Environment

The High SeasOlive HeffernanGreystone Books, $32.95

The ocean is a rich, fertile and seemingly lawless frontier. It’s a watery wild west, irresistible to humans hoping to plunder its many riches.

That is the narrative throughout The High Seas: Greed, Power and the Battle for the Unclaimed Ocean, a fast-paced, thoroughly reported and deeply disquieting book by science journalist Olive Heffernan, also the founding chief editor of the journal Nature Climate Change.

The book begins by churning rapidly through the waves of history that brought us to today, including how we even define the high seas: all ocean waters more than 200 nautical miles from any country’s coastline. In many ways, the modern ocean grab was set in motion some 400 years ago. A bitter feud between Dutch and Portuguese traders culminated in a legal document called the Mare Liberum, or the “free seas,” which argues that the ocean is a vast global commons owned by no one. More

In the United States, urban neighborhoods with primarily white residents tend to have more trees than neighborhoods whose residents are predominantly people of color. A new analysis has now linked this inequity to a disparity in heat-related illness and death, researchers report April 8 in npj Urban Sustainability. 

Neighborhoods with predominantly people of color have 11 percent less tree cover on average than majority white neighborhoods, and air temperatures are about 0.2 degrees Celsius higher during summer, urban ecologist Rob McDonald of The Nature Conservancy and colleagues found. Trees already prevent 442 excess deaths and about 85,000 doctor visits annually in these neighborhoods. In majority white neighborhoods, trees save around 200 more lives and prevent 30,000 more doctor visits. More

Air pollution may blunt the signature scents of some night-blooming flowers, jeopardizing pollination.

When the aroma of a pale evening primrose encounters certain pollutants in the night air, the pollutants destroy key scent molecules, lab and field tests show. As a result, moths and other nocturnal pollinators may find it difficult to detect the fragrance and navigate to the flower, researchers report in the Feb. 9 Science.

The finding highlights how air pollution can affect more than human health. “It’s really going deeper … affecting ecosystems and food security,” says Joel Thornton, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle. “Pollination is so important for agriculture.” More

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

Forest fires can devastate vast swaths of land, but in the United States, another category of conflagrations takes the title of most destructive.

Of the homes destroyed in wildfires across the contiguous United States from 1990 to 2020, 64 percent — nearly 11,000 — were razed by grassland and shrubland fires, researchers report in the Nov. 10 Science.  

“We often think about forest fires because that’s what we see on the news … they’re dramatic, they’re huge, they’re intense,” says ecologist Volker Radeloff of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “but grassland and shrubland fires can also be quite destructive.” For instance, the 2023 Lahaina fire on the Hawaiian island of Maui, fueled by invasive wild grasses, killed at least 98 people and destroyed some 2,200 buildings.

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For the new study, Radeloff and his colleagues analyzed three decades of data on wildfire occurrence, land use and housing, hoping to learn more about what factors fuel such destructive blazes.

The team found that about 337,000 square kilometers of grasslands and shrublands burned from 1990 to 2020, compared with about 144,000 square kilometers burned by forest fires. Though forest fires were about twice as likely as grassland fires to burn down homes they encountered, the much larger expanse burned by grassland and shrubland fires helped make them more destructive overall.

The data also revealed that U.S. wildfire risk had risen substantially. Today, roughly 148,000 houses stand in areas where wildfires have burned before — that’s more than twice as many as in 1990. About half of those additional homes were built on land that had already burned prior to 1990, the team found, while the rest were already standing when a blaze burned through.

