Last Friday, I went to a briefing in the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill about adaptation to climate change. I present here a transcription of my notes as a quick, unpolished rundown of what was discussed there. It may be of interest to you.

The speakers, their titles, and their topics were:

• Michael MacCracken, Chief Scientist for Climate Change Programs, the Climate Institute: Projected impacts of Climate Change on the United States


• Kristie L. Ebi, Executive Director, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group 2 Technical Support Unit - Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability: Adaptation


• Katharine L. Jacobs, Professor, University of Arizona Soil, Water and Environmental Science Department: Adaptation to water resource changes


• Susanne Moser, Director and Principal Researcher, Susanne Moser Research & Consulting: California as a case-study in adaptation planning

MacCracken was first up, and gave [what I was surely biased to percieve as] the most compelling talk. I felt this way not because he was the only dude, but because he was talking science, while everyone else was talking adaptation -- how humans should/can/might respond to climate change -- a topic I find fundamentally less interesting than the science. However, I'm teaching environmental geology again this semester, and having some clue as to policy options is a part of my job. That's why I went. Citing the IPCC and a UNEP report (reproduced above because I think its cover design is pretty clever), MacCracken informed us that the overall projections for North America is that it will get wetter in the north and drier in the south. He noted that there is less confidence in precipitation projections than there is in temperature projections. Water is going to be one of the most important aspects of climate change, MacCracken asserted. Tangentially, he also suggested that the large amount of snow we're seeing in the U.S. this winter has to do with less ice cover on the Great Lakes (encouraging evaporation and precipitaiton as snow). He showed a cool graph of corn yields over time, showing the crop's susceptibility to extreme climate events (superimposed on an overall upward trend). I found this to be interesting, and coveted the graph. [Eventually, all the speakers' PowerPoints will be available at the AMS Climate Briefing site - but they are not there yet.] He showed some good graphs showing projections of sea level rise under high, medium, and low emissions scenarios. He also cited Isabella Velicogna (2009), displaying graphs which show estimates of ice mass loss from Greenland and Antarctica. (I need to get a copy of these images: very compelling! The Way Things Break discussed them in October, when they were first published.) Finally, he brought up ecosystem changes, showing us maps of the spruce bark beetle infestation on the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska (a forest catastrophe I have seen firsthand).

Ebi spoke quietly about adaptation in general. Adaptation is in contrast to mitigation, which is what most people spend their climate time talking about: Mitigation attempts to prevent future climate change (by limiting emissions of CO2 or by capturing CO2 and sequestering it), while adaptation says, "given a certain level of climate change, what do we do in order to maximize human welfare?") She noted that the impacts we face are entirely contingent upon which adaptation strategies we adopt: a given quantum of climate change will have different effects upon identical communities which adopt different levels of adaptation. Ergo, adaptation is important, and we really need to start talking about it. She made the claim that the federal Stimulus package was a major missed opportunity, as major infrastructural investment was made without consideration as to whether long-term infrastructure should be modified or moved. For instance, before rebuilding a bridge, perhaps we should be asking ourselves if it should be taller, or before repaving a coastal road, we should perhaps consider moving it to a higher elevation where it is likely to last longer. She gave a compelling example of Barbados (I think), where coastal mapping showed that with year 2100 projections for sea-level rise plus a category-3 hurricane, the portion of Barbados' coast to be flooded will include both the power plant and the coastal road! While Barbados has been proactive in addressing these issues, Ebi says the U.S. has not. Adaptation, she argued, is nothing more than iterative risk management. She gave a list of criteria necessary for action, and you can see that the U.S. is falling short of the minimum threshold for action on many of them:

• an awareness of the problem
• an understanding of the causes
• a sense that the problem matters
• a capability to influence outcomes
• political will to deal with the problem

The third expert to speak was Kathy Jacobs. She pointed out that many of the projected impacts of climate change will be delivered, one way or another, via the water cycle. One example she gave that caught my attention was the declining amount of snowpack in the western U.S. Historically, this snowpack has been a fundamental reservoir of water during the summer months, and as it melts away, we are going to need to build artificial reservoirs to compensate. She noted that this sort of adaptation is uniquely human: ecosystems do not have the foresight or ability to build reservoirs and the like -- so if we want those ecosystems to continue to function, we will have to do their planning, too. She discussed the Colorado River, which is estimated to decline somewhere between 11% and 40% at the same time demand for its water is increasing. She said, "We may not know the magnitude or the rate of change [in Colorado River discharge], but we know the direction of change" (i.e., downward). The comment she made that impressed me the most was that the current uncertainty (in U.S. society) about whether climate change is real is blocking action. She was citing the frequently-made argument that because we don't understand everything about climate change, we shouldn't take any action. "Yet we make decisions with imperfect information all the time," she said. "Climate change shouldn't be any different. We need to get past that." She made two final points: (1) that there is no silver bullet solution to our burgeoning water resources crisis ["We will need a broad portfolio approach" including things like desalination], and (2) Many of the current water technologies are energy intensive, and these technologies will be less attractive in the future because of their carbon cost.

