Jump to content
Wikipedia The Free Encyclopedia

Portal:Environment

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Portal maintenance status: (June 2018)
  • This portal's subpages have been checked by an editor, and are needed.
Please take care when editing, especially if using automated editing software. Learn how to update the maintenance information here.
Wikipedia portal for content related to the environment


Welcome to the Environment Portal
(image link)

Introduction

Land management has preserved the natural characteristics of Hopetoun Falls, Australia while allowing ample access for visitors.

The natural environment or natural world encompasses all biotic and abiotic things occurring naturally, meaning in this case not artificial. The term is most often applied to Earth or some parts of Earth. This environment encompasses the interaction of all living species, climate, weather and natural resources that affect human survival and economic activity. The concept of the natural environment can be distinguished as components:

In contrast to the natural environment is the built environment. Built environments are where humans have fundamentally transformed landscapes such as urban settings and agricultural land conversion, the natural environment is greatly changed into a simplified human environment. Even acts which seem less extreme, such as building a mud hut or a photovoltaic system in the desert, the modified environment becomes an artificial one. Though many animals build things to provide a better environment for themselves, they are not human, hence beaver dams and the works of mound-building termites are thought of as natural.

There are no absolutely natural environments on Earth. Naturalness usually varies in a continuum, from 100% natural in one extreme to 0% natural in the other. The massive environmental changes of humanity in the Anthropocene have fundamentally affected all natural environments including: climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution from plastic and other chemicals in the air and water. More precisely, we can consider the different aspects or components of an environment, and see that their degree of naturalness is not uniform. If, for instance, we take an agricultural field, and consider the mineralogic composition and the structure of its soil, we will find that whereas the first is quite similar to that of an undisturbed forest soil, the structure is quite different. (Full article... )

Selected article - show another

Space view of a tropical cyclone with a well-defined eye
Hurricane Florence viewed from the International Space Station in 2018. The eye, eyewall, and surrounding rainbands are characteristics of tropical cyclones.

A tropical cyclone is a rapidly rotating storm system with a low-pressure area, a closed low-level atmospheric circulation, strong winds, and a spiral arrangement of thunderstorms that produce heavy rain and squalls. Depending on its location and strength, a tropical cyclone is called a hurricane (/ˈhʌrɪkən,-kn/ ), typhoon (/tˈfn/ ), tropical storm, cyclonic storm, tropical depression, or simply cyclone. A hurricane is a strong tropical cyclone that occurs in the Atlantic Ocean or northeastern Pacific Ocean. A typhoon is the same thing which occurs in the northwestern Pacific Ocean. In the Indian Ocean and South Pacific, comparable storms are referred to as "tropical cyclones". In modern times, on average around 80 to 90 named tropical cyclones form each year around the world, over half of which develop hurricane-force winds of 65 kn (120 km/h; 75 mph) or more.

Tropical cyclones typically form over large bodies of relatively warm water. They derive their energy through the evaporation of water from the ocean surface, which ultimately condenses into clouds and rain when moist air rises and cools to saturation. This energy source differs from that of mid-latitude cyclonic storms, such as nor'easters and European windstorms, which are powered primarily by horizontal temperature contrasts. Tropical cyclones are typically between 100 and 2,000 km (62 and 1,243 mi) in diameter. The strong rotating winds of a tropical cyclone are a result of the conservation of angular momentum imparted by the Earth's rotation as air flows inwards toward the axis of rotation. As a result, cyclones rarely form within 5° of the equator. South Atlantic tropical cyclones are very rare due to consistently strong wind shear and a weak Intertropical Convergence Zone. In contrast, the African easterly jet and areas of atmospheric instability give rise to cyclones in the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea. (Full article... )

List of selected articles

Did you know (auto-generated) - load new batch

Selected image - show another

Power County wind farm, Idaho, USA
Power County wind farm, Idaho, USA
Credit: ENERGY.GOV

Wind Power is the conversion of wind energy into more useful forms, usually electricity, using wind turbines. The energy is generated in the form of electricity by converting the rotation of turbine blades into electrical current by means of an electrical generator. Wind power is used in large scale wind farms for national electrical grids as well as in small individual turbines for providing electricity to rural residences or grid-isolated locations.

Current events

Selected biography - show another

Fuller in 1972

Richard Buckminster Fuller Jr. (/ˈfʊlər/ ; July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983) was an American architect, systems theorist, writer, designer, inventor, philosopher, and futurist. He styled his name as R. Buckminster Fuller in his writings, publishing more than 30 books and coining or popularizing such terms as "Spaceship Earth", "Dymaxion" (e.g., Dymaxion house, Dymaxion car, Dymaxion map), "ephemeralization", "synergetics", and "tensegrity".

Fuller developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, and popularized the widely known geodesic dome; carbon molecules known as fullerenes were later named by scientists for their structural and mathematical resemblance to geodesic spheres. He also served as the second World President of Mensa International from 1974 to 1983. (Full article... )

Selected organization - show another

National ecological surplus or deficit, measured as a country's biocapacity per person (in global hectares) minus its ecological footprint per person (also in global hectares). Data from 2013.
  x ≤ -9
  -9 < x ≤ -8
  -8 < x ≤ -7
  -7 < x ≤ -6
  -6 < x ≤ -5
  -5 < x ≤ -4
  -4 < x ≤ -3
  -3 < x ≤ -2
  -2 < x ≤ -1
  -1 < x < 0
  0 ≤ x < 2
  2 ≤ x < 4
  4 ≤ x < 6
  6 ≤ x < 8
  8 ≤ x
  Data unavailable

The Global Footprint Network was founded in 2003 and is an independent think tank originally based in the United States, Belgium and Switzerland. It was established as a charitable not-for-profit organization in each of those three countries. Its aim is to develop and promote tools for advancing sustainability, including the ecological footprint and biocapacity, which measure the amount of resources we use and how much we have. These tools aim at bringing ecological limits to the center of decision-making. (Full article... )

List of selected organizations

General images - load new batch

The following are images from various environment-related articles on Wikipedia.

Selected quote - show another

To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we thought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.

More did you know - show different entries

Chemical structure of carbon dioxide
Chemical structure of carbon dioxide
  • ... that Summer Rayne Oakes has been called "the world's first eco-model" because she only models clothes made from organic or recycled materials?

Main topics

Atmosphere
Climate
Continents
Culture and society
Environment
Geodesy
Geophysics
Geology
Oceans
Planetary science
Art
Culture
Literature
Philosophy
Religion
Other
Related
Applied
Main fields
Related fields
Applications
Lists
See also
Fields
Related
Applied
Biology
Overview
Chemical basis
Cells
Genetics
Evolution
Diversity
Plant form
and function
Animal form
and function
Ecology
Research
methods
Laboratory
techniques
Field techniques
Branches
Glossaries
Branches
Human
Physical
Technical
Integrated
Techniques
and tools
Quantitative
Qualitative
Institutions,
organizations,
and societies
Education
Publication
Major topics
Society and
population
Publications
Lists
Events and
organizations
Related topics
Air
Pollution / quality
Emissions
Energy
Land
Life
Water
Types / location
Aspects
Related
Resource
Politics
Ethics and
principles
Social
accounting
Environmental
accounting
Reporting
Auditing
Related
Materials
Products
Apparatus
Countries
Concepts
See also
Major types
Processes
Countries
Agreements
Occupations
Other topics

Things you can do

  • This list is transcluded from the tasks list page. To edit the list, click here

WikiProjects

Associated Wikimedia

The following Wikimedia Foundation sister projects provide more on this subject:

Discover Wikipedia using portals

AltStyle によって変換されたページ (->オリジナル) /