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...first major geothermal power station, Krafla. Soon after the inaugural borehole was drilled here 34 years ago, the first in a series of volcanic eruptions rocked the area. The eruptions, nine in all, went on for nearly a decade, sending engineers scrambling to keep up with the shifting earth. Fanndal, the plant's manager, stops his truck in front of a crater where, without warning, one early drill hole imploded into a cauldron of boiling water that took half a year to settle down. "There were a lot of people who said we should leave this place," Fanndal recalls...
...power plants sustainable by "resting" boreholes to give the source time to replenish its heat. While the ongoing costs of a geothermal power plant are low - Krafla, for example, has only 15 full-time employees - the start-up technology needed to extract heat from a few miles beneath the earth's surface and convert it to electricity is not cheap. By some estimates, conducting the necessary geologic surveys and exploratory drilling for one plant can take up to eight years and $20 million before the turbines start turning. "The high cost is a barrier to everybody," says Karl Gawell, executive...
Geothermal has its share of critics. The power plants release low levels of carbon dioxide, nitric oxide and sulfur, and some people worry that drilling holes deep into the earth destabilizes the land around it. This summer, police arrested a group of environmental activists who had chained themselves to machinery at a drill site near the nation's largest power station outside Reykjavik to protest the plans for a new aluminum factory. Iceland's government has responded to such criticisms by trying to diversify and attract companies like Microsoft, Cisco and Yahoo!, all of which have discussed building massive server...
...forest are lost to the logger's ax or to fire every year, and that hurts the planet in two very important ways. Rare plants and animals, many still undiscovered, depend on the forests - especially the rich rain forests that encircle the earth either side of the equator. When the forests disappear, all that wildlife disappears as well. But trees also contain carbon, and while they live, they absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, compensating in part for the greenhouse gases spewed into the air from cars, power plants and factories. When trees are cut down or burned, that carbon...
What's more, none of that includes a new X factor: global warming. Some areas of the world will grow wetter as a result of climate change, but others will grow dryer, and so far the drying is winning. The area of the earth's land surface classified as very dry has doubled since the 1970s; by 2050, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change believes, that trend will worsen. "You do the math, and it gets a little scary," says Stuart Minchin, a water expert with the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization. (See pictures of Australia, the driest inhabited...