Yesterday, I went up to Delaware Bay to help the Nature Conservancy count spawning horseshoe crabs. I carpooled with my student Efrain and his friend Dennis. We did some birding at Cape Henlopen State Park, then had dinner and a few crafty craft beers at the Dogfish Head Brewpub in Rehoboth Beach (I had crabcake, natch.), and then headed out to Big Stone Beach for the main event: the spring tide and the new moon mean spawning horseshoe crabs (Limulus polyphemus) by the thousands. We were helping the Nature Conservancy tally up the numbers of male and female crabs. You can learn more about horseshoe crabs at this excellent website. Or you can just look at these images:



























...You get the idea. Other images on the Flickr photostream. Joining a couple of medical doctors from Delaware (well, originally from Virginia, but stationed in Delaware), we surveyed the beach using TNC's rope and square-meter protocol. The weather turned cold and rainy, but we kept it up, and saw a lot of crabs. I estimate that altogether, we saw somewhere around 5,000 crabs. Pretty cool: one of the great wildlife concentrations in the world, and it's only 2.5 hours from DC. Next up: sandhill cranes on the Platte River in Nebraska, or maybe polar bears in Churchill, Manitoba...

Labels: critters, delaware, environmental, field trips, travel

There's been some interesting articles in my media subscriptions lately. Thought I'd use today's post to share.

In the June National Geographic, a study of the geology of Stonehenge reveals the source of the monoliths ("polyliths?") there. They came from the Preseli Mountains of Wales. That's a long journey for such big rocks. Also in the same issue is an eye-popping pictorial piece on sea slugs. You must check it out, because it features dozens of David Doubilet images like this one:

WIRED's cover story this month is about environmental "heresies": ideas that supposedly environmentalists aren't supposed to like, but need to happen. The basic premise is that "only cutting carbon matters," and so they come up with some interesting recommendations like: (1) use A/C more, and heating less, (2) "screw the spotted owl" (don't worry about the loss of biodiversity), and (3) buy a used Geo Metro rather than a new Prius. I found this last of particular interest, as it recounts a web rumor that it took less carbon to make a Hummer than a Prius, and therefore Hummers were more environmentally friendly. (The Prius' battery has a lot of high-carbon-cost nickel in it.) WIRED breaks it all down into BTUs, and runs the numbers. According to their analysis, it takes the Prius 100,000 miles to catch up (i.e. be more carbon-efficient) than an old Toyota. Bummer... Big bummer. (At least the Hummer bit has been debunked.)

As usual, Smithsonian had a bunch of interesting pieces in it. Almost everything in there catches my imagination. It's a very well done magazine.

The New Yorker had a couple of articles, too: In their recent "innovators issue," Alex Ross profiled John Luther Adams, the man responsible for the mesmerizing "the place where you go to listen" in the Museum of the North at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. If you haven't ever been there and find yourself in Fairbanks, I would recommend this museum highly, and this one room / art installation in particular: it plays certain notes and tones and changes the lighting depending on what the aurora, seismic activity, and other Earth processes are doing. And Margaret Talbot profiled Irene Pepperberg, who raised the parrot Alex and taught him to talk. This article explores the insights into intelligence gained from this serendipitous longterm experiment.

On the commodities front, the New York Times reports today that thieving biofuellers are stealing vegetable oil in Oregon, and that guano stocks are being closely guarded in Peru. Telling quote from the latter: "Before there was oil, there was guano, so of course we fought wars over it," (Pablo Arriola).

Labels: alaska, birdies, environmental, mollusks, news, prius, wales

An article in today's Washington Post explores the constant feedback that Prius drivers get about their fuel consumption -- and how that may be one of the main reasons that Prii* get lower gas mileage than other vehicles. I've noted this phenomenon before, so I thought I'd pass along a link to the article.

* "Prii" = plural of "Prius," at least in my world.

Labels: action, environmental, oil, prius, tech

This map was in this morning's Washington Post. The red dots are currently-existing coal-fired power plants. The black dots with the central stars are proposed future coal-fired power plants.

Labels: CO2, coal, dc, environmental, nova

Last week, my friend Michelle loaned me her copy of Farewell, My Subaru, a humorous account of a year spent trying to live locally. The author, Doug Fine, buys a ranch in New Mexico, then converts it to solar power and solar heated water, and raises goats and vegetables. And, yes, he trades in his Subaru for a R.O.A.T. (Ridiculously Oversized American Truck), which runs on vegetable oil. Along the way, he has lots of mishaps (many involving the goats) and finds love, happiness, and satisfaction. In general, he has a nice reflective time of it, accumulating enough experiences and insight to warrant a book. He's also got a great sense of humor. Recommended.

Labels: books, environmental, oil

Periodically I post book reviews on this blog of geology-relevant books. I haven't done too many of these since I started the blog because it's been the spring semester, and that means I've been too busy to read. But now that the summer's here, I've got a bit more time. Today's tome is Last Child in the Woods, by Richard Louv.

