That is an enormous amount of mass, and has resulted in the sea level rising about .46 millimeters per year, on average. Sea levels are rising more quickly in recent years though: From 2006 to 2008, it rose about 0.75 mm per year. Researchers, who published their findings in Science today, used both on-the-ground observations and combined them with satellite observations and both methods gave consistent results. Melting of the entire sheet is predicted to raise sea levels globally by about 20 feet, flooding many major cities.

These gorgeous photographs, taken by the science team during their research, show the unearthly beauty of massive ice sheet landscapes. Someday, this landscape may truly be science fiction - or at least, geological history.

via BBC News

The village is located in the heart of Vancouver.

Here are some of the green features built into the Village, which will hold Olympic competitors and visitors during the 2010 Olympics, but then be converted into a sustainable community afterwards:

* Neighbourhood energy system an environmentally-friendly community energy system that will provide space heating and domestic hot water to all buildings in the Southeast False Creek re-development area.
* Urban agriculture
* Rainwater management systems with 50% reduction in water consumption through harvesting and re-use of rainwater
* Green roofs
* Island and inter-tidal fish habitat
* Seaside greenway and bikeway

Planners say that the area, called Southeast False Creek, will be home to 12,000 to 16,000 people by 2020. They will live in 5,000 high-density, high-efficiency homes.

via Olympic Village Site

Photo by Stephanie Lamy/AFP/Getty Images

1: Pump the atmosphere full of nanomachines to get "smart weather."

In Century Rain by Alastair Reynolds, people seed the oceans and the upper atmosphere with tons of tiny floating machines, "invisible to the eye, harmless to people." They controlled the weather and fixed the climate by reflecting radiation here or absorbing it there. The machines made clouds appear and disappear and controlled ocean currents. And it works — for a while. The climate starts returning to pre-2050 conditions. But then the nanomachines stop obeying orders, and even create an obscene symbol off the Bay Of Biscay "that had to be airbrushed out of every satellite image." The scientists try to release even smarter nanomachines to deal with the first batch of nanomachines and — well, you can guess how well that turns out.

2: A ring of ice.

In the Stanislaw Lem novel Fiasco, scientists launch an artificial ring of ice into the atmosphere of the planet Quinta to reduce temperatures so the oceans will recede and more land mass will be available. The mass of the ice ring is equal to around 1 percent of the oceans' volume. The protagonists speculate that the ring was created by causing lightning in the upper atmosphere to create a kind of ice rail-gun that could shoot the ice up into orbit. This being a Stanislaw Lem novel, the whole thing falls apart due to political wrangling before it can be completed, so huge chunks of ice rain down onto the planet's equator in a never-ending torrent.

3: Use special bacteria.

In the story "Noah's Ark" by Narendra Desirazu, we find bacteria on Mars, with bizarre properties — it hibernates just below the freezing point of water, but when the water melts, the bacteria goes into frantic activity to get the water to refreeze. So scientists struggle with the effort to introduce the bacteria only to the icecaps and other areas where they want to reverse melting — without letting it get into, say, our oceans and stuff. Luckily, there's a happy but "ambivalent" ending.

4: Build a giant sunshade around the Earth.

We build huge space elevators and a massive sunshade in The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod, causing the dawn light to look all trippy:

The dawn sky glowed innumerable shades of green, from lemon to duck-egg to almost blue, like the background colour in a Hindu painting, and turned slowly to a pure deep blue over ten minutes or more as he watched. He dozed again.

Also, Arthur C. Clarke's Fountains Of Paradise includes a ring of satellites and space stations linked together around a planet's equator by cables and other connectors, which becomes an unbroken wheel of tremendous stability — which presumably can reflect a lot of sunlight. And in Clarke's Childhood's End, the Overlords are able to use polarized fields to "make the sun go out" for a particular region of South Africa, to punish the residents for depriving the white minority of civil rights. And in Venus Of Dreams by Pamela Sargent, colonists cool the planet Venus by using a giant Parasol to shade the planet, plus bombarding the planet with ice asteroids.

5: Take Earth further away from the sun.

The Futurama episode "Crimes Of The Hot" is like a smorgasbord of global-warming solutions. We learn that humans stopped global warming in the 21st century by bombarding the oceans with ice from space. And now that the planet is heating up again, due to the emissions from unsafe robots, there are a few solutions, including a giant space mirror (which goes awry) and shutting down all the robots. But in the end, the easiest solution is to have all the robots emit their exhaust at once, sending the planet further away from the sun — and giving us an extra week in each year, which can be Robot Party Week!

