Environment

The Dead Sea is slowly dying as industrial and agricultural extraction of water causes the lake to shrink at record rate over the last year.

NASA satellite images illustrating the decline of the Dead Sea over the past 40 years:

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The week's hottest temperature was 121.1 degrees Fahrenheit (49.5 degrees Celsius) at Kaedi, Mauritania.

The week's coldest temperature was minus 79.6 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 62.0 degrees Celsius) at Russia's Vostok Antarctic research station.

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Every rainy season, the Guna people living on the Panamanian white sand archipelago of San Blas brace themselves for waves gushing into their tiny mud-floor huts.

Rising ocean levels caused by global warming and decades of coral reef destruction have combined with seasonal rains to submerge the Caribbean islands for days on end.

Once rare, flooding is now so menacing that the Guna have agreed to abandon ancestral lands for an area within their semi-autonomous territory on the east coast of the mainland.