Noise pollution and wildlife; No till farming; Cornwall's geothermal heat

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 21 November 2019

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The effects of human-made noise on the natural world has been surprisingly little studied. Hanjoerg Kunc at Queen's University in Belfast has collected all experimental data on the effects of anthropogenic noise on wild animals and found it to be overwhelmingly harmful., And Cambridge University's PhD student Sophia Cooke is looking at the impact of roads, including road noise on British birds, and the impact could be huge. Last week we spoke to Jane Rickson at Cranfield University about how healthy soils are a good defence against the effects of, and indeed the process of, flooding. Many farmer listeners emailed in to tell us about their experiences with no till and minimum disturbance agriculture. Simon Jeffery at Harper-Adams University takes Adam through some of the points raised. Last November, drilling began in Redruth, Cornwall to see if geothermal heat could be tapped from the hot rocks below. Graihagh Jackson went to catch up with the project and met with Lucy Cotton – the project geologist for the United Downs Deep Geothermal Power project. Producer: Fiona Roberts

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and trust me you'll get there in a moment but if you're a comedy fan
0:05.2	I'd really like to tell you a bit about what we do. I'm Julie Mackenzie and I commission comedy
0:10.2	podcast at the BBC. It's a bit of a dream job really.
0:13.0	Comedy is a fantastic joyous thing to do because really you're making people laugh,
0:18.0	making people's days a bit better, helping them process, all manner of things.
0:22.0	But you know I also know that comedy is really
0:24.4	subjective and everyone has different tastes so we've got a huge range of comedy on offer
0:29.6	from satire to silly shocking to soothing profound to just general pratting about. So if you
0:36.2	fancy a laugh, find your next comedy at BBC Sounds.
0:41.0	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:44.8	Hello, you, this is the podcast of Inside Science from BBC Radio 4,
0:48.0	first broadcast on the 21st of November 2019.
0:51.7	I'm Adam Rutherford. The Cornish are taming the power locked in their
0:55.5	lands to provide energy and heat water. We get deep into hot rocks in Redruth,
1:00.0	which could be a 1980s metal album.
1:03.0	And we follow up on the impact of flooding on arable land,
1:06.0	farmers and agriculturalists have been telling us their experiences
1:09.0	of using old and new farming techniques to mitigate flood devastation.
1:14.0	But first...
1:15.0	The roaring traffic's boom is not something that we all love, but it is part of our ecosystem, the unfortunate soundtrack of modern life.
1:26.0	Generally annoying though the sound of roads is, the effects this background racket has on our wildlife is not well studied or understood but it isn't
1:34.4	positive.
	...

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