Hindu Notes from General Studies-01

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Glaciers shrinking faster than thought

News

• Earth’s glaciers are melting much faster than scientists thought.
• A new study shows they are losing 369 billion tons of snow and ice each year, more than half of that in North America.

Findings

• The most comprehensive measurement of glaciers worldwide found that thousands of inland masses of snow compressed into ice are shrinking 18 percent faster than an international panel of scientists calculated in 2013.
• The world’s glaciers are shrinking five times faster now than they were in the 1960s. Their melt is accelerating due to global warming, and adding more water to already rising seas, the study found.
• The glaciers shrinking fastest are in central Europe, the Caucasus region, western Canada, the U.S. Lower 48 states, New Zealand and near the tropics. Glaciers in these places on average are losing more than 1 percent of their mass each year, according to a study in Monday’s journal Nature .
• Team used ground and satellite measurements to look at 19,000 glaciers, far more than previous studies. They determined that southwestern Asia is the only region of 19 where glaciers are not shrinking, which Zemp said is due to local climate conditions.
• A number of factors are making sea levels rise. The biggest cause is that oceans are getting warmer, which makes water expand.
• The new figures show glacier melt is a bigger contributor than thought, responsible for about 25% to 30% of the yearly rise in oceans, Zemp said.

While people think of glaciers as polar issues, shrinking mountain glaciers closer to the equator can cause serious problems for people who depend on them.

• People in the Andes, for example, rely on the glaciers for drinking and irrigation water each summer.
• A separate study confirmed faster melting and other changes in the Arctic. It found that in winter, the Arctic is warming 2.8 times faster than the rest of the Northern Hemisphere.

Hindu Notes from General Studies-02

NGT sets up Central monitoring panel in a bid to reduce pollution stretches

News

• The National Green Tribunal (NGT) has constituted a Central Monitoring Committee to ensure the implementation of action plan meant for reducing pollution stretches across the country.

Beyond News

• Senior representatives of NITI Aayog, Secretaries of the Ministry of Water Resources, Ministry of Urban Development, Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change will be a part of the committee, apart from the Chairman, Central Pollution ControlBoard and Director General, National Mission for Clean Ganga, the NGT said.
• The Committee has been asked to coordinate with the respective States to oversee the action plans and ensure execution of the same in a time-bound manner.
• Additionally, the Union Environment Ministry was directed to consider a policy for giving “environmental awards” to institutions and States that comply with orders and ensure reduction in pollution.
• The CPCB, along with the respective State pollution control boards and pollution control committees, was directed to launch a nationwide programme on biodiversity monitoring and indexing of the rivers to “assess the efficacy of river cleaning programmes.”
• Further, for the safety of human health and maintaining sanctity of the rivers, regular hygienic surveys of the rivers should be carried out with reference to fecal coliform and fecal streptoccoi, as indicated in the primary water quality criteria for bathing water.

Smokers spent $700 billion on cigarettes in 2017, says WHO

News

• Global cigarette sales in 2017 stood at $700 billion, the World Health Organisation (WHO) tweeted, highlighting the fact that the amount was 250 times more than what the international organisation needed to protect human health.

Beyond News

• WHO noted that tobacco is the only legal drug that kills many of its users when used exactly as intended by manufacturers.
• It is estimated that tobacco use (smoking and smokeless) is currently responsible for the death of about six million people across the world each year with many of these deaths occurring prematurely.
• In India, where the mean age at initiation to daily smoking is 18.7 years, the total tax revenue collected from tobacco products is more than ₹34,000 crore annually. Doctors warn that the early age of starting tobacco abuse translates into an increased risk of heart disease in younger people.
• Worldwide, a total 6,00,000 people are also estimated to die from the effects of second-hand smoke. Although often associated with ill-health, disability and death from non-communicable chronic diseases, tobacco smoking is also associated with an increased risk of death from communicable diseases.
• According to information released by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), quitting tobacco abuse immediately reduces the risk of heart attack and/or stroke. This helps even if a person has already had a heart attack and/or stroke, irrespective of his/her age.
• Despite accounting for 17% of the world population, tobacco consumption in the form of cigarettes in India is less than 2% of global consumption.
• However, India accounts for 84% of the world’s consumption of smokeless tobacco while accounting for low per capita consumption of cigarettes.
• Among young people, the short-term health consequences of smoking include respiratory and non-respiratory effects, addiction to nicotine and the associated risk of other drug use.
• Long-term health consequences of youth smoking are reinforced by the fact that most young people who smoke regularly continue to smoke through adulthood. Also cigarette smokers have a lower level of lung function than those persons who have never smoked, noted WHO.

