November 11, 2010
For Cats, a Big Gulp With a Touch of the Tongue
By NICHOLAS WADE
It has taken four highly qualified engineers and a bunch of integral equations to figure it out, but we now know how cats drink. The answer is: very elegantly, and not at all the way you might suppose.
Cats lap water so fast that the human eye cannot follow what is happening, which is why the trick had apparently escaped attention until now. With the use of high-speed photography, the neatness of the feline solution has been captured.
The act of drinking may seem like no big deal for anyone who can fully close his mouth to create suction, as people can. But the various species that cannot do so — and that includes most adult carnivores — must resort to some other mechanism.
Dog owners are familiar with the unseemly lapping noises that ensue when their thirsty pet meets a bowl of water. The dog is thrusting its tongue into the water, forming a crude cup with it and hauling the liquid back into the muzzle.
Cats, both big and little, are so much classier, according to new research by Pedro M. Reis and Roman Stocker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, joined by Sunghwan Jung of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and Jeffrey M. Aristoff of Princeton.
Writing in the Thursday issue of Science, the four engineers report that the cat’s lapping method depends on its instinctive ability to calculate the balance between opposing gravitational and inertial forces.
What happens is that the cat darts its tongue, curving the upper side downward so that the tip lightly touches the surface of the water.
The tongue is then pulled upward at high speed, drawing a column of water behind it.
Just at the moment that gravity finally overcomes the rush of the water and starts to pull the column down — snap! The cat’s jaws have closed over the jet of water and swallowed it.
The cat laps four times a second — too fast for the human eye to see anything but a blur — and its tongue moves at a speed of one meter per second.
Being engineers, the cat-lapping team next tested its findings with a machine that mimicked a cat’s tongue, using a glass disk at the end of a piston to serve as the tip. After calculating things like the Froude number and the aspect ratio, they were able to figure out how fast a cat should lap to get the greatest amount of water into its mouth. The cats, it turns out, were way ahead of them — they lap at just that speed.
To the scientific mind, the next obvious question is whether bigger cats should lap at different speeds.
The engineers worked out a formula: the lapping frequency should be the weight of the cat species, raised to the power of minus one-sixth and multiplied by 4.6. They then made friends with a curator at Zoo New England, the nonprofit group that operates the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston and the Stone Zoo in Stoneham, Mass., who let them videotape his big cats. Lions, leopards, jaguars and ocelots turned out to lap at the speeds predicted by the engineers.
The animal who inspired this exercise of the engineer’s art is a black cat named Cutta Cutta, who belongs to Dr. Stocker and his family. Cutta Cutta’s name comes from the word for “many stars” in Jawoyn, a language of the Australian aborigines.
Dr. Stocker’s day job at M.I.T. is applying physics to biological problems, like how plankton move in the ocean. “Three and a half years ago, I was watching Cutta Cutta lap over breakfast,” Dr. Stocker said. Naturally, he wondered what hydrodynamic problems the cat might be solving. He consulted Dr. Reis, an expert in fluid mechanics, and the study was under way.
At first, Dr. Stocker and his colleagues assumed that the raspy hairs on a cat’s tongue, so useful for grooming, must also be involved in drawing water into its mouth. But the tip of the tongue, which is smooth, turned out to be all that was needed.
The project required no financing. The robot that mimicked the cat’s tongue was built for an experiment on the International Space Station, and the engineers simply borrowed it from a neighboring lab.
November 12, 2010
Finding a Bed Among Central Park’s Trees
By COLIN MOYNIHAN
There is no shortage of places in Manhattan where visitors can spend the night. Luxury hotels offer lavish suites that can run thousands of dollars, and youth hostels have beds for as little as $20. At least one flophouse survives on the Bowery. And, of course, there is couch-surfing — countless travelers bunk with old friends or near-strangers for little more than an owed favor.
Cory and Dana Foht have taken another route. On some 20 nights over the past two months, the Fohts, 25-year-old twins from Florida, have climbed about 25 feet up the side of a tall American elm tree in Central Park, stretched nylon hammocks between its branches, unrolled sleeping bags and, with a few acrobatic moves, squirmed into their makeshift beds.
“It’s kind of like its own ecosystem up here,” Cory said one recent night as he lay in his hammock. “You’re definitely aware that you are sleeping in something and attached to something that’s alive.”
Their resting spot is not likely to be awarded any stars by the Michelin Guide, but it offers something the Fohts think is better: stars in an inky firmament directly overhead and obscured only by a screen of twigs and leaves.
“When you sleep inside, it’s warm and cozy,” Dana explained. “But it’s also like you’re sleeping in a box.”
