The reason is complex. Increased atmospheric carbon dioxide also means increased absorption of carbon in the Earth's oceans. And this increase, in turn, means more acidic sea water. More acidic oceans mean less absorption of sound at low frequencies.

And less sound absorption means louder noises over longer distances. In a paper published in Nature Geoscience, scientists predict that, within 100 years, absorption of sounds at around 200 Hz will go down by 70%, meaning sound could travel much farther.

The effects of less absorption and more noise at this frequency could be huge. For instance, scientists and commercial shipping vessels use these lower range frequencies for navigation and oceanic research. Also, marine mammals, such as whales, use these low frequencies for finding food and mates. Noisier oceans might cripple ocean navigation and interfere with whale life.

Unfortunately, the acidification of the ocean won't end when we stop polluting. In fact, the acidic shallow waters will propagate into the deeper ocean, where sound travels farthest, and possibly spread this noisy effect much farther than expected.

Recently, scientists found that blue whale songs are changing, drifting lower in pitch. Their research hinted at the deep complexity of marine life and the in-progress nature of this kind of science. This new marine acoustics research puts an additional wrinkle in the world of underwater communication, making the story more complex and even more interesting.

Man-made carbon dioxide affects ocean acoustics [EurekAlert]

For 10 million dollars, the coastal area belonging to Wisconsin's Concordia University went from eroding wasteland to a beautiful park. According to landscape architecture firm JJR:

Concordia University came to JJR with a clear problem: It was literally losing acres of its waterfront campus to Lake Michigan due to a continually eroding, 130-foot high bluff that steeply dropped down to the Lake Michigan shoreline. JJR's master plan and final design focused on stabilizing the bluff and providing armored shoreline revetments and beaches to halt the continued erosion caused by the severe Lake Michigan wave environment. This project also included recreational and environmental enhancements down the face of the bluff itself.

Read about more runners-up for 2009's best engineering projects via the American Society of Civil Engineers and Popular Mechanics.

Images of the Concordia University project via JJR.

While the situation is quite weird - few icebergs this large have ever drifted so far from Antarctica - it will not end in an iceberg vs. landmass smackdown. As the huge sheet of ice drifts into warmer waters, it will break up and melt. In fact, scientists studying this phenomenon have seen other enormous icebergs, like the one pictured above, reach as far as New Zealand.

In this satellite photo, you can see where the enormous iceberg originated. According to CNN:

Named B17B, [the iceberg is] about 1,700 km (1,056 miles) off the coast of West Australia, according to the country's Antarctic Division.

"B17B is a very significant one in that it has drifted so far north while still largely intact," said Australian Antarctic Division glaciologist Neal Young, who spotted the slab using satellite images taken by NASA and the European Space Agency. "It's one of the biggest sighted at those latitudes."

Researchers aren't sure whether this iceberg migration is part of a natural cycle, or has been affected by recent climate change.

All I can say is that it sounds like the great setup for an action movie: Giant Landmass vs. Mega-Iceberg!

Satellite photo via AP/Australian Antarctic Division.

Earth's climate has shifted drastically many times in its history, but barring massive asteroid impacts, climate change tends to play out over thousands or tens of thousands of years. Plenty of time to pack away the summer clothes and buy a nice warm coat when you spot an ice age coming. But researchers at the University of Saskatchewan recently discovered that some ice ages come on quite rapidly.

By taking some very thin slices of a mud core sampled from a really old lake (Ireland's Lough Monreach), the Saskatchewan team got a high-resolution look at varying oxygen and carbon isotope levels in the lake's history. The analysis revealed events happening month by month in the lake's ancient past. They found that things got very cold very quickly during the "Big Freeze" (more scientifically referred to as the Younger Dryas), a small ice age that occurred about 13,000 years ago. How quickly? The lake basically froze solid within a few years, and it might even have happened within a few months.

