Iceland rises as its glaciers melt from climate change

Mari N. Jensen at the University of Arizona College of Science: The Earth’s crust under Iceland is rebounding as global warming melts the island’s great ice caps, a University of Arizona-led team reports in an upcoming issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

The paper is the first to show the current fast uplift of the Icelandic crust is a result of accelerated melting of the island’s glaciers and coincides with the onset of warming that began about 30 years ago, the scientists said.

Some sites in south-central Iceland are moving upward as much as 1.4 inches per year — a speed that surprised the researchers. "Our research makes the connection between recent accelerated uplift and the accelerated melting of the Icelandic ice caps," said first author Kathleen Compton, a UA geosciences doctoral candidate.

Geologists have long known that as glaciers melt and become lighter, the Earth rebounds as the weight of the ice decreases. Whether the current rebound geologists detect is related to past deglaciation or modern ice loss has been an open question until now, said co-author Richard Bennett, a UA associate professor of geosciences. "Iceland is the first place we can say accelerated uplift means accelerated ice mass loss," Bennett said.

To figure out how fast the crust was moving upward, the team used a network of 62 global positioning satellite receivers fastened to rocks throughout Iceland. By tracking the position of the GPS receivers year after year, the scientists "watch" the rocks move and can calculate how far they have traveled — a technique called geodesy.

The new work shows that, at least for Iceland, the land’s current accelerating uplift is directly related to the thinning of glaciers and to global warming. "What we’re observing is a climatically induced change in the Earth’s surface," Bennett said....

The geyser called Strokkur erupts in Iceland, shot by Andreas Tille, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Severe drought is causing the western US to rise

Mario Aguilera at the UC San Diego News Center: The severe drought gripping the western United States in recent years is changing the landscape well beyond localized effects of water restrictions and browning lawns. Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego have now discovered that the growing, broad-scale loss of water is causing the entire western U.S. to rise up like an uncoiled spring.

Investigating ground positioning data from GPS stations throughout the west, Scripps researchers Adrian Borsa, Duncan Agnew, and Dan Cayan found that the water shortage is causing an “uplift” effect up to 15 millimeters (more than half an inch) in California’s mountains and on average four millimeters (0.15 of an inch) across the west. From the GPS data, they estimate the water deficit at nearly 240 gigatons (63 trillion gallons of water), equivalent to a four-inch layer of water spread out over the entire western U.S.

...While poring through various sets of data of ground positions from highly precise GPS stations within the National Science Foundation’s Plate Boundary Observatory and other networks, Borsa, a Scripps assistant research geophysicist, kept noticing the same pattern over the 2003-2014 period: All of the stations moved upwards in the most recent years, coinciding with the timing of the current drought.

Agnew, a Scripps Oceanography geophysics professor who specializes in studying earthquakes and their impact on shaping the earth’s crust, says the GPS data can only be explained by rapid uplift of the tectonic plate upon which the western U.S. rests (Agnew cautions that the uplift has virtually no effect on the San Andreas fault and therefore does not increase the risk of earthquakes).

For Cayan, a research meteorologist with Scripps and USGS, the results paint a new picture of the dire hydrological state of the west. “These results quantify the amount of water mass lost in the past few years,” said Cayan. “It also represents a powerful new way to track water resources over a very large landscape. We can home in on the Sierra Nevada mountains and critical California snowpack. These results demonstrate that this technique can be used to study changes in fresh water stocks in other regions around the world, if they have a network of GPS sensors.”...

Plate Boundary Observatory GPS station P466, located in the Inyo Mountains near Lone Pine, California. P466 is mounted on a deep-drilled braced (Wyatt-Agnew) monument, and its displacement data were used to determine water loading changes in the western United States. Credit: Shawn Lawrence, UNAVCO

What lies beneath – scientists discover giant trench under Antarctic Ice

Newcastle University Press Office: A massive ancient subglacial trough – deeper than the Grand Canyon -- has been discovered by a team of UK experts. The research involved scientists from Newcastle University, the University of Bristol’s Glaciology Centre, the British Antarctic Survey and the universities of Edinburgh, Exeter, and York. They charted the Ellsworth Subglacial Highlands – an ancient mountain range buried beneath several kilometres of Antarctic ice - by combining data from satellites and ice-penetrating radars towed behind skidoos and on-board small aircraft.

