Oceanography

Sharks are under threat! Humans catching sharks on purpose and on accident is a big crisis right now. In addition, climate change is affecting sharks too! And nobody cares.

Even though sharks are “scary,” they play a really important role as an apex predator.

When you flip sharks upside down, they go into this trance.

Sharks! Have no bones! They’re just full of cartilage. How cool is that?

They’re a special type of fish called an “elasmobranch.” ^^

Sharks have the thickest skin of any animal, and the largest brains of any fish.

Shark skin’s texture is similar to sandpaper.

Sharks don’t like the taste of humans. On average, only about 16 shark attacks happen per year, and only becuase sharks mistake humans for their natural prey.

Scientists measure the age of sharks by counting the rings on their vertebrae.

There are over 500 species of sharks.

Sharks have super good eyesight!

They have these special black spots that let them sense electromagnetic fields and temperature shifts underwater.

Sharks can only swim forward, not backward.

The oldest shark fossils are from around 455 million years ago. Even though they don’t have bones, they can fossilize!

Whale sharks spots are like human fingertips! They’re all special and unique!

The smallest shark is the dwarf lantern shark. The largest is the whale shark.

Sharks have eyelids.

Different shark species reproduce in different ways. Some sharks lay eggs, some give birth.

Great white sharks can jump up to ten feet in the air!

Even though most sharks are cold-blooded, Great White Sharks are warm-blooded!

Sharks just... don’t sleep! They have to constantly pump water through their mouth or they’ll die.

Sharks have smooth scales, compared to fish which have rough scales.

Sharks typically have around 40-45 teeth in seven rows. They can go by 30,000 teeth in their lifetime because of how often they lose them.

Can hear up to 3,000 feet away.

The biggest threat to sharks is humans! But sharks do have predators; larger sharks, killer whales, seals, and crocodiles.

Hammerhead sharks are one of the few species that hunt in groups.

There are around 440 known species of shark!

I had somebody in the comments suggest a few facts that I haven’t been able to verify yet, but you should see them anyway:

Some shark species eat plants! I find this very fascinating!

The tiger tail sea cucumber is the largest sea cucumber known in the western Atlantic Ocean, and can reach up to 2 meters (6 feet and 7 inches) in length.

REGISTER AND VOTE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The proposed overhaul will update how federal agencies implement the bedrock National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a law aimed at ensuring the government protects the environment when reviewing or making decisions about major projects, from building roads and bridges, cutting forests, expanding broadband to approving interstate pipelines like the Keystone XL.

The White House Council on Environmental Quality [CEQ] is expected to announce that federal agencies will not be required to consider “cumulative” climate change impacts when considering federal projects, said two people familiar with the CEQ rulemaking. The CEQ oversees how nearly 80 government agencies meet their NEPA obligations.  

The CEQ is also expected to limit the scope of projects that would trigger stringent environmental reviews called environmental impact studies, expand the number of project categories that can be excluded from NEPA reviews and allow companies or project developers to conduct their own environmental assessments, the sources said.  

Excerpt from this story from the Washington Post:

Chesapeake Energy, which more than any other company capitalized on the fracking revolution that turned the United States into a leading shale gas producer, filed for bankruptcy protection Sunday.

Staggering under $9 billion in debt and the historically low price for gas, driven down even further by the novel coronavirus pandemic, Chesapeake said it will continue to operate and expects to reorganize and emerge from protection under Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code.

But its fall since the heady days a dozen years ago has been epic. Once valued at $37 billion, Chesapeake, based in Oklahoma City, had been the country’s second-largest producer of natural gas. Its shares closed Friday worth just $115 million.

Under the leadership of the late Aubrey McClendon, Chesapeake swept up leases from Pennsylvania to the Dakotas, from Louisiana to New Mexico. The expansion was entirely fueled by debt, which crippled the company when its own success as a producer — and the success of its later rivals — drove the price of natural gas down nearly 90 percent.

Apps

PROTONVPN: A free VPN with out-of-US options. PROTONMAIL: A lightweight Gmail alternative. FIREFOX: A lightweight browser with good privacy protections. SIGNAL: A secure, encrypted messaging service.

Firefox Extensions

[ID: a screenshot of tumblr comments by users crowman-manofcrows, urlsaretoomuchwork, and retronerd89. They read as follows: “what recent events?”, “What recent events? I feel like I’ve missed something important…”, and “Wait…how recent is this? I’m on mobile so I have no context as to when this was posted? Are people still using Firefox in 2020? I have so many questions…” /end ID]

I posted this on May 31st, 2020, in response to the EARN IT bill. The recent situation in the Philippines has brought it into relevance again. Firefox remains the best browser for a lot of things, in my opinion.

