Sun Care Decoded: Answers to Questions You Didnt Know to Ask

Why would that be? Certain nutrients, especially phytochemicals, improve skin's ability to ward off damage. One study found that supplementing with lycopene a pigment in red fruits and vegetables may prevent UV damage; another showed that people taking a supplement with alpha-and beta-carotenoids in orange and yellow produce were less likely to have skin damage after UV exposure.

It's possible eating a rainbow could delay sunburn, but that doesn't mean a salad is equal to sunscreen. Be on the lookout for an SPF pill: British scientists are working to create sunscreen in pill form, after discovering that coral in the Great Barrier Reef creates its own UV protection by consuming a compound in algae.

Human testing hasn't begun yet, but someday we may be able to swallow our sunscreen. Is sunscreen residue bad for marine life? Some ingredients in sunscreen can awaken viruses that kill coral's food supply—and ultimately the reefs themselves and the animals that live there. The common ingredients that are most damaging include oxybenzone and the preservative butylparaben. For an eco-friendly option, choose a product that uses the physical sunscreen ingredients zinc oxide or titanium dioxide because they "break down more readily in nature," says Ni'Kita Wilson, a cosmetic chemist in New Jersey.

Should I be using regular sunscreen on my face, or do i need something special? Rosacea makes skin sensitive and more likely to react to certain ingredients in sunscreen—but the sun itself is one of the biggest flare-up triggers, so going unprotected is not an option. Wechsler also tells her patients with rosacea to say no to fragrance. Can you recommend a natural sunscreen that doesn't look like toothpaste? The purest options are those without chemical sunscreens, retinyl palmitate, fragrance, or para-bens.

That leaves products that use physical sunscreens, which typically don't rub in as easily and sometimes leave skin with a whitish cast. After trying pretty much every natural sunscreen that meets these guidelines for a list, go to prevention. Best Makeup Tips For Summer. Is there any reason to wear sun-protective clothing? But, really, who wants to wear head-to-toe denim—not to mention velvet! Instead, look for sweat-wicking clothes with at least UPF 30; Athleta, Columbia, and Patagonia all have great options.

I know too much sun can cause cancer, but aren't the chemicals in sunscreens unhealthy too? Although a few studies have raised questions about the safety of oxybenzone and retinyl palmitate, two ingredients found in some sunscreens, they are entirely avoidable if you read labels. So, what are potential concerns about those two components? Oxybenzone has been shown to cause hormone disruption in studies of cancer cells however, a study on its effect when applied to skin did not show any statistically significant change in hormone levels. Retinyl palmitate has been linked to skin cancer when applied topically in very large doses to mice however, the species of mice used in the study were far more susceptible to skin cancer than humans, and there aren't any human studies showing the ingredient causes cancer, according to Steven Q.

I want to make sure I get enough vitamin D. Severe flooding has been reported across many northwestern parts of the country. The more I looked around, the more I realized that it was nationwide. This isn't a year-down-the-road thing. It is right now. What Paul came to realize was how these global changes in the atmosphere could be affecting his local weather patterns. Climate and weather are flip sides of the same coin. You impact climate, it's going to impact weather.

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Weather is what is happening in the atmosphere at a given time and place: Climate is an average of that weather, over longer periods. Paul says the connection between climate change and our local weather comes down to how much heat is in Earth's system. Uneven heating by the sun of the earth is what drives the weather machine: Cold air wants to flow south; hot air wants to flow north. But there's a twist, and that twist is triggered by the earth spinning on its axis. The combination of heating plus the spin of the earth on its axis creates the complicated air circulations that drive our weather.

It is fundamentally these two factors, Earth's spin and heat differences between the poles and the equator that create the weather patterns we know. So, if you trap more heat in the system, you change the weather. You put more heat into the system, there are going to be consequences, like more extremes worldwide.

Weather that would have formed anyway is now super-sized. There are certain conditions that may be enhancing larger storms. We can expect more intense hurricanes going forward, as our climate system warms. We're poking at the climate system with a long, sharp, carbon-tipped spear and then acting surprised, shocked, indignant when the weather bites back.

And the weather will be biting back with greater ferocity, with greater frequency. As a meteorologist, Paul has made a career out of predicting the weather for the next few days. What we need now are predictions about how our climate is changing over the next 50 years or even hundreds of years. We are more powerful than nature in the push we are putting on climate. And we don't entirely understand and cannot perfectly predict all of the consequences. It's not we're worried because it's never happened before, Earth's climate has changed.

