A record amount of rainfall in Australia has closed its famous
national park at Uluru in what meteorologists described as a "twice a
century" weather event.
Waterfalls have formed all over the
park's huge sandstone landmark, which is also known as Ayers Rock and is
among Australia's top tourist attractions in the Northern Territory.
"There's
a lot of water coming off the rock and what that does is just channels
across the ring road around Uluru," said park ranger Mike Misso.
"Some of those roads there were flooded by about 300-400mm of rain. Quite spectacular but very hazardous road conditions."
Rangers were forced to close the park at 9am on Boxing Day due to flooded roads and a risk of car accidents.
The
heavy rain also led to flash flooding in the nearby town of Kintore,
which saw 25 houses flooded and forced dozens to evacuate the area.
"There's
a significant number of houses that have been affected by flooding in
some capacity," Acting Superintendent Pauline Vicary told ABC News.
It may be situated in a small French village that doesn't see that
much sun, but the Normandy town of Tourouvre has opened the world's
first solar roadway, bringing the hugely popular idea into reality.
The
notion of paving roadways with solar panels to meet our energy needs is
very appealing, but for the longest time it has remained largely a
theoretical one.
The newly launched French roadway is just one
kilometre long but that works out to be 2800 square metres of
photovoltaic cells - enough, theoretically, to power the village's
street lights.
The resin-coated solar panels were hooked up to
the local power grid just in time for Christmas as France's Environment
Minister Segolene Royal looked on last week.
"This new use of
solar energy takes advantage of large swathes of road infrastructure
already in use ... to produce electricity without taking up new real
estate," she said in a statement.
The one kilometre road is set to pave the way for to construction of much bigger solar highways in the future.
The
minister announced a four-year "plan for the national deployment of
solar highways" with initial projects in western Brittany and southern
Marseille.
The idea, which is also under exploration in Germany,
the Netherlands and the United States, is that roadways are occupied by
cars only around 20 per cent of the time, providing vast expanses of
surface to soak up the sun's rays.
The simple idea bestowes and
secondary - and equally important - purpose for roads by allowing them
to double as an energy source.
Killer whale found dead off Canada part of endangered population
Scientists say an orca found dead off the coast of British Columbia
belongs to the endangered population of killer whales that spend time in
Washington state waters.
Center for Whale Research
scientist Ken Balcomb said yesterday that he and others have confirmed
the whale was an 18-year-old male called J-34. They based the
identification on photographs and its unique markings.
The orca was seen floating near the shore Tuesday near Sechelt, about 40 miles northwest of Vancouver.
The
whale was towed to a beach, and Canadian officials performed a necropsy
on Wednesday. The centre is awaiting those results for a cause of
death.
Balcomb said in a statement that at least four members of
the J pod, one of three families of southern resident killer whales,
have died this year. The pod now stands at 25 members. K pod has 19
members and L pod has 35.
He said the killer whales have not been
getting enough salmon - their chief food source - for years. He said
policymakers should be considering stricter salmon catch limits and
strategic dam removals to improve wild salmon populations.
A tear in the sea floor 7km deep just north of Australia could cause disastrous earthquakes and tsunamis.
The
tear in the Earth's crust is in the Banda Sea, near Indonesia, and
measures about 60,000sq km - roughly the size of Tasmania.
Geologists
have now discovered the tear is one of the biggest faults on the planet
and is running through the Ring of Fire, an area in the Pacific Ocean
where a huge number of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions occur.
According
to the United States Geological Survey, 90 per cent of the world's
earthquakes and 81 per cent of the world's worst earthquakes occur along
the Ring of Fire.
The ring extends from New Zealand, around the
top of Australia and past Indonesia. It curls around Japan and down the
West Coast of the United States before ending at the bottom of South
America.
Just last month it became even more evident how dangerous the Ring of Fire could be.
On November 14 Kaikoura was struck by a magnitude 7.9 earthquake that casued widespread damage and killed two people.
On
November 22, an earthquake with a magnitude of 6.9 shook the Japanese
coast of Fukushima prefecture and tsunami waves followed not long after.
This
month, 84,000 people were left homeless after an 6.5 magnitude
earthquake struck western Indonesia. The earthquake killed more than 100
people.
Scientists yesterday provided a global quantification of one of the
most pervasive, but least recognised, ways that humans are marring the
coherence of the natural world - by building endless numbers of roads.
Roads
fragment natural habitats, and the more of them there are, the smaller
and more compromised those habitats become. At the same time, roads give
humans access to remote, once pristine regions, where they can begin
logging, mining, accidentally (or intentionally) starting fires and much
else.
In the Amazon rain forest, for instance, the fragmentation
of the landscape that occurs because of deforestation - to which roads
also contribute - upends the entire nature of the ecosystem. Once
sunlight can penetrate into the rain forest from a cleared area to its
side, rather than being mostly blocked out by the lush canopy from
above, the forest floor dries out, the forest itself heats up, trees
collapse more easily, there isn't enough range for many key species, and
on and on.
