East Antarctica has the potential to reshape coastlines around the world through sea level rise, but scientists have long considered it more stable than its neighbor, West Antarctica. Now, new detailed NASA maps of ice velocity and elevation show that a group of glaciers spanning one-eighth of East Antarctica’s coast have begun to lose ice over the past decade, hinting at widespread changes in the ocean.
In recent years, researchers have warned that Totten Glacier, a behemoth that contains enough ice to raise sea levels by at least 11 feet (about 3 meters), appears to be retreating because of warming ocean waters. Now, researchers have found that a group of four glaciers sitting to the west of Totten, plus a handful of smaller glaciers farther east, are also losing ice.
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“Totten is the biggest glacier in East Antarctica, so it attracts most of the research focus,” said Catherine Walker, a glaciologist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who presented her findings at a press conference on Monday at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Washington. “But once you start asking what else is happening in this region, it turns out that other nearby glaciers are responding in a similar way to Totten.”
For her research, Walker used new maps of ice velocity and surface height elevation that are being created as part of a new NASA project called Inter-mission Time Series of Land Ice Velocity and Elevation, or ITS_LIVE. Researchers with ITS_LIVE will be launching a new initiative in early 2019 to track the movement of the world’s ice, which includes the creation of a 30-year record of satellite observations of changes in the surface elevation of glaciers, ice sheets and ice shelves, and a detailed record of variations in ice velocity starting in 2013.
Walker found that four glaciers west of Totten, in an area called Vincennes Bay, have lowered their surface height by about 9 feet (almost 3 meters) since 2008—before that year, there had been no measured change in elevation for these glaciers. Farther east, a collection of glaciers along the Wilkes Land coast have approximately doubled their rate of lowering since around 2009, and their surface is now going down by about 0.8 feet (0.24 meters) every year.
For renewable energy technologies like concentrated solar power (CSP) to make sense economically, storage is crucial. Since the sun isn’t always shining, solar energy needs to be somehow stored for later use. But CSP plants are currently limited by their steel-based infrastructure.
“Improving energy storage is a critical issue that presents one of the biggest technological hurdles toward minimizing greenhouse gas emissions,” explains Asegun Henry, the Noyce Career Development Professor and associate professor of mechanical engineering.
An expert in heat transfer, Henry has turned to an unlikely class of materials to help increase the efficiency of thermal storage: ceramics.
Currently, CSP plants are limited by the temperature at which they can store heat. Thermal energy from the solar power is currently stored in liquid salt. This liquid salt can’t exceed a temperature of 565 C since the steel pipes they flow through will get corroded.
“There has been a ubiquitous assumption that if you’re going to build anything with flowing liquid, the pipes and pumps have to be out of metal,” says Henry. “We essentially questioned that assumption.”
Henry and his team, which recently moved from Georgia Tech, have developed a ceramic pump that allows liquid to flow at much higher temperatures. In January 2017, he was entered into the Guinness Book of World Record for the “highest operating temperature liquid pump.” The pump was able to circulate molten tin between 1,200 C and 1,400 C.
Above, Rolling Stone’s Jeff Goodell on the economics and politics of real estate in South Florida – up till recently oblivious to climate change and sea level rise.
Sea-Level Rise (SLR) Projections from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers (USACE) indicate increasing, and imminent, risk to coastal communities from tidal flooding and hurricane storm surge. Building on recent research related to the potential demographic impacts of such changes (Hauer et al. 2016, in Nat Clim Chang 3:802–806, 2017; Neumann et al. 2015; Curtis and Schneider in Popul Environ 33:28–54, 2011), localized flooding projections in the Miami Beach area (Wdowinski et al. in Ocean Coast Manag 126:1–8, 2016) and projected economic losses associated with this rise in projected SLR (Fu et al. Ocean Coast Manag 133:11–17, 2016); this research investigates the accrued current cost, in terms of real-estate dollars lost, due to recurrent tidal flooding and projected increases of flooding in Miami-Dade County. Most directly related to this line of research, Keenan et al. (2018) have recently produced results indicating that Climate Gentrification is taking place in Miami, FL with higher elevations in flood prone areas appreciating at a higher rate. In that vein of thinking, we seek to answer a question posed by such research: What is the actual accrued loss to sea–level rise over the recent past? To answer this question, we replicate well-documented estimation methods by combining publicly available sea-level rise projections, tide gauge trends, and property lot elevation data to identify areas regularly at risk of flooding. Combining recent patterns of flooding inundation with future forecasts, we find that properties projected to be inundated with tidal flooding in 2032 have lost $3.08 each year on each square foot of living area, and properties near roads that will be inundated with tidal flooding in 2032 have lost $3.71 each year on each square foot of living area. These effects total over $465 million in lost real-estate market value between 2005 and 2016 in the Miami-Dade area.
Monongahela, Pennsylvania (CNN)It sits on the banks of the Monongahela River like a monstrous monument to extinction.
With no fire in its belly and no smoke in its stacks, the rusting power plant provides only one sign of its former inhabitants, scribbled on a white board in a padlocked guard booth.
“RIP Mitchell,” the handwriting reads. “You gave us a good few years.”
The Mitchell Power Station, just south of Pittsburgh, actually turned Pennsylvania coal into power for a good 65 years before the discovery of cheaper, cleaner forms of energy.
As fracked natural gas and renewables like wind and solar undercut the price of coal, both Mitchell and the nearby Hatfield’s Ferry power plants were deactivated on the same day in 2013.
Many in this corner of coal country blamed Obama-era regulations on their demise, so when a candidate named Donald Trump promised to end a so-called “war on coal,” they were ready to believe.
“We are putting our great coal miners back to work,” he repeated to rally crowds waving “Trump Digs Coal” signs. “I’m coal’s last shot.”
