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Greenland glacier calves island 4 times the size of Manhattan - 0 views

  • Greenland glacier calves island 4 times the size of Manhattan
  • A University of Delaware researcher reports that an “ice island” four times the size of Manhattan has calved from Greenland's Petermann Glacier. The last time the Arctic lost such a large chunk of ice was in 1962.
  • “In the early morning hours of August 5, 2010, an ice island four times the size of Manhattan was born in northern Greenland,” said Andreas Muenchow, associate professor of physical ocean science and engineering at the University of Delaware's College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment.
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  • Satellite imagery of this remote area at 81 degrees N latitude and 61 degrees W longitude, about 620 miles [1,000 km] south of the North Pole, reveals that Petermann Glacier lost about one-quarter of its 43-mile long [70 km] floating ice-shel
  • The new ice island has an area of at least 100 square miles and a thickness up to half the height of the Empire State Building. “The freshwater stored in this ice island could keep the Delaware or Hudson rivers flowing for more than two years. It could also keep all U.S. public tap water
  • The last time such a massive ice island formed was in 1962 when Ward Hunt Ice Shelf calved a 230 square-mile island, smaller pieces of which became lodged between real islands inside Nares Strait. Petermann Glacier spawned smaller ice islands in 2001 (34 square miles) and 2008 (10 square miles). In 2005, the Ayles Ice Shelf disintegrated and became an ice island (34 square miles) about 60 miles to the west of Petermann Fjord.
Hunter Cutting

Small islands coping with inches of sea-level rise, with higher waves supplying sand an... - 0 views

  • islands are coping with sea-level change, with higher waves and water depth supplying sand and gravel from coral reefs.
  • study shows the islands are coping with sea-level change, with higher waves and water depth supplying sand and gravel from coral reefs.
  • "In other words, they (the islands) are slowly moving ... migrating across their reef platforms," he said. "As the sea-level conditions and wave conditions are changing, the islands are adjusting to that."
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  • an accelerated rate of sea-level rise could be "the critical environmental threat to the small island nations," with "a very rapid rate of island destruction" possible from a water depth beyond a certain threshold. That threshold is unknown.
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    An Associated Press story on a widely mis-reported science study on the impact of climate change on small coral atolls in the south Pacific.
Hunter Cutting

Rising sea drives Panama islanders to mainland - 0 views

  • Rising seas from global warming, coming after years of coral reef destruction, are forcing thousands of indigenous Panamanians to leave their ancestral homes on low-lying Caribbean islands. Seasonal winds, storms and high tides combine to submerge the tiny islands, crowded with huts of yellow cane and faded palm fronds, leaving them ankle-deep in emerald water for days on end.Pablo Preciado, leader of the island of Carti Sugdub, remembers that in his childhood floods were rare, brief and barely wetted his toes. "Now it's something else. It's serious," he said.
  • The increase of a few inches in flood depth is consistent with a global sea level rise over Preciado's 64 years of life and has been made worse by coral mining by the islanders that reduced a buffer against the waves.Carti Sugdub is one of a handful of islands in an archipelago off Panama's northeastern coast, where the government says climate change threatens the livelihood of nearly half of the 32,000 semi-autonomous Kuna people.The 2,000 inhabitants of Carti Sugdub plan to move to coastal areas within the Kuna's autonomous territory on the Panama mainland. They are eyeing foothills a half-hour walk from the swampy beach areas."The water level is rising. The move is imminent," said Preciado, who has been leading a group of villagers clearing tropical forest for the new settlement.
  • "This is no longer about a scientist saying that climate change and the change in sea level will flood (a people) and affect them," said Hector Guzman, a marine biologist and coral specialist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. "This is happening now in the real world."
Hunter Cutting

