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Webcast: 'We Sea Change,' a Climate Change Education Video 0 What is climate change, and how is it affecting coastal Carolina? That is the question that a group of teens from Isaac Bear Early College High School set out to answer for their Third National Student Summit on the Ocean & Coasts project. Representing the North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher, four teens spent months researching climate change issues such as salt water intrusion in rivers, changes to barrier islands, disappearing beaches, and habitat loss in longleaf pine forests in the Wilmington, N.C., region. The students presented a video documenting this research during the National Student Summit on February 15, 2011 at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. After the Summit, the team broadened the project's scope to include climate change education through the production of a second video. This film, We Sea Change, aims to give their local community in Wilmington an understanding of climate change, impacts on the coastal Carolina region, and how people can be part of the climate change solution. We Sea Change will be broadcast live to the Ocean Portal from the North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher on Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 7pm. There will be a panel discussion on climate change immediately following the 7pm screening. Meet the team! The Cape Fear Beach Bears: Sandy Paws for a Cause team members include students Jessica Lama, Keela Sweeney, Evan Lucas, and Dustin Chambers. They have conducted research and produced their videos under the guidance of teachers Bryan Bishop from Isaac Bear Early College High School and Megan Ennes from the North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher.

Three Historic Blowouts 1. Lauren Schenkman Figure Mexico 1979 "CREDIT: NOAA" The decade from 1969 to 1979 witnessed three massive spills from offshore oil wells around the world. Here is how they compare in size and impact. IXTOC 1 The biggest well-related spill was triggered on 3 June 1979, when a lack of drilling mud allowed oil and gas to shoot up through the 3.6-km-deep IXTOC 1 exploratory well, about 80 km offshore in the southern Gulf of Mexico. The initial daily outflow of 30,000 barrels of oil was eventually reduced to 10,000 barrels. The well was finally capped more than 9 months later. Mexico's state-owned oil company, PEMEX, treated the approximately 3.5-million-barrel spill with dispersants. U.S. officials had a 2-month head start to reduce impacts to the Texas coastline. Figure North Sea 1977 "CREDIT: WALLY FONG/AP PHOTO" Ekofisk The first major spill in the North Sea resulted in the release of 202,000 barrels of oil about 250 km off the coast of Norway. The 22 April 1977 blowout caused oil to gush from an open pipe 20 m above the sea surface. The well was capped after a week. Between 30% and 40% of the spill evaporated almost immediately. Rough waters broke up the slick before it reached shore. Figure Santa Barbara 1969 "CREDIT: BETTMANN/CORBIS" Santa Barbara A blown well 1 km below the sea floor and 9 km off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, spewed out a total of 100,000 barrels of oil. The initial eruption occurred on 28 January 1969, and the well was capped by mud and cement on 7 February, but the pressure forced oil through sea floor fissures until December. The oil contaminated 65 km of coastline. At least 3700 birds are known to have died, and commercial fishing in the area was closed until April.

"Science 25 November 2011: Vol. 334 no. 6059 pp. 1052-1053 DOI: 10.1126/science.334.6059.1052 * News Focus Adaptation to Climate Change Adaptation to Climate Change Time to Adapt to a Warming World, But Where's the Science? 1. Richard A. Kerr With dangerous global warming seemingly inevitable, users of climate information-from water utilities to international aid workers-are turning to climate scientists for guidance. But usable knowledge is in short supply. Figure View larger version: * In this page * In a new window Adapt to that. Climate will change, but decision-makers want to know how, where, and when. "CREDIT: KOOS VAN DER LENDE/NEWSCOM" DENVER, COLORADO-The people who brought us the bad news about climate change are making an effort to help us figure out what to do about it. As climate scientists have shown, continuing to spew greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will surely bring sweeping changes to the world-changes that humans will find it difficult or impossible to adapt to. But beyond general warnings, there is another sort of vital climate research to be done, speakers told 1800 attendees at a meeting here last month. And so far, they warned, researchers have delivered precious little of the essential new science. At the meeting, subtitled "Climate Research in Service to Society,"* the new buzzword was "actionable": actionable science, actionable information, actionable knowledge. "There's an urgent need for actionable climate information based on sound science," said Ghassem Asrar, director of the World Climate Research Programme, the meeting's organizer based in Geneva, Switzerland. What's needed is not simply data but processed information that an engineer sizing a storm-water pipe to serve for the next 50 years or a farmer in Uganda considering irrigating his fields can use to make better decisions in a warming world. Researchers preparing for the next international climate assessment, due in 2013, delive

