May 23, 2007, 7:59 PM CT

Follow the 'green' brick road?

Scientists have observed that bricks made from fly ash--fine ash particles captured as waste by coal-fired power plants--may be even safer than predicted. Instead of leaching minute amounts of mercury as some scientists had predicted, the bricks apparently do the reverse, pulling minute amounts of the toxic metal out of ambient air.

Each year, roughly 25 million tons of fly ash from coal-fired power plants are recycled, generally as additives in building materials such as concrete, but 45 million tons go to waste. Fly ash bricks both find a use for some of that waste and counter the environmental impact from the manufacture of standard bricks.

"Manufacturing clay brick requires kilns fired to high temperatures," said Henry Liu, a longtime National Science Foundation (NSF) awardee and the president of Freight Pipeline Company (FPC), which developed the bricks. "That wastes energy, pollutes air and generates greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. In contrast, fly ash bricks are manufactured at room temperature. They conserve energy, cost less to manufacture, and don't contribute to air pollution or global warming".

Once colored and shaped, the FPC bricks are similar to their clay counterparts, both in appearance and in meeting or exceeding construction-material standards......... Posted by: Tyler      Read more         Source

May 23, 2007, 7:50 PM CT

IceTop at the bottom of the world

The University of Delaware is helping to build a huge "IceCube" at the South Pole, and it has nothing to do with cooling beverages.

"IceCube" is a gigantic scientific instrument--a telescope for detecting illusive particles called neutrinos that can travel millions of miles through space, passing right through planets.

A poet might refer to them as stardust or ghosts from outer space. But to astrophysicists, neutrinos are the high-energy messengers from the universe, formed during such cataclysmic cosmic events as exploding stars and colliding galaxies.

When the novel telescope is completed in the next several years, a cubic kilometer of ice at the "bottom of the world" will provide a new eye into the heavens and some of the most distant and violent events in the cosmos.

The telescope, its third year of construction recently concluded, is an international effort involving more than 20 institutions. The project is funded primarily by the National Science Foundation, with additional contributions from Belgium, Gera number of, Japan and Sweden, as well as the U.S. Department of Energy and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

The lead institution for the IceCube project is the University of Wisconsin, which is working in collaboration with UD and several other universities across the nation......... Posted by: Tyler      Read more         Source

Thu, 24 May 2007 01:02:58 GMT

New Orleans Reels Under Hurricane Fear

With the nightmarish memory of Hurricane Katrina still fresh in the mind, New Orleans officials said tsafety plan in place this year but if the citizens want to save their lives, fleeing would be the best idea.

New Orleans has not fully recovered from the devastation caused by Katrina in 2005. Though the city is better prepared this year, officials said they cant assure peoples safety as the Atlantic hurricane season begins.

Jerry Sneed, director of the city’s office of emergency preparedness, said

When the mayor tells the citizens to evacuate, the citizens should listen and heed the mayor’s warning.

Thankfully, last year not a single storm hit Louisiana, allowing it the time to rebuild itself. But this year, the forecast is quite scary and the hurricane season might cause havoc along the U S Gulf Coast.

Katrina was a Category 3 storm on the Saffir-Simpson scale, which hit New Orleans and inundated 80 percent of the city.

It killed nearly,300 people and caused an estimated damage of $81 billionImage Posted by: Irani      Read more     Source

Mon, 21 May 2007 02:53:50 GMT

Race Against Climate Change Catastrophe

The verdict is out and it’s a race against time now. According to a new report, our planet is just five years away from catastrophic climate change, but can still be saved.

The World Wide Fund for Nature(WWF)warns governments of countries around the world that they have until 2012 to “plant the seeds of change” and make positive moves to limit carbon emissions. The WWF further warns that if they fail to do the same, then “generations to come will have to live with the compromises and hardships caused by their inability to act”.

James Leape, from the WWF, said:

We have a small window of time in which we can plant the seeds of change, and that is the next five years. We cannot afford to waste them. This is not something that governments can put off until the future.

The world’s energy needs are expected to double between now and 2050. But the Climate Solutions document says that technologies already available could be harnessed to produce enough sustainable energy to power the planet besides reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 60-80%.

