KENYA AND ITS PART IN REDUCING GLOBAL WARMING (part 2)

Solar energy in this country has grossly been underutilized!

Equatorial Kenya has been blessed with an uninterrupted solar supply 365 days in an year and the government has seemed oblivious to this fact. Rural Kenya has been a beneficiary of the rural electrification project that has tried to connect more people to the national power grid that is already grappling with power shortages and inadequate supply to the fast growing economy. Understandably rural Kenya demand for power is not that high but penetration has also been an issue for the project. Rural homes grapple with high prices of fuel used primarily for lighting as firewood remains the most preferred cooking fuel. Most of the projects undertaken many companies and individuals have been small scale and has involved supply of solar lanterns. This, however small can have a great impact of these families lives. On average it is estimated that these families use about 75/= a day on kerosene and in an economy where most people live on a dollar a day that amount is ridiculously high! If we get enough lanterns into these homes we could solve a problem that could seem hard in a very simple way.

Urban Kenya can also benefit greatly from solar power. The government recently passed a law that required installation of solar panels in certain households and businesses. Establishments coming up have been trying to comply to this law and this could significantly reduce the power costs for these businesses and households although more should be done to push for proper implementation of the law. The Nairobi City Council comes under a lot of criticism with its archaic laws, askaris, and councilors alike! But I must commend them on one fact, their use of solar panels for street lights. Along Parliament Road all these street lights have solar panels and this should be used in almost if not all of the light in the city.

This model would have worked very well on the lighting along the Thika Super highway.

All in all the government MUST reduce taxes on solar equipment being imported! This is the only way that we can encourage use of solar energy in the country and county governments will be wise to encourage use of solar in their counties since it will solve some of the problems that people grapple with. That said......

GATE TO HELL: Not As Far As You'd Imagine

Remember the 50 Year Old Fire in Centralia Pennsylvania? Of course you do. Because you have subscribed this this blog and thus receive regular updates of geological happenings in the world. Thank you for doing that by the way.

So if you thought the 50 year old fire was bad, wait till you hear this. Somewhere in Turkmenistan in a town called Derweze ( take some time to Google that location), there is another crater that has been on fire for 40 years.

These are probably geologists wondering how far hell was from where they stood. Photo credit: DailyMail

This giant hell hole in the middle of the Karakum Desert is a result an assumption gone haywire. Soviet geologists in 1971 were drilling for natural gas when the cavern collapsed and their rig got lost in the 70 m wide hole. In anger, Boris, the lead contractor, decided to make the hole pay by setting it on fire.

'Burn in hell you piece of schist!'

But as it turned out, the supply of gas was almost unlimited and the fire has been burning ever since.

Watchu doing Philpski? Nothing just chilling

According to the Daily Mail: In April 2010 the country's president, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, visited the site and ordered that the hole should be closed but this is yet to happen.

What I think should happen is they find ways of harvesting that fire. Maybe put up pipes that will go to everyone home (it's a small town) where it will be used for heating shower water and swimming pools.


What do you think they should do with it? Let me know.

If the locals haven't started using this pit for disposal of waste, then they are really wasting it.

Beautiful

This is why you need good data.  And maybe some 3d imaging

 Forl the actual real reason as to why they burnt off the gas, read the article on the DailyMail

How Dinosaurs Mated: The Sexisaurus Chronicles

During your lifetime you have probably spent huge amounts of time wondering, how the hell did dinosaurs have sex? Did the male mount the female or vice versa? How much semen did one ejaculation produce? How tricky was it considering that a T-Rex can weigh up to 30 tonnes and one crucial body part was 12 feet [sch]long?

If you have not been wondering such things, well then congratulations. You are not a weirdo. Or a paleontologist.

 These are the questions that keep paleontologist up at night (probably playing with themselves to such thoughts. Probably). They finally came up with the answer. 'Dinos made love like dogs'.

I am going to give you a moment or two to absorb this shocking revelation by the researchers.

'All dinosaurs used the same basic position to mate,' said Dr Beverly Halstead, an English researcher who spent too much time on this issue. 'Mounting from the rear, he put his forelimbs on her shoulders, lifting one hind limb across her back and twisting his tail under hers.' Well!

Most researchers concluded that dinosaurs had sex like 

The males and females of modern-day birds and reptiles have a single body opening for urination, defecation, and reproduction--something called a cloaca (Latin for sewer! wow!). Paleontologists believe that dinosaurs had the same basic equipment, and that they coupled by pressing their cloacas together. Kinda sapphic if you ask me.

Pelecanimimus dinosaurs mating - these bird-like creatures lived 120 million years ago during the Cretaceous period

No penis is needed to perform a "cloacal kiss." But some birds have penises and crocodiles sport penis-like "intromittent organs," and male dinosaurs might have had something similar. As you might imagine, a dinosaur penis might have been pretty big--perhaps up to 12 feet in length for T. Rexes.

