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In Hawaii, the Mauna Loa Observatory tracked the CO2 in the atmosphere and detected a baseline of 415 ppm. This proves that the temperature is increasing, as it has increased 1.0C since pre-industrial times since more man made emissions were released into the atmosphere. The CO2 levels continue to increase and so do the temperatures.

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May 13, 2019 by Patrick Galey

Carbon dioxide levels in Earth's atmosphere have hit record highs as man-made greehouse gas emissions continue to grow

Scientists in the United States have detected the highest levels of planet-warming carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere since records began, sounding new alarm over the relentless rise of man-made greenhouse gas emissions..26

The Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, which has tracked atmospheric CO2 levels since the late 1950s, on Saturday morning detected 415.26 parts per million (ppm).

It was also the first time on record that the observatory measured a daily baseline above 415 ppm.

The last time Earth's atmosphere contained this much CO2 was more than three million years ago, when global sea levels were several metres higher and parts of Antarctica were blanketed in forest.

"It shows that we are not on track with protecting the climate at all. The number keeps rising and it's getting higher year after year," Wolfgang Lucht, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), told AFP.

"This number needs to stabilise."

But far from stabilising, levels of CO2-one of a trinity of greenhouse gases produced when fossil fuels are burnt-are climbing ever more rapidly.

Ralph Keeling, director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography's CO2 Programme, said the trend would probably continue throughout 2019-likely to be an El Nino year in which temperatures rise due to warmer ocean currents.

"The average growth rate is remaining on the high end. The increase from last year will probably be around three parts per million whereas the recent average has been 2.5 ppm," he said.

"Likely we're seeing the effect of mild El Nino conditions on top of ongoing fossil fuel use."

The levels of greenhouse gases in Earth's atmosphere from burning fossil fuels are growing every year

'Increasing at increasing rate'
The 2015 Paris Agreement calls on humanity to block the rise in Earth's temperature at "well below" 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) compared to preindustrial levels, and 1.5C if possible.

The last four years were the four hottest on record and, in spite of the Paris deal and increasing public awareness of the problem, mankind continues to break its own emissions records, year on year.

Earth's average surface temperature has already increased 1.0C since pre-industrial times due to man-made emissions.

"All of human history has been in a colder climate than now," said Lucht.

"Every time an engine runs we emit CO2 and it has to go somewhere. It doesn't miraculously disappear, it stays in the atmosphere.

"Despite the Paris climate agreement, despite all the speeches and the protests-we are not seeing that we are bending the curve yet," he added.

While there is some disagreement over what would constitute "safe" atmospheric CO2 levels, there is a broad consensus that 350 ppm-a level surpassed in the late 1980s-would stave off runaway global warming.

"350 ppm is a precautionary value because some of the consequences of being above 400 may still be evolving," Lucht said.

"But since we're not on track anyhow, any value that we can manage to stabilise at is a win."

The 415 ppm threshold was first surpassed earlier this month and has already risen further.

"I'm old enough to remember when passing 400ppm was a big deal," Gernot Wagner, a research associate at Harvard University, said on Twitter.

"Two years ago we hit 410ppm for the first time. By now, it's 415ppm. And oh, the increase is increasing at an increasing rate!"

© 2019 AFP

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415.26 parts per million: CO2 levels hit historic high

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May 13, 2019 by Patrick Galey Scientists in the United States have detected the highest levels of planet-warming carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere since records began, sounding new alarm over the relentless rise of man-made greenhouse gas emissions..26 The Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, which has tracked atmospheric CO2 levels since the late 1950s, on Saturday morning detected 415.26 parts per million (ppm).

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Arctic Made Greener, but now turning brown

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Arctic Made Greener, but now turning brown

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There has been an increase in plant growth and a longer growing season, so the arctic is turning more green due to the increasing temperatures 2-3 times more than the rest of the world. However, some parts are browning as plant growth reverses.

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The Chugach people of southern Alaska's Kenai Peninsula have picked berries for generations. Tart blueberries and sweet, raspberry-like salmonberries - an Alaska favorite - are baked into pies and boiled into jams. But in the summer of 2009, the bushes stayed brown and the berries never came.

For three more years, harvests failed. "It hit the communities very hard," says Nathan Lojewski, the forestry manager for Chugachmiut, a nonprofit tribal consortium for seven villages in the Chugach region.

The berry bushes had been ravaged by caterpillars of geometrid moths - the Bruce spanworm ( Operophtera bruceata) and the autumnal moth ( Epirrita autumnata). The insects had laid their eggs in the fall, and as soon as the leaf buds began growing in the spring, the eggs hatched and the inchworms nibbled the stalks bare.

Chugach elders had no traditional knowledge of an outbreak on this scale in the region, even though the insects were known in Alaska. "These berries were incredibly important. There would have been a story, something in the oral history," Lojewski says. "As far as the tribe was concerned, this had not happened before."

At the peak of the multiyear outbreak, the caterpillars climbed from the berry bushes into trees. The pests munched through foliage from Port Graham, at the tip of the Kenai Peninsula, to Wasilla, north of Anchorage, about 300 kilometers away. In summer, thick brown-gray layers of denuded willows, alders and birches lined the mountainsides above stretches of Sitka spruce.
Two summers ago, almost a decade after the first infestation, the moths returned. "We got a few berries, but not as many as we used to," says Chugach elder Ephim Moonin Sr., whose house in the village of Nanwalek is flanked by tall salmonberry bushes. "Last year, again, there were hardly any berries."
For more than 35 years, satellites circling the Arctic have detected a "greening" trend in Earth's northernmost landscapes. Scientists have attributed this verdant flush to more vigorous plant growth and a longer growing season, propelled by higher temperatures that come with climate change. But recently, satellites have been picking up a decline in tundra greenness in some parts of the Arctic. Those areas appear to be "browning."

Like the salmonberry harvesters on the Kenai Peninsula, ecologists working on the ground have witnessed browning up close at field sites across the circumpolar Arctic, from Alaska to Greenland to northern Norway and Sweden. Yet the bushes bereft of berries and the tinder-dry heaths (low-growing shrubland) haven't always been picked up by the satellites. The low-resolution sensors may have averaged out the mix of dead and living vegetation and failed to detect the browning.

Scientists are left to wonder what is and isn't being detected, and they're concerned about the potential impact of not knowing the extent of the browning. If it becomes widespread, Arctic browning could have far-reaching consequences for people and wildlife, affecting habitat and atmospheric carbon uptake and boosting wildfire risk.

Growing greenbelt

The Arctic is warming two to three times as fast as the rest of the planet, with most of the temperature increase occurring in the winter. Alaska, for example, has warmed 2 degrees Celsius since 1949, and winters in some parts of the state, including southcentral Alaska and the Arctic interior, are on average 5 degrees C warmer.

An early effect of the warmer climate was a greener Arctic. More than 20 years ago, researchers used data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's weather satellites to assess a decade of northern plant growth after a century of warming. The team compared different wavelengths of light - red and near-infrared - reflecting off vegetation to calculate the NDVI, the normalized difference vegetation index. Higher NDVI values indicate a greener, more productive landscape. In a single decade - from 1981, when the first satellite was launched, to 1991 - the northern high latitudes had become about 8 percent greener, the researchers reported in 1997 in Nature.

The Arctic ecosystem, once constrained by cool conditions, was stretching beyond its limits. In 1999 and 2000, researchers cataloged the extent and types of vegetation change in parts of northern Alaska using archival photographs taken during oil exploration flyovers between 1948 and 1950. In new images of the same locations, such as the Kugururok River in the Noatak National Preserve, low-lying tundra plants that once grew along the riverside terraces had been replaced by stands of white spruce and green alder shrubs. At some of the study's 66 locations, shrub-dominated vegetation had doubled its coverage from 10 to 20 percent. Not all areas showed a rise in shrub abundance, but none showed any decrease.