Radeloff hopes more people will consider their wildfire risk and take steps to prepare, be that planning evacuation routes or fireproofing their homes. Evading wildfire danger, it seems, takes more than getting out of the woods. More

Forget Arizona or Florida — sun worshippers ought to head to the Atacama Desert in South America. It’s there that the sun’s rays on Earth are most intense, beating out places like Mount Everest and even, occasionally, rivaling the conditions on Venus, researchers report July 3 in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

Satellite data have suggested that the Altiplano — a high-altitude plateau in the Atacama that straddles parts of Chile, Bolivia, Peru and Argentina — experiences the most intense levels of sunlight on Earth. But since satellites look down on our planet’s surface from afar, it’s important to verify that claim with on-the-ground data, says Raúl Cordero, a physicist at the University of Santiago in Chile. “How good are these estimates?”

To answer that question, Cordero and colleagues set up a small atmospheric observatory, housed in two shipping containers, in the Chilean Altiplano. Since 2016, the researchers have been measuring solar radiation levels at the site using a pyranometer, a palm-sized instrument sensitive to ultraviolet, visible and near-infrared light.

A researcher working high in the Andes Mountains of Chile sets up an instrument to measure solar radiation.R. Cordero

Based on the first five years of data from the observatory, the average amount of solar power hitting each square meter of the landscape — 308 watts — is consistent with the earlier satellite observations and even higher than values recorded by a pyranometer near the summit of Mount Everest, the team reports.

The researchers also captured bursts of extremely intense solar radiation. One event, in January 2017, blasted the site with 2,177 watts per square meter — more than seven times the average. The intensity of that burst and others like it rivals solar radiation on Venus, which is over 40 million kilometers closer to the sun than Earth is (SN: 2/13/18). Such events, which typically last just a few minutes, are caused by thin clouds scattering light toward the ground, the researchers suggest. More

Utah’s trademarked “greatest snow on earth” may be getting dirtier — and melting faster — due in part to dust blowing off newly exposed lakebed from the shrinking Great Salt Lake.

Snow in the Wasatch Mountains above Salt Lake City had more dust deposited on it in 2022 than in any year since observations began in 2009, researchers report in the June Environmental Research Letters. The dust accumulation caused snow to disappear 17 days earlier than if the snow had been clean.

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An earlier, faster snowmelt may alter the water supply for the 1.2 million people who live in the region, as well as ecosystems downstream, says McKenzie Skiles, a snow hydrologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. It also affects the region’s ski areas, which contribute more than $1.5 billion per year to the local economy.

In arid parts of the western United States, snow acts as a natural reservoir. More than half the municipal water in Salt Lake City comes from four streams that drain snow out of the Wasatch Mountains. But current forecasting tools don’t account for the impact of dust, Skiles says, which absorbs sunlight, speeding up snowmelt. That means people can’t accurately predict when snow runoff will happen so they can use water efficiently.

As an avid skier, Skiles noticed the slopes near Salt Lake City looked especially dirty in 2022. So she and colleagues investigated whether the increase in dust was related to consecutive years of record-low water in the Great Salt Lake (SN: 4/17/23).

The team collected snow samples from a plot adjacent to Alta Ski Resort and found that storms deposited substantial amounts of dust 16 times during the 2022 snowmelt season. After calculating where the dust came from during each storm based on wind direction and atmospheric conditions, the team found that Great Salt Lake contributed nearly a quarter of the total dust to the study site. It also released the most dust relative to the lake’s exposed surface area. This was surprising, Skiles says, because the Great Salt Lake’s dry lakebed is tiny compared with the exposed surfaces of neighboring dust sources, such as the much bigger West Desert, a dry landscape west of Great Salt Lake. The West Desert contributed about of half the dust, while other dried-up lakebeds and deserts, some as far away as Idaho and Nevada, delivered the rest.

A record amount of dust coated snow at the Atwater Study Plot near Alta, Utah, in spring of 2022. The dust speeded up snowmelt by 17 days.Otto Lang

“The future of Utah is going to be drier,” says Patrick Belmont, a hydrologist at Utah State University in Logan who was not part of the study. Earlier snowmelt causes the landscape to dry out faster, creating “a feedback loop that’s hard to break out of,” he explains. As Great Salt Lake shrinks and deposits more dust on the mountains, there’s less water available to refill the lake during the summer, which in turn exposes a larger dust source as the shoreline recedes.

