Show:
Air Pollution
Fossil Fuels
Forests
Plastics
Oceans
100
This phenomenon happens when chemicals in the air mix with precipitation. It causes corrosion and washes away necessary nutrients from the soil and water.
What is acid rain?
100
This company recently abandoned Arctic drilling because of unsuccessful exploratory drilling and the dropping price of oil.
What is Dutch Royal Shell?
100
In 2014 alone, this country lost over 5.5 million acres of forest.
What is Brazil?
100
This country is the largest contributor to plastic waste in the ocean.
What is China?
100
This natural wonder off the coast of Australia recently came close to death.
What is the Great Barrier Reef?
200
This type of fuel is very popular in European cars, but is a major contributor to urban air pollution.
What is diesel?
200
This country is the biggest importer of petroleum into the US as well as the highest recipient of petroleum leaving the US.
What is Canada?
200
This industry is the world's greatest contributor to forest destruction.
What is agriculture?
200
This conglomeration of plastics in the ocean has been estimated to be between the size of Texas and the United States.
What is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?
200
This name is given to organisms that migrate from one part of the world to another. This often happens when they hitch rides on trans-oceanic boats, and they can have devastating effects on foreign ecosystems.
What are invasive species?
300
This chemical compound is useful for deflecting UV rays in the atmosphere, but at the ground level can cause irritation in the sinuses.
What is Ozone?
300
This process involves the injecting of "wastewater" into the ground to push up the desired gas.
What is fracking?
300
This continent is seeing the highest rate of forest recovery, greatly due to the landmass of its largest nation, but also a decrease in the demand for forest goods.
What is Europe?
300
This modified type of plastic has been criticized as a false solution to plastic pollution, as it would lead consumers to believe that the plastics will break down fully in the environment, when that will only happen under certain conditions and will still cause pollution in the meantime.
What are biodegradable plastics?
300
While these endangered sea creatures are under protection from several countries, their hunting is permitted for cultural purposes.
What are whales?
400
This country is home to the city with the highest air pollution in the world currently. This is partly due to the amount of dust in the air and the dry climate.
What is Iran? (City is Zabol)
400
This organization is comprised of 13 countries whose main exports are fossil fuels.
What is OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries)?
400
This attribute, the variety of living creatures in the world, is being threatened as more forests are destroyed. Science shows that systems with this attribute are more likely to survive challenges and disasters.
What is biodiversity?
400
These tiny plastics, often used in hygiene products, are now being banned because of how hard they are to filter out of the water.
What are microbeads?
400
The US government subsidizes this industry an average of $700 million a year, leading to an excessive extraction of resources.
What is fishing?
500
This material, often referred to as "brown coal", is mostly water and therefore needs to be burned in vast amounts to produce sufficient energy.
What is lignite?
500
This agreement aims to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels by encouraging participating countries to continually cut carbon emissions. Temperatures rising above the 2°C goal almost guarantees annual sea level rise and a significant increase in water scarcity.
What is the Paris Agreement?
500
This term refers to when forests have been reduced but retain >10% canopy cover, compared to "deforestation", when forests have had their canopy cover reduced to less than 10%.
What is forest degradation?
500
This type of molecule is the foundation of all plastics. It's a repeating pattern of a standard subunit. Every type of plastic has a different subunit.
What is a polymer?
500
This phenomenon causes abnormally high temperatures in the equatorial Pacific, and leads to intense weather conditions such as flooding or drought.
What is El Niño?