For the rest of the summer, I will be creating posts that highlight the most important environmental stories from the previous week, as well as extra links to interactive material. I hope that you all enjoy this idea, as it allows me to report on many ideas.. I can never choose what to blog about because there are so many articles and so little time!

First on the list for today is a coral reef exhibit that is coming to the National Aquarium in Baltimore, Maryland this summer. However, it is not your typical exhibit: it will be sculpted and fake, but real enough to “fool” aquarium guests and even the wildlife in the tank. The idea of the Blacktip Reef exhibit is to re-create an endangered coral species from the Indo-Pacific region of the world in order to promote coral conservation and show patrons how important coral is to delicate ocean ecosystems. The designers will be utilizing molds to create the shapes of the coral and is made out of a fiberglass shell and paint, embellished with sand and gravel. (For the NPR story, click here)

Next, you may recall that I posted about the documentary Chasing Ice when I attended the AGU conference in December 2012. The Chasing Ice can be described as such from the website:

Chasing Ice is the story of one man’s mission to change the tide of history by gathering undeniable evidence of climate change. Using time-lapse cameras, his videos compress years into seconds and capture ancient mountains of ice in motion as they disappear at a breathtaking rate.

I really enjoyed this viewing at the AGU conference, and I encourage you all to watch it: it will give you something to think about in terms of climate change, and it will open your mind to the majesty and grandeur of glaciers around the world. Chasing Ice is now available on iTunes and Netflix (streaming!), so if you love Netflix as much as I do, please do yourself a favor and add it to your instant queue. Check out the trailer below:

Lastly, along with the glacial time-lapse theme comes one more time-lapse video that will blow your mind. In order to really understand how global warming works the scientific specifics of global warming, you would have to study for years. However, this NASA-created video shows a time-lapse of 62 years of global warming in 13 seconds. One specific part to watch for includes “an acceleration of the temperature trend in the late 1970s as greenhouse gas emissions from energy production increased worldwide and clean air laws reduced emissions of pollutants that had a cooling effect on the climate, and thus were masking some of the global warming signal.” You can see from the video that the earth is warming overall, even though there are some years where it seems to be more cool. Check it out!:

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