In 2003, Howard Epstein, a terrestrial ecologist at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, and colleagues looked to the satellite record, which now held another decade of data. Focusing on Alaska's North Slope, which lies just beyond the crown of the Brooks Range and extends to the Beaufort Sea, the researchers found that the highest NDVI values, or "peak greenness," during the growing season had increased nearly 17 percent between 1981 and 2001, in line with the warming trend.

Brown among the green

Earth-observing satellites have been monitoring the Arctic tundra for almost four decades. In that time, the North Slope, the Canadian low Arctic tundra and eastern Siberia have become especially green, with thicker and taller tundra vegetation and shrubs expanding northward. "If you look at the North Slope of Alaska, if you look at the overall trend, it's greening like nobody's business," says Uma Bhatt, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Yet parts of the Arctic, including the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta of western Alaska, the Canadian Arctic Archipelago (the islands north of the mainland that give Canada its pointed tip) and the northwestern Siberian tundra, show extensive browning over the length of the satellite record, from the early 1980s to 2016. "It could just be a reduction in green vegetation. It doesn't necessarily mean the widespread death of plants," Epstein says. Scientists don't yet know why plant growth there has slowed or reversed - or whether the satellite signal is in some way misleading.

"All the models indicated for a long time that we would expect greening with warmer temperatures and higher productivity in the tundra, so long as it wasn't limited in some other way, like [by lower] moisture," says Scott Goetz, an ecologist and remote-sensing specialist at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. He is also the science team lead for ABoVE, NASA's Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment, which is tracking ecosystem changes in Alaska and western Canada. "Many of us were quite surprised ... that the Arctic was suddenly browning. It's something we need to resolve."

Freeze-dried tundra

While global warming has propelled widespread trends in tundra greening, extreme winter weather can spur local browning events. In recent years, in some parts of the Arctic, extraordinary warm winter weather, sometimes paired with rainfall, has put tundra vegetation under enormous stress and caused plants to lose freeze resistance, dry up or die - and turn brown.
Gareth Phoenix, a terrestrial ecologist at the University of Sheffield in England, recalls his shock at seeing a series of midwinter timelapse photos taken in 2001 at a research site outside the town of Abisko in northern Sweden. In the space of a couple of days, the temperature shot up from −16° C to 6° C, melting the tundra's snow cover.
"As an ecologist, you're thinking, 'Whoa! Those plants would usually be nicely insulated under the snow,' " he says. "Suddenly, they're being exposed because all the snow has melted. What are the consequences of that?"

Arctic plants survive frigid winters thanks to that blanket of snow and physiological changes, known as freeze resistance, that allow plants to freeze without damage. But once the plants awaken in response to physical cues of spring - warmer weather, longer days - and experience bud burst, they lose that ability to withstand frigid conditions.
That's fine if spring has truly arrived. But if it's just a winter heat wave and the warm air mass moves on, the plants become vulnerable as temperatures return to seasonal norms. When temporary warm air covers thousands of square kilometers at once, plant damage occurs over large areas. "These landscapes can look like someone's gone through with a flamethrower," Phoenix says. "It's quite depressing. You're there in the middle of summer, and everything's just brown."Jarle Bjerke, a vegetation ecologist at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research in Tromsø, saw browning across northern Norway and Sweden in 2008. The landscape - covered in mats of crowberry, an evergreen shrub with bright green sausagelike needles - was instead shades of brown, red-brown and grayish brown. "We saw it everywhere we went, from the mountaintops to the coastal heaths," Bjerke says.
Bjerke, Phoenix and other researchers continue to find brown vegetation in the wake of winter warming events. Long periods of mild winter weather have rolled over the Svalbard archipelago, the cluster of islands in the Arctic Ocean between Norway and the North Pole, in the last decade. The snow melted or blew away, exposing the ground-hugging plants. Some became encrusted in ice following a once-unheard-of midwinter rainfall. In 2015, the Arctic bell heather, whose small white flowers brighten Arctic ridges and heaths, were brown that summer, gray the next and then the leaves fell off. "It's not new that plants can die during mild winters," Bjerke says. "The new thing is that it is now happening several winters in a row."

Insect invasion

The weather needn't always be extreme to harm plants in the Arctic. With warmer winters and summers, leaf-eating insects have thrived, defoliating bushes and trees beyond the insects' usual range. "They're very visual events," says Rachael Treharne, an Arctic ecologist who completed her Ph.D. at the University of Sheffield and now works at ClimateCare, a company that helps organizations reduce their climate impact. She remembers being in the middle of an autumnal moth outbreak in northern Sweden one summer. "There were caterpillars crawling all over the plants - and us. We'd wake up with them in our beds."

In northernmost Norway, Sweden and Finland in the mid-2000s, successive bursts of geometrid moths defoliated 10,000 square kilometers of mountain birch forest - an area roughly the size of Puerto Rico. The outbreak was one of Europe's most abrupt and large-scale ecosystem disturbances linked to climate change, says Jane Jepsen, an Arctic ecologist at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research.

Three effects

"These moth species benefit from a milder winter, spring and summer climate," Jepsen says. Moth eggs usually die at around −30° C, but warmer winters have allowed more eggs of the native autumnal moth to survive. With warmer springs, the eggs hatch earlier in the year and keep up with the bud burst of the mountain birch trees. Another species - the winter moth ( O. brumata), found in southern Norway, Sweden and Finland - expanded northward during the outbreak. The spring and summer warmth favored the larvae, which ate more and grew larger, and the resulting hardier female moths laid more eggs in the fall.

While forests that die off can grow back over several decades, some of these mountain birches may have been hammered too hard, Jepsen says. In some places, the forest has given way to heathland. Ecological transitions like this could be long-lasting or even permanent, she says.

Smoldering lands

Once rare, wildfires may be one of the north's main causes of browning. As grasses, shrubs and trees across the region dry up, they are being set aflame with increasing frequency, with fires covering larger areas and leaving behind dark scars. For example, in early 2014 in the Norwegian coastal municipality of Flatanger, sparks from a power line ignited the dry tundra heath, destroying more than 100 wooden buildings in several coastal hamlets.

Sparsely populated places, where lightning is the primary cause of wildfires, are also seeing an uptick in wildfires. Scientists say lightning strikes are becoming more frequent as the planet warms. The number of lightning-sparked fires has risen 2 to 5 percent per year in Canada's Northwest Territories and Alaska over the last four decades, earth system scientist Sander Veraverbeke of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and his colleagues reported in 2017 in Nature Climate Change.

In 2014, the Northwest Territories had 385 fires, which burned 34,000 square kilometers. The next year, 766 fires torched 20,600 square kilometers of the Alaskan interior - accounting for about half the total area burned in the entire United States in 2015.

In the last two years, wildfires sent plumes of smoke aloft in western Greenland ( SN: 3/17/18, p. 20) and in the northern reaches of Sweden, Norway and Russia, places where wildfires are uncommon. Wildfire activity within a 30-year period could quadruple in Alaska by 2100, says a 2017 report in Ecography. Veraverbeke expects to see "more fires in the Arctic in the future."

The loss of wide swaths of plants could have wide-ranging local effects. "These plants are the foundation of the terrestrial Arctic food webs," says Isla Myers-Smith, a global change ecologist at the University of Edinburgh. The shriveled landscapes can leave rock ptarmigan, for example, which rely heavily on plants, without enough food to eat in the spring. The birds' predators, such as the arctic fox, may feel the loss the following year.

The effects of browning may be felt beyond the Arctic, which holds about half of the planet's terrestrial carbon. The boost in tundra greening allows the region to store, or "sink," more carbon during the growing season. But carbon uptake may slow if browning events continue, as expected in some regions.

Treharne, Phoenix and colleagues reported in February in Global Change Biology that on the Lofoten Islands in northern Norway, extreme winter conditions cut in half the heathlands' ability to trap carbon dioxide from the atmosphere during the growing season.

