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Showing posts from December, 2019

Coal Power Plants in the World from 1927 to 2019

The animated map below from SVT.SE shows all coal power plants in the world opened from 1927 to 2019. Unfortunately, the number of coal power plants increasing (especially in China and India). Coal capacity (2010) China: 630,238 MW India: 100,037 MW Other Asia: 127,515 MW Coal capacity (2018)  China: 972,514 MW (+54%) India: 220,670 MW (+121%) Other Asia: 191,088 MW (+50%) In 2019, there are 2,425 coal-fired power plants in the Earth. Their total capacity was about 2 thousand gigawatts. They emitted fifteen billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere of our planet.  According to Carbon Brief, world coal power production could fall 3 percent in 2019.

Scale and Composition of Earth’s surface: crust, water and atmosphere

Magnificient visualization shows significant components of our planet: the Earth's crust, water, and atmosphere. Iron oxide is 5x denser than water, so that's why the spheres are different volumes. All densities are factored in, even the crust plus water sphere is a weighted average of coating plus water density.  You may be astonished that Silicon dioxide (SiO₂) has an equivalent size to the entire crust plus water sphere. That's just an illustration of the volume growing as the cube of the radius; if you make the radius of a sphere only 26 percent larger, the volume doubles! It's also why our planet looks almost a similar size.

What Earth Would Look Like If All The Oceans Were Drained

We know that the world ocean is bottomless and that the deepest trench in the world has almost 11 kilometers. We also know that the world ocean covers about 70 percent of our planet, making more than 2/3 of Earth’s surface unseen to us. But assume we obtained a way  to drain oceans  of our world, what would Earth’s exterior look like, exactly? Planetary scientist James O’Donaghue made the animation that shows what the planet would look like if the water level of the oceans fell from 0 meters below sea level to 10,190 meters below sea level. The animation was remade from a NASA animation with the using of new satellite data. And as you can see from the animation, when the water drops to around 150 meters below sea level, the continental shelves, the seabed surrounding large landmasses, are the first to appear. When the world ocean is dropped to around 6 kilometers below sea level, most of the surface of our planet can be observed, except some of Earth’s deepest ocean trench

The invasion of the brown marmorated stink bug

The brown marmorated stink bug ( Halyomorpha halys ) is an insect native to East Asia (China, Japan, Korea). In September 1998, it was found in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where it is supposed to have been accidentally introduced. The nymphs and adults of the brown marmorated stink bug feed on over one hundred species of plants, including many agricultural crops, and by 2011 had become a season-long pest in farms in the EasternUS. In 2010, in the Mid-Atlantic US, 37 million dollars in apple products were lost, and some stone fruit farmers lost more than 90 percent of their fruits. It is now founded in many parts of North America and has recently become introduced in Europe and South America.