Sleeping in the elm may be invigorating, but it is also illegal. Visitors are not allowed in Central Park between 1 and 6 a.m.; violators can be fined $50. While park rules do not explicitly forbid climbing any of its 24,000 trees, they do prohibit any behavior that damages a tree.
Police and parks officers go through Central Park each night and rouse anyone found sleeping. But those people are usually on a bench or under a tree. A spokeswoman said the Department of Parks and Recreation knew of no one who had recently been discovered slumbering in a hammock after curfew.
“Twenty-five years ago, there was a guy who built treehouses in the park,” the spokeswoman, Vickie Karp, wrote in an e-mail. “He promised never to do it again.”
The Fohts made no such promises.
The notion to camp above the ground came to the brothers this spring while they were climbing a banyan tree in Florida. They put the idea into practice a few months later when they embarked on a city-to-city bicycle trip and began exploring creative and cheap ways of finding food and lodging.
“Really, the inspiration behind it was getting above the sidewalk level,” Cory said. “You’re getting into your own little world and rising above the stress of the street life.”
Their first try came a few months later, in August, while visiting Williamsburg, Va., but they encountered hammock-hanging problems.
Soon, they learned the importance of selecting the right tree. It must have branches low enough to be ascended without a rope, but also have boughs high and sturdy enough that the hammocks can safely be suspended. The tree’s canopy must be dense enough for the Fohts to recline amid the leaves without being easily seen.
They have since slept in trees on the campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville (“We thought Jefferson would approve,” said Cory, referring to Thomas Jefferson, the founder of the school), and near Arlington National Cemetery. In Richmond, where they spent about a week’s worth of nights in two different trees, their favorite perch was a towering oak next to a church parking lot, until one Sunday morning when they awoke to find a police officer guarding cars parked by worshipers. (They stayed in their hammocks until the congregation had dispersed.)
While in trees, the brothers said, they sometimes catch glimpses of people who do not know they are being observed, or overhear snippets of conversation from those who imagine that they are alone. They have experienced a few close encounters with birds, they said, but have been lucky to avoid raccoons. The soft sway of the branches usually lulls them to sleep, though one recent night in Central Park, Dana had a disturbing dream in which a cord used to secure one end of his hammock came loose, leaving him to swing among the leaves like a pendulum.
The brothers, who graduated from Florida Gulf Coast University in 2007 and want to make documentaries, said that they were editing footage to create a 10-minute film about life in the elm, which they plan to post on YouTube. The two came to New York in September to participate in a rally for the preservation of community gardens, then decided to stay. They have spent some rainy nights in friends’ apartments, and occasionally hang their hammocks in the back room of a bicycle-repair workshop in Brooklyn where they volunteer as mechanics.
But they find themselves drawn back to their elm in Central Park. Spending a night there is spiritually restorative, they said, if a bit chilly of late. As the leaves and temperatures fall, the brothers said, their time in the tree is drawing to a close.
“I love this tree,” Cory said, adding that they always climb carefully, to avoid harming it. “Some of the most inspiring nights I’ve had in New York were spent here.”
One night this week, they entered the park about 9 p.m., wearing knit hats and backpacks, and keeping an eye out for others. They followed the shadowed turns of a path, then scrambled up the side of their beloved elm, grabbing thick branches and feeling for toeholds. A wintry wind whipped through the park, but by 10 p.m., aloft in the tree, it was as quiet as Manhattan gets. An occasional siren wailed, and a faint whistle could occasionally be heard from a Metro-North train emerging from the Park Avenue tunnel. The rumble of cars and trucks, though, washed into a high distant sound that blended with the rustle of the wind through the leaves.
About seven hours later, the brothers woke up as the sky began to brighten and reported that gusts of wind had rocked their hammocks for much of the night. In daylight, they showed off some of the tree’s features that they had come to appreciate most: the thick, leathery bark of its trunk, which provided climbing traction; the low, sweeping boughs that offered an easy path back to the ground; the dense foliage that gave cover from inquisitive eyes.
“It’s made an interesting little home,” Cory said.
Then the Fohts packed up their gear and headed for the Upper West Side, where they had stored their bicycles overnight with a friend. Joggers and dog walkers filled the park, but nobody appeared to give the itinerant tree-dwellers a second glance.
NOVEMBER 12, 2010, 7:51 PM
In the Remote Pacific, Glimpses of Pristine Corals
By STUART SANDIN
Last night, sitting on the deck of the ship, I smelled fire. Not a fire that would cause the captain of the Hanse Explorer to sound the alarm, but fire from the island off our starboard side. The people of Tabuaeran — which is also known as Fanning Island — were stoking the flames to cook fish that they had caught from the surrounding coral reefs earlier in the day. This was the first time I had smelled smoke during this expedition.