New England's oaks and hemlocks falling to pests as region warms - 0 views

  • Spring did not come for the oaks of Martha's Vineyard. For three years, the residents here watched a stunning outbreak of caterpillars that stripped an oak tree bare in a week, then wafted on gossamer threads to another.  In the denuded branches, scientists see a fingerprint of climate change - and a pattern of things to come. The islanders fought through clouds of drifting filaments with brooms, brushed off the showers of excrement after they walked under trees, and tiptoed through a maze of half-inch worms on the sidewalks. The local newspapers ran pictures of building sides covered with caterpillars, looking like horror-movie outtakes. 
  • Spring did not come for the oaks of Martha's Vineyard. For three years, the residents here watched a stunning outbreak of caterpillars that stripped an oak tree bare in a week, then wafted on gossamer threads to another. 
  • In the denuded branches, scientists see a fingerprint of climate change - and a pattern of things to come.
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  • Scientists see a fingerprint of climate change in the denuded branches, and a pattern of things to come. The effects of climate change, they say, are unlikely to be gradual or predictable. Warming winters will throw into confusion old orders of species, nurturing unexpected predators and weakening age-old relationships that helped form forests.
  • "They were gross," recalled Barbara Hoffman, 53, with a visible shudder. "You could hear them munching. I said spray 'em." Most trees recovered in the first year; fewer survived the second. But as the bugs struck again in late 2007, an accomplice drought hit the weakened trees, leaving the island now with swaths of stark, barren and lifeless branches.
  • The islanders fought through clouds of drifting filaments with brooms, brushed off the showers of excrement after they walked under trees, and tiptoed through a maze of half-inch worms on the sidewalks. The local newspapers ran pictures of building sides covered with caterpillars, looking like horror-movie outtakes.
  • "You can get unexpected dynamics in nature as we generate new combinations with climate change," said David Foster, director of the Harvard Forest, who heads a research group financed by the National Science Foundation to study the Martha's Vineyard die-off
  • In New England, the majestic hemlocks that were grist for Longfellow and Frost are doomed by the steady advance of a pest in warmer winters. "To see hundreds of acres of dead forest like this in New England is remarkable," said Foster.
  • Farther north and west in Massachusetts, Foster and others are studying the devastation of the stately hemlocks.  An insect brought from Japan, called the hemlock woolly adelgid, is moving steadily northward into New England. It already has infested much of the US South, bringing what forestry officials call "an ecological disaster" to the iconic Great Smokey Mountains and Blue Ridge Parkway. With warmer temperatures in New England-some studies put the average winter increase at 4 degrees in 40 years-the pest is advancing. "The northward spread is being kept in check by cold winters. As winters warm, which is what is projected, that all falls apart," said Wyatt Oswald, an assistant professor of science at Emerson college who is studying the hemlocks. "At some point, climate change will allow all these hemlock to be wiped out."
  • Certainly the residents here were perplexed at the caterpillar outbreaks from 2004 to 2007. Although several insects were at work, the prime culprit was eventually identified as a fall cankerworm, a long-time resident of the island that no one recalled having done more than minimal damage. This outbreak was a full-fledged invasion.
  • "It was disgusting," said Jason Gale, 39. He recalls glancing back at the island from his lobster boat, and being shocked by the stretches of dead trees.
Hunter Cutting

12 Malaysian coral reefs hit by bleaching are closed to tourists - 0 views

  • Nine marine park islands and three islands off Langkawi, Terengganu and Pahang are closed to tourists from July 2 to Oct 31 due to coral bleaching.Marine Parks Department director-general Abdul Jamal Mydin said the coral degradation, which was caused by global warming, was worse than in 1998.He said in Langkawi, the authorities decided to close Teluk Wangi, Pantai Damai, and Coral Garden in Pulau Payar while in Terengganu - Pulau Redang, Teluk Bakau, Pulau Tenggol, Teluk Air Tawar, Pulau Perhentian Besar and Teluk Dalam.There other islands are in Pahang, namely Pulau Rengis, Pulau Tumok and Pulau Soyak, he told a news conference after attending a meeting on the quagmire on Wednesday.
  • Abdul Jamal said more than 500,000 local and foreign tourists visited the marine parks every year.On Pulau Payar, he said visitors to island would be reduced by 50 per cent to 200 as a controlled measure and to reduce stress on the coral reef.
Hunter Cutting

