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

# data[].attributes.body
the worlds largest iceberg has been melting and is about to disappear near the equator due to the increase in carbon emissions.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
After 18 years of drifting, Antarctica's largest iceberg is about to melt away near South America.

Credit: NASA/ International Space Station

If being far from home ever gets you down, just be glad you aren't also melting.

NASA scientists reported that, after drifting for nearly 20 years, the largest iceberg ever to break away from Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf is about to disappear forever.

Now floating northwest of the South Georgia islands near the tail of South America, the iceberg - named B-15 - has traveled more than 6,600 miles (10,000 kilometers) from the ice shelf and is veering dangerously close to the equator. [ Photos: Diving Beneath Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf]

Satellite images taken from the International Space Station (ISS) on May 22 confirm that the remains of the iceberg are on a crash course with warm tropical waters, where growing pools of meltwater will soon "work [their] way through the iceberg like a set of knives," NASA glaciologist Kelly Brunt said in a statement.

The freewheelin', formerly Connecticut-size iceberg first embarked on its long cruise after breaking away from the Ross Ice Shelf in 2000, NASA said. At the time, it was the largest single chunk of ice ever to split off from the shelf, measuring 160 nautical miles long and 20 nautical miles wide. (That's a total area of 3,200 square nautical miles - larger than the island of Jamaica.)

Iceberg B-15 broke off of the Ross Ice Shelf in 2000, floated three quarters of the way around Antarctica and is now veering north toward its doom.

Credit: NASA/ International Space Station

Currents swept the berg three-quarters of the way around Antarctica; then, it suddenly shifted northward into the southern Atlantic Ocean within the past year or two, NASA said.

The stately raft of ice has gradually splintered into many smaller pieces, most of which have already melted. Today, only four chunks remain with a large enough surface area to be trackable by the National Ice Center (20 square nautical miles is the minimum).

The chunk observed from the ISS last month (its name is B-15Z) still has a surface area of about 50 square nautical miles, but it is likely nearing the end of its journey as it floats ever closer to the equator. According to NASA, icebergs have been known to rapidly melt once they drift into this region. A large fracture is already visible at B-15Z's center, and smaller pieces are crumbling away from its edges.

B-15 will be missed. But its fans may take solace in knowing that, thanks to climate change, another "largest iceberg ever" will probably break away soon enough.

Originally published on Live Science.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Antarctica's Largest Iceberg Is About to Die ... Near the Equator

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
If being far from home ever gets you down, just be glad you aren't also melting. NASA scientists reported that, after drifting for nearly 20 years, the largest iceberg ever to break away from Antarctica's Ross Ice Shelf is about to disappear forever.

# data[].attributes.body
the lava has evaporated an entire lake in Hawaii. all aquatic life in the lake was killed and now there is only ash where the lake once was.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The water within Green Lake evaporated away in a steamy white plume on Saturday (June 2).

Credit: Hawaii County Fire Department; U.S. Geological Survey

Fiery lava from Hawaii's ongoing volcanic eruption has completely evaporated the water from Green Lake, the Big Island's largest freshwater lake, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS).

The assassination by evaporation began this past Saturday morning (June 2), when lava from Fissure 8 flowed into the lake and boiled the water away. The lake didn't go peacefully, either. Rather, the boiling water turned into a thick white plume that reached high into the sky, the USGS reported.

The Hawaii County Fire Department (HCFD) snapped a photo showing the tail end of the annihilation. The above image shows the still-steaming lava in Green Lake, which is located near the intersection of highways 132 and 137, the USGS said. [ Photos: Fiery Lava from Kilauea Volcano Erupts on Hawaii's Big Island]

"By 1:30 p.m. [local time], the steam plume had ceased, and by 3 p.m., an HCFD overflight reported that lava had filled the lake and apparently evaporated all the water," the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory said.

A bird's-eye view of Green Lake, taken before it completely evaporated.

Credit: DigitalGlobe/Google

Green Lake, also known as Ka Wai a Pele, was a popular swimming spot and was about 200 feet (60 meters) deep, according to Hawaii News Now. Reviewers of Green Lake on Google Maps mourned the loss of the lake and wrote a few funny quips about how the "lake is lit" and how it "should be renamed Lava Lake."

Lava from the roughly month-old Kilauea volcano eruption has covered about 7.7 square miles (20 square kilometers) of land so far, CNN reported. Lava has also poured into Kapoho Bay and formed a delta there, forever changing Hawaii's landscape, the USGS reported.

Original article on Live Science.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Scorching-Hot Lava Evaporates Entire Lake in Hawaii

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Fiery lava from Hawaii's ongoing volcanic eruption has completely evaporated the water from Green Lake, the Big Island's largest freshwater lake, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The assassination by evaporation began this past Saturday morning (June 2), when lava from Fissure 8 flowed into the lake and boiled the water away.

# data[].attributes.body
After Hurricane Harvey scientists have discovered that hurricanes are likely to get bigger and stronger in the coming years.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Hurricane Harvey, which inundated the Houston area with up to 60 inches of rain last August, was one of the most outlandish storms ever to hit the U.S. Ironically, it crossed a Gulf of Mexico that had been calm for days and quickly quieted again afterward. This rare situation allowed scientists to obtain unusually specific data about the ocean before and after the hurricane, and about the storm's energy and moisture.

Last week researchers published that data in Earth's Future. The numbers indicate the amount of energy Harvey pulled from the ocean, in the form of rising water vapor, equaled the amount of energy it dropped over land in the form of rain-the first time such an equivalence has been documented. Investigators say this revelation supports assertions climate change is likely to make Atlantic hurricanes bigger, more intense and longer-lasting than in the past. The researchers calculate climate change caused Harvey's rainfall to be 15 to 38 percent greater than it would have been otherwise.

Kevin Trenberth, a senior climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, led the team. Scientific American asked him why Harvey behaved so strangely, how it confirms predictions about changing hurricanes and what the U.S. and other nations prone to the storms should prepare for in the future.

[ An edited transcript of the interview follows:]
You say hurricanes will get bigger, and last longer. Why?
As climate change makes oceans hotter there is more heat-more energy-available, so there is likely to be an increase in hurricane activity. That can be the size of the storms, their duration and their intensity.
So hurricane dynamics are really driven by ocean energy?
Right. The way that energy moves around is transporting water vapor in the atmosphere-in this case, pulled up into the storm and dumped over the land in Texas. As the water vapor condenses it releases the latent ocean heat into the atmosphere. Our study was the first time anyone has been able to match up these two numbers.
Is moving energy a hurricane's main role in the climate system? Why do we even have them?
A hurricane moves heat out of the ocean rapidly. It keeps the oceans cooler. A hurricane is actually a relief valve for the tropical ocean.
Why does it need a relief valve?
In general, the global weather system doesn't like to have big temperature contrasts. If it's hot in one place and cold in another, that produces wind that blows the warm air toward the cold and the cold air toward the warm. The atmosphere is always trying to remove those temperature gradients.

Similarly, thunderstorms move heat upward from a hot ocean to a cooler atmosphere but they don't have the strong winds that a hurricane does, which produce the very large evaporating out of the ocean into the atmosphere. A hurricane is a collection of thunderstorms, but having the same number of thunderstorms without hurricane winds doesn't cool off the tropical ocean to the same extent. Without hurricanes the tropical ocean would get really hot and the contrast between there and the middle latitudes would create different weather systems than we have now.
Warmer oceans mean more intense hurricanes. But you note that the number of large storms might actually decrease. Why?
By pulling up an ocean's heat, a hurricane leaves a colder ocean in its wake. One big storm creates more cooling than, say, four smaller storms. It leaves a cooler ocean that is less favorable for a new storm.
That explains why Harvey got so big; your paper notes that the Gulf of Mexico water temperature was several degrees hotter than usual for late August. But why did Harvey stay big?
Over the ocean a hurricane's circulation typically reaches about 1,000 miles in all directions, grabbing moisture and bringing it into the storm. Once over land the storm dries and weakens. But even when two sides of Harvey were over land, the spiral arm bands reached well out over the Gulf, which was still very warm. That kept the storm going.

After several days the storm moved back over the Gulf before it came inland again, and then moved north. We don't attribute that movement to climate change. But the fact that when it did come back over the Gulf it reintensified is very much related to climate change. Despite the fact that Harvey had taken a lot of energy from the Gulf and cooled the waters in the upper 100 meters in particular, the deeper Gulf was still warm enough to well up and sustain hurricane-force winds.
The related question is why did Harvey remain over Houston so long? Some experts say it had to do with climate change altering the nature of the jet stream-giving it bigger bends, causing it to meander more slowly from west to east across the U.S.- which can help weather systems get stuck in one place.
Some people suggest that may have played a role. I'm inclined to think it didn't. The storm track does depend on the weather; a high-pressure system blocked Harvey from moving north or northeast over land as it normally would have. But that high wasn't part of a big jet steam wave structure. Also, the idea of a slow jet stream, because of changing conditions in the Arctic, is still a controversial topic. I and others think the bigger factor is the tropical Pacific-systems like El Niño and so on. We need to research this more, but I think the effect of the tropics is much greater than the effect of polar regions.
The end of the paper addresses what society needs to do to prepare for stronger hurricanes. It's commentary, which is unusual. Why did you decide to include this?
Physical scientists often do not talk about impacts and consequences. They often leave that to social scientists or economists. But we need to connect the physical and social effects much more. The Earths' Future journal is designed to help bridge that divide. Our study is relevant to a lot of policy. And it's especially relevant to the current administration, whose operational rule seems to be to do away with regulations even when they make sense and are based in science.
You also recommended actions hurricane-prone regions should take. What is the most crucial?
The hurricane damage last season in Puerto Rico, Florida and Texas shows that infrastructure should have been hardened for such storms, which were certainly going to come sooner or later. There were many meetings-I was at some of them-in which politicians, heads of countries and states, were very aware of two main threats: sea level rise and intense hurricanes. But they haven't done much to prepare.

In Texas, after Hurricane Ike in 2008, there were proposals to add flood control measures in Houston, and they were voted down. In contrast, places like Taiwan, in the typhoon belt, hardened their infrastructures: drainage systems, building codes to withstand category 4 and 5 storms, emergency systems. In 2015 Taiwan had four typhoons that caused flooding and damage-but each time, within about four days they were back up and fully operational because they had built-in resilience and were prepared. Places in the U.S. need to make that kind of investment.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Hurricane Harvey, which inundated the Houston area with up to 60 inches of rain last August, was one of the most outlandish storms ever to hit the U.S. Ironically, it crossed a Gulf of Mexico that had been calm for days and quickly quieted again afterward.

# data[].attributes.body
The growing size of greenhouse gases can affect the overall nutrition of rice. this will also affect poorer countries that use rice as their main food source.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
One of the world's most important food crops may be declining in quality due to greenhouse gas emissions.

The results of a major study, published yesterday in Science Advances, suggest that rice-a crucial food source for billions of people-is less nutritious when grown under higher carbon dioxide concentrations. Its stores of protein, iron, zinc and some important B vitamins all decline.

