Earthbytes

More Damning Evidence Points to Pesticide as Cause of Mass Bee Deaths | Common Dreams

Continuing saga of the bees...interesting article:

Bayer-produced imidacloprid harmful to bees even at very low levels

- Common Dreams staff

A new study published in Naturwissenschaften - The Science of Nature by a leading bee expert provides damning evidence that a widely used pesticide, even at low levels, is harmful to bees.

The pesticide that the study (pdf) looked at was imidacloprid, one of the most widely used pesticides worldwide. It is neonicotinoid insecticide produced by Bayer CropScience.

via www.commondreams.org

Greenland’s Ice Is Growing Darker

The Earth Observatory newsletter yesterday had several great stories and photos. Here are some photos, excerpts and links to the one on Greenland's dark ice:

In the past, the bright surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet reflected well over half of the sunlight that fell on it. This reflectiveness helped keep the ice sheet stable, as less absorbed sunlight meant less heating and melting. In the past decade, however, satellites have observed a decrease in Greenland’s reflectiveness. This darker surface now absorbs more sunlight, which accelerates melting.

The map above shows the difference between the amount of sunlight Greenland reflected in the summer of 2011 versus the average percent it reflected between 2000 to 2006. Virtually the entire ice sheet shows some change, with some areas reflecting close to 20 percent less light than a decade ago. The map is based on observations from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. It was produced as part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Arctic Report Card.

 

Ohio State University scientist Jason Box says the darkening is due to changes in the shape and size of the ice crystals in the snowpack. The grains of snow clump together and reflect less light than the many-faceted, smaller crystals. Sharp crystal edges become rounded when exposed to more heat. These absorb more sunlight than jagged snow crystals:

Read mora via earthobservatory.nasa.gov

 

 

Tell Obama: No fastracking for the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline permit!

Wow, NRDC couldn't have found a better celebrity to help stop the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. The Closer herself! Take a look:

 

Now -- if you haven't already done so -- please ask President Obama to close the valve for good on some of the dirtiest oil on planet Earth!

For a few precious moments, it seemed the Keystone XL pipeline permit would get a second look after Obama stood up to the oil industry and delayed a decision pending further environmental review. But Big Oil's Congressional lapdogs have now forced a 60-day review that is way too short for adequate analysis, let alone an informed decision from the President.

In the past few days, industry claims that the pipeline would be safe has been challenged by whistleblower Mike Klink, an engineer who says he was fired by Bechtel after he called them out for shoddy materials and poor craftsmanship during construction of the original Keystone pipeline.

Klink himself wrote an awesome article in December 2011 that called safety of Keystone XL into question.

 

New Deep-Sea Hydrothermal Vent Communities Found in the Southern Ocean - PLoS Biology

Interesting (open access) study of organisms found in hydrothermal vent areas of the Southern Ocean...important discovery relative to biodiversity of species in this underexplored region of Earth's oceans.

Authors Summary:

Deep-sea hydrothermal vents are mainly associated with seafloor spreading at mid-ocean ridges and in basins near volcanic island arcs. They host animals found nowhere else that derive their energy not from the sun but from bacterial oxidation of chemicals in the vent fluids, particularly hydrogen sulphide. Hydrothermal vents and their communities of organisms have become important models for understanding the origins and limits of life as well as evolution of island-like communities in the deep ocean. We describe the fauna associated with high-temperature hydrothermal vents on the East Scotia Ridge, Southern Ocean, to our knowledge the first to be discovered in Antarctic waters. These communities are dominated by a new species of yeti crab, stalked barnacles, limpets and snails, sea anemones, and a predatory seven-armed starfish. Animals commonly found in hydrothermal vents of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans, including giant Riftia tubeworms, annelid worms, vent mussels, vent crabs, and vent shrimps, were not present at the Southern Ocean vents. These discoveries suggest that the environmental conditions of the Southern Ocean may act as a barrier to some vent animals and that the East Scotia Ridge communities form a new biogeographic province with a unique species composition and structure.

via www.plosbiology.org

Warmer temperatures allow plant communities in Quebec to expand northward

An amazing NASA study utilizing Landsat images of northern Quebec show that more than 20 years of warming temperatures have led to an expanding number and range of shrubs and grasses.

