including the pollution of rivers and lakes. But Chinese farmers are often unaware of the consequences of over-fertilization.
and oceans to futuristic'solar-radiation management'techniques for example, creating haze in the stratosphere to act as a cheap layer of sunscreen.
Another cadre of researchers is pushing a more benign technology that involves seeding clouds with sea salt to increase their brightness.
The technique could be focused on regional problems such as disappearing Arctic sea ice say advocates, who suggest that a research programme could be presented to the intergovernmental Arctic Council for approval.
the team also correlated rainfall patterns with nearly 150 years of sea-surface-temperature recordings throughout the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
Colorado, reveals how distant ocean conditions might affect Asian weather again, useful for refining climate models.
by hot air rising inland over the continents, pulling in moisture from the sea. Future changes in that process will be driven not just by traditional patterns of sea-surface-temperature fluctuations
but by changes in sunlight-reducing haze from air pollution from industrialized areas of China, for example,
and differences in the degree to which global warming affects sea and land. The drivers today are different,
Increased planting of herbicide-tolerant crops may also have reduced the use of many herbicides that linger in soil and waterways
Research A microbial world Estimates for the number of microbial species in the world's oceans have jumped massively.
But the latest analyses indicate that the oceans are home to at least 20 million types,
The protected biodiversity hot spot covers more than half a million square kilometres of ocean, and will include a'no-take'reserve where all commercial fishing is banned.
but that the specimens came from a strip of trees along a waterway through a savannah1.
The oil spewing into the Gulf of mexico was stemmed partially this week, after BP managed to force a siphon tube into the leaking wellhead pipe.
Number crunch 14.5 °C April's combined land and sea surface temperature: the hottest April on record, at 0. 76 °C above the average for the twentieth century.
) Canadell says that cutting down forests sometimes results in the drying out of wetlands and peat bogs and the release of their huge carbon stores
BP's latest efforts to staunch the flow of oil from its wellhead in the Gulf of mexico have failed,
The waterfowl, found mainly in Lake Alaotra in eastern Madagascar, is thought to have been killed off by poaching and the introduction to its habitat of carnivorous fish.
flowing from the ruptured Gulf of mexico well up to four times the official estimate from a month ago.
and sea level rise of different greenhouse-gas emissions scenarios. It also concludes that once the global average temperature warms beyond a certain point,
Oil gushed into the Gulf of mexico at a staggering rate from the damaged riser that had attached the platform to the well.
Some of the oil was trapped well below the Gulf's surface, with undetermined effects. It seemed as though the spill might drag on forever.
Tunnell points out that the Gulf may have been healthier and more resilient then, so it's difficult to say
whether species in the northern Gulf will rebound as quickly from the current spill. But the curtailment of commercial fishing owing to fears over contaminated seafood may hasten the recovery of exploited species. In some parts of Campeche,
but that more productive ecosystems such as mangrove swamps or salt marshes the closest analogue to mangroves in the northern Gulf retain oil indefinitely.
That oil made its way around the Gulf, and at one point some beaches in Texas took an unexpected oil hit after it mixed with surface waters close to shore.
Nature Newsthe colour of her historic, red wood villa on the Bosporus waterfront in Istanbul may be fading,
With a limited labour force but ample subsidized chemical fertilizer available in most of rural China, dumping this phosphate-rich animal manure into waterways has become an easier and cheaper option than using it to fertilize cropland.
A pollution census conducted by China's government earlier this year earlier this year see'China takes stock of environment')found that livestock is the largest contributor to run off pollution from the land into waterways,
%Excess phosphorus in many of China's lakes, coastal waters and rivers has caused repeated occurrences of harmful algal blooms known as eutrophication.
an ecologist at the Beijing-based Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, examined phosphate run off into Lake Tai,
It found that the area of land from which water drains into the lake exports more than 6 kilograms of phosphate per hectare-most
a study of ocean sediments suggests. The findings, published in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1,
Dahl's team looked at the concentration of molybdenum and the ratios of its isotopes atoms of the same element with different numbers of neutrons and different masses in oceanic rocks for clues to the concentration of oxygen in the seas
Molybdenum in sea water behaves in different ways, depending on the concentration of oxygen. In oxygenated water, the lighter of the two main molybdenum isotopes 95mo and 98mo is absorbed into the seabed
leaving the heavier isotope in solution. Sea water gets lighter and heavier as a measure of the balance between oxic
and anoxic conditions, says Tim Lyons, a geochemist at the University of California, Riverside. Patterns of heavy and light molybdenum in sea water, reflecting oxygenation levels, are captured in deposited rocks called shales.
