Archive for April, 2010
Aquatic Biodiversty: The Changing Shape Of Our Planet
Aquatic Biodiversty: The Changing Shape Of Our Planet
Aquatic biodiversity is important to the health and well-being of our planet, but is being threatened at an increasing rate. It is affected by many variables, including irrigation, contamination, and evaporation.
Irrigation
Irrigation is, possibly, the most subtle threat to aquatic biodiversity. Until recently, most irrigation issues were considered strictly from an engineering standpoint, with little regard to how construction and maintenance of irrigation channels would affect aquatic biodiversity.
body of water’s aquatic biodiversity
The channels were just earthworks, with no seepage protection. Over time, seepage affects a body of water’s aquatic biodiversity by changing its composition, affecting all life in or sustained by it.
Contamination of the body of water
In the past, lakes were often used as dumping grounds for waste materials. These materials are ingested by native animal and plant life, directly affecting aquatic biodiversity by killing off entire species. According to Philip Micklin and Nikolay V. Aladin’s article in the Scientific American, over the last thirty years animal life has decreased as follows: Fish species, from 32 to 6; bird species, from 319 to 160; and mammal species, from 70 to 32.
Evaporation
If rate of evaporation exceeds rate of rainfall, snowmelt, or groundwater supply, aquatic biodiversity is threatened.
volume decreases
When a body of water’s volume decreases (transforming the area into first a marsh, then dry ground, then eventually a desert) aquatic biodiversity changes as well. Micklin and Aladin state that the Aral Sea has actually suffered sufficient evaporation that it split into two smaller bodies, the Small and Large Aral Seas.
Large Aral Sea
The Large Aral Sea split again, into a deep western basin, a shallow eastern basin, and an isolated gulf. None are as deep as the original body of water and damage has been done to both plant and animal sectors. They further note that the marshland has decreased from 100,000 hectares in 1960 to 15,000 hectares in the 1990s.
percentage of salinity
Second, the percentage of salinity (the ratio of salt to water) can rise. Two of the smaller bodies are no longer habitable largely due to this aspect. According to Micklin and Aladin, the salinity of the Large Aral Sea has risen from about 14 grams per liter (g/l) to over 100.
ocean’s salinity
A typical ocean’s salinity is about 53 g/l, so this is devastating. What were once lush expanses of plant life sustained by the lake’s water are now barren except for the few varieties able to thrive in either saline soil, dry conditions or both.
aquatic biodiversity
If damage was restricted to this one body of water, the threat to aquatic biodiversity would not necessarily be world-threatening. The problem (exceedingly costly to fix once the damage has begun), however, is spreading. The latest victims are Central Africa’s Lake Chad and California’s Salton Sea.
survival
Unfortunately, even economically fortunate countries are cautious in allocating funds for remedying the problems. Unless ways can be found to help smaller countries, where immediate survival is often more urgent than long-term effects, we can expect these changes to continue, with disastrous effects.
Duration : 0:1:19
Irrigation draining the Aral Sea
http://www.55energy.com MAKE CHEAP WINDMILLSmall Wind Energy on the Rise in U.S.
As energy prices continue to rise worldwide, many homeowners in the U.S. are becoming interested in renewable forms of energy to power their homes. Jeff Swicord introduces us to one horse farmer north of Washington D.C. who thinks the answer is small wind energy, in his case, personal wind turbines.
Duration : 0:3:58
EEE aerospace FYP project i’m just the test pilot.Solar Powered Bluetooth Caller ID With LCD Display
[ http://www.chinavasion.com/n4vq ] This Solar Powered Bluetooth Car Kit is for busy travelers and for people who get calls while driving. The Solar Powered Bluetooth has caller ID & LCD Display has got handsfree functionality for safe cell phone use while driving, Full Duplex System with DSP Technology, Noise suppression, echo cancellation and backlit display for night use
Who would like this: Business men and women, people who drive often, people who are on the road a lot. People who drive and receive phone calls quite often on their mobile phone.
What eBay keywords can I use:
Bluetooth, Car kit, Car Kit, Caller ID, LCD Display, Bluetooth hands free, solar cars, Solar power, Bluetooth wireless
This Solar Powered Bluetooth Car Kit- With Caller ID and LCD Screen, comes with a frequency range of 2.4GHz Spectrum and operates at temperatures between 0C to 50C, unlike other solar powered technologies.
It is Beautifully Designed and pleasing to the sight. The Solar Powered Bluetooth hosts a number of powerful call management features, which provides you with the flexibility to answer and end calls, reject calls, call waiting function, voice dial and redial, and phonebook support is also provided along with callback, ensuring that you never miss an important call.
