Government approves massive resource projects on Great Barrier Reef coast

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December 10, 2013 – 7:29PM

Tom Arup

Environment editor, The Age

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Dunk Island, on the Great Barrier Reef.

Several massive resource projects have been approved on the Great Barrier Reef coast by the federal government including the dredging and dumping of spoil near the reef and a new coal export terminal.

Environmentalists have hit out at the decision, with the WWF and the Greens saying it further industrialises and threatens the world heritage protected icon.

The projects approved by Environment Minister Greg Hunt late on Tuesday include the dredging of 3 million cubic metres of spoil – which will be dumped in the reef’s waters – for the development of three coal export terminals at Abbot Point.

Mr Hunt also approved the building of a new coal terminal at Abbot Point by Indian mining giant Adani.

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Approval was also given to a new processing plant for coal seam gas on Curtis Island, which includes 1.4 million cubic meters of dredging at Port Curtis and the mouth of the Calliope River near Gladstone. A pipeline to the plant – being proposed by Arrow Energy – was also approved.

In making the decision Mr Hunt said he had imposed 148 strict environmental conditions on the Abbot Point and Curtis Island developments. That included conditions to ensure the water quality impact from the dumping of dredging spoil was offset. Mr Hunt said the offsets – which would stop sediments entering the Great Barrier Reef marine park from land sources such as farm runoff – would require an overall gain in water quality.

“It is important to note that each of these sites is already heavily industrialised and that the processes were highly advanced at the change of government,” Mr Hunt said.

“The conditions I have put in place for these projects will result in an improvement in water quality and strengthen the Australian Government’s approach to meeting the challenges confronting the Reef into the future”

Water quality is a significant problem for the Great Barrier Reef with increasing pollutants and nutrients resulting in damage to corals, sea grass and other important marine habitats. There is also emerging evidence poor water quality can encourage populations of a damaging starfish know as crown-of-thorns that has plagued the reef.

The World Heritage Committee has also been alarmed by increasing development on the reef’s coast – with a number of major resource projects approved in recent years – and will consider in 2014 whether it should be placed on an “in danger” list of world heritage sites.

Richard Leck from WWF said Mr Hunt had failed the reef and had turned his back on scientific evidence of the damage dredging would cause.

“Approving a massive amount of sediment to be dumped at a time when the reef’s health is so low, it really is against what the science tells us,” he said.

Queensland Resources Council Chief Executive Michael Roche welcomed the decision and said it confirmed that industry could co-exist with the reef.

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We’re doing some pretty awesome things here in Australia as part of a global movement that is both history defying and future shaping.

Just to be clear though, when I say “awesome” I mean it in the context in which it’s not often used these days.

This “awesome” is the one that might evoke fear and dread. Like the awesome power of a cyclone or the awesome size of a mega-coal mine.

This week, Australia showed its mettle again, when Environment Minister Greg Hunt approved four projects on the Great Barrier Reef coastline that are part of an attempt to liberate hundreds of millions of tonnes of coal and gas.

Two of the approvals help the expansion of the Abbot Point coal export facilities in north Queensland, near Bowen and the Whitsunday Islands. This is mainly to dig coal from massive planned mines in the Galilee Basin for export and burning.

The T0 coal terminal, if built, is a project of the Indian energy group Adani and will be able to export as much as 70 million tonnes of coal per year. The coal would come from Adani’s planned giant Carmichael mine in the Galilee Basin, which, if built, would be one of the biggest coal mines in the world.

As I’ve outlined before, the coal planned to be dug up from two other Galilee mines would emit about 3.7 billion tonnes of CO2 – that’s about six years worth of the emissions of Australia or the UK.

With a long list of conditions which it is claimed will protect the reef and local habitat, Hunt has approved the dredging of up to three million cubic metres of material from the ocean bottom for the new coal terminal. The dredged material will be dumped in the ocean, putting more pressure on the Great Barrier Reef which already has an uncertain future.

The other two approvals are part of Queensland’s rapid multi-billion dollar expansion of the contentious coal seam gas industry.

Given the go ahead are a nine-kilometre pipeline to get the gas from Gladstone to Curtis Island and a new plant there to compress the gas and export up to 18 million tonnes a year of liquified natural gas. Both projects are owned by Arrow Energy (jointly owned by Shell and PetroChina).

