Juneau Forced To Cut Energy Use

(Reuters) Residents of Juneau, Alaska's capital city, have been forced to cut energy use since a series of avalanches wiped out transmission towers and electrical lines, cutting off all power from the area's hydroelectric system.

The extensive damage has forced Juneau to rely on costly electricity from backup generators fueled by diesel, which is at all-time high prices. Electricity from the generators cost nearly five times as much as power from the hydroelectric dam.

Avalanches rumbled down the mountainsides two weeks ago at the Snettisham hydroelectric dam about 25 miles (40 kilometres) southeast of Juneau, a city of about 30,000.

Alaska Electric Light and Power Co, the local utility, said the area is expected to rely on the backup diesel generators for three months because it is not safe for workers to go fix the damage.

Unlike other parts of the energy-rich state, Juneau has no source of natural gas and relies almost exclusively on the area's hydroelectric system for most of its power.

Without drastic reductions in energy use, a typical Juneau family could be facing electric bills of over $1,000 a month for the next three months, said Tim McLeod, president of the Alaska Electric Light and Power Co.

Low-income Juneau residents and several businesses that struggle through the tourism off-season might be crippled by skyrocketing electricity bills, said House Minority Leader Beth Kerttula.

Juneau city leaders and the city's legislators are seeking state and national disaster declarations that would pave the way for assistance to the needy, said Kerttula. (

..."Reno earthquakes keep shaking"

(AP) Scientists at the University of Nevada, Reno are scrutinizing seismic readings and studying damage at residents' homes to try to figure out what's happening beneath the earth's surface under a northwest Reno neighborhood rocked by a seemingly endless string of earthquakes...

...the shaking is unusual, seismologists say, because the intensity of the quakes has increased over the past few weeks. Generally, earthquakes tend to occur and are followed by smaller aftershocks.

In this case, the earth's rumblings have continued unabated, with barely negligible bumps occurring often minutes apart, followed by occasional larger shakers.

It's impossible to know if the temblors are foreshocks of a bigger quake to come, or aftershocks of what has been, experts said.

Up until April 15, sizable quakes that could be felt were occurring about once every third day.

Then, the rate increased, with about three, 2.0 or larger incidents occurring daily.

On April 24, when the first 4.2 quake was registered, "all of a sudden we were seeing 20 (of the magnitude) 2s and larger per day," said state geologist Jon Price.

"This is an exceptionally vigorous sequence of earthquakes," Price said.

During the past week alone, more than 500 occurrences have been recorded.

Most recently, two measuring 3.1 and 3.2 in magnitude occurred around 11 p.m. Monday. Another 3.1 was recorded at 9:15 a.m. Tuesday.

The largest so far was a 4.7 quake that was registered at 11:40 p.m. Friday. It was preceded 11 seconds earlier by a 3.3 quake, and followed 3 minutes later by one registering 3.4.

The temblors sent goods flying off shelves, cracked walls, broke glass and collapsed part of a water flume west of Reno. There were no injuries.

They are mostly shallow, occurring just beneath the surface to within a mile or two...

Mapping of the quakes shows they are clustered around the Mogul and Somersett neighborhoods in northwest Reno, in an area about 2.5 miles long and 1/3 of a mile wide...

Bats & White-nose Syndrome

The old Greeley Talc Mine sits high on a hillside above the banks of the White River.

It's the only place in the Green Mountain National Forest where bats are known to be hibernating.

The U.S. Forest Service hopes it's remote enough that the hundreds of bats inside will be protected from a mysterious disease.

"In this particular cave, we have not found the effects of white nose syndrome yet," said Rob Hoelscher, a wildlife biologist with the USFS.

White nose syndrome is a fungus that's been found in hibernating bat populations, killing an estimated 90 to 95 percent of bats in affected areas. It has spread to at least 25 sites in the Northeast, including sites in Vermont, New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Hoelscher said it's a significant concern...

"This bat in particular is exhibiting that very characteristic white nose syndrome," said Scott Darling, a bat biologist for the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, as he pulled a dead, emaciated bat from a sealed plastic bag. It was one of several bats found last week in the old Elizabeth Mine in Strafford. Before then, the disease had not been detected east of the Green Mountains.

"The fact that it has spread so rapidly is obviously disconcerting to us," he said.

