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      Surviving a drought may help forests weather future dry spells

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      Some forests take one-two punches surprisingly well.

      Researchers have shown that certain California forests exposed to two successive droughts weathered the second one much better than forests only hit by the later dry period. Given that the frequency and severity of droughts is increasing with climate change (SN: 3/10/22), the findings suggest that forested regions might fare better than predicted in the future, the research team proposes in the May 17 AGU Advances. That’s important because of the many resources that forests provide, including their ability to sequester about a quarter of the carbon dioxide that humans put into the atmosphere every year.

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      Carl Norlen and Mike Goulden, ecologists at the University of California, Irvine, studied roughly 520,000 hectares of California forest (about 4 percent of the state’s forested areas). The researchers focused on conifers, trees such as pines and firs that have needles rather than flat leaves. Using archival data gleaned from airplane observations, Norlen and Goulden estimated the extent of conifer die-off during two droughts that struck from 1999–2002 and 2012–2015. “Both of them when they happened were considered some of the most severe droughts ever in California,” Norlen says.

      When the researchers looked at forests that just experienced the 2012–2015 drought, they found that over 50 percent of forested areas showed evidence of die-off. But when Norlen and Goulden analyzed forests that had weathered both droughts, they were surprised to find that only 13 percent of those forested areas showed evidence of die-off after the second drought. The researchers also analyzed satellite data that revealed the severity of tree die-off, and they again found that forests hurt by one drought were better prepared to weather another.

      The underlying cause of those differences probably has to do with the tree mortality that occurred during the first drought, Norlen and Goulden propose. Roughly 31 percent of the forested areas that experienced both droughts showed signs of die-off during the 1999–2002 drought. “We think that it has to do with experiencing die-off the first time,” Norlen says.

      That makes sense, says William Anderegg, an ecologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City who was not involved in the research. “You might have culled out the weak trees,” he says.

      Norlen and Goulden speculate that the first drought eliminated trees weakened by pests like bark beetles (SN: 2/21/23), or perhaps that the dry conditions prompted trees to protect themselves by growing deeper roots. Those changes would have helped protect the remaining trees from future droughts, Goulden says. “You effectively have a stronger population.”

      Getting at the root of why exactly some forests are better prepared to weather successive droughts will require more investigation, the researchers say. One way forward is to monitor individual trees to better understand their physiology, which other teams have done by outfitting trees with sensors (SN: 4/25/23).

      However, the new findings already provide some hope for the forests of the future. Modeling work has suggested that upwards of 50 percent of present-day conifer tree coverage could be lost in the Northern Hemisphere by the end of the century. But this new work shows that that prediction might well turn out to be an overestimate. “There’s an element of it that’s actually hopeful,” Goulden says. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Heart

      Why the 2023 Atlantic hurricane season is especially hard to predict

      by

      It’s hard to know how busy this year’s Atlantic hurricane season will be, thanks to a rarely observed combination of ocean and climate conditions.

      The Atlantic Ocean is in an active storm era, a yearslong period of increasing storm activity. Plus sea surface temperatures there are much higher than usual this year, which can fuel storms, Matthew Rosencrans, the lead hurricane forecaster for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said May 25 at a news conference. But this year will also see the onset of an El Niño phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation ocean and climate pattern, which tends to suppress hurricane formation.

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      That’s not a scenario that has occurred in historical records often, Rosencrans said. “It’s definitely kind of a rare setup for this year.”

      He and his colleagues reported that there’s a 40 percent chance that Atlantic hurricane activity will be near normal this year. Near normal is actually unusually high for an El Niño year. But there’s also a 30 percent chance that activity will be above normal, and a 30 percent chance it’ll be below normal.

      Overall, the agency is predicting 12 to 17 named storms, of which five to nine are predicted to become hurricanes, with sustained wind speeds of at least 119 kilometers per hour (74 miles per hour). Between one and four of those hurricanes could be category 3 or greater, with wind speeds of at least 178 kph (111 mph). The Atlantic hurricane season officially begins on June 1 and ends November 30.

