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1/22/11

Greenland's icesheet, feared as a major driver of rising sea levels, shed a record amount of melted snow and ice in 2010, scientists reported Friday, a day after the UN said last year was the warmest on record.

The 2010 runoff was more than twice the average annual loss in Greenland over the previous three decades, surpassing a record set in 2007, said the study, published in the US-based journal Environmental Research Letters.

Ice melt has now topped this benchmark every year since 1996, according to the paper, derived from long-term satellite and observational data.

Were it to melt entirely, Greenland's icesheet would drive up ocean levels by some seven metres (23 feet), drowning coastal cities around the world.

No credible projections today include a doomsday scenario for the coming centuries. But recent research, including the new study, suggest that Greenland will contribute more to rising seas than predicted only a few years ago.

Based on computer models, Tedesco estimated that runoff in 2010 was 530 gigatonnes, or billions of tonnes, compared to an average of 274 gigatonnes for the period 1958-2009, and 285 gigatonnes for 1979-2009.

"The process is far from being linear, and it is not possible to simply draw a line" into the future, said lead researcher Marco Tedesco, who heads the Cryosphere Processes Laboratory at the City College of New York.

But over the last 30 years "there has been an increase in runoff," he said in an email exchange.

Researchers have thrown up different figures for how much, and how fast, Greenland is shedding its icy mantle, which is up to three kilometres (1.7 miles) thick in places.

They concur, though, that climate change is largely to blame: temperatures in the Arctic region have risen at two to three times the global average over the last 40 years.

In Greenland, summer temperatures in 2010 were 3.0 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) above average.

"The capital, Nuuk, had the warmest spring and summer since records began in 1873," Tedesco noted.

Globally, the year was also the warmest ever recorded, as was the decade it brought to a close, the UN's World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said on Thursday.

The new study focused on surface melt, runoff and the number of days when bare ice, free of snow, is exposed to the Sun's radiative force.

In 2010, "melting in some areas stretched up to 50 days longer than average," Tedesco said.

The study also showed that land area where melting has been observed has been increasing at a rate of about 17,000 square kilometers (6,500 square miles) per year.

Not only do melting snow and ice flow directly into the sea, they also form torrential under-ice streams that lubricate the passage of glaciers toward the ocean.

In assessing the icesheet's total mass loss, melt is only part of the picture, Tedesco said.

"Our calculations do not account for losses due to calving" -- the splitting of large chunks of glacier ice into the sea -- "and ice dynamics, which are as big if not bigger than those due to surface melting," he said.

Nor did they factor in cyclical contributions to the icesheet from snowfall, he said.

Current estimates of the Greenland icesheets net mass loss vary between 130 and 250 gigatonnes per year.

Antarctica is the world's biggest source of land ice after Greenland, but -- with the exception of West Antarctica -- is considered more resistant to any doomsday collapse.

By century's end, Greenland could contribute as much as 50 centimetres (20 inches) to average worldwide sea levels, many experts agree today.

This would double the predictions for overall sea-level rise in the UN climate panel's landmark 2007 report, which factored in glacial runoff and the thermal expansion of the sea, but not the loss of mass from Greenland.

A one-metre (3.25 feet) increase in the global watermark would devastate many island nations, and wreak havoc in heavily-populated delta regions across the planet.

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The California Coastal Conservancy is calling for input on plans to control invasive Spartina densiflora (Chilean cordgrass) and restore native vegetation to native salt marshes in the Humboldt Bay region, include the Eel and Mad River estuaries.  This plan is part of a regional plan to control non-native Spartina species in Washington, Oregon, and California salt marshes. The Coastal Conservancy is requesting input on the scope of impacts to be analyzed in an Environmental Impact Report for the project. 

The primary methods to Spartina control that will be assessed in the DEIR are:

1. Mechanical with handheld brushcutter;
2. Mechanical with large machinery;
3. Manual with hand tools;
4. Herbicides.

Despite the success of mechanical removal over the past 4 years, herbicides are being included in the environmental analysis because they have been the primary method used to control different Spartina species in San Francisco and Washington salt marshes.

Humboldt Baykeeper will be submitting scoping comments but members of the public are encouraged to submit comments as well.

What potential impacts would you like to see analyzed in the environmental review?

Comments are due Feb. 9. Submit them via email to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Download the Conservancy’s draft Initial Study HERE.

For more info on Spartina control efforts in the Humboldt Bay area, click HERE.

Contact Joel Gerwein, Coastal Conservancy project manager, with questions or comments, at 510-286-4170 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

For more info about the State Coastal Conservancy, click HERE. 

1/6/11

Oregon is poised to adopt the strictest standard for toxic water pollution in the United States, driven by concerns about tribal members and others who eat large amounts of contaminated fish.

The Department of Environmental Quality proposed the new standard Thursday, nearly two decades after concerns about contamination in fish prompted studies that showed tribal members along the Columbia River eat far more fish than the general population.

The new rule, scheduled for approval in June, would dramatically tighten human health criteria for a host of pollutants, including mercury, flame retardants, PCBs, dioxins, plasticizers and pesticides.

