Environment

Gray whales live in the North Pacific, and once also lived in the North Atlantic, but appear to have been driven to extinction by the 18th century. A gray whale hasn't been spotted in the Atlantic basin for nearly 300 years, until three years ago when in May 2010, a gray whale was spotted off the coast of Israel. In July 2010, that same whale was spotted off the coast of Spain. Until now, gray whales had never been found in the Southern Hemisphere.

Four tour boats on dolphin-spotting cruises near Namibia's Walvis Bay spotted an unusual whale. Just eight days later, John Paterson of the Albatross Task Force confirmed that the lone whale was a gray whale -- the first ever recorded south of the equator.

Comparing photographs with the whale spotted nearly Israel and Spain in 2010 confirm that the whale found in the Southern Hemisphere was not the same whale. Scientists are now trying to determine the origins of the whale.

It is possible that the whale swam south past Baja California, rounded the tip of South America and across the Atlantic, but it seems unlikely as the whale would have to travel a large distance against currents, through open ocean, from west to east. Gray whales typically do not do any of that.

Scientists from the University of Manchester have shown that natural emissions and humanmade pollutants can both have an unexpected cooling effet on Earth's climate by making clouds brighter.

Clouds are composed of water droplets that are condensed onto tiny particles suspended in the air. When the air is humid enough, the particles swell into cloud droplets. Researchers have known for some decades that the number of these particles and their size control how bright the clouds appear from the top, which controls the efficiency with which clouds scatter sunlight back into space.

One of the major challenges for climate scientists is to understand and quantify these effects, which have major effects in polluted areas of the world.

The tiny seed particles can either be natural from things like sea spray or dust, or humanmade pollutants from things like vehicle exhaust or industrial activity. These particles ofte contain a large amount of organic material and are quite volatile compounds, so in warm conditions they exist as a vapor.

Researchers have found that the effect acts in reverse in the atmosphere as the volatile organic compounds from pollution or from the biosphere evaporates and give off characteristic aromas.However, under moist, cooler conditions where clouds form, the molecules prefer to be liquid and make larger particles that are more effective seeds for cloud droplets.

Researchers from around the globe have made repeated attempts to capture data of Greenland's ice via overhead aircraft and space satellites, but now NASA is going about the data collecting in a new way - they're sending in a robotic rover, much like the ones that the space agency has sent to Mars in recent years.

A robot named GROVER, which stands for Goddard Remotely Operated Vehicle for Exploration and Research, will deploy to the northern Atlantic land mass today (Friday) to begin a five-week analysis mission of its melting ice sheets.

The rover will run a solo mission from May 3 to June 8. During the mission, GROVER will use ground-penetrating radar to study the thickness of the glaciers and the patterns in which snow accumulates over time to build them up. Solar panels and wind turbines will keep the rover running as it moves across miles of remote snow and ice that would be inaccessible to a human team without massive supplies of food and fuel weighing them down.

A second rover named Cool Robot will join GROVER in mid-June. Cool Robot was built at Dartmouth University in Hanover, New Hampshire, with funding from the National Science Foundation, and will bring with it an assortment instruments for testing not only the ice, but the atmosphere as well.

According to a new study, from 1971 to 2000, the Earth's land areas were the warmest they have been in at least 1,400 years.

The new study, which was published in Nature Geoscience, was a massive undertaking involving 80 researchers from around the world with the Past Global Changes (PAGES) group. It is considered to be the first study to look at continental temperature changes over two thousand years, which gives insight into regional climatic changes from the Roman Empire to modern day.

According to the data, Earth's land masses were generally cooling until anthropogenic climate change reversed the long-term pattern during the late 19th century.

Co-author Ulf Büntgen with the Swiss Federal Research Institute (WSL) and PAGES noted:

"Even just a few years ago we would have aimed for a single worldwide temperature series. Nowadays, we know how important it is to have a better understanding of regional differences."

The scientists were able to reconstruct continental temperatures across every continent with the exception of Africa, where data is still lacking. They discovered that continents could still show important idiosyncrasies in the midst of global trends. Co-author Heinz Wanner of the University of Bern and PAGES member commented:

"Distinctive periods, such as the Medieval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age stand out, but do not show a globally uniform pattern."

Scientists revealed on Wednesday at the Seismological Society of America's annual meeting that Yellowstone's underground volcanic plumbing system is larger and better connected than previously thought.

Jamie Farrell, a seismology graduate student at the University of Utah says that the "magma reservoir is at least 50 percent larger than previously imaged."

The volcano is currently dormant, but knowing the volume of molten magma that sits beneath Yellowstone is important for estimating the size of potential future eruptions.