Eleven million Melbourne Cricket Grounds

But these decisions are just part of an awesome effort in the last 250 years or so to dig up and burn fossil fuels that have powered our modern lives.

What has this effort achieved in a historical context, in terms of smacking our climate around the chops?

Between 1750 and 2012, according to the Global Carbon Project, our fossil fuel burning has emitted about 1,407 billion tonnes (gigatonnes) of carbon dioxide.

This year, the Global Carbon Project says we will likely reach an all time high of emitting about 36 billion tonnes of CO2 from fossil fuel burning and cement making.

That’s a difficult number to visualise.

To give us an idea of just how much CO2 that actually is,  geologist Derek Taylor has calculated that one gigatonne of CO2 is enough to fill the Melbourne Cricket Ground 300,000 times.

That means emissions this year from fossil fuel burning would create enough carbon dioxide to fill about 11 million MCGs or 16 million Wembley stadiums.

History making

Efforts like the coal and gas extraction in Australia are helping to push the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to almost 400 parts per million.

Levels like this have not been seen on earth since the Pliocene era, which ended about 2.6 million years ago.

As Dr Andrew Glikson of the Australian National University has explained, during the Pliocene the world’s average temperature was between 1C and 3C higher than it is today.

The rate at which CO2 concentrations are rising has not been recorded for at least 65 million years, says Glikson, when a chunk of rock thought to have been about 10 kilometres wide hit the earth and scrubbed out half or more of the species on the planet.

The Geological Society in the UK, the world’s oldest geological group, has just updated its climate change statement to take account of new scientific findings.

The society says the speed that CO2 concentrations are rising in the atmosphere is now “unprecedented” – and they too have looked a long way back for a precedent. The society says:

…  the rates of increase of CO2 since 1970 are unprecedented, even in comparison with the massive injections of carbon to the atmosphere at the Palaeocene-Eocene boundary, which led to a major thermal event 55 million years ago.

In some places on earth during the Pliocene, when CO2 levels in the atmosphere were similar to today, the society says after hundreds of years sea levels went up 20 metres in some places.

If emissions keep rising, then the society says the earth will have levels of CO2 in the atmosphere that have not been experienced for 24 million years or more.

Awesome or what?

Now that West Antarctica is losing weight–that is, billions of tons of ice per year–its softer mantle rock is being nudged westward by the harder mantle beneath East Antarctica.

The discovery comes from researchers led by The Ohio State University, who have recorded GPS measurements that show West Antarctic bedrock is being pushed sideways at rates up to about twelve millimeters–about half an inch–per year. This movement is important for understanding current ice loss on the continent, and predicting future ice loss.

They reported the results on Thursday, Dec. 12 at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Half an inch doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s actually quite dramatic compared to other areas of the planet, explained Terry Wilson, professor of earth sciences at Ohio State. Wilson leads POLENET, an international collaboration that has planted GPS and seismic sensors all over the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

She and her team weren’t surprised to detect the horizontal motion. After all, they’ve been using GPS to observe vertical motion on the continent since the 1990’s.

They were surprised, she said, to find the bedrock moving towards regions of greatest ice loss.

“From computer models, we knew that the bedrock should rebound as the weight of ice on top of it goes away,” Wilson said. “But the rock should spread out from the site where the ice used to be. Instead, we see movement toward places where there was the most ice loss.”

The seismic sensors explained why. By timing how fast seismic waves pass through Earth under Antarctica, the researchers were able to determine that the mantle regions beneath east and west are very different. West Antarctica contains warmer, softer rock, and East Antarctica has colder, harder rock.

Stephanie Konfal, a research associate with POLENET, pointed out that where the transition is most pronounced, the sideways movement runs perpendicular to the boundary between the two types of mantle.

She likened the mantle interface to a pot of honey.

“If you imagine that you have warm spots and cold spots in the honey, so that some of it is soft and some is hard,” Konfal said, “and if you press down on the surface of the honey with a spoon, the honey will move away from the spoon, but the movement won’t be uniform. The hard spots will push into the soft spots. And when you take the spoon away, the soft honey won’t uniformly flow back up to fill the void, because the hard honey is still pushing on it.”

Or, put another way, ice compressed West Antarctica’s soft mantle. Some ice has melted away, but the soft mantle isn’t filling back in uniformly, because East Antarctica’s harder mantle is pushing it sideways. The crust is just along for the ride.

This finding is significant, Konfal said, because we use these crustal motions to understand ice loss.

