The tsunami that struck the South Pacific islands of Somoa, American Somoa, and Tongo yesterday has resulted in at least 108 deaths, according to early reports.
Experts monitoring the underwater earthquake that triggered the tsunami have issued various reports of its magnitude, ranging from 7.8 to 8.3. The powerful quake struck early on Tuesday morning, local time, as island residents were getting ready for work and school. About ten minutes after the shock, ten-foot-high waves hit American Somoa’s shore. “American Samoa is a small island, and most of the residents are around the coastline,” [said Filipo Ilaoa, deputy director of the American Samoan office in Honolulu]. “There was no warning or anything at all. By the time the alert was out of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center, it had already hit” [The New York Times].
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A 8.3 magnitude earthquake in the South Pacific triggered a tsunami early Tuesday morning local time (5:48 pm Greenwich Mean Time), sending residents of the Samoan Islands running to the hills. At this time there are unconfirmed reports of scattered deaths in American Samoa. The powerful waves reportedly swept into Pago Pago, American Samoa’s capital city.
To the west, in the independent state of Samoa, at least one coastal village was leveled, according to eyewitness Graeme Ansell of New Zealand. “It was very quick. The whole village has been wiped out,” Ansell told National Radio from a hill near Samoa’s capital, Apia. “There’s not a building standing. We’ve all clambered up hills, and one of our party has a broken leg. There will be people in a great lot of need ’round here” [AP].
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The tiny island nation of Palau has taken a big step to protect the ocean’s endangered sharks, by designating all of its territorial waters a shark sanctuary within which all commercial shark fishing is prohibited. Palau’s president, Johnson Toriboing, announced the plan at a meeting of the UN General Assembly last Friday. Sharks are increasingly under threat as the demand for shark-fin soup—a delicacy in many Asian countries—has risen worldwide. “The need to save the ocean and save sharks far outweighs the need to enjoy bowls of soup,” Toriboing said [National Geographic News].
Palau consists of about 200 small islands in the Pacific Ocean to the east of the Philippines; its expansive marine territory spans 230,000 square miles, an area about the size of Texas. About 130 species of rare sharks either make their homes or pass through these waters, including hammerheads, leopard sharks, and reef sharks, as well as the related stingrays.
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In an ambitious attempt to assess how humans are doing as stewards of planet earth, 28 leading scientists have drawn up a list of nine “planetary boundaries” that must not be crossed if we want to avoid drastically changing the global environment and imperiling our own existence. The only problem is, we’ve already crossed three of those thresholds.
The paper, published in Nature (and available for free), aims to define a “safe operating space” for human life on the planet. It’s a first-draft users’ manual for an era that scientists dub the “anthropocene,” in which nearly seven billion resource-hungry humans have come to dominate ecological change on Earth [Wired.com]. What follows is a list of the nine environmental factors, and how we’re doing on living within each limit.
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Forget, for a moment, all those fancy geoengineering schemes that would alter the face of the planet in an attempt to reduce global warming’s impact. Population scientists argue that a cheaper and simpler strategy is to hand out birth control to those who want it–especially to people in the developing world, where birth rates are booming.
The world’s population is projected to jump to 9 billion by 2050, with more than 90 percent of that growth coming from developing countries…. In countries with access to condoms and other contraceptives, average family sizes tend to fall significantly within a generation. Until recently, many U.S.-funded health programs did not pay for or encourage condom use in poor countries, even to fight diseases such as AIDS [AP].
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Oil and gas companies looking for deposits offshore have touted their equipment as environmentally friendly. However, new research suggests that blue whales are having a hard time hearing each other over the seismic blasting that the search entails. Research has discovered that whales forced to compete with the seismic testing work, which involves bouncing sound waves off the sea bed, markedly increase the number of times they repeat the same calls [The Times].
The study, published in Biology Letters, was conducted in Canada’s St. Lawrence Estuary, and is the first report of whales increasing their calls in response to underwater noise. Researchers believe that the whales are repeating the calls simply because other whales can’t hear them, and they’re having trouble gathering to feed and mate.