The
new study, published in the journal Science by a team of 10
conservation scientists at institutions in Germany, Greece, Poland, the
United Kingdom, Brazil and the United States, used an open-source,
citizen science database of global roads. The researchers then combined
this with an assessment from the research literature of the size of
areas alongside roads that are compromised ecologically by them. This
allowed them to count up the world's remaining truly untrammeled areas
and assess their number and size.
They defined these areas as
starting 1 kilometre away from any road. "There are some effects that go
far beyond 1km actually. It's a gradient of course, of impacts fading
out, but the majority of problems is occurring in this belt or buffer of
1 kilometre," said Pierre Ibisch, the study's first author and a
researcher at the Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development in
Germany.
Using this metric, the study found that the Earth's land
areas (excluding Antarctica and Greenland) were 80 percent roadless,
which may sound like a good thing - but peering in closer, the
researchers found that roads had divided that land area into some
600,000 pieces. More than half of these were less than a square
kilometre in area.
Only 7 per cent of the fragments were very
large - more than 100 square kilometres in area. Some of the largest
untrammeled areas were in the Amazon rain forest, northern or boreal
forests, and in Africa.
Warming at the top of the world is happening twice as fast as the
rest of the globe, and extending unnatural heating into the northern
autumn and winter, according to a new US federal report.
In its
annual Arctic Report Card , the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration today tallied record after record of high temperatures,
low sea ice, shrinking ice sheets and glaciers.
Study lead author
Jeremy Mathis, NOAA's Arctic research chief, said it shows long-term
Arctic warming trends deepening and becoming more obvious, with a
disturbing creep into seasons beyond summer, when the Arctic usually
rebuilds snow and ice.
Scientists have long said man-made climate change would hit the Arctic fastest.
Mathis and others said the data is showing that is what's now happening.
"Personally,
I would have to say that this last year has been the most extreme year
for the Arctic that I have ever seen," said Mark Serreze, director of
the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Boulder, Colorado, who wasn't
part of the 106-page report. "It's crazy."
NOAA's peer-reviewed
report said air temperatures over the Arctic from October 2015 to
September 2016 were "by far the highest in the observational record
beginning in 1900." The average Arctic air temperature at that time was
2C warmer than the 1981-2010 average.
East Antarctica's massive ice sheet may be more exposed to global
warming than long assumed, according to a study yesterday that shows how
strong winds can erode ice shelves that help hold it in place.
There
is enough frozen water sitting on top of the world's polar continent to
raise sea level by dozens of metres and redraw the world map if it
melts.
But understanding the dynamics of the region - which includes the much smaller West Antarctica ice sheet - has proven difficult.
Up to now, scientists have focused on the threat of West Antarctica.
Recent
studies have suggested that climate change may already have condemned
large chunks of its ice sheet to disintegration, whether on a time scale
of centuries or millennia.
In contrast, ice covering East Antarctica was seen as far more stable, even gaining mass.
The
floating, cliff-like ice shelves straddling land and ocean that prevent
inland ice from slipping into the sea, it was thought, were solidly
anchored.
That remains largely true. But a mysterious crater on
the King Baudoin ice shelf, due south from the tip of Africa, prompted a
team of researchers from the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany to
challenge that assumption.
"Our research has shown that East
Antarctica is also vulnerable to climate change," said Jan Lenaerts,
lead author of the study and a researcher at Utrech
Atop the ice sheet covering the Arctic island of Greenland, you now
see dramatic melting in the summer. It forms lakes, rivers and even
dangerous "moulins" in the ice where rivers suddenly plunge into the
thick ice sheet, carrying water deep below.
East Antarctica is
supposed to be different. It is extremely remote and cold. It doesn't
see such warm temperatures in the summer - yet - and so its ice tends to
remain more pristine.
"Many people refer to East Antarctica as
being too cold for significant melt," says Jan Lenaerts, a glaciologist
with the Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
"I mean there's marginal melt in summer, but there's not a lot."
That's
the common wisdom, at least, but it is challenged in a new study in
Nature Climate Change, by Lenaerts and his colleagues from universities
in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. They do so based on research
they conducted atop the very large Roi Baudouin ice shelf in East
Antarctica, which floats atop the ocean, and where they found a very
Greenland-like situation in early 2016.
The researchers had
traveled to investigate what had been described as a nearly 2-mile-wide
"crater" in the shelf, glimpsed by satellite, which some sources
believed had been caused by a meteorite. To the contrary, they found
that it was a large, 10 foot deep, icy lake bed. In its center,
meanwhile, were multiple rivers and three moulins that carried water
deep down into the floating ice shelf.
And even this, perhaps,
was not the most dramatic finding. The researchers also drilled through
the ice and found what they called "englacial" lakes, sandwiched between
the surface of the ice shelf and its base, which is in contact with the
ocean beneath it. They found 55 lakes in total on or in the ice shelf,
and a number of them were in this buried, englacial format.
This
meant that the ice shelf is anything but solid - it had many large
pockets of weakness throughout its structure, suggesting a greater
potential vulnerability to collapse through a process called
"hydrofracturing," especially if lake formation continues or increases.
