Number 85 - To see a tree asmiling.

So nice to see you all here. Is it a full moon or something? Doesn't matter - hope you will come back on a daily basis.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Warming air from climate change isn't the only thing that will speed ice melting near the poles — so will the warming water beneath the ice, a new study points out.
Increased melting of ice in Greenland and parts of Antarctica has been reported as a consequence of global warming, potentially raising sea levels. But little attention has been paid to the impact of warmer water beneath the ice.
Now, Jianjun Yin of the University of Arizona and colleagues report the warming water could mean polar ice melting faster than had been expected. Their report was published Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience.
While melting floating ice won't raise sea level, ice flowing into the sea from glaciers often reaches the bottom, and grounded ice melted by warm water around it can produce added water to the sea.
"Ocean warming is very important compared to atmospheric warming because water has a much larger heat capacity than air," Yin explained. "If you put an ice cube in a warm room, it will melt in several hours. But if you put an ice cube in a cup of warm water, it will disappear in just minutes."
In addition, Yin explained, if floating ice along the coastal areas melts it will allow the flow of glaciers to accelerate, bringing more ice into the seas.
"This mean that both Greenland and Antarctica are probably going to melt faster than the scientific community previously thought," co-author Jonathan T. Overpeck said in a statement.
Overpeck, co-director of the University of Arizona's Institute of the Environment, said: "This paper adds to the evidence that we could have sea level rise by the end of this century of around 1 meter and a good deal more in succeeding centuries."
The subsurface ocean along the Greenland coast could warm as much as 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 Celsius) by 2100, the researchers reported. The warming along the coast of Antarctica would be somewhat less, they calculated, at 0.9 degree F (0.5 C).

Thanks HS...........

sumac, very interesting articles. I like the part about the tether going both ways.

Good tree saving all.

Ruptured Montana Pipeline Was Shut Down Before
By DAN BILEFSKY and ANAHAD O’CONNOR
An Exxon Mobil pipeline that ruptured late Friday along the Yellowstone River in south-central Montana, spilling crude oil into the river and forcing evacuations, had been shut down for one day in May because of concerns over the rising waters on the Yellowstone, the company said Sunday.

The president of the Exxon Mobil Pipeline Company, Gary Pruessing, said in a conference call that the company decided to restart the line after examining its safety record and determining that the risks of failure were minimal.

The pipeline, which is buried about eight feet below the river, runs about 70 miles to Billings, Mont., where it supplies an Exxon refinery.

Mr. Pruessing said it was unclear what had caused the spill. In addition to sending 70 employees to clean up and investigate, Exxon said it was using contractors and airplanes to search for oil along the riverbank and to assess whether the shores had been damaged.

On Sunday, Exxon’s team was joined by federal and state workers who traveled to the affected area to assess the damage. Mr. Pruessing said that company observers flying over the river had seen “very little soiling” beyond Billings.

Tim Thennis, a public assistance officer at the Montana Disaster and Emergency Services Division, told The Associated Press that the company’s claim was reasonable but had not been independently verified. “My guess is that as fast as that water is moving, it’s probably dissipating pretty quick,” he said.

Claire Hassett, a spokeswoman for Exxon, said by telephone on Sunday that the company had reduced production at its refinery in Billings and shut down the pipeline after the leak, which the company estimated at 750 to 1,000 barrels. Industry experts said that the amount was relatively small, although it remained uncertain precisely how much oil had been leaked.

The company said that air-quality monitoring in the affected area was continuing and that there was no danger to public health. It said the impact of the spill on water quality had not been determined.

The pipeline burst about 10 miles west of Billings, coating parts of the Yellowstone River that run past Laurel — a town of about 6,500 downstream from the rupture — with shiny patches of oil. Throughout the weekend, cleanup crews in Laurel worked to lessen the impact of the spill, laying down absorbent sheets along the banks of the river to mop up some of the escaped oil and measuring fumes to determine the health threat.

Fearing a possible explosion, officials in Laurel evacuated about 140 people on Saturday just after midnight, then allowed them to return at 4 a.m. after tests showed that fumes from the leaked oil had dissipated, The Associated Press reported.

While the cause of the rupture was not immediately known, Brent Peters, the fire chief for Laurel, told the news agency that it might have been caused by high waters eroding parts of the riverbed and exposing the pipeline to debris.

The pipeline is 12 inches wide and runs to Billings, an area with three refineries, Exxon Mobil said. All three were shut down after the spill. Exxon Mobil said it had called in its North American Regional Response Team to help clean up the spill, and a Fire Department spokesman in Laurel said more than 100 people, including officials with the Environmental Protection Agency, were also dispatched.

In a statement, Exxon Mobil said it “deeply regrets this release and is working hard with local emergency authorities to mitigate the impacts of this release on the surrounding communities and to the environment.”

