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Amazon rainforest - Q-files - The Online Library of Knowledge

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The River Amazon originates in the Andes Mountains, and winds its way eastwards through Peru and Brazil before reaching the Atlantic Ocean. This vast.

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Tropical rainforest - Q-files - The Online Library of Knowledge

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Areas of tropical rainforest are found near the Equator, in regions that have a hot climate and high level of rainfall all year round. The most extensive.

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South America reaches from the tropical coast of the Caribbean to the icy Southern Ocean. The world's longest mountain range, the Andes, stretches down.

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Oceans - Q-files - The Online Library of Knowledge

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The oceans cover more than 360 million square kilometres (139 million square miles) of the Earth's surface, approximately 71% of its total area. More.

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Mars - Q-files - The Online Library of Knowledge

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Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun. A barren planet, its reddish colour comes from iron oxide dust (familiar to us as rust). Immense storms occasionally.

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Ocean life - Q-files - The Online Library of Knowledge

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Although the oceans make up by far the largest biome on Earth, only about 20% of Earth's species live in the oceans, of which about 90% are.

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Ocean floor - Q-files - The Online Library of Knowledge

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Much of the ocean seems completely empty: a great expanse of featureless water, dotted with the occasional island. But beneath the waves it is a different.

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Plastic pollution - Q-files - The Online Library of Knowledge

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Story of space transport - Q-files - The Online Library of Knowledge

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People dreamed of travelling in outer space long before rockets were invented. In 1865 the French science-fiction writer Jules Verne wrote a story about.

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Huaorani Indians in Yasuni National Park carry the bushmeat they've killed with their blowgun - including three howler monkeys and one coati. Photo by Danita Delimont via Getty Images.
Editor's note: This piece is part of a collaboration on the Yasuni National Park between the Miami Herald and the PBS NewsHour. Read more about the project here.
TIPUTINI RIVER, Ecuador - Waving away a cloud of gnats, biologist Phyllis "Lissy" Coley scours the Amazonian underbrush for inga shrubs, whose young leaves are loaded with powerful toxins and chemicals that might be useful in medical research.

Coley and her team from the University of Utah have spent almost two years in the Amazon of Guyana, Peru and Brazil researching the plant - but this patch of Ecuador was delivering surprises. In a single week, Coley's team found 60 species of inga, 40 of which were unknown to them - and likely unknown to science. They also found a carnivorous caterpillar. While flesh-eating caterpillars exist in Asia, they've never been recorded in the New World.
Photo essay: Snapshot of Species in Ecuador's Yasuni National Park
The mysteries of this forest, which scientists like Coley are still discovering, could be at risk after this South American nation quietly began considering pulling the plug on one of the most innovative and ambitious conservation plans ever attempted.

The Yasuní-ITT Initiative was designed to leave more than 846 million barrels of crude oil untouched, in perpetuity, beneath Yasuní National Park - rioting with unknown species and tribes living in voluntary isolation.

In exchange, the government asked the world to cover just half of the crude's $7.2 billion market price.

Environmental groups praised the plan as a novel way to slash greenhouse gases. In 2010, the United Nations threw its support behind the project, setting up a trust fund to receive and manage donations. There were hopes that crowd-sourcing conservation might be a model for other developing nations.

But six years after its launch, those goals are proving elusive. The plan has raised less than 10 percent of the $3.6 billion it's seeking. Ecuador's government says it has received $116.7 million and has pledges for an additional $220 million - some of it in non-cash cooperation. The United Nations trust fund has just $9.8 million in the bank.

The shortfall is driving speculation that Ecuador might be forced to drill for crude in the ITT oil block (short for Ishpingo, Tambococha, Tiputini), which it says holds 20 percent of the nation's reserves.

"We want to keep 400â€‰million tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere," Ecuador's president Rafael Correa told a crowd in April. "But if the international community doesn't help share the responsibility, we have to make the best decision for the Ecuadorean people."

Correa and his cabinet held a meeting about the fate of the project in June and are expecting to meet again in coming weeks. Officials say drilling the ITT is on the table.

In the balance is one of the most biodiverse spots on the planet. The ITT block is among the most isolated areas of YasunÃ National Park, a 2.4 million-acre U.N. biosphere reserve, which holds about one-third of all of the Amazon's amphibian species, even though it represents just a small fraction of the total area. In any given two-and-a-half acre plot of the YasunÃ - roughly the size of a soccer pitch - there are more species of trees than in the United States and Canada combined.

"As a biologist, nothing makes me more awestruck than to work in an incredibly diverse and pristine area where every day you discover something that you couldn't even imagine or anticipate," Coley said.

A family of red howler monkeys eats nuts from a palm tree off the Napo River in Yasuni National Park. Photo by Rebecca Yale via Getty Images. View full photo essay here.

Even so, she understands the financial pressure Ecuador is facing.

"You can't expect countries just to save rainforest because they're amazing places and we would, as humans, like to keep them around," she said. "Given the potential to make oil money from here, I think it's a remarkably generous offer to say to the rest of the world 'Can you contribute and we won't develop this area.'â€‰"

Ecuador needs the money. One of the poorest nations in South America, oil represents more than half of its export earnings and is the country's top source of revenue.

Keeping oil underground is like "a very poor family trying to protect the family jewels, in the meantime most of the people are starving to death," said David Romo, one of the directors of the University of San Francisco de Quito's Tiputini Biodiversity Station, which borders the park and where Coley was doing her research. "So how do you do the trade-off here? The initiative gives us an option for that."

Ivonne Baki is the former Ecuadorean ambassador to the United States, a one-time presidential candidate who speaks six languages. Now, she's traveling the world on behalf of the government, marshaling resources for the project.

Photo of tourists in a dugout canoe in a black water stream in Yasuni National Park by Danita Delimont/Getty Images. View full photo essay here.

While the initiative has seen a groundswell of popular support, she admits the financing has been disappointing. The government is considering "Plan B," which includes tapping the oil in the ITT block in a "conscientious" way. But keeping the oil underground is still the administration's priority, she said.

"We believe in conserving and we have done it before," she said. Twenty-five percent of Ecuador's territory is in a national park or protected area, including the world-renowned Galapagos Islands. By contrast, 12 percent of the United States is under protection, according to the World Database on Protected Areas.

The YasunÃ-ITT Initiative is "an environmental service we are providing to the world, not just Ecuador," Baki said.

But the world seems deaf to the plea. While countries like Italy, Germany, Spain, Turkey and Luxembourg have supported the effort, the United States - Ecuador's largest oil buyer and which has a long and troubled history of polluting the Amazon - has not contributed to the effort. Neither have gas guzzling nations like China, Japan or India.

Baki speculated that crude-consuming nations fear the model might be replicated and push fuel prices higher.

But critics say the country also has a credibility issue. The socialist-leaning Correa administration has broken pledges in the past, defaulting on the national debt in 2008, and unilaterally forcing oil companies to renegotiate their contracts.

And while the country touts the initiative, it's already exploring for oil in YasunÃ National Park and has begun building a road in oil block 31, adjacent to the ITT area. It's also building a massive new refinery that's designed to process more oil than the country is currently producing.

"It might seem like the government is operating in bad faith," said Ivonne YÃ¡nez, one of the founders of the AcciÃ³n EcolÃ³gica environmental group. "On one hand, they seem to be pushing Plan B, which is to extract the petroleum, and on the other hand there is Plan A that Ms. Baki is promoting."

YÃ¡nez said the government's mixed messages are likely hurting international support for the initiative.

But Baki said powerful business interests are also undermining the project. In particular, oil companies don't like its implications.

A White Chinned Jacamar perches on branch over the Napo River in Yasuni National Park. Photo by Rebecca Yale/Getty Images. View full photo essay here.

"They don't want to accept that oil contaminates," she said. "They say they have the best technologies and that the technology works. We saw what happened in the Gulf of Mexico with British Petroleum."

Ecuador doesn't have to look as far afield as the 2010 Gulf oil spill for cautionary tales. Beginning in the 1960s, Texaco and the state-run oil company began punching into the Amazon looking for crude. Critics accuse the company of using obsolete technology and pumping millions of gallons of wastewater into open pits and rivers.

Last year, an Ecuador appellate court ordered Texaco's successor Chevron to pay $18 billion to clean up the mess and reward local communities. The company is fighting the judgment and is suing Ecuador's legal team on racketeering charges.

But even cutting-edge oil exploration can have unintended consequences. In 1993, Maxus Ecuador built a 112-mile road that cuts through the northern boundary of YasunÃ National Park. Only 19-feet wide, it was designed to disappear in a decade after the crude it targeted ran dry. The company also guarded the route to keep colonizers from moving in.

Twenty years later, the crude is still flowing and the road has the marks of permanence. A handful of Huaorani and Quichua communities have sprung up along the gravel route. Most of the proto-villages are just a few wooden shacks, but others have cinderblock schools and concrete volleyball courts.

