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New Technique Identifies micropollutants in New York Waterways

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New Technique Identifies micropollutants in New York Waterways

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Engineers at Cornell University have recently come up with a new technique to test for micropollutants in lakes, rivers, and other potable water sources. This technique is vastly outperforming conventional methods. Conventional methods narrowly investigate one or two contaminants at a time, but the new method developed by Cornell is an analytical method that is designed to measure as broad of a range of contaminants as possible. The new technique assessed 18 water samples collected from New York state waterways. A total of 112 micropollutants were found in at least one of the samples, including pharmaceuticals, pesticides and personal care products. This new technique represents a broad range of chemical micropollutants that are unlikely to be found using conventional water testing means.

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Agricultural Fires in Brazil Harm Infant Health, a Warning for the Developing World

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Agricultural Fires in Brazil Harm Infant Health, a Warning for the Developing World

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Pollution from the controlled fires that burn across Brazil's São Paulo state during the sugarcane-harvesting season have had a negative impact on infant health nearby, but the health of those same infants likely benefits from the economic opportunities the fires bring to their parent. This, in turn, creates a very interesting dynamic regarding the fires. The pollution from the fires has led to earlier birth and smaller babies, and fetal mortality has also increased. In Brazil, and worldwide, more attention should be paid to the impact of pollution from fires. Usually, all the focus is centered around big cities and polluting emissions.

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Pollution from the controlled fires that burn across Brazil's São Paulo state during the sugarcane-harvesting season has a negative impact on infant health nearby. But the health of those same infants likely benefits from the economic opportunities the fires bring to their parents.

Researchers at Princeton and Duke universities gathered information from satellites, pollution monitors and birth records to untangle those competing influences and accurately measure the impact of pollution from the fires.

They found that exposure to pollution from the fires in the last few months of gestation leads to earlier birth and smaller babies, and they found some evidence of increased fetal mortality. Conditions in early life, including in utero, have been shown to affect children's longterm outcomes, not only in terms of health but also their educational and economic success.

The findings suggest that policymakers in Brazil and across the developing world should pay more attention to the negative health impact of pollution from fires that are often part of traditional farming techniques, even though the pollution doesn't usually reach levels considered dangerous by industrial standards.

"Policymakers often think about heavily polluted cities like Beijing or New Delhi, but our results show that these agricultural fires are consequential," said Tom Vogl, an assistant professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton.

Vogl and co-author Marcos Rangel, assistant professor at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy, detailed their findings in a working paper titled "Agricultural Fires and Infant Health" released online in December by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Brazil is the world's leading producer of sugarcane, and São Paulo state accounts for more than two-thirds of the nation's production. The traditional approach to harvesting begins with burning the fields to remove straw and other materials, leaving the cane to be cut by hand. Although mechanized harvesting, which doesn't use fires, is becoming more common in Brazil, traditional techniques are still widely used there and across the developing world.

The researchers used remote-sensing data from satellites to track fires, which burn throughout the six-month harvesting season. That data was combined with pollution and weather information collected by 13 air-quality monitoring stations.

"We find that fires that are upwind from population centers increase pollution levels in those areas and other fires don't increase pollution nearly as much," Vogl said.

The researchers then linked the fire and pollution information to vital records and hospitalization records from the Brazilian government. Altogether the information allowed the researchers to compare how the health of infants responded to fires that had different effects on pollution in their communities.

The key to the research design, Vogl said, was incorporating information on wind direction, which allowed the researchers to parse out the consequences of pollution from the fires from the beneficial things that are correlated with the fires.

"We would get the answer completely wrong if we just looked at the relationship between fires and infant health in general," Vogl said. "The reason is that these agricultural fires are necessarily connected with economic activity. When there's more sugarcane harvesting, there are more fires. And when there is more sugarcane harvesting, people have higher incomes, which can be good for kids and kids' health."

Rangel added that sustainable development policies need to take into account trade-offs between economic and environmental goals.

"Our results point to a dirty side of clean fuel policies in Brazil," Rangel said. "To some extent, the incentives for ethanol production for cleaner fuel in urban areas have considerable side effects on the population and future generations in the production areas.

"By appropriately measuring how much ill comes with the blessings of a strong agricultural cycle, our work highlights the need for evidence-based policies across the globe," Rangel said.

Prashant Bharadwaj, an assistant professor of economics at the University of California-San Diego who studies development and labor economics, said the research helps fill an important gap by looking at persistent, moderate pollution like that from agricultural fires.

"Controlled burns for the purposes of agriculture are very popular in developing countries where the density of population near agricultural areas is also large; hence, their study has important implications for not only large parts of the world, but also for the significant portion of the world's population that resides in poorer agricultural settings," Bharadwaj said. Vogl said the researchers, who began their collaboration when Rangel was a visiting professor at Princeton, are working to apply the same technique to examining agricultural fires in Africa.

Find the report at: http://www.nber.org/papers/w22955

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health policy; public health education; diseases and conditions; agriculture and food; trees; food and agriculture; wildfires; pollution; air quality

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Agricultural fires in Brazil harm infant health, a warning for the developing world

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Pollution from the controlled fires that burn across Brazil's São Paulo state during the sugarcane-harvesting season has a negative impact on infant health nearby. But the health of those same infants likely benefits from the economic opportunities the fires bring to their parents.

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New technique Quickly Predicts Salt Marsh Vulnerability

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New technique Quickly Predicts Salt Marsh Vulnerability

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Scientists have been working on a rapid assessment technique for determining which US coastal salt marshes are most at risk of being affected by erosion and were surprised to find that all eight of the Atlantic and Pacific Coast marshes where they field-tested their method are losing ground, and half of them will be gone in 350 years. The only way that these marshes have a chance to recover is if water levels recede and more ground is recovered, but that is a very unlikely scenario. Most of New Jersey’s marshes had estimated lifespans of about 170-350 years until they will be completely gone.

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Scientists working on a rapid assessment technique for determining which US coastal salt marshes are most imperiled by erosion were surprised to find that all eight of the Atlantic and Pacific Coast marshes where they field-tested their method are losing ground, and half of them will be gone in 350 years' time if they don't recapture some lost terrain.

The US Geological Survey-led research team developed a simple method that land managers can use to assess a coastal salt marsh's potential to survive environmental challenges. The method, already in use at two national wildlife refuges, uses any one of several remote sensing techniques, such as aerial photography, to gauge how much of an individual marsh is open water and how much of it is covered by marsh plants. By comparing the ratio of ponds, channels and tidal flats to marsh vegetation, land managers can determine which marshes stand the best chance of persisting in the face of changing conditions.

This ratio, called the Unvegetated-Vegetated Marsh Ratio or UVVR, is a good surrogate for much more labor-intensive field studies, said oceanographer Neil Ganju of the USGS Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center. Ganju is the lead author of the study, which was published Jan. 23 in Nature Communications.

"Our method does a good job of tracking the main destructive processes in marshes -- the conversion of vegetated areas to open water, and the loss of sediment," Ganju said. "Together these changes control the long-term fate of the marsh."

Salt marshes worldwide are being lost to sea-level rise, erosion, and land use changes. These marshes protect the coast against storms and erosion, filter pollution, and provide habitat for fish and shellfish. Land managers nationwide want to know which marshes stand the best chance of enduring, so they can concentrate marsh conservation and restoration work where it will be most effective. But making that assessment is normally difficult and costly, the researchers said.

To find out whether the UVVR is a good predictor of coastal salt marshes' fates, the researchers applied it to eight marshes that had already been studied. The sites were portions of Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge and Point Mugu Naval Air Station in California; Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge in Maine; Fishing Bay Wildlife Management Area and Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in Maryland; Reedy Creek and Dinner Creek at New Jersey's Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge, and Schooner Creek in New Jersey.

The researchers wanted to include marshes that seemed fairly stable and ones that seemed unstable. And to test their method, they needed sites where scientists had already done the field studies necessary to develop a detailed local "sediment budget."

"Think of a marsh as similar to a savings account, with sediment as the principal," Ganju said. "Every new deposit of sediment is like interest added to the principal, and every sediment loss is like money spent. If a marsh is gaining sediment, it can tolerate some withdrawals, and the budget will still be in the black. If it's losing sediment, that marsh is in the red. Its sediment either gets replenished by natural processes or human intervention, or eventually the principal will all be spent."

All eight marshes' sediment budgets were "in the red." And in each case that UVVR result correlated with the sediment budget, confirming that each of those marshes is losing ground. The researchers calculated the likely life spans of all eight marshes. The shortest, at Maryland's Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, was approximately 83 years, and the New Jersey marshes had life spans ranging from 170 to 350 years.