“The pipeline has been shut down and the segment where the release occurred has been isolated,” the statement added. “All appropriate state and federal authorities have been alerted.”

The rupture occurred around 11:30 p.m. Friday. Duane Winslow, a disaster and emergency services coordinator for Yellowstone County, told a local television station, KTVQ, that all oil companies with pipelines near the river were told to immediately shut them down, and that the damaged pipe was shut down within half an hour.

Mr. Winslow said drinking water in the surrounding area was being monitored and so far had been determined to be safe. Officials in Billings initially shut down water intake but later reopened it, KTVQ reported.

Hey Danon, gotten any rain lately? I'm still curious as to why the three musketeers showed up at the same time.

Don't know sumac --- must have been a TriClickta.......... Grin, new word for Webster.

I saw the oil spill segmented on the Nat'l news this morning. I just think it's terrible to have those lines laid in our rivers.

Good clicking all - another tree asmiling.

Thirst for Fairness May Have Helped Us Survive
By NATALIE ANGIER
Among the Ache hunter-gatherers in eastern Paraguay, healthy adults with no dependent offspring are expected to donate as much as 70 to 90 percent of the food they forage to the needier members of the group. And as those strapping suppliers themselves fall ill, give birth or grow old, they know they can count on the tribe to provide.

Among the !Kung bushmen of the Kalahari in Africa, a successful hunter who may be inclined to swagger is kept in check by his compatriots through a ritualized game called “insulting the meat.” You asked us out here to help you carry that pitiful carcass? What is it, some kind of rabbit?

Among the Hadza foragers of northern Tanzania, people confronted by a stingy food sharer do not simply accept what’s offered. They hold out their hand, according to Frank Marlowe, an anthropologist at Durham University in England, “encouraging the giver to keep giving until the giver finally draws the line.”

Among America’s top executives today, according to a study commissioned by The New York Times, the average annual salary is about $10 million and rising some 12 percent a year. At the same time, the rest of the tribe of the United States of America struggles with miserably high unemployment, stagnant wages and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Now, maybe the wealth gap is a temporary problem, and shiny new quarters will soon rain down on us all. But if you’re feeling tetchy and surly about the lavished haves when you have not a job, if you’re tempted to go out and insult a piece of corporate meat, researchers who study the nature and evolution of human social organization say they are hardly surprised.

Darwinian-minded analysts argue that Homo sapiens have an innate distaste for hierarchical extremes, the legacy of our long nomadic prehistory as tightly knit bands living by veldt-ready team-building rules: the belief in fairness and reciprocity, a capacity for empathy and impulse control, and a willingness to work cooperatively in ways that even our smartest primate kin cannot match. As Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology has pointed out, you will never see two chimpanzees carrying a log together. The advent of agriculture and settled life may have thrown a few feudal monkeys and monarchs into the mix, but evolutionary theorists say our basic egalitarian leanings remain.

Studies have found that the thirst for fairness runs deep. As Ernst Fehr of the University of Zurich and his colleagues reported in the journal Nature, by the age of 6 or 7, children are zealously devoted to the equitable partitioning of goods, and they will choose to punish those who try to grab more than their arithmetically proper share of Smarties and jelly beans even when that means the punishers must sacrifice their own portion of treats.

In follow-up research with older children and adolescents that has yet to be published, Dr. Fehr and his colleagues have found a more nuanced understanding of fairness, an acknowledgment that some degree of inequality can make sense: The kid who studies every night deserves a better grade than the slacker. Nevertheless, said Dr. Fehr, there are limits to teenage tolerance. “ ‘One for me, two for you’ may not be too bad,” Dr. Fehr said. “But ‘one for me, five for you’ would not be accepted.”

A sense of fairness is both cerebral and visceral, cortical and limbic. In the journal PLoS Biology, Katarina Gospic of the Karolinska Institute’s Osher Center in Stockholm and her colleagues analyzed brain scans of 35 subjects as they played the famed Ultimatum game, in which participants bargain over how to divide up a fixed sum of money. Immediately upon hearing an opponent propose a split of 80 percent me, 20 percent you, scanned subjects showed a burst of activity in the amygdala, the ancient seat of outrage and aggression, followed by the arousal of higher cortical domains associated with introspection, conflict resolution and upholding rules; and 40 percent of the time they angrily rejected the deal as unfair.

That first swift limbic kick proved key. When given a mild anti-anxiety drug that suppressed the amygdala response, subjects still said they viewed an 80-20 split as unjust, but their willingness to reject it outright dropped in half. “This indicates that the act of treating people fairly and implementing justice in society has evolutionary roots,“ Dr. Gospic said. “It increases our survival.”

