Lake Vostok has not been exposed to light or air in more than 15 million years and scientists believe it could contain life forms that existed before the Ice Age.

Evidence of a giant lake beneath the Antarctic ice has been gathering since the 1970s.  

Suspicions were first aroused after a team of Russians drilled deep into the ice to get a climate-record core sample. According to Montana State University microbiologist John Priscu, a veteran Antarctic researcher, the Russian scientists were puzzled by what their ice cores revealed.

“As they got deeper, though, they hit this funny ice, a different kind of ice that no longer had layers," Priscu says. "It didn’t have climate-record layering in the bottom. So they stopped drilling to find out what the heck they were getting into.”

What they were getting into was the vicinity of Lake Vostok, more precisely, the region at the bottom of the ice sheet above the lake. By 1996, scientists had gathered enough data on the structure of the ice sheet and the terrain beneath it to publish an article in Nature describing the hidden lake at Vostok.

_{An artist's cross-section of Lake Vostok, the largest known subglacial lake in Antarctica. Liquid water is thought to take thousands of years to pass through the lake, which is the size of North America's Lake Ontario. (Nicolle Rager-Fuller/NSF)}

Russia quickly launched a project to drill through the four kilometers of ice and gain access to the lake. That drilling and core sampling continued every year since.

Priscu sampled some of that 400,000 year-old ice core, which, he says, contained colonies of cold-adapted micro-organisms much like those found growing near deep-ocean vents.

“Other ones, based on our DNA data, suggested that [the bacteria] would get their energy from minerals in the water. These organisms actually can mine the minerals in the rocks and then apparently they are producing new carbon to feed organisms that reduce carbon.”

Drilling into Lake Vostok without contaminating it is a complex job. Priscu says the Russians have taken extreme care to avoid introducing surface bacteria or pollutants into the lake’s virgin waters.

“They will put no probes into the lake or any hardware.  What they will do when they penetrate the lake they will back pressure their bore hole and they will let the lake water come up into the bore hole. They will not let any of their borehole fluid go into the lake. So when they penetrate only lake water will come up.”

According to plan, water will rise up through the bore hole and be left to freeze over the Antarctic winter so the scientists can go back next year and analyze it. But that is water just from the lake’s surface.

While the Russians are apparently the first to tap it, teams from the United States and England already have established projects to drill into the ancient Antarctic ice.

Priscu expects that within a decade an international team will explore Lake Vostok’s deepest regions.

“I also predict that once we really start figuring these systems out, we’ll find that they play an important role in biodiversity on our planet, a role in terms of carbon sinks and sources, which is important for the atmosphere.”

Priscu expects today’s discoveries in the Antarctic will inspire a new generation of scientists to unlock the secrets of this vast and still largely unexplored world.

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Diver Rhys Cochrane said the whale did not seem to mind when he swam down to cut the rope and said it swam away quickly once it was freed. He said several other whales had watched from a distance.

New Zealand orca expert Ingrid Visser watched the video Cochrane had taken of the experience. She said whales are smart enough to know when you are trying to help them.

Visser said she could see bite marks on the whale, indicating other whales had tried to free it.

Visser added that swimmers should never jump in the water to swim with orcas as they are a top predator. But, she said, at the same time, there is no record of a person being attacked by an orca in the wild.

Some information for this report was provided by AP, AFP and Reuters.

"It's a counter-intuitive result," says Arianne Cease at Arizona State University, lead author of the study published in Science.<!--IMAGE-LEFT-->

Cease and her team thought the locusts they studied might not form swarms if they had access to well-fertilized vegitation which was high in protein.

Locust killer

“What we found was that the high-protein diet was actually very deleterious to this locust. It caused most of them to die." On the other hand, she says, they found this particular locust thrived on low-protein grasses found on eroded, overgrazed land. "They actually need what's typically thought of as a poor-quality food to build up to high population levels."  

University of Sydney biologist Stephen Simpson notes that, as the Eurasian grasslands have been degraded by  livestock grazing and erosion, locust outbreaks have increased.

"The authors have shown that they are indeed linked," he says. "Understanding this relationship will help in the development of land management practices that reduce the locust threat."

Fertilizing an over-grazed field to raise plants’ protein levels might actually help control this insect, according to Cease's research.

Different impacts

However, the same may not be true for all locusts, cautions Keith Cressman, chief of locust outbreak forecasting at the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

Researchers have found just the opposite effect in desert locusts, which Cressman says are perhaps the most destructive. “When the insects eat leaves high in [protein], they will reproduce more, they will grow faster, they will increase in number, they will survive better and they’re just a healthier locust.”

Cressman says the relationships between livestock, land and locusts are complex and differ from place to place. More research will be needed to sort them out completely.

Cease plans studies in Africa on how grazing practices affect other species of locusts.

Businessmen Peter Nyeko has invested $50,000, along with two partners, in 20 hectares of eucalyptus trees just west of the capital, Kampala. He calls it his “tree bank.” Despite the work involved in clearing the land and caring for the trees, he says a tree bank is the best investment he could possibly have made.

"You could invest about $50,000 and in about 10 years you’re harvesting trees worth about $5 million," he said. "You buy a seedling for less than $5, but once that seedling grows to become a fully grown tree, it will probably cost more than $150. As long as you’re willing to wait for about 10 years for a return on your capital employed, it’s pretty amazing. It’s just like a trust fund."

This is exactly the message the Ugandan government is trying to convey to its citizens. Demand for wood is on the rise, and the deforestation rate is alarming - the country has lost nearly 40 percent of its forests over the past 20 years.

Gonza Araali of the National Forestry Authority, or NFA, says his agency provides free seedlings and technical advice to tree planters. He says the government is advocating tree planting not just for the wealthy, but for all segments of Ugandan society.

"We are also telling them it’s an investment; it’s an insurance," he said. "It’s where they can get income and be able to sustain themselves, and also pay school fees for their children."

Possible carbon credits

Systems are not yet in place in Uganda to allow tree planters to benefit from carbon credits. But investors like Nyeko are betting that they soon will be.

"In the next few years, we might finally be able to trade carbon credits linked to trees that have been growing. That would open up another revenue stream as well, making it sometimes even more profitable to keep the trees rather than cutting them. It’s part of my rationale," said Nyeko.

