Arctic expedition reaches the ice

September 23rd, 2009 at 11:13am Under Planet Earth

U.S. and Russian scientists exploring the Arctic ocean finally reached ice on Monday, about 435 miles (700 km) northwest of Barrow, Alaska.

On a year when the Arctic sea ice has receded in the summer to its third-smallest on record, researchers on the RUSALCA expedition got the opportunity to study the water, sea life and the ocean floor at a location where there is rarely open water.

The mission’s science chief, Terry Whitledge, said it he did not expect explore such a northerly location without an icebreaker.

The team took core samples from the seabed, more than 600 metres (1,968 feet) down from the surface.

“We think that is our biggest scientific gain,” Whitledge, of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said by satellite phone from the bridge of the research vessel Professor Khromov.

The scientists are on a six-week expedition through the Bering Strait and Chukchi Sea, coordinated by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Russian Academy of Sciences, to gauge the impact of climate change on the region.

The weather has been mostly moderate for the time of year, but one recent Russian cold front made work on the ship tough by icing up the deck and freezing up some gear used to lower equipment into the ocean, Whitledge said.

Microbiologist Alexander Savvichev said he has been surprised by the lack of methane concentrations in sediment where pockmarks, or deep depressions on the sea floor, had been identified. Such features can be caused by gas seeps, so the formation of these is a mystery.

“The success is that we have collected enough samples for laboratory analysis, and we are taking them home. Experiments will show exactly what the situation is,” he said.

The expedition runs to the end of September.

(Photo: The Professor Khromov at its northernmost location in the Arctic Ocean, 77 27.5 N, 166 25.6 W, on Monday, Sept 21, 2009. Photo courtesy of RAS-NOAA)

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Greenpeace protest againts IT companies: Perception meets reality

September 23rd, 2009 at 11:13am Under Planet Earth

Newsweek, encroaching on territory usually mined by activist groups like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, has unveiled its innaugural NEWSWEEK Green Rankings, which ranks the 500 biggest U.S. companies based on their “actual environmental performance, policies, and reputation.”

The magazine pointed out that compiling such a list was a challenge “because comparing environmental performance across industries is a bit like analyzing whether Tiger Woods or LeBron James is the world’s greatest athlete—there’s an inevitable apples-and-oranges element.”

Still, it believes it’s system makes sense. To come up with the greenest company, the magazine assigned each a “Green Score” that was then compared to the average score of the collective group. You can find out more about Newsweek’s methodology here. But, in terms of weighting, Impact and Policies were each given 45 percent and Reputation received 10 percent.

The results? I’ll let you be the judge. But I found it noteworthy that the top two overall are also the top two PC makers in the

world — Hewlett-Packard and Dell. And five of the top 10 are tech companies, blamed for manufacturing products that end up contributing to mountains of electronic waste in developing nations.

What do you think? Will the rankings affect who you do business with? What would your green rankings look like? Leave your comments in the box below.

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