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We have released a new Travel article detailing the Microsoft outage and how it is impacting the aviation industry amid peak summer travel, specifically Delta Airlines. Check out the new article here.
Also, look out for our new Top Destinations article on Banff, Canada coming soon, and the new Architecture section arriving in the coming weeks. Visit YNH Travel to keep up with all of the new articles today!
To dive into some news today, researchers have recently made a huge new discovery, and it could change the way we think of the ocean completely.
Researcher Andrew Sweetman has been investigating a portion of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Mexico for over a decade now, and he actually made a revolutionary discovery in 2013 but never realized it. During his preliminary investigations, he found huge amounts of oxygen very deep down into the ocean, and he wrote it off as a mechanical issue or something of the sort.
However, over the years, he tried various other machines and sent them back to the manufacturer several times, claiming that they were defective-- the makers came back saying it was completely fine every time. It was then that he started to realize that there was a possibility that he had discovered something amazing.
During his later investigations, he did indeed find that there were massive amounts of oxygen, now called 'dark oxygen' due to their location, being produced from small metal nodules, which were spread across the abyss. The nodules, which consist of precious metals like cobalt, nickel, copper, and various rare earth elements, act like weak batteries as they split water molecules (H2O) into hydrogen and oxygen. This was truly a revolutionary discovery due to the fact that the nodules are producing oxygen without photosynthesis, which is a first in the biological world. It also means that there could be cold-water life on other planets, surviving on the oxygen-rich environments created by these nodules.
Unfortunately, due to their ability to act as batteries and the precious metals found inside, multiple deep-sea mining companies are looking into taking the nodules from the seafloor. This would devastate the surrounding ecosystem and possibly contribute to the increasing deoxygenation of the ocean, which has become an unofficial tenth planetary boundary, with the other nine being:
Climate change
Change in biosphere integrity (biodiversity loss and species extinction)
Stratospheric ozone depletion
Ocean acidification
Biogeochemical flows (changes in phosphorus and nitrogen cycles)
Land-system change (ex. deforestation)
Freshwater use
Atmospheric aerosol loading (microscopic particles in the atmosphere that affect climate and living organisms)
Introduction of novel entities (anything that humans produce and release into nature)
So far, humans have already crossed six of the nine boundaries (1, 2, 5, 6, 7, and 9) and are moving toward crossing two others (4 and 8). If this becomes planetary boundary 10, it will become crucial to protect our oceans from dangerous aquatic deoxygenation, which, if it gets worse enough, would eliminate most of marine life as we know it. Sweetman doesn't think we can eradicate deep-sea mining completely, but he thinks that maybe we can find a solution to mine the oceans without harming the surrounding ecosystem.
This revolutionary discovery is still huge, though, and may help motivate people to stop the potentially devastating future operations to save our oceans. Want to join the fight against deep-sea mining? Click here to find out more. Also, you can check out this article to learn more on how to help save the oceans by implementing some easy new things into your everyday life.
Fact of the Day (Reader's Digest): Neil Armstrong had to go through customs after returning from the Moon.
Quote of the Day (Gracious Quotes): You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere. (Lee Iaccoca)
Word of the Day (Merriam-Webster): Extenuate (verb)- Extenuate is a formal word that is most often used to mean “to lessen the strength or effect of something, such as a risk.” In legal use, to extenuate a crime, offense, etc., is to lessen or to try to lessen its seriousness or extent by making partial excuses.
In a Sentence: Developers are trying to extenuate the various risks associated with the product.
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