Why birds can fly over Mount Everest (2020) (lede-v2.nautil.us)

From the footer of TFA:

Walter Murch has been working in film for more than 50 years, as an editor, sound designer, writer, and director. He edited and sound-designed many films for Francis Coppola (The Godfather Trilogy, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now) and Anthony Minghella (The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cold Mountain). His interest in science can be seen in his editing of Mark Levinson’s film Particle Fever (2013), about the search for the Higgs Boson.

Yes, That Walter Murch.

In The Blink Of An Eye is on the bookshelf just behind the monitor I'm typing this on, with my headphones and BMD Speed Editor slightly blocking my view of it.

It's not bacteria. The only organisms that can digest lignin are fungi, and they do it by blasting lignin with peroxides.

As such, this works only in aerobic environments (not swamps).

That theory is not really disproven, even if it was not the only reason for the huge accumulations of coal during the Carboniferous.

Coal has been always forming later, even today, but never in such quantities, because later it required much luckier conditions for the wood to not be decomposed by fungi.

The climate and the position of the continents during the Carboniferous must have contributed to the accumulation of coal, i.e. it is likely that a much greater percentage of the surface of the Earth was covered by some kind of swamps with warm climate, where plants were abundant and dead wood could submerge and be protected from decomposition, but this still does not appear to be able to explain the so great discrepancy in the amount of accumulated coal.

The most likely explanation is that all factors must have contributed, the conformation of the continents, the climate and the low abundance or absence of wood-digesting fungi, or perhaps there already were wood-digesting fungi, but their enzymes were not as efficient yet as those of later fungi, so they could decompose only a small part of the wood before it was buried in sediments.

Solar energy output has exploded the past few years, it's not all bad news out there.

«Just like me / they long to be / close to you!»

But oil, gas and coal are indeed cool, you get some of the highest chemical energy density substances on Earth for the price of digging. It sucks that burning them reverts the atmosphere to something life isn't really adapted anymore, but the substances themselves are still pretty cool.

I agree about the incentives, but I wouldn't go as far as saying organizations can't change

It needs better alt text for accessibility

Right, oxygen is an oxidizer, not a fuel. A world with 43% oxygen would have some pretty terrifying wildfires, but the sky wouldn't just burst into flames

Imagine forest fires at 43% oxygen.

Sadly this wonder of nature was deduced from the 5 feathers that were all that remained after the noble creature was ingested by a turbofan engine of an airliner.

https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=7...