Tube worms – one of the larger deep ocean critters
Microbial mats
Set the table
With poisonous sulfides
For those that are able.
Beyond sandy shores,
More hitchhiking beasts
Find methane gas
A sumptuous feast.
How odd to discover
These gases are forming
In deep ocean cold
To drive global warming.
The dragon sleeps,
Its bubbling snores
Provide the incentive
To learn something more.
by Kate Rauner
Thanks to huffpost.com
Trees! Planting trees has been a good thing to do for ages, and maybe it’s more important that ever.
Data finally exist to show that if the right species of trees are planted in the right soil types across the planet, the emerging forests could capture 205 gigatons of carbon dioxide in the next 40 to 100 years. That’s two thirds of all the CO2 humans have generated since the industrial revolution. “Forest restoration is by far our most powerful planetary solution today.” scientificamerican.com
There are details, of course. Always details, like the species and soil conditions can make trees better or worse soldiers in the fight against global warming. But a recent study by Tom Crowther, professor of global ecosystem ecology at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, produced the jaw-dropping numbers quoted above. And Crowther’s study didn’t assume agriculture would be wiped off the face of the planet – we humans can co-exist with all these new trees.
In America, there are many areas where forests are growing back.
The United States went through a period of intense deforestation between 1600 and 1900, but the size of its forest areas has been relatively stable for the last hundred years… between 1990 and 2010, the nation added 7,687,000 hectares (18,995,000 acres) of forested land. The trend in reforesting areas has been driven by organizations such as the U.S. Forest Service and the Arbor Day Foundation. education.seattlepi.com
I’ve also noticed in areas I’ve lived that slopes once cut for firewood are now blanketed in trees. And that’s better than a blanket of carbon dioxide.
Over 100 years ago, a chemist in Kansas documented that cottonwood sap contained methane bubbles. He could light escaping gas and watch a blue flame flicker. Others discovered that not only cottonwoods produce the gas.
Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas and today, thanks to global warming, we need to understand the ins and outs of methane in the atmosphere. New studies show:
Many instances in which trees produce their own methane—sometimes from microbes in the heartwood or other tissues and in other cases from a remarkable direct photochemical reaction thought to be driven by the ultraviolet wavelengths in sunlight. NatGeo
Measuring methane and CO2 emisisons from arctic tundra
Life writes its name with methane, which is why methane on Mars is so exciting. On Earth, methane is released from fossil fuels, microbes in soggy soil like bogs and rice paddies, and (as you know) cattle. Human activities accelerate emissions – sometimes, we do in a year what nature does in centuries.
Methanotroph microbes also break down methane. The life expectancy of an average methane molecule is a few decades.
Trees emit methane and break it down by hosting the wily microbes and also on their own. The balance depends on the tree and soil conditions, but there are “forests where similar trees in similar soils have been measured with a fiftyfold difference in methane emissions… [Forests] in wet soils uniformly were net emitters of methane but those in drier conditions in some regions actually were net absorbers of the gas.”
One scientists said that what we know today is “a third grader’s cartoon drawing of a forest.”
None of this means trees are bad! Trees good. Forests good. But learning more about Earth’s methane cycle will improve our models and, if we’re smart enough, help us hand a beautiful world to our progeny.
I ran across this freebie story: the tale of an eco-warrior.
Free for a limited time
Together with his fellow student activists, Ben traveled to London on Earth Day to take one last stand. To make a final plea for an environmental solution to save the planet. Time is up on combating climate change. Humanity’s choice is about to be made. And most are choosing to leave the fate of the world to a mysterious geoengineering experiment.
Goengineering is a fascinating and terrifying idea. Humanity’s been changing the Earth for eons, and especially since the Industrial Revolution, without any plan. Would we do better if we had a plan? What about the law of unintended consequences? And what if we addressed one aspect of Climate Change, like land surface temperatures, but ignored others, like ocean acidification? There are a lot of apocalyptic dystopian stories to be spun from here, and I don’t want to live in one of them.
Here’s an article Anna Kucirkova suggested to me on geoengineering. I can’t vouch for the story or the article, but this is a topic that deserves discussion. I don’t expect to find a silver bullet. No solution that would fit inside a one-hour TV episode (not even of Star Trek TOS.)
I don’t see anything that allows humanity to go merrily on its way with fossil fuels, land and animal use, and economic inequality as usual. What do you think of our precarious future?
Feral horse
Rewilding is “large-scale conservation aimed at restoring and protecting natural processes and core wilderness areas.” In North America and Europe, projects are underway to protect and reintroduce large wildlife, including predators, and reverse habitat loss.