That's a potential concern for public health, the authors say, particularly in poorer nations where rice makes up a large proportion of people's diet.

"These results indicate that the role of rising CO2 on reducing rice quality may represent a fundamental, but underappreciated, human health effect associated with anthropogenic climate change," the authors, led by Chunwu Zhu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, wrote in the paper.

The findings challenge a common argument floated among doubters of accepted climate science-that rising CO2 concentrations are a net positive for global vegetation, including crops.

Rep. Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican who leads the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, is one outspoken proponent of the idea. In an essay published last summer in The Daily Signal, he argued that more carbon dioxide will lead to increased plant growth, spurring "a greater volume of food production and better quality food."

But the new research-and other studies published before it-discredit those claims.

"We have some rice varieties that show a stronger response to CO2 and they are able to convert more of that CO2 into seed, which can be good," said senior study author Lewis Ziska, a scientist with the Department of Agriculture. "On the other side of that coin is the quality of that seed also being diminished in response to CO2."

The new study evaluated 18 types of commonly grown rice to see how they would respond to elevated levels of carbon dioxide. In the experiments, the researchers increased ambient carbon dioxide levels to concentrations between 568 and 590 parts per million. Currently, atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations hover around 410 ppm-but at the rate they're currently rising, they could reach the high levels used in the study by the end of the century, if action isn't taken to curb them.

Compared with current concentrations, the rice crops' nutrient contents all suffered under higher carbon dioxide levels. On average, protein levels declined by about 10 percent, iron by 8 percent and zinc by 5 percent. The researchers also found that certain B vitamins declined significantly, some by up to 30 percent. Vitamin E was the only nutrient found to increase under higher CO2.

The research "corroborates previous work that we've done, showing that elevated CO2 alters the protein, iron and zinc content of rice-and, in the case of our work, in other staple food crops, as well," said Samuel Myers, a Harvard University expert on climate change and human health.

Myers, who was not involved in yesterday's research, has co-authored previous studies that came to similar conclusions-elevated carbon dioxide concentrations cause nutrients to decline in globally important crops, including rice, wheat, barley and soy. While his work has mainly focused on protein, zinc and iron, the new study is among the first of its kind to evaluate the impact of carbon dioxide on vitamins-and it seems that for some of them, the outcomes may be similar.

Altogether, the growing body of research on crops and carbon dioxide levels indicates the future isn't nearly as rosy as Smith and others might suggest. While more carbon dioxide can increase growth and production in some plants-all other conditions held equal-it seems that there are trade-offs after all. Bigger crops aren't necessarily useful to human societies if they're less nutritious.

Additionally, some recent research suggests that the growth spurred by higher carbon dioxide levels could plateau after a certain point, Myers noted. And there are myriad other climate-related factors, such as rising temperatures and changes in precipitation patterns-all spurred by greenhouse gas emissions-that may harm agriculture, as well.

The idea that rising carbon dioxide levels are nothing but a positive for global crops is "pure nonsense," Myers said.

The declines in nutrition raise an obvious concern for public health, especially when observed in global staple crops like rice. Scientists are still evaluating exactly how much of a problem these nutrient declines might turn out to be.

In previous studies, Myers and his colleagues have used models to simulate the diets of people around the world, the nutrients they receive from those foods and the declines in nutritiousness if CO2 levels rise. Some populations could experience nutrient deficiencies in the future, some studies found. One high-profile 2015 study in The Lancet suggested that 140 million more people worldwide may suffer from zinc deficiency by 2050.

The new study took a more economic approach. Focusing on the top 10 highest rice-consuming nations in the world, it compared rice consumption-and the nutrient losses under higher CO2-with each country's gross domestic product per capita. They found that people in countries with lower GDP per capita, where rice may make up a greater proportion of their daily diet, are likely to be hit hardest.

Still, "what the nature of that impact is in terms of nutritional effects and health effects" remains to be seen, Ziska noted.

Myers cautioned that a more detailed modeling study-which examines exactly how much of each nutrient a person derives from rice, as opposed to other food sources-would be needed to fully evaluate the public health concerns raised by the new research.

In the meantime, Ziska hopes to investigate how crop nutrient contents may have already changed in previous decades, in response to historical greenhouse gases emissions. He says it may yield further insights into how crops react to future carbon emissions.

"Trying to understand those complexities and trying to understand those interactions is one of the things we think is very important," he said.
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E News. E&E provides daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news at www.eenews.net.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
As CO2 Levels Rise, Rice Becomes Less Nutritious

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
One of the world's most important food crops may be declining in quality due to greenhouse gas emissions. The results of a major study, published yesterday in Science Advances, suggest that rice-a crucial food source for billions of people-is less nutritious when grown under higher carbon dioxide concentrations.

# data[].attributes.body
Scientists are starting to use the sounds that the glaciers make to determine how fast or slow they are melting.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The waters of the fjords of Svalbard-the Arctic archipelago between mainland Norway and the North Pole-are known to snap, crackle and pop with the sound of melting icebergs and glaciers. Now new research finds the fizz of a thawing glacier can be distinguished from the burble of a softening iceberg, and that these telltale sounds are more intense in places where ice is melting faster.

The findings, published this month in Geophysical Research Letters, suggest this commotion can be tapped for useful clues as to how quickly glaciers may recede as temperatures climb-and thus how fast global sea levels might rise. "Now we can say it's not just great that you can listen to the noise; it's that we can...transform it into a real tool in the future," says study leader Oskar Glowacki, a postdoctoral researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Credit: Oskar Glowacki, American Geophysical Union

Although satellites can be used to track the gradual retreat of glaciers, they cannot closely examine the site of the main action: the underside of a glacier's terminus-where seawater meets ice and drives melt. And it is dangerous for scientists to work along the fronts of glaciers, where huge icebergs regularly slough off into the sea, Glowacki says. Instead, placing underwater microphones called hydrophones in such areas could safely provide accurate measurements of the crucial melt process.

To test this idea, Glowacki and his colleagues at the Polish Academy of Sciences deployed hydrophones in Svalbard's Hornsund Fjord, near the terminus points of the Hans, Paierl and Stor glaciers. In the recordings the difference between glaciers and icebergs is unmistakable. Glacier fronts are chock-full of compressed air bubbles that fizz as they hit the water, creating a gentle, continuous sound like rain on a placid lake. There are fewer bubbles in an iceberg because they are so much smaller than their parent glaciers, so the popping noise they make is more irregular. They sound more like a pot of water at a rolling boil, with distinguishable sounds of individual bubbles bursting.

It was a victory to be able to separate the glacier and iceberg sounds, Glowacki says, and to distinguish the noise from the rest of the clatter of Svalbard's bays and fjords. The hydrophones, he notes, pick up everything from the sound of waves lapping the shore to rain falling and the calls of sea mammals. In an even more exciting development the researchers found they could pick out the difference between the sounds on the side of an iceberg facing the local surface current and those on the protected side. Melt should be more rapid at the current-facing side, where the ocean water circulates against the ice, and this was reflected in more intense noise in the recordings. The finding suggests the strength of the ice noise can tell scientists where ice is melting faster.

Acoustic signals will probably never compete with visual satellite data, says ice sheet researcher Mauri Pelto, a professor of environmental science at Nichols College and U.S. representative to the World Glacier Monitoring Service. But Pelto, who was not involved in the new study, says the finding offers "another tool in the toolbox to deploy when and where it's going to deliver the most value."

Arctic glacial bays-which are among the loudest marine environments on Earth because of climate change-driven melt-would seem to be one such worthwhile place, Glowacki notes. "Why not take advantage of this," he adds, "and listen to the planet?"

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How Fast Are Glaciers Melting? Just Listen to Them

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The waters of the fjords of Svalbard-the Arctic archipelago between mainland Norway and the North Pole-are known to snap, crackle and pop with the sound of melting icebergs and glaciers. Now new research finds the fizz of a thawing glacier can be distinguished from the burble of a softening iceberg, and that these telltale sounds are more intense in places where ice is melting faster.

# data[].attributes.body
there is currently a drought in Wyoming that creating trouble for farmers who are losing large amounts of their crops and money due to the drought.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Perhaps the most menacing and widespread aspects of climate change are the droughts that can come with climbing temperatures.

They're not like violent hurricanes, which slam into a region with devastating force and then leave abruptly. Storms get names and television time. Droughts don't. Scientists call them a "creeping phenomenon" whose arrival is hard to identify. So is their exit.

In agricultural areas, the creeping effect can subtly change the rhythms of life over a period of years. This compounds the struggle to detect and adapt to droughts. If there is a poster child where the "creep" has taken a toll of shock, misery and expense, it might be the Wind River Indian Reservation, an arid 3.4-million-square-mile stretch in west-central Wyoming.

Measured in terms of damage, U.S. droughts rank second behind hurricanes. They cost $236 billion from 1980 to 2017, according to NOAA. There was nothing subtle about the drought of 2012. It covered 65 percent of the United States, the largest area since the Dust Bowl.

It hit the Wind River Country in July, when hay and other crops grown by the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho people need irrigation. Normally, the reservation gets its water from winter snowpack and the melting of a nearby glacier. But heat and dryness arrived early that year, and by the time irrigation was needed, much of the water was gone.

That forced some farmers to sell their livestock herds at low prices and to watch their hay and other crops burn up in the fields. It was an unexpected blow in a fight that has left the reservation in a fragile position for years.

To many farmers, a "normal" year at the reservation consisted of memories from the 1980s and 1990s, when water for irrigation was available from mid-April into early October. Most of it came from melting snow on a ring of mountains that surround the reservation, or the glacier.

Most farmers drew their water from canals extending from the Washakie Reservoir, which was usually filled by Memorial Day and carefully husbanded until August, when irrigation needs became strong.

Then came 2013. It was warmer and drier than usual, and the storms that are needed to fill the reservoir in April and May were sparse. Starting on June 1, when the first reports of a recurring drought came, a panicky engineer for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which runs the Washakie Reservoir, began to empty it. That meant most of the water flowed downstream unused, because the crops weren't mature.

Irrigation was shut down in mid-July because the remaining water had to be saved for livestock. Crops died in the fields. One farmer described 2013 like this: "A lot of them lands never got enough water, and even the best of the best farmers, they suffered some losses." Rain finally came in mid-September, like a gardener watering lifeless plants.

The drought raised tensions between the reservation's tribes-the Eastern Shoshone and the Northern Arapaho-and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which built and ran the irrigation system that supplied most of the tribal farmers.

Tribal leaders consulted a number of outside groups, including scientists from state and federal agencies. A series of meetings were held in 2014, and the upshot was a request for a two-year, $390,000 federal grant program to give the tribes better information on the impacts of climate change.

"We're going to have trigger points and be able to gauge where we are, so we can be prepared and have water for all of the reservation," said Mitchell Cottenoir, the water engineer appointed by the two tribes.

But by July 2015, when Cottenoir made this prediction, the Wind River Country had entered a new and even stranger irrigation season. The grant had been approved and an assortment of outside scientists arrived to help the tribes, but getting a gauge on "where we are" would take a while.

