Author: M. Özgür Nevres

I am a software developer and a science enthusiast. I was graduated from the Istanbul Technical University (ITU), Computer Engineering. In the past, I worked at the Istanbul Technical University Science Center as a science instructor. I write about the planet Earth and science on this website, ourplnt.com. I am also an animal lover! I take care of stray cats & dogs. This website's all income goes directly to our furry friends. Please consider supporting me on Patreon, so I can help more animals!

Here’s What did Ancient Earth Look Like

Post author By M. Özgür Nevres
Post date April 5, 2018
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Ancient Earth (280 million years ago). Permian period. The concept of the Permian was introduced in 1841 by geologist Sir Roderick Murchison, who named it after the Russian city of Perm. The Permian witnessed the diversification of the early amniotes into the ancestral groups of the mammals, turtles, lepidosaurs, and archosaurs. The world at the time was dominated by two continents known as Pangaea and Siberia, surrounded by a global ocean called Panthalassa. The Carboniferous rainforest collapse left behind vast regions of desert within the continental interior. Amniotes, who could better cope with these drier conditions, rose to dominance in place of their amphibian ancestors. Extreme conditions such as polar ice caps and deserts limited the extent of plant life, but amphibious tetrapods and reptiles diversified where plants grew. Oceans teemed with fish and invertebrate life.

I stumbled upon an amazing web page showing what did ancient Earth look like. On the “Dinosaur Pictures and Facts” web page (dinosaurpictures.org), there’s also an interactive animation. On this page, you can either select the years (i.e. 600 million years ago) or jump to a particular event (i.e. first multicellular life) and see how ancient Earth did look like then. You can also remove the clouds and stop the Earth’s rotation if you want to.

Climate Life on Earth Places Plants

Iceland is growing new forests for the first time in 1,000 years

Post author By M. Özgür Nevres
Post date April 3, 2018
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Screenshot: Iceland growing forests — Iceland was extensively forested when it was first settled. When the Vikings first arrived in the 9th century, the Nordic island was covered in 25 to 40 percent forest, compared to 1% in the present day. In the late 12th century, Ari the Wise (Ari Thorgilsson, 1067–1148 AD), Iceland’s most prominent medieval chronicler, described it in the Íslendingabók (Book of Icelanders^{Notes 1}) as *“forested from mountain to sea shore”*. Unfortunately, after the permanent human settlement, the forests were heavily exploited for firewood, timber and to make room for farming. Within a few centuries, almost all of Iceland’s trees were gone. This rapid deforestation has resulted in massive soil erosion that puts the island at risk for desertification. Today, many farms have been abandoned. Three-quarters of Iceland’s 100,000 km²is affected by soil erosion, 18,000 km² (6,900 sq mi) serious enough to make the land useless. But,, with the help of forestry societies and forest farmers, Iceland's trees are slowly beginning to make a comeback.

Iceland was extensively forested when it was first settled. When the Vikings first arrived in the 9th century, the Nordic island was covered in 25 to 40 percent forest, compared to 1% in the present day. In the late 12th century, Ari the Wise (Ari Thorgilsson, 1067-1148 AD), Iceland’s most prominent medieval chronicler, described it in the Íslendingabók (Book of Icelanders (see notes 1) as “forested from mountain to seashore”.

Places Photography

Earth’s Wonders Like You Have Never Seen Them Before

Post author By M. Özgür Nevres
Post date April 2, 2018
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Earth Wonders Like You Have Never Seen Them Before: The Pearl-Qatar, Doha — The Pearl-Qatar, Doha, Qatar. November 11, 2017. "The Pearl" is a an artificial island off the coast of Doha. Image ©2018 Planet Labs, Inc. cc-by-sa 4.0. As of January 2015, there were 12,000 residents. Once fully completed, The Pearl will create over 32 kilometers of new coastline, for use as a residential estate with an expected 18,831 dwellings and 45,000 residents by 2018. The name "The Pearl" was chosen because the island is being built on one of Qatar's previous major pearl diving sites. Qatar was one of the major pearl traders of Asia before the Japanese introduced cheaper more affordable pearls just before Qatar's oil boom. The Pearl Qatar will help represent Qatar's rich past in the pearl industry. Once completed The Pearl will resemble a string of pearls.

