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This image covers many shallow irregular pits with raised rims, concentrated along ridges and other topographic features. How did these odd features form?
One idea is that they could be from sublimation of shallow lenses of nearly pure ice, but why do the pits have raised rims? They can’t be impact craters with such fortuitous alignment and irregular margins. They aren’t wind-blown deposits because there are many boulders, too big to be moved by the wind. There are younger wind-blown drifts on top of the pits, and there’s no clear connection to volcanism.
Some speculate that there were ancient oceans over this region—could that somehow explain these features? Ancient glaciation is another possibility, perhaps depositing ice-rich debris next to topographic obstacles.Future images of this region may provide clues, but for now this is a mystery.
Clouds and Light Pollution
Compare the effect of light pollution with and without clouds.— Till Credner
To clarify, just in case you misunderstood me in thinking I was knocking solar energy, I wasn’t. I meant the other more destructive means of acquiring energy.
Admittedly I’m not that well versed when it comes to the diversity or lack of when it comes to emergent developing energies.That said, a good source of energy that I believe we can easily start implementing now while we continue to find better, safer, abundant sources of energy would be harnessing the power of the sun. In just the last 5 years there has been countless research and data expanding ways we can harness more efficiently and implement more readily this energy we downplay.
It’s cheap (hell, if we play it smart rather than greedy we can make solar energy so abundant and so easily attainable that it can be free for all with a small fee of simply installing the means to acquire and use it), it’s literally everywhere, it doesn’t compromise the safety our environment, the species that inhabit them and our way of life. With such efficiency, it would allow the time to slow (too late to stop) us from spiraling into the environmentally destructive path we’ve already set for ourselves as we find even better, safer, powerful energies and look for ways to revert some of the editable problems that we can change.
If we can manage to have our technologies mimic processes like photosynthesis (which we somewhat already can — so imagine with a bit more research, interest, lobbying and funding, say, as much as oil gets what can be done with this) rather than continue living and making technologies based on the energies we currently have (which time again have shown to be more harmful than they are useful when you stop thinking in short term) we can knock down a lot of the problems that plague us because of the oil industry and other harmful means of energy extraction and usage.
Gas Flares from Bakken Fracking are Visible from Space
This sparkling view of American cities from space reveals a town with a different kind of night-life. One of the bright regions that sits alone in the darkness of the northern plains isn’t a bustling city at all - instead, this blaze is a night-time view of fracking in action.
Seen in this photo taken by NASA’s Suomi NPP satellite, the glow comes from hundreds of flares from rigs drilled into the Bakken formation of North Dakota. The huge amount of unwanted gas being burned off from the production of shale oil creates a light the size of metropolitan Boston.
Bakken is a 360-million-year-old tectonic plate made primarily of shale rock. Fracking has liberated the oil that lies within it, propelling North Dakota to the second-largest oil producing state in the US, behind Texas.
Flaring is a way to burn off excess natural gas during oil production, but the process effectively wastes a natural resource while simultaneously emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. As of 2011, more than 35 per cent of North Dakota’s natural gas production was burnt off in flares, according to a study done by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The same study reported that in 2009, on average, less than 1 per cent of the total amount of natural gas produced in the US was lost to flaring. By those standards, the Bakken formation in North Dakota sticks out as a staggeringly flaring-heavy drilling site and the island of light in this picture only helps make that case.
Read more about fracking in our Energy and Fuels topic guide.
Whenever you see ‘Paul Staments’ in any article, you better damn well pay attention.
Presenting solutions for cleaning up petroleum spills and nuclear accidents, replacements for antimicrobial drugs; treatment against flu, pox, herpes, cancer, etc. and pest control that effectively renders chemical pesticides obsolete.
Harvard Scientist Proposes a Way to Refreeze the Arctic to Combat Possible Global Warming Disaster
The amount of ice in the Arctic Ocean shrunk to an all time low in September, with the area covered now only half of what it was in the 1980s. This alarming development along with the global community’s inability to come to a consensus about cutting CO2 emissions has led Harvard professor of applied physics David Keith to look at a technological solution to reversing the warming of the Arctic. In a paper published in Nature Climate Change and an affiliated study in the Environmental Research Letters, Keith proposes a way to refreeze the Arctic through geoengineering.
Injecting reflective particles into the high atmosphere could reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth’s surface, counteracting the greenhouse gas effect. High CO2 levels would continue to trap heat in the atmosphere, but with less energy coming in, temperatures on the surface would go down. Keith suggests using the method for a regional correction to restore the ice cover in the Arctic. In his paper, he claims that “with an average solar reduction of only 0.5%, it is possible to recover pre-industrial sea ice extent.” A separate paper shows that this could all be done with a few modified Gulfstream jets and is estimated to cost around $8 billion, which is about the price of a installing a major oil pipeline.