Yet there's still some uncertainty about how these browned tundra ecosystems might change in the long-term. As the land darkens, the surface absorbs more heat and warms up, threatening to thaw the underlying permafrost and accelerate the release of methane and carbon dioxide. Some areas might switch from being carbon sinks to carbon sources, Phoenix warns.

On the other hand, other plant species - with more or less capacity to take up carbon - could move in. "I'm still of the view that [these areas] will go through these short-term events and continue on their trajectory of greater productivity," Goetz says.

A better view

The phenomena that cause browning events - extreme winter warming, insect outbreaks, wildfires - are on the rise. But browning events are tough to study, especially in winter, because they're unpredictable and often occur in hard-to-reach areas.
Ecologists working on the ground would like the satellite images and the NDVI maps to point to areas with unusual vegetation growth - increasing or decreasing. But many of the browning events witnessed by researchers on the ground have not been picked up by the older, lower-resolution satellite sensors, which scientists still use. Those sensors oversimplify what's on the ground: One pixel covers an area 8 kilometers by 8 kilometers. "The complexity that's contained within a pixel size that big is pretty huge," Myers-Smith says. "You have mountains, or lakes, or different types of tundra vegetation, all within that one pixel."
At a couple of recent workshops on Arctic browning, remote-sensing experts and ecologists tried to tackle the problem. "We've been talking about how to bring the two scales together," Bhatt says. New sensors, more frequent snapshots, better data access and more computing power could help scientists zero in on the extent and severity of browning in the Arctic.

Researchers have begun using Google Earth Engine's massive collection of satellite data, including Landsat images at a much better resolution of 30 meters by 30 meters per pixel. Improved computational capabilities also enable scientists to explore vegetation change close up. The European Space Agency's recently launched Sentinel Earth-observing satellites can monitor vegetation growth with a pixel size of 10 meters by 10 meters. Says Myers-Smith: "That's starting to get to a scale that an ecologist can grapple with."

This article appears in the April 13, 2019 issue of Science News with the headline, "Arctic Browning: Warming trends bring insects, extreme weather and wildfires to land that had been going green."

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Climate change made the Arctic greener. Now parts of it are turning brown.

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The Chugach people of southern Alaska's Kenai Peninsula have picked berries for generations. Tart blueberries and sweet, raspberry-like salmonberries - an Alaska favorite - are baked into pies and boiled into jams. But in the summer of 2009, the bushes stayed brown and the berries never came. For three more years, harvests failed.

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Increase of Flies, causing more diseases

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Increase of Flies, causing more diseases

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As the temperature increase, more flies are attracted to that area. This is a problem in houses and farms because flies can carry diarrhea causing diseases and can land on your food, spreading it.

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Warmer springs and summers could make house flies friskier, spreading diarrhea-causing bacteria to more places. As a result, foodborne Campylobacter infections could increase with climate change, proposes epidemiologist Melanie Cousins of the University of Waterloo in Canada.

Cousins' computer simulation, still a proof-of-concept version, focuses on how the warm weather surge in house flies and their activity affects the typical spring-summer rise in Campylobacter cases. Under a scenario of summers 2.5 degrees Celsius warmer on average than in 2003, the simulation predicts about 28 percent more Campylobacter cases in the Canadian province of Ontario by 2050, she and colleagues say February 13 in Royal Society Open Science.

Campylobacter infections are most often caused by contaminated food, perhaps by a fly that's strolled on other tainted food, an infected animal or feces. Most people recover from an infection within about 10 days. The bacteria are the most common cause of gastrointestinal illness in Canada, with Ontario averaging more than 3,000 cases a year. The United States has some 1.3 million infections a year.

To set up a simplified simulation, Cousins used data from 2005 on reported Campylobacter infections in Ontario to estimate transmission rates and fly birth and death rates. She then plugged those rates into the simulation to predict subsequent years' Campylobacter infections. Those results came close to the real data available through 2013, and allowed her to predict future infections under different warming scenarios. The simulation assumes flies become more active with climate change since, like other insects, they depend on ambient temperatures for heating and cooling. It also assumes bacterial increases with warming.

The study is just the latest to highlight consequences of warming on insect behavior. Other studies have predicted how climate change might increase pest attacks on crops ( SN: 9/29/18, p. 8) and affect public health, such as Lyme disease's creep into Canada ( SN: 8/19/17, p. 16).

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Climate change could energize flies, spreading more bacteria to food

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Warmer springs and summers could make house flies friskier, spreading diarrhea-causing bacteria to more places. As a result, foodborne Campylobacter infections could increase with climate change, proposes epidemiologist Melanie Cousins of the University of Waterloo in Canada.

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Increasing water temperatures are yielding fewer fish

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Increasing water temperatures are yielding fewer fish

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Due to climate change, the oceans are warming and decreasing the amount of fish being able to be caught. The sustainable yield as dropped by 4% globally and 35% in particular areas. This harms not only the fish themselves, but also affects jobs and sources of food as well.

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While there are a lot of alarm bells sounding over how climate change will affect marine ecosystems and the world's seafood supply in the future, there's been much less attention paid to the effects it's already had on them. In fact, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimates that more than 90 percent of the earth's warming over the past 50 years has occurred in the ocean. Now, a new, first-of-its-kind study reveals that ocean warming has significantly affected fisheries worldwide, and it's done more harm than good.

"Everyone wants to know what the future of our marine resources are - the problem is that getting even basic information is hard," says Daniele Bianchi, an assistant professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Ocean Sciences at the University of California-Los Angeles. It's a great starting point, he says, "that they can prove there is this influence, and to do that they had to do a lot of work, not just in this paper, but really collecting all the data."

Published Thursday in , the study used temperature records and maximum sustainable yield data - a metric showing the most that a resource can be exploited without depleting it - from 1930 to 2010 to determine warming impacts on 235 fish and invertebrate populations around the world. (That sample included 124 species in 38 eco-regions, or about a third of the reported global catch.)

"Most people have been looking at forecasting what the anticipated impacts of climate change are going to be on the future of fisheries, but no one has actually looked at what the impact of climate change has already been," says Chris Free, the study's lead author and a researcher at the University of California-Santa Barbara. "It helps us figure out some of the factors that make populations more vulnerable to anticipated climate change." It also highlights just how significantly future warming could affect the studied populations, since the already-observed changes resulted from about a half-degree Celsius in ocean warming. Projections for the future expect more than three times that increase.

Free and his peers from Rutgers University, the University of Washington, and NOAA found that overall, global sustainable fish and shellfish yields decreased by about 4 percent, with some species, like the Atlantic cod in the Irish Sea, faring worse than others. While 4 percent might not seem huge, it's still a marked drop, and beyond that, the regional differences are especially striking. Alarmingly, yield losses reached almost 35 percent in some eco-regions.

The global decrease "is fairly significant for the past 80 years," Bianchi says. "Populations of fish that are negatively affected declined quite a lot, and I'm sure the people that rely on these resources might find these results quite worrisome, even more than someone taking the global perspective."

The biggest losses occurred in the Sea of Japan and the North Sea, where the maximum sustainable yields dropped by over 34 percent. The East China Sea (8.3), Celtic-Biscay Shelf (15.2), Iberian Coast (19.2), South Atlantic Ocean (5.3), and Southeast U.S. Continental Shelf (5) also saw significant dips.

"To see these massive losses in the North Sea, which supports really important commercial fisheries, and also in the East Asian ecosystems that are home to some of the fastest-growing human populations and populations that depend on seafood is really concerning," Free says.

Beyond the environmental impact, as fisheries change, many worry about the threat to global economics and nutrition. An estimated 3 billion people rely on seafood as their primary source of protein, and global marine fisheries bring in about $100 billion in revenue a year; more than 10 percent of the world's population depends on them for their livelihood. Moreover, seafood is a major global trade commodity, so the big declines above Northern Europe or in the Sea of Japan, for example, could create ripple effects in other areas as well. "The losses in those ecosystems aren't just about those countries, but also about the countries they export seafood to," Free notes. Take the United States, for example, which imported 6 billion pounds of seafood in 2017, more than in any previous year. These imports accounted for more than 90 percent of the seafood Americans consumed. Notably, the data shows an increasing reliance on imports from places like Norway and China.