“We’re witnessing expected movements being reversed, so we know we really need computer models that can take lateral changes in mantle properties into account.”

Wilson said that such extreme differences in mantle properties are not seen elsewhere on the planet where glacial rebound is occurring.

“We figured Antarctica would be different,” she said. “We just didn’t know how different.”

Ohio State’s POLENET academic partners in the United States are Pennsylvania State University, Washington University, New Mexico Tech, Central Washington University, the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics and the University of Memphis. A host of international partners are part of the effort as well. The project is supported by the UNAVCO and IRIS-PASSCAL geodetic and seismic facilities.

“The Late Devonian mass extinction was one of the five largest mass extinction events in the history of life,” said Professor Johnny Waters, who is a co-leader of the five-year, U.N. International Geoscience Programme project that began in 2011. The research team, which includes Assistant Professor Sarah Carmichael, is examining the relationship between climate change and changes in the ecosystems in the Devonian period, from 419 to 359 million years ago.

“This is the third most significant mass extinction and it was caused by plants,” Waters said. “Unlike the dinosaur mass extinction, which was related to an asteroid impact, this one was environmentally related.”

In the Devonian period, Waters explained, the world was experiencing super greenhouse climate conditions. This means that it was very warm, there probably were no ice caps, there was a lot carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (with estimates of 4,000 parts per million).

“As plant communities expanded onto land to form the first forests, they depleted the carbon dioxide (CO2) that was in the atmosphere,” Waters said. “CO2 levels dropped to 400 ppm toward the end of the Devonian. It got colder. There were glaciation events and the rapid change in the climate caused severe extinction in the tropics and the existing coral reefs became extinct.” By comparison, the world’s current CO2 level is very close to 400 ppm.

Most of the knowledge that geologists have about this mass extinction comes from North America and Europe. Although these two land masses are far apart now, in the Devonian they were very close to each other. Scientists have tried to make inferences about worldwide events based on sample locations that are really quite limited in terms of their geographic history, or paleogeography. Therefore, it is vitally important to obtain samples from locations outside this region for understanding global climate change during this time period.

Waters’ international team of geoscientists has conducted field work in remote areas of western China for many years, in addition to two recent field seasons in western Mongolia near the Russian and Chinese borders. The changing political climate in China, Russia and Mongolia in recent years has now made it possible to do fieldwork in these locations. The strength of these field collaborations is that they draw on the expertise of scientists from a variety of disciplines to add critical climatic information to a limited database. U.N. researchers associated with this project are also collecting related data in Thailand, Myanmar, Vietnam and Northern China.

“The reason we are working in central Asia is that there is a lot of good evidence of what happened at and after this mass extinction — this is an area that has not been well studied,” Waters said. “It’s all a part of our work finding the places that give us the best information in sorting out what happened in the extinction event and in its aftermath.”

Answers about Earth’s climate during and after this mass extinction are contained within rock samples from these new field sites, which were once part of the ocean floor, as geochemical signals preserved in the rocks record devastating climate change. The paleogeography of the field sites indicate that Devonian climate change not only had environmental impacts on life associated with large land masses, but also on life in the open ocean.

“We now have evidence that the radiation of surviving life following the mass extinction was centered in Central Asia,” Waters said.

The geochemistry of the samples is being analyzed primarily by students in Appalachian’s Department of Geology under Carmichael’s supervision, with additional analyses being conducted at UNC-Chapel Hill and a university in Austria. “We are using geochemistry to tie it all together all across Central Asia, which used to be an open ocean, and compare our new data to established sequences in Europe and North America, in order to develop a global understanding of the climate change associated with this mass extinction,” Waters said.

“Today we are looking at increases in carbon dioxide causing warming and the negative impacts to the ecosystem. In the Devonian period, we are looking at a rapid loss of carbon dioxide, which in geologic time occurred over millions of years rather than hundreds of years,” Waters said. “But the lessons are actually quite similar. We clearly are concerned today about climate change and its impact on the environment and its effect on the ecosystem, and the geologic record is really the only record where we can see these events and compare what happened before and after.”

Waters and Carmichael will present the preliminary results of their research at the Geological Society of America’s Annual Meeting in Denver in October and at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting in San Francisco in December.

Next summer, Waters will lead a 20-member team, including Dr. Sarah Carmichael and two students from Appalachian’s Department of Geology, for continued field work in Mongolia.

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