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Environmental News Network -- Know Your Environment
La epifanía de Stephen Luby surgió a 30.000 pies en el aire. El epidemiólogo de Stanford volaba sobre la India cuando se dio cuenta de que la vista desde su asiento en la ventana era adecuada para identificar hornos de ladrillo abajo en el suelo. La visión fue sorprendente por su potencial para arrojar luz sobre una pesadilla ambiental que mata a miles de personas cada año.
Bigger than any medieval castle, with its 12 giant white cooling towers gleaming in the sun, the Drax Power Station dominates the horizon for tens of miles across the flat lands of eastern England. For four decades, it has been one of the world’s largest coal power plants, often generating a tenth of the U.K.’s electricity. It has been the lodestar for the final phase of Britain’s 250-year-long love affair with coal – the fuel that built the country’s empire and industrialized the world.
Infrared imagery provides a look at tropical cyclones at night and NASA-NOAA’s Suomi NPP satellite got a look at Tropical Storm Norma in the Eastern Pacific using infrared light.
In a groundbreaking public-private partnership, Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Paul G. Allen and NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory will deploy a large array of new deep ocean floats to expand ocean observations in a key area of the western South Atlantic Ocean.
These instruments, called Deep Argo floats, can collect data down to nearly four miles deep, and promise to lead scientists to a better understanding of how the bottom half of the ocean may influence long term weather, climate, and sea level rise.
Stephen Luby’s epiphany came to him 30,000 feet up in the air. The Stanford epidemiologist was flying over India when he realized the view from his window seat was adequate to identify brick kilns on the ground below. The insight was startling for its potential to shed light on an environmental nightmare that kills thousands of people every year.
A new UBC study has found that small-scale fisheries may have a much larger impact on ocean ecosystems than previously thought, due to a lack of data on their development over time.
“We found that the influence from small-scale fisheries is far from small,” said Jennifer Selgrath, lead author who completed the research as a PhD student with UBC’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries and Project Seahorse. “In our case study in the Philippines, we found that the fisheries have become unsustainable because there are so many people trying to catch a limited number of fish and invertebrates.”