All that said, there is something of a silver lining, at least in some regions. The study shows that fish in some areas, like the black sea bass off the Northeast U.S. Continental Shelf, have actually benefited from ocean warming. But even the good news comes with an asterisk: Many more of the populations studied had a negative versus positive reaction to the warming. And even for the species currently thriving in warmer waters, as the warming increases- as it's expected to-these benefits could run out when species reach their temperature threshold. "It can't be good forever," Free says. "These populations that have been winning aren't going to be climate winners forever." Moreover, a number of other climate-fueled factors not included in this research, like ocean acidification and rising seas, have been wreaking more and more havoc on marine ecosystems, so the warming only reveals one piece of the puzzle.

Adding to the risks posed by a changing climate is the problem of overfishing, a persistent and increasing issue plaguing global fisheries, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, which found last year that a third of the world's oceans are overfished, while fish consumption is at a record high. Significantly, the study reveals an important relationship between environmental change and overfishing (the act of fishing a species so much it cannot replenish itself): The researchers found that the populations that experienced heavy and prolonged overfishing were more vulnerable to the impacts of ocean warming, meaning overfishing could make species less resilient to climate change in the future, and climate change could in turn make it harder to rebuild overfished populations.

"A lot of what happens to fisheries depends on how well they are managed. The impact might be very different if the fishery is currently well-managed or if it's going to be well-managed into the future," Bianchi says. "That probably is even more important than climate change."

With all the moving variables from human interference to complex ecosystem interactions, predicting global warming's effect on the world's fisheries is a particularly complicated task. Scientists have gathered huge amounts of data on weather patterns and marine processes via satellites and weather stations, and so have come to understand global warming's print on the atmosphere and ocean fairly well. But these tools aren't as helpful when it comes to monitoring ocean-dwellers. Satellites cannot track what's going on underwater, and a lot of coordinated on-the-ground time and energy is needed to monitor the changing patterns of constantly moving sea critters, Bianchi notes. This makes forecasting the future extremely difficult. So Free's backward-looking research also has implications for predicting the future.

"The models that we use are as good as the data that we have to constrain them," Bianchi says. "That's why I'm excited about these types of papers, because they take all these observations that we trust and that we understand and start extracting the signature of warming."

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Warming oceans have already harmed the world's fish supply

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While there are a lot of alarm bells sounding over how climate change will affect marine ecosystems and the world's seafood supply in the future, there's been much less attention paid to the effects it's already had on them.

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Trumps' New York Buildings Need to cut down emissions

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Trumps' New York Buildings Need to cut down emissions

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President Trump's buildings are responsible for half of the building emissions in New York City, increasing global warming. After bills were passed to reduce greenhouse emissions, the Trump buildings must reduce their carbon footprint by 2030 or they could face 2 million dollars in yearly fines.

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"Don't mess with your hometown." That was the message New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio had Monday afternoon for real-estate-mogul-turned-President Donald Trump, who has several properties subject to carbon emissions targets recently set by the Big Apple.

If the Trump organization fails to reduce the carbon footprint of the eight buildings in question, it could face more than $2 million in yearly fines starting in 2030.

"[Trump's] not just a problem because of his policies in Washington. He's a problem because his buildings are among the biggest polluters in New York City," said de Blasio, who has confronted the president time and again over issues ranging from global warming to immigration.

.@realDonaldTrump is running scared from NYC's Green New Deal. The temper tantrum his organization threw at Trump Tower today is proof.

You're on notice, Donald: we won't let you mortgage our future for your real estate. Fix your buildings or pay the price.

We WILL collect. pic.twitter.com/3wHT4gr2km

- Mayor Bill de Blasio (@NYCMayor) May 13, 2019

Trump has often undermined the science of global warming, including reports issued by his own administration. He's also said he intends to take the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement - a promise House Democrats symbolically attempted to block by passing a doomed pro-climate bill earlier this month.

In April, New York City passed the Climate Mobilization Act, a package of 10 bills aimed at keeping the city compliant with carbon reduction goals outlined in the Paris accord. De Blasio expanded municipal climate policies by outlining his city-level "Green New Deal" (not to be confused with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's own statewide version, or Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's much-discussed federal Green New Deal, which in its most clearly formed iteration is still just a non-binding resolution).

Keeping to NYC, De Blasio's $14 billion deal would cut down greenhouse gas emissions by 30 percent by 2030.

Nearly 70 percent of New York City's greenhouse gas emissions come from its buildings. The Climate Mobilization Act mandates buildings larger than 25,000 square feet reduce emissions by 40 percent by 2040 and 80 percent by 2050. These megastructures are just two percent of real estate in the city but are responsible for half of building emissions.

According to the mayor, Trump's buildings' carbon footprint is equivalent to 5,800 cars. "Maybe President Trump has forgotten where he comes from. This is the city that has suffered because of global warming and we are still vulnerable," said de Blasio, referencing the devastation caused by Superstorm Sandy in 2012.

Speaking alongside the mayor at a rally inside Trump Tower, New York Communities for Change board member Rachel Rivera spoke about how she and her daughter are still recovering from Sandy seven years later. "We ran into the night with nothing . . . When it rains extremely hard, [my daughter] gets extremely anxious," she said. "New York City will not survive without a radical action to stop climate change."

Rivera's comments were met with both cheers and boos - the latter from counter-protesters who interrupted the gathering bearing signs that read, "Trump 2020."

"Clearly the Trump Organization is a little sensitive to the fact that we're calling them out for what they are doing to the climate and the way this building is a part of the problem," de Blasio said. "But, we will not back down."

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Trump's New York buildings need to cut emissions or pay millions in fines

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"Don't mess with your hometown." That was the message New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio had Monday afternoon for real-estate-mogul-turned-President Donald Trump, who has several properties subject to carbon emissions targets recently set by the Big Apple.

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Photorespiration can speed up the process of photosynthesis by up to 40%. This new way has been tested on tobacco and has worked well.

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A genetic hack to make photosynthesis more efficient could be a boon for agricultural production, at least for some plants.

This feat of genetic engineering simplifies a complex, energy-expensive operation that many plants must perform during photosynthesis known as photorespiration. In field tests, genetically modifying tobacco in this way increased plant growth by over 40 percent. If it produces similar results in other crops, that could help farmers meet the food demands of a growing global population, researchers report in the Jan. 4 Science.

Streamlining photorespiration is "a great step forward in efforts to enhance photosynthesis," says Spencer Whitney, a plant biochemist at Australian National University in Canberra not involved in the work.

Now that the agricultural industry has mostly optimized the use of yield-boosting tools like pesticides, fertilizers and irrigation, researchers are trying to micromanage and improve plant growth by designing ways to make photosynthesis more efficient ( SN: 12/24/16, p. 6).

Photorespiration is a major roadblock to achieving such efficiency. It occurs in many plants, such as soybeans, rice and wheat, when an enzyme called Rubisco - whose main job is to help transform carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into sugars that fuel plant growth - accidentally snatches an oxygen molecule out of the atmosphere instead.

That Rubisco-oxygen interaction, which happens about 20 percent of the time, generates the toxic compound glycolate, which a plant must recycle into useful molecules through photorespiration. This process comprises a long chain of chemical reactions that span four compartments in a plant cell. All told, completing a cycle of photorespiration is like driving from Maine to Florida by way of California. That waste of energy can cut crop yields by 20 to 50 percent, depending on plant species and environmental conditions.

Using genetic engineering, researchers have now designed a more direct chemical pathway for photorespiration that is confined to a single cell compartment - the cellular equivalent of a Maine-to-Florida road trip straight down the East Coast.

