Image for the day

Blade of Grass (200X)

Dr. Donna Stolz

Nikon Small World 2011 - The World's Top Women Photomicrographers

Thanks, Greenpeace

Amchitka: The Founding Voyage

VIDEO: 40 Years of Victories

VIDEO: A Conversation in Pictures (Rex Weyler and Kumi Naidoo)

Image source here.

Coral reefs signal mass extinction

Coral reefs 'will be gone by end of the century'

They will be the first entire ecosystem to be destroyed by human activity, says top UN scientist

The Independent: Professor Peter Sale studied the Great Barrier Reef for 20 years at the University of Sydney. He currently leads a team at the United Nations University for Water, Environment and Health.

The predicted decline is mainly down to climate change and ocean acidification. [Sale's] book, Our Dying Planet... contains further alarming predictions, such as the prospect that 'we risk having no reefs that resemble those of today in as little as 30 or 40 more years...'

Coral reefs... contain a quarter of all marine species, despite covering only 0.1 per cent of the world's oceans by area, and are more diverse than the rainforests... About 180 million people live within 100km of a reef, of which some 275 million are likely to depend on the reef ecosystems for nutrition or livelihood. Fringing reefs can also help to protect low-lying islands and coastal regions from extreme weather, absorbing waves before they reach vulnerable populations.

Carbon emissions generated by human activity, especially our heavy use of fossil fuels, are the biggest cause of the anticipated rapid decline... Climate change increases ocean surface temperatures... and leads to coral bleaching, where the photosynthesising algae on which the reef-building creatures depend for energy disappear. Deprived of these for even a few weeks, the corals die. On top of this comes ocean acidification. Roughly one-third of the extra carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere is absorbed through the ocean surface... The imbalance created makes it harder for reef organisms to retrieve the minerals needed to build their carbonaceous skeletons...

If past mass extinctions are anything to go by... reef disappearance has tended to precede wider mass extinction events... 'The losses of species that are occurring now are in every way equivalent to the mass extinctions of the past,' Professor Sale says... About 20 per cent of global coral reefs have already been lost in the past few decades... 'If we can keep CO2 concentrations below 450 parts per million we could be able to save something resembling coral reefs.'... The current atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is about 390 parts per million, but few experts believe it will remain below 500 for long.

Image: Australia's Great Barrier Reef is the planet's largest reef system and one of the seven natural wonders of the world, but it may not survive the century. Source here.

Image for the day

Take heart.

Image source here.

Taken for a pipeline ride

Overheard: Asia's View of Alberta, Tar Sands and Pipelines

If this insider is right, Gateway is purely a ploy and Canadians are rubes.

Michael Byers, The Tyee.ca: As I listen in, I hear from a consultant a startling analysis of what Asia really thinks... 'The Gulf of Mexico coast is the only place in the world with any significant capacity for handling bitumen... If the Asians buy any bitumen from Canada, they'll insist on a very steep discount, because they'll have to ship it to the Gulf of Mexico too.'... He chuckles. 'But we don't tell the Canadians this straight-out.'...

'But what about the Northern Gateway,' I ask,... the proposed 1,200-kilometre-long twin pipelines between Fort McMurray, Alberta, and Kitimat, B.C. 'Enbridge is a major player. Surely they would realize that there's no market in Asia?'

'Enbridge is a pipeline company, not an oil company,' he replies... 'They've promised to find a market, and nothing more. They don't care if it's at a discount.'... 'If the Canadians were smart, they'd build the capacity to refine all their bitumen at source, so as to ship a much more valuable product to Asia and elsewhere.'...

'But surely Northern Gateway isn't just about Canadian oil companies being taken for a ride? I thought that Northern Gateway was designed, at least in part, to put pressure on the U.S. State Department to approve Keystone XL.'... a proposed 3,190 kilometre-long pipeline that would transport bitumen from Fort McMurray direct to the refineries on the Gulf of Mexico coast...

'You're absolutely right,' the consultant nods. 'And not just in part. Gateway is all about putting pressure on the State Department.'

'But the people at the State Department aren't stupid,' I protest. 'Surely they can see right through this?' 'Don't count on it,' he laughs derisively. 'They're focused on the Middle East. They don't understand the Asian energy market. They really don't.' He leans over and whispers: 'And even if they did realize that Gateway is an empty threat, they'd still approve Keystone XL, eventually. No matter what the EPA says, the State Department isn't about to depart from its practice of approving pipelines from Canada. It'll just spin out the decision as long as it can, hoping the project dies for other reasons.'

Image: tar sand; source here.

Labour Day 2011: Jack is with us

Taking a long break

Back in September.

Image source here.