Susanne Moser was the last one at bat. She detailed California's response to the question of adaptation. It was an interesting case study, because under the leadership of Governor Schwarzenegger, an office was formed to examine what adaptation might mean for the Golden State. This office provides bi-annual updates to the government of California on the state of the science. They are the only state to do this, so far (though ~a dozen other states have taken less decisive measures). Unfortunately, "California is also adapting to bankruptcy," and so really this golden example of adaptation is hamstrung by economic constraints: It is really only a baby step.

I enjoyed the briefing. It was the sixth or seventh AMS-sponsored briefing I've attended on Capitol Hill, and it was informative as always. Typing up these notes reminds me how useful it was. I'd like to thank AMS for making these sessions open to the general public, and for providing lunch to all the participants.

Labels: alaska, antarctica, art, barbados, california, climate change, CO2, dc, global warming, graphics, greenland, politics, science and society, water resources

Last new year's, I stated some of my goals for the year. Here they are again; I'll bold the ones I actually accomplished, and strike through the ones that I didn't.

1. visiting the Galapagos Islands
2. visiting the high Andes (Cotopaxi, Chimborazo), Ecuador
3. finding a cool outcrop of graded beds in the Martinsburg Formation (late Ordovician turbidites in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia) that Rick Diecchio told me about last week
4. "walking on the Moho" in Gros Morne National Park, Newfoundland (late summer)
5. seeing Snowball rocks and Ediacarans on the Avalon Peninsula, Newfoundland (late summer)
6. visiting Egg Mountain paleontological site, Montana
7. joining my colleague Ken Rasmussen's field trip to the Culpeper Basin, a Triassic rift valley in northern Virginia
8. some cool trip next winter break (2009-10): perhaps Patagonia? Or Antarctica?

I've also got some big teaching resolutions:

1. Running a successful and robust Structural Geology course for George Mason University (spring semester).
2. Running a successful and innovation Environmental Geology course for NOVA (spring semester).
3. Running a successful and safe Regional Field Geology of the Northern Rocky Mountains course for NOVA (summer semester).
4. Preparing and running a successful and groundbreaking Honors Historical Geology course linked with English Literature 242 at NOVA, where the English professor and I will bridge the two subjects with readings of Lyell, Darwin, "A Pair of Blue Eyes," and others (fall semester). (didn't get sufficient enrollment for this one; bummer!)

On other topics:

1. Finish my M.S.S.E. degree (July)
2. Buy a house
3. Put together a series of geology 'vodcasts' on local geology (though I've gathered a lot of footage that will eventually go into this series)
4. Write a few freelance articles [link]
5. Publish one cartoon per month in EARTH
6. Prepping (cutting and polishing) a backlog of rock samples from all over the place (I'll have to share the story soon of how our "Campus Safety Officer" emasculated my rock saw out of a fear of accidents and ensuing litigation: it's an absolute abomination...)
7. Successfully moving the geology department into our new building

So what's up for the coming year, 2010?

1. More structure at GMU! Bigger, better, tweaked towards greater learning.
2. Hire and train a new member of the NOVA geology team to take on some of the tasks that my colleagues and I can't currently keep up with.
3. Actually get up to Newfoundland this year. I've got a family reunion up there in early August, so hopefully that will be the catalyst. (My mom's side of the family are Newfies.)
4. Run my Rockies course (with co-instructor Pete Berquist) again.
5. Update my website's numerous mentions of "greywacke" (English spelling) to "graywacke" (American spelling).
6. Get my geoblogging under control. I'm clearly devoting too much time to this for too little recompense. Maybe an alternate would be: find a grant or some such to fund the time I spend writing this blog.
7. Continue my cartooning for EARTH. Also occasional freelance writing pieces.
8. Scan my Cartoon Guide to Geology and post it for download/printing on Lulu.
9. Take meaningful action as a "citizen scientist" to combat climate change misinformation, creationism and Intelligent Design mumbo-jumbo, and other forms of pseudoscience pertinent to my expertise as a geologist.
10. Get those geology vodcasts going.
11. Go to Antarctica. (fingers crossed)
12. Work less. Relax more. Be creative. Enjoy life.

