GENEVA, Switzerland, February 25, 2009 (ENS) – New evidence of the far-reaching effects of global warming in the polar regions has emerged from the scientific explorations of International Polar Year 2007-2008. Snow and ice are declining in both polar regions, affecting human livelihoods as well as local plant and animal life in the Arctic, as well as global ocean and atmospheric circulation and sea level.

The IPY findings are reported in “State of Polar Research,” released today by the World Meteorological Organization and the International Council for Science.

At a time in which the global environment is changing faster than ever in human history, IPY science has increased understanding of pollutant transport, species’ evolution, and storm formation and climate change, among many other areas.

The IPY findings result from more than 160 endorsed science projects assembled from researchers in more than 60 countries.

The U.S. Antarctic Program’s South Pole Traverse team identifies and analyzes crevasses in an area known as the Shear Zone. November 2008. (Photo by Paul Thur courtesy National Science Foundation)

Launched in March 2007, the IPY covers a two-year period to March 2009 to allow for observations during the alternate seasons in both polar regions.

A joint project of the World Meteorological Organization and the International Council for Science, IPY spearheaded efforts to better monitor and understand the Arctic and Antarctic regions, with international funding support of about US$ 1.2 billion over the two-year period.

“The International Polar Year 2007 – 2008 came at a crossroads for the planet’s future” said Michel Jarraud, secretary-general of WMO. “The new evidence resulting from polar research will strengthen the scientific basis on which we build future actions.”

Catherine Bréchignac, president of ICSU, said, “The planning for IPY set ambitious goals that have been achieved, and even exceeded, thanks to the tireless efforts, enthusiasm, and imagination of thousands of scientists, working with teachers, artists, and many other collaborators.”

Taking aerial pictures at the southern coast of Samoylov Island within the Lena Delta close to the Laptev Sea in the Siberian Arctic. Summer 2008. (Photo courtesy Alfred-Wegener Institut)

It now appears clear that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass, contributing to sea level rise. Warming in the Antarctic is much more widespread than it was thought prior to the IPY, and it now appears that the rate of ice loss from Greenland is increasing.

Researchers also found that in the Arctic, during the summers of 2007 and 2008, the minimum extent of year-round sea ice decreased to its lowest level since satellite records began 30 years ago. IPY expeditions recorded an unprecedented rate of sea-ice drift in the Arctic as well. Due to global warming, the types and extent of vegetation in the Arctic shifted, affecting grazing animals and hunting.

Other evidence for global warming comes from IPY research vessels that have confirmed warming in the Southern Ocean above the global average. A freshening of the bottom water near Antarctica is consistent with increased ice melt from Antarctica and could affect ocean circulation. Global warming is thus affecting Antarctica in ways not previously identified.

IPY research has also identified large pools of carbon stored as methane in permafrost. Thawing permafrost threatens to destabilize the stored greenhouse gas and send it into the atmosphere. IPY researchers along the Siberian coast observed substantial emissions of methane from ocean sediments.

New Zealand scientist measures the depth of Antarctic coastal sea ice. (Photo courtesy University of Otago)

In the area of biodiversity, surveys of the Southern Ocean have uncovered a rich, colorful and complex range of life. Some species appear to be migrating poleward in response to global warming.

IPY has also given atmospheric research new insight. Researchers have discovered that North Atlantic storms are major sources of heat and moisture for the polar regions. Understanding these mechanisms will improve forecasts of the path and intensity of storms.

Studies of the ozone hole have benefited from IPY research, with new connections identified between the ozone concentrations above Antarctica and wind and storm conditions over the Southern Ocean. This information will improve predictions of climate and ozone depletion.

Many Arctic residents, including indigenous communities, participated in IPY’s projects. Over 30 of these projects addressed Arctic social and human science issues, including food security, pollution, and other health issues, and will bring new understanding to addressing these pressing challenges.

Inger Marie Gaup Eira prepares for field work on EALAT, the Reindeer Herders Vulnerability Network Study, examining reindeer pastoralism in view of climate change. February 14, 2009.

“IPY has been the catalyst for the development and strengthening of community monitoring networks across the North” said David Carlson, director of the IPY International Programme Office. “These networks stimulate the information flow among communities and back and forth from science to communities.”

IPY leaves as its legacy enhanced observational capacity, stronger links across disciplines and communities, and an energized new generation of polar researchers.

“The work begun by IPY must continue,” said Jarraud. “Internationally coordinated action related to the polar regions will still be needed in the next decades,” he said.

