Tag Archives: nasa

Don’t gloat over Ted Cruz’s loss. He’ll just go back to harassing climate scientists.

by AngelaJNTN Posted on May 5, 2016

Don’t gloat over Ted Cruz’s loss. He’ll just go back to harassing climate scientists.

By on May 5, 2016Share

The 2016 presidential field lost one of its more vocal climate deniers when Ted Cruz suspended his campaign this week (Donald Trump will be picking up the slack there). But Cruz won’t disappear entirely. He’s still in the U.S. Senate serving a term through 2018, so he’ll be free to return to one of his favorite hobbies: terrorizing federal scientists, NASA, and climate advocates once more.

Cruz has often used his position as chair of the Subcommittee on Science and Space to elevate some of his favorite climate denier tropes — especially the (incorrect) point that over the “last 15 years, there has been no recorded warming.”

In December, Cruz held a hearing entitled “Data or Dogma” to “debate over climate science, the impact of federal funding on the objectivity of climate research, and the ways in which political pressure can suppress opposing viewpoints in the field of climate science.” He invited mostly climate change deniers to make his case that global warming is on pause. At another committee hearing last fall, Cruz grilled Sierra Club President Aaron Mair on the point that 97 percent of scientists agree global warming is human-caused.

Cruz’s other focus while chairing this committee has been to pressure NASA to abandon its Earth-focused studies of the climate.

Cruz will still have enough of a megaphone from the Senate to frustrate and confound any of us who believe in facts — and he won’t have the presidential campaign to distract him.

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Don’t gloat over Ted Cruz’s loss. He’ll just go back to harassing climate scientists.

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Watch a NASA Scientist and a Yellow Puppet Explore Greenland’s Melting Glaciers

by CerysGollan Posted on April 30, 2016

Mother Jones

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For a sign that Josh Willis isn’t your typical NASA scientist, let’s start with the name of his major new climate study: Oceans Melting Greenland. That’s “OMG,” if your mind isn’t the sort to instantly elide everything into texting lingo.

Willis, a researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, likes to inject a little humor into the science of climate change, taking to the stage and to YouTube in the hopes of spurring his audience to action. On this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast, he’s joined by special guest “Dick Dangerfield,” the swashbuckling NASA pilot who stars in Willis’ new comedy web series, “The Adventures of Dick Dangerfield.” Oh, and Dick is also a puppet. You can watch the first episode above.

Willis and Dangerfield talk with co-host Kishore Hari about NASA’s mission to study Greenland’s melting ice and its massive climate-altering potential. “Greenland contains enough ice to raise sea levels 20 feet if it all melted,” Willis says. “The big question is how fast it’s going to melt.”

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Most research takes a top-down approach to the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, Willis says, examining the flow of water as it melts off the surface of the glaciers. But due to changing ocean temperatures, the ice around the island’s edges is disappearing even more quickly than it is at the center. That’s partly due to Greenland’s unique geography; the massive glaciers “literally have a toe in the water,” he explains. They flow directly into deep ocean water that is saltier and warmer than the water near the surface. The deeper water, which is typically a few degrees Celsius above the melting point, nibbles away more ice in the warm months than can be replenished over the winter, causing the glaciers to gradually recede.

Greenland’s glaciers run directly into the ocean, plunging into warmer, saltier water beneath the surface that’s melting them from below. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech

But the exact mechanisms for this process remain poorly understood, Willis says. Scientists with the OMG project measure the heights of glaciers each year using airborne radar. They also torpedo sensors into the surrounding ocean to record temperature and salinity. In the interactions between the glacial ice and ocean water, the scientists are looking for signs of a runaway melting process similar to what has been feared in western Antarctica, where climate models suggest rapid melting could contribute to more than three feet of sea level rise by 2100.

Beyond sea level rise, scientists worry that an influx of cold freshwater from Greenland’s melting ice could itself alter the climate, bringing changes to the Atlantic currents that regulate the weather conditions of surrounding landmasses. Some regions could see an uptick in extreme weather, Willis says, while others could see extra sea level rise. But we’re unlikely to know the precise effects until we observe them happening.

But for all the gloomy uncertainty, Willis says he tries to remain optimistic about the future of Greenland’s ice. Though some melting and sea level rise is inevitable, there’s still time to avoid the biggest consequences, he says. “The question is, do you want to get hit in the head with a pingpong ball or a bowling ball?”

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow, like us on Facebook, and check out show notes and other cool stuff on Tumblr.

