Our daily joyride around the world

🇦🇪 The world’s largest Ferris wheel, located in Dubai, has been dormant for over a year – and officials won’t say why. The Ain Dubai, which stands twice as tall as the London Eye and contains more steel than the Eiffel Tower, was supposed to be the centerpiece of an artificial island featuring some of Dubai’s most expensive real estate. But when the attraction was closed last summer for “one month” of repairs, its owners kept extending the shutdown one month at a time until quietly revealing this past April that the ride was closed indefinitely. UAE officials have publicly said very little about Ain Dubai, in keeping with the country’s culture of secrecy around high-profile projects which are often halted or demolished without explanation, per WaPo.

🌊 Humanity is dumping significantly less plastic into oceans than previously thought. That’s the conclusion of a new peer-reviewed study published in Nature Geoscience, which found about 500,000 metric tons of plastic end up in the ocean each year – a number far lower than the 8 million metric tons per year reported in a widely publicized study from 2015. Though the new findings weren’t all positive – the researchers said the total amount of plastic in the oceans is still growing by 4% per year, and will likely double within the next two decades.

🌍 European scientists officially confirmed July was Earth’s hottest month on record (dating back to 1940). July’s global average temperature of 62.51°F was more than half-a-degree higher than the previous high set in 2019, and 1.3°F warmer than the 1991-2020 average for July, the Copernicus Climate Change Service announced yesterday. The world’s previous single-day heat record, initially set in 2016 and tied in 2022, was exceeded on every day last month except for July 1st and 2nd, Copernicus scientists said.