Underwater Meadows of Seagrass Could Be the Ideal Carbon Sinks
Seagrass plants have an excellent capacity for taking up and storing carbon in the oxygen-depleted seabed, where it decomposes much slower than on land. This oxygen-free sediment traps the carbon in the dead plant material which may then remain buried for hundreds of years.
This map and chart, from EcoWatch, pertains to a study that was published in the journal Nature and that was described in one of my posts earlier today. Essentially, the study tells us that 77% of land, excluding Antarctica, and 87% of oceans, has been modified by human activity, and that 70% of the remaining wilderness is situated in Canada, Russia, the US, Brazil and Australia.
The five countries that control most remaining wilderness area are Brazil, the U.S., Canada, Russia and Australia. Nature
The list of countries controlling most of the world’s wilderness. Nature
The U.S. and nine of the world’s largest fishing economies will sign an agreement Wednesday in Ilulissat, Greenland that bans commercial fishing in the central Arctic Ocean for the next 16 years.
“This is the first multilateral agreement of its kind to take a legally binding, precautionary approach to protect an area from commercial fishing before that fishing has begun,” the U.S. State Department said in a statement on Monday.
Signatories include the U.S., Canada, Denmark (for Greenland and the Faroe Islands), Norway, Russia, China, Iceland, Japan, the Republic of Korea and the European Union.
The world’s rising temperatures have significantly thawed Arctic ice, and shipping operations have eyed the melting North Pole as a new economic opportunity.
By the same token, commercial fishing may become viable in areas where such activity was previously not possible, the State Department noted.
The “Agreement to Prevent Unregulated High Seas Fisheries in the Central Arctic Ocean” bars unregulated fishing in an area that covers 2.8 million square kilometers—or about the size of the Mediterranean Sea—said David Balton, the former U.S. ambassador for oceans and fisheries, who led the negotiations that produced the agreement.
The agreement also creates a joint scientific research and monitoring program to learn more about the changing Arctic marine ecosystem, Balton said, “to determine when commercial fishing might be viable and how best to manage such a fishery in the future.”
The 16-year ban can be extended in five-year increments if the parties agree.
When asked why the Arctic deserves protection, Balton explained to Pew that the region “is warming faster than probably any other part of the planet, more than twice as fast as the global average. And this is bringing about profound change.”
A coalition of 17 groups filed a lawsuit Friday, challenging the decision to gut the Bureau of Land Management's Waste Prevention Rule.
Excerpt:
A coalition of 17 conservation and tribal citizen groups filed a lawsuit Friday challenging the Trumpadministration’s decision to gut the Bureau of Land Management’s Waste Prevention Rule, stating that the rule violates a number of existing federal policies. The states of New Mexico and California have already filed a lawsuit challenging BLM’s action.
“We are going to court on behalf of American taxpayers, public health and the planet,” said Robin Cooley, an Earthjustice attorney representing the groups. “The Trump administration is not above the law—Interior Secretary Zinke cannot yank away a common-sense rule that was the product of years of careful deliberation simply to appease his friends in the oil and gas industry.”
The common sense rule updated nearly 40-year-old standards by implementing cost-effective measures to reduce wasteful venting, flaring and leaking of publicly owned natural gas from federal and tribal lands. However, the administration’s revised shell of a rule fails to take reasonable precautions to prevent waste and protect the public welfare, illegally relying almost entirely on inadequate or nonexistent state regulations in place of federal standards.
BLM adopted the Waste Prevention Rule to address rampant waste of public resources. BLM’s own estimates show that between 2009 and 2015 oil and gas companies wasted more than 462 billion cubic feet of natural gas, enough gas to supply more than 6.2 million households—or every household in Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming—for one year.
As a result of BLM’s actions eliminating those protections, oil and gas companies will now be allowed to vent, leak or flare $824 million worth of publicly owned natural gas into the air over the next decade. State, local and tribal taxpayers will lose millions of dollars of royalty payments.
They couldn't reach a compromise to keep even this popular part of the government running.
I’m sure that the lapse of the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) that happened yesterday will be reversed, and that the LWCF will be reauthorized, permanently funded at its intended (and higher) levels, and its reauthorization will be tied together with another piece of legislation that is intended to address the maintenance backlog at our national parks. Leaders and significant senators and congressional representatives from both parties agree to all this. The reauthorization doesn’t seem to be hung up on political considerations, which is contrary from what happened in earlier years.
Excerpt:
Congress failed to reauthorize the fund for the second time in three years because key members of the House and Senate could not agree about how to pay for the program going forward. The fund’s expiration casts an uncertain future on ongoing projects and prevents new oil and gas receipts from being used for conservation work until the program is reauthorized.
