Drones capture incredible whale pictures

Scientists have successfully used drones to capture detailed images of Southern right whales during an expedition to New Zealand's naturally hostile subantarctic islands.

An international team of researchers aboard Otago University's research vessel RV Polaris II last week returned from a month-long voyage to the wild and windy Auckland Islands, 465km south of Stewart Island.

The team sought to gauge the status of right whales, which breed at Port Ross, and gain a deeper insight into how a warming world was affecting one of the most sensitive parts of the globe.

They also sought enough data to make useful comparisons with their counterparts the North Atlantic right whale, which now numbers only in its hundreds, to better understand the stresses on right whales globally.

Along with photographic surveys of the whales from small boats, the expedition used a drone - a small four-rotor helicopter equipped with a high-resolution camera - to document the condition of individual whales.

"We fitted our drone with a tiny laser range-finder to measure altitude with a high degree of precision," said expedition leader and Otago University marine biologist Professor Steve Dawson.

The technology allowed the researchers to measure the size and shape of right whales photographed from above.

"This helps us understand the population at the Auckland Islands, and is crucial for figuring out why some right whale populations, such as ours, are recovering strongly, while others, such as the North Atlantic right whale, are not," he said.

"The pictures were taken while the drone hovered 25 to 35m above the whales and the whales did not seem to react.

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Secret US military project hidden under ice sheet for decades will be revealed sooner than expected thanks to climate change

It seems a story straight from a Cold War thriller - only the case of Camp Century is 100 per cent fact.

Now scientists have discovered the secretive military base in Greenland created by Danish and US governments during the 1950s and thought to be locked under the ice forever could be exposed by climate change.

A recent study published in the journal of Geophysical Research Letters found the submerged city could be exposed within 75 years under a "business as usual" approach to global warming.

It means low-level radioactive material, sewage, diesel and other waste that governments assumed would be locked up indefinitely in the ice could be leaked into the surrounding environment with no plan as to who is responsible.

"Two generations ago, people were interring waste in different areas of the world, and now climate change is modifying those sites," lead author William Colgan, of Canada's York University told the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES).

"It's a new breed of political challenge we have to think about."

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A huge crack is spreading across one of Antarctica's biggest ice shelves

r some time, scientists who focus on Antarctica have been watching the progression of a large crack in one of the world's great ice shelves - Larsen C, the most northern major ice shelf of the Antarctic peninsula, and the fourth largest Antarctic ice shelf overall.

Larsen C, according to the British Antarctic Survey, is "slightly smaller than Scotland." It's called an ice "shelf" because the entirety of this country-sized area is covered by 350 meter thick ice that is floating on top of deep ocean waters.

The crack in Larsen C grew around 30 kilometers (18.6 miles) in length between 2011 and 2015. And as it grew, also became wider - by 2015, yawning some 200 meters in length. Since then, growth has only continued - and now, a team of researchers monitoring Larsen C say that with the intense winter polar night over Antarctica coming to an end, they've been able to catch of glimpse of what happened to the crack during the time when it could not be observed by satellite.

The result was astonishing.

The rift had grown another 22 kilometers (13.67 miles) since it was last observed in March 2016, and has widened to about 350 meters, report researchers from Project MIDAS, a British Antarctic Survey funded collaboration of researchers from Swansea and Aberystwyth Universities in Wales, and other institutions. The full length of the rift is now 130 km, or over 80 miles.

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Humans have caused climate change for 180 years

Humans have been driving global warming for nearly two centuries, finds a new study showing climate change isn't just a 20th century phenomenon.

The study, published today in major journal Nature and authored by an international team of 25 scientists, finds that global warming began during the early stages of the industrial revolution and is first detectable in the Arctic and tropical oceans around the 1830s - much earlier than scientists had expected.

The new insights have important implications for assessing the extent that humans have caused the climate to move away from its pre-industrial state, and will help scientists understand the future impact of greenhouse gas emissions on the climate.

