Stratosphere

Winning a Fight

2008-07-31T02:41:00.000-07:00

The only thing you can do is to wait. waiting is the best game ever. Remember sun zu who said let your emnemies come to you and the real winner of a fight is the one who wins without fighting. It is all true. People by nature dont like to wait. So their weakness ebcomes your strength. They start being impatient and soon they will reveal their weaknesses. But be careful, in order to win you must know your own weaknesses first and strive to rectify them. The one who doesnt will always loose. And everyone has weaknesses.

The Mean Boss

2008-07-25T01:12:00.000-07:00

Although he has been transfered to another location, my stupid boss is until the last minute conspiring to reduce the salaries of the employees. I dont know if this is legal. On my planet, it certainly is not. Why is he doing this? it's simple. He is a mean asshole. I am doing the best that I can to help them. I will even try to ignore his idiotic instructions for a while....maybe he forgets. The question is...is there a lawyer outthere who can give me a legal opinion on this.

My Brazilian Vacation

2008-03-05T16:35:00.000-08:00

My Brazilian vacation was cool excpet for the fact that I didnt get the tan I wanted. What I found amazing in this country are two things: The sun is not there all the time and no one eats fruits. Ok...let me explain. Brazil hás na image of sun, beach and pretty naked women. There is lots of beaches. God knows how much I admire the women in this country...but the sun is not always there. In fact, I spent most of my vacation hiding from the damn rain. This is supposed to be Summer time here.....hahhaha.

People here do not appreciate the natural fruits and vegetables god gave them. So your typical brazilian diet will be mostly composed of meat or fish. People here use fruits for house decoration. And one more thing...they actually put butter on corn before they eat it...my god.

But it was fun all in all...my brazilian vacation so far. Next vacation, however, will probably be Alaska or cyberia.

Feb 14, 2008, Iran's president to visit Iraq in March

2008-02-14T11:15:00.000-08:00

The News

“Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will make a landmark visit to Iraq on March 2, the first-ever trip by an Iranian leader, the Iraqi government said Thursday. Ahmadinejad will meet with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and President Jalal Talabani during his two-day visit, according to an Iraqi government spokesman.

"The two countries will discuss bilateral relations and joint projects," spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh said. The two neighbors fought a ruinous eight-year war in the 1980s that left an estimated 1 million people killed or wounded. But relations have improved since the 2003 ouster of Saddam Hussein's regime. Iran is overwhelmingly Shiite Muslim, and Iraq has a roughly 60 percent Shiite majority that emerged from decades of marginalization to become the country's dominant force after Saddam's ouster. Ahmadinejad's trip was announced last month but Iraqi officials only unveiled the date on Thursday.”

The Way I See It

Now what is this guy doing there? This is the big question. I doubt that he will be there to talk to the Iraqi government. In normal human circumstance, if two countries fought for more than eight years (in recent time only) and between them had more than one million people killed, none of their leaders would venture such a visit even decades after a peace treaty is signed or a truce is reached. I think this guy will go there to show his country’s influence in

Iraq

. I think he is going there to negotiate with the Americans. After all, both parties can be temporary winners of the Iraqi debacle…..when I say benefits; I am talking about simple economics…exports, reconstruction and so forth. I also think that if people think that Iran has an influence in

Iraq

only are totally mistaken. It has a greater influence in a region that the West recently discovered…Central Asia. Why do I say recently discovered….well. Because until the Soviet Union disintegrated, this oil and gaz rich area was totally unknown to the West because for decades the West dealt with the Soviet Union as a whole unit....it saw no differences in cultures or ideologies within it and it dealt with it as just…Moscow. For those who haven’t studied history, alliances are instantaneous. They are wrong. For alliances have a historical continuity. France and Russia were allies and until now they are very good friends….Iran and

Russia

were allies and until now the alliance stands. In such global alliances, individual countries are pieces of the construction. The fight for

Iraq

is just another fight for another piece in the ongoing and continuous world wide construction of alliances.

Thu Feb 14, 2008, Hezbollah chief threatens Israel

2008-02-14T10:56:00.000-08:00

The News

"The chief of Hezbollah told throngs of supporters at a funeral for slain commander Imad Mughniyeh his group would retaliate against Israeli targets anywhere in the world after accusing the Jewish state of killing the militant.

Israel ordered its military, embassies and Jewish institutions overseas to go on alert earlier in the day, fearing revenge attacks for the car bomb that killed Mughniyeh Tuesday night in Damascus. The former Hezbollah security chief was one of world's most wanted fugitives, accused of masterminding attacks that killed hundreds of Americans in Lebanon in the 1980s.

While Hezbollah supporters bid farewell to Mughniyeh, tens of thousands of their pro-Western political opponents filled a downtown Beirut square to mark former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri's 2005 assassination. The opposing gatherings reflected Lebanon's divided soul and fearing clashes, authorities deployed thousands of troops. But by evening, there were no reports of violence."

The Way I See It

Frankly, I feel sorry for Lebanon. This is a country that tried to be a model of religious and cultural cohabitation for all humans. Unfortunately, it couldn’t so far. It has always been an experimental area. An experimental area for a political system that doesn’t exist elsewhere in the Arab world began there a long time ago and is apparently falling. Where else in the Arab world can you find a country where the head of the state changes every few years and occupies a ceremonial post. Where else can you find a country where the key government posts (president, prime minister, head of parliament) are distributed according to religion? …nowhere as far as I know. And most importantly, where else can you find so many neighbors fighting their wars on the neighbor’s tiny peace of land but in Lebanon. The thing is I have no idea who assassinated this guy but I think once again the ones who are going to pay for another war in Lebanon are innocent people. I hope there will be no more wars there but whatever I hope will not change the fact that this country will continue to pay for its experimental nature.

On Feb 14, 2008, Serbia's government denounced any unilateral declaration of Kosovo's independence

2008-02-14T10:30:00.000-08:00

The News

"Serbia issued the defiant declaration just days before the province is expected to secede, and hours before the U.N. Security Council is to meet in New York to discuss Kosovo.

"Such a (move) would represent a flagrant and unilateral act of secession of a part of the territory of the Republic of Serbia, and is therefore invalid and void," the Serbian government said in a statement. The government demanded that the Security Council "immediately annul" any Kosovo declaration of independence, and denounced a European Union plan to dispatch a 1,800-member police and judiciary mission to Kosovo. Serbia wants to keep hold of Kosovo — which it considers the cradle of its medieval statehood and religion — although it has had no control over the province since a 1999 NATO launched a bombing campaign to end a Serb crackdown on ethnic Albanian rebels. The U.S. and most EU nations support statehood for the U.N.-run province, where 90 percent of the population of 2 million is ethnic Albanian."

The Way I See It

I think central Europe will always be the soft spot of this continent. It is nothing more than a trigger but it is always the cause of war in Europe. You may think it is just a piece of land. It is. But lands were never the cause of war. Wealth was never the cause of war. The cause of war in all cases was always a difference of points of view. It is mostly differences in ideology, traditions, customs, language…etc.

Man is an above all an egoistic being and fear is what influences his behavior. When people feel threatened they always go back to a smaller circle…a nation…an ethnicity within a nation…a religion within the ethnicity…a tribe within the ethnicity…a neighborhood…a house….a room. This is what is called affinities. There are cultural, ethnic, linguistic, ideological… etc…affinities (similarities). Think of them as circles of comfort. The more affinities you have with someone, the closer you are to this person. Why do people tend to do this? It is simple. Whatever human beings do is conditioned by their fear of something. They go to work because they are afraid that if they don’t they wont get paid and they will maybe die. They get together because the more they are with those who are similar, the more they feel protected. They become religious fanatics because they don’t know what they will find if they die so they kill in the name of supposedly merciful all providing gods. They go to war because they are afraid their lands, wealth and values maybe taken away by the more foreign entities.

So long ago, humans decided to live in communities of similar beings. This is how lands were divided and nations emerged. But this is also how nations disappeared. There were always hotspots where frontiers between communities didn’t seem right. In Europe, Kosovo is one of those spots. Behind Kosovo, there are slave-slave divisions, catholic-orthodox divisions, Muslim Christian divisions…etc. Its layers and layers of differences that triggered wars between nations in the past and will most likely trigger them again.

Climate Changes Brews Trouble For Marine Life In European Seas

2008-02-14T10:22:00.000-08:00

There is no denying that climate changes have profound impacts on the world and especially on the marine environment. Recent research has shown that the Northern Hemisphere has been warmer since 1980 than at any other time during the last two millenniums. As a result the increase in temperature under climate change was generally higher in northern than in southern European seas.

The latest European Science Foundation-Marine Board study report, “Impact of climate change on European marine and coastal environment - Ecosystem approach” shows how even moderate climate scenarios have caused marked consequences on the European marine environment.

The study has detailed the impact of climate change at a European Seas level – in the Arctic, the Barents Sea, the Nordic Seas, the Baltic, the North Sea, the Northeast Atlantic, in the Celtic-Biscay Shelf, the Iberia upwelling margin, the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

Take the northern Arctic and Barents Seas for example the decline in sea ice cover there has triggered the most obvious temperature-related changes for marine life. The open systems structure of these seas has demonstrated how climate changes are causing further northward movement of marine organisms – Atlantic species are beginning to inhabit the more northern seas, the traditional preserve of Arctic species, and subtropical species are moving into southern waters where previously mainly temperate species existed.

In addition, the increased river runoff and subsequent freshening of the Baltic Sea have also led to shifts from marine to more brackish and even freshwater species while the temperature-induced loss of native species from enclosed systems, such as the Mediterranean and Black Sea, will enhance the introduction of non-native organisms, according to the study-report which is led by Dr. Katja Philippart from the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research.

After taking in all of the recorded impacts on the European Seas for consideration, the ESF-Marine working group has identified other possible future challenges in terms of climate change monitoring, modelling, indicators and research and development. It has made several recommendations based on these challenges.

Recommendations:

1. A concerted effort to gather, store and analyse previously and presently collected marine environmental data (e.g. common open access database and annual Pan-European reporting based on national contributions);

2. Identifying the nature and rate of consequences of climate change in European marine and coastal waters; this will require the maintainance of sustained monitoring efforts and use of new technologies to increase their spatial and temporal resolution;

3. Predicting the consequences of climate change for our marine environment; this will require the development and measurement of parameters.

4. Predicting the response and feedback of marine environments and ecosystems to climate change which would require the improvement of regional climate models and the development of biophysical models;

5. Predicting the impact on climate change on the distribution of marine organisms and on marine food webs; this will require the inclusion of knowledge on species’ physiology, bioenergetics and behaviour in biophysical and ecosystem models.

Climate Change Impacting Marine Environment Surrounding UK

2008-02-14T10:19:00.000-08:00

Climate change is having a significant impact on the United Kingdom’s marine environment according to a new report. The Marine Climate Change Impacts Partnership report card 2007-08 highlights just how much climate change has affected the UK’s marine environment and what the future impacts may be.

Key findings from the report include:

2006 was the second warmest year for UK coastal waters since records began in 1870; seven of the 10 warmest years have been in the last decade.
Warmer winters have been strongly linked to reduced breeding success and survival in some seabird populations.
Models predict fewer storms in future but there will be increased numbers of severe storms.
Coastal erosion and flooding is expected to increase.
Marine climate change is having a significant impact on the marine environment and the goods and services it provides.
Coastal erosion is occurring along 17 per cent of the UK coastline (30 per cent of England’s coastline; 23 per cent of Wales; 20 per cent of Northern Ireland; 12 per cent Scotland).
Recent warmer conditions and associated shifts in the abundance and geographical distribution of plankton have led to reduced availability of prey fish for some seabirds, which has been strongly linked to recent poor breeding success and reduced survival rates.
The impacts of climate change on the commercial services provided by our seas will be significant. Sea-level rise, coastal flooding, storms and bigger waves will affect ports, shipping and built structures. Fishing and fish farming will be affected by temperature change and plankton (prey) availability.

Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs and the Environment, Richard Lochhead, said:“Climate change, including marine climate change, is one of the most serious threats facing us today. It is a truly global issue and can only be tackled if we work together. Our seas play a vital role in regulating our climate and are a lifeline for the communities that live around them.

“Our winters are getting wetter and warmer, sea levels are rising and coastal erosion is increasing. Our marine wildlife is now having to cope with these as well as other pressures, and is beginning to suffer as a result. Our marine industries also have to cope with changes. These are happening now and we must take action."

The report was co-authored by scientists at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton and was published January 16.

Carbon Capture Strategy Could Lead To Emission-free Cars

2008-02-14T10:18:00.000-08:00

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a strategy to capture, store and eventually recycle carbon from vehicles to prevent the pollutant from finding its way from a car tailpipe into the atmosphere. Georgia Tech researchers envision a zero emission car, and a transportation system completely free of fossil fuels.

Technologies to capture carbon dioxide emissions from large-scale sources such as power plants have recently gained some impressive scientific ground, but nearly two-thirds of global carbon emissions are created by much smaller polluters — automobiles, transportation vehicles and distributed industrial power generation applications (e.g., diesel power generators).

The Georgia Tech team’s goal is to create a sustainable transportation system that uses a liquid fuel and traps the carbon emission in the vehicle for later processing at a fueling station. The carbon would then be shuttled back to a processing plant where it could be transformed into liquid fuel. Currently, Georgia Tech researchers are developing a fuel processing device to separate the carbon and store it in the vehicle in liquid form.

“Presently, we have an unsustainable carbon-based economy with several severe limitations, including a limited supply of fossil fuels, high cost and carbon dioxide pollution,” said Andrei Fedorov, associate professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech and a lead researcher on the project. “We wanted to create a practical and sustainable energy strategy for automobiles that could solve each of those limitations, eventually using renewable energy sources and in an environmentally conscious way.”

Little research has been done to explore carbon capture from vehicles, but the Georgia Tech team outlines an economically feasible strategy for processing fossil or synthetic, carbon-containing liquid fuels that allows for the capture and recycling of carbon at the point of emission. In the long term, this strategy would enable the development of a sustainable transportation system with no carbon emission.

Georgia Tech’s near-future strategy involves capturing carbon emissions from conventional (fossil) liquid hydrocarbon-fueled vehicles with an onboard fuel processor designed to separate the hydrogen in the fuel from the carbon. Hydrogen is then used to power the vehicle, while the carbon is stored on board the vehicle in a liquid form until it is disposed at a refueling station. It is then transported to a centralized site to be sequestered in a permanent location currently under investigation by scientists, such as geological formations, under the oceans or in solid carbonate form.

In the long-term strategy, the carbon dioxide will be recycled forming a closed-loop system, involving synthesis of high energy density liquid fuel suitable for the transportation sector.

Georgia Tech settled on a hydrogen-fueled vehicle for its carbon capture plan because pure hydrogen produces no carbon emissions when it is used as a fuel to power the vehicle. The fuel processor produces the hydrogen on-board the vehicle from the hydrocarbon fuel without introducing air into the process, resulting in an enriched carbon byproduct that can be captured with minimal energetic penalty. Traditional combustion systems, including current gasoline-powered automobiles, have a combustion process that combines fuel and air — leaving the carbon dioxide emissions highly diluted and very difficult to capture.

“We had to look for a system that never dilutes fuel with air because once the CO₂ is diluted, it is not practical to capture it on vehicles or other small systems,” said David Damm, PhD candidate in the School of Mechanical Engineering, the lead author on the paper and Fedorov’s collaborator on the project.

The Georgia Tech team compared the proposed system with other systems that are currently being considered, focusing on the logistic and economic challenges of adopting them on a global scale. In particular, electric vehicles could be part of a long-term solution to carbon emissions, but the team raised concerns about the limits of battery technology, including capacity and charging time.

The hydrogen economy presents yet another possible solution to carbon emissions but also yet another roadblock — infrastructure. While liquid-based hydrogen carriers could be conveniently transported and stored using existing fuel infrastructure, the distribution of gaseous hydrogen would require the creation of a new and costly infrastructure of pipelines, tanks and filling stations.

The Georgia Tech team has already created a fuel processor, called CO₂/H₂ Active Membrane Piston (CHAMP) reactor, capable of efficiently producing hydrogen and separating and liquefying CO₂ from a liquid hydrocarbon or synthetic fuel used by an internal combustion engine or fuel cell. After the carbon dioxide is separated from the hydrogen, it can then be stored in liquefied state on-board the vehicle. The liquid state provides a much more stable and dense form of carbon, which is easy to store and transport.

The Georgia Tech paper also details the subsequent long-term strategy to create a truly sustainable system, including moving past carbon sequestration and into a method to recycle the captured carbon back into fuel. Once captured on-board the vehicle, the liquid carbon dioxide is deposited back at the fueling station and piped back to a facility where it is converted into a synthetic liquid fuel to complete the cycle.

Now that the Georgia Tech team has come up with a proposed system and device to produce hydrogen and, at the same time, capture carbon emissions, the greatest remaining challenge to a truly carbon-free transportation system will be developing a method for making a synthetic liquid fuel from just CO2 and water using renewable energy sources, Fedorov said. The team is exploring a few ideas in this area, he added.

The research was published in Energy Conversion and Management . The research was funded by NASA, the U.S. Department of Defense NDSEG Fellowship Program and Georgia Tech’s CEO (Creating Energy Options) Program.

Antarctic Expedition Provides New Insights Into The Role Of The Southern Ocean For Global Climate

2008-02-14T10:15:00.000-08:00

In the Southern Ocean, large quantities of surface-drifting plankton algae are able to significantly reduce the carbon dioxide content of the surface waters, which can affect the global carbon dioxide cycle. This is one of the results from an Antarctic expedition which has just drawn to a close in Cape Town on February 4, and which was led by the Alfred Wegener Institute, part of the Helmholtz Association. The goal of the exploration is to understand the role of the Southern Ocean for past, present and future climate.

During expeditions of the research vessel Polarstern, and within the framework of the International Polar Year 2007/08, researchers from all over the world are making pioneer contributions to the understanding of the Southern Ocean. This massive water body surrounding the Antarctic continues to be largely unexplored. However, since it has a significant effect on the climate of the entire earth, it is absolutely necessary to intensify research activities. The International Polar Year provides a unique opportunity for combining the scientific efforts of various countries in order to gain major insights.

First results from the expedition

The recently concluded Polarstern expedition had started in Cape Town on November 28, 2007 and was devoted primarily to organisms and materials cycles in the ocean. Under the leadership of Prof Dr Ulrich Bathmann of the Alfred Wegener Institute, 53 Scientists from nine countries have been studying the biological carbon pump in the Southern Ocean, among other topics. Algal plankton absorbs carbon through photosynthetic activity, hence removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Researchers have discovered that melting sea ice has created a pool of fresh water on the sea surface. Algal plankton growing in this pool started to decay and to sink to the seafloor. There, metabolic processes occurred.

The scientists investigated an algal carpet drifting in the water near the edge of the sea ice. This algal bloom measured 700,000 square kilometres, i.e. approximately twice the size of Germany. The researchers wanted to find out which physical conditions lead to such algal blooms, and how they affect the living and non-living environment. Their measurements demonstrate a significant decrease in the carbon dioxide content of the surface water.

In addition, the new data show the effect of the plankton bloom on the species community at the seafloor. For the first time ever the complete water column of the Southern Ocean -- from the surface to the seafloor -- was sampled simultaneously and comprehensively. The current inventory of the flora and fauna will also provide the basis for comparison with future investigations.

During the expedition, Polarstern also offered crucial support through her icebreaking capacity so that the construction materials for the new German Antarctic station Neumayer III could be unloaded despite severe ice conditions.

International workshop

On February 5, an international workshop on climate research in the Southern Ocean will take place aboard Polarstern in Cape Town. The scientists aboard the French and German research vessels Marion Dufresne and Polarstern will meet South African partners to exchange results and plan future collaboration. Most German Antarctic expeditions leave from Cape Town, and it is intended to strengthen and intensify cooperation with South Africa regarding both marine sciences and logistics. Federal research minister Dr Annette Schavan will attend the workshop.

The next Polarstern expedition

On February 6, Polarstern will leave for the next Antarctic expedition under the leadership of Dr Eberhard Fahrbach of the Alfred Wegener Institute. The main expedition programme is motivated by the International Polar Year 2007/08. The two projects, CASO (Climate of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean) and GEOTRACES are focused on recording current physical and biogeochemical conditions in the Southern Ocean. Recording equipment aboard Polarstern, as well as ocean-deployed buoys and drift units designed to sink to deep water will be measuring ocean currents in the Southern Ocean, distribution of trace substances, transport of water bodies, and interactions between sea and ice as well as ocean and atmosphere. This expedition is scheduled to end on April 16 in Punta Arenas, Chile.

Teacher participation in the expedition

Gaining insights into the global climate system is not the only objective of the International Polar Year. Involving the public, specifically the young generation, in ongoing research and provision of extensive information are central goals. For this reason, two teachers will also be aboard Polarstern. Charlotte Lohse from Hamburg and Stefan Theisen from Kiel will be actively involved in the expedition research, allowing them not only to refresh their knowledge about current climate research, but also to communicate their insights via telephone and internet to their students. "I hope that I can personally bring home many impressions from this research voyage, so that I can provide the students with a more accurate representation of the Polar Regions. During preparations for the trip and in conversations with my students, I have experienced great enthusiasm in these young people when it comes to the subject Antarctic", says Charlotte Lohse, teacher at Heisenberg Gymnasium in Hamburg.

