Category: Earth

By Anupum Pant

The ultimate universal speed limit is the speed of light. No information travels faster than that, or that is what we’ve always known. So, the point is, it is pretty darn fast. But that ultimate speed in the massiveness of our cosmos can seem pretty darn tiny. It’s hard to visualize how big things are in our universe.

Ignoring a few laws of physics, on what the photon actually sees considering relativity, Alphonse Swinehart created an animation which takes you on a journey across the solar system as if you were sitting on a photon. See how at around 8 minutes 20 seconds you reach the earth, taking exactly the amount of time the sunlight takes to reach us.  While watching it please note that it was intentional  that the alignment of planets and asteroids in the video were not kept realistic. That’s artistic freedom…

The video ends at Jupiter because the artist wanted to keep the length of it less than 1 hour. Anyway, the video does deliver its purpose and does it with great artistry.

Riding Light from Alphonse Swinehart on Vimeo.

By Anupum Pant

Did you know? In certain places on the sea floor there are lakes – underwater lakes! (there are underwater rivers too). One such lake, recently found, half a mile under the sea, exists in the gulf of mexico. It’s about 20 metres long and has its own shore full of mussels and other organisms. Here’s what it looks like…

By Anupum Pant

Although radiation would be last of your worries, but eating 20 million bananas would kill you due to radiation poisoning, if not due to anything else. That is because bananas emit ionising radiation which is bad for you. But, as the amount of radiation dose you’d get if you eat a banana would be almost the same that you’d get from the background radiation while sitting in your balcony for an hour, you shouldn’t really worry.

Bananas are slightly radioactive because they contain potassium. The element decays and emits radiation which can kick electrons out of atoms – ionising radiation. In fact, everything emits trace amounts of radiations.

By Anupum Pant

We’ve been mining gold for about 6000 years now. It isn’t totally clear how much has been mined yet. Still, there are a few reliable estimates which say that about 150,000 to 170,000 tonnes of gold has been mined till date. The 170,000 tonnes figure is the most reliable estimate, which would mean that the amount of gold ever mined can fit in a not-so-massive cube with each side measuring 21 meters. However, some estimates take the figure up to 2.5 million tonnes.

That said, how much more is yet to be mined then? A good estimate is that about 52000 tonnes of gold is still out there that can be realistically mined. But is that all?

No. 52000 tonnes of left over gold might be economically viable, but there are places here on earth which hold massive amounts of gold. It is in the oceans. No, not in treasure chests of sunken pirate ships.

In the ocean waters there’s about 20 million tonnes of gold waiting to get harvested. Although there isn’t a good method by which this can be extracted, it sure is a massive amount of gold. The gold is so spread out in the waters that you’d have to process billions of litres of water to find one gram of gold. The concentration is in the orders of parts per trillion. No one knows how to extract that.

Now, that’s the gold dissolved in water. There’s also gold trapped in the sea bed, just like we have it here on land, in rocks. Even that is 4-5 kilometres under the sea. And it’s trapped in rock there. So, no one has a good way to extract that too.

via [Oceanservice]

By Anupum Pant

This 13,000 square miles of rectangular land, somewhere in the US, is the national radio quiet zone – or NRQZ.

Some of it falls in Virginia and the other major part of it is west Virginia. A tiny part of Maryland (on the top) is also included.

Living in the NRQZ means that the people who choose to live there have to sign a contract saying that they’ll never own some of the modern equipments like wi-fi, microwave, a wireless telephone etc. People living there are banned from using almost anything that uses electricity and could possibly cause a radio interference. That is because the rectangular NRQZ is home to one of the largest radio telescopes at the  National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) at Green Bank, west Virginia.

Any wireless transmitters in this very interesting piece of land spanning about 10 miles in all directions of the radio telescope has a potential to cause an interference. It’s like the 50s in here. No cellphones there. Life’s pretty different and it’s for the good of scientists from all over the world who wish to use this world-class piece of technology. This small film talks about it…

via [the Atlantic]

By Anupum Pant

Liquid Nitrogen, also known as LN2 is an odourless, colourless, non-flammable nitrogen. It’s extremely cold with a boiling point of -196°C and has great dangers associated with it if it is not handled properly.

And yet, 2 huge pressurized canisters of Liquid nitrogen can be seen at one of the very important public places. In Manhattan, at the intersection of 6th avenue and the 50th street, in front of the well known radio city music hall, sit these 2 big canisters of Liquid Nitrogen. Probably thousands pass by these potentially dangerous cryogen containers everyday. Still, never has an accident occurred there.