That's bad news because when ice shelves fall apart, the glacial ice
behind them flows more rapidly to the ocean, raising sea levels.
Reindeer are shrinking on an Arctic island near the North Pole in a
side-effect of climate change that has curbed winter food for the
animals.
The average weight of adult reindeer on Svalbard, a
chain of islands north of Norway, has fallen to 48kg from 55kg in the
1990s as part of sweeping changes to Arctic life as temperatures rise,
experts say.
"Warmer summers are great for reindeer but winters
are getting increasingly tough," Professor Steve Albon, an ecologist at
the James Hutton Institute in Scotland who led the study with Norwegian
researchers, said.
Less chilly winters mean that once-reliable
snows fall more often as rain that can freeze into a sheet of ice,
making it harder for the herbivores to reach plant food.
Some
reindeer starve and females often give birth to stunted young. In
summer, however, plants flourish in a food bonanza that ensures healthy
females more likely to conceive in autumn - a pregnancy lasts about
seven months.
My 6-year-old asked me about Santa the other day. Luckily, it wasn't the moment where his innocence is shattered forever.
Instead,
he was wondering how Santa was going, preparing for his annual voyage
around the world, dispensing plastic junk from China to all the world's
least-needy kids. (I added the last part, but you get the drift).
I
painted the picture that my parents had passed on to me. I explained to
him how the night is slowly descending across the North Pole at the
moment, and by the time Santa sets off on his sleigh across the ice on
Christmas Eve, it will be shrouded in continuous darkness, lit only by
his Christmas candles, and one shiny red nose.
My son is very
interested in fashion, and so we talked at length about Santa's warm red
jacket. The sad thing that I didn't have the heart to tell my son is
that, at the moment, Santa's big red jacket is probably too warm for
Santa himself, even at the North Pole.
Over the past few weeks the temperature of the North Pole has been 22 degrees hotter
than the average temperature for this time of year. That's not a typo.
It's not 2.2 degrees hotter. It's 22 degrees Celsius hotter.
The
reason it's such a huge difference is because even though night is now
falling, the temperature around the poles is still getting hotter rather
than colder. That's never happened before. What it means is that the
gap between average temperature and this year's temperature is getting
wider and wider by the day.
A huge, mysterious 'dead zone' - 60,000 sq km devoid of oxygen and
life - has been discovered in the Indian Ocean to the west of Australia.
Such zones have already been found off the coasts of North and South America, western Africa and the Arabian Sea.
But this is the first time one has been found encroaching into South-East Asia.
A
study published in the science journal Nature Geoscience reveals a new
'dead zone' appears to be emerging in the Bay of Bengal, in waters
extending from 100m to 400m in depth.
Dead zones are normally
associated with a lack of oxygen and concentrations of microbes
stripping the vital nutrient nitrogen out of the water.
In the case of the Bay of Bengal, no such nitrogen loss has yet been detecte d.
And traces of oxygen have been found - at levels 10,000 times lower than normal air-saturated surface waters.
While this is less than is needed to support most life, it also impedes nitrogen-harvesting microbes.
A field training instructor at Antarctica New Zealand's Scott
Base has shared a video offering an insight into life on the frozen
continent.
Matt Windsor says his job generally involves providing
training for scientists and providing safety support for their projects
in the field.
His
video chronicles an early summer trip to Granite Harbour, in which his
job was to choose a route across the ice and identify and measure the
cracks.
But in his downtime there was some fun to be had: his Antarctic leisure activities include kite skiing and snowmobiling.
Guy McPherson, retired professor of conservation biology from the University of Arizona, has been on a speaking tour
of New Zealand this month peddling a bleak message: we're going to push
the planet's climate system over the edge and we've only got a decade
to live. A prominent New Zealand climate scientist sees no
basis for that claim and says such alarmism, which has already
generated a slew of scary headlines, is counter-productive to the
crucial effort of combating the worst potential effects of climate
change while we still can.
Science reporter Jamie Morton
talked to James Renwick, a professor of physical geography at Victoria
University of Wellington who served as a lead author on the last two
IPCC reports and recently co-hosted a Royal Society of New
Zealand-sponsored series of public talks on climate change.
What do you make of his claims? Is he misrepresenting climate science?
Misrepresenting - I'm not sure if that's quite the right word.
I've
read stuff on his website and I've had a look at some of the papers
that he's written and a lot of what he says is quite right and
mainstream.
Where we seem to part company is this idea that [humans will be wiped out] in the next 10 years.
South Island kea are having fun with motorists by rearranging road cones on a popular tourist route.
The
Kea Conservation Trust said the NZ Transport Agency's Milford Alliance
team were puzzled to find their road cones in odd places on State
Highway 94 at the Homer Tunnel, the entrance to Milford Sound.
After
a few weeks they checked the footage from their cameras at each end of
the tunnel and made a remarkable, and hilarious, discovery - it was
cheeky kea.
