Surreal Glories of a Salt Flat
Lake Eyre basin, Australia. Source: NASA Earth Observatory.At the NY Times Green blog, John Collins Rudolf calls attention to a PBS special scheduled to debut August 17:
The Lake Eyre basin stretches across 750,000 square miles of inland Australia, draining nearly a quarter of the continent’s land mass… For the past six years the Australian photographer Murray Fredericks has journeyed across the lake bed (it fills completely only about once every 100 years), camping alone on the salt flats for as much as five weeks at a time. He collected the photographs from these expeditions for display in Salt, a stunning 2006 gallery show in London, Sydney, Paris and Shanghai.
Now, this surreal landscape and Mr. Fredericks’s attempts to capture its strange permutations on film are the subject of a documentary that makes its premiere on PBS on Tuesday. The film, Salt — not to be confused with the hyperkinetic action thriller starring Angelina Jolie — is a meditation on solitude, nature, time and mankind’s struggle against the elements.
The Crack in the Roof of the World: A Climate Change Skeptic Changes his Mind
In the Daily Mail, Michael Hanlon reports from an expedition in Greenland (and includes some stunning photographs):
I have long been something of a climate-change sceptic, but my views in recent years have shifted. For me, the most convincing evidence that something worrying is going on lies right here in the Arctic.
Because while across most of the world evidence for current climate change is often inconclusive and anecdotal, the huge ice sheet which sits atop this, the largest island in the world, appears to be cracking up before our eyes. And on a timescale of decades rather than the millennia many predicted.
The Biology and Conservation of Declining Coral Reefs
At mongabay.com, Laurel Neme, host of The Wildlife radio show, interviews Kristian Teleki, Vice President for Science Initiatives for SeaWeb and former Director of the International Coral Reef Action Network (ICRAN), about the biology of corals, threats to coral reefs, and what can be done to halt their decline.
A Global Graveyard for Dead Computers in Ghana
NYTimes Magazine has a photo essay on the dumping of e-waste in the developing world. At the National Resource Defense Council, Allen Hershkowitz calls for a end to the practice.
Into Climate Change Denial? There’s An App for That.
Yes, iPhone users interested in wishing climate change away now have an app that “neatly compiles the many cherry-picked arguments into a single app without a mess of contradictions — i.e. “Our Climate” frequently touts CO2 as plant food, but mentions nothing of that important little thing called water and the increasing severity of drought.”
More disturbing than the deceptively benign title, Our Climate appears to be radically popular. (Perhaps because people like yours truly are giving it free publicity?)
Greenpeace Launches 3-Month Expedition to Investigate Oil Leak Impacts in the Gulf of Mexico
[August 12] Greenpeace today launched a three-month ship expedition to support independent research into the impacts of the Gulf oil disaster on marine life, as well as researching the unique environments and marine life that are at risk. The ship departs from St. Petersburg, Florida tomorrow and will visit the Florida Keys and the Dry Tortugas before approaching the well-head this month, examining everything from the plankton on the surface to the subsurface plumes, to the deep sea corals on the floor of the Gulf.
