NASA Builds Sophisticated Earth-Observing Microwave Radiometer

June 6, 2013 A NASA team delivered in May a sophisticated microwave radiometer specifically designed to overcome the pitfalls that have plagued similar Earth-observing instruments in the past. Literally years in the making, the new radiometer, which is designed to measure the intensity of electromagnetic radiation, specifically microwaves, is equipped with one of the most sophisticated signal-processing systems ever developed for an Earth science satellite mission. Its developers at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., shipped the instrument to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., where technicians will integrate it into the agency's Soil Moisture Active Passive spacecraft, along with a synthetic aperture radar system developed by JPL. With the two instruments, the NASA mission will globally map soil moisture levels -- data that will benefit climate models -- when it begins operations a few months after its launch in late 2014. In particular, the data will give scientists the ability to discern global soil moisture levels, a crucial gauge for drought monitoring and prediction, and fill gaps in scientists' understanding of the water cycle. Also important, it could help crack an unsolved climate mystery: the location of the places in the Earth system that store carbon dioxide. Years in the Making Building the new radiometer took years to accomplish and involved the development of advanced algorithms and an onboard computing system capable of crunching a deluge of data estimated at 192 million samples per second. Despite the challenges, team members believe they've created a state-of-the-art instrument that is expected to triumph over the data-acquisition troubles encountered by many other Earth-observing instruments. The signal received by the instrument will have penetrated most non-forest vegetation and other barriers to gather the naturally emitted microwave signal that indicates the presence of moisture. The wetter the soil, the colder it will look in the data. The instrument's measurements include special features that allow scientists to identify and remove the unwanted "noise" caused by radio-frequency interference from the many Earth-based services that operate near the instrument's microwave-frequency band. The same noise has contaminated some of the measurements gathered by the European Space Agency's Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity satellite and, to a certain extent, NASA's Aquarius satellite. These spacecraft found that the noise was particularly prevalent over land. "This is the first system in the world to do all this," said Instrument Scientist Jeff Piepmeier, who came up with the concept at NASA Goddard. Tuning into Earth's Noise Like all radiometers, the new instrument "listens" to the noises emanating from a very noisy planet. Like a radio, it's specifically tuned to a particular frequency band -- 1.4 gigahertz or "L-Band" -- that the International Telecommunication Union in Geneva, Switzerland, has set aside for radio astronomy and passive Earth remote-sensing applications. In other words, users only may listen to the "static" from which they can derive the moisture data. Despite the prohibition, however, the band is far from pristine. "Radiometers listen to the desired signal in the spectrum band, as well as undesired signals that end up in the same band," said Damon Bradley, a NASA

Goddard digital signal-processing engineer who worked with Piepmeier and others to create the radiometer's advanced signal-processing capabilities. As operators of SMOS quickly discovered shortly after the spacecraft's launched in 2009, unwanted noise certainly exists in the signal. Signal-spillover from neighboring spectrum users -- particularly air-traffic control radars, cellphones and other communication devices -- interferes with the microwave signal users want to gather. Just as troublesome is the interference caused by radar systems and TV and radio transmitters who violate International Telecommunication Union regulations. As a result, the global soil-moisture maps generated by SMOS data sometimes contain blank, data-less patches. "Radio-frequency interference can be intermittent, random and unpredictable," Bradley said. "There's not a lot you can do about it." That's why Bradley and others on Piepmeier's team turned to technology. New Algorithms Implemented In 2005 Bradley, Piepmeier and other NASA Goddard engineers teamed with researchers at the University of Michigan and Ohio State University, who already had created algorithms, or step-by-step computational procedures, for mitigating radio interference. Together, they designed and tested a sophisticated digitalelectronics radiometer that could use these algorithms to help scientists find and remove unwanted radio signals, thereby greatly increasing data accuracy and reducing areas where high-interference levels would impede measurements. Conventional radiometers deal with fluctuations in microwave emissions by measuring signal power across a wide bandwidth and integrating it over a long time interval to get an average. The SMAP radiometer, however, will take those time intervals and slice them up into much shorter time intervals, making it easier to detect the rogue, human-produced RFI signals. "By chopping the signal in time, you can throw away the bad and give scientists the good," Piepmeier said. Another step in the radiometer's development was the creation of a more powerful instrument processor. Because the current state-of-the-art flight processor -- the RAD750 -- is incapable of handling the radiometer's expected torrent of data, the team had to develop a custom-designed processing system featuring more powerful, radiation-hardened field programmable gate arrays, which are specialized application-specific integrated circuits. These circuits are capable of withstanding the harsh, radiation-rich environment found in space. The team then programmed these circuits to implement the University of Michigan-developed algorithms as flight signal-processing hardware. The team also replaced the detector with an analog digital converter and bolstered the overall system by creating ground-based signal-processing software to remove interference. "SMAP has the most advanced digital processing-based radiometer ever built," Piepmeier said. "It took years to develop the algorithms, the ground software, and the hardware. What we produced is the best L-band radiometer for Earth science."

Stalagmites Provide New View of Abrupt Climate Events Over 100,000 Years
June 6, 2013 A new set of long-term climate records based on cave stalagmites collected from tropical Borneo shows that the western tropical Pacific responded very differently than other regions of the globe to

abrupt climate change events. The 100,000-year climate record adds to data on past climate events, and may help scientists assess models designed to predict how Earth's climate will respond in the future. The new record resulted from oxygen isotope analysis of more than 1,700 calcium carbonate samples taken from four stalagmites found in three different northern Borneo caves. The results suggest that climate feedbacks within the tropical regions may amplify and prolong abrupt climate change events that were first discovered in the North Atlantic. The results were scheduled to be published June 6 in Science Express, the electronic advance online publication of the journal Science, and will appear later in an issue of printed publication. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation. Today, relatively subtle changes in the tropical Pacific's ocean and atmosphere have profound effects on global climate. However, there are few records of past climate changes in this key region that have the length, resolution and age controls needed to reveal the area's response to abrupt climate change events. "This is a new record from a very important area of the world," said Kim Cobb, an associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "This record will provide a new piece of the puzzle from the tropical Pacific showing us how that climate system has responded to forcing events over the past 100,000 years." Among the findings were some surprises that show just how complicated Earth's climate system can be. While the stalagmite record reflected responses to abrupt changes known as Heinrich events, another major type of event -- known as Dansgaard-Oeschger excursions -- left no evidence in the Borneo stalagmites. Both types of abrupt climate change events are prominently featured in a previously-published stalagmite climate record from China -- which is only slightly north of Borneo. "To my knowledge, this is the first record that so clearly shows sensitivity to one set of major abrupt climate change events and not another," said Cobb. "These two types of abrupt change events appear to have different degrees of tropical Pacific involvement, and because the tropical Pacific speaks with such a loud voice when it does speak, we think this is extremely important for understanding the mechanisms underlying these events." The researchers were also surprised to discover a very large and abrupt signal in their stalagmite climate records precisely when super-volcano Toba erupted nearby, roughly 74,000 years ago. The team recovered the stalagmites from caves in Gunung Mulu and Gunung Buda National Parks, in northern Borneo, which is located a few degrees north of the Equator in the western Pacific. Back at their Georgia Tech lab, they analyzed the stalagmites for the ratio of oxygen isotopes contained in samples of calcium carbonate, the material from which the stalagmites were formed. That ratio is set by the oxygen isotopes in rainfall at the site, as the water that seeped into the ground dissolved limestone rock and dripped into the caves to form the stalagmites. The stalagmites accumulate at a rate of roughly one centimeter every thousand years. "Stalagmites are time capsules of climate signals from thousands of years in the past," said Stacy Carolin, a Georgia Tech Ph.D. candidate who gathered and analyzed the stalagmites. "We have instrumental records of climate only for the past 100 years or so, and if we want to look deeper into the past, we have to find records like these that locked in climate signals we can extract today." In the laboratory, Carolin sawed each stalagmite in half, opening it like a hot dog bun. She then used a tiny drill bit to take samples of the calcium carbonate down the center at one-millimeter steps. Because the stalagmites grew at varying rates, each sample represented as little as 60 years of time, or as much as 200 years. The precise ages of the samples were determined by measuring uranium and thorium isotope ratios, an analysis done with the help of Jess F. Adkins, a professor at the California Institute of Technology and a co-author of the study.

Rainfall oxygen isotopic ratios are good indicators of the amount of rainfall occurring throughout the region, as determined by a modern-day calibration study recently published by another graduate student in Cobb's lab. Merging data from the four different stalagmites provided a record of precipitation trends in the western Pacific over the past 100,000 years. That information can be compared to stalagmite and ice core climate records obtained elsewhere in the world. "This record, which spans the entire last glacial period, adds significantly to the understanding of how various climate forcings are felt by the western tropical Pacific," Carolin added. Climate scientists are interested in learning more about abrupt climate changes because they indicate that the climate system may have "tipping points." So far, the climate system has responded to rising carbon dioxide levels at a fairly steady rate, but many scientists worry about possible nonlinear effects. "As a society, we haven't really thought enough about the fact that we are moving Earth's climate system toward a new state very quickly," said Cobb. "It's important to remember that the climate system has important nonlinearities that are most evident in these abrupt climate events. Ultimately, we'd like to be able to reproduce the global signatures of these abrupt climate events with numerical models of the climate system, and investigate the physics that drive such events." For Carolin, studying the half-meter-long stalagmites brought an awareness that Earth has not always been as we know it today. "You have to be impressed with the scope of what you are studying, and recognize that the state our climate is in today is incredibly different from Earth's climate during the last Ice Age," she said. "As we consider how humans may be affecting climate, dissecting what was going on tens of thousands of years ago in all regions of the globe can help scientists better predict how the Earth will respond to modern climate forcings." In addition to those already mentioned, the research team included Brian Clark, manager of the Gunung Mulu National Park where the samples were gathered; Syria Lejau and Jenny Malang, Gunung Mulu cave guides who aided in sample collection; Jessica Conroy, a Georgia Tech postdoctoral fellow; and Andrew Tuen, a professor at the Universiti Malaysia Sarawak. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation through PECASE Award ATM-0645291. The findings and conclusions are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the NSF.

Pollution in Northern Hemisphere Helped Cause 1980s African Drought

June 6, 2013 Decades of drought in central Africa reached their worst point in the 1980s, causing Lake Chad, a shallow lake used to water crops in neighboring countries, to almost dry out completely. The shrinking lake and prolonged drought was initially blamed on overgrazing and bad agricultural practices. More recently, Lake Chad became an example of global warming. New University of Washington research, to be published in Geophysical Research Letters, shows that the drought were caused at least in part by Northern Hemisphere air pollution. Aerosols emanating from coal-burning factories in the United States and Europe during the 1960s, '70s and '80s cooled the entire Northern Hemisphere, shifting tropical rain bands south. Rains no longer reached the Sahel region, a band that spans the African continent just below the Sahara desert.

