Massive reclamation at Labrador continues
on the wildfilms blog
What Fish Are You?
on the ashira blog
Red-wattled Lapwing: Failed nesting
on the Bird Ecology Study Group blog
Singapore is Not Ready for Renewable Energy
on the AsiaIsGreen blog
Fishy origins of speech
on the wildfilms blog
Patwant Singh, Channel NewsAsia 17 Jul 08;
SINGAPORE: Endurance races are all the rage in Singapore and the latest to come on track is an off-road ultra-marathon to push the limits of human endurance.
Organisers said it is the first official event of this nature, where participants are paired in teams of two, each running 50 kilometres.
The North Face 100 event, which will be staged in October, will cover the central catchment area from MacRitchie Reservoir to Bukit Timah Nature Reserve.
The route will cover a variety of terrain - from mud roads to tarmac.
Australia was where the series kicked off in May, moving on to the Philippines, then Singapore and finally ending in Beijing in early 2009. - CNA/vm
Fuel rates moving more closely in tandem with crude prices, say analysts
Christopher Tan, Straits Times 18 Jul 08;
PUMP prices fell for just the second time in 18 months yesterday, following a slip in crude oil prices.
Petrol rates dropped by four cents a litre while diesel slid by two. The decreases come a week after the first reduction since January 2007.
The latest falls followed a drop in crude prices. They tumbled below US$140 on Tuesday when news broke that the United States had more oil reserves than expected.
Industry watchers said pump prices seem to be moving more closely in tandem with crude prices now.
Consumers Association of Singapore executive director Seah Seng Choon said: 'Consumers will welcome such quick response. We believe oil companies are able to adjust pump prices promptly and the latest move shows that such action is possible.'
Mr Ng Weng Hoong, the editor of energy news portal EnergyAsia.com, said: 'It looks good for the oil companies. But remember, it will be equally fast when prices rise.'
A litre of 92-octane petrol now costs $2.173, while 95- and 98-octane go for $2.206 and $2.28 respectively before discount. Shell's V-Power and Caltex's Platinum, so-called ultra-premium grades, are now $2.399 and $2.396 respectively. Diesel is $2.013.
Meanwhile, prices of compressed natural gas (CNG) continue to rise, jumping more than 40 per cent in the last six months.
With this, the gap between CNG and petrol has narrowed considerably.
Mr Ng said prices of all fossil fuels are correlated in some way. 'Ultimately, all will have to move up,' he noted.
One kilogram of CNG at Smart Energy's Mandai station is now $1.73, about 50 cents higher than when it opened six months ago.
Smart Energy managing director Johnny Harjantho said this was because the cost of gas had soared.
Motorists who drive CNG cars are obviously not thrilled. Customer service officer Wong Chee Wei, who owns a bi-fuel Chevrolet Optra, said: 'It has been rising almost every week.'
Aubrey Belford Yahoo News 17 Jul 08;
Tiger skins and rare caged primates openly sold at markets in the heart of Indonesia's capital are the most brazen and visible aspect of a thriving illegal wildlife trade.
Indonesia is struggling to take on a multi-million-dollar industry that is stripping the archipelago nation's vast forests of endangered species for enormous profit by selling them to buyers around the world.
With corruption rife and authorities overwhelmed, conservationists say police and forestry officials have barely made a dent.
Activists and the government estimate Indonesia loses at least 80 million dollars a year through the illegal trade, with rare animals -- dead and alive -- being sold at huge mark-ups once they get to overseas markets.
"What's interesting is that an orangutan caught in Kalimantan (on Borneo island) costs no more than three million rupiah (327 dollars) and is sold in Jakarta for five million rupiah," said Asep Purnama from the non-government organisation ProFauna.
"Once they get to Taiwan they will sell for around 100 million rupiah and in Europe they'll sell for 400 million," he said, adding that an estimated 100 orangutans are taken every year from Kalimantan's forests alone.
Purnama's group estimates around 10,000 animals found only on Sumatra island were poached in 2007 to supply the illegal trade.
While some animals are shipped directly from Kalimantan or Sumatra to Malaysia or the Philippines, much of the trade is directed through the teeming animal markets of Indonesia's major cities, Purnama said.
"Since the illegal wildlife trade in the markets is the result of wild poaching, stopping the illegal trade in the markets would reduce the poaching itself," he said.
A short walk through Jakarta's Jatinegara shows a flourishing trade.
Peddlers sell slow lorises, a rare bug-eyed primate from Sumatra's forests, for less than 10 dollars each as pets for middle-class families.
Most buyers likely don't know trade in the seemingly cute animals is illegal -- or that they usually die within weeks from the stress of captivity -- but the sellers do, and they are extremely camera shy.
A few hundred metres (yards) away in Jatinegara's gem market, however, one trader selling tiger skins was happy to show off her wares.