Darling added that bats are a major predator of insects, so white nose syndrome isn't just a problem for bats.

"When you do the math and make the calculations of some 500,000 bats being affected by white nose syndrome," he explained, "that adds up to literally 2 billion insects per night that won't be eaten by those bats."...

Another article: On a freefall toward extinction

Bats have been dying by the thousands recently in the Northeastern United States. No one knows why, and it may be months, perhaps years, before the cause is determined.

Meanwhile, scientists predict that this summer there will be a population explosion of insects, which bats normally eat in large quantities. Greater numbers of beetles and moths could mean severe and costly losses for farmers and timber producers. There could also be bigger swarms of mosquitoes and other biting bugs, which will mean more discomfort for all of us.The perplexing bat affliction is called white-nose syndrome. Bat biologists have called it the “gravest threat to bats ever known.” Whether its cause is eventually found to be a toxic substance in the environment, a newly emergent infectious disease, lack of food, or something else, it’s clear that this latest blow to bats — and it is only the latest in a long list of injuries — could bring about the regional disappearance of one or more species. We may even lose certain species altogether.

The plight of the bats signals an unhealthy, deteriorating environment — one that we all share. Though biologists don’t believe the white-nose syndrome is a contagion that directly threatens people, from a broader perspective we all ought to worry when the natural balance of things has been so altered that bats are dying out before our eyes.

We live in an era when the words “endangered” and “extinct” have become sadly commonplace. Nonetheless, the sudden, wholesale death of wintering colonies of bats has captured headlines nationwide, and shaken biologists used to dealing with species on the downward slope.

One of the species affected is the Indiana bat, which is on the federal endangered species list. While it is estimated to have once numbered in the millions throughout its range in eastern North America, its global population was estimated last year at approximately 500,000. The reasons for its decline are disturbance and destruction of its wintering sites (caves and abandoned mines), loss of summer habitat (forests), and, probably, the use of pesticides and other toxic substances...

"Stem Rust Never Sleeps"

From New York Times

WITH food prices soaring throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America, and shortages threatening hunger and political chaos, the time could not be worse for an epidemic of stem rust in the world’s wheat crops. Yet millions of wheat farmers, small and large, face this spreading and deadly crop infection.

The looming catastrophe can be avoided if the world’s wheat scientists pull together to develop a new generation of stem-rust-resistant varieties of wheat. But scientists must quickly turn their attention to replacing almost all of the commercial wheat grown in the world today. This will require a commitment from many nations, especially the United States, which has lately neglected its role as a leader in agricultural science.

Stem rust, the most feared of all wheat diseases, can turn a healthy crop of wheat into a tangled mass of stems that produce little or no grain. The fungus spores travel in the wind, causing the infection to spread quickly. It has caused major famines since the beginning of history. In North America, huge grain losses occurred in 1903 and 1905 and from 1950 to ’54.

During the 1950s, I and other scientists, first in North America and later throughout the world, developed high-yielding wheat varieties that were resistant to stem rust and other diseases. These improved seeds not only enabled farmers around the world to hold stem rust at bay for more than 50 years but also allowed for greater and more dependable yields. Indeed, with this work, global food supplies rapidly increased and prices dropped.

From 1965 to 1985, the heyday of the Green Revolution, world production of cereal grains — wheat, rice, corn, barley and sorghum — nearly doubled, from 1 billion to 1.8 billion metric tons, and cereal prices dropped by 40 percent.

Today, wheat provides about 20 percent of the food calories for the world’s people. The world wheat harvest now stands at about 600 million metric tons.

In the last decade, global wheat production has not kept pace with rising population, or the increasing per capita demand for wheat products in newly industrializing countries. At the same time, international support for wheat research has declined significantly. And as a consequence, in 2007-08, world wheat stocks (as a percentage of demand) dropped to their lowest level since 1947-48. And prices have steadily climbed to the highest level in 25 years.


The new strains of stem rust, called Ug99 because they were discovered in Uganda in 1999, are much more dangerous than those that, 50 years ago, destroyed as much as 20 percent of the American wheat crop. Today’s lush, high-yielding wheat fields on vast irrigated tracts are ideal environments for the fungus to multiply, so the potential for crop loss is greater than ever...

