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Tag: Environmental Science

  • EXPERT: Feds OK plan to demolish four dams on the lower Klamath River, water resources law scholar available

    EXPERT: Feds OK plan to demolish four dams on the lower Klamath River, water resources law scholar available

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    Newswise — U.S. regulators just announced that they have approved a plan to demolish four dams on the lower Klamath River and open up hundreds of miles of salmon habitat that would be the largest dam removal and river restoration project in the world when it goes forward. 

    University of Oregon law professor Adell L. Amos has deep experience and expertise on the Klamath Basin and on dam removal more generally. 

    ABOUT ADELL L. AMOS

    Amos is served in the Obama Administration as the Deputy Solicitor for Land and Water Resources at the U.S. Department of the Interior. Amos oversaw legal and policy issues involving the nation’s water resources and public lands. She worked directly on water resilience and planning, wilderness policy, the National Landscape Conservation System, renewable energy and its associated water footprint, low-impact hydropower, dam removal efforts including the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement, the America’s Great Outdoors Initiative, and many others. Her research emphasizes the jurisdictional governance structures that are deployed for water resources management in the United States and internationally. She focuses on the relationship between federal and state governments on water resource management, the role of administrative agencies in setting national, state, and local water policy, the role of law in developing water policy and responding to change, and the impact of stakeholder participation in water resource decision-making. She is currently working on a multi-year project which focuses on the integration of law and policy into hydrologic and socioeconomic modeling for the Willamette River Basin through a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary effort funded by the NOAA and the National Science Foundation. Amos holds the Clayton R. Hess Professorship and serves as the Executive Director for the Environment Initiative at the UO. She teaches regularly in the nationally ranked Environmental and Natural Resources Law Program, including courses in Water Law, Federal Administrative Law, Environmental Conflict Resolution, and Oregon Water Law and Policy. Her teaching and scholarship have been recognized by the UO Fund for Faculty Excellence and the Hollis Teaching Awards.

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    University of Oregon

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  • Missouri S&T CO2 research is rock solid

    Missouri S&T CO2 research is rock solid

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    Newswise — As climate change accelerates, scientists are investigating ways to lower carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. At Missouri University of Science and Technology, researchers are developing solutions by turning CO2 into rock, including massive rocks for permanent carbon storage, and concrete, the manmade rock that supports modern civilization.

    “CO2 concentration in our atmosphere is now 420 parts per million, the highest in human history,” says Dr. Hongyan Ma, an associate professor of civil engineering at Missouri S&T. “We need ways to not only reduce CO2 emission but also to remove CO2 from the air and utilize or permanently store the removed CO2 at a scale large enough to combat climate change.”

    Ma and a team of researchers in materials science and engineering, chemical engineering, mining, economics, and other disciplines at Missouri S&T are forcing CO2 to react with silicate rocks and industrial wastes generated from power plants, cement plants, concrete recycling facilities, and steel mills to form carbonate minerals. Such reactions happen in nature over millions of years to create natural limestone and dolomite formations that stores trillions of tons of carbon, but they are too slow to address the climate change challenge.

    Ma and his team use innovative technologies to speed up the process. Their manmade rocks are intended for gigaton-scale permanent carbon storage or production of carbon-negative cement materials for making concrete. Traditional cement production emits a metric ton of CO2 for every metric ton of cement produced, and Ma says the innovations will potentially reduce over 2 billion metric tons of CO2 every year.

    Ma’s CO2 conversion and utilization work has garnered more than $2 million in grants for Missouri S&T from the National Science Foundation and other organizations such as the Environmental Research & Education Foundation and the Association for Iron & Steel Technology. These research projects focus on processing various solid wastes using captured CO2 or CO2-rich flue gases to make carbon-negative cement materials and manmade rock for permanent carbon storage.  Ma is seeking follow-up grant funding and investment to scale up these innovations and accelerate commercialization.

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    Missouri University of Science and Technology

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  • Earth can regulate its own temperature over millennia, new study finds

    Earth can regulate its own temperature over millennia, new study finds

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    Newswise — The Earth’s climate has undergone some big changes, from global volcanism to planet-cooling ice ages and dramatic shifts in solar radiation. And yet life, for the last 3.7 billion years, has kept on beating.

    Now, a study by MIT researchers in Science Advances confirms that the planet harbors a “stabilizing feedback” mechanism that acts over hundreds of thousands of years to pull the climate back from the brink, keeping global temperatures within a steady, habitable range.

    Just how does it accomplish this? A likely mechanism is “silicate weathering” — a geological process by which the slow and steady weathering of silicate rocks involves chemical reactions that ultimately draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and into ocean sediments, trapping the gas in rocks.

    Scientists have long suspected that silicate weathering plays a major role in regulating the Earth’s carbon cycle. The mechanism of silicate weathering could provide a geologically constant force in keeping carbon dioxide — and global temperatures — in check. But there’s never been direct evidence for the continual operation of such a feedback, until now.

    The new findings are based on a study of paleoclimate data that record changes in average global temperatures over the last 66 million years. The MIT team applied a mathematical analysis to see whether the data revealed any patterns characteristic of stabilizing phenomena that reined in global temperatures on a  geologic timescale.

    They found that indeed there appears to be a consistent pattern in which the Earth’s temperature swings are dampened over timescales of hundreds of thousands of years. The duration of this effect is similar to the timescales over which silicate weathering is predicted to act.

    The results are the first to use actual data to confirm the existence of a stabilizing feedback, the mechanism of which is likely silicate weathering. This stabilizing feedback would explain how the Earth has remained habitable through dramatic climate events in the geologic past.

    “On the one hand, it’s good because we know that today’s global warming will eventually be canceled out  through this stabilizing feedback,” says Constantin Arnscheidt, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “But on the other hand, it will take hundreds of thousands of years to happen, so not fast enough to solve our present-day issues.”

    The study is co-authored by Arnscheidt and Daniel Rothman, professor of geophysics at MIT.

    Stability in data

    Scientists have previously seen hints of a climate-stabilizing effect in the Earth’s carbon cycle: Chemical analyses of ancient rocks have shown that the flux of carbon in and out of Earth’s surface environment has remained relatively balanced, even through dramatic swings in global temperature. Furthermore, models of silicate weathering predict that the process should have some stabilizing effect on the global climate. And finally, the fact of the Earth’s enduring habitability points to some inherent, geologic check on extreme temperature swings.

    “You have a planet whose climate was subjected to so many dramatic external changes. Why did life survive all this time? One argument is that we need some sort of stabilizing mechanism to keep temperatures suitable for life,” Arnscheidt says. “But it’s never been demonstrated from data that such a mechanism has consistently controlled Earth’s climate.”

    Arnscheidt and Rothman sought to confirm whether a stabilizing feedback has indeed been at work, by looking at  data of global temperature fluctuations through geologic history. They worked with a range of global temperature records compiled by other scientists, from the chemical composition of ancient marine fossils and shells, as well as preserved Antarctic ice cores.

    “This whole study is only possible because there have been great advances in improving the resolution of these deep-sea temperature records,” Arnscheidt notes. “Now we have data going back 66 million years, with data points at most thousands of years apart.”

    Speeding to a stop

    To the data, the team applied the mathematical theory of stochastic differential equations, which is commonly used to reveal patterns in widely fluctuating datasets.

    “We realized this theory makes predictions for what you would expect Earth’s temperature history to look like if there had been feedbacks acting on certain timescales,” Arnscheidt explains.

    Using this approach, the team analyzed the history of average global temperatures over the last 66 million years, considering the entire period over different timescales, such as tens of thousands of years versus hundreds of thousands, to see whether any patterns of stabilizing feedback emerged within each timescale.

    “To some extent, it’s like your car is speeding down the street, and when you put on the brakes, you slide for a long time before you stop,” Rothman says. “There’s a timescale over which frictional resistance, or a stabilizing feedback, kicks in, when the system returns to a steady state.”

    Without stabilizing feedbacks, fluctuations of global temperature should grow with timescale. But the team’s analysis revealed a regime in which fluctuations did not grow, implying that a stabilizing mechanism reigned in the climate before fluctuations grew too extreme. The timescale for this stabilizing effect — hundreds of thousands of years — coincides with what scientists predict for silicate weathering.

    Interestingly, Arnscheidt and Rothman found that on longer timescales, the data did not reveal any stabilizing feedbacks. That is, there doesn’t appear to be any recurring pull-back of global temperatures on timescales longer than a million years. Over these longer timescales, then, what has kept global temperatures in check?

    “There’s an idea that chance may have played a major role in determining why, after more than 3 billion years, life still exists,” Rothman offers.

