Google Doodle honours British primatologist Jane Good all
Every year on April 22, people across the globe unite to
celebrate Earth Day. As the name suggests, the day is dedicated to protect the
planet and promote ways to preserve the environment. Carrying forward its
practice of honouring important personalities and days, Google on Sunday paid
tribute to British primatologist and anthropologist Jane Good all with a doodle
on its homepage. Founder of the Jane Good all Institute and the Roots &
Shoots programme, Good all has worked tirelessly on animal welfare issues as
well as environmental conservation. The Google doodle also features a short
video clip of Good all narrating her experience as an anthropologist.
Good all in the video shares how much she loves animals. “My
whole childhood really was animals, animals, animals.” She then goes on to
describe a moment when she was in the Gombe National Park and it was
raining. After the rain stopped, she
recollects she could smell the wet hair on the chimpanzees and hear the insects
singing loudly. At that moment Good all says, “I just felt absolutely at one
and it was a sense of awe and wonder.” She then goes on to highlight the
importance of rainforest and how they teach you that everything is
interconnected, and every species, “even though it may seem insignificant has a
role to play in this tapestry of life”.
At the end of the video, Good all shares her message with
everybody on. She encourages others to make a “determined effort to live lives
in better harmony with nature.” She also gives a parting word of advice — “Every single individual matters,
every single individual makes some impact on the planet every single day, and
we have a choice as to what kind of difference we are going to make.”
This year, according to Earth Day Network, the day intends
to spread awareness about the pollution caused by plastic and the need to
eventually end its use. The Earth Day, which was first celebrated in the United
States in 1970, went global by the 1990s and now almost 192 countries celebrate
it.
People around the globe will on Sunday come together to
celebrate the Earth Day, a day meant to emphasise on the need to protect the
planet and preserve its environment. First celebrated in the United States in
1970, the idea of commemorating such a day was propounded by Gaylord Nelson, a
US senator from Wisconsin. Nelson, who had been a witness to the devastation
caused by an enormous oil spill in Santa Barbara, California in 1969, felt the
urgency of the matter.
According to Earth Day Network, this year’s Earth Day is
dedicated to spreading awareness about the pollution caused by plastic and the
need to eventually end its use. The Earth Day went global by the 1990s and is
now celebrated by at least 192 countries.
7 things we’ve learned about Earth since the last Earth Day
Earth dayturns 48 this Sunday, April 22, and Google is celebrating it
with a Google Doodle of conservationist Dr. Jane Goodall, who nudges us in a
video a “do our part for this beautiful planet.”
When Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-Wisc.) founded Earth Day in
1970, his hope was to make the environment a political issue in an era where US
rivers caught on fire and thick smog choked cities.
In many ways, it worked. Since then, major environmental
laws have helped clean up much of the vivid toxic detritus in the soil, air,
and water in the US. But our challenges today are no less daunting. The
accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the loss of wilderness and
species, and the acidification and pollution of the oceans have all become more
acute — and more destabilizing.
In keeping with the tradition started by former Vox writers
Brad Plumer and Joseph Stromberg, here are seven of the most troubling,
intriguing, and encouraging things we learned about the Earth since the last
Earth Day.
1) The plastic problem is even worse than we thought
One of the bleakest stories of the year so far was the
report of a six-ton sperm whale washing up on the shores of southern Spain with
64 pounds of plastic in its stomach, a grotesque sign of the alarming rate at
which we’re dumping plastics into the ocean.
The plastic crisis is a truly global one, and the numbers
are staggering: A 2015 study found that between 4.8 and 12.7 million metric
tons of plastic makes it into the ocean from land each year. By 2050, there
will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by weight.
Since plastic is synthetic, there are few natural processes
that break it down, allowing bags, straws, and packaging to linger for decades
if not centuries. And we’re not very good at containing it to landfills. About
32 percent of plastics make out into nature, where it often end up in the
bellies of fish, birds, and whales. And, as it turns out, potentially in our
stomachs too.
In one investigation, the nonprofit Orb Media found plastic
fibers in 83 percent of drinking water samples all over the world, with some of
the highest levels in drinking fountains at the US Capitol. In a separate
investigation published this year, it found microplastic particles in 93
percent of the bottled water samples it tested (250 bottles from 11 leading
brands including Dasani and Aquafina).
