Planet Earth Win09

Do volcanoes trigger climate change?
Whitening the clouds Hot stuff in the deep sea Star turns Whats hiding in the basement?
Contents
FEATURES
9 Whitening the clouds
Seeding artificial clouds could buy time to cut CO2 emissions.
Planet Earth
winter 2009
14
12 Rebels with a cause

How some organisms shake up the ecological establishments.
14 COVER STORY Do volcanoes trigger climate change?

Huge eruptions may have pushed the climate from warming to cooling.
20 16
16 Why the Amazon should quit smoking

Drought causes fires; fires make drought more likely.
18 Hot stuff in the deep sea

Making artificial fossils at hydrothermal vents.
20 Star turns
Detecting pollution with sea stars help.
22 Secrets of the mysterious yeast

Undreamed-of complexity in the yeast genome.
24 Settling dust
How does dust affect the climate?
26 The voyage of the Ocean of Bliss

Wandering the mangrove swamps, engaging with local people.
22
Editor: Tom Marshall, 01793 442593, thrs@nerc.ac.uk Science writers: Tamera Jones, 01793 411561, tane@nerc.ac.uk Design and production: Candy Sorrell, cmso@nerc.ac.uk Print: Pepper Communications Ltd is accredited to BS8555
and registered to ISO 14001 for environmental management systems. Printed using chemical-free plate technology and 100 per cent vegetable-oil-based inks on Revive Pure Offset, a recycled grade containing 100 per cent post-consumer waste and is totally chlorine free (TCF). ISSN: 1479-2605 Sara Coelho, 01793 411604, sarelh@nerc.ac.uk
28 Afloat on a sea of noise

Building the MERMAID floating earthquake recorder.
30 Pounds, shillings and pence

How much are ecosystem services worth?
32 Whats hiding in the basement?

Bringing academia and industry together.
NERC scientists: we want to hear from you

Planet Earth is always looking for interesting NERC-funded science for articles and news stories. If you want to see your research in the magazine, contact the editor to discuss. Please dont send in unsolicited articles as we cant promise to publish them. We look forward to hearing from you.
Front cover: Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone National Park. Pete Saloutos/Photolibrary.com
Planet Earth is the quarterly magazine of the Natural Environment Research Council. It aims to interest a broad readership in the work of NERC. It describes new research programmes, work in progress and completed projects funded by NERC or carried out by NERC staff. Some of this work may not yet have been peer-reviewed. The views expressed in the articles are those of the authors and not necessarily those of NERC unless explicitly stated. Let us know what you think about Planet Earth. Contact the editor for details.
PRODUCTIVE, HEALTHY, SUSTAINABLE
hat this issue of Planet Earth reminds us about is the tremendous public, policy and business impact of NERC-funded research. By impact I mean the demonstrable contribution that excellent research makes to society and the economy. We have much to gain from being better at realising and describing the impact of research. To add clarity to what the public investment in the research base is for, on 19 October 2009 Research Councils UK (RCUK) launched a framework for the future around the theme of Excellence with Impact. Research investments by RCUK produce impacts that will help to create a more productive economy, a healthy society and a sustainable world. Research is the engine of the UK economy. The RCUK framework has examples of how research investment sustained over years from research student training, to the researcher making a discovery, to the discovery winning an international prize, to its societal and economic impact being realised; see www.rcuk.ac.uk/ framework. These timelines cover examples like the internet, mobile phones, rapid manufacturing, budget analysis and the green economy within the Productive Economy category. Within the Healthy Society category they cover examples like child development, stem cells, smoking, flu, childhood leukaemia and MRI. And within the Sustainable World category they cover areas including the ozone hole and the Montreal Protocol that addressed it, the Thames
We have much to gain from being better at realising and describing the impact of research.
barrier, climate change, crime, and carbon capture and storage. The message is that sustained investment in research in universities and institutes is the only way to find solutions to the problems and exploit the opportunities associated with having a productive economy, a healthy society and a sustainable world. These problems are urgent and the research reported in this edition of Planet Earth makes that point loud and clear. Indeed environmental science plays a key role in all three sectors. Why is the Research Councils UK vision Excellence with Impact? Excellence because we fund only the best research and the UK is world leading in many research fields. For example, the 2009 citation analysis shows that in terms of citations per published research paper, the UK is number one in the G8 in environmental sciences. It is this UK research excellence that persuades business and other investors to come to the UK. Impact because the research generates social and economic benefit time after time. This is a tremendous good news story, and it is a story we must promote as we head into choppy waters ahead for the UK economy. It is certainly not a given that the tax-payer will continue to invest in research in the UK to the tune currently of over 3 billion a year at either the same level or at a higher level. We need to make the case not just me, but all of us; not just to ministers and MPs, but to the public; not some time soon, but now! Alan Thorpe Chief Executive, NERC
Planet Earth Winter 2009
DAILY UPDATED NEWS www.planetearth.nerc.ac.uk
News
Antarctic and Greenland ice-sheet thinning spreads
THE most comprehensive study of Antarctic and Greenland glaciers yet shows that ice-sheet thinning has reached the far north of Greenland, has intensified in Antarctica and is spreading and penetrating far into the interior of both ice sheets. The researchers report in Nature that thinning has continued decades after the collapse of large ice shelves, and say that a combination of warmer summers and warm ocean currents are probably to blame. This is the first time scientists have been able to see just how much ice sheets are thinning as a result of accelerating glaciers. Glaciers can lose ice because less snow falls on them, because summer melting increases, or because the glaciers start to flow faster, which puts the glacier out of balance. What weve shown is that many glaciers across both regions are considerably out of balance, because they are flowing faster, says Dr Hamish Pritchard of British Antarctic Survey, who led the study. Pritchard and his team used data from NASAs ICESat Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite to compare how quickly ice in fastmoving glaciers moved compared with slow-moving ice next to the glaciers. The data covered the five years from 2003 to 2008. The teams results show the glaciers have lost ice, because theyre accelerating towards the sea. Ice loss from accelerating glaciers, called dynamic thinning, is a much faster way of losing ice from an ice sheet than melting alone. We think this is what happened to some of the great ice sheets at the end of the last Ice Age, explains Pritchard. Our results show that ice loss is happening in many parts of Antarctica and Greenland. Were surprised at just how widespread this is, he adds. Some researchers have suggested that changing wind patterns have redirected ocean currents south and brought warm water into direct contact with Antarctic ice, a view the authors support. Some of the fastest-thinning glaciers such as Pine Island Glacier and neighbouring Smith and Thwaites glaciers in West Antarctica are thinning by as
A glacier meets the ocean in the Antarctic.
much as nine metres a year. Ice loss from dynamic thinning is poorly understood. So much so that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) decided not to include it in its latest predictions of sea-level rise. Dynamic thinning of Antarctic and Greenland glaciers could become by far the biggest contribution to sea-level rise, so the IPCCs prediction of an
18 to 59 centimetre rise over the next century could be an underestimate. What we do see is that the strongest thinning is where glaciers speed up as a result of ice-shelf collapse. It seems the collapse is like a shock, like taking a cork out of a bottle, and the effect propagates rapidly inland and persists for decades, Pritchard explains.
Ice-sheet thinning in Antarctica and Greenland. Red areas indicate regions of strongest thinning.
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News
Robyn Mackenzie /istockphoto.com
Faces more important than bodies in mating game

SCIENTISTS have discovered that if youre trying to attract a partner, an athletic body helps but a good-looking face is more important. The science of attraction is complex; researchers have highlighted numerous cues that may affect how attractive someone is. Suggestions have ranged from facial symmetry to the ratio between body volume and height. Many previous experiments tended to focus on just one of these factors at a time. But a study published in Evolution and Human Behavior is among the first to shed light on the relative importance of two traits. The scientists examined the relative importance of faces and bodies in making someone attractive. They used the internet to show 127 male and 133 female volunteers ten images of members of the opposite sex. The volunteers were asked to rate each images attractiveness, both for a long-term relationship such as marriage and for a short-term fling. First they rated separate images of body and face, before finally seeing and rating pictures showing both. In both sexes, faces were more important than bodies in determining who the volunteers found attractive overall scores for facial beauty were a better predictor of the models overall rating than scores for bodily attractiveness. Intriguingly, though, men seem to look for slightly different things in short-term and longterm partners. Whether they were being asked to evaluate partners for long-term or shortterm relationships made no difference to female volunteers. In both cases, faces were more important than bodies. But for men, an attractive body becomes relatively more important when choosing potential short-term partners than for long-term relationships although faces were still the bigger factor in their decisions. This may be because women evaluate the balance between face and body differently from men, or because the way the choice was posed didnt affect their assessments in the same way as it did those of the male volunteers. Why should faces be so vital to romantic success? One idea, the authors note, is that they have a lot of anatomical features packed into a relatively small area. This could mean its easier to spot genetic or developmental abnormalities that may make someone less attractive as a prospective mate by paying close attention to the face than by looking at other parts of the body. Because the face contains a number of features in close proximity, deviations from symmetry may be more readily assessed in the face rather than the body, explains Dr Tom Currie, a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Cognitive and Behavioral Science at the University of Tokyo and co-author of the paper. More generally, in most human societies facial expressions are vital to all kinds of social interactions. It could be that our social development has predisposed us to focus on faces, and that our sexual choices now take account of this focus.
Protea flowers are native to South Africas Cape region

