Author: Scott K. Johnson

Here’s a conversation starter that wouldn’t have gotten you very far 10 years ago: “Let’s talk about earthquakes in Oklahoma.” But the Sooner State has experienced an amazing boom in (mostly very minor) seismic activity over the last decade as a result of industrial wastewater disposal in deep injection wells.

Wastewater in many of the wells is altering fluid pressures in the old igneous and metamorphic basement beneath the state’s sedimentary bedrock. Those pressure changes have facilitated movement on small, ancient faults that would otherwise have stayed locked together.

Oklahoma has started trying to rein this in, acting before there are more potentially damaging earthquakes like the magnitude 5.6 quake in 2011 and a magnitude 5.1 event earlier this year. The effort includes a pair of new rules, enacted in the last few months, to cut back on the amount of wastewater being injected into these disposal wells. As The New York Times reported, a new rule announced Monday basically caps injections in a portion of the state including Oklahoma City to 60 percent of the volume from 2014, when over 1 million barrels of wastewater were being handled per day in this area. Last month, a similar cap was placed on injections in the northwestern part of the state.

As the pace of warming has shot up, politicians have responded in part by casting doubt on the global temperature data. They've argued we should ignore surface datasets and pay attention to satellite measurements of the upper atmosphere, which just happen to show a little less warming in recent years. The work that goes into maintaining all of these datasets is pretty complex—enough so that we recently dedicated about 5,000 words to the subject.

One of the people we talked to for that story was Carl Mears, who helps run one of the major satellite datasets of upper air temperatures. Mears explained the calibrations and corrections that go into that dataset and frankly discussed the uncertainties surrounding it. Overall, he felt that the uncertainties of the satellites' data were greater than those for surface datasets like those run by NASA and the UK Met Office.

Building on analysis of that uncertainty, Mears and his colleague Frank Wentz have published a paper describing an update to their dataset—one that ends up increasing the warming trend significantly.

As part of his ongoing fight with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Congressman Lamar Smith (R-TX) sent a February 22 letter that demanded documents related to the agency's analysis of global temperature data. NOAA handed over 301 pages of e-mails between NOAA officials (but not scientists) pertaining to a study published last year in the journal Science. There apparently wasn’t anything juicy in those e-mails, however, because Rep. Smith is now asking for a great deal more.

A new letter (initially acquired by the Union of Concerned Scientists) complains that “[i]t seems unlikely that documents and communications would be so scarce,” and Smith directs NOAA to cast a wider net. He requests e-mails and documents not just from officials in the offices that had been targeted by the previous requests but also from “agency employees” across a broad swath of NOAA. The list includes the National Centers for Environmental Information that houses the scientists behind NOAA's global temperature dataset—a group Rep. Smith has accused of manipulating data.

NOAA had apparently searched for e-mails including “hiatus”, “global temperature”, and “climate study”, but Rep. Smith wants that list expanded dramatically. Now, he wants NOAA to hand over anything that contains “Karl” (the name of the lead NOAA scientist on the Science paper), “buoy”, “ship”, “Night Marine Air Temperature”, “temperature”, “climate”, “change”, “Paris”, “U.N.”, “United Nations”, “clean power plan”, “regulations”, “Environmental Protection Agency”, “President”, “Obama”, “White House”, and “Council on Environmental Quality”.

The earliest chapters in the history of life are in some ways the most interesting, but also the hardest to read. The pages are badly stained and tattered, and the print was terribly small to begin with. You can occasionally trip on a dinosaur femur, but any evidence that remains from the earliest animals is incredibly subtle.

Despite the challenges, we've learned that the “Cambrian explosion” was far from the start of multicellular life. The title for “most ancient animal” currently belongs to the sponge. A recently described fossil just a millimeter across appears to be a 600 million year old sponge—that’s 60 million years before the start of the Cambrian period. But we can find chemical traces going back another 50 million years that have been interpreted as a calling card for sponges. Some have challenged that interpretation, however, on the grounds that this chemical “biomarker” is not unique to sponges, and could instead have come from a type of algae.

The biomarker of interest is the remnant of a sterol (as in “cholesterol”), which is a key component in the cells of eukaryotes (as opposed to bacteria and archaea). With a small bit of the chemical structure lopped off, you get a sterane that can happily hang around in the rock record. A group of researchers led by MIT’s David Gold took a closer look at the sterol 24-isopropylcholesterol in sponges and other organisms to find out more about when the genes for it evolved—and what is most likely to have left it in 650 million year old rocks.

One of the obstacles to making the case for environmental policies is that the financial cost of an action can be easy to calculate, while the benefits can be much more difficult to fully quantify. Good deals can be made to sound like money pits when the costs are emphasized without the context of the benefits.

When it comes to action on climate change, there has been some effort to put numbers on the costs and benefits of certain courses of action. But a new study from Drew Shindell and Yunha Lee of Duke University and NASA’s Greg Faluvegi looks at the benefits of more aggressive US actions—ones that could actually put us on the path to meeting the goal of limiting climate change to less than 2ºC warming. While the 2ºC limit is the stated goal of international negotiations, it is quickly slipping out of reach. So what would happen if the US went for it?

