The new findings, published January 20 in Science Advances, indicate that red sea urchin populations in Southern California may be more vulnerable to climate change than those in Northern California. Although the sea urchins in Southern California are already adapted to warmer conditions, the researchers suspect that further warming of their environment may be more than they can tolerate.

“Red sea urchins from the Southern California population were much more sensitive to environmental changes than those from Northern California, and we think that is likely because they are already closer to some kind of thermal limit,” said senior author Kristy Kroeker, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz.

First author Emily Donham led the study as a UCSC graduate student and is now a postdoctoral scholar at UC Santa Barbara. “Red sea urchins are an important fishery species along our coast, so understanding how they are likely to be impacted by climate change is very important,” she said.

The study looked at the effects of three key environmental variables in the sea urchins’ coastal habitat: water temperature, dissolved oxygen, and pH (a measure of ocean acidification). Climate change driven by increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is warming the oceans and reducing oxygen levels in the water, while increased absorption of carbon dioxide by seawater leads to ocean acidification.

According to Kroeker, most studies looking at the adaptability of species to climate change have focused on one aspect of environmental change, such as warming or ocean acidification. “But all of these species that we are concerned about are embedded in environments with multiple variables that will be affected by climate change,” she said.

Using a network of sensors deployed along the coast, the researchers first characterized the current conditions in Northern and Southern California kelp forests. There are big differences between the coastal waters of Northern and Southern California because of strong seasonal upwelling in the north, which brings to the surface cold deep waters with reduced levels of dissolved oxygen and lower pH (closer to the acidic end of the scale). Coastal upwelling is much weaker in Southern California.

As a result, Northern California sea urchin populations are already exposed to conditions that are more acidic, less oxygenated, and colder than Southern California waters. In the future, however, both regions will experience warmer, more acidic, and less oxygenated waters compared to current conditions.

To study the sensitivity of red sea urchins to these changing conditions, the researchers grew juvenile sea urchins from the two regions in outdoor tanks at UCSC’s Long Marine Laboratory, where they could control the conditions in each tank.

The experiments exposed sea urchins from both populations to the average conditions in each of the two regions for temperature, dissolved oxygen, and pH. The results clearly showed that red sea urchin populations are adapted to their home environments and experience increased mortality when raised in different conditions. Southern California sea urchins fared poorly under Northern California conditions, and vice versa.

The researchers also exposed red sea urchins to the future conditions expected for their home regions based on regional climate projections for the year 2100. These future conditions generally do not overlap with the range of conditions currently measured along the coast.

Although mortality increased in populations from both regions under the projected future conditions, the Northern California sea urchins experienced lower mortality and had better body condition than the Southern California sea urchins.

“Despite the Northern California populations being in more acidic, lower-oxygen conditions in the future, it was the Southern California populations that were much more impacted,” Kroeker said.

This was a surprise, she said, because the Northern California populations are adapted to seasonal changes in which temperature, dissolved oxygen, and pH all decrease in concert, whereas with climate change this tightly coupled variation, or “covariance structure,” will be broken. Dissolved oxygen and pH will decrease further, but temperature will increase.

“It’s breaking down the environmental covariance structure they’re adapted to, so our prediction was that this would make them more vulnerable. But that’s not what we found,” Kroeker said.

The findings suggest that water temperature is a critical environmental variable for red sea urchins. With warmer temperatures to begin with, the coastal waters of Southern California may not have to get much warmer to reach temperatures inhospitable to red sea urchins.

“We should not assume that a species’ vulnerability to climate change is the same across its whole range,” Kroeker said. “Each population is adapted to local conditions, and not all populations are going to respond similarly to global climate change.”

In addition to Donham and Kroeker, the coauthors include Iris Flores, Alexis Hooper, and Evan O’Brien at UC Santa Cruz; Kate Vylet and Jan Freiwald at Reef Check Foundation; and Yuichiro Takeshita at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. This work was supported by the UC Institute for the Study of Ecological and Evolutionary Climate Impacts (ISEECI) and the California Ocean Protection Council.

“Regional land use change is no longer simply driven by local demand; it is also indirectly influenced by international markets and the surging consumption of land-based products,” say the authors, led by Bin Chen, a postdoctoral fellow at Fudan University. “Countries with forest conservation goals can import finished land-based products via global supply chains, displacing land-use pressure and related eco-environmental impacts outside their own territory borders.”

The researchers used multi-source geographic information data and economic modeling to evaluate the direct and indirect causes of intact forest landscape loss. Intact forests support more diverse species, are more resilient to natural disturbances such as wildfires, and in Africa and South America, can store more than three times the amount of carbon per hectare compared to disturbed or managed forests.