The Bush administration was initially quick to grasp Ug99’s threat to American wheat production... But more recently, the administration has begun reversing direction. The State Department is recommending ending American support for the international agricultural research centers that helped start the Green Revolution, including all money for wheat research. And significant financial cuts have been proposed for important research centers, including the Department of Agriculture’s essential rust research laboratory in St. Paul.

This shocking short-sightedness goes against the interests not only of American wheat farmers and consumers but of all humanity. It is tantamount to the United States abandoning its pledge to help halve world hunger by 2015...

Mountain Top Removal

I saw an article from Mud, WV on this in the paper the other day and while I've known about it for awhile and seen it when I've flown over areas that are decimated by it - it is still one of the most depressing things. It's such a concrete example of how the American Lifestyle is destroying nature in our own backyard. Energy to power our conveniences seen as so necessary that people justify destroying entire mountains along with all of the wildlife, animals, trees, ferns, and flowers, streams, insects and all that goes with it. Surely people could be cutting back on their usage instead of resorting to this.

This article quoted Roy Carter as saying the Midwest and South were the users of the power generated by the destruction of the mountains. Another article referred to Washington D.C. and their increased population and energy use.

This site ->www.ilovemountains.org
has a way for people to input their zip code and see what connection their local power plant has to mountain top removal.

Carter speaks out against Mountain Top Removal:

In the coalfields of central Appalachia, the ridge tops themselves are being forever leveled by a coal mining practice known as mountain top removal. In the past two decades more than 470 mountains have been decapitated, more than 1,000 miles of headwater streams have been filled, and more than a million acres of hardwood forests have been stripped from an area the size of Delaware, all for the purpose of extracting cheap fuel for coal fired power plants in the Midwest and South, power plants whose pollutants cause premature deaths, hospitalizations for respiratory and cardiovascular complications, asthma attacks, and the further deterioration of the forests in our own Blue Ridge mountains. In the name of economic development and job creation, large coal corporations in Kentucky, West Virginia and Tennessee are sapping the economic future of coalfield mountain communities.

W.Va. town copes with mountaintop mining:

MUD, W.Va. - This is a place where moving mountains is no longer a figure of speech. Here, among the steep green Appalachians, mining companies are moving mountaintops off their pedestals to get the kind of coal that Washington needs.

It happened here, on a ridgeline called Sugar Tree Mountain, where locals once hunted for squirrels and puckery sour grapes. Then, the top was scraped off to expose the black seams in its innards, leaving a rock-strewn plateau.

"It used to be West Virginia," said Vivian Stockman, an environmental activist. "And now it's Mars."

Though this isolated mine is more than 400 miles from Washington, the two places share a powerful connection: coal. The D.C. region, with its need for electricity skyrocketing, has been steadily burning more coal, buying almost a third of its supply from this part of Appalachia.

And that, analysts and environmentalists said, means that Washington's air conditioners and iPods have helped drive the region's "mountaintop" mining.

The coal industry and the Bush administration say the benefits of these mines, measured in jobs and energy, outweigh the damage.

But in West Virginia, where mining opponents can face back-roads intimidation, some neighbors say that Washington area residents might not know the true cost of their power.

"We have to go through a lot for them to get their electric," said Lucille Miller, who picked the grapes on the vanished mountain.

The links that bind the suburbs of Washington to the mines of West Virginia can be traced through federal energy records. The Washington Post analyzed almost four years of data, showing where the six coal-fired power plants across the region bought their supply.

The records make one thing clear: The plants have been buying a lot more coal. Total purchases were more than 40 percent higher in 2006 than in 2004. The increase came as the Washington region's demand for electricity grew 18 percent since 2001, driven by population growth and an increasingly wired culture. D.C. area plants do not send their electricity straight to local homes, but feed it into the regional power grid.

Records also show that about 32 percent of the coal the plants bought came from one kind of mine in this corner of Appalachia - a "surface" operation, where miners do not have to tunnel.

The region, where southern West Virginia meets Virginia and Kentucky, is home to the vast majority of mountaintop mines in the United States.... (more)

And then there is the Tar Sands

project up in Canada which is destroying forests for oil....

More on the Arctic Ice Melt

By Ed Struzik, Canwest News Service

Ice was the last thing David Barber was worried about when he and an international team of scientists made plans last year to have their research icebreaker frozen into the Beaufort Sea for the winter.

But when the Amundsen sailed into the western Arctic in November, the ice that normally begins to take hold in October hadn't even begun to gel.

