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Author: Neville

  • Geochemistry Survey at Chatham Rise Reveals Absence of Modern Day Greenhouse Gas Emissions

    Geochemistry Survey at Chatham Rise Reveals Absence of Modern Day Greenhouse Gas Emissions

    May 29, 2013 — Geochemistry analysis conducted by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory of fossil sediment injection structures off the New Zealand coast in February and March reveal no presence of modern day expulsions of methane gas, a potential contributor to global ‘greenhouse effect’ warming.

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    The main focus of this most recent expedition was to investigate the geological origin of seafloor anomalies discovered during a 2007 marine-life survey on the Chatham Rise.

    During the 2007 survey scientists discovered several large seafloor craters, or pockmarks, including a giant 11 kilometers by 6 kilometers pockmark in water depths of about 1,000 meters, considered immense compared with pockmarks observed elsewhere in the world.

    Scientists from Germany, New Zealand, and United States used the two-leg voyage aboard the German research vessel, R/V Sonne, to map and investigate giant seabed features and subsurface structures characteristic of large scale gas-rich fluid migration about 500 kilometers east of Christchurch, South Island, New Zealand.

    While the gas and related sediment chemistry results demonstrate this system is no longer geochemically active, these very large pockmarks — 11 kilometers by 6 kilometers in diameter and 100 meters deep — are part of a much larger field of many thousands of smaller pockmarks that extends eastward along the Chatham Rise. Covering approximately 20,000 kilometers of seafloor, these pockmarks suggest sporadic gas escape may be occurring, possibly only during glacial intervals that occur approximately every 20,000 years.

    “Geochemical analyses of the seafloor craters taken during the second leg of the voyage displayed no indication of a vertical methane flux through the sediment as indicated by the first part of the voyage,” said Richard Coffin, chief scientist, NRL Chemistry Division. “This result suggests that gas-charged fluid escape leading to the pockmark formation may have occurred in the past, but seafloor gas seeps are not currently active.”

    The first leg of the survey was to map the seabed and undertake a high-resolution three-dimensional (3D) seismic survey over some of the pockmarks to image the sub-seafloor. During the second leg of the expedition, Coffin led geochemical investigations at four distinct Chatham Rise locations based on data from the seismic surveys. Piston and multi coring was conducted for geochemical evaluation of sediment and pore water to assess current and past day vertical fluid and gas fluxes.

    “The apparent absence of methane in the shallow sediment and water column at the giant pockmark area was a surprise given the first leg results,” Coffin said. “Onboard analysis showed no current day flux of deep sediment thermogenic or biogenic methane to the shallow sediment.”

    Scientists believe the latest results indicate the pockmarks are formed by gas escape that has come from rocks buried deep beneath the rise. Methane may have escaped during vigorous ancient degassing from under the seafloor into the ocean with significant implications for climate change and ocean acidification.

    Ongoing seismic interpretation and pore water chemistry studies, to be undertaken by the international team of investigators, is expected to clarify the history of the enigmatic giant pockmarks and underlying sedimentary structures.

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  • Bill McKibben is on his way

    6:28 PM (21 minutes ago)
    to me

    Dear Friend,

    He’s packed his bag.

    The guy who’s got the coal industry running scared is 92 hours away from touching down on our shores.

    But our vision for next week is not just about Bill McKibben. It’s much bigger than that – imagine packed out theatres at each event, unleashing the energy and excitement to catapult the divestment campaign across Australia, and sending ripples around the world. We want to show that Australia is ready to be the climate solution and not the climate problem.

    We feel like we’re really close to enabling that vision, but we need one more push to get there. Will you help us reach that vision by sharing this email with 5 friends and inviting them to an event next week?

    Even better, why not suggest they attend one of the after-show receptions where they can chat face to face with Bill! And as you can see on this map, we now have live broadcasts in both Perth and Hobart!

    All the details are on maths.350.org/australia

    So many thanks for your support so far. And get ready, because we’re in for a heck of a ride!

    With excitement,

     

    Aaron, Tim, Blair, Charlie and the whole 350.org Australia Team

    PS – More exciting news – Bill’s movement-building efforts have just been recognised this week with a prestigious international environment award- the Sophie Prize. In receiving the award, Bill joins the ranks of environmental champions such as Wangarai Maathai, James Hansen and Sheila Watt Cloutier.