Planet.com, a team of analysts and rocket scientists, software engineers, creatives, environmentalists, and researchers, have published an amazing post on their Medium account, @planetlabs. In the post titled “Earth’s Wonders Like You’ve Never Seen Them Before”, you can see amazing aerial photos of some famous places.

Below, you can see an example of the amazing photos published in the post: “The Pearl-Qatar”.

Space Exploration

Why You Shouldn’t Worry About the Uncontrolled Reentry of Tiangong-1 [China’s Falling Space Station]

Post author By M. Özgür Nevres
Post date March 31, 2018
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Tiangong-1 artist illustration — Artist’s illustration of China’s Tiangong-1 space station. Means literally “Heavenly Palace 1” in English, the 8.5-tonne spacecraft was China’s first prototype space station. Launched on 29 September 2011, and its operational life cycle was predicted at two years. On 21 March 2016, after its lifespan extended by two years, the Space Engineering Office of China announced that they had disabled data service since the space station had operated two and half years longer than its intended two-year service plan. The officials went on to state that the telemetry link with Tiangong-1 had been lost. But, a couple of months later, amateur satellite trackers watching Tiangong-1 began to speculate that China’s space agency had lost control of the station. Tiangong-1 started reentry over the southern Pacific Ocean, northwest of Tahiti, on 2 April 2018 at 00:15 UTC and burned up in the atmosphere.

Tiangong-1, China’s falling space station will make an uncontrolled re-entry on late Sunday, April 1, or early Monday, April 2. But, there’s no need to panic: the risk is quite low that people on Earth will be in danger. Since two-thirds of Earth’s surface is covered by water, any remaining debris that doesn’t burn up in the atmosphere has a high chance of falling into an ocean. In fact, in every few years, uncontrolled spacecraft of this size enter the Earth’s atmosphere.

Climate

Climate Reanalyzer [Visual Climate and Weather Datasets]

Post author By M. Özgür Nevres
Post date March 31, 2018
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Climate Reanalyzer World Temperature Map As of March 31, 2018 — World Temperature Map As of March 31, 2018. from Climate Reanalyzer (http://cci-reanalyzer.org), Climate Change Institute, University of Maine, USA. 2m means Maximum Temperature at 2 meters above the ground.

Today I stumbled upon on a beautiful website: the Climate Reanalyzer. In fact, Chris Hadfield, the retired Canadian astronaut and also who was the first Canadian to walk in space, tweeted about the website, saying “The current bulge of cold“. Then I visited the website and found it really informative.

Geography Oceans Places Planet Earth

7 Most Remote Places on Earth

Post author By M. Özgür Nevres
Post date March 24, 2018
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One of the most remote places on Earth - The South Pole of Inaccessibility. A bust of Lenin stands there. — One of the most remote places on Earth - The South Pole of Inaccessibility, Antarctica's most remote point, lies at 83°06'S 54°58'E, 878 km (546 miles) from the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. First reached in 1958 by the Soviet Antarctic Expedition, it has an elevation of 3,800 meters and the coldest year-round average temperature of -58.2°C (-72.8°F). A buried Soviet station with a bust of Lenin marks the site, now a historic monument. Its last visit was in 2011 during a transcontinental Antarctic crossing by Sebastian Copeland and Eric McNair-Landry. Image: Wikipedia

How far away can you get from everybody else on Earth? The answer is “actually quite far”, there are a lot of extremely remote places left in the world and some of them have actually yet to be reached by anybody in all of history. The world is an enormous place. Here are the most remote places on Earth.

