Alabama coastline named 1 of 10 most endangered places in the South

The Alabama coastline has been named one of the 10 most endangered places in the South by the Southern Environmental Law Center.

Although Louisiana, Mississippi and Florida saw plenty of oil, Alabama’s coastline was the only one singled out for the list, because of this quirk: For its purposes, the Law Center defines the South as a six-state region including Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee and Virginia.

The threat to the coast is ongoing, even though the oil spill has been over for months, according to the group, which contends that federal drilling laws still don’t have enough teeth to prevent another major spill.

A statement from the group touts its “legal efforts to strengthen oversight and regulation of offshore drilling, and to ensure that nothing like the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is allowed to happen again.”

The group does a new list annually. Last year, Alabama’s Black Warrior River (right) was singled out as one of the most endangered places.

Other places on this year’s list were highlighted due to various industrial projects, including hydroelectric dams, coal mines, bridge construction and hydraulic fracking for natural gas production.

A central theme of the group’s report involves energy, both producing it and consuming it. The South, according to the group, relies on coal-fired power plants and allows particularly destructive mining practices, including mountaintop removal coal mining (at left) and strip mines.


“Our region is headed down a path that threatens to overwhelm the Southern landscapes we love — our mountains, rivers, coast and rural countryside,” said Marie Hawthorne, with the group. “Decisions made today about how we extract and produce energy will have consequences for decades to come.”

The group contends that if the six states in which it works were a single country, it would be the sixth-largest carbon dioxide source on Earth. Carbon dioxide is one of the key greenhouse gases associated with global warming.

Source:
Alabama.com for the Mobile Register,"Alabama coastline named 1 of 10 most endangered places in the South", accessed January 26, 2011

'Many seed-bearing trees may become extinct'

Global warming is already affecting the earth in a variety of ways that demand our attention. Now, research carried out at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem indicates that many tree species might become extinct due to climate change if no action is taken in time.

According to the research, trees which disperse their seeds by wind, such as pines and maples, will be unable to spread at a pace that can cope with expected climate changes. (Right: red maple seeds)

The research, which focused on the ecological consequences of expected changes in the climate and the environment on tree spread, was conducted by Prof. Ran Nathan, head of the Alexander Silberman Institute of Life Science at the Hebrew University; his student, Nir Horvitz; and researchers from abroad.

Climate changes, which can be sensed already today and which are expected to continue in the next 50 years, include the increase of carbon dioxide concentration in the air and a reduction of surface wind speed in many areas. On the basis of earlier work, elevated concentration of carbon dioxide is expected to cause trees to produce many more seeds and to reach maturity earlier than under current conditions, hence speeding up their spread. On the other hand, the weakening of wind speed in certain areas should reduce spread rate of these trees. The balance between these opposing forces remained unknown.

Furthermore, it was unclear whether even the projected increase in wind speed in certain areas, together with the higher seed production and earlier maturation, will result in a fast enough spread of trees in order to be sufficient to match the climate changes.

The new research, published in the journal Ecology Letters is based on a unique, fully mechanistic model developed to predict trends in plant spread. This model is the first to consider how projected changes in biological and environmental factors would impact tree spread in future environments. Predictions which were made until now were founded on past trends and did not take into consideration the expected future changes in the key biological and environmental factors that determine plant spread. (at right: different ways seeds disperse)

They note that global warming is already affecting the earth in a variety of ways that demand attention. Among the tree species that might disappear due to climate change if no action is taken in time are pines and maples (left).

Climate changes, which can be sensed already today and which are expected to continue in the next half century include the increase of carbon dioxide concentration in the air and a reduction of surface wind speed in many areas.

On the basis of earlier work, higher concentrations of carbon dioxide are expected to cause trees to produce many more seeds and to reach maturity earlier than under current conditions, hence speeding up their spread. (At right: a dandelion's seeds are spread by wind)

On the other hand, the weakening of wind speed in certain areas should reduce spread rate of these trees.

The balance between these opposing forces remains unknown. It was also unclear whether even the projected increase in wind speed in certain areas – together with the higher seed production and earlier maturation – will result in a fast enough proliferation of trees to be sufficient to match the climate changes.

These questions were examined in this study for the first time. Surprisingly, the results show that changes in wind speed, either the projected increase or decrease, have negligible effects on the rate of wind-driven spread of these species. The effects of increased seed production and earlier maturation is that which prevails, giving rise to faster spread in the future compared to current conditions.

