In 2015, a sea turtle with a straw stuck in its nose took over the internet. It launched a movement to eliminate plastic straws and raised awareness of plastic pollution in the ocean. Did any of it make a difference, or was it just another viral moment of shared but shallow outrage? Let’s see how the sea turtles are doing now.

Sea Straws

About eight years ago, on a research trip in Costa Rica, marine biologist Christine Figgener from Texas A&M University found an olive ridley sea turtle with a plastic straw lodged in his nostril. The disturbing video of her team prying the straw out of the turtle’s bloody nose went viral. For the first time, the topic of plastic pollution in the oceans became something anyone could respond to emotionally.

Plastic straws became the focus of attention for many people. Some people gave up using straws. Others searched for alternatives to plastic, while companies scrambled to develop new compostable straws. Even diehard disposable plastic straw fans tried to find ways to recycle them. As a single-use item that (outside of hospitals and certain physical disabilities) wasn’t really necessary in the first place, eliminating straws is not a bad starting point.

Plastic Pollution

But ocean plastic is much more than just straws, and there’s more at stake than turtles’ nostrils. Plastic pollution affects sea life throughout the ocean. Over 90% of all seabirds have ingested plastic, sometimes in fatal amounts. Each year, consuming or becoming entangled in marine plastic debris kills individuals belonging to nearly 700 different bird, reptile, fish, and mammal marine species. Microplastics bioaccumulate, even in fish that do not consume plastic litter, and have now been found in human bodies.

It’s not clear what impact all the attention to straws has made. In India, England, and the EU, plastic straws have been banned together with other types of single-use plastic. But Americans still use millions of plastic straws every day, and straws are among the most common pieces of litter found in national parks. Eight million tons of plastic waste continue to travel from inland locations, often along rivers, to enter the oceans every year, collecting in garbage gyres in oceans around the world.

Sea Turtles

Despite its obvious success in raising awareness of one specific threat to sea turtles, the video doesn’t seem to have led to improved conditions for turtles. Of the seven species of sea turtle found all over the world, six are classified as either threatened or endangered. The seventh, the flatback turtle, is considered data deficient and may be endangered as well.

About 1,000 sea turtles are known to die from plastic ingestion each year, and it may be getting worse; more post-hatchling turtles are found with internal plastic than adults. Plastic also threatens turtles through entanglement, both with free-floating debris and as bycatch in active fishing operations. Loss and degradation of habitat due to coastal development and water pollution as well as warming waters resulting from climate change reduce turtle populations further.

Sea Change

You might not be thinking about sea turtles when you hop in the car to run an errand. But reducing your carbon footprint by driving less, shopping smarter, and making your home more efficient is one of the best things you can do to help sea life, including turtles.

To invest in a post-plastic world, move towards a plastic-free lifestyle, starting with single-use items. Eliminating one type of item at a time is the most practical approach. Straws and water bottles are low-hanging fruit, then do a plastics inventory to choose your next goal. Take up plogging, and when you are near the ocean, participate in coastal cleanups.

Save the Turtles

For most of us, choosing seafood that is certified sustainable has the most immediate impact on the threats to sea turtles. But if you live or travel near the ocean, your actions could harm or help save sea turtles more directly. If you boat or fish on the ocean, learn how to avoid harming turtles with your hobby. Contact your local sea turtle stranding network if you see a sick or injured sea turtle on or near the beach. Be aware of hatching season (you could even volunteer to monitor nests) and turn off lights at night to avoid disorienting hatchlings.

Take the ecotourism approach when you travel and visit places like Tortuguero and Ostional where turtle conservation also supports local livelihoods. Avoid souvenirs made from tortoiseshell and do not support restaurants serving turtle eggs or turtle meat (both of which are illegal in most places, but still widely available in some countries). Endangered species are not doomed to extinction if there is enough public interest to make the changes to protect them.

Adrian Bejan, the J.A. Jones Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Duke University, was busy demonstrating the former for a class full of students when a thought struck him: this is not how nature operates. Evolution is a sequence of design changes happening on their own in a discernible direction; it never weds itself to a single point on a drawing board. An evolving system or animal is free to simply go with what works. Not so much that its performance suffers greatly, but enough that it opens access to other options near the so-called optimal design.

With science often looking to nature for clues to solve challenges, Bejan wondered if he might look the opposite way, to predict nature before looking at it. If problem solvers and builders were free to miss the absolute highest mark, how much greater might be the range of designs they consider plausible?

