The West has become 500 percent dustier in the past two centuries due to westward U.S. expansion and accompanying human activity beginning in the 1800s, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The environmental damage caused by rich nations disproportionately impacts poor nations and costs them more than their combined foreign debt, according to a first-ever global accounting of the dollar costs of countries' ecological footprints.

Research carried out in the Department of Social Psychology and Methodology of Behaviour Sciences of the University of Granada has shown that the level of academic training is not related to the ecological awareness of people, despite the great proliferation of programs designed to educate and increase social awareness of the environment.

The process of deep-water formation involves the sinking of aerated surface waters down to the bottom of the ocean. This process replenishes the deep ocean with oxygen, which is otherwise consumed by decomposition of organic material raining down from the surface waters where primary productivity occurs.