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Category: climatology – Page 70

Dr. Tim Wittig, Ph.D. — Applying Data & Intelligence To Defeat Global Wildlife Trafficking

(https://www.timothywittig.com/) is a conservationist, professor, and former defense intelligence analyst. He is a research fellow at Oxford University (Oxford Martin School), an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London, and has served as Head of Intelligence for both the Royal Foundation’s United for Wildlife Transport and Financial Taskforces (https://unitedforwildlife.org/), and the wildlife investigations charity Focused Conservation.

Dr. Wittig has lived in 8 countries on 3 continents and worked in nearly 50 different countries. His professional background is in research & development and applied sciences, intelligence-led targeting of illicit financial networks, and African and global security.

Dr. Wittig began his career in national security, and was one of the first people in the US Intelligence Community (IC) to treat biodiversity and ecosystem collapse as a threat to global security.

Since their inception in 2016, Dr. Wittig has played a central role in the United for Wildlife Transport and Financial Taskforces, a groundbreaking program of the Royal Foundation of the Prince & Princess of Wales (https://royalfoundation.com/), to use data and intelligence, alongside high-level formal commitments, to mobilize 200+ of the worlds’ largest banks, maritime shipping companies, and airlines to take meaningful action against global wildlife trafficking. Dr. Wittig conceived of and currently runs the central intelligence sharing system of the both Taskforces.

A former tenured professor of International Relations and Humanitarian Action, and a life-long environmentalist and outdoorsman, Dr. Wittig, like many people today, believes reversing the current catastrophic extermination of nature is the single most important issue of our time — a literal life-and-death struggle for the future of our common planet and ultimately humanity itself.

Dr. Wittig came to work professionally in conservation a decade ago after observing how the major threats to the environment today — species loss, climate change, pollution, et al — are all underpinned and driven often to a large extent by crime and corruption, illicit networks, and social injustices. And that rigorous, hard-hitting intelligence and data-led analysis of these dynamics, especially when done at scale, will be a game changer in how we confront threats to the world’s wildlife and ecosystems.

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Tracking ocean microplastics from space

New information about an emerging technique that could track microplastics from space has been uncovered by researchers at the University of Michigan. It turns out that satellites are best at spotting soapy or oily residue, and microplastics appear to tag along with that residue.

Microplastics—tiny flecks that can ride ocean currents hundreds or thousands of miles from their point of entry—can harm sea life and , and they’re extremely difficult to track and clean up. However, a 2021 discovery raised the hope that satellites could offer day-by-day timelines of where microplastics enter the water, how they move and where they tend to collect, for prevention and clean-up efforts.

The team noticed that data recorded by the Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS), showed less —that is, fewer and smaller waves—in areas of the ocean that contain microplastics, compared to clean areas.

Melt: Scientists discover a new molten layer under Earth’s crust

Here is something new from Earth’s interiors.

A team of researchers at the University of Texas at Austin (UTA) has found a new layer under Earth’s crust called “melt,” according to a press release. It comprises hot molten rocks and reveals useful insights about our planet’s tectonic plate activity.

Interestingly, these plates are constantly moving, and their movement is linked to the occurrence of earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions. Moreover, tectonic motion is so powerful; that it could also lead to the formation of new mountain ranges and even new continents.

Forplayday/iStock.

Tectonic plates are giant subterranean rocks that form the Earth’s crust and upper mantle. So basically, all the landmass we see around us is built upon tectonic plates. Currently, there are seven major tectonic plates on Earth that keep the seven continents intact.

Genetic engineering sheds light on ancient evolutionary questions

Cyanobacteria are single-celled organisms that derive energy from light, using photosynthesis to convert atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and liquid water (H2O) into breathable oxygen and the carbon-based molecules like proteins that make up their cells. Cyanobacteria were the first organisms to perform photosynthesis in the history of Earth, and were responsible for flooding the early Earth with oxygen, thus significantly influencing how life evolved.

Geological measurements suggest that the atmosphere of the early Earth—over three billion years ago—was likely rich in CO2, far higher than current levels caused by , meaning that ancient had plenty to “eat.”

But over Earth’s multi-billion-year history, atmospheric CO2 concentrations have decreased, and so to survive, these bacteria needed to evolve new strategies to extract CO2. Modern cyanobacteria thus look quite different from their ancient ancestors, and possess a complex, fragile set of structures called a CO2-concentrating mechanism (CCM) to compensate for lower concentrations of CO2.

Earth’s Inner Core May Right Now Be in The Process of Changing Direction

Few of us give much thought to Earth’s swirling, spinning contents until some sudden movement, an earthquake or a volcanic eruption, jolts us to our senses.

Geoscientists, though, are a little more clued into the dynamics of Earth’s guts, and have just discovered that Earth’s solid inner iron core – which usually spins within a near-frictionless molten outer envelope – appears to have slowed to a grinding halt.

Before anybody panics and searches for a copy of a terrible 20-year-old science fiction movie predicting such an event in hopes of inspiring a solution, it’s not the first time record of such an event. It’s not even the first in recent history.

IBM AI Helps NASA Researchers Mine Earth Data

NASA has a massive amount of data and it receives more every day. While some of the data is processed immediately, much of the data is archived to be processed later, sometimes years later. This situation needs to change if researchers are to utilize the data to investigate critical issues with dynamically changing characteristics like global climate change. To increase its ability to process and use this data in a timely manner, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center announced a joint development program with IBM Research to process the NASA data using IBM’s foundation AI technology.

To put this task into perspective, the GPT-3 data set, which led to the development of ChatGPT AI platform that recently passed a Wharton MBA exam, represents about 45TB (terabytes) of data. By comparison, NASA estimates that its data set could be upwards of 250PB (petabytes). With 1PB equal to 1,000TB, the NASA data set is over 5,000 times larger than the GPT-3 data set, making this a monumental task, but the benefits could be ground-breaking.

Previously, IBM estimated that 90% of data collected is never used, and in their press invitation, IBM and NASA noted that “Currently, half of all scientific findings come from archived data, which makes it challenging for researchers to study ever-evolving threats such as climate change.” Efficiently mining the enormous amount of archival data needs the power of AI. IBM Research’s massive cloud resources, the collective experiences of the company’s AI experts, and its AI foundation model technology will help NASA filter and analyze earth-science data in days or months rather than years or even decades.

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