Абе класика испран мозок брат.
Туку поентата ми е мене. Загадувањето од 1000 други многу поважни аспекти штети на сите нас, а овие овде се тепат оти пари не му носело на новородените зелени наичници. Па нешто воена индустрија ми спомнува :nesvest: па то луѓе умират од војни, тој осудва оти планетата ја “затоплувале“. Не можам да опишам значи колку треба да си ограничен да прифатиш вакви приказни како антрополошкото глобално затоплување.
Ten percent of the world's reefs have been completely destroyed. In the Philippines, where coral reef destruction is the worst, over 70% have been destroyed and only 5% can be said to be in good condition. What has happened to destroy all of the reefs? Humans have happened.
There are two different ways in which humans have contributed to the degradation of the Earth's coral reefs, indirectly and directly. Indirectly, we have destroyed their environment. As you read earlier, coral reefs can live only within a certain temperature and salinity range. Global warming caused by the green house effect has raised the temperature of the oceans so high that the coral get sick and die. Even a rise of one degree in the average water temperature can hurt the coral. Due to global warming, 1998 was the hottest year in the last six centuries and 1998 was the worst year for coral.
The most obvious sign that coral is sick is coral bleaching. That is when either the algae inside die, or the algae leave the coral. The algae are what give coral its color, so without the algae the coral has no color and the white of the limestone shell shines through the transparent coral bodies. People have been noticing coral bleaching since the turn of the century, but only since the 1980s has it gotten really bad.
This mountainous star coral, Montastraeaa faveolata, from Panama has started to bleach.
Photo by E.C. Peters.
The warmer water also encourages the growth of harmful algae on top of the coral, which kills it, because it blocks out the sun. Without the sun, the zooxanthellae cannot perform photosynthesis and so they die. Without the zooxanthellae, the coral polyps die too. This algae is usually eaten by fish, but because of over fishing, there aren't enough fish left to eat all the algae. And the pollution we dump in the ocean is just what the algae needs to grow and be healthy, which means covering and eventually killing the coral reefs.
The direct way in which humans destroy coral reefs is by physically killing them. All over the world, but especially in the Philippines, divers catch the fish that live in and around coral reefs. They sell these fish to fancy restaurants in Asia and to fancy pet stores in the United States. This would be OK if the divers caught the fish carefully with nets and didn't hurt the reefs or take too many fish. But the divers want lots of fish and most of them are not very well trained at fish catching. Often they blow up a coral reef with explosives (picture below) and then catch all the stunned fish swimming around. This completely destroys the reefs, killing the coral polyps that make it as well as many of the plants and animals that call it home. And the creatures that do survive are left homeless.
Dynamite not only kills the fish that live in the reef, but the reef as well.
(Photo courtesy Thomas Heeger: Philippines)
Another way that divers catch coral reef fish is with cyanide. Cyanide is a poison. The divers pour this poison on the reef, which stuns the fish and kills the coral. Then they rip open the reef with crowbars and catch the fish while they are too sick from the poison to swim away. This poison kills 90% of the fish that live in the reef and the reef is completely destroyed both by the poison and then by being ripped apart.
The map below shows the areas in the world where coral reefs are in danger.
All this may seem a bit depressing, but there are many groups in the world dedicated to saving the coral reefs. These groups work to educate people about the destruction of coral reefs. They lobby the United States Congress as well as the governments of other nations, trying to convince them not to buy fish that have been caught by destroying coral reefs. They encourage governments to crack down on pollution, both into the ocean and into the air, which causes global warming. They encourage visitors to coral reefs to be careful not to harm them. They even build artificial reefs to replace the reefs that have been destroyed. If you want to learn more about these groups, visit some of their websites, like the
Coral Reef Alliance,
Reef Relief, and the
Planetary Coral Reef Foundation.
Some people help coral reefs by convincing governments to treat them with care. Other people help coral reefs by studying them. One way that people learn more about coral reefs is by slicing open dead ones and looking inside. The inside of a coral reef looks a lot like the inside of a tree (picture below) and the lines mean the same thing. A person who studies tree rings is called a dendrochronologist. " Dendro " means tree, " chron " means time and " ologist " means person who studies, so dendrochronologist means person who studies trees through time. Dendrochronologists count the number of rings in a slice of a tree to see how old the tree was when it died. There is one ring for each year the tree lived. The dendrochronologist also looks at the size of the rings. A thick ring means that that year there was lots of food and it was a good year for the tree. A thin ring can mean that there was a drought that year or maybe the tree was sick. In the same way, oceanographers can look at the rings in a slice of coral and see how old the coral is and which years were good years and which were not. The more we know about coral the better we will be able to protect them for years to come.
Coral Bands
(Photo courtesy Jennifer M. Smith)
This is an x-ray of a Montastrea faveolata, collected in 1996 from the West Flower Garden banks in the Gulf of Mexico. Count the rings! How old is this coral?
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory scientists have shown that water, in hot dense environments, plays an unexpected role in catalyzing complex explosive reactions. A catalyst is a compound that speeds chemical reactions without being consumed. Platinum and enzymes are common catalysts. But water rarely, if ever, acts as a catalyst under ordinary conditions.
Detonations of high explosives made up of oxygen and hydrogen produce water at thousands of degrees Kelvin and up to 100,000 atmospheres of pressure, similar to conditions in the interiors of giant planets.
While the properties of pure water at high pressures and temperatures have been studied for years, this extreme water in a reactive environment has never been studied. Until now.
Using first-principle atomistic simulations of the detonation of the high explosive PETN (pentaerythritol tetranitrate), the team discovered that in water, when one hydrogen ion serves as a reducer and the hydroxide (OH) ion serves as an oxidizer, the ions act as a dynamic team that transports oxygen between reaction centers.
"This was news to us," said lead researcher Christine Wu. "This suggests that water also may catalyze reactions in other explosives and in planetary interiors."
This finding is contrary to the current view that water is simply a stable detonation product.
"Under extreme conditions, water is chemically peculiar because of its frequent dissociations," Wu said. "As you compress it to the conditions you'd find in the interior of a planet, the hydrogen of a water molecule starts to move around very fast."
In the molecular dynamic simulations using the Lab's BlueGene L supercomputer, Wu and colleagues Larry Fried, Lin Yang, Nir Goldman and Sorin Bastea found that the hydrogen (H) and hydroxide (OH) ions in water transport oxygen from nitrogen storage to carbon fuel under PETN detonation conditions (temperatures between 3,000 Kelvin and 4,200 Kelvin). Under both temperature conditions, this "extreme water" served both as an end product and as a key chemical catalyst.
For a molecular high explosive that is made up of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen, such as PETN, the three major gaseous products are water, carbon dioxide(ете ти за експлозивите
) and molecular nitrogen.
But to date, the chemical processes leading to these stable compounds are not well understood.
The team found that nitrogen loses its oxygen mostly to hydrogen, not to carbon, even after the concentration of water reaches equilibrium. They also found that carbon atoms capture oxygen mostly from hydroxide, rather than directly from nitrogen monoxide (NO) or nitrogen dioxide (NO2). Meanwhile water disassociated and recombines with hydrogen and hydroxide frequently.
The research appears in the premier issue
(April 2009) of the new journal Nature Chemistry.
