PLAGUES & PESTILENCES: The Number Of Turtles With Body Tumors Dramatically Increasing In Florida - Half Of The Green Sea Turtles Are Affected, Scientists Unclear As To The Exact Cause?!

The tumors are thought to be caused by a herpes virus, and can blind the reptiles. © Peter Bennett & Ursula Keuper-Bennett/Wikimedia

February 11, 2016 - FLORIDA, UNITED STATES - Off the coast of Florida, the population of green sea turtles has dramatically rebounded. From fewer than 500 nests recorded on the beaches nearly 30 years ago, last year saw a record 28,000 clutches of eggs laid. But despite this impressive recovery, they now seem to be facing another problem.

More and more of the reptiles are being found infected with a potentially deadly disease, which causes tumors to grow all over their bodies.

The disease, known as fibropapillomatosis, is thought to be caused by a herpes virus and is specific to sea turtles. Despite looking harmful, the tumors that develop on the surface are mainly benign, but problems arise when they grow over the turtles' eyes, which prevents them from seeing and therefore feeding. Around 20 years ago, vets at the Turtle Hospital in the Florida Keys were seeing around eight turtles a month with the tumors, but recently they have seen a massive increase, now seeing around eight a week.

While the disease is predominantly found in green sea turtles, the hospital has also found it in Kemp's ridley turtles, as well as the larger loggerheads. They have found that around half of the green sea turtles in the area are affected, and treat them by surgically removing the bulbous tumors from their bodies. Sometimes this takes multiple operations due to the severe conditions some of them are in. After this, they are held for about a year to aid in their recovery, but if the disease has spread to their liver and kidneys, nothing can be done to save them. Unfortunately, only around one in five of the turtles recover to a state in which they can be returned to the wild.

The cause of the disease, and why it has suddenly increased in incidence, is still not 100 percent clear.

One report looking into fibropapillomatosis in turtles living off Hawaii claims that certain areas around the coast had a disproportionately large number affected due to nitrogen runoff from cities and farms. They purport that an increase in nitrogen in the water leads to the algae converting more of it into an amino acid called arginine. The turtles feed on the algae, and therefore take in elevated levels of arginine, which has been found to support the growth of the herpes virus responsible for fibropapillomatosis. - IFL Science.

EXTINCTION & THE WAR ON MOTHER NATURE: Scientists - Human Activity Has Pushed Planet Earth BEYOND Four Of Nine "Planetary Boundaries"!

Clmate change: A severe drought plagued a third of Queensland, Australia in 2013. Destabilizing the global environment
could make Earth less hospitable for humans. (David Gray/Reuters)

January 17, 2015 - EARTH - At the rate things are going, the Earth in the coming decades could cease to be a “safe operating space” for human beings. That is the conclusion of a new paper published Thursday in the journal Science by 18 researchers trying to gauge the breaking points in the natural world.

The paper contends that we have already crossed four “planetary boundaries.” They are the extinction rate; deforestation; the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere; and the flow of nitrogen and phosphorous (used on land as fertilizer) into the ocean.

“What the science has shown is that human activities — economic growth, technology, consumption — are destabilizing the global environment,” said Will Steffen, who holds appointments at the Australian National University and the Stockholm Resilience Center and is the lead author of the paper.

Forest cover and land system change: Farming, mining and infrastructure projects are consuming the Amazon rainforest. According to data from Brazil’s space
agency, deforestation increased by more than a third in 2013, wiping out an area more than twice the size of Los Angeles. (Nacho Doce/Reuters)

These are not future problems, but rather urgent matters, according to Steffen, who said that the economic boom since 1950 and the globalized economy have accelerated the transgression of the boundaries. No one knows exactly when push will come to shove, but he said the possible destabilization of the “Earth System” as a whole could occur in a time frame of “decades out to a century.”

