The Weekly Anthropocene, July 17 2024
Frog saunas in Australia, 34,000 year old termite mounds, sperm whale phonemes, U.S. solar canals, clean drilling, & a titanium-melting microgrid, and more!
Australia
The chytrid fungus has brought a wave of death to frog populations around the world in recent years, but a recent innovation by Australian researchers offers a new effective, cheap, and scalable way to help: frog saunas. The green and golden bell frog (Litoria aurea) has been wiped out from 90% of its range since the advent of chytrid in Australia, but the researchers found that they could fight off a chytrid infection if provided with simple sun-warmed shelters within which to “bake off” the infection, essentially an externally imposed “fever” for the cold-blooded amphibians. Even better, frogs that had survived the infection thanks to the saunas gained some immunity to future infections.
The researchers are now planning to build frog sauna shelters in the wild at a chytrid-vulnerable population of green and golden bell frogs in Sydney’s Olympic Park, in another great example of can-do interventionist Anthropocene conservation. Absolutely spectacular work!
“In the 25 years since chytridiomycosis was identified as a major cause of the global collapse of amphibian populations, our results are the first to provide a simple, inexpensive and widely applicable strategy to buffer frogs against this disease…
In these simple little hotspots, frogs can go and heat up their bodies to a temperature that destroys the infections.”
-Dr. Anthony Waddle, lead researcher.
China
China’s emissions may have already peaked due to an ultra-mega-gigantic renewables buildout, and a stunning new stat is a sign of the times: in the first half of 2024, zero new coal-based steelmaking projects were permitted, with all 7.1 million tons of new steelmaking capacity added in China during January through June 2024 using electric arc furnaces heated by electricity instead of by burning coal. This is frankly amazing; extraordinary industrial transformations are happening much faster than expected! Great news.
South Africa
An astounding new study has found that several termite mounds in the Namaqualand region of South Africa are over 34,000 years old, constructed by southern harvester termites (Microhodotermes viator) at a time when humans were painting caves, hunting mammoths, and coexisting with Neanderthals in Pleistocene Europe. When researchers radiocarbon-dated the Namaqualand mounds, each approximately 40 meters in diameter, they were shocked to find them far older than expected, making them the oldest known continuously occupied termite mounds by far.
These super-old termite mounds also appear to play an underappreciated role in carbon cycling: some organic material within, which normally degrades quickly, was over 19,000 years old and still intact, while some much-younger organic material was found deeper in the mound, likely buried by the termites, meaning that its decomposition will release little or no carbon to the atmosphere. The termites’ tunnels likely also allow rainwater to carry dissolved inorganic carbon deeper into the soil, and the researchers suspect that in addition to burying and rainwater seeping, there may be microbes in the mounds converting organic carbon into inorganic carbon. Fascinating!
United Kingdom
Prime Minister Keir Starmer is losing no time in accelerating the British clean energy transition! Less than a month old, the new UK government has already removed a de facto ban on new onshore wind farms (at least six companies are already interested in building new ones now!) and quickly approved two different solar farms long delayed by local NIMBYism. Great work!
“As of today we are ending the absurd ban on new onshore wind in England…We are going to get Britain building again.”
-Rachel Reeves, Chancellor of the Exchequer
A rewilding movement is burgeoning across the UK, with lodestar projects like the Knepp Estate and Wilder Blean inspiring multitudes more across the country.
Atlantic salmon are now spawning in the upper reaches of the River Derwent in Derbyshire, for the first time in over 100 years, thanks to river restoration work and barrier removal.
Last summer, 19 wildcats were released in Scotland. Now, wildcat kittens have been observed in Cairngorms National Park.
A rewilding project in Sussex Bay has banned trawling and is already seeing more dolphin sightings and expanding mussel beds, with the long-term goal of restoring the bay’s once-great kelp forest.
In 2020, white storks were recorded breeding in Britain for the first time since 1416. Now, a Citizen Zoo working group is planning to find a site to rewild white storks in Greater London.
