and passages and a flowing aqueduct that s turned the ground level into a swamp of pooling water and sucking mud.
which the Nobel-prize winning author made the case for creating a NASA for the oceans.
which a lovely little stream rushes to find its home in a deep blue lake. A glowing wife is cooking something delicious
In an open letter to editor-in-chief Ernest Heyn Steinbeck argued that the investigation of Earth's oceans was critical to the success of humanity
I know enough about the sea to know how pitifully little we know about it. We have not as a nation and a world been alert to the absolute necessity of going back to the sea for our survival.
I do not think $21 billion or a hundred of the same is too high a price for a round-trip ticket to the moon.
when under the seas three-fifths of our own world and over three-fifths of our world's treasure is undiscovered unknown and unclaimed.
Please believe Ernie that my passion for the world's seas and underseas does not lessen my interest in our space probes.
Ernie I'm going to try to put down some of the reasons why I think it is really necessary to explore the sea.
There is something for everyone in the sea...food for the hungry...incalculable wealth...the excitement and danger of exploration...
But the seas he has changed not In our relation to three-fifths of the world we correspond exactly to Neolithic man earful ignorant and swinish.
And the huge agriculture of the seas we have ignored completely except to rip out the fringes for iodine or fertilizer.
I said that three-fifths of the earth's surface is under the seas ut with the washing down from the continents of minerals
More important in the near future the plankton the basic reservoir of the world's food live in the sea.
But it is possible that we may be driven back to our mother the sea because we are running out of supplies.
but for placing whole producing cities on the sea bottom. If our inventive minds were given the money
and moving of sea water it would be a very short time before life-giving water would flow to desert places
To me personally the oceans mean safety mystery and wonder. During the depression I lived by the sea
and took most of my protein food from it and lived very well indeed. I have studied the endless variety of ocean animal life undreds of thousands more species than are to be found on land.
Several years ago I went along as an observer on the Mohole Project. You remember that was the expedition
which put down a drill string to the earth's crust under 18000 feet of water near Guadalupe Island off the west coast of Mexico.
The movement to possess the sea must be given the strength and structure to move. We must explore our world
There is something for everyone in the sea ncredible beauty for the artist the excitement and danger of exploration for the brave and restless an open door for the ingenuity and inventiveness of the clever a new world for the bored food for the hungry and incalculable material
And so I present to you an all-you-can-eat story not about the limits of stomach capacity but about the far shores of edibility.**
and then jumped across thousands of miles of open ocean to appear in Australia where it devastated the banana industry in the Darwin region.
and that northbound shipments were threatened too by piracy along the African coast. One big question is how the disease actually arrived in Mozambique.
#Colorado river Delta To Get Colorado river Water For First time In Yearsdampen is the right word for it.
Later this month officials plan to release water from the Colorado river into the river's delta.
Since the 1930s successive dam projects have held back the river so that folks in the U s. and Mexico can use Colorado water for drinking farming and everything else.
It represents less than 1 percent of the river's annual flow. Nevertheless scientists think that even this amount of water alculated to mimic days of light spring flooding from the time before dams ill help.
The goal is to dampen broad swathes of the arid Colorado river delta Nature News'Alexandra Witze writes allowing new cottonwood
Or as science puts it we caused a harmful top-down trophic cascade by removing an apex predator the wolf from the food web.
Some of the recent studies suggest that trophic cascades in land-based ecosystems are more center out than top-down composed of many many radial lines of cause
For centuries residents of Guiyu s four villages had scratched out a living farming rice along the Lianjiang River.
Others acid-stripped circuit boards in caustic baths near the river to salvage bits of gold. No one wore protective clothing.
Puckett estimated that just more than half of the material processed in Guiyu actually got recycled judging from the tons of plastic leaded glass and burned circuit boards discarded near waterways and in open fields.
and drainage tiles most ended up in landfills incinerators or the ocean. But by the time he saw Puckett s film Biddle had achieved quietly
#With few hard frosts, tropical mangroves push northcold-sensitive mangrove forests have expanded dramatically along Florida's Atlantic Coast as the frequency of killing frosts has declined according to a new study based on 28 years
Between 1984 and 2011 the Florida Atlantic coast from the Miami area northward gained more than 3000 acres (1240 hectares) of mangroves.