Image: Josef Hanus/Shutterstock

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Watch a NASA Scientist and a Yellow Puppet Explore Greenland’s Melting Glaciers

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Arctic sea ice hits another record low

by BarbraLlanas529 Posted on March 29, 2016

Arctic sea ice hits another record low

By on 29 Mar 2016commentsShare

The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) reports that a record amount of the Arctic sea never froze this winter. Ice extent, which usually hits a wintertime maximum around mid-March, was at a record-low for the second year in a row, 5,000 square miles below 2015’s record-low maximum extent. This year’s maximum extent is 431,000 square miles below averages from 1981 to 2010.

It’s a pattern that will likely continue, according to NASA Arctic sea scientist Walter Meier. “It is likely that we’re going to keep seeing smaller wintertime maximums in the future because in addition to a warmer atmosphere, the ocean has also warmed up,” Meier said. The amount of sea ice can vary a lot from year to year, but we’re seeing “significant downward trend” from warming conditions, Meier added.

This new record comes after another year of record high temperatures across the globe: 2015 broke the record for high temperatures set by 2014, and February of this year was the hottest month on record. And the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. “I’ve never seen such a warm, crazy winter in the Arctic,” said NSIDC director Mark Serreze. “The heat was relentless.”

Arctic sea ice is vital to stabilizing Earth’s temperature, according to NASA; when it melts, the oceans absorb more sunlight and warm ever faster. Subsequently, this melts more sea ice, contributing to to global sea level rise. It’s a cycle. A very disturbing cycle. You can watch a visualization from NASA below.

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Arctic sea ice hits another record low

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The scientist who first warned of climate change says it’s much worse than we thought

by LPRKirbygpyva Posted on March 22, 2016

The scientist who first warned of climate change says it’s much worse than we thought

By on 22 Mar 2016 10:11 amcommentsShare

The rewards of being right about climate change are bittersweet. James Hansen should know this better than most — he warned of this whole thing before Congress in 1988, when he was director of NASA’s Institute for Space Studies. At the time, the world was experiencing its warmest five-month run since we started recording temperatures 130 years earlier. Hansen said, “It is time to stop waffling so much and say that the evidence is pretty strong that the greenhouse effect is here.”

Fast forward 28 years and, while we’re hardly out of the Waffle House yet, we know much more about climate change science. Hansen is still worried that the rest of us aren’t worried enough.

Last summer, prior to countries’ United Nations negotiations in Paris, Hansen and 16 collaborators authored a draft paper that suggested we could see at least 10 feet of sea-level rise in as few as 50 years. If that sounds alarming to you, it is — 10 feet of sea-level rise is more than enough to effectively kick us out of even the most well-endowed coastal cities. Stitching together archaeological evidence of past climate change, current observations, and future-telling climate models, the authors suggested that even a small amount of global warming can rack up enormous consequences — and quickly.

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However the paper, publicized before it had been through peer review, elicited a mix of shock and skepticism, with some journalists calling the news a “bombshell” but a number of scientists urging deeper consideration.

Now, the final version of the paper has been published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. It’s been reviewed and lightly edited, but its conclusions are still shocking — and still contentious.

So what’s the deal? The authors highlight several of threats they believe we’ll face this century, including many feet of sea-level rise, a halting of major ocean circulatory currents, and an outbreak of super storms. These are the big threats we’ve been afraid of — and Hansen et al. say they could be here before we know it — well before the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sanctioned climate models predict.

Here we help you understand their new paper:

NASA

Sea-level rise

The scientists estimate that existing climate models aren’t accounting well enough for current ice loss off of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. Right now, Antarctica and Greenland ice sheets both contribute under or near 1 millimeter to sea-level rise every year; they each contain enough stored ice to drive up ocean levels by 20 and 200 feet, respectively.

This study suggests that, since the rate of ice loss is increasing, we should think of it not as a straight line but as an exponential curve, doubling every few years. But how much time it takes to double makes a big difference. Right now, measurements of ice loss aren’t clear enough to even make a strong estimate about how long that period might be. Is it 10 years or is it 40? It’s hard to say based on the limited data we have now, which would make a big difference either way.

But then again, we don’t even know that ice loss is exponential. Ian Joughin — a University of Washington researcher unaffiliated with the paper and who has studied the tipping points of Antarctic glaciers — put it this way: Think about the stock market in the ’80s. If you observed a couple years of accelerating growth, and decided that rate would double every 4 years — you’d have something like 56,000 points in the Dow Jones Industrial by now.