The video, labelled The Kea Movie, starts with
the road clear of any road cones before a kea can be seen dragging one
onto the left hand lane.
Another one then appears being brought into the
middle of the road as cars weave around them, before the Kea again pops
out and moves the cone again.
A third road cone is then brought
out onto the road and the mischievous kea continue to rearrange the
cones, popping out of sight as traffic goes by, before darting out and
moving them again.
Parts of New Zealand are sinking at faster rates than others and rising faster, a scientist says. The
just-published tectonic research provides new information about how
different parts of New Zealand are either rising or subsiding in
relation to the centre of the earth.
Data was collected by
GeoNet's GPS recorders between 2000 and 2015, and the first map has been
produced of relative vertical movements of the Earth's surface based on
measurements at 189 places across the country.
Analysis of the
data shows that parts of New Zealand, like the North Island's east
coast, have subsided by as much as 3mm a year for the past 15 years.
This
means this region is effectively subjected to a maximum sea level rise
of up to 6mm a year, which is twice the global average.
Co-author
Professor Tim Stern, of Victoria University's School of Geography,
Environment and Earth Sciences, said other parts of New Zealand were
rising.
"For
example, along parts of the Bay of Plenty coast, the Whanganui coast
and south to the Kapiti region, and along the Otago, Westland and
Southland coastlines, there are small rises of 1mm per year or less."
This meant sea level rise in these areas would be less than the global average.
"The
data also show inland areas of the South Island and the Southern Alps
are rising by up to 6mm per year, while in the Rotorua area there is a
remarkable subsidence rate of 15 mm per year.
Recent
sightings of whales, as well as Hector's and Dusky dolphins, off the
coast of Kaikoura have brought immense relief to locals and tour
operators.
Forest and Bird marine advocate Anton van Helden was
optimistic about the welfare of Kaikoura's many deep-diving species -
among them sperm whales, humpback whales, Southern right whales, orca
and several dolphin species.
While the submarine Kaikoura Canyon
provided a productive ecosystem for whales and dolphins, there were
similarly productive habitats elsewhere that could have served as
alternatives.
But he expected that, even with considerable uplift
around the canyon area - and the potential of landslides - the systems
would have been easily large enough to sustain the quake's effects.
"The
other thing, with sperm whales, it is only males that would effectively
be there at the moment, so this is the time of year when there would be
fewer of them in the region."
However, early indications showed Kaikoura's resident fur seals would have fared worse.
At
Ohau Point, a large slip had caused heavy damage to a specially
protected seal sanctuary, and it was likely some animals would have
perished.
"It's too soon to be able to know the full impact that
the earthquake will have had on the local population," Department of
Conservation science adviser Laura Boren said.
Political people are watching the chaos in Washington at the moment.
But some people in the science community are watching the chaos
somewhere else - the Arctic.
It's polar night there now - the sun
isn't rising in much of the Arctic. That's when the Arctic is supposed
to get super-cold, when the sea ice that covers the vast Arctic Ocean is
supposed to grow and thicken.
But in fall 2016 - which has been a
zany year for the region, with multiple records set for low levels of
monthly sea ice - something is totally off. The Arctic is super hot,
even as a vast area of cold polar air has been displaced over Siberia.
At
the same time, one of the key indicators of the state of the Arctic -
the extent of sea ice covering the polar ocean - is at a record low
right now. The ice is freezing up again, as it always does this time of
year after reaching its September low, but it isn't doing so as rapidly
as usual. In fact, the ice's area is even lower than it was during the
record-low 2012.
Twitter's
expert Arctic watchers are stunned. Zack Labe, a PhD student at the
University of California at Irvine who studies the Arctic, tweeted out
an image on Thursday from the Danish Meteorological Institute showing
Arctic temperatures about 20C higher than normal above 80 degrees north
latitude. "Today's latest #Arctic mean temperature continues to move the wrong direction ... up. Quite an anomalous spike!," Labe wrote.
"Despite
onset of #PolarNight, temperatures near #NorthPole increasing.
Extraordinary situation right now in #Arctic, w/record low #seaice,"
added Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA.
This is the second year in a row that temperatures near the North Pole have risen to freakishly warm levels.
Political people in the United States are watching the chaos in
Washington in the moment. But some people in the science community are
watching the chaos somewhere else - the Arctic.
It's polar night
there now - the sun isn't rising in much of the Arctic. That's when the
Arctic is supposed to get super-cold, when the sea ice that covers the
vast Arctic Ocean is supposed to grow and thicken.
But in fall
2016 - which has been a zany year for the region, with multiple records
set for low levels of monthly sea ice - something is totally off. The
Arctic is superhot, even as a vast area of cold polar air has been
displaced over Siberia.
At the same time, one of the key
indicators of the state of the Arctic - the extent of sea ice covering
the polar ocean - is at a record low right now. The ice is freezing up
again, as it always does this time of year after reaching its September
low, but it isn't doing so as rapidly as usual.
In fact, the ice's area is even lower than it was during the record-low 2012.
