El Niño: how the weather event is affecting global heating in 2023


Damian Carrington Environment editor

THE GUARDIAN
Fri, 23 June 2023 

Photograph: Ritesh Shukla/Getty Images

The planet is being hit with a double whammy of global heating in 2023. On top of the inexorable rise in global temperature caused by greenhouse gas emissions is an emerging El Niño. This sporadic event is the biggest natural influence on year-to-year weather and adds a further spurt of warmth to an already overheating world. The result is supercharged extreme weather, hitting lives and livelihoods.

The last major El Niño from 2014 to 2016 led to each of those years successively breaking the global temperature record and 2016 remains the hottest year ever recorded. However, El Niño has now begun and may already be driving new temperature records, with record heatwaves on land from Puerto Rico to China and record heatwaves in the seas around the UK.

What is the El Niño-La Niña cycle?

Variations in wind strength and ocean temperatures in the vast Pacific Ocean lead to two distinct climate patterns, El Niño and La Niña. The switch between them happens irregularly, every three to seven years, usually with neutral years in between. El Niños tend to last about a year but the La Niña phase can be longer, and 2023 has brought the end of an unusual run of three successive La Niña years.
What drives the cycle?

Easterly winds normally push warm surface waters in the equatorial Pacific towards Australia and Indonesia and away from South America. As a result, warm water piles up in the west Pacific and cool water is drawn up from depth in the east Pacific. This is the neutral state.

But at the onset of El Niño, the easterly winds weaken and the warm water spreads back across the whole Pacific. In contrast, at the onset of La Niña, the easterly winds are even stronger than normal, leading to further cooling of the east Pacific waters.

The erratic timing of the switches between neutral, El Niño and La Niña conditions are the result of complex interactions between different climate system phenomena, from ocean current dynamics to thunderstorm cloud formation.

How does El Niño increase global temperatures?

The ocean absorbs more than 90% of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases released by fossil fuel burning and other human activities. The ocean is particularly effective at absorbing the heat during a La Niña event, when east Pacific temperatures are especially cold.

However, during an El Niño, some of this heat is released to the atmosphere because warm water is spread right across the Pacific, smothering cooler waters. El Niño can add up to 0.2C to annual global surface temperatures.

How does El Niño affect extreme weather?

The El Niño-La Niña cycle switches the position of warm ocean waters and the damp, rain-laden air above it, meaning the cycle brings increased heatwaves, droughts, wildfires and floods to different regions.

The places closest to the Pacific are most strongly affected. In Peru and Ecuador, El Niño brings heavy rains and flooding. The event’s full name – El Niño de Navidad, or the Christ Child – comes from the region and was coined because the biggest impacts occur at Christmas time.

In the Amazon, the weather gets hotter and drier during an El Niño, meaning less growth and greater risk of fires in a forest already approaching a tipping point. Heat and drought also increase in Colombia and Central America.

On the other side of the Pacific, Australia can be hit hard by the higher temperatures brought by El Niño. It raises the risk of heatwaves, drought, and bushfires in the east of the country and also increases the chances of mass coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef. The “black summer” of 2019-20 occurred during a small El Niño. Drought risk also increases in Indonesia and the last big El Niño from 2014-2016 fuelled huge forest fires, which sent a smoke plume halfway around the world.

Countries further from the equator are still significantly affected by El Niño, which shifts the position of the high-altitude jet stream wind. As a result, the southern US gets wetter weather and increased flood risks, while the northern US and Canada get warmer and drier. The situation is similar In China, wetter in the south and hotter and drier in the north.

Does El Niño affect places farther from the Pacific?

Yes – its impacts reverberate throughout the global climate system. Perhaps the biggest impact is a tendency for reduced rainfall in the Indian monsoon, which provides 70% of the country’s water and is vital for growing food in the world’s most populous nation. However, El Niño could bring increased rain to the drought-stricken Horn of Africa, where dry conditions brought by the three consecutive La Niñas exacerbated a long-term drought in parts of Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia.

El Niño also affects the risk of hurricanes and typhoons, usually suppressing those that affect the Caribbean and US, India and Bangladesh, and Japan and Korea. However, these storms are powered by ocean heat, and record-high sea temperatures in the Atlantic in 2023 have led the UK Met Office to forecast an above-average number of tropical storms in the North Atlantic.

Europe is less affected, but in winter El Niño can shift the jet stream and bring more rain to the south of the continent and drier, colder conditions in the north.

El Niño’s impact on rainfall, temperature and plant growth also has knock-on effects, such as increased infectious disease including dengue fever in south-east Asia and Brazil. One study has even linked lower food production in El Niño years to civil wars.

What is the situation now?

Weak El Niño conditions arrived in May and are expected to strengthen in the coming months, with an 84% chance of a moderate event at its peak from November to January, and a 56% chance of a strong event.

Global average temperatures in early June were nearly 1C above levels previously recorded for the same month, leading to record heatwaves from Puerto Rico to Siberia to China. Some scientists said the heating suggested 2023 could become the hottest on record, although most of El Niño’s heat will appear in 2024.
Does human-caused climate change increase the likelihood of El Niño or La Niña, or both?

Scientists are not sure. This is partly because there are not very many El Niño and La Niña events in the observational record, which goes back about 150 years. That makes it hard to be sure that trends in the data, which suggest a tendency towards more La Niña events, are not simply the result of chance.

Furthermore, climate models do not agree on the question. This is because climate models have a relatively coarse resolution of 100km and cannot represent well either the ocean dynamics of the tropical Pacific or the thunderstorm clouds that drive large-scale circulation patterns. Prof Tim Palmer, at the University of Oxford, UK, hopes that a new generation of kilometre-scale global climate models, run on the latest “exascale” supercomputers, will provide more robust answers to this vitally important question.

One thing is certain. Rising global temperatures, boosted in El Niño years and bringing worse extreme weather, will not end until carbon emissions are reduced to net zero.

Here comes El Niño


The Week Staff
Sat, June 24, 2023 

Storm moves in over coast. by wildestanimal/Getty Images.

Warming Pacific Ocean waters periodically unleash extreme weather around the globe, and climate change may make it worse. Here's everything you need to know:
What is El Niño?

It's a natural, cyclical warming of Pacific Ocean waters that makes global weather more extreme. The phenomenon was named back in the 1600s, when Peruvian fishermen noticed that waters sometimes warmed around Christmastime in the Eastern Pacific Ocean, affecting their catch and the weather. They named the phenomenon El Niño — "The Boy" — after the infant Jesus. The effects of an El Niño vary throughout the world: Some regions experience severe drought and wildfires, while others get massive downpours and flooding. The last full El Niño ended in 2016 — the hottest year on record. A new one was detected this month forming in the Pacific, and some meteorologists warn that this could be a "Super El Niño," dramatically raising global temperatures for a year or more.

Why would this one be stronger?

Global ocean temperatures already have smashed records in four of the past five years. The WMO predicts a 66% chance that this El Niño will temporarily raise global temperatures by roughly 0.7 degrees on top of previous warming of about 2 degrees, sending atmospheric temperatures zooming past the 2.7-degree Fahrenheit (1.5-degree Celsius) threshold established by the Paris climate agreement as a tipping point for more severe consequences. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is predicting that there is a 98% likelihood that at least one of the next five years, and the five-year period as a whole, will be the warmest on record. "We're in unprecedented territory," said Michelle L'Heureux, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Prediction Center.
How does an El Niño form?