Bréchignac concurs, “This IPY has further strengthened the ICSU-WMO relationship on polar research coordination, and we must continue to assist the scientific community in its quest to understand and predict polar change and its global manifestations at this critical time.”

The “State of Polar Research” document also recommends priorities for future action to ensure that society is best informed about ongoing polar change and its likely future evolution and global impacts. A major IPY science conference will take place in Oslo in June 2010.

Click here [www.ipy.org] to view the “State of Polar Research” report.

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SEATTLE, Washington, January 14, 2009 (ENS) – Climate change will desiccate crop yields in the tropics and subtropics by the end of this century, leaving half the world’s population facing a food crisis unless methods of adaptation are found quickly, new research shows.

The area at risk stretches from the southern United States to northern Argentina and southern Brazil, from northern India and southern China to southern Australia and all of Africa.

 Farmhouse abandoned to drought in Fairbanks, Arizona (Photo by Edward Grondin)

Currently three billion people live in the tropics and subtropics, and their number is expected to nearly double by the end of the century. Many people who now live in these areas subsist on less than $2 a day and depend largely on agriculture for their livelihoods.

“The stresses on global food production from temperature alone are going to be huge, and that doesn’t take into account water supplies stressed by the higher temperatures,” said David Battisti, a University of Washington atmospheric sciences professor and lead author of the study in the current edition of the journal “Science.”

“You can let it happen and painfully adapt, or you can plan for it,” he said. “You also could mitigate it and not let it happen in the first place, but we’re not doing a very good job of that.”

Battisti collaborated with Rosamond Naylor, director of Stanford University’s Program on Food Security and the Environment, to examine the impact of climate change on the world’s food security. The National Science Foundation and the Tamaki Foundation funded their research.

“This is a compelling reason for us to invest in adaptation, because it is clear that this is the direction we are going in terms of temperature and it will take decades to develop new food crop varieties that can better withstand a warmer climate,” Naylor said.

“We are taking the worst of what we’ve seen historically and saying that in the future it is going to be a lot worse unless there is some kind of adaptation,” she said.

Hungry people with a precious load of food aid from the UN World Food Programme (Photo by Marcus Prior courtesy WFP)

Today, nearly one billion of the world’s 6.75 billion people go to bed hungry, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization said in December. Another 40 million people have been pushed into hunger this year due to high food prices, the agency said. This increase comes after four decades of progress when the international community collectively helped to bring down the percentage of hungry people from 37 to 17.

In the future, Battisti and Naylor says, higher temperatures in the tropics can be expected to cut yields of the primary food crops, maize and rice, by 20 to 40 percent. And rising temperatures also will dry up soil moisture, cutting yields even further.

“When all the signs point in the same direction, and in this case it’s a bad direction, you pretty much know what’s going to happen,” Battisti said. “You are talking about hundreds of millions of additional people looking for food because they won’t be able to find it where they find it now.”

By combining direct observations with data from 23 global climate models, Battisti and Naylor determined there is greater than a 90 percent probability that by 2100 the lowest growing-season temperatures in the tropics and subtropics will be higher than any temperatures recorded there to date.

They used the data as a filter to view historic instances of severe food insecurity, and concluded such instances are likely to become more commonplace. Those include severe episodes in France in 2003 and the Ukraine in 1972. In the case of the Ukraine, a near-record heat wave reduced wheat yields and contributed to disruptions in the global cereal market that lasted two years.

“I think what startled me the most is that when we looked at our historic examples there were ways to address the problem within a given year. People could always turn somewhere else to find food,” Naylor said. “But in the future there’s not going to be any place to turn unless we rethink our food supplies.”

Cracked stream bed in France during the European drought of 2005 (Photo by GeoBlogs)

Climate-related food shortages will not be limited to the tropics, the scientists conclude, citing record temperatures that struck Western Europe in June, July and August of 2003, killing an estimated 52,000 people.

The summer-long heat wave in France and Italy cut wheat yields and fodder production by one-third. In France, temperatures were nearly 6.5 degrees Fahrenheit above the long-term mean, and the scientists say such temperatures could be normal for France by 2100.

“We have to be rethinking agriculture systems as a whole, not only thinking about new varieties but also recognizing that many people will just move out of agriculture, and even move from the lands where they live now,” Naylor said.

Temperature increases from climate change are expected to be less in equatorial regions than at higher latitudes, but because average temperatures in the tropics today are much higher than at midlatitudes, rising temperature will have a greater impact on crop yields in the tropics.

Recent research at the University of Washington has shown that even with much smaller temperature increases in the tropics, the impacts of warmer climate will be greater there because life in the tropics does not encounter much temperature variation and so is less adaptable, Battisti said. That makes an even stronger case to begin now searching for ways to deal with substantially warmer conditions.

