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A lot of things that humans do.

1. The biggest driver is habitat destruction: humans transforming habitats for their own purposes. Resource-extractive industry practices, like clear-cutting trees, drilling for oil and gas, and mining, destroy habitats. Real-estate development in places that have been off limits before is also causing populations to drop.

2. The second driver is what scientists call overutilization: humans exploiting natural resources for mass consumption, faster than the earth can replenish them. That includes overharvesting plants for industrial agriculture, and overfishing. For example, humans sustainably caught fish for millennia without exceeding the ocean's seafood supply; but with the advent of industrial fishing, humans started extracting more fish than the sea could provide, causing fish populations to crash.

3. The third driver is chemical pollution. This in particular is causing insect populations to collapse, which are critical for most of the ecosystem services on which we depend.

In the midst of all this, climate change is an ascending factor that is worsening the effects of all these drivers. As the planet warms, habitats become inhospitable - too hot, too dry. A species either needs to move habitat, which it may not be able to do (because the ground between their current home and the next livable place is being developed by humans), or it dies out.

An example of how all these factors combine is our case to protect salmon in the Columbia-Snake River ecosystems of the Pacific Northwest. Salmon require cool waters to survive, but the rivers are warming due to climate change. They need to access higher, cooler river habitat. There is habitat available in central Idaho - but they can't get to it, because of the dams blocking the river system.

So now the salmon are dying, which affects all the other species that depend on them. That's the type of migration that needs to happen to mitigate the effects of climate change, but human influences stop that from happening.

Close Section

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A lot of things that humans do. 1. The biggest driver is habitat destruction: humans transforming habitats for their own purposes. Resource-extractive industry practices, like clear-cutting trees, drilling for oil and gas, and mining, destroy habitats. Real-estate development in places that have been off limits before is also causing populations to drop.

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Air, Water, and Soils Pollution

Air pollution has been a serious problem for the forests of the Northeast (especially those at high altitudes), which are downwind of the industrial heartland. The chief agent of environmental damage is acid deposition, or acid rain as it is commonly known. This phenomenon occurs when emissions of sulfur dioxide (SO ₂) and oxides of nitrogen (NO x) react in the atmosphere with water, oxygen, and oxidants to form various acidic compounds. These compounds then fall to the earth in either dry form (such as gas and particles) or wet form (such as rain, snow, and fog). Thus, polluted air can damage trees directly in the dry form or indirectly through its affects on the chemistry of water and soils and by making trees more vulnerable to other biological and environmental stressors. More specifically, acid rain weaken trees by damaging their leaves, limiting the nutrients available to them, or exposing them to toxic substances slowly released from the soil. Acid rain that flows into streams, lakes, and marshes also has serious ecological effects. In watersheds where soils do not have a buffering capacity, acid rain releases aluminum, which is highly toxic to many species of aquatic organisms, from soils into lakes and streams. NRS scientists are study the problems of pollution at many levels, from cellular biochemistry to landscape-level ecology.

Selected Research Studies

Nitrogen Pollution Moving Through Forests Faster Than Expected
Researchers with the Northern Research Station and their collaborators have developed a web-based tool that will allow land managers in New England and the Great Lake states to more easily and accurately predict air quality impacts on their forests.

Website Maps Air Pollution Threats To Forests
Researchers with the Northern Research Station and their collaborators have developed a web-based tool that will allow land managers in New England and the Great Lake states to more easily and accurately predict air quality impacts on their forests.

Phyto-Recurrent Selection: A Method for Selecting Genotypes for Phytotechnologies
The success of certain phytotechnologies has prompted the use of wastewaters as a combination of irrigation and fertilization for woody crops such Populus species and their hybrids (i.e., poplars). A common protocol for such efforts has been to utilize a limited number of readily-available genotypes with decades of deployment in other applications, such as fiber or windbreaks. However, it is possible to increase phytoremediation success with proper genotypic screening and selection, followed by the field establishment of clones that exhibited favorable potential for clean-up of specific contaminants. While such efforts are limited for environmental remediation, centuries of plant selection success in agronomy, horticulture, and forestry validate the need for similar approaches in phytotechnologies.

Development of Improved Mycorrhizal Fungi for Use in Reforestation and Reclamation of Mined Lands
We are testing several known mycorrhizal fungi for their ability and efficacy to support survival and growth of seedlings planted in reclaimed sites. Every year we have been generating Virginia pine seedlings inoculated with various fungi and planting them in reclaimed abandoned mine site locations in Ohio. Qualitative and quantitative measurements are being made to assess fungi that aid survival and growth of seedlings.

Effects of CO₂ and O₃ on the communities of symbiotic fungi associated with aspen and birch roots
Elevated carbon dioxide (CO ₂) and ozone (O ₃) affect tree photosynthesis and growth in largely opposing ways, with CO ₂ increasing growth and O ₃ decreasing growth. These changes in growth can affect the amount of carbon going to roots. Associated with roots are a class of symbiotic fungi that provide nutrients and water in exchange for sugars.

Fuels and Fire Behavior in Eastern Hardwoods
An ability to predict fuel loads and fire behavior are needed to improve prescriptions for prescribed fire and answer questions about smoke emissions and transport and fire effects on flora and fauna. Our fuels and fire behavior research seeks to develop process-based (mechanistic) approaches to predicting fuel characteristics and fire behavior, with particular focus on hardwoods in Appalachian topography.

Adapting Forests to Climate Change
Climate models have projected significant increases in temperature over the next century for the Northeast and Midwest. Climate change will also affect rainfall patterns, but scientists cannot yet predict how regional rainfall patterns will change. Growing seasons will lengthen further in both spring and fall. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, there is very high confidence that the vulnerability of North America depends on the effectiveness and timing of adaptation and the distribution of coping capacity, which vary spatially and among sectors. Climate change will constrain North America's over-allocated water resources, increasing competition among agricultural, municipal, industrial and ecological uses (very high confidence).

Atmospheric Disturbance Climatology System
Understanding the spatial and temporal patterns of these and other climate variables throughout the region is important in developing effective land management strategies that can sustain our natural resources.

Climatic Indicators of Forest Health
Managers often need frequent, updated assessments of current and developing conditions on which to base management decisions and respond to public concerns. No methodology has been developed to indicate when a forest population is at risk to specific local and regional climate and air pollution stressors.

Greenhouse Gas Impacts on Forest Microclimates
Our ability to predict the future impacts of increasing greenhouse gas concentrations and associated changes in the climate system on forest ecosystems requires an understanding of how vegetation responses to increased greenhouse gas concentrations can further alter the local atmospheric environment within forest ecosystems. It is this local atmospheric environment that governs many of the basic physical and biological processes within forest ecosystems.

