Category: Uncategorized

The giants of the green world that profit from the planet’s destruction

A new movement has erupted demanding divestment from fossil fuel polluters – and Big Green is in their sights
Share 403

inShare.8
Email

Naomi Klein

Naomi Klein

The Guardian, Friday 3 May 2013

Jump to comments (172)

Belle Mellor pic for Naomi Klein
‘Purists will point out no big green group is clean, since virtually every one takes money from foundations built on fossil fuel empires.’ Illustration by Belle Mellor

The movement demanding that public interest institutions divest their holdings from fossil fuels is on a serious roll. Chapters have opened up in more than 100 US cities and states as well as on more than 300 campuses, where students are holding protests, debates and sit-ins to pressure their to rid their endowments of oil, gas and coal holdings. And under the “Fossil Free UK” banner, the movement is now crossing the Atlantic, with a major push planned by People & Planet for this summer. Some schools, including University College London, have decided not to wait and already have active divestment campaigns.

Though officially launched just six months ago, the movement can already claim some provisional victories: four US colleges have announced their intention to divest their endowments from fossil fuel stocks and bonds and, in late April, 10 US cities made similar commitments, including San Francisco (Seattle came on board months ago).

There are still all kinds of details to work out to toughen up these pledges, but the speed with which this idea has spread makes it clear that there was some serious pent-up demand. To quote the mission statement of the Fossil Free movement: “If it is wrong to wreck the climate, then it is wrong to profit from that wreckage. We believe that educational and religious institutions, city and state governments, and other institutions that serve the public good should divest from fossil fuels.” I am proud to have been part of the group at 350.org that worked with students and other partners to develop the Fossil Free campaign. But I now realise that an important target is missing from the list: the environmental organisations themselves.

You can understand the oversight. Green groups raise mountains of cash every year on the promise that the funds will be spent on work that is attempting to prevent catastrophic global warming. Fossil fuel companies, on the other hand, are doing everything in their power to make the catastrophic inevitable. According to the UK’s Carbon Tracker Initiative (on whose impeccable research the divestment movement is based), the fossil fuel sector holds five times more carbon in its reserves than can be burned while still leaving us a good shot of limiting warming to 2C. One would assume that green groups would want to make absolutely sure that the money they have raised in the name of saving the planet is not being invested in the companies whose business model requires cooking said planet, and which have been sabotaging all attempts at serious climate action for more than two decades. But in some cases at least, that was a false assumption.

Maybe that shouldn’t come as a complete surprise, since some of the most powerful and wealthiest environmental organisations have long behaved as if they had a stake in the oil and gas industry. They led the climate movement down various dead ends: carbon trading, carbon offsets, natural gas as a “bridge fuel” – what these policies all held in common is that they created the illusion of progress while allowing the fossil fuel companies to keep mining, drilling and fracking with abandon. We always knew that the groups pushing hardest for these false solutions took donations from, and formed corporate partnerships with, the big emitters. But this was explained away as an attempt at constructive engagement – using the power of the market to fix market failures.

Now it turns out that some of these groups are literally part-owners of the industry causing the crisis they are purportedly trying to solve. And the money the green groups have to play with is serious. The Nature Conservancy, for instance, has $1.4bn (£900m) in publicly traded securities, and boasts that its piggybank is “among the 100 largest endowments in the country”. The Wildlife Conservation Society has a $377m endowment, while the endowment of the World Wildlife Fund–US is worth $195m.

Let me be absolutely clear: plenty of green groups have managed to avoid this mess. Greenpeace, 350.org, Friends of the Earth, Rainforest Action Network, and a host of smaller organisations such as Oil Change International and the Climate Reality Project don’t have endowments and don’t invest in the stock market. They also either don’t take corporate donations or place such onerous restrictions on them that extractive industries are easily ruled out. Some of these groups own a few fossil fuel stocks, but only so that they can make trouble at shareholder meetings.