Paul South, a molecular biologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Urbana, Ill., and colleagues embedded genetic directions for this shortcut, written on pieces of algae and pumpkin DNA, in tobacco plant cells. The researchers also genetically engineered the cells to not produce a chemical that allows glycolate to travel between cell compartments to prevent the glycolate from taking its normal route through the cell.
Unlike previous experiments with human-designed photorespiration pathways, South's team tested its photorespiration detour in plants grown in fields under real-world farming conditions. Genetically altered tobacco produced 41 percent more biomass than tobacco that hadn't been modified.
"It's very exciting" to see how well this genetic tweak worked in tobacco, says Veronica Maurino, a plant physiologist at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf in Germany not involved in the research, but "you can't say, 'It's functioning. Now it will function everywhere.'"

Experiments with different types of plants will reveal whether this photorespiration fix creates the same benefits for other crops as it does for tobacco. South's team is currently running greenhouse experiments on potatoes with the new set of genetic modifications, and plans to do similar tests with soybeans, black-eyed peas and rice.

The vetting process for such genetic modifications to be approved for use on commercial farms, including more field testing, will probably take at least another five to 10 years, says Andreas Weber, a plant biochemist also at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf who coauthored a commentary on the study that appears in the same issue of Science. In the meantime, he expects that researchers will continue trying to design even more efficient photorespiration shortcuts, but South's team "has now set a pretty high bar."

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A new way to genetically tweak photosynthesis boosts plant growth

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A genetic hack to make photosynthesis more efficient could be a boon for agricultural production, at least for some plants. This feat of genetic engineering simplifies a complex, energy-expensive operation that many plants must perform during photosynthesis known as photorespiration. In field tests, genetically modifying tobacco in this way increased plant growth by over 40 percent.

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Plants defending themselves, can limit growth

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Plants defending themselves, can limit growth

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When plants spend too much energy on defending themselves and sending chemicals throughout their roots to protect themselves, they do not grow as fast. When engineered to defend themselves, they have less viable seeds and are shorter and weaker

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A tiny weed that slithers up through sidewalk cracks is helping scientists understand the sacrifices that plants make to protect themselves from pests.

Most plants combat insects and other herbivores by sending out bitter chemicals through their leaves. Now by studying thale cress ( Arabidopsis thaliana), a commonly found member of the mustard family, researchers found that energy spent pumping protective chemicals through a plant's veins diminishes its ability to grow and successfully reproduce.

"When plants use those resources for defense - in this case, defense against insects - there is a major trade-off," says Gregg Howe, a plant biologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing. He and his colleagues report their findings online October 22 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

All plants have a bundle of what are known as JAZ genes. Those genes provide the instructions to make JAZ proteins, which help plants control the use of the defensive chemicals. Over a decade, the team disrupted the activity of 10 of the 13 JAZ genes found in Arabidopsis plants to hinder production of those proteins.

As a result, the engineered plants were nearly permanently in defensive mode, which ultimately made them shorter, weaker and with fewer viable seeds than their normal counterparts, the scientists found. Brown and withered leaves also revealed that the engineered plants were starved of carbon, meaning they weren't getting enough food. Maintaining such a defensive strategy consumes energy that the plant could otherwise use for growth or reproduction, the researchers speculate.

For now, it's unclear how applicable these insights from Arabidopsis are to other plants, including major grain crops, says Georg Jander, a chemical ecologist at Cornell University. But through such research, the team hopes to illuminate new ways to protect crops from foraging insects without sacrificing crop yield or dousing fields in pesticides.

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Plants engineered to always be on alert don't grow well

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A tiny weed that slithers up through sidewalk cracks is helping scientists understand the sacrifices that plants make to protect themselves from pests. Most plants combat insects and other herbivores by sending out bitter chemicals through their leaves.

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Recently, instead of harvesting meat from an animal on a farm, scientists are engineering meat in a lab. One of the reasons they are engineering meat is to decrease the amount of greenhouse gases emitted during animal agriculture.

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Researchers hope to replace whole animal agriculture and feed the world with lab-made meats or plants.

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Whiteflies cause tomatoes to deceive their neighbors

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Whiteflies cause tomatoes to deceive their neighbors

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When these flies attack a tomato plant, the plant gives off a smell as if a fungi has attacked it. The nearby tomato plants then prepare to resist a pathogen, which weakens their ability to resist a bug.

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Don't blame the tomato. Tiny pests called silverleaf whiteflies can make a tomato plant spread deceptive scents that leave its neighbors vulnerable to attach.

Sap-sucking Bemisia tabaci, an invasive menace to a wide range of crops, are definitely insects. Yet when they attack a tomato plant, prompting a silent shriek of scents, the plant starts smelling as if bacteria or fungi have struck instead. Those phony odors prime neighboring tomato plants for an attack, but not from an insect, an international research team found.

Those plants prepare to mount a fast and strong resistance against an incoming pathogen. But that high alert suppresses the plants' chemistry for resisting insects and "leaves them far more vulnerable to the whiteflies when they arrive," says Xiao-Ping Yu, an entomologist at China Jiliang University in Hangzhou.

Tomato plants that spent 24 hours in a chamber with just the odor of a major whitefly attack managed to produce only half the surge of an insect-fighter hormone as plants taken by surprise by an insect attack, Yu and colleagues report March 25 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Plant defense chemistry often poses this one-or-the-other dilemma. To put up a good fight against insects, plants typically rev up a system of defenses controlled by the hormone jasmonic acid, or JA. But throwing that system into full gear suppresses the defenses controlled by salicylic acid, SA, which are more useful against pathogens.

The pathogen prep may not be a complete waste of effort for the plants. Whiteflies function like mosquitoes for plants, spreading viruses and other diseases. Even drops of whitefly pee, sometimes called honeydew, attract sooty mold.

"Maybe the plant is more worried about diseases," says study coauthor Ted Turlings, a chemical ecologist at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland. In the short term, the deceptive signal costs the neighbor plants because whitefly infestations get off to a strong start. But the diseases whiteflies bring may mean the SA defenses could be useful in the end. "We will try to explore this in follow-up research," he says.

To help cultivated tomato plants defend against whiteflies, Petra Bleeker of the University of Amsterdam is turning to a wild relative, Solanum habrochaites. It makes its own insect repellants, compounds called terpenes, in glands at the tips of abundant hairs. Commercial tomatoes still show vestiges of this hairy chemistry. "If you put your finger on these hairs, on the green parts, you smell the typical tomato smell," she says. The trick will be breeding the power to make repellants back into domestic plants without introducing unwanted traits.

Turlings is taking a different approach to helping beleaguered tomatoes. Because the odors that waft off plants can be highly specific to what has attacked them, machines with sensitive "noses" could raise an alarm when particularly problematic insects or pathogens arrive. "It sounds futuristic, but a robot might sniff the plants," Turlings says. Even his human (but very experienced) nose can smell the difference between scents released by two corn plants under attack by a different, but related, caterpillar species, he says.

Monitoring for those scents might warn a farmer in time to squelch pest invasions early. Quick action could be particularly important for pests like whiteflies that accelerate their own spread through false signals to eavesdroppers.

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A major crop pest causes tomato plants to spread fake news

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Don't blame the tomato. Tiny pests called silverleaf whiteflies can make a tomato plant spread deceptive scents that leave its neighbors vulnerable to attach. Sap-sucking Bemisia tabaci, an invasive menace to a wide range of crops, are definitely insects.

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California nitrogen containing farm soils causing air pollutants 

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California nitrogen containing farm soils causing air pollutants 

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The soil in some California farm soils are causing nitrogen oxide gases in the air. It is responsible for 51% of California's nitrogen oxide pollutant in the air.

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Smog-causing nitrogen oxide gases aren't only found in auto exhaust

California's crops are creating some noxious air.

