VOTO, a new device that converts the heat from a fire into readily usable electricity. Photo via Point Source Power

In the wealthy world, improving the energy system generally means increasing the central supply of reliable, inexpensive and environmentally-friendly power and distributing it through the power grid. Across most of the planet, though, simply providing new energy sources to the millions who are without electricity and depend on burning wood or kerosene for heat and light would open up new opportunities.

With that in mind, engineers and designers have recently created a range of innovative devices that can increase the supply of safe, cheap energy on a user-by-user basis, bypassing the years it takes to extend the power grid to remote places and the resources needed to increase a country’s energy production capacity. Here are a few of the most promising technologies.

1. VOTO: Millions of people around the world use charcoal and wood-fueled stoves on a daily basis. VOTO (above), developed by the company Point Source Power, converts the energy these fires release as heat into electricity, which can power a handheld light, charge a phone or even charge a spare battery. The company initially designed VOTO for backpackers and campers in wealthy countries so they can charge their devices during trips, but is also trying to find a way to make it accessible to residents of the developing world for daily use.

The Window Socket. Photo by Kyuho Song & Boa Oh

2.Window Socket: This is perhaps the simplest solar charger in existence: Just stick it on a sunny window for 5 to 8 hours with the built-in suction cup, and the solar panels on the back will store about 10 hours worth of electricity that can be used with any device. If there’s no window available, a user can just leave it on any sunny surface, including the ground. Once it’s fully charged, it can be removed and taken anywhere—inside a building, stored around in a bag or carried around in a vehicle. The designers, Kyuho Song and Boa Oh of Yanko Design, created it to resemble a normal wall outlet as closely as possible, so it can be used intuitively without any special instructions.

The Berkeley-Darfur Stove. Photo via Berkeley Lab Cookstove Projects

3. The Berkeley-Darfur Stove: In the past few years, a number of health researchers have come to the same conclusion: that providing a safe, energy-efficient wood-burning cookstove to millions of people in the developing world can directly improve health (by reducing smoke inhalation), aid the environment (by reducing the amount of wood needed for fuel) and alleviate poverty (by reducing the amount of time needed to devote to gather wood every day).

Many projects have pursued this goal, but Potential Energy, a nonprofit dedicated to adapting and scaling technologies to help improve lives in the developing world, is the furthest along, having distributed more than 25,000 of their Berkeley-Darfur Stoves in Darfur and Ethiopia. Their stove’s design achieves these aims with features such as a tapered wind collar, a small fire box opening, nonaligned air vents that reduce the amount of wind allowed to stoke or snuff the fire (which wastes fuel) and ridges that ensure the optimal distance between the fire and pot in terms of fuel efficiency.

Photo via deciwatt.org

4. GravityLight: Along with wood-burning stoves, the kerosene-burning lamps that provide light throughout the developing world have recently become a target for replacement for one of the same reasons: The fumes generated by burning kerosene in closed corners are a major health problem. A seemingly simple solution is GravityLight, developed by the research initiative deciwatt.org.

To power the device, a user fills an included bag with about 20 pounds of rock or dirt, attaches it to the cord hanging down from the device and lifts it upward. The potential energy stored in that lifting motion is then gradually converted to electricity by the GravityLight, which slowly lets the bag downward over the course of about 30 minutes and powers a light or other electrical device during that time. It’s currently priced at about $10, and because it requires no running costs, the development team estimates that the investment will be paid back in about 3 months, as compared to the cost of kerosene.

Image via Uncharted Play

5. SOCCKET: Soccer—known simply as football in nearly every English-speaking country besides the U.S.—is easily the most popular sport in the world. The newest product of Uncharted Play, a for-profit social enterprise, seeks to take advantage of the millions of people already playing the sport to replace kerosene lamps with electric light generated in a much different manner. Their ball uses an internal kinetically-powered pendulum to generate and store electricity. After about 30 minutes of play, the ball stores enough energy to power an attachable LED lamp for 3 hours. Development of the product was funded via Kickstarter, and the first ones will ship in the next few weeks. A percentage of all retail sales will go to providing SOCCKETs to schools in the developing world.

Emperor penguins swimming. Photo by Polar Cruises

Penguins seem a bit out of place on land, with their stand-out black jackets and clumsy waddling. But once you see their grace in the water, you know that’s where they’re meant to be–they are well-adapted to life in the ocean.

April 25 of each year is World Penguin Day, and to celebrate here are 14 facts about these charismatic seabirds.

1. Depending on which scientist you ask, there are 17–20 species of penguins alive today, all of which live in the southern half of the globe. The most northerly penguins are Galapagos penguins (Spheniscus mendiculus), which occasionally poke their heads north of the equator.

2. While they can’t fly through the air with their flippers, many penguin species take to the air when they leap from the water onto the ice. Just before taking flight, they release air bubbles from their feathers. This cuts the drag on their bodies, allowing them to double or triple their swimming speed quickly and launch into the air.

3. Most penguins swim underwater at around four to seven miles per hour (mph), but the fastest penguin—the gentoo (Pygoscelis papua)—can reach top speeds of 22 mph!

Gentoo penguins “porpoise” by jumping out of the water. They can move faster through air than water, so will often porpoise to escape from a predator. Photo: Gilad Rom (Flickr)

4. Penguins don’t wear tuxedos to make a fashion statement: it helps them be camouflaged while swimming. From above, their black backs blend into the dark ocean water and, from below, their white bellies match the bright surface lit by sunlight. This helps them avoid predators, such as leopard seals, and hunt for fish unseen.

5. The earliest known penguin fossil was found in 61.6 million-year old Antarctic rock, about 4-5 million years after the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs. Waimanu manneringi stood upright and waddled like modern day penguins, but was likely more awkward in the water. Some fossil penguins were much larger than any penguin living today, reaching 4.5 feet tall!

6. Like other birds, penguins don’t have teeth. Instead, they have backward-facing fleshy spines that line the inside of their mouths. These help them guide their fishy meals down their throat.

An endangered African penguin brays with its mouth open, showing off the bristly inside of its mouth. Photo by Dimi P (Flickr), with permission

7. Penguins are carnivores: they feed on fish, squid, crabs, krill and other seafood they catch while swimming. During the summer, an active, medium-sized penguin will eat about 2 pounds of food each day, but in the winter they’ll eat just a third of that.

8. Eating so much seafood means drinking a lot of saltwater, but penguins have a way to remove it. The supraorbital gland, located just above their eye, filters salt from their bloodstream, which is then excreted through the bill—or by sneezing! But this doesn’t mean they chug seawater to quench their thirst: penguins drink meltwater from pools and streams and eat snow for their hydration fix.

9. Another adaptive gland—the oil (also called preen) gland—produces waterproofing oil. Penguins spread this across their feathers to insulate their bodies and reduce friction when they glide through the water.

10. Once a year, penguins experience a catastrophic molt. (Yes, that’s the official term.) Most birds molt (lose feathers and regrow them) a few at a time throughout the year, but penguins lose them all at once. They can’t swim and fish without feathers, so they fatten themselves up beforehand to survive the 2–3 weeks it takes to replace them.

An emperor penguin loses its old feathers (the fluffy ones) as new ones grow in underneath. Photo by Carlie Reum, National Science Foundation

11. Feathers are quite important to penguins living around Antarctica during the winter. Emperor penguins (Aptenodytes forsteri) have the highest feather density of any bird, at 100 feathers per square inch. In fact, the surface feathers can get even colder than the surrounding air, helping to keep the penguin’s body stays warm.

12. All but two penguin species breed in large colonies for protection, ranging from 200 to hundreds of thousands of birds. (There’s safety in numbers!) But living in such tight living quarters leads to an abundance of penguin poop—so much that it stains the ice! The upside is that scientists can locate colonies from space just by looking for dark ice patches.

13. Climate change will likely affect different penguin species differently—but in the Antarctic, it appears that the loss of krill, a primary food source, is the main problem. In some areas with sea ice melt, krill density has decreased 80 percent since the 1970s, indirectly harming penguin populations. However, some colonies of Adelie penguins (Pygoscelis adeliae) have grown as the melting ice exposes more rocky nesting areas.

