Roughly 30 percent of the carbon dioxide produced by humans dissolves into oceans, rivers and lakes, transforming conditions for ocean life for the worse.
Stanford scientists have produced a 360-degree virtual underwater ecosystem to provide an up-close look at how coral reefs might appear by the end of the century if emissions aren’t curbed
A new, free virtual reality program allows users to explore what happens as climate change kills off coral reefs.
The Stanford Ocean Acidification Experience
is a free science education tool that takes students to the bottom of
the sea and then fast-forwards their experience to the end of this
century, when, as scientists predict, many coral reefs are expected to
corrode through ocean acidification.
By putting the experience in VR,
the collaborators say they are hoping to change people's behavior in
the real world.
The project came out of Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab,
which created a related 360-degree video project that also examines
the problem of global warming and its impact on the ocean's life forms.
But it's the VR version that allows the viewer to deep-sea dive and
collect samples off of the ocean floor.
Wearing a virtual reality headset, a researcher tries out the Stanford Ocean Acidification Experience, a new VR science education tool, with coral animation still in background.
(Image credit: Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab)
The simulation places the viewer into heavy traffic, where he or she
can follow carbon dioxide molecules as they float from car tailpipes
to the sea, where they're absorbed.
Then the viewer steps into the waves
and moves around coral as it loses its vitality and displays the
effects of increasingly acidic water on marine life.
A narrator
explains what's happening as the story unfolds and encourages the
viewer to undertake specific actions, such as a species count.
"You're not watching something, you're doing it," said Jeremy
Bailenson, founding director of the lab and a communications professor.
"You learn by doing. These are magic, teachable moments."
The development process took two years to recreate a virtual replica
of an actual rocky reef around the Italian island of Ischia, where
underground volcanic vents have been spewing carbon dioxide at the
reef.
The data collected from that site has allowed researchers to
measure the impact on marine life and to extrapolate what effect
people's increasing fossil fuel use will have in decades to come.
A related video, "The Crystal Reef,"
filmed in 360 degrees and developed as part of a master's degree
project by a lab member, premiered during the Tribeca Film Festival
earlier this year.
There, people could watch the film on VR headgear.
The VR project has also gone to Washington, where lawmakers and
staffers tried it out during a Capitol Hill event organized by
non-profit Ocean Conservancy.
Among them was Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.
"This
simulation shows in rich detail the damage carbon pollution inflicts on
our oceans," said Whitehouse after his viewing.
"I appreciate the
Stanford Ocean Acidification Experience for calling attention to the
peril our oceans face and what we must do to protect them."
Other research from Stanford : A
combination of sensors and video reveals details about the hunting
methods of the largest predators that have ever lived. The study focuses
on rorquals, a family of baleen whales that includes blue whales,
humpbacks and minke whales.
Sea level change resulting from Greenland ice melt,
derived from NASA GRACE measurements. Black circles show locations of
the best historical water level records, which underestimate global
average sea level rise due to Greenland melt by about 25 percent.
A new NASA and university study using NASA satellite data finds that
tide gauges -- the longest and highest-quality records of historical
ocean water levels -- may have underestimated the amount of global
average sea level rise that occurred during the 20th century.
A research team led by Philip Thompson, associate director of the
University of Hawaii Sea Level Center in the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology, Manoa, evaluated how various processes that
cause sea level to change differently in different places may have
affected past measurements.
The team also included scientists from
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, and Old Dominion
University, Norfolk, Virginia.
“It’s not that there’s something wrong with the instruments or the
data,” said Thompson, “but for a variety of reasons, sea level does not
change at the same pace everywhere at the same time. As it turns out,
our best historical sea level records tend to be located where 20th
century sea level rise was most likely less than the true global
average.”
Global mean sea level is rising, but as shown by the satellite data pictured here, the rate of sea level change is not the same everywhere.
This presents a challenge when estimating historical average global sea level rise from tide gauges prior to satellite measurements.
Credit: NOAA
One of the key processes the researchers looked at is the effect of
“ice melt fingerprints,” which are global patterns of sea level change
caused by deviations in Earth’s rotation and local gravity that occur
when a large ice mass melts.