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TROY, New York, December 18, 2008 (ENS) – A new generation of lighting devices based on light-emitting diodes, LEDs, will supplant the common light bulb in coming years, according to a paper published this week by two professors at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Innovations in photonics and solid state lighting will lead to trillions of dollars in cost savings, along with a massive reduction in the amount of energy required to light homes and businesses around the globe, write co-authors E. Fred Schubert and Jong Kyu Kim.

If all of the world’s light bulbs were replaced with energy-efficient LEDs for a period of 10 years, the researchers say it would reduce global crude oil consumption by 962 million barrels and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 10.68 gigatons.

The researchers predict financial savings of $1.83 trillion over the 10 year period, and the number of required global power plants would be reduced by 280.

In addition to the environmental and cost benefits of LEDs, the technology is expected to enable a wide range of advances in areas as diverse as healthcare, transportation systems, digital displays, and computer networking.

Light emitting diodes (Photo by Schubert and
Kim courtesy RPI)

“What the transistor meant to the development of electronics, the LED means to the field of photonics. This core device has the potential to revolutionize how we use light,” write Schubert and Kim.

Schubert is the Wellfleet Senior Constellation Professor of Future Chips at Rensselaer, and heads the university’s National Science Foundation-funded Smart Lighting Center.

Kim is a research assistant professor of electrical, computer, and systems engineering.

Their paper, titled “Transcending the replacement paradigm of solid-state lighting,” will be published in the December 22 issue of “Optics Express.”

Researchers are able to control every aspect of light generated by LEDs, allowing the light sources to be tweaked and optimized for nearly any situation, Schubert and Kim said.

In general, LEDs will require 20 times less power than today’s conventional light bulbs, and five times less power than compact fluorescent bulbs.

With all of the promise and potential of LEDs, Schubert and Kim said it is important not to pigeonhole or dismiss smart lighting technology as a mere replacement for conventional light bulbs.

The paper stresses that advances in photonics will position solid state lighting as a catalyst for unexpected, currently unimaginable technological advances.

“Deployed on a large scale, LEDs have the potential to tremendously reduce pollution, save energy, save financial resources, and add new and unprecedented functionalities to photonic devices,” the researchers write. “These factors make photonics what could be termed a benevolent tsunami, an irresistible wave, a solution to many global challenges currently faced by humanity and will be facing even more in the years to come.”

“Transcending the replacement paradigm will open up a new chapter in photonics – smart lighting sources that are controllable, tunable, intelligent, and communicative,” they write.

Possible smart lighting applications include rapid biological cell identification, interactive roadways, boosting plant growth, and better supporting human circadian rhythms to reduce an individual’s dependency on sleep-inducing drugs or reduce the risk of certain types of cancer.

In October, Rensselaer announced its new Smart Lighting Research Center, in partnership with Boston University and the University of New Mexico, and funded by an $18.5 million, five-year award from the National Science Foundation’s Generation Three Engineering Research Center Program.

The three primary research thrusts of the center are developing novel materials, device technology, and systems applications to further the understanding and proliferation of smart lighting technologies.

“Sustainability and energy efficiency are two key challenges of our time, yet they also present rich opportunities,” said Rensselaer President Shirley Ann Jackson. “With innovation, ingenuity, and a clear vision, the NSF-funded Smart Lighting Center at Rensselaer will rewrite the rules for manipulating light and help introduce these new green technologies to the world.”

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ARLINGTON, Virginia, December 15, 2008 (ENS) – Jellyfish blooms are ruining some of the world’s most beautiful vacation spots, according to a new online report by the National Science Foundation on massive jellyfish swarms in U.S. waters and around the world.

At least 150 million people around the world are exposed to jellyfish every year, the report says. Swarms of stinging jellyfish and jellyfish-like animals are transforming many world-class fisheries and tourist destinations into “jellytoriums” that are intermittently jammed with the pulsating, gelatinous creatures.

This is happening in U.S. waters from Hawaii to the Chesapeake Bay, where 500,000 people are stung by jellyfish every year.

Another 200,000 people are stung every year in Florida, and 10,000 are stung in Australia by the deadly Portuguese man-of-war, according to the report.

These jellyfish explosions are generated by human activities, some scientists believe. Possible causes include pollution, climate change, introductions of non-native species, overfishing and the presence of artificial structures, such as oil and gas rigs.

Jellyfish swarms have damaged fisheries, fish farms, seabed mining operations, desalination plants and large ships, and they have disabled nuclear power plants by clogging intake pipes.

