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Earth Wise

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Earth Wise episodes

December 06, 2019 Should New York Build A Storm Surge Barrier?
In 2012, Superstorm Sandy’s storm surge combined with a high tide and buried lower Manhattan under 13 feet of water. Across all five boroughs, subways, highways, and parking garages flooded and homes and businesses were destroyed. Sandy caused nearly $20 billion in damages in New York City alone and more than 50 people died.
Ever since that disaster took place, there have been discussions about
building storm surge barriers to protect the city from future storms. Columbia University’s Sabin Center recently
hosted an event to discuss the feasibility of building such barriers.
A study by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers called the NY and NJ
Harbor and Tributaries Focus Area Feasibility Study (HATS, for short) evaluates
five options for coastal protection, which range in scope and price.
The most extensive option would involve constructing six miles of
storm surge gates along with 26 miles of floodwalls, levees, and buried
seawalls. This option would cost $62
billion but could theoretically save $131 billion in damages and protect 95% of
the study area.
The study also considers the side effects of building storm surge
barriers. These include environmental
impacts such as effects on fish and wildlife, water quality, noise and
vibrations, and changes in water flow.
While these effects can be quite serious and there is opposition from
many quarters related to environmental impacts, others point out that there is
really no other credible defense against storm surge. The debate over whether or not to build storm
surge barriers could easily last for many more years.
In the bigger picture, storm surge barriers do nothing to protect against
rain-driven flooding, sea level rise, and tidal floods which continue to
increase.
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Web Links
Should New York Build a Storm Surge Barrier?
Photo, posted October 30, 2012, courtesy of Pamela Andrade via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.
2 min
December 05, 2019 Bioacoustics
Researchers are increasingly placing microphones in forests and other ecosystems to monitor birds, insects, frogs, and other animals. Advances in technology are enabling the wide-spread use of bioacoustics as an important research tool.
Studying animals in their natural habitat Is often a difficult
task. For one thing, many animals are
difficult to find, and the presence of humans disrupts their behavior or even
drives them off. Remote cameras are
useful, but cameras can only see what is in front of them and aren’t much use
for detecting small animals, hidden animals, or ones high up in trees.
Biologists have long recognized the value of recording sound to identify
animals and learn about their havior.
Animal sounds can be as definitive a means of identification as visual
images and microphones can pick up the sounds from animals located anywhere
within their detection range.
The two advances in technology that are turning bioacoustics into a
widely used tool are a steep drop in the price of recording equipment and the
rapidly expanding capabilities of user-friendly artificial intelligence
algorithms.
Autonomous environmental audio recorders tended to cost between $500
and $1000 until quite recently. Now,
such equipment can be had for as little as $70.
The other big challenge is analyzing audio data. Finding specific animal sounds among hundreds
of hours of recordings is an untenably tedious task. Identifying the characteristic sounds of
specific species in crowded environments is a tricky business. But neural network-based artificial
intelligence technology is making such big data analysis quite practical and,
remarkably, it is becoming quite user-friendly.
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Web Links
Listening to Nature: The Emerging Field of Bioacoustics
Photo, posted January 28, 2013, courtesy of Felix Uribe via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.
2 min
December 04, 2019 Reducing Emissions From Natural Gas Processing
Qatar, a small country in the Middle East with a population of about 2.5 million has the highest per capita income of any country in the world. This is largely a result of being one of the world’s top producers of natural gas. The upshot of that is that the tiny country has the dubious honor of being the world’s leading emitter of CO2 per capita.
Texas A&M University has a campus in Qatar and researchers there
in collaboration with colleagues at the main campus in College Station, Texas
have developed a new reactor technology that can help Qatar process its wealth
of natural gas while reducing the country’s carbon footprint.
The technology processes natural gas and captured CO2 to produce both syngas – which is a valuable precursor for many products – and high-quality carbon nanotubes, all without releasing CO2 into the atmosphere.
