Delaware's new maps to show future flood risks

Molly Murray in Delawareonline: There's a new worst-case scenario for future flood riisk in Delaware – worse than the state's sea level rise maps, worse than flooding from 100-year storms plotted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. This mapping project takes that 100-year storm flood level and adds three feet to it.

So at the south end of Rehoboth Beach, the maps – not yet publicly available – show places that are high and dry on the FEMA maps in a 100-year-storm, but are inundated with water during that same storm once sea level rises three feet.

The new mapping tool is designed to help state officials plan where and how to build future roads, bridges, buildings and other structures ev
en when they aren't within a currently mapped flood zone. It can also be used as a tool during reconstruction and to avoid places where future flooding is likely.

"The new maps are not regulatory," said Susan Love, a planner with the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control. "They are for guidance." In fact, said state Environmental Chief David S. Small, there is no one within state government to enforce the use of the maps by state agencies.

Small and others stressed they were strictly advisory and had no impact on where local government and private landowners could or should build. "It doesn't mean we are taking your rights away," said state Planner Constance Holland. But, she added, "it is better building."...

The aftermath of a 1913 flood in New Jersey (near Delaware)

NASA launches groundbreaking soil moisture Mapper

A press release from NASA: The Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) observatory, a mission with broad applications for science and society, lifted off at 6:22 a.m. PST (9:22 a.m. EST) Saturday from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, on a United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, manages SMAP for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, with instrument hardware and science contributions made by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

...SMAP now begins a three-year mission that will figuratively scratch below Earth's surface to expand our understanding of a key component of the Earth system that links the water, energy and carbon cycles driving our living planet. SMAP's combined radar and radiometer instruments will peer into the top 2 inches (5 centimeters) of soil, through clouds and moderate vegetation cover, day and night, to produce the highest-resolution, most accurate soil moisture maps ever obtained from space.

The mission will help improve climate and weather forecasts and allow scientists to monitor droughts and better predict flooding caused by severe rainfall or snowmelt -- information that can save lives and property. In addition, since plant growth depends on the amount of water in the soil, SMAP data will allow nations to better forecast crop yields and assist in global famine early-warning systems.

"The launch of SMAP completes an ambitious 11-month period for NASA that has seen the launch of five new Earth-observing space missions to help us better understand our changing planet," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. "Scientists and policymakers will use SMAP data to track water movement around our planet and make more informed decisions in critical areas like agriculture and water resources."....

NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) observatory lifts off from Space Launch Complex 2 West at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base, beginning a three-year mission to map Earth's vital moisture hidden in the soils beneath our feet. Image credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls 

Amazon water comprehensively mapped from space

Science Daily via the Intitut de recherche pour le Developpement (IRD): A research team has refined a highly original method for studying ground water based on altitude measurements taken by satellite. This technique was originally only intended for the study of oceans, and has been used for only a few years to observe continental surface water bodies. After years of work to calibrate and validate the data in the Amazon basin, the researchers measured the altitude and variations in levels of more than 500 rivers, lakes, and flood zones.

Through this observation network, the densest every deployed on this scale, the researchers were able to create the first maps of Amazon groundwater. In the dry season, surface water reservoirs are at the same level as the aquifer that feeds them: altitude measurements of the surface water then made possible direct observations of the height of the groundwater. The researchers then mapped the groundwater ceiling at low water periods, which is to say at its lowest level of the year, from 2003 to 2008. The maps obtained were found to be consistent with direct measurements of water depth carried out in wells.

These first maps offer a way to monitor changes in the groundwater over these five years. Following the drought in 2005, the researchers observed the abrupt drop in its low water level in most of the zone under study. Then, this level gradually rose from the north to the south, to only return to its average value between 2007 and 2008. This result suggests an important "memory effect" in the groundwater. This could in turn have a strong impact on the climate. Because of this, if an abnormally low water level persists, this could contribute to reducing evapotranspiration, limit the moisture level in the atmosphere, and reduce rainfall in time.

The maps obtained are a source of essential and unprecedented information on the spatial and temporal structure of the Amazon groundwater and a major advance for hydrology. They help better understand the large-scale underground hydrological processes involved in the water cycle, carbon cycle, and maintenance of biodiversity in the Amazon. In fact, until now, groundwater was a major unknown in these reports....

Rio Negro in Amazonia, created by IRD/J. Pfeffer, after Hess et al. 2003

China to publish Arctic shipping route guide

Space Daily via AFP: China will soon publish a guide to navigating the Northeast Passage, a recently opened shortcut to Europe through the Arctic, state media reported Friday in a further sign of the country's polar ambitions.