Or if stocks aren’t your thing, think about that other exponentially expanding force of nature: bacteria. Certain colonies of bacteria can double their population in a matter of hours. Can they do this forever? No, or else we’d be nothing but bacteria right now (and while we’re certainly a high percentage of bacteria, there’s still room for a couple other things).

Nature tends to put limits on exponential growth, Joughin points out — and the same probably goes for ice loss: “There’s only so fast you can move ice out of an ice sheet,” Joughin explained. While some ice masses may be collapsing at an accelerating rate, others won’t be as volatile.

This means, while some parts of ice sheet collapse may very well proceed exponentially, we can’t expect such simple mathematics to model anything in the real world except the terror spike of the Kingda Ka.

Shutterstock

Ocean turnover

Mmm mm, ocean turnover: Is it another word for a sushi roll or a fundamental process that keeps the climate relatively stable and moderate?

That’s right — we’re talking the Atlantic Meridonal Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, and other currents like it.

As cold meltwater flows off of glaciers and ice sheets at enormous rates, it pools at the ocean’s surface, trapping the denser but warmer saltwater beneath it. This can seriously mess with the moving parts of the ocean, the so-called “conveyor belts” that cycle deep nutrient-rich water to the surface. These slow currents are driven by large-scale climate processes, like wind, and drive others, like the carbon cycle. But they also rely on gradients in temperature and density to run; if too much cold water from the glaciers pools at the surface, the whole conveyor belt could stutter to a stop.

In the North Atlantic, this would mean waters get colder, while the tropics, denied their influx of colder water, would heat up precipitously. Hansen says we’re already seeing the beginnings of AMOC’s slowdown: There’s a spot of unusually cool water hanging out off of Greenland, while the U.S. East Coast continues to see warmer and warmer temperatures. Hansen said it plainly in a call with reporters: “I think this is the beginning of substantial slowdown of the AMOC.”

NASA

Superstorms

Pointing to giant hunks of rock that litter the shore of the Bahamas, among other evidence of ancient climates, the study’s authors suggest that past versions of Earth may have featured superstorms capable of casually tossing boulders like bored Olympians.

And as the temperature gradient between the tropic and the polar oceans gets steeper, thanks to that slowing of ocean-mixing currents, we could see stronger storms, too.

This is surprisingly intuitive: Picture a temperature gradient like a hill, with the high temperatures up at the top and the low temperatures down at the bottom. As the highs get higher and the lows get lower, that hill gets a lot steeper — and the storms are the bowling balls you chuck down the hill. A bowling ball will pick up a lot more speed on a steep hill, and hurt a lot more when it finally runs into something. Likewise, by the time these supercharged storms are slamming into coasts in the middle latitudes, they will be carrying a whole lot of deadly force with them.

So what does it all mean?

Whether other scientists quibble over these results or not — and they probably will — the overall message is hardly new. It’s bad, you guys. It might be really, truly, deeply bad, or it might be slightly less bad. Either way, says Hansen, what we know for sure is that it’s time to do something about it. “Among the top experts, there’s a pretty strong agreement that we’ve reached a point where this is truly urgent,” he said.

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So Hansen is frustrated once more with the failure of humanity to respond adequately. The result he’d hoped for when he released an early version of the paper online last summer was to get world leaders to come together in Paris to agree on a global price on carbon. As he told Grist’s Ben Adler at the time, “It’s going to happen.” (It didn’t happen, but some other stuff did.)

Still, true urgency would require more of us than just slowing the growth of emissions — it requires stopping them altogether. In a paper published in 2013, Hansen found that we have to cut 6 percent of our use of carbon-based fuels every year, if we want to avoid dangerous climate change.

Carbon prices and emissions cuts are more the purview of politicians and diplomats, but if anything, Hansen has shown he is unafraid to stray beyond the established protocol of academic science.

“I think scientists, who are trained to be objective, have something to offer by analyzing the problem all the way to the changes that are needed in order to address it,” he said on a press call. “That 6 percent reduction — that’s not advocacy, that’s science. And then I would advocate that we do that!”

And to pre-empt the haters, Hansen wants you to remember one thing. “Skepticism is the life blood of science. You can be sure that some scientists will find some aspects in our long paper that they will think of differently,” he said. “And that’s normal.”

