Eideard

This photo could hardly impress anyone who lived somewhere with humidity. Har.

But, our typical summertime humidity runs around 15 to 25% even during the monsoon season. We get a small amount of monsoon rain before moisture streams from the South dry out completely in the uplift of the Southern Rockies.

Last night we had what NOAA euphemistically calls a “trace” of rain. But, on my first walk along the fenceline with Rally I could see enough moisture had collected in a depression on the East-facing shoulder of the ancient volcano immediately across the valley of La Cieneguilla – to start a breath of mist rising.

I waited for the sunrise to reach the volcano and recorded the moment.

Glaciers along the Gulf of Alaska are enriching stream and near shore marine ecosystems from a surprising source — ancient carbon contained in glacial runoff, researchers from four universities and the U.S. Forest Service report in the December 24, 2009, issue of the journal Nature.

In spring 2008, Eran Hood, associate professor of hydrology with the Environmental Science Program at the University of Alaska Southeast, set out to measure the nutrients that reach the gulf from five glaciated watersheds he can drive to from his Juneau office. “We don’t currently have much information about how runoff from glaciers may be contributing to productivity in downstream marine ecosystems. This is a particularly critical question given the rate at which glaciers along the Gulf of Alaska are thinning and receding” said Hood.

Hood then asked former graduate school colleague Durelle Scott, now an assistant professor of biological systems engineering at Virginia Tech, to help analyze the organic matter and nutrient (nitrogen and phosphorus) loads being exported from the Juneau-area study watersheds. “Because there are few reports of nutrient yields from glacial watersheds, Eran and I decided to compare the result from a non-glacial watershed with those of a watershed partially covered by a glacier and a watershed fully covered by a glacier,” said Scott.

Hood and Scott’s initial findings, reported in the September 2008 issue of the journal Nature Geoscience, presented something of a mystery. As might be expected, there is more organic matter from a forested watershed than from a fully or partially glacier-covered watershed. With soil development, organic matter is transported from the landscape during runoff events. However, there was still a considerable amount of organic carbon exported from the glaciated landscape…

“We found that the more glacier there is in the watershed, the more carbon is bioavailable. And the higher the percentage of glacier coverage, the older the organic material is — up to 4,000 years old,” said Scott.

Hood and Scott hypothesize that forests that lived along the Gulf of Alaska between 2,500 to 7,000 years ago were covered by glaciers, and this organic matter is now coming out. “The organic matter in heavily glaciated watersheds is labile, like sugar. Microorganisms appear to be metabolizing ancient carbon and as the microorganisms die and decompose, biodegradable dissolved organic carbon is being flushed out with the glacier melt,” said Scott.

A little bit of positive news as part of climate change. Fisheries may improve. Some fisheries.

Ancient groundwater being tapped by Jordan, one of the 10 most water-deprived nations in the world, has been found to contain twenty times the radiation considered safe for drinking water in a new study by an international team of researchers.

“The combined activities of 228 radium and 226 radium – the two long-lived isotopes of radium – in the groundwater we tested are up to 2000 percent higher than international drinking standards,” said Avner Vengosh. Making the water safe for long-term human consumption is possible, he said, but it will require extra steps to reduce its radioactivity.

Jordan’s annual water use exceeds the natural replenishment of its major river, the Yarmouk, and its local aquifers are becoming salinized as a result of over-pumping. In 2007, the Jordanian government announced plans for a $600-million project to pump low-saline fossil groundwater from the Disi aquifer, located along the nation’s remote southern border with Saudi Arabia, and pipe it 250 kilometers north to the capital, Amman, a city of 3.1 million people, and other population centers.

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In 430 B.C., a new and deadly disease—its cause remains a mystery—swept into Athens. The walled Greek city-state was teeming with citizens, soldiers and refugees of the war then raging between Athens and Sparta. As streets filled with corpses, social order broke down. Over the next three years, the illness returned twice and Athens lost a third of its population. It lost the war too. The Plague of Athens marked the beginning of the end of the Golden Age of Greece.

The Plague of Athens is one of 10 historically notable outbreaks described in an article in The Lancet Infectious Diseases by authors from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). The phenomenon of widespread, socially disruptive disease outbreaks has a long history prior to HIV/AIDS, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), H5N1 avian influenza and other emerging diseases of the modern era, note the authors.

“There appear to be common determinants of disease emergence that transcend time, place and human progress,” says NIAID Director Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., one of the study authors. For example, international trade and troop movement during wartime played a role in both the emergence of the Plague of Athens as well as in the spread of influenza during the pandemic of 1918-19. Other factors underlying many instances of emergent diseases are poverty, lack of political will, and changes in climate, ecosystems and land use, the authors contend. “A better understanding of these determinants is essential for our preparedness for the next emerging or re-emerging disease that will inevitably confront us,” says Dr. Fauci.

Worthwhile, interesting, thought-provoking article. In this era of fears about Bird Flu or some mutating reinvention of the Spanish Flu, they would rocket about our planet faster than any comparable plague in our past.

Governments, populations can’t and won’t prepare without knowledge of previous disasters.

Melting alpine glaciers are revealing fascinating clues to Neolithic life in the high mountains. And, as a conference of archaeologists and climatologists meeting in the Swiss capital Berne has been discussing, the finds are also providing key indicators to climate change…

It all started at the end of the long hot summer of 2003, when a Swiss couple, hiking across a melting Schnidejoch glacier, came across a piece of wood that aroused their curiosity.

They took it down with them, and gave it to canton Berne’s archaeological department, where careful examination and carbon dating revealed the piece of wood to be an arrow quiver made of birch bark, dating from about 3000 BC.

And the finds are not confined to 3000 BC. Some of the leather found, and a fragment of a wooden bowl, date from 4500 BC, older even than Oetzi, making them the oldest objects ever found in the Alps…
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