The Younger Dryas is thought to have been caused by the sudden emptying of Lake Aggasiz, a massive freshwater sea that covered a much of what is now mid-Canada and the northern U.S. At some point, the contents of the lake poured down through the Great Lakes and down the St. Lawrence River, flooding the Arctic Ocean and the North Atlantic with a deluge of fresh water. Not only did this raise global sea levels, it severely disrupted ocean currents in the area, scrambling the climate and causing an instant ice age. It took about 200 years for things to get back to normal.

Since there's no Lake Aggasiz around to empty itself and cause an ice age, we're off the hook, right? Wrong. The Greenland Ice Sheet (which is an enormous slab of ice that covers most of Greenland) has been melting at a rate of about 50 cubic miles of ice per year. Because the ice sheet basically keeps itself cold, scientists worry that the growing melt zones each summer will lead to a runaway meltdown. If the sheet were to melt away suddenly, it could very well lead to a disruption of ocean currents similar to the one preceeding the Younger Dryas.

Of course, that would probably be the least of our problems, since sea level would rise more than 20 feet. And you still can't outrun cold.

Big Freeze Plunged Europe Into Ice Age in Months. [Science Daily]

A research team led by Stanford University's David Lobell and Marshall Burke at the University of California, Berkeley, has uncovered a possible link between temperature and violence. Mapping connections between African civil wars and local temperature between 1981 and 2002, the team discovered a "strong relationship" between temperature spikes and civil war, leading them to predict a 54 per cent rise in the incidence of civil war by 2030 unless current estimates of global warming are somehow curbed. We await Al Gore's statement on the matter.

African conflicts spurred by warming [New Scientist]

That is an enormous amount of mass, and has resulted in the sea level rising about .46 millimeters per year, on average. Sea levels are rising more quickly in recent years though: From 2006 to 2008, it rose about 0.75 mm per year. Researchers, who published their findings in Science today, used both on-the-ground observations and combined them with satellite observations and both methods gave consistent results. Melting of the entire sheet is predicted to raise sea levels globally by about 20 feet, flooding many major cities.

These gorgeous photographs, taken by the science team during their research, show the unearthly beauty of massive ice sheet landscapes. Someday, this landscape may truly be science fiction - or at least, geological history.

via BBC News

In this case, the Rabb's fringe-limbed treefrog is apparently being wiped out by a species of chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, which has invaded its habitat in central Panama. Since the fungus was detected, only one of the species' males has been heard calling out, but no other males have been heard to answer.

There's also been some forest clear-cutting in its habitat, to build some luxury holiday homes, but that hasn't reached critical levels. Photo by Brad Wilson/UICN/AP Images [Guardian]

Over at Astrobiology magazine, Aaron Gronstal describes new scientific work that led to the creation of this map. What you see here is the landmass which included a land bridge over the Bering Strait - the same bridge that allowed animals and humans to wander from Northern Europe into North America without being hindered by the Arctic Sea. The timeframe here is the Pleiocene and Pleistocene Eras - between 5.3 million to 12,000 years ago - when ice sheets and glaciers covered most of the northern hemisphere. And yet at the same time, some of the iciest parts of today's warmer world were at that time ice-free and full of life. How did that happen?

Gronstal sums up the research:

Temperatures were still low in Beringia during these epochs, but a lack of moisture due to the rainshadow of the surrounding mountain ranges prevented large-scale formation of ice. As the authors [of the new study] put it, "The interior of Yukon and Alaska was cold enough to support ice sheets but too dry for extensive glaciation." Because of this, Beringia was a key location for life during the Pleistocene, when the Earth's climate fluctuated between ice ages and glaciers often covered large portions of the globe.

