Sunday, February 11, 2018

Why these tiny ocean creatures are eating plastic

When plastic trash degrades in the ocean, it doesn't just go away: It becomes countless tiny particles, and little creatures called larvaceans sweep it up--and into the food chain.
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Saturday, February 10, 2018

Haunting words from one of the most daring Antarctic adventures of all time

In 1914, Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew embarked on an ambitious expedition:
completing the first land crossing of the Antarctic continent.
"Life, to me, is the greatest of all games. The danger lies in treating it as a trivial game."
What words or phrases were most haunting for you?

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Friday, February 9, 2018

Image of the week : signs of ships in the clouds

NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS Rapid Response

From NASA by Adam Voiland

Ships churning through the Atlantic Ocean produced this patchwork of bright, criss-crossing cloud trails off the coast of Portugal and Spain.
The narrow clouds, known as ship tracks, form when water vapor condenses around tiny particles of pollution that ships emit as exhaust or that form from gases in the exhaust.
Ship tracks typically form in areas where low-lying stratus and cumulus clouds are present.

Some of the pollution particles generated by ships (especially sulfates) are soluble in water and serve as the seeds around which cloud droplets form.
Clouds infused with ship exhaust have more and smaller droplets than unpolluted clouds.
As a result, the light hitting the polluted clouds scatters in many directions, making them appear brighter and thicker than unpolluted marine clouds, which are typically seeded by larger, naturally occurring particles such as sea salt.

Several shipping lanes intersect in the waters off the coast of Portugal.
Visualizations of ship traffic show large numbers of ships entering and exiting the Mediterranean Sea in this region.
Many of them hug the coast of the Iberian Peninsula as they travel toward ports in northern Europe. In this case, the large volume of ships along the coast appear to have brightened the clouds so much that it is difficult to distinguish individual ship tracks.
The more visible tracks are several hundred kilometers offshore, and many of these appear to be created by ships heading out of the Mediterranean Sea toward North America.
Others are probably the result of ships from South America and Africa charting courses toward northern Europe.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard the Aqua satellite captured this natural-color image on January 16, 2018. Some of the criss-crossing clouds stretch hundreds of kilometers from end to end.
The narrow ends of the clouds are youngest, while the broader, wavier ends are older.

Age is not the only factor that affects the appearance of ship tracks. NASA scientists have identified specific atmospheric conditions that affect their brightness, or albedo.
One key factor is the structure of clouds already in the area. Ship tracks clouds that form near open-cell clouds—many of which are present in this image—tend to be brighter than those that form near close-celled clouds.
(Open-cell clouds look like empty compartments, whereas closed-cell clouds look like compartments stuffed with clouds.)

The high reflectivity of ship track clouds means they shade Earth’s surface from incoming sunlight, which produces a local cooling effect.
However, determining whether ship tracks have a global cooling effect is challenging because the way particles affect clouds remains one of the least understood and most uncertain aspects of climate science.

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Thursday, February 8, 2018

Mega-rocket test succeeds, but not landing at sea


SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy Demonstration Mission launched from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A), Kennedy Space Center, Florida, on 6 February 2018, at 20:45 UTC (15:45 ET).
For its maiden flight, Falcon Heavy’s second stage will attempt to place the payload, Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster, into a precessing Earth-Mars elliptical orbit around the Sun.
For this first flight test, Falcon Heavy’s two side cores launched the Thaicom 8 satellite (May 2016) and the CRS-9 mission (July 2016).
Following booster separation, Falcon Heavy’s two side cores landed at SpaceX’s Landing Zones 1 and 2 (LZ-1 and LZ-2) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida.
Falcon Heavy’s center core attempted to land on the “Of Course I Still Love You” droneship, stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.

From Maritime Executive

On Tuesday, aerospace firm SpaceX conducted the first test of its Falcon Heavy rocket, the heaviest capacity launch vehicle in operation today.
The launch was a success, the rocket's dummy payload is in orbit, and two of three booster sections have returned to Earth for reuse.

  Falcon Heavy animation :
When Falcon Heavy lifts off, it will be the most powerful operational rocket in the world by a factor of two. With the ability to lift into orbit nearly 64 metric tons (141,000 lb)---a mass greater than a 737 jetliner loaded with passengers, crew, luggage and fuel--Falcon Heavy can lift more than twice the payload of the next closest operational vehicle, the Delta IV Heavy, at one-third the cost.
Falcon Heavy's first stage is composed of three Falcon 9 nine-engine cores whose 27 Merlin engines together generate more than 5 million pounds of thrust at liftoff, equal to approximately eighteen 747 aircraft.
Following liftoff, the two side boosters separate from the center core and return to landing sites for future reuse.
The center core, traveling further and faster than the side boosters, also returns for reuse, but lands on a drone ship located in the Atlantic Ocean.
At max velocity the Roadster will travel 11 km/s (7mi/s) and travel 400 million km (250 million mi) from Earth.

The Falcon Heavy is comprised of three of the company's Falcon 9 first stage boosters, which are designed to return to ground (or to a seagoing landing pad) for recovery.