The researchers spent three seasons investigating and mapping the region in West Antarctica, uncovering a massive subglacial valley up to 3 kilometres deep, more than 300 kilometres long and up to 25 kilometres across. In places, the floor of this valley is more than 2000 metres below sea level. The mountain range and deep valley were carved millions of years ago by a small icefield similar to those of the present-day Antarctic Peninsula, or those of Arctic Canada and Alaska.

The team’s analysis has provided an unprecedented insight into the extent, thickness and behaviour of this ancient icefield, and the configuration and behaviour of the early West Antarctic Ice Sheet. The subglacial landscape shows where and how the West Antarctic Ice Sheet originated and grew. It also provides important clues about the size and shape of the ice sheet in West Antarctica in a warmer global climate.

The findings are published in the latest edition of the Geological Society of America Bulletin. The paper’s lead author Dr Neil Ross from Newcastle University said: “The discovery of this huge trough, and the characterisation of the surrounding mountainous landscape, was incredibly serendipitous.

The lecturer in Physical Geography added:  "We had acquired ice penetrating radar data from both ends of this huge hidden valley, but we had no information to tell us what was in between. Satellite data was used to fill the gap, because despite being covered beneath several kilometres of ice, the valley is so vast that it can be seen from space.

“To me, this just goes to demonstrate how little we still know about the surface of our own planet. The discovery and exploration of hidden, previously-unknown landscapes is still possible and incredibly exciting, even now.”...

An aerial view of the Beardmore Glacier, National Science Foundation photo

Volcano discovered smoldering under a kilometer of ice in West Antarctica

Washington University in St. Louis Newsroom: It wasn’t what they were looking for — but that only made the discovery all the more exciting. In January 2010, a team of scientists had set up two crossing lines of seismographs across Marie Byrd Land in West Antarctica....

...There were big questions to be asked and answered. The goal, said Doug Wiens, PhD, was essentially to weigh the ice sheet to help reconstruct Antarctica’s climate history. (Wiens is a professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and one of the project’s principal investigators.) But to do this accurately, the scientists had to know how the earth’s mantle would respond to an ice burden, and that depended on whether it was hot and fluid or cool and viscous. The seismic data would allow them to map the mantle’s properties.

In the meantime, automated-event-detection software was put to work to comb the data for anything unusual. When it found two bursts of seismic events between January 2010 and March 2011, Wiens’ PhD student Amanda Lough looked more closely to see what was rattling the continent’s bones.... Uncertain at first, the more Lough and her colleagues looked, the more convinced they became that a new volcano was forming a kilometer beneath the ice.

...A colleague suggested that the event waveforms looked like Deep Long Period earthquakes, or DPLs, which occur in volcanic areas, have the same frequency characteristics and are as deep. “Everything matches up,” Lough said.

...Will the new volcano erupt?  “Definitely,” Lough said. “In fact, because the radar shows a mountain beneath the ice, I think it has erupted in the past, before the rumblings we recorded.”

... On the other hand, a subglacial eruption and the accompanying heat flow will melt a lot of ice. “The volcano will create millions of gallons of water beneath the ice — many lakes full,” Wiens said.  This water will rush beneath the ice toward the sea and feed into the hydrological catchment of the MacAyeal Ice Stream, one of several major ice streams draining ice from Marie Byrd Land into the Ross Ice Shelf. By lubricating the bedrock, it will speed the flow of the overlying ice, perhaps increasing the rate of ice-mass loss in West Antarctica....

Melt water from the new volcano will drain into the MacAyeal Ice Stream, labeled above as ice stream E, its original designation. This radar image of West Antarctica (see box on the inset at bottom right for location) has been color-coded to indicate the speed at which the ice is moving. Red marks the fast-moving centers of the ice streams and black lines outline each stream’s catchment area. By greasing the skids with water, the new volcano might increase the rate of ice loss from the MacAyeal Ice Stream. From the Earth Observatory/NASA

Could Sandy happen again? Maybe, says Tufts geologist

Newswise via Tufts University: Almost a year after Hurricane Sandy, parts of New York and New Jersey are still recovering from billions of dollars in flood damage. Tufts University geologist Andrew Kemp sees the possibility of damage from storms smaller than Sandy in the future.

