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    Speed bumps under Thwaites Glacier could help slow its flow to the sea

    SAN FRANCISCO — Most of the news regarding the Thwaites Glacier, a Florida-sized slab of ice that is melting and currently contributing about 4 percent of global sea level rise, is bad. But a bit of good news may have emerged.

    A seismic survey of the bed beneath an upstream section of Thwaites has revealed rough high-rises of earth under the Antarctic glacier, which are comparable in height to the Manhattan skyline, glaciologist Coen Hofstede reported December 12 at a news conference during the American Geophysical Union fall meeting. These rugged rises may be snagging the glacier’s underbelly, slowing its flow toward the ocean and mitigating global sea level rise.

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    Glaciers flow somewhat like rivers, but much slower. Where Thwaites outlets into the ocean, it connects to a floating shelf of ice that braces and partially restrains the glacier. That ice shelf was once pinned upon an underwater mountain, which helped stabilize it (SN: 12/13/21). But now the shelf is so deteriorated that it’s basically unhitched, Erin Pettit, a glaciologist at Oregon State University in Corvallis, said at the news event.

    Fortunately, though, the glacier “is not going to suddenly flow off land,” thanks partly to what’s been discovered upstream, said Pettit, who was not involved in the discovery.  

    To image Thwaites’ underbelly, researchers used a tractorlike vehicle (background, center) to haul a seismic vibrator truck on a sled, as well as a 1.5-kilometer-long chain of seismometers (foreground), across the glacier’s surface. A caboose-train (left) used for cooking, eating and repairs accompanied the vibrator truck across the ice. Coen Hofstede

    More than 70 kilometers inland from Thwaites’ ice shelf, Hofstede and his colleagues conducted a seismic survey to probe the glacier’s underbelly. The team attached a 1.5-kilometer-long daisy-chain of seismometers to a vehicle equipped with a vibrating plate. Then they drove a roughly 200-kilometer-long stretch of the glacier, using the plate to generate seismic waves and the seismometers to record the waves’ reflectance off layers of ice and earth below. “It’s almost like radar,” said Hofstede, of the Alfred Wegener Institute Helmholtz Center for Polar and Marine Research in Bremerhaven, Germany.

    A Pisten Bully (center left), a tracked vehicle able to maneuver on the ice, tows seismic equipment (red) across Thwaites Glacier. A second Pisten Bully (right) hauls the
    accommodation train with the crew’s sleeping tents.Ole Zeising

    The seismic waves revealed rises under Thwaites that are 10 to 20 kilometers long and toothed with blocks of sediment. These blocks stood up to 100 meters tall above the rises and stretched for up to several kilometers horizontally.

    The data showed that the upstream faces of these blocks appear to be under greater pressure than their downstream sides, and that there might be layers of deformed ice within the glacier above the rises. Hofstede hypothesizes that the rises and blocks are slowing Thwaites’ flow as its ice presses against them.

    Using computers to simulate the flow of Thwaites glacier shows that “it gets hung up on tall features,” said glaciologist Ben Smith of the University of Washington in Seattle, who was not involved in the work.

    The rises are probably related to a rift system, an area where tectonic forces have pulled the ground apart, Hofstede said. Under Thwaites, these rifts run roughly perpendicular to the glacier’s ice flow, sort of like speed bumps on a street.

    The findings will allow for more nuanced simulations of the glacier’s evolution, Hofstede said, which are crucial for understanding rates of sea level rise. More

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    Invisible comet tails of mucus slow sinking flakes of ‘marine snow’

    WASHINGTON — Tiny, sinking flakes of detritus in the ocean fall more slowly thanks to the goop that surrounds each flake, new observations reveal.

    The invisible mucus makes “comet tails” that surround each flake, physicist Rahul Chajwa of Stanford University reported November 19 at the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting. Those mucus tails slow the speed at which the flakes fall. That could affect the rate at which carbon gets sequestered deep in the oceans, making the physics of this sticky goo important for understanding Earth’s climate.

    Although scientists knew the goo was a component of the “marine snow” that falls in the ocean, they hadn’t previously measured its impact on sinking speed.

    Marine snow is made of dead and living phytoplankton, decaying organic matter, feces, bacteria and other aquatic sundries, all wrapped up in mucus that’s produced by the organisms. Like the gunk known for clogging airways during respiratory virus season, the mucus is what’s called a viscoelastic fluid (SN: 3/17/16). That’s something that flows like a liquid but exhibits elastic behavior as well, springing back after being stretched.

    This underwater blizzard is not easy to study. When observed in the ocean, the particles sink swiftly out of view. In the laboratory, the particles can be viewed for longer periods, but the trek ashore degrades the delicate marine snow and kills the living organisms within it.