Twitter's
expert Arctic watchers are stunned. Zack Labe, a PhD student at the
University of California at Irvine who studies the Arctic, tweeted out
an image on Wednesday from the Danish Meteorological Institute showing
Arctic temperatures about 20 degrees Celsius higher than normal above 80
degrees North Latitude.
"Today's latest #Arctic mean temperature continues to move the wrong direction ... up. Quite an anomalous spike!," Labe wrote.
"Despite
onset of #PolarNight, temperatures near #NorthPole increasing.
Extraordinary situation right now in #Arctic, w/record low #seaice,"
added Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA.
This year is on track to be the hottest on record, the United Nations forecast yesterday.
Scientists,
meanwhile, reported that greenhouse-gas emissions from burning fossil
fuels, the main driver of global warming, remained constant for the
third year running last year, while the World Bank calculated that 26
million people slip into poverty annually due to natural disasters,
reflecting the risks posed by climate change.
All three reports
were issued on the sidelines of high-level United Nations climate talks
in Marrakesh still reeling from news that Donald Trump, who denies
climate change, had captured the White House.
The fact that economic growth and CO2 pollution no longer move in lock-step is an encouraging sign, the scientists said.
Carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels have been nearly flat for
three years in a row - a "great help" but not enough to stave off
dangerous global warming, a report said yesterday.
Emissions of
planet-warming carbon dioxide stayed level last year at 36.3 billion
tonnes (GtCO2) and were projected to rise "only slightly", by 0.2 per
cent this year, according to the annual Global Carbon Budget report
compiled by teams of scientists from around the world.
"This
third year of almost no growth in emissions is unprecedented at a time
of strong economic growth," said research leader Corinne Le Quere of the
University of East Anglia.
Driven largely by reduced coal use in
China, this was a "clear and unprecedented break" with the preceding
decade's fast emissions growth, at a rate of some 2.3 per cent per year
from 2004 to 2013, before dipping to 0.7 per cent in 2014.
"This is a great help for tackling climate change but it is not enough," said Le Quere. For
the world's nations to make true on the global pact to limit average
global warming to 2C over pre-Industrial Revolution levels, emissions
must do more than level off, the study found. A decrease of 0.9 per cent per year was needed to 2030.
The
concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has continued to
grow, the report warned, hitting a record level of 23 GtCO2 last year
that looked set to reach 25 GtCO2 in 2016. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11747963
Many of the deadly heatwaves and hurricanes, droughts and floods
this decade have borne the imprint of man-made global warming, said a
series of reports yesterday that warned of worse to come.
United Nations envoys yesterday gathered in Morocco for a second day of talks on putting the Paris Agreement into action.
According
to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), the half-decade from
2011 to 2015 was the warmest five-year stretch on record, with 2014 and
2015 the hottest of all.
In a report issued on the sidelines of
the Marrakesh gathering, it warned of "the increasingly visible human
footprint on extreme weather and climate events with dangerous and
costly impacts". Climate change "has increased the risks of extreme
events such as heatwaves, drought, record rainfall and damaging floods",
WMO secretary general Petteri Taalas said.
In a separate report,
risk analysts Germanwatch said more than half-a-million people
worldwide died as a result of almost 11,000 extreme weather events from
1996 to 2015.
These caused damage upwards of US$3 trillion ($3.07t). Four of the 10 countries hardest hit by extreme weather events last year were in Africa, said Germanwatch.
Poor
countries, which contributed least to the planet-warming greenhouse
gases in Earth's atmosphere, were least prepared to deal with the
fallout - superstorms, extreme drought, heatwaves and flooding.
The
Paris Agreement, the world's first universal climate pact, vows to cap
global warming to under 2C over pre-Industrial Revolution levels, while
aiming for 1.5 C.
The hottest year on record globally in 2015 could be an average year
by 2025 and beyond if carbon emissions continue to rise at the same
rate, new research has found.
An Australian study published today in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society
indicated that human activities had already locked in this new normal
for future temperatures - but immediate climate action could prevent
record extreme seasons year after year.
Its lead author, Dr
Sophie Lewis of the Australian National University, said if the world
continued with business-as-usual emissions, extreme seasons would
inevitably be the norm within decades and Australia was the "canary in
the coal mine" that would experience the change first.
"This
research tells us we can potentially prevent record-breaking season "If we
don't reduce our rate of emissions the record hot summer of 2013 in
Australia - when we saw temperatures approaching 50 degrees Celsius in
some areas - could be just another average summer season by 2035," she
said
The idea
of a "new normal" had been used repeatedly when talking about climate
change but had never been clearly defined until Lewis and colleagues
developed a scientific definition for the term. "Based on a
specific starting point, we determined a new normal occurred when at
least half of the years following an extreme year were cooler and half
warmer," she said.
Drive your car 4000km and its greenhouse gas emissions will melt
three square metres of ice on the Arctic Ocean, according to a study
that has found a direct link between carbon dioxide and shrinking ice.
