NASA will host a media teleconference at 3 p.m. EDT Tuesday, Oct. 25, to discuss the latest findings of the agency’s Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT), including a new, unanticipated capability which will help better understand impacts of climate change.

Audio of the teleconference will be streamed live on NASA’s website.

EMIT was installed on the International Space Station in July. Its primary mission is to map the prevalence of key minerals in the planet’s deserts in order to advance understanding of airborne dust’s effects on climate. However, the imaging spectrometer, which was designed and built at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, has also demonstrated a new crucial ability that the following teleconference participants will discuss:

• Karen St. Germain, Earth Science Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington
• Robert Green, EMIT principal investigator, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Southern California
• Andrew Thorpe, research technologist, JPL
• Kirt Costello, chief scientist, NASA’s International Space Station Program

Media interested in participating should request the dial in-details at least two hours prior to the start of the call by sending their full name, media affiliation, email address, and phone number to Rexana Vizza at [email protected] on Tuesday, Oct. 25.

For more information about EMIT, visit:

https://earth.jpl.nasa.gov/emit/

News Media Contacts

Tylar Greene / Karen Fox

Headquarters, Washington

202-358-0030 / 202-358-1257

[email protected] / [email protected]

Andrew Wang / Jane J. Lee

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

626-379-6874 / 818-354-0307

[email protected] / [email protected]

“Marine protected areas are increasingly being promoted as an ocean-based climate solution. Yet such claims remain controversial due to the diffuse and poorly synthesized literature on climate benefits of marine protected areas,” write the authors. “To address this knowledge gap, we conducted a systematic literature review of 22,403 publications spanning 241 marine protected areas.”

The authors found that carbon sequestration in marine protected areas increased significantly in seagrass areas, mangroves, and in areas where sediment wasn’t trawled. “Partial or full degradation of mangroves and seagrass both resulted in similar decreases of sequestered carbon, indicating that even low levels of human impact result in important carbon emissions,” they write.

In addition to boosting carbon sequestration, preserved areas were more biodiverse, had increased species richness, and showed benefits for humans, too. Marine protected areas had greater food security, and fish stocks in waters adjacent to these protected areas swelled. The authors note that the mitigation and adaptation benefits of these protected areas were only achieved under high levels of protection, and that benefits increased the longer an area had been protected.

“Across all four pathways analyzed, only full and high levels of protection resulted in mitigation or adaptation benefits,” they write. “In contrast, low levels of protection generated no benefits. Furthermore, increases in species richness and in fishers’ income only occurred for fully protected areas, where no fishing is allowed.”

Story Source:

Materials provided by Cell Press. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

New modelling by UBC Okanagan researchers suggests an increasing amount of microplastics — fragments from tires and roadways — are ending up in lakes and streams.

The UBCO School of Engineering researchers developed a conceptual framework to examine the potential contamination originating from the regular use of vehicles on roads and highways. Their findings suggest that more than 50 tonnes of tire and road wear particles are released into waterways annually in an area like the Okanagan.

“The results are quite significant,” says Dr. Haroon Mian, a UBC Postdoctoral Research Associate and study lead author. “It’s especially alarming considering that this microscopic waste can contaminate our freshwater sources.”

Tires are critical for transportation and about 1.5 billion tires are produced annually to meet global demand — leading to almost six million tonnes of tire and road wear particles being generated around the world.

Both synthetic rubber and vulcanized natural rubber are considered forms of elastomeric polymers contributing to microplastics. It isn’t simply the rubber that causes contamination, says Dr. Mian.

“Over time, all of those materials begin to break down and can release chemical additives that affect aquatic species,” he explains.

While some of the materials end up in the atmosphere, the majority of the tire and road wear particles are spread across roadways and eventually end up in aquatic environments. The results of his study indicate that almost 15 tonnes of tire and road wear particles can be transmitted to lake surface water each year, he adds.

This is not only a global issue, but a local one, he points out. The research was done locally and he says lakes like Okanagan and Kalamalka are being unknowingly contaminated every day as thousands of people drive the highways connecting BC interior communities.

“This analysis focused on a small section of highway in the BC interior, but the findings suggest that other regions across Canada may experience the same challenges with this type of contamination,” says Mian. “A more uniform and comprehensive management and treatment strategy must be developed to limit the possible environmental ramifications.”

As part of his research, Mian also conducted a scenario-based assessment to estimate tire and road wear emissions by considering various real-time factors such as tire and roadway degradation in the environment and seasonal variations.

The report recommends implementing tire wear labels and standardization policies, adopting tire pressure monitoring systems, and applying wetlands or roadside swales as a secondary runoff treatment.

The research appeared in the latest edition of Science of the Total Environment and was supported by Kal Tire and Mitacs.

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of British Columbia Okanagan campus. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

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. Getting dinner on the table every day is hard enough without worrying about the state of the planet, but this week you can reduce your foodprint by making one vegetarian meal.