    [embedded content]
    Tiny particles (white dots) within a seawater-filled chamber were used to measure the rate at which fluid flows around this flake of marine snow as it falls. The chamber is designed to keep the sinking snowflake in view of the camera.

    So Chajwa and colleagues built a physics lab at sea. Aboard a research vessel in the Gulf of Maine, the team collected marine snow particles in traps 80 meters below the water’s surface. Then they loaded their catch into a device onboard, designed to observe the particles falling.

    Nicknamed “the gravity machine,” it’s a fluid-filled wheel that rotates in order to keep an individual flake in view of a camera. It’s a bit like a hamster wheel for falling debris. As the flake sinks, the wheel turns so as to move the snow in the opposite direction, allowing the snowfall to be observed indefinitely. The gravity machine was itself mounted on a gimbal designed to stave off sloshing from the rocking of the ship.

    “It’s a very nice compromise between the real marine snow that you get in the ocean versus what you can do practically in the lab,” says biophysicist Anupam Sengupta of the University of Luxembourg, who was not involved with the research.

    To observe how the fluid flowed around the particles, the researchers added tiny beads within the fluid in the gravity machine. That revealed the rate of fluid flow around the particles. The speed of fluid flow was slowed in a comet tail–shaped region around the particle, revealing the invisible mucus that sinks along with the particle.

    Marine snow particles (one shown) are surrounded with invisible mucus. Drag the slider to see how fluid flows around the flake as it falls. Slower speeds (yellow) reveal mucus that trails the flake in a comet tail–shape (red dotted line). Left: Rahul Chajwa and Manu Prakash/PrakashLab/Stanford UniversityRight: Rahul Chajwa and Manu Prakash/PrakashLab/Stanford University

    The particles sank at speeds up to 200 meters per day. The mucus played a big role in sinking speed. “The more the mucus, the slower the particles sink,” Chajwa says. On average, the mucus causes the marine snow particles to linger twice as long in the upper 100 meters of the ocean as they otherwise would, Chajwa and colleagues determined.

    If it falls deep enough, marine snow can sequester carbon away from the atmosphere. That’s because living phytoplankton, like plants, take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen. When phytoplankton form marine snow, they take that carbon along with them as they sink. If a flake reaches the ocean floor, it can settle into a scum at the bottom that caches that carbon over long time periods. The faster the particles sink, the more likely they are to make it to the abyss before being eaten by critters (SN: 6/23/22).

    Knowing how fast the particles sink is important for calculating the ocean’s impact on Earth’s climate, and how that might change as the climate warms, the researchers say. The oceans are major players in the planet’s carbon cycle (SN: 12/2/21), and scientists estimate that oceans have taken up roughly 30 percent of the carbon dioxide released by humans since industrialization. Chajwa and colleagues hope that their results can be used to refine climate models, which currently do not take the mucus into account.

    So this mucus is nothing to sneeze at. “We’re talking about microscopic physics,” says Stanford physicist Manu Prakash, a coauthor of the work, which is also reported in a paper submitted October 3 at arXiv.org. “But multiply that by the volume of the ocean … that’s what gives you the scale of the problem.” More

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    3 Antarctic glaciers show rapidly accelerated ice loss from ocean warming

    SAN FRANCISCO — Several Antarctic glaciers are undergoing dramatic acceleration and ice loss. Hektoria Glacier, the worst affected, has quadrupled its sliding speed and lost 25 kilometers of ice off its front in just 16 months, scientists say.

    The rapid retreat “is really unheard of,” says Mathieu Morlighem, a glaciologist at Dartmouth College who was not part of the team reporting these findings.

    The collapse was triggered by unusually warm ocean temperatures, which caused sea ice to retreat. This allowed a series of large waves to hit a section of coastline that is normally shielded from them. “What we’re seeing here is an indication of what could happen elsewhere” in Antarctica, says Naomi Ochwat, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado Boulder who presented the findings December 11 at the American Geophysical Union meeting.

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    Hektoria Glacier, Green Glacier, and Crane Glacier sit near the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, which reaches up toward South America. The crescent moon–shaped bay, called the Larsen B Embayment, once seemed stable. As these glaciers oozed off the coastline, their ice used to merge into a floating slab around 200 meters thick. This slab, called the Larsen B Ice Shelf, was about the size of Rhode Island and filled the entire bay.

    Having existed for over 10,000 years, this ice shelf buttressed and stabilized the glaciers flowing into it. But during a warm summer in 2002, it suddenly fragmented into thousands of skinny icebergs (SN: 3/27/02).