Our team is in the midst of a monthlong research cruise in the Line Islands, an archipelago in the remote central Pacific. According to many metrics, these islands are among the most isolated on the planet, and they depend on the already-remote islands of Hawaii as nearest port of refuge. (Mind you that Honolulu is more than 1,200 miles to the north of us.) We are here to study the ecology of coral reefs, taking a holistic perspective of each of the major biological players on the reef —the fish, corals, algae, and even the bacteria and viruses — and estimating how fast each of these groups grows.
Why, you may ask, did we travel so far to study growth rates on coral reefs? There are certainly simpler ways to reach coral reefs than by chartering a 158-foot yacht and spending the greater part of a year arranging the logistics. The answer lies specifically in the location’s remoteness. The Line Islands have been difficult to reach for all of human history, and as such have remained largely outside the influence of people. It is here in the Line Islands that we have a chance to study the basics of coral reef ecology, not simply the remains of coral reef ecology. The reefs here have not collapsed, and the hand of humans is somewhere between light and nil. It is surprising how rare it is to study coral reefs without lamenting solely what has been lost.
If you read reports about coral reefs, the news is typically bad. Reef fisheries are collapsing due to overexploitation. Seaweeds are growing out of control when too much pollution is dumped, often leading to the spread of invasive species. And when the seawater gets too warm (as happens during intensive El Nino events), the corals can go into a form of heat shock and die. Fishing, pollution, and climate change are the main stories on coral reefs, and we are trying to prevent these culprits from killing all reefs before our children or grandchildren get to enjoy them. But in order to manage coral reefs in the presence of people, we have to understand how coral reefs work in the absence of people. The Line Islands give us a rare opportunity to do so.
Jennifer Smith A research diver collecting data on fish populations.
Today we started our work on Tabuaeran, finding an abundance of corals and countless dinner-plate-sized fish sprinting around the reef. A dive like this would sell for a lot of money in many popular destinations, and many of my fishing friends would love a day spent with hook and line in these waters. Happily, these coral reefs are thriving, not collapsing.
We arrived to Tabuaeran by way of Palmyra Atoll and Kingman Reef. Unlike Tabuaeran, these islands are uninhabited and support some of the biggest and healthiest coral reefs on the planet. The fish on the reefs are huge, and sharks and large snappers dominate. The corals on the reefs are also spectacular, with table corals that look like underwater satellite dishes and dome corals the size of the satellites they are trying to reach. A dive at these islands would also sell for much more money.
Stuart Sandin A variety of fish call the coral reefs of Palmyra Atoll home.
A critical question remains: what does it mean ecologically for a reef to be “heavy” — by which I mean some ineffable quality of being impressive and even a bit daunting? But even more importantly, what does it mean for humans trying to live off of the services provided by their reef if the heaviness is lost? Because the reefs of Tabuaeran are changed relative to Kingman and Palmyra, has some critical service been lost to the local humanity? The answer is not simply academic. Millions of people depend on the productivity of coral reefs. The fires onshore are a demonstration of the importance of understanding productivity of the sea. The reefs below us are feeding the residents of this island.
By comparing the reefs of inhabited and uninhabited islands in this remote part of the Pacific, we are looking for the sweet spot of human activity. We cannot feed humanity by not fishing, and we cannot feed humanity by fishing too much. Somewhere in between is the solution, and the people of Tabuaeran may just have found this perfect balance. Floating here in the true middle of the Pacific Ocean, we are taking steps to provide new answers.
@danon5,
Hi all ~
Still not receiving notices from a2k...must be planetary...the past few days have been very odd.
Today the weathers georgous! Tomorrow a tad warmer, and for the rest of the week...mild temps.
Dan, your welcome, hun. So sad what our Vets went through.
sue, the cat article? why? LOL
Makes ya wonder, dudn't it???
November 13, 2010
As Glaciers Melt, Scientists Seek New Data on Rising Seas
By JUSTIN GILLIS
TASIILAQ, Greenland — With a tense pilot gripping the stick, the helicopter hovered above the water, a red speck of machinery lost in a wilderness of rock and ice.
To the right, a great fjord stretched toward the sea, choked with icebergs. To the left loomed one of the immense glaciers that bring ice from the top of the Greenland ice sheet and dump it into the ocean.
Hanging out the sides of the craft, two scientists sent a measuring device plunging into the water, between ice floes. Near the bottom, it reported a temperature of 40 degrees. It was the latest in a string of troubling measurements showing that the water was warm enough to melt glaciers rapidly from below.
“That’s the highest we’ve seen this far up the fjord,” said one of the scientists, Fiammetta Straneo.
The temperature reading was a new scrap of information in the effort to answer one of the most urgent — and most widely debated — questions facing humanity: How fast is the world’s ice going to melt?
