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1. Favorite subject:

2. Least favorite subject:

3. What you like doing in your free time?

4. What is your dream job?

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Midsummers Nights Dream

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Weather and Climates (+ Climate Graphs)

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What has happened so far?

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foreshadowing and symbolism

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8 - Antarctica - protection and concerns

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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-24/scientist-names-tiny-antarctic-creature-after-greta-thunberg/12176788

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/nov/26/lorde-urges-climate-action-ahead-of-new-book-on-antarctica-trip

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An Australian scientist has named a tiny six-legged creature that lives in a harsh Antarctic environment after Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg.

An Australian scientist has identified a new species of a tiny creature called a springtail

The insect-like creatures are found throughout the world, but are inconspicuous because of their size

Penelope Greenslade has named her discovery Frisea gretae in honour of teen climate activist Greta Thunberg

The creature, known as a springtail, was identified by Penelope Greenslade, an honorary research fellow at Federation University.

Dr Greenslade said naming the species after Ms Thunberg seemed apt, given where it lived.

"Climate change is particularly evident in the Antarctic because you can actually measure glaciers melting," she said.

"It seems appropriate to call an Antarctic species after Greta Thunberg because she's been doing such a good job of drawing attention around the world, especially among young people, to the climate change problem."

Hidden in plain sight

Dr Greenslade has dedicated decades of her professional life to springtails, which are small, soft, wingless hexapods similar to insects.

Springtails, or collembola, are found throughout the world but are inconspicuous because they are only 1-2 millimetres in size.

They live in native vegetation and soil and help to decompose leaves, in turn freeing nutrients to help plant roots grow.

You probably have about twenty species in your own backyard.

Dr Greenslade was first drawn to springtails in the 1960s while working in the Solomon Islands, where she was paid by the Royal Society of London to collect soil animals.

Since then she has described more than 200 species and collaborated with researchers around the world in the study of springtails.

From grisea to gretae

It was while she was working with colleagues at the University of Siena in Italy that Dr Greenslade noticed the springtail she was studying had visible differences to other described species.

"We noticed there were quite a lot of locations around the continent, and on the Shetland Islands, that recorded a species called Friesea grisea," she said.

"Now, this is very peculiar because as a rule you do not get a widespread species in the Antarctic, because the ice-free areas are pretty isolated.

"So you get different species evolving in different places."

Friesea grisea was first described in South Georgia, in the southern Atlantic Ocean in 1897, but researchers had not examined it since.

Dr Greenslade thought that the Friesea grisea described there could not possibly be the same as the ones on the Antarctic continent, which already had significant genetic differences recorded between their isolated populations.

She travelled to the United Kingdom, where she examined specimens from South Georgia at the University of Cambridge and discovered the Friesea grisea there were significantly different to the Antarctic specimens.

"Then, of course, the continental [Antarctic] ones had to have a different name," she said.

"Because they were no longer Friesea grisea."

Thus the Antarctic springtail formerly known as Friesea grisea became Friesea gretae.

Staying alive by staying still

On Antarctica, Friesea gretae lives in moss and algae at Cape Hallett, one of the few ice-free areas on the continent where a small range of invertebrates live.

They feed on rotifers and tardigrades, tiny little creatures that can survive cold icy conditions by becoming immobile and losing moisture.

Despite working with springtails since the 1960s, Dr Greenslade says there is always more to learn.

"There's always new things to discover, that is why scientists carry on," she said.

"They're always discovering new things that nobody else has found before and could be very important for sustainability."

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Australian scientist names tiny Antarctic creature after Greta Thunberg

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An Australian scientist has named a tiny six-legged creature that lives in a harsh Antarctic environment after Swedish climate change activist Greta Thunberg.