The researchers focused on nine separate planetary boundaries first identified by scientists in a 2009 paper. These boundaries set theoretical limits on changes to the environment, and include ozone depletion, freshwater use, ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosol pollution and the introduction of exotic chemicals and modified organisms.

Beyond each planetary boundary is a “zone of uncertainty.” This zone is meant to acknowledge the inherent uncertainties in the calculations, and to offer decision-makers a bit of a buffer, so that they can potentially take action before it’s too late to make a difference. Beyond that zone of uncertainty is the unknown — planetary conditions unfamiliar to us.

“The boundary is not like the edge of the cliff,” said Ray Pierrehumbert, an expert on Earth systems at the University of Chicago. “They’re a little bit more like danger warnings, like high-temperature gauges on your car.”

Pierrehumbert, who was not involved in the paper published in Science, added that a planetary boundary “is like an avalanche warning tape on a ski slope.”

The scientists say there is no certainty that catastrophe will follow the transgression of these boundaries. Rather, the scientists cite the precautionary principle: We know that human civilization has risen and flourished in the past 10,000 years — an epoch known as the Holocene — under relatively stable environmental conditions.

No one knows what will happen to civilization if planetary conditions continue to change. But the authors of the Science paper write that the planet “is likely to be much less hospitable to the development of human societies.”

The authors make clear that their goal is not to offer solutions, but simply to provide information. This is a kind of report card, exploiting new data from the past five years.

Atmosphere aerosol loading: Emissions spew from smokestacks at a Kansas coal-fired power plant. (Charlie Riedel/AP)

It’s not just a list of F’s. The ozone boundary is the best example of world leaders responding swiftly to a looming environmental disaster. After the discovery of an expanding ozone hole caused by man-made chemicals, chlorofluorocarbons, the nations of the world banned CFCs in the 1980s.

This young field of research draws from such disciplines as ecology, geology, chemistry, atmospheric science, marine biology and economics. It’s known generally as Earth Systems Science. The researchers acknowledge the uncertainties inherent in what they’re doing. Some planetary boundaries, such as “introduction of novel entities” — CFCs would be an example of such things — remain enigmatic and not easily quantified.

Better understood is the role of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. The safe-operating-zone boundary for CO2 had previously been estimated at levels up to 350 parts per million. That’s the boundary — and we’re already past that, with the current levels close to 400 ppm, according to the paper. That puts the planet in the CO2 zone of uncertainty that the authors say extends from 350 to 450 ppm.

At the rate CO2 is rising — about 2 ppm per year — we will surpass 450 ppm in just a couple of decades, said Katherine Richardson, a professor of biological oceanography at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and a co-author of the new paper.

Biogeochemical flows: Rows of corn wait to be harvested in Minooka, Ill. Fertilizer makes its ways to the ocean
via surface runoff or seeping into the ground and groundwater. (Jim Young/Reuters)

Humanity may have run into trouble with planetary boundaries even in prehistoric times, said Richard Alley, a Penn State geoscientist who was not part of this latest research. The invention of agriculture may have been a response to food scarcity as hunting and gathering cultures spread around, and filled up, the planet, he said. “It’s pretty clear we were lowering the carrying capacity for hunter-gatherers 10,000 years ago,” Alley said.

There are today more than 7 billion people, using an increasing quantity of resources, turning forest into farmland, boosting the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and driving other species to extinction. The relatively sudden efflorescence of humanity has led many researchers to declare that this is a new geological era, the human age, often referred to as the Anthropocene.

Species extinction: 14-week-old twin polar bear cubs play in Munich. Polar bears, the largest predator on Earth, are struggling to survive due to melting ice and
depletion of its food source — seal blubber. (Alexandra Beier/Getty Images)

A baby mountain gorilla in the Sabyinyo Mountains of Rwanda: Mountain gorillas are an endangered species found only in the border areas of Rwanda,
Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. (Ivan Lieman/AFP/Getty Images)

A kaleidoscope of Monarch butterflies clings to tree branches in the Piedra Herrada, near Valle de Bravo, Mexico.
Unusually cold temperatures and the threat to its food supply — milkweed — worry scientists. (Rebecca Blackwell/AP)

The Earth has faced shocks before, and the biosphere has always recovered. Hundreds of millions of years ago, the planet apparently froze over — becoming “Snowball Earth.” About 66 million years ago, it was jolted by a mountain-sized rock from space that killed half the species on the planet, including the non-avian dinosaurs. Life on Earth always bounced back. “The planet is going to take care of itself. It’s going to be here,” Richardson said.