This website contains documents and information useful to Federal Land Managers and others for understanding calculations of critical loads for nitrogen and sulfur deposition to forest ecosystems in theory and practice.

Eastern Area Modeling Consortium
The Eastern Area Modeling Consortium (EAMC) is a multi-agency coalition of researchers, fire managers, air-quality managers, and natural resource managers at the federal, state, and local levels. As part of this group, NRS researchers are working to (1) increase understanding of fire behavior and smoke dispersion; (2) expand knowledge of the physics of fire-atmosphere interactions; (3) enhance prediction and response to the dangers of prescribed fires and wildfires; and (4) develop products and transfer new technologies related to national and regional fire-weather and air-quality dynamics. In addition, the EAMC provides two types of weather products for fire managers: maps showing current and future weather patterns over various regions of the United States and time series products indicating likely weather changes in at a given location over a 48-hour period.

Mid-Atlantic Forests and the Chesapeake Bay Watershed
Forest landscapes are changing as a consequence of climate and environmental change. These changes affect people and the forest ecosystems they depend on for clean water, clean air and forest products, and recreation. How can we best manage our forest resources to sustain this array of ecosystem services under increasing environmental stress and a changing climate?

Developing atmospheric models to trace ozone through the midwest
NRS scientists are cooperating with scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Battelle Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, to simulate the dynamics of atmospheric ozone transport and diffusion over the western Great Lakes Region. These simulations are being conducted using a coupled atmospheric mesoscale and photochemistry model. The simulations allow us to see where ozone and ozone precursor chemicals are coming from, and where they are transported to throughout the northcentral U.S.

Last Modified: 01/05/2021

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Air, Water, and Soils Pollution - Forest Disturbance Processes - Northern Research Station - USDA Forest Service

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Air pollution has been a serious problem for the forests of the Northeast (especially those at high altitudes), which are downwind of the industrial heartland. The chief agent of environmental damage is acid deposition, or acid rain as it is commonly known.

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Explore long-term changes in deforestation, and deforestation rates across the world today.

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Heatwaves and wildfires across Europe are causing alarm - with warnings some countries could be in for their worst fire seasons so far.

So how do wildfires compare with previous years?

So far this year, the amount of land burnt by fires across the European Union is more than three times greater than what you would expect by the middle of July.

Almost 346,000 hectares (1,370 sq miles) of land have been recorded as burnt (as of 16 July), according to the European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS).

Much of Western Europe has been hit by a record-breaking heatwave, which substantially increases the risk of fires.

"There are basically three important ingredients for fires - high temperatures, dryness, and high wind," says Dr Friederike Otto, a senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London.

What is the overall trend?

This fire season is something of an outlier, according to experts.

"We've actually seen a decline in the area burned by fires in the Mediterranean and across Europe more widely over the last couple of decades, in a way that doesn't marry up with the rapidly changing risk of fires," says Dr Matthew Jones, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia.

It is a complex picture, experts say, and hard to pick one reason for this trend for the whole of Europe.

Over 95% of the fires in Europe are caused by human activity, according to the EFFIS.

And some places where fires are becoming more expected, such as throughout the Mediterranean, are seeing better safeguards and awareness campaigns.

"People are more aware than ever of the risks of wildfire - and that's leading to fewer wildfire ignitions and improvements in the way we fireproof the landscape," Dr Jones says.

"Yet, when we get really extreme droughts and heatwaves like the current one, we get huge fire years that puncture through the long-term trend."

Which countries have been worst hit this year?

France and Spain have had a big jump in the amount of land burnt by forest fires so far this season.

Both countries have recorded about seven times more land burnt through to the middle of July compared with average.

North-western Spain has seen some of the country's worst fires this week.

Neighbouring Portugal has also seen significant fires, with three times more land burned than normal.

The worst of France's fires have been in the south-western Gironde region, where two engulfed more than 20,000 hectares in the past week.

Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy have also seen a big increase in land burned.

Unseasonably hot weather and low rainfall have dried out large areas of forest and grassland across much of Europe, creating good conditions for wildfires to spread.

As you can see in this map of the UK and France, much of the land has been dried out to a shade of brown compared with the green landscape of last year.

The UK has also seen an unusually large amount of land burnt by fires so far this year, over four times more than the seasonal average.

Are fires linked to climate change?

"Heatwaves and droughts are exacerbated by climate change and are absolutely the defining factor in years with massive wildfire outbreaks, like the present one," Dr Jones says.

But he says other factors such as forest management can affect the likelihood of fires in years with more typical weather.

In high-risk areas of Europe, authorities are increasingly burning down some vegetation, under carefully managed conditions, to make it harder for wildfires to spread.

Planes were used to drop water on fires in north-west France

There also needs to be better water management to tackle drought conditions, according to some experts.

"In many parts of Europe, you have lots of small rivers, swamps and flood plains which have been drained out, which increase the dryness of the forest," Dr Otto says.

"But we definitely see trends in fire weather risk because of climate change.

"The risk is higher in the Mediterranean region than the rest of Europe."

Studies show increasing fire risk for central and southern regions of Europe over the past couple of decades.

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Europe wildfires: Are they linked to climate change?

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A series of wildfires across the Europe has caused alarm - how do they compare with previous years?

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"If we don't have it, we don't need it," pronounces Daniel Fagre as we throw on our backpacks. We're armed with crampons, ice axes, rope, GPS receivers, and bear spray to ward off grizzlies, and we're trudging toward Sperry Glacier in Glacier National Park, Montana. I fall in step with Fagre and two other research scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey Global Change Research Program. They're doing what they've been doing for more than a decade: measuring how the park's storied glaciers are melting.

So far, the results have been positively chilling. When President Taft created Glacier National Park in 1910, it was home to an estimated 150 glaciers. Since then the number has decreased to fewer than 30, and most of those remaining have shrunk in area by two-thirds. Fagre predicts that within 30 years most if not all of the park's namesake glaciers will disappear.

"Things that normally happen in geologic time are happening during the span of a human lifetime," says Fagre. "It's like watching the Statue of Liberty melt."

Scientists who assess the planet's health see indisputable evidence that Earth has been getting warmer, in some cases rapidly. Most believe that human activity, in particular the burning of fossil fuels and the resulting buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, have influenced this warming trend. In the past decade scientists have documented record-high average annual surface temperatures and have been observing other signs of change all over the planet: in the distribution of ice, and in the salinity, levels, and temperatures of the oceans.

"This glacier used to be closer," Fagre declares as we crest a steep section, his glasses fogged from exertion. He's only half joking. A trailside sign notes that since 1901, Sperry Glacier has shrunk from more than 800 acres (320 hectares) to 300 acres (120 hectares). "That's out of date," Fagre says, stopping to catch his breath. "It's now less than 250 acres (100 hectares)."

