Time to visit Death Valley's new lake (video)

Ananda (Dharma Buddhist Meditation), Dhr. Seven, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly

Death Valley's no high-altitude Peruvian lake, and its light snow is not avalanche material

• Kayakers flock to Death Valley after severe rain creates ‘extremely rare’ lake | The Guardian
• VIDEO: Death Valley’s temporary lake is so deep, one can kayak on it — and some have. See it

It is now possible to boat in Death Valley's Badwater Basin, and many are flocking to kayak

Careful! It's shallow, no diving, and very saline.

A "desert" is not really a "hot, dry place." It just seems that way because of all of the famous examples of deserts, like the great Sahara in Africa, the Gobi in China, and the Mojave in California.

A desert is a place of temperature extremes.

So it does get very hot in the day, but with so little moisture (humidity) in the air, nights can be frigid, freezing, and more deadly than the day. In the day, get in the shade? At night? Find a crevice, pull out a Bedouin tent, dig into the sand, ball up, make a fire, run from wild nocturnal animals?

What if rain could pool up in the mountains when it pours rain or when the snow melts?

.

Those strangers said go this way.

That extreme swing of temperature dries out the environment. When rain finally comes, it tends to be torrential, a deluge, cold, quickly draining or evaporating like it never happened.

Why? The sand, gravel, and loamy ground is hardly "soil" -- clay minerals mixed with decomposing organic material, like leaves, enriching the ground with water retaining recycled nutrients -- but rather terrain that drains too quickly.

The atmospheric river keeps coming to Cali

Local plants -- some of which bloom like a brightly colored carpet -- have evolved amazing ways of surviving, and wet feet (roots) annoy them. They fare far better in dry conditions with a little moisture from dew, humidity, an underground aquifer, or occasional sprinkles.

• Historical pluvial Lake Manly, Death Valley
• Are there FISH in the lake? YES: Death Valley pupfish

Death Valley is a mineral basin, an inhospitable gravel pit, more quarry than anything recognizable on the planet as habitable for humans. There's too much salt and borax, calcium and granite, lime and compressed silt.

It's so bad that it can be used for fake surface of Mars probe photos for NASA to manipulate.

It's a desert, the hottest, dryest place in the world, bar none, worse than the Dead Sea

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We get by with a long dormant stage, waiting.

There must certainly be secret watering holes or underground networks of water, or nothing could live other than sparse chapparal and the occasional bristlecone pine and yucca tree, ice plants, or lichen. Even these would be rare. It's all bleak wilderness haunted by djinn (genies) at night.

Drive from Los Angeles to San Francisco without taking the scenic Pacific Coast Highway. Try the 5 Freeway to the 365, and for stretches you'll be driving through a harsh desert while staring up at the California "Alps" topped with snow all the way to Mammoth Mountain ski resort.

Where does the runoff go as the ice melts? It seeps right through or forms washes, gulches, gulleys, and arroyos that are soon seco (dry, as dry as if snow never happened). Return in the summer, and it's the Gobi, impossible to imagine water much less snow.

• List of world's great deserts by area

Burning Man Festival, Black Rock Desert

Look at the ground and see why. It's all permeable, in need of remediation and de-desertification by dumping decomposing organic matter everywhere to hold the moisture for plants to sprout in the abundant sunshine.

When you get to Independence, make a hard right, into Death Valley, destination Pahrump then Las Vegas. In the meantime, bring a kayak or a dingy.

SUTRA: Crossing the Wilderness

The wise proceed with care.

Once upon a time, long long ago, the Bodhisatta (the Buddha-to-be) was reborn a merchant who was wise and careful. He wanted to take his wares to market through the desert, but it was too dry, so he waited.

A brash rival merchant [a young and foolish Devadatta in a former birth], not wishing to wait and dreaming of setting the price, went forward into that dry wilderness, until food ran out and water stores were almost down to nothing.

A genie (yakkha, shapeshifting ogre, ghoul), wishing to deceive him, transformed into a fellow traveler soaked in water with water plants strewn on him and his cart, coming from the other direction. The merchant was overjoyed to see him wet and asked, "Is there water in that direction?"

Birth-Stories: Jataka Tales

"There's so much water, friend! Empty out your water pots to lighten your load and get there more quickly. There is water enough to drink, bathe in, and supply your animals."

"Thank you, friend!" he said and did so, coming to ruin and death when there was no such water.

But the Bodhisatta, being wise and careful, waited for the right season to travel, when herbs for curry were growing and there was sufficient water and plants for the draft animals to eat along the way, reached market in safety and was a business success (Apannaka Jataka, Jat 1). SEE FULL SUTRA

Humanimals marveling at the new lake covering miles of Death Valley, California

This is like, but not quite, Mono Lake beneath Yosemite National Park, a super salty lake.