When clean-air legislation passed in the U.S. and Europe, the rain band shifted back, and the drought lessened. Related research by the UW researchers and their collaborators shows that global warming is now causing the land-covered Northern Hemisphere to warm faster than the Southern Hemisphere, further reversing the pre1980s trend. Previous research has suggested a connection between coal-burning and the Sahel drought, but this was the first study that used decades of historical observations to find that this drought was part of a global shift in tropical rainfall, and then used multiple climate models to determine why. "One of our research strategies is to zoom out," said lead author Yen-Ting Hwang, a UW doctoral student in atmospheric sciences. "Instead of studying rainfall at a particular place, we try to look for the larger-scale patterns." To determine that the Sahel drought was part of a broader shift, the authors looked at precipitation from all rain gauges that had continuous readings between 1930 and 1990. Other places on the northern edge of the tropical rain band, including northern India and South America, also experienced dryer climates in the 1970s and '80s. Meanwhile, places on the southern edge of the rain band, such as northeast Brazil and the African Great Lakes, were wetter than normal. To understand the reason, authors looked at all 26 climate models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Researchers discovered that almost all the models also showed some southward shift, and that cooling from sulfate aerosols in the Northern Hemisphere was the primary cause. "We think people should know that these particles not only pollute air locally, but they also have these remote climate effects," Hwang said. Light-colored sulfate aerosols are emitted mainly by dirty burning of coal. They create hazy air that reflects sunlight, and also lead to more reflective, longer-lasting clouds. People living in the Northern Hemisphere did not notice the cooling, the authors said, because it balanced the heating associated with the greenhouse effect from increased carbon dioxide, so temperatures were steady. "To some extent, science messed this one up the first time around," said co-author Dargan Frierson, a UW associate professor of atmospheric sciences. "People thought that a large part of that drought was due to bad farming practices and desertification. But over the last 20 years or so we've realized that that was quite wrong, and that large-scale ocean and atmosphere patterns are significantly more powerful in terms of shaping where the rains fall." The models did not show as strong a shift as the observations, Frierson said, suggesting that ocean circulation also played a role in the drought. The good news is that the U.S. Clean Air Act and its European counterpart had an unintended positive effect beyond the improved air quality and related health benefits. Although shorter-term droughts continue to affect the Sahel, the long-term drought began to recover in the 1980s. "We were able to do something that was good for us, and it also benefited people elsewhere," Frierson said. The work was funded by the National Science Foundation. Sarah Kang at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology in South Korea was a co-author.

Drought, River Fragmentation Forcing Endangered Fish out of Water, Biologist Finds
June 6, 2013 A Kansas State University researcher is discovering that the North American drought has caused dramatic changes in native fish communities. "A couple of key species that we have been studying have virtually disappeared where they historically were abundant," said Keith Gido, professor of biology who researches fish ecology and conservation of aquatic systems. Gido and his team study state and federal endangered and threatened fish species in river ecosystems, including the Arkansas, Kansas, Gila, San Juan, Red and Platte rivers. He travels to these different rivers to study imperiled species such as the Colorado pikeminnow, the loach minnow, the spikedace in New Mexico and the plains minnow and silver chub in Kansas. Before the drought, Gido's team observed more than 300 silver chub in the Ninnescah River in southern Kansas in summer 2011. In 2012, after the second consecutive year of severe drought, his team saw three silver chub during their sampling. They found zero silver chub in spring 2013. "We are in a conservation crisis," Gido said. "Our fish communities have changed dramatically and we are losing a lot of native species." Gido said two activities -- river fragmentation and groundwater withdrawals -- largely affect aquatic systems and native fish species in the Great Plains. When combined with the drought, these two activities result in dramatically reduced fish communities and lower species diversity. River fragmentation occurs when barriers, such as dams, break up the long sections of connected river and create shorter segments. Gido and his research team -- including Joshuah Perkin, a postdoctoral researcher and 2012 Kansas State University doctoral graduate in biology, and Thomas Turner, a population geneticist at the University of New Mexico -- have spent years studying how river fragmentation affects fish communities in Great Plains rivers. They are currently studying the genetic diversity of populations in different rivers and different fragment sizes. In previous research, Perkin and Gido found that river fragments less than 100 kilometers make it difficult -- if not impossible -- for certain fish species to survive. The research appeared in the journal Fisheries. "Some fish species will release their eggs into the river and these eggs have to drift downstream for a certain distance to develop," Gido said. "They basically cannot persist in fragments less than 100 kilometers." Additionally, reservoirs and ponds behind dams often are stocked with nonnative fish, such as largemouth bass, that can move into the stream fragments and prey on native fish. This increases the effects of shrunken rivers. "As the water levels decline, if you have a nonnative predator in the system, then the predators' effects are much stronger and have a more drastic effect on fish," Gido said. "We have seen a gradual decline in native diversity over time. The drought exacerbates any of the effects because with fragmentation, if the stream is dry and the water is lower, the fish are unable to move around a barrier." Gido said countermeasures, such as removing nonnative fish predators, may prevent more native fish from disappearing. Nonnative predator removals are currently under way in the San Juan and Gila rivers, Gido said.

"It might not be something that you can do all the time, but during drought conditions it might be possible to remove predators to give native fish a chance and maintain diversity," Gido said. Maintaining diversity is important to maintain healthy river ecosystem functions, Gido said. As part of the ecosystem, fish can influence the cycling of stream and river nutrients. Streams filter nutrients that flow to rivers or other large bodies. When this balance is off, too many nutrients can result in negative effects, such as harmful algae blooms. A lot of native species of fish also provide recreational opportunities, so there is a societal interest in conserving native fish, Gido said. "It's really a challenge because you have things like dams and nonnative sport fish that benefit society, but they have a negative effect on native fish," Gido said. "Research agencies have a challenging problem of managing these recreational opportunities but also preserving the natural diversity. We want to find more information about how this system works and how these things can coexist."

Gido is involved in several additional research projects. Two projects involve western desert fish in the Colorado River system. The Bureau of Reclamation and the Great Plains Landscape Conservation Cooperative have funded the research. The researchers also are studying streams at the Konza Prairie Biological Station to understand how the presence of fish -- particularly grazing minnows -- influences the ecosystem. The project is part of a large-scale $3.3 million National Science Foundation grant to study stream ecosystems in Kansas, Puerto Rico, Georgia and Alaska.

Irish Chronicles Reveal Links Between Cold Weather and Volcanic Eruptions
June 5, 2013 Medieval chronicles have given an international group of researchers a glimpse into the past to assess how historical volcanic eruptions affected the weather in Ireland up to 1500 years ago. By critically assessing over 40,000 written entries in the Irish Annals and comparing them with measurements taken from ice cores, the researchers successfully linked the climatic aftermath of volcanic eruptions to extreme cold weather events in Ireland over a 1200-year period from 431 to 1649. Their study, which has been published today, 6 June, in IOP Publishing's journal Environmental Research Letters, showed that over this timescale up to 48 explosive volcanic eruptions could be identified in the Greenland Ice Sheet Project (GISP2) ice-core, which records the deposition of volcanic sulfate in annual layers of ice. Of these 48 volcanic events, 38 were associated, closely in time, with 37 extreme cold events, which were identified by systematically examining written entries in the Irish Annals and picking out directly observed meteorological phenomena and conditions, such as heavy snowfall and frost, prolonged ice covering lakes and rivers, and contemporary descriptions of abnormally cold weather. Lead author of the study, Dr Francis Ludlow, from the Harvard University Center for the Environment and Department of History, said: "It's clear that the scribes of the Irish Annals were diligent reporters of severe cold weather, most probably because of the negative impacts this had on society and the biosphere.

"Our major result is that explosive volcanic eruptions are strongly, and persistently, implicated in the occurrence of cold weather events over this long timescale in Ireland. In their severity, these events are quite rare for the country's mild maritime climate." Through the injection of sulphur dioxide gas into the stratosphere, volcanic eruptions can play a significant role in the regulation of the Earth's climate. Sulphur dioxide gas is converted into sulphate aerosol particles after eruptions which reflect incoming sunlight and result in an overall temporary cooling of the Earth's surface. Whilst the global effects of recent eruptions are quite well-known, such as the Mount Pinatubo eruption almost 22 years ago (15 June 1991), less is known about their effects on climate before the beginning of instrumental weather recording, or their effects on regional scales; the Irish Annals provided an opportunity to explore both of these issues. The Irish Annals contain over one million written words and around 40,000 distinct written entries, detailing major historical events on an annual basis, and providing both systematic and sustained reporting of meteorological extremes. The dating and reliability of the Annals can be gauged by comparing reported events to those which are independently known, such as solar and lunar eclipses. "With a few honourable exceptions, the Irish record of extreme events has only been used anecdotally, rather than systematically surveyed and exploited for the study of the climate history of Ireland and the North Atlantic, and so the richness of the record has been largely unrecognized," continued Dr Ludlow. Although the effect of big eruptions on the climate in summer is largely to cause cooling, during the winter, low-latitude eruptions in the tropics have instead been known to warm large parts of the northern hemisphere as they cause a strengthening of the westerly winds that brings, for example, warmer oceanic air to Europe; however, this study identified several instances when low-latitude eruptions appeared to correspond to extreme cold winters in Ireland. One example is the 1600 eruption in Peru of Huaynaputina, which the researchers found, against expectations, to be associated with extreme cold winter weather in Ireland in the following years. "The possibility that tropical eruptions may result in severe winter cooling for Ireland highlights the considerable complexity of the volcano-climate system in terms of the regional expression of the response of climate to volcanic disturbances. "It is on the regional scale that we need to refine our understanding of this relationship as ultimately, it is on this scale that individuals and societies plan for extreme weather," continued Dr Ludlow.

NASA's IceBridge Mission Contributes to New Map of Antarctica

June 5, 2013 A new dataset called Bedmap2 gives a clearer picture of Antarctica from the ice surface down to the bedrock below. Bedmap2 is a significant improvement on the previous collection of Antarctic data -known as Bedmap -- that was produced more than 10 years ago. The product was a result of work led by the British Antarctic Survey, where researchers compiled decades worth of geophysical measurements, such as surface elevation measurements from NASA's Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite, known as ICESat, and ice thickness data collected by Operation IceBridge.

