ECTalks

“The phenomena of the physical world collectively, including plants, animals, the landscape, and other features and products of the earth, as opposed to humans or human creations”.

IMPORTANCE OF NATURE IN OUR LIVES

• Fresh water: There is no physical substance humans require more than freshwater: without water we can only survive a few hellish days. While pollution and overuse has threatened many of the world’s drinking water sources, nature has an old-fashioned solution, at least, to pollution. Healthy freshwater ecosystems—watersheds, wetlands, and forests—naturally clean pollution and toxins from water. Soils, microorganisms, and plant roots all play a role in filtering and recycling out pollutants with a price far cheaper than building a water filtration plant. According to research, the more bio-diverse the ecosystem, the faster and more efficiently water is purified.
• Pollination: Imagine trying to pollinate every apple blossom in an orchard: this is what nature does for us. Insects, birds, and even some mammals, pollinate the world’s plants, including much of human agriculture. Around 80% of the world’s plants require a different species to act as pollinator. In agriculture, pollinators are required for everything from tomatoes to cocoa, and almonds to buckwheat, among hundreds of other crops. Globally, agricultural pollination has been estimated to be worth around $216 billion a year. However large such monetary estimates don’t include pollination for crops consumed by livestock, bio-fuels, ornamental flowers, or the massive importance of wild plant pollination.

• Seed dispersal: Much like pollination, many of the world’s plants require other species to move their seeds from the parent plant to new sprouting ground. Seeds are dispersed by an incredibly wide-variety of players: birds, bats, rodents, megafauna like elephants and tapir, and even, researchers have recently discovered, fish. Seed dispersal is especially important for tropical forests where a majority of plants depend on animals to move.
• Pest control: A recent study found that bats save US agriculture billions of dollars a year simply by doing what they do naturally: eating insects, many of which are potentially harmful to US crops. Almost all agricultural pests have natural enemies, along with bats, these include birds, spiders, parasitic wasps and flies, fungi, and viral diseases. The loss, or even decline, of such pest-eating predators can have massive impacts on agriculture and ecosystems.
• Soil health: The ground under our feet matters more than we often admit. Healthy fertile soil provides optimal homes for plants, while participating in a number of natural cycles: from recycling nutrients to purifying water. Although soil is renewable, it is also sensitive to overuse and degradation often due to industrial agriculture, pollution, and fertilizers. Natural vegetation and quality soil also mitigates excessive erosion, which can have dramatic impacts from loss of agricultural land to coastlines simply disappearing into the sea.
• Medicine: Nature is our greatest medicine cabinet: to date it has provided humankind with a multitude of life-saving medicines from quinine to aspirin, and from morphine to numerous cancer and HIV-fighting drugs. There is no question that additionally important medications—perhaps even miracle cures—lie untapped in the world’s ecosystems. In fact, researchers estimate that less than 1% of the world’s known species have been fully examined for their medicinal value. However the ecosystems that have yielded some of the world’s most important and promising drugs—such as rain forests, peat swamps, and coral reefs—are also among the most endangered. Preserving ecosystems and species today may benefit, or even save, millions of lives tomorrow. 

• Fisheries: Humankind has turned to the rivers and seas for food for at least 40,000 years but probably even longer. Today, amid concern of a global fishery collapse, more than a billion people depend on fish as their primary source of protein, many of them among the global poor. Fisheries also provide livelihoods, both directly and indirectly, for around half a billion. Coral reefs, mangroves, and sea grass ecosystems provide nurseries for the world’s fisheries, while the open ocean is used for migrating routes and hunting. Even with the direct importance of the world’s fisheries for food, stewardship has been lacking, allowing many populations to drop precipitously and still permitting ecologically destructive fishing. While the world’s fisheries are primarily threatened by over fishing, including bycatch, marine pollution is also a major problem.
• Biodiversity and wildlife abundance: The argument to save the world’s wildlife has often come from an aesthetic point of view. Many conservationists have fought to save species simply because they like a particular species. This is often why more popularly known animals—tigers, elephants, rhinos—receive far more attention than less popular (although just as endangered) wildlife—for example, the red belly egg frog, the smokey bat, or the bastard quiver tree. But beyond making the world a less lonely, less boring, and less beautiful place—admirable reasons in themselves—many of the services provided by biodiversity are similar to those provided by all of nature. Biodiversity produces food, fibers, wood products; it cleans water, controls agricultural pests, pollinates and dispersers the world plants; and provides recreation, such as bird watching, gardening, diving, and ecotourism.
• Climate regulation: The natural world helps regulate the Earth’s climate. Ecosystems such as rain forests, peat lands, and mangroves store significant amounts of carbon, while the ocean captures massive amounts of carbon through phytoplankton. While regulating greenhouse gases are imperative in the age of climate change, new research is showing that the world’s ecosystems may also play a role in weather. A recent study found that the Amazon rain forest acted as its own ‘bioreactor’, producing clouds and precipitation through the abundance of plant materials in the forest.
• Economy: In the common tension viewed between the economy and the environment—e.g. do we clear-cut a forest or conserve it?—one fact is often neglected: the environment underpins the entire global economy. Without fertile soils, clean drinking water, healthy forests, and a stable climate, the world’s economy would face disaster. By imperiling our environment, we imperil the economy. According to research published in Science, the global worth of total ecosystem services could run between $40-60 trillion a year.

