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Geothermal → Geothermal gradient is the rate of increasing temperature with respect to increasing depth in the Earth's interior. Away from tectonic plate boundaries, it is 22.1°C per km of depth (1°F per 70 feet of depth) in most of the world. Strictly speaking, geo-thermal necessarily refers to the Earth but the concept may be applied to other planets. The Earth's internal heat comes from a combination of residual heat from planetary accretion (about 20%) and heat produced through radioactive decay (80%). The major heat-producing isotopes in the Earth are potassium-40, uranium-238, uranium-235, and thorium-232. At the center of the planet, the temperature may be up to 7,000 K and the pressure could reach 360 GPa. Because much of the heat is provided by radioactive decay, scientists believe that early in Earth history, before isotopes with short half-lives had been depleted, Earth's heat production would have been much higher. This extra heat production, which was twice that of present-day at approximately 3 billion years ago, would have increased temperature gradients within the Earth, increasing the rates of mantle convection and plate tectonics, and allowing the production of igneous rocks such as komatiites that are not formed today.

Nature → Nature, in the broadest sense, is equivalent to the natural world, physical world, or material world. "Nature" refers to the phenomena of the physical world, and also to life in general. It ranges in scale from the subatomic to the cosmic.

Environment → The environmental impact of agriculture varies based on the wide variety of agricultural practices employed around the world.

Organic → Organic farming is the form of agriculture that relies on techniques such as crop rotation, green manure, compost and biological pest control. Organic farming uses fertilizers and pesticides but excludes or strictly limits the use of manufactured (synthetic) fertilizers, pesticides (which include herbicides, insecticides and fungicides), plant growth regulators such as hormones, livestock antibiotics, food additives, genetically modified organisms, human sewage sludge, and nanomaterials.

Green energy → Sustainable energy is the sustainable provision of energy that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. Technologies that promote sustainable energy include renewable energy sources, such as hydroelectricity, solar energy, wind energy, wave power, geothermal energy, and tidal power, and also technologies designed to improve energy efficiency.

Solar power → Solar power is the conversion of sunlight into electricity, either directly using photovoltaics (PV), or indirectly using concentrated solar power (CSP). Concentrated solar power systems use lenses or mirrors and tracking systems to focus a large area of sunlight into a small beam. Photovoltaics convert light into electric current using the photoelectric effect.


More on organic...

Organic farming methods combine scientific knowledge of ecology and modern technology with traditional farming practices based on naturally occurring biological processes. Organic farming methods are studied in the field of agroecology. While conventional agriculture uses synthetic pesticides and water-soluble synthetically purified fertilizers, organic farmers are restricted by regulations to using natural pesticides and fertilizers. The principal methods of organic farming include crop rotation, green manures and compost, biological pest control, and mechanical cultivation. These measures use the natural environment to enhance agricultural productivity: legumes are planted to fix nitrogen into the soil, natural insect predators are encouraged, crops are rotated to confuse pests and renew soil, and natural materials such as potassium bicarbonate and mulches are used to control disease and weeds. Organic farmers are careful in their selection of plant breeds, and organic researchers produce hardier plants through plant breeding rather than genetic engineering.

Crop diversity

Crop diversity is a distinctive characteristic of organic farming. Conventional farming focuses on mass production of one crop in one location, a practice called monoculture. This makes apparent economic sense: the larger the growing area, the lower the per unit cost of fertilizer, pesticides and specialized machinery for a single plant species. The science of agroecology has re ... Read the rest of this article

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Featured Articles on Nature...

Chemical Element ... As of November 2011, 118 elements have been identified, the latest being ununseptium in 2010. Of the 118 known elements, only the first 98 are known to occur naturally on Earth...

Hydrogen ... The most common isotope of hydrogen is protium (name rarely used, symbol 1H) with a single proton and no neutrons. In ionic compounds it can take a negative charge (an anion known as a hydride and written as H−), or as a positively charged species H+...

Electric Vehicle ... Electric vehicles first came into existence in the mid-19th century, when electricity was among the preferred methods for motor vehicle propulsion, providing a level of comfort and ease of operation that could not be achieved by the gasoline cars of the time. The internal combustion engine (ICE) is the dominant propulsion method for motor vehicles but electric power has remained commonplace in other vehicle types, such as trains and smaller vehicles of all types...