Geologists think that Yellowstone sits over a hotspot, which is a plume of superheated rock rising from the Earth's mantle. It is believed that as North America drifted over the hotspot, the Yellowstone plume punched through the continent's crust, leaving behind a trail of calderas that were created by massive volcanic eruptions along Idaho's Snake River Plain, which leads straight to Yellowstone.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Drought Task Force recently released a study which found that the 2012 Great Plains drought, the worst on record in the U.S. since record keeping began in 1895, was not the result of climate change. Instead, the NOAA says that the drought was the result of "natural variations in weather patterns" and not "human-induced climate change."

The 2012 drought affected the states of Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota. It had previously been blamed on climate change.

Dr. Martin Hoerling, senior author of the new report, "An interpretation of the Origins of the 2012 Central Plains Drought", said that while he is an "advocate of global warming...the science also tells that every drought that is occurring isn't a result of climate change."

Plans to construct the world's largest optical telescope on top of a volcano in Hawaii have been officially approved. The plan, which was crafted by California and Canadian universities, calls for a 30m telescope, the largest ever created.

The $1 billion telescope would have the capability of observing planets orbiting stars other than the sun, and will enable astronomers to watch new planets and stars being formed. In fact, with the 30m telescope, astronomers will be able to look 13 billion light years away.

Mauna Kea's peak is already home to more than a dozen telescopes. It is popular with astronomers because its summit is far above the clouds at 13,796 feet, which offers a clear view of the sky for more than 300 days per year. Because Hawaii is isolated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, it's also relatively free of air pollution. There is also very little man-made lights on the Big Island that would disrupt observations.

The telescope's segmented primary mirror is enarly 100 feet long, and will give it nine times the collecting area of the largest optical telescopes in use today. The images it produces will also be three times sharper.

Unfortunately, the telescope is not likely to hold the world's largest title for very long as a group of European countries are planning to build the European Extremely Large Telescope, which will feature a 138-foot long mirror.

The massive asteroid impact that is thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago may have also light up the Earth's skies red and sparked a cataclysmic global firestorm.

The mass die-off known as the K-T extinction is believed by most scientists to have been caused by an asteroid or comet that impacted the Earth and created the 112-mile-wide Chicxulub crater in Mexico. This extinction event resulted in the vanishing of up to 80 percent of Earth's species.

Researchers have created a new model of the disaster, and now say that the impact would have sent vaporized particles of rock high above Earth's atmosphere, where they would have condensed into sand-grain size pieces. As the hot, ejected rock material fell back to Earth, it could have dumped enough heat in the upper atmosphere to cause it cook at 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit, which would have turned the sky red for several hours.

The infrared "heat pulse" would have behaved like a broiler oven, igniting tinder below and burning every twig, bush, tree and any living thing not shielded underground or underwater.

Douglas Robertson of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, explains:

"It's likely that the total amount of infrared heat was equal to a 1 megaton bomb exploding every four miles over the entire Earth."

Researchers note that a 1-megaton hydrogen bomb would be the equivalent of 80 Hiroshima-type nuclear bombs. The Chicxulub event is thought to have produced about 100 million megatons of energy.

A new study has found that global warming will make it difficult to raise grapes in traditional wine country, which will force production to shift to other regions. The study has found sharp declines in wine production from Bordeaux, Rhone, Tuscany, California's Napa Valley, and Chile by 2050 as warming climates make it harder to raise grapes in traditional wine country.

Researchers are now predicting a two-thirds fall in production in the world's premier wine regions due to climate change, with the biggest decline expected in Europe. However, they also anticipate that wine production will make a large push into areas that were once considered unsuitable for wine making, which could mean a greater variety from northern Europe, the northwest U.S., and even the hills of central China.

Lee Hannah, a senior scientist at Conservation International and an author of the study, says:

"The fact is that climate change will lead to a huge shakeup in the geographic distribution of wine production."

Researchers are anticipating huge changes in the regions that produce good grapes. Hannah notes:

"It will be harder and harder to grow those varieties that are currently growing in places in Europe. It doesn't necessarily mean that [they] can't be grown there, but it will require irrigation and special inputs to make it work, and that will make it more and more expensive."

One of the most finicky varieties of grapes are white grapes, which are sensitive to very subtle temperature shifts, rain, and sunshine.

5,000 years ago, the climate shift in North Africa was quite dramatic and sudden. It transformed from lakes and grasslands with hippos and giraffes, to a vast, dry desert. A new study finds that the sudden geographic transformation took place nearly simultaneously across the continent's northern half.

These findings come from the analysis of dust blown west from Africa and dropped into the Atlantic Ocean. Researchers sifted through 30,000 years worth of dust and ocean bottom muck that was retrieved by ocean drilling ships. The changing levels of windblown dust in ocean sediments are what have provided scientists with clues to Africa's climate, and how it has changed over time.

In simple terms, a lot of dust meant drier conditions and less dust meant a wetter environment.

The west period in northern Africa is known as the African Humid Period. This period of wetness both started and ended suddenly. The Humid Period ended abou 6,000 years ago, and dust levels were at about 20 percent of today's, which is much less dusty than previous estimates. This suggests that the change in climate was rather dramatic.