      There’s little consensus among other groups’ predictions, in part due to the uncertainty of what role El Niño will play. On April 13, Colorado State University, in Fort Collins, announced that it anticipated a below-average season, with just 13 named storms, including six hurricanes. On May 26, the U.K. Meteorological Office announced that it predicts an extremely busy hurricane season in the Atlantic, with 20 named storms, including 11 hurricanes, of which five could be category 3 or greater. The long-term average from 1991 to 2020 is 14 named storms.

      So far, 23 different groups have submitted predictions for the 2023 Atlantic season to a platform hosted by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center in Spain, which allows users to compare and contrast the various predictions. There’s a large spread among these predictions, ranging “from below average to well above average,” says Philip Klotzbach, an atmospheric scientist at Colorado State University who is responsible for the group’s seasonal Atlantic hurricane forecasts.

      That spread is likely the result of two big sources of uncertainty, Klotzbach says: the strength of the El Niño (and when during the year it’s expected to develop), and whether the Atlantic’s surface water temperatures will stay above average.

      Each group’s forecast is based on a compilation of many different computer simulations of ocean and atmospheric conditions that might develop during the hurricane season. How often those models agree leads to a probability estimate. NOAA’s models struggled to agree: “That’s why probabilities are not 60 to 70 percent,” Rosencrans said. “That’s to reflect there’s a lot of uncertainty this year in the outlook.”

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      An emerging El Niño phase is signaled by abnormally warm waters in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, which in turn is tied to shifts in wind strength and humidity around the globe. One of the ways that El Niño tinkers with climate is that it alters the strength of winds in the upper atmosphere over the northern Atlantic Ocean. Those stronger winds can shear off the tops of developing storms, hampering hurricane formation. Warmer ocean waters like those in the Atlantic right now, on the other hand, fuel hurricanes by adding energy to storm systems. How active a season it will be depends on which of those two forces will prevail.

      The Met Office, for example, reported that its climate simulations suggest that the wind shear due to this year’s El Niño will be relatively weak, while surface ocean temperatures will remain well above average. Similarly anomalously warm waters in 2017 were found the be the primary cause behind that year’s glut of intense Atlantic hurricanes (SN: 9/28/18).

      In the future, hurricane forecasts could become ever more uncertain. It’s unknown how climate change will affect large-scale ocean and climate patterns such as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation in general (SN: 8/21/19). Computer simulations have suggested that as the atmosphere warms, these globe-scale “teleconnections” may become somewhat disconnected, which also makes them potentially harder to predict (SN: 2/13/23). Climate change is also expected to increase ocean temperatures.

      Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the Pacific Ocean’s hurricane season has already begun with a powerful storm, Super Typhoon Mawar, which battered Guam as a category 4 cyclone before roaring toward the Philippines on May 25, strengthening to category 5. More

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      in Heart

      This house was built partly from recycled diapers

      by

      Meet the house that diapers built.

      Researchers have designed and erected a house that has shredded, disposable diapers mixed into its concrete and mortar. A single-story home of about 36 square meters can pack nearly 2 cubic meters of used diapers into its floors, columns and walls, the team reports May 18 in Scientific Reports.

      Using recycled diapers as composite building materials would not only shrink landfill waste but also could make such homes more affordable, the team says, a particular need in developing countries like Indonesia where the demand for low-cost housing far outstrips the supply.

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      Indonesia’s urban population has increased by about 4 percent per year in the last three decades, and more of its people are moving to urban centers. Over two-thirds of Indonesians are expected to live in urban areas by 2025, says environmental engineer Siswanti Zuraida of the University of Kitakyushu in Japan. That population boom is putting a heavy strain on both housing demand and waste management, says Zuraida, who is originally from Indonesia. Used disposable diapers mostly pile up in landfills or get incinerated, adding to a growing waste problem.

