Subfreezing temperatures have spread across much of Europe over the past week, stretching from Poland to Spain. Snow fell in Rome for the first time in six years. Norway recorded the lowest temperatures of the cold snap: minus 43 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 42 Celsius) in the southeast part of the country on Thursday. The Arctic warmth and the European cold snap have raised questions over whether the unusual weather occurrences are linked to each other, and if they are somehow related to climate change.
The polar vortex is a low-pressure system that, as its name suggests, ordinarily rests over the North Pole.The polar vortex weakens and allows cold air to escape the Arctic to more temperate climes. This has always happened from time to time, but a growing body of research suggests that because of climate change the warming Arctic is weakening the polar vortex.
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Bats spend every night hard at work for local farmers, consuming over half of their own weight in insects, many of which are harmful agricultural pests, such as the noctuid moths, corn earworm and fall armyworm. And now they are arriving earlier in the season, and some of them are reluctant to leave. It seems the bats know more about climate change than we had realized.
This bat study "presents a new perspective on adaptation to global change, answering some longstanding questions while raising many more," conclude the pair. They also note that "weather radar networks are key infrastructure around much of the world...and hold the promise of providing continental surveillance of bat populations, as well as their ongoing responses to global change."
In the National Geographic article, "Great Tits May Be Evolving Bigger Beaks. Here's Why," by Jason Bittel, reports the findings that the bird called the great tit may be evolving longer beaks to access bird feeders. Lewis Spurgin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom, has been researching this evolution with his colleagues to help us probe at big evolutionary questions. This is what led he and his team to start looking at DNA from two distinct populations of great tits, a yellow-and-black songbird found in the U.K. and the Netherlands. “We found evidence for really rapid and recent selection for longer beaks, especially in the U.K. population,” says Spurgin. The researchers found that long-billed birds are more likely to take advantage of the free food than short-billed individuals.
“The missing context is, what else may be going on here besides the changes in beak shape?” says Abzhanov, a researcher in evolution and developmental genetics at Imperial College and Natural History Museum in London. “It is not clear if other traits, which could be evolving rapidly at the same time, were considered.” For instance, it seems likely that if the birds’ beaks are elongating, then they would also be experiencing changes to their skulls, as well as the keratinous sheath that covers the beak. Causing for further research to be done. In the National Geographic article, "Hole the Size of Maine Opens in Antarctica Ice" by Heather Brady, tells the audience of the mysterious hole as big as the state of Maine that has been spotted in Antarctica’s winter sea ice cover. This is the first time scientists have observed a hole of this magnitude since the 1970s. Known as a polynya, this year’s hole was about 30,000 square miles at its largest, making it the biggest polynya observed in Antarctica’s Weddell Sea since the 1970s. The deep water in that part of the Southern Ocean is warmer and saltier than the surface water. Ocean currents bring the warmer water upwards, where it melts the blankets of ice that had formed on the ocean’s surface. That melting created the polynya. Since the hole continually exposes the water to the atmosphere above, it is difficult for new ice layers to form. When the warmer water cools, on contact with the frigid temperatures in the atmosphere, it sinks. Then it reheats in deeper areas, allowing the cycle to continue. Scientists aren’t sure what this polynya will mean for Antarctica’s oceans and climate, and whether it is related to climate change.
news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/10/sea-ice-hole-antarctica-southern-ocean-spd/ In the National Geographic article, "Without Bugs, We Might All Be Dead" by Simon Worrall, the audience is told that bugs are the invisible force working throughout the world to keep it running. Mace Vaughan and John Losey, two entomologists, did in-depth research on how much insects contribute economically to the U.S. Most of this comes from wildlife, which insects keep going along because they are the base of the food chain for fish, birds, or mammals. They also work as a pest control and help with the decomposition of dead bodies. Bugs are also part of a huge diet of some countries that lack the needed nutrients from other sources.Bugs have also been used in medical practices in modern day brain surgery. In human clinical trials in the U.S. and Australia they are looking at “tumor paint,” a venom derived from deathstalker scorpions, which attaches to tumors, like a magnet, and highlight the tumor so the brain surgeons know where to cut. Cockroaches are helping scientists resolve antibiotic resistance, due to their high resistance to many infections. There has been a sharp decrease in the honeybee's lifetime. A lot of scientists now figure that the cause has probably been underneath their noses the whole time: varroa mites and stress factors from trucking hives across huge distances for pollination, which happens here in the U.S. but less in the U.K. and Europe. Work is being done on hygienic bees at the University of Sussex, in England, to breed varroa-resistant bees. For without bees pollination would be complicated and food production would be sure to go down. We don’t notice these services because insects are so small and we often see them as this nuisance. But they are the lever pullers of the world. news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/08/insect-bug-medicine-food-macneal/ In the National Geographic article, "How a 3-Ton Mess of Dead Pigs Transformed This Landscape," by Christie Wilcox, we are introduced to the experiment done by Brandon Barton of Mississippi State University and his colleagues, who decided to see how a mass mortality event of a species would affect the environment. In nature, mass mortality sometimes happens. More than 200,000 saiga antelopes in Kazakhstan drop dead in a matter of weeks; 337 dead whales wash up in a remote fjord in southern Chile; some 300 reindeer in Norway are felled by a single bolt of lightning— all that has happened since 2015. There’s evidence such spectacular displays of death are increasing in frequency due to climate change. These events have been happening, but no information has been obtained on how these mass mortality events have affected the environment. So these scientists decided, since they can't predict when a mass mortality event will take place they will create one of their own. Wildlife biologist Marcus Lashley of Mississippi State had connections with people at state and federal agencies who are responsible for combating a wildlife pest that currently plagues Mississippi and many other states. A few phone calls later, the dead feral pigs started streaming in. In the end, 6,000 pounds of dead feral pigs. These scientists received permission to make use of university-owned forest land for their research, allowing 3-tons of carcasses to be dumped into their study plots and left to rot.
Almost immediately, vultures and maggots invaded these corpses, which were to be expected, but the intensity of the response awed the researchers. Many other creatures started to appear and tear apart the ground and surrounding plants, wrecking the plant communities, which allowed new species to colonize the area. Even now, more than a year later, the sites remain ecologically scarred. For Tomberlin, the experiment has highlighted the environmental impact of culling feral pigs. The pigs are invasive species themselves, and they do considerable damage, but the paradox, Tomberlin says, is that killing them on a large scale may actually promote the spread of other invasive species. news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/09/dead-feral-pig-science-ecology/ "In general, the way to think about it is: climate change has changed the environment that everything is happening in," says Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. "When you add in the climate's natural variability and then the right conditions come along, you can get a storm which is stronger than you might otherwise have expected." In the article How Climate Change Likely Strengthened Recent Hurricanes , by Craig Welch, he analyzes Harvey and what were the likely causes to make it the way it was. Welch breaks down the behavior of this monstrous hurricane by how the storm intensified rapidly, why it stalled out over one area, and how it was able to dumped record rains for days and days; in the end, relating it all back to the change it climate over the years.
news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/08/hurricane-harvey-climate-change-global-warming-weather/ |