watershed moment

On this day in 1969, the Cuyahoga River, downstream from the industrial cities of Akron, Kent and Cleveland Ohio, caught on fire—the latest in a series of at least a dozen major conflagrations of the polluted tributary of Lake Erie—captured the attention of reporters at TIME magazine and the issue made the cover of the June edition. The public outrage that followed helped endorse a tranche of pollution-control measures and eventually led to the creation of a federal and state Environmental Protection Agency by early December of the following year.

downstream effects

Never mind the fact that you might be ingesting multiple tiny spiders per night—or conversely that if the spiders of the world teamed up, they could consume all the humans on the face of the Earth (or cocaine prawns or antidepressants in the groundwater), the World Wildlife Foundation launches a new campaign to illustrate the awful non-food pyramid that we’ve created. Via the Drum, we learn that on average a person consumes one hundred thousand micro-plastic particles annually, meaning about five grams (a lot of different factors come into play and you can get a more personalised estimate of your dietary intake here), a credit card’s worth of the stuff each week.

glowing, glowing, gone

We are all for any gesture—however notional—that highlights the plight of the planet and causes us to reflect on how rubbish we are as stewards of the oceans, so appreciated Pantone and Adobe owing up to its slightly tone-deaf irony in nominating Living Coral as the colour of the year, considering that over half of the vital ecosystems have died off over the past three decades with the rest endangered and on the decline, by introducing a palette that reflects the death-rattle of coral.
Called coral fluorescence, the vibrant colour change from purple to yellow to blue is the reef’s final response to heated, acidified water, heralding succumbing to the phenomena of coral bleaching and demise. Signalling overall health but still not fully understood (like most tings, it seems to be far more nuanced and a way of filtering sunlight, protecting from ultra-violet rays and regulating its symbiotic relationship with algæ and other denizens), going through these chromatic transformations is a distress message that we can’t ignore.

known colloquially as moss piglets

Via the Art of Darkness’ Shadow Manor blog, we’re introduced to a stress-relief ball in the form of a macroscopic version of a tardigrade (previously). Having survived the previous five mass-extinction events, able to withstand extreme temperatures and the vacuum of space, this little water bear—even just watching the video of it being squished and regain its shape is relaxing on its own—can surely handle your day-to-day stressors and would be glad to help alleviate them.

голос води

Commissioned for the 23 March annual observance of World Water Day (previously), a group of one hundred sound engineers and musicians—including the group DakhaBrakha—teamed up to create a tone poem from the waters of Ukraine, designing special accompanying instruments to capture the character of currents coursing down the Carpathians. More to explore at Calvert Journal at the link above and for those of you who missed the commemoration like we did, it’s your cue to appreciate and collect the music of your local body of water.

macroalgae

Instead of the usual plastic cups or bottles of water offered to parched runners, for this past London Marathon participants were handed out some thirty thousand gulps of a sports drink encapsulated (previously) in a seaweed-based edible container. Among the newest wonder material, designers and the industry are just beginning to appreciate the potential of seaweed as a sustainable bio-plastic which, incorporated dietarily, can also combat the bio-genesis of methane.

plop, plop, fizz, fizz

Swedish sound artist Alexander Höglund ordered different effervescent pain-relieving tablets from around the world and brought them to his recording studio in Malmö to press a limited run of vinyl records as a meditation on the fizzing sounds as the pills slowly dissolve.
The resulting album, Substance, is surprisingly soothing and perhaps a nice placebo—resonant with me as well for the morning ritual H calls my “vitamin water”—and makes me want to experiment a bit with the drinking vessel and water levels and makes me wonder how much of the experience one has to take in to achieve the desired result, like the impression that the angry hiss of tablet finding just a few drops of moisture instead of the full glass would probably begrudge any pharmacological efficacy.