Labels: antarctica, canada, climate change, evolution, montana, newfoundland, pseudoscience, structure, teaching

Wow. Very cool. Literally.

Hat tip to Al Rasheed. Thanks Al!

Labels: antarctica, australia, ice

Can you guess which of these Google Maps is (a) Greenland, (b) Australia, (c) Antarctica, and (d) Utah?

Labels: antarctica, australia, contest, greenland, ice, salt, snow, utah

I'm on the mailing list for ANDRILL, an organization that I got interested in because they pair educators up with Antarctic researchers for scientific expeditions. They forwarded this video to me yesterday from the recent Polar-palooza campaign. It's a bunch of high school kids singing/rapping about climate change. Some of the turns of phrase are pretty clever, and the overall production values are high. I dig it, and figured you might want to check it out too:

Labels: antarctica, climate change, global warming, music

Labels: antarctica, astronomy, australia, basalt, gsw, hadean, igneous, isotopes, meteors, minerals

I went down to downtown DC's local 'art film' theater this week to catch a showing of Werner Herzog's new movie, Encounters at the End of the World (IMDB, Netflix, trailer).

The movie is a documentary about Herzog's visit to Antarctica in the austral summer of 2006. It is not a scientific movie, but many of the people Herzog talks to are scientists. His thesis is that these people have got to be pretty wacky to go all the way to Antartica and hang out there. This thesis has plenty of supporting evidence, no doubt about it. But the movie is at its strongest when it just shows incredible imagery, set to an odd soundtrack that Herzog has chosen (lots of choirs, but also some Tuvan throat-singing, it sounds like).

There are some hilarious moments in the movie, and some contemplative ones, and some uncomfortable ones. If you've never seen a Herzog movie, maybe you should go familiarize yourself with his style by watching Grizzly Man or Little Dieter Needs To Fly. I'm of the opinion that Herzog is a talented director in the sense of having a vision, and pursuing his filiming to enact that vision. But his technical choices sometimes leave the impression that he's sloppy: lots of too-quick camera pans (which results in lack of optical focus), or too-long unedited sequences that would be more coherent with some selective editing. Regardless of these snipes, I always enjoy watching his movies because he chooses interesting subject matter. Encounters reminded me of his 1971 film Fata Morgana, which was about the Sahara (again, lots of long shots of beautiful austere landscapes, set to an incongruous soundtrack-- in this case Leonard Cohen and a Mayan creation myth), with the exception that he seems to have relaxed in his old age, and lightened up a bit. In Encounters, it's not all doom and gloom; He's equally comfortable speaking about how a penguin's insanity will lead to its "certain death" in the Antarctic interior and (in an exasperated tone) how McMurdo Station includes "such abominations" as a yoga studio.

Thanks to Dean K. for recommending the movie to me.
Have you seen it? What did you think? Chime in below in the comments section.

Labels: antarctica, movies

It appears that researchers have located a volcano under a thick mantle of Antarctic ice. They found the volcano's approximate position by mapping a layer of ash and glass shards within the glacial ice. The volcano erupted in or around 325 B.C., say Hugh Corr and David Vaughan, based on their study. (Both men work for the British Antarctic Survey.)

They initially detected the layer of volcanic debris through airborne radar-reflectance measurements. (At first they thought the reflective layer was the bedrock at the bottom of the ice, since it provided such a strong reflection.) Then they looked at the thickness of snow overlying this layer and correlated the ash deposit with eruption-linked acid-rich snow strata in ice cores that were taken in adjacent areas. The image here shows the radar-wave reflectance profile.

(According to my rough calculations, the vertical exaggeration of the cross-section is about 6x. )

This has been billed as the first time we've seen clear evidence of a volcano pushing its way up through the ice sheet in Antarctica, though similar eruptions have been observed in historical times in Iceland (like Grimsvotn in 2004). However, just this past weekend I watched an episode of the PBS series NOVA, which showed scientists working on a big ice coring project near what they interpreted to be a sub-ice volcano. There was a big depression, and ice was flowing into the depression (downhill) from all directions. Ergo that ice had to be going somewhere. NOVA's scientists posited it was being melted, and that meltwater was greasing the skids of the bottom of multiple ice streams which were cruising out of that area of the ice sheet. (These ice streams are just faster-flowing areas of the ice sheet, like currents zooming through ocean water, sometimes 50x as fast as the "background" rate of flow.)