And in the novel The Circle: A Science Fiction Thriller by Harold R. Watson, the High Rulers Of Earth decide to haul the planet away from the sun to put it into a deep freeze for one year. At the end of that time, they'll return Earth to its original orbit. As some of the planet's icy covering melts, it'll have the effect of restoring the ozone layer, and after about five years, enough vegetation will have grown to make the planet habitable again. Suuuure.

6: Hack The Human Genome

It's a radical solution, but it might be the only way. In the story "Dear Abbey" by Terry Bisson, a group of radical environmentalists come up with a plan:

Dear Abbey is a radical, long-range plan for saving the environment that will make Ted Kaczynski look like Mother Teresa. It involves an alarmingly complex but theoretically possible piece of genetic engineering that will, let us say, severely inhibit the ability of humans to degrade the environment. Severe being the operative modifier. You can't call it terrorism because no one will be killed, directly at least, and no one will even know for sure what is happening until it has been operating for at least a decade, by which time it will be too late to undo it. The human cost will be high but not nearly as high as the cost of doing nothing, or of simply continuing with the kind of pointless stunts for which the environmental movement is known.

7: Restart the Gulf Stream

Kim Stanley Robinson is the champion of depicting environmental disasters and geo-hacking projects, and his environmental thrillers Forty Signs Of Rain and Fifty Degrees Below deal with the disastrous effects of global warming. Among other things, Fifty Degrees includes scientists trying to restart the stalled Gulf Stream. The ice caps melt completely, and in the winter, Washington, D.C. hits fifty degrees below. So an enormous fleet of ships ventures out to dump millions of tons of ice into the ocean in the hopes of rebooting the Gulf Stream. A fleet of 3,500 oil tankers is available to transport the salt, and five hundred million metric tons of salt is needed — about two years' worth of total world production.

8: Shut down all our technology

I'm still not entirely sure what happened at the end of last year's "remake" (quotation marks are necessary here) of The Day The Earth Stood Still. Keanu/Klaatu was going to unleash nanomachines to disassemble everything on Earth, because that would save the planet. You know that makes sense! And then he changed his mind and did some kind of EMP-ish thing that made all electricity go out and all technology stop working. So the human race was allowed to survive, but with no technology. Keanu is merciful! All hail Keanu!

9: Open a big hole.

Global warming? No problem! Just open a dimensional gateway and pump all the extra heat somewhere else. That's the scheme that a science whiz comes up with in the Stargate Atlantis episode "Brain Storm" (featuring Bill Nye the Science Guy, among other luminaries.) Of course, it all goes horribly wrong and the gathering of eminent scientists is in danger of freezing to death.


Also, in the Syfy movie Lost City Raiders, the world is flooded due to global warming. And the Catholic Church has the answer — an ancient hole in the ground, which will drain off all the excess water to... somewhere. But you need to find the secret hidden keys to open it. It all makes perfect sense!

10: Kill the aliens who are causing the problem in the first place.

But of course, you know deep down that global warming can't really be the result of our own completely harmless activities. There must be aliens behind it — probably evil dinosaur aliens. In the Syfy original TV movie, Heatstroke, it turns out that dinosaur people have been secretly working to pump out greenhouse gases to raise our planet's temperature and prepare the way for their invasion. But the U.S. government knows about this and sends a secret taskforce (why not a whole army? Budget constraints, I guess) to stop them. The aliens are operating on a tropical island, where an ex-swimsuit model just happens to be shooting a new calendar. It's like synergy! Oh, and there's also The Arrival directed by David Twohy, where Charlie Sheen discovers that weird double-jointed aliens are producing greenhouse gases to mess us up and transform our planet. Good thing it's Charlie Sheen, then.


Oh, and the Silurians in Doctor Who And The Silurians also have a similar idea about raising the planet's temperature, but they don't get very far with it.

Additional reporting by Alexis Brown. This post also would have been a lot harder to write without the never-ending awesomeness that is Technovelgy.com.

Many forests packed with trees are now submerged in lakes, mostly due to humans rerouting water for dams and setting up reservoirs. Though they've been underwater for decades in some cases, their trees still make for good lumber. And since the trees are already dead, it's an environmentally-friendly way to get a lot of wood without cutting into living forests on dry land.