Pollution in China

2008-01-29T07:41:00.000-08:00

A new study has cast doubts about whether air quality has truly improved in Beijing and has concluded that “irregularities” in the city’s system of measuring air pollution have enabled the city to meet environmental targets linked to the coming Olympic Games. The study, written by an American environmental consultant, found flaws in Beijing’s “Blue Sky” system of air quality monitoring stations and noted that the city changed its method for measuring pollution in 2006. In particular, officials stopped including readings from two stations in polluted areas and began using readings in three other stations in less polluted locales. Without this switch, Beijing would have fallen far short of its goals in 2006 and 2007 for the number of days that met national air quality standards, according to the study. The study also found that a disproportionate number of days were rated just below the statistical break point that separates a polluted day from one that passes standards. “Irregularities in the monitoring of air quality account for all reported improvements over the last nine years,” said Steven Q. Andrews, the author of the study, in a telephone interview. Mr. Andrews published an op-ed article about his study on Wednesday in the Asian edition of The Wall Street Journal. On Wednesday afternoon, Du Shaozhong, deputy director of Beijing’s Environmental Protection Bureau, reviewed a faxed copy of the article but responded in broad terms rather than addressing any specific findings. He agreed that Beijing still needed to make progress in reducing air pollution but said the city’s air had undeniably improved. “Over the past 10 years, through our enormous hard work, Beijing’s air pollution has visibly improved,” Mr. Du said in a statement. “This is an indisputable fact.” He added, “We have patience for that small group of people who don’t understand, and we believe that, as time passes, and in the face of facts, they will eventually understand.” Mr. Andrews said he based his study, which has not undergone peer review, on official government statistics. He spent more than a year in Beijing as a Princeton in Asia fellow at the National Resources Defense Council, or N.R.D.C., a nonprofit environmental group. But he said his study was independent of his association with the council. With roughly seven months remaining before Beijing plays host to the Olympics, air quality has become a major concern. Chinese officials have pledged that pollution will not be a problem during the Olympics and are discussing contingency plans that include possible factory shutdowns or traffic restrictions, if necessary. But Beijing officials also have pointed to improved Blue Sky air quality ratings as proof that the city is fulfilling its commitment to clean itself up for the Olympics. The Blue Sky program, used in 84 major cities across China, measures sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and airborne particulate matter known as PM10. Pollutants are measured on a scale of 1 to 500, with 500 considered the worst score. Any rating below 101 meets national air quality standards and is considered a “Blue Sky day.” The city’s overall daily rating is determined by whichever of the three pollutants has the highest rating for a 24-hour period. In Beijing, PM10 is almost always the worst pollutant.

In 1998, Beijing recorded only 100 Blue Sky days. In 2007, that number had risen to 246, a fact hailed last week in China’s state media. But Mr. Andrews said the recent improvement was largely the result of changing the formula in 2006. He said the city’s daily pollution rating was based on readings from a subset of the more than two dozen monitoring stations around the city. Mr. Andrews said readings from seven stations were used from 1998 to 2005. But in 2006, the city dropped two stations located near areas with high traffic and replaced them with three other stations in quieter areas. The impact on the Blue Sky ratings was drastic; Mr. Andrews found that using the original seven stations would have meant 38 fewer Blue Sky days in 2006, and 55 fewer last year. This would have meant that Beijing had fewer days meeting national air quality standards last year than in 2002, when there were 203. Mr. Andrews also found that ratings began to change after officials set targets for every monitoring station in the city. He said this political imperative coincided with a rising number of days that rated just below the break point of 101 to qualify as a Blue Sky day.

Winter storm brings chaos to China

2008-01-29T07:32:00.000-08:00

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Deadly winter storms — the worst in five decades — showed no signs of letting up Tuesday in China, where cities were blacked out, transport systems were paralyzed and a bus crash on an icy road killed at least 25 people during the nation's busiest travel season. The extreme weather — blamed for 54 deaths in the past two weeks — was walloping China as the country began one of the world's biggest annual mass movements of humanity: the Chinese New Year festival. Before the storms, railway officials estimated that a record 178.6 million people — more than the population of Russia — would travel by train for the holiday, which begins Feb. 7. But hundreds of thousands of those travelers spent another day shivering outside railroad stations as they learned that their trains were canceled. Most were migrant workers trying to leave booming southern Guangdong province — often called the world's factory floor because it makes everything from Honda sedans to Apple iPods and Nike sneakers.

Those traveling by bus or car took big risks on the frozen roads in southern provinces, which have been suffering their heaviest snowfalls since the 1950s. Expressways were shut down in the nation's financial capital, Shanghai, because snow and sleet made them a slushy treacherous mess. The worst accident since the blizzards began happened Tuesday when a 35-seat bus slid off an icy mountain road and plunged 40 yards into a valley. The crash in Guizhou province killed 25 people, the State Administration of Work Safety said. Another bus in northwestern Gansu provinceXinhua News Agency reported. flipped over on icy roads and killed four people, the official

Several cities suffered blackouts as heavy snowfalls snapped power lines and hampered the delivery of coal, used to generate most of China's electricity. In industrial Guangdong, huge red banners were hanging around the train station in the provincial capital of Guangzhou, urging migrant workers to scuttle their plans to return home, cash in their tickets and return to their factory dormitories. About 200,000 people took the advice and got ticket refunds, railway officials said, while about 200,000 continued to linger at the station in a bone-chilling drizzle. Thousands stood under umbrellas that formed a huge canopy in the train station's plaza, while a larger crowd huddled beneath a highway overpass in front of the station hoping to catch a train. But the busy Beijing-Guangzhou line may not return to normal for three to five days, Xinhua said. Wang Jigen was one of many workers who couldn't cash in his ticket because he had no place to go. The 50-year-old day laborer left his job before the holiday and couldn't afford to stay in a hotel until the trains began running again to his home in the western province of Sichuan.

"I spent last night outside at a bus depot," said Wang, dressed in a ragged sweater and a dusty olive corduroy coat. "I have no idea where I'll sleep tonight or how I'll ever get home."

Just blocks away from the station, migrants were finding emergency shelter in the China Import and Export Fair exhibition center — a complex with enough space for three or four football fields. The place was packed with travelers sitting on their luggage. Free water bottles were being passed around, and lunch boxes of rice, chicken legs and cabbage were being sold for about US$1 (euro0.68).

The general mood seemed calm and stoic — in line with the traditional Chinese trait of "chi ku" or "eating bitterness," enduring hardship without complaint. But legions of police and soldiers were ready for any disorder, and the nation's leaders scrambled to show the public that they were on the case. State broadcaster CCTV showed Premier Wen Jiabao meeting officials telling stranded travelers at the Changsha train station in central Hunan province that the trains would start again soon. "Let me express my apologies for you all having been stuck here," Wen said through a megaphone to a huddled crowd that cheered and applauded. But the nation's top leader, President Hu Jintao, warned of more bad weather and urged officials "be aware of the seriousness of the situation and be fully prepared to prevent and fight disasters."

So far, the central government has given a total 126 million yuan ($17 million) in aid to six provinces and one region battered by the winter weather, Xinhua said. In China, the New Year holiday is as important as Christmas is in the West. For most migrant workers, it's the only time of the year when they can visit their hometowns. They often take a month off to feast with their families and perform a series of rituals. Spending the holiday in Guangdong was a painful thought for Wang Yusheng, a 33-year-old salesman from the central province of Henan. He nibbled on a chicken wing outside Guangzhou's station as he slowly gave up hope of going home. His backup plan was to spend the holiday where he works in the city of Shenzhen, near Hong Kong. "We in the North eat dumplings during the holiday, but people in the South don't," said Wang. "Southern food really tastes terrible. It's really going to be different celebrating the New Year here."

Britain Invites EU leaders for talks on world economy

2008-01-29T06:54:00.000-08:00

The News

“British Prime Minister Gordon Brown hosts European leaders in London later on Tuesday for talks on global financial turmoil and efforts to detect and prevent a repetition. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Italy's crisis-hit premier Romano Prodi and the President of the EU Commission Jose Manuel Barroso will gather in Downing Street late Tuesday afternoon.

On the agenda will be moves towards greater transparency in financial markets, new arrangements for credit ratings agencies and better co-operation between national regulators, Brown's office has said.

They were also expected to discuss an enhanced "surveillance" role for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to assess and warn about potential economic strife.

The talks come amid the continuing fall-out from the crisis on the US sub-prime mortgage sector last year that saw a squeeze on the global credit markets.

In particular, it has seen stock market turmoil, the threat of a US recession, a rogue trader scandal at France's Societe Generale bank and the near collapse of British mortgage lender Northern Rock.

Brown will also be looking to gain support for his plans to reform global institutions like the IMF and the World Bank, which he said last week were now ill-suited to the modern, globalised world.

Media suggested that Brown will also seek to use the meeting to demonstrate his commitment to Europe, after missing the formal signing with other leaders of the new EU treaty in Lisbon last month.

Britain's finance minister Alistair Darling rejected claims in the Financial Times that the talks could be "long on rhetoric and short on concrete outcomes, with disagreements among the leaders for the need for tighter regulation".

In Italy, the business daily Il Sole 24 Ore expressed concern that the mini-summit, by not including all members of the 27-strong bloc, would create a "multi-tier" EU with the major economies taking separate decisions.

And in Germany, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung said there was a "high probability" that the meeting would not calm the markets but lead to "new turbulence".

Darling, who spells out reforms to Britain's banking regulations and oversight system on Wednesday, said the current difficulties affected all world economies and governments could play a key role.

"There's two things that we need to look at: one is, have we got the right supervisory regime?" he told BBC radio Tuesday.

"We want to avoid an over-reaction as we saw in America after the collapse of Enron where they actually ended up compounding their problems by trying to make the system too rigid. "You've also got to make sure that governments and central banks act together, especially at the present time where there's no doubt the economies across the world are slowing down." Darling said the current difficulties demonstrated the effect of globalisation but by ensuring the correct regulatory and economic response, the world economy could continue to grow.”

The Way I See It

I think for four or five presidents or prime ministers to gather over two or three days and decide about the world economy is a pretty alarming sign. It is always catastrophic when so few decide for so many. Remember what one man did to France’s biggest bank. The French trader Jerome actually wanted to make more money for the bank and be promoted. It was as simple as this. But so much power was concentrated in his hands and he decided for so many. The result was a shocking revelation of several billion dollars’ loss for the bank. Imagine the same thing but on a wider scale. That strong bank was shaken by only one man. What can happen to the so called “world economy”. Do you really think such a thing exists or is it much more fragile than anyone can imagine?

ٍScientists Discover A Strange Creature Immune to Pain

2008-01-29T06:49:00.000-08:00

The NewsThe News

“As vulnerable as naked mole rats seem, researchers now find the hairless, bucktoothed rodents are invulnerable to the pain of acid and the sting of chili peppers. A better understanding of pain resistance in these sausage-like creatures could lead to new drugs for people with chronic pain, scientists added. Naked mole rats live in cramped, oxygen-starved burrows some six feet underground in central East Africa. Unusually, they are cold-blooded — which, as far as anyone knows, is unique among mammals. "They're the nicest, sweetest animals I've ever worked with — they look frightening, but they're very gentle," said neurobiologist Thomas Park at the University of Illinois at Chicago

Scientists knew the mole rats were quite sensitive to touch — perhaps to help replace their almost useless eyes. After probing their skin, Park and his colleagues unexpectedly discovered the rodents lacked the chemical Substance P, which causes the feeling of burning pain in mammals.

Acid test

The researchers discovered that when unconscious mole rats had their paws injected with a slight dose of acid, "about what you'd experience with lemon juice," Park said, as well as some capsaicin — the active ingredient of chili peppers — the rodents showed no pain.

"Their insensitivity to acid was very surprising," Park told LiveScience. "Every animal tested — from fish, frogs, reptiles, birds and all other mammals — every animal is sensitive to acid."

To explore their pain resistance further, the researchers used a modified cold sore virus to carry genes for Substance P to just one rear foot of each tested rodent. Park and his colleagues found the DNA restored the naked mole rats' ability to feel the burning sensation other mammals experience from capsaicin.

"They'd pull their foot back and lick it," Park said. Other feet remained impervious to the sting of capsaicin.

"Capsaicin is very specific for exciting the fibers that normally have Substance P," Park added. "They're not the fibers that respond to a pinprick or pinch, but the ones that respond after an injury or burn and produce longer-lasting pain."

Curiously, the researchers found that mole rats remained completely insensitive to acids, even with the Substance P genes. This suggests there is a fundamental difference in how their nerves respond to such pain.

"Acid acts on the capsaicin receptor and on another family of receptors called acid-sensitive ion channels," Park said. "Acid is not as specific as capsaicin. The mole rat is the only animal that shows completely no response to acid."

Why so insensitive?

Scientists theorize naked mole rats evolved this insensitivity to acid due to underground living. The rodents exhale high levels of carbon dioxide, and in such tight, poorly ventilated spaces it builds up in tissues, making them more acidic. In response, the mole rats became desensitized to acid.

"To give you an idea of what they experience, we normally all breathe in carbon dioxide levels of less than 0.1 percent. If people are exposed to an air mixture with as low as 5 percent carbon dioxide, we'll feel a sharp, burning, stinging sensation in our eyes and nose," Park said. "We hypothesize that naked mole rats live in up to 10 percent carbon dioxide."

Researcher Gary Lewin, a neuroscientist at the Max Delbrück Institute for Molecular Medicine in Germany, noted, "People may say, 'So what — it's weird, but what has it to do with human pain?' I think that is wrong, unimaginative and short sighted."

Lewin noted that all vertebrate pain-receptor systems "are built in a highly similar way, so the mole rat may tell us how you can unbuild the system."

Help for people

Specifically, Park noted this research adds to existing knowledge about Substance P. "This is important specifically to the long-term, secondary-order inflammatory pain. It's the pain that can last for hours or days when you pull a muscle or have a surgical procedure," he explained.

As such, these findings might shed new light on chronic pain. Park said,

"We're learning which nerve fibers are important for which kinds of pain, so we'll be able to develop new strategies and targets."

Lewin added, "We really do not understand the molecular mechanism of acid sensing in humans, although it is thought to be pretty important in inflammatory pain. An animal that naturally lacks such a mechanism may help us identify what the mechanism actually is."

Park next plans to study distantly related animals that dwell in similar circumstances, such as the Mexican free-tailed bat and the Alaskan marmot, which both spend large amounts of time in high carbon dioxide caves or burrows. "How are they surviving down there? It'd be interesting if we saw some parallels there with the naked mole rats," Park said.

The scientists detailed their findings online Jan. 28 in the journal PLoS Biology.”

The Way I See It

They haven’t discovered how much pain aliens can withstand yet !!!

Brazil wants to build nuclear submarine

2008-01-29T05:45:00.000-08:00

The News

“ Brazil is seeking to buy military technology from France that could help it become the first country in Latin America to have a nuclear submarine, the Defense Ministry said on Monday.

Defense Minister Nelson Jobim traveled to France last week to discuss the possible purchase of a diesel-powered Scorpene class submarine that would "serve as a model for the development of a nuclear submarine, which is the main objective of his visit," said Defense Ministry spokesman Jose Ramos.

"Any defense-related agreement that may eventually be signed with France must include the transfer of technology," Ramos said, noting that while Brazil has nuclear reactors and fuel enrichment capacity, it has not had the technology to build a nuclear submarine.

Ramos declined to confirm a report, published Monday by the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper, that Brazil would buy the submarine for $600 million, paid over 20 years at an annual interest rate of 2.4 percent.

Brazil has discussed building a nuclear submarine for decades, and began a formal program in 1979. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva announced $540 million in new funding for the program and for existing uranium enrichment efforts last July.

Brazil currently has five conventionally powered submarines.

If an agreement results in the construction of a nuclear submarine, then "Brazil will surely become the first country in Latin America to have one," said Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Washington-based Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan research group.

Ramos said Brazil wants to establish a strategic partnership with France to transfer technology. France is interested in Brazilian know-how on jungle warfare and "the use of electronic equipment in the humidity of tropical rain forests," he said.”

The Way I See It

Way to go Brazil….another submarine with nuclear capabilities!!. Well, I am a great defender of Brazil….I think the country that provides the earth’s lungs deserves to be defended. It is the biggest country in South America, it has enormous natural resources and it has the money to do it. But, is it the right time or the right allocation of resources. I don’t think nuclear installations are safer now than they were fifty years ago. I don’t think they are friendlier to the environment either. In Brazil’s case, there is no dependency on foreign oil. In fact, if a worldwide energy crisis were to take place, Brazil is the only country in the world that will not be affected because they started relying on ethanol a long time ago. I also think they should use the money for something more urgent and more harming to this beautiful country….urban violence.

Kenya rivals may start a 'dialogue process'

2008-01-29T05:35:00.000-08:00

The News

"After days of deadlocked meetings with President Mwai Kibaki and opposition leader Raila Odinga, former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced in a statement that the two sides would start a "dialogue process" Tuesday afternoon.

Meanwhile, U.S. presidential hopeful Barack Obama repeated his appeals for peace in the conflict that has left more than 800 dead since the Dec. 27 election.

But the violence continued to rage.

A gang of youths, who belong to Odinga's Luo tribe, dragged a Kikuyu doctor out of a clinic and beheaded him with machetes.

"They pulled the doctor out and then cut and cut until his head was off," said Sabat Abdullah, a resident of Kibera, a Nairobi slum where violence erupted following the killing of an opposition lawmaker.

Two gunmen shot Mugabe Were as he drove to his house in suburban Nairobi, police said, adding they did not yet know if the political turmoil had motivated the slaying.

"We are treating it as a murder but we are not ruling out anything, including political motives," Kenyan police spokesman Eric Kiraithe said. "We are urging everyone to remain calm."

But another resident of Kibera, Teddy Njoroge, said houses were being set ablaze near a railway that generally divides members of Kibaki's Kikuyu tribe from Luo inhabitants. Flames and smoke rose from one area of Kibera.

"They have decided to revenge this MP," Njoroge said of the member of parliament.

Were was among a slew of opposition members who won seats in the December legislative vote, held at the same time as the presidential election.

"We suspect the foul hands of our adversaries," Odinga said on his way to Were's home, where dozens of protesters manned burning barricades of tires and uprooted telephone posts.

Kibaki condemned the killing and appealed to Kenyans to avoid drawing premature conclusions. In a statement, Kibaki promised police would act swiftly to ensure the perpetrators were dealt with severely.

Obama, a Democratic senator whose father was Kenyan, called on the leaders to seek a peaceful solution.

"Now is the time for all parties to renounce violence. Now is the time for Kenyan leaders to rise above party affiliations and past ambitions for the sake of peace," Obama said on Nairobi's Capital FM radio station.

In western Kenya's Rift Valley, where much of the violence is focused, thousands of machete-wielding youths from both Kikuyu and Luo tribes hunted each other down, burned homes, and clashed with police who appeared overwhelmed.

The Rift Valley is the traditional home of the Kalenjin and Masai ethnic groups. British colonizers seized large tracts of land to cultivate fertile farms there. After independence in 1963, President Jomo Kenyatta flooded reclaimed farmlands with his Kikuyu people, creating deep-seated resentment that exists to this day.

Kikuyus also are resented for their domination of politics and the economy, a success cemented by endemic corruption and a patronage system where politicians favor their own ethnic group.

More than half the 255,000 people driven from their homes this month have been Kikuyus displaced from the fertile valley.

On Tuesday, homes were set ablaze and thousands of looters smashed shop windows in Naivasha, Kenya's flower-exporting capital, located alongside a freshwater lake inhabited by pink flamingoes.

Five police officers fired into the air but were unable to control the mob of about 5,000. Naivasha's police chief tried to calm the crowd, but was pelted with stones and fled in his car.

Shots were fired from three helicopters at looters and protesters.

On a flower estate on the outskirts of town, a local reporter saw a mob of Kikuyus stone to death two Luos. Earlier, Kikuyus stoned to death a Luo man.

"We're trapped," said Rose Achieng, who fled with her two children when looters ransacked her home Sunday. She and hundreds of other Luos had sought refuge next to the police station, beside the road outside the country club.

Police, apparently worried they could not protect them, started ferrying them in trucks to the town's walled prison compound, where more than 1,000 refugees already had gathered.

"If you stay we will kill you," Kikuyus yelled.

In Kisumu town, where columns of smoke rose from burning homes on Monday, police took away one charred body.

"We didn't waste time, we had to kill him," said Stanley Ochieng, 25. He said they stoned the man, slashed him with machetes, then threw him to burn on their roadblock of burning tires because he was Kikuyu.

The U.S. Embassy said Tuesday that U.S. health research workers including some military personnel are pulling out of Kisumu to be temporarily rebased in Nairobi.

About 10 health researchers working on endemic disease projects for the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will be leaving Kisumu, said embassy spokesman T.J. Dowling. He said no personnel were being evacuated from Kenya.

Human rights groups and officials charge the violence in Kenya has become organized.

"What is so alarming about the last few days is ... there's evidently hidden hands organizing it now," Britain's visiting minister for Africa, Mark Malloch-Brown, told reporters Monday.

He spoke after meetings with Odinga, Kibaki and their mediator, Annan, who announced the planned Tuesday afternoon meeting. Kibaki and Odinga had been asked to name three negotiators each to participate in the talks. They are under international pressure to form a power-sharing government."

The Way I See It

I think it will be great if reason takes over in Kenya. Though, if you read my previous comment on news from this country, you will note that I said that there must be someone gaining from all this ethnic and tribal violence in Africa. I think all colonizing powers left a little poisined gift before their departure. In the case of Kenya, it was land division. For one tribe was allocated most of the land before colonisation ended. Now, the conflict there is more about land than about anything else.

UFOs in the Ex- Societ Union

2008-01-29T05:32:00.000-08:00

The first “flying saucers” could not cover long distances, and Americans had to use submarines to deliver those saucers to the Soviet shores. The Pentagon was testing the third generation of flying saucers when the Soviet Union just started development of similar mechanisms. A correspondent of PRAVDA.Ru is going to break the secrecy requirement and publish a story told by a former engineer of an enterprise where UFO components were manufactured.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the USSR witnessed an invasion of unidentified flying objects. Some of the “visits” were particularly curious. In December 1989, policemen in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk came to a scene of actio and witnessed “some dark apparatuses with colored lights” were experimenting on a power line going to a local aluminum plant. Other acquaintances of the man who told the story witnessed objects flying over the Yenisei River and the city of Krasnoyarsk. The man himself saw an UFO earlier, April 26, 1989 in the Ural Region. Where did the strange machines that were obviously made by humans come from?

