Externalities

Film director James Cameron has begun an attempt to become the first person in 50 years to visit the deepest part of the ocean.

Cameron is travelling 11km (7 miles) down to the Mariana Trench in the western Pacific, where he hopes to spend six hours exploring and filming.

A manned descent to the trench was last attempted in 1960, by US Navy Lt Don Walsh and Swiss oceanographer Jacques Piccard.

They spent about 20 minutes on the ocean floor but their landing kicked up silt, meaning their view was obscured.

This is only the second manned expedition to this ocean’s deepest depths - the first took place in 1960.

Follow at https://twitter.com/#!/DeepChallenge

Hollywood director James Cameron may be close to making a dive to the deepest place on Earth.

In a one-man submarine, he plans to dive 11km (seven miles) down beneath the waves to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, in the western Pacific.

There has only ever been one manned dive there, and that was half a century ago.

Mr Cameron and his team have set sail to reach the trench and are now waiting for calm weather to begin the dive.

[…]

If they can get a few days of good weather on their side, the team hopes to first make an unmanned 11km dive with the sub, to check it works properly at this deepest of ocean depths - and then it will be time for James Cameron to enter the craft and take the reins.

[…]

It is packed full of 3D cameras and huge lighting systems so that the director can capture the excitement of the voyage all the way to the bottom. […] The director plans to release a documentary with footage captured on his dives - but he also has science in mind.

Awesome (and there’s more at nature.com).

It’s just a shame there doesn’t seem to be any live information or video (no tweets?!) from the ship (not the sub, presumably). The moon landings managed it!

At the moment we’re in a nice, warm, stable ‘interglacial’ - and have been for 10,000 years or so (the emergence and continued existence of civilisation in this period not being a coincidence). But when will we return to a colder ‘glacial’ period - referred to as an ‘Ice Age’ in this article (somewhat incorrectly, in my view)?

In the journal Nature Geoscience, [researchers] write that the next Ice Age would begin within 1,500 years - but emissions have been so high that it will not.

As global warming skeptics are quick to reference,

The renewal of ice-age conditions would render a large fraction of the world’s major food-growing areas inoperable, and so would inevitably lead to the extinction of most of the present human population.

But, “if we were trying to avoid an ice-age, we’ve tried too hard.”

Incidentally, the Global Warming Policy Foundation seem to be accepting here that human GHG emissions lead to global warming and that it is desirable not to stray too far from the stable climatic conditions upon which humanity has relied. Which is nice of them.

The government has signalled a revolution in scientific publishing by throwing its weight behind the idea that all publicly funded scientific research must be published in open-access journals.

Very glad to see this issue getting such attention. The typical academic publishing model is wrong in oh so many ways.

The European Commission are currently running a “Consultation on scientific information in the digital age” which is almost entirely on open access. The consultation ends on September 9th.

Edit: also, Ben Goldacre - Academic publishers run a guarded knowledge economy