Triton Logging is a company that specializes in lumber processing, and they've got a giant underwater saw robot that can clearcut submerged trees - by remote control, from a desktop computer. Wired did an interesting article about Triton a couple of years ago, and now they're in the news again at Environmental Graffiti, where Linda McCormick wonders why Triton's Sawfish robot hasn't caught on, despite there being possibly 300 million submerged trees. (Some might even be thousands of years old.)

Tree chopping image by Kevin Hand, via Wired.

The fly ash, collected from airborne pollution released in the making of coal, is quite dangerous for the environment, and locals report some areas are buried in up to 6 feet of ash. The biggest concern right now in terms of cleanup is keeping the slurry from reaching the Tennessee river, which feeds into the Mississippi and provides water for Tennessee, Alabama and Kentucky.

SOURCES: Scholars & Rogues (which links to a lot of other great sources) and AP News.

Photo via AP Photo/Wade Payne.

Instead of working rice paddies, Chinese farmers today care for solar cells that feed energy-hungry cities. Below, you can see smog-shrouded Xining looming over its new power station. The solar farm will expand considerably before it's complete.

Photo by China Photos/Getty Images.

Hey, the Internet is awesome, right? It's like a magic fruit machine, except instead of fruit, it dispenses information. And blogs, which are like the nasty seeds inside the fruit. But anyway — what if we could have an Internet, but for electricity? Hook up all of your appliances to the information superhighway and ensure that they talk to the grid and figure out how to use the least amount of electricity possible? Or only guzzle electricity during non-peak hours? This will lead to "clean electrons" because they'll be SMART electrons. They'll be electrons with their own MySpace page. Our cars, our dishwashers, our xBoxes, will all be talking to each other about ways to reduce their carbon footprint. ("Hey xBox," I can just hear the refrigerator saying, "I'm about to make some ice. Can you generate fewer pixels for a minute?")

To be fair, Friedman's book also does call for hard steps amongst all the gee-whiz awesomeness. He wants the government to impose a whole new regime of taxes and incentives, including cap-and-trade schemes, to give everybody the incentives to make those electrons as smart as they can be. Electrons don't educate themselves, you know. [IHT and Free Press and Business Lexington]

Latham explains that it's all about making clouds more reflective. When the salt spray gets taken up into the clouds, the salt crystals allow more drops of water to form. And a cloud with more water in it can reflect more sunlight. Ultimately, Latham hopes, this means that less sunlight will reach Earth and allow the oceans to cool down. If his plan were put into practice right away, it's possible we could prevent the Arctic ice sheet from breaking up, and keep those giant ice shelves from crumbling in Antarctica. As the cooled ocean currents circulate throughout the world, global temperatures will lower too.

According to Physics World:

Latham maintains that his group’s idea is not pie in the sky and that its feasibility is supported by two of the world’s leading computer climate models, as well as recently obtained experimental cloud data. He points out that, unlike rival techniques, the system could be used to vary the degree of cooling as required and could be switched off instantaneously if needed. However, he adds more research must be done to find out a number of unknowns — such as exactly what fraction of spray droplets will reach the clouds — and to establish that the technique would not create any harmful climatic side effects. More work must also be done on the spray technology, he says.

Before you get excited, futurist Jamais Cascio, who writes a lot about geoengineering, has some words of warning:

A couple of really important factors, worth keeping in mind when evaluating these kinds of proposals:

1) Albedo-changing geoengineering (like the water spray, or stratospheric sulphate particles) is a symptom-reduction treatment, not a cause-reduction treatment. This means that if you stop the geoengineering — and you haven't been reducing carbon outputs — all of the heat comes back, and there's even a "bounce" effect where it can get warmer faster than it would have otherwise.

2) Geoengineering of this sort does nothing about carbon, but excess carbon does more than just warm the air. Ocean acidification is probably the biggest problem, causing coral extinctions, diatom extinctions (HUGE foodchain implications), and similar nastiness.

Geoengineering is useful if it's coupled with carbon-reduction, since it can slow the onset of some of the warming-related catastrophes. It's not a cure or a solution for global warming, though. It's a cough-suppressant — can be ideal for letting you sleep and get rid of your flu, but can make the flu stick around longer if all you do is use it to get through a work day.