The researchers stressed that these figures are estimates with large margins of error, and don't necessarily mean that these marshes are doomed -- only that they will need infusions of sediment to last longer.

"Our results can be used to distinguish marshes that are struggling to survive from more resilient ones," said co-author Matthew Kirwan, an assistant professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. "That's important because it will help prioritize restoration work."

Staffers at Massachusetts' Parker River National Wildlife Refuge are working with members of the research team to identify which marsh units are losing sediment, and at what rates.

"This will help us figure out where we can make a difference with restoration techniques. It will also help us determine which areas are beyond restoration," said Refuge Manager Bill Peterson. "This ensures that we're using our limited resources effectively to strengthen and enhance these valuable natural areas."

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ecology; exotic species; oceanography; landslides; water; environmental policy; global warming; floods

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New technique quickly predicts salt marsh vulnerability: All 8 Atlantic and Pacific coast marshes assessed are losing ground, researchers find

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Scientists who developed a rapid assessment technique for determining which US coastal salt marshes are most imperiled by erosion were surprised to find that all eight of the Atlantic and Pacific Coast marshes where they field-tested their method are losing ground. Four of the eight will be gone in 350 years if they don't recapture some lost terrain.

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Gobi Desert Dust Helps Sustain California's Sierra Nevada

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Gobi Desert Dust Helps Sustain California's Sierra Nevada

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Phosphorus, along with nitrogen and carbon, is crucial to the survival of life on Earth. It is generally supplied to plants as bedrock is broken down into soil over the slow machinations of geologic time. Researchers have long considered the granite formations of the Sierra Nevada to be limited in phosphorus. "In recent years it has been a bit of mystery how all these big trees have been sustained in this ecosystem without a lot of phosphorus in the bedrock," Emma Aronson, an assistant professor of plant pathology and microbiology at UC Riverside, said in a statement. "This work begins to unravel that mystery and show that dust may be shaping this iconic California ecosystem." A research team found that dust from Asia accounted for an average of 20 percent of the dust at the lowest elevation and 45 percent of the total amount at the highest elevation. The greater amount of Asian dust in the higher locations, the researchers said, is because dust travels high in the atmosphere and only falls to the ground when it comes into contact with an object such as a mountain.

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Sequoia trees seen along the Trail of the 100 Giants in the Sequoia National Monument in the southern Sierra Nevada mountains.

Credit: David McNew/Getty Images

After the conservationist John Muir devotedly hiked the Sierra Nevada mountain range in the late 19th century, he penned some of the greatest American nature writing ever put to paper and launched the Sierra Club, which remains one of the most influential members of the nation's conservation movement.

Thanks to his efforts and those of generations that followed, the wild beauty of Muir's beloved Sierra Nevada and its giant sequoias continues to thrive, albeit with a much greater amount of stress due to human-caused climate change. But new research suggests an unlikely ally in the preservation of Muir's iconic muse.

Credit, it seems, must be given to dust.

In a paper published today in the journal Nature Communications, a team of researchers found that dust provides a much greater amount of nutrients to vegetation in the Sierra Nevada than previously thought. The dust comes from as far away as the Gobi Desert in Central Asia and as nearby as California's Central Valley.

Phosphorus, along with nitrogen and carbon, is crucial to the survival of life on Earth. It is generally supplied to plants as bedrock is broken down into soil over the slow machinations of geologic time. Researchers have long considered the granite formations of the Sierra Nevada to be limited in phosphorus.

"In recent years it has been a bit of mystery how all these big trees have been sustained in this ecosystem without a lot of phosphorus in the bedrock," Emma Aronson, an assistant professor of plant pathology and microbiology at UC Riverside, said in a statement. "This work begins to unravel that mystery and show that dust may be shaping this iconic California ecosystem."

RELATED: Extreme Climate Change Millions of Years Ago Caused Mammals to Shrink

Climate change is expected to increase the frequency and intensity of drought around the world, which will likely mean more dust moving around in the atmosphere. Understanding the role of dust migration in providing nutrients to plants will help researchers anticipate the effects of global warming.

The team, which included researchers from University of California campuses in Riverside and Merced, collected dust samples from four locations in the Sierra Nevada mountains, ranging in elevation from 1,300 to 8,800 feet.

Nicholas Dove, a UC Merced graduate student, was responsible for collecting the dust.

"Harvesting dust for scientific purposes is surprisingly rudimentary," he said in a statement. "We use many household supplies: Wooden posts hold up bundt pans filled with marbles, and the dust settles in the marble matrix. We collect this dust by 'washing' the marbles with sterile water. The water is filtered and, voila, you have your dust."

The pans were fixed atop 6-foot-high poles in order to avoid dust contamination from the researchers' boots.

The scientists identified the geographic origin of the dust samples by examining their isotopes.

They found that dust from Asia accounted for an average of 20 percent of the dust at the lowest elevation and 45 percent of the total amount at the highest elevation. The greater amount of Asian dust in the higher locations, the researchers said, is because dust travels high in the atmosphere and only falls to the ground when it comes into contact with an object such as a mountain.

Dust from the Central Valley was greater at lower elevations, which was expected. But the team found more Central Valley dust at higher elevations later in the dry season, which is significant because their study took place during the peak of what is likely the worst drought to hit California in a millennium.

"Considering we took our measurements in 2014, in the middle of the drought, this makes us think that the drought is a factor here," Aronson said.

Funding for the study was provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

"This research reveals that the transport of dust in the atmosphere is important for the ecological health of many parts of our planet," said Richard Yuretich, program director for the NSF's Critical Zone Observatory Network. "Complex cycles and feedbacks regulate conditions at the surface of the Earth. This study adds a significant piece to our knowledge of how the Earth works and what we can do to keep it functioning properly."

WATCH: Using Drones to Predict the Future of Climate Change

Originally published on Seeker.

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Gobi Desert Dust Helps Sustain California's Sierra Nevada

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After the conservationist John Muir devotedly hiked the Sierra Nevada mountain range in the late 19th century, he penned some of the greatest American nature writing ever put to paper and launched the Sierra Club, which remains one of the most influential members of the nation's conservation movement.

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What's Behind the Arctic's Mysterious Green Ice

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What's Behind the Arctic's Mysterious Green Ice

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It should be dark under the ice cover of the Arctic, and yet in 2011, scientists were perplexed when they discovered phytoplankton blooming beneath it, giving the ice a greenish hue. Now they know why: The ice has thinned enough to let light through to fuel a thriving bunch of little plants. A large bloom of phytoplankton, which is algae, was first found growing under the Arctic sea ice in 2011. Researchers said they were shocked at the discovery, because conditions under the ice should have been too dark for the plants to photosynthesize (making sugars from light, water and carbon dioxide) to survive. As global temperatures rise and the Arctic ice melts and thins, the normally reflective surface has become darker, the researchers said. Melt ponds ― dark pools of water on the ice's surface ― have also lessened the ice's reflectivity of sunlight. And so now, some of the sunlight passes through the ice.

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Melt ponds dot the surface of Arctic ice.

Credit: NASA

It should be dark under the ice cover of the Arctic, and yet in 2011, scientists were perplexed when they discovered phytoplankton blooming beneath it, giving the ice a greenish hue. Now they know why: The ice has thinned enough to let light through to fuel a thriving bunch of little plants.

A large bloom of phytoplankton, which is algae, was first found growing under the Arctic sea ice in 2011. Researchers said they were shocked at the discovery, because conditions under the ice should have been too dark for the plants to photosynthesize (making sugars from light, water and carbon dioxide) to survive. New research has shown, however, that the thinning sea ice allows enough light to pass through for the phytoplankton to bloom.

Under typical conditions, most of the sunlight that hits the Arctic sea ice gets reflected to space. But as global temperatures rise and the Arctic ice melts and thins, the normally reflective surface has become darker, the researchers said. Melt ponds ― dark pools of water on the ice's surface ― have also lessened the ice's reflectivity of sunlight. And so now, some of the sunlight passes through the ice. [ Images of Melt: Earth's Vanishing Ice]

"Our big question was, 'How much sunlight gets transmitted through the sea ice, both as a function of thickness, which has been decreasing, and the melt pond percentage, which has been increasing?'" lead study researcher Christopher Horvat said in a statement. "What we found was that we went from a state where there wasn't any potential for plankton blooms to massive regions of the Arctic being susceptible to these types of growth," added Horvat, who is a graduate student in applied mathematics at the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at Harvard University.

Using mathematical modeling, the researchers found that while melt ponds help the phytoplankton grow by allowing sunlight, thinner ice is the main culprit for the greening of Arctic ice.