Examining
long-term trends for ice floating on the ocean since the 1950s,
scientists in Germany and the United States projected the ocean around
the North Pole would be ice-free in summers by the mid-2040s at current
levels of emissions.
In the historical records, they found that
every tonne of carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere meant on average
the loss of three square metres of ice in September, when the ice
reaches a minimum extent before expanding in winter.
That made it
possible to "grasp the contribution of personal carbon dioxide
emissions to the loss of Arctic sea ice," scientists at Germany's Max
Planck Institute for Meteorology and the US National Snow and Ice Data
Center wrote in the journal Science.
Each
passenger taking a return flight from New York to Europe, or driving a
car 4000km, would emit about a tonne of carbon dioxide, they estimated.
A
long-term retreat of Arctic sea ice is already causing profound
changes, disrupting the lives of indigenous peoples while opening the
region to more oil and gas exploration and shipping.
Scientists usually deal in more abstract terms such as billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases.
The world's nations must urgently ramp up commitments to cut
planet-warming carbon emissions to avoid "human tragedy", the United
Nations warned yesterday.
As they stand, these commitments -
which do not kick in until 2020 - would still allow average global
temperatures to climb as high as 3.4C by the end of the century, a
recipe for massive climate damage, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)
said in its annual Emissions Gap report.
"If we don't start
taking additional action now, beginning with the upcoming climate
meeting in Marrakesh, we will grieve over the avoidable human tragedy,"
said UNEP head Erik Solheim.
Scientists who sought to solve mysteries about hammerhead sharks were
only left with another when one of the first adults ever tagged ended
up eluding them.
Last week, eight months after the smooth
hammerhead shark was caught and tagged in the Hauraki Gulf, the
electronic pop-up tag started transmitting data back via satellite.
But they soon discovered the 3.2m shark, named Sophie, had long since shed the device.
Sophie
was hooked at Simpsons Rock, near the Mokohinau Islands, by long-time
research collaborators and Auckland fishers Scott and Sue Tindale.
Finding
an adult smooth hammerhead shark had been a coup; while previous
studies had successfully tracked juveniles, only one other adult in the
species had ever been tagged with an electronic tag, and was thought to
have died soon after.
"They're
hard to find, they're hard to tag and they're quite susceptible to
stress and handling," National Institute of Water and Atmosphere (Niwa)
marine scientist Dr Malcolm Francis said.
"Elsewhere in the world, it's been found that hammerheads die a lot more easily after capture than a lot of other sharks do."
The
scientists had been optimistic about Sophie, which proved a challenge
to tag and appeared to be healthy and lively when released.
For Francis - whose Government-funded research has led to stunning new insights
into the behaviour and range of hammerhead, mako and great white sharks
- the tag presented the first real opportunity to learn where adult
smooth hammerhead sharks travel over a year, and why.
A joint New Zealand-US proposal to create the world's largest marine
protected area in Antarctic waters has finally got across the line.
Foreign
Affairs Minister Murray McCully confirmed this afternoon that member
countries of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine
Living Resources (CCAMLR) had agreed to the sanctuary in the Ross Sea
after talks in Hobart this week.
The marine protected area (MPA) will cover roughly 1.55m square kilometres, of which 1.12m sq km will be a no-take zone.
"New
Zealand has played a leading role in reaching this agreement which
makes a significant contribution to global marine protection," McCully
said.
Now that it has the approval of the 25 countries which govern the Antarctic, the MPA will come into force in December 2017.
It
is one of New Zealand's major foreign policy objectives, and it has
taken six years of diplomatic wrangling to get all countries to agree to
the proposal.
CCAMLR decisions require a consensus, and
proposals can fail if any single country objects. Previous attempts to
reach agreement have been scuppered by opposition from fishing
countries, mainly Russia and Ukraine.
McCully lobbied his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov on the issue during a recent trip to Moscow. United
States Secretary of State John Kerry - who has a strong interest in
marine protected area - had also held talks with Lavrov. "At a
time when relations on so many fronts are difficult with the Russians,
some co-operation and a constructive dialogue is very pleasing to us."
New Zealand's marine environment is under increasing pressure
from climate change, pollution and pests, a new Government stocktake has
found.
Yet the major report,
released this morning by the Ministry for the Environment and
Statistics New Zealand, fails to show the full impact fishing is having
on our oceans. The paper pin-points three major concerns:
• Global greenhouse gas emissions are causing ocean acidification and warming - changes that will continue for generations.
• Most of our native marine birds and many mammals are threatened with, or at risk of extinction. •
Our coasts are the most degraded of all marine areas, due to sediment
and nutrients washed off the land, introduced marine pests, and seabed
trawling and dredging.
But
it found the full ecological impact of fishing "was not clear" - and
did not draw firm conclusions about specific effects of commercial,
recreational and customary fishing.
Secretary for the Environment
Vicky Robertson said our oceans are facing multiple, and cumulative
pressures that have been building over generations.
"Our waters have become more acidic from absorbing excess CO2," she said.
"This
affects the creatures that live there. Among other things, ocean
acidification makes it more difficult for shellfish, like pa and
mussels, to form shells."