The theme of the book is "nature deficit disorder," a condition the author loosely defines as adults not caring about the natural world because they never spent any time outside as children. Setting aside the quasi-disease-sounding name (which Louv acknowledges as being iffy), it's pretty much a priori that if you don't know something, you don't value it. When children spend their time playing video games instead of romping in nature, they end up caring about the one and not about the other. Last Child gets a little tedious making this point over and over: do you really need a whole book to explain that?

In the course of that protracted treatment, however, Louv brings up some good points. For instance, natural play has been effectively "criminalized" in our (U.S.) litigious society. We care so much for our kids' safety that we prevent them from doing anything dangerous. He also makes the point that nature education has dropped off, resulting in lower knowedge about natural systems.

Some passages rang particularly true for me. On page 139, Louv describes an observation by Robert Stebbins, an old-school naturalist (and professor emeritus at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley). Stebbins has been going out to the California desert for many years studying reptiles and other critters. The rise of ATV (all-terrain vehicle) recreation in his study sites has obliterated the local wildlife. He found that 90% of invertebrate life had been destroyed in popular ATV areas. I'll quote Louv quoting Stebbins here:

What upset him most was not the destruction that had already occurred, but the devastation yet to come and the waning sense of awe -- or simple respect -- toward nture that he sensed in each successive generation. "One time I was out watching the ATVs. I saw these two little boys trudging up a dune. I went running after them. I wanted to ask why they weren't riding machines -- maybe they were looking for something else out there. They said their trail bikes were broken. I asked if they knew what was out there in the desert, if they had seen any lizards. 'Yeah,' one of them said, 'But lizards just run away.' These kids were bored, uninterested. If only they knew."

Labels: books, environmental, teaching

What's the difference between these pictures?

... Find out at the NASA Earth Observatory feature page that examines "Cities at night: the view from space."

Labels: environmental, maps, satellite imagery

Thought I'd pass these along:

(1) This weekend's New York Times Magazine is the "Green Issue" with a wealth of articles on environmental issues and their solutions. The range of authors they got to contribute is pretty impressive.

(2) A video on YouTube which simplifies thinking about our choices regarding climate policy, and provides a compelling argument that action is the right choice, even if climate science turns out to be wrong:

Labels: climate change, environmental, global warming

What would it look like if Napolean Dynamite designed a website to promote energy conservation by switching out lightbulbs? Maybe something like the "Unscrew America" website. The navigation is a bit of a head-spinner, though. Take your Dramamine before you start moving that mouse around.

Labels: environmental, websites

It's almost cherry blossom season, so that means it's also time for the annual DC Environmental Film Festival. For two weeks, lots of interesting films are hosted by dozens of libraries, theaters, embassies, NGOs, and the like. Many of them are free. If you live in the DC area, this is an excellent opportunity to see some movies that you won't otherwise get access to. Even if you're not in the Capitol area, you can check out some of these films: this year, several of the films (like tonight's snow leopard movie) are available for watching free via the Internet. Enjoy!

Labels: dc, environmental, movies

On Thursday, I posted some reflections on one of the talks at the most recent meeting of the Geological Society of Washington. At the same meeting, there was another talk that got my attention, and I wanted to briefly share its findings with the geoblogosphere. The talk was entitled "Mineralogy of the Atmosphere: Assessing environmental and health impacts of airborne particulate matter." It was given by Reto Giere, of the University of Freiburg, Germany. (He's currently in DC as a Visiting Investigator at the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.)

Reto's research has lately focused on particulate matter in the air. He collects it and then evaluates it using transmission electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction, and other techniques. The first point he made in Wednesday's talk is that "soot" is a matter of definition. Natural and anthropogenic sources can both be found in the sub-1-micrometer range. If you look at small particulates, Switzerland's environmentally-lauded train system actually generates three times as much "soot" as their traffic output.

So what's in that "soot?" Turns out that a lot of it is anglesite, PbSO4 and some of it is gunningite, ZnSO4'H2O. (There are also droplets of elemental selenium, Se.) The majority of these metal sulfates (and others) are coming from flue gases from power plants. And the thing is, because they're so small, all these goodies end up in our lungs. Reto has run modeling experiments to see what weight-percent of the average person's dose of inhaled metals gets extracted by the lung fluid. In one week, 80% of the zinc was absorbed by the lungs, 55% of the nickel, and 35% of copper. Yum! (I would have been interested to see the actual masses of these absorbed metals compared to the quantities present in a typical vitamin pill, but that wasn't covered.)

There's good news that stems from Reto's work too: the particular "cocktail" of minerals in a sample may be diagnostic of a specific source, which would be useful for forensic identification of polluters. Overall, I found it an interesting talk, on something I'd never really thought about before.

Labels: environmental, gsw, minerals

A sizable group of researchers (21; all members of the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London) has put forward an idea in this month's issue of GSA Today: they suggest that humans have altered the planet enough that it will show up in the geologic record of the future. They suggest, therefore, that we may have already entered a new geologic epoch defined by human alteration. As a result, they've adopted the name originally suggested by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen: "the Anthropocene." (Crutzen won in 1995, with two other chemists, for his work on the depletion of the ozone layer in the atmosphere.)

The evidence they offer for this assertion is compelling, but it raises a few questions about how we define these stratigraphic breaks in the geologic record.