But thanks largely to free-market forces, more coal-fired power plants have been deactivated in Trump’s first two years in office then in Obama’s entire first term. When asked about the President’s claim to be the savior of coal, veteran miner and industry consultant Art Sullivan bristles.
“He’s trying to get their votes,” he says, standing by the fenced-off entrance to a mine not far from Mitchell where he once served as Face Boss, a coal industry term for managers. “He’s lying to them.”
CBC has a new piece following the work of glaciologist Ben Pelto in the mountains of British Columbia.
I was fortunate to be with Ben and his Dad, Mauri Pelto, in the Cascades back in 2012. Now Ben is a PhD student and continuing his Father’s work of long term glacial monitoring.
When Ben Pelto does his field research on glaciers in the Rocky and Columbia mountains there are distinct perks.
The views aren’t bad, if you like the breathtaking kind.
He also gets to drink water that comes straight from the source.
However, on recent visits the water has tasted less like pristine glacier and more like soot.
“When it’s fire season you can taste the smoke in the water. It’s a bit of a bummer, because you look forward to this crisp cold water, but it has this funky taste,” said Pelto, who has been monitoring glaciers, like the Conrad, south of Golden, B.C., for the last five years, as part of a research project at the University of Northern British Columbia.
It’s not the taste that concerns Pelto so much as the darkening of the ice, especially last summer when wildfires raged across British Columbia.
“The surface of the glaciers was the dirtiest I’ve ever seen it,” Pelto said.
The darker the ice the more sunlight it absorbs.
Scientists are concerned forest fire fallout will speed up the melt of glaciers already in retreat.
U.S. carbon dioxide emissions rose an estimated 3.4 percent in 2018, according to new research — a jarring increase that comes as scientists say the world needs to be aggressively cutting its emissions to avoid the most devastating effects of climate change.
The findings, published Tuesday by the independent economic research firm Rhodium Group, mean that the United States now has a diminishing chance of meeting its pledge under the 2015 Paris climate agreement to dramatically reduce its emissions by 2025.
The findings also underscore how the world’s second-largest emitter, once a global leader in pushing for climate action, has all but abandoned efforts to mitigate the effects of a warming world. President Trump has said he plans to officially withdraw the nation from the Paris climate agreement in 2020 and in the meantime has rolled back Obama-era regulations aimed at reducing the country’s carbon emissions.
“We have lost momentum. There’s no question,” Rob Jackson, a Stanford University professor who studies emissions trends, said of both U.S. and global efforts to steer the world toward a more sustainable future.
The sharp emissions rise was fueled primarily by a booming economy, researchers found. But the increase, which could prove to be the second-largest in the past 20 years, probably would not have been as stark withoutTrump administration rollbacks, said Trevor Houser, a partner at Rhodium.
“I don’t think you would have seen the same increase,” Houser said, referring to the electric power sector in particular.
Jan 7 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for the attorney general of Massachusetts to obtain records from Exxon Mobil Corp to probe whether the oil company for decades concealed its knowledge of the role fossil fuels play in climate change.
The justices declined to hear Exxon’s appeal of a ruling by the top court in Massachusetts holding that Attorney General Maura Healey, a Democrat, had jurisdiction to seek records to probe whether the company misled consumers and investors.
The action by the high court marked the latest setback for Exxon in its efforts to halt the Massachusetts investigation and a similar one by New York’s attorney general, who in October filed a lawsuit against the company.
New York’s lawsuit accused Exxon of engaging in a systematic scheme to deceive investors about the impact that future climate change regulations could have on its business. Exxon has called the claims “meritless.”
The Massachusetts and New York investigations were launched following 2015 news reports that Exxon’s own scientists had determined that fossil fuel combustion must be reduced to mitigate the impact of climate change.
Those news reports, by InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times, were based on documents from the 1970s and 1980s. Exxon said the documents were not inconsistent with its public positions.
If you really hate the idea of scary brown people moving out of the global tropics, and coming to get your mama, – you should do something about climate change.
Copán, Honduras (CNN) – Each night after her husband left, Delmi Amparo Hernández walked to a neighbor’s house to look for him on the TV news. He had fled their mountaintop community here in rural Honduras without a phone because no one in the family could afford one. Their floor was made of dirt, they grew their own food. Watching coverage of the migrant caravan heading for the United States was Hernández’s only way to know if he was alive.
What she saw in the broadcasts were visions from hell. Families jumping from bridges, getting kidnapped along dusty roads, dodging tear gas cannons fired by police from richer nations. How could this be? She continued scanning, hoping to find him, hoping not to.
She had begged Germán Ramírez not to go, but her 30-year-old husband had his reasons. The town’s corn and bean crops had failed during a years-long drought. There was no work aside from farming. No money for irrigation. Their four children, ages 3 to 13, had little to eat.
Ramírez told his wife that he had no choice but to leave with the “caravan” of thousands that had formed in Honduras and would make its way north. This was their chance, she recalled him saying that day. He could go with the group, find work, send back money.
It was this or risk starvation.
The couple’s tragic story, as well as others I heard on a recent four-day trip to western Honduras, complicates two narratives being told about the migrant caravan.
To hear President Trump tell it, Central American “Gang Members and some very bad people” are attempting to storm the United States at its southern border. “This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you,” the President wrote on Twitter. American news reports, meanwhile, largely have focused on high rates of violent crime in Honduras and El Salvador that have driven families to seek asylum as refugees in the United States.
Overlooked is this factor: climate change.
The “dry corridor” of Central America, which includes parts of Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua, has been hit with an unusual drought for the last five years. Crops are failing. Starvation is lurking. More than two million people in the region are at risk for hunger, according to an August report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.
