Fishing and refuse disposal are to be banned in the 1st high seas Marine Protected Area (MPA) in the Southern Ocean, an area of the ocean that contains more species than the Galapagos Islands.

This will allow scientists to monitor the effects of climate change in this region. This is only the first of possibly twelve such areas.

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More data show that ‘Yes, climate change is happening, ice is melting at alarming rates, and the time for action is now.’

Independent research using state-of-the-art modeling and satellite observations shows that melting of the Greenland ice sheet is speeding up.

Four months ago, new research showed that Arctic sea ice was at its lowest point in about 800 years, another study a couple months ago showed suprisingly fast melting in Greenland and Antarctica. Now, research from other scientists in Bristol (UK) published in Science confirms that ice sheets in Greenland are melting at an unprecedented rate.

There has been a lot of effort in the past few months to knock down climate change activists, say it isn’t happening. No wonder, of course, given that we are quickly approaching one of the most important meetings in the history of the human race — the climate change conference in Copenhagen. This new report shows again that whether we admit it or not, ice is melting, sea levels are bound to rise, climate change is happening, and the whole world will be changed as a result of it.

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This week in the journal Nature scientists give the most comprehensive view of thinning ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica to date.

Scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and the University of Bristol analyzed 50 million satellite measurements (from NASA) to show the massive ice loss on these polar giants.

The result are surprising, even to the scientists.

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BUT, what does it mean to be a “global citizen”?

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Halley Research Station sits on the Brunt Ice Shelf 15km in from the edge of the shelf. It is the British Antarctic Surveys most southerly and remote research station. I am lucky enough to be a member of the eleven strong wintering team working as the chef on Station. With the impending arrival of 24 hour darkness we are all keen to make the most of the remaining daylight, taking every opportunity to make the most of our time in this amazing place.

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Large flares or solar explosions from the sun will expel numerous amounts of solar particles which make their way towards Earth.  These particles come into contact with the Earth’s magnetosphere and are directed towards the polar regions.  High energy particles then cascade into the highest parts of the Earth’s atmosphere, ionising gases.  It’s this process that emits the glows that we see on Earth.  The variation of colour is a result of particles with different energies ionising different gases.

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As I take off from the ice runway at the British Antarctic Survey’s Halley base, situated on the Brunt Ice Shelf (75o34’S 26o34’W), I finally realise I am living and working at the extreme of human endurance.  I am in one of the Survey’s De Havilland Twin Otters, known as Victor Papa Foxtrot Bravo Bravo (or VP-FBB), heading to the remote automatic weather station known affectionately as Baldrick, located at 83oSouth.

The weather station is hundreds of miles from the nearest living thing (human or otherwise) in the middle of the most inhospitable environment on the planet.  My life is entirely in the hands of the pilot Mark; fortunately they are very skilled hands.

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Introducing Halley Station (75°34’S 26°34’W), located on the 150m thick, continually moving, Brunt Ice Shelf in Antarctica.  Named after the Astronomer Edmond Halley, the current station (Halley V) is the fifth to be built.  It is the British Antarctic Survey’s most remote research station and has been operational since 1956 (established by the Royal Society for the International Geophysical Year, 1957-58).   Halley Station (also known as Base Z) has presented itself in many forms since those first buildings in 1956.

The extreme environment challenges even the most thought out buildings.  Blizzards and snow drifts eventually bury any structures left on the ground and the constant movement of the ice shelf compresses any structures under the surface, making these buildings eventually unsuitable for use.

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Researchers in have discovered ancient, extremophile life forms that survive with neither light nor oxygen underground in Antarctica.

From the surface, the McMurdo Dry Valleys of Eastern Antarctica appears to be one of the most desolate places on Earth. And indeed it is. Apart from a few glaciers, the land is ice-free. No animals live here, and what few plants are able to are simple planktonic forms. But recently, a team of researchers have discovered evidence of a thriving community of extremophile microbes thriving several hundred feet below the barren surface.

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One of the most important findings of this project is a confirmation of what many climate scientists have suspected for a couple of years now–that the impact of climate change on our environment is happening at a much faster rate than previous computer models predicted. This is true even for the four major reports released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the last of which was released in 2007).

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Antarctica seems more like a dead zone than a haven for renewable energy, but solar and wind power are slowly taking hold on Antarctic research bases. The Rothera base already has a $58,000 set of solar thermal panels that generate 15 kW of energy, and soon it will receive $11,000 German Ritter Solar GmbH panels. According to Rothera scientist William Ray, more solar energy can be collected on the Antarctic Peninsula than in London.

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A team of UK scientists have discovered a natural process that could delay, or even end, the threat of global warming.