Only two decades ago, about 3 to 4 percent of the Arctic's sea ice was thin enough for phytoplankton to take in enough sunlight to grow, they said. The new research found that today, nearly 30 percent of the sea ice is thin enough for sub-ice phytoplankton blooms. In fact, the Arctic sea ice has thinned by about 3 feet (1 meter) over the last 30 years, Horvat said.

"All of a sudden, our entire idea about how this ecosystem works is different," Horvat said. "The foundation of the Arctic food web is now growing at a different time and in places that are less accessible to animals that need oxygen."

The researchers said their model could be used to observe the blooms in the future, and measure the overall change in the Arctic's ecosystems.

The research is described in a paper published online March 29 in the journal Science Advances.

Original article on Live Science.

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What's Behind the Arctic's Mysterious Green Ice?

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It should be dark under the ice cover of the Arctic, and yet in 2011, scientists were perplexed when they discovered phytoplankton blooming beneath it, giving the ice a greenish hue. Now they know why: The ice has thinned enough to let light through to fuel a thriving bunch of little plants.

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Clean Power Worldwide Has Doubled in 10 Years

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Clean Power Worldwide Has Doubled in 10 Years

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Renewable energy generation grew globally by 161 gigawatts in 2016, setting another record for capacity additions and pushing clean power capacity past 2,000 GW.

That’s roughly double the amount of renewable energy that was flowing across the world’s power grids a decade ago, and it reflects the unprecedented adoption of solar, wind, hydro and other emissions-free power by the world’s largest economies. China, Europe and the United States now account for 62 percent of the world’s total installed renewable capacity, with China and the United States supporting the largest clean power portfolios. Other leaders are Brazil, Germany, Canada and India.

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Renewable energy generation grew globally by 161 gigawatts in 2016, setting another annual record for capacity additions and pushing clean power capacity past 2,000 GW, according to newly released data from the International Renewable Energy Agency.

That's roughly double the amount of renewable energy that was flowing across the world's power grids a decade ago, according to the Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates-based organization, and it reflects the unprecedented adoption of solar, wind, hydro and other emissions-free power by the world's largest economies.

China, Europe and the United States now account for 62 percent of the world's total installed renewable capacity, with China and the United States supporting the largest clean power portfolios, according to the data. Other leaders are Brazil, Germany, Canada and India.

Asia was the fastest-growing region year over year, with a 13.1 percent increase in renewable energy capacity. Africa installed 4.1 GW of new capacity in 2016, a 12 percent jump from 2015.

In addition to boosting the world's carbon-free electricity, which experts say is essential to arresting global warming, the surge in renewables "provides multiple socio-economic benefits in terms of fueling economic growth, creating jobs and improving human welfare and the environment," Adnan Amin, IRENA's director-general, said in a statement.

The 2016 growth represents an 8.7 percent jump in global renewable energy capacity from 2015, according to IRENA. Solar was the largest source of new renewable energy for the year, estimated at 71 GW, followed by wind power at 51 GW and hydropower at 30 GW.

Hydropower saw its greatest expansion in Asia, Africa and South America, while solar and wind installations were more broadly distributed, with China and the United States leading the world in year-over-year expansions for the two leading non-hydro renewable energy resources. Solar also saw multigigawatt expansions in India, Japan and the United Kingdom. India, Germany and Brazil each added more than 2 GW of wind power capacity in 2016, according to the data.

Notably, offshore wind energy saw its second-largest annual growth in 2016, with China nearly tripling its capacity in 12 months, from 559 to 1,480 megawatts. New offshore turbines also came online in Germany, the Netherlands, Great Britain and the United States.
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E News. E&E provides daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news at www.eenews.net.

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Clean Power Worldwide Has Doubled in 10 Years

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Renewable energy generation grew globally by 161 gigawatts in 2016, setting another annual record for capacity additions and pushing clean power capacity past 2,000 GW, according to newly released data from the International Renewable Energy Agency.

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In 1985, a trio of British researchers noticed a hole in the ozone layer, our protection against harmful UV rays, over the Antarctic. Almost ten years earlier in 1974, scientists had noted a link between possible damage to the ozone layer and the release of chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere. In the 1970s and 1980s, chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs were readily used in coolants for refrigeration systems and everyday propellants like hair sprays or other aerosols. CFCs are fairly stable molecules so, once released, they almost always make their way up into the stratosphere, the layer of the Earth’s atmosphere that starts about 10-20 kilometers up.

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Advertisement |

Taking action to protect our planet can seem like a daunting or even futile task. Scientists have to navigate a complicated ecosystem with many interwoven variables in order to link an effect (like increased droughts or unusually intense storms, for example) with a cause. Politicians spanning many countries and cultural differences then have to come up with a plan, and entire industries have to agree to invest in that plan.

As we ring in the new year of 2017, let's look at one of my favorite science stories from 2016: a story that tells us that all of that is possible. Science can save the world, with a little help, of course, from the cooperation and investment of its inhabitants.

What caused the hole in the ozone layer?

In 1985, a trio of British researchers noticed a hole in the ozone layer, our protection against harmful UV rays, over the Antarctic. Almost ten years earlier in 1974, scientists had noted a link between possible damage to the ozone layer and the release of chlorofluorocarbons in to the atmosphere, work which later earned those authors, Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland, along with Paul Crutzen, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

In the 1970s and 1980s, chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs were readily used in coolants for refrigeration systems and everyday propellants like hair sprays or other aerosols. CFCs are fairly stable molecules so, once released, they almost always make their way up into the stratosphere, the layer of the Earth's atmosphere that starts about 10-20 kilometers up (depending on where on Earth you're located). They do not stay trapped inside the walls of your apartment, as has been incorrectly suggested by the US president elect.
"Continue reading on QuickAndDirtyTips.com

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)

Everyday Einstein Sabrina Stierwalt

Sabrina Stierwalt, PhD, is an astrophysicist at the University of Virginia and the host of the Everyday Einstein podcast on Quick and Dirty Tips.

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Taking action to protect our planet can seem like a daunting or even futile task. Scientists have to navigate a complicated ecosystem with many interwoven variables in order to link an effect (like increased droughts or unusually intense storms, for example) with a cause.

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Seagrasses Boost Ecosystem Health by Fighting Bad Bacteria

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Seagrasses Boost Ecosystem Health by Fighting Bad Bacteria

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Meadows of underwater seagrass plants might lower levels of harmful bacteria in nearby ocean waters. That could make the whole ecosystem — from corals to fish to humans — healthier. Not actually a grass, seagrasses are flowering plants with long,  leaves. They grow in shallow ocean water, spreading into vast underwater lawns. Seagrasses are “a marine powerhouse, almost equal to the rainforest. They’re one of the largest stores of carbon in the ocean,” says study coauthor Joleah Lamb, an ecologist at Cornell University.  “It’s no secret that seagrasses improve water quality,” says James Fourqurean, a biologist at Florida International University in Miami. The plants are great at removing excess nitrogen and phosphorus from coastal waters. But now, it seems, they might take away harmful bacteria, too.

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BOSTON - For a lawn that helps the environment - and doesn't need to be mowed - look to the ocean. Meadows of underwater seagrass plants might lower levels of harmful bacteria in nearby ocean waters, researchers reported February 16 during a news conference at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. That could make the whole ecosystem - from corals to fish to humans - healthier.

Not truly a grass, seagrasses are flowering plants with long, narrow leaves. They grow in shallow ocean water, spreading into vast underwater lawns. Seagrasses are "a marine powerhouse, almost equal to the rainforest. They're one of the largest stores of carbon in the ocean," says study coauthor Joleah Lamb, an ecologist at Cornell University. "But they don't get a lot of attention."

It's no secret that seagrasses improve water quality, says James Fourqurean, a biologist at Florida International University in Miami who wasn't involved in the research, which appears in the Feb. 17 Science. The plants are great at removing excess nitrogen and phosphorus from coastal waters. But now, it seems, they might take away harmful bacteria, too.

A few years ago, Lamb's colleagues became ill with amoebic dysentery while studying coral reefs in Indonesia, an archipelagic nation that straddles the Indian and Pacific oceans. When a city or village on one of the country's thousands of islands dumps raw sewage into the ocean, shoreline bacteria populations can spike to dangerous levels.
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Water sampled close to the shores of four small and densely populated Indonesian islands had 10 times the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's recommended exposure limit of Enterococcus bacteria, which can cause illness in humans and often signals the presence of other pathogens. But water collected from offshore tidal flats and coral reefs with seagrass beds had lower levels of the bacteria compared with similar sites without the plants less than 20 meters away. The water had lower levels of numerous bacterial species that can make fish and marine invertebrates sick, too. And field surveys of more than 8,000 coral heads showed that those growing adjacent to or within seagrass beds had fewer diseases than those growing farther away.

