Project Earth (TV Series)

infobox television
show_name = Project Earth
format = Reality
camera = Multi-camera
picture_format = 480i (SDTV)
1080i (HDTV)|

"Project Earth" is a recently reality TV series on the Discovery Channel in which several groups of scientists experiment with radical ideas to slow and/or stop global warming with the financial aid of the Discovery Channel. [http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/project-earth/project-earth.html]

Projects

The show consists of eight experiments to weigh pros and cons of ideas on how to reduce global warming. The projects are as follows:

Wrapping Greenland

Seeing if glacier melting can be prevented by wrapping them in blankets. Led by Dr. Jason Box, a team travels to Greenland to wrap glaciers in a geo-textile blanket that will reflect the sun's rays and keep the glacier intact.

Raining Forests

Led by scientist Mark Hodges, they attempt to reforest areas of bare Earth from helicopters using canisters holding a tree seedling.

Brighter Earth

Led by atmospheric physicist John Latham and engineer Stephen Salter, the team will attempt to make reflective clouds. By changing the size of water droplets within a cloud, they make clouds brighter and reflect the sun's heat into space. They choose to seed marine stratocumulus clouds, because of their commonality around the world and they are low-lying. The Project Earth team uses potassium chloride and sodium chloride particles that are a micrometre in diameter to seed these clouds. Also, to achieve John Latham and Stephen Salter's dream of seeing this type of cloud seeding happening around the world, the team must create a boat that is carbon-neutral and can easily be remote controled. For this they use the concept of the Flettner rotor.

Infinite Winds

Testing of a revolutionary wind turbine led by engineer Fred Ferguson in an attempt to harness the energy of high-altitude winds. The team will test a 70 foot prototype attached to a blimp over The Appalachians to harness the endless supply of wind.

Hungry Oceans

Dr. Brian von Herzen and the Discovery team join Professors David M Karl (University of Hawaii) and Ricardo M Letelier (Oregon State University) to test wave powered pumps in an effort to bring nutrients from the depths of the oceans to the surface. This nutrient enrichment of the open ocean's well lite surface layers is needed to enhance photosynthesis and trigger large blooms of phytoplankton that could increase the role of vast oceanic regions in the sequestration of anthropogenic carbon dioxide. However, before producing large scale perturbations using these pumps, the scientific team from Hawaii and Oregon wants to better understand the risks and benefits of such large scale perturbations by looking at the effect that the deployment of a few pumps may have in the environment.

Space Sunshield

Attempting to create a 100,000 square-mile sunshade by placing trillions of lenses in space, led by astronomer and professor Roger Angel. Angel has developed a diffraction pattern by etching onto a lens, which will deflect the sun's rays.

Orbital Power Plant

Former NASA physicist John Mankins's vision of launching thousands of satellites into space, gathering solar energy from the sun and beaming it down to Earth as microwave energy. The energy will then be collected by antennas on the ground, which will convert it into electricity.

Fixing Carbon

Testing to see if the air can be scrubbed clean of its carbon dioxide. Canadian professor David Keith builds a machine prototype that sucks air into one end and sprays with a sodium hydroxide solution, then expelling clean air out.

See also

*Global warming
*Black swan theory

References

External links

* [http://earth-project.blogspot.com/ Project Earth Blog]
* [http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/project-earth/project-earth.html Discovery's Project-Earth website] Watch full episodes here - http://video.discovery.com/player.html