Here's the only figure from the paper, a temporal comparison between several lines of data (top to bottom): sea level, average global temperature, atmospheric CO2, terrestrial erosion rates, and human population of the planet.

This is a powerful image. The authors note that climate essentially stabilized in the Holocene, the "long summer" of Brian Fagan's phrasing. In a classic display of scientific understatement, they note that this prolonged period of stable climate "has been a significant factor in the development of human civilization."

How will the rise of humanity be remembered by the geologic record? They note that we've accomplished some major changes to the rate of erosion and sedimentation : "directly, through agriculture and construction, and indirectly, by damming most major rivers, that now exceeds natural sediment production by an order of magnitude." I may be missing something here, but it would seem to me that anthropogenic erosion would produce more sediment due to our land use practices, but that less of that sediment would make it to the sea due to the "sediment trap" effect of dammed reservoirs. I mean, the Colorado River doesn't even make it to the ocean anymore.

Then there's temperature. A quote from the paper: "Temperature is predicted to rise by 1.1 °C to 6.4 °C by the end of this century, leading to global temperatures not encountered since the Tertiary." The high end of that estimate is indeed the sort of temperature change that one would think would leave a profound mark in the geologic record. (I find it interesting to note that a cast of 21 stratigraphers persists in using the outmoded and archaic term "Tertiary," by the way. I guess that's as sure a sign as any the Wernerian Chronology still has some kick left in it.)

I think one of the most compelling arguments made in favor of the Anthropocene is the rapid change in the Earth's biosphere. As the authors of the GSA Today paper point out, we've wiped out the majority of the big terrestrial animals, and concomitant wave of extinctions has rippled through the marine realm. Since changes in fossil biota have been the benchmarks of change in the geologic timescale, it seems certain that our tenure will be marked clearly for future paleontologists to see. Not only are species going extinct, those that survive are migrating to new territories as a result of shifting climate.

I'm pleased that the authors also explored changes to ocean chemistry, which will likely be a major source of information to future geologists. They cite Ken Caldiera and Michael Wickett's 2003 study on ocean acidification (which I blogged about last month) which shows that pH in the world's oceans has already dropped by 0.1 unit, and is predicted to continue acidifying so long as there's excess carbon dioxide to absorb from the atmosphere. Of course, add sea level rise to that (as is predicted via accelerated melting of continental ice sheets), and you've got a distinctive stratigraphic signature.

And I guess that brings me to a point that's been on my mind since I started listing these items. Will these changes persist for a long time, or will they be a small but distinct signature, a la the iridium layer at the K/P (formerly known as the "K/T") boundary? Another way of putting this: are we seeing the beginning of the Anthropocene's modus operandi, or are we seeing the environmental catastrophe which paves the way for a new, different, and (at this time) unpredictable Anthropocene status quo? At this point, we don't know what the Anthropocene will really look like in bulk. While it makes a lot of sense to point out the accelerated rates of change unfolding in so many geological realms, what it all portends for an as-yet-unattained future equilibrium remains to be seen.

I think papers like this are important. It's both broad in scope and displays some excellent thinking outside the box. I'm curious to see what reaction it provokes in the scientific community. Certainly it's getting some press.

* A side note: Does anybody else find GSA Today to be a weird journal? It always has one main article and then a bunch of stuff about meetings, awards, and the like, of interest to members of the GSA. But the articles featured each month are all over the map. Some, like this month's, are potentially ground-breaking works of scholarship. Others, just seem a bit... fringe. Like the one in December about how a team has shared Denver's geologic story with the public. Or the one about a historical critique of Lord Kelvin. Don't get me wrong: both topics are well and good, but if you're putting out only a single article each month that gets mailed to the entire GSA membership, why those? Sometimes I'm just left perplexed and scratching my head.

References:

Caldeira K., Wickett M.E. 2003. Anthropogenic carbon and ocean pH. Nature. v. 425. p 365. doi: 10.1038/425365a
Fagan, Brian. (2004) The Long Summer: How Climate Changed Civilization. Basic Books. ISBN 0465022812
Zalasiewicz J, Williams M, Smith A, Barry TL, Coe AL, et al. (2008) "Are we now living in the Anthropocene?" GSA Today: Vol. 18, No. 2 pp. 4–8. doi: 10.1130/GSAT01802A.1

Labels: CO2, environmental, global warming, stratigraphy

Whole Foods stores have decided to phase out the use of plastic bags in their stores, aiming to be rid of the nasty things by Earth Day. Bravo! The sea turtles thank you. Let's use that (petroleum-derived) plastic for something else.

Labels: environmental

I watched a cool documentary the other night about the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky. The film is called Manufactured Landscapes. (It's available from Netflix.)

It follows Burtynsky mostly through China (with asides to Bangladesh and North America) as he photographs of places where humankind has indelibly altered nature to produce landscapes that are at once disturbing and utterly beautiful. By trailing Burtynsky, the documentarians film the landscape through his eyes, as well as showing his still photos. Burtynsky maintains a website with some of his best images available in an online gallery. It's a remarkable ensemble. I recommend that you check out this visionary photographer.

Labels: art, environmental, movies