Sunday, January 26, 2020

Notes From All Over, Part 1 -- January 26, 2020

I'm watching our oldest granddaughter play in local water polo tournament, so I'm not watching TCM or the PGA golf tournament at the moment.

But I checked in, curious how Tiger Woods was doing. The leaderboard says he has moved up "two," tied at twelfth. I thought he was tied at 8th at the end of the third round, but perhaps I was wrong. Whatever.

Through eight holes, he is down one for the day, eight strokes below par for the tournament, halfway through the fourth round.

The current leader, Marc Leishman, jumped six positions to take sole possession of first place, 13 strokes under par. Through the same number of holes as Tiger today, Marc has shot five strokes under; Woods has shot one stroke under. And all the television commentary will be on Tiger Woods.

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CO2 And Oceanic Reefs

All these years we were told how dangerous CO2 was for oceanic reefs.

Now this, from UT News:
Diving 200 feet under the ocean surface to conduct scientific research can lead to some interesting places. For University of Texas at Austin Professor Bayani Cardenas, it placed him in the middle of a champagne-like environment of bubbling carbon dioxide with off-the-chart readings of the greenhouse gas.

Cardenas discovered the region – which he calls “Soda Springs” – while studying how groundwater from a nearby island could affect the ocean environment of the Verde Island Passage in the Philippines. The passage is one of the most diverse marine ecosystems in the world and is home to thriving coral reefs.

The amazing bubbling location, which Cardenas captured on video, is not a climate change nightmare. It is linked to a nearby volcano that vents out the gases through cracks in the ocean floor and has probably been doing so for decades or even millennia. However, Cardenas said that the high CO2 levels could make Soda Springs an ideal spot for studying how coral reefs may cope with climate change. The site also offers a fascinating setting to study corals and marine life that are making a home among high levels of CO2.

The scientists measured CO2 concentrations as high as 95,000 parts per million (ppm), more than 200 times the concentration of CO2 found in the atmosphere. The readings range from 60,000 to 95,000 and are potentially the highest ever recorded in nature. The CO2 levels fall quickly away from the seeps as the gas is diluted in the ocean, but the gas still creates an elevated CO2 environment along the rest of the coastline of the Calumpan Peninsula, with levels in the 400 to 600 ppm range.

Cardenas is a hydrologist and not an expert on reef systems. He discovered Soda Springs while researching whether groundwater from the nearby land could be discharging into the submarine ocean environment, which is a phenomenon that is generally ignored by scientists looking at the water cycle, Cardenas said.
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His Royal Hypocrisy

Meanwhile, over in Europe:

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