It's unclear how far from seagrass beds this cleaner water extends, but the benefits can ripple through the entire ecosystem, Lamb said at the news conference. Healthier corals help protect the islands from erosion. And fish less contaminated with bacteria make a better source of food for people.

Lamb is planning follow-up studies to figure out exactly how the seagrasses clean the water. Like a shag carpet, seagrasses trap small particulates drifting through the ocean and prevent them from flowing on. The plants might ensnare bacteria in the same way, building up biofilms on their blades. Or, she suggests, the leaves could be giving off antimicrobial compounds that directly kill the bacteria.

The findings are one more reason to conserve seagrasses, study coauthor Jeroen van de Water, an ecologist at the Scientific Center of Monaco, said at the news conference. Worldwide, seagrass beds are declining by 7 percent each year, thanks to pollution and habitat loss. And while restoration efforts are underway in some areas, "it's better to stop what we're doing to the meadows than to try to replant them," Lamb added. "Seagrasses are quite particular in the depth they want to be at and the environment they want to have. It's hard to start doing restoration projects if the environment isn't exactly what the seagrass prefers."

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Seagrasses boost ecosystem health by fighting bad bacteria

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BOSTON - For a lawn that helps the environment - and doesn't need to be mowed - look to the ocean. Meadows of underwater seagrass plants might lower levels of harmful bacteria in nearby ocean waters, researchers reported February 16 during a news conference at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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Ocean Plastic Emits Chemical that Tricks Seabirds into Eating Trash

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Ocean Plastic Emits Chemical that Tricks Seabirds into Eating Trash

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Plastic smells good for some seabirds. When the common  material ends up in the ocean, it gives off a chemical that Antarctic prions, petrels and shearwaters often use to locate food, which leads the birds to ingest harmful junk instead of a real meal. Researchers let small beads of three common plastics linger off the coast of California. After a couple of weeks, the once-clean plastic accumulated grit, grime and bacteria that gave off an odiferous gas called dimethyl sulfide. Phytoplankton give off the same gas, and certain seabirds use its odor as a cue that dinner is nearby. Birds that rely more heavily on dimethyl sulfide as a beacon for a nearby meal are more likely to ingest plastic than birds that don’t, the team found. And other plankton-feeding marine animals could also be fooled.

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Plastic smells like supper for some seabirds. When the ubiquitous material ends up in the ocean, it gives off a chemical that Antarctic prions, petrels and shearwaters often use to locate food, researchers report online November 9 in Science Advances. That might lead the birds to ingest harmful junk instead of a real meal.

Researchers let small beads of three common plastics linger off the coast of California. After a couple of weeks, the once-clean plastic accumulated grit, grime and bacteria that gave off an odiferous gas called dimethyl sulfide. Phytoplankton give off the same gas, and certain seabirds use its odor as a cue that dinner is nearby. Birds that rely more heavily on dimethyl sulfide as a beacon for a nearby meal are more likely to ingest plastic than birds that don't, the team found. And other plankton-feeding marine animals could also be fooled.
Editor's note: This story was updated Nov. 22, 2016, to correct which birds are among those that respond to the smell of dimethyl sulfide. Antarctic prions, not albatrosses as previously stated, use the chemical as a food cue.

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Ocean plastic emits chemical that tricks seabirds into eating trash

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Plastic smells like supper for some seabirds. When the ubiquitous material ends up in the ocean, it gives off a chemical that Antarctic prions, petrels and shearwaters often use to locate food, researchers report online November 9 in Science Advances. That might lead the birds to ingest harmful junk instead of a real meal.

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Scientists have been working on a rapid assessment technique for determining which US coastal salt marshes are most at risk of being affected by erosion and were surprised to find that all eight of the Atlantic and Pacific Coast marshes where they field-tested their method are losing ground, and half of them will be gone in 350 years. The only way that these marshes have a chance to recover is if water levels recede and more ground is recovered, but that is a very unlikely scenario. Most of New Jersey’s marshes had estimated lifespans of about 170-350 years until they will be completely gone.

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Scientists working on a rapid assessment technique for determining which US coastal salt marshes are most imperiled by erosion were surprised to find that all eight of the Atlantic and Pacific Coast marshes where they field-tested their method are losing ground, and half of them will be gone in 350 years' time if they don't recapture some lost terrain.

The US Geological Survey-led research team developed a simple method that land managers can use to assess a coastal salt marsh's potential to survive environmental challenges. The method, already in use at two national wildlife refuges, uses any one of several remote sensing techniques, such as aerial photography, to gauge how much of an individual marsh is open water and how much of it is covered by marsh plants. By comparing the ratio of ponds, channels and tidal flats to marsh vegetation, land managers can determine which marshes stand the best chance of persisting in the face of changing conditions.

This ratio, called the Unvegetated-Vegetated Marsh Ratio or UVVR, is a good surrogate for much more labor-intensive field studies, said oceanographer Neil Ganju of the USGS Woods Hole Coastal and Marine Science Center. Ganju is the lead author of the study, which was published Jan. 23 in Nature Communications.

"Our method does a good job of tracking the main destructive processes in marshes -- the conversion of vegetated areas to open water, and the loss of sediment," Ganju said. "Together these changes control the long-term fate of the marsh."

Salt marshes worldwide are being lost to sea-level rise, erosion, and land use changes. These marshes protect the coast against storms and erosion, filter pollution, and provide habitat for fish and shellfish. Land managers nationwide want to know which marshes stand the best chance of enduring, so they can concentrate marsh conservation and restoration work where it will be most effective. But making that assessment is normally difficult and costly, the researchers said.

To find out whether the UVVR is a good predictor of coastal salt marshes' fates, the researchers applied it to eight marshes that had already been studied. The sites were portions of Seal Beach National Wildlife Refuge and Point Mugu Naval Air Station in California; Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge in Maine; Fishing Bay Wildlife Management Area and Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge in Maryland; Reedy Creek and Dinner Creek at New Jersey's Edwin B. Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge, and Schooner Creek in New Jersey.

The researchers wanted to include marshes that seemed fairly stable and ones that seemed unstable. And to test their method, they needed sites where scientists had already done the field studies necessary to develop a detailed local "sediment budget."

"Think of a marsh as similar to a savings account, with sediment as the principal," Ganju said. "Every new deposit of sediment is like interest added to the principal, and every sediment loss is like money spent. If a marsh is gaining sediment, it can tolerate some withdrawals, and the budget will still be in the black. If it's losing sediment, that marsh is in the red. Its sediment either gets replenished by natural processes or human intervention, or eventually the principal will all be spent."

All eight marshes' sediment budgets were "in the red." And in each case that UVVR result correlated with the sediment budget, confirming that each of those marshes is losing ground. The researchers calculated the likely life spans of all eight marshes. The shortest, at Maryland's Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, was approximately 83 years, and the New Jersey marshes had life spans ranging from 170 to 350 years.

The researchers stressed that these figures are estimates with large margins of error, and don't necessarily mean that these marshes are doomed -- only that they will need infusions of sediment to last longer.

"Our results can be used to distinguish marshes that are struggling to survive from more resilient ones," said co-author Matthew Kirwan, an assistant professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science. "That's important because it will help prioritize restoration work."

Staffers at Massachusetts' Parker River National Wildlife Refuge are working with members of the research team to identify which marsh units are losing sediment, and at what rates.

"This will help us figure out where we can make a difference with restoration techniques. It will also help us determine which areas are beyond restoration," said Refuge Manager Bill Peterson. "This ensures that we're using our limited resources effectively to strengthen and enhance these valuable natural areas."

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ecology; exotic species; oceanography; landslides; water; environmental policy; global warming; floods

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New technique quickly predicts salt marsh vulnerability: All 8 Atlantic and Pacific coast marshes assessed are losing ground, researchers find

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Scientists who developed a rapid assessment technique for determining which US coastal salt marshes are most imperiled by erosion were surprised to find that all eight of the Atlantic and Pacific Coast marshes where they field-tested their method are losing ground. Four of the eight will be gone in 350 years if they don't recapture some lost terrain.

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Could Climate Change Build Big Business in Kenya?

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Could Climate Change Build Big Business in Kenya?

