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Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 19 July 2011
 Polar bear cubs that swam long distances had a 45% mortality rate Polar bear cubs forced to swim long distances with their mothers as their icy Arctic habitat melts appear to have a higher mortality rate than cubs that didn’t have to swim as far, a new study reports.
Polar bears hunt, feed and give birth on ice or on land, and are not naturally aquatic creatures. Previous reports have noted individual animals swimming hundreds of kilometres to reach ice platforms or land, but this is one of the first to show these swims pose a greater risk to polar bear young.
“Climate change is pulling the sea ice out from under polar bears’ feet, forcing some to swim longer distances to find food and habitat,” said Geoff York of World Wildlife Fund, a co-author of the study.
York said this was the first time these long swims had been quantitatively measured, filling a gap in the historical background on this iconic Arctic species.
To gather data, researchers used satellites and tracked 68 polar bear females equipped with GPS collars over six years, from 2004 to 2009, to find occasions when these bears swam more than 50km at a time. Continue reading Polar bears at risk over melting ice
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 29 June 2011
Tiny algae and a whale native to the Pacific have crossed a thawing Arctic Ocean in what may portend a marine invasion threatening Atlantic fish stocks, scientists said on Sunday.
 A gray whale spotted in the Mediterrannean is believed to have swum from the Pacific through newly ice-free waters in the Arctic Ocean The Pacific algae, absent from the North Atlantic for 800,000 years according to fossil records, apparently returned after climate change thawed sea ice and currents carried the microscopic plants across the Arctic Ocean, they said.
And a gray whale spotted in the Mediterranean in 2010 – 300 years after the species was hunted to extinction in the Atlantic region – is believed to have swum from the Pacific through newly ice-free waters in the Arctic Ocean in summertime.
“It’s a Pandora’s Box,” said professor Chris Reid, from the Sir Alister Harvey Foundation for Ocean Science in Britain who said the algae had now drifted almost as far south as New York.
“We can expect more species to come through from the Pacific,” he told Reuters. Upheavals to life in the seas have been documented by European scientists from 17 marine institutions in 10 nations in a project called CLAMER.
An influx of species could “be extremely damaging…for fisheries in the North Atlantic,” Reid said. New arrivals would compete with established species such as cod or salmon. Continue reading Pacific marine invasion a threat to Atlantic fish stocks
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 03 May 2011
World sea levels could rise by between 0.9 and 1.6 metres (2ft 11in to 5ft 3in) this century, stoked by accelerated climate change in the Arctic, a study showed on Tuesday.
 Antarctica contains enough ice to raise sea levels by about 57 metres if it ever all melted. The projection, by the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, is higher than most past estimates including a 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the main U.N. scientific group.
Rising sea levels are a threat to cities from New York to Buenos Aires, coasts from the Netherlands to China and low-lying islands in the Pacific or Indian Oceans.
Following is a history of sea level rise and projections:
History – Sea levels rose about 120 metres (almost 400 ft) after a thaw at the end of the last Ice Age about 21,000 years ago released vast amounts of water frozen on land.
Sea levels stabilised about 2,000 to 3,000 years ago, with “no significant change from then until the late 19th century”, the IPCC said in 2007. During the 20th century, they rose about 17 cms. Since 1993, rates have accelerated to about 3 mm per year. Continue reading Higher sea level rise projected
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) – partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 07 August 2010
A University of Delaware researcher reports that an “ice island” four times the size of Manhattan has calved from Greenland’s Petermann Glacier. The last time the Arctic lost such a large chunk of ice was in 1962.
 Research Tents on the Petermann Glacier. The glacier connects the great Greenland ice sheet directly with the ocean. Image courtesy of NASA. “In the early morning hours of August 5, 2010, an ice island four times the size of Manhattan was born in northern Greenland,” said Andreas Muenchow, associate professor of physical ocean science and engineering at the University of Delaware’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment. Muenchow’s research in Nares Strait, between Greenland and Canada, is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Satellite imagery of this remote area at 81 degrees N latitude and 61 degrees W longitude, about 620 miles [1,000 km] south of the North Pole, reveals that Petermann Glacier lost about one-quarter of its 43-mile long [70 km] floating ice-shelf.
Trudy Wohlleben of the Canadian Ice Service discovered the ice island within hours after NASA’s MODIS-Aqua satellite took the data on Aug. 5, at 8:40 UTC (4:40 EDT), Muenchow said. These raw data were downloaded, processed, and analyzed at the University of Delaware in near real-time as part of Muenchow’s NSF research.
Petermann Glacier, the parent of the new ice island, is one of the two largest remaining glaciers in Greenland that terminate in floating shelves. The glacier connects the great Greenland ice sheet directly with the ocean.
The new ice island has an area of at least 100 square miles and a thickness up to half the height of the Empire State Building. Continue reading Ice island calves from Greenland glacier
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