Arctic Circle oil spill: Russian prosecutors order checks at permafrost sites

The leaked diesel oil drifted some 12km (7.5 miles) from the site of the accident

From BBC

Russian prosecutors have ordered checks at "particularly dangerous installations" built on permafrost after a huge oil spill in the Arctic.

An emergency was declared after 20,000 tonnes of diesel leaked into a river when a tank at a power plant near the city of Norilsk collapsed last Friday.

Initial Russian inquiries suggest ground subsidence as the cause.
The plant is owned by a subsidiary of Norilsk Nickel, which is the world's leading nickel and palladium producer.

Irina Yarinskaya / AFP

Delays over reporting the collapse prompted criticism from President Vladimir Putin and the power plant's director, Vyacheslav Starostin, has been taken into custody.
The Russian Investigative Committee has launched a criminal case over pollution and alleged negligence.

Arctic permafrost has been melting in exceptionally warm weather for this time of year.
What checks have been ordered exactly?

Russia's chief prosecutor, Igor Krasnov, gave orders for regional and environmental prosecutors to conduct a "thorough check" of "particularly dangerous installations" located on "territories exposed to permafrost melting".
The aim is to prevent a repeat of the incident at the plant near Norilsk.

A spokesman for Mr Krasnov's department told Russian media prosecutors would assess companies' adherence to safety laws, environmental monitoring and measures to prevent emergencies.
The effectiveness of state monitoring would also be assessed, he said.

What is permafrost?

The term is used for ground that is frozen continuously for two or more years.
Some 55% of Russia's territory, predominantly Siberia, is permafrost and home to its main oil and gas fields.

A 2017 report to the Arctic Council, an international forum which includes Russia, warned that because of global warming and melting ice, foundations in permafrost regions could no longer support the loads they did as recently as the 1980s.

A recent report by Bloomberg news agency points out that Russia's newer oil infrastructure takes account of the changing climate: storage tanks on the Yamal Peninsula, for instance, are mounted on piles.

60km long Ambarnaya River flows into Lake Pyasino; the Pyasina River outflows this lake into the Kara Sea, part of the Arctic Ocean.

Pictures: social media, The Siberian Times

How bad was the spill?

The leaked oil drifted some 12km (7.5 miles) from the site, turning long stretches of the Ambarnaya river crimson red.
The spill contaminated a 350 sq km (135 sq mile) area, state media report.

In a statement, Norilsk Nickel said the incident had been reported in a "timely and proper" way.
The state of emergency means extra forces are going to the area to assist with the clean-up operation.

The accident is believed to be the second largest in modern Russian history in terms of volume, an expert from the World Wildlife Fund, Alexei Knizhnikov, told the AFP news agency.

What can be done to clear up the damage?

The incident has prompted stark warnings from environmental groups, who say the scale of the spill and geography of the river mean it will be difficult to clean up.
Greenpeace has compared it to the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska.

Experts have warned that the clean-up operation poses huge challenges

Oleg Mitvol, former deputy head of Russia's environmental watchdog Rosprirodnadzor, said there had "never been such an accident in the Arctic zone".
He said the clean-up could cost 100bn roubles (£1.2bn; $1.5bn) and take between five and 10 years.

It is not the first time Norilsk Nickel has been involved in oil spillages.
In 2016, it admitted that an accident at one of its plants was responsible for turning a nearby river red.

Minister of Natural Resources Dmitry Kobylkin warned against trying to burn off such a vast quantity of fuel oil and has proposed trying to dilute the oil with reagents.

Links :

• Economics Times : Russia finds permafrost melting behind Arctic fuel spill
• Science Alert : As Permafrost Melts It's Unleashing Ancient Viruses, Carbon - And Now Fuel Spills / It's Official: Siberia's 10°C Hotter Than Average, We Just Had ...
• The Moscow Times : Russia to Review Structures on Permafrost After Arctic Spill / Massive Thermal Plant Fuel Leak Pollutes Siberian River
• National Academy of Sciences : Why Arctic Permafrost Is Thawing — and How it Affects the ...
• Arctic : Researchers study the emergence of a crater in the permafrost  
• Phys : Permafrost in the Arctic can thaw faster than presumed / Here be methane: Scientists investigate the origins of a ... / Warmest May on record, Siberia 10C hotter
• GeoGarage blog : The warmest ever winter on the Northern ... / The future of the Arctic economy / Permafrost loss worse climate peril than ...

This is how the oceans can be used to help fight climate change

From World Economic Forum

The ocean could contribute much more to renewable energy creation, says a new report.
Scientists argue that ocean solutions should be incorporated into Green New Deal policies.
The World Economic Forum’s Virtual Ocean Dialogues is debating how the world’s oceans should be managed and protected.