As the Earth's climate varied, so did sea levels. This ebb and flow of the sea exposed a land-bridge across the Bering Straight between Alaska and Siberia. Not only was this an important route for the migration of animals between the continents of Asia and North America, it also expanded the ice-free land mass of Beringia. This provided a large area that was relatively rich in food – which was a lifesaver for those struggling to survive in the Earth's frozen North. Beringia was by no means a tropical paradise for life, but the cold, wind-swept desert was an important ecological refuge for plants and animals when glaciation of the Earth was at its peak.

This map is a perfect demonstration of how complicated the results are when we see massive weather shifts on Earth. Some areas that were uninhabitable become habitable in unforeseen ways.

via Astrobiology

Normally relocating bears is frowned on as a way of saving populations. Conventional environmental science says that a declining population should not be moved until the sources of its decline have been addressed. But this group of French biologists say that in this case, they have population models that prove the cause of the decline in the population has to do with a gender disparity.

While you might think this solution is obvious, it isn't. You see, the problem with these bears isn't that there aren't enough females to breed a new population - in fact, there are. Instead, the problem comes from the bears' practice of co-rearing their young, with the fathers sticking around to care for their offspring. Because the babies take a while to mature, there will be long stretches where some males are fathers and others aren't. The single bears will fight the fathers. When single bears win, they murder the father's offspring so they can parent their own children. As a result, even a slight gender imbalance between the bears can result in viable offspring being killed over and over.

The scientists' study was published yesterday in PLoS One. A release about the study explains:

The researchers analyzed field data collected from 1993 to 2005 and found that the western sub-population had much lower reproductive success than the central sub-population. They suggest this could be the consequence of the western sub-population being inbred or having a male-biased sex ratio. In species with extended parental care, a male-biased sex ratio can induce sexually selected infanticide, a behavior in which males attempt to kill unrelated cubs to induce estrous in females, maximizing their opportunity to breed.

[Researcher Guillaume] Chapron and his colleagues used a population model to compute how many bears should be released to ensure viability, and showed the population could recover provided an adequate number of new females are translocated.

via PLoS One

The dust storm accomplished something that geoengineers call "ocean fertilization." When the storm hit Sydney, it dumped an estimated three million tonnes of Australian desert dust into Sydney Harbour and the Tasman Straight. That dust brought nitrogen and phosphate to the waters, providing food to microscopic phytoplankton, whose population numbers rapidly tripled (which is what you see in the image above). And that in turn may rapidly expand the population of local fish, too. Boosting the lower levels of the food chain can easily lead to population growth at the higher rungs.

But ocean fertilization isn't just a way to help the fishing industry, and feed hungry Australians. There are some even more interesting results that come from rapidly hurling piles of dirt into the ocean - results that could slow climate change.

Ocean fertilization can trap atmospheric carbon. First, the excess algae absorb carbon dioxide; then, when the algae dies and sinks to the bottom of the ocean, the carbon it has absorbed is isolated from the atmosphere for a few thousand years. Of course, the effectiveness of this is hotly disputed. An article recently published in Nature tracked a natural influx of high levels of iron into the ocean around the Crozet Islands, and the carbon uptake was 50 times lower than previously estimated. This study, as most others on the subject, focused on iron rather than nitrogen, and there is some argument that natural intake will produce different effects than deliberately dumping tonnes of the material into the ocean. Geoengineering could promote different phytoplanktons to develop. The location of the experiment also has a lot to do with what grows and how much carbon it traps.

The final effect that this explosion of algae could produce? It could help cool the planet. Certain plankton species produce dimethyl sulfide, which works its way into the atmosphere, and eventually transforms into clouds, increasing the reflectivity of the Earth, and lowering its temperature.

So, by taking tonnes of desert dirt (something Australia is in no way short of), and flushing it into the ocean, we can potentially rejuvenate flagging fish populations, trap atmospheric carbon dioxide and lower the Earth's albedo. That's a hell of a way to hack the planet. Except no-one's sure if it actually works yet, with iron or nitrogen.