In news films about the history of aviation one can see a strange device resembling a huge motorized and manned umbrella. This umbrella can twitch up and down, and can even hover in the air for a second when twitching down. Inventor Chance Vought tested the umbrella plane in 1911 in America.

The device is an ancestor of contemporary Flying Saurcers. The 1911 umbrella plane looks funny, but it is unlikely that the American inventor spent money on making the machine just for fun. The flight principle based on generating compression under a vibrating plane is no worse than the flight principle of traditional airplanes. When the device was being created, engineers realized that it would give a higher lifting force. Step by step it turned out during the tests that the device could perform a flight if the oscillation frequency was measured in megahertz and the amplitude of oscillation in millimeters. But at that time there were no technologies to get the total power of vibration and achieve supersonic frequency.

The aircraft-building company of Chance Vought cooperated with the Naval Department. The Skimmer flying saucer that appeared after WWII was a result of the cooperation. It is believed to be an experimental variant of a propeller-driven airplane, however it is not ruled out that Chance Vought made the model especially for running tests of the aerodynamic lift of electrokinetic engines.

In the late 1940s, first flying saucers appeared in the US. They resembled telephone loudspeakers: impulse electromagnets made one or several huge membranes beat the air at a megahertz frequency. And a streamline top part of the device provided the difference of drag forces on the top and on the bottom. But still some facts pertaining to the strange device remained unclear.

A flying saucer could not generate any lifting force until it threw something off the way rockets did. This is a ring whirl: it does not leave vacuum to intake a flying saucer. It is necessary to keep a saucer on the ring whirl just for a couple of microseconds, the period within which a new whirl is generated.

Flying saucers with impulse electromagnets were heavy and could not cover long distances. So, Americans had to use submarines to deliver them to the Soviet shores that gave rise to stories telling that UFOs emerged from under water. Later, new devices appeared where no electromagnetic field was used to shake a propelling membrane. The bodies of such devices were made of piezoceramic, and vibration appeared thanks to the piezoelectric effect (we know that piezoelectric tweeters make the sound in electronic alarm clocks and mobile phones). The new generation apparatuses were no longer saucers but spheres, ellipsoids and other three-dimensional figures haloed with ionized gas.

The USSR got UFOs of its own in the 1960s-70s. Once, Soviet Academician Shklovsky asserted in the popular informational program Vremya (Time) that there were no other creatures besides earth dwellers in the Universe. It sounded like an official statement of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party saying that no aliens ever existed, and all reports alleging that people witnessed UFOs were misinformation. Special committees immediately started censoring newspaper publications and deleted everything that could be connected with UFO visits and aliens. Also, the Tekhnika Molodezhi (Technics for Youth) popular magazine issued a publication about civil use of a secret technology, the electropulse de-icers that cleared ice mounds off IL-86 wings. The publication was also supplied with a scheme of impulse supply going to inductors that made aluminum planes vibrate.

At that very period Americans already had the third generation of flying saucers, dark objects with just few zones on them glowing. Those were whirl activators: the glow on the bottom to make the object fly and the glow on the side (so-called illuminators) to make it move to the sides.

Flying saucers are not in fact fantastic aliens landing this planet with antigravity machines but quite earthly apparatuses with electrokinetic engines that went up and down thanks to creating vortex rings. This is an absolutely unusual and strange idea to us indeed. However, as far as we believe in the existence of aliens we should also recognize a new flight technology that was invented some time ago and has been kept secret until recently. When explained clearly, the principles of the technology are quite understandable and do not seem to be fantastic. We know that vortexes are also very important in generating the lifting force of flying insects, take a dragonfly for instance.

Now that we know the principle of flight of flying saucers we can trace the development stages of the technology. But despite of the fact the American military are not going to declassify the technique. These days UFOs can be often observed in Iran that proves that the US keeps on employing its secret apparatuses.

A question arises why the break-through transport technology has never been declassified and officially used? In fact, application of the revolutionary breakthrough technology would have inevitably resulted in transforming the entire of the civilization and infringed upon the interests of a great number of people. Such apparatuses could help easily cross governmental borders, the thing that would have made them a cherished dream of terrorists and drug dealers. Such machines could be more popular than transport using petrol which would inevitably mean bankruptcy of oil tycoons and automakers. And the key reason of the secrecy in this situation is the fact that use of such flying saucers contradicts the international law; these machines cross governmental borders without notification of authorities. So, the advantages are worthy of keeping the invention secret for so many years. And this is why the secret of flying saucers was kept for so long.

The man who told the story about the secret of UFOs says it is time to say goodbye to a nice legend about aliens no matter how we like it.

The device is an ancestor of contemporary flyinhg saucers. The 1911 umbrella plane looks funny, but it is unlikely that the American inventor spent money on making the machine just for fun. The flight principle based on generating compression under a vibrating plane is no worse than the flight principle of traditional airplanes. When the device was being created, engineers realized that it would give a higher lifting force. Step by step it turned out during the tests that the device could perform a flight if the oscillation frequency was measured in megahertz and the amplitude of oscillation in millimeters. But at that time there were no technologies to get the total power of vibration and achieve supersonic frequency.

The USSR got UFOs of its own in the 1960s-70s. Once, Soviet Academician Shklovsky asserted in the popular informational program Vremya (Time) that there were no other creatures besides earth dwellers in the universe. It sounded like an official statement of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party saying that no aliens ever existed, and all reports alleging that people witnessed UFOs were misinformation. Special committees immediately started censoring newspaper publications and deleted everything that could be connected with UFO visits and aliens. Also, the Tekhnika Molodezhi (Technics for Youth) popular magazine issued a publication about civil use of a secret technology, the electropulse de-icers that cleared ice mounds off IL-86 wings. The publication was also supplied with a scheme of impulse supply going to inductors that made aluminum planes vibrate.

The man who told the story about the secret of UFOs says it is time to say goodbye to a nice legend about aliens no matter how we like it.

El Nino Will Be Source Of More Severe Regional US Wintertime Storms

2008-01-29T04:34:00.000-08:00

Researchers now believe that some of the most intense winter storm activity over parts of the United States may be set in motion from changes in the surface waters of far-flung parts of the Pacific Ocean. Siegfried Schubert of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and his colleagues studied the impact that El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events have on the most intense U.S. winter storms.

An ENSO episode typically consists of an El Niño phase followed by a La Niña phase. During the El Niño phase, eastern Pacific temperatures near the equator are warmer than normal, while during the La Niña phase the same waters are colder than normal. These fluctuations in Pacific Ocean temperatures are accompanied with fluctuations in air pressure known as the Southern Oscillation.

ENSO is a coupled ocean-atmosphere effect that has a sweeping influence on weather around the world. Scientists found that during El Niño winters, the position of the jet stream is altered from its normal position and, in the U.S., storm activity tends to be more intense in several regions: the West Coast, Gulf States and the Southeast. They estimate, for example, that certain particularly intense Gulf Coast storms that occur, on average, only once every 20 years would occur in half that time under long-lasting El Niño conditions. In contrast, under long-lasting La Nina conditions, the same storms would occur on average only about once in 30 years. A related study was published this month in the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate.

The scientists examined daily records of snow and rainfall events over 49 U.S. winters, from 1949-1997, together with results from computer model simulations. According to Schubert, the distant temperature fluctuations in Pacific Ocean surface waters near the equator are likely responsible for many of the year-to-year changes in the occurrence of the most intense wintertime storms.

"By studying the history of individual storms, we've made connections between changes in precipitation in the U.S. and ENSO events in the Pacific," said Schubert, a meteorologist and lead author of the study. "We can say that there is an increase in the probability that a severe winter storm will affect regions of the U.S. if there is an El Niño event."

"Looking at the link between large-scale changes in climate and severe weather systems is an emerging area in climate research that affects people and resources all over the world," said Schubert. "Researchers in the past have tended to look at changes in local rainfall and snow statistics and not make the connections to related changes in the broader storm systems and the links to far away sources. We found that our models are now able to mimic the changes in the storms that occurred over the last half century. That can help us understand the reasons for those changes, as well as improve our estimates of the likelihood that stronger storms will occur."

El Niño events, which tend to climax during northern hemisphere winters, are a prime example of how the ocean and atmosphere combine to affect climate and weather, according to Schubert. During an El Niño, warm waters from the western Pacific move into the central and eastern equatorial Pacific, spurred by changes in the surface wind and in the ocean currents. The higher sea surface temperatures in the eastern equatorial Pacific increase rainfall there, which alters the positions of the jet streams in both the northern and southern hemispheres. That in turn affects weather in the U.S. and around the world.

Scientists have known about El Niño weather fluctuations over a large portion of the world since the early 1950s. They occur in cycles every three to seven years, changing rain patterns that can trigger flooding as well as drought.

Schubert cautions against directly linking a particular heavy storm event to El Niño with absolute certainty. "This study is really about the causes for the changes in probability that you'll have stronger storms, not about the causes of individual storms," he said. For that matter, Schubert also discourages linking a particularly intense storm to global warming with complete certainty.

"Our study shows that when tropical ocean surface temperature data is factored in, our models now allow us to estimate the likelihood of intense winter storms much better than we can from the limited records of atmospheric observations alone, especially when studying the most intense weather events such as those associated with ENSO," said Schubert. "But, improved predictions of the probability of intense U.S. winter storms will first require that we produce more reliable ENSO forecasts." NASA's Global Modeling and Assimilation Office is, in fact, doing just that by developing both an improved coupled ocean-atmosphere-land model and comprehensive data, combining space-based and in situ measurements of the atmosphere, ocean and land, necessary to improve short term climate predictions.

Asteroid passes by Earth today

2008-01-29T04:31:00.000-08:00

An asteroid described as “potentially dangerous” by scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the

space agency National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is set to pass near Earth today.

While scientists assured the public that Asteroid TU24, estimated to be 160 to 500 meters in diameter, would definitely not hit the Earth, various websites are now teeming with theories on its possible effects on Earth.

NASA, in its website neo.jpl.nasa.gov, said, “2007-TU24 will be the closest currently known approach by a potentially hazardous asteroid of this size or larger until 2027.”

The JPL is based in Pasadena, California.

Jose Mendoza IV of the Astronomy Research and Development Section of the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (Pagasa) sent The STAR information from NASA saying that the asteroid “will pass within 540,000 kilometers (334,000 miles) of Earth on January 29 at 4:33 p.m. (Philippine Standard Time).”

“Hopefully this news won’t cause any alarmist cries of doom, as the asteroid has no chance of hitting Earth. But there is one reason to get excited about this close approach by an asteroid: it will be close enough to likely be visible to amateur astronomers,” said Mendoza’s email to The STAR.

“Plans have been made for the Goldstone planetary radar to observe this object on Jan. 23-24, and for the Arecibo radar to observe it Jan. 27-28 and then on Feb. 1-4. High resolution radar imaging is expected, which may permit later 3-D shape reconstruction,” said the website in an information released by the NASA/JPL Near-Earth Object Program Office last Jan. 22.

“The asteroid 2007-TU24, discovered by the Catalina Sky Survey on October 11, 2007, will closely approach the Earth to within 1.4 lunar distances (334,000 miles) on 2008 Jan. 29 08:33 UT. This object, between 150 and 600 meters in diameter, will reach an approximate apparent magnitude 10.3 on Jan. 29-30 before quickly becoming fainter as it moves further from Earth. For a brief time the asteroid will be observable in dark and clear skies with amateur telescopes of 3 inch apertures or larger,” NASA said.

The NASA website also said that “the average interval between actual Earth impacts for an object of this size would be about 37,000 years.”

“For the January 29th encounter, near Earth asteroid 2007-TU24 has no chance of hitting, or affecting, Earth,” it stressed.

Already, some websites are claiming that NASA has imposed a news blackout on the potential adverse effects of the passage of the asteroid to avoid panic.

The website tu24.org said that, “Although the chances of a direct impact are nearly non-existent, there is a much greater chance that there will be a degree of electromagnetic interference as 2007-TU24 traverses Earth’s magnetosphere in the manner of Tunguska 100 years ago.”

The Tunguska Event, also known as Tunguska explosion, occurred near the Tunguska River in Russia on June 30, 1908.

The explosion was believed to have been triggered by an airburst of a large meteoroid or comet fragment at an altitude of 5 to 10 kilometers above Earth’s surface.

The fragment was believed to be from 30 to 90 meters in diameter, smaller than the 160 to 500 meter diameter estimated size of 2007-TU24.

The energy of the blast, triggered by a phenomenon called “magnetic reconnection,” was estimated to be about 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, felling an estimated 80 million trees over 2,150 square kilometers and producing an earthquake measuring up to 5.0 on the Richter scale in an area which was then thickly populated.

New Antarctic Ice Core Will Provide Clearest Climate Record Yet

2008-01-29T01:31:00.000-08:00

After enduring months on the coldest, driest, and windiest continent on Earth, researchers today closed out the inaugural season on an unprecedented, multi-year effort to retrieve the most detailed record of greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere over the last 100,000 years.

Working as part of the National Science Foundation's West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide (WAIS Divide) Ice Core Project, a team of scientists, engineers, technicians, and students from multiple U.S. institutions have recovered a 580-meter (1,900-foot) ice core -- the first section of what is hoped to be a 3,465-meter (11,360-foot) column of ice detailing 100,000 years of Earth's climate history, including a precise year-by-year record of the last 40,000 years.

The dust, chemicals, and air trapped in the two-mile-long ice core will provide critical information for scientists working to predict the extent to which human activity will alter Earth's climate, according to the chief scientist for the project, Kendrick Taylor of the Desert Research Institute of the Nevada System of Higher Education. DRI, along with the University of New Hampshire, operates the Science Coordination Office for the WAIS Divide Project.

WAIS Divide, named for the high-elevation region that is the boundary separating opposing flow directions on the ice sheet, is the best spot on the planet to recover ancient ice containing trapped air bubbles -- samples of the Earth's atmosphere from the present to as far back as 100,000 years ago.

While other ice cores have been used to develop longer records of Earth's atmosphere, the record from WAIS Divide will allow a more detailed study of the interaction of previous increases in greenhouse gases and climate change. This information will improve computer models that are used to predict how the current unprecedented high levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere caused by human activity will influence future climate.

The WAIS Divide core is also the Southern Hemisphere equivalent of a series of ice cores drilled in Greenland beginning in 1989, and it will provide the best opportunity for scientists to determine if global-scale climate changes that occurred before human activity started to influence climate were initiated in the Arctic, the tropics, or Antarctica.

The new core will also allow investigations of biological material in deep ice, which will yield information about biogeochemical processes that control and are controlled by climate, as well as lead to fundamental insights about life on Earth.

Says Taylor, "We are very excited to work with ancient ice that fell as snow as long as 100,000 years ago. We read the ice like other people might read a stack of old weather reports."

The WAIS project took more than 15 years of planning and preparation, including extensive airborne reconnaissance and ground-based geophysical research, to pinpoint the one-square-kilometer (less than a square mile) space on the 932,000-square-kilometer (360,000-square-mile) ice sheet that scientists believe will provide the clearest climate record for the last 100,000 years.

With only some 40 days a year when the weather is warm enough for drilling -- yesterday's temperature was a balmy -15 degrees Celsius (5 degrees Fahrenheit) -- it is expected to take until January 2010 to complete the fieldwork.

For the project, Ice Coring and Drilling Services of the University of Wisconsin-Madison built and is operating a state-of-the-art, deep ice-coring drill, which is more like a piece of scientific equipment than a conventional rock drill used in petroleum exploration. The U.S. Geological Survey National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver designed the core handling system. Raytheon Polar Services Corporation provides the logistical support. The NSF Office of Polar Programs-U.S. Antarctic Program funds the project. The core will be archived at the National Ice Core Laboratory, which is run by the USGS with funding from NSF.

Baffin Island Ice Caps Shrink By 50 Percent Since 1950s, Expected To Disappear by Mid-Century

2008-01-29T01:29:00.000-08:00

A new University of Colorado at Boulder study has shown that ice caps on the northern plateau of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic have shrunk by more than 50 percent in the last half century as a result of warming, and are expected to disappear by the middle of the century.

Radiocarbon dating of dead plant material emerging from beneath the receding ice margins show the Baffin Island ice caps are now smaller in area than at any time in at least the last 1,600 years, said geological sciences Professor Gifford Miller of CU-Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. "Even with no additional warming, our study indicates these ice caps will be gone in 50 years or less," he said.

The study also showed two distinct bursts of Baffin Island ice-cap growth commencing about 1280 A.D. and 1450 A.D., each coinciding with ice-core records of increases in stratospheric aerosols tied to major tropical volcanic eruptions, Miller said. The unexpected findings "provide tantalizing evidence that the eruptions were the trigger for the Little Ice Age," a period of Northern Hemisphere cooling that lasted from roughly 1250 to 1850, he said.

A paper on the subject was published online in Geophysical Research Letters and featured in the Jan. 28 edition of the American Geophysical Union journal highlights. Authors on the study included Miller, graduate students Rebecca Anderson and Stephen DeVogel of INSTAAR, Jason Briner of the State University of New York at Buffalo and Nathaniel Lifton of the University of Arizona.

Located just east of Greenland, the 196,000 square-mile Baffin Island is the fifth largest island in the world. Most of it lies above the Arctic Circle.

The researchers also used satellite data and aerial photos beginning in 1949 to document the shrinkage of more than 20 ice caps on the northern plateau of Baffin Island, which are up to 4 miles long, generally less than 100 yards thick and frozen to their beds. "The ice is so cold and thin that it doesn't flow, so the ancient landscape on which they formed is preserved pretty much intact," said Miller.

In addition to carbon-dating plant material from the ice edges, the researchers extracted and analyzed carbon 14 that formed inside the Baffin Island rocks as a result of ongoing cosmic radiation bombardment, revealing the amount of time the rocks have been exposed, he said. The analysis of carbon 14 in quartz crystals indicated that for several thousand years prior to the last century, there had been more ice cover on Baffin Island, Miller said.

The increase of ice extent across the Arctic in recent millennia is thought to be due in large part to decreasing summer solar radiation there as a result of a long-term, cyclic wobble in Earth's axis, said Miller. "This makes the recent ice-cap reduction on Baffin Island even more striking," he said.

Funded primarily by the National Science Foundation, the study is among the first to use radiocarbon samples from rocks for dating purposes, Miller said. The radiocarbon portion of the study was conducted at INSTAAR and the University of Arizona.

Temperatures across the Arctic have been rising substantially in recent decades as a result of the build up of greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere. Studies by CU-Boulder researchers in Greenland indicate temperatures on the ice sheet have climbed 7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1991.

Kenya election violence spreads in west

2008-01-28T07:42:00.000-08:00

The News

Some 2,000 people from rival tribes faced off on a main road on Monday in this previously quiet tourist town. Some 130 miles away from the violence in Naivasha, in the city of Kisumu on the shore of Lake Victoria, armed mobs of young men torched houses and buses, burning alive anyone inside and blocking blood-spattered roadways.

Ethnic clashes sparked by a disputed presidential election a month ago have claimed the lives of 800 people, spreading into the fertile Rift Valley. The fighting began after President Mwai Kibaki's Dec. 27 re-election, which international and local observers say was rigged. About 255,000 people have been forced from their homes.

"This is Kikuyu land!" was the cry in Naivasha from one side, which called for revenge against the rival Luo tribe.

"We want peace, but we (also) want to fight them," said Peter Mwangi, a 20-year-old acrobat. "We don't want Luos here."

EU foreign ministers threatened to suspend development aid unless Kenya's rival political factions agree to a power-sharing pact and restore stability, saying the bloc "cannot conduct business as usual with Kenya."

In a declaration, the ministers backed warnings by EU Development Commissioner Louis Michel, who has said that long-term development aid to Kenya — about $563 million over five years — could be at risk.

Only about 6 percent of Kenya's budget comes from foreign aid and the government has said it will not be blackmailed over it.

In Kisumu on Monday, young men blocked roads out of the town with burning tires and rocks.

"Kikuyus must go!" "No Raila, no peace!" they yelled, referring to the tribe of Kibaki, and to his chief rival, opposition leader Raila Odinga. Members of Odinga's Luo tribe are among those challenging the official election results, and in Kisumu some of them took out their rage on Kikuyus, including a bus driver who was burned to death inside his minibus, according to Lillian Ocho, who saw the destruction.

"The road is covered in blood. It's chaos. Luos are hunting Kikuyus for revenge," said Baraka Karama, a journalist for independent broadcaster Kenya Television.

Kenya's Rift Valley, scene of the worst postelection violence, is dominated by the Kalenjin and Masai tribes but has pockets of population from all over the country. Many of them, especially Kibaki's Kikuyu people, settled there in the 1960s under controversial land resettlement schemes that have caused deep resentment.

The bloodshed has transformed this once-stable African country, pitting neighbors against one another and turning towns where tourists used to gather for luxury holidays into no-go zones.

Britain's visiting minister for Africa, Mark Malloch-Brown, said the latest violence appeared to be orchestrated. "What is so alarming about the last few days is ... there's evidently hidden hands organizing it now," he said.

Kibaki's government sought to capitalize on Malloch-Brown's visit, putting out a statement after the meeting headed "British Government recognizes President Kibaki and his Government."

British Embassy spokeswoman Charley Williams said Britain recognizes states, not governments. Kibaki has received congratulatory messages on his reelection from only seven countries, according to Kenya's Foreign Affairs Ministry: Iran, Kuwait, Morocco, Rwanda, Somalia, Swaziland and Uganda.