      The materials used to build a house, meanwhile, particularly those needed to shore up its structural integrity, are often the biggest barrier to making homes affordable. So researchers have previously examined the possibility of using a wide variety of unconventional materials that could also save costs. These materials included many that would otherwise pile up as waste, such as the husks of rice grains or fly ash, the fine residue left over from the combustion of pulverized coal. Disposable diapers, as it happens, contain a lot of potentially useful building material, such as wood pulp, cotton, rayon and plastic.

      Zuraida and colleagues assessed how much of the sand, gravel and other traditional building materials used in mortar and concrete could be replaced by diapers — washed, dried, sterilized and shredded — without reducing the strength of the structures. They created six different samples of concrete and mortar by mixing different proportions of diaper material with cement, sand, gravel and water. Crushing the samples in a machine let the researchers test how much weight each could bear.

      The team then went on to design — and then build — a small, single-story, two-bedroom, one-bathroom home based on the maximum amount of diaper waste they calculated they could use. Recycled diapers could replace up to 27 percent of the traditional materials used in load-bearing structural components like columns and beams without losing significant strength, the team found. For buildings with more floors, that fraction is somewhat less: A three-story home could use up to 10 percent disposable diapers in its load-bearing structures, the team calculated. As for nonstructural components like wall partitions or garden paving blocks, shredded diapers could replace up to 40 percent of the sand.

      Despite the need for more affordable housing, there are significant hitches that stand in the way of adopting diapers or other low-impact nonconventional materials, Zuraida says.

      Diapers’ plastic components would have to be separated from the organic fibers, a complicated recycling process currently available only in developed nations. And Indonesia’s building regulations restrict construction materials to concrete, bricks, wood and ceramics — materials that also bear a high cost in terms of carbon emissions.

      “Thinking about how to use waste for other purposes is an excellent idea,” says chemist Christof Schröfl of Technische Universität Dresden in Germany. But there may be limits on the ultimate environmental friendliness of repurposing used diapers in buildings, he says, due to the existing challenges of separating and sanitizing diapers in waste. “It’s maybe worthwhile to start thinking about ways to replace single-use diapers” with something less frequently disposed of. More

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      in Heart

      Soil microbes that survived tough climates can help young trees do the same

      by

      Microbial stress can be a boon for young trees.

      Saplings grown in soil microbes that have experienced drought, cold or heat are more likely to survive when faced with those same conditions, researchers report in the May 26 Science. And follow-up tests suggest that the microbes’ protective relationship with trees may linger beyond initial planting.   

      The team’s findings could aid massive tree planting efforts by giving new saplings the best chance of survival over the long run, says Ian Sanders, a plant and fungal ecologist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. “If you can control which microbes are put onto tree saplings in a nursery, you can probably help to determine whether they’re going to survive or not when they’re transplanted to the field.”

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      As climate change pushes global temperatures ever higher, many species must either adapt to new conditions or follow their ideal climate to new places (SN: 1/25/23). While forests’ ranges have changed as Earth’s climate has warmed and cooled over hundreds of millions of years, the pace of current climate change is too fast for trees to keep up (SN: 4/1/20).

      Trees live a long time, and they don’t move or evolve very quickly, says Richard Lankau, a forest ecologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. They do have close relationships with fast-adapting soil microbes, including fungi, which can help plants survive stressful conditions.

      But it was unclear whether microbes that had previously survived various climates and stresses might give inexperienced baby trees encountering a changing climate a leg up. With friends in the soil, “trees might have more tools in their toolkit than we give them credit for” to survive tough conditions, Lankau says.

      For the study, Lankau and fellow ecologists Cassandra Allsup and Isabelle George — both also at UW–Madison — collected soil from 12 spots in Wisconsin and Illinois that varied in temperature and amount of rain. The team then used the soils to plant an abundance of 12 native tree species, including white oak (Quercus alba) and silver maple (Acer saccharinum). Overall, “we had thousands of plants we were monitoring,” Allsup says.