But large-scale geoengineering like what Keith is suggesting is banned by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity because it could result in disastrous unintended consequences. Even Keith acknowledges that manually refreezing the arctic is not the right way to solve the larger problem of global warming. He thinks that this level of geoengineering would only be appropriate to consider in states of emergency such as a sudden collapse of ice sheets or a killing drought. But first, we need to cut our greenhouse gas emissions and he warns that “if we do this and we do not cut emissions, we just walk further and further off the cliff, like Wile E. Coyote.”
A starry view from a forest of giant Sequoia trees in the Yosemite National park, California. Sequoias are among the largest and tallest trees on Earth.
They grow to an average height of 50-85 m and 6-8 m in diameter. Record trees have been measured to be about 95 m (311 ft) in height and 17 m (57 ft) in diameter. The oldest known Giant Sequoia is 3500 years old and many of the largest are over 2000 years old. — Babak Tafreshi
Bad-Ass Female Scientists: Lynn Margulis
“ I don’t consider my ideas controversial. I consider them right.”
Biologist Lynn Margulis died on November 22nd. She stood out from her colleagues in that she would have extended evolutionary studies nearly four billion years back in time. Her major work was in cell evolution, in which the great event was the appearance of the eukaryotic, or nucleated, cell — the cell upon which all larger life-forms are based. Nearly forty-five years ago, she argued for its symbiotic origin: that it arose by associations of different kinds of bacteria. Her ideas were generally either ignored or ridiculed when she first proposed them; symbiosis in cell evolution is now considered one of the great scientific breakthroughs.
Margulis was also a champion of the Gaia hypothesis, an idea developed in the 1970s by the free lance British atmospheric chemist James E. Lovelock. The Gaia hypothesis states that the atmosphere and surface sediments of the planet Earth form a self- regulating physiological system — Earth’s surface is alive. The strong version of the hypothesis, which has been widely criticized by the biological establishment, holds that the earth itself is a self-regulating organism; Margulis subscribed to a weaker version, seeing the planet as an integrated self- regulating ecosystem. She was criticized for succumbing to what George Williams called the “God-is good” syndrome, as evidenced by her adoption of metaphors of symbiosis in nature. She was, in turn, an outspoken critic of mainstream evolutionary biologists for what she saw as a failure to adequately consider the importance of chemistry and microbiology in evolution.
I first met her in the late 80’s and in 1994 interviewed her for my book The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (1995). Below, in remembrance, please see her chapter, “Gaia is a Tough Bitch”. One of the compelling features of The Third Culture was that I invited each of the participants to comment about the others. In this regard, the end of the following chapter has comments on Margulis and her work by Daniel C. Dennett, the late George C. Williams, W. Daniel Hillis, Lee Smolin, Marvin Minsky, Richard Dawkins, and the late Francisco Varela. Interesting stuff.
As I wrote in the introduction to the first part of the book (Part I: The Evolutionary Idea): “The principal debates are concerned with the mechanism of speciation; whether natural selection operates at the level of the gene, the organism, or the species, or all three; and also with the relative importance of other factors, such as natural catastrophes.” These very public debates were concerned with ideas represented by George C. Williams and Richard Dawkins on one side and Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge on the other side. Not for Lynn Margulis. All the above scientists were wrong because evolutionary studies needed to begin four billion years back in time. And she was not shy about expressing her opinions. Her in-your-face, take-no-prisoners stance was pugnacious and tenacious. She was impossible. She was wonderful. — John Brockman
“Gaia is a tough bitch.” L. Margulis
Some Himalayan Glaciers Doomed to Shrink
There’s bad news for glaciers at the eastern end of the Himalayas: Even if temperatures in the region remain steady for decades, the glaciers of the nation of Bhutan will continue to melt, new research suggests.
Image: The impressive Bhutan Himalayas are permanently capped with snow, which extends down valleys in long glacier tongues. Credit: NASA image courtesy the NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team
All told, Bhutan’s glaciers will shrink by about 10 percent and lose about 30 percent of their meltwater even if current temperatures hold over the next few decades, the study found. And if regional temperatures rise just 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius), the glaciers’ area could decrease by 25 percent and meltwater could drop off by 65 percent.
The reason is the lag time between changes in the climate and a glacier’s response to them, the study researchers say.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have figured out how to track trash. They are doing this to get a better sense of people’s disposal habits, which they hope will improve recycling efforts.