• Health: Recent research has found what nature-lovers have long expected: spending time in a green space, such as a park, provides benefits for one’s mental and physical health. Exercising in a park, instead of inside a gym, has shown to provide mental health benefits as a greater sense of well-being. Walking for 20 minutes in a green space has been proven to help children with ADHD improve their concentration, even working as well, or better, than medication. People who live in more natural settings have better overall health, even when research has taken into account economic differences.
• Art: Imagine poetry without flowers, painting without landscapes, or film without scenery. Imagine if Shakespeare had no rose to compare Juliet to, or if William Blake had no Tyger to set alight. Imagine if Van Gogh lacked crows to paint or Durer a rhinoceros to cut. What would the Jungle Book be without Baloo or the Wind in the Willows without Mr. Badger? Imagine My Antonia without the red grass of the American prairie or Wuthering Heights without the bleak moors. How would The Lord of the Rings film series appear without the stunning mountain ranges of New Zealand, or Lawrence of Arabia without the desert of North Africa? There is no question that the natural world has provided global arts with some of its greatest subjects. What we lose in nature, we also lose in art.
• Spiritual: While some of what nature provides us is measurable, most of what nature gives us is simply beyond measure. Economic measurements are useful; but as with most of what happens in the world, economics is simply incapable of capturing true worth. Science is also a useful measurement regarding the importance of nature, but once again cannot measure what nature means—practically and aesthetically—to each individual.

WHY IT’S IMPORTANT to VALUE NATURE?

Because nature is free, we often take it for granted and over exploit it. We clear forests, over fish oceans, pollute rivers and build over wetlands without taking account of the impact this will have. By not taking into account the benefits we get from nature, we create huge social and economic costs for ourselves.

NATURE V/S ENVIRONMENT

Rice engineers' study reveals critical role of molecular confinement in interpreting NMR

Date:

April 13, 2020

Source:

Rice University

Summary:

Engineers put to rest a long-held theory about the use of nuclear magnetic resonance to detect oil and gas deposits in the nanoscale pores of shale formations.

Rice University engineers have put to rest a long-held theory about the detection of oil and gas that hides inside the nanoscale pores of shale formations.
The Rice researchers determined that puzzling indicators from nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) tools are not due, as thought, to the paramagnetic properties of the rock but solely to the size of the space that traps the petrochemicals.
The team expects the discovery will lead to better interpretation of NMR logs by the oil and gas industry, especially in unconventional shale formations.
The study's authors -- senior investigators Dilip Asthagiri, Philip Singer, George Hirasaki and Walter Chapman and graduate student Arjun Valiya Parambathu, all of the Brown School of Engineering's Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering -- have been at the forefront in using atomistic simulations to refine how to interpret NMR relaxation behavior.
Their paper in the Journal of Physical Chemistry B builds on earlier work from the same group and elucidates the critical role of molecular confinement on NMR relaxation response.
NMR relaxation is an important tool to nondestructively measure the dynamics of molecules in porous materials. NMR is commonly used to detect diseased tissues in the human body, but is also employed to help extract oil and gas safely and economically by characterizing sedimentary rocks to see if they contain hydrocarbons.
NMR manipulates the nuclear magnetic moments of hydrogen nuclei by applying external magnetic fields and measuring the time it takes for the moments to "relax" back to equilibrium. Because relaxation times differ depending on the molecule and its environment, the information gathered by NMR, specifically the relaxation times known as T1 and T2, can help identify whether a molecule is gas, oil or water and the size of the pores that contain them.
A puzzle in the field has been to explain the large T1/T2 ratio of light hydrocarbons confined in such nanoporous material as kerogen or bitumen (aka asphalt) and the mechanism behind NMR surface relaxation, a phenomenon that emerges when formerly free molecules are adjacent to the surfaces that confine them.
Specifically, the researchers note, the T1/T2 ratio of hydrocarbons in kerogen is found to be much larger than the T1/T2 ratio of water in clays. While this contrast in T1/T2 has potential for predicting hydrocarbon reserves in unconventional shale formations, the fundamental mechanism behind it remained elusive.
The conventional explanation of the large T1/T2 ratio in kerogen invoked the physics of paramagnetism that dictate how materials respond to magnetic fields.
Through large-scale atomistic simulations by Valiya Parambathu, Chapman and Asthagiri and experiments by Singer and Hirasaki, the Rice team showed that explanation is not correct.
In the study, the team showed instead that the large T1/T2 ratio emerges as a consequence of confining the hydrocarbon in a tight space.
"In physical terms, under strong confinement, the correlation times of the molecular motions get longer," Asthagiri said.
"These longer correlation times result in faster NMR relaxation -- that is shorter T1 and T2 times," Singer added. "This effect is more pronounced for T2 than it is for T1, which results in a large T1/T2 ratio."
Chapman noted the team is also interested in exploring ideas presented in the paper in the context of medical MRI.

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