Lava flowing out of the Pacaya volcano, 25km south of Guatemala City on March 25, 2021
The Pacaya volcano close to Guatemala’s capital is maintaining “high levels” of activity with strong eruptions, ash clouds and rivers of lava spewing out, officials said on Friday.
The 2,500-meter (8,200-foot) volcano that lies 25 kilometers to the south of Guatemala City has been erupting for 50 days, damaging plantations in the path of the lava.
Pacaya is expelling ash up to 500 meters from its crater, located 2.5 kilometers southwest of the cone, the vulcanology institute said in a statement.
Falling ash was registered in the El Rodeo and El Patrocinio communities, the institute said, adding that “the volcanic activity is considered at high levels.”
The activity has produced a lava flow 2.2 kilometers long on the west flank of the volcano.
The national disaster coordination body said the lava had caused “fire and the destruction of coffee and avocado plantations.”
Despite the spectacular eruptions, inhabitants of the surrounding villages have chosen to stay at home.
The civil protection body has asked authorities to prohibit people from approaching either the crater or the lava flows due to the risk of falling debris.
On Tuesday, a change in wind direction forced the closure of the country’s only international airport for almost 24 hours due to ash.
A powerful eruption of the Pacaya volcano in May 2010 killed a television journalist covering the event.
Guatemala has 30 volcanos including two other active ones.
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Guatemala’s Pacaya volcano continues erupting after 50 days (2021, March 26)
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Two Czech zoos have installed large screens to let their chimpanzees watch each other via Zoom, an attempt to relieve the boredom during closures enforced by coronavirus restrictions.
The video chat platform, which has become a fixture for many humans over the past year, allows apes at the Safari Park in Dvur Kralove nad Labem northeast of Prague to see their peers at a zoo in the second city of Brno some 160 kilometres (100 miles) to the south.
“We are trying to ensure some entertainment for our apes at a time when visitors cannot come to the zoo and these intelligent animals therefore lack an important entertaining stimulus,” Safari Park spokesman Michal Stastny told AFP.
The Safari Park is home to one male chimpanzee and five females, who enjoy sitting in front of the large screen, munching on salad or grass.
Safari Park zoologist Gabriela Linhartova said their interest has recently started to wane, but at first they loved sitting down in a row in front of the screen with nuts and fruit in their hands.
“The similarity between them and, say, cinemagoers or us sitting in front of a TV was really quite striking,” Linhartova said.
“We can see that when something is happening with the animals in Brno, when there’s a conflict or they are being fed, our animals react with increased attention,” she said.
Zoo life continues
Linhartova said the apes missed visitors just like visitors missed the animals.
“Visitors are a source of entertainment, study and observation for the animals,” she said, adding that it took the apes some time to figure out the chimpanzees on the screen were not really there.
“At first, the male made gestures in a bid to protect the group when the animals in Brno got close to the camera,” said Linhartova.
Before making new friends in Brno, the Safari Park chimpanzees were allowed to watch children in a kindergarten.
The two enclosures are also being broadcast on YouTube daily between 8:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m.
“We are trying to show that although Czech zoos have been closed for more than 170 days since the spring of 2020, there’s still life in them,” Stastny said.
One of the worst-hit countries, the Czech Republic has so far seen 1.5 million COVID-19 cases and more than 25,000 deaths.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is underestimating methane emissions from oil and gas production in its annual Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks, according to new research from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). The research team found 90 percent higher emissions from oil production and 50 percent higher emissions for natural gas production than EPA estimated in its latest inventory.
The paper is published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.
The research team, led by Joannes Maasakkers, a former graduate student at SEAS, developed a method to trace and map total emissions from satellite data to their source on the ground.
“This is the first country-wide evaluation of the emissions that the EPA reports to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC),” said Maasakkers, who is currently a scientist at the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research.
Currently, the EPA only reports total national emissions to the UNFCC. In previous research, Maasakkers and his collaborators, including Daniel Jacob, the Vasco McCoy Family Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Environmental Engineering at SEAS, worked with the EPA to map regional emissions of methane from different sources in the US. That level of detail was used to simulate how methane moves through the atmosphere.