David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary theorist at the State University of New York at Binghamton, sees the onset of humanity’s cooperative, fair-and-square spirit as one of the major transitions in the history of life on earth, moments when individual organisms or selection units band together and stake their future fitness on each other. A larger bacterial cell engulfs a smaller bacterial cell to form the first complex eukaryotic cell. Single cells merge into multicellular organisms of specialized parts. Ants and bees become hive-minded superorganisms and push all other insects aside.

“A major transition occurs when you have mechanisms for suppressing fitness differences and establishing equality within groups, so that it is no longer possible to succeed at the expense of your group,” Dr. Wilson said. “It’s a rare event, and it’s hard to get started, but when it does you can quickly dominate the earth.” Human evolution, he said, “clearly falls into this paradigm.”

Our rise to global dominance began, paradoxically enough, when we set rigid dominance hierarchies aside. “In a typical primate group, the toughest individuals can have their way and dominate everybody else in the group,” said Dr. Wilson. “Chimps are very smart, but their intelligence is predicated on distrust.”

Our ancestors had to learn to trust their neighbors, and the seeds of our mutuality can be seen in our simplest gestures, like the willingness to point out a hidden object to another, as even toddlers will do. Early humans also needed ways to control would-be bullies, and our exceptional pitching skills — which researchers speculate originally arose to help us ward off predators — probably helped. “We can throw much better than any other primate,” Dr. Wilson said, “and once we could throw things at a distance, all of a sudden the alpha male is vulnerable to being dispatched with stones. Stoning might have been one of our first adaptations.”

Low hierarchy does not mean no hierarchy. Through ethnographic and cross-cultural studies, researchers have concluded that the basic template for human social groups is moderately but not unerringly egalitarian. They have found gradients of wealth and power among even the most nomadic groups, but such gradients tend to be mild. In a recent analysis of five hunter-gatherer populations, Eric Aiden Smith of the University of Washington and his colleagues found the average degree of income equality to be roughly half that seen in the United States, and close to the wealth distribution of Denmark.

Interestingly, another recent study found that when Americans were given the chance to construct their version of the optimal wealth gradient for America, both Republicans and Democrats came up with a chart that looked like Sweden’s. There’s no need to insult the meat in the land of lutefisk.

Pleistocene Treasures, at a Breakneck Pace
By KIRK JOHNSON
SNOWMASS, Colo. — Two different time scales collided in this place.

More than 130,000 years ago in the chilled depths of the Illinoian ice age, an errant glacier left a hole atop a 9,000-foot-high ridge near what would become the town of Aspen in the central Colorado Rockies. The depression filled with snowmelt, and for tens of thousands of years, the little lake attracted the giants of the Pleistocene — mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths half again the size of grizzly bears, supersize bison, camels and horses — that came to drink, and in many cases to die, in the high alpine mud.

The second time scale was more like a runner’s sprint. Scientists had only 70 days — a number framed by mountain winter weather and lawyerly fine print — to search the old lake bed sediments for remnants of these ancient animals.

That was from Oct. 14, when workers on a reservoir dam turned over the first fossil bones (of a young female mammoth, promptly nicknamed Snowy) to last weekend, when work on the reservoir resumed. A tight contract schedule dictates that the reservoir, which will supply the condos and ski lodges of Snowmass, must be completed by late this year. The result was a frantic race to find and catalog everything possible before the site was entombed once more by water.

The breakneck pace of the fossil dig was matched only by what scientists said was the extraordinary richness of the site, one of the best windows into the thundering megafauna of its time. “The speed of this thing is so unlike normal science — from discovery to completion of one of the biggest digs ever in less than nine months,” said Kirk R. Johnson, the chief curator of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, who oversaw the project. (He is no relation to this reporter.)

“Typically, you write a grant proposal and wait nine months to hear anything,” Dr. Johnson said. “We couldn’t wait — in a single day, we were finding a couple hundred bones.”

The ancient Snowmass clock was measured in the untold lives of the creatures that roamed and roared in a place and period poorly recorded in the scientific record: The high reaches of Rocky Mountains during the Sangamonian interglacial, a time of very warm weather around the globe, 75,000 to 125,000 years ago.

Other well-known ice age fossil sites, by contrast, like the La Brea Tar Pits in California and Hot Springs, S.D., have been dated to between 10,000 and 40,000 before present, and no well-preserved site has ever been found, scientists said, at this altitude in North America.

Here at Snowmastodon, as the site is called, the human clock ran partly on adrenaline, with 50 or more shovel-wielding scientists, volunteers and interns from the Denver Museum pawing the lake bed on a typical day. Their goal: sift 7,000 tons of sediment — 35 feet worth to the bottom of the glacial scrape — by the deadline.

Something very big — a mammoth tusk taller than LeBron James, a partial mastodon skull half the size of a Smart Car — was turning up every few days. By the end, more than 4,500 fossil specimens from 20 different animals were hauled out.