    Hektoria, Green, and Crane glaciers — no longer contained by the ice shelf —  began to flow into the ocean several times faster than they had before, shedding billions of tons of ice over the next decade.

    Then starting in 2011, the hemorrhaging slowed down. The thin veneer of sea ice that forms over the bay each winter began to persist year round, preserved by a series of cold summers. This “landfast ice,” attached firmly to the coastline, grew five to 10 meters thick, stabilizing the glaciers. Their floating tongues gradually advanced back into the bay. But things changed abruptly in early 2022. On January 19 and 20, the landfast ice disintegrated into fragments, which drifted away.

    Satellite images taken just 10 days apart reveal the dramatic breakup of sea ice in Antarctica’s Larsen B Embayment. On January 16, 2022, sea ice filled the bay (left). By January 26 (right), the ice had fractured and was drifting away following a series of powerful waves that struck the bay several days earlier. Left: Joshua Stevens, MODIS/LANCE/EOSDIS/NASA, WORLDVIEW/GIBS/NASARight: Joshua Stevens, MODIS/LANCE/EOSDIS/NASA, WORLDVIEW/GIBS/NASA

    Using data from ocean buoys farther north, Ochwat and colleagues determined that a series of powerful waves, higher than 1.5 meters, had swept in from the northeast — cracking apart the landfast ice. Those waves were highly unusual for this area.

    The Southern Ocean, which encircles Antarctica, holds some of the world’s roughest waters. The Antarctic Peninsula extends up into this turbulent region, but its east side, where the Larsen B Embayment sits, rarely feels the waves. It is normally protected by several hundred kilometers of pack ice — floes of sea ice, pressed together by ocean currents — that dampen the waves, leaving the waters near Larsen as flat as a mirror.

    In 2022, water temperatures near the surface of the Southern Ocean rose several tenths of a degree Celsius higher than normal, causing pack ice to shrink and peel away from the peninsula. This exposed the area to waves, which then broke up the landfast sea ice.

    The glaciers accelerated as their floating tongues, no longer held in place, fragmented into bergs. Crane Glacier lost 11 kilometers of ice, nearly erasing its floating tongue; Green Glacier lost 18 kilometers, encompassing all of its floating ice.

    Hektoria lost all 15 kilometers of its floating ice — followed by another 10 kilometers of ice that is normally more stable, because it rests on the seafloor. That “is faster than any tidewater glacier retreat that we know of,” Ochwat says.

    The previous standout, Alaska’s Columbia Glacier, had lost 20 kilometers of ice in 30 years, records show. But Hektoria lost its 10 kilometers of nonfloating ice in just five months — including 2.5 kilometers that crumbled in a 3-day period.

    All of this suggests that people trying to predict sea level rise need to consider sea ice, Morlighem says. Up until now, “its role in [glacier] dynamics has been completely ignored.”

    Ochwat is waiting to see what will happen as the current Antarctic summer heats up between December and March. Hektoria and the other glaciers have been retreating only during summer months, when sea ice is absent; they pause during winter, when the surface of the bay freezes for a few months.

    If Antarctic sea ice continues to shrink, as it has since 2022, it could spell trouble, says study coauthor Ted Scambos, a glaciologist also at UC Boulder. “You’re going to have a longer section of coastline where wave action can act on the front of ice shelves and glaciers,” potentially accelerating glacial retreat. More

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    COP28 nations agreed to ‘transition’ from fossil fuels. That’s too slow, experts say

    Days of contentious wrangling in Dubai at the United Nations’ 28th annual climate summit ended December 13 with a historic agreement to “transition away” from fossil fuels and accelerate climate action over the next decade. The organization touted the agreement as a moment of global solidarity, marking “the beginning of the end” of the fossil fuel era.

    But the final agreement reached at COP28, signed by nearly 200 nations, did not include language that explicitly mandated phasing out fossil fuel energy, deeply frustrating many nations as well as climate scientists and activists.

    The agreement is considered the world’s first “global stocktake,” an inventory of climate actions and progress made since the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial average (SN: 12/12/15).

    It acknowledges the conclusions of scientific research that greenhouse gas emissions will need to be cut by 43 percent by 2030 compared with 2019 levels, in order to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. It then calls on nations to speed up climate actions before 2030 so as to reach global net zero by 2050 — in which greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere are balanced by their removal from the atmosphere. Among the actions called for are increasing global renewable energy generation, phasing down coal power and phasing out fossil fuel subsidies.

    But among many scientists gathered in San Francisco at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting to discuss climate change’s impacts to Earth’s atmosphere, polar regions, oceans and biosphere, the reaction to the language in the agreement was more frustrated than celebratory.