Morocco
Construction has begun on Africa’s largest-ever desalination plant, located 40 kilometers south of Casablanca, Morocco. The Lamharza Essahel desalination plant will have two 1.85-kilometer seawater intake pipes, and will use reverse osmosis (pressure pushing water through a semi-permeable membrane) to produce fresh water. The facility will be 100% powered by wind energy, and is set to provide over 500,000 cubic meters of fresh water per day by 2026, rising to over 800,000 cubic meters per day later on, providing drinking water to approximately 7.5 million people in the greater Casablanca region.
This is part of a global trend to ensure water security in a warming world; Namibia, Taiwan, and the United Arab Emirates are also starting large new desalination projects, with earlier-stage plans underway from Spain to Chile. Impressive work!
Dominica
This newsletter has long kept an eye on Project CETI, a fascinating research effort trying to use AI to decode the language of wild sperm whales of the coast of Dominica. Now, Project CETI reports that they have found a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet,” the basic building blocks used to form words in sperm whale language, identifying 156 distinct click sequences that like human phonemes are combined in different orders to form multitudes of distinct vocalizations and can be “spoken” at different speeds and volumes. We still have no idea what each vocalization means, but we’re starting to understand how the language is put together; this may be just the beginning of a new voyage of interspecies understanding. WOW!
“We see them living very complicated lives, the coordination and sophistication in their behaviours. We're at base camp. This is a new place for humans to be – just give us a few years. Artificial intelligence is allowing us to see deeper into whale communication than we've ever seen before."
-Professor David Gruber, Project CETI.
United States
America’s first solar-covered canal is nearing completion on tribal lands in Arizona! The Inflation Reduction Act-funded 1.3 MW solar installation will cover half a mile of the Casa Blanca Canal, part of a wide network of canals owned by the Gila River Indian Community.
“Canal solar allows for greater power production per land size, cleaner water, less power transmission losses, and significant reduction in evaporation.”
-Ben Lepley, engineer.
Reducing evaporation of water and keeping junk out while providing clean electrons, solar canals are a true win-win innovation for the Anthropocene, a brilliantly simple yet highly multifaceted solution.
And this is just the beginning; the Biden Administration is already providing funding to similar solar canal projects in California, Oregon, and Utah. The sunny America West’s vast networks of irrigation canals are the obvious first choice, and there are thousands of miles of similar canals and drainage ditches across the rest of America and the world. Solar canals are just getting started!
Fervo Energy, the brilliant enhanced geothermal startup this newsletter has long lauded, just announced a new 15-year deal to sell clean energy from its under-construction 400 MW Cape Station project in Utah to the Southern California grid, enough to power 350,000 homes 24/7. A new renewables champion is on the rise: cross your fingers, but this sector might just turn out to be “solar in the 2010s” level big - a gigantic new source of clean electrons!
A world-leading renewables-powered manufacturing project just began construction in the little town of Ravenswood, West Virginia. It consists of two build-outs right next to each other: the first is a new titanium airplane parts factory for Timet, and the second is a solar microgrid1 with large battery storage systems built by BHE Renewables to power the factory. (Both Timet and BHE belong to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate, so coordination is easy). The titanium-melting plant and its solar/battery grid will scale up together, starting with 18 MW of power and planning to reach 106 MW by the end of 2027.
This project is also using some of the latest advances of the renewables revolution! The factory will include two types of electric furnace, and the microgrid’s batteries will likely use the cutting edge, cost-effective lithium iron phosphate battery chemistry, containing neither nickel nor cobalt.
“The project is perhaps the first to directly power a large industrial facility using solar-plus-storage technology.”
-Canary Media
There’s been a lot of amazing work in electric-powered manufacturing recently, with emerging success stories like electric steelmaking taking off across the USA, China and Europe. But this West Virginia project is special because of its unprecedented vertical integration: it’s using clean electrons generated right next door to its factory, running its entire process from primary energy generation to raw metal melting to final product manufacturing at the same site with renewable energy. Humanity is beginning to switch over our entire industrial stack to clean power! Spectacular news.
Good work, as usual!
Love those little frogs ❤️
The solar canal ..Wow !! and hope for UK with new government .