    In other words, as the Earth’s temperatures fluctuate over longer stretches, these fluctuations may just happen to be small enough in the geologic sense, to be within a range that a stabilizing feedback, such as silicate weathering, could periodically keep the climate in check, and more to the point, within a habitable zone.

    “There are two camps: Some say random chance is a good enough explanation, and others say there must be a stabilizing feedback,” Arnscheidt says. “We’re able to show, directly from data, that the answer is probably somewhere in between. In other words, there was some stabilization, but pure luck likely also played a role in keeping Earth continuously habitable.”

    This research was supported in part by a MathWorks fellowship and the National Science Foundation.

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    Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

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  • Report: 90% of US counties hit with disaster in last decade

    Report: 90% of US counties hit with disaster in last decade

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    Ninety percent of the counties in the United States suffered a weather disaster between 2011 and 2021, according to a report published Wednesday.

    Some endured as many as 12 federally-declared disasters over those 11 years. More than 300 million people — 93% of the country’s population — live in these counties.

    Rebuild by Design, which published the report, is a nonprofit that researches ways to prepare for and adapt to climate change. It was started by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, the catastrophic storm that slammed into the eastern U.S. just over ten years ago, causing $62.5 billion in damage.

    Researchers had access to data from contractors who work closely with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, allowing them to analyze disasters and payouts down to the county level. The report includes some 250 maps. They also looked at who is most vulnerable, and compared how long people in different places are left without power after extreme weather.

    California, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Iowa and Tennessee had the most disasters, at least 20 each, including severe storms, wildfire, flooding, and landslides. But entirely different states — Louisiana, New York, New Jersey, North Dakota and Vermont — received the most disaster funding per person over the 11-year period.

    Amy Chester, managing director of Rebuild by Design and co-author of the report, said she was surprised to see some states are getting more money to rebuild than others. Partly it’s that cost of living differs among states. So does the monetary value of what gets damaged or destroyed.

    “Disaster funding is oftentimes skewed toward communities that are more affluent and have the most resources,” said Robert Bullard, an environmental and climate justice professor at Texas Southern University, who was not part of the team that wrote the report. Bullard wrote a book, “The Wrong Complexion for Protection” in 2012 with another environmental and climate justice expert, Beverly Wright, about how federal responses to disasters often exclude black communities.

    The new report seems to support that. People who are most vulnerable to the effects of these extreme weather events are not receiving much of the money, the report said. Those areas of the country also endure the longest electric outages.

    “When disasters hit …. funding doesn’t get to the places of greatest need,” Bullard said.

    Another reason for the unevenness of funds could be that heat waves are excluded from federal disaster law and don’t trigger government aid. If they did, states in the southwest like Arizona and Nevada might rank higher on spending per person.

    REPORT OVERSTEPS

    The report was prepared by policy advocates, not scientists, and oversteps in attributing every weather disaster to climate change. That is inaccurate. Climate change has turbocharged the climate and made some hurricanes stronger and disaster more frequent, said Rob Jackson, a climate scientist at Stanford University. But, “I don’t think it’s appropriate to call every every disaster we’ve experienced in the last 40 years a climate disaster.”

    Even though all the weather disasters compiled aren’t attributable to climate change, Jackson said the collection could still have value.

    “I do think there is a service to highlighting that weather disasters affect essentially all Americans now, no matter where we live.”

    The annual costs of disasters has skyrocketed, he said, to over $100 billion in 2020. The National Centers for Environmental Information tallied more than $150 billion for 2021.

    POLICY CHANGE

    The federal government provided counties a total $91 billion to recover after extreme events over the 11 years, the researchers found. That only includes spending from two programs run by FEMA and HUD, not individual assistance or insurance payouts from the agency. Nor does it include help from other agencies like the Small Business Administration or Army Corps of Engineers.

    Chester said that if all these federal disaster relief programs were included, the total would be far higher. The National Centers for Environmental Information estimate over $1 trillion was spent on weather and climate events between 2011 and 2021.

    The report recommends the federal government shift to preventing disasters rather than waiting for events to happen. It cites the National Institute of Building Sciences which says that every dollar invested in mitigating natural disaster by building levees or doing prescribed burns saves the country $6.

    “The key takeaway for us is that our government continues to invest in places that have already suffered instead of investing in the areas with the highest social and physical vulnerability,” Chester said.

    ———

    Follow Drew Costley on Twitter: @drewcostley.

    ———

    The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • What is a soil carbon credit?

    What is a soil carbon credit?

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    Newswise — November 15, 2022 – The agricultural industry is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Incentivizing climate-smart farming practices by creating “soil carbon credits” is one way to reduce the impact of agriculture on the environment. The Soil Science Society of America’s (SSSA) November 15th Soils Matter blog discusses soil carbon credits and carbon markets.

    Carbon can be stored in soil in many ways. One very important type of soil carbon is organic matter, which is made of decayed materials from living things like plants, animals and microbes.

    With a soil carbon credit system, carbon becomes a valued commodity for growers to gain additional revenue. One soil carbon credit represents 1 metric ton of carbon dioxide or an equivalent greenhouse gas emission that has been reduced, avoided, or removed from the atmosphere.

    Soil carbon credits are produced through carbon farming – using best practices that are known to hold carbon in the soils. Other practices that may receive credits might reduce nitrous oxide emissions. The practices vary by field but may include reduced tillage or no till, adding cover crops, rotational grazing, diversifying crop rotations, and reduced fertilizer usage.

    The new additional practices slow the rate in which carbon is released into the atmosphere and increases the storage of organic carbon in the soil. In a sense, carbon becomes a new crop.

    Growers “harvest” this crop through the collection and submission of data and records. They sell them to a new type of market, the carbon market.

    To ensure that the soil carbon credits are high-quality and the practices that generate them are environmentally beneficial, the credits must undertake a thorough vetting process. A project developer brings growers together and conducts all data collection and reporting. The project is then brought to a registry, which has established a set of standards for soil carbon projects.

    There are even third-party verifiers who ensure the data, methods, and results are accurate. They check that the results adhere to the registry’s standards. Once verified, the registry approves the project results and issues carbon credits that can be sold on a carbon market. Then, other companies, such as a manufacturer, can buy these credits to offset their carbon footprint.

    To read the entire blog, visit: https://soilsmatter.wordpress.com/2022/11/15/what-is-a-soil-carbon-credit/

    Follow SSSA on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/SSSA.soils, Twitter at SSSA_Soils. SSSA has soils information on www.soils.org/discover-soils, for teachers at www.soils4teachers.org, and for students through 12th grade, www.soils4kids.org.

    The Soil Science Society of America (SSSA) is a progressive international scientific society that fosters the transfer of knowledge and practices to sustain global soils. Based in Madison, WI, and founded in 1936, SSSA is the professional home for 6,000+ members and 1,000+ certified professionals dedicated to advancing the field of soil science. The Society provides information about soils in relation to crop production, environmental quality, ecosystem sustainability, bioremediation, waste management, recycling, and wise land use.

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    American Society of Agronomy (ASA), Crop Science Society of America (CSSA), Soil Science Society of America (SSSA)

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  • 15 ways to reforest the planet

    15 ways to reforest the planet

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    Newswise — Scientists are calling for a ‘decade of global action’ to reforest the planet, following the overnight publication of a themed international journal led by researchers from Australia’s University of the Sunshine Coast.

    The landmark issue of the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions reveals the latest scientific advances in forest restoration with the aim of benefiting people as well as nature.

    “This paves the way for evidence-based, on-the-ground action plans for the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration,” said Professor Andy Marshall of UniSC’s Forest Research Institute.

    Professor Marshall said it was exciting to see the strong focus on forests at this week’s UN Climate Change Conference (COP27) underway in Egypt, with Australia joining world leaders in committing to halting forest loss and land degradation by 2030.

    He said the recommendations in the new journal issue combined research findings with knowledge and experience from many countries.

    “Our goals are ambitious and intend to deliver long-term success by learning from the past – from choosing the right location and restoration method through to mitigating socioeconomic pressures, weather extremes and people-wildlife interactions,” he said.

    “Almost 200 authors from 27 countries and the United Nations’ taskforce are working to ensure these findings really make a difference to forest restoration and inspire action around the world, particularly in the developing tropics where much of this research has been undertaken.”

    Professor Marshall’s principal paper lists 15 essential advances for science to help restore the world’s forested landscapes.

    “Forests are crucial for the health and economies of our planet, but they must be better planned, managed and monitored to ensure sustainable benefits for people as well as nature,” he said.

    He said careful planning of future forest projects could boost the biodiversity of species, carbon sinks, economic development and people’s livelihoods.