These kinds of findings have prompted environmental
activists pushing to reduce or end the use of disposable plastics. Curbing
plastic pollution is a key theme in this year’s Earth Day and there’s a
high-profile campaign underway to ban plastic straws in particular.
UK Prime Minister Theresa May called this week to ban
plastic straws, swabs, and stirrers. Some researchers last year openly called
for an international agreement to control plastic pollution. And there was one
bit of hopeful news for potentially more effective disposal in the future:
scientists have discovered an enzyme that can digest plastic.
2) We lost the last male Northern white Rhino
Another benchmark we’re obliged to revisit each Earth Day is
how many species we’ve lost forever.
In December, the US Fish and Wildlife Service declared the
beaverpond marstonia, a tiny freshwater snail found in Georgia, to be extinct.
The Center for Biological Diversity called it the first species declared
extinct under the Trump administration, a consequence of water overuse for
agriculture and pollution.
Also in the last year, the Christmas Island Pipistrelle, a
bat found off the coast of Australia, was declared extinct. Three reptiles also
went extinct on the island, including the chained gecko, the blue-tailed skink,
and the whiptail skink, according to the International Union for the
Conservation of Nature. Much of this is due to disease and predatory invasive
species.
And some species are teetering on the brink of extinction.
The last male Northern White Rhino, Sudan, died in March at the age of 45.
As the Northern White rhinos have been rapidly decimated by
poaching, conservationists have tried desperate tactics to resuscitate them,
including creating a Tinder profile for Sudan. The more viable strategy now is
in vitro fertilization of a female Southern White Rhino with the eggs from the
two remaining Northern White Rhino females and stored northern white rhino
semen.
3) A few species have bounced back. And we discovered some
brand new ones.
The Black-eyed Leaf Frog hopped back from the edge of the
abyss. It’s now been classified as a species of “least concern” after having
been “critically endangered,” the last step before extinction.
“This lovely leaf frog is hope in a small, green-and-black
package,” said Jennifer Luedtke, an amphibian specialist at Global Wildlife
Conservation, in a statement.
Researchers reported this year that other tropical frog
species, like the variable harlequin frog, are also bouncing back after a
fungal epidemic drastically slashed their numbers.
The Chesapeake Bay’s striped bass has also rebounded to a
healthy population.
Scientists also described some new species for the first
time. The California Academy of Sciences added 85 new species of plants and
animals last year to its catalog, including “16 flowering plants, one
elephant-shrew, 10 sharks, 22 fish, three scorpions, seven ants, 13
nudibranchs, seven spiders, three wasps, one fossil sand dollar, one deepwater
coral, and one lizard.”
Researchers also discovered a sulfur-eating giant shipworm that
lives at the bottom of muddy lagoons:
Other new species include a new parasitic wasp with spiked
forelimbs and a variety of tardigrade found in a parking lot in Japan. It’s not
too surprising since the notoriously hardy eight-legged microorganism is often
a pioneer of new ecosystems, including those created by humans.
And scientists announced they’s found the first new species
of great ape in 90 years, Pongo tapanuliensis, also known as the Tapanuli
orangutan. But with just 800 individuals on the island of Sumatra left, it’s
also endangered.
4) Greenland’s ice is melting faster than we realized
We know the Earth is warming, but we saw several jarring
examples over the past year of how quickly and dramatically this is playing
out.
Earth’s polar regions are warming twice as fast as the
average rate of the planet. NOAA scientists reported late last year that the
Arctic losing ice at its fastest rate in at least 1,500 years.
We also saw a heat wave in the Arctic. In the middle of
winter. For the third year in a row. January saw the lowest extent of Arctic
sea ice for the month on record. The sea ice maximum for the Arctic, which
typically occurs in March, was at its second-lowest on record this year, bested
only by 2017.
This warming is playing out in sharp and sudden ways across
the Arctic. Researchers reported last year that a section of Greenland’s ice
sheet suddenly started melting 80 percent faster. Another study found
Greenland’s entire ice sheet is melting at its fastest rate in at least 400
years, and that the melt rate sped up drastically in 1990.
If the entire Greenland ice sheet were to melt, it would
raise global sea levels by more than 20 feet.
Glaciers in Denali National Park are also melting 60 times
faster than they were 150 years ago.
These examples show that the impacts of a changing climate
aren’t always slow and gradual; global warming can push some phenomena to
tipping points that lead to rapid, self-propagating changes.