To determine the unique melt fingerprint
for glaciers, ice caps and ice sheets, the team used data from NASA’s
Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites on Earth’s
changing gravitational field, and a novel modeling tool
(developed by study co-author Surendra Adhikari and the JPL team) that
simulates how ocean mass is redistributed due to ice melting.
One of the most fascinating and counter-intuitive features of these
fingerprints is that sea level drops in the vicinity of a melting
glacier, instead of rising as might be expected.
The loss of ice mass
reduces the glacier’s gravitational influence, causing nearby ocean
water to migrate away.
But far from the glacier, the water it has added
to the ocean causes sea level to rise at a much greater rate.
During the 20th century, the dominant locations of global
ice melt were in the Northern Hemisphere. The results of this study
showed that many of the highest-quality historical water level records
are taken from places where the melt fingerprints of Northern Hemisphere
sources result in reduced local sea level change compared to the global
average.
Changes in ocean height in the Indian Ocean (2004-2014).
Darker reds indicate faster rate of rise.
Credit: University of Hawaii at Manoa
Furthermore, the scientists found that factors capable of
enhancing sea level rise at these locations, such as wind or Southern
Hemisphere melt, were not likely to have counteracted the impact of
fingerprints from Northern Hemisphere ice melt.
The study concludes it is highly unlikely that global average sea
level rose less than 5.5 inches (14 centimeters) during the 20th
century. The most likely amount was closer to 6.7 inches (17
centimeters).
“This is really important, because it provides answers to the
question about how melt fingerprints and the influence of wind on ocean
circulation affect our ability to estimate past sea level rise,” said
Thompson.
“These results suggest that our longest records are most
likely to underestimate past global mean change and allow us to
establish the minimum amount of global sea level rise that could have
occurred during the last century.”
Antarctica’s surrounding waters are home to some of the healthiest marine ecosystems on Earth, but efforts to establish conservation areas in the Southern Ocean are being hobbled by political infighting and fishing interests.
Efforts to adopt effective marine protected areas in the Southern Ocean, a global commons containing the world’s most pristine marine ecosystems, are being thwarted by political infighting and fishing interests.
Antarctica’s surrounding waters are home to some of the healthiest
marine ecosystems on Earth and support thriving populations of krill,
seabirds, fish and whales.
But efforts to establish a network of
effective Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) in the Southern Ocean are being
hobbled by political infighting and demands that prioritize fishing
interests over conservation by members of the international consortium
tasked with conserving the region, Stanford scientists say.
The last intact sea : The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) is currently considering the adoption of marine protected areas (MPAs) in the Southern Ocean.
The findings, published Oct.14 in Science,
come as 24 countries and the European Union convene in Hobart,
Australia, next week for the annual meeting of the Commission for the
Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR), to resume
negotiations of Southern Ocean MPAs.
“Our research shows that
CCAMLR’s positions for and against MPAs have become entrenched,” said
lead author Cassandra Brooks, a PhD candidate at Stanford School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences.
“Negotiations have become entangled with larger global geopolitics and
we see an emerging scramble for marine resources in this remote
frontier.”
The authors argue that as a leader in international
fisheries management, CCAMLR has the opportunity to set an example for
ongoing negotiations at the United Nations level to develop a legal
instrument for conserving biodiversity in international waters, also
known as the high seas.
But if CCAMLR continues to fall short in its
duties, it could set a sorry example with ramifications for marine
protection in other parts of the world, said study co-author Kristina
Gjerde, a legal scholar at the International Union for Conservation of
Nature (IUCN).
“It would send the message that fishing interests
trump conservation, despite the global interests at stake,” Gjerde said.
“It could raise doubts that nations will be able to set aside
short-term national interests to confront global ocean challenges
stemming from accelerating climate change.
And finally, it is doubtful
that these diminished sites would count toward global goals for MPAs as
they would not meet the IUCN MPA criteria.”
Despite
more than a decade of international negotiations informed by robust
scientific planning, CCAMLR has failed to meet its goal of adopting a
system of MPAs in the Southern Ocean to conserve biodiversity in the
face of threats from climate change and potential overfishing, the
authors say.