For the last two decades, Terry Erwin, one of the world's top entomologists who works at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, has been studying the environmental impact of the road. While the construction has had virtually no effect on the insects that he monitors, the same is not true for larger creatures. When Erwin began studying the area, the forests alongside were home to five monkey species.

"By the end of three years, there were no monkeys left," he said. "Everything was out of there - gone."

The Huaorani, who have ancestral rights to the land, had eradicated all the game animals for about one mile on either side of it, he said.

Some of the species are making a comeback, Erwin said, but that is largely because of changing Huaorani lifestyles - they are giving up their nomadic hunting ways for more permanent agriculture.

In theory, there are ways to responsibly extract oil from the ITT, Erwin said, "but even with the best ideas possible to start out with, if you let a person in there it's gone."

In some ways, the YasunÃ-ITT project is already a success. YÃ¡nez, with AcciÃ³n EcolÃ³gica, said that before the initiative was launched few in Ecuador were aware of the area. Now polls show that more than 80 percent of Ecuadoreans don't want the country to exploit the oil in the ITT, even if the international funds don't materialize. If Correa lifts the drilling ban, he's likely to face a public backlash, she said.

Gas flares from an oil facility near Yasuni National Park. Photo by Alejandra Parra/Bloomberg via Getty Images. View full photo essay here.

One of the risks of tapping the ITT is that no one is sure what it holds. Researchers recently discovered a fungus near the area with intriguing commercial potential: it consumes plastic. Erwin says 85 percent of all the insects his team collects are unknown to science.

Damaging the forest before it gives up its secrets is analogous to the burning of the legendary library of Alexandria, Egypt in 600 B.C., said Romo with the university research station.

"There are so many wonders and so much information that YasunÃ is holding that will be beneficial to humans," he said. "We just don't know it because we haven't had the chance to explore it."

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How the World's 'Most Biodiverse Place' Could Be Ransomed for Oil Money

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Huaorani Indians in Yasuni National Park carry the bushmeat they've killed with their blowgun -- including three howler monkeys and one coati. Photo by Danita Delimont via Getty Images. Editor's note: This piece is part of a collaboration on the Yasuni National Park between the Miami Herald and the PBS NewsHour.

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Each year, the NOAA ship Okeanos Explorer maps an area of the seafloor the size of West Virginia.

When compared to the total Atlantic Ocean, which spans 41 million square miles, West Virginia's not so large. But the discoveries the team is making are vast: Small creatures in hydrothermal vents. Asphalt volcanoes. Ancient landslides. New species of squid.

Last month, while traveling around Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, the NOAA ship spotted 100 different species of fish, along with 50 different species of coral and hundreds of other invertebrates. One fish species is so new it's never been named; another jellyfish-like creature called a ctenophore or comb jelly, has only been observed once before.

They also captured unusual behaviors, such as sea stars hunting prey, shrimp cleaning themselves and a hermit crab using an anemone as a shell.

It's a common refrain among oceanographers: We know more about the surface of Mars than we do the bottom of the ocean. About 95 percent of the ocean remains unexplored. And to date, just 15 percent of the ocean floor has been mapped. The result is that the deep sea hosts many creatures that are unknown or not well understood to science. The scientists on Okeanos Explorer are working furiously to change that.

"It's the last frontier," says Mike Cheadle, associate professor of geophysics at the University of Wyoming. "The only way to see it is to go down there and do it."

But descending one to three miles underneath the ocean surface is a technical challenge. Satellites give scientists a rough outline of the ocean floor, but lack detail. And looking for marine life requires submersible vehicles that can withstand the pressure of a 19,000 foot dive, and those are expensive.

"Features start appearing ping by ping. It's remarkable to watch the seafloor unfold before you."

It's a real dilemma for deep-sea scientists, Cheadle said: How do you start your research when you don't know what's down there?

Since it was commissioned in 2008, the Okeanos Explorer has sailed around the world with two goals: map the ocean floor and explore it with underwater cameras.

For mapping, the ship uses sonar with a resolution of 33 to 165 feet, depending on the depth, said Brian Kennedy, who coordinates Okeanos Explorer for NOAA's Office of Ocean Exploration and Research. Each year, the expedition maps between 23,000 and 38,000 square miles of the ocean.

To Kennedy, the maps alone are an achievement.

"Features start appearing ping by ping," he said. "It's remarkable to watch the seafloor unfold before you. The data is amazingly exciting."

But these sonar images only tell scientists so much. So after mapping an area, the ship sends down two submersible, remote-operated vehicles with cameras that livestream high-quality video of the ocean floor. Aboard the ship, a lead biologist and geologist act like film directors, guiding the cameras from one discovery to the next and narrating what they see for their online audience.

On a dive in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2014, the ship found small volcanoes that spewed asphalt along the ocean floor. The asphalt erupted into petal-like shapes. The crew named them "tar lilies." Geologists watching the discovery on the livestream began calling in. On the video of the dive, you can hear their excitement.

"The great thing about today is we came down here thinking that these structures might be parts of a shipwreck. It's pretty clear that they're not now, that they're naturally occurring," said James Austin, the lead geologist aboard on the dive's recording.

It's worth pointing out Okeanos has spotted real shipwrecks too - this one in the Gulf of Mexico in 2012, for example. That discovery led to later expeditions, which uncovered two more ships.

Other findings include new species in environments thought to be inhospitable. Cheadle recalls watching from shore when the ship's cameras discovered hydrothermal vents along the Mid-Cayman Rise in 2011, complete with tiny critters.

"The water is 226 degrees Celsius (438 degrees Fahrenheit), and here are creatures unlike anything we see on the surface of the earth," Cheadle said.

Brian Kennedy recalled seeing a new species of squid on his first Okeanos Explorer voyage near Indonesia. It had a narwhal-like horn protruding from its head and a long squid body. He watched the squid sink to the sea floor and use its horn to "hop".

"We nicknamed it 'Pogo squid.' This was all novel to me," he said. "That moment sticks with me, seeing this surreal Dr. Seussian creature."

During an expedition, as many as 40 scientists ashore chime in daily with their thoughts and questions via a private instant messaging channel and phone line. Scientists capture screen grabs of animals and geologic features and email them to colleagues.

In the Mona Canyon off the coast of Puerto Rico, during the latest mission, the cameras spotted a sea star. From shore, Christopher Mah at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History called the ship. That sea star, he informed them, was incredibly rare. It hadn't been seen since 1878.

"This is a great example of how little we have explored topographically complex and deep habitats, and how this telepresence technology allows us to connect with more scientists in real time," Andrea Quattrini, a USGS postdoctoral researcher and lead biologist aboard the mission, wrote in an email.

While the animals are known to steal the show on dives, the rocks on the sea floor have their own story to tell. In the Mona Canyon off the coast of Puerto Rico, the Okeanos Explorer found an ancient, enormous landslide - 9 miles wide and 6 miles long. When it occurred is unclear, but it could have been the result of a massive earthquake that caused the 1918 Puerto Rico tsunami, said Cheadle, the lead geologist on the dive. Geologists study ocean floor rocks and features to better underwater landslides or earthquakes, said Jason Chaytor, a USGS research geologist.

He points to the tubular rocks off the Northeast United States that the ship spotted in 2013.

"We just saw these amazingly weird features in the rock that we couldn't understand," Chaytor said. "They were just concentric tubular feature with an open aperture. To this day I still don't know what they are."

Throughout the dive, scientists narrate the expedition for the livestream audience. That part can be tedious on slow days, said Martha Nizinski, a research zoologist for NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service, who was on the Okeanos Explorer in 2013. But other times, it's almost impossible to keep up with what's unfolding on camera. One of her favorite moments: seeing undiscovered coral communities in deep canyons off of the Northeast United States.

"When I was out there in Heezen Canyon, we saw amazing corals all along the side of the canyon. We called it the coral forest," she said. "That's the beauty of this, going to areas where we don't know anything...I think every time that the ship goes out, they find something we haven't seen before."

Correction: An earlier version of this post misidentified the location of the area of ocean floor that NOAA's Okeanos Explorer maps each year. While the area mapped is equal to the size of West Virginia, the expeditions are not just limited to the North Atlantic, but occur throughout the world.

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See the strange creatures NOAA found at the bottom of the sea

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https://youtu.be/ST_nC126W_k Each year, the NOAA ship Okeanos Explorer maps an area of the seafloor the size of West Virginia. When compared to the total Atlantic Ocean, which spans 41 million square miles, West Virginia's not so large. But the discoveries the team is making are vast: Small creatures in hydrothermal vents.

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It weighs as much as 43,000 cars, swirling nonstop in the ocean currents between California and Hawaii. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is an accidental human disaster, consisting of fishing nets, plastic containers and trillions of unidentifiable plastic fragments scattered across an area twice as big as Texas.

