Farmers from Australia are the latest donors to a polar bear-patrolled Arctic doomsday vault that stores seeds as insurance against an international food emergency.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a converted mine, is located about 800 miles from the North Pole in Arctic Norway. An Australian delegation of farmers and scientists next week will deposit 301 samples of peas and 42 rare chickpeas in the vault, intending to protect the plant species from extinction by climatic or man-made events. John McConnico, AP Australian farmers and scientists next week will deposit 301 samples of peas and 42 rare chickpeas in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, shown here in 2008. "It's a very robust structure, concrete, made into the side of a mountain at Svalbard in the Spitsbergen Highlands in the Arctic," said Dr. Tony Gregson, a farmer and scientist with Plant Health Australia, an agriculture industry body. According to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault website, the facility's main purpose is "to store duplicates ('back ups') of all seed samples from the world's crop collections. Permafrost and thick rock ensure that, even in the case of a power outage, the seed samples will remain frozen."
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![]() WASHINGTON (AFP) – A powerful solar eruption that has already disturbed radio communications in China could disrupt electrical power grids and satellites used on Earth in the next days, NASA said. The massive sunspot, which astronomers say is the size of Jupiter, is the strongest solar flare in four years, NASA said Wednesday. The Class X flash -- the largest such category -- erupted at 0156 GMT Tuesday, according to the US space agency. "X-class flares are the most powerful of all solar events that can trigger radio blackouts and long-lasting radiation storms," disturbing telecommunications and electric grids, NASA said. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory saw a large coronal mass ejection (CME) associated with the flash that is blasting toward Earth at about 560 miles per second (900 kilometers per second), it said. The charged plasma particles were expected to reach the planet's orbit at 0300 GMT Thursday. (ENS) - New York, NY - "Forests for People" is the theme of the UN's International Year of Forests 2011 - launched at a ceremony today at UN Headquarters in New York attended by world leaders, Nobel Peace Laureate Wangari Maathai and forest experts. While the worldwide rate of deforestation remains "alarmingly high," the UN says in its latest biennial report on the state of the world's forests, the rate of forest loss is slowing. Europe has more forests than any other region, due to the vast forests of Russia, while Latin America and the Caribbean had the highest net forest loss over the last decade.
At least 1.6 billion people depend on forests for their daily livelihoods and subsistence needs, and the world's forests are home to more than 60 million people, many of them members of indigenous communities, the UN says. The UN General Assembly designated 2011 as the International Year of Forests, and today Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said this year will be used as a pathway to raise awareness about the management, conservation and sustainable development of all types of forests. "By declaring 2011 as the International Year of Forests, the United Nations General Assembly has created an important platform to educate the global community about the great value of forests - and the extreme social, economic and environmental costs of losing them," said Ban. ![]() by Terrence Aym, Helium "Superstorms can also cause certain societies, cultures or whole countries to collapse. Others may go to war with each other." (CHICAGO) - NASA has been warning about it…scientific papers have been written about it…geologists have seen its traces in rock strata and ice core samples… Now "it" is here: an unstoppable magnetic pole shift that has sped up and is causing life-threatening havoc with the world's weather. Forget about global warming—man-made or natural—what drives planetary weather patterns is the climate and what drives the climate is the sun's magnetosphere and its electromagnetic interaction with a planet's own magnetic field. When the field shifts, when it fluctuates, when it goes into flux and begins to become unstable anything can happen. And what normally happens is that all hell breaks loose. ![]() (CBS) A controversial bill handing President Obama power over privately owned computer systems during a "national cyberemergency," and prohibiting any review by the court system, will return this year. Internet companies should not be alarmed by the legislation, first introduced last summer by Sens. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), a Senate aide said last week. Lieberman, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, is chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. "We're not trying to mandate any requirements for the entire Internet, the entire Internet backbone," said Brandon Milhorn, Republican staff director and counsel for the committee. Instead, Milhorn said at a conference in Washington, D.C., the point of the proposal is to assert governmental control only over those "crucial components that form our nation's critical infrastructure." Portions of the Lieberman-Collins bill, which was not uniformly well-received when it became public in June 2010, became even more restrictive when a Senate committee approved a modified version on December 15. The full Senate did not act on the measure. |
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