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As a result of climate change, the agricultural industries in Africa have taken a hard hit. Increasing surface temperatures and reduced rainfall proves to be a challenging feat to these farmers. Many farming communities still lack basic tools that would help ease the process such as fertilizer and irrigation. Fertilizer is usually imported to these regions and it's very expensive so most people have to go without it. However, Sam Rigu, a former Maize harvester, discovered a way to use corn husks to create fertilizer. Corn husks are typically thrown away as garbage after the corn is separated from them. Now, Rigu collects these scraps from local farms and sells them fertilizer. In turn, not only does Rigu make a profit, but the small business farms are now able to produce more crops and make more money too. There are many other rising entrepreneurs like Rigu popping up all over Kenya. The small business farmers are finding new ways to adapt to the climate change happening around them.

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When Sam Rigu was a kid, growing up on a maize farm in central Kenya, his grandmother made a disturbing prediction.

"She said something I'll never forget," he recalls. "She said, 'Twenty years ago we were harvesting double this. Twenty years from now we might have nothing to feed our children.' That really scared me."

It wasn't until many years later, when Rigu first learned about climate change as a university student, that he realized just how right she was.

After college, Rigu began managing his own maize farm, and saw firsthand the toll that rising temperatures and unpredictable rain had on his corn. He sought solutions, but he was never much of a green thumb: His dream was to help farmers with the business side of farming. One day, on a shopping trip to the rice-trading hub of Mwea, he saw his opportunity.

Outside every rice processor's storefront were great mountains of chaff, the featherweight rice husk that is separated from the grain during processing. Many of the heaps Rigu saw were burning, just to get rid of the stuff. But where most people saw trash, Rigu saw shillings.

"I decided to work around the waste and see if I can make it into something economically viable," he says.

Rigu's entrepreneurial spirit is common in Kenya, where everyone seemingly has a side hustle and every sidewalk teems with ad-hoc businesses. But he's also part of a growing niche that could help small-scale farmers-the lifeblood of Kenya's economy-adapt to the challenge of climate change.

New start-up companies offer tools like solar-powered irrigation pumps and all-natural pesticides that are tailor-made to Kenyan conditions. Meanwhile, nonprofits and financial institutions are trying to improve farmers' access to such products through microloans and weather-based insurance.

Three years later, Rigu has quit the maize farm and now operates a thriving business, Safi Organics, that turns rice chaff into high-quality organic fertilizer. He buys chaff from a network of local rice processors for about $30 per ton. He burns it into a kind of loose charcoal, then mixes it with a secret cocktail of crushed limestone and other plant waste, to produce a fertilizer that he sells back to local farmers for $15 per 50-kg bag. He can typically process four tons of chaff in a day; once sold, a single ton can net him up to $200.

Rigu's success also enriches the processors, who now get paid for a product they used to throw away, and his farmer customers, who are enjoying improved yields for about half the typical price of traditional (often imported) fertilizer.

"We realized that we can create a new value chain to empower farmers," he says. "We're the first people to pay for the husk."

A Hungry Market

Companies like Safi Organics are at the forefront of a larger movement to equip Kenyan small-scale farmers with the tools they badly need to cope with global warming.

Temperatures across East Africa are rising-up nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1960s on average-as seasonal rainfall becomes increasingly unpredictable. Meanwhile, millions of farmers still operate without the basic implements; things like high-quality seeds, fertilizer, and irrigation, that are needed to make farms more resilient.

According to a 2015 World Bank survey of 22,000 farming households across sub-Saharan Africa, two-thirds use no fertilizer; no more than 3 percent use irrigation; and fewer than one percent use more than one of these improvements on the same plot of land. There are many reasons. For one, so-called "inputs" like seeds and fertilizer are expensive: Fertilizer in sub-Saharan Africa is two to six times the global average price, according to Harvard University agro-economist Calestous Juma, thanks to high import and transportation costs. And it's hard to access: Juma estimates that up to 70 percent of farmers live between two and five hours away from the nearest market.

There is little help to be had from local banks; farmers typically have little or nothing to offer as collateral, and are seen as a risky bet for loans. The World Bank found fewer than one percent of households use any kind of credit-even informal loans from neighbors-to purchase inputs.

All of this, combined with rapidly rising rural populations, notoriously poor soil quality across much of the continent, and climate change, has led to sub-Saharan Africa being the only place on Earth where per-capita food production is falling.

But in Kenya, a market is gradually emerging for climate solutions for small-scale farmers. That's where entrepreneurs like Sam Rigu come in.

"The climate change space in Kenya is vibrant," says Edward Mungai, CEO of the Kenya Climate Innovation Centre, a startup incubator based at Strathmore University in Nairobi. "It's heating up, let me put it that way. And agriculture is the focal sector."

KCIC takes funding from the World Bank and the Danish and British governments and distributes it in the form of small grants,ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand U.S. dollars,for climate-related startups. When Mungai opened the centre in 2012, he expected to receive around 150 proposals and be able to fund one-third of them. Instead, he received 3,000 proposals, of which he was able to fund fewer than ten percent. More pour in all the time.

"That shows that Kenyans are thinking about this concept and how it can be commercialized, this concept of climate change," he says. "That means the opportunity is huge."

Kenya Biologics is one company that used KCIC funding to take advantage of that opportunity. The company's signature product is an all-natural pesticide targeted at crop-destroying caterpillars. Lab technicians at a facility outside Nairobi raise millions of caterpillars and then infect them with a virus lethal to them but harmless to other organisms (including humans). The caterpillars themselves act as a living petri dish for mass producing the virus that will go on to kill their cousins in the wild.

"They reproduce the virus in millions, then you squash the caterpillar, you put it in a bottle, and that is what the farmer sprays," says Chris Kolenberg, the company's CEO.

The product allows farmers to control pests without synthetic chemicals that can damage soil, pollute water, pose health risks, or cause a crop to fail quality control tests for export to foreign markets.

"At the moment East Africa is a booming market" for agricultural products, Kolenberg says, because farmers are becoming more sophisticated, more eager to tap export markets, and more determined to overcome adverse environmental conditions. Although it started in the late 2000s with an exclusive focus on large-scale commercial farms, Kenya Biologics is increasingly focused on smallholders: The company now employs a dozen sales staff who fan out across the country to connect with farmers at local markets and pitch the product.

But even with customers in sight, you still have to spend money to make money. And that remains a major hurdle. Both Kolenberg and Rigu shared similar stories about the difficulty of securing their first round of investment. In a well-established startup hub like Silicon Valley, a good idea can quickly attract financing from venture capitalists. But in Kenya there are still few financial institutions willing to gamble on small, unproven ventures.

"During our first period, we weren't asking for enough money," Kolenberg says. "If you ask for $400,000 or less from a private equity fund, they'll say it's not even worth putting one guy on this project."

Mungai agreed that finance is the biggest challenge Kenya's entrepreneurs face.

"We still haven't been able to provide an enabling environment to these enterprises, and I attribute it mainly to lack of understanding: The people with the money not understanding the people with ideas," he says. "These are new technologies, innovations. The commercial banks and private equity funds do not understand them, at least at the startup phase. When they start scaling up, then you start seeing the big boys becoming interested."

But scaling up could be difficult if farmers aren't able to afford what the innovators are selling. So the next challenge is to improve farmers' access to finance

Cash on Hand

Christine Wasike's farm in Bungoma is typical of this region of western Kenya, not far from the Ugandan border. Her plot is no bigger than a football field, tucked between a towering rock outcrop and a cluster of wood and mud brick buildings where she lives with her husband, some extended family, and crew of rowdy children that seems to grow ever larger over the course of the morning.

Here, she grows maize, beans, and kale, and keeps a few chickens, goats, and cows. On the day I visited, she was hard at work shelling beans by hand, tossing them in a woven basket to get them clean and ready to eat and sell.

Wasike, a lifelong farmer, said she constantly worries about how deteriorating climate conditions will impact her family. The farm is watered exclusively by rain, which has been increasingly in short supply.

"This year and last year, drought was very bad and it affected crops," she says. "When there is drought, farmers suffer a lot. There is a lot of hunger, especially with children at home. But as farmers, we don't give up. We must have food. We must continue."

Wasike is sometimes able to spring for better seeds, fertilizer, or other inputs. But a shopping trip to the local supply store can set her back up to $55. In a year like this one, when she's only able to produce two or three sacks of maize to sell, she won't even break even on that investment. In other words, investing in inputs is a huge risk: If severe drought hits, she will have thrown away a season's worth of income, and with it her childrens' school fees, healthcare budget, and other vital expenses.

And that's if she can even get her hands on the money at all. As in many Kenyan farming households, the family purse is controlled by Wasike's husband, even though women are the ones who perform most of the farm labor. Getting money means having to beg for a handout, she says, which is an exhausting and often fruitless exercise.

