Top Ten Discoveries of 2009: Nat Geo News’s Most Viewed

National Geographic News’s most popular coverage of 2009 scientific finds is swarming with megamouth sharks, giant snakes, a transparent-headed fish, and rare species rescued from obscurity—then eaten.

10. Ultra-Rare Megamouth Shark Found, Eaten In March, the 41st megamouth shark ever found went from swimming in Philippine waters to simmering in coconut milk.

9. Ancient Gem-Studded Teeth Show Skill of Early Dentists The glittering “grills” of some hip-hop stars aren’t exactly unprecedented. Sophisticated dentistry allowed Native Americans to add bling to their teeth as far back as 2,500 years ago, a May study said.

8. Alien Giant Snakes Threaten to Invade Up to 1/3 of U.S. Nine giant snakes could be on the verge of causing ecological catastrophe if they establish themselves in the U.S. wild&—at least two have already set up shop in Florida&—according to an October report. • See pictures

7. Biggest Snake Discovered; Was Longer Than a Bus The 60-million-year-old reptile was also heavier than a car, scientists said in February, adding that the fossil could shed light on climate change. • See pictures

6. Gold Rush-Era “Ghost Ship” Wreck Found With boots thrown hastily on deck and cooking utensils scattered, the last moments of the crew aboard the gold rush-era paddleboat A.J. Goddard are preserved in the ship’s recently found wreck, archaeologists announced in November.

5. Oldest Skeleton of Human Ancestor Found There was never a chimp-like missing link between humans and today’s apes, according to an October fossil-skeleton study that could rewrite human evolutionary history. Said one scientist, “It changes everything.” • See pictures

4. “Extinct” Bird Seen, Eaten Long believed to be extinct, a rare quail from the Philippines was photographed for the first time ever—then sold at a poultry market, experts said in February.

3. New Cloud Type Discovered? Nicknamed “Jacques Cousteau” clouds, these “turbulent” seas in the sky could be examples of the first official new cloud type since 1951, experts said in June.

2. Fish With Transparent Head Seen Alive for First Time Perhaps the most bizarre nature discovery of the year—though Stephen Colbert put it a bit less delicately—a Pacific barreleye fish shows off its transparent head and barrel-like eyes in pictures released on February of the first specimen ever found alive. • Watch video

1. “Missing Link” Found: Fossil Connects Humans, Lemurs? The 47-million-year-old, exceptionally preserved primate fossil “Ida,” unveiled on May 20, was hailed by some as a major discovery in human evolution. The publicity frenzy made National Geographic News’s brief coverage our most viewed page of the year—and inspired a backlash as some experts, including one here at Nat Geo HQ, suggested Ida was more media event than milestone.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/12/091202-top-ten-discoveries-2009-year-science-news.html

Malaysian Rainforest Tribes Establish ‘Peace Park’ to Push Back Loggers

photo: Bruno Manser Fonds

by Matthew McDermott

Here’s one solution to holding back loggers: Bruno Manser Fonds reports seventeen Penan communities in Sarawak, Borneo, Malaysia have proclaimed a new tropical forest reserve on their lands. The newly inaugurated Penan Peace Park will preserve their last remaining undisturbed forests from development, allowing tourism and preserving their culture.

Our Heritage Must Be Preserved
A former regional chief in the region, James Lalo Kesoh described the necessity of establishing the park:

As nomadic hunter-gatherers, we Penan people have been roaming the rainforests of the Upper Baram region for centuries. Even though we have settled down and started life as farmers sicne the late 1950s, we still depend on the forests for our food supply, for raw materials such as rattan for handicrafts, for medicinal plants and for other jungle products. Our entire cultural heritage is in the forest and needs to be preserved for future generations.

The Penan Peace Park consists of about 1630 square kilometers around the Gunung Murud Kecil mountain range, near the border of Indonesia.

The Penan people in the region have opposed logging in their rainforest for the past three decades, repeatedly blocking roads and taking direct action against encroachments.

Hat tip to Mongabay on this one…

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/12/malaysian-rainforest-tribes-establish-peace-park-push-back-loggers.php

U.S. Proposes Climate Adaptation Fund for Poor Nations

By LISA FRIEDMAN of ClimateWire

The United States has proposed a new global fund that would direct billions of dollars to help poor countries prepare for climate disasters and adjust to low-carbon economies.