Faced with a problem of this magnitude, most environmental groups have focused on tackling plastic pollution at the source - on land. But earlier this month, The Ocean Cleanup - a group of engineers, researchers and ocean lovers - kicked off an ambitious and potentially risky plan to directly scoop abandoned plastic out of the ocean.

The Netherlands-based project launched a 2,000-foot-long floating boom out of San Francisco Bay on Sept. 8, marking the first full-fledged test of their device. On Oct. 3, the device passed its initial testing phase and began its journey more than 1,000 miles offshore.

While the 5-year-old project has been hailed as one solution for ocean plastic pollution, some researchers have expressed concern. The project - which has raised $31.5 million in mostly private funding - may grow to be the largest human-made structure ever released in the oceans, with a parallel potential for failure or harm to marine life.

System 001 is back in towing config and is on it's way to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch right now pic.twitter.com/V6JnL35ne0

- Boyan Slat (@BoyanSlat) October 3, 2018

How the ocean cleanup device works

The length of about six and a half football fields, the device is meant to travel with wind, waves and storms, collecting trash as its buoyant plastic tubes float along. An impermeable skirt stretches almost 10 feet underwater to sweep up pieces of plastic below the surface.

Founder Boyan Slat, 24, left his university in 2013 to start The Ocean Cleanup, and since then the system's design has changed drastically. For the most recent iteration, the organization built a series of free-floating plastic booms that will corral widely scattered debris for later pickup by boat.

Lonneke Holierhoek, The Ocean Cleanup's chief operating officer, said their goal is to collect the relatively large floating plastic objects before they break down into smaller, less buoyant and more elusive microplastics.

This summer, the organization reported 92 percent of the plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is larger than a centimeter, which should be "big enough to be able to collect," Holierhoek said. They aim to reduce these patches of large plastic by 50 percent in five years, she added.

Once collected, the plastic will be extracted from the water with nets and brought back to shore by boat. The Ocean Cleanup hopes the trash will be recycled, though they don't know exactly what materials will be recovered or which waste management systems will be able to process it.

Why this cleanup technique worries researchers

In 2015, marine biologist Andrew Thaler raised concerns that the huge booms could attract or harm ocean-going animals. Earlier this year, shark researcher David Shiffman polled some fellow scientists about their concerns, and found that few believed the cleanup would solve more problems than it would cause.

When oceanographers Kim Martini and Miriam Goldstein reviewed a previous version of the system in 2014, they criticized the design's resilience against ocean forces. Martini and Goldstein claimed the system carried a potential for failure in the storms that frequently roil the Pacific Ocean.

"I don't think this is the big idea that's going to help us solve the marine trash problem."

Others said that regardless of the system's ability to safely collect trash from the ocean's surface, it misses the real problems behind oceanic plastic.

Studies estimate that 60 to 70 percent of ocean plastic eventually sinks to the seafloor, far from a floating collection boom. Plastic trash has even been found in the Marianas Trench, the most remote and deepest part of the Pacific Ocean.

"I don't think this is the big idea that's going to help us solve the marine trash problem," said Jerry Schubel, president and CEO of the Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific.

That's because collecting the plastic already littering the ocean won't stem the flow of new garbage. The Ocean Cleanup intends to remove half of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in five years, which amounts to about 45,000 tons of floating plastic.

But the math isn't in their favor; more than 8 million tons of plastic enter the oceans each year from the land.

"I'd much prefer to see them take these devices and put them near the mouth of rivers in Asia," Schubel said.

Eighty percent of ocean-bound plastics are estimated to originate from Asia, because of the continent's dense populations, manufacturing industries and overwhelmed waste management systems.

"If we want to solve the problem," according to Schubel, "we should go to the places that are major contributors to the problem."

Finding hope in floating debris

The Ocean Cleanup does not claim to be the sole solution to oceanic plastic pollution. "Yes, we need to prevent more plastic arriving in the ocean," Holierhoek said. "But even if we did that today, we don't want what's out there to stay for hundreds of years. We still need to clean it up."

In response to many of its criticisms, The Ocean Cleanup said it has employed engineers to modify and strengthen the designs and worked with biologists to address concerns about potential harm.

"When I heard about The Ocean Cleanup, I thought it was likely to have issues similar to the ones fishermen have," said David Die, a fishery ecologist from the University of Miami. Objects floating out in the ocean can become "fish-attracting devices" by accumulating algae and attracting small fish looking for shelter.

In the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, those small fish draw larger fish, like tuna and billfish - a dynamic that could disrupt migration patterns and breeding behavior or expose fish to increased fishing.

"I think that clearly the project was originally in the brain of an engineer" rather than a biologist, Die said. "But to their credit, they have listened to me."

Briana Gibbs, one of Die's students who has been funded by The Ocean Cleanup, will be installing acoustic sensors to determine if fish and other animals gather under the new floating shelter provided by the boom.

But they might not encounter many fish anyway, according to Die. The area where the device will be deployed is one of the least lively parts of the Pacific Ocean. There isn't much food for oceangoing animals, due to a low current, small amounts of nutrients mixing from the ocean floor to the surface and fewer plankton.

Timelapse drone shot of System 001 during one of the re-orientation tests. If it performs well for the remaining tests, we will have another checklist item completed. pic.twitter.com/u630jEX2KZ

- The Ocean Cleanup (@TheOceanCleanup) September 20, 2018

Although some turtles may be found in the area of interest, "it's not a hot spot, so the device is unlikely to have a drastic impact on turtle populations," said Scott Benson, a marine ecologist who studies endangered leatherback sea turtles with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Benson has been involved in training members of The Ocean Cleanup personnel in turtle rescue.

Besides, Benson wrote in an email, "the area is seldom visited by anybody, and we don't have the resources to access or monitor that area."

It could then offer an added boon for researchers, Benson said: "The Ocean Cleanup has the potential to provide access to data we don't have and wouldn't be able to obtain otherwise."

Expected to reach its destination in the garbage patch this month, the team's prototype has been dubbed "Wilson," after the volleyball that kept Tom Hanks company in the movie "Castaway."

"It's floating debris that provides hope," Holierhoek said.

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A massive plastic cleanup project provokes hope and skepticism

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It weighs as much as 43,000 cars, swirling nonstop in the ocean currents between California and Hawaii. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is an accidental human disaster, consisting of fishing nets, plastic containers and trillions of unidentifiable plastic fragments scattered across an area twice as big as Texas.

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It's the biggest shark. And it is the biggest fish in the sea. It is often found roaming in warm waters around the globe. It often has its huge mouth agape in search of dinner.

Yet despite its hulking appearance, the whale shark has only tiny, almost useless teeth. It is sometimes so docile that entire boatloads of people can swim alongside the enigmatic, spotted beast. It's also one of the least understood animals in the oceans.

A group of scientists spent several weeks diving with whale sharks in the Galapagos Islands. This was last summer and fall. They were attempting to solve some of the most enduring mysteries. They tried some never-before-used techniques on the species in the wild. For instance, they took blood samples and did ultrasound exams. They did this while swimming furiously beside them underwater.

Here's what's known about these massive marine animals. And here is what scientists are still trying to find out:

WHALE OR SHARK?

While they are comparable in size to whales, whale sharks are sharks. They typically grow to be bigger than a double-decker bus. They grow to 20 to 52 feet. They can weigh more than 20 tons. But they are filter feeders. As such, the enormous whale sharks are dangerous only to the plankton, fish eggs and tiny fish they chomp on.

The gentle giants aren't particularly fast when compared to other sharks. But a simple wave of their tail propels them through the water faster than any human could ever swim. They have broad, flat heads. Their entire dark-blue bodies are covered in dots that act as camouflage underwater.

They have been overhunted by fishermen for years. Now whale sharks are endangered and at risk of extinction.

HANGOUT SPOTS.

Whale sharks prefer warm waters. They are often found feeding at locations around the world. These locations include Australia and the Philippines. It includes Mexico and even in the oil fields off the coast of Qatar.

Hundreds of whale sharks - mostly young males - gather in these areas at certain times of the year. They do this to scoop up fish eggs. It is unknown where adult females are feeding then.

The vastness of the ocean usually makes the shy animals hard to find. Jacques Cousteau only ever saw two in his decades of sea exploration.

TRACKING WHALE SHARKS.

Marine biologists have been tagging whale sharks in recent years. They do this to track their movements. Others are trying to answer questions about their life and reproductive cycles. Only one pregnant whale shark has ever been found. In 1995, a dead whale shark was found off the coast of Taiwan with 300 embryos inside. All the embryos were different stages of development.

"The million-dollar questions are where are they mating, hunting and where do their young live?" That's the question asked by Jonathan Green. He is director of the Galapagos Whale Shark Project.