“Bone up!” Dr. Johnson shouted on recent, brilliantly sunny day, as a cheer rose across the pit. “Arm bone of a sloth,” Dr. Johnson said casually from a practiced distance, when the huge humerus was held aloft by its finder.

Preliminary estimates say the ancient ridge-top lake — unusual in having no stream inlet to bring in sediment — might have persisted for as long as 100,000 years before windblown dust filled it in to become a typical-looking alpine meadow, a state it had reached 50,000 years or more before humans came to the Americas.

The resulting fossil bed thus has a long climate record in its pollens, buried plants and windborne particles, as well as a long yardstick of the animals and what might be deduced about their lives. The sediment layers suggest periods when the lakeside landscape was tundra — too cold for trees — and others when great forests hugged the shore.

“I think at the end of the day that’s what’s going to be so valuable — you’ve got this crystal-clear glimpse into the Rockies before humans show up,” said Ian Miller, curator of paleobotany at the Denver museum. “We’re sitting here at almost 9,000 feet, and climate is driving ecosystems up and down. It’s a window, and you just watch it go by.”

A businessman from Wisconsin, R. Douglas Ziegler, bought the lake bed in 1958, when it was just an old meadow being used for grazing sheep.

The growing water needs of Snowmass Village, founded in the 1960s, eventually led engineers to look for a reservoir site, which led to the backhoes, and the first discoveries last fall, and which will lead, in a grand circling back of history, to an eventual restoration of meadow’s use as a watering hole. The accelerated pace was partly because the Snowmass Water and Sanitation Department District, under its contract with the Ziegler family, which still owns the land around the lake, faced substantial financial penalties if the work wasn’t completed on time. The reservoir must be up and running by next spring under the contract, but because winter will close down the work late this year, just as it did on the dig, that means finishing up before snow flies.

The dig, partly supported by a grant from the National Geographic Society, will be featured in a National Geographic-Nova special on PBS next year.

“We cross-country skied over where those creatures once roamed, and we never had any idea,” said Peter Ziegler, 62, who spent two days at the dig in June, laboring with a shovel.

There are still many unanswered questions about what happened here — most pointed is, when did the animals actually die?

Because the site is too old for radiocarbon dating, which is only useful to about 50,000 years before present, other more complicated methods, all of which take longer to work out, will have to be used. Ancient pollen, for example, was collected from the mud to compare against other climate indicators. Core samples will be examined for markers like volcanic dust, which might be dated using radiometric dating techniques based on argon 40-39 or uranium-lead geochronology.

Secondly, the animals did not march to their deaths in a steady procession over the centuries. There are sediment layers with few bones, followed by layers with many bones — indicating, Dr. Johnson said, that the lake may have multiple stories to tell. The remains of young animals found in the pit could suggest, for example, that through at least through part of its history the lake was a trap, with slippery slopes or lethal leg-sucking goo, like the La Brea Tar Pits.

The third great question, connected to everything else, is how the great shifts of climate recorded by the mud affected the lives and habits of the creatures that roamed here.

Was the climate warm enough in the interglacial period, which peaked in temperature around 110,000 years ago, that elephant-family relatives and other animals like camels and sloths could live year round at high altitude, or were there migratory patterns — highlands in the summers, lowlands in winter — that might emerge? For instance, will the growth rings of mastodon or mammoth tusks found here differ from those of cousins found at low altitude sites, hinting at permanent mountain residence?

“That’s the kind of question we couldn’t even ask before this site was discovered,” Dr. Johnson said.

Some researchers are hoping the finds will yield DNA that might give a glimpse into the genes of ice age mammals. Genetic diversity, or uniformity, can suggest how big a population was at the time of an individual’s death.

“The interglacial period wasn’t a great time for stuff to be preserved,” said Beth Shapiro, an associate professor of biology at Pennsylvania State University who studies ancient DNA. “So this is not just a window into a time, but a whole group of animals we’ve never been able to get before.”

“Scale” is the word that researchers and volunteers used over and over, from the timeline to the volume of specimens to the crush of pressure to the trove of data that will fill research agendas for years to come.

Chris Faison, a schoolteacher from Aspen and a volunteer at the dig, said he hoped the story would resonate into the future, too.

After the news broke last fall about the archaeological treasure trove, his school built a mastodon model to scale, 12 feet tall at the shoulder — and Mr. Faison said the first and second graders he teaches shared his awe.

“I never thought I’d see this kind of stuff,” he said, pushing his shovel into the mud.

good ones, sumac. I think the Colo dig should have been given more time. Also, the first article reminds me of the American Natives who shared with the entire tribe. Thanks.

Good clicking all good clickers.

