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 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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If global warming melts the West Antarctic ice sheet, the thick slab of ice that covers an area the size of Texas, the situation for coastal dwellers around the world may not be as dire as previously estimated. A new study, which has sparked some debate, suggests that the water released by West Antarctica’s melting glaciers would raise sea levels by about 10 feet, not the 15 to 20 feet that had previously been predicted.
While the results sound like good news, Antarctic experts and the study’s lead author, Jonathan L. Bamber of the Bristol Glaciology Center in England, agreed that the odds of a disruptive rise in seas over the next century or so from the buildup of greenhouse gases remained serious enough to warrant the world’s attention [The New York Times]. They also note that some regions would also experience a larger surge in sea levels than others. “Sea level rise is not uniform across the world’s oceans, partly as a result of disruptions to the Earth’s gravity field,” explained Professor Bamber. “It turns out that the maximum increase in sea level rise is centred at a latitude of about 40 degrees along the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards of North America.” This would include cities such as San Francisco and New York [BBC News].
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The 340 residents of Newtok, Alaska will soon be among the first “climate refugees” in the United States. Global warming has battered the tiny coastal town: As average yearly temperatures rise, coastal ice shelves melt as does the permafrost on which the town sits. The Ninglick River has overtaken the town as the ground level simultaneously sinks [Backpacker blog]. As a result, the town’s scattered buildings are connected by a network of boardwalks across the mud.
With the forces of nature arrayed against them, the townspeople have now voted to relocate their town to a new site nine miles inland, on higher ground by the river. “We are seeing the erosion, flooding and sinking of our village right now,” said Stanley Tom, a Yup’ik Eskimo and tribal administrator for the Newtok Traditional Council…. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has estimated that moving Newtok could cost $130 million. Twenty-six other Alaskan villages are in immediate danger, with an additional 60 considered under threat in the next decade, according to the corps [CNN].
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A new study of fossilized coral reefs in Mexico has revealed that sea levels have risen abruptly in past epochs, which researchers say supports the theory that ocean levels could rise dramatically again in response to global warming. The study suggests that a sudden rise of 6.5 feet to 10 feet occurred within a span of 50 to 100 years about 121,000 years ago, at the end of the last warm interval between ice ages. “The potential for sustained rapid ice loss and catastrophic sea-level rise in the near future is confirmed by our discovery of sea-level instability” in that period, the authors write [The New York Times].
Other researchers have previously found evidence of rapid sea level rise as ice ages gave way to more temperate eras, causing vast ice sheets to melt. But because the coral shows evidence from a warmer interglacial period—similar to the one we’re in currently—the find boosts the chances that today’s melting ice sheets could trigger rapid sea-level rise, the study authors say [National Geographic News]. However, not everyone is convinced that the authors have proven their case. Some experts argue that the researchers haven’t definitively shown that the coral fossils date from 121,000 years ago.
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An ice bridge between two Antarctic islands that pinned the vast Wilkins Ice Shelf in place has splintered, and researchers say the change will probably accelerate the disintegration of the ice shelf, which is currently the size of Connecticut. Temperatures on the Antarctic Peninsula, which reaches up towards the bottom tip of South America, have risen by five degrees Fahrenheit over the past 50 years; researchers believe the continent is being reshaped by global warming.
The ice bridge between the islands Charcot and Latady shattered suddenly, says glaciologist David Vaughan: “It’s amazing how the ice has ruptured. Two days ago it was intact.” … The break left a jumble of huge flat-topped icebergs in the sea. The loss of the ice bridge, which was almost [60 miles] wide in 1950 and had been in place for hundreds of years at least, could allow ocean currents to wash away more of the Wilkins. “My feeling is that we will lose more of the ice, but there will be a remnant to the south,” Vaughan said [Reuters].
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A massive chunk of the Antarctic ice sheet seems destined to melt away due to global warming, raising sea levels dramatically. But the good news is, the process will take thousands of years. Those are the conclusions reached by two studies of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which can be considered the planet’s Achilles’ heel. It holds a vast amount of water, locked up as ice, and it’s sitting below sea level, so it’s inherently unstable [NPR].