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Geothermal energy, a promising but increasing controversial type of alternative energy, is on the hot seat again, this time in a German town that experienced an earthquake that some are blaming on the local geothermal power plant. A government panel is investigating claims that the plant triggered a magnitude-2.7 earthquake on 15 August in the town of Landau…. If the panel finds against the company that built the plant, Geox of Landau, it could be shut down [New Scientist].
Geox hasn’t been very vocal about the cause of the quake, but company officials initially denied any responsibility for the temblor and continue to dispute the government’s data linking the project to the quake. The panel will, among other things, have to sort through the conflicting data presented by the company and government scientists [The New York Times].
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A team of researchers has come up with a simple plan to halt global warming: All we need to do is turn both the Sahara and the Australian outback into vast, shady forests.
While that might sound so ambitious as to be absurd, the climate scientists say the project would be no more expensive or technologically challenging than some of the other geoengineering schemes that are currently under discussion. And researcher Leonard Ornstein says it would certainly get results. Ornstein says that if most of the Sahara and Australian outback were planted with fast-growing trees like eucalyptus, the forests could draw down about 8 billion tons of carbon a year–nearly as much as people emit from burning fossil fuels and forests today. As the forests matured, they could continue taking up this much carbon for decades [ScienceNOW Daily News].
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Norman E. Borlaug, a world-renowned American botanist, died this past Saturday at his home in Dallas from complications due to cancer. Borlaug, who was 95, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for starting the “Green Revolution” that dramatically increased food production in developing nations and saved countless people from starvation [Washington Post]. Borlaug pioneered high-yield agricultural techniques, using cross-bred crops and nitrogen fertilizers, which helped India, Mexico, and other nations combat hunger and become self-sufficient producers of grains.
“Civilization as it is known today could not have evolved, nor can it survive, without an adequate food supply,” said Borlaug during his Nobel Lecture in 1970. “Yet food is something that is taken for granted by most world leaders despite the fact that more than half of the population of the world is hungry. Man seems to insist on ignoring the lessons available from history.”
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Arctic sea ice melting, which scientists have linked to global warming, may be a boon for the shipping industry. As the sea ice continues to melt a shipping passage to Russia’s north is becoming more navigable, and now two German ships are close to completing the first trip from Asia to Europe via the Arctic shortcut. However, walruses that live in the Arctic could care less, since their sea ice habitat is rapidly disappearing.
Thousands of walruses are congregating on Alaska’s northwest coast, a sign that their Arctic sea ice environment has been altered by climate change. Chad Jay, a U.S. Geological Survey walrus researcher, said Wednesday that about 3,500 walruses were near Icy Cape on the Chukchi Sea, some 140 miles southwest of Barrow [AP]. Walruses wear themselves out diving for clams, and need to rest on the sea ice between meals. Since the sea ice is disappearing, they are turning to the shore for a break. Federal managers and researchers worry that so many walruses in one location could lead to a deadly stampede or could drive off prey. Highlighting the animals’ peril, the Obama administration is considering adding walruses to the endangered species list.
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The Mount Wilson Observatory has allowed astronomers to gaze at the heavens for more than a century from a peak in the San Gabriel Mountains, just northeast of Los Angeles, but the devastating conflagration known as the Station Fire that ripped through the Angeles National Forest over the past week had stargazers wondering if the historic facility was about to go up in smoke. The flames got so close at one point that firefighters abandoned the facility, but now L.A. County Deputy Fire Chief Jim Powers has assured astronomers that he foresees “another hundred years for Mount Wilson Observatory.” This is the story of how firefighters saved the birthplace of modern astronomy as well as a virtual forest of communication towers that serve the region [AP].
On Monday night, the scene was grim. The observatory had been hastily evacuated that day, and only two-dozen firefighters stood overnight sentry, positioned along the gloomy perimeters of the observatory and towers. A greater number might have been deployed, but there were more pressing priorities in the urban elevations — the protection of hillside homes [Los Angeles Times]. By daybreak, fire chiefs made the call to retreat from the mountaintop, where firefighters could easily be trapped by the oncoming flames. “It’s not worth dying for,” said Los Angeles County Fire Department Battalion Chief Steve Martin [Los Angeles Times].