Between Cape canaveral National Seashore and Saint augustine mangroves doubled in area. Meanwhile between the study's first five years and its last five years nearby Daytona Beach recorded 1. 4 fewer days per year
when temperatures fell below 28.4 degrees Fahrenheit(-4 degrees Celsius). The number of killing frosts in southern Florida was unchanged.
The mangroves'march up the coast as far north as St augustine Fla. is a striking example of one way climate change's impacts show up in nature.
Salt marshes are threatened by drainage polluted runoff and rising sea levels. Florida naturalists noticed that mangroves now grow in places that once were too chilly for the tropical trees.
While the study only looked at the Atlantic Coast the same trend is taking place on Florida's Gulf Coast Cavanaugh
and descended to the bottom of the sea looked in their own backyards (California) and explored the other side of the world (Africa).
of sea fan found off the Pacific coast. For 100 years the fiery red sea fan with long elegant branches had been lumped in with 36 other species of Euplexaura until Academy octocoral expert Gary Williams was able to set the record straight.
After comparing a colony collected off the coast of San francisco to older samples in the Academy's collection Williams announced an entirely new genus
Williams the Academy's Curator of Invertebrate Zoology and Geology encountered the sea fan now named Chromoplexaura marki during a two-week survey of the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary
The proposed expansion--roughly 2000 additional square miles--would encompass the largest upwelling site in North america better protecting the nutrient-rich waters that support everything from reefs and seabird colonies to endangered whales.
A Walk on the Ocean Floorthat was not the only new species found in the ocean this year.
Scientists at the Academy dove into their collections to discover 24 other new species that live in the world's oceans.
The color pattern it displays is a perfect camouflage that helps the animal blend into its habitat on the bottom of the sea.
This bamboo shark like a similar species on display at the Academy's Steinhart Aquarium uses its pectoral fins to walk along the ocean floor.
and the University of California-Riverside--is uncovering evidence for the evolutionary processes that paved the way for the amazing diversity of the more than 300000 flowering plant species we enjoy today.
But Amborella is unique in that it does not seem to have acquired many new mobile sequences in the past several million years stated Sue Wessler of the University of California-Riverside.
when these other factors were considered was the region around Lake victoria in East Africa. The area currently has little vegetation biomass due to heavy degradation
Rather regions of the Upper Guinean rainforests of West Africa and the Lower Guinean rainforests which are situated on the coast of Nigeria
and around the Great lakes using a citizen scientist data base--the Project Feeder Watch --which showed that the numbers of three woodpecker species
We measured large differences in hydrologic response between watersheds with different land-use histories and land cover said Fred Ogden STRI Senior Research Associate and Civil engineering Professor at the University of Wyoming.
and include this improved understanding in a high-resolution hydrological model that we are developing to predict land-use effects in tropical watersheds.
Land use in the watershed not only affects world commerce but also water availability for Panama's major urban areas.
The 700-hectare Panama watershed experiment also known as Agua Salud will run for 20 to 30 years making it the largest ongoing study of land use in the tropics.
But University of Utah biologists discovered that roly-poly pikas living in rockslides near sea level in Oregon can survive hot weather by eating more moss than any other mammal.
Yet their population extends thousands of feet all the way down the north slope of Mount Hood to the often wet foggy Columbia river Gorge
The river there is only about 150 feet above sea level. In the gorge--which runs roughly 30 miles east-to-west--these American pikas--Ochotona princeps--live among the rocks on moss-covered talus slopes.
In cooperation with the Oregon Zoo and local wildlife agencies Varner has helped begin a citizen science program in the Columbia river Gorge so local hikers can help monitor the pikas.
#Saving Fijis coral reefs linked to forest conservation upstreamthe health of coral reefs offshore depend on the protection of forests near the sea according to a new study by the Wildlife Conservation Society that outlines the importance of terrestrial protected areas
Thinking about the connections between the land and sea is done rarely when designing protected areas--Fiji is leading the way globally.
