Author: Neville

Toxic Oceans May Have Delayed Spread of Complex Life

Feb. 28, 2013 — A new model suggests that inhospitable hydrodgen-sulphide rich waters could have delayed the spread of complex life forms in ancient oceans. The research, published online this week in the journal Nature Communications, considers the composition of the oceans 550-700 million years ago and shows that oxygen-poor toxic conditions, which may have delayed the establishment of complex life, were controlled by the biological availability of nitrogen.

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In contrast to modern oceans, data from ancient rocks indicates that the deep oceans of the early Earth contained little oxygen, and flipped between an iron-rich state and a toxic hydrogen-sulphide-rich state. The latter toxic sulphidic state is caused by bacteria that survive in low oxygen and low nitrate conditions. The study shows how bacteria using nitrate in their metabolism would have displaced the less energetically efficient bacteria that produce sulphide — meaning that the presence of nitrate in the oceans prevented build-up of the toxic sulphidic state.

The model, developed by researchers at the University of Exeter in collaboration with Plymouth Marine Laboratory, University of Leeds, UCL (University College London) and the University of Southern Denmark, reveals the sensitivity of the early oceans to the global nitrogen cycle. It shows how the availability of nitrate, and feedbacks within the global nitrogen cycle, would have controlled the shifting of the oceans between the two oxygen-free states — potentially restricting the spread of early complex life.

Dr Richard Boyle from the University of Exeter said: “Data from the modern ocean suggests that even in an oxygen-poor ocean, this apparent global-scale interchange between sulphidic and non-sulphidic conditions is difficult to achieve. We’ve shown here how feedbacks arising from the fact that life uses nitrate as both a nutrient, and in respiration, controlled the interchange between two ocean states. For as long as sulphidic conditions remained frequent, Earth’s oceans were inhospitable towards complex life.”

Today, an abundance of nitrate, in the context of an oxygenated ocean, prevents a reversion to the inhospitable environment that inhibited early life. Determining how Earth’s oceans have established long-term stability helps us to understand how modern oceans interact with life and also sheds light on the sensitivity of oceans to changes in composition.

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Costello’s plan to slash Queensland debt

By Kym Agius, AAPUpdated March 1, 2013, 6:23 pm

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Queensland’s assets could again be up for sale under major reforms that could wipe out almost half of the state’s debt.

The executive summary of the final independent Commission of Audit, headed by former federal treasurer Peter Costello, recommends selling electricity assets to raise the $25 billion needed to return Queensland to a triple-A credit rating.

It also recommends the sale of the Gladstone and North Queensland port corporations.

Government services should be pitted against what value for money could be achieved in the private sector, the audit report says.

It suggests health, bus, rail, child safety, mental health, corrective services and public housing services could be outsourced.

Treasurer Tim Nicholls will release the full 1000-plus-page report, as well as the government’s response, within two months.

He promised there would not be any major asset sales until the government was given a mandate by voters, but the same could not be said for outsourcing services.

“There are opportunities for the government to be an enabler, to procure those services, rather than be the doer of those services,” Mr Nicholls said.

He promised there would be no more job losses, after 14,000 last year.

Public servants, however, should expect to be shifted onto private payrolls if services are outsourced.

Mr Costello warned the government needs to improve service productivity by one per cent a year.

“The government either does something now in an ordered and planned way or if it doesn’t, in three years or 10 years, the change will be forced upon it and it will be much tougher and harsher,” he said.

Mr Costello said it was a bad time to sell electricity assets.

He said the sale of generators should be delayed until there was certainty about the carbon tax and renewable energy targets, and a decision about distributors should be made after 2015 when new price regulations come in.

Big businesses has been one of the few supporters of electricity asset sales.

Australian Industry Group state director Matthew Martyn-Jones says privatisation wouldn’t lead to price hikes, and blamed top tier infrastructure for rises suffered in the state.

Secretary of public service union Together, Alex Scott, says the audit benefits LNP donors instead of improving services.

“We will see a tidal wave of privatisation which will destroy the structure and fabric of Queensland society,” Mr Scott said.

Queensland Opposition Leader Annastacia Palaszczuk says the opposition opposes any asset sales and the party has suffered the wrath of the public for its decisions.