The Golden State is at the vanguard in the United States in reducing auto emissions of nitrogen oxide gases, which help produce toxic smog and acid rain. But the NOx pollution problem isn't limited to auto exhaust. California's vast agricultural lands - particularly soils heavily treated with nitrogen fertilizers - are now responsible for as much as 51 percent of total NOx emissions across the state, researchers report January 31 in Science Advances.

The catchall term "NOx gases" generally refers to two pollution-promoting gases: nitric oxide, or NO, and nitrogen dioxide, or NO2. Those gases react with incoming sunlight to produce ozone in the troposphere, the lowest layer of the atmosphere. At high levels, tropospheric ozone can cause respiratory problems from asthma to emphysema.

Between 2005 and

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Gassy farm soils are a shockingly large source of these air pollutants

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Smog-causing nitrogen oxide gases aren't only found in auto exhaust California's crops are creating some noxious air. The Golden State is at the vanguard in the United States in reducing auto emissions of nitrogen oxide gases, which help produce toxic smog and acid rain. But the NOx pollution problem isn't limited to auto exhaust.

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Car Tires Produce Harmful Microplastics  

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Car Tires Produce Harmful Microplastics  

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Scientists recently analyzed more than 500 particles from highways and came to the conclusion that these are microplastics from car tires.Vehicles driving at a constant speed and brakes less can reduce the amount of particles on the road.

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There's a big problem where the rubber meets the road: microplastics.

Scientists analyzed more than 500 small particles pulled from the air around three busy German highways, and found that the vast majority - 89 percent - came from vehicle tires, brake systems and roads themselves. All together, these particles are classified by the researchers as microplastics, though they include materials other than plastic.

Those particles get blown by wind and washed by rain into waterways that lead to the ocean, where the debris can harm aquatic animals and fragile ecosystems, says environmental scientist Reto Gieré of the University of Pennsylvania. He presented the findings on November 6 at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Indianapolis. Previous research has estimated that about 30 percent of the volume of microplastics polluting oceans, lakes and rivers come from tire wear.

"We all want to reduce CO ₂ emissions" from vehicle exhaust, Gieré says. "But you can't stop tire abrasion." Traffic congestion makes the problem worse. Vehicles traveling at constant speeds, without so much brake use, produced fewer particles, the researchers found.

Because some materials, including synthetic rubber, become coated in dust and other tinier bits of debris, they're not always easy to identify. The researchers figured out what each particle was by examining each of them under a scanning electron microscope and running chemical analyses.

"These [tire] particles are stealthy," says John Weinstein, an environmental toxicologist at the Citadel in Charleston, S.C., who was not involved in the study.

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Car tires and brake pads produce harmful microplastics

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There's a big problem where the rubber meets the road: microplastics. Scientists analyzed more than 500 small particles pulled from the air around three busy German highways, and found that the vast majority - 89 percent - came from vehicle tires, brake systems and roads themselves.

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Air pollution has been linked to chronic dieses. Pollution is responsible for 14% of diabetes cases.

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New study quantifies the link between smoggy air and diabetes

Air pollution caused 3.2 million new cases of diabetes worldwide in 2016, according to a new estimate.

Fine particulate matter, belched out by cars and factories and generated through chemical reactions in the atmosphere, hang around as haze and make air hard to breathe. Air pollution has been linked to chronic conditions such as heart disease and diabetes ( SN: 9/30/17, p. 18), but this study is one of the first attempts to quantify the connection for diabetes. Researchers tracked 1.7 million U.S. veterans for almost a decade to assess their risk of developing diabetes. They also used data from global studies on diabetes risk, as well as air quality data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and NASA, to create equations that analyzed the connection between air pollution exposure and diabetes globally.

The new estimate, reported in July in The Lancet Planetary Health, holds air pollution responsible for about 14 percent of new cases of diabetes worldwide. Factors such as genetics, weight, activity level and diet also influence the risk of the disease, which is on the rise globally. (The World Health Organization estimates that 422 million people now live with type 2 diabetes - up from 108 million in 1980.)

The burden isn't the same around the globe: Unsurprisingly, countries with high pollution levels, such as Pakistan, India and China, also have especially high rates of air pollution-linked diabetes. The United States, which now has comparatively clean air, is also high on the list.

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Air pollution is triggering diabetes in 3.2 million people each year

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New study quantifies the link between smoggy air and diabetes Air pollution caused 3.2 million new cases of diabetes worldwide in 2016, according to a new estimate. Fine particulate matter, belched out by cars and factories and generated through chemical reactions in the atmosphere, hang around as haze and make air hard to breathe.

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Wildfires increasing air pollution in the northwest

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Wildfires increasing air pollution in the northwest

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The fires are causing dangerous particulates to go into the air, causing air pollution. These particulates are lung clogging.

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The northwestern United States has become an air pollution hot spot - literally.

Air quality in states from Nevada to Montana is worse than it was 30 years ago on the days with the most extreme air pollution. Bigger and more frequent wildfires that spew plumes of fine particulate matter into the sky are largely to blame, researchers report July 16 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

By contrast, the rest of the country has seen decreasing trends in similar smog and haze over the last three decades. Legislation such as the Clean Air Act, which mandates air quality standards and the regulation of vehicle and factory emissions of particulate matter, is making a difference, says study coauthor Daniel Jaffe, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington in Bothell.

But the increase in lung-clogging particulate matter from wildfires shows how the effects of climate change - which is, in part, driving the worsening fires - can counteract those gains, Jaffe says.

Wildfire smoke is filled with fine particulates, minuscule solids or droplets that can be inhaled into the lungs, exacerbating breathing problems. Children, the elderly and people with asthma are most at risk, but communities near wildfires can temporarily experience levels of pollutants so high that it's unsafe for anyone to be outside for very long. "When we start to think about people's health, episodic events matter a lot," says Gannet Hallar, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, who wasn't part of the study.

Regular exposure to elevated levels of these fine airborne pollutants (less than 2.5 micrometers wide, or about 3 percent of the width of a human hair) has also been linked to an increased risk of chronic health conditions such as heart disease and diabetes ( SN: 9/30/17, p. 18).

Tracking the broader influence of wildfires on air pollution can be tricky because the fires are intermittent and patchy, says Jaffe, who carried out the study with Crystal McClure, also an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington in Bothell. "Most of the year, wildfires aren't impacting air quality, but on some of the worst days they are." And the blazes can hit one community hard, but leave neighboring towns relatively unaffected.

Jaffe and McClure looked at daily measurements of fine particulate matter at more than 100 rural monitoring sites around the country, from 1988 to 2016. In most parts of the country, the data showed a success story of cleaner air over time - but not in the northwest, an area that gets hit hard by wildfires every summer.

Where air pollution has gotten better or worse

The team made similar calculations for levels of a few specific pollutants - particulate carbon, a hallmark of fire emissions, and sulfate, a by-product of burning fossil fuels. Particulate carbon levels had increased over time in the northwest, but sulfate levels didn't, supporting the conclusion that wildfires are mainly driving the air pollution trend in the western United States, rather than industrial activity.

Wildfires weren't making air pollution on an average day worse in the northwest, the team found. Most of the time, air quality is fine - wildfires might only affect a given community for a few days or weeks out of a year. But the air quality on the bad days, when air pollutants are especially high, is getting worse over time, the analysis shows. Those particularly bad days tended to be in the summer, when wildfires are at their peak. In the northwest, levels of fine particulates on the handful of days with the worst air quality each year have increased at an average rate of 0.21 micrograms per cubic meter per year, though there's substantial local variability in that number.

As the overall air quality picture in the country has improved, we now have harder work to do, says Jenny Hand, an atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University in Fort Collins who wasn't part of the study. Those challenges include figuring out how to prevent and mitigate these more uncontrollable sources of air pollution that can't be regulated like emissions from human sources can, she says.

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Wildfires are making extreme air pollution even worse in the northwest U.S.