Comparison of area in Northern Quebec showing increased vegetation between 1986 and 2004. In this false-color Landsat image, more red color indicates more vegetation. Credit: Jeff Masek

"For the first time, we've been able to map this change in detail, and it's because of the spatial resolution and length-of-record that you can get with Landsat," says Jeff Masek, one of the study's authors.

According to NASA, this study is one of the first to present a detailed look at how warmer temperatures influence how plants spread out across the landscape and how dense they grow in northern regions of North America.

As I looked at some other photos from this study at the Earth Observatory website, I wondered how the scientists knew how to interpret the changes of shown in the images. Here's how the Earth Observatory article explains this:

Scientists typically track vegetation by measuring the “greenness” of a study area. Doug Morton, a NASA Goddard scientist and lead author, noted that previous satellite studies used yearly compilations, making it difficult to determine if increasing greenness was due to the expansion of vegetation cover or just the effect of a longer growing season.

For this study, Morton, Masek, and colleagues focused only on greenness measurements during the peak summer growth from 1986 to 2010. By using Landsat's 30-meter (98 foot) resolution and viewing the same area at the same time for 23 years, the researchers were able to decipher vegetation growing denser and more widespread.

Masek and his co-authors presented their study at the American Geophysical Union fall meeting in San Francisco on December 9th.

The day before that, former vice president Al Gore attended a session on the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite. A primary mission of DSCOVR was to help document global warming, but the project was cancelled before the satellite could be launched. It is being refurbished, however, and the Obama administration hopes it can be launched to replace the ageing Advanced Composition Explorer (ACE) satellite that monitors solar storms and space weather.

Also see:

More info on Landsat

NASA's Earth Observatory website

 

 

 

Action Alert: Virginia Rising to Keep Ison Rock Ridge Standing

Please stand with me and thousands of others today to stop destruction of Ison Rock Ridge in southwestern Virginia. If a mountaintop removing mining permit is approved there, the mountain communities of Inman, Andover, Derby, and Callahan Avenue and Ridge Street in the town of Appalachia would be at risk for more damage to the health of people and nature.

The permit area is huge: over 1200 acres of this awesome mountain ecosystem would be deforested and blown apart, disrupting the natural processes that must be kept intact to support human beings and other species who know this place as home.

Google Earth image of the permit area. See this image and more information at Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards website.

I Love Mountains has a page that will help you ask President Obama, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson, Nancy Sutley of the White House Council on Environmental Quality and EPA Regional Administrator Shawn Garvin to deny the permit.  If another mine is permitted here, it will only compound the destruction by mountaintop removal coal mining that Wise County's land, air, water, wildlife and people have already suffered.

Here's a great video that will let you hear from folks in Wise County, in their own words:

 

Please take action now to help all of our relations in Wise County, Virginia to keep Ison Rock Ridge standing.

Dr. Douglas Fields: Science cuts through the hysteria for answers to worldwide increase in fatal shark attacks

A great article today by neurobiologist Douglas Fields (at Huffington Post) explores growing numbers of shark attacks in the world's waters...I enjoyed his analysis, which includes interesting pieces of shark's natural history:

Is there a scientific explanation for these alarming data and the spike in recent fatal shark attacks?

Yes, both experts agree. The steady increase in shark attacks is easily explained by the increase in human population and growing popularity of water related sports and recreational activities. "The increase in shark attacks is largely a function of human demographics and growth. The number we get in any given year is purely a function of how many people went into the water," says Burgess.

There are, however, some new patterns emerging from Burgess' data on shark attacks. "There has been an increase this year [in shark attacks] in a number of areas where we have not traditionally had such attacks, undoubtedly by white sharks, most notably the three series of attacks in Russia in areas of cold water most of the time," he says. This, he explains is due to warming of waters, possibly associated with global warming, that are allowing sharks to expand their range farther north and south into waters that they normally do not go, and also because warmer water induces more people entering the sea.

via www.huffingtonpost.com

At the end of the article, George Burgess, shark researcher and curator of the International Shark Attack File at the Florida Museum of Natural History has some good advice for us terrestrial humans:

"When we enter the sea, we need to understand that we are visiting a foreign environment," Burgess observes. "We are terrestrial animals. Our evolution occurred on land. We don't have gills. We can't swim very well, and as such every time we enter the sea it is a wilderness experience for us...."

