Rhinos eradicated for profit

So heartbreaking. Black Rhinos are gone. Extinct. An ugly word befitting such a hideous outcome.


[South African Animal Rights Activists Community photo]

It didn't have to happen. Greedy, evil, vicious, self-absorbed humans with black holes for souls did this. I won't wish them equal evil though. I trust the universe will deal with them in its own time.

Breaking: Space junk falling to Earth

We've come to the point of space exploitation where these things are rarely mentioned. I don't recall any big buzz when this launched but now that this satellite is about to sort of crash to Earth within the hour it's slightly bigger news. Also too, it's an exceptional unit.


[video at CNN]

The Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer -- a European Space Agency satellite known shorthand as GOCE -- was barely a dozen miles above the scientifically recognized edge of space as its orbit decayed, the ESA announced shortly before midnight Sunday (6 p.m. ET). GOCE is expected to nose into the atmosphere and break up sometime before 8 p.m. ET, the agency projected. [...]

"At an altitude of less than 120 km (75 miles), the spacecraft is -- against expectations -- still functional," the ESA said. The craft's "most probable" path for re-entry takes it mainly over the Pacific and the Indian oceans, and controllers have all but ruled out any chance that the spacecraft would come down over Europe, it said. (GOCE's orbit can be tracked via an ESA website.)

The 5-meter (16-foot) satellite was launched in 2009 to map variations in the Earth's gravity in 3-D, provide ocean circulation patterns and make other measurements. Powered by solar panels and not-your-average lithium-ion battery, it lasted more than three times its expected lifespan before running out of juice on October 21.

In March 2011, the ESA added another role -- as the "first seismometer in orbit" -- when GOCE detected sound waves from the massive earthquake that struck Japan.

Good technology will likely evolve from the demise of this old piece of hardware.

According to this guy, this satellite was one of 1071 operational satellites in orbit around the Earth. And those are just a small fraction of the 21K larger inoperational items and 500K smallish bits of space junk orbiting the Earth. I'm too lazy to fact check his numbers but there's no doubt our planet is encircled by some amount of space junk. Maybe some day we'll accumulate enough of it to have a ring, like Saturn. That would be cool.

Meanwhile, I still really miss the toolbag in space.

Broken planet

In news that never makes it to BigTV last week, BigOil is still polluting the Gulf of Mexico:

As Coast Guard crews were scouring the Louisiana coast looking for damage from Tropical Storm Karen this week, they made a startling discovery: A tar mat weighing 4,100 pounds, presumably remnants from the devastating BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010.

Not as impressive as the 40,000 pound mat they found earlier but the ongoing damage is adding up.

Mats and balls of tar have continued to wash up on gulf shores, despite the more than three years that have passed since a rig explosion left oil spewing into the gulf’s waters and spawned the worst environmental disaster in U.S.

But despite the lasting impact that BP’s oil spill has had on the region, the company discontinued its regular searches for remaining oil earlier this year.

Worse yet, nobody really seems to know what the long term damage will be:

The scope of damage from this tar isn’t entirely clear. What is known is that tar from the Deepwater spill contains the bacteria Vibrio vulnificus — which causes a deadly type of seafood contamination — at a rate 100 times higher than surrounding waters. On top of that, a combination of these tar balls and the dispersants that were used to clean up the spill can hold carcinogenic pollutants that are soaked up by human skin.

And after Fukishima, the Pacific is in even worse shape. Seriously, read this whole story of a man who sailed through thousand of miles of it. The ocean is broken:

"After we left Japan, it felt as if the ocean itself was dead," Macfadyen said.

"We hardly saw any living things. We saw one whale, sort of rolling helplessly on the surface with what looked like a big tumour on its head. It was pretty sickening.

"I've done a lot of miles on the ocean in my life and I'm used to seeing turtles, dolphins, sharks and big flurries of feeding birds. But this time, for 3000 nautical miles there was nothing alive to be seen."

In place of the missing life was garbage in astounding volumes.

Dangerous garbage at that. Big enough enough to sink small ships. We are literally killing this planet and nobody is reporting it with the urgency it deserves. [graphic via]