So while scientists continue their debate over whether the ice sheets are poised to collapse in the next 50 years or the next 500, the prognosis is the same: The future is wetter, stranger, stormier unless we make serious moves to alternative energy sources now. Will we? Maybe. We’ve started but we still have a long, long way to go. If it’s a race between us and the ice sheets, neither I nor James Hansen nor anyone else can tell you for sure who will win.

Hey, no one said telling the future was easy.

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The scientist who first warned of climate change says it’s much worse than we thought

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Growing Good Air: Houseplants for a Healthier Home

by DarwinDiederich Posted on March 12, 2016

We breathe 10 to 20 thousand liters of air per day. With this much air going in and out of our lungs every second, it is vital to make sure we are breathing in good air all day. We are so used to hearing the expression go out and get some fresh air,” but why not bring some of that fresh air inside? Or better yet,createit inside! And not just any air. But air that can actually remove toxic gases and chemicals from your home environment! Thats correct air that can actually remove VOCs including formaldehyde and benzene.

Listen to my Green Divas @ Homesegment about creating a better indoor environment for your healthy home . . . then read on for more!

NASA and the Associated Landscape Contractors of America (ALCA) released the findings of a 2-year study suggesting, in addition to what some plant physiologists already knew: plants absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen as part of the photosynthetic process (hence, the fresh air image on the can). Get your beakers ready for a brief lesson in biology. As you may know, plants directly absorb carbon in their life-dependent process, photosynthesis. By taking in carbon dioxide and converting it to oxygen during photosynthesis, plants and trees naturally remove excess carbon from the air. During photosynthesis, foliage also removes from the atmosphere other chemicals, such as nitrogen oxides, airborne ammonia, some sulfur dioxide, and ozone that are part of the smog and greenhouse effect problems. Plants also affect air quality by acting as collection sites for dust and other air particles. So, by adding plant to your environment, you are cleaning up your indoor air and helping the planet.

Heres where it gets exciting! In addition, these researchers (including Dr. Bill Wolverton, formerly a senior research scientist at NASA) have found many common houseplants absorb benzene, formaldehyde and trichloroethylene, as well. In the NASA study, each plant type was placed in sealed, Plexiglas chambers in which chemicals were injected. The results surprised everyone.

Plants take substances out of the air through the tiny openings in their leaves, according to Wolverton. But research in their labs has determined that plant leaves, roots and soil bacteria areallimportant in removing trace levels of toxic vapors. Did you know that one potted plant per 100 square feet will clean the air in an average office? Although not a replacement for anair purifier, the NASA studies generated the recommendation that you use 15 to 18 good-sized plants in 6 to 8-inch diameter containers to improve air quality in an average 1,800 space. But, not justanyplant of course a certain 50 plants in particular! And, the more vigorously they grow, the better job theyll do for you, so keep em watered!

You may be staring at the little wilted plant on your windowsill or desk wondering if it made the list or not. If youd like the entire Top 10 list, you can find it in our book,Just GREEN It!But for now, I want to share the Top 5 plants according to the study that are most effective in removing: formaldehyde, benzene, and carbon monoxide from the air. These include:

Areca Palm
Lady Palm
Bamboo Palm
Rubber Plant
Dracaena Janet Craig

Bonus:

Listen to the latest full episode of theGreen Divas Radio Show…

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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Growing Good Air: Houseplants for a Healthier Home

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2015 Was by Far the Hottest Year on Record

by Myrna Posted on January 20, 2016

Global warming is real. Scientific Visualization Studio/Goddard Space Flight Center 2015 was almost certainly the hottest year since we began keeping records, according to data released today by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In a press release Wednesday, NASA stated that it was 94 percent confident that last year was the warmest since 1880. Here’s a chart from NOAA: NOAA/NASA “Record warmth was spread throughout the world,” said Thomas Karl, director of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information. “Ten of 12 months were records. That’s the first time we’ve seen that.” NASA/NOAA Shattered global temperature records are becoming increasingly commonplace, thanks to climate change; with today’s announcement, all five of the hottest years on record have occurred in the last decade. But the amount by which 2015 shattered the previous record, in 2014, was itself a record, scientists said. That’s due in part to this year’s El Niño, characterized by exceptionally high temperatures in the Pacific Ocean. NASA/NOAA But Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said the effects of El Niño only really appeared in the last few months of the year, and that 2015 likely would have been a record year regardless. “2015 was warm right from the beginning; it didn’t start with El Niño,” he said. “The reason this is such a record is because of the long-term trend, and there is no evidence that trend has slowed or paused over the last two decades.” NASA/NOAA Schmidt added that El Niño is likely to persist into 2016, which means we could be in for a record-breaking year yet again. Credit:   2015 Was by Far the Hottest Year on Record ; ; ;