Not everyone is convinced that tree banks are beneficial for Uganda as a whole. The most popular trees to plant are fast-growing varieties like eucalyptus and pine - imported trees that threaten native species.

On the other hand, Araali of the NFA explains that fast-growing trees can also protect native forests.

"People are able to get timber out of them, and the rate at which they would have gone to the natural forest to cut [trees] reduces," he said. "They also help in conservation in one way or another, which people are not seeing."

Environmental concerns

But as Abby Onencan of the Entebbe-based Nile Basin Discourse points out, there are other environmental concerns as well, some of which could have regional implications.

"A lot has been said about the eucalyptus. There are some breeds which are really bad, they really cause a lot of destruction and should not be planted near the water," said Onencan. "If we plant trees around the Nile that take up the water, then the water might never reach Egypt. What one country does affects largely another country, so we need to be really careful about what we do."

Social consequences

Some say the tree plantations also come with a social cost. Last year the British NGO Oxfam published a report accusing a British-based tree planting company of kicking local people off land in Uganda in order to plant. The company later closed their operations in the country on a wave of bad publicity.

Uganda’s Minister for the Environment, Flavia Munaaba, admits that allocating large tracts of land to tree plantations can create problems.

"We are losing forest cover very rapidly. However, when it comes to guidance on reforestation, the tendency is to allocate land to big investors, at the exclusion of the common people. That is the problem, in the sense that there is resentment," said Munaaba.

Responsible planting

But Onencan says there are ways in which the trees, if sensitively managed, can benefit the local population.

"I think you can actually empower the communities to be part of the whole program in such a way that they are the ones planting the trees, they are the ones determining the tree that they want to plant, and they get actually a percentage of the benefit. So you involve them fully so they can own that project," he said.

Nyeko is convinced that by the time he eventually harvests his trees, they will have benefited both the environment and Ugandan society. His eucalyptus will be useful, he says, to a growing population hungry for timber.

"The more people that get involved now, the better, because the population is rising, demand is shooting up, and we just don’t have enough timber growing to sustain our demand for timber. There is a benefit in it for the whole country at large," he said.

In any case, the NFA reports that more and more people are asking for planting advice, so tree banking will most likely become even more popular in the years to come.

They are the only gene-altered fruit on the market today in Japan, a country with strict laws regarding genetically-modified organisms (GMOs).



Those laws include a requirement that they be labeled as GMOs - a rule that does not exist in the United States.

The papaya’s arrival in Japan comes as advocates in the United States press the government to require labels on all GMO foods.

'Almost like vaccination'

The Rainbow papaya was released in 1998.

U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist Dennis Gonsalves, who helped develop the new fruit variety, may be its best salesman.<!--IMAGE-LEFT-->

“I’m prejudiced, but I will tell you," Gonsalves says. "This Hawaii-grown papaya is the best in the world. You folks go and taste it.”

But taste was not the reason Gonsalves and colleagues developed it. In the 1990s, a virus ravaged Hawaii’s papaya groves, leaving the industry on the verge of collapse.

So Gonsalves engineered the papaya's genetic makeup to produce a small piece of the virus’s outer shell in its cells, triggering the plant’s immune system.

“It’s almost like vaccination,” he says.

And just like vaccinated people, the genetically-engineered plants do not get sick with the virus. Gonsalves says the piece of virus won't harm people because tests showed it breaks down in three seconds in the harsh environment of the human stomach.

“And, virtually, it saved the papaya industry in Hawaii," Gonsalves says. "So now, Rainbow papaya accounts for 80 percent of Hawaii’s papaya.”

Label debate

But, according to Gonsalves, fighting the virus was only half the battle. They had to convince their biggest customer - Japan - that the fruit was safe to eat.

It took more than a decade of tests before Japanese regulators were satisfied. The last hurdle was labeling.

Japan requires that all GMOs be labeled. That's also the law in the European Union and many other countries, but not in the United States.

A campaign called “Just Label It” seeks to change that.

Not all Americans are convinced GMOs are safe.

“And while the debate is raging on, and while we’re collecting data on the impacts of these very, very new crops, people deserve and need and have the right to know whether to participate in that system or not,” says Gary Hirshberg, CEO of Stonyfield Farm, a major organic yogurt company and a backer of the campaign.

He and others cite polls showing that more than 90 percent of people say products containing GMOs should be labeled.

But those numbers don't mean much, says Val Giddings, with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

“People always opt for more information," says Giddings, "whether or not they have any idea what it means, or how they might use it.”

Giddings has worked on GMO policy for three decades. He points to research in the European Union, where labels are required, which shows that even consumers who say they avoid GMOs still buy products with GMO ingredients on the label.

Giddings says labeling supporters are trying to mislead consumers into thinking that authorities have concerns about the safety of gene-altered foods. He says they don't.

“Every authoritative body who’s looked at this without preconceptions has concluded that crops improved through biotechnology are at least as safe as their conventional counterparts.”

Major U.S., E.U. and international scientific advisory groups have agreed that today’s crop of GMOs do not pose a risk to health or the environment.

But they also say it may be appropriate to monitor these crops after they are on the market. That would not be easy, but labels would help.

Testing the market

The Rainbow papaya went on sale in Japan a few weeks ago with a label that says it is a GMO. Gonsalves hopes his fruit will help answer lingering questions about genetically modified foods.

“Now, instead of lots of speculation, ‘Oh, my gosh, these people aren’t going to eat it because they don’t like this.’ They’re all speculating," he says. "There is no test case. Now there is a test case.”

Gonsalves calls it the "Super Bowl" of marketing challenges: getting a population that's still widely skeptical of genetic-engineering technology to enjoy a beautiful, delicious papaya with a GMO label on it.

The walnut-sized discovery is the first evidence that this relationship existed so long ago.

India’s Gujarat state was once the site of a tropical rainforest. It's where Paul Nascimbene's team found the eight-millimeter-long shard of amber, or petrified tree sap.<!--IMAGE-LEFT-->

Nascimbene, a paleozoologist with the American Museum of Natural History in New York, says a tiny mass of mycorrhizal fungus and bits of tree root are visible inside the amber.