"Rising sea levels exacerbate flooding," says Kemp. "As sea level rises, smaller and weaker storms will cause flood damage." An assistant professor in Tufts' Department of Earth and Ocean Sciences, Kemp co-authored a study on sea-level change close to New York that was published recently in the Journal of Quaternary Science. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jqs.2653/abstract

Sandy hit New York as a team led by Kemp was researching sea-level change and flooding that had occurred in seven historically damaging hurricanes in New York since 1788. Last October, Sandy's storm surge hit the coast at high tide, but storm and tidal conditions were not the only cause of the devastation, Kemp says. Seawaters off New York's coast have risen 16 inches since 1778, the year of New York City's first major recorded storm, his research shows.

To make this determination Kemp and his team studied salt-marsh sediments from Barnegat Bay in northern New Jersey, south of the tide gauge at Battery Park in New York. Using sediment cores, long cylinders drilled into the marsh floor that offer scientists a look back through time, they were able to reconstruct sea-level changes since 1788.

Kemp cites two factors for rising seas. One is the natural sinking of land called glacio-isostatic adjustment. A second factor, and one supported by the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), points to the melting of the ice-covered terrain of Greenland and Antarctic as well as the thermal expansion of ocean waters.

Looking forward, Kemp sees the possibility of storms less powerful than Sandy inflicting serious damage. He uses a basketball analogy. "It's like playing basketball and raising the level of the court so that shorter and shorter people can dunk. It makes low lying property and infrastructure more vulnerable at a time when developers are pumping money into coastal cities and towns." ...

Flooding in Marblehead, Massachusetts, after Hurricane Sandy, shot by The Birkes, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Cryosat measures largest-ever flood beneath Antarctica

European Space Agency: ESA’s CryoSat satellite has found a vast crater in Antarctica’s icy surface. Scientists believe the crater was left behind when a lake lying under about 3 km of ice suddenly drained. Far below the thick ice sheet that covers Antarctica, there are lakes of fresh water without a direct connection to the ocean. These lakes are of great interest to scientists who are trying to understand water transport and ice dynamics beneath the frozen Antarctic surface – but this information is not easy to obtain.

One method is to drill holes through kilometres of ice to the water – a difficult endeavour in the harsh conditions of the polar regions. But instead of looking down towards the ice, a team of European scientists is looking to the sky to improve our understanding of subglacial water and its transport.

By combining new measurements acquired by CryoSat with older data from NASA’s ICESat satellite, the team has mapped the large crater left behind by a lake, and even determined the scale of the flood that formed it.

From 2007 to 2008, six cubic kilometres of water – about the same amount that is stored in Scotland’s Loch Ness – drained from the lake, making it the largest event of its kind ever recorded. That amount of water equals a tenth of the melting that occurs beneath Antarctica each year. Since the end of 2008, the lake appears to be refilling but six times slower than it drained. It could take decades to reform.

The study, published recently in Geophysical Research Letters, highlights CryoSat’s unique capacity to map changes in Antarctica’s subglacial lakes in 3D, and sheds new light on events at the base of the ice sheet....

Location of the crater in Victoria Land, East Antarctica at about 73ºS and 156ºE. The color scale shows height derived from CryoSat data. The crater is located within the white box., image copyright ESA/M. McMillan

Tracking the earth’s mantle -- and sea level rise

Rob Enslin in Syracuse University News: From Virginia to Florida, there is a prehistoric shoreline that, in some parts, rests more than 280 feet above modern sea level. The shoreline was carved by waves more than 3 million years ago—possible evidence of a once higher sea level, triggered by ice-sheet melting. But new findings by a team of researchers, including Robert Moucha, assistant professor of Earth Sciences in The College of Arts and Sciences, reveal that the shoreline has been uplifted by more than 210 feet, meaning less ice melted than expected.

Equally compelling is the fact that the shoreline is not flat, as it should be, but is distorted, reflecting the pushing motion of the Earth’s mantle. This is big news, says Moucha, for scientists who use the coastline to predict future sea-level rise. It’s also a cautionary tale for those who rely almost exclusively on cycles of glacial advance and retreat to study sea-level changes.

“Three million years ago, the average global temperature was two to three degrees Celsius higher, while the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was comparable to that of today,” says Moucha, who contributed to a paper on the subject in the May 15 issue of Science Express. “If we can estimate the height of the sea from 3 million years ago, we can then relate it to the amount of ice sheets that melted. This period also serves as a window into what we may expect in the future.”