Now Australian geoengineers Ian Jones and Associate Professor Rob Wheen, both of Sydney University, want to inject 2.5 tonnes of nitrogen-rich urea into a controlled area of the sea and try to replicate the effect. They claim that nourishing a 20km wide patch of water could significantly boost catch numbers for small-scale artisanal fishing industries.

The process still very controversial, and the act of massively changing the makeup of the biosphere is practically begging for algae to take over the ocean as we know it and start belching sulfurous fumes into the air. Jones is also the head of the Ocean Nourishment Corporation, a private group who are attempting to use urea to boost phytoplankton numbers, and gain carbon credits to sell, which perhaps makes him a less than unbiased figure to ask about the whole topic.

Still, the Sydney dust storms have given us the first solid evidence that ocean nourishment can affect algae blooms. And as far as geoengineering goes, ocean fertilization uses techniques and technology readily available. If the mechanisms of action are shown to be effective, Jones and Wheen's project could be rolled out easily. The research on it is already underway, and it's now a working concept. Your oceans could be massively reengineered soon, without requiring significant hardware developments.

Dust storm triggers ocean bloom [ABC Science]

In a paper published in Nature this week, a group of scientists explain that boreal forests emit hydrocarbons called "volatile monoterpene compounds," some of which cause the distinct smell of a pine forest. These are all basically particles that float into the clouds, and interact with ozone and other compounds to form small, semi-liquid droplets called cloud condensation nucleii (CCN). The key here is that monoterpene causes more of these CCN droplets to form, which are what make the clouds so reflective. Essentially, it's just sunlight reflecting off water held together with other chemicals.

So if these giant pine forests are always emitting so many monoterpenes, why would the Earth ever warm up? The problem is a compound that comes from deciduous trees and other vegetation called isoprene. Isoprene cancels out monoterpene, and causes fewer of those reflective droplets to form. As the climate changes, it's likely we'll see more of the kinds of plants that make isoprene, and fewer that make monoterpene.

The obvious solution is geoengineering. Why not synthesize a reasonable quantity of monoterpenes and seed the clouds with them? It's a naturally-occurring chemical which would normally float up to the clouds anyway. And it would encourage the production of reflective droplets in our cloud cover, thus reflecting back more sunlight and lowering temperatures.

Either that, or let's start boreal farms whose sole purpose is cloud engineering.

via Nature

Photo by peterkelly

The farm is called Horns Rev 2, and was commissioned by the Danish utility Dong Energy.

The farm is spread over 35 kilometers, and generates 209 megawatts - enough to power 200,000 homes, Dong Energy estimates.

Made by German company Siemans, the 91 turbines, combined with labor and setup, cost $1 billion.

Here is the platform where tourists can stay - the hotel is the boxy container on the right. It will also house 24 on-site workers for maintenance. According to the New York Times:

Andris Piebalgs, the European Union energy commissioner, said on Monday that a study by the European Wind Energy Association showed offshore wind could be the dominant source of employment in the sector in Europe by 2025, providing 200,000 jobs.

And here is what the farm looked like during construction.

This picture first surfaced on the DotEarth blog, where Henry Fountain explains:

Camera traps are used by conservationists to document the presence of animals that because of their rarity, behavior or other factors would otherwise be seldom seen. The basic trap consists of a camera and a means of triggering it - often an infrared device or some other motion sensor.

What makes this photograph so amazing is that this endangered big cat has been captured so clearly, looking wild and cute at the same time. Often, because camera traps are automated, all you get is a blur or just, as CuteOverload would say, "the tocks."

The camera trap was set by the Wildlife Conservation Society, which hopes to turn the region where this fluffy creature was found into a preservation area.

via DotEarth

Back in the good old days, kids inhaled nitrous oxide out of whip cream canisters without a care in the world. But, according to geochemist A.R. Ravishankara, "manmade nitrous oxide is now the elephant in the room among ozone-depleting substances." It causes more ozone destruction in the upper atmosphere than any other form of emission - and according to the atmospheric models created by Ravishankara and his team, the gas is likely to linger in the atmosphere for the rest of the century.