In the Eastern Pacific, near the equator, trade winds usually flow from east to west, pushing warm surface water toward Australia and Asia and letting cooler water rise to the surface near the Americas. For reasons scientists don't fully understand, during an El Niño period, those winds tend to die down or reverse, allowing the warm surface water to flow eastward and preventing cold water from rising. The moisture of the warm water evaporates into the atmosphere, causing the global temperature to rise, currents to shift, and local weather systems to depart from their usual patterns. Forecasters generally wait until sea surface temperatures rise 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit for at least three months before declaring an El Niño's arrival, which usually occurs every two to seven years.
What happens then?

El Niño usually strikes first in the Southern Hemisphere from July to September (their winter). North America then experiences the impact from December through January. In the southeastern third of the U.S., that often means downpours, flooding, and landslides. But areas further north in the Americas tend to see warmer, drier conditions, which create prime conditions for wildfires such as the 400-plus blazes now burning across Canada. The 1997-98 El Niño caused an estimated 23,000 deaths. El Niño-fueled fires in Southeast Asia alone contributed to as many as 100,000 deaths in 2015 and 2016. Dartmouth researchers recently estimated that each El Niño saps an average of $3.4 trillion from the global economy, destroying crops and preventing the flow of goods and services.
What can we expect from this El Niño?

Scientists can only guess, because it arrives to a changed world. We've just seen the end of an abnormally long La Niña — a countervailing phenomenon in which strong Pacific trade winds periodically increase the upwelling of cold, deep water, producing many of the opposite effects of an El Niño. That La Niña began in 2020 and lasted for most of the past three years before ending in March — but its normal cooling effect did not materialize. Instead, ocean temperatures continued rising, and 2020, 2021 and 2022 remained hotter than any El Niño year before 2015. Though the U.S. is usually given a reprieve from strong, frequent Atlantic and Caribbean hurricanes during El Niños, that's not expected to be the case this time.
Why not?

The world's oceans have absorbed more than 90% of the warmth generated by fossil fuels. As a result, North Atlantic temperatures — which reached nearly 73 degrees this month — are now higher than at "any day in recorded history," according to UCLA climatologist Daniel Swain. The Pacific also appears to be warming in a lasting way. Warm waters make for frequent and powerful hurricanes and cyclones, and forecasters expect an above-average season this year. Marine heat waves also speed up the melting of ice sheets and kill off fish stocks and wildlife. The severe warming of the 2015-16 El Niño destroyed nearly a third of the coral in the Great Barrier Reef. A recent Australian study suggests El Niño/La Niña temperature shocks have grown 10% more extreme since 1960. The double whammy of this El Niño on top of climate change, scientists warn, could trigger weather extremes and disasters of unprecedented scope and scale. "There's a huge amount of heat stored below the surface that's ready to erupt," said NOAA senior scientist Michael McPhaden. "The escalator is only going up."
Peru as ground zero

The cyclical pattern of current and weather changes Peruvian fisherman named El Niño actually dates back thousands of years, at least to the last Ice Age, geological research has determined. The phenomenon may have even played a role in the collapse of ancient civilizations such as the Inca. Every region in the world is affected differently by El Niños; for Peru, they usually bring a major increase in rainfall and storms. Over recent decades, the country has been severely battered during El Niño, with whole villages sliding off sodden mountainsides. In 2017, heavy rain and flooding displaced some 300,000 Peruvians. And this year's El Niño is already being blamed for downpours and a consequential outbreak of mosquito-borne dengue fever that has sickened nearly 140,000 people. "The increase in temperature is going to continue, and diseases like dengue are one of the results," said Dr. Luis Pampa of Peru's National Health Institute. "We don't have to be fortune tellers to say that, if we do not not take this problem seriously, it could get worse."

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As Arctic warms, caribou and muskoxen slow biodiversity loss
Agence France-Presse
June 23, 2023

A muskox is seen from the motorcade of US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, May 20, 2021 (SAUL LOEB)

Rapidly warming conditions in the Arctic and the loss of sea ice caused by climate change are driving a steep decline in biodiversity, including among plants, fungi and lichen.

But a new study out Thursday in Science found the presence of caribou and muskoxen help to reduce the rate of loss by roughly half, suggesting the large herbivores have an under-recognized role as ecosystem climate defenders.

Co-author Christian John of the University of California, Santa Barbara told AFP the results showed that "in some cases 'rewilding' (reintroduction of large herbivores) may be an effective approach to combating negative effects of climate change on tundra diversity."

The paper was the result of a 15-year-long experiment that began in 2002 near Kangerlussuaq, a small settlement of around 500 people in western Greenland.
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An international team of scientists used steel fencing to set up 800-square-meter plots, or about a fifth of an acre, to exclude or include herbivores and measure the impact on the surrounding environment.

They also used "passive warming chambers," which act like miniature greenhouses to raise the temperature a few degrees, to see how biodiversity might fare under conditions even warmer than today. Herbivores were given access to some warmed plots and not others.

Each day, the team hiked for miles to tally up the ungulates.

"There were a lot of demands to the job, working long hours hiking across uneven terrain, living in a tent under a sun that doesn't set, all the while with the ubiquitous whine of mosquitos in the background," said John.

"But at the end of the day, none of these challenges ever overshadowed the joy of seeing the first caribou calf of the year."

Sadly, tundra community diversity declined across the board over the course of the study, both as a direct result of warming but also changing precipitation patterns associated with melting ice, and the increasing shrub cover in the tundra squeezing out other species.

However, "tundra community diversity dropped at almost double the rate in plots where herbivores were excluded compared to plots where herbivores were able to graze," said John.

In the warmed plots, the difference was yet more dramatic. Diversity declined by about 0.85 species per decade when herbivores were excluded, whereas this decline was only about 0.33 species per decade when they were allowed to graze.

The scientists attributed this to herbivores keeping species such as shrubs, dwarf birch and gray willow in check so that other plants could better flourish.

"Efforts focused on maintenance or enhancement of large herbivore diversity may therefore under certain conditions help mitigate climate change impacts on at least one important element of ecosystem health and function: tundra diversity," wrote the team.

The melting Arctic is a crime scene
The Conversation
June 25, 2023, 

 (AFP Photo/Torsten Blackwood)

LONG READ

The Arctic’s climate is warming at least four times faster than the global average, causing irrevocable changes to this vast landscape and precarious ecosystem – from the anticipated extinction of polar bears to the appearance of killer whales in ever-greater numbers. A new study suggests the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free in summer as soon as the 2030s – around a decade earlier than previously predicted.




A new Arctic sea ice map compares the 30-year average with recent ten-year averages.

British Antarctic Survey

But to properly understand the pace and force of what’s to come, we should instead focus on organisms too small to be seen with the naked eye. These single-celled microbes are both the watchkeepers and arch-agitators of the Arctic’s demise.

Scientists like me who study them have become forensic pathologists, processing crime scenes in our Arctic field sites. We don the same white anti-contamination suits, photograph each sampling site, and bag our samples for DNA analysis. In some areas, red-coloured microbes even create an effect known as “blood snow”.

In this complex criminal investigation, however, the invisible witnesses are also responsible for the damage being done. Microbes testify to the vulnerability of their Arctic habitats to the changes that humans have caused. But they also create powerful climate feedback loops that are doing ever-more damage both to the Arctic, and the planet as a whole.

Zipping headlong into icy oblivion

My first visit to the Arctic was also nearly my last. As a PhD student in my early 20s in 2006, I had set out with colleagues to sample microbes growing on a glacier in the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard – the planet’s northernmost year-round settlement, about 760 miles from the North Pole.