    “The beginning of the end? I wish it was the middle of the end,” says climate scientist Luke Parsons of the Nature Conservancy, who is based in Durham, N.C. “But you have to start somewhere, I guess.”

    It is a step forward, says Ted Scambos, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. “Saying it out loud, that we are aiming to phase out fossil fuels, is huge.”

    It’s not a moment too soon: The globe is already experiencing many climate change–linked extreme weather events, including the hottest 12 months ever recorded (SN: 11/9/23). Still, Scambos says, “it’s a tribute to the science and the negotiators that we can take this step now, before the disastrous global impacts truly get underway.” But, he added, “I fear that the pace [of future climate action] will … still be driven by impacts arriving at our collective doors.”

    Other researchers had a grimmer take.

    “It was weak sauce,” says climate scientist Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania. “What we really need is a commitment to phase out fossil fuels, on a very specific timeline: We’re going to reduce carbon emissions by 50 percent this decade, bring them down to zero mid-century. Instead, they agreed to transition away from fossil fuels — the analogy that I use is, you’re diagnosed with diabetes, and you tell your doctor you’re going to transition away from doughnuts. That’s not going to cut it. It didn’t meet the moment.”

    Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at the University of California, Irvine, called the agreement “deeply disappointing and misleading,” noting that it didn’t include any language specifically calling for phasing out fossil fuels. Furthermore, he says, “COP28 keeps entertaining the idea that 1.5 degrees Celsius may be achievable, but everyone is offtrack to meet that goal. [And] for ice sheets and glaciers, even 1.5 degrees is not sustainable.”  There already are fears, for instance, that the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet can’t be stopped (SN: 8/9/21).

    Even if the world stays close to that average temperature, “the ice sheets are going to be retreating,” says Rob DeConto, a glaciologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. “But you start getting out toward the end of the century, and all hell is going to break loose if we go much above 1.5. You’re talking about actually exceeding the limits of adaptation around so much of our coastlines.”  

    On December 12, the eighth anniversary of the signing of the Paris Agreement, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service noted that the world has, in effect, “lost” 19 years by delaying action to reduce fossil fuel emissions. Back in 2015, climate projections suggested that Earth’s average temperature would reach the 1.5 degrees C threshold by the year 2045 — then 30 years away. Now, projections show that the planet may reach that benchmark by 2034, just 11 years in the future.

    “We’ve got a shrinking window of opportunity,” Mann says. “And that window of opportunity will close if we don’t make dramatic and immediate reductions to our carbon emissions.” More

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    Ocean heat waves often lurk out of sight

    Heat waves don’t just strike on land — they can also occur in the ocean. And roughly a third of marine heat waves aren’t detectable at the ocean’s surface, a new study reports. The findings, published in the December Nature Geoscience, suggest that far more of these potentially harmful events might be occurring than previously believed.

    Ocean heat waves can have a slew of adverse effects on marine ecosystems because many forms of life cannot rapidly adapt to changes in temperature. For instance, cod populations were devastated from 2013 to 2015 when a marine heat wave lingered off the West Coast of North America. Given the interconnectedness of marine food webs, seabirds suffered, too (SN: 1/15/20).

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    Marine heat waves are often identified with satellite observations that measure the temperature of the ocean surface. But these data leave the ocean depths unmonitored.   

    To literally take a deeper look, statistician Furong Li and colleagues turned to computer simulations of the ocean’s temperature, salinity and currents, among other parameters, created from both satellite and subsurface data stretching back to the early 1990s. Such simulations are a powerful way of studying the ocean on a global scale, says Li, of the Ocean University of China in Qingdao.

    The researchers pinpointed ocean heat waves in the simulations by looking for layers of water that remained unusually warm — up to a few degrees Celsius above surrounding levels — for at least five days. Such events can be caused by changes in atmospheric circulation, for instance, or shifts in ocean currents.

    Li and her collaborators spotted several hundred marine heat waves per year. But the real surprise was finding that about 1 in 3 of those events consistently lurked out of view and were never visible in the uppermost 10 meters of the water. “We discovered a great number of marine heat waves hidden below the sea surface,” Li says.

    Researchers might accordingly be missing a lot of these events, says Mike Jacox, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Monterey, Calif., not involved in the research. “Just looking at the surface temperature might not be enough.”

    Marine life might therefore be contending with significantly more ocean heat waves than previously thought. And that means additional stress on marine ecosystems. In 2020, Jacox and his colleagues showed that animals seeking to escape marine heat waves would have to swim hundreds of kilometers on average (SN: 8/10/20). And when creatures are unable to move, marine heat waves often prove deadly. Warming in the Great Barrier Reef, for example, has been linked to coral bleaching (SN: 4/7/20). More

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    COP28 is making headlines. Here’s why the focus on methane matters

    This year’s United Nations’ annual climate summit, dubbed COP28, is making a lot of headlines — not something I would have found myself writing a few years ago.

