Ecoclimax

Join Leonardo DiCaprio as he explores the topic of climate change, and discovers what must be done today to prevent catastrophic disruption of life on our planet.

- Here’s an interesting question: which city do you think is more dense - Paris, France or New York, United States? - It probably seems obvious: New York, the land of skyscrapers, the Big Apple … right? - Wrong. New York, in fact, has a population densityof less than half that of Paris. Paris’s is 56,000 people per square mile (22,000 per square kilometer) while New York’s is only 27,000 people per square mile (10,500 per square kilometer.) To find a European city with a comparable population density to New York’s - the densest American city—you have to go all the way down to number six on the list: Lyon France (27,000 per sq/mile; 10,500 per sq/km.) New York of course has a super-dense urban core, but then around it is miles and miles of suburbia—just like almost every other American city. Paris, on the other hand, packs almost its entire population into a compact urban core. There’s also another interesting pattern that differs between the two continents: rich Americans liv...

In recent years, one significant change in the Arctic region has been the rapid decline in perennial sea ice. Perennial sea ice, also known as multi-year ice, is the portion of the sea ice that survives during the summer melt season. Perennial ice may have a lifespan of nine years or more and represents the thickest component of the sea ice; perennial ice can grow up to 4 meters thick. By contrast, first-year ice that grows during a single winter is generally 2 meters thick. This animation shows the Arctic sea ice age for the week of the minimum ice extent for each year, depicting the period in different colors. Younger sea ice, or first-year ice, is shown in a dark shade of blue, while the ice that is 5 or more years old is shown as white. A color scale identifies the age of the intermediary years. A bar graph displayed in the lower right corner quantifies the area covered by the ice in each age category on the day of the annual minimum. In addition, memory bars shown in green portr...

During a press event at Universal Studios in Los Angeles, Elon Musk announces that Tesla will build and sell its own line of solar panels with integrated batteries. Coupled with the also unveiled PowerWall 2, it will allow residential homeowners to replace their entire roof with solar panels, making it much simpler for homes to be entirely powered by solar power.  

This video documents a dam collapse on our property in Northern Minnesota. The beavers have been building on this dam, adding one and a half feet in height per year for the last 7 years. Needless to say, they reached the limit of 9 feet and it spontaneously collapsed draining the whole pond in about 4 hours. Thankfully no one was near the spillway when it blew.  

New York City generated over 3 million tons of household waste in 2015. This map follows its journey from the street curb to the other side of the world. New York City generated over 3 million tons of household waste in 2015. This map follows its journey from the street curb to the other side of the world. Non-recyclable waste is collected at the curb and deposited at a waste transfer station. Paper and metal/glass/plastic recyclables are each collected separately and brought to handling and recovery facilities, where the material will be separated. From there, non-recyclable waste is shipped to a landfill or waste-to-energy plant. Paper and metal/glass/plastic recyclables are sold to domestic and international recyclers, often in China or India. Total cost for collection and disposal: approximately $1.5 billion. Each day, New York’s public garbage trucks collect nearly 7,000 tons of residential mixed solid waste. After finishing their routes, most of these trucks wil...

Tornado locations

A botanical garden or botanic garden is a garden dedicated to the collection, cultivation and display of a wide range of plants labelled with their botanical names. It may contain specialist plant collections such as cacti and other succulent plants, herb gardens, plants from particular parts of the world, and so on; there may be greenhouses, shadehouses, again with special collections such as tropical plants, alpine plants, or other exotic plants. Visitor services at a botanical garden might include tours, educational displays, art exhibitions, book rooms, open-air theatrical and musical performances, and other entertainment.Botanical gardens are often run by universities or other scientific research organizations, and often have associated herbaria and research programmes in plant taxonomy or some other aspect of botanical science. A contemporary botanic garden is a strictly protected natural urban green area, where a managing organization creates landscaped gardens and holds d...

Front Foot (Tarsus) Of A Male Diving Beetle Dr. Igor Siwanowicz Eyes Of A Jumping Spider Yousef Al Habshi Human Neural Rosette Primordial Brain Cells Dr. Gist F. Croft Scales Of A Butterfly Wing Underside Francis Sneyers Poison Fangs Of A Centipede Walter Piorkowski Air Bubbles Formed From Melted Ascorbic Acid (Vitamin C) Crystals Marek Mis Retinal Ganglion Cells In The Whole-Mounted Mouse Retina Dr. Keunyoung Kim Wildflower Stamens Samuel Silberman Four-Day-Old Zebrafish Embryo Dr. Oscar Ruiz Espresso Coffee Crystals Kitayama & Sanae Kitayama Goatsbeard Flower Dr. Csaba Pintér Caudal Gill Of A Dragonfly Larva Marek Miś Leaves Of Selaginella David Maitland Polished Slab Of Teepee Canyon Agate Douglas L. Moore Butterfly proboscis Jochen Schroeder Via nikonsmallworld.com

