tagged w/ polar
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Russian Northern coast is a vast territory lays for a few thousand of miles and all this coastline is inside the Polar Circle. Long polar winters mean no daylight at all, just one day changes another without any sign of the Sun rising above the horizon. There is only polar night for 100 day a year.
But across this Northern coast there was always a short way for the cargo boats to travel from Eastern part of Russia to the Western. Now this trip can be made fairly easy with the appearance of all the satellite navigation equipment like GPS and others, but during the Soviet Era they had none of this.
So, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union decided to build a chain of lighthouses to guide ships finding their way in the dark polar night across uninhabited shores of the Soviet Russian Empire. So it has been done and a series of such lighthouses has been erected. They had to be fully autonomous, because they were situated hundreds and hundreds miles aways from any populated areas. After reviewing different ideas on how to make them work for a years without service and any external power supply, Soviet engineers decided to implement atomic energy to power up those structures. So, special lightweight small atomic reactors were produced in limited series to be delivered to the Polar Circle lands and to be installed on the lighthouses. Those small reactors could work in the independent mode for years and didn’t require any human interference, so it was very handy in the situation like this. It was a kind of robot-lighthouse which counted itself the time of the year and the length of the daylight, turned on its lights when it was needed and sent radio signals to near by ships to warn them on their journey. It all looks like ran out the sci-fi book pages, but so they were.
Then, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the unattended automatic lighthouses did it job for some time, but after some time they collapsed too. Mostly as a result of the hunt for the metals like copper and other stuff which were performed by the looters. They didn’t care or maybe even didn’t know the meaning of the “Radioactive Danger” sign and ignored them, breaking in and destroying the equipment. It sounds creepy but they broke into the reactors too causing all the structures to become radioactively polluted.
Those photos are from the trip to the one of such structures, the most close to the populated areas of the Russian far east. Now, there are signs “RADIOACTIVITY” written with big white letters on the approaching paths to the structure but they don’t stop the abandoned exotics lovers.
http://englishrussia.com/?p=2198Russian Northern coast is a vast territory lays for a few thousand of miles and all... more
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The next clip is now live on Youtube and on the BBC Wildlife Finder. It contains amazing timelapse photography filmed in the Antarctic. Despite near freezing temperatures, there is plenty of life in the shallow waters of Antarctica as nemertean worms and five-legged sea stars prowl along the seabed in search of food.
"The trickiest part, however, was trying to rig the gear under 8 feet of solid ice. Every piece of equipment had to be brought through a specially drilled hole in the ice and be monitored every day. In the end, it took the crew over 100 dives to get the sequence."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/adaptations/Scavenger#p005bprk
Launched in 2009, this BBC site features short video and audio clips from the past thirty years of wildlife film making. The material can be searched by species or by habitat, adaptation (behaviour, communication, and so on), or ecozone.The next clip is now live on Youtube and on the BBC Wildlife Finder. It contains... more
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Climate Change is affecting us all, but it's often tricky to calculate just how. Native American Communities in Alaska are providing important information that helps Scientists downscale climate change models, giving us a clearer picture of how changes will impact specific locations. This marriage of traditional Native American knowledge and academic research is benefiting us all.Climate Change is affecting us all, but it's often tricky to calculate just how.... more
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A polar bear attacked a woman at Berlin Zoo Friday afternoon after she climbed a fence and jumped into its habitat during feeding time, police said Saturday.
One adult polar bit her several times after she plunged into the moat, police said.
Zoo workers tossed rescue rings toward the woman to hoist her out and distract polar bears swimming nearby, said Goerg Gebhard, a Berlin police officer.
At one point the woman fell back into the water and was grabbed by a bear before she was eventually hoisted to safety.
"They saved her life," Gebhard told CNN.
The woman was severely injured and was being treated at a hospital, police said.A polar bear attacked a woman at Berlin Zoo Friday afternoon after she climbed a fence... more
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Due to melting ice caps, polar bears are moving further south and encountering grizzly bears. This interaction between the two species has led to cross breeding, and the result--a grolar bear.Due to melting ice caps, polar bears are moving further south and encountering grizzly... more
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kevung
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added this
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4 years ago
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