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https://docs.google.com/document/d/1z5_ZvzTy1NruXcpXwrs0nQ9XWIMRgpfwhFWUBXTCPYI/edit?usp=sharing

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A new polar research ship: Sir David Attenborough

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A new polar research ship: Sir David Attenborough

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https://www.bas.ac.uk/polar-operations/sites-and-facilities/facility/rrs-sir-david-attenborough/

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The new polar ship is commissioned by NERC, built by Cammell Laird to a Rolls-Royce design and operated by British Antarctic Survey. This new research platform will transform how ship-borne science is conducted in the Polar Regions.

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Luxury Tourism in Antartica- write down 5 positives and 5 negatives of this experience.

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Luxury Tourism in Antartica- write down 5 positives and 5 negatives of this experience.

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https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-12-17/luxury-tourism-is-landing-in-antarctica-but-at-what-cost/100682698

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Decked out with wooden flooring, timber bedheads and even leather couches in the dining room, Wolf's Fang looks more like a Nordic guesthouse than a remote outpost in Antarctica.

For around $US48,000 ($68,000) travellers can fly to and spend six days at the luxury polar campsite - taking part in various activities like hiking, abseiling and skiing.

Visitors willing to spend more can also fly within the continent, watch emperor penguins and visit the South Pole.

Once the temporary home of only the toughest explorers and dedicated scientists, Antarctica has seen tourism steadily grow in recent decades.

But there are concerns about the environmental impact on the White Continent.

So remote, a can of Coke costs $53

Last month, the first-ever Airbus A340 to land in Antarctica touched down on the camp's private blue ice runway.

Capable of carrying up to 254 passengers, the chartered flight was ferrying 23 people and supplies to the camp for this year's summer tourist season.

Wolf's Fang and another camp, Whichaway, are run by White Desert tours, which flies tourists out of Cape Town, South Africa, to an area of Antarctica called Queen Maud Land.

They take a maximum of 12 guests on expeditions but even with such small numbers, the logistics of each trip are immense and expensive.

"For us, it costs about $US38 ($53) for a can of Coke once it arrives in Antarctica," says White Desert's chief marketing officer, Mindy Roberts, who has just returned from a visit to one of the camps.

"So the cost of our trips is high."

Potatoes and carrots for the camps' food are peeled in Cape Town before departure, "because we've got specific weight restrictions on getting things into the ice and the peelers are heavy," she says.

Other tour companies also operate in Antarctica, in some cases offering private campsites, cruises and skydiving.

Should people be travelling there?

According to the International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators (IAATO), 74,401 visitors travelled to Antarctica with IAATO member operators during the 2019-2020 season - compared to 56,168 visitors of the previous year.

Only 731 visitors were "deep field" tourists, travelling inland by air.

Most Antarctic tourists visit by sea, often with expedition cruises that make brief landings ashore on the Antarctic Peninsula, south of Chile.

While many operators emphasise their commitment to sustainability and ecological sensitivity, some involved in Antarctic research have voiced concern that tourism in Antarctica remains largely self-regulated.

Despite multiple nations - including Australia - having territorial claims to parts of the continent, Antarctica itself isn't governed by one single authority but rather by the Antarctic Treaty, which has been ratified by 54 countries.

That means tourism and visitor behaviour is mainly controlled through guidelines outlined in the Antarctic Treaty system.

Operators also need to fulfil certain requirements to gain membership to IAATO.

Those include the need to conduct environmental impact assessments, and provisional members must carry an IAATO observer aboard to ensure they're adhering to the organisation's standards.

With Antarctic tourism expected to rebound after the COVID-19 pandemic, there are questions around how much longer those guidelines can successfully minimise the impact of visitors to parts of Antarctica - and whether tourists should be travelling there at all.

"When you look at people's ecological footprint to get to Antarctica, it's already unsustainable," says Freya Higgins-Desbiolles, a senior lecturer in tourism management at the University of South Australia.

"I know that some people will say the environmental education that the visitors get will outweigh their damage, because they become advocates for protection, but I think that's a pretty dodgy argument.

"What I'd like to see is firm regulations rather than voluntary codes of conduct."

