GEOLOGICAL UPHEAVALS: "We Don't Know Why The Water Is Rising" - Scientists Baffled By Relentless Rise Of Two Caribbean Lakes That Are Swallowing Up Communities In Haiti And The Dominican Republic?!

The Haitian village of Lunettes appears to float in Lake Azuéi, also known as Étang Saumâtre. The lake's water level has risen so much
that it has swamped thousands of acres. © Alessandro Grassani

March 4, 2016 - CARIBBEAN - In Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the lakes are flooding farmland, swallowing communities and leading to deforestation.

On a recent calm day, the surface of Lake Azuéi has no waves, not even any ripples. Pillars of pastel-colored concrete break the still surface, the tops of what once were houses. They are all that's visible of the community that once thrived here.

Alberto Pierre, a skinny, wide-eyed 25-year-old, said the submerged village where he grew up wasn't even near the lake. "The water used to be many kilometers from here."

Lake Azuéi, the largest lake in Haiti, lies about 18 miles east of Port-au-Prince, the capital, nestled along the border with the Dominican Republic. Also known as Étang Saumâtre, the lake rose so much between 2004 and 2009 that it engulfed dozens of square miles.

"At first we put rocks so it wouldn't come into our houses," Pierre says. "But then the water just overran the rocks." Families in the village of Letant began abandoning their houses, building huts on higher ground using wood, tarps, whatever they could find. By 2012, all 83 houses had been vacated.

"We don't know why the water is rising," he says.

In fact, nobody does. There seems to be no logic to the lake's rise. Experts from the United Nations, a French engineering firm, a Dominican Republic university, a New York City college and many others have looked for clues to explain the rise of Lake Azuéi and neighboring Lake Enriquillo, just across the border in the Dominican Republic. But few of the theories seem to hold water. Some now hypothesize the phenomenon is related to climate change, but the evidence is counterintuitive: Unlike ocean levels, which rise with climate change, lakes tend to shrink.

Two boys row past the remains of houses that lined a street in Lunettes. About a hundred families once lived in the village, which was also ruined in 2006 by a cyclone.© Alessandro Grassani

For the estimated 400,000 people living in the watershed of the two lakes, the fallout has been severe. Lake Enriquillo rose an incredible 37 feet in less than 10 years, doubling in size and swallowing at least 40,000 acres of farmland.

Most of those who lost their land are poor farmers.

Displaced from their farmland, some are turning to a nefarious occupation: charcoal. Illegal loggers are cutting down trees in the Dominican Republic to produce 50,000 tons of charcoal annually, which they sell in Haiti. The U.N. estimates it's a $15 million a year business. They transport it under the cover of darkness on small boats across Lake Azuéi, which has risen high enough to straddle the border.

Meanwhile, the water is destroying a fragile ecosystem. Cao Cao birds (Hispaniolan Palm Crow, or Corvus palmarum) and other bird species lost their habitat as trees where they once nested died, their roots drowned by the water. Endangered Hispaniola ground iguanas (Cyclura ricordi) and rhinoceros iguanas (Cyclura cornuta) were forced to flee the protected island in the center of Lake Enriquillo for higher ground above the shoreline where they compete with humans and other wildlife.

"The crocodiles can't lay their eggs there anymore, so they climb higher, onto the rocky hillsides," explains Adifer Miguel Medina Terreras, 23, who works with conservationists at the national park that encompasses the lake, offering boat rides to the island for tourists eager to see iguanas and crocodiles. "But there the eggs break. Cats, mules eat or trample the eggs." At the turn of the century, Terreras says, you could ride a motorcycle to the island during dry season—the water was that low. Back then, he says, "everyone thought the lake was going to disappear."

The waters' rise is also hurting the economy of both nations. Stuck together on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, trade between the countries is a billon dollar a year business. The main thoroughfare is a low-lying highway that passes next to the lakes.

When Antonio Perera arrived in Haiti in 2008 with the U.N. Environmental Program, he would drive this highway between the countries nearly every weekend. "The first time I crossed was a nightmare," he recalls. "The road was under the water, 20 or 30 centimeters below. You have to look not to lose the water or else you will fall into the lake." On one trip an SUV in front of him toppled in.

Rising Lakes

Since 2004, two lakes on the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean have been growing. Some scientists attribute the growth to climate change; however, others feel the Yaque
del Sur River is to blame. The government plans to dam the river to control flooding of agricultural canals, which it claims are channeling water to the lakes. 
© ANDREW UMENTUM, NG STAFF SOURCES: SISTEMA DE INFORMACIÓN GEOGRÁFICA AND
INSTITUTO NACIONAL DE RECURSOS HIDRÁULICOS, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC; USGS

Over the years, the water flooded customs and immigration buildings at border checkpoints, including one that was submerged two years after it was built. "I remember one building, it was a two-story house—it became a one-story house," he says.

Often, the water would flood the twice-weekly market at the border crossing, forcing hundreds of vendors to carry the food, clothes and other items they sold through a narrow, overcrowded strip of land. Perera says that on several occasions, the U.N. peacekeeping operation in Haiti piled gravel on top of the road to raise it above the water level, only to see it disappear underwater once again.

In 2008 Perera dispatched a team to survey Haitians affected by Lake Azuéi and to review existing research into its causes. "I remember the estimation of the land that was flooded in Azuéi was around 15,000 hectares [about 6,000 acres] of agricultural land. That's a lot in Haiti," Perera says. "This is a phenomenon that cannot be stopped."

He says Haitian farmers "were in desperation." "They had to go to other places they could cultivate. So you can imagine, they went to private land," he adds, explaining that spurred conflict between farmers and landowners.

Michael Piasecki, professor for water resources engineering at the City College of New York who has done research in both countries on the island, says, "On the Dominican side, people are a lot more vocal, a lot more demanding and willing to go out on the street and protest—at least to be loud enough for the government to do something." But in Haiti, he says, "There's a lot more resignation. We got the impression that the Haitian government isn't doing anything, literally, for the people, other than trying to keep that road above water level so that trade can continue."

Since Lake Azuéi flooded her home, Ata Pierre, 40, has lived with her daughter Jennifer in a home built by the charity Love a Child. Her husband died years ago,
and she struggles to pay Jennifer’s school fees.  © Jacob Kushner

In Haiti there has been "no aid for people being displaced, no idea of compensating them, of moving villages." The only relief has come from a Florida-based Christian charity called Love a Child, which gave homes to some of the Haitian families whose houses were lost to Lake Azuéi. Meanwhile, in the Dominican Republic, an entire town was built from scratch to house residents in danger.

Retreating to Higher Ground

An hour's drive east into the Dominican Republic, a hillside with hundreds of identical concrete-block houses painted in bright pastel colors overlooks the dark waters of Lake Enriquillo. This is the new Boca de Cachón, a $24 million community built by the government to house people on the verge of losing their homes to the lake.

One of them is Emilio Perez Nova, 48. Sitting on a plastic chair in front of the small army office he oversees, Perez finds the lake's rise difficult to fathom.

