Environment Discovery

Photo Courtesy of Pixabay  I've talked about The Ocean Cleanup before on this blog. The Ocean Cleanup is the most ambitious project of its kind. The goal is to clean up 50 percent of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP), the largest accumulation of ocean plastic in the world. Located between California and Hawaii, it's one of five gyres (circular systems of ocean currents) that accumulate plastic garbage. Once the plastic is retrieved, it's hoped that most of it can be recycled. The GPGP is twice the size of Texas and contains an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic with a total weight of about 80,000 tons. The Ocean Cleanup technology includes passive floating barriers to concentrate and capture the debris. Natural ocean forces are used to capture the debris. Electronics used for monitoring and controlling the system are all solar powered. The system is modular, allowing improvements to be made based on experience and funding. What's Been Comp

Comet 46P/Wirtanen Image Credit: NASA Just a quick post to let you know about this year's brightest comet. On December 16, 2018 Wirtanen, also called Comet 46P, will be closer to the earth than it has been for over four centuries. It will be a mere 7.1 million miles away, or about 30 times the distance of the moon. Wirtanen may be visible to the naked eye, but ambient light and the nearly full moon could make it hard to see. Binoculars or a telescope would be better. Check the website Time and Date to find out the best time to view the comet. Wirtanen will appear as a diffuse green object. If you can't get outside to watch it, go to The Virtual Telescope Project to watch it online!

Jupiter's South Pole Photo captured by the NASA's JunoCam, Enhanced by Donna Kaluzniak On December 21, 2018, NASA's Juno spacecraft will mark its halfway point for collecting data on the planet Jupiter. Juno is soaring over Jupiter's clouds in an elliptical orbit around the north and south poles. Juno was launched August 5, 2011 and reached Jupiter on July 4, 2016. The goal is to discover more about the planet's structure, origins, atmosphere, and magnetic fields. Juno's already provided a first photo of Jupiter's ring, and scientific data on its radiation belts. But what makes this mission so special to me is the JunoCam Community .  The JunoCam community encourages the public to actively participate in this mission! Yes, you can take part in this historic, scientific, and extremely cool project. The JunoCam website gives you all the information you need to participate in planning, discussion, decision making, image processing, and analysi

The Problem with Plastic Plastic makes many of our daily tasks much easier. W e can make a single cup of coffee in the morning using a plastic coffee pod. We can grab a bottle of water on the way to exercise class. Small plastic grocery bags are lighter load in the car. And we don't have to wash disposable diapers when they're dirty. But plastics have a dark side. Too often, they end up as litter on our beaches, in our parks, and on roadways where they end up in drainage systems. They congregate in our oceans, lakes, and rivers, harming aquatic life. Even plastics disposed of in the garbage clog our landfills. Single-use plastics--those that are used once and thrown away--are especially problematic due to the volume of waste. According to an article on Forbes.com , we're buying a million plastic bottles per minute, worldwide--and only 9 percent of plastic is recycled. An article on the website Bad Plastics notes that "single-use plastics are one of the most po

I've let this blog languish with the usual excuses--too busy, too distracted, too many other priorities. But a recent 60 Minutes segment on Joel Sartore inspired me to bring Environment Discovery back to life. Egret at Hanna Park, Jacksonville, FL Photo by Donna Kaluzniak Sartore is a National Geographic photographer, though I'm most familiar with him through several online photography courses I took. (He's a great instructor, too, and just a very nice guy). He's also the founder of the Photo Ark , a 25-year project to document every species in captivity. The Photo Ark's goal is to get people to care that half of all the species in the world could vanish by the turn of the next century. The portraits are made with clean black or white backgrounds, allowing us to look into the animals' eyes, to see their intelligence and beauty. Over 12,000 animals are in captivity, and Sartore has taken portraits of over 8,000 during the last 12 years. In the p