    One reason for COP’s higher profile is a growing sense of urgency to take stronger action to reduce humans’ fossil fuel emissions and mitigate the looming climate crisis. The world is nowhere near on track to meet the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement — that is, reducing greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to limit global warming to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius of preindustrial averages by the year 2100 (SN: 12/12/15). Meanwhile, 2023 has been the hottest year on record, people have been suffering through a barrage of extreme weather events, including heat waves, droughts and floods, and 2024 is likely to break more temperature records (SN: 12/6/23; SN: 7/19/23).

    The headlines emerging from COP28 have been a mix of pleasing, frustrating and bewildering. For example: It’s good news that 198 nations have ratified the Loss and Damage Fund, a formal acknowledgment by wealthy, high-polluting nations that they should help mitigate the rising costs of climate change faced by developing nations. But it’s frustrating that the pledges by the wealthy nations so far amount to just about $725 million, less than 0.2 percent of the annual climate change–linked losses faced by developing nations.

    For me, one of the biggest questions related to those headlines pertains to methane. It feels unclear whether, on balance, there’s more good or bad news when it comes to emissions of that second most important human-caused greenhouse gas.

    Methane is a powerhouse climate-warming gas, with about 80 times the atmosphere-warming potential of carbon dioxide. However, methane has a saving grace: It mercifully lingers for only about a decade in the atmosphere (SN: 4/22/20). Carbon dioxide can stick around for up to 1,000 years. Cutting methane emissions can mean its atmospheric concentration drops relatively rapidly.

    The Global Methane Pledge, launched two years ago at COP26, may be gaining some momentum, but it still lacks the sign-on of key big-emitting nations. Then there’s the December 1 announcement by 49 oil and gas companies that they would reduce methane leaks from their infrastructure to “near zero” by 2030, which seems like a good thing on the face of it but has also been called greenwashing (SN: 11/24/21).

    And all of this policy wrangling is happening against a bizarre backdrop: a startling, puzzling, worrisome sharp increase in methane emissions over the last decade — not from humans, but from natural sources, particularly wetlands.

    To help me sift through the headlines and better understand all the news that’s seeping out, I talked with Euan Nisbet, a geochemist at Royal Holloway, University of London in Egham.

    Methane “is rising very fast,” Nisbet says. “So fast it looks like the Paris Agreement is going to fail.”

    Countries are promising to cut methane emissions

    While the rise in natural methane emissions is worrisome, about 60 percent of current methane emissions into the atmosphere still comes from human activities. Methane doesn’t just seep out of leaky oil and gas pipelines or get pumped into the air during coal combustion. Agriculture, including ruminant animals, are a big source (SN: 5/5/22). Landfills are another (SN: 11/14/19).

    That’s where the Global Methane Pledge comes in, promising a 30 percent cut in humans’ emissions by 2030. The pledge was spearheaded in 2021 by the United States and the European Union, and so far, 150 nations have signed on. Most recently, Turkmenistan, which has sizable methane emissions, joined. So there’s hope: If everyone were to follow suit, it really is possible to cut global methane emissions deeply, bringing us much closer to meeting the Paris Agreement’s goals, Nisbet argues in a Dec. 8 editorial in Science.

    Still, many of the world’s biggest methane emitters, including China, India, Russia, Iran and South Africa, have not signed on to the pledge. China’s methane comes in large part from its coal combustion; India’s, from coal as well as waste heaps and biomass fires. And China alone currently releases an estimated 65 million metric tons of methane per year, more than double that of the United States or India, the next two biggest emitters.

    With only seven years left before the 2030 deadline, meeting the global pledge’s methane reduction goals would be steep — but, Nisbet says, not impossible.

    There’s precedent for successfully making such steep cuts to methane in such a short time, he adds. During the 2000s, “there was a seven-year period where [the U.K. government] brought methane emissions down by 30 percent,” in large part by reducing emissions from landfills and gas leaks.

    China has just released its own Methane Emissions Control Action Plan in November, alongside a joint commitment between China and the United States to take action on methane. That news sounds potentially promising, if not wholly reassuring, as the plan does not include a lot of concrete numbers, Nisbet says.

    So, what about the oil and gas industry’s recent promise to address its leaky infrastructure? Such a promise also sounds positive on the face of it — leaky infrastructure is definitely the low-hanging fruit when it comes to reducing humans’ methane emissions to the atmosphere (SN: 2/3/22).