    350.org is building a global movement to solve the climate crisis. Connect with us on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for email alerts. You can help power our work by getting involved locally, sharing your story, and donating here.To stop receiving emails from 350.org, click here.

  • Some ocean currents persist through dramatic climate shifts

    Some ocean currents persist through dramatic climate shifts

    Posted on May 30, 2013 by Bob Berwyn

    Arctic drainage current essentially unchanged since ice age

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    How will global warming affect ocean currents/

    By Summit Voice

    FRISCO — Climate scientists have been trying to determine how global warming could affect deep ocean currents that are critical parts of the global ocean circulation system, with some research suggesting that melting sea ice in  the Arctic could have a big impact on the Gulf Stream.

    A new study shows that some currents have persisted through big climate changes, including currents that flush the Arctic and feed the North Atlantic Ocean. The research, published in Nature, shows that the deep Arctic Ocean has been churning briskly for the last 35,000 years, through the chill of the last ice age and warmth of modern times.

    “The Arctic Ocean must have been flushed at approximately the same rate it is today regardless of how different things were at the surface,” said study co-author Jerry McManus, a geochemist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

    Researchers reconstructed Arctic circulation through deep time by measuring radioactive trace elements buried in sediments on the Arctic seafloor. Uranium eroded from the continents and delivered to the ocean by rivers, decays into sister elements thorium and protactinium. Thorium and protactinium eventually attach to particles falling through the water and wind up in mud at the bottom. By comparing expected ratios of thorium and protactinium in those ocean sediments to observed amounts, the authors showed that protactinium was being swept out of the Arctic before it could settle to the ocean bottom. From the amount of missing protactinium, scientists can infer how quickly the overlying water must have been flushed at the time the sediments were accumulating.

    “The water couldn’t have been stagnant, because we see the export of protactinium,” said the study’s lead author, Sharon Hoffmann, a geochemist at Lamont-Doherty.

    The upper part of the modern Arctic Ocean is flushed by North Atlantic currents while the Arctic’s deep basins are flushed by salty currents formed during sea ice formation at the surface.

    “The study shows that both mechanisms must have been active from the height of glaciation until now,” said Robert Newton, an oceanographer at Lamont-Doherty who was not involved in the research. “There must have been significant melt-back of sea ice each summer even at the height of the last ice age to have sea ice formation on the shelves each year. This will be a surprise to many Arctic researchers who believe deep water formation shuts down during glaciations.”

    The researchers analyzed sediment cores collected during the U.S.-Canada Arctic Ocean Section cruise in 1994, a major Arctic research expedition that involved several Lamont-Doherty scientists. In each location, the cores showed that protactinium has been lower than expected for at least the past 35,000 years. By sampling cores from a range of depths, including the bottom of the Arctic deep basins, the researchers show that even the deepest waters were being flushed out at about the same rate as in the modern Arctic.

    The only deep exit from the Arctic is through Fram Strait, which divides Greenland and Norway’s Svalbard islands. The deep waters of the modern Arctic flow into the North Atlantic via the Nordic seas, contributing up to 40 percent of the water that becomes North Atlantic Deep Water—known as the “ocean’s lungs” for delivering oxygen and salt to the rest of world’s oceans.

    One direction for future research is to find out where the missing Arctic protactinium of the past ended up.

    “It’s somewhere,” said McManus. “All the protactinium in the ocean is buried in ocean sediments. If it’s not buried in one place, it’s buried in another. Our evidence suggests it’s leaving the Arctic but we think it’s unlikely to get very far before being removed.”

  • Sydney family leaves home amid NBN asbestos safety breaches

    Sydney family leaves home amid NBN asbestos safety breaches

    ABCUpdated May 30, 2013, 3:57 pm

    A Sydney family is demanding answers from Telstra and the Federal Government over fears asbestos fibres have contaminated their home during the rollout of the National Broadband Network (NBN).

    Work has stopped at some sites in New South Wales and Victoria, improvement notices issued in Tasmania, and Telstra subcontractors are being investigated for asbestos safety breaches by Comcare.

