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Archive for March 29th, 2016
These tiny mangroves hold vast stores of carbon
Posted by Climate Central: John Upton on March 29th, 2016
Climate Central: Squat mangrove forests that seem at first blush to simply eke by along the coasts of Baja California are sitting on a big secret — one with sweeping implications in an era of accelerating climate change. Despite their diminutive appearance, scientists discovered that these mucky coastal ecosystems store huge amounts of carbon, helping to slow global warming. The peninsula’s low-growing mangrove forests harbor at least as much carbon as towering mangrove forests found elsewhere, scientists led by...
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Could Pacific waters give early warning of East Coast heat waves?
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 29th, 2016
Christian Science Monitor: For much of the United States east of the Rocky Mountains, the summer of 2012 brought a heat wave that smashed temperature records, triggered extensive crop failures, and helped fuel a powerful line of thunderstorms known as a derecho, which moved eastward out of Indiana to leave nearly 4 million customers without power as it eventually swept through the mid-Atlantic states. The heat wave and derecho accounted for more than 100 deaths.
Inspired by that summer's events, a team of researchers says...
Arctic sea ice falls to record low for winter
Posted by Climate Home: Alex Pashley on March 29th, 2016
Climate Home: Arctic sea ice fell to its lowest winter extent in recorded history for a second straight year, according to scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Center and NASA.
Ice cover in the polar region averaged 14.52 million square kilometres (5.607 m sq miles) on March 24, the US science agencies said in a statement on Monday.
Arctic sea ice appears to have reached a record low wintertime maximum for 2nd year in a row https://t.co/L2Ki4T2FK9 pic.twitter.com/WUsnLikuh6
-- NASA (@NASA) March...
Arctic sea ice reaches new record low mark for wintertime
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 29th, 2016
Telegraph: Arctic sea ice hit a record low level for the second straight year this month amid high winter temperatures over the Arctic Ocean, according to scientists.
The National Snow and Ice Data Centre says ice covered a maximum of 5.607 million square miles of the Arctic Ocean in 2016. That's 5,000 square miles less than the old record set in 2015 - a difference slightly smaller than the state of Connecticut.
It's also 431,000 square miles less than the 30-year average. That difference is the size...
Desert mangroves are major source of carbon storage, study shows
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 29th, 2016
ScienceDaily: Researchers found that short, stunted mangroves living along the coastal desert of Baja California store up to five times more carbon below ground than their lush, tropical counterparts. The new study led by researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego estimates that coastal desert mangroves, which only account for one percent of the land area, store nearly 30 percent of the region's belowground carbon.
"Mangroves represent a thin layer between ocean and land, and yet we...
2016 Arctic sea ice wintertime extent hits another record low
Posted by Washington Post: Juliet Eilperin on March 29th, 2016
ScienceDaily: Arctic sea ice appears to have reached a record low wintertime maximum extent for the second year in a row, according to scientists at the NASA-supported National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) and NASA.
Every year, the cap of frozen seawater floating on top of the Arctic Ocean and its neighboring seas melts during the spring and summer and grows back in the fall and winter months, reaching its maximum yearly extent between February and April. On March 24, Arctic sea ice extent peaked at 5.607...