Moucha and his colleagues—led by David Rowley, professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago—have been using computer modeling to pinpoint exactly what melted during this interglacial period, some 3 million years ago. So far, evidenced is stacked in favor of Greenland, West Antarctica and the sprawling East Antarctica ice sheet, but the new shoreline uplift implies that East Antarctica may have melted some or not at all. “It’s less than previous estimates had implied,” says Rowley, the article’s lead author.

Moucha’s findings show that the jagged shoreline may have been caused by the interplay between the Earth’s surface and its mantle—a process known as dynamic topography. Advanced modeling suggests that the shoreline, referred to as the Orangeburg Scarp, may have shifted as much as 196 feet. Modeling also accounts for other effects, such as the buildup of offshore sediments and glacial retreats.

“Dynamic topography is a very important contributor to Earth’s surface evolution,” says Rowley. “With this work, we can demonstrate that even small-scale features, long considered outside the realm of mantle influence, are reflective of mantle contributions.”...

The East Coast shoreline, also known as the Orangeburg Scarp, as it may have appeared 3 million years ago. From the Syracuse University website

Superstorm Sandy shook the US. Literally

News Center, University of Utah: When superstorm Sandy turned and took aim at New York City and Long Island last October, ocean waves hitting each other and the shore rattled the seafloor and much of the United States – shaking detected by seismometers across the country, University of Utah researchers found.

“We detected seismic waves created by the oceans waves both hitting the East Coast and smashing into each other,” with the most intense seismic activity recorded when Sandy turned toward Long Island, New York and New Jersey, says Keith Koper, director of the University of Utah Seismograph Stations.

“We were able to track the hurricane by looking at the ‘microseisms’ [relatively small seismic waves] generated by Sandy,” says Oner Sufri, a University of Utah geology and geophysics doctoral student and first author of the study with Koper. “As the storm turned west-northwest, the seismometers lit up.”

...There is no magnitude scale for the microseisms generated by Sandy, but Koper says they range from roughly 2 to 3 on a quake magnitude scale. The conversion is difficult because earthquakes pack a quick punch, while storms unleash their energy for many hours.

The shaking was caused partly by waves hitting the East Coast, but much more by waves colliding with other waves in the ocean, setting up “standing waves” that reach the seafloor and transmit energy to it, Sufri and Koper say.

While many people may not realize it, earthquakes are not the only events that generate seismic waves. So do mining and mine collapses; storm winds, waves and tornadoes; traffic, construction and other urban activities; and meteors hitting Earth....

Hurricane Sandy on October 29, 2012, via NASA

Earth’s interior affects long-term sea-level and climate change

Joshua S. Hill in PlanetSave: Climate change deniers are often want to pronounce the current trends in our climate as being part of a larger cycle of warming. Despite the overwhelming lack of evidence for such a claim, it is always important to look at climate cycles to see where and how they might play a part. New research published in the journal Eos looks at the long-term cyclical activity of the world below our planet’s surface.

Ancient rises in sea levels and global warming are partially attributable to cyclical activity below the earth’s surface, researchers from NYU and Ottawa’s Carleton University have concluded in an analysis of geological studies.

Article author’s Michael Rampino from New York University and Andreas Prokoph from Carleton University found that cyclical activity below the Earth’s surface does indeed play a part in rising sea levels and global warming.

Rampino and Prokoph’s analysis looked at long-term fluctuations in the global climate, the diversity of marine organisms, and sea level changes, in an attempt to identify a unifying cause.

Recent studies into what goes on beneath our planet’s surface have found that the upwelling of mantle plumes — the rising up of heated rocks from the mantle that eventually reach the surface — have a noticeable impact on the eruption of large igneous provinces — known as LIPs — which are basically large masses of rocks that have formed from congealed lava….

Diagram of the earth's layers by Anthonydavis74, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license

Glacial ghosts set sea-level trap for East Coast

Paul Voosen in E&E News: The United States has a debt, etched in stone, to pay back to the sea. Across the world, the oceans are rising. Because of human-caused warming, global sea level has increased at 3 millimeters a year for the past two decades. Sucking in 90 percent of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gases, the ocean is the world's thermometer, running hot. It's the largest sign, and impact, of climate change.