The fund would likely operate under the World Bank, U.S. Treasury officials said, and would be the main vehicle to deliver emissions reduction and adaptation measures throughout the world.

William Pizer, deputy assistant secretary for environment and energy at the U.S. Treasury Department, explained that the fund would contribute to a spectrum of projects from “building a solar park or creating a financial vehicle to support investments in energy efficiency to creating an insurance mechanism for disasters or crops.”

The world’s poorest countries also are among the most vulnerable to climate change and will be disproportionately affected by harsher droughts, rising sea levels and fiercer storms, scientists say. The World Bank estimates it will cost $75 billion to $100 billion annually for developing nations to accommodate a world that is warmer by 2 degrees Celsius.

Part of the global climate deal that nations are negotiating in U.N.-sponsored talks in Copenhagen next week involves the promise of substantial funding to help defray those costs.

Just how much money nations will put into the pot remains unknown. That is one of the prickliest questions that negotiators face. Yet while dollar figures — or absence of them — grab headlines, analysts say the architecture of the fund is one of the nuts-and-bolts issues fundamental to the climate talks.

“It’s certainly a critical part of what needs to be addressed and concluded in the negotiations,” said David Waskow, climate change program director at Oxfam America. “At the end of the day … it’s never a just a question about money, but also how the money is governed and spent.”

An expected target of $7B to $10B

Countries are expected in Copenhagen to offer between $7 billion and $10 billion for immediate needs in poor countries, with about $1.3 billion expected to come from the United States. The United States has not declared how much it will allocate in the long term. Pizer didn’t offer any clues, but said agreeing on a structure for delivering and accounting for the money would be a major step forward.

“I don’t think we would be going down this avenue if we didn’t see the need for scaling up funding in the future,” he said.

Under the proposal — which mirrors ideas put forward by Mexico and Australia — the fund would be governed by a board made up equally of net donors and recipients. All countries except the least-developed nations would be expected to contribute “in accordance with their national circumstances and respective capabilities.”

Elliot Diringer, vice president for international strategies at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, noted that the proposal reflects “a growing view that some of the faster-growing developing countries are in a position to help,” as well as industrialized ones. A number of environmental groups oppose the notion and say only rich countries should be expected to foot the bill for climate change.

In a recent analysis, ActionAid USA, Friends of the Earth US and the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network faulted the proposal for failing to force countries to contribute to the fund. The groups also argue that any money for poor countries to address climate change must be in addition to regular foreign assistance, and call for a board governed by a majority of developing countries.

“This is important so as to mirror the composition of parties in the UNFCCC [U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change] and to ensure that those most affected by climate change are in the majority on the governing bodies,” the groups wrote.

Narrowly focused on easing burdens of climate change

Treasury officials said they envision a fund that can leverage private-sector investments as well as public funds. They described it as one of several financial arrangements available to help developing countries access funds for different needs.

Article Continues – http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2009/12/02/02climatewire-us-proposes-climate-adaptation-fund-for-poor-53618.html

Copenhagen’s Clean-Tech Dividend

Hot air: A wind turbine and several national flags welcome visitors to the Bella Center in Copenhagen–the venue for the U.N.’s Climate Change Conference.   Credit: Claus Starup

Climate deal could deliver incentives to grow nascent energy technologies.

By Peter Fairley

The 11^th hour is, as often happens in negotiations, proving fruitful for the United Nations Climate Change Conference that opens Monday in Copenhagen, Denmark. The last-minute actors are President Barack Obama, who last week said he will personally deliver a pledge to reduce U.S. emissions 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who unveiled an ambitious energy-efficiency target one day later. Those moves have economists, analysts, and technology developers increasingly hopeful that the 11-day talks will secure a deal to reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases, thus extending the market for energy-efficient technologies.

The impact could be both immediate and far-reaching, according to Ethan Zindler, who directs U.S. research for the London-based consulting firm New Energy Finance. “It sends an important long-term signal to the marketplace about commitment from multiple nations. That’s something that, particularly in the U.S., there’s been a desire to see for some time,” says Zindler. At the same time, he says, Obama may have made his pledge in the hopes that Copenhagen will help secure the passage of U.S. energy and climate legislation. The climate bill offers incentives for renewable energy installations and large-scale demonstrations of carbon sequestration.

