Ecoclimax

Waters 6 plants for up to 1 month using nothing but gravity. A system of Clayolas connected to a water tank will let each plant draw the exact amount of water it needs. 80% more efficient than traditional watering and drip irrigation methods. A system of Clayolas installed in planting pots and connected to a water tank will let each plant draw the amount of water it needs until the tank is empty. You can recycle an old jar. An empty 20 liter water cooler container would be perfect. Via Clayola

The Amazon basin houses a gigantic ecological machine of global importance being cannibalised for its parts. The human exploitation of Amazonia bears upon the food we eat, the medicine we take, the wood we use, and the temperature outside our doors. The basin sprawls over parts of seven countries and embraces a variety of terrains dominated by the world’s largest tropical rain forest. Solar radiation and water drive this ecosystem in an endless cycle: Ocean evaporation falls as rain, which returns to the sea or rises, by transpiration from vegetation, back to the atmosphere. On a larger scale, hot tropical air rises along the equatorial belt and spreads toward the Poles, as cold polar air sinks and moves toward the Equator. The earth’s rotation deflects this north-south movement, creating trade winds that meet in the intertropical convergence zone. The northeast trade winds transport dust from deserts in Africa, enriching thin rain forest soil an ocean away. Healthy, the forest is...

The warmest year on record: +0.83 °C +/− 0.10 °C warmer than the average for the 1961–1990 reference period, +1.1 above the pre-industrial period. The 2015/2016 El Niño is one of the three strongest events since 1950. Sea Level On timescales longer than about a year, the vast majority (more than 90%) of the Earth’s energy imbalance goes into heating the oceans. As the oceans warm, they expand, resulting in both global and regional sea-level rise. Globally, sea level has risen by 20 cm since the start of the 20th century, due mostly to thermal expansion of the oceans and melting of glaciers and ice caps. Some regions are experiencing greater sea-level rise than others. The tropical western Pacific observed some of the highest rising sea-level rates over the period 1993–2015, which was a significant factor in the enormous devastation in parts of the Philippines when Typhoon Haiyan caused a massive storm surge in November 2013. EL Niño 2015/2017 The year began with a strong El Ni...

On March 7, 2017, Arctic sea ice likely reached its maximum extent for the year, at 14.42 million square kilometers (5.57 million mi2), the lowest in the 38-year satellite record. This year’s maximum extent is 1.22 million square kilometers (471,000 mi2) below 1981 to 2010 average maximum of 15.64 million square kilometers (6.04 million mi2) and 97,000 square kilometers (37,000 mi2) below the previous lowest maximum that occurred on February 25, 2015. This year’s maximum is 100,000 square kilometers (39,000 mi2) below the 2016 maximum, which is now third lowest. Via nsidc.org In Antarctica, this year’s record low annual sea ice minimum of 815,000 square miles (2.11 million square kilometers) was 71,000 square miles (184,000 square kilometers) below the previous lowest minimum extent in the satellite record, which occurred in 1997. Via nasa.gov

Percentage of adults per congressional district who support strict CO2 limits on existing coal-fired power plants About seven in 10 Americans support regulating carbon pollution from coal-fired power plants – and 75 percent support regulating CO2 as a pollutant more generally. Percentage of adults per county who think Global warming will harm people in the U.S. and my personally Via nytimes.com

Dumpsites are a critical issue facing our planet today, contributing to pollution, health hazards, and environmental degradation. With the ever-increasing generation of waste, understanding the scale of this problem and exploring solutions is more urgent than ever. This article delves into the staggering amounts of garbage produced globally, the countries leading in waste generation, the distribution and growth of dumpsites, and potential strategies to reduce waste production. How Much Garbage Is Generated Globally? Each year, the world generates approximately 2.01 billion metric tons of municipal solid waste. This figure is expected to rise significantly, reaching 3.40 billion metric tons by 2050 if current trends continue. The majority of this waste ends up in landfills and dumpsites, posing severe environmental and health risks. Leading Countries in Garbage Production The countries producing the most waste are often those with the largest populations and most advanced economies. The...

The four-metre African rock python had recently swallowed a buck whole when it was found by transporter Jaco Kotze on his farm.   African rock pythons can stomach a hyena.

Source: informationisbeautiful.net

Reddit user: kevpluck

Christian Åslund, a Swedish photojournalist gathered early photos of glaciers in Svalbard (Norway) from the Norwegian Polar Institute and juxtaposed them next to his own photos of the same locations from 2002. Source: Christian Åslund

While the major cities on the coast were spared massive snowfall, areas of Pennsylvania, New York state, and New England all got a load of snow. A persistent band of snow stayed over the house for most of the day. This video from 3 cameras shows the snowfall in Apalachin, New York between 2 AM and 8:24 AM.  

If all the land ice melts, the sea level will rise almost 66 meters. UK, Irland, Denmark India Americas Reddit user: Beflap

A thermal power station is a power plant in which heat energy is converted to electric power. In most of the places in the world, the turbine is steam-driven. Water is heated, turns into steam and spins a steam turbine which drives an electrical generator. After it passes through the turbine, the steam is condensed in a condenser and recycled to where it was heated; this is known as a Rankine cycle. The greatest variation in the design of thermal power stations is due to the different heat sources, fossil fuel dominates here, although nuclear heat energy and solar heat energy are also used.Some prefer to use the term energy center because such facilities convert forms of heat energy into electrical energy.Certain thermal power plants also are designed to produce heat energy for industrial purposes of district heating, or desalination of water, in addition to generating electrical power. Almost all coal, nuclear, geothermal, solar thermal electric, and waste incineration plants, ...