Still, this research showed that the faster spread predicted for these trees in the future will be much slower than the expected poleward shift of temperature ranges, so these tree species might not be able to withstand this climate change.

“Our research indicates that the natural wind-driven spread of many species of trees will increase but will occur at a significantly lower pace than that which will be required to cope with the changes in surface temperature,” said Nathan.

“This will raise extinction risk of many tree populations because they won’t be able to track the shift in their natural habitats, which currently supply them with favorable conditions for rooting and reproduction,” he explained.

“As a result, the composition of different tree species in future forests is expected to change and their areas might be reduced, the goods and services that these forests provide for man might be harmed, and wide-ranging steps will have to be taken to ensure seed dispersal in a controlled, directed manner,” he continued.

“Predictions that were made until now were founded on past trends and did not take into consideration the expected future changes in the key biological and environmental factors that determine plant spread.”

In Israel, the research has bearing on various native tree species whose seeds are dispersed by the wind, such as Aleppo pine , Syrian maple (right) and Syrian ash. The model that has been developed will be useful also in predicting the invasive spread of alien tree species into Israeli natural habitats.

The current research points to the need to take human action to insure the dispersal of the seeds of the desirable trees within the next half century, in view of the expected climate changes.

“It is important for those responsible for forest management in many parts of the world to understand that nature alone will not do the job,” concluded Nathan. “Human action will be required to ensure in a controlled manner the minimization of unexpected detrimental byproducts, and that those trees which are very important for global ecological processes will not become extinct,” he said.

“These forests are important in many ways to man, including the supply of wood, the safeguarding of water quality and the provision of recreation and tourism facilities.”


Source:
The Jerusalem Post, "'Many seed-bearing trees may become extinct'", accessed January 25, 2011
Science Daily, "Climate Change Threatens Many Tree Species", accessed January 25, 2011

Glaciers largely stable in one range of Himalayas

An important portion of the Himalaya’s glacier cover is currently stable and, thanks to an insulating layer of debris, may be even growing, a new study finds. The study’s conclusion contradicts a portion of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that had to be retracted last year because it could not be substantiated.

Though the IPCC report stated that the risk of the region’s glaciers “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high,” the new study finds that ice cover is stable in the Karakoram mountains, a northern range that holds about half of the Himalaya’s store of frozen water.

That’s not to imply that water reservoirs on what’s often called the roof of the world aren’t under stress. Throughout most Himalayan ranges, roughly 65 percent of the studied glaciers were shrinking, Dirk Scherler of the University of Potsdam, Germany, and his colleagues report in the January 23 Nature Geoscience. But in Karakoram, 58 percent of studied glaciers were stable or slowly expanding up to 12 meters per year.

Scherler’s team pored over satellite images of 286 glaciers throughout the Himalayas. Collected between 2000 and 2008, they showed a consistent trend everywhere except the Karakoram: a reduction in the area of glacial cover. Many glaciers in those regions also were stagnant — not flowing — which, Scherler says, is an indicator of poor health.

A blanket of dust and rock debris apparently shields some glaciers in the world's highest mountain range from a thaw, a factor omitted from past global warming reports. And varying wind patterns might explain why some were defying a melt.

"Our study shows there is no uniform response of Himalayan glaciers to climate change and highlights the importance of debris cover," scientists at universities in Germany and the United States wrote in the study of 286 glaciers.

The report said that 58 percent of glaciers examined in the westerly Karakoram range of the Himalayas were stable or advancing, perhaps because they were influenced by cool westerly winds than the monsoon from the Indian Ocean.

The new findings are consistent with what Kenneth Hewitt of Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, has observed, and point to the fact “that the picture of climate change effects in high Asia is much more complicated than most people realize.”

Indeed, for much of the past century Karakoram’s glaciers were in retreat. A 2005 paper by Hewitt described a turnaround that commenced only in the late 1990s.

In the new study, Scherler’s team looked for factors that might affect the responsiveness of Himalayan glaciers to regional warming. A rocky blanket quickly emerged as a major one.

In general, the warmer the air above a glacier becomes the faster exposed ice will melt. A thin veneer of dust or grit will darken glaciers, increasing the amount of heat they absorb and exaggerating their warming, much as a dark roof becomes hotter in sunlight than a light gray one. But once the depth of any rock cover exceeds several centimeters, it will insulate ice from the sun’s warming rays. In some lower reaches of Himalayan glaciers, especially in the Karakoram, rock debris can include house-size boulders, Scherler observes.