Columbia University economist Graciela Chichilnisky, who crafted the Kyoto Protocol’s carbon trading provisions, predicts that Copenhagen will produce a deal mandating emissions reductions by 2020 equal to or greater than those pledged by Obama. “That is the minimum that will happen,” says Chichilnisky.

Chichilnisky says the U.S. pledge equates to just a 3 percent cut from the Kyoto Protocol’s 1990 baseline. The Obama pledge is dwarfed by the EU’s pledged 20 percent cut from 1990 levels by 2020 and the 25 percent cut pledged by Japan. Climatologists are calling for cuts of 80 to 90 percent by 2050. As Chichilnisky says of the U.S. pledge: “It’s absurd, but it’s a beginning.”

Finn Strom Madsen, the executive in charge of R&D for Danish wind-turbine company Vestas, agrees that a deal at Copenhagen is critical for renewable-energy developers, regardless of the scale of the mandate. Madsen says real value in Copenhagen is having world leaders reach “the political consensus that we need to bring alternatives into the conventional energy mix, and that we need to do it faster than we’re doing it today.”

Vestas, in fact, already announced plans this fall to boost its R&D staff of 1,375 people by almost half in order to push ahead with several large R&D efforts simultaneously. These include: a six-megawatt turbine for offshore use that is twice as powerful as Vestas’s biggest turbine; floating foundations for deep offshore waters; and stealth turbines to minimize disruption of air traffic radar. “If it turns out that we don’t get anything [at Copenhagen] and people are throwing rocks at each other, we might reconsider some of the things we’re doing,” says Madsen. “But we certainly expect that we will have a political agreement.”

Story Continues - http://www.technologyreview.com/business/24044/

Global Salmon Study Shows ‘Sustainable’ Food May Not Be So Sustainable

Popular thinking about how to improve food systems for the better often misses the point, according to the results of a three-year global study of salmon production systems. Rather than pushing for organic or land-based production, or worrying about simple metrics such as “food miles,” the study finds that the world can achieve greater environmental benefits by focusing on improvements to key aspects of production and distribution.

For example, what farmed salmon are fed, how wild salmon are caught and the choice to buy frozen over fresh matters more than organic vs. conventional or wild vs. farmed when considering global scale environmental impacts such as climate change, ozone depletion, loss of critical habitat, and ocean acidification.

The study is the world’s first comprehensive global-scale look at a major food commodity from a full life cycle perspective, and the researchers examined everything — how salmon are caught in the wild, what they’re fed when farmed, how they’re transported, how they’re consumed, and how all of this contributes to both environmental degradation and socioeconomic benefits.

Article continues: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091124152803.htm

http://www.enn.com/wildlife/article/40766

What Happens When Your Country Drowns?

—Photo: Robin Hammond - November/December 2009 Issue

Meet the people of Tuvalu, the world’s first climate refugees.

—By Rachel Morris

IT’S A BRIGHT, BALMY SUNDAY afternoon and I’m driving through the western outskirts of Auckland, New Zealand, the kind of place you never see on a postcard. No majestic mountains, no improbably green pastures—just a bland tangle of shopping malls and suburbia. I follow a dead-end street, past a rubber plant, a roofing company, a drainage service, and a plastics manufacturer, until I reach a white building behind a chain-link fence. Inside is a kernel of a nation within a nation—a sneak preview of what a climate change exodus looks like.

This is the Tuvalu Christian Church, the heart of a migrant community from what may be the first country to be rendered unlivable by global warming. Tuvalu is the fourth-smallest nation on Earth: six coral atolls and three reef islands flung across 500,000 square miles of ocean, about halfway between Australia and Hawaii. It has few natural resources to export and no economy to speak of; its gross domestic product relies heavily on the sale of its desirable Internet domain suffix, which is .tv, and a modest trade in collectible stamps. Tuvalu’s total land area is just 16 square miles, of which the highest point stands 16 feet above the waterline. Tuvaluans, who have a high per-capita incidence of good humor, refer to the spot as “Mount Howard,” after the former Australian prime minister who refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that low-lying island nations are particularly endang­ered by rising seas and will also be buffeted by more frequent and more violent storms. Already, warmer ocean temperatures are eating away at the coral reefs that form Tuvalu’s archipelagic spine. Tuvaluans themselves point to more tangible indicators of trouble—the “king tides” that increasingly sluice their homes, the briny water oozing up into the “grow pits” where they used to cultivate taro and other vegetables. As Julia Whitty predicted in this magazine in 2003, the prognosis has become sufficiently dire that the residents of Tuvalu and other low-lying atoll islands “are beginning to envision the wholesale abandonment of their nations.” Around one-fifth of the 12,000-some inhabitants have already left, most bound for New Zealand, where the Tuvaluan community has nearly tripled since 1996.