But as the surge sloshed into New York Harbor last week by Superstorm Sandy made clear, sea-level rise is also a deeply local phenomenon. There is no average ocean. There are only particular coastlines, shaped by geology, currents and gravity. The past matters. And in few places does it matter more than the United States.

Most of the country's eastern coastline is caught at the end of an unstoppable collapse, stemming from the loss of ice sheets many millennia ago. It's a complex process, with one succinct outcome: The ice age set a sea-level trap for the United States. From Massachusetts to the Carolinas, the Eastern Seaboard is sinking.

"[It's] going to experience significantly more sea-level rise than the global average," said Jerry Mitrovica, a geophysicist at Harvard University and expert on the continent's glacial legacy. "The U.S. East Coast could be at double the global average."...

The Greenland Ice Sheet from the air, shot by Hannes Grobe, Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license

New diagnostic tool for climate change research enables better understanding of global patterns

Phys.org: Scientists have developed a new diagnostic tool that will enable better understanding of global climate patterns. The development, by researchers from The University of Queensland, University of Canterbury (New Zealand) and Monash University, distinguishes between the causes of particles in glacial deposits – whether climactic or caused by rock avalanche – allowing for more accurate data to inform climate models.

Co-author of the study, UQ Professor James Shulmeister, says the development represents a breakthrough in the way climate change research is approached. He says that while glaciers have been used as an early indicator of the extent and rate of global warming, there was previously an assumption that they always reflected climatic change.

“But there has been some debate on how much of the mountain glacier record represents climate change and how much relates to changes in glaciers resulting from rock avalanches onto the glaciers,” he said. “Being able to determine whether a glacial advance is caused by a rock avalanche or by purely climatic factors enables us to ensure the climatic record from glacial deposits is accurate. Using this information we will be able to better understand our changing climate and inform the creation of climate models.”

The research, published in the April issue of the prestigious journal Geology, represents a major breakthrough in the fields of both landslide (rock avalanche) research and climate change from glaciers. Lead researcher Dr Natalya Reznichenko says the cause of glacial deposits is more complex than originally thought and that some deposits that were previously identified as being of climatic origin are in fact the products of readvances triggered by the deposition of rock avalanche debris on glaciers.

“We discovered that during rock avalanches, intense fragmentation of rock generates extremely fine particles – much less than a thousandth of a millimetre across - that cluster together to form agglomerates,” she said. “These agglomerates are completely absent from glacial deposits known to lack rock avalanche material.

...“Using these particles as indicators we are able to determine whether a glacial advance is driven by climatic factors or is a result of rock avalanches.” The results provide a diagnostic tool to identify glacial deposits that might be caused by rock avalanches from those clearly caused by climate....

An active rock glacier in the Zittertal Alps, shot by Jerzas, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

Insurance industry grapples with impact of climate change

Janet Whitman in CNBC writes about the pressure on insurance company profits, in a story that illustrates why the insurance business is so unforgiving. A company can write policies that look profitable year after year, only to have all those profits and more vanish in a big loss year like this one. Or, as an investment banker once told me, insurance companies are really hedge funds with an unfortunate addiction to writing insurance: As a surge in catastrophic weather events leads to billions of dollars in claims, climate change may pose the insurance industry’s biggest problem — and profit potential. An unusual onslaught of floods in Mississippi, tornadoes in the Midwest, drought and wildfires in Texas and earthquakes abroad has wiped out hope of much profit for many insurance and reinsurance companies this year.

Natural disasters, including Japan’s earthquake and tsunami, have left the industry on the hook for $60 billion in the first six months of this year alone, according to data from reinsurance giant Munich Re. That’s nearly five times the first-half average since 2001, and the oftentimes costly hurricane season is just getting underway.

Although the damage has been worse than expected, the industry has plenty of capital set aside to weather the losses — barring the occurrence of more off-the-charts disasters, which insurers and reinsurers say may or may not be linked to global warming.

“Many companies that write large catastrophe risks, primarily reinsurance companies, are getting paid money in many years when nothing happens,” says Matthew Rohrmann, an insurance industry analyst with Keefe, Bruyette & Woods. “There really haven’t been that many devastating hurricanes over the past few years, for example, and reinsurers and insurers are still getting paid premiums. They may lose a lot of money in one year, but their pricing is based on many years.”...

