Two teenage brothers with ties to the Chicago area are among the victims who lost their lives after a volcano erupted in New Zealand on Monday .

Matthew and Berend Hollander died in a hospital as a result of injuries from the White Island volcano eruption, according to a letter addressed to parents from Knox Grammar School, the boys’ school in Australia.

The Chicago Tribune reports Berend was 16  and Matthew was 13.

Their parents, Martin and Barbara Hollander, are unaccounted for, the school says.

The family moved from Northbrook, a suburb north of Chicago, to Australia about five years ago, WLS-TV reported. The teens’ mother is from the area, and their father is from Sydney.

“We are together with our family grieving the loss of our loved ones,” Barbara’s parents said in a statement sent to the TV station. “Our amazing daughter, Barbara Hollander, and our son-in-law, Martin Hollander, were a wonderful couple and parents to our grandsons.”

The school memorialized the brothers in its letter: „Matthew had a close circle of friends and was popular amongst his peers. He was always enthusiastic about life and was actively involved in school and year group activities.”

„Ben was a compassionate and enthusiastic student, with an interest in software design. Ben’s engaging smile and quirky sense of humour made him a good mate to his close group of friends and a welcome member to every classroom.”

Family members released a statement through Knox Grammar School requesting privacy.

„We are absolutely heartbroken by this loss,” the family said in a statement. „Ben and Matthew were wonderfully kind and spirited boys who lived short but very fulsome lives.

„They loved Knox and all their friends, and the Australian sports and outdoor lifestyle they adopted on moving from the United States six years ago.  They had a positive and lasting impact on everyone’s paths they crossed.”

New Zealand medical staff were continuing to work around the clock treating severely burned survivors of the eruption as the estimated death toll climbed to 16 early Thursday.

The enormity of the task facing doctors in burn units around the country became clear when Dr. Peter Watson, a chief medical officer, said at a news conference that they had needed to order extra skin from American skin banks.

Watson said staff anticipated needing an extra 1,300 square feet of skin for grafts for patients. Most of those who survived the eruption suffered burns, and 28 patients remain hospitalized, including 23 in critical condition.

Newlyweds on cruise: Couple burned by volcanic eruption on New Zealand honeymoon cruise

Police believe 47 visitors were on the island at the time of the eruption, 24 of them Australian, nine Americans, five New Zealanders and others from Germany, the United Kingdom, China and Malaysia. Many were passengers aboard the Royal Caribbean cruise ship Ovation of the Seas.

A risky mission to recover bodies from the island on Friday morning local time recovered multiple bodies from the island.

Contributing: Joel Shannon, USA TODAY; T Associated Press. Follow Adrianna Rodriguez on Twitter: @AdriannaUSAT.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: New Zealand volcano eruption: Chicago-area teen brothers among victims

World

How 16-year-old Greta Thunberg — Time’s 2019 person of the year — became the face of climate activism in just one year

Business Insider•December 11, 2019

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MICHAEL CAMPANELLA/Getty Images and REUTERS/Kate Munsch

• Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old activist from Sweden, has become the face of the youth climate movement.
• In the summer of 2018, Thunberg started sitting outside the Swedish parliament every Friday. On September 20, 2019, Thunberg led the largest climate strike in history, which included an estimated 4 million people across 161 countries.
• Thunberg has addressed the United Nations, US Congress, and UK Parliament.
• On Wednesday, Time magazine named Thunberg the 2019 person of the year.
• Here’s how she rose to prominence on the world stage.
• Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.

Teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg has been named Time magazine’s 2019 person of the year.

Thunberg „has succeeded in creating a global attitudinal shift, transforming millions of vague, middle-of-the-night anxieties into a worldwide movement calling for urgent change,” Time wrote.

The scale of that movement was especially apparent this fall, when an estimated 4 million people in 161 countries took to the streets on September 20 — the largest climate demonstration in history.