According to their study, nitrous oxide is dangerous because it comes from natural sources as well as human-made ones:

Nitrous oxide is emitted from livestock manure, sewage treatment, combustion and certain other industrial processes. Dentists use it as a sedative (so-called "laughing gas"). In nature, bacteria in soil and the oceans break down nitrogen-containing compounds, releasing nitrous oxide. About one-third of global nitrous oxide emissions are from human activities. Nitrous oxide, like chlorofluorocarbons, is stable when emitted at ground level, but breaks down when it reaches the stratosphere to form other gases, called nitrogen oxides, that trigger ozone-destroying reactions.

So now you know. Every hit you take on that nitrous cracker is killing the Earth.

via Science

Image via CelebrateNothing.

Matt Staggs, a literary publicist who specializes in speculative fiction, has put forth a "GreenPunk Manifesto," to define the concept and his hopes for a possible eco-friendly fiction movement:

GreenPunk: a technophilic spec-fic movement centered on characters using and being affected by the use of DIY renewable resources, recycling and repurposing. GreenPunk would emphasize the ability of the individual – and his or her responsibility – for positive ecological and social change.

Rejecting steampunk's romanticism while embracing its focus on approachable, "knowable" technology (as opposed to the "black box" nature of digital tech), GreenPunk envisions a world in which the detritus of consumer culture as propogated by the Elite is appropriated and repurposed by the masses toward the reconstruction of a devastated ecology and the address of social ills.

What Staggs misses, however, is the design component that has made steampunk so popular. Because it's rooted to a particular aesthetic, steampunk is easy to recognize and simple for enthusiasts to replicate. Staggs is trying to compile a list of novels and stories that fit within his definition of greenpunk, but he might do better to work with designers and solicit images as well.

A GreenPunk Manifesto [Enter the Octopus]

The study, published today in PLoS One, is the result of work on climate modeling based on likely climate change in California's Central Valley. Researchers project that the region will lose more than half its winter chill by the year 2100. From the study:

Winter chill determines the ability of many deciduous trees from temperate climates to break their dormancy in the spring. Each species or cultivar has a specific chilling requirement, which if not met results in erratic growth patterns and economically unsuccessful fruit or nut production.

The authors used modeled temperature records for two past and 18 future climate scenarios and calculated the amount of safe winter chill that will be exceeded in 90 percent of all years for each scenario. Their findings indicate that imminent climatic change is likely to make most of California's Central Valley, which annually produces 1.2 million hectares of tree crops with chilling requirements and produces valued at about 9 billion dollars, unsuitable for many crops such as walnuts, cherries, prunes and peaches. Pistachios and almonds might also be affected.

What this means is that one of California's greatest sources of income will be strongly affected. Plus, many other regions will suffer since so many communities depend on California exports for fruits and nuts throughout the year.

Professor Minghua Zhang, whor worked on the study, said:

Depending on the pace of winter chill decline, the consequences for California's fruit and nut industries could be devastating.

Get ready for the post-farm California apocalypse. Without fruit exports, the main export from Central California could become some futuristic crystal meth. Of course if we're lucky, scientists will come up with GMO fruits and nuts that can bloom even with warmer winters.

via PLoS One

Image by Bill Sharp.

Researchers at the UK National Oceanography Centre have inspected samples from arctic sea floors, discovering that these floors used to teem with life. The samples were replete with a type of algae called diatoms. These diatoms serve as a low rung on the food chain for larger, more complex ecosystems. Other studies suggest that sharks and larger fish once called the warmed arctic their home.

If arctic temperatures continue their upward trend, the arctic ocean floors will be covered in this food source again. As a result, creatures that consume these diatoms could move in during the summer, making the summer arctic oceans as biologically rich as southern oceans.

No word yet on when construction begins for the first arctic beach resort.

