Doug Ford's Highway 401 tunnel is technically doable. So what's the down side?
Civil engineers have long understood how to build tunnels in complicated places: just think of the Chunnel or London's Crossrail subway, which burrowed through Roman graveyards deep beneath the British capital. From a technical point of view, Premier Doug Ford's scheme to build a 40-odd kilometre long tunnel under Highway 401 is doable. But this megaproject to end all megaprojects will be brutally expensive and glacial.
'It's expensive, it's time consuming, it's slow,' says Shoshanna Saxe, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Toronto and a Canada Research Chair in sustainable infrastructure. 'This project is technically buildable. It's just bad idea.'
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Montreal Gazette
2 days ago
- Montreal Gazette
Brownstein: Montreal producer takes deep dive in documentary Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster
By The documentary begins intriguingly enough: 'Where do you want to go in the ocean? What is the most known site in the ocean? It's clearly the Titanic.' The speaker is well-heeled, maverick American inventor Stockton Rush, whose mission it was to take paying passengers 3,800 metres into the Atlantic Ocean in his mini-sub to scope the ruins of the Titanic luxury liner that sank on its maiden voyage in April 1912 after striking an iceberg 600 kilometres off the coast of Newfoundland. More than 1,500 passengers died in that disaster. Five died, including Rush, when his submersible the Titan imploded on its way down to the Titanic wreck on June 18, 2023. The documentary Implosion: The Titanic Sub Disaster takes a deep and disturbing plunge into the apparent arrogance of Titan mastermind Rush, the co-founder and CEO of the OceanGate undersea exploration company. The doc, co-produced by Montreal GalaFilm boss Arnie Gelbart and directed and co-scripted by acclaimed British director Pamela Gordon, begins streaming Friday on CBC Gem. It will also be broadcast on CBC Television June 20. The production team has done a thorough job in bringing this tragedy into fuller focus, aided and abetted by insightful interviews, rare footage of the Titan's final voyage and other failed dives plus access to the U.S. Coast Guard's investigation. Experts interviewed had misgivings about the Titan's structure, particularly its carbon-fibre hull, even if Rush had pulled off some dives prior to its final descent. There were other ominous warning signs, like seeping water damage and cracking engine sounds. Mutters one skeptic: 'Everyone stepping on board the Titan was risking their life.' The feeling was that Rush was 'hell-bent' on taking the Titan to dangerous new lows under the ocean, someone seeking to 'democratize deep-sea exploration.' Rush was an engineer who initially dreamed of becoming an astronaut. But when it became apparent he was never going to make it to 'Jupiter or Mars,' he turned his sights in the opposite direction. He concluded that would require a 'special sub.' Rush had the money, vision and drive to do so. He was a patrician whose roots went way back, with two of his ancestors having signed the U.S. Declaration of Independence. History, as is often the case, repeats itself here. How's this for cruel irony? Rush's wife's great-great-grandparents, owners of the fabled Macy's department-store chain, perished on the Titanic. They were rumoured to have been the richest passengers aboard. Christine Dawood is understandably livid. Among the five who died aboard the imploded Titan were her billionaire British-Pakistani husband, Shahzada, 48, and son Suleman, 19. She blames 'ego and arrogance' for their deaths. Gelbart has long been consumed by the Titanic and Titan. He brings to the documentary a wealth of factoids about both as well as Rush's participation. 'Rush had done some 88 dives prior to his last, but not all successful ones,' Gelbart says in a phone interview. 'It went down successfully only six times.' Gelbart had been involved since 2017 when Rush had come up with a working model of the Titan, which he had initially tested in the Bahamas. Then ensued a lot of correspondence with Rush, who was to move to his company's home in Everett, Wash. before heading to his last base in St. John's. 'He was looking for publicity, and I first wanted to make an Imax film, The Return to Titanic. What he was building for us was a remote camera that would go inside the hold of the Titanic, full of cars and furniture and other stuff that no one had seen since 1912.' Gelbart's project was initially to be a four-part series, retelling the Titanic story but using Rush's submersible to examine what was left of it, including its interior. 'We were looking for a Hollywood celebrity for the project,' Gelbart says. 