The skins are from tigers killed more than a decade ago, she said, and the most valuable parts, the bones and meat, were long ago sold to China and Singapore.
What was left would only be good for making handbags, she said.
Most of Jakarta's animal trade, including at Jatinegara, comes through the city's massive Pramuka bird market, the largest in Southeast Asia, according to Femke den Haas from the Jakarta Animal Aid Network (JAAN).
Occasional raids have driven most of the high-profile endangered animals from clear view, but buyers from around the world still place orders for goods as exotic as tiger cubs and ivory, den Haas said.
"The bigger stuff you get from houses from behind (the markets) and the even bigger stuff, for example orangutans, you have to order," she said.
Investigations by JAAN and other non-government organisations have found exotic birds brought by ferry from Papua in the country's east and rare animals brought in from Sumatra by air-conditioned coach.
"We call them the grandmother mafia network because all these grandmothers transport the animals," den Haas said.
While conservationists have been pushing for a crackdown, they say authorities are often either under-resourced, corrupt or unaware of the problem.
"(For a prosecution) you need to pay the judges, you need to pay the police, you need to pay for the food in the police cell," den Haas said.
"The reason the justice system takes so long is that the judge says: 'I didn't know these species were protected, I have two sea turtles in my house'," she said, adding this was a genuine anecdote from a recent trial.
Despite the slow progress, the forestry ministry says it is doing the best it can with limited resources.
"Regular enforcement is still going on. I see the enforcement making a lot of progress compared to the past," said ministry biodiversity conservation head Toni Suhartono.
But the ministry can usually only muster small teams to go on raids, and they are often easily outwitted in the winding alleyways of the animal markets, Suhartono said.
"They're very smart," he said of the wildlife dealers.
"When we send people there they disappear. It's like hit and run," he said, adding that low penalties meted out by courts mean even successful raids are not a strong deterrent.
Corruption within the ministry also made enforcement a challenge, Suhartono said, with officials earning a basic wage of only 1.3 million rupiah a month.
ProFauna said a recent investigation found one forestry ministry officer in Medan in northern Sumatra moonlighting as a smuggler.
Another investigation by the group in 2007 found ministry officials had sold off confiscated ivory that had been stockpiled as evidence in a poaching trial.
Yahoo News 17 Jul 08;
China on Thursday hit back at criticism of its approval as a licensed buyer of ivory, saying it had scored good results in the fight against illegal smuggling and sales of the product.
"The Chinese government attaches great importance to the protection of wildlife, including elephants," foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao told reporters.
"It has released a series of rules and regulations strictly cracking down on the illegal smuggling and sales of wildlife products including ivory, and has had obvious results."
The criticism from conservationists came after China was for the first time allowed to participate as a licensed buyer in an auction of 108 tonnes of ivory from African countries.
South Africa-based Animal Rights Africa said the decision, made by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), would facilitate the laundering of illegal ivory into the Chinese market.
"In real terms this represents the death of an estimated 7,699 South African elephants (1.8 tusks per elephant and 3.68kg per tusk)," the organisation said in a statement, highlighting how it would increase the poaching of elephants.
China is one of the world's biggest consumers of ivory, which is used mainly for ornaments and jewellery.
The auction of government-owned stockpiles, which includes ivory from South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe, is the second organised by CITES since 1999.
CITES, which groups 173 countries, banned international trade in ivory in 1989, but from 1997 onwards, it authorised a few African nations to hold ivory sales at regular intervals.
The decision, made on Tuesday, came a day before the detention of three Chinese nationals in Kenya on suspicion of smuggling ivory.
Liu said he was unclear about the details of the case.
"In general, the position of the Chinese government is that we strictly crackdown on illegal smuggling and sales," he said when asked about the detentions.
Navin Singh Khadka, BBC News 16 Jul 08;
Amidst growing criticism from industrialised countries for not committing to greenhouse gas reduction targets, India has indicated it would initiate regional efforts to deal with climate change.
Some experts believe the regional approach could be aimed at resisting pressure from major western economies, while others say the South Asian country has no other way to face the global challenge.
In its recently launched climate change national action plan, for example, India has stressed working with other nations in South Asia.
"We will need to exchange information with the South Asian countries and countries sharing the Himalayan ecology," the plan reads.
"Co-operation with neighbouring countries will be sought to make a comprehensive network for observation and monitoring of the Himalayan environment, to assess fresh water resources and the health of the ecosystem."
Sustaining the Himalayan ecosystem that India shares with most other South Asian countries is one of eight national missions in the action plan.
Another mission, for national water, also talks about "customising climate change models for regional water basins".
The Ganges, Meghna, Brahmaputra and Indus rivers forming the regional water basins are lifelines to hundreds of millions of people, nearly half of them poor.
Experts have warned that the people hardest hit by climate change will be the poor.
They have also said that most of the river basins in South Asia will see less and less water as Himalayan glaciers that feed them recede due to rising temperatures.
