内容摘要：Across the rugged expanse of Socotra’s Firmihin plateau, the largest remaining dragon’s blood forest unfolds against the backdrop of jagged mountains. Thousands of wide canopies balance atop slender trunks. Socotra starlings dart among the dense crowns while Egyptian vultures bank against the relentless gusts. Below, goats weave through the rocky undergrowth.

Across the rugged expanse of Socotra’s Firmihin plateau, the largest remaining dragon’s blood forest unfolds against the backdrop of jagged mountains. Thousands of wide canopies balance atop slender trunks. Socotra starlings dart among the dense crowns while Egyptian vultures bank against the relentless gusts. Below, goats weave through the rocky undergrowth.

It’s the same story across the Arctic, withdegradation damaging roads, railroad tracks, pipes and buildings for 4 million people across the top of the world, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Arctic Institute. In the Russian Arctic, Indigenous people are being moved to cities instead of having their eroding villages relocated and across Scandinavia, reindeer herders are finding the land constantly shifting and new bodies of water appearing,

About 85% of Alaska’s land area lies atop permafrost, so named because it’s supposed to be permanently frozen ground. It holds a lot of water, and when it thaws or when warmer coastal water hits it, its melting causes further erosion. Another issue with warming:to act as natural barriers that protect coastal communities from the dangerous waves of ocean storms.Calvin Tom, left, the tribal administrator, lifts his son Brady Tom into his boat in Mertarvik, Alaska on Wednesday, Aug. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)

Calvin Tom, left, the tribal administrator, lifts his son Brady Tom into his boat in Mertarvik, Alaska on Wednesday, Aug. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer)The Yupik have a word for the catastrophic threats of erosion, flooding and thawing permafrost: “usteq,” which means “surface caves in.” The changes are usually slow — until all of a sudden they aren’t, as when a riverbank sloughs off or a huge hole opens up, said Rick Thoman, a climate specialist with the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

from erosion, flooding or permafrost melt, according to a report in January from the the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium. Six of them — Kivalina, Koyukuk, Newtok, Shaktoolik,

and Unalakleet — were deemed imminently threatened in a Government Accountability Office report more than two decades ago.The blunder came days after the Trump administration gave New York a

to stop collecting the toll, which started in January and charges most drivers $9 to enter the most traffic-snarled part of the borough.In the memo, three assistant U.S. attorneys from the Southern District of New York wrote that there is “considerable litigation risk” in defending Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s decision to pull federal approval for the toll and that doing so would likely result in a legal loss.

Instead, the three attorneys wrote, the department might have better odds if it tried to end the toll through a different bureaucratic mechanism that would argue it no longer aligns with the federal government’s agenda.Nicholas Biase, a spokesperson for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement Thursday that the filing was “a completely honest error and was not intentional in any way.”