09 AM | 06 Aug

“Mysterious Craters Are Just the Beginning of Arctic Surprises…” [#geekgirl]

The Artic = sad

[From this Scientific American article] “It’s not just craters purportedly dug by aliens in Russia, it’s also megaslumps, ice that burns and drunken trees. The ongoing meltdown of the permanently frozen ground that covers nearly a quarter of land in the Northern Hemisphere has caused a host of surprising arctic phenomena.

Temperatures across the Arctic are warming roughly twice as fast as the rest of the globe, largely due to the reduction in the amount of sunlight reflecting off of white, snow-covered ground. “At some point, we might get into a state of permafrost that is not comparable to what we know for 100 years or so, some new processes that never happened before,” says geologist Guido Grosse of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany.”

12 PM | 24 Apr

2059: FutureCoast [#geekgirl]

[FUTURECOAST: Image Via Fast Company]

[Image Via Fast Company]

[Via Fast Company] “FutureCoast, launched in early February with the help of a National Science Foundation climate education grant and Columbia University, has at least a hundred other messages like the Last Lobster. Some are funny: Like the one woman in the seaside town of Brighton who can’t get home because the tide’s gotten too high and needs to seek shelter in a “flotel” for the night. Others are devastating. In one message, a woman with a trembling voice asks her friend in government if he might be able to help her locate her partner, who’s gone missing after having gone to interview protesters at a “refugee rights” demonstration.

The emotional tenor and imagination of the messages range widely, but the futures aren’t actually that far off. In the FutureCoast world, voice messages are leaking into the present day from futures between 2020 and 2065. And some, like the disappearance of certain flora and fauna, mass political unrest, and water shortages, are incredibly realistic–just go and read the latest IPCC report.”

02 PM | 04 Apr

“Half of European bumblebees in decline, quarter face extinction…” [#geekgirl]

[From an article at RT] “Almost one-quarter of European crops’ vital pollinators – bumblebees – could die out in the coming years, as half of the species are declining, a new study says. Citing human factor and climate change, it warns of “serious implications” for agriculture.

A preview of the recent European Commission-funded study, published on the website of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) on Wednesday, says it has some “bad news” for Europe’s bumblebees.

As much as 46 percent of the 68 bumblebee species living in Europe have a declining population and just 13 percent are increasing in numbers, the study shows. According to IUCN, 24 percent of those species are “threatened with extinction.”

The study, which contributes to the European Red List of pollinators and is part of the Status and Trends of European Pollinators (STEP) project, stresses that three of the five “most important insect pollinators of European crops” are bumblebee species.

Bumblebees have for thousands of years played a “critical role” in agriculture as they help crops reproduce by transferring pollen from plant to plant. However, as agriculture and urban development have intensified in recent years and cultivated land has been changed, bumblebees have been hit by the loss of habitat and the loss of their preferred forage, as well as pollution and insecticides. “