As the world warms, clouds could disappear - catastrophically

ON A 1987 voyage to the Antarctic, the paleoceanographer James Kennett and his crew dropped anchor in the Weddell Sea, drilled into the seabed, and extracted a vertical cylinder of sediment. In an inch-thick layer of plankton fossils and other detritus buried more than 500 feet deep, they found a disturbing clue about the planet’s past that could spell disaster for the future.

A bright-red stratum of sedimentary rock coursing through
 the badlands in Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin yielded some of
the first fossil evidence of an extreme global warming event
 56 million years ago.

Lower in the sediment core, fossils abounded from 60 plankton species. But in that thin cross-section from about 56 million years ago, the number of species dropped to 17. And the planktons’ oxygen and carbon isotope compositions had dramatically changed. Kennett and his student Lowell Stott deduced from the anomalous isotopes that carbon dioxide had flooded the air, causing the ocean to rapidly acidify and heat up, in a process similar to what we are seeing today.

Read the story from Wired by Natalia Wolchover - “As the world warms, clouds could disappear - catastrophically.”

BHP prepares for a hotter future

It's a familiar image: an Antarctic glacier melting in unprecedented warmth. The relentless process goes on without much visible change, until gradually, worn away beneath, the glacier can no longer hold together. The strain becomes too much. The ice splits. Another gigantic iceberg – an object so big that the Earth's maps must be redrawn – falls into the sea.

Something similar is happening in the mining industry, and the cause is the same: climate change. BHP, the world's largest mining company, has given notice to three major industry bodies of which it is a member – the Minerals Council of Australia, the World Coal Association and the US Chamber of Commerce – that it may have to break away. BHP has reviewed the policies and statements on climate change of all the industry bodies it belongs to, and has found these three act in support of views seriously at variance with its own position. That means, in effect, that it has been paying considerable sums to industry representatives who are lobbying against the company's interests on the issue. If they don't stop, a split is inevitable.

Read the Melbourne Age Editorial - “BHP prepares for a hotter future.”

New study reveals plastic pollution in the Antarctic is 5x worse than expected

Microplastic levels in the Antarctic are five times greater than anticipated, according to the international team. 

Plastic in the Antarctic is five
times worse than anticipated.

Microplastics are those tiny particles less than five millimeters in diameter found in personal care items like toothpaste and shampoo, but they can also come from clothing fibers or be created as larger pieces of plastic in the ocean break down.

The researchers found the plastic around the Antarctic continent and in the Southern Ocean, which is around 8.5 million square miles large. They think plastic originating outside the area may be coming in over the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, which scientists in the past considered nearly impassible.

Read the Inhabitat story by Lucy Cooke - “New study reveals plastic pollution in the Antarctic is 5x worse than expected.”