Hi Danon,
Clicked this morning - may have forgotten to yesteerday.

Well, sumac -- you saved another tree today.

Great clicking all.

Sue, I hope you got some rain........ It looked like it on the news.

Thanks for making a tree smile today everyone.

Yes, Danon, I have been getting some good rain. .4 inches yesterday and then again some overnight. The gardens are most appreciative. Clicked today.

Thank you Sue - you know I feel the same way about all of you. This lone pine tree is the sole survivor of a wood with 70,000 pines on the Japanese beach hardest hit by the tsunami. Sorry for reprinting the whole article (from today's Wall Street Journal) but it's subscription-only - and I know you'll love it

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Hope of the Lone Pine: As Tree Clings to Life, So Does Japanese City

"RIKUZENTAKATA, Japan—In the quiet hours just after dawn, Yasumori Matsuzaka drives through the ruins of his hometown, past the gutted hospital and the mounds of splintered wood and shattered concrete.

The object of his pilgrimage: a tree. The solitary pine, which towers 100 feet above this pulverized city's waterfront, is all that's left of a grove of roughly 70,000 trees that once lined the beach here, and which his ancestors helped plant more than two centuries ago.

It has become a national symbol of Japan's tenacity, clinging to life amid the destruction of the March 11 tsunami, which killed more than 20,000 people and laid waste to entire communities along the country's northeast coast.

"When I see it, I feel our city can revive," said the 67-year-old Mr. Matsuzaka, a retired teacher, who makes the trek from his temporary house in the hills several times a week.

Lately, however, his visits have turned ominous. More than three months after the tree—known by locals simply as the Lone Pine—escaped the devastation of that terrible day, its once-green needles are turning a reddish-brown as saltwater envelopes its roots.

The Lone Pine may be dying.

A team of volunteer specialists has put the tree on the arboreal equivalent of life support, swathing its trunk in bandages and constructing a caisson around its base in an effort to keep the infiltrating sea at bay.

"If we can save this tree, it will show we have the power, the strength to come back," Mr. Matsuzaka said.

In Rikuzentakata, volunteers are collecting historical documents and books to be restored. The papers are relics of their common past. WSJ's Gordon Fairclough reports from northeastern Japan.

If residents fail, it will be yet another reminder of the hard road ahead for a part of Japan that was already fading before the tsunami struck. Rikuzentakata was one of the worst-hit cities in the country. Towering waves carried away nearly a tenth of its 23,000 residents and all but obliterated its downtown. Survivors are struggling to find new homes and jobs, restart businesses and rebuild shattered lives.

But as they cope with the urgent worries of the present, Mr. Matsuzaka and others are also fighting to salvage relics from their common past and save the cultural touchstones that gave their community character—and, in the eyes of many, make it worth saving. The desire to preserve such anchors is a fundamental human impulse in the face of uncertainty and loss.

"It's the identity of the city that's at stake," said Masaru Kumagai, a 44-year-old museum curator overseeing reclamation of many of the city's artifacts, including the contents of a destroyed museum that range from a trio of ancient swords and prehistoric bone tools to comic books from the 1960s. "This is what makes us who we are."

Some of Rikuzentakata's treasures were parts of daily life: a local soy sauce brand made in a factory by the river for centuries; the sake whose dark-green bottles were known throughout Japan to the pride of people here; and shops where traditional Japanese sweets were made with recipes handed down for generations.

Others, like a set of official diaries of the feudal governors of Rikuzentakata, preserve memories of a time when this now-shrinking coastal city was in its heyday, with gold mines and abundant timber and fish. The Yoshida Papers, which span more than 100 years of history starting in the 1750s, detail everything from local salt production to famines and the fiery landing of a meteor in Rikuzentakata in 1850. A group of amateur historians, who had been working for decades to translate the diaries, saw most of its work destroyed in the tsunami and is now starting over again.

Yasumori Matsuzaka, whose ancestors helped plant the city's vast pine grove in the 18th century, is fighting to save the lone survivor.

The Lone Pine, with its gracefully curved trunk and spray of needled branches at the top, has been adopted as Rikuzentakata's unofficial emblem, and its image adorns everything from towels and T-shirts to the helmets of soldiers conducting relief operations. Posters hanging around town feature a photograph of the tree and an exhortation: "Join our hearts together, and let's bring our hometown back to life."

When Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan toured the city after the disaster, the mayor, Futoshi Toba, made a point of taking him by the tree, which stands behind a smashed youth hostel, surrounded by the shorn-off stumps of trees that couldn't withstand the waves.

City officials believe it survived because of its location—partially shielded on the ocean side by the youth hostel and protected inland by a raised roadway that may have muted the water's force.

