Friday, May 27, 2016
Wednesday, May 25, 2016
Monday, May 23, 2016
Tuesday, May 3, 2016
An endorheic basin (from the Ancient Greek: ἔνδον, éndon, "within" and ῥεῖν, rheîn, "to flow") is a closed drainage basin that retains water and allows no outflow to other external bodies of water, such as rivers or oceans, but converges instead into lakes or swamps, permanent or seasonal, that equilibrate through evaporation. Such a basin may also be referred to as a closed or terminal basin or as an internal drainage system.
Normally, water that has accrued in a drainage basin eventually flows out through rivers or streams on the Earth's surface or by undergrounddiffusion through permeable rock, ultimately ending up in the oceans. However, in an endorheic basin, rain (or other precipitation) that falls within it does not flow out but may only leave the drainage system by evaporation and seepage. The bottom of such a basin is typically occupied by asalt lake or salt pan.
Endorheic regions, in contrast to exorheic regions which flow to the ocean in geologically defined patterns, are closed hydrologic systems. Their surface waters drain to inland terminal locations where the water evaporates or seeps into the ground, having no access to discharge into the sea.[1] Endorheic water bodies include some of the largest lakes in the world, such as the Aral Sea (formerly) and the Caspian Sea, the world's largest saline inland sea.[2]
Most endorheic basins are arid, although there are many notable exceptions, such as the Valley of Mexico, the Lake Tahoe region, and various regions in the Caspian Basin.
Endorheic basins can be massively and rapidly affected by climate change and excessive water abstraction. An exorheic lake naturally remains at an overflow level, so water flow into the lake may be many times more than is needed to maintain its present size. In contrast, an endorheic basin has no outlet, so any loss of water intake can immediately begin to shrink the lake. In the past century or so, many very large endorheic lakes have been reduced to small remnants of their former size, as with Lake Chad and Lake Urmia, or gone completely as have Tulare Lakeand Fucine Lake. The same effect was seen at the end of the Ice Age, in which many extremely large lakes in the Sahara and western United States disappeared or were drastically reduced, leaving behind desert basins, salt pans and remnant saline lakes.
Monday, May 2, 2016
The Okavango Delta (or Okavango Grassland) in Botswana is a very large inland delta formed where the Okavango River reaches a tectonic trough in the central part of the endorheic basin of the Kalahari.
Thursday, April 28, 2016
Tuesday, April 26, 2016
Monday, April 25, 2016
2015 smashes record for hottest year, final figures confirm
2015 smashed the record for the hottest year since reporting began in 1850, according to the first full-year figures from the world’s three principal temperature estimates.
Data released on Wednesday by the UK Met Office shows the average global temperature in 2015 was 0.75C higher than the long-term average between 1961 and 1990, much higher than the 0.57C in 2014, which itself was a record. The Met Office also expects 2016 to set a new record, meaning the global temperature records will have been broken for three years running.
Temperature data released in the US on Wednesday by Nasa and by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) also showed 2015 shattered previous records.
Monday, April 18, 2016
Tuesday, March 8, 2016
Tuesday, February 16, 2016
Who is Antonin Scalia?
Antonin Scalia
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
Antonin Gregory Scalia was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1986 until his death in 2016. Wikipedia
Born: March 11, 1936, Trenton, New Jersey, United States
Died: February 13, 2016, Shafter, Texas, United States
Wednesday, January 20, 2016
Monday, January 4, 2016
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