What hasn't happened before is to change it this quickly. We are so far outside the range of natural variability. We have not seen carbon dioxide levels like this in the history of human civilization on this planet. We're really doing an experiment on the planet that hasn't been done for about million years. Across the globe, scientists are now racing to understand and model Earth's climate system, trying to figure out just how damaging climate change will be.

From the ice sheets of Greenland to the deserts of Australia, and from Hawaii's volcanic peaks to the depths of the ocean, they are searching for clues in the land, sea, ice and air, the key elements of Earth's climate machine. Our planet did not come with a manual of how it all works, and so, much of science is trying to, kind of, take the planet apart and understand how all of these pieces work together.

The evidence is clear that by burning fossil fuels, we humans have changed the composition of the atmosphere, which is now trapping more heat. How the other parts of the climate machine will respond will determine how much our climate will change and how much the great diversity of life that it supports will be affected. The planet has been here for 4. What I'm really concerned about is how humans will survive and how our lifestyles will be affected by this in the future.

We are already feeling the effects of climate change. We don't have the luxury of being a gentlemanly scientist in the s. We have to make a difference right now. It's a planetary crisis. And it's a crisis that we've collectively created together, but we're clever enough to think our way out of this.

The efforts to think our way out of this and understand what the future may hold are now underway.

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Forests are a big part of the earth machine. To think about the world without forests would be like taking a piece of the machine out, and then the whole machine won't actually work. We're currently right in this zone. And these are the great forests of the Sierras. This is where the bulk of the giant sequoia trees live. From 10, feet, he uses lasers to reconstruct the entire forest in 3D, capturing a million-and-a-half trees an hour. You can't really see what the trees are doing with the naked eye, but instrumentation lets us peel away the foliage and see the chemicals in the foliage.

Greg's measurements provide a clue to one of the surprising mysteries of climate change: We knew from Dave Keeling's measurements that the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere was rising. We knew roughly how much coal and oil and gas we had burned, and there was a certain amount of carbon dioxide that wasn't showing up in the atmosphere. Now the question is, where did it go? We can calculate how much carbon dioxide we are putting into the air, and we can measure how much carbon dioxide is in the air, but, intriguingly, those numbers do not add up.

The increase in the atmosphere is only about 50 percent of what we're actually putting into the atmosphere. So, half of what we emit isn't even staying there. It is going somewhere else. Given how much we are emitting, levels of carbon dioxide should be much higher than they are. So where has all the carbon gone? His instruments can peel back the canopy of the forest below, to reveal the chemical makeup of each individual tree.

In this image, the red shows areas of high carbon, the blue, low carbon. Forests soak up carbon dioxide, and they put it into wood, leaves, roots, you know, the basic building blocks of a tree. And that carbon is held in that tree. Although trees breathe in carbon dioxide in the spring and exhale it in the fall, overall, as they grow, they store some of that carbon. This helps cool the atmosphere, by reducing heat-trapping gases. All around the world, Greg is precisely recording the carbon content of millions of trees.

From this kind of research, the impact of forests has become clear: Trees are soaking up about a quarter of the carbon dioxide that we are putting into the atmosphere per year. And so, without that subsidy, without that service, we would actually be in a more precarious predicament, making our atmosphere even hotter.

The land, part of Earth's climate machine, is playing an essential role, because trees are absorbing about 25 percent of the extra carbon dioxide that is heating our atmosphere. It turns out that the oceans are doing the same. Of every two molecules of CO2 that we put into atmosphere, one of them gets absorbed by the surface of the planet, half of it by the oceans and half of it by land. Without these, the problem would be worse than twice as bad as it is already.

And there is another way that the oceans are helping us. They are absorbing heat from the atmosphere. When we talk about warming of the climate system, we tend to focus on the atmosphere, but the lion's share of the warming of our climate system is in the ocean.

Viewed from space, Earth has been described as a "blue marble. And it is largely uncharted territory. The oceans really are our final frontier. It's 70 percent of our planet, so we have to understand what's going on there. There is no better place to understand just how the oceans dominate our climate than here in the Southern Ocean, the massive body of water encircling Antarctica.

The whole ocean is a mystery, but the Southern Ocean has been the ultimate mystery. Stephen is one of the leaders of a multi-year, international effort to investigate how our oceans are changing. He is now zeroing in on the Southern Ocean. It's a very difficult place to work. Even in good conditions, the weather is terrible.

In the winter it's ice covered, so we largely have no idea what's going on under the ice. Nobody in their right mind goes there in the winter. Along with teams from around the world, he is building fleets of underwater drones, called "Argo floats," to do the work. In the Southern Ocean, Stephen launches one of these underwater floats, and then it's on its own, hopefully, for years to come. The float is launched at the sea surface. It will signal to the satellite that it's okay; it will drop to a depth of 3, feet, drift for 10 days, then drop to 6, feet briefly.

