Ocean warming speeds up ice sheet melting Greenland and Antarctica

Ice sheet melting Greenland & AntarcticaIn March we learned ice sheet formation is two-sided. On Sunday, sipping coffee whilst reading the latest Nature Geoscience, we learned the same might go for ice sheet melting. If so, melting would likely accelerate over this century and sea levels would rise faster than previously projected.

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Antarctic krill promotes CO2 uptake by plankton through iron fertilisation

Iron is very rare in the upper layers of the world´s oceans, where photosynthesis is possible and therefore biological activity and concentration of living biomass is highest, making the mineral a growth-limiting nutrient in 40 percent of the world’s oceans, including the Southern Ocean around Antarctica.

It is why geoengineering minds have suggested ocean iron feritilisation may be effective to spur plankton growth and thereby increase CO2 uptake. Around Antarctica, it turns out, nature already does that for us.

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Potential new biomarker for neurofibromatosis identified

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Published today in BMC Medicine, scientists have found a new biomarker, MIA, for neurofibromatosis, a disease that affects 1 in 3000. Although many cases are benign cafe au lait spots, some cases can result in malignant peripheral nerve sheath tumors. Identification of a marker in the blood will help diagnosis.

Visit BMC medicine to read the entire article.

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Today’s paradox: hunt for oxygen-rich seas may be bad news for hypoxic plankton

Certain types of plankton have adapted themselves to living in water with low oxygen content, so they can hide away from fish when digesting [through anaerobic glycolysis] and meanwhile suppressing their metabolism. Only at night, when in search for food, the plankton moves to the surface to re-enter oxygen-richer waters, having to accept the risk of a deadly encounter.

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From La Niña to ‘La Nada’ – perhaps El Niño later on

Yesterday we took a better look at the climate records of 2010 – a year characterized by many extremes and a ‘binary’ El Niño/La Niña Southern Oscillation – that switched suddenly from the one state to the other, somewhere in July. This year too, there is an ENSO shift in mid-summer, but this time it seems [the extreme La Niña is] fading out, instead of tipping over to an [El Niño] extreme [although El Niño conditions are possible in the second half of 2011].

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A new hope for hydrogen energy: nanoparticle driven and solar powered

Hydrogen would be an excellent clean energy source, were it not for the fact that it costs a tremendous amount of energy to produce and is thus quite expensive. Researchers have been looking for ways to cheaply and sustainably produce hydrogen for decades and now researchers from the University of Adelaide have managed to do just that.

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NOAA’s analysis of climate records 2010: trend consistent with climate change

Here on Bitsofscience.org we hope to be your climate records reference point, so we try not to miss any of the major reports on temperature trends or Arctic melting records. That means we definitely could not ignore yesterday’s release by NOAA.

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CCD threatens supply of healthy foods more than staple and fast foods

‘Some 35 percent’ of the foods we eat [and two-thirds to three-quarters of the crop foods] are derived from flowering plants and trees that depend on pollination by insects. This often-cited percentage is used to stress the importance of bees to the human food supply – and the possible severe consequences of escalating CCD, or Colony Collapse Disorder, among populations of wild bees, bumblebees and honeybees.

But perhaps that percentage does not reflect the full weight of the bees’ importance for our diets.

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Extrapolating lab study on yeast: species may evolve around deadly environmental change within 50-100 generations

If however survival conditions are optimal, like a gradual increase of the environmental stressor, ‘modest’ inter-population contact – and indeed if such extrapolation from a microorganism to a blue whale would be as legitimate as the researchers in their Science publication risk to suggest.

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