At least 22 people were killed in Naivasha over the weekend, said district commissioner Katee Mwanza. Nineteen of them were Luos whom a gang of Kikuyus chased through a slum and trapped in a shanty that they set on fire, said police commander Grace Kakai. The others were hacked to death with machetes, a local reporter told The Associated Press.

In Kakamega, gangs of youths looted and set ablaze a downtown hotel and two wholesalers, the Rev. Allam Kizili of the Pentecostal Church said. Police fired tear gas to try to stop the violence, he said.

The violence is complicating mediation efforts by Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

"Negotiations are becoming more and more difficult because the level of anger between the two sides is just growing exponentially," Malloch-Brown told reporters. "The two sides are very far apart at this time."

He said that Odinga appeared eager for international mediation to succeed but "the government feels the situation is being manipulated and internationalized to weaken its control."

Kibaki has said he is open to direct talks with Odinga, but that his position as president is not negotiable. Odinga says Kibaki must step down and only new elections will bring peace.

After meetings Sunday, opposition spokesman Salim Lone said the two leaders were asked to name three negotiators for the talks, which he said he would hopefully start "within a week."

On Sunday, looters used iron bars to smash the windows of shops belonging to non-Kikuyu businesspeople, and made off with television sets, groceries and clothing. One woman came screaming down the road from a blazing house.

"They set it on fire, they are killing my brother and sister," Alice Okoth said.

Two-thirds of the town of Timboroa was set ablaze in a pre-dawn attack Sunday that witnesses said left four dead.

Elsewhere, in Nakuru, the provincial capital of Kenya's fertile Rift Valley, 64 bodies were counted Monday at the morgue, said a worker who asked that his name not be used because he was not authorized to speak to the media. Ethnic clashes broke out there Thursday.

National police Commissioner Hussein Ali told reporters in Nairobi that police had arrested 159 people in Nakuru and Naivasha "for possession of crude weapons and for suspected involvement in the murders." He also said 95 people were arrested in Nairobi, but gave no details.

The Way I See It

I think we should look for the ones who benefit from this. If I recall correctly, this country was a unique case of stability in Africa. If you look carefully at the map of Africa and note the countries that have internal ethnic conflicts, you will discover that they all form sort of a line that streches from the horn of Africa ( Somalia) to the eastern end of the continent. Now if you look more carefully, you will see that these countries with internal ethnic conflicts also have substantial amounts of natural resources (usually minerals and energy resources). So, if you ask me, I will tell you to check if someone recently discovered that Kenya had hidden treasures that need exploiting somewhere.

Hamas, Egypt want to reclose border

2008-01-28T07:11:00.000-08:00

The News

Six days after Hamas blew holes in the border wall with Egypt to end a two year blockade and sent hundreds of thousands of Palestinians across the border in a shopping frenzy, authorities in the region are still struggling to come up with a new system to administer the border.

Egypt wants to restore shared control of the border among the Palestinian Authority, Israel, and European Union monitors, while Hamas rejects the old system and is pushing for a new one — presumably with more control in the hands of the militant group.

With much of the Arab world expressing deep sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians, Egyptian forces have moved very gingerly in stemming the flow of Gazans seeking food and supplies after nearly a two year blockade.

The fence is the first attempt to close one of the main crossing points, though Egyptian security forces earlier began stopping supplies from reaching the divided border town of refah to discourage Palestinian shoppers — leaving many local shopkeepers worried about the future.

"Since I opened this shop more than 20 years ago, I haven't seen such a chaotic situation, if this keeps up, the Egyptians in Rafah will be starving to death," said Mohammed Barahmah, 60, who owns one of the biggest grocery shops in downtown Rafah. "This is terrible, (Egyptian) Rafah will turn into Gaza, there will be nothing to buy and if there was it would be ten times the price."

Outside Rafah, lines of trucks with Cairo plates could be seen stopped at checkpoints and being sent back to the capital. But security officials in Cairo, speaking on customary condition of anonymity, denied any shipments to Rafah were being blocked.

The border cannot ultimately be reclosed, however, until a new system to replace the sharing arrangement brokered by Secretary of State Rice in 2005. Egypt and Arab foreign ministers have supported a return to the 2005 arrangement involving the Palestinian Authority — something vociferously opposed by Hamas.

But Hamas wants a new Rafah security scheme, calling the old one a piece of "history."

"This agreement has become part of past history, and the Palestinian people will not accept turning back to the old procedure," said Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman

Hamas says its main objection to the old system is that Israel uses cameras and computers to track everyone who passes in and out of Gaza, even though the Jewish state pulled its citizens out of the strip in summer 2005.

But while it does not say so publicly, the militant group could also be seeking to wrest the Palestinian Authority's share of responsibility for Rafah.

Hamas is dispatching a delegation to Egypt to discuss Rafah security Wednesday — the same day Abbas meets in Cairo with Egyptian president Mubarak.

But the rival Palestinian factions will likely meet separately with Egyptian officials. Abbas refuses to talk to Hamas until the group gives up control of Gaza.

The Way I See It

What is happening there is annoying even to an alien like yours trully. The thing is that you can not contain more than one and a half million people wiothout food, water or energy for long. Sooner or later, human survival instincts start working. They found a way to break down a wall and get the supplies they needed. This was inevitable. Now, closing that wall requires that the conditions leading to its breaching be gone. This didn't happen yet.

What I want to say is that collective punishment is always counterproductive. For those of you earthlings who do not know gaza, just know that the only other exist those one and a half million had is the sea. Whether, the breached wall can be closed or not is a matter that needs further analysis. I do not think the Egyptian government can at this stage justify to tis own people closing the breached border but I do not think they can withstand for long the international pressure for not closing it.

Report of Seeing UFO in Stephenville, Texas

2008-01-28T02:21:00.000-08:00

In Stephenville, a farming community where nightfall usually brings clear, starry skies, residents are abuzz over reported sightings of what many believe is a UFO.

Several dozen people — including a pilot, county constable and business owners — insist they have seen a large silent object with bright lights flying low and fast. Some reported seeing fighter jets chasing it.

"People wonder what in the world it is because this is the Bible Belt, and everyone is afraid it's the end of times,'' said Steve Allen, a freight company owner and pilot who said the object he saw last week was a mile long and half a mile wide. "It was positively, absolutely nothing from these parts.''

While federal officials insist there's a logical explanation, locals swear that it was larger, quieter, faster and lower to the ground than an airplane. They also said the object's lights changed configuration, unlike those of a plane. People in several towns who reported seeing it over several weeks have offered similar descriptions of the object.

Machinist Ricky Sorrells said friends made fun of him when he told them he saw a flat, metallic object hovering about 300 feet over a pasture behind his Dublin home. But he decided to come forward after reading similar accounts in the Stephenville Empire-Tribune.

"You hear about big bass or big buck in the area, but this is a different deal,'' Sorrells said. "It feels good to hear that other people saw something, because that means I'm not crazy.''

Sorrells said he has seen the object several times. He said he watched it through his rifle's telescopic lens and described it as very large and without seams, nuts or bolts.

Maj. Karl Lewis, a spokesman for the 301st Fighter Wing at the Joint Reserve Base Naval Air Station in Fort Worth, said no F-16s or other aircraft from his base were in the area the night of Jan. 8, when most people reported the sighting.

Lewis said the object may have been an illusion caused by two commercial airplanes. Lights from the aircraft would seem unusually bright and may appear orange from the setting sun.

"I'm 90 percent sure this was an airliner,'' Lewis said. "With the sun's angle, it can play tricks on you.''

Officials at the region's two Air Force bases — Dyess in Abilene and Sheppard in Wichita Falls — also said none of their aircraft were in the area last week. The Air Force no longer investigates UFOs.

One man has offered a reward for a photograph or videotape of the mysterious object.

About 200 UFO sightings are reported each month, mostly in California, Colorado and Texas, according to the Mutual UFO Network, which plans to go to the 17,000-resident town of Stephenville to investigate.

Fourteen percent of Americans polled last year by The Associated Press and Ipsos say they have seen a UFO.

Erath County Constable Lee Roy Gaitan said that he first saw red glowing lights and then white flashing lights moving fast, but that even with binoculars could not see the object to which the lights were attached.

"I didn't see a flying saucer and I don't know what it was, but it wasn't an airplane, and I've never seen anything like it,'' Gaitan said. "I think it must be some kind of military craft — at least I hope it was.''

Man-made Changes Bring About New Epoch In Earth's History

2008-01-28T02:16:00.000-08:00

Geologists from the University of Leicester propose that humankind has so altered the Earth that it has brought about an end to one epoch of Earth's history and marked the start of a new epoch.

Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams at the University of Leicester and their colleagues on the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London have presented their research in the journal GSA Today.

In it, they suggest humans have so changed the Earth that on the planet the Holocene epoch has ended and we have entered a new epoch - the Anthropocene.

They have identified human impact through phenomena such as:

Transformed patterns of sediment erosion and deposition worldwide
Major disturbances to the carbon cycle and global temperature

Ocean acidification

The scientists analysed a proposal made by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen in 2002. He suggested the Earth had left the Holocene and started the Anthropocene era because of the global environmental effects of increased human population and economic development.

The researchers argue that the dominance of humans has so physically changed Earth that there is increasingly less justification for linking pre- and post-industrialized Earth within the same epoch - the Holocene.

The scientists said their findings present the scholarly groundwork for consideration by the International Commission on Stratigraphy for formal adoption of the Anthropocene as the youngest epoch of, and most recent addition to, the Earth's geological timescale.

They state: "Sufficient evidence has emerged of stratigraphically significant change (both elapsed and imminent) for recognition of the Anthropocene--currently a vivid yet informal metaphor of global environmental change--as a new geological epoch to be considered for formalization by international discussion."

2007 Was Tenth Warmest For U.S., Fifth Warmest Worldwide

2008-01-27T13:38:00.000-08:00

The average temperature for the contiguous U.S. in 2007 is officially the tenth warmest on record, according to data from scientists at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C. The agency also determined the global surface temperature last year was the fifth warmest on record.

The average U.S. temperature for 2007 was 54.2°F; 1.4°F warmer than the 20th century mean of 52.8°F. NCDC originally estimated in mid-December that 2007 would end as the eighth warmest on record, but below-average temperatures in areas of the country last month lowered the annual ranking. For Alaska, 2007 was the 15th warmest year since statewide records began in 1918.

Six of the 10 warmest years on record for the contiguous U.S. have occurred since 1998, part of a three decade period in which mean temperatures for the contiguous U.S. have risen at a rate near 0.6°F per decade.

For the contiguous U.S., the December 2007 mean temperature was 33.6°F, near the 20th century average of 33.4°F. The Southeast was much warmer than average, while 11 states — from the Upper Midwest to the West Coast — were cooler than average.

Warmer-than-average temperatures for December 2007 in large parts of the more heavily populated eastern U.S. resulted in temperature related energy demand about 1.9 percent below average for the nation as a whole, based on NOAA’s Residential Energy Demand Temperature Index. For the year, the REDTI estimates that national residential energy consumption was about 2.5 percent below average.

U.S. Precipitation Highlights – December 2007

December 2007 was wetter than normal for the contiguous U.S., the 18th wettest December since national records began in 1895. Thirty-seven states were wetter, or much wetter, than average. Only Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and North Dakota were drier than average.

Precipitation was much above average in Washington State, due to a powerful storm that struck the Pacific Northwest in early December. Heavy rain and wind gusts greater than 100 mph caused widespread damage and the worst flooding in more than a decade in parts of western Oregon and Washington. Many locations received more than 10 inches of rainfall during the first three days of the month.

While above-average precipitation in late November and December led to improving drought conditions in parts of the Southwest, Southeast, and New England, more than three-fourths of the Southeast and half of the West remained in some stage of drought.

Global Highlights

For December 2007, the combined global land and ocean surface temperature was the 13th warmest on record (0.72°F/0.40°C above the 20th century mean). Separately, the global December land-surface temperature was the eighth warmest on record. The most anomalously warm temperatures occurred from Scandinavia to central Asia.

La Niña continued to strengthen as ocean surface temperatures in large areas of the central and eastern equatorial Pacific were more than 3°F (1.7°C) below average. The continuation of cooler-than-average temperatures dampened the global ocean average, which was the 18th warmest on record for December.

For 2007, the global land and ocean surface temperature was the fifth warmest on record. Separately, the global land surface temperature was warmest on record while the global ocean temperature was 9th warmest since records began in 1880. Seven of the eight warmest years on record have occurred since 2001, part of a rise in temperatures of more than 1°F (0.6°C) since 1900. Within the past three decades, the rate of warming in global temperatures has been approximately three times greater than the century scale trend.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an agency of the U.S. Commerce Department, is dedicated to enhancing economic security and national safety through the prediction and research of weather and climate-related events and information service delivery for transportation, and by providing environmental stewardship of our nation's coastal and marine resources. Through the emerging Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), NOAA is working with its federal partners, more than 70 countries and the European Commission to develop a global monitoring network that is as integrated as the planet it observes, predicts and protects.

Can Tiny Diatoms Help Offset Global Warming?

2008-01-27T13:32:00.000-08:00

Diatoms -- some of which are so tiny that 30 can fit across the width of a human hair -- are so numerous that they are among the key organisms taking the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide out of the Earth's atmosphere.

The shells of diatoms are so heavy that when they die in the oceans they typically sink to watery graves on the seafloor, taking carbon out of the surface waters and locking it into sediments below.

Scientists have reported the discovery of whole subsets of genes and proteins that govern how one species of diatom builds its shell. For oceanographers, the work might one day help them understand how thousands of different kinds of diatoms -- and their ability to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere -- might be affected by something like global climate change. Material scientists involved in the work are interested in the possibilities of manipulating the genes responsible for silica production as a way of fabricating more efficient computer chips.

Diatoms, most of which are far too tiny to see without magnification, are incredibly important in the global carbon cycle, says Thomas Mock, a University of Washington postdoctoral researcher in oceanography and lead author of the paper. During photosynthesis, diatoms turn carbon dioxide into organic carbon and, in the process, generate oxygen. They are responsible for 40 percent of the organic carbon produced in the world's oceans each year.

The new work took advantage of the genomic map of the diatom Thalassiosira pseudonana published in 2004 by a team led by UW oceanography professor Virginia Armbrust, who is corresponding author of the new PNAS paper.* Thalassiosira pseudonana is encased in a hatbox-shaped shell comprised of a rigid cell wall, made mainly of silica and delicately marked with pores in patterns distinctive enough for scientists to tell it from other diatoms.

Armed with the genomic map, the researchers changed environmental conditions in laboratory cultures of Thalassiosira pseudonana, for example limiting the amount of silicon and changing the temperatures. Then researchers used what's called "whole genome expression profiling" to determine which parts of the genome were triggered to compensate.

Think of a plant on a windowsill that starts getting a lot more sunlight, Mock says. The new set of conditions will cause genes in the plant to turn on and off to help the plant acclimate to the increased light as best it can.

Scientists since the late 1990s have found only a handful of genes that influence diatom shell formation. The work with Thalassiosira pseudonana identified large, previously unknown subsets. A set of 75 genes, for example, was triggered to compensate when silicon was limited.

The researchers were surprised to find another subset of 84 genes triggered when either silicon or iron were limited, suggesting that these two pathways were somehow linked. Under low-iron conditions, the diatoms grew more slowly and genes involved in the production of the silica shell were triggered. Individual diatoms also tended to clump together under those conditions, making them even heavier and more likely to sink.

The response of thin and thick cell walls depending on the amount of iron available had been observed at sea but "no one had a clue about the molecular basis," Mock says.

Considering that 30 percent of the world's oceans are iron-poor, some scientists have suggested fertilizing such areas with iron so diatoms become more numerous and absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, thus putting the brakes on global warming. If, however, adding iron causes diatoms to change the thickness of their shells then perhaps they won't be as likely to sink and instead would remain in the upper ocean where the carbon they contain might be released back to the atmosphere as they decay or are eaten.

"Iron increases primary production by diatoms but our study adds another concern about the efficiency of iron fertilization," Mock says.

Along with helping scientists understand implications for climate change and absorption of carbon dioxide, diatoms can manipulate silica in ways that engineers can only dream about.

University of Wisconsin professor Michael Sussman, the co-corresponding author on the paper, says the new findings will help his group start manipulating the genes responsible for silica production and potentially harness them to produce lines on computer chips. This could vastly increase chip speed because diatoms are capable of producing lines much smaller than current technology allows, he says.

*This research was published recently in the online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Other co-authors from the University of Washington are Vaughn Iverson, Chris Berthiaume, Karie Holtermann and Colleen Durkin; from Systemix Institute is Manoj Pratim Samanta; and from University of Wisconsin are Matthew Robinson, Sandra Splinter BonDurant, Kathryn Richmond, Matthew Rodesch, Toivo Kallas, Edward Huttlin and Franceso Cerrina.

Funding for the research came from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, National Science Foundation, German Academic Exchange Service, National Institutes of Health Genomic Sciences Training Center and the University of Wisconsin.

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2008-01-27T13:25:00.001-08:00

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Dream Meanings

Social and Political Debate Over Global Warming

2008-01-27T11:09:00.000-08:00

Over the past several years, public perceptions and attitudes concerning the causes and importance of global warming have changed. Increased awareness of the scientific findings surrounding global warming has resulted in political and economic debate. Poor regions, particularly Africa, appear at greatest risk from the suggested effects of global warming, while their actual emissions have been small compared to the developed world. At the same time, developing country exemptions from provisions of the Kyoto Protocol have been criticized by the United StatesAustralia, and have been used as part of the rationale for continued non-ratification by the U.S.Western world, the idea of human influence on climate has gained wider acceptance in Europe than in the United States. and In the

The issue of climate change has sparked debate weighing the benefits of limiting industrialemissions of greenhouse gases against the costs that such changes would entail. There has been discussion in several countries about the cost and benefits of adopting alternative energy sources Organizations and companies such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute and ExxonMobil have emphasized more conservative climate change scenarios while highlighting the potential economic cost of stricter controls, Likewise, various environmental lobbies and a number of public figures have launched campaigns to emphasize the potential risks of climate change and promote the implementation of stricter controls. Some fossil fuel companies have scaled back their efforts in recent years, or called for policies to reduce global warming. in order to reduce carbon emissions.

Another point of debate is the degree to which newly developed economies such as India and China should be expected to constrain their emissions. China's gross national CO₂ emissions are expected to exceed those of the U.S. within the next few years, and may have already done so according to a 2006 report. China has contended that it has less of an obligation to reduce emissions since its per capita emissions are roughly one-fifth that of the United States. India, also exempt from Kyoto restrictions and another of the biggest sources of industrial emissions, has made similar assertions. However, the U.S. contends that if they must bear the cost of reducing emissions, then China should do the same.

Security Effects of Global Warming

2008-01-27T11:07:00.000-08:00

In November 2007, the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for a New American Security published a report highlighting the national security effects of climate change. These security effects include increased competition for resources between countries, mass migration from the worst affected areas, challenges to the cohesion of major states threatened by the rise in sea levels, and, as a consequence of these factors, an increased risk of armed conflict, including even nuclear conflicts.

Economic Effects of Global Warming

2008-01-27T11:05:00.000-08:00

Some economists have tried to estimate the aggregate net economic costs of damages from climate change across the globe. Such estimates have so far failed to reach conclusive findings; in a survey of 100 estimates, the values ran from US$-10 per tonne of carbon (tC) (US$-3 per tonne of carbon dioxide) up to US$350/tC (US$95 per tonne of carbon dioxide), with a mean of US$43 per tonne of carbon (US$12 per tonne of carbon dioxide). One widely publicized report on potential economic impact is the Stern Review; it suggests that extreme weather might reduce global gross domestic product by up to 1%, and that in a worst-case scenario global per capita consumption could fall 20%. The report's methodology, advocacy and conclusions have been criticized by many economists, primarily around the Review's assumptions of discounting and its choices of scenarios, while others have supported the general attempt to quantify economic risk, even if not the specific numbers.

In a summary of economic cost associated with climate change, the United Nations Environment Programme emphasizes the risks to insurers, reinsurers, and banks of increasingly traumatic and costly weather events. Other economic sectors likely to face difficulties related to climate change include agriculture and transport. Developing countries, rather than the developed world, are at greatest economic risk.

General Effects of Global Warming

2008-01-27T11:03:00.000-08:00

Although it is difficult to connect specific weather events to global warming, an increase in global temperatures may in turn cause broader changes, including glacial retreat, Arctic shrinkage, and worldwide sea level rise. Changes in the amount and pattern of precipitation may result in floodingdrought. There may also be changes in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. Other effects may include changes in agricultural yields, addition of new trade routes, reduced summer streamflows, species extinctions, and increases in the range of disease vectors. and

Some effects on both the natural environment and human life are, at least in part, already being attributed to global warming. A 2001 report by the IPCC suggests that glacier retreat, ice shelf disruption such as that of the Larsen Ice Shelf, sea level rise, changes in rainfall patterns, and increased intensity and frequency of extreme weather events, are being attributed in part to global warming. While changes are expected for overall patterns, intensity, and frequencies, it is difficult to attribute specific events to global warming. Other expected effects include water scarcity in some regions and increased precipitation in others, changes in mountain snowpack, and adverse health effects from warmer temperatures.

Increasing deaths, displacements, and economic losses projected due to extreme weatherIPCC Third Assessment Report by Working Group II. The newer IPCC Fourth Assessment Report summary reports that there is observational evidence for an increase in intense tropical cyclone activity in the North Atlantic Ocean since about 1970, in correlation with the increase in sea surface temperature, but that the detection of long-term trends is complicated by the quality of records prior to routine satellite observations. The summary also states that there is no clear trend in the annual worldwide number of tropical cyclones. attributed to global warming may be exacerbated by growing population densities in affected areas, although temperate regions are projected to experience some benefits, such as fewer deaths due to cold exposure. A summary of probable effects and recent understanding can be found in the report made for the

Additional anticipated effects include sea level rise of 110 to 770 millimeters (0.36 to 2.5 ft) between 1990 and 2100, repercussions to agriculture, possible slowing of the thermohaline circulation, reductions in the ozone layer, increased intensity of hurricanes and extreme weather events, lowering of ocean pH, and the spread of diseases such as malaria and dengue fever. One study predicts 18% to 35% of a sample of 1,103 animal and plant species would be extinct by 2050, based on future climate projections. However, few mechanistic studies have documented extinctions due to recent climate change and one study suggests that projected rates of extinction are uncertain.