    On the other hand, hundreds of scientific and environmental organizations have signed an open letter in response. The letter suggests that the oil and gas industry’ promise is just greenwashing, “a smokescreen to hide the reality that we need to phase out oil, gas and coal,” the letter states. Furthermore, many oil and gas companies may routinely abandon old, still-leaking wells — effectively eliminating those leaks from their company’s emissions roster without actually stopping them.

    That said, addressing the leaks does have to be done, Nisbet says. “I’d love to shut down the coal industry quickly, but I’m aware of the enormous social problems that brings. It’s a very difficult thing to nuance. You can’t go cold turkey. We’ve got to wind it down in an intelligent and collaborative way. The best thing to do is to stop the crazy leaks and venting.”

    Natural methane emission has been surging

    Plugging the leaks as soon as possible has taken on an increasing urgency, Nisbet says, because of a stark rise in natural methane being emitted to the atmosphere. Why this rise is happening isn’t clear, but it seems to be some sort of climate change–related feedback, perhaps linked to changes in both temperature and precipitation.

    That natural methane emissions bump was also not something that the architects of the Paris Agreement saw coming. Most of that rise has happened since the agreement was signed. From 1999 to 2006, atmospheric methane had spent several years in near-equilibrium — elevated due to human activities, but relatively stable. Then, in 2007, atmospheric methane concentrations began to increase. In 2013, there was a particularly sharp rise, and then again in 2020.

    Much of that increase seems to have come from tropical wetlands. Over the past decade, researchers have tracked shifts in methane sources by measuring carbon-12 and carbon-13 in the gas. The ratio of those two forms of carbon in the methane varies significantly depending on the source of the gas. Fossil fuel-derived methane tends to have higher concentrations of carbon-13 relative to carbon-12; methane from wetlands or agriculture tends to be more enriched in carbon-12.

    The recent spikes in natural methane are eerily reminiscent of ice core records of “glacial termination” events, times in Earth’s deep past when the world abruptly shifted from a glacial period to a period of rapid warming, Nisbet and others reported in June in Global Biogeochemical Cycles. Such glacial termination events are large-scale reorganizations of the ocean-atmosphere system, involving dramatic changes to the circulation of the global ocean, as well as to large climate patterns like the Indian Ocean Dipole (SN: 1/9/20).

    “Is this comparable to the start of a termination event? It looks horribly like that,” Nisbet says. But “it may not be. It might be totally innocent.”

    Right now, scientists are racing to understand what’s happening with the natural methane bump, and how exactly the increased emissions might be linked to climate change. But as we search for those answers, there is something that humans can and must do in the meantime, he says: Cut human emissions of the gas as much as possible, as fast as possible. “It’s very simple. When you’re in a hole, stop digging.” More

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    Landscape Explorer shows how much the American West has changed

    With the click of a mouse, a new mapping tool shows how places in the American West have changed over the last 70 years.

    With just a Web browser, anyone can open Landscape Explorer, which will pull up a modern Google map of the United States beside a black-and-white aerial image of the western states circa 1950. A slider button allows for scrolling back and forth between past and present.

    You can type a place or address into the search bar, then zoom in or out. Search for “Lake Powell” and watch the Colorado River’s red rock canyons of the past turn into a reservoir. Type in “Las Vegas” and see Sin City’s sprawling grid of streets disappear into desert arroyos as you swipe back in time.

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    The free tool is an easy way for anyone with an interest in the American West to peruse the past. But Landscape Explorer also has a loftier purpose: helping government agencies, landowners and conservation professionals make complex decisions about how to manage land.

    The powerful visual contrast between the historical snapshot and modern-day satellite imagery “allows us to go from zero to 100” in terms of understanding ecosystem changes, says Scott Morford, an applied spatial ecologist at the University of Montana in Missoula who led the development of Landscape Explorer. The project was supported by Working Lands for Wildlife, a conservation initiative led by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and other partners. The impetus, Morford says, was to “give us a reference for how rapidly things are changing across biomes that we care about.”

    Before Landscape Explorer, most collections of historical imagery of large-scale landscapes went back to only the 1980s. Finding earlier imagery of large landscapes was expensive and time-consuming. While some previous projects have stitched together historical imagery at small scales to look at how a particular watershed or county has changed, “the real revolution is that we were able to figure out how to do it at scale,” Morford says. “We wanted to make something that was universal and accessible” for everyone, not just remote sensing specialists.

    Morford and colleagues processed about 170,000 aerial images that were taken by U.S. Army pilots during the Cold War and later digitized. To create a continuous mosaic, the team used specialized software to stitch together images of adjacent patches of land, the researchers explained in a paper published in July in Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation. The final step was pairing the mosaic with satellite imagery using Google Earth Engine.