In this range, it seems, rocky rubble eroded from uphill peaks serves to decouple the effects of regional warming from glacial retreats. The new analysis found retreat rates varied in the Himalaya “from high for debris-free glaciers to zero for glaciers with debris cover greater than 20 percent.”

What the satellite data, which surveys the extent of a glacier’s coverage, can’t establish is how much area glaciers might be thinning. Such information requires ground measurements, Hewitt says, which are particularly rare in this part of the world. But they could also prove quite crucial. He notes that some data emerging from India and China suggest that the diffuse fallout of soot from local industries, traffic and cook stoves might be subtly darkening debris-free portions of Himalayan glaciers — and constitute “a more significant factor than even temperature change in their melting.”


Source:
Science News, "Glaciers largely stable in one range of Himalayas", by Janice Raloff, accessed January 25, 2011
Reuters, "Some Himalayan glaciers advance, despite warming", by Alistar Doyle, accessed January 25, 2011

Wolves, bears blamed for decline of elk in Yellowstone

Wolves and grizzly bears are mostly to blame for a steep population decline in a signature elk herd in the northern range of Yellowstone National Park, government scientists said on Wednesday.

The elk population in the northern section of the park is prized by sportsmen who hunt outside Yellowstone boundaries in Montana and by the millions who pour into the park each year to see wildlife.

Annual counts of the northern Yellowstone elk population show it has plummeted by more than 70 percent since 1995, falling from 16,791 to fewer than 5,000 today.

The herd, which seasonally migrates north from the park and into the Gardiner, Montana area, saw its numbers cut by nearly a quarter over the past year or from 6,070 in December 2009 to 4,635 last month, according to the latest survey by state and federal officials.

Biologists said wolves and grizzlies are the major reasons for the decline, with wolves reintroduced in the area in the mid-1990s.

But hunting and a drought that began to plague the region in the early 2000s, reducing forage for elk and lowering reproduction also have played significant roles in the decline, according to the Northern Yellowstone Cooperative Wildlife Working Group.

The group, composed of state and federal wildlife and land managers, said the reduction in northern Yellowstone elk comes amid a significant decline in wolves and slight drop in grizzlies in the same area in recent years. (At left: grizzly takes over wolf kill of elk, chasing wolves away)

The number of wolves in the park's northern range fell from 94 in 2007 to 37 last year, with the population dented by a public hunt in 2009 and diseases like distemper.

Scientists said fewer predators and the cancellation of a late season elk hunt in the region will likely boost the herd's numbers.

Source:
Reuters, "Wolves, bears blamed for decline of elk in Yellowstone", accessed January 20, 2011

Experts predict climb in grizzly conflicts

Conflicts between people and grizzlies in the Yellowstone National Park region are likely to rise this year as more bears try to recolonize areas now inhabited by people, wildlife managers said on Tuesday.

The news comes as federal and state agencies gather beginning on Wednesday in Montana to craft measures they hope will reduce the number of grizzlies they must kill in 2011 for threatening people and livestock.

Problems between Yellowstone area grizzlies and people reached unprecedented levels last year, with bear managers in Wyoming alone grappling with an all-time high of 52 grizzly captures. One incident involved a grizzly killing a Michigan man and mauling two other victims.

On July 28, a mother grizzly killed a camper and injured two others (One victim at right) at a campsite for tents in a national forest in Montana. That rampage came just weeks after a grizzly mauled a hiker to death in northwestern Wyoming.

But the estimated 600 grizzlies in the park and nearby Wyoming, Montana and Idaho won't be the focus of renewed efforts to contain conflicts.

"We can cope with the bears, now we need to work on the humans," said Gregg Losinski, member of a federal and state task force on bear recovery.

Hunting and trapping of the outsized, hump-shouldered bears drove them to near extinction before they were added to the threatened and endangered species list in 1975.

The grizzly population in the Yellowstone region has climbed to an estimated 600, 100 more than the recovery goal. Bear experts say more conflicts are an ironic outcome of the steady recovery of the species.

"Conflicts are a natural result of the increasing number of bears; the two go hand in hand," said Chris Servheen, grizzly recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

And scientists say those conflicts will climb as grizzlies venture into areas that made up their historic habitat.

"They used to live only in the park and wilderness areas; now they live right next door to where we live," said Chuck Schwartz, head of the Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team. (At upper right: Interagency Team processes yearlings)

DELISTING WOULD OPEN WAY TO HUNTING

The comeback by Yellowstone area grizzlies is the chief reason the Obama administration wants the bears to be delisted, which opens the way for public hunting.