The guide covers the Northern Sea Route, a shipping lane that Russian legislation defines as running from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean along the Russian Arctic coast, the China Daily newspaper said. China's guide, to be released in July, is its first to the route and follows one issued by Russia, the report said.

The book will provide "comprehensive, practical and authoritative" information for Chinese cargo ships sailing the route to Europe, Zhai Jiugang, deputy head of the Ministry of Transport's Maritime Safety Administration, told reporters on Thursday, the report said....

Hidden Greenland canyons mean more sea level rise

NASA: Scientists at NASA and the University of California, Irvine (UCI), have found that canyons under Greenland's ocean-feeding glaciers are deeper and longer than previously thought, increasing the amount of Greenland's estimated contribution to future sea level rise.

"The glaciers of Greenland are likely to retreat faster and farther inland than anticipated, and for much longer, according to this very different topography we have discovered,” said Mathieu Morlighem, a UCI associate project scientist who is lead author of the new research paper. The results were published Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Ice loss from Greenland has accelerated during the last few decades. However, older ice sheet models predicted the speedup would be temporary because the glaciers would soon melt back onto higher ground and stabilize. The models projected that Greenland's contribution to global sea level rise would therefore be limited.

Morlighem's new topography shows southern Greenland's ragged, crumbling coastline is scored by more than 100 canyons beneath glaciers that empty into the ocean. Many canyons are well below sea level as far as 60 miles (100 kilometers) inland. Higher ground, where glaciers could stabilize, is much farther from the coastline than previously thought. The finding calls into question the idea that the recent accelerated ice loss will be short lived.

..."We have been able to make a quantum leap in our knowledge of bed topography beneath ice sheets in the last decade, thanks to the advent of missions like NASA's Operation IceBridge in combination with satellite data on the speed these ice sheets are flowing," said coauthor Eric Rignot of UCI and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, California.

The same research team reported new findings on glacial melt in West Antarctica last week. "Together the papers illustrate clearly the globe’s ice sheets will contribute far more to sea level rise than current projections show,” said Rignot...

Kejser Franz Josef Fjord near Stensjö Bjerg, Greenland Nationalpark. Shot by Erik Christensen, Wikimedia Commons, under Creative Commons 3.0 license

Odds of storm waters overflowing Manhattan seawall up 20-fold

A press release from the American Geophysical Union: Maximum water levels in New York harbor during major storms have risen by nearly two and a half feet since the mid-1800s, making the chances of water overtopping the Manhattan seawall now at least 20 times greater than they were 170 years ago, according to a new study. Whereas sea-level rise, which is occurring globally, has raised water levels along New York harbor by nearly a foot and a half since the mid-19th century, the research shows that the maximum height of the city’s “once-in-10-years” storm tide has grown additionally by almost a foot in that same period.

The newly recognized storm-tide increase means that New York is at risk of more frequent and extensive flooding than was expected due to sea-level rise alone, said Stefan Talke, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Portland State University in Portland, Ore. He is lead author of the new study accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. The research also confirms that the New York harbor storm tide produced by Hurricane Sandy was the largest since at least 1821.

Tide gauge data analyzed in the study show that a major, “10-year” storm hitting New York City today causes bigger storm tides and potentially more damage than the identical storm would have in the mid-1800s. Specifically, Talke explained, there’s a 10 percent chance today that, in any given year, a storm tide in New York harbor will reach a maximum height of nearly two meters (about six and a half feet), the so-called “10-year storm.” In the mid-19th century, however, that maximum height was about 1.7 meters (about 5.6 feet), or nearly a foot lower than it is today, according to tide gauge data going back to 1844, he noted.

“What we are finding is that the 10-year storm tide of your great-, great-grandparents is not the same as the 10-year storm tide of today,” Talke said.

... The study’s findings may indicate that “storm surges’ interaction with New York harbor has gotten larger so that in addition to sea level rise, the storm surges may have been enhanced,” said Chris Zervas, a scientist at NOAA’s Center for Operational Oceanographic Products and Services in Silver Spring, Md., who was not involved in the study. “For the latter part of the 1900s, [it shows] that the possibility of overtopping the seawall has increased quite a bit in addition” to sea-level rise, he added...