In this paper, the researchers compared those simulations to satellite observations from 2010-2015. Using a transport model, they were able to trace the path of emissions from the atmosphere back to the ground and identify areas across the US where the observations and simulations didn’t match up.
“When we look at emissions from space, we can only see how total emissions from an area should be scaled up or down, but we don’t know the source responsible for those emissions,” said Maasakkers. “Because we spent so much time with the EPA figuring out where these different emissions occur, we could use our transport model to go back and figure out what sources are responsible for those under- or over-estimations in the national total.”
The biggest discrepancy was in emissions from oil and natural gas production.
The EPA calculates emission based on processes and equipment. For example, the EPA estimates that a gas pump emits a certain amount of methane, multiplies that by how many pumps are operating across the country, and estimates total emissions from gas pumps.
“That method makes it really hard to get estimates for individual facilities because it is hard to take into account every possible source of emission,” said Maasakkers. “We know that a relatively small number of facilities make up most of the emissions and so there are clearly facilities that are producing more emissions than we would expect from these overall estimates.”
The researchers hope that future work will provide more clarity on exactly where these emissions are coming from and how they are changing.
“We plan to continue to monitor U.S. emissions of methane using new high-resolution satellite observations, and to work with the EPA to improve emission inventories,” said Jacob.
“It’s important to understand these emissions better but we shouldn’t wait until we fully understand these emissions to start trying to reduce them,” said Maasakkers. “There are already a lot of things that we know we can do to reduce emissions.”
More information:
Joannes D. Maasakkers et al. 2010–2015 North American methane emissions, sectoral contributions, and trends: a high-resolution inversion of GOSAT observations of atmospheric methane, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (2021). DOI: 10.5194/acp-21-4339-2021
Citation:
Oil and natural gas production emit more methane than previously thought (2021, March 26)
retrieved 27 March 2021
from https://phys.org/news/2021-03-oil-natural-g
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In this Feb. 16, 2021, file photo, thousands of Atlantic green sea turtles and Kemp’s ridley sea turtles suffering from cold stun are laid out to recover at the South Padre Island Convention Center on South Padre Island, Texas. About a third of the cold-stunned sea turtles found along Texas’ coast during last month’s deadly winter freeze survived following a massive rescue effort by experts and volunteers struggling themselves without power at home. The Sea Turtle Stranding and Salvage Network says that of the about 13,000 sea turtles found, about 4,300 have now been rehabilitated and released. (Miguel Roberts/The Brownsville Herald via AP, File)
About a third of the cold-stunned sea turtles found along Texas’ coast during last month’s deadly winter freeze survived following a massive rescue effort by experts and volunteers who were themselves struggling without power at home.
Of the approximately 13,000 sea turtles found, about 4,300 have been rehabilitated and released, according to the Sea Turtle Stranding and Salvage Network, a cooperative of federal, state and private partners coordinated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It’s been the largest cold-stunning event for sea turtles recorded in the U.S. since the network was established in 1980.
While the majority of the sea turtles found during the winter storm were already dead, those that survived wouldn’t have if not for the rescuers, said Barbara Schroeder, NOAA’s national sea turtle coordinator. She said the water and air temperatures were “too cold for too long” for them to recover on their own.
“The event was so severe—the temperatures were so extreme—yes, they absolutely would have all died,” said Schroeder, who added that a small number are still being cared for.
As below-freezing temperatures hit the coast during the February storm, scientists, volunteers and even the U.S. Coast Guard joined the effort to rescue the immobile sea turtles from the water and shore.
“Mind you, while they’re bringing and rescuing all of these sea turtles, we didn’t have power or water, our gas stations ran out of gas,” said Wendy Knight, executive director at Sea Turtle Inc., a nonprofit on South Padre Island.
Ed Caum, executive director of the South Padre Island Convention and Visitors Bureau, said that for a while during the week of the storm a vehicle pulled up “every 15 minutes or less” and dropped off turtles.
When water temperatures drop below about 50 degrees (10 degrees Celsius), sea turtles become lethargic and are unable to swim. Surf temperatures dropped into the low 40s that week on South Padre Island.
Some of the cold-stunned sea turtles had other problems as well, including hook infections and injuries from boats, Knight said.
Almost all of the rescued sea turtles were green turtles, Schroeder said.
