Melting Ice Caps Allow Huge “Invasion” Of Marine Species
The November issue of Ecology is a special issue devoted to the efforts of the Coordinating Research on the North Atlantic (CORONA) network. The group, which includes ecologists, geneticists, paleontologists and oceanographers, among others, met on five separate occasions with the goal of expanding the scope of work performed across the North Atlantic, both geographically and scientifically. The resulting papers are comprehensive reviews of the field that cover topics including ecology, climate change and evolution, from both a geographical and historical perspective.
In order to understand the impact of human activity on our environment, we first need to understand the history of our planet and the species that reside here. Charles Darwin spent five years abroad studying plants and animals and collecting fossils from the Galapagos Islands. In contrast, modern day scientists aim to characterize much larger ecosystems. Large-scale interdisciplinary collaborative efforts such as CORONA aim to deliver an accurate ‘big picture’ view of ecosystems and the environment.
Researchers in the CORONA network study the North Atlantic as a model of species invasion. Approximately 3.5 million years ago the Bering Strait opened, allowing marine organisms from the Pacific to migrate to the Atlantic. The CORONA network brought together evolutionists who have studied this grand natural experiment from a historical perspective, and ecologists and oceanographers who look at what is happening today. The goal of these collaborations is to enhance our understanding of how past events contributed to the world we know today so that we may better predict the effect of current events on our future environment.
“Now that the Arctic Ice Cap is melting, a new invasion has begun,” says Cliff Cunningham, director of the CORONA network and guest editor of this issue of Ecology. “Studying comparative ecology across the Atlantic gives us an idea about how important each species is to the community. This kind of information can help us predict which species may come across with increased warming. We now have the technology to take on bigger questions by doing large-scale surveys of many different species. It is the coordination of these efforts that is key.”
The CORONA network collaboration is the result of efforts to foster interactions between scientists across disciplinary, organizational and geographical boundaries via the Research Coordination Networks (RCN) program at NSF. Unifying topics for these awards range from organisms to techniques to geographical areas.
Unlocking Climate Mysteries By Engaging Students From Harlem
Shakira Brown, right, a science teacher at New York's Harlem Children's Zone Promise Academy, and Howard Koss, a graduate student at Queens College, CUNY, on a C-17 flight from New Zealand to McMurdo Station in Antarctica as part of the Offshore New Harbor Project team. The project is conducting research into climate conditions over millions of years and participating in several outreach efforts that enable schools across the country to chart their progress.
Like most middle-school science teachers, Shakira Brown, a teacher at New York’s Harlem Children’s Zone Promise Academy, has spent the past months working hard to grab her student’s interest in science. It’s probably safe to say, however, that few of her colleagues are going to the extreme–both in distance and effort–that she is this fall.
Brown is currently in Antarctica as a member of a National Science Foundation (NSF)-supported scientific expedition that seeks to document what conditions were like there tens of millions of years ago. The project will help us understand what could happen to our planet as the climate changes. It will also act as a window for K-12 students from across the country to see scientists in action. Brown, scientists and students on the expedition are blogging about their work and will interact with students throughout the expedition via videoconferencing and the Internet.
“For me,” Brown said from Antarctica earlier this week by email, “this work speaks to what science is in essence, a natural curiosity that drives us to seek knowledge, embrace adventure and face fears.”
Brown is part of the Offshore New Harbor (ONH) Project, headed by Stephen Pekar, a geology professor at Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY) that seeks to unravel some of the mysteries of the earth’s climate. The project’s work is supported by the U.S. Antarctic Program. As manager of the program, NSF coordinates all U.S. government-sponsored research on the southernmost continent.
Pekar’s research was sponsored specifically by a grant made as part of NSF’s contribution to the International Polar Year (IPY), a coordinated scientific deployment to the polar regions and the largest international scientific effort of its kind in 50 years. NSF is the lead agency for the U.S. government’s IPY efforts.
Stephen Pekar of Queens College, CUNY, and Marvin Speece of Montana Tech pose for a photo near the site of the Offshore New Harbor (ONH) Project team's area of study on the ice of the Ross Sea off the coast of Antarctica. Their research will offer new insights into the relationship between climate and ocean currents over millions of years.
Scientists understand that increased levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other so-called greenhouse gases can alter our climate, and many experts believe that this climate change may affect our lives dramatically. After remaining relatively steady for millions of years, the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere has climbed rapidly in the last 100 years and is expected to climb even higher, according to the ONH team.