"Even by mid-December, the southern Beaufort Sea was still wide open," said Barber, a University of Manitoba sea ice physicist and chief scientist aboard the Amundsen. "That's over a month longer than the time freeze-up normally occurs."

Barber and his colleagues got an even bigger surprise when they sailed north into M'Clure Strait, the main channel connecting the Northwest Passage to the western Arctic. The strait is legendary as a gateway for thick, rock-hard, multi-year ice that piles in from the Beaufort Sea, but Barber and his colleagues found nothing but clear sailing.

"It was surreal," he said. "The weeks spent on the ship were some of the most remarkable of my career. The multi-year pack ice had migrated about 150 miles (240 kilometres) north from where it has traditionally been located. So the ice-associated, high-pressure system that traditionally forms over the southern Beaufort at this time of year was displaced.

"All that cyclonic activity that was drawn in by the warm, open water not only made for some rough sailing, it also put more heat into the air, keeping the local climate warmer than usual."

Barber isn't alone in wondering whether this winter signals the climatic tipping point that many scientists have been anticipating. That's the moment in time when sea ice in the Arctic becomes so thin and vulnerable that the ice produced each winter can no longer keep up with the spring and summer melts.

Many scientists now believe that when this happens, the world will enter a new era of global change -- one that no one really understands, but that will likely have an enormous impact on the climate of the rest of the world. (more)

"Ontario to ban use of pesticides"

I think they need to ban the use for golf courses, as well.

TORONTO - Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty is expected to use Earth Day today to introduce legislation banning the cosmetic use of pesticides across the province.

McGuinty promised a ban in the last election but he is expected to go one step farther today by prohibiting not only the use but the sale of pesticides for cosmetic purposes.

"There is a lot of consciousness being raised about environmental health issues and I think accordingly this is a really exciting step forward," Minister of Health George Smitherman said Monday.

The new legislation would apply to lawns, gardens, parks and schoolyards but will not apply to agriculture, according to the province.

Pesticides needed to address public health issues such as the West Nile virus will also be exempt from legislation.

Golf courses will also be exempt from the new rules but will be required to develop plans to limit the environmental impact of pesticides, the province said.

Environment Minister John Gerretsen said the proposed legislation has received "tremendous support" during public consultations with 90 per cent of submissions in favour of a ban.

AquaJelly and AirJelly (Two robotic jellyfish)

A Design News editor was lucky enough to watch two robotic jellyfish swim and fly at the Hannover Fair in Germany. These two robots, AquaJelly and AirJelly, made by Germany-based Festo company, are using 8 tentacles based on fish fins for propulsion.

The AquaJelly has 11 infrared light-emitting diodes and communicates with a central station by using the short-range radio standard ZigBee. AquaJellies also can collaborate to solve a large problem by autonomously picking single. Obviously, the AirJelly has a somewhat different body to float into the air, a helium-filled balloon. Markus Fischer, Head Of Corporate Design at Festo, says these robots ‘will be very useful in the factory of the future.’

You can see above several Festo’s AquaJellies robots. (Credit: Festo) This image was picked from a Festo’s document, Bionic Learning Network: Inspired by nature, which gives more details about the AquaJelly. “AquaJelly is an artificial autonomous jellyfish with an electric drive and an intelligent, adaptive mechanical system. AquaJelly consists of a translucent hemisphere and eight tentacles used for propulsion. At the centre of the AquaJelly is a watertight, laser-sintered pressure vessel. This comprises a central, electric drive, two lithium-ion-polymer batteries, the charge control device and the servo motors for the swashplate.”...

NAS Panel Confirms That Ozone Kills

This is important for the whole "Cost/benefit" nonsense. Detriments must all be denied so benefits can be denied.

(AP)

Short-term exposure to smog, or ozone, is clearly linked to premature deaths that should be taken into account when measuring the health benefits of reducing air pollution, a National Academy of Sciences report concluded Tuesday.

The findings contradict arguments made by some White House officials that the connection between smog and premature death has not been shown sufficiently, and that the number of saved lives should not be calculated in determining clean air benefits.

The report by a panel of the Academy's National Research Council says government agencies "should give little or no weight" to such arguments.

"The committee has concluded from its review of health-based evidence that short-term exposure to ambient ozone is likely to contribute to premature deaths," the 13-member panel said.

