Greenland's valuable glacial mud

Minerals in the mud of Greeland

https://www.dw.com/en/greenlands-valuable-glacial-mud/av-42227881

Visiting Greenland to study climate change

Cool program for PhD students in Greenland

http://sciencenordic.com/video-understanding-climate-change-greenland

China's war on waste

Great video about the personal side of how China's waste is increasing yet it does not have the facilities to handle it all

China's War on Waste
https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/101east/2018/10/china-war-waste-181011063048342.html

Rural migrants evicted from Beijing

Great slice of life of rural migrants who are being evicted from Beijing.

https://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/101east/2018/05/beijing-brutal-evictions-180527093537974.html

Was China's loess plateau every green?

The Loess Plateau today is a dry area of easily-eroded flyaway yellow soil known as loess. It's what makes the Yellow River yellow. Loess dust has blown all the way to Beijing, causing major dust storms.

One solution being tried is massive tree-planting projects, in the hope that roots will grab and stabilize the soil and that the litter from the vegetation will fertilize the soil. However, this study questions whether the Loess Plateau is suited for trees.

New study uproots popular belief in Central China's leafy Loess Plateau

New study of region's ancient vegetation finds grasses have dominated landscape for millennia and calls tree-planting campaigns into question

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/1246865/new-study-uproots-popular-belief-leafy-loess-plateau

China's growth

From the section "China's Addiction to US Treasuries" p. 125 in the book The China Boom by Ho-Fun Hung:

How the Made in China era started with rural-to-urban migration:

"The rise of China's export sector was enabled by a series of policy changes in the mid-1990s that precipitated an expanding stream of low-wage rural migrant laborers."


Why China's rise is similar to that of the earlier Asian Tigers:

"Asia's exporters [like Japan, S. Korea, Taiwan] devoted most of their reserves to the purchase of US Treasury bonds, turning themselves into the largest creditors of the United States...

Asia's massive investment in low-yield US Treasury bonds was tantamount to a tribute payment through which Asia's savings were transformed into Americans' consumption power, prolonging US prosperity but creating a financial bubble in the 1980s and beyond. China's export-oriented boom is a continuation and escalation of this market and financial dependence on the United States... In 2008, China surpassed the US as the biggest foreign holder of [US Treasury] bonds."


Hung also has an interesting history of how the US dollar took over global dominance from the British Sterling, and how rivals such as the Euro have tried to compete with the dollar, unsuccessfully.