A computer data center needs enormous amounts of electricity and heavy-duty air conditioning. Iceland has a great climate for obtaining free cool air and lots of geothermal electricity.
The EIA Natural Gas Weekly Update has an interesting graph that tracks the month-by-month dry gas production growth from various shale gas fields in the United States. For example, it shows that production from the Haynesville Shale started to increase significantly in early 2009 and continued until today the Haynesville is the most prolific dry gas producer.
The Energy Information Administration has a beta program that produces on-demand graphs of natural gas production, price, storage, import and export data. Make a few graphs – its free.
“Geologists have a new tool to study how earthquakes change the landscape–down to a few inches. It’s giving scientists insights into how earthquake faults behave.”
An international team of scientists has documented a regular, significant and unexpected increase in the amount of particulate matter exported to the deep sea in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre that may be related to day length.
In this video, CNN Money takes you on a short visit to Barrick Gold’s Cortez Mine near Elko, Nevada.
Black Smokers on Land
February 10, 2012 | Jackson School of Geosciences, The University of Texas at Austin
Scientists have discovered a new type of hot spring along the banks of a volcanic lake in the Philippines. These “terrestrial smokers” are cousins to submarine black smokers, hydrothermal vents on the seafloor that spew plumes of hot, nutrient-rich water and often support rich communities of life.
In the United States and other developed countries, fluoride is often added to drinking water and toothpaste to help strengthen teeth. But too much naturally occurring fluoride can have exactly the opposite effect.
“More than 500 volcanic vents have been identified in the State of California. At least 76 of these vents have erupted, some repeatedly, during the last 10,000 years. … Sooner or later, volcanoes in California will erupt again, and they could have serious impacts on the health and safety of the State’s citizens as well as on its economy.” Quoted from the USGS press release.
“Rivers and streams in the United States are releasing substantially more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than previously thought. These findings could change the way scientists model the movement of carbon between land, water, and the atmosphere.” Quoted from the USGS press release.
“This methodology is designed to assess the storage resources in mappable subsurface bodies of rock into which CO2 is injected and trapped; in this methodology, these mappable subsurface bodies of rock are referred to as storage assessment units (SAUs). The total volume of pore space within a SAU can be described as the total in-place resource.” Quoted from the USGS report.
Russian scientists have successfully drilled through two miles of Antarctic ice to reach Lake Vostok, a freshwater lake that has been isolated from the atmosphere for possibly 30 million years.
“For decades, however, scientists have wondered if the less volatile subsurface in areas such as Texas could provide economically viable locations for geothermal power.” Quoted from the University of Texas at Austin press release.
“Around the world coral reefs are facing threats brought by climate change and dramatic shifts in sea temperatures. While warming has been the primary focus for scientists and ocean policy managers, cold can also cause significant damage.” Quoted from the NSF press release.
“In the first comprehensive satellite study of its kind, a University of Colorado at Boulder-led team used NASA data to calculate how much Earth’s melting land ice is adding to global sea level rise.” Quoted from the NASA press release.
“Today, for the most part, higher education for students interested in energy lacks the cross-disciplinary curriculum that they critically need, and so we propose the adoption of energy departments on college campuses, departments that would tie seemingly disconnected fields of the sector together.” Quoted from the article.
“Some climate cooling caused by past volcanic eruptions may not be evident in tree-ring reconstructions of temperature change because large enough temperature drops lead to greatly shortened or even absent growing seasons, according to climate researchers, who compared tree-ring temperature reconstructions with model simulations of past temperature changes.”
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