With effects ranging from influencing ocean currents to raising sea level, Antarctica plays a large role in the global climate system. Researchers are using a variety of methods to understand how Antarctica will react to a changing climate, but limited information on ice thickness and what lies beneath the ice makes this work challenging. Now, thanks to work led by the British Antarctic Survey published recently in the journal The Cryosphere, scientists will have a new detailed map of the frozen continent. A Better Map Bedmap2, like the original Bedmap, is a collection of three datasets -- surface elevation, ice thickness and bedrock topography. Over the past decade there have been many Antarctic surveys, which vastly increased the amount of available data. Researchers used data from satellites, aircraft and surface-based surveys to build a data product with higher resolution, greater coverage and improved precision. Both Bedmap and Bedmap2 are laid out as grids covering the entire continent, but with a tighter grid spacing, Bedmap2 includes many surface and sub-ice features too small to be seen in the previous dataset. The millions of additional data points in Bedmap2 also cover a larger percentage of Antarctica. Additionally, the extensive use of GPS data in more recent surveys improves the precision of the new dataset. Improvements in resolution, coverage and precision will lead to more accurate calculations of ice volume and potential contribution to sea level rise. Total ice volume and sea level contribution remain similar to calculations using the original Bedmap, but Antarctica's average bedrock depth, deepest point and ice thickness estimates have all increased. Peter Fretwell, BAS scientist and lead author, said the new dataset increases our knowledge of the sub-glacial environment and will be help future research on the Antarctic ice sheet. "It will be an important resource for the next generation of ice sheet modelers, physical oceanographers and structural geologists," said Fretwell. A Better Model Ice sheet modeling is an area that will likely make heavy use of Bedmap2 data. Ice sheets are thick, domeshaped formations of ice that cover large areas of land. There are two major ice sheets on Earth, one covering Greenland and one over Antarctica. Ice sheets are formed as snow accumulates and is compacted into ice over many years. "Ice sheets grow because of snow, and like honey poured on a plate, spread outward and thin due to their own weight," said Sophie Nowicki, an ice sheet scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. Ice sheet researchers use computer models to simulate how ice sheets will respond to changes in ocean and air temperatures. An advantage of these simulations is that they allow testing of many different climate scenarios, but the models are limited by how accurate the data on ice volume and sub-ice terrain are. "In order to accurately simulate the dynamic response of ice sheets to changing environmental conditions, such as temperature and snow accumulation, we need to know the shape and structure of the bedrock below the ice sheets in great detail," said Michael Studinger, IceBridge project scientist at NASA Goddard. Knowing what the bedrock looks like is important for ice sheet modeling because features in the bed control the ice's shape and affect how it moves. Ice will flow faster on a downhill slope, while an uphill slope or bumpy terrain can slow an ice sheet down or even hold it in place temporarily. "The shape of the bed is the most important unknown, and affect how ice can flow," said Nowicki. "You can influence how honey spreads on your plate, by simply varying how you hold your plate." The vastly improved bedrock data included in Bedmap2 should provide the level of detail needed for models to be realistic. Disparate Data Creating such a detailed map required researchers to collect and analyze large sums of data from a variety of sources. NASA contributed significant amounts of data on surface elevation, ice shelf limits and ice thickness.

For example, measurements from three Operation IceBridge airborne campaigns make up about 12 percent of the 25 million ice thickness data points gathered by more than 200 airborne campaigns over the past 50 years. IceBridge uses an ice-penetrating radar instrument known as the Multichannel Coherent Radar Depth Sounder to gather data on ice thickness and subglacial topography. MCoRDS, operated by the Center for the Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets at the University of Kansas, sends radar signals down through the ice and records the angle and timing of returning waves to image the ice surface, internal layering and the bedrock below. Researchers also used a large amount of ICESat data to build the surface elevation grid in hard-to-measure areas. Satellite radar altimetry, which makes up a large portion of Bedmap2, works best in flat areas. Mountainous and steeply sloping areas call for other methods, and data from ICESat's laser altimeter helped researchers build an accurate map in these regions. In addition, the Bedmap2 team used IceBridge altimetry data to verify the accuracy of the combined surface datasets. IceBridge data also played a big role by providing data on parts of Antarctica where there have been few to no measurements before. One such area is the Recovery Ice Stream, which IceBridge essentially put on the map with data from its 2011 Antarctic campaign. Both NASA and the U.S. National Science Foundation have invested a great deal of time and money in radars like MCoRDS and airborne campaigns like IceBridge over the years. NASA's contributions go beyond merely collecting this data. By making its data freely available to researchers, NASA is leading a positive trend with researchers. "We hope that other partners will also go down this road," said Fretwell. Collecting radar sounding data over Antarctica is an expensive effort, which has led some researchers to be understandably protective. This could change, however, as more researchers make use of freely available data. "More and more people in the research community realize the tremendous value of making data freely available," said Studinger.

Human Deforestation Outweighs Climate Change for Coral Reefs

June 5, 2013 Better land use is the key to preventing further damage to the world's coral reefs, according to a study published this week in the online science journal Nature Communications. The study, by an international team including a researcher from The University of Western Australia's Oceans Institute, has important implications for Australia's Great Barrier Reef. The study authors write that preventing soil erosion and sediment pollution arising from human activities such as deforestation are crucial to reef survival. The study -- 'Human deforestation outweighs future climate change impacts of sedimentation on coral reefs' -looked at the effects of future climate change on the hydroclimate of Madagascar's reefs and different deforestation scenarios. "The findings are very relevant for Australia since intense land use and past deforestation have transformed the river catchments tremendously and are seen as a major threat to coral reefs in the Great Barrier Reef and elsewhere," said Dr Jens Zinke, of UWA's Oceans Institute. "Managing hinterland land use is the major action needed to buy time for corals growing near rivers."

Dr Zinke said the study looked at four watersheds near coral reef ecosystems in Madagascar, which has different climate zones that mimic most of the world's coral reef climate and a range of different land uses. "With Madagascar, we wanted to understand how soil erosion and sediment discharges into coral reefs adjacent to river catchments are going to change with these two factors," he said. "Curbing sediment pollution to coral reefs is one of the major recommendations to buy time for corals to survive ocean warming and bleaching events in the future. "Our results clearly show that land use management is the most important policy action needed to prevent further damage and preserve the reef ecosystem. "The major question is: how do we manage the sedimentation through reforestation efforts and proper coastal management? "Our study clearly shows that we need to have specific reforestation goals/targets for specific regions and make sure that the amount of land allocated for reforestation is enough to reduce sediments significantly. "Until we precisely understand these relationships, reforestation as a tool for coral reef conservation might not meet its objective of sediment and pollution reduction." The study was the result of a collaboration between the UWA Oceans Institute, the Australian Institute of Marine Science, Macquarie University, the Institute for Environmental Studies at the VU University Amsterdam (Netherlands) and the Wildlife Conservation Society in the US. The lead author is Joseph Maina from Macquarie University. The study was funded through the Marine Science for Management program of the Western Indian Ocean Marine Science Association.

Acceleration of Ocean Denitrification During Deglaciation Documented

June 3, 2013 As ice sheets melted during the deglaciation of the last ice age and global oceans warmed, oceanic oxygen levels decreased and "denitrification" accelerated by 30 to 120 percent, a new international study shows, creating oxygen-poor marine regions and throwing the oceanic nitrogen cycle off balance. By the end of the deglaciation, however, the oceans had adjusted to their new warmer state and the nitrogen cycle had stabilized -- though it took several millennia. Recent increases in global warming, thought to be caused by human activities, are raising concerns that denitrification may adversely affect marine environments over the next few hundred years, with potentially significant effects on ocean food webs. Results of the study have been published this week in the journal Nature Geoscience. "The warming that occurred during deglaciation some 20,000 to 10,000 years ago led to a reduction of oxygen gas dissolved in sea water and more denitrification, or removal of nitrogen nutrients from the ocean," explained Andreas Schmittner, an Oregon State University oceanographer and author on the Nature Geoscience paper. "Since nitrogen nutrients are needed by algae to grow, this affects phytoplankton growth and productivity, and may also affect atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations."

"This study shows just what happened in the past, and suggests that decreases in oceanic oxygen that will likely take place under future global warming scenarios could mean more denitrification and fewer nutrients available for phytoplankton," Schmittner added. In their study, the scientists analyzed more than 2,300 seafloor core samples, and created 76 time series of nitrogen isotopes in those sediments spanning the past 30,000 years. They discovered that during the last glacial maximum, the Earth's nitrogen cycle was at a near steady state. In other words, the amount of nitrogen nutrients added to the oceans -- known as nitrogen fixation -- was sufficient to compensate for the amount lost by denitrification. A lack of nitrogen can essentially starve a marine ecosystem by not providing enough nutrients. Conversely, too much nitrogen can create an excess of plant growth that eventually decays and uses up the oxygen dissolved in sea water, suffocating fish and other marine organisms. Following the period of enhanced denitrification and nitrogen loss during deglaciation, the world's oceans slowly moved back toward a state of near stabilization. But there are signs that recent rates of global warming may be pushing the nitrogen cycle out of balance. "Measurements show that oxygen is already decreasing in the ocean," Schmittner said "The changes we saw during deglaciation of the last ice age happened over thousands of years. But current warming trends are happening at a much faster rate than in the past, which almost certainly will cause oceanic changes to occur more rapidly. "It still may take decades, even centuries to unfold," he added. Schmittner and Christopher Somes, a former graduate student in the OSU College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, developed a model of nitrogen isotope cycling in the ocean, and compared that with the nitrogen measurements from the seafloor sediments. Their sensitivity experiments with the model helped to interpret the complex patterns seen in the observations. This study was supported by the National Science Foundation.

Effects of Interannual Climate Variability On Tropical Tree Cover: Satellite Data Reveal How Tropical Ecosystems May Respond to Climate Extremes
June 2, 2013 Tree cover in the tropics will likely change in surprising ways as climate change increases the frequency of extreme rainfall events, according to a study by scientists from Wageningen University published today in Nature Climate Change. The study shows that increasing year-to year variability in rainfall is associated to lower tree cover in the moist tropical forests worldwide but it can open windows of opportunity for tree expansion in some tropical drylands. "Understanding how ecosystems respond to climate variability is a priority in a fast changing globe" says Marten Scheffer, who leads the research program on tipping points. "Climate events can open windows of opportunity for abrupt changes in ecosystems. We are starting to glimpse on the complexity of these patterns" says Scheffer.

"The overall effects of climate variability are puzzling. On one hand, severe drought can produce massive tree mortality, but there is also evidence of episodic tree recruitment during extreme rainy years" says Milena Holmgren, leading author of the study and a specialist on plant ecology. Satellite data The authors used satellite data to look at large scale patterns of tree cover across the tropics of Africa, Australia and South America. They show that increasing rainfall variability is associated to lower tree cover in the moist tropical forests of all continents. In the dry tropics, however, the effects of higher year-to year variability in rainfall depend on the specific continent. Higher overall inter-annual variation in rainfall has positive (South America), negative (Australia) or neutral effects (Africa) on tree cover in dry-lands. "The effects of climate variability in tropical drylands seem to depend on the balance between wet and dry extreme events, as well as on the opportunities trees have to grow during rainy events," says Milena Holmgren. "We knew from small scale experiments in South America and observations in Australia that rainy years can be essential for tree recruitment in drylands. During extreme rainy years there is massive tree germination and if these young seedlings grow fast enough to escape from herbivores, then woodlands can expand. With our analysis of satellite data, we could now assess how general this response is. We found out that the positive effect of extreme rainy events is localized and can be offset in certain conditions, as in Australia, by negative effects of extreme dry years," explains Holmgren. "Understanding potential impacts of climate change on the Amazon forest and the savannas surrounding it is one of the major challenges for scientists in the region today," explains author Marina Hirota who came to work with the Wageningen team after her studies in Brazil to analyze forest resilience. "Our study shows that the forest is fragile to increasing climate variability within a year but also between years. This kind of information shows the risks and opportunities that are inherent to the stability properties of these ecosystems that still cover massive parts of the Earth."

