General Awareness

ENVIRONMENT - February 2016

Feb 2016

Aug 14, 2019

Northeast States Crowds List Of States With Most Dense Tree, Forest Cover

According to the data by the Ministry of Environment,Forest and Climate Change,a quarter of India's geographical area which is 24.49% is under forest and tree cover.
The lowest forest and tree cover in the country is in Haryana at 6.79 % of its geographical area.Punjab follows with 6.87 %.Further,Rajasthan's forest and tree cover is over 7.26 % of its geographical area.
The highest forest and tree cover in terms of % is at Lakshadweep at 97 %.Among the six states with the highest forest and tree cover,four are in the Northeast which are Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram and Meghalaya.
The highest forest and tree cover in terms of geographical area is in Madhya Pradesh with 85,487 sq km.Further,Goa and Kerala are two other states with more than 50 % of their geographical area under forest and tree cover.

Aug 13, 2019

US Overhauls Endangered Species Protections

The Trump administration rolled out some of the broadest changes in decades to enforcement of the landmark Endangered Species Act, allowing the government to put an economic cost on saving a species and other changes critics contend could speed extinction for some struggling plants and animals.
Interior secretary David Bernhardt and other administration officials contend the changes improve efficiency of oversight , while protecting rare species.

Aug 12, 2019

Govt To Try a New Method To Cut Down Mountains Of Waste

Delhi government officials hold talks with Ahmedabad civic agency officials to introduce bio-remediation, a method by which the latter will be able to clear a massive 35-year-old landfill.
The Delhi government is taking help of the civic agency in Gujarat's Ahmedabad for removal of around 28 million tonnes of waste from the three gigantic landfills in the city — Ghazipur, Bhalswa and Okhla — in adherence to the National Green Tribunal's (NGT) directions.
The three mountain-like landfills in Ghazipur, Bhalswa and Okhla are made of around 14 million tonnes, 8.5 million tonnes and 5.5 million tonnes of waste, as pegged by civic agencies till June 30, 2019. The Ghazipur landfill, last measured as 65m high, is the tallest of them, only 8m less that Qutub Minar's height ( 73m).
To clear the three landfills, the Delhi government will adopt bioremediation method, which refers to deliberate introduction of microorganisms to consume and break down environmental pollutants in order to clear a polluted site.

Aug 11, 2019

Centre Grants Tungareshwar, Tansa Reserves 'Eco-Sensitive Zone' Status

The Centre declared two wildlife sanctuaries near Mumbai as 'Eco-Sensitive Zones' (ESZs). There are 11 more such zones in Tamil Nadu and Chhattisgarh.
Tungareshwar Wildlife Sanctuary (TWLS) and Tansa Wildlife Santuary (TWS) are lush green areas spread across several hundred square kilometres in Palghar and Thane districts adjoining Mumbai.
They also serve as the catchment areas for lakes and reservoirs that supply water to the city.
The total protected area of TWLS is around 86 sq km and will have the ESZ of 67 sq km. For TWS, the total area is around 305 sq km with ESZ of around 490 sq km, which will include 150 villages. TWLS and TWS are ranked as major habitats for wildlife.
The Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Borivali, sprawled across Mumbai's north-east and north-western suburbs, is home to around 45 leopards, different varieties of deer, four-horned antelopes, monkeys, Indian Flying Foxes, spot-Striped Hyena and a large number of birds and insects.
Leopards often stray into residential areas like Dahisar, Borivali, Kandivali, Malad, Goregaon, Andheri, Powai, Bhandup, Kanjurmarg and Mulund, and other green areas in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region.
Experts said declaring an ESZ, or a buffer zone, around a wildlife reserve will help conserve the ecosystem since only agriculture, a few small scale industries and minor infra-works are permitted within the ESZ. Maharashtra had proposed the ESZ around TWLS and TWS forests in August 2016.

Aug 10, 2019

Researchers Solve 'Hot Spot' Debate

Volcanic hot spots such as the ones that created the Hawaiian Islands have long been considered stationary points, created by processes deep within the earth's interior.
Volcanic hot spots such as the ones that created the Hawaiian Islands have long been considered stationary points, created by processes deep within the earth's interior.
Using new paleomagnetic data and analyses, researchers John Tarduno, a professor of earth and environmental sciences at the University of Rochester; Richard Bono, a former post-doctoral research associate in Tarduno's lab and now a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Liverpool; and Hans-Peter Bunge, a geophysicist at Munich University, provide conclusive evidence that hot spots are not fixed but are moving.
The research, published in Nature Communications, solves a major debate about the origin of the large-scale structure of the earth's surface and deep interior.

Scientists Discover Why Some Sharks Glow In The Dark

It may not sound like the best way to go incognito, but some species of shark that lurk on the ocean floor glow a bright green hue visible to others of their kind.
Scientists said they identified the molecules responsible for the predators' biofluorescence, and that it might perform other functions too like fighting microbial infection.
The research, published in the journal iScience, pinpoints a previously unknown family of small-molecule metabolites.
"It's very different from all the other forms of marine biofluorescence" such as the processes seen in jellyfish and corals, David Gruber, a senior professor at City University of New York and co-author of the study said.
"This is a small molecule and it shows that in the blue ocean, animals are evolving this ability to absorb blue light and transform it into other colours."
The paper focused on two species, the swell shark and chain catshark, that Gruber studied during scuba trips in Scripps Canyon.
They dwell at depths of 30 metres or more, where only light at the blue end of the spectrum penetrates: if you were bitten there and started bleeding, it would look inky black.

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