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A few weeks ago, Unknown Country reported that NASA were investing millions of dollars into a new laser-based instrument, located on the International Space Station,  which is intended to provide a unique 3-D view of Earth’s forests. The focus of its mission is to provide definitive information about the role of forests in the carbon cycle, and as such, in global warming.

The laser, known as the Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) lidar, the instrument will be the first to systematically probe the depths of the forests from space, and assess how they affect our weather systems and other ecosystems.
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Twelve months ago, a study revealed a shocking decline in the global populations of so-called "priority species" creatures. The evidence suggested a 58 per cent drop in 210 key species during the forty year period between 1970 and 2010, with seven per cent being lost within the past five years.

It seems that the decline is not restricted to endangered or priority species, however, as new research by scientists at WWF and the Zoological Society of London found that the global situation is even worse than previously thought. According to a new analysis, in which 10,000 different populations of animals, birds and fish were examined, the number of all wild animals on Earth has more than halved during the past 40 years.
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This is a journal entry I hoped I would never have to write. For most of my career, I have been fighting to prevent this, to slow it down or at least to plan for it.

What is happening is that methane hydrates are melting in the Arctic Ocean and along the US Atlantic seaboard. The methane they are releasing is adding to that already pouring out of tundra in Siberia, Alaska and Canada.
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It has been said that "life will always find a way," and a recent discovery by Russian space officials appears to confirm that life can certainly exist in the most hostile of environments.

Traces of plankton and other microorganisms have been found living happily aboard the International Space Station (ISS), not safely within its cosy interior but clinging to its exterior surfaces assaulted by freezing temperatures and cosmic radiation. It seems that the tiny organisms are even able to survive in an atmosphere without oxygen, previously thought to be one of the factors necessary to support any form of life.
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