mongabay.com

Twenty years of research has led Dr. Graham Jones of Australia’s Southern Cross University to discover a startling connection between coral reefs and coastal precipitation. According to Jones, a substance produced by thriving coral reefs seed clouds leading to precipitation in a long-standing natural process that is coming under threat due to climate change.

“Coral reefs produce a volatile substance called dimethylsulphide or DMS which oxidizes in the atmosphere to produce cloud condensation nuclei (CCN). These are tiny sulphur aerosol particles around which water vapor condenses to form clouds,” Jones explained to mongabay.com, adding that, “water vapor cannot form clouds without these tiny aerosol particles being present.”

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Yet, in his studies, Jones has discovered that even a slight rise in ocean temperatures could affect this natural process, making climate change a significant threat to clouds (and precipitation) seeded by coral reefs.

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Jones says that the Australian government has a number of policies in place to protect coral reefs, but “what we don’t have is funding of basic reef processes such as this one, which significantly can affect regional climate in the Great Barrier Reef.”

Research into how ecosystems, such as coral reefs and forests, may be involved in regional climate patterns has been gaining steam over the years. Two Russian scientists have published a number of studies on a controversial theory that forests actually ‘pump’ rain from the coast to continent’s interiors.

If such theories withstand the test of time, and science, they could have widespread implications for the conservation of both forests and coral reefs, adding a new and vital ecosystem-service provided by these two threatened environments: the ‘makers’ and ‘movers’ of precipitation.

Discovery

The habitats of wild bird species are shifting in response to global warming, but not fast enough to keep pace with rising temperatures, according to a study released Wednesday.

Researchers in France also found that the delicate balance of wildlife in different ecosystems is changing up to eight times more quickly than previously suspected, with potentially severe consequences for some species.

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These “mismatches” are likely to become greater over time, and could eventually threaten some birds with extinction, he added.

The study showed that the geographic range of 105 birds species in France — accounting for 99.5 percent of the country’s wild avian population — moved north, on average, 91 kilometers (56.5 miles) from 1989 through 2006.

Average temperatures, however, shifted northward 273 kilometers (170 miles) over the same period, nearly three times farther.

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Earlier studies looked at the impact of global warming by comparing “snapshots” — taken years or decades apart — of the range across which a given species lived.

But trying to define the outer boundary of a shifting habitat is extremely difficult because data is, by definition, scarce.

Devictor took another approach, taking advantage of France’s French Breeding Bird Survey, which has gathered data collected by hundreds of ornithologists from more than 1500 well-defined plots since 1989.

This made it possible to look at the entire distribution of a species over a continuous period, he explained.

The northward shift of most species “is most likely changing at its maximal possible rate, which is insufficient to catch up to climate change,” Devictor said.

“This discrepancy may have profound consequences on the ability of species to cope with climate change in the long run.”

The study was published in the British journal Proceedings of The Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

reuters

Elephant seals swimming under Antarctic ice and fitted with special sensors are providing scientists with crucial data on ice formation, ocean currents and climate change, a study released on Tuesday said.

The seals swimming under winter sea ice have overcome a “blind-spot” for scientists by allowing them to calculate how fast sea ice forms during winter.

Sea ice reflects sunlight back into space, so less sea ice means more energy is absorbed by the earth, causing more warming.

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Conventional oceanographic monitoring from ships, satellites and drifting buoys, cannot provide observations under sea ice.

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The elephant seals have provided scientists with a 30-fold increase in data recorded in parts of the Southern Ocean, said the study by a team of French, Australian, U.S. and British scientists and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Between 2004 and 2005, the seals swam up to 65 kilometers (40 miles) a day, supplying scientists with 16,500 ice profiles. The seals dived to a depth of more than 500 meters (1,500 feet) on average and to a maximum depth of nearly 2 km (a mile).

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The experiment involved 85 seals with sensors attached to their heads.

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The polar regions play an important role in the earth’s climate and are changing more rapidly than any other part of the world, with the Southern Ocean warming more rapidly than the global ocean average.

Sea ice not only affects the amount of energy reflected back into space, but also the amount of dense water around the Antarctic which drives ocean currents that transports heat around the globe.