"It was like a miracle," said Mr. Toba, who wears a button with a picture of the pine tree and the words "Fight On" pinned to his windbreaker. "For people to see this tree withstanding the devastation, it gives them hope" that Rikuzentakata will one day again be the way it was.

As a child, Mr. Toba went to the pine wood by the beach for summer picnics with his grandparents. As an adult, he visited the grove with his wife, Kumi, who perished in the tsunami, and his two sons, who survived. "We're going to keep doing all we can to keep it alive," he said.

The stand of 70,000 pines, known as the Takata Matsubara, or pine forest, lined Rikuzentakata's long, white-sand beach. It was the city's main tourist attraction. Its beauty drew visitors from across Japan, providing vital income for the local economy. But its most important role was as a city commons.

Athletes jogged, teenagers courted, old friends took walks along the hushed and shaded paths of the woods. "It's always been a big part of life in this city," said Mr. Matsuzaka, a member of Preserve the Takata Matsubara, a conservation group set up three years ago to help maintain the grove.

Mr. Matsuzaka's ancestors, prominent local officials, ordered the planting of part of the grove in the 18th century in an effort to cope with an earlier upheaval in the city: the exhaustion of the mountainous area's gold mines and a subsequent shift to more reliance on agriculture.

The trees were meant to screen rice fields from sand and salt spray. In the lean years after World War II, Mr. Matsuzaka remembers fishing in the shallows off the beach with nets, hauling in sardines and sea perch. Timber from the wood was used to build a local middle school.

"The whole country was so poor," Mr. Matsuzaka said. "We needed the beach and the pine grove to survive."

In more recent years, Mr. Matsuzaka took daily afternoon walks in the woods, where he found inspiration for traditional Japanese song verses he composed. He would jot down his thoughts in a small notebook that he kept in his breast pocket.

He visited the pine grove the day before the tsunami. Its stolid trees, many more than 100 years old, seemed as eternal as the mountains ringing the city and the ocean that stretched away from the shore.

Disasters had hit the pines before. A tsunami spawned by an earthquake across the Pacific Ocean off Chile in 1960 ripped out a large part of the grove. Residents replanted.

The task now is far more complicated. The quake and tsunami have radically changed Rikuzentakata's topography. Land along the waterfront has sunk by nearly three feet in places, and much of the beach is submerged. It is unclear whether the area can be reclaimed.

Some in the city question the wisdom of investing so much emotional energy in a quest to save such a fragile link to the past. Matsuo Sasaki, a local businessman, who also belongs to Preserve the Takata Matsubara, said he hopes the pine will survive. But he is trying to be philosophical about its fate.

"Some people see the tree as a symbol of their hard situation and are trying to hang on. They might be disappointed if it dies," said Mr. Sasaki. "I try not to look at it that way. The pine tree is a tree, and we are different. We are people, and we can recover."

For many in the town, however, the Lone Pine's fate is critical.

On the frigid fifth day after the waves tore through Rikuzentakata, Mr. Matsuzaka made his way back downtown. Although he lost his house and his car, none of his family members were killed, and he was eager to help with salvage operations.

"When I saw only one tree was left, I couldn't believe my eyes," he said.

He and others quickly identified the tree as a priority. When soldiers arriving in Rikuzentakata to help asked Mr. Toba, the mayor, to pick a name for their relief mission, his choice was "The Hope of the Takata Matsubara."

The tree itself seemed fine, at least at first. "It was very green. It seemed healthy," Mr. Matsuzaka said.

But a month after the tsunami, the amount of salt in the water surrounding the tree's roots remained stubbornly high. Local officials began to worry and sought expert help.

Tree surgeons volunteering their time built a sandbag-and-timber barricade to protect the pine against the ocean. Gashes in the tree's bark, from floating debris, were treated with antibiotic salve, and its trunk was wound with straw and green plastic. Straw mats were staked to the ground to protect the tree's shallow roots.

By early May, though, the salt level was roughly three times the survivable limit for the tree, a local hybrid of Japanese red and black pines. Specialists called in from across Japan decided more drastic steps were required. The city sought help to build a caisson around the tree so that its roots could be bathed in fresh water.

In mid-June, construction workers used a pile driver to slam interlocking steel plates 16 feet deep into the earth around the tree. Equipment began pumping out salt water, while tons of fresh water, brought in by truck, have been poured in.

"The tree is in very critical condition," said Kichiei Yonai, a landscape contractor deputized by the city to oversee efforts to keep the tree alive.

If the tree survives until February or March of next year, Mr. Yonai and others think it may need to be moved. During those months, trees here are in a state akin to hibernation, making it less dangerous to move them. Still, the pine is extremely heavy and has widespread roots, making relocation difficult.

"It's in the hands of the specialists now," said Mr. Matsuzaka. "All I can do is pray."