SOUTH AFRICANS did well to choose the protea as official emblem for their national cricket team, as new research shows that these flowers are native to the Cape area. This contradicts the previous theory that proteas evolved in the tropics and colonised the Cape only recently. With their beautiful flowers and about 70 different species exclusive to the Cape region in South Africa, proteas are one of the most spectacular plant groups in the world, says Professor Tim Barraclough, an evolutionary biologist from Imperial College London. Barraclough and colleagues were interested to find out why proteas are so concentrated in the Cape a biodiversity hotspot thats home to 20,000 flowering plant species, 80 per cent of which arent found elsewhere. To find out how and how fast the genus diversified in the Cape and elsewhere, the team collected samples of all Cape proteas and 17 species from elsewhere in Africa. They extracted DNA and looked for genetic differences between species. The idea was to use the differences observed in todays proteas to reconstruct how the group diversified in the past, says Barraclough. The information was used to build the first phylogenetic tree of the protea group. The researchers uncovered many sub-groups, called clades, of genetically similar proteas. But all the species found in other regions of Africa belong to the same branch of the family tree. This suggests that non-Cape species descend from a single ancestor that colonised the rest of Africa about 15 million years ago, according to the paper, published in Evolution. This contradicts the previous idea that proteas appeared in tropical Africa and arrived only recently at the Cape, where they quickly diverged into many new species. We found the opposite proteas radiated in the Cape and diversified at the same speed as in the rest of Africa, says Barraclough. The findings also suggest that migration out of the Cape happened only once. This may be because of the regions climate. This is an area with a Mediterranean climate, with winter rains and dry summers, says Barraclough. In the rest of Africa, the rainy season occurs during the hot months of summer. Its probably difficult for plants evolved in such specific conditions to adapt to the climate elsewhere in Africa, he suggests.
News
Big livers help young sharks survive
In brief
Albatrosses dine with killer whales Scientists have used a tiny camera mounted on the back of an albatross to record the first images of the birds scavenging next to a killer whale in the Southern Ocean. The images show other albatrosses trailing the surfacing whale. The birds are almost certainly picking up scraps from the killer whale kill, says Dr Richard Phillips, an albatross expert from the British Antarctic Survey. Visit Planet Earth online to see the pictures. Small gardens boost biodiversity When it comes to gardens, size doesnt matter. If you want to attract wildlife, its what you do with your green fingers that counts. Researchers from the University of Sheffield have found more biodiversity in urban gardens than the countryside, because intensive farming has had such a huge impact on rural wildlife. The thrush, common toad and the hedgehog are all doing better in UK gardens than in the countryside. Oil production could peak in a decade Theres a significant risk that global oil production will peak in less than ten years time, according to a report from the UK Energy Research Centre. The authors warn that governments are not sufficiently concerned about our dwindling oil reserves, even though oil provides a third of the worlds energy. Just ten oil fields provide 20 per cent of the worlds oil, says Jamie Speirs, one of the reports authors. Theyre old fields and many of these are past their best.
Chris Dascher/istockphoto.com
SHARKS abandon their young as soon as theyre born. But far from being cold-hearted mothers, scientists have shown for the first time that they provide their pups with super-sized livers to live off while they learn to hunt. Researchers from Bangor University made the finding after trawling through shark data records from KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa spanning more than 30 years. We found this really just by chance. We plotted liver mass against body mass and there was a massive peak in the really young sharks. There was an obvious pattern of the liver being used up, says Nigel Hussey, who led the research. The huge livers, which make up around 20 per cent of the pups body mass, are packed with fats and probably keep them going in the first months of their lives, say the researchers. Once the sharks are fully grown and get better at
hunting, the livers make up just six per cent of total mass. Until now, researchers hadnt looked in detail at how shark mothers invest in their young. South Africa is a magnet for sharks. The authorities use beach protection nets, which the sharks inevitably get trapped in. But this means the dataset that Hussey and his team analysed is one of the largest of its kind in the world. Most shark studies have focused on newborns or juveniles, because they stick to the same nursery grounds, so are easier to study than adult sharks, which hunt over large areas. But scientists began to worry after noticing the young sharks losing weight. It looks like this is a normal, natural process and theyre not losing weight because theyre not getting enough food or any other reason, says Hussey. The liver reserves allow young sharks to move from the protection of the mother environment
to independence. The international study, published in the Journal of Animal Ecology, also found evidence to suggest that female sharks choose when to give birth so that conditions are best for the pups. If resources arent good, its possible that females hold on to pups for longer so that theyre born later, Hussey says. The sardine run a massive gathering of spawning fish off the South African coast can be a good opportunity for young sharks to cut their teeth, but the huge abundance of fish naturally attracts hundreds of predators. Unfortunately young sharks also make a nice meal for larger predators, so its also a risky time to be learning how to hunt. Instead, if pups are born after the sardine run, theyre often bigger and are more able to fend for themselves, because they can swim faster and further, explains Hussey.
News
Size matters for stalk-eyed flies
MALE STALK-EyED FLIES use the size of their eyespan not just to attract mates, but also to tell foes to get lost. And rivals had better watch out; males with large eyespans win more fights and are more aggressive than their less well-endowed peers. The flies, with their odd-looking eyes perched at the end of thin stalks, are a classic example of sexual selection. Females use eyespan to judge a males genetic quality the bigger the better. In some species eyespan can be as wide as the fly is long. Females prefer males with a large eyespan because they are more likely to be in better condition, healthier and probably more fertile than the others, explains Professor Andrew Pomiankowski, from University College London. This is because eyespan closely reflects genetic quality, and so is likely to be passed on to offspring. In the wild, male stalk-eyed flies try to attract females to land on their territory. But as the number of females increases, so does the competition, as other males try to muscle in. Fights between males are not uncommon and start with a face-off, with rivals eyeballing each other. This confrontation may or may not escalate to a real fight. The behaviour sparked Pomiankowskis curiosity could the males be using eyespan to gauge each others size and fighting prowess? Pomiankowski collected stalkeyed flies from the wild and took them to the lab for experiments designed to complement field observations in Malaysia. The results, published in Animal Behaviour, show that males with large eyespans won more It seems that eyespan works as a double signal. To females large eyespan suggests a healthy male in good condition, says Pomiankowski. To other males, eyespan is a marker for aggression and fighting prowess. But what triggered the development of large eyespans in the first place? In most species with distinctive male features, such as deer and their antlers, traits evolve first for fighting amongst males and then females start using them to assess male quality, Pomiankowski says. In stalk-eyed flies, though, the order may be reversed our findings indicate that large eyespan probably evolved as a response to female preference and then males started using this trait to gauge each other during fights.
Sam Cotton
fights than rivals with smaller eyespans, both in staged laboratory conditions and in nature. They were also more likely to be more aggressive and get involved in serious fights, beyond the initial face-to-face stage. Aggression also increased when a female was added to the fight cage in the lab, or as the number of females rose in the wild. Potential mating partners are a precious resource and if there are many of them, males have a stronger motivation to fight for their territory.
Snowy and Kentish plovers are not the same

when the snowy plover was first described in California. But in the 1920s, taxonomists decided that their plumage was too similar for them to be considered as two species, so decided to classify the birds as one, Charadrius alexandrinus. Until now the taxonomic classification of snowy and Kentish plovers hasnt been revisited, says Dr Clemens Kpper from the University of Bath, who led the study, published in The Auk. The findings could be important for the currently threatened snowy plover, which nests on beaches on the Pacific coast of North America. Were not just talking about a local population of birds now. The American snowy plover is a separate species from the Kentish plover, which means its conservation status may need to be changed, says Kpper. The researchers describe how they analysed DNA samples from 166 birds from two American populations of snowy plover, four Eurasian populations of Kentish plover and a population of the closely-related white-fronted plover. They first looked at the genes of snowy and Kentish plovers and compared them with white-fronted plovers to see how different they were. They also compared body mass, leg length and wing length as well as chick plumage and calls. They found huge genetic differences between snowy and Kentish plovers. The African white-fronted plovers are closer to the European Kentish plovers than to their American relatives. The differences suggest that Kentish and snowy plover ancestors separated earlier than those of Kentish and white-fronted plovers, says Kpper.
THE KENTISH-snowy plover has an identity crisis. Although separated by thousands of miles, all birds have been classified as one species. But now scientists have used genetic analysis to show that the American snowy plover and the Kentish plover from Europe and Asia are separate species. Researchers made the discovery after analysing DNA from
snowy and Kentish plovers, small shorebirds found on nearly every continent, from seven different populations in Europe, Africa, America and the Middle East. Whether or not Kentish plovers and snowy plovers are one and the same has been the subject of a longstanding debate. The birds were classified as separate species back in 1858,
News
Ice cover linked to climate for at least 30,000 years
CHANGES in the amount of ice covering the Arctic have been linked to the climate for at least 30,000 years, scientists report in Nature Geoscience. This suggests the loss of sea ice from the region over the last 30 years is directly related to recent changes in our climate. Arctic sea ice has both thinned and retreated dramatically in recent decades, but until now scientists werent sure if this was just part of a natural cycle. Although they were fairly certain that sea-ice cover and climate have always been intimately linked, until now, there wasnt much concrete evidence for this. Theres been a burning desire for more datasets on sea-ice cover, says Professor Simon Belt from the University of Plymouth, who led the study. Now Belt and colleagues at the University of Plymouth and the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research have worked out exactly how the amount of ice covering one region of the Arctic has varied over the last 30,000 years. They analysed muddy sediment samples from the seafloor of the Fram Strait, between Greenland and Spitsbergen. To find out how ice cover varied over the period, they looked at two microscopic marine plants, which prefer different conditions and leave behind different chemicals when they die. Tiny marine algae called diatoms grow well when there is some sea ice as well as sunlight. When they die, they sink to the ocean floor and decompose. They produce a chemical called IP25. As far as scientists know, no other creature makes this chemical, which stays in sea-floor sediments for thousands of years. This method is much easier than trying to find and identify intact diatoms, which are incredibly fragile. IP25 is stable, says Belt. Other miniature marine plants, like Arctic phytoplankton, do better when theres lots of sunlight but no ice. They use sunlight to photosynthesise and make energy. When they decompose, they release a different chemical, called brassicasterol, which also lingers in sediments. The researchers reasoned that lots of IP25 in sediments suggests ice cover varied according to the seasons, because diatoms would flourish only in these conditions. No trace of this chemical in sediments means that when they were laid down, the Arctic sea was either ice-free, or completely covered with ice all year round. When the sea is covered with thick ice, no sunlight can get through, so neither diatoms nor phytoplankton can get a foothold. On the other hand, in an ice-free Arctic, phytoplankton would have flourished, meaning that brassicasterol would have piled up on the ocean floor when they died. Using this information, they found that during the last ice age, 30,000 to 17,000 years ago, theres practically no evidence for either species, suggesting the northern Atlantic Ocean was, unsurprisingly, almost entirely covered with ice. But 14,000 years ago, the region warmed. The researchers found evidence that at this time phytoplankton did very well, but diatoms didnt, because the region was essentially ice-free. From 11,700 years ago until today, medium levels of IP25 and brassicasterol reflect sea ice that varies with the seasons.
Pest aphids unlikely to adapt to global warming