14. Of the 17 penguin species, the most endangered is New Zealand’s yellow-eyed penguin (Megadyptes antipodes): only around 4,000 birds survive in the wild today. But other species are in trouble, including the erect-crested penguin (Eudyptes sclateri) of New Zealand, which has lost approximately 70 percent of its population over the past 20 years, and the Galapagos penguin, which has lost more than 50 percent since the 1970s.

  Learn more about the ocean from the Smithsonian’s Ocean Portal.

By combining genes from different bacteria species, scientists created E. coli that can produce diesel fuel from fat. Image via Marian Littlejohn/PNAS

Over the past few decades, researchers have developed biofuels derived from an remarkable variety of organisms—soybeans, corn, algae, rice and even fungi. Whether synthesized into ethanol or biodiesel, though, all of these fuels suffer from the same limitation: They have to be refined and blended with heavy amounts of conventional, petroleum-based fuels to run in existing engines.

Though this is far from the only current problem with biofuels, a new approach by researchers from the University of Exeter in the UK appears to solve at least this particular issue with one fell swoop. As they write today in an article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team has genetically engineered E. coli bacteria to produce molecules that are interchangeable to the ones in diesel fuels already sold commercially. The products of this bacteria, if generated on a large-scale, could theoretically go directly into the millions of car and truck engines currently running on diesel worldwide—without the need to be blended with petroleum-based diesel.

The group, led by John Love, accomplished the feat by mixing and matching genes from several different bacteria species and inserting them into the E. coli used in the experiment. These genes each code for particular enzymes, so when the genes are inserted into the E. coli, the bacteria gains the ability to synthesize these enzymes. As a result, it also gains the ability to perform the same metabolic reactions that those enzymes perform in each of the donor bacteria species.

By carefully selecting and combining metabolic reactions, the researchers built an artificial chemical pathway piece-by-piece. Through this pathway, the genetically modified E. coli growing and reproducing in a petri dish filled with a high-fat broth were able to absorb fat molecules, convert them into hydrocarbons and excrete them as a waste product.

Hydrocarbons are the basis for all petroleum-based fuels, and the particular molecules they engineered the E. coli to produce are the same ones present in commercial diesel fuels. So far, they’ve only produced tiny quantities of this bacterial biodiesel, but if they were able to grow these bacteria on a massive scale and extract their hydrocarbon products, they’d have a ready-made diesel fuel. Of course, it remains to be seen whether fuel produced in this way will be able to compete in terms of cost with conventional diesel.

Additionally, energy never comes from thin air—and the energy contained within this bacterial fuel mostly originates in the broth of fatty acids that the bacteria are grown on. As a result, depending on the source of these fatty acids, this new fuel could be subject to some of the same criticisms leveled at biofuels currently in production.

For one, there’s the argument that converting food (whether corn, soybeans or other crops) into fuel causes ripple effects in global food market, increasing the volatility of food prices, as a UN study from last year found. Additionally, if the goal of developing new fuels is to fight climate change, many biofuels fall dramatically short, despite their environmentally-friendly image. Using ethanol made from corn (the most widely used biofuel in the U.S.), for example, is likely no better than burning conventional gasoline in terms of carbon emissions, and maybe actually be worse, due to all the energy that goes into growing the crop and processing it info fuel.

Whether this new bacteria-derived diesel suffers from these same problems largely depends upon what sort of fatty acid source is eventually used to grow the bacteria on a commercial scale—whether it would by synthesized from a potential food crop (say, corn or soy oil), or whether it could come from a presently-overlooked energy source. But the new approach already has one major advantage: Just the steps needed to refine other biofuels so they can be used in engines use energy and generate carbon emissions. By skipping these steps, the new bacterial biodiesel could be an energy efficient fuel choice from the start.

Image via NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring

Last year, to celebrate the 42nd Earth Day, we took a look at 10 of the most surprising, disheartening, and exciting things we’d learned about our home planet in the previous year—a list that included discoveries about the role pesticides play in bee colony collapses, the various environmental stresses faced by the world’s oceans and the millions of unknown species are still out in the environment, waiting to be found.

This year, in time for Earth Day on Monday, we’ve done it again, putting together another list of 10 notable discoveries made by scientists since Earth Day 2012—a list that ranges from specific topics (a species of plant, a group of catfish) to broad (the core of planet Earth), and from the alarming (the consequences of climate change) to the awe-inspiring (Earth’s place in the universe).

Even the supposedly pristine Antarctic landscape is marred by trash heaps. Image via Germany Federal Environment Agency Report (PDF)

1. Trash is accumulating everywhere, even in Antarctica. As we’ve explored the most remote stretches of the planet, we’ve consistently left behind a trail of one supply in particular: garbage. Even in Antarctica, a February study found (PDF), abandoned field huts and piles of trash are mounting. Meanwhile, in the fall, a new research expedition went to study the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, counting nearly 70,000 pieces of garbage over the course of a month at sea.

2. Climate change could erode the ozone layer. Until recently, atmospheric scientists viewed climate change and the disintegration of the ozone layer as entirely distinct problems. Then, in July, Harvard researcher Jim Anderson (who won a Smithsonian Ingenuity Award for his work) led a team that published the troubling finding that the two might be linked. Some warm summer storms, they discovered, can pull moisture up into the stratosphere, an atmospheric layer 6 miles up. Through a chain of chemical reactions, this moisture can lead to the disintegration of ozone, which is crucial for protecting us from ultraviolet (UV) radiation. Climate change, unfortunately,  is projected to cause more of these sorts of storms.

3. This flower lives on exactly two cliffs in Spain. In September, Spanish scientists told us about one of the most astounding survival stories in the plant kingdom: Borderea chouardii, an extremely rare flowering plant that is found on only two adjacent cliffs in the Pyrenees. The species is believed to be a relic of the Tertiary Period, which ended more than 2 million years ago, and relies on several different local ant species to spread pollen between its two local populations.

4. Some catfish have learned to kill pigeons. In December, a group of French scientists revealed a phenomenon they’d carefully been observing over the previous year: a group of catfish in Southwestern France had learned how to leap onto shore, briefly strand themselves, and swim back into the water to consume their prey. With more than 2,000,000 Youtube views so far, this is clearly one of the year’s most widely enjoyed scientific discoveries.

5. Fracking for natural gas can trigger moderate earthquakes. Scientists have known for a while that whenever oil and gas are extracted from the ground at a large scale, seismic activity can be induced. Over the past few years, evidence has mounted that injecting water, sand and chemicals into bedrock to cause gas and oil to flow upward—a practice commonly known as fracking—can cause earthquakes by lubricating pre-existing faults in the ground. Initially, scientists found correlations between fracking sites and the number of small earthquakes in particular areas. Then, in March, other researchers found evidence that a medium-sized 2011 earthquake in Oklahoma(which registered a 5.7 on the moment magnitude scale) was likely caused by injecting wastewater into wells to extract oil.

6. Our planet’s inner core is more complicated than we thought. Despite decades of research, new data on the iron and nickel ball 3,100 miles beneath our feet continue to upset our assumptions about just how the earth’s core operates. A paper published last May showed that iron in the outer parts of the inner core is losing heat much more quickly than previously estimated, suggesting that it might hold more radioactive energy than we’d assumed, or that novel and unknown chemical interactions are occurring. Ideas for directly probing the core are widely regarded as pipe dreams, so our only options remains studying it from afar, largely by monitoring seismic waves.

The berries of Pollia condensata were found to produce the most intense color in the natural world. Image via PNAS

7. The world’s most intense natural color comes from an African fruit. When a team of researchers looked closely at the blue berries of Pollia condensata, a wild plant that grows in East Africa, they found something unexpected: it uses an uncommon structural coloration method to produce the most intense natural color ever measured. Instead of pigments, the fruit’s brilliant blue results from nanoscale-size cellulose strands layered in twisting shapes, which which interact with each other to scatter light in all directions.