Together, they speak across the eons about one of the most abiding and important plant relationships on Earth.   

“When plants colonized the land - because initially they were aquatic, in the oceans - this partnership, or symbiosis, began between the mycorrhizae and pretty much 90 percent of all land plants," Nascimbene says. "And then there were different types of these partnerships that occurred.” 

According to Nascimbene, there are two types of mycorrhizal symbiosis. In endomycorrhizae, the most common form, the fungi live symbiotically within the roots of a tree.<!--IMAGE-LEFT-->

In ectomycorrhizae, the fungi live on the roots of their partner trees. This is the type that Nascimbene's team discovered entwined with roots and mixed with flowers inside the Indian amber.

“The one that we found, in a 52 million-year-old tropical rainforest biota, was perhaps the earliest record of such a symbiosis with a flowering plant, a modern flowering plant," Nascimbene says.

That mycorrhyzal symbiosis has endured because it is important to the survival of both organisms - the fungus and the tree.<!--IMAGE-LEFT-->

“Both organisms benefit because, in one sense, the surface area of the root is increased," Nascimbene says. "But also the fungus has the ability to leach important nutrients out of the soil. And that helps support the growth of the trees.  Also, they are protected for some extent from drought… Essentially, when you have the roots surrounded by the various stages of this fungus, you have a network which essentially creates a sort of microenvironment; the water doesn’t evaporate or dissipate from it as readily as [from] bare roots.”

The tree that produced the amber at the Gujarat fossil site was a dipterocarp, which is still the dominant family of hardwood trees in Southeast Asia.  Although they are logged heavily, dipterocarp forests are thriving thanks largely to the mycorrhizal fungi.  

And that, says Nascimbene, carries an important lesson for the global environment.  

“There are a lot of people now on the planet, and there are a limited number of resources. So in order to plant and grow more trees, we have to be aware of the conditions that favor their growth. And in the case of the dipterocarps, these ectomycorrhizas are added to the soil in association with their roots when they are planted in order to allow the forest to develop properly. Otherwise as both a business - and as an ecology - it would fail.”

Nascimbene and his colleagues plan to continue digging for prehistoric mycorrhizae, and for further clues to the origins of the world’s forests.

The hours spent discussing worldwide water scarcity problems got his students thinking about local solutions.

“Obviously our resources were limited, so we couldn’t solve the problems of India, for example, but let’s look at our own backyard," Young says. "Here in Wisconsin, we’re blessed to be next to the Great Lakes. But not more than 20 miles from Milwaukee, there is the smaller city of Waukasha, which is running out of water. Wakasha is not able to get access to Lake Michigan water and so they’re faced with a real severe crisis.”

H2O Score

The class concluded that most Americans have no idea how much water they use. Without that information, Young says, it’s difficult to do something to reduce it. The typical water bill, he says, doesn’t provide much guidance.

“In most places, the water bills are not very user friendly. In Milwaukee, we get it once a quarter. The water company tells us how many hundreds of cubic feet we’ve used. To me, 100 cubic feet has no context. So if I use 20 in a quarter, was that good? Was that bad?”

So Young and his students developed H2O Score to answer those questions.

“We put together a website that takes people’s actual water usage and translates it into terms they understand, like average gallons-per-day, and allows them to compare to other similar households and then gives them tips for reducing the amount of water that they use.”

Political science major Daniel Beck is an H2O Score member. “It definitely made me much, much more aware of my water usage.”

Lessons learned

Beck says there are many ways to conserve water including taking shorter showers, checking faucets and toilets for leaks, and installing new products like low-flow shower heads. Being part of this project taught him other lessons, too.

“It’s given me an incredible amount of experience with a vast array of things: how a business gets started, how a business works," Beck says. "I’ve done everything from approaching local municipalities to get the information so we can put it through our website, doing market research and also working on a team.”

Local experts in water conservation accompany H2O Score members on their on-site consultations to local residents and businesses.

“They came in and we looked at everything that uses water in our restaurant,” says Peter Sandroni, who owns La Merando, a popular restaurant in Milwaukee. “From hand sinks in our bathroom to the dish machine in our kitchen, with everything in between, the water heater at the bar, the ice machine, all that stuff, we looked at.”

Water audit

After conducting that water audit, the group offered Sandroni tips for using water more efficiently.

“[They said] this is where you can immediately have an impact on lowering water consumption in your restaurant: low-flow water [faucets] at hand sinks in the bathrooms. Number two was in our dish area, we have a three-compartment sink and we have a dish machine," Sandroni says. "We have a spray nozzle that you use to kind of pre-rinse all the plates and pots and pans. We reduced the water flow coming out of those as well. Number three was asking customers if they wanted water, instead of automatically bringing water out to customers.”  

H2O Score founder Young says the positive feedback from the local residents and business owners encouraged him to expand the project, this time with a new class of students.

"We’re rolling out new pilot programs in small communities here in Wisconsin, redoing the website to make it more user-friendly, and now we’re getting feedback from people all over the country - water utility directors, individuals - who want to know how they can participate, too, because they want to save water, save money and make a difference in their communities.”

Every drop of water counts. That’s the message H2O Score hopes to drive home through its online tips and on-the-ground water conservation efforts.

Continue to Parts:     1 / 2 / 3 / 4 / 5

In April, conservationist Alan Weyer witnessed a scene he said had continued to haunt him. Summoned to an area of the Kariega Game Reserve in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province, the park’s manager saw a rhino shivering silently in a clearing in the bush.

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“This animal had been darted (and sedated), the horn had been removed, but the animal hadn’t died. The animal stood up and it was walking around with, literally, its face hacked off. It was absolutely dreadful,” Weyer said. “We could not save it. A vet had to put the rhino down.”

Just a month before, poachers had targeted another of his rhino. “It’s clear that the animal bled to death because of the hemorrhaging where they cut the horn off,” Weyer explained.

The rhinos killed on Kariega are just two of the almost 450 slaughtered by poachers in 2011in South Africa. “We are incredibly worried at the moment. We are actually facing the worst rhino poaching crisis for decades,” said Lucy Boddam-Whetham, deputy director of the United Kingdom-based organization, Save the Rhino International.