She said under the recommendations no public servant’s job was safe, public transport fares could rise and profits would be put before people.

The role of government was to deliver core services but the Liberal National Party (LNP) was shirking its responsibilities.

“Today the LNP has put Queensland up for sale,” Ms Palaszczuk said.
The Queensland Council of Unions (QCU) says it will launch a well-resourced campaign against privatisation from now through to the next election and beyond.

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Gillard set for mixed Rooty Hill reception
AAP March 1, 2013, 4:55 pm

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Every second person entering the Rooty Hill RSL club has been asking if Julia’s there yet.

The prime minister’s five-day stay in western Sydney, staying in The Novotel next to the club, is the talk of the town but she looks like getting a mixed reception.

Ms Gillard will move in on Sunday for five days of meeting and greeting and announcing new policies to benefit the region.

The visit is widely seen as a bid to shore up dipping support for Labor in western Sydney, with a number of ALP seats tipped to fall.

At the RSL club on Friday, a club member walking in asked, “Is Julia here yet?”

Gail Smith, who greets guests at the door told AAP that every second person wanted to know if the prime minister had arrived, indicating there was a lot of interest in her visit.

But down the road at The Imperial hotel, bar attendant Tania Moorecroft said she didn’t think most people would really care about the visit and Ms Gillard might even cop some verbal abuse.

She said Ms Gillard had not paid a visit to Rooty Hill since she became prime minister.

“Now with an election coming up she decides to pay us a visit.”

Ms Moorecroft said the area was full of working class people, housing commission tenants and pensioners struggling to make ends meet while Ms Gillard stays at the best room at The Novotel.

She said people at the bar referred to the prime minister as “Gillard”, rather than Julia or Ms Gillard and some said she would not be welcome.
Computer technician Christopher Talmage said there might not be that much interest in the prime minister’s visit but he hoped federal Labor would not lose seats in the west or be tainted by state Labor’s corruption scandal.

Japan plans viable methane hydrate technology by 2018

Kyodo

Feb 28, 2013
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Japan hopes to develop commercially viable technology for exploiting seabed methane hydrate, viewed as a next-generation energy source, by fiscal 2018, according to a draft new basic ocean policy plan made available Wednesday.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government wants to formalize the plan next month, believing tapping marine resources should be a pillar of the country’s growth strategy, a government source said.

Methane hydrate, an icelike substance consisting of methane gas trapped in ice below the seabed, is believed to exist around Japan, with deposits estimated to be sufficient to cover domestic consumption of natural gas for about 100 years.

The draft plan would have the private sector start commercializing methane hydrate development between 2023 and 2029, and the government would also study the extent of rare earth reserves within around three years.

The government will help Japanese firms take part in large-scale projects in the marine industry, especially drilling for oil and natural gas, to ensure the ventures are internationally competitive.

With an eye to expanding resource development far from mainland Japan, the government will also create refueling and transport bases on the far eastern island of Minamitori and southern outcropping of Okinotori.

The plan also calls for the government to beef up information-gathering pertaining to remote islands, on the back of China’s recent incursions in waters near the Japan-controlled Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea. China also claims the uninhabited islets.

Japan will also speed up technological development of renewable energy sources in the sea, pursuing research on the operation of one of the world’s largest floating wind generators, according to the draft plan. The equipment would be placed off Fukushima Prefecture.

The government is working on renewing the current first basic plan, which was drawn up in 2008, because the Basic Act on Ocean Policy requires a revision every five years.

Ministers ‘driving up bills by failing to commit to low-carbon energy’

Ministers undermine their own policies by postponing decision on emissions-free electricity, advisers warn Ed Davey
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Damian Carrington

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 27 February 2013 14.42 GMT

Postponing a decision on whether to require electricity generation to be essentially emissions-free by 2030, ministers are undermining their own policies, advisers warn. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

Ministers are unnecessarily driving up energy bills for consumers by failing to fully commit to low-carbon energy production, the government’s official advisers have warned the energy secretary, Ed Davey.

Postponing a decision on whether to require electricity generation to be essentially emissions-free by 2030, ministers are undermining their own policies and will make energy more expensive, according to the Committee on Climate Change.