Cloud-Seeding Ships Could Combat Climate Change [via Physics World] Thanks, Ethan!

Space construction from science fiction:

Science fiction is full of lavish descriptions of objects being built or assembled in space, from small robots to structures the size of a solar system. And many mega-structures described in science fiction must have been built in space, since they're too big to have been put together inside a gravity well.

Probably the most famous instance of outer space construction comes from Star Trek. There's a huge controversy over whether the USS Enterprise NCC 1701 (without any bloody A, B, C, D, or E) was built in space or not. And the long-simmering debate was boosted into a roaring flame-war by the teaser trailer for J.J. Abrams' Star Trek movie, which appeared to show the starship being constructed on Earth. There's evidence on both sides: supposedly Trek creator Gene Roddenberry stated the Enterprise was built in orbit, but there are also sources that said it was built in San Francisco. But we do know the earlier Enterprise, the NX-01, was built in space, and so were the NCC-1701-D and USS Voyager. Here's a picture of the Utopia Planitia shipyards, from Memory Alpha:There are also tons of other shipyards in space, including the famous "Mon Calamari Shipyards" and several other orbital shipyards in Star Wars. Pictured at the top of this post are the orbital shipyards of Kuat, from the Wookiepedia. And of course, the massive Death Star had to be constructed in space.

Science fiction is full of space elevators and other "megastructures" that must be built, at least partly, in space. Arthur C. Clarke's Fountains Of Paradise and Charles Sheffield's The Web Between The Worlds both involve a kind of "skyhook" or orbital tower, which connects the Earth's equator to a satellite in geosynchronous orbit. In the Clarke book, eventually five more "spokes" are built from Earth, to form a structure resembling a ship's wheel.

Other space megastructures, such as ringworlds, discworlds, Dyson Spheres and artificial planets, would be impossible, or near-impossible, to build inside an existing gravity well. In the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, we get to see the massive planet-building area hidden in hyperspace and accessible through an opening in the planet Magrathea:

In Asimov's I, Robot, the robot QT (aka Cutie) deduces that he's superior to the humans, partly because he has no memory of being assembled in space, from parts built on Earth. As far as he knows, he just turned up in space, fully formed.

"Something made you, Cutie," pointed out Powell. "You admit yourself that your memory seems to spring full-grown from the absolute blankness of a week ago. I'm giving you the explanation. Donovan and I put you together from the parts shipped us."

Cutie gazed upon his long, supple fingers in an oddly human attitude of mystification. "It seems to me that there should be a more satisfactory explanation than that. For you to make me seems improbable."

In R. Cordwainer Smith's "Think Blue, Count Two," he specifies that the massive solar sails which people use to sail across the universe were constructed in the vaccuum:

Before the great ships whispered between the stars by means of planoforming, people had to fly from star to star with immense sails - huge films assembled in space on long, rigid, coldproof rigging.

Real-life applications:

So what are the real-life applications of the idea of building in space? We've already proved we can put together a space station in orbit, but we're not likely to be building dozens of those any time soon. It's entirely possible that more robots like Dextre, with complex and multi-jointed arms, will be built in space to handle satellites and space junk. We're definitely not likely to be building space elevators, Dyson Spheres or orbital stations any time soon.

But here are a few other ideas that are being batted around for big space construction projects. Some of them relate to mega-environmentalism. Some people claim we can halt global warming in its tracks by building mega-structures, such as space mirrors, or giant nanofiber "sun shades," in orbit. These would deflect some of the sunlight reaching Earth, and they'd need to be constructed in space.

Also, a mooted solar power satellite, which would collect solar energy from orbit and beam it back to Earth, would almost certainly need to be constructed in orbit. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency wants to have one of these up and running by 2030.

Also, when we get around to building long-range spaceships to explore or colonize outside our solar system, we'll have to build them in space. Some observers argue that these large ships could be constructed using some Near-Earth Objects (NEOs) as raw materials and maybe also as a shell for human habitats.

But a lot sooner than that, big and expensive satellites may be constructed in orbit, to save on launching costs. Last year, some small Japanese "spider robots" successfully crawled out along a net linking three satellites in orbit. They only functioned for a short time, but scientists saw the test as an important proof of concept. In a few years, we could be launching big antennas and solar panels into space in pieces, using small, cheap rockets. And then tiny robots could assemble them in space.