APHIDS may not be well equipped to cope with rising global temperatures, say scientists. This might be good news for pestplagued farmers, but spells trouble for harmless species caught in a warming climate. Insects have only a limited ability to regulate their body temperature, so their survival and geographical distribution is partly governed by local climate, says Professor Jeff Bale from the University of Birmingham. A warming world will push the range of many species northwards and open Europes farming areas to new insect pests from the south. But climate change will also increase the number of freak weather events like heatwaves or exceptionally hot days. We know that warmer winters have a positive effect on the yearly numbers of aphids, says Bale. But what happens during hot summers is poorly understood. The team collected samples of peach potato aphids (Myzus persicae), a pest common in temperate climates, an aphid native to dry and sparsely vegetated cold areas of Greenland and northern Canada (Myzus polaris) and a species with a broad subtropical distribution (Myzus ornatus). The three aphid species were allowed to grow and breed at 15C, a temperature comfortable for all of them. Then the team took sets of the three species and reared them at 10C, 20C and 25C for several generations. Then they tested how aphids accustomed to these different temperatures reacted to extreme heat or cold. They found huge differences. In the cold experiment, aphids stopped moving at about 5C and entered a chill coma at around 1C. A temperature of -13C was enough to cause death by hypothermia. We observed a 20C temperature range between the first behavioural change and death by cold, and rearing at 10C also made the aphids more cold hardy, explains Dr Steve Hazell, also of the University of Birmingham, the studys first author. But in the hot experiment, the difference between life and death was just 3C. Aphids stopped moving at 39C and at 41-42C they entered heat coma and died. This lack of tolerance to hot temperature was seen for all three species, including the groups used to higher temperatures. The fact that aphids reared at higher temperatures did not increase their heat tolerance indicates that these insects are less able to adapt physiologically to high temperatures. This suggests that they are already living close to their upper temperature limit for survival, says Hazell.
News
Virus linked to bee colony collapse
Volker Steger/Science Photo Library
Coloured scanning electron micrograph of a Varroa mite on the thorax of a honeybee.
A CHANGE in the behaviour of a bee virus may be responsible for a spate of honeybee colony collapses in Britain. The results are worrying but open the way to new strategies to protect bee colonies from disease. Bee populations are declining all over the world thanks to colony collapses caused by viruses, parasites, bacteria, fungi or combinations of these. Because of the bees crucial ecological role as pollinators and economic value as honey producers, colony collapse has attracted the attention of many scientists, as well as politicians and the general public. But a clear cause for bee decline is still elusive. The tiny Varroa mite is a known bee parasite and transmits many bee viruses. When a virus is spread by this mite, its usually associated with a specific symptom, which gives the name to the virus,
explains Dr Declan Schroeder, a virologist at the Marine Biological Association in Plymouth. So, the acute bee paralysis virus leaves bee workers paralysed, while the black queen cell virus kills young queen larvae. The deformed wing virus interferes with the development of workers wings. We set out to look at the relationship, if any, between the viruses, the mites and honeybee colony health, says Schroeder. To do that, the team sampled 15 bee colonies from England, all infected with several viruses and Varroa mites, as well as three colonies from the Scilly Isles disease-free so far. Schroeder and his colleagues collected 20 honeybees from each colony at different times during 2007 and 2008 and looked for genetic traces of viruses, while
noting the degree of mite infestation. In one year, four England-based colonies collapsed during winter, with no obvious trigger. The bees from these colonies showed no clear symptoms of disease, says Schroeder. The colonies were not infested by unusually large numbers of mites. So what happened? The team looked at the viruses present in the colonies. Their results, reported in Applied and Environmental Microbiology, show that the bees from the four collapsed colonies had higher loads of deformed wing virus during winter than the others. This is the first observed link between the abundance of a virus during a specific time of the year and over winter colony collapse, without Varroa mites being the cause, says Schroeder.
Schroeder believes his team found evidence for a change in the behaviour of the deformed wing virus, possibly caused by a mutation. We are used to observing the deformed wing virus being transmitted by mites and causing clear symptoms, he explains. Now the virus is implicated in colony collapse, with no obvious signs of disease and without the mites. Its not clear what is happening, but Schroeder suggests that the virus is interfering with the bees behaviour, changing flight ranges, lifespan or even the queens fertility, without the hallmark deformed wings. The individual bees may look healthy, but the colony as a whole is not, he says. Now that we are aware that this virus is able to change behaviour, we can think of new strategies to protect colonies.
News
Oil-palm plantations can cause air pollution
PLANTING oil-palm plantations where rainforests once stood could have unplanned and unwelcome side-effects on air quality, according to scientists. Oil-palm trees produce unusually high levels of so-called volatile organic compounds (VOCs). These react with nitrogen oxides (NOX) in the presence of sunlight to form ozone. While ozone is welcome high in the atmosphere shielding the Earth from damaging ultraviolet light, at ground level it causes breathing problems and damages plants. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, compared an area of oil-palm plantation with a nearby area of protected rainforest in Malaysias Danum Valley on the island of Borneo. Our measurements show that the conversion of rainforest to oil-palm plantation substantially increases VOC and NOX concentrations, they write. Plants like oil palms produce VOCs, in particular isoprene, as a defence against environmental stress. Meanwhile industrialisation and heavier fertiliser use on plantations cause NOX levels to rise. Our paper is about what happens when you replace rainforest with oil-palm plantation, says Professor Nick Hewitt, an atmospheric chemist at Lancaster University and the papers lead author. One of the consequences is that the plantation landscape produces much more VOCs than the natural forest, and this can be detrimental to air quality. At present, ozone concentrations are low in the areas the scientists studied lower than is typical in the UK, for example. But this could change if care isnt taken to limit emissions of nitrogen oxides in and around oil-palm plantations. These emissions come mostly from burning fossil fuels and from nitrogen-based fertilisers. Based on their measurements, the researchers modelled the effect of increasing NOX in the region on ground-level ozone. They found that in untouched rainforest, increasing NOX levels to around 10 parts per billion (ppb) equivalent to typical rural levels in
Juan Carlos Munoz/NPL
the northern hemisphere could push ozone levels up from around 12ppb at present to around 50ppb. This is close to the World Health Organizations threshold value for ozone for acceptable air quality. But because oil-palm plantations emit far more VOCs than the same area of rainforest, an equivalent increase in NOX emissions in a plantation-heavy area would lead to ozone concentrations around 120ppb a level known to endanger human health. When rainforest is converted to plantation, an unsullied landscape with no infrastructure becomes crisscrossed by roads and dotted with villages, processing plants and other facilities. So NOX emissions
rise at the same time as VOC levels. The increased ozone concentrations this would cause would damage plants and so harm crop production in the region, possibly endangering food security. NOX levels are still low, but the palm plantations will increase VOC emissions, and our paper is an early warning that we need to be very careful about managing reactive nitrogen emissions to control NOX in the atmosphere, Hewitt explains. Measures to do this might range from putting catalytic converters on cars and machinery to limiting the use of fossil fuels and artificial fertilisers.
Nazca were responsible for environmental collapse