The WWF report also states that nuclear power is not necessary to cut carbon emissions. This statement is in stark contrast to the UK Government’s insistence upon the need to go nuclear.

Keith Allott, head of WWF-UK’s climate change programmes, said:

This report shows that although the scale of the climate change challenge can seem daunting, it can be tackled provided we act with real urgency. We can slash carbon emissions and meet global energy demand without resorting to the red herring of nuclear power. The big question is whether the world’s statesmen will have the strength and vision to make this happen - and Britain will be key to that.
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Source: Sky

Posted by: Niveditamajumdar      Read more     Source

May 17, 2007, 7:28 PM CT

Colorado River streamflow history

An epic drought during the mid-1100s dwarfs any drought previously documented for a region that includes areas of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.

The six-decade-long drought was remarkable for the absence of very wet years. At the core of the drought was a period of 25 years in which Colorado River flow averaged 15 percent below normal.

The new tree-ring-based reconstruction documents the year-by-year natural variability of streamflows in the upper Colorado River basin back to A. D. 762, said the tree-ring researchers from The University of Arizona in Tucson who led the research team.

The work extends the continuous tree-ring record of upper Colorado streamflows back seven centuries earlier than prior reconstructions.

"The biggest drought we find in the entire record was in the mid-1100s," said team leader David M. Meko, an associate research professor at UA's Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research. "I was surprised that the drought was as deep and as long as it was.

Colorado River flow was below normal for 13 consecutive years in one interval of the megadrought, which spanned 1118 to 1179.

Meko contrasted that with the last 100 years, during which tree-ring reconstructed flows for the upper basin show a maximum of five consecutive years of below-normal flows......... Posted by: Tyler      Read more         Source

May 17, 2007, 7:11 PM CT

Ski Area And Mountain Watershed

Historically, people lived in lowlands. Except for logging and some agricultural uses, mountains were mostly left to the birds. But in recent decades, mountain regions in a number of parts of the world-including Vermont-have faced growing development pressures from recreation and tourism uses such as vacation homes and ski areas.

Despite these new uses, most scientific studies of soil and water in high-elevation areas have focused on the effects of traditional resource extraction, like logging. How ski resort developments impact watersheds is little understood.

In the first study to document the effects of existing ski resort development on water flows and water quality in the northeastern US, Beverley Wemple, associate professor of geography at the University of Vermont, and her colleagues, have studied two side-by-side mountain watersheds on the eastern slopes of Mount Mansfield in Vermont. The nearly pristine Ranch Brook watershed served as a control, while the adjacent West Branch watershed contains the Stowe Mountain Resort.

Their results, forthcoming in the print edition of the journal Hydrological Processes (and published online April 24, 2007," show "surprising" differences, Wemple said, between the two watersheds, including greater water volume, chloride (probably from parking lot salt runoff) and sediment (probably from land clearing) flowing out of the developed watershed......... Posted by: Tyler      Read more         Source

May 16, 2007, 10:33 PM CT

Working with Inuit Community

Research on global warming is drawing researchers in increasing numbers to the world's polar regions. But as researchers make more journeys northward, some of them find that their mission now extends beyond the ice or sediment samples they will bring back to their labs to analyze.

When Elizabeth Thomas, a graduate student in the University at Buffalo Department of Geology, travels this month to Baffin Island in the northeast Canadian Arctic, she not only will be sampling sediments from the bottom of frozen lakes, she also will be educating a native Inuit class about global warming, taking local schoolchildren on a sediment-coring field trip and may participate in a call-in radio show with translators that will be broadcast in Inuktitut, the local language.

"We go up there to do research and the local community gives us so much logistical support, I thought we should really give something back to them," said Thomas who leaves Thursday for Baffin Island in the Nunavut territory of Canada.

Thomas is traveling with a team funded by the National Science Foundation and led by Jason Briner, Ph.D., assistant professor of geology in the UB College of Arts and Sciences, who has been conducting research on Baffin Island for seven years.