Current troubles
But even before it all becomes that bad, India is already water-troubled.
"Many parts of the country are water stressed today," the climate change action plan says.
"India is likely to be water scarce by 2050, and the problem is likely to worsen due to climate change impacts."
Environmentalists say it is the threats of such impacts that could bring the region together.
"Unless we understand the climate change problem and work on it together as a region, we will never be able to deal with it," says Sunita Narain, director of the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment (CSE).
"In the action plan, we have seen for the first time that India has recognised that South Asian region must work together as a voice."
A recent meeting of environment ministers from the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation (Saarc) also stressed the importance of having one voice for the region.
Participants said there has been a seven-point agreement to work towards that end.
Atiq Rahman, one of the delegates to that meeting and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said it was the commonality of the problem that led to the agreement.
"While countries like Bangladesh and Maldives in the region are threatened by rising sea levels, others including Bhutan, Nepal, India and Pakistan face increasing risks from glacial lake outburst flood and extreme weather.
"Common problems like these made it easier to have one voice."
Looking outwards
Experts however also believe that the unanimous regional voice is not just about climate change related problems from inside the region, but also from outside.
Says Dr Rahman, an environment expert from Bangladesh: "They are seeing the enemy, as it were; the opposite side, which is outside the South Asian system.
"It is about the primary emitters that are the industrialised countries."
Ajay Dixit, who is researching climate change research lapses in Asia, also sees what some say is regional posturing against western economies.
"In the global debate on climate change, a divide already exists between western economies and the developing world," says the water expert from Nepal.
"The latest moves (of India) appear to focus on the negotiations with the west."
Growing pains
India has been arguing that industrialised countries must take most responsibility for global warming, and that its own emissions would never exceed those of western economies.
As an emerging economy, India's emissions are on a rapid rise, triggering calls from industrialised countries to commit to cuts.
"If we persist in our current growth paradigm, our carbon emissions will go up by 500% in the next 25 years," writes India 's National Security Advisory Board member Sudha Mahalingam, arguing that the climate change national action plan does not adequately address challenges from the transport sector.
Defending as it does its right to development and economic growth, even if that entails increased emissions, India could well play the regional card while dealing with the west.
But to make that bid effective, it will first have to gain the confidence of countries in the region.
Saarc has a poor track record. It has shrivelled into a namesake alliance over the last two decades.
Forget big things; the region has not even been able to handle perennial issues, like forecasting the floods that wreak havoc and claims hundreds of lives every monsoon.
"Saarc may not have succeeded because there have been major political and economic issues which are very difficult as a region," says Ms Narain.
"But climate change binds the region together because it is the victim and not the culprit."
Other experts believe it might be too early to believe India has gone regional on climate change, from its usual bilateral approach on almost all issues.
"But since it has started talking about making the Himalayan ecosystem sustainable, it cannot do so without joining hands with other countries that share the same ecology in the region," notes Ajay Dixit.
John Flesher, Associated Press Writer Yahoo News 16 Jul 08;
Foreign species that slipped into the Great Lakes in ballast tanks of oceangoing cargo ships cost the regional economy at least $200 million a year, according to a University of Notre Dame study released Wednesday.
Sport fishing has taken the biggest hit: $123.5 million in 2006, the year on which the data are based, the report said. Participation is 11 to 35 percent lower on the lakes than it would have been if fish populations hadn't fallen because of the invasive species.
Other damaged sectors of the economy include wildlife viewing ($47.6 million loss); raw water use by municipalities, power plants and industry ($27 million); and commercial fishing ($2.1 million).
A separate report issued by the National Research Council rejects calls to stem the species invasion by closing the St. Lawrence Seaway or declaring it off-limits to oceangoing freighters.
Instead, the U.S. and Canada should work together to make sure that saltwater ships exchange their ballast water — or rinse their tanks if empty — while still at sea, the council's report said.
Both reports come as environmentalists are prodding the U.S. Senate to approve a bill ordering ships to install systems for killing invasive fish, mussels and other critters that can disrupt the Great Lakes' ecosystem. The measure has cleared the House but supporters say its prospects will be dim unless the Senate acts before its August recess.
Of the 185 exotic animals and plants that have established populations in the lakes, 84 have arrived since the St. Lawrence Seaway opened in 1959, providing a navigational link between the lakes and the Atlantic.
Fifty-seven of the newcomers likely caught a ride in ballast water scooped up in foreign ports and dumped into the lakes when ships took on cargo, the Notre Dame report said. Among them: the round goby, the spiny water flea and the Eurasian ruffe.
They also include zebra and quagga mussels, which have been especially damaging to the regional economy by clogging water intake pipes and gobbling algae at the base of the aquatic food chain.
Estimates of their cost to the economy have varied widely. The Notre Dame scientists suggested losses of $300 million last spring. But their latest report, using a different analytical method, pegged the loss at $200 million.