By examining the shale strata, scientists can chart periods of low and high oxygenation in the history of the seabed and, by inference, in the oceans themselves.
Levels of oxygenation in the oceans are assumed to reflect levels in the atmosphere. Dahl's study uncovered two periods when heavy molybdenum isotopes show up in the shale records
suggesting that oxygen levels increased in the Ediacaran period, about 560-550 million years ago,
when oceans are ventilated the oxygen in the atmosphere is going up, but that isn't necessarily the case,
adding that lowering the supply of nutrients in the ocean also increases oxygenation, as animal life respires less.
which costs farmers in Africa's Great lakes region an estimated half a billion dollars every year. Bananas infected with BXW ripen unevenly and prematurely,
Mayans converted wetlands to farmland: Nature Newsthe ancient Maya civilization is recognized widely for its awe-inspiring pyramids, sophisticated mathematics and advanced written language.
researchers have found that the Maya coped with tough environmental conditions by developing ingenious methods to grow crops in wetland areas.
The Maya's home was a tough environment replete with recurring droughts and rising sea levels,
or wetlands. So one of historians'biggest questions about the Maya civilization is managed how they to feed their huge populations.
In the 1970s, researchers began characterizing the remains of elaborate irrigation canals found in wetland areas.
or whether the use of wetlands for farming was an important part of the Maya agricultural system.
Working in low-lying wetlands, which are difficult to access and navigate, the team dug trenches some 3 metres deep and 10-20 metres long to study soil and water chemistry.
Their research suggests that the Maya built canals between wetlands to divert water and create new farmland,
and remote sensing techniques suggest that this wetland system was probably around 100 kilometres across.
the idea that the Maya farmed wetland areas extensively has been controversial among archaeologists. But the new work is very suggestive that the Maya were modifying these swamps intensively to make a living,
One of the reasons some scholars dismissed the idea that wetlands were fundamentally important to the Maya is that they are often far from famous sites such as Tikal and Chichen Itza.
But there must have been dense populations living in rural areas near wetlands, far from the glitzy urban centres, says Beach.
When a Westerner goes into a wetland today, they see nothing but trouble. It's difficult to tame,
In areas where she had some expertise clouds and sea ice, for example she felt that the report's authors were not appropriately careful.
or How much will sea level rise? Instead the experts give ranges and confidence intervals and the like. More important, other scientists part ways with Curry over how significant those uncertainties are to the final calculation.
and how much that extra water should raise sea level. Warming, though, could also affect the rate at
which glaciers flow from the ice sheets down to the sea to dump icebergs, which raises sea level independently.
Predicting the latter effect is tougher. In fact, Curry says, we don't know how to quantify it, so we don't even include it in our models.
citing diminished sea ice in their native habitats. The final decision will be made after a period of 60 days to allow public comment;
Oil-spill budget Scientists have welcomed a long-awaited peer-reviewed US government report on the short-term fate of the oil from the Deepwater horizon spill in the Gulf of mexico this summer.
Susan Lieberman, director of international policy for the Pew Environment Group in WASHINGTON DC, says the agreement showed that management of high seas fisheries was flawed and inadequate.
and Wildlife Service has set aside roughly 484,000 square kilometres in Alaska and the surrounding seas as a'critical habitat'for the polar bear (Ursus maritimus),
Almost all of the protected area is sea ice off Alaska's northern and western coasts.
to relocating fish to cooler lakes farther north. Because of the large uncertainties in the estimated impact of climate change, some researchers prefer to avoid putting dollar figures on climate-change costs at all.
Spill science scarce The presidential commission investigating last year's huge oil spill in the Gulf of mexico has called for more science in federal decisions on oil production and spill response.
Business BP in Russian deal BP is joining up with Russia's state oil company Rosneft to drill in the Arctic waters of the Kara Sea.
000-square-kilometre area that it compares in potential to the north Sea. Rosneft will get 5%of BP's ordinary shares, worth around US$8 billion.
Nature Newsan international effort to protect coastal wetlands by assigning them carbon credits kicked off last week in Paris. The aim is to do for some wetland plants mangroves, seagrasses and salt marshes
Wetland plants and forests act as carbon sinks, locking away substantial amounts of carbon absorbed from the atmosphere.