    “The evidence gives scientific backing to campaigns by environmental groups using the banner, Plantations Are Not Forests – acknowledging that tree-planting is not always the correct approach to restoration, and that restoration needs to consider underlying ecology, local people, and the ultimate reasons for planting the trees.”

    UniSC is involved in seven of the collaborative articles, leading five of them:
    •    Fifteen essential science advances for effective restoration of the world’s forest landscapes, by Professor Andrew Marshall and colleagues; 
    •    Monitoring the recovery of tree diversity during tropical forest restoration in Costa Rica – lessons from long term trajectories of natural regeneration, by Professor Robin Chazdon and colleagues;
    •    Applying a Community Capacity Curve framework to reforestation to support success in the Philippines, by Professor John Herbohn and colleagues;
    •    A practice-led assessment of landscape restoration potential in a biodiversity hotspot in Tanzania, by Professor Marshall with Abigail Wills of the University of York and colleagues;
    •    How certified community forests in Tanzania impact forest restoration and human wellbeing, by Dr Robin Loveridge of the University of York with project leader Professor Marshall and colleagues.

    Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research and Innovation) Professor Ross Young said UniSC’s contribution to the journal was an honour and showcased the global relevance and expertise of its researchers.

    “The University of the Sunshine Coast was ranked the top Queensland university in the 2022 Times Higher Education Impact Rankings, which are the only global performance tables that assess universities against the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals,” he said.

    “This success reflects UniSC’s longstanding commitment to research in sustainability and climate action.”
    Selected other papers in the journal:
    •    Implications of tropical cyclones on damage and potential recovery and restoration of logged forests in Vietnam;
    •    How animal seed dispersal recovers within 40 years after passive restoration in a forested landscape;
    •    How restoration success in former Amazonian mines is driven by soil amendment and forest proximity;
    •    Evaluating tree restoration interventions for wellbeing and ecological outcomes in rural tropical landscapes, aiming to prevent conflicts such as big animals roaming into crops and farms;
    •    The impacts of wildfires on restoration, particularly in tall, wet eucalypt forests.

    Professor Marshall is also principal investigator of FoRCE (Forest Restoration and Climate Experiment) and founding director of Reforest Africa. 

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    University of the Sunshine Coast

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  • Researchers cook up a new way to remove microplastics from water

    Researchers cook up a new way to remove microplastics from water

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    Newswise — Researchers at Princeton Engineering have found a way to turn your breakfast food into a new material that can cheaply remove salt and microplastics from seawater.

    The researchers used egg whites to create an aerogel, a lightweight and porous material that can be used in many types of applications, including water filtration, energy storage, and sound and thermal insulation. Craig Arnold, the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and vice dean of innovation at Princeton, works with his lab to create new materials, including aerogels, for engineering applications.

    One day, sitting in a faculty meeting, he had an idea.

    “I was sitting there, staring at the bread in my sandwich,” said Arnold. “And I thought to myself, this is exactly the kind of structure that we need.” So he asked his lab group to make different bread recipes mixed with carbon to see if they could recreate the aerogel structure he was looking for. None of them worked quite right initially, so the team kept eliminating ingredients as they tested, until eventually only egg whites remained.

    “We started with a more complex system,” Arnold said, “and we just kept reducing, reducing, reducing, until we got down to the core of what it was. It was the proteins in the egg whites that were leading to the structures that we needed.”

    Egg whites are a complex system of almost pure protein that — when freeze-dried and heated to 900 degrees Celsius in an environment without oxygen — create a structure of interconnected strands of carbon fibers and sheets of graphene. In a paper published Aug. 24 in Materials Today, Arnold and his coauthors showed that the resulting material can remove salt and microplastics from seawater with 98% and 99% efficiency, respectively.

    “The egg whites even worked if they were fried on the stove first, or whipped,” said Sehmus Ozden, first author on the paper. Ozden is a former postdoctoral research associate at the Princeton Center for Complex Materials and now a scientist at Aramco Research Center. While regular store-bought egg whites were used in initial tests, Ozden said, other similar commercially available proteins produced the same results.

    “Eggs are cool because we can all connect to them and they are easy to get, but you want to be careful about competing against the food cycle,” said Arnold. Because other proteins also worked, the material can potentially be produced in large quantities relatively cheaply and without impacting the food supply. One next step for the researchers, Ozden noted, is refining the fabrication process so it can be used in water purification on a larger scale.

    If this challenge can be solved, the material has significant benefits because it is inexpensive to produce, energy-efficient to use and highly effective. “Activated carbon is one of the cheapest materials used for water purification. We compared our results with activated carbon, and it’s much better,” said Ozden. Compared with reverse osmosis, which requires significant energy input and excess water for operation, this filtration process requires only gravity to operate and wastes no water.

    While Arnold sees water purity as a “major grand challenge,” that is not the only potential application for this material. He is also exploring other uses related to energy storage and insulation.

    The research included contributions from the departments of chemical and biological engineering and geosciences at Princeton and elsewhere. “It’s one thing to make something in the lab,” said Arnold, “and it’s another thing to understand why and how.” Collaborators who helped answer the why and how questions included professors Rodney Priestley and A. James Link from chemical and biological engineering, who helped identify the transformation mechanism of the egg white proteins at the molecular level. Princeton colleagues in geosciences assisted with measurements of water filtration.

    Susanna Monti of the Institute for Chemistry of Organometallic Compounds and Valentina Tozzi from Instituto Nanoscienze and NEST-Scuola Normale Superiore created the theoretical simulations that revealed the transformation of egg white proteins into the aerogel.

    The article, “Egg protein derived ultralightweight hybrid monolithic aerogel for water purification,” was published in the journal Materials Today. Besides Arnold, Monti, Ozden, Priestley, Link and Tozzi, authors include Nikita Dutta, a former graduate student in mechanical and aerospace engineering who is now at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory; Stefania Gill, John Higgins and Nick Caggiano of Princeton University; and Nicola Pugno of the University of Trento and Queen Mary University of London. Support was provided in part by the Princeton Center for Complex Materials and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

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    Princeton University School of Engineering and Applied Science

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  • Negligible climatic impact of the recent methane leak from the Nord Stream pipelines

    Negligible climatic impact of the recent methane leak from the Nord Stream pipelines

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    Newswise — On 26 September 2022, Nord Stream 1 and 2, two subsea pipelines for transferring natural gas from Russia to Germany, were both deliberately ruptured. Massive quantities of gases, primarily methane, escaped into the ocean and were then released into the atmosphere.

    Methane is the second most abundant anthropogenic greenhouse gas after CO2, but has a much stronger greenhouse effect. Hence, whether negative climatic impacts would arise from this incident is a key concern worldwide. A news article published in Nature commented on this issue, but no quantitative conclusions were made.

    Recently, researchers from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, estimated the possible climatic impact of the leaked methane by adopting the energy-conservation framework of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report (IPCC AR6), released in 2021. Their findings have recently been published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.

    Having collected all estimates of the total amount of leaked methane available in the world’s media after the incident, it was found that the earliest estimates (1–2 days after) reached up to 0.5 million tonnes (Mt). However, it later became clear that the quantity of methane that leaked was likely to be much lower than first estimated. In particular, a team from Nanjing University, China, provided a more accurate estimate of 0.22 ± 0.03 Mt by drawing upon multiple observations including those from high-resolution satellites.

    This value established that this was the largest methane emission in a single event in human history—more than two times that of the Aliso Canyon accident in California in 2015. However, according to IPCC AR6, annual emissions of methane from the oil and gas sectors amounted to as much as 70 Mt during 2008–2017. The leaked methane from the Nord Stream pipelines was equivalent to only 1 day of emissions from these sectors.

    IPCC AR6 also highlighted that methane in the atmosphere is gradually removed by reacting with certain radicals, such as hydroxyl radical, resulting in an approximate 10-year lifetime, which is short-lived compared to CO2. This means that the climatic impact of methane depends on the time horizon, which complicates matters when trying to calculate it directly. Instead, the researchers made an indirect estimate with the help of the concept of “global warming potential”. Specifically, they determined that the quantity of heat accumulated per unit mass of methane in the next 20 years after its emission into the atmosphere is 82.5 times that of CO2. Then, armed with this information, they were able to calculate that, when considering a time horizon of 20 years, the climatic impact of the leaked methane is equivalent to that of 20.6 Mt of CO2, which would raise the atmospheric CO2 concentration by only 0.0026 ppm. Based on the newest assessments in IPCC AR6 of the effective radiative forcing under doubled CO2, climate feedback, and ocean heat uptake efficiency, under the energy conservation framework, the global mean surface air temperature would in theory increase by 1.8×10−5 ℃.

