This fascinating tidal power project is being conducted by Verdant Power.
Image: RITE Project Phase 2: Verdant Power Free Flow Turbine Being Installed into East River (December 2006). Photographer: Kris Unger; Source: Verdant Power, Inc.
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Via the Energy Information Administration
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According to a Monmouth University poll, residents of Mid-Atlantic States show overwhelming support for using coastal areas to produce renewable energy. This isn’t surprising, since renewable energy has a lot of potential to supplement domestic energy needs. However, we must overhaul our energy infrastructure and geographically distribute wind turbines in order to maximize the potential of wind energy.
You can read “Life on the Mid-Atlantic Coast 2009: A 5-state survey of coastal community residents” here. From the New York Times:
The Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA) quickly jumped on the poll to revive the call for increased offshore drilling.
“Nothing about this poll should come as a surprise,” IPAA president and CEO Barry Russell said in a statement. “This poll represents the latest indication of the American people’s support for that strategy — capturing the interests and impressions of a segment of the country not necessarily predisposed to that point of view. Times have changed, however — and so must we.”
The study surveyed 1,006 residents of coastal New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia in April. It has a 3.1 percent margin of error.
The poll found somewhat varying views on offshore drilling, depending on the state. In Maryland, Delaware and New Jersey, the majority of residents support drilling, while support sits at 42 percent in Virginia and 37 percent in New York.
Meanwhile, 82 percent of coastal residents would support the placement of non-visible windmills offshore, and 67 percent would support the placement of turbines even if they could be seen from land.
Seventy-six percent said protecting coastal areas should be a high priority, with 61 percent saying they would support greater efforts to protect local coasts even if it required tax increases.
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Photo source for attribution. The author or licensor of this image does not endorse my work or me and their image is protected under an attribution license.
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The Earth’s magnetosphere protects the Earth and its life from the Sun’s solar activity (think the shields portrayed in Star Trek). However, our protective blanket may be resulting in activity that is leaking our atmosphere into space—slowly. From New Scientist:
At the poles, the magnetosphere might be aiding loss of the atmosphere, according to Stas Barabash of the Swedish Institute of Space Physics in Kiruna, who is principal investigator for the European Space Agency’s Venus Express mission. Barabash bases his suggestion on measurements of the flow of ions escaping from Venus, Mars and Earth. It is thought that Venus has never had a magnetosphere, whereas Mars did until its magnetic dynamo wound down 3.5 billion years ago.
Taking into account the different masses of the three planets, their atmospheric make-up and their distance from the sun, Barabash compared the rate of loss of oxygen ions from each one. He focused on oxygen ions because these are the most abundant ions in the ionospheres of all three planets. He found that Earth lost oxygen around three times as fast as the other planets.
Barabash points out that a planet’s magnetosphere will always be far larger than the planet itself or its atmosphere. This, he reasons, means that a planet with a magnetic field will absorb more energy from the solar wind than it would if it didn’t have one. This extra energy would be funnelled down towards the magnetic poles, so molecules in the ionosphere above these regions could be accelerated enough to escape (see diagram). Barabash presented the results this month at the International Conference on Comparative Planetology at Noordwijk in the Netherlands.
The idea is supported by past studies of the magnetosphere, such as the European Space Agency’s Cluster mission, which have shown that ions escape from the Earth’s poles at twice the rate or more compared with the average for the planet as a whole.
In other earth science related news, “the Earth could be habitable for another 2.3 billion years, extending previous estimates of life’s horizon by more than 1 billion years.”
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