Geeko friendly's List: Nature

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• A sunday morning stroll on the promenade almost turned into an afternoon swim when 70mph winds whipped up this 33ft wave. Curious onlookers that gathered to watch the storm, in San Sebastian, Spain, scrambled over each other to escape its wrath.
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• This, if confirmed, is really, really, really bad news:
• The first evidence that millions of tons of a greenhouse gas 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide is being released into the atmosphere from beneath the Arctic seabed has been discovered by scientists.
• In the past few days, the researchers have seen areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through "methane chimneys" rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a "lid" to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age.
• Methane is about 20 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide and many scientists fear that its release could accelerate global warming in a giant positive feedback where more atmospheric methane causes higher temperatures, leading to further permafrost melting and the release of yet more methane.
• Some have already begun calling for a program of massive geoengineering to stave off the triggering of runaway climate change as this methane starts hitting the atmosphere.

  • wtf is geoengineering??
• Our first priority as a civilization ought not to be huge interventions in systems we only barely understand, but a planetary commitment to Zero, now.
• The stakes are rising faster and faster. You often hear the line at conferences that on climate change, science is 10 years ahead of business, and business is 5 years ahead of policy and the public debate; I'm increasingly less sure that science and the public debate are even operating in the same space-time continuum anymore.
• Geoengineering, he said, is a forbidden topic among many who are concerned about climate change, because they fear that it will help to legitimize wasteful lifestyles which they would rather see changed.
• This, he said, is analogous to those who don't want to talk about birth control with teenagers, for fear that it will encourage them to have sex.
• To carry the analogy further: if the methane hydrates are indeed going off, then the girl is officially knocked up.
• Carbon sequestration is the *only* thing which might turn that process around

  • wtf is carbon sequestration?
• Nathan, I take your point, but that's a terrible analogy. Leaving aside the weirdness of gendering the climate as a teenage girl, it's not like geoengineering is abortion and will suddenly make that girl un-pregnant. We don't even know that any of the proposed geoengineering ideas would actually work. History suggests that it's far more likely that they would go disastrously wrong.

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• the reports remain spotty on some critical details. Most important question: is this coming from frozen methane hydrates? If it's not, the potential release of methane could be bad, but probably something we could deal with. If it is... we're in a lot of trouble.
• that's 50 gigatons of methane that could be released. And methane, as has been reiterated time and again, is 23 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2.

• Except it's not. It's actually worse. That 23x figure refers to the impact of a given quantity of methane over a 100 year period -- a standard way of comparing the effects of different gases. But methane cycles out after a decade, so a better way of comparing its impact is over a shorter time period -- say, 20 years. Compressed to two decades, then, the relative power of methane as a greenhouse gas is 72 times that of carbon dioxide.

    

  72x.

    

  So that 50 gigatons of methane? That's the equivalent of 3600 gigatons of carbon dioxide, in terms of greenhouse effect.

    

  To put that into comparison: the Earth's atmosphere holds a total of about 3000 metric gigatons of carbon dioxide.

    

  This would more than double the concentration of CO2e in the atmosphere.

    

  So this is not just huge, it's really freaking huge.
• As I said, we still don't know if this is the methane hydrates beginning to melt. If it is, then even going to zero CO2 emissions now won't do a damn thing. Ocean thermal inertia will keep the temperatures up undersea for a good while, even if we stopped all carbon outputs now. Thermal inertia alone would keep us warming on land for a couple of decades, too, after we zero out, but that's comparatively less catastrophic than the hydrates.
• Albedo-modification geoengineering (stratospheric sulfates, "space mirrors," that sort of thing) won't do much to change ocean temperatures in a short enough period to stop hydrate melts.
• CO2 sequestration geo (iron or urea dumps in the ocean, bioengineered supertrees, that sort of thing) won't do a damn thing about methane, even if it worked.
• It's hard to imagine a geoengineering project gone wrong that would be worse than a methane hydrate melt; a big methane hydrate event appears to be connected to one of the largest extinctions in geological history (bigger than the KT event killing the dinosaurs). 90+% of all species gone.
• I've made it abundantly clear that I don't think geo is a good idea. It's a pretty damn crazy idea, in a lot of ways. But if this methane report is as bad as it looks to be, crazy ideas may be all that we have left.

• Zero emissions from human activity needs to be the standard, world-wide, and remediation techniques have to be developed and deployed, oh, yesterday.

    

  Looks like we're going to have an interesting 21st century. I know the Uh-ohs (what I call this present decade) has been fair crazy already.