Everywhere on Earth ice is changing. The famed snows of Kilimanjaro have melted more than 80 percent since 1912. Glaciers in the Garhwal Himalaya in India are retreating so fast that researchers believe that most central and eastern Himalayan glaciers could virtually disappear by 2035. Arctic sea ice has thinned significantly over the past half century, and its extent has declined by about 10 percent in the past 30 years. NASA's repeated laser altimeter readings show the edges of Greenland's ice sheet shrinking. Spring freshwater ice breakup in the Northern Hemisphere now occurs nine days earlier than it did 150 years ago, and autumn freeze-up ten days later. Thawing permafrost has caused the ground to subside more than 15 feet (4.6 meters) in parts of Alaska. From the Arctic to Peru, from Switzerland to the equatorial glaciers of Man Jaya in Indonesia, massive ice fields, monstrous glaciers, and sea ice are disappearing, fast.

When temperatures rise and ice melts, more water flows to the seas from glaciers and ice caps, and ocean water warms and expands in volume. This combination of effects has played the major role in raising average global sea level between four and eight inches (10 and 20 centimeters) in the past hundred years, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Scientists point out that sea levels have risen and fallen substantially over Earth's 4.6-billion-year history. But the recent rate of global sea level rise has departed from the average rate of the past two to three thousand years and is rising more rapidly-about one-tenth of an inch a year. A continuation or acceleration of that trend has the potential to cause striking changes in the world's coastlines.

Driving around Louisiana's Gulf Coast, Windell Curole can see the future, and it looks pretty wet. In southern Louisiana coasts are literally sinking by about three feet (a meter) a century, a process called subsidence. A sinking coastline and a rising ocean combine to yield powerful effects. It's like taking the global sea-level-rise problem and moving it along at fast-forward.

The seventh-generation Cajun and manager of the South Lafourche Levee District navigates his truck down an unpaved mound of dirt that separates civilization from inundation, dry land from a swampy horizon. With his French-tinged lilt, Curole points to places where these bayous, swamps, and fishing villages portend a warmer world: his high school girlfriend's house partly submerged, a cemetery with water lapping against the white tombs, his grandfather's former hunting camp now afloat in a stand of skeleton oak snags. "We live in a place of almost land, almost water," says the 52-year-old Curole.

Rising sea level, sinking land, eroding coasts, and temperamental storms are a fact of life for Curole. Even relatively small storm surges in the past two decades have overwhelmed the system of dikes, levees, and pump stations that he manages, upgraded in the 1990s to forestall the Gulf of Mexico's relentless creep. "I've probably ordered more evacuations than any other person in the country," Curole says.

The current trend is consequential not only in coastal Louisiana but around the world. Never before have so many humans lived so close to the coasts: More than a hundred million people worldwide live within three feet (a meter) of mean sea level. Vulnerable to sea-level rise, Tuvalu, a small country in the South Pacific, has already begun formulating evacuation plans. Megacities where human populations have concentrated near coastal plains or river deltas-Shanghai, Bangkok, Jakarta, Tokyo, and New York-are at risk. The projected economic and humanitarian impacts on low-lying, densely populated, and desperately poor countries like Bangladesh are potentially catastrophic. The scenarios are disturbing even in wealthy countries like the Netherlands, with nearly half its landmass already at or below sea level.

Rising sea level produces a cascade of effects. Bruce Douglas, a coastal researcher at Florida International University, calculates that every inch (2.5 centimeters) of sea-level rise could result in eight feet (2.4 meters) of horizontal retreat of sandy beach shorelines due to erosion. Furthermore, when salt water intrudes into freshwater aquifers, it threatens sources of drinking water and makes raising crops problematic. In the Nile Delta, where many of Egypt's crops are cultivated, widespread erosion and saltwater intrusion would be disastrous since the country contains little other arable land.

In some places marvels of human engineering worsen effects from rising seas in a warming world. The system of channels and levees along the Mississippi effectively stopped the millennia-old natural process of rebuilding the river delta with rich sediment deposits. In the 1930s oil and gas companies began to dredge shipping and exploratory canals, tearing up the marshland buffers that helped dissipate tidal surges. Energy drilling removed vast quantities of subsurface liquid, which studies suggest increased the rate at which the land is sinking. Now Louisiana is losing approximately 25 square miles (65 square kilometers) of wetlands every year, and the state is lobbying for federal money to help replace the upstream sediments that are the delta's lifeblood.

Local projects like that might not do much good in the very long run, though, depending on the course of change elsewhere on the planet. Part of Antarctica's Larsen Ice Shelf broke apart in early 2002. Although floating ice does not change sea level when it melts (any more than a glass of water will overflow when the ice cubes in it melt), scientists became concerned that the collapse could foreshadow the breakup of other ice shelves in Antarctica and allow increased glacial discharge into the sea from ice sheets on the continent. If the West Antarctic ice sheet were to break up, which scientists consider very unlikely this century, it alone contains enough ice to raise sea level by nearly 20 feet (6 meters).

Even without such a major event, the IPCC projected in its 2001 report that sea level will rise anywhere between 4 and 35 inches (10 and 89 centimeters) by the end of the century. The high end of that projection-nearly three feet (a meter)-would be "an unmitigated disaster," according to Douglas.

Down on the bayou, all of those predictions make Windell Curole shudder. "We're the guinea pigs," he says, surveying his aqueous world from the relatively lofty vantage point of a 12-foot-high (3.7-meter) earthen berm. "I don't think anybody down here looks at the sea-level-rise problem and puts their heads in the sand." That's because soon there may not be much sand left.

Rising sea level is not the only change Earth's oceans are undergoing. The ten-year-long World Ocean Circulation Experiment, launched in 1990, has helped researchers to better understand what is now called the ocean conveyor belt.

Oceans, in effect, mimic some functions of the human circulatory system. Just as arteries carry oxygenated blood from the heart to the extremities, and veins return blood to be replenished with oxygen, oceans provide life-sustaining circulation to the planet. Propelled mainly by prevailing winds and differences in water density, which changes with the temperature and salinity of the seawater, ocean currents are critical in cooling, warming, and watering the planet's terrestrial surfaces-and in transferring heat from the Equator to the Poles.

The engine running the conveyor belt is the density-driven thermohaline circulation ("thermo" for heat and "haline" for salt). Warm, salty water flows from the tropical Atlantic north toward the Pole in surface currents like the Gulf Stream. This saline water loses heat to the air as it is carried to the far reaches of the North Atlantic. The coldness and high salinity together make the water more dense, and it sinks deep into the ocean. Surface water moves in to replace it. The deep, cold water flows into the South Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans, eventually mixing again with warm water and rising back to the surface.