And then, as it ascends back to the sea surface, it will collect data all the way up, with all of its sensors on. These sensors take the vital signs of the ocean, including its chemistry and temperature. Once at the surface, the floats beam that data to a satellite, before diving back down and repeating the cycle. You never know what you are going to get, but every observation is a gem in its own right, because there aren't very many of them yet. We've been blind about the oceans. It's just been a dark room. And the Argo floats are like flipping on the lights.

For the first time, you can actually see what's going on. So far, over 3, floats have been launched, all around the globe. They now pepper our oceans, dutifully collecting data on an unprecedented scale. We suddenly have a three-dimensional measurement of the oceans that is essentially continuous in time over the last 10 years.

In one summer, we collected more data than we had in 50 years previously of all of oceanographic measurements. With this information, the Argo floats have transformed our understanding of the ocean. The water in the ocean circulates. At the surface, it is warmer, but in the deep ocean, the water is very cold and has not been exposed to the atmosphere for hundreds of years. It is in the Southern Ocean that this deep cold water rises to the surface.

The Southern Ocean is this gateway between the deep ocean and the atmosphere. There's not many places in the global ocean where that deep water can contact the atmosphere. Once at the surface, the deep cold water, that scientists call "old water," soaks up heat like a sponge. That older water has not been in contact with the atmosphere for a long time, since before the industrial era, and so this is water that hasn't seen any of the heat that has been accumulating in the climate system. When that water does come up to the surface, it is able to take up the excess heat. The Argo floats reveal that over the last 30 years, the ocean has heated up by an average of a half-degree Fahrenheit.

When the oceans change in temperature by a little bit, that is storing the same amount of heat that the atmosphere would store by changing in temperature by a lot. If we put all of that heat into the lower atmosphere, the atmosphere would heat up by about 20 degrees Fahrenheit, that's how much heat we're talking about here. We have already warmed the atmosphere a degree-and-a-half Fahrenheit. Without the help of the ocean, it could be much hotter. In all, a staggering 93 percent of the heat that we're putting into our atmosphere is getting soaked up by our oceans.

This comes with consequences. Heating the ocean and adding carbon dioxide are damaging to life in the sea. As you change one component of the climate machine, you affect the others, which can have benefits but can also lead to devastating consequences. And one of the most urgent questions of all is what will happen when the warmer air and ocean come into contact with the polar ice caps?

In a helicopter over Greenland, David Holland, of New York University, wants to find out how warmer temperatures are affecting this actively shrinking glacier. Today's mission is to place motion trackers directly on the ice. We are going to go to three locations on the glacier and see if we can begin to understand how large glaciers disintegrate. Constantly moving, this glacier is filled with crevasses, which makes it extremely dangerous, so David has brought along Brian Rougeux, an experienced mountaineer. It is dangerous in terms of the helicopter being able to land and dangerous, certainly, in terms of being able to walk around.

But the ice here may collapse under the weight of the helicopter. They must do what is known as a "toe-in. A toe-in is where the helicopter will come in and set its skids down on the ice, but not power down. So, the ice doesn't get its full weight, just kind of touches down just enough to give me an opportunity to hop out, get the gear out, and then he's able to take off again.

It is difficult to really put into words what it feels like to look around and know that miles of ice are surrounding you. And then you have in the back of your mind the only way out of there is that helicopter.

Sun Care Decoded by Michael J. Russ & Peter Zahner on Apple Books

On the western coast of Greenland, the Jakobshavn glacier is one of the fastest disintegrating glaciers in the world. The glacier meets the sea, here, where icebergs break off, in a process called "calving. In , an iceberg twice the size of the Empire State Building breaks off and floats out to sea. Speeding up a year of images reveals the glacier advancing as ice flows from inland, but from space, satellites show the glacier is actually retreating. In one decade, it lost 10 miles. The Jakobshavn ice stream is pretty much the fastest glacier in the world, and it drains huge amounts of ice from the Greenland ice sheet.

It's almost like uncorking a bottle of wine, right? There's all this pressure of ice wanting to flow to the sea, and as you remove that resistance in the front, that ice will accelerate. Back on the glacier, Brian has been working quickly to install instruments that can reveal how the ice is moving behind the calving wall.

Brian signals to the helicopter, and they swoop in to pick him up. It's a successful deployment. The data from the motion trackers and other high tech devices, like this radar, are giving Holland new insights into how glaciers disappear. What he has found is surprising.