Inside the church I find a vibrant scene, suggesting both the resilience of Tuvaluan culture and its ability to adapt. Rows of green plastic chairs are filled with several hundred chattering churchgoers, some in traditional lavalavas—vivid cotton skirts emblazoned with flowers—others in Western dresses and suits. A border of bright blue, yellow, and pink stars rings the upper walls—in Tuvalu these might be constructed from frangipani blossoms, but here they are woven from the plastic bands used to tether shipping cargo. As soon as I sit down, a young man in a dapper dark suit strikes up a conversation. He came here in 1997, is making good money, and hasn’t been home once. “You may have heard the news about Tuvalu—with global warming, the sea is rising,” he says cheerfully. “So better we come here to be safe.” Tuvaluans, resigned to fielding reporters’ questions about their homeland’s impending doom, often offer observations like this unprompted.

After the service, the congregation drifts outside to the gravelly yard, where a group of visitors from the islands is reenacting the crucifixion of Christ on a makeshift stage draped with threadbare astroturf. Reverend Elisala Selu, a thoughtful, soft-spoken man who has worked second jobs to avoid burdening his congregants, explains that Tuvaluan politicians are reluctant to encourage the mass evacuation of their voting base, and so the church, wanting people to be prepared, has taken matters into its own hands. It instructs followers not to assume that, like Noah, they will be delivered by God from the rising waters, and hosts groups of congregants who visit New Zealand to see if they might like to relocate here. But, Selu confides, life in New Zealand isn’t always easy. The Tuvaluans are one of the country’s poorest communities. Just over half the adults have found work; the median income is about $17,000 for men, $10,000 for women. There are those here illegally—overstayers, in Pacific parlance—who struggle to make ends meet; Tuvaluans on the run from debt collectors after buying cars on shady financing schemes; children left unattended for long hours because their parents work multiple jobs as cleaners or laborers or farmworkers. Then there’s the jarring adjustment to urban Auckland from a place where most citizens don’t pay rent or buy food, but sleep on grass mats beside the road on warm nights, go fishing or pick breadfruit when they’re hungry, and where, as one jovial Tuvaluan remarked to me, “the only crime is cycling in the night without a torch [flashlight].” Selu frets about the new generation of Tuvaluan children born in New Zealand. “We try to run away from the sea rise in Tuvalu, but this is another sea-level rise,” he says with a wry smile. “The next generation gets caught by two cultures. Before Tuvalu sinks physically, our identity might sink in a foreign country.”

Tuvalu and other low-lying island countries like Kiribati and the Maldives are, in one sense, the starkest example of how climate change will reshape the world. But Auckland’s Tuvaluan community also represents a best-case scenario—so far their migration has been orderly, and their numbers are minuscule compared with the millions of impoverished people who live in global warming hot spots like Africa’s Sahel, coastal Bangladesh, and Vietnam’s deltas. Koko Warner, an expert on climate change and migration at the United Nations University in Bonn, says the displacement of those populations could be “a phenomenon of a scope not experienced in human history.”

Yet little has been done to prepare. In fact, our understanding of exactly how global warming will affect people—how many lives will be threatened, and what we could do to avert a succession of humanitarian disasters—remains extremely rudimentary. As Bill Gates has caustically observed, “It is interesting how often the impact of climate change is illustrated by talking about the problems the polar bears will face rather than the much greater number of poor people who will die unless significant investments are made to help them.”

Article Continues – http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2009/11/tuvalu-climate-refugees

Barcoding the Planet’s Plant Species

Hundreds of experts from 50 nations are set to agree on a “DNA barcode” system stored on a global database that will be available to scientists around the world that gives every plant on Earth a unique genetic fingerprint.

“Biodiversity scientists are using DNA technology to unravel mysteries, much like detectives use it to solve crimes,” said David Schindel, executive secretary for the Consortium for the Barcode of Life.

