Tag Archives: turns

California scientists are calling for the largest U.S. investment in climate research in years.

by cassidy281 Posted on August 17, 2017

That’s all kinds of scary. If there’s one place on Earth that would be the worst possible spot for a giant volcanic chain, it’s beneath West Antarctica. Turns out, it’s not a great situation to have a bunch of volcanoes underneath a huge ice sheet.

In a discovery announced earlier this week, a team of researchers discovered dozens of them across a 2,200-mile swath of the frozen continent. Antarctica, if you’re listening, please stop scaring us.

The study that led to the discovery was conceived of by an undergraduate student at the University of Edinburgh, Max Van Wyk de Vries. With a team of researchers, he used radar to look under the ice for evidence of cone-shaped mountains that had disturbed the ice around them. They found 91 previously unknown volcanoes. “We were amazed,” Robert Bingham, one of the study’s authors, told the Guardian.

The worry is that, as in Iceland and Alaska, two regions of active volcanism that were ice-covered until relatively recently, a warming climate could help these Antarctic volcanoes spring to life soon. In a worst-case scenario, the melting ice could release pressure on the volcanoes and trigger eruptions, further destabilizing the ice sheet.

“The big question is: how active are these volcanoes? That is something we need to determine as quickly as possible,” Bingham said.

More here:

California scientists are calling for the largest U.S. investment in climate research in years.

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, green energy, LAI, LG, ONA, Ringer, solar, solar panels, solar power, Uncategorized, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on California scientists are calling for the largest U.S. investment in climate research in years.

Being a big fish in a small pond (or, uh, the ocean) could get you killed.

by LucianaCurrie Posted on September 14, 2016

Turns out the largest sea creatures are most likely to go extinct, according to research published today in Science.

The research, led by Stanford’s Jonathan Payne, compared modern marine vertebrates and mollusks to their ancestors in the fossil record, all the way up to the last mass extinction 66 million years ago. Today, unlike in any previous time studied, a 10 percent increase in body size means a 13 percent increase in extinction risk.

This differs from a run-of-the-mill mass extinction, when your likelihood of dying off has a lot more to do with, say, where you live in the ocean or where you fall on the evolutionary tree.

And the biggest-is-not-best pattern has human fingerprints all over it — just think of the mastodon and moa.

“Humans, with our technology, have made ourselves into predators that can go after very large animals,” says Payne. But there’s an upside. Unlike the huge environmental changes that spurred mass extinctions in the past (and perhaps the near future), human activity has been known to do a quick 180.

After all, the oceans have seen very little extinction in the Anthropocene. “We still have a huge opportunity to save almost everything,” Payne says.

This article:  

Being a big fish in a small pond (or, uh, the ocean) could get you killed.

Posted in alo, Anchor, Bunn, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, ONA, PUR, The Atlantic, Uncategorized, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Being a big fish in a small pond (or, uh, the ocean) could get you killed.

Completely unsurprisingly, coal dust kills coral, too

by FloyX98jwpxwape Posted on May 18, 2016

Completely unsurprisingly, coal dust kills coral, too

By on May 18, 2016 4:44 amShare

To the shock of no one, it turns out that coal dust is pretty bad for just about everything. People? Turns their lungs the wrong color. Rats? Plaque in the arteries. Corals? Turns out when you spill a lot of coal dust into the water, they don’t do so well either.

In a Nature Scientific Reports article titled “Simulated coal spill causes mortality and growth inhibition in tropical marine organisms,” scientists from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and the Australian Institute of Marine Science have shown that, well, a simulated coal spill kills pretty much everything it touches underwater.

Here are some corals at different stages of exposure. The badly abused Swiffer mop of a polyp on the right bathed for 14 days in water flavored with 275 mg of coal per liter:

Berry et al., Nature Scientific Reports

And here are some stunted fish getting progressively more and more freaked out that scientists are making strip-mine tea in their tanks:

Berry et al., Nature Scientific Reports

Climate change is already devastating coral reefs around the world, but this new research seems to say, “Why not cut out the middle man! It turns out we can snuff out some ecosystems with coal dust alone!”

And — surprise again — with increased seaborne coal trade comes a greater risk of coal dust exposure for all these marine critters.

Find this article interesting?

Donate now to support our work.

Get Grist in your inbox

Excerpt from: 

Completely unsurprisingly, coal dust kills coral, too

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, Mop, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Completely unsurprisingly, coal dust kills coral, too