By studying sediment samples from millions of years ago, researchers determined that the ice shelf has collapsed many times in the past, when warmer climate phases boosted ocean temperatures. With that historical data, another set of researchers simulated past and future changes to the West Antarctic ice sheet, and found that it could indeed begin to collapse sometime in the next century or so if nearby ocean temperatures increase roughly 5°C–a possibility if current warming trends continue. If that warming occurs, the sheet could totally collapse in a few thousand years but contribute to sea-level rise much sooner [ScienceNOW Daily News].
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Last year, President Mohamed Nasheed announced that his country would look to buy land for Maldivians to resettle on when sea levels rose and caused the low-lying islands to be uninhabitable. That plan proved too expensive, but Nasheed has now announced a $1.1 billion plan that will shift the Maldives entirely to renewable energy over the next ten years, making it the world’s first carbon-neutral nation.
The archipelago Indian Ocean nation consists of almost of 1,200 islands, of which only about 250 are inhabited. None of the coral islands measures more than 1.8 metres (six feet) above sea level, making the country vulnerable to a rise in sea levels associated with global warming [BBC]. Scientists at a meeting in Copenhagen last week predicted that glaciers and ice sheets melting as a result of global warming could boost the level of the world’s oceans by as much as a metre by the end of the century [CBC].
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By the year 2100, ocean levels may have risen twice as much as was predicted just two years ago, researchers announced at the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change in Copenhagen. This means that the lives of some 600 million people living on low-lying islands, as well as those living in Southeast Asia’s populous delta areas, will be put at serious risk if climate change is not quickly and radically mitigated [The New York Times]. Meanwhile, a separate study has cataloged the damage that rising seas would do to the California coastline.
Previous estimates of sea level rise from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change didn’t take full account of the rapid melting of mountain glaciers and Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, researchers in Copenhagen said. Antarctica, in particular, was thought to be little affected by global warming until recent research proved definitively that the southern continent is heating up. Taking into account the new findings, the upper range in the rise of sea levels could be approximately 1 meter (3.28 feet), “possibly more,” by 2100. At the lower end of the spectrum, it appears increasingly unlikely, say the study’s authors, that sea level rise will be much less than a half-meter by 2100…. “Two or three years ago, those making this type of statement were seen as extremists” [The New York Times], says study coauthor Eric Rignot.
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The collapse of an ice sheet in West Antarctica would not only threaten coastal areas of North America and nations in the southern Indian Ocean, but would also cause a shift in the earth’s rotation axis, researchers report in Science.
If the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) collapses and melts, as some scientists feel is likely due to global warming, the earth’s rotation would shift an approximate 500 meters from its current position. Rather than cause a uniform rise in sea level, this would result in a 30 percent greater increase in certain areas—about 21 feet for Washington, D.C., for example, compared with the uniform 16 to 17 feet already predicted. The researchers say the melting would change the balance of the globe in much the same way that tsunamis move huge amounts of water from one area to another [ABC News].
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Researchers say they have an answer to a question that’s been befuddling climate scientists for years: Was it possible that Antarctica, alone among the earth’s seven continents, wasn’t feeling the effects of global warming? As recently as 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change declared that the jury was still out on the question, but now, finally, researchers say they have conclusive proof that the icy southern continent is also heating up. In October, a separate group of researchers came to much the same conclusion using computer models, but the new study bolsters previous research with empirical evidence.
The confusion over conditions in Antarctica arose mostly from strange weather patterns created by ozone depletion in the Southern Hemisphere, and allowed “climate skeptics” who deny the existence of global warming to use the continent as a talking point. Scientists had long thought that while some isolated parts of Antarctica had been warming, much of the continent had been cooling over the past 50 years. But the new analysis found that since 1957, when measured as a whole, the continent’s temperature has risen about 1 degree Fahrenheit. “The thing you hear all the time is that Antarctica is cooling — and that’s not the case,” says study lead author Eric Steig [USA Today].