    Thousands of telco-pits across Australia are being prepared for fibre optic cables, including old pits containing asbestos.

    There are concerns the deadly fibres have been released into residential areas during the works.

    Matthew O’Farrell, his wife and their two children aged 12 weeks and six years old have been moved out of their home in Penrith, in Sydney’s west, and into a motel after being told there was asbestos in a pit outside their home and their street may have been contaminated.

    “The first time I found out that this was asbestos, my stomach sank. I’ve been on edge ever since, nervous of everything I do. I started to get very paranoid about how far this stuff had got,” he said.

    “I’ve had no reassurance from anyone when we’ll be able to go back to our home, when it is safe and whether my children or wife have come into contact or breathed in any of this material.

    “I just hope that over the next 20 years I’m not having to say to my children that they’ve got this from living in that house.”

    ‘It’s just exploding everywhere’

    Mr O’Farrell says the Telstra contractors who had been working on the pit had “no idea” what they were doing and he says some of them cannot speak English.

    “I’ve watched the owner of the company communicate with them from metres away with hand signals, telling them to break up the pits with their hands and putting it into bags,” he said.

    “[They were] hitting the pits with sledgehammers, pitchforks and crowbars.

    “It’s just exploding everywhere, all over the road, down the driveways, all over the front yards of our properties.”

    ‘Urgent investigation’

    Telstra chief operations officer Brendon Riley said his team reacted immediately to the concerns of residents on the Penrith street earlier this month.

    “As soon as we received the information we sent our team out to the pit to inspect the site and as a result immediately suspended the contractor from further work and safely secured the area,” he said.

    He says Telstra did further investigations.

    “We also re-visited all sites remediated by this contractor to make sure the removal of asbestos was conducted in the appropriate way,” he said.

    “I ordered an urgent investigation into the incident and my team has been liaising regularly with the local residents including bringing in asbestos experts to talk to them.

    “We understand this is a distressing time for the residents who have every right to expect that this type of work will be conducted safely and in accordance with the strictest of safety procedures.”

    Government taking safety breaches seriously

    Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has moved to reassure the public that the Government is taking the safety breaches very seriously.

    “The Office of Asbestos Safety will work closely with Comcare to address any asbestos hazards in a nationally coordinated way to protect Australians from asbestos exposure,” he said.

    “This is a very serious issue and as you know lives can be put at stake.”

    Comcare is investigating the work, health and safety systems of Telstra in Tasmania, New South Wales and Victoria.

    The National Office of Asbestos Safety has also been called in to investigate.

    Workplace Relations Minister Bill Shorten says the Government is working with Telstra and its contractors to address asbestos safety issues.

    “We take any potential cases of asbestos exposure extremely seriously and a national approach to asbestos awareness, handling and eradication is urgently needed,” he said.

    “There is no excuse, if it’s proven to have happened, for this to have happened full stop.

    “Asbestos is a killer.

    “We are determined to have a national action plan and I’ve spoken with Telstra about best practice.”

    Union calls for fund for future victims

    The Union representing NBN technicians is calling for Telstra to set up a fund to pay for the care and treatment of future asbestos disease victims caused by poor asbestos management on the NBN project.

    CEPU NSW assistant secretary Shane Murphy wants Telstra to set up a register for all workers who have been exposed to asbestos while working on the Telstra network.

    “The impacts of this mess will be felt decades into the future,” he said.

    “Telstra needs to take responsibility for the health impact on its own workers as well as the broader community.”

    Subcontractors are ‘cowboys’

    Asbestos Diseases Foundation president Barry Robson says some of the subcontractors involved with the NBN work “are just cowboys”.

    “They had no protection, the four workers [in Penrith],” said Mr Robson.

    “The residents tell me they just got stuck into this particular one, some of the workers smashed it all up … asbestos went everywhere.”

    Kevin Harkins from Unions Tasmania says Comcare has not been checking sites often enough.

    “Hopefully this will be a wake-up call, but Comcare don’t have any officers based in Tasmania,” he said.

    “We need more people on the ground inspecting health and safety risks to employees and the community.

    “As I understand it, in New South Wales, a number of houses have actually been evacuated because of the dangers of asbestos, we don’t want that happening in Tasmania.”