      Those saplings grew in the soils in a greenhouse for two months before being transplanted in one of two field sites — one warm and one cold. To simulate drought, some trees in each spot were placed under transparent plastic sheets that blocked direct rainfall.

      One site in northern Wisconsin was at the northern edge of the trees’ range and represented how trees might take root in a new area that’s getting warm enough for them to grow. There, trees planted in soil containing cold-adapted microbes better survived Wisconsin’s frigid winter temperatures. Plants that faced drought in addition to the cold, on the other hand, didn’t have the same benefit.

      The other location, set up in central Illinois, was designed to represent a region where the climate is getting too hot or dry for the tree species to tolerate. Saplings grown in soil with microbes from arid spots were more likely to survive a lack of rain. But those grown in soils with heat-tolerant microbes were only slightly more likely to survive when they received normal rainfall. 

      Some fungi, including this jack-o’-lantern mushroom (Omphalotus illudens), have a close relationship with trees. That connection could help saplings expand their range amid changing climate.Cassandra Allsup

      Resident species already living in the area didn’t outcompete all of the transplanted microbes. Newly introduced fungi persisted in the soil for three years, a sign that any protective effects might last at least that long, the team found. 

      It’s still unclear which microbes best aid the trees. Analyses of microbes living in the soil hinted that fungi that live inside plant roots may better help trees survive drought. Cold-adapted soils seem to have fewer fungal species. But soils also contain bacteria, archaea and protists, Sanders says. “We don’t know what it is yet that seems to affect the plant survival in these changing climates.”

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      Determining which microbes are the important ones and whether there are specific conditions that best suit the soil is next up on the list, Allsup says. For example, can dry-adapted soil from Iowa help when planting trees in Illinois? “We need to think more about soils and combinations and [transplant] success… to actually save the forest.”

      One caution, Sanders says, is that transporting microbes from one place to another en masse could bring the bad along with the good. Some microbes might be pathogens in the new place where they’re transplanted. “That’s also a big danger.”  More

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      There’s good and bad news with California’s electric vehicle program

      by

      A worldwide gearshift from fossil fuel–powered cars to electric vehicles could significantly reduce the amount of carbon dioxide that humans emit to the atmosphere. But current strategies for vehicle electrification can also shift some pollution to communities already suffering under higher economic, health and environmental burdens, researchers warn.

      California, which leads the United States by a mile when it comes to EV adoption, offers a window into this evolving problem. The state is aggressively seeking to reduce its carbon footprint and has made substantial increases in wind and solar power generation as well as in the promotion of electric vehicle purchases. One tool the state has used is the California Clean Vehicle Rebate Project, or CVRP, which kicked off in 2010 and offers consumers money back for the purchase or lease of new EVs.

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      Now, an analysis of the CVRP’s impact on the state’s air quality from 2010 to 2021 reveals both good and bad news, researchers report May 3 in PLOS Climate.

      To assess the impact of the CVRP on a community and statewide level, the team developed a computer model that incorporates data on where the rebates went, how much additional electricity would be required to power those vehicles, which of the state’s electric generating units would provide that power and how much pollution they might produce.

      The team then overlapped these data with a mapping tool called CalEnviroScreen that identifies which of the state’s more than 8,000 census tracts — county subdivisions used in population assessments — are the most vulnerable to pollution. That vulnerability measure is based not only on exposure to pollutants such as power plant emissions and unsafe water but also on factors such as income, education level, access to health care and linguistic isolation.

      The good news is that the CVRP is responsible for making a dent in the state’s overall CO2 emissions, reducing them by about 280,000 metric tons per year on average, says environmental scientist Jaye Mejía-Duwan of the University of California, Berkeley. In 2020, transportation in California produced about 160 million tons of CO2, about 40 percent of the total 370 million tons of CO2 emitted by the state that year.