Once rescued, the turtles were slowly warmed up.
“You can’t warm them up really, really quickly. And some of the turtles that came in live did not make it,” said Christopher Marshall, director of the Gulf Center for Sea Turtle Research, which rescued sea turtles in the Galveston area.
He said that once the turtles they rescued were revived, they were taken to the Houston Zoo for a check-up and if they then passed a swim test, they were returned to the Gulf.
Knight said they have held a volunteer appreciation day and made T-shirts for those who helped rescue the turtles that say: “I survived the great cold stun.”
“There were hundreds, maybe even thousands, I couldn’t even guess at how many people we had involved,” Knight said.
Citation:
About 4,300 cold-stunned turtles survived the Texas freeze (2021, March 25)
retrieved 26 March 2021
from https://phys.org/news/2021-03-cold-stunned-turtles-survived-texas.html
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Efforts to shift from petrochemical plastics to renewable and biodegradable plastics have proven tricky—the production process can require toxic chemicals and is expensive, and the mechanical strength and water stability is often insufficient. But researchers have made a breakthrough, using wood byproducts, that shows promise for producing more durable and sustainable bioplastics.
A study published in Nature Sustainability, co-authored by Yuan Yao, assistant professor of industrial ecology and sustainable systems at Yale School of the Environment (YSE), outlines the process of deconstructing the porous matrix of natural wood into a slurry. The researchers say the resulting material shows a high mechanical strength, stability when holding liquids, and UV-light resistance. It can also be recycled or safely biodegraded in the natural environment, and has a lower life-cycle environmental impact when compared with petroleum-based plastics and other biodegradable plastics.
“There are many people who have tried to develop these kinds of polymers in plastic, but the mechanical strands are not good enough to replace the plastics we currently use, which are made mostly from fossil fuels,” says Yao. “We’ve developed a straightforward and simple manufacturing process that generates biomass-based plastics from wood, but also plastic that delivers good mechanical properties as well.”
To create the slurry mixture, the researchers used a wood powder—a processing residue usually discarded as waste in lumber mills—and deconstructed the loose, porous structure of the powder with a biodegradable and recyclable deep eutectic solvent (DES). The resulting mixture, which features nanoscale entanglement and hydrogen bonding between the regenerated lignin and cellulose micro/nanofibrils, has a high solid content and high viscosity, which can be casted and rolled without breaking.
Yao then led a comprehensive life cycle assessment to test the environmental impacts of the bioplastic against commons plastics. Sheets of the bioplastic were buried in soil, fracturing after two weeks and completely degrading after three months; additionally, researchers say the bioplastic can be broken back down into the slurry by mechanical stirring, which also allows for the DES to be recovered and reused.
“That, to me, is what really makes this plastic good: It can all be recycled or biodegraded,” says Yao. “We’ve minimized all of the materials and the waste going into nature.”
The bioplastic has numerous applications, says Liangbing Hu, a professor at the Center for Materials Innovation at the University of Maryland and co-author of the paper. It can be molded into a film that can be used in plastic bags and packaging—one of the major uses of plastic and causes of waste production. Hu also says that because the bioplastic can be molded into different shapes, it has potential for use in automobile manufacturing, as well.
One area the research team continues to investigate is the potential impact on forests if the manufacturing of this bioplastic is scaled up. While the process currently uses wood byproducts in manufacturing, the researchers say they are keenly aware that large-scale production could require usage of massive amounts of wood, which could have far-reaching implications on forests, land management, ecosystems and climate change, to name a few.
Yao says the research team has already begun working with a forest ecologist to create forest simulation models, linking the growth cycle of forests with the manufacturing process. She also sees an opportunity to collaborate with people who work in forest-related fields at YSE—an uncommon convenience.
“It’s not often an engineer can walk down the hall and talk to a forester,” says Yao.
More information:
A strong, biodegradable and recyclable lignocellulosic bioplastic, Nature Sustainability (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41893-021-00702-w
Citation:
Turning wood into plastic (2021, March 25)
retrieved 26 March 2021
from https://phys.org/news/2021-03-wood-plastic.html
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Encased in an icy shell, the ocean on Enceladus appears to be churning. Credit: California Institute of Technology
Buried beneath 20 kilometers of ice, the subsurface ocean of Enceladus—one of Saturn’s moons—appears to be churning with currents akin to those on Earth.