Thousands emigrate as seas rise over Sunderbans - 0 views

  • Another community likewise affected equally, if not more, by climate change is the one which inhabits the Tropics in the Sunderban forests. Straddling the massive delta of Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna on the Bay of Bengal spreading across India and Bangladesh, Sunderbans are spread over an area of more than 10000 square kilometres. More than half of it has the world’s largest mangrove forests which have been declared as two different World Heritage Sites for the two countries. The forests are a
  • Another community likewise affected equally, if not more, by climate change is the one which inhabits the Tropics in the Sunderban forests. Straddling the massive delta of Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna on the Bay of Bengal spreading across India and Bangladesh, Sunderbans are spread over an area of more than 10000 square kilometres. More than half of it has the world’s largest mangrove forests which have been declared as two different World Heritage Sites for the two countries. The forests are also home to a substantial population of the threatened Royal Bengal Tiger.
  • A 2007 report of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (UNESCO) said that a 45 centimetres anthropogenic rise in the sea level by the end of the current century is likely to destroy 75 per cent of the Sunderban mangroves within the current century. However, certain inhabited islands have already disappeared having been overtaken by the sea. Among them are Lohachara and the New Moore islands. Another island, Ghoramara, has lost around half of its landmass turning more than half of the Island’s population of 12000 into climate refugees. They have all fled – some to the mainland and others elsewhere in Sunderbans. The remaining have had to give up cultivation in the fertile soil or gathering honey from the jungle and have taken to fishing. Researchers have heard the same story retold everywhere in the Sunderbans. As the sea-water comes in floods it destroys the crops, the soil takes on the sea’s salinity and renders it unproductive. Moving away and looking for a safer place is the only alternative to cope with the rising sea. Of late, such movements have, however, had to become devastatingly more frequent, stressing the once-simple rhythm of life of these poor people.
Hunter Cutting

New Moore Island lost to sea level rise - 0 views

  • From Africa to the Himalayas, everyone's worried about global warming's potential to drive world conflict. But what about the disputes it will solve? A long-running argument between India and Bangladesh over a small island in the Bay of Bengal has just been resolved: the island's not there anymore: 
  • New Moore Island [also known as South Talpatti] in the Sunderbans has been completely submerged, said oceanographer Sugata Hazra, a professor at Jadavpur University in Calcutta. Its disappearance has been confirmed by satellite imagery and sea patrols, he said. "What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking, has been resolved by global warming," said Hazra.
Hunter Cutting

Puffins decline on Forth island linked to sea temperature increase - 0 views

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    Caledonian Mercury: "Tree mallow is native to the south coast of England and was brought to the Bass Rock by ships in the 17th century. It gradually spread to the other islands of the Forth - reaching Craigleith in the 1950s and Fidra in the 1990s - but it was not extensive until the warmer climate of recent years encouraged its growth."
Hunter Cutting

Rhode Island floods prompt cold water phytoplankton surge - 0 views

  • Torrential rains last month in Rhode Island led to widespread flooding, causing millions of dollars in property damage and leaving thousands homeless. The floodwaters also overwhelmed water treatment plants, spilling vast amounts of raw sewage into the rivers and streams that flow into Narragansett Bay. It sounds like the makings of an environmental nightmare, but in fact it’s just the opposite. To scientists’ delight, the sewage-laden floodwaters have caused a well-timed bloom of phytoplankton, the microscopic creatures that form the foundation of marine food chains. With more food available for fish, clams and other sea creatures, the bay’s fisheries industry is expected to benefit. The timing of the rains was fortuitous. In decades past, Narragansett Bay typically experienced a late winter/early spring algal bloom that fed creatures up and down the water column. But in recent years, the waters of Narragansett Bay have warmed greatly, interrupting this seasonal event. In particular, bottom-feeding fish like the flounder have suffered dramatic declines. The surge of freshwater and nutrient-rich sewage this spring, however, is mimicking the conditions of years past. Mark Berman, an oceanographer with the National Marine Fisheries Service, said the flood seemed to have sent the bay back to its  normal state.
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    In Fearsome Floods, a Dividend - Green Blog - NYTimes.com
Hunter Cutting

