Group items tagged

Sea Level Rise and the Future of the Netherlands ....no comment

this is what I call truly cloaking!...of course only found in and made by nature :) (video at the bottom of the page)

Definitely beautiful, even psychedelic maybe.. but technically its not really cloaking, you wouldn't call your window a cloaking device right? :)

The video looks surreal!

Interesting long read on the future of deep-sea mining

Another underestimated source of CO2, are turbulent waters. "The stronger the turbulences at the water's surface, the more CO2 is released into the atmosphere. The combination of maps and data revealed that, while the CO2 emissions from lakes and reservoirs are lower than assumed, those from rivers and streams are three times as high as previously believed." Alltogether the emitted CO2 equates to roughly one-fifth of the emissions caused by humans. Yet more stuff to model...

Nasia, I thought about your statement carefully - and I cannot agree with you. Water is not a greenhouse gas. It is instead a liquid. Also, I can't believe you keep feeding the troll! :-P But on a more topical note: I think it is an over-simplification to call water a greenhouse gas - water is one of the most important mechanisms in the way Earth handles heat input from the sun. The latent heat that you mention actually cools Earth: solar energy that would otherwise heat Earth's surface is ABSORBED as latent heat by water which consequently evaporates - the same water condenses into rain drops at high altitudes and releases this stored heat. In effect the water cycle is a mechanism of heat transport from low altitude to high altitude where the chance of infrared radiation escaping into space is much higher due to the much thinner layer of atmosphere above (including the smaller abundance of greenhouse gasses). Also, as I know you are well aware, the cloud cover that results from water condensation in the troposphere dramatically increases albedo which has a cooling effect on climate. Furthermore the heat capacity of wet air ("humid heat") is much larger than that of dry air - so any advective heat transfer due to air currents is more efficient in wet air - transporting heat from warm areas to a natural heat sink e.g. polar regions. Of course there are also climate heating effects of water like the absorption of IR radiation. But I stand by my statement (as defended in the above) that rain cools the atmosphere. Oh and also some nice reading material on the complexities related to climate feedback due to sea surface temperature: http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/1520-0442(1993)006%3C2049%3ALSEOTR%3E2.0.CO%3B2

I enjoy trolling conversations when there is a gain for both sides at the end :-) . I had to check upon some of the facts in order to explain my self properly. The IPCC report states the greenhouse gases here, and water vapour is included: http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/faq-2-1.html Honestly, I read only the abstract of the article you posted, which is a very interesting hypothesis on the mechanism of regulating sea surface temperature, but it is very localized to the tropics (vivid convection, storms) a region of which I have very little expertise, and is difficult to study because it has non-hydrostatic dynamics. The only thing I can comment there is that the authors define constant relative humidity for the bottom layer, supplied by the oceanic surface, which limits the implementation of the concept on other earth regions. Also, we may confuse during the conversation the greenhouse gas with the Radiative Forcing of each greenhouse gas: I see your point of the latent heat trapped in the water vapour, and I agree, but the effect of the water is that it traps even as latent heat an amount of LR that would otherwise escape back to space. That is the greenhouse gas identity and an image to see the absorption bands in the atmosphere and how important the water is, without vain authority-based arguments that miss the explanation in the end: http://www.google.nl/imgres?imgurl=http://www.solarchords.com/uploaded/82/87-33833-450015_44absorbspec.gif&imgrefurl=http://www.solarchords.com/agw-science/4/greenhouse--1-radiation/33784/&h=468&w=458&sz=28&tbnid=x2NtfKh5OPM7lM:&tbnh=98&tbnw=96&zoom=1&usg=__KldteWbV19nVPbbsC4jsOgzCK6E=&docid=cMRZ9f22jbtYPM&sa=X&ei=SwynUq2TMqiS0QXVq4C4Aw&ved=0CDkQ9QEwAw

They were able to compare the ticking rates of two optical clocks separated by 2000 km, with the objective of computing sea level based on the effect gravity has on the clock ticking rate. They did the experiment using glass optical fibers, but I wonder if we could one day do the same from orbit, to measure the gravitational field around Earth.

isn't this is effectively what pacome has been doing with his time for the last few years? e.g. http://arxiv.org/pdf/1308.6766v1.pdf also mentioning the ACES experiment

The location of the second largest volcanic eruption in human history, the waters off Greece's Santorini are the site of newly discovered opalescent pools forming at 250 meters depth. The interconnected series of meandering, iridescent white pools contain high concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO 2) and may hold answers to questions related to deepsea carbon storage as well as provide a means of monitoring the volcano for future eruptions.

We were there last year, swimming in one of those 'healthy' mud pits..

250m and we did not know about them ??

Seems looking into turbulence is a source of innovative concepts. After the black hole modelling here was found a mathematical expression which describes "how turbulence can alter the shape and course of a flock of birds, a swarm of insects or even an algal bloom (phytoplankton!) and could help us to better predict them". More relevant for motions in air and sea, rather than space, where the fluids are dense enough to exhibit turbulence ; but what about a swarm moving in and exploring an exoplanet's atmosphere?

monitoring sea level rise using GPS data

fantastic images from the deep sea ...

Alvin, the only deep-diving manned submersible used for science has been upgraded, allowing scientists to explore for the 1st time the depth of the oceans down to 6500m bsl.

Bacterial wires explain enigmatic electric currents in the seabed: Each one of these 'cable bacteria' contains a bundle of insulated wires that conduct an electric current from one end to the other. Cable bacteria explain electric currents in the seabed Electricity and seawater are usually a bad mix.