“There’s a lot of emotion involved in this. If you think about it, the American ethic is, ‘The sky’s the limit.’ And here you have people coming on and saying, no it isn’t, the Earth’s the limit,” she said.Technology can potentially provide solutions, but innovations often come with unforeseen consequences. “The trends are toward layering on more and more technology so that we are more and more dependent on our technological systems to live outside these boundaries,” Pierrehumbert said. “. . . It becomes more and more like living on a spaceship than living on a planet.” - Washington Post.

POLE SHIFT: More Signs Of Earth's Magnetic Polar Migration - Most Unusual BLUE Auroras Seen Over Norway?!

March 04, 2014 - SPACE - Northern Lights are usually green, and sometimes red. Those are the colors produced by oxygen when it is excited by electrons raining down from space. On Feb. 22nd, Micha Bäuml of Straumfjord, Norway, witnessed an appariton of aurora-blue:

"All of a sudden the sky exploded," says Micha. "The aurora looked like a giant flame."

In auroras, blue is a sign of nitrogen. Energetic particles striking ionized molecular nitrogen (N₂⁺) at very high altitudes produces a cold azure glow of the type captured in Micha's photo. Why it overwhelmed the usual hues of oxygen on Feb 22nd is unknown. Auroras still have the capacity to surprise.

Any auroras tonight, blue or otherwise, will be a bit of a surprise. Geomagnetic conditions are quiet. NOAA forecasters estimate a scant 5% chance of polar geomagnetic storms on March 3rd. - Space Weather.

SIGNS IN THE HEAVENS: Comet ISON Hosted A Rare Kind Of Nitrogen - Hinting At Reservoirs In Young Solar System!

February 23, 2014 - SPACE - Comet ISON — that bright comet last year that broke up around Thanksgiving weekend — included two forms of nitrogen in its icy body, according to newly released observations from the Subaru Telescope.

Photo of Comet ISON taken Nov. 15 from Charleston, Rhode Island. Credit: Scott MacNeill.

Of the two types found, the discovery of isotope 15NH2 was the first time it’s ever been seen in a comet. Further, the observations from the Japanese team of astronomers show “there were two distinct reservoirs of nitrogen [in] the massive, dense cloud … from which our Solar System may have formed and evolved,” stated the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

Besides being pretty objects to look at, comets are considered valuable astronomical objects because they’re a sort of time capsule of conditions early in the universe. The “fresh” comets are believed to come from a vast area of icy bodies called the Oort Cloud, a spot that has been relatively untouched since the solar system formed about 4.6 billion years ago. Spying elements inside of comets can give clues as to what was present in our neighborhood when the sun and planets were just coming to be.

“Ammonia (NH3) is a particularly important molecule, because it is the most abundant nitrogen-bearing volatile (a substance that vaporizes) in cometary ice and one of the simplest molecules in an amino group (–NH2) closely related to life. This means that these different forms of nitrogen could link the components of interstellar space to life on Earth as we know it,” NAOJ stated.

You can read more details about the finding at the NAOJ website. - Universe Today.

MONUMENTAL EARTH CHANGES: Visible From Orbit - An Astronaut On The International Space Station Captures Very Massive Late Summer Plankton Bloom Across Much Of Lake Ontario!

September 02, 2013 - NORTH AMERICA - This photograph taken by an astronaut on the International Space Station highlights a late summer plankton bloom across much of Lake Ontario, one of North America’s Great Lakes.