Shannon McNeeley, a social scientist with Colorado State University, began to interview tribal members and farmers to get their sense of it. Meanwhile, climate experts from the National Drought Mitigation Center and the University of Nebraska were looking at a new phenomenon: a sudden "micro-drought" that had crept into part of the reservation. For weeks, the new drought did not appear on the national Drought Monitor, which is published weekly, but it was rapidly drying out the area fed by the Washakie Reservoir.

The scientists had brought in an experimental statistical tool, called the Evaporative Demand Drought Index, or EDDI. It spotted the drying, which over the next two months proceeded to wreck another crop season. By midsummer, 2015 had established itself as a year of strange and seemingly contradictory climate signals.

EDDI was developed by Mike Hobbins, a climate scientist working with the Physical Sciences Division of NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo. Hobbins, an Australian, had been intrigued by the mysteries of droughts since he was 9 years old. That was the year when his father, an engineer, had brought him to Nairobi, Kenya. They saw farmers driving the last of their thirsty livestock into the city, hoping to sell them before they died.

The traditional measure of drought has been an absence of rainfall. Much later, Hobbins stumbled across a way to measure the early stages of droughts by calculating what he calls the "evaporative demand," or the "growing thirst of the atmosphere." He found a set of weather data, spanning 38 years, giving him the basic creators of dryness: the wind, air temperature, humidity and incoming solar radiation. That allowed him to identify developing droughts on weather maps without needing to know local soil moisture conditions.

Hobbins sometimes calls them "flash droughts," as opposed to flash floods. They can both be devastating. To the scientists in the Wind River Country in mid-2015, EDDI was like a red warning light. Something was seriously wrong.

EDDI has since been used around the world to predict the early onset of droughts and help emergency preparedness. "We already knew it. They didn't have to tell us," Cottenoir said. What tribal leaders were hoping for was a solution.

McNeeley's interviews showed that the story of 2015 was a dismal twist on a familiar plot. The winter snow came down in the form of slush, which melted quickly, or rain, which didn't linger on the mountains. May brought record rains, which filled up the reservoir early. "It led to an optimistic expectation among local water users that the upcoming summer would be void of drought," she wrote.

But the reservoir was already full and couldn't handle the excess flow. So the water had to be released before most of it was needed. Then the "flash drought" reappeared, closing irrigation season on Aug. 21, leaving only enough water for farm animals.

"Basically, we can't use the water management practices of the '80s and the '90s," one water manager told McNeeley,"because the water cycle is not that way anymore."

So in March 2016, when water managers suspected that dryness during the winter had cut the snowpack by 25 to 50 percent, they declared an early drought warning. But then the snows and rain returned, culminating in a spectacular 6-inch rainfall on May 10, which caused flash floods and ended the drought warning.

But the brimming Washakie Reservoir couldn't hold it. The water had to be released early again, and by Aug. 24, another "micro-drought" had settled in, bringing irrigation season to an early end before many farmers had enough water to save their crops. In the end, the grief of 2016 was a "mirror image" of the year before, according to Cottenoir.

Last year provided "big water" for the Wind River Country, he recalled. That wasn't the case elsewhere: The Dakotas and parts of Montana had what the U.S. Drought Monitor called an "exceptional" drought, damaging the nation's wheat crop and triggering record wildfires. A meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Glasgow, Mont., called it "the worst we've seen in 100 years."

The respite in Wyoming gave the tribes time to put together a list of what they needed. The process exposed years of neglect, a chronic lack of resources and a growing inability to measure the progress of what they were really confronting: a slowly changing climate.

Their irrigation system had been approved by Congress in 1905, but construction was never fully completed, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office. It has three reservoirs and 377 miles of canals and ditches, but its last maintenance review was done in the 1930s. Meanwhile, the canals gradually filled up with sticks, logs and other debris. The net result was "poor delivery performance" of water.

During her research, McNeeley, the social scientist, found that there were once 48 stream gauges measuring water flow into the Washakie Reservoir, but their number had been reduced to about 12 because of federal funding cutbacks. There was also no gauge for water coming out of the reservoir, which compounded the measurement problem. That was serious because the Washakie was undersized compared with other reservoirs in the area.

The remaining gauges also had difficulty measuring the difference between precipitation falling as snow or rain, which made it harder to estimate the size of the snowpack in the mountains. As for Dinwoody Glacier, which sends a badly needed stream of meltwater into the reservation in the late summer and early fall, it has lost almost 35 percent of its ice. If the reservation's struggle with drought becomes more severe, as predicted, "then we're just going to be done," one informant told McNeeley.

If there is going to be a solution to the Wind River Country's drought problems, it may come in the form of an enlarged reservoir and an overhauled irrigation system, which will cost in the vicinity of $90 million. The projects are in the planning stage and may take as long as 20 years to complete.

In the meantime, according to Cottenoir, the tribes' frustrations are likely to continue: "The water just runs down the river. We capture as much as we can in the reservoir."
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E News. E&E provides daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news at www.eenews.net.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
A Wyoming Reservation Shows the New Face of Drought

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Perhaps the most menacing and widespread aspects of climate change are the droughts that can come with climbing temperatures. They're not like violent hurricanes, which slam into a region with devastating force and then leave abruptly. Storms get names and television time. Droughts don't. Scientists call them a "creeping phenomenon" whose arrival is hard to identify.

# data[].attributes.body
scientists have found that the average time for a heat wave within the ocean has increased. these heat waves can be deadly to certain ocean organisms like coral.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The extreme events can kill corals and kelp and throw marine ecosystems into chaos

The world's oceans are sweltering. Over the last century, marine heat waves have become more common and are lasting longer. New research suggests the annual number of days that some part of the ocean is experiencing a heat wave has increased 54 percent from 1925 to 2016, researchers report April 10 in Nature Communications.

Typically, scientists define a marine heat wave as at least five consecutive days of unusually high temperatures for a particular ocean region or season. These extreme temperatures can be lethal for marine species such as corals, kelp and oysters, and can wreak havoc on fisheries and aquaculture ( SN: 2/3/18, p. 16).

In the new study, the researchers searched for such events recorded in sea surface temperature data recorded as far back as 1900 and in satellite data since 1982. Not only have the heat waves become 34 percent more common on average, but they also last an average 17 percent longer, the team found.

That trend is mostly influenced by climate change causing surface ocean waters to warm, rather than by large atmosphere-ocean climate patterns, such as the periodic warming and cooling of waters in the equatorial Pacific called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation. The researchers predict even more frequent marine heat waves in coming decades.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Ocean heat waves are becoming more common and lasting longer

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The extreme events can kill corals and kelp and throw marine ecosystems into chaos The world's oceans are sweltering. Over the last century, marine heat waves have become more common and are lasting longer.

# data[].attributes.body
there is a new type of plastic that when exposed to certain chemicals, can break down into what it originally was before it was manufactured.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
There's a great future in plastics.

A new kind of plastic can, when exposed to the right chemicals, break down into the same basic building blocks that it came from and be rebuilt again and again. The recyclable material is more durable than previous attempts to create reusable plastics, researchers report inthe April 27 Science.

Designing plastics that can be easily reused is one line of attack against the global plastic waste problem. Only about 10 percent of plastic ever made gets recycled, according to a 2017 study in Science Advances. But the material is so cheap and useful that hundreds of millions of tons of it keeps getting churned out each year.

A major impediment to plastic recycling is that most plastics degrade into molecules that aren't immediately useful. Transforming those molecules back into plastic or into some other product requires many chemical reactions, which makes the recycling process less efficient. And while biodegradable plastics have become popular in recent years, they break down only if the right microbes are present. More often than not, these plastics end up lingering in landfills or floating in the ocean. Creating plastics that could be broken down into their building blocks and reused without additional processing and purifying could help reduce the pollution buildup.

But designing such a plastic polymer is a balancing act, says Michael Shaver, a polymer chemist at the University of Edinburgh who wasn't part of the study. Polymers are long chains of small molecules, called monomers, that link together like beads on a string. Monomers that need extreme temperatures or too much chemical coaxing to join up into polymers might not be practical building blocks. And resulting polymers need to be stable up to a high enough temperature that, say, pouring hot coffee into a cup made of them won't destabilize the chains and make the plastic melt into a sticky puddle.
Polymer chemist Jianbo Zhu and his colleagues at Colorado State University in Fort Collins set out to solve this challenge. The team had had some luck in the past creating a polymer that could be broken down into its starting molecules. But the resulting plastics created by their lab and others on the same track were too soft and temperature-sensitive to have much practical use.
This time, Zhu and his colleagues modified one of their previous creations, a small ringed molecule, by adding another ring in a way that braced the molecule into a particular conformation. That rigidity helped the monomers quickly link together at room temperature into polymer chains that are heat-stable.

Then, when exposed to certain mild chemicals or high enough heat, the polymers degraded back into monomers. The researchers were able to repeat this cycle several times, showing that, in theory, the polymer could be infinitely recyclable.

While each monomer is locked into a particular conformation, not all of them have the same shape even though they're made from the same chemical recipe. Mixing two different conformations of monomers created an even stronger plastic, says Zhu.

"This is probably the best system out there," Shaver says.

Still, it's not perfect yet: Zhu and his colleagues plan to tinker with the monomer design more in the future to make the resulting plastic a bit less brittle. Eventually, they hope to commercialize the product.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
This plastic can be recycled over and over and over again

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There's a great future in plastics. A new kind of plastic can, when exposed to the right chemicals, break down into the same basic building blocks that it came from and be rebuilt again and again. The recyclable material is more durable than previous attempts to create reusable plastics, researchers report inthe April 27 Science.

# data[].attributes.body
Scientists have found that modeling the location of igneous provinces since 400 million years ago will allow them to modulate climate changes.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
About 250 million years ago, a massive volcanic eruption flooded modern-day Siberia with lava, creating the Siberian Traps, giant plateaus made of multiple layers of lava. The eruption also released huge quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that rapidly altered the climate and triggered the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event that wiped out more than 90% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial species. After the eruption, however, the Siberian Traps began drawing atmospheric carbon dioxide back into the crust through weathering and erosion. The Siberian Traps are the largest of several floods of basalt, called Large Igneous Provinces (LIPs), that have occurred during Earth's history and that likely have played a role in regulating Earth's climate.

In a new paper in Geophysical Research Letters, lead author Louis Johansson, along with Deep Carbon Observatory members Sabin Zahirovic and Dietmar Muller at the University of Sydney's School of Geosciences modelled the eruption of LIPs and their movement as a result of plate tectonics around the globe for the last 400 million years.

The researchers compared the timing of LIP eruption and weathering with estimates of atmospheric carbon dioxide to see if eruptions and weathering had a controlling effect. Through their analysis the researchers were able to pinpoint specific times when LIPs were instrumental in turning up or down Earth's global thermostat.

"These huge eruptions bring up an enormous amount of carbon dioxide and can change the climate and trigger major extinctions," said Zahirovic.