Sea ice also provides a critical habitat for krill, penguins and seals.

An elephant seal is seen with a special sensor fitted to its head in South Georgia in this undated photo released on August 12, 2008 by the Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO).

REUTERS

independent.co.uk

It seems unthinkable, but for the first time in human history, ice is on course to disappear entirely from the North Pole this year.

The disappearance of the Arctic sea ice, making it possible to reach the Pole sailing in a boat through open water, would be one of the most dramatic – and worrying – examples of the impact of global warming on the planet. Scientists say the ice at 90 degrees north may well have melted away by the summer.

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If it happens, it raises the prospect of the Arctic nations being able to exploit the valuable oil and mineral deposits below these a bed which have until now been impossible to extract because of the thick sea ice above.

Seasoned polar scientists believe the chances of a totally ice-free North Pole this summer are greater than 50:50 because the normally thick ice formed over many years at the Pole has been blown away and replaced by huge swathes of thinner ice formed over a single year.

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Each summer the sea ice melts before reforming again during the long Arctic winter but the loss of sea ice last year was so extensive that much of the Arctic Ocean became open water, with the water-ice boundary coming just 700 miles away from the North Pole.

This meant that about 70 per cent of the sea ice present this spring was single-year ice formed over last winter. Scientists predict that at least 70 per cent of this single-year ice – and perhaps all of it – will melt completely this summer, Dr Serreze said.

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Ron Lindsay, a polar scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, agreed that much now depends on what happens to the Arctic weather in terms of wind patterns and hours of sunshine. “There’s a good chance that it will all melt away at the North Pole, it’s certainly feasible, but it’s not guaranteed,” Dr Lindsay said.

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There are other indications that the Arctic sea ice is showing signs of breaking up. Scientists at the Nasa Goddard Space Flight Centre said that the North Water ‘polynya’ – an expanse of open water surrounded on all sides by ice – that normally forms near Alaska and Banks Island off the Canadian coast, is much larger than normal. Polynyas absorb heat from the sun and eat away at the edge of the sea ice.

Inuit natives living near Baffin Bay between Canada and Greenland are also reporting that the sea ice there is starting to break up much earlier than normal and that they have seen wide cracks appearing in the ice where it normally remains stable. Satellite measurements collected over nearly 30 years show a significant decline in the extent of the Arctic sea ice, which has become more rapid in recent years.

Independent Graphics

timesonline.co.uk

Five years after the hit film that endeared the clownfish to audiences the world over, Nemo is becoming increasingly difficult to find.

The lovable tropical species, immortalised in the smash Pixar movie Finding Nemo, is facing extinction in many parts of the world because of soaring demand from the pet trade, according to marine biologists.

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Dr Billy Sinclair, of the University of Cumbria, who has been studying clownfish populations for five years, says the species should now be listed as endangered.

Studies of clownfish on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef have revealed a dramatic population decline since the release of the movie in 2003. Shoals that used to number dozens of clownfish have dwindled to just a few specimens, leaving them with difficulty breeding, Dr Sinclair says.

Over-harvesting for the pet trade at a time when many reefs are starting to die back from bleaching – caused by rising sea temperatures – is thought to be the main culprit.

Dr Sinclair said the film – the best-selling DVD of all time at over 40 million copies – had done much to educate children about marine life. But as the tiny, brightly-coloured creature had since become a “must-have” pet, captive breeding programmes could now only meet about 50 per cent of demand. The rest are captured from the wild.

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With a central message against keeping marine life in captivity, the film featured a host of Hollywood stars such as Ellen DeGeneres, Willem Defoe and Geoffrey Rush.

Following its release, it became a favourite screening at snorkelling and diving hotspots around the world. But within months, the scuba diving industry was reporting a steep decline in sightings of the diminutive creature, while some pet suppliers saw an eight-fold increase in sales.

(Disney/Pixar/Reuters)

BBC

A healthy fish population could be the key to ensuring coral reefs survive the impacts of climate change, pollution, overfishing and other threats.

Australian scientists found that some fish act as “lawnmowers”, keeping coral free of kelp and unwanted algae.