Scientists long believed that the collapse of the gigantic ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica would take thousands of years, with sea level possibly rising as little as seven inches in this century, about the same amount as in the 20th century.
But researchers have recently been startled to see big changes unfold in both Greenland and Antarctica.
As a result of recent calculations that take the changes into account, many scientists now say that sea level is likely to rise perhaps three feet by 2100 — an increase that, should it come to pass, would pose a threat to coastal regions the world over.
And the calculations suggest that the rise could conceivably exceed six feet, which would put thousands of square miles of the American coastline under water and would probably displace tens of millions of people in Asia.
The scientists say that a rise of even three feet would inundate low-lying lands in many countries, rendering some areas uninhabitable. It would cause coastal flooding of the sort that now happens once or twice a century to occur every few years. It would cause much faster erosion of beaches, barrier islands and marshes. It would contaminate fresh water supplies with salt.
In the United States, parts of the East Coast and Gulf Coast would be hit hard. In New York, coastal flooding could become routine, with large parts of Queens and Brooklyn especially vulnerable. About 15 percent of the urbanized land in the Miami region could be inundated. The ocean could encroach more than a mile inland in parts of North Carolina.
Abroad, some of the world’s great cities — London, Cairo, Bangkok, Venice and Shanghai among them — would be critically endangered by a three-foot rise in the sea.
Climate scientists readily admit that the three-foot estimate could be wrong. Their understanding of the changes going on in the world’s land ice is still primitive. But, they say, it could just as easily be an underestimate as an overestimate. One of the deans of American coastal studies, Orrin H. Pilkey of Duke University, is advising coastal communities to plan for a rise of at least five feet by 2100.
“I think we need immediately to begin thinking about our coastal cities — how are we going to protect them?” said John A. Church, an Australian scientist who is a leading expert on sea level. “We can’t afford to protect everything. We will have to abandon some areas.”
Sea-level rise has been a particularly contentious element in the debate over global warming. One published estimate suggested the threat was so dire that sea level could rise as much as 15 feet in this century. Some of the recent work that produced the three-foot projection was carried out specifically to counter more extreme calculations.
Global warming skeptics, on the other hand, contend that any changes occurring in the ice sheets are probably due to natural climate variability, not to greenhouse gases released by humans.
Such doubts have been a major factor in the American political debate over global warming, stalling efforts by Democrats and the Obama administration to pass legislation that would curb emissions of heat-trapping gases. Similar legislative efforts are likely to receive even less support in the new Congress, with many newly elected legislators openly skeptical about climate change.
A large majority of climate scientists argue that heat-trapping gases are almost certainly playing a role in what is happening to the world’s land ice. They add that the lack of policies to limit emissions is raising the risk that the ice will go into an irreversible decline before this century is out, a development that would eventually make a three-foot rise in the sea look trivial.
Melting ice is by no means the only sign that the earth is warming. Thermometers on land, in the sea and aboard satellites show warming. Heat waves, flash floods and other extreme weather events are increasing. Plants are blooming earlier, coral reefs are dying and many other changes are afoot that most climate scientists attribute to global warming.
Yet the rise of the sea could turn out to be the single most serious effect. While the United States is among the countries at greatest risk, neither it nor any other wealthy country has made tracking and understanding the changes in the ice a strategic national priority.
The consequence is that researchers lack elementary information. They have been unable even to measure the water temperature near some of the most important ice on the planet, much less to figure out if that water is warming over time. Vital satellites have not been replaced in a timely way, so that American scientists are losing some of their capability to watch the ice from space.
The missing information makes it impossible for scientists to be sure how serious the situation is.
“As a scientist, you have to stick to what you know and what the evidence suggests,” said Gordon Hamilton, one of the researchers in the helicopter. “But the things I’ve seen in Greenland in the last five years are alarming. We see these ice sheets changing literally overnight.”
Dodging Icebergs
In the brilliant sunshine of a late summer day in southeastern Greenland, the pilot at the controls of the red helicopter, Morgan Goransson, dropped low toward the water. He used the downdraft from his rotor to clear ice from the surface of Sermilik Fjord.
The frigid waters were only 30 feet below, so any mechanical problem would have sent the chopper plunging into the sea. “It is so dangerous,” Mr. Goransson said later that night, over a fish dinner.
Taking the temperature of waters near the ice sheet is essential if scientists are to make sense of what is happening in Greenland. But it is a complex and risky business.
The two scientists — Dr. Straneo, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, and Dr. Hamilton, of the University of Maine — are part of a larger team that has been traveling here every summer with financing from the National Science Foundation, the federal agency that sponsors much of the nation’s most important research. Not only do they remove the doors of helicopters and lean over icy fjords to get their readings, but they dodge huge icebergs in tiny boats and traipse over glaciers scarred by crevasses that could swallow large buildings.