Earth´s Climate models

2008-01-27T11:01:00.000-08:00

Scientists have studied global warming with computer models of the climate. These models are based on physical principles of fluid dynamics, radiative transfer, and other processes, with simplifications being necessary because of limitations in computer power and the complexity of the underlying system (climate). These models predict that the effect of adding greenhouse gases is to produce a warmer climate. However, even when the same assumptions of future greenhouse gas levels are used, there still remains a considerable range of climate sensitivity.

Including uncertainties in future greenhouse gas concentrations and climate modeling, the IPCC anticipates a warming of 1.1 °C to 6.4 °C (2.0 °F to 11.5 °F) by the end of the 21st century, relative to 1980–1999. Models have also been used to help investigate the causes of recent climate change by comparing the observed changes to those that the models project from various natural and human-derived causes.

Current climate models produce a good match to observations of global temperature changes over the last century, but do not simulate all aspects of climate. These models do not unambiguously attribute the warming that occurred from approximately 1910 to 1945 to either natural variation or human effects; however, they suggest that the warming since 1975 is dominated by man-made greenhouse gas emissions.

Most global climate models, when run to project future climate, are forced by imposed greenhouse gas scenarios, generally one from the IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarioscarbon cycle; this generally shows a positive feedback, though this response is uncertain (under the A2 SRES scenario, responses vary between an extra 20 and 200 ppm of CO₂). Some observational studies also show a positive feedback. (SRES). Less commonly, models may be run by adding a simulation of the

The representation of clouds is one of the main sources of uncertainty in present-generation models, though progress is being made on this problem. There is also an ongoing discussion as to whether climate models are neglecting important indirect and feedback effects of solar variability.

Pre-human climate variations

2008-01-27T11:00:00.000-08:00

Earth has experienced warming and cooling many times in the past. The recent Antarctic EPICAorbital variations with interglacial warm periods comparable to present temperatures. ice core spans 800,000 years, including eight glacial cycles timed by

A rapid buildup of greenhouse gases amplified warming in the early Jurassic period (about 180 million years ago), with average temperatures rising by 5 °C (9 °F). Research by the Open University indicates that the warming caused the rate of rock weathering to increase by 400%. As such weathering locks away carbon in calcite and dolomite, CO₂ levels dropped back to normal over roughly the next 150,000 years.

Sudden releases of methane from clathrate compounds (the clathrate gun hypothesis) have been hypothesized as both a cause for and an effect of other warming events in the distant past, including the Permian-Triassic extinction event (about 251 million years ago) and the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (about 55 million years ago).

Changes in the Earth´s Temperature

2008-01-27T10:58:00.000-08:00

Global temperatures on both land and sea have increased by 0.75 °C (1.35 °F) relative to the period 1860–1900, according to the instrumental temperature record. This measured temperature increase is not significantly affected by the urban heat island effect. Since 1979, land temperatures have increased about twice as fast as ocean temperatures (0.25 °C per decade against 0.13 °C per decade). Temperatures in the lower troposphere have increased between 0.12 and 0.22 °C (0.22 and 0.4 °F) per decade since 1979, according to satellite temperature measurements. Temperature is believed to have been relatively stable over the one or two thousand years before 1850, with possibly regional fluctuations such as the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age.

Sea temperatures increase more slowly than those on land both because of the larger effective heat capacity of the oceans and because the ocean can lose heat by evaporation more readily than the land. Since the Northern Hemisphere has more land mass than the Southern Hemisphere it warms faster; also there are extensive areas of seasonal snow cover subject to the snow-albedo feedback. Although more greenhouse gases are emitted in the Northern than Southern Hemisphere this does not contribute to the asymmetry of warming as the major gases are essentially well-mixed between hemispheres.

Based on estimates by NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, 2005 was the warmest year since reliable, widespread instrumental measurements became available in the late 1800s, exceeding the previous record set in 1998 by a few hundredths of a degree. Estimates prepared by the World Meteorological Organization and the Climatic Research Unit concluded that 2005 was the second warmest year, behind 1998.

Anthropogenic emissions of other pollutants—notably sulfate aerosols—can exert a cooling effect by increasing the reflection of incoming sunlight. This partially accounts for the cooling seen in the temperature record in the middle of the twentieth century, though the cooling may also be due in part to natural variability. James Hansen and colleagues have proposed that the effects of the products of fossil fuel combustion—CO₂ and aerosols—have largely offset one another, so that warming in recent decades has been driven mainly by non-CO₂ greenhouse gases.

Paleoclimatologist William Ruddiman has argued that human influence on the global climate began around 8,000 years ago with the start of forest clearing to provide land for agriculture and 5,000 years ago with the start of Asian rice irrigation. Ruddiman's interpretation of the historical record, with respect to the methane data, has been disputed.

My Black Compass

2008-01-27T05:55:00.000-08:00

That is my beautiful black Jeep Compass and I finally drove it today for half an hour. You may ask why the excitement...is it the car?? Nope. It is that I bought it two months ago but it´s the second time I actually drive it. Am I a terrible driver? Do I have a licence?. Well, maybe he first but not the second. For your info, dear earthlings, I have a drving licence since 1988 ( the year of my crash on your so-called blue planet). The thing is that at one point, I became so terrified with the way you humans drive that I couldn´t possibly sit behind a wheel for the last seven years. Yes..you heard me...seven earthly years. So today, after several previous failed attempts to get myself to actually move the car and not just start it for ten minutes, I did it. I drove for half an hour. Whether this will happen again soon...I don´t know. All I know is that today I actually moved my black beauty.

Solar Variation

2008-01-26T12:35:00.000-08:00

A few papers suggest that the Sun's contribution may have been underestimated. Two researchers at Duke University, Bruce West and Nicola Scafetta, have estimated that the Sun may have contributed about 45–50% of the increase in the average global surface temperature over the period 1900–2000, and about 25–35% between 1980 and 2000. A paper by Peter Stott and other researchers suggests that climate models overestimate the relative effect of greenhouse gases compared to solar forcing; they also suggest that the cooling effects of volcanic dust and sulfate aerosols have been underestimated. They nevertheless conclude that even with an enhanced climate sensitivity to solar forcing, most of the warming since the mid-20th century is likely attributable to the increases in greenhouse gases.

A different hypothesis is that variations in solar output, possibly amplified by cloud seeding via galactic cosmic rays, may have contributed to recent warming. It suggests magnetic activity of the sun is a crucial factor which deflects cosmic rays that may influence the generation of cloud condensation nuclei and thereby affect the climate.

One predicted effect of an increase in solar activity would be a warming of the stratosphere. The observed trend since at least 1960 has been a cooling of the lower stratosphere, which is one of the predicted results of greenhouse gas warming. Reduction of stratospheric ozone also has a cooling influence, but substantial ozone depletion did not occur until the late 1970s. Solar variation combined with changes in volcanic activity probably did have a warming effect from pre-industrial times to 1950, but a cooling effect since. In 2006, Peter Foukal and other researchers from the United States, Germany, and Switzerland found no net increase of solar brightness over the last thousand years. Solar cycles led to a small increase of 0.07% in brightness over the last 30 years. This effect is far too small to contribute significantly to global warming.A paper by Mike Lockwood and Claus Fröhlich found no relation between global warming and solar radiation since 1985, whether through variations in solar output or variations in cosmic rays. Henrik Svensmark and Eigil Friis-Christensen, the main proponents of cloud seeding by galactic cosmic rays, disputed the findings of Lockwood and Fröhlich.

Global Warming Feedbacks

2008-01-26T12:30:00.000-08:00

The effects of forcing agents on the climate are complicated by various feedback processes.

One of the most pronounced feedback effects relates to the evaporation of water. In the case of warming by the addition of long-lived greenhouse gases such as CO₂, the initial warming will cause more water to be evaporated into the atmosphere. Since water vapor itself acts as a greenhouse gas, this causes still more warming; the warming causes more water vapor to be evaporated, and so forth until a new dynamic equilibrium concentration of water vapor is reached with a much larger greenhouse effect than that due to CO₂ alone. Although this feedback process involves an increase in the absolute moisture content of the air, the relative humidity stays nearly constant or even decreases slightly because the air is warmer. This feedback effect can only be reversed slowly as CO₂ has a long average atmospheric lifetime.

Feedback effects due to clouds are an area of ongoing research. Seen from below, clouds emit infrared radiation back to the surface, and so exert a warming effect; seen from above, clouds reflect sunlight and emit infrared radiation to space, and so exert a cooling effect. Whether the net effect is warming or cooling depends on details such as the type and altitude of the cloud. These details are difficult to represent in climate models, in part because clouds are much smaller than the spacing between points on the computational grids of climate models. Nevertheless, cloud feedback is second only to water vapor feedback and is positive in all the models that were used in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.

A subtler feedback process relates to changes in the lapse rate as the atmosphere warms. The atmosphere's temperature decreases with height in the troposphere. Since emission of infrared radiation varies with the fourth power of temperature, longwave radiation emitted from the upper atmosphere is less than that emitted from the lower atmosphere. Most of the radiation emitted from the upper atmosphere escapes to space, while most of the radiation emitted from the lower atmosphere is re-absorbed by the surface or the atmosphere. Thus, the strength of the greenhouse effect depends on the atmosphere's rate of temperature decrease with height: if the rate of temperature decrease is greater the greenhouse effect will be stronger, and if the rate of temperature decrease is smaller then the greenhouse effect will be weaker. Both theory and climate models indicate that warming will reduce the decrease of temperature with height, producing a negative lapse rate feedback that weakens the greenhouse effect. Measurements of the rate of temperature change with height are very sensitive to small errors in observations, making it difficult to establish whether the models agree with observations.

Another important feedback process is ice-albedo feedback. When global temperatures increase, ice near the poles melts at an increasing rate. As the ice melts, land or open water takes its place. Both land and open water are on average less reflective than ice, and thus absorb more solar radiation. This causes more warming, which in turn causes more melting, and this cycle continues.

Positive feedback due to release of CO₂ and CH₄ from thawing permafrost, such as the frozen peat bogs in Siberia, is an additional mechanism that could contribute to warming. Similarly a massive release of CH₄ from methane clathrates in the ocean could cause rapid warming, according to the clathrate gun hypothesis.

The ocean's ability to sequester carbon is expected to decline as it warms. This is because the resulting low nutrient levels of the mesopelagic zone (about 200 to 1000 m depth) limits the growth of diatoms in favor of smaller phytoplankton that are poorer biological pumps of carbon.

Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere

2008-01-26T12:25:00.000-08:00

The greenhouse effect was discovered by Joseph Fourier in 1824 and was first investigated quantitatively by Svante Arrhenius in 1896. It is the process by which absorption and emission of infrared radiation by atmospheric gases warm a planet's atmosphere and surface.

Existence of the greenhouse effect as such is not disputed. Naturally occurring greenhouse gases have a mean warming effect of about 33 °C (59 °F), without which Earth would be uninhabitable. Rather, the issue is how the strength of the greenhouse effect is changed when human activity increases the atmospheric concentrations of some greenhouse gases.

On Earth, the major greenhouse gases are water vapor, which causes about 36–70% of the greenhouse effect (not including clouds); carbon dioxide (CO₂), which causes 9–26%; methane₄), which causes 4–9%; and ozone, which causes 3–7%. Molecule for molecule, methane is a more effective greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, but its concentration is much smaller so that its total radiative forcing is only about a fourth of that from carbon dioxide. Some other naturally occurring gases contribute very small fractions of the greenhouse effect; one of these, nitrous oxide (N₂O), is increasing in concentration owing to human activity such as agriculture. The atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ and CH₄ have increased by 31% and 149% respectively since the beginning of the industrial revolution in the mid-1700s. These levels are considerably higher than at any time during the last 650,000 years, the period for which reliable data has been extracted from ice cores. From less direct geological evidence it is believed that CO₂ values this high were last attained 20 million years ago. Fossil fuel burning has produced about three-quarters of the increase in CO₂ from human activity over the past 20 years. Most of the rest is due to land-use change, in particular deforestation.

The present atmospheric concentration of CO₂ is about 383 parts per million (ppm) by volume.₂ levels are expected to rise due to ongoing burning of fossil fuels and land-use change. The rate of rise will depend on uncertain economic, sociological, technological, and natural developments, but may be ultimately limited by the availability of fossil fuels. The IPCC Special Report on Emissions Scenarios gives a wide range of future CO₂ scenarios, ranging from 541 to 970 ppm by the year 2100. Fossil fuel reserves are sufficient to reach this level and continue emissions past 2100, if coal, tar sands or methane clathrates are extensively used. (CH Future CO

Causes of Global Warming

2008-01-26T12:21:00.000-08:00

The Earth's climate changes in response to external forcing, including variations in its orbit around the Sun (orbital forcing), volcanic eruptions, and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. The detailed causes of the recent warming remain an active field of research, but the scientific consensus identifies elevated levels of greenhouse gases due to human activity as the main influence. This attribution is clearest for the most recent 50 years, for which the most detailed data are available. Some other hypotheses departing from the consensus view have been suggested to explain the observed increase in mean global temperature. One such hypothesis proposes that warming may be the result of variations in solar activity.

None of the effects of forcing are instantaneous. The thermal inertia of the Earth's oceans and slow responses of other indirect effects mean that the Earth's current climate is not in equilibrium with the forcing imposed. Climate commitment studies indicate that even if greenhouse gases were stabilized at 2000 levels, a further warming of about 0.5 °C (0.9 °F) would still occur.

Global Warming for Dummies

2008-01-26T12:10:00.000-08:00

If you earthlings dont know, Global warming is the increase in the average temperature of the Earth's near-surface air and oceans in recent decades and its projected continuation.

The global average air temperature near the Earth's surface rose 0.74 ± 0.18 °C (1.33 ± 0.32 °F) during the 100 year period ending in 2005. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes "most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations" via the greenhouse effect. Natural phenomena such as solar variation combined with volcanoes probably had a small warming effect from pre-industrial times to 1950 and a small cooling effect from 1950 onward. scientific societies and academies of science,^[including all of the national academies of science of the major industrialized countries. While individual scientists have voiced disagreement with the conclusions of the IPCC,the overwhelming majority of scientists working on climate change are in agreement with the conclusions.These basic conclusions have been endorsed by at least 30

Climate model projections summarized by the IPCC indicate that average global surface temperature will likely rise a further 1.1 to 6.4 °C (2.0 to 11.5 °F) during the 21st century. The range of values results from the use of differing scenarios of future greenhouse gas emissions as well as models with differing climate sensitivity. Although most studies focus on the period up to 2100, warming and sea level rise are expected to continue for more than a thousand years even if greenhouse gas levels are stabilized. The delay in reaching equilibrium is a result of the large heat capacity of the oceans.

Increasing global temperature will cause sea level to rise, and is expected to increase the intensity of extreme weather events and to change the amount and pattern of precipitation. Other effects of global warming include changes in agricultural yields, trade routes, glacier retreat, species extinctions and increases in the ranges of disease vectors.

Remaining scientific uncertainties include the amount of warming expected in the future, and how warming and related changes will vary from region to region around the globe. There is ongoing political and public debate worldwide regarding what, if any, action should be taken to reduce or reverse future warming or to adapt to its expected consequences. Most national governments have signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol, aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and outside of the United States there is considerably less debate over the effects and uncertainties of global warming.

If you are still not convinced that your planet is in danger, then I suggest you read the following:- Causes of Global Warming, Greenhouse gases , Global Warming Feedbacks, Solar variation, Earth´s Temparature Changes, Pre-human climate variations, Climate models, General Effects of Global Warming, Economic Effects of Global Warming, Security Effects of Global Warming, Social and Political Debate Over Global Warming

The Urban Ecosystem

2008-01-26T12:04:00.000-08:00

Urban ecosytems are the cities, towns and urban strips constructed by humans.

This growth in the urban population and the supporting built infrastructure has impacted on both urban environments and also on areas which surround urban areas. These include semi or 'peri-urban' environments that fringe cities as well as agricultural and natural landscapes.

Scientists are now developing ways to measure and understand the effects of urbananisation on human and environmental health.

By considered urban areas as part of a broader ecological system, scientists can investigate how urban landscapes function and how they effect other landscapes with which they interact. In this context, urban environments are effected by their surrounding environment but also impact on that environment. Knowing this may provide clues as to which alternative development options will lead to the best overall environmental outcome.

CSE's urban ecosystem research is focused on:

Understanding how cities work as ecological system Developing sustainable approaches to development of city fringe areas that reduce negative impact on surrounding environments Developing approaches to urban design that provide for health and opportunity for citizens.

The Tundra Ecosystem

2008-01-26T11:57:00.000-08:00

In physical geography, tundra is an area where the tree growth is hindered by low temperatures and short growing seasons. The term "tundra" comes from Kildin Sami tūndâr 'uplands, tundra, treeless mountain tract'. There are two types of tundra: Arctic tundra (which also occurs in Antarctica), and alpine tundra. In tundra, the vegetation is composed of dwarf shrubs, sedges and grasses, mosses, and lichens. Scattered trees grow in some tundra. The ecotone (or ecological boundary region) between the tundra and the forest is known as the tree line or timberline.

Arctic tundra occurs in the far Northern Hemisphere, north of the taiga belt. The word "tundra" usually refers only to the areas where the subsoil is permafrost, or permanently frozen soil. (It may also refer to the treeless plain in general, so that northern Sápmi would be included.) Permafrost tundra includes vast areas of northern Russia and Canada ^[1]. The polar tundra is home to several peoples who are mostly nomadic reindeer herders, such as the Nganasan and Nenets in the permafrost area (and the Sami in Sápmi).

The Arctic tundra is a vast area of stark landscape, which is frozen for much of the year. The soil there is frozen from 25-90 cm (9.8-35.4 inches) down, and it is impossible for trees to grow. Instead, bare and sometimes rocky land can only support low growing plants such as moss, heath, and lichen. There are two main seasons, winter and summer, in the polar Tundra areas. During the winter it is very cold and dark, with the average temperature around -28 °C (-18.4°F), sometimes dipping as low as -50 °C (-58°F). However, extreme cold temperatures on the tundra do not drop as low as those experienced in taiga areas further south (for example, Russia's and Canada's lowest temperatures were recorded in locations south of the treeline). During the summer, temperatures rise somewhat, and the top layer of the permafrost melts, leaving the ground very soggy. The tundra is covered in marshes, lakes, bogs and streams during the warm months. Generally daytime temperatures during the summer rise to about 12°C (53.6°F) but can often drop to 3°C (37.4°F) or even below freezing. Arctic tundras are sometimes the subject of habitatconservation programs. In Canada and Russia, many of these areas are protected through a national Biodiversity Action Plan.

The tundra is a very windy area, with winds often blowing upwards at 48–97 km/h (30-60 miles an hour). However, in terms of precipitation, it is desert-like, with only about 15–25 cm (6–10 inches) falling per year (the summer is typically the season of maximum precipitation). During the summer, the permafrost thaws just enough to let plants grow and reproduce, but because the ground below this is frozen, the water cannot sink any lower, and so the water forms the lakes and marshes found during the summer months. Although precipitation is light, evaporation is also relatively minimal.

Antarctic tundra occurs on Antarctica and on several Antarctic and subantarctic islands, including South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands and the Kerguelen Islands. Antarctica is mostly too cold and dry to support vegetation, and most of the continent is covered by ice fields. However, some portions of the continent, particularly the Antarctic Peninsula, have areas of rocky soil that support plant life. The flora presently consists of around 300-400 lichens, 100 mosses, 25 liverworts, and around 700 terrestrial and aquatic algae species, which live on the areas of exposed rock and soil around the shore of the continent. Antarctica's two flowering plant species, the Antarctic hair grass (Deschampsia Antarctica) and Antarctic pearlwort (Colobanthus quitensis), are found on the northern and western parts of the Antarctic Peninsula In contrast with the Arctic tundra, the Antarctic tundra lacks a large mammal fauna, mostly due to its physical isolation from the other continents. Sea mammals and sea birds, including seals and penguins, inhabit areas near the shore, and some small mammals, like rabbits and cats, have been introduced by humans to some of the subantarctic islands.

The flora and fauna of Antarctica and the Antarctic Islands (south of 60° south latitude) are protected by the Antarctic Treaty.

Tundra also occurs on Tierra del Fuego and southern Argentina. Notable plant and lichen species of this tundra include Neuropogon aurantiaco, Azorella lycopodioides, Marsippospermum reichei, Nardophyllum bryoides, and Bolax gummifera.

The biodiversity of the tundras is low: 1,700 species of vascular plants and only 48 land mammals can be found, although thousands of insects and birds migrate there each year for the marshes. There are also a few fish species such as the flat fish. There are few species with large populations. Notable animals in the Arctic tundra include caribou (reindeer), musk ox, arctic hare, arctic fox, snowy owl, lemmings, and polar bears (only the extreme north) .

Due to the harsh climate of the Arctic tundra, regions of this kind have seen little human activity, even though they are sometimes rich in natural resources such as oil and uranium. In recent times this has begun to change in Alaska, Russia, and some other parts of the world.

A severe threat to the tundras, specifically to the permafrost, is global warming. Permafrost is essentially a frozen bog - in the summer, only its surface layer melts. The melting of the permafrost in a given area on human time scales (decades or centuries) could radically change which species can survive there.

Another concern is that about one third of the world's soil-bound carbon is in taiga and tundra areas. When the permafrost melts, it releases carbon in the form of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. The effect has been observed in Alaska. In the 1970s the tundra was a carbon sink, but today, it is a carbon source.