Previous studies have focused on deforestation — the complete removal of tree cover — but focusing on intact forests instead allowed the authors to shine a spotlight on the insidious roles played by degradation and fragmentation.

“Even the removal of narrow tracts of forests can affect overall forest structure and composition,” say the authors. “Considering the exceptional conservation value of intact forest landscapes in terms of stabilizing terrestrial carbon stocks and harboring biodiversity, intact forest landscapes loss displacement can also reflect potential indirect driving forces behind carbon emissions and biodiversity loss.”

“It is widely thought that beef production drives deforestation in the Amazon, but it is hard for consumers to realize that the production of highly processed equipment may involve timber and metals produced at the expense of intact forest and that services provided by tertiary sectors may be supported by electricity generated from oil and gas associated with this loss” the authors say. “The more dispersed nature of intact forest loss drivers and their indirect links to individual final consumers call for stronger government engagement and supply-chain interventions.”

Earth911 is honoring the 52 years of Earth Day with 52 Actions for the Earth. Each week through Earth Day 2023, we will share an action you can take to invest in the Earth and make your own life more sustainable. This week, one small action you can take for the Earth affects several big issues – reduction of carbon emissions, protection of public lands, and politician accountability. Let politicians know you oppose drilling for fossil fuels on public lands.

Action: Sign the petition to ban new oil and gas permits on public lands and waters

Producing Fossil Fuels on Public Lands

Public lands are held by the government and managed for the public good. But not all public lands are parks, and the public good is not always defined as “preservation” or even “conservation.” The Bureau of Land Management manages about 700 million acres (30% of the United States) — land whose use is often determined by the value of its “onshore subsurface mineral estate.” According to BLM, as of 2018, some 26 million of those acres are under lease to oil and gas developers, with about 13 million acres in active production. Between 5-10% of all oil and natural gas production in the United States comes from these public lands. Fossil fuels extracted from federal lands account for nearly one-quarter of carbon emissions in the U.S.

Broken Promises?

President Biden promised on the campaign trail that he would “ban new oil and gas permitting on public lands and waters.” Once in office, Biden did pause quarterly sales of federal oil and gas drilling leases for a while. Even during the 15-month pause in lease sales, oil production on federal lands increased, with domestic oil production reaching a near-record high in 2021. But instead of banning future sales, those lease sales resumed in July 2022 after months of rising gas prices and a court order.

No one was happy about the way the leases were resumed. Only about 20% of the public land industry hoped for went up for auction, while royalty rates increased by 50%. Overall, industry claims that changes to the system create new barriers discouraging companies from investing in public lands drilling. Meanwhile, environmental groups filed a lawsuit to stop the lease sales entirely. But even if the lawsuit is successful (which is far from a given) it will take years to resolve.

At the heart of a tangle of lawsuits for and against drilling on public lands is the question of presidential authority. The court order in February of 2022 related to the climate cost estimate metric that is used in lease reviews. The previous president cut the number to a negligible amount. On his first day in office, Biden restored it. Fifteen months later, in a ruling that has been described as “legally incoherent” and “deeply flawed,” a judge claimed the president does not have the authority to make such a change.

Petition Against Drilling

Biden’s actions so far indicate an intent to keep his campaign promise. But communicating with elected officials serves more purposes than simple scolding. Letters and petitions let elected officials know when there is public support for a course of action. Widespread, vocal support for the end of drilling on public lands will encourage the administration to continue pursuing all available methods to keep its campaign promises.

Studying these faults can help geoscientists not only better understand the process of plate tectonics, which helped form the planet’s continents and mountains, but also better model their earthquake hazards. The problem is that most studies on these types of faults are (quite literally) shallow, looking only at the upper layer of the Earth’s crust where the faults form.

New research led by Brown University seismologists digs deeper into the Earth, analyzing how the part of the fault that’s near the surface connects to the base of the tectonic plate in the mantle. The scientists found that changes in how thick the plate is and how strong it is deep into the Earth play a key role in the location of Alaska’s Denali Fault, one of the world’s major strike-slip faults.

The findings begin to fill major gaps in understanding about how geological faults behave and appear as they deepen, and they could eventually help lead future researchers to develop better earthquake models on strike-slip faults, regions with frequent and major earthquakes.

“That means when geoscientists model earthquake cycles, they’ll have new information on the strength of the deeper rocks that would be useful for understanding the dynamics of these faults, how stress will build up on them, and how they might rupture in the future,” said Karen M. Fischer, a study author and geophysics professor at Brown.

The study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, was led by Brown alumna Isabella Gama, who completed the work last year while she was a Ph.D. student in the University’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences. The paper focuses primarily on the Denali Fault, a 1,200-mile-long fault that arcs across most of Alaska and some of Western Canada. In 2002, it was the site of a magnitude 7.9 earthquake that sloshed lakes as far away as Seattle, Texas and New Orleans.