Dense jellyfish swarm in the Gulf of Mexico
(Photo by Monty Graham)

In the Gulf of Mexico’s densest jellyfish swarms there are more jellyfish than there is water – 100 jellyfish can occupy each cubic meter of water.

“I’m often asked whether a single, overarching condition is triggering jellyfish swarms in diverse locations,” says Monty Graham of Alabama’s Dauphin Island Sea Lab on a barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico. Graham says the abnormally large, dense or frequent jellyfish swarms are “a symptom of an ecosystem that has been tipped off balance by environmental stresses.”

“The exact nature of such balance-tipping environmental stresses may vary from place to place and usually involve unique interactions with local ecology,” Graham explains. “But such stresses are often caused by people.”

So, just as a weakened person is vulnerable to opportunistic diseases, stressed ecosystems are vulnerable to infestations of jellyfish.

“There is clear, clean evidence that certain types of human-caused environmental stresses are triggering jellyfish swarms in some locations,” William Hamner of the University of California at Los Angeles says in the report.

These stresses include the introduction of jellyfish species into non-native habitats by ships; the formation of ultra-polluted areas, known as Dead Zones, where jellyfish face few predators and competitors; and increases in water temperatures, which accelerate the growth and reproduction of many jellyfish species.

As prey, jellyfish are eaten by seabirds, salmon, sun fish, turtles and other gelatinous creatures.

But as marine turtles have disappeared, jellyfish have proliferated. All seven species of sea turtles eat jellyfish and all seven species are endangered. Their survival is threatened by fishing lines that trap them, pollution, beach development, climate change and sales of turtles and turtle parts.

Box jellyfish in Hawaii (Photo
courtesy Waikiki Aquarium)

Jellyfish are not all bad – scientists are identifying ecological services provided by jellyfish. For instance, recent studies show that the tentacles dangling from the Bering Sea’s large jellyfish provide hiding places for young pollock that are pursued by other predators but have grown too big for the jellyfish to eat.

Most species of jellyfish and jellyfish-like animals are not harmful to people, according to the National Science Foundation report. But it warns that all true jellyfish and some species of jellyfish-like creatures sting – and a single stinging tentacle may be studded with thousands of stingers.

Stinging gelatinous creatures cause various reactions in people, ranging from no noticeable sensation to rashes, and some cases, death.

Australia’s beaches host many types of toxic gelatinous animals, including the Portuguese man-of-war and the world’s most venomous animal, the Chironex fleckeri, which can kill a person in under three minutes. In addition, the potentially deadly Irukandji jellyfish, currently increasing in number, are small enough to slip through nets that protect Australia’s beaches from the larger Chironex.

Beware, warns the report. Gelatinous creatures that are harmful to people live in every ocean.

Click here to view the report, “Jellyfish Gone Wild: Environmental Change and Jellyfish Swarms.”

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BOULDER, Colorado, October 9, 2008 (ENS) – Wildfires can hike ozone pollution to levels that violate U.S. public health and environmental standards, new research has determined.

The study by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research focused on California wildfires in 2007, finding that they repeatedly caused ground-level ozone to spike to unhealthy levels across a broad area, including much of rural California as well as neighboring Nevada.

Fires worsen ozone levels by releasing nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons, which can form ozone near the fire or far downwind as a result of chemical reactions in sunlight.

The study was published today in “Geophysical Research Letters.” It was funded by NASA and by the National Science Foundation, which sponsors NCAR.

Blaze at night on the Panther Fire
in north central California, August 6,
2008. (Photo by Art Gonzales)

“It’s important to understand the health impacts of wildfires,” says NCAR scientist Gabriele Pfister, the lead author. “Ozone can hit unhealthy levels even in places where people don’t see smoke.”

Although scientists have long known that wildfires can affect air quality by emitting particles and gases into the air, there has been little research to quantify the impacts.

The researchers, using a combination of computer models and ground-level measurements, studied intense California wildfires that broke out in September and October of 2007. They found that ozone was three times more likely to violate safe levels when fire plumes blew into a region than when no plumes were present.

At the time of the wildfires, the public health standard for ozone set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was 0.08 parts per million over an eight-hour period.

The EPA has since tightened the standard to 0.075 parts per million. Under the stricter standard, the number of violations would have nearly doubled.

While ozone in the stratosphere benefits life on Earth by blocking ultraviolet radiation from the Sun, ozone in the lower atmosphere can trigger health problems.

These range from coughing and throat irritation to more serious problems, such as aggravation of asthma, bronchitis, and emphysema. Ground-level ozone pollution also damages crops and other plants.