    “Such a tiny warming cannot be perceived in ecosystems or human society,” explains Dr. Xiaolong Chen, first author of the study. “Still, anthropogenic methane has been the second largest driver of global warming, and is emitted from multiple sectors of agriculture and industry. If we are going to achieve the warming target of below 1.5℃ or 2℃ set out in the Paris Agreement, damage to infrastructure such as this should be avoided so that we can better control and reduce methane emissions.”

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    Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences

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  • Linking mass extinctions to the expansion and radiation of land plants

    Linking mass extinctions to the expansion and radiation of land plants

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    Newswise — Boulder, Colo., USA: The Devonian Period, 419 to 358 million years ago, was one of the most turbulent times in Earth’s past and was marked by at least six significant marine extinctions, including one of the five largest mass extinctions ever to have occurred. Additionally, it was during the Devonian that trees and complex land plants similar to those we know today first evolved and spread across the landscape. This evolutionary advancement included the development of significant and complex root systems capable of affecting soil biogeochemistry on a scale the ancient Earth had yet to experience.

    It has been theorized that these two seemingly separate events, marine extinctions and plant evolution and expansion, were intricately linked in the Devonian. Specifically, it has been proposed that plant evolution and root development occurred so rapidly and on such a massive scale that nutrient export from the land to the ancient oceans would have drastically increased. This scenario is seen in modern systems where anthropogenically sourced nutrient export has vastly increased the nutrient load into areas such as the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes, leading to large-scale algal blooms that ultimately deplete the oxygen in the water column. This effect, known as eutrophication, magnified on a global scale, would have been catastrophic to ancient oceans, fueling algal blooms that would have depleted most of the ocean’s oxygen.

    The key to linking mass extinctions and the expansion and radiation of land plants lies in identifying a nutrient flux elevated above background levels, linking that nutrient flux to either indirect or direct evidence of the presence of deeply rooting land plants and finally showing that this phenomenon occurred in multiple locations and times.

    This study, the first of its kind, was able to do precisely that by utilizing geochemical records from ancient lake deposits in Greenland, northern Scotland, and Orkney. Utilizing lake records, elevated values of the nutrient phosphorus were detected in five distinct locations during the height of plant evolution and expansion in the Devonian. In each case, elevated values of nutrient input were coincident with evidence of the presence of early trees in the form of fossilized spores and, in some cases, fossilized stems of the earliest deeply rooting tree, Archaeopteris. In two cases, that evidence coincided with a Devonian marine extinction event, including the most significant Devonian mass extinction, the Frasnian–Famennian extinction (also known as the Late Devonian mass extinction).

    Additionally, this study, published yesterday in the Geological Society of America Bulletin, linked the periodic wet/dry climate cycles known to exist in the region during the Devonian with specific episodes of plant colonization. While elevated nutrient export was noted during both wet and dry climate cycles, the most significant export events occurred during wet cycles, suggesting that plant expansion was episodic and tied to climate cyclicity.

    The episodic nature of plant expansion could help explain why there are at least six significant marine extinctions in the Devonian. While the scope of this study was limited to a single geographic region, it is likely that these events occurred throughout the Devonian Earth. The colonization of different types of land plants in different regions and at different times would have resulted in episodic nutrient pulses significant enough to sustain eutrophication and cause (or at least contribute) to the numerous marine extinction events throughout the mid- to Late Devonian.

    FEATURED ARTICLE
    Enhanced terrestrial nutrient release during the Devonian emergence and expansion of forests: Evidence from lacustrine phosphorus and geochemical records
    Matthew Smart; Gabriel Filippelli; William Gilhooly; John Marshall; Jessica Whiteside
    Contact: Matthew Smart, [email protected], Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, Earth Sciences, Indianapolis, Indiana
    URL: https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/gsabulletin/article-abstract/doi/10.1130/B36384.1/618814/Enhanced-terrestrial-nutrient-release-during-the

    GSA BULLETIN articles published ahead of print are online at https://bulletin.geoscienceworld.org/content/early/recent . Representatives of the media may obtain complimentary copies of articles by contacting Kea Giles. Please discuss articles of interest with the authors before publishing stories on their work, and please make reference to The Geological Society of America Bulletin in articles published. Non-media requests for articles may be directed to GSA Sales and Service, [email protected]

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  • DNA’ Podcast Hosts Two Climate and Health Twitter Spaces Chats

    DNA’ Podcast Hosts Two Climate and Health Twitter Spaces Chats

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    Newswise — Vanderbilt Health is hosting spin-off live chat episodes of its award-winning podcast series, “DNA: Discoveries in Action,” on Twitter Spaces. These live chats will explore how climate change is impacting well-being and how listeners can boost their climate literacy and action.

    These conversations are designed to cross-pollinate expertise, sectors and perspectives to illustrate the collaborative imperative of tackling climate change.

    DNA’s expert guests will explain why they have hope and want listeners to be energetic and reject “doomerism” while embracing reality and emphasizing teamwork without ego to accomplish individual and systemic goals.

    The conversations feature guests from Vanderbilt’s Medical Center, School of Law and School of Nursing, along with experts from Metro Nashville government, Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Philips.

    The conversations will take place on Nov. 13 and 14, from 12:15 pm – 1 pm CT and will be held on Twitter Spaces. Some guests will appear live from the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) annual meeting in Nashville with other guests joining remotely.

    Twitter Spaces is a feature that allows people to listen to real-time voice conversations taking place in the mobile app. Anyone may join the audience for the Twitter Spaces conversations; users may listen only on desktop. To be a part of the active audience and potentially ask a question, the mobile app is required.

    Get details by following @VUMC_Insights. Suggest questions ahead of or during the conversations by tweeting using the hashtag #ListenDNA.

    Click the links below to set reminders for the conversations or join the DNA Climate x Health Twitter Spaces on the day of the chat:

    Nashville’s Opportunity: Eco-Action or Anxiety, Sun., Nov. 13, from 12:15 pm to 1 pm CT

    Equity, Energy, Action: The Climate Opportunity, Mon., Nov. 14, from 12:15 pm to 1 pm CT

    The “Climate and Health” chapter of Discoveries in Action (DNA) offers  an expansive look at the disparities of climate change and its impact on health and well-being, as well as sustainability opportunities.

    Episodes offer tangible steps forward for further education and resources to personally shift toward climate-forward paradigms and leadership roles.

    Find the following episodes at listendna.com or subscribe on any podcast platform:

     

    How To…

    •Be A Climate Changemaker (Oct. 31)

    •Fill In The Knowledge Gap (Nov. 7)

    •DIY Climate Action (Nov. 14)

     

    The third season of VUMC’s award-winning podcast, DNA, is an experimental, fresh concept crafted to emphasize collaboration and conversation about how the current era of rapid change impacts mental and physical well-being.

     

     

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  • Bacterial Sensors Send a Jolt of Electricity When Triggered

    Bacterial Sensors Send a Jolt of Electricity When Triggered

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    Newswise — HOUSTON – (Nov. 2, 2022) – When you hit your finger with a hammer, you feel the pain immediately. And you react immediately.

    But what if the pain comes 20 minutes after the hit? By then, the injury might be harder to heal. 

    Scientists and engineers at Rice University say the same is true for the environment. If a chemical spill in a river goes unnoticed for 20 minutes, it might be too late to remediate.

    Their living bioelectronic sensors can help. A team led by Rice synthetic biologists Caroline Ajo-Franklin and Jonathan (Joff) Silberg and lead authors Josh Atkinson and Lin Su, both Rice alumni, have engineered bacteria to quickly sense and report on the presence of a variety of contaminants. 

    Their study in Nature shows the cells can be programmed to identify chemical invaders and report within minutes by releasing a detectable electrical current. 

    Such “smart” devices could power themselves by scavenging energy in the environment as they monitor conditions in settings like rivers, farms, industry and wastewater treatment plants and to ensure water security, according to the researchers.

    The environmental information communicated by these self-replicating bacteria can be customized by replacing a single protein in the eight-component, synthetic electron transport chain that gives rise to the sensor signal.

    “I think it’s the most complex protein pathway for real-time signaling that has been built to date,” said Silberg, director of Rice’s Systems, Synthetic and Physical Biology Ph.D. Program. “To put it simply, imagine a wire that directs electrons to flow from a cellular chemical to an electrode, but we’ve broken the wire in the middle. When the target molecule hits, it reconnects and electrifies the full pathway.”

    “It’s literally a miniature electrical switch,” Ajo-Franklin said. 

    “You put the probes into the water and measure the current,” she said. “It’s that simple. Our devices are different because the microbes are encapsulated. We’re not releasing them into the environment.” 