The Natural Resources Defense Council is halfway there. It has a $118m endowment and, according to its accounting team, for direct investments “we specifically screen out extractive industries, fossil fuels, and other areas of the energy sector”. However, the NRDC continues to hold stocks in mutual funds and other mixed assets that do not screen for fossil fuels. (The Fossil Free campaign is calling on institutions to “divest from direct ownership and any commingled funds that include fossil fuel public equities and corporate bonds within 5 years”.)

Purists will point out that no big green group is clean, since virtually every one takes money from foundations built on fossil fuel empires – foundations that continue to invest their endowments in fossil fuels today. It’s a fair point. Consider the largest foundation of them all: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. As of December 2012, it had at least $958.6m – nearly a billion dollars – invested in just two oil giants: ExxonMobil and BP. The hypocrisy is staggering: a top priority of the Gates Foundation has been supporting malaria research, a disease intimately linked to climate. Mosquitoes and malaria parasites both thrive in warmer weather, and they are getting more and more of it. Does it really make sense to fight malaria while fuelling one of the reasons it may be spreading more ferociously in some areas?

Clearly not. And it makes even less sense to raise money in the name of fighting climate change, only to invest that money in, say, ExxonMobil stocks. Yet that is precisely what some groups appear to be doing. Conservation International, notorious for its partnerships with oil companies and other bad actors (the CEO of Northrop Grumman is on its board, for God’s sake), has close to $22m invested in publicly traded securities and, according to a spokesperson, “we do not have any explicit policy prohibiting investment in energy companies”.

The same goes for Ocean Conservancy, which has $14.4m invested in publicly traded securities, including hundreds of thousands in “energy”, “materials” and “utilities” holdings. A spokesperson confirmed in writing that the organisation does “not have an environmental or social screen investment policy”. Neither organisation would divulge how much of its holdings were in fossil fuel companies or release a list of its investments. But according to Dan Apfel, executive director of the Responsible Endowments Coalition, unless an institution specifically directs its investment managers not to invest in fossil fuels, it will almost certainly hold some stock, simply because those stocks (including coal-burning utilities) make up about 13% of the US market, according to one standard index. “All investors are basically invested in fossil fuels,” says Apfel. “You can’t be an investor that is not invested in fossil fuels, unless you’ve actually worked very hard to ensure that you’re not.”

Another group that appears very far from divesting is the Wildlife Conservation Society. Its financial statement for fiscal year 2012 describes a subcategory of investments that includes “energy, mining, oil drilling, and agricultural businesses”. How much of WCS’s $377m endowment is being held in energy and drilling companies? It failed to provide that information despite repeated requests.

The WWF-US told me that it doesn’t invest directly in corporations – but it refused to answer questions about whether it applies environmental screens to its very sizable mixed-asset funds. The National Wildlife Federation Endowment used to apply environmental screens for its $25.7m of investments in publicly traded securities, but now, according to a spokesperson, it tells its investment managers to “look for best-in-class companies who were implementing conservation, environmental and sustainable practices”. In other words, not a fossil fuel divestment policy. Meanwhile, the Nature Conservancy – the richest of all the green groups – has at least $22.8m invested in the energy sector, according to its 2012 financial statements. Along with WCS, TNC completely refused to answer any of my questions or provide any further details about its holdings or policies.

It would be a little surprising if TNC didn’t invest in fossil fuels, given its various other entanglements with the sector. A small sample: in 2010, the Washington Post reported that TNC “has accepted nearly $10m in cash and land contributions from BP and affiliated corporations”; it counts BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell among the members of its Business Council; Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy, one of the largest US coal-burning utilities, sits on its board of directors; and it runs various conservation projects claiming to “offset” the carbon emissions of oil, gas and coal companies.

The divestment question is taking these groups off guard because for decades they were able to make these kinds of deals with polluters and barely raise an eyebrow. But now, it appears, people are fed up with being told that the best way to fight climate change is to change their light bulbs and buy carbon offsets while leaving the big polluters undisturbed. And they are raring to take the fight directly to the industry most responsible for the climate crisis.