Changes in water temperature and salinity, depending on how drastic they are, might have considerable effects on the ocean conveyor belt. Ocean temperatures are rising in all ocean basins and at much deeper depths than previously thought, say scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Arguably, the largest oceanic change ever measured in the era of modern instruments is in the declining salinity of the subpolar seas bordering the North Atlantic.

Robert Gagosian, president and director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, believes that oceans hold the key to potential dramatic shifts in the Earth's climate. He warns that too much change in ocean temperature and salinity could disrupt the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation enough to slow down or possibly halt the conveyor belt-causing drastic climate changes in time spans as short as a decade.

The future breakdown of the thermohaline circulation remains a disturbing, if remote, possibility. But the link between changing atmospheric chemistry and the changing oceans is indisputable, says Nicholas Bates, a principal investigator for the Bermuda Atlantic Time-series Study station, which monitors the temperature, chemical composition, and salinity of deep-ocean water in the Sargasso Sea southeast of the Bermuda Triangle.

Oceans are important sinks, or absorption centers, for carbon dioxide, and take up about a third of human-generated CO2. Data from the Bermuda monitoring programs show that CO2 levels at the ocean surface are rising at about the same rate as atmospheric CO2. But it is in the deeper levels where Bates has observed even greater change. In the waters between 820 and 1,476 feet (250 and 450 meters) deep, CO2 levels are rising at nearly twice the rate as in the surface waters. "It's not a belief system; it's an observable scientific fact," Bates says. "And it shouldn't be doing that unless something fundamental has changed in this part of the ocean."

While scientists like Bates monitor changes in the oceans, others evaluate CO2 levels in the atmosphere. In Vestmannaeyjar, Iceland, a lighthouse attendant opens a large silver suitcase that looks like something out of a James Bond movie, telescopes out an attached 15-foot (4.5-meter) rod, and flips a switch, activating a computer that controls several motors, valves, and stopcocks. Two two-and-a-half liter (about 26 quarts) flasks in the suitcase fill with ambient air. In North Africa, an Algerian monk at Assekrem does the same. Around the world, collectors like these are monitoring the cocoon of gases that compose our atmosphere and permit life as we know it to persist.

When the weekly collection is done, all the flasks are sent to Boulder, Colorado. There, Pieter Tans, a Dutch-born atmospheric scientist with NOAA's Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory, oversees a slew of sensitive instruments that test the air in the flasks for its chemical composition. In this way Tans helps assess the state of the world's atmosphere.

By all accounts it has changed significantly in the past 150 years.

Walking through the various labs filled with cylinders of standardized gas mixtures, absolute manometers, and gas chromatographs, Tans offers up a short history of atmospheric monitoring. In the late 1950s a researcher named Charles Keeling began measuring CO2 in the atmosphere above Hawaii's 13,679-foot (4,169-meter) Mauna Loa. The first thing that caught Keeling's eye was how CO2 level rose and fell seasonally. That made sense since, during spring and summer, plants take in CO2 during photosynthesis and produce oxygen in the atmosphere. In the fall and winter, when plants decay, they release greater quantities of CO2 through respiration and decay. Keeling's vacillating seasonal curve became famous as a visual representation of the Earth "breathing."

Something else about the way the Earth was breathing attracted Keeling's attention. He watched as CO2 level not only fluctuated seasonally, but also rose year after year. Carbon dioxide level has climbed from about 315 parts per million (ppm) from Keeling's first readings in 1958 to more than 375 ppm today. A primary source for this rise is indisputable: humans' prodigious burning of carbon-laden fossil fuels for their factories, homes, and cars.

Tans shows me a graph depicting levels of three key greenhouse gases-CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide-from the year 1000 to the present. The three gases together help keep Earth, which would otherwise be an inhospitably cold orbiting rock, temperate by orchestrating an intricate dance between the radiation of heat from Earth back to space (cooling the planet) and the absorption of radiation in the atmosphere (trapping it near the surface and thus warming the planet).

Tans and most other scientists believe that greenhouse gases are at the root of our changing climate. "These gases are a climate-change driver," says Tans, poking his graph definitively with his index finger. The three lines on the graph follow almost identical patterns: basically flat until the mid-1800s, then all three move upward in a trend that turns even more sharply upward after 1950. "This is what we did," says Tans, pointing to the parallel spikes. "We have very significantly changed the atmospheric concentration of these gases. We know their radiative properties," he says. "It is inconceivable to me that the increase would not have a significant effect on climate."

Exactly how large that effect might be on the planet's health and respiratory system will continue to be a subject of great scientific and political debate-especially if the lines on the graph continue their upward trajectory.

Eugene Brower, an Inupiat Eskimo and president of the Barrow Whaling Captains' Association, doesn't need fancy parts-per-million measurements of CO2 concentrations or long-term sea-level gauges to tell him that his world is changing.

"It's happening as we speak," the 56-year-old Brower says as we drive around his home in Barrow, Alaska-the United States' northernmost city-on a late August day. In his fire chief's truck, Brower takes me to his family's traditional ice cellars, painstakingly dug into the permafrost, and points out how his stores of muktuk-whale skin and blubber recently began spoiling in the fall because melting water drips down to his food stores. Our next stop is the old Bureau of Indian Affairs school building. The once impenetrable permafrost that kept the foundation solid has bucked and heaved so much that walking through the school is almost like walking down the halls of an amusement park fun house. We head to the eroding beach and gaze out over open water. "Normally by now the ice would be coming in," Brower says, scrunching up his eyes and scanning the blue horizon.

We continue our tour. Barrow looks like a coastal community under siege. The ramshackle conglomeration of weather-beaten houses along the seaside gravel road stands protected from fall storm surges by miles-long berms of gravel and mud that block views of migrating gray whales. Yellow bulldozers and graders patrol the coast like sentries.

The Inupiat language has words that describe many kinds of ice. Piqaluyak is salt-free multiyear sea ice. Ivuniq is a pressure ridge. Sarri is the word for pack ice, tuvaqtaq is bottom-fast ice, and shore-fast ice is tuvaq. For Brower, these words are the currency of hunters who must know and follow ice patterns to track bearded seals, walruses, and bowhead whales.

There are no words, though, to describe how much, and how fast, the ice is changing. Researchers long ago predicted that the most visible impacts from a globally warmer world would occur first at high latitudes: rising air and sea temperatures, earlier snowmelt, later ice freeze-up, reductions in sea ice, thawing permafrost, more erosion, increases in storm intensity. Now all those impacts have been documented in Alaska. "The changes observed here provide an early warning system for the rest of the planet," says Amanda Lynch, an Australian researcher who is the principal investigator on a project that works with Barrow's residents to help them incorporate scientific data into management decisions for the city's threatened infrastructure.