Dan Ashe, President Barack Obama's pick to head the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversees the bulk of imperiled species, stated last month that the administration "will delist the grizzly" in the Yellowstone region, predicting final action within 18 months.

With delisting -- and hunting -- at least a year away, bear managers say they will be stepping up campaigns at campgrounds and in communities about safeguarding food and garbage that draw bears.

And some areas in national parks and forests will require campers and trailers instead of tents, a policy that stems from a deadly campground attack last summer, that left a Michigan man dead and 2 others mauled.

An estimated 75 Yellowstone area grizzlies were killed in 2010, many targeted by wildlife managers because of problem behavior like raiding chicken coops, rifling tents or trash at popular campsites and preying on domestic livestock.

Schwartz is eyeing a link between last year and 2008, when grizzlies experienced record mortality at a projected 79, for conflicts and for a delay in the start of spring.

In both cases, a late spring with snow still in the high country pushed bears to lower elevations for food earlier and delayed or even destroyed the crop of fruit-producing plants like huckleberries (left) which the omnivores favor.

Yellowstone area grizzlies were delisted in 2007. Sportsmen were eager to harvest the trophy animals but states had to put hunts on hold after environmentalists gained a legal victory in 2009 that relisted the bears as threatened.

Conservation groups successfully argued the government failed to analyze the impact of climate changes on Yellowstone area grizzlies, pointing to the dwindling supply of whitebark pines and cutthroat trout (at right) bears rely on.

Scientists say a warming West is the leading cause of a sharp drop in whitebarks (left), high-elevation trees under assault by diseases and pests. Climate changes also play a role in the decline of cutthroat trout, which depend on cold water.


Source:
Reuters,"Experts predict climb in grizzly conflicts", accessed January 20, 2011

Melting in Andes Reveals Remains and Wreckage

In the eateries of La Paz, Bolivia where experienced climbers gather over plates of grilled llama and bottles of Paceña beer to swap tales of mountaineering feats of bravery and skill, they assume an air of boredom when the discussion includes the 19,974-foot-high Huayna Potosí.

“A training climb,” scoffs climber, who guides foreigners up the mountains of Bolivia, which boasts peaks higher than the Alps and the Rockies.

Bravado fades, however, when talk shifts to what climbers are discovering on Huayna Potosí’s glacier: crumpled fuselage, decades-old pieces of wings and propellers, and, in November, the frozen body of Benjamin Pabon Galindo's (right) was recovered from Huayna Potosi mountain, where his plane crashed due to mechanical problems in 1990. At the time of the crash Pabon was flying a load of beef from the northern region of Beni to La Paz.

The body of the other pilot aboard the plane was recovered in 1997, while Pabon's remains were located Sunday by climbers hired by his family.

The body was intact with "the clothing and everything", but it was frozen and broke apart while being pulled out of the pilot's seat, the crash victim's father, Carlos Pabon, said.

“When I found the pilot, he was still strapped into his seat, crunched over like he was sleeping, some black hair falling from his skull,” said Eulalio González, 49, the climber who carried Mr. Pabón’s mummified body down the mountain. “There are more ice mummies in the peaks above us,” he said. “Melting glaciers will bring them to us.”

The missing aviator was the great-grandson of Rafael Pabon, a hero of the 1932-35 Chaco War and the first fighter pilot in the Americas to win a dogfight in combat.

The discovery of Mr. Pabón’s partially preserved remains was one of a growing number of finds pulled from the world’s glaciers and snow fields in recent years as warmer temperatures cause the ice and snow to melt, exposing their long-held secrets. The bodies that have emerged were mummified naturally, with extreme cold and dry air performing the work that resins and oils did for ancient Egyptians and other cultures.

Up and down the spine of the Andes, long plagued by airplane crashes and climbing mishaps, the discoveries are helping to solve decades-old mysteries.

In one such find, in the late ’90s, climbers on Mount Tupungato in Argentina discovered parts the wreckage of the Star Dust, a fabled British aircraft rumored to have disappeared in 1947 with a cargo of gold.

The climbers found no treasure at the crash site of the Avro Lancastrian plane flown by British South American Airways. But they did discover a preserved torso and a hand with pointed, manicured fingernails, an eerie fashion relic of 1940s London that served as testament to the fate of the plane’s passengers and crew.

Scientists say the retreat of the ice is an unexpected boon for those yearning to peer back in time.