The researchers used new data from a cutting-edge network of seismic stations to create a new 3D model of seismic wave velocities throughout Alaska. With this innovative tool, the researchers discovered changes in the thickness and internal strength of the tectonic plate that Alaska sits on. The model shows how these changes in plate strength, that extend as deeply as about 80 kilometers, feed back into the mechanics of where the Denali fault line is produced.

Geoscientists have known that the Earth’s crust that is south of the Denali Fault is thicker, while north of the fault, the crust is thinner. What’s been less clear is data on changes in the deeper, mantle portion of the plate.

In the new study, the researchers documented for what is believed to be the first time that the Denali Fault forms because of an increase in strength on the northern side of the fault that goes all the way through the upper plate.

They found that when they looked at the base of the plate or lithosphere, the lithosphere is stronger and thicker on the northern side of the fault vs. being much thinner and weaker on the southern side. The deeper part of the plate to the north can act almost as a backstop, they describe in the paper. They conclude that the fault at the surface formed and stayed at the edge of this thicker, stronger lithosphere.

“There has been this controversy that faults in the shallower brittle crust wouldn’t connect to structures in the deepest part of the plate, but here we show that they do,” Gama said. “And this could mean a variety of things. For example, it means that we could expect earthquakes occurring deeper than previously thought for strike-slip faults such as the Denali fault, and that plate motions could occur on clear boundaries that extend from shallow faults all the way to the base of the plate.”

The scientists’ avenue of research opened up when IRIS, a research consortium funded by the National Science Foundation and dedicated to exploring the Earth’s interior, deployed the EarthScope Transportable Array in Alaska from 2014 to 2021. The advanced technology — a large collection of seismographs installed temporarily at sites across the U.S. — gave researchers like Gama and Fischer the capability to measure properties of the deeper crust and mantle that hadn’t been possible before.

The researchers next plan to look closer at other strike-slip fault lines around the world to see if they can find similar variations in the structure of tectonic plates the deeper they go. Other well-known strike-slip fault lines include the San Andreas Fault in California and the Anatolian Fault in Turkey, both of which have caused major earthquakes in the past. The San Andreas Fault, for instance, caused the earthquake of 1906 in San Francisco that killed thousands.

“We hope that projects such as the EarthScope Transportable Array will continue to receive support so that we can obtain higher-resolution images of the Earth’s interior from anywhere on the planet,” Gama said. “We hope to gain a better understanding of plate tectonics by using these images and will begin by investigating how other strike-slip faults appear and behave, looking for parallels with Alaska. This information could then be fed back into improving models for how earthquakes occur.”

This research was supported by the NSF EarthScope Program.

Climate change has undisputable global effects on ecosystems and ecological community compositions, but why certain communities are better able to resist the effects of climate change than others remains unclear. In a recent scientific study covering nearly all North American bird species, researchers studied community composition changes and community diversity over half a century. Consistently, bird communities with higher species richness and a larger variety of functional properties changed less radically in their community composition following climate change.

“For example, if a community contained birds of prey, insectivores, and seed-eaters rather than birds from just one feeding guild, it was better safeguarded against the negative impacts of climate change,” highlights PhD Emma-Liina Marjakangas, the leading researcher of the study from University of Helsinki.

Community-level diversity works as a buffer against negative climate change impacts, especially during winter, i.e the season that has shown strongest climatic warming across the Northern Hemisphere. On the other hand, biodiversity played a smaller role during the breeding season. Indeed, earlier studies have shown that bird communities change faster during winter than summer, which explains this pattern.

“Habitat and available food determine a species’ flexibility for changing its breeding and wintering areas. For example, grassland species have shifted their distributions northwards slower than forest passerines, such as the American robin, or habitat generalists, such as the mourning dove,” explains Senior curator Aleksi Lehikoinen from the University of Helsinki.

Functionally diverse bird communities help maintain ecosystems via plant seed dispersal, pest insect control and even pollination of flowering plants. Climate change reshuffles the composition of these important bird communities and therefore threatens their ability to provide ecosystem services.

“Our results strengthen the understanding that biodiversity safeguards ecosystem functioning and that the biodiversity and climate crises need to be mitigated simultaneously to avoid multiplicative effects,” Marjakangas emphasizes.

The study is based on a community science database from 1966-2016 covering all of North America, and it was published in the international journal Scientific Reports.

In the study, researchers surveyed 644 elementary school children about how motivated they were to act in ways that would help the environment — such as by using a reusable water bottle at home or refusing to use plastic straws in restaurants — before and after participating in an environmental education program.