The last time CO2 levels were that high was between 25 and 40 million years ago. Sometime during that period, about 34 million years ago, the climate switched abruptly from a warm greenhouse world, where very little ice collected in Antarctica, to the so-called icehouse world, where large ice sheets began to form. Based on research by Pekar and others, once formed, the ice sheet covering Antarctica sometimes grew larger than it is today and sometimes melted to a much smaller size, dramatically lowering and raising sea level.
By studying the sediments deposited off the coast of Antarctica during the last years of the greenhouse world, and the transition to the icehouse world, the ONH team hopes to gather data about the planet’s physical conditions during that period in order to better understand what happened the last time CO2 levels were this elevated.
“Since this time interval was the last time that CO2 was as high as what they predict for this century, getting a climate history from studying sediments from this time will be looking back to our future,” Pekar said.
A marker flag in the area where the Offshore New Harbor (ONH) Project researchers are working. Ferrar Valley is visible in the background.
After setting up a base camp on the sea ice off the shore of eastern Antarctica, Marvin Speece of Montana Tech will lead the team in using sophisticated tools to seismically image and reconstruct the ancient sediments beneath the sea floor that were deposited during the greenhouse era, and during the transition period to the icehouse era.
“Since this will be the first time that data of this quality has been collected in a region that is so critical for understanding the greenhouse world climate in Antarctica, we will be using new tools to explore undiscovered country,” Pekar said.
The goal is to locate the best site to drill into these sediments on a future expedition.
There are several ways educators, students and people interested in learning more about the expedition can track the team’s progress. The project has created a Web site that provides links to the nine educational organizations that are currently collaborating with the OHN expedition, as well as the following additional resources:
- The ARISE Program, part of the ANDRILL project, has produced a Research Immersion for Science Educators Web site with opportunities for field research, blogs and images from past expeditions.
- The Global Nomads Group that offers live video conferencing between the team and schools nationwide.
- The ONH Expedition will collect real time weather data from their field camp for the GLOBE Program, which will be posted for teachers, students and general public to use.
- U.S. Satellite Labs Inc. (http://www.us-satellite.net/antarcticalive/) will have live Webcasts from Antarctica for teachers and students.
- Ice Stories, which is part of the San Francisco Exploratorium, a “hands on” science museum, is teaming up with the ONH expedition to bring video blogs from Antarctica this fall.
- Two Queens College students are working with Reach the World to report for the RTW website throughout the expedition.
For her part, Brown hopes the expedition will achieve another important goal–connecting students to the possibilities science has to offer.
“It is my deepest hope that the children that we touch as we share this expedition with them will come to understand that science is not simply something read in a book,” Brown said. “It is the impetus that causes us to search deeper within ourselves and our world for the truth that surrounds us.”
Rats, Now With Super Powers
I found this story from the Boston Globe to be pretty interesting.
Reviled as vermin through the ages, rats are becoming unlikely soldiers in the struggle against two scourges of the developing world: land mines and tuberculosis.
In Mozambique, special squads of raccoon-size rats are sniffing out lethal explosive devices buried across the countryside, remnants of the country’s anticolonial and civil wars of the last century.
In neighboring Tanzania, teams of rats use their twitchy noses to detect TB bacteria in saliva samples from four clinics serving slum neighborhoods. So far this year, the 25 rats trained for the pilot medical project have identified 300 cases of early-stage TB – infections missed by lab technicians with their microscopes. If not for the rodents, many of these victims would have died and others would have spread the disease.
“It’s fair, I think, to call these animals ‘hero rats,’ ” said Bart Weetjens, the Belgian conceiver of both programs.
Just goes to show you what can happen when we think outside the box.
A New Slogan For Coal
This is the weekly blog post from Bruce Nilles, director of the Sierra Club’s National Coal Campaign.
With dozens of new coal plants across the country now on hold because of last week’s ruling requiring a second look at carbon emissions, the coal industry is stepping up its game. Already in Kansas they’ve sued the Sebelius administration in an attempt to prevent states from acting to fight global warming.
We’re stepping up our game in response and need your input.
Already through our new website and online video at CoalIsNotTheAnswer.org, tens of thousands of people have learned the truth about coal – revealing the reality behind the coal industry’s slick $40 million advertising campaign that masks the harmful and polluting nature of coal-fired power plants.
Now it’s time to take the truth about coal to the masses. As part of our campaign to rebut the coal industry’s misleading claims, we need your help coming up with a new slogan for coal.
It’s easy, just go to CoalIsNotTheAnswer.org and enter your submission. If we like your idea, we’ll use it in an upcoming advertising campaign. In fact, we’ll be using a lot of entries.
The best entries will be featured prominently on a mobile billboard sent around D.C. and straight to the coal industry’s headquarters. (Don’t worry we’ve made sure our campaign is carbon-neutral, which is more than we can say about the coal industry!)