Hannah Jones, one of the student divestment movement organisers, told me: “Just as our college and university boards are failing us by not actively confronting the forces responsible for climate change, so are the big corporate green groups. They have failed us by trying to preserve pristine pockets of the world while refusing to take on the powerful interests that are making the entire world unliveable for everyone.” But, she added, “students now know what communities facing extraction have known for decades: that this is a fight about power and money, and everyone – even the big green groups – is going to have to decide whether they are with us, or with the forces wrecking the planet.”

It doesn’t seem like too much to ask. I mean, if the city of Seattle is divesting, shouldn’t WWF do the same? Shouldn’t environmental organisations be more concerned about the human and ecological risks posed by fossil fuel companies than they are by some imagined risks to their stock portfolios? Which raises another question: what are these groups doing hoarding so much money in the first place? If they believe their own scientists, this is the crucial decade to turn things around on climate. Is TNC planning to build a billion-dollar ark?

Some groups, thankfully, are rising to the challenge. A small but growing movement inside the funder world is pushing the big liberal foundations to get their investments in line with their stated missions – which means no more fossil fuels. It’s time for foundations to “own what you own”, says Ellen Dorsey, executive director of the Wallace Global Fund. According to Dorsey, her foundation, which has been a major funder of the coal divestment campaign, is now “99% fossil free and will be completely divested by 2014”.

But convincing the biggest foundations to divest will be slow, and the green groups – which are at least theoretically accountable to their members – should surely lead the way. Some are starting to do just that. The Sierra Club, for instance, now has a clear policy against investing in, or taking money from, fossil fuel companies (it once didn’t, which caused major controversy in the past). This is good news for the Sierra Club’s $15m in investments in publicly traded securities. However, its affiliated organisation, the Sierra Club Foundation, has a much bigger portfolio – with $61.7m invested – and it is still in the process of drafting a full divestment policy, according to Sierra Club’s executive director, Michael Brune. He stressed that “we are fully confident that we can get as good if not better returns from the emerging clean energy economy than we can from investing in the dirty fuels from the past”.

For a long time, forming partnerships with polluters was how the green groups proved they were serious. But the young people demanding divestment – as well as the grassroots groups fighting fossil fuels wherever they are mined, drilled, fracked, burned, piped or shipped – have a different definition of seriousness. They are serious about winning. And the message to Big Green is clear: cut your ties with the fossils, or become one yourself.

• First published in The Nation; www.naomiklein.org

Lava Erupting On Sea Floor Linked to Deep-Carbon Cycle

May 2, 2013 — Scientists from the Smithsonian and the University of Rhode Island have found unsuspected linkages between the oxidation state of iron in volcanic rocks and variations in the chemistry of the deep Earth. Not only do the trends run counter to predictions from recent decades of study, they belie a role for carbon circulating in the deep Earth.

——————————————————————————–

Share This:

6

See Also:

Earth & Climate
•Global Warming
•Earth Science
•Geochemistry
•Forest
•Air Quality
•Oceanography

Reference
•Igneous rock
•Basalt rock
•Mantle plume
•Volcanic rock

The team’s research was published May 2 in Science Express.

Elizabeth Cottrell, lead author and research geologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and Katherine Kelley at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography measured the oxidation state of iron, which is the amount of iron that has a 3+ versus a 2+ electronic charge, in bits of magma that froze to a glass when they hit the freezing waters and crushing pressures of the sea floor. Due to the high precision afforded by the spectroscopic technique they used, the researchers found very subtle variations in the iron-oxidation state that had been overlooked by previous investigations.

The variations correlate with what Cottrell described as the “fingerprints” of the deep Earth rocks that melted to produce the lavas — but not in the way previous researchers had predicted. The erupted lavas that have lower concentrations of 3+ iron also have higher concentrations of elements such as barium, thorium, rubidium and lanthanum, that concentrate in the lavas, rather than staying in their deep Earth home. More importantly, the oxidation state of iron also correlates with elements that became enriched in lavas long ago, and now, after billions of years, show elevated ratios of radiogenic isotopes. Because radiogenic isotopic ratios cannot be modified during rock melting and eruption, Cottrell called this “a dead ringer for the source of the melt itself.”

