Tag: environment
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All Fracked Up
Last week a new study revealed that the injection of wastewater from oil drilling and fracking may contribute to earthquakes. Put simply, the theory is that the wastewater injected into the ground lubricates fault lines. And when sufficiently lubricated, the resistance between sides of the fault vanishes and an earthquake is triggered to release the…
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Sandy’s Winds
Hurricane Sandy also brought quite a lot of wind. Before the storm landed just south of Atlantic City I was travelling east on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. And as the map below from the New York Times illustrates, I was driving through not insignificant winds (with quite a few more powerful gusts). In the first few…
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Electrical Outages from Sandy
Hurricane Sandy hit the Jersey shore before moving northwest through southeastern Pennsylvania. These were two maps from two different electric utility companies providing information on the number of outages. This first and smaller graphic is from PECO. The second and larger is from FirstEnergy. The graphic from FirstEnergy breaks into the township level when zoomed…
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Frack You, Gas Hole.
And not in the polite Galactica way, but more in the let’s drill you, rocks, and split you open. I could go in further detail about the injection of fracking fluids, but let’s leave the double entendre alone and talk about Marcellus Shale. It’s a layer of rocks in the dirt that contain natural gas.…
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A Nine-story Log Cabin
It’s like a log cabin. But taller. A lot taller. The New York Times reports with an infographic on a nine-story block of flats (apartment building for us Americans) in London called the Graphite Apartments that was built almost entirely of timber. Credit for the piece goes to Mika Gröndahl.
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New York Times Lies About Science
In a rare infographic misstep, the New York Times published an incorrect diagram detailing the centre of the Earth. Clearly, anyone who knows anything about science knows that it is not a solid core of iron at the centre of the Earth, but dinosaurs. And I see no dinosaurs in this diagram. Credit for the…
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Visualising Panda Mating
Animals need to reproduce. Well, except perhaps some of our own species…and so today’s infographic from the Washington Post looks at the birds and the bees. Or rather the pandas and the pandas. Or is that the pandas on pandas? Regardless, the reader can see that panda mating is not easy. Credit for the piece…
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Canada Invades the Land of the Mole People
Subways. Home of the mole people. And in the United States an unwanted recipient of government money to build things. Along with being generally unwanted. By those who do not live in cities. Probably because of said mole people. Or something. But in Canada, they like subways. At least enough that Toronto is building an…
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Nope, It’s Just Clouds in the Shapes of Birds and Planes.
Supporting an article about how the clouds are the last great hope for the climate change skeptics, the New York Times published an interesting infographic that looks at cloud cover and insolation, the amount of solar energy that irradiates the planet. The main feature is an animation of a year’s worth of cloud cover. The…