"You have to understand—when I was growing up, Boca de Cachón was not a lakeside town. The lake was a kilometer away!" Perez says.

He laments how he was forced to sell his cattle when water flooded the land they grazed. Relocated into a pop-up suburban community with no land to his name, Perez says he and hundreds of others here are struggling to earn a living.

Children stand on the shore of Lake Azuéi near a submerged hotel in Thomazeau, Haiti, near the border with the Dominican Republic. The lake now straddles
the border between the two countries.   © Dieu Nalio Chery, Associated Press

"You can move to a new place, but life is not the same," Perez says, noting that many who moved used to have at least an acre or more to farm. "Imagine—you have seven, eight, nine tareas of land. And now you have nothing?"

The road between the new Boca de Cachón and the old one passes through a forest of dead trees. On a cloudy day, their tangled branches look gray and dark, giving one the eerie feeling of walking through a bombed-out no man's land. For years, a maze of hand-made fences demarked each family's property. Now all that's left are the tips of wooden fence posts poking up through the water.

Griselda Cuevas is 44, but her wrinkled skin makes her seem much older. Cuevas is one of only seven or so families, out more than 500, who didn't move. She grew up farming maize, rice, and beans. Now, instead of growing them, she buys those crops from a nearby market and resells them.

There aren't many buyers. What just five years ago was a poor but bustling community is now a mostly uninhabited field of rubble with about a dozen houses. As a condition for accepting the new houses, the government destroyed the old ones.

Her husband, Martin Cuevas, 60, worries that the water might soon flood the house. "If you put a stick in the ground," he says, "water shoots out."

Turning to Charcoal to Make Ends Meet

At the center of the town of Duvergé on Lake Enriquillo's southern side is a park with a giant statue of an iguana. The small metal fence that surrounds the fake animal seems like a joke—until you look a bit closer and notice that the fence is actually there to pen in the dozens of very real iguanas crawling around the statue and living underneath it.

The iguana pen is a symbol of the pride the town's residents take in their wildlife. But now some of these residents say they have no choice but to destroy their precious ecosystem: Many looked to higher ground to make a living—to land that is unsuitable for farming but perfect for the illegal production of charcoal.

On an overcast morning in December, a small clearing in the shrubbery above Lake Enriquillo is scorched black—soot from a charcoal oven that once burned there. A few yards away, smoke billows out of tiny holes in a large mound of dirt—an active charcoal furnace. It smells of sharp, smoldering spices.

Fishermen row near the former migration and customs offices in Jimani, Dominican Republic, on the border with Haiti. Lake Azuéi has repeatedly
swamped the main thoroughfare between the countries. © Orlando Barra, EPA

The perpetrator is probably someone like Demetrio, a round-faced Dominican who declined to provide his full name out of fear of prosecution. A farmer by trade, Demetrio remembers the wet morning in 2007 that found him scrambling to recover his employer's crops as they became engulfed by the lake's rise.

"We had to go carry out the sacks of juandules [lentils] with water up to our knees—rapido," he says. "The lake killed all the mango trees—they all died. Sugarcane too."

In the weeks that followed, "we were hungry," he says. "It was a big crisis. So we dedicated ourselves to charcoal. We had to live."

Demetrio knows that cutting down trees to make charcoal is bad for the environment. But he says there's little alternative. "We make charcoal only because we don't have any other way to live." Demetrio is one of 28 farmers on the lake's southern edge who recently found work planting and harvesting molondrones (okra) at a local cooperative, allowing them to leave the charcoal business, at least for now. "But if we lost our job today, you'd see all of us tomorrow out there making charcoal again."

Searching for an Explanation

Lake Enriquillo and Lake Azuéi have always been anomalies. For starters, their water is not fresh, but saline, even though they have no known connection to the ocean. Lake Enriquillo is the largest lake in the Caribbean, and it is also region's lowest point: in 2013 its surface was 112 feet below sea level.

"The topography is unfortunate," explains Piasecki. "Both lakes are flanked on the north and the southern side by steep mountains. It's like a bathtub."

In a tiny, windowless office in Santo Domingo, Yolanda León sits behind a desk piled high with books and reports. León is a professor at the Technological Institute of Santo Domingo and for years has been the leading researcher studying the lakes.

"Here it was chaos," León recalls of the many attempts to explain the lakes' dramatic rise. "Everybody had a hypothesis, and there was no data behind it."

One Dominican professor has been working to show that the 2010 earthquake had something to do with it, hypothesizing that it disrupted the underground aquifers. But that wouldn't explain why the water started rising in 2004.

Demetrio, who declined to provide his last name, began illegally making charcoal when Lake Enriquillo flooded his farmland. He knows it's bad
for the environment, he says, but there are few alternatives.    © Jacob Kushner

Another Dominican professor hypothesizes that erosion from deforestation has caused mud to pile up on the bottom of the lake, displacing the water to higher levels. But León finds that hard to believe because there's little topsoil on these mountains to begin with.

She says locals tend to blame the rise on drainage from the vast web of canals that flush the land with freshwater. But that too seems implausible. "We visit a lot of these canals and they don't really reach the lake. The water is consumed by crops," explains León.

Complicating matters is the possibility that the two lakes are connected by an underground waterway. If true, Lake Azuéi, with its higher elevation, may be slowly draining into Lake Enriquillo. "But we can only speculate about this because we don't know what the water table actually looks like," says Piasecki. Absent funding that would allow scientists to drill the 40 to 50 boreholes he says would be necessary to find out if it's true, the subterranean river mystery will remain just that.

For its part, the Dominican government asserts that the crux of the problem is that too much water is reaching the lake from the Rio Yaque del Sur, the nation's second-longest river. But the Yaque doesn't feed directly into the lake. Instead, officials suggest that during times of heavy rainfall, such as tropical storms and hurricanes, the river unleashes high amounts of water into a small lagoon located about 15 miles southeast of Lake Enriquillo, and that from there water trickles down freshwater canals into the lake.

If true, the solution would be a simple matter of engineering: the river must be dammed. And that's precisely what the Dominican government is doing. In 2012, officials contracted to build a $401 million, 7.8 megawatt dam on the Yaque at Monte Grande. The reservoir will displace three communities. Luis Cuevas, a Dominican official working on the project, did not respond to requests for comment.

"Many people think that dam will solve the problem," says León. But she says there's no indication that more water has flowed down the Yaque recently than in years past, and no evidence that damming it will solve the problem of the lake.

To León, the most likely culprit is climate change.

"With climate change, the sea has risen in temperature. This creates more clouds," explains León. When clouds pass over the mountains that surround the lakes, they drop their load as rain. But León admits that because there haven't been weather stations to monitor rainfall, "we don't know for certain."