The total refers only to costs for the eight U.S. states on the Great Lakes. Canada also has suffered from the species invasion, said David Lodge, director of the university's Center for Aquatic Conservation.
"The distributions of losses we found with invasions from shipping may be the tip of the iceberg," Lodge said.
___
On the Net:
Notre Dame study: http://www.glu.org/english/index.html
National Research Council study: http://national-academies.org
Eurekalert 17 Jul 08;
CORVALLIS, Ore. – The invasion of predatory lionfish in the Caribbean region poses yet another major threat there to coral reef ecosystems – a new study has found that within a short period after the entry of lionfish into an area, the survival of other reef fishes is slashed by about 80 percent.
Aside from the rapid and immediate mortality of marine life, the loss of herbivorous fish also sets the stage for seaweeds to potentially overwhelm the coral reefs and disrupt the delicate ecological balance in which they exist, according to scientists from Oregon State University.
Following on the heels of overfishing, sediment depositions, nitrate pollution in some areas, coral bleaching caused by global warming, and increasing ocean acidity caused by carbon emissions, the lionfish invasion is a serious concern, said Mark Hixon, an OSU professor of zoology and expert on coral reef ecology.
The study is the first to quantify the severity of the crisis posed by this invasive species, which is native to the tropical Pacific and Indian Ocean and has few natural enemies to help control it in the Atlantic Ocean. It is believed that the first lionfish – a beautiful fish with dramatic coloring and large, spiny fins – were introduced into marine waters off Florida in the early 1990s from local aquariums or fish hobbyists. They have since spread across much of the Caribbean Sea and north along the United States coast as far as Rhode Island.
"This is a new and voracious predator on these coral reefs and it's undergoing a population explosion," Hixon said. "The threats to coral reefs all over the world were already extreme, and they now have to deal with this alien predator in the Atlantic. These fish eat many other species and they seem to eat constantly."
Findings of the new research will be published soon in Marine Ecology Progress Series. The lead author is Mark Albins, a doctoral student working with Hixon.
In studies on controlled plots, the OSU scientists determined that lionfish reduced young juvenile fish populations by 79 percent in only a five-week period. Many species were affected, including cardinalfish, parrotfish, damselfish and others. One large lionfish was observed consuming 20 small fish in a 30-minute period.
Lionfish are carnivores that can eat other fish up to two-thirds their own length, while they are protected from other predators by long, poisonous spines. In the Pacific Ocean, Hixon said, other fish have learned to avoid them and they also have more natural predators, particularly large groupers. In the Atlantic Ocean, native fish have never seen them before and have no recognition of danger. There, about the only thing that will eat lionfish is another lionfish – they are not only aggressive carnivores, but also cannibals.
"In the Caribbean, few local predators eat lionfish, so there appears to be no natural controls on them," Hixon said. "And we've observed that they feed in a way that no Atlantic Ocean fish has ever encountered. Native fish literally don't know what hit them."
When attacking another fish, Hixon said, the lionfish will use its large, fan-like fins to herd smaller fish into a corner and then swallow them in a rapid strike. Because of their natural defense mechanisms they are afraid of almost no other marine life. And the poison released by their sharp spines can cause extremely painful stings to humans – even leading to fatalities for some people with heart problems or allergic reactions.
"These are pretty scary fish, and they aren't timid," Hixon said. "They will swim right up to a diver in their feeding posture, looking like they're ready to eat. That can be a little spooky."
Their rapid reproduction potential, Hixon said, must now be understood in context with their ability to seriously depopulate coral reef ecosystems of other fish. Parrotfishes and other herbivores prevent seaweeds from smothering corals. A major, invasive predator such as lionfish could disrupt the entire system.
Options to manage the lionfish threat are limited, Hixon said. They can be collected individually, which may be of localized value, but that approach offers no broad solution. Recovery or introduction of effective predators might help. Groupers, a fish that has been known to eat lionfish in the Pacific Ocean, have been heavily over-fished in the tropical Atlantic Ocean, Hixon said.
"We have to figure out something to do about this invasion before it causes a major crisis," Hixon said. "We basically had to abandon some studies we had under way in the Atlantic on population dynamics of coral reef fish, because the lionfish had moved in and were eating everything."
Mason Inman, National Geographic News 17 Jul 08;
People should help species threatened by climate change move to new habitats, researchers argue in a new paper.
Warming temperatures have already sent animals and plants inching toward the poles or climbing up mountains to seek out tolerable habitats.
But many species aren't able to move far enough or will have difficulty fleeing in the future, researchers say. That's because natural barriers such as mountains and deserts block some species, while others are trapped in pockets of forest or other habitats fragmented by cities and cropland.
Now some researchers are supporting an idea called assisted colonization, or actively moving plants and animals to more favorable locations.
"Under these circumstances, the future for many species and ecosystems is so bleak that assisted colonization might be their best chance," the authors write in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science.
