Earth
The future of Anchorage
That’s because, although Anchorage is experiencing unusually balmy winters right now, the city is positioned to actually benefit from climate change. “Alaska is going to be the next Florida by the end of the century,” Camilo Mora, a University of Hawaii geographer told The New York Times last year. A study he published in Nature backed that idea up by suggesting that Anchorage won’t face extreme temperatures until 2071.
Measuring crop yields from space
A research team, led by Kaiyu Guan, a postdoctoral fellow in Earth system science at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy, & Environmental Sciences, has developed a method to estimate crop yields using satellites that can measure solar-induced fluorescence, a light emitted by growing plants. The team published its results in the journal Global Change Biology.
Atomic Bomb time markers
It turns out that virtually every tree that was alive starting in 1954 has a “spike” — an atomic bomb souvenir. Everywhere botanists have looked, “you can find studies in Thailand, studies in Mexico, studies in Brazil where when you measure for carbon-14, you see it there,” Nadkarni says. All trees carry this “marker” — northern trees, tropical trees, rainforest trees — it is a world-wide phenomenon.”
Can you find the airplane in this photo from the ISS of Great Exuma Island, Bahamas?
Thanks to the astronaut’s steady hands in controlling a long lens in weightlessness, this photograph is detailed enough to show a single aircraft and its twin condensation trails.