An international database was launched to identify as many whale sharks as possible through their distinctive dot pattern. Each shark has a unique configuration of dots. The dots act like a fingerprint. More than 8,000 sharks have been logged so far. Scientists can only afford to spend a few weeks in the Galapagos each year. So they depend on photos taken by visiting divers to figure out what the whale sharks are up to. So far, none of the sharks spotted in the Galapagos has been seen anywhere else.

RESULTS.

It is difficult to conduct a medical exam on a free-swimming whale shark. So researchers only obtained two blood samples. These samples haven't yet been tested. The ultrasound exams were inconclusive. That's because more powerful machines are needed. Most ultrasound machines for animals are intended for abdominal walls that are 1 to 2 inches thick. But a whale shark's abdominal wall is about 8 inches.

"When we first started studying these large animals, nobody knew how to go about it," Green said. "Now that we have better technology and more experience, we will hopefully be able to answer some of the fundamental questions soon."

Besides blood and ultrasound tests, scientists successfully tagged seven sharks. While not a large number, it's important since so few whale sharks are tracked. The pressure of deep water can cause tags to drop off if the sharks dive below 2,000 meters. The animals often do if they're traveling long distances or possibly giving birth. But any migratory data the scientists collect when sharks stay at shallower depths can help build a picture of the sharks' life cycle.

Green and colleagues are planning further expeditions to the Galapagos later this year to continue their research. They plan to gather more blood samples and continue satellite tagging.

"When you have so few data points, every single shark is important," said Robert Hueter. He is the director of the Center for Shark Research at Mote Marine Laboratory in Florida. He was not part of the Galapagos research. "These aren't like goldfish where you can get sample sizes of hundreds at a time."

WHY IT MATTERS.

In the last 75 years, the vast majority of whale sharks have been hunted by people for food and their numbers are still dropping, said Simon Pierce. He is chief scientist at the Marine Megafauna Foundation.

Some biologists worry climate change could hurt the sharks by reducing their food supply. Rising ocean temperatures could mean less plankton.

"If we do the things that are necessary to conserve the whale sharks, we'll be conserving the ocean itself," said Simon Thorrold. He works at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts.

For Green, who heads the Galapagos project, it's more personal. "Even after years of diving with whale sharks, I still get goose bumps every time I see that huge blue shadow in the water. It's an incredibly emotional experience."
Source URL: https://www.tweentribune.com/article/tween56/cracking-mysteries-elusive-majestic-whale-shark/

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Cracking the mysteries of the elusive, majestic whale shark

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It's the biggest shark. And it is the biggest fish in the sea. It is often found roaming in warm waters around the globe. It often has its huge mouth agape in search of dinner. Yet despite its hulking appearance, the whale shark has only tiny, almost useless teeth.

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Science

The faded, "distressed look" of a favorite pair of blue jeans, may come with a hidden price for the residents of New York.

The Hudson River dumps 300 million clothing fibers into the Atlantic Ocean each day, according to a recent study in the Marine Pollution Bulletin. Many of the fibers come from aging clothes, rinsed out with the laundry and into the environment. Approximately half of the fibers were plastic, while the remainder were spun from natural materials like cotton or wool. Invisible to the naked eye, these fibers can cause health problems for animals and humans.

An average-sized, above-ground swimming pool filled with this water would contain about 10,800 microfibers.

"The ocean is the endgame for plastics," said marine biologist Abigail Barrows, who is a principal investigator with Adventure Scientists.

Barrows, who has been studying microfiber pollution in oceans for more than five years, wanted to learn more about what's happening upstream in freshwater. So last year, Barrows and a team of scientists and volunteers measured microfiber pollution across all 13,300 miles of the Hudson river.

They hiked, waded, sailed and even whitewater rafted to urban and rural locations to collect 142 water samples using Barrows' "grab method" analysis. The grab method involves filling a submerged container of water, then filtering the samples through an extremely fine screen, before counting and identifying the material of each microfiber.

The team found about one microfiber per liter of water, which seems small until you consider the sheer volume of the Hudson River. An average-sized, above-ground swimming pool filled with this water would contain about 10,800 microfibers, and the entire Hudson River dumps 300 million human-made fibers into the Atlantic Ocean each day.

The grab method is Barrows' "real contribution to the field," said Tim Hoellein, an aquatic ecologist at Loyola University who was not involved in the study. In the past, microfiber researchers typically used a "Neuston net" to collect samples. The funnel-like net, originally designed to study plankton, collects microfibers and other materials in the water while being towed behind a boat. But, unlike the grab method, tiny fibers can sieve through the net. That is why Hoellein believes the grab method gives a more accurate count of microfiber pollution.

"It reveals that most likely there is more material than we previously thought," Hoellein said.

Rachael Miller, director of the Rozalia Project which is working to curb microfiber in laundry greywater, expected to see a larger concentration of microfibers in locations near wastewater treatment facilities or industrial sites. But instead the pollution was more uniform throughout the river.

"There was no pattern across the whole Hudson River - from Lake Tear of the Clouds, an alpine remote beauty, down to the heaving, thriving Manhattan," said Miller, who is a co-author on the study. "It was a real surprise."

"It's invisible, but everywhere you go and everywhere I go, we are leaving a trail of fibers in our wake."

If wastewater treatment facilities are not the major culprit, people may want to look their everyday clothes. Fabrics cast off tiny threads at every stage of their life. Even crime scene investigators count on perpetrators leaving behind bits of clothing. These clothes can shed more fibers into the air than laundering, according to Steve Carr, supervising scientist at the Los Angeles County Sanitation District.

"We are just not conscious of it," Carr said. "It's invisible, but everywhere you go and everywhere I go, we are leaving a trail of fibers in our wake."

After a microfiber study of the Seine River in 2014, Bruno Tassin, an urban hydrologist at University of Paris-Est, faced the same dilemma: tons of pollution without definitive point source. So he conducted a follow-up in Paris in 2016 to determine if microfibers clouded the atmosphere. Tassin found that three to ten tons of microfibers rain out of the air onto the 1,098-square-mile region surrounding Paris, each year.

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"We don't know how they move through the air. There is a probable link between production and fallout, but we don't know precisely," said Tassin. But Tassin thinks other sources, such as ground runoff, might still play a role.

Pollutants and other fine particles can hang in the air and travel great distances, said George Thurston, who studies the health effects of air pollution at New York School of Medicine. These airborne fibers can also be toxic. During the industrial revolution, byssinosis or brown lung disease, befell textile plant workers due to cotton or other fibers in the factory's air. But Thurston said more research is needed to ascertain how microfibers get around.

These airborne fibers can also be toxic. During the industrial revolution, byssinosis or brown lung disease, befell textile plant workers due to cotton or other fibers in the factory's air.

"It would be interesting to find if [the results] varied seasonally," Thurston said, explaining that westerly winds carry pollution from the the Midwest to New York, but in the winter, the air clears when winds shift northeast.

To reduce her personal plastic footprint, Barrows swapped fleeces in her wardrobe for natural wool sweaters, but cautions that even fibers made of natural materials can be coated with pollutants.

"Toxins and dyes are added into that thread. The science is still out. We don't know how natural fibers are interacting with humans or animals," Barrows said.

"We want to understand all of the [microfiber] sources and consequences for the environment. Only in understanding what those are, are we in a good position of coming up with solutions." Hoellein said, citing the 2015 microbead ban as an example. In 2014, Hoellein found microbeads from cleaning products were abundant in wastewater. The following year, President Barack Obama instituted a microbead ban.

"Once we understood that it was there, where it was coming from, then we could make a change for the better," Hoellein said.
Editor's Note: An earlier version of this story misspelled the name of the director of the Rozalia Project. It's Rachael, not Rachel, Miller.

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This New York river dumps millions of fabric microfibers into the ocean daily

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Science The faded, "distressed look" of a favorite pair of blue jeans, may come with a hidden price for the residents of New York. The Hudson River dumps 300 million clothing fibers into the Atlantic Ocean each day, according to a recent study in the Marine Pollution Bulletin.

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The world's largest population of Grauer's gorilla, also known as eastern lowland gorillas, have plummeted in the midst of a nearly two-decade civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A new report estimates a 77 to 93 percent decline in this gorilla subspecies population.

In 1998, there were an estimated 17,000 of these majestic great apes in the DRC; today there are around 3,800, according to a conjoint report by the Wildlife Conservation Society, Flora and Fauna International and the Congolese Institute for the Conservation of Nature. The report points to unsettling conflict in the region.

The report states that since 1959 gorilla numbers were exacerbated by the thousands of refugees fleeing from the Rwandan genocide, two civil wars in DRC and high levels of insecurity. Other precursors to the gorillas' downfall are the depletion of their environment and illegal hunting.