We knew this news was coming, perhaps. Now that it is here, it is no less shocking.
Ever
since a historic coral bleaching event hit the treasured Great Barrier
Reef in March - courtesy of a dramatic influx of warm water in the
region - scientists have been trying to take a toll of the damage. And
the latest report, from researchers with the ARC Centre of Excellence
for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Queensland, seems to
reaffirm some of the worst fears.
It's important to caution that not all of the evidence is in yet. The Great Barrier Reef is enormous and takes time to survey.
Still
it appears that in the northern part of the Great Barrier Reef, large
volumes of corals may have died. That's the part of the reef researchers
say was, previously, the most "pristine" - in other words, the least
damaged by pollution and other human influences.
"In
the area [where] I am, I'm at Lizard Island, about 250 kilometres north
of Cannes, around about 80 per cent and upwards of the corals have
died," said Andrew Hoey, a senior research fellow with the Centre,
during a break yesterday from the ongoing research.
In a press
release from the ARC Centre, one of Hoey's colleagues, Greg Torda, said
"millions" of corals in the northern sector of the reef have died.
Even
though their studies are not complete, the researchers are already
asserting that this is far worse than prior bleaching events that
occurred in 1998 and 2002.
"The mortality is devastating really," said Hoey. "It's a lot higher than we had hoped."
Few regions of the world are as unstable in the face of advancing
climate change as frozen West Antarctica, where rapidly melting glaciers
have scientists on edge about the potential for huge amounts of future
sea-level rise.
Now, a new study has pinpointed some of the most
rapid ice losses observed in the region in the past 15 years - and it
supports a growing scientific belief that warm ocean water is behind the
melting.
"[The study] seems to provide a strong piece of
evidence to support a general hypothesis about what's happening in the
Amundsen Sea," said Ala Khazendar, a polar scientist at Nasa's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory and the new paper's lead author.
Much of
the focus on West Antarctica centres around the Amundsen Sea region,
whose glaciers may already be experiencing irreversible ice loss. The
glaciers backing up to this sea have the potential to cause about 1.2m
of sea-level rise, and the ice contained in West Antarctica as a whole
could raise sea levels by 3m.
Several
of the region's largest glaciers have inspired some of the greatest
concern. Just last week, US and British science agencies announced a
joint multimillion-dollar research mission to study the massive Thwaites
Glacier, which scientists believe may already be contributing about 10
per cent of all global sea-level rise. And a recent study on the nearby
(and slightly smaller) Pine Island Glacier has documented recent rapid
retreat .
Now, research increasingly suggests it's not just
atmospheric warming that's causing all the problems in West Antarctica,
but the influence of the ocean as well . Many glaciers in this region
back right up to the edge of the sea, terminating in what's known as an
ice shelf - a ledge of floating ice that's disconnected from the bedrock
and juts out into the water, helping to stabilise the glacier and hold
back the flow of ice behind it.
Scientists now believe that
rising water temperatures may be helping to weaken ice shelves by
seeping into the cavities beneath them and lapping up against the
exposed ice. If an ice shelf thins or breaks, the glacier behind it
begins to pour ice into the ocean and retreat inland. The point where
the bottom of the glacier actually joins to the bedrock is known as the
grounding line, and scientists often use it as a point of reference to
measure how far a glacier has retreated over time.
Scientists
believe this is what's driving the retreat of the Pine Island and
Thwaites glaciers. But while these glaciers hold some of the greatest
potential to raise sea-levels, smaller glaciers in the area can also
offer some important insights into the processes driving ice loss in the
region.
Shark attacks on humans are at a record number with scientists
concluding people interfering with the ocean beasts' environment is the
main reason for the rise. Last year, there were 98 unprovoked shark attacks around the world, six of those fatal. That's 10 more than the previous record of 88 in 2000.
Researchers at Bond University in Queensland have looked at areas where shark attacks are most common, reported The Australian.
Their
studies, published in the Ocean & Coastal Management journal,
showed that 84 per cent of attacks occurred in six areas - the United
States, South Africa, Australia, Brazil, the Bahamas and the [Indian
Ocean] island of Reunion.
In the Bahamas, one factor in attacks was the rise in careless shark diving and handfeeding.
Off
Reunion, shark populations surged after hunting them was banned - which
researchers said could have led to food shortages for the sharks. It
coincided with an increase in scuba
More than half the attacks happened in America, with the
majority in Florida, in particular around the city of Daytona on surfing
beaches.
An ancient crater lake in Central Otago has given a Kiwi scientist a
unique insight into how quickly climate change could cause the Antarctic
ice sheet to melt. Fossilised leaves found at Foulden Maar near
Middlemarch have been found to contain evidence of a sharp increase in
atmospheric CO2 levels associated with a major collapse of the ice sheet
23 million years ago. University of Waikato paleoclimatologist
Dr Beth Fox and colleagues from Columbia University in New York
calculated the CO2 levels by studying stomatal cells and carbon isotope
ratios in the fossils. They found CO2 levels rose from about 500
parts per million (ppm) to up to 1550ppm over a geologically short span
of less than 10,000 years.