In 2010, 333 of the endangered animals were killed in South Africa. Both 2010 and 2011 were record years in terms of killings in the country. In most cases, the rhinos – members of South Africa’s famous Big Five animals – were tranquillized with veterinary drugs before poachers sawed their horns off.

More expensive than gold

In Asia, rhino horn has been used for centuries in traditional medicines to treat minor ailments such as headaches and fevers. “Commonly it’s ground into a powder and combined with other ingredients to form a medicine that you would swallow like a pill, or it can be ground and mixed into water so that you drink it,” said Tom Milliken of Traffic International, which monitors the world trade in wildlife products.

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The Zimbabwe-based director of Traffic’s operations in Southern and Eastern Africa added that demand for rhino horn had boomed in recent years because of a growing belief in parts of Asia, most notably in Vietnam, that it could cure cancer.

“If you’re selling the gift of life, you’re able to ask a premium price and I believe that’s what’s going on,” commented Milliken, who’s traveled across the globe to investigate the increase in poaching in recent years.

According to the International Rhino Foundation, the price of horn is currently nearly $57,000 a kilogram – making it more expensive than gold.

“You lose one rhino, you’ve just lost half a million rand (about $62,500); you lose two, you’ve lost a million rand. Sadly the poachers are selling (horn) for a lot more than that,” said Weyer.

Several studies put the average weight of white rhino horn entering the black market at almost 3.7 kilograms. So criminal syndicates are making huge profits. And they’re reaping these rewards by selling horns that consist just of keratin – the same protein that makes up human hair and fingernails, which science has proven has no curative properties.

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On par with drugs and weapons trafficking

But the scientific facts have not permeated the markets for rhino horn in Asia, said Boddam-Whetham, resulting in South Africa becoming the international epicenter of poaching. Its wildlife reserves are home to most of the world’s remaining white and black rhinos – about 20,000 animals.

The World Wide Fund for Nature said poachers killed more than 1,000 rhinos in South Africa in the past four years. “It’s a really sudden increase in rhino killings,” said Boddam-Whetham. “If you look back to 2007, there were only 13 lost. So you can see the massive jump…. I think it’s been a massive shock to everyone – the level of poaching at the moment.”

“Certainly not the least reason for the sudden spike is that rhino poaching has now become part of international organized crime, on the same level – in terms of execution, sophistication and ruthlessness – as drug and weapons trafficking, said Kirsty Brebner, director of the Rhino Security Project at South Africa’s Endangered Wildlife Trust.

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Despite this, she said, governments and law enforcers have not invested enough resources in anti-poaching operations and the smuggling of illegal wildlife products.

“This opened the door for organized crime. Rhino poaching is an easy avenue to riches,” Brebner said. “Some of the organized crime syndicates are seeing it as an easy option, to move away from their traditional drugs and explosives and guns and so on. It’s a low risk, high reward type of operation….”

Asian economic success fuels poaching

Another factor in the upsurge of rhino poaching, according to many in the wildlife industry, is the Asian economic boom of recent years. “Suddenly, with more disposable income than ever before (in Asia), rhino horn has made a huge resurgence on the local market,” Milliken stated.

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He said this is particularly true of Vietnam, which is now one of the world’s fastest growing economies on the back of its oil, mining, manufacturing and agricultural industries.

“In Vietnam it’s at the point now where they’re selling horn for home use,” said Milliken. “There’s a whole subsidiary industry that is manufacturing these rhino horn grinding bowls, so that you can grind the powder at home and then add water to it and drink it. This is a usage that I’ve never seen anywhere in the world except in Vietnam.”

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Boddam-Whetham explained, “More Asians are now able to afford expensive rhino horn products and also the increasing Asian footprint in Africa has opened up trade routes to get rhino horn out of Africa and into Asia.”

The cancer factor

Brebner said the myth that rhino horn could cure cancer was undoubtedly the biggest driver of poaching. Milliken agreed: “This has stimulated usage (of horn) in a way that we haven’t seen before.”

Many in the global wildlife sector attribute the surge in rhino killings to supposed claims a few years ago by Asian politicians and celebrities that the horn cured their life-threatening cancer.

“There was a Vietnamese diplomat or MP that came out a couple of years ago saying that rhino horn had cured his cancer. This has led to a big interest in rhino horn and demand for it,” said Boddam-Whetham.

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South African conservationist and game park owner Dale Howarth insisted that soaring demand for horn stemmed from “a Korean national minister who publicized that he’d been cured from cancer from taking rhino horn.”

Milliken said such stories were commonly told in Asia and spread around the world. “Everybody’s heard it. They’ve heard it so much that there’s kind of a tacit belief that maybe it happened, but we can’t actually validate any of these stories. When you really go for the details to get a name and to put a face on this, you can’t get there,” he maintained.

Milliken described the cancer cure legends as urban myths that are brilliant marketing tools invented and spread by criminals to boost demand, and thus prices, for rhino horn.

He said killings have increased massively as the poaching syndicates have been driven to kill as many rhino as fast as possible because they know that the rhino horn market is a “bubble economy that will burst” relatively soon.

“Obviously people who take rhino horn and have cancer are not going to be cured in the long run. So I think that there’s a race against time here (and) that the criminal syndicates are maximizing their profits while they can.”

Milliken remained concerned that the bubble would not have burst before the “large-scale entry of China into the illegal rhino horn trade.

“China looms large in the background. We’re increasingly worried about the market for rhino horn in that country,” he said. “With the largest number of consumers in the world, any resurgent rhino horn trade in China is going to have major consequences around the world.”

Back on South Africa’s wildlife reserves, conservationists and anti-poaching units continue their efforts to save the country’s rhinos. It’s a battle that many acknowledge they lost in 2011. It’s also a battle that’s transforming as it intensifies.

“It’s now a war, plain and simple,” said park manager Alan Weyer.

While most CO2 emissions from automobiles, buildings and factories go into the atmosphere, one-third ends up in the oceans, changing ocean chemistry and making seawater more acid.

A study in Nature Climate Change tracks ocean acidity over 21,000 years of climate history. Tobias Friedrich, co-author and post-doctoral fellow at the University of Hawaii International Pacific Research Center says the record shows natural increases in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere over time and differences from region to region.