[ID: a screenshot of a tumblr comment by user iwnattodye, reading “is proton one of those free vpns that sells your shit? if not then how do you know?” /end ID]

They have the best guarantee from all the free VPNs I’ve seen out there and just about every review of them I found with a quick search rated them very high on privacy. I admit, it is entirely possible that they are lying, but they are also based in Switzerland, so all user data is protected by the strict Swiss privacy laws.

[ID: a screenshot of a comment by user falsepr0digy, reading “Duckduckgo is a very good browser for privacy, definitely recommended. Also, there’s an extension called lightbeam for Firefox that lets you see which third parties have cookies on your computer in a spider diagram type thing, really interesting tool” /end ID]

Thank you for this addition! I neglected to include it on the original post, as I had not had it installed. If anyone wants to download Lightbeam, you can find it here.

“Is it possible to turn things around by 2050? The answer is absolutely yes,” says Kai Chan, a professor at the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia.

Many scientists have been telling us how the world will look like, if we don’t act now. However, others, like Chan, are tracking what success might look like.

They are not simply day-dreamers either. They aren’t being too optimistic. They are putting together road maps for how to safely get to the planet envisioned in the 2015 Paris Agreement, where temperatures hold at 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than before we started burning fossil fuels, this article from July states.

“Three decades is enough to do a lot of important things. In the next few years—if we get started on them—they will pay dividends in the coming decades,” says Chan, the lead author of the chapter on achieving a sustainable future in a recent UN report that predicted the possible extinction of a million species.

Making these changes won’t mean years of being poor, cold and hungry before things get comfortable again, the scientists insist. They say that if we start acting seriously NOW, we stand a decent chance of transforming society without huge disruption. 

No doubt, it will take a massive switch in society’s energy use. But without us noticing, that’s already happening. Not fast enough, maybe, but it is. Solar panels and offshore wind power plummet in price.  Iceland and Paraguay have stripped the carbon from their grids, according to a new energy outlook report from Bloomberg. Europe is on track to be 90 per cent carbon-free by 2040. And Ottawa says that Canada is already at 81 per cent, thanks to hydro, nuclear, wind and solar. 

Decarbonizing the whole economy is within grasp. We can do this.

Look at how many different apocalypses people can visualise. Our brains can freely feast on unlimited scenes of scarcity, competition and fear. Everywhere we turn we can consume endless content about killing our neighbors for scraps, about hurting children, about bleak planets and extinction, and lots and lots of guns. It is easy, accessible and cheap. Our minds gobble up as much of this content as the market generates and the market gleefully generates more. We feed and feed upon a future of suffering and loss. We feast on images of brown children being hurt, unnecessarily, and say smugly that “that’s just what humanity is like.” Our brains are programmed away from the natural human responses to crises (fix it, help each other, rebuild and hope) and TOWARDS the mindsets of fictional apocalypse (cause it, turn on each other [it’s just what humans do! We’ve all seen the same stories!], collapse, fight each other for crumbs, the world is doomed anyway.)

It’s pretty unnecessary. And frankly pretty cringe. Imagine being part of some of the most prosperous, empowered, educated, connected group of humans to ever exist, and having a brain that can only picture the future as apocalypse-movie.

And where is the food of abundance, equality, beauty, hope, diversity? Where is the actual food of the future? Oh. It’s in, like, three solarpunk anthologies, huh?

Huh.

Anyway not to get all Amitav Ghosh on main but we have GOT to address this unnecessary and EMBARRASSING failure of imagination. Because we are the generation currently failing in our responsibilities as caretakers of the earth, because of this deranged inability to picture the world as being a real place, and the future being a place where people will live.

A private company is pledging to build Yukon’s biggest solar project to date.

Solvest Inc. has announced plans to build a new solar farm on private property outside Whitehorse along the North Klondike Highway. The company expects the $2.1-million project will pay for itself in less than a decade.

The facility would connect 4,000 new solar panels to Yukon’s grid, creating almost two GWh of power per year.

Ben Power, VP and co-founder of the Whitehorse-based company, said this would be equivalent to the power used every year on average by 153 Yukon homes.

Yukon Energy, the territory’s supplier of power, also pledged on Monday to buy electricity from the solar farm for 25 years.

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