Tag: Mother Nature

Infographics Information

The Shapes of Snowflakes

This detailed chart shows the different classifications and shapes of snowflakes.
The Shapes of Snowflakes

In the Northern Hemisphere at least, the idealised vision of Christmas involves snow. Whilst no one snowflake is exactly the same as another, at least on a molecular level, scientists have none-the-less devised a system of classification for the many types of crystals that snow can form. This graphic shows the shapes and names of some of the groups of this classification.

You might wonder what the shapes of snowflakes have to do with chemistry. Actually, the study of crystal structures of solids has its own discipline, crystallography, which allows us to determine the arrangement of atoms in these solids. Crystallography works by passing X-rays through the sample, which are then diffracted as they pass through by the atoms contained therein. Analysis of the diffraction pattern allows the structure of the solid to be discerned; this technique was used by Rosalind Franklin to photograph the double helix arrangement of DNA prior to Watson & Crick’s confirmation of its structure.

Back to snow crystals: the shapes they form are very dependent on temperature and humidity. This diagram illustrates this fact: simpler shapes are more common at low humidities, whilst more complex varieties of crystal are formed at high humidities. We still don’t know the precise variables behind the formation of particular shapes, although researchers are continually working on theoretical equations to predict snowflake shapes.

The number of categories snow crystals can be categorised into has been steadily increasing over the years. In early studies in the 1930s, they were classified into 21 different shape-based categories; in the 1950s, this was expanded into 42 categories, in the 1960s to 80 categories, and most recently in 2013 to a staggering 121 categories.

This latest study splits the classification into three sub-levels: general, intermediate, and elementary. The graphic featured here shows the 39 intermediate categories, which themselves can be grouped into 8 general categorisations. Each of the intermediate categories  have specific characteristics, which are detailed at length in the research paper this graphic is based on.

The eight intermediate categories shown in the graphic are:

  • Column crystals.
  • Plane crystals.
  • Combination of column & plane crystals.
  • Aggregation of snow crystals.
  • Rimed snow crystals.
  • Germs of ice crystals.
  • Irregular snow particles.
  • Other solid precipitation.

There’s a lot more out there on snowflake structure than described here; if you want to read in much more detail, check out some of the links below. If you’d rather just see some amazing macro images of snowflakes, then check out the photos of Russian photographer Alexey Kljatov.

Source…

 

via

Amusing

The Earth Doesn’t Care What Is Done to It

I have been saying this for years. When it comes to controlling or affecting Mother Nature, man is insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

The cover of The American Scholar quarterly carries an impertinent assertion: “The Earth Doesn’t Care if You Drive a Hybrid.” The essay inside is titled “What the Earth Knows.” What it knows, according to Robert B. Laughlin, co-winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics, is this: What humans do to, and ostensibly for, the earth does not matter in the long run, and the long run is what matters to the earth. We must, Laughlin says, think about the earth’s past in terms of geologic time.

For example: The world’s total precipitation in a year is about one meter—“the height of a golden retriever.” About 200 meters—the height of the Hoover Dam—have fallen on earth since the Industrial Revolution. Since the Ice Age ended, enough rain has fallen to fill all the oceans four times; since the dinosaurs died, rainfall has been sufficient to fill the oceans 20,000 times. Yet the amount of water on earth probably hasn’t changed significantly over geologic time.

Damaging this old earth is, Laughlin says, “easier to imagine than it is to accomplish.” There have been mass volcanic explosions, meteor impacts, “and all manner of other abuses greater than anything people could inflict, and it’s still here. It’s a survivor.”

Laughlin acknowledges that “a lot of responsible people” are worried about atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. This has, he says, “the potential” to modify the weather by raising average temperatures several degrees centigrade and that governments have taken “significant, although ineffective,” steps to slow the warming. “On the scales of time relevant to itself, the earth doesn’t care about any of these governments or their legislation.”

Buy a hybrid, turn off your air conditioner, unplug your refrigerator, yank your phone charger from the wall socket—such actions will “leave the end result exactly the same.” Someday, all the fossil fuels that used to be in the ground will be burned. After that, in about a millennium, the earth will dissolve most of the resulting carbon dioxide into the oceans. (The oceans have dissolved in them “40 times more carbon than the atmosphere contains, a total of 30 trillion tons, or 30 times the world’s coal reserves.”) The dissolving will leave the concentration in the atmosphere only slightly higher than today’s. Then “over tens of millennia, or perhaps hundreds” the earth will transfer the excess carbon dioxide into its rocks, “eventually returning levels in the sea and air to what they were before humans arrived on the scene.” This will take an eternity as humans reckon, but a blink in geologic time.

It seems, Laughlin says, that “something, presumably a geologic regulatory process, fixed the world’s carbon dioxide levels before humans arrived” with their SUVs and computers. Some scientists argue that “the photosynthetic machinery of plants seems optimized” to certain carbon dioxide levels. But “most models, even pessimistic ones,” envision “a thousand-year carbon dioxide pulse followed by glacially slow decay back to the pre-civilization situation.”

Laughlin believes that humans can “do damage persisting for geologic time” by “biodiversity loss”—extinctions that are, unlike carbon dioxide excesses, permanent. The earth did not reverse the extinction of the dinosaurs. Today extinctions result mostly from human population pressures—habitat destruction, pesticides, etc.—but “slowing man-made extinctions in a meaningful way would require drastically reducing the world’s human population.” Which will not happen.

There is something like a pathology of climatology. To avoid mixing fact and speculation, earth scientists are, Laughlin says, “ultraconservative,” meaning they focus on the present and the immediate future: “[They] go to extraordinary lengths to prove by means of measurement that the globe is warming now, the ocean is acidifying now, fossil fuel is being exhausted now, and so forth, even though these things are self-evident in geologic time.”

Climate change over geologic time is, Laughlin says, something the earth has done “on its own without asking anyone’s permission or explaining itself.” People can cause climate change, but major glacial episodes have occurred “at regular intervals of 100,000 years,” always “a slow, steady cooling followed by abrupt warming back to conditions similar to today’s.”

Six million years ago the Mediterranean dried up. Ninety million years ago there were alligators in the Arctic. Three hundred million years ago Northern Europe was a desert and coal formed in Antarctica. “One thing we know for sure,” Laughlin says about these convulsions, “is that people weren’t involved.”

Source…

Hat tip Rita

Jokes

Joke Of The Day

Barack Hussein Obama and Bill Clinton were out playing golf one beautiful day.

After hitting their tee shots, both noticed that neither was even close to the fairway. Obama hit it way left, Clinton way right.

They decided that since the shots were so bad, they would just meet up at the hole.

So Obama went off and looked and looked and finally found his ball sitting down deep in a field of beautiful Buttercups. He promptly pulled out his 7 iron and started whacking away. Buttercups were flying everywhere, but the ball would not come out.

Well, finally Mother Nature got mad.

She came up from the ground and said to Obama, “I have created this beautiful field of Buttercups and you have no respect for them at all, now they are ruined. I am going to have to punish you. Since these are Buttercups, your punishment is that you cannot have butter for a year.”

Obama started to laugh and went back to whacking at the Buttercups.

Mother Nature said, “Hey, this is no laughing matter. What do you find so funny?”

Obama looked up and said, “Clinton is over on the other side in the Pussy willows.”

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