“Barcoding is a tool to identify species faster, more cheaply and more precisely than traditional methods, ” explained Patricia Escalante, head of the zoology department at Mexico’s National University (UNAM), which is hosting the gathering. Mexican researchers are also involved in a network to produce barcodes in key taxonomic groups, such as trees, fungi, bees and aquatic insects.

In an effort to limit the impact on the planet’s biodiversity, Dr Escalante said it was vital to establish a reliable monitoring system. “We need an accurate inventory,” she observed, “to recognize parasites of medical, economic or ecological importance. The technology will be used in a number of ways, including identifying the illegal trade in endangered species.

The agreement will be signed at the third International Barcode of Life conference in Mexico City on Tuesday.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/11/barcoding-the-planets-plant-species.html

Quakes from the 1800s still shaking planet

From New Scientist Magazine

SOME earthquakes can leave a legacy of aftershocks that last for centuries.

Low-level seismic rumbles appear to foreshadow many quakes. Yet not always: the 2008 Sichuan quake in China (pictured) came out of the blue. These rumbles may not be precursors but aftershocks – readjustments at a fault following a larger event, in some cases centuries earlier.

Seth Stein of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and colleagues analysed the rate of fault slip in various tectonic settings. At plate boundaries, motion rapidly “reloads” a fault with new stress and changes conditions there, so tremors that can be clearly identified as aftershocks typically end within a decade, they found. Far away from plate boundaries, however, fault reloading is much slower, and aftershocks can continue for hundreds of years. The New Madrid fault in Missouri, for instance, may be experiencing aftershocks from a quake in the early 1800s (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature08502).

Seismic activity away from plate boundaries “tells you more about where large quakes were than where the next one will be”, says Stein.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427334.600-quakes-from-the-1800s-still-shaking-planet.html

Researchers ask how best to engineer the planet

by Martin LaMonica

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.–A group of academics on Friday considered the ultimate engineering challenge: building machines to stabilize the earth’s climate.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology convened a symposium here to discuss the potential benefits and pitfalls of geoengineering, also called climate engineering. Everything from shooting light-blocking particles into the atmosphere to “artificial trees” is being seriously studied, despite trepidation among researchers and opposition from others.

During talks Friday morning, academics said climate engineering techniques are not well understood and, because of the complexity of the global climate system, individual approaches are pockmarked with uncertainties.

Still, speakers at the event said it’s time to step up research in geoengineering to sort out which approaches are worth serious consideration. But they cautioned against expecting easy fixes or abandoning efforts to ratchet down the growth of greenhouse gas emissions in the atmosphere.

“At this point the fear is that if we talk about this, people will stop cutting emissions, which is a rational fear. But the idea that we shouldn’t have a research program would be a real mistake,” said David Keith, the director of the ISEEE Energy and Environmental Systems Group at the University of Calgary during his talk the symposium, which was called Engineering a Cooler Planet.

Speakers said each climate engineering approach needs to be viewed with an associated cost and risk. For example, one relatively inexpensive idea is to shoot particles, called aerosols, into the air in order to block the amount of heat from the sun that reaches the earth’s surface.

The cooling effect from aerosols, such as sulfur dioxide, in the atmosphere is rapid–measured in days or years. But they also impact the planet’s water cycle. Early models show that large-scale efforts to inject aerosols in the atmosphere would likely make certain areas drier and affect the monsoons in India and Asia, said Joyce Penner, a professor of atmosopheric sciences at the University of Michigan.

Even with the risks and uncertainties of climate engineering, speakers said that there is risk with the so-called business-as-usual scenario where the concentration of greenhouse emissions continues to increase at its current pace.

These heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere are forecast to raise average global temperatures, speakers said. But there are a number of regional impacts from global warming, which will likely spur more research in planet-level engineering, said Thomas Karl, the director of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center.

For example, higher temperatures directly affect water and agriculture. The productivity and ability to reproduce of common crops goes down after certain temperature levels, Karl noted. Pests have a longer time to populate and weeds grow better with more carbon dioxide, too, he said. The west of the U.S. is already feeling the impact of droughts, which will continue if mountain snowpack decreases.

“It’s an important choice to make even if we don’t do a thing–that’s a choice itself,” said Karl. “The consequences of not studying this are enormous–understanding the physical, ecosystem, and societal impacts.”