“Wildfires are expected to worsen in the future, especially as our climate grows warmer,” Pfister says. “But we are only now beginning to understand their potential impacts on people and ecosystems, not only nearby but also potentially far downwind.”

The unhealthy levels of ozone the researchers detected occurred mostly in rural areas. This finding may be a result of the computer modeling, which lacked the fine detail to zoom in on relatively compact urban areas.

But the authors also speculate that wildfire emissions have a greater impact on ozone levels in the countryside than on cities.

They say cities tend to have more nitrogen dioxide, a pollutant that can, at high levels, reduce the efficiency with which ozone is produced or even destroy ozone.

“The impact of wildfires on ozone in suburban and rural areas, far from urban sources of pollution, was quite noticeable,” says NCAR scientist Christine Wiedinmyer, a co-author of the paper.

The paper notes that ozone levels would likely have been even greater except that Santa Ana winds in October blew wildfire plumes over the Pacific Ocean, safely away from populated areas.

To measure the impact of the fires on ozone formation, the researchers used a pair of computer models developed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

With the first one, a specialized fire model, they estimated the amount of vegetation burned and resulting emissions of nitrous oxides, sulfur dioxide, and other pollutants.

Those results went into a global air chemistry model that simulated the movement of the emissions and tracked the resulting formation of ozone as the fire plumes spread downwind.

The scientists verified the accuracy of their modeling results by comparing them with ozone measurements from a network of EPA ground stations at various sites in California.

This also allowed them to determine both the number of ozone violations and the extent to which the wildfires contributed to those violations.

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MIAMI, Florida, July 10, 2008 (ENS) – A new public opinion poll of Floridians finds that most are convinced that global warming is happening now and that more should be done by key leaders to help Florida deal with climate change.

Sixty-five percent of those surveyed believe that global warming is already having or will have dangerous impacts on people in Florida within the next 10 years.

Sixty-nine percent believe that parts of the state’s coasts may need to be abandoned due to rising sea levels over the next 50 years.

Sea level rise and storm surge
endangers these Florida beachfront
homes. (Photo courtesy FEMA)

The survey is the first to study Floridians’ opinions about global warming. It was conducted by researchers at Yale University and the University of Miami, with funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation.

A survey of 1,077 adults in Florida from May 1, 2008 to May 19, 2008 was fielded by Knowledge Networks, using a representative, online research panel.

The survey found that a majority of Floridians are convinced that global warming is happening (71%) and that global warming is caused mainly by human activities (55%), or caused equally by humans and natural changes (13%).

“Floridians believe global warming will have serious consequences here at home and are growing increasingly concerned about the issue,” said Dr. Kenny Broad, associate professor at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.

Large majorities believe that global warming will cause worse storms, hurricanes and tornadoes (80%), droughts and water shortages (80%), flooding of major cities (68%), food shortages (68%), less tourism (64%), and increased rates of disease (57%).

In line with these concerns, large majorities support state policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, even if these policies impact their own pocketbook.

Sixty-five percent support requiring electric utilities to produce at least 20 percent of their electricity from wind, solar or other renewable energy sources, even it if costs the average household an extra $100 per year.

Sixty-five percent support a state subsidy to encourage building owners to replace old water heaters, air conditioners, light bulbs, and insulation, even if it cost the average household $5 a month in higher taxes. Sixty-three percent of those polled support the installation of solar panels on state-owned buildings, even if the electricity generated is significantly more expensive than what state government normally pays for its electricity.

“Large majorities of Floridians want Governor [Charlie] Crist, their state legislators, and their own mayors to do more to address global warming,” said Dr. Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change at Yale University. “Many Floridians also say they are willing to act individually to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

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SANTA BARBARA, California, May 2, 2008 (ENS) – The rising temperature of the world’s largest lake – Lake Baikal in Siberia – shows that this icy region of Russia is changing due to global warming, Russian and American scientists have discovered.

This lake was expected to be among those most resistant to climate change, due to its huge volume and unique water circulation, but long-term data collection reveals that warming is taking place.

In their paper, the scientists detail the effects of climate change on Lake Baikal – from warming of its vast waters to reorganization of its microscopic food web – drawing on 60 years of research.

The scientific research effort survived the reign of Stalin, the fall of the Soviet Union, and other more regional social and financial upheavals.

Data collection continued through every season, in an environment where winter temperatures drop to minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit.

Lake Baikal in Russia’s northern region
of Siberia (Photo by Nicholas Rodenhouse)

The data on Lake Baikal reveal “significant warming of surface waters and long-term changes in the food web of the world’s largest, most ancient lake,” write the researchers in their paper.