Carbon is one of the “geochemical goodies” that tends to become enriched in the lava when rocks melt. “Despite is importance to life on this planet, carbon is a really tricky element to get a handle on in melts from the deep Earth,” said Cottrell. “That is because carbon also volatilizes and is lost to the ocean waters such that it can’t easily be quantified in the lavas themselves. As humans we are very focused on what we see up here on the surface. Most people probably don’t recognize that the vast majority of carbon — the backbone of all life — is located in the deep Earth, below the surface — maybe even 90 percent of it.”

The rocks that the team analyzed that were reduced also showed a greater influence of having melted in the presence of carbon than those that were oxidized. “And this makes sense because for every atom of carbon present at depth it has to steal oxygen away from iron as it ascends toward the surface,” said Cottrell. This is because carbon is not associated with oxygen at depth, it exists on its own, like in the mineral diamond. But by the time carbon erupts in lava, it is surrounded by oxygen. In this way, concludes Cottrell, “carbon provides both a mechanism to reduce the iron and also a reasonable explanation for why these reduced lavas are enriched in ways we might expect from melting a carbon-bearing rock.”

Share this story on Facebook, Twitter, and Google:

Numbers shaping up for carbon tax repeal

DateMay 3, 2013 – 1:43PM 197 reading now

Read later

Jonathan Swan

Jonathan Swan

National political reporter

View more articles from Jonathan Swan

Follow Jonathan on Twitter Follow Jonathan on Google + Email Jonathan

Zoom in on this story. Explore all there is to know.
Labor
Senate
Coalition
Tony Abbott
.

inShare.
Pin It
submit to reddit
Email article
Print
Reprints & permissions

.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott.
The numbers are lining up for Tony Abbott to fulfil his pledge to repeal the carbon tax. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott is looking more likely to be able to make good on his oft-repeated assertions to scrap the carbon tax should the Coalition win government in September.

Analysis of voting trends shows that should the present pattern continue to the election, the Coalition would effectively control both houses of parliament, making it powerful enough to repeal the carbon tax.

While Prime Minister Julia Gillard has previously claimed Mr Abbott will not have the numbers to honour his ”blood pledge” to scrap the carbon tax, an analysis of Senate seats up for re-election reveals a majority will likely fall into conservative hands.

Senior lecturer in politics at Griffith University Paul Williams said ”there should be no electoral or numerical obstacles to Tony Abbott repealing the act early in his first term”.

Advertisement

”The numbers would probably align to repeal the carbon tax,” agreed ABC election analyst, Antony Green.

”Whether the minor parties would agree to the withdrawal of the compensation measures could be another matter.”

If current polling trends continue, and Mr Abbott wins a majority in the House of Representatives, then to repeal the carbon tax he would need 39 votes in the Senate. Currently the Coalition controls 34 out of the 76 seats. The Coalition will win another seat in Tasmania and is likely to get an extra South Australian seat at the expense of Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, Mr Green said.

That takes the Coalition to 36 votes – three shy of the majority it would need to repeal the tax.

While the Coalition is unlikely to win any more seats in the Senate, it is likely the three extra seats it needs will be held by conservatives who oppose the carbon tax. Democratic Labor Party Senator John Madigan told Fairfax Media he opposes the tax and would not hold the Coalition to ransom over it – they can count on his vote. That leaves Mr Abbott needing only two more votes to repeal it.

”The key benefit of minor right-wing parties being elected to the Senate is it gives the new Coalition government a negotiation path for legislation through the Senate that doesn’t involve talking to the Greens or Labor,” Mr Green said.

To get his way, Mr Abbott needs minor right-wing parties to swap preferences tightly and in several states he needs the left-wing vote to plummet to historically low levels.

To control an extra Senate seat in Western Australia, Queensland or NSW, conservatives need the combined first preference vote for Labor and the Greens to fall below 43 per cent.

Such a plunge in the progressive vote almost never happens but Mr Green says it is likely to occur in Western Australia and Queensland.

Western Australian Greens Senator Scott Ludlum looks set to lose his seat to a minor right-wing party and in Queensland, Labor will probably lose a seat to Bob Katter’s Australian Party. A spokeswoman for Mr Katter confirmed he remains a climate change sceptic and opposes the carbon tax.