Since its inception in 1965, the program has protected millions of acres nationwide, including according to one analysis at least 491,000 acres between 2014 to 2017 alone. Federal agencies and state governments have used the conservation fund to do everything from building swimming pools and basketball courts in cities to expanding wildlife refuges and national parks like Acadia in Maine and Grand Canyon in Arizona.
Leaders in the Senate and House found themselves at loggerheads over whether to make funding for the program permanent. Although LWCF funding comes from the government’s cut of oil and gas drilling on public lands, Congress needs to sign off on that spending every year. Some years, Congress failed to appropriate the full $900 million authorized for the program.
Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, wants to fix those spending lapses by making that $900 million in funding for LWCF mandatory every year. Her bill, which will be marked up in committee on Tuesday, has the support of Burr along with several GOP senators on the panel, including Steve Daines of Montana and Cory Gardner of Colorado. Last week, those senators took to the Senate floor to argue in favor of reupping the program.
Their counterparts on the House Natural Resources Committee have advanced a package that would permanently reauthorize the fund like the Senate bill would, but that would require funding to be approved by Congress on a yearly basis. That committee’s chairman, Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah), wants the renewal of the fund to be paired with some of his other priorities, including a plan to use some of that same oil and gas money for repairs to roads and other infrastructure in national parks.
#FindYourWay to deep canyons and truly wild streams along the Little Jacks Creek Wild and Scenic River in Idaho. Protected in 2009 and surrounded by wilderness in Southern Idaho’s Owyhee Canyonlands, the multi-tiered cliffs and steep grassy slopes of Little Jacks Creek plunge almost 1,000 feet to the streambed, which provides habitat for Redband trout. The Little Jacks Creek canyon is a prime example of high desert fluvial geology; vertical and angular rock lines create a mosaic amid coarse-textured, red, brown, or blackish eroded basalt cliffs, often glazed with yellow to light green micro-flora. Bighorn sheep are a main attraction for visiting hikers, so be sure to keep your eyes open! Little Jacks Creek is one of 209 river segments in 40 states that are part of the Wild and Scenic Rivers System, which has protected 12,754 miles of free-flowing rivers over the last 50 years! Photo by Bureau of Land Management, @mypubliclands
Harbor seals and their brethren have a superpower that lets them track their prey even without sight or sound. It’s their whiskers, which are sensitive enough to follow the trail left by a single fish thirty seconds earlier. The secret to the whisker’s sensitivity lies in its shape. Instead of a uniform, circular cross-section, the seal’s whisker is oval-shaped and its width varies along the length in a wavy pattern. So unlike a straight cylinder, which vibrates when towed through water, the seal’s whiskers are unperturbed by their own movement. They shed only weak vortices and do not vibrate as a result.
But, if you expose the whiskers to any external turbulence, like the vortices trailing a fish, the whisker ‘slaloms’ back-and-forth in time with the wake. That motion gets transmitted to the nerves in the seal’s cheek, carrying potential information about both the size and speed of the wake’s originator. Researchers hope similar bio-inspired whiskers could help underwater vehicles track schools of fish or locate underwater drilling leaks. (Image credit: M. Richter; video credit: MIT; research credit: H. Beem and M. Triantafyllou; via the Economist; submitted by Russ A. and Kam-Yung Soh)
Many spiders fly long distances by riding “balloons” of silk, and a new study suggests that they’re propelled by more than just the wind.
Electric fields at strengths found in nature can also trigger the spiders’ ballooning behavior. And electrostatic forces can lift up the spiders even when the air is still, according to a newly published report in the journal Current Biology.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.“
–Stephen Jay Gould
It is estimated that Einstein had an IQ of 160; further, a standard deviation of IQ is estimated to be 15 points–that is to say, there are as many people in the 100-115 range as there are 115+, as many people in the 115-130 range as 130+, etcetera. If we hold these estimates to be true, that means 3.125% of the population is Einstein’s intellectual equal or superior.
Now that’s not exactly common, but it’s not vanishingly rare, either. As of my typing this, I have ~900 followers; assuming my followership doesn’t skew one way or the other, 28 of them should be Einsteins. The US has a population of 325.7 million; there ought to be ten million Einsteins walking our streets. By this same estimate, there should be four million Einsteins in Mexico, four and a half in Russia, over five million in Bangladesh, over six million each in Nigeria and Pakistan, eight and a third million in Indonesia, nearly forty two and a third million in India, and over forty four million in China. And of course, 237.5 million Einsteins worldwide.
Can you imagine the number of problems we’d be able to solve if we were able to find and educate those 237.5 million Einsteins and give them grants? Talk about wasted potential! We can’t accurately screen for that, though, so the only solution is to ensure that every child has access to a quality education and healthy diet…which has other benefits as, you know, it’s not only the Einsteins among us who contribute to society.
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