The Hugh L. Carey Tunnel (formerly known as the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel) on Oct. 30, 2012, during Hurricane Sandy, shot by Metropolitan Transportation Authority of the State of New York, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license 

FAO initiative brings global land cover data under one roof for the first time

A press release from FAO: A new FAO database released today collects previously scattered and unharmonized land cover information from around the globe into one centralized database, marking a major improvement in information regarding the physical characteristics of the Earth's surface.

Up to now, one of the major challenges to getting a good global overview of land cover - e.g. how much land is covered by croplands, trees or forests, bare soils, etc. - has been the fact that different countries and organizations go about identifying, measuring and recording such data in diverse ways.

But for FAO's new Global Land Cover SHARE database (GLC-SHARE), data pulled from multiple sources and partners was quality-controlled and harmonized using internationally accepted definitions and standards, bringing a wealth of country-level information into one consolidated dataset spanning the entire planet.

Applications of the new GLC-share database include monitoring of global land cover trends, evaluating the suitability of land for various uses, assessing the impact of climate change on food production, and land-use planning. "A strong understanding of our planet's land cover is essential to promoting sustainable land resources management - including agricultural production to feed a growing population - that makes efficient use of increasingly scarce natural resources yet safeguards the environment," said John Latham, of FAO's Land and Water Division....

A farm in Azna, Iran, shot by Hamid Soufi, public domain 

New maps reveal locations of species at risk as climate changes

A press release from CSIRO: In research published today in the journal Nature, CSIRO and an international team of scientists revealed global maps showing how fast and in which direction local climates are shifting. This new study points to a simpler way of looking at climatic changes and their likely effects on biodiversity.

As climate change unfolds over the next century, plants and animals will need to adapt or shift locations to track their ideal climate. “The maps show areas where plants and animals may struggle to find a new home in a changing climate and provide crucial information for targeting conservation efforts,” CSIRO's Dr Elvira Poloczanska said.

The study analysed 50 years of sea surface and land temperature data (1960-2009) and also investigated two future scenarios for marine environments (‘business as usual’ and a 1.75°C temperature increase). The new maps show where new thermal environments are being generated and where existing environments may disappear.

“The maps show us how fast and in which direction temperatures are shifting, and where climate migrants following them may hit barriers such as coastlines. Our work shows that climate migration is far more complex than a simple shift towards t
he poles,” ecological geographer with the project Kristen Williams said.

“Across Australia, species are already experiencing warmer temperatures. In terrestrial habitats, species have started to seek relief by moving to higher elevations, or further south. However, some species of animals and plants cannot move large distances, and some not at all.”...

Speed and direction of climate shifts over the past 50 years in Australia.

Google Earth enables remote tracking of fish catches

Ola Al-Ghazawy in SciDev.net: Persian Gulf governments could use Google’s free global satellite imaging program to better monitor and control fishing in their waters, say experts. Their comments follow a study that used Google Earth to uncover huge discrepancies between reported and observed fish catches in the region.

The study, which tracked fishing from space, found that actual catches taken from Persian Gulf fisheries could be six times greater than the official numbers the Gulf states reported to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Researchers from the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada used Google Earth to count, for the first time, intertidal fishing weirs — an old technique used to catch fish by placing obstructions across tidal waters. They examined six countries on the Persian Gulf: Bahrain, Iran, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

The study, which was published last year (27 November) in ICES Journal of Marine Science, highlights the unreliability of some countries’ official reports to the FAO. It found 1,900 weirs were operational in the countries surveyed in 2005 and estimated their combined production that year at approximately 31,000 tonnes of fish — more than six times the combined total of 5,000 tonnes the six countries reported to the FAO that year.

“Underreporting fish catches can jeopardise a country’s food security and economy, not to mention impact entire marine ecosystems,” says Dalal Al-Abdulrazzak, the study’s first author...

Making use of the hazard maps in the Phlippines

An editorial in the Cantanduanes Tribune (Philippines): All 11 municipalities, as well as the provincial government, have received sets of hazard maps under a disaster risk management project funded by the Australian Aid Program through the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council (NDRRMC).

Hopefully, the maps would guide them in helping save their constituents during calamities. The 1:50,000-scale maps indicate areas of each town facing various hazards such as earthquake, storm surge, landslide due to earthquake, landslide due to heavy rains, tsunami, flooding and liquefaction during earthquakes. The municipal DRRM offices were also given “soft” or digitized copies.

Now, the maps are nice to look at, especially if they are wrapped in plastic, framed and nailed on the walls of the MDRRM offices. But they should serve the purpose of saving the population from certain danger as envisioned under the Ready Multi-Hazard Mapping and Assessment for Effective Community-based Disaster Risk Management (Ready Project).