Records fall again in U.S. East Coast heat wave - 0 views

  • The eastern U.S. cooked for another day Wednesday as unrelenting heat again sent thermometers past 100 degrees in urban "heat islands," buckled roads, slowed trains and pushed utilities toward the limit of the electrical grid's capacity.
  • Records fall again in East as heat swelters on
  • Philadelphia hit 100 degrees for second straight day, breaking a record of 98 degrees set in 1999. Baltimore hit 100 for the third straight day and Newark, N.J., hit triple digits for the fourth straight day. New York's Central Park was at 99 degrees at 2 p.m.
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  • Scattered power outages affected customers up and down the coast and usage approached record
  • levels. In the Washington, D.C., area, nearly 1,000 customers were without power Wednesday, while New Jersey's largest utility, Public Service Electric & Gas, reported about 6,300 customers without power. Consolidated Edison in New York said it was working to restore power to about 6,300 customers, down from outages to 18,700 customers Tuesday.
  • The heat also forced nursing homes with power problems to evacuate and buckled highways near Albany and in the Philadelphia area. On New York's Long Island, a radio station was distributing free bottled water to day laborers, while human services workers in Pittsburgh were doing the same for the homeless there.
  • Transportation officials cut the speed of commuter trains in suburban Washington, D.C., and New York when the tracks got too hot. Extreme heat can cause welded rails to bend under pressure. Some New Jersey trains were canceled and rail-riders were advised to expect delays.
  • In Park Ridge, N.J., police evacuated a nursing home and rehabilitation center after an electrical line burned out Tuesday evening. In Maryland, health officials moved all 150 residents out of a Baltimore nursing home whose operators didn't report a broken air conditioner. The state learned of the home's troubles when a resident called 911 Tuesday
  • Residents of two Rhode Island beach towns, Narragansett and South Kingstown, were hit with an added layer of inconvenience: They were banned from using water outdoors and were asked to boil and cool their water before using it. The high temperatures combined with the busy holiday weekend for tourists created higher-than-expected demand, causing water pressure to drop and increasing the chance of contamination.
  • With people cranking up their air conditioners Wednesday, Valley Forge, Pa.-based PJM Interconnection — which operates the largest electrical grid in the U.S. — urged users to conserve electricity as much as possible, especially in the peak afternoon hours. PJM's grid covers about 51 million people in 13 states and the District of Columbia.
  • Meteorologists in some places began calling the current hot stretch a heat wave, defined in the Northeast as three consecutive days of temperatures of 90 or above.
Hunter Cutting

U.S. cities experiencing surge in hot days - 0 views

  • The study, which looked at the number of very hot days in 53 U.S. metro area between 1956 and 2005, says the number of very hot days is on the rise globally, but the rate of increase is more than double in the most sprawling regions compared with more compact cities. This was true regardless of the urban regions’ climate zone, population size or rate of growth. The annual number of very hot days increased by 14.8 days on average in the regions with the most sprawl and by 5.6 days in the least sprawling cities, according to the study.
  • Between 1992 and 2001, the rate of deforestation in the most sprawling regions was more than double that of compact regions, the study noted. Other studies have shown that the loss of vegetative cover is one of the main reasons that cities become much hotter than surrounding areas.
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    Global warming is compounded by the urban heat island effect which has been worse in sprawling cities that have lost their forest/vegetation cover
Hunter Cutting

Recording setting June temps across the U.S. fits climate trend - 0 views

  • New daily high temperature records were set in many cities, with June 2010 ranking as the hottest June on record for Delaware, New Jersey, and North Carolina.
  • The unusual warmth in the highly populated South and Southeast resulted in the second highest June REDTI value in the 116-year record. For the first half of 2010, large footprints of extreme wetness (more than three times the average footprint), warm minimum temperatures ("warm overnight lows"), and areas experiencing heavy 1-day precipitation events resulted in a Climate Extremes Index (CEI) that was about 6 percent higher than the historical average.
  • The nationally-averaged temperature for June was much warmer than normal. A deep layer of high pressure dominated much of the eastern United States
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  • The Southeast, South and Central regions experienced their second, fifth and seventh warmest June on record, respectively.
  • Record-warm June temperatures were observed in Delaware, New Jersey and North Carolina (tied), where each had average temperatures 5 to 6 degrees F above the long-term mean. Many other states ranked in their top ten based on 116 years of data.
  • Midway through 2010, four New England states (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Rhode Island) have experienced their warmest January-June period on record. Eight other states in the Northeast and Great Lakes areas had a top-ten warm such period.
  • Persistent warmth made the year's second quarter (April-June) much warmer than normal for every state east of the Mississippi River, and several to its west. Louisiana and ten Atlantic Seaboard states (Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Delaware, Rhode Island, Connecticut [tied], New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina) had a record-warm second quarter. In all, twenty states had their warmest or second-warmest such period on record. The warmth in these areas contributed to both the Northeast and Southeast climate regions' warmest April-June period.
Hunter Cutting

Grey Whale reaches Spain through ice-free Arctic - 0 views

  • The wandering grey whale that bewildered scientists after appearing off the coast of Israel last month is now paying a visit to northeastern Spain.The sighting near Barcelona Harbour means the whale, believed to be one that would normally swim past Vancouver Island, travelled about 3,000 kilometres since it was last spotted 23 days earlier.
  • Although scientists have not been able to positively identify where the 12-metre whale came from, the most likely scenario is that it's part of the population that would normally swim past Vancouver Island, migrating from birthing lagoons in Mexico to the Bering Sea, and that it swam through the Northwest Passage in an increasingly ice-free Arctic.
  • There is speculation the whale was following food -- some observers say there are signs populations are dropping, possibly because warming waters mean less food. The tiny marine life they thrive on needs cooler temperatures to survive.
Hunter Cutting