Action: Make a Vegetarian Meal

The Matter With Meat

In 2018, the journal Science published a comprehensive study of agriculture’s environmental impacts. They concluded that while meat and dairy provide one-fifth of the world’s calories and about a third of its protein, they use 83% of farmland and produce 60% of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions. By contrast, at least one study has found that a vegan diet can be healthier while generating only 20% of the greenhouse gases of a meat-heavy diet. Eliminating meat and dairy is the best way to cut carbon from your diet.

The Matter With Meatless

As anyone who has tried to lose a few pounds can attest, any dietary change is hard. Many factors, such as access, affordability, health, and culture, influence our food choices. A major dietary shift like cutting out meat and dairy may simply not be possible. Even people who are determined to make the switch to vegan are advised to do so slowly. There is a significant learning curve when figuring out how to replace meat’s protein and amino acids with plant-based food sources. A healthy vegan or vegetarian diet often includes ingredients and requires cooking techniques that are not common in the standard American diet.

Make a Vegetarian Meal

One vegetarian meal is not going to make a significant difference to your environmental impact. A family of four eats one to two pounds of meat in a single meal. But at 6.61 pounds of CO2-eq per serving of beef, every pound of meat you don’t eat trims a tiny bit off the climate impact of your overall diet. And if you add one new climate-friendly meal to your regular rotation, that reduction can add up over time.

So whether you are on a journey towards veganism, a bad vegetarian, or just trying to cut down on red meat, there are a lot of hacks for eating more plants and cutting meat consumption.

This week, start with a little research on vegetarian protein sources and then add one new vegetarian meal to your cooking repertoire. It doesn’t have to be dinner – a meatless breakfast or lunch is just as helpful. A vegan slow cooker recipe has the added benefit of saving time. Learn how to make a meal based on legumes or a dish that uses a favorite vegan ingredient like peanuts. Test out one of the plant-based meat options or try a vegan version of a favorite dish like mac & cheese.

Whatever you make, you’re helping the environment. And with any luck, you’ll find a dish that your family will happily eat again. Then you’ll be helping the environment a little bit more every time you make it.

That makes the Laramie chickensage unusual among the hundreds of species of sagebrush, most of which are primarily pollinated by the wind, according to the research published in the Nordic Journal of Botany.

Madison Crawford, a recent UW master’s degree recipient from Newcastle, led the research. She also holds a bachelor’s degree in botany from UW, where she was an undergraduate Wyoming Research Scholar in 2017-19. Co-authors of the paper are Lusha Tronstad, lead invertebrate zoologist, and Joy Handley, an assistant research scientist, both with the Wyoming Natural Diversity Database at UW.

The Laramie chickensage is found only in the foothills of the Laramie Range, Shirley Basin and Shirley Mountains of southeast Wyoming. Listed as a sensitive species by the Bureau of Land Management — which funded this study — the plant features large, showy, yellow flowerheads, unlike the vast majority of sagebrush varieties.

The scientists theorized that the showy flowerheads might attract insect pollinators, and that’s what the research showed. While the Laramie chickensage is partially wind-pollinated, some 61 percent of the viable seeds produced by the plants in the study were from insect pollination.

“Despite ideal environmental conditions for wind pollination, we think that pollen transported by insects is needed to produce the most seeds,” the researchers wrote.

The experimental study involved eight patches of Laramie chickensage in the region, where mesh bags were used to prevent insect pollination and cloth bags were used to prevent both insect and wind pollination. Seeds were counted and weighed in each area.

The scientists also trapped and identified a variety of bees at those locations, then collected pollen from the insects.

Previous research covering a broad range of plants has shown that pollination by insects and other animals is more widespread than wind pollination. When plants transition from animal to wind pollination to compensate for changing environments, the plants display both pollination mechanisms.

“We observed that (Laramie chickensage) shows more animal than wind pollination, which may suggest that this plant is in a transitional period and is adapting to a changing habitat,” the researchers wrote.

They suggest that similar research should be done to help inform management decisions for other types of rare plants.

“We demonstrated that assuming a plant is pollinated the same way as other members of the genus can be misleading, and we urge others to investigate the pollination of rare and endemic plants,” they wrote. “The widespread decline of pollinating insects makes this need even more urgent.”

Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Wyoming. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

“Tropical cyclones draw their energy from ocean surface heat. Also, warmer air can hold more water which eventually can get released in heavy rains and flooding that often occur when a hurricane makes landfall,” says Robin Middelanis from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and Potsdam University, lead author of the study. “It’s thus clear since long that hurricane damages will become bigger if we continue to heat up our Earth system.” While we might not have more hurricanes in the future, the strongest among them could get more devastating.