Turner's "Shipwreck of the Minotaur", oil on canvas, Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon

China warns of 'urgent problems' facing Three Gorges dam

Jonathan Watts in the Guardian (UK) reports on the Chinese government admitting what the dam's critics have been saying all along: The Three Gorges dam, the flagship of China's massive hydroengineering ambitions, faces "urgent problems", the government has warned. In a statement approved by prime minister Wen Jiabao, the state council said the dam had pressing geological, human and ecological problems. The report also acknowledged for the first time the negative impact the dam has had on downstream river transport and water supplies.

Since the start of construction in 1992 about 16m tonnes of concrete have been poured into the giant barrier across the Yangtze river, creating a reservoir that stretches almost the length of Britain and drives 26 giant turbines.

The world's biggest hydropower plant boasts a total generating capacity of 18,200MW and the ability to help tame the floods that threaten the Yangtze delta each summer.

But it has proved expensive and controversial due to the rehousing of 1.4 million people and the flooding of more than 1,000 towns and villages. Pollution, silt and landslides have plagued the reservoir area. Given the 254bn yuan (£24bn) cost and political prestige at stake, the government focused for many years on the dam's achievements and attempted to stifle domestic criticism of the project. But its public analysis has become increasingly sober.

A statement on the government's website read: "At the same time that the Three Gorges project provides huge comprehensive benefits, urgent problems must be resolved regarding the smooth relocation of residents, ecological protection and geological disaster prevention."...

A 2006 photo of the downstream side of the Three Gorges Dam by Christoph Filnkößl, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Monsoons change the motion of tectonic plates

Daisy Dumas in Australian Geographic: Long-term, natural climactic events can alter the motion of the earth's tectonic plates, according to new research. An international team - led by researchers from the Australian National University - found that intensifying monsoon activity has sped up the motion of the Indian plate, which crunched into the Eurasian plate to form the Himalayas 40 to 50 million years ago.

Over the past 10-15 million years, monsoons - which increase rainfall in northeast India by 4m annually and cause erosion - have sped up the anti-clockwise motion of the Indian plate by almost one centimetre per year, the researchers say. This is quite fast, considering tectonic plates move about the same rate at which fingernails grow.

"We were very excited," ANU's Dr Giampiero Iaffaldano told Australian Geographic. "This is the first time we have been able to make the link between what naturally happens to climate over millions of years and the motion of tectonic plates," he says. "While it was already known that plate tectonics can affect climate through events such as mountain uplift altering wind and rainfall patterns," Giampiero says. "Now we know that it can also operate the opposite way".

Monsoonal rain, says Giampiero, causes erosion of mountains, which reduces frictional forces along the plate boundary. This essentially allows the plates to move against each other more quickly - although he is quick to stress that it remains, nevertheless, a very slow process, taking millions of years.

Dr Jo Whittaker, a geophysicist at the University of Sydney, says the work has "implications for how scientists understand the forces driving the motion of the tectonic plates" - in particular, it is hoped the results may help to unlock the secrets of earthquake-prone regions…

Tectonic plates of the earth, from the USGS website

Philippines to produce bigger geohazard maps for flood- and landslide-prone areas

Philippine Information Agency: The densification of geohazard and climate change maps is among the major projects to be implemented this year by the Mines and Geosciences Bureau (MGB) of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR). Environment Secretary Ramon J.P. Paje said the densification project is aimed to produce geohazard maps with scale of 1:10,000 covering critical areas to show more details of the area covered by the map.

“The production of a 1:10,000-scale geohazard map is like zooming in the 1:50,000 map until we see the details of the area which cannot be represented in the 1:50,000-scale geohazard maps,” Paje said. Among the details that can be found in a 1:10,000-scale geohazard map include parameters or features in the area that may affect ground stability and the type of landslides that can possibly occur in the area.

“With the 1:10,000 map, the relocation sites can also be plotted, which we cannot be done in the 1:50,000-scale maps,” Paje said.