Our treacherous commute took us high above the glacier, traversing an icy scree slope to approach its flank before crossing a river at the ice’s margin. It was a route we had navigated recently – yet this day I mis-stepped. Time slowed as I slid towards the stream swollen with ice melt, my axe bouncing uselessly off the glassy ice. I was zipping headlong into icy oblivion.

In that near-death calm, two things bothered me. The water would carry me deep into the glacier, so it would be decades before my remains were returned to my family. And the ear-worm of that field season meant I would die to the theme tune to Indiana Jones.

This article is part of Conversation Insights

The Insights team generates long-form journalism derived from interdisciplinary research. The team is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges.

Thankfully, the scree slowed my slide – I lived and learned, quickly, that dead scientists don’t get to write up their papers. And I’m still learning about the tiny organisms that populate every habitat there: from seawater in the Arctic Ocean to ice crystals buried deep in the Greenland ice sheet.

These micro-managers of all manner of planetary processes are acutely sensitive to the temperatures of their habitats. The slightest change above freezing can transform an Arctic landscape from a frozen waste devoid of liquid water to one where microbes get busy reproducing in nutrient-rich water, transforming themselves in ways that further amplify the effects of climate warming.

The Svalbard region is now warming seven times faster than the global average. While much of the world continues its efforts to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, in the Arctic, that battle was lost long ago.


Joseph Cook’s film on the microbes that inhabit the Greenland ice sheet.

Decades ahead of us all

It’s 2011, and Nozomu Takeuchi is visiting Svalbard from Japan. It has been a difficult year back home, following the earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear incident, but Nozomu – a glacier ecologist and professor at Chiba University – is unrelenting in his quest to measure the effects of climate change.


Just hours after he stepped off a plane in the August midnight sun at Longyearbyen airport, we are marching up the nearest glacier. Above us, snow-capped mountain sides loom out of the swirling mist.

Since the 1990s, Nozomu has been collecting samples and measurements from glaciers all over the world. When we reach our goal near the snowline, he opens his rucksack to reveal a bento box full of sampling kit – stainless steel scoops, test tubes, sample bags, all arranged for efficiency. As he scurries around with practised efficiency, I think of offering help but fear I would only slow him down.


Nozomu Takeuchi measuring the biological darkening of a Svalbard glacier in 2011.
Arwyn Edwards, Author provided

In truth, Nozomu is decades ahead of us all. Years ago, he made the link between the future of life and the death of ice, and these melting Svalbard glaciers are adding yet more points to his graphs.

Just as we apply oodles of factor 50 to protect ourselves from the Sun, so the billions of microbes sandwiched between the sky and surface of the glacier protect themselves by accumulating sunscreen-like pigments. And if enough of these pigments rest in one place under the Sun, this area of “biological darkening” absorbs the heat of the Sun much more effectively than reflective white snow and ice – so it melts faster.

Nozomu scoops up some of the so-called blood snow, heavily laden with algae. Under the microscope, their cells are indeed reminiscent of red blood cells. But rather than haemoglobin, these cells are laden with carotenoids – pigments also found in vegetables that protect the algae from overheating. Other patches of the glacier are verdant green, rich in algae that are busy photosynthesising light into chemical energy in this 24-hour daylight world.


The author with a sample of ‘blood snow’, collected from a glacier surface.
Arwyn Edwards, Author provided

Further down the glacier, the professor crushes some “dirty” ice into a bag. A different kind of algae lives here that, depending on your point-of-view, is either black, brown or purple (perhaps it depends on the tint of your sunglasses). The pigment created is like the compounds that colour tea, and the algae keep it in layers like parasols above the photosynthetic factories within their cells – ensuring they have just enough sunlight to photosynthesise, but not enough to burn.

Open Google Earth and as you zoom in on the Arctic, you may spot the large dark stripe that scars the western margin of the Greenland ice sheet. This is the “dark zone”, but it’s not caused by dark dust or soot. It’s alive, laden with algae – and it has been darkening, and growing, as Greenland warms.

Between 2000 and 2014, the dark zone’s area grew by 14%. At 279,075 km² in 2012, it was already more than twice the size of England than bare ice.

Next morning, I am woken by the smell of chemicals, having slept beneath a coffee table. Nozomu is busy processing his samples: bags of melting ice pinned to a clothesline by bulldog clips. They resemble bunting around the crowded room, but this is no time for celebration. The tint of each bag adds a measurement which quantifies the link between these algae, their pigments, and the death of their icy home.
The case becomes urgent

By the summer of 2014, glaciologists all over the world have started to listen to the warnings of pioneering ecologists such as Nozomu. The glaciers are dying even as life blossoms on their darkening surfaces. The case has become urgent.

I am in a helicopter, flying with colleagues to a camp in the dark zone on the Greenland ice sheet – the largest mass of glacial ice in the northern hemisphere. Covering 1.7 million km², its ice holds the equivalent of the water required to raise global sea levels by 7.7 metres.


A highly darkened surface of the Greenland ice sheet, rich in algae and incised with rivers of meltwater.
Arwyn Edwards, Author provided

As we warm our climate, the rate of water flowing from this reservoir increases, with each degree Celsius added to global temperatures opening the drainage valve even wider. Feedback processes such as biological darkening have the potential to multiply the number of drainage valves that are open, hastening dramatically the rate at which sea levels rise.

To monitor this effect, every day Karen Cameron, the leader of our camp this summer, walks to undisturbed patches of ice carrying a £100,000 backpack which contains a spectrometer to measure the darkness of the ice, capturing how it absorbs the solar energy that causes melting. The glaciologists are desperate for ground truth, and their models need data.

Up to this point, none of their predictions of how the Greenland ice sheet would respond to our warming climate have included biological darkening. Even if the effect were modest, it could still topple the ice sheet from a predictable, straightline response to climate warming.

All the time we are in Greenland, the only lifeforms we encounter are the flies that hatch from the fresh fruit and peppers in our food rations. These and the few types of glacier algae and several hundred kinds of bacteria that are biologically darkening the ice: a living scum scarring the surface of the ice sheet.

My work focuses on how these tiny organisms adapt to their icy habitat, but the implications of their behaviour are now of global concern. A filmmaker at the camp is weaving a thread between the ice melt in Greenland and its consequences for people living in coastal communities all over the world – from villages near my home on the west coast of Wales, to huge metropolises like Manhattan, Amsterdam and Mumbai, and even entire low-lying island nations in the Pacific.

As smaller glaciers fade, and the larger ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica start to respond with full force to our warming climate, it is these communities, capitals and countries that will bear the brunt of the flooding, inundation and erosion that comes with rising sea levels.


The author (left) and Joseph Cook high on the Greenland ice sheet, meltwater dripping from their ice corer.
Sara Penrhyn Jones, Author provided

Before heading home, our helicopter takes us on a detour, high over the ice sheet. We fly over the brown-black-purple algae to brighter, higher elevations where the palette shrinks to the blue and white of water and ice, then snow and sky. Greenland makes its own weather and, in these higher elevations, we expect the ice to be frozen all year round. When we land and begin to collect snow samples and a small ice core, however, we find we are digging into slush. The ice has started to melt up here, too.

We heave up our ice corer, and meltwater dribbles out from its bottom. In periods of extreme warming, much of the surface of the ice sheet can experience melting episodes, disturbing the slumbering microbes stored within the otherwise permanently frozen surface. It’s a sobering moment for us all.

Flying back to camp, I watch the streams become rivers and lakes as we head back over the dark zone, where melt and microbes dominate the icescape. I contemplate how much water, once locked in the ice, will become free to flow into the sea and into millions of homes by the end of the century.
Popping a pingo

The frozen lands of eight nations encircle the Arctic. Their soils store vast quantities of carbon: a third of the planet’s entire quantity of soil carbon resides in this frozen ground.

