Note from the Author
Hey there all you environmental enthusiasts!
With the passing of September, where I'm from we've welcoming the pseudo-official beginning of autumn. There's something about fall in the midwestern United States that gives me a sense of comfort. I don't think I'm alone in that regard either, fall brings a cozy feeling to a lot of peoples' hearts and it got me thinking about seasons in general. It was the topic of this month's Human Nature if you want to read my musings about that :)
Beyond that, I've been doing a bit of seed collection volunteering with my local arboretum, a much more chill way to spend time volunteering than the pulling and brush-cutting of the summer. It gives a chance to slow down while you're out in natural areas and take in your surroundings. My hands are a generally beat up from all the seed head handling and breaking, but it's worth it in the end.
At any rate, I hope that the changing of the seasons is being friendly to you wherever you currently find yourself, and I'll catch up with you again in another month!
~ Jon
~ And, as always, don’t forget to keep wondering ~
New from Prismatic Planet!
Haikusday
Winding mountain trail
Descend over the peaks of
The sky's horizon
Sun-dappled feathers
Patterns burn equally bright
Perched its ashen wings
A world of secrets
The feathered realm whispers, they
Keep away from you
Delightful morsel
Celebratorily seized
Tasty midday snack
Educational Topics
Circulating Knowledge of Heat Domes
Extreme heat is a challenge for all species on the Earth. We know that we're buying into a hotter planet now more than ever thanks to a greater breadth and depth of knowledge on how humans are impacting the global climate. What's more, we understand that the story of a warmer planet is far more intricate than tracking a slow up-tick in degrees. As the planet warms, how heat is distributed is changing. And how this distribution changes impacts more than just the temperature, but how the Earth's systems behave.
Heat generally behaves like other fluid systems on the Earth. Similar to water and air, heat is always trying to reach an equilibrium, moving from hotter regions to colder regions, from high pressure areas to low pressure areas. When the systems this heat hitches a ride on start to change, it in turn has an effect on said heat. In terms of extreme heat, we're looking at when these effects lead to higher than average temperatures.
One of those effects is what we'd like to cover here: the heat dome. This year (2021), we've been hearing that our recent heat waves have been intensified thanks to these phenomena, so we wanted to take a look at what heat domes are and why they occur. And we can start by taking a look a very recent example to boot, so let's dive in!
Human Nature
This past Wednesday marked the autumnal equinox for 2021 where I'm situated. For those reading who might not be familiar with an equinox, it's considered a day in the year when day and night are very near equal. This usually amounts to the day when a location experiences close to an even split of 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of night. What makes it "autumnal" is that it happens in the season of Autumn (or Fall dependent on how you grew up learning about seasons). Despite this day not being a great indicator of an area's local climate, per se, it is generally observed as the "first day of autumn."
I have a certain fondness for fall. There's a warmth the word carries in contrast to the cooler temperatures that the season invites. Or at least that's how I've typically experienced the concept. It's the time of the year I'll start swapping out readily accessible shorts for readily accessible flannel pants. Short sleeves for long sleeves. Fireplaces become a actively used amenity where people have them, carrying a scent of wood through open chimneys into the air. And just about every food and drink shop breaks out the cinnamon, a notably "warm-flavored" spice in my book.
Of course, there's no reason these sensations have to be locked to autumn. Well, maybe you wouldn't opt for long-sleeves in summer, but fireplaces and cinnamon don't have to lose their flair in the winter, yet somehow they do. I could approach this from a branding cynicism where local shops want to entice you with new seasonal items, and the more they change with the seasons, the more opportunities they have to present you a novel experience for the year. There's certainly truth in that, but seasons weren't built for the human capitalist machine. No, that machine merely adopted seasonality. But did humans adopt them too? Are seasons an invention or a discovery of humanity?
Let's dive in!
September Eco News
Deep Time & the Tropical Rainforest
The more we investigate how humans interfaced with the world in the past, the more we learn that those humans have much they can teach us. Once considered by ecologists to be "pristine green hells" we overlooked the activity of indigenous peoples that thrived in these areas. Further, these communities acted and reacted to climatic changes in the environment in ways that are still applicable today, and are discussed in this paper.
As someone who is running a site with weekly posts revolving around poetry and nature photography, it's always neat to see what other photography gurus and enthusiasts are up to. This BBC piece collects winners, runners-up, and honorable mentions from the Mangrove Photography Awards, which captures many perspectives around the mangrove ecosystem, an ecotone of woodland and wetland that isn't often the center of attention, but holds much beauty to share.
Sounds plays a major part in the lives of a lot of species, and with the ongoing impacts of COVID, urban areas around the world have been toggling between returning to business as usual and varying levels of lockdown. In these times, we've seen a trend toward the quieter and have seen that while some species have used these opportunities to reintegrate with habitats lost due to noise, some species seem to have been permanently driven from these areas or otherwise have their behaviors permanently shifted by disruptive urban soundscapes.
Rainforests are the most biodiverse ecosystem on Earth, and while it might be easy to think that all rainforests are roughly equal in this measure, you'd be surprised. The African rainforest has been observed as being less diverse than other rainforests, and a new model for measuring biodiversity has shined a light on the importance in geological variety as a factor in biodiversity!
Given our rapidly changing climate, the odds of dealing with extreme weather are an ever-growing concern. This article goes over how paleotempestologists, scientists specializing in historic tropical storm analysis, use a natural archive of data ranging from tree rings to marine cavern and coastal pond sediment build-up to gauge the effects of storms throughout the past to better understand the shifts in range and strength of tropical storms over the course of time.
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~ And, as always, don’t forget to keep wondering ~