Charles Darwin's Best-Kept Secret

beschra writes "BBC writes of 'terra-forming' Ascension Island, one of the islands Charles Darwin visited. He and a friend encouraged the Royal Navy to import boatloads of trees and plants in an attempt to capture the little bit of water that fell on the island. They were quite successful. The island even has a cloud forest now. From the article: '[British ecologist] Wilkinson thinks that the principles that emerge from that experiment could be used to transform future colonies on Mars. In other words, rather than trying to improve an environment by force, the best approach might be to work with life to help it "find its own way."'"

Comments

ok...

[garyisabusyguy]

let's spray the bugger with lichen, they seem to survive everywhere

http://library.thinkquest.org/26442/html/life/plant.html

Re:ok...

[Sir_Lewk]

You were modded funny, but it is not particularly hard to imagine a specially engineered lichen growing in the northern hemisphere of Mars. It could go dormant during the winter, and briefly grow during the summer when the sun begins to melt the (mostly CO2) icecap creating strong southward winds.

Scientists discover new extremophiles every year, the more we learn the more we discover the window that life can survive in is larger than we originally thought.

Re:Interesting tool

[BradleyUffner]

I had a hard time relating to that group in the book also. But I think it came down to how you see beauty. Something like the grand canyon, without any plant or animal life at all, is worthy of being preserved. The geography of Mars dwarfed anything seen in the Grand Canyon many times over, at a planetary scale. The splinter group felt that it was it's duty to preserve that geography so that people could better understand the solar system as a whole. At least that's the what I got from it. Red Mars really is a great series of books, it's worth the read.

Re:Interesting tool

[phantomfive]

A year or so ago I came across an article about some protesters who opposed creating garbage dumps in Nevada. They said, "sure, there's nothing here, but how many places are there with nothing??" Apparently not enough.

Create a Rain Forest in 20 Years

[Slur]

Here's a video about how a rainforest was created in only 20 years, altering weather and creating a habitat for abundant life. This could be done all over the world to mediate the effects of Human activity.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/willie_smits_restores_a_rainforest.html

Re:Mars?

[dargaud]

The lack of a magnetosphere will always present an issue for human life

I could probably run the computation, but I don't feel like it right now, so, would it be possible to create a magnetosphere by laying down a (supraconducting) cable along the equator and running a current through it ? Or more simply two shorter cables circling the poles ?

Darwin also...

[drkim]

Darwin was also a genius in many other ways...

Many years before the fossil and DNA discoveries that might have helped him, he conjectured that human life evolved on the continent of Africa and spread outward.

Re:Mars?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes you could!

And the problem is not the electricity that has to flow to build up the magnetic field (building the magnetic field takes energy, but given enough time, it can be done.) The real problem is the solar wind itself. As it tries to strip away the atmosphere, it pushes against the magnetic field. This costs energy and therefore a minimum power output to the superconducting cables.

I didn't do any calculations for this effect, but prepare to build a few BIG nuclear power plants.

Re:Mars?

[wisdom_brewing]

1) Build temperature regulated greenhouse
2) Fill it with higher pressure martian atmosphere (say 10x pressurised)
3) Pump in a "bit" more oxygen
4) Plant sugar cane first thing in the morning thats been kept alive elsewhere before
5) Sugar cane is bottlenecked by CO2 content of air on earth, on mars probably not, but it should create enough oxygen over the day to sustain itself at night.
6) ?????
7) Profit!!!

Re:Mars?

[sunspot42]

According to this article from 2007, that might not be the case:

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/070125_mars_atmosphere.html

Combining two years of observations by the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft, researchers determined that Mars is currently losing only about 20 grams of air per second into space.

Extrapolating this measurement back over 3.5 billion years, they estimate that only a small fraction, 0.2 to 4 millibars, of carbon dioxide and a few centimeters of water could have been lost to solar winds during that timeframe. (A bar is a unit for measuring pressure; Earth's atmospheric pressure is about 1 bar.)

Re:Lush tropical cloud forest?

[Alsee]

Cool overhead shot. It lead me to some even more illuminating ground photos.

This barren photo appears to represent the natural state of the island. If you go about one mile there's this photo from the edge of the green zone looking out over the barren island. A mere quarter mile further we find this photo at the heart of the green zone.

I'd say it's quite a striking transition from dry barren red rock to that wet greenery. I'd say it pretty well qualifies as "Terraformed! Like Jurassic Park style." It's all the more striking when you realize that you can walk from the barren desert on one side in to that third photo, and walk back out to barren desert on the other side, in probably less than two hours. I expect boundary is advancing at a decent rate each year, and the area of the biome increasing by the square of the radius.

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