Most of the ice shelves buttressing Antarctica’s ice sheets risk fracturing as meltwater trickles into cracks on their surface, which could accelerate sea level rise Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2252946-meltwater-may-fracture-antarctic-ice-shelves-and-speed-sea-level-rise/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
Tag: sheets
Solar Panels Are Starting to Die, Leaving Behind Toxic Trash
“Solar panels are an increasingly important source of renewable power that will play an essential role in fighting climate change. They are also complex pieces of technology that become big, bulky sheets of electronic waste at the end of their lives — and right now, most of the world doesn’t have a plan for dealing with that,” reports Wired. (Alternate URL…
Greenland Lost 586 Billion Tons of Ice In 2019
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Associated Press: Greenland lost a record amount of ice during an extra warm 2019, with the melt massive enough to cover California in more than four feet (1.25 meters) of water, a new study said. After two years when summer ice melt had been minimal, last summer shattered all records with 586 billion…
2019 State of the Climate Report: Peak greenhouse gases and record heat
2019 ranks among the 3 warmest years in records dating to the mid-1800s. In 2019, greenhouse gases reached their highest levels on record. Both facts are from the 30th annual State of the Climate report, a review of world climate based on contributions from more than 520 scientists in over 60 countries. Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/international-climate-report-2019-record-heat-greenhouse-gas…
Google Sets Timeline For Deprecating ‘Classic’ Google Sites
Google has announced that its structured wiki- and webpage-creation tool “Google Sites,” which it launched in 2008 after acquiring JotSpot, will be shutting down in 2021. 9to5Google reports: This morning an email was dispatched to “active” users of classic Sites detailing its retirement, which will take place over the next year. The email, which had the subject line “Migrate your classic…
Could ice sheets, not rivers, have formed the channels on Mars?
New research suggests that many of Mars’ ancient channels, thought to have been carved by flowing surface water, were formed instead by meltwater beneath glacial ice sheets. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/mars-river-channels-ice-sheets-devon-island-canadian-arctic-archipelago…
Social Movements Are Pushing Google Sheets To the Breaking Point
In the past decade, Google’s suite of collaborative tools has steadily gained prominence in social movements and other forms of widespread collaboration. From a report: It was used to organize Occupy Wall Street movements in 2011, disseminate resources for protesting after the U.S. election in 2016, and assemble response to the California wildfires in 2017. During 2020, these tools have earned…
Ancient Mars may have been covered in ice sheets
Early Mars may not have been quite the warm, wet paradise scientists have hoped for — not if the valleys scarring its surface work the same way as their counterparts here on Earth do. Source: https://www.livescience.com/ancient-mars-covered-in-ice-sheets.html
5 years after New Horizons flyby, 10 cool things about Pluto
Here are 10 of the coolest, weirdest and most unexpected findings about the Pluto system scientists have learned thanks to the New Horizons spacecraft’s flyby of the distant world in 2015. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/new-horizons-flyby-10-cool-things-about-pluto…
Power Pioneer Invents New Battery That’s 90% Cheaper Than Lithium-Ion
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Lithium-ion batteries play a central role in the world of technology, powering everything from smartphones to smart cars, and one of the people who helped commercialize them says he has a way to cut mass production costs by 90% and significantly improve their safety. Hideaki Horie, formerly of Nissan Motor Co., founded Tokyo-based…