In the recent past, the national government also distributed hazard maps of smaller scale to several municipalities, but apparently the maps gathered dust in drawers or in the walls of their offices. None, or very few, people in the villages saw or even had the chance to understand the import of the hazard maps.

Thus, as soon as 2014 comes in, each of the municipal disaster bodies should open the digital copies and begin zooming in on each barangay. By doing this, they can pinpoint specific areas of the village which would be highly susceptible to the hazards. Hazard maps for each barangay could then be made, after which the barangay DRRM council as well as residents could be gathered at the plaza where the particular hazardous areas could be explained. Knowing where a hazard could hit hardest and how to avoid the threat and where to evacuate could save hundreds of lives....

Global map provides new insights into land use

A press release from the Helmholtz Centre for Environment Research-UFZ (Germany): In order to assess the global impacts of land use on the environment and help provide appropriate countermeasures, a group of researchers under the leadership of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) has created a new world map of land use systems. Based on various indicators of land-use intensity, climate, environmental and socio-economic conditions, they identified twelve global patterns called land system archetypes. ...

Land use changes come in various forms: maize fields replace meadows and grasslands, tropical forests are cleared for pastures, steppes become cropland. The reasons are complex, the impacts are immense: animal and plant communities change, ecosystem functions disappear, carbon emissions contribute to climate change. Whatever happens regionally has global consequences. In order to better assess these impacts and help provide effective countermeasures, the researchers from UFZ created a world map that identifies twelve global land-use systems, also called archetypes. These include barren lands in the developing world, pastoral systems or extensive cropping systems. ...

What is novel about this research is the fact that the scientists analyzed significantly more data and indicators than what is common in similar studies. In contrast to traditional models of land use, over 30 factors with more than one million data points were processed. “For example, we didn’t know before which regions had an unfulfilled potential for agricultural intensification given the environmental and socio-economic conditions, or in which regions the maximum agricultural yields were already achieved”, says Tomáš Václavík, a scientist and leading author from UFZ. The information that was usually hidden behind the complexity of data is now revealed. “If we had analysed only the environmental indicators, we could not identify where viable opportunities for yield improvements exist”.

...According to the co-author and the head of the Department of Computational Landscape Ecology at UFZ Leipzig, Prof. Ralf Seppelt, this representation of land systems is useful also because we can now provide science-based policy recommendations for regions in certain land-use types on how to avoid negative consequences of land use...

Global land system archetypes: world map. The data for this classification refer to the year 2005.
Source: Tomáš Václavík/UFZ

Extent of Peruvian Amazon lost to illegal goldmines mapped for first time

Dan Collyns in the Guardian (UK): The area affected by illegal gold mining in Peru's south-eastern Amazon region increased by 400% from 1999 to 2012, according to researchers using state-of-the-art mapping technology.

Using airborne mapping and high-satellite monitoring, researchers led by the Carnegie Institution for Science also showed that the rate of forest loss in Madre de Dios has tripled since the 2008 global economic crisis, when the international price of gold began to rise to new highs.

Until this study, thousands of small, clandestine mines that have boomed since the economic crisis went unmonitored, according to the research team, which was led by Carnegie's Greg Asner and worked with Peru's environment ministry.

Crucial technological differences, such as the use of the Carnegie Landsat Analysis System-lite (CLASlite), meant the team was able to map both large and small mining operations.

"The gold miners are working in thousands of small groups, so it takes our high resolution techniques to map their activities," said Asner, who developed the Carnegie Airborne Observatory (CAO), technology that uses algorithms to detect changes to the forest in areas as small as 10 square metres (about 100 square feet), allowing scientists to find small-scale disturbances that cannot be detected by traditional satellite methods....

This CLASlite map shows the areas along the Madre De Dios river damaged by small, clandestine gold miners between 1999 and 2012. Photograph: CLASlite Team

Accurate maps of streams could aid in more sustainable development of Potomac River watershed

University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science: Where a stream ends is clear, but where it begins can be more difficult to discern. Researchers from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science have developed a new method to solve this problem, resulting in a new map of the Potomac River watershed stream network that significantly improves the information needed for assessing the impact of urbanization on aquatic ecosystems.

“For the first time, we have an accurate representation of where streams once flowed through major urban areas of Baltimore and Washington, D.C. and where streams currently flow through forests,” said the study’s lead author Dr. Andrew Elmore of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science's Appalachian Laboratory. “This information is critical for quantifying the impact of urbanization on aquatic ecosystems.”