"But Earth has inbuilt mechanisms to scrub out the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over geological timeframes."

LIPs can absorb large amounts of carbon dioxide because the basalt lavas are full of silicate-rich rocks that are especially vulnerable to weathering. When rain falls through a carbon dioxide-rich atmosphere, it dissolves the gas and forms acid rain. The weak acid reacts with silicate minerals in the LIPs to make long-lived carbonate sediments. Warm, rainy environments speed up the erosion process, and so more erosion occurs when LIPs are in regions near the equator, which have high temperatures and receive the most rainfall.

Scientists have looked at the climate impacts of individual LIPs, but no one had considered the long-term, global impacts of LIPs, as they moved around Earth on shifting continents.

The researchers used GPlates, an open-source software tool that reconstructs the movement of tectonic plates through Earth's history, developed by Müller's EarthByte group at the University of Sydney along with international collaborators. They took into account the timing of LIP eruptions and how many million years each LIP spent near the equator to estimate erosion. Then they compared the emission and absorption of carbon dioxide from LIPs to estimates of atmospheric carbon dioxide using proxy data from a previously published compilation.

To attain an unbiased comparison, the researchers performed a wavelet analysis, which is a statistical test that compares two sets of measurements over time to see if and when they are correlated.

"This analysis eliminates arm waving and also tells us when a particular signal leads another signal, so it gives us an indication, perhaps, of causation," said Zahirovic.

When the researchers compared the estimated level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere with the eruption and erosion of LIPs, they were able to identify several associated jumps and dips in atmospheric carbon dioxide, showing that these basalt floods have played a role in modulating Earth's temperature for millions of years.

"What surprised me was that 200 million years ago, as Pangaea was breaking apart, and the Atlantic was opening up, the Central Atlantic Magmatic Province produced a huge amount of lava," said Zahirovic.

"You can see that in the carbon dioxide proxy record, there's a huge increase of carbon dioxide [after the eruption], but then because the volcanic province spends a lot of time in the humid near-equatorial belt, it is followed by a rapid decrease in carbon dioxide."

The eruption and weathering of LIPs is only one aspect of Earth's carbon cycle, and there are points when the influence of LIPs likely took a backseat to other geological processes. The researchers also note that their model omitted LIPs that erupted underwater, because these basalts tend to be recycled back into the mantle and thus are more difficult or impossible to reconstruct.

Next, the researchers are looking into other ways that plate tectonics influence the deep carbon cycle. "What we're trying to understand are the longer-term variations of climate and the carbon cycle, over geological time frames," said Zahirovic.

Currently they are compiling a global database of ophiolites, which are chunks of basaltic oceanic crust that get thrust up onto the continents during tectonic collisions. Like LIPs, ophiolites take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they weather, and similarly to LIPs also have a finger on the global thermostat.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9MDlb8V7S8

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
global warming; climate; air quality; geochemistry; early climate; fossils; origin of life; paleontology

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Large igneous provinces contribute to ups and downs in atmospheric carbon dioxide

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
About 250 million years ago, a massive volcanic eruption flooded modern-day Siberia with lava, creating the Siberian Traps, giant plateaus made of multiple layers of lava. The eruption also released huge quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere that rapidly altered the climate and triggered the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event that wiped out more than 90% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial species.

# data[].attributes.body
Scientists have gained images of dissolved organic carbon molecules from the ocean. this will allow them to see the Earth's changing climate through the ocean.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
from research organizations

In a first, researchers from the University of California, Irvine -- as well as Switzerland's University of Zurich, IBM Research-Zurich and UC Santa Cruz -- have obtained direct images of dissolved organic carbon molecules from the ocean, allowing better analysis and characterization of compounds that play an important role in the Earth's changing climate.

Using an atomic force microscopy technique developed by IBM, the team was able to visualize individual atoms and bonds, yielding clues about their persistence in the marine environment. Findings were published today in the American Geophysical Union journal Geophysical Research Letters.

"To understand processes happening on the scale of ocean basins, it is sometimes necessary to view objects that are orders of magnitude smaller," said study co-author Ellen Druffel, professor and Fred Kavli Chair of Earth System Science at UCI. "By seeing with our own eyes the double bonds and rings of dissolved organic carbon molecules, we are better equipped to explain how they remain in the ocean for tens of thousands of years."

The molecules that were imaged were collected by UC Santa Cruz researchers from waters in the northern central Pacific Ocean.

The marine dissolved organic carbon pool, comparable in size to the atmospheric CO ₂ reservoir, is about 200 times larger than the amount of carbon contained in all the plants and animals on the planet. Because of its complexity, diverse origins and varied reactions to environmental conditions, only about 10 percent of DOC has been characterized.

"We are still trying to figure out how the vast majority of this substance is going to be impacted by the ongoing addition of new CO ₂ from fossil fuel burning and from increasing temperatures due to global climate change," said co-author Brett Walker, a UCI assistant researcher in Earth system science.

Most DOC near the ocean surface is derived from the remains of recently living phytoplankton. However, radiocarbon dating of DOC in the deep ocean shows it to be much older than expected -- by as much as 4,500 years -- indicating that a portion of this DOC survives multiple ocean mixing cycles.

Researchers have suggested that the chemical structure of DOC is responsible for its endurance in the environment, and through the atomic force microscopy technique, scientists are now able to see real-space images of the bound atoms in these compounds. The team has found that molecules from the deep ocean frequently exhibit aromaticity, meaning they're flat rings of atoms that are very stable and do not break apart easily.

"These atom-scale visualizations help demonstrate that the old age of small DOC molecules in the deep ocean has to do with their chemical structure, which bacteria do not seem to utilize," Walker said. "This is a crucial finding that will help researchers better understand the cycling of carbon in the oceans and the overall health of our planet's marine environments."

The work was funded by the University of Zurich, IBM Research-Zurich, the National Science Foundation and the American Chemical Society.

Journal Reference:

Shadi Fatayer, Alysha I. Coppola, Fabian Schulz, Brett D. Walker, Taylor A. Broek, Gerhard Meyer, Ellen R. M. Druffel, Matthew McCarthy, Leo Gross. Direct Visualization of Individual Aromatic Compound Structures in Low Molecular Weight Marine Dissolved Organic Carbon. Geophysical Research Letters, 2018; DOI: 10.1029/2018GL077457

Cite This Page:

Below are relevant articles that may interest you. ScienceDaily shares links and proceeds with scholarly publications in the TrendMD network.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
oceanography; environmental awareness; earth science; global warming; geochemistry; climate; geography; environmental issues

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Scientists analyze first direct images of dissolved organic carbon from the ocean: Joint research project furthers understanding of important CO2 reservoir

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
from research organizations In a first, researchers from the University of California, Irvine -- as well as Switzerland's University of Zurich, IBM Research-Zurich and UC Santa Cruz -- have obtained direct images of dissolved organic carbon molecules from the ocean, allowing better analysis and characterization of compounds that play an important role in the Earth's changing climate.

# data[].attributes.body
scientists have found that red spruce trees in northeastern woods, which were thought to be all but gone due to coal mining and acid rain, are beginning to repopulate the area.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
from research organizations
Credit: Alexandra Kosiba, University of Vermont
Red spruce, for decades the forest equivalent of the canary in the coal mine signaling the detrimental effects of acid rain on northeastern forests, is making a comeback. New research by a team of scientists from the USDA Forest Service and the University of Vermont suggests that a combination of reduced pollution mandated by the 1990 Amendments to the Clean Air Act and changing climate are behind the resurgence.

The study, "The surprising recovery of red spruce growth shows links to decreased acid deposition and elevated temperature" by lead author Alexandra Kosiba of the University of Vermont with co-authors Paul Schaberg of the USDA Forest Service's Northern Research Station and University of Vermont researchers, was published this week in the journal Science of the Total Environment.

The research team assessed the relationship between red spruce growth and factors that may influence growth such as tree age and diameter, stand dynamics, plot characteristics (elevation, slope, aspect, geographical position), and environmental variables including temperature, precipitation, a suite of climate indices, and sulfur and nitrogen pollution deposition that cause acid deposition. In a study that encompassed 658 trees in 52 plots spanning five states, they found that more than 75 percent of red spruce trees and 90 percent of the plots examined in the study exhibited increasing growth since 2001.

"Our research suggests that the reductions we've seen in acid rain are making a difference to forests in the Northeast," said Schaberg. "Acid rain decline has helped red spruce recover, as well as higher temperatures in the fall, winter, and spring. Higher temperatures help some species and hurt others -- right now, red spruce are benefiting, but they could be vulnerable to change in the future."

Red spruce have unique characteristics that make them particularly susceptible to acid rain. For example, they have little genetic variation and they have only moderate tolerance to the cold. But they are also able to "wake up" and photosynthesize during warm interludes of the dormant season, a characteristic that may better position the species to take advantage of recent climate shifts that extend the functional growing season. Yet the study notes that future changes in habitat suitability may not be as favorable to red spruce as those already experienced -- it will likely depend on how extreme future changes are.

Scientists are confident that their research represents the state of red spruce in the entire region, according to Kosiba. "Our study included a broad range of tree ages and sizes as well as a variety of plot locations and characteristics," she said. "We are confident that we are capturing the regional status of red spruce forests, not just a snapshot of a specific location."

"More broadly our work demonstrates the importance of using research to identify ecosystem problems that inform policy to mitigate those issues, and result in biological recovery," noted Kosiba.

Journal Reference:

Alexandra M. Kosiba, Paul G. Schaberg, Shelly A. Rayback, Gary J. Hawley. The surprising recovery of red spruce growth shows links to decreased acid deposition and elevated temperature. Science of The Total Environment, 2018; 637-638: 1480 DOI: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.05.010

Cite This Page:

Below are relevant articles that may interest you. ScienceDaily shares links and proceeds with scholarly publications in the TrendMD network.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
trees; beer and wine; ecology research; soil types; forest; acid rain; environmental issues; rainforests

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Surprising resurgence of red spruce likely result of cleaner air and warmer winters

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
When scientists found a resurgence of red spruce in northeastern forests, they had a lot of questions. Fifty years ago, red spruce was the equivalent of a canary in the coalmine signaling the effects of acid rain on forests. Researchers have identified two factors behind the tree's surprising recovery: reduced inputs of acid rain and warmer fall, winter and spring temperatures.

# data[].attributes.body
People living near turbine have described their quality of life as "degrading." people say that there are audible and sub audible sounds that are "annoying to hear."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
from research organizations

Wind turbines are a source of clean renewable energy, but some people who live nearby describe the shadow flicker, the audible sounds and the subaudible sound pressure levels as "annoying." They claim this nuisance negatively impacts their quality of life.

A team of researchers from the University of Toronto and Ramboll, an engineering company funding the work, set out to investigate how residential distance from the wind turbines -- within a range of 600 meters (1,968.5 feet) to 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) -- affects people's health.