But some researchers and conservation groups are skeptical about assisted colonization, arguing that the risk of spreading invasive species is too high. They also say that the practice could favor saving individual species over preserving larger ecosystems.
(Explore an interactive map of what could happen in a warmer world.)
Urgency
Humans have had a bad track record when it comes to moving species and disrupting environments.
The introduced kudzu vine now chokes much of the U.S. South, and the noxious cane toad has spread successfully across Australia.
That's why any movement should be modest—especially at first—and only employed for species that are well understood, experts say. But it's urgent to sort out the good candidates now, they add.
"Some species are already at risk for extinction due to climate change," said paper co-author Chris Thomas, a conservation biologist at the University of York in the United Kingdom.
Global warming is already changing rain and snow patterns and acidifying the oceans, all of which put a strain on ecosystems, scientists say.
Before any moves are made, however, rules need to be set for how plants and animals will colonize new lands across state or national boundaries, according to Thomas.
"Then we should proceed with a few [species movements] within the next ten years," Thomas said.
"Starting early means that existing populations are still large," he added. "It gets much harder to achieve once only a few individuals are surviving."
Perfect Candidates
The endangered quino checkerspot butterfly "is a perfect candidate for assisted migration" to higher altitudes, said biologist Carmille Parmesan of the University of Texas in Austin.
The unaggressive butterfly is unlikely to overwhelm the plants it eats or crowd out other insects, said Parmesan, who was not a paper author.
"I wouldn't advocate moving them very far, as if you take a species completely out of it's evolutionary background it can become a huge pest in the new area," she added.
Corals are also ideal, since many species are at high risk and it's hard for them to change habitats quickly on their own.
Placing concrete blocks on the seafloor could give corals a boost in new areas they weren't previously able to colonize, Parmesan said.
Skeptics
But some consider assisted colonization to be an extreme undertaking.
Patrick Gonzalez is a climate change scientist at the Arlington, Virginia-based conservation group the Nature Conservancy.
"We need to employ the range of potential adaptation strategies before considering assisted migration, which is a relatively drastic option of last resort," Gonzalez said.
These other strategies include creating wildlife refuges and corridors to connect patches of land, allowing animals to move freely between them.
Others say that the practice may favor preserving individual species over whole ecosystems.
Jason McLachlan, an ecologist at Notre Dame University in Indiana, has studied assisted colonization but was not a co-author of the new paper.
"Widespread imposition of assisted migration favors saving species at the expense of saving the natural processes that shape ecosystems and landscapes," McLachlan said.
While assisted migration may save some species, McLachlan said, "there are legal, ethical, aesthetic, and emotional dimensions to the native [plants and animals] of a place."
"We need to rethink conservation in a world that is changing," said Dov Sax of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who studies invasive species.
Moving species to new locations will change or disrupt the existing ecosystems to some degree, Sax said.
"In many cases we can keep these disruptions from causing environmental catastrophes, but occasionally we'll get it wrong," he said.
"The real issue in my mind is whether we can keep the ratio of successes versus catastrophes high enough to make assisted migration worthwhile," he added. "I suspect that we can."
Should we move species to save them?
Randoph E. Scmid, Associated Press Yahoo News 17 Jul 08;
With climate change increasingly threatening the survival of plants and animals, scientists say it may become necessary to move some species to save them. Dubbed assisted colonization or assisted migration, the idea is to decide how severe the threat is to various species, and if they need help to deal with it.
"When I first brought up this idea some 10 years ago in conservation meetings, most people were horrified," said Camille Parmesan, a biology professor at the University of Texas.
"But now, as the reality of global warming sinks in, and species are already becoming endangered and even going extinct because of climate change, I'm seeing a new willingness in the conservation community to at least talk about the possibility of helping out species by moving them around," she said. Parmesan discusses the idea in Friday's edition of the journal Science.
It's an idea that makes conservation biologists nervous.
There are plenty of risks in moving plants and animals to new locations. They may not survive, or they may become invasive, growing wildly without predators and crowding out natives of their new location.
And it's not possible to relocate every species that may need it, so how to decide who gets moved and who gets left behind to become extinct?
Stanford biologist Terry Root has been traveling the country urging her colleagues to come up with a plan for "triage" to decide which species should be saved from global warming and which can't. After other biologists complained about the word "triage," Root said she now calls it prioritizing which species should be saved.
"We've got to work on the ones we have a prayer of saving," Root said.
Some species will have to be written off, she suggested, such as threatened and endangered species of the Sky Islands in Arizona and New Mexico because "they don't have any place to move to."
"Those species are functionally extinct right now," Root said. "They're toast."
When deciding which species to save and which to watch die, Root said one key is uniqueness. That's why she said she'd save the odd-looking Tuatara of New Zealand, a lizard-like creature with almost no living relatives, over the common sparrow.