8. Climate change will let ships cruise across the North Pole. Climate change is sure to create countless problems for many people around the world, but one specific group is likely to see a significant benefit from it: international shipping companies. A study published last month found that rising temperatures make it probable that during summertime, reinforced ice-breaking ships will be able to sail directly across the North Pole—an area currently covered by up to 65 feet of ice—by the year 2040. This dramatic shift will shorten shipping routes from North America and Europe to Asia.

9. One bacteria species conducts electricity. In October, a group of Danish researchers revealed that the seafloor mud of Aarhus’ harbor was coursing with electricity due to an unlikely source: mutlicellular bacteria that behave like tiny electrical cables. The organisms, the team found, built structures that traveled several centimeters down into the sediment and conduct measurable levels of electricity. The researchers speculate that this seemingly strange behavior is a byproduct of the way of the bacteria harvests energy from the nutrients buried in the soil.

Kepler 62f, discovered yesterday, is the most promising exoplanet candidate yet in terms of its potential to harbor life. Image via NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech

10. Our Earth isn’t alone. Okay, this one might not technically be a discovery about Earth, but over the past year we have learned a tremendous amount about what our Earth isn’t: the only habitable planet in the visible universe. The pace of exoplanet detection has accelerated rapidly, with a total of 866 planets in other solar systems discovered so far. As our methods have become more refined, we’ve been able to detect smaller and smaller planets, and just yesterday, scientists finally discovered a pair of distant planets in the habitable zone of their stars that are relatively close in size to Earth, making it more likely than ever that we might have spied an alien planet that actually supports life.

Drought and an increased demand for water have stressed the Colorado River, which flows nearly 1,500 miles through seven states and Mexico. Photo by Flickr user Alex E. Proimos

When Alexandra Cousteau, granddaughter of Jacques, recently went to Mexico to explore the southern terminus of the Colorado River, she found mud, sand and dust where water once raged. The expedition was videotaped for a short film (viewable below) produced in conjunction with Cousteau’s nonprofit, Blue Legacy, which raises awareness about water issues. The video was called Death of a River: The Colorado River Delta.

That title, it turns out, is an apt one: Today, the conservation organization American Rivers released its annual ranking of America’s most endangered rivers, and the Colorado topped the list.

The group cites outdated water management as the main malady attacking the Colorado’s health. “A century of water management policies and practices that have promoted wasteful water use have put the river at a critical crossroads,” a statement (PDF) released by the organization reads. “Demand on the river’s water now exceeds its supply, leaving the river so over-tapped that it no longer flows to the sea.”

At one time, the river emptied into the Gulf of California, between mainland Mexico and the Baja Peninsula. In fact, this river mouth can still be found on maps, including Google’s, because it’s supposed to be there. But a recent study (PDF) conducted by the Bureau of Reclamation (a division of the U.S. Department of Interior) determined that the entire river and its tributaries are siphoned off to meet the drinking, bathing and toilet-flushing needs of 40 million Americans throughout seven states, including Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Wyoming. It also irrigates 5.5 million acres of land and helps meet the electrical-power appetite of much of the West through hydro-power facilities. Nearly two dozen Native American tribes depend on it, and it’s the centerpiece of 11 national parks, most famously the Grand Canyon.

“Growing demands on the Colorado River system, coupled with the potential for reduced supplies due to climate change may put water users and resources relying on the river at risk of prolonged water shortages in the future,” the study authors write. “Ultimately,” they add, “the Study [sic] is a call to action.”

Low water levels at the Colorado River’s Hoover Dam, on the Arizona-Nevada border. Photo by Flickr user Remon Rijper

But what action is needed? Water conservation, water reuse and water augmentation–replacing water drawn from wells–the authors say. Specifically, landowners and municipalities must boost their agricultural, municipal and industrial water conservation agendas, as well as improve their energy water-use efficiency. Solutions for the most challenging regions include finding ways to import water, reuse waste water and desalinize ocean and brackish water.

Scientists acknowledge some solutions they’ve looked into are easier said than done and that not all are viable in every region. For instance, options like importing water to Southern California via submarine pipelines, water bags and icebergs (PDF), along with watershed management techniques like weather modification (aka cloud-seeding) are a bit pie-in-the-sky.

The Colorado isn’t the only endangered river, by far. Georgia’s Flint River, the San Saba River in Texas, Wisconsin’s Little Plover River, the Catawba River in the Carolinas and Minnesota’s Boundary Waters were all also red-flagged by American Rivers this year.

The challenge for all of these rivers, including the Colorado, only grows in the future. Climate-change-induced drought is working against them. American Rivers notes (PDF) that changes to climate are expected to reduce the Colorado River’s flow by as much as 10 to 30 percent by the year 2050. It could leave yet more sand and mud behind, making parts of the American West and Southwest even more parched.

Wetlands, such as this marsh above, buffer communities against flooding. Photo by Flickr user daryl_mitchell

In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy last fall, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo joked to President Barack Obama that New York “has a 100-year flood every two years now.” On the heels of flooding from 2011′s Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee, it certainly seemed that way. Given that climate change has sparked multiple major storms and raised sea levels, and that urban and agricultural development have impeded our natural flood-management systems, chronic flooding could be here to stay.

Wetlands, which include swamps, lagoons, marshes and mangroves, help mitigate the problem by trapping floodwaters. “Historically, wetlands in Indiana and other Midwestern states were great at intercepting large runoff events and slowing down the flows,” environmental engineer Meghna Babbar-Sebens of Oregon State University said in a recent statement. ”With increases in runoff, what was once thought to be a 100-year flood event is now happening more often.”

One key problem is that most of our wetlands no longer exist. By the time the North American Wetlands Conservation Act (PDF) was passed in 1989, more than half of the wetlands in the United States had been paved over or filled in. In some states, the losses are much greater: California has lost 91 percent of its wetlands, and Indiana, 85 percent. In recent years, scientists have been honing the art of wetlands restoration, and now a recent study published in the journal Ecological Engineering by scientists at Oregon State University is helping to make new wetlands easier to plan and design.

Scientists are using an Indiana watershed to study how wetlands can be created or restored to help stem the effects of climate change. Photo by Flickr user Davitydave

The research focused on Eagle Creek Watershed, ten miles north of Indianapolis, and identified nearly 3,000 potential sites where wetlands could be restored or created to capture runoff. Through modeling, the scientists discovered that a little wetland goes a long way. “These potential wetlands cover only 1.5% of the entire watershed area, but capture runoff from 29% (almost a third) of the watershed area,” the study authors wrote.

Their next step was to begin developing a web-based design system to allow farmers, agencies and others to identify areas optimal for new or restored wetlands and to collaborate in designing them. The recently launched system, called Wrestore, uses Eagle Creek as a test-piece.

A new web tool analyzes different components of a watershed; Indiana’s Eagle Creek Watershed steam network is pictured here. Map courtesy of Wrestore

The tool has a variety of functions: It helps identify a region’s rivers and streams, divides watersheds into smaller sub-watersheds and shows where runoff is likely to collect—places conducive to building wetlands. If a city wants to reduce flooding in its watershed, the site’s interactive visualization engine displays various conservation options and allows groups of city planners to collaborate on the design of new wetlands.

“Users can look at various scenarios of implementing practices in their fields or watershed, test their effectiveness via the underlying hydrologic and water quality models, and then give feedback to an ‘interactive optimization’ tool for creating better designs,” Babbar-Sebens, lead author of the study and the lead scientist on the web tool, told Surprising Science.

It provides an easy way for landowners to tackle such environmental challenges. “The reason we used a web-based design system is because it gives people the flexibility to try and solve their problems of flooding or water quality from their homes,” Babbar-Sebens said.

As the spring flood season approaches and environmental degradation continues throughout the nation, a new tool for mitigating wetland loss with targeted, minimal wetland gain is certainly a timely innovation. Babbar-Sebens and her team have been testing it out on Eagle Creek Watershed and will be fine-tuning it throughout the spring. ”There is a lot of interest in the watershed community for something like this,” she said.