Fishermen in Lake Enriquillo float in a sea of dead trees where farmers once grew crops near Villa Jaragua, Dominican Republic. The lake rose
37 feet in 10 years, swallowing at least 40,000 acres.   © Jason Henry, The New York Times, Redux

In 2012 and 2013, León and researchers at the City College of New York installed a handful of weather stations to monitor future rainfall and humidity. They also installed sensors at both lakes to measure daily changes in water levels, which they hope to compare to rainfall data.

Apart from a U.N. survey of Haitians affected by the lake, just one study has focused entirely on Haitian side. Produced in 2011 by EGIS International, an engineering firm controlled by the French government, it endorsed the notion that increased rainfall has led to Lake Azuéi's rise. It too speculated that climate change might be to blame.

Hoping for a Solution

If the water's rise could somehow be reversed, the sunken land could probably be restored to its original state.

Dalbes Garcia Borques, a landowner in Duvergé, says that about four of his acres have resurfaced in the last two years as the lake receded slightly. He paid some workers to dig small irrigation trenches from nearby canals to "wash" away the salt residue left by the lake. One year later, he's harvesting potatoes.

"It's an expensive and arduous process," says Borques.

And yet, it could be cause for optimism: If scientists and the island's governments could work together to reverse the lakes' rise, the land, barren and destroyed as it may look, could once again resemble the land that has not yet succumbed to the water's grasp—lush with palm trees and tall grasses upon which fat cows graze.

For now, farmers seem hesitant to invest in the labor it would take to wash the re-emerged land and replant. With no solution in sight, most expect the water will continue to rise—flooding even more of the limited land on this small island.

The reporting for this article was made possible by support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

- National Geographic.

GLOBAL COASTAL EVENT: Waves Reaching Up To 70-FEET HIGH Hit Hawaii - Forcing Hours-Long Closure Of Kamehameha Highway; Several Homes Damaged! [VIDEOS]

North Shore. © Clark Little/Facebook

February 26, 2016 - HAWAII - Waves with up to 70-foot faces rolled into Oahu's North Shore on Monday, forcing an hours-long closure of Kamehameha Highway and damaging homes, according to Hawaii News Now.

On Tuesday, National Weather Service officials said the swell was one of the strongest surf events in Hawaii in the last 50 years.

And, they warned, another swell is on its heels.

At least one home sustained serious damage from the waves, officials said, and they feared other homes were at risk. Officials also said surf had undermined the foundation of a lifeguard stand at Laniakea.

@northshoreoahu/Instagram

Waves toppled a Haleiwa home's seawall, undermined the home's foundation and washed away a tree.

Waves were also showering cars, creating hazardous driving conditions and pushing rocks onto the roadway.Throughout Monday, residents and crews reported coastal flooding up and down the coastline, including at Laniakea and Rockpiles.

Residents compare this weeks waves to a swell in 1969, that damaged scores of homes along the North Shore.


WATCH: Giant waves seen in Hawaii.

A High Surf Warning remains in effect for the north and west shores of Niihau, Kauai, Oahu and Molokai, and the north shores of Maui and the Big Island through 6 a.m. Friday.  - Property Casualty 360.

WEATHER ANOMALIES: "A Big Milestone" - Florida Marks Record Of 10 Years With A Major Hurricane?!

National Hurricane Center says Sunshine State has been lucky

December 4, 2015 - FLORIDA, UNITED STATES - The state of Florida is marking a big milestone with the official end of the 2015 hurricane season — 10 years without a major hurricane making landfall in the state.

The hurricane-free streak is a new record for the state.

Experts say Floridians shouldn't count on the streak continuing.

Michael Brennan, of the National Hurricane Center, says that the Sunshine State has been exceptionally lucky and residents should always be prepared for the possibility of a storm hitting the state.

"In 205, there were 11 named storms, four of which were hurricanes, and two of those were major hurricanes," News 6 meteorologist Troy Bridges said. - Click Orlando.

 

GLOBAL COASTAL EVENT: French Coast Hit With The Biggest "Tide Of The Century"!

© AFP 2015/ PHILIPPE HUGUEN

March 21, 2015 - FRANCE - After the excitement of Friday's solar eclipse, thousands of visitors have flocked to France's coastal areas for the chance to see the biggest tide in 18 years.

Thousands of visitors made their way to coastal areas in Brittany and Normandy on Saturday morning to catch this year's spring tides, which are billed to rise as high as 14 meters above their usual level following Friday's solar eclipse, which saw the Earth, moon, and sun in alignment.

Referred to as the 'tide of the century' in the French press, the phenomenon actually takes place every 18 years; this week's is the first of this millennium, and follows exceptionally high tides seen on March 10, 1997.

The picturesque 11th century fortified island of Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy, which is usually buffeted by high tides, was a popular destination, with ten thousand people going to see the UNESCO-listed monastery surrounded by rising water before the tide receded from sight, exposing areas of beach and rock which will next be visible in 2033.

On Friday the tidal coefficient, which ranges from 20 to 120 and measures the height between consecutive high and low tides, was recorded at 118 on Brittany's Atlantic Coast, and reached 119 on Saturday, the joint highest ever recorded. The super high tide is also expected to affect coastlines along the North Sea, the English Channel and to a lesser extent, the Mediterranean. - Sputnik.

GLOBAL COASTAL EVENT: Washing Away The United Kingdom - Rising Sea Levels Will Claim 7,000 Homes And Cost Over ONE BILLION POUNDS!

Reuters/Darren Staples

January 2, 2015 - UNITED KINGDOM - Some 7,000 homes, totalling £1 billion, will be lost to the seas around the UK during the next 100 years. Analysis from the Environment Agency claimed that the buildings would be sacrificed as building the requisite defences would be too expensive.

The research,obtained by theGuardian,also predicts that more than 800 buildings will be lost during the next two decades.

There is not, however, currently any compensation scheme for those who will lose their properties.

Coastal community campaigner Chris Blunkell told the Guardian that the government needed to learn from the “overwhelming” impact of last year’s storms.

“Last winter’s storms saw the eastern seaboard overwhelmed,” he said.

“If government won’t defend all people living on the coast, then it must make sure that they can move elsewhere, and that means compensating them for their loss. It’s wrong that the costs of climate change should be borne by the most vulnerable” he added.

The coastline most likely to lose homes over the next 20 years is Cornwall, which is expected to surrender 76 to the sea.

Blunkell criticised the government for being too London-centric, saying that the discrepancies between protection in London and the rest of the UK were too wide.

“During last year’s tidal surge, the biggest since 1953, some people on the east coast were evacuated from their homes and given a biscuit in the church hall".

“Yet Londoners could sleep easy protected by the Thames Barrier. A biscuit for some and a barrier for others is unjust, and such injustice will grow with rising sea levels" he said.

AFP Photo/Paul Faith

A further six local authorities are predicted to lose more than 200 properties each, over the course of the next century: Great Yarmouth (293), Southampton (280), Cornwall (273), North Norfolk (237), East Riding of Yorkshire (204) and Scarborough (203).

Coastal erosion expert Professor Rob Duck from Dundee University, told the newspaper the issue of protection was “difficult”.