    The researchers’ proof-of-concept bacteria was Escherichia coli, and their first target was thiosulfate, a dichlorination agent used in water treatment that can cause algae blooms. And there were convenient sources of water to test: Galveston Beach and Houston’s Brays and Buffalo bayous.

    They collected water from each. At first, they attached their E. coli to electrodes, but the microbes refused to stay put. “They don’t naturally stick to an electrode,” Ajo-Franklin said. “We’re using strains that don’t form biofilms, so when we added water, they’d fall off.”

    When that happened, the electrodes delivered more noise than signal. 

    Enlisting co-author Xu Zhang, a postdoctoral researcher in Ajo-Franklin’s lab, they encapsulated sensors into agarosein the shape of a lollipop that allowed contaminants in but held the sensors in place, reducing the noise. 

    “Xu’s background is in environmental engineering,” Ajo-Franklin said. “She didn’t come in and say, ‘Oh, we have to fix the biology.’ She said, ‘What can we do with the materials?’ It took great, innovative work on the materials side to make the synthetic biology shine.”

    With the physical constraints in place, the labs first encoded E. coli to express a synthetic pathway that only generates current when it encounters thiosulfate. This living sensor was able to sense this chemical at levels less than 0.25 millimoles per liter, far lower than levels toxic to fish.

    In another experiment, E. coli was recoded to sense an endocrine disruptor. This also worked well, and the signals were greatly enhanced when conductive nanoparticles custom-synthesized by Su were encapsulated with the cells in the agarose lollipop. The researchers reported these encapsulated sensors detect this contaminant up to 10 times faster than the previous state-of-the-art devices. 

    The study began by chance when Atkinson and Moshe Baruch of Ajo-Franklin’s group at Berkeley Lawrence National Laboratory set up next to each other at a 2015 synthetic biology conference in Chicago, with posters they quickly realized outlined different aspects of the same idea.

    “We had neighboring posters because of our last names,” said Atkinson. “We spent most of the poster session chatting about each other’s projects and how there were clear synergies in our interests in interfacing cells with electrodes and electrons as an information carrier.” 

    “Josh’s poster had our first module: how to take chemical information and turn it into biochemical information,” Ajo-Franklin recalled. “Moshe had the third module: How to take biochemical information and turn it into an electrical signal.

    “The catch was how to link these together,” she said. “The biochemical signals were a little different.”

    “We said, ‘We need to get together and talk about this!’” Silberg recalled. Within six months, the new collaborators won seed funding from the Office of Naval Research, followed by a grant, to develop the idea.

    “Joff’s group brought in the protein engineering and half of the electron transfer pathway,” Ajo-Franklin said. “My group brought the other half of the electron transport pathway and some of the materials efforts.” The collaboration ultimately brought Ajo-Franklin herself to Rice in 2019 as a CPRIT Scholar.

    “We have to give so much credit to Lin and Josh,” she said. “They never gave up on this project, and it was incredibly synergistic. They would bounce ideas back and forth and through that interchange solved a lot of problems.” 

    “Each of which another student could spend years on,” Silberg added.

    “Both Josh and I spent several years of our Ph.D.s working on this, with the pressure of graduating and moving on to the next stage of our careers,” said Su, a visiting graduate student in Ajo-Franklin’s lab after graduating from Southeast University in China. “I had to extend my visa multiple times to stay and finish the research.”

    Silberg said the design’s complexity goes far beyond the signaling pathway. “The chain has eight components that control electron flow, but there are other components that build the wires that go into the molecules,” he said. “There are a dozen-and-a-half components with almost 30 metal or organic cofactors. This thing’s massive compared to something like our mitochondrial respiratory chains.” 

    All credited the invaluable assistance of co-author George Bennett, Rice’s E. Dell Butcher Professor Emeritus and a research professor in biosciences, in making the necessary connections.

    Silberg said he sees engineered microbes performing many tasks in the future, from monitoring the gut microbiome to sensing contaminants like viruses, improving upon the successful strategy of testing wastewater plants for SARS-CoV-19 during the pandemic.

    “Real-time monitoring becomes pretty important with those transient pulses,” he said. “And because we grow these sensors, they’re potentially pretty cheap to make.” 

    To that end, the team is collaborating with Rafael Verduzco, a Rice professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and of materials science and nanoengineering who leads a recent $2 million National Science Foundation grant with Ajo-Franklin, Silberg, bioscientist Kirstin Matthews and civil and environmental engineer Lauren Stadler to develop real-time wastewater monitoring.

    “The type of materials we can make with Raphael takes this to a whole new level,” Ajo-Franklin said. 

    Silberg said the Rice labs are working on design rules to develop a library of modular sensors. “I hope that when people read this, they recognize the opportunities,” he said.

    Silberg is the Stewart Memorial Professor of BioSciences and a professor of bioengineering at Rice. Ajo-Franklin is a professor of biosciences. Atkinson is a visiting National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Aarhus University, Denmark, and has an affiliation with the University of Southern California. Su is a postdoctoral research associate and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge.

    The research was supported by the Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences of the U.S. Department of Energy (DE-SC0014462), the Office of Naval Research (0001418IP00037, N00014-17-1-2639, N00014-20-1-2274), the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (RR190063), the National Science Foundation (1843556), the Department of Energy Office of Science Graduate Student Research Program (DE SC0014664), the Lodieska Stockbridge Vaughn Fellowship and the China Scholarship Council Fellowship (CSC-201606090098).

    -30-

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  • Surf’s up (and don’t mind the sharks)

    Surf’s up (and don’t mind the sharks)

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    Newswise — Clean, choppy, or cranking, when the surf’s up, so too are the surfers. But even the most avid surfer would steer clear of the waves when a shark is about… or would they? 

    In a new study from the University of South Australia, researchers found that 60 per cent of surfers are not afraid of sharks when surfing, despite more than half of them spotting a shark when out in the water. 

    It’s an interesting finding, particularly given people’s general fascination and fear of sharks, but as behavioural scientist and conservation psychology researcher, UniSA’s Dr Brianna Le Busque, says it’s a step in the right direction when it comes to shark conservation.

    “People have long feared sharks – not surprisingly given the hype generated from modern shark movies,” Dr Le Busque says. 

    “But exaggerated depictions of sharks have unfairly influenced people and as a result, have damaged shark conservation efforts. 

    “Surfers are frequent ocean users, so they’re in a unique position to change these perceptions.

    “Anecdotally, we know that surfers understand the role sharks play in ocean health and, for the most part, believe that shark conservation is good.

    “But the relationship between surfers and sharks is complex and has not been widely researched, so understanding their interactions is an important step in shark conservation and management policies.” 

    Surveying 391 surfers across 24 different countries (predominantly USA), the study found that:

    • 60 per cent were not afraid of sharks when surfing
    • 52 per cent had seen a shark when surfing
    • 44 per cent said a shark sighting would not stop them from going in the water
    • 17 per cent had been bitten or personally knew someone who had been bitten by a shark.

    Globally, 100 million sharks are killed each year with a quarter of shark species threatened by extinction.

    Le Busque says that the study will help to change people’s negative perceptions of sharks.

    “Surfers encounter sharks more than any other people in the community; they should be part of the consultation process when it comes to management or mitigation strategies,” Le Busque says.

    “When we step into the ocean, we step into their environment. We all need to be appropriately informed to ensure a logical balance between safety and conservation.”

    Notes to editors:

    …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

     

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  • Flood Modeling Framework Reveals Heightened Risk and Disparities in Los Angeles

    Flood Modeling Framework Reveals Heightened Risk and Disparities in Los Angeles

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    Newswise — Irvine, Calif., Oct. 31, 2022 – Flood risk in Los Angeles is vastly larger than previously indicated by federally defined flood maps, and low-income and marginalized communities face a significantly higher threat, according to a study led by researchers at the University of California, Irvine.

    The findings are the product of a recently developed high-resolution flood modeling platform that can assess risk every 10 feet across the 2,700-square-mile expanse of the Greater Los Angeles basin. The framework, described in a paper published today in Nature Sustainability, connects hazards from rainfall, stream flow and storm tides with demographic data including population density, ethnicity, race and economic disadvantage.

    “We have developed an innovative, new flood risk modeling platform that, for the first time, enables household exposure and inequalities to be systematically quantified across major metro regions,” said lead author Brett Sanders, UCI professor of civil and environmental engineering. “This platform could, in principle, be applied everywhere to not only assess risks but measure the efficacy and equity of proposed solutions. And because the modeling is at a very fine resolution, anyone can immediately visualize the risk and contemplate how it might impact them.”