The carbon is a legacy of soils formed in past climates and preserved for millennia. However, human-induced climate change is reheating this leftover carbon, providing a luxuriant food source for microbes resident within the tundra, which then emit it as greenhouse gases.

This is known as the permafrost carbon feedback loop. When even modest quantities of this vast carbon store reach the atmosphere, warming accelerates – resulting in faster thawing of the tundra and the release of yet more greenhouse gases.

Furthermore, not all greenhouse gases are equal in their impact. While carbon dioxide is relatively abundant and stable for centuries in the atmosphere, methane is less abundant and shorter-lived, but remarkably powerful as a greenhouse gas – nearly 30 times more damaging to the climate than carbon dioxide, for the same volume.


Andy Hodson sampling methane from a freshly ‘popped’ pingo.
Arwyn Edwards, Author provided

For more than three decades, Andy Hodson has worked at the frontier where microbes, carbon and the Arctic landscape meet. In 2018, we join him on a brisk spring day in Svalbard. It’s -26°C but the snowmobile commute is thankfully brief – then we work quickly against the cold.

Hodson’s plan is to “pop” one of the many pingos that populate the floor of this wide open valley. Think of pingos as the acne of the Arctic: they form as permafrost compresses unfrozen wet sediments, erupting as small hills blistering the skin of the tundra.

The story of these microbes’ lives is complicated. They only live beyond the reach of oxygen – where oxygen is more prevalent, methane-consuming microbes thrive instead, quenching the belches of methane from below. Similarly, should mineral sources of iron or sulphide be nearby, then microbes that use them outcompete the methanogens.


A popped pingo discharging supercooled water rich in methane.
Arwyn Edwards, Author provided

It all adds up to one of the greatest uncertainties for our civilisation: the extent and composition of greenhouse gases escaping from Arctic lands. Estimates of the economic impacts from this permafrost carbon feedback tally in the tens of trillions of dollars to the global economy. We know it is bad news, but exactly how bad depends on the microbes in their microscopic mosaic.

Hodson’s field work shows that, during the Arctic winter, this pingo is probably the only source of methane in the immediate area, its chimney enabling the gas to escape from the depths of the ice before methane-consuming microbes can catch it. Annually, tens of kilograms of methane and more than a ton of carbon dioxide will escape from this pingo alone - one of more than 10,000 scattered across the Arctic, in addition to its other methane-producing hotspots.

A near-perfect ecosystem

Arctic lands are a patchwork of permafrost carbon feedbacks, and our future depends on the uncertain fate of the microbes within.

While the ice melt enhances the growth of microbes in the short term, if it continues to the point of erasing habitats then the microbes will be lost with them. We recognise this danger for polar bears and walruses, but not the invisible biodiversity of the Arctic. Small does not mean insignificant though.

To appreciate this, we can head back to the dark zone on Greenland’s ice sheet and join Joseph Cook during our summer 2014 field season. He’s lying on a mat improvised from a bath towel and a binbag wrapped in duct tape, peering into a dark, pothole-like depression in the ice. It’s a cryoconite hole, and millions of them are dotted over the edges of the ice sheet. Where pingos contribute to climate warming by emitting methane, cryoconite is a good sink of greenhouse gases, but this creates its own problems.


Joseph Cook measuring the carbon cycling activities of Greenland’s cryoconite holes.
Arwyn Edwards, Author provided

The earliest estimate of its ability to store carbon dioxide from the air on the ice surface of the world’s glaciers exceeded Finland’s total carbon emissions in the same year. Every cryoconite hole is a near-perfect ecosystem – with a singular flaw. Its inhabitants must melt ice to live. But the very act of melting the ice hastens the demise of their glacier habitat.

Despite being found in some of the harshest locations on Earth, cryoconite is home for thousands of different types of bacteria (including the all-important photosynthetic cyanobacteria), fungi, and protozoa. Even tardigrades thrive in cryoconite.


Microscope image of a cryoconite granule, showing biological darkening and cyanobacteria growing through it.
Arwyn Edwards, Author provided

Cook is professionally besotted with the perfection of this near-frozen “microscopic rainforest”. Its inhabitants are shielded and nourished at just the right depth and in the right shape for a busy ecosystem to be engineered by the interaction of sunlight with cyanobacteria, dust and ice to the benefit of all its inhabitants. The cyanobacteria use sunshine to capture carbon dioxide from the air and convert it into the slimy cement that builds each granule of cryoconite

However, with vast numbers of cryoconite holes dotted across the ice surface, “swarms” of these holes help shape and darken the ice surface. This in turn influences the melting rate, as the surface is sculpted under the sun of 24-hour daylight.

Writing in the scientific journal Nature in 1883, Swedish polar explorer Adolf Erik Nordenskjöld, who discovered cryoconite, thanked the organisms within cryoconite for melting away the ancient ice that once covered Norway and Sweden:
In spite of their insignificance, [they] play a very important part in nature’s economy, from the fact that their dark colour far more readily absorbs the Sun’s heat than the bluish-white ice, and thereby they contribute to the destruction of the ice sheet, and prevent its extension. Undoubtedly we have, in no small degree, to thank these organisms for the melting away of the layer of ice which once covered the Scandinavian peninsula.

Taking DNA analysis to strange new places

We return to Greenland in winter 2018 to explore cryoconite’s singular flaw. Cook and I are joined by Melanie Hay, then a PhD student in Arctic bioinformatics.

Hay and I are taking DNA analysis to strange new places to learn more about the evolution and biology of cryoconite. Powerful advances in genomics are changing our view of the microbial world, but large DNA-sequencing instruments fare best in sophisticated labs.


Melanie Hay camping and sampling on the Greenland ice sheet.
Arwyn Edwards, Author provided

Instead, we are using a stapler-sized nanopore sequencer hooked up to the USB port of a winterised laptop. Outside the tent, it is –20°C – but the DNA sequencer must run at body temperature. The only sustainable source of warmth is body heat, so I have snuggled up with the sequencer in my sleeping bag every night and in my clothes all day.

That evening, we are caught in a storm of hurricane force. Becoming disorientated while moving between tents would be lethal, so we crawl in a human chain through the whiteout to our sleeping tents. Hay reaches her tent but Cook’s is lost, so we squeeze into my one-person tent. Somehow I sleep soundly, while Cook is exposed to the full force of the night’s terror.

In the morning, we excavate Hay, whose snow-laden tent had collapsed in the night. The sequencing is complete, but storm damage to our generator means the camp is losing power, so she must work quickly. She identifies the cyanobacteria building the cryoconite – it’s a short list dominated by one species: Phormidesmis priestleyi.

This species, found in cryoconite throughout the Arctic, seems to be the ecosystem engineer of cryoconite – a microscopic beaver building a dam of dust. But the flaw is the darkness of the near-perfect cryoconite ecosystems it creates. Like the neighbouring glacier algae we met earlier, Phormidesmis priestleyi is biologically darkening Arctic ice, and eventually hastening the demise of the thousands of different types of organism contained in cryoconite holes.

And so, this work shows us ever more clearly that the loss of the planet’s glaciers is as much a component of the global biodiversity crisis as it is a headline impact of climate change.
Last line of defence against antibiotic resistance

The loss of the Arctic’s microbial biodiversity matters in other ways too. Hay and Aliyah Debbonaire are both reformed biomedical scientists seeking cures from the Arctic in the form of new antibiotics. In the summer of 2018, we are in Svalbard looking for clues.