They reanalyzed data collected for the "Community Noise and Health Study" from May to September 2013 by Statistics Canada, the national statistical office. The team reports their new analysis in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

"The Community Noise and Health Study generated data useful for studying the relationship between wind turbine exposures and human health -- including annoyance and sleep disturbances," said Rebecca Barry, an author on the paper. "Their original results examined modeled wind turbine noise based on a variety of factors -- source sound power, distance, topography and meteorology, among others."

The team's new assessment confirmed Statistics Canada's initial findings. "Respondents who live in areas with higher levels of modeled sound values (40 to 46 decibels) reported more annoyance than respondents in areas with lower levels of modeled sound values (<25 dB)," Barry said. Unsurprisingly, the survey's respondents who live closer to the turbines "were more likely to report being annoyed than respondents who live further away."

The earlier Statistics Canada study found no direct link between residents' distance from wind turbines and sleep disturbances (as measured by sleep assessments and the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index), blood pressure, or stress (either self-reported or measured via hair cortisol). However, the more recent study showed that survey respondents closer to wind turbines reported lower ratings for their environmental quality of life. Barry and her co-authors note that their cross-sectional study cannot distinguish whether these respondents were dissatisfied before the wind turbines were installed.

"Wind turbines might have been placed in locations where residents were already concerned about their environmental quality of life," said Sandra Sulsky, a researcher from Ramboll. "Also, as is the case with all surveys, the respondents who chose to participate may have viewpoints or experiences that differ from those who chose not to participate. Survey respondents may have participated precisely to express their dissatisfaction, while those who did not participate might not have concerns about the turbines."

The team's more recent study didn't explicitly find evidence that exposure to wind turbines actually impacts human health, but in the future, "measuring the population's perceptions and concerns before and after turbine installation may help to clarify what effects -- if any -- exposure to wind turbines may have on quality of life," Sulsky said.

Journal Reference:

Rebecca Barry, Sandra I. Sulsky and Nancy Kreiger. Using residential proximity to wind turbines as an alternative exposure method to investigate the association between wind turbines and human health. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2018 DOI: 10.1121/1.5039840

Cite This Page:

Below are relevant articles that may interest you. ScienceDaily shares links and proceeds with scholarly publications in the TrendMD network.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
sleep disorders; social psychology; insomnia; wind energy; acoustics; energy policy; renewable energy; energy and the environment; environmental science

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Does living near wind turbines negatively impact human health?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Wind turbines are a source of clean renewable energy, but some people who live nearby describe the shadow flicker, the audible sounds and the subaudible sound pressure levels as 'annoying.' They claim this nuisance negatively impacts their quality of life.

# data[].attributes.body
scientists have found that using a satellite to see the photosynthesis glow from the Earth can help "redraw" the carbon cycle.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
from research organizations

It doesn't matter if it's a forest, a soybean field, or a prairie, all plants take up carbon dioxide during photosynthesis -- the process where they use sunlight to convert water and carbon dioxide into food. During this changeover, the plants emit an energy "glow" that is not visible to the human eye, but can be detected by satellites in space. Now, researchers at the University of New Hampshire have taken that one step further. By using satellite data from different major land-based ecosystems around the globe, they have found that the photosynthesis glow is the same across all vegetation, no matter the location. This first-of-its-kind global analysis could have significance in providing more accurate data for scientists working to model carbon cycle and eventually help better project climate change.

"The importance of these results is that rather than look at several different types of data and computer-based models from information collected on the ground to monitor plant photosynthesis across the globe, using the satellite observations will provide a near real-time option that is simple, reliable and fast," said Jingfeng Xiao, a UNH research associate professor and the principal investigator on the study recently published in the journal Global Change Biology.

Plants across the globe are a major carbon sink helping to remove carbon from the atmosphere during photosynthesis. Because of this, accurate photosynthesis estimates are crucial for scientists who examine ecosystem functions, carbon cycling, and feedbacks to the climate. The challenge has been in the ground-based data scientists previously used to estimate it, including air temperature, solar radiation, precipitation, and other information used in computer-based Earth systems models that focus on the carbon cycle. However, those calculations have large variations that can affect results.

To measure the amount of carbon taken up by plants through photosynthesis, known as gross primary productivity (GPP), scientists have increasingly been measuring the energy glow of plants, called solar-induced fluorescence (SIF). This light that is emitted through the leaf is found at the high end of the light spectrum. While scientists have used this data for specific biomes, or distinct biological communities like a forest or a desert, this study is the first to look at the relationship between ground-based GPP and satellite-observed SIF in different areas across the globe -- from grasslands to mixed forests and even areas with sparse vegetation.

Researchers collected the SIF data for plants in eight major biomes, or ecosystem types, from the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) satellite and found that it didn't matter where the plants were, that just like earlier studies in single areas, where there was more SIF, the plants took up more carbon from photosynthesis, and vice versa. Xiao's research establishes this universal relationship across eight major ecosystem types and shows that SIF can indeed serve as a proxy for more time-intensive calculations.

"This is a big step towards being able to solely rely on satellite measurements," said Xiao. "Because it is a very simple model it could help reduce uncertainty in the data, lower computational costs and help better project climate change."

This is the first time the OCO-2 has been used in a global analysis based on SIF observations. In addition, the direct universal relationship revealed in this study allows the estimation of photosynthesis without knowing the ecosystem type. This is especially important for areas of the globe where the satellite might not have reliable, fine-scale data on the vegetation type. Xiao is currently working on developing global SIF estimates for areas ranging on the scale of a few to tens of square kilometers, which he says will be useful for the scientific community studying these topics.

Journal Reference:

Xing Li, Jingfeng Xiao, Binbin He, M. Altaf Arain, Jason Beringer, Ankur R. Desai, Carmen Emmel, David Y. Hollinger, Alisa Krasnova, Ivan Mammarella, Steffen M. Noe, Penélope Serrano Ortiz, A. Camilo Rey-Sanchez, Adrian V. Rocha, Andrej Varlagin. Solar-induced chlorophyll fluorescence is strongly correlated with terrestrial photosynthesis for a wide variety of biomes: First global analysis based on OCO-2 and flux tower observations. Global Change Biology, 2018; DOI: 10.1111/gcb.14297

Cite This Page:

Below are relevant articles that may interest you. ScienceDaily shares links and proceeds with scholarly publications in the TrendMD network.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
satellites; extrasolar planets; astrophysics; dark matter; global warming; climate; forest; air quality

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Researchers shine a light on more accurate way to estimate climate change

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By using satellite data from different major land-based ecosystems around the globe, researchers have found that the photosynthesis glow is the same across all vegetation, no matter the location. This first-of-its-kind global analysis could have significance in providing more accurate data for scientists working to model carbon cycle and eventually help better project climate change.

# data[].attributes.body
study finds that sea cucumbers decompose dead organisms and recycle them into nutrients for the ecosystem and help keep them healthy and clean.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The lowly sea cucumber strikes observers as a simple sausage-like creature, one that is far less interesting than brightly colored reef fish or color-changing octopi that share its coastal habitat.

The sea cucumber's unimpressive appearance belies the outsized role these creatures play in converting decomposing organic matter into recyclable nutrients and keeping coastal ecosystems healthy and clean, and overfishing them can have negative impacts on coastal marine environments, according to a new study focusing on a species of sea cucumber called a sandfish in the journal PeerJ.

The authors of the study titled "Effects of sandfish ( Holothuria scabra) removal on shallow-water sediments" are: Steven Lee of the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research and the University of Bremen; Amanda K. Ford of the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research and the University of Bremen; Sangeeta Mangubhai of WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society); Christian Wild of the University of Bremen; and Sebastian C.A. Ferse of Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research and the University of Bremen.

In a sense, sea cucumbers are the vacuum cleaners of coastal marine environments. Since these invertebrates are also the target of a growing demand from Asian markets -- dried sea cucumbers are known as "bêche-de-mer" -- the authors of the study sought to examine the ecological implications of removing them from tropical coastal areas.

"Our study was designed to determine exactly how the removal of these organisms is impacting coastal ecosystems, which in this case was a coral reef flat in Fiji," said lead author Steven Lee.

The experiment focused on a specific species of sea cucumber known as the sandfish ( Holothuria scabra), and was conducted along a wide reef flat along the coast of Vanua Levu, Fiji for several months between September 2015 and February 2016. After conducting a standard survey of the site in order to determine the density of sandfish on the sea bottom, the researchers created 16 square plots with four "treatments" containing different densities of sea cucumbers, all of which were designed to ascertain the implications of harvesting, and overharvesting, sea cucumbers from the reef.

The research team found that, in plots with high densities of sea cucumbers, oxygen conditions within the sediment stayed relatively stable, even under elevated sea surface temperatures experienced during the 2015/2016 El Niño event. In plots where all sea cucumbers had been removed, the penetration of oxygen into surface sediments decreased substantially, by 63 percent.

Overall, the researchers found that a reef's ability to handle increases in organic matter inputs from rainfall and flooding inland was diminished by the removal of sea cucumbers.

"Our findings suggest that overharvesting of sandfish and other sea cucumber species could have lasting effects on the marine ecosystems of small Pacific islands such as those in Fiji, resulting in changes that could limit the productivity of shallow water ecosystems," said Dr. Sangeeta Mangubhai, Director of WCS's Fiji Program. "Hopefully these results will help inform management decisions that will conserve moderate to high densities of sea cucumbers and protect these ecosystems in the interest of safeguarding coastal livelihoods and food security."

"Sea cucumbers are an important source of livelihood for many tropical coastal communities and are heavily fished throughout the tropical belt, but so far we didn't have a good understanding of the wider ecological implications of harvesting them" said Dr. Sebastian Ferse of the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT) in Bremen, who collaborated with WCS in conducting this study as part of a project that looks into the social and ecological resilience of coral reefs in the South Pacific. "The results of this study fill an important knowledge gap and are timely for the management of an important resource for coastal communities."

This work was supported by: the Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (ZMT); WCS; University of Bremen; the University of the South Pacific; and the residents of Natuvu village who permitted the study within their traditional fishing ground.

2018 has been designated by the International Coral Reef Initiative as the third International Year of the Reef. This is a great opportunity to come together to strengthen awareness on the plight of coral reefs, to step up and initiate conservation efforts.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
marine biology; fish; sea life; fisheries; oceanography; ecology; coral reefs; global warming

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Study in Fiji finds that removing sea cucumbers spells trouble for shallow coastal waters

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The sea cucumber's unimpressive appearance belies the outsized role these creatures play in converting decomposing organic matter into recyclable nutrients and keeping coastal ecosystems healthy and clean, and overfishing them can have negative impacts on coastal marine environments, according to a new study focusing on a species of sea cucumber called a sandfish.

# data[].attributes.body
Researchers have found a new way to estimate lava underneath the ground. it allows them to see how fast magma is recharging beneath Yellowstone.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Researchers at Washington State University and the University of Idaho have found a new way to estimate how fast magma is recharging beneath the Yellowstone supervolcano. While their findings offer no help in predicting if the volcano will erupt, they can now get a better understanding of a key factor -- a pool of basalt magma recharging the system -- in how it works.