    A 100-year flood event in Los Angeles would expose more than 400,000 people to danger, and property damage could exceed $50 billion. According to the UCI researchers, losses would be comparable to those felt in severe hurricanes such as Katrina in 2005, Sandy in 2012, and Irma and Harvey in 2017, each of which incurred tens of billions of dollars in damages and displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

    Los Angeles is less at risk of impact from a tropical cyclone – the most common source of flooding in the southeastern United States – but Southern California is subject to occasionally catastrophic levels of precipitation from climate change-driven atmospheric river events.

    “The impacts of a severe flood would not be evenly distributed across Angelinos,” Sanders said. “Disadvantaged communities are disproportionately affected, and they’re less well protected. Recovery from floods is often prolonged and incomplete in these areas due to unequal government responses, which further exacerbate the inequities.”

    A sizeable portion of the risk – and the inequality in possible outcomes – in Greater Los Angeles comes from the region’s built environment, according to the researchers.

    “The impacts of a severe flood would not be evenly distributed across Angelinos. Disadvantaged communities are disproportionately affected, and they’re less well protected,” says Brett Sanders, UCI professor of civil and environmental engineering, here walking in the Santa Ana River channel. Jo Kwon / Spectrum News

    “Recent flooding disasters across the U.S. have demonstrated that cities are underprepared and that infrastructure is undersized,” said co-author Richard Matthew, UCI professor of urban planning and public policy. “As we saw in Texas and Florida recently, areas exposed to flood risk have been underestimated by previous mapping, especially among disadvantaged communities, and this is the case here in Los Angeles and Orange County too.”

    Matthew noted that the drivers of disaster differ from inland to coastal areas. Poorer regions are more affected by intense rainfall, causing runoff to collect in streets and overwhelm flood channels, while more affluent communities along the coast are more vulnerable to flooding from storm tides and waves. Each set of hazards requires different mitigation measures, he stressed.

    “The development of this modeling framework is especially timely given that the U.S. is increasingly focused on climate change, committed to infrastructure investments, concerned about social justice, and in need of tools that facilitate community participation in infrastructure planning and design,” Sanders said.

    The project received financial support from the National Science Foundation, high-performance computing assistance from the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s Computational and Information Systems Laboratory in Wyoming, and data from Los Angeles County and Orange County. Additional researchers included Amir AghaKouchak, Steven Davis, Daniel Kahl, Jochen Schubert and Nicola Ulibarri of UCI; Katharine Mach of the University of Miami; David Brady of UC Riverside; and Fonna Forman of UC San Diego.

    About the University of California, Irvine: Founded in 1965, UCI is a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities and is ranked among the nation’s top 10 public universities by U.S. News & World Report. The campus has produced five Nobel laureates and is known for its academic achievement, premier research, innovation and anteater mascot. Led by Chancellor Howard Gillman, UCI has more than 36,000 students and offers 224 degree programs. It’s located in one of the world’s safest and most economically vibrant communities and is Orange County’s second-largest employer, contributing $7 billion annually to the local economy and $8 billion statewide. For more on UCI, visit www.uci.edu.

    Media access: Radio programs/stations may, for a fee, use an on-campus ISDN line to interview UCI faculty and experts, subject to availability and university approval. For more UCI news, visit news.uci.edu. Additional resources for journalists may be found at communications.uci.edu/for-journalists.

    NOTE TO EDITORS: PHOTO AVAILABLE AT
    https://news.uci.edu/2022/10/31/uci-flood-modeling-framework-reveals-heightened-risk-and-disparities-in-los-angeles

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  • It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Humidity: Water Loss Hurts Bees Most in the Desert

    It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Humidity: Water Loss Hurts Bees Most in the Desert

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    Newswise — (San Diego) October 29, 2022—Digger bees lose large amounts of water during flight, which compromises their activity period and survival in the desert heat. Researchers from Arizona State University will present their work this week at the American Physiological Society (APS) Intersociety Meeting in Comparative Physiology: From Organism to Omics in an Uncertain World conference in San Diego. 

    “Water loss appears to be a critical problem for male digger bees. Climate change will very likely challenge their important ecological functions.” —Meredith Johnson

    Climate change plays a role in the physiological evolution and survival of animals of all sizes. Desert animals, already acclimated to high temperatures, use evaporative heat loss to help prevent overheating. However, the sometimes-limited ability to replenish water loss means the danger of dehydration is a challenge for desert animals, including the Sonoran Desert digger bee.

    Bees are an integral part of the ecosystem due to their ability to pollinate—more than 80% of flowering plants rely on insect pollinators. When bees become unable to pollinate sufficiently—due to lack of food or other changes in their environment—plant biodiversity decreases and plant-eating animals are affected. A large percentage of food crops, including fruits, nuts and vegetables, also depend on pollination. Researchers explored the effects of heat, water stress and food availability on male digger bees in the Arizona Uplands, a region of the Sonoran Desert.

    During the study, air temperatures increased from around 66 degrees F in the early morning—when the bees began to fly to a mating site—to about 100 degrees at midday, when they typically stop flying for the day. In addition, no plants were in bloom at the study site to provide nectar for the bees to drink at the time of the study. Marking techniques used by the research team suggest that the bees survive for about a week, which means they are finding nectar somewhere in the desert. Researchers think the bees may be traveling for some distance during the later—and hotter—part of the day to find food.

    The researchers also examined the bees’ body temperature and body water content throughout the day. The hottest body temperature measurement was approximately 111 degrees F. Digger bees can withstand body temperatures around 125 degrees during flight, suggesting that overheating is not why the bees stopped flying before midday, explained Meredith Johnson, a doctoral candidate at Arizona State University and first author of the study.

    Water loss is a bigger problem for the insects. “These bees lose 17% of their body water content per hour, with the amount slightly increasing as the air temperature [rises],” Johnson said. “Loss of about 50% of total body water content is lethal, suggesting that these bees can maximally fly for about three hours.”

    The flying time constraint is important to note, as typically bees need to fly for six or seven hours each day searching for mating opportunities. Without sufficient time to mate, the bee population will shrink in the future.

    “Water loss appears to be a most critical problem for male digger bees. Climate change will very likely challenge their important ecological functions,” Johnson said.

    Physiology is a broad area of scientific inquiry that focuses on how molecules, cells, tissues and organs function in health and disease. The American Physiological Society connects a global, multidisciplinary community of more than 10,000 biomedical scientists and educators as part of its mission to advance scientific discovery, understand life and improve health. The Society drives collaboration and spotlights scientific discoveries through its 16 scholarly journals and programming that support researchers and educators in their work. 

     

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  • Food Security Harmed by Warming Ocean, Accelerating Fish Development

    Food Security Harmed by Warming Ocean, Accelerating Fish Development

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    Newswise — (San Diego) October 29, 2022— Higher temperatures spurred by worsening climate change increased the growth rate of fish and consumption of their yolk sac—a structure that provides an embryo with food and helps develop important structures, such as blood cells. In addition, higher temperatures boosted fish mortality rates and led to faster depletion of their yolk sac, according to researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego. The findings will be presented this week at the American Physiological Society (APS) Intersociety Meeting in Comparative Physiology: From Organism to Omics in an Uncertain World conference in San Diego. 

    Ocean temperatures are predicted to rise as carbon monoxide gas accumulates due to climate change. To determine the impact on larval white seabass, researchers sampled fish reared at 18–23 degrees Celsius throughout development from birth to six days old. With this process, they were hoping to differentiate the effects of temperature and time. They estimated growth and development rates by examining images obtained under a light microscope, among other methods.

    These findings are important because it helps inform fish population predictions in the face of climate change. The fishing industry is an important link in the U.S. food supply chain. Predicting growth rates and population structures of white seabass, a commercially and recreationally significant population in California, is critically important to help ensure food security.

    “Our results suggest that larval fish recruitment could swing to either extremity as a result of ocean warming,” said Ria Bhabu, co-author of the study and a student at the University of California San Diego. 

    Physiology is a broad area of scientific inquiry that focuses on how molecules, cells, tissues and organs function in health and disease. The American Physiological Society connects a global, multidisciplinary community of more than 10,000 biomedical scientists and educators as part of its mission to advance scientific discovery, understand life and improve health. The Society drives collaboration and spotlights scientific discoveries through its 16 scholarly journals and programming that support researchers and educators in their work. 