A combination of high winds and frigid temperatures left John Kucko's house on Lake Ontario completely covered in ice.

The Greenland ice sheet is the second largest ice body globally, after the Antarctic ice sheet, embracing 1.71 million square kilometers (660 thousand sq mi), approximately 79 percent of the cover of Greenland for the last 18 million years.  The mean elevation of the ice is 2.1 kilometers or 1,3 miles (over 3 km or 1.9 mi at its thickest point). Nowadays, Greenland is losing approximately 260 billion tonnes of ice to the ocean each year. If the whole 2.85 million cubic kilometers (684 thousand cubic mi) of ice were to melt, it would increase the global sea level by 7.42 meters (24.34 feet). The map below shows a topographic map of Greenland without its ice sheet.  

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This New Yorker has 500 plants. Summer Rayne Oaks lives in a 1,2000 sq ft apartment filled with  150 types of plants. An ex-model with masters in environmental studies, she embraces green living. "Variegated monsteras, corn plants, golden pothos, and philodendrons. Some lemon verbena. We have peppercorn. This is also turmeric." "The plants have really been fully integrated, so they very much like make my home, but they also make the home theirs as well."

Garth De Bruno Austin has been filming this rhino for years, and apparently it got tired of being his subject and getting nothing in return.  

Where we don't live. Green represents areas where no humans reside. United States Canada UK France Netherlands Finland New Zealand Brasil

"The best time to plant a tree? - Twenty years ago. The second best time? -Today." (Chinese proverb) In 1991, David Milarch, an arborist from Michigan, had a near-death experience that inspired a personal quest... When David come back to life, he launched an ambitious project to clone and replant the world's largest trees. Archangel Tree Archive's operations are now expanding to include more propagation facilities, outreach programs and tree planting efforts in nine countries.

The main criteria for megadiverse countries are endemism at the level of species, genera, and families. A megadiverse country must have: 1. At least, 5,000 species of endemic plants, and 2. marine ecosystems on its borders"). Source: Wikipedia.org

University of Colorado scientist Jennifer Balch and several colleagues came to their conclusion after analyzing reports of 1.6 million wildfires from a comprehensive’s fire occurrence database maintained by the U.S. Forest Service. As shown by the map above, almost all (84 percent) of the fires in the Mediterranean ecosystems of central and southern California, the temperate forests of the eastern United States, and the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest are caused by humans. The researchers also found that human-ignited fires tripled the length of the wildfire season. Though lightning-ignited fires were clustered in the summer, human-ignited fires occurred in the spring, fall, and winter as well, times when forests tend to be moist. During these seasons, people added more than 840,000 fires - a 35-fold increase over the number of lightning-started fires. Source: earthobservatory Related posts: - Drought duration by U.S. county (2010 - 2016) - Drought severity ...

Map below visualizing the data allows users to explore nearly 8,000 discovery sites, revealing information on what could be as many as 25,000 dinosaur fossils. Scientists have created a massive database of fossils discovered all around the world, in a painstaking project that covers 165 million years of dinosaur evolution. A remarkable interactive map visualizing the data allows users to explore nearly 8,000 discovery sites, revealing information on what could be as many as 25,000 dinosaur fossils. Via dailymail.co.uk

Reddit user: kabukistar

Some 117 million people get at least some of their drinking water from small streams. For 72 million people in 1,033 counties, more than half of their drinking water comes from small streams. Via ecowatch.com

"Spring is arriving very early this year . . . at least 2-3 weeks early across almost the entire Southeast, from San Antonio to Atlanta to Washington, D.C." "When the researchers applied the plant models to the recent weather data, they were able to create national-scale daily maps of leaf emergence for these plant species. Then, by comparing the daily maps from this year to historical maps created the same way, they created maps that showed just how different this year is relative to the long-term average (1981-2010). It is these data that reveal just how unusually early spring is arriving across most of the USA this year." "The Spring Leaf Index is a measure of these early season events in plants, based on recent temperature conditions. This model allows us to track the progression of spring onset across the country. The map shows locations that have reached the requirements for the Spring Leaf Index model." Via usgs.gov

Detailed vegetation map in The National Atlas of the United States of America (USGS, 1970, Gerlach). This 1:7,500,000-scale map, in the Albers equal-area projection, has 119 vegetation classes for needle leaf, broadleaf, and combined broadleaf/needle leaf forests; shrubs; grasslands; and shrub/grasslands combinations; and grassland/forest combinations. Vegetation areas were symbolized using the colors in this style along with, for some classes, overlaid pattern fills. Via www.vividmaps.com

Surface-level ozone, also known as smog, has increased over the past quarter century at western US rural sites during springtime, partly due to rising Asian pollution, whereas smog has decreased in the eastern US but can spike due to heat waves, according to a new study from Princeton University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL). Shown are the 1988-2014trends in springtime ozone levels on days that were very smoggy (top panel) and of average smogginess (bottom panel), from observations (left) and from a model built by the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (right). Larger circles indicate sites where there is greater certainty about the ozone trend. On very smoggy days (top panel), ozone levels have declined in the east, as indicated by the blue circles. Ozone levels have increased in the west, as indicated by the red circles, despite a 50 percent reduction in the emission of smog-forming pollutants. Credit: ...