'I would have liked to go down there myself, but because it was something like $250,000 a seat, it was not feasible. Instead, we included that price in our budget for a celebrity, someone to tell the Titanic story by being next to it.' Amid all the experimenting, failed testing and rebuilding of the original Titan, Gelbart stayed in touch with Rush. 'He was a great salesman and really believed in the Titan. As an engineer, he could talk the talk. We trusted him. We didn't think he was creating something that was fatally flawed. He explained the technology, but what do I know about carbon fibre? 'He moved his operation to St. John's for a number of reasons, one of which was so he wouldn't need to certify it in Canada. But on the downside was the weather there. And with water freezing, then thawing on the Titan lining outside, this could have created damage. In the final report of the U.S. Coast Guard, we heard this could have been one of the mitigating factors in the disaster.' That official report has yet to be released. Why? 'When (U.S. president Donald) Trump took over this year, he fired the head of the U.S. Coast Guard. So they're not allowed to release it until they get a new head.' Gelbart was shocked like most everyone else upon learning of the implosion. 'But 24 hours later, we had the commission from the BBC, Discovery U.S.A. and the CBC to make this documentary. It was such a whirlwind turnaround for a story that much of the world had been watching and waiting for news about what happened to the Titan and its occupants, until the fate was learned.' Gelbart's GalaFilm has more than 120 film and TV credits and has won dozens of awards, including multiple Gémeaux/Geminis and one Prime Time Emmy Award for the Cirque du Soleil series Fire Within. 'But this was the first time in my life I was involved with anything as well-known as this one.'
Winnipeg Free Press
29-05-2025
- Winnipeg Free Press
What would happen if the Amazon rainforest dried out? This decades-long experiment has some answers
CAXIUANA NATIONAL FOREST, Brazil (AP) — A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world's largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for 'Forest Drought Study Project' in Portuguese— set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is the longest-running project of its kind in the world, and has become a source for dozens of academic articles in fields ranging from meteorology to ecology and physiology. Understanding how drought can affect the Amazon, an area twice the size of India that crosses into several South American nations, has implications far beyond the region. The rainforest stores a massive amount of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that is the main driver of climate change. According to one study, the Amazon stores the equivalent of two years of global carbon emissions, which mainly come from the burning of coal, oil and gasoline. When trees are cut, or wither and die from drought, they release into the atmosphere the carbon they were storing, which accelerates global warming. Creating drought conditions and observing the results To mimic stress from drought, the project, located in the Caxiuana National Forest, assembled about 6,000 transparent plastic rectangular panels across one hectare (2.5 acres), diverting around 50% of the rainfall from the forest floor. They were set 1 meter above ground (3.3 ft) on the sides to 4 meters (13.1 ft) above ground in the center. The water was funneled into gutters and channeled through trenches dug around the plot's perimeter. Next to it, an identical plot was left untouched to serve as a control. In both areas, instruments were attached to trees, placed on the ground and buried to measure soil moisture, air temperature, tree growth, sap flow and root development, among other data. Two metal towers sit above each plot. In each tower, NASA radars measure how much water is in the plants, which helps researchers understand overall forest stress. The data is sent to the space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, where it is processed. 'The forest initially appeared to be resistant to the drought,' said Lucy Rowland, an ecology professor at the University of Exeter. That began to change about 8 years in, however. 'We saw a really big decline in biomass, big losses and mortality of the largest trees,' said Rowland. This resulted in the loss of approximately 40% of the total weight of the vegetation and the carbon stored within it from the plot. The main findings were detailed in a study published in May in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. It shows that during the years of vegetation loss, the rainforest shifted from a carbon sink, that is, a storer of carbon dioxide, to a carbon emitter, before eventually stabilizing. There was one piece of good news: the decades-long drought didn't turn the rainforest into a savanna, or large grassy plain, as earlier model-based studies had predicted. Next steps include measuring forest recovery In November, most of the 6,000 transparent plastic covers were removed, and now scientists are observing how the forest changes. There is currently no end date for the project. 