The study's lead author, Associate Professor Nerilie Abram from The Australian National University, said anthropogenic (man-made) climate change was generally talked about as a 20th century phenomenon because direct measurements of climate are rare before the 1900s.

However, the team studied detailed reconstructions of climate spanning the past 500 years to identify when the current sustained warming trend really beg

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11700064

By 2085, most cities could be too hot to host the Oympics

Swimmers compete during the menics in Rio have already made a major statement about climate change - at the opening ceremony, which featured a video about the subject.

But now, scientists are going further by using the Games to teach a grim climate lesson.

At a high-end scenario for greenhouse gas emissions, a team of researchers write in the influential medical journal the Lancet, fewer and fewer major cities will be able to host a Summer Olympics as the end of the century nears.

The reason? Too much risk of seeing weather conditions get so hot and humid that they would pose a major heat illness danger to athletes.

"You could take a risk, and plan your Olympics, and maybe not get the hot days you expect, but that would be a big risk when there are many billions of dollars at stake," said Kirk Smith, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley's School of Public Health and the lead author of the study.

Smith completed it with researchers based at institutions in New Zealand, Cyprus and the US.

At the centre of the study is the scary concept of the "wet-bulb globe temperature". What it refers to is a particular combination of temperature, humidity, wind (or the lack thereof), and heat radiation that, at elevated levels, is simply too much for humans to bear for long outdoors, especially when engaging in physical exertion. The core issue is that if there's too much humidity, it limits our ability to use evaporation, through sweating, to cool down our bodies.

The wet bulb globe temperature is determined based on several separate measurements, including one taken while covering the bulb of a thermometer with a wet towel, and another taken after inserting it into a dark globe, and can be either lower or higher than the actual temperature. But humans can't tolerate as high of a wet bulb temperature as an ordinary one. The danger zone is around 25C, for those engaging in major physical activity.

"It's tricky to measure and tricky to predict, but it's come to be understood as the best indicator of heat stress on the body," said Smith of the metric.

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Meet our newfound glow-in-the-dark neighbour

Scientists have discovered two new species of a glow-in-the-dark fish family found deep in waters near New Zealand.

Researchers from the Australian Museum and the Greenland Nature Institute found they'd happened upon two new species of the bioluminescent deep-sea "barreleyes" family when they looked at the patterns of pigmented "glow-blocking" scales on the underside of barreleyes caught near New Zealand, American Samoa and in the Atlantic.

The scientists saw three different pigment patterns that suggested three distinct species - which was confirmed when looking at the genetics - and revealed that the two new species were found only in the Pacific, not in the Atlantic.

Because of their rareness and fragility, barreleye fish are not well described, although previous work suggested the family included 19 species.

 

Some species have organs called "soles" along their bellies, covered with pigmented scales that control the light emitted from an internal organ.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/environment/news/article.cfm?c_id=39&objectid=11691185

Happy feat: penguins swim fifteen thousand kilometres in six months

Call it a happy feat.

New Zealand scientists have been astounded to find that two species of subantarctuic penguin were able to travel 15,000km - equivalent to the distance between Auckland and Boston - over a stretch of just six months.

The insight was revealed by a tagging project observing nearly 100 subantarctic rockhopper and Snares penguins over winter in the Southern Ocean.

"If they are constantly moving this averages out at about 100km a day but you also have to add on to that the distances covered vertically as the birds dive to capture food," said the study's leader, National Institute of Water and Atmosphere seabird ecologist Dr David Thompson.

While the Snares penguin population on their craggy namesake islands was relatively stable, Campbell Island's rockhoppers had dwindled by at least 21 per cent since 1984, leaving just over 33,000 breeding pairs there.

The island was once the world's largest breeding colony of the colourful rockhoppers - the smallest of all penguin species and featured on the movies Happy Feet and Surf's Up - but between 1942 and 1984 the population dropped by about 94 per cent.

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