The risk of extinction has to be balanced by the potential hazard to the community where a species is relocated as well as the time and cost of making the move, Parmesan says.
"Ultimately, the decision about whether to actively assist the movement of a species into new territories will rest on ethical and aesthetic grounds as much as on hard science," she said in a statement.
"Passively assisting coral reef migration may be acceptable, but transplanting polar bears to Antarctica, where they would likely drive native penguins to extinction, would not be acceptable," she said.
"Conservation has never been an exact science, but preserving biodiversity in the face of climate change is likely to require a fundamental rethinking of what it means to preserve biodiversity," Parmesan said.
AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein contributed to this report.
Kimberly Johnson, National Geographic News 18 Jul 08;
Rapid warming along the Antarctic Peninsula is causing more skyscraper-sized icebergs to break free, drift, and scour away practically all life along swaths of the seafloor, according to a new study.
Ocean-bottom scrubbings along the West Antarctic Peninsula will increase as temperatures rise, annihilating some animal and plant populations but helping others by clearing the habitat, the study said.
The study establishes for the first time the intimate link between increased scouring and declines in winter sea ice due to climate change, researchers said.
In the past, these icebergs were locked in place by winter sea ice for longer periods and only free to crash into the seabed in summer.
"Our results suggest that as the winter sea ice season shortens, the thousands of icebergs that float around the coastline of the Antarctic Peninsula will be free to move around and collide with the seabed creatures with ever increasing frequency," lead author Daniel Smale of the British Antarctic Survey, said in an e-mail.
A Significant Degree
Antarctica is one of the fastest warming regions in the world, the researchers said.
Sea temperatures around Antarctica tend to be stable, spanning from 28.8 degrees Fahrenheit (-1.8 degrees Celsius) to 35.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius).
The Bellingshausen Sea along the western side of the Antarctic Peninsula, however, has seen its temperatures increase by about a degree Celsius in the last 50 years, said marine biologist and study co-author David Barnes, also of the British Antarctic Survey.
"This may not sound like a lot, but it is nearly a third of the total annual variability" for that region of the sea, Barnes said.
The study will be published in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science.
Each winter, a frozen crust called fast ice forms on the sea's surface. It can stretch for thousands of square kilometers but is rarely found more than seven feet (two meters) thick.
Warming is reducing the area and time that seasonal sea ice covers the sea surface, Barnes said.
The winter ice decays as winter temperatures rise, releasing slabs of iceberg to drift in the sea.
These icebergs can vary dramatically in size—from the size of fists to small countries, Barnes said.
Once freed from the fast ice, icebergs are blown by winds and carried by sea currents until they smash into the seabed in shallow depths.
"They not only kill virtually everything underneath on the seabed—mainly animals—but crush rock and reshape the seabed," Barnes said.
Vulnerable animals include Antarctic worms, sea spiders, and urchins, the scientists said.
An Unfamiliar Look
Researchers studied the ice scouring over a five-year period, regularly monitoring markers placed at varying depths along the seafloor.
Made of molded concrete and plastic, the markers deformed and splintered when they encountered the force of a drifting iceberg.
The variety in iceberg sizes creates a range of damaged areas on the seafloor, Barnes said.
In shallow waters, researchers measured damaged areas a few meters by a meter. At deeper regions, however, they found impacted areas up to 0.62 mile (a kilometer), he said.
Smale added that icebergs can ground out at depths of up to 550 yards (500 meters), which means much of polar seabed could be susceptible to ice scouring.
The impact is dramatic, Barnes said. "Diving on the big ice scours after they have happened is like visiting a completely new area, everything looks unfamiliar," he said.
Life is able to eventually rebound in the deadly wake of a scrubbing, but the process takes a while, Barnes said.
"Antarctic animals grow very slowly—in fact, they do virtually everything very slowly—so re-colonization is not quick," he said.
Part Biodiversity, Part "Black Pools of Death"
By clearing out the seafloor, however, the scouring also enables a wide range of species to live, Barnes said.
"Think of it like a forest," he said. "The weedy species that are normally crowded out and out-competed by the dominant species persist where big trees fall and create a clearing."
The research can help expand awareness about the impact of warming temperatures, said a marine biologist not affiliated with the study.
"It is a nice story about what sea ice can do to marine life and sediment characteristics on the seafloor, a place where the general public would not associate processes happening on the surface with what is happening on the bottom of the ocean," said Kathleen Conlan at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa.
Conlan, who has conducted research on ice scouring in the eastern Canadian Arctic, agreed that its effect on marine life could be varied.
In some areas, it can promote diversity, where it turned over nutrient-rich sediments and pushed out dominant grazers, such as sea urchins.
In other locations, however, the result could be catastrophic, "producing black pools of death," she said.
