World Watch
LATITUDE
SCHOOL OF COLOUR, LIGHT, AND WONDER With 12,000 coloured panels, the new Copenhagen International School’s Nordhavn campus features the largest solar facade in the world. The panels are designed to provide about 300 megawatt-hours of electricity per year — about half the electricity needs of the seven-storey school. The panels, angled to create a sequin-like effect, are among many buzz-generating features at the futuristic, 25,000-square-metre, US $80-million project, set among the hanging gardens and floating islands of central Copenhagen. The building is subdivided into four small towers, stacked asymmetrically and each tailored to the needs of children at different stages of development. Structural engineering firm NIRIS, which worked with architectural firm CF Moller, designed the four columns to maximize floor and ground space. The solution involved employing diagonal steel members rather than the more traditional approach, a central concrete core.
SLOW DOWN AND FEED THE GRID Working with engineers and other research- ers at the Polytechnic University of Milan, an Italian start-up named Underground Power has developed a speed-absorbing system that does double duty. LYBRA , a rubber paving technology, features a series of panels that create indentations as cars pass over them — think of a finger swiped along a keyboard. The bumpy ride strongly encourages drivers to slow down, but the system then works overtime by converting kinetic energy into electrical power and feeding it to the grid. LYBRA’s creators say an installation in a zone with heavy traffic, such as a supermarket parking lot or a highway tollbooth, could produce as much as 100,000 kilowatt-hours per year.
GLACIERS MAKE THE WORLD GO — WARMER? Strange as it sounds, glaciers may have made the Earth a warmer place, according to recent research at Rice University in Houston. Mark Torres, an assistant professor of Earth, environmental, and planetary sciences, studied millions of years of glacial cycles. His goal was to learn more about the chemicals released by weathering on land and what their effect is on the atmosphere and the ocean. His findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , show that the oxidation of pyrite — or fool’s gold — likely caused acidity. In turn, this action possibly altered carbon cycles in oceans, increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide by 25 parts per million or more for 10,000 years. While that amount is significant, it’s a small portion of the current 400 parts per million. It may, however, have created a negative feedback loop to keep glaciers from taking over the planet.
GLACIERS AND CLIMATE New research now suggests that glaciers, like the Athabasca Glacier of the Columbia Icefield, may have contributed to climate warming.
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