Priority in the densification project will be maps of provinces located in the eastern seaboard, according to him. These include the provinces of Quirino, Isabela, Nueva Vizcaya and Cagayan in Region 2; Aurora, Pampanga, Bulacan, Tarlac, Zambales and Bataan in Region 3; Quezon, Rizal, Laguna, Batangas and Cavite in Region 4A; Camarines Norte, Camarines Sur, Catanduanes, Albay, Sorsogon and Masbate in Region 5; Southern Leyte, Northern Leyte, Biliran and Samar Island in Region 8; Compostela Valley in Region 11; and Agusan del Sur, Agusan del Norte, Surigao del Sur in CARAGA region.

A field in the Aklan is flooded after Typhoon Fengshen hit the Philippine region in 2008. US Navy photo

A lost road in Malta

Annaliza Borg in the Malta Independent Online: The Ghadira road, part of which caved in last Monday, was built directly on a sand dune without much attention to the underlying geology, The Malta Independent on Sunday has learnt. It may truly be lost if climate change is not taken seriously and geological studies are not carried out.

Lack of attention to surface and subsurface geology is widespread in Malta and explains why our roads are of such poor quality, said geologist Peter Gatt, when contacted. The part of Marfa Road opposite the beach was built directly on a sand dune.

“A relatively thin layer of asphalt over unbound aggregate cannot withstand traffic load especially when the underlying sand has shifted,” Mr Gatt pointed out. The high water pressure from a leaking water pipe may have caused some liquefaction and erosion of the sand. The sand flowed away through cracks or along the perimeter of the road leaving a void under the asphalt.

Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the road surface caved in when a bus was driving over it. No one was hurt in the incident, the circumstances of which were identical to those of another unpleasant situation in May 2005, when a coachload of tourists was involved.

This week’s incident has nonetheless spurred comments about the proposed controversial road project that the government shelved at the end of October last year. The government had announced the road project months before, generating controversy mainly because many argued that the nature reserve and Foresta 2000 would be compromised if a new road was built through it.

Mellieha mayor Robert Cutajar is calling for the Malta Environment and Planning Authority to conclude its Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) documentation on the Ghadira Road as the beach was “becoming smaller by the hour”….

The Ghadira nature preserve in Malta. Just guessing, but that might be the road in question to the left of the image. Shot by Inkwina, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative CommonsAttribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Geologists show unprecedented warming in Lake Tanganyika

Brown University: Lake Tanganyika, the second oldest and the second-deepest lake in the world, could be in for some rough waters. Geologists led by Brown University have determined the east African rift lake has experienced unprecedented warming during the last century, and its surface waters are the warmest on record. That finding is important, the scientists write in the journal Nature Geoscience, because the warm surface waters likely will affect fish stocks upon which millions of people in the region depend.

The team took core samples from the lakebed that laid out a 1,500-year history of the lake’s surface temperature. The data showed the lake’s surface temperature, 26 degrees Celsius (78.8°F), last measured in 2003, is the warmest the lake has been for a millennium and a half. The team also documented that Lake Tanganyika experienced its biggest temperature change in the 20th century, which has affected its unique ecosystem that relies upon the natural conveyance of nutrients from the depths to jumpstart the food chain upon which the fish survive.

“Our data show a consistent relationship between lake surface temperature and productivity (such as fish stocks),” said Jessica Tierney, a Brown graduate student who this spring earned her Ph.D. and is the paper’s lead author. “As the lake gets warmer, we expect productivity to decline, and we expect that it will affect the [fishing] industry.”

The research grew out of two coring expeditions sponsored by the Nyanza Project in 2001 and 2004. Cores were taken by Andrew Cohen, professor of geological sciences at the University of Arizona and director of the Nyanza project, and James Russell, professor of geological sciences at Brown, who is also Tierney’s adviser….

Researchers drilled cores into Lake Tanganyika to document the lake’s surface temperature for the last 1,500 years. They found unprecedented warming in the 20th century. Brown geologist James Russell, kneeling at drill head, led this core sampling mission in 2004. Credit: Kate Whittaker, from the Brown University website

Swiss Re insurance profits dampened by disaster damage

Terra Daily via Agence France-Presse has an article about a former employer of mine: Swiss Re, one of the world's biggest reinsurers, on Thursday reported a surge in first quarter profit although its results were dampened by losses from Chile's earthquake and European storm Xynthia. Net profit rose by 21 percent to 158 million dollars (116 million euros) in the first three months of 2009 against 130 million dollars a year earlier, the company said in a statement.