The researchers, aboard the Royal Navy’s HMS Endurance, have found that melting icebergs off the coast of Antarctica are releasing millions of tiny particles of iron into the southern Ocean, helping to create huge ‘blooms’ of algae that absorb carbon emissions. The algae then sinks to the icy depths, effectively removing CO2 from the atmosphere for hundreds of years.

According to lead researcher, Prof. Rob Raiswell of Leeds University, “The Earth itself seems to want to save us.”

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Anti-whaling activists aboard the Sea Shepherd vessel ‘Steve Irwin’ have covered a whaling ship with a smelly cocktail of rotten butter, methyl cellulose and indelible dye.

The unconventional sliming operation was carried out in a bid to intimidate the Japanese whaler, Kaiko Maru, into moving out of Australian Antarctic territorial waters. According to Peter Hammarstedt, the Sea Shepherd’s second officer, “this is one stinky, slippery ship.”

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This year, the ozone hole extended to approximately 27 million square kilometers. This compared to 2007’s 25 million square kilometers and 2006’s 29 million square kilometers.

Want a size comparison? That’s about the size of the North American continent!

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Scientists have put elephant seals into action, donning head devices to transmit information about climate change from under Antarctic sea ice in winter.  View related photos.
Owing to the extreme conditions, the community is not very diverse-with only a handful of species appearing, chief of which are the bacillus-like species thiomicrospira and desulfocapsa. These unique microbes are specially adapted to the underground environment and are able to utilize sulfur compounds to extract iron from the surrounding rock, which, along with carbon, is actively cycled through the cell to drive its key energy-harnessing and metabolic functions. Once excreted, the iron reacts with oxygen (in the water) and forms rust, which is the reason for the rusty-reddish color of the meltwater, and the name Blood Falls). The microbes are also adapted to an environment high in chlorides and sulfates, which are normally poisonous to many other microorganisms.

Such rare and isolated microbial communities give scientists a glimpse of the conditions on the early Earth that may have produced the first single-celled life forms. Scientist known as astrobiologists believe that by studying such extremophilic environments and organisms here on earth, they might shed light on the possibility of finding such lifeforms–or the “proto-biotic” environments that give rise to them–existing on other worlds,  starting with those of our own solar system. Candidate, extra-terrestrial environments include: underneath the icecaps of Mars,  within the ice-blanketed oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa, or amongst the underground, and the sub-surface, cryo-volcanic flows of Saturn’s “planet-like” moon, Titan (the only moon possessing an atmosphere).

Reporting in the April 17 edition of Science Magazine, the team of explorers was lead by Jill Mikucki of Dartmouth College, New Hampshire (also of the University of Montana, and Harvard University), with support from the National Science Foundation.

Image credit: Zina Deretsky/NSF

According to Brazilian wildlife authorities on Wednesday, penguins have been “washing up” in far greater numbers this year in areas like Rio de Janeiro, where they are common, but not normally in these numbers.

“This is unheard of. There have even been reports of penguins washing up as far as Aracaju,” said Adelson Cerqueira Silva of the federal environmental agency.

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Speaking in a telephone briefing last Friday, Jennifer Francis, an atmospheric scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said that the Arctic and Antarctic are exhibiting opposite effects to the climate change affecting our planet.

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Usually.

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I’ve personally reported several times over the past few months focusing on environmental issues that are not entirely man-made. Early in January I looked at a recent study in the journal Nature that indicated that a natural and cyclical increase in the amount of atmospheric energy was part of the cause the Arctic sea-ice so drastically failed to appear.

Three days later I introduced us to recent findings that indicated that the warming of the North Atlantic was also not entirely the result of man-made global warming, but rather a natural and cyclical wind circulation pattern called the North Atlantic Oscillation.

I focus on these now to once again put forth the idea in your minds that Green Options is not about blaming everything on mankind.

But this next study once again helps me to reiterate that while we are not the sole contributor to the problems, we have tipped the balance.

Back between January and March of 2002 we watched as Antarctica’s 3200-square kilometer Larsen B ice shelf broke apart. Many of the scientists blamed this abrupt breakup on climate change, including the previous warm summers and melt ponds – ponds of melted ice that form beneath the ice shelf, helping the shelf slide and break apart – rather than looking for more answers.

“But the picture is much more complicated,” says Neil Glasser of Aberystwyth University in the UK who, along with Ted Scambos of the University of Colorado at Boulder, has been tracking increased movement of glaciers near where Larsen B used to be.

When the pair reviewed satellite imagery from 1987 onwards, what they saw added another catalyst to the eventual breakup of Larsen B. Giant rifts and crevasses were formed as a result of long-term glaciological processes. And while these alone could not have caused the break up, they didn’t help. Glasser and Scambos believe that once global warming came in to play, thinning the ice, the glaciological stress was too much.