That’s the question that Bejan posits in a new paper published online May 16 in the journal Biosystems. Using two relatively simple examples — walkways ferrying passengers off a train and a bird flapping its wings — he discovers that the answer is, “quite a lot.”

“In engineering, design, theater, architecture or even the organization of this university, any form of design benefits from the ability to make good but imperfect decisions and the freedom to move on and contemplate other opportunities for improvement,” Bejan said. “If one is wedded to the idea of the absolute best, nothing new will ever be created.”

In the paper, Bejan first looks at the example of passengers arriving by train and walking across a room with many exit points. With the total area of the room remaining constant but the length and width of the room free to change, he solves for the optimal shape of the room to get all passengers where they’re going the quickest. With the solution equations in hand, he shows that providing even 1% wiggle room for imperfection away from the best performance opens the design space by 28%.

In his second example, Bejan looks at the flapping motion of birds at nearly constant altitude and speed. Considering the various forces involved — drag during gliding, lift created by wing size, speed and body size, among others — he formulates an equation for the rhythm of wings needed to maintain constant speed with minimum effort. While an optimal answer does exist, Bejan once again shows that allowing for just 1% imperfection above the theoretical minimum effort opens the design space by 20%.

Bejan says that he chose these examples because they involved changing only a single variable, a single degree of freedom — the shape for a room or the flapping rhythm for a wing. In more complex examples that involve many variables, these tiny tolerances for imperfection create an even wider range of “good enough” solutions.

The lesson learned is that science now has a predictive idea of how nature works. By focusing less on finding absolute optimal designs, researchers may use the freedom to iteratively move toward entirely new design concepts that wouldn’t otherwise have been within their sight. It also gives designs, methods and entire fields of study the ability to adapt to a changing world.

“The doctrine of chasing the best design is not helpful,” Bejan said. “The teaching of science should go hand-in-hand with the freedom to take a shot, hit the vicinity of the mark and move on. The end goal isn’t just to hit a bullseye, but to keep more arrows in your quiver to keep taking shots over a long period of time.”

This work was supported by a grant from CaptiveAire Systems.

The new Nature Ecology & Evolution study predicts when and where climate change is likely to expose species across the globe to potentially dangerous temperatures.

The research team from UCL, University of Cape Town, University of Connecticut and University at Buffalo analysed data from over 35,000 species of animals (including mammals, amphibians, reptiles, birds, corals, fish, cephalopods and plankton) and seagrasses from every continent and ocean basin, alongside climate projections running up to 2100.

The researchers investigated when areas within each species’ geographical range will cross a threshold of thermal exposure, defined as the first five consecutive years where temperatures consistently exceed the most extreme monthly temperature experienced by a species across its geographic range over recent history (1850-2014).

Once the thermal exposure threshold is crossed, the animal is not necessarily going to die out, but there is no evidence that it is able to survive the higher temperatures – that is, the research projects that for many species there could be an abrupt loss of habitat due to future climate change.

The researchers found a consistent trend that for many animals, the thermal exposure threshold will be crossed for much of their geographic range within the same decade.

Lead author Dr Alex Pigot (UCL Centre for Biodiversity & Environment Research, UCL Biosciences) said: “It is unlikely that climate change will gradually make environments more difficult for animals to survive in. Instead, for many animals, large swaths of their geographic range are likely to become unfamiliarly hot in a short span of time.

“While some animals may be able to survive these higher temperatures, many other animals will need to move to cooler regions or evolve to adapt, which they likely cannot do in such short timeframes.

“Our findings suggest that once we start to notice that a species is suffering under unfamiliar conditions, there may be very little time before most of its range becomes inhospitable, so it’s important that we identify in advance which species may be at risk in coming decades.”

The researchers found that the extent of global warming makes a big difference: if the planet warms by 1.5°C, 15% of species they studied will be at risk of experiencing unfamiliarly hot temperatures across at least 30% of their existing geographic range in a single decade, but this doubles to 30% of species at 2.5°C of warming.

Dr Pigot added: “Our study is yet another example of why we need to urgently reduce carbon emissions to mitigate the harmful effects climate change is having on animals and plants, and avoid a massive extinction crisis.”

The researchers hope that their study could help with targeting conservation efforts, as their data provides an early warning system showing when and where particular animals are likely to be at risk.

Co-author Dr Christopher Trisos (African Climate and Development Initiative, University of Cape Town) said: “In the past we’ve had snapshots to show the impact of climate change, but here we are presenting the data more like a film, where you can see the changes unfold over time. This shows that for many species the risk is a bit like everything, everywhere, all at once. By animating this process, we hope to help direct conservation efforts before it’s too late, while also showing the potentially catastrophic consequences of letting climate change continue unchecked.”