Looking to support the committee's efforts to land-sea planning initiative the study authors systematically analyzed six scenarios for expanding Fiji's network of terrestrial protected area networks with the aim to uncover how well each approach did to protect different forest types
and link land to sea conservation helps to ensure the long term security of their globally important coral reef ecosystems while supporting the livelihoods and resilience of coastal communities.
Cellulose could come from a variety of biological sources including trees plants algae ocean-dwelling organisms called tunicates
and river flooding in the future. What they found was:#¢#¢The frequency of drought may increase by more than 20 per cent in some regions.#¢
#¢Increases in river flooding are expected in more than half of the areas investigated.#¢#¢Adverse climate change impacts can combine to create global'hotspots'of climate change impacts.
For the project--'Intersectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISI-MIP)'-Dr Gosling contributed simulations of global river flows to help understand how climate change might impact on global droughts water scarcity and river flooding.
while river flooding could decrease by the end of the century across about a third of the globe increases are expected at more than half of the areas investigated under a high greenhouse gas emissions scenario.
Above all globalization and perhaps climate change bring not only more foreign plants and invertebrates to these shores but also--more worrying by far--new pests and diseases especially of trees such as the recent ash chalara.
and wetlands are required certainly simply to ensure healthy populations of birds like the stone curlew as well as to sustain a wide range of endangered plants.
Having all the genetic information is like having a detailed roadmap of the organism said Jackie Burns director of the UF/IFAS Citrus Research and Education Center in Lake Alfred.
The research was conducted on the Smithsonian's 700-hectare Panama canal Watershed Experiment a long-term research site designed to quantify ecosystem services provided by different land uses.
Mangrove forests protect coastlines and are important for biodiversity; they are a nursery ground for many fish species
For example in Indonesia mangrove rehabilitation projects are being developed using brushwood groynes to counteract erosion and enable mangrove seedlings to develop.
As the highest glacier in the eastern Alps (2. 4 miles or 3. 9 km above sea level) Alto dell'Ortles is located in the heart of Europe--one of the most industrialized and populated areas
When it rains for instance the pesticides are washed into rivers and lakes where in higher concentrations they can result in effects on aquatic organisms.
This is because many fungicides do not specifically combat fungi but prevent general processes in cells such as energy production
It is recommended that protected areas will be established for remaining old-growth forests and wetlands. Five valuable natural areas in northwest Russia have been designated pilot sites for the BPAN project.
#Coral reef gardens found thriving in Gulf of Mainenew research has found a type of coral reef called Octocorals previously thought to have diminished off the east coast of the US in the Gulf of Maine has been discovered recently surviving in dense coral garden communities in more than one location.
The paper'Octocoral gardens in the Gulf of Maine (NW Atlantic) by Peter Auster et al published in Biodiversity studied Octocorals a type of fragile deep-sea coral reef that grow
Octocorals used to be a common part of seafloor fauna in the Gulf of Maine. However based on past accounts of where corals had been had found it appeared that a century of fishing with bottom contact gear had reduced their distribution to just a small habitable area.
A recent expedition in July this year to the western Jordan Basin and Schoodic Ridge regions of the Gulf of Maine revealed an initial report of impressive octoral gardens.
The researchers recommend greater conservation attention to these spatially rare octocoral garden communities in the Gulf.
and it reached the Atlantic coast of Argentina in late 2011. By 2012 the insect had penetrated already deep into south Patagonia reaching the gateways to some of the major national parks. Given that colonies
Furthermore food provisioning by tourists on beaches has encouraged the iguanas to spend disproportionate amounts of time foraging in the area rather than further in the island resulting in higher levels of marine life being ingested.
In gallery forests near rivers ring-tailed lemurs regularly sleep high in the canopies of tall trees.
Sediment cores from the Meerfelder Maar lake depict a typical deposition pattern which was also found in the sediments of Lake Krakenes in southern Norway but with a time lag of 120 years.
and Central europe and we can find them with new technologies as tine ash particles in the sediment deposits of lakes.
Therefore this ash material reflects a distinct time marker in the sediments of the lakes in the Eifel and in Norway.
Furthermore lake sediments are very accurate climate archives especially when they contain seasonal bands similar like tree rings.