Sea level rise particularly high for Bay of Bengal, Arabian Sea, Sri Lanka, Sumatra and... - 0 views

  • Sea-Le
  • Sea-Level Rise in Indian Ocean Observed
  • A new study concludes that Indian Ocean sea levels are rising unevenly and threatening residents in some densely populated coastal areas and islands. The study, led by scientists at the University of Colorado (CU) at Boulder and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., finds that the sea-level rise is at least partly a result of climate change.
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  • Sea-level rise is particularly high along the coastlines of the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea, as well as the islands of Sri Lanka, Sumatra and Java, the authors found. The key player in the process is the Indo-Pacific warm pool, an enormous, bathtub-shaped area spanning a huge region of the tropical oceans stretching from the east coast of Africa to the International Date Line in the Pacific. The warm pool has heated by about 1 degree Fahrenheit, or 0.5 degrees Celsius, in the past 50 years, primarily because of human-generated emissions in greenhouse gases.
Hunter Cutting

Mango production in Philippines hit by erratic weather attributed to climate change - 0 views

  • Aside from the possible sinking of many parts of Iloilo, Alvarez noted that climate change has started affecting the mango production on the island of Guimaras, resulting to losses among mango farmers. In 2009 the National Mango Research and Development Center (NMRDC) reported that erratic weather pattern, which has been attributed to climate change, has already taken its toll on the production of the “sweetest” mango in the world.
  • Rhod Orquia, junior researcher at the NMRDC, said mango production in Guimaras is being threatened by climate change, since the shifting trend in the onset of rains already affects the planting process and harvesting schedule of mangoes.
Hunter Cutting

Arctic sea ice at record low for June - 0 views

  • Average June ice extent was the lowest in the satellite data record, from 1979 to 2010. Arctic air temperatures were higher than normal, and Arctic sea ice continued to decline at a fast pace. June saw the return of the Arctic dipole anomaly, an atmospheric pressure pattern that contributed to the record sea ice loss in 2007.
  • At the end of May 2010, daily ice extent fell below the previous record low for May, recorded in 2006, and during June continued to track at record low levels
  • The linear rate of monthly decline for June over the 1979 to 2010 period is now 3.5% per decade. This year’s daily June rate of decline was the fastest in the satellite record; the previous record for the fastest rate of June decline was set in 1999
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  • Ron Kwok of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) reports that Nares Strait, the narrow passageway between northwest Greenland and Ellesmere Island is clear of the ice “arch" that usually plugs southward transport of the old, thick ice in the Lincoln Sea. Typically the ice arch forms in winter and breaks up in early July. This year the arch formed around March 15th and lasted only 56 days, breaking up in May. In 2007 the ice arch did not form at all, allowing twice as much export through Nares Strait than the annual mean. Although the export of sea ice out of the Arctic Ocean through Nares Strait is very small in comparison to the export through Fram Strait, the Lincoln Sea contains some of the Arctic’s thickest ice.
Hunter Cutting

Temps up, rainfall down in Hawaii - 0 views

  • Global warming is already leading to rising temperatures in the mountains and declining rainfall in Hawaii, climate change experts said at a meeting Friday. Temperatures at Hawaii's higher elevations are rising faster than the global average, said Deanna Spooner, coordinator of the Pacific Islands Climate Change Cooperative. "It's getting hotter here faster than anywhere else in the world up in the upper elevations," Spooner said at the Honolulu meeting of the federal Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force.
Hunter Cutting

Cross-Breed Grizzly-Polar Bear Offspring confirmed - 0 views

  • Scientists from the Northwest Territories confirmed that a bear spotted by Inuit hunter David Kuptana on April 8 is a second-generation hybrid. DNA tests made by the NWT Environment and Natural Resources said the animal is a grizzly-polar bear cross breed.
  • The polar bear features of the animal were its creamy white fur, while its grizzly features were the big head, long claws and a ring of brown hair around its hind. It is being billed as the first recorded second-generation grolar in the area. The department said the grolar was the offspring of a polar/grizzly female with a male grizzly bear.
  • The cross-breeding of the two species is believed to have been caused by global warming, which have prompted the grizzlies to move to the north, which is polar bear territory. The first sighting of a grolar was in 2006 in Banks Island by an American hunter.
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