"Most of the farmers here are women; it is very rare to find a man farming," she says. "We face many challenges in farming. Getting seeds to plant is very difficult because we need money, and it is hard to get money."

So a few months ago, Wasike followed the advice of some neighbors and signed up for One Acre Fund. The nonprofit grants small loans to farmers in the form of seed and fertilizer delivered directly to the farm, that farmers have a year to pay back. Each loan is worth about $100, and comes with an insurance policy so farmers aren't on the hook in the event of a totally lost crop. Founded in Bungoma in 2006 with 37 clients, in the decade since One Acre Fund has grown to serve 200,000 Kenyans as well as farmers in several countries across East Africa.

"Smallholder farmers are the most vulnerable population when it comes to the effects of climate change," says Kelvin Owino, a spokesperson for One Acre Fund in Bungoma. "With climate change, their potential of producing enough food reduces year by year, or season by season. They need access to high-quality seed, high-quality fertilizer, and training. That will enable them to produce much more than before, and also become more resilient to shocks."

Josephine Wamela, another One Acre Fund farmer in Bungoma, says in the last few years she lost so much of her harvests to drought that she almost had to give up on farming altogether.

"As the climate keeps changing," she says, "farmers are scared of planting because they plant but don't get anything out of it."

One Acre Fund was the first institution willing to give her a loan, she says, and now "even when there is drought I'm still able to harvest."

One Acre Fund was a pioneer in finance for small-scale farmers, but the field is steadily growing, and farmers' access to financial instruments seems to be improving across East Africa. The continent's largest weather-based insurance program, known as the Agriculture and Climate Risk Enterprise (ACRE), added more than 160,000 farmers between 2010 and 2013, and is projected to grow by an order of magnitude by 2018. That program acts as a kind of middleman between traditional insurers and farmers, using high-tech weather data to predict crop yields and then distributing payouts if conditions worsen beyond a predetermined threshold. A 2015 study led by Columbia University scientists found that farmers enrolled in ACRE earned 16 percent more by the end of the harvest season than their uninsured neighbors. A similar program sponsored by the World Bank was launched in spring 2016, which included specialized offerings for Kenya's nomadic pastoralists in addition to crop farmers.

Programs like this create a positive feedback loop: When Kenya's farmers are able to afford technology, the country's climate innovation sector grows, making technology more easily available. The end result is a stronger national economy, and a vulnerable population made more resilient.

"If we can manage to provide better technologies for agriculture," says KCIC's Mungai, "then we have gone a long way in terms of fighting the menace of climate change."
Tim McDonnell is a Fulbright-National Geographic storyteller who is spending the next several months gathering the stories of African farmers. You can follow his journey here, on the Voices blog, and on Twitter @timmcdonnell and Instagram @timothy.m.mcdonnell.

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Could Climate Change Build Big Business in Kenya?

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When Sam Rigu was a kid, growing up on a maize farm in central Kenya, his grandmother made a disturbing prediction. "She said something I'll never forget," he recalls. "She said, 'Twenty years ago we were harvesting double this. Twenty years from now we might have nothing to feed our children.'

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Huge Puffin Die-off May Be Linked to Hotter Seas

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Huge Puffin Die-off May Be Linked to Hotter Seas

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Scientists have recently observed mass deaths in the Tufted Puffin populations. They attribute this catastrophe to warming ocean water. The stretch of ocean in the Bering sea has experienced record high water temperatures which has caused the ocean food web to shift. Puffins feed on pollock fish. However, due to the warming waters, pollock have been seen is smaller numbers. Therefore, the puffin are starving.

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The tufted puffins started washing ashore on St. Paul Island in mid-October-first a handful, then dozens, then so many that volunteers patrolling to collect dead birds began walking their four-wheelers rather than riding. It was easier than getting off every few feet.

The hundreds of dead, emaciated puffins showing up on this isolated, wind-swept scratch of land in the Pribilof Islands in the middle of the North Pacific suddenly has scientists worried-about the population of this white-masked, orange-beaked seabird, but also about what their deaths may portend for the normally productive Bering Sea.

A stretch of water that provides more seafood than any other in North America saw such record-warm temperatures earlier this year that scientists suspect the ocean food web there has shifted. That could spell big downturns for marine life, from seabirds and fur seals to salmon, crab and the $1 billion-a-year pollock fishing industry that provides flaky white filets for everything from McDonald's fish sandwiches to frozen fish sticks.

"The Bering Sea has been off-the-charts warm," said Nate Mantua, an ecologist at NOAA's Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Santa Cruz, California. "We've never seen anything like this. We're in uncharted territory. We're in the midst of an extraordinary time."

In the last few years another patch of unusually warm water that settled into the Gulf of Alaska and merged with warm waters in southern California completely transformed the coastal ocean. For months, scientists off Oregon found almost none of the fatty-rich copepods that form the base of the food web. Sea lions, common murres, and Cassin's auklets died by the thousands because of a lack of food. Scores of whales and sea otters turned up dead in Alaska. The West Coast saw it's most toxic and longest-lasting harmful algal bloom ever. ( Read more about this warm water blob.)

But the subarctic waters of the Bering Sea, coming off a strong period of cold water and record sea-ice in 2012 and 2013, seemed mostly spared. Waters were unusually warm beginning in 2014, but not ridiculously so. Last year would have seen more normal ice, if warm water from the Gulf of Alaska hadn't poured into the Bering Sea through the Aleutian Island chain and kept the ice at bay.

But all that changed this year. Even the pool of cold water that normally rests on the bottom of the Bering Sea was at times 6 degrees Celsius warmer than usual.

"The maximum summer temperatures in the Bering Sea were the warmest we've ever seen," said Phyllis Stabeno, with NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Lab. "And the minimum temperature-the coldest it gets in winter-was warmer than several of the last years."

Under normal cycles in the Pacific Ocean, warm water usually translates to less food, and so far that's what scientists are seeing, especially among the tiny copepods that are food for smaller fish and other animals. But it's actually worse than normal.

"When it's warm we usually no longer have a lot of large, fatty zooplankton around," Stabeno said. Instead, the sea usually includes smaller, less nutritious zooplankton. "But this year there just wasn't much of anything."

Said Janet Duffy-Anderson of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center, "That bodes poorly for fish and birds and mammals. It's that zooplankton prey base that provides food for young pollock that are then eaten by birds and cod and halibut and even older pollock."

That appears to be what has happened with puffins in the remote Pribolofs.

Mass Deaths

In early October, Lauren Divine, co-director of the ecosystem conservation office for St. Paul's Aleut community, was given two dead puffins to take back to Anchorage for research. At the time she though little of it. On this 40-square-mile island, of roughly 500 people, dead birds wash up once in awhile.

But within a few days it was obvious something was wrong.

"On the 17th we started doing surveys of the two main beaches and we came up with about 40 birds that first day," said volunteer Aaron Lestenkof. "Since then it's been about 20 to 30 birds each time we go out."

Several hundred birds have now washed up, nearly 200 times the normal rate. And since St. Paul and its rocky sister island, St. George, are the only land masses anywhere nearby, scientists are certain they're seeing just a tiny fraction of the deaths.

"In 10 years of monitoring, we've only seen six puffins wash in-total," said Julia Parrish, a University of Washington professor who coordinates a West Coast volunteer bird-monitoring network. "Now we've seen nearly 250 in 20 days. And these islands are small dots in the middle of a huge ocean. The entire puffin population is only 6,000 birds, and we project half that many may be affected."

Parrish said the birds-deep-diving fish eaters that chow on forage fish, such as baby walleye pollock-aren't sick. Scientists see no evidence of disease. The animals are just in such an advanced state of starvation "they appear to be eating themselves inside out." Even if she wasn't already aware of the last two years of bird die-off events along the West Coast and Alaska, she said, this is unusual enough to be worrisome.

Puffins have seen trouble before. One year after the unusually warm 2012, Atlantic puffins in the Gulf of Maine suffered their worst reproductive season ever-until this year. Breeding of puffins in Iceland has been collapsing for a decade. But along the Pacific adults are simply washing up dead.

"Clearly something very weird is going on," Parrish said. "It's basically every year now we're getting some huge mass-mortality event. It seems that the bottom-up changes provoked by the atmosphere are creating massive, massive changes in marine ecosystems. And the forage fish that everything depends on are taking it in the shorts."

What does that mean for the rest of the creatures in the ocean?

"We don't know," Parrish said. "The Bering Sea is an incredibly big place, and we're just seeing this now." ( Learn how puffins are tougher than they look.)