The world is running out of effective antibiotics, and the Arctic’s frontiers may be our last line of defence in this antibiotic resistance crisis. Countless species of microbes have evolved to live within its harsh habitats using all the tricks in the book, including making antibiotics as chemical weapons to kill off competitors. This means they may be sources of new antibiotics.


Aliyah Debbonaire (left) and Melanie Hay sampling a cryoconite hole.
Arwyn Edwards, Author provided

And this is not their only application. From cheeses to eco-friendly biological washing powders, entire shopping aisles of products have been derived from cold-adapted microbes. As climate warming threatens to disrupt entire Arctic habitats, our opportunity to use, learn from, and protect this biodiversity may be lost forever.

As our tiny plane returns to the nearest town, Longyearbyen, we fly low over the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which contains the fruits of more than 12,000 years of agriculture in the form of seeds from a million different varieties of crop. Nearby, a similar facility inside a disused coal mine stores essential computer programmes on microfilm – the ultimate backup for our data-addicted world.

Within a snowy kilometre, you can walk between the the alpha and omega of human innovation in civilisation. Both facilities have chosen the fastest-warming town on the planet as the safest place to store these treasures of humanity. Yet no such facility is dedicated to the microbial biodiversity of the Arctic, despite its critical importance to the future of the world’s biotech and medical sectors.

Instead, it falls to microbiologists such as Debbonaire, racing against time to identify, nurture and screen the microbes of the melting Arctic. Her painstaking work accumulates towers of Petri dishes, each a temporary refuge for a different Arctic microbe.

Eventually, they will be stored in ultra-freezers in laboratories scattered across the world. Such work is unglamorous to funders, so it is done piecemeal on the edges of other projects. Yet it represents our only attempt to save the microbes of the Arctic.
The battle is lost

Most of all, the Arctic matters because it is the fastest-warming part of the planet, and its microbes are responding first. What happens there carries implications for everyone. It is the harbinger of change for everywhere.

Another Arctic microbiologist could strike plangent notes regarding permafrost or sea ice, but as an ecologist of glaciers I am drawn to glacial ice.

Over the first fifth of this century, Earth’s glaciers have discharged some ten quadrillion (ten to the power 25) tablespoons of melt a year – and within each tablespoon, the tens of thousands of bacteria and viruses that were once stored within that ice.

What’s to come is sadly predictable. Even the most modest warming scenario of 1.5°C above the pre-industrial era will lead to the extinction of at least half the Earth’s 200,000 glaciers by the end of the century.

Depending on the urgency and effectiveness of our actions as a civilisation, this century could also represent the “peak melt” in our history. Yet the battle to save many of these precious icy habitats is already lost. Instead, for scientists like me, our field work is now largely a question of documenting these “crime scenes” – so at least the knowledge of life within ice can be preserved, before it melts away forever.



For you: more from our Insights series:

Prehistoric communities off the coast of Britain embraced rising seas – what this means for today’s island nations

‘Too afraid to have kids’ – how BirthStrike for Climate lost control of its political message
Climate scientists: concept of net zero is a dangerous trap

Noise in the brain enables us to make extraordinary leaps of imagination. It could transform the power of computers too

Beyond GDP: changing how we measure progress is key to tackling a world in crisis – three leading experts

Arwyn Edwards, Reader in Biology, Department of Life Sciences, Aberystwyth University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

#PROTECTANTARCTICA

Russia, China block move for new Antarctic marine reserves

Pedro SCHWARZE
Fri, 23 June 2023 

Passers-by take photos of an ice sculpture representing a krill in Santiago on June 19, 2023 as the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources met to discuss three new proposed marine protected areas 

(MARTIN BERNETTI)

Members of a multinational group on Antarctic conservation failed to agree Friday on a roadmap for the creation of three new marine protected areas -- a goal that has proven elusive for years.

"No agreement was reached. It was not possible to obtain... a road map" for protected areas in the seas around Antarctica, Cesar Cardenas, a member of the Chilean Antarctic Institute and part of the Chilean delegation, told AFP.

Cardenas said Russia and China resisted new protected areas.

The bid to create the sanctuaries around Antarctica to counter climate change and protect fragile ocean ecosystems would safeguard nearly four million more square kilometers (1.5 million more square miles) of ocean from human activities.

The areas are home to penguins, seals, toothfish, whales and huge numbers of krill -- a staple food for many species.

Members of the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) met to discuss plans for three new marine protected areas (MPAs): in East Antarctica, the Weddell Sea and the Antarctic Peninsula.

There are two in Antarctica now: around the South Orkney Islands, comprising an area of 94,000 square kilometers, created in 2009, and one of 2 million square kilometers in the Ross Sea region, established in 2016.

Activists voiced disappointment at the lack of action.

"Unfortunately this special meeting ended as the previous six annual meetings have done: with two countries blocking the will of the other 25 CCAMLR members to move towards a network of Southern Ocean MPAs," Andrea Kavanagh of the nonprofit Pew Bertarelli Ocean Legacy said in a statement.

Beijing and Moscow have been key in blocking the expansion scheme since it was first floated by Australia, France and the EU in 2010 before being scaled down in 2017 in an attempt to win greater support.

Antarctica is particularly threatened by global warming.

"One of the biggest threats to this area is climate change, which is causing sea ice to decrease significantly. The presence of sea ice is essential to the life cycle of Antarctic krill," said Rodolfo Werner, scientific and political adviser to the Southern Ocean and Antarctic Coalition (ASOC).

"The creation of marine protected areas is very important, because above all it protects the biodiversity... by removing the stress of fishing in these areas," he added.

Studies have shown that the melting of western Antarctica's biggest glaciers, which contain enough water to raise the oceans by several meters, appears irreversible.

The CCAMLR, which regulates fisheries, is comprised of 26 member countries plus the EU. They include the United States, Russia, China, the UK, France, India, Japan, host Chile, Brazil and South Africa.

The CCAMLR will again address the topic of marine reserves at a meeting in October in Hobart, Australia.

ps/pa/sf/mlr/tjj/acb

Safety investigators board Titan’s support ship after fatal implosion

Josh Payne, PA Chief Reporter in St John's, Canada
Sat, 24 June 2023 

A team of investigators has boarded the main support ship of the Titan submersible after it returned to the harbour following the deep-sea vessel’s fatal implosion.

Flags on board the Polar Prince were at half-mast as it arrived at the port in St John’s in Newfoundland on Saturday, after four passengers and the pilot of Titan were killed in the incident near the wreckage of the Titanic.

Police and safety investigators could be seen on board the vessel after the Transportation Safety Board (TSB) of Canada announced it would be the subject of an investigation.

The Polar Prince docked in St John’s harbour on Saturday (Jordan Pettitt/PA)

TSB officials could be seen boarding the Polar Prince shortly after it docked.

The Associated Press reported that the TSB said the US Coast Guard will lead the investigation after they declared the loss of Titan to be a “major marine casualty”.

Rib boats could be seen towing what appeared to be the Titan submersible’s launch platform away from the Polar Prince and further along the port.

Canadian Coast Guard (CCG) boats had already started to return to St John’s harbour on Friday as the recovery operation began to wind down.

British adventurer Hamish Harding and father and son Shahzada and Suleman Dawood were killed on board the Titan submersible, alongside the chief executive of the company responsible for the vessel, Stockton Rush, and French national Paul-Henri Nargeolet.

In a statement issued before ships began to return to the port, the CCG said the search and rescue operation had concluded.

The CCG said one of its vessels would remain on the scene and would “provide assistance and support to the recovery and salvage operations as requested by Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre Boston”.

