Earth

Sunday gave me some of my absolute favorite creatures, including this sweet derpy long Synemosyna petrunkevitchi lass. Her face is all 👀

Watch the moment curlew frightens a hare which wandered too close to its nest

One of my favourite native wildflowers, Cleomella serrulata. I saw a few dozen of them today that were covered in a mixture of native bees, wasps, ants, and beetles. There was a really healthy and diverse bird population in that natural area as a result of the robust insect populations and fruiting shrubs.

It's owlfly larva.

This region of Colorado, maybe an hour's drive from where this was taken, is where Chronic Wasting Disease was first detected. Our Cervidae species naturally change their elevation based on seasonal habitat availability. They go into the Rockies during high summer when they can forage without snow and retreat to the front range when it's too cold to survive any higher.

The front range was immediately colonised by cattle ranchers and farmers. The ecocide of the bison degraded that land on top of industrial agriculture's impact, as their foraging patterns are different. Between fencing, irresponsible hunting, calorie loss, wildfire/water policy, and the urban development of the front range/foothills the Cervidae were concentrated in the least desirable pieces of high elevation land. Their most genetically healthy were killed for trophies while the isolated breeding pools created what will be dementia covid at some point. CWD is the most horrifying disease I know of and it comes from denying habitat.

I like that this city-managed natural area manages to balance habitat with accessible low-impact hiking. It has a tremendous number of birds and insects. The native grasses are healthy despite recent heatwaves, so the deer and elk can actually seasonally migrate to quality grazing land. It was full of currants and dozens of our 946 native bee species and dead trees pockmarked by woodpeckers. If we had just done this from the start, the world would have been spared The Big One.

Rescue crews are scrambling to find survivors of catastrophic flooding that tore through Central Texas on the Fourth of July. It’s already one of the deadliest flood events in modern American history, leaving at least 95 people dead, 27 of whom were girls and counselors at a Christian summer camp in Kerr County, which was inundated when the nearby Guadalupe River surged 26 feet in just 45 minutes.

“It’s the worst-case scenario for a very extreme, very sudden, literal wall of water,” said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, during a livestream Monday morning. “I don’t think that’s an exaggeration in this case, based on the eyewitness accounts and the science involved.”

It will take some time for scientists to do proper “attribution” studies here, to say for instance how much extra rain they can blame on climate change. But generally speaking, this disaster has climate change’s marks all over it — a perfect storm of conspiring phenomena, both in the atmosphere and on the ground. “To people who are still skeptical that the climate crisis is real, there’s such a clear signal and fingerprint of climate change in this type of event,” said Jennifer Francis, senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center.

This tragedy actually started hundreds of miles to the southeast, out at sea. As the planet has warmed, the gulf has gotten several degrees Fahrenheit hotter. That’s turned it into a giant puddle of fuel for hurricanes barreling toward the Gulf Coast, since those storms feed on warm seawater.

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Here's a new thing to think about.

“When you take the load off, it’s just like opening a Coca-Cola bottle or a champagne bottle.”

— Brad Singer, University of Wisconsin–Madison geoscientist

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/223955

In a feedback of fire and ice, thinning ice sheets over geologic hot spots could allow more eruptions, while increased volcanic activity may speed the meltdown.

By Bob Berwyn

Add to the long list of global warming concerns that melting ice caps could trigger more volcanic eruptions.

From Inside Climate News via this RSS feed

One of my favourite hikes in the region. Up in that mountain bowl is Emmaline Lake and to the left is a trail leading over the Mummy Pass into Rocky Mountain National Park.

This area was glassed five years ago in the massive Cameron Peak fire. You could walk for an entire day and see the conifers in that condition. This year is the first that plants have really begun filling in the dead space. It's just now starting to get quaking aspen saplings to start the first stage of regrowth.

"Quack"

$45k for the flower beds in our parks, another $45k for the plants in the road medians. None of them are pollinator plants and a fair number are tropical/temperate species we're planting in the high desert. Those median plants generate 9500kg of green waste per year which we don't have the facilities to compost. The teams required to service them probably cost $200/hr~. They require almost daily hand-watering using a heavy truck in a drought-stressed region. We can't even propagate them because the cultivars are all patented. All so the public can look at some stupid purely ornamental bed and say "wowoo petunias" for three months.

Also our budget is being cut by 20%+ next year and half the workers don't get benefits.

My hate is becoming pure enough to write theory.

It's a snowy owl.

Wild orcas on more than 30 occasions in four oceans have attempted to share their prey with people, potentially to develop relationships with humans, researchers have found.

In each of the instances recorded over two decades, orcas approached a person within a length of the orca’s body, and dropped freshly-hunted prey in front of the human, then waited for a response, according to a paper reporting the behavior published Monday in the Journal of Comparative Psychology.

Orcas of every age tried to share their prey, and just about everything was on the menu: sea otter, harbor seal, common murre, gray whale, green turtle, eagle ray, starfish, jellyfish, on and on.

Orcas are the ocean’s top predator, and their brains are second only to modern humans in terms of their size in relation to their body. Their capacity for advanced communications and cognitive, social and emotional intelligence is well known. Prey sharing is common in orca culture.

So just what are the orcas doing, offering food to people?

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Built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1934-35 by unit 886. Part of the New Deal, the men and women who made this worked over 40 hours a week, and took home $30 a month. Most of them apparently sent it back home as this was all on the tail end of the Great Depression.

It's pretty neat. The place is built from 'caliche-crete', which was a blend of concrete and the local caliche stone.

Pretty interesting, thinking about the people who built this, looking at the individual blocks and thinking about the toil in the hot Texas sun to build this place.

Out at a place built by the Civilian Conservation Corps back in 1935/36. Found this while walking around. I think this was used for surveying changes to the land around where I am, as this area was dammed in the 1930s.

I've been searching for something specific to these but I think due to their age it might be lost to time.