Natural gas reforming is a process by which syngas – a feedstock for liquid hydrocarbons and ultraclean fuels- is produced. The process requires lots of heat and emits CO2. The new technology adds a novel CARGEN (or CARbon GENerator) reactor that advances the natural gas reforming process and includes a catalyst that captures the CO2 emissions and produces nanotubes. The reactor can be driven by either electric or solar power, eliminating the need to burn fuel that ordinarily results in more carbon emissions.
The result is that Qatar’s CO2 emissions would be converted into two products that are important to its economy. In particular, carbon nanotubes are very expensive and extremely versatile, and can be used to manufacture products such as computers and other high-quality materials.
The next step for the researchers is to partner with industry collaborators to further scale up the technology.
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Web Links
Qatar Researchers Develop Natural Gas Processing Technology That Could Reduce Qatar’s Carbon Footprint
Photo, posted September 30, 2012, courtesy of Jimmy Baikovicius via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.
2 min
December 03, 2019 Keeping Plants Plump
The leading cause of crop failures worldwide is drought. Ironically, the very close runner-up is flooding. Facing a changing and increasingly erratic climate, farmers need all the help they can get in protecting their crops.
Researchers at the University of California, Riverside, have created a
chemical to help plants hold onto water, which could stem the tide of massive
annual crop losses from drought. Details
of the team’s work is described in a paper published in Science.
The chemical is called Opabactin, but is also known as “OP.” OP is gamer slang for overpowered, referring to the best character or weapon in a game.
OP mimics abscisic acid, or ABA, which is the natural hormone produced
by plants in response to drought stress.
ABA slows a plant’s growth, so it doesn’t consume more water than is
available and doesn’t wilt. OP is
10-times stronger than ABA, which makes it a super hormone. It works fast. Within hours, there is a measurable
improvement in the amount of water plants release. Because it works so quickly, OP could give
farmers more flexibility in how they deal with drought. Plants can’t predict the future, but if, for
example, farmers think there is a reasonable chance of drought, they could make
decisions such as to apply OP to improve crop yields.
The research team is now trying to find a second chemical tool. Whereas OP slows down plant growth, the team
wants to find a molecule that will accelerate it. Such a molecule could be useful in controlled
environments such as indoor greenhouses.
There are times when you want to speed up growth and times when you want
to slow it down.
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Web Links
Game changer: New chemical keeps plants plump
Photo, posted June 7, 2013, courtesy of Bayer CropScience UK via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.
2 min
December 02, 2019 Climate Change And El Niño
The term El Niño refers to a large-scale ocean-atmosphere climate interaction linked to a periodic warming in sea surface temperature across the central and east-central equatorial Pacific Ocean. Amazingly, the phenomenon was originally recognized by fishermen off the coast of South America in the 1600s, with the appearance of unusually warm water in the Pacific Ocean.
According to a new study published in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, climate change is increasing the frequency of
extreme El Niño events, leading to intensifying droughts, worsening floods, and
shifting hurricane patterns.
The study, led by scientists in China and the US, looked at data from
33 El Niños dating back to 1901. Since
the 1970s, El Niños have been forming farther to the west in the Pacific Ocean,
where temperatures are warmer. Strong El
Niños can cause severe drought in dry climates such as Australia and India,
intense flooding in wetter climates such as the US Pacific Northwest and Peru,
and more hurricanes to form in the Pacific and fewer in the Atlantic.
Before 1978, 12 out of 14 El Niños formed east of the International Dateline. Since 1978, all 11 have formed in the central or western Pacific Ocean a shift of hundreds of miles. There have been three so-called super El Niños since the shift – in 1982, 1997, and 2015. These have set new average temperature records and triggered catastrophic natural disasters.
With rising global temperatures, El Niños are likely to continue to
intensify, with major impacts on human societies around the world.
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Web Links
Climate Change is Making El Niños More Intense, Study Finds
Photo, posted January 20, 2016, courtesy of Los Angeles District via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.
