What is beneath the world’s largest ice sheet? Compiled by the British Antarctic Survey and made from “millions of new measurements, including substantial data sets from NASA’s ICESat satellite and an airborne mission called Operation IceBridge,” this animated map of the changing Antarctic Ice Sheet reveals the bedrock terrain below with a level of detail never seen before.

Read more about decades of data: Peeling Back the Ice of Antarctica by Wired’s Adam Mann.

via thekidshouldseethis

At the heart of the White House’s new Arctic strategy is an elementary but devastating contradiction between what President Obama, in the document’s preamble, describes as seeking “to make the most of the emerging economic opportunities in the region” due to the rapid loss of Arctic summer sea ice, and recognising “the need to protect and conserve this unique, valuable, and changing environment.”

Despite repeated references to “preservation” and “conservation”, the strategy fails to outline any specific steps that would be explored to mitigate or prevent the disappearance of the Arctic sea ice due to intensifying global warming. Instead, the document from the outset aims to:

“… position the United States to respond effectively to challenges and emerging opportunities arising from significant increases in Arctic activity due to the diminishment of sea ice and the emergence of a new Arctic environment.”

In other words, far from being designed to prevent catastrophe, the success of the new strategy is premised precisely on the disappearance of the Arctic summer sea ice.

No comment.

via climateadaptation

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6ft Ancient Lizard Named After Late Singer, Jim Morrison

A team of paleontologists roaming South East Asia has stumbled upon an amazing fossil of a lizard which upon closer inspection was revealed to be 36-40 million years old, about 6 ft long and weighing around 27 kg. This rather impressive size of a reptile is believed to have been possible due to the the higher temperatures of the time and their cooperation with mammals, as opposed to competition.

Dr. Head of the research team had been listening to The Doors a lot during the research and their imagery of ancient places, reptiles and of course the late Jim Morrison’s nickname, The Lizard King, had a notable effect when the team decided to call the newly discovered reptile Barbaturex morrisoni as a play on Morrison’s nickname.

Barbaturex morrisoni is the largest plant eating reptile ever discovered and while we are currently heading towards a climate which would allow reptiles to evolve to be extremely large once again, the rapid change of climate may see a great extinction instead of a rise in reptile size as the process is too rapid for animals around the world to adapt in time.

via theedgeofscience

(via throughascientificlens)

Time to Wake Up: GOP Opposition to Climate Science

In his weekly climate speech, Senator Whitehouse slammed the Republican Party for their opposition to taking action on climate change, and for siding with the pollutors over the the scientists.

Jellyfish surge in Mediterranean threatens environment – and tourists: A project is tracking the phenomenon as global warming and overfishing boost numbers of the venomous sea creature @ Guardian

via saveplanetearth

Global warming is expected to have far-reaching, long-lasting and, in many cases, devastating consequences for planet Earth. For some years, global warming — the gradual heating of Earth’s surface, oceans and atmosphere — was a topic of heated debate in the scientific community.

But the overwhelming consensus of researchers today is that global warming is real and is caused by human activity, primarily the burning of fossil fuels that pump carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

Additionally, global warming is having a measurable effect on the planet right now. [ Increase in average temperatures, extreme weather events, shift in climate patterns, snow and ice, rising sea levels, ocean acidification, plant and animal impacts, social impacts] …

(Source: science-junkie)

This is where all our greenhouse gases come from … sources, users and the volume of gases. Also check a more in-depth analysis at Grist.

One thing to remember is that while a gas like methane is only 1/5th of the emission volume, its greenhouse effect is 20 times that of CO2, pound for pound. 

Saving the Last Coral Wilderness on Earth

With his jaw-dropping footage of amazing sea creatures, oceanographer David Gallo strikes us with wonder and exposes how little we know about what lies below the surface of the ocean. The ocean is the planet’s largest habitat, covering more than three-quarters of its surface, yet most of this environment is unexplored. We know more about the surface of Mars than we do about the seafloor of our own planet.

Today, most of the world’s ocean is in serious decline, especially coral reefs, which are overfished and dying due to coastal development, erosion and runoff, pollution, and global warming. Back in 2000 I dove for the first time among the corals surrounding the Phoenix Islands in the South Pacific. They were the most pristine ever found. Virtually uninhabited, the islands had been protected by their remoteness, seeming to exist outside of time, and their reefs had been spared the overfishing and destruction that had ravaged neighboring reefs in the Pacific and elsewhere.

We must take care of our ocean. The fact that only about 1 percent of the ocean is protected (compared with 12 percent of the landmasses) should be a clarion call for ocean conservation. We need to ramp up our protection of the ocean and create more large marine protected areas like the Phoenix Islands Portected Area (PIPA), the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, and Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, to name a few. There has never been a more important time than the present to do so.

