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Antarctic Ozone Hole
Today, Susan Solomon and David Hoffman, who led the research team, met with colleagues from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) at a news briefing in Washington, D.C., to reflect on the importance of the finding and discuss its implications for the future. "The patient hasn't recovered," said Hoffman, who heads NOAA's global atmospheric monitoring program. "But it's not getting any sicker. We really have not seen any recovery in Antarctica," he said. Hoffman also predicted it would take until 2060 for the ozone layer to heal completely, provided humans stop all release of man-made substances containing chlorine or bromine. Their work began in 1986, when NSF, NOAA and NASA rapidly put together a research team, known as the National Ozone Expedition, or NOZE. The purpose was to discover the cause of a confimed depletion of ozone in the Earth's atmosphere over Antarctica. In just two months, the team led by Solomon of NOAA and Hoffman, who was then at the University of Wyoming, learned most of what we know about the ozone hole, particularly the role chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, in destroying the ozone layer--which protects the Earth from ultraviolet radiation......... Posted by: Tyler Permalink Source "Frozen" Natural Gas Discovered Below Seafloor
Contrary to established expectations of how gas hydrate deposits form, IODP expedition co-chief Michael Riedel, of McGill University, Montreal, confirms, "We found anomalous occurrences of high concentrations of gas hydrate at relatively shallow depths, 50-120 meters below the seafloor". The science party used the drilling facility and laboratories of the U.S. research vessel, JOIDES Resolution, on a 43-day expedition in Fall 2005 during which they retrieved core samples from a geological area known as the (northern) Cascadia Margin. Gas hydrate deposits are typically found below the seafloor in offshore locations where water depths exceed 500 meters, and in Arctic permafrost regions. Gas hydrate remains stable only under low temperature and relatively high pressure......... Posted by: Tyler Permalink Source Ozone forecaster unveiled
With the intent to not only increase public awareness, but also help Texas manage air quality issues, the Institute for Multi-dimensional Air Quality Studies (IMAQS) at UH has been operating an air quality forecasting system for a year that has been tested, fine-tuned and now determined ready for public use. Over the course of this past year, the system has been expanded and improved to serve the entire eastern half of Texas, including the Houston and Dallas metropolitan areas. "Our ozone forecaster is more localized than others and goes into further detail," said Daewon Byun, director of IMAQS and a professor in UH's geosciences department. "For instance, while the ozone conditions may be rated unhealthy in downtown Houston on a given day, suburbs like Sugar Land and The Woodlands may actually be experiencing a good day that still is safe for outdoor activities in those specific areas. Other days, the opposite is true with downtown-area ozone levels being lower than in certain suburbs." By clicking on the local, regional or national maps at http://www.imaqs.uh.edu/ozone_forecast.htm, the public can obtain a map view of daily maximum ozone levels color-coded with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) health alert index. Also included are links to animations of a two-day forecast in one-hour increments. These maps and animations can help individuals, especially those with respiratory problems, plan their day's outside activities. The Web site is updated daily with the most recent 48-hour local, regional and national forecasts, providing graphical analysis of the onset, intensity, duration and area of poor air quality conditions via access to hourly data from 165 East Texas air pollution monitors. The near real-time hourly air pollution and meteorological data, air quality indices and animations from 3-D simulations performed by IMAQS use the EPA's Community Multiscale Air Quality modeling system co-developed by Byun in 1999 while at the EPA before coming to UH......... Posted by: Tyler Permalink Source Ocean Noise Has Increased Considerably
Sean Wiggins (left) and John Hildebrand deploy listening devices at various locations around the world. This instrument was recovered in the Gulf of California.
New research reported in the recent issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA) has shown a tenfold increase in underwater ocean noise off Southern California's coast as compared with the 1960s. Mark McDonald of WhaleAcoustics in Bellvue, Colo., and John Hildebrand and Sean Wiggins of Scripps Oceanography accessed acoustic data recorded in 1964-1966 through declassified U.S. Navy documents and compared them against acoustic recordings made in 2003-2004 in the same area off San Nicolas Island, one of the Channel Islands more than 160 miles west of San Diego. The results showed that noise levels in 2003-2004 were 10 to 12 decibels higher than in 1964-1966, an average noise increase rate of three decibels per decade. The culprit behind the increase, as per Hildebrand, appears to be a byproduct of the vast increase in the global shipping trade, the number of ships plying the world's oceans and the higher speeds and propulsion power for individual ships. The noise detected off Southern California originates from ships traveling across the entire North Pacific Ocean. As per Lloyd's Register figures quoted in the JASA paper, the world's commercial fleet more than doubled in the past 38 years, from 41,865 in 1965 to 89,899 in 2003......... Posted by: Tyler Permalink Source Bacteria Can Help Predict Ocean Change
Scientists have long endorsed the concept of a unique biological niche for most animals and plants a shark, for example, has a different role than a dolphin. Bacteria instead have been relegated to an also-ran world of "functional redundancy" in which few species are considered unique, said Jed Fuhrman, holder of the McCulloch-Crosby Chair in Marine Biology in the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. In The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences' Early Edition, Fuhrman and colleagues from USC and Columbia University show that most kinds of bacteria are not interchangeable and that each thrives under predictable conditions and at predictable times. Conversely, the kinds and numbers of bacteria in a sample can show where and when it was taken. "I could tell you what month it is if you just got me a sample of water from out there," Fuhrman said. The researchers took monthly bacteria samples for more than four years in the Pacific Ocean near the USC Wrigley Institute's marine laboratory on Catalina Island. They used statistical methods to correlate the bacteria counts with the Wrigley Institute's monthly measurements of water temperature, salinity, nutrient content, plant matter and other variables......... Posted by: Tyler Permalink Source Microbe center plumbs depths of ocean life
The Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education (C-MORE) will facilitate collaborations among the previously separate disciplines of oceanography, microbiology, ecology and genomics. These new alliances will enable a deeper understanding of the seas, including their potential response to global environmental variability and climate change. C-MORE, which will receive approximately $19 million from the National Science Foundation over the first five years, is based at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Participating institutions in addition to MIT and UH Manoa are the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Oregon State University, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and the Hawaii Department of Education. "A central objective of C-MORE will be to increase understanding about how biological diversity detected at the genome level expresses itself at the ecosystem function level, and then to transfer this knowledge to policymakers to assist them in their decision-making process," said MIT Professor Edward DeLong, C-MORE associate director for research. "Marine microorganisms are invisible to the naked eye, but their presence enables all multicellular life to exist, including human populations," said DeLong, who holds appointments in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and the Biological Engineering Division. "Novel methods in molecular biology combined with satellite- and sea-based remote sensing technologies provide an unprecedented opportunity to study microorganisms across broad spatial scales ranging from genes to entire ocean basins"......... Posted by: Tyler Permalink Source Drilling Into Fossil Magma Chamber Deep Under the Ocean
The scientists, affiliated with the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), published their findings on April 20 in Science Express, the online edition of the journal Science. Although gabbro has been sampled elsewhere in the oceans where faulting and tectonic movements have brought it closer to the seafloor, this is the first time gabbro has been recovered from intact ocean crust. The borehole into the magma chamber took nearly five months to drill, and required the use of twenty-five hardened steel and tungsten carbide drill bits. Getting there "is a rare opportunity to calibrate geophysical measurements with direct observations of real rocks," said geophysicist Doug Wilson of the University of California at Santa Barbara, lead author on the Science Express paper. "Finding the right place to drill was probably the key to this success". Wilson and his IODP colleagues found that place by identifying a region of the Pacific Ocean that formed some 15 million years ago when the East Pacific Rise was spreading at a "superfast" rate of more than 200 millimeters per year, faster than any mid-ocean ridge on Earth today......... Posted by: William Permalink Source Antarctic snowfall hasn't changed in 50 years
The most precise record of Antarctic snowfall ever generated shows there has been no real increase in precipitation over the southernmost continent in the past half-century, even though most computer models assessing global climate change call for an increase in Antarctic precipitation as atmospheric temperatures rise. "The year-to-year and decadal variability of the snowfall is so large that it makes it nearly impossible to distinguish trends that might be correlation to climate change from even a 50-year record," said Andrew Monaghan, a research associate with Ohio State University's Byrd Polar Research Center and lead author of an article on the topic reported in the Aug. 10 edition of Science magazine. "There were no statistically significant trends in snowfall accumulation over the past five decades, including recent years for which global mean temperatures have been warmest," Monaghan said. The findings also suggest thickening of Antarctica's massive ice sheets haven't reduced the slow-but-steady rise in global sea levels, as some climate-change critics have argued......... Posted by: Tyler Permalink Source Microbe In The Depths Of Ocean Life
The Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education (C-MORE) will facilitate collaborations among the previously separate disciplines of oceanography, microbiology, ecology and genomics. These new alliances will enable a deeper understanding of the seas, including their potential response to global environmental variability and climate change. C-MORE, which will receive approximately $19 million from the National Science Foundation over the first five years, is based at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Participating institutions in addition to MIT and UH Manoa are the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Oregon State University, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and the Hawaii Department of Education. "A central objective of C-MORE will be to increase understanding about how biological diversity detected at the genome level expresses itself at the ecosystem function level, and then to transfer this knowledge to policymakers to assist them in their decision-making process," said MIT Professor Edward DeLong, C-MORE associate director for research. "Marine microorganisms are invisible to the naked eye, but their presence enables all multicellular life to exist, including human populations," said DeLong, who holds appointments in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and the Biological Engineering Division. "Novel methods in molecular biology combined with satellite- and sea-based remote sensing technologies provide an unprecedented opportunity to study microorganisms across broad spatial scales ranging from genes to entire ocean basins"......... Posted by: Tyler Permalink Source New Mammal Discovered
Darin A. Croft
With Federico Anaya from Universidad Autónoma Tomás Frías, Croft reported on the new mammal find named Hemihegetotherium trilobus in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology article, "A New Middle Miocene Hegetotherid (Notoungulata: Typotheria) and a Phylogeny of the Hegetotheriidae." It is named for the distinctive three lobes on its back lower molar teeth. The animal belonged to a group of animals called notoungulates—hoofed mammals native only to South America. The group originated in South America soon after the dinosaurs went extinct and evolved to include hundreds of species over a span of more than 50 million years; all of them are now extinct. Eventhough most notoungulates were gone before humans got to South America, some of the earliest humans to journey to that continent may have seen the last living notoungulates......... Posted by: William Permalink Source |
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