Planetsave

As coral reefs around the world continue to disappear, one Florida town has taken the initiative by investing $60,000 to stimulate coral reef growth using electricity. While there is not yet peer-reviewed evidence to suggest that using a low powered electrical current works, scientists are not dismissing the idea. The company that has been hired to make the reefs claims that they have had many prior successes. Read the rest of this entry »

Living in Australia brings with it a wonderful set of environmental circumstances to live with. Not only do we have two weather patterns – El Nino/La Nina and the Indian Ocean Dipole – that are combining to lengthen our drought, but we’re one of the countries that suffer from the ever fluctuating ozone hole in the Southern Hemisphere.

This year, the ozone hole extended to approximately 27 million square kilometers. This compared to 2007’s 25 million square kilometers and 2006’s 29 million square kilometers.

Want a size comparison? That’s about the size of the North American continent!

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With the beginning of spring in the Northern Hemisphere these days, comes the inexorable wait to see when the Arctic sea ice starts melting, and then waiting to see how far it’ll melt. If nothing else, it’s great for journalists looking for a story. For my money though, I’m a much bigger fan of this time of year, when the Arctic sea ice starts reclaiming ground.

And after reaching the second-lowest extent ever recorded last month, sea ice in the Arctic has begun to refreeze in the face of autumn temperatures. Subsequently, both the Northern Sea Route and the direct route through the Northwest Passage have been closed.

“This is the first time in our charting records that both historic passages opened up in the same year,” said NIC Chief Scientist Dr Pablo Clemente-Colón. “Both of the routes appeared as closed by 22 September.”

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If it wasn’t bad enough that we seem to be pumping more and more in the way of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, we humans seem to be doing a pretty damn good job of eating away any chance of removing said emissions.

The latest comes in a one-two punch. First of all experts are labeling the fight to save the Florida Everglades as a “losing battle,” while Brazil’s Environment Minister is blaming upcoming elections and increasing food prices for another rise in Amazon deforestation.

So no matter which way you look at it, the simple fact of the matter is, humans are irreversibly stupid.

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Over the past few years we have sadly had to watch the Arctic ice concentrations drop significantly. Focus has been primarily centered on the Arctic Circle, but Greenland is also suffering from the increased global temperature.

And now, thanks to researchers from the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and the Center for Space Research (CSR) in America, a new and accurate picture of Greenland’s shrinking ice cap has been formulated.

Subsequently, the researchers have found that Greenland is currently responsible for an annual increase of sea levels of up to half a millimeter.

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This is a guest post by Meg Hamill, a freelance writer, also working at the environmental non-profit LandPaths in Sonoma County, California

This summer at the University of Calgary in Canada, great strides were made in  an air capture system, built to filter CO2 emissions from diffuse sources.

Professor David Keith, director of the Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment and Economy’s (ISEEE) at the University of Calgary, and his team, captured CO2 directly from the air using less than 100 kilowatt-hours of electricity per ton of CO2.

Their custom-built tower captured the equivalent of about 20 tons per year of CO2 on a single square meter of scrubbing material.  To put this in context:  It’s about the average amount of emissions that one person would produce in a year in North America.  The team’s hope and belief is that this technology can easily be perfected and made more efficient.

The air capture technology being researched at the University of Calgary, is significant, as it is said to be the only way to capture CO2 emissions from polluters such as cars and airplanes.  These CO2 sources are referred to as “diffuse” sources, and make up about half of the greenhouse gases emitted on earth.

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There is almost nothing quite as intriguing and interesting as learning of a new experiment. And while Bunsen burners and the like may be OK for some of you, for me, get me outside and in some dirt any day.

A new experiment, being conducted at Imperial College London’s Silwood Park campus in Berkshire, will attempt to determine how the British plant ecosystem will be affected by future changes to climate and biodiversity.

With this experiment, however, there will be no computer simulations. Instead, scientists and researchers will be conducting the experiment outside, with 168 plots of grassland ecosystem at their fingertips. This will give a clear insight into how the ecosystems will hold up under a variety of different situations.

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According to a new study published in Restoration Ecology, the use of large experimental tests in the field of environmental restoration has been limited, at best. The study posits that, for restoration to proceed as a science as well as a practice, large scale experiments will have to be conducted on whole ecosystems.

“Very few restoration ecologists are taking advantage of large restoration sites by conducting large-scale experiments,” says Joy B. Zedler of the University of Wisconsin- Madison. “Most people wouldn’t buy a new shirt without trying on several different kinds to see which fits best and looks right. It’s similar with restoration; we want to find the best fit between the methods we use and the outcomes we want.”

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Sarah Palin has said many times that the polar bear habitat is safe, and there’s no need to classify them as a “threatened” species.  Yet today comes word that as the Arctic sea ice melts, polar bears are finding less and less food sources and are beginning to cannibalize one another. Read the rest of this entry »

American missiles are not the only threat to Iran’s physical stability. A geological study has found that the nation’s groundwater is running so low from decades of over-use that many parts of the country have sunk dramatically, causing damage in both agricultural and urban areas.

Fifty percent of the country’s water is sourced from the wells and only ten percent of the population is able to survive on rainwater alone. The groundwater level has decreased by 1.5 feet annually for the past 15 years, and with little rain and increased water use for Iran’s growing population, the aquifers have had no chance to refill. As a result, some areas have been sinking up to 20 inches a year.

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