(New Scientist, 13 November 2009) -- Champions of carbon offsetting may have been barking up the wrong tree. It is generally assumed that the tropics are the best place to plant forests in order to sequester carbon and cool the planet, but a study of the effects of tree planting is casting doubt on this idea. To maximise climate benefits we should be planting trees at higher latitudes, the study suggests.

Alvaro Montenegro at St Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada, and colleagues used high-resolution satellite data to work out where new forests would bring the biggest benefit. They estimated the net climate impact of planting trees on 5-kilometre-square plots of cropland in locations where forests can be expected to thrive. Their calculations took into account both the cooling effect of the trees soaking up CO₂ and the heating effect which would result from the trees reflecting less sunlight than the crops they replaced. To their surprise, Montenegro's team found that on balance, planting forests in northern Russia, central Canada and Europe would cool the climate more effectively than planting them in India, Brazil and most of China (Global and Planetary Change, DOI: 10.1016/j.gloplacha.2009.08.005).

Govindasamy Bala at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore reckons existing tropical carbon-offsetting schemes may still have the edge, however. Montenegro's study may have overestimated the amount of carbon forests in Siberia and Canada can store, he warns.

(Nunatsiaq News, 20 November 2009) -- Greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, power stations and industries far to the south are putting shellfish in the Arctic Ocean at risk, an international team reports in the Nov. 20 edition of the journal Science. Acidification may put “some species may be at risk,” say the researchers — this would have a major impact on the entire marine food chain. And acidification is expected to increase as sea ice cover decreases due to global warming, they say.

Ten years of study in the Beaufort Sea showed the seawater is becoming more acidic and fresher, which means there’s less of minerals and carbonate needed for shell formation. The shellfish which may now be at risk include mussels and clams that need minerals in the water to form their shells and skeletons. If emissions of carbon dioxide are not curbed, the researchers conclude “the Arctic ecosystem may be at risk,” because the acidification of the seawater and resulting damage to shellfish could affect other marine life and fisheries.

(ArcticInfo list, 19 November 2009) -- The Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna (CAFF) and Protection of the Arctic Marine Environment (PAME) working groups of the Arctic Council announce a new web portal called ArcticData. The portal is at: http://www.arcticdata.is/

The aim of the web portal is to make data generated through the activities of CAFF and PAME more readily available. The site is in its initial stages and data will be added as it becomes available. For further information, please go to the web site. If you have questions, comments, or data you would like made available on the ArcticData site, please email: data +at+ arctic.is

(UNBC press release, 18 November 2009) -- A better understanding of how waterways influence the health of communities, economies, and the world is the focus of the University of Northern British Columbia’s newest Canada Research Chair. Dr. Margot Parkes was recently named Canada Research Chair in Health, Ecosystems, and Society, UNBC’s ninth CRC appointment.

Dr. Parkes comes to northern BC to examine the effect of changing ecosystems on the health and well-being of communities, with a focus on water as a common resource for livelihoods, food security, culture and economies. Her work will bring together organizations, communities and researchers involved in health and water governance in the northern Fraser River Basin, which includes Prince George, Burns Lake, Fort St. James, Fraser Lake, McBride, Valemount, and Vanderhoof.

The results of her research are intended to provide practical guidance for integrating health and environmental decision-making in BC, across Canada, and beyond.

(Elizabeth Bluemink/Anchorage Daily News, 17 November 2009) -- Scientists funded by Shell and six other oil companies say that cleaning up oil spills in Arctic ice is in many respects easier than cleaning it from open water. The reason, they said Tuesday, is that oil spilled in open water tends to spread out quickly over large areas and contaminate the shoreline. In contrast, recent testing in the Barents Sea above northern Europe has shown that ice can act as a natural blockade that traps the oil and gives responders more time to clean it up. The researchers' preliminary findings conflict with the conventional wisdom about how spills in Arctic ice would be difficult, if not impossible, to clean up.