“This, of course, also had an effect on acidity levels in the ocean, and then (we) compared this naturally occurring increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations with man-man emissions over the last two-hundred years.”

The scientists used computer models with data from ice and ocean sediment cores to simulate ocean conditions, back to the ice age and forward to the end of the 21st century.

When Earth started to warm 17,000 years ago, at the end of the last ice age, atmospheric CO2 began to rise. Over the next 6,000 years, it grew from 190 parts per million to 280 parts per million.

Marine systems had time to adjust.

Axel Timmerman is a professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii International Pacific Research Center and co-author of the study. He says the past 200 years paint a much different picture.

“Starting with the pre-industrial revolution, anthropogenic emissions increased so much that the oceans suddenly started to take up huge amounts of carbon.”

CO2 concentration in the atmosphere now stands at 392 parts per million. Timmerman says the study, which also includes 30 years of observational data, finds dangerously high levels of ocean acidification in certain regions.

“Such as the coral triangle, the western tropic of the Pacific and the Caribbean exceed the naturally occurring levels by factors of up to thirty in a few spots.”  

Timmerman says this is happening at an accelerated pace. “The rate of change is about two orders of magnitude faster than what occurred during the last glacial period about 20 to 15,000 years ago.”

While ocean acidification could have been detected much earlier, scientists only began to monitor it a few decades ago. As seawater becomes more acid, carbonate - the mineral many sehllfish and corals use to form their shells and skeletons - is reduced.

Coupled with pollution and warming temperatures, it is a serious threat to ocean life. Axel Timmerman says his study gives decision-makers another tool for assessing that threat and evaluating the steps they can take to mitigate it.

The rice varieties Japanese farmers were growing in those paddies couldn't survive in salt-contaminated soil.

Those ruined paddies might be the first to test out the new rice-growing techniques.

Delicate balance

The challenge before scientists, says plant biologist Sophien Kamoun at the Sainsbury Laboratory in the United Kingdom, is, “How do you introduce a new trait like salt tolerance into that local variety, while at the same time you maintain all the other traits that make that variety really ideal for that region?” <!--IMAGE-LEFT-->

Plant breeders normally take that ideal variety and mate, or cross, it with one that is salt-tolerant. Some of the offspring would acquire that trait. But they may also differ from the ideal variety in other ways.  

“If you make a cross, for example, with an unrelated variety of rice, you will have thousands of differences," Kamoun says.

Those differences may be good or bad. Accentuating the positive while eliminating the negative may take a decade or more.

Kamoun and colleagues in Japan started instead with a popular high-quality rice variety and, using a technique common in plant breeding, introduced random changes - or mutations - in the plant’s genes with a chemical.

“Then you end up with thousands of plants that have all kinds of changes in their habits," Kamoun says. "And then you plant them out there in the field and identify the plants that have particular traits of interest.”<!--IMAGE-LEFT-->

Sequencing lots of genomes

Then Kamoun’s group did something that would have been too difficult and expensive just a few years ago. They used new technology to sequence the entire genomes of the plants with those traits of interest. They identified precisely what genetic changes were found in plants with the new traits and where those changes appear on the map of the rice genome.

It’s a big improvement for crop breeders who usually follow rough landmarks in the genetic map to guide their efforts.

“Instead of saying, ‘It’s between Street A and Street B,’ you can say, ‘It’s exactly this address,’” says U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist Shannon Pinson.

She was not involved in the research. But she says it is exciting not only because it makes plant breeding more precise. She says even when breeders know where in the genetic map to find the genes responsible for a trait, or phenotype, “That doesn’t mean we know exactly what the gene is, and what the sequence is and what change in that sequence is causing that change in phenotype.”

Pinson says the new method hones in on the precise changes in a gene responsible for changes in a trait. That should make it easier to figure out how the gene works.

Sophien Kamoun says his colleagues have already improved the salt tolerance of a high-quality rice variety in greenhouse experiments and expect to have it ready for farmers in a couple years - far sooner than conventional breeding would take.

And he says the methods should cut the time needed to develop other varieties and other crops as well.

Recirculating wetlands system

Aquaponics is really as old as nature itself.

“Aquaponics is really a recirculating wetlands system, so it’s happening right on the banks of our lakes," says Sylvia Bernstein.

Bernstein was a hydroponic gardener for years - growing plants without soil using a water-soluble chemical fertilizer - before discovering she could use the waste water from fish to grow organic vegetables and fruits.

“Honestly, I was very skeptical and just couldn’t believe that something as simple as fish waste could become a complete fertilizer," she recalls. "So I had to actually see a system that was in a friend’s basement. But when I did, it changed my life.”

That was three years ago. Bernstein built her first aquaponics system with her 15-year-old son on a concrete pad outside her home in Boulder, Colorado. In her greenhouse today, she mainly raises tilapia and trout - feeding them once a day.

There are no weeds in her aquaponics garden, and she doesn’t have to worry about watering. The plants are growing in containers at a table height for easy access.

“I, just this morning, pulled four radishes and some lettuce for lunch," Bernstein says. "In my greenhouse right now, I grow all sorts of herbs, tomatoes, peppers.”

Bernstein started her own business, The Aquaponics Source, with an online store, her own YouTube channel and a blog. She teaches aquaponics at the Denver Botanic Gardens and recently published a book about how to set up an aquaponic garden at home.

According to Berstein, a growing number of people in the U.S. and around the world are doing it, and enjoying the results: a year-round supply of healthful, safe and delicious food.

Earth-friendly food production

The Internet is helping many aquaponic gardeners get connected and learn from one another.

“Aquaponics is a perfect thing to invest one’s mind and heart and elbow grease into," says James Godsil, co-founder of Sweet Water Organics, a commercial aquaponics farm in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

In 2010, Godsil helped set up a foundation to promote the approach.

“The Sweet Water Foundation was dedicated to democratizing and globalizing the information and the methodologies required to advance this very Earth-friendly food production system, which, by the way, only uses about 10 percent of the water normal farming does, and uses no pesticides. It’s all natural.”

