Our World and Everything in It

I’m addicted to the Science Channel. The topic of interest tonight was tsunamis. After the one in Indonesia that killed a quarter million people it should be of interest to everyone who lives on a coast somewhere. There are many shifting plates around the world known for their activity that can cause earthquakes. I had no idea how many there really are. There is a Eurasian-African plate, Indian Australian plate, the Alpine plate, Caribbean plate, a lot of plates for a lot of earthquakes.

Australia is particularly concerned. It seems the most likely place a tsunami will hit as it has before is the East Coast of Australia where sits Sydney. There is a huge public beach there with thousands of beachgoers in the summer season. A simulated video showed how a Tsunami like that in Indonesia would travel up an inlet there and really cause trouble because the coastline is lined with boulders. Imagine a wall of water coming at you full of boulders. If the water doesn’t kill you the debris does.

Australia has suffered two large tsunamis near Sydney and a bunch of small ones in the past. Earthquakes along the Alpine Fault next to New Zealand are to blame. Earthquakes there happen every 500 years and guess what’s overdue? It was stated that just because it hasn’t happened does not mean it’s not going to. It means it will really be big when it does. Sounds like giving birth doesn’t it?

Hawaii has been hit by tsunamis in the past also. But now Hawaii has the NOAA Tsunami Warning Center to give notice as soon as possible. But will it be soon enough? Right now Dr. Stephen Hickman, a scientist with the U.S. Geological Society is involved with drilling down and across the San Andreas Fault off of San Francisco in order to secure seismic meters there in an attempt to have the earliest warning possible of any and all earthquakes. I was reading more about this project on the Southern California Earthquake Center website and the author, part of a film crew, says he was standing on the drilling platform of the SAFOD or San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth project when an earthquake hit. Now that’s reporting firsthand. It was a 6.0 and the comment was that this was probably ‘the most well-recorded earthquake in history.’

It’s an interesting and humorous story, and quite a fluke that the author was actually there on top of the quake shaking violently on the drilling platform. This is quite a new and innovative project, but in the end may save millions of people if it can forecast big and small, upcoming quakes, and broadcast threats of any resulting tsunamis. I wonder how or who is placing those seismic meters in the tunnels? Considering what happened, not a good job to have. Kind of like putting the first construction cone out on the highway.

http://www.scec.org/education/041007parkfield.html
 

Robusta coffee might ring a bell to coffee aficionados out there but I am not one. When I was young I never drank coffee during warm weather. It made me sweat. I would occasionally drink it in the winter but never at my own apartment. I couldn’t afford a coffee pot or the coffee, and I like it with cream or milk, sometimes sweet. That would mean that I would have to stock all of that. Living on my own in the 70’s was just shy of being a pauper. We left home before the age of 30 back then, most of the time we weren’t even 20 yet. Milk, sugar, and coffee were an extravagance to have around.  I relied heavily on vitamins, a can of tuna, a can of cream of mushroom soup, a can of peas, and noodles and you pretty much know what I had there. 

Now I’m past middle age and one would think I need coffee to start up in the morning. Wrong. Turns out I’m naturally hyper…and am sensitive to caffeine. I don’t even drink regular diet Pepsi at night. It has to be caffeine free. But I’ve started to like the taste of coffee since those flavored, fat free creamers came out. I drink decaf just for the taste of java. But recently I ran across some articles that Indonesian tigers, elephants, and rhinos are being threatened by a certain type of coffee called ROBUSTA because it is illegally grown in patches of plantation that invades the perimeter of a particular game park, Bukit Barisan Selatan (BBS) National Park in Sumatra. The park is a reserve that is supposed to protect the habitat of these endangered species. The World Wildlife Federation had a really good article on sun-grown coffee, and another on peopleandplanet.org about this growing problem.

The illegally grown Robusta coffee beans are mixed with legitimate beans and American companies like Nestle, Kraft, and others aren’t prepared to screen all imported beans, so they don’t know what they’ve got.  I learned that traditionally, coffee is grown in the shade under a canopy of trees. These shade coffee plantations have a high biodiversity of birds and animals much like a rainforest.  These shade coffee plantations are being transformed into industrialized sunny plantations with little shade. Without a lot of explanation we can see this will result in a loss of biodiversity for animals that thrive in shade coffee plantations and that their habitat is threatened over coffee. 

And there is a problem with sun grown coffee. It may turn over faster but requires a heck of a lot of fertilizer, care, and water than is required of the slower growing shade coffee. So the Robusta brand is not an environmentally friendly coffee bean using more water than necessary, and causing more fertilizer runoff into fresh water supplies while eliminating the rich green life-sustaining canopy of forest like the traditional coffee everyone was perfectly happy with before.

Do you know what kind of bean you’re drinking? Is this going to be a problem for Starbucks? They have an awful lot of environmentally friendly customers nationwide. Sir Paul debuted his latest CD at Starbucks and we know he’s all about preservation and respect for animals. If Kraft and Nestle are hard put to figure out what they’re importing how would Starbucks know which of their 100’s of combinations of coffee contain beans that are threatening elephants, tigers, and rhinos? And what about Dunkin Donuts, and the thousands of coffee houses everywhere?

I love elephants, tigers and rhinos so when I finish the last of my instant decaf, that’s it for me, Robusta beans or not. If you’re thinking of cutting back, now is the time to do it. Here is a little anecdote about elephants: Science has long stated that the difference between animals and people is the ability to recognize themselves as an individual in a mirror, that most animals think it’s another animal or that their reflection registers nothing at all. Well just last year I watched on GMA an experiment at a sanctuary for elephants. A large mirror was put in a pen. The elephants occasionally looked at themselves but the researchers had no idea if the animal recognized its own particular reflection. That is until someone swiped a patch of paint on one of the elephant’s heads. That elephant looked in the mirror and immediately tried to rub the paint off, and kept checking. I wonder if it was a female elephant? 
http://www.peopleandplanet.net/doc.php?id=2918

http://www.panda.org/about_wwf/where_we_work/asia_pacific/where/singapore/news_publications/index.cfm?uNewsID=91840