Dr Williams said that Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party is also gaining traction in Queensland ”no doubt about it” and the party could threaten Katter’s party to take a seat from Labor in that state.

If those results occur, Mr Abbott will have the power to remove the carbon tax and the result in NSW would become academic.

Still, the Coalition could find itself in the luxurious position of having 40 conservative votes in the Senate. Left-wing parties almost always win three Senate seats in NSW but the results of the last state election raise prospects of Labor losing its third seat to a conservative party.

The new Senate comes into effect on July 1, 2014 – making this the earliest date Mr Abbott can hope to repeal the carbon tax.

Follow the National Times on Twitter

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/political-news/numbers-shaping-up-for-carbon-tax-repeal-20130503-2ixcd.html#ixzz2SDBGBkxz

MPs to vote on disability levy after Abbott indicates support

By chief political correspondent Emma Griffiths, ABCUpdated May 2, 2013, 8:23 pm

tweet

Email
Print

MPs to vote on disability levy after Abbott indicates support
Julia Gillard/Twitter © Enlarge photo

Related Links

: Myer faces backlash over NDIS comments

: Tasmania signs on to NDIS

: Bring on NDIS levy vote: Windsor

Legislation to pass a disability care levy will be brought before Parliament before the election, with the Prime Minister welcoming the Opposition’s apparent support for the new tax.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott said earlier today that the Coalition was prepared to “consider supporting” the 0.5 percentage point increase to the Medicare levy and would not “quibble” over it.

Julia Gillard has welcomed his apparent support and says she will bring the levy legislation to Parliament this term.

“The Leader of the Opposition has changed his mind on this matter and I welcome that change of mind,” Ms Gillard said.

“On the basis of that change of mind by the Leader of the Opposition, I will bring to the Parliament the legislation to increase the Medicare levy by half a per cent.”

Mr Abbott has previously said it would be better to fund the scheme through general government revenue.

But today he emphasised the Coalition’s bipartisan support for the scheme and conditional support for the proposed levy.

“We are prepared to consider supporting a modest increase in the Medicare levy to make sure that this happens as soon as possible,” he said.

“We do want to see this come into the Parliament in this term.

“There are five weeks of Parliament remaining, and I don’t see why we can’t get this dealt with so that this Parliament does have a substantial monument.

“This is not a day to be quibbling over something which is very, very important to the future of our country.”

Ms Gillard announced the levy yesterday, saying voters would be asked to give her a mandate and “make their choice” in the September 14 federal election.

But after Mr Abbott challenged her to bring the matter before Parliament this term, she declared she would immediately if Mr Abbott backed it.

The Opposition Leader has still not given his unconditional support to the levy, repeating his call for more detail.

“It is important the Prime Minister come clean with all the details,” he said.

“How is this scheme going to be fully funded and who exactly will be covered?”

“At the moment we’ve got a half-funded scheme, what we don’t want is half a scheme to go with half the funding.”

The levy will raise $3.2 billion a year. However when it is fully operational in 2018-19, the scheme is estimated to cost $8 billion a year.

The Prime Minister has said the extra money would have to come from federal, state and territory coffers.

In a statement, the Opposition outlined further conditions to its support for the levy.

It wants legislation introducing the levy to also explain how the scheme will work and who will be eligible.

The Coalition has called on the Government to release all the details of bilateral agreements with states and territories, and it also wants the fund that holds the levy proceeds to be steered by the guardians of the Future Fund.

However, a spokesman for Mr Abbott said the conditions were “not about setting the bar so high they can’t be leapt over” and that Mr Abbott wanted to be “genuinely constructive”.

‘Let’s do it right’

Ms Gillard brushed aside Mr Abbott’s list of conditions as mere “matters of detail”.

“I understand the Leader of the Opposition has raised some matters of detail,” she said.

“In those areas the Government was already working prior to my announcement about the Medicare levy yesterday.

“On the question of savings to support DisabilityCare, we have been outlining long-term savings.

“What I’ve announced with the increase in the Medicare levy would fully fund what we need to do with DisabilityCare over the next five years.”