THE NAZCA people of ancient Peru were partly responsible for the collapse of their environment and the downfall of their own civilization as they cleared old forests for agricultural use. Without trees, the valley they lived in was exposed to dry winds and catastrophic flooding. The valleys of southern Peru are arid, swept by some of the strongest winds on Earth. But until 600AD, were covered with trees and fields, and were home to the civilization that created the world-famous
An ancient huarango tree.
Nazca lines, according to a paper in Catena. This land was once very productive and is now a desert we wanted to know why, says Dr David Beresford-Jones, an archaeologist from the University of Cambridge. His team searched the lower Ica Valley for signs of human occupation and environmental change. Pollen grains preserved by the areas dry climate revealed that the Nazca grew crops in the floodplains of the River Ica a
landscape dominated by the huarango, a large, slow-growing hardwood tree. This was the ecological keystone that kept the soil fertile, protected the valley against the wind and held the floodplain together with its roots, explains Beresford-Jones. But the forests were progressively replaced by fields. They removed the big trees to clear land for agriculture, he says. After a while, they must have crossed a tipping point without realising it.
WHITENING THE CLOUDS
Whitening the clouds

Cutting the emissions that cause climate change is vital. But what if we cant do it quickly enough to avoid humanitarian catastrophe? Alan Gadian and colleagues describe an idea that could help keep the Earth cool and buy us precious time.
n the Revenge of Gaia (2009), James Lovelock argued that catastrophe will happen within the next 30 years. Severe storms and droughts will become the norm, carbon offsetting is a joke, and current efforts to promote ethical behaviour are a scam. Is he right? Here, we discuss an alternative approach to dealing with climate change geoengineering the clouds so they become whiter and reflect more sunlight back into space before it reaches the Earth. Geoengineering is man-made environmental change. Since the industrial revolution, people have been geoengineering the planet cutting down rainforests, burning fossil fuels, and pumping CO2 and other radiative gases into the atmosphere. Environmental temperature change is now accelerating, not only due to CO2, but also because of the release of other gases such as methane. Some of this comes from agriculture, but the greater concern is that the Canadian and Siberian permafrost could thaw, allowing the methane held in underground gas fields to escape. Although methane is relatively shortlived in the atmosphere, it is between 20 and 70 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 and could cause a runaway heating effect, only mitigated by the large amount of latent heat needed to melt the ice caps.
that warms the Earth. One of these was the cloud whitening scheme we discuss here. As these techniques could buy us time to implement methods to reduce CO2, it would be very wise to research their viability, in case we need them in an emergency. The cloud whitening scheme has to operate continuously and produces a one-off effect. But its advantages
lie in its low ecological impacts. Its only ingredients are seawater and air. The energy to run it would come from the wind and be relatively cheap. It could be easily and immediately shut down, with conditions returning to normal within a few days. It would give us precise and rapid control, via satellite measurements of albedo how reflective the
The light grey stratocumulus clouds are visible off the coast of Chile, and were measured using the NERC BAE 146 and Dornier 128 aircraft on the NERC-funded VOCALS consortium project.
The philosophy of cloud whitening

So-called geoengineering schemes are designed to reverse the harm we have already caused and to provide a breathing space in which to cut greenhouse gas emissions. But we need to understand the science behind them, to avoid the risk of unintended consequences. Several possible schemes were analysed and discussed in the Royal Society report Geoengineering the climate, published in September 2009. The report recommended research into two plans aimed at managing the solar radiation
Simulation of the effects of the cloud cooling scheme using the UK Met Offices HADGaM climate model, using clouds with 375 droplets per cubic centimetre. The purple areas show the strongest cooling effect, with green areas representing more limited cooling. The overall impact is global cooling of around 8 watts per square metre. Doubling CO2 concentrations from present levels would cause warming of around 3.7 watts per square metre.
(Reproduced with kind permission of The Royal Society, Latham J et al. 2008, Global temperature stabilization via controlled albedo enhancement of low level maritime clouds, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A, 366, 3969-3987)
As these techniques could buy us time to implement methods to reduce CO2, it would be very wise to research their viability, in case we need them in an emergency.
clouds are and cloudiness fed back through a global model. It would be cheap to implement. And if current small-scale experiments confirm that the theory works, we could put it into action quickly.
Stratocumulus clouds
Oceans cover 70 per cent of the globe, and low-level stratocumulus or layer clouds cover 30 per cent of the oceans. These clouds are very important parts of the atmospheric and ocean global heat engine system. In November 2008 a large international field project, based in Arica, Chile, with over 200 scientists, five aircraft and two ships, measured these clouds in situ and with remote sensing. NERC funded a consortium project, VOCALS, with scientists from four UK universities. The image on the previous page, taken by the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) during the project, shows the extent of these clouds.
The water droplets in clouds reflect sunlight back into space. The numbers of these droplets in clouds depend largely on the number of Cloud Condensation Nuclei (CCN). These are tiny particles of matter like dust or soot that form a seed around which water droplets can form. Many CCN are produced over the land. This means land-locked clouds contain many hundreds of cloud droplets per cubic centimetre, while clouds that form over the sea contain substantially less: typically only a few hundred per cubic centimetre. Generally, for a given total amount of water in a cloud, the more droplets that are present, the smaller these drops are. And clouds with smaller droplets tend to be whiter, and hence more reflective. These clouds are maintained by a complex balance of factors. How fast the water droplets collide and coalesce affects whether they precipitate out to form raindrops, or maintain a stable system. There is still a lot we dont know about how these processes interact.
10
WHITENING THE CLOUDS
The technology
John Latham has suggested that by increasing the number of droplets in maritime layer clouds, known as stratocumulus, we could significantly increase the amount of solar energy these clouds reflect. The idea is to inject a fine spray of sea-salt from the ocean surface into the clouds. The salt particles would act as CCN, artificially increasing the number of droplets in the cloud, and so reducing their size and making the cloud more reflective that is, whiter. This would in turn reflect more sunlight before it reaches the Earth and so reduce its rate of warming, and
could buy us time maybe as much as 50 years. We need further research, including numerical modelling and field experiments, to determine the ideal size of the sea-salt CCN. But preliminary results from climate models show that a modest increase of CCN in marine stratocumulus clouds could produce the desired cooling, and suggest this method would let us compensate for anything up to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 from pre-industrial levels. These initial results from models also suggest that the biggest cooling from this scheme as opposed to injection of sulphate into the stratosphere, another proposal entirely would
The idea is to inject a fine spray of sea-salt from the ocean surface into the clouds.
occur around the poles. This is consistent with what the theory predicts, and is good news, as the poles are precisely where cooling is most needed to stop permafrost from melting. It uses natural seawater spray and can be turned off immediately, if it turns out to produce undesirable consequences. Scientists, including Stephen Salter of the University of Edinburgh, have suggested a design for a fleet of about 2000 wind-powered, unmanned yachts which incorporate a sophisticated spray mechanism. The design would release sea-spray with a diameter of around 0.8 microns, providing CCN for the clouds. We propose to perform detailed research into the scheme, and to find out whether it is viable within five years. This research has four elements. More work is needed on modelling the physics of clouds; there are still questions about how big the sea-salt CCN should be and how the clouds will respond as CCN numbers increase. We are already collaborating with top US cloud physicists on this. We also need further research on climate modelling, and we need to develop and build Stephen Salters test yachts. Finally, we need small-scale field experiments in a region of stratocumulus to test whether the idea works in practice. Developing a test spray system and conducting a field experiment to assess the schemes viability will cost around 6 million. This is an insignificant sum compared with the cost of doing nothing. In five to ten years, we could have an answer to Lovelocks question: Could we have done anything to slow down the warming and the irreversible change in the Earth system?