“The conclusions shown here for this enormous body of freshwater result from careful and repeated sampling over six decades,” said Henry Gholz, program director for the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis based at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

He said, “Thanks to the dedication of local scientists, who were also keen observers, coupled with modern synthetic approaches, we can now visualize and appreciate the far-reaching changes occurring in this lake.”

“Warming of this isolated but enormous lake is a clear signal that climate change has affected even the most remote corners of our planet,” said study co-author ecologist Stephanie Hampton, who serves as deputy director of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis.

Lake Baikal contains 20 percent of the world’s fresh water, and it is large enough to hold all the water in North America’s Great Lakes.

It is the world’s deepest lake as well as its oldest. At 25 million years old, it predates the emergence of humans.

In 1996, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, UNESCO, declared Lake Baikal a World Heritage site because of its biological diversity.

At least 2,500 plant and animal species inhabit the lake. Most of these species, including the freshwater seal, are found nowhere else in the world.

“Our research relies on a 60 year data set, collected in Lake Baikal by three generations of a single family of Siberian scientists,” said study co-author Marianne Moore, a biologist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.

“In the 1940s, Mikhail Kozhov began collecting and analyzing water samples in anticipation that this lake could reveal much about how lakes in general function,” said Moore.

“Ultimately, his daughter Olga Kozhova continued the program, followed by her daughter, who is also a co-author of today’s paper, Lyubov Izmest’eva.”

Ice on Lake Baikal (Photo
by Lyubov Izmest’eva)

Moore, Hampton and Izmest’eva, along with three other scientists, report their results online today in the journal “Global Change Biology.”

“Increases in water temperature (1.21°C since 1946), chlorophyll a (300 percent since 1979), and an influential group of zooplankton grazers (335 percent since 1946) have important implications for nutrient cycling and food web dynamics,” they write.

The scientists conclude that the lake now joins other large lakes, including Lake Superior, Lake Tanganyika and Lake Tahoe, in showing warming trends. “But,” they note, “temperature changes in Lake Baikal are particularly significant as a signal of long-term regional warming.”

The research paper is the result of a collaboration involving six Siberian and American scientists, who were assisted by student translators from Wellesley College.

The paper’s Russian contributors are Izmest’eva, director of the Scientific Research Institute of Biology, Irkutsk State University, Irkutsk, Russia, and Eugene Silow of the Scientific Research Institute of Biology at Irkutsk State University.

Other U.S. contributers are Stephen L. Katz, recently of the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, NOAA Fisheries, Seattle, Washington, and Brian Dennis of the departments of statistics and fish and wildlife resources, University of Idaho, Moscow, Idaho.

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MANHATTAN, Kansas, March 16, 2008 (ENS) – Nitrogen can be a valuable nutrient that fertilizes crops, lawns and public parks, but too much nitrogen in water can cause environmental problems.

Nitrogen in water can cause algal blooms that consume oxygen in lakes, rivers and oceans, causing the death of fish and other aquatic animals.

To understand how nitrogen accumulates in large rivers and oceans miles away from where it entered the environment, 31 scientists examined 72 small streams across the United States and Puerto Rico.

Walter Dodds, a professor of biology at Kansas State University, K-State, looked no farther than his own campus for a testing site. Campus Creek at K-State was one of nine small waterways in the Manhattan area that Dodds used to study how nitrogen is removed from streams.

With a grant from the National Science Foundation, he and his 30 colleagues from across the United States and Puerto Rico studied nitrogen removal in streams in their own geographical areas. Their research appears in the March 13 issue of the journal “Nature.”

Agricultural runoff laden with nitrogen enters
a Wisconsin stream. (Photo
courtesy Wisconsin DNR)

Nitrogen makes its way into streams from such sources as the combustion of fossil fuels by cars and trucks, power plants and industry, as well as and fertilizer use by agricultural operations, golf courses and homeowners. “People tend to add a lot of fertilizer to their lawns,” he said.

Dodds said the study included data from waterways in environments ranging from tropical forests to deserts to prairies.

“The significant thing about this project is that we all did the same experiments everywhere,” he said.

In previous studies, researchers looked at pristine waterways, but Dodds said that this time researchers also wanted to evaluate urban and agricultural waterways where humans leave a mark.

The researchers investigated the dynamics of nitrogen in streams, using special nitrogen tracers analyzed by mass spectrometry to see how far nitrogen travels through waterways.

“When trying to account for nitrogen, we see that not all of it makes it down to the ocean,” Dodds said. “We wanted to know how this is happening in streams.”