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• Underground stores of methane are important because scientists believe their sudden release has in the past been responsible for rapid increases in global temperatures, dramatic changes to the climate, and even the mass extinction of species.
• Scientists aboard a research ship that has sailed the entire length of Russia's northern coast have discovered intense concentrations of methane – sometimes at up to 100 times background levels – over several areas covering thousands of square miles of the Siberian continental shelf.
• areas of sea foaming with gas bubbling up through "methane chimneys" rising from the sea floor. They believe that the sub-sea layer of permafrost, which has acted like a "lid" to prevent the gas from escaping, has melted away to allow methane to rise from underground deposits formed before the last ice age.
• They have warned that this is likely to be linked with the rapid warming that the region has experienced in recent years.
• The amount of methane stored beneath the Arctic is calculated to be greater than the total amount of carbon locked up in global coal reserves so there is intense interest in the stability of these deposits as the region warms at a faster rate than other places on earth.
• An extensive area of intense methane release was found. At earlier sites we had found elevated levels of dissolved methane. Yesterday, for the first time, we documented a field where the release was so intense that the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface.
• At some locations, methane concentrations reached 100 times background levels. These anomalies have been seen in the East Siberian Sea and the Laptev Sea, covering several tens of thousands of square kilometres, amounting to millions of tons of methane
• "The conventional thought has been that the permafrost 'lid' on the sub-sea sediments on the Siberian shelf should cap and hold the massive reservoirs of shallow methane deposits in place. The growing evidence for release of methane in this inaccessible region may suggest that the permafrost lid is starting to get perforated and thus leak methane... The permafrost now has small holes. We have found elevated levels of methane above the water surface and even more in the water just below. It is obvious that the source is the seabed
• Dr Semiletov has suggested several possible reasons why methane is now being released from the Arctic, including the rising volume of relatively warmer water being discharged from Siberia's rivers due to the melting of the permafrost on the land.

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• a fruit that when eaten, renders sour foods sweet.
• Dubbed miracle fruit, this small red berry hailing from West Africa is the star performer at “flavour tripping parties” organized by Franz Aliquo in the United States. Bartenders have also been experimenting with the fruit to create new cocktails, and UK art magazine Cabinet has included it on the menu at their events.

  • what people use it for
• The flavour-altering berry (or Synsepalum dulcificum, if you want to be technical), contains a protein called miraculin. When miraculin comes into contact with acids, the result is a sweet, sweet taste in your mouth. We want.

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• The Namib Desert, one of the driest regions in the world, gets less than half an inch of rain per year. But early in the morning, a light fog drifts over the desert, offering the plants and animals living in that harsh environment their only chance for a life-sustaining drink.
• Namib Desert beetle is ready with a moisture-collection system exquisitely adapted to its desert habitat. Inspired by this dime-sized beetle, MIT researchers have produced a new material that can capture and control tiny amounts of water.
• The material combines a superhydrophobic (water-repelling) surface with superhydrophilic (water-attracting) bumps that trap water droplets and control water flow. The work was published in the online version of Nano Letters.
• Scientists had already learned to copy the water-repellent lotus leaf, and the desert beetle shell seemed like another good candidate for "bio-mimicry."

• When fog blows horizontally across the surface of the beetle's back, tiny water droplets, 15 to 20 microns, or millionths of a meter, in diameter, start to accumulate on top of bumps on its back.

   

  The bumps, which attract water, are surrounded by waxy water-repelling channels. "That allows small amounts of moisture in the air to start to collect on the tops of the hydrophilic bumps, and it grows into bigger and bigger droplets," Rubner said. "When it gets large, it overcomes the pinning force that holds it and rolls down into the beetle's mouth for a fresh drink of water."

  • how the beatle functions

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• Aiming to inspire people to think globally about sustainable living, Arthus-Bertrand has been photographing unique views of our planet, seen from the sky, since 1994
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• Worker resting on bales of cotton, Thonakaha, Korhogo, Ivory Coast. Cotton crops occupy approximately 335,000 square klilometers worldwide, and use nearly one quarter of all pesticides sold.
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• Barrios, Caracas, Venezuela. Caracas has grown enormously in the last 40 years, attracting people from all over South America, filling its narrow valley and climbing up the steep sides of the surrounding hills. These new districts, known as barrios or ranchos are home to more than 50 percent of Caracas's 3.8 million inhabitants
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• an ecosystem that contains just a single species of bacteria.
• In all other known ecosystems, the key functions of life -- harvesting energy and elements like carbon and nitrogen from the environment -- have been shared among different species. But in the water of the Mponeng gold mine, two miles under the earth's surface, Desulforudis audaxviator carries out all of those functions by itself. In short, it's the tidiest package of life found yet. 

  • !
• What makes D. audaxviator so special is that its genome, cobbled together from bacterial and archaeal genes, can carry out all life's functions by itself.

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• The giant fish, one of the biggest fresh water fish in existence, may have developed an uncanny taste for human flesh after feasting on the remains of burnt corpses.

• a high-resolution map shows where underground aquifers store vast amounts of water.
• the result of nearly a decade of sometimes difficult talks between neighbouring governments, mediated by UNESCO. The hope is that it will help pave the way to an international law to govern how water is shared around the world.
• Aquifers are underground layers of rocks or sediments from which water can be extracted – normally by drilling boreholes or digging wells. They hold 100 times the volume of freshwater that flows down rivers and streams around the world at any time.