Related posts: - Topographic map of Greenland from bedrock elevation data

It seems like today the world is full of people. There are 7.4 billion of us after all, and it seems like everywhere has already been discovered there are satellites, an international space station, gps, and there have even been explorers like this gentleman after all but it didn't always used to be like this. The world used to be a much larger place. The question is where and when was the last piece of land on Earth that was discovered by humans. To start literally at the beginning of humanity we go back to Ethiopia in 195,000 BC. We don't really know exactly when humanity discovered certain parts of the world this long ago but we do have our best guesses that we can make based off of fossil evidence that has been discovered. So let's go with our best guesses for now the oldest Homo sapiens fossils to date were found in Ethiopia. So human exploration likely started from here with an entire world to explore it took until 140,000 to 160,000 years ago for humans to disco...

Ever wondered what Greenland would look like if we could strip away all its ice? Thanks to modern radar technology and years of scientific research, we now have an incredible view of what's really down there. This 3D visualization isn't just a pretty picture - it's a window into Earth's past. Scientists discovered something amazing when they mapped Greenland's bedrock: a massive impact crater hiding under the ice near the Hiawatha Glacier. At 31 kilometers wide, it's one of the largest impact craters on Earth. Think about it - a massive meteorite possibly just a few million years ago slammed into Greenland! The bedrock data also revealed something unexpected - a huge canyon running straight through the middle of Greenland. At 750 kilometers long, it's longer than the Grand Canyon and was carved by ancient rivers long before the ice sheet formed. While it stretches further than its Arizona cousin, the Greenland canyon reaches depths of up to 800 meters...

Entwined lives "Entwined," Tim Laman's image of a determined young male orangutan shimmying up the thick root of a tree in Indonesian Borneo, beat almost 50,000 entries from 95 countries to win the grand prize at the Natural History Museum of London's 2016 Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. The annual contest calls on photographers worldwide to put nature in the frame. Laman, an American photographer, spent three days climbing up and down a tree by rope, positioning GoPros to catch his winning shot of the endangered animal climbing 100 feet (30 meters) to grab a crop of figs in Gunung Palung National Park. Laman knew the orangutan would return to forage after spotting him at the site earlier. Wild orangutans face a crisis of habitat loss due to agriculture and logging. Tim Laman The moon and the crow Gideon Knight, 16, won the Young Wildlife Photographer of the Year title for this magical image of a crow in a tree. The twigs of the sycamore silho...

Over the last 140 thousand years, the global sea level has changed over a range of more than 120 meters. The most recent significant change was a rise of more than 120 meters as the last ice age ended. Then sea level stabilized over the last several thousand years, and there was a slight variation between about 1AD and 1800AD. Sea level began to increase again in the nineteenth century and quickened anew in the early twenty century. Nowadays, satellite measures reveal a rate of sea-level increase of approximately 3 millimeters per year since the early 1990s - a further rise in the rate. If all the ice on the planet melts, the global sea level will rise by 70 meters. Nevertheless, VividMaps presented maps that show what would happen to our planet if the world's sea level increased by 100 meters.

Ceres evaluated water use for 109,665 oil and gas wells that were hydraulically fractured over the past five years (January 2011 through January 2016) in regions with varying levels of water stress. Water stress is indicated by percentages that reflect the amount of available water that is already allocated for municipal, industrial and agricultural uses.

The biggest factors threatening plant species with extinction are the destruction of habitats for farming (31%) - such as palm oil production and cattle ranching, deforestation for timber (21%) and construction of buildings and infrastructure (13%). Climate change is currently a smaller factor - 4% - but is likely to grow. One important crop that is already suffering is coffee, as rising temperatures make the beans impossible to grow and increase diseases in key countries such as Ethiopia. Many important crops have been bred over thousands of years to produce high yields, but have lost genes that help fight pests and cope with changes in climate. Bananas, sorghum and aubergines are among those with very little genetic diversity, making them highly vulnerable to new threats. Finding wild relatives of such crops means new, more robust varieties can be bred. The importance of plants for the development of new medicines was revealed in the report, which found that 57% of the 31,...