 Monday, June 8, is World Oceans Day, a global celebration honouring our oceans.

The best way we can honour our oceans is to help save them, and understand some of their biggest threats, which are climate change, plastic pollution and overfishing.

Don’t overlook the power of the oceans to help combat climate change.
That is the message of a group of scientists who believe that the world’s oceans are too often viewed as victims of climate change – for example, rising sea levels or damaged coral reefs – rather than recognized as part of the solution.

 Above-water-seascapes

(photo Dragus-Dumitrescu)

Policymakers around the world are developing strategies to offset climate change, with particular emphasis on renewable energy, food security, sustainable transport and restoring natural habitats like forests.
Such policies have been grouped together in the United States and elsewhere and referred to as the Green New Deal.

Now, a group of leading US scientists is calling for oceans to play a much greater role in the development of such policies, suggesting that some blue should be mixed in with the green, to make a "Teal Deal".

Here are four ways the scientists believe the ocean’s potential should be included in policies to tackle climate change, according to research they published in the journal Conservation Letters.

1. A focus on renewable energy

The ocean’s winds, waves and currents represent a massive source of clean energy that can reduce greenhouse gas emissions, while meeting electricity demand.

Offshore winds blow harder and more consistently than those on land, helping provide an uninterrupted supply of renewable energy. It is also windiest in the afternoon and evening, when available renewable energy from solar declines, but daily electricity demand is at its highest.

On top of this, new technology to harness the energy of waves and currents has great potential to contribute to the generation of renewable energy.

2. Sustainable transport

Much of the world’s global trade is transported at sea.
And while greenhouse gas emissions from this are relatively high, there are many solutions to help make sea travel more sustainable.
The report says that emissions could be reduced by more than 75% by using a combination of currently available technologies, including changing hull designs, switching to liquified natural gas, biofuels and wind power, or optimizing ship speed and capacity.

3. Food security

Marine fisheries remain one of the most sustainable sources of protein for human consumption and have a lower overall carbon footprint than many land-based food sources.
And there is further potential in aquaculture – the process of specifically growing or rearing fish or plants like seaweed in the oceans.

4. Restoring habitats

Restoring coastal habitats such as mangroves, tidal wetlands and kelp forests will help capture and store carbon dioxide, preventing it from entering the atmosphere.
In addition, coastal habitat restoration will help protect against floods or erosion, offsetting the impact of more extreme weather.

The report comes as leading experts meet to discuss the future of the oceans as part of the World Economic Forum’s Oceans Dialogue virtual meeting.

Links :

• CNN : Our oceans are amazing, but they need our help
•  Modern Diplomacy : Oceans Have Saved Us Now We Have To Save Our Oceans

Isle of pleasure map

H. J. Lawrence, 1931

Google Art & Climate data : Heartbeat of the Earth

To celebrate World Environment Day, Google Arts & Culture and the UNFCCC are announcing "Heartbeat of the Earth", a series of new experimental artworks that offer everyone a new perspective to explore issues related to the climate crisis.

Google Arts & Culture worked with five artists who created four experiments/artworks that address one or more of the key findings of the landmark 2018 United Nations IPCC report and data from global scientific institutions such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the World Meteorological Organization.

The artists have interpreted the evidence and transformed it into striking and accessible visualizations or scenarios that help you learn more interactively about sea level rise, glacier retreat, food-related CO2 production or ocean acidification.

By supporting artists who explore scientific climate data, creating experimental artworks that engage the public in new ways to address the climate issues we face, Google Arts & Culture continues to support experimentation in art and technology.

Find the four interactive experiments / "climate artworks" below:

    Coastline Paradox - Artists Timo Aho and Pekka Niittyvirta (FIN) invite the viewer to explore a world where sea levels are rising and instability is increasing as we move into the future. -
A map and Street View experience visualizing the actual and predicted rise in sea level caused by the climate crisis.
See, for example, the effect this will have in our country by searching for "Belgium" in the search bar.

    Timelines - Photographs of spectacular landscapes taken by artist Fabian Oefner (CH) who used precise digital coordinates from ETH data, linking them to Google Earth terrain to visualize the retreat of glaciers and choose where he would take the photos from. 

    What We Eat - An interactive online artwork to engage people in activities that show the CO2 footprint of individual foods and diets.
The work by Laurie Frick (USA) visually explores the impact of individual diets, using US, UK and French data to expose the disparity in CO2 consumption between foods.

    Diving into the acidifying oceans - An interactive visualization of the data invites you to dive into the ocean and explore the impact of rising temperatures and, consequently, CO2 levels on marine life over time, using the cloud point.