Before leaving the Arctic, I drive to Point Barrow alone. There, at the tip of Alaska, roughshod hunting shacks dot the spit of land that marks the dividing line between the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. Next to one shack someone has planted three eight-foot (2.4-meter) sticks of white driftwood in the sand, then crisscrossed their tops with whale baleen, a horny substance that whales of the same name use to filter life-sustaining plankton out of seawater. The baleen, curiously, looks like palm fronds.

So there, on the North Slope of Alaska, stand three makeshift palm trees. Perhaps they are no more than an elaborate Inupiat joke, but these Arctic palms seem an enigmatic metaphor for the Earth's future.

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As the climate warms, how much, and how quickly, will Earth's glaciers melt?

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Oil and gas drilling is a dirty business

Oil and gas drilling has a serious impact on our wildlands and communities. Drilling projects operate around the clock generating pollution, fueling climate change, disrupting wildlife and damaging public lands that were set aside to benefit all people.

For many years the federal government prioritized the development of fossil fuels over habitat conservation and recreation. Federal agencies gave the oil and gas industry generous access to public lands, tax breaks and subsidies. With this support, the industry encroached upon too many of our nation's wildlands.

The Biden administration is reviewing some of these processes but we are still living with the consequences. For a cleaner future, it's critical to reduce fossil fuel drilling on public lands. We need to equitably transition to responsible renewable energy-including solar and wind-to fulfill our energy needs while preserving our environment and communities.

Here are seven impacts of oil and gas drilling:

1. Pollution impacts communities

A total of oil and gas production facilities scar the U.S. landscape-from active wells to processing plants. More than 12 million people live within 1/2 mile of these sites and are exposed to pollutants on a daily basis. What's more, when fossil fuels are burned by automobiles, power plants and industrial facilities, they release even more impurities.

Air pollution from fossil fuels is known as the "invisible killer." It can lead to respiratory, cardiovascular and other diseases and is responsible for more than 13 percent of deaths in people aged 14 and older in the United States. Fossil fuel development can also leak toxic substances into the soil and drinking water sources, causing cancer, birth defects and liver damage.

Black, Brown, Indigenous and low-income communities are disproportionately impacted since these groups tend to live in neighborhoods with more pollution. Not surprisingly, these communities are fighting back. In Greeley, Colorado, residents of a predominantly Latino and immigrant community are trying to close an oil and gas operation located two blocks from a public school. The original plan was to place the wells near a predominantly white school but the location changed after angry parents pushed back.

The health threats from oil and gas production are very real and it's crucial to reduce fossil fuel development-especially on public lands that should be contributing to our health and well-being.

2. Dangerous emissions fuel climate change

Climate change is happening here and now. The year 2020 was one of the warmest on record, wildfire season in the West is longer and hurricanes are more dangerous. These extreme weather events are directly linked to fossil fuels that release heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere.

While we are all impacted, Black, Brown, Indigenous and working-class communities are feeling the heat-quite literally. Due to unjust housing policies and practices, these communities often live in treeless, concrete neighborhoods that are more susceptible to extreme weather events. These groups also have a harder time accessing natural landscapes that can help mitigate climate impacts.

The United States is one of the world's top emitters of greenhouse gases and almost one quarter comes from fossil fuel extracted on public lands. With better management, public lands can be a part of the solution instead of the problem. We can have less fossil fuel extraction on these lands and more responsible renewable energy.

3. Oil and gas development can ruin wildlands

Infrastructure built for oil and gas extraction can leave behind radical impacts on wildlands. The construction of roads, facilities and drilling sites requires the use of heavy equipment and can destroy big chunks of pristine wilderness. The damage is often irreversible.

On public lands, over 12 million acres are being used to produce fossil fuels-the equivalent of six Yellowstone National Parks. These developments typically remove large amounts of rangelands and vegetation that is used by wildlife and people. Even if oil and gas companies eventually abandon these sites, it can take centuries before they fully recover.

What's more, many fossil fuel developments are located in the West and in a semi-arid climate that receives little precipitation. A full recovery would require human intervention and a bundle of resources.

4. Fossil fuel extraction turns visitors away

Hunters, anglers, hikers, birders and vacationing families go into the wilderness to experience nature in all its beauty. Oil tanks, power poles, noisy compressors and busy roads are not what they expect to see. Too much noise, air pollution or damaged landscapes can ruin anyone's getaway.

The unsightly effects of oil and gas can ultimately hurt local communities that depend on tourism for a living. Outdoor recreation is a big driver of local and national economies. In 2019, visitors to national parks spent an estimated $21.0 billion on their trips and supported 341,000 jobs, according to the National Park Service.

If polluters continue to call the shots on public lands, they'll usher in a new era of unchecked energy development on wildlands that deserve preservation.

5. Drilling disrupts wildlife habitat

Oil and gas extraction is a menace to wildlife. Loud noises, human movement and vehicle traffic from drilling operations can disrupt animals' communication, breeding and nesting. Powerlines, wellpads, fences, and roads can also fragment habitats for many species.

The pronghorn antelope and mule deer in Wyoming are among the species most impacted. In the winter, some pronghorn travel south from the Grand Teton National Park to the Upper Green River Valley to escape heavy snow. Their journey is one of the longest big game migrations in the country.

But recently, animals making this age-old trek have faced a series of obstacles, notably, intense activity in major natural gas fields. The pronghorn have to navigate past enormous well pads and noisy compressor stations to find what forage hasn't been bulldozed. Future energy development farther south could ultimately have major impacts on the abundance of this herd.

6. Oil spills can be deadly to animals

Big oil spills are big killers of wildlife and can cause long-lasting damage to marine ecosystems. Just think of BP's Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The 2010 incident spread oil across 68,000 square miles of sea surface and killed approximately 1 million seabirds, 5,000 marine mammals and 1,000 sea turtles.

Smaller spills during oil and gas extraction don't always make headlines but can also be dangerous. Drilling fluids injected into wells for lubrication-known as "mud"-are supposed to be captured in lined pits for disposal. However, they often leak and are splashed around drilling sites.

Big and small oil spills are common in top producing states. A recent report by the Center for Western Priorities found that 2,179 spills were reported in Colorado, New Mexico and Wyoming in the year 2020. These incidents can have devastating effects on local wildlife through direct contact, inhalation and ingestion of toxic chemicals.