The ocean absorbs some 25%of the world's carbon-dioxide emissions, and in its watery depths are acres of seagrass meadows that use about 15%of the dissolved carbon to grow.
Yet the world's coastal wetlands have been in continuous decline over the past century and now cover just 2%of the seabed1.
When coastal wetlands are drained, the soil is oxidized and carbon dioxide is released into the air, contributing to climate change.
The'blue carbon'concept aims to protect some of the most endangered wetlands by assigning credits to their stored carbon2.
For starters, no one knows how much carbon is stored by wetlands around the world-largely because no one knows exactly how many seagrass beds
That means there is no good estimate of how much wetlands destruction contributes to global emissions. Stephen Crooks, climate change programme manager at the environmental consultancy ESA PWA in San francisco, California, estimates that emissions from drained mangroves and salt marshes total half a billion tonnes
protecting wetlands may not make a huge difference to anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions. Oceanographer Christoph Heinze at the University of Bergen, Norway, points out that the carbon sequestration abilities of wetland plants are
quite literally, a drop in the ocean compared with Earth's other carbon sinks. But Crooks points out that marine carbon circulation models have tended to consider wetlands'current carbon sequestration abilities,
yet ignore the impact of releasing thousands of years of stored carbon when the lands are dried out.
Pidgeon acknowledges that a financial system such as blue carbon credits is at least a decade down the line.
in parallel with further efforts to quantify the scale of Earth's wetlands and how much carbon they hold.
Arctic fishing Fishing catches in the seasonally ice-free Arctic Sea by Russia the United states and Canada were 75 times greater than reported to the United nations'Food and agriculture organization from 1950 to 2006, according to estimates published last week (D. Zeller et al.
Crucially, the team's modelling work also suggests that the bulk of the seeds are distributed on the flood plains where they are likely to germinate rather than in permanent bodies of water such as lakes.
and manure damage sensitive wetland ecosystems. Coleman says that the cattle do stop fires, by eating the vegetation that forms potential fuel,
for example, has moved from the warming seas off mainland Australia and has invaded more temperate waters off Tasmania.
the fact that many are dying after high ocean temperature events may have something to do with humans stressing them with pollution, dynamite fishing, recreational activities and coastal development.
if the reefs were overstressed not by other things humans are doing again, we'll never know.
A previous attempt at quantifying peat-forest conversion to oil-palm planting was made by the nonprofit organization Wetlands International for the Malaysian state of Sarawak on Borneo.
When global pressures, including rising ocean temperatures or ocean acidification, are taken into account, about 75%are threatened,
with the proportion expected to rise to 90%by 2030. The World Resources Institute in WASHINGTON DC published the statistics on 23 february in Reefs at Risk
a report updating a 1998 study. The latest report emphasized that reefs affect society, providing food and coastline protection,
and said that they can rebound if communities stop unsustainable practices. Oil-spill health study A study claiming to be the largest ever to follow up the long-term effects of an oil spill on human health was launched on 28 february (see nihgulfstudy. org.
and volunteers who supported the cleanup effort after the Deepwater horizon disaster in the Gulf of mexico. Booking a rocket The first contracts have been signed to send researchers into suborbit using commercial spacecraft.
A flight test vehicle, Enterprise, will travel to the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New york city.
Although carbon reserves in other types of tropical wetland forest have been assessed, the amount of carbon in mangroves has been ignored largely,
Kauffman and his team assessed aboveground and belowground carbon pools in mangrove sites occupying estuaries and oceanic settings, such as island coasts.
The team found that this underground layer is thicker in mangrove forests in estuaries than in those near the ocean
the relative area of mangrove forests in estuaries compared with those near oceans, and the effect of land-use changes on carbon release from soils.
cleaning up contaminated soil and waterways, and the development of large-scale livestock farms to make it easier to collect
hydro, wind, solar, geothermal and oceans). More than half of the 164 future scenarios presented in the report suggest that these sources will provide more than 27%of the global energy supply by 2050.
Ancient sea jelly makes tree of life wobble: Nature News A 580-million-year-old fossil is casting doubt on the established tree of animal life.
believe that Eoandromeda is the ancient ancestor of modern ocean dwellers known as comb jellies gelatinous creatures similar to jellyfish,
but in theory, the stable temperatures and ph of sea water should preserve DNA well, adds Matthew Collins, a bioarchaeologist from the University of York,
which sticks out from the Amundsen Sea coast on the west of the continent. The rift (pictured, around 80 metres wide and 50 metres deep) was seen first in Mid-october by NASA's Operation Icebridge project, which released images last week.