According to the World Health Organization, overcrowding refers to the situation in which more people are living within a single dwelling than there is space for, so that movement is restricted, privacy secluded, hygiene impossible, rest and sleep difficult. The terms crowding and overcrowding are often used interchangeably to refer to the same condition. The effects on quality of life due to crowding may be due to children sharing a bed or bedroom, increased physical contact, lack of sleep, lack of privacy, poor hygiene practices and an inability to care adequately for sick household members.While population density is an objective measure of number of people living per unit area, overcrowding refers to people's psychological response to density. But, definitions of crowding used in statistical reporting and for administrative purposes are based on density measures and do not usually incorporate people’s perceptions of crowding. Risks due to overcrowding: 1. Physical : Spread of...

This map was produced for the purposes of landscape hazard assessment and climate change adaptation planning for the community of Old Crow. An accompanying report provides additional detail on local surficial geology, stratigraphy, glacial history and landscape hazards ( Benkert et al., 2 016) . The report is published by Yukon College’s Northern Climate Exchange and is available for download at yukoncollege.yk.ca/research . Landscape hazards for the community of Old Crow are modelled using a Geographic Information System (GIS) to generate an integrated risk ranking for each landscape "unit" (defined by 30m x 30m pixels). Input data for the model include the following datasets: slope; angle (steepness); slope aspect (directionality and exposure to sunlight); and surface materials (derived from geological map) (see Benkert et al., 2016 for additional details). Attributes of the individual datasets are classified on a ...

The crude oil market is bigger than all raw metal markets combined. The globla market fo crude oil was 94 million barrels per day in 2015. This puts the crude oil market ant $1.7 trillion per year with today's prices - far more than all raw metals combined! The largest metal market by tonnage is iron ore. China alone consumes 1 billion tonnes per year mostly to produce steel. The world's largest metal market by dollar value is gold. The physical market is worth $170 billion per year at today's spot price. visualcapitalist.com

Hazardous waste is waste that poses substantial or potential threats to public health or the environment.In the United States, the treatment, storage, and disposal of hazardous waste are regulated under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). Hazardous wastes are defined under RCRA in 40 CFR 261 where they are divided into two major categories characteristic wastes and listed wastes. 1. Characteristic hazardous wastes are materials that are known or tested to exhibit one or more of the following four hazardous traits: - ignitability - reactivity - corrosivity - toxicity 2. Listed hazardous wastes are materials specifically listed by regulatory authorities as hazardous wastes which are from non-specific sources, specific sources, or discarded chemical products. The requirements of RCRA apply to all the companies that generate hazardous waste as well as those companies that store or dispose hazardous waste in the United States. Many types of businesses generate haz...

In 2006, Planet Earth transformed how we saw the natural world. 10 years on we'll be showing you life in all its wonder closer than ever before.  

In the map below, the hurricane’s impact on precipitation and streamflow are shown. Normalized discharge (cubic feet per second) at US Geological Survey gaging stations within ~150 km of the eye of the hurricane is shown in the right panel. Variation in the shape of the hydrographs (right panel) is due to stream size, storm-surge, reservoir closures, and other local conditions, which can impact the effect of precipitation on flow. Via owi.usgs.gov Related post: -  GOES East imagery shows Hurricane Matthew's outer bands approaching the Florida coast on the morning (October 6)

More than 6,000 tropical cyclones, ranging from 1842 and occurring in over seven major ocean basins around the world.

If 100 people lived on Earth... - 50 man, 50 women. - 11 Europeans, 14 Americans, 15 Africans, 60 Asian people. - 26 - 0-14 years, 16 - 15-24 years, 41 - 25-54 years, 9 - 55-64 years, 8 - 65+ years. - 33 Christianity, 21 Islam, 14 Hinduism, 6 Buddhism. - 12 Chinese speakers, 6 Spanish speakers, 5 English speakers, 4 Hindi speakers, 3 Arabic speakers, the rest speak 6500 languages. - 86 can read and write, 14 can't. - 15 spend $2 a day, 56 spend $2-10 a day, 13 spend $10-20 a day, 9 spend $20-50 a day, 6 spend $50-90 a day, 1 spends more than $90 a day. - 1 person controls 50% of all money. - 21 are overweight, 63 are normal weight, 15 are underfed, 1 is starving. - 87 have clean water, 13 don't. - 77 have somewhere to live, 23 don't. - 44 have the internet, 56 don't. - 75 have a phone, 25 don't. - 7 attended, 93 didn't

2016 Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards winners. Adam Parsons Gil Gofer Philip Marazzi Mario Gustavo Fiorucci Perdita Petzl Artyom Krivosheev Tom Stables CWPA Henrik Spranz Brigitta Moser Anup Deodhar James Mitson Patricia Bauchman Mary Swaby Angela Bohlke Via comedywildlifephoto.com