Side note - it always amazes me (and people when I tell them) that when you lose fat from your body, they main way for that fat to leave your system, is to burn it then breathe the co2 out - that is one of the limits on how much fat you can burn a day. You do lose some of the results of the burning, and a little through sweat, but the vast majority is down to co2 leaving your system.
(Note you can temporarily also lose weight through water loss - but that isn't the loss of actual fat from your system.)
Given the speed that biting midges spread across Iceland, this is potentially very concerning news ( https://www.icelandreview.com/news/iceland-marks-ten-years-o... ). I wonder if there will be any benefits for birds or other insect eating animals. Though the negative of having another disease vector will surely outweigh any benefits to Iceland.
Great news to have another proof point on the benefits of exiting coal from our electrical energy grid. The sooner we can over-provision renewables and close the gaps in production with batteries - the better.
Indeed - and let's not forget that these are the ones that successfully landed somewhere - many many others will have landed in the sea, or otherwise died before they could reach a suitable spot.
The ones that landed here hadn't aimed for or planned to find the rig, they were just in the same physical location and found a space to land.
A few years ago in the Mediterranean I observed what initially seemed like an oil spill. Taking a closer look, it turned out to be millions of tiny dead insects. I guess sometimes they do land in the sea?
At the time, I tried to find information about it online, and all I found was an article about it happening on the other side of the Atlantic several years earlier.
There’s a reason most insects have thousands of offspring. Wikipedia states that houseflies have about 5k. Since their population isn’t exponentially exploding, you can assume the chance of reproducing as a fly is something like 1/5000
I feel very lucky to have seen coral reefs first hand in the sea, but unlucky also have seen huge coral graveyards collapsing into ocean rubble out in Greece.
I am very unsure if my children will be able to see natural coral reefs, that feels hugely unfair from the point of view of environmental loss and as part of the beauty of the ocean.
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