“[Delay] will adversely impact on supply chain investment decisions and project development, therefore undermining implementation of the energy bill and raising costs for consumers,” said Lord Deben, chair of the CCC, in a letter to Davey, David Cameron and George Osborne. Deben, who as John Gummer was a Conservative environment secretary, said that an early commitment to deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions was “economically sensible compared to the alternative of a dash for gas through the 2020s”, a strategy backed by Osborne.

The government has said it will consider setting a “decarbonisation target” for 2030 in 2016, a coalition compromise between Osborne, who opposes the target, and Davey, whose own party has backed the target. Davey has said that the “vast majority” of companies in the UK want a government-set 2030 target. Conservative former minister Tim Yeo, now chair of the energy select committee, is seeking to amend the coalition’s energy bill to force a target to be set. The CCC letter was published on Wednesday, the same day that British Gas announced an 11% rise in annual profits to £600m, helped by sharp rises in customer bills.

Davey told the Guardian: “We have made clear that £7.6bn per year of support will be available by 2020 and have committed to setting a decarbonisation target. There is a logic to setting it in 2016 when we know what the [UK’s next] carbon budget will look like.”

He added: “Investors are already showing great confidence in the UK energy sector. In 2012, a record £12bn of new investment was committed, supporting 20,000 jobs in the renewables sector.”

The CCC argues that without a 2030 target set now to succeed current 2020 targets for clean energy, there is no incentive for industry to invest the billions needed to replace the UK’s ageing and dirty power plants. “The 2020s may seem a long way off, but for offshore wind, nuclear and CCS projects to start operating in 2021, you need to start developing them now or next year,” David Kennedy, CCC chief executive, told the Guardian. “The risk, without a 2030 carbon target, is that we don’t get supply chain investment now, and fail to drive costs down – this would mean that we don’t get value for money from the large amount of funding already committed by the government. The risk is also that we get a five year investment hiatus from 2020, something we should try hard to avoid in the interests of keeping down long term costs and electricity prices.”

The CCC wants ministers to set the 2030 target by 2014 at the latest. Deben wrote: “This would address widely raised investor concerns and provide more confidence that there will be good value for money” for energy bill payers who will ultimately pay for all new energy infrastructure. He said delay was “particularly damaging” for offshore windfarms, which the government hopes will expand hugely in coming years, because investors could not be confident that a market would exist after 2020.

The CCC analysed the gas strategy launched by Osborne in December and found the scenario setting out the biggest dash for gas would mean “little or no further investment in low carbon generation beyond 2020. Instead, investment would be focused on unabated gas.” Kennedy said previously that this scenario is “completely incompatible” with the UK’s legally binding carbon emissions targets and should be “plan Z”.

Greenpeace energy campaigner Leila Deen said: “Deben echoes the concerns of hundreds of UK businesses and investors – without a goal to remove carbon from our electricity sector by 2030, green jobs and investment will be lost, the UK will become dangerously dependent on gas and consumers will pay the price. Osborne has done his best to block the 2030 goal, but his own Conservative colleague Tim Yeo knows this won’t work. Billions of pounds of investment and stable household bills rest on Yeo’s amendment becoming law.”

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NASA’s Aquarius Sees Salty Shifts

Feb. 27, 2013 — Colorful new images chronicle the seasonal stirrings of our salty world: Pulses of freshwater gush from the Amazon River’s mouth; an invisible seam divides the salty Arabian Sea from the fresher waters of the Bay of Bengal; a large patch of freshwater appears in the eastern tropical Pacific in the winter. These and other changes in ocean salinity patterns are revealed by the first full year of surface salinity data captured by NASA’s Aquarius instrument.

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“With a bit more than a year of data, we are seeing some surprising patterns, especially in the tropics,” said Aquarius Principal Investigator Gary Lagerloef, of Earth & Space Research in Seattle. “We see features evolve rapidly over time.”

Launched June 10, 2011, aboard the Argentine spacecraft Aquarius/Satélite de Aplicaciones Científicas (SAC)-D, Aquarius is NASA’s first satellite instrument specifically built to study the salt content of ocean surface waters. Salinity variations, one of the main drivers of ocean circulation, are closely connected with the cycling of freshwater around the planet and provide scientists with valuable information on how the changing global climate is altering global rainfall patterns.

