General Awareness

ENVIRONMENT - August 2019

Aug 2019

Aug 30, 2021

Greenland Expedition Discover World's Northernmost Island

Scientists set foot on a tiny island off the coast of Greenland which they say is the world's northernmost point of land and was revealed by shifting pack ice.
The discovery comes as a battle is looming among Arctic nations the United States, Russia, Canada, Denmark and Norway for control of the North Pole some 700 km (435 miles) to the north and of the surrounding seabed, fishing rights and shipping routes exposed by melting ice due to climate change.
"It was not our intention to discover a new island," polar explorer and head of the Arctic Station research facility in Greenland, Morten Rasch, said.
The scientists initially thought they had arrived at Oodaaq, an island discovered by a Danish survey team in 1978. Only later, when checking the exact location, they realized they had visited another island 780 metres northwest.
The small island, measuring roughly 30 metres across and a peak of about three metres, consists of seabed mud as well as moraine - soil and rock left behind by moving glaciers. The team said that they would recommend it is named "Qeqertaq Avannarleq", which means "the northernmost island" in Greenlandic.

Aug 29, 2021

Massive Iceberg Narrowly Avoided Collision with Antarctic Ice Shelf

A massive iceberg that broke off of Antarctica last year recently spun around and narrowly avoided colliding with the Brunt Ice Shelf. Such a crash could have caused a new, even more massive iceberg to break off.
Iceberg A-74, which is more than 20 times the size of Manhattan, split from Antarctica's Brunt Ice Shelf in February 2020. Ocean currents kept the giant iceberg near its parent ice shelf for the past six months. Everything was quiet, until the winds came.
In early August, strong winds spun the iceberg around the ice shelf. Two polar-orbiting satellites that make up the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission captured radar images between Aug. 9 and Aug. 18 that showed A-74 "brushing slightly" against a thin strip of ice that juts off the shelf and then moving south.

Aug 24, 2021

Stubble Burning: Air Quality Commission Asks States to Follow Protocol Developed by ISRO

The Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM) asked Delhi and its neighbouring states to adopt a protocol developed by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) for estimation of crop residue burning fire events. The protocol developed by the ISRO estimates these events using satellite data.
The CAQM asked the governments of Delhi, Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan to develop a time-bound comprehensive action plan in collaboration with stakeholder agencies responsible for monitoring and reporting of events related to agriculture residue burning. The CAQM is responsible for executing plans to prevent and control air pollution in the Delhi-NCR region and adjoining areas.

Aug 22, 2021

Rain Falls on Greenland's Summit for First Time in Recorded History

Rain has fallen on the summit of Greenland's ice sheet for the first time in recorded history, heightening concerns about the already precarious condition of its ice.
An unprecedented 7 billion tons (6.3 billion metric tons) of water pelted the ice sheet, falling as rain and not snow for several hours. This was the third time temperatures at the summit had risen above freezing in less than a decade, according to recordings taken by the National Science Foundation's Summit Station.
The rainfall, which is the heaviest since records began, is a sure indication that Greenland is warming at a rapid pace.

Aug 21, 2021

Muga Dhambi One of the Largest and Oldest Corals in the Great Barrier Reef

Australian scientists have discovered one of the largest and oldest coral colonies in the Great Barrier Reef, which is the largest coral reef system on Earth.
The massive coral belongs to the genus Porites and measures 34 feet (10.4 meters) wide and 17.4 feet (5.3 m) tall, making it the widest and sixth-tallest coral in the Great Barrier Reef. Snorkelers found the record-breaking coral off the coast of Goolboodi, part of the Palm Island Group in Queensland, Australia, and they named it "Muga dhambi" — meaning "big coral" in the language of the Manbarra people, who are the Indigenous people of Palm Islands.
The researchers found that the massive coral has been around for between 421 and 438 years, meaning that it predates the colonization of Australia.

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