      The program has also reduced the state’s overall emissions of other types of air-polluting gases, including sulfur dioxide and several nitrogen oxide gases collectively called NOx.

      The bad news is that the most disadvantaged communities in the state didn’t see the same overall improvement in air quality, Mejía-Duwan and colleagues found. Those communities didn’t have the same decreases in sulfur dioxide and NOx gases — and in fact saw an increase in one type of air pollution, tiny particulates known as PM2.5 (SN: 7/30/20). “These particles are small enough to penetrate deep into the lungs and cross over into the bloodstream,” increasing the risk of cancer, cardiovascular problems and cognitive decline, Mejía-Duwan says.  

      Where the power is

      California uses a computer model called CalEnviroScreen, currently in its fourth version, to determine levels of vulnerability to the impacts of pollution. The most disadvantaged communities (darker blue) are determined by both pollutant exposure and socioeconomic factors. The state’s electricity-generating units (EGUs, circles) are disproportionately located in the most disadvantaged communities. That reveals how increasing electrification, which includes power generated by nonrenewable sources, could increase pollution in many of the most disadvantaged communities.

      Pollution impact by community

      J. Mejía-Duwan, M. Hino and K. J. Mach/PLOS Climate 2023

      J. Mejía-Duwan, M. Hino and K. J. Mach/PLOS Climate 2023

      That increase may be indirectly related to putting more EVs on the road. Although electric vehicles themselves don’t produce PM2.5 from their tailpipes, increased electricity generation, if it’s not fossil fuel–free, can. Renewable resources, including rooftop solar cells, supplied about half of California’s electricity in 2022. But natural gas–fired power plants still provide a hefty chunk of the state’s power.

      “Electric vehicles are often incorrectly referred to as ‘zero-emission vehicles,’ but they’re only as clean as the underlying electric grid from which the energy is sourced,” Mejía-Duwan says. The most disadvantaged 25 percent of the state’s communities also contain 50 percent of the power plants, the team found.

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      EVs also tend to be relatively heavy due to their hefty batteries. And “heavier vehicles can produce as much if not more particulate matter” than equivalently sized fossil fuel-powered cars, due to brake, tire or road wear, Mejía-Duwan says.

      Increasing the cleanliness of the electric grid would help, as would changes to the management of the state’s generated power, the researchers say. California’s solar, wind and hydroelectric energy production has grown rapidly. But the battery technology to store and use that energy later lags behind. Most of that energy is generated during the day, so some researchers have suggested plugging in electric vehicles while it’s light out to take advantage of the daytime glut of electricity — and then using the vehicles to help power houses at nighttime (SN: 12/22/21).

      But, clever as that idea is, it doesn’t address the underlying factors behind these inequities. Since 2010, the CVRP has provided over 400,000 rebates for EVs of up to $7,500, depending on income. Yet, as it turns out, those rebates have disproportionately gone to the least disadvantaged communities. “That’s a major driver of these inequities,” Mejía-Duwan says.

      Changing that isn’t an easy fix. The state has tried several ways to address the issue, such as by imposing an income cap on eligibility.

      But those efforts have had little effect, particularly given strong barriers that stand in the way of the adoption of EVs by people in disadvantaged communities. One roadblock is that prospective EV buyers must have enough money for a down payment, and then fill out forms and be able to wait several months for the rebate money. Another is that car manufacturers are trending toward producing larger, more expensive EVs. Chevrolet, for example, announced in April that its most affordable EV, the Bolt, will be discontinued as the company pivots to producing electric SUVs.

      There’s also a lack of equitable access to vehicle charging infrastructure. And then there are subtler but no less insidious issues, such as “a lack of sufficient multicultural and multilingual outreach about EVs, plus the fact that people of color and minoritized communities report facing discrimination at dealerships,” Mejía-Duwan says.