Not an ephemeral phenomenon? Why ancient DV Lake that reemerged will stick around

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Ice Skating on Portage Lake, Alaska (video)

Aurora Roth, NPR, 1/28/24; CC Liu, Ashley Wells (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly

Amber Glenn is first LGBTQ+ woman to win US Women's Figure Skating Championship

The lake at Portage Glacier has transformed into an ice-skating destination

Aurora Roth, Weekend Edition Sunday, NPR.org, Jan, 28, 2024

This 3-minute listen looks at a fascinating skating destination. The Portage Glacier just outside Anchorage, Alaska (USA), is a huge tourist attraction in the summer. In the winter, the lake at the toe of the melting glacier freezes over, and anyone can skate to it. The lake at Portage Glacier has transformed into an ice-skating destination (NPR)

Cave in Canada frozen since Ice Age (video)

This cave has been frozen since the last Ice Age

(NOVA PBS Official) Feb. 19, 2020. This cave in Canada remains frozen every summer — as it has for every summer in the last 10,000 years. It was the last Ice Age when it went into a deep freeze it has yet to emerge from. What can it tell us about the earth's future climate?

• Stream Polar Extremes online to learn more: pbs.org/wgbh/nova... 

PRODUCTION CREDITS

• Polar Extremes Director: Lucy Haken
• Assistant Producer: Sacha Thorpe
• Digital Production: Angelica Coleman
• © WGBH Educational Foundation 2020

7th anniversary: FUKUSHIMA disaster (video)

Hard; Dr. Caldicott; NHK; Pfc. Sandoval, S. Auberon, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly Wiki edit

The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster (福島第一原子力発電所事故 Fukushima Dai-ichi genshiryoku hatsudensho jiko) happened in 2011.

It was an energy accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Ōkuma, Fukushima Prefecture, primarily initiated by the tsunami following the Tōhoku earthquake [caused by the U.S.] on March 11, 2011.

Immediately after the earthquake the active reactors automatically shut down their sustained fission reactions.

However, the tsunami disabled the emergency generators that would have provided power to control and operate the pumps necessary to cool the reactors.

(SGT Report) Dr. Helen Caldicott, M.D. on "The Horrible Truth About Fukushima"

The insufficient cooling led to three nuclear meltdowns, hydrogen-air explosions, and the release of radioactive material in Units 1, 2, and 3 from March 12 to March 15.

Loss of cooling also caused the pool for storing spent fuel from Reactor 4 to overheat on March 15th due to the decay heat from the fuel rods.

(NHK) What about the plants and animals? "Radioactive Forest"

 

On July 5, 2012 the Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent Investigation Commission (NAIIC) found that the causes of the accident had been foreseeable and that the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), had failed to meet basic safety requirements such as risk assessment, preparing for containing collateral damage, and developing evacuation plans.

On October 12, 2012 TEPCO admitted for the first time that it had failed to take necessary measures for fear of inviting lawsuits or protests against its nuclear plants.

 

The Fukushima disaster was the most significant nuclear incident since the April 26, 1986 Chernobyl disaster and the second disaster to be given the Level 7 event classification of the International Nuclear Event Scale. More

Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Fukushima (video)

Plutonium and uranium cores and fuel rods at three world-class nuclear power plants are melting down in Japan like Chernobyl (Russia) and Three Mile Island (USA) did in the past. Meanwhile, Obama joins Republicans to build more nuclear power plants in US.

SOMA, Japan (HuffPost) – The second hydrogen explosion in three days rocked Japan's stricken Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant Monday, sending a massive column of [radiactive] smoke into the air and wounding 6 workers. The plant's operator said radiation levels at the reactor were still within legal limits.

• LIVE UPDATES
• beyondnuclear.org

• nirs.org

The explosion at the plant's Unit 3, which authorities have been frantically trying to cool following a system failure in the wake of a massive earthquake and tsunami, triggered an order for hundreds of people to stay indoors, said Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano. More>>

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Front line climate change: tiny Tuk

(AP) TUKTOYAKTUK, Northwest Territories – Caught between rising seas and land melting beneath their mukluk-shod feet, the villagers of Tuktoyaktuk are doing what anyone would do on this windy Arctic coastline. They're building windmills.

That's wind-power turbines, to be exact — a token first try at "getting rid of this fossil fuel we're using," said Mayor Merven Gruben. It's a token of irony, too: People little to blame, but feeling it most, are doing more to stop global warming than many of "you people in the south," as Gruben calls the rest of us who fill the skies with greenhouse gases.

They're feeling climate change not only in this lonely corner of northwest Canada, but in a wide circle at the top of the world, stretching from Alaska through the Siberian tundra, into northern Scandinavia and Greenland, and on to Canada's eastern Arctic islands, a circle of more than 300,000 indigenous people, including Gruben and the 800 other Inuvialuit, or Inuit, of the village they know as "Tuk." More>>