It added that "studies have yielded strong evidence that short-term exposure to ozone can exacerbate lung conditions, causing illness and hospitalization and can potentially lead to death."

The White House Office of Management and Budget, which in its review of air quality regulations has raised questions about the certainty of the pollution and mortality link, did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment.

"The report is a rebuke of the Bush administration which has consistently tried to downplay the connection between smog and premature death," said Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, a Washington-based advocacy organization.

Vickie Patton, deputy general counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, said the Academy's findings "refutes the White House skepticism and denial" of a proven link between acute ozone exposure and premature deaths. Such arguments have been used to diminish the health benefits of reducing air pollution, she said.

The Academy panel examined short-term exposure — up to 24 hours — to high levels of ozone, but said more studies also were needed on long-term chronic exposure where the risk of premature death "may be larger than those observed in acute effects studies alone."

Ground-level ozone is formed from nitrogen oxide and organic compounds created by burning fossil fuels and is demonstrated often by the yellow haze or smog that lingers in the air. Ozone exposure is a leading cause of respiratory illnesses and especially affects the elderly, those with respiratory problems and children.

While premature death from ozone exposure is greater among individuals with lung and heart disease, the report said such deaths are not restricted to people who are at a high risk of death within a few days...

One such case involves the EPA's decision last month to toughen the ozone health standard, reducing the allowable concentration in the air.

When the cost-benefit analysis was being prepared in connection with the rulemaking, the OMB argued there is "considerable uncertainty" in the association between ozone levels and deaths.

As a result, the EPA issued a wide cost-benefit range from an annual net societal cost of $20 billion to a savings of $23 billion, depending largely on whether one takes into account lives saved from ozone-related premature deaths.

OMB officials also have objected to the EPA quantifying ozone-related mortality benefits in new emissions standards for lawn mowers and other small engines that release large amounts of ozone-forming pollution.

In response, the EPA removed "all references to quantified ozone benefits" in the proposed rule, according to an e-mail sent by EPA to the OMB. The small engine regulation is awaiting final action.

Food shortages....

Food shortages: how will we feed the world? (From Telegraph (UK))

The era of cheap food is over. In Britain, a standard white loaf costs more than £1, grocery bills are driving up inflation and land prices are going through the roof. But steep rises in the price of staples such as wheat and rice are having an even bigger impact on poor countries.

In Cameroon, 24 people have been killed in food riots since February, while in Haiti, protesters chanting, "We're hungry" forced the prime minister to resign this month.

In the past month, there have been food riots in Egypt, Cote d'Ivoire, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Madagascar.

The World Bank now believes that some 33 countries are in danger of being destabilised by food price inflation, while Ban Ki-Moon, the UN secretary-general, said that higher food prices risked wiping out progress towards reducing poverty and could harm global growth and security...

Bob Watson, the chief scientist at the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, puts the rise in the price of commodity crops such as wheat down to a number of factors: higher demand for grain to feed livestock in China, where increasing affluence means more people want to eat meat; drought in Australia for three years, meaning it has had to import wheat; market jitters brought on by the sight of several countries stopping exporting grain; speculators seeing a chance to make money; and, of course, the sudden extra demand for food crops such as maize for use in biofuels, in both Europe and the United States...

Food represents about 10 to 20 per cent of consumer spending in the rich world, but as much as 60 to 80 per cent in developing countries, many of which are net food importers, according to Henri Josserand, of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation.

Bob Zoellick, president of the World Bank, calculates that food inflation could push 100?million people back into poverty, wiping out the gains of a decade of economic growth.

Food Riots Begin: Will You Go Vegetarian? (From Wired.com)

As food riots break out around the globe, vegetarianism seems like more than a way of being kind to animals. It's about eating as efficiently as possible, so that grains destined for livestock will reach people instead... It takes an estimated five pounds of grain to produce a single pound of beef...

In the last month, something largely ignored by the public but long predicted in organizational white papers and academic studies has come to pass: widespread food shortages. Ballooning prices. Outright riots. Neighbor fighting neighbor. Countries scrambling to feed themselves, export partners be damned.

Even before this crisis, food experts said the world could not feed itself in coming decades if growing populations in developing countries insisted on a meat-rich western diet. That time may already have arrived -- and largely without climate-change induced agricultural disruption. Add droughts and years of failing harvests, and things get seriously scary...