      These findings echo and support researchers’ longtime concerns about how current programs to encourage vehicle electrification will disproportionately impact people. “It’s not a surprise,” says Román Partida-López, senior legal counsel for transportation equity at The Greenlining Institute, a nonprofit organization based in Oakland, Calif. “What [California] is doing is a move in the right direction, but it’s not enough.”

      California and other states pursuing aggressive zero-emissions policies need to shift their thinking, Partida-López says, to be more intentional about targeting their efforts toward the communities experiencing the greatest impacts (SN: 12/14/22). Rebates, in particular, are known to be an inequitable approach, he says, because they “assume you have the money up front to be able to put down a down payment of several thousand dollars.”

      A better strategy to reduce the barriers to EV adoption, he says, would be to provide other types of incentives, such as vouchers that low-income households could use at the time of purchase as well as accessible financing programs.

      After all, making EVs accessible to everyone is going to be essential to the big picture of transitioning to zero emissions (SN: 1/27/23). “We’re not going to meet any of those goals unless we center equity” in program designs, Partida-López says. “The focus has always been, ‘How do we transform the market?’ We need to change the narrative to ‘How are we going to focus on the people most impacted, to help with this transition?’”

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      by

      How microbes survive in lakes far beneath Antarctica’s ice sheet has been a mystery. Now scientists have figured out what’s on the menu for microbes in one buried lake in West Antarctica.

      The lake’s bacteria and other microbial inhabitants get by on carbon that seawater left behind thousands of years ago, researchers report in the April AGU Advances. The find adds to existing evidence that, during a period of warming about 6,000 years ago, the ice sheet in West Antarctica was smaller than it is today. That allowed seawater to deposit nutrients in what is now a lake bed buried under hundreds of meters of ice.

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      This study is among the first to provide evidence from beneath the ice that the ice sheet was smaller in the not-so-distant past, geologically speaking, before growing back to its modern size, says Greg Balco, a geochemist at the Berkeley Geochronology Center in California.

      Understanding how the ice sheet changed during past periods of warming is crucial to predicting Antarctica’s future as the world continues to warm due to human-caused climate change, says Balco, who was not involved in the new study.

      Hundreds of lakes pool under Antarctica’s massive ice sheet, the result of the underside of the ice ever-so-slowly melting due to heat from the Earth’s interior. The lakes tend to be pitch-black, near freezing and are almost all isolated from the outside world.

      These less-than-ideal conditions should make them hostile to life. “If I were a microbe, I wouldn’t want to live in the cold, dark depths where I haven’t seen the sun or a new nutrient in thousands of years,” says Ryan Venturelli, a paleoglaciologist at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden. Yet billions of microbes — and even some animals — have found a way to thrive in these subglacial waterbodies (SN: 4/21/23).

      As the last glacial period came to a close, starting around 15,000 years ago, ice sheets around the world retreated. Computer simulations have predicted that as the climate warmed, the ice sheet in West Antarctica may have shrunk to an even smaller size than it is today. But working out what a smaller ice sheet might have looked like isn’t easy since most of the evidence for it is now locked under ice, Balco says.

      In 2018, Venturelli joined a team of about 30 scientists headed to a remote corner of West Antarctica to drill for the past. The journey took them to Lake Mercer: a body of subglacial water that today sits 150 kilometers from the sea.

      It took the expedition over a week of using a hot-water drill 24 hours a day to pierce through just over a kilometer of ice to reach the lake. “There was a lot of cheering and high-fiving” when the drill finally made it through, Venturelli recalls. Lake Mercer is only the second subglacial lake in the world that scientists have ever managed to reach.

      Paleoglaciologist Ryan Venturelli holds a tube of sediment collected from the bed of Lake Mercer. Carbon in this sediment core reveals that the lake was connected to the ocean 6,000 years ago.Billy Collins

      The team collected and analyzed lake water and sediment samples from the lake bed. This work revealed traces of 6,000-year-old carbon-14, a form of the element that’s made in the atmosphere and then falls to Earth. For that carbon to get past the ice, the lake would have had to have contact with the outside world. 