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  • Climate Change Negatively Affecting School Sharks

    Climate Change Negatively Affecting School Sharks

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    Newswise — (San Diego) October 29, 2022— Preliminary research data suggest warmer temperatures and increased salt levels might have negative effects on the behavior and physiology of school sharks. A clear indicator of physiological changes is higher levels of stress markers such as glucose and lactate concentrations in the blood. Researchers also noted behavior changes according to the warmer and saltier the environment is and the more time school sharks spend resting. School sharks are usually constantly swimming. A break in their usual activity means they might be too stressed to find food or escape predators. The findings will be presented this week at the American Physiological Society (APS) Intersociety Meeting in Comparative Physiology: From Organism to Omics in an Uncertain World conference in San Diego. 

    Researchers also examined the response of school sharks to increases in temperatures and salinity levels based on neonatal and juvenile (one year old and older) stage. The findings show newborns were more tolerant of some of the environmental changes than juveniles. This suggests neonates might have a special ability at birth to inhabit coastal waterways where freshwater mixes with salt water before migrating into deeper waters as juveniles. 

    The shallow water home of school sharks is constantly fluctuating, but this natural variation is being exacerbated due to the rapid pace of climate change. As a result, researchers through this study were seeking to determine “if this endangered species will be able to continue using these protected, resource-rich waters, or if they will be forced out into the ocean, which may have major ecological implications for the survival of the species.” They specifically wanted to know if the nursery ground in southeast Tasmania will remain a viable area for school shark pups in the coming years. To reach their conclusion, researchers evaluated the physiology and biochemistry of neonatal and juvenile sharks. 

    “Hopefully, these findings will be able to guide or inform regulations that can improve shark health,” said Katherine Ollerhead, a PhD candidate at the University of Tasmania in Australia and co-author of the study. 

    Physiology is a broad area of scientific inquiry that focuses on how molecules, cells, tissues and organs function in health and disease. The American Physiological Society connects a global, multidisciplinary community of more than 10,000 biomedical scientists and educators as part of its mission to advance scientific discovery, understand life and improve health. The Society drives collaboration and spotlights scientific discoveries through its 16 scholarly journals and programming that support researchers and educators in their work. 

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  • NASA Laser Project Benefits Animal Researchers, UW Scientists Show

    NASA Laser Project Benefits Animal Researchers, UW Scientists Show

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    Newswise — Scientists researching forest carnivores such as martens, foxes and coyotes spend hours clambering through rugged terrain, sometimes in deep snow, placing and baiting camera traps to learn about animals’ behavior in relation to their habitat.

    In recent years, this on-the-ground work has received a big boost from what might seem to be an unlikely source: NASA.

    In a new scholarly paper that details research in northwest Wyoming, University of Wyoming researchers explain how NASA’s Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI) mission can provide valuable information about the world’s forests for wildlife scientists. The article appears in the journal Forest Ecology and Management.

    Using a light detection and ranging (LiDAR) laser instrument installed on the International Space Station, GEDI collects high-resolution observations of the three-dimensional structure of Earth’s forest — including precise measurements of forest canopy height, canopy cover and vertical structure. GEDI was attached to the International Space Station in 2018 for a two-year mission that has been extended until January 2023; it is expected to collect over 10 billion samples of Earth’s tropical and temperate forests.

    “Our work indicated that spaceborne LiDAR collected from the GEDI mission provided a ready sampling of forest structure that could be combined with other remotely sensed data to improve our understanding of animal-habitat relationships,” wrote the researchers, led by Austin Smith, now an assistant research scientist for the team of Assistant Professor Joe Holbrook in UW’s Haub School of Environment and Natural Resources.

    Working in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem — including two national parks, parts of three national forests, one national wildlife refuge and Bureau of Land Management land — the researchers deployed 107 camera traps for three consecutive winters. Based on photographs of target species, they calculated habitat use for Pacific martens, Rocky Mountain red foxes and coyotes, along with prey species red squirrels and snowshoe hares.

    The scientists then paired data from GEDI with other remote-sensing platforms to create forest height and structure maps, which they used to run computer models to evaluate animal-environment relationships. They found that the pairing of GEDI data with other sensors resulted in a substantial improvement in characterizing vertical and horizontal forest structure, which aided efforts to understand important habitat features for the animals studied.

    “Our successes are likely transferrable to other landscapes and animal species, which is important given the large-scale disturbances that are occurring in Western forests, such as wildfire and bark beetle outbreaks,” the researchers say.

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  • El NiñO Increases Seedling Mortality Even in Drought-Tolerant Forests

    El NiñO Increases Seedling Mortality Even in Drought-Tolerant Forests

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    Newswise — Global climate change may lead to more extreme weather events such as droughts. To predict the impact of climate change on tropical forests, it is necessary to understand more accurately the effects of drought. El Niño often reduces rainfall and causes drier forests in the tropical regions of Southeast Asia. Since tropical rainforests there usually experience rainfall year-round with no dry season, El Niño-induced drought increases tree mortality. Seasonally dry tropical forests (SDTFs), on the other hand, are considered more adaptive to drought given that they experience both wet and dry seasons. However, there remains limited understanding about the effects of El Niño on SDTFs.

    Addressing this knowledge gap, a research team led by graduate student Prapawadee Nutiprapun, from the Graduate School of Science at Osaka City University, Professor Akira Itoh, from the Graduate School of Science at Osaka Metropolitan University, and Professor Dokrak Marod, from the Faculty of Forestry at Kasetsart University, monitored seedling recruitment and mortality at an SDTF in a national park in Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand, at monthly intervals for 7 years.

    During the study period, an extremely strong El Niño event occurred between 2014 and 2016, resulting in reduced rainfall. In 2016, the dry season was approximately 3 months longer than normal. The collected data show that severe and prolonged drought increased seedling mortality even in the SDTF. In addition, drought-caused mortality was greater in evergreen forests at higher elevations, where drought is usually less severe, than in deciduous forests at lower elevations, where severe drought is more frequently observed.

    Only in deciduous forests did the number of seedlings increase significantly during the El Niño period. This was mainly due to a large number of acorns produced by the deciduous oak Quercus brandisiana (Fagaceae). El Niño has been known to stimulate mass flowering and fruiting, leading to an increase in seedlings in tropical rainforests in Southeast Asia.

    “This study takes us one step closer to understanding the impact of El Niño on seasonally dry tropical forests in Southeast Asia,” said Ms. Nutiprapun.

    “A decline in the number of seedlings that carry the next generation will affect the entire forest in the long run,” concluded Professor Itoh. “We believe that we have obtained useful basic knowledge to develop measures to conserve tropical forest ecosystems in consideration of future climate change.”

     

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    About OMU

    Osaka Metropolitan University is a new public university established by a merger between Osaka City University and Osaka Prefecture University in April 2022. For more science news, see https://www.upc-osaka.ac.jp/new-univ/en-research/, and follow @OsakaMetUniv_en, or search #OMUScience.

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  • Hybrid Songbirds Found More Often in Human-Altered Environments

    Hybrid Songbirds Found More Often in Human-Altered Environments

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    Newswise — Hybrids of two common North American songbirds, the black-capped and mountain chickadee, are more likely to be found in places where humans have altered the landscape in some way, finds new University of Colorado Boulder research.

    Published today in Global Change Biology, it’s the first study to positively correlate hybridization in any species with landscape changes caused by humans, and the first to examine this relationship across an entire species’ range—spanning almost all of western North America.

    The paper also contradicts a long-standing assumption that these two birds rarely hybridize, finding instead that black-capped and mountain chickadee hybrids (identified using genetic tools) occur across the United States and Canada.

    “These are common birds. If you go anywhere in North America, you’ll find a chickadee,” said Kathryn Grabenstein, lead author on the study and postdoctoral associate in ecology and evolutionary biology. “And what we’re finding now is that if you see a chickadee in a place where both black-capped and mountain chickadees live, they’re probably at least a little bit of a hybrid chickadee.”

    Hybridization—the interbreeding of closely related species to produce mixed ancestry offspring—is common in the development of life on Earth and is thought to be especially important in the evolution of plants. This new analysis of songbirds adds to the growing body of evidence that hybridization is also quite relevant within vertebrate evolution.

    Human disturbance

    What this study cannot say is why these chickadee hybrids are more common in places where humans have changed the landscape, but it is the first-of-its-kind to examine this correlation separate from climate change.

    Climate change often changes the range of a species—where it lives, roams or migrates—bringing species into contact with one another that would not normally interact, which can lead to hybridization. In contrast, this study looked at two related species whose ranges already overlap and focused on the variable of human “disturbance,” such as building cities, clearing land, planting trees, creating reservoirs and noise pollution.

    This way, the researchers could exclusively examine if changes to the physical structure of the environment affect the interactions between two species that are already in the same place.

    “It’s not bringing new species into contact with each other—it’s changing the rules of negotiation between them,” said Grabenstein.