The sediments of the Eifel maar lake depict the rapid warming 100 years before the volcanic ash
while it is seen in the southern Norwegian lake sediment 20 years after the volcanic eruption. The same warming but with a 120 difference in timing between the about 1200 km distant locations?
and the amount of sediment entering the area's rivers and streams--and ultimately the Gulf of mexico.
The Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley located in the historic floodplain of the Mississippi river stretches from Cairo Illinois south to the Gulf of mexico.
One of the largest coastal and river basins in the world the area is also one of the most affected by floods erosion and sediment deposition as a result of more than a century of converting bottomland hardwood forests to agricultural lands.
and fertilizers the latter associated with the formation of the hypoxic (low oxygen) dead zone in the Gulf of mexico.
in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley the frequently flooded agricultural land in the batture (land that lies between a river
and in reducing sediment flow from agricultural lands into our watersheds notes Carlton Owen president and CEO of the Endowment.
The researchers chose two Lower Mississippi river Alluvial Valley watersheds--the large Lower Yazoo River Watershed
and the smaller Peters Creek Watershed--to model the effects of reforestation in or near the battures on water outflow and sediment load (the amount of solid material carried by a river or stream).
They performed two simulations the first to predict water outflow and sediment load without reforestation the second to project over 10 years the potential impacts of converting different levels--25 50 75 and 100 percent--of the land to forest in or near the battures.
and reduce the effects of sediment load as far as the Gulf of mexico says Ouyang lead author of the article and research hydrologist at the SRS Center for Bottomland Hardwoods Research.
For the Lower Yazoo River watershed a twofold increase in forest land area would result in approximately a twofold reduction in the annual volume of water outflow
and the mass of sediment load moving into the river. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by USDA Forest Service#Southern Research Station.
Since coming out of the ice age some 10000 years ago summer solar insolation in the Northern hemisphere has been decreasing as a result of the Earth's changing orbit according to Edward Brook a paleoclimatologist in Oregon State's College of Earth Ocean
which produce vast wetlands and emit methane into the atmosphere. Yet some 5000 years ago atmospheric methane began rising
On the natural side changes in the Earth's orbit could have been responsible for increasing methane emissions from tropical wetlands.
Applications extend to terrestrial data from less accessible sites such as deep lake basins or undisturbed river bed sediments.
#¢Sea levels will likely rise by an average of 3 feet by the end of this century.
Of particular concern is that storm surges will compound impacts of rising sea levels Ingram said.
Arrow indicates dark paleo-wetland soil layer containing fossil leaf deposits with four plus meters of historical sediment buildup on top.
Instead we found that most of the valley bottoms at the time of European contact were dominated by wetland ecosystems with numerous small stable'anastomosing'streams.
and little light seeps in among the understory of the Cedar River Municipal Watershed about 30 miles east of Seattle.
and a handful of other instruments will help them map winter temperatures throughout the watershed as they track snow accumulation and melt.
This fieldwork piggybacks on a recent finding by Jessica Lundquist a UW associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and her lab that shows that tree cover actually causes snow to melt more quickly on the western slopes of the Pacific Northwest's Cascade
and healthy river flows for fish said Rolf Gersonde who designs and implements forest restoration projects in the Cedar River Watershed.
Reservoirs in the western Cascades hold approximately a year's supply of water. That means when our snowpack is gone--usually by the summer solstice--our water supply depends on often meager summer rainfall to get us through until fall he said.
Snowpack is a key component of the Northwest's reservoir storage system so watershed managers care about how forest changes due to management decisions
or natural disturbances may impact that melting timetable. The UW's research in the watershed has been a beneficial partnership researchers say.
The 90000-acre watershed is owned by the City of Seattle and provides drinking water to 1. 4 million people.
Watershed managers have tried thinning and cutting gaps in parts of the forest to encourage more tree
#Plan to address hypoxia in Gulf of mexico urged by expertsdespite a 12-year action plan calling for reducing the hypoxia zone in the Gulf of mexico little progress has been made
and there is no evidence that nutrient loading to the Gulf has decreased during this period. University of Illinois researchers have identified some of the biophysical and social barriers to progress
Biophysical and Social Barriers Restrict Water Quality Improvements in the Mississippi river Basin was published in the Nov 5 issue of Environmental science and Technology.