The researchers say that this pattern of abrupt exposure may be an inevitable feature of living on a round planet – because of the shape of the Earth, there is more area available to species in environments near the hot end of what they are used to, such as in low-lying areas or near the equator.

A previous study by the same lead authors found that even if we stop climate change so that global temperatures peak and start to decline, the risks to biodiversity could persist for decades after.* In another analysis similar to the current study, they found that many species facing unfamiliar temperatures will be living alongside other animals experiencing similar temperature shocks, which could pose grave risks to local ecosystem function.**

The study was supported by the Royal Society, the Natural Environment Research Council, the National Science Foundation (US), the African Academy of Sciences and NASA.

* https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2022/jun/biodiversity-risks-persist-well-beyond-future-global-temperature-peak

** https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/apr/climate-change-could-cause-sudden-biodiversity-losses-worldwide

Smart plugs are affordable, easy-to-use devices that bring smart home features to your home electronics. By offering scheduling capabilities and the ability to turn off devices remotely, and by reducing standby energy drain, smart plugs make it easy to save energy.

Source: How To Save Energy in Your Home With Smart Plugs

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VISIONS: The EMIT Open Data Portal

Two recent studies by researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California used contrasting approaches to measure drops in human-caused emissions of the potent greenhouse gas methane in recent years in the Los Angeles region.

In the first study, published in February in Environmental Research Letters, scientists analyzed data from ground-based sensors scattered around four counties in densely populated Southern California: Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, and Riverside. They found emissions fell by about 7% between 2015 and 2020 – a reduction of 33 million pounds (15 million kilograms) of methane released per year.

The second study, published in March in Environmental Research Communications, compared emissions from a belt of oil refineries across the South Bay area of Los Angeles during the first summer of the COVID-19 pandemic to those observed three years earlier. Using data from a NASA airborne instrument, researchers saw that most of the facilities they identified as methane sources in the earlier campaign were no longer emitting the greenhouse gas, leading to a 73% reduction in measured emissions. While such a reduction around COVID disruptions was not necessarily surprising, the result was important for demonstrating scientists’ ability to track point sources of methane.

Methane has a much shorter atmospheric lifespan than carbon dioxide – around 12 years, compared to centuries for carbon dioxide – but it absorbs much more energy while it exists in the atmosphere. Therefore, reducing human-caused emissions of the gas is a particularly effective way to make significant, short-term impacts on global climate change.

“These papers demonstrate that methane reductions are not only possible, they’re measurable through persistent monitoring,” said Andrew Thorpe, lead author of the COVID-period study and a JPL research technologist.

That two studies could use different techniques to identify and quantify emissions trends is crucial for generating confidence in the conclusions drawn from methane observations, added Vineet Yadav, a JPL data scientist and lead author of the first paper.

“The important thing is to determine whether emissions are increasing or declining, and for that it’s helpful to have more than one approach,” said Yadav, whose study employs two techniques. “If you are turning the information over to decision-makers, you have to be sure.”

Focusing on the Region

Yadav’s paper is based on measurements from eight spectroscopic sensors that were installed as part of the Megacities Carbon Project, a multiagency collaboration currently monitoring greenhouse gases in the Los Angeles, Indianapolis, and Washington areas. The sensors have been gathering data across a large swath of Southern California since 2015 and enabled researchers to study an area that stretches from the beaches of Malibu in the west to the mountains and deserts of San Bernardino and Riverside counties in the east. It also extends south through all of Orange County.

The researchers found that month-to-month fluctuations in methane concentrations measured at each sensor tower gradually fell from 2015 to 2020 and well into 2022 – a strong indication that local emissions of the gas were also decreasing. Then, using a mathematical model to estimate the emissions decrease, Yadav and colleagues found the areas covered by the Granada Hills and Ontario sensors accounted for much of the drop in annual emissions from 2015 to 2020.

Although the paper doesn’t cite causes of the emission reductions in those two locales, Yadav suspects they resulted from better management of natural gas pipelines and equipment, which in turn led to lower fugitive – or accidental – methane releases. Improved infrastructure at a massive waste site near Granada Hills likely also played a role.

Focusing on Refineries

Rather than analyzing data from ground sensors, the study focusing on oil refineries uses measurements made by an imaging spectrometer called AVIRIS-NG (Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer-Next Generation). Attached to the bottom of an aircraft, the instrument can detect greenhouse gas emissions from individual facilities or even pieces of equipment by looking at how the gases absorb sunlight.