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The northwestern United States has become an air pollution hot spot - literally. Air quality in states from Nevada to Montana is worse than it was 30 years ago on the days with the most extreme air pollution.

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More than 11 billion plastic objects are polluting Asia-Pacific coral reefs, a new estimate finds. This waste can harbor pathogenic bacteria known to make corals sick.

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View the video
Coral reefs are sick of plastic.

More than 11 billion plastic objects are polluting Asia-Pacific coral reefs, a new estimate finds. This waste can harbor pathogenic bacteria known to make corals sick. Reefs littered with plastic were at least 20 times as likely to have diseased corals as unpolluted reefs, researchers say.

Corals succumbing to disease can throw ocean ecosystems out of whack. When corals die, they break down, robbing underwater organisms of their reef habitats. Based on current trends, the amount of plastic trapped in Asia-Pacific reefs is projected to increase 40 percent by 2025, further endangering corals, scientists report in the Jan. 26 Science.

"Plastic has pits and pores. It's the perfect vessel for microbes to colonize," says Joleah Lamb, a marine biologist at Cornell University. If these pathogenic microbes get inside coral, they can cause devastating diseases.

The researchers surveyed 159 reefs between 2011 and 2014, documenting diseased coral and plastic debris larger than about the size of a Ping-Pong ball. All of the reefs are located within 50 kilometers of large coastal cities or settlements, from Thailand to Indonesia and south to Australia. The Asia-Pacific region is home to more than half the world's coral reefs and nearly three-quarters of the world's human population.

Lamb's team found that plastic levels varied dramatically by location, with Australian reefs having the lowest levels and Indonesian reefs the highest. That variation was strongly associated with how much plastic waste each country produced, and how the debris was managed, the researchers say.

The team began its study as part of routine checkups on the reefs, but quickly realized something was wrong. "We didn't start out looking for plastic and disease," Lamb says. "But we kept coming across it, so it became necessary to report."

New research published on January 25 in Science estimates the amount of plastic in coral reefs and the effect this pollution has on reef health.

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Plastic pollution increases risk of devastating disease in corals

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View the video Coral reefs are sick of plastic. More than 11 billion plastic objects are polluting Asia-Pacific coral reefs, a new estimate finds. This waste can harbor pathogenic bacteria known to make corals sick. Reefs littered with plastic were at least 20 times as likely to have diseased corals as unpolluted reefs, researchers say.

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The system is designed to capture pieces of plastic ranging in size from a few millimeters to tens of meters across, such as fishing nets. They say these methods can take 90% of the litter in the ocean out of the patch by 2040.

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The days of the great Pacific garbage patch may be numbered.

A highly anticipated project to scoop up plastic from the massive pool of ocean debris is poised to launch its first phase from Alameda, Calif., on September 8. The creators of the project, called the Ocean Cleanup, say their system can remove 90 percent of the plastic in the patch by 2040.

First proposed in a 2012 TED talk by Dutch-born inventor Boyan Slat, who was then just 18 years old, the Ocean Cleanup's system consists of a snaking line of booms designed to simulate a kind of free-floating coastline that can essentially herd the plastic trash into retrievable piles. The project, based in Delft, the Netherlands, has drawn more than $30 million in donations from sponsors, philanthropists and a crowdfunding campaign.

It has also drawn the ire of researchers who worry about possible negative effects on ocean life, or who say the project doesn't address the majority of ocean plastic - bits called microplastics that are smaller than half a centimeter. The system is designed to capture pieces of plastic ranging in size from a few millimeters to tens of meters across, such as fishing nets. Critics also worry the project will divert attention and money from the root of the problem: too much plastic waste in the first place.

Ready for launch

A March study in Scientific Reports, led by Ocean Cleanup's lead oceanographer Laurent Lebreton, estimated that in 2015 the great Pacific garbage patch was scattered across some 1.6 million square kilometers - an area twice the size of Texas - within a vast ocean swirl known as the North Pacific gyre. The patch, the study found, contains about 1.8 trillion pieces of debris, largely consisting of buoyant plastics like polyethylene and polypropylene, floating at the surface ( SN Online: 3/22/18). Most of those pieces are smaller than half a centimeter - but by mass, more than 90 percent of the patch is made up of pieces 5 centimeters or bigger, the scientists estimate.

It's those larger pieces that the cleanup system will snag. The system features a 600-meter-long line of unmoored booms that act as an artificial shoreline traveling with the wind, waves and ocean currents while rounding up plastic debris. Beneath the surface, the booms drag a 3-meter-long skirt, through which only the tiniest bits of plastic can escape. Currents will naturally push the line of booms into a u-shape, herding plastic particles so they're easier to collect.

The booms are also tricked out with solar-powered lights, anti-collision systems and satellite antennas to avoid vessels and help project scientists keep track of the system's location. Periodically, support vessels will cart the collected plastic bits back to land for recycling.

The September 8 launch of "System 001" will be a beta test for the first of a planned fleet of about 60 such systems, though parts of a system have been tested for durability and performance in the North Sea and off California. Once launched, System 001 will undergo two weeks of field testing off the California coast, Lebreton says. If all goes well, it will head to the North Pacific gyre, arriving within five weeks of the launch date. "We're hoping to bring the first plastic back before the end of the year," he says.

Once the full fleet is launched, Ocean Cleanup says, it could remove 50 percent of the plastic in the patch within five years, and 90 percent by 2040.

Do no harm

Because the great Pacific garbage patch lies within international waters, no environmental impact assessment is required for launching the apparatus. Still, the foundation says it commissioned an assessment from an independent consultant group, published in July. The report, which focused on how the system might affect marine life, found no reasons for serious concern but identified one moderate concern: that sea turtles might be drawn to the system and then ingest the plastics.

But there are many concerns not covered by the assessment, says Kim Martini, a physical oceanographer at Seattle-based Sea-Bird Scientific, which makes instruments that measure ocean properties. In a January 2017 piece on the oceanography blog Deep Sea News, Martini outlined other worries including whether the sweeping net could accumulate marine hitchhikers, from algae to barnacles and other kinds of critters, adding drag and stress that could alter the hydrodynamics of the system. There's another question, Martini says, in whether herding the plastic will promote new, tiny ecosystems among the trash - possibly attracting even more wildlife to the area ( SN: 2/20/16, p. 20). "Are they going to start scooping that up?"

Can it even work?

Despite previous test deployments, Martini says, there's also no evidence yet that the system can actually collect much plastic. "This [deployment] is the real litmus test. So we'll see."

Environmental scientist Marcus Eriksen at the Los Angeles-based nonprofit 5 Gyres Institute also doubts the system will collect as much plastic as the project scientists claim. A 2014 study in PLOS ONE that he coauthored with Lebreton said many of the estimated 5 trillion bits of ocean plastic worldwide are quickly removed from surface waters by natural forces.

"There's a lot of beaching, shredding, sinking of the debris," so that many of the small particles would have now sunk below the project's 3-meter-deep skirt, Eriksen says.

Meanwhile, new particles are always entering the ocean. Eriksen says that's why 5 Gyres and other conservation organizations are focused on prevention as the most effective cleanup strategy: persuading people to use less plastic in the first place. "If you want to mitigate the harm, it's really upstream."

Every effort helps

The Ocean Cleanup representatives say their project is meant to work in concert with such upstream measures. Even while trying to change human behavior, the team argues, it's still worth trying to remove whatever is already out there floating near the surface.

"The whole point is that we want to try to collect as much as possible," Lebreton says.

Whatever the result of this deployment, some groups trying to tackle the plastic trash problem applaud the Ocean Cleanup for raising awareness around the issue.

"I love how passionate people are about the Ocean Cleanup project," says Adam Lindquist, the director of Baltimore's Healthy Harbor Initiative. His group installed a pair of moored but floating "water wheels" with booms and skirts - nicknamed Mr. Trash Wheel and Professor Trash Wheel - at two river mouths in the city's inner harbor. In four and a half years, the two have scooped up some 900 tons of debris, from contact lenses to mattresses, in an effort to catch the trash before it enters the ocean.

