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The Giant Coal Plan Converting To Green Energy
The UK plans to end coal-fired electricity by 2025. But what happens to the massive plants left behind? One facility is pioneering an unusual idea: converting to green energy. On the train to visit one of the last places in Britain that burns coal for electricity, I pass three solar farms soaking up sunshine. I also pass a coal plant called Eggborough that has all but ceased operations. No steam rises from its giant cooling towers. It will shut in September. But the coal plant I’m visiting is different. It’s named Drax, after a local village, and is the largest power plant in Western Europe. By 2023, its owners plan to stop burning coal entirely. They hope that instead their plant will consume only natural gas and biomass – wood pellets crushed into powder. The European Union has some key targets for reducing pollution in the coming decades and coal power plants have been earmarked for closure by many countries seeking to meet these objectives. In the UK, government...
When dinosaurs roamed Antarctica By Vivien Cumming
Antarctica - icy, empty, desolate, cold - these are words you may use to describe it, but it hasn’t always been that way. There was once a time when the great southern landmass was covered in forests and dinosaurs roamed free. How could such an icy wilderness once have been so warm that it could support Earth’s most gigantic creatures? To understand this we have to go back in geological time. Antarctica was ice free during the Cretaceous Period , lasting from 145 to 66 million years ago. That long ago may seem unfamiliar but we know it because it was the last age of the dinosaurs before an asteroid hit the earth and ended their time on this planet. During this time period there were forests at both poles. Fossils of trees and cold-blooded reptiles have allowed scientists to build up a picture of what the climate was like. Cold-blooded reptiles need the warmth of the sun to survive; today we see them basking in the sun to warm up during the day. At the poles where the sun...
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