MOre infOrMATiOn Dr Alan Gadian is senior research scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS), at the University of Leeds. Professor Alan Blyth is director of the NCAS Facility for Ground-based Atmospheric Measurements at the University of Leeds. Professor John Latham is an atmospheric physicist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Stephen Salter is professor of engineering design at the University of Edinburgh. Laura Stevens is a PhD student at the University of Leeds. furTher reAding J. Latham, 1990, Control of global warming? Nature 347 J. Latham et al. 2008, Global temperature stabilization via controlled albedo enhancement of low level maritime clouds, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A, 366, 3969-3987 J. Lovelock, 2009, Revenge of Gaia, Penguin S. Salter, et al. 2008, Sea-going hardware for the cloud albedo method of reversing global warming, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A (2008) 366
John McNeill
Stephen Salters spray ship design.
11
I
Rebel organisms are newcomers that shake up the prevailing ecological order and can radically reshape the environment. Hywel Williams and Tim Lenton explain how this new concept can shed light on everything from how oxygen became so vital to life on Earth, to humanitys troubled relationship with fossil fuels.
n his 1944 book What is life? the physicist Erwin Schrdinger argued convincingly that one of lifes distinguishing features is its ability to use energy to create order. To do this, organisms must export waste products to their environment. James Lovelock noted this in the 1960s when considering how to detect life on Mars. He recognised the signature of life in the Earths atmosphere, which is a long way from the chemical equilibrium it would approach in lifes absence. The observation that organisms, Martian or otherwise, must inevitably change their physical environment became a cornerstone of Lovelocks Gaia hypothesis. Looking at the Earths history over very long timescales, it is clear that the evolution of new kinds of organism with different types of metabolism has transformed the biogeochemical cycles that support life on Earth. The evolution of photosynthetic cyanobacteria, for example, led to radical changes in the biosphere during the Great Oxidation event around 2.4 billion years ago. Cyanobacteria proliferated widely using abundant water, carbon dioxide and sunlight for photosynthesis, but they polluted the
environment with a highly toxic by-product: oxygen. The Earth would never be the same again, and once-dominant anaerobic organisms were relegated to life at the fringes. Cyanobacteria in the Archean are an example of what we call rebel species organisms with a newly evolved metabolism that disrupts the ecological balance established by incumbent species. In doing so, rebels often create a new ecological order that suits their preferences. Successful rebels can become dominant todays rebel is tomorrows reactionary old guard. We first spotted rebel species in an unlikely environment: the computer. We were trying to understand how some fundamental properties of the biosphere emerged, specifically how nutrient recycling and environmental regulation could come about in a world populated by evolving micro-organisms. A key problem in Earth system science is that we have a sample size of only one we have no other life-bearing planets with which to compare the Earth. So we have developed a computer model that simulates virtual biospheres in which to explore the interactions between life and its
Rebels with a cause
Bernd Lauter/Photolibrary.com
12
REBELS WITH A CAUSE
environment. This model represents an evolving microbial ecosystem after all, the Earth is overwhelmingly a microbial world. Our model explicitly accounts for both the influence of the physical environment on growth and the influence of growth on the physical environment. For example, in the real world temperature affects the rate of photosynthesis, and metabolic waste products including greenhouse gases can alter temperature. This adds a new kind of feedback to the system. Assuming that there is an optimum environment for any metabolic reaction for example, human metabolic processes work best at around 37C our model organisms need their metabolic functions to suit prevailing conditions. Since prevailing conditions are in part controlled by biological activity, the model simulates co-evolution, by which the microbial community collectively alters the environment that in turn determines the natural selection pressures experienced by its future members. Nutrient recycling loops readily emerge in our model, as they have on the Earth. Natural selection for advantageous feeding strategies creates communities that make efficient use of all available resources. The waste of one species often becomes food for another, and
Sinclair Stammers /Science Photo Library
Light micrograph of cyanobacteria filaments.
an unexploited resource can grow rapidly using built-up stockpiles. If this species has an environmental preference different to the evolved preferences of the established community, and if it also happens to move the environment towards its own optimum conditions, then we have a perfect storm in evolutionary ecology: the new species grows rapidly, and in doing so, changes environmental conditions to suit its
Human fossil-fuel use has all the hallmarks of the disruptive rebel species we observe in our model.
cycling of scarce nutrients via such cross-feeding relationships lets the environment support a greater overall biomass. We have also looked at how environmental stabilisation can emerge from natural selection in a spatial version of the model. Community-level selection pressures weed out local communities that degrade their environment, while favouring those that improve their environment. The global result of this process is regulation of the environment against perturbations. own growth and harm the growth of others. This creates positive feedback between growth and environmental change that can lead to a dramatic shift in the state of the ecosystem, which may in turn cause widespread extinction of most or even all of the previous incumbents. We call this process an evolutionary regime shift, where a rebel species causes the collapse of an established ecosystem and the formation of a new stable pattern of ecological order. Fortunately, our model predicts that large events such as these should be rare the bigger the event, the less likely it is to occur. Rebels are no problem unless they can grow sufficiently to have an appreciable effect. In most cases, competition for resources with more established species prevents rebels from taking over. There is a cautionary note to be sounded from our research, moving away from abstract models of microbes and into the all-too-real world of anthropogenic climate change. Human fossil-
fuel use has all the hallmarks of the disruptive rebel species we observe in our model: access to a previously unused resource leads to rapid growth, producing harmful environmental side effects. Fossil-fuel use has powered the Industrial Revolution, transformed agriculture and allowed a much greater human population to be supported. Humans now monopolise a far greater share of global productivity than any other species in Earth history. The environmental changes related to fossilfuel use are now beginning to be understood climate change and ocean acidification are just two among many. What is clear is that, just like the rebels in our model system, humans are shifting the environment away from the conditions to which most existing species are adapted. We are already witnessing rates of extinction comparable to the largest mass extinction events in Earth history. What remains to be seen is how well life on Earth, including us humans, can adapt to rapid environmental change.
MOre infOrMATiOn Dr Hywel Williams is part of the Computational Biology Group, and Professor Tim Lenton is head of the Earth System Modelling Group, both at the University of East Anglia. Email: h.williams@uea.ac.uk or t.lenton@uea.ac.uk furTher reAding H.T.P. Williams & T. M. Lenton, (2007) The Flask model: Emergence of nutrient-recycling microbial ecosystems and their disruption by `rebel organisms. Oikos, 116 (7), 1087. H.T.P. Williams & T. M. Lenton, (2008) Environmental regulation in a network of simulated microbial ecosystems. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. 105 (30), 10432.
Evolutionary regime change