Space Exploration Mars

Mars Curiosity Rover Celebrates Sol 2,000

Post author By M. Özgür Nevres
Post date March 24, 2018
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Mars Curiosity Rover Selfie — This self-portrait of NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows the vehicle at the "Mojave" site, where its drill collected the mission's second taste of Mount Sharp. The scene combines dozens of images taken during January 2015 by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera at the end of the rover's robotic arm. The pale "Pahrump Hills" outcrop surrounds the rover, and the upper portion of Mount Sharp is visible on the horizon. Darker ground at upper right and lower left holds ripples of wind-blown sand and dust. Image: NASA.gov Some conspiracy theorists ask "where is the robotic arm?", "who took this photo?", "who holds the camera" etc. The view does not include the rover's robotic arm. Wrist motions and turret rotations on the arm allowed MAHLI to acquire the mosaic's component images. The arm was positioned out of the shot in the images, or portions of images, that were used in this mosaic. This process was used previously in acquiring and assembling Curiosity self-portraits taken at sample-collection sites "Rocknest" (PIA16468), "John Klein" (PIA16937) and "Windjana" (PIA18390).

This week, NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover celebrated its 2,000th Martian day (or Sol) on the Red Planet. The nuclear-powered rover was launched from Cape Canaveral on November 26, 2011, and landed on Aeolis Palus in Gale Crater on Mars on August 6, 2012. A Mars day is slightly longer than a day here on Earth: a sidereal day is 24 hours, 37 minutes, and 22 seconds (on Earth, it is 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4.1 seconds) and a solar day is 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35 seconds (on Earth, 24 hours).

Earth from Space Life on Earth

“One Strange Rock” Trailer

Post author By M. Özgür Nevres
Post date March 22, 2018
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We live on a strange rock… and nobody realizes that better than astronauts. A new documentary, including astronaut experiences of looking down at Earth from space, is coming to National Geographic Channel soon. The award-winning American filmmaker and writer Darren Aronofsky, the American actor, producer, rapper, comedian, and songwriter Will Smith, and experienced astronauts join forces to tell the extraordinary story of why life as we know it exists on Earth. Premieres March 26 on the National Geographic Channel. Here’s the trailer of the “One Strange Rock” documentary.

Space Exploration Astronomy Science Fiction

Exoplanet Travel Bureau by NASA [Interactive 3D Images]

Post author By M. Özgür Nevres
Post date March 20, 2018
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NASA - Exoplanet Travel Bureau — Will we ever visit other stars? Maybe, in the distant future, if humans won't become extinct, our grand grand … (insert a hundred or a thousand grands here) children can stand on an exoplanet's surface someday. But, we don't have to wait. NASA has opened a new web page, an "Exoplanet Travel Bureau", and we can, at least, see the artists' imaginations of what an exoplanet surface look like, based on available data. NASA warns, there are no actual images of the exoplanets, obviously. With interactive 3D images, it is still an exciting experience.

Will we ever visit other stars? Maybe, in the distant future, if humans won’t become extinct, our grand grand grand … (insert a hundred or a thousand “grand” here) children can stand on an exoplanet’s surface someday. But, we don’t have to wait. NASA has opened a new web page, an “Exoplanet Travel Bureau”, and we can, at least, see the artists’ imaginations of what an exoplanet surface looks like, based on available data. NASA warns, there are no actual images of the exoplanets, obviously. With interactive 3D images, it is still an exciting experience.

Space Exploration Astronomy

Rotating Moon from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

Post author By M. Özgür Nevres
Post date March 19, 2018
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NASA APOD (Astronomy Picture of the Day) published an amazing video showing a rotating Moon. In fact, no one sees the Moon rotate like this. We see only one side of the Moon because the Moon is tidally locked to Earth. But, thanks to modern digital technology combined with many detailed images returned by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a high-resolution virtual Moon rotation movie has been composed.