Engineering for a cooler planet
There are two general approaches to engineering for a cooler planet: reflecting sunlight back into space or removing carbon dioxide from the air and storing it.

Injecting sulfur-based aerosols in the atmosphere have a known cooling effect observed in volcanic eruptions, including Mount Pinatubo in 1991. The approach is more practical than, say, placing mirrors in space. But there still isn’t suitable understanding of how the entire climate system would react, including potential changes to ocean circulation, ocean ecosystems, and land precipitation, said Penner.

Also, blocking sunlight from space does not address the problems caused by higher concentrations of carbon dioxide on earth, notably ocean acidification which makes it more difficult for marine animals with shells or corals to grow, speakers

noted.

(Credit: Philip Boyd, University of Otago in Dunedin.)

Other approaches for reflecting heat back into space include spraying sea salt from special-purpose boats to enhance the reflectivity of clouds or installing white roofs on buildings to bounce more sunlight back into space.

Land-based approaches to reducing greenhouse gas concentrations include growing algae-based fuels at massive scale, storing carbon dioxide in underground geological formations, and making charcoal with plants to create a soil amendment called biochar.

There have also been 12 tests to stimulate plankton growth by “fertilizing” the ocean with iron. The goal is to create a rapid “plankton bloom” which will remove carbon dioxide and sequester it in the ocean. But this technique is difficult to verify and risks transforming the existing ocean ecosystems, said Tim Lenton, professor of earth system science at the University of East Anglia.

Because of the risk and uncertainly, Lenton said he is not convinced that climate engineering proposals to block solar radiation makes sense. On the other hand, land-based approaches create competition with other uses of land, notably agriculture.

One area that clearly needs further research is the life-cycle analysis of different climate engineering idea, Lenton said. For example, dumping iron into the ocean to grow plankton has an associated carbon footprint.

“You’ll find out when you do the full calculation, it’s very difficult to make it carbon negative,” he said. “Because of the emissions in simply deploying the technology, it will veto a number of options.”

The computational models to simulate the regional impact of climate changes need to be improved as well, said David Battisti, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington. In research he presented on Friday, Battisti found that once models took into account ice and ocean effects from aerosol injection, there was a significant variation on the projected impact on temperatures and precipitation.

The symposium at MIT is not the first meeting of scientists to consider geoengineering–the idea has been discussed for decades. But some of the academics on Friday said the current trajectory of climate change argues in favor of at least doing research on climate engineering techniques, even if these projects are ultimately never launched.

There is also a uncertainty around climate policy and how effective policies will be at cutting emissions, noted Keith. “It doesn’t mean that we have to do it. But it means that you do need to have the capability to do it,” he said.

In the near term, research in the field should be focused on ranking different proposals, addressing both scientific and political issues, said Philip Boyd, a professor of ocean biochemistry from the University of Otago in New Zealand.

Boyd has created a model that ranks geoengineering schemes in terms of efficacy, affordability, safety, speed of implementation, and the ability to stop a project. Societal and political factors need to be considered because conflicts over use of land, water, and the ocean creates a “geopolitical mess.”

“We pump up the potential for conflict,” he said. “It’s just a minefield in terms of teasing these apart.”

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-10387137-54.html?tag=newsEditorsPicksArea.0

Giz Explains: Why Every Country Has a Different F#$%ing Plug

Ok, maybe not every country, but with at least 12 different sockets in widespread use it sure as hell feels like it to anyone who’s ever traveled. So why in the world, literally, are there so many? Funny story!

The more you look at the writhing orgy of plugs in the world, the sillier it seems. If you buy a phone charger at the airport in Florida, you won’t be able to use it when your flight lands in France. If you buy a three-pronged adapter for le portable in Paris, you might not be able to plug it in when your train drops you off in Germany. And when your flight finally bounces to a stop on the runway in London, get ready to buy a comically large adapter to tap into the grid there. But that’s cool! You can take the same adapter to Singapore with you! And parts of Nigeria! Oh yeah, and if said charger doesn’t support 240v power natively, make sure you buy a converter, or else it might explode.

And aside from a few oases, like the fledgling standardization of the Type C Europlug in the European Union, this is the picture all across the world.

I’d hesitate to refer to power sockets as a part of a country’s culture, because they’re plugs—they don’t really mean anything. But in the sense that they’re probably not going to change until they’re forcefully replaced with something wildly new, it’s kind of what they are.