    Landscape Explorer began as a small project to assess the extent of woody encroachment onto grasslands in western Montana. Due to fire suppression, conifers like western juniper or eastern red cedar are taking over ecosystems that were historically treeless, such as sagebrush steppe and prairies. A monoculture of these water-guzzling trees is bad news for local biodiversity and increases the risk of catastrophic wildfire.

    Third-generation Montana rancher Bruce Peterson says that seeing historical and current aerial imagery side by side made him realize how the steady infiltration of trees had devalued his family’s livestock pastures. “It’s a little bit like losing your hearing or your vision with these trees. They eat away a little of your land at a time, and then by the time you get hearing aids or glasses, you realize it’s gotten really out of hand,” Peterson says.

    Using Landscape Explorer, Peterson and dozens of other landowners involved in the Southwest Montana Sagebrush Partnership have prioritized where to remove invading trees. The group has restored nearly 50,000 acres of treeless rangeland since 2020, according to the Nature Conservancy, a member of the partnership.

    Landscape Explorer also helped the Clark Fork Coalition, a Montana-based nonprofit that protects and restores waterways, to see how urban and industrial development has impacted floodplains. “This tool gives us the power of time travel. It’s like a time-lapse showing all that’s been lost and where the continued pressure is very real,” says Karen Knudsen, the coalition’s executive director.

    After seeing the successes in Montana, the makers of Landscape Explorer extended the tool to 17 states in the West to show where forests, grasslands or rivers are most at risk of disappearing and where intact habitats can still be preserved.

    Since the expanded tool was released in September, researchers have used it to assess glacial retreat in the Pacific Northwest, measure the historical extent of sand dunes in coastal California and pinpoint where wetlands have dried up. Morford is excited to see all the ways Landscape Explorer can help land managers. “It’s going to be used in ways we haven’t even thought of yet.” More

  • in

    A new UN report lays out an ethical framework for climate engineering

    The world is in a climate crisis — and in the waning days of what’s likely to be the world’s hottest year on record, a new United Nations report is weighing the ethics of using technological interventions to try to rein in rising global temperatures.

    “The current speed at which the effects of global warming are increasingly being manifested is giving new life to the discussion on the kinds of climate action best suited to tackle the catastrophic consequences of environmental changes,” the report states.

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    A broad variety of climate engineering interventions are already in development, from strategies that could directly remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to efforts to modify incoming radiation from the sun (SN: 10/6/19; SN: 7/9/21; SN: 8/8/18).

    But “we don’t know the unintended consequences” of many of these technologies, said UNESCO Assistant Director-General Gabriela Ramos at a news conference on November 20 ahead of the report’s release. “There are several areas of great concern. These are very interesting and promising technological developments, but we need an ethical framework to decide how and when to use them.”

    Such a framework should be globally agreed upon, Ramos said — and that’s why UNESCO decided to step in. The new report proposes ethical frameworks for both the study and the later deployment of climate engineering strategies.

    In addition to explicitly addressing concerns over how tinkering with the climate might affect global food security and the environment, ethical considerations must also include accounting for conflicting interests between regions and countries, the report states. Furthermore, it must include assessing at what point the risks of taking action are or are not morally defensible.   

    “It’s not [for] a single country to decide,” Ramos said. “Even those countries that have nothing to do with those technological developments need to be at the table … to agree on a path going forward. Climate is global and needs to be a global conversation.”

    The ethics-focused report was prepared by a UNESCO advisory body known as the World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology. Its release coincided with the start of the U.N.’s international climate action summit, the 28th Conference of the Parties, or COP, in Dubai. COP28 runs from November 30 through December 12.

    To delve more into the goals of the study and what climate engineering strategies the report considers, Science News talked with report coauthor Inés Camilloni, a climate scientist at the University of Buenos Aires and a resident in the solar geoengineering research program at Harvard University. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

    SN: There have been a lot of reports recently about climate engineering. What makes this one important?

    Camilloni: One thing is that this report includes the views from the Global South as well as the Global North. This is something really important, there are not many reports with the voices of scientists from the Global South. The U.N. Environment Programme’s report this year [on solar radiation modification] was another one. [This new report] has a bigger picture, because it also includes carbon dioxide removal.

    I’m a climate scientist; ethics is something new to me. I got involved because I was a lead author of a chapter in the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] 1.5-degrees-Celsius special report in 2018, and there was a box discussion about climate engineering (SN: 10/7/18). I realized I was not an expert on that. The discussion was among scientists in the Global North, who had a clear position in some ways about the idea, but not Global South scientists. We were just witnessing this discussion.