Some of my favorites thus far are:
Coal: 19th Century Solutions for 21st Century problems
Coal: It’s the Same Old Soot
Clean Coal Is Just Dirty Business
COAL: Contaminating Our Air & Lungs
Now it’s your turn – Go check out the submissions and enter one of your own today.
Toward A Green Deal For Transportation
By Michael Renner
In early 1942, the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt directed the entire U.S. auto industry to make a sudden and wholesale switch from producing cars to churning out tanks, armored cars, tank engines, and aircraft propellers. Close to 4 million vehicles had rolled off assembly lines the previous year, but emergency wartime priorities brought the nation’s auto production to zero for three years as the sale of private cars was banned. After World War II ended, the reconversion from a wartime economy to a peacetime economy was carried out with equal speed, accompanied by careful planning.
Today, facing an emergency of a different nature, it is imperative to consider a similar break with business-as-usual. Over the past half-century, automobile manufacturers in the United States and the rest of the world expanded production from 8 million vehicles in 1950 to some 74 million in 2007. The industry has grown to become a major driver of climate change. The U.S. “Big Three” manufacturers—GM, Ford, and Chrysler—have for two decades peddled oversized, gas-gulping SUVs that were good for short-term profits but lethal for the planet. This strategy has left Detroit with few options now that the financial crisis, rollercoaster oil prices, and unease about peak oil are weighing heavily on consumers’ minds.
Facing bankruptcy, the Big Three are now asking for a government bailout. Public and Congressional opinion has been skeptically, but Barack Obama may respond more favorably after he becomes president. The decision is not an easy one: an open-ended rescue rewards corporate failure, yet rejecting any sort of intervention risks massive job loss. Even so, there is a silver lining. Taking the 1940s experience to heart, this is a generational opportunity to revolutionize the industry—and more broadly, to reinvent transportation policy for sustainability. It is time for a strategic overhaul aimed at boosting vehicle fuel economy and reviving the long-neglected public transportation sector.
Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards remained largely unchanged from the mid-1980s until December 2007, when Congress passed the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. The law raised the combined standard for new cars, pickup trucks, and SUVs to 35 miles per gallon by 2020. Given that only 1.5 percent of vehicles sold in the United States in 2008 rated 35 mpg or more, this seems an appropriate challenge. Yet the more-efficient models produced in Japan and Europe today, and the fact that even a newcomer such as China has adopted more stringent fuel economy standards than the United States, suggest that Washington should adopt far more ambitious targets—at least 50 mpg by 2020, with continued improvements in later years.
An injection of public resources into the auto industry should take place under stringent conditions:
· Replace current management at the Big Three, and impose limits on executive compensation.
· Mandate that R&D and commercialization efforts are focused unequivocally on developing high-efficiency vehicles. This effort could entail more-efficient gasoline/diesel-powered cars, as well as hybrids and plug-ins (along with mandatory limits on vehicle weight and engine power).
· Outlaw the sale of vehicles that do not achieve a minimal level of fuel efficiency, with a floor that rises each year on an ambitious sliding scale.
· Buy up the least efficient vehicles currently on the road—in recognition of their “built-in” consumption that will otherwise drag down average fleet fuel efficiency for years.
· Offer tax rebates or other incentives for consumers who purchase the most-efficient models.
A green transportation policy also needs to look beyond autos and to rebalance the transportation system. Unlike other industrialized countries, the United States features a passenger rail system that occupies little more than a niche and is burdened by outdated tracks, ancient locomotives, and archaic signal systems. Aside from a handful of cities, urban mass transit remains limited, largely a consequence of land-use policies that have led to sprawling settlements. And decades of neglect have led to a situation where the country lacks even the capacity to manufacture modern locomotives and rolling stock domestically.
A green transportation overhaul would overcome these handicaps by:
· Making substantial and sustained investments in rail and light rail (while limiting highway spending principally to repairs of crumbling infrastructure such as bridges).
· Dedicating adequate R&D budgets to developing modern rail and bus technologies.
· Converting part of the bloated car-manufacturing capacities to produce rail and mass transit systems.
· Overhauling land-use policies to stimulate denser settlements that permit public transit, reduce reliance on motorized transportation, and make biking and walking realistic options.
Overall, such a course would stimulate innovation, reduce carbon emissions and air pollutants, inject urban and suburban areas with new vigor and vitality, and generate or retain large numbers of well-paying jobs.
Michael Renner is a senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based environmental research organization. He is a co-author of the recent Worldwatch report Green Jobs: Working for People and the Environment.
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