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The Greenland ice sheet melt season for this year is over, resulting in the 28th year in a row in which Greenland has lost its.Carbon Brief Dr Martin Stendel, a climate scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) in Copenhagen, which is part of the Polar Portal.Dr Ruth Mottram, a climate scientist at DMI.11-11-2024This has been a spiky year for Greenland – a mix of highs from abundant snow in winter and lows from some very high melt days in summer. Those spikes of high snowfall delayed the onset of the melt season in June and reduced melt substantially in August. Fresh snow is a brighter white than old glacier ice, so summer snow effectively acted as a shiny protective blanket – just when the high melt season was getting going. The 2023-24 year, as the year before, had strong melt rates throughout the northern-hemisphere summer, but also above average snowfall during winter and in June. As a result, the balance between accumulated snow and melting ice on Greenland’s surface ended above the 1981-2010 average. The increase in both melt and snowfall are exactly what scientists expect in a warming climate. But, overall, Greenland has again lost more ice than it gained – even though, as in previous years, Greenland was comparably cool compared to North America and Europe. High “calving” rates – the breaking off of icebergs at the face of the ice sheet – meant that Greenland lost 80bn tonnes of ice over the 12 months from September 2023 to August 2024. The last year to see a net gain of ice is still 1996. This marks the 10th year of these annual reviews – see our previous annual analysis for 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020,
Surface melt.....Greenland’s annual cycle covers the 12 months from the previous September up to the end of August. Over this period, we calculate the “surface mass budget” (SMB) for the ice sheet. The SMB is akin to the bank account for the surface of the Greenland ice sheet. It is the balance between gains (from snowfall) and losses (from ice melt and runoff). As the ice sheet largely gains snow from September, accumulating ice through autumn, winter and into spring, we start the ice budget year on 1 September. Then, as the year warms up into late spring, the ice sheet begins to lose more ice through surface melt than it gains from fresh snowfall, generally from the mid of June. This melt season usually continues until the middle or end of August, the end of the surface budget year. Snowfall is the only way for the ice sheet to gain mass. Therefore, for the size of the ice sheet to remain constant, this snow must outweigh all other ways the ice sheet can lose ice – iceberg calving, melt at the base of the ice sheet and evaporation from the surface..According to our calculations, the Greenland ice sheet ended the year 2023-24 with an overall SMB of about 367bn tonnes (Gt). This is the 19th highest SMB in a dataset that goes back 44 years, and it is close to the 1981-2010 average of 348 Gt......there's a lot more- text, maps, graphs https://www.carbonbrief.org/
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Oceans face ‘triple threat’ of extreme heat, oxygen loss and acidification. A fifth of world’s ocean surface particularly vulnerable to threats driven by burning fossil fuel and deforestation, new research finds.Guardian Oliver Milman Tue 4 Jun 2024 The world’s oceans are facing a “triple th eat” of extreme heating, a loss of oxygen and acidification, with extreme conditions becoming far more intense in recent decades and placing enormous stress upon the planet’s panoply of marine life, new research has found. About a fifth of the world’s ocean surface is particularly vulnerable to the three threats hitting at once, spurred by human activity such as the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation, the study found. In the top 300 meters of affected ocean, these compound events now last three times longer and are six times more intense than they were in the early 1960s, the research states. The study’s lead author warned that the world’s oceans were already being pushed into an extreme new state because of the climate crisis. “The impacts of this have already been seen and felt,” said Joel Wong, a researcher at ETH Zurich, who cited the well-known example of the heat “blob” that has caused the die-off of marine life in the Pacific Ocean. “Intense extreme events like these are likely to happen again in the future and will disrupt marine ecosystems and fisheries around the world,” he added. The research, published in AGUAdvances, analyzed occurrences of extreme heat, deoxygenation and acidification and found that such extreme events can last for as long as 30 days, with the tropics and the north Pacific particularly affected by the compounding threats. Climate scientists have been alarmed by the relentless onward rise of heat in the ocean, which has hit extraordinary heights in recent months. “The heat has been literally off the charts, it’s been astonishing to see,” said Andrea Dutton, a geologist and climate scientist at the University of Wisconsin.......read on https://news.climate.
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- or years, campaigners have highlighted the unsustainable practices of the cruise ship industry, including the massive vessels’ Fdumping of sewage and wastewater, and their emissions of air pollutants and greenhouse gases.
- The cruise industry says it’s working hard to limit its environmental footprint, with the adoption of advanced wastewater treatment systems, cleaner fuels, and other sustainability measures.
- Jurisdictions around the globe have begun tightening rules to limit the effects of visiting ships.
- Critics and advocates remain unconvinced, arguing that much more needs to be done at a far faster pace to tackle cruisers’ global impact on the ocean and air.
