A Norwegian company is revolutionizing wind power at sea with its novel array of small turbines.

Each array has a small footprint, stands 324 metres tall, contains 126 wind turbines, and can generate up to 126 Megawatts of electricity.

How do we reduce the distrust in the face of climate change and other existential threats? Teaching scientific reasoning skills is proposed.

White Spruce trees are on the march northward in the Arctic increasing the rate of warming.

Trees are growing in the Arctic tundra where none have survived before. The Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the planet which means the barriers that made Arctic terrain hostile to trees are diminishing. Forests are marching towards the North Pole.

Last August a paper appeared in the Journal Nature entitled, “Sufficient conditions for rapid range expansion of a boreal conifer.” It is one of a number of papers describing a changing pattern of tree growth and range across the Arctic landscape in Alaska, Siberia, Canada, and Scandinavia. The more trees establish themselves in high latitude environments, the faster warming is coming as a low albedo effect takes hold.

The paper described what was happening to the North American White Spruce population in Alaska tundra conditions. White Spruce require temperatures of 10 Celsius (50 Fahrenheit) or greater for seeds to germinate. And White Spruce don’t start producing seeds until they are 30 years of age. So seeing an expanding population of White Spruce in areas where none have been observed in human recorded history is rather compelling evidence that the Arctic climate conditions are undergoing significant change. The rate of the northward march is about 4 kilometres (2.5 miles) per decade. The advance corresponds with both rising land temperatures and disappearing sea ice.

The rapid development of geothermal energy can contribute not only to reducing greenhouse gas emissions but also to the production of environmentally sustainable lithium for EV batteries.

Jane Marsh describes how a Salton Sea project is producing both geothermal energy and lithium salts suitable for EV batteries.

Work at Woods Hole using low-frequency, long-distance transmitters is about to change how to find things underwater.

The word “intriguing” is being used to describe Perseverance results coming from sedimentary rocks on Mars that are of the same type known for preserving fossils and evidence of life here on Earth.

When NASA landed the Perseverance rover on Mars complete with an instrument package capable of identifying organic molecules, the Agency chose the Jezero Crater, the site of an ancient water-formed delta dating back 3.5 billion Earth years. The goal was to look for signs of ancient Martians, not the Martians of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds,” but rather microorganisms like the ones that killed off the Martians after they arrived.

Onboard Perseverance is an instrumentation package that goes by the acronym SHERLOC which stands for Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman and Luminescence for Organics and Chemicals. Using SHERLOC, Perseverance has been sampling sedimentary rocks laid down by the water that flowed on the Martian surface earlier in its history.

What does the presence of organic molecules in samples tell us about the existence of past or present life on Mars? Although organic molecules may form from chemical processes where life is not present, it usually is a good sign of its existence. And Perseverance isn’t the first Martian lander or rover to discover organic molecules. The Viking landers, and now defunct rovers, Spirit, and Opportunity, have all indicated that Mars could or did harbour life in the past. Curiosity, the other active Martian rover in the Gale Crater has made similar discoveries. The difference between the two rovers, however, is one of both quantity and quality when looking at the Perseverance samples. Perseverance has found far more organic molecules than its sister rover and is caching the samples for a future mission to find, gather and return to Earth for study.