What Dodds and the other scientists learned is that organisms like bacteria, algae and fungi are responsible for removing nitrogen from small streams.

This reduces the amount that makes its way into larger rivers, lakes and in oceans, where nitrogen can trigger excessive growth of algae and aquatic plants.

The researchers found that the filtration process works best if small streams are allowed to remove the nitrogen before merging with larger waterways. But small streams can do a better job of filtering if less nitrogen gets into the streams in the first place.

“An important thing to take away from this research is to understand how we’re saturating our streams with nitrogen,” Dodds said. “As you increase nitrogen, small streams become overwhelmed and cannot do their job.”

Knowing the role that microorganisms play in removing nitrogen from small streams presents opportunities for research that can make waterways cleaner.

“What we can ask,” Dodds said, “is which microorganisms are removing nitrogen and what management approach is most likely to stimulate that occurring.”

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WASHINGTON, DC, February 21, 2008 (ENS) – More than 30 scientists will embark on a research cruise this month to the Southern Ocean, which surrounds Antarctica. There they will combat cold and wind to study how gases that impact climate change move between the atmosphere and the ocean under high winds and seas.

The Southern Ocean Gas Exchange Experiment, a six week cruise aboard the research vessel Ronald H. Brown, is co-sponsored by NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, and the National Science Foundation.

Scientists will study the movement of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide in an effort to improve the accuracy of climate models and predictions during the cruise, which departs February 28 from Punta Arenas, Chile.

The world’s oceans are estimated to absorb about two billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year. NOAA’s research on ocean acidification resulting from carbon dioxide uptake indicates that many organisms that support marine biodiversity may be threatened by climate change in the future.

Scientists know that higher wind speeds promote faster exchange of gases, but there have been very few studies aimed at directly measuring these exchanges under real world conditions where other factors, like breaking waves, can influence the process.

“The Southern Ocean is the largest ocean region where the surface waters directly connect to the ocean’s interior currents, providing a pathway into the deep sea for carbon dioxide released from human activities,” said Christopher Sabine, an oceanographer at NOAA’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, and co-chief scientist on the cruise.

“Understanding how atmospheric carbon dioxide is absorbed into these cold surface waters under high winds speeds is important for determining how the ocean uptake of carbon dioxide will respond to future climate change,” Sabine said.

“Our ongoing effort to understand the global carbon cycle will benefit from the data this cruise will produce about the mechanisms that govern gas transfer in this remote part of the world’s ocean,” said Paula Bontempi, manager of NASA’s ocean biology and biogeochemistry research program.

“And NASA’s global satellite observations of ocean color that reveal so much about the health of our oceans will also be improved in this region as we validate what our space-based sensors see with direct measurements taken at sea,” she said.

“We will be directly assessing the rate and mechanism by which the ocean is taking up carbon and releasing it,” said cruise chief scientist David Ho of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York.

Scientists from 20 universities and research institutions on the cruise plan to measure turbulence, waves, bubbles, temperature and ocean color, to see how these factors relate to the exchange of carbon dioxide and other climate gases.

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BOULDER, Colorado, February 15, 2008 (ENS) – By noticing when plants bud, flower and leaf out, volunteers can track climate change as part of a nationwide initiative starting Friday. Project BudBurst allows students, gardeners, and other citizen scientists in every state to enter their observations into an online database that will give researchers a detailed picture of the warming climate.

Plant and animal species throughout the world are being affected by climate change. Some plants respond to warmer temperatures by extending their growing seasons. Others shift their ranges toward the poles or to higher elevations.

At the same time, many insects breed and disperse based on regular cycles of sunlight rather than temperature. This can cause a mismatch between the behavior of pollinating insects, such as bees, and flowers that bloom earlier than the insects expect. These mismatches have already been noted across many parts of the world. Project BudBurst is an effort to extend human understanding of how climate change is affecting the environment.

The project is operated by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, UCAR, a consortium of 70 universities.

Budding fruit tree at California’s
Sonoma State University
(Photo courtesy SSU)

“Climate change may be affecting our backyards and communities in ways that we don’t even notice,” says project coordinator Sandra Henderson of UCAR’s Office of Education and Outreach.

“Project BudBurst is designed to help both adults and children understand the changing relationship among climate, seasons, and plants, while giving the participants the tools to communicate their observations to others,” she said.

The Chicago Botanic Garden and University of Montana are collaborators on Project BudBurst, which was funded with a grant from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.

The project is also supported by the National Science Foundation and Windows to the Universe, a UCAR based website that will host the project online as part of its citizen science efforts.

