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Showing posts from January, 2021

Mitigating Climate Change: It Starts With Better Ocean Data

  For years (and we mean many years), the ocean helped us mitigate the early effects of human emissions by absorbing greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide and heat, from the atmosphere. As a result, more than 90 percent of the warming that happened on Earth between 1971 and 2010 occurred in the ocean . A selfless act by Mother Nature, but it's catching up to us.  Climate change, which describes long-term changes to temperature and typical weather, is accelerating at an alarming pace—and the impacts are hard to ignore. Let's take a look at some changes to our ocean. Agustín Lautaro 3 Ways Climate Change Affects Our Ocean  Rising sea levels Sea levels are rising at the fastest rate in 3,000 years. From 2018 to 2019, the global sea level rose to 6.1 millimeters . Sure, a few millimeters doesn’t sound like a lot until you hear that the average, since 1993, has been 3.2 millimeters per year. That means that last year we doubled the global average from the past twenty years! The sam

The Great Green Wall of the Sahara Mapped

The Great Green Wall of the Sahara is action to fight the expanding desertification.  To fight the threat of desertification of the Sahel (the area directly to the south of the Sahara), the African Union is starting an initiative to plant the Great Green Wall , a 7,775 kilometers (4,830 miles) belt of trees passing the whole breadth of North Africa. Reddit user: InkyScrolls The Great Green Wall project responds to the mixed effect of natural resource degradation and aridity in country regions. It tries to support communities in adapting and decreasing climate change and enhancing food security because the Sahel population is supposed to double by 2039, attaching importance to the project.

The Global Climate in 3D

 Data analyst Alasdair Rae encouraged me to make 3D maps representing different climatic parameters. To create these maps , I used Worldclim data: average temperature (°C), precipitation (mm), solar radiation (kJ m-2 day-1), and wind speed (m s-1). Average annual temperature Precipitation Solar Radiation Wind Speed

The Storehouses of Acorn Woodpecker

Woodpeckers are captivating birds. They have a tightly packed brain, a compressible sponge-like skull bone to absorb the impact's energy, and an elongated tongue-bone that envelops around the skull, amortizing the brain. Most species of woodpeckers peck at trees in search of insects, but the acorn woodpecker, drill holes to stock food. The acorn woodpecker's preferred food is an acorn. When winter nears, the acorn woodpecker will start keeping acorns in storehouses built out of tree trunks, telephone poles, and even wooden houses. The acorn woodpecker drills thousands of holes just large suitable for a single acorn, and they aren't forced too deep into the trunk so that their recapture is more leisurely.  Because the acorns are put in shallow holes, they are noticeable from the outside, which interests prey, and thus storehouses have to be protected. Large storehouse trees that contain enough food (in some cases 50 thousand acorns in a single tree) are often protected by se