The show got me thinking about another study, coincidentally also published in Nature Geoscience, although this one was in the inaugural January issue. It's a study of the Kennicott Glacier, in Alaska's Wrangell-St. Elias National Park:

The study was conducted by three researchers, all associated with the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research: Timothy Bartholomaus, Robert Anderson & Suzanne Anderson. They measured a bunch of variables on the Kennicott Glacier, seeing which of them correlated with a rise in the glacier's speed. They found that an annual flood event from Hidden Creek Lake (HCL in part d of the diagram, orange line) occurred at the same time as the glacier's maximum speeds during the measured interval, the maximum discharge of the (downstream) Kennicott River, and a maximum electrical conductivity of the water in the Kennicott River (the bedrock beneath the glacier is halite-bearing). As this whopper of a graphic shows, Not only does the glacier speed up its horizontal motion during the flood (part b), but the whole thing actually rises up vertically too! (part c) Also, Donoho Falls Lake (DHL in part d of the diagram, blue line) downstream experiences a huge surge in water as the flood passes over it. Conductivity spikes during this same interval. Bartholomaus and the two Andersons propose that when the ice dam of the lake gives way and all that water surges into the glacier's channel, it overwhelms the capacity of the sub-glacial network of channels & raises the pore pressure of water within the ice. This extra pressure "inflates" the space between glacial ice & underlying bedrock, and the whole thing slides like an air hockey puck. At least, as long as the super-high pressure lasts. Once the flood ebbs, pore pressure in the glacier drops back down to levels that are easily counteracted by friction. The glacier slows once more to a "normal" pace.

This is very reminiscent to me of studies done on how an increase in pore pressure along a fault plane can trigger movement along that fault. When I took structural geology in college, the professor described an example from Colorado (I think) where the Army (I think) was injecting nerve gas down into the ground to get rid of it. The nasty nerve gas was dissolved in water, and the periodic injections of this solution correlated with a series of earthquakes (movement) along a previously-unknown subterranean fault. The injections increased fluid pressure in the pore space of the rock, and that "inflated" the space between the fault blocks, and the relatively minor shear acting on them was then enough to get the two to slide. I won't get into the whole Mohr Circle here, but I do recommend you check out the famous Beer Can Experiment to get an idea of how an increase in fluid pressure can cause an otherwise "stuck" fault to slide. Anyhow, I guess the base of a glacier is essentially a big fault, with one kind of rock below and another (ice) above. Same phenomenon, in other words, but different geologic context.

The Bartholomaus + 2 Andersons study also has some big global warming implications. The recent surge noted in Greenland's glaciers (e.g. Zwally, et al., 2002) may be explained by higher rates of surface melting (due to elevated Arctic air temperatures) which then produces lots of meltwater, which flows down through the glaciers to the bottom via meltwater channels which plunge through the ice. Via the mechanism explained above, the great ice sheet atop Greenland is reduced more rapidly than without the surface melting. One of these meltwater channels was featured prominently on the cover of the June 2007 issue of National Geographic.

So, with that, I think I'll end this blog post -- my thoughts went from volcanoes to ice streams & subglacial meltwater to fault slippage to global warming. I reckon that's just about enough... just about... but I also noticed something else...

A tangent about publication: The Corr & Vaughan findings will be published in the second issue of the new spinoff journal Nature Geoscience, but they were posted online over the weekend in advance of the actual print publication of that issue. An article in the New York Times alerted me to the study. I'm not surprised that Nature, like the Proceedings of the Royal Society, has taken to hatching specialty sub-journals to convey more articles each month. (An "about the journal" page appears on their website, if you're curious.) The image shown here with this post is from the Times, not the actual Nature Geoscience article.

References:
Hugh F. J. Corr & David G. Vaughan. (2008) "A recent volcanic eruption beneath the West Antarctic ice sheet." Nature Geoscience. Published online: 20 Jan. 2008. doi:10.1038/ngeo106

Timothy C. Bartholomaus, Robert S. Anderson & Suzanne P. Anderson. (2008) "Response of glacier basal motion to transient water storage." Nature Geoscience 1, 33-37. Published online: 20 December 2007 doi:10.1038/ngeo.2007.52

H. Jay Zwally, Waleed Abdalati, Tom Herring, Kristine Larson, Jack Saba, & Konrad Steffen. (2002) "Surface melt-induced acceleration of Greenland Ice-Sheet flow." Science 297, 218-222. doi: 10.1126/science.1072708

Also see:
Kenneth Chang. "Scientists find active volcano in Antarctica." The New York Times. Published online: 21 Jan. 2008.

Labels: antarctica, global warming, tv, volcano