Police could be seen on board the Polar Prince shortly after it docked (Jordan Pettitt/PA)

The TSB said a team of investigators had been deployed to St John’s to “gather information, conduct interviews and assess the occurrence”.

In its own statement, the safety body said the investigation would be carried out “in accordance with the Canadian Transportation Accident Investigation and Safety Board Act and international agreements”.

The TSB will not determine civil or criminal liability and conducts investigations for “the advancement of transportation safety”.

A number of tributes have been paid to those who died on the deep-sea vessel, including from Mr Harding’s sons, who issued statements on Saturday describing him as a “loving father, family man and a determined and tireless businessman”.

The investigation comes after the BBC reported that emails from Mr Rush showed he had dismissed safety concerns over the Titan submersible.

In the exchanges with deep-sea exploration specialist Rob McCallum, OceanGate’s chief executive said he was “tired of industry players who try to use a safety argument to stop innovation”.

The Titan submersible catastrophically imploded close to the wreckage of the Titanic (OceanGate Expeditions/PA)

The Titan submersible lost contact with the tour operator an hour and 45 minutes into the two-hour descent to the wreckage, with the vessel reported missing eight hours after communication was lost.

In the days that followed the gone-missing report, the US Coast Guard said the vessel had a depleting oxygen supply that was expected to run out on Thursday.

A report from The Wall Street Journal said the US navy had detected a sound in the search area for the submersible on Sunday that was consistent with an implosion.

The Associated Press, citing a senior military official, reported that the navy passed on the information to the Coast Guard, which continued its search because the data was not considered by the navy to be definitive.

'The Titanic sub tragedy was a major disaster waiting to happen'


Letter writer

Bournemouth Echo UK
Fri, 23 June 2023 


Rescue teams are searching for the missing submersible Titan before its oxygen supply runs out (American Photo Archive/Alamy/PA)

WORLD news media for four days is locked on the missing Titanic submarine in the North Atlantic.

I worked myself on the ship-board side of a dive support vessel in the 1970s.

Highly trained professional deep sea divers spend thirty days at a time in saturation chambers.


Twelve hours shifts operating on the sea floor from a diving bell.

Then 12 hours in saturation chambers, 20 feet by seven feet diameter, back on the dive support ship.

During all this time breathing a mixture of oxygen and helium to match diving depth pressures.

You need nerves of steel.

Very level temperament.

Huge endurance.

Not a place by any means for amateurs.

On the missing Titanic sub operated by OceanGate Expeditions, as far as we know the vessel had very little certification, being operated as an experimental project.

An absolute horror story.

A major disaster waiting to happen.

On one count no-one should be diving on what is an ocean grave.

It should be left in peace in memory of all who died so terribly 15th April 1912. Not turned into a commercial tourist enterprise.

On a second count – astonishing that any paying passengers, so called adventurers, should be taken as tourists on the dives.

And on a third count – hundreds died when a refugee boat sank off Greece last week, with reports of children stuck in holds.

So terrible but that passes out of the news cycle within 48-hours.

The Titanic sub is a terrible tragedy. For all of us our worst nightmare.

But then hugely expensive adventurism when we have so much real need to deal with.

JEFF WILLIAMS

Jubilee Road, Poole

CRT 

 UK Village Marks Struggle Against US Army Racism In WWII

Eighty years later, English villagers are remembering a racist row between Black and white American soldiers.

Danica Kirka

AP
Jun 24, 2023, 

BAMBER BRIDGE, England (AP) — The village of Bamber Bridge in northwestern England is proud of the blow it struck against racism in the U.S. military during World War II.

When an all-Black truck regiment was stationed in the village, residents refused to accept the segregation ingrained in the U.S. Army. Ignoring pressure from British and American authorities, pubs welcomed the GIs, local women chatted and danced with them, and English soldiers drank alongside men they saw as allies in the war against fascism.

But simmering tensions between Black soldiers and white military police exploded on June 24, 1943, when a dispute outside a pub escalated into a night of gunfire and rebellion that left Private William Crossland dead and dozens of soldiers from the truck regiment facing court martial. When Crossland’s niece learned about the circumstances of her uncle’s death from an Associated Press reporter, she called for a new investigation to uncover exactly how he died.

The community has chosen to focus on its stand against segregation as it commemorates the 80th anniversary of what’s now known as the Battle of Bamber Bridge and America reassesses its past treatment of Black men and women in the armed forces.


Clinton Smith, chair of Preston Black History Group is seen this week outside the Ye Olde Hob Inn in Bamber Bridge near Preston, England.
JON SUPER VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

“I think maybe it’s a sense of pride that there was no bigotry towards (the soldiers),” said Valerie Fell, who was just 2 in 1943 but whose family ran Ye Olde Hob Inn, the 400-year-old thatched-roof pub where the conflict started. “They deserved the respect of the uniform that they were wearing. … That’s how people felt about it.”

That was in stark contrast to the treatment Black soldiers received in the wartime Army, which was still segregated by law.

The men of the 1511th Quartermaster Truck Regiment (Aviation) stationed at Bamber Bridge complained that they received poor food and often had to sleep in their trucks when they stopped at white bases, according to evidence presented during the court martial proceedings. They also said white military police harassed Black troops, hassling them for minor transgressions that were often ignored for other soldiers.

EXPORTING SEGREGATION

Black soldiers accounted for about 10% of the American troops who flooded into Britain during the war. Serving in segregated units led by white officers, most were relegated to non-combat roles such as driving trucks that delivered supplies to military bases.

U.S. authorities tried to extend those policies beyond their bases, asking pubs and restaurants to separate the races.

Bamber Bridge, then home to about 6,800 people, wasn’t the only British community to resist this pressure. In a country that was almost entirely white, there was no tradition of segregation, and after four years of war people welcomed any help they received from overseas.

What’s different about Bamber Bridge is the desire of local people to preserve this story and pass it on to others, said Alan Rice, co-director of the Institute for Black Atlantic Research at the University of Central Lancashire.

“If we’re going to have a fight against racism or fascism, these are the stories we need to talk about,” Rice said. “If you’re fighting fascism, which these people were, it’s ludicrous, absolutely ludicrous, that the U.S. Army (were) encouraging a form of fascism — segregation.”

Clinton Smith, head of the Black history group in nearby Preston, was among those who revived interest in the Battle of Bamber Bridge in the 1980s when he discovered bullet holes in the side of a bank and started asking long-time residents what had happened.

That helped attract wider interest, with local blogger Derek Rogerson publishing a short book, “The Battle of Bamber Bridge: The True Story,’’ that includes photos of Black troops hosting a Christmas party for village children and watching movies with kids perched on their laps. A filmmaker, Danny Lyons, compiled oral histories.

Last year, the local government council installed a plaque outside the Hob Inn that outlines the community’s relationship with the soldiers, the violence and its aftermath.

The story “just can’t be allowed to wither on the vine,” Smith said. “As much as it’s withered, we’re just now trying to rejuvenate it whilst maintaining the accuracy.’’

THE BATTLE OF BAMBER BRIDGE

Despite their friendships with the GIs, villagers weren’t able to head off the violence when Black soldiers, frustrated by their treatment and angry about news of race riots in Detroit, faced off with military police outfitted with batons and sidearms.

On that hot June night, Private Eugene Nunn was sitting at the Hob Inn bar when a white military police officer threatened to arrest him for wearing the wrong uniform. British soldiers and civilians intervened.