WOW!!!! don't want to even imagine what we do to these with the trailing fishing boats that sweep through sea beds with large masses .... "Our experiments showed that the electric connections in the seabed must be solid structures built by bacteria," says PhD student Christian Pfeffer, Aarhus University. He could interrupt the electric currents by pulling a thin wire horizontally through the seafloor. Just as when an excavator cuts our electric cables. In microscopes, scientists found a hitherto unknown type of long, multi-cellular bacteria that was always present when scientists measured the electric currents. "The incredible idea that these bacteria should be electric cables really fell into place when, inside the bacteria, we saw wire-like strings enclosed by a membrane," says Nils Risgaard-Petersen, Aarhus University. Kilometers of living cables The bacterium is one hundred times thinner than a hair and the whole bacterium functions as an electric cable with a number of insulated wires within it. Quite similar to the electric cables we know from our daily lives. "Such unique insulated biological wires seem simple but with incredible complexity at nanoscale," says PhD student Jie Song, Aarhus University, who used nanotools to map the electrical properties of the cable bacteria. In an undisturbed seabed more than tens of thousands kilometers cable bacteria live under a single square meter seabed. The ability to conduct an electric current gives cable bacteria such large benefits that it conquers much of the energy from decomposition processes in the seabed. Unlike all other known forms of life, cable bacteria maintain an efficient combustion down in the oxygen-free part of the seabed. It only requires that one end of the individual reaches the oxygen which the seawater provides to the top millimeters of the seabed. The combustion is a transfer of the electrons of the food to oxygen which the bacterial inner wires manage over centimeter-long distances. However, s

What stroke me especially was the shape of the Marianas Trench (much wider than deep) [edit] This reminds me I used to have a printout of a similar, but more space-related, comic http://xkcd.com/482/ hanging on the wall next to my desk in estec... good ol' times...

and in case you missed it, check also the excellent Money infographic that guy created last year: http://xkcd.com/980/huge/

A wide scale 8 year experiment in China on combating desertification seems to have been successful. Instead of using cyanobacteria blooms in the sea, the tested method proposes to spray them on the boundaries of desert/farmland every few days, so that the carbon they capture stays on the ground. It is useful in fixing the organic material against wind erosion only complementary to planting hardy grasses. Very fast result, nevertheless. Could be classified as a geoengineering activity.

130 km2 as next step will be quite an area

why am I not surprised .....

http://www.academia.edu/4210419/Can_climate_models_explain_the_recent_stagnation_in_global_warming A view of well-respected scientists on how to proceed from here, that was rejected from Nature. In any case, a long way to go...

unfortunately it's too early to cheer and burn more coal ... there is also a nice podcast associated to this paper from nature Recent global-warming hiatus tied to equatorial Pacific surface cooling Yu Kosaka & Shang-Ping Xie Nature 501, 403-407 (19 September 2013) doi:10.1038/nature12534 Received 18 June 2013 Accepted 08 August 2013 Published online 28 August 2013 Despite the continued increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, the annual-mean global temperature has not risen in the twenty-first century1, 2, challenging the prevailing view that anthropogenic forcing causes climate warming. Various mechanisms have been proposed for this hiatus in global warming3, 4, 5, 6, but their relative importance has not been quantified, hampering observational estimates of climate sensitivity. Here we show that accounting for recent cooling in the eastern equatorial Pacific reconciles climate simulations and observations. We present a novel method of uncovering mechanisms for global temperature change by prescribing, in addition to radiative forcing, the observed history of sea surface temperature over the central to eastern tropical Pacific in a climate model. Although the surface temperature prescription is limited to only 8.2% of the global surface, our model reproduces the annual-mean global temperature remarkably well with correlation coefficient r = 0.97 for 1970-2012 (which includes the current hiatus and a period of accelerated global warming). Moreover, our simulation captures major seasonal and regional characteristics of the hiatus, including the intensified Walker circulation, the winter cooling in northwestern North America and the prolonged drought in the southern USA. Our results show that the current hiatus is part of natural climate variability, tied specifically to a La-Niña-like decadal cooling. Although similar decadal hiatus events may occur in the future, the multi-decadal warming trend is very likely to continue with greenhouse gas

University at Buffalo researchers are developing a deep-sea Internet. The technological breakthrough could lead to improvements in tsunami detection, offshore oil and natural gas exploration, surveillance, pollution monitoring...

Metasurfaces have been made, but the problem is that they usually are static and for quantum optic applications the question is how to make a rapidly configurable metasurface. for this Harvard has initiated a multidisciplinary team that involves theoretical physics, metamaterials, nanophotonic circuitry, quantum devices, plasmonics, nanofabrication, and computational modeling

Reading "wavefront engineering" in the title I thought it had to do with wave manipulation in the sea. Nothing to do though. As I read further in this article, Harvard thrives in forming multidisciplinarity groups. Their practice is to call the best team in each expertise they need to merge. Not one researcher from each discipline, but teams of experienced professors and a series of graduate students. Maybe we could discuss it in the retreat!

I wonder how much energy you can extract from the ocean in a responsible way... Mixing up different thermal layers would probably a quite an influence on ecology.

The last available assessment report on the ecological impact seems to date from 1981 which would need to be brought up to current standards. On the other hand, this system could have a positive influence on fish population as deep cold water brings nutrients to the surface. The cold water could also be used to lower sea surface temperatures and affect hurricane genesis!

The high seas of Mars may never have existed. According to a new study that looks at two opposite climate scenarios of early Mars, a cold and icy planet billions of years ago better explains the water drainage and erosion features seen today.

That's a lot of assumptions along the way, what do you think of it Nina?