A major obstacle is agreement about the concept of
“rational use,” which sets the terms under which CCAMLR’s member nations
are allowed to fish in the Southern Ocean.
The region contains some of
Earth’s least exploited fish stocks, and its large populations of krill –
small crustaceans that are food for the region’s fish, seabirds and
whales – and toothfish have made it an increasingly prized fishing spot.
Krill is valuable as fishmeal and for making health supplements, and
toothfish are sold as lucrative “Chilean sea bass” around the world.
As
originally defined, rational use required that fishing not cause
irreversible damage to the greater marine ecosystems of the Southern
Ocean and for precautionary catch limits and scientific oversight to be
set in place.
But as the number of CCAMLR’s fishing nations has grown,
and as pressure increases to secure access to current and future
resources in the Southern Ocean, some nations are pushing to equate
rational use with the unfettered right to fish.
Countries such as
China and Russia have argued against MPA proposals that in any way
restrict fishing and demand sufficient evidence to show that fishing
threatens ecosystems.
“MPA opponents want to reverse the burden of
proof,” said co-author Larry Crowder, science director of the Center for
Ocean Solutions in Monterey, California, and a fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.
“When rational use was first negotiated, the whole idea was that you
needed data in order to fish.
Now, it’s being interpreted by some
fishing nations as unequivocal fishing.”
Sunset clauses
Sunset
clauses on the MPAs are another source of fierce debate.
MPAs are
usually established in perpetuity, but some CCAMLR member nations are
advocating that Southern Ocean MPAs have built-in expiration dates
ranging from 20 to 30 years.
“Twenty years is shorter than the lifespan
of most Antarctic predators which the MPAs are proposing to protect,”
Brooks said.
But not only are sunset clauses inconsistent with the
stated goals of MPAs, they do not meet internationally established
criteria for protected areas and may not qualify for global MPA targets,
the authors warn.
Broader geopolitics have also infiltrated
CCAMLR negotiations, the authors say.
For example, poor international
relations between nations – such as tensions between Russia and the
United States over Crimea – seem to be spilling into the negotiating
room.
Nations opposing MPAs are being accused of not negotiating in good
faith, while proponents of MPAs are accused of using MPAs a political
tool.
“The result is a breakdown of trust between member nations, causing a stalemate over MPAs,” Crowder said.
Campaign to have the Ross Sea, Antarctica declared a marine reserve protected area.
High seas implications
Two
large MPAs are currently being negotiated at CCAMLR: one in the East
Antarctic and one in the Ross Sea – a region that has been deemed “The
Last Ocean” because it is perhaps the healthiest large marine ecosystem
left on the planet.
“We’ve seen an East Antarctic and Ross Sea MPA
come to CCAMLR’s decision-making table five times now without being
adopted.
Next week will be the sixth,” Brooks said.
“Each year, during
the course of negotiations, the proposed MPAs in these two regions have
continued to be downsized, with ecologically critical areas removed and
‘research fishing zones’ added.”
With CCAMLR meetings set to
resume on Oct. 17, Brooks and her co-authors urge member nations to find
a way forward in upholding their mandate and meeting their commitment
toward MPAs.
“The Southern Ocean is our best-case scenario,” Brooks
said.
“If we can’t figure out how to protect marine ecosystems there, it
suggests it will be extremely difficult to protect them anywhere else.”
Other
co-authors on the paper, “Science-based management in decline in the
Southern Ocean,” include Robert Dunbar of Stanford School of Earth,
Energy & Environmental Sciences; Lisa Curran, Stanford professor of
anthropology and a fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the
Environment; David Ainley of H.T. Harvey & Associates; Klaus Dodds
of the Royal Holloway University of London; and Rashid Sumaila of the
University of British Columbia.
Bill McGuire on the influence of climate change on geological systems, the link between episodes of major climate transition and geohazards (2012). Small changes in the Earth's crust can potentially trigger large hazards such as earthquakes and volcanoes.
Global warming may not only be causing more destructive hurricanes, it could also be shaking the ground beneath our feet
Devastating hurricane? More than 1,000 lives lost? It must be climate change! Almost inevitably, Hurricane Matthew’s
recent rampage across the Caribbean and south-eastern US has been
fingered by some as a backlash of global warming driven by humanity’s
polluting activities, but does this really stack up?