7. Light pollution impacts wildlife and wilderness

The glare from oil and gas sites is so strong that it's visible from space. Photos of Earth taken by NASA satellites show North Dakota's Bakken oil fields burning almost as bright as Minneapolis and Chicago. Much of that light is produced by the burnin, or flaring, of natural gas, well pads and storage sites.

Scientists have found that the bright glow can hurt pollinators such as bees. These insects have the very important job of moving pollen around, which helps to generate new fruits and plants. But luminosity disrupts their sleep, feeding and reproductive cycles, which in turn leads to the dwindling of plants such as the cabbage thistle.

The brightness is also changing important cultural landscapes like the Chaco National Park. The park is one of the best places in the world to stargaze, but its pristine skies could disappear to the human eye due to glare coming from oil and gas complexes. The show could come to an end if the federal government doesn't permanently protect the area from this type of development.

For joining the movement to save our lands.

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7 ways oil and gas drilling is bad for the environment

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Oil and gas drilling has serious consequences for our wildlands and communities. It's crucial to reduce fossil fuel development-especially on public lands that should be contributing to our health and well-being.

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What is the impact of shipping on climate change?

The Third IMO GHG Study (2014) estimated that for the period 2007-2012, shipping emitted about 1,000 Mt CO2 per year, equaling approximately 3.1% of annual global CO2 emissions. The latest update to the study by CE Delft projects shipping emissions to increase by up to 120% by 2050 if other sectors decarbonise successfully. Under a business-as-usual scenario and if other sectors of the economy reduce emissions to keep the global temperature increase below 2 degrees Celsius, shipping could represent some 10% of global GHG emissions by 2050.

Shipping also contributes to climate change through emissions of Black Carbon, tiny black particles, produced by combustion of marine fuel. The highest amounts of black carbon particles are produced by ships burning heavy fuel oil. Black carbon accounts for 21% of CO2-equivalent emissions from ships, making it the second most important driver of shipping's climate impacts after carbon dioxide. Currently there are no regulations controlling black carbon emissions from shipping.

Is shipping included in the Paris Agreement?

Until the Paris agreement was finalised at the end of 2015, the major climate agreement in force was the Kyoto Protocol which tasked developed countries to work through the IMO to cut emissions. The Paris agreement is different. Unlike Kyoto, which had specific emission targets only for developed countries, the Paris agreement requires all parties to address all emissions. Parties are required to establish 'economy-wide' emission reduction targets, and shipping is clearly a key part of the economy. Read more here.

What action is the IMO taking to address climate change?

In April 2018 the IMO agreed a draft greenhouse gas strategy for shipping requiring the shipping sector to reduce its emissions by at least 50% by 2050 compared to 2008' while pursuing efforts towards phasing them out as soon as possible. It was agreed that carbon intensity of international shipping should decline with reductions in CO2 emissions per transport work, as an average across international shipping, by at least 40% by 2030, pursuing efforts towards 70% by 2050, compared to 2008.

This is to be achieved by an agreed set of short, medium and long measures which are the subject of ongoing negotiations. The candidate short-term measures, include strengthening the energy efficiency requirements for existing ships (EEDI), speed and other technical and operational measures. CE Delft has analysed the impact of the proposed short-term measures on emissions and concludes that only with measures that change operational practices (for example, the vessel speed) the 2030 target can be met. On their own, technical measures or measures that remove market barriers will not improve carbon intensity sufficiently to meet the global goal for reducing energy intensity of shipping of 40% by 2030.

Despite these plans and many successive rounds of negotiations, the IMO has so far failed to adopt reduction measures to set the maritime sector on a pathway compatible with the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement.

What is the EEDI?

The IMO's Energy Efficiency Design Index (EEDI), approved in July 2011, is the first globally-binding design standard aimed at abating climate change from shipping. It applies to (almost) all new ships and entered into force in 2013. The index requires new ships to become more energy efficient, with standards that will be made increasingly more stringent over time. Read our questions and answers on the IMO's EEDI.

How much more fuel efficient will EEDI ships have to be, and by when?

Different classes and sizes of ships will have different standards to meet. Standards are compared to the baseline, set as the average efficiency of ships built between 1999-2009.

Phase I: an overall 10% improvement target in vessel energy efficiency applies to new ships built between 2015 and 2019;

Phase II: ships built between 2020 and 2024 will have to improve their energy efficiency by 15 and 20%, depending on the ship type;

Phase III: Ships delivered after 2025 will have to be 30% more efficient;

Smaller ships have different efficiency requirements for each phase.

New ship designs less fuel-efficient than those built in 1990

Ships built in the first decade of the 2000s were, on average, less fuel-efficient than those built in the 1990s, according to the first study of the historical development of the design efficiency of new ships. The data indicates that new ships, such as bulk carriers, tankers, and container ships, built in 2013 were, on average, 10% less fuel-efficient than those built a quarter of a century ago. The findings contradict the shipping industry's narrative that it has been constantly improving its environmental performance.

EEDI standards too weak to drive improvements

Since 2013, however, the design efficiency of ships has improved considerably. Industry claims it is due to the EEDI but this cannot explain some of the extraordinary levels of over-compliance being seen by certain types of new ships with the 2025 Phase III EEDI requirements, which are complying almost a decade in advance and sometimes by a factor of 2. Cyclical higher fuel prices and low freight rates are more likely to be the main drivers of efficiency. Although the current over-compliance is welcome news, without strengthening the EEDI new ships will likely be less efficient when market conditions (long-term fuel prices and freight rates) change.

IMO discussion has acknowledged that the EEDI is not stimulating the uptake of new technologies, nor is it driving efficiency improvements. Read the study here. Since 2013 newly-built ships subject to the EEDI have performed much the same as those not covered by the regulation.

Almost three-quarters (71%) of all new containerships, which emit around a quarter of global ship CO2 emissions, already comply with the post-2025 requirements of the IMO's Energy Efficiency Design Index (EEDI), according to a recent study based on the in-house analysis of the IMO's own data. Additionally, the best 10% of new containerships are already almost twice as efficient as the requirement for 10 years' time. This reveals that the EEDI is not incentivising the uptake of new technologies - all it may do is prevent a reversion to the worst designs of the past. These recent efficiency gains are part of a recognised historical trend for ship design efficiency to fluctuate according to economic cycles and fuel prices.

While reducing design speed is a very effective way of improving the design efficiency of a ship, there has in fact only been a modest reduction in the average design speed of new vessels according to the data analysed (and that has largely been limited to container ships). Meanwhile the design efficiency of new vessels has improved considerably. With efficiency improvements via new technologies and speed reduction largely untapped, there remains considerable potential for further design efficiency improvements but these will not be taken up unless the IMO incentivises them through stricter EEDI requirements.