The program, developed by the Duke University Marine Lab, focuses on trash in oceans and other waterways, and includes lessons on how long different types of trash persist in waterways, a trash clean-up, and hands-on investigations of challenges related to marine debris. After the program, students scored higher on average on the survey gauging their motivation to act for the environment. Bilingual or multilingual students saw bigger gains on average compared to students who spoke English primarily at home — a finding researchers say is promising, and needs to be investigated further.

“What we saw was that in aggregate, the programs seemed to encourage environmentally friendly actions among everybody, but when we dug down, most of the program’s effect was explained by the response from linguistically diverse children,” said study co-author Kathryn Stevenson, associate professor of parks, recreation and tourism management at NC State. “This is encouraging, as linguistically diverse children are making up more and more of the U.S. population, and we want our programs to resonate with everyone. It also highlights how young people with different backgrounds can make important contributions. It also makes us wonder: Are students bringing these lessons home?”

The study is part of a research series looking at how environmental education can impact children, their families and their communities. In a previous study, researchers found parents’ climate change concern increases after their children are educated. In another study, they found that local leaders’ as well as voters’ views shifted after watching children’s presentations on an environmental issue.

“We’ve been interested in the mechanisms of inter-generational learning,” Stevenson said. “We saw this program can impact all children involved, but this suggests it might work differently for children who speak more than one language. For kids who act as translators for their family, they might be even more practiced at translating on many levels — linguistically or culturally — and we want to know how that might impact inter-generational learning about the environment.”

“This warming trend is alarming,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “Our warming climate is already making a mark: Forest fires are intensifying; hurricanes are getting stronger; droughts are wreaking havoc and sea levels are rising. NASA is deepening our commitment to do our part in addressing climate change. Our Earth System Observatory will provide state-of-the-art data to support our climate modeling, analysis and predictions to help humanity confront our planet’s changing climate.”

The past nine years have been the warmest years since modern recordkeeping began in 1880. This means Earth in 2022 was about 2 degrees Fahrenheit (or about 1.11 degrees Celsius) warmer than the late 19th century average.

“The reason for the warming trend is that human activities continue to pump enormous amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and the long-term planetary impacts will also continue,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of GISS, NASA’s leading center for climate modeling.

Human-driven greenhouse gas emissions have rebounded following a short-lived dip in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Recently, NASA scientists, as well as international scientists, determined carbon dioxide emissions were the highest on record in 2022. NASA also identified some super-emitters of methane — another powerful greenhouse gas — using the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation instrument that launched to the International Space Station last year.

The Arctic region continues to experience the strongest warming trends — close to four times the global average — according to GISS research presented at the 2022 annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, as well as a separate study.

Communities around the world are experiencing impacts scientists see as connected to the warming atmosphere and ocean. Climate change has intensified rainfall and tropical storms, deepened the severity of droughts, and increased the impact of storm surges. Last year brought torrential monsoon rains that devastated Pakistan and a persistent megadrought in the U.S. Southwest. In September, Hurricane Ian became one of the strongest and costliest hurricanes to strike the continental U.S.

Tracking Our Changing Planet

NASA’s global temperature analysis is drawn from data collected by weather stations and Antarctic research stations, as well as instruments mounted on ships and ocean buoys. NASA scientists analyze these measurements to account for uncertainties in the data and to maintain consistent methods for calculating global average surface temperature differences for every year. These ground-based measurements of surface temperature are consistent with satellite data collected since 2002 by the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder on NASA’s Aqua satellite and with other estimates.

NASA uses the period from 1951-1980 as a baseline to understand how global temperatures change over time. That baseline includes climate patterns such as La Niña and El Niño, as well as unusually hot or cold years due to other factors, ensuring it encompasses natural variations in Earth’s temperature.

Many factors can affect the average temperature in any given year. For example, 2022 was one of the warmest on record despite a third consecutive year of La Niña conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean. NASA scientists estimate that La Niña’s cooling influence may have lowered global temperatures slightly (about 0.11 degrees Fahrenheit or 0.06 degrees Celsius) from what the average would have been under more typical ocean conditions.

A separate, independent analysis by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) concluded that the global surface temperature for 2022 was the sixth highest since 1880. NOAA scientists use much of the same raw temperature data in their analysis and have a different baseline period (1901-2000) and methodology. Although rankings for specific years can differ slightly between the records, they are in broad agreement and both reflect ongoing long-term warming.

NASA’s full dataset of global surface temperatures through 2022, as well as full details with code of how NASA scientists conducted the analysis, are publicly available from GISS.

GISS is a NASA laboratory managed by the Earth Sciences Division of the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The laboratory is affiliated with Columbia University’s Earth Institute and School of Engineering and Applied Science in New York.

For more information about NASA’s Earth science programs, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/earth