For glaciers in contact with the ocean, warmer air causes some of the loss of ice, but the real trigger for intense calving is warmer water coming underneath the glacier and destabilizing it. And David says that changing winds and currents are bringing that warmer water up from the Gulf Stream, increasing the loss of ice. People have begun to understand that half the ice loss occurs through calving, through fracturing of ice. This calving is a concern, because ice melts slowly but it fractures in an instant. The fracture and breakup of the glacier could actually dominate everything.

If that is the case, then the retreat of glaciers could be much faster than previously thought. And the reason we care is there is about 23 feet of sea level equivalent locked up in the Greenland ice sheet.

If it were all to disappear, oceans would go up 23 feet. That's not going to happen, well, in the near future. But it is shrinking, it is losing ice to the oceans, and oceans are rising as a result. The same loss of ice is unfolding on the other side of the planet, only on a much bigger scale. Locked up in the Antarctic ice sheet is a total of feet of possible sea level rise.

And this vast continent of ice, especially the western part, is breaking up faster than anyone thought possible. There is a huge amount of water locked up in the Antarctic. The only question under warming is how rapidly that ice could melt or slide into the ocean. The melting or break up of all that ice would devastate much of civilization as we know it, as sea levels rise and flood cities and coasts.

The answer lies half a world away in a remote corner of the western Australian outback. Andrea Dutton of the University of Florida has travelled here to work out how high sea levels could rise in the future, by looking into the past. Earth has done experiments for us in the past. It hasn't warmed up perhaps as quickly as we've seen over the last century, but it has been this warm before.

By drilling deep into this rock, Andrea can travel back to that time when Earth was as warm as today. Every time someone takes the drill for the first time, they look at me, and they say, "That was really hard. So, it takes a long time to collect a little bit of core, but it's worth it because it gives us a really important window into the past. Inside the cores, she finds fossils of ancient coral. There is only one way to explain what that coral is doing here: An ancient coral reef extends more than a mile in from today's coastline.

At one location, Andrea finds some of these ancient fossils exposed and rising above today's waterline. Corals only grow in the ocean. So, wherever there are fossilized corals, there must have been seawater. The corals that we are looking at need sunlight to survive, so they live very close to the sea surface. So, we use that to our advantage to understand where that sea surface was in the past, by looking at how high the coral is. By mapping this ancient Australian reef, Andrea is able to tell how high sea levels were the last time Earth was as warm as today.

You can see the waves breaking on the shoreline below me. Where I'm standing, I'm already more than nine feet higher than that. We know the seas must have risen at least to that level to keep these corals alive. Andrea has found similar coral formations around the world, from this time period, that point to even greater sea level rise. Our research shows that with just the amount of warming we've seen today, the seas could rise much higher, up to 20 to 30 feet higher than today. This enormous increase is due, in part, because warmer water has a greater volume, but it also means that, at that time, some of the world's great ice sheets must have collapsed.

The big question is how fast? Does it take us years to get there? Well that's one thing. Or does it take us years to get there. That's three feet in a decade. In Antarctica, we see massive glaciers breaking off, adding to the amount that sea level is rising. Two thirds of the world's biggest cities are within just a few feet of sea level. And you can't pick up a city and move it. So, when will we start to feel the impact of sea level rise? Some people already are. The Marshall Islands are a nation of low-lying islands in the Pacific.

They are home to 50, people and a vibrant culture. Today, they face becoming a new kind of refugee: We are only, like, two meters above sea level, so every time that there is a high tide, all this water gushes over and crashes into our homes and washes away graves. You feel really small. These floodings are going to continue to the point where we can't live there anymore. Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner is a poet from the Marshall Islands. For her family, it is their homes and their very way of life that is at stake.

What's going to happen to our culture, our traditions? We're hoping to not become nomads. We're hoping to not become lost, There are songs and chants that you can't hear anywhere else. What will happen to those stories that have survived for thousands of years? There's just things that you can't find anywhere else on Earth that you can only find in the Marshalls. Kathy has become the voice of the Marshalls, addressing the United Nations with a poem to her daughter about the world she will face.

Her words are an attempt to bring the realities of climate change to people who believe it will not affect them. It's kind of hard to connect to an issue that you don't see outside of your own front door, you know? It doesn't stop it from being a reality though. If our island goes down, who do you think will be next? It's going to be the rest of the world, it's just going to start with us. The results of climate change are, in fact, already striking the rest of the world, and much closer to home.

For those people who don't believe that sea level rise is happening, all you've got to do is come to Norfolk, or Charleston, or Miami, or New Orleans or San Diego, because you could see evidence of this in every one of those cities.