Briner and his students travel to the region in the spring to sample Arctic lake sediments and analyze them to reconstruct past climates. Arctic regions show strong seasonality, so it's relatively easy to correlate changes with very fine layers in sediments......... Posted by: Tyler      Read more         Source

May 14, 2007, 8:57 PM CT

Air Quality And Weather Changes By 2050

In a first of its kind study, a research team based at Columbias Mailman School of Public Health observed that changes in urban sprawl and climate that are projected to occur in the New York City metropolitan area by the 2050s could significantly affect air quality and health in the region. Findings suggest that urban sprawl alone could result in a 1F rise in average summer temperatures and a 16 percent increase in unhealthy levels of ozone during episodes.

This is the first successful attempt to simulate both weather and air quality due to climate and land use changes at a scale that is relevant to local and regional policy makers. Using a unique modeling system, the scientists were able to link climate change, land use change, and air quality, to predict sprawling development over this region in the year 2050 in comparison to present-day conditions. This new system makes it possible for the first time to examine the separate and joint influences of land use, climate and emissions changes on future environmental conditions and resulting health implications such as asthma attacks and difficulty in breathing, ER visits and hospitalizations, and even increased risk of death for vulnerable persons.

With a population exceeding 21 million people in the greater NYC metropolitan area, ongoing urbanization puts a significant strain on natural resources and impacts air pollution levels and regional climate. The study highlights the value of modeling systems that quantitatively assess the potential impacts of changes in climate, emissions and land use on environmental health in the region......... Posted by: Tyler      Read more         Source

May 11, 2007, 5:11 PM CT

Climate swings and CO2 pulses up from the deep sea

May 10, 2007, The Earth Institute at Columbia UniversityA study released recently provides some of the first solid evidence that warming-induced changes in ocean circulation at the end of the last Ice Age caused vast quantities of ancient carbon dioxide to belch from the deep sea into the atmosphere. Researchers believe the carbon dioxide (CO2) releases helped propel the world into further warming. The study, done by scientists at the University of Colorado, Kent State University and Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, appears in the May 10 advance online version of the leading journal Science.

Atmospheric CO2, also produced by burning of fossil fuels, is believed to be largely responsible for current warming. However, researchers have known for some time that the gas also goes through natural cycles. By far most of the world's mobile carbon is stored in the oceans40 trillion metric tons, or 15 times more than in air, soil and water combined. But how this vast marine reservoir interacts with the atmosphere has been a subject of debate for the last 25 years. The study indicates what a number of researchers have long suspected, but could not prove: sometimes the oceans can release massive amounts of CO2 into the air as they overturn. "The lesson is that abrupt changes in ocean circulation in the past have affected the oceans' ability to keep carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere," said geologist Thomas Marchitto of the University of Colorado, a co-lead author. "This could help us understand how that ability might be affected by future global warming"......... Posted by: Tyler      Read more         Source

May 10, 2007, 10:42 PM CT

Seismic Monitor Installed on Underwater Volcano

Kick'em Jenny is its name, and for oceanographers working in the southeastern Caribbean Sea, this undersea volcano has been a handful.

Now, a team of marine researchers funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and affiliated with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) may have figured out how to tame it. This week, the scientists will begin using radio telemetry to monitor the rumblings of Kick'em Jenny from a real-time seismic monitoring device installed on the volcano.

The new technology will improve the ability of natural hazards managers to protect residents from volcanic eruptions and tsunamis, said Alex Isern, program director in NSF's Division of Ocean Sciences. "Basic oceanographic research leads to technological advances that directly benefit society--like detecting hazards--in time to make a difference," said Isern.

Located just off the north coast of the island nation of Grenada, Kick 'em Jenny is a "natural laboratory"--a submarine volcano that will eventually emerge from beneath the sea to form a new volcanic island. It is the only "live" submarine volcano in the West Indies, and has erupted at least 12 times since 1939. The last major eruption occurred in 2001.

Part of a project to develop new technology for earthquake monitoring in coastal areas, the seismic station, called a Real Time Offshore Seismic Station (RTOSS), uses an ocean-bottom seismometer deployed directly on the volcano. RTOSS allows seismic data to be transmitted by high-frequency radio to a land-based observatory in a nearby village. The data will reach the shore within milliseconds of being collected......... Posted by: Tyler      Read more         Source