Ms Roberts says there's a big difference between the mass tourism of cruise ships and the bespoke experiences provided by smaller operators.

"The majority of people that come to us are influencers, they're powerful, they're captains of industry, they're royalty, they're celebrities - people that do have an ability to influence change," Ms Roberts says.

"Antarctic tourism can be done in a sensitive and sensible way ... but it's keeping it small.

"Operations in Antarctica are not easy, and so I don't think you're ever going to have even tens of tourism operators that do what we do."

The cumulative impact of visitors

There are many ways human activity can impact the Antarctic environment - from the carbon footprint of planes and ships to the effects of visitors on local flora and fauna.

"Most Antarctic tourism concentrates in a relatively small area in the north-west Antarctic Peninsula and in a discrete number of sites within that area," says Ricardo Roura, a senior advisor with the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition.

"Even if people behave as required, there might be issues to do with the concentration of activities and their cumulative effects."

Mr Roura was a guest on a cruise ship to the Antarctic peninsula in December 2019, at the height of the tourism boom before the pandemic.

"It was kind of crazy, the whole thing, the whole set of activities," he says.

"In some instances, we had to leave the site earlier to let others come in, that kind of thing."

But he says inland tourism is also cause for concern.

"They have a big chunk of the Antarctic as a playground if they have the time and the means to get there," Mr Roura says.

"If land-based tourism expands, then it will open quite a new set of issues to discuss and a new set of concerns for us."

Then there's the potential for pollution.

While the Antarctic Treaty requires waste to be removed, and for operators to have no more than a "minor or transitory" impact on the environment, damage can be unavoidable in the case of an accident.

In 2007, the MS Explorer struck an iceberg while cruising off the Antarctic peninsula and sank, causing an oil spill near penguin breeding grounds.

All 154 people on board survived after being rescued by nearby vessels.

In 2011, the International Maritime Organisation banned ships from using heavy fuel oil in the Antarctic and in 2017, it introduced the International Code for Ships Operating in Polar Waters.

Future of the industry

Tourism researcher at the University of Canterbury, Daniela Liggett, says interest in Antarctica is here to stay.

"I think it will pick up again after the pandemic, there is still an interest in visiting Antarctica as one of the 'last continents' that is still reasonably untouched by human presence," she says.

A spokesperson from IAATO told the ABC that preliminary estimates from May this year suggest about 60,000 people will visit Antarctica in the 2021-2022 season.

Mr Roura says the competition within the industry to offer unique experiences is one of the driving forces behind the growing numbers.

"There is this frenzy sometimes that people need to land in lots of places, they need to see all sorts of wildlife, they need to see all sorts of things and maybe that's just not possible or necessary."

Another driver of tourist numbers? The desire to see untouched wilderness of Antarctica before it disappears.

"'Last-chance tourism' is going to be the phenomenon that's driving the demand for it," says Ms Higgins-Desbiolles.

"But by engaging in last-chance tourism, we're actually causing the very thing that's the problem."

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A can of Coke costs $53 in Antarctica. The White Continent is open for tourism, but it's not cheap

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Decked out with wooden flooring, timber bedheads and even leather couches in the dining room, Wolf's Fang looks more like a Nordic guesthouse than a remote outpost in Antarctica. For around $US48,000 ($68,000) travellers can fly to and spend six days at the luxury polar campsite - taking part in various activities like hiking, abseiling and skiing.

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What is black carbon? (Pollution from Tourism)

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What is black carbon? (Pollution from Tourism)

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/22/black-carbon-pollution-from-tourism-and-research-increasing-antarctic-snowmelt-study-says

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Black carbon pollution from tourism and research activities in Antarctica is likely increasing snowmelt on the continent by an estimated 83 tonnes for each visitor, according to new research.

Scientists have estimated that the black carbon produced by vessels, planes and diesel generators results in 23mm of additional snowmelt each summer in the most frequently visited areas of the ice-covered landmass.