"and a controversial bill prescribing how North Carolina can forecast future sea level rise for planning became law. "

"Project Kaisei is a non-profit organization based in San Francisco and Hong Kong, established to increase the understanding and the scale of marine debris, its impact on our ocean environment, and how we can introduce solutions for both prevention and clean-up. \n\nOur main focus is on the North Pacific Gyre, which constitutes a large accumulation of debris in one of the largest and most remote ecosystems on the planet. To accomplish these objectives, Project Kaisei is serving as a catalyst to bring together public and private collaborators to design, test and implement break-throughs in science, prevention and remediation.\n\nKaisei means "Ocean Planet" in Japanese, and is the name of the iconic tall ship that was one of the two research vessels in the August expedition."

Not really back from the dead: A single-celled alga that went extinct in the North Atlantic Ocean about 800,000 years ago has returned after drifting from the Pacific through the Arctic thanks to melting polar ice. And while its appearance marks the first trans-Arctic migration in modern times, scientists say it signals something potentially bigger.

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."

ScienceDaily (July 9, 2010) - Alarm at the massive oil plume in the Gulf of Mexico emphasizes the problem of marine pollution and how difficult it is to evaluate. Thanks to a EUREKA project, another heavily polluted maritime ecosystem, the European North Sea, has been for more than 20 years a test-bed for a highly advanced early-warning system for all types of pollution. This development is now aiding marine authorities around the world to keep seas clean.

The shallow water reefs of the Coral Triangle, which stretches across Indonesia and north through the Philippines, host the world's greatest diversity of corals, fish, crustaceans, mollusks, and marine plant species. Now preliminary results from a joint Indonesian-U.S. marine survey indicate that the biodiversity runs deep. A remotely operated vehicle has captured stunning images of massive corals, as well as unusual crustaceans and fish living at depths never before surveyed, thousands of meters below the surface. And mapping of that sea floor has turned up a huge, previously unknown volcano.

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.

Science 8 July 2011: Vol. 333 no. 6039 pp. 173-175 Galaxy Zoo Volunteers Share Pain and Glory of Research 1. Daniel Clery A project to "crowdsource" galactic classifications has paid off in ways the astronomers who started it never expected. Figure View larger version: * In this page * In a new window Space oddity. Greenish "voorwerp" spotted by a Dutch volunteer still intrigues scientists. "CREDIT: NASA, ESA, W. KEEL (UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA), AND THE GALAXY ZOO TEAM" The automated surveys that are becoming increasingly common in astronomy are producing an embarrassment of riches for researchers. Projects such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) are generating so much data that, in some cases, astronomers don't know what to do with them all. SDSS has compiled a list of more than 1 million galaxies. To glean information about galaxy evolution, however, astronomers need to know what type of galaxy each one is: spiral, barred spiral, elliptical, or something else. At present, the only reliable way to classify galaxies is to look at each one. But the SDSS list is so long that all the world's astronomers working together couldn't muster enough eyeballs for the task. Enter the "wisdom of crowds." An online effort called Galaxy Zoo, launched in 2007, set a standard for citizen-scientist participation projects. Zealous volunteers astonished the project's organizers by classifying the entire catalog years ahead of schedule. The results have brought real statistical rigor to a field used to samples too small to support firm conclusions. But that's not all. Buoyed by the curiosity and dedication of the volunteers, the Galaxy Zoo team went on to ask more-complicated classification questions that led to studies they hadn't thought possible. And in an online discussion forum on the Galaxy Zoo Web site, volunteers have pointed to anomalies that on closer inspection have turned out to be genuinely new astronomical objects. "I'm incredibly impres