The melting of the Patagonian glaciers accelerated between 2011 and 2017

Good examples were the Jorge Montt glacier, which reaches the Ocean and decreased about 2.5 gigatons a year, retreating 2.5 kilometers and the Uppsala, which drains into a lake and lost 2.68 gigatons of ice a year. 

Photo: Instituto Antartico Chileno

   The decline in the volume of ice of the glaciers of Patagonia, which are the ones that suffer most from this process due to global warming, accelerated between 2011 and 2017, according to the European Space Agency (ESA).

In that period, the Patagonian ice fields lost a mass of 21 gigatons a year, which is equivalent to an elevation of the sea level of 0.06 millimeters and represented an increase of 24% with respect to what was found between 2000 and 2014, ESA said in a release.

These calculations derive from a new way of processing the data obtained by the CryoSat satellite, which examines glaciers in detail by scanning the entire surface.

"Thanks to CryoSat we have discovered that between 2011 and 2017 the decrease in thickness was widespread, especially in the north of the ice fields," said Luca Foresta, one of the researchers at the University of Edinburgh who has worked on this innovative technique.
  
Very representative in this regard were the Jorge Montt glacier, which reaches the Ocean, decreased by about 2.5 gigatons a year and retreated 2.5 kilometers and the Upsala glacier, which drains into a lake and lost 2.68 gigatons of ice a year.

On the contrary, the Pío XI glacier - the largest in South America -, increased its volume by 0.67 gigatons a year.
 

   ESA, which remembers that all the glaciers of the Earth are in decline and that during the last 15 years their thaw has been the main responsible for the rise in sea level, explains that this is happening more quickly in Patagonia for two reasons:

First because the weather there is "relatively mild" and then because the glaciers usually flow into fjords and lakes, which accelerates the thawing and causes them to drain faster and reduce the ice mass in the form of icebergs on its margins.

Translated by: Raul Silva M.
Source:  chiledesarrollosustentable.cl

New Solar-Powered- Plant Makes Seawater Drinkable!!

Today, there are still some 2.2 billion people in the world who do not have potable water service. 70% of the Earth is covered with water, but most of it is saline because it is in the oceans, not being suitable for consumption.

 

 

August, 2019

Historically, a great interest has been put in the purification of salt water as a resource to face the shortage of fresh water. Now, it seems that the achievement is about to become a reality.

The nonprofit organization GivePower seems to have found the answer by designing a water treatment plant. The NGO has just installed a pilot test in a region of Kenya, Africa, where most people are in a critical situation with regard to drinking water.

Kiunga is the name of the town where GivePower began working successfully with the solar plant which transforms saline water into fresh water.

The system works with solar energy, so the desalination process consumes much less electricity, in this way reducing the cost of the process. This method is able to provide drinking water for 35,000 people every day.

According to the organization, this desalination plant is sustainable and does not have a negative environmental impact because it does not produce polluting substances harmful to flora and fauna.

Soon, GivePower will replicate the plant in other parts of the world such as Colombia and Haiti.

The organization hopes to continue raising funds through donations to keep on expanding and installing more solar plants such as this that could provide drinking water to millions of people.

"We have to find a way to extract water from the Ocean in a scalable and sustainable way", said Hayes Barnard, President of GivePower to the Business Insider portal.

The plant consists of a series of solar panels that produce 50 kilowatts of energy, high-performance Tesla batteries for storage and two pumps operating 24 hours a day.

Photo: https://badabun.com

Translated by: Raul Silva M.
Source:  chiledesarrollosustentable.cl