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The Republic of Maldives has big plans for discarded coconut shells: they can become both a fertilizer and a planet-cooler. The Maldivian government has announced plans to burn the shells and turn them into biochar, a form of high-carbon charcoal that takes a long time to decompose, and which can be used to nourish the soil. It’s one effort of many that the government of the Indian Ocean archipelago hopes will help it achieve carbon neutrality by the year 2020.
The “slow-cooked” organic waste project was launched through a partnership between the Maldives government and the British company Carbon Gold. The scheme would not only reduce organic garbage, it would also decrease dependence on imported fertilizer. Carbon Gold argues that the biochar is an effective way of removing CO2 from the atmosphere. The company says the fertiliser also improves soil fertility…. “Waste that would have rotted or been burnt before is now locked up and put very safely in the soil,” [BBC], says company cofounder Daniel Morrel. Researchers believe that biochar doesn’t break down (and therefore release its carbon) for hundreds of years.
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It would be funny if it weren’t so serious: While some skeptics are still ignoring the scientific evidence and insisting that global warming is a hoax, engineers and scientists are already looking for the best “plan B” that can help out humanity in the likely event that the world’s governments can’t agree to cut carbon dioxide emissions fast enough to prevent serious global consequences. Just last week Britain’s Institution of Mechanical Engineers released their picks for the most realistic geoengineering tactics, and now the Royal Society, Britain’s top science academy, has weighed in with its suggestions.
A 12-member working group of scientists, engineers, an economist, a social scientist, and a lawyer spent nearly a year examining technologies, such as fertilizing the oceans to suck down atmospheric carbon dioxide or orbiting giant mirrors to deflect sunlight [ScienceInsider]. The subsequent report (pdf) argues that many of the most-hyped geoengineering ideas are simply too risky, including the proposal to fertilize the ocean to create carbon-absorbing algae blooms. “Most of the things that have gone wrong in the past have happened when we’ve tampered with biological systems” [New Scientist], says John Shepherd, who chaired the report committee.
The report separates geoengineering tactics into two basic approaches: those that reflect sunlight back into space to cool down the planet, and those that remove the heat-trapping gas carbon dioxide from the air. Of the two strategies, the report concluded that those involving the removal of carbon dioxide were preferable, as they effectively return the climate system closer to its pre-industrial state. But the authors found that many of these options were currently too expensive to implement widely. This included “carbon capture and storage” methods, which require CO2 be captured directly from power plants and stored under the Earth’s surface [BBC News]. Yet carbon capture and storage projects have been touted as an important response to global warming by power plants and governments alike.
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Just a few days ago, we wrote that laughing gas, or nitrous oxide, has become today’s biggest threat to the ozone layer. So what’s the greatest source of nitrous oxide? Manure, according to new research published in Nature Geoscience.
Nitrous oxide, which also contributes to global warming, is produced naturally and through human activities like agriculture. Fertilizer is a recognized source of the gas, but until now, manure had been largely overlooked. Says researcher Eric Davidson: “[Fertilisers] are extremely important, but that’s only part of the story.” … He says nitrous oxide levels started increasing in the late 19th century “long before we started using nitrogen fertilisers in the 1960’s” [ABC Science]. And as a growing number of people around the globe consume meat, the manure that is an inevitable byproduct of meat production could pump an increasing amount of nitrous oxide into the atmosphere–or we could harness the power-producing potential of the waste.
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Watermelons could do more than grace the tables at picnics across the land: They could also serve as a source of biofuel. Researchers fermented watermelon juice to produce ethanol, according to a study published in Biotechnology for Biofuels, and while the melons aren’t likely to become a primary biofuel crop, the process could help out farmers.
Nearly one-fifth of the watermelon crop grown in the United States is left in the fields after harvest because of defects on the melons’ rinds. “It’s not that there’s anything wrong with the melon on the inside, but our only method of judgment is the outside,” said [lead author] Wayne Fish [Greenwire]. Although farmers often till the abandoned melons into the soil, the value of the nutrients provided by this practice is much less than the overall cost to farmers of losing so much of their crop.
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