There are around 12 major plug types in use today, each of which goes by whatever name their adoptive countries choose. For our purposes, we’re going to stick with U.S. Department of Commerce International Trade Administration names (PDF), which are neat and alphabetical: America uses A and B plugs! Turkey uses type C! Etc. Thing is, these names are arbitrary: the letters are just assigned to make talking about these plugs less confusing—they don’t actually mandate anything. They’re not standards, in any meaningful sense of the word.

And even worse, these sockets are divided into two main groups: the 110-120v fellas, like the the ones we use in North America, and the 220-240v plugs, like most of the rest of the world uses. It’s not that the plugs and sockets themselves are somehow tied to one voltage or another, but the devices and power grids they’re attached to probably are.

How This Happened

The history of the voltage split is a pretty short story, and one you’ve probably heard bits and pieces of before. Edison’s early experiments with direct current (DC) power in the late 1800s netted the first useful mainstream applications for electricity, but suffered from a tendency to lose voltage over long distances. Nonetheless, when Nikola Tesla invented a means of long-distance transmission with alternating current (AC) power, he was doing so in direct competition with Edison’s technology, which happened to be 110v. He stuck with that. By the time people started to realize that 240v power might not be such a bad idea for the US, it was the 1950s, and switching was out of the question.

Words were exchanged, elephants were electrocuted, and eventually, the debate was settled: AC power was the only option, and national standardization started in earnest. Westinghouse Electric, the first company to buy Tesla’s patents for power transmission, settled on an easy standard: 60Hz, and 110v. In Europe—Germany, specifically—a company called BEW exercised their monopoly to push things a little further. They settled somewhat arbitrarily on a 50Hz frequency, but more importantly jacked voltages up to 240, because, you know, MORE POWER. And so, the 240 standard slowly spread to the rest of the continent. All this happened before the turn of the century, by the way. It’s an old beef.

For decades after the first standards, newfangled el-ec-trick-al dee-vices had to be patched directly into your house’s wiring, which today sounds like a terrifying prospect. Then, too, it was: Harvey Hubbell’s “Separable Attachment Plug“—which essentially allowed for non-bulb devices to be plugged into a light socket for power—was designed with a simple intention:

My invention has for its object to…do away with the possibility of arcing or sparking in making connection, so that electrical power in buildings may be utilized by persons having no electrical knowledge or skill.

Thanks, Harvey! He later adapted the original design to include a two-pronged flat-blade plug, which itself was refined into a three-pronged plug—the third prong is for grounding—by a guy named Philip Labre in 1928. This design saw a few changes over the years too, but it’s pretty much the type Americans use now.

Here’s the thing: Stories like that of Harvey Hubbell’s plug were unfolding all over the world, each with their own twist on the concept. This was before electronics were globalized, and before country-to-country plug compatibility really mattered. The voltage debate had been pared down to two, which made life a bit easier for power companies to set up shop across the world. But once they were set up, who cared what style plug their customers used? What were you gonna do, lug your new vacuum cleaner across the ocean on a boat? Early efforts to standardize the plug by organizations like the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) had trouble taking hold—who were they to tell a country which plug to adopt?—and what little progress they did make was shattered by the Second World War.

Take the British plug. Today, it’s a huge, three-pronged beast with a fuse built right into it—one of the weirder plugs in the world, to anyone who’s had a chance to use one. But it isn’t Britain’s first plug, or even their first proprietary plug. In the early 1900s the Isles’ cords were capped with the British Standard 546, or Type D hardware, which actually include six subversions of its own, all of which were physically incompatible with one another. This worked out fine until the Second World War, when they got the shit bombed out of them by Germany, and had to rebuild entire swaths of the country in the midst of a severe shortage of basic building supplies— copper, in particular. This made rewiring stuff an expensive proposition, so the government was all, “we need a new plug, stat!”

Here was the pitch: Instead of wiring each socket to a fuseboard somewhere in the house, which would take quite a bit of wire, why not just daisy-chain them together on one wire, and put the fuses in each plug? Hey presto, copper shortage, solved. This was called the British Standard 1363, and you can still find them dangling from wires today. Notice how even in the 1940s and ’50s—practically yesterday!—the UK was devising a new type of plug without any regard for the rest of the world.