More than 74,000 tourists visited Antarctica in the 2019-2020 season, nearly double the figures from a decade ago.

A team of researchers sampled the snow yearly between 2016 and 2020 at 28 sites spanning 2000km from Antarctica's northern tip to the Ellsworth Mountains.

They focused primarily on the Antarctic peninsula, where about half of the research facilities on the continent are located and where an estimated 95% of Antarctic tourist trips are made.

The team estimated that 53,000 tourists visited Antarctica annually between 2016 and 2020.

Study co-author Dr Raúl Cordero, of the University of Santiago Chile, said Antarctic snow was the cleanest on Earth, typically with baseline levels of black carbon around one part in a billion.

"That is 1000 times less than what you would find in the Himalayas, and 100 times less than what you can find in the Andes or in the Rocky Mountains," he said.

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Black carbon levels at sites on the Antarctic peninsula were between two and four times higher than on other parts of the continent.

"What black carbon is doing is making the snow darker [so it] is absorbing more solar radiation," Cordero said. "That extra energy is accelerating the melting of the snow."

He believes a limit on the number of tourists to Antarctica may need to be adopted.

The team quantified the likely snowmelt by calculating how black carbon pollution reduced the snow's albedo - a measure of how well a surface reflects solar energy.

Researchers suggest that alternatives to diesel be used to power Antarctic facilities, such as wind. Photograph: Raul Cordero/University of Santiago, Chile

They calculated that an Antarctic researcher's black carbon footprint was about 10 times greater than a tourist's.

"We estimated that ... the snow that is melting faster because of the activities carried out by a researcher would be closer to 1000 tonnes," Cordero said. "Every researcher is using vessels, planes, helicopters, generators - and everybody's using diesel for powering these."

Cordero said that while the amount of pollution-induced snowmelt is far less than the ice and snow lost to global warming, the study highlighted the need for a transition to renewable energy sources.

"There are technical alternatives to diesel that could be used in Antarctica," he said, citing the Belgian research station, Princess Elisabeth Antarctica, which is primarily powered by wind.

Prof Andrew Mackintosh, head of the school of earth atmosphere and environment at Monash University, who was not involved in the research, said the link between black carbon pollution and increased surface melt was well established in other parts of the world.

"In the Antarctic peninsula the two major processes [affecting melting] would still be warming oceans melting ice shelves from beneath, or warming surface air temperatures that are melting the ice from above," Mackintosh said.

"If we have even greater surface warming in [the] decades to centuries ahead, as is projected for the Antarctic peninsula, then the additional black carbon on the surface will cause even more melt than would have occurred otherwise," he said.

"Human activity is causing the polar regions to warm, but the burning of ... [fossil] fuels has a direct consequence in terms of surface melt as well."

"If you can get rid of the greenhouse gases in the first place, you'll reduce the temperature increase," he said. "There's also the added benefit of less darkening of the snow surfaces."

Cordero said: "Antarctica is the last continent more or less unpolluted. I think we should try to keep it that way."

The study was published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications.

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Black carbon pollution from tourism and research increasing Antarctic snowmelt, study says

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Black carbon pollution from tourism and research activities in Antarctica is likely increasing snowmelt on the continent by an estimated 83 tonnes for each visitor, according to new research. Scientists have estimated that the black carbon produced by vessels, planes and diesel generators results in 23mm of additional snowmelt each summer in the most frequently visited areas of the ice-covered landmass.

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14 - Physical Geography of the Middle East

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Japan has the highest proportion of elderly citizens of any country in the world.[1] 2014 estimates showed that about 38% of the Japanese population was above the age of 60, and 25.9% was above the age of 65, a figure that increased to 29.1% by 2022. By 2050, an estimated one-third of the population in Japan is expected to be 65 and older.[2] Population aging in Japan preceded similar trends in other countries, such as South Korea and China.[3][4]

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02 - How economically important is tourism