 

USGS study: U.S. Rivers and Streams Super-Saturated With Carbon Dioxide

A US Geological Survey study has found that rivers and streams in the United States are releasing far more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than previously thought.

In their Nature Geoscience article “Significant efflux of carbon dioxide from streams and rivers in the United States”, David Butman and Professor Peter Raymond of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies report that as plant cover on land decomposes, significant carbon accumulations discharge into streams and rivers. The carbon is subsequently outgassed as carbon dioxide (CO₂) into the atmosphere. They estimate that streams and rivers release almost 100 million metric tons of carbon each year. According to the researchers, this would be about the same as a car burning 40 billion gallons of gasoline.

Butman and Raymond used water chemistry data from more than 4,000 USGS gaging stations on rivers and streams throughout the US. Then they incorporated this data with detailed geospatial data from the USGS and the Environmental Protection Agency to model the movement of carbon dioxide from water.

The important research by Butman and Raymond will be be incorporated into the larger LandCarbon project of the USGS. In this national assessment, researchers are trying to get a clearer picture of "biological carbon sequestration" -- how vegetation, soils, and sediments naturally store carbon.

LandCarbon assessments include all major terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems in all fifty states. This analysis is expected to yield important baseline estimates as well as potential carbon storage and movement of greenhouse gases in and out of ecosystems in response to natural processes, as well as land use changes and land management activities by people.

The integrated LandCarbon assessment methodology uses data collections from various national inventory, monitoring, and remote sensing programs. It also utilizes an interdisciplinary approach that includes remote sensing, land change studies, biogeochemical modeling, mapping of wildfires, wetland ecology, aquatic studies and hydrological modeling.

LandCarbon is a regional scale assessment that uses scenarios, model parameterization, analyses, uncertainty estimates, as well as progress tracking and reporting of results based on EPA’s level II ecoregions.

 

USGS: Have Floods Changed with Increasing CO2 Levels?

US Geological Survey scientists R.M. Hirsch and K.R. Ryberg have published a new study investigating statistical relationships of flooding to increased CO2 levels in the Hydrologic Sciences Journal:

Only one of four large regions of the United States showed a significant relationship between carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere and the size of floods over the last 100 years. This was in the southwestern region, where floods have become smaller as CO₂ has increased. 

This does not mean that no strong relationship between flooding and greenhouse gases will emerge in the future. 

An increase in flood magnitudes remains one of the most anticipated impacts of climate change, and land and water resource managers are asking questions about how to estimate future flood risks and develop effective flood mitigation strategies for the future.  

A new report published by U.S. Geological Survey scientists in the Hydrologic Sciences Journal looks at this potential linkage using historical records of floods throughout the nation. Scientists studied flood conditions at 200 locations across the United States looking back 127 years through 2008. 

"Currently we do not see a clear pattern that enables us to understand how climate change will alter flood conditions in the future, but the USGS will continue to collect new data over time and conduct new analyses as conditions change," said USGS scientist and lead author Robert Hirsch. "Changes in snow packs, frozen ground, soil moisture and storm tracks are all mechanisms that could be altered by greenhouse gas concentrations and possibly change flood behavior. As we continue research, we will consider these and other factors in our analyses." 

Read the whole press release at www.usgs.gov

Download the paper at Hydrologic Sciences Journal (Taylor and Francis Pubs): Has the magnitude of floods across the USA changed with global CO₂ levels

 

Worst algae bloom in decades greens up Lake Erie

A MODIS image from a NASA satellite on October 9th shows a huge algal bloom on Lake Erie following a persistent mid-latitude cyclone that moved out of the region a week before. 

via earthobservatory.nasa.gov

According to Colleen Mouw, a University of Wisconsin-Madison researcher, the algae may have initially spread across the western side of the lake because of windy weather, but calm weather and warm temperatures after the storm allowed green scum to build on the surface. The bloom now covers much of the western half of the lake.

“This is considered the worst bloom in decades,” says Richard Stumpf, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

You can also see some green in Saginaw Bay that is most likely an algal bloom. The blue coloration visible in Lake Michigan and Lake Huron is sediment that came to the surface when strong winds stirred the waters.

This image and others are available for download at NASA's Earth Observatory website. You can sign up there also for a weekly email of featured Earth images.