The reading that the scientists obtained a few weeks ago, of 40 degrees near the bottom of the fjord, fit a broader pattern that researchers have been detecting in the past few years.
Water that originated far to the south, in warmer parts of the Atlantic Ocean, is flushing into Greenland’s fjords at a brisk pace. Scientists suspect that as it melts the ice from beneath, the warm water is loosening the connection of the glaciers to the ground and to nearby rock.
The effect has been something like popping a Champagne cork, allowing the glaciers to move faster and dump more ice into the ocean. Within the past decade, the flow rate of many of Greenland’s biggest glaciers has doubled or tripled. Some of them have eventually slowed back down, but rarely have they returned to their speed of the 1990s.
Two seismologists, Meredith Nettles and Göran Ekström of Columbia University, discovered a few years ago that unusual earthquakes were emanating from the Greenland glaciers as they dumped the extra ice into the sea. “It’s remarkable that an iceberg can do this, but when that loss of ice occurs, it does generate a signal that sets up a vibration that you can record all across the globe,” Dr. Nettles said in an interview in Greenland.
Analyzing past records, they discovered that these quakes had increased severalfold from the level of the early 1990s, a sign of how fast the ice is changing.
Satellite and other measurements suggest that through the 1990s, Greenland was gaining about as much ice through snowfall as it lost to the sea every year. But since then, the warmer water has invaded the fjords, and air temperatures in Greenland have increased markedly. The overall loss of ice seems to be accelerating, an ominous sign given that the island contains enough ice to raise global sea levels by more than 20 feet.
Strictly speaking, scientists have not proved that human-induced global warming is the cause of the changes. They are mindful that the climate in the Arctic undergoes big natural variations. In the 1920s and ’30s, for instance, a warm spell caused many glaciers to retreat.
John R. Christy, a climatologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville who is often critical of mainstream climate science, said he suspected that the changes in Greenland were linked to this natural variability, and added that he doubted that the pace would accelerate as much as his colleagues feared.
For high predictions of sea-level rise to be correct, “some big chunks of the Greenland ice sheet are going to have to melt, and they’re just not melting that way right now,” Dr. Christy said.
Yet other scientists say that the recent changes in Greenland appear more pervasive than those of the early 20th century, and that they are occurring at the same time that air and ocean temperatures are warming, and ice melt is accelerating, throughout much of the world.
Helheim Glacier, which terminates in Sermilik Fjord, is one of a group of glaciers in southeastern Greenland that have shown especially big changes.
On a recent day, the red helicopter landed on a rocky outcrop above the glacier, a flowing river of ice about 25 miles long and nearly four miles wide. On the side of the canyon, Dr. Hamilton pointed toward a band of light-colored rock.
It was, in essence, a bathtub ring.
Something caused the glacier, one of Greenland’s largest, to speed up sharply in the middle of the last decade, and it spit so much ice into the ocean that it thinned by some 300 feet in a few years. A part of the canyon that was once shielded from the sun by ice was thus left exposed.
The glacier has behaved erratically ever since, and with variations, that pattern is being repeated all over Greenland. “All these changes are happening at a far faster pace than we would have ever predicted from our conventional theories,” Dr. Hamilton said.
A few days after the helicopter trip, an old Greenlandic freighter nudged its way gingerly up Sermilik Fjord, which was so choked with ice that the boat had to stop well short of its goal. “You have to be flexible to work out here,” said the leader of the team that day, Dr. Straneo of Woods Hole.
Soon she was barking orders, and her team swung into motion. A cold, Arctic drizzle fell on the boat and the people. Off the port side in a rickety skiff, David Sutherland, a young scientist at the University of Washington, tossed a floating buoy, carrying a string of instruments, into the water, and an anchor snatched it below the surface. Over the next year, it will measure temperature, currents and other factors in the fjord.
Dr. Sutherland climbed back aboard the freighter with cold, wet feet. As the boat headed back to port, it passed icebergs the size of city blocks, chunks of the Greenland ice sheet bound for the open sea.
An Ocean in Flux
The strongest reason to think that the level of the sea could undergo big changes in the future is that it has done so in the past.
With the waxing and waning of ice ages, driven by wobbles in the earth’s orbit, sea level has varied by hundreds of feet, with shorelines moving many miles in either direction. “We’re used to the shoreline being fixed, and it’s not,” said Robin E. Bell, a scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University.
But at all times in the past, when the shoreline migrated, humans either had not evolved yet or consisted of primitive bands of hunter-gatherers who could readily move. By the middle of this century, a projected nine billion people will inhabit the planet, with many millions of them living within a few feet of sea level.
