We haven’t yet seen how much water a climate-change-fueled atmospheric river can dump on California, but a new study evaluates the result and it is dreadful. Bye bye Central Valley even if the dams hold, although loss of some dams is also likely and study authors say there’s a 50 percent chance of such a storm in the next 40 years.
Not even the Great Flood of 1862 was as bad as it gets and that storm turned the Central Valley into a lake and destroyed a quarter of the state’s buildings. What might happen with a supercharged version of the 1862 flood was reimagined recently for the climate change era in a study called ARkStorm 2.0. A previous study, ARkStorm 1.0 released in 2010, imagined a future storm based on the atmospheric rivers of 1969 and 1986 and that was dire enough to scare water managers into shoving it into a drawer (metaphorically) and insisting it was impossible.
ARkStorm 2.0 imagines an even worse scenario based on real data: “30 days of unrelenting rain across the whole state. ‘It would be a transformational event for California, without any doubt, if and when it recurs,’ (Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA) says. In the next 40 years, he and (Xingying Huang of the National Center for Atmospheric Research) determined, the odds of such a storm sequence occurring were as high as 50 percent.”
Worse storms have happened before climate change supercharged the atmospheric rivers. Large floods, such as the one in 1862, push sediment into the ocean and a section of ocean floor near Santa Barbara is known for preserving this sediment record—the biggest floods leave a grey layer. Core samples from the area show an alarming paleoflood history of regular occurrences every 120 years, with one leaving a grey layer 10 times thicker than the 1862 flood.
The New York Times story on the subject goes into much more detail about California’s dams, how releases are managed, why the dams’ construction makes them vulnerable to damage from heavy prolonged rainfall, and other aspects of the ARkStorm megaflood worries. It’s such a fascinating read that I removed the paywall so everyone can enjoy the thrilling story of how much closer the Oroville Dam was to being destroyed in 2017 than anyone officially let on.
Extreme weather is threatening California’s dams. What happens if they fail?
On the morning of Feb. 7, 2017, two electricians were working on a warning siren near the spillway of Oroville Dam, 60 miles north of Sacramento, when they heard an explosion. As they watched, a giant plume of water rose over their heads, and chunks of concrete began flying down the hillside toward the Feather River. The dam’s spillway, a concrete channel capable of moving millions of gallons of water out of the reservoir in seconds, was disintegrating in front of them. If it had to be taken out of service, a serious rainstorm, like the one that had been falling on Northern California for days, could cause the dam — the tallest in the United States — to fail.
Oroville is an earth-fill embankment dam with a clay core and a surface of loosely placed rocks. These structures can be incredibly resilient, especially to earthquakes — concrete dams like Hoover Dam are rare in seismically active California — but they are also more vulnerable if overtopped. Once water overwhelms the spillway and starts flowing over an embankment dam, its layers can melt away at an astonishing speed. If Oroville failed in this way, it would send a wave more than 185 feet tall sweeping into the valley below.
Orcas, spurred by an alleged ringleader, a matriarch named Gladis, are attacking boats in Western Europe. Since 2020, over 500 reports originated from near Spain’s coast, and recently three boats were sunk off the Iberian Coast. Three days ago, orcas rammed a seven ton yacht in the North Sea near Scotland, and yesterday orcas attacked two sailing boats on their approach to the Strait of Gibraltar as they competed in an international race. Either Gladis is busy AF or her acolytes are everywhere. The Atlantic Orca Working Group reported a 298% rise in orca-boat interactions since 2020. Scientists say the orcas attacks are intentional, although likely not revenge for the myriad ways we humans have trashed their homes. And what about the spy dolphins Russia trained to detect and “counter” enemy divers in the Black Sea? You think Big Gladis doesn’t talk with the dolphins?
Given how often our human perceptions of animals’ emotions, actions, intentions have been proven flawed when closely examined in controlled studies, we shouldn’t be sanguine about our assumptions.
University of Queensland researchers have found bottlenose dolphins in Moreton Bay off Brisbane could be teaching other dolphins to "beg" for food from recreational fishers, with the behavior creating short and long-term risks. [...]
"Within the dolphins' social network, I found a cluster that would consistently patrol moored boats, waiting for recreational fishers to illegally toss them discarded bait or catches," Dr. Huijser said. "Fishing is popular in the bay and it seems some dolphins have learned to exploit it."
Dr. Huijser said the begging behavior was dangerous for the dolphins, and she was concerned it could spread throughout the population.
"Dolphins learn behavior from their peers," she said. "If these 'beggar' dolphins start to associate with 'non-beggar' dolphins, the behavior may spread rapidly, making it a population-wide problem."
The large ocean mammals are not the only animals with social structure, communication, and intelligence. Do you really want to piss off the parrots any more than we already have?