As the Arctic warms, more of it will be covered by shrubs (like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, above) and even by forest. Image via ANWR

You probably think of the Arctic as a cold, frozen tundra—home to lichen, polar bears and scattered herds of reindeer. In many places, this view would be accurate, but in a few relatively southern areas in Canada, Alaska and Russia, warming temperatures over the past few decades have allowed new types of plants, such as shrubs, to take root.

And by 2050—if current warming trends continue—we’ll see a dramatically different ecosystem across the Arctic, starting with something that’s largely unknown in the area currently: trees. According to research published today in Nature Climate Change, tree cover in the Arctic could increase by more than 50 percent over the next few decades.

The research team, which included scientists from a number of universities and was led by Richard Pearson of the American Museum of Natural History, made the calculation based off of current projections of how the Arctic’s climate will change by 2050. So far, temperatures in the region have risen about twice as fast as those for the planet as a whole.

They created a model that predicts which class of plants (various grasses, mosses, shrubs or trees) will grow given a particular temperature and precipitation range expected for the future; for each spot on a map of the Arctic, they fed in the 2050 projections. Doing this kind of vegetative modeling for the Arctic, they say, is relatively straightforward compared to doing it for somewhere like the tropics, because there are hard limits on the temperature and growing season length that given plant types can tolerate.

They found that tree cover will expand drastically, covering up to 52 percent more land area than currently, rising far north of the current tree line in Alaska and Canada. This new tree cover will mostly come at the expense of areas currently covered by shrubs, but shrubs will take over places now dominated by tundra plants (lichens and mosses), and some areas presently under ice will convert into tundra.

In effect, the area’s warming climate and lengthening growing season will shift all current vegetation zones to more northerly and colder regions. Already, these vegetation zones have shifted an average of five degrees of latitude over the past 30 years–in other words, the vegetation in one spot resembles how a location five degrees south looked 30 years ago.

But by 2050, this shift will be even more dramatic—perhaps equaling 20 degrees of latitude—and a projected 48 to 69 percent of the Arctic’s vegetated areas will switch to a different class of plants. Some rare plant species could be at risk of extinction if they’re not able to migrate as quickly as the vegetation zones move.

Presently (left), vegetated areas of Alaska are mostly covered by small shrubs and tundra mosses (represented by the pea green color). By 2050 (right), much of this area will be dominated forests (bright green). Image via Nature Climate Change/Pearson et. al.

In Canada, areas currently covered by tundra shrubs (purple at left) will be taken over by forest (bright green at right). Image via Nature Climate Change/Pearson et. al.

Because plants are the base of any food chain, this conversion will have wide-ranging effects, both locally and elsewhere. “These impacts would extend far beyond the Arctic region,” Pearson said in a press statement. “For example, some species of birds seasonally migrate from lower latitudes and rely on finding particular polar habitats, such as open space for ground-nesting.” Their migrations patterns would presumably be altered by the growth of forests on what had been open tundra.

Most troubling, the conversion of white, snow-covered land to dark vegetation will further affect the warming of the planet. Because darker colors absorb more radiation than the white of ice and snow, shifting large masses of land to a darker color is projected to further accelerate warming, creating a positive feedback loop: more warming leads to a greener Arctic, which leads to more warming.

Given all the other problems that the area is rapidly encountering as the climate changes—melting glaciers, increasing oil exploration and hybridizing bear species—it’s clear that the Arctic will be one of the most environmentally fragile regions of the planet over the coming century.

An island of ice breaking away from Greenland’s Petermann Glacier (in the center of the photo)  in the summer of 2010. By NASA

On the morning of July 16, 2010, a hunk of ice four times the size of Manhattan cracked away from the tongue of Greenland’s Petermann Glacier and drifted to sea as the largest iceberg since 1962. Just two years later, another massive section of ice calved from the same glacier. Icebergs like these don’t stay put in the Arctic–they get picked up by currents and ushered to warmer climates, melting along the way.

According to a new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Greenland’s melting glaciers and ice caps sent 50 gigatons of water gushing into the oceans from 2003 to 2008. This comprises about 10 percent of the water flowing from all ice caps and glaciers on Earth. The research comes on the heels of a study last year that showed the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are disappearing three times faster than in the 1990s, and that Greenland’s is melting at an especially accelerated rate. In the new study, scientists were able to put an even finer point to the ice-melt situation by separating out the glaciers and ice caps from the ice sheet, which blankets 80 percent of the island. What they discovered is that Greenland’s glaciers are actually melting more quickly than the ice sheet.

Studies such as these demonstrate the impacts of a warming climate on Greenland’s glaciers. But, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Visual evidence of this liquefaction is captured by NASA satellites, which are able to take snapshots of calving glaciers and document longer-term ice melt. NASA displays photos of the glaciers in its State of Flux photo gallery, along with a rotating collection of satellite images that illustrate other changes to the environment, including wildfires, deforestation and urban development.

The photos, with their “now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t” quality, illustrate how glaciers are fast becoming ephemeral. Here are a few stark examples:

Greenland’s Helheim Glacier can be seen retreating and thinning from 2001 (left) to 2003 (center) to 2005 (right). By NASA 

The set of images above shows the edge of Greenland’s Helheim Glacier, located on the fringe of the Greenland Ice Sheet, as captured by a satellite in 2001, 2003 and 2005. The calving front is marked by the curved line through the valley, while bare ground appears brown or tan and vegetation is red.

According to NASA, when warmer temperatures initially cause a glacier to melt, it can spark a chain reaction that accelerates the thinning of the ice. As the edge of the glacier begins to liquefy, it crumbles, creates icebergs and eventually disintegrates. The loss of mass throws the glacier off balance, and further thinning and calving occurs, a process that stretches the glacier through its valley. Total ice volume decreases then shrinks the glacier as calving carries ice away. Helheim’s calving front stayed put from the 1970s until 2001, at which point the glacier began hasty cycles of thin, advance, and dramatic retreat, ultimately moving 4.7 miles toward land by 2005.

Greenland’s Petermann Glacier on June 26, 2010 (left) , before a massive iceberg broke away, and on August 13, 2010, after the break. By NASA

The massive calving event at Petermann Glacier in 2010 is pictured in these two images. The glacier is the white ribbon on the right side of each photo, and its tongue extends into the Nares Strait, which appears as a bluish-black stripe across the center of the right image and is heavily flecked with white chunks in the photo on the left. In the first image, the tongue of the glacier is intact; in the second, a huge chunk of ice has broken off and can be seen floating away through the fjord. This iceberg was 97 square miles in size–four times bigger than the island of Manhattan.

Greenland’s Petermann Glacier on July 16, 2012 (left and center), before a major calving event, and July 17, 2012, after an iceberg broke off. By NASA

In the summer of 2012, a second massive iceberg crumbled away from the Petermann Glacier. In these images, the glacier is the white ribbon snaking up from the bottom right. If you follow the tongue up, you’ll see that it appears intact in the photos at left and center (though the center image has an ominous crack spanning its width), which were taken the day before the calving occurred. The photo on the right shows that it crumbled as the glacier calved.

Given that Greenland experienced an exceptionally warm summer in 2012 and temperatures were higher than average this winter, 2013 is primed for more melting and massive icebergs. Last year’s ice-melt season lasted two months longer than the average since 1979, and this year’s is already off to an inauspicious start. It kicked off on March 13 with the sixth-smallest sea-ice area on record for Greenland, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. What will the new summer calving season bring?

Polar bear-brown bear hybrids like this pair at Germany’s Osnabrück Zoo are becoming more common as melting sea ice forces the two species to cross paths. Photo by Corradox/Wikimedia Commons

Scientists and science writers have created catchy monikers for hybrid species, much the way tabloid writers merge the names of celebrity couples (Kimye, Brangelina, anyone?). Lions and tigers make ligers. Narwhals meet beluga whales in the form of narlugas. And pizzlies and grolar bears are a cross between polar bears and grizzlies. In coming years, their creativity may get maxed out to meet an expected spike in the number of hybrids. A driving force? Climate change. 