"In the first quarter of 2010, we continued to deliver strong underlying performance, even though the result was impacted by high natural catastrophe losses, mainly from the earthquake in Chile and European winter storm Xynthia," said chief executive Stefan Lippe. "While natural catastrophes like these can contribute to earnings volatility, protecting our clients against such extreme events is the essence of our business model," he added.

The company's quarterly net profit had reached 403 million Swiss francs (362 million dollars, 281 million euros) in the final three months of 2009. The reinsurer provisionally estimated that it would have to foot about 200 million dollars of losses from the Deepwater Horizon oil rig blast in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20.

The total insurance industry payout could reach 1.5 billion to 3.5 billion dollars, it added in a provisional estimate of the cost of the disaster to the industry.

…Swiss Re's share of the insurance payout after storm Xynthia, which left 62 people dead when it struck the Atlantic and North Sea coasts of Europe in March, reached 100 million dollars. Those claims offset a strong revival from record losses in the financial crisis by depressing operating income in the company's property and casualty division, which dropped by 69 percent year-on-year to 259 million dollars in the first quarter….

Scientists study 'glaciovolcanoes,' mountains of fire and ice, in Iceland, British Columbia, US

Science Daily: Glaciovolcanoes, they're called, these rumbling mountains where the orange-red fire of magma meets the frozen blue of glaciers. Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull volcano, which erupted recently, is but one of these volcanoes. Others, such as Katla, Hekla and Askja in Iceland; Edziza in British Columbia, Canada; and Mount Rainier and Mount Redoubt in the U.S., are also glaciovolcanoes: volcanoes covered by ice.

"When an ice-covered volcano erupts, the interplay among molten magma, ice and meltwater can have catastrophic results," says Sonia Esperanca, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Division of Earth Sciences, which funds research on glaciovolcanoes.

In Iceland last week, scientists were well prepared for the floods, called "jökulhlaups," that can happen after a glaciovolcano blows and melts its glacial covering. The floods were followed by tons of ash ejected into the atmosphere. Most of the rest of the world, however, was unaware that an eruption from a small, northern island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean could freeze air transportation and stop global commerce in its tracks.

That, say NSF-funded scientists Ben Edwards at Dickinson College and Ian Skilling at the University of Pittsburgh, is the nature of glaciovolcanoes. Understanding volcano-ice interactions occupies much of Edwards' and Skilling's daily lives. They're working at Mt. Edziza in British Columbia, Canada, and in Iceland to find out how glaciovolcanic deposits--rock fragments strewn for miles after an ice-covered volcano erupts--are formed….

This image shows both the eruption plume and the heat signature of lava at the volcano’s summit and at nearby Fimmvörduháls, the site of a precursor eruption. The heat signature shows a rough estimate of temperature, with yellow being hottest and red coolest. The signature at Eyjafjallajökull is a concentrated circle without a river of lava, supporting the Icelandic Coast Guard’s observation that lava had not started to flow from the volcano. Image from NASA

Scientists call for research on climate link to geological hazards

David Adam in the Guardian (UK): Scientists today called for wide-ranging research into whether more volcanoes, earthquakes, landslides and tsunamis could be triggered by rising global temperatures under global warming.

Significant warming of the atmosphere in the distant past can be linked to changes in geological activity, they say. Suggestions that climate change predicted for coming decades could bring similar changes remain speculative, but the scientists say there is enough evidence to take the threat seriously. Some experts have already linked current levels of global warming to rockfalls and landslides in mountain regions.

Richard Betts, a climate modeller at the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter, said: "This is a new area of academic research with potentially interesting implications. It was previously assumed there was no link at all between climate change and these events, but it is possible to speculate that climate change might make some more likely. If we do get large amounts of climate change in the long term then we might see some impacts."

…Experts say global warming could affect geological hazards such as earthquakes because of the way it can move large amounts of mass around on the Earth's surface. Melting glaciers and rising sea levels shift the distribution of huge amounts of water, which release and increase pressures through the ground.

These pressure changes could make ruptures and seismic shifts more likely. Research from Germany suggests that the Earth's crust can sometimes be so close to failure that tiny changes in surface pressure brought on my heavy rain can trigger quakes. Tropical storms, snowfall and shifting tides have all been linked to shifts in seismic activity….

Volcanic eruption at Fimmvörðuháls in Iceland on its 6th day, shot by Olikristinn, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license