Catastrophic Climatic Events Leave Corals Facing a Decade-Long Fight for Recovery
June 1, 2013 Marine conservationists from Plymouth University, and the Universidad Federal da Bahia in Brazil, have spent more than 17 years analysing the diversity and density of coral colonies off the coast of South America. That coincided with the catastrophic El Nio event of 1997-98, creating an opportunity for the first detailed assessment of the long-term impact a major environmental incident of this nature can have on coral assemblages. Professor Martin Attrill, Director of Plymouth University's Marine Institute, said: "Coral reefs are perhaps the most diverse marine ecosystem on Earth, potentially holding 25% of the known marine species. Yet they are under intense threat from a range of local human activities and, in particular, climate change. Any impact on the corals is going to have major knock on effects on the organisms that live on coral reefs, such as the fish, and if climatic events become more frequent, as is suggested, it is likely corals will never be able to fully recover." The 1997-98 El Nio was the most extensive global event of its kind in history, with record global high seawater temperatures in an 18-month period before and subsequently. It prompted flooding in some parts of the world and droughts in others, but also caused severe coral bleaching and mortality in parts of Central America, the Indian Ocean, Arabian Gulf, the tropical Pacific and Brazil.

For this study, the research team used their own observations of eight species of scleractinian corals, and data from the Brazilian Meteorological Office, to create a full picture of environmental conditions and species behaviour that resulted. It showed a significant rise in air and seawater temperatures in 1998, with increased mortality across all species and, in one case, it disappearing completely from the reefs for more than seven years. The density of the coral in the area also fell after 1998, but then increased continuously until 2007, with recent measurements showing it is now mostly back to pre-1998 levels. Professor Attrill added: "El Nio events give us an indication of how changing climate affects ecosystems as major changes in the weather patterns within the Pacific impact the whole world. If the reefs can recover quickly, it is probable they can adapt and survive the likely changes in water temperature ahead of us. However, we found it took 13 years for the coral reef system in Brazil to recover, suggesting they may be very vulnerable to regular climate-related impacts. This has major consequences for how we consider climate change impacts on coral reefs."

Acidifying Oceans Could Spell Trouble for Squid

June 1, 2013 Acidifying oceans could dramatically impact the world's squid species, according to a new study led by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) researchers and soon to be published in the journal PLOS ONE. Because squid are both ecologically and commercially important, that impact may have farreaching effects on the ocean environment and coastal economies, the researchers report.

Share This: 18 "Squid are at the center of the ocean ecosystem -- nearly all animals are eating or eaten by squid," says WHOI biologist T. Aran Mooney, a co-author of the study. "So if anything happens to these guys, it has repercussions down the food chain and up the food chain." Research suggests that ocean acidification and its repercussions are the new norm. The world's oceans have been steadily acidifying for the past hundred and fifty years, fueled by rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO 2) in the atmosphere. Seawater absorbs some of this CO2,turning it into carbonic acid and other chemical byproducts that lower the pH of the water and make it more acidic. As CO2 levels continue to rise, the ocean's acidity is projected to rise too, potentially affecting ocean-dwelling species in ways that researchers are still working to understand. Mooney and his colleagues -- lead author Max Kaplan, then an undergraduate student from the University of St. Andrews in the U.K. and now a WHOI graduate student, and WHOI scientists Daniel McCorkle and Anne Cohen -- decided to study the impact of acidifying seawater on squid. Over the summer of 2011, Mooney and Kaplan gathered male and female Atlantic longfin squid (Loligo pealeii) from the waters of Vineyard Sound and transported them to a holding tank in the WHOI Environmental Systems Laboratory. When these squid mated and the females laid their egg capsules -- each of which can contain 200 to 300 fertilized eggs -- the researchers transferred some of the capsules to one of two smaller tanks filled with Vineyard Sound seawater. These two smaller tanks represented two environments: today's ocean, and the more acidic oceans of the future. One was continuously exposed to air pumped in from outside, to simulate the ocean's current interaction with

the atmosphere. The other received air enriched with higher CO2 levels that made the seawater about three times more acidic, a level of acidity that models predict will be widespread a hundred years from now. The researchers watched as the eggs hatched and the squid began to develop in each of the two tanks, and measured their time to hatching, body length and other parameters as they grew. "Amazingly, we found effects or changes in all those parameters," Mooney says. "Animals raised in high CO2 took longer to develop, which is a big deal when you're basically this egg mass on the bottom of the ocean and fish can just pop along and eat you." Squid reared in more acidic seawater were also 5 percent smaller on average, the team reports, and they developed smaller and misshapen statoliths, which are organs made of carbonate crystals that enable the squid to orient themselves while swimming. Earlier work has shown that squid with malformed statoliths may swim in circles or swim poorly, which leaves them likely to die when they can't escape predators or catch their prey. Squid that grew up in more acidic seawater formed statoliths with a disorganized, degraded crystal structure, Mooney says. "That means the animal probably had a challenging time laying down those crystals," he says. "It doesn't look like they can do that in a very orderly or standard fashion in high CO2 because the acidified conditions keep dissolving the calcium carbonate as the animals are trying to lay it down." The results suggest that squid are vulnerable to the acidic conditions that higher CO2 levels create, and may face greater challenges to survival as the ocean acidifies than researchers anticipated. "The fact that we found an impact in everything we measured was pretty astounding," Mooney says. "That means that squid, this keystone species, might be really impacted by the environment that we're changing, and that's going to have ramifications down the line." Those ramifications could include significant changes to the ocean ecosystem, where squid play a vital role, as well as economic losses. Squid are a key food source for many commercially important fish, including tuna and hake, and are themselves a valuable commodity: In 2011 alone, U.S. fishermen harvested more than 300 million pounds of squid with a value of more than $100 million. Mooney and his colleagues are planning additional studies to better understand how squid may fare in changing ocean conditions. Future experiments may look at a range of different levels of acidity, to determine which levels squid can and can't tolerate, and at the effects of temperature changes, as seawater is also expected to warm in the coming century. The researchers also hope to observe and measure behavioral differences in squid reared in more acidic seawater to form a clearer picture of how the animals' lives may shift as the ocean around them changes.

Elevated Carbon Dioxide Making Arid Regions Greener

May 31, 2013 Scientists have long suspected that a flourishing of green foliage around the globe, observed since the early 1980s in satellite data, springs at least in part from the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in Earth's atmosphere. Now, a study of arid regions around the globe finds that a carbon dioxide "fertilization effect" has, indeed, caused a gradual greening from 1982 to 2010.

Focusing on the southwestern corner of North America, Australia's outback, the Middle East, and some parts of Africa, Randall Donohue of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Canberra, Australia and his colleagues developed and applied a mathematical model to predict the extent of the carbon-dioxide (CO2) fertilization effect. They then tested this prediction by studying satellite imagery and teasing out the influence of carbon dioxide on greening from other factors such as precipitation, air temperature, the amount of light, and land-use changes. The team's model predicted that foliage would increase by some 5 to 10 percent given the 14 percent increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration during the study period. The satellite data agreed, showing an 11 percent increase in foliage after adjusting the data for precipitation, yielding "strong support for our hypothesis," the team reports. "Lots of papers have shown an average increase in vegetation across the globe, and there is a lot of speculation about what's causing that," said Donohue of CSIRO's Land and Water research division, who is lead author of the new study. "Up until this point, they've linked the greening to fairly obvious climatic variables, such as a rise in temperature where it is normally cold or a rise in rainfall where it is normally dry. Lots of those papers speculated about the CO2 effect, but it has been very difficult to prove." He and his colleagues present their findings in an article that has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. The team looked for signs of CO2 fertilization in arid areas, Donohue said, because "satellites are very good at detecting changes in total leaf cover, and it is in warm, dry environments that the CO2 effect is expected to most influence leaf cover." Leaf cover is the clue, he added, because "a leaf can extract more carbon from the air during photosynthesis, or lose less water to the air during photosynthesis, or both, due to elevated CO2." That is the CO2 fertilization effect. But leaf cover in warm, wet places like tropical rainforests is already about as extensive as it can get and is unlikely to increase with higher CO2 concentrations. In warm, dry places, on the other hand, leaf cover is less complete, so plants there will make more leaves if they have enough water to do so. "If elevated CO2 causes the water use of individual leaves to drop, plants will respond by increasing their total numbers of leaves, and this should be measurable from satellite," Donohue explained. To tease out the actual CO2 fertilization effect from other environmental factors in these regions, the researchers first averaged the greenness of each location across 3-year periods to account for changes in soil wetness and then grouped that greenness data from the different locations according to their amounts of precipitation. The team then identified the maximum amount of foliage each group could attain for a given precipitation, and tracked variations in maximum foliage over the course of 20 years. This allowed the scientists to remove the influence of precipitation and other climatic variations and recognize the long-term greening trend. In addition to greening dry regions, the CO2 fertilization effect could switch the types of vegetation that dominate in those regions. "Trees are re-invading grass lands, and this could quite possibly be related to the CO2 effect," Donohue said. "Long lived woody plants are deep rooted and are likely to benefit more than grasses from an increase in CO2." "The effect of higher carbon dioxide levels on plant function is an important process that needs greater consideration," said Donohue. "Even if nothing else in the climate changes as global CO2 levels rise, we will still see significant environmental changes because of the CO2 fertilization effect." This study was funded by CSIRO's Sustainable Agriculture Flagship, Water for a Healthy Country Flagship, the Australian Research Council and Land & Water Australia.

Rainforests Take the Heat, Paleontologists Show

May 30, 2013 South American rainforests thrived during three extreme global warming events in the past, say paleontologists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in a new report published in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Science. No tropical forests in South America currently experience average yearly temperatures of more than 84 degrees Fahrenheit (29 degrees Celsius). But by the end of this century, average global temperatures are likely to rise by another 1 F (0.6 C), leading some scientists to predict the demise of the world's most diverse terrestrial ecosystem. Carlos Jaramillo, Cofrin Chair in Palynology, and Andrs Crdenas, post-doctoral fellow, at the Smithsonian in Panama reviewed almost 6,000 published measurements of ancient temperatures to provide a deep-time perspective for the debate. "To take the temperature of the past we rely on indirect evidence like oxygen isotope ratios in the fossil shells of marine organisms or from bacteria biomarkers," said Jaramillo. When intense volcanic activity produced huge quantities of carbon dioxide 120 million years ago in the midCretaceous period, yearly temperatures in the South American tropics rose 9 F (5 C). During the PaleoceneEocene thermal maximum, 55 million years ago, tropical temperatures rose by 5 F (3 C) in less than 10,000 years. About 53 million years ago, temperatures soared again. According to the fossil record, rainforests prospered under these hothouse conditions. Diversity increased. Because larger areas of forest generally sustain higher diversity than smaller areas do, higher diversity during warming events could be explained by the expansion of tropical forests into temperate areas. "But to our surprise, rainforests never extended much beyond the modern tropical belt, so something other than temperature must have determined where they were growing," said Jaramillo. Jaramillo and Crdenas' report also refers to findings by Smithsonian plant physiologist Klaus Winter that leaves of some tropical trees tolerate short-term exposure to temperatures up to 122 F (5 C). When carbon dioxide concentrations double, trees use much less water, which is further evidence that tropical forests may prove resilient to climate change.

