Abu Dhabi’s plan is to build the world’s largest and first carbon-neutral, zero-waste city. The project symbolizes the capacity of this powerful United Arab Emirate to be a leader in renewable energy. It will also show the world that independence from fossil fuels is possible (once the project is complete). Building a carbon-free city hasn’t been without its trials.
A rendering of Masdar City from The National.
Dr. Christine Rollinson is the perfect example of a scientist with an atypical career. She works in the non-profit sector, as lead Forest Ecologist at The Morton Arboretum in Illinois. She grew up in the central Appalachian Mountains, received her Bachelor’s at Oberlin College of Ohio, and went on to complete her Master’s and PhD at Penn State. Finally, she did a Postdoc at Boston University.
Personal photo from Christy Rollinson.
I’m calling it the first because the impact factor of Lil Dicky’s “Earth”, released three days before Earth Day 2019, has already surpassed 60 million views during its first 9 days on YouTube. No other Earth Day song to date can brag that level of notoriety or relevance. Below is a short description of his motivation in starting this campaign. Warning: some language!
What is the world’s largest natural carbon sink? Wetlands. But what is the world’s largest carbon stock? The ocean. My adoration of wetland ecosystems is not hindered by the fact that oceans are a larger carbon stock, though. Wetlands still win at sequestering the largest amount of carbon per year in peat. We can detect this because of something called a “carbon sink”. Carbon sinks have net negative carbon emissions. On the opposite end, carbon sources have positive emissions.
Depiction by Alison Elmhorst, 2016.
Horizontal gene transfer was first discovered in 1928, but like many topics in the science realm there is still so much to learn about it. A talk I attended recently highlighted the fact that up to 10% of bacterial DNA wasn’t originally their DNA. Bacteria have the ability to “shop around” for bacteria, adding genes that spark joy to their initial DNA. After a few generations the unuseful DNA tends to get deleted, but certain bacteria may choose to keep it. This is one way that bacteria “evolve” even though they don’t undergo meiosis (combination of an egg & sperm).
Photo by Egor Kamelev on Pexels.com
Science calls it a phenomena. But the word “phenomena” makes it sound as though the Nocturnal Boundary Layer (NBL) is something inexplicable. In reality, we know that it is a relatively thin layer of cool air separate from the rest of the Boundary Layer which appears at night. Its creation is spurred by net radiative loss from Earth’s surface. In the unique case of the solar eclipse of 2017, the NBL appeared from the lack of sun in under a half-hour. We also know there is an effect from cooling of the air after sunset, but the Earth constantly emits longwave radiation (infrared) into the universe.
“Many interacting processes can occur within the statically stable nocturnal boundary layer: patchy sporadic turbulence, internal gravity waves, drainage flows, inertial oscillations, and nocturnal jets.”
– American Meteorological Society