Island states threatened by rising seas, such as Grenada and Papua new guinea, had hoped for more immediate, aggressive steps.
such as improved access to Arctic shipping routes owing to melting sea ice, increased wheat yields as a result of warmer conditions,
which is less abundant in the world s oceans than brown seaweed, but"relatively easy to ferment using yeast,
Xinhua/Photoshotevents Drought in China After a decade-long dry spell, China's largest freshwater lake has shrunk to its smallest size in years,
The area of Poyang Lake, in the eastern Jiangxi province, was 183 square kilometres early this year, nearly half the average of 344 square kilometres recorded since 1951.
769 metres through Antarctica's ice sheet to reach the subglacial Lake Vostok. The breakthrough was made on 5 february,
although the water was melted probably from ice at the bottom of the borehole, not from the lake itself.
See page 289 for more on the flu-virus debate. go. nature. com/pf7bwv20-24 february Marine scientists'responses to the Gulf of mexico oil spill in 2010 are discussed among topics at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in Salt lake city, Utah
Geochemist Germain Bayon and his colleagues at The french Research Institute for Exploration of the Sea in Plouzanã examined the weathering of sediment samples drawn from the mouth of the Congo river.
Forests, rangelands and wetlands. The land rush is very much jeopardizing the existence of these resources.
"I don't know that it's a sea change yet, Gibbs says, "but they are definitely changing the rules
algal blooms and damage to important wetlands, eucalyptus forests and wildlife. To address these problems,
including the downstream Lower Lakes and Coorong regions, in the form of increased tourism and improved water quality, for example.
The plan would mean fewer blooms of blue-green algae and less risk of acidification of the Lower Lakes.
This'deep sequencing'technique has been used to characterize mixtures of microbes living in environments such as oceans and animal guts.
covering 3. 1 Â million square kilometres of ocean along the nation s coasts. Researchers were worried by draft proposals last year (see Nature 480,14-15;
Ocean acidity The International atomic energy agency (IAEA), based in Vienna, is to create a centre to facilitate
and communicate research into ocean acidification, it announced on 18 june. The centre, to be launched this summer at the IAEA s Environmental Laboratories in Monaco,
affected by acidifying oceans.  German excellence Thirty-nine universities have won each a share of  2. 4  billion (US$3 billion) in the second round of Germany s Excellence Initiative
Russia, the United nations educational scientific and cultural organization s World Heritage Committee meets to discuss the state of conservation sites including Australia s Great Barrier  Reef. whc36-russia2012. ru26-28 june
marine scientists plan out an international network to monitor the acidification of the oceans. go. nature. com/lopgt6
destroying 6, 600 Â hectares of wetlands and primary tropical forest. And they predicted that the trend will only get worse.
depending on the size of the waterway, the revised law and presidential order reduce those requirements to just 5-100 metres.
Dry weather is expected to continue into August in the southern to central Plains, across the Gulf coast and along the west coast
of sea to reach Wolf, probably carried by pirates and whalers. Using DNA from museum specimens
so that they can tolerate irrigation with sea water? It would be really presumptuous of me to say,
nsidcarctic sea-ice coverage reached the lowest point of this year s summer melt on 16 Â September, the US National Snow and Ice Data center in Boulder,
On that date, around 3. 41 million square kilometres of sea in the Arctic were covered at least 15 in ice,
and cooperative conservation measures will improve the water quality of our lakes, rivers, streams and coastal environments.
and large areas of ocean and coastlines are polluted. What role should the federal government play domestically
and through foreign policy to protect the environmental health and economic vitality of the oceans? We are directing additional funding to Gulf Coast restoration to bring back the fisheries and coastal ecosystems
which are still recovering in the aftermath of the Deepwater horizon spill. We kicked off the Great lakes Restoration Initiative, the largest investment in the Great lakes in two decades,
which is targeting ecological problems such as invasive species, toxic hot spots, and pollution runoff. We are cleaning up the Chesapeake bay,
These are significant steps that are helping us improve the health of our oceans and build more robust fisheries.
and vitality of the oceans and to adjust policy when necessary. A Romney Administration will safeguard the long-term health of fisheries,
No native microbes were found by an early analysis of the ice on the drill used by a Russian team to penetrate Lake Vostok, a body of water buried deep under Antarctica s ice, in February.