Improving 'Crop Per Drop' Could Boost Global Food Security and Water Sustainability
May 29, 2013 Improvements in crop water productivity -- the amount of food produced per unit of water consumed -- have the potential to improve both food security and water sustainability in many parts of the world, according to a study published online in Environmental Research Letters May 29 by scientists with the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment (IonE) and the Institute of Crop Science and Resource Conservation (INRES) at the University of Bonn, Germany. Led by IonE postdoctoral research scholar Kate A. Brauman, the research team analyzed crop production, water use and crop water productivity by climatic zone for 16 staple food crops: wheat, maize, rice, barley, rye, millet, sorghum, soybean, sunflower, potato, cassava, sugarcane, sugar beet, oil palm, rapeseed (canola) and groundnut (peanut). Together these crops constitute 56 percent of global crop production by tonnage, 65 percent of crop water consumption, and 68 percent of all cropland by area. The study is the first of its kind to look at water productivity for this many crops at a global scale.

The wide range of variation in crop water productivity in places that have similar climates means that there are lots of opportunities for improving the trade-off between food and water. And the implications of doing so are substantial: The researchers calculated that in drier regions, bringing up the very lowest performers to just the 20th percentile could increase annual production on rain-fed cropland enough to provide food for an estimated 110 million people without increasing water use or using additional cropland. On irrigated cropland, water consumption could be reduced enough to meet the annual domestic water demands of nearly 1.4 billion people while maintaining current production. "Since crop production consumes more freshwater than any other human activity on the planet, the study has significant implications for addressing the twin challenges of water stress and food insecurity," says Brauman. For example, if low crop water productivity in precipitation-limited regions were raised to the 20th percentile of water productivity, specific to particular crops and climates, total rain-fed food production in Africa could be increased by more than 10 percent without exploiting additional cropland. Similar improvements in crop water productivity on irrigated cropland could reduce total water consumption some 8-15 percent in precipitationlimited regions of Africa, Asia, Europe and South America. Because the study is global in scope, it is able to identify potential locations for interventions, crops to pay attention to, and opportunities for the biggest improvements in crop water management. Specific solutions for improving crop per drop will vary by location and climatic zone over time, however.

The US Shale-Gas Revolution and European Renewables: Divergence and Cooperation in Alternative Energy
May 29, 2013 That the United States and Europe have been following different energy policies over the past few decades won't come as a surprise. However, according to one researcher, their divergence -- with the US leading 'the shale gas revolution' and Europe investing heavily in modern renewables -- is a good thing for the development of both alternative-energy sources. Writing in the Journal of Transatlantic Studies, Marianne Haug of the University of Hohenheim argues that although the transatlantic energy partners continue to be committed to common goals -- namely energy security, environmental sustainability and economic competitiveness -- the relative priority given to each has changed substantially since the early 1990s. Domestic issues, geopolitical concerns, differing resource bases, changing energy markets, government policy, public opinion, the accession of new countries to the EU and the choices of investors have all altered the landscape. To address these new challenges, both the US and Europe have jointly and separately reached out to new markets, partners and collaboration arrangements. Haug points to the example of the Kyoto Protocol as a turning point for energy policy. Before the 1997 agreement, which the US did not ratify, energy security was considered the most important of the three goals. After Kyoto, European countries gave higher, if not equal, priority to environmental concerns. European countries entered into partnerships beyond the US to develop low-carbon technologies, such as windmills, photovoltaic units, solar thermal hot-water installations and rapeseed biofuel. The EU also developed emissiontrading systems, biofuel targets, energy-efficiency guidelines and standards, which stimulated the market for renewables and the industry as a whole. In the United States, where the European acceptance of the potential dangers of continued fossil-fuel use is not widespread, public and private investors have spent heavily on shale gas, building on existing fossil-fuel technology. The ability to extract shale gas efficiently could indeed 'change the game' for the US and other

countries by contributing to energy security and bringing lower prices. However, the industry is still in its infancy in Europe, due both to stricter regulations and public opinion. This may be changing, at least in the UK: the government stated in its March 2013 budget the intention to invest in its production. Haug concludes that this parallel development of shale gas in the US and renewables in Europe diversifies and enriches the world's energy-supply choices. They are complementary technology pathways to limit import dependence for both partners and contribute to secure, affordable and sustainable energy for all. They are the result of transatlantic diversification -- initially driven by energy-security then environmental concerns -through public and private R&D and supportive government policies. Now further cooperation between the transatlantic partners is needed to scale up the development of both forms of alternative energy for the benefit of the global energy community. This article is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the major players' current positions on alternative-energy sources and what the future might hold for global energy supply.

Microplastic Pollution Prevalent in Lakes, Too

May 29, 2013 EPFL researchers have detected microplastic pollution in one of Western Europe's largest lakes, Lake Geneva, in large enough quantities to raise concern. While studies in the ocean have shown that these small bits of plastic can be harmful to fish and birds that feed on plankton or other small waterborne organisms, the full extent of their consequences in lakes and rivers is only now being investigated. The study, which is being extending under a mandate by the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment, was published in the latest issue of the journal Archives des Sciences. "We were surprised to find such high concentrations of microplastics, especially in an environmentally aware country like Switzerland," says first author Florian Faure from EPFL. Faure's study focused on Lake Geneva, where both beaches and lake water were shown to contain significant amounts of microplastic contamination -pieces of plastic waste up to 5 mm in diameter. The study is one of the first of its kind to focus on a continental freshwater lake. And according to Faure, given the massive efforts put into protecting the lakes shores over the past decades, both on its French and the Swiss shores, the situation is likely to be representative of fresh water bodies around the world. Microplastics in continental waters may be the main source of microplastic pollution in oceans, where huge hotspots containing high concentrations of these pollutants have formed. Scientists estimate that only around 20 percent of oceanic microplastics are dumped straight into the sea. The remaining 80 percent are estimated to originate from terrestrial sources, such as waste dumps, street litter, and sewage. Microplastic pollution is also a strain to lake and river ecosystems, threatening the animals that inhabit these aquatic ecosystems both physically and chemically. When inadvertently swallowed by aquatic birds and fish, the tiny bits of plastic can wind up stuck in the animals' intestines, where they obstruct their digestive tracts, or cause them to suffocate by blocking their airways. Ingested plastics may also leach toxic additives and other pollutants stuck to their surface into the animals that swallow them, such as bisphenol A (BPA) and phthalates, two carcinogenic agents used in transparent plastics, or other hydrophobic water pollutants, such as PCBs. Like counting needles in a haystack Florian Faure and his collaborators used a variety of approaches to quantify plastic and microplastic pollution in and around the lake, from combing beaches along Lake Geneva for plastic litter to dissecting animals, fishes (pikes, roaches and breams) and birds from the aquatic environment, and observing bird droppings around the lake.

To measure the concentration of microplastics in the water, Faure worked in collaboration with Oceaneye, a Geneva-based non-profit organization. Using an approach developed to study plastic pollution in the Mediterranean Sea, they pulled a manta trawl -- a floating thin-meshed net -- behind a boat in Lake Geneva to pick up any solid matter in the top layer of the water. The samples were then sorted out, dried and the solid compounds were analyzed for their composition. "We found plastic in every sample we took from the beaches," says Faure. Polystyrene beads were the most common culprits, but hard plastics, plastic membranes, and bits of fishing line were also widespread. In this preliminary study, the amount of debris caught in Lake Geneva using the manta trawl was comparable to measurements made in the Mediterranean Sea. The scientists are now extending their focus to lakes and rivers across the country, backed by a mandate from the Swiss Federal Office for the Environment. According to the lab's director, Luiz Felippe de Alencastro, this will involve studying microplastic pollution in lakes, rivers, and biota across the country, as well as the associated micropollutants, such as PCBs, which have already been found stuck on microplastics from Lake Geneva in significant concentrations.

Scientists Develop CO2 Sequestration Technique

May 28, 2013 Lawrence Livermore scientists have discovered and demonstrated a new technique to remove and store atmospheric carbon dioxide while generating carbon-negative hydrogen and producing alkalinity, which can be used to offset ocean acidification. The team demonstrated, at a laboratory scale, a system that uses the acidity normally produced in saline water electrolysis to accelerate silicate mineral dissolution while producing hydrogen fuel and other gases. The resulting electrolyte solution was shown to be significantly elevated in hydroxide concentration that in turn proved strongly absorptive and retentive of atmospheric CO2. Further, the researchers suggest that the carbonate and bicarbonate produced in the process could be used to mitigate ongoing ocean acidification, similar to how an Alka Seltzer neutralizes excess acid in the stomach. "We not only found a way to remove and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere while producing valuable H2, we also suggest that we can help save marine ecosystems with this new technique," said Greg Rau, an LLNL visiting scientist, senior scientist at UC Santa Cruz and lead author of a paper appearing this week (May 27) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. When carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere, a significant fraction is passively taken up by the ocean forming carbonic acid that makes the ocean more acidic. This acidification has been shown to be harmful to many species of marine life, especially corals and shellfish. By the middle of this century, the globe will likely warm by at least 2 degrees Celsius and the oceans will experience a more than 60 percent increase in acidity relative to pre-industrial levels. The alkaline solution generated by the new process could be added to the ocean to help neutralize this acid and help offset its effects on marine biota. However, further research is needed, the authors said. "When powered by renewable electricity and consuming globally abundant minerals and saline solutions, such systems at scale might provide a relatively efficient, high-capacity means to consume and store excess atmospheric CO2 as environmentally beneficial seawater bicarbonate or carbonate," Rau said. "But the process also would produce a carbon-negative 'super green' fuel or chemical feedstock in the form of hydrogen." Most previously described chemical methods of atmospheric carbon dioxide capture and storage are costly, using thermal/mechanical procedures to concentrate molecular CO2 from the air while recycling reagents, a process that is cumbersome, inefficient and expensive.

"Our process avoids most of these issues by not requiring CO2 to be concentrated from air and stored in a molecular form, pointing the way to more cost-effective, environmentally beneficial, and safer air CO2 management with added benefits of renewable hydrogen fuel production and ocean alkalinity addition," Rau said. The team concluded that further research is needed to determine optimum designs and operating procedures, cost-effectiveness, and the net environmental impact/benefit of electrochemically mediated air CO2 capture and H2 production using base minerals. Other Livermore researchers include Susan Carroll, William Bourcier, Michael Singleton, Megan Smith and Roger Aines.

Study Explores 100 Year Increase in Forestry Diseases

May 28, 2013 As ash dieback disease continues to threaten common ash trees across Europe, new research in the Journal of Quaternary Science explores the historic impact of forest diseases to discover if diseases played a significant factor in vegetation change. The study explores how large-scale pathogen outbreaks were much more infrequent in the past, which suggests the human role in transporting pathogens to new locations, such as the international seed trade, is a major factor. "The temperate and boreal forests of Europe and North America have been subject to repeated pathogen outbreaks over the last 100 years," said Martyn Waller from Kingston University. "Palaeoecology can, potentially, offer a long-term perspective on such disturbance episodes, providing information on their triggers, frequency and impact."