Alpine tundra is an ecozone that does not contain trees because it has high altitude. Alpine tundra occurs at high enough altitude at any latitude on Earth. Alpine tundra also lacks trees, but the lower part does not have permafrost, and alpine soils are generally better drained than permafrost soils. Alpine tundra transitions to subalpine forests below the tree line; stunted forests occurring at the forest-tundra ecotone are known as Krummholz. Alpine tundra occurs in an alpine zone.

Alpine tundra does not map directly to specific World Wide Fund for Nature ecoregions. Portions of Montane grasslands and shrublands ecoregions include alpine tundra.

Because alpine tundra is located in various widely-separated regions of the Earth, there is no animal species common to all areas of alpine tundra. Some animals of alpine tundra environments include the Kea parrot, marmot, Mountain goats, chinchilla, and pika.

Tundra climates ordinarily fit the Köppen climate classification ET, signifying a local climate in which at least one month has an average temperature high enough to melt snow (0°C or 32°F), but no month with an average temperature in excess of (10°C/50°F). The cold limit generally meets the EF climates of permanent ice and snows; the warm-summer limit generally corresponds with the poleward or altitudinal limit of trees, where they grade into the subarctic climates designated DfdDwd (extreme winters as in parts of Siberia), Dfc typical in Alaska, Canada, European Russia, and Western Siberia (cold winters with months of freezing), or even Cfc (no month colder than -3°C as in parts of Iceland and southernmost South America). Tundra climates as a rule are hostile to woody vegetation even where the winters are comparatively mild by polar standards, as in Iceland. and

Despite the potential diversity of climates in the ET category involving precipitation, extreme temperatures, and relative wet and dry seasons, this category is rarely subdivided. Rainfall and snowfall are generally slight due to the limited capacity of the chilly atmosphere to hold water vapor, but as a rule potential evapotranspiration is extremely low, allowing soggy terrain of swamps and bogs even in places that get precipitation typical of deserts of lower and middle latitudes. Scarcity or lushness (by polar standards) of native vegetation of tundra regions depends more upon the severity of the temperatures than upon the scarcity or copiousness of precipitation. The alpine tundra also lacks in precipitation compared to the Arctic tundra.

The Taiga Ecosystem

2008-01-26T11:50:00.000-08:00

Taiga (pronounced /ˈtaɪgə/, from Mongolian) is a biome characterized by coniferous forests. Covering most of inland Alaska, Canada, Sweden, Finland, inland Norway and Russia (especially Siberia), as well as parts of the extreme northern continental United States (Northern Minnesota, Upstate New York, New Hampshire, and Maine), northern Kazakhstan and Japan (Hokkaidō), the taiga is the world's largest terrestrial biome. In Canada, boreal forest is the term used to refer to the southern part of this biome, while "taiga" is used to describe the more barren northern areas of the Arctic tree line.

Taiga, the worlds largest biome, has a harsh continental climate with a very large temperature range between summer and winter, classified as "Dfc" or "Dfb" in the Köppen climate classificationtundra and permanent ice caps, it is the coldest biome on Earth. High latitudes mean that for much of the year the sun does not rise far above the horizon. Winters last at least 5-6 months, with average temperatures below freezing. Temperatures vary from −50 °C to 30 °C throughout the whole year, with eight or more months of temperatures averaging below 10 °C. The summers, while short, are generally warm and humid. In general, taiga grows to the south of the 10 °C July isotherm, but occasionally as far north as the 9 °C July isotherm. The southern limit is more variable, depending on rainfall; taiga may be replaced by open steppe woodland south of the 15 °C July isotherm where rainfall is very low, but more typically extends south to the 18 °C July isotherm, and locally where rainfall is higher (notably in eastern Siberia and adjacent northern Manchuria) south to the 20 °C July isotherm. In these warmer areas, the taiga has higher species diversity with more warmth-loving species such as Korean Pine, Jezo Spruce and Manchurian Fir, and merges gradually into mixed temperate forest, or more locally (on the Pacific Ocean coasts of North America and Asia) into coniferous temperate rainforests. scheme. Aside from the

The taiga experiences relatively low precipitation throughout the year (200–750 mm annually), primarily as rain during the summer months, but also as fog and snow; as evaporation is also low for most of the year, precipitation exceeds evaporation and is sufficient for the dense vegetation growth. Snow may remain on the ground for as long as nine months in the northernmost extensions of the taiga ecozone.

Much of the area currently classified as taiga was recently glaciated. As the glaciers receded, they left depressions in the topography that have since filled with water, creating lakes and bogs (especially muskeg soil), found throughout the Taiga.

Taiga soil tends to be young and nutrient-poor; it lacks the deep, organically-enriched profile The thinness of the soil is due largely to the cold which hinders the development of soil, as well as the ease with which plants can use its nutrients. Fallen leaves and moss can remain on the forest floor for a long time in the cool, moist climate, which limits their organic contribution to the soil; acids from evergreen needles further leach the soil, creating spodosol.^[5] Since the soil is acidic due to the falling pine needles, the forest floor has only lichens and some mosses growing on it. It is not good for farming because it is nutrient poor.

present in temperate deciduous forests.

There are two major types of taiga, closed forest, consisting of many closely-spaced trees with mossy ground cover, and lichen woodland, with trees that are farther-spaced and lichen ground cover; the latter is more common in the northernmost taiga.

The forests of the taiga are largely coniferous, dominated by larch, spruce, fir, and pine. Evergreen species in the taiga (spruce, fir, and pine) have a number of adaptations specifically for survival in harsh taiga winters, though larch, the most cold-tolerant of all trees, is deciduous. Taiga trees tend to have shallow roots to take advantage of the thin soils, while many of them seasonally alter their biochemistry to make them more resistant to freezing, called "hardening". The narrow conical shape of northern conifers, and their downward-drooping limbs, also help them shed snow.

Because the sun is low in the horizon for most of the year, it is difficult for plants to generate energy from photosynthesis. Pine and spruce do not lose their leaves seasonally and are able to photosynthesize with their older leaves in late winter and spring when light is good but temperatures are still too low for new growth to commence. The adaptation of evergreen needles limits the water lost due to transpiration and their dark green color increases their absorption of sunlight. Although precipitation is not a limiting factor, the ground freezes during the winter months and plant roots are unable to absorb water, so desiccation can be a severe problem in late winter for evergreens.

Although the taiga is dominated by coniferous forests, some broadleaf trees also occur, notably birch, aspen, willow, and rowan. Many smaller herbaceous plants grow closer to the ground. Periodic stand-replacing wildfires (with return times of between 20-200 years) clear out the tree canopies, allowing sunlight to invigorate new growth on the forest floor. For some species, wildfires are a necessary part of the life cycle in the taiga; some, e.g. Jack Pine have cones which only open to release their seed after a fire, dispersing their seeds onto the newly cleared ground. Grassesmosses and lichens thrive on the damp ground and on the sides of tree trunks. In comparison with other biomes, however, the taiga has a low biological diversity. grow wherever they can find a patch of sun, and

Coniferous trees are the dominant plants of the taiga biome. A very few species in four main genera are found: the evergreen spruce, fir, and pine, and the deciduous larch or tamarack. In North America, one or two species of fir and one or two species of spruce are dominant. Across Scandanavia and western Russia the Scots pine is a common component of the taiga.

The taiga is home to a number of large herbivorous mammals and smaller rodents. These animals have also adapted to survive the harsh climate. Some of the larger mammals, such as bears, eat during the summer in order to gain weight and then go into hibernation during the winter. Other animals have adapted layers of fur or feathers to insulate them from the cold.

A number of wildlife species threatened or endangered with extinction can be found in the Canadian Boreal forest including woodland caribou, grizzly bear and wolverine. Habitat loss due to destructive development, mostly in the form of logging, is the main cause of decline for these species.

Due to the climate, carnivorous diets are an inefficient means of obtaining energy; energy is limited, and most energy is lost between trophic levels. However, predatory birds (owls and eagles) and other smaller carnivores, including foxes and weasels, feed on the rodents. Larger carnivores, such as lynxes and wolves, prey on the larger animals. Omnivores, such as bears and raccoons are fairly common, sometimes picking through human garbage.

A considerable number of birds such as Siberian Thrush, White-throated Sparrow and Black-throated Green Warbler, migrate to this habitat to take advantage of the long summer days and abundance of insects found around the numerous bogs and lakes. Of the perhaps 300 species of birds that summer in the taiga, only 30 stay for the winter. These are either carrion-feeding or large raptors that can take live mammal prey, including Golden Eagle, Rough-legged Buzzard, and Raven, or else seed-eating birds, including several species of grouse and crossbills.

In Canada, less than 8% of the Boreal forest is protected from development and more than 50% has been allocated to logging companies for cutting . The main form of forestry in the Boreal forest in Canada is clearcutting, where most if not all trees are removed from an area of forest. Clearcut upwards of 110 km² have been recorded in the Canadian Boreal forest. Some of the products from logged Boreal forests include toilet paper, copy paper, newsprint and lumber. However, in most cases forest companies harvest trees to create high value products used for building and value added processing. Pulp is produced by using tree tops, low grade trees, and species which cannot be used for other products. More than 80% of Boreal forest products from Canada are exported for consumption and processing in the United States.

Most companies that harvest in Canadian forests are certified by an independent third party agency such as the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), Sustainable Forests Initiative (SFI), or the Canadian Standards Association (CSA). While the certification process differs between these the various groups all of them include forest stewardship, respect for aboriginal peoples, compliance with local, provincial and/or national environmental laws, forest worker safety, education and training, and other environmental, business and social requirements. The prompt renewal of all harvest sites by planting or natural renewal is also required.

The Subsurface Lithoautotrophic Microbial Ecosystem

2008-01-26T09:41:00.001-08:00

Evidence is accumulating to show that the Earth's biosphere extends underground into deep igneous rock formations. In certain formulations, abiotic energy-yielding reactions between reduced rocks and groundwater provide a potential for in situ primary production by anaerobic microorganisms-- thus obviating any dependence on a surface ecosystem. Conceivably, such ecosystems could exist in the subsurface of other planets in the solar system. The main requirements are water, ferrous silicate minerals, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen. Unfortunately, observation of the subsurface is difficult. For example, current estimates suggest that the hydrosphere on Mars might be more than 2 km below the surface. Living SLMEs might be detected through conduits to the subsurface, such as wells, springs, or seeps in deep canyon walls. Signals produced by SLMEs might include cells, metabolic products (such as reduced gases) and their isotope ratios, and isotope ratios in residual substrates. Rocks in which now-defunct SLMEs once existed might be more accessible if they are brought to the surface by rock cycle processes. Signals of extinct SLME remnants have not yet been investigated, but might include microfossils, certain secondary mineralization patterns, and isotope ratios of secondary materials. Examples of both extant and extinct SLMEs have been identified on Earth, and are available for study and experimentation.

The Savanna Ecosystem

2008-01-26T09:32:00.000-08:00

A savanna or savannah is a tropical or subtropical woodland ecosystem. Savannas are characterised by the trees being sufficiently small or widely spaced so that the canopy does not close. It is often believed that savannas are characterized by widely spaced, scattered trees, however in many savanna communities tree densities are higher and trees are more regularly spaced than in forest communities. The open canopy allows sufficient light to reach the ground to support an unbroken herbaceous layer consisting primarily of C4 grasses. Savannas are also characterised by seasonal water availability, with the majority of rainfall being confined to one season of the year. Savannas can be associated with several types of biomes. Savannas are frequently seen as a transitional zone, occurring between forest regions and desert regions.

Although the term savanna is believed to have originally come from a Native American word describing "land which is without trees but with much grass either tall or short" (Oviedo y Valdes, 1535), by the late 1800s it was used to mean "land with both grass and trees". It now refers to land with grass and either scattered trees or an open canopy of trees.

Savannas are subject to regular fires and the ecosystem appears to be the result of human use of fire. For example Native Americans created subtropical savannas by periodic burning in some areas of the US southeastern coast where fire-resistant Longleaf Pine was the dominant species. and savannas in India are a creation of human fire use.The maquis shrub savannas of the Mediterranean region were likewise created and maintained by anthropogenic fire. Aboriginal burning appears to have been responsible for the widespread occurrence of savanna in tropical Australia and New Guinea

These fires are usually confined to the herbaceous layer and do little long term damage to mature trees. However, these fires do serve to either kill or suppress tree seedlings, thus preventing the establishment of a continuous tree canopy which would prevent further grass growth. Prior to European settlement aboriginal land use practices, including fire, influenced vegetation and may have maintained and modified savanna flora. It has been suggested by many authors that aboriginal burning created a structurally more open savanna landscape. Aboriginal burning certainly created a habitat mosaic that probably increased biodiversity and changed the structure of woodlands and geographic range of numerous woodland species. It has been suggested by many authors that with the removal or alteration of traditional burning regimes many savannas are being replaced by forest and shrub thickets with little herbaceous layer.

The consumption of herbage by introduced grazers in savanna woodlands has led to a reduction in the amount of fuel available for burning and resulted in fewer and cooler fires.^[The introduction of exotic pasture legumes has also led to a reduction in the need to burn to produce a flush of green growth because legumes retain high nutrient levels throughout the year, and because fires can have a negative impact on legume populations which causes a reluctance to burn.

The closed forests types such as broadleaf forests and rainforests are usually not grazed owing to the closed structure precluding grass growth, and hence offering little opportunity for grazing. In contrast the open structure of savannas allows the growth of a herbaceous layer and are commonly used for grazing domestic livestock. As a result much of the world's savannas have undergone substantial change and degradation as a result of grazing by sheep, goats and cattle, ranging from changes in pasture composition to woody weed encroachment and severe soil erosion.

The removal of grass by grazing affects the woody plant component of woodland systems in two major ways. Grasses compete with woody plants for water in the topsoil and removal by grazing reduces this competitive effect, potentially boosting tree growth. In addition to this effect the removal of fuel reduces both the intensity and the frequency of fires which may control woody plant species. Grazing animals can have a more direct effect on woody plants by the browsing of palatable woody species. There is evidence that unpalatable woody plants have increased under grazing in savannas. Grazing also promotes the spread of weeds in savannas by the removal or reduction of the plants which would normally compete with potential weeds and hinder establishment. In addition to this cattle and horses are implicated in the spread of the seeds of weed species such as Prickly Acacia (Acacia nilotica) and Stylo (Stylosanthes spp.). These alterations in savanna species composition brought about by grazing can alter ecosystem function, and are exacerbated by overgrazing and poor land management practices.

Introduced grazing animals can also affect soil condition through physical compaction and break-up of the soil caused by the hooves of animals and through the erosion effects caused by the removal of protective plant cover. Such effects are most likely to occur on land subjected to repeated and heavy grazing. The effects of overstocking are often worst on soils of low fertility and in low rainfall areas below 500 mm, as most soil nutrients in these areas tend to be concentrated in the surface so any movement of soil can lead to severe degradation. Alteration in soil structure and nutrient levels affects the establishment, growth and survival of plant species and in turn can lead to a change in woodland structure and composition.

Large areas of savanna have been cleared of trees, and this clearing is continuing today. For example until recently 480,000 ha of savanna were cleared annually in Australia alone primarily to improve pasture production. Substantial savanna areas have been cleared of woody vegetation and much of the area that remains today is vegetation that has been disturbed by either clearing or thinning at some point in the past.

Clearing is carried out by the grazing industry in an attempt to increase the quality and quantity of feed available for stock and to improve the management of livestock. The removal of trees from savanna land removes the competition for water from the grasses present, and can lead to a two to fourfold increase in pasture production, as well as improving the quality of the feed available. Since stock carrying capacity is strongly correlated with herbage yield there can be major financial benefits from the removal of trees. The removal of trees also assists grazing management. For example in sheep grazing regions of dense tree and shrub cover harbours predators, leading to increased stock losses while woody plant cover hinders mustering in both sheep and cattle areas.

A number of techniques have been employed to clear or kill woody plants in savanna. Early pastoralists used felling and ringbarking, the removal of a ring of bark and sapwood, as a means of clearing land). In the 1950’s arboricides suitable for stem injection were developed. War-surplus heavy machinery was made available, and these were used for either pushing timber, or for pulling using a chain and ball strung between two machines. These two new methods of timber control, along with the introduction and widespread adoption of several new pasture grasses and legumes promoted a resurgence in tree clearing. The 1980’s also saw the release of soil-applied arboricides, notably tebuthiuron, that could be utilised without cutting and injecting each individual tree.

In many ways ‘artificial’ clearing, particularly pulling, mimics the effects of fire and, in savannas adapted to regeneration after fire as most Queensland savannas are, there is a similar response to that after fire.Tree clearing in many sevanna communities, although causing a dramatic reduction in basal area and canopy cover, often leaves a high percentage of woody plants alive either as seedlings too small to be affected or as plants capable of re-sprouting from lignotubers and broken stumps. A population of woody plants equal to half or more of the original number often remains following pulling of eucalypt communities, even if all the trees over 5 metres are uprooted completely.

A number of exotic plants species have been introduced to the savannas around the world. Amongst the woody plant species are serious environmental weeds such as Prickly Acacia (Acacia nilotica), Rubbervine (Cryptostegia grandiflora), Mesquite (Prosopis spp.), Lantana (Lantana camara and L. montevidensis) and Prickly Pear (Opuntia spp.) A range of herbaceous species have also been introduced to these woodlands, either deliberately or accidentally including Rhodes grass and other Chloris species, Buffel grass (Cenchrus ciliaris), Giant rats tail grass (Sporobolus pyramidalis) parthenium (Parthenium hysterophorous) and stylos (Stylosanthes spp.) and other legumes. These introductions have the potential to significantly alter the structure and composition of savannas worldwide, and have already done so in many areas through a numbers of processes including altering the fire regime, increasing grazing pressure, competing with native vegetation and occupying previously vacant ecological niches.

There exists the possibility that human induced climate change in the form of the greenhouse effect may result in an alteration of the structure and function of savannas. Some authors have suggested that savannas and grasslands may become even more susceptible to woody plant encroachment as a result of greenhouse induced climate change. A recent case described involved a savanna increasing its range at the expense of forest in response to climate variation, and potential exists for similar rapid, dramatic shifts in vegetation distribution as a result of global climate change, particularly at ecotones such as savannas so often represent.

The Rainforest Ecosystem

2008-01-26T09:28:00.000-08:00

Rainforests, or rain forests, are forests characterized by high rainfall, with definitions setting minimum normal annual rainfall between 1750 mm and 2000 mm (68 inches to 78 inches).

Rainforests are home to two thirds of all the living animal and plant species on the planet. It has been estimated that many hundreds of millions of new species of plants, insects and microorganisms are still undiscovered. Tropical rain forests are called the "jewels of the earth", and the "world's largest pharmacy" because of the large number of natural medicines discovered there. Tropical rain forests are also often called the "Earth's lungs", however there is no scientific basis for such a claim as tropical rainforests are known to be essentially oxygen neutral, with little or no net oxygen production.

The undergrowth in a rainforest is restricted in many areas by the lack of sunlight at ground level. This makes it possible for people and other animals to walk through the forest. If the leaf canopy is destroyed or thinned for any reason, the ground beneath is soon colonized by a dense tangled growth of vines, shrubs and small trees called jungle.

( contiguous area of The largest tropical rainforests exist in the Amazon Basin (the Amazon Rainforest), in NicaraguaLos Guatuzos, Bosawás and Indio-Maiz), the southern Yucatán Peninsula-El Peten-BelizeCentral America (including the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve), in much of equatorial Africa from Cameroon to the Democratic Republic of Congo, in much of southeastern Asia from Myanmar to Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, northern and eastern Australia and in the Hawaiian Islands. The majority of tropical rainforest is found within a 20 degree band around the equator.

along the Outside of the tropics, temperate rainforests can be found in North America including the northwestern coast of the United States and the Pacific coast of Canada. In Europe they are found in coastal portions of Ireland, Scotland and southern Norway, parts of the western BalkansAdriatic coast, coastal areas of the eastern Black Sea including Georgia and coastal Turkey. In Asia portions of southern China, Taiwan, much of Japan, Korea, Sakhalin Island and the adjacent coast of Russia.

A natural rainforest emits and absorbs vast quantities of carbon dioxide. Over the long term these fluxes are approximately in balance, so that an undisturbed rainforest would have little net impact on atmospheric CO₂ levels, though they may have other climatic effects (on cloud formation, for example, by recycling water vapour). No rainforest in the 21st century can be considered to be undisturbed. Human induced deforestation plays a significant role in causing rainforest to release carbon dioxide, as do natural processes such as drought that result in tree death and these droughts themselves are believed to be exacerbated by human induced climate change. Some climate model runs with interactive vegetation predict a large loss of Amazonian rainforest around 2050 due to drought, leading to forest dieback and the subsequent feedback of releasing more carbon dioxide.

Marine Ecosystems

2008-01-26T09:26:00.000-08:00

Marine ecosystems are part of the earth's aquatic ecosystem. They include oceans, estuaries, salt marshes, lagoons, some tropical ecosystems, such as mangrove forests and coral reefs, rocky, subtidal ecosystems, and shores. The main difference between this and other aquatic ecosystems is its salt content larger than that of fresh water.

Littoral Zone Ecosystem

2008-01-26T09:23:00.000-08:00

Littoral refers to the coast of an ocean or sea, or to the banks of a river, lake or estuary. It is usually used as an adjective, but may also be used as a noun. The littoral zone is defined as the area between the high water and low water marks. The word is derived from the Latin noun litus, litoris, meaning "shore". (The doubled 't' is a late mediaeval innovation and the word is sometimes seen in the more classical-looking spelling 'litoral'.)

In lakes, where tides are usually negligibly small, other definitions of "littoral" must be used. The Minnesota Department of Natural Resources defines littoral as that portion of the lake that is less than 15 feet in depth. This zone is home to most of the aquatic plantlife (both rooted and floating) in a pond or lake because the high amount of sunlight reaching it allows for significant photosynthetic activity.