"It is the coal in the furnace that's heating things up," said Peter Larson, a professor in the Washington State University School of the Environment. "It's heating up the boiler. The boiler is what explodes. This tells us what is heating the boiler."

Some 640,000 years have passed since the volcano's last major eruption. But it can be "super," having produced one of the largest known blasts on Earth and spewing more than 2,000 times as much ash as Mount St. Helens did in 1980.

A major element in the volcano's power is the explosive, silica-rich rhyolite that break's through the Earth's crust during an eruption. Larson and his colleagues focused on the plume of basalt magma heating the rhyolite from below.

"This gives us an idea of how much magma is recharging the volcano every year," said Larson, whose findings appear in the latest issue of the journal Geosphere.

With funding from the National Science Foundation, the researchers "spiked" several hot springs in Yellowstone National Park with deuterium, a stable hydrogen isotope. The researchers used the length of time needed for deuterium concentrations to return to background levels and the temperature of the hot springs to calculate the amount of water and heat flowing out of the springs. Using deuterium for estimating heat flow is safe for the environment and has no visual impact to distract from the park visitors' experience.

The team found that previous studies underestimated the amount of water coursing through the springs and the amount of heat leaving the springs. The data also allowed the team to estimate the amount of magma entering the supervolcano from the mantle.

The study also has implications for geothermal energy, helping inform how heat is transported to the earth's surface from molten rock.

Journal Reference:

Nicholas McMillan, Peter Larson, Jerry Fairley, Joseph Mulvaney-Norris, Cary Lindsey. Direct measurement of advective heat flux from several Yellowstone hot springs, Wyoming, USA. Geosphere, 2018; DOI: 10.1130/GES01598.1

Cite This Page:

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
volcanoes; geology; natural disasters; renewable energy; earth science; near-earth object impacts; water; geochemistry

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
New way to estimate magma beneath Yellowstone supervolcano: 'This tells us what is heating the boiler'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Researchers have found a new way to estimate how fast magma is recharging beneath the Yellowstone supervolcano. While their findings offer no help in predicting if the volcano will erupt, they can now get a better understanding of a key factor -- a pool of basalt magma recharging the system -- in how it works.

# data[].attributes.body
suggests that the rise of fossil fuel industry will result in a dramatic decline in the economy and will also result in the slow down of the industry.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
New research shows that the demise of the fossil-fuel industry has profound economic and geopolitical consequences. Relying on ground breaking modelling techniques, researchers from Radboud University, the University of Cambridge (C-EENRG), Cambridge Econometrics, The Open University (UK) and the University of Macau show that the consumption of fossil fuels will slow down or decline in the near future, as a result of ongoing technological change, potentially exacerbated by new climate policies.

This transition will result in clear winners, importers such as China and the EU, and losers, exporters such as Russia, the USA or Canada, which could see their fossil-fuel industries nearly shut down. If these countries keep up their investment and production levels despite declining demand, the global wealth loss could be huge: 1-4 trillion dollars, a loss comparable to that which triggered the financial crisis in 2007. Even the USA could not pull out from the transition, as it would only hurt itself even more. Global climate policy is therefore no longer a 'prisoner's dilemma' game. These findings by researchers from Radboud University, the University of Cambridge (C-EENRG), Cambridge Econometrics, The Open University (UK) and the University of Macau are published in Nature Climate Change.
A dangerous 'carbon bubble'
Several major economies rely heavily on fossil-fuel production and exports. The price of fossil-fuel companies' shares is calculated under the assumption that all fossil-fuel reserves will be consumed. But to do so would be inconsistent with the tight carbon budget set in the 2015 Paris Agreement, which limits the increase in global average temperature to 'well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels'. So far, this prospect has not deterred continuing investment in fossil fuels because many believe that climate policies will not be adopted, or at least not in the near future.

However, and crucially, researchers now show that ongoing technological change, by itself and even without new climate policies, is already reducing global demand growth for fossil fuels, which could peak in the near future. New climate policies would only aggravate the impact. Continuing investment in fossil fuels is therefore creating a dangerous 'carbon bubble' that could burst, with massive economic and geopolitical consequences.
Winners and losers
The scientists modelled the decline of demand for fossil fuels using novel modelling techniques that track the diffusion of low-carbon technologies on the basis of empirical data. Examples are technologies in power generation, cars and households that become more efficient and therefore diminish the use of fossil fuels. They then tracked what this means for national economies, as some economies lose an important industry (mostly due to loss of competitiveness), while other economies get rid of high current fossil-fuel expenditures and imports. "This means that by 2035, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth is affected negatively in producer countries (e.g. USA, Russia), while it is affected positively in importing countries (e.g. EU, China)," Dr Jean-Francois Mercure of Radboud University/C-EENRG explains.
'Free-riding' climate change mitigation: good or bad idea?
With the USA's withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, the scientists also modelled what would happen if the USA did indeed continue to invest in fossil-fuel assets instead of diversifying and divesting from them. The analysis shows their GDP would be reduced even further. Dr Mercure clarifies this point: "With a declining global fossil-fuel demand, fossil-fuel production in the USA is becoming uncompetitive, and may shut down. If the USA remains in the Paris Agreement, it will promote new low-carbon technologies and reduce its consumption of fossil fuels, creating jobs and mitigating its loss of income, despite losing its fossil-fuel industry. If it pulls out, it will nevertheless lose its fossil-fuel industry, but by not promoting low-carbon technologies, will miss out on job creation opportunities, while increasing its fossil-fuel imports by not reducing its domestic fossil-fuel consumption. The outcome is therefore worse if the USA pulls out."
A new financial crisis?
The study findings support the existence of a carbon bubble which, if not deflated early, could lead to a discounted global wealth loss of between 1 to 4 trillion dollars, a loss comparable to what triggered the 2007 financial crisis. "If countries keep investing in equipment to search for, extract, process and transport fossil fuels, even though their demand declines, they will end up losing money on these investments on top of their losses due to limited exports," Mercure explains. "Countries should instead carefully deflate the carbon bubble through investment in a variety of industries and steady divestment. The way in which this is done will determine the impact of the ongoing low-carbon transition on the financial sector."

Hector Pollitt, study co-author from Cambridge Econometrics and C-EENRG, adds: "This new research clearly shows the mismatch between the reductions in fossil fuel consumption required to meet carbon targets and the behaviour of investors. Governments have an important role to play in emphasising commitments to meet the Paris Agreement to ensure that the significant detrimental economic and geopolitical consequences we have identified are avoided."
Divestment and creative destruction
The process of transition towards a low-carbon economy is now becoming inevitable, as policies supporting this change have been developed and gradually implemented for some time. "New efficiency standards imply that we do more with the same amounts of energy, as older, less efficient technologies are gradually phased out. The transition is therefore irreversible; however its pace can vary according to whether and how new climate policies are implemented."

The scientists conclude that further economic damage from a potential bubble burst could be avoided by decarbonising early. "Divestment is a prudential thing to do. We should be carefully looking at where we are investing our money. For instance, much like companies, pension funds and other institutions currently invest in fossil-fuel assets. Following recommendations from central banks, commercial banks are increasingly looking at the financial risks of stranded fossil-fuel assets, even though their possible impacts have not yet been fully determined. Until now, observers mostly paid attention to the likely effectiveness of climate policies, but not to the ongoing and effectively irreversible technological transition. This level of 'creative destruction' appears inevitable now and must be carefully managed," Mercure concludes.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
energy and resources; fossil fuels; alternative fuels; global warming; energy and the environment; renewable energy; markets and finance; computer modeling; mathematical modeling; energy issues; economics; resource shortage

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'Carbon bubble' coming that could wipe trillions from the global economy: Demand for fossil fuels will decline in the near future with major macroeconomic and geopolitical consequences

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Unlike current expectations, new research suggests that the prospects of the fossil-fuel industry are not bright, and that its demise may have profound economic and geopolitical consequences. Relying on ground breaking modelling techniques, researchers show that the consumption of fossil fuels will slow down or decline in the near future, as a result of ongoing technological change, potentially exacerbated by new climate policies.

# data[].attributes.body
when oil is drilled it creates millions of gallons of wastewater which is used to treat roadways. the wastewater can leak its contaminants Earth.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Thirteen states allow the practice to help with deicing, dust control and road maintenance

Each year, finding and extracting oil and gas for energy produces hundreds of billions of gallons of wastewater in the United States. When recycled and spread on roads, the wastewater can leak its contaminants, including salt, radioactive elements and chemicals that interfere with hormones, into groundwater and surface water, researchers report May 30 in Environmental Science and Technology.

Currently, 13 states permit this wastewater to be used on streets for road maintenance, as a cheap deicing fluid or to keep down dust on unpaved roads. It's a particularly common practice in rural communities with low budgets for keeping roads in shape.

Spills from oil and gas wastewater treatment plants have sparked concern about contaminants such as radium (which naturally occurs in oil and natural gas deposits) that could affect human and environmental health. But the water's use on roads might be a bigger problem, the study shows. For example, in Pennsylvania, the amount of radium that leached from wastewater spread on roads from 2008 to 2014 is about four times as high as what was discharged from wastewater treatment facilities during the same period, the researchers calculated using existing data. And it was about 200 times as high as the amount leached during wastewater spills.

The new research could lead to policy interventions, such as requiring the wastewater to be tested for radium before being used on roads. And it also suggests a need for affordable deicing alternatives, the team suggests.

Oil soil

At least 13 states (highlighted) allow wastewater from oil and gas production to be spread on roads as a deicer, for dust control or for other road maintenance.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Treating roads with oil and gas wastewater may spread harmful pollution

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Thirteen states allow the practice to help with deicing, dust control and road maintenance Each year, finding and extracting oil and gas for energy produces hundreds of billions of gallons of wastewater in the United States.

# data[].attributes.body
Wildfires burned in Indonesia and travel to Thailand killing up to 100,000 people due to smoke inhalation and caused billions of dollars in damages.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In 2015, massive wildfires burned through Indonesia, sending thick smoke and haze as far as Thailand.

These fires were "the worst environmental disaster in modern history," says Thomas Smith, a wildfire expert at King's College London. Smith estimates that the fires and smoke killed 100,000 people in Indonesia and neighboring countries and caused billions of dollars in damage. The fires were costly for the rest of the planet, too: At their peak, the blazes belched more climate-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each day than did all U.S. economic activity.

Two years later and 13,000 kilometers away, a fire smoldered on the fringes of a barren, northern landscape. The remote blaze could have gone unnoticed. But Jessica McCarty and other fire researchers actively monitor satellite imagery of Earth the way some people check Facebook. One Sunday in August, McCarty, of Miami University in Ohio, was surprised to see massive plumes of what appeared to be white smoke over a swath of Greenland. The giant landmass had not been on her fire radar. It's mostly ice, and the parts that aren't have sparse vegetation.

The settings of these two blazes couldn't have been more different, but scientists suspect the two had something important in common: plenty of decaying organic matter known as peat.

