Earth Science

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Taisha is again the author. She writes: Today's photo is of Equisetum arvense, also known as the field horsetail. This picture was taken by Hans Mohr (aka muscovite@Flickr) on May 19, 2013. Thank you Hans for the vibrant photo (submitted via the Botany Photo of the Day Flickr Pool)! Equisetum arvense is a perennial species that is found across North America, Eurasia, Asia, and Greenland. Often, it grows along roadsides or riverbanks, or in fields and pastures. Though native, the field horsetail is considered a weedy species in British Columbia as it is poisonous to young horses and sheep when ingested. Equisetum is derived from the Latin equus meaning "horse", and seta, "bristle", a reference to the resemblance of some species to the tails of horses. Field horsetail can propagate vegetatively from an underground rhizomatous stem. Fertile and vegetative aerial (aboveground) stems are hollow, except at the nodes. The shorter, brown fertile stems mature in early spring, shown in today's photograph. They are unbranched and terminate in a spore-bearing "cone". After spore dispersal, the fertile stems will wither and sterile stems grow. These vegetative counterparts with whorls of side shoots at the nodes are green and photosynthetic. The nodal leaves on the vegetative stems are dark brown, toothed, and form a papery sheath around the stalk.

One of the great things about field stations is the silliness they engender. I mean, there you are, in the middle of nowhere, with no one but other scientists thinking about the wonder of the natural world. Awe and wonder can only take you so far. And then, at some point, you cross over, and start to get a little silly. It leads to things like dressing up as fouling panels, launching serious plans to make an ‘underwater office,’ elaborate nail-polish-marking designs for crab carapaces, and no small number of pranks. And then, there’s this. This may be on the order of the silliest things ever to come out of field station. I heard the gull interns (seagull science is notorious for producing silliness alongside great science) talking about this idea to sync some of their videos up with the Les Mis soundtrack and now…now I found they’ve… well.. You must see this to believe it. Astounding. My hats off to the SML 2013 Gull crew. Marine science music video of the year? (also, who is singing on ‘I dreamed a dream’ – amazing voice!)

This is a guest post from Alea Tuttle, a former graduate student of Anne’s at UNC Charlotte, who now works in environmental consulting. Alea recently discovered the 10 hundred words of science challenge and was inspired to write her own entry.* I think it perfectly captures the start-to-finish of restoration and its environmental aspects. Part 1: How we make money by making wet places better When people want to build things on top of wet places, or when they do bad things to wet places they are supposed to tell a group of people that watch out for the wet places. They figure out how much of the wet place that they did bad things to, which then gets turned into a number that people use to figure out how much money the people who build things have to give away. Then the people who look out for the wet places give the money to us to help other wet places that need help getting better. When we find a wet place that needs help, we use their money to buy the wet place and make it so that nobody can do bad things to it anymore and also to help the fix the wet place to make it better. Also we use some of the money to buy food and other things that we need and want while we are helping the wet places. Part 2: What makes a wet place good or bad We look at lots of different wet places and see if the water and the places around the water are good.  When people grow food or build things near wet places, they do things that make the water and the places around the water bad for animals and people.  The biggest thing people do is take away trees. We like to see enough trees and places where trees leave a shadow so that the water stays cool. If the water gets too hot it is bad for the animals in the water. We also like to see enough of the part of the trees that go under the ground to keep the ground from getting pulled away by the water. Sometimes people do things that make the water go in a straight line, but we like to see water move in a way that goes side to side like a wave, because that is the way that water likes to move. If the water isn’t moving, but staying still in a place that is low, we like to see that the water is keeping the ground wet, because sometime people to things to make the wet places dry out. We like to see places where there are a lot of different types of green living things instead of just a few types that grow really fast and keep others from growing. We like ones that have lived there for a long time and are good food for animals better than the ones from somewhere else. We like to see all of these things because this is what is good for the animals that like wet places and because it helps the water to be good for animals and people. Part 3: What we do to make wet places better If the wet places and the places around them are not good, we try to make them better. The easiest thing to do is to keep the animals that people grow for food away from the wet places because they can do bad things to the ground and the green living things, and the water. We also make it so that people can’t build things near the wet places.  If the water is moving in a way that is not good or if the ground is drying up too much, we move the ground around and make the water move the way we want and keep the ground wet. We also take out the green living things that are bad (like the ones that come from somewhere else and grow too fast) and we put in other green living things that are good (like the ones that have things animals can eat, and that have been there for a long time) and also we put in lots of baby trees that will grow up and make shadows over the water. Part 4: What we do to make sure we did things right Sometimes the green living things that are bad come back because they grow a lot and very fast, and because the animals and people bring them back. This sometimes keeps some of the other green living things from growing, especially baby trees. Also, sometimes the water doesn’t go where we want it to go