The researchers look at a scenario in which the US cuts emissions to 40 percent below their current levels by 2030, focusing on energy and transportation. That’s a trajectory that would ultimately fulfill the US contribution to meeting a 2ºC goal, assuming it were continued. But for the purposes of this study, emissions stay steady after 2030 so that we’re purely talking about the benefits of actions in the next 14 years. This isn’t just about CO₂—all the other air pollutants that are emitted from the same smokestacks and tailpipes were analyzed as well.

Humans put considerable effort into controlling river flood water. We build dams to hold the water back, levees to keep it in the river channel, and floodways to divert it from protected areas if the first two reach their limit. The great irony of levees, though, is that the more of them you build, the more dangerous the river becomes. Whatever volume of water comes down the river has to go somewhere. Wall off part of the river’s natural floodplain, and it will have to take up extra space somewhere else.

Climate change looks to be responsible for greater flooding risk in some places, as extreme rainfall becomes more common or weather patterns shift. But greenhouse gas emissions are not the only way we bring more flood damage on ourselves. We also manipulate river systems and construct new developments in risky places.

In late December, a weather system juiced by the El Niño conditions in the Pacific dragged rain across the central US. The Meramec River, which joins the Mississippi on the south side of St Louis, saw about 20 centimeters of rain fall around it over three days. Because a storm a few days earlier had already soaked the ground, most of that rain ran along the surface into the nearest stream. The Meramec River hit record flood stages in the St Louis suburbs, and at least twelve people died in Missouri despite evacuations.

Imagine you’re a seismologist. In addition to studying data from earthquakes after the fact, you’d like to get out warnings to help save lives the moment one hits. To do that, you’re going to need enough seismometers to guarantee that you have one near the epicenter.

Seismometers cost money to install and operate properly—but everyone with a smartphone has a passable one in their pocket. Harness enough of them and you’ve got yourself a crowdsourced earthquake-detection network that could work absolutely anywhere.

Researchers have played with similar ideas in the past but have mainly had to rely on dedicated devices, along with volunteers who were willing to connect them to their computers. But in a paper published today in Science Advances, a group led by University of California-Berkeley’s Qingkai Kong describes an Android app (available now) that’s up to the task.

With no warning, a hellish rumble announces a crack in the ground, opening to a yawning chasm as the walls spread, crumble, and disappear into the abyss—fortunately, this particular seismic disaster occurs only in cartoons. (And ridiculous movies.) But tone down the special effects a bit and then try to put yourselves in the shoes of some residents of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in October 2010.

Early in the morning, folks just north of Menominee, Michigan, heard a loud noise and felt a shake. In that part of the country, a grain elevator explosion is more likely than an earthquake. But when someone went out to finish cutting up a large tree that had come down in a storm two weeks previous, they found a huge crack had opened up in the Earth. It wasn’t going to swallow anybody whole, but you could probably have lost a cell phone in there.

The “Menominee Crack” was a little longer than a football field, over half a meter wide in places, and approached 1.7m deep. It ran through a forested area that had previously been flat. The crack actually sat atop what was now a six-foot-high ridge, with trees on either side now tipping slightly away from vertical. If you look carefully, you can actually see it in satellite imagery.

Fracking, enabled by the technology to drill oil and gas wells that turn horizontal to follow specific layers of rock, has driven a boom in US natural gas production. But how much of that natural gas (which is mainly the potent greenhouse gas methane) is leaking into the atmosphere before making it to a power plant or your furnace? It's not just an idle question. When natural gas displaces the use of coal, it results in significant reductions in CO₂ and other pollutants. Leak enough, however, and that climate benefit might just disappear.

The public debate has treated this leakage issue as specific to the process of fracking. But “conventional” natural gas wells—vertical wells drilled through porous rocks that give up natural gas without the need for new fractures—have always leaked. A study by a Carnegie Mellon University group led by Mark Omara measured leakage at both conventional and fracked wells in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The results are a little complicated.

The researchers visited 18 conventional natural gas sites and 17 fracked sites (including 88 fracked wells, which are commonly drilled down from a central pad before splaying out horizontally). Between 100 meters and a kilometer downwind, they made methane and ethane measurements. To control for the dilution of the leaked gas as it spread and swirled in the wind, they added a leak of their own. Right next to the gas wells, they set up tanks of nitrous oxide and acetylene and opened the valves to leak at a constant rate. By checking their measurements of those gases downwind, they could calculate the true natural gas leak rate.

Staff at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) received an unpleasant e-mail when they came to work Thursday morning, one that outlined some specifics of long-awaited restructuring plans. The gist of the message? You've done such a good job, we have to let you go.

CSIRO’s CEO Larry Marshall's lengthy message stated, “Our climate models are among the best in the world and our measurements honed those models to prove global climate change. That question has been answered, and the new question is what do we do about it, and how can we find solutions for the climate we will be living with?”

The Sydney Morning Herald reported that about 110 of the 135 people in CSIRO’s Oceans and Atmosphere division will be cut, and there will be a similar reduction in the Land and Water division. Smaller cuts are also planned for the Manufacturing and Data61 digital technology divisions. The remaining positions in Oceans and Atmosphere will be shifted away from climate science and toward mitigation of and adaptation to climate change.