Study Explores Atmospheric Impact of Declining Arctic Sea Ice

May 28, 2013 There is growing recognition that reductions in Arctic sea ice levels will influence patterns of atmospheric circulation both within and beyond the Arctic. New research in the International Journal of Climatology explores the impact of 2007 ice conditions, the second lowest Arctic sea ice extent in the satellite era, on atmospheric circulation and surface temperatures. Two 30-year simulations, one using the sea ice levels of 2007 and another using sea ice levels at the end of the 20th century, were used to access the impact of ice free seas. The results showed a significant response to the anomalous open water of 2007. The results confirm that the atmospheric response to declining sea ice could have implications far beyond the Arctic such as a decrease in the pole to equator temperature gradient, given the increased temperatures associated with the increase in open water, leading to a weaker jet stream and less storminess in the midlatitudes.

Historic Sea-Level Change Along New Jersey Coastline Mapped

May 28, 2013 Hurricane Sandy caught the public and policymakers off guard when it hit the United States' Atlantic Coast last fall. Because much of the storm's devastation was wrought by flooding in the aftermath, researchers have been paying attention to how climate change and sea-level rise may have played a role in the disaster and how those factors may impact the shoreline in the future. A new study led by the University of Pennsylvania's Benjamin P. Horton, an associate professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science, relied upon fossil records of marshland to reconstruct the changes in sea level along the New Jersey coast going back 10,000 years. The team's findings confirm that the state's sea level has risen continuously during that period. In addition, their analysis reveals that there have been times of very high rates of sea-level rise that coincided with periods of glacial melting, a particularly relevant finding to conditions today as a warming climate has caused the large ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland to melt into the sea. Even leaving climate change out of the equation, the investigation indicates that sea levels will continue to rise over time, increasing the chances of disruptive flooding as was seen following Sandy. "We're trying to better understand past sea-level changes because they are key to putting the future in context," Horton said. The study was published in the Journal of Quaternary Science. Horton's co-authors were Simon E. Engelhart, who earned his doctorate at Penn and is now at the University of Rhode Island; David F. Hill of Oregon State University; Andrew C. Kemp, who earned his doctorate and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Penn and is now at Yale University; Daria Nikitina of West Chester University; Kenneth G. Miller of Rutgers University; and W. Richard Peltier of the University of Toronto. To gain insight into the variations in New Jersey's past sea levels, the team compiled and standardized data from multiple studies conducted during the last few decades. All the studies used fossil evidence of marsh vegetation to estimate sea level at various times during the Holocene, with data points from 10,000 years ago through the year 1900. "We knew that the sea level across the whole of the U.S. Atlantic Coast, including New Jersey, has been rising for the last 10,000 years," Horton said. "But it's been rising at different rates. We wanted to find out the reasons for the different rates of rise and the processes that control them." An analysis of the data revealed three distinct time periods in which the rate of sea-level rise varied. From 10,000 to 6,000 years ago the sea level rose an average of 4 millimeters per year: from 6,000 to 2,000 years ago 2 mm per year; from 2,000 years ago until 1900,1.3 mm per year. This last figure, a sea-level rise of 1.3 mm per year, is due to the fact that the land along the coast is naturally subsiding, or sinking over time. This rate may serve as a baseline to incorporate into future flood-risk planning, Horton noted. And the 4 mm rate of rise last seen thousands of years ago may also be relevant to the New Jersey shore's near future. "If you look at what was happening 6 to 10,000 years ago, the ice sheets were melting on Earth, both from northwest Europe and North America, contributing to those high rates of rise," Horton said. "Now what's happening? Greenland and Antarctica are melting and could trigger similar rates of sea-level rise."

But 4 mm may not be the ceiling for rates of rise. Sea-level rise was higher than that even earlier than 10,000 years ago and could reach those rates again if climate change triggers catastrophic melting of ice sheets. "Ice sheets don't respond linearly to temperature rise; they go through thresholds," Horton said. "That could lead to far higher rates of sea-level rise if they reach one of these tipping points." Local factors could also drive the rate of rise much higher than 4 mm per year. While the scientists' analysis did not suggest that tidal ranges have changed significantly in the time range they studied, anthropogenic factors, such as dredging in the Delaware Bay or groundwater extraction in the Atlantic City region, could serve to increase tides or sediment compaction, thus effectively driving sea level higher in those areas. "To model what the ocean is doing, you have to incorporate what the land is doing, too," Horton said. "This is the way we're starting to go from global to regional projections of sea level." This study was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, National Science Foundation and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Active or 'Extremely Active' Atlantic Hurricane Season Predicted for 2013

May 24, 2013 In its 2013 Atlantic hurricane season outlook issued today, NOAA's Climate Prediction Center is forecasting an active or extremely active season this year. For the six-month hurricane season, which begins June 1, NOAA's Atlantic Hurricane Season Outlook says there is a 70 percent likelihood of 13 to 20 named storms (winds of 39 mph or higher), of which 7 to 11 could become hurricanes (winds of 74 mph or higher), including 3 to 6 major hurricanes (Category 3, 4 or 5; winds of 111 mph or higher). These ranges are well above the seasonal average of 12 named storms, 6 hurricanes and 3 major hurricanes. "With the devastation of Sandy fresh in our minds, and another active season predicted, everyone at NOAA is committed to providing life-saving forecasts in the face of these storms and ensuring that Americans are prepared and ready ahead of time." said Kathryn Sullivan, Ph.D., NOAA acting administrator. "As we saw firsthand with Sandy, it's important to remember that tropical storm and hurricane impacts are not limited to the coastline. Strong winds, torrential rain, flooding, and tornadoes often threaten inland areas far from where the storm first makes landfall." Three climate factors that strongly control Atlantic hurricane activity are expected to come together to produce an active or extremely active 2013 hurricane season. These are:

A continuation of the atmospheric climate pattern, which includes a strong west African monsoon, that is responsible for the ongoing era of high activity for Atlantic hurricanes that began in 1995; Warmer-than-average water temperatures in the tropical Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean Sea; and El Nio is not expected to develop and suppress hurricane formation.

"This year, oceanic and atmospheric conditions in the Atlantic basin are expected to produce more and stronger hurricanes," said Gerry Bell, Ph.D., lead seasonal hurricane forecaster with NOAA's Climate Prediction Center. "These conditions include weaker wind shear, warmer Atlantic waters and conducive winds patterns coming from Africa."

NOAA's seasonal hurricane outlook is not a hurricane landfall forecast; it does not predict how many storms will hit land or where a storm will strike. Forecasts for individual storms and their impacts will be provided throughout the season by NOAA's National Hurricane Center. New for this hurricane season are improvements to forecast models, data gathering, and the National Hurricane Center communication procedure for post-tropical cyclones. In July, NOAA plans to bring online a new supercomputer that will run an upgraded Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting (HWRF) model that provides significantly enhanced depiction of storm structure and improved storm intensity forecast guidance. Also this year, Doppler radar data will be transmitted in real time from NOAA's Hurricane Hunter aircraft. This will help forecasters better analyze rapidly evolving storm conditions, and these data could further improve the HWRF model forecasts by 10 to 15 percent. The National Weather Service has also made changes to allow for hurricane warnings to remain in effect, or to be newly issued, for storms like Sandy that have become post-tropical. This flexibility allows forecasters to provide a continuous flow of forecast and warning information for evolving or continuing threats.

Expedition to Study Ancient Continental Breakup West of Spain

May 24, 2013 An international team of scientists has embarked on a shipboard expedition to study how Earth's crust was pulled apart in an area beneath the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Spain. The team includes geophysicists from University of Southampton Ocean and Earth Science (SOES) based at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK. From the research vessels RV Poseidon and RV Marcus G. Langseth the team will use sound waves to create a three-dimensional picture of the rocks in the Deep Galicia Basin, located to the west of northern Spain. The new datasets will improve understanding of how continents stretch and break apart, creating new ocean basins in between. About 250 million years ago, Spain and Newfoundland in Canada were connected as part of a larger continent. Then around 220-200 million years ago, the continental crust in between began to spread apart, exposing the mantle beneath and eventually forming new oceanic crust by volcanic activity. Professor Tim Minshull, Head of SOES, who is leading the Southampton team aboard the German vessel RV Poseidon, says: "We first conceived this project almost nine years ago, so after many years of preparation it is exciting to finally be doing the experiment."The team will drop 78 seismic detectors onto the seabed in cooperation with colleagues from GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, NOCS' German counterpart, led by Dr Dirk Klaeschen. Led by Professor Dale Sawyer of Rice University, scientists aboard RV Marcus G. Langseth will then image Earth's crust in three dimensions over a 64 x 22 kilometre region of the ocean floor. Seismologists use sound waves to image structures below the sea floor in much the same way that ultrasound techniques image organs in the human body. The sophisticated seismic instruments aboard the US vessel RV Marcus G. Langseth will allow seismologists to build up a picture of the faults and continental blocks up to 15 kilometres below the sea floor. Pressure guns towed behind the ship produce sound waves that penetrate the rocks and bounce off fault planes and boundaries. The reflected sound waves are then recorded by the detectors on the sea floor as well as instruments called hydrophones that are towed behind the ship.

The scientists are particularly interested in a strongly reflective fault surface -- known as the "S reflector" -- as well as the structures above and below it. This fault is thought to have formed when the crust was pulled apart. It is the boundary between the overlying crustal blocks and the underlying mantle rocks that have been penetrated by seawater. The scientists will also use the seismic images to work out how and in what order the different blocks moved as the crust was stretched. In addition to Professor Minshull, SOES participants include Dr Gaye Bayrakci aboard the RV Poseidon and Dr Marianne Karplus aboard the RV Marcus G. Langseth. Also aboard RV Marcus G. Langseth will be scientists from the University of Birmingham, Rice University (USA), Columbia University (USA), the Institute of Marine Sciences in Barcelona (Spain) and the University of Aveiro (Portugal). Professor Jon Bull (SOES) is involved with cruise planning and data analysis, with particular focus on imaging faults and determining fault behaviour. The RV Poseidon ocean bottom seismometer deployment lasts from 22 May to 12 June 2013. The RV Marcus G. Langseth will be collecting data in the Deep Galicia Basin from 1 June to 16 July.

Earth's Mantle Affects Long-Term Sea-Level Rise Estimates

May 23, 2013 From Virginia to Florida, there is a prehistoric shoreline that, in some parts, rests more than 280 feet above modern sea level. The shoreline was carved by waves more than 3 million years ago -- possible evidence of a once higher sea level, triggered by ice-sheet melting. But new findings by a team of researchers, including Robert Moucha, assistant professor of Earth Sciences in The College of Arts and Sciences, reveal that the shoreline has been uplifted by more than 210 feet, meaning less ice melted than expected. Equally compelling is the fact that the shoreline is not flat, as it should be, but is distorted, reflecting the pushing motion of Earth's mantle. This is big news, says Moucha, for scientists who use the coastline to predict future sea-level rise. It's also a cautionary tale for those who rely almost exclusively on cycles of glacial advance and retreat to study sea-level changes. "Three million years ago, the average global temperature was two to three degrees Celsius higher, while the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was comparable to that of today," says Moucha, who contributed to a paper on the subject in the May 15 issue of Science Express. "If we can estimate the height of the sea from 3 million years ago, we can then relate it to the amount of ice sheets that melted. This period also serves as a window into what we may expect in the future." Moucha and his colleagues -- led by David Rowley, professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago -- have been using computer modeling to pinpoint exactly what melted during this interglacial period, some 3 million years ago. So far, evidenced is stacked in favor of Greenland, West Antarctica and the sprawling East Antarctica ice sheet, but the new shoreline uplift implies that East Antarctica may have melted some or not at all. "It's less than previous estimates had implied," says Rowley, the article's lead author. Moucha's findings show that the jagged shoreline may have been caused by the interplay between Earth's surface and its mantle -- a process known as dynamic topography. Advanced modeling suggests that the shoreline, referred to as the Orangeburg Scarp, may have shifted as much as 196 feet. Modeling also accounts for other effects, such as the buildup of offshore sediments and glacial retreats.

