Category: science

Continents of floating garbage

Richard

Sometimes it’s easy to forget just how large of an impact mankind has on the earth – all the garbage.jpgmore so when we’re talking about the ocean.But we do have an effect. Take, for instance, the massive patches of floating garbage that are drifting in the oceans, trapped in ocean conveyors and vortexes (we’re talking hundreds of millions of tons of trash). Via The Daily Galaxy:

Ocean currents have collected massive amounts of garbage into a sort of
plastic “soup” where countless bits of discarded plastic float
intertwined just beneath the surface. Indeed, the human race has really
made its mark. One enormous plastic patch is estimated to weigh over 3
million tons altogether and cover an area roughly twice the size of
Texas.
[…]

The trash collects in this remote area, known as the North Pacific
Gyre, due to a clockwise trade wind that encircles the Pacific Rim.
According to Moore the trash accumulates the same way bubbles clump at
the center of hot tub.

Ian Kiernan, the Australian founder of Clean Up the World, started
his environmental campaign two decades ago after being shocked by the
incredible amount of rubbish he saw on an around-the-world solo yacht
race. He’ll says he’ll never be able the wipe the atrocious site from
his memory.

“It was just filled with things like furniture, fridges, plastic
containers, cigarette lighters, plastic bottles, light globes,
televisions and fishing nets,” Kiernan says. “It’s all so durable it
floats. It’s just a major problem.”

Read more here.

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Vast iceberg threatens ocean life, global climate

Richard 1 Comment
Iceberg

Image by orvaratli via Flickr

BBC News reports that a gigantic iceberg – at 2,500 km^2, larger than Greater London – could threaten marine life and disrupt key ocean cycles.

They say the iceberg, which is 78km long and up to 39km wide, could have
consequences for the area’s colonies of emperor penguins.
…
The calving of the iceberg, which has an estimated mass of 700-800bn
tonnes, has changed the shape of the local geography, Dr Young
explained.
…

He added that the new iceberg had shortened the length of the Mertz
Glacier Tongue, which could result in pack ice entering the area and
disrupting the polynia.

“That means that the bottom water
production rate… will decrease.

“The bottom water spills over
the continental shelf, flows down the continental slope into the deep
ocean.”

This process helps drive the “conveyor belt” of currents
in the Southern, Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

Any disruption to
the net flow of bottom water could result in a weakening in the deep
ocean circulation system, which plays a key role in the global climate
system.

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Are the Chile and Haiti quakes related?

Richard 1 Comment

We bring you the latest in our ongoing coverage of earthquakes. To recap what’s happened recently: An magnitude 8.8 earthquake – one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded – struck Chile on February 27. A magnitude 7.0 earthquake devastated Haiti on January 12, killing upwards of 200,000 people. And in the meantime (as we reported earlier), scientists’ fears that the Haiti quake forewarns increased seismic activity seem to have been realized. In light of the Chile quake, too, reports of the hundreds of small tremors that have been rocking Yellowstone National Park over the past few weeks are more troubling. As if all this wasn’t enough, the United States Geological Survey is reporting that it recorded a magnitude 3.8 earthquake in northern Illinois (see also the NY Times article) – an area normally free of seismic activity.

One question on everyone’s mind, then, is this: are the Chile and Haiti earthquakes in any way related? The answer is this:

They may have the same parent. Most seismologists agree that the
Haitian quake didn’t cause Saturday’s event in Chile. Earthquakes occur
when the stress on a tectonic plate overcomes the friction holding it
in place. The last stress-relieving earthquake at this location in
Chile occurred in 1835. Since then, friction has held the edge of the Nazca plate in place while the rest of it slid 10 to 12 meters underneath the neighboring South American plate.
As a practical matter, that displacement was the sole cause of
Saturday’s earthquake. But displacement isn’t the only thing stressing
a tectonic plate. Tides, dammed-up rivers,
and pressure from other shifting plates can play a supporting role.
Major earthquakes may shift plates slightly and thus increase the
stress along fault lines. If another earthquake was poised to happen at
some point soon, the added stress from a first quake could serve as a
catalyst. While the Haitian earthquake really wasn’t big enough to have
that effect in Chile, some seismologists believe the much stronger
Sumatran quake of 2004–and maybe even the 1960 Chilean quake, the most
powerful ever recorded–may have set the stage for both of them.

Unsettling (forgive the pun – it’s probably not appropriate, to be honest). You can read more here.

Edit: Update: I neglected to mention that the Chile quake altered the earth’s axis and shortened the length of the day.

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One island, one hundred million crabs.

Richard

Christmas Island is a territory of Australia in the Indian Ocean. It’s pretty small (52 square miles, or about three-quarters of the size of Washington, D.C.), sparsely populated (it’s home to only 1,402 people), and relatively distant from Australia itself (1,600 miles, or 3,000 kilometers, northwest of the Western Australian City of Perth).

Christmas Island is a very special, interesting place, though (and not just because of its name – which it got because it was discovered on Christmas Day, 1643). Every November, something amazing happens. More than 100 million red crabs migrate to and through Christmas Island to spawn. Words don’t do this phenomenon justice. For the full effect, see the video below:

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Grizzly bears enter polar bear territory

Richard
Up close and personal with a grizzly bear in D...