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2015 Was by Far the Hottest Year on Record

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Smith Island Is Sinking Into the Chesapeake Bay Thanks to Climate Change

by Myrna Posted on November 3, 2015

By century’s end, it will be “almost completely under water.” A seagull perches on an experimental erosion barrier constructed by the US Army Corps of Engineers just offshore from Smith Island in 1998. Roberto Borea/AP Twelve miles off the coast of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Tim Marshall and I knife through the salty, choppy waters of the Chesapeake Bay in an aging white fishing skiff. It’s a clear, bright August morning, and Marshall, slugging cans of Diet Coke, steers us straight for the approximately 4,500 acres of tidal marsh that make up the federal Martin National Wildlife Refuge. To our backs is Smith Island, the last inhabited offshore island on the Maryland side of the Chesapeake. Marshall pilots us to the outer banks of the wildlife refuge, where the horizon is nothing but the blue waters of the Chesapeake and a faint speck in the distance—the remains of Holland Island, whose 360 residents fled rising waters and eroding soil in 1922, and which serves as a constant reminder to the people living on Smith Island that they might be frogs in a pot of slowly boiling water. Smith Island too is disappearing, its land eroding as it submerges into the Chesapeake. Smith Island comprises the wildlife refuge and a stretch of islands directly south, where roughly 280 residents live in three small villages about 5 feet above sea level. But erosion nips away at Smith Island’s banks at a rate of roughly 2 feet each year, and a 2008 report predicted that by 2100 Smith Island will be “almost completely under water as the Bay’s average level goes up nearly one-foot.” Read the rest at Newsweek. See original article here:   Smith Island Is Sinking Into the Chesapeake Bay Thanks to Climate Change ; ; ;

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Smith Island Is Sinking Into the Chesapeake Bay Thanks to Climate Change

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Too bad NASA’s plan for space-based solar never happened

by CharityMullens Posted on September 21, 2015

Too bad NASA’s plan for space-based solar never happened

By on 21 Sep 2015 4:20 pmcommentsShare

It’s always irksome when tech companies talk about their latest “moonshot.” The actual moonshot was one of the most incredible accomplishments of humankind. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy challenged NASA to put someone on the moon by the end of the decade, and NASA, which hadn’t even put someone in orbit yet, was like, “On it, boss,” and then had three people on the moon eight years later. So sorry, Google, even if Google Glass hadn’t flopped, it wouldn’t have been a moonshot, and neither will anything else that comes out of the “moonshot factory.”

So it’s a real bummer to find out that the agency that today’s most powerful engineers and entrepreneurs so desperately want to emulate had a mind-blowingly awesome plan for a space-based solar factory back in the ’70s that never came to fruition. Here’s the scoop from Motherboard:

At the height of the oil crisis in the 1970s, the US government considered building a network of 60 orbiting solar power stations that would beam energy down to Earth. Each geosynchronous satellite, according to this 1981 NASA memo, was to weigh around 35,000 to 50,000 metric tons. The Satellite Power System (SPS) project envisaged building two satellites a year for 30 years.

To get said power stations into orbit, the once-powerful aerospace manufacturing company Rockwell International designed something called a Star-Raker, which, in addition to sounding like something from a sci-fi movie, also would have acted like one:

The proposed Star-Raker would load its cargo at a regular airport, fly to a spaceport near the equator, fuel up on liquid oxygen and hydrogen, and take off horizontally using its ten supersonic ramjet engines. A 1979 technical paper lays out its potential flight plan: At a cruising altitude of 45,000 feet, the craft would then dive to 37,000 feet to break the sound barrier. At speeds of up to Mach 6, the Star-Raker would jet to an altitude of 29km before the rockets kicked in, propelling it into orbit.

Just to recap: The Star-Raker would have broken the speed of sound by diving seven miles. And the spacecraft would have been making so many regular trips to orbit that it would have essentially been a 747 for space, Motherboard reports.

In terms of feasibility, here’s how one scientist put it at the time:

“The SPS is an attractive, challenging, worthy project, which the aerospace community is well prepared and able to address,” physicist Robert G. Jahn wrote in the foreword to a 1980 SPS feasibility report. “The mature confidence and authority of [the working groups] left the clear impression that if some persuasive constellation of purposes … should assign this particular energy strategy a high priority, it could be accomplished.”