What's Causing the Warmth?

Mantua said the strange behavior in the atmosphere that helped the Gulf of Alaska's warm "blob" form in 2013 shifted again late this spring, with a high-pressure system setting up over the entire North Pacific. That led to an extended warm period across Alaska from May through September.

Then, in October, the patterns changed again, with significant storms in the Gulf of Alaska. But in the Bering Sea wind brought warm air and water from out of the south.

"These patterns in the atmosphere are big," he said. "They span much of the North Pacific and can create warm or cold patches at the same time. But it's the fact that there has been so much persistence in these patterns that has led to such extraordinary ocean temperatures. That, to me, is the big mystery. We just keep going from one extreme to another. If you get 10 or 12 days that are stuck in the same pattern, then the ocean is going to slowly build up heat."

Scientists are still grappling with trying to determine how much of this change is likely linked to climate change. Some have argued that melting sea ice has affected the jet stream, causing it to be more wobbly. Others have suggested these strange anomalies are connected to warmth in the tropics but are largely just extreme versions of normal climate fluctuations.

Regardless, for now, marine scientists are planning to spend extra time at sea, trying to assess what all this means for the North Pacific-particularly for Alaska's fishing industry, which supplies half the nation's catch of seafood.

"We're going to go back out and do some more surveying, because we're pretty worried," said Duffy-Anderson.

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Huge Puffin Die-Off May Be Linked to Climate Change

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The tufted puffins started washing ashore on St. Paul Island in mid-October-first a handful, then dozens, then so many that volunteers patrolling to collect dead birds began walking their four-wheelers rather than riding. It was easier than getting off every few feet.

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Engineers at Cornell University have recently come up with a new technique to test for micropollutants in lakes, rivers, and other potable water sources. This technique is vastly outperforming conventional methods. Conventional methods narrowly investigate one or two contaminants at a time, but the new method developed by Cornell is an analytical method that is designed to measure as broad of a range of contaminants as possible. The new technique assessed 18 water samples collected from New York state waterways. A total of 112 micropollutants were found in at least one of the samples, including pharmaceuticals, pesticides and personal care products. This new technique represents a broad range of chemical micropollutants that are unlikely to be found using conventional water testing means.

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from research organizations

Date:

Source:

Cornell University

Summary:

Engineers have developed a new technique to test for a wide range of micropollutants in lakes, rivers and other potable water sources that vastly outperforms conventional methods. The new technique -- using high-resolution mass spectrometry -- assessed 18 water samples collected from New York state waterways. A total of 112 so-called micropollutants were found in at least one of the samples.

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Cornell University engineers have developed a new technique to test for a wide range of micropollutants in lakes, rivers and other potable water sources that vastly outperforms conventional methods.

"Water quality monitoring is conventionally done by narrowly investigating one or a few contaminants at a time. We aimed to develop an analytical method that would be as broad as possible," said Damian Helbling, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering. Helbling and Amy Pochodylo, published their research as the cover story in the journal Environmental Science: Water Research & Technology.

The new technique -- using high-resolution mass spectrometry -- assessed 18 water samples collected from New York state waterways. A total of 112 so-called micropollutants were found in at least one of the samples -- chemicals including pharmaceuticals, pesticides and personal care products. Helbling said that eight of the chemicals were found in every sample and dozens more were found in most samples.

Helbling and Pochodylo refer to their approach as "suspect screening." The spectrometer analyzed the chemical composition of the water samples and the researchers compared the resulting data with a large list of 1,100 "suspect chemicals" by employing a nimble data-mining algorithm.

The unmasked contaminants read like a soup recipe concocted in a pharmacist's nightmare, as they found anticonvulsants (levetiracetam), antihistamines (fexofenadine) and muscle relaxants (carisoprodol, metaxalone and methocarbamol) -- all chemicals that have rarely been reported as water contaminants and some of which are being reported for the first time.

Prominent chemicals found in New York's waterways include triclosan, an anti-bacterial agent found in liquid hand soaps and toothpaste; the anesthetic and heart medicine lidocaine; diethyl-phthalate, a component of plastics; and the herbicide atrazine.

In all of the 18 waterways, researchers detected atenolol acid (a high-blood-pressure medication component); 5-methyl-1H-benzotriazole (a corrosion inhibitor found in dishwasher detergent); caffeine; the insect repellant DEET; gabapentin (an epilepsy medication); metformin (a medication that controls blood sugar); saccharin and sucralose (Splenda).

Citing how this new technique represents a broad range of chemical structures unlikely to be found using conventional means, Helbling said, "These results are not only interesting from a novelty perspective, but demonstrate the breadth of chemical coverage that our suspect screening affords."

Helbling hopes that local and regional stakeholders -- responsible for ensuring that waterways are monitored effectively -- adopt their approach.

"It is no secret that the chemicals we use in our daily lives often find their way into our air and water. This work contributes to our understanding of the specific types of chemicals that influence our water resources," he said, noting that he believes this broad method will one day become routine in monitoring. "This is probably several years down the line."

The National Science Foundation funded this work.

Story Source:
Materials provided by Cornell University. Original written by Blaine Friedlander. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Journal Reference:

Amy L. Pochodylo, Damian E. Helbling. Emerging investigators series: prioritization of suspect hits in a sensitive suspect screening workflow for comprehensive micropollutant characterization in environmental samples. Environ. Sci.: Water Res. Technol., 2017; 3 (1): 54 DOI: 10.1039/C6EW00248J

Cite This Page:

Cornell University. "New technique identifies micropollutants in New York waterways." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 29 January 2017. <www.sciencedaily.com

Cornell University. (2017, January 29). New technique identifies micropollutants in New York waterways. ScienceDaily. Retrieved April 29, 2026 from www.sciencedaily.com

Cornell University. "New technique identifies micropollutants in New York waterways." ScienceDaily. www.sciencedaily.com

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engineering and construction; energy and resources; civil engineering; construction; air quality; environmental science; air pollution; pollution

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New technique identifies micropollutants in New York waterways

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Engineers have developed a new technique to test for a wide range of micropollutants in lakes, rivers and other potable water sources that vastly outperforms conventional methods. The new technique -- using high-resolution mass spectrometry -- assessed 18 water samples collected from New York state waterways.

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A Rare Look at the Disappearing World of Antartica's Whales

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A Rare Look at the Disappearing World of Antartica's Whales

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Antartica is one of the fastest warming regions on the planet. With the icecaps melting at unprecedented rates and shortening winters, Antartica's whale populations are being affected. Although humpback whales favor open water to feed, Minke whales are suffering since they rely on the presence of ice for survival. Unlike humpbacks, they use the ice as protection from orcas. The smaller, sleek bodies of the Minke whales are an adaptation which allows them to navigate icy fjords where they can access food sources that other larger whales cannot reach. Now, the minke whales are forced to compete with many other whales for krill. As a result, the Minke whale population is rapidly declining while the humpback population is increasing. Although the humpbacks are thriving now, the krill population will eventually begin to decrease since they depend on the ice to reproduce. Once the krill population begins to decline, this could have devastating effects on the entire Antarctic food chain, not just the whales.

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Ari Friedlaender kneels at the front of our inflatable boat as it bobs on the ocean.

He holds a rifle, with two metal harpoons protruding from its muzzle. His gaze is fixed a few feet ahead, where something big stirs just beneath the surface. "OK, put it in neutral," he says to the driver. Our boat drifts closer.

A jet of mist suddenly erupts from the water. The humpback whale exhales with a grunt, emitting a putrid whiff of stomach acid and decay.

The Oregon State University marine ecologist brings the rifle to his shoulder and pulls the trigger. The dart flies into the animal's dorsal fin just as it sinks beneath the waves.

Watch six scientists and survival experts dispatched to Antarctica to learn more about melting ice in the new National Geographic show Continent 7, which airs Tuesdays at 10/9c through December 20.

It's a perfect shot: The small GPS sensor will stay lodged in the whale's fin for a month. Each time the giant surfaces, its sensor will transmit the location to satellites.

Friedlaender, also a National Geographic explorer, is plying these waters to study the private lives of Antarctica's two most common whale species, the humpback and the Antarctic minke.

He's focused his efforts on the northwestern edge of the Antarctic Peninsula, where Cierva Cove sits. This region is one of the world's key feeding grounds for these animals. It is also-thanks to humans-one of the fastest warming places on Earth. ( See beautiful drone video of migrating humpbacks.)

Average annual temperatures on the western side of the Peninsula have warmed by 4 or 5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1950, and the winters have warmed an astonishing 8 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit-"over five times faster than the global average," according to Douglas Martinson, an oceanographer at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York.

