Environment

A new study may have a solution for both acid mine drainage and natural radioactivity in hydraulic fracturing – fracking –   wastewater that can be found in 'flowback fluid.' In hydraulic fracturing, water is injected at high pressure down wells to crack open shale deposits buried deep underground and extract the natural gas trapped within the rock. Some of the water can flow back up through the well, along with natural brines and the natural gas.   Trace amounts of potentially harmful natural contaminants can be found in Marcellus Shale wastewater, for example, but trace…

While the number of killing frosts in southern Florida has remained unchanged since 1984, the number a short distance away declined enough that researchers are implicating global warming, and noted that the expansion of cold-sensitive mangrove forests along Florida's Atlantic Coast has led to them edging out salt marshes. What happens when one ecosystem replaces another? Happens all of the time, of course, and has throughout history. But it's impossible to predict the result. People who live there are not complaining, though researchers up north are concerned. Between 1984 and 2011, the…

The assumption has long been that if mercury is increasing in fish in the North American and European Arctic, the same is true of fish elsewhere in the Arctic. Not so, according to conservation scientists from the U.S., Russia, and Canada.  Atmospheric mercury comes largely from mining and ore processing, such as smelting, according to United Nations analyses. Under certain water conditions, through the process called methylation, mercury is converted to methylmercury, a special form that can be absorbed by living organisms. Methylmercury is highly toxic. But the research team determined…

Caterpillars of two species of butterflies in Colorado and California aren't waiting for China and India to stop belching out so much CO2 - according to a paper in the journal Functional Ecology, they have already evolved to feed rapidly at higher and at a broader range of temperatures, just in the last 40 years, suggesting to the biologists that they did so in order to quickly to cope with a hotter, more variable climate.  This represents the first instance where recent climate change has affected physiological traits, such as the internal workings of how the body regulates feeding…

Almost every study of food production over the last decade has claimed it has implications for global warming, but in reality the resources required to grow food and raise livestock and grains vary dramatically depending on the animal, the type of food it provides, the kind of feed it consumes and where it lives. The actual implications are unknown because simplistic numerical models use a few variables and a whole lot of assumptions. "Livestock ecosystems" that are estimates claiming disasters in 'virtual' water and other things can be a little silly but a new paper in the Proceedings of the…

New series of webinars on Earth observations and the water cycle – Check details at the end of this article.  Modern explorers have much better tools than yesteryear, if not yesterday. The tools are not even compatible. What if our polar heroes like Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen (the first to reach the South pole) had had sea-ice forecasts? The majestic ship Fram would not have frozen in the ice, for sure, and history would have been different. One of our modern explorer's, ship owner Felix Tschudi, pointed out during an interview on the subject of modern sea transportation in the…

Children's congenital heart defects may be associated with their mothers' exposure to specific mixtures of environmental toxins during pregnancy, according to research presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2013. Congenital heart defects occur when the heart or blood vessels near the heart don't develop normally before birth. Defects may be caused by chromosomal abnormalities, but the cause is unknown in most cases. Researchers examined patterns of congenital heart defects incidence and presence of environmental toxicants in Alberta, Canada. The ongoing research…

The mountain pine beetle is killing lodgepole pine and jack pine forests in the Western United States, British Columbia, the Northwest Territories, Alberta and could spread east to the Maritimes. Yes, beetles are natural, but before you start waving Sierra Club brochures and yelling about scary science, keep in mind that nature is out to kill us all. She is, basically, a real bitch. Researchers have been investigating pheromones emitted by the pest in North America's lodgepole and jack pine forests and tree chemical compounds that play critical roles in the beetle's pheromone production and…

People who live in regions where there is a real change of seasons know that plants go 'dormant' in the winter and then spring to life again as the weather warms. But a new study found a counter-intuitive effect; instead of a colder winter causing trees to hold off growth for a longer period of time, that happens during a warmer winter, according to an examination of 36 tree and shrub species. The colder the winter, the earlier native plants begin to grow again. If global warming occurs and we get warmer winters, the spring development phase for typical forest trees might start later and…

Protecting carbon-storing forests in the developing world may be easier than mobilizing government bureaucracies; a recent paper finds that local communities, using simple tools like ropes and sticks, can produce forest carbon data on par with results by government employees using high-tech devices.   Yet nearly half of official REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) projects, which rely on the accurate measurement of carbon trapped in forests, do not engage communities in this data gathering, despite assertions by the United Nations that these projects must…