Iceberg Damage to Seafloor Increases
Andrea Thompson, LiveScience.com Yahoo News 17 Jul 08;
Worms, sea spiders, urchins and other creatures that dwell on the Antarctic seafloor are pounded daily by icebergs scraping up their homes.
Now scientists say these denizens of the deep take more hits as global warming diminishes the layer of sea ice that blocks the icebergs and protects habitats.
Icebergs are large chunks of ice that have broken off from a glacier or ice shelf and float in open water. As they float, pushed around by winds and tides, their bottoms, which can sometimes reach to a depth of 1,600 feet (500 meters), scour the seafloor beneath them.
In the winter, a type of sea ice sometimes called "fast ice" forms along coastlines as the ocean water freezes, locking icebergs in place and temporarily halting the scouring.
But around the West Antarctic Peninsula, winter fast ice has declined dramatically in recent decades, both in terms of the area of ocean it covers and how long it stays around. This is a result of the region's air temperature having risen by nearly 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius) on average in the last 50 years, an amount several times the global average.
Scientists with the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) studied how this decline in winter fast ice was affecting ice scouring at a shallow water site on the peninsula. They placed a grid of concrete markers on the seabed at three different depths, and for five years, scuba divers returned each January to inspect how much damage icebergs had done to the markers.
They found that more scouring occurred during years when winter sea ice shrank back, removing the icebergs' road block and giving them free reign over the seabed, where 80 percent of all Antarctic life lives.
The results are detailed in the July 18 issue of the journal Science.
"It has been suggested previously that iceberg disturbance rates may be controlled by the formation of winter sea ice, but nobody's been able to go out and measure it before," said study lead author Dan Smale of the BAS. "We were surprised to see how strong the relationship between the two factors is."
As icebergs scrape the sea floor, they change the local habitats. While the damage they leave behind can actually create space for new animals to move in and thereby increase the community's diversity, any increase in scouring could drastically change the type and number of marine creatures found in the area.
Smale and his co-authors caution that because the results come from just one site, it's hard to generalize them to the entire shelf ecosystem, but they say that their findings seem to point to more scouring in a warming world, with potentially large, unknown changes in store for Antarctic marine creatures.
Dina Cappiello, Associated Press Yahoo News 17 Jul 08;
Former Vice President Al Gore called Thursday for a "man on the moon" effort to switch all of the nation's electricity production to wind, solar and other carbon-free sources within 10 years, a goal that he said would solve global warming as well as economic and natural security crises caused by dependence on fossil fuels.
"The answer is to end our reliance on carbon-based fuels," Gore told a packed auditorium in Washington's historic Constitution Hall. "When you connect the dots, it turns out that the real solutions to the climate crisis are the very same measures needed to renew our economy and escape the trap of ever-rising energy prices."
Gore compared the challenge to establishing Social Security and the Interstate highway system, as well as landing a man on the moon — all successes that took more than a single presidency to accomplish and required members of both political parties to overcome their partisanship.
The Alliance for Climate Protection, a bipartisan group Gore leads, put the 30-year cost of his plan — both government and private — at $1.5 trillion to $3 trillion.
To speed up the transition to new energy sources, Gore said the single most important policy change would be to "tax what we burn, not what we earn," advocating a tax on carbon dioxide pollution.
Gore's proposal would represent a significant shift in where the U.S. gets its power. In 2005, coal supplied slightly more than half the nation's 3.7 billion kilowatt hours of electricity. Nuclear power accounted for 21 percent, natural gas 15 percent and renewable sources, including wind and solar, about 8.6 percent.
Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize for sounding the alarm about climate change and his documentary on the issue, "An Inconvenient Truth," won an Oscar. In his speech, he did not address what to do about coal, which is responsible for more than a third of the United States' carbon dioxide pollution, the most prevalent of the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.
Coal's share of electricity generation is only expected to grow between now and 2030, according to Energy Department forecasts that assume no new government controls will be put on pollution. Renewable energy resources' share of the power production would grow to 11 percent under that scenario.
In an interview with The Associated Press after his speech, Gore said coal's place in the nation's energy future will depend on whether the industry cuts back on carbon.
"Even coal has a role to play if the carbon dioxide is captured and safely buried ... but clean coal does not exist right now," Gore said.
Gore told the AP that his plan counts on nuclear power plants still providing about a fifth of the nation's electricity while the U.S. dramatically increases it's use of solar, wind, geothermal energy and clean coal technology. He said one of the largest obstacles will be updating the nation's electricity grid to harness power from solar panels, windmills and dams and transport it to cities.
The Edison Electric Institute, the private utility industry's trade association, said it shares Gore's support for more renewable generation, a "smarter" power grid and the eventual use of plug-in electric vehicles.
"But we cannot do the job with renewable and efficiency alone," it said. A portfolio for the future must also include "an expanded role for nuclear energy, as well as natural gas and clean coal with carbon capture and storage."
Some energy experts said the turnaround Gore advocates is too fast.