Both nutrient recycling and environmental regulation can be disrupted by rebel species. In our model, this happens most often when there is some resource in the system that is not being fully exploited, perhaps a potential nutrient that no existing species has found a way to use. This creates a vacant niche for some lucky mutant to occupy. The first species to discover a way to use
13
Do volcanoes trigger climate change?

Huge volcanic eruptions may have pushed the climate from global warming to global cooling 16 million years ago. The theory could have big implications for efforts to slow climate change by fertilising plankton in the ocean. Sev Kender, Victoria Peck and John Smellie explain.
Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone National Park.
ome have argued that increasing the productivity of planktonic algae in the worlds oceans is a viable means of removing carbon from the atmosphere, counteracting the build-up of industrial CO2 and mitigating man-made global warming. When so many planktonic algae flourish that their remains get little chance to decay on the seafloor before they are buried under even more debris, the result is that carbon is removed from the atmosphere for the long term. Marine sediments dating back 16 million years reveal that in the Middle Miocene period (about 16 to 11.5 million years ago), a trend of global warming was reversed, leading to worldwide cooling. This climatic change went alongside the burial of enormous quantities of organic matter, consisting mostly of planktonic algae, in the Pacific Ocean. While the drawdown of atmospheric CO2 and global cooling go hand in hand, we dont know what triggered this climatic reversal. We have studied sediments from the Congo Fan, off the coast of West Africa, an area where very few marine sediment cores have ever been investigated. We found that, as in the Pacific Ocean, substantial quantities of organic carbon were also buried in the Atlantic during the mid Miocene, meaning that increased carbon burial at this time was a truly global event.
At the Congo Fan we find that, like today, stronger winds blowing off Africa forced surface waters away from the shore, and deeper waters welled up in their place. This had a two-fold effect. The upwelled waters would have been rich in nutrients, and dust blown from Africa by the stronger winds would also have fertilised the ocean. The result was that planktonic algae flourished and their bodies were buried in the ocean sediments in vast quantities. To explain why it became so much windier off West Africa in the middle Miocene we looked at what else was happening in the world at that time. As well as the progressive closure of an equatorial seaway, the Tethys Ocean, we noticed that a huge volcanic eruption of flood basalts in western USA, known as the Columbia River Basalt Group, reached its peak at about the same time as the first increase in burial of organic matter on the Congo Fan. Basalts are very primitive lavas, rich in iron and magnesium, and flood basalt eruptions are the most voluminous eruptions in the world. They release large quantities of CO2, which could contribute to global warming.
Cooling aerosols
However, they also release great quantities of sulphuric acid, in the form of tiny acidic particles known as aerosols, which can have the
opposite effect on climate. The accumulation of sulphuric acid in the atmosphere reflects sunlight before it reaches the Earth and causes the lower atmosphere to cool, counteracting the effect of increasing CO2 concentrations. Most volcanic eruptions last only days or months, although the cooling effect of sulphuric acid, known as a volcanic winter, may last several years before the acid particles are cycled out of the atmosphere. But the Columbia River Basalts erupted many times, and each eruption probably lasted decades. This produced vast quantities of sulphuric acid aerosols amounts not seen on Earth since. The long-term cooling effect on the climate caused by so much sulphuric acid in the atmosphere would have been much more profound than any warming caused by the addition of volcanic CO2, probably causing global cooling and changing atmospheric circulation patterns. This in turn led to stronger winds over west Africa and caused the planktonic algae to flourish off the coast. At some point eruption of the Columbia River Basalt Group was complete and sulphuric acid stopped cooling the Earth. But the burial of organic carbon in the oceans continued long after the eruptions had stopped and the climate continued to cool. We therefore concluded that the volcanic winters
14
DO VOLCANOES TRIGGER CLIMATE CHANGE?
Pete Saloutos/Photolibrary.com
Volcanic winters acted as a trigger, tipping the climate from warming to cooling.
acted as a trigger only, helping tip the climate from warming to cooling. Does this trigger exist today, and could it reverse current global warming? Flood basalt eruptions are rare events, and it seems highly unlikely that another flood basalt province will suddenly start erupting. However, although the Columbia River Basalt eruptions are over, the factors causing those eruptions still exist and mean that at some point North America will suffer an even bigger volcano-driven environmental catastrophe, on a scale not experienced in human history. The Columbia River Basalts were caused by a very hot mass of molten rock, or magma, known as a mantle plume or hotspot, rising in the Earths deep interior until it collided with the base of the crust. This mantle plume continued to puncture North American crust, causing it to melt and forming a line of large volcanoes, now of a different composition known as rhyolite, that get younger as you move eastwards.
Supervolcanic winter?
These rhyolite magmas differ from the flood basalts because they formed during crustal melting caused by the mantle plume, and are much richer in silica, with far less iron and magnesium. These vast rhyolite structures are known as supervolcanoes, and one of the best
known is in yellowstone National Park. Supervolcano eruptions might flare up with only weeks, days or even hours of warning, and bring catastrophic environmental devastation. The last full-scale eruption at yellowstone occurred about 640,000 years ago and ejected a large volume of ash into the atmosphere, covering about half of the United States and probably causing widespread destruction to surrounding ecosystems. Emissions of SO2 in some rhyolite eruptions can far exceed those in basalt eruptions, thus potentially triggering a prolonged volcanic winter. Geologists are monitoring the upward movement of the yellowstone Plateau, as it responds to changes in underlying pressure. For the past three years the ground has risen three times more rapidly than ever observed since measurements began in 1923. Geologists see no evidence that another such cataclysmic eruption will occur at yellowstone in the foreseeable future, but recurrence intervals of these events are neither regular nor predictable. Our results, however, do show that greater global ocean productivity in the Middle Miocene probably led to the removal of atmospheric CO2 and eventually to global cooling, perhaps lending support to those promoting ocean fertilisation as a viable means to draw down CO2. Although we would not discourage attempts
to avert the catastrophes associated with human-induced global warming over the coming centuries, the ecological impact of increasing surface water productivity is unknown and may be great. It is worth noting that the Middle Miocene is associated with the largest extinction of deep-sea single-celled organisms (foraminifera) in the past 30 million years.
MOre infOrMATiOn Sev Kender specialises in micropalaeontology and palaeoceanography and is based at the British Geological Survey, Nottingham. Email: sev.kender@bgs.ac.uk. Victoria Peck is a palaeoceanographer at the British Antarctic Survey. Email: vlp@bas.ac.uk. John Smellie is the senior volcanologist at the British Antarctic Survey, with a particular focus on volcanic eruptions under ice sheets and how you can use the volcanic record to extract a uniquely wide range of important information on past ice sheets. Email: jlsm@bas.ac.uk furTher reAding S. Kender, V. L. Peck, R. W. Jones and M. A. Kaminski, 2009. Middle Miocene oxygen minimum zone expansion offshore West Africa: evidence for global cooling precursor events. Geology, volume 37, issue 8 (August).
15
Wildfires threaten the Amazon rainforest and may affect the local climate, in turn making future fires more likely. Suzanne Bevan and Peter North describe how satellite data is changing our view of what fire means for this vulnerable but crucially important ecosystem.
Why the Amazon should quit smoking R
esearch into the effects of burning biomass wood, foliage and other plant matter on rainfall over the Amazon may not seem an obvious topic to choose after my PhD work on using satellite-borne radar to measure how fast glaciers in the Arctic were flowing. But both research topics involve processing large amounts of data collected and transmitted back to Earth by satellites flying thousands of miles a day across the globe. Over the Amazon, as in the Arctic, local feedback processes can amplify the effects of global climate change on the region. And just like the Arctic, the Amazon is an area so vast and inaccessible that remote sensing from space is the best way to monitor it. The Amazon is the largest remaining rainforest on Earth and plays a major role in regulating the planets climate. But tens of thousands of square kilometres of Amazon rainforest are destroyed each year by slashand-burn practices, which local people use to clear land for farming. As well as this deliberate deforestation, climate modellers fear that climate change will make the Amazon warmer and drier, causing the forest to die back. These scientists use climate models that include a dynamic vegetation component they represent the ability of vegetation to grow or die back in response to climate change. The models do not, however, consider the possible feedback effects between smoke from the burning forests and the regions rainfall patterns, partly because we dont understand these interactions well enough. Aerosols are tiny solid or liquid particles, less than a thousandth of a millimetre across, that float suspended in the atmosphere. Around
Loren McIntyre/Photolibrary.com
16
WHY THE AMAzON SHOULD qUIT SMOKING
the world there are many sources of aerosols, such as desert dust, sea spray and industrial pollution, and their concentrations in the atmosphere vary throughout the year and from place to place. While they remain in the atmosphere, aerosols scatter and absorb sunlight, producing a cooling at the Earths surface which in some areas may be up to three times greater than the warming caused by increasing greenhouse gases. Aerosols also act as cloud condensation nuclei, providing a seed onto which water vapour can condense to form cloud droplets. This means adding aerosols to the atmosphere can change the properties of clouds, changing their reflectivity, their lifetimes and also their ability to produce precipitation (see p9). During the rainy season, the atmosphere over the Amazon rainforest is so clean it has been referred to as a green ocean. In contrast, during the dry season in September and October biomass burning pollutes the atmosphere with smoke aerosols. Forest fires in the Amazon do not occur naturally. They happen because people deliberately start them, and in a dry year its much more likely these fires will leak beyond the area they were intended to burn.
July
September
In July 2005 the atmosphere over the Amazon region was clean and aerosol optical depths were low. By September 2005, when biomass burning occurred, aerosol optical depths were higher than they would have been over an extremely polluted city.
There were more fires and more smoke in dry years. And the more smoke there was, the later the dry season ended.
combination of data from rain gauges and observations from satellite microwave and infrared instruments. The data on fires come from the dates and locations of night-time hot pixels identified in satellite thermal images, showing areas of land that are much warmer than their surroundings. Using these three collections of data, we found that from 1995 to the 2008 dry-season, AOD was strongly correlated with the number of fires and inversely correlated with the amount of precipitation. In other words, as expected, there were more fires and more smoke in dry years. We also found that the more smoke there was, the later the dry season ended. These results were very interesting but they were compatible with the possibility of a local climate feedback effect rather than proving it. Were the fires suppressing rainfall, or were they just spreading in response to dry conditions? We know that Amazon forest fires are not a natural phenomenon and, therefore, that the amount of burning is influenced by economics and legislation as well as by climate. For example, when prices of agricultural crops rise, farmers have more incentive to cut down and burn forest to clear land to plant them. With our unique 13-year time series of dry-season AODs we were able to identify trends in biomass burning over several years, and to relate these to external factors. We found that when land values were increasing, due to worldwide demand for soybeans and beef, concentrations of aerosols in the atmosphere rose. More recently, from 2004 onwards, falling soybean prices, a strong Brazilian currency and active government intervention reduced the demand for land and AODs declined as less forest was burned. 2005 was an exception aerosols were extremely high, probably because of an unusually severe drought that year. Our research shows that biomass burning in the Amazon region, driven by local and global economics, can affect the local climate in ways which amplify the regional consequences of global climate change. Now that global demand is rising again for soybeans and beef, and for ethanol to replace fossil fuels, there is a risk that deforestation and burning will begin to rise again and exacerbate the effects that the drying and die-back of the Amazon rainforest are predicted to have on the climate.
MOre infOrMATiOn Dr Suzanne Bevan and Dr Peter North work on remote sensing and environmental change in the School of the Environment & Society at Swansea University. Email: s.l.bevan@swansea.ac.uk or p.r.j.north@swansea.ac.uk. The research described in this article was funded by the NERC National Centre for Earth Observation. furTher reAding S. L. Bevan, P. R. J. North, W. M. F. Grey, S. O. Los, and S. E. Plummer (2009). Impact of atmospheric aerosol from biomass burning on Amazon dryseason drought. Journal of Geophysical Research Atmospheres 114.
Fire in the forest

The key question is, do these fires intensify or extend the drought by suppressing rainfall? If so, droughts could cause more fires, which would then make further drought more likely a vicious circle. Answering this question means disentangling cause and effect, and requires repeated observations of rainfall, fires and smoke aerosols over as long a period as possible. Recently, satellite remote sensing has begun to provide the data we need. Aerosol Optical Depth (AOD) is a measure of the total amount of sunlight scattered or absorbed by aerosols throughout the depth of the atmosphere. This lets us estimate how many aerosol particles are in the atmosphere at a particular moment. But measuring it from space is difficult because satellites, looking down from above the top of the atmosphere, see light from the sun scattered back by both the surface and the atmosphere. At Swansea we have developed an algorithm to use data from radiometer instruments designed in the UK, which have been flying onboard European Space Agency satellites since 1995. These instruments view the Earth from two different angles and use four different wavelengths (colours), letting us separate light scattered by the Earths surface from light scattered by atmospheric aerosols. The rainfall observations we used are based on a
17
Hot stuff in the deep sea