According to Godsil, those advantages have been a powerful incentive for people from all walks of life who are considering a career in aquaponics.  

“The Sweet Water Foundation probably has had 500 supporters, including school students, and a community of retired engineers, professionals, social enterprisers, teachers and artists," Godsil says. "There are so many young elders who are retiring and looking for another career for the next 20 years.”

Beyond borders

Through collaboration and joint projects, Godsil is carrying the inspiration beyond U.S. borders.

“I was asked to go to Venezuela this March," he says. "And I’m working with people who have a project in Ecuador, I'm working with people in the Congo, in Uganda and Tanzania.”

A private group called the Society for Appropriate Rural Technology for Sustainability, is partnering with Sweet Water Foundation on an initiative in India.

“We’ve formed this Indo-American Aquaponics Initiative, and we aim to make aquaponics one of the fastest growing economic activities in India within a decade," says Subra Mukherjee, secretary of the group, based in Kolkata, India.

Advocates say, with fuel and fertilizer prices climbing and irrigation water supplies dwindling, aquaponics offers a sustainable alternative that can help feed the world’s growing population.

In more than 17,000 U.S. hotels and motels, travelers who are staying longer than one night are agreeing to forgo a change of towels, washcloths, and bed sheets in the name of conservation. This is quite a variance from the usual custom of enjoying clean linens each night.<!--IMAGE-LEFT-->
According to Project Planet - a company that grew out of the Inter-Continental Hotel chain’s efforts to save energy costs - this skip-the-clean-towels program in a 100-room hotel keeps 2,300 liters of dirty water and 150 liters of detergent out of the ecosystem - each month.  

Labor costs drop, too, since housekeepers can finish cleaning a room faster when they don’t have to change linens and towels.

The Holiday Inn Express chain leaves little Project Planet placards in rooms that read, “Yes, I’ll help!”  Other motels instruct guests to drop towels in the tub if they want them washed; otherwise, the cleaning staff won’t bother.

Not everybody likes this idea.  Some patrons, particularly at upscale hotels, grouse that they’re paying plenty for a room and want to be pampered with fresh linens - “and don’t forget the mint on the pillowcase.”

But as many as 95 percent of guests at other hotels are going along with the program - buying into the idea that they’re saving the planet, one washcloth at a time.

When the naturalist set out with about a dozen Pygmy guides to walk across the dense tropical forests of the Congo and Gabon, most people thought he was on an impossible mission.

“You know, we were [on] like an epic voyage out there," he says. "Every day you have to find food for 13 people, you have to keep everyone healthy. You have to be the mother, the father, the coach, everybody, for all these guys.”

Fay intended for his journey through the last pristine forests in west-central Africa to draw international attention to the rich biological diversity being threatened by commercial logging.
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He admits the local people on his team didn’t really know what they were signing up for.

“They certainly got depressed after three or four months out on the trail," he says. "So I had to switch teams about halfway through, because those guys were just burned out, basically.”

At one point, they stopped at a small village where Fay warned his companions not to drink the water because of the risk of disease.

“And sure enough, one of the Pygmies gets hepatitis like, probably two or three weeks later. And the first reaction of those guys to something like that is to scarify them with razor blades and bleed them, you know, to get the bad blood out," Fay remembers. "And so here you’ve got this highly-infectious guy, who all of a sudden everybody’s touching his blood, and I just had these nightmares of the whole crew getting hepatitis.”

According to Fay, it took about a week to carry the sick man to a river, where they used a dugout canoe to transport him to safety.

Expedition of a lifetime

Using a satellite-based positioning system, digital cameras, and a laptop computer, Fay documented his experiences - good and bad - during his long trek through the forest.

He crossed rivers, hacked through dense underbrush, and slogged through deep, muddy swamps. Along the way, he saw an enormous variety of wildlife, from elephants to aardvarks to gorillas.

Fay also came across roads and bulldozers, where logging companies were cutting down the forest.

Fay collected samples, took photographs, and compiled a detailed description of, as he puts it, “every pile of dung, every tree, every cry of a chimpanzee” along his route. He sent occasional dispatches describing the trip to one of his funders, the National Geographic Society, which published his accounts online.

“It was hard. But we didn’t lose a single person, and it was an expedition of a lifetime, for sure.”

Making a difference

For Fay, the risk and hardship were worth it. The knowledge that came out of his trip, and the attention it drew to the rich biodiversity of the Congo basin, spurred the creation of 13 national parks in Gabon, which placed more than four million hectares of forest into protected status.

“And those parks are still very much protected and real. And logging - just like I thought - has completely surrounded every single one of those parks in the interim. So if we didn’t do it when we did it, none of that forest would have been saved from logging.”

After he finished the MegaTransect in 2000, Fay rented an apartment in Washington, D.C., intending to write up his findings. But after sleeping outdoors in the forest for so long, he had a hard time readjusting to city life.

“I spent one night in this apartment, and I immediately just fled, you know. And I went to Rock Creek Park, which is the big National Park in the middle of Washington, D.C., and it was like ‘Oh my God, this is perfect, this is beautiful, I can sleep outside, the birds are here, there’s deer, there’s trees, you know it’s forest cover,’ and I thought, you know, ‘Why would I ever want to live inside?’”

Since returning from his expedition across the Congo Basin, Fay has conducted other large-scale surveys of biodiversity. His latest, in 2007, took him on a 3,000 kilometer hike through California’s redwood forests - not bad, for a guy in his early 50s.

And no matter where he is, Fay says he still avoids sleeping indoors, if he can help it.

Some information for this report was provided by AP and Reuters.

"When we look at those four events, we see that all four of them began directly after a La Niña event in the Pacific," he says.



La Niña is a periodic cooling of Pacific ocean waters that triggers changes in global weather patterns. Among other things, that altered weather disrupts bird migrations.

Birds can carry flu virus, and when their migratory patterns change, they can come into contact with other avian species they don't normally meet - birds which might carry a different strain of flu virus.

In the process, the viruses’ genetic material can get intermingled to create new influenza strains - in a process known as reassortment.

"And it's this reassortment, this creation of new sub-types that takes place - and we think it's in the bird population - that generates, potentially, these pandemic strains that can infect humans and to which most of the world's population will be susceptible," Shaman says.