There have been hopeful signs that the pine may survive. A specialist who climbed to the top of the tree in late May reported seeing flowing sap and new shoots sprouting from branches.

Still, Rikuzentakata's leaders are preparing for the worst.

To preserve the Lone Pine's DNA in case it perishes, researchers have taken cuttings of branches and grafted them onto the trunks of similar pines. Four of 100 attempted grafts have succeeded. It will be several years before the new trees, now in a nursery, can be transplanted.

"Even if it takes 10 or 20 years, I want to recreate the Takata Matsubara and leave that for the generations to come," Mr. Matsuzaka said. "If you could have gone there, you would understand.""
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—Hitoshi Koreeda contributed to this article.
Write to Gordon Fairclough at gordon.fairclough (at) wsj.com

HS, thanks for the article. It touched my heart and I do hope the tree survives. Mr. Matsuzaka sounds very dedicated and a serious student of history. It's nice to see there are people like him still around.

Good clicks all --- we have saved another tree today.

Answer for Invasive Species: Put It on a Plate and Eat It
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
With its dark red and black stripes, spotted fins and long venomous black spikes, the lionfish seems better suited for horror films than consumption. But lionfish fritters and filets may be on American tables soon.

An invasive species, the lionfish is devastating reef fish populations along the Florida coast and into the Caribbean. Now, an increasing number of environmentalists, consumer groups and scientists are seriously testing a novel solution to control it and other aquatic invasive species — one that would also takes pressure off depleted ocean fish stocks: they want Americans to step up to their plates and start eating invasive critters in large numbers.

“Humans are the most ubiquitous predators on earth,” said Philip Kramer, director of the Caribbean program for the Nature Conservancy. “Instead of eating something like shark fin soup, why not eat a species that is causing harm, and with your meal make a positive contribution?”

Invasive species have become a vexing problem in the United States, with population explosions of Asian carp clogging the Mississippi River and European green crabs mobbing the coasts. With few natural predators in North America, such fast-breeding species have thrived in American waters, eating native creatures and out-competing them for food and habitats.

While most invasive species are not commonly regarded as edible food, that is mostly a matter of marketing, experts say. Imagine menus where Asian carp substitutes for the threatened Chilean sea bass, or lionfish replaces grouper, which is overfished.

“We think there could be a real market,” said Wenonah Hauter, the executive director of Food and Water Watch, whose 2011 Smart Seafood Guide recommends for the first time that diners seek out invasive species as a “safer, more sustainable” alternative to their more dwindling relatives, to encourage fisherman and markets to provide them.

“What these species need now is a better — sexier — profile, and more cooks who know how to use them,” she said. She has enlisted celebrity chefs to promote eating the creatures.

Scientists emphasize that human consumption is only part of what is needed to control invasive species and restore native fish populations, and that a comprehensive plan must include restoring fish predators to depleted habitats and erecting physical barriers to prevent further dissemination of the invaders.

“We are not going to be able to just eat our way out of the invasive species problem,” Dr. Kramer said. “On the other hand, there are places where this can be a very useful part of the strategy.”

The United States Fish and Wildlife Service is now exploring where it might be helpful. Models suggest that commercial harvest of Asian carp in the Mississippi would most likely help control populations there, “as part of an integrated pest management program,” said Valerie Fellows, a spokeswoman.

In practice, it is still unclear whether commercial fishing pressure could be high enough to have a significant impact, she said. The Army Corps of Engineers has spent millions of dollars to erect electronic barriers to keep Asian carp from moving from the Illinois River into the Great Lakes.

There are risks to whetting America’s appetite. Marketing an invasive species could make it so popular that “individuals would raise or release the fish” where they did not already exist, Ms. Fellows said, potentially exacerbating the problem; tilapia were originally imported into Latin America for weed and bug control, but commercialization helped the species spread far more widely than intended.

Dr. Kramer is concerned that the marketing of lionfish might increase the number of traps on reefs, which could trap other fish as well. He said spearfishing was the sustainable way to catch lionfish, which are reef dwellers.

Cookbooks do not say much about how to filet an Asian carp, which has an unusual bony structure. And even if one developed a taste for, say, European green crab soup, there is nowhere to buy the main ingredient, though it is plentiful in the sea.

To increase culinary demand, Food and Water Watch has teamed up with the James Beard Foundation and Kerry Heffernan, the chef at the South Gate restaurant in New York City, to devise recipes using the creatures. At a recent tasting, there was Asian carp ceviche and braised lionfish filet in brown butter sauce.

Lionfish, it turns out, looks hideous but tastes great. The group had to hire fishermen to catch animals commonly regarded as pests. Mr. Heffernan said he would consider putting them on his menu and was looking forward to getting some molting European green crabs to try in soft-shell crab recipes.