Peatlands - which include bogs, other swampy wetlands and, yes, Greenland's icy soil - are ecosystems rich in decayed organic matter.

In their healthy, soggy state, peatlands are quite fire resistant. So when it comes to fire risk, peat-heavy landscapes haven't historically gotten the same attention as, say, the dry pine forests of the western United States. But with those devastating peat fires in Indonesia, the spotlight has turned to the planet's other peatlands, too.

Worldwide, peatlands store massive amounts of carbon in thick blankets of wet organic matter accumulated in the ground over centuries. And though they cover just 3 to 5 percent of Earth's land surface, peatlands store a quarter of all soil carbon. That adds up to more carbon than all of the world's forests combined.

But changes in land use - draining the water to plant acres of crops that demand drier soil, a common practice in tropical regions, or building a road through an area - can dry out the peat. And then, a single carelessly tossed cigarette or an errant lightning strike can ignite a fire that will smoke and smolder for months, releasing thousands of years of stored carbon as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Or fires set to clear land for agriculture can get out of hand, like they've done in Indonesia: Over the last few decades, the country has drained many of its peatlands to grow oil palms and other crops. Now, the country is seeing the worst-case scenario of what can happen when peatlands are disrupted and desiccated. In northern latitudes, meanwhile, thawing permafrost exposes peat that has been buried for years, which can fuel fires like those seen in Greenland last summer.

In the short term, peat fires clog the air with deadly smoke and smog. In densely populated areas such as Indonesia, blazes can devour homes and businesses and claim lives. But the fires' impact lingers long after the flames die down. Peat fires reshape entire ecosystems. Once the peat burns away, it can take thousands of years to build up again. And all of the carbon that was once neatly stored away is instead floating around in the atmosphere, contributing to climate change much like burning coal does.

Now, scientists are trying to get a better handle on peatlands and the effects of agriculture, development and a climate that's shifting toward warmer and drier. Recent discoveries of hidden peatlands in Africa and South America expand the extent of peat around the world, and up the stakes for protecting those carbon stores. New research is making it increasingly clear that, without a shift in approach, humans might strip away healthy peatlands and get, in return, a lot of climate-warming carbon dioxide.

Meet peat

Bogs don't conjure warm, fuzzy feelings for most people. The landscapes are often associated in popular culture with witches, Europe's mummified "bog bodies" and dreary weather. It's perhaps telling that "quagmire" - another word for a bog - is also used to refer to a sticky predicament. But to the scientists who study them, bogs are far from bleak.

"Most people walk far, far out of their way to avoid walking through these things, but I love them," says Merritt Turetsky, a peat researcher at the University of Guelph in Canada. The bogs that she studies in Canada and Alaska look like "hobbit ecosystems," she says, with all of the action happening low to the ground: stunted trees studding a colorful carpet of mosses and lichens. And, she points out, bogs play a crucial role in keeping our planet healthy.

Carbon is constantly being recycled throughout the world: It's taken in by plants as carbon dioxide, for example, and is dissolved in the oceans. But excess circulating carbon can throw ecosystems out of whack. Too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere makes the planet heat up; too much dissolved in the ocean makes the water more acidic. Long-term carbon stores in ocean sediments and rocks such as limestone pull carbon out of the short-term cycle, cloistering it where it can't do harm. The same goes for peatlands; dig down many meters into a bog, and you'll find carbon that's been buried for thousands of years.

And while the untrained eye might look at a bog and see nothing but a soggy morass that calls for waterproof waders, peatlands can be surprisingly diverse. In the tropics, where swamp forests are filled with large, leafy trees, blankets of peat are typically built up by decayed woody plants. Temperate peatlands, like those in the northern United States and Canada, sport scrubbier vegetation and are made mostly from decayed sphagnum moss.

Peat is "not exactly nonrenewable, but it accumulates so slowly," Turetsky says. "A fire can burn through a dry bog and literally release thousands of years of carbon in a couple minutes of combustion." She learned that firsthand as a graduate student.

Almost 20 years ago, she buried small bags of peat in a Canadian bog to study their decomposition. When she returned two years later to dig up the samples, her entire field site had gone up in smoke. Her precious data were gone.

"I was devastated for about a day," Turetsky says. "But then I started thinking about it: We were shocked that this system had burned."

The very next day, she started collecting new data, this time observing how the bog recovered from the fire. Back then, she says, people assumed that the only thing slowing down the accumulation of peat was its inevitable natural decomposition over time. "It was the first time I realized that decomposition wasn't the only process leading to peat loss," Turetsky says. "Fire also reduces peat by combusting it."

Hidden deposits

With an increased awareness of the threats to bogs has come a greater push to identify and protect the resources contained in these ecosystems. Recently, large new peat-rich spots have been discovered around the world. In January 2017, British and Congolese scientists announced in Nature that huge tracts of peat have been hiding in a lush expanse of forest straddling the equator in the Central Congo Basin. The area is home to groups of indigenous people but difficult for outsiders to access, so nobody had surveyed its peat resources until recently.

The researchers, led by Simon Lewis and Greta Dargie of University College London and the University of Leeds in England, trekked into the basin to extract "cores" to measure how deep the peat went in dozens of places. Based on those long cylindrical cross sections of soil, the researchers calculated that the peat deposits found in the jungle, some as deep as 5.9 meters, boost the global estimated amount of peat in the tropics by 36 percent. Then the team used satellite data to measure the boundaries of the peat. From there, the researchers estimated that the carbon stored in Central Congo Basin's peat is equivalent to about 20 years of fossil fuel emissions from the United States, at current rates.

Other groups have quantified existing peatlands remotely. A study published in August 2017 in Global Change Biology used data on where water accumulates and how it flows across the landscape to predict where peat might be hiding in tropical regions.

The analyses suggest that South America may be home to far more peat than previously known. A network of smaller peatlands in the Amazon Basin adds up to 629,000 square kilometers, an even larger area than the Congo find, says study coauthor Louis Verchot of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Cali, Colombia. This newfound South American peat plus the Congo area and some new finds in Asia boost known tropical peatlands from 440,000 square kilometers to 1.5 million.

Logging and mining already threaten the carbon stored in the trees of tropical forests. The peat-rich soil has value as well.

Where's the peat?

Out of balance

When dug up, peat is inherently flammable and is used in some places as a source of fuel. But in their natural, wet state, peatlands are resistant to fires. Even after months of drought, healthy peatlands stay moist. So scientists are trying to understand what factors change that dynamic - and what that means for fires and carbon storage.

It can be hard to test the effect of drying over time in a controlled way, but in one instance, Turetsky got lucky. In 1983, part of a fen, or marshland, in Alberta, Canada, was drained for a forest management project. The water table dropped roughly a quarter of a meter, a moderate amount. Eighteen years later, a wildfire burned in the area.

Turetsky and colleagues saw an opportunity for a natural experiment to answer a few open questions. The researchers tracked how drainage followed by fire affected the peatland over time, compared with areas that burned but weren't drained or parts that were drained but didn't burn.

The drained area was far more vulnerable than the undrained area to big changes after a fire, the researchers reported in 2015 in Scientific Reports. The combination of drainage and wildfire invited different plant species to move in over the next decade. The new plants changed the ecosystem from fire-resilient to one that was liable to burn again and again. And the leafy canopy of the broadleaf trees that took up residence in place of the once-dominant black spruces blocked out the sunlight necessary for peat-producing mosses to return.

The change Turetsky saw, from a fairly modest disturbance, was much bigger than she expected. She knew that completely drying out such a landscape would make it extremely fire-vulnerable - dramatic changes like those seen in Southeast Asia. But the change in the Alberta fen was much smaller, and yet still had a substantial effect.

Compared with areas that hadn't been drained, the areas that had been drained lost almost 500 more years' worth of accumulated peat, she says. (She calculated the figure based on the amount that burned and the rate at which peat accumulates.) That's 500 additional years of locked-away carbon released back into the atmosphere in a matter of weeks.

Farming's future

Draining the land plus "slash and burn" techniques to clear areas for agriculture are the main reasons that tropical peatlands are catching fire, says Alexander Cobb, an environmental scientist at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology. To make room for oil palm plantations and other crops, companies will raze existing trees (the source of future peat) and drain the water to dry out the soil.

In 2017, 139 scientists signed a letter to the editor in Global Change Biology arguing that draining tropical peatlands for agriculture is unsustainable. Denying the effects that agriculture has on these landscapes will have long-term consequences, such as more frequent and more devastating fires, the researchers wrote.

Now, Indonesia is working to restore its peatlands. It's not as simple as prohibiting crops in peat-rich areas, though. In densely populated island nations, space is at a premium and people still need to eat, says Susan Page, a tropical bog expert at the University of Leicester in England and one of the letter's signers. Solving the problem might require finding crops that can grow in soggier soil so bogs wouldn't have to be drained. But solutions are a long way off.

"A lot of the economic support for alternative crops doesn't really exist yet," Page says. "We're in the in-between stage of knowing we want crops but not having a suitable list of species."

Even in places where peatlands are protected from agriculture, there are other potential threats. Cobb and colleagues spent months figuring out how to bushwhack through dense trees with exposed roots as tall as a human to reach a rare, untouched peatland in Brunei, a small, wealthy Southeast Asian nation that Cobb says has been more proactive about protecting its peatlands than neighboring countries. The researchers plunged measuring devices into the soil to determine the depth of peat and how wet it was. With those data, the team created a model of the way rainfall affects the amount of peat that can build up in any particular place, published last June in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The conclusion: Along with total rainfall, timing of that rainfall matters. If rainfall becomes more irregular, as it's predicted to in the future, "then with the same average rainfall, the peatland can support less peat," Cobb says.

Safe if frozen

Land of ice and fire

Peatlands in cold places face challenges in a changing climate, too. In northern latitudes, including the Arctic, peat has been entombed for centuries in permafrost. Arctic warming is now exposing that peat, raising the risk of once-uncommon fires.

Last summer's Greenland fire is one such example. When McCarty spotted what she thought was a fire, she posted the satellite data on Twitter. Over the coming weeks, she and other scientists virtually checked in on the fire multiple times each day, becoming convinced that the smoke was fueled by peat.

For one thing, there's very little vegetation in the region that could provide fuel. Peat in the soil was one of the few options. Plus, the fire lingered for several weeks, but barely traveled. That's very characteristic of a peat fire, McCarty says. If the fire's not moving, it's probably smoldering, slowly burning through dense organic matter with a lot of smoke and minimal flames.

Scientists have not scoped out the Greenland fire site in person, says Guillermo Rein, a fire scientist at Imperial College London. But he's part of a team that's trying to organize an expedition to the remote area, to study the soil and confirm that peat was the fire's main driver.

Arctic peat has what Rein calls "dormant flammability." That is, when it's frozen, it's safe. But if the permafrost begins to thaw, these long-entombed carbon stores are exposed to the air and suddenly vulnerable to burning.