Pleistocene rewilding seeks to restore ecosystems from ten thousand years ago – for example, by introducing elephants, lions, and cheetahs to protected areas in the American Great Plains.
Rewilding aims to save animals and ecosystems, but a project now underway in Siberia is “a radical geoengineering scheme” with a human-centric goal: to slow climate change.
During the last Ice Age, vast areas of grasslands beyond the edges of glaciers locked up huge amounts of carbon in Siberia (not something universal in the Arctic.) As today’s permafrost melts, release of all that carbon dioxide threatens to create a positive feedback that would accelerate global warming and make climate change worse for you and me – and our progeny. But returning these areas to Pleistocene grassland could slow or prevent the change by keeping “permafrost frozen by giving it a top coat of Ice Age grassland.”
All we need are the animals that created that grassland ecosystem. Horses, bison, musk ox, and reindeer have already been moved into what was once a Soviet-era gulag of gold mining, but the project needs something bigger – mammoths.
Cloning may jump into your mind, but it’s not likely. DNA degrades even when frozen and we may never find a viable mammoth cell. But mammoths are closely related to elephants, and scientists from across the globe are working to resurrect the mammoth by turning on genes that will adapt elephants to the Arctic climate by giving them heavy coats, thick layers of fat, and smaller ears, among other changes.
That seems like the easy part. If embryos are eventually created, they can’t be placed in surrogate elephant mothers – Asian elephants are endangered. So artificial wombs are needed.
A womb isn’t just a bucket of fluid.
The mammalian mother–child bond, with its precisely timed hormone releases, is beyond the reach of current biotechnology. But scientists are getting closer with mice… [There are] hopes to deliver the first woolly mammoth to Pleistocene Park within a decade.
Even if the technical problems are solved, there’s still a cultural issue. A baby needs a mother. Elephants – and, no doubt, mammoths – are highly social animals.
Older mammoths would have taught the calf how to find ancestral migration paths, how to avoid sinkholes, where to find water. When a herd member died, the youngest mammoth would have watched the others stand vigil, tenderly touching the body of the departed with their trunks before covering it with branches and leaves. No one knows how to re-create this rich mammoth culture, much less how to transmit it to that cosmically bewildered first mammoth.
It’s an amazing, overwhelming undertaking. But there are people out there working on it. Perhaps we’ll see reconstructed, de-extincted mammoths in our lifetime.
Thanks to theatlantic.com for their article, with some help from wikipedia.org.
I’m used to seeing climate data from satellites, ships, and
Shinto priests
weather stations – from Victorian to modern times – documenting global warming since the Industrial Revolution. But I hadn’t expected centuries of data from these sources:
In 1442, Shinto priests in Japan began keeping records of the freeze dates of a nearby lake, while in 1693 Finnish merchants started recording breakup dates on a local river. Together they create the oldest inland water ice records in human history and mark the first inklings of climate change.”
The data show climate changes pre and post industrial revolution, documenting the sharp increase in warming’s rate.
Our findings not only bolster what scientists have been saying for decades, but they also bring to the forefront the implications of reduced ice cover.”
Today’s citizen scientists join a distinguished group of observers.
Thanks to phys.org.
Wandering magnetic North Pole
To find the North Pole, you travel north, right?
It depends on which North Pole you’re after.
Earth turns around an axis like a giant spinning top. The places where that invisible axis intersects with the planet’s surface are the north and south rotational poles. Due to Earth’s wobble on its axis, these spots drift in roughly decade-long cycles… [and are] completely separate [from] the planet’s magnetic poles, which also reverse periodically over the course of millions of years… the geographic north and south poles [are] the long-term averages of those rotational positions.
Now, as global warming melts ice and pumping drains aquifers, Earth’s distribution of mass is changing—and so are the rotational poles. Earth’s northern pole is drifting rapidly eastward.
Well, “rapidly” in geologic terms.
The change isn’t fast enough for the average person to notice – you don’t need to replace your maps and globes today – though you could write a poem about it. For science, understanding what’s happening could lead to “more accurate predictions of changes in climate in the future.”
It all reminds me of the old joke-question asking if all the people in China jumped at the same time, could they change the Earth’s spin? Instead the joke should be, if all the people in China (and everywhere else) burn fossil fuels at the same time, can they change the Earth’s spin? Now the answer is “yes” and it’s not nearly as funny.
Thanks to nationalgeographic.com