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The Third IMO GHG Study (2014) estimated that for the period 2007-2012, shipping emitted about 1,000 Mt CO2 per year, equaling approximately 3.1% of annual global CO2 emissions. The latest update to the study by CE Delft projects shipping emissions to increase by up to 120% by 2050 if other sectors decarbonise successfully.

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evastating hurricane? More than 1,000 lives lost? It must be climate change! Almost inevitably, Hurricane Matthew 's recent rampage across the Caribbean and south-eastern US has been fingered by some as a backlash of global warming driven by humanity's polluting activities, but does this really stack up?

The short answer is no. Blame for a single storm cannot be laid at climate change's door, as reinforced by the bigger picture. The current hurricane season is by no means extraordinary, and the last few seasons have actually been very tame. The 2013 season saw no major hurricanes at all and tied with 1982 for the fewest hurricanes since 1930. This, in turn, is no big deal as there is great year-on-year variability in the level of hurricane activity, which responds to various natural factors such as El Niño and the so-called Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, as well as the progressive warming of the oceans as climate change bites harder.

The current consensus holds that while a warmer world will not necessarily mean more hurricanes, it will see a rise in the frequency of the most powerful, and therefore more destructive, variety. This view was supported recently by Kerry Emanuel, a hurricane scientist at MIT, who pointed to Matthew as a likely sign of things to come.

Debate within the hurricane science community has in recent decades been almost as hostile as the storms themselves, with researchers, on occasion, even refusing to sit on the same panels at conferences. At the heart of this sometimes acrimonious dispute has been the validity of the Atlantic hurricane record and the robustness of the idea that hurricane activity had been broadly ratcheting up since the 1980s. Now, the weight of evidence looks to have come down on the side of a broad and significant increase in hurricane activity that is primarily driven by progressive warming of the climate. For many, the bottom line is the sea surface temperature, which is a major driver of hurricane activity and storm intensification. Last year saw the warmest sea temperatures on record, so it should not be a surprise. As Michael Mann, an atmospheric scientist at Penn State University, says: "It isn't a coincidence that we've seen the strongest hurricane in both hemispheres [western and eastern] within the last year." As the Atlantic continues to heat up, the trend is widely expected to be towards more powerful and wetter storms, so that Matthew might seem like pretty small beer when looked back on from the mid-century.

As with hurricanes, Pacific typhoons and the mid-latitude storms that periodically batter the UK and Europe are forecast to follow a similar pattern in an anthropogenically warmed world. Storm numbers may not rise, but there is likely to be an escalation in the frequency of the bigger storm systems, which tend to be the most destructive. An additional concern is that mid-latitude storms may become clustered, bringing the prospect of extended periods of damaging and disruptive winds. The jury is out on whether climate change will drive up the number of smaller, but potentially ruinous vortices of solid wind that make up tornadoes, although an apparent trend in the US towards more powerful storms has been blamed by some on a warming atmosphere.

Tornadoes, typhoons, hurricanes and mid-latitude storms - along with heatwaves and floods - are widely regarded as climate change's shock troops; forecast to accelerate the destruction, loss of life and financial pain as planet Earth continues to heat up. It would be wrong to imagine, however, that climate change and the extreme events it drives are all about higher temperatures and a bit more wind and rain.

An earthquake fault that is ready to go is like a coiled spring - all that is needed is the pressure of a handshake

The atmosphere is far from isolated and interacts with other elements of the so-called "Earth system", such as the oceans, ice caps and even the ground beneath our feet, in complex and often unexpected ways capable of making our world more dangerous. We are pretty familiar with the idea that the oceans swell as a consequence of the plunging atmospheric pressure at the heart of powerful storms, building surges driven onshore by high winds that can be massively destructive. Similarly, it does not stretch the imagination to appreciate that a warmer atmosphere promotes greater melting of the polar ice caps, thereby raising sea levels and increasing the risk of coastal flooding. But, more extraordinarily, the thin layer of gases that hosts the weather and fosters global warming really does interact with the solid Earth - the so-called geosphere - in such a way as to make climate change an even bigger threat.

This relationship is marvellously illustrated by a piece of research published in the journal Nature in 2009 by Chi-Ching Liu of the Institute of Earth Sciences at Taipei's Academia Sinica. In the paper, Liu and his colleagues provided convincing evidence for a link between typhoons barrelling across Taiwan and the timing of small earthquakes beneath the island. Their take on the connection is that the reduced atmospheric pressure that characterises these powerful Pacific equivalents of hurricanes is sufficient to allow earthquake faults deep within the crust to move more easily and release accumulated strain. This may sound far fetched, but an earthquake fault that is primed and ready to go is like a coiled spring, and as geophysicist John McCloskey of the University of Ulster is fond of pointing out, all that is needed to set it off is - quite literally - "the pressure of a handshake".

Perhaps even more astonishingly, Liu and his team proposed that storms might act as safety valves, repeatedly short-circuiting the buildup of dangerous levels of strain that otherwise could eventually instigate large, destructive earthquakes. This might explain, the researchers say, why the contact between the Eurasian and Philippine Sea tectonic plates, in the vicinity of Taiwan, has far less in the way of major quakes than further north where the plate boundary swings past Japan.

In a similar vein, it seems that the huge volume of rain dumped by tropical cyclones, leading to severe flooding, may also be linked to earthquakes. The University of Miami's Shimon Wdowinski has noticed that in some parts of the tropics - Taiwan included - large earthquakes have a tendency to follow exceptionally wet hurricanes or typhoons, most notably the devastating quake that took up to 220,000 lives in Haiti in 2010. It is possible that floodwaters are lubricating fault planes, but Wdowinski has another explanation. He thinks that the erosion of landslides caused by the torrential rains acts to reduce the weight on any fault below, allowing it to move more easily.

It has been known for some time that rainfall also influences the pattern of earthquake activity in the Himalayas, where the 2015 Nepal earthquake took close to 9,000 lives, and where the threat of future devastating quakes is very high. During the summer monsoon season, prodigious quantities of rain soak into the lowlands of the Indo-Gangetic plain, immediately to the south of the mountain range, which then slowly drains away over the next few months. This annual rainwater loading and unloading of the crust is mirrored by the level of earthquake activity, which is significantly lower during the summer months than during the winter.

And it isn't only earthquake faults that today's storms and torrential rains are capable of shaking up. Volcanoes seem to be susceptible too. On the Caribbean island of Montserrat, heavy rains have been implicated in triggering eruptions of the active lava dome that dominates the Soufrière Hills volcano. Stranger still, Alaska's Pavlof volcano appears to respond not to wind or rain, but to tiny seasonal changes in sea level. The volcano seems to prefer to erupt in the late autumn and winter, when weather patterns are such that water levels adjacent to this coastal volcano climb by a few tens of centimetres. This is enough to bend the crust beneath the volcano, allowing magma to be squeezed out, according to geophysicist Steve McNutt of the University of South Florida, "like toothpaste out of a tube".