Last summer, the Nature Conservancy sponsored a lionfish food fair in the Bahamas, featuring lionfish fritters and more. They offered fishermen $11 a pound — about the price of grouper — and got an abundant supply. Lionfish, native to the Indian Ocean and South Pacific, arrived in the Caribbean in the early 1990s and are spreading rapidly; voracious eaters, they even eat juveniles of native fish.

Lionfish, like grouper, can carry ciguatoxin, which causes vomiting and neurological symptoms, so they cannot be taken from water where the microbe that produces the toxin is found. The fish’s venomous spines must be removed before sale, although that is not a serious marketing obstacle.

Mitchell Davis, vice president of the Beard Foundation, said other species had moved from being pariah pests to must-have items on American plates, like dandelion greens for salads.

Millions of tonnes of plastic debris dumped each year in the world's oceans could pose a lethal threat to whales, according to a scientific assessment to be presented at a key international whaling forum this week.
A review of research literature from the last two decades reveals hundreds of cases in which cetaceans -- an order including 80-odd species of whales, dolphins and porpoises -- have been sickened or killed by marine litter.
Entanglement in plastic bags and fishing gear have long been identified as a threat to sea birds, turtles and smaller cetaceans.
For large ocean-dwelling mammals, however, ingestion of such refuse is also emerging as a serious cause of disability and death, experts say.
Grisly examples abound.
In 2008, two sperm whales stranded on the California coast were found to have a huge amount -- 205 kilos (450 pounds) in one alone -- of fish nets and other synthetic debris in their guts.
One of the 50-foot (15-metre) animals had a ruptured stomach, and the other, half-starved, had a large plug of wadded plastic blocking its digestive tract.
Seven male sperm whales stranded on the Adriatic coast of southern Italy in 2009 were stuffed with half-digested squids beaks, fishing hooks, ropes and plastic objects.
In 2002, a dead minke whale washed up on the Normandy coast of France had nearly a tonne of plastic in its stomach, including bags from two British supermarkets.
"Cuvier's beaked whales in the northeast Atlantic seem to have particularly high incidences of ingestion and death from plastic bags," notes Mark Simmonds, author of the report and a member of scientific committee of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), which meets this week from July 11-14 on the British island of Jersey.
How widespread the problem is, and whether it could threaten an entire population or species, remains unknown.
"In many areas of the world, stranded whale carcasses are not recorded or examined, and in areas where strandings are recorded, examination of gut contents for swallowed plastics is rare," said Chris Parsons, a marine biologist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
The majority of cetaceans that die from intestinal trauma getting caught up in fishing gear probably sink to the ocean floor, experts say.
"There is, however, evidence that plastic debris in the seas can harm these animals by both ingestion and entanglement, and this needs to be urgently further investigated," said Simmonds, Director of Science for Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society.
The main threats to cetaceans worldwide are accidental capture in fishing nets and climate change, he noted in an email exchange.
"We don't yet know enough about marine debris to rank it against other theats, but as it continues to sadly grow in the oceans, it will surely play a greater and greater role."
Studies have shown that litter concentrates in so-called convergence zones -- formed by currents and wind -- where whales feed on abundant prey.
Scientists have been slow to measure the impact of ocean refuse on animals living in or by the sea, and international organisations have been even slower in taking action.
In 2003, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) established the Global Initiative on Marine Litter, but it launched a detailed analysis of the scope of the problem only in 2009.
More recently, representatives from 38 countries meeting in Hawaii in March adopted the "Honolulu Commitment" outlining a dozen voluntary measures.
For whales, the level of threat from ocean garbage varies according to species and type of debris, the new report said.
For toothed whales from the suborder Odontoceti, ingestion of plastic pieces appears to pose the greatest danger.
Sperm and beaked whales are thought to be especially vulnerable because they are suction feeders.
Less is known about the impact on filter-feeding or baleen whales (suborder Mysticeti), which consume huge quantities of tiny zooplankton and small, schooling fish.
A single blue whale, for example, eats up to 3,600 kilos (8,000 pounds) of krill each day during feeding season.
Potentially, the greater danger here is from toxins in plastic that breaks down over time into tiny, even microscopic, particles.
Collisions with ships, and tissue-damaging noise pollution from off-shore oil exploration are additional threats, experts note.
The IWC is riven between countries that oppose whale hunting, and those that back the handful of nations -- Japan, Iceland and Norway -- that defy a 1986 whaling ban or use legal loopholes to circumvent it.

ohhhh, I really detest that we humans are so polluting the earth that other animals can't survive.
We really need to have laws to jail polluters............

Thank you all clickers!!!!!!!!!!

We saved another tree today.

Going to go click on this hot dry day. Supposed to hit 100 tomorrow.

Thank you....................

And thank you for cliciking t0day......................

Thanks to all cickers for saving a tree today...............