The theory, derived from the shape of Enceladus’s ice shell, challenges the current thinking that the moon’s global ocean is homogenous, apart from some vertical mixing driven by the warmth of the moon’s core.
Enceladus, a tiny frozen ball about 500 kilometers in diameter (about 1/7th the diameter of Earth’s moon), is the sixth largest moon of Saturn. Despite its small size, Enceladus attracted the attention of scientists in 2014 when a flyby of the Cassini spacecraft discovered evidence of its large subsurface ocean and sampled water from geyser-like eruptions that occur through fissures in the ice at the south pole. It is one of the few locations in the solar system with liquid water (another is Jupiter’s moon Europa), making it a target of interest for astrobiologists searching for signs of life.
The ocean on Enceladus is almost entirely unlike Earth’s. Earth’s ocean is relatively shallow (an average of 3.6 km deep), covers three-quarters of the planet’s surface, is warmer at the top from the sun’s rays and colder in the depths near the seafloor, and has currents that are affected by wind; Enceladus, meanwhile, appears to have a globe-spanning and completely subsurface ocean that is at least 30 km deep and is cooled at the top near the ice shell and warmed at the bottom by heat from the moon’s core.
Despite their differences, Caltech graduate student Ana Lobo (MS ’17) suggests that oceans on Enceladus have currents akin to those on Earth. The work builds on measurements by Cassini as well as the research of Andrew Thompson, professor of environmental science and engineering, who has been studying the way that ice and water interact to drive ocean mixing around Antarctica.
The oceans of Enceladus and Earth share one important characteristic: they are salty. And as shown by findings published in Nature Geoscience on March 25, variations in salinity could serve as drivers of the ocean circulation on Enceladus, much as they do in Earth’s Southern Ocean, which surrounds Antarctica.
Lobo and Thompson collaborated on the work with Steven Vance and Saikiran Tharimena of JPL, which Caltech manages for NASA.
Gravitational measurements and heat calculations from Cassini had already revealed that the ice shell is thinner at the poles than at the equator. Regions of thin ice at the poles are likely associated with melting and regions of thick ice at the equator with freezing, Thompson says. This affects the ocean currents because when salty water freezes, it releases the salts and makes the surrounding water heavier, causing it to sink. The opposite happens in regions of melt.
“Knowing the distribution of ice allows us to place constraints on circulation patterns,” Lobo explains. An idealized computer model, based on Thompson’s studies of Antarctica, suggests that the regions of freezing and melting, identified by the ice structure, would be connected by the ocean currents. This would create a pole-to-equator circulation that influences the distribution of heat and nutrients.
“Understanding which regions of the subsurface ocean might be the most hospitable to life as we know it could one day inform efforts to search for signs of life,” Thompson says.
More information:
A pole-to-equator ocean overturning circulation on Enceladus, Nature Geoscience (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41561-021-00706-3
Citation:
Ocean currents predicted on Enceladus (2021, March 25)
retrieved 26 March 2021
from https://phys.org/news/2021-03-ocean-currents-enceladus.html
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Asian Americans reported the single biggest increase in serious incidents of online hate and harassment as racist and xenophobic slurs blaming people of Asian descent for the coronavirus pandemic spread over the past year, according to a new survey shared exclusively with U.S. TODAY.
Some 17% of Asian Americans reported sexual harassment, stalking, physical threats and other incidents, up from 11% last year.
Half of them said the harassment was spurred by their race or ethnicity, according to the survey from anti-hate group ADL. Overall, 21% of Asian-American respondents said they were harassed online.
CEO Jonathan Greenblatt says the survey’s findings, which come amid a growing outcry over the rapid rise in attacks on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders nationwide, show that efforts to curb surging anti-Asian sentiment by social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube have fallen short.
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey are slated to testify on Capitol Hill on Thursday about their handling of misinformation, disinformation and other harmful content. The vast majority of those polled by ADL—81%—agreed with the statement that social media platforms should do more to combat online hate.
In a statement, Facebook said it does not allow hate speech and removes content that attacks someone for who they are, their race, ethnicity or national origin.
