Marine epidemics have the potential to cause a mass die-off of wildlife from the bottom to the top of the food chain, impacting the health of ocean ecosystems as well as lives on land. Ocean outbreaks are a sentinel of an impending global environmental disaster, fueled by sewage dumping, unregulated aquaculture, and drifting plastic in a warming ocean.

This century has seen the costliest hurricanes in U.S. history--but who bears the brunt of these monster storms?

Huge, towering clouds build up in the sky--it's a super cell. The Doppler radar indicates that the system is rotating. But is there a funnel? Is it touching the ground? Only a storm chaser can confirm when a tornado is present--and help meteorologists warn nearby towns.