Environmental News

As I understand it, 'research' whaling by Japan was a cover used until 2019 when they exited the IWC. Now they are just whaling whaling, with total annual catch numbers set below 400. Zero would be an appropriate number in my opinion, but nobody asked.

More cheerfully I saw a video documentary recently on Monterey Bay (CA). Sea otters, whales and sardines were sequential boom and bust. Now it has largely recovered due to substantial work and blind good luck.

 

If for any reason you want to know ambient radiation levels in Hong Kong, those data are available:

Radiation Monitoring, Assessment and Protection｜Hong Kong Observatory(HKO)｜Radiation<br> Monitoring

 

No benefit in starting rumors, I only wanted that web site to be known to others here.

 

Back to my usual lane see increase in high-elevation forest fires:

Climate change leads to unprecedented Rocky Mountain wildfires | EurekAlert! Science News

In this press release you can read a sentence not often seen in 'the lit': "During the Medieval Climate Anomaly, Northern Hemisphere temperatures were 0.3 degrees Celsius above the average in the 20th century."

 

Some seeds buried 142 years ago can germinate:

These 142-year-old seeds sprouted after spending more than a century underground | Popular Science

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Very few such long-term experiments have been established, but they yield very interesting information. It remains an underutilized tool in part because the set-up team gets no reward by publishing.

 

Permafrost seed germination seems doable, assuming that vegetation has been dropping seeds.

Go to your favorite such place and chop out a chunk (with a long vertical axis).
Further chop into chunkettes with short vertical axes (which we presume to represent time).
Retreat to lab, thaw samples, send subsamples for C14 dating by accelerator mass spectrometry. Possibly can be done much more cheaply by scintillation - check with Beta Analytic in Miami.
Wait for sprouts to sprout, find a botanist who knows what the heck they are.

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Also in news of the old, some folks have germinated fungal spores from specimens collected by Carl Linnaeus circa 1760's. Dang.

Linnaeus invented genus/species Latin naming system that has provided fodder for biology exams ever since. That guy. Not beloved by all

 

A Miami suburb coastal condominium collapsed ~40 hrs ago. Not the entire building, but remaining units seem certain to be declared uninhabitable.

Hard to discern whether required insurance will make victims whole. There will surely be lawsuits.

Land subsidence was studied in this area by:

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ocecoaman.2019.105078

If you happen to look at that article, the collapsed building is in the northernmost circled yellow dots in Fig 3a. There are many other yellow dots.

No one is asserting that 2 mm/yr land subsidence would ruin a proper foundation and superstructure. But now people will be looking.

 

Putting a heavy building on gooshy wood (or gooshy anything) would not be seen as best practice.

Some Florida seaside land (including the current topic area) is 'fill' meaning it got pushed out to make Florida bigger. There are many 1-story homes that do not need spiffy foundations because they do not weigh very much. The concrete condos, 5 to 12 stories and perhaps taller, weigh a lot and have concrete piers footed on bedrock (maybe). Concrete there and above has rebar (of course it does, you say) but salt water seems to find its way in, iron chloride is 'bigger', and we reach the word of the day - spallation.

That land surfaces are subsiding does not mean that foundation piers also are, but dang I'd want to know, especially if some piers are going down faster than others. Concrete is no good at 'tension'

Fortunately Miami-Dade has a 40 year inspection cycle for such buildings, and a fella might guess that many more buildings will get their inspections ahead of schedule.

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In other concrete news of MA and CT, your other word of the day is pyrrhotite. A pesky mineral sometimes used in concrete aggregate, it blows out through time even without salt water. No pyrrhotite in FL according to USGS

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The most click baity reports from Surfside FL also mention that Ivanka and Jared's apartment is a short distance north of current action. A beautiful building from 2019 and nowhere near due for re-inspection. But yeah, c'mon.

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Actually the most click baity reports talk about cheap substandard rebar from overseas .

I do not know, but 1981 construction date seems too soon after that foreign country in questions' opening up in 1978.