To a majority of climate scientists, the question is not whether the earth’s land ice will melt in response to the greenhouse gases those people are generating, but whether it will happen too fast for society to adjust.
Recent research suggests that the volume of the ocean may have been stable for thousands of years as human civilization has developed. But it began to rise in the 19th century, around the same time that advanced countries began to burn large amounts of coal and oil.
The sea has risen about eight inches since then, on average. That sounds small, but on a gently sloping shoreline, such an increase is enough to cause substantial erosion unless people intervene. Governments have spent billions in recent decades pumping sand onto disappearing beaches and trying to stave off the loss of coastal wetlands.
Scientists have been struggling for years to figure out if a similar pace of sea-level rise is likely to continue in this century — or whether it will accelerate. In its last big report, in 2007, the United Nations group that assesses climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that sea level would rise at least seven more inches, and might rise as much as two feet, in the 21st century.
But the group warned that these estimates did not fully incorporate “ice dynamics,” the possibility that the world’s big ice sheets, as well as its thousands of smaller glaciers and ice caps, would start spitting ice into the ocean at a much faster rate than it could melt on land. Scientific understanding of this prospect was so poor, the climate panel said, that no meaningful upper limit could be put on the potential rise of sea level.
That report prompted fresh attempts by scientists to calculate the effect of ice dynamics, leading to the recent, revised projections of sea-level rise.
Satellite evidence suggests that the rise of the sea accelerated late in the 20th century, so that the level is now increasing a little over an inch per decade, on average — about a foot per century. Increased melting of land ice appears to be a major factor. Another is that most of the extra heat being trapped by human greenhouse emissions is going not to warm the atmosphere but to warm the ocean, and as it warms, the water expands.
With the study of the world’s land ice still in its early stages, scientists have lately been trying crude methods to figure out how much the pace might accelerate in coming decades.
One approach, pioneered by a German climate researcher named Stefan Rahmstorf, entails looking at the past relationship between the temperature of the earth and sea level, then making projections. Another, developed by a University of Colorado glaciologist named Tad Pfeffer, involves calculations about how fast the glaciers, if they keep speeding up, might be able to dump ice into the sea.
Those two methods yield approximately the same answer: that sea level could rise by 2 1/2 to 6 1/2 feet between now and 2100. A developing consensus among climate scientists holds that the best estimate is a little over three feet.
Calculations about the effect of a three-foot increase suggest that it would cause shoreline erosion to accelerate markedly. In places that once flooded only in a large hurricane, the higher sea would mean that a routine storm could do the trick. In the United States, an estimated 5,000 square miles of dry land and 15,000 square miles of wetlands would be at risk of permanent inundation, though the actual effect would depend on how much money was spent protecting the shoreline.
The worst effects, however, would probably occur in areas where land is sinking even as the sea rises. Some of the world’s major cities, especially those built on soft sediments at the mouths of great rivers, are in that situation. In North America, New Orleans is the premier example, with large parts of the city already sitting several feet below sea level.
Defenses can be built to keep out the sea, of course, like the levees of the New Orleans region and the famed dikes of the Netherlands. But the expense is likely to soar as the ocean rises, and such defenses are not foolproof, as Hurricane Katrina proved.
Storm surges battering the world’s coastlines every few years would almost certainly force people to flee inland. But it is hard to see where the displaced would go, especially in Asia, where huge cities — and even entire countries, notably Bangladesh — are at risk.
Moreover, scientists point out that if their projections prove accurate, the sea will not stop rising in 2100. By that point, the ice sheets could be undergoing extensive melting.
“Beyond a hundred years out, it starts to look really challenging,” said Richard B. Alley, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. “You start thinking about every coastal city on the planet hiding behind a wall, with storms coming.”
A Shortage of Satellites
One Saturday morning a few months back, a University of Colorado student named Scott Potter, sitting in a control room on the Boulder campus, typed a word into a computer.
“GO.”
Over the next 40 seconds, indicators in the control room turned red. Alarms rang. Pagers buzzed. High above the earth, a satellite called ICESat, reacting to Mr. Potter’s order, prepared itself to die.
The commotion was expected. Mr. Potter, one of several Colorado students who hold part-time jobs as satellite controllers under professional supervision, was doing the bidding of NASA. His command that day formally ended the ICESat mission, which had produced crucial information about the world’s ice sheets for seven years.
At the end of August, two weeks after Mr. Potter sent his order, the remains of ICESat plunged into the Barents Sea, off the Russian coast. Its demise was seen by many climate researchers as a depressing symbol.
After a decade of budget cuts and shifting space priorities in Washington, several satellites vital to monitoring the ice sheets and other aspects of the environment are on their last legs, with no replacements at hand. A replacement for ICESat will not be launched until 2015 at the earliest.
