Iceland

I have this interesting class. It's called water security. It covers topics like hydrology, contamination, supply, and political issues about water. On Monday The teacher had us go to a lecture instead of class so, like a good student I went. I got to the auditorium and sort of wandered about the extra police hanging around and a few guys with little wires running up to their ears. After going in and reading the hand out I saw that we were going to be listening to a lecture by the president of Iceland on climate change and clean energy sources. That was not what I was expecting, but the president of Iceland is pretty cool guy. Iceland is the leader in the world in clean energy production. 100% of the electricity production is from renewable energy sources. They have an extensive geothermal system, and a wide spread hydrogen based transportation system including buses and cars. They are experimenting with this way of CO2 sequestration where they pump CO2 down into the ground and when it contacts a basalt strata it turns into carbon rock. I think this is still in the developing stages but it is kind of a cool idea of a way to get rid of CO2. He said that with their new drilling technology, there are over 70 countries that can do geothermal energy. They are drilling 3-5 km deep now. Anyway, he was a fun speaker, and it made me want to be the president of a small country sometime.

Here are some cool links that we were looking at in class the other day.

At this USGS sight you can see real time flow rates on over 6000 water gaging stations in the US.
Here is another one about world sats you can see the shape of the world if it was shaped in relation to almost any thing, GDP, literacy, pop, women no in tertiary education, rainfall ect. It is pretty cool