Microscopic cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, can reach such large concentrations and color the water to such an extent that the change is visible from orbit.

Astronaut photograph ISS036-E-35635 was acquired on August 24, 2013, with a Nikon D3S digital camera using
a 50 millimeter lens, and is provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations experiment and Image Science &
Analysis Laboratory, Johnson Space Center. The image was taken by the Expedition 36 crew. It has been cropped
and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program
supports the laboratory as part of the ISS National Lab to help astronauts take pictures of Earth that will be of the
greatest value to scientists and the public, and to make those images freely available on the Internet. Additional
images taken by astronauts and cosmonauts can be viewed at the NASA/JSC Gateway to Astronaut
Photography of Earth. Caption by William L. Stefanov, Jacobs at NASA-JSC.

Harmful algal blooms, or HABs, have been observed in all of the Great Lakes—particularly Lake Erie—and are caused by a variety of factors, including: changes in precipitation; drought; invasive species (quagga, zebra mussels, Asian carp); nutrient loading from runoff and sewage (nitrogen and phosphorus); and warmer than average temperatures. In addition to reduced water quality and human health concerns, algal blooms can also lead to hypoxia—a reduction of oxygen in the bottom waters that kills large numbers of fish and other aquatic life.

Lake Ontario—like the Great Lakes Erie, Huron, and Superior—is roughly divided between the United States and Canada. The USA side of Lake Ontario has its shoreline in the state of New York, while its Canadian shoreline lies within the province of Ontario.

The city of Kingston, Ontario, is visible near the Saint Lawrence River outflow from the lake. Several other landscape features of New York State are visible in the image, including the Finger Lakes region to the west of Syracuse. To the northeast of Syracuse, the dark wooded slopes of the Adirondack Mountains are visible at image upper left. Patchy white cloud cover obscures much of the land surface to the west of Lake Ontario.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured an image of the same bloom on the same day, August 24, 2013. - Earth Observatory.

ELECTRIC UNIVERSE: Cosmic Catastrophism - Cosmic Rays Reveal Event in Earth's Magnetic Field History!

November 30, 2012 - PORTUGAL - The Earth's magnetic field forms an efficient shield that deflects charged particles of cosmic origin headed for Earth. Far from being constant, the magnetic field has undergone many reversals, with the North magnetic pole shifting to the South geographic pole. Such reversals are always accompanied by a disappearance of the magnetic field. The last such reversal took place 780 000 years ago. The magnetic field can also undergo excursions, periods when the field suddenly drops as if it was going to reverse, before recovering its normal polarity.

The most recent event of this kind, known as the Laschamp excursion, took place 41 000 years ago. Evidence for the event was uncovered by the researchers in sediment cores collected off the coasts of Portugal and Papua New Guinea. In the samples, they found an excess of beryllium-10, an isotope produced solely by collisions between particles of cosmic origin and atoms of nitrogen and oxygen. The beryllium-10 (10Be) produced in the atmosphere then falls to the Earth's surface where it is incorporated into ice and sediments. In sedimentary beds dating from the age of the Laschamp excursion, the researchers found up to twice as much 10Be as normal, evidence of the intense cosmic ray bombardment that the Earth underwent for several thousand years. Traditionally, the presence of various iron oxides, especially magnetite, in volcanic lavas, sediments and ancient pottery provides information on the history of the magnetic field by indicating its direction and strength at the time when these materials solidified.