The Solar Powered Bluetooth Car Kit comes in with Bluetooth 2.0 technology, meaning compatibility with any of your cell phones. It has noise reduction and echo cancellation which gives you clear audio when having a chat with some one.
The Solar Powered Bluetooth comes with and LCD screen which lets you see whos calling clearly, and backlit display when driving at night.
Check out the specs for this Solar powered Bluetooth Caller ID LCD Car Kit or see what other wholesale Bluetooth Devices Chinavasion has in store at
[ http://www.chinavasion.com/index.php/cName/bluetooth/ ]
Duration : 0:1:28
SOLAR POWER- UNLIMITED BENEFITS
Long-time solar power expert, Roy Heine of Suntrek Industries, discusses both the immediate and long lasting benefits of adding a solar system to your home or business.
Duration : 0:1:31
Spray-On Solar-Power Cells Are True Breakthrough
SOLAR REVOLUTION – Solar Paint
Ted Sargent is a pioneer in solar science. He’s working on solar technology that could literally be woven into every aspect of daily life, from our clothes to our roads, using what is known as a spray-on solar cell. The implications for our energy systems are profound. As Ted says, “Solar energy is not just an exciting science problem, but an incredibly important human problem.”
Ted is working on solar nanotechnology with the potential to make solar energy very cheap and allow society to collect it on a huge scale. Currently, solar technology costs more to build and install than most people are willing to pay. Solar panels, for example, the technology most commonly associated with solar energy, are installed on your rooftop. The cost of collecting one kilowatt per hour of solar energy (about a third of the electricity an average household uses on any given day) is about $11,000.
Not only are panels expensive to install, they capture only the visible portion of the sun’s rays so they work only on sunny days. Ted’s focus is the infrared portion of the sun’s rays which accounts for more than half of all solar energy. What’s more, infrared energy is available to us even in cloudy weather.
A quantum dot is a semiconductor nanostructure that confines the motion of conduction band electrons, valence band holes, or excitons (bound pairs of conduction band electrons and valence band holes) in all three spatial directions. The confinement can be due to electrostatic potentials (generated by external electrodes, doping, strain, impurities), the presence of an interface between different semiconductor materials (e.g. in core-shell nanocrystal systems), the presence of the semiconductor surface (e.g. semiconductor nanocrystal), or a combination of these. A quantum dot has a discrete quantized energy spectrum. The corresponding wave functions are spatially localized within the quantum dot, but extend over many periods of the crystal lattice. A quantum dot contains a small finite number (of the order of 1-100) of conduction band electrons, valence band holes, or excitons, i.e., a finite number of elementary electric charges.
Duration : 0:3:5
Living Green – Nature Conservancy
David Lewis of “A Natural State of Living Green” interviews Mike Slay of the Nature Conservancy in Northwest Arkansas about the unique Karst system in the Ozarks. Featured on Jones Television cox cable ch. 22
Duration : 0:10:0
lessons learned from the Aral Sea tragedy?
What ecological and economic lessons can we learn from the Aral Sea tragedy?
The problem arose initially in the aftermath of the First World War when the newly established USSR wanted to obtain greater agricultural production by irrigating parts of Kazakhstan / Uzbekistan for the production of cotton.
This involved the diverting of two rivers, the Amu Darya in the south and the Syr Darya in the northeast to water areas of desert. Many of these pipelines and canals were badly constructed resulting in huge leakages and wastage of water. The scheme was continued and even extended as it had resulted in good cotton harvests from the region.
It was not until the 1960s that the removal of water from these rivers was having a noticeable effect on the diminishing level of water in the Aral Sea which had employed 40,000 fishermen as well a further industry related to muskrat trapping in the deltas of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers.
In terms of economic and economic lessons, one has to be exceptionally careful when redirecting water resources within a desert region. Where water is KNOWN to empty into the sea, then river can (with caution) be pumped or diverted into irrigation channels.
The main problem as far as the Aral Sea is concerned is that it is an inland sea and the development of a large cotton industry has been at the expense of a large fishing industry as well as a significant change to the local climate.
I would hope that a similar venture would never be tried again and that with use of more waterproof pipe and canal floor materials, gradual repair and overhaul of the irrigation infrastructure will result in increasing flow back into the Aral Sea. The water level has already risen by 7 feet in the northern parts of the Sea. It is clear that the Kazakh government is taking a much more responsible attitude to the problem than the Soviet government had done.