5) Seagrass is regrowing in the Chesapeake Bay. And humans
can take credit.
The Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the United
States, and for decades it was also one of its most polluted. Massive
quantities of fertilizer, waste from farm and poultry operations, and
stormwater in Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, and Pennsylvania were leaching into
the water.
As nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus sullied the bay,
much of the underwater life, including grasses and the fish and shellfish that
lived inside it, died off. The impact was so severe that the federal government
and states had to come up with a way to limit the pollution — and so they
started paying farmers to farm in different ways to keep fertilizer from
washing into the bay and cracked down on sewage treatment plants and other
facilities that were dumping waste.
Happily, scientists writing in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences in March report that these regulations to limit
that runoff are working. The most striking evidence is the regrowth of the
seagrass beds — now covering more than 42,000 acres, the highest cover in the
Chesapeake in almost half a century.
The recovery of the “underwater forest” of seagrass also
suggests that other forms of life in the Bay — like blue crabs and fish species
that use it for food and shelter — will recover too. And given that seagrasses
worldwide have declined by nearly a third over the last century, the successful
efforts to limit nutrient pollution in the Chesapeake could help influence new
policies to restore coastal ecosystems elsewhere.
“Nutrient reductions and biodiversity conservation are
effective strategies to aid the successful recovery of degraded systems at
regional scales, a finding which is highly relevant to the utility of
environmental management programs worldwide,” the PNAS authors write.
6) We’re woefully unprepared for disasters. And we aren’t
learning enough from them.
2017 was a brutal year for natural disasters in the US, and
the ongoing blackout in Puerto Rico continues to remind us just how vulnerable
we are to extreme weather especially as climate change makes these kinds of
events more intense.
Hurricane Maria ripped through the Caribbean with 150 mph
winds and upward of 36 inches of rain last September, knocking down 80 percent
of electricity infrastructure and creating the largest blackout in US history
for Puerto Rico’s 3.3 million residents.
Other parts of the United States were also hit hard last
year, as the worst wildfire season on record torched California and as
Hurricane Harvey drenched Texas with the largest amount of rainfall ever
recorded for a single storm.
In fact, natural disasters across 2017 caused at least $306
billion in damages across the US, making it the costliest year on record.
And researchers expect that torrential rain, massive storms,
and expansive infernos will get worse as average temperatures continue to rise.
“Human-induced climate change likely increased Harvey’s
total rainfall around Houston by at least 19 percent, with a best estimate of
37 percent,” Michael Wehner, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National
Laboratory said at the American Geophysical Union conference in December.
Despite all this, we’re already going back to our old
habits. Homes are being rebuilt in floodplains around Houston and construction
is still booming along Florida’s coasts despite rising seas. Meanwhile,
California homeowners are rebuilding their torched properties in the same
spots. Let’s do better.
7) We’re getting closer to finding another Earth out there
As far as we know, Earth is the only planet with life in the
universe. But scientists are getting better at finding tantalizingly similar
planets. And as astrophysics and astrobiology come together to make these
discoveries, we keep learning more about our own home.
There’s been a boom in exoplanet discoveries since the
launch of the Kepler Space Telescope in 2009. Of the more than 3,500 planets
we’ve found outside of our solar system, Kepler has helped identify more than
2,500 of them.
These planets range in size from larger-than-Jupiter to
smaller-than-Earth.
But by pooling from observations from telescopes around the
world and in space, scientists have discovered more spheres like ours.
Researchers reported last year that they found seven Earth-sized planets
orbiting a dwarf star called Trappist-1, the largest batch of planets in the
habitable zone of a star ever discovered.
“It represents a unique opportunity to thoroughly
characterize temperate Earth-like planets that are orbiting a much cooler and
smaller star than the Sun,” the scientists wrote.
NASA says we now know more about the Trappist-1 system than
any other planetary system save our own. And earlier this year, the agency
reported that the planets closest to the star could have liquid water, a
necessary ingredient for life as we know it.
Researchers at the MEarth Project last April also found an
Earth-like planet, LHS1140b, orbiting a star about one-fifth the size of our
sun. “It also receives similar amounts of energy from its star that Earth does
from the Sun, which means it may have liquid water on its surface!” the team
reported.
And on April 19, NASA launched the Transiting Exoplanet
Survey Satellite aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9. The $228 million mission is aimed
specifically at “discovering new earths.”