So for the sake of the human race, let's hope J.J. Abrams' Trek movie comes down on the side of the Enterprise having been built in orbit. Our future as a species may depend on getting people used to the idea of large-scale outer space construction.

Don't expect giant machines that can purify the atmosphere or nanotech that can reverse global warming just yet. The U.S. government has yet to approve the fledgling agency which would unify several independent researchers and university labs with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Basically, it would be an Earth-monitoring super-group whose goals are to research and solve humanity's crimes against the biosphere.

USGS director Charles Grote, who is helping to put the group together, isn't quite as grandiose when explaining the ESSA's mission:

The USGS, in bringing not only its geologic, biologic, hydrologic and geospatial expertise to the understanding of natural systems, but also its research capabilities in energy, mineral, water, and biologic resources, gives the new organization a comprehensive perspective on both environmental and resource systems. If we effectively link these capabilities with those of NOAA, we will have a powerful research institution

But David Rejeski, former member of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, is thinking bigger:

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has demonstrated the value of funding high-risk, high-reward research and development. ESSA should foster similar ventures in the environmental arena.

Given the kinds of projects that have come out of DARPA, including the internet and swarm robots, Rejeski is clearly hoping for giant robots who can cool down the oceans or clean up chemical spills. That's what we're hoping for too.

Earth Systems Science Agency, we have a planetary emergency! Help us before it's too late!

Image from Earth Sons.

Organizing an Earth Systems Science Agency [Nature via Eurekalert]

You can get in for free if you can prove you walked or bicycled to the club. Otherwise it's 10 pounds. According to Environmental Graffiti:

Based at Bar Surya in Pentonville Road, the club is owned by property millionaire and head of new climate change organization Club4Climate, Andrew Charalambous. The Greek-Cypriot businessman is trying to reach out to young people in an effort to save the world . . . Apparently everyone [who goes to the club] needs to sign a pledge promising to work towards curbing climate change. Is it just me or does that sound annoying?

It does sound annoying, especially if they want your e-mail or address so they can spam you. Hopefully the weird pledge thing won't get off the ground, but these dance floors will become more popular. I want one for my flat right now.

Eco-Nightclub [via Environmental Graffiti]

As you can see above, the city of Los Angeles would look a lot less ugly and disheartening if you could just wipe this traffic jam (photographed by The Infamous Gdub) out of existence and bring the city's formerly glorious cable car system back to life. If you ever want to see the LA cable car system of yore, it makes many exciting appearances in Harold Lloyd's 1923 comedy Safety Last!.

Right now, the city of Baltimore is considering upgrading its mass transit to include aerial gondolas, a system of elevated trams on cables with a tiny carbon footprint. They would initially service mostly the convention center and waterfront areas, but could branch out all over the city. Apparently gondola-makers have recently seen a spike in requests for mass transit systems, and even New York City is considering an aerial gondola to take commuters from Manhattan to Governor's Island and on to Brooklyn. Here is what the proposed gondolas might look like on a typical Baltimore city street (original photo from Zaloudek.net).

Seattle has a long and tragic history with monorails, once believed to be the public transit of the future. Just recently, the city voted to expand its tiny, largely-decorative monorail system, built for the World's Fair back in the 1960s. But urban planners have been trying to make Seattle a monorail city since 1910, when a Seattle monorail was first proposed (and shelved). We have yet to see whether the city will act on this latest vote for the monorail, but this is what you might see in downtown Seattle (original photo by GiSuser) if the system started ferrying commuters.

Although Melbourne has one of the most extensive electronic tram systems in the world, it might have been much bigger if early-twentieth century plans to expand it hadn't been derailed. If you look at images of late-nineteenth century Melbourne, you'll see a peaceful city full of trams and horses, but no traffic jams. Here's what Melbourne might look like today if the automobile had never taken over, and the city had become a haven for trams.

If you've ever visited San Francisco, you know that the downtown area is dominated by a wide street called Market (original photo by Hyku). What you probably don't know is that Market is actually a gushing river that early city planners decided to bury underground just to make everything nicer for carriages — and, later, cars. If we'd built San Francisco to cooperate with the region's actual geography, downtown San Francisco might have a system of canals like the ones in Venice (original photo by Minnaert). People could boat to work instead of burning gas in their cars.