Warming arctic could teem with life by 2030 [via NewScientist]

Further reading: Images of the Arctic Ocean as We Will Know It

In this detail from the image, you can see where Baghdad is supposed to be. But the city is entirely obscured by dust. So are most of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

Dust storms are not uncommon for the hotter months in Iraq. A recent drought has made the land drier than usual, giving the seasonal summer winds more fuel for violent and dramatic storms like these.

NASA has also provided a short animation showing how the storm developed over a huge area. Now all the middle east needs to fully resemble Dune are giant sand-worms and complex politics. Or maybe just the worms.

Dust Storm over Iraq [NASA Earth Observatory]

According to BBC News:

In Europe, one vast colony of Argentine ants is thought to stretch for 6,000km (3,700 miles) along the Mediterranean coast, while another in the US, known as the "Californian large", extends over 900km (560 miles) along the coast of California. A third huge colony exists on the west coast of Japan.

While ants are usually highly territorial, those living within each super-colony are tolerant of one another, even if they live tens or hundreds of kilometres apart. Each super-colony, however, was thought to be quite distinct.

But it now appears that billions of Argentine ants around the world all actually belong to one single global mega-colony. Researchers in Japan and Spain led by Eiriki Sunamura of the University of Tokyo found that Argentine ants living in Europe, Japan and California shared a strikingly similar chemical profile of hydrocarbons on their cuticles . . . "The enormous extent of this population is paralleled only by human society," the researchers write in the journal Insect Sociaux, in which they report their findings.

The real question is, do the ants have a plan?

via BBC News

The design contest had five categories: Overall, Best Picture, Aesthetics, Personality, and Community Choice. (The winners from each category are shown in this post in that particular order, so the first design up top is the Overall winner, the one to the right is Best Picture, and so on.) With prizes ranging from $250 to $1000, the design contest attracted both amateur and professional architects from around the world, as the winners hailed from such far-flung locales as Estonia, Hungary, Brazil, and Minnesota.



Seasteading, a term derived from combining "sea" and "homesteading", is a general term given to the notion of either converting existing structures, such as old boats or disused oil rigs, or custom-building new ones to allow people to live in the middle of the ocean. Generally, this also includes the interrelated goal of establishing a sovereign state on the open seas, away from any existing governmental structures on dry land. Patri Friedman and Wayne Gramlich - whose 1998 article "Seasteading – Homesteading on the High Seas" is generally given credit for popularizing the term - founded the Seasteading Institute in 2008 in order to better organize the seasteading effort.


Perhaps the most famous - and, to some extent, the only - example of successful seasteading is the microstate of Sealand, which started life as the World War II sea fort HM Fort Roughs. Located six miles off the coast of Suffolk, Sealand was occupied by Roy Bates and his family in 1967. Crowning himself Prince Roy, Bates declared the disused fort to be the independent Principality of Sealand. Although the "country" is only the size of about two tennis courts, the Bates family has lived on the desolate fort for much of the last four decades. As one might well imagine, Sealand's history is about as eccentric as it origins, including an attempted invasion by a group of German and Dutch entrepreneurs in 1978, which forced the exiled Prince Roy to take up arms to reclaim his country. (How that hasn't become a movie yet is completely beyond me.)


Sealand's story is well worth reading up on, as it's just about the only topic I know of that can make the differences between de jure and de facto diplomatic recognition absolutely fascinating. Still, the question remains what, if any, long-term viability seasteading has. The success of the Bates family at least suggests it's possible to exist out on the open sea with limited government oversight (although the British government did still handle all the mail sent to Sealand), and the Seasteading Institute has raised over 500,000 dollars in support of their work. Of course, whether that would be enough to build even a fraction of any of these designs is an open question. In the meantime, at least we can take some small comfort in the fact that, should Waterworld ever prove terrifyingly realistic, at least a few people will be well prepared.

[The Seasteading Institute]

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