Following that global strike, Thunberg gave an impassioned, tearful speech to world leaders at the UN Climate Action Summit.

„This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be standing here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean,” she said with tears in her eyes. „Yet you all come to me for hope? How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”

Thunberg launched the „Fridays For Future” movement — or School Strike for Climate (as it says in Swedish on her now-famous sign) — in 2018, encouraging students to skip school to demand action on climate change from their governments. In November of that year, when she was in ninth grade, Thunberg staged a strike for two weeks outside the Swedish parliament, demanding that the government cut emissions by 15% a year.

Thunberg still spends every Friday on strike. She has met with countless world leaders in her quest to raise awareness about and action to address our changing climate.

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Californians’ umbrellas have been put to good use for the last few weeks — and all that rain has helped drive away drought conditions that were creeping back, new data show.

“All of a sudden we went from people wondering when it would rain to people wondering when it will stop raining,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Spencer Tangen, according to SFGATE. “It’s almost as if a switch was flipped.”

As recently as Nov. 12, “abnormally dry” conditions blanketed nearly all of California, with stretches of the southeastern corner slipping into “moderate drought,” according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

But as of Dec. 10, only the furthest northern reaches of the Golden State are listed as “abnormally dry” — and there’s no drought left in the state at all.

“Another week of above-normal rainfall and mountain snow led to continued improvements in the Southwest,” U.S. Drought Monitor experts said Thursday. “In California and Nevada, rainfall over the last three weeks has helped to make up for the slow start to the water year, resulting in the removal of the abnormal dryness depiction across most of the state.”

Dangerously high waves headed to California and Oregon beaches, forecasters warn

Those experts said remaining pockets of dryness were “in areas that missed the heaviest precipitation or where station data indicate below-normal snow.”

And there’s no sign of the wet weather letting up.

“Precipitation is likely to be above normal over the Pacific Northwest [and] parts of northern California” in coming days, the U.S. Drought Monitor experts wrote.

The U.S. Drought Monitor is a partnership of the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Back in mid-November, only about 18 percent of the state avoided falling into dry or drought conditions, while roughly 81 percent of California was “abnormally dry” and nearly 4 percent had slipped into “moderate drought,” the U.S. Drought Monitor showed.

The lurch to dryness in mid-November was a drastic change from just days earlier, when 82 percent of California was experiencing no dry or drought conditions and only 18 percent of the state was “abnormally dry.” And months before that, none of the state was in drought at all thanks to heavy winter precipitation that pulled California from persistent drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

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Technology like this will take humans to Mars

To explore the solar system beyond our planet, one important factor is the ability to locate water which can be used for drinking and for creating rocket fuel. To assist in the hunt for water on neighboring Mars, NASA has released a „treasure map” of potential ice locations on the red planet.

Researchers created the map of the Martian surface which shows where water ice (so-called because other chemical compounds can freeze) is believed to be located. In some places, the ice is as little as 2.5 centimeters below the surface, making it easily accessible to future visitors. Cool colors represent ice closer to the surface, while warm colors are ice deeper down.

„You wouldn’t need a backhoe to dig up this ice. You could use a shovel,” the paper’s lead author, Sylvain Piqueux of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a blog post. „We’re continuing to collect data on buried ice on Mars, zeroing in on the best places for astronauts to land.”

Locating reserves of ice is important to enable manned missions to the planet, and could help identify sites for projects like SpaceX’s planned Mars base. Water is heavy to transport aboard rockets, so finding it on Mars could help humans survive there. However, because the planet has such a thin atmosphere, most water on the surface evaporates quickly.

We’ve known for a while that there’s water on Mars in the form of ice. In 2008, NASA’s Mars Phoenix lander discovered frozen water in a soil sample after landing on the planet a month earlier.

Looking below the Martian surface provides the best hope of finding accessible water ice, and that there may even be liquid water beneath the polar ice caps. With this new map, researchers have a blueprint for where to start planning missions and eventually sending astronauts to Mars.