Apologies for the lack of entries -- it's all on me and my (lack of) time, as I now have a good-sized backlog of entries from Taisha. She's written today's entry: Today's images (original 1 | original 2) of Melastoma malabathricum subsp. malabrathricum, commonly known as blue tongue or Malabar melastome or native lasiandra, were taken on April 17, 2011 by long-time BPotD contributor Andreas Lambrianides. Thank you for all of your wonderful photos and for today's pictures! Melastoma malabathricum subsp. malabrathricum of the Melastomataceae is native to tropical Asia, Taiwan, parts of Australia, Mauritius and Seychelles. In Australia, typical habitats include roadsides, disturbed rain forest areas and other wet forests. The Flora of China's account seems to take a broader view of the species (Melastoma malabathricum), so the habitat includes more environments and the species distribution is wider. The 3m tall stem of this shrub and its branches are covered in appressed scales. As shown in the photographs, the elliptical or ovate leaves are hairy and have a midrib with 2 to 3 longitudinal veins on either side. The terminal clusters of 3-7 flowers are purple-reddish in color with two leaf-like bracts at the base. The fruit is a densely hair-covered fleshy capsule. It dehisces to reveal a dark pulp with small orange seeds that are dispersed by birds. According to Malay, Indian and Indonesian folk medicine, different parts of Melastoma malabrathicum are thought to have medicinal value for the treatment of a variety of ailments. There are also several prospective pharmacological uses, but in-depth scientific studies first must be completed to verify their potential (see: Joffry, SM., et al. 2011. Melastoma malabrathicum (L.) Smith ethnomedicinal uses, chemical constituents, and pharmacological properties: A review. Evid. Based Complement Alternat Med. 2012: 258434. doi:10.1155/2012/258434).

Natural gas is much cleaner than coal but it's also important that its energy return on investment (EROI) - the total input energy with the energy expected to be made available to end users - is similar to coal, according to a paper in the Journal of Industrial Ecology. The paper looked at gas from horizontal, hydraulically fractured wells in the Marcellus Shale of Pennsylvania and their analysis indicates that the EROI ratio of a typical well is likely between 64:1 and 112:1, with a mean of approximately 85:1. This range assumes an estimated ultimate recovery of 3.0 billion cubic feet per well, similar to the estimated ultimate recovery of coal, which falls between 50:1 and 85:1. read more

The end of the Atlantic Ocean is coming. A new subduction zone forming off the coast of Portugal shows that a passive margin in the Atlantic ocean is becoming active and Europe could to move closer to America, according to a paper in Geology. read more

Water in the Earth's upper mantle and crust likely plays a less important role as a lubricant of plate tectonics than previously assumed, according to a paper presented by geoscientists present in the current issue of Nature (13/06/2013) after the examination of water in the mineral olivine. Laboratory experiments over the past three decades have suggested the presence of water greatly weakens the mechanical strength of the mineral olivine, a key component of the Earth's upper mantle. In the recent study, led by the Bayerisches Geoinstitut in Bayreuth, the Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometer (SIMS) facility at the Potsdam based GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences was used to reassess the importance of water in defining the rigidity of olivine. read more

Around The Arctic June 2013The Arctic is currently primed for rapid and extensive ice loss, unless we see some very unusual weather conditions this Summer.The state of the ice can be seen in the following series of satellite images from NASA's Earth Observing System Data and Information System - EOSDIS. EOSDIS produces near real-time data and makes images such as the Arctic mosaic and the Near Real Time (Orbit Swath) Images available on the web. --> read more

x-posted from openpub One year ago, one of the more intereting experiments in open access publishing – PeerJ – launched. It’s model of membership rather than paying by the article is still something people are grappling with – it’s just so different, so delightfully disruptive. Not only that, but PeerJ has stepped in to fill the void in providing a biology preprint server (which we have used), as well as coming up with a more intuitive interface for commentary on preprints and published work – along with supplying reviews alongside published work. A number of other great open access journals have tried one or more of these innovations, but few have tried them all *at once*. Not only that, but I have the feeling they’re not going to stop there. After all, if they’ve tried this many new things in year one, I, for one, want to know what year two is going to hold…