It would be easy to dismiss the Greenland fire as a one-off event, a fluke. But really, it's just one match in a whole box. Peat blazes have been recorded in Alaska and Siberia, as well as across Canada. Evidence suggests that fires like these will become more common. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's annual Arctic Report Card, released December 12, showed that ground-level air in the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the global average surface air temperature. By the end of this century, carbon release from Arctic burning is likely to quadruple, according to a 2016 study in Environmental Research Letters. Plus, fires and permafrost thaw can start a feedback cycle that hastens future thawing, McCarty says.

The precise long-term consequences of such thawing on peat stores in the Arctic are still unclear. While peat emerging from frozen permafrost initially dries and cracks, the area might eventually flood and rewet as ice melts elsewhere, according to a 2015 paper in Scientific Reports. But until then, the dried-out peat is a fire risk.

These Arctic and high-latitude peat fires might not immediately affect as many people as tropical peat fires, because for the most part the fires aren't in agricultural hot spots or urban centers. But the global consequences, in terms of carbon release, could be just as severe.

Some researchers expect that as climate change pushes agriculture and human populations farther north, "people are going to come more in contact with these mostly pristine landscapes" and disturb them in ways that could increase fire risk, Page says. In Canada, she says, "decades down the line, we could see a similar fire dynamic as we're seeing in Southeast Asia" - uncontrolled fires causing irreparable damage to long-term carbon stores.

"There's more and more talk in the north about draining northern soils," Turetsky adds. "We already know what's going to happen."

This article appears in the March 17, 2018 issue of Science News with the headline, "Smoke Signals: Burning peatlands have environmental researchers on alert."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
When bogs burn, the environment takes a hit

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In 2015, massive wildfires burned through Indonesia, sending thick smoke and haze as far as Thailand. These fires were "the worst environmental disaster in modern history," says Thomas Smith, a wildfire expert at King's College London. Smith estimates that the fires and smoke killed 100,000 people in Indonesia and neighboring countries and caused billions of dollars in damage.

# data[].attributes.body
there is an invisible barrier that reduces carbon uptake going into the atmosphere. this results in "slower removal of anthropogenic carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and thus has implications for predicting future global climate."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
An invisible layer of biological compounds on the sea surface reduces the rate at which carbon dioxide gas moves between the atmosphere and the oceans, scientists have reported.

Scientists from Exeter, Heriot-Watt and Newcastle universities published their research in the journal Nature Geoscience today, and say the findings have major implications for predicting our future climate.

The world's oceans currently absorb around a quarter of all anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, making them the largest long-term sink of carbon on Earth.

Atmosphere-ocean gas exchange is controlled by turbulence at the sea surface, the main cause of which is waves generated by wind. Greater turbulence means increased gas exchange and, until now, it was difficult to calculate the effect of biological surfactants on this exchange.

The Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), Leverhulme Trust and European Space Agency funded team developed a novel experimental system that directly compares "the surfactant effect" between different sea waters collected along oceanographic cruises, in real time.

Using this and satellite observations the team then found that surfactants can reduce carbon dioxide exchange by up to 50 percent.

Dr Ryan Pereira, a Lyell Research Fellow at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, said: "As surface temperatures rise, so too do surfactants, which is why this is such a critical finding. The warmer the ocean surface gets, the more surfactants we can expect, and an even greater reduction in gas exchange.

"What we discovered at 13 sites across the Atlantic Ocean is that biological surfactants suppress the rate of gas exchange caused by the wind. We made unique measurements of gas transfer using a purpose-built tank that could measure the relative exchange of gases impacted only by surfactants present at these sites.

"These natural surfactants aren't necessarily visible like an oil slick, or a foam, and they are even difficult to identify from the satellites monitoring our ocean's surface.

"We need to be able to measure and identify the organic matter on the surface microlayer of the ocean so that we can reliably estimate rates of gas exchange of climate active gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane."

Professor Rob Upstill-Goddard, professor of marine biogeochemistry at Newcastle University, said: "These latest results build on our previous findings that, contrary to conventional wisdom, large sea surface enrichments of natural surfactants counter the effects of high winds.

"The suppression of carbon dioxide uptake across the ocean basin due to surfactants, as revealed by our work, implies slower removal of anthropogenic carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and thus has implications for predicting future global climate."

The University of Exeter team, Drs Jamie Shutler (Geography) and Ian Ashton (Renewable Energy) led the satellite component of the work.

Dr Ashton said: "Combining this new research with a wealth of satellite data available allows us to consider the effect of surfactants on gas exchange across the entire Atlantic Ocean, helping us to monitor carbon dioxide on a global scale."

The team collected samples across the Atlantic Ocean in 2014, during a NERC study on the Atlantic Meridional Transect (AMT). Each year the AMT cruise undertakes biological, chemical and physical oceanographic research between the UK and the Falkland Islands, South Africa or Chile, a distance of up to 13,500km, to study the health and function of our oceans.

The research cruise crosses a range of ecosystems from sub-polar to tropical and from coastal and shelf seas and upwelling systems to oligotrophic mid-ocean gyres.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
nature; marine biology; fish; sea life; global warming; geography; oceanography; air quality

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Invisible barrier on ocean surface can reduce carbon uptake

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
An invisible layer of biological compounds on the sea surface reduces the rate at which carbon dioxide gas moves between the atmosphere and the oceans, scientists have reported. Scientists from Exeter, Heriot-Watt and Newcastle universities published their research in the journal Nature Geoscience today, and say the findings have major implications for predicting our future climate.

# data[].attributes.body
Scientists have discovered pockets of methane that are coming up from the sea floor. this can pose a problem to any state on the border of this.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For the past two years, scientists from Oregon State University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have surveyed the Pacific Northwest near-shore region mapping sites where underwater bubble streams signify methane gas is being released from the seafloor.

And what they have found is eye-opening. Since the first evidence of underwater methane was discovered in the late 1980s, only about 100 "seep sites" had been identified along the Northwest coast through 2015. They often were discovered by accident, when fishermen would spot anomalies on their fish-finders that turned out to be acoustic reflections of the bubbling methane gas.

But over the past two years the scientists -- aided by new sonar technology on the Exploration Vessel (E/V) Nautilus, owned and operated by the Ocean Exploration Trust -- have purposefully gone seeking evidence of underwater methane and have expanded the total number of offshore seep emission sites to a whopping 1,000 locations.

It is not yet clear whether the methane presents an opportunity for a new source of energy or a potentially serious environmental threat, but for now the researchers want to map the distribution of the sites and conduct research on the composition and sources of the gas. They believe they will discover new methane seeps this summer when they utilize several research vessels to conduct additional mapping off the Northwest coast.

"Using this new sonar system, we've mapped only about 38 percent of the seafloor and about 25 percent of the water column data from Washington to Northern California," said Susan Merle, an Oregon State oceanographer who works out of OSU's Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, Ore. "No doubt, there are more sites out there, and we hope to find them."

The researchers will embark on another expedition this June aboard the E/V Nautilus and use a remotely operated vehicle during daytime to collect samples of gas, methane hydrate, seepwater, fauna and rocks right where the methane is exiting the seafloor. Investigating these samples will help tell the story of the origin of the seeping methane and its impact on life at these sites and in the overlying ocean.

During the night, they will do extensive mapping of areas not yet surveyed in an attempt to locate more methane seeps.

The potentially vast storehouse of this potent greenhouse gas could provide an intriguing energy source, but it is widely distributed and may not be economical to extract, noted Robert Embley, an OSU geophysicist who spent much of his career with NOAA's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory.

"It is very tricky and potentially hazardous to attempt to extract methane," Embley said. "Mining would have all sorts of implications. When methane appears as a hydrate it can look like a chunk of ice or snow. But when you try to bring it to the surface, it immediately begins to decompose. In addition to hydrates, we've found hundreds of bubble streams, but their origin and scope remains to be seen."

In their survey, the researchers have found that together with some free gas, much of the methane below an ocean depth of 500 meters (or about 1,600 feet), is found as solidified hydrates. Above 500 meters, it usually appears as a gas in bubble streams.

"One question we'd like to address is whether hydrates are formed by methane gas seeping out of the Earth and meeting the cold, deep seawater, or are the bubbles we're seeing a result of the hydrates breaking down and releasing gas," said John Lupton, a chemical oceanographer with NOAA/PMEL.

Just how much methane is off the Northwest coast is uncertain, the researchers say. But it appears to be a lot and it could cause potential environmental problems.

"One concern is what would happen during a major Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake," Embley pointed out. "It would add more permeability to the seafloor, add more pathways for the methane to escape, and increase the potential for its release to the atmosphere."

So what is happening with all of the methane that is bubbling up out of the seafloor and into the Pacific Ocean waters?

Tamara Baumberger, a researcher with the Cooperative Institute for Marine Resources Studies -- a joint OSU/NOAA center based at Hatfield -- has sampled some of the bubbles from the site and found different chemical signatures that helped the researchers pinpoint the origin of the methane. Some of it was "thermogenic" -- the result of organic material like dead plankton being heated up and transformed into the gas. Some was "biogenic," in which the organic material was altered by microbial activity.

"When methane is in seawater, it often is oxidized into carbon dioxide by microbial activity, which can keep much of it from reaching the atmosphere," Baumberger said. "The downside, of course, is that the newly formed CO2 is also a problem and it can both reach the atmosphere and increase ocean acidification."

Baumberger said that methane released into shallow water can get into the atmosphere more quickly because the bacteria don't have enough time to oxidize it. However, the researchers are unsure how many methane seeps lie in shallow water, which they define as less than about 150 meters.

"We know very little about methane seep distribution in shallow water because it is very difficult to map there," Merle said. "But everywhere we looked for seeps, we found them. That's one of our goals this June is to get a better handle on how prevalent the shallower seeps might be."

OSU's La Verne Kulm was one of the first to discover methane seeps off the coast in the 1980s, and a decade later, researchers documented ample methane at Hydrate Ridge off the Oregon coast. University of Washington scientist Paul Johnson mapped many of the Washington locations, and OSU's Marta Torres found more hydrates off the Heceta Bank in 1998.

Beginning in 2016, though, the search began in earnest and the researchers have found a large aggregation of methane seep sites off the Coquille Bank near Coos Bay, as well as in the Astoria Canyon, "which is full of them," Merle said. "Wherever we find canyons, we seem to find methane."

They also discovered methane seeps off Newport, Oregon, in water that was only 40 meters deep.

Some of the methane samples included traces of helium, which is only found in the mantle, the researchers noted.

"This research has raised some interesting questions," Baumberger said. "How common is mantle gas in the Cascadia Margin methane seeps? How stable is the system during an earthquake? Will a warming ocean lead to an increase in the release of methane? What we're trying to do is identify how much is out there and establish a baseline. Then we can address these and other scientific questions."

The NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research and the Ocean Exploration Trust, Inc., supported the research.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
global warming; climate; renewable energy; oceanography; geography; water; environmental issues; earthquakes

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Widespread methane seeps off Oregon coast

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For the past two years, scientists from Oregon State University and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have surveyed the Pacific Northwest near-shore region mapping sites where underwater bubble streams signify methane gas is being released from the seafloor. And what they have found is eye-opening.