The report advocates that the DRC government and surrounding regions cooperate more and gather increased funding in order to reverse the gorillas' future existence. Andrew Plumptre, the study's lead author, told The Guardian that the government is taking some action, but more needs to be done.

"The DRC army has been going into the Kahuzi-Biega national park and trying to chase out armed groups. But they don't maintain a long-term presence. Also, if the army find mining sites, they start managing those sites," he said.

Eastern lowland gorillas live in the lowland tropical rainforests in the eastern DRC. According to the World Wildlife Fund, loss of habitat and poaching, as well as the spread of the Ebola virus are a threat to all gorilla subspecies.

In addition to preserving their habitat and the species, the Wildlife Conservation Society hopes to research how Ebola is transmitted between Gorillas, according to the WCS website.

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Gorilla population decimated by decades of war in Democratic Republic of Congo

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The world's largest population of Grauer's gorilla, also known as eastern lowland gorillas, have plummeted in the midst of a nearly two-decade civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. A new report estimates a 77 to 93 percent decline in this gorilla subspecies population.

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Science

Located at the edge of a more than three-billion-year-old ice cap covering Mars's south pole, the region known as Planum Australe would rank high on any list of the Red Planet's least-interesting locales. Frozen, flat and featureless, it seemingly offers little more than windblown dust and drifts of crystallized carbon dioxide for any aspiring explorer to see. Unless, that is, one could somehow peer deep beneath its frigid surface to the base of the ice cap some 1.5 kilometers below, where a lake of liquid water nearly three times larger than the island of Manhattan may lurk.

Discovered by a team of Italian scientists using three year's worth of data from the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding (MARSIS) instrument on the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter, the potential lake is at least a few meters deep, and might be a fixed, steady feature of the subsurface. If confirmed, this would be the first-known reservoir of liquid water on present-day Mars-a keystone in the search for past or even present life on the Red Planet, potentially offering fresh clues about how Earth's neighbor so profoundly transformed billions of years ago from a warmer, wetter world to its current freeze-dried state.

Announced today at a press conference in Rome, the results are detailed in a study appearing in the July 26 edition of Science. Although this is just one detection, the team wrote, "there is no reason to conclude that the presence of subsurface water on Mars is limited to a single location."

"The presence of a body of liquid water beneath Mars's south polar cap has various implications, opening new possibilities for the existence of microorganisms in the Martian environment," said Sebastian Lauro, a study co-author based at Roma Tre University in Rome. "Moreover, it provides a valuable confirmation that the water that once flowed abundantly over the Martian surface in the form of seas, lakes and rivers filled the voids in the subsurface."

For the past 12 years MARSIS has mapped the Martian underground using beams of low-frequency radar pulses, which can penetrate up to several kilometers beneath the surface. Although they pass relatively unscathed through most substances, these pulses reflect back up to the spacecraft each time they encounter boundaries between different materials, such as the interface of ice and bedrock.

That reflection is particularly strong at interfaces with liquid water, and shows up as a distinctively bright spot in visualizations of the data. Following up on preliminary detections of bright spots beneath Mars's southern ice cap dating back to 2007, the Italian team reprogrammed MARSIS to employ a more intensive scanning mode, then surveyed Planum Australe 29 times with the instrument between 2012 and 2015.

On Earth those lakes are often connected by channels, forming branching riverlike networks of water that extend across vast spaces beneath the ice.

Time and time again across the entire observing campaign the new MARSIS readings revealed a consistent 20-kilometer-wide bright spot nestled in a bowl-like depression beneath the ice cap in Planum Australe-a feature consistent with a sizable body of liquid water (or, to be fair, with water-saturated sediments more akin to subterranean sludge).

The team then spent almost a year analyzing the data, and another two years writing their paper and attempting to rule out non-aqueous explanations for what they had seen.

Billions of years ago, Mars was a much more Earth-like place where water pooled in seas, carved enormous canyons and bubbled from hot springs. Life, many astrobiologists speculate, may have had no difficulty getting started there. But early in its promising existence the planet somehow lost its way, transforming into a desiccated orb of dried-up ocean-, river- and lakebeds. Robotic missions to the planet's surface still find surprising echoes of that bygone time, such as patches of water-ice frost forming on rocks as well as water droplets condensing like dew on a lander's leg. Orbiters, too, have glimpsed what might be rivulets of water flowing down sun-bathed crater walls at the height of Martian summer.

Perhaps life, too, has managed to endure in some diminished, limited way. But, if so, it would have to contend with a world in which all moisture quickly vanishes in the thin, cold air, leaving the surface dry as a bone.

Still, the water that once flowed across the land had to go somewhere. Some of it was likely lost to space, due to Mars's diminutive gravitational field, but a significant fraction of the planet's aqueous inventory never really left, instead just freezing belowground. Now it appears not all of that buried watery wealth is frozen after all.

"The really exciting thing is that this is a stable body of liquid water that was observed in the radar data over three years, not just droplets that have been observed over a short period of time," said Anja Diez, a glaciologist at the Norwegian Polar Institute who wrote an accompanying commentary about the discovery. The subsurface lake, Diez said, may be similar those found via radar-sounding on Earth beneath ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland.

Whether below an Earthly glacier or a Martian ice cap, the mechanism for melting is much the same: heat trickling up from below combines with the immense bulk of an insulating blanket of material pressing down from above to form lakes of meltwater.

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On Earth those lakes are often connected by channels, forming branching riverlike networks of water that extend across vast spaces beneath the ice. In the late 1980s, Steve Clifford, a researcher now at the Planetary Science Institute, began exploring how similar hydrological activity could occur under both Mars's southern and northern polar caps, and whether it might feed meltwater into worldwide aquifers he hypothesized should exist beneath the planet's permafrost. Clifford's models suggest huge amounts of liquid water could still be hidden in the planet's depths, providing a globe-spanning refuge for any life that retreated from the ever-more inhospitable surface long ago.

"This finding is potentially of enormous significance," said Clifford, who was not involved with the study. "Based on analogy with Earth, if water still exists in the subsurface, there is no reason to believe that life which arose on Mars and evolved for underground conditions could not persist there into the present day.... If you do have liquid water as shallow as 1.5 kilometers beneath the surface [at Planum Australe], then liquid water is also likely to be present at greater depths here. And if you have conditions for life in one area of the planet that is in hydraulic continuity with other areas where liquid water also exists, you could have a very substantial subsurface biosphere that has survived since the planet's early history."

That life, however, would have to contend with another key factor making its aquatic environs possible: mineral salts that leach out of rocks and sediments to act as antifreeze. Suffusing the meltwater, the salts would create brines that remain liquid far below the typical freezing point of pure water. Such salts are known to exist in abundance in some Martian rocks, and are the most likely cause of the dewlike droplets and crater-wall rivulets previously observed on the planet's surface.

But Clifford holds out hope subsurface geothermal hotspots like those that power volcanoes and hot springs on Earth could sufficiently heat portions of the Martian underworld to allow liquid reservoirs to exist there without the need for life-sabotaging salt levels. Such a hot spot could, in fact, be responsible for the MARSIS team's newfound lake.

These conjectures must, for now, remain untested. The MARSIS instrument lacks sufficient sensitivity and resolution to clearly determine the thickness of this deposit or whether it is in fact connected to other similar bodies, although studies using more advanced radar instruments on an as-yet-unbuilt next generation of orbiters could clarify such details. For that matter, the detection itself is as yet uncorroborated: Another radar-sounding instrument called SHARAD (for shallow radar) onboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has also repeatedly scanned Planum Australe and other regions in search of buried water.

But its beams cannot penetrate as deeply, and it has not replicated MARSIS's detection.

Even so, according to Bruce Campbell, a SHARAD team member and senior scientist at the Smithsonian Institution, "it is possible that a targeted effort [by SHARAD] to collect data on more tracks across this region could build up enough echo strength to detect the reflector seen by MARSIS."

Ultimately, "ground truth" may be required to solve the mystery of just how much water is locked away in Mars's underworld. But there are presently no public or private plans to build or launch missions, robotic or human, that would be capable of drilling or melting down to the depths probably required to directly sample meltwater anywhere on the planet-which, Clifford said, might be for the best.

"The possibility that life could currently exist somewhere beneath the polar ice reinforces the point that we must take care that our investigations do not needlessly contaminate Mars," he said. "That could not only make the result of any life-detection experiment ambiguous but could also contaminate a habitat that may be interconnected on a global basis, leading to a very serious impact on any native biosphere. I worry that unless we are very careful, we could end up responsible for the extinction of the very first life we ever detect on another planet."
This article is reproduced with permission from Scientific American. It was first published on July 25, 2018. Find the original story here.

