Pollution over China can be seen from space
Fog and haze blanketed the North China Plain on January 10, 2012, making travel difficult. The Beijing airport cancelled 43 flights and delayed 80 more in the morning hours, when visibility dropped to 200 meters, according to state news reports. Provinces across the plain reported low visibility.
The haze decreased visibility in satellite images too. A milky, gray pall entirely blocks the ground from view in the top image, taken in the early afternoon by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Aqua satellite. Patches of white fog or low cloud hang below the gray haze. Winds had already begun to push the haze out of Beijing in the north, but the rest of the North China Plain still suffered from poor air quality. By the next day, when Aqua MODIS acquired the lower image, skies were mostly clear across the region.
Via It's Full of Stars
Oh, boy. Someone would really shake up my world if they were wearing these.
Seconded.
Via Learn It, Live It, Love it
npr:
I thought it would be fun to start the year addressing some questions that many people have about the universe. Mind you, some of these are far from simple, true to what Milan Kundera once wrote, “the only truly serious questions are the ones that even a child can formulate.”
—Marcelo Gleiser fills us in on “What Happened Before The Big Bang? And Other Weird Cosmic Questions”
Thursday throwback: Clueless! This may be my favorite movie.
