Hindu Notes from General Studies-02

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9 groynes to check erosion in Ennore

News

• Fishing hamlets along the Ennore Expressway that face a stormy sea and flooding every year may be spared this year. The long-pending project to construct nine groynes to prevent erosion along the coastline is expected to be completed by May-end.

Beyond News

• Residents of coastal areas in north Chennai have been living in fear of the strong waves that hit the localities sometimes past the sea wall built in some portions.
• The second phase of the project to build groynes, which are a collection of boulders laid perpendicular to the shoreline, was started last year.
• Some of the groynes are being built in ‘T’ shape to control fierce waves and aid sand accretion in the locations that have been affected severely by sea erosion. Officials of Water Resources Department said nearly 60% of the work has been completed so far.
• The Department expects to reclaim three-four m of shoreline in a year after the implementation of the project. With this project, most of the stretch of the coastline in north Chennai would be better equipped to face the monsoon.

Hindu Notes from General Studies-03

NASA exoplanet hunter TESS finds Earth size planet

News

• NASA’s new exoplanet hunter Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) has discovered its first earth-sized world.
• The planet orbits HD 21749, a star with about 70% of the sun’s mass located 53 light years away in the southern constellation Reticulum and is the second planet TESS has identified in the system.

Indian tigers are highly stressed due to human disturbances

News

• Compared with 200-odd Amur tigers in Russian Far East, the Bengal tigers in three tiger reserves in India Bandhavgarh, Kanha, Sariska are about 20% more stressed, a study found.
• The Indo-Russian team measured the stress level by studying the glucocorticoids metabolites present in the faeces of tigers.

Findings

• Increased stress level for prolonged periods will affect the immunity and fitness of tigers. Most importantly, elevated stress negatively impacts reproductive hormones which can lead to reduced fertility and reproductive failure.
• Tigers in the Kanha reserve had the highest faecal glucocorticoids metabolites level (markers for stress) while tigers in the Bandhavgarh reserve had the lowest level and comparable with the Amur tigers of 
• The elevated stress in Bengal tigers might be due to anthropogenic disturbance.
• While the tiger reserves in India are smaller than in Russia, the anthropogenic disturbances are very high in Indian reserves.
• Besides high anthropogenic stress, tigers in the three reserves experience higher population density compared with Amur tigers in Russia. At 11.33 tigers per 100 sq km, the density of tigers is many times higher in India compared with Ussuriisky reserve in Russia (0.15 tigers per 100 sq. km).
• A 2015 study found that tigers reintroduced in Sariska reserve experienced high stress due to anthropogenic disturbances.
• Besides high vehicular traffic, tigers in the Sariska reserve encounter herders, villagers who visit the forest for collecting wood and livestock grazing. As a result, the reproducing ability of Sariska tigers reduced.

Even remote peaks are not free of microplastic

News

• A secluded mountain region thought to be free of plastic pollution is in fact blanketed by airborne microplastics on a scale comparable to a major city such as Paris, researchers have found.

Findings

• Over a five-month period in 2017-2018, an average of 365 tiny bits of plastic settled every day on each square metre of an uninhabited, high-altitude area in the Pyrenees straddling France and Spain.
• The study focussed on microplastics mostly between 10 and 150 micrometres across, including fragments, fibres and sheet-like pieces of film.
• By comparison, a human hair is, on average, about 70 micrometres in width.
• Most significant finding is that microplastics are transported through the atmosphere and deposited in a remote, high-altitude mountain location far from any major city.
• Researchers used two monitoring devices to independently measure particle concentration in an area long considered to be among the most pristine in western Europe.
• The nearest village is 7km away, and the nearest city, Toulouse, is more than 100 km away. While the scientists were able to identify the types of plastic, they could not say with certainty where they came from or how far they had drifted.
• Analysing the pattern of air flows, they surmised that some particles had travelled at least 100 km. Samples transported by wind, snow and rain were collected at the meteorological station of Bernadouze at an altitude of more than 1,500 metres.

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