Urbanization results with the land being covered by hard, or impervious, surfaces that prevent soil from absorbing water and pollutants. Water instead moves quickly as "runoff," picking up large amounts of sediment and pollution along the way and delivering it to streams and major bodies of water, such as the Chesapeake Bay. This leads to decreased water quality that can impact the health of vegetation, wildlife, and humans that come into contact with it.

The researchers developed a high-resolution map of streams in the Potomac River watershed and five smaller Maryland watersheds, an area that spans from the Appalachian Mountains to the Chesapeake Bay and includes the metropolitan areas of Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. The maps show streams that still flow through forests and fields, as well as predicts the location of streams that have been buried through development and agricultural use....

Hagen Creek in Maryland, US Fish & Wildlife Service

Philippines produces 3D flood hazard map

Imelda V. Abano in the Thomson Reuters Foundation: Devastating floods and heavy rains across the country have prompted the Philippine government to begin producing 3D flood hazard maps to help make better planning decisions about flood risks.

“We consider this new map as relevant especially as a tool to make local land use plans truly based on risk - not only historical risks but future risks based on rainfall scenarios. We cannot be planning long term development based on yesterday's event, but must factor in future climate risks,” said Mary Ann Lucille Sering, secretary of the country’s Climate Change Commission.

The maps, which will provide up-to-date scientific data and analysis on local-scale flooding and climate risks, are being created using 3D technology as part of the Climate Change Commission’s efforts to adapt the Philippines to the impacts of climate change.

They incorporate climate change projections for the years 2020 to 2050, and expected future changes in annual mean temperature and rainfall, as well as humidity, chances of erosion, soil texture, sea level rise and other environmental risks. The data, laid on top of existing maps, helps highlight areas that could face future flooding, Sering told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The map identifies areas most vulnerable to flooding with a gradation of colour - the darker the hue, the deeper the water. For instance, the purple colour in the map shows how high water might rise along the banks of the Cagayan De Oro River if heavy rainfall occurs...

An aerial view of flood areas in Kalibo, Philippines, is shown June 26, 2008, three days after being struck by Typhoon Fengshen. The Ronald Reagan Carrier Strike Group is providing humanitarian assistance and disaster relief to victims of the typhoon, which struck the Philippines June 23, 2008. Photo by MCCS Spike Call, US military photo

New world vulnerability map for overcoming climate change

Newswise via the Wildlife Conservation Society: Using data from the world’s ecosystems and predictions of how climate change will impact them, scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society, the University of Queensland, and Stanford University have produced a roadmap that identifies the world’s most vulnerable and least vulnerable areas in the Age of Climate Change.

The authors say the vulnerability map will help governments, environmental agencies, and donors identify areas where to best invest in protected area establishment, restoration efforts, and other conservation activities so as to have the biggest return on investment in saving ecosystems and the services they provide to wildlife and people alike.

...“We need to realize that climate change is going to impact ecosystems both directly and indirectly in a variety of ways and we can’t keep on assuming that all adaptation actions are suitable everywhere. The fact is there is only limited funds out there and we need to start to be clever in our investments in adaptation strategies around the world,,” said Dr. James Watson, Director of WCS’s Climate Change Program and lead author of the Nature study. “The analysis and map in this study is a means of bringing clarity to complicated decisions on where limited resources will do the most good.”

The researchers argue that almost all climate change assessments to date are incomplete in that they assess how future climate change is going to impact landscapes and seascapes, without considering the fact that most of these landscapes have modified by human activities in different ways, making them more or less susceptible to climate change.

...The new map, the authors say, identifies southern and southeastern Asia, western and central Europe, eastern South America, and southern Australia as some of the most vulnerable regions. The analysis differs from previous climate change exposure assessments based on only climate change exposure which shows the most vulnerable regions as central Africa, northern South America, and northern Australia....

From the Wildlife Conservation Society: The map illustrates the global distribution of the climate stability/ecoregional intactness relationship. Ecoregions with both high climate stability and vegetation intactness are dark grey. Ecoregions with high climate stability but low levels of vegetation intactness are dark orange. Ecoregions with low climate stability but high vegetation intactness are dark green. Ecoregions that have both low climate stability and low levels of vegetation intactness are pale cream.

Philippine province to use geographic information systems for forest management

Clarice Africa in FutureGov:   The German Technical Cooperation – Manila, the social development agency in the Philippines on behalf of the German Government, will be conducting capacity building workshop on the use of GIS in forest management.