The short answer is no.
Blame for a single storm cannot be laid at
climate change’s door, as reinforced by the bigger picture.
The current
hurricane season is by no means extraordinary, and the last few seasons
have actually been very tame.
The 2013 season saw no major hurricanes at
all and tied with 1982 for the fewest hurricanes since 1930.
This, in
turn, is no big deal as there is great year-on-year variability in the
level of hurricane activity, which responds to various natural factors
such as El Niño and the so-called Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, as
well as the progressive warming of the oceans as climate change bites
harder.
The current consensus holds that while a warmer world will not
necessarily mean more hurricanes, it will see a rise in the frequency of
the most powerful, and therefore more destructive, variety.
This view
was supported recently by Kerry Emanuel, a hurricane scientist at MIT,
who pointed to Matthew as a likely sign of things to come.
Debate within the hurricane science community has in recent decades
been almost as hostile as the storms themselves, with researchers, on
occasion, even refusing to sit on the same panels at conferences.
At the
heart of this sometimes acrimonious dispute has been the validity of
the Atlantic hurricane record and the robustness of the idea that
hurricane activity had been broadly ratcheting up since the 1980s.
Now,
the weight of evidence looks to have come down on the side of a broad
and significant increase in hurricane activity that is primarily driven
by progressive warming of the climate.
For many, the bottom line is the
sea surface temperature, which is a major driver of hurricane activity
and storm intensification.
Last year saw the warmest sea temperatures on
record, so it should not be a surprise.
As Michael Mann, an atmospheric
scientist at Penn State University, says: “It isn’t a coincidence that
we’ve seen the strongest hurricane in both hemispheres [western and
eastern] within the last year.” As the Atlantic continues to heat up,
the trend is widely expected to be towards more powerful and wetter
storms, so that Matthew might seem like pretty small beer when looked
back on from the mid-century.
As with hurricanes, Pacific typhoons and the mid-latitude storms that
periodically batter the UK and Europe are forecast to follow a similar
pattern in an anthropogenically warmed world.
Storm numbers may not
rise, but there is likely to be an escalation in the frequency of the
bigger storm systems, which tend to be the most destructive.
An
additional concern is that mid-latitude storms may become clustered,
bringing the prospect of extended periods of damaging and disruptive
winds.
The jury is out on whether climate change will drive up the
number of smaller, but potentially ruinous vortices of solid wind that
make up tornadoes, although an apparent trend in the US towards more
powerful storms has been blamed by some on a warming atmosphere.
Tornadoes, typhoons, hurricanes and mid-latitude storms – along with
heatwaves and floods – are widely regarded as climate change’s shock
troops; forecast to accelerate the destruction, loss of life and
financial pain as planet Earth continues to heat up.
It would be wrong
to imagine, however, that climate change and the extreme events it
drives are all about higher temperatures and a bit more wind and rain.
The atmosphere is far from isolated and interacts with other elements
of the so-called “Earth system”, such as the oceans, ice caps and even
the ground beneath our feet, in complex and often unexpected ways
capable of making our world more dangerous.
We are pretty familiar with
the idea that the oceans swell as a consequence of the plunging
atmospheric pressure at the heart of powerful storms, building surges
driven onshore by high winds that can be massively destructive.
Similarly, it does not stretch the imagination to appreciate that a
warmer atmosphere promotes greater melting of the polar ice caps,
thereby raising sea levels and increasing the risk of coastal flooding.
But, more extraordinarily, the thin layer of gases that hosts the
weather and fosters global warming really does interact with the solid
Earth – the so-called geosphere — in such a way as to make climate
change an even bigger threat.
Japan Earthquake: Helicopter aerial view video of giant tsunami waves
This relationship is marvellously illustrated by a piece of research published in the journal Nature in 2009
by Chi-Ching Liu of the Institute of Earth Sciences at Taipei’s
Academia Sinica.
In the paper, Liu and his colleagues provided
convincing evidence for a link between typhoons barrelling across Taiwan
and the timing of small earthquakes beneath the island.
