Jasper was impressed at the turnout.
Thursday, January 13, 2022
Update on the Neighborhood Century Plant
The century plant is still standing. The limbs and flowers are darkened and look moribund, but there's no sign of an impending collapse. It started shooting up in April and May of 2021. Maybe it'll keep on keepin' on for awhile.
The Challenges of Energy in a Finite World
Hot springs are scarce in the desert:
On Monday, a U.S. district judge halted construction of two geothermal power plants on public land in Nevada. The decision was in response to a lawsuit filed in December by the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental nonprofit, and the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe, against the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, for approving the project.
Geothermal power plants pump hot water from deep underground and use it to generate steam to produce clean electricity. The Nevada plants are set to be built on a verdant wetland in the desert called Dixie Meadows. The suit alleges that the project threatens to dry up the hot springs that support the wetland and are of religious and cultural significance to the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone. The ecosystem is also home to the Dixie Valley toad, a species that is not known to exist anywhere else on Earth.
...Geothermal power plants currently produce a small fraction of U.S. electricity — only about 0.5 percent in 2020. But an analysis by the Department of Energy found that with improvements in technology, that number could go up to 8.5 percent by 2050. Geothermal power plants have several relative advantages, in addition to not directly producing any carbon emissions. They have a small physical footprint compared to wind and solar farms, and they can provide power 24/7. This kind of always-available, dispatchable source of electricity will be critical for grid reliability as intermittent sources of energy like wind and solar increase.
...The plaintiffs have reason to be skeptical. The geothermal company behind the Dixie Meadows project, Ormat Technologies, opened a geothermal power plant in 2011 about 40 miles away on another hot springs called Jersey Valley. The springs dried up entirely a few years after the plant began operating.
The lawsuit also asserts that the project violates the American Indian Religious Freedom Act. “Many of the other springs in the area have been damaged or ruined by development,” the lawsuit says. “Dixie Meadows Hot Springs is therefore the most important and sacred spring to the Tribe, and one of the very last remaining springs in the area.” Members of the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe use the site for “healing, soaking, camping, and harvesting native plants for weaving and other uses. These practices require quiet for contemplation, and darkness to see the night sky.”
A Bunch of Icefish in the Weddell Sea
Interesting stuff:
A breeding colony of 60 million fish has been discovered in Antarctica's ice-covered Weddell Sea -- a unique and previously unknown ecosystem that covers an area the size of Malta.
...The vast colony, believed to be the world's largest, is home to the remarkable icefish (Neopagetopsis ionah), which has a see-through skull and transparent blood. Icefish are the only vertebrates to have no red blood cells.
To survive at such low temperatures, it has evolved an anti-freeze protein in its transparent blood that stops ice crystals from growing.
...The breeding colony was discovered in February 2021 by the German polar research vessel Polarstern, which was surveying the seabed about half a kilometer below the ship. It used a car-sized camera system attached to the stern of the ship that transmits pictures up to the deck as it's being towed.
..."We just saw fish nest after fish nest for the whole four hours, and during that time we covered maybe six kilometers (3.7 miles) of the sea floor," said Autun Purser, a postdoctoral reseacher at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Bremerhaven, Germany. He's the lead author of a study on the icefish colony that published in the journal Current Biology on Thursday.
...The colony covers more than 240 square kilometers (93 square miles), the researchers said. With, on average, one nest for every three square meters, they estimated that the colony includes about 60 million active nests.
..."Some animals like to be social, but there's a limit. Congregating may give them advantages for finding mates but provides a rich point source for predation."
The fish appear to be attracted by an area of warmer water, which is around 2 degrees Celsius warmer than the surrounding sea bed, which is a chilly 0 degrees Celsius, said Purser. (Sea water freezes at a lower temperature than fresh water.)
...The findings reveal a globally unique ecosystem, according to the researchers, and they say it should be designated a protected area. ...While the Weddell Sea is covered with sea ice all year round, the ice is relatively thin -- three feet thick -- meaning that photosynthesis can still take place and life can thrive. Purser said the Weddell Sea floor is far from barren, with sea sponges, corals, octopuses and star fish lurking along the seabed.
Monday, January 10, 2022
Lions in Europe
No reason not to believe lions once roamed eastern Europe:
But early-20th-century archaeologists in mainland Greece thought that there might be some truth to the existence of lions in the region in ancient times. Why else would these creatures feature so prominently—and realistically—in art from the late Bronze Age, as well as in myths and actual reports by later scholars from the Classical period, such as Aristotle and Herodotus?