Photoshoppage on all images by Stephanie Fox.

Abengoa Solar's PS10 power plant generates 11 megawatts of clean power, supplying more than 5,000 households. The heliostats automatically swivel to follow the sun and focus maximum sunlight on the receiver at the top of the tower. The company claims the potential to generate temperatures in the neighborhood of 1,800 degrees F with an efficiency 25 percent greater than current photovoltaic technology. Prototype towers were tested in the U.S., but PS10 is the first commercial plant. More Spanish towers are planned with greater power generating capacity.

How hard would it be to put a mirror array like this into orbit? With GPS, it would have pinpoint accuracy, cause incredible damage and leave no unpleasant radioactivity behind. Company reps swear they have absolutely no plans to demand a $500 million ransom from the world's governments to keep them from incinerating cities. Top photo by: afloresm. Schematic by: Abengoa.

11 Megawatt Solar Power Tower [EcoGeek]

Cory developed the balloons with aerospace engineer Pini Gurfil. The two say that these balloons would be good for off-the-grid applications, like setting up a camp after a disaster or pumping energy into a house far from electricity generators. Because the balloons are so lightweight and energy-efficient, they can be quickly deployed and moved around.

According to Inhabitat:

Cory and Gurfil have constructed several prototypes and have conducted research to show that a 10 ft balloon could provide around a kilowatt of energy (equivalent to 25 square meters of solar panels). Their target cost is $4,000 per balloon, compared to the $10,000 it would cost for a solar field producing the same amount of energy. The balloons will last about a year without needing maintenance.

Solar Balloons [Inhabitat]

Sanderson hopes that pictures like this, and one of Tribeca below, will inspire people to consider how much impact they've had on the natural environment — and perhaps give them pause when they think about intervening in it further.

According to Treehugger's Bonnie Hulkower, who recently saw Sanderson give a talk about his work:

Sanderson has been working on the Mannahatta Project for the last decade. He first became fascinated with his adopted city after he accepted a position here with the Wildlife Conservation Society, and began to study old maps. One map in particular, an 18th-century British Headquarters map, fascinated him. The map, made for British officers defending the island, details the contours of the island's topography, swamp, and river locations. Sanderson has been using this British map, Randel's Farm Maps, and a GPS system to create his own contour map of what Manhattan looked like in 1609, when Henry Hudson and his crew sailed into New York Harbor and the island was inhabited only by the Lenape. He has been able to produce an expansive vision of Mannahatta's ecologic richness through a computer program he created, named "Muir webs," after the famous naturalist John Muir.

Sanderson is using his program to map what would have existed on each city block in Mannahatta 400 years ago. The program works through a process of matching animals to their habitats and vice-versa. By knowing that a certain animal species existed in an area of Manhattan and knowing what that animal ate, Sanderson can predict through the Muir webs program what plants or soils would have been there as well, or conversely can use knowledge of plants and soils to discover what animals would have found a habitat in any specific area.

Ecologist Maps Manhattan of 400 Years Ago [Treehugger]

Mapping Manhatta Slideshow [New Yorker]

In Salaise-sur-Sanne, southern France, the Tredi factory is packed with high tech purification systems that handle extreme toxic cleanups like the one in 2006 in Ivory Coast that involved 6,000 tons of toxic waste and killed 10 people. Where does all your waste plastic from bottles and wrappers and tupperware go? To this factory in Qingzhou City, Shandong Province, China. Tons of plastic gets melted down and converted into threads and grain-shaped pieces. The results are sold to factories as raw materials. People help feed the garbage machines, too. Plastic straws are laid out in vast bales and piles to dry in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Once dried, they'll be shipped to a plastic recycling factory. Bangladesh has a near 100 percent recycling rate for its waste, and has one of the most efficient plastic recycling systems in the world. Dealing with waste can be very low-tech and industrial. In Ghana, workers turn waste into fuel for the local palm oil plant. Here you can see them scooping it into a steam-driven machine that powers the factory. The lowest-tech waste disposal job falls to these Palestinian workers, who use sledgehammers to break up the remains of a bombed factory. The cement and metals will be recycled. Images via Getty.

Here are the giant water bottle's many regular-sized friends (its mini-mes, if you will): And here it is close up: Now, from a distance: Photos via MAURICIO LIMA/AFP/Getty Images.

Air Tree Structures in Madrid [Inhabitat]