La Niña events happen every few years, and most are not followed by a pandemic. But because the risk of a pandemic appears to increase after a La Niña, the next step for researchers is to get a better understanding of how birds and the flu viruses they carry are affected.

One result, Shaman says, may be the ability to improve prediction of an influenza pandemic.

"That's the thing that's exciting about it," he says. "I mean, it offers this sort of tantalizing possibility that you can say, we have a La Niña coming, we need to make these preparations because we know there's an increased likelihood that a pandemic flu strain could arise and infect humans."

But Shaman cautions that more research is needed before that kind of prediction becomes possible. His research paper is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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The international team was led by Sir John Beddington, Britain’s chief scientific advisor. The article, What Next for Agriculture After Durban, follows the latest U.N. climate conference in December. It says negotiations there made “incremental progress” in helping farmers adapt to climate change while reducing agriculture’s contribution to global warming.

“Well, agriculture is important, period, because of the imperative of food security. And we’re falling short there in significant ways that have come to our attention, especially recently with the significant price shocks,” said Professor Molly Jahn of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, co-author of the Science article.

International prices have remained high since the food crisis of 2007/2008.

Agriculture is a major emitter of greenhouse gases. But Jahn said it also offers opportunities to lessen their effects with known and proven farming practices.

“So it represents both an activity that’s essential for our survival -- an activity that is threatened by climate change, especially in vulnerable parts of the world. And an opportunity to better manage meeting our needs while we reduce the emissions of various greenhouse gases that are accumulating in the atmosphere,” she said.

Faster response needed

The Science magazine article says the “integration of agriculture in the climate change negotiating process has moved at a slow pace.” However, it says at the same time climate change, forces affecting food security, and population growth have been moving “much faster.”

The scientists hope to influence policymakers.

Jahn said, “It was important for this team to get together precisely because so much work has been done. There’s so much information about opportunities and options, as well as threats. So this body was convened to carefully, objectively review that vast amount of information and synthesize clear policy relevant recommendations.”

Those recommendations include putting agriculture front and center in policy considerations.

“While we are transitioning to climate-smart agriculture, we need to assure that the world’s most vulnerable people will be considered in any policy strategies,” she said.

Another recommendation is to reduce the vast amount of food that’s lost, wasted or spoiled along the food chain – and to choose crops that place less stress on the environment.

“Given current knowledge, there’s a great deal we can do within current budgets and within current economic structures that will bring us forward to a better place with respect to agricultural practices in the developing and the developed world,” said Jahn.

Playing a bigger role

The magazine article calls on scientists to “assume a more prominent role” by ensuring clear data is available for climate change negotiations. It says that data can help spur investment in agriculture.

Professor Jahn warns “the window of opportunity to avert a humanitarian, environmental and climate crisis is rapidly closing.” She adds urgent action is needed.

Agriculture’s role in climate change is expected to be discussed in June at Rio+20. The meeting in Brazil marks the 20^th anniversary of the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro. It’s commonly known as The Earth Summit.

The prospect of new wind-turbine farms going up within sight of popular beaches prompted interest in such plans in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. On the U.S. West Coast, the impetus has been wave and tidal energy development, but balancing competing uses for coastal waters has proved a difficult challenge.

Uncharted territory

At first glance, the Pacific Ocean looks wide open and mostly empty, but it's anything but that on a digital map the state of Oregon recently posted online. The interactive display includes some 150 layers of data about existing ocean uses and natural features.

Oregon Sea Grant fellow Todd Hallenbeck checks out prime fishing grounds on his laptop.

"There's a large area of the territorial sea that's important to fishing with the darker red colors representing some of the most important areas for each of the ports," he says, looking at the map, which lights up from Neah Bay, Washington south to the Oregon-California border. "We can turn on things like commercial shipping lanes...We can turn on some of the seabird layers that represent areas where there are seabird colonies."

Purple lines crisscross the screen. Little dots that appear along the shoreline and rocky reef areas represent seabird colonies.

Mixed-use approach

All this leaves wave energy developer Justin Klure, of Pacific Energy Ventures, feeling excluded from the initial set of lines drawn on the ocean planning map.

"First blush, those maps look a little intimidating from the industry perspective," Klure says, "because the areas that they've identified are relatively small and don't align with some of the basic requirements that the industry is looking at, which is access to port, access to transmission, certain water depths."<!--IMAGE-->

Hallenbeck acknowledges there are challenges. "There are not a ton of areas that seem to not have something of importance in them already. So the challenge here is finding the few areas that do exist that have the least amount of conflict."

And Klure isn't giving up hope yet. It's early in the process, too early in his view to be "drawing lines in the sand." To stay with the zoning analogy, he argues for a "mixed use" approach while more data is gathered.

Regulatory uncertainty

The planning process is moving slowly. That's creating regulatory uncertainty. It's scared off at least one ocean energy company interested in Oregon. Scotland-based Aquamarine Power closed its Oregon office this fall.

In a statement, the company expressed its hope of returning to the Pacific Northwest someday, but said it will focus on California in the meantime.

Aquamarine Power's energy generator relies on a large mechanical flap placed just below the surf. A more traditional ocean energy design uses an array of bobbing buoys. There are also new prototypes that employ pressure-sensitive airbags on the sea floor.

Groups representing the fishing fleet remain leery of such technologies and the ocean-planning process.

Ilwaco, Washington crab fisherman Dale Beasley has a hard time imagining sharing the sea with industrial energy installations. "Ocean energy and fishing are mutually exclusive. They will not be able to coexist in the same area."

Not everyone agrees with that perspective. A representative of environmental groups is more conciliatory.

"I do think there is a way through this," says Susan Allen, who directs a coalition called Our Ocean. "It has to do with the fact that Oregon is uniquely suited to deal with this. We have a long legacy of figuring out what compromises are. We are the state that pioneered...land use planning."

The ocean mapping and zoning process won't stop the West Coast's first commercial wave-energy park. Ocean Power Technologies' demonstration project near Reedsport, Oregon, has already been approved.

The company plans to launch the first of 10 massive floating wave energy generators there around the middle of this year.

