Environment

And so here it is, the first public Landsat 8 image. The geographical honours goes to Wyoming and Colorado and the area where the Great Plains meets the Rocky Mountains in USA. I wrote about the torturing excitement and suspense when NASA and USGS launched Landsat 8 in February. The success of this launch secured an even longer record of continuous Earth observations from the Landsat program. Continuity is extremely important for climate change studies as well as other application areas. Today NASA published the two first images on their fabulous Earth Observatory website. The close-ups…

The 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon Oil spill dumped more than 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico yet government assessments have been unable to account for all of it. Microbes likely processed most of the oil within months of the spill, but not all of it. A new hypothesis suggests the oil acted as a catalyst for plankton and other surface materials to clump together and fall to the sea floor in a massive sedimentation event - what they have termed a "dirty blizzard."  The Deep-C (Deep Sea to Coast Connectivity in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico) Consortium is composed of 10 major…

Unless we want continued runaway wildfires in dry regions like California, logging makes sense. But there is also an ecological upside, according to a new study.  Retaining moderate levels of logging debris, also known as "slash," helped to both directly and indirectly increase the growth rate of Douglas-fir seedlings replanted after harvest. The findings, which are among the first to speak to the benefits of second-growth logging debris,  show that the downed limbs and other woody debris that are inevitable byproducts of timber harvest could be among the most important…

Evidence from Siberian caves suggests that a global temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius could see permanently frozen ground thaw over a large area of Siberia, which would threaten to release carbon from soils and damage to natural and human environments. A thaw in Siberia's permafrost (ground frozen throughout the year) could release over 1,000 giga-tons of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, potentially enhancing global warming. The data comes from an international team studying stalactites and stalagmites from caves located along the 'permafrost frontier…

2012 was the 40th anniversary since President Richard Nixon signed the Clean Water Act and established regulations for the discharge of pollutants to waterways - and even lets the government declare water itself as a pollutant.  Despite sewage treatment plants becoming more widespread, sewage can still be a major source for both naturally occurring hormones found in the environment and from both pharmaceuticals and personal care products (PPCPs). Many rural communities in the United States use aerated lagoon systems, where  oxygen-loving and anaerobic microorganisms remove many…

There is a good reason I was not a fan of Energy Secretary Steven Chu's nationalistic claim that we are in a 'race' to beat China in creating cheap solar panels.   It wasn't that we can't win for economic reasons, like that workers in America don't want to do jobs that Chinese people are happy to do - we live in a culture where we think every janitor should get a $50 an hour benefit package and university students get sex change operations included in their health care plans, whose $50,000 costs are then paid for by federal student loans and federal taxpayer grants and, soon, federal…

Will we will be able to meet the growing global demand for food over the next few decades?  Will we be able to do that in a way that does not degrade the environment?  Surprisingly, the answers depend on how well we manage the soils we farm. Soils are not just dirt.  They are dynamic living systems with highly complex physical and chemical properties.  Whether they are healthy and have desirable features depends on how they are tended, and historically many farming practices degraded soil quality rather than improved it.  Fortunately, over the past several decades…

When you think of the South Pole, you probably don't think of garbage.   Yet according to a report commissioned by the Federal Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt) in Germany, the Antarctic is littered with leftovers from derelict experimental set-ups and field huts are slowly decomposing. Garbage containing dangerous chemicals, discarded oil cans and car batteries is lying in the open. Coastal waters and beaches are suffering oil-pollution as a result of poor handling of fuel at those science stations.  Yes, science is polluting. Even the sparse vegetation has been crushed by tire…

When people talk about sustainable food in 2013, they really mean something with an 'organic' label that they can attribute all kinds of other ethical and environmental traits to - sustainable food the way those people mean it is not sustainable at all, there is no way organic food can feed anyone except the rich 1% (the economically rich and the food gentry lucky enough to be born into agriculturally rich lands) but if food enthusiasts mired in such first world guilt really want to try sustainable food there is a new solution published in PLoS One. Mealworms. Survivalists already know that…

Our Earth observation capacity is growing. Not only are star satellite data providers such as NASA and ESA improving their high quality products, new economies such as China and Brazil invest parts of their new won wealth in remote sensing as well. Below you will find some of my favorite satellite images published in 2012. I will use this opportunity to encourage the 'new comers' to follow the lead of NASA and ESA and prepare more satellite images for non-expert public consumption. NASA has understood that science is culture and published a book (Earth as art) with images of our planet that…