“Over the past year we’ve updated our policies to catch more implicit hate speech,” Facebook said. “Thanks to significant investments in our technology we proactively detect 95% of the content we remove and we continue to improve how we enforce our rules as hate speech evolves over time.”
Fatal shootings of women of Asian descent in Atlanta escalate concern
The fatal shootings of eight people, including six women of Asian descent, at Atlanta-area massage parlors, have escalated concern that racist and xenophobic rants online are spilling over into real-world violence.
Though police say the suspect said he did not target the women because of their race, the crime touched a nerve with the sharp increase in anti-Asian incidents in recent months. Experts say the killings were inextricably linked to racism and hate.
“Hate and stigma against Asian-American populations have gone viral during the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Anahi Viladrich, a professor of sociology at Queens College and The Graduate Center at the City University of New York, who recently published a paper in the American Journal of Public Health exploring the rise of anti-Asian language.
“Social media has significantly contributed to the pandemic of prejudice and hate against Asian populations globally,” she said. “With its power to freely move across time zones and social geographies, social media has turned terms such as ‘Chinese virus’ and ‘Wuhan virus’ into race-based stigma against Asian groups in the United States and overseas.”
Researchers at University of California at San Francisco traced the rise of anti-Asian hashtags on Twitter to Donald Trump’s tweet in March 2020 referring to the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus.”
“The use of racial and ethnic terms to describe the coronavirus is an important contributor to the record-breaking level of severe online harassment against Asian Americans over the past year,” John Brownstein, an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and co-author of the study, told U.S. TODAY.
Anti-Asian sentiment rose 85% after Trump was diagnosed with COVID-19 last fall, the ADL found at the time. Trump used the term “China virus” in a recent Fox News interview.
How Trump, ‘China virus’ fueled hate speech
Jeremy Blackburn, a professor of computer science at Binghamton University, is studying Sinophobic,or anti-Chinese, terms on 4chan and Twitter.
What he and his colleagues witnessed was the evolution of anti-Chinese hate speech in real-time.
“One slur many people are probably familiar with is ‘Wuhan Flu,’ which did not exist in the lexicon until COVID-19,” he said. “But we also found not only dozens of new slurs, but more importantly that previously benign words like ‘pangolin’ were increasingly used as slurs.”
Blackburn points out how difficult it is to measure the scope of the problem given how much the language has changed—even in the time since the pandemic started.
“One of the major challenges in measuring Sinophobic content is that it has rapidly evolved,” he said. “Although it is quite easy to look for occurrences of well known slurs, we’ve seen all sorts of new Sinophobic terms arise.”
Advocates for the Asian American community have warned for months that inflammatory online rhetoric about COVID-19 from political leaders including Trump could lead to violence.
Hate crimes against Asian Americans jump during coronavirus pandemic
Hate crimes against Asian Americans rose 149% from 2019 to 2020, even though hate crimes overall decreased 7% during the pandemic, according to findings released in early March by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University.
Stop AAPI Hate, a group that tracks discrimination and xenophobia against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, received nearly 3,800 reports of hate incidents during the year-long pandemic.
These numbers are probably a fraction of actual incidents. One in 4 Americans, including nearly half of Asian Americans, in recent weeks have seen someone blame Asian people for the coronavirus epidemic, a U.S. TODAY/Ipsos Poll found.
Recent attacks include multiple violent assaults on elderly people of Asian descent.
“Racially motivated violence and other incidents against Asian Americans have reached an alarming level across the United States since the outbreak of COVID-19,” a United Nations report released last year found, citing sharp rises in vandalism, physical assaults and robberies against Asian American people, businesses and community centers.
President Joe Biden denounced the attacks as un-American in his first prime-time address. During his first week in office, Biden condemned racially motivated harassment and violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and directed federal agencies to explore ways to counter the attacks.
Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Tuesday the Senate will take up legislation on anti-Asian hate crimes.
The ADL survey of 2,251 individuals also found:
Nearly 6 in 10 African Americans reported a sharp rise in racially motivated online harassment, up from 42% last year.
American adults who were harassed said they were exposed to the most harassment on Facebook, the world’s largest social media platform, (75%), followed by Twitter (24%), Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, (24%) and YouTube, owned by Google, (21%).