Hindu Notes from General Studies-03

First ever image of a black hole revealed

News

• Astronomers unveiled the first photo of a black hole, one of the star-devouring monsters scattered throughout the Universe and obscured by impenetrable shields of gravity.
• The image of a dark core encircled by a flame-orange halo of white-hot gas and plasma looks like any number of artists’ renderings over the last 30 years.

Beyond News

• Scientists have been puzzling over invisible “dark stars” since the 18th century, but never has one been spied by a telescope, much less photographed.
• The supermassive black hole now immortalised by a far-flung network of radio telescopes is 50 million lightyears away in a galaxy known as M87.
• Most speculation had centred on the other candidate targeted by the Event Horizon Telescope Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the centre of our own galaxy, the Milky Way.
• By comparison, Sag A* is only 26,000 lightyears from Earth.
• Locking down an image of M87’s supermassive black hole at such distance is comparable to photographing a pebble on the Moon.
• Over several days in April 2017, eight radio telescopes in Hawaii, Arizona, Spain, Mexico, Chile, and the South Pole zeroed in on Sag A* and M87.
• Knit together “like fragments of a giant mirror”, they formed a virtual observatory some 12,000 km across — roughly the diameter of Earth.
• In the end, M87 was more photogenic. Like a fidgety child, Sag A* was too “active” to capture a clear picture, the researchers said.
• The light from behind the black hole gets bent like a lens.
• The term “blackhole” refers to a point in space where matter is so compressed as to create a gravity field from which even light cannot escape.
• At the same scale of compression, Earth would fit inside a thimble. The Sun would measure a mere 6 km edge-to-edge.

Iconic lake set to become history

News

• Years after a small lake was turned into a three-hole golf course abutting the Banjari Darwaja of the Golconda Fort, the city is set to lose the iconic Shah Haatim Lake to an ingenious plot to drain the water body.
• Historically, the lake was one of the water sources that flooded the moat of the Golconda Fort to keep besiegers at bay. Now, the fort’s moat channel is being turned into a nala that will transfer the water from the lake into the Langar Houz Lake.

Beyond News

• The water channel hugging the fort wall is lower than the lake’s current level, and it will drain the lake. A bridge has also been built before the drainage channel is connected to the lake.
• The sprawling 64-acre lake is now ringed by a road where garbage and building debris is dumped every day shrinking it further.
• On the northern side, a residential colony is being built into the lake bed. The water from the Shah Haatim lake fills the moat and then drains through the Naya Qila and flows out of Deccan Park of the Golconda Fort and into the Langer Houz lake.
• In the late 90s, the civic body constructed another water channel to drain the water from the lake, but with little success as the gradient of the Naya Qila is higher than the lake. One of the stated reasons for the deeper water channel is to prevent flooding of Nadeem Colony and other low-lying areas.
• Satellite imagery between 2003 and 2019 show the dramatic shrinkage of the lake. The historical imagery shows how the present road that skirts the lake is built into the lake bed as are the dozens of houses and residential colonies.
• It remains to be seen how the transformation of a 500-year-old fort’s moat into a drainage channel affects the hydrology of the Shah Haatim lake and the neighbourhood communities.

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