Environmental News

Retreat of glaciers, global perspective, photographic evidence:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170419122006.htm

link there to GSA page, then free download.

 

That is a lovely article. Including about modeling getting 'off the grid'.

Using Prius power will generate smiles here, but (as BobW would surely agree) it is an obvious engineering solution.

 

Photovoltaic in coal country. What next, I ask?

http://www.courier-journal.com/story/tech/science/environment/2017/04/18/coal-company-plans-huge-solar-farm-strip-mine/100597672/

 

WIPP is the military transuranics disposal site in SE New Mexico. It halted operation in 2014 Feb (wrong kitty litter) and has now restarted:

Nuclear waste facility receives its first shipment since 2014 accident | Ars Technica

 

If you don't know what nitrogen fixation is, I grieve, because it is quite central to our Biological Planet.

This appears to be first article on a current aspect of this subject. Will either turn out to be a small bump in the road or something very very important.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170427141721.htm

First is good, One of the few ways to get published in Science. So, authors hang it out there and see what develops.

 

What happened to Bob's coral bleaching thread? Anyway, folks are trying to scope the subject with a new global database:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170501141623.htm

 

Coral 'breakwaters' can strongly modify erosion and even keep up with sea-level rise to an extent. Pretty nifty habitat all by themselves as well.

It would seem appropriate to balance short-term concerns about coral health with long-term evidence that they have somehow managed to persist through a wide range of ocean temperatures and (probably) pH. That knot won't get untied without more and better data.

Even though it seems odd that Canadians are doing it not a lot of coral up there.

 

It would seem a shame if they never traveled, but the work described could be done from a comfy UBC office. Funded by NOAA, by the way.

 

Perhaps a tough sell but giving it a shot. First the URL:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170510174912.htm

Traditional carbon balances consider plant growth, decomposition, and sometimes, changes in soil carbon pools. But (often) a river runs through it. sending some carbon downstream to unmeasured fates.

Research described here is not the first to watch rivers exhale, but it addresses a difficult aspect - downstream where tidal flows complicate things.

Those inspired to open the primary publication will find some tough sledding, and typical lack of poetry. So here we'll just float above all that and appreciate broad outlines.

+++

A famous ecologist* summed up geomorphology by saying "every once in a while, you need a river". True enough. If you're into counting carbon, better count there too.

*Who also has basement filled with model trains, so no name disclosure here. Not everything that's fun can be told.

 

Atypically I draw your attention to a poorly-written piece of science communication:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170509121937.htm

That links to a similarly uninspiring publication. If, as in my opinion they blew it, perhaps it can be unblown.

This is about procaryotes which we might simply call bacteria. Those appear to be original life on earth, arguably created the biosphere, and continue to affect it (us) in vast and subtle ways.

They are unimaginably diverse and reconfigure themselves without regard to what we call 'sex'. That came along much later. It seems extremely sad that a thinking creature might not be curious about bacteria.

One point of curiosity is which ones are most similar or different from others. This we choose to call 'phylogeny'. A lot might be learned from that, but so far we are at stage 0.1.

This is not from lack of research and publications, it is because those lack large perspective.

This is what is addressed by research I point you towards here. It uses machine intelligence (our new friend ?) to develop that perspective. It is, clearly, another 0.1 effort. First of many I would hope.

We are geographically bound to this planet and functionally bound to bacteria. With progress towards figuring out 'what it all means', those bindings might be less prison and more opportunity.

So, seek the good and let bad writing slip by. Just more blah blah blah by from me, right?

Maybe?

 

You may feel that US National Monuments are about right in scope, or perhaps excessive. Either way it is now open comment period for several of them:

Regulations.gov

 

DNA and genes are a thing but not the whole story:

DNA is the ruling metaphor of our age | Aeon Essays

Aeon-style writing is, well, what it is. No judgement. But Biology is a thing worth contemplating. Internet essays (this and others) give dear readers here a chance to see.

Anyway we are well past the idea that DNA inheritance controls everything. Many things figure in.

Just me here saying blah blah blah. Maybe your thoughts are better directed elsewhere.

 

There is a new article in PNAS about marine plastic come ashore at very remote island near Pitcairn. I'll link if someone wants to read.

But what I found interesting was they found almost no driftwood there. Driftwood being one of 'wood fates' and thus of interest to me.

Based on very limited evidence, forests of the world annually send 0.01 petagrams of wood carbon to sea. No one knows better , for lack of study. Marine plastic trash seems to total 0.004 petagrams carbon (does get studied). So Team Humanity has still not quite caught up.

But spatial patterns vary, and on Henderson Island in southwest Nowhere, it's all plastic.

Another source of wood at sea is shipwrecks but since that activity is mostly lost to antiquity, it is also largely unknown. UNESCO says 3 million, I say (for no compelling reason) that an average one weighs 50 tons. It works out that human sailors have dumped 7 years of driftwood overall. This of course may be far wrong, but as nobody else is even making a guess, youse guys get bored in yet another way.

 

Si si senor. But marine plastic has been addressed in many others. A poster child so to speak.

Driftwood is much more fun for me. Supposed to be a great thing for island-hopping lizards. It is just hard to image being a lizard, with waves crashing over your driftwood substrate, and not jumping off (back to the beach) and running upslope.

But who knows how lizards think...