"Dynamic topography is a very important contributor to Earth's surface evolution," says Rowley. "With this work, we can demonstrate that even small-scale features, long considered outside the realm of mantle influence, are reflective of mantle contributions." Building a case Moucha's involvement with the project grew out of a series of papers he published as a postdoctoral fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advance Research in Montreal. In one paper from 2008, he drew on elements of the North American East Coast and African West Coast to build a case against the existence of stable continental platforms. "The North American East Coast has always been thought of as a passive margin," says Moucha, referring to large areas usually bereft of tectonic activity. "[With Rowley], we've challenged the traditional view of passive margins by showing that through observations and numerical simulations, they are subject to long-term deformation, in response to mantle flow." Central to Moucha's argument is the fact that viscous mantle flows everywhere, all the time. As a result, it's nearly impossible to find what he calls "stable reference points" on Earth's surface to accurately measure global sea-level rise. "If one incorrectly assumed that a particular margin is a stable reference frame when, in actuality, it has subsided, his or her assumption would lead to a sea-level rise and, ultimately, to an increase in ice-sheet melt," says Moucha, who joined SU's faculty in 2011. Another consideration is the size of the ice sheet. Between periods of glacial activity (such as the one from 3 million years ago and the one we are in now), ice sheets are generally smaller. Jerry Mitrovica, professor of geophysics at Harvard University who also contributed to the paper, says the same mantle processes that drive plate tectonics also deform elevations of ancient shorelines. "You can't ignore this, or your estimate of the size of the ancient ice sheets will be wrong," he says. Rise and fall Moucha puts it this way: "Because ice sheets have mass and mass results in gravitational attraction, the sea level actually falls near the melting ice sheet and rises when it's further away. This variability has enabled us to unravel which ice sheet contributed to sea-level rise and how much of [the sheet] melted." The SU geophysicist credits much of the group's success to state-of-the-art seismic tomography, a geological imaging technique led by Nathan Simmons at California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. "Nathan, who co-authored the paper, provided me with seismic tomography data, from which I used high-performance computing to model mantle flow," says Moucha. "A few million years may have taken us a day to render, but a billion years may have taken several weeks or more." Moucha and his colleagues hope to apply their East Coast model to the Appalachian Mountains, which are also considered a type of passive geology. Although they have been tectonically quiet for more than 200 million years, the Appalachians are beginning to show signs of wear and tear: rugged peaks, steep slopes, landslides, and waterfalls -- possible evidence of erosion, triggered by dynamic topography. "Scientists, such as Rob, who produce increasingly accurate models of dynamic topography for the past, are going to be at the front line of this important research area," says Mitrovica. Adds Rowley: "Rob Moucha has demonstrated that dynamic topography is a very important contributor to Earth's surface evolution. His study of mantle contributions is appealing on a large number of fronts that I, among others of our collaboration, hope to pursue."

Tropical Upper Atmosphere 'Fingerprint' of Global Warming

May 22, 2013 In the tropics at heights more than 10 miles above the surface, the prevailing winds alternate between strong easterlies and strong westerlies roughly every other year. This slow heartbeat in the tropical upper atmosphere, referred to as the quasibiennial oscillation (QBO), impacts the winds and chemical composition of the global atmosphere and even the climate at Earth's surface. The pulse of the QBO has weakened substantially at some altitudes over the last six decades, according to a new study by scientists at the International Pacific Research Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa, and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology. The decline in the strength of the QBO is consistent with computer model projections of how the upper atmosphere responds to global warming induced by increased greenhouse gas concentrations. The study appears in the May 23, 2013, online issue of Nature. "This is the first demonstration of a systematic long-term trend in the observed QBO record," says co-author Kevin Hamilton and Director of the IPRC. "We see a similar trend in computer models of the global atmosphere when they simulate the last century using the historical changes of greenhouse gases. So this change in upper atmospheric behavior can be considered part of the "fingerprint" of the expected global warming signal in the climate system." The global atmospheric circulation is characterized by air slowly rising in the tropics into the upper atmosphere and sinking at higher latitudes. While this circulation is so slow that a blob of air may take decades to travel to the upper atmosphere, it impacts the chemical composition of the global atmosphere because many chemical properties are very different in the lower and upper atmosphere layers. Although computer models used to project climate changes from increasing greenhouse gas concentrations consistently simulate an increasing upward airflow in the tropics with global warming, this flow cannot be directly observed. "We demonstrated that the mean upward-air motion suppresses the strength of the QBO winds in the models and thus interpret our observed weakened QBO trend as confirmation that the mean upward velocity in the tropics has indeed been increasing," notes Hamilton. Hamilton provides an example of why the upward airflow is so significant: "The manufacture of ozonedestroying chemicals such as the freon compounds used in the past in spray cans and in refrigerators has been largely banned for over 20 years. These chemicals, however, remain in the atmosphere for many decades. They are slowly flushed out of the lower atmosphere into the upper atmosphere where they are destroyed. Stronger mean upward airflow transports these chemicals more quickly into the upper atmosphere, and the ozone layer will recover more quickly to its natural state before the introduction of man-made freon compounds."

Changing Arctic: What Should Be Done?

May 21, 2013 In two critical reports released at the Arctic Council Ministerial Meeting in Kiruna, Sweden on May 15th, the scientific expertise of the Wildlife Conservation Society helped inform an international body of senior government officials about changing conditions in the Arctic, and potential responses to those changes. The scientific reports reviewed by the ministers are products of contributions from various experts, representing a range of knowledge and traditions -- including indigenous perspectives.

The first report, entitled "Arctic Biodiversity Assessment -- Status and Trends," provides the best available science and traditional ecological knowledge on the status and trends of biodiversity in the Arctic. It looks at all aspects of Arctic biodiversity, including all taxonomic groups and ecosystems, and includes a section on recommendations for conservation actions and policy. WCS Canada's Associate Conservation Zoologist Dr. Don Reid is the lead author of the "Mammals" chapter of this report, which documents recent and ongoing changes to distribution and abundance of marine and terrestrial mammals, along with an assessment of the likely causes of those changes. In addition, he contributed to the "Synthesis" chapter, which brings together the key findings of all the chapters and lays out recommendations for dealing with trends that have been or may soon be problematic for conservation of species and ecosystems. Reid summarizes the changes as both negative and positive depending on the species, "The Arctic is changing fast, and for mammals, the changes are most obvious in the shifts in habitat that a warming climate is driving," said Reid. On the oceans, ice creates habitat, but summer ice is disappearing, creating problems for polar bears, walrus and seals, but opportunities for some whales. On land, substantial tundra is changing to shrub land, which means a loss of feeding habitats for some species such as reindeer, but a novel area of expansion for moose." Reid goes on to point out that, "These climate-driven changes then overlay the various other human-induced forces that Arctic wildlife face. This includes new mines, roads, pipelines, oil and gas developments, and increased industrial pollutants, creating a growing complexity of management issues that will require harmonized regulatory regimes internationally, and greater involvement of northern communities in the conservation of the wildlife which are so crucial to their food security and culture." A second report, the Arctic Resilience Report (ARR), features the insights of WCS Beringia Director Dr. Martin Robards and makes a science-based assessment of the integrated impacts of change in the Arctic. The report looks at the potential for large shifts in ecosystem services that affect human well-being, and how drivers of change interact to affect the ability of ecosystems and human populations to adapt or transform. In addition, this report offers an evaluation of adaptive strategies. Dr. Robards is a lead author on the Background/Introduction chapters and the author of Chapter Seven that presents one of four case studies. His chapter discusses the rapid increase in Arctic shipping in the narrow confines of the Bering Strait -- the gateway for all vessel traffic passing between the Arctic and Pacific Ocean. "We found great political challenges for responding to the rapid increase in international vessel traffic in a manner that minimizes risks to the incredible aggregations of marine mammals and the food security of indigenous communities," said Dr. Robards. "However, there are also great opportunities for learning from successful efforts elsewhere such as on the eastern seaboard of the United States where Atlantic right whales have received greater protection through attention to vessel speeds and routing. Through our continuing work in the Arctic, WCS is well-suited to offer a unique perspective on the issue and to be a critical voice in offering science-based solutions to these challenges that benefit from the active engagement of the region's indigenous communities." Approximately 300 people including ministers, delegates from the eight Arctic states (Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States), representatives of indigenous peoples, scientists, and observers gathered in Kiruna to mark the end of the two-year Swedish chairmanship and the beginning of the Canadian chairmanship of the Arctic Council. The Council is a high level intergovernmental forum promoting cooperation, coordination and interaction among the Arctic States. This includes active involvement by Permanent Participants, including Arctic Indigenous representatives, on common Arctic issues, such as sustainable development and environmental protection.

Slow Earthquakes: It's All in the Rock Mechanics

May 20, 2013 Earthquakes that last minutes rather than seconds are a relatively recent discovery, according to an international team of seismologists. Researchers have been aware of these slow earthquakes, only for the past five to 10 years because of new tools and new observations, but these tools may explain the triggering of some normal earthquakes and could help in earthquake prediction. "New technology has shown us that faults do not just fail in a sudden earthquake or by stable creep," said Demian M. Saffer, professor of geoscience, Penn State. "We now know that earthquakes with anomalous low frequencies -- slow earthquakes -- and slow slip events that take weeks to occur exist." These new observations have put a big wrinkle into our thinking about how faults work, according to the researchers who also include Chris Marone, professor of geosciences, Penn State; Matt J. Ikari, recent Ph.D. recipient, and Achim J. Kopf, former Penn State postdoctural fellow, both now at the University of Bremen, Germany. So far, no one has explained the processes that cause slow earthquakes. The researchers thought that the behavior had to be related to the type of rock in the fault, believing that clay minerals are important in this slip behavior to see how the rocks reacted. Ikari performed laboratory experiments using natural samples from drilling done offshore of Japan in a place where slow earthquakes occur. The samples came from the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, an international collaborative. The researchers reported their results recently in Nature Geoscience. These samples are made up of ocean sediment that is mostly clay with a little quartz. "Usually, when you shear clay-rich fault rocks in the laboratory in the way rocks are sheared in a fault, as the speed increases, the rocks become stronger and self arrests the movement," said Saffer. "Matt noticed another behavior. Initially the rocks reacted as expected, but these clays got weaker as they slid further. They initially became slightly stronger as the slip rate increased, but then, over the long run, they became weaker." The laboratory experiments that produced the largest effect closely matched the velocity at which slow earthquakes occur in nature. The researchers also found that water content in the clays influenced how the shear occurred. "From the physics of earthquake nucleation based on the laboratory experiments we would predict the size of the patch of fault that breaks at tens of meters," said Saffer. "The consistent result for the rates of slip and the velocity of slip in the lab are interesting. Lots of things point in the direction for this to be the solution." The researchers worry about slow earthquakes because there is evidence that swarms of low frequency events can trigger large earthquake events. In Japan, a combination of broadband seismometers and global positioning system devices can monitor slow earthquakes. For the Japanese and others in earthquake prone areas, a few days of foreknowledge of a potential earthquake hazard could be valuable and save lives. For slow slip events, collecting natural samples for laboratory experiments is more difficult because the faults where these take place are very deep. Only off the north shore of New Zealand is there a fault that can be sampled. Saffer is currently working to arrange a drilling expedition to that fault. The National Science Foundation and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft supported this work.