GIS continues to evolve according to the needs of the users. Since it is capable of handling large amounts of data and create new information about our environment, decision makers can leverage it to arrive at well-informed decisions related to soil and water conservation, wildlife conservation and many others.

The workshop will be given to the Local Government Units located in Easter Samar which include: Guiuan, Llorente, Can-avid and the City of Borongan, which are now being considered as “Eco-towns”. Eastern Samar is one of three provinces on Samar Island, the second largest island in the Visayas, the region between Luzon Island to the north and Mindanao Island to the south....

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

African soil diversity mapped for the first time

Bernard Appiah in SciDev.net: A team of international experts has drawn up the Soil Atlas of Africa — the first such book mapping this key natural resource — to help farmers, land managers and policymakers understand the diversity and importance of soil and the need to manage it through sustainable use.

They say that despite soil's importance, most people in Africa lack knowledge about it, partly because information about it tends to be confined to academic publications read only by scientists. "There was an existing database on soil that had not been updated by soil science experts from Africa, so we asked them to provide us with new information, which we translated into a form understandable to key stakeholders," says Arwyn Jones, a member of the soil team at the Land Resource Management Unit of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, which produced the atlas.

The project began four years ago, and involved experts from the European Commission, the African Union and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. The atlas was released at the meeting of the African Union and European Union commissions in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, last month (25–26 April).

Robert Zougmoré, regional programme manager for West Africa at the CGIAR research programme on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security, says the atlas displays the diversity of African soil for both agricultural and non-agricultural purposes. "We documented all the different types of soils and mapped them so that our decision-makers at national and regional levels can use the maps to decide where to invest in terms of food production and urbanisation," he says....

Image from http://eusoils.jrc.ec.europa.eu/library/maps/africa_atlas/index.html

Data dearth impeding fight against desertification

Jan Piotrowski in SciDev.net: The lack of location-specific scientific data on the degradation of land, and the dearth of networks through which to share such data where it does exist, are hampering the fight against desertification, a conference has heard.

The absence of such data means that the global models that map land degradation and are used in policy and funding decisions misrepresent the situation in many regions, particularly in developing countries, heard the UN Convention to Combat Desertification's (UNCCD) 2nd Scientific Conference in Bonn this week (9-12 April).

Klaus Kellner, South Africa's science and technology correspondent to the UNCCD, tells SciDev.Net that the World Atlas of Desertification, as well as similar maps for climate change and biodiversity, understate the severity of the situation as a result.

For example, a model presented to the conference indicated only minimal land degradation in the Sahel — a claim contradicted by scientists from the African region who attended the event, he says. "These global maps often overlook areas that have a lack of data, which are often the poorest and most in need," he adds.

The effect of land degradation, especially in the developing world, is significant, according to a UNCCD report, presented at the conference. Africa's agricultural GDP is reduced by four to 12 per cent because of environmental damage, the vast majority of which is due to land degradation, the study estimates. In Guatemala, this figure rises to 24 per cent, it adds.

Yet despite these impacts, inaccurate mapping can lead policymakers to underestimate some areas' vulnerability to land degradation, says Kellner...

Australia's Great Sandy Desert, from NASA. This is a false-color composite image made using shortwave-infrared, infrared, and red wavelengths.

Climate change impacts absent from FEMA's redrawn NYC flood maps

Katherine Bagley in InsideClimate News: When the federal government released updated flood maps for the New York City region last week, residents were shocked to find that the number of houses and businesses in the region's flood zone had doubled since the maps were last revised, in 1986.

But it now appears that those maps might have underestimated the extent of New York's flood risk, because they don't factor in the effects of future climate change. Scientists say that by the 2080s, sea levels off the city's coast could rise by as much as five feet from melting glaciers, making storm surges more severe and causing floods much further inland than the new maps indicate.

The maps also don't incorporate data from Hurricane Sandy, which caused catastrophic flooding in the nation's financial capital. Many structures destroyed by the superstorm are not included in the newly drawn flood zones.

If future sea level rise had been taken into account, the flood zone would likely have been much larger, said Philip Orton, a physical oceanographer at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, who served as a technical reviewer on the updated maps.

"The fear is that we'll get a meter [3.3 feet] of [sea level] rise by the end of the century, potentially more," Orton said. "People are rightfully concerned. ... The New York City area isn't ready for the storm surges of today, as we learned from Sandy, let alone what is possible in the future."....

Hurricane Sandy damage in Brooklyn, shot by Jim.henderson, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license