Pacific nations have taken a leadership position in global marine conservation. In 2009 President Anote Tong of Kiribati presented a concept to fellow member nations of the Pacific Islands Forum, proposing a “Pacific Oceanscape” initiative to protect the world’s largest ocean. In 2010 the fifteen-member nations’ leaders, including President Tong, met in Vanuatu and endorsed the Pacific Oceanscape Framework. Covering nearly 25 million square miles (40 million km2) of ocean and island ecosystems — the size of Canada, the United States, and Mexico combined — the Pacific Oceanscape unites Pacific island states in a survival campaign for ocean conservation and management in the twenty-first century.

To design the Pacific Oceanscape, stakeholders were recruited from fisheries, universities, conservation organizations, regional agencies, and governments to create a framework for the long-term, sustainable management of the ocean region that the Pacific island nations depend on for their survival and treasure as their natural and cultural heritage. This innovative and ambitious initiative is remarkable not only for its scale, but also for the united Pacific voice it brings to issues of sustainable development and ocean conservation.

The Future of the Phoenix Islands

It all started in 2001, when I flew to Tarawa, the capital of Kiribati, with two of my friends and marine biology researchers David Obura and Sangeeta Mangubhai to meet with government officials after our first expedition to explore the corals and sea life surrounding the Poenix Islands. The three of us presented a slide show and science report to the ministers of Fisheries and Environment, showing them the magical underwater scenes of hundreds of sharks, lavish, colorful corals, dense clouds of reef fish, and countless bird nesting on the islands.

“Turning conversations into action requires each of us to commit ourselves anew.” - Greg Stone

They were as amazed as we had been at the untouched, museum-like quality of the Phoenix Islands reefs, in sharp contrast to the reefs closer to their population centers, which were all overfished and degraded by coastal development. I could tell that seeing these thriving reefs meant a great deal to the Kiribati people in the room because of their society’s ancient connection to the sea. They informed us that we were the first foreign scientists who had ever bothered to come to Tarawa to explain in person what we had done and what we learned while conducting research in Kiribati waters.

The conversation that began in Tarawa marked the beginning of a remarkable partnership. The story of the Phoenix Islands shows how a single small action by a few individuals can grow to enlist the expertise, energy, and passion of people around the world, from ordinary citizens to professionals to policymakers at the highest levels of government.

Turning conversations into action requires each of us to commit ourselves anew, dedicating our time, energy, financial resources, and political will to the problems of climate change, overpopulation, and the other forces that affect our beleaguered water planet. It demands that we engage in free and honest dialogue across disciplines, cultures, and oceans. Our children, and their children, can inherit this blue planet only if we make the urgent mission to save the ocean our own and raise our voices along with our hopes.

Greg Stone is the Chief Ocean Scientist and Executive Vice President of The Betty and Gordon Moore Center for Science and Oceans at Conservation International. He is co-author of ‘Underwater Eden.’

Stay Curious! Read an original op-ed from the TED speaker who inspired this post and watch the TED Talk above.

Study Finds That North American Amphibian Populations Are Plummeting

by Darryl Fears

Frogs, toads and salamanders continue to vanish from the American landscape at an alarming pace, with seven species — including Colorado’s boreal toad and Nevada’s yellow-legged frog — facing 50 percent drops in their numbers within seven years if the current rate of decline continues, according to new government research.

The U.S. Geological Survey study, released Wednesday, is the first to document how quickly amphibians are disappearing, as well as how low the populations of the threatened species could go, given current trends.

The exact reasons for the decline in amphibians, first noticed decades ago, remain unclear. But scientists believe several factors, including disease, an explosion of invasive species, climate change and pesticide use are contributing…

(read more: Washington Post)        

(photo: Boreal Toad, by AP/Colorado Div. of Wildlife)

(Source: rhamphotheca, via rhamphotheca)

Exxon CEO, missing the point. (via think-progress)

You read that right…

The Guardian has a multi-part, video heavy media set on climate refugees in America. I’d argue that the title “first” is a misnomer and would point to the coastal communities in Texas, New Orleans, and the Carolinas who’ve been retreating from the coasts for several years.  But, the point is made - that sea-level rise and coastal erosion is much more aggressive than at anytime in history. Thus, tens of thousands of people are at immediate risk, especially the poor.

The above is one minute.

The people of Newtok, on the west coast of Alaska and about 400 miles south of the Bering Strait that separates the state from Russia, are living a slow-motion disaster that will end, very possibly within the next five years, with the entire village being washed away.

The Ninglick River coils around Newtok on three sides before emptying into the Bering Sea. It has steadily been eating away at the land, carrying off 100ft or more some years, in a process moving at unusual speed because of climate change. Eventually all of the villagers will have to leave, becoming America’s first climate change refugees.

(Source: climateadaptation, via climateadaptation)

This time, I worked with up and coming AccuWeather journalist Samantha-Rae Tuthill. She asked tough questions and dug deep for this piece. She was really great and I had a lot of fun. She also picked out some good zingers (I bet long-time readers will recognize my pessimism). Check it out if you can!