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Who owns the moon? A space lawyer answers

'Oumuamua, the first known interstellar visitor, is just a comet

NASA's Parker Solar Probe will 'shake' hands with sun, thanks to small push from Venus

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Mars has a giant hidden lake. Could there be life in it?

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Science Located at the edge of a more than three-billion-year-old ice cap covering Mars's south pole, the region known as Planum Australe would rank high on any list of the Red Planet's least-interesting locales. Frozen, flat and featureless, it seemingly offers little more than windblown dust and drifts of crystallized carbon dioxide for any aspiring explorer to see.

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(AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky)

New mission searches for life on Mars

Europe and Russia have launched a joint mission to explore the atmosphere of Mars and hunt for signs of life on the red planet.

The unmanned ExoMars probe is a partnership between the European Space Agency and Roscosmos. It took off March 14. The probe is aboard a Russian rocket. It is expected to reach Mars in October.

The probe's Trace Gas Orbiter will analyze methane and other gases in the Martian atmosphere. It wants to determine where they are coming from. This is according to Paolo Ferri, ESA's head of mission operations.

Methane is created by biological or geological activity. It breaks down within a relatively short period of time once it reaches the atmosphere.

"It cannot be older than 400 years. That means there has been either biological or geological activity in this timeframe," said Ferri. "Four hundred years is nothing. If there is methane, it means there is basically a process going on now."

The prospect of finding life on Mars, even microscopic organisms, has excited scientists for some time. So far, none has been discovered.

"The fact that they've not found life doesn't mean certainly that there's no life there," said Ferri. He noted that much of the planet's vast surface hasn't been closely examined.

That task will fall to a rover that ESA plans to send to Mars in 2018. Until then, the orbiter will have time to find a good landing spot. It will conduct a test run using a trial lander. The lander's name is Schiaparelli. It is on board the probe.

If life is discovered, it actually raises questions about whether future manned missions to the planet should be attempted, said Mark McCaughrean. He is senior science adviser at ESA.

"Weirdly, if we find life on Mars, it actually really begs the question if we should go at all with human beings because of that idea of planetary protection," he said at ESA mission control. It is in Darmstadt, Germany. "We would take with us bugs. And if now those bugs meet Martian bugs, that could be a disaster."

Landing a spacecraft on Mars is particularly difficult. Several attempts have failed. One included ESA's Beagle 2 probe that was part of the Mars Express mission in 2003. Beagle 2 disappeared during the landing process. It was a setback the agency is keen to avoid this time, hence the decision to separate the orbiter mission from the actual landing attempt.

"It was quite clear that putting both things in one mission drove up the complexity," said Ferri.

ExoMars cost the European Space Agency alone $1.44 billion. ExoMars is the first interplanetary mission jointly undertaken by ESA and Roscosmos.

The orbiter also has a NASA-built radio on board. The radio will help relay signals from other Mars probes.

CRITICAL THINKING QUESTION

Why did Paolo Ferri say "Four hundred years is nothing?"

Write your answers in the comments section below

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(AP Photo/Dmitri Lovetsky) New mission searches for life on Mars Europe and Russia have launched a joint mission to explore the atmosphere of Mars and hunt for signs of life on the red planet. The unmanned ExoMars probe is a partnership between the European Space Agency and Roscosmos.

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Before sunrise on Saturday morning, a NASA rocket is scheduled to lift off from a California launchpad with an interplanetary spacecraft aboard and set forth on a six-month journey to Mars to study the guts of the Red Planet.

InSight, which stands for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, will be the first lander or rover bound for Mars since Curiosity launched in 2011. It will also be the first to dig deep into the planet's interior in an effort to understand how the planet's geology evolved over billions of years. The probe will scan for seismic activity, keeping tabs on the planet's so-called "marsquakes."

The event is also historic for California. Strapped into the Atlas V rocket, InSight will take off from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base, marking the first time the West Coast will witness an interplanetary spacecraft launch. Much of Los Angeles and surrounding counties can view the takeoff from their own backyards (given clear skies) and at these locations, recommended by NASA.

Why send InSight?

All of the Mars flybys, orbiters and rovers have beamed back a wealth of information, but so far, the robots have worked only at the surface level: sifting through dirt, blasting apart rocks, looking down canyons and hiking up mountains.

The Viking landers, for example, launched in 1975 to study seismology on Mars and look for evidence of " marsquakes." These probes revealed that Mars isn't as geologically active as Earth, but it's still churning underground and releasing heat. But those quake-measuring tools sat atop the robot rather than digging under the Mars ground.

NASA scientists equipped InSight with an instrument called SEIS, a dome with a "seismometer" inside. Bruce Banerdt, InSight's principal investigator,t described this instrument as a planetary CT scanner looking for the frequency, size and speed of marsquakes.

Two additional experiments will probe Mars' interior to describe Martian geological history. The HP3 probe will drill 16 feet through the crust, send cable sensors down and take temperature readings to see how much heat is leaving the planet. The RISE sensor will track InSight's location, ascertaining how much the planet's North Pole wobbles as it orbits the sun. This latter experiment could determine the size of Mars's iron-rich core and if other elements exist inside. All three experiments will take a Martian year - two Earth years - to complete.

Banerdt said in a statement that scientists struggle to understand Earth's geological history because plate tectonics constantly drift, revealing various surface ages. If InSight can gather details on Mars' geological history, it could help us understand Earth's evolution too.

InSight was a long time in the making

InSight was on track to launch in March 2016, but as the engineers crept closer to the deadline, they discovered leaks in the SEIS system. The crack was miniscule-maybe a few nanometers across-on the system's nine-inch chamber.

But that "insignificant" crack prevented the chamber from holding its vacuum seal around the sensors inside. When working properly, those sensors can pick up Mars' subtle, subsurface tremors-some as small as the width of an atom. If the seal breaks, the sensors won't work and the equipment could get destroyed by the harsh, Martian environment, such as the extreme temperature that ranges from 80 degrees Fahrenheit to -200 degrees Fahrenheit.

The InSight team then had to tack on $150 million to the mission's $675 million budget to seal the leak.

InSight isn't traveling alone

The Atlas V rocket will also loft the twin mini spacecrafts called Mars Cube One, or MarCO.

MarCO-A and MarCO-B, which the engineering team calls them "Wall-E" and "Eva", will be NASA's first deep-space CubeSats, which are inexpensive, bite-sized satellites.

Wall-E and Eva are the size of briefcases and will follow InSight on their own paths to Mars.

If these compact spacefarers make it to Mars, they will relay deep-space communications back to Earth as InSight enters Martian airspace. If these CubeSats prove successful overall, they may become the " go-to" communication method to use for future missions, NASA announced last year.

Why NASA tends to avoid West Coast launches

Fun fact: NASA tends to launch on the East Coast, at Cape Canaveral in Florida, because Earth's eastward rotation provides launch vehicles an extra oomph or a momentum boost. The launches must also send the rockets over water for safety reasons.

Going against the Earth's rotation, especially with a heavy spacecraft on board, requires a rocket to rely more on its engine. Since InSight is 20 feet long and under 1,600 pounds, Atlas V can easily pump it toward space without that momentum.

If any delays occur, the InSight team has set a launch window from May 5 through June 8, which will get the lander to Mars on Nov. 26, 2018.

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WATCH LIVE: NASA launches InSight, the first lander for peering deep into Mars

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Before sunrise on Saturday morning, a NASA rocket is scheduled to lift off from a California launchpad with an interplanetary spacecraft aboard and set forth on a six-month journey to Mars to study the guts of the Red Planet.

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I couldn't sleep last night, because Scott Kelly came home. The NASA commander hopped into a metal pod smaller than a Volkswagon Beetle, before plummeting to Earth at speeds exceeding 500 miles per hour. He was joined by Russia's Mikhail Kornienko and Sergey Volkov. For Kelly and Kornienko, the landing marked an end to a 340-day expedition in space. For me, the images of his return filled my mind with childhood wonder and straight up adult terror.

The two spent the last 12 months in space as part of a bold prequel to a journey to Mars. For humanity to one day voyage to the Red Planet, Kelly and Kornienko exposed themselves to loneliness and cosmic radiation typically deflected by our planet's atmosphere. They floated through the International Space Station, as it hurtled against the pull of Earth's gravity at 17,500 mph. In the end, they traveled nearly 144 million miles and witnessed 10,944 sunrises. During the last month of his year in space, the New Jersey-born Kelly reflected on the value of spending a year inside the International Space Station:

Though their voyage has ended, the mission for Kelly and Kornienko is far from complete. Both are participants in the "one-year mission" study, a seven-branch investigation into the health consequences of long-duration spaceflight.

While orbiting the planet, Kelly and Kornienko doubled as guinea pigs. Up to seven times a day, they took psychological surveys to check for myriad conditions like space fog, wherein the disruption of sleep patterns and physical rigors of space station life wear on the mind. Other tests checks for changes in their vision, given some astronauts become farsighted during long space trips.

