ENVIRONMENT

Posts in "Environment"

New Study Shows Organic Farming Traps Carbon in Soil to Combat Climate Change

When it comes to mitigating the worst impacts of climate change, keeping excess carbon out of the atmosphere is the prime target for improving the health of our planet. One of the best ways to do that is thought to be locking more of that carbon into the soil that grows our food.

Link: http://civileats.com/2017/09/11/new-study-shows-organic-farming-traps-carbon-in-soil-to-combat-climate-change/

Good Samaritans save stranded manatees from Irma

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Two manatees were stranded after Hurricane Irma sucked the water out of Sarasota Bay, in Florida’s Manatee County.

Several people posted photos of the mammals on Facebook Sunday, hoping rescue workers or wildlife officials would respond. Michael Sechler posted that the animals were far too massive to be lifted, so they gave them water.

Link: https://nypost.com/2017/09/10/good-samaritans-save-stranded-manatees-from-irma/

A juice company dumped orange peels in a national park. Here’s what it looks like now.

In exchange for donating a portion of unspoiled, forested land to the Área de Conservación Guanacaste — a nature preserve in the country’s northwest — the park would allow the company to dump its discarded orange peels and pulp, free of charge, in a heavily grazed, largely deforested area nearby.

https://www.upworthy.com/a-juice-company-dumped-orange-peels-in-a-national-park-heres-what-it-looks-like-now

Scientists Find Record 2.7-Million-Year-Old Ice Core in Antarctica

Back in 2010, a group of scientists drilling in Antarctica pulled up a one-million-year-old chunk of ice. At the time, it was the oldest ice core ever discovered. But as Paul Voosen reports for Sciencethe team recently dug even deeper into Earth’s glacial history, unearthing an ice core that dates back 2.7 million years.  

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-find-27-million-year-old-ice-core-antarctica-180964566/

Trees with “Crown Shyness” Mysteriously Avoid Touching Each Other

If you look up toward certain types of towering trees—including eucalyptus, Sitka spruce, and Japanese larch—you may notice a unique phenomenon: the uppermost branches don’t touch. Known as “crown shyness,” this natural occurrence results in rupture-like patterns in the forest canopy that seem to perfectly outline the trees’ striking silhouettes.

https://mymodernmet.com/crown-shyness-trees-phenomenon/

A Butterfly Reappears in Scotland After 133 Years Away

LAST WEDNESDAY, IAN COWE TOOK a photograph of a white-letter hairstreak in Scotland—the first time since 1884 the butterfly had been seen in the country. The butterfly, he told the BBC, was “a very ragged and worn individual found feeding on ragwort in the grassy edge of an arable field.”

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/butterfly-scotland-136-years-hairstreak?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=atlas-page

Testing Out Ocean Cleanup

Ocean Cleanup device in Great Pacific Garbage Patch breaks, will be towed back to port
A 60-foot chunk of the Ocean Cleanup device in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch has broken off.
The system was towed out to sea from its building berth on San Francisco Bay on Sept. 8, 2018, and was first deployed about 240 nautical miles offshore where it was tested for two weeks. It was then towed to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch nearly 1,400 miles off the West Coast, about halfway between California and Hawaii. 

 

TREEmail

Melbourne gave 70,000 trees email addresses so people could report on their condition. But instead people are writing love letters, existential queries and sometimes just bad puns. Read the weird, funny and philosophical emails that people are sending to Melbourne’s trees.

 

Sono Motors’s Sion Is a Crowdfunded, Solar- and Battery-Powered Electric Car


Electric car startups are nothing new, but Germany’s Sono Motors has found a way to stand out from the crowd. Sono just unveiled the Sion, an electric city car powered by a combination of batteries and solar cells. That’s not the only novel thing about this project, though; It’s also crowdfunded.
http://www.thedrive.com/tech/12963/sono-motorss-sion-is-a-crowdfunded-solar-and-battery-powered-electric-car