Though such theories were long dismissed by other researchers, in 1978, two prominent German zooarchaeologists made a startling discovery. During an excavation of Tiryns—the same city whose legendary king dared Hercules into action—they chanced upon a feline heel bone near a human skeleton. It was unmistakably from a lion, they concluded, and possibly of the same species that inhabits parts of the African continent today.
The bone was only the first of dozens to surface in Tiryns and elsewhere over the following decades. Though some details remain unclear, many archaeologists and historians now use this evidence to conclude that modern lions once lived alongside people in parts of what is today Europe, including Greece, for hundreds of years. Today lion bones offer a rare glimpse into the Bronze Age world and the fraught relationship that humans had with these fierce predators, animals that inspired legends and creative works for centuries.
“Now it’s possible to say that some [lion images] could have been recalled from real experiences on the [Greek] mainland,” says the art historian Nancy Thomas. The finds, she adds, cast “a whole different light on the art … and how hunting real lions could have played into the elite structure development that was going on in Greece at the time.”
...The fossil record suggests that modern Panthera leo populations were once widespread, stretching from parts of Africa through the Middle East to India. But the route these cats would have taken to reach Europe, whether across the mainland or crossing the Bosporus over an ancient land bridge, remains a mystery.
Scholars such as Bartosiewicz speculate that lions ventured around the Black Sea into Ukraine, then moved south to the Balkans. From there, some could have roamed farther south to Greece.
Agriculture In Iraq is in Trouble
No freaking water. These places have been superb farmland for millenia. And they are in trouble:
This corner of Diyala province, which stretches from the center of Iraq to the country’s east, was once famous for its pomegranates. Everywhere you drove, you’d encounter acres of trees laden with blood-red baubles. Yassin had three fields and a vineyard.
Not these days. Standing in one of his plots, Yassin pointed out a few desiccated-looking trees and the churned brown of recently tilled fields. Like other farmers in Diyala, he had given up. Over the last few months he cut down most of his pomegranate trees; he just finished plowing over his vineyard.
“If you saw this area 10 years before, I swear you would think you’re in Eden,” he said.
“But there’s just no water. We couldn’t do it anymore.”
Diyala is perhaps the starkest example of Iraq’s impending Great Thirst. The country — fed not by one but two mighty rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates — is thought to be where humans first started cultivation: Mesopotamia, the land of plenty.
But another year of crippling drought and of competition with equally parched neighbors means there isn’t enough water to go around. Both Turkey and Iran have activated dams and tunnels to divert water from tributaries of the Tigris and Euphrates, leaving downstream Iraq — which relies on the two rivers’ largesse for 60% of its freshwater resources — with an acute shortage.
This year, inflows from Turkey fell by almost two-thirds; from Iran they’re about one-tenth of what they were, Mahdi Rashid Hamdani, Iraq’s minister of water resources, said in an interview.
In desperation, Baghdad has appealed to its neighbors to help mitigate the crisis. In October, the Water Ministry invoked an agreement with Ankara that’s supposed to ensure Turkey’s “fair and equitable” contributions to the Tigris and Euphrates. In Tehran, the appeal has been met with silence, Iraqi officials say.
“Iran hasn’t cooperated with us at all. It diverted rivers to areas inside the country and doesn’t work with us to share the damage from the drought,” Hamdani said, adding that his ministry has completed procedures for a lawsuit against Iran and asked the Iraqi Foreign Ministry to contact the International Court of Justice. A spokesman for the Foreign Ministry did not respond to questions on the matter.
The water scarcity is compounded by wider shifts in the environment. This year, temperatures in Iraq reached 125 degrees, and the country is experiencing 118-degree days more frequently and earlier in the year. Berkeley Earth, a California-based climate science organization, found that temperatures in Iraq have increased at double the world average.
Last year, Iraq ranked No. 5 on the United Nations’ list of countries most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. By 2050, the World Bank said in a report last month, a temperature increase of 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) and a precipitation decrease of 10% could cause Iraq to lose fully one-fifth of its available fresh water.
That’s already the reality in Diyala. Almost all of the province was dropped from the government’s agricultural plan for summer crops, excluding farmers there from water appropriations in favor of irrigating strategic crops such as barley and wheat. The same thing happened in October. Instead, Diyala’s farmers have had to rely on roughly 200 wells to slake their orchards’ thirst as well as their own.
For many here, the changes mean the end of a way of life.
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