2 min
November 29, 2019 Safe And Simple Hydrogen Peroxide
We don’t think about hydrogen peroxide very often. Perhaps we have a bottle of it under our bathroom sink that we haven’t touched in a few years. But it is an important product manufactured in the millions of tons each year and the basis of a $6 billion global business.
Hydrogen peroxide is widely used as an antiseptic, a detergent, in
cosmetics, as a bleaching agent, in water purification, and in many other
applications. It is produced in
industrial concentrations of up to 60% in solution with water in order to
maximize the economics of transportation.
This makes transportation hazardous and costly because the concentrated
form is unstable. Most applications use
a far more diluted form.
Researchers at Rice University have developed a new method for
producing hydrogen peroxide that is much simpler and safer than the current
technology, which actually dates back to the 1930s. The Rice technique requires only air, water
and electricity to produce the chemical.
The electrosynthesis process, which is detailed in the journal Science,
uses an oxidized carbon nanoparticle-based catalyst.
The process could enable point-of-use production of pure hydrogen
peroxide solutions, which would eliminate the need to transport the hazardous
concentrated chemical. The use of a
solid electrolyte instead of the traditional liquid electrolyte eliminates the
need for product separation or purification that is part of the current
technology.
In the future, instead of storing containers of hydrogen peroxide, hospitals that use it as a disinfectant could turn on a spigot and get, for example a 3% solution on demand. Instead of storing chemicals to disinfect swimming pool water, future homeowners could flick a switch and turn on their peroxide reactor to clean their pools.
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Web Links
Water + air + electricity = hydrogen peroxide
Photo, posted April 19, 2009, courtesy of Robert Taylor via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.
2 min
November 28, 2019 The March Of The Penguins Toward Extinction
According to a new study from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the warming climate may render emperor penguins extinct by the end of this century. The study, which was part of an international collaboration between scientists, finds that emperor penguins will likely experience an 86% decline by 2100 if the global climate continues to warm at the current rate. At that point, it would be very unlikely for them to recover, according to the study’s lead author.
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and
recently published in the journal Global Change Biology.
The fate of emperor penguins is largely tied to the fate of sea
ice. The penguins use sea ice as a place
for breeding, feeding, and molting. They
look for very specific conditions of sea ice – it must be locked in to the
Antarctic shoreline but also close enough to open seawater to give them access
to food. The study predicts that this sea ice will gradually disappear,
depriving the birds of their habitat, food sources, and ability to raise their
young.
The researchers combined two existing computer models to study three
different climate change scenarios. If
the average global temperature increases by only 1.5 degrees Celsius, the study
found that only 5% of sea ice would be lost by 2100, resulting in a 19% drop in
penguin colonies. If the planet warms by
2 degrees Celsius, the sea ice loss nearly triples and more than a third of
penguin colonies disappear. The
‘business as usual’ scenario where the planet continues to warm at the current
rate will ensure a near complete loss of emperor penguin colonies by 2100.
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Web Links
Unless warming is slowed, emperor penguins will be marching towards extinction
Photo, posted January 15, 2011, courtesy of Eli Duke via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.
2 min
November 27, 2019 Clean Gas From An Artificial Leaf
Photosynthesis is the process used by plants, algae and certain bacteria to harness energy from sunlight and turn it into chemical energy. It is often described as the green engine of life on earth.
For quite some time, there have been extensive research efforts around
the world in the area of artificial photosynthesis. The goal is to somehow mimic the behavior of
plants in order to generate clean-burning fuels using nothing more than
sunlight and the carbon dioxide in the air.
Researchers at the University of Cambridge have recently demonstrated
a so-called artificial leaf that can directly produce syngas using
sunlight. Syngas is a fuel gas mixture
consisting primarily of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Most people haven’t heard of syngas, but many
products are created using it. Being
able to produce it sustainably would be a critical step to a far greener
chemical and fuel industry.