In 2016 and 2017, AVIRIS-NG was flown over 22,000 square miles (57,000 square kilometers) of the state as part of the California Methane Survey. From July to September 2020, researchers retraced some of those flight paths over refineries and power plants in Los Angeles County and over oilfields in central California’s San Joaquin Valley. The flights were funded by NASA’s Earth Science Division, the California Air Resources Board, and the California Energy Commission.

The 2020 surveys over Los Angeles identified only 11 plumes from five refinery sources, with a total emissions rate of about 712 pounds (323 kilograms) of methane per hour. The 2016 and ’17 flights had found 48 plumes from 33 sources, with a total emissions rate of roughly 2,639 pounds (1,197 kilograms methane) per hour. The drop correlates with an 18% decrease in monthly production in Southern California refineries between the two flight campaigns, the scientists noted, citing data from the California Energy Commission. The study also found that emissions from oilfields in and around the city of Bakersfield in central California fell 34.2%, correlating with a 24.2% drop in oil production.

Thorpe said that reduced production during the pandemic due to lower demand for fuel and depressed oil prices could have led to the drop in methane emissions, as oilfields and refineries emitted less methane during operations. However, he added, improved equipment maintenance and mitigation efforts at those facilities between 2016 and 2020 can’t be ruled out as a factor.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s estimate of global atmospheric methane concentration accelerated after 2020, “underscoring the critical need to reduce emissions,” Thorpe writes in the paper. Being able to accurately detect and measure emissions is a key step, both he and Yadav said.

For decades, NASA has been developing and using innovative tools to observe changes in greenhouse gas concentrations driven by both human activity and natural variations. For instance, in 2022 the agency launched the EMIT mission (short for the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation), which can identify methane point-source emissions. Additionally, JPL is partnering with Carbon Mapper and Planet Labs PBC to launch satellites with greenhouse-gas monitoring capabilities. The agency is also working to make data more accessible and combining it with other sources to make user experiences easier and more efficient.

News Media Contacts

Andrew Wang / Jane J. Lee

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

626-379-6874 / 818-354-0307

[email protected] / [email protected]

The most recent sea level data from the U.S.-European satellite Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich indicates early signs of a developing El Niño across the equatorial Pacific Ocean. The data shows Kelvin waves – which are roughly 2 to 4 inches (5 to 10 centimeters) high at the ocean surface and hundreds of miles wide – moving from west to east along the equator toward the west coast of South America.

When they form at the equator, Kelvin waves bring warm water, which is associated with higher sea levels, from the western Pacific to the eastern Pacific. A series of Kelvin waves starting in spring is a well-known precursor to an El Niño, a periodic climate phenomenon that can affect weather patterns around the world. It is characterized by higher sea levels and warmer-than-average ocean temperatures along the western coasts of the Americas.

Water expands as it warms, so sea levels tend to be higher in places with warmer water. El Niño is also associated with a weakening of the trade winds. The condition can bring cooler, wetter conditions to the U.S. Southwest and drought to countries in the western Pacific, such as Indonesia and Australia.

The Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite data shown here covers the period between the beginning of March and the end of April 2023. By April 24, Kelvin waves had piled up warmer water and higher sea levels (shown in red and white) off the coasts of Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia. Satellites like Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich can detect Kelvin waves with a radar altimeter, which uses microwave signals to measure the height of the ocean’s surface. When an altimeter passes over areas that are warmer than others, the data will show higher sea levels.

“We’ll be watching this El Niño like a hawk,” said Josh Willis, Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “If it’s a big one, the globe will see record warming, but here in the Southwest U.S. we could be looking at another wet winter, right on the heels of the soaking we got last winter.”

Both the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the World Meteorological Organization have recently reported increased chances that El Niño will develop by the end of the summer. Continued monitoring of ocean conditions in the Pacific by instruments and satellites such as Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich should help to clarify in the coming months how strong it could become.

“When we measure sea level from space using satellite altimeters, we know not only the shape and height of water, but also its movement, like Kelvin and other waves,” said Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer, NASA program scientist and manager for Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich in Washington. “Ocean waves slosh heat around the planet, bringing heat and moisture to our coasts and changing our weather.”

More About the Mission

Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, named after former NASA Earth Science Division Director Michael Freilich, is one of two satellites that compose the Copernicus Sentinel-6/Jason-CS (Continuity of Service) mission.