“Everyone was saying, ‘Leave him alone. He just wants a drink. It’s a hot day,’’’ Fell said as she recounted her mother’s story. “People just didn’t understand this viciousness.’’

When Nunn left the pub, the police were waiting. Tempers rose. A bottle smashed against the windshield of the police Jeep. Things escalated from there.

It wasn’t until 4 a.m. that order was restored. Military authorities sought severe penalties to head off unrest at other bases.

Thirty-seven Black soldiers were charged with mutiny, riot and unlawful possession of weapons, and some 30 were convicted on some or all of the charges. Most received sentences of between three and 15 years in prison, combined with loss of pay and dishonorable discharges. As the allies prepared for the D-Day landings, many of the sentences were shortened to time served so the men could be cycled back into the war effort.

While the court martial criticized the white officers for poor leadership, the records give no indication that either they or the military police were disciplined.

LONGSTANDING CHANGE

Ken Werrell, a U.S. Air Force Academy graduate and retired professor of history at Radford University in Virginia, studied the court martial proceedings and reviewed other military records for an article published in 1975.

The documents show the accused were badly treated, Werrell told The Associated Press.

But the broader story is that senior generals, focused on improving morale and performance, quickly ordered changes in the treatment of Black troops. Many of the officers commanding Black units were replaced, additional recreation facilities were provided and the army deployed more racially mixed military police patrols.


Bamber Bridge sits near Preston, England.
JON SUPER VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS

“In this way, the Bamber Bridge affair was more than just a minor incident in World War II,” Werrell wrote. “It was one of a number of incidents in the Black’s and America’s continuing crusade for freedom.”


President Harry Truman in 1948 ordered the end of segregation in the U.S. military, though it took years to fully achieve that goal. Lloyd Austin, a Black man and retired four-star general in the Army, is now secretary of defense.


That progress was too late for Crossland, a former railroad worker was 25 when he died. Evidence in the court martial proceedings provided little detail on how he was killed, saying only that he was found gravely injured with a bullet near his heart. Officers said they believed he had been caught in cross-fire between two groups of Black soldiers.


Investigators placed most of the blame for the violence on the Black soldiers, describing them as a “mob” that was “determined on revenge at any cost,” according to reports submitted during the court martial proceedings. But locals say they knocked on doors and told people to stay inside to avoid getting hurt.


RE-ASSESSING HISTORY


Nancy Croslan Adkins, the daughter of one of William’s brothers, said she was never told about the circumstances of her uncle’s death. The family later changed the spelling of its last name.


Adkins, of Upper Marlboro, Maryland, wants to know more about what happened at Bamber Bridge.


“Having dealt with direct discrimination myself by integrating the school system in North Carolina, and the racial injustice that my parents faced, I would love an investigation,” she said.


Aaron Snipe, the spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in London, said he couldn’t prejudge any military decision, but President Joe Biden’s administration has shown a willingness to “right the wrongs of the past.”

The U.S. Navy earlier this month issued a formal apology to the families of 15 Black sailors who were dishonorably discharged in 1940 after complaining that they were forced to serve as mess attendants who made beds and waited on tables. Earlier this month, the Army renamed a base for William Henry Johnson, a Black soldier who was awarded the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military award, almost a century after he was wounded 21 times while beating back attacking forces during World War I.

Snipe also said he planned to pay tribute to the people of Bamber Bridge at an 80th anniversary event.


“Part of this story is about their unwillingness to accept segregation orders or regulations that were pushed on them,” he said. “They pushed back … at a time where it might have been more convenient for local folks to just go along with what the United States, the United States military, had said. They’re to be commended for that.”


Associated Press writer Ben Finley in Norfolk, Virginia, and researcher Rhonda Shafner in New York contributed to this report.

Spending time in nature is associated with decreased smartphone usage, study finds

2023/06/23


New research published in Environment and Behavior explored the relationship between spending time in green spaces and smartphone use. Unlike previous studies that relied on participants’ own reports, this study used geolocation data to determine if people were in green spaces. The findings showed that those who spend more time in green spaces tend to use their smartphones less.

Using smartphones excessively has been linked to negative outcomes like shorter attention spans, impaired thinking, and reduced well-being. That’s why there’s growing interest in understanding what influences smartphone use and finding ways to develop healthier technology habits.

Research has consistently shown that being in nature has positive effects on our well-being. It can reduce stress, improve our mood, enhance our thinking, and make us feel better overall. This has led to the Attention Restoration Theory (ART), which suggests that being in nature can restore our attention after dealing with the demands of daily life, including smartphone use.

While the benefits of nature exposure and the detrimental effects of excessive smartphone use are well-documented individually, the relationship between these two phenomena remains relatively unexplored. Understanding how greenspace exposure may influence smartphone use has important implications for promoting a healthy balance between technology and nature engagement.

Previous studies have provided some insights into this relationship. For instance, research has shown that individuals who spend more time in nature tend to engage in less screen time overall, including smartphone use. Additionally, studies have found that nature exposure can reduce the desire to use smartphones and decrease the frequency of checking mobile devices. However, these studies have primarily focused on self-reported measures of nature exposure and smartphone use, which may be subject to biases and inaccuracies.

To address these limitations, Kelton Minor and colleagues aimed to provide a more objective and comprehensive examination of the relationship between greenspace exposure and smartphone use among young adults. By utilizing mobile screen activity and geolocation data, the researchers could capture real-time smartphone usage patterns and objectively measure the time spent in green spaces. This approach allowed for a more accurate assessment of the association between nature contact and smartphone activity.

To conduct this study, the research team utilized a large sample of 701 young adults in Denmark, primarily undergraduate students. The participants were given smartphones with an app that recorded their smartphone usage, location, and mobility for two years. The data was collected with the students’ consent, and they could view and delete their own data at any time.

The researchers used this data to examine the relationship between the participants’ smartphone use and their exposure to natural environments. They categorized the locations into two main contexts: greenspaces (such as parks and nature reserves) and urban environments. They used geolocation data and land cover maps to determine where the participants were located during 15-minute intervals.

Within each 15-minute interval, the researchers measured three aspects of smartphone use: screen time, texting, and phone calls. They focused on outgoing communication activities to understand how environmental exposures influenced the participants’ digital behaviors.

The study found that young adults who spent more time in green spaces used their smartphones less. This suggests that being in green spaces may protect young adults from excessive smartphone use. On the other hand, outgoing smartphone communication (such as texting and calling) increased in recreational areas like parks and urban areas for visits shorter than two hours.

“Greentime, or time outdoors, has long been recommended as a way to restore our attention from the demands of daily life, yet before our study, little was known about whether nature provides a way for people to disconnect from the mobile devices that now follow us into the great outdoors,” said lead author Kelton Minor, a postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University’s Data Science Institute.

“While past research suggested that short trips to city parks might provide a digital detox, we saw texting and phone calls actually go up. It was really the longer visits to wilder areas, like forests or nature preserves, that helped people get off their screens and wrest back their attention from their smartphones.”

The researchers also found that longer visits to natural environments had larger effects on reducing smartphone usage. However, even short to moderate visits to nature were found to improve digital impulse inhibition compared to urban settings. Staying in one place within greenspaces had a greater impact on reducing smartphone screen use compared to being on the move.

The findings of this study contribute to the growing body of research on the relationship between nature exposure and smartphone use. The results suggest that spending time in green spaces may help individuals regulate their smartphone usage and reduce the potential negative effects of excessive screen time. This has important implications for promoting healthy technology habits and enhancing well-being among young adults.

It’s important to note some limitations of this study.The sample mostly consisted of undergraduate students, so we can’t say for sure if the findings apply to other populations. Future research should include more diverse participants to ensure the results hold up.