Their take on
the connection is that the reduced atmospheric pressure that
characterises these powerful Pacific equivalents of hurricanes is
sufficient to allow earthquake faults deep within the crust to move more
easily and release accumulated strain.
This may sound far fetched, but
an earthquake fault that is primed and ready to go is like a coiled
spring, and as geophysicist John McCloskey of the University of Ulster
is fond of pointing out, all that is needed to set it off is – quite
literally – “the pressure of a handshake”.
Perhaps even more astonishingly, Liu and his team proposed that
storms might act as safety valves, repeatedly short-circuiting the
buildup of dangerous levels of strain that otherwise could eventually
instigate large, destructive earthquakes.
This might explain, the
researchers say, why the contact between the Eurasian and Philippine Sea
tectonic plates, in the vicinity of Taiwan, has far less in the way of
major quakes than further north where the plate boundary swings past
Japan.
In a similar vein, it seems that the huge volume of rain dumped by
tropical cyclones, leading to severe flooding, may also be linked to
earthquakes.
The University of Miami’s Shimon Wdowinski has noticed that
in some parts of the tropics – Taiwan included – large earthquakes have
a tendency to follow exceptionally wet hurricanes or typhoons, most
notably the devastating quake that took up to 220,000 lives in Haiti in 2010.
It is possible that floodwaters are lubricating fault planes, but
Wdowinski has another explanation.
He thinks that the erosion of
landslides caused by the torrential rains acts to reduce the weight on
any fault below, allowing it to move more easily.
It has been known for some time that rainfall also influences the pattern of earthquake activity in the Himalayas, where the 2015 Nepal earthquake
took close to 9,000 lives, and where the threat of future devastating
quakes is very high.
During the summer monsoon season, prodigious
quantities of rain soak into the lowlands of the Indo-Gangetic plain,
immediately to the south of the mountain range, which then slowly drains
away over the next few months.
This annual rainwater loading and
unloading of the crust is mirrored by the level of earthquake activity,
which is significantly lower during the summer months than during the
winter.
And it isn’t only earthquake faults that today’s storms and
torrential rains are capable of shaking up.
Volcanoes seem to be
susceptible too.
On the Caribbean island of Montserrat, heavy rains have
been implicated in triggering eruptions of the active lava dome that
dominates the Soufrière Hills volcano.
Stranger still, Alaska’s Pavlof volcano
appears to respond not to wind or rain, but to tiny seasonal changes in
sea level.
The volcano seems to prefer to erupt in the late autumn and
winter, when weather patterns are such that water levels adjacent to
this coastal volcano climb by a few tens of centimetres.
This is enough
to bend the crust beneath the volcano, allowing magma to be squeezed
out, according to geophysicist Steve McNutt of the University of South
Florida, “like toothpaste out of a tube”.
If today’s weather can bring forth earthquakes and magma from the
Earth’s crust, it doesn’t take much to imagine how the solid Earth is
likely to respond to the large-scale environmental adjustments that
accompany rapid climate change.
In fact, we don’t have to imagine at
all.
The last time our world experienced serious warming was at the end
of the last ice age when, between about 20,000 and 10,000 years ago,
temperatures rose by six degrees centigrade, melting the great
continental ice sheets and pushing up sea levels by more than 120m.
These huge changes triggered geological mayhem.
As the
kilometres-thick Scandinavian ice sheet vanished, the faults beneath
released the accumulated strain of tens of millennia, spawning massive
magnitude eight earthquakes.
Quakes of this scale are taken for granted
today around the Pacific Ocean’s “Ring of Fire”, but they are completely
out of place in Santa’s Lapland.
Across the Norwegian Sea, in Iceland,
the volcanoes long buried beneath a kilometre of ice were also
rejuvenated as the suffocating ice load melted away, prompting a
“volcano storm” about 12,000 years ago that saw the level of activity
increase by up to 50 times.
Now, global average temperatures are shooting up again and are
already more than one degree centigrade higher than during preindustrial
times.
It should come as no surprise that the solid Earth is starting
to respond once more.
