Thing-makers, Tool Freaks and Prototypers: How the Whole Earth Catalog’s Optimistic Message Reinvented the Environmental Movement in 1968

In the fall of 1968 a Stanford-trained biologist, organizer of the legendary Trips Festival and Merry Prankster named Stewart Brand published the first Whole Earth Catalog. Between 1968 and 1972, the Catalog reached millions of readers and won the National Book Award. The title and iconic cover image of this counterculture classic celebrated the first publicly released NASA photographs showing the whole planet Earth from space. These images profoundly changed the way humans thought about the environment. And the Catalog played an important role in that change

Does numerical modelling of the onset of dissolution-convection reliably reproduce this key stabilization process in CO2 storage?

Dissolution of carbon dioxide into water is a key medium-term CO2 plume stabilization process. It proceeds much more quickly when aided by convection than when driven by diffusion alone. The onset of the convection process is not well understood, so laboratory experiments using a Hele-Shaw cell containing a porous medium were used to reproduce the process of CO2 dissolution and convection in water. High resolution numerical flow models were then used to replicate the laboratory results. They show a remarkably good match in terms of convective plume temporal and spatial development. This suggests that numerical models of dissolution-convection at much larger reservoir scales can reliably predict the onset of dissolution-convection

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Using pressure recovery at a depleted gas field to understand saline aquifer connectivity

A key uncertainty facing Carbon dioxide Capture and Storage (CCS) in saline aquifers is long term injectivity, which is primarily a function of the connected aquifer pore-volume within which formation brine can be displaced as the CO2 is injected. Protracted injection testing to interrogate and prove the far-field connected pore-volume would increase the lead-in times for commissioning of storage sites and would significantly increase appraisal costs. Here we use natural gas production and subsequent reservoir recharge legacy data from the Esmond gas field in the UK sector of the southern North Sea to gain an understanding of the dynamic behaviour of the Bunter Sandstone, a major saline aquifer. Results suggest that Esmond has a connected pore volume of 1.83x1010 m3, suitable for injecting CO2 at a rate of up to 2 million tonnes per year for at least 55 years. 3D seismic data suggest that Esmond reservoir properties are likely to be replicated across the wider Bunter Sandstone aquifer, notably around the Endurance structure which was, until recently, proposed for a full-chain CCS project

Ultraluminous infrared galaxies: mergers of sub-L* galaxies?

A sample of 27 low-redshift, mostly cool, ultraluminous infrared galaxies (ULIRGs) has been imaged at 1.6 μm with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Near-Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS). The majority (67%) of the sample's galaxies are multiple-nucleus galaxies with projected separations of up to 17 kpc, and the rest of the sample (33%) are single-nucleus galaxies, as determined by the NICMOS angular resolution limit. The average observed, integrated (host+nucleus) H magnitude of our HST H sample ULIRGs is -24.3, slightly above that of an L* galaxy (MH = -24.2), and 52% of the sample's galaxies have sub-L* luminosities. The ULIRGs in the HST H sample are not generated as a result of the merging of two luminous (i.e., ≥L*) spiral galaxies. Instead, the interactions and mergers occur in general between two, or in some cases more, less massive sub-L* (0.3-0.5L*) galaxies. Only one out of the 49 nuclei identified in the entire HST H sample has the properties of a bright quasar-like nucleus. On average, the brightest nuclei in the HST H sample galaxies (i.e., cool ULIRGs) are 1.2 mag fainter than warm ULIRGs and low-luminosity Bright Quasar Survey quasars (BQS QSOs) and 2.6 mag fainter than high-luminosity BQS QSOs. Since the progenitor galaxies involved in the merger are sub-L* galaxies, the mass of the central black hole in these ULIRGs would be only about (1-2) × 107 M☉, if the bulge-to-black hole mass ratio of nearby galaxies holds for ULIRGs. The estimated mass of the central black hole is similar to that of nearby Seyfert 2 galaxies but at least 1 order of magnitude lower than the massive black holes thought to be located at the center of high-luminosity QSOs. Massive nuclear starbursts with constant star formation rates of 10-40 M☉ yr-1 could contribute significantly to the nuclear H-band flux and are consistent with the observed nuclear H-band magnitudes of the ULIRGs in the HST H sample. An evolutionary merging scenario is proposed for the generation of the different types of ULIRGs and QSOs on the basis of the masses of the progenitors involved in the merging process. According to this scenario, cool ULIRGs would be the end product of the merging of two or more low-mass (0.3L*-0.5L*) disk galaxies. Warm ULIRGs and low-luminosity QSOs would be generated by a merger involving intermediate-mass (0.5 L*) disk galaxies. Under this scenario, warm ULIRGs could still be the dust-enshrouded phases of UV-bright low-luminosity QSOs, but cool ULIRGs, which are most ULIRGs, would not evolve into QSOs

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