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Publication: The Guardian Author: Suzanne Goldenberg 03/12/2012 - When it comes to drilling for oil in the harsh and unpredictable Arctic, Shell has gone to the dogs, it seems. A dachshund and two border collies to be specific. The dogs' ability to sniff out oil spills beneath snow and ice has been tested and paid for by Shell - and other oil companies and government research organisations - in preparation for the industry's entry into the forbidding Arctic terrain. The company hopes to begin drilling for oil off the north-west coast of Alaska in June. ... Others said the study should be an embarrassment to the industry. "This is another example of how we do not have adequate science and technology yet to drill in the Arctic Ocean - particularly in ice," Marilyn Heiman, the director of the US Arctic Programme for the Pew Environment Group said in an email. "It is embarrassing that using dogs to sniff out oil is the best technology we have to track oil under ice. Industry needs to invest in research to determine how to track oil under ice, as well as significantly improve spill response capability in ice, before [being] allowed to drill in ice conditions."

Scientists researching harmful algal bloom "hot spots" off southern and central California have been awarded $821,673 for the first year of an anticipated 5-year $4,076,929 project to investigate methods that could provide early warning detection of the toxic blooms, also known as red tides. The research is being conducted in partnership with two U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System partners - the Central and Northern California Ocean Observing System and the Southern California Coastal Ocean Observing System. The teams will combine the detection and monitoring of the toxic blooms with ocean models that can forecast ocean conditions, potentially leading to bloom predictions.

"Abstract The Phanerozoic fossil record of marine animal diversity covaries with the amount of marine sedimentary rock. The extent to which this covariation reflects a geologically controlled sampling bias remains unknown. We show that Phanerozoic records of seawater chemistry and continental flooding contain information on the diversity of marine animals that is independent of sedimentary rock quantity and sampling. Interrelationships among variables suggest long-term interactions among continental flooding, sulfur and carbon cycling, and macroevolution. Thus, mutual responses to interacting Earth systems, not sampling biases, explain much of the observed covariation between Phanerozoic patterns of sedimentation and fossil biodiversity. Linkages between biodiversity and environmental records likely reflect complex biotic responses to changing ocean redox conditions and long-term sea-level fluctuations driven by plate tectonics. "

"Friday, December 14th, 2007 Coral in Crisis Bleached corals on coral reef on southern Great Barrier Reef in January 2002. Coral bleaching primarily affects reef building corals when conditions get too warm. Image © Science The world's coral reefs are in great danger, threatened by climate change and rising carbon dioxide levels. In an article published in the journal Science, researchers provide provide three different scenarios for the fate of reef-building corals worldwide as they face higher concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide and the related ocean acidification that slows coral calcification, the process needed for a reef to grow. Increasing CO2 levels have the potential to greatly shift the chemistry of ocean waters, threatening the existence of most coral species. "

"Slowing climate change requires overcoming inertia in political, technological, and geophysical systems. Of these, only geophysical warming commitment has been quantified. We estimated the commitment to future emissions and warming represented by existing carbon dioxide-emitting devices. We calculated cumulative future emissions of 496 (282 to 701 in lower- and upper-bounding scenarios) gigatonnes of CO2 from combustion of fossil fuels by existing infrastructure between 2010 and 2060, forcing mean warming of 1.3°C (1.1° to 1.4°C) above the pre-industrial era and atmospheric concentrations of CO2 less than 430 parts per million. Because these conditions would likely avoid many key impacts of climate change, we conclude that sources of the most threatening emissions have yet to be built. However, CO2-emitting infrastructure will expand unless extraordinary efforts are undertaken to develop alternatives. "

Aerosols Altered Asian Monsoons Summer monsoons provide much of the water for farming on the Indian subcontinent, but the pattern of rain shifted dramatically during the last half of the 20th century. In a study appearing online 29 September in Science, researchers pin the blame on soot and other aerosols from human activities. From 1951 to 1999, central-northern India became drier while Pakistan, northwestern India, and southern India got wetter. To determine whether these changes were due to natural variability or human interference (greenhouse gases or aerosols), climate scientists Massimo Bollasina, Yi Ming, and V. Ramaswamy of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory/NOAA in Princeton, New Jersey, compared the history of rainfall with simulations that singled out each climate "forcing" factor to observe its impact. Although greenhouse gases would have increased rainfall over north-central India, the aerosols, they found, caused the "very pronounced drying trend," Ming says. Here's why: Under normal conditions, the northern hemisphere receives more energy from the sun from June to September; that imbalance drives the ocean-atmosphere circulation that powers the monsoons. But atmospheric aerosols shaded the northern hemisphere relative to the southern hemisphere, altering the energy balance between the two-weakening the circulation and altering where the rain falls.

"The Orangeburg Scarp, a band of hard, crusty sediment teeming with tiny plankton fossils that runs from Florida to Virginia, marks an ancient shoreline where waves eroded bedrock 3 million years ago. That period, the middle Pliocene, saw carbon dioxide levels and temperatures that many scientists say could recur by 2100. The question is: Could those conditions also result in Pliocene-epoch sea levels within the next 10 to 20 centuries, sea levels that may have been as much as 35 meters higher than they are today? The answer, say climate scientists, may lie 17,000 kilometers away in East Antarctica. The East Antarctic Ice Sheet is the world's largest, a formation up to 4 km thick and 11 million km2 in area that covers three-quarters of the southernmost continent. Its glaciers were thought to sit mostly above sea level, protecting them from the type of ocean-induced losses that are affecting the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. But studies of ancient sea levels that focus on the Orangeburg Scarp and other sites challenge that long-held assumption. Not everybody believes the records from Orangeburg. But combined with several other new lines of evidence, they support the idea that parts of East Antarctica could indeed be more prone to melting than expected. "

A major puzzle of paleoclimatology is why, after a long interval of cooling climate, each late Quaternary ice age ended with a relatively short warming leg called a termination. We here offer a comprehensive hypothesis of how Earth emerged from the last global ice age. A prerequisite was the growth of very large Northern Hemisphere ice sheets, whose subsequent collapse created stadial conditions that disrupted global patterns of ocean and atmospheric circulation. The Southern Hemisphere westerlies shifted poleward during each northern stadial, producing pulses of ocean upwelling and warming that together accounted for much of the termination in the Southern Ocean and Antarctica. Rising atmospheric CO2 during southern upwelling pulses augmented warming during the last termination in both polar hemispheres.