  • explanation of aquifers
• So far, the organisation has identified 273 trans-boundary aquifers: 68 in the Americas, 38 in Africa, 155 in Eastern and Western Europe and 12 in Asia.
• "It highlights the importance of groundwater resources, which is generally misunderstood or ignored completely compared to surface water."
• The increasing reliance on aquifer groundwater – because there is more of it and it tends to be less contaminated by industrial run-off – has been called the "groundwater revolution".

• Where an aquifer lies relative to an international border is one variable, but others that could be considered include: which nation's geography contributes most to the aquifer's recharge, the size of the respective populations, and the amount of water removed to irrigate crops.

                  

  The UNESCO map merely helps define the geographical extent of an aquifer, which could be useful in defining international agreements.
• aquifers fall into two gross categories: those that are recharged by rainfall permeating from the surface and "fossil" aquifers, such as the famous Nubian sandstone aquifer beneath Egypt, Sudan, Chad and Libya. These contain water that can be tens of thousands of years old, relics of a much wetter climate. Crucially, they are not recharged by rainwater, making them finite resources.

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• Much is known about color physics and color physiology, but very little about color psychology
• The red effect extends only to males and only to perceptions of attractiveness.
• the meaning of a color depends on its context. For example, Elliot and others have shown that seeing red in competition situations, such as written examinations or sporting events, leads to worse performance.
• The current findings have clear implications for the dating game, the fashion industry, product design and marketing.

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• 14,000 new cars on the roads each day, 52,000 miles of roadways under construction, 70% of electricity generated from coal, a new coal-fired electric plant coming online nearly every week; 75% of China’s urban residents breathe polluted air which kills 750,000 people annually; 20% of water used in in urban China lost to leaky pipes.
• Cities such as Shanghai and Tianjin have sunk six feet over the past decade and a half as precious underground water reserves are drawn down, causing skyscrapers to tilt and encouraging coastal flooding.  

  Yet tilting skyscrapers are the least of the cities' concerns. In Beijing, factories, buildings and underground pipelines have all been destroyed by the plundering of underground aquifers and the resultant land subsidence.
• China -- which is roughly the same size as the United States -- is almost one-quarter desert, and the desert is advancing at more than 1,300 square miles,
• Entire villages in China's north have been lost, submerged in sand by the encroaching desert.
• desertification affects 400 million Chinese

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• The assumption that time, weather, and pollution are what cause buildings to decline is only partly true. Bacteria are also responsible for the ageing of buildings and monuments – a process known as biodeterioration, where organisms change the properties of materials through their vital activities.
• Leonila Laiz from the Institute for Natural Resources and Agrobiology in Seville, Spain, and colleagues have just isolated five new strains of bacteria that degrade old buildings.
• The strains are partly involved in the process of efflorescence formation, where salt residues form on buildings, due to the loss of water after exposure to air for a prolonged period of time. Efflorescences lead to damage in the porous structure of the rocks and the gradual deterioration of these buildings.
• Two of the newly isolated strains were then grown onto rocks to replicate the biodeterioration process in the laboratory. The Rubrobacter cells penetrated the mineral matrix and crystals formed in contact with the bacterial film. When the film separated from the rock surface after exposure to heat, it removed mineral grains, producing a mechanical deterioration. These three processes are characteristic of biodeterioration and confirm that the isolated bacteria are actively involved in the ageing of the studied buildings.

  • How the Rubrocaters damage buildings

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• The researchers have shown that rock formations called peridotite, which are found in Oman and several other places worldwide, including California and New Guinea, produce calcium carbonate and magnesium carbonate rock when they come into contact with carbon dioxide. The scientists found that such formations in Oman naturally sequester hundreds of thousands of tons of carbon dioxide a year.

• physical evidence, backed by powerful simulations on the world’s most advanced computer climate models, is reshaping that view and lending strong support to the radical idea that human-induced climate change began not 200 years ago, but thousands of years ago with the onset of large-scale agriculture in Asia and extensive deforestation in Europe.

   

  What’s more, according to the same computer simulations, the cumulative effect of thousands of years of human influence on climate is preventing the world from entering a new glacial age, altering a clockwork rhythm of periodic cooling of the planet that extends back more than a million years.
• the introduction of large-scale rice agriculture in Asia, coupled with extensive deforestation in Europe began to alter world climate by pumping significant amounts of greenhouse gases — methane from terraced rice paddies and carbon dioxide from burning forests — into the atmosphere. In turn, a warmer atmosphere heated the oceans making them much less efficient storehouses of carbon dioxide and reinforcing global warming.

• Only 10% of the earth's land is "remote": defined as more than 48 hours travel from a large city.
• over 95% of the world's population lives on only 10% of the land.

• the climate is an incredibly complex system, and it is unlikely we have a full overview over which factors play a part and how important each is in a given circumstance," Riisager told Videnskab.