Soil ... Soil is composed of particles of broken rock that have been altered by chemical and mechanical processes that include weathering and erosion and precipitation into the form of clay. Soil is altered from its parent rock due to interactions between the lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere, and the biosphere...

Nature ... The word nature is derived from the Latin word natura, or "essential qualities, innate disposition", and in ancient times, literally meant "birth"... The concept of nature as a whole, the physical universe, is one of several expansions of the original notion; it began with certain core applications of the word φύσις by pre-Socratic philosophers, and has steadily gained currency ever since... Nature may refer to the general realm of various types of living plants and animals, and in some cases to the processes associated with inanimate objects – the way that particular types of things exist and change of their own accord, such as the weather and geology of the Earth, and the matter and energy of which all these things are composed...


Featured Articles on Solar Power...

Solar Cell ... Assemblies of solar cells are used to make solar modules which are used to capture energy from sunlight. When multiple modules are assembled together (such as prior to installation on a pole-mounted tracker system), the resulting integrated group of modules all oriented in one plane is referred to in the solar industry as a solar panel...

Solar Power In The People's Republic Of China ... Domestic installed capacity The amount of electricity generated with solar power within China itself is so far comparatively small: as of the end of 2010, the solar power capacity attached to the national grid (i.e., excluding autonomous systems) was about 900 MW — about 0.1% of total capacity...

Solar Power In The United Kingdom ... Solar power use has increased very rapidly in recent years, albeit from a small base, as a result of reductions in the cost of photovoltaic (PV) panels, and the introduction of a Feed-in tariff (FIT) subsidy in April 2010... At the end of 2011, there were 230,000 solar power projects in the United Kingdom, with a total installed generating capacity of 750 megawatts (MW)...


Featured Articles on Environment...

Wind Power ... The total amount of available power from the wind is considerably more than present human power use from all sources. At the end of 2011, worldwide nameplate capacity of wind-powered generators was 238 gigawatts (GW), growing by 41 GW over the preceding year...

Biofuel ... Bioethanol is an alcohol made by fermentation, mostly from carbohydrates produced in sugar or starch crops such as corn or sugarcane. Cellulosic biomass, derived from non-food sources such as trees and grasses, is also being developed as a feedstock for ethanol production...

History Of Organic Farming ... Consciously organic agriculture (as opposed to traditional agricultural methods from before the inorganic options existed, which always employed only organic means) began more or less simultaneously in Central Europe and India. The British botanist Sir Albert Howard is often referred to as the father of modern organic agriculture...

Environmental Impact Of Agriculture ... At the same time, agriculture has been shown to produce significant effects on climate change, primarily through the production and release of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, but also by altering the Earth's land cover, which can change its ability to absorb or reflect heat and light, thus contributing to radiative forcing. Land use change such as deforestation and desertification, together with use of fossil fuels, are the major anthropogenic sources of carbon dioxide; agriculture itself is the major contributor to increasing methane and nitrous oxide concentrations in earth's atmosphere...

Compressed Air Energy Storage ... Isothermal compression and expansion approaches attempt to maintain operating temperature by constant heat exchange to the environment... The theoretical efficiency of isothermal energy storage approaches 100% for perfect heat transfer to the environment...


Featured Articles on Geothermal...

Binary Cycle ... As of 2010, flash steam plants are the most common type of geothermal power generation plants in operation today, which use water at temperatures greater than 182 °C (455 K; 360 °F) that is pumped under high pressure to the generation equipment at the surface... With binary cycle geothermal power plants, pumps are used to pump hot water from a geothermal well, through a heat exchanger, and the cooled water is returned to the underground reservoir... Examples of binary cycle geothermal plants can be found at Mammoth Lakes, California, Steamboat Springs, Nevada, Hilo, Hawaii and at the Te Huka Power Station in Taupo, New Zealand...

Heat Pump ... During the operation of a heat pump, some of the thermal energy must be transformed into another type of energy, before reappearing as heat in the heat sink. The heat pump uses mechanical work, or some source of thermodynamic work (such as much higher-temperature heat source dissipating heat to lower temperatures) to accomplish the desired transfer of thermal energy from source to sink...

Feed-in Tariff ... In addition, feed-in tariffs often include "tariff degression", a mechanism according to which the price (or tariff) ratchets down over time. This is done in order to track and encourage technological cost reductions...