How glaciers hold water

 

Glaciers and ice sheets hold about 69 percent of the world's freshwater.

Glaciers are a big item when we talk about the world's water supply. Almost 10 percent of the world's land mass is currently covered with glaciers, mostly in places like Greenland and Antarctica. You can think of a glacier as a frozen river, and like rivers, they "flow" downhill, erode the landscape, and move water along in the Earth's water cycle.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Venus

Image
In our solar system, all planets are revolved in the anticlockwise direction.  But Venus is the only planet that revolved in the clockwise direction.
Read more

Oxygen in ocean

Image
  How much oxygen comes from the ocean? Scientists estimate that 50-80% of the oxygen production on Earth comes from the ocean. The majority of this production is from oceanic  plankton  — drifting plants, algae, and some bacteria that can photosynthesize. One particular species, Prochlorococcus, is the smallest photosynthetic organism on Earth. But  this little bacteria produces up to 20% of the oxygen in our entire biosphere . That’s a higher percentage than all of the tropical rainforests on land combined. It’s important to remember that although the ocean produces at least 50% of the oxygen on Earth, roughly the same amount is consumed by marine life. Like animals on land, marine animals use oxygen to breathe, and both plants and animals use oxygen for cellular respiration. Oxygen is also consumed when   dead plants and animals decay   in the ocean. Calculating the exact percentage of oxygen produced in the ocean is difficult because the amounts are con...
Read more

The Smallest guitar

Image
  The smallest guitar in the world is of the size of a red blood cell The  world's smallest guitar  is of the size of a  red blood cell. It was developed by scientists from  Cornell University.US The nano  guitar has six strings each of 50 nano meters wide.When  plucked by an atomic force microscope ,the strings would resonate.But it will at be inaudible frequencies. The first of its kind was made in Cornell University in 1997. The nano guitar was made from crystalline silicon.It is about  10 micrometers long .It can be viewed with the help of an  electron microscope .
Read more

Aerogel

Image
  What is Aerogel? ‘Aerogel’ is a broad term used to talk about an extraordinary group of materials that have been used since the 1960s in space travel, but are now finding uses across a whole range of industries. ‘Aerogel’ is not a specific mineral or material with a set chemical formula-rather, the term is used to encompass all materials with a specific geometrical structure. This structure is an extremely porous, solid foam, with high connectivity between branched structures of a few nanometres across. Though aerogel is technically a foam, it can take many different shapes and forms. The majority of aerogel is composed of silica, but carbon, iron oxide, organic polymers, semiconductor nanostructures, gold and copper can also form aerogel. However, within the aerogel structure, very little is solid material, with up to 99.8% of the structure consisting of nothing but air. This unique composition gives aerogel an almost ghostly appearance; hence it is often referred t...
Read more

Maximum"Oxygen" producer in Earth.

Image
Our atmosphere is made up of roughly 78 per cent nitrogen and 21 per cent oxygen, with various other gases present in small amounts. The vast majority of living organisms on Earth need oxygen to survive, converting it into carbon dioxide as they breathe. Thankfully, plants continually replenish our planet’s oxygen levels through photosynthesis. During this process, carbon dioxide and water are converted into energy, releasing oxygen as a by-product. Covering 5.5 million square kilometres (2.1 million square miles), the Amazon rainforest cycles a significant proportion of the Earth’s oxygen, absorbing large quantities of carbon dioxide at the same time.
Read more

Chenab bridge

Image
  The Chenab Bridge is a 1315 m long, steel arch railway bridge under construction in Jammu and Kashmir, India. The bridge is a part of the Jammu-Udhampur-Srinagar-Baramulla Rail Line (JUSBRL) project being undertaken by the Indian Railways. The Chenab bridge will have a structural height of 359 m   from the riverbed level, the highest in the world.The terrain of this railway line is mountainous and will pass through tunnels and bridges constructed in difficult Himalayan geology. The crossing of the Chenab river is one of the most challenging parts of the project. The bridge comprises of a 530 m long approach bridge, and a 785 m long arch bridge. The main arch spans 467 m, making it one of the longest arches in the world and the longest arch for rail traffic. The deck will be 13.5 m wide and will include two tracks upon completion.
Read more

A new chameleon

Image
  A new chameleon species may be the world’s tiniest reptile Hidden beneath the leaf litter of a northern Malagasy forest lives a chameleon so slight that it could tumble off the tip of your finger. Measuring just under 30 millimeters from snout to tail, the newly described species,  Brookesia nana,  may be the smallest reptile on Earth , researchers report January 28 in  Scientific Reports . Just two adult specimens, a male and female, are known. The female measures 28.9 millimeters, considerably larger than the 21.6-millimeter-long male. The size difference may have driven the male’s genitalia to be quite large — nearly 20 percent of its body length — to be a better fit to his mate, herpetologist Frank Glaw of the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology in Munich and colleagues suggest.
Read more