"Any tech that's removing plastics from the ocean is a good thing," Lindquist says. "But the actual worth is getting people to take the problem more seriously, so that we can move toward real solutions - like source reduction."
Editor's note: This story was updated on September 10, 2018, to correct Adam Lindquist's name.

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A massive net is being deployed to pick up plastic in the Pacific

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The days of the great Pacific garbage patch may be numbered. A highly anticipated project to scoop up plastic from the massive pool of ocean debris is poised to launch its first phase from Alameda, Calif., on September 8.

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It is home to over 500 species of coral reef in the region. A third of the coral- reef fish species call the coral triangle home.

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Remote islands of Indonesia are surrounded by coral reefs bursting with marine life. This area is part of a region called the Coral Triangle.

Credit: Ethan Daniels/Shutterstock

The Coral Triangle is a vast network of coral reefs that dot the waters surrounding the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste.

Also known as "the Amazon of the ocean," this expansive underwater ecosystem in Southeast Asia is a hotspot for marine biodiversity, hosting 30 percent of the world's coral reefs that span 2.3 million square miles (6 million square kilometers). From humpback whales to humphead wrasses, a wide variety of sea creatures survive and thrive along the reefs in the Coral Triangle.

"If you go to a place in the Coral Triangle - like the Verde Island Passage or Bali - there's so much microhabitat diversity," said Luiz Rocha, a coral reef scientist at the California Academy of Sciences. "You can go 100 yards [90 meters] from one reef to another, and the reef composition will be completely different."

The region is home to more than 500 species of reef-building corals, which have adapted to an array of habitats. Some corals, like those Rocha and other scientists at the California Academy of Sciences study, are adapted to live at greater depths and in cooler waters. Other corals in the region are adapted to muddy, sediment-rich waters, as opposed to the crystal-clear conditions most corals prefer, according the London Natural History Museum.

Nearly a third of the world's coral-reef fish species and six of the world's seven species of sea turtle call the Coral Triangle home, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Other marine creatures - such as dugongs, damselfish, manta rays and throngs of invertebrates - inhabit parts of the Coral Triangle.

There are many theories as to why reefs in this part of the world are so successful. Here are a few that may explain the abundance of life in the Coral Triangle:

Center of o rigin h ypothesis: From volcanic islands with rocky shores to white sand beaches to mangrove forests, the Coral Triangle consists of a wide range of habitats. Scientists suspect that the diversity of landscapes contributes to the diversity of species in the region because these species have been forced to adapt to the geographically complex reef system.

Center of a ccumulation h ypothesis: Prevailing currents pour water into the Coral Triangle. The center of accumulation hypothesis suggests that many species originate in isolated archipelagos in the Indian and Pacific oceans, such as Hawaii or the Maldives, and then are swept to the Coral Triangle by those currents. Once in the Coral Triangle, these species mix and mingle with species already living in the region, and eventually form new species.

Center of o verlap h ypothesis: The Coral Triangle sits between the Indian and Pacific oceans. Marine species from both bodies of water colonize parts of the reef system where the ocean basins overlap, increasing the number of species found in the region. "There are parts of Indonesia that have Indian Ocean fauna. There are parts of Indonesia that have Pacific Ocean fauna, and there are parts that have both," said Paul Barber, a marine scientist with the University of California, Los Angeles. "It's the overlap of these two faunas that create such a diverse ecosystem."

Center of s urvival h ypothesis: As geographic area increases, the risk of extinction decreases. If a species inhabits a large area, there's less of a chance the organism will go extinct if something happens to one part of the reef where that species lives. "Because the Coral Triangle is [the] largest region of coral reef in world, it's going to have [the] lowest extinction rates in the world," Barber said.

Unlike the Great Barrier Reef or the Caribbean Reef, which are more exposed and have changed significantly over time, the Coral Triangle is "a very stable region, even through geologic time," Rocha said. Research published in October 2018 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B suggested that the persistence of these stable conditions over the last 30 million years may have given rise to the Coral Triangle's biodiversity.

Rocha is quick to note that "all of these hypotheses could have contributed to and influenced" the region's high biodiversity.

The coral triangle is home to nearly a third of the world's coral-reef fish species.

Credit: Ethan Daniels/Shutterstock

With roughly 264million people strung along the island chain, Indonesia is the fourth most populous country in the world, according to the World Bank. In total, more than 360 million people live around the Coral Triangle, 100 million of which rely on the reefs for their livelihood, according to a 2014 report by the Coral Triangle Initiative. One-third of the population rely on seafood as their primary source of protein, fishing grouper, tuna and other predatory fish species, Barber said.

Healthy reefs also provide other benefits to the islands they encompass, acting as natural barriers that soften the blow from typhoons, storm-generated waves and even tsunamis. A June 2018 study in the journal Nature Communications revealed that damage to coastal communities in the Coral Triangle caused by flooding events would nearly double without the coral reefs. Additionally, without these reefs, countries like Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines would see the costs related to flooding events triple; if protected, the reefs that ring these countries could save, on average, more than $400 million each year.

Colorful reefs also draw tourists from around the world and provide an economic boost to exotic locales like Bali in Indonesia and Sipadan Island in Malaysia, which are known for their pristine scuba-diving conditions.

These prolific ecosystems are incredibly fragile. Habitat destruction, pollution and climate change are threatening coral reefs around the world, and the Coral Triangle is no exception.

Much of the damage to reefs in the Coral Triangle is caused by poor fishing practices, Rocha said. Often, locals will overfish, drag nets that damage fragile corals and leave fishing equipment to float around in the water.

Large predators, like sharks and groupers, are critical to the health of the reef, often keeping populations of coral-munching fish in check. When large, predatory fish are sustainably caught, the reef can rebound. Often, though, the Coral Triangle's largest predators are pulled from the reef in high numbers, shrinking their populations and allowing destructive fish populations to weaken the coral reef ecosystem.

Barber warned that the collapse of the fishing industry in the Coral Triangle due to overfishing would devastate the local countries and could eventually impact the entire world, as impoverished communities sought food elsewhere. If these regions are overfished, "it's not like they [communities] can just ramp up animal husbandry to replace that missing seafood," he said.

Yet another threat reefs face is plastic pollution. Small pieces of plastic are easily consumed by animals that live in the reef, but the presence of this litter acts as a threat multiplier. In some cases, plastics that pollute reefs in the Coral Triangle have acted as vectors for disease, spreading contagions like so-called white syndrome from sick to healthy corals, as reported in a 2018 study in the journal Science.

Because of climate change, reefs like the Coral Triangle will increasingly face bleaching events. As corals are exposed to rising water temperatures, they become stressed and expel the symbiotic algae that live inside them. This leaves the coral colorless, or bleached, and unable to feed themselves.

In the long term, ocean acidification will also cause problems for reefs. The ocean becomes more acidic as it absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The calcium carbonate skeletons of most coral species aren't built to withstand that acidity, and so they slowly dissolve.

But there's still hope, insisted Rocha. The Coral Triangle is "more resilient against climate change because of the complexity in that region," he said. Because the Coral Triangle is less exposed than places like the Great Barrier Reef, there's a chance the Coral Triangle can withstand some of the more dire consequences of climate change.

Further reading:

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Jennifer Leman, Live Science Contributor

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The Coral Triangle is a vast network of coral reefs that dot the waters surrounding the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste. Also known as "the Amazon of the ocean," this expansive underwater ecosystem in Southeast Asia is a hotspot for marine biodiversity, hosting 30 percent of the world's coral reefs that span 2.3 million square miles (6 million square kilometers).

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After looking for this specific tortoise, they found it on the Galapagos Island, buried in the dirt. It may be 100 years old and they believed prior that this type of tortoise was extinct.

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Tortoise Not Seen for 113 Years Found on Galapagos Island

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.