“It is a very difficult issue, but we can’t defend everything at all costs. There are just not the resources to do it and keep on doing it. But it is not just about money, often people have lived in places for generations and there is a lot of history and memories.”

A Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) spokesperson said the current government had increased spending on coastal defences.

“We are spending more than £3.2bn over the course of this parliament on flood management and protection from coastal erosion – half a billion more than in the previous parliament” she added.

The research is based on the assumption that current levels of funding remains stable over the course of the century. Otherwise, the report warns, the number of properties lost could increase ten times to 74,000.

The revelation of the unpublished analysis comes only a month after the Royal Society warned that coastal populations are hugely at risk from extreme weather conditions due to global warming and rising sea levels.

The research claimed that if governments fail to tackle climate change by the year 2100, Britain’s heatwaves will increase three-fold. At present, approximately 2,000 people perish annually in the UK as a result of high temperatures, with the nation’s elderly population most at risk. - RT.

MONUMENTAL EARTH CHANGES: Antarctica Iceberg Six Times The Size Of Manhattan In Open Ocean, Tracked By Scientists - Covers About 255 SQUARE MILES, Up To 500 Meters Thick!

April 25, 2014 - ANTARCTICA - Scientists are monitoring one of the largest icebergs in existence, after it broke off from an Antarctic glacier and began to head into the open ocean.

The B-31 Iceberg as it separated from a rift in Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier NASA/REUTERS

The iceberg covers about 255 square miles, making it roughly six times the size of Manhattan - and is up to 500 meters thick.

Known as B31, glacial crack that created the iceberg was first detected in 2011 but the iceberg separated from Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier in November.

NASA glaciologist Kelly Brunt said that the iceberg is not currently presenting a danger, but needs to be continually monitored.

"It's one that's large enough that it warrants monitoring. There is not a lot of shipping traffic down there. We're not particularly concerned about shipping lanes. We know where all the big ones are."

She added that scientists are especially interested because it originated in an unexpected location.

"It's like a large sheet cake floating through the Southern Ocean."

Scientists say the iceberg has floated across Pine Island Bay, a basin of the Amundsen Sea, and will likely be swept up soon in the swift currents of the Southern Ocean. - Telegraph.

MONUMENTAL GEOLOGICAL UPHEAVAL: "We Have Passed The Tipping Point" - Massive Antarctic Glacier Uncontrollably Retreating, Study Suggests; Covers OVER 2 MILLION Square Kilometers; The Collapse Of The Entire Ice Sheet Would Raise Global Sea Level By 16 FEET!!

January 20, 2014 - ANTARCTICA - The glacier that contributes more to sea level rise than any other glacier on Antarctica has hit a tipping point of uncontrollable retreat, and could largely collapse within the span of decades, a new study suggests.

A NASA satellite image snapped Nov. 13, 2013, shows open water between Pine Island Glacier and its massive iceberg. 
NASA Modis

Pine Island Glacier accounts for about 20 percent of the total ice flow on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet — an amalgam of glaciers that covers roughly 800,000 square miles (2 million square kilometers) and makes up about 10 percent of the total ice on Antarctica. Many researchers think that, given the size of Pine Island Glacier, its demise could have a domino effect on surrounding glaciers and ultimately — over the course of many years — lead to the collapse of the entire ice sheet, which would raise average global sea level by between 10 and 16 feet (3 and 5 meters).

The glacier is not only massive, but also one of the least stable of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet ice flows. In the past 40 years, its melting rate has accelerated due to relatively warm ocean currents that have seeped underneath its base and lubricated its flow seaward. As it slips into the ocean, the glacier's ice shelf — the part that floats on water and extends beyond the glacier's base — disintegrates through a natural process called calving, exposing yet more of the glacier to warm waters. Last year, an iceberg larger than the city of Chicago broke off into the surrounding Amundsen Sea.

'We have passed the tipping point'Many researchers have tried to predict the future behavior of this important glacier using mathematical models but, given the complicated nature of glacial dynamics, all of these attempts have been limited and prone to error. Precipitation, wind patterns, atmospheric temperatures, oceanic currents and the shape of bedrock underneath the glacier are only some of the numerous factors that control glacial growth and retreat. Models predicting glacial behavior are therefore very complicated and always prone to some degree of error.

Researchers based at the French National Center for Scientific Research in Grenoble have now developed state-of-the-art models that, while still limited, provide the best estimates yet of the future behavior of Pine Island Glacier, they say. The team has found that the glacier's grounding line — the point where glacier and its ice shelf meet — is about to retreat over an oceanic trench that would increase the amount of water that seeps underneath and melts the glacier. Their models suggest that this would cause the glacier to uncontrollably retreat about 25 miles (40 kilometers) over the next several decades, potentially raising global sea levels by more than 0.4 inches (1 centimeter).

Retreat may slow once the glacier passes the trench, the researchers report, but it will not likely regain stability or enter a positive-growth phase.

"Whatever it will do, we are already engaged in a big change," study co-author Gael Durand told LiveScience. "We have passed the tipping point."


Uncertainties remainEric Steig, a glacial geologist at the University of Washington who also studies Pine Island Glacier but was not involved in this study, thinks the study provides the best models yet of this particular glacier's dynamics. Still, he points out that the models make the assumption that melting rates will increase in the near future and that, while this is likely, it is not necessarily a given.

Last month, Steig and colleagues published a paper in the journal Science reporting that Pine Island Glacier's retreat slowed significantly in 2012 due to oceanographic changes related to La Niña. While this seems to have been an anomalous event, Steig says that the 40 years of data gathered on the glacier may not be enough to make accurate predictions about its future behavior, and about what is normal or anomalous for its flow.

"I actually think it's a good assumption that the melt rate will stay high," Steig told LiveScience. "But my confidence that that is right is extremely low and the reason that it is low is that it depends strongly on what happens elsewhere."

For example, La Niña — a weather pattern related to El Niño that brings cold-water masses up the coast of South America, into the central equatorial Pacific, and eventually along the coast of Antarctica — originates as far away as the equatorial tropics, and has a significant impact on the behavior of the glacier. Future work will need to take these distant global factors into account in predicting the behavior of the glacier.

Still, despite these shortcomings, Durand is convinced the glacier has little chance of regaining stability.

"We showed that it will need a very large decrease of the melting condition below the ice shelf and that the oceanographic conditions would need to be much colder than it was before it started its retreat [to maintain stability]," Durand said. "What will come next is an open question, but to recover to its 1990s position is unlikely."

The study findings were detailed earlier this month in the journal Nature Climate Change. - NBC News.

MONUMENTAL EARTH CHANGES: Vast Antarctic Iceberg "Could Threaten Shipping" - Researchers Granted Emergency Grant To Track Iceberg, Estimated To Be About 700 Square Kilometres!

November 13, 2013 - ANTARCTICA - UK researchers have been awarded an emergency grant to track a vast iceberg in Antarctica that could enter shipping lanes.