Image by Alaskan Dude via Flickr

Discovery.com reports on the makings of what is sure to be a showdown for the ages:

Grizzly bears have entered polar bear territory, setting the stage
for deadly bear versus bear encounters to come, suggests a study
recently published in the journal Canadian Field Naturalist.

Should the bears meet, the grizzlies could do some serious damage.

No doubt about that, but polar bears have a definite size advantage. In one-on-one confrontation, my money’s on the polar bear. My question is this: what happens if, rather than fighting, the two species breed? And fuse into some unholy sort of unstoppable ultra-bear with an insatiable taste for human flesh?

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Big things live in the ocean. Big, scary things.

Richard
Macrocheira kaempferi

Image via Wikipedia

BBC News reports that the

Prehistoric seas were filled with giant
plankton-eating fish which died out at the same time as the dinosaurs,
new fossil evidence suggests.

Scientists from Glasgow, Oxford
and the United States have identified fossil evidence which shows the
fish existed between 66 and 172 million years ago.

It also reports that

A Japanese spider crab believed to be the biggest
ever seen in Britain is set to go on show at Birmingham’s National Sea
Life Centre.

Dubbed Crabzilla, his front feeding limbs are
more than 5ft (1.5m) long and end in big claws.

In the meantime, the Open_Sailing project is trying to develop (via open source) solutions to enable humans to inhabit the oceans. From their website:

We urgently need a new generation of semi-permanent affordable and
sustainable architecture to explore and study the oceans, understand biodiversity, monitor climate change, address marine pollution, invent new modes of sustainable aquaculture, create data mesh networks, produce renewable energies, for navigation safety purposes and much
more.

I’m not so sure that I’d be eager to live in the ocean, given its other denizens. The Open_Sailing project sounds fascinating anyhow, though – they’re developing, among other things, “an architecture that behaves like a super-organism, reacting to the
weather conditions and other variables, reconfiguring itself” and “a mobile aquaculture to sustain human long term life at sea.” Check out their concept video below:

Open_Sailing 4 minutes concept on Vimeo.

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Physicists “break the laws of nature.”

Richard

… Let’s hope Mother Nature didn’t have any traffic cops in the area. Yesterday, we mentioned that the Brookhaven National Laboratory had managed, under experimental conditions, to create temperatures of up to 4 trillion degrees Celsius. Apparently, in doing so they “briefly distorted the laws of physics”:

physicists have been accelerating gold nuclei around a 2.4-mile
underground ring to 99.995 percent of the speed of light and then
colliding them in an effort to melt protons and neutrons and free their
constituents — quarks and gluons. The goal has been a state of matter
called a quark-gluon plasma, which theorists believe existed when the
universe was only a microsecond old.

The departure from normal
physics manifested itself in the apparent ability of the briefly freed
quarks to tell right from left. That breaks one of the fundamental laws
of nature, known as parity, which requires that the laws of physics
remain unchanged if we view nature in a mirror.

See more here!

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Earthquakes in Illinois?

Richard

The United States Geological Survey is reporting that it has recorded a magnitude 3.8 earthquake in northern Illinois (see also the NY Times article). This is not unheard of; earthquakes do sometimes occur east of the Rockies (my own mother has told me of a medium-sized earthquake that was felt in Northeast Ohio a few decades ago). Nevertheless, northern Illinois is well outside of any geological hotspots (the US Geological Survey maps it in Seismic Zone 0, the zone of lowest risk). And this is especially troubling given – as we noted earlier – scientists’ fears that the Haiti quake forewarns increased seismic activity and the hundreds of small tremors that have been rocking Yellowstone National Park over the past few weeks.

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Acidic droplet solves maze

Richard

From Chemical & Engineering News:8803notw9_mazecxd.jpg

A team led by Northwestern University chemistry professor Bartosz A.
Grzybowski has shown that an acidic droplet can successfully
navigate a complex maze (J. Am. Chem. Soc., DOI: 10.1021/ja9076793).

“I personally find most exciting that such a simple system can
exhibit apparently ‘intelligent’ behavior,” Louisiana State University
chemistry professor John
A. Pojman comments. “This approach may be useful as a pumping
method for microfluidics or a way to convert chemical energy to
mechanical motion in small devices. I am eager to see if they can
generalize it to other types of gradients,” he says.

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A more fragrant world?

Richard

According to leading climatologists and plant scientists, the Earth will become more fragrant as it grows warmer. Apparently, the higher temperatures will lead plants to produce more aromatic chemicals. From BBC Earth News:

Climate change will make the world more fragrant.

As
CO2 levels increase and the world warms, land use, precipitation and
the availability of water will also change.

In response to all
these disruptions, plants will emit greater levels of fragrant chemicals
called biogenic volatile organic compounds.

That will then alter
how plants interact with one another and defend themselves against
pests, according to a major scientific review.

According
to the scientists leading the review, the world may already be becoming
more fragrant, as plants have already begun emitting more smelly
chemicals.

“The increase is exponential,” says Professor Josep
Penuelas, of the Global Ecology Unit at the Autonomous University of
Barcelona, Spain.

“It may have increased already by 10% in the
past 30 years and may increase 30 to 40% with the two to three degrees
(Celsius) warming projected for the next decades.”

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