Quote for the day

Philosophy as an Art of Dying

Costica Bradatan:

There is a point beyond which philosophy, if it is not to lose face, must turn into something else: performance. It has to pass a test in a foreign land, a territory that's not its own. For the ultimate testing of our philosophy takes place not in the sphere of strictly rational procedures... but elsewhere: in the fierce confrontation with death of the animal that we are. The worthiness of one's philosophy reveals itself, if anywhere, in the live performance of one's encounter with one's own death; that's how we find out whether it is of some substance or it is all futility. Tell me how you deal with your fear of annihilation, and I will tell you about your philosophy.

1600 years of English in 10 1-minute videos

The History of English in Ten Minutes

Go here.

Adrian Gray, stone balancer

The weird art of stone balancing

The Independent: Adrian Gray is a professional stone balancer. He started placing different shaped rocks precariously on top of each other one day because he wanted 'to make a beautiful family group of stones.' That was more than eight years ago, and he has since constructed all manner of impossible looking sculptures on the Dorset shoreline near his home.

'I realised that stones would balance in a really strange way,' he explained. 'People come up to me and ask if I've stuck the stones down with blue tack or glue. Then I simply lift off the top stone and they look astonished.'

To see examples of Gray's sculptures, go here.

Image source here.

Atospheric CO2

As of May 2011

Source of image here.

Plants breathing

Global Garden

Earth Observatory: Plants breathe. They take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turn it into the sugars that become leaves, stems, roots, and woody trunks. What carbon dioxide they don't use, they exhale, releasing the leftover gas with oxygen. And after plants die, they decay, releasing the carbon to the atmosphere. The difference between the amount of carbon plants absorb and what they release is called net primary productivity. It is a direct measurement of how much plant matter -- from crops to forests or ocean phytoplankton -- Earth produces.

Image source here.

Pacific sea life moving east via NW Passage

Pacific species migrating through warmer Northwest Passage

National Post: Set loose by an ice-free Northwest Passage, an invasion force of Pacific sea creatures are moving east to Atlantic waters... Last summer, European scientists were baffled when a grey whale appeared off Israel...

Killer whales have been capitalizing on the melting Arctic... Wary of the ferocious newcomers, bowhead whales, narwhal and beluga have all been spotted staying near shore and swimming in unnaturally tight formations. The Humboldt squid, a creature once seen only off the South American coast, has gradually worked its way north into ice-filled waters off Alaska...

The invasion is already bad news for Newfoundland's ravaged Atlantic cod. While the decimated cod stock may no longer be threatened by fishing nets, they are 'facing a potentially mutating ecosystem.. Arctic char are already facing tough competition for food by schools of east-moving capelin, a small forage fish...

An Arctic shipping traffic ramps up, the migration of sea life will only increase as crustaceans and plankton hitch rides east on Europe-bound freighters. Following the construction of the Suez Canal... the Mediterranean Sea became overcome with invasive species swimming over from the Red Sea... Species used to move freely between the Atlantic and Pacific, but they were isolated by the introduction of polar ice. Pacific and Atlantic counterparts are now poised for their first meeting in several million years.

Image source here.

Warmer water causing migration of species

Scientists say warming waters reshuffling location of marine species

The Canadian Press: Some marine species are migrating to oceans where they were once extinct because of warming temperatures and polar melt, according to scientists who say the shakeup poses risks to entire ecosystems...

Chris Reid, a professor of oceanography at the University of Plymouth in England, said they discovered the presence of a microscopic plankton in the North Atlantic 800,000 years after it had disappeared from that area. It would be the first evidence of a trans-Arctic migration for plankton in modern times and one of the first times in tens of thousands of years that water has flown freely between the two oceans after ice retreated from the Alaska coastline... 'They are a marker of a major transition because the last time we had an opening between the Pacific and the Atlantic was about two to three million years ago,' Reid said. 'This could have big impacts on living marine resources as well as fisheries and aquaculture.'...

He said the species shuffle could shake up the marine food web and transform the biodiversity of the Arctic and North Atlantic ecosystems... Some changes in plankton life have been linked to the collapse of some fish stocks, as well as declines in fish-eating North Sea birds, the researchers report. Changes in tiny animals called copepods are threatening the food supply for fish such as cod, herring and mackerel... Some of the tiny creatures, which are rich in oil, are being replaced by smaller and less nutritious varieties because of warming waters...

Reid said species will extend their ranges if water continues to warm and could flourish, increasing the risk of algal blooms that involve harmful phytoplankton or species like jellyfish overtaking other marine life. 'Most of the impacts are so clearly negative and the scope of change so potentially huge that, taken together, they constitute brightly flashing warning signals,' said Carlo Help, director general of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research...

Researchers predict that by 2060, as the Mediterranean warms, one-third of its 75 fish species will be threatened and six will be extinct. The findings also raise alarms about chemical cycling in the Atlantic, one of the most crucial oceans in the world for climate change and the absorption of carbon dioxide.

Image source here.