Collecting vent mussels and crabs using one of Alvins manipulators, which can be seen on the left.
How do fossils form around hydrothermal vents? Crispin Little describes how his team found out by making their own.
esearch on the deep seafloor is a serious undertaking. It requires specialised equipment like the famous manned submersible Alvin and very expensive oceanographic vessels capable of operating far from land for a long time. Potential problems are not only technical ships engines malfunctioning or submersible cables tangling, for example. They can also be due to factors beyond anyones control; bad weather has scuppered many a well-planned research cruise. Working on the mid-ocean ridges is even harder, because these are among the most geologically active areas on the planet. Here new ocean crust is being formed as lava erupts onto the seafloor, accompanied by strong earthquakes (see Planet Earth Autumn 2009, p28). Not only that, but the ridges are also sites of intense hydrothermal activity, with 370C, highly acidic vent fluids gushing out of towering mineral chimneys on the seafloor. This challenging environment was the setting for our project to study fossilisation in deep-sea hydrothermal vents. Indeed, these challenges
were confirmed when we lost an entire set of experimental devices to a major seafloor volcanic eruption early on in the experiment. Why are we interested in fossilisation at deep-sea hydrothermal vents? The aim of the study was to better understand the evolutionary history of the extraordinary communities of animals that live only at hydrothermal vents. First discovered in 1979 on the Galapagos Rise, these communities have radically changed our view of the diversity of life in the deep sea, partly because their primary energy source is not sunlight, but geochemical energy from hot rocks. The most important compound in vent fluid is hydrogen sulphide, and many vent animals, including giant vestimentiferan tube worms, vent mussels and clams, depend for food on symbiotic bacteria that live by oxidising this sulphide. This dependence on geochemical rather than solar energy may have shielded vent communities from major environmental events, like the mass extinctions and global climate change that affected contemporary
18
HOT STUFF IN THE DEEP SEA
photosynthesis-based ecosystems. Thus, the evolutionary history of vent fauna is probably very different from that of other marine biotas. The only direct evidence for this history comes from the fossil record. But at present this is sparse, with only 25 examples known from the past 550 million years, and there are fundamental questions about why this is. For example, why do some ancient vent deposits contain fossils, while others in the same state of preservation dont? There are also significant groups of animals, like crabs and shrimps, that are abundant at modern vents, but which do not appear in the vent fossil record. Why should this be? Is it a case of imperfect preservation, or were these groups not present at vent sites in the past? To find out, we decided to investigate how modern deep-sea hydrothermal vent animals (vestimentiferan and polychaete tube worms, molluscs and crustaceans) become fossilised at vents. To do this we chose an area on the East Pacific Rise, 500 nautical miles south of Mexico, where scientists have studied vents for two decades. The plan was, in partnership with colleagues at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the University of New Hampshire, to use Alvin to deploy specially designed duplicate sets of experimental materials at different hydrothermal vents in three different microhabitats: the high temperature black smoker hydrothermal fluid habitat (up to 370C), diffuse flow sites where hot fluid and seawater mix (at 10-40C, this is where the majority of animals live), and a control away from active venting (3C). Wed then recover these experimental materials at roughly yearly intervals for transport back to the UK and investigation. The experimental devices consisted of identical titanium mesh cages, inside which were wired
The author extracting a pair of fossilisation cages from Alvins collection basket, recovered from 2.5km down on the seafloor.
a variety of control materials and biological substrates: dried vestimentiferan tubes, vent mussel and clam shells, periwinkle shells and tiger prawn carapaces. We deployed the first fossilisation cages at two vent sites in May 2005. Unfortunately, our hard work came to nothing the cages (together with all the other research groups scientific equipment) were destroyed by a major submarine volcanic event in the area late in 2005, in which an estimated 22 million cubic meters of lava was erupted. Presumably our cages are still there, but covered by several metres of basalt! We had to restart the project, building new cages and negotiating ship time with our
Presumably our cages are still there, but covered by several metres of basalt!
American colleagues. Happily, things have since been a great success. We deployed new sets of fossilisation cages at two different vent sites in November 2006 and December 2007, and recovered them after 373 days and 319 days respectively. The results are very interesting, and go a long way towards answering many of our questions about fossilisation at hydrothermal vents. For example, we now know that fossilisation is very dependent on exactly where the remains are located around the vent. In our experiment, fossilisation by the growth of sulphide minerals on the biological materials (vestimentiferan tubes, periwinkle, mussel and clam shells) only occurred in the highHydrothermal vent chimneys are formed mainly out of sulphide minerals.
temperature areas of the vent sites, or where the vent changed over time for example, where a diffuse flow vent turned into a black smoker during the experiment. Sulphide mineralisation did not generally occur at diffuse flow sites, although mollusc shells suffered considerable dissolution here, or at control areas away from active venting. The implication is that the fossils found in ancient vent deposits reflect only the parts of those communities that lived at the higher-temperature areas around the vents. We found that the mollusc shells and tubes acted as simple substrates for the growth of pyrite (iron sulphide) with mineralisation occurring on both shells and tubes. This is exactly what we might expect from the preservation of vent fossils in ancient vent deposits. We also discovered that the apparent bias towards the fossilisation of worm tubes and mollusc shells is a real phenomenon and reflects how well the various biological substrates resist chemical dissolution in the vent environment, which puts them under high pressure due to depth and exposes them to hot, acidic vent fluid. Thus, no shrimp carapaces remained in any of the ten cages, including those from the control sites away from active venting. Vestimentiferan tubes, by contrast, proved resistant enough to decay to become fossilised. The organic coating, called the periostracum, of mollusc shells protects them to some extent from dissolution and makes it more likely that shells with thick periostracal layers will get preserved as vent fossils, particularly as the periostracum on its own can be mineralised. The implication is that crustaceans like crabs and shrimps were present at hydrothermal vents in the past, but just did not get preserved. Our results are consistent with observations from ancient vent sites and let us better interpret the fossil record of vent communities. From this, we now know more of how vent fauna evolved, because we now understand how organisms are preserved in these environments, including the extremely rapid pathway to fossilisation less than a year. However, because fossilisation at vent sites happens so quickly, we still dont fully understand the very early stages of mineralisation of shells and tubes by pyrite, and future experiments should have shorter durations in the order of a few months. Ship time and submersible seats anyone?
MOre infOrMATiOn Dr Crispin Little is a senior lecturer in the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds. Email: c.little@earth.leeds.ac.uk
19
Andrew Bailey/FLPA
Star turns
Sea stars can turn themselves the right way up when they are placed on their backs. But pollution reduces their self-righting abilities. Awadhesh Jha explains how this could make them an important tool for assessing the impact of contaminants on fragile ecosystems and even on people.
uman population growth and industrial development mean the production, consumption and disposal of man-made chemicals and wastes continue to increase. A growing range of chemicals, with many different effects, now end up in our rivers and seas. Biological responses or biomarkers are becoming key tools for determining these pollutants potential effects on health, both in humans and in wild species. About a third of man-made discharges are potentially genotoxic or carcinogenic that is, they can cause genetic damage, cancer or birth defects. Genetic damage or mutations in wildlife also have implications for organisms longterm survival, and hence for biodiversity and environmental sustainability. Many anti-cancer drugs, which are designed to kill cancerous cells, have been detected in waste and surface waters. These drugs can simultaneously act as genotoxins and carcinogens, but damage to brain cells or changes in behaviour are among the most common side effects. Concern is growing over the presence of such contaminants
20
STAR TURNS
How long it takes a sea star to return to its normal position after being placed upside down could be a valuable indicator of environmental stress.
in the aquatic environment; quite apart from their potential impact on human health, we know little about their effects on natural plants and animals (see Planet Earth, Summer 2008, pages 26-27). Echinoderms are among the most environmentally sensitive marine organisms, close to chordates our own group, including all vertebrates in the evolutionary tree. Like mammalian brain cells, their nervous systems can synthesise, store and release chemicals, called neurotransmitters, and they have similar receptors and signalling mechanisms. These properties have led some researchers to suggest the embryo-larval stages of echinoderms as models for the screening of potential neurotoxicants. In humans, exposure to environmental agents causing genetic damage, like metals and pesticides, has been correlated with behavioural and developmental disorders such as learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder and mental retardation. But no studies have yet established links between genetic damage, neurotoxicity and physiological or behavioural effects in surrogate aquatic organisms. Among the echinoderms, sea stars like Asterias rubens are fascinating organisms, displaying many spectacular characteristics. A few studies have suggested that measuring their righting time that is, how long it takes a sea star to return to its normal, upright, position after being placed upside down could provide an indicator of environmental stress. There has, though, been no systematic approach to link this intriguing behaviour pattern to exposure to contaminants. At the University of Plymouth, we have used this self-righting behaviour to connect the genetic damage caused by an environmentally relevant anticancer drug to behavioural effects. Work carried out by PhD student Martin Canty under a NERC CASE award in collaboration with AstraZenecas Brixham Environmental Laboratory, recently published in Aquatic Toxicology, has suggested that exposure to the anti-cancer drug cyclophosphamide, which is used in a number of cancer treatments and has also been found in waste and surface waters, can cause genetic damage in blood cells, and that this damage affects sea stars righting behaviour. The integrated study, linking genetic damage with behavioural effects, at Plymouth carried out without sacrificing the sea stars showed that the greater the genetic damage, the longer it took them to return to their normal position. The study also compared a physiological response in this case, feeding rate in bivalve mussels (Mytilus edulis), which are commonly used to assess the impact of pollutants in the marine environment. It found that compared to feeding rate, a physiological response in mussels, the sea stars were more sensitive to genetic damage at DNA and chromosomal levels, and showed greater behavioural responses. This exciting study has several implications and potential benefits. Currently, determining whether a chemical is neurotoxic to humans is a cumbersome process, and only a small proportion of new chemicals and consumer products are screened for their neurotoxic potential. If we can firmly establish the relationship between toxicity and righting behaviour, we can test the toxic potential of environmental chemicals in a non-invasive manner, without killing the animals, to protect both human and ecosystem health. This could also help in screening anti-cancer drugs for potential neurotoxic side effects. As well as this, new regulations recognise that basing environmental health assessments on a few selected species may not give a good measure of the impact on other parts of the aquatic community. These new rules emphasise the need to extend toxicological studies by using other groups of invertebrates, ones that are less often used but are still ecologically relevant. If we can establish the relative sensitivity of vertebrates and echinoderms using noninvasive techniques for different sub-lethal biological responses like genotoxicity and neurotoxicity, we could substantially reduce the use of vertebrates like fish in experiments this is desirable for ethical reasons, as well as on legal and economic grounds. More work will be needed to shed light on these phenomena. Echinoderms have played an important role in the discovery of many fundamental biological concepts, including the chromosomal basis of inheritance and cancer, and how cellular division is controlled. Sea stars have striking regenerative abilities, and so are considered an excellent model for stem cell research. Scientists have even sequenced the genome of the closely-related species of sea urchins (Stronglycentrotus purpuratus). Echinoderms have much more to offer as we try to understand not just fundamental aspects of the origin and evolutionary journey of life, but also the molecular basis of pollutant response and the underlying mechanisms of how diseases are induced and developed by pollution. More generally, they have the potential to make our society more sustainable by helping us diagnose, predict and reduce the harm our activities can cause to our environment.
MOre infOrMATiOn Dr Awadhesh N. Jha is a reader in genetic toxicology in the School of Biomedical and Biological Sciences at the University of Plymouth. Email:a.jha@plymouth.ac.uk furTher reAding M. N. Canty, T. H. Hutchinson, R. J. Brown, M. B. Jones, A. N. Jha (2009) Linking genotoxic responses with cytotoxic and behavioural or physiological consequences: differential sensitivity of echinoderms (Asterias rubens) and marine molluscs (Mytilus edulis). Aquatic Toxicology 94, 68-76.
Ingo Arndt/Minden Pictures/FLPA
21
akers yeast lives in a broad range of habitats, from grapes and humans to soil and trees. They all belong to the same species, but the yeasts normally used to bake bread, ferment wine, brew sake and those living wild in trees from Asia, Africa or North America are genetically distinct from one another. The domesticated yeasts we use to bake bread are mosaics, a genetic pot-pourri of yeast from different sources, suggesting that humans have helped different yeasts come into contact and cross. These are some of the findings of a recent landmark study reporting on the complete DNA sequences for more than 70 strains of yeast that were produced at the Sanger Institute.
yeast researchers are lucky our favourite species is simple, but close enough to humans that most cutting-edge technologies are tested on it first. Bakers yeast was one of the first species to have its full complement of DNA, its genome, sequenced. The yeast genome project was completed five years before that of humans, because its genome is hundreds of times smaller than our own and so is much cheaper to study. Since then, the cost of such projects has plummeted, and scientists can now get genome data from many representatives of a single species. Methods developed from this pilot study on the humble yeast will be applied to current efforts to study natural variation in the genomes of plants and animals.
Secrets of the mysterious yeast