    SN: The report raises a concern about the “moral hazard” of relying too much on climate engineering, which might give countries or companies an excuse to slow carbon emission reductions. Should we even be considering climate engineering in that context?

    Camilloni: What we are saying in the report is that the priority must be the mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions. But the discussion on climate engineering is growing because we are not on track to keep temperatures [below] 1.5 degrees C. We are not [at] the right level of ambition really needed to keep temperatures below that target. There are so many uncertainties that it’s relevant to consider the ethical dimensions in these conversations, to make a decision of potential deployment. And in most IPCC scenarios that can limit warming to below 1.5 degrees, carbon dioxide removal is already there.

    SN: What are some of the carbon dioxide removal strategies under consideration?

    Camilloni: Carbon dioxide removal combines two different methods: Restoring natural carbon sinks, like forests and soils, and investing in technologies that are maybe not yet proven to work at the scale that’s needed. That includes direct air capture [of carbon dioxide] and storage; bioenergy with carbon capture and storage; increasing uptake by the oceans of carbon dioxide, for example by iron fertilization; and enhancing natural weathering processes that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

    But there are potential consequences that need to be considered. Those include negative impacts of terrestrial biodiversity, and effects on marine biodiversity from ocean fertilization. As for sequestering carbon dioxide — how do you store it for hundreds of years or longer, and what are the consequences of rapid release from underground reservoirs? Also there’s potential competition for land [between bioenergy crops or planting trees] and food production, especially in the Global South.

    SN: Solar radiation modification is considered even more controversial, but some scientists are saying it should now be on the table (SN: 5/21/10). What type of solar radiation modification is the most viable, technologically?

    Camilloni: That’s an umbrella term for a variety of approaches that reduce the amount of incoming sunlight reflected by the atmosphere back to space.

    There’s increasing surface reflectivity, for example with reflective paints on structures, or planting more reflective crops (SN: 9/28/18). That reflects more solar radiation into space. It’s already being used in some cities, but it has a very local effect. Similarly, increasing the reflectivity of marine clouds — there were some experiments in Australia to try to protect the Great Barrier Reef, but it seems that also the scale is not global.

    Another proposed strategy is to thin infrared-absorbing cirrus clouds — I don’t really know much about that or if it’s really possible. And there’s placing reflectors or shields in space to deflect incoming solar radiation; I also don’t really know if it’s possible to do that.

    Injecting aerosols into the stratosphere, to mimic the cooling effect of a volcanic eruption, is the most promising for a global impact. It’s not so challenging in terms of the technology. It’s the only way that we have identified that can cool the planet in a few years.

    SN: How soon could aerosol injection be used?

    Camilloni: We need at least 10 to 20 years before we can think of deployment. The limitation is that we need the aircraft that can fly at around 20 kilometers altitude. Those are already being designed, but we need about 10 years for those designs, and another 10 to build a fleet of them.

    SN: What are some of the ethical concerns around aerosol injection or other solar radiation modification technologies?

    Camilloni: These new technologies may be risky in the potential for exacerbating climate problems or introducing new challenges. There are potential risks to changing precipitation patterns, even overcooling in some regions. A key consideration in deciding whether to pursue them is the need for a full characterization of the positive and negative effects of the different technologies around the globe, and a comparison against the risk of not intervening.

    SN: In 2021, a research group at Harvard was barred from launching a balloon into the stratosphere to test equipment for possible future aerosol release. How might this report address similar studies?

    Camilloni: In our report, we want to make a distinction among the different types of research. You can have indoor research — simulations, social analysis — and this is not so controversial. When you consider outdoor research — releasing particles into the atmosphere — that is more controversial. We are calling for more indoor research. We need to understand the potential impacts.

    [For example,] I studied the impact of solar radiation modification on the hydrology of the La Plata Basin [which includes parts of southeastern Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay and northeastern Argentina]. It’s the most populated region on the continent, and very relevant for hydropower production. And it’s already a very impacted region by climate change.

    However, that research was based on just one climate model. We need more — more resources, more capacity building in the Global South. My research group was the first to explore those impacts in Latin and South America. There are others doing research on this over the next few months, but I can count those groups on one hand.

    We need more resources to be part of any discussion. Those resources include the Loss and Damage Fund to provide support to nations most vulnerable to the climate crisis [agreed to at the end of COP27 in 2022]. But nobody really knows now how that will be implemented.

    SN: The report’s release was timed to the start of COP28. What are you hoping that policymakers will take away from it over the next two weeks?

    Camilloni: These recommendations are really important to have in mind, of course. We need more research to make a decision about whether this is a good idea or a bad idea. And maybe people will cut admissions faster if they’re afraid of climate engineering. More