Overall, this study provides valuable insights into how being in green spaces affects smartphone use among young adults. The findings suggest that spending time in nature can help reduce excessive smartphone use and promote well-being. “Prescribing more time in natural areas within the biosphere may be a relevant intervention for young adults in need of a digital break from the cybersphere,” the researchers wrote.

The study, titled “Nature exposure is associated with reduced smartphone use,” was authored by Kelton Minor, Kristoffer Lind Glavind, Aaron J. Schwartz, Christopher M. Danforth, Sune Lehmann, and Andreas Bjerre-Nielsen.

© PsyPost

‘Very troubling’: U.S. honeybees just suffered second deadliest year on record

Olivia Rosane

Common Dreams
June 23, 2023,

Working bees on honey cells (Shutterstock)

The year that spanned April 1, 2022 to April 1, 2023 was the second deadliest on record for U.S. honeybees.

Beekeepers lost 48.2% of their managed hives, according to the initial results of the Bee Informed Partnership's annual Colony Loss and Management Survey, released Thursday.

"This is a very troubling loss number when we barely manage sufficient colonies to meet pollination demands in the U.S.," Jeff Pettis, a former government bee scientist and current president of the global beekeeper association Apimondia who was not involved in the study, toldThe Associated Press. "It also highlights the hard work that beekeepers must do to rebuild their colony numbers each year."

"Beekeepers are under substantial pressure to recover from losses by creating new colonies every year."

Honeybees—and pollinators in general—are essential to biodiversity and agriculture, helping around three-quarters of the world's flowering plants and around 35% of its crops to reproduce. Honeybees alone pollinate more than 100 crops including nuts, vegetables, berries, citrus, and melons, according to the AP.

But in 2006, U.S. beekeepers began to report an alarming trend, The Hillexplained. Worker bees would simply abandon their hives, leaving the queen and larvae to die on their own. The emergence of "colony collapse disorder," as the phenomenon came to be known, prompted the University of Auburn in Alabama and the University of Maryland to team up to survey American beekeepers on rates of colony collapse through the nonprofit Bee Informed Partnership.

The worst year for colony survival was 2020 to 2021, when 50.8% of hives were lost. That loss doesn't mean that a beekeeper goes out of business; rather, they find a way to rebuild their hives, but doing it again and again takes a toll.

"Although the total number of honey bee colonies in the country has remained relatively stable over the last 20 years (~2.6 million colonies according to the USDA NASS Honey Reports), loss rates remain high, indicating that beekeepers are under substantial pressure to recover from losses by creating new colonies every year," the report authors wrote.

Nathalie Steinhauer, lead survey author and University of Maryland bee researcher, told the AP that "the situation is not really getting worse, but it's also not really getting better."

During 2022 to 2023, it was the winter that hit particularly hard, with 37.4% of hives lost, the survey found. This was 13.2 percentage points higher than last year's loss and 9.9 percentage points higher than the average. More than 60% of beekeepers also reported unacceptable losses during winter 2022-2023—or losses above 21.3% of their hives.

While honeybees face many threats, the leading cause of collapse reported by the beekeepers was the Varroa destructor mite, a parasite that makes bees more susceptible to viruses. The harm varroa causes has increased over time, Steinhauer told the AP. While it once took a 60% infestation to harm a colony, an infestation of just 1-2% can now have devastating consequences.

Another important cause of loss during 2022 and 2023 was "adverse weather." U.S. Department Agriculture research entomologist Jay Evans, who was not a part of the survey, told the AP that, in Washington, D.C., a spate of unusual 80°F days in January tricked bees into emerging earlier from winter habits only to face challenges when temperatures plunged again. In general, a change in seasonal rhythms can lead to a mismatch between the spring emergence of bees and the blooming of the flowers they rely on, The Hill pointed out.

"The impact of climate change on bee colony survival is real and can go undetected."

Other types of extreme weather—from heat to rainfall—can also take a toll. Hurricane Ian destroyed as many as 300,000 beehives in Florida in September 2022, as The New York Times reported in December, though the survey did not mention this.

"The impact of climate change on bee colony survival is real and can go undetected," Pettis told the AP.

Bee health can also be undermined by the spraying of pesticides and a lack of plant biodiversity that limits bees' food, scientists said.

The survey results come as wildlife advocacy groups celebrate National Pollinator Week from June 19 to 25. This year's week is focusing on how the climate crisis impacts pollinators.

"Pollinators are dying because their food and homes are disappearing, diseases have increased, and rising temperatures and natural disasters are affecting their ability to survive—all of which are related to climate change," the Pollinator Partnership wrote on its website.

Protecting pollinators can help lessen climate impacts by improving the health of the surrounding environment.

"Combined," the group said, "these results make planet earth a safer place for us to live."

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

OLIVIA ROSANE  is a staff writer for Common Dreams.

Like dogs, wolves recognize familiar human voices

Agence France-Presse
June 24, 2023

Grey wolf (Shutterstock)

Here, wolfie, wolfie, wolfie!

Like dogs, wolves recognize and respond to the voices of familiar humans more than strangers, according to a study that has implications both for the story of canine domestication and our broader understanding of the natural world.

Holly Root‑Gutteridge of the University of Lincoln, a co-author of the paper that appeared in Animal Cognition this week, told AFP a longstanding theory held that dogs' ability to distinguish human voices was a consequence of generations of selective breeding.

"So we wanted to look at wolves, because obviously nobody has been selecting so that wolves can recognize human voices," she said.

Root‑Gutteridge and colleagues carried out experiments across five zoos and wildlife parks in Spain, involving a total of 24 gray wolves, both male and female, aged between one and 13.

The team set up speakers and first played the animals the voice of a number of strangers that they would "habituate" to, in other words, get bored of, because they decided it was not salient to them.

Then, they played the wolves the voice of their keeper who would say familiar things to them in Spanish, such as "Hey, what's up wolves?" or "Hello little ones, good morning, how's it going?"

In gestures that would be instantly recognizable to any dog owner, the wolves raised their heads, pricked their ears up, and turned towards the speaker.

To test the effect wasn't random, the researchers went back to playing the wolves recordings of strangers, and found they once more lost interest.

Finally, to make sure the wolves genuinely knew their keepers' voices, rather than just knowing words that the familiar humans would normally say to them, the team mixed things up and had the keepers utter a stream of unfamiliar phrases.

Once more the results held up.

'Listening to us'

The fact that the wolves engaged with disembodied voices played through speakers echoes what's been seen in dogs from the era of gramophones -- as captured in a famous painting entitled "His Master's Voice" -- to today's video doorbells, though it's not yet known whether our pooches enjoy this or it frustrates them.

In terms of implications, Root‑Gutteridge said it was significant that wolves possessed the ability to distinguish between humans despite the fact that our species went our separate evolutionary ways tens of millions of years ago.

Before this, there had been limited study on the topic of how animals differentiate between the vocalizations of other species. Research had shown our close cousins, gorillas listen to people, but that was expected.

Big-brained elephants have also been found to distinguish the gender, age, and ethnicity of humans by their voices, assigning less threat value, for example, to women and children, in addition to being more fearful of the elephant-spearing Maasai than the agrarian Kamba.

Given the new finding, "chances are, lots of species are listening to us and getting to know us as individuals," Root‑Gutteridge said.

And it's not all about us, she said. Dogs could be listening to the neighbors' cats and understanding the difference between one meow or the other, for example.

"If the abilities are that general, it means that animals might be having a lot more cross species interactions than we had thought about before."


© Agence France-Presse