Robby Diamond, president of Securing America's Future Energy, a nonpartisan energy policy group, said weaning the nation away from fossil fuels — coal, oil and natural gas — can't be done in a decade.
"The country is not going to be able to go cold turkey," Diamond said. "We have a hundred years of infrastructure with trillions of dollars of investment that is not simply going to be made obsolete."
Gore said the changing economics of energy, in which high gasoline and oil prices are driving investments in renewable energy, would overcome the political and technological obstacles.
His challenge comes as Congress, and the White House, are debating how to address high energy prices, particularly the oil that drives the nation's transportation. Both Democrats and Republicans are pushing for more exploration and production of domestic fossil fuels, albeit in different ways.
"It is only a truly dysfunctional system that would buy into the perverse logic that the short-term answer to high gasoline prices is drilling for more oil 10 years from now," Gore said.
In the past year, Congress has rejected initiatives that would make Gore's vision a reality. Requiring part of the nation's energy to come from alternative sources didn't have enough support in the Senate to become part of an energy bill in December. And a bill before the Senate last month to cut greenhouse gases got 48 votes.
Jonathan Lash, president of the World Resources Institute, said in a statement Thursday that the problem has been political will.
"Climate change and energy security are not just threats ... , they are opportunities," he said. "We need to change the debate in this country from what we can't do, to what we can do."
Gore told the AP he hoped the speech would contribute to "a new political environment in this country that will allow the next president to do what I think the next president is going to think is the right thing to do." He said both fellow Democrat Barrack Obama and Republican rival John McCain are "way ahead" of most politicians in the fight against global climate change.
McCain, who supports building more nuclear power plants as one solution to global warming, said Thursday he admires Gore as an early and outspoken advocate of addressing the global warming problem even though "there may be some aspects of climate change that he and I are in disagreement (on)."
Of the goals Gore outlined Thursday for generating more electricity with solar and wind resources, McCain said, "If the vice president says it's doable, I believe it's doable."
Associated Press writer Ron Fournier contributed to this report.
Gore urges total shift to renewable energy to avert disaster
Karin Zeitvogel, Yahoo News 17 Jul 08;
Nobel laureate and former US vice president Al Gore echoed president John F. Kennedy on Thursday as he urged Americans to shoot for the moon and make a total shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy in 10 years.
"I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years," Gore told thousands of people who packed into a conference hall near the White House to hear the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner speak.
"When president John F. Kennedy challenged our nation to land a man on the moon and bring him back safely in 10 years, many people doubted we could accomplish that goal," Gore said.
"But eight years and two months later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the surface of the moon," Gore told the crowd, eliciting a huge cheer.
Just as Kennedy, in 1961, urged Americans to "take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth", Gore said the shift to new energy sources was needed to ensure "the survival of the United States of America as we know it."
"Even more, the future of human civilization is at risk," he told the crowd.
Nay-sayers would say the shift to renewable energy could not be achieved, or that 10 years was not enough time to make the transition.
But Gore dismissed them as having "a vested interest in perpetuating the current system no matter how high a price the rest of us will have to pay," and again citing the history-making speech in which Kennedy called on Americans to enter the space race and put a man on the moon.
"Once again, we have an opportunity to take a giant leap for humankind," Gore said, echoing the words spoken by Armstrong when he became the first man to set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969.
The chief obstacle to achieving 100 percent renewable energy in 10 years was a dysfunctional US political system that panders to special interests, said Gore, who served as vice president for two terms in the 1990s under Democratic president Bill Clinton.
"In recent years, our politics has tended toward incremental proposals made up of small policies designed to avoid offending special interests ..." Gore told the rally organized by environmental activist group wecansolveit.org.
Scientists and researchers applauded Gore's leadership and urged Americans to heed his call to rapidly move over to renewable energy sources.
"Responding to climate change requires the full engagement of national, state and local public officials, business executives, religious and community leaders, and every citizen," said Alden Hayden of the Union of Concerned Scientists.
"By uniting in this common purpose and mobilizing America's ingenuity and can-do spirit, we can rise to this challenge. We can revitalize our economy, increase our energy security, and do our part to cut global warming pollution, all at the same time," he said.
Going over to renewable energy would "cure our carbon addiction and stimulate the economy. It would be the turning point that is needed to lead the world to a stable climate," said James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
And Jonathan Lash, head of the environmental think-tank, the World Resources Institute, said: "America has led every major technological shift in the last 100 years, and we can lead the next one as well.
"The problem is not technology, it is political will," he said.
Gore, who narrowly lost the 2000 presidential election to President George W. Bush, was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize jointly with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a UN body of 3,000 scientists, for work on global warming.
To a rousing cheer and standing ovation, Gore, who jokingly calls himself the man who used to be the next president of the United States, called on Americans to take concrete steps to halt climate change.
Americans need to change "not just light bulbs, but laws," he said.
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