“We are slowly going blind in space,” said Robert Bindschadler, a polar researcher at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who spent 30 years with NASA studying ice.
Several federal agencies and two presidential administrations, Democratic and Republican, have made decisions that contributed to the problems.
For instance, an attempt by the Clinton and Bush administrations to combine certain military and civilian satellites ate up $5 billion before it was labeled a “horrendous and costly failure” by a Congressional committee.
A plan by President George W. Bush to return to the moon without allocating substantial new money squeezed budgets at NASA.
Now, the Obama administration is seeking to chart a new course, abandoning the goal of returning to the moon and seeking a substantial increase in financing for earth sciences. It is also promising an overall strategy for improving the country’s environmental observations.
Major elements of the administration’s program won support from both parties on Capitol Hill and were signed into law recently, but amid a larger budget impasse, Congress has not allocated the money President Obama requested.
In the meantime, NASA is spending about $15 million a year to fly airplanes over ice sheets and glaciers to gather some information it can no longer get by satellite, and projects are under way in various agencies to plug some of the other information gaps. NASA has begun planning new satellites to replace the ones that are aging.
“The missions that are being designed right now are fantastic,” said Tom Wagner, who runs NASA’s ice programs.
The satellite difficulties are one symptom of a broader problem: because no scientifically advanced country has made a strategic priority of studying land ice, scientists lack elementary information that they need to make sense of what is happening.
They do not know the lay of the land beneath most of the world’s glaciers, including many in Greenland, in sufficient detail to calculate how fast the ice might retreat. They have only haphazard readings of the depth and temperature of the ocean near Greenland, needed to figure out why so much warm water seems to be attacking the ice sheet.
The information problems are even more severe in Antarctica. Much of that continent is colder than Greenland, and its ice sheet is believed to be more stable, over all. But in recent years, parts of the ice sheet have started to flow rapidly, raising the possibility that it will destabilize in the same way that much of the world’s other ice has.
Certain measurements are so spotty for Antarctica that scientists have not been able to figure out whether the continent is losing or gaining ice. Scientists do not have good measurements of the water temperature beneath the massive, floating ice shelves that are helping to buttress certain parts of the ice sheet in West Antarctica. Since the base of the ice sheet sits below sea level in that region, it has long been thought especially vulnerable to a warming ocean.
But the cavities beneath ice shelves and floating glaciers are difficult to reach, and scientists said that too little money had been spent to develop technologies that could provide continuing measurements.
Figuring out whether Antarctica is losing ice over all is essential, because that ice sheet contains enough water to raise global sea level by nearly 200 feet. The parts that appear to be destabilizing contain water sufficient to raise it perhaps 10 feet.
Daniel Schrag, a Harvard geochemist and head of that university’s Center for the Environment, praised the scientists who do difficult work studying ice, but he added, “The scale of what they can do, given the resources available, is just completely out of whack with what is required.”
Climate scientists note that while the science of studying ice may be progressing slowly, the world’s emissions of heat-trapping gases are not. They worry that the way things are going, extensive melting of land ice may become inevitable before political leaders find a way to limit the gases, and before scientists even realize such a point of no return has been passed.
“The past clearly shows that sea-level rise is getting faster and faster the warmer it gets,” Dr. Rahmstorf said. “Why should that process stop? If it gets warmer, ice will melt faster.”
November 15, 2010
50 Years of Chimpanzees
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
Jane Goodall went to the Gombe Stream Reserve near Lake Tanganyika in East Africa when she was 26. By living among the animals and quietly recording their interactions, she was able to show that the chimp world included love, hate, fear, jealousy, tool use, brutality, even warfare. I spoke with Dr. Goodall last month at Western Connecticut State College, where she was giving a lecture, and then later by telephone. A condensed version of the conversations follows:
Q. In July you celebrated the 50th anniversary of your first trip to Gombe Stream Reserve. When you arrived there in 1960, could you have imagined the life that lay ahead?
A. Of course not. I was a young girl, straight from England, more or less, no degree of any sort, and Louis Leakey was giving me this amazing opportunity to live with the animal most like us.
There’d been no long-term studies of great apes. The longest had been George Schaller, with mountain gorillas, and he’d stayed a year. I think Louis Leakey thought the study might last 10 years. But at 26, I thought perhaps three. And then the more I learned about chimpanzees, the more I realized there was more to learn — until I couldn’t stop.
Q. So you got to Gombe, and very soon, you observed something astounding: Chimpanzees used tools to fish for ants.
A. I went in July. And tool-making was toward the end of October.
Q. After you had lived with the wild chimpanzees for a year, Dr. Leakey sent you to Cambridge for a doctorate. How did the conservative professors there respond to you?