"Today, I took my own blood...I did eight blood tubes. I collected my urine all day and saliva in the morning. On other days, we might do ultrasound exams," Kelly recounted a week ago. Life on Earth loves gravity. Our bodies evolved to hunger for gravity. Without it, our bones lose their mass, our muscles wilt and our metabolisms slow. The ultrasounds and blood tests onboard the space station and during the many months back on Earth will reveal the extent of this decay, but also how quickly the body recovers.

"I'm a big believer in what we're doing here. I believe in the importance of flying in space and the research that we do," said Kelly, who is part of a second series of experiments called the Twins Study. While Scott Kelly performed spacewalks and ate freeze-dried food for a year, his twin brother and fellow astronaut Mark stayed put on the ground and submitted his own biological specimens for analysis.

Twins present what might be described as two mirrored canvasses. Their genetic backgrounds offer identical slats, wherein scientists decipher how these two lives - and their stress hormones, microbes and immune systems - evolve in space and on Earth.

That's the theory, at least, but even Scott Kelly admits the limitations of these studies given the small sample size:

"You know Misha [Kornienko] and I are only 1 datapoint or 2 datapoints. Anyone who is a scientist is going to tell you that you need a lot more numbers to draw specific conclusions. I'm hoping what we find are areas that we need to investigate further...that we can say after so many months, we've seen this thing from physiological or psychological aspect, and we need to take a much closer look before we travel beyond low-orbit for longer periods of time."

Kelly and Kornienko are this century's Lewis and Clark. Rather than venture into the desolate void of North America, they traveled inward, enduring the long trials of empty space. And while they were gone, much like the tumbling space station, life on Earth failed to stay still. Shooting after shooting after shooting marred countries around the world. Cyclones tore through the Pacific Ocean. Same-sex marriage had its day in court. And the Kansas City Royals - the Royals! - won the World Series.

Yet even removed 249 miles from Earth, Scott Kelly witnessed this tumult among humans.

"This past summer, you could notice the drought in California and the fires," Kelly said. "We had this incredible pass over the Himalayas and to just see all of that pollution that's riding up against those mountains from the south is just really heartbreaking."

Though Kelly broke the American duration record for spaceflight, he and Mikhail Kornienko aren't the first cowboys to spend a year in space, nor do they hold the world record for time spent there. (Their trips are now tied for fourth longest). But one gets the sense that the journey forever altered their perspectives.

Before his return, Kelly said vacating the space station would be bittersweet. It's hard to live space, where the work is challenging and you rarely venture outside, he said. He looked forward to dinners with friends and feeling a breeze and the sun on his face. But still, he said:

"I believe in exploration, and I will miss being on the front lines of that endeavor. On one hand, I look forward to going home but it's something that's been a big part of my life, and I'm going to miss it."
For more, check out A YEAR IN SPACE, a two-part program that tells the story of what it takes, mentally and physically, to spend a year in space. Part one airs March 2 at 8/7c on PBS. A YEAR IN SPACE is a co-production with TIME and PBS.

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I couldn't sleep last night, because Scott Kelly came home

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I couldn't sleep last night, because Scott Kelly came home. The NASA commander hopped into a metal pod smaller than a Volkswagon Beetle, before plummeting to Earth at speeds exceeding 500 miles per hour. He was joined by Russia's Mikhail Kornienko and Sergey Volkov.

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(NASA/JPL/University of Arizona via AP)

There's water on Mars. Could there be Martians?

Mars appears to have flowing rivulets of water, at least in the summer. Scientists have reported this in a finding that boosts the odds of life on the red planet.

"Mars is not the dry, arid planet that we thought of in the past," said Jim Green. He is director of planetary science for NASA.

Scientists in 2008 confirmed the existence of frozen water on Mars, and now, instruments aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have yielded what researchers said is the strongest evidence yet. It appears that water in liquid form trickles down certain Martian slopes.

Liquid water is essential to life so the finding could have major implications for the possibility of microscopic life forms on Earth's next-door neighbor.

"It suggests that it would be possible for there to be life today on Mars," NASA's science mission chief, John Grunsfeld, said Sept. 28. He spoke at a Washington news conference.

The rivulets - if that's what they are, since the evidence for their existence is indirect - are about 12 to 15 feet wide. They are 300 feet or more long, scientists said. They apparently consist of wet soil, not standing water.

The water is believed to contain certain salts. It is not ordinary table salt. It contains magnesium perchlorate, magnesium chlorate and sodium perchlorate. So it's more like road salt used to melt ice and snow on Earth. Such compounds can prevent water from freezing at extremely low temperatures.

That would explain how water could exist in liquid form on Mars. The planet has an average temperature of minus 81 degrees Fahrenheit.

In addition to supporting life, the presence of liquid water could make things easier for astronauts visiting or living on Mars. Water could be used for drinking. And it could be used for creating oxygen and rocket fuel. NASA's goal is to send humans there in the 2030s.

Michael Meyer is the lead scientist for NASA's Mars exploration program. He said the only definitive way for now to determine whether there's life on Mars is to collect rocks and soil for analysis on Earth. It is something a U.S. lander set for liftoff in 2020 will do.

"Water is one of the most precious resources necessary for a human mission to the red planet," noted Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas. He is chairman of the House science, space and technology committee. "The more evidence we find of it, the more encouraged I am for future Mars missions."

Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona at Tucson is a scientist on the project. He said he believes the possibility of life on Mars to be "very high."

The source of the briny water is a mystery. Scientists said it could be melting ice, an underground aquifer, water vapor from the thin Martian atmosphere, or some combination.

The evidence of flowing water consists largely of dark, narrow streaks on the surface. They tend to appear and grow during the warmest Martian months. They fade the rest of the year. The streaks are in places where the temperature is as low as 10 below zero.

They were spotted by the Mars orbiter's high-resolution, telescopic camera. Another on-board instrument detected the chemical signature of salt compounds combined with water.

McEwen said that there appears to be a "significant volume" of water. He speculated that it could fill many Olympic swimming pools. But it is spread thin.

Present-day Mars is nothing like ancient Mars. Three billion years ago, our most Earthlike neighbor had a huge ocean. But something radical happened. Exactly what remains a mystery.

The notion of water and life on Mars has been irresistible to earthlings for generations.

In 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli spied what he called "canali" on Mars - Italian for "channels. The word was mistranslated as "canals" in English, which caused imaginations to run wild. In the early 1900s, amateur astronomer Percival Lowell claimed to have spotted irrigation canals and theorized they were built by Martians.

In 2008, NASA's Phoenix spacecraft landed on Mars and confirmed the long-suspected presence of ice in the soil. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been circling the planet since 2006.

The latest findings were published in the journal Nature Geoscience. The lead author is a doctoral candidate at Georgia Institute of Technology, Lujendra Ojha, who first noticed the streaks on Mars in 2010. Ojha and colleagues speculated that they were seeing flowing water.

For NASA, at least, the timing couldn't be better. On Oct. 2, the NASA-approved movie "The Martian" has its premiere.

CRITICAL THINKING QUESTION

Why does the discovery of water on Mars beg the question about life on Mars?

Write your answers in the comments section below

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There's water on Mars. Could there be Martians?

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(NASA/JPL/University of Arizona via AP) There's water on Mars. Could there be Martians? Mars appears to have flowing rivulets of water, at least in the summer. Scientists have reported this in a finding that boosts the odds of life on the red planet.

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(The Ocean Agency / XL Catlin Seaview Survey via AP)

Scientists race to prevent wipeout of world's coral reefs

There were startling colors on South Ari Atoll just a year ago. They pointed to a dazzling array of life beneath the waves. Now this Maldivian reef is dead.

What happened? It was killed by the stress of rising ocean temperatures. What's left is a haunting expanse of gray. It's a scene repeated in reefs across the globe. It has fast become a full-blown ecological catastrophe.

The Maldives are a group of coral atolls in the Indian Ocean.

The world has lost roughly half its coral reefs in the last 30 years. Scientists are now scrambling to ensure that at least a fraction of these unique ecosystems survives. The health of the planet depends on it. Coral reefs support a quarter of all marine species, as well as half a billion people around the world.

"This isn't something that's going to happen 100 years from now. We're losing them right now," said marine biologist Julia Baum. She works at Canada's University of Victoria. "We're losing them really quickly, much more quickly than I think any of us ever could have imagined."

Even if the world could halt global warming now, scientists still expect that more than 90 percent of corals will die by 2050. Without drastic intervention, we risk losing them all.

"To lose coral reefs is to fundamentally undermine the health of a very large proportion of the human race," said Ruth Gates. She is director of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology.

Coral reefs produce some of the oxygen we breathe. They often are described as underwater rainforests. They populate a tiny fraction of the ocean. But they provide habitats for one in four marine species. Reefs also form crucial barriers. They protect coastlines from the full force of storms.

