Environmental News

Pan Canal seems to close completely only during years with unusually heavy rain. I guess this is because excessive sediment enters Lake Gatun, and the dredged channels in that (shallow) lake slump.

That lake is very frequently dredged.

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If sea-level canal in Nicaragua is eventually built, it won't have dry-year problems, but it will have similar wet-year problems.

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Six million years ago the skinny part of Central America had not yet been raised above sea level, and Atlantic and Pacific Oceans were connected. We missed it.

 

My guess is that local engineers have already thought of pumping seawater up to the lowest locks on both coasts. But not advanced that idea.

@Trollbait dandy map shows the new locks on both sides. Also implies (if you catch it) that sunrise is over the Pacific in Panama City and sunset is over the Atlantic in Colon. Maybe that can win you a bar bet some day.

 

For your consideration:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06444-3#Sec3

It is not the only study with similar methods and results. But it has a fascinating side story:

I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published

It is rare indeed for a group of authors to to work through rounds of journal review and revision, and then on the day of article's publication, for one of those authors to say words to the effect of 'I tricked you all to expose systemic defects'.

Another aspect is publicly available (not always the case). The peer review file is linked at nature.com page towards the end. In that, one can read that Brown et al. were fully aware of other factors influencing fire behavior, and excluded those so a more tractable analysis could be performed. I read that as a negotiation, then an approach agreed upon, and then this published outcome.

Readers here are free to draw their own conclusions. If you need to look away from the peer review file (as Brown does at thefp.com), go right ahead.

I am very interested in whether and how Nature (journal) editors publicly respond to Brown on this.

 

On a lighter note, as birds are light, please see:

https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/

This is a phone app to identify birds near you by sight or sound. If anyone has a user test of this, please reply here or start a burd thread.

Not all regions of globe are covered. I'd like ornithologists in Asia to get into this.

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Birds can vocalize both while inhaling and exhaling. Lungs are very different from yours (ours). So if you ever wonder how they can 'go on and on' without stopping to take a breath, that's how.

 

Maybe it is circular breathing under discussion here. The wind instrument is sustained by air in puffed up cheeks. Nose connection to lungs is open and one inhales meantime.

Glassblowers do it too. Not singers. Plumbing does not allow for that.

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We do have a notably broad range of topics here yes?

 

There was global cooling prior to the Chicxulub event, which was not dino-friendly because they were not great at thermo-regulation. About half of species (or families, I forgot which, see last week's Science) were event before the big rock arrived.