A. They didn’t know what to make of me. But I was very fortunate in that I had one of the most erudite of all the animal behavior people, Robert Hinde, there. He proceeded to help me to write in such a way that I couldn’t be torn apart by my more pompous scientific colleagues.
For instance, I had written that when Fifi’s (one of the Gombe chimps) brother was born, she was jealous of the others coming to try to touch him. Robert said, “You can’t say ‘jealous’ because you can’t prove it.” And I said, “Well, I’m sure she was!” And he said, “I suggest you say, ‘Fifi behaved in such a way that had she been a human child, you would say she was jealous.’ ” That is so clever. No one can say anything about that. There’s nothing that isn’t fact.
Q. When you first reported chimp tool use, Dr. Leakey declared, "We must now redefine man, redefine tool or accept chimpanzees as human!" Did that ever happen?
A. It’s never happened. Every time someone has shown that chimpanzees or any other animal possesses a characteristic which we used to think was unique to us, there’s an outcry from either scientists or religious people: “It can’t be so.”
It becomes illogical. For a long time people used chimpanzees in medical research because of all the amazing biological similarities. They used them to investigate not only human diseases but mental conditions like depression. Yet, they are still reluctant to admit similarities in mind and expressive emotion.
Q. There are 185 captive chimpanzees at the federal primate facility in Alamogordo, N.M., that may soon be used for medical research, particularly to study Hepatitis C. Why have you been trying to stop that?
A. Because it’s morally wrong. We scientists have proved pretty conclusively that chimpanzees can suffer, that they can anticipate arriving pain. They do have feelings. If you perform an invasive procedure on an animal that is capable of suffering and feeling pain, your behavior is amoral.
These particular animals have been “retired” from experimentation for the past 10 years. Now suddenly someone has decided that they need to experiment on them again. I don’t know why. We’re lobbying. I’ve tried to see the head of the N.I.H. My latest information is that some of them have already gone back into medical research — and this was just as the labs (that use chimps as research subjects) were being closed.
Q. The advocates of this policy argue that short of using humans for these tests, chimpanzees are best.
A. I’m sure there are other ways. There are alternatives on the market today that at one time the animal experimenters said we will always need animals for.
Q. On a different subject: There's continuing debate among linguists and primatologists about whether other great apes have the capacity for language. What's your position?
A. It seems to me that the controversy is about whether other primates have grammar in their communications. And to be honest, I’m not interested in whether or not they have a grammar. Why would they? I’ve always felt there are so many fights in this life, so many battles that seem important to win. Like in the beginning I was incensed to be told that chimpanzees or any animal couldn’t be “he” or “she,” but they had to be an “it” and that I couldn’t talk about adolescence or motivation or childhood, that those things are unique to humans. This language thing, I’d rather leave it to people who are involved in that line of inquiry. I’ve been fighting battles that, to me, were important, and that relate to emotions. Do they feel pain or sadness? Do they have minds capable of thinking or planning?
Q. I read somewhere that before you went to Africa, you were a debutante. Can that be true?
A. I was. My father’s sister married the son of one of the last lord chief justices of India. And he wanted to “present” his niece. But the thing about being a debutante is that it’s a marriage market. When you come out, you have a big party and you go to Ascot. Well, we couldn’t afford anything like that. So I got a dress that had been modeled by someone. It was very cheap — gorgeous, but cheap. I literally went to the palace and curtsied to the queen and left. This was about two years before I left for Kenya. That kind of life was never, in the remotest, appealing. I wanted to go to Africa. Because of Dr. Dolittle taking the circus animals back. And then Tarzan. Those were the two books that inspired me to go to Africa.
Q. Are there areas of your life that you regret?
A. Not really. Probably for my own personal peace of mind, it would have been nice if I hadn’t divorced Hugo (van Lawick), my first husband, for the sake of Grub (their son). But then I wouldn’t have married Derek (Bryceson, the head of the Tanzanian National Parks), and then probably Gombe would have collapsed.
Q. You don't get to Gombe very often now. In fact, you are traveling 300 days a year for your conservation charity, the Jane Goodall Institute. Living in a different hotel every night, constantly encountering new people: that has to be difficult.
A. Well, it is a jolly tough way to live, but it’s worthwhile. Because everywhere I go, there are shining eyes. There are children from our Roots and Shoots program who are all so excited to meet “Dr. Jane” and tell me what they’ve been doing to make the world a better place.
There’s a Roots and Shoots member in the Eastern Congo — where the bush meat trade is decimating wildlife — and he had an uncle who was a hunter. He persuaded the uncle to give it up and become a chicken farmer. Between them, in two years, they’ve changed 75 hunters. When I meet people like that, they give me energy and hope.