Climate change: 'Stunning' seafloor ridges record Antarctic retreat

It's amongst the best ocean-floor imagery obtained anywhere around Antarctica
The spacing between the "rungs" is about 20-25m
Image copyright DOWDESWELL ET AL

From BBC by Jonathan Amos

Scientists are learning just how fast the ice margin of Antarctica can retreat in a warming world.

They've identified features on the seafloor that indicate the ice edge was reversing at rates of up to 50m a day at the end of the last ice age.
That's roughly 10 times faster than what's observed by satellites today.

Retreating ice sheets leaving their mark in the seabed

(Dowdeswell etal., Science, 2020)

The discovery is important because it puts realistic constraints on the computer simulations that are used to project future change in the region.
"In numerical models, you play with the parameters - and they can do very strange things," said Prof Julian Dowdeswell.
"But what these data are saying is that actually rates considerably higher than we get even in the satellite record today were possible in the not-far-distant geological past."

The director of the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) in Cambridge, UK, led an expedition last year to the Larsen region of the Antarctic Peninsula.
His team deployed autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) with high-resolution mapping capability to examine the sediments at the bottom of the western Weddell Sea.

What the robots saw was a delicate pattern of ridges that looked like a series of ladders where each rung was about 1.5m high and spaced roughly 20-25m apart.
The scientists interpret these ridges to be features that are generated at the ice grounding zone.
This zone is the point where the ice flowing off Antarctica into the ocean becomes buoyant and starts to float.
The rungs are created as the ice at this location repeatedly pats the sediments as the tides rise and fall.

Image copyright WEDDELL SEA EXPEDITION

The AUVs flew just 60m above the seafloor in about 500m of water

For the pattern to have been produced and preserved, the ice must have been in retreat (advancing ice would destroy the ridges).
And the tidal "clock" therefore gives a rate for this reversal.

Prof Dowdeswell explained: "We have a maximum of 90 of these rungs with a spacing of 20-25m - that gives us, if extrapolated, a rate of 40-50m per day.
Again, if extrapolated - that's a rate in excess of 10km per year of retreat.
And the really interesting thing about that is it's a rate that's pretty much an order of magnitude higher than even the most rapid retreat of the grounding lines in the Pine Island-Thwaites system today."

Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers are two of Antarctica's fastest-changing ice bodies whose ice margins are being melted by warm ocean water getting underneath them.

The ridges seen by the AUVs are some 40km from the cliffs that front the ice edge in the Larsen sector today.
The marks are considered to be around 12,000 years old.
Back then, the ice sheet would have been far more extensive than it is today, but like today would have been experiencing rapid change as the global climate emerged from the deepest of freezes.

Image copyright WEDDELL SEA EXPEDITION

The western Weddell Sea is not an easy place to work because of its abundant sea-ice

 Image copyright ESA/CRYOSAT/CPOM/LEEDS UNI

Dr Alistair Graham from the University of South Florida, US, works with AUV data.
He was not involved in this research.
He said he found the interpretation compelling but that there would likely be some scepticism in the community that the rungs really did form daily with the tides.
"The data in the paper are absolutely stunning," he told BBC News.
"The ability to map at a sub-metre resolution from an AUV really lifts a veil on the seafloor structure and composition.
We have been able to get snapshots of these sorts of images before, by sending an AUV under Pine Island Glacier, for example, but these imagery from the Dowdeswell team are the best yet from anywhere around Antarctica.

"What this paper also emphasises to me is that there are still big lessons to learn from looking at the past history of ice sheets at the poles.
For somewhere like Thwaites Glacier, where we are desperate to understand its future trajectory, understanding what it did in the centuries and millennia leading up to the observations we are making today will be a critical part of determining how much ice is lost and how fast going forwards.
"We do have similar high-resolution imagery from an AUV deployed at Thwaites Glacier last year that we are currently working on, and which will hopefully tackle some of these pressing questions."

The new research is published in the journal Science.
The Weddell Sea Expedition 2019 was an international effort led from the SPRI and funded in part by the Flotilla Foundation and Marine Archaeology Consultants Switzerland.

The AUVs were operated by the US-UK Ocean Infinity company.

Links :

• BBC : Thwaites: Journey to the 'doomsday glacier' / Antarctic Peninsula 'can avoid irreversible change' /  Antarctica's 'green snow' mapped from space /  Is the world's biggest iceberg about to break up?  / Antarctica's troublesome 'hairdryer winds'
• ScienceAlert : Ancient Ice Sheet Loss Shows Antarctica Can Melt Much Faster Than We Thought
• Scientific American : Rapid Antarctic Ice Melt in the Past Bodes Ill for the Future
• BBC Focus Mag : Rapid Ice Age retreat of Antarctic ice gives stark climate ...
• The Independent : Antarctic ice shelves melted at speeds of 50 metres a day at ...