Environmentalists cite botched spill cleanup experiments that occurred a decade ago in the Beaufort Sea. At the time, the state concluded that Prudhoe Bay oil field operator BP could not adequately clean spills in slushy water. Shell says spill-response techniques have improved greatly since then and is trying to enlist Alaskans' support for offshore exploration in federal waters. The company spent more than $2 billion last year to acquire leases and is seeking state and federal permits to explore for oil next summer in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, which geologists say may hold vast amounts of oil and natural gas. But several conservation groups and Arctic village governments have sued to block Shell's drilling, saying it could result in pollution or interfere with subsistence whale hunts.

(Inke Arns/HMKV.de via Circumpolar Blog, 15 November 2009) -- Three architects – Richard Carbonnier (Nunavut, Canada), Giuseppe Mecca (Italy), and Catherine Rannou (France) – have been selected as the joint winners of the Arctic Perspective Initiative open architecture competition. The challenge of this international competition was to design a zero-footprint mobile research unit for use by local populations in the Arctic. The unit is intended to facilitate a diverse range of technological research opportunities, such as remote sensing, environmental monitoring, video editing and streaming, and communications systems.

The three winning entries, each awarded €1500, were selected by an expert jury from 103 submissions from architects and engineers in more than 30 countries. The competition was the first phase of a design process, the next phase of which will involve working with the winning submissions through a collaborative design effort with local community members from Nunavut, Canada. A prototype unit will be tested in the field next year in Igloolik, Nunavut, by local media workers, hunters, youth and elders of the community. ...

API is committed to the empowerment and sustainable development of Northern communities through the collaboration and combination of science, arts, engineering and culture. The unit aims to serve as a model for mobile research in the north, incorporating proven local expertise, sustainable resources, and high tech solutions, while promoting open source data sharing strategies and management. All required power will come from green sources.  The Arctic Perspective Initiative (API) is a transnational art, science, and culture work group composed of HMKV (Germany), The Arts Catalyst (UK), Projekt Atol (Slovenia), Lorna (Iceland) and C-TASC (Canada).

For complete details on the winning projects and the jury process, please see here.

(Henry Fountain/New York Times, 9 November 2009) -- A geodesic dome that sheltered scientists and support workers at the South Pole for three decades is due to be demolished in the next few months, having outlived its usefulness at the bottom of the world.  But a small group of polar veterans is trying to preserve the dome, arguing it is a signature feature of the United States Antarctic program. They want the 55-foot-high aluminum structure taken apart the same way that Navy Seabees assembled it — bolt by bolt and panel by panel — for reassembly stateside.

“If you saw anything about the South Pole, that dome would always be the symbol that you saw,” said Billy-Ace Baker, a former Navy radio operator in Antarctica and a founder of the Old Antarctic Explorers Association, who is involved in the effort. ... The National Science Foundation, or N.S.F., the federal agency that oversees polar programs, has agreed to disassemble the top three rings, or about 45 triangular panels, for eventual installation at a Seabee museum being built in Port Hueneme, Calif. The bulk of the dome, which has 904 panels and 1,448 struts in all, held together by about 60,000 bolts, would be cut apart.

Brian W. Stone, a deputy division director in the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs, said the agency had been talking with the Seabees for two years about ways to preserve part of the dome. “The Seabees feel it has historical significance, as do we and others who have worked at the South Pole,” Mr. Stone said. But as part of a long-term modernization plan at the site, the agency had to have the dome removed by next March, he said.

A new public exhibition and accompanying website devoted to the role of indigenous peoples and intermediaries, including interpreters and guides, in the history of exploration has been launched at the Royal Geographical Society in London, England. Materials from the Arctic, Africa, Asia, and the Americas are represented. The exhibition is open daily from 15 October to 10 December 2009. Entrance is free of charge.

