One of the biggest habits that humanity has to kick is that of seeing a human-free space and assuming it’s worthless/empty unless we fill it up with something. It’s happening with plans for the ocean, deforestation for “development”, talk of delivery drones filling the future sky, cube sats that will hide the stars. This “space” is the planetary engine, and it’s incredibly valuable NOW. doing all sorts of things that keep us alive & enrich our lives. We should protect it. #ocean#climate#Earth
Portugal is crushing it: renewables met 91% of Portugal’s electricity needs in the first 4 months this year & have pushed their⚡️prices to a 4 yr low!
Renewables are carrying an increasing % of their electrcity demand in the first 4 months in 2024:
95% April
91% March
88% Feb
81% in Jan
Portugal’s rapid transition is evidence it can be done: renewables are up from 27% in 2005 & 54% in 2017 with their last coal power plant shut down in 2021. #nature#environment#renewables#earth
A look underneath seafloor hydrothermal vents on 🌎has revealed cave systems teeming w/ worms, snails & chemosynthetic bacteria living in 75F-degree water.
Methinks this may have significance for the origin of life on Earth & maybe Enceladus!
The key point that I think a lot of engineers still don't get is that their job is not about making widgets that get plonked on top of the world. This is about changing the shape of things inside a working system (Planet Earth) to shift how it operates. Those widgets become part of that system - it's like operating on a living human. The engineers of the future mustn't see their job as creating things external to the world. #science#engineering#climate#Earth
#PPOD: This is neither an impact crater nor a volcano. It is a perfect circular intrusion, about 10km in diameter with a topographic ridge up to 600m high. The Kondyor Massif is located in Eastern Siberia, Russia, north of the city of Khabarovsk. It is a rare form of igneous intrusion called alkaline-ultrabasic massif and it is full of rare minerals. The river flowing out of it forms placer mineral deposits. Credit: NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team
Let's raise children who can name plants and animals, not celebrities and brands!
By prioritizing a nature-oriented education — alongside other forms of learning — we can raise a generation of individuals who are not only well-informed about the world but who are also motivated to protect, preserve and nurture nature for future generations!
Whoa! 👉 Our new perspectives paper just went online!
Introducing an important new paradigm: the notion of #Earth regulating "planetary commons" - a substantial and critical framing for building global governance fit for the #Anthropocene.
"Planetary Commons" are #Earth systems on nation's territories, under sovereignty and ownership - but maintaining them is vital for keeping Earth stable. How does humanity govern them? 🌏🌎🌍
Happy birthday to Danish #seismologist Inge Lehmann (1888 – 1993) who demonstrated that the Earth's core is not a single molten sphere, but contained an inner solid core, in ‘36. She was a pioneer #womanInScience, a brilliant seismologist & lived to be 105.
As she first postulated, the #earth has roughly 3 equal concentric sections: mantle, liquid outer core & solid inner core. 🧵1/n
Energy flows through (in from sunlight and then radiated away into space some time later - Earth is just a temporary stop-off)
Stuff/atoms/matter goes round and round
Every decision we make about a sustainable future should bear those in mind. We can’t change these rules, so we have to choose what we do to work within this system, like the rest of nature does. And this illuminates a lot of issues (see following posts). #climate#Earth#Energy
“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.” - Carl Sagan
This image was taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft on 14 February at Sagan’s suggestion. Voyager was about 6.4 billion kilometers from our tiny dot of a world and heading out of our solar system.
In the same way that you wouldn’t want someone to operate on your kidneys without a good general medical education covering blood, bones & the rest of the human system, I don’t think we want climate interventions trialed by people who don’t understand how Earth works & only consider the local problem and not the whole system it is an integral part of.
Proposal: We measure how good we are at being citizens of Earth by how we deal with our "rubbish". Do we consider it a valuable resource to be reused (mature approach, based on understanding planetary cycles), or do we just push it off to Away (childish denial). Current score: Could Do Better...
Humans pump so much groundwater that Earth’s axis has shifted, study finds (edition.cnn.com)
New research shows that persistent groundwater extraction over more than a decade has shifted the axis on which our planet rotates.