More than a quarter—27%—experienced severe online harassment over the past year which includes incidents of swatting, in which false police reports are made in hopes of getting a SWAT team sent to someone’s home, and doxing, which is leaking personal information online.
Overall, 41% of Americans said they had experienced some form of online hate and harassment.
A third of those surveyed attributed the harassment to an identity characteristic, which was defined as sexual orientation, religion, race or ethnicity, gender identity, or disability.
LGBTQ respondents reported disproportionately higher rates of harassment than all other identity groups at 64%
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With 2 degrees Celsius of warming, the population of South Asia will experience more than double the exposure to unsafe labor temperatures (left) and will have almost three times the exposure to temperatures that cause lethal heat stress (right). Credit: Saeed et. al/ Geophysical Research Letters/AGU
Residents of South Asia already periodically experience heat waves at the current level of warming. But a new study projecting the amount of heat stress residents of the region will experience in the future finds with 2 degrees Celsius of warming, the population’s exposure to heat stress will nearly triple.
Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius will likely reduce that impact by half, but deadly heat stress will become commonplace across South Asia, according to the new study in Geophysical Research Letters, short-format reports with immediate implications spanning all Earth and space sciences.
With almost one quarter of the world’s population living in South Asia, the new study underlines the urgency of addressing climate change.
“The future looks bad for South Asia, but the worst can be avoided by containing warming to as low as possible,” said Moetasim Ashfaq, a computational climate scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and corresponding author of the new study. “The need for adaptation over South Asia is today, not in the future. It’s not a choice anymore.”
Earth has warmed by 1 degree Celsius since the start of the Industrial Revolution, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. On the current climate trajectory, it may reach 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming in 2040. This deadline leaves little time for South Asian countries to adapt. “Only half a degree increase from today is going to cause a widespread increase in these events,” Ashfaq said.
A hot region getting hotter
People living in South Asia are especially vulnerable to deadly heat waves because the area already experiences very hot, humid summers. Much of the population live in densely populated cities without regular access to air conditioning, and about 60% perform agricultural work and can’t escape the heat by staying indoors.
In the new study, the researchers used climate simulations and projections of future population growth to estimate the number of people who will experience dangerous levels of heat stress in South Asia at warming levels of 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius. They estimated the wet bulb temperature residents will experience, which is similar to the heat index, as it takes into account humidity as well as temperature. A wet bulb temperature of 32 degrees Celsius (89.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is considered to be the point when labor becomes unsafe, and 35 degrees Celsius (95 degrees Fahrenheit) is the limit to human survivability—when the body can no longer cool itself.
Their analysis suggests at 2 degrees of warming, the population’s exposure to unsafe labor temperatures will rise more than two-fold, and exposure to lethal temperatures rises 2.7 times, as compared to recent years.
Curbing warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius will likely cut that exposure in half, but large numbers of people across South Asia will still experience extreme temperatures. An increase in heat events that create unsafe labor conditions are likely to occur in major crop producing regions in India, such as West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh, and in Pakistan in Punjab and Sindh. Coastal regions and urban centers such as Karachi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Peshawar are also likely to be heavily affected, according to the study.
“Even at 1.5 degrees, South Asia will have serious consequences in terms of heat stress,” Ashfaq said. “That’s why there is a need to radically alter the current trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions.”
The results differ from a similar study conducted in 2017, which predicted that heat waves of lethal temperatures will occur in South Asia toward the end of the 21st century. The researchers suspect the earlier study is too conservative, as deadly heat waves have already hit the region in the past. In 2015, large parts of Pakistan and India experienced the fifth deadliest heat wave in the recorded history, which caused about 3,500 heat-related deaths.
“A policy framework is very much needed to fight against heat stress and heat wave-related problems,” said T.V. Lakshmi Kumar, an atmospheric scientist at India’s SRM Institute of Science and Technology who was not involved in the work. “India has already committed to reduce emissions to combat climate change issues.”