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Several new studies of ice loss at the earth’s poles paint a distressing picture of global warming’s impact on those fragile ecosystems, and one study warns that changes in the Arctic climate can have a large impact on the rest of the world. In the first study, researchers determined that more than 2 trillion tons of landlocked ice in Greenland, Alaska, and Antarctica have melted since 2003, a melting trend that researchers expect to continue. Using new satellite technology that measures changes in mass in mountain glaciers and ice sheets, NASA geophysicist Scott Luthcke concluded that the losses amounted to enough water to fill the Chesapeake Bay 21 times. “The ice tells us in a very real way how the climate is changing,” said Luthcke [CNN].
Melting of land ice, unlike sea ice, increases sea levels very slightly. Between Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska, melting land ice has raised global sea levels about one-fifth of an inch in the past five years, Luthcke said. Sea levels also rise from water expanding as it warms [AP]. The amount by which sea levels will rise as a result of global warming is still uncertain. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gives an official estimate of a seven-inch to two-foot rise by 2100, but researchers say conditions at the poles are changing too quickly for confident predictions.
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If life gives you saltwater, grow salt-loving plants. That’s the cheerful prescription two ecologists have offered to cope with the salinization of coastal fresh water supplies that would likely occur if global warming causes sea levels to rise, bringing saltwater sloshing further inland. The scientists say that convincing farmers to grow edible salt-tolerant plants would prepare them for changing conditions, and would also allow them to utilize previously barren coastal deserts and degraded agricultural land.
Governments should begin to invest in “saltwater agriculture,” says coauthor Jelte Rozema. “We have limited amounts of freshwater – most of it is used for drinking water. Gradually it will be profitable to think of brackish water and sea water as a resource.” … The scientists suggest the best way forward is to domesticate wild plants, crossbreeding them to produce higher yields [BBC News]. Researchers points to edible plants like sea kale and samphire (sometimes called sea asparagus) as likely candidates for domestication, as both grow happily amid the sea spray. In the Netherlands, researchers have experimented with growing sea kale as a crop in coastal areas, and their results have been a hit at one island restaurant. “It has a stronger flavor than most vegetables but brings out very nice accents in food,” [restaurateur Jef] Schuur said. “Growing sea kale here shows that there are a lot more opportunities for local produce on low-lying islands affected by salt” [Bloomberg].
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The newly elected president of the Maldives, the island chain south of India, says his country must start saving up money to buy a new homeland, in case global warming causes sea levels to rise so much that the waves submerge the archipelago entirely. Says Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed: “We can do nothing to stop climate change on our own and so we have to buy land elsewhere. It’s an insurance policy for the worst possible outcome…. We do not want to leave the Maldives, but we also do not want to be climate refugees living in tents for decades,” he said [The Guardian].
The Maldives are the lowest-lying nation on the planet: most of the islands are only a few feet above sea level, and the highest point, in the capital city of Malé, is about seven feet above sea level. But the white sandy beaches are a major tourist attraction bringing in billions of dollars every year…. Mr Nasheed’s plan is to create a “sovereign wealth fund” using tourism revenues to buy land so that future generations will have somewhere to rebuild their lives if they have to leave. He wants somewhere within the region, where the culture is similar – possibly India or Sri Lanka [BBC News]. However, Nasheed also mentioned Australia as a possibility, because of the vast swaths of unoccupied land on that continent.
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A new analysis of Antarctic weather conditions has found that human-caused global warming is to blame for the changing climate at the south pole, according to a new study. In its landmark Fourth Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) declared in 2007 that human influence on climate “has been detected in every continent except Antarctica” [Nature News]. Now, researchers have evidence that even that final frontier is feeling the heat from human activities.
In the study, published in Nature Geoscience [subscription required], researchers compared 100 years of Antarctic and Arctic climate records to the results of two sets of computerized climate models. Both sets factored in the effects of natural phenomena, such [as] volcanic eruptions and solar sunspot cycles, but only one set factored in the consequences of human activities that can affect climate, such as rising levels of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide and fluctuations in the amount of ozone in the stratosphere. It was the models which included human factors that most closely matched the temperature profiles recorded at the poles. “For me, it can’t be more clear that human activity is responsible” [New Scientist], said study coauthor Alexey Karpechko.
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