Reported in the Journal Science, this globe-spanning research finds that abundant forms of plant life keep soils more fertile and productive, and help to buffer ecosystems against the stresses of a changing climate.   

The study focused on semi-arid ecosystems which cover 40 percent of the planet and support 40 percent of the human population. Co-author David Eldridge, with the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences at Australia’s University of New South Wales, says these dry lands are also among the ecosystems most at risk “from changes in management, changes in rainfall, changes in climate.”

An international team of scientists studied dry lands on every continent, except Antarctica.  Eldridge points out that on each, they marked out 30-by-30-meter plots, inventoried the plant life within and measured how it cycled carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus, elements considered essential for life on earth.

“We also measured other attributes that we thought might be related, things like temperature, soil texture... how much sand or clay the soil has got in it, slope, latitude, longitude, all those attributes and used a modeling system to be able to pick out what some of the drivers were.”

Eldridge says while there were differences among the areas - from the dry woodlands in Western Australia to the high alpine grasslands in Chile - the overall findings were remarkably similar.

“Even with this huge diversity of different types of plant communities, the fact that when we analyzed our data from more than 200 sites, that even in these really diverse communities, diversity of plants came out as being a highly significant driver of how functional the soil was.”

And that wide variety of plant species was even more important than other factors, Eldridge says, such as annual rainfall and microbes in the soil. Loss of biodiversity reduces those services the ecosystem can provide.

“If we go from a system where we have a lot of species to very, very few species, then we know that the ability of the soil to produce carbon, to allow water to infiltrate to hold together, actually break down.”

The changing climate is also likely to reduce plant diversity and increase the areas affected by the desertification now underway in many developing countries. Eldridge says, for example, in a warmer world, sand content in soils would be expected to rise, lowering its productivity.

"What this shows is that anything that results in increased temperatures is ultimately going to reduce the functionality of dry land soils. Our diverse community of plants is providing a buffer against increased climate change.”

“Deep sea vents are hot springs on the ocean floor. They are a little bit like the geysers you may know from Yellowstone Park in the U.S., except they are underwater... [and] they are not erupting steam. They are erupting really hot fluid, still liquid, loaded with dissolved minerals that form particles that looked like smoke and that’s why we nicknamed them 'black smokers',” said Copley.
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Hot fluid from Earth's crust

Although they didn’t measure the vent temperatures directly, the scientists estimate that the dark material spewing out - mostly copper and other dissolved minerals - is hotter than 450 degrees Celsius.

“That’s the temperature you get right at the very throat of the vent, where the hot fluid is gushing out [from] the earth’s crust. But the animals don’t live there. They live a little bit further away. A few meters away the temperature is down to 20 to 40 degrees [Celsius].”                                                        
In those cooler waters around the vents’ six-meter tall mineral spires, the scientists found teeming populations of marine animals, including a new species of shrimp. Copley said the tiny white creatures exist in near-total darkness and feed mostly on bacteria.

New species discovered

“Instead of two eyes on stalks like shrimp normally have as an adult, these shrimp have a light-sensing organ on their back,” said Copley.

They also found hundreds of white-tentacled anemones, but they could not collect specimens.

Copley said that by studying the deep-sea vents and their animal colonies, scientists can better understand how marine life disperses and evolves in the deep ocean. He noted that in the coming years, the ecosystem will see an increasing human presence, in the form of deep-sea fishing, oil and gas extraction and mining operations.

“”If we are going to make responsible decisions about how we manage those ocean resources, we need to understand what determines the patterns of life in the deep ocean,” said Copley.

Copley and his team are now analyzing samples and data from “black smoker” vents recently found at four other seafloor sites around the world.

Officials and panda researchers were joined Wednesday by basketball icon Yao Ming to inaugurate a wildlife area northeast of Chengdu. They stood by as the first of six pandas were released for wildlife training into a 20-square kilometer habitat. Television footage showed their first tentative steps in a semi-wild environment, with the iconic bears later frolicking and eating bamboo.

Officials say the six were selected for their health, behavior and genetic traits from a pool of 108 bears at a breeding center in the provincial capital. Other releases are to follow.  An official at the Chengdu research base said pandas in the controlled habitat will still be cared for by staff, because of their reliance on humans for food and water. But he said they would slowly be eased into living independently in the area.

Viewed as a national treasure, giant pandas have come back from the brink of extinction in recent decades. Scientists say some 1,600 pandas currently live in the wild in the region, with more than 300 others cared for in captivity.

Some information for this report was provided by AP.

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This is one of the many Bikeshare locations in southeast Washington.   Renting a bike is as easy as 1.2.3. All you have to do is put in your credit card.  Once the card is accepted, select the type of membership.  The system will print your receipt and a code to unlock the bicycle. Enter that code in this digital lock, the light turns green and you are ready to roll.

Annual members get a plastic key, which goes into this electronic lock.  Returning the bicycle is also easy.  You can go to any Bikeshare location and push the bike back into the rack.

Washington's local government started this program in September 2010. Today there are 134 stations with 1,100 bicycles in the nation's capital and the neighboring city of Arlington, Virginia.

Chris Holben is the project director of Washington's Capital Bikeshare program.   The program offers a wide variety of membership options - for a single day, 3 days, one month, or a full year.  Holben says the number of annual memberships is increasing.

"We have about 20,000 annual members who can walk up take a bike out," said Holben.  "We also had about 90,000 visitors use our bikes.  Those were tourists or people here for the day".

During the last year these bicycles have been used for one million rides.   

Holben says a membership survey shows that 5 percent of those who use Bikeshare would have used cars if bikes were not available.  He says this works out to 50,000 fewer automobile trips.

In the developing world, many people regard bicycles as the ride of the poor and see a car as a symbol of status.  Holben says what he calls "national heroes" can help counter that image.

"I think one of the main things is you need some champions at either the high political level or a higher social level, who can promote cycling whether for health reasons or get people out of the car," added Holben.  "You would also need somewhere safer for them to bike so whether that's the government or the municipalities providing trails or spaces just for cyclists."

Two other Washington suburbs, Montgomery County, Maryland, and the city of Alexandria, Virginia, have now approved plans to join the network, which is slated to grow to 288 stations and 2,800 bikes by the end of 2012.