Industry and cities worry about the costs of complying with the new rules and controlling pollution, likely to run in the millions.

"There are potentially a lot of manufacturing jobs being put at risk," said John Ledger, an Associated Oregon Industries vice president. "It could put (businesses) in a terrible position, where they can't locate here or expand."

Environmental groups say the change is long overdue, but exceptions built into the proposed rules and a lack of focus on pollution from farms, timberlands and urban stormwater mean they might not reduce pollution significantly.

"We can change standards on paper, but how it plays out on the ground and whether we're really ratcheting down pollution is what matters," said Brett VandenHeuvel, Columbia Riverkeeper's executive director.

The proposal presses some big hot buttons: regulating industry in a down economy; DEQ's authority over farms and forests; protecting tribal members who have seen their health compromised and their traditional diet degraded by pollution.

Oregon's current water quality standard is built on an assumption that people eat 17.5 grams of fish a day, about a cracker's worth. The proposed standard boosts that to 175 grams a day, just shy of an 8-ounce meal.

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1/16/11

Higher ocean levels force Ventura officials to move facilities inland, an action that is expected to recur along the coast as the ocean rises over the next century.

At Surfers Point in Ventura, California is beginning its retreat from the ocean.

Construction crews are removing a crumbling bike path, ripping out a 120-space parking lot and laying down sand and cobblestones. By pushing the asphalt 65 feet inland, the project is expected to give the wave-ravaged point 50 more years of life.

The effort by the city of Ventura is the most vivid example to date of what may lie ahead in California as coastal communities come to grips with rising sea levels and worsening coastal erosion. As the coastline creeps inland, scouring sand from beaches or eating away at coastal bluffs, landowners will increasingly be forced to decide whether to spend vast sums of money fortifying the shore or give up and step back.

State officials say the $4.5-million project in Ventura is the first of its kind in California and could serve as a model for threatened sites along the coast.

"Managed retreat, as it's called, is one of the things that we're going to have in our quiver to deal with sea-level rise and increasing storms," said Sam Schuchat, executive officer of the California Coastal Conservancy, which helped fund the Surfers Point project.

Sea levels have risen about 8 inches in the last century and are expected to swell at an increasing rate as climate change warms the ocean, experts say. In California, the sea is projected to rise as much as 55 inches by the end of the century and gobble up 41 square miles of coastal land, according to a 2009 state-commissioned report by the Pacific Institute.

For years, the preferred solution to an eroding shoreline has been to build sea walls or dump imported sand to serve as a buffer. About one-third of the Southern California coastline and about 10% of the shore statewide have been fortified with sea walls and other hard structures.

Although artificial barriers may protect property in the short term, they often intensify the effect of waves, leaving beaches stripped of sand until they narrow or disappear, permanently altering surf patterns.

As a result, beach-armoring projects are increasingly out of favor with environmentalists and coastal regulators.

At Surfers Point, Ventura officials first knew they had a problem about two decades ago, when storms started chewing away at the oceanfront bike path a few years after it was built.

When heavy storms hit, waves ate mounds of sand, washed away chunks of asphalt and exposed rebar, car parts and junk that had been underground for decades.

Officials at the Ventura County Fairgrounds, which is on a 62-acre site next to Surfers Point, initially suggested a buried sea wall. But environmentalists and surfers fiercely objected, saying that armoring the shore would protect a parking lot at the expense of the beach and destroy the point break near the Ventura River that generates the distinctive, surfer-friendly waves for which the site was named.

After extensive debate, the fairgrounds agreed to give up some of its property for a plan that would provide room for the sand to shift. It is based on the idea that beaches are constantly in flux, growing as the summer's gentle waves bring sand ashore and shrinking when winter storms scour it away.

"It was the right thing to do for all of the residents of the county," said fairgrounds Chief Executive Officer Barbara Quaid, who prefers not to view it as sacrificing land but as redirecting its use. "Coming down to the beach and seeing it beautified is a lot different than coming down and seeing a bike path that's falling into the ocean."

The "managed retreat" marks a reversal with profound implications for a state that has for more than a century crammed its most valuable homes and businesses on the edge of the ocean.

"There's the old-school mentality that when nature threatens you, you fight back," said Paul Jenkin, Ventura campaign manager for the Surfrider Foundation and a longtime advocate for the project. "So this idea of retreating and moving back was really quite a radical proposition."

In the near term, there are a number of publicly owned sites, from a weathered parking lot hugging a narrow strand at Cardiff State Beach in San Diego County to a lifeguard station within a few steps of the surf in San Clemente, where planners might soon have to consider moving structures out of harm's way.

Such a decision would be far tougher for private property owners, but they too could eventually be in the position of giving up billions of dollars of desirable real estate.

"The challenge is we have built most of our civilization within a few feet of sea level or right at the edge," said Gary Griggs, a coastal geologist at UC Santa Cruz who co-wrote the book "Living With the Changing California Coast." "It's either going to be managed or unmanaged, but it's going to be retreat."

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