With global models drawing an ever-clearer picture of
unchecked warming, there has never been a more urgent time to answer the
big questions about climate change's vast, frozen elephant in the room:
Antarctica. As top Kiwi scientists fly south for New Zealand's 60th
research season on the ice, science reporter Jamie Morton takes a look at some of the fascinating studies planned for this summer.
1. Antarctica from the air
Antarctica's
sea ice, swelling and retreating with the seasons like a breathing
organ, plays a crucial yet poorly understood role in our planet's
climate system.
The immensely complex natural sequence helps
maintain the cold conditions that ultimately sustain the continent,
while also influencing storms across the Southern Hemisphere and
affecting the amount of heat the Southern Ocean can absorb as the Earth
warms.
Experimental observations during the polar
winter have shown increased losses of ozone that were caused by
solar-generated
But some of the sea ice's most intriguing behaviour isn't
captured by the giant Earth System Model (ESM) used to predict our
planet's future climate, prompting a team of Kiwi researchers to fill in
the gaps.
They'll
do it using an airborne electromagnetic device called the "EMBird",
which will be slung below a DC3 utility aircraft to map snow and sea ice
thickness as it flies over the southwest Ross Sea.
The research
team, from Otago University, Canterbury University, the National
Institute of Water and Atmosphere (Niwa) and US collaborators, wants to
tease out the influence on coastal sea ice of the very cold water that
emerges from beneath ice shelves, the huge glaciers that float on the
ocean.
"We have flown the EMBird from a helicopter before, but it
has never been flown below an aircraft in Antarctica," says project
leader Professor Pat Langhorne, of Otago University.
"There will
be the challenges of the weather and inevitable delays and the
preparation of the aircraft - we have to change from skis to wheels and
back."
The observations they collect will contribute
toward a new part of an improved ESM able to create region-specific
forecasts of future climate for New Zealand and its nearest neighbours.
There
will be the challenges of the weather and inevitable delays and the
preparation of the aircraft - we have to change from skis to wheels and
back.
Professor Pat Langhorne
2. Drilling down into the ice world's past
Earth's
future sea level - projected to be around a metre higher by 2100, but
potentially much higher if carbon emissions continue unabated - is one
of the most worrying prospects of climate change.
We know the
biggest potential contributor to sea level rise is ice stored in
Antarctica - oceans could rise by an estimated average 60m if all of it
melted - but scientists still can't put their finger precisely on how
the continent is responding.
A collaboration led by Dr Gavin
Dunbar, of Victoria University's Antarctic Research Centre, is zeroing
in on a region thought to be particularly susceptible to collapse in a
warmer world.
At the Ross Ice Shelf, near the Kamb ice stream and
1000km from Scott Base, they plan to drill deep into rocks beneath the
ocean and ice to reveal a detailed record of the environment in which
they were once deposited, millions of years ago.
"By reading the
rock we can get some idea of how extensive the ice was under climates
of the past when Earth was warmer than today," Dunbar says.
"This helps us calibrate our computer models that are trying to project how much and how fast sea level will rise in future."
Over
November and December, the team will pin-point a drilling target,
revealed by generating sound waves with explosives that travel through
the ice and rock and bounce back when they hit changing rock type, up to
500m below the surface.
Beyond seeing whether the record will give them the kind of
information they're after, the seismic data should also be useful for
ongoing studies of Antarctic glaciology and informing the bigger picture
of how Antarctica works.
"We also hope to deploy an array of
weather stations in this remote part of Antarctic to get some idea of
how the atmosphere circulates there for the first time."
The expedition would face the ever-present dangers that come with working in freezing conditions.
"However,
the ice shelf itself is probably the most featureless part of
Antarctica, so fingers are crossed that we don't get any unpleasant
surprises from nature."
Global warming is said to be bringing temperatures last seen during
an interglacial era, when sea level was 6-9 meters (20-30ft) higher than
today
In order to meet targets set at last year’s Paris climate accord to
avoid runaway climate change, “massive CO2 extraction” costing an
eye-watering $104tn to $570tn will be required over the coming century
with “large risks and uncertain feasibility” as to its success, the
paper states.
“There’s a misconception that we’ve begun to address the climate
problem,” said Hansen, who brought climate change into the public arena
through his testimony to the US congress in the 1980s. “This
misapprehension is based on the Paris climate deal where governments
clapped themselves on the back but when you look at the science it
doesn’t compute, it’s not true.
“Even with optimistic assumptions (future emissions reduction) will
cost hundreds of trillions of dollars. It’s potentially putting young
people in charge of a situation that is beyond their control. It’s not
clear they will be able to take such actions.”
European experts have announced that the winter 2016 – 2017 will be the
coldest in the last 100 years as Arctic air masses arrive over the
European continent.
European experts have announced that the winter 2016 – 2017 will be the
coldest in the last 100 years as Arctic air masses arrive over the
European continent.
