Many people hope to come back from a wildlife safari with close-up pictures of lions or elephants – this picture below is my best attempt from a search for the largest land animals in Antarctica.

If you look hard you can see a reddish blob at the tip of the thumb — it’s Antarctica’s most aggressive land predator, an eight-legged mite known as Rhagidia.

Pete Convey, a biologist at the British Antarctic Survey (that’s his thumb), says that such tiny creatures evolved in Antarctica over tens of millions of years — they can freeze their bodies in winter in an extreme form of hibernation.

Penguins, seals and whales are the best known animals in Antarctica, but none live year-round on land, where the biggest creature is a flightless midge whose name is ”Belgica antarctica” and who’s about 0.5 cm long.

Global warming could mean problems for some of these tiny creatures if it keeps going — the Antarctic Peninsula where Pete showed us the creatures has warmed by about 3 Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit) over the past 50 years, the fastest rate in the southern hemisphere.

Some other creatures might be able to survive in a warmer climate and threaten mites like Rhagidia.

Pete is a genius at finding the creatures — the second rock he picked up had one of these red mites on it…I picked up about 50 and found none.

Here is Pete on his hunt being filmed by my colleague Stuart McDill of Reuters TV: (for a text story, click here)

 And here’s a much better close-up of a monstrous Antarctic mite, related to Rhagidia:

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. ThomsonReuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone.

A retrospective exhibit about the life and inventions of R. Buckminster Fuller (a.k.a. Bucky) is about to open at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City . Fuller was truly one-of-a-kind-an iconoclastic architect, inventor, engineer, and philosopher.

I still have vivid memories of a public talk he gave at Columbia University in the late 1970’s. He died in 1983. He is best known as the leading proponent, if not inventor, of the geodesic dome, the sturdy spherical structure, composed of triangular elements, that closely approximates a sphere.  

It’s hard to imagine Bucky not being engaged by the modern problems of global warming. It would have attracted him on all fronts: the energy challenges, the technological challenges and the ‘geo-engineering’ challenges.

Geo-engineering is the term used to describe large-scale human interventions that could possibly offset climate change such as deliberate releases of particles into the stratosphere to block sunlight, or the capture and sequestration of carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere and power plants.

Certainly, Bucky thought on such scales. For example, he envisioned covering mid-town Manhattan with a  large geodesic dome as a way to create a controlled climate!

How this would work is puzzling to me. For example, if the dome was clear to sunlight, the greenhouse effect inside in summer would be astounding and I can’t imagine it would require less electricity to cool it off than it does now-it would likely need vastly more electricity.

Still, as an urban climate scientist, I don’t like to dismiss such conceptual ideas completely out of hand because if a geo-engineered way were found to cool cities down this would be of enormous socio-economic value. Cities are where the world’s population will increasingly live and we are going to have to find ways to make them more habitable as summer heat waves become more brutal and common.

Right now the main ‘technologies’ we have to do so are tree planting, light-colored surfaces and green roofs. However, if large-scale initiatives were found that could artificially shade large sections of cities or increase wind ventilation during heat-waves, that would be much more effective, saving vast amounts of energy and lives. I’ve heard anecdotally of Japanese researchers orienting new buildings to channel winds in certain directions and even of trying to bring cold bottom water up from Tokyo Bay.  

Any Fuller-esque ideas out there?