"Running Out of Planet to Exploit"

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Nine years ago The Economist ran a big story on oil, which was then selling for $10 a barrel. The magazine warned that this might not last. Instead, it suggested, oil might well fall to $5 a barrel.

In any case, The Economist asserted, the world faced “the prospect of cheap, plentiful oil for the foreseeable future.”

Last week, oil hit $117.

It’s not just oil that has defied the complacency of a few years back. Food prices have also soared, as have the prices of basic metals. And the global surge in commodity prices is reviving a question we haven’t heard much since the 1970s: Will limited supplies of natural resources pose an obstacle to future world economic growth?

How you answer this question depends largely on what you believe is driving the rise in resource prices. Broadly speaking, there are three competing views.

The first is that it’s mainly speculation — that investors, looking for high returns at a time of low interest rates, have piled into commodity futures, driving up prices. On this view, someday soon the bubble will burst and high resource prices will go the way of Pets.com.

The second view is that soaring resource prices do, in fact, have a basis in fundamentals — especially rapidly growing demand from newly meat-eating, car-driving Chinese — but that given time we’ll drill more wells, plant more acres, and increased supply will push prices right back down again.

The third view is that the era of cheap resources is over for good — that we’re running out of oil, running out of land to expand food production and generally running out of planet to exploit.

I find myself somewhere between the second and third views...

In retrospect, the commodity boom of 1972-75 was probably the result of rapid world economic growth that outpaced supplies, combined with the effects of bad weather and Middle Eastern conflict. Eventually, the bad luck came to an end, new land was placed under cultivation, new sources of oil were found in the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea, and resources got cheap again.

But this time may be different: concerns about what happens when an ever-growing world economy pushes up against the limits of a finite planet ring truer now than they did in the 1970s.

For one thing, I don’t expect growth in China to slow sharply anytime soon. That’s a big contrast with what happened in the 1970s, when growth in Japan and Europe, the emerging economies of the time, downshifted — and thereby took a lot of pressure off the world’s resources.

Meanwhile, resources are getting harder to find. Big oil discoveries, in particular, have become few and far between, and in the last few years oil production from new sources has been barely enough to offset declining production from established sources.

And the bad weather hitting agricultural production this time is starting to look more fundamental and permanent than El Niño and La Niña, which disrupted crops 35 years ago. Australia, in particular, is now in the 10th year of a drought that looks more and more like a long-term manifestation of climate change...

But rich countries will face steady pressure on their economies from rising resource prices, making it harder to raise their standard of living. And some poor countries will find themselves living dangerously close to the edge — or over it.

Don’t look now, but the good times may have just stopped rolling.

Jet stream...moving northward

(AP)

The jet stream — America's stormy weather maker — is creeping northward and weakening, new research shows. That potentially means less rain in the already dry South and Southwest and more storms in the North.

And it could also translate into more and stronger hurricanes since the jet stream suppresses their formation. The study's authors said they have to do more research to pinpoint specific consequences.

From 1979 to 2001, the Northern Hemisphere's jet stream moved northward on average at a rate of about 1.25 miles a year, according to the paper published Friday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. The authors suspect global warming is the cause, but have yet to prove it.

The jet stream is a high-speed, constantly shifting river of air about 30,000 feet above the ground that guides storm systems and cool air around the globe. And when it moves away from a region, high pressure and clear skies predominate.

Two other jet streams in the Southern Hemisphere are also shifting poleward, the study found.

The northern jet stream "is the dominant thing that creates weather systems for the United States," said study co-author Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Stanford, Calif. "Bascially look south of where you are and that's probably a good guess of what your weather may be like in a few decades."

The study looked at the average location of the constantly moving jet stream and found that when looked at over decades, it has shifted northward. The study's authors and other scientists suggest that the widening of the Earth's tropical belt — a development documented last year — is pushing the three jet streams toward the poles...

A rate of 1.25 miles a year "doesn't sound like much, but that works out to about 18 feet per day," Caldeira said. "If you think about climate zones shifting northward at this rate, you can imagine squirrels keeping up. But what are oak trees going to do?

"We are seeing a general northward shift of all sorts of phenomena in the Northern Hemisphere occurring at rates that are faster than what ecosystems can keep up with," he said....