The reefs provide billions of dollars in revenue from tourism, fishing and other commerce. The reefs are used in medical research for cures to diseases. These include cancer, arthritis and bacterial or viral infections.

"Whether you're living in North America or Europe or Australia, you should be concerned," said biologist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, director of the Global Change Institute. It is at Australia's University of Queensland. "This is not just some distant dive destination, a holiday destination. This is the fabric of the ecosystem that supports us."

That fabric is being torn apart.

Corals are invertebrates. They live mostly in tropical waters. They secrete calcium carbonate to build protective skeletons. These grow and take on impressive colors. It is thanks to a symbiotic relationship with algae that live in their tissues and provide them with energy.

But corals are sensitive to temperature fluctuations. Now they are suffering from rising ocean temperatures and acidification. In addition, they suffer from overfishing, pollution, coastal development and agricultural runoff.

A temperature change of just 1.8 to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit can force coral to expel the algae. It leaves their white skeletons visible. The process is known as "bleaching."

Bleached coral can recover if the water cools. But if high temperatures persist for months, the coral will die. Eventually the reef will degrade. That can leave fish without habitats and coastlines less protected from storm surges.

The first global bleaching event occurred in 1998. Sixteen percent of corals died. The problem spiraled dramatically in 2015-2016. It happened amid an extended El Nino natural weather phenomenon. Warming Pacific waters near the equator triggered the most widespread bleaching ever documented. This third global bleaching event, as it is known, continues today even after El Nino ended.

Headlines have focused on damage to Australia's famed Great Barrier Reef. But other reefs have fared just as badly or worse. It has been spotted from Japan to Hawaii to Florida.

Around the islands of the Maldives, an idyllic Indian Ocean tourism destination, some 73 percent of surveyed reefs suffered bleaching between March and May 2016. This is according to the country's Marine Research Center.

"This bleaching episode seems to have impacted the entire Maldives. But the severity of bleaching varies" between reefs, according to local conditions. So says Nizam Ibrahim, the center's senior research officer.

Worst hit have been areas in the central Pacific. That is where the University of Victoria's Baum has been conducting research on Kiritimati, or Christmas Island. It is in the Republic of Kiribati. Warmer water temperatures lasted there for 10 months in 2015-2016. It killed a staggering 90 percent of the reef.

Baum had never seen anything like it.

To make matters worse, scientists are predicting another wave of elevated ocean temperatures starting in April.

"The models indicate that we will see the return of bleaching in the South Pacific soon, along with a possibility of bleaching in both the eastern and western parts of the Indian Ocean," said Mark Eakin. He is coral reef specialist and coordinator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Coral Reef Watch. It uses satellites to monitor environmental conditions around reefs. It may not be as bad as last year. But it could further stress "reefs that are still hurting from the last two years."

The speed of the destruction is what alarms scientists and conservationists. Damaged coral might not have time to recover before it is hit again by warmer temperatures.

CRITICAL THINKING QUESTION

Why are scientists in a hurry?

Write your answers in the comments section below

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Scientists race to prevent wipeout of world's coral reefs

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(The Ocean Agency / XL Catlin Seaview Survey via AP) Scientists race to prevent wipeout of world's coral reefs There were startling colors on South Ari Atoll just a year ago. They pointed to a dazzling array of life beneath the waves. Now this Maldivian reef is dead. What happened?

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(The Ocean Cleanup via AP)

Scientists and volunteers track trash in ocean

Far away from California's coast, where the Pacific Ocean currents swirl, the blue of the sea was replaced. It was switched with fishing nets, buckets, buoys, laundry baskets and unidentifiable pieces of plastic. They floated past the Ocean Starr. It is a ship that was carrying a team of scientists and volunteers. They were gathering data on plastic garbage.

"We were surrounded by an endless layer of garbage," sad Serena Cunsolo. She is an Italian marine biologist who works for The Ocean Cleanup. "It was devastating to see."

Cunsolo who is 28-years-old, was one of a team of 15 researchers and volunteers aboard the Ocean Starr. The ship set out this summer from San Francisco. It headed out to study the plastic waste. The trip was part of the "Mega Expedition." The trip was a major step in the organization's effort to eventually clean up what's known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

The 171-foot mother ship carried massive white bags. They were filled with plastic garbage. The vessel returned to San Francisco along with two sailing boats with volunteers who helped collect the garbage samples.

Most of the trash they found, including a 1-ton fishing net, is medium to large-sized pieces, as opposed to confetti-like plastic shards. The smaller pieces can easily enter the food chain. That is after being eaten by small fish and birds. They are extremely difficult to clean up, said Boyan Slat. He founded The Ocean Cleanup and has developed a technology. He says it can start removing the garbage by 2020.

"It was a good illustration of why it is such an urgent thing to clean up. Because if we don't clean it up soon, then we'll give the big plastic time to break into smaller and smaller pieces," Slat said.

Volunteer crews on 30 boats have been measuring the size and mapping the location of tons of plastic waste floating between the West Coast and Hawaii. According to some estimates, the area is twice the size of Texas.

Slat said the group will publish a report of its findings by mid-2016. After that, the group hopes to test out a 1-mile barrier. It would collect garbage near Japan. The ultimate goal is the construction of a 60-mile barrier in the middle of the Pacific.

The expedition was sponsored by The Ocean Cleanup. It's an organization founded by Slat. He is a 21-year-old innovator from the Netherlands. Slat has envisioned using long-distance floating barriers that will attach to the seabed with an anchoring system used by oil-drilling rigs. The devices will target ocean currents full of waste. The barriers would skim garbage from the surface. Meanwhile, aquatic life and the currents themselves pass underneath.

He first became passionate about cleaning the oceans of plastic while diving in the Mediterranean Sea five years ago. "I was diving in Greece and realized that there were more plastic bags than fish. And I wondered why can't we clean this up," Slat said.

After dropping out of university after his first six months, Slat dedicated his life to developing the technology the group will start testing next year.

He decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign and raised about $2.27 million that helped to launch his organization. Soon, his ground-breaking solution got the attention of major philanthropists in Europe and Silicon Valley. One was Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. The philanthropists are helping pay for the data-gathering efforts and the technology's development.

The Pacific expedition will end in mid-September. It will gather data that will be more extensive than what has been collected in the past 40 years. It also will give a better estimate of the how much plastic waste is in the Pacific Ocean.

The boaters are using GPS and a smartphone app to search for and record the plastic. They take samples. Then they ship them to the Netherlands. There, the plastics are counted and recorded.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch was discovered by Charles J. Moore in 1997 as he returned home from the Transpacific Yacht Race, which starts in Los Angeles and ends in Honolulu.

CRITICAL THINKING QUESTION

Why is it important to track the trash?

Write your answers in the comments section below

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Boats and boating--Equipment and supplies

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Scientists and volunteers track trash in ocean

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(The Ocean Cleanup via AP) Scientists and volunteers track trash in ocean Far away from California's coast, where the Pacific Ocean currents swirl, the blue of the sea was replaced. It was switched with fishing nets, buckets, buoys, laundry baskets and unidentifiable pieces of plastic. They floated past the Ocean Starr.

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Oceans (Science Trek: Idaho Public Television)

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Find out more about this topic by clicking on the buttons on this page. You can watch our broadcast show, Science Trek: The Web Show, and our video shorts in our player. Facts will tell you more about the topic. Links will expand your learning beyond our site.

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Mars (Science Trek: Idaho Public Television)

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Find out more about this topic by clicking on the buttons on this page. Videos will take you to our videos on this topic. Facts will tell you more about the topic. Links will explain your learning beyond our site. Glossary gives you a list of specialized words. Books offer reading suggestions.

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Academic Articles

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Academic Articles

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Academic Articles

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Introduction to Reading Skills: Using Text Features to Find Information

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To access, sign up using: www.pbslearningmedia.org/student/signup/

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Seeing in the Dark . Astronomy Topics . Mars | PBS

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A Mars opposition happens roughly every 26 months (2 years and 2 months). Close oppositions are separated by 15 to 17 years. We had one of the closest oppositions in history in August 2003; the next close one will not be until July 2018. Still, there will be regular opposition in late December 2007.

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Coral Anatomy | Living Oceans | PBS LearningMedia

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Explore this unit on coral anatomy from The Khaled bin Sultan Living Oceans Foundation with three lessons that target functionality and anatomical structure of coral polyps. Students will watch videos, use an online interactive and complete worksheets to better understand the structure and functions of a coral polyp.

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Journey Into Amazonia -- Teacher Resources -- Be an Amazon Activist

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The Protect-An-Acre Program: Organize a community fundraiser for this program, and the money will be used to help native people in the Amazon secure community land and develop sustainable uses of rainforest resources.