The salinity sensor detects the microwave emissivity of the top 1 to 2 centimeters (about an inch) of ocean water — a physical property that varies depending on temperature and saltiness. The instrument collects data in 386 kilometer-wide (240-mile) swaths in an orbit designed to obtain a complete survey of global salinity of ice-free oceans every seven days.

The Changing Ocean

The animated version of Aquarius’ first year of data unveils a world of varying salinity patterns. The Arabian Sea, nestled up against the dry Middle East, appears much saltier than the neighboring Bay of Bengal, which gets showered by intense monsoon rains and receives freshwater discharges from the Ganges and other large rivers. Another mighty river, the Amazon, releases a large freshwater plume that heads east toward Africa or bends up north to the Caribbean, depending on the prevailing seasonal currents. Pools of freshwater carried by ocean currents from the central Pacific Ocean’s regions of heavy rainfall pile up next to Panama’s coast, while the Mediterranean Sea sticks out in the Aquarius maps as a very salty sea.

One of the features that stand out most clearly is a large patch of highly saline water across the North Atlantic. This area, the saltiest anywhere in the open ocean, is analogous to deserts on land, where little rainfall and a lot of evaporation occur. A NASA-funded expedition, the Salinity Processes in the Upper Ocean Regional Study (SPURS), traveled to the North Atlantic’s saltiest spot last fall to analyze the causes behind this high salt concentration and to validate Aquarius measurements.

“My conclusion after five weeks out at sea and analyzing five weekly maps of salinity from Aquarius while we were there was that indeed, the patterns of salinity variation seen from Aquarius and by the ship were similar,” said Eric Lindstrom, NASA’s physical oceanography program scientist, of NASA Headquarters, Washington, and a participant of the SPURS research cruise.

Future goals

“The Aquarius prime mission is scheduled to run for three years but there is no reason to think that the instrument could not be able to provide valuable data for much longer than that,” said Gene Carl Feldman, Aquarius project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “The instrument has been performing flawlessly and our colleagues in Argentina are doing a fantastic job running the spacecraft, providing us a nice, stable ride.”

In future years, one of the main goals of the Aquarius team is to figure out ways to fine-tune the readings and retrieve data closer to the coasts and the poles. Land and ice emit very bright microwave emissions that swamp the signal read by the satellite. At the poles, there’s the added complication that cold polar waters require very large changes in their salt concentration to modify their microwave signal.

Still, the Aquarius team was surprised by how close to the coast the instrument is already able to collect salinity measurements.

“The fact that we’re getting areas, particularly around islands in the Pacific, that are not obviously badly contaminated is pretty remarkable. It says that our ability to screen out land contamination seems to be working quite well,” Feldman said.

Another factor that affects salinity readings is intense rainfall. Heavy rain can affect salinity readings by attenuating the microwave signal Aquarius reads off the ocean surface as it travels through the soaked atmosphere. Rainfall can also create roughness and shallow pools of fresh water on the ocean surface. In the future, the Aquarius team wants to use another instrument aboard Aquarius/SAC-D, the Argentine-built Microwave Radiometer, to gauge the presence of intense rain simultaneously to salinity readings, so that scientists can flag data collected during heavy rainfall.

An ultimate goal is combining the Aquarius measurements to those of its European counterpart, the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity satellite (SMOS) to produce more accurate and finer maps of ocean salinity. In addition, the Aquarius team, in collaboration with researchers at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is about to release its first global soil moisture dataset, which will complement SMOS’ soil moisture measurements.

“The first year of the Aquarius mission has mostly been about understanding how the instruments and algorithms are performing,” Feldman said. “Now that we have overcome the major hurdles, we can really begin to focus on understanding what the data are telling us about how the ocean works, how it affects weather and climate, and what new insights we can gain by having these remarkable salinity measurements.”

Aquarius was built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Goddard. JPL managed Aquarius through its commissioning phase and is archiving mission data. Goddard now manages Aquarius mission operations and processes science data. Argentina’s space agency, Comisión Nacional de Actividades Espaciales (CONAE), provided the SAC-D spacecraft, optical camera, thermal camera with Canada, microwave radiometer, sensors from various Argentine institutions and the mission operations center. France and Italy also contributed instruments.

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