The study was supported by National Climate Computing Research Center, which is located within ORNL’s National Center for Computational Sciences and supported under a Strategic Partnership Project between Department of Energy and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
More information:
Fahad Saeed et al, Deadly heat stress to become commonplace across South Asia already at 1.5°C of global warming, Geophysical Research Letters (2021). DOI: 10.1029/2020GL091191
Citation:
Deadly heat waves will be common in South Asia, even at 1.5 degrees of warming (2021, March 24)
retrieved 25 March 2021
from https://phys.org/news/2021-03-deadly-common-south-asia-degrees.html
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In this Nov. 20, 2020, file photo, a bald eagle grabs a fish from the Susquehanna River near the Conowingo Dam, in Havre De Grace, Md. The number of American bald eagles has quadrupled since 2009, with more than 300,000 birds soaring over the lower 48 states, government scientists said Wednesday in a new report. (AP Photo/Julio Cortez)
The number of American bald eagles has quadrupled since 2009, with more than 300,000 birds soaring over the lower 48 states, government scientists said in a report Wednesday.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said bald eagles, the national symbol that once teetered on the brink of extinction, have flourished in recent years, growing to more than 71,400 nesting pairs and an estimated 316,700 individual birds.
Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, in her first public appearance since being sworn in last week, hailed the eagle’s recovery and noted that the majestic, white-headed bird has always been considered sacred to Native American tribes and the United States generally.
“The strong return of this treasured bird reminds us of our nation’s shared resilience and the importance of being responsible stewards of our lands and waters that bind us together,” said Haaland, the first Native American Cabinet secretary.
Bald eagles reached an all-time low of 417 known nesting pairs in 1963 in the lower 48 states. But after decades of protection, including banning the pesticide DDT and placement of the eagle on the endangered species list in more than 40 states, the bald eagle population has continued to grow. The bald eagle was removed from the list of threatened or endangered species in 2007.
“It is clear that the bald eagle population continues to thrive,” Haaland said, calling the bird’s recovery a “success story” that “is a testament to the enduring importance of the work of the Interior Department scientists and conservationists. This work could not have been done without teams of people collecting and analyzing decades’ worth of science … accurately estimating the bald eagle population here in the United States.”
In this Feb. 6, 2020, file photo, a bald eagle lands in a tree overlooking the Des Moines River in Des Moines, Iowa. The number of American bald eagles has quadrupled since 2009, with more than 300,000 birds soaring over the lower 48 states, government scientists said Wednesday, March 24, 2021, in a new report. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall, File)
The celebration of the bald eagle “is also a moment moment to reflect on the importance of the Endangered Species Act, a vital tool in the efforts to protect America’s wildlife,” Haaland said, calling the landmark 1973 law crucial to preventing the extinction of species such as the bald eagle or American bison.
Reiterating a pledge by President Joe Biden, Haaland said her department will review actions by the Trump administration “to undermine key provisions” of the endangered species law. She did not offer specifics, but environmental groups and Democratic lawmakers criticized the Trump administration for a range of actions, including reducing critical habitat for the northern spotted owl and lifting protections for gray wolves.
“We will be taking a closer look at all of those revisions and considering what steps to take to ensure that all of us—states, Indian tribes, private landowners and federal agencies—have the tools we need to conserve America’s natural heritage and strengthen our economy,” Haaland said.
“We have an obligation to do so because future generations must also experience our beautiful outdoors, the way many of us have been blessed,” she added.
Martha Williams, deputy director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, called recovery of the bald eagle “one of the most remarkable conservation success stories of all time” and said she hopes all Americans get the chance to see a bald eagle in flight.
“They’re magnificent to see,” she said.
To estimate the bald eagle population in the lower 48 states, Fish and Wildlife Service biologists and observers conducted aerial surveys over a two-year period in 2018 and 2019. The agency also worked with the Cornell University Lab of Ornithology to acquire information on areas that were not practical to fly over as part of aerial surveys.