In southern Alaska, which has in places lost a
vertical kilometre of ice cover, the reduced load on the crust is
already increasing the level of seismic activity.
In high mountain
ranges across the world from the Caucasus in the north to New Zealand’s
southern Alps, longer and more intense heatwaves are melting the ice and
thawing the permafrost that keeps mountain faces intact, leading to a
rise in major landslides.
Does this all mean that we are in for a more geologically active
future as well as a hotter and meteorologically more violent one? Well,
no one is suggesting that we will see a great surge in the number of
earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
As always, these will be controlled
largely by local geological conditions.
Where an earthquake fault or
volcano is primed and ready to go, however, climate change may provide
that extra helping hand that brings forward the timing of a quake or
eruption that would eventually have happened anyway.
As the world continues to heat up, any geological response is likely
to be most obvious where climate change is driving the biggest
environmental changes – for example, in areas where ice and permafrost
are vanishing fast, or in coastal regions where rising sea levels will
play an increasing role.
Freysteinn Sigmundsson of the Nordic
Volcanological Centre observes that the centre of Iceland is now rising
by more than three centimetres a year in response to shrinking glaciers.
Studies undertaken by Sigmundsson and his colleagues forecast that the
reduced pressures that result will lead to the formation of significant
volumes of new magma deep under Iceland.
Whether this will translate
into more or bigger eruptions remains uncertain, but the aviation chaos
that arose from the Eyjafjallajökull eruption in 2010
provides a salutary warning of the disruption that any future increase
in Icelandic volcanic activity may cause across the North Atlantic
region.
Volcanologist Hugh Tuffen, of Lancaster University, is worried about the
stability of the more than 10% of active volcanoes that are
ice-covered.
He says that “climate change is driving rapid melting of
ice on many volcanoes worldwide, triggering unloading as ice is removed.
As well as encouraging magma to rise to the surface, leading to
increased volcanic activity, removal of ice can also destabilise steep
volcano flanks, making hazardous landslides more likely.”
The potential for more landslides is also likely to be a problem in
high mountain ranges as the ice cover that stabilises rock faces
vanishes.
Christian Huggel of the University of Zurich has warned that
“in densely populated and developed regions such as the European Alps,
serious consequences have to be considered from [future] large slope
failures”.
Looking ahead, one of the key places to watch will be Greenland,
where recent findings by a research team led by Shfaqat Khan of
Denmark’s Technical University reveal a staggering loss of 272bn tonnes
of ice a year over the last decade.
GPS measurements show that, like
Scandinavia at the end of the last ice age, Greenland and the whole of
the surrounding region is already rising in response to the removal of
this ice load.
Andrea Hampel of the University of Hannover’s Geological
Institute, who with colleagues has been studying this behaviour, is
concerned that “future ice loss may trigger earthquakes of intermediate
to large magnitude if the crust underneath the modern ice cap contains
faults prone to failure”.
More earthquakes in Greenland might not seem like a big deal, but
this could have far wider ramifications.
About 8,200 years ago, an
earthquake linked to the uplift of Scandinavia, triggered the Storegga
Slide; a gigantic undersea sediment slide that sent a tsunami racing
across the North Atlantic.
Run-up heights were more than 20m in the
Shetlands and six metres along the east coast of Scotland, and the event
has been blamed for the flooding of Doggerland; the inhabited
Mesolithic landmass that occupied what is now the southern North Sea.
The submerged margins of Greenland are currently not very well
mapped, so the likelihood of a future earthquake triggering a landslide
capable of generating a major tsunami in the North Atlantic is unknown.
Dave Tappin, a tsunami expert at the British Geological Survey, points
out that one large, undersea landslide has been identified off the coast
of Greenland, but suspects that there may not be sufficient sediment to
generate landslides as large as Storegga.
Nonetheless, the seismic
revival of Greenland is certainly a geological response to climate
change that we need to keep an eye on.
The bottom line in all of this is that as climate change tightens its
grip, we should certainly contemplate more and bigger Hurricane
Matthews.
However, when it comes to the manifold hazardous by-blows of
an overheating planet, and especially those involving the ground we
stand on, we must also be prepared to expect the unexpected.