“It looks like the warming trend seen in many regions is continuing,” said Gerald Holdsworth, a glaciologist at the Arctic Institute of North America in Calgary, Alberta. “There are still some large snowbanks left in promising places, and many glaciers of all different shapes, orientations and sizes, so the finds could go on for a long time yet.”

Some discoveries are personal, allowing families closure after years of mourning loved ones who appeared to have vanished. Others have added alluring clues into the history of human migration, diet, health and ethnic origins, said María Victoria Monsalve, a pathologist at the University of British Columbia who studies ice mummies. (At left: mummy of Inca maiden)

She said some of the most valuable discoveries in recent years include three Inca child mummies found on the summit of Mount Llullaillaco in northern Argentina and a 550-year-old iceman discovered by sheep hunters in northern British Columbia.

Younger mummies can also add to the historical record. In 2004, three well-preserved soldiers were found in a scene of high-altitude fighting from World War I in the Italian Alps. And in 2006, a military lab in Hawaii pieced together the story of a World War II airman found on Darwin Glacier in California. Identified as Leo M. Mustonen, he was buried in his hometown, Brainerd, Minn.

Even Mr. Holdsworth, who as a glaciologist is generally more interested in the ice itself, has been closely monitoring the Malaspina Glacier in southeastern Alaska (see map at right), in part because he says he believes that it holds a plane that crashed near the Yukon border in 1951.

For the family of Rafael Pabón, the pilot found high in the Andes in November, the discovery was a relief of sorts. For two decades, his mother, Yolanda Galindo de Pabón, 69, had been tortured by thoughts of what had happened to him. She said she nurtured a theory that he might be wandering Bolivia’s provinces as a result of an accident. She wondered whether his plane could have been hijacked and flown across the border into Brazil.

The discovery of his body — still clad in the same white shirt and gray pants he wore when he lifted off with a cargo of beef carcasses from Bolivia’s eastern lowlands on Oct. 19, 1990 — at least put an end to the doubts.

“It took me a very long time to acknowledge he might be dead,” Ms. Pabón said. “Now we have a body. I can visit my son at his burial site and grieve like any mother has a right to do.”

The frozen corpse of Mr. Pabón’s co-pilot was discovered on Huayna Potosí in 1997. The cargo plane’s only other crew member, a mechanic named Walter Flores, has not been found.

Climbers here say they expect to find more remains as the country’s glaciers, like Chacaltaya — once said to be the site of the world’s highest ski resort — retreat. The resort closed in 2009 due to global warming, a full 6 years before it was forecast to be melted away. But far more than a ski run has been lost here--a crucial part of Bolivia's water supply has been disrupted as well.

La Paz’s main water supplies come from rainwater and melt-off from tropical glaciers in the Cordillera Real range, which includes Chacaltaya and the Tuni-Condoriri glacial system set in the mountains above the region’s largest reservoir.

The glaciers not only provide drinking water to Bolivian residents, but are also used to create power through hydroelectric dams--glacial runoff gives the region 80% of its electricity.

Climbers speak with a certain reverence of glaciers guarding plane wrecks stretching back decades, including a Hercules military cargo plane from the 1970s and smaller planes that crashed into mountains after encountering storms and poor visibility.

In at least one case, the mystery is unfolding in chapters, as layers of ice slowly reveal an old tragedy.

In 2006, a climbing team on Mount Illimani (right), Bolivia’s second-highest peak, rediscovered the wreckage of a Boeing 727 operated by Eastern Air Lines that crashed into the mountain shortly after takeoff on Jan. 1, 1985, killing all 29 people aboard.

No bodies were found at the time of the crash or during the 2006 ascent. But Roberto Gómez, 28, a climber who retrieved part of the Boeing’s fuselage, said it was only a matter of time before they surface as the glacier on Illimani melts. He has already found photographs, children’s clothing and, strangely, what seemed to be crocodile hides from the cargo hold at the crash site. “The bodies and the black box are still somewhere in the ice,” he said.

Aware of the fate which has often met those who dare challenge Bolivia’s peaks, some climbing guides here respectfully refer to the mountains as “achachila,” a word from the indigenous Aymara language that roughly translates as “earth spirit” or “uncle.” Before each ascent, they make offerings of coca leaves to the peaks they depend on for their livelihood. “The uncles guard many secrets,” said Mr. González, who found the body of Mr. Pabón, “just like the graveyards in their shadow.”

Source:
The New York Times, "Melting in Andes Reveals Remains and Wreckage", accessed January 19, 2011
Top News, "20 years after crash, pilot's body found in Bolivian Andes", accessed January 19, 2011