Latest images show several kilometres of water between the iceberg, estimated to be about 700 sq km (270 sq miles), and the glacier that spawned the block.

UK researchers will closely monitor the movement of the iceberg as it travels through the Southern Ocean

The £50,000 award will fund a six-month project that will also predict its movement through the Southern Ocean.

The icy giant broke away from the Pine Island Glacier (PIG) in July.

"From the time it had been found that the crack had gone all the way across in July, it had stayed iced-in because it was still winter (in Antarctica)," explained principal investigator Grant Bigg from the University of Sheffield.

A Nasa aircraft was the first to detect the expanding crack across the Pine Island Glacier in 2011

"But in the last couple of days, it has begun to break away and now a kilometre or two of clear water has developed between it and the glacier.

"It often takes a while for bergs from this area to get out of Pine Island Bay but once they do that they can either go eastwards along the coast or they can… circle out into the main part of the Southern Ocean.

Prof Bigg told BBC News that one iceberg was tracked going through The Drake Passage - the body of water between South America's Cape Horn and Antarctica's South Shetland Islands.

If the iceberg did follow this trajectory, it would bring the Singapore-size ice island into busy international shipping lanes.

Eyes in the sky

The team of scientists from Sheffield and the University of Southampton will use data from a number of satellites, including the German TerraSAR-X, which first alerted researchers at the Alfred Wegener Institute to the July calving.

PIG is described as the longest and fastest flowing glacier in the Antarctic, with vast icebergs being calved from ice shelf every 6-10 years. Previous notable events occurred in 2007 and 2001.

Scientists first noticed a spectacular crack spreading across the surface of the PIG in October 2011.

See how the giant berg took shape:

As well as tracking the movement of the iceberg, Prof Bigg explained that the team also planned to predict its path through the Southern Ocean.

"Part of the project is to try to simulate what we think the berg might do, given the... wind fields being experiencing in the region recently.

He added that the team would attempt to predict possible tracks into the coming 12 months or so.

If the berg did move towards or into shipping lanes then a warning would be issued via the services of numerous ice hazard agencies around the world. - BBC.

WEATHER ANOMALIES: Hurricane Season Has Been A Dud Despite Dire Forecasts - The Season Is About To Enter Record Territory For Its UNUSUAL Lack Of Hurricanes!

September 07, 2013 - ATLANTIC OCEAN - The preseason predictions were all dire, using words like "extremely active" and "above-normal" to describe the forecast for the 2013 Atlantic hurricane season. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predicted that seven to 11 hurricanes would form, while AccuWeather predicted eight.

Tropical Storm Gabrielle (right) spins in the Caribbean on Sept. 5. While seven tropical storms have
formed this season, no hurricanes have yet developed. (Photo: AFP/Getty Images)

However, the season so far has been a welcome if unexpected dud, with not a single hurricane yet through the first week of September. (A typical full June-November hurricane season, based on weather records that go back to 1950, has seven hurricanes.)

In fact, the season is about to enter record territory for its unusual lack of hurricanes:

"If the first hurricane of 2013 forms after 8 a.m. on Sept. 11, it would set a record for the latest 'first' hurricane to arrive in the satellite era (1967 and later)," says Dennis Feltgen, spokesman with the National Hurricane Center in Miami. He says the current record holder is 2002's Gustav, which formed on Sept. 11 of that year.

The "satellite era" has increased the accuracy of hurricane counts: Once orbiting satellites were able to "spot" hurricanes that otherwise might have been missed, a more accurate count of the actual number of tropical storms and hurricanes each year became possible.

U.S. hurricane records go back to 1851, NOAA reports, but "because tropical storms and hurricanes spend much of their lifetime over the open ocean — some never hitting land — many systems were 'missed' during the late 19th and early 20th centuries," notes Chris Landsea, science and operations officer with the hurricane center.

Throughout history, there have only two years that had no reported hurricanes, according to AccuWeather: 1907 and 1914. However, considering there were only five reported tropical storms in 1907 and only one in 1914, that information is suspect.

As for all the other years that actually had hurricanes, the record latest "first" hurricane formed on Oct. 8, 1905, says Feltgen.

So, what's happened to all of the expected hurricanes this year?

Several tropical storms — of which there have been seven so far — dissipated when they ran into dry air and wind shear, Feltgen says, and did not affect the U.S. Wind shear — strong winds that roar from different directions at various levels of the atmosphere — can tear developing hurricanes apart.

Strong winds blowing west off of the Sahara Desert have helped bring dry, dusty air into the Atlantic this summer, which can tend to decrease hurricane formation, AccuWeather reports.

A tropical storm becomes a hurricane when its sustained winds reach 74 mph or greater.

"Several tropical waves coming across the tropical Atlantic in recent weeks have run into the same environmental issues and have failed to develop any further," Feltgen adds. Tropical waves are small weather disturbances that spin off the western Africa coast, which sometimes can strengthen into tropical storms and eventually hurricanes.

"Even though dry air has backed off a little in recent days, strong westerly winds aloft continue to interrupt tropical development for almost every budding system," according to AccuWeather hurricane expert Dan Kottlowski.

But now is not the time to get complacent, experts say:

"We are only at the midpoint of the six-month hurricane season, and have just entered the peak of the hurricane season (mid-August through late October)," Feltgen warns. "It is a mistake to believe that the second half of the season would resemble the first half."

"Hurricane formation in the Atlantic is overdue and is soon likely to shift in favor of multiple tropical systems," says Kottlowski.

As of late Friday afternoon, the hurricane center was monitoring three separate tropical disturbances in the Atlantic. However, none is forecast to develop into a hurricane. - USA Today.

WEATHER ANOMALIES: Atlantic Hurricane Season Reaches Halfway Point Without A Hurricane - In May, NOAA And Other Meteorologists Predicted An Above-Normal Hurricane Season?!

September 03, 2013 - ATLANTIC OCEAN - Meteorologists predicted an above-normal hurricane season in the Atlantic, but Monday marked the halfway point of the season and not one hurricane has brewed yet.

A satellite image of the Atlantic Ocean and Caribbean on Monday, Sept. 2, showing little disturbance.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

In May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted a “very active” hurricane season and said they expected between seven and 11 hurricanes. In August, the NOAA lowered the numbers to between six and nine possible hurricanes, but anticipated that three to five of those could become major hurricanes — storms in which winds are above 111 mph.

When the NOAA released its second report, the lead seasonal hurricane forecaster at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, Gerry Bell, Ph.D., said, “Our confidence for an above-normal season is still high because the predicted atmospheric and oceanic conditions that are favorable for storm development have materialized.”

However, Monday was the midpoint of the season, which runs from June 1 to Nov. 30, and the Atlantic has yet to see a hurricane. Is it safe for those on the East Coast to drink their bottled water and eat their canned goods, regardless of predictions?

Dennis Feltgen, a NOAA meteorologist based in Florida, said, “it’s still forecast to be an active season and it still can be.”