A smaller lake also means less winter snow, Belmont says, as evaporation from Great Salt Lake contributes up to 10 percent of the snowpack in the Wasatch range. “Unless we make some big policy changes, we should expect to see a much lower Great Salt Lake, and it’s very possible that we lose the lake altogether.”

Skiles and her colleagues plan to keep monitoring the snowpack and to use remote sensing to see if dust is impacting snow across all of the mountains that drain into the Great Salt Lake. “We need more years of data to understand if this is the new normal,” she says. More

Hidden flows of water are poised to flush toxic contamination into U.S. coastal communities.

Sea level rise from climate change won’t just force shorelines to retreat — in inland areas, it will guilefully lift groundwater into shallower soils. That rising water could infiltrate hundreds of U.S. Superfund sites — severely polluted locations identified by the Environmental Protection Agency for cleanup — researchers warn in a preliminary study posted May 25 to ESS Open Archive.

These sites — and thousands of other polluted areas — could be at risk of releasing heavy metals, radioactive elements, pesticides and industrial chemicals associated with human health problems (SN: 4/26/23). People of color and low-income communities would be disproportionately affected.

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“Just the sheer number of Superfund sites where there are these dangerous contaminants that could be liberated — it’s astonishing,” says coastal geologist Patrick Barnard of the U.S. Geological Survey in Santa Cruz, Calif., who wasn’t involved in the study. Many of the polluted areas have been managed without regard for groundwater rise, he says. “We need to think about what the future holds for these sites.”

The link between climate change, the sea and underground water may not be obvious, but it is intimate. At the beach, seawater can seep into the ground and move inland, permeating layers of earth under coastal communities. Meanwhile, rain and runoff can also trickle down from above. In the ground, this freshwater often sits atop the denser saltwater from the sea. And when the sea level rises due to climate change, it pushes all this groundwater up through the earth (SN: 10/29/19).

As the top of the groundwater — the water table — nears the surface, it can damage human infrastructure. It can also spread hazardous substances in the soil, exposing people and ecosystems nearby.

Environmental planner and geologist Kristina Hill found motivation for the new study while investigating groundwater conditions at a former Superfund site in the San Francisco Bay Area. There, groundwater was touching pollutants in the soil. “I started wondering, what is the scale of this problem?” says Hill, of the University of California, Berkeley.

She and her colleagues identified which of the roughly 1,300 U.S. Superfund sites are in low-lying coastal areas — no more than 10 meters above mean sea level — where groundwater rise could potentially infiltrate.

They found if the sea surface rose by one meter — a possibility by 2100 — then groundwater could potentially rise into contaminated soils at 326 sites. New Jersey and Florida respectively contained the most at-risk Superfund sites — 54 and 51 respectively.

Not every polluted site in the United States is a Superfund site, but that doesn’t make them less hazardous, Hill says. Her team assessed that potential impact with a case study of the Bay Area alone. They flagged five Superfund sites and nearly 5,300 state-managed contaminated areas vulnerable to that one-meter sea level rise. There could be thousands more such sites up and down our coastlines, Hill says.

The researchers analyzed U.S. Census data to investigate who could face the greatest risk of exposure. People from socially vulnerable communities — those whose circumstances limit their ability to prevent suffering or loss in face of a disaster — bore disproportionate risk, they found.

“The findings are not surprising,” says hydrogeologist Holly Michael of the University of Delaware in Newark. This study takes the first step in addressing the hazard, by calling out where it could arise, she says. More local research will be needed to thoroughly assess each site’s risk and determine next steps, be that treating contaminated soils or removing them altogether.

As the ocean encroaches, Hill says, helping people move inland won’t be enough unless we also clean up our mess. “Otherwise, there will be a toxic area that we leave behind, and that will spread.” More