      The researchers didn’t spot any telltale signs of ancient photosynthesizing plankton, suggesting that the area wasn’t open ocean when the carbon settled in the sediment. Instead, seawater carrying the carbon must have come to the lake. That means that ocean water had to have flowed under the ice about 250 kilometers farther inland than it does today, the researchers say. 

      “There’s no other way to get carbon-14 in there,” Balco says. “You can’t push it through ice. Organisms can’t tunnel through. The only way for it to get it there is for ocean water to get under the ice sheet.”

      Seawater does flow under the ice today — but not as far inland as the lake’s location. So the edge of the ice shelf was probably closer to Lake Mercer several thousand years ago. That suggests, the team says, that the ice sheet over West Antarctica was probably smaller back then.

      Microorganisms living in this area 6,000 years ago would have feasted on the inflow from the ocean. And their descendants still seem to as well. The researchers found traces of carbon-14 in the water samples as well as in the sediment, suggesting the microbes are recycling the ancient carbon deposited in the lake bed as food.

      The new study emphasizes how much information is waiting to be found in Antarctica’s hidden lakes, Venturelli says. “There are about 675 lakes under the ice sheet, and we’ve only sampled two,” she says. “I would very much like to drill into every single one of them.” More

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      Satellite data reveal nearly 20,000 previously unknown deep-sea mountains

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      The number of known mountains in Earth’s oceans has roughly doubled. Global satellite observations have revealed nearly 20,000 previously unknown seamounts, researchers report in the April Earth and Space Science.

      Just as mountains tower over Earth’s surface, seamounts also rise above the ocean floor. The tallest mountain on Earth, as measured from base to peak, is Mauna Kea, which is part of the Hawaiian-Emperor Seamount Chain.

      These underwater edifices are often hot spots of marine biodiversity (SN: 10/7/16). That’s in part because their craggy walls — formed from volcanic activity — provide a plethora of habitats. Seamounts also promote upwelling of nutrient-rich water, which distributes beneficial compounds like nitrates and phosphates throughout the water column. They’re like “stirring rods in the ocean,” says David Sandwell, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

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      More than 24,600 seamounts have been previously mapped. One common way of finding these hidden mountains is to ping the seafloor with sonar (SN: 4/16/21). But that’s an expensive, time-intensive process that requires a ship. Only about 20 percent of the ocean has been mapped that way, says Scripps earth scientist Julie Gevorgian. “There are a lot of gaps.”

      So Gevorgian, Sandwell and their colleagues turned to satellite observations, which provide global coverage of the world’s oceans, to take a census of seamounts.

      The team pored over satellite measurements of the height of the sea surface. The researchers looked for centimeter-scale bumps caused by the gravitational influence of a seamount. Because rock is denser than water, the presence of a seamount slightly changes the Earth’s gravitational field at that spot. “There’s an extra gravitational attraction,” Sandwell says, that causes water to pile up above the seamount.

      Using that technique, the team spotted 19,325 previously unknown seamounts. The researchers compared some of their observations with sonar maps of the seafloor to confirm that the newly discovered seamounts were likely real. Most of the newly discovered underwater mountains are on the small side — between roughly 700 and 2,500 meters tall, the researchers estimate.

      However, it’s possible that some could pose a risk to mariners. “There’s a point when they’re shallow enough that they’re within the depth range of submarines,” says David Clague, a marine geologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, Calif., who was not involved in the research. In 2021, the USS Connecticut, a nuclear submarine, ran into an uncharted seamount in the South China Sea. The vessel is still undergoing repairs at a shipyard in Washington state. More

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      in Heart

      Thawing permafrost may unleash industrial pollution across the Arctic

      by

      As the Arctic’s icebound ground warms, it may unleash toxic substances across the region.

      By the end of the century, the thaw threatens to destabilize facilities at more than 2,000 industrial sites, such as mines and pipelines, and further compromise more than 5,000 already contaminated areas, researchers report March 28 in Nature Communications.