Putting solar plants in space would’ve been hard, sure, but this proposal came just 10 years after NASA landed Apollo 11 on the moon, so doing seemingly impossible things was kind of their thing. Even if SPS hadn’t happened as planned (and for more details on what exactly that plan was, check out this in-depth look from Wired), there’s no doubt that with the right amount of support and funding, NASA could’ve done something incredible in the cleantech arena.

Today, NASA remains an indispensable source of climate change research. Unfortunately, politicians aren’t as eager to throw money at the agency now that we’re no longer trying to show up the Soviet Union (in fact, the U.S. government is now relying on Russia to take U.S. astronauts up to the International Space Station). And some members of Congress (lookin’ at you, Ted Cruz) have it in their heads that NASA shouldn’t even be doing Earth sciences research in the first place.

We know from the landing of the Curiosity Rover on Mars back in 2012 that NASA still has the ability to inspire and astonish. People geeked out hard over those “seven minutes of terror” and for good reason. Getting that same kind of support behind something that addresses climate change would be exactly what this world needs. If only the one organization proven capable of doing moonshots wasn’t beholden to a bunch of science-hating idiots.

Source:

The Space Plane NASA Wanted to Use to Build Solar Power Plants in Orbit

, Motherboard.

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Too bad NASA’s plan for space-based solar never happened

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We’re making massive waste islands in the sea

by LeannaHan74323 Posted on August 24, 2015

We’re making massive waste islands in the sea

By on 24 Aug 2015commentsShare

That message in a bottle you tossed into the sea as a young rapscallion? Remember how you didn’t get a response? It’s because oceans aren’t the same thing as carrier pigeons. Instead of sending bottles bobbing merrily on their way across the Pacific, ocean currents tend to push bits of trash to convergence points in the ocean called garbage patches.

The video above shows a new data visualization from NASA illustrating the phenomenon. By mapping the paths of free-floating ocean buoys distributed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration over a period of 35 years, scientists were able to verify the garbage patch effect, as well as the locations of the patches. Aside from providing these insights, the visualization is a win for science, because the researchers were able to lend some more validation to an ocean current model called ECCO2. When the group generated a cloud of particles — digital buoys — and ran the model, the particles ended up in the same spots as the physical buoys they’d been tracking.

There are probably more than 5 trillion pieces of plastic in the ocean. The message in a bottle example might be a bit of red herring, though, since most of the plastic floating in the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” is thought to come in the form of microplastics smaller than a thumbtack, which are distributed throughout the water column at the rate of about one piece every two cubic meters of water. That said, a recent expedition gathering data on the Great Pacific Garbage Patch trawled up mostly medium to large-sized pieces of trash. Either way, there’s a lot of garbage out there. You’re better off sending a postcard.

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Garbage Patch Visualization Experiment

, NASA.

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This scuba diver wants everyone — black, white, or brown — to feel at home in the oceanKramer Wimberley knows what it’s like to feel unwelcome in the water. As a dive instructor and ocean-lover, he tries to make sure no one else does.


This chef built her reputation on seafood. How’s she feeling about the ocean now?Seattle chef Renee Erickson weighs in on the world’s changing waters, and how they might change her menu.


Oceans 15We’re tired of talking about oceans like they’re just a big, wet thing somewhere out there. Let’s make it personal.

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We’re making massive waste islands in the sea

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This Map Shows What San Francisco Will Look Like After Sea Levels Rise

by Myrna Posted on July 30, 2015

And not much is being done about it. Mark Schwettmann/Shutterstock Developers in the booming San Francisco Bay Area are busy planning everything from much-needed new housing to sports stadiums and gleaming tech campuses. But according to a new report just published by the San Francisco Public Press, many of these construction projects sit on land susceptible to rising waters due to climate change. And regulators and local governments are not doing much to prepare. The Public Press found 27 major commercial and residential developments that will be vulnerable to flooding if San Francisco Bay sea levels rise as much as climate researchers like the National Research Council project in the next century. These developments include a new stadium for the Golden State Warriors, campuses being built by Google and Facebook, and revamped public spaces like San Francisco’s iconic ferry terminal and Jack London Square in Oakland. Read the rest at Mother Jones. This article is from:  This Map Shows What San Francisco Will Look Like After Sea Levels Rise ; ; ;

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This Map Shows What San Francisco Will Look Like After Sea Levels Rise

Posted in eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, Landmark, Monterey, ONA, OXO, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This Map Shows What San Francisco Will Look Like After Sea Levels Rise