If today's weather can bring forth earthquakes and magma from the Earth's crust, it doesn't take much to imagine how the solid Earth is likely to respond to the large-scale environmental adjustments that accompany rapid climate change. In fact, we don't have to imagine at all. The last time our world experienced serious warming was at the end of the last ice age when, between about 20,000 and 10,000 years ago, temperatures rose by six degrees centigrade, melting the great continental ice sheets and pushing up sea levels by more than 120m.

The bottom line is that as climate change tightens its grip, we must be prepared to expect the unexpected

These huge changes triggered geological mayhem. As the kilometres-thick Scandinavian ice sheet vanished, the faults beneath released the accumulated strain of tens of millennia, spawning massive magnitude eight earthquakes. Quakes of this scale are taken for granted today around the Pacific Ocean's "Ring of Fire", but they are completely out of place in Santa's Lapland. Across the Norwegian Sea, in Iceland, the volcanoes long buried beneath a kilometre of ice were also rejuvenated as the suffocating ice load melted away, prompting a "volcano storm" about 12,000 years ago that saw the level of activity increase by up to 50 times.

Now, global average temperatures are shooting up again and are already more than one degree centigrade higher than during preindustrial times. It should come as no surprise that the solid Earth is starting to respond once more. In southern Alaska, which has in places lost a vertical kilometre of ice cover, the reduced load on the crust is already increasing the level of seismic activity. In high mountain ranges across the world from the Caucasus in the north to New Zealand's southern Alps, longer and more intense heatwaves are melting the ice and thawing the permafrost that keeps mountain faces intact, leading to a rise in major landslides.

Does this all mean that we are in for a more geologically active future as well as a hotter and meteorologically more violent one? Well, no one is suggesting that we will see a great surge in the number of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. As always, these will be controlled largely by local geological conditions. Where an earthquake fault or volcano is primed and ready to go, however, climate change may provide that extra helping hand that brings forward the timing of a quake or eruption that would eventually have happened anyway.

As the world continues to heat up, any geological response is likely to be most obvious where climate change is driving the biggest environmental changes - for example, in areas where ice and permafrost are vanishing fast, or in coastal regions where rising sea levels will play an increasing role. Freysteinn Sigmundsson of the Nordic Volcanological Centre observes that the centre of Iceland is now rising by more than three centimetres a year in response to shrinking glaciers. Studies undertaken by Sigmundsson and his colleagues forecast that the reduced pressures that result will lead to the formation of significant volumes of new magma deep under Iceland. Whether this will translate into more or bigger eruptions remains uncertain, but the aviation chaos that arose from the Eyjafjallajökull eruption in 2010 provides a salutary warning of the disruption that any future increase in Icelandic volcanic activity may cause across the North Atlantic region.

A cloud of ash rises from the volcano under the Eyjafjallajökull glacier in Iceland in May, 2010, causing chaos for millions of airline passengers as flights were cancelled across Europe. Photograph: Ingolfur Juliusson/Reuters

Volcanologist Hugh Tuffen, of Lancaster University, is worried about the stability of the more than 10% of active volcanoes that are ice-covered. He says that "climate change is driving rapid melting of ice on many volcanoes worldwide, triggering unloading as ice is removed. As well as encouraging magma to rise to the surface, leading to increased volcanic activity, removal of ice can also destabilise steep volcano flanks, making hazardous landslides more likely."

The potential for more landslides is also likely to be a problem in high mountain ranges as the ice cover that stabilises rock faces vanishes. Christian Huggel of the University of Zurich has warned that "in densely populated and developed regions such as the European Alps, serious consequences have to be considered from [future] large slope failures".

Looking ahead, one of the key places to watch will be Greenland, where recent findings by a research team led by Shfaqat Khan of Denmark's Technical University reveal a staggering loss of 272bn tonnes of ice a year over the last decade. GPS measurements show that, like Scandinavia at the end of the last ice age, Greenland and the whole of the surrounding region is already rising in response to the removal of this ice load. Andrea Hampel of the University of Hannover's Geological Institute, who with colleagues has been studying this behaviour, is concerned that "future ice loss may trigger earthquakes of intermediate to large magnitude if the crust underneath the modern ice cap contains faults prone to failure".

More earthquakes in Greenland might not seem like a big deal, but this could have far wider ramifications. About 8,200 years ago, an earthquake linked to the uplift of Scandinavia, triggered the Storegga Slide; a gigantic undersea sediment slide that sent a tsunami racing across the North Atlantic. Run-up heights were more than 20m in the Shetlands and six metres along the east coast of Scotland, and the event has been blamed for the flooding of Doggerland; the inhabited Mesolithic landmass that occupied what is now the southern North Sea.

The submerged margins of Greenland are currently not very well mapped, so the likelihood of a future earthquake triggering a landslide capable of generating a major tsunami in the North Atlantic is unknown. Dave Tappin, a tsunami expert at the British Geological Survey, points out that one large, undersea landslide has been identified off the coast of Greenland, but suspects that there may not be sufficient sediment to generate landslides as large as Storegga. Nonetheless, the seismic revival of Greenland is certainly a geological response to climate change that we need to keep an eye on.

The bottom line in all of this is that as climate change tightens its grip, we should certainly contemplate more and bigger Hurricane Matthews. However, when it comes to the manifold hazardous by-blows of an overheating planet, and especially those involving the ground we stand on, we must also be prepared to expect the unexpected.
Bill McGuire is professor emeritus in geophysical and climate hazards at UCL. His current book is Waking the Giant: How a Changing Climate Triggers Earthquakes, Tsunamis and Volcanoes. Click here to order a copy for £9.83

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How climate change triggers earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes

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evastating hurricane? More than 1,000 lives lost? It must be climate change! Almost inevitably, Hurricane Matthew 's recent rampage across the Caribbean and south-eastern US has been fingered by some as a backlash of global warming driven by humanity's polluting activities, but does this really stack up? The short answer is no.

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To fight climate change, save the whales, some scientists say

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Science has established the urgency of reducing carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere. If humans do not reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 45% from 2010 levels in the next nine years and eliminate them completely by 2050, the planet's temperature will rise to 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) above that of the pre-industrial period.

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What is Coral Bleaching and What Causes It - Fight For Our Reef

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Coral bleaching is a global crisis, caused by increased ocean temperatures caused by carbon pollution and climate change.