A new study published in the journal PLOS Genetics showed that there’s a historic precedent for cross-breeding among polar bears and brown bears–we’ll jump on the bandwagon and call them brolar bears. The researchers also asserted that such hybridization is currently occurring at an accelerated clip. As sea ice melts, polar bears are forced ashore to an Arctic habitat that’s increasingly hospitable to brown bears. There have been recent sightings in Canada of the resulting mixed-breed animals, which have coloring anomalies such as muddy-looking snouts and dark stripes down their backs, along with the big heads and humped backs typical of brown bears.

As it turns out, climate-change-induced hybridization extends well beyond bears. A 2010 study published in the journal Nature listed 34 possible and actual climate-change-induced hybridizations (PDF) of Arctic and near-Arctic marine mammals–a group that has maintained a relatively consistent number of chromosomes over time, making them particularly primed for hybridization. Here are some highlights from this list, along with some more recent discoveries. 

In 2009, a bowhead-right-whale hybrid was spotted in the Bering Sea by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Marine Mammal Laboratory. Right whales, which typically hail from the North Pacific and North Atlantic, will increasingly be migrating north into the Arctic Ocean, the domain of bowheads, as a result of climate change–and co-mingling their DNA. The authors of the Nature study determined that “[d]iminishing ice will encourage species overlap.”

The narluga has a very big head, according to the scientists who found one in West Greenland. Its snout and lower jaw were particularly burly, and its teeth shared some similarities with both narwhals and belugas. Both species, which form a whale family called monodontidae, live in the Arctic Ocean and hunters have reported seeing more whales of similar stature in the region.

Harbor and Dall’s porpoises have already been mixing it up off the coast of British Columbia, and given that harbor porpoises are likely to keep moving north from the temperate seas of the North Atlantic and North Pacific into the home waters of the Dall’s, the trend is expected to continue. (Click here to see rare photos of the hybrid porpoise.)

Scientists in Ontario, Canada, are investigating inter-breeding between southern and northern flying squirrels as the southern rodents push into northern habitats. The hybrid squirrels have the stature of the southern species and the belly coloring of the northern one. The video below details the research.

Hybrid species often suffer from infertility, but some of these cross-breeds are having success at procreating. For example, researchers recently discovered the offspring of a female pizzly and a male grizzly bear (a subspecies of the brown bear) in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Despite cases like these, scientists are debating whether all of this hybridization is healthy. “Is this going to be a problem for the long-term existence of parental species? Are they going to merge into one big hybrid population?” asked University of California, Berkeley evolutionary biologist Jim Patton in an interview.

In the case of inter-bred polar bears, the concern is that the changing climate will be more welcoming to brown bears, and that while inter-species mating at first might appear to be an adaptive technique for polar bears, it could end up spelling their demise in all ways except cellular structure–much the way Neanderthals were folded into the human gene pool thanks to early humans in Europe more than 47,000 years ago.

Rare and endangered species are particularly vulnerable to the pitfalls of hybridization, according to the authors of the Nature study. “As more isolated populations and species come into contact, they will mate, hybrids will form and rare species are likely to go extinct,” they wrote. “As the genomes of species become mixed, adaptive gene combinations will be lost.”

Such is likely the case with the narluga. Scientists determined the animal’s lack of a tusk is a liability because the tusk is a measure of the narwhal’s breeding prowess. And a pizzly living at a German zoo showed seal-hunting tendencies, but lacked the swimming prowess of polar bears.

As Patton pointed out, it will be many years until we know the full consequences of hybridization. “We’re only going to find out in hindsight,” he said. But that’s not a reason to be complacent, according to the Nature authors, who called for the monitoring of at-risk species. “The rapid disappearance of sea ice,” they wrote, “leaves little time to lose.”

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Warming oceans have caused levels of phytoplankton, like the mixed sample of single-celled and chain-forming diatoms pictured above, to decline 40 percent since 1950. Photo by Richard Kirby

Two weeks ago, a group of sailors off the coast of New Zealand leaned over the side of their boat, dropped a contraption into the Pacific Ocean and watched it disappear. Using an app they’d downloaded to a smartphone, they logged a reading from the underwater device, along with their GPS location and the water temperature. In just a few minutes’ time, they had become the first participants in a new program launched by the UK’s Plymouth University Marine Institute which allows citizen scientists to help climatologists study the effects of climate change on the oceans.

The Kiwi sailors were measuring the concentration of phytoplankton, a microorganism that lives at the sea surface. Phytoplankton, also called microalgae, produce half of the oxygen in the air we breathe and are responsible for 50 percent of the Earth’s photosynthesis. Whales, jellyfish, shrimp and other marine life feast on it, making it a critical part of the marine food chain.

Phytoplankton require a certain water temperature to thrive (this varies regionally), and without these favored conditions, they either decrease in number or migrate in search of optimal water. As the upper levels of the Earth’s oceans have warmed by 0.59 degrees Fahrenheit in the past century, the amount of phytoplankton worldwide dips by roughly 1 percent each year, according to a 2010 study published in the journal Nature

In fact, the study showed that phytoplankton concentrations have decreased by a total of 40 percent since 1950. The decline joins coral bleaching, sea-level rise, ocean acidification and a slowing of deep-water circulation (which effects water temps and weather patterns) as the known tolls of climate change on the oceans.

This drop in phytoplankton population is troubling because of this organism’s role in the marine food web. “Despite their microscopic size, phytoplankton… are harbingers of climate change in aquatic systems,” wrote the authors of a 2011 study on phytoplankton and climate change published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society. So understanding how other sea creatures will fare as climate changes depends on how drastically phytoplankton levels continue to drop.

The effects of a food shortage on big, open-ocean fish like swordfish and tuna, which already suffer from over-fishing, could pose problems for humans as well. “We’re squeezing [fish] from both ends,” Paul Falkowski, who runs the Rutgers University Environmental Biophysics and Molecular Ecology Lab, told Nature. “We’re overfishing the oceans for sure. Now we see there is pressure from the bottom of the food chain.”

Despite it’s importance, scientists have struggled to monitor phytoplankton, and analyzing all of the Earth’s oceans presents obvious logistical hurdles. Those challenges became apparent after one recent study concluded climate change is not to blame for dwindling phytoplankton levels and another refuted that phytoplankton is vanishing at all–igniting debate within the scientific community. Enter the Plymouth study, which is attempting to end the dispute and fill in gaps in phytoplankton research by harnessing the millions of sailors and fishermen who cruise the world’s oceans to help measure phytoplankton levels in the upper reaches of the water.

The program relies on the Secchi app, a new smartphone app devised by the Plymouth scientists that’s named for the Secchi Disk (PDF)—a piece of equipment that’s been used to measure turbidity in water since its invention in 1865 by Italian scientist Pietro Angelo Secchi. “It’s arguably the simplest item of marine sampling equipment,” Plymouth’s Richard Kirby, a plankton biologist who’s heading up the project, told Surprising Science.

Plankton biologist Richard Kirby lowers a Secchi Disk into Britain’s Plymouth Sound. Photo courtesy of Richard Kirby

When a seafaring citizen scientist is ready to use the app, the first step is to make a Secchi Disk (instructions are included). The small, white disk–made of plastic, wood or metal–is attached to a tape measure on one side and a weight on the other. You hold the tape measure and lower the disk vertically into the seawater, and as soon as it disappears from sight, you note the depth on the tape measure. This number, the “Secchi depth,” reflects the transparency of the water column, which is influenced by the number of particles present. “Away from estuaries and areas where the turbidity of the water column may be influenced by suspended sediment, the Secchi Depth is inversely related to phytoplankton biomass,” Kirby says. The Secchi depth also tells scientists the depth to which light supports life in the water.

You enter the Secchi depth and the GPS location on your smartphone (a network connection isn’t required for this) into the app. The Plymouth researchers receive the data as soon as you regain network connectivity. You can also upload photos and type in additional details like water temperature (measured by the boat) and notes on visual observations–say, a foamy surface, a plankton bloom or a flock of feeding sea birds.

