Tunnel on the Moon

Following the discovery that the Moon's surface may hide a network of underground tunnels, a veteran Russian cosmonaut has plans to set up a colony of in this labyrinth of lava caves.

In 2008, Japan's Kaguya spacecraft unveiled a mysterious, metres-deep cave in the Sea of Tranquility. Nasa went back with its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) and snapped high resolution images of the enticing pit.

"They could be entrances to a geologic wonderland," Mark Robinson of Arizona State University, principal investigator for the LRO camera, said in 2010. "We believe the giant holes are skylights that formed when the ceilings of underground lava tubes collapsed."

Those long-dead lava tubes -- a vestigial signature of the Moon's explosive volcanic past -- could still remain as a labyrinth of underground tunnels. These, Russian space pioneers reckon, would be a perfect, natural shelter from hazardous outer-space conditions.

"If it turns out that the Moon has a number of caves that can provide some protection from radiation and meteor showers, it could be an even more interesting destination than previously thought," cosmonaut Sergei Krikalyov was quoted as saying by Reuters, at a forum on the future of manned spaceflight. Krikalyov now heads Russia's Star City cosmonaut training centre outside Moscow.

Instead of building walls and ceilings, or digging into the lunar soil, Krikalyov's plan is to send lunar explorers into the tunnels with inflatable tents. Once there, the blow-up module expands until its hard outer shell seals the tunnel.

Boris Kryuchkov, the deputy science head at the training centre, estimates that the first lunar colony could be built by 2030.

North America, on the other hand, isn't that interested in returning to the Moon. President Obama cancelled the lunar project in 2010 saying, "We've been there before. There's a lot more of space to explore." Instead, he wants Nasa to focus on landing on an asteroid by 2025, and eventually send a manned mission to Mars.

by "environment clean generations"

Clouds Can Make Warming Worse

Researchers are making headway against one of the most deceptively difficult problems in climate science: What happens to clouds in a warming world? Are there more, or fewer, and do they make matters better or worse?

A team of University of Hawaii-Manoa researchers from the U.S. and Japan report that a regional atmospheric model has achieved a breakthrough in the depiction of the impact of warming temperatures on cloudiness in the eastern Pacific Ocean, something that large global climate models have failed to accomplish.

It doesn't qualify as a dramatic Eureka! moment, but in climate science, progress on this front is a big deal, because this failure of the large, supercomputer-driven global climate models to accurately capture the role of clouds in our changing climate is a major source of uncertainty in their forecasts.

"All the global climate models we analyzed have serious deficiencies in simulating the properties of clouds in present-day climate," said lead author Axel Lauer in a statement released by UHM. "It is unfortunate that the global models' greatest weakness may be in the one aspect that is most critical for predicting the magnitude of global warming."

Unfortunately, the news from the University of Hawaii team, reporting in the Journal of Climate, apparently confirms earlier estimates that the response of clouds to rising sea surface temperatures amplifies the warming trend, leading scientists to suggest that our future lies at the warmer high end of the spread of model uncertainty rather than the cooler low end.

Higher sea surface temperatures cause low-level marine clouds to dissipate, the thinking goes, allowing more of the sun's warming rays to break through, causing a further rise in ocean temperatures. . . and so on.

In the same stretch of the eastern North Pacific, similar "positive feedback" results were reported last summer by a team led by Amy Clement of the University of Miami, who compared observations made by sailors with measurements taken by satellite-borne instruments, but is the first report of a model successfully capturing the effect.

"If our model results prove to be representative of the real global climate, then climate is actually more sensitive to perturbations by greenhouse gases than current global models predict, and even the highest warming predictions would underestimate the real change we could see," said co-author Kevin Hamilton.

 by "environment clean generations"

Reflective Crops Could Cool the Planet

• Planting more reflective versions of crops could cool off the regional climate.


• Changing a plant's wax, hairiness or leaf arrangement can change it's reflectivity.


• About 11 percent of the global land surface is devoted to crops. 

Planting more reflective versions of crops could cool regional temperatures in summertime, reducing the impact of increasing global temperatures in these areas, according to ongoing research.
Increasing the reflectivity of crop plants by 20 percent could decrease temperatures in a given area by about one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), said Joy Singarayer of the University of Bristol, United Kingdom.

"It's quite immediate and it's quite safe because crops get planted every year," she said. "The idea is not to think about changing what crops you plant but rather to look within the variety of crops you might plant." This might mean choosing a more reflective variety of wheat, for example.

About 11 percent of the global land surface is devoted to crops, Singarayer said. Even planting all of the world's crops with more reflective varieties would not be enough to reduce climate change worldwide, but it could take the edge off of regional temperature increases as the climate warms.

"That's one degree you don't have to turn up the air conditioning," said John Shepherd of the University of Southampton who was not involved in the study. "You'd be clipping the extreme temperatures."
So far, the team has seen differences in reflectivity of up to 20 to 40 percent in some plant varieties.

Several things change the reflectivity of a crop, including the amount and composition of the wax on the leaf surface, and even how hairy the leaves are. The arrangement of the leaves in the canopy can also change how much sun is reflected.

Changing the wax can also change the plant's water retention, which could change crop yields, probably for the better, especially in arid regions, Singarayer said. Models suggest these changes could have a positive affect on regional water cycles, she added.

Genetic engineering could be used to improve reflectivity, but the team's intention is to start with conventional crop breeding to create more reflective crops.

"It's a very interesting idea and it's a very nice idea in many ways," Shepherd said. "It's using something that's there already."

The idea is similar to the proposal to reduce urban temperatures by making roofs white to reflect more sunlight.

"The disadvantage with white roofs is that there simply isn't enough area of them to make a difference," he said. "We have a much larger area of crops available. It's a question of what can be achieved, and if you can do that without damaging the productivity and water retention and all the other things that are important for crops."

"It's not going to make a big dent, but it could be a really affordable and non-threatening option," he added.

by"environment clean generations"