Roots of Future Tropical Rainfall: Sea Level Influenced Tropical Climate During the Last Ice Age
May 19, 2013 How will rainfall patterns across the tropical Indian and Pacific regions change in a future warming world? Climate models generally suggest that the tropics as a whole will get wetter, but the models don't always agree on where rainfall patterns will shift in particular regions within the tropics. A new study, published online May 19 in the journal Nature Geoscience, looks to the past to learn about the future of tropical climate change, and our ability to simulate it with numerical models. Pedro DiNezio of the University of Hawaii and Jessica Tierney of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution investigated preserved geological clues (called "proxies") of rainfall patterns during a time when the planet went into opposite gear and cooled dramatically in the last ice age. Land clues included charcoal from fires, and evidence of more sand dune activity and desiccated lakes, all indicating drier conditions, and evidence for higher lake levels and more pollen, indicating wetter conditions. They also looked at records of seafloor sediments containing preserved shells of dead marine organisms; the shells contain higher or lower levels of a heavier isotope of oxygen, depending on the relative salinity of surface waters when the organisms were alive (less salty waters indicate more rainfall over the ocean). Together the records show that 26,000 to 19,000 years ago during the ice age, conditions were drier throughout the center of the Indo-Pacific warm pool -- a vast region of warm ocean waters in the western Pacific region that is the main source of heat and moisture to Earth's atmosphere. Wetter conditions prevailed on either side of the warm pool. They then compared this evidence with results from 12 different mathematical climate models that simulate Earth's climate, which incorporate basic laws of physics, chemistry, and fluid dynamics surrounding air-sealand-ice interactions. The idea is that the ice age provides a great test "to evaluate numerical models' ability to simulate climates radically different from the present one," the scientists said. Their results surprised them: Only one model, developed by the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in the England, reproduced the rainfall patterns they found from the geological evidence: a pattern of strong, widespread dry conditions over Indonesia, Southeast Asia and northern Australia, wetter conditions in eastern Africa, saltier waters (less rainfall) in the eastern Indian Ocean and Bay of Bengal and less salty waters (more rainfall) in the Arabian Sea and the western Pacific. The scientists say the primary cause for these conditions during glacial times was lower sea levels, which exposed the now-submerged Sunda Shelf as dry land and connected what are now Indonesian islands into one large land mass. However, the finding that only one model is able to reproduce the patterns of rainfall during the glacial period has broad implications for simulating tropical climate change. Climate scientists think that the main weakness of the models is their limited ability to simulate convection, the vertical air motions that lift humid air into the atmosphere. Differences in the way each model simulates convection may explain why model results for the glacial period are so different and don't match the proxy evidence. "The good news is, the Hadley model combined with the geological evidence show a pathway to improve our ability to simulate and predict tropical rainfall in the future," Tierney said. "The more we study the mechanisms that governed tropical climate in the past, the better we can predict the climate changes that will affect the billions of people that live in this vast region of the world."

GPS Solution Provides Three-Minute Tsunami Alerts

May 17, 2013 Researchers have shown that, by using global positioning systems (GPS) to measure ground deformation caused by a large underwater earthquake, they can provide accurate warning of the resulting tsunami in just a few minutes after the earthquake onset. For the devastating Japan 2011 event, the team reveals that the analysis of the GPS data and issue of a detailed tsunami alert would have taken no more than three minutes. The results are published on 17 May in Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, an open access journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU). Most tsunamis, including those in offshore Sumatra, Indonesia in 2004 and Japan in 2011, occur following underwater ground motion in subduction zones, locations where a tectonic plate slips under another causing a large earthquake. To a lesser extent, the resulting uplift of the sea floor also affects coastal regions. There, researchers can measure the small ground deformation along the coast with GPS and use this to determine tsunami information. "High-precision real-time processing and inversion of these data enable reconstruction of the earthquake source, described as slip at the subduction interface. This can be used to calculate the uplift of the sea floor, which in turn is used as initial condition for a tsunami model to predict arrival times and maximum wave heights at the coast," says lead-author Andreas Hoechner from the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ). In the new Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences paper, the researchers use the Japan 2011 tsunami, which hit the country's northeast coast in less than half an hour and caused significant damage, as a case study. They show that their method could have provided detailed tsunami alert as soon as three minutes after the beginning of the earthquake that generated it. "Japan has a very dense network of GPS stations, but these were not being used for tsunami early warning as of 2011. Certainly this is going to change soon," states Hoechner. The scientists used raw data from the Japanese GPS Earth Observation Network (GEONET) recorded a day before to a day after the 2011 earthquake. To shorten the time needed to provide a tsunami alert, they only used data from 50 GPS stations on the northeast coast of Japan, out of about 1200 GEONET stations available in the country. At present, tsunami warning is based on seismological methods. However, within the time limit of 5 to 10 minutes, these traditional techniques tend to underestimate the earthquake magnitude of large events. Furthermore, they provide only limited information on the geometry of the tsunami source (see note). Both factors can lead to underprediction of wave heights and tsunami coastal impact. Hoechner and his team say their method does not suffer from the same problems and can provide fast, detailed and accurate tsunami alerts. The next step is to see how the GPS solution works in practice in Japan or other areas prone to devastating tsunamis. As part of the GFZ-lead German Indonesian Tsunami Early Warning System project, several GPS stations were installed in Indonesia after the 2004 earthquake and tsunami near Sumatra, and are already providing valuable information for the warning system. "The station density is not yet high enough for an independent tsunami early warning in Indonesia, since it is a requirement for this method that the stations be placed densely close to the area of possible earthquake sources, but more stations are being added," says Hoechner.

Note Traditional tsunami early warning methods use hypocentre (the point directly beneath the epicentre where the seismic fault begins to rupture) and magnitude only, meaning the source of the earthquake and tsunami is regarded as a point source. However, especially in the case of subduction earthquakes, it can have a large extension: in Japan in 2011 the connection between the tectonic plates broke on a length of about 400km and the Sumatra event in 2004 had a length of some 1500km. To get a good tsunami prediction, it is important to consider this extension and the spatial slip distribution.

World's Melting Glaciers Making Large Contribution to Sea Rise

May 16, 2013 While 99 percent of Earth's land ice is locked up in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, the remaining ice in the world's glaciers contributed just as much to sea rise as the two ice sheets combined from 2003 to 2009, says a new study led by Clark University and involving the University Colorado Boulder. The new research found that all glacial regions lost mass from 2003 to 2009, with the biggest ice losses occurring in Arctic Canada, Alaska, coastal Greenland, the southern Andes and the Himalayas. The glaciers outside of the Greenland and Antarctic sheets lost an average of roughly 260 billion metric tons of ice annually during the study period, causing the oceans to rise 0.03 inches, or about 0.7 millimeters per year. The study compared traditional ground measurements to satellite data from NASA's Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite, or ICESat, and the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, missions to estimate ice loss for glaciers in all regions of the planet. "For the first time, we've been able to very precisely constrain how much these glaciers as a whole are contributing to sea rise," said geography Assistant Professor Alex Gardner of Clark University in Worcester, Mass., lead study author. "These smaller ice bodies are currently losing about as much mass as the ice sheets." A paper on the subject is being published in the May 17 issue of the journal Science. "Because the global glacier ice mass is relatively small in comparison with the huge ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica, people tend to not worry about it," said CU-Boulder Professor Tad Pfeffer, a study co-author. "But it's like a little bucket with a huge hole in the bottom: it may not last for very long, just a century or two, but while there's ice in those glaciers, it's a major contributor to sea level rise," said Pfeffer, a glaciologist at CU-Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research ICESat, which ceased operations in 2009, measured glacier changes using laser altimetry, which bounces laser pulses off the ice surface to determine changes in the height of ice cover. The GRACE satellite system, still operational, detects variations in Earth's gravity field resulting from changes in the planet's mass distribution, including ice displacements. GRACE does not have a fine enough resolution and ICESat does not have sufficient sampling density to study small glaciers, but mass change estimates by the two satellite systems for large glaciated regions agree well, the scientists concluded. "Because the two satellite techniques, ICESat and GRACE, are subject to completely different types of errors, the fact that their results are in such good agreement gives us increased confidence in those results," said CUBoulder physics Professor John Wahr, a study co-author and fellow at the university's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.

Ground-based estimates of glacier mass changes include measurements along a line from a glacier's summit to its edge, which are extrapolated over a glacier's entire area. Such measurements, while fairly accurate for individual glaciers, tend to cause scientists to overestimate ice loss when extrapolated over larger regions, including individual mountain ranges, according to the team. Current estimates predict if all the glaciers in the world were to melt, they would raise sea level by about two feet. In contrast, an entire Greenland ice sheet melt would raise sea levels by about 20 feet, while if Antarctica lost its ice cover, sea levels would rise nearly 200 feet.

'Fish Thermometer' Reveals Long-Standing, Global Impact of Climate Change

May 15, 2013 Climate change has been impacting global fisheries for the past four decades by driving species towards cooler, deeper waters, according to University of British Columbia scientists. In a Nature study published this week, UBC researchers used temperature preferences of fish and other marine species as a sort of "thermometer" to assess effects of climate change on the world's oceans between 1970 and 2006. They found that global fisheries catches were increasingly dominated by warm-water species as a result of fish migrating towards the poles in response to rising ocean temperatures. "One way for marine animals to respond to ocean warming is by moving to cooler regions," says the study's lead author William Cheung, an assistant professor at UBC's Fisheries Centre. "As a result, places like New England on the northeast coast of the U.S. saw new species typically found in warmer waters, closer to the tropics. "Meanwhile in the tropics, climate change meant fewer marine species and reduced catches, with serious implications for food security." "We've been talking about climate change as if it's something that's going to happen in the distant future -- our study shows that it has been affecting our fisheries and oceans for decades," says Daniel Pauly, principal investigator with UBC's Sea Around Us Project and the study's co-author. "These global changes have implications for everyone in every part of the planet." A summary of the study is available at http://www.pewenvironment.org/news-room/fact-sheets/warmingoceans-are-reshaping-fisheries-85899474034.