Records tracking hurricanes date back to 1851 and since then, “there have been 20 other years where the first hurricane of the season has formed on or after Sept. 3,” Feltgen said.

The last time August passed without a hurricane was in 2002, when the first one formed Sept. 11, he said.

Feltgen said that regardless of the rarity of making it to Labor Day without a hurricane, “to write off the season would be a huge mistake,” because “we just entered the peak of the season.”

Feltgen said that in 2001, the first hurricane didn’t hit until Sept. 9, but “we ended up with 15 named storms” that year. “And remember, Sandy made landfall on Oct. 29,” he added, referring to the superstorm that cost the Northeast $60 billion in damage and killed more than 100 people there.

A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that global warming reduced the possibility of the atmospheric currents that caused two storms to converge into Sandy and steered it into the New York region.

Study co-author Adam Sobel told The Associated Press that "Sandy was an extremely unusual storm in several respects and pretty freaky. And some of those things that make it more freaky may happen less in the future." Still, because of rising sea levels, a typical storm from the south could cause even more damage than Sandy did.

“There's nothing to get complacent about coming out of this research," Sobel told the AP.

Feltgen agreed. “We don’t want anyone letting their guard down ... We will have a hurricane, we’ll probably have a number of them,” he said. - NBC News.

EXTREME WEATHER: The World Continues To Broil - Federal Study Reveals That 2012 Was Warmer Than Every Year In The Previous Century; With Record Earth Changes In Heat Waves, Rising Sea Levels, Snow Melts, And Heat Buildup In The Oceans!

August 07, 2013 - UNITED STATES - A new massive federal study says the world in 2012 sweltered with continued signs of climate change. Rising sea levels, snow melt, heat buildup in the oceans, and melting Arctic sea ice and Greenland ice sheets, all broke or nearly broke records, but temperatures only sneaked into the top 10.

Surface temperatures in 2012 compared with the temperature average from 1981 to 2010.
Dan Pisut / NOAA Environmental Visualization Lab

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Tuesday issued a peer-reviewed 260-page report, which agency chief Kathryn Sullivan calls its annual "checking on the pulse of the planet." The report, written by 384 scientists around the world, compiles data already released, but it puts them in context of what's been happening to Earth over decades.

"It's critically important to compile a big picture," National Climatic Data Center director Tom Karl says. "The signs that we see are of a warming world."

Sullivan says what is noticeable "are remarkable changes in key climate indicators," mentioning dramatic spikes in ocean heat content, a record melt of Arctic sea ice in the summer, and whopping temporary melts of ice in most of Greenland last year. The data also shows a record-high sea level.

The most noticeable and startling changes seen were in the Arctic, says report co-editor Deke Arndt, climate monitoring chief at the data center. Breaking records in the Arctic is so common that it is becoming the new normal, says study co-author Jackie Richter-Menge of the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers' Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, N.H.

Karl says when looked at together, all the indicators show a climate that is changing over the decades. Individually, however, the story isn't as simple.

Karl says surface temperatures haven't risen in the last 10 years, but he notes that is only a blip in time due to natural variability. When looking at more scientifically meaningful time frames of 30 years, 50 years and more than 100 years, temperatures are rising quite a bit, Karl said. Since records have been kept in 1880, all 10 of the warmest years ever have been in the past 15 years, NOAA records show.

Depending on which of four independent analyses are used, 2012 ranked the eighth or ninth warmest year on record, the report says. Last year was warmer than every year in the previous century, except for 1998 when a record El Nino spiked temperatures globally. NOAA ranks 2010 as the warmest year on record.

They don't have to be records every year, Karl says.

Overall, the climate indicators "are all singing the same song that we live in a warming world," Arndt says. "Some indicators take a few years off from their increase. The system is telling us in more than one place we're seeing rapid change."

While the report purposely doesn't address why the world is warming, "the causes are primarily greenhouse gases, the burning of fossil fuels," Arndt says.

The study is being published in a special edition of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.  - NBC News.

MONUMENTAL EARTH CHANGES: Iceberg Antarctica - Ice Mass Size Of Chicago Breaks Off Pine Island Glacier!

July 13, 2013 - ANTARCTICA -  An iceberg in Antarctica recently broke off a glacier and is now floating freely in the ocean. What makes this so incredible is that the size of this icy mass is reportedly bigger than the city of Chicago.

Iceberg (Photo : Wikipedia/Facebook )

According to German scientists, this gigantic iceberg broke off Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier Monday, with the body of ice floating throughout parts of the Amundsen Sea.

The scientists said the iceberg was spotted floating in the area by an earth-observing satellite operated by the German Space Agency. The satellite, referred to as TerraSAR-X, further identified a crack forming in the iceberg, which was originally spotted back in October by NASA.

When the space agency did a fly over the Pine Island Glacier to investigate a survey of the crack, they studied the fracture that was 15 miles in length and 164 miles wide. A second fissure formed soon after near the top side of the first crack, which was discovered back in May via satellite images.

Yet researchers note that icebergs breaking off of the Pine Island Glacier is nothing new or rare. In fact, back in 2007 and 2008, the glacier saw two large icebergs severe and float away, making this Icelandic mace the fastest-changing on the West Antarctic Sheet.

However, researchers caution that rapid ecological changes can come from the Glacier's rapid flow, as it "acts as a plug, holding back part of the immense West Antarctic Ice Sheet whose melting ice contributes to rising sea levels." - Science World Report.

GLOBAL COASTAL EVENT: Geological Upheaval - Rising Seas Clearly Evident Along South Carolina Coast!

May 01, 2013 - UNITED STATES - Living in a coastal town or city with seawalls and docks on the waterfront, it can be difficult to notice the sea level rise by increments each year. But effects of higher sea level are very clear down a winding dirt road in Georgetown County where acres of what was once a forested wetland have morphed into a salt marsh of dead trees jutting toward the sky.

"When you go into the field, you really see a lot of trees dying. That's the first thing that catches your eye," said Alex Chow, who teaches biosystems engineering at Clemson University's Baruch Institute of Coastal Ecology and Forest Science located at Hobcaw Barony, a 17,500-acre wildlife refuge northeast of Georgetown.

Strawberry Swamp at Hobcaw Barony just outside Georgetown, S.C., is seen in this April 12, 2013 photograph. Clemson University researchers have mapped the advance of salt water due to rising sea levels at the swamp during the past six decades. The dead trees are trees those that can no longer survive in the salt water environment. The study found a 300 percent increase in the salt marsh during the period. (AP Photo/Bruce Smith)

Chow and two other colleagues at the institute used aerial photos to map how the salt water has advanced into freshwater Strawberry Swamp from nearby Winyah Bay.

Their study found that over the past six decades, the amount of salt marsh in the area has increased from about 4 acres to more than 16 acres. The study was published in December in "Wetland Science and Practice," the quarterly journal of the international Society of Wetland Scientists.

"Over long periods — and what we looked at is over 60 years — the maritime forest retreats at approximately the same rate sea level rises," said Tom Williams, a professor emeritus of forestry and natural resources who is a co-author.