A Secchi Disk submerged in Britain’s Plymouth Sound. Photo by Richard Kirby

The Plymouth researchers hope ocean-goers across the globe will participate in the research, with which they will build a database and a map of the oceans charting both the seasonal and annual changes in phytoplankton levels to help scientists studying climate change and the oceans. “One person recording a Secchi depth twice a month for a few years will generate useful data about their local sea,” Kirby says. “The more people that take part, the greater the project and the more important and valuable it will become to future generations.”

Kirby notes that citizen scientists have long provided valuable data on long-term changes to the environment, and sees the internet as big opportunity to unite the efforts of citizen scientists. “We often look back and wish we had started monitoring something about the natural world,” he says. “‘If only we had started measuring ‘x’ ten years ago.’ Well, there is no time like the present to start something for the future.”

Fluorescent proteins all aglow in these corals. Photo by Michael Lesser and Charles Mazel, NOAA Ocean Explorer

Anyone who has gone scuba diving or snorkeling in a coral reef will likely never forget the dazzling colors and other-worldly shapes of these underwater communities. Home to some of the world’s most diverse wildlife hotspots, reefs are worth an annual $400 billion in tourist dollars and in the ecosystem services they provide, such as buffering shores from storms and providing habitat for fish that people eat.

Yet it’s a well known fact that coral reefs around the world are in decline thanks to pollution and rapidly warming oceans. However, determining just how reefs are faring–and designing steps to protect them–requires a way to accurately measure their health. Researchers tend to rely upon invasive, damaging techniques to figure out how corals are coping, or else they perform crude spot checks to determine reef health based on coral color alone.  But now, scientists have announced a new method of determining coral health that relies upon measuring the intensity of corals’ fluorescent glow.

Yes, glow. Corals naturally produce fluorescent proteins which glow an eery green when seen under a blue light–nearly all corals exhibit this physiological phenomenon.

“This is the first study to follow the dynamics of coral fluorescence and fluorescent protein levels during temperature stress, and shows that coral fluorescence could be utilized as a early indicator of coral stress,” said Melissa Roth, a marine biologist at the University of California, Berkeley (formerly of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego), in an email. “Because coral fluorescence can be measured non-invasively in the field, it could be an important tool for management of reefs,” she said. Roth and her colleague Dimitri Deheyn described their findings this week in Scientific Reports.

The degree to which a coral glows depends largely on another group of organisms, dinoflagellate algae. Corals are actually a symbiotic assembly of itself and these microscopic dinoflagellate algae–the dinoflagellates help corals attain nutrition, which in turn fuels the growth of coral reefs. The tiny organisms are also responsible for giving corals their typical brownish hue.

But dinoflagellates can abandon ship due to stressors such as increased temperature, a phenomenon known as coral bleaching. Left on their own without the aid of their dinoflagellate covering, the corals’ naturally white skin becomes glaringly visible. The coral can live for a little while after a dinoflagellate exodus, but not for long. If the algae do not return, the coral will die.

Knowing this, Roth and Deheyn decided to investigate how coral fluorescence might reflect the current state of a coral and its dinoflagellates’ relationship. They chose to use Acropora yongei, a common branching coral, in their experiments since it’s often one of the first corals shows signs of stress and bleaching in a reef. They subjected individual corals to one of two different experimental setups in their lab. In some containers, they pummeled corals with cold water, and in others they doused corals in hot water. Another group of corals served as a control. Then they let the corals pickle in their temperature-regulated waters for almost three weeks. 

The researchers found a distinct correlation between the degree of bleaching and the concentration of a coral’s fluorescent proteins, which in turn determined the strength of it’s glow. In the first 4 to 5 days, the fluorescent protein concentration and glow of both cold and heat-treated corals dropped. But by the end of the 20-day experiment, cold-stressed corals had acclimated and recovered to their normal level of fluorescence. Heat-stressed corals, on the other hand, bleached and began to glow even more strongly, probably because their dinoflagellate communities no longer blocked the coral’s underlying fluorescence. Like a supernova before a star’s final collapse, the corals send out a steady stream of intense glow just before their inevitable demise.

Corals pictures under white light (left panels) and blue light (right panels) show how corals subjected to heat stress eventually bleached and increased their fluorescent glow by the end of the experiment. Photo by Melissa Roth, Scientific Reports

After death, the glow stops. In a reef system, the bone white coral would gradually get masked by a film of green algae that coats the ruins of the now deceased organism.

Once corals start to bleach, conservationists or wildlife managers have few options for helping reefs as they begin to decline and often eventually die. But if they catch the problem ahead of time, they could try to help the coral with strategies such as shading with artificial structures or sediments, adding antioxidants to the water or introducing heartier dinoflagellates, though scientific studies validating these potential rescue methods are largely lacking. 

This new finding, Roth hopes, can be used to preempt reef collapse, serving as a sort of canary in the coal mine for corals in distress. “Managers could focus on the most sensitive corals on a reef, like branching corals, and look for rapid drops in fluorescence as an early sign of stress,” Roth said. This would give them about a week-long window to take action before full-blown bleaching began. “Bleaching would be like a heart attack,” she explained. “You would rather detect signs of high blood pressure or clogging of the arteries to address and avoid a heart attack.”

Managers who want to visualize their reef’s health can observe the glow by using a blue flashlight and a yellow filter over their snorkel mask, or they can film the phenomenon with a camera equipped with these same features. If managers notice the initial drop in coral glow that indicates an impending problem, for example, immediate action could perhaps be taken to try and rescue the reef.

“So the idea is that we can use coral fluorescence as a early indicator of coral health prior to bleaching, which could actually give time for managers to do something if they wanted to take actions to protect the reef. Obviously that may be difficult on a large scale,” she explained, adding that “as reefs become degraded the few that we have left might be protected more aggressively.”

Further research on how these findings might apply to other species of coral is needed, the authors write. They also hope that future studies will combine biology with engineering to help design a digital imaging system that better captures and quantifies the extent to which corals change their glow.

The pollution in California’s San Joaquin Valley, including above this Norton cornfield, was tested by NASA as part of a program to monitor air quality from space. Photo by Flickr user mhall209

If you had to guess what part of the the U.S. has the very worst air pollution–where winds and topography conspire with fumes from gasoline-chugging vehicles to create an aerial cesspool–places like Los Angeles, Atlanta and as of late, Salt Lake City, would probably pop to mind. The reality may come as a bit of a surprise. According to the Environmental Protection agency, California’s bucolic San Joaquin Valley is “home of the worst air quality in the country.”

Not coincidentally, the San Joaquin Valley is also the most productive agricultural region in the world and the top dairy-producing region in the country. Heavy duty-diesel trucks constantly buzz through the valley, emitting 14 tons of the greenhouse gas ozone daily, and animal feed spews a whopping 25 tons of ozone per day as it ferments, according to a 2010 study. In addition, hot summertime temperatures encourage ground-level ozone to form, according to the San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District. Pollution also streams down from the Bay Area, and the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the east help to trap all of these pollutants near the valley floor. Particulate matter that creates the thick greyish-brown smog hanging over the valley is of paramount concern–it’s been linked to heart disease, childhood asthma and other respiratory conditions.

So when NASA devised a new, five-year air quality study to help fine-tune efforts to accurately measure pollution and greenhouse gases from space, it targeted the San Joaquin Valley. “When you’re trying to understand a problem, you go where the problem is most obvious,” the study’s principal investigator, Jim Crawford, said in an interview. To Crawford, the dirty air over the valley may be important to evaluating how human activities contribute to climate change. “Climate change and air quality are really traced back to the same root in the sense that air quality is the short term effect of human impact and climate change the long term effect,” Crawford said.

In January and February, NASA sent two research planes into the skies above San Joaquin Valley to collect data on air pollution. One plane flew at high altitude over the valley during the daytime, armed with remote sensors, while the second plane cruised up and down the valley, periodically spiraling down toward the ground to compare the pollution at higher and lower altitudes. Weather balloons were used for ground-level measurements as well.