David said that the Gulf of mexico hypoxic zone that was measured in July 2013 was 5800 square miles (nearly the size of Connecticut) the result of riverine losses of nitrate and total phosphorus from the Mississippi river Basin.
constructed wetlands; buffer strips; and conversion of row crops to CRP or perennial crops. David said that unfortunately few of these methods are used on tile-drained fields
For example end-of-pipe practices such as tile bioreactors or constructed wetlands have substantial construction costs require land to be taken out of production
This leads to an ever-widening trust gap that is a major barrier to effective collaboration and policy development for water-quality improvement in the Mississippi river Basin and beyond.
because it's long been assumed that nitrogen crucial to plant growth mainly arrived with floods of river water each spring according to Thomas Deluca a University of Washington professor of environmental
It also might lead to more accurate models of nitrogen in river systems because none of the prominent models consider nitrogen being fixed in floodplains Deluca said.
Scientists model nitrogen loading of rivers especially where industrial fertilizers and effluent from wastewater-treatment plants cause dead zones and other problems in the lower reaches
and mouths of rivers. Ten rivers and 71 flood plains were studied in northern Fennoscandia a region that includes parts of Scandinavia and Finland.
The rivers were chosen because their upper reaches are pristine haven't been dammed and are not subject to sources of human-caused nitrogen enrichment--much like river systems humans encountered there hundreds of years ago as agriculture emerged in such boreal habitats.
Boreal habitat--found at 60 degrees latitude and north all the way into the Arctic circle where it meets tundra habitat--is the second largest biome
or habitat type on Earth. In the northern regions of the boreal the surrounding hillsides have thin infertile soils and lack shrubs or herbs that can fix nitrogen.
Little of it reaches waterways. On the floodplains high rates of nitrogen fixation occur in thick slimy black mats of cyanobacteria growing in seasonably submerged sediments and coating the exposed roots and stems of willows and sedges.
We saw this happening along the coastline from Mexico to Costa rica and then we realized that carbon exchange can explain it.
and Azteca ants (Azteca pittieri) Pringle and her colleagues studied the interaction at 26 sites in seasonally dry tropical forests along the Pacific coast of southern Mexico and Central America.
whether the Philistines and other Sea Peoples--groups of seafaring invaders from around the Aegean sea--made use of local pig breeds
Domestic European pig breeds may have been introduced by groups of Sea Peoples--including the Philistines mentioned in the Bible--who migrated to the coast of the Levant starting in the 12th century BCE and settled in places like Gaza Ashkelon and Ashdod.
but also contributed to global warming and the pollution of aquifers rivers lakes and coastal ecosystems.
or purify the rivers. To achieve lasting food and environmental security we need an agricultural soil ecosystem that more closely approximates the close and efficient cycling in natural ecosystems
#Redwood trees reveal history of west coast rain, fog, ocean conditionsmany people use tree ring records to see into the past.
But redwoods--the iconic trees that are the world's tallest living things--have so far proven too erratic in their growth patterns to help with reconstructing historic climate.
This is really the first time that climate reconstruction has ever been said done with redwoods Jim Johnstone who recently completed a postdoctoral position at the UW-based Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and the Ocean.
While coastal redwoods are not the longest-lived trees on the West Coast they do contain unique information about their foggy surroundings.
Redwoods are restricted to a very narrow strip along the coastline Johnstone said. They're tied to the coastline
and they're sensitive to marine conditions so they actually may tell you more about what's happening over the ocean than they do about
what's happening over land. The new study used cores from Northern California coastal redwoods to trace climate back 50 years.
When seawater evaporates off the ocean to form clouds some drops fall as rain over the ocean
Fog on the other hand forms near shore and blows on land where it drips down through the branches until the trees use it like rainwater.
Related research by Johnstone shows that the amount of West Coast fog is tied closely to the surface temperature of the ocean
so redwoods may be able to tell us something about the long-term patterns of ocean change such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.
Zebra mussels muscle-out native mussels in Lake Champlain. Burmese pythons devastate local wildlife in the Everglades.
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