He's not ready to say the all the change over six decades is the work of global warming.

Strawberry Swamp at Hobcaw Barony just outside Georgetown, S.C., is seen in this April 12, 2013 photograph. Clemson University researchers have mapped the advance of salt water due to rising sea levels at the swamp during the past six decades. The dead trees are trees those that can no longer survive in the salt water environment. The study found a 300 percent increase in the salt marsh during the period. (AP Photo/Bruce Smith)

"Sea level rises and falls based on earthquakes and changes in a great number of things. I'm not the expert to say how much sea level rise in the last 20 years is climate change and how much is other things," he said.
Bo Song, and assistant professor of forestry and natural resources also contributed to the study.

The study notes that along the state's north coast, the sea level rise has average 3 to 4 millimeters a year during the past century or so.

William Conner, a professor of forestry and natural resources at the institute, said that what is happening in Strawberry Swamp is similar to what is happening throughout the Southeast where the shorelines tend to be flattened. The dead trees along the Cape Fear River in Wilmington are an example, he said. In areas where rivers are dredged for shipping, it also makes it easier for salt water to impinge on freshwater areas.

"It's been a little more dramatic in recent years," he said.

Clemson University researchers, from left, Bo Song, Alex Chow, William Conner and Tom Williams discuss sea level rise at Strawberry Swamp at Hobcaw Barony just outside Georgetown, S.C., on April 12, 2013. Clemson researchers have mapped the advance of salt water due to rising sea levels at the swamp during the past six decades. The study found a 300 percent increase in the salt marsh during the period. (AP Photo/Bruce Smith)

"Based on the calculations in this study, you can see it's happening much faster in the past two decades," Chow said.

In natural areas sea level rise will mean a lost habitat for animals and birds that inhabit freshwater swamps. Salt marshes are also an abundant area for various species. But it can take years for the salt marshes created out of other land to become productive as a spawning ground for shrimp and other creatures.

"I call it a degraded swamp," Chow said. "It will take some time for that to happen." - Yahoo.

GLOBAL COASTAL EVENT: Extreme Weather - Powerful Winds Ground At Least Six Ships On The Caribbean Side Of The Panama Canal!

March 07, 2013 - PANAMA - Powerful winds and waves caused by a cold front from North America on Monday grounded at least six ships on the Caribbean coast of Panama, officials said.

The ships include several massive cargo vessels stranded off the city of Colon, near the Caribbean side of the Panama Canal.

No injuries or environmental damage were immediately reported, although residents reported a smell of petroleum in the vicinity of a ship that appeared to have a ruptured hull.

Red Cross workers attempted to secure some of the vessels as waves battered the coastline.

Officials reported 10 flooded homes and one person missing in the area due to bad weather.

The ships were not travelling through the canal and traffic in the channel was not affected. - India TV News.

Powerful winds created from a cold front in North America have grounded at least six ships on the coast of Panama.

There have been no reported injuries or environmental damage, although local residents had reported a smell of petrol coming from the affected area.

The ships included several massive cargo ships stranded off the city of Colon. - BBC.

WATCH: Powerful Winds Ground At Least Six Ships.

GEOLOGICAL UPHEAVAL: Land Subsidence And Planetary Transformations - American East Coast Faces Rising Seas From Slowing Gulf Stream! UPDATE: The Thick Sea Ice Is Disappearing From The Arctic - New Satellite Data Show!

February 15, 2013 - UNITED STATES - Experts on the sea level rise triggered by climate change have long known that it will proceed faster in some places than others. The mid-Atlantic coast of the U.S. is one of them, and the reason — in theory, anyway — is that global warming should slow the flow of the Gulf Stream as it moves north and then east toward northern Europe.

Waters from Hurricane Sandy start to flood Beach Avenue on Oct. 29, 2012, in Cape May, N.J. Later the full force of Hurricane Sandy would hit the New Jersey coastline bringing heavy winds and flood waters.

Now there’s a smoking gun that appears to validate the theory. A study in the February Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans ties the measured acceleration of sea level rise in this area to a simultaneous slowdown in the flow of the Gulf Stream. "There have been several papers showing (sea level rise) acceleration," said lead author Tal Ezer, of Old Dominion University’s Center for Coastal Physical Oceanography. “This new paper confirms the hypothesis for why it’s happening.” Even without faster-than-average sea level rise, America’s East Coast would be at high risk. On average, scientists have projected that the oceans should rise by about 3 feet by 2100, inundating low-lying land, contaminating water supplies and undermining roads, airports, port facilities and power plants.

Add the storm surges that come with hurricanes and other severe weather, and the danger gets even worse. A worldwide average of 8 inches of sea level rise since 1900 has already put millions of Americans at risk; 3 feet more will greatly multiply that risk; and the even higher levels that Americans could see will be a very bitter icing on top of that already unpleasant cake. The slowing of the Gulf Steam is not the only reason the U.S. coast will see higher sea level than the world average in coming decades, Ezer said. In some places, the land itself is slowly sinking as it readjusts to the disappearance of continental ice sheets more than 10,000 years ago. But that process can’t explain why sea level rise should actually be speeding up, as a report in the Journal of Coastal Research documented in October 2012.

Another study, which appeared in Nature Climate Change in June 2012, showed the same thing, and suggested that a Gulf Stream slowdown could be a contributing factor. Ezer’s own paper in Geophysical Research Letters in September 2012, documented the phenomenon in Chesapeake Bay, and once again, suggested the Gulf Stream’s possible role. What makes this new study different is that it includes actual measurements of the Gulf Stream’s flow, from instruments mounted on underwater cables that stretch across the Florida Strait. It also uses satellite altimeter data to document changes in the height of the ocean from one side of the Gulf Stream to the other.  Normally, the northeasterly flow of the stream literally pulls water away from the coast.

WATCH: Rising Sea Level Concerns.

“It keeps coastal sea level a meter or a meter and a half lower than the rest of the ocean,” Ezer said. In recent years, however, the satellites show that the midpoint of the Gulf Stream doesn’t have as high an elevation as it used to, and that the edges aren’t quite as low — again, evidence that the stream itself is starting to slow down. Theory says this is just what should be happening. Ordinarily, the Gulf Stream brings warm surface water from the tropics up along the U.S. coast, and then across to the eastern North Atlantic, where it cools and sinks to the bottom of the sea. The cold bottom water then flows south to the tropics, where it gradually warms, rises to the surface, and begins flowing north again. This constant flow, which meanders through all of the world’s oceans is sometimes called the global ocean conveyor belt, and the section that operates in the North Atlantic is called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. In a warming world, two things happen to throw a monkey wrench into the conveyor belt. First, melting ice, mostly from Greenland, dilutes the surface waters where the Gulf Stream reaches its northernmost extent.