NASA deployed two airplanes to study pollution in the lowest level of the atmosphere in California’s San Joaquin Valley as part of a program to use satellites to monitor air quality and emissions. Photo by Tom Tschida/NASA

The data NASA collected in the experiment was similar to what satellites can see from space: the presence of ozone, fine particulates, nitrogen dioxide and formaldehyde (precursors to pollution and ozone) and carbon monoxide (which has a median lifetime of a month and can be used to watch the transport of pollution). But satellites are limited in their air-quality-sensing abilities. “The real problem with satellites is that they’re currently not quantitative enough,” Crawford told Surprising Science. “They can show in a coarse sense where things are coming from, but they can’t tell you how much there is.”

Nor can satellites distinguish between pollution at the ground level and what exists higher in the atmosphere. Also, they circle just once a day, and if it isn’t in the early morning, when commuters are busily burning fossil fuels, or in the late afternoon, when emissions have festered and air quality is at its worst, scientists don’t have a clear picture of just how bad pollution can get. Monitoring stations on the ground are likewise limited. They provide scientists with a narrow picture that doesn’t include the air farther above the monitoring station or an understanding of how the air mixes and moves. The research from the NASA study, specifically that collected by the spiraling airplane, fills in these gaps.

Data from the flights will also be used in conjunction with future satellites. “What we’re trying to move toward is a geostationary satellite that will stare at America throughout the day,” Crawford told Surprising Science. Geostationary satellites–which will be able to measure overall levels of pollution–can hover over one position, but like current satellites, researchers need ancillary data from aircraft detailing how pollution travels above the Earth’s surface, like that retrieved from the San Joaquin Valley, to help validate and interpret what satellites see. “The satellite is never going to operate in isolation and the ground station isn’t going to do enough,” Crawford said. 

But first, the research will be plugged into air-quality computer models, which will help locate the sources of emissions. Knowing how sources work together to contribute to poor air quality, where pollution is and exactly what levels it’s hitting is a priority for the EPA, which sets air-quality regulations, and the state agencies that enforce them, according to Crawford. The data will inform their strategies on reducing emissions and cleaning the air with minimal impact to the economy and other quality-of-life issues. “Air quality forecasts are great,” Crawford says. “But at some point people will ask, ‘Why aren’t we doing something about it?’ The answer is that we are.” The researchers have conducted similar flights over the Washington, D.C. area and are planning flyovers of Houston and possibly Denver in the years to come.

One thing’s for sure: Data to inform action is sorely needed. In 2011, Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park, on the eastern edge of the valley, violated the EPA’s national ambient air quality standard a total of 87 days of the year and Fresno exceeded the standard 52 days. Pinpointing exactly where pollution originates and who’s responsible–a goal of the study–will go a long way to clearing the air, so to speak.

New York City is a leader in lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Photo by Flickr user Andrew C Mace

Cities are to greenhouse-gas emissions what Chernobyl was to nuclear power plant failures, which is to say, they’re the worst offenders out there. Cities consume two-thirds of the world’s energy and cough up 70 percent of global CO₂ emissions. Some are even gaining notoriety: Air pollution in Beijing is so severe these days that residents can’t even escape it by going indoors, according to scientists at Columbia University’s Earth Institute.

But many cities are making progress in shrinking their greenhouse-gas footprints, and a recent new study shows that they can make reductions of as much as 70 percent. Scientists at University of Toronto’s Civil Engineering department used Toronto as a test piece for studying cities’ carbon footprints, and they outlined how changes in transportation, buildings and energy supplies–things like boosting insulation, switching to LED lighting and putting in building management systems and automatic lighting controls–can reduce emissions.

A 30 percent reduction would be fairly simple, the researchers say. “With current policies, especially cleaning of the electricity grid, Toronto’s per-capita GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions could be reduced by 30 per cent over the next 20 years,” study author Chris Kennedy said in a statement. “To go further, however, reducing emissions in the order of 70 per cent, would require significant retrofitting of the building stock, utilization of renewable heating and cooling systems, and the complete proliferation of electric, or other low carbon, automobiles.”

Toronto has yet to begin adopting the plan Kennedy and his colleagues have outlined, but it is among the 58 city-members of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, an organization committed to developing and implementing policies and practices to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The group’s chair is New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and in fact, New York is one of the most innovative and aggressive cities in the world when it comes to emissions reduction. “In my mind London and NYC are providing the greatest leadership,” Kennedy told Surprising Science.

Many other cities are also making strides, according to a 2011 study issued by C40 that details what its member-cities are doing to reduce their emissions. Forty major cities participated in the research, including Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and New York in the U.S., and cities from Moscow and Jakarta to Beijing and Mexico City internationally–many of the most populated, high-traffic urban centers in the world. Engineering and design firm Arup, along with the Clinton Climate Initiative, surveyed city officials and conducted research on their greenhouse-gas output and actions to reduce emissions.

Five cities stood out–here’s a breakdown of some highlights:

São Paulo: When landfills were reaching capacity in South America’s most populous city, the Brazilian metropolis installed thermoelectric power plants to capture and burn biogases emitted by the decaying waste. São Paulo’s 10 million citizens generate 15,000 tons of garbage each day, and trash is one of the city’s biggest greenhouse-gas challenges—as opposed to other cities, which struggle more with emissions from buildings and energy supplies. This step allowed São Paulo to reduce methane emissions and produce clean energy at the same time, and now 7 percent of the city’s electricity needs are met this way.

Copenhagen: Known for its bicycle culture, Denmark’s capital is a leader in green transportation, with 36 percent of work- or school-related commutes done by pedaling, according to the C40 study. Other cities have used Copenhagen as a model for their cycle parking, lanes, signage and other biking infrastructure. But Copenhagen is also a leader in waste management. Since 1988, it has reduced the amount of garbage it sends to landfills from 40 percent to less than 2 percent, and fully half of the city’s waste is recycled and used to generate heat. Nearly all of Copenhagen’s buildings (PDF) utilize an underground piping network that distributes hot water or steam in lieu of relying on boilers or furnaces. Citizens are required to pay for the heat regardless of whether they’re connected to the system.

Addis Ababa: In Ethiopia’s capital, shoddy water pipes are being replaced to help boost the city’s 50 percent leakage rate  “Cities can lose huge amounts of their often energy-intensively produced potable water due to leakage from pipes during distribution,” the C40 study authors wrote. “Wasting potable water… increases greenhouse gas emissions, and is also a major issue for those cities that are threatened with droughts. The number of drought-threatened cities is rising due to climate change.” 

That project joins large-scale, low-carbon housing developments that will create new homes for people currently living in Addis Ababa’s shanty towns, the C40 study showed. The city is also planning to convert 40 percent of its land to green space, which serves to absorb CO₂ emissions and reduce the urban-heat-island effect. To that end, Addis Ababa’s mayor instituted a plan to plant three million new trees (the most ambitious tree-planting project in the world) and create a giant nature reserve featuring every tree and plant native to Ethiopia. 

Ethiopia’s capital city Addis Ababa is shrinking its carbon footprint by building low-carbon, low-income housing and launching the most aggressive tree-planting program in the world. Photo by Flickr user Travlr

New York City: The city that never sleeps is a leader in green policy, according to the C40 study. Its PlaNYC, a program designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and otherwise prepare for climate change, includes planting trees and other vegetation to enhance 800 acres of parks and open spaces and pushing new development to areas with existing transit access so that new subway and bus lines don’t have to be added. The Greener Greater Buildings plan mandates upgrades to meet the NYC Energy Conservation Code for renovations, and the NYC Green Infrastructure Plan integrates details like green roofs and porous pavement into the city’s quest to manage storm runoff and alleviate pressure on wastewater treatment plants, which overflow in storms. New York is also known for its system of innovative pneumatic troughs that remove trash from Roosevelt Island through underground tunnels and eliminate the need for fleets of fossil-fuel-burning garbage trucks that clog traffic and wear down streets.