'The forest has already adapted. Now we want to understand what happens next,' said meteorologist João de Athaydes, vice coordinator of Esecaflor, a professor at the Federal University of Para and coauthor of the Nature study. 'The idea is to see whether the forest can regenerate and return to the baseline from when we started the project.' During a visit in April, Athaydes guided Associated Press journalists through the site, which had many researchers. The area was so remote that most researchers had endured a full-day boat trip from the city of Belem, which will host the next annual U.N. climate talks later this year. During the days in the field, the scientists stayed at the Ferreira Penna Scientific Base of the Emilio Goeldi Museum, a few hundred yards (meters) from the plots. Four teams were at work. One collected soil samples to measure root growth in the top layer. Another gathered weather data and tracking soil temperature and moisture. A third was measured vegetation moisture and sap flow. The fourt focused on plant physiology. 'We know very little about how drought influences soil processes,' said ecologist Rachel Selman, researcher at the University of Edinburgh and one of the co-authors of the Nature study, during a break. Wednesdays A weekly look towards a post-pandemic future. Esecaflor's drought simulation draws some parallels with the past two years, when much of the Amazon rainforest, under the influence of El Nino and the impact of climate change, endured its most severe dry spells on record. The devastating consequences ranged from the death of dozens of river dolphins due to warming and receding waters to vast wildfires in old-growth areas. Rowland explained that the recent El Nino brought short-term, intense impacts to the Amazon, not just through reduced rainfall but also with spikes in temperature and vapor pressure deficit, a measure of how dry the air is. In contrast, the Esecaflor experiment focused only on manipulating soil moisture to study the effects of long-term shifts in rainfall. 'But in both cases, we're seeing a loss of the forest's ability to absorb carbon,' she said. 'Instead, carbon is being released back into the atmosphere, along with the loss of forest cover.' ___ The Associated Press' climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP's standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at
Cision Canada
27-05-2025
- Cision Canada
Announcement of The Shaw Laureates 2025
HONG KONG, May 27, 2025 /CNW/ -- The Shaw Prize in Astronomy is awarded in equal shares to John Richard Bond Professor, Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics and University Professor, University of Toronto, Canada and George Efstathiou Professor of Astrophysics, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom for their pioneering research in cosmology, in particular for their studies of fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. Their predictions have been verified by an armada of ground-, balloon- and space-based instruments, leading to precise determinations of the age, geometry, and mass-energy content of the universe. The Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine is awarded to Wolfgang Baumeister Director Emeritus and Scientific Member, Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, Germany for his pioneering development and use of cryogenic-electron tomography (cryo-ET), an imaging technique that enables three-dimensional visualisation of biological samples, including proteins, macromolecular complexes, and cellular compartments as they exist in their natural cellular settings. The Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences is awarded to Kenji Fukaya Professor, Beijing Institute of Mathematical Sciences and Applications and the Yau Mathematical Sciences Center, Tsinghua University, PRC for his pioneering work on symplectic geometry, especially for envisioning the existence of a category — nowadays called the Fukaya category — consisting of Lagrangians on a symplectic manifold, for leading the monumental task of constructing it, and for his subsequent ground-breaking and impactful contributions to symplectic topology, mirror symmetry, and gauge theory. Tuesday, 27 May 202 5. At today's press conference in Hong Kong, The Shaw Prize Foundation announced the Shaw Laureates for 2025. Information was posted on the website at Hong Kong time 15:30 (GMT 07:30). The Shaw Prize consists of three annual prizes: Astronomy, Life Science and Medicine, and Mathematical Sciences, each bearing a monetary award of US$1.2 million. This will be the twenty-second year that the Prize has been awarded and the presentation ceremony is scheduled for Tuesday, 21 October 2025 in Hong Kong.