The adjacency of water gives a number of distinctive characteristics to littoral regions. Water's erosive power results in particular types of landforms, such as sand dunes, and estuaries. The natural movement of the littoral along the coast is called the littoral drift. Biologically, the ready availability of water enables a greater variety of plant and animal life, and the additional local humidity due to evaporation usually creates a microclimate supporting unique types of organisms.

The littoral zone is bordered by the supra-littoral zone, also known as the "spray zone", and the sublittoral zone, which runs to the edge of the continental shelf.

Chaparral Ecosystem

2008-01-26T09:20:00.000-08:00

Chaparral is a shrubland or heathland plant community found primarily in California, USA, that is shaped by a Mediterranean climate (mild, wet winters and hot dry summers) and wildfire. Similar plant communities are found in the five other Mediterranean climate regions around the world, including the Mediterranean Basin (where it is known as maquis), central Chile (where it is called matorral), South African Cape Region (known there as fynbos), and in Western and Southern Australia.

The word chaparral is a loan word from Spanish. The Spanish word comes from the word chaparro, which means both small and dwarf evergreen oak, which itself comes from the Basquetxapar, with the same meaning. word

A typical chaparral plant community consists of densely-growing evergreen scrub oaks and other drought-resistant shrubs. It often grows so densely that it is all but impenetrable to large animals and humans. This, and its generally arid condition, makes it notoriously prone to wildfires. Although many chaparral plant species require some fire cue (heat, smoke, or charred wood) for germination, chaparral plants are not "adapted" to fire per se. Rather, these species are adapted to particular fire regimes involving season, frequency, intensity and severity of the burn.

Chaparral is one of the most fire-prone plant communities in North America. As a consequence, since an increasing number of developments are pushing into the backcountry along what is known as the wildland-urban interface, management of the system has become increasingly important.

There are two assumptions relating to California chaparral fire regimes that appear to have caused considerable confusion and controversy within the fields of wildfire and land management: first, older stands of chaparral become “senescent” or “decadent” implying they need fire to remain healthy (Hanes 1971), and second, fire suppression policies have allowed chaparral to accumulate unnatural levels of fuel leading to larger fires (Minnich 1983).

The perspective that older chaparral is unhealthy or unproductive may have originated during the 1940s when studies were conducted measuring the amount of forage available to deer populations in chaparral stands. However, according to recent studies, California chaparral is extraordinarily resilient to very long periods without fire (Keeley, J.E., A.H. Pfaff, and H.D. Safford 2005) and continues to maintain productive growth throughout pre-fire conditions (Hubbard 1986, Larigauderie et al. 1990). Seeds of many chaparral plants actually require 30 years or more worth of accumulated leaf litter before they will successfully germinate (e.g. scrub oak: Quercus berberidifolia, toyon: Heteromeles arbutifolia, holly-leafed cherry: Prunus ilicifolia). When intervals between fires drop below 10 to 15 years, many chaparral species are eliminated and the system is typically replaced by non-native, weedy grassland (Haidinger and Keeley 1993, Keeley 1995, Zedler 1995).

The idea that older chaparral is responsible for causing large fires was originally proposed in the 1980’s by comparing wildfires in Baja California and southern California. It was suggested that fire suppression activities in southern California allowed more fuel to accumulate which in turn led to larger fires (in Baja, fires often burn without active suppression efforts). This is similar to the argument that fire suppression in western United States has allowed Ponderosa Pine forests to become “overstocked.” In the past, surface-fires burned through these forests at intervals of anywhere between 4 and 36 years, clearing out the understory and creating a more ecologically balanced system. However, chaparral has a crown-fire regime, meaning fires consume the entire system whenever they burn. Detailed analysis of historical fire data has shown that fire suppression activities have failed to exclude fire from southern California chaparral as they have in Ponderosa Pine forests (Keeley et al. 1999). In addition, the number of fires is increasing in step with population growth. Overall, chaparral stand age does not have a significant correlation to its tendency to burn (Moritz et al. 2004). Low humidity, low fuel moisture, and high winds appear to be the primary factors in determining when a chaparral stand burns.

Large marine ecosystems

2008-01-26T08:26:00.001-08:00

Large marine ecosystems (LMEs) are regions of the world's oceans, encompassing coastal areas from river basins and estuaries to the seaward boundaries of continental shelves and the outer margins of the major ocean current systems. They are relatively large regions on the order of 200,000 km² or greater, characterized by distinct bathymetry, hydrography, productivity, and trophically dependent populations.

The system of LMEs has been developed by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to identify areas of the oceans for conservation purposes.

Although the LMEs cover only the continental margins and not the deep oceans and oceanic islands, the 64 LMEs produce 95% of the world's annual marine fishery biomass yields. Most of the global ocean pollution, overexploitation, and coastal habitat alteration occur within their waters. NOAA has conducted studies of principal driving forces affecting changes in biomass yields for 33 of the 64 LMEs, which have been peer-reviewed and published in ten volumes.

Human Ecosystems

2008-01-26T08:18:00.000-08:00

Human ecosystems are complex cybernetic systems that are increasingly being used by ecological anthropologists and other scholars to examine the ecological aspects of human communities in a way that integrates multiple factors as economics, socio-political organization, psychological factors, and physical factors related to the environment.

The term ‘ecosystem’ was coined in 1930 by Roy Clapham, to denote the physical and biological components of an environment considered in relation to each other as a unit. British ecologist Arthur Tansley later refined the term, describing it as the interactive system established between biocoenosis (a group of living creatures) and their biotope (the environment in which they live).

Central to the ecosystem concept is the idea that living organisms are continually engaged in a set of relationships with every other element constituting the environment in which they exist. The human ecosystem concept is then grounded in the deconstruction of the human/nature dichotomy, and the emergent premise that all species are ecologically integrated with each other, as well as with the abiotic constituents of their biotope. Ecosystems can be bounded and discussed with tremendous variety of scope, and describe any situation where there is relationship between organisms and their environment.

A system as small as a household or university, or as large as a nation state, may then be suitably discussed as a human ecosystem. While they may be bounded and individually discussed, (human) ecosystems do not exist independently, but interact in a complex web of human and ecological relationships connecting all (human) ecosystems to make up the biosphere. As virtually no surface of the earth today is free of human contact, all ecosystems can be more accurately considered as human ecosystems.

The human ecosystem concept draws from disciplines such as ecology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, political science, cybernetics, and psychology, seeking to understand the complex system of relationships in which humans interact. These relationships exist within nested hierarchies of context with which individuals and human aggregates interact with differentially. Most analysis of human ecosystems focuses on particular contexts of relationship, such as biological, individual, socio-cultural, environmental et cetera.

World Systems Theory, as proposed by Immanuel Wallerstein, is an example of a systemic analysis of the socio-political and economic dimensions of the global network of human ecosystems. The human ecosystem unit of analysis is perhaps most often used by ecological anthropologists, and is apparent in the work of scholars such as Roy Rappaport, who has explored ritual cycles and communication within human ecosystems (Rappaport, 1999). Gregory Bateson, E.N. Anderson, Mary Douglas, Keith Basso, and Paul Nadasdy are some other anthropologists who have employed the human ecosystem as a unit of analyses.

Through the emergence and subsequent evolution of cybernetics human ecosystems are increasingly recognized as complex cybernetic systems. Cybernetics, the study of communication and control in living beings and machines, was established as a cohesive discipline in the 1940s by Norbert Wiener (who coined the term), Warren McCulloch and others. The discipline is not grounded in any one empirical field, but is concerned with the study of systems and control in an abstracted sense. The emphasis is on the functional relations that hold between the different parts of a system, rather than the parts themselves. This is directly applicable to any inquiry involving human ecosystems, which emphasize the relationships between humans and the biotic and abiotic constituents of the environments they inhabit. Such relationships include the transfer of information, nested hierarchies of context and meaning, feedback, emergent phenomena, self-organization and autopoiesis. These phenomena are perhaps most holistically identified and interpreted by means of cybernetic analysis.

The transmission and transformation of information is central to the inquiry of human ecosystems. As scholars such as E.N. Anderson illustrate (1996), humans certainly appear to be specialized information processors. In the context of human ecosystems, information is viewed as a type of input to or output from an organism or designed device. This idea stems from information theory, the foundations of which were laid by Claude Shannon, who published an influential paper titled “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” in 1948. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s cognitive psychology became concerned with information processing, in attempt to understanding human thinking. This approach considers cognition as being essentially computational. During this time cybernetics was emerging, also concerned with the nature and transmission of information.

Information processing is generally considered as the changing (processing) of information in any manner detectable by the observer. It can be described as either sequential or parallel, both of which can be either centralized or decentralized (distributed). Cyberneticians have argued that it is a process which describes everything that happens (changes) in the universe, from the falling of a rock (a change in position) to the printing of a text file from a digital computer system. In the 1960s and 1970s cybernetic theory began to permeate anthropology, through the work of Roy RappaportGregory Bateson in particular. and

Work by scholars such as Roy Rappaport, Gregory Bateson, and E.N Anderson has focused of transfer and transformation of information in human ecosystems. Inquiries as such have focused on the ecological and informational aspects of relationships in human ecosystems. In Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) Bateson discusses information as pattern and difference within complex cybernetic systems.

In the 1990s Edwin Hutchins developed a school of psychology known as distributed cognition, which draws heavily from anthropology and sociology, emphasizing the social aspects of cognition. Distributed cognition is directly applicable to studies of human ecosystems, considering systems as sets of representations, and modeling the interchange of information between these representations. These representations can be either in the mental space of the participants or external representations available in the environment. In Cognition in the Wild (1994) Hutchins considers information processing within a bounded human ecosystem in a discussion of distributed cognition on board a naval vessel.

Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem

2008-01-26T07:58:00.000-08:00

Greater Yellowstone is the last remaining large, nearly intact ecosystem in the northern temperate zone of the Earth and is partly located in Yellowstone National Park. Conflict over management has been controversial, and the area is a flagship site among conservation groups that promote ecosystem management. The Greater Yellow Ecosystem (GYE) is one of the world's foremost natural laboratories in landscape ecology and geology and is a world-renowned recreational site. It is also home to the animals of Yellowstone.

Yellowstone National Park boundaries were arbitrarily drawn in 1872 in hopes of including all regional geothermal basins in the area. No other landscape considerations were incorporated. By the 1970s, however, the grizzly bear's (Ursus arctos) range in and near the park became the first informal minimum boundary of a theoretical Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem that included at least 16,000 km² (4,000,000 acres). Since then, definitions of the greater ecosystem's size have steadily grown larger. A 1994 study listed the size as 76,890 km² (19,000,000 acres), while a 1994 speech by a Greater Yellowstone Coalition leader enlarged that to 80,000 km² (20,000,000 acres).

In 1985 the United States House of Representatives Subcommittees on Public Lands and National Parks and Recreation held a joint subcommittee hearing on Greater Yellowstone, resulting in a 1986 report by the Congressional Research Service outlining shortcomings in interagency coordination and concluding that the area's essential values were at risk.

Other federally managed areas within the GYE include Gallatin, Custer, Caribou-Targhee, Bridger-Teton and Shoshone National Forests, as well as the National Elk Refuge and Grand Teton National Park. The GYE also encompasses some privately held lands surrounding those managed by the U.S. Government. Outside of Yellowstone National Park, ten distinct wildernessNational Forests since 1966 to ensure a higher level of habitat protection than is normally mandated. areas have been established in the

The great ecosystem concept has been most often advanced through concerns over individual species rather than over broader ecological principles. Though 20 or 30 or even 50 years of information on a population may be considered long-term by some, one of the important lessons of Greater Yellowstone management is that even half a century is not long enough to give a full idea of how a species may vary in its occupation of a wild ecosystem.

For example, anecdotal information on grizzly bear abundance dates to the mid-1800s, and administrators have made informal population estimates for more than 70 years. From these sources, ecologists know the species was common in Greater Yellowstone when Europeans arrived and that the population was not isolated before the 1930s, but is now. Researchers do not know if bears were more or less common than now.

A 1959-1970 bear study suggested a grizzly bear population size of about 175, later revised to about 229.[1] Later estimates have ranged as low as 136 and as high as 540; the most recent is a minimum estimate of 236.[2] Although the Greater Yellowstone population is relatively close to recovery goals, the plan's definition of recovery is controversial. Thus, even though the population may be stable or possibly increasing in the short term, in the longer term, continued habitat loss and increasing human activities may well reverse the trend.

Yellowstone cutthroat trout (Oncorhynchus clarki bouvieri) have suffered considerable declines since European settlement, but recently began flourishing in some areas. Especially in Yellowstone Lake itself, long-term records indicate an almost remarkable restoration of robust populations from only three decades ago when the numbers of this fish were depleted because of excessive harvest. Its current recovery, though a significant management achievement, does not begin to restore the species' historical abundance.

Early accounts of pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) in Greater Yellowstone described herds of hundreds seen ranging through most major river valleys. These populations were decimated by 1900, and declines continued among remaining herds. On the park's northern range, pronghorn declined from 500-700 in the 1930s to about 122 in 1968. By 1992 the herd had increased to 536.

Among plants, whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis) is a species of special interest, in large part because of its seasonal importance to grizzly bears, but also because its distribution could be dramatically reduced by relatively minor global warming. In this case, researchers do not have a good long-term data set on the species, but they understand its ecology well enough to project declining future conservation status. A more immediate, and serious, threat to whitebark pine is an introduced fungal disease, white pine blister rust (Cronartium ribicola), which is causing heavy mortality in the species. Occasional resistant individuals occur, but in the short to medium term, a severe population decline is expected.

Estimates of the decline of quaking aspen (Populus tremuloides) on the park's northern range since 1872 range from 50% to 95%, and perhaps no controversy underway in Greater Yellowstone more clearly reveals the need for comprehensive interdisciplinary research. Several factors are suspected in the aspen's changing status, including Native American influences on numerous mammal species and on fire-return intervals before the creation of the park in 1872; European influences on fire frequency since 1886; regional climate warming; human harvests of beaver and ungulates in the first 15 years of the park's history and of wolves and other predators before 1930; human settlement of traditional ungulate migration routes north of the park since 1872; ungulate (especially elk) effects on all other parts of the ecosystem since 1900; and human influences on elk distribution in the park.

The Yellowstone hot springs are important for their diversity of thermophilic bacteria. These bacteria have been useful in studies of the evolution of photosynthesis and as sources of thermostable enzymes for molecular biology. Although the smell of sulfur is common and there are some sulfur fixing cyanobacteria, it has been found that hydrogen is being used as an energy source by extremophile microbes.

List of Deserts in the World

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Africa

Sahara – the world's largest hot desert, in northern Africa
Kalahari – a desert in southern Africa
Namib – a desert located primarily in Namibia

Antarctica

Antarctica – the interior of the continent is the world's largest desert

Asia

Gobi – a desert in Mongolia
Taklamakan – a desert located in China
Ordos – a desert in northern China
Kara Kum – a large Central Asian desert
Kyzyl Kum – a desert located in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan
Thar- Cholistan – a desert in India and Pakistan
Dasht-e Lut - a large salt desert in southeastern Iran.
Dasht-e Kavir – a desert in center of Iran

Australasia

Main article: Deserts of Australia

Gibson Desert – a central Australian desert
Great Sandy Desert – a northwestern Australian desert
Great Victoria Desert – the sixth largest desert in the world by area, located in south-central Australia
Simpson Desert – a central Australian desert
Little Sandy Desert – a western Australian desert
Strzelecki Desert – a south-central Australian desert
Tanami Desert – a northern Australian desert
Western Desert – a desert located in western Australia, comprising the Gibson, Great Sandy, and Little Sandy deserts
Rangipo Desert – a barren high altitude desert on the North Island Volcanic Plateau in New Zealand

Europe

Hálendi – a region of Iceland and Europe's largest desert
Błędowska Desert – a desert located in Lesser Poland Voivodeship, Poland
Deliblatska Peščara – a desert located in Vojvodina, Serbia
Oltenian Sahara – a desert spanning approximately 80.000 hectares or 800 km² in the Romanian historical province of Oltenia
Tabernas Desert – a desert in Almería, Spain.
Accona Desert - a desert in Tuscany, Italy

Middle East

Arabian Desert – a vast desert complex on the Arabian Peninsula comprising the Al-Dahna Desert, Empty Quarter, Nefud Desert and other deserts
Dasht-e Kavir – a desert in central Iran
Dasht-e Lut – a large salt desert in southeastern Iran
Judean Desert – a desert in eastern Israel and in the West Bank
Negev – a desert located in southern Israel
Desert of Sin / Zin Desert (Bible usage) – a desert located on the Sinai Peninsula

North America

Great Basin Desert – the largest desert in North America, located in the western United States
Mojave Desert – a desert located primarily in southeastern California
Chihuahuan Desert – the second largest desert in North America, in the United States and Mexico
Sonoran Desert – a desert located in the United States and Mexico

South America

Patagonian Desert – the largest desert by area in the Americas, located in Argentina
La Guajira Desert – a desert in northern Colombia and some of northwestern Venezuela
Atacama – a desert in Chile, the driest place on Earth
Sechura Desert – a desert located along a portion of the northwestern coast of South America
Monte Desert – in Argentina, a smaller desert above the Patagonian

Aridification

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Aridification is the process of a region becoming increasingly dry. It refers to long term change rather than seasonal variation. It is often measured as the reduction of average soil moisture content. It can be caused by natural or anthropogenic means such as climate change, reduced precipitation, increased evaporation, lowering of water tables or changes in ground cover. Its major consequences include reduced agricultural production, soil degradation, ecosystem changes and decreased water catchment runoff.

Desertification

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Desertification is the degradation of land in arid, semi arid and dry sub-humid areas resulting from various climatic variations, but primarily from human activities. Current desertification is taking place much faster worldwide than historically and usually arises from the demands of increased populations that settle on the land in order to grow crops and graze animals.

A major impact of desertification is biodiversity loss and loss of productive capacity, for example, by transition from grassland dominated by perennial grasses to one dominated by perennial shrubs. In the southwestern deserts of the United States, semiarid ecosystems dominated by perennial bunchgrasses, including blue grama and black grama, have been replaced by shrublands dominated by creosotebush since the early 1900s. The change in vegetation is thought to have induced desertification in this region. In the Madagascar's central highland plateau, 10% of the entire country has been lost to desertification due to slash and burnAfrica, if current trends of soil degradation continue, the continent might be able to feed just 25% of its population by 2025, according to UNU's Ghana-based Institute for Natural Resources in Africa.

Desertification is induced by several factors, primarily anthropogenic at the current era. Chief causes are deforestation, overgrazing, overdrafting of groundwater, salination of soil, overagriculture, and global climate change, all fundamentally caused by the burgeoning human population.

Deserts may be separated from surrounding, less arid areas by mountains and other contrasting landforms that reflect basic structural differences in the terrain. In other areas, desert fringes form a gradual transition from a dry to a more humid environment, making it more difficult to determine the desert border. These transition zones have very fragile, delicately balanced ecosystems. Desert fringes often are a mosaic of microclimates. Small hollows support vegetation that picks up heat from the hot winds and protects the land from the prevailing winds. After rainfall the vegetated areas are distinctly cooler than the surroundings.

In these marginal areas human activity may stress the ecosystem beyond its tolerance limit, resulting in degradation of the land. By pounding the soil with their hooves, livestock compact the substrate, increase the proportion of fine material, and reduce the percolation rate of the soil, thus encouraging erosion by wind and water. Grazing and collection of firewood reduce or eliminate plants that help to bind the soil.

In large desert areas, sand dunes can encroach on human habitats. Sand dunes move through a few different means, all of them helped by wind. One way that dunes can move is through saltation, where sand particles skip along the ground like a rock thrown across a pond might skip across the water's surface. When these skipping particles land, they may knock into other particles and cause them to skip as well. With slightly stronger winds, particles collide in mid-air, causing sheet flows. In a major dust storm, dunes may move tens of meters through such sheet flows. And like snow, sand avalanches, falling down the steep slopes of the dunes that face away from the winds, also moving the dunes forward.

It is a common misconception that droughts by themselves cause desertification. While drought is a contributing factor, the causes are social and economic, having to do with tenure (access to resources), power and economics. Droughts are common in arid and semiarid lands, and well-managed lands can recover from drought when the rains return. Continued land abuse during droughts, however, increases land degradation. Increased population and livestock pressure on marginal lands has accelerated desertification. In some areas, nomads moving to less arid areas disrupt the local ecosystem and increase the rate of erosion of the land. Nomads are trying to escape the desert, but because of their land-use practices, they are bringing the desert with them.

Some arid and semi-arid lands can support crops, but additional pressure from greater populations or decreases in rainfall can lead to the few plants present disappearing. The soilwind, causing soil particles to be deposited elsewhere. The top layer becomes eroded. With the removal of shade, rates of evaporation increase and salts become drawn up to the surface. This increases soil salinity which inhibits plant growth. The loss of plants causes less moisture to be retained in the area, which may change the climate pattern leading to lower rainfall. becomes exposed to

This degradation of formerly productive land is a complex process. It involves multiple causes, and it proceeds at varying rates in different climates. Desertification may intensify a general climatic trend toward greater aridity, or it may initiate a change in local climate. Desertification does not occur in linear, easily mappable patterns. Deserts advance erratically, forming patches on their borders. Areas far from natural deserts can degrade quickly to barren soil, rock, or sand through poor land management. The presence of a nearby desert has no direct relationship to desertification. Unfortunately, an area undergoing desertification is brought to public attention only after the process is well under way. Often little data are available to indicate the previous state of the ecosystem or the rate of degradation.