Now imagine every other developed country in the world doing the same thing, with a totally different set of historical circumstances. That’s how we ended up here, blowing fuses in our Paris hotel rooms because our travel adapters’ voltage warning were inexplicably written in Cyrillic. Oh, and it gets worse.

You know how the British had control over India for, like, ninety years? Well, along with exporting cricket and inflicting unquantifiable cultural damage, they showed the subcontinent how to plug stuff in, the British way! Problem is, they left in 1947. The BS 1363 plug—the new one—wasn’t introduced until 1946, and didn’t see widespread adoption until a few years later. So India still uses the old British plug, as does Sri Lanka, Nepal and Namibia. Basically, the best way to guess who’s got which socket is to brush up on your WW1/WW2 history, and to have a deep passion for postcolonial literature. No, really.

Is There Any Hope for the Future?

No. I talked to Gabriela Ehrlich, head of communications for the International Electrotechnical Commission, which is still doing its thing over in Switzerland, and the outlook isn’t great. “There are standards, and there is a plug that has been designed. The problem is, really, everyone’s invested in their own system. It’s difficult to get away from that.”

When Holland’s International Questions Commission first teamed up with the IEC to form a committee to talk about this exact problem in 1934. Meetings were stalled, there was some resistance, blah blah blah, and the committee was delayed until 1940. Then a war—a World War, even!—threw a stick in the committee’s spokes, (or a fork in their socket? No?), and the issue was effectively dropped until about 1950, when the IEC realized that there were “limited prospects for any agreement even in this limited geographical region (Europe).” It’d be expensive to tear out everyone’s sockets, and the need didn’t feel that urgent, I guess.

Plus, the IEC can’t force anyone to do anything—they’re sort of like the UN General Assembly for electronics standards, which means they can issue them, but nobody has to follow them, no matter how good they are. As time passed, populations grew, and hundred of millions of sockets were installed all over the world. The prospect of switching hardware looked more and more ridiculous. Who would pay for it? Why would a country want to change? Wouldn’t the interim, with mixed plug standards in the same country, be dangerous?

But the IEC didn’t quite abandon hope, quietly pushing for a standard plug for decades after. And they even came up with some! In the late 80s, they came up with the IEC 60906 plug, a little, round-pronged number for 240v countries. Then they codified a flat-pronged plug for 110-120v countries, which happened to be perfectly compatible with the one we already use in the US. As of today, Brazil is the only country that even plans to adopt the IEC 60906, so, uh, there’s that.

I asked Gabriela if there was any hope, any hope at all, for a future where plugs could just get along:

Maybe in the future you’ll have induction charging; you have a device planted into your wall, and you have a [wireless] charging mechanism.

Last time I saw a wireless power prototype was at the Intel Developer Forum in 2008, and it looked like a science fair project: It consisted of two giant coils, just inches apart, which transmitted enough electricity to light a 40w light bulb. So yeah, we’ll get this power plug problem all sorted by oh, let’s say, 2050?

She took care to emphasize that the standards are still there for people to adopt, so countries could jump onboard, but even in a best-case scenario, for as long as we use wires we’ll have at least two standards to deal with—a 110-120v flat plug and the 240-250v round plug. For now, the Commission is taking a more practical approach to dealing with the problem, issuing specs for things like laptop power bricks, which can handle both voltages and come with interchangeable lead wires, as well as as something near and dear to our hearts: “We have to move forward into plugs we can really control,” Gabriela told me. She means new stuff like USB, which is turning into the de facto gadget charging standard. The most we can hope for is a future where AC outlets are invisible to us, sending power to newer, more universal plugs. My phone’ll charge via USB just as well in Sub-Saharan Africa as it will in New York City; just give me the port.

In the meantime, this means that things really aren’t going to change. Your Walmart shaver will still die if you plug it into a European socket with a bare adapter, Indians will still be reminded of the British Empire every time they unplug a laptop, Israel will have their own plug which works nowhere else in the world, and El Salvador, without a national standard, will continue to wrestle with 10 different kinds of plug.

In other words, sorry.

Many thanks to Gabriela Ehrlich and the IEC, as well as the Institute for Engineering and Technology and Wiring Matters (PDF), and USC Viterbi’s illumin review. Map adapted from Wikimedia Commons by Intern Kyle

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Send an email to John Herrman, the author of this post, at jherrman@gizmodo.com.

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