    For example: Here in the Front Range, what once was ponderosa pine savanna with deciduous trees along the rivers has been transformed into an urban forest. This shift isn’t necessarily good or bad, said Grabenstein, but the goal of the research is to help understand what these changes to the land and water by humans means for these species.

    “What are the consequences of the ways we modify the landscape? We think about it mostly in terms of habitat loss, not necessarily in terms of species interaction modifications,” said Scott Taylor, co-author on the study and associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology. “This paper changes our understanding of this system incredibly.”

    10 years in the making

    Previous published research by Grabenstein and Taylor found examples of various species hybridizing in the wake of humans disrupting their habitats, but they wanted to document a clear example of this occurring across a wide geographical range. Based on local observations of possible hybrid black-capped and mountain chickadees in several towns and cities across the West, they realized these two species would be good candidates for a study.

    Black-capped and mountain chickadees are estimated to have diverged from a common ancestor over 2 million years ago, but they still overlap across many areas of the western U.S., including the Rocky Mountains. Black-capped chickadees have a black head, white edging on their wings and tend to be more buff- or cinnamon-colored on their sides. Mountain chickadees, in contrast, are grayer, have big white eyebrows and do not have white edging on their wings. Early generation hybrids often have a bit of both: thin white eyebrows, buff coloring on their sides and some white edging on their wings.

    To test their hypothesis about these birds, the researchers compiled observational data from eBird, an online birding site, and DNA samples from 196 black-capped and 213 mountain chickadees at 81 sites in North America, gathered over the past decade by co-authors Ken Otter of the University of Northern British Columbia and Theresa Burg of the University of Lethbridge. They found a positive, significant correlation between hybrids of these two species and areas where humans have disturbed their habitat in some form—as well as that black-capped chickadees are found more often in these disturbed areas than mountain chickadees.

    This study is also a positive sign for science. Sequencing the DNA of 409 birds is big study: Just a decade ago, a study of this size may not have been possible due to the large amount of time and money it would have required. As the price tag of DNA sequencing has dramatically dropped and running samples has become more efficient, these precise genomic tools have become more accessible to more researchers, allowing them to improve our understanding of how humans impact biodiversity at the genetic level.

    The future of hybridization

    This hybridization is unlikely to lead to the creation of a new chickadee species, however. Female hybrids from black-capped and mountain chickadee parents are likely to be sterile but can survive. Male hybrids with a parent from each species, however, can reproduce, and seem to do so predominantly with black-capped chickadees.  

    It makes studying hybridization like trying to hit a moving target, said Grabenstein, but there is still much to be learned from the genetic variation within different members of a species.

    This songbird research will also inform the local Boulder Chickadee Study, founded by Grabenstein and Taylor. Working with local landowners and municipalities where these birds live and nest, the researchers will continue to examine reasons why these birds are hybridizing.

    But for now, there’s no need to remove bird feeders or bird boxes, said Grabenstein.

    “It’s hard to say whether this hybridization is good or bad, but it’s happening, and we will only understand the impacts through continued study,” said Taylor, also director of CU Boulder’s Mountain Research Station and a fellow at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR). “It is certainly something to consider when thinking about the future of some of these birds that we’re really familiar with in our backyards.”

    Additional authors on this publication include Ken Otter of the University of Northern British Columbia and Theresa Burg of the University of Lethbridge.

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    University of Colorado Boulder

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  • Drought snarls Mississippi River transit in blow to farmers

    Drought snarls Mississippi River transit in blow to farmers

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    ALONG THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER — Adam Thomas starts harvesting soybeans on his Illinois farm when the dew burns off in the morning. This year, dry weather accelerated the work, allowing him to start early. His problem was getting the soybeans to market.

    About 60% of the Midwest and northern Great Plain states are in a drought. Nearly the entire stretch of the Mississippi River — from Minnesota to the river’s mouth in Louisiana — has experienced below average rainfall over the past two months. As a result, water levels on the river have dropped to near-record lows, disrupting ship and barge traffic that is critical for moving recently harvested agricultural goods such as soybeans and corn downriver for export.

    Although scientists say climate change is raising temperatures and making droughts more common and intense, a weather expert says this latest drought affecting the central United States is more likely a short-term weather phenomenon.

    The lack of rain has seriously affected commerce. The river moves more than half of all U.S. grain exports but the drought has reduced the flow of goods by about 45%, according to industry estimates cited by the federal government. Prices for rail shipments, an alternative for sending goods by barge, are also up.

    “It just means lower income, basically,” said Mike Doherty, a senior economist with the Illinois Farm Bureau.

    Thomas farms at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and doesn’t own enough grain storage to wait out the high costs of shipping.

    “I’ve had to take a price discount,” he said.

    Climate change is generally driving wetter conditions in the Upper Mississippi River region but in recent months, lower water levels have revealed parts that are usually inaccessible. Thousands of visitors last weekend walked across typically submerged riverbed to Tower Rock, a protruding formation about 100 miles (161 kilometers) southeast of St. Louis. It’s the first time since 2012 that tourists could make the trek and stay dry. On the border of Tennessee and Missouri where the river is a half-mile wide, four-wheeler tracks snake across vast stretches of exposed riverbed.

    In a badly needed break from the dry weather earlier this week, the region finally received some rain.

    “It is kind of taking the edge off the pain of the low water, but it is not going to completely alleviate it,” said Kai Roth of the Lower Mississippi River Forecast Center, adding that the river needs several rounds of “good, soaking rain.”

    Barges are at risk of hitting bottom and getting stuck in the mud. Earlier this month, the U.S. Coast Guard said there had been at least eight such “groundings.” Some barges touch the bottom but don’t get stuck. Others need salvage companies to help them out. Barges are cautioned to lighten their loads to prevent them from sinking too deep in the water, but that means they can carry fewer goods.

    To ensure that vessels can travel safely, federal officials regularly meet, consider the depth of the river and talk to the shipping industry to determine local closures and traffic restrictions. When a stretch is temporarily closed, hundreds of barges may line up to wait.

    “It’s very dynamic: Things are changing constantly,” said Eric Carrero, the Coast Guard’s director of western rivers and waterways. “Every day, when we are doing our surveys, we’re finding areas that are shallow and they need to dredge.”

    After a closed-down section is dredged, officials mark a safe channel and barges can once again pass through.

    In some places, storage at barge terminals is filling up, preventing more goods from coming in, according to Mike Steenhoek, executive director of the Soy Transportation Coalition. He said the influx of grain into a compromised river transportation system is like “attaching a garden hose to a fire hydrant.” High costs for farmers have led some to wait to ship their goods, he added.

    For tourists, much of the river is still accessible. Cruise ships are built to withstand the river’s extremes: Big engines fight fast currents in the spring and shallow drafts keep the boats moving in a drought, said Charles Robertson, president and CEO of American Cruise Lines, which operates five cruise ships that can carry 150 to 190 passengers each.

    Nighttime operations are limited, however, to help ships avoid new obstacles that the drought has exposed. And some landing areas aren’t accessible because of low water — the river is dried out along the edges. In Vicksburg, Mississippi, a cruise ship couldn’t get to a ramp that typically loads passengers, so the city, with help from townspeople, laid gravel and plywood to create a makeshift walkway. For some, it adds to the adventure.

    “They’re experiencing the headlines that most of the rest of the country is reading,” Robertson said.

    Drought is a prolonged problem in California, which just recorded its driest three-year stretch on record, a situation that has stressed water supplies and increased wildfire risk. Climate change is raising temperatures and making droughts more common and worse.

    “The drier areas are going to continue to get drier and the wetter areas are going to continue to get wetter,” said Jen Brady, a data analyst at Climate Central, a nonprofit group of scientists and researchers that reports on climate change.

    Brad Pugh, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said however, that the current drought in the Midwest is likely “driven by short-term weather patterns” and he wouldn’t link it to climate change.

    In the Midwest, climate change is increasing the intensity of some rainstorms. Flood severity on the upper Mississippi River is growing faster than any other area of the country, according to NOAA.

    Some worry that fertilizer and manure have accumulated on farms and could quickly wash off in a hard rain, reducing oxygen levels in rivers and streams and threatening aquatic life.

    In rare cases, communities are moving to alternate sources of drinking water away from the Mississippi. The drought also is threatening to dry out drinking-water wells in Iowa and Nebraska, NOAA says.

    It’s unclear how much longer the drought will last. In the near term, there is a chance for rain, but NOAA notes that in November, below average rainfall is more likely in central states such as Missouri, which would extend shipping problems on the river. In some northern states including Michigan, the winter may bring more moisture, but less rain is expected in southern states.

    “It does take a lot of rainfall to really get the river to rise,” Roth said.

    ———

    The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment

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