“Now, one of the important questions is: can we deal with that, economically? The answer is: not like this, we can’t,” says Middelanis. “Our calculations show, for the first time, that the US economy as one of the strongest on our planet, will eventually not be able to offset the losses in their supply chains on their own. Increasing hurricane damages will exceed the coping capacities of this economic super-power.”

Local production losses propagate throughout supply chain networks

The scientists looked at the 2017 hurricane Harvey that hit Texas and Louisiana and already then cost the enormous sum of 125 billion US Dollars in direct damages alone, and computed what its impacts would be like under different levels of warming. Importantly, losses from local business interruption propagate through the national and global supply chain network, leading to additional indirect economic effects. In their simulations of over 7000 regional economic sectors with more than 1.8 million supply chain connections, the scientists find that the US national economy’s supply chains cannot compensate future local production losses from hurricanes if climate change continues.

“We investigated global warming levels of up to 5°C — which unfortunately might be reached by the end of our century if climate policy fails us,” says Anders Levermann, head of complexity science at PIK and scientist at New York’s Columbia University, a co-author of the study. “We do not want to quantify temperature thresholds for the limit of adaptation of the US economy’s national supply chains, since we feel there’s too much uncertainty involved. Yet we are certain that eventually the US economy’s supply chain capacities as they are now will not be enough if global warming continues. There is a limit of how much the US economy can take, we just don’t know exactly where it is.”

“Bad for people”

Ironically, in the case of hurricane Harvey it is in particular the oil and gas industry in Texas which suffers from the impacts of hurricanes driven by global warming — while global warming is in turn driven by the emissions from burning oil and gas, plus of course coal. The fossil fuel extraction sector is big in that region of the US, and it is vulnerable to cyclone damages. The computer simulations show that production losses in the fuel sector will be amongst those which will be most strongly compensated by countries like Canada and Norway, but also Venezuela and Indonesia, at the expense of the US economy.

“When things break and production fails locally, there’s always someone in the world who is happy to make money by selling the replacement goods,” says Levermann. “So why worry? Well, reduced production means increasing prices, and even if that means it’s good for some economies, it is generally bad for the consumers — the people. Also from a global economic perspective, shifts due to disrupted supply chains can mean that less efficient producers step in. It’s a pragmatic, straightforward conclusion that we need to avoid increasing greenhouse gas emissions which amplify this kind of disruptions.”

To honor Earth Day’s 52 years of environmental action, Earth911 is presenting 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. Even if you don’t have a sweet tooth, you probably indulge in a few pieces of Halloween candy each year. But all those little candy wrappers add up to a scary waste problem. This week, you can invest in the Earth by recycling Halloween candy wrappers.

Action: Recycle Wrappers

Wrapper Waste

There’s a lot to love about Halloween, and candy lands near the top of the list for a lot of people. But Halloween candy poses a quandary for ethical consumers. You don’t want to be part of the problem of childhood obesity in America or global child slavery on cacao plantations. You can offer trick-or-treaters healthier and more sustainable snacks, or even some fun alternatives to food, but completely avoiding individually wrapped, fun-sized candies in October is pretty hard; Americans buy 300,000 tons of candy and 90 million pounds of chocolate just during Halloween week.

Recycling Dilemma

You’re going to have to deal with some candy wrappers in October. But you can’t put candy wrappers in the recycle bin. Those little plastic wrappers usually comprise multiple materials, which makes their recovery difficult and expensive. Recycling is also complicated by the fact that individual candy wrappers are a low-volume product, which adds to the technical and economic challenges of collection and recycling. Unfortunately, their small size also makes them more likely to escape the waste stream and end up in the ocean as plastic pollution. Even paper cartons like the ones containing Nerds and Milk Duds may not be recyclable either. Many of them are plastic-coated.

Holiday Opportunity

It’s not cost-effective to separate the odd KitKat wrapper throughout the year from the recycling stream, but the sheer numbers of Halloween candy wrappers make it possible to bundle them. There are two mail-in recycling programs that accept source-separated candy wrappers.

TerraCycle offers both prepaid boxes and pouches. The boxes come in three sizes (the smallest is 11″ x 11″ x 20″) with prices ranging from $86 to $218. The pouches are 7.5″ x 10.5″ and cost $43. Rubicon’s Trick or Trash boxes are the same size as a small TerraCycle box and cost $100 for individual purchase. Neither company’s option is cheap, but they do better reflect the true cost of the candy we consume. Neighbors may want to pool their resources to share a box.

Fortunately, Rubicon offers an option that doesn’t put the burden of disposal costs on individual families. They offer their boxes at no charge to schools, community organizations, and businesses that want to serve as collection points. Parent groups could organize a post-holiday wrapper collection at school, or shops that participate in neighborhood trick-or-treat programs could choose to be part of the solution for free.

Act fast to receive your box in time for Halloween, and if the system works for you, consider repeating it at Easter – the only holiday that consumes more candy than Halloween.