But how did Mr. Dino ever get his cloaca near Ms. Dino's? By mounting her from behind. At least that's the view of many paleontologists, including one Beverly Halstead, an Englishman who became known for his candid talk about dinosaur mating before his death in 1991. For an article that appeared in the now-defunct science magazine "Omni" magazine in 1988, Dr. Halstead said:

All dinosaurs used the same basic position to mate. Mounting from the rear, he put his forelimbs on her shoulders, lifting one hind limb across her back and twisting his tail under hers to align the cloaca.

I am going to assume that all that liquid is from both of them. Orgasmic

Some of Halstead's present-day counterparts concur that that's the way dinos did it.

"I don't think there's much doubt about that," Dr. Gregory M. Erickson, an evolutionary biologist at Florida State University, told The Huffington Post in a telephone interview. But, he acknowledged, "It must have been a hell of a thing to see."

This does not look safe.

So what do you think of this discovery? Are geoscientists venturing into matters that don't help us grow or is such discoveries useful for the growth of earth sciences? Let me know in the comments below.

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More images for you to pleasure yourself with:

40 Dinosaurs Having Sex (NSFW if You Are a Dino)

Sources
Daily Mail 
Huffington Post
Buzzfeed

PINK MONTH, PINK TERRACES, PINK GEOLOGY

October is "pink month" and is the designated breast cancer month by the UN. being Pink month i decided got to looking for a lighter side of pink and i came across the Pink Terraces of New Zealand!!!
wikipedia describes the rocks as....

The Pink Terraces, or Otukapuarangi ("fountain of the clouded sky") in Māori, and the White Terraces, also known as Te Tarata ("the tattooed rock")

Visitors wore special shoes in order to climb up and gaze into the throat of the gigantic geyser whose silica-charged waters had formed the terraces over countless centuries.The only sad thing about them is that they are now buried under layer of volcanic ash and mud but not before some spectacular snapshots and paintings were made of them in the 1800's before the eruption of Mount Tarawera in 1886. The terraces are made of Traventine ( A type of limestone (a calcium-rich rock composed primarily of the CaCO3 minerals calcite and aragonite) which forms by chemical precipitation (the stuff that makes the rock falls out of solution) from certain types of shallow or surface waters, such as springs and rivers. courtesy of georneys) of alternate white and pink color. They formed heated pools in which people used to bathe in. 

the first paintings were very well detailed and showed this spectacular sites in available detail. 

Charles Blomfield (1848–1926) painted the Pink Terraces four years after they were buried by the eruption of Mt Tarawera. His highly romantic paintings strove for an aesthetic ideal. link

Charles Blomfield, The Pink and White Terraces Rotomahana, New Zealand. link

Painting of the White Terraces, near Rotorua, New Zealand.

 

 

Delightful illustration of bathers at the White Terrace before the famous eruption of Mt Tarawera in 1886. link

when a geologist Ferdinand von Hochstetter and fellow friend Bruno Hamil undertook a geological survey of the area he came up with a lithograph of the terraces. 

Bruno Hamil's 1860 lithograph of Ferdinand von Hochstetter talking to the local chief at the bottom left of the white terraces. link

black and white photos of the 8th wonder of the world

The hot water basins, White Terrace, 1885. link

Boars Head, White Terrace by George Valentine. link

Hot Baths, Pink Terrace George Valentine. link

White Terrace -by Alfred Burton. link

A part of the White Terraces was rediscovered in June 2011. The announcement of the rediscovery of the White Terraces coincided with the 125th Anniversary of the eruption of Mt Tarawera in 1886.

Digital underwater photographs of area around the pink terrace structures in Lake Rotomahana, New Zealand. Photo by Dan Fornari, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. link

#FACTSvsFALLACIES TURKANA - THE CRADLE OF MANKIND

FACT
Former Tukana district occupied the larger part of the north west of Kenya all within the Great East African Rift Valley bordering South Sudan and Ethiopia to the north and Uganda to the West
The area is semi-arid with extreme day temperatures and equally low temperatures at night.
 Dr Richard Leakey, a renowned Kenyan paleoanthropologist and conservationist, together with a group of paleotologists discovered  the famous "Turkana boy" the oldest and most complete skeleton of Homo erectus. 

Nariokotome Boy, or “Turkana Boy,” a Homo erectus found by Alan Walker and Richard Leakey, Lake Turkana, Kenya is the most complete Homo erectus ever found.

 The 9-12 year old boy believed to be around 1.6 million years old was an important milestone filling the gaps palaeotologists had found hard to fill back then. 
Watch a video of Dr Leakey and the Turkana boy here  

He and and his team made further discoveries. A new species of Australopithecus a bipedal species with an upright posture that dated over 4 million years ago, the earliest stages of human evolution. Human and animal remains were trapped and fossilized in the stratified sediments of the Great Rift Valley. Tectonic activity has uplifted many ancient sediments and the constant erosion of them by wind and water exposes new finds every year. The lake basin is rich in specimens of Australopithecus, the primitive “transitional” hominid with many ape-like features. Koobi Fora to the east of the lake has yielded some of the most fascinating animal fossils in the world. Different types of primitive elephants, prehistoric hippos, giraffes and ancient species of crocodiles are but a few of the fossils discovered around the lake shore.

 So Kenya and Turkana in specific has been scientifically proven to be the cradle of mankind!

further reading can be found here