Project BudBurst builds on a pilot program carried out last spring, when several thousand participants recorded the timing of the leafing and flowering of hundreds of plant species in 26 states.

“Based on the success of last year’s pilot program, this project is capturing the public’s imagination in a way we never expected,” Henderson said.

“Project Budburst provides an exciting opportunity for the public, particularly children, to contribute to scientific research on the effects of global climate change on plants,” adds Kayri Havens, a senior scientist with the Chicago Botanic Garden.

An oak tree in Georgia buds
in January. (Photo by Judy
Baxter via Flickr)

The project will operate year round so that early and late blooming species in different parts of the country can be monitored throughout their life cycles.

Each participant in Project BudBurst selects one or more plants to observe. The project website suggests more than 60 widely distributed trees and flowers, with information on each. Users can add their own choices.

Participants begin checking their plants at least a week prior to the average date of budburst – the point when the buds have opened and leaves are visible.

After budburst, participants continue to observe the tree or flower for later events, such as the first leaf, first flower and, eventually, seed dispersal. When participants submit their records online, they can view maps of these events across the United States.

The science of phenology, or tracking cyclic behavior among plants and animals, has a distinguished history. In Japan and China, for example, the blossoming of cherry and peach trees is associated with ancient festivals, some of which extend back more than a thousand years.

Cherry trees in Japan now bloom four days earlier than in the 1950s, according to the nation’s meteorological agency.

Project BudBurst collaborators include the Plant Conservation Alliance; USA-National Phenology Network; and the universities of Arizona; California, Santa Barbara; Wisconsin-Milwaukee; and Wisconsin-Madison.

Find Project Budburst on the Internet at: www.budburst.org

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ATLANTA, Georgia, February 13, 2008 (ENS) – Nanotechnology researchers are developing the perfect complement to the power tie – a real power shirt able to generate electricity to power small electronic devices for soldiers in the field, hikers, marathoners and anyone whose physical motion could be harnessed and converted to electrical energy.

Research from Georgia Institute of Technology published in the February 14 issue of the journal “Nature” details how pairs of textile fibers covered with zinc oxide nanowires can generate electrical current.

Combining current flow from many fiber pairs woven into a shirt or jacket could allow the wearer’s body movement to power a range of portable electronic devices. The fibers could also be woven into curtains, tents or other structures to capture energy from wind motion, sound vibration or other mechanical energy.

“The fiber-based nanogenerator would be a simple and economical way to harvest energy from physical movement,” said Zhong Lin Wang, a Regents professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Tech. “If we can combine many of these fibers in double or triple layers in clothing, we could provide a flexible, foldable and wearable power source that, for example, would allow people to generate their own electrical current while walking.”

The research was sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy and the Emory-Georgia Tech Nanotechnology Center for Personalized and Predictive Oncology.

The microfiber-nanowire hybrid system builds on the nanowire nanogenerator that Wang’s research team announced in April 2007. That system generates current from arrays of vertically-aligned zinc oxide (ZnO) nanowires that flex beneath an electrode containing conductive platinum tips. The nanowire nanogenerator was designed to harness energy from environmental sources such as ultrasonic waves, mechanical vibrations or blood flow.

The nanogenerators developed by Wang’s research group take advantage of the unique coupled piezoelectric and semiconducting properties of zinc oxide nanostructures, which produce small electrical charges when they are flexed.

Professor Zhong Lin Wang holds a
prototype microfiber nanogenerator.
(Photo by Gary Meek courtesy
Georgia Tech)

The microfiber generators rely on the same principles, but are made from soft materials and designed to capture energy from low-frequency mechanical energy. They consist of DuPont Kevlar fibers on which zinc oxide nanowires have been grown radially and embedded in a polymer at their roots, creating what appear to be microscopic baby-bottle brushes with billions of bristles. One of the fibers in each pair is also coated with gold to serve as the electrode and to deflect the nanowire tips.

“The two fibers scrub together just like two bottle brushes with their bristles touching, and the piezoelectric-semiconductor process converts the mechanical motion into electrical energy,” Wang explained. “Many of these devices could be put together to produce higher power output.”

Wang and collaborators Xudong Wang and Yong Qin have made more than 200 of the fiber nanogenerators.

As a next step, the researchers want to combine multiple fiber pairs to increase the current and voltage levels and improve conductance of their fibers.

But as it is designed right now, the power shirt could not be washed. Zinc oxide is sensitive to moisture, so in real shirts or jackets, Wang said, the nanowires would have to be protected from the effects of the washing machine.

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