LAVA LAMPS NEVER LOOKED SO GOOD
They’re one of the deadliest forces of nature, but the heat from volcanoes could supply one of the cleanest energy sources on the planet.
The idea of tapping into geothermal energy, using heat from the earth, is being promoted by Alaska’s Division of Oil and Gas, which will begin selling leases on land on state volcanoes in August to energy companies. It’s predicted that underground heat could eventually provide a quarter of the state’s energy needs.
Geothermal heating systems have been in use for more than a century, starting in Lardarello, Italy, in 1904. Iceland gets more than 80 per cent of its heating this way and generates about a quarter of its electricity from geothermal-driven turbines.
The Bureau of Land Management in the U.S. says 12 states could be tapped for sizable sources of geothermal energy, but industry experts say many more sources may yet be discovered.
In Canada, a commercial geothermal electricity source is being built at Mount Meager, B.C., but homeowners anywhere can tap into the earth with a small residential heating system, available from commercial suppliers – sweetened in some provinces with grants or loans for retrofits.
MIGRATION UPS AND DOWNS
Species of plants and animals across the globe are already moving in response to climate change. The red fox, for example, has expanded its range in Northern Canada (at the expense of the smaller Arctic fox). The most dramatic changes are happening on mountains: Some trees in Sweden are now growing 200 metres farther uphill than they were 100 years ago.
Even more dramatic migrations may be happening in the ocean among such fish species as plaice, megrim, cod and angler fish. Nicholas Dulvy, previously with the British government and now at Simon Fraser University in B.C., found that over the past 25 years in the North Sea, instead of shifting northward, “the overwhelming pattern is that species are moving into deeper waters at spectacular rates.”
Monitoring how fast they migrate downward could be an important way to keep tabs on climate change, like taking the pulse of the planet. “It doesn’t tell you exactly what’s wrong, but it shows that you need to be looking,” Prof. Dulvy says.
But what this downward migration means is anybody’s guess. It could be that the fish will change geographical ranges without falling in numbers, or “this could be an impending warning of massive extinctions,” Prof. Dulvy says.
And while climate change has been the main impetus for species migration over the past 30 years, he says fishing is “absolutely without a doubt” the main factor that has affected abundance (as we’ve experienced with Atlantic cod).
The next step will be to see if some species are doubly at risk because of the combination of climate change and fishing.
POLLUTANT PREVENTION
Some chemicals, such as DDT and PCBs, have become notorious pollutants in the Arctic, contaminating the blood and milk of seals, whales and people, even though they were used thousands of kilometres away decades ago.
In an effort to identify other chemicals that could become a problem (or already are), environmental chemists at the University of Toronto, led by Frank Wania, screened more than 100,000 chemicals currently in use, looking for similarities in their molecular structure to known pollutants.
The study, to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Environmental Science and Technology, identified more than 4,000 candidates, of which 120 are known to be produced in high volumes.
All 4,000 of these share certain characteristics with known “persistent” pollutants, which don’t easily break down, can travel huge distances and accumulate in the food chain.
But there were many chemicals on the list of 4,000 whose production volume is unknown, since industry is not always required to report this information. So, while not all of the 120 chemicals may be a problem, “certainly we should be looking at many more than just those 120 – this is not the last word,” Prof. Wania says.
MERCURY MOP-UP
There’s no doubt that fluorescent bulbs are energy-efficient – they use about 75-per-cent less energy than incandescent bulbs and last 10 times longer.
The catch is: Fluorescents contain mercury, which is toxic to the nervous system and causes brain damage. One in six American babies are born with mercury levels exceeding the recommended level, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (Canadian stats are not available). Broken bulbs are a hazard in the home, and can also leach mercury into the environment from landfill sites.
Researchers at Brown University have developed a new material, a kind of cloth laced with nanoparticles of selenium, which would absorb the mercury from broken bulbs. It could be used in packaging for the bulbs and in materials for cleanup. They reported their findings last week in Environmental Science and Technology online.
The findings are important because fluorescent use will soon skyrocket. Australia, Canada and Britain will ban incandescents within the next six years, and even U.S. President George W. Bush signed a ban, effective in 2014.