Canadian Scientists and A Beetle’s Butt Harness The Power Of Fog
But for good or evil?
Fog: not just for lighthouses and ruining pictures anymore! New technology in Australia and Canada shows that capturing the moisture in fog may be the answer to ending droughts. (And when we say technology, we mean a beetle butts.)
If you’re like us, you usually think fog is just a shroud created by the underworld to trick travelers and bring mortals to their doom. However, that shroud is composed of 0.05 to 0.5 grams of water per cubic meter, which if captured could be a solution to water shortages for communities in areas with the right combination of wind and fog but little to no rainfall.
Canadian company FogQuest (if that sounds like the worst video game ever to you, you’re not alone) has been capturing fog since 2000, using a polyester mesh to ”trap” fog in rural communities across the globe and turn it into clean drinking water. FogQuest claims their mesh technology can sustain a community “for as long as the village and the local NGO maintain the system. This could be 10, 100, or 1,000 years. The durability of a project will depend on the human component. The meteorological conditions that produce the fog are determined by large scale circulations in the atmosphere that change little over long periods of time.”
Unfortunately, despite the popular suggestion of San Fransisco blogger Burritto Justice (duuude, we get it, you’re from California) that FogQuest’s technology be used in San Fransisco to combat their recent record breaking drought, FogQuest says it would be impossible for their technology to meet the demands of a large city.
Beetle-butt-based Australian technology may instead be more effective in meeting the water supply demands of heavily populated areas. Having experienced a 2006 drought that was referred to by Australasian Science as “the worse drought in 1,000 years”, Australians know a thing or two about the necessity of alternative water sources, and are truly going “down under” (it’s a butt joke, you guys) with the Stenocara Beetle to help combat droughts.
The Stenocara survives in the Namib Desert, one of the driest places on Earth, by sticking its beetle behind into the fog that occasionally comes in off the Atlantic then using its unique exoskeleton to propel the moisture into its mouth. By replicating the Stenocara’s exoskeleton with synthetic material to coat the roofs of houses on the coastline, scientists may be able to effectively trap moisture in larger metropolitan coastline areas with the right weather conditions.
Obviously this technology isn’t yet viable in larger cities, but it has at least changed our view of foggy weather from “a cocktail of mystery and gloom” to “an atmosphere of promise”. Maybe our next summer won’t be spent taking one-minute showers and capturing our tears in bottles for reuse. Foggetaboutit!
(via Gizmodo, photo credit via David Yu)
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