Sentinel-6/Jason-CS was jointly developed by ESA (European Space Agency), the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT), NASA, and NOAA, with funding support from the European Commission and technical support on performance from the French space agency CNES (Centre National d’Études Spatiales). Spacecraft monitoring and control, as well as the processing of all the altimeter science data, is carried out by EUMETSAT on behalf of the European Union’s Copernicus programme, with the support of all partner agencies.

JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, contributed three science instruments for each Sentinel-6 satellite: the Advanced Microwave Radiometer, the Global Navigation Satellite System – Radio Occultation, and the Laser Retroreflector Array. NASA also contributed launch services, ground systems supporting operation of the NASA science instruments, the science data processors for two of these instruments, and support for the U.S. members of the international Ocean Surface Topography Science Team.

To learn more about Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/sentinel-6

News Media Contacts

Jane J. Lee / Andrew Wang

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

818-354-0307 / 626-379-6874

[email protected] / [email protected]

Research lead Dr Elisa Girola from UQ’s Faculty of Science said this quirk of whale evolution could have consequences for breeding and behaviour.

“Humpback whales evolved over millions of years with noise from natural sources but noise from human-made vessels is foreign to their instincts,” Dr Girola said.

“It’s a surprising finding given engine noise has a similar frequency range to the wind.

“It’s possible the whales are picking out other differences such as wind noise being broadband and the same over large areas, while vessel noise is generated by a single-point source with specific peaks in frequency.

“We don’t know yet if this lack of response to boat noise is making whales communicate less effectively or making breeding practices more difficult.

“Male humpback whale singing is probably used to mediate reproductive interactions, but we can’t say if vessel noise is interfering.”

The audio data for the study was collected in late 2010 off Peregian Beach in Queensland, during the whales’ southward migration from breeding grounds in the lagoon of the Great Barrier Reef to feeding grounds in Antarctica.

Whale songs were recorded using an acoustic array of five hydrophone buoys, which sent signals back to the beach.

A 19-metre fishing boat was introduced to produce vessel noise.

The researchers say it is possible that humpback whales are using other strategies to compensate for vessel noise.

“Even with a 19-metre boat making a racket, the whales just didn’t sing any louder,” Dr Girola said.

“There are a few things going on — they might be using ‘spatial release from masking’, which is the ability to discriminate between audio signals coming from different directions.

“Or there’s ‘comodulation release from masking’ which is the ability to discriminate between signal and noise when the noise has distinctive frequency components and at least some of these components are not overlapping with the signal.

“There’s still so much more research to be done.

“Understanding humpback whales’ response to noise is important for developing mitigation policies for human activities at sea.

“I’m sure these beautiful, mysterious creatures will continue to surprise and amaze us.”

The team led by Christoph Spötl has been investigating the famous “Devils Hole” cave system in Nevada since 2010 — during spectacular expeditions. Using the calcite deposits in the cave, the researchers have already reconstructed the development of the water level in the cave up to several hundred thousand years ago. In the current study, this information has now been combined with a numerical groundwater model for this arid region.

“Based on our extensive sampling in Devils Hole, we have a large amount of data that provides information on the evolution of the water table. By combining this with groundwater models from the US Geological Survey, we can now draw quantitative conclusions about changes in precipitation for the entire region over the last 350,000 years using the precise data from the cave,” explains the geologist Simon Steidle. In drylands like the southwest of the USA, precipitation is particularly important and groundwater data is a mirror of changes in the hydroclimate. “The results can be useful for developing water management strategies and sustainable use of groundwater resources, such as how much water can be withdrawn for agricultural purposes.”

Drought increases sensitivity

The new data suggest that the elevation of the water table in Devils Hole was three to four times more sensitive to groundwater recharge during dry climates than during wetter climates of the past. “Given that drought conditions will likely increase even more in the future due to the ongoing climate crisis, our results highlight the vulnerability of large aquifers, and thus the alteration of the most important freshwater resource in this area of the United States,” Steidle said. The minimum groundwater level in Devils Hole during the peak of the interglacial warm periods was no more than 1.6 metres below today’s level, which corresponds to a decrease in groundwater recharge of less than 17 % compared to today’s conditions. During the glacial periods, however, the level was at least 9.5 metres above today’s level, which means an increase in groundwater recharge of almost 250% compared to today’s conditions.

The new information is relevant especially for the already highly endangered Devils Hole pupfish, a fish measuring just a few centimetres whose only habitat is the water in Devils Hole. The habitat of this species is thus the smallest of all known vertebrates (about half the size of an average classroom). Even small changes in water availability triggered by abstraction of groundwater for irrigation purposes or by climate change are of utmost importance for its survival.