Whether they call it global warming, climate change or even global cooling, more and more Americans are taking a stand on one side or the other of this hotly debated issue.

According to a survey published last year by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, 66 percent of Americans believe that global warming is happening, with 42 percent concerned that it will harm people in the United States between now and the next 10 years. Forty-five percent of Americans believe the country will be harmed by global warming in the next 50 years, with only 16 percent saying that global warming will never harm the U.S.

The arguments on either side of the issue can be broken into three main categories. Those who do not believe in climate change, or at least in man-made climate change, are considered “climate skeptics.” Groups concerned about climate change are primarily split between two camps; those who want to prevent further change and those who want to adapt to changes that do occur.

(Source: climateadaptation)

Climatologists Call For Action On CO2

World leaders are being challenged to take action on climate change, following the news that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have broken through the 400 parts per million barrier.

Carbon Dioxide is the most important of several greenhouse gases, which also include methane and nitrous oxide. As part of many human activities, the gas is emitted into the atmosphere, where it absorbs energy emitted from the surface of the planet into space, re-emitting it back down again and warming the planet in the process. The more gas in the atmosphere, the greater the warming effect.

Brian Hoskins from the Grantham Insitute for Climate Change, told the BBC that the figure should “jolt governments into action”. He added: “Before we started influencing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, over the last million years it went between about 180 and 280 parts per million.”

It’s the first time that the symbolic threshold, which was crossed on 10 May at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii, has been passed for three to five million years.

There has been a certain amount of controversy over efforts to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide in the UK. Ministers claim that Britain is one of the world leaders in reducing emissions, but the government’s own climate change committee has warned that this is due to the country “exporting” its emissions by buying goods abroad and importing them to the UK once they’ve been manufactured. Meanwhile, the government remains firmly wedded to tax breaks for fossil fuel extraction.

Globally, emissions are still rising fast. However, Hoskins admitted that “it’s not all doom and gloom”. “China is doing a lot. Its latest five year plan makes really great strides,” he said.

image: Carbon Emissions credit: Duncan Geere / CC BY-SA 2.0

Study: Climate change will cut habitats by 2080: Climate change leaves many plants and animals only a few decades to adjust. A study warns that losses of living space will afflict plants and animals worldwide, raising extinction worries @ USA Today

(Source: saveplanetearth, via saveplanetearth)

New Steel Production Method Cuts Out Carbon Dioxide Emissions

Material chemists at MIT have developed a way to produce steel without carbon dioxide as a side product, potentially heralding a way to eliminate one of the major sources of carbon dioxide emissions worldwide.

Steel production has steadily risen for years, driven by countries like China and India that have been undergoing rapid and intensive industrialisation. According to the World Steel Association, even with the worldwide economic slump, steel production still rose 1.2 percent between 2011 and 2012 to 1,547 million tonnes. The production of steel — from extracting the iron ore to smelting the steel itself — accounts for more than three percent of global carbon dioxide emissions by some estimates.

To make steel, iron oxide is heated with carbon — the carbon and iron alloy is the steel, while excess carbon reacts with the oxygen to form carbon dioxide. Every tonne of steel creates almost two tonnes of carbon dioxide. Unexpectedly, a way to create steel without the problematic carbon dioxide waste product came about as a result of research into lunar bases.

Antoine Allanore, Lana Yin and Donald Sadoway, material chemists at MIT, received a grant from Nasa to look into ways to produce oxygen cheaply and easily on the Moon, a key precursor to being able to establish permanent lunar bases. Moon dust is rich in iron oxide, and in the course of their research they looked at a process called molten oxide electrolysis. The process, which electrolyses molten metal ores into their constituent elements, proved capable of extracting pure oxygen from Moon dust — with steel as a byproduct.

This was not unexpected, but the breakthrough now is that the team has found a way to make the method economical back on Earth. The original electrolysis used an iridium anode, but iridium is extremely expensive. The new method instead uses an alloy of chromiun and iron, which, when exposed to air, oxidises enough to be protected from significant oxidation, but still thin enough to allow current to flow through it. The team tested its Earth-based adaptation using lunar-like soil from Meteor Crater in Arizona.

According to Sadoway, this method has several advantages over conventional steel production beyond the avoidance of carbon dioxide emissions. The metal is reportedly extremely pure, and the same process could theoretically be adapted to the production of other metals, such as nickel or titanium.

However, the economical advantages are yet to be explored. It’s not easy to create steel normally, as a factory must produce millions of tonnes each year to be considered profitable, and while the team claims that this process would be economical on the scale of only hundreds of thousands of tonnes per year, there’s no evidence yet to back that up.

Furthermore, the temperatures required limit the materials that can be used as ovens. The same problem applies to molten oxide electrolysis — it has to be kept at a temperature of 1,600 degrees Celsius throughout, “a really challenging environment” Sadoway said. “The melt is extremely aggressive. Oxygen is quick to attack the metal.”

The research has been published in Nature.