Earthweek: A Diary of the Planet (Dec. 6, 2013)

Almost Human?
Using a legal strategy once employed to fight human slavery, an animal rights group is asking a New York court to declare that chimpanzees are enough like human beings to deserve some of the same rights.  The Nonhuman Rights Project filed a classic writ of habeas corpus, demanding that a chimp named Tommy be released from a cage in a used-trailer lot.  It asks that the primate be the beneficiary of a trust that would house him in one of the eight facilities of the North American Primate Sanctuary Alliance.  "This petition asks this court to issue a writ recognizing that Tommy is not a legal thing to be possessed by respondents, but rather is a cognitively complex autonomous legal person with the fundamental legal right not to be imprisoned," the court filing says.  Tommy's owner argues the chimp is well cared for and has many toys since being rescued from an abusive owner. A ruling in favor of the writ would set chimps apart from other animals.
Typhoon Contamination
An unusually active and fierce typhoon season in Japan has brought a fresh flood of Hazardous caesium particles from the country's Fukushima nuclear disaster zone to areas downstream, researchers say.  A joint study by France's Climate and Environmental Science laboratory and Japan's Tsukuba University finds that people who escaped the initial fallout from reactor meltdowns in March 2011 could now find their food and water contaminated by the radioactive particles as typhoon runoff penetrates agricultural land and coastal plains.  The five typhoons that struck Japan during October alone were the most ever recorded during the month.  Two other named storms struck the archipelago during September.
Saharan Extinctions
The world's largest tropical desert has lost much of its wildlife population in recent years, according to a new study of the Sahara.  Led by the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Zoological Society of London, researchers found that half of the 14 desert species studied were regionally extinct or confined to 1 percent or less of their historic ranges.  Writing in the journal Diversity and Distributions, the team found that the bubal hartebeest is extinct, the scimitar-horned oryx is extinct in the wild and the African wild dog and African lion no longer live anywhere in the Sahara.  Cycles of political instability and long-term regional conflicts have for decades prevented researchers from determining exactly what has decimated the wildlife populations.
Unseasonable Migration
The famed wildebeest of East Africahave returned to Kenya's Maasai Mara Game Reserve months early in an off-season migration that wildlife experts say has never been seen before.  The animals typically spend the next few months grazing in Tanzania's Serengeti plains, but a protracted drought has left grasslands there barren.  An official said tourists who missed the usual wildebeest migration between July and October now have another chance to view it through the upcoming holiday season.
Earthquakes
Rescue teams comforted the survivors of a 5.6 magnitude quake that killed eight people and injured 59 others in southwestern Iran on Nov.28.
*     Earth movements were also felt in eastern India, northwestern Sumatra, the southern Philippines, northern Puerto Rico, southwestern Mexico and southeastern Connecticut.
Disappearing Lakes
A trend toward drier summers and less snowy winters in sub-Arctic Canada is leading to an unprecedented drying up of the region's expansive patchwork of lakes, according to a new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.   Researchers from four universities found that the shift in climate and the shrinking of the lakes that followed has not happened for at least the past 200 years.  Some lakes first began showing signs of losing water in 2010, but observers say it became far more pronounced during this past summer.  Researchers made the discovery after studying 70 lakes in the Yukon Territory and Manitoba.  Most of the bodies of water studied are less than 1 meter deep.
'Root' of the Problem
Feral hogs are rooting up levees along stretches of the Mississippi River in Louisiana, threatening to trigger breaches in the flood protections for nearby communities.  The Times-Picayune reports the problem came to light after Hurricane Isaac sent an 3.3 metre  storm surge into southern Louisiana during August 2012.  That inundation forced thousands of feral hogs onto the levees, where they damaged the flood defenses while foraging for food.  The unruly swine can destroy over a hundred linear metres of levee in one night, which engineers say can take months to repair.  And since it takes only one small stretch of weakened levee to flood a vast area, officials say they are concerned.