      Those numbers come from the first comprehensive study to pinpoint where Arctic permafrost thaw could release industrial pollutants. But there are probably even more contaminated areas that we don’t know about, says permafrost researcher Moritz Langer of the Alfred Wegener Institute in Potsdam, Germany. “We only see the tip of the iceberg.”

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      Toxic substances released from these locations could jeopardize fish and other animals living in Arctic waterways, as well as the health of people who depend on them.

      Permafrost is any soil, sediment or rock that remains frozen for at least two years. Step on the ground in the Arctic and chances are that permafrost lies underfoot. For decades, people have treated the frozen earth as staunch and largely immobile. Industries constructed infrastructure atop its firmness, and within it they buried their refuse and sludge. In some places, scientists and others have used permafrost to store radioactive waste.

      But the Arctic is warming nearly four times as fast as the rest of the planet as a result of climate change, and as much as 65 percent of the region’s permafrost may disappear by 2100 (SN: 8/11/22).

      That could release some worrisome things, says climate scientist Kimberley Miner of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., who wasn’t involved in the study. In 2021, Miner and her colleagues warned that the thawing of Arctic permafrost could release antibiotic-resistant bacteria, viruses and radioactive waste from nuclear-testing programs into the environment.

      Keen to identify where the warming could spread industrial pollutants, Langer and his colleagues first analyzed the range of Arctic permafrost and whereabouts of industrial infrastructure. They identified about 4,500 sites — including oil fields, mines and abandoned military installations — in places where permafrost probably exists. Next, the team used contamination data from Alaska and Canada — regions with accessible records — and found that as of January 2021, about 3,600 contaminated locations occupy the two regions. These include waste areas and places where pollutants were accidentally released.

      Realistically, these numbers are probably deflated, Langer says, because many incidents of contamination have probably gone undocumented.

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      Focusing on Alaska, the researchers found that diesel, gasoline and related petrochemicals make up about half of the pollutants reported. Lead, arsenic and mercury — substances toxic to fish, people and other organisms — were reported too. But in many cases, the type of pollutant was not documented. “That’s a big problem,” Langer says, in part because it makes understanding the risks of a particular leak or spill much harder.

      Using the locations of industrial sites and North American contamination data, Langer and colleagues extrapolated where industrial contamination and permafrost might coexist across the entirety of the Arctic, finding 13,000 to 20,000 such sites may exist today. Then, they used computer simulations to investigate the impact of current and future levels of climate change.

      Today, there may already be a risk of permafrost degrading at about 1,000 of the known industrial sites and 2,200 to 4,800 of the known and estimated contaminated locations, they found.

      In a low-emissions scenario in which warming rises by up to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by the end of the century, those numbers increase to more than 2,100 industrial sites and 5,600 to 10,000 contaminated areas. An increase of about 4.3 degrees C would probably affect almost all the known and projected locations.

      “We’re going to need to think about keeping [pollutants] where they need to be,” Miner says, “not just leaving them on the landscape where we feel like.”

      The new findings are probably conservative, Langer says, partly because the analysis didn’t consider that infrastructure itself can warm the ground. What’s more, even if it doesn’t fully thaw, “warming of the permafrost causes quite a bit of problem,” says civil engineer Guy Doré of Université Laval in Quebec City, who wasn’t involved in the study. Permafrost that warms from –5° C to –2° C can lose half of its load-bearing capacity, he says, destabilizing infrastructure.

      Today, no international regulations mandate industries in the Arctic to document the substances they use and store, or what happens to them. Without that information, Langer says, it’ll be difficult to assess and manage the growing risk of contamination.

      He plans to visit decades-old oil drilling facilities in Canada to study how the changing permafrost has affected the containment of drilling fluids. “That’s the next step,” he says, “to understand better how [industrial contaminants] spread into the landscape.” More