It is clear Mr Abbott wants to neutralise disability funding as a potential election issue, and has repeatedly highlighted his long-standing support for an insurance scheme.

“I am, as all of you know, profoundly committed to the NDIS. I’ve been calling from the beginning for a bipartisan approach to this,” he said.

John Della Bosca, the head of the group lobbying for an NDIS, says the two sides of politics have inched towards a bipartisan position on the funding of a scheme.

“It’s very important, I think, to give credit where credit is due and say that Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott have respectively shown great leadership and great compassion in arriving at the positions they have as of today,” he said.

Meanwhile, another state has signed up to the full rollout of the scheme.

Ms Gillard has reached agreement with the Labor Government in Tasmania, with the state set to provide $232 million and the Commonwealth contributing $245m by 2018-19.

South Australia, the ACT and New South Wales have also signed up to the scheme in full.

DisabilityCare will begin at launch sites around the country, except for Western Australia, from July.

Video Player Controls
Play
Mute
Volume Down
Volume Up
Seek Back 5 seconds
Seek Forward 5 seconds
Next Video
Open Info
Open Hotkey Menu

Abbott supports Medicare levy rise

Tony Abbott has all-but supported an increase to help fund Julia Gillard’s Disability Insurance Scheme, but stressed there were some conditions.

tweet

UN sounds alarm on record Arctic ice melt

DateMay 2, 2013 – 8:39PM 85 reading now

Read later

inShare.
submit to reddit
Email article
Print

.

The Arctic’s sea ice melted at a record pace in 2012, the ninth-hottest year on record, compounding concerns about climate change underscored by extreme weather such as Hurricane Sandy, the UN weather agency says.

In a report on the situation in 2012, the World Meteorological Organisation said on Thursday that during the August to September melting season, the Arctic’s sea ice cover was just 3.4 million square kilometres.

That was a full 18 per cent less than the previous record low set in 2007.

WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud dubbed it a “disturbing sign of climate change.”

Advertisement

“The year 2012 saw many other extremes as well, such as droughts and tropical cyclones. Natural climate variability has always resulted in such extremes, but the physical characteristics of extreme weather and climate events are being increasingly shaped by climate change,” he said.

“For example, because global sea levels are now about 20 centimetres higher than they were in 1880, storms such as Hurricane Sandy are bringing more coastal flooding than they would have otherwise,” he added.

October’s Hurricane Sandy killed almost 300 people and caused major destruction in the Caribbean before developing further strength and causing tens of billions of dollars in damage and around 130 deaths in the eastern United States.

Typhoon Bopha, the deadliest tropical cyclone of the year, hit the Philippines twice in December, sparking floods and landslides which killed more than 1,000 people.

The WMO said that the 2012 global land and ocean surface temperature was estimated to be 0.45C above the 1961-1990 average of 14.0C.

That marked the ninth warmest year since records began in 1850 and the 27th consecutive year that the global land and ocean temperatures were above the 1961-1990 average, it underlined.

Jarraud noted that the rate of warming varies from year to year due to a range of factors, including the El Nino and La Nina weather phenomena – which see warming and cooling, respectively, in the Pacific Ocean – as well as volcanic eruptions.

Last year’s warming came despite a cooling La Nina at the beginning of the year.

“The sustained warming of the lower atmosphere is a worrisome sign,” said Jarraud.

“The continued upward trend in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases and the consequent increased radiative forcing of the Earth’s atmosphere confirm that the warming will continue,” he added.

Above-average temperatures were observed across most of the globe’s land surface areas, most notably North America, southern Europe, western Russia, parts of northern Africa and southern South America, the WMO noted.

Nonetheless, cooler than average conditions were observed across Alaska, parts of northern and eastern Australia, and central Asia, it said.

Precipitation also varied, with drier-than-average conditions across much of the central United States, northern Mexico, northeastern Brazil, central Russia, and south-central Australia.

Northern Europe, western Africa, north-central Argentina, western Alaska, and most of northern China were meanwhile wetter than average.

