roomthily

detail from a map of global forest canopy heights (Marc Simard, NASA JPL)

via Earth Observatory

climateadaptation:

2010 Spike in Greenland Ice Loss Lifted Bedrock, GPS Reveals

“An unusually hot melting season in 2010 accelerated ice loss in southern Greenland by 100 billion tons — and large portions of the island’s bedrock rose an additional quarter of an inch in response.

That’s the finding from a network of nearly 50 GPS stations planted along the Greenland coast to measure the bedrock’s natural response to the ever-diminishing weight of ice above it.

Every year as the Greenland Ice Sheet melts, the rocky coast rises, explained Michael Bevis, Ohio Eminent Scholar in Geodynamics and professor in the School of Earth Sciences at Ohio State University. Some GPS stations around Greenland routinely detect uplift of 15 mm (0.59 inches) or more, year after year. But a temperature spike in 2010 lifted the bedrock a detectably higher amount over a short five-month period — as high as 20 mm (0.79 inches) in some locations.

In a presentation December 9 at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, Bevis described the study’s implications for climate change.

“Pulses of extra melting and uplift imply that we’ll experience pulses of extra sea level rise,” he said. “The process is not really a steady process.”

Because the solid earth is elastic, Bevis and his team can use the natural flexure of the Greenland bedrock to measure the weight of the ice sheet, just like the compression of a spring in a bathroom scale measures the weight of the person standing on it.”

Source: Science Daily

Stop The Drill - near real-time oil spill map

climateadaptation:

This is a picture of crews working for The Department of Water Protection in Los Angeles, CA pouring 3 million black plastic balls into the Ivanhoe Reservoir on June 10th, 2008. Scientists discovered that when sunlight is combined with the bromides and chlorine that are present in the water, a carcinogen bromate is formed which can be harmful to humans. The Department of Water Protection realized the problem and began construction of a new covered reservoir, but while a new underground facility was being built, they had to determine a way to keep the sunlight out of the water. They explored the possibility of tarps and metal coverings but they were either too expensive or very ugly. They settled on the idea of bird balls which are designed to keep water fowl from landing where they shouldn’t. They are non toxic, and only cost about 34 cents each. The total cost of protecting the Ivanhoe reservoir as well as the Elysian reservoir that was facing the same problem was 2 million dollars. The balls were estimated to remain in the water for five years until the new reservoir is completed.

Via: Supertight

U.S. Forest Service model showing the possible shifts in tree species in 2100 based on two different climate change scenarios

via Yale e360

curiositycounts:

A view on the Land of Fires – interesting read on merging locative media with civic media, using Google Streetview as a tool for monitoring and reporting environmental crimes

first global ocean salinity map from the Aquarius satellite 

via NASA