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The assembled experts told parliamentarians that fish able to graze on invading plants played a vital role in the health of reef ecosystems.

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His research group has conducted experiments which involved building cages to keep fish away from sections of reef.

They found that three times as much new coral developed in areas where the fish were present as in the caged portions.

Parrotfish in particular use their serrated jaws to scrape off incipient algae and plants.

More recently, his team has also identified the rabbit fish – a brown, bland-looking species – as a potentially important harvester of seaweed.

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Dr Peter Doherty from the Australian Institute of Marine Science presented data showing that just two years of protection brought significant increases in populations of important species such as coral trout and tropical snapper.

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The eggs, he showed, travelled well outside the boundaries of the protected zones, potentially increasing fish populations in non-protected areas too.

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Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg from the University of Queensland noted that unusually warm water in 1998 and 2002 had bleached and damaged coral in southern parts of the Barrier Reef.

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In the past, he said, bleaching events happened only at the warm extremes of natural cycles such as El Nino; but now the overall water temperature is higher, which makes the peaks of the cycles more harmful to coral.

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At high temperatures, coral polyps expel the algae which normally live with them in a symbiotic relationship, turning the reef white. The algae typically provide most of the polyp’s nutrition; without them, the polyps eventually die.

Even if a bleached zone contains live polyps and carries the potential to recover when waters cool, a quick invasion of kelp, or types of algae that do not live symbiotically with coral, can make the die-off permanent – hence the protective role of plant-munchng fish.

The parrotfish performs a vital role as a “lawnmower” of the reef

NOAA

The least biologically productive areas of the oceans are expanding much faster than predicted, according to a new study by researchers at NOAA and the University of Hawaii. This change in ocean biology, linked to the warming of sea surface waters, may negatively affect the populations of many fish species trying to survive in these desert-like environments.

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“The fact that we are seeing an expansion of the ocean’s least productive areas as the subtropical gyres warm is consistent with our understanding of the impact of global warming. But with a nine-year time series, it is difficult to rule out decadal variation,” said Jeffrey J. Polovina, an oceanographer with NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service in Honolulu, who authored the study along with NOAA’s Evan A. Howell and Melanie Abecassis of the University of Hawaii.

The evidence of this expansion comes from data collected by a sensor aboard NASA’s orbiting SeaStar spacecraft.

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The research showed that the areas of low productivity in the Pacific Ocean are expanding from the center toward Hawaii. In the Atlantic Ocean, the least productive areas of the subtropical gyre are expanding at an even more rapid rate eastward across the Caribbean toward Africa. The low-productivity zones, likened to deserts, now cover an estimated 51 million square kilometers in the two oceans. The least productive area of the Indian Ocean shows the same trend, but there has been too much variability for it to be statistically significant.

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Black areas in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans are the least productive. (Credit NOAA)

BBC

Scientists in the US have presented one of the most dramatic forecasts yet for the disappearance of Arctic sea ice.

Their latest modelling studies indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.

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Summer melting this year reduced the ice cover to 4.13 million sq km, the smallest ever extent in modern times.

Remarkably, this stunning low point was not even incorporated into the model runs of Professor Maslowski and his team, which used data sets from 1979 to 2004 to constrain their future projections.

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Professor Maslowski’s group, which includes co-workers at Nasa and the Institute of Oceanology, Polish Academy of Sciences (PAS), is well known for producing modelled dates that are in advance of other teams.

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Professor Peter Wadhams from Cambridge University, UK, is an expert on Arctic ice. He has used sonar data collected by Royal Navy submarines to show that the volume loss is outstripping even area withdrawal, which is in agreement with the model result of Professor Maslowski.

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He cited the ice-albedo feedback effect in which open water receives more solar radiation, which in turn leads to additional warming and further melting.

Professor Wadhams said the Arctic was now being set up for further ice loss in the coming years.

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The US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) collects the observational data on the extent of Arctic sea ice, delivering regular status bulletins. Its research scientist Dr Mark Serreze was asked to give one of the main lectures here at this year’s AGU Fall Meeting.