"The Greenland Factor"

As the island's ice sheets melt, lakes form, then disappear. Scientists investigated: Turns out the melting's glacial speed is increasing...

Greenland isn't just a huge ice-covered island. It is also a crucial factor in how global warming may reshape the world. If all the ice and snow on Greenland were to melt, the oceans would rise 20 feet...

So how fast is Greenland melting? To figure that out scientists have been clocking the speed at which ice sheets are sliding to the sea, and have shown that the speed has increased. New research published Apr. 17 in the online journal Science Express explains how this actually occurs. Here's what happens: Big lakes of meltwater form on the surface of the ice in the summer. The pressure from the water then creates cracks in the ice sheet that go all the way down to bedrock, more than half a mile below. The water then gushes down through the ice in a cataclysmic flow rivaling Niagara Falls.

Down at the bedrock, the water actually lifts up the massive ice sheet and acts like grease, doubling the speed of the glaciers' journey over the bedrock to the sea. "It matters," says Richard Alley, professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University, and an ice-sheet expert: "It is not 'run for the hills, we are doomed,' but this tells us that loss of the Greenland ice could happen in centuries, not millennia."

The new research proves a theory proposed by Alley and others. Scientists had been puzzled by the fact that the glaciers on Greenland seemed to be moving at an increasing speed (though at less than a tenth of a mile per year, the pace is glacial). The researchers already knew, from observations and calculations, that Greenland's ice is slowly shrinking simply from melting. That process is slow, however. "It would take a lot of centuries to melt the whole thing," says Alley. Yet if the glaciers also started sliding faster to the sea, the loss of ice could be more rapid.

In poring over satellite images, researchers noticed that large lakes form on the surface of the glaciers during the summer. Those lakes then suddenly disappear. "We see these things come and go," says Sarah Das, glaciologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Woods Hole, Mass. One possibility was the lakes simply drain into rivers on the surface. Or, scientists theorized, the water might generate enough pressure to crack the 3,000-foot-thick ice all the way to bedrock, pouring down through the ice.

A team led by Das and Ian Joughin of the University of Washington set out to prove which idea was correct. They flew to an area of glaciers with lakes, and set up camp on the ice. Then they installed an array of instruments. They put sensors in a lake 2½ miles wide to measure the changes in the amount of water it held. They deployed seismometers to detect rumbles in the ice, and put global-positioning units on the ice to chart its movement. They left the instruments in place when they left the study area, and waited.

It wasn't a long wait. "The lake drained about 10 days after we were there," Das says. When they went back, gathered up the instruments, and began to look at the data, it was clear that the crack theory was correct. The water had indeed rushed down to the bedrock. It had spread out under the ice, and raised the huge ice sheet by more than three feet. But there was a also a surprise: It happened in a relative flash. "The entire lake drained in about two hours," says Das. "It was a much more catastrophic drainage than we expected." The volume of water flowing down to bedrock matched the torrent over Niagara Falls. That realization led the team to ditch plans to explore other, still-intact lakes aboard a rubber boat. "We decided we'd leave the boat in its crate," laughs Das.

The data also showed that as the water flowed underneath it, the glacier did indeed speed up, doubling its velocity. That doesn't mean Greenland's ice is about to fall into the sea, since the glaciers move pretty slowly to begin with. But it does mean that the ice will disappear faster than just from melting alone, cutting the time from thousands of years to hundreds...

Sea Level Rise

Information resources:

EPA - Sea Level Rise Reports

Effect of a change in sea level on worldwide topography

"Melting causes lake in Chile to empty"

SANTIAGO, Chile (AP)- Melting ice in southern Chile caused a glacial lake to swell and then empty suddenly, sending a "tsunami" rolling through a river, a scientist said Thursday. No one was injured in the remote region.

Glacier scientist Gino Casassa said the melting of the Colonia glacier, which he blamed on rising world temperatures, filled the Cachet Lake and increased pressure on the ice sheet.

The water bored a 5-mile tunnel through the glacier and finally emptied into the Baker River on April 6.

"The remarkable thing is that the mass of water moved against the current of the river," Casassa told The Associated Press by telephone from the Center for Scientific Studies in the southern city of Valdivia. "It was a real river tsunami."

The lake was nearly full again by late Wednesday, he said.

Casassa said temperatures were unusually high during the recent Southern Hemisphere summer...