Tangaliya Weavers
20-Jan-2017: Tangaliya weavers to get government support for purchasing looms.
Smt. Smriti Zubin Irani(Textiles Minister);
- announced that Government of India will facilitate Tangaliya weavers in purchase of looms, by providing them an assistance amounting to 90% of the price of looms.
- announced the formation of a special association of Tangaliya workers, which will work for their interest.
- said that the work needs to be marketed through international platforms and requested the district administration to make proper arrangements for the same.
- appealed to fashion designers to use the Tangaliya art work for their fashionable garments.
Topic segment: GS Paper III: Government policies and interventions for development in various sectors and issues arising out of their design and implementation.
Fossil fuel formation increased the levels of oxygen in atmosphere
1-Jan-2017: Large scale evolution of animals during Cambrian explosion(500 Mya) led to spike in atmospheric oxygen.
Photosynthesis in green plants separates carbon dioxide into molecular oxygen(released into atmosphere) and carbon is stored as carbohydrates.
Photosynthesis in plants is already there for 2.5 billion years, but what led to the sudden spike in oxygen during the Cambrian(first period in the Paleozoic era)?
The sudden rise in oxygen was a result of rapid increase in the burial of sediment containing large amounts of carbon-rich organic matter. Sediment storage blocked the oxidation of carbon.
Stored sediment contains organic matter that was formed by photosynthesis, which converted carbon dioxide into biomass and released oxygen into the atmosphere. Burial removes the carbon from Earth's surface, preventing it from bonding molecular oxygen pulled from the atmosphere.
Surges in sediment burial coincided with the formation of vast fields of fossil fuel that are still mined today.
Today, burning billions of tons of stored carbon in fossil fuels is removing large amounts of oxygen from the atmosphere, reversing the pattern that drove the rise in oxygen. And so the oxygen level in the atmosphere falls as the concentration of carbon dioxide rises.
The ultimate geological cause for the accelerated sediment storage that promoted the two surges in oxygen remains murky. There are many ideas to explain the different phases of oxygen concentration. Deep-rooted changes in the movement of tectonic plates or conduction of heat or circulation in the mantle may be in play, but there is no explanation at this point.
The secret to having more oxygen in the atmosphere is to remove a portion of the present biomass and sequester it in sedimentary deposits. That's what happened when fossil fuels were deposited.
Higher Resolution Weather Prediction Model
16-Jan-2017: Ministry of Earth Sciences Commissions Higher Resolution Weather Prediction Model.
The Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) has commissioned a very high resolution (12 km) global deterministic weather prediction model for generating operational weather forecasts. The model has been on trial since September 2016. It has shown significant improvements in skill of daily weather forecasts. This model has been made operational from January 16, 2017.
The present model replaces the earlier version which had a horizontal resolution of 25 km. It was very helpful, especially in predicting the track and the intensity of the recent Very Severe Cyclonic Storm Vardah and the cold wave over the northern parts of India.
MoES’s operational Ensemble Prediction System (EPS) will also be upgraded to 12 km. For this the High Performance Computing (HPC) system resources available with MoES is to be augmented to 10 Peta Flops from the current 1.2 Peta Flops. The operational EPS currently has a horizontal resolution of about 25 km.