The top layer of the lake seems to be lifeless, according to"very preliminary results presented by Sergey Bulat of the Petersburg Nuclear physics Institute in Gatchina, Russia, at the 12th European Workshop on Astrobiology in Stockholm on 16 october.
they would be reared similarly isolated from the ocean. The prospects for research are better outside the United states. Last year,
Scientists assume that the rest is absorbed largely by the oceans and plants, but ground-based monitoring stations are too few and far apart to pinpoint the sinks.
but the severe droughts of 2005 and 2010 seem to have been influenced by warmer sea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic ocean.
 hours of drilling to reach Antarctica s subglacial Lake  Ellsworth, buried under more than 3  kilometres of ice (see Nature 491,506-507;
Reed Schererdrilling team reaches Lake Whillans A US research team drilled through 800-metre-thick ice to reach the subglacial Lake Whillans in Western Antarctica on 28 january.
The project is the first to retrieve fully intact samples of liquid water (pictured) and sediment from a subglacial lake,
This is the first time that researchers have probed the water of one of the more than 300 Â lakes discovered under Antarctica s ice in recent years.
Perciasepe, currently deputy administrator at the environment agency, developed a watershed-protection programme while previously at the agency under Bill clinton.
Jane Lubchencolubchenco (pictured) promoted a new US oceans policy and overhauled the way the agency disseminated environmental data.
Her successor will face questions about catch limits in ocean fisheries, and will need to resolve cost overruns
fuelling concerns over the future of glaciers that hold enough water to raise global sea levels by around 7 Â metres.
it also implies that Antarctica has much greater potential to raise sea levels than previously thought.
respectively enough to raise sea levels by about 0. 6 millimetres per year3. Scientists think that by 2100
the global sea level may have risen by 0. 5-1. 2 metres above current levels. Although ice loss is currently greatest in Greenland,
which one of the company s oil platforms in the Gulf of mexico exploded. The deal follows a $4. 5-billion settlement last year by oil
Comb jellies paddle through the sea with iridescent cilia and snare prey with sticky tentacles. They are much more complex than sponges they have nerves, muscles, tissue layers and light sensors, all of which the sponges lack."
That was especially the case for soil on small islands in northern lakes, where wildfires rage only rarely
But when Lindahl and his colleagues carbon-dated samples taken at various depths throughout the soil on 30 islands in two Swedish lakes near the Arctic circle,
which can reveal changes in ice mass and ocean circulation; SMOS is measuring soil moisture and ocean salinity;
and Cryosat-2 is monitoring variations in sea-ice thickness and changes in the mass of large ice sheets and glaciers.
Three further missions Swarm, ADM-Aeolus and Earthcare are scheduled for launch over the next three years,
In the second study, a team led by St andrews marine mammal science student Jenny Allen examined 27 years of whale-watching data from the Gulf of Maine, off the eastern coast of the United states,
But in 1980, observers in the gulf saw something new: a humpback slapping the surface of the water with its tail fluke before proceeding with a standard bubble feed.
but by 2007,37%of the humpbacks in the Gulf of Maine were observed using the technique,
and a belt extending around the Bohai Sea to Liaoning province in the north. Gilbert was one of more than 30 international experts who gathered at the Food and agriculture organization of the united nations in Rome for a two-day meeting last week to discuss the current H7n9 outbreaks.
boosting ocean productivity and salmon populations. On 17 april, the corporation filed a court brief arguing that Canadian anti-dumping regulations do not apply to"ocean pasture replenishment and restoration.
Source: Thomson Reuters Point Carbonprices for allowances to emit a tonne of carbon dioxide on Europe s carbon-trading market are likely to remain low until 2020,
who is flyways programme manager for conservation group Wetlands International in The netherlands. He also co-convenes the Asia-Pacific Working group on Migratory Waterbirds and Avian influenza with the Food and agriculture organization of the united nations (FAO.
Melting sea ice exposes dark water, allowing the ocean to soak up more heat. Arctic warming speeds the release of carbon dioxide from permafrost.
And, as researchers discussed at a meeting last week in Seefeld, Austria, climate extremes heatwaves,
and think that coastal communities should be prepared better for rising seas and stronger storms, a survey published on 28 march has found.
Aurora Photos/Alamyus waterways in bad shape More than half of US rivers and streams are in a poor environmental condition,
The data from 2008-09 the most recent available show that 28%of the nation s waterways have excessive levels of nitrogen
US National Snow and Ice Data Centera record low in the extent of sea ice in the Arctic last September has been followed by a record refreezing of uncovered ocean surface,
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