Combating desertification is complex and difficult as well. Over-exploitation of the land and climate variations can have identical impacts and be connected in feedbacks, which makes it very difficult to choose the right mitigation strategy. Investigating the historic desertification plays a special role since it allows better distinguishing of human and natural factors. In this context, recent research about historic desertification in Jordan questions the dominant role of man. It seems possible that current measures like reforestation projects cannot achieve their goals if global warming continues. Forests may die when it gets drier, and more frequent extreme events as testified in sediments from earlier periods could become a threat for agriculture, water supply, and infrastructure.

Desertification is a historic phenomenon; the world's great deserts were formed by natural processes interacting over long intervals of time. During most of these times, deserts have grown and shrunk independent of human activities. Paleodeserts, large sand seas now inactive because they are stabilized by vegetation, extend well beyond the present margins of core deserts, such as the Sahara. Many deserts around western Asia came about because of an overpopulation of prehistoric species and subspecies during the late Cretaceous era.

Dated fossil pollen indicates that today's Sahara desert has been changing between desert and fertile savanna. Studies also show that prehistorically the advance and retreat of deserts tracked yearly rainfall, whereas a pattern of increasing amounts of desert began with human-driven activities of overgrazing and deforestation.

Overgrazing and to a lesser extent drought in the 1930s transformed parts of the Great Plains in the United States into the "Dust Bowl". During that time, a considerable fraction of the plains population abandoned their homes to escape the unproductive lands. Improved agricultural and water management have prevented a disaster of the earlier magnitude from recurring, but desertification presently affects tens of millions of people with primary occurrence in the lesser developed countries.

Desertification is widespread in many areas of the People's Republic of China. The populations of rural areas have increased since 1949 for political reasons as more people have settled there. While there has been an increase in livestock, the land available for grazing has decreased. Also the importing of European cattle such as Friesian and Simmental, which have higher food intakes, has made things worse.

Human overpopulation is leading to destruction of tropical wet forests and tropical dry forests, due to widening practices of slash-and-burn and other methods of subsistence farming necessitated by famines in lesser developed countries. A sequel to the deforestation is typically large scale erosion, loss of soil nutrients and sometimes total desertification. Examples of this extreme outcome can be seen on Madagascar's central highland plateau, where about seven percent of the country's total land mass has become barren, sterile land.

Overgrazing has made the Rio Puerco Basin of central New Mexico one of the most eroded river basins of the western United States and has increased the high sediment content of the river. South Africa such as the Waterberg Massif, although restoration of native habitat and game has been pursued vigorously since about 1980. Overgrazing is also an issue with some regions of

Another example of desertification occurring is in the Sahel. The chief cause of desertification in the Sahel is slash-and-burn farming practised by an expanding human population.

The Desert of Maine is a 40 acre dune of glacial silt near Freeport, Maine. Overgrazing and soil erosion exposed the cap of the dune, revealing the desert as a small patch that continued to grow, overtaking the land. The site is maintained as a tourist attraction.

Ghana and Nigeria currently experience desertification; in the latter, desertification overtakes about 1,355 square miles (3,510 km²) of land per year. The Central Asian countries, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, are also affected. More than 80% of Afghanistan's land could be subject to soil erosion and desertification. In Kazakhstan, nearly half of the cropland has been abandoned since 1980. In Iran, sand storms were said to have buried 124 villages in Sistan and Baluchestan Province in 2002, and they had to be abandoned. In Latin America, Mexico and Brazil are affected by desertification.

Global warming is leading to increased desertification in many areas of the world.

Human Life in The Desert

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A desert is a hostile, potentially deadly environment for unprepared humans. In hot deserts, high temperatures cause rapid loss of water due to sweating, and the absence of water sources with which to replenish it can result in dehydration and death within a few days. In addition, unprotected humans are also at risk from heatstroke.

Humans may also have to adapt to sandstorms in some deserts, not just in their adverse effects on respiratory systems and eyes, but also in their potentially harmful effects on equipment such as filters, vehicles and communication equipment.

Despite this, some cultures have made hot deserts their home for thousands of years, including the Bedouin, Tuareg tribe and Pueblo people. Modern technology, including advanced irrigationdesalinization and air conditioning have made deserts much more hospitable. In the United States and Israel for example, desert farming has found extensive use. systems,

In cold deserts, hypothermia and frostbite are the chief hazards, as well as dehydration in the absence of a source of heat to melt ice for drinking. Falling through pack-ice or surface ice layers into freezing water is a particular danger requiring emergency action to prevent rapid hypothermia. Starvation is also a hazard, in low temperatures the body requires much more food energy to maintain body heat and to move. As with hot deserts, some people such as the Inuit have adapted to the harsh conditions of cold deserts.

Most traditional human life in deserts is nomadic. It depends in hot deserts on finding water, and on following infrequent rains to obtain grazing for livestock. In cold deserts, it depends on finding good hunting and fishing grounds, on sheltering from blizzards and winter extremes, and on storing enough food for winter. Permanent settlement in both kinds of deserts requires permanent water and food sources and adequate shelter, or the technology and energy sources to provide it.

Many deserts are flat and featureless, lacking landmarks, or composed of repeating landforms such as sand dunes or the jumbled ice-fields of glaciers. Advanced skills or devices are required to navigate through such landscapes and inexperienced travellers may perish when supplies run out after becoming lost. In addition sandstorms or blizzards may cause disorientation in severely-reduced visibility.

The danger represented by wild animals in deserts has featured in explorers' accounts but does not cause higher rates of death than in other environments such as rainforests or savanna woodland, and generally does not by itself affect human distribution. Defence against polar bearsvenomous snakes and scorpions in choosing sites at which to camp in some hot deserts. may be advisable in some areas of the Arctic, as may precautions against

Desert Mineral Resources

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Some mineral deposits are formed, improved, or preserved by geologic processes that occur in arid lands as a consequence of climate. Ground water leaches ore minerals and redeposits them in zones near the water table. This leaching process concentrates these minerals as ore that can be mined.

Evaporation in arid lands enriches mineral accumulation in their lakes. Lake beds known as Playas may be sources of mineral deposits formed by evaporation. Water evaporating in closed basins precipitates minerals such as gypsum, salts (including sodium nitrate and sodium chloride), and borates. The minerals formed in these evaporite deposits depend on the composition and temperature of the saline waters at the time of deposition.

Significant evaporite resources occur in the Great Basin Desert of the United States, mineral deposits made famous by the "20-mule teams" that once hauled borax-laden wagons from Death Valley to the railroad. Boron, from borax and borate evaporites, is an essential ingredient in the manufacture of glass, enamel, agricultural chemicals, water softeners, and pharmaceuticals. Borates are mined from evaporite deposits at Searles Lake, California, and other desert locations. The total value of chemicals that have been produced from Searles Lake substantially exceeds US$1 billion.

The Atacama Desert of South America is unique among the deserts of the world in its great abundance of saline minerals. Sodium nitrate has been mined for explosives and fertilizer in the Atacama since the middle of the 19th century. Nearly 3 million tonnes were mined during World War I.

Valuable minerals located in arid lands include copper in the United States, Chile, Peru, and Iran; iron and lead-zinc ore in Australia; chromite in Turkey; and gold, silver, and uranium deposits in Australia and the United States. Nonmetallic mineral resources and rocks such as beryllium, mica, lithium, clays, pumice, and scoria also occur in arid regions. Sodium carbonate, sulfate, borate, nitrate, lithium, bromine, iodine, calcium, and strontium compounds come from sediments and near-surface brines formed by evaporation of inland bodies of water, often during geologically recent times.

The Green River Formation of Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah contains alluvial fan deposits and playa evaporites created in a huge lake whose level fluctuated for millions of years. Economically significant deposits of trona, a major source of sodium compounds, and thick layers of oil shale were created in the arid environment.

Some of the more productive petroleum areas on Earth are found in arid and semiarid regions of Africa and the Mideast, although the oil fields were originally formed in shallow marine environments. Recent climate change has placed these reservoirs in an arid environment. It's noteworthy that Ghawar, the world's largest and most productive oilfield is mostly under the Empty Quarter and Al-Dahna deserts.

Other oil reservoirs, however, are presumed to be eolian in origin and are presently found in humid environments. The Rotliegendes, a hydrocarbon reservoir in the North Sea, is associated with extensive evaporite deposits. Many of the major U.S. hydrocarbon resources may come from eolian sands. Ancient alluvial fan sequences may also be hydrocarbon reservoirs.

Desert Water

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Rain does fall occasionally in deserts, and desert storms are often violent. A record 44 millimeters (1.7 in) of rain once fell within 3 hours in the Sahara. Large Saharan storms may deliver up to 1 millimeter per minute. Normally dry stream channels, called arroyos or wadis, can quickly fill after heavy rains, and flash floods make these channels dangerous.

Though little rain falls in deserts, deserts receive runoff from ephemeral, or short-lived, streams fed considerable quantities of sediment for a day or two. Although most deserts are in basins with closed or interior drainage, a few deserts are crossed by 'exotic' rivers that derive their water from outside the desert. Such rivers infiltrate soils and evaporate large amounts of water on their journeys through the deserts, but their volumes are such that they maintain their continuity. The Nile River, the Colorado River, and the Yellow River are exotic rivers that flow through deserts to deliver their sediments to the sea. Deserts may also have underground springs, rivers, or reservoirs that lay close to the surface, or deep underground. Plants that have not completely adapted to sporadic rainfalls in a desert environment may tap into underground water sources that do not exceed the reach of their root systems.

Lakes form where rainfall or meltwater in interior drainage basins is sufficient. Desert lakes are generally shallow, temporary, and salty. Because these lakes are shallow and have a low bottom gradient, wind stress may cause the lake waters to move over many square kilometers. When small lakes dry up, they leave a salt crust or hardpan. The flat area of clay, silt, or sand encrusted with salt that forms is known as a playa. There are more than a hundred playas in North American deserts. Most are relics of large lakes that existed during the last ice age about 12,000 years ago. Lake Bonneville was a 52,000 kilometers² (20,000 mi²) lake almost 300 meters (1000 ft) deep in Utah, Nevada, and Idaho during the Ice Age. Today the remnants of Lake Bonneville include Utah's Great Salt Lake, Utah Lake, and Sevier Lake. Because playas are arid landforms from a wetter past, they contain useful clues to climatic change.

When the occasional precipitation does occur, it erodes the desert rocks quickly and powerfully.Winds are the other factor that erodes deserts—they are slow yet constant.

The flat terrains of hardpans and playas make them excellent racetracks and natural runways for airplanes and spacecraft. Ground-vehicle speed records are commonly established on Bonneville Speedway, a racetrack on the Great Salt Lake hardpan. Space shuttles land on Rogers Lake Playa at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

Desert Flora and fauna

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Deserts have a reputation for supporting very little life, but in reality deserts often have high biodiversity, including animals that remain hidden during daylight hours to control body temperature or to limit moisture needs. Some fauna includes the kangaroo rat, coyote, jack rabbit, and many lizards. Some flora includes shrubs, Prickly Pears, and the Brittle bush.

Most desert plants are drought- or salt-tolerant, such as xerophytes. Some store water in their leaves, roots, and stems. Other desert plants have long taproots that penetrate to the water table if present, or have adapted to the weather by having wide-spreading roots to absorb water from a greater area of the ground. Another adaptation is the development of small, spiny leaves which shed less moisture than deciduous leaves with greater surface areas. The stems and leaves of some plants lower the surface velocity of sand-carrying winds and protect the ground from erosion. Even small fungi and microscopic plant organisms found on the soil surface (so-called cryptobiotic soil) can be a vital link in preventing erosion and providing support for other living organisms.

Deserts typically have a plant cover that is sparse but enormously diverse. The giant saguaro cactiSonoran Desert provide nests for desert birds and serve as "trees" of the desert. Saguaro grow slowly but may live up to 200 years. When 9 years old, they are about 15 centimeters (6 in) high. After about 75 years, the cacti develop their first branches. When fully grown, saguaro cacti are 15 meters tall and weigh as much as 10 tons. They dot the Sonoran and reinforce the general impression of deserts as cactus-rich land. of the

Although cacti are often thought of as characteristic desert plants, other types of plants have adapted well to the arid environment. They include the pea and sunflower families. Cold deserts have grasses and shrubs as dominant vegetation.

Desert features

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Sand covers only about 20 percent of Earth's deserts. Most of the sand is in sand sheets and sand seas—vast regions of undulating dunes resembling ocean waves "frozen" in an instant of time. In general, there are six forms of deserts:

Mountain and basin deserts
Hamada deserts, which consist of plateau landforms
Regs, which consist of rock pavements
Ergs, which are formed by sand seas
Intermontane Basins
Badlands, which are located at the margins of arid lands comprising clay-rich soil

Nearly all desert surfaces are plains where eolian deflation—removal of fine-grained material by the wind—has exposed loose gravels consisting predominantly of pebbles but with occasional cobbles.

The remaining surfaces of arid lands are composed of exposed bedrock outcrops, desert soils, and fluvial deposits including alluvial fans, playas, desert lakes, and oases. Bedrock outcrops commonly occur as small mountains surrounded by extensive erosional plains.

Several different types of dunes exist. Barchan dunes are produced by strong winds blowing across a level surface and are crescent-shaped. Longitudinal or seif dunes are dunes that are parallel to a strong wind that blows in one general direction. Transverse dunes run at a right angle to the constant wind direction. Star dunes are star-shaped and have several ridges that spread out around a point.

Oases are vegetated areas moistened by springs, wells, or by irrigation. Many are artificial. Oases are often the only places in deserts that support crops and permanent habitation.

Types of desert

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In 1953, Peveril Meigs divided desert regions on Earth into three categories according to the amount of precipitation they received. In this now widely accepted system, extremely arid lands have at least 12 consecutive months without rainfall, arid lands have less than 250 millimeters (10 in) of annual rainfall, and semiarid lands have a mean annual precipitation of between 250 and 500 millimeters (10-20 in). arid and extremely arid lands are deserts, and semiarid grasslands are generally referred to as steppes.

Measurement of rainfall alone can't provide an accurate definition of what a desert is because being arid also depends on evaporation which depends in part on temperature. For example, Phoenix, Arizona receives less than 250 millimeters (10 in) of precipitation per year, and is immediately recognized as being located in a desert due to its arid adapted plants. The North Slope of Alaska's Brooks Range also receives less than 250 millimeters (10 in) of precipitation per year, but is not generally recognized as a desert region.

So "potential evapotranspiration" supplements measurement of rainfall in providing a scientific measurement-based definition of a desert. The water budget of an area can be calculated using the formula P-PE+/-S, wherein P is precipitation, PE is potential evapotranspiration rates and S is amount of surface storage of water. Evapotranspiration is the combination of water loss through atmospheric evaporation, coupled with the evaporative loss of water through the life processes of plants. Potential evapotranspiration, then, is the amount of water that could evaporate in any given region. As an example, Tucson, Arizona receives about 300 millimeters, (12 in), of rain per year, however about 2500 millimeters, (100 in), of water could evaporate over the course of a year. In other words, about 8 times more water could evaporate from the region than actually falls. Rates of evapotranspiration in other regions such as Alaska are much lower.

There are different forms of deserts. Cold deserts can be covered in snow or ice; frozen water unavailable to plant life. These are more commonly referred to as tundra if a short season of above-freezing temperatures is experienced, or as an ice cap if the temperature remains below freezing year-round, rendering the land almost completely lifeless.

Most non-polar deserts are hot in the day and chilly at night (for the latitude) because of the lack of the moderating effect of water. In some parts of the world, deserts are created by a rain shadowmountain range; other areas are arid by virtue of being very far from the nearest available sources of moisture. effect in which air masses lose much of their moisture as they move over a

Deserts are also classified by their geographical location and dominant weather pattern as trade wind, mid-latitude, rain shadow, coastal, monsoon, or polar deserts. Former desert areas presently in non-arid environments are paleodeserts.

Montane deserts are arid places with a very high altitude; the most prominent example is found north of the Himalaya especially in Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir (India), in parts of the Kunlun Mountains and the Tibetan Plateau. Many locations within this category have elevations exceeding 3,000 meters (10,000 ft) and the thermal regime can be hemiboreal. These places owe their profound aridity (the average annual precipitation is often less than 40 mm/1.5in) to being very far from the nearest available sources of moisture. Montane deserts are normally cold.

Rain shadow deserts form when tall mountain ranges block clouds from reaching areas in the direction the wind is going. As the air moves over the mountains, it cools and moisture condenses, causing precipitation on the windward side. Moisture almost never reaches the leeward side of the mountain, resulting in a desert. When that air reaches the leeward side, the air is dry, because it has already lost the majority of its moisture. The air then warms, expands, and blows across the desert. The warm, desiccated air takes with it any remaining small amounts of moisture in the desert.

Desert Ecosystem

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A desert is a landscape form or region that receives very little precipitation. Deserts are defined as areas that receive an average annual precipitation of less than 250 mm (10 in). In the Köppen climate classification system, deserts are classed as (BW).

Deserts are located where vegetation cover is exceedingly sparse. This corresponds to the 'hyperarid' regions of the earth, where rainfall is exceedingly rare and infrequent. Deserts are part of a wider classification of regions that, on an average annual basis, have a moisture deficit (i.e. they can potentially lose more than is received). These areas are collectively called 'drylands' and extend over almost a third of the earth's land surface. Because desert is a vague term, the use of 'dryland', and its subdivisions of hyper arid, arid, semiarid and dry-subhumid, is preferred in some contexts, and is approved by the United Nations.

Deserts take up one-third of the Earth's land surface.They usually have a large diurnal and seasonal temperature range, with high daytime temperatures (in summer up to 45 °C or 113 °F), and low night-time temperatures (in winter down to 0 °C; 32 °F) due to extremely low humidity. Water acts to trap infrared radiation from both the sun and the ground, and dry desert air is incapable of blocking sunlight during the day or trapping heat during the night. Thus during daylight most of the sun's heat reaches the ground. As soon as the sun sets, the desert cools quickly by radiating its heat into space. Urban areas in deserts lack large (more than 25 °F/14 °C) daily temperature ranges, partially due to the urban heat island effect.

Many deserts are formed by rain shadows, mountains blocking the path of precipitation to the desert. Deserts are often composed of sand and rocky surfaces. Sand dunes called ergs and stony surfaces called hamada surfaces compose a minority of desert surfaces. Exposures of rockyvegetation. terrain are typical, and reflect minimal soil development and sparseness of

Bottomlands may be salt-covered flats. Eolian processes are major factors in shaping desert landscapes. Cold deserts (also known as polar deserts) have similar features but the main form of precipitation is snow rather than rain. Antarctica is the world's largest cold desert (composed of about 98 percent thick continental ice sheet and 2 percent barren rock). Some of the barren rock is to be found in the so-called Dry Valleys of Antarctica that almost never get snow, which can have ice-encrusted saline lakes that suggest evaporation far grater than the rare snowfall due to the strong katabatic winds that evaporate even ice.

The largest hot desert is the Sahara.

Deserts sometimes contain valuable mineral deposits that were formed in the arid environment or that were exposed by erosion. Due to extreme and consistent dryness, some deserts are ideal places for natural preservation of artifacts and fossils.

If you earthlings need more info on why deserts are essential for your planet, you should see the following items:-

What to do on Saturday

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I have no idea what I am going to do today. It´s saturday January the 26th, 2008 and I just woke up. .....at 11 A.M. ...Shame you might say but I have no work today and have been working hard all week ...so yes I got drunk last night.

There are so many things to do but where to start. I have to go buy something to eat cause the frig is absaloutely empty, I have to meet a couple of humans ( dont know why yet) and most importantly, I have to try to drive that Jeep Compass again today. I didn´t tell you about that did I?. I don´t think so. But it has been my resolution for 2008....do I have a driving licence....Yes dear humans I do and since 1988- the year of my crash on your lovely planet. So why can´t I drive yet? Well, I succeeded in your earthly driving test after only five lessons....but then again I had an advantage....I am an alien. Anyhow, i was driving just fine. I followed your road instructions and kept to the law until one day I was so terrorized by the way you earthlings drive that I was not able to sit behind a wheel again. Don´t get me wrong....I wasn´t afraid to heart myself driving. I was afraid to heart other drivers because of their driving stupidity and aggressiveness.

For a long time, I was happy not to have a car and not to have to drive. But things have changed lately. For my cover, I had to get married to an earthling and not just that but I am expecting alien junior. So, I am obligated to try to drive again and besides, according to your social code, it is shamefull that a woman can drive while her husband can´t.

Will I finally drive today or will I just go where the car is parked, enter it and start it for half an hour then close it and move away again?

Worldwide Destruction

2008-01-25T10:53:00.000-08:00

Southeast Asian coral reefs are at risk from damaging fishing practices (such as cyanide and blast fishing), overfishing, sedimentation, pollution and bleaching. A variety of activities, including education, regulation, and the establishment of marine protected areas are under way to protect these reefs. Indonesia, for example has nearly 33,000 square miles of coral reefs. Its waters are home to a third of the world’s total corals and a quarter of its fish species. Indonesia's coral reefs are located in the heart of the Coral Triangle and have been victim to destructive fishing, unregulated tourism, and bleaching due to climatic changes. Data from 414 reef monitoring stations throughout Indonesia in 2000 found that only 6% of Indonesia’s coral reefs are in excellent condition, while 24% are in good condition, and approximately 70% are in poor to fair condition (2003 The Johns Hopkins University).

On September 24, 2007, Reef Check (the world’s largest reef conservation organization) stated that only 5% of Philippines 27,000 square-kilometers of coral reef are in “excellent condition” : Tubbataha Reef, Marine Park in Palawan, Apo Island in Negros Oriental, Apo Reef in Puerto Galera, Mindoro, and Verde Island Passage off Batangas. Philippine coral reefs is 2nd largest in Asia.

General estimates show approximately 10% of the coral reefs around the world are already dead. Problems range from environmental effects of fishing techniques, described above, to ocean acidification. Coral bleaching is another manifestation of the problem and is showing up in reefs across the planet.