I`m Carl Azuz for CNN 10. Good to see you this Thursday and thank you for taking a few
minutes to get up to speed on world events. People in southeast China are measuring the
scope of the damage caused by a powerful typhoon that hit yesterday morning. It was called
typhoon Hato.
It brought powerful winds and flooding to this region and several deaths were blamed
in the storm.
One thing unique about it was that Hato wasn`t initially very powerful as it moved toward
Hong Kong. It was about the equivalent of an average
tropical storm. But that changed in just 24 hours before it made landfall. Hato`s wind
speeds nearly doubled in that time before the storm crashed
into the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau.
A local weather service said it was the strongest storm to hit the area in five years. Hato`s
maximum wind speeds were around 108 miles per hour,
which is almost the strength of a category three hurricane. It made landfall during high
tide, bringing large waves, flooding and damage to the
coast. Schools, businesses and the stock market were closed.
And then as Hato moved west over China, it passed over a densely populated area, more
than 60 million people were in the path of the system. The
threat wasn`t as great inland though tough. Typhoons like hurricanes are fueled by war
water and they general lose their strength as they pass over
land.
Typhoons are hurricanes are cyclones. They are the same thing, just in different oceans.
A lot like a hot cake is a flat jack is a pancake is a short stack. If you are west
of the dateline, so west of Hawaii, north of equator, you`re a
typhoon. If you`re in the Atlantic or the Pacific, around America, you are a hurricane.
And if you are around the Indian Ocean or in the southern
hemisphere, you`re a cyclone.
So, it`s not out of the question for a hurricane to become a typhoon if it moves over the dateline.
In fact, after crossing the international
dateline, Hurricane Genevieve turned into Typhoon Genevieve a few years ago.
Ten-second trivia:
Which of these constellations is also known as "the Hunter"?
The Pleiades, Orion, Taurus, or Hercules?
One of the most recognizable constellations in the night sky, Orion, is also known as
the Hunter.
And NASA is hoping to use its new Orion spacecraft to hunt new territory in deep space. The contractor
building it says the latest
version of Orion was turned on for the first time this week. It was an important milestone
for the program. NASA has been working on Orion since
2011 and it`s had its share of setbacks, an unmanned test flight of the craft that had
been planned for November was pushed back until at least
2019 because of concerns about safety, technical issues and high costs.
NASA spent almost $14 billion on Orion. That doesn`t include the addition billion it spent
on developing the rocket that could get Orion out of this
world. Still, the spacecraft is expected to have a lot of capability.
And CNN`s Rachel Crane was able to take a seat inside.
NASA`s new heavy lift rocket -- The dawn of Orion and a new era of American
space exploration - -
Together with the spacecraft Orion, which will go on top of the rocket, humans could
explore our solar system deeper than ever before.
There`s only two of us right now in here --
Yes. and you`re saying the thing could it up to
six. And we got an inside look at what that new
spacecraft looks like.
Could we even survive 21 days just the two of us inside of --
Yes, it would be a wild, yes.
Orion will take up to six astronauts into deep space for 21 days.
Is there any way we can get inside these chairs here, you think?
Yes.
How was Orion outfitted to get us to deep space?
State of the art heat shields to protect the crew on entry, parachute systems, a very lightweight
system, so Orion is, you know, over
40 percent composites, which means it`s light.
One of the things special about Orion is the size. So, four people in 21 days gives you
a lot of capability whether it`s exploring an asteroid or on
the surface of a planet.
And why 21 days?
Well, 21 days -- it gets you really into this high orbits around the moon, which allows
you to either do missions at the moon or do transfers on to asteroids around the Mars.
So, it`s about the right duration. For a journey to Mars, the crew would have
to transfer from Orion to a larger habitat. If you`re going to go to Mars, which is somewhere
up to a year and a half to three-year mission, you need more volume.
Right.
: You need bigger head module, more food.
Orion still doesn`t have an exact destination. But whether it`s the moon or Mars, it`s going
to take a powerful rocket to get it out there.
Next, plastics. They`re lightweight, many are strong. They`re easy to make. They`re
used in everything from cars to construction to
electronics. The screen you`re watching this one is probably surrounded by plastic. But
if they`re not recycled, it can take hundreds of years for
plastics to decompose in the environment, and that`s a growing problem especially at
sea.
The South Pacific Ocean, a vast marine landscape of precious part of our Earth.
But take a closer look and scientists say it`s becoming a plastic garbage junk.
Here I am standing on Hi-Zex Buoy Island.
Meet Captain Charles Moore, founder of Algalita Marine Research and Education, a non-profit
group dedicated to solving the sea`s plastic pollution problem.
In 1997, Captain Moore discovered a massive garbage patch in the North Pacific. Now, his
team has confirmed the existence of another further
south of the coast of Chile and Peru, Captain Moore estimated to be about 2 million square
kilometers, larger than Mexico.
Here`s how it formed. Winds around a persistent high pressure system drive ocean currents,
creating a vortex, known as a gyre, causing debris to
collect in a central location.
I call it a plastic soup. If you think of the ocean as the liquid and a soup, we`ve
gone from, you know, creamy to extra junkie.
Captain Moore and his team spent months trolling the south Pacific collecting samples from
large objects to plastic the size of a grain of rice.
The surface waters are where we see the debris and it is mostly particulate, that the size
that`s most common is between one and three
millimeters in diameter. We find interesting objects, a lot of tubs that are used in sorting
fish in the fisheries that are manufactured in New
Zealand. We found a lot of fishing buoys. And, of course, the most common things that
we find out there are the floating bottles and the bottle caps.
The plastic poses a major threat to marine life. Small lantern fish come to the surface
at night to feed on plankton. Many eat small
microplastics instead and are then unable to swim back to the bottom. The plastic acting
like a buoy.
Not only do these fish ingest chemicals from the plastic, but so the larger fish who eat
them.
Algalita Marine Research found 35 percent of lantern fish in the previously discovered
North Pacific garbage patch are eating plastic. The researchers
are now sifting through the samples to try to get a better understanding of what types
of plastic they`ve collected. But Captain Moore says it`s our
throwaway society that needs to change.
We have to fear plastic for not only to what it does to the marine environment, but what
it`s doing to us. We need to fear it and we need to
respect it because it is being treated like waste, like thrash, it`s just this buffer
that you throw away. And we`ve got to have a new attitude
about that, in which we realize that plastics have an afterlife. It must be reincarnated.
It must be part of a circular economy, or it`s going to
end up in the ocean and destroy marine life.
So, we are now working with plastic companies, with Coca-Cola, with Dow. We`re working desperately
to reshape the thinking of those who are making
the stuff to create this infrastructure to take it back, to have a circular economy.
Linda Kinkade, CNN.
This gets a "10 Out of 10" for cuteness. It`s a Joey, a baby koala and though she was born
at the Australia Zoo in January, she just started
leaving his mother`s poach and appearing to the public. Her white fur that you see gives
her a very rare color for a koala. She`s not technically an
albino koala, which is actually more common.
The zoo says her mother has had other Joeys with lighter than usual fur, but that this
girl really stands out.
The koa-lity care she`s getting is part of her mother`s koal-intuition. She`s koalamish
about letting the juvenile Joey koala over the place.
Sight to see in your next trip to Koalstralia, this certainly koalifies and those are all
the puns I can bear on CNN 10. I`m Koalazuz. Come back on Friday.