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US report: Bald eagle populations soar in lower 48 states (2021, March 24)
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A simple laser comprising just two standard mirrors was used to create higher-dimensional classically entangled light, a new state of the art, deviating from the prevailing paradigm of two-dimensional Bell states. The approach combines internal generation, in-principle unlimited in what can be created, with external control, allowing user-defined states to be molded. Shown here are examples of two-dimensional Bell (left) and high-dimensional states (right), including the famous GHZ states. Credit: Yijie Shen, Isaac Nape, Xilin Yang, Xing Fu, Mali Gong, Darryl Naidoo and Andrew Forbes
Tailoring light is much like tailoring cloth, cutting and snipping to turn a bland fabric into one with a desired pattern. In the case of light, the tailoring is usually done in the spatial degrees of freedom, such as its amplitude and phase (the ‘pattern’ of light), and its polarization, while the cutting and snipping might be controlled with spatial light modulators and the like. This burgeoning field is known as structured light, and is pushing the limits in what we can do with light, enabling us to see smaller, focus tighter, image with wider fields of view, probe with fewer photons, and to pack information into light for new high-bandwidth communications. Structured light has also been used to test the classical-quantum boundary, pushing the limits with what classical light can do for quantum processes, and vice versa. This has opened the intriguing possibility of creating classical light that has quantum-like properties—as if it is ‘classically entangled.’ But how to create and control such states of light, and how far can one push the limits?
The prevailing tools for structuring light from lasers is hindered by the complexity of the specialized lasers needed, often requiring customized geometries and/or elements, while the prevailing two-dimensional paradigm of using only pattern and polarization, means accessing two-dimensional classically entangled light, mimicking quantum qubits, 1s and 0s. An example of this would be the well-known quantum Bell states, shown in Figure 1 (left), which as classical light appears as vectorial structured light, combining the two degrees of freedom of ‘pattern’ and ‘polarization.’ These two degrees of freedom mimic the two dimensions of the qubit quantum state. To create higher dimensions requires finding more degrees of freedom in a system seemingly constrained to just two.
In their paper “Creation and control of high-dimensional multi-partite classically entangled light,” Chinese and South African scientists report on how to create arbitrary dimensional quantum-like classical light directly from a laser. They use a very simple laser available in most university teaching laboratories to show eight dimensional classically entangled light, a new world record. They then go on to manipulate and control this quantum-like light, creating the first classically entangled Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states, a rather famous set of high-dimensional quantum states, shown in Figure 1.
“Theorists have long suggested all the applications that would be possible with such quantum-like light, but the lack of any creation and control steps has prohibited any progress. Now we have shown how to overcome this hurdle,” says Dr. Shen from Tsinghua University (present senior research fellow in University of Southampton), the lead author of the paper.
Traditionally, exotic structured light from lasers requires equally exotic laser systems, either with custom elements (metasurfaces for example) or custom geometries (topological photonic based for example). The laser built by the authors contained only a gain crystal and followed textbook design with just two off-the-shelf mirrors. Their elegant solution is itself build on a principle embedded in quantum mechanics: ray-wave duality. The authors could control both path and polarization inside the laser by a simple length adjustment, exploiting what is called ray-wave duality lasers.
According to Prof. Forbes, the project supervisor, “what is remarkable is not only that we could create such exotic states of light, but that their source is as simple a laser as you could possibly imagine, with nothing more than a couple of standard mirrors.” The authors realized that the crucial “extra” degrees of freedom were right in front of theirs eyes, needing only a new mathematical framework to recognize them. The approach allows in-principle any quantum state to be created by simply marking the wave-like rays that are produced by the laser and then externally controlling them with a spatial light modulator, molding them to shape. In a sense, the laser produces the dimensions needed, while later modulation and control molds the outcome to some desired state. To demonstrate this, the authors produced all the GHZ states, which span an eight dimensional space.
Because no-one had ever created such high-dimensional classically entangled light, the authors had to invent a new measurement approach, translating tomography of high-dimensional quantum states into a language and technique suitable for its classical light analog. The result is a new tomography for classically entangled light, revealing its quantum-like correlations beyond the standard two dimensions.
This work provides a powerful approach to creating and controlling high-dimensional classical light with quantum-like properties, paving the way for exciting applications in quantum metrology, quantum error correction and optical communication, as well as in stimulating fundamental studies of quantum mechanics with much more versatile bright classical light.
More information:
Yijie Shen et al, Creation and control of high-dimensional multi-partite classically entangled light, Light: Science & Applications (2021). DOI: 10.1038/s41377-021-00493-x
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A simple laser for quantum-like classical light (2021, March 23)
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