Discussing the possibility for an open Arctic ocean in summer months, he told the meeting: “A few years ago, even I was thinking 2050, 2070, out beyond the year 2100, because that’s what our models were telling us. But as we’ve seen, the models aren’t fast enough right now; we are losing ice at a much more rapid rate.

“My thinking on this is that 2030 is not an unreasonable date to be thinking of.”

And later, to the BBC, Dr Serreze added: “I think Wieslaw is probably a little aggressive in his projections, simply because the luck of the draw means natural variability can kick in to give you a few years in which the ice loss is a little less than you’ve had in previous years. But Wieslaw is a smart guy and it would not surprise me if his projections came out.”

: The US NSIDC monitors Arctic sea ice extent on a five-day mean. The 16 September 2007 record low falls below the previous minimum set on 20-21 September 2005, by an area roughly the size of Texas and California combined, or nearly five UKs.

MSNBC

The amount of melt on Greenland’s ice sheet last summer broke the previous measured record by 10 percent, according to new data analyzed by researchers at Colorado University.

The 2007 melt was the largest ever recorded since satellite measurements began in 1979, researcher Konrad Steffen told colleagues at a conference of the American Geophysical Union this week.

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The melting has increased by about 30 percent for west Greenland from 1979 to 2006, with record melt years in 1987, 1991, 1998, 2002, 2005 and 2007, said Steffen, director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at Colorado University.

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His team used data from military and weather satellites to chart the melt. It also maintains 22 monitoring stations on the ice sheet that transmit hourly data via satellites to Colorado University at Boulder.

Steffen noted that while Greenland has been thickening at higher elevations due to more snow, the gain is more than offset by accelerating loss where glaciers meet the sea.

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Of particular concern is an increase in shafts known as moulins, which drain melt water from surface ponds down to bedrock.

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The current contribution of Greenland ice melt to global sea levels is about .02 inches a year, Steffen’s institute noted, but the potential impact is enormous. About a quarter the size of the United States, Greenland has about one-twentieth of the world’s ice — the equivalent of about 21 feet of global sea rise were it to completely melt into the sea.

That process could take centuries to complete, but once started would be difficult to reverse.

Uriel Sinai / Getty Images file

Icebergs float in Greenland’s Jacobshavn Bay on Aug. 24. The icebergs are calved from the Jacobshavn Glacier, which is draining twice as much ice melt into the ocean as it was two decades ago.

News @ Nature

Even for a society jaded by the continual breaking of climate records, the retreat of Arctic ice this year is stunning.

Sea-ice extent — the total number of 25 x 25 kilometer square sections of ocean covered by at least 15% ice — in the Arctic Ocean melts from about 16 million km2 every March to a minimum sometime in September or October, the exact date normally only being evident in retrospect. The US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) says the previous record absolute minimum was 5.32 million km², set in 2005. This year has already reached 4.14 million km² — the lowest since records began in the late 1970s.

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Some models suggest that if the current trends continue, we’ll hit a first summer day entirely free of sea ice sometime between 2050 and 2100 ¹,² – dates accepted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Other studies predict it could happen even earlier³.

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As well as examining the area over which sea ice is prominent, scientists also look at the actual area of ice. Processing of NSIDC data by researchers at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, puts the previous 2005 record for area at 4.01 million km², with this year’s sea-ice area currently at 2.92 million km².

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Whether global warming should be blamed entirely for this year’s low is not entirely clear. Variation in the factors mentioned by Walsh is not necessarily caused by climate change. But a warmer planet has resulted in thinner ice, which is more vulnerable to warm weather. 

Initial results from a German survey that were revealed last week show that arctic ice is approximately 50% of its 2001 thickness.

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As well as opening up trade routes, the reduction of sea ice in the north will have consequences on local wildlife too. The most visible example of this will be polar bear populations; newly released reports from the US Geological Survey (USGS) suggest that two-thirds of the bears could be lost within 50 years because of reduced sea ice. Polar bears rely on the ice as a hunting platform and the USGS models predict a 42% loss of habit in the key summer breeding months.

16 Sept 2007: the long-term average summer sea ice extent is shown by the pink line, today’s ice extent is shown in white.

National Snow and Ice Data Center