båly bay

An undersea restaurant on the Norwegian southern coast whose ground-breaking caught our attention a year and a half ago is celebrating its official grand opening and welcoming diners. Designed by the Snøhetta group to suggest an emerging periscope, Under (that word also means a wonder in Norsk) hosts up to forty guests, for whom I hope the liminal experience makes a lasting and profound impression, and serves a dual purpose as a marine research laboratory when not serving meals. Learn more at the links above, including a peek at the menu and where to book reservations.

i’ve got a mule and her name is sal

In order to better protect the body of water and the ecosystem it supports from pollution, residents of Toledo on the shores of Lake Erie voted by a sizable margin to great it legal personhood, granting the lake (or some one championing it) the ability to sue (or be sued). The concept of a judicial personality (persona ficta) has been fraught and arguably abused in the past with the notion of lifting the corporate veil and giving businesses the rights, responsibilities and liabilities of the stakeholders (natural persons) but can in some cases be a force of good, this being the first under US jurisdiction.

styx

From the BBC Monitoring desk, we learn that years of neglect and crumbling infrastructure may be turned the Athens’ advantage and lead to the revival of an ancient and storied river that used to course through the city unimpeded but has been buried for decades after a post-war building boom.
Flowing down from Mount Hymettus and emptying into Phakeron Bay, the banks of the River Ilisos (Ιλισός, a demi-god, son of Demeter and Poseidon) was a favourite spot for Socrates and his pupils as well as being dotted with shires and temples to Zeus, Diana and Pan along its route. Rather than repairing the tunnel that contains the river, the plan is to return it to the surface and line its banks with a public park, emanating from the Pantheatnaic Stadium—the venue for the first modern Olympic Games in 1896.

peak curtains

Via Nag on the Lake, we learn about a couple of new and innovative IKEA undertakings that aim to augment and improve environmental conditions on a personal level which hopefully scales up.
Scheduled to go on sale in stores next year, the Gunrid drapes are made with a textile with a photocatalyst material that passively breaks down and absorbs air pollutants. The other development, based off the design of its toy boat the Småkryp, has already been pressed into service, trawling Deptford Creek in southeast London and collecting trash, twenty kilogrammes a go. This demonstration project is set to expand and the Good Ship IKEA are remotely controlled—as well as autonomous units—equipped with web cameras that provide a live-feed and shipping-report on conditions as they ply the waters. Much more to explore at the links above.

hungersteine

Weeks of drought conditions have precipitated significant drops in the water level in rivers and lakes across Europe, including the Elbe (Labe), where near the border between Germany and the Czech Republic at Děčín carved boulders, normally submerged, have been exposed. Known as hunger stones, the engravings mark historic droughts and thus failed harvests that have occurred over the past six centuries. While such memorials lends some perspective to our times, the extremes we are experiencing now and unprecedented in combination with intense temperatures that overtax the resilience of ecosystems when there’s no relenting.

darling, it’s better down where it’s wetter

Via Boing Boing, we are treated to a rather remarkable demonstration video from Marine Imaging Technologies’ new HYDRUS camera. An array of eight underwater cameras whose perspectives are selectable as if the footage were in real time surveys a reef off the Cayman Islands under natural, low light conditions, giving one a taste of what live-cams undersea could offer.

anthropocene

Via Nag on the Lake, we are invited to ruminate over the indelible mark that humans are leaving on the planet through insatiable greed and a feeling of entitlement to exploit Nature, which will result in a future world inimical and inhospitable to human life through anthropogenic climate change and destruction of vital ecosystems. This is not something that we can look away from and pretend is not happening.  Learn more about the filmmakers and their trilogy of documentaries here.

water column

Oceanographers in Queensland for the first time have produced a comprehensive, global map charting out the pristine, untouched areas of oceanic wilderness, which sadly reveals that there is only a small percentage not already befouled by mankind.
Researchers admit that they were expecting to find much broader expanses of unspoilt waters and ecosystems but these contrary results, testament to the endless assault that people are waging with careless pollution, climate change heating up waters and disrupting currents, over-fishing, sand-mining (the chief component of all the concrete and glass that goes into new construction) and intensive shipping, demonstrate the degree of negative, disruptive impact that humans have had above and below the waves.