The website, which contains many more images, film clips, research and teaching materials from the RGS-IBG collections, and other research resources and links, is at http://hiddenhistories.rgs.org/. This project has been undertaken with the support of an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) grant promoting the public dissemination of research relating to collections in museums, galleries, archives and libraries. FMI contact:Felix Driver,F.Driver@rhul.ac.uk

(AP via Mercury News, 13 November 2009) -- RENO, Nev. - A scientist at the Desert Research Institute in Reno has been awarded more than $3.2 million in grant funding to study ice cores and climate change in the Arctic and Antarctic. Joseph McConnell is a research professor in DRI's Division of Hydrologic Sciences and director of its Ultra-Trace Chemistry Laboratory. The bulk of the money from the National Science Foundation is grants from the American Recovery and Restoration Act. Officials say it will fund five projects. One study will focus on how short-lived aerosols, including those generated by wildfires, affect the Earth's climate. Another project, in collaboration with the University of Utah, will study the accumulation variability of ice sheet snow in Greenland.

Posted by Amanda Graham – 14 November 2009; 1:26:37 PM – Permalink  

(Jeremy Hance, mongabay.com, 12 November 2009) -- A new report states that boreal forests store nearly twice as much carbon as tropical forests per hectare: a fact which researchers say should make the conservation of boreal forests as important as tropical in climate change negotiations. The report from the Canadian Boreal Initiative and the Boreal Songbird Initiative, entitled The Carbon the World Forgot, estimates that the boreal forest—which survives in massive swathes across Alaska, Canada, Northern Europe, and Russia—stores 22 percent of all carbon on the earth's land surface. According to the study the boreal contains 703 gigatons of carbon, while the world's tropical forests contain 375 gigatons.

"Past accounting greatly underestimated the amount and depth of carbon stored in and under the boreal forest," says Jeff Wells, one of the report's authors. Researchers explain that while tropical forests store most of their carbon in vegetation, boreal forests store vast amounts of the greenhouse gas deep in permafrost soil and peatlands in addition to its trees. Cold temperatures prevent the complete breakdown of dead biomass in the boreal, so that carbon is accumulated over time, sometimes even millennia. Scientists have found carbon that has been locked away for 8,000 years. ...

Wells says that these findings should not change scientists' or policymakers' view that tropical forests require immediate protection, but only that boreal forests must also be included in negotiations if the world is to successfully to mitigate climate change.

See the report here: http://www.borealbirds.org/carbonreport.shtml or download the full report.

(Alister Doyle/Reuters, 12 November 2009) -- Greenland's ice losses are accelerating and nudging up sea levels, according to a study showing that icebergs breaking away and meltwater runoff are equally to blame for the shrinking ice sheet. The report, using computer models to confirm satellite readings, indicated that ice losses quickened in 2006-08 to the equivalent of 0.75 mm (0.03 inch) of world sea level rise per year from an average 0.46 mm a year for 2000-08.

"Mass loss has accelerated," said Michiel van den Broeke, of Utrecht University in the Netherlands, who led the study, in Friday's edition of the journal Science. "The years 2006-08, with their warm summers, have seen a huge melting," he told Reuters of the study with colleagues in the United States, the Netherlands and Britain. "The underlying causes suggest this trend is likely to continue in the near future," Jonathan Bamber, a co-author at the University of Bristol, said in a statement. The computer models matched satellite data for ice losses—raising confidence in the findings—and showed that losses were due equally to meltwater, caused by rising temperatures, and icebergs breaking off from glaciers.

(Canadian Institutes of Health Research, 3 November 2009) -- Convenience foods, lifestyle changes and global warming are putting Northerners' nutritional health at risk. The Issue: Soaring diabetes rates, startling increases in cardiovascular disease:  the state of nutritional health  in Canada's North is of critical concern. CIHR assembled a panel of four experts, including First Nations leaders (Dene Elder François Paulette and Chief Bill Erasmus) and respected researchers in the field of nutrition (Dr. Harriet Kuhnlein and Dr. Eric Dewailly), to discuss this timely and important issue. What follows is an edited summary of their discussion.

Posted by Amanda Graham – 11 November 2009; 11:17:30 AM – Permalink  

(Oregon State University press release via EurekAlert! 10 November 2009) -- CORVALLIS, Ore. - Penguins that died 44,000 years ago in Antarctica have provided extraordinary frozen DNA samples that challenge the accuracy of traditional genetic aging measurements, and suggest those approaches have been routinely underestimating the age of many specimens by 200 to 600 percent.