Since fresh water is less dense than salty water, the water has a more difficult time sinking to begin its journey southward. Second, the surface water is warmer than it used to be, and since warm water is less dense than cold water, this just adds to the problem. Put the two together and you start to jam up the works, with the result that the whole conveyor belt slows down. And the water along the Atlantic coast of the U.S. begins to rise at an accelerating rate. While scientists expect sea level to rise by about 3 feet over the next 90 years or so, in places like New York City and Norfolk, Va., it could be significantly more. New York, where sea level is already a foot higher than it was in 1900, was just reminded of what happens when higher seas are pushed ashore by a major event like Superstorm Sandy. Add several more feet of sea level to that destructive equation, and the potential destruction is difficult to imagine. - TWC.

This is an Arctic sea ice ridge at one of the sites used to validate ice thickness measurements from the CroySat-2. Seymour Laxon / University College London.

Thick sea ice is disappearing from a broad swath of the Arctic, according to new satellite data that confirms estimates from computer models and suggests the region may be ice free during the summers sooner rather than later. The Arctic sea ice reached a new record minimum extent in 2012, when it covered nearly half the average area it did from 1979 to 2010. The new data show the Arctic sea ice volume in the fall, when it is at its lowest, has declined more than a third between 2003 and 2012. Ice volume in the winter has declined 9 percent. "Not only is the area getting smaller, but also its thickness is decreasing and making the ice more vulnerable to more rapid declines in the future," Christian Haas, a geophysicist at York University in Canada, told NBC News. Sea ice extent can change in response to melting from warmer ocean and air temperatures as well as getting shifted around by winds and currents, which can push it into thick piles. "The latter process would not change the volume of the ice," explained Haas. "But now we know that not only the area decreases, but also the thickness and therefore the total volume decreases."

The new observations are the first data analyzed from the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 satellite, which was launched in 2010. It uses a technique called radar altimetry to measure the thickness of the sea ice, which reveals the volume of the ice there, not just how much of the Arctic it covers. A NASA satellite collected similar data between 2003 and 2008 and helped researchers verify a computer model used to compute ice volume based on weather records, sea-surface temperature and satellite imagery. In recent years, that model, called the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS), has generated some controversy because of the substantial ice loss it showed, according to the University of Washington, where it was built. "These (new) data essentially confirm that in the last few years, for which we haven’t really had data, the observations are very close to what we see in the model," Axel Schweiger, a polar scientist with the university’s Applied Physics Laboratory, said in a news release. "So that increases our confidence for the overall time series from 1979 to present."

Monthly sea ice volume anomalies from 1979 to the present calculated using the PIOMAS system. Axel Schweiger / UW.

In a follow-up telephone interview with NBC News, Schweiger added that for the eight-year satellite record, the estimates from PIOMAS have actually been less than what was observed. "We knew that our system was conservative, we had a sense of that," he said, "but this confirms it." Going forward, researchers will use the PIOMAS to forecast when the Arctic will be ice free in the summers, a phenomenon that may impact everything from global shipping to weather patterns. Some studies indicate that could come as early as 2040. "As the satellite measurements show that not only the area decreases but also its thickness, it is actually becoming more likely that the ice will disappear sooner rather than later," Haas told NBC News. - NBC News.

EXTINCTION LEVEL EVENT: Tigers Under Threat From Disappearing Mangrove Forest In India And Bangladesh!

January 30, 2013 - INDIA - Report shows vast forest, shared by India and Bangladesh, is being rapidly destroyed by environmental change  A vast mangrove forest shared by India and Bangladesh that is home to possibly 500 Bengal tigers is being rapidly destroyed by erosion, rising sea levels and storm surges, according to a major study by researchers at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and others. 

A tiger roams within the Sunderban, some 140 km south of Calcutta. © Photograph: Piyal Adhikary/EPA.

The Sundarbans forest took the brunt of super cyclone Sidr in 2007, but new satellite studies show that 71% of the forested coastline is retreating by as much as 200 metres a year. If erosion continues at this pace, already threatened tiger populations living in the forests will be put further at risk.  Natalie Pettorelli, one of the report's authors, said: "Coastline retreat is evident everywhere. A continuing rate of retreat would see these parts of the mangrove disappear within 50 years. On the Indian side of the Sundarbans, the island which extends most into the Bay of Bengal has receded by an average of 150 metres a year, with a maximum of just over 200 metres; this would see the disappearance of the island in about 20 years." 

The Sundarbans are known for vanishing islands but the scientists said the current retreat of the mangrove forests on the southern coastline is not normal. "The causes for increasing coastline retreat, other than direct anthropogenic ones, include increased frequency of storm surges and other extreme natural events, rises in sea-level and increased salinity, which increases the vulnerability of mangroves," said Pettorelli.  "Our results indicate a rapidly retreating coastline that cannot be accounted for by the regular dynamics of the Sundarbans. Degradation is happening fast, weakening this natural shield for India and Bangladesh.  "As human development thrives, and global temperature continues to rise, natural protection from tidal waves and cyclones is being degraded at alarming rates. This will inevitably lead to species loss in this richly biodiverse part of the world, if nothing is done to stop it.  "The Sundarbans is a critical tiger habitat; one of only a handful of remaining forests big enough to hold several hundred tigers. To lose the Sundarbans would be to move a step closer to the extinction of these majestic animals," said ZSL tiger expert Sarah Christie. - Guardian.

GEOLOGICAL UPHEAVAL: The Dead Sea Rises For The First Time In 10 Years - Higher Level Comes In The Wake Of Huge Storm That Pounded Israel In Early January!

January 24, 2013 - ISRAEL - A test conducted Wednesday revealed that the Dead Sea rose 10 centimeters since its last monthly measurement, the first recorded increase in volume for the iconic and endangered body of water in 10 years.

The higher level is the result of runoff from the fierce storm that swept across Israel last week, bringing record levels of rainfall and causing the Sea of Galilee to rise by some 70 centimeters, with more expected after the winter runoff.  The Dead Sea is fed by the Jordan River as well as a series of streams running from the Judean Hills, many of which experienced heavy flooding last week. Pumping from the Sea of Galilee, which feeds the Jordan River, along with the diversion of water to the Dead Sea Works factory and the extremely arid climate have all contributed to a sharp drop in the level of the Dead Sea — over 20 meters since the 1970s.

On Tuesday, in a long-awaited report, the World Bank approved the feasibility of a canal and desalination system that which would in theory save the Dead Sea. The Israeli-Palestinian-Jordanian project would cost nearly $10 billion, and is opposed by environmental groups because of potential damage to the surrounding desert area. The initiators of the project hope to use water flowing from the Red Sea northward, down to the Dead Sea (the lowest point on earth), to drive hydroelectric plants, which would in turn power desalination stations and produce drinking water for the regional partners. The highly saline by-product would continue on to finally replenish the depleted Dead Sea, where the receding waters pose a serious danger by causing sinkholes along the shores of the sea. The plan, conceived in 1998, was hailed as a great example of regional cooperation; however, the project has been fraught with problems. In early December, Jordan reportedly backed out of the project, citing financial concerns. - Times of Israel.