  • THE AMERICAN PARTY (HANSEN)

    James Hansen jimehansen@gmail.com via mail124.us4.mcsv.net
    1:32 PM (28 minutes ago)
    to me
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    The American Party
    A commentary is available on my web site or directly at The American Party.

    ~Jim Hansen
    29 May 2013

  • Ecology Lessons From the Cold War

    Op-Ed Contributor

    Ecology Lessons From the Cold War

    By JACOB DARWIN HAMBLIN
    Published: May 29, 2013
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    CORVALLIS, Ore. — TODAY the effort to preserve the planet’s biodiversity is often seen as a campaign to save the whales for their own sake, or to give polar bears a few more winters on the Arctic ice. But in the 1950s, when the concept was first discussed, it was understood that far more was at stake. The “conservation of variety,” as it was called during the early years of the cold war, was no less than a strategy of human survival.

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    At that time, American military leaders and scientists were contemplating the possibility of total war with the Soviet Union, with not only civilians, but plants, animals and entire ecosystems as fair game. The war planners imagined a brave new world in which biological and radiological weapons would be considered side by side with crop destruction, huge fires, artificial earthquakes, tsunamis, ocean current manipulation, sea-level tinkering and even weather control.

    Numerous approaches seemed feasible then: melting polar ice by blackening it with soot, seeding clouds with chemicals to harass an enemy with rain and mud, killing life-sustaining crops with deadly cereal rust spores or radioactive contamination. Entire forests might be set ablaze by the thermal radiation of a high-altitude nuclear blast. Well-placed detonations might unleash the energy of the earth’s crust, oceans or weather systems. During the Korean War, Representative Albert Gore Sr. went so far as to urge President Harry S. Truman to contaminate an enormous strip of territory across the Korean Peninsula with radioactive waste from plutonium processing, hoping the poisonous landscape would deter Communist troops from moving south.

    By the early 1960s, NATO was calling these approaches “environmental warfare.” One of the important considerations in the calculus, not surprisingly, was self-preservation. War planning would include figuring out how to keep people alive beyond the initial devastation. The best approach, scientists concluded, was coming up with ways to protect ecosystems.

    Today we call it biodiversity. One of its principal advocates was the Oxford ecologist Charles Elton, whose book “The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants,” argued that simplifying landscapes with weedkillers, or planting single crop species over large areas made a recipe for disaster. The best defense from diseases, other species or natural catastrophes, he said, was to conserve as much biological variety as possible in the fields and hedges of the countryside to counterbalance any threat. In his book he called it the conservation of variety.

    Elton’s approach not only inspired Rachel Carson to write “Silent Spring,” about the harm done by insecticides, it also resonated among scientists in the defense establishment. Fantasizing about environmental warfare in the early 1960s, NATO scientists tried to imagine which links in ecosystems were vulnerable to manipulation. Studies had recently shown radioactive fallout infiltrating reindeer meat, a crucial part of Eskimos’ diets. It was a revelation to think that such a connection in the food chain was now targetable. But the reverse was also true, and underscored Elton’s point: the complexity of an ecosystem made any particular “link” less important, making the system less vulnerable.

    This was the lesson defense planners took to heart. They decided that a robust peacetime market economy provided variety, and thus security in peace and war. If nuclear war ever came, a decentralized, diversified society would be in better shape than a centrally planned one like the Soviet Union’s. The same logic applied to biological variety. That is why strategic stockpiles of Western nations during the cold war did not collect enormous stores of favorite foods but samples of the widest range of species imaginable.

    In the face of natural disasters, such diversity seemed to be the West’s ace in the hole. The variety of agricultural products in the United States far outpaced those of the Soviet Union, and is a reason that C.I.A. analysts predicted in the 1980s that global climate change would cause more harm to Russia than to the United States.

    We managed to survive the cold war, but the challenges to our environmental security remain. We need to stop treating the idea of biodiversity as a philosophical preference and embrace it as a strategy of survival, just as it was for those who, more than a half-century ago, planned for a calamitous total war.

    Jacob Darwin Hamblin is an associate professor of history at Oregon State University and the author of “Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism.”

    A version of this op-ed appeared in print on May 30, 2013, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Ecology Lessons From the Cold War.