This Week on Earth: Jan 21-27
View of Chicago from the North side of the Willis Tower. (Matthew Tuhey/ION)
United States
Egg prices are soaring across the United States, fueled in part by a bird flu epidemic.
Red hens in chicken coop. (Wikimedia Commons)
According to USDA data, 13.2 million birds in the US have been exposed to H5N1, commonly referred to as “bird flu,” in the last 30 days. Birds very rarely recover from bird flu, meaning an outbreak can devastate entire flocks. It has also caused outbreaks in dairy cows.
As more and more chickens are exposed to this virus, the domestic egg supply has dwindled. This has the effect of increasing the price of eggs (since scarce things are more expensive) — in fact, the average price of a dozen, large, grade A eggs has increased by more than 60% over the course of the last year, hitting $4.15 in Dec. 2024.
The first confirmed human death from bird flu was reported by the Louisiana Department of Health on January 6, 2025. However, the CDC said that the “current public health risk is low.” At-risk humans are those who tend to work with animals in dairy and poultry industries; the WHO reported that bird flu “does not appear to transmit easily from person to person, and sustained human-to-human transmission has not been reported.”
Antarctica
The world’s largest iceberg is on the move.
The iceberg, named A23a by the U.S. National Ice Center, is more than 1,000 square nautical miles in area. That’s almost the size of the state of Rhode Island. For the last year, the iceberg was spinning in place in an ocean vortex, but recently broke free.
It is now heading for South Georgia Island, a British Overseas Territory in the southern Atlantic Ocean. The island is a “haven for wildlife,” home to five million seals and 65 million breeding birds, according to the island’s website.
As the iceberg continues its journey north toward the equator, it will encounter warmer waters, which may cause it to begin melting. Floating ice is made of freshwater, so when it melts into ocean water, it can have significant impacts on the surrounding ecosystem.
Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies Gavin Schmidt told NASA that melting ice can potentially change “carbon dioxide uptake and the temperature trends.”
As climate change worsens, glacial ice loss is becoming more prevalent, which could mean we could see more and more of these iceberg events in the future.
International
On his first day of office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement.
Trump’s executive order, entitled “Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements,” also put an end to the U.S. International Climate Finance Plan.
This plan, which was established by executive order of former President Joe Biden in 2021, focused on the “provision or mobilization of financial resources to assist developing countries to reduce and/or avoid greenhouse gas emissions and build resilience and adapt to the impacts of climate change.”
According to the EPA, the United States is the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world. Considering this, it’s clear that the U.S. has been ‘putting itself first’ for quite a while now. And it’s unsustainable — the NOAA reported that 2024 was the “planet’s warmest year on record.”
The Center for Global Development reports that developed countries’ per capita greenhouse gas emissions are “more than twice those of developing countries, and over four times higher than the poorest countries.”
Climate-friendly policy and technology requires money and resources — resources that developed countries have in part because of their disproportionate exploitation of natural resources.
Trump’s policies toward the climate seem to be at odds with the United States’ role in the climate crisis. His decision to pull out of the Paris Agreement has been met with criticism, but what he will choose to do in the face of that remains to be seen.