On one hand, the melting has given humpback whales, which prefer open water, more room to find food. But it may spell disaster for the Antarctic minke, a species that depends on ice for its survival.

The loss of sea ice "has really changed the abundance of animals," Friedlaender says.

"There are way fewer minke whales in this area than you would expect, and enormous numbers of humpback whales. It's almost staggering."

Peering Under the Ice

In 2009 Friedlaender witnessed the largest gathering of humpback whales ever documented. Over 300 whales congregated in a single bay to feed on krill -an estimated two million tons of these tiny whiskered crustaceans.

But less is known about why Antarctic minke are declining- there isn't even enough information about them to determine their conservation status, how quickly their numbers are falling, or whether they are simply retreating into smaller areas of ocean.

What Friedlaender knows is this: In the early 2000s, minke accounted for up to 40 percent of the whales that he saw along the Antarctic Peninsula. Now they account for only about 5 percent. It doesn't help that they're skittish and hard to study. During our cruise in March, we rarely saw a minke for more than a few seconds.

To find out why these populations are changing, Friedlaender spent the entire Antarctic summer sticking sensors on minke and humpbacks. Some, like the one he just deployed with an air rifle, track whales' movements for weeks.

Another type of sensor, a suction cup stuck gently on a whale's back using a long pole, collects more detailed information. For 24 hours, the sensors record the animal's second-by-second choreography as it dives below the surface-capturing every corkscrew twirl and every feeding lunge as the animal engulfs seawater buzzling with krill.

In 2013, Friedlaender managed to put suction cup sensors on two minke-a touchy procedure, and the first time anyone had managed to record this kind of information from these whales.

Safe Haven for Minke

His results, published in 2014, revealed some key insights. Unlike humpbacks, which feed in ice-free water, minke prefer being deep inside fjords, which are strewn with various frozen formations-icebergs plunging hundreds of feet below the surface, or swaths of sea ice forming a blue translucent roof over the water.

For instance, one minke that Friedlaender tracked frequently dove under the sea ice, staying under for as long as eight minutes. It spent most of that time skimming just a few feet beneath, gulping down krill.

Friedlaender and colleagues believe there's a why reason 25-foot-long minke-which are half the size of humpbacks-stick near the sea ice: It protects them from being eating by orcas, a hazard that humpbacks generally needn't fear.

The team also believe minke are adapted to ice: The animal's small, maneuverable body and mouth are optimized for flitting around under the ice, gulping down small groups of krill. This gives the smaller whales an entire food source that bigger whales can't get to.

But that advantage is now becoming a liability as sea ice disappears, says Friedlaender. "The available habitat for them is disappearing."

Whether these changes stem from the loss of sea ice and difficulty hunting remains to be seen. But scientists have observed a similar pattern among some penguin species: As sea ice retreats from the northwestern Antarctic Peninsula, entire breeding colonies of Adélie penguins, which depend on that ice, have vanished.

Disappearing Prey

Late in the afternoon on Cierva Cove, our boat approached another humpback. As it dived underwater, clouds of reddish brown material suddenly billowed up to the surface-whale poop, infused with the red pigment of digested krill.

Though they're booming now, the humpbacks' gains may be short-lived. Krill also depend on sea ice to reproduce-their offspring spend the winter sheltered under it, eating algae and other organisms from its underside. ( See up-close video of humpbacks feeding.)

As warming continues to erase sea ice from Antarctuca, krill may also begin to plummet -cutting off a crucial food source for not only humpbacks but the Antarctic food chain as a whole, Friedlaender says.

By warming the planet, "we're seeing an experiment that we didn't intend to do," says Friedlaender.

"Now we're seeing the results."
Douglas Fox is a freelance science and environmental journalist. Carolyn Van Houten is a photojournalist at the San Antonio Express-News. She was the recipient of the 2016 National Geographic Photography Internship.

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A Rare Look at the Disappearing World of Antarctica's Whales

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Ari Friedlaender kneels at the front of our inflatable boat as it bobs on the ocean. He holds a rifle, with two metal harpoons protruding from its muzzle. His gaze is fixed a few feet ahead, where something big stirs just beneath the surface. "OK, put it in neutral," he says to the driver.

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Pollution from the controlled fires that burn across Brazil's São Paulo state during the sugarcane-harvesting season have had a negative impact on infant health nearby, but the health of those same infants likely benefits from the economic opportunities the fires bring to their parent. This, in turn, creates a very interesting dynamic regarding the fires. The pollution from the fires has led to earlier birth and smaller babies, and fetal mortality has also increased. In Brazil, and worldwide, more attention should be paid to the impact of pollution from fires. Usually, all the focus is centered around big cities and polluting emissions.

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Pollution from the controlled fires that burn across Brazil's São Paulo state during the sugarcane-harvesting season has a negative impact on infant health nearby. But the health of those same infants likely benefits from the economic opportunities the fires bring to their parents.

Researchers at Princeton and Duke universities gathered information from satellites, pollution monitors and birth records to untangle those competing influences and accurately measure the impact of pollution from the fires.

They found that exposure to pollution from the fires in the last few months of gestation leads to earlier birth and smaller babies, and they found some evidence of increased fetal mortality. Conditions in early life, including in utero, have been shown to affect children's longterm outcomes, not only in terms of health but also their educational and economic success.

The findings suggest that policymakers in Brazil and across the developing world should pay more attention to the negative health impact of pollution from fires that are often part of traditional farming techniques, even though the pollution doesn't usually reach levels considered dangerous by industrial standards.

"Policymakers often think about heavily polluted cities like Beijing or New Delhi, but our results show that these agricultural fires are consequential," said Tom Vogl, an assistant professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton.

Vogl and co-author Marcos Rangel, assistant professor at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy, detailed their findings in a working paper titled "Agricultural Fires and Infant Health" released online in December by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Brazil is the world's leading producer of sugarcane, and São Paulo state accounts for more than two-thirds of the nation's production. The traditional approach to harvesting begins with burning the fields to remove straw and other materials, leaving the cane to be cut by hand. Although mechanized harvesting, which doesn't use fires, is becoming more common in Brazil, traditional techniques are still widely used there and across the developing world.

The researchers used remote-sensing data from satellites to track fires, which burn throughout the six-month harvesting season. That data was combined with pollution and weather information collected by 13 air-quality monitoring stations.

"We find that fires that are upwind from population centers increase pollution levels in those areas and other fires don't increase pollution nearly as much," Vogl said.

The researchers then linked the fire and pollution information to vital records and hospitalization records from the Brazilian government. Altogether the information allowed the researchers to compare how the health of infants responded to fires that had different effects on pollution in their communities.

The key to the research design, Vogl said, was incorporating information on wind direction, which allowed the researchers to parse out the consequences of pollution from the fires from the beneficial things that are correlated with the fires.

"We would get the answer completely wrong if we just looked at the relationship between fires and infant health in general," Vogl said. "The reason is that these agricultural fires are necessarily connected with economic activity. When there's more sugarcane harvesting, there are more fires. And when there is more sugarcane harvesting, people have higher incomes, which can be good for kids and kids' health."

Rangel added that sustainable development policies need to take into account trade-offs between economic and environmental goals.

"Our results point to a dirty side of clean fuel policies in Brazil," Rangel said. "To some extent, the incentives for ethanol production for cleaner fuel in urban areas have considerable side effects on the population and future generations in the production areas.

"By appropriately measuring how much ill comes with the blessings of a strong agricultural cycle, our work highlights the need for evidence-based policies across the globe," Rangel said.

Prashant Bharadwaj, an assistant professor of economics at the University of California-San Diego who studies development and labor economics, said the research helps fill an important gap by looking at persistent, moderate pollution like that from agricultural fires.

"Controlled burns for the purposes of agriculture are very popular in developing countries where the density of population near agricultural areas is also large; hence, their study has important implications for not only large parts of the world, but also for the significant portion of the world's population that resides in poorer agricultural settings," Bharadwaj said. Vogl said the researchers, who began their collaboration when Rangel was a visiting professor at Princeton, are working to apply the same technique to examining agricultural fires in Africa.

Find the report at: http://www.nber.org/papers/w22955

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health policy; public health education; diseases and conditions; agriculture and food; trees; food and agriculture; wildfires; pollution; air quality

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Agricultural fires in Brazil harm infant health, a warning for the developing world

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Pollution from the controlled fires that burn across Brazil's São Paulo state during the sugarcane-harvesting season has a negative impact on infant health nearby. But the health of those same infants likely benefits from the economic opportunities the fires bring to their parents.