“Had it not got warmer, the shelf would have survived,” says Glasser. “It’s very likely that the warm summers could have been the final trigger.”

Following on with their research, the pair are now turning their attention to the 15,000 square-kilometer Larsen C ice shelf. As Larsen B once did, Larsen C slows the flow in to the sea of nearby glaciers by acting as a giant stopper. If it broke up, the resulting plunge of glaciers in to the ocean could have “a noticeable effect” on sea level, says Glasser.

Photo Courtesy of Pathfinder Linden via Flickr

New Scientist - Natural rifts may have weakened Antarctic ice shelf
Owing to the extreme conditions, the community is not very diverse-with only a handful of species appearing, chief of which are the bacillus-like species thiomicrospira and desulfocapsa. These unique microbes are specially adapted to the underground environment and are able to utilize sulfur compounds to extract iron from the surrounding rock, which, along with carbon, is actively cycled through the cell to drive its key energy-harnessing and metabolic functions. Once excreted, the iron reacts with oxygen (in the water) and forms rust, which is the reason for the rusty-reddish color of the meltwater, and the name Blood Falls). The microbes are also adapted to an environment high in chlorides and sulfates, which are normally poisonous to many other microorganisms.

Such rare and isolated microbial communities give scientists a glimpse of the conditions on the early Earth that may have produced the first single-celled life forms. Scientist known as astrobiologists believe that by studying such extremophilic environments and organisms here on earth, they might shed light on the possibility of finding such lifeforms–or the “proto-biotic” environments that give rise to them–existing on other worlds,  starting with those of our own solar system. Candidate, extra-terrestrial environments include: underneath the icecaps of Mars,  within the ice-blanketed oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa, or amongst the underground, and the sub-surface, cryo-volcanic flows of Saturn’s “planet-like” moon, Titan (the only moon possessing an atmosphere).

Reporting in the April 17 edition of Science Magazine, the team of explorers was lead by Jill Mikucki of Dartmouth College, New Hampshire (also of the University of Montana, and Harvard University), with support from the National Science Foundation.

Image credit: Zina Deretsky/NSF

Arctic becoming the canary in the coal mine for climate change? But oil has briefly hit $100 per barrel and the U.S. economy is tanking. So let’s hold the first-ever oil and gas lease sale in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea … just this once.

Canada’s Boreal Forest a carbon sink twice as powerful as the forests of the tropics? But rising fuel prices have suddenly made it profitable to tap the region’s vast reserves of tar sands … just this once.

Discovering that the coldest, most pristine place on Earth — Antarctica — might also harbor a wealth of oil and gas reserves? Let’s tiptoe around the continent’s edges trying to establish rights to resources below the seabed … just this once.

The list of “just-this-once” announcements from the past few months alone could go on and on, but would make for even more disheartening reading.

For the individual human addict, help sometimes comes in the form of an intervention from friends and loved ones who hope to confront the “just-this-once” behavior before it collapses into outright personal destruction. For an addicted human civilization, though, who will intervene?

Photo courtesy of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration via Wikimedia Commons.
Owing to the extreme conditions, the community is not very diverse-with only a handful of species appearing, chief of which are the bacillus-like species thiomicrospira and desulfocapsa. These unique microbes are specially adapted to the underground environment and are able to utilize sulfur compounds to extract iron from the surrounding rock, which, along with carbon, is actively cycled through the cell to drive its key energy-harnessing and metabolic functions. Once excreted, the iron reacts with oxygen (in the water) and forms rust, which is the reason for the rusty-reddish color of the meltwater, and the name Blood Falls). The microbes are also adapted to an environment high in chlorides and sulfates, which are normally poisonous to many other microorganisms.

Such rare and isolated microbial communities give scientists a glimpse of the conditions on the early Earth that may have produced the first single-celled life forms. Scientist known as astrobiologists believe that by studying such extremophilic environments and organisms here on earth, they might shed light on the possibility of finding such lifeforms–or the “proto-biotic” environments that give rise to them–existing on other worlds,  starting with those of our own solar system. Candidate, extra-terrestrial environments include: underneath the icecaps of Mars,  within the ice-blanketed oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa, or amongst the underground, and the sub-surface, cryo-volcanic flows of Saturn’s “planet-like” moon, Titan (the only moon possessing an atmosphere).

Reporting in the April 17 edition of Science Magazine, the team of explorers was lead by Jill Mikucki of Dartmouth College, New Hampshire (also of the University of Montana, and Harvard University), with support from the National Science Foundation.

Image credit: Zina Deretsky/NSF