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This walkway, that was once supposed to allow people to walk and enjoy the water, is now under water. Sea level rise is now a reality even in the United States. And low-lying cities, like Norfolk, Virginia, are on the front line. This floods all the time. So, like, when that happens, we'll take our furniture and stack it up. It's been much higher than this before. It's sort of annoying to have all this flooding all the time. The flooding may be annoying today, but it will become a tragedy if it continues. Norfolk is an important commercial port and home to America's largest naval base.

You have Naval Station Norfolk, the largest naval station in the world. Our national defense is certainly impacted by what's happening in the community outside. Sea levels here have risen about 18 inches since World War I, about half of that related to climate change. For this strategically important port, the rising water is literally getting in the way. Folks live and reside in the communities right outside of the base.

And on a daily basis they must get to the base to perform the duties that are vital to our national security. Sea level rise means there is just that much more flooding and that means that there's just that much more impact to roads, logistics infrastructure, moving cargo back and forth. And so that just makes it that much harder for you to prepare that ship to go and for the crew to prepare themselves to go. According to retired admiral Ann Phillips, climate change is a national security issue.

The Navy does see climate as an impact to its readiness and its ability to be resilient. From a national security perspective, sea level rise is a threat multiplier or a threat magnifier. But to the people who live here, coastal flooding has an enormous personal cost. This house has flooded three times.

I just don't know. I don't know how we'd be able to sell the house. Honestly, I really don't. Donna Woodward and Jim Schultz doubted they could sell their house and so decided to raise it up. It came down to deciding whether we wanted to go ahead and move out of the area or put all the money into elevating the house and staying. It's happening now, not in the future, today. It's happening as we stand here. So, anyone who doubts it, we invite them to buy all of this property here and to come live and see for themselves.

Sea level rise affects me in ways I had not thought of, you know?

I need to be able to get to work. I bought a truck that has a snorkel. Sea level rise affects everyone here personally, and that is going to continue to accelerate. We have no time to waste, the situation is urgent. For the people of Norfolk, climate change is already affecting their lives. And across all of America, the costs are mounting. On a single day in , a satellite recorded three megastorms bearing down on the Americas.

Meteorologist Paul Douglas' weather team has never seen anything like it. This is easily going to be a three-hundred-billion-dollar year for hurricanes. Two-thousand-seventeen was the costliest hurricane season on record. So, for example, if your skin would typically burn after 10 minutes in the sun, a sunscreen with SPF 15 should allow you to stay in the sun 15 times longer minutes before your skin would start to burn. Higher SPF is not always better—in fact, it can be misleading source.

Also, sweating, swimming and other physical activities can reduce the potency of the SPF, which means you may need to apply it more often. This resource from the Cleveland Clinic has some great application tips to help you get maximum protection! There are chemicals in many personal care products, sunscreen included, that have been linked with cancer, birth defects and a variety of other health issues. I know you want to protect yourself, your family and the environment. So, here are a few red flags to look out for:. This ingredient has been linked to the faster growth of skin tumors when applied and exposed to sunlight.

It may also lead to vitamin A toxicity. Luckily, EWG does report that the number of sunscreens containing this problematic ingredient has dropped by more than half since You can read more about Vitamin A in sunscreen here. This toxic chemical, which EWG found in almost 65 percent of non-mineral products it evaluated this year, is perhaps the most troubling sunscreen ingredient.

It comes with a whole host of environmental and health concerns, including hormone disruption source and coral reef damage. As convenient as these products are, they pose a couple of challenges. Remember what I said before about mineral sunscreens? Old-school mineral sunscreens were often known for their white, chalky look SO not cute! To remedy this, many brands have started using nanoparticles. The problem is, these babies are not well-regulated and vary greatly in their size, shape and so on—all factors that may impact the protection power of the sunscreen. Their effect on the environment is also not well understood.

These recommendations are among the 23 oxybenzone-free non-mineral sunscreens that EWG is able to recommend. You also need healthy sun habits! Spend minutes in the sun sans sunscreen a few times per week to meet your vitamin D needs. Apply the recommended amount usually 1. The best protection from the sun is complete protection. Cover up with a hat, long sleeves, a shady tree or an umbrella to give yourself a break from those rays.

Carry sun protection and sunscreen with you at all times. Sunscreen and sun protection are still imperfect sciences. Some companies are making progress, and some have work to do. And when it comes to choosing the best possible protection for you, your family and the environment—a little awareness check—you got that from this article!

What are your tips for safe fun in the sun? Do you have a favorite natural sunscreen? Let me know in the comments below!