residence hall

Under construction since the summer of 2016, the architects behind Urban Rigger—we learn via Plain Magazine—present an innovative concept to address the shortage of affordable student housing by creating floating dormitories along disused docklands in Copenhagen.
The potential for expanding sustainable dwelling places parallel to abandoned water transport infrastructure that line the world’s rivers and canals with extant but outmoded infrastructure is tremendous and would relieve a lot of pressure in places where space is already at a premium. Units, which would have applications for sheltering refugees as well, moored and unmoored as needed, are housed in upgraded shipping containers and include an array of amenities and harness power passively through solar panels and the passing current and tides.  Be sure to visit the links above for a whole gallery of the floating dorm and a video documentary.

froggy goes a-courting

Though taxologically distinguished from their amphibian cousins by behaviour rather than any agreed upon definition, most toads live their adult lives in dry woodlands and only return to the ponds where they hatched (a practise in the animal kingdom called natal site fidelity or philopatry) to spawn the next generation.
Their annual march down the valley goes directly through our yard but they encounter a big last-mile problem with a single lane road (read about a possible technological way to help mitigate such competition here). They’ve been managing the passage fairly well on their own but one does see a few flattened casualties but we helped out as many as we could to cross the street.

agalmatophilia

Though normally a highly sociable bird species, we learn that one handsome specimen of gannet called Nigel passed away happily at a ripe old age, surrounded by friends but sadly possibly on the cusps of something big that would have remedied what some are describing as terminal loneliness and would have certainly stripped him of his nickname of “No Mates Nigel.”  Conservationists in New Zealand wanted to reintroduce seabirds to Mana Island and in order to signal to passing flocks that it was safe to nest here (invasive species that might prey on hatchlings were removed from the island), they installed an ensemble of concrete, decoy gannets. Only Nigel alighted, however, in 2013 and became besotted with one particular stone figure which he courted (either to his great frustration or contentment—it’s hard to say) for the next five years. In February, Nigel’s body was found next to his beloved, just as more live gannets had begun to investigate the island.

antipodal

Amusing Planet brings us the story of the planet’s loneliest tree, a stunted Sitka spruce, and how this transplant is the perfect candidate to mark the separation of the Anthropocene geological epoch. While on a survey expedition, Uchter Knox, Earl of Ranfurly and Governor of New Zealand, visited the remote Campbell Island and was possessed for to plant a tree on this otherwise treeless piece of land, whose climate is hostile to anything growing above ground level.
The specimen that Knox choose, however, is indigenous to a strip of coast in British Columbia—from the opposite ends of the Earth almost—and while not exactly qualifying as an invasive species, the spruce having taken root but never matured to produce cones, it does demonstrate the effect that humans have on the environment. Moreover, the tree is a contender for a “golden spike,” a symbolic milestone like the ceremonial final spike driven that marked the completion of the North American transcontinental railroad that arraign other epochal transitions like the asteroid strike that ended the Paleocene and age of the dinosaurs sixty-six million years hence, as the tree is also a living record of humanity’s attempt to harness and weaponise nuclear fission and fusion. In order to demonstrate that the impact of nuclear testing was truly pervasive and global—that no one was out of range, no matter how isolated or removed—researchers took core samples of the Sitka spruce and found traces of the radioactive carbon isotope that is the signature sign of atomic explosions especially concentrated in the growth rings that corresponded to the mid-1960s when testing was at its peak.

7x7

clan of the ice bear: the outsized but possibly overlooked contributions that polar bears made to the development of evolution

hal 90210: Boston Dynamics is teaching its robotic dog to fight back, via Slashdot

one of these things is not like the others: Trump reportedly wears dress shirts with customised cuffs—as a reminder to himself and others, he is the forty-fifth president

tierrechte: Switzerland outlaws boiling living lobsters

we’ll leave the light on for you: a nice, retrospective profile of US National Public Radio essayist and humourist Tom Bodett

service feline: Puffy the cat with hypnotic powers

cultural icon: David Attenborough dance sensation, via Marginal Revolution