In July, Amsterdam became the latest in a series of cities to regulate against huge cruise ships in an attempt to tackle pollution and the burden of overtourism. The Dutch capital joins other cities, such as Venice in Italy, Monterey Bay in California, and Bar Harbor in Maine, in seeking to limit the impact of cruises.
Around the same time, Transport Canada, a national regulator, took its own steps to tackle cruise waste: It upgraded measures that prohibit ship wastewater disposal in the sea from voluntary to mandatory. For years, Canada’s national waters were likened to a “toilet bowl” due to lax regulations enabling cruise ships passing through the country’s waters to dump sewage at will, according to campaigners.
“Making the voluntary program into a mandatory one allows enforcement to come in and brings the possibility of fines,” Anna Barford, shipping campaigner for U.S.- and Canada-based NGO Stand.Earth, told Mongabay. She said cruisers dumped as much as 32 billion liters (8.45 billion gallons) of waste in Canadian waters in 2019. “This is absolutely a good and right step.”
Meanwhile, the cruise industry says it’s working hard to limit its environmental footprint across the globe, including greenhouse gas emissions and harm to oceans and air. Critics and advocates argue that much more needs to be done at a far faster pace to tackle cruisers’ global impact.
U.S.-based NGO Friends of the Earth releases an annual scorecard that grades cruise ship companies on their environmental impacts. The most recent, from 2022, looked at 18 major cruise lines, giving the top overall grade, a C+, to a single company. Three others received C-range grades, seven got D-range grades, and seven got the lowest grade: an F. Despite the poor overall scores, some companies are improving when it comes to issues such as air and water pollution, said Marcie Keever, the group’s oceans and vessels program director. But the industry writ large remains mired in harmful activities, underpinned by a general lack of transparency by many players, she said. https://news.mongabay.
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Scientists discovered what they called “dark oxygen.” Until this paper, oxygen was believed to be created solely through photosynthesis, the process by which plants, algae and certain types of bacteria, consume light and produce oxygen. Dark oxygen, by contrast, is created deep in the ocean where sunlight does not reach; in pitch blackness, somehow oxygen was being produced. For years the scientists dismissed the findings, attributing it to faulty equipment, until finally the conclusion was inescapable. Something was producing oxygen deep below the surface. Mining the ocean floor for critical minerals was already controversial, but a new groundbreaking scientific study has thrown the industry into chaos as countries negotiate its future. At a meeting of the United Nations’ International Seabed Authority (ISA) in Jamaica, running from July 15 to Aug 2, countries are negotiating rules to govern deep sea mining. The regulations have been under development for years, but the clock has been running out on an agreement.
But as the negotiations were underway this year, a major study published in Nature Geoscience did more than just expose potential harms to ocean ecosystems due to mining – it revolutionized humans' understanding of how our world works. Mining on the seafloor could affect oxygen levels, and threaten biorich ecosystems in previously unknown ways. Scientists discovered what they called “dark oxygen.” Until this paper, oxygen was believed to be created solely through photosynthesis, the process by which plants, algae and certain types of bacteria, consume light and produce oxygen. Dark oxygen, by contrast, is created deep in the ocean where sunlight does not reach; in pitch blackness, somehow oxygen was being produced. For years the scientists dismissed the findings, attributing it to faulty equipment, until finally the conclusion was inescapable. Something was producing oxygen deep below the surface.
To power the green economy we need to extract metals... So what we have discovered means that we’re going to have to carefully think about if deep ocean mining goes ahead, where that mining should take place." The scientists describe “polymetallic nodules” – lumps of rock containing minerals found around four kilometeres deep that produce a small electric current. That electric current is believed to be splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen in a process called saltwater electrolysis, similar to how hydrogen can be produced using an electric current to split water into oxygen and hydrogen. The Metals Company wants to mine those nodules and sell them to produce batteries needed for the energy transition. The scientific study that found the nodules produce oxygen was funded in part by the company. During a press conference Thursday, Greenpeace International’s deep sea mining lead Lousia Casson said the findings — that the very minerals mining companies are after could be producing oxygen in total darkness — has set the debate over the industry’s future alight. “This is a really revolutionary discovery. It fundamentally changes our understanding of how oxygen is produced on planet Earth,” she said. The findings have “been brought up directly by a number of delegations, from Latin America and Europe inside these negotiations as a clear reason for precaution.”....read on https://www.
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- HURRICANES and FLOODING- There's More to Come! One is bad enough Climate Change raises the Threat of Multiple Hurricanes
- Save our Seas: Five Ways to Rewild and Conserve the Ocean- Oceans are Critical to Life but have Never been so Vulnerable.
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