Earth Wise

A look at our changing environment.

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Spreading Like Wildfire

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Last July 7th, 140 wildfires started up in British Columbia, triggering a state of emergency.  By the end of the summer, more than 1,000 fires had been triggered across the Canadian province, burning nearly 3 million acres of forest, about 10 times more than the average over the past decade.

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Mass Production Of Biodegradable Plastic  

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Plastic pollution is a major problem for the world’s oceans and non-biodegradable plastics continue to fill the planet’s landfills and litter the landscape.   There are many approaches to making plant-derived, biodegradable plastics but most of these materials do not offer the resistance to heat and moisture that is characteristic of petroleum-based plastics.

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Another Unconventional Fossil Fuel Source

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It has only been about 10 years that fracking has been a big deal in the energy world.   With it, a largely inaccessible source of fossil fuel became relatively easy pickings.   And both the economic benefits and the attendant environmental problems have been grabbing headlines ever since.

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Earthquake Warning System

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The destructive power of both hurricanes and earthquakes has made headlines in recent times.   The slow development of the hurricanes in the Atlantic was monitored for days before they wreaked havoc on Caribbean islands and Florida cities.  Earthquakes, on the other hand, occur suddenly and without warning.   Except, that isn’t entirely true.

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The Effects Of One Degree

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In discussions of global warming, we often hear about the effects of a 2-degree rise in temperature or a 1-degree rise in temperature.   For most of us, such changes seem pretty insignificant.  Of course, in our daily lives, a one-degree temperature change is not particularly noticeable.   But in the context of climate change, we are talking about a change in average temperature over time, not the temperature on a particular day or at a particular time.

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Storing Carbon in the Ocean

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As carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere continue to rise, it may be that clean energy technologies, electric cars, and other methods of reducing emissions may not be enough.  Carbon sequestration – sucking carbon out of the atmosphere – is seen by many as a crucial part of the solution.

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New Places For Solar Cells

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Solar panels are on more than a million rooftops in the United States, so they are getting to be a pretty common sight.   We also see them along our highways powering lights and signs and emergency call boxes.  As it gets cheaper and more common, solar technology is starting to show up in more unusual ways.

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Climate Change And Hurricanes

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No single weather event can be attributed to climate change.   Storms, floods and droughts have always happened and some of them have always been severe.   However, two centuries of people burning fossil fuels has altered temperatures just enough that some of the storms we have seen in recent times have been much worse than they otherwise would have been.

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The Tiny Country That Feeds The World

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The Netherlands is a small, densely populated country with more than 1,300 inhabitants per square mile.  It lacks almost every resource one associates with large-scale agriculture.  Nevertheless, it is the number two exporter of food in the world, second only to the United States, which is almost 300 times bigger.  The Dutch lead the world in exporting tomatoes, potatoes and onions and produce many other crops as well. 

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Measuring Earth’s Outgoing Energy

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The earth’s energy imbalance is the difference between the amount of solar energy absorbed by the earth and the amount of energy the planet radiates back into space as heat.  If the imbalance is positive, that is, if more energy is coming in than going out, then the earth will get warmer over time.  If the imbalance is negative, then the planet will get cooler. 

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Pine Barrens Threatened

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Pine barrens occur throughout the northeastern U.S. from New Jersey to Maine.  They are plant communities that occur on dry, acidic, infertile soils dominated by grasses, forbs, low shrubs, and small to medium-sized pines.  The Pine Bush Preserve in Albany, New York is one of the larger inland pine barrens in the country.

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Super Blooms

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This past August one of the driest regions on Earth transformed from a barren desert to a sea of colorful flowers.  Heavy rains in Chile’s Atacama Desert caused the phenomenon, locally known as the desierto florido or flowering desert.   These things typically only happen every five to seven years, but the previous super bloom actually took place in 2015.

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Better Zinc-Air Batteries

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Zinc-air batteries are metal-air batteries powered by oxidizing zinc with the oxygen from the air.  They have high energy densities (as much as five times more energy than lithium-ion batteries) and are more environmentally friendly.  Since they are based on abundant zinc, they are potentially much cheaper to produce than the lithium-ion batteries that are used in so many current applications.  But because it is difficult and expensive to produce rechargeable versions of these batteries, they have only found limited use in hearing aids, in some film cameras, and in large form to power navigation instruments, oceanographic experiments and railway signals. 

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Air Travel And Global Warming

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Air travel is pretty carbon intensive.  For those of us who take plane trips, it represents a substantial part of our individual carbon footprints. It isn’t that plane travel is inefficient fuel-wise on a miles-per-gallon-per-passenger basis compared with driving, for example.  It is just that we go so much farther on planes.   Currently, aviation accounts for only a few percent of overall carbon emissions, but that is changing for two reasons.

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