London: Greenhouse-gas reductions in the UK’s capital and largest city are impressive in part because it’s the only city to have achieved them “by diminishing consumption [rather] than a change of energy sources,” according to another study published last fall by Kennedy. His research showed that London was also the sole city where carbon emissions from commercial and institutional buildings have dropped. How did London make it happen? Establishing a so-called Congestion Charge Zone (PDF) was one key measure. A fee structure tied to emissions restricts the movement of freight and other heavy goods vehicles within the city’s center and allows electric vehicles to travel for free in the zone. The scheme, introduced in 2003, “has reduced vehicle numbers in the central business district by over 70,000 per day, cutting carbon emissions in the zone by 15%,” according to the study authors. Also, the city’s transit systems are integrated and easy to use thanks to a smart-ticket program, attracting more riders who might otherwise drive gas-guzzling cars.

While the overall effect of these emissions-reduction efforts hasn’t yet been measured, C40 study authors say the 40 cities have taken a combined total of 4,734 actions to tackle climate change. The simplest and most immediate change cities can make, according to Kennedy, is to decarbonize their electricity grids. “This is important because a low-carbon electricity source can be an enabler of low carbon technologies in other sectors, for example electric vehicles, or heating via ground source heat pumps,” he says. But the most effective change Kennedy recommends that city residents make in lowering their carbon footprints is to set their home thermostats 1 or 2 degrees lower in the winter or higher in the summer.

What does or could your city do to reduce its emissions? Leave us a note with your ideas!

Rapidly melting sea ice will open up shipping lanes across the Arctic, potentially making the Northwest Passage (left) and North Pole (center) navigable during the summer. Image via PNAS/Smith and Stephenson

Rapidly melting ice has already remade shipping possibilities in the Arctic. Over the past decade, commercial use of the Northern Sea Route (the blue shipping lane along the northern coast of Russia in the map above) during late summer has become commonplace, dramatically shortening the journey from Europe to the Far East.

If present trends continue, though, the options for shipping goods across the Arctic will expand even more. According to a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, by 2040, the legendary Northwest Passage (the shipping lane on the left side of the map, along the cost of Canada and Alaska) could be accessible during some summers to normal oceangoing ships without specially reinforced ice-breaking hulls. Most surprisingly, at times, reinforced polar icebreakers might even be able to plow straight across the North Pole, making the shortest possible journey across the Arctic.

All this is due to the fact that, over the past two decades, temperatures have risen even faster in the Arctic than the planet as a whole. Although the polar ice pack grows each winter and shrinks each summer, the overall trend has been a decrease in total ice cover, as seen in the video below. In the future, this will open up a window for reinforced ships to break through weaker ice, and for normal ships to cruise through ice-free corridors.

The new study, by Laurence Smith and Scott Stephenson of UCLA, uses existing climate models to examine how this trend will change Arctic shipping for the years 2040 to 2059. They looked at theoretical ice conditions under a pair of climate scenarios from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent report, one that assumed a medium-low level of greenhouse gas emissions going forward, and another that assumed a high level. They also explored the navigational possibilities for two different types of ships: Polar Class 6 ice-breaking ships and normal oceangoing vessels.

Their analysis found that in both scenarios, the Northern Sea Route—already navigable for reinforced vessels in late summer most years—will become wider, opening up for a greater number of months each summer and allowing for a greater geographical diversity in routes. The wider lane will enable ships to take routes further away from the Russian coast and closer to the North Pole, shortening the journey over the top of our planet, and will allow unreinforced ships to travel through without an ice-breaking escort.

Currently, the Northwest Passage is inaccessible for normal vessels, and has only been transited a handful of times by reinforced ice-breaking ships. Under both of the scenarios in the model, though, it becomes navigable to Polar Class 6 ships every summer. At times, it could even be open to unreinforced vessels as well—the study shows that, when multiple simulations were run in both medium-low and high levels of greenhouse gas emissions, open sailing was possible for 50 to 60 percent of the years studied.

Finally, the straight shot over the North Pole—a route that would currently take would-be captains through a sheet of ice as much as 65 feet thick in areas—could also become possible for Polar Class 6 ships in both scenarios, at least in warmer years. “Nobody’s ever talked about shipping over the top of the North Pole,” Smith said in a press statement. “This is an entirely unexpected possibility.”

The most striking part of the study might be that these dramatic changes occurred in simulations assuming both medium-low and high levels of emissions, and that the time period studied isn’t all that far away, beginning just 27 years from the present. “No matter which carbon emission scenario is considered, by mid-century we will have passed a crucial tipping point—sufficiently thin sea ice—enabling moderately capable icebreakers to go where they please,” Smith said.

Scientists have identified a link between global warming and extreme weather events such as heat waves. Photo by Flickr user perfectsnap

During the month of July 2011, the United States was seized by a heat wave so severe that roughly 9,000 temperature records were set, 64 people were killed and a total of 200 million Americans were left very sweaty. Temperatures hit 117 degrees Fahrenheit in Shamrock, Texas, and residents of Dallas spent 34 consecutive days stewing in 100-plus-degree weather.

For the past couple of years, we’ve heard that extreme weather like this is tied to climate change, but until now, scientists weren’t sure exactly how the two were related. A new study published yesterday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals the mechanism behind events such as the 2011 heat wave.

What it comes down to, according to scientists at Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), is that higher temperatures caused by global warming are disrupting the flow of planetary waves that oscillate between Arctic and tropical regions, redistributing the warm and cold air that usually help regulate the Earth’s climate. “When they swing up, these waves suck warm air from the tropics to Europe, Russia, or the US, and when they swing down, they do the same thing with cold air from the Arctic,” lead author Vladimir Petoukhov of PIK explained in a statement.

Under pre-global-warming conditions, the waves might have initiated a short, two-day burst of warm air followed by a rush of cooler air in Northern Europe, for example. But these days, with global temperatures having climbed 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past century and escalating particularly sharply since the 1970s, the waves increasingly stall out, resulting in 20- to 30-day heat waves. 

The way it occurs is this: The greater the temperature difference between regions like the Arctic and Northern Europe, the more air circulates between the areas–warm air rises over Europe, cools over the Arctic, and rushes back down to Europe, keeping it chilly. But with global warming heating up the Arctic, the temperature gap between the regions is closing, stanching the flow of air. In addition, land masses warm and cool more easily than oceans. ”These two factors are crucial for the mechanism we detected,” Petoukhov said. “They result in an unnatural pattern of the mid-latitude air flow, so that for extended periods the… waves get trapped.”

The scientists developed models of this phenomenon and then entered daily weather data for the middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere during the summers from 1980 to 2012. They found that during several major heat waves and episodes of prolonged rain–which led to floods–the planetary waves had indeed been trapped and amplified.

Researchers examined the July 2011 heat wave in the U.S. for new clues on global warming and extreme weather. (Reds represent above-average temperatures and blues are lower-than-average temps.) Image via NASA Earth Observatory

“Our dynamical analysis helps to explain the increasing number of novel weather extremes,” said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of PIK and co-author of the study. “It complements previous research that already linked such phenomena to climate change, but did not yet identify a mechanism behind it.”

The research joins another recent study (PDF) by scientists at Harvard that highlights how changes to air circulation patterns are spreading drought. As warm tropical air rises, it triggers rains before migrating to higher latitudes. The dry air then descends, heats up and eventually travels again, landing in regions characterized by desert. These dry regions used to be confined to narrow bands spanning the globe. But now, these bands are expanding by several degrees in latitude.

“That’s a big deal, because if you shift where deserts are by just a few degrees, you’re talking about moving the southwestern desert into the grain-producing region of the country, or moving the Sahara into southern Europe,” study author Michael McElroy said in a statement. In this way, climate change threatens national security because drought, heat and other extreme weather events can jeopardize food stocks, destroy roads and bridges, and ultimately lead to political instability, the authors note.

The connection between climate change and extreme weather will be highlighted this summer, if current trends continue. The summer of 2012 was even hotter in the U.S. than that of 2011, and according to the PIK scientists, it was also marked by prolonged, amplified waves in the mid-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere.

Unfortunately, the frequency of these atmospheric patterns is only expected to increase. When the researchers compared the period from 1980 to 1990 with that from 2002 to 2012, they saw that the incidence of trapped waves had doubled. Bottom line: Heat waves are not only here to stay, they’ll become more frequent and will linger for longer.