Today at least 60 of the world's 380 or so parrot species have a breeding population in a country outside their natural geographical range. Each successful transplant has its own story: some are benign, others a threat to the local wildlife; some are abundant in their home ranges, whereas others rely on cities as a refuge from extinction. All are by-products of the pet trade and animal trafficking around the world. Because they're parrots, they're smart, adaptable, creative and loud. “They're animals that are really social, and they live in cognitively complex social environments,” says Grace Smith-Vidaurre, a postdoctoral fellow at the Rockefeller University and the University of Cincinnati, who studies the birds. “They're like humans in a lot of ways.”
Andy Davis is a hero for his research and his efforts to communicate the findings to a non-science audience more interested in apocalyptic than reassuring messages.
The wings of monarchs that survive a 2,000-mile-long migration tend to be spottier, suggesting that feature may aid the insects’ ability to fly.
“No one even knew what these spots were for in monarchs,” said Andy Davis, a biologist at the University of Georgia and an author of a study published on Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE. He added, “All of a sudden, it seems like they’re really important.”
Monarch wings are mostly orange, but their edges are black, punctuated with tiny white spots. Dr. Davis was curious if those black edges contributed to monarchs’ migratory capabilities. Dark colors absorb more heat, and studies of seabirds have suggested that the temperature difference between dark and light feathers can change air flow patterns, enabling birds with blacktopped wings to “enhance their flight efficiency — basically increasing the lift and decreasing the drag,” said Mostafa Hassanalian, a mechanical engineer at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology.
Air pollution is having an unbelievable effect on flies, altering how they attract one another and mate.
Insects typically find their mates by heavily relying on pheromones –– chemicals that allow males and females to locate each other and mate.
These pheromones are distinctive to males and females of a species, and in the case of flies, they are being disrupted and degraded by the pervasive increase of ozone in the air, which is a result of air pollution.
The University of Essex-led study, in collaboration with the neuroscience of pain group at the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich, found fast-oscillating brain waves linked to brief pain and touch can differ widely in scans.
These waves, called gamma oscillations, were previously thought to represent pain perception in the brain -- with past research focussing on group data and overlooking individual differences, even discarding them as 'noise' in scans … "Not only, for the first time, can we pinpoint the extreme variability in the gamma response across individuals, but we also show that the individual response pattern is stable across time."
This pattern of group variability and individual stability may apply to other brain responses, and characterising it may allow us to identify individual pain fingerprints in the activity of the brain."
Runoff from irrigation has moved so much water from land to sea that Earth’s rotation might have measurably shifted.
Computer simulations suggest that from 1993 through 2010, irrigation alone nudged the North Pole by about 78 centimeters, researchers reported in the June 28 Geophysical Research Letters. That would make irrigation the second largest contributor to polar drift after the ongoing rebound of Earth’s surface following the retreat of glaciers since the last ice age. [...]
When all sources of water movement are considered — including the runoff of meltwater from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets — the North Pole drifted about 1.6 meters toward the east coast of Greenland in that time. The impact of irrigation was mostly to nudge the pole generally east of where it would have gone otherwise, the team found. Without irrigation, the pole would have drifted nearly the same amount, but toward the center of Greenland instead.
Unlike other drivers that vary over the course of a year, Wilson says, the polar drift due to irrigation is permanent and probably growing each year.
Researchers have found that the cooling effect that volcanic eruptions have on Earth's surface temperature is likely underestimated by a factor of two, and potentially as much as a factor of four, in standard climate projections.
While this effect is far from enough to offset the effects of global temperature rise caused by human activity, the researchers, led by the University of Cambridge, say that small-magnitude eruptions are responsible for as much as half of all the sulfur gases emitted into the upper atmosphere by volcanoes.
The results, reported in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, suggest that improving the representation of volcanic eruptions of all magnitudes will in turn make climate projections more robust.
In a new study, we show through real-time measurements that hurricanes don't just churn water at the surface. They can also push heat deep into the ocean in ways that can lock it up for years and ultimately affect regions far from the storm.
Heat is the key component of this story. It has long been known that hurricanes gain their energy from warm sea surface temperatures. This heat helps moist air near the ocean surface rise like a hot air balloon and form clouds taller than Mount Everest. This is why hurricanes generally form in tropical regions.
What we discovered is that hurricanes ultimately help warm the ocean, too, by enhancing its ability to absorb and store heat. And that can have far-reaching consequences.
A scientist at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) who has recently faced media allegations that he was the first person with COVID-19 and his research on coronaviruses sparked the pandemic strongly denies that he was ill in late 2019 or that his work had any link to the emergence of SARS-CoV-2. Moreover, a newly released U.S. report of declassified information on COVID-19’s origin, from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), fails to name him or substantiate that any WIV scientists had the initial cases of COVID-19.