AFP

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/un-sounds-alarm-on-record-arctic-ice-melt-20130502-2iw07.html#ixzz2S8Drk9Pp

RELEASE : 13-127

NASA Rover Prototype Set to Explore Greenland Ice Sheet

WASHINGTON — NASA’s newest scientific rover is set for testing May 3 through June 8 in the highest part of Greenland.

The robot known as GROVER, which stands for both Greenland Rover and Goddard Remotely Operated Vehicle for Exploration and Research, will roam the frigid landscape collecting measurements to help scientists better understand changes in the massive ice sheet.
This autonomous, solar-powered robot carries a ground-penetrating radar to study how snow accumulates, adding layer upon layer to the ice sheet over time.

Greenland’s surface layer vaulted into the news in summer 2012 when higher than normal temperatures caused surface melting across about 97 percent of the ice sheet. Scientists at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., expect GROVER to detect the layer of the ice sheet that formed in the aftermath of that extreme melt event.

Research with polar rovers costs less than aircraft or satellites, the usual platforms.

“Robots like GROVER will give us a new tool for glaciology studies,” said Lora Koenig, a glaciologist at Goddard and science advisor on the project.

GROVER will be joined on the ice sheet in June by another robot, named Cool Robot, developed at Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H., with funding from the National Science Foundation. This rover can tow a variety of instrument packages to conduct glaciological and atmospheric sampling studies.

GROVER was developed in 2010 and 2011 by teams of students participating in summer engineering boot camps at Goddard. The students were interested in building a rover and approached Koenig about whether a rover could aid her studies of snow accumulation on ice sheets. This information typically is gathered by radars carried on snowmobiles and airplanes. Koenig suggested putting a radar on a rover for this work.

Koenig, now a science advisor on the GROVER Project, asked Hans-Peter Marshall, a glaciologist at Boise State University to bring in his expertise in small, low-power, autonomous radars that could be mounted on GROVER. Since its inception at the boot camp, GROVER has been fine-tuned, with NASA funding, at Boise State.

The tank-like GROVER prototype stands six feet tall, including its solar panels. It weighs about 800 pounds and traverses the ice on two repurposed snowmobile tracks. The robot is powered entirely by solar energy, so it can operate in pristine polar environments without adding to air pollution. The panels are mounted in an inverted V, allowing them to collect energy from the sun and sunlight reflected off the ice sheet.

A ground-penetrating radar powered by two rechargeable batteries rests on the back of the rover. The radar sends radio wave pulses into the ice sheet, and the waves bounce off buried features, informing researchers about the characteristics of the snow and ice layers.

From a research station operated by the National Science Foundation called Summit Camp, a spot where the ice sheet is about 2 miles thick, GROVER will crawl at an average speed of 1.2 mph (2 kilometers per hour). Because the sun never dips below the horizon during the Arctic summer, GROVER can work at any time during the day and should be able to work longer and gather more data than a human on a snowmobile.

At the beginning of the summit tests, Koenig’s team will keep GROVER close to camp and communicate with it via Wi-Fi within a three-mile (4.8-kilometer) range. GROVER will transmit snippets of data during the trial to ensure it is working properly but the majority of data will be recovered at the end of the season. The researchers eventually will switch to satellite communications, which will allow the robot to roam farther and transmit data in real time. Ideally, researchers will be able to drive the rover from their desks.

“We think it’s really powerful,” said Gabriel Trisca, a Boise State master’s degree student who developed GROVER’s software. “The fact is the robot could be anywhere in the world and we’ll be able to control it from anywhere.”

Michael Comberiate, a retired NASA engineer and manager of Goddard’s Engineering Boot Camp said the Earth-bound Greenland Rover is similar to NASA missions off the planet.

“GROVER is just like a spacecraft but it has to operate on the ground,” Comberiate said. “It has to survive unattended for months in a hostile environment, with just a few commands to interrogate it and find out its status and give it some directions for how to accommodate situations it finds itself in.”

Koenig hopes more radar data will help shed light on Greenland’s snow accumulation. Scientists compare annual accumulation to the volume of ice lost to sea each year to calculate the ice sheet’s overall mass balance and its contribution to sea level rise.

For images and a video about GROVER, visit:

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/grover.html