In other words, a biological specimen determined by traditional DNA testing to be 100,000 years old may actually be 200,000 to 600,000 years old, researchers suggest in a new report in Trends in Genetics, a professional journal. The findings raise doubts about the accuracy of many evolutionary rates based on conventional types of genetic analysis.

"Some earlier work based on small amounts of DNA indicated this same problem, but now we have more conclusive evidence based on the study of almost an entire mitochondrial genome," said Dee Denver, an evolutionary biologist with the Center for Genome Research and Biocomputing at Oregon State University. "The observations in this report appear to be fundamental and should extend to most animal species," he added. "We believe that traditional DNA dating techniques are fundamentally flawed, and that the rates of evolution are in fact much faster than conventional technologies have led us to believe." ... "For the genetic analysis to be accurate, however, you must have the right molecular clock rate," Denver said. "We now think that many genetic changes were happening that conventional DNA analysis did not capture. They were fairly easy to use and apply but also too indirect, and inaccurate as a result."

A precise study of this ancient DNA was compared to the known ages of the bones, and produced results that were far different than conventional analysis would have suggested. Researchers also determined that different types of DNA sequences changed at different rates. Aside from raising doubts about the accuracy of many specimens dated with conventional approaches, the study may give researchers tools to improve their future dating estimates, Denver said.

(Catherine Marciano/Agence France-Presse via The Montreal Gazette, 11 November 2009)** -- TROMSO, Norway – As the world climate summit closes in, scientists monitoring the impact of global warming in the far north have grown frustrated by public apathy and disbelief about the extent of the problem.

“Measuring ice thickness is extremely difficult,” says Edmond Hansen, an arctic change researcher at the Norwegian Polar Institute meticulously charting the effects of climate change, ahead of the December 7-18 Copenhagen summit. “Satellites can’t do it for the moment. You have to drill into the ice and use electro-magnetic techniques,” he says at his office in the fjords of Tromso, a university town on the same latitude as Siberia [sic].

He has just got back from his annual trip, closer to the North Pole, with new measurements to complete graphs plotting the change wrought by greenhouse gases. For the past 11 years, Hansen has been positioning himself at the same spot on Fram Strait, between Greenland and the Spitzberg [sic, Svalbard](administered by Norway). He measures currents, temperatures and the salinity of the slowly warming Arctic waters which promise to bring a king tide of climate change to Northern Europe. That’s millions of euros for every expedition, to pay a staff of 30, an ice-breaker with a laboratory and a helicopter. Plus a continuous fight to get fresh cash to continue research, which takes up most of Hansen’s energy. “It takes years getting a graph out” from which to draw scientific conclusions, he points out with some bitterness.

“I’m frustrated by the lack of willingness to understand. The general problem in the field is the lack of respect for the knowledge of climate scientists.” Jan-Gunnar Winther, director of the Norwegian Polar Institute, regrets that half of the population of Norway “doesn’t believe in climate change,” compared to 97 percent of scientists.“That worries me because the general public has a connection to politicians. They are voters,” he said. “We need to act and it’s the politicians’ responsibility to act.”

(CP, 9 November 2009) -- IQALUIT, Nunavut - The Olympic torch is continuing its journey through Canada's north today and some scientists are hoping it will shine an international light on the plight of the polar bear. Environmentalists say the polar bear is in grave danger because of climate change and they're hoping people will shift their focus from the Games to think about global warming.

Andrew Derocher, biologist at the University of Alberta, says the Vancouver Olympics has a strong northern component so it's only natural to focus on the challenges facing the Arctic. He says global warming is thawing Arctic sea ice, slowly destroying the crucial habitat and hunting ground of the polar bear.

But some Inuit say the torch relay is not the time to debate the fate of the polar bear. They say there are twice the polar bears now than there were 40 years ago and the only thing the torch bearers should worry about is avoiding an encounter with a polar bear.