Why these containers are there is a good question to ask. And they have been kept there for a very good reason. These canisters belong to a phone company and are used to keep the underground phone cables cool, dry and free from oxygen. Because these wires getting wet from the underground municipal system, isn’t very desirable to the phone company. The nitrogen continuously keeps circulating and finishes off in about three days. The canisters are then replaced.

Here’s a Google street view image I captured where these Liquid Nitrogen canisters can be seen on the sidewalk.

Tom Scott talks about them.

By Anupum Pant

Rivers are never straight. What makes them curvy is something I never questioned in the first place.

What’s really fascinating is, how these curves form. They are almost always in pairs, alternating curves, unless there’s some geographical feature messing with the natural flow. From a hypothetical straight line river, these curves start forming when there’s even a slight aberration in the bank.

Besides that thicker a streams make bigger curves. And smaller tributaries meander in tighter turns. This is what makes rivers (with their smaller tributaries turning tighter and bigger ones in bigger curves) look like fractals on the surface of the earth.

Minute earth explains…

By Anupum Pant

In the southern part of the Gulf of Carpentaria in Northern Australia from late September to early November a rare natural phenomenon is witnessed by thousands of tourists and locals of Burketown who come to see it – The rolling morning glory clouds.

These are huge 1000 km long rolling clouds appear about 1-2 km from ground every year. This is the only place where they are seen regularly and can be predicted. Some times just one, other times tens of them go rolling in the skies at speeds of 10-20 meters per second.

The Morning Glory cloud is not clearly understood because their rarity means they have little significance in terms of rainfall or climate.Regardless of the complexity behind the nature of this atmospheric phenomenon, some conclusions have been made about its causes. Through research, one of the main causes of most Morning Glory occurrences is the mesoscale circulations associated with sea breezes that develop over the peninsula and the gulf.

These have been seen in Japan and several other places too.

By Anupum Pant

It is believed that for centuries in the Hindu Kush and Karakoram mountain region villagers have been practising something called glacier growing (or glacier grafting). Yes, literally making their own new glacier. This is done in order to increase the water supply for crops, for survival.

In order to encourage the growth of a glacier local farmers acquire ice from naturally occurring glaciers, and carry it to high altitude areas where the ice is put inside a small cave dug out in a scree-slope. Along with the ice other ingredients such as water, salt, sawdust, wheat husks and charcoal are also placed at the site.

It is believed by the local people that there are male and female glaciers. The male ones, they believe, are covered in soil or stones and move very less. While the female glaciers are whiter, grow faster and yield more water. It is also believed that to grow a glacier, equal amounts of both sexes are needed.

[Read More]

By Anupum Pant

Manaus is the capital city of the state of Amazonas in northern Brazil. The city is situated at about a 10 kilometre distance from the confluence of the Negro and Solimões rivers – two big tributaries of the Amazon river. While these are two names which you must haven’t probably heard of, the place where they meet is a very interesting place.

The first river, Rio Solimões is a water body full of sediments that wash down with it from the Andes mountains. Thanks to the sand, mud and silt that comes washing with it, the river looks muddy, the colour is light brown, nearly. The locals call it the white river.

On the other hand, we have the Negro river (or Rio Negro). It has significantly darker coloured water due to the presence of humic acid from incomplete breakdown of phenol-containing vegetation from sandy clearings. Although the locals call it the black river, it isn’t exactly black. The colour is very similar to a black tea concoction. However, the colour of Rio Negro is very different from Rio Solimões. Here’s how they look from up above.

At the place where they meet, the rivers don’t mix. They leave a fairly clear boundary and flow side by side without mixing for about six kilometres. That happens because of the big difference in their flow speed, density and temperature.

While the river Solimões is a fast flowing (6 km per hour), high density (due to the sediments) and cooler river, the other river flows much slower (one third of the speed of Solimões river), is warmer and is less dense (because it is much cleaner). These differences cause the rivers to meet and not mix. Much later, about 6 kilometres later, these differences attain equilibrium and the rivers merge into the main Amazon river.

By Anupum Pant

Perfect circles of ice have been seen spinning on top of water bodies for quite some time. They aren’t perfectly round most times. Recently, in the month of November last year, a huge 17 meter spinning ice disk was spotted on the river Sheyenne in North Dakota.

Several such ice disks have also been seen in the past in Canada, England and Sweden. Similar ice swirls were also seen in the Charles river, Boston. Some times they are huge, other times you see a number of tiny clusters of such ice swirls.

As always, even ice circles aren’t the work of aliens or government spies. It is completely a natural phenomena which occurs when slowly moving water moves past an obstacle creating a slow moving eddy. In due time, and due to very low temperatures, ice circles form small and keep growing as rings of frozen water on the surface of the water body keeps adding to their diameters. Here’s a video of one such big, and almost perfect, ice circle which was spotted in Rattray Marsh, Canada.