 Synchronized landing of the two side booster cores.
Photo : Jared Haworth / We Report Space

In earlier launches of the Falcon 9 - a single-booster variant that is designed to put commercial satellites into orbit - SpaceX has managed to recover the rocket's valuable first stage on a specially-equipped, DP-enabled landing barge.
It has also successfully experimented with the recovery of its rocket nose cones at sea, using a modified crewboat with a grabbing device to catch each half of the cone.
By bringing its equipment back to shore intact for refurbishment, SpaceX hopes achieve "full and rapid reusability" and greatly reduce the cost per launch.

During the second Falcon 9 rocket launch (GovSat, January 31st, 2018), the company chose not to land the booster after takeoff and instead dispensed it in the ocean.
In a weird twist, the Falcon 9 still managed to survive its fall into the deep sea waters and is bobbing intact in the Atlantic.
see @elonmusk_tweet

The Falcon Heavy test required a highly complex, choreographed sequence of events.
After takeoff, the two side boosters separated from the main body of the rocket and fell away.
They reduced speed, rotated and flew back for a successful landing on shore.
The center stage separated successfully and reentered the atmosphere, but the video feed aboard the landing barge cut off before touchdown.

To stop the polemic :
SpaceX has historically shown every failure, some epic explosions and missed landings...
So no doubt SpaceX hided anything.
Core crashed beside platform and that was it.
Nothing happened in frame anyhow other than smoke and one piece of debris.
Overall mission was an awesomely impressive success
see Elon Musk describing Core failure

In a news conference later on Tuesday, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said that the center stage was only able to relight one out of its three engines during landing, and it missed the barge and hit the water at 300 miles an hour.


Nose cone fairing recovery at sea was also listed as part of Tuesday's launch evolution, but it appears that it was not successful either.
"Fairing recovery has proven surprisingly difficult. It turns out if you pop a parachute on the fairing you've got this giant awkward thing - it tends to interfere with the airflow on the parachute, and it gets all twisty," Musk said.
"We've got a boat to catch the fairing - it's like a giant catcher's mitt in boat form."

 The modified crewboat "Mr. Stevens," likely designed to catch Falcon 9 nose cone fairings
(file image via social media)

While the reusable components headed back to the surface, the second stage and its payload achieved orbital trajectory around Earth.
If all is successful, SpaceX says, the payload will head for a slingshot orbit around the sun, then out into space.


In a whimsical twist, the dummy payload is an actual dummy, seated behind the steering wheel of Musk's Tesla Roadster.
(Elon Musk is the charismatic entrepreneur behind both Tesla and SpaceX.)

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Wednesday, February 7, 2018

France set to become a European Offshore Wind powerhouse by 2022 ?

There was a big 19% increase in wind generation in Europe last year.

From Bloomberg by Jeremy Hodges and Jess Shankleman
  • WindEurope sees French turbine orders passing U.K., Germany
  • Offshore wind investments to recover after contracting in 2017
Europe’s wind-power industry expects new French offshore turbine installations to overtake the U.K. and Germany by 2022, boosting President Emmanuel Macron’s pledge to increase renewable energy.

Such has been the slow progress with early projects that floating offshore wind is likely to leapfrog them
France has made a significant commitment to offshore windfarms but still hasn’t built any, however that situation is changing as floating offshore wind projects come to the fore

Construction off the French coast is expected to ramp up from 2020 and turn the country in the fourth-biggest offshore wind generator with about 4.3 gigawatts capacity by 2030, according to the Brussels-based WindEurope industry group.


Macron has repeatedly promised to turn France into a green energy leader and reduce the country’s reliance on nuclear power.
He’s trying to cut through bureaucratic red tape that has delayed offshore wind projects tendered in 2012.
His government said in November that it aims to trim offshore project development to less than seven years from more than a decade.



The U.K. and Germany currently lead in offshore wind installations with 1,753 and 1,168 installed turbines respectively, according to a WindEurope report on Tuesday.


98% of offshore wind capacity comes from the UK, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium.

Investment in new offshore wind farms is expected to recover marginally in 2018 after a sharp drop last year, according to the industry group, which estimates more than 9 billion euros ($11.2 billion) of projects could reach financial close this year.

Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy currently accounts for 51% of new installed capacity.

Last year investment in new European offshore wind projects dropped almost three-fifths, to 7.5 billion euros, after countries cut subsidies and technology costs fell.
Conversely, the refinancing of existing projects jumped 80 percent to 4.6 billion euros.
“Project sponsors have used the favorable market conditions and increased liquidity to restructure their project debt,” WindEurope reported.


By 2020 WindEurope expects European offshore wind capacity of 25 gigawatts.
The market will continue to concentrate around the North Sea, where the U.K. will connect 3.3 gigawatts of new offshore capacity by 2020.

Fifteen miles off Scotland's North Sea coast is a new wind farm,
with the world's first floating turbines.

During the period, Germany is expected to install 2.3 gigawatts while Belgium and the Netherlands will install 1.3 gigawatts and Denmark will add 1 gigawatt of offshore power.

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