The artificial leaf contains two light absorbers, similar to the
molecules in plants that harvest sunlight, which are combined with a catalyst
made from the naturally abundant element cobalt. When the device is immersed in water, one
light absorber uses the catalyst to produce oxygen. The other carries out the chemical reaction
that reduces carbon dioxide and water into carbon monoxide and hydrogen. The result is the syngas mixture.
It turns out that even a rainy or overcast day provides enough light
to drive the process.
Previous artificial leaf devices have mostly just produced
hydrogen. The Cambridge device produces
syngas thanks to the novel combination of materials and catalysts it uses.
The researchers are now focused on finding ways to use the technology
to produce a sustainable gasoline substitute.
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Web Links
‘Artificial leaf’ successfully produces clean gas
Photo, posted August 15, 2014, courtesy of Mike Mozart via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.
2 min
November 26, 2019 Ocean Acidification And Mass Extinction
Since the industrial revolution, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has increased due to the burning of fossil fuels and land use changes. The ocean absorbs about 30% of the CO2 that is released in the atmosphere. As the levels of atmospheric CO2 increase, so do the levels in the ocean.
When CO2 is absorbed by the ocean, a series of chemical reactions
occur, resulting in seawater becoming more acidic. Ocean acidification threatens calcifying
organisms, such as clams and corals, as well as other marine animals, like
fish. When these organisms are at risk,
the entire marine ecosystem may also be at risk.
In fact, according to research recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, fossil evidence from 66 million years ago has revealed that ocean acidification can cause the mass extinction of marine life. Researchers analyzed seashells in sediment laid down shortly after a giant meteorite hit earth. This strike wiped out the dinosaurs and 75% of marine species. Chemical analysis of the shells revealed a sharp drop in the PH of the ocean over hundreds of years after the meteorite strike. The meteorite impact vaporized rocks, causing carbonic acid and sulphuric acid to rain down, acidifying the ocean. The strike also resulted in mass die-off of plants on land, increasing atmospheric CO2.
Researchers found that the pH dropped by 0.25 pH units in the 100 to 1,000 years after the meteorite strike. Alarmingly, scientists expect the pH of the ocean to drop by 0.4 pH units by 2100 if our carbon emissions continue as projected.
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Ocean acidification can cause mass extinctions, fossils reveal
Photo, posted March 16, 2017, courtesy of Zachary Martin via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.
2 min
November 25, 2019 Stranded Coal Assets In Japan
Japan is facing a looming financial problem as a result of heavy investments in coal technology that may quickly become stranded assets as renewable energy sources become increasingly inexpensive.
Japan is gradually adding more ambitious policies with regard to
climate change including goals to reduce emissions and to have renewables
become the main source of power over the next three decades. But despite these policy efforts, Japan is
still investing heavily in coal power.
Japan currently has 21 new coal projects with over 11 GW of
under-construction, permitted or pre-permitted coal capacity. But these tens of billions of dollars in
assets would have to be closed prematurely in order to remain consistent with
the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement.
According to a new report by the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a
financial think tank, and the University of Tokyo, offshore wind power will be
cheaper than coal in Japan by 2022, new solar cheaper by 2023, and onshore wind
less expensive by 2025. The price of
offshore wind is already comparable to existing coal power in Japan. Japan had a total of 55.5 GW of solar
capacity last year and has the potential to reach 150 GW by 2030.
The report notes that 42% of the global coal fleet likely became
unprofitable last year and this could rise to 72% by 2040. The authors contend that building coal power
today equals high-cost power and financial liabilities tomorrow. The planned and operating coal capacity in
Japan is partially protected by regulations that give coal generators an unfair
advantage in the marketplace. Ultimately,
the stranded coal assets are likely to be passed down to consumers through
higher power prices.
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Web Links
Land of the Rising Sun and Offshore Wind
Photo, posted April 25, 2019, courtesy of Jen via Flickr.
Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio.
2 min

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From green business and new environmental legislation to how nature impacts our environment in ways never before considered, Earth Wise offers a look at our changing environment.