This so-called paleomagnetic approach does not always allow global variations in the magnetic field to be quantified accurately. The researchers combined this method with the measurement of beryllium-10 concentrations in the same sedimentary records. This enabled them to demonstrate that peak concentrations of this isotope are synchronous and have the same dynamics and amplitude in Atlantic and Pacific sediments as in the previously analyzed Greenland ice cores. The method based on beryllium-10, which has been developed over the past 10 years at CEREGE, therefore makes it possible to obtain a continuous reconstruction of variations in the strength of the Earth's global magnetic field. It is also known that over the past 3000 years the magnetic field has lost 30% of its strength. This trend suggests that in the coming centuries, the Earth might undergo an excursion similar to the one that took place 41 000 years ago. Since high energy cosmic rays can cause mutations and cell damage, such an event would have a significant impact on biodiversity, and in particular on humans. This is why the researchers are seeking to find out the precise rates of the magnetic field's reversal and excursion sequences, in order to identify potential regularities in its behavior and thus shed light on the cause of these phenomena, which originate in the Earth's core. - PHYSORG.

MASS OYSTER DIE-OFF: Massive & Mysterious Deaths in Chesapeake!

"We can’t oyster through this. This has really hit us hard.”

A massive die-off of oysters in the Chesapeake is placing livelihoods on the brink.

Alex DeMetrick reports some watermen are already calling it quits. Every oyster season will turn up empty shells and dead oysters, but this year was worse than normal. “Some of the bars were 100  percent dead. We didn’t find a live oyster at all,” said waterman Barry Sweitzer. Watermen say the Chesapeake north of the bay has become an oyster graveyard. They blame the massive runoff from Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee, which brought debris and a flood of fresh water, which kills oysters. “We can’t oyster through this. This has really hit us hard,” said waterman Richard Manly.


“The hurricane’s gone from most people’s memories but if you work the bay, you’re dealing with it every day,” said waterman Greg Jetton. Sweitzer is dealing with it by getting out. He’ll place one of Maryland’s last working skipjacks for sale, a boat that’s supported his family for 64 years. “I don’t have any other choice. Logistically, I can’t work the lower bay; it’s just too far away,” he said. Because oysters reproduce best in saltier water, the northern bay will take years to recover. “If you get a good spawn once every five years in the upper bay, you’re doing pretty good,” said Erik Zlokovitz, DNR Fisheries. “The worst part for me with this boat, it’s not the money you make off of it, it’s the opportunity to go out there and watch the sun come up and actually do the job and that’s what’s heartbreaking to me. That breaks my heart,” Sweitzer said. Although watermen believe tropical weather triggered the oyster die-off, state scientists have yet to determine an exact cause. - CBS Baltimore.

MASS OYSTER BED DIE-OFF: Mysterious Deaths in Florida Panhandle!

State scientists will head to the Florida Panhandle this week to check on East Bay oyster beds where oystermen are reporting a die-off.

Oyster season opened Oct. 1. Oystermen have reported pulling up dead oysters from beds that had been filled with large, healthy oysters at the end of the last harvest season on June 30. "We're finding very few alive," Pasco Gibson, a main supplier of the East Bay oysters, told the Pensacola News Journal (http://on.pnj.com/t1Ziy7). "This time of the year, we should be catching 500 to 1,000 pounds per boat a day. We're not even catching a hundred pounds." Gibson's six oyster boats are mostly idle, and some of his freelance oystermen are heading to Apalachicola to look for work. He said the meager harvests have cost him 40 percent of his income.

Depending on what's killing the oysters, once they start growing back, it could take up to three years to grow them large enough to harvest, he said. "Something happened in August, and it had to be massive because some of these beds are 10 miles apart," Gibson said of the beds scattered near the shorelines of East Bay. Scientists from the Department of Agriculture's Division of Aquaculture will check the oyster beds this week. Oyster die-offs are not unusual, said Leslie Palmer, director of the Aquaculture Division in Tallahassee. A variety of causes could potentially be responsible, including drought, extreme heat, warmer-than-normal water temperatures, or high salinity and low oxygen in the water, she said. Diseases and parasites also can wipe out an oyster bed. Storm water runoff from Tropical Storm Lee, which hit the area Labor Day weekend, could have pushed silt over the beds, smothering the oysters, said Robert Turpin, Escambia County's marine resources manager. "That could be easily confirmed by jumping into the water and checking out the beds to see if it is silt or something else," he said. - Miami Herald.