We depend on yeast for our daily bread, but most people dont give it a second thought. Now, scientists looking at its genes are finding that even this seemingly simple organism is far more complex than theyd ever imagined. Douda Bensasson tells us more.
David Mack/Science Photo Library
22
SECRETS OF THE MYSTERIOUS YEAST
The benefit of genome projects to science rarely ends with their initial purpose, as the data collected can often answer many unanticipated questions. Scientists from a wide range of fields can use the wealth of information in genomes to answer general questions in biology quickly and cheaply. For example, we got involved with this exciting project after responding to a call by the project organisers for researchers to make use of the genome data. We investigated how much of the yeast genome is made up of viral-like DNA, called transposons. Our aim was to ask whether yeasts vary in the amount of these potentially harmful selfish DNA sequences embedded in their genomes. Before the availability of the Sanger data, few could answer this question for any living organism.
Jumping genes
Almost half the human genome is made up of transposon DNA. Active transposons are bits of rogue genetic material; they transpose by hijacking a cells machinery to make copies of themselves. They then insert these copies into other parts of the genome, thus spreading within it. This can be dangerous to the host. A transposition could be lethal if it results in a hop into a gene that is essential for survival, disrupting vital information. Luckily, most transposons in humans are no longer active they are relics of ancient transpositions that occurred many thousands or even millions of years ago. The first look at a complete yeast genome in 1996, that of a single laboratory strain of yeast, revealed that only about a thirtieth of it is transposon. Is this typical for yeast, or just a snapshot of a single yeast strain with transposons that are actively hopping? Analysis of the laboratory strain suggested that some transposons have been there a long time perhaps, as in humans, thousands or even millions of years. So we might expect all yeast strains to have the same set of transposons, relics of genomic strife in ancient ancestors. On the other hand, studies of yeast in the laboratory show that some transposons hop at rates that would suggest large differences between one yeast strain and the next. What we discovered might explain both predictions. All strains of yeast harboured some transposons in their genomes, but some have as much as three times more than others. Surprisingly, the transposon content of the original laboratory yeast outstripped that of any of the 70 other yeast strains sequenced. It seems there are ancient dead transposons in all yeast strains, but the high rates of transposition in the
Adam Hart-Davis/Science Photo Library
The laboratory strain is a hybrid of different kinds of yeast, including one from decaying figs and another from rotting bananas.
stored in freezers in public yeast collections. By defrosting these we can replay history and test whether the proliferation of these parasites was the result of inbreeding, hybridisation or an unfortunate inheritance that persisted due to a sheltered laboratory life. These yeast genomes have yielded many more discoveries, and the wealth of information on these and other genomes will likely keep researchers busy for years to come. One of the ultimate goals is to understand the genetic basis of natural variation within and between species. For example, yeasts vary in their tolerance of heat and cold, or in their production of sulphites, and hence their ability to infect the human body, survive in different parts of the world, or spoil wine. Scientists can now start to use the rapidly growing body of genome data to discover the genetic changes behind this natural variation, and so understand the raw material that lets yeast adapt to changing environments.
lab could be a peculiarity of the lab strain itself. Why is the lab strain riddled with so many transposons? This is also the most domesticated yeast of all, a single strain kept in labs for experiments since the 1930s. Perhaps all yeasts are prone to transposon outbreaks, but normally the most afflicted are doomed. As with other domesticated species, maybe we have cared for this strain so well in the relative safety of the lab that it would struggle to survive in the wild.
Living mosaics
This is not the only possible explanation. We also found that the yeast strains that are mosaics of other strains are more afflicted by transposons than others. For those familiar with transposons this rings some bells. Mosaics are hybrids of genetically distinct ancestors and, in species as diverse as fruitflies and kangaroos, we know that hybridisation between genetically different strains can lead to an explosion of transposon hopping. It seems our genomes are not helpless against these parasites, and that their jumps are normally suppressed. When very different strains within a species cross, this suppression sometimes becomes less efficient. The laboratory strain is a hybrid of different kinds of yeast, and this may be why it has so many transposons. There are experiments we could perform to explain the parasitic burden of the lab strain, which illustrate some of the advantages of yeast research. This lab yeast was born of laboratory crosses between yeast from decaying figs from California, a rotting banana from Costa Rica and yeast used to bake bread. At least one progenitor from each of these sources is
MOre infOrMATiOn Dr Douda Bensasson is a NERC research fellow at University of Manchester. The transposon work was in collaboration with Dr Casey Bergman, also at the University of Manchester. Email: douda.bensasson@manchester.ac.uk furTher reAding The Saccharomyces Genome Resequencing Project was headed by Professor Ed Louis group at the University of Nottingham and Professor Richard Durbin at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. For more about the project, visit its website at www.sanger.ac.uk/Teams/Team118/sgrp/, and see Liti et al (2009) Population genomics of domestic and wild yeasts. Nature 458, 337-341.
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Northern Africa as seen from satellite observations made at different wavelengths on 7 March 2006. The left-hand picture shows visible and near-infrared wavelengths with strong dust emissions showing up as magenta. The right-hand picture shows the same view as seen in the mid-infrared.
Settling dust
Desert dust blown on the wind has a profound effect on the Earths energy balance and climate, but until now its impact has not been routinely measured over the most important global source of dust, the Sahara. Helen Brindley and Jacqui Russell describe how insights from new satellite instruments are changing this.
Dust amount (expressed as optical depth) and its associated impact on the Earths outgoing longwave energy measured from space. The correspondence between dust amount and impact is clearly apparent.
een from space, the Earths climate system is a balance between the incoming shortwave energy from our Sun, which heats the planet, and the outgoing longwave thermal energy emitted back into space, which cools it. Any process that can disturb the balance between these radiative energy fluxes can influence our weather and climate. Wind-blown mineral dust can directly upset that balance. This is both because its presence changes the Earths reflectivity, altering the amount of incoming shortwave energy, and because it can also absorb and scatter longwave radiation, trapping it in the Earths atmosphere. Not surprisingly, the largest sources of wind-blown mineral dust on Earth are found in the Sahara desert, which covers millions of square miles across much of northern Africa. Several recent intrepid aircraft and groundbased campaigns dotted around the region have confirmed that this dust can have a large effect on shortwave and longwave radiative energy fluxes. Studies also suggest that the absorption of radiation by a layer of dust can heat that layer up, altering the temperature structure of the atmosphere. Thus, it can affect regional circulation patterns, influencing important weather phenomena such as the West African monsoon. It may also play a role in suppressing the development of hurricanes. Over longer periods, the changes in land use that climate change is causing for example, desertification could increase dust production and further affect our climate. Given dusts potential importance, it
would be nice to be able to monitor dust over the Sahara and its environs routinely, and simultaneously measure its impact on the Earths energy balance. Long-term satellite records that can be related to the amount of dust over the region are available, but estimates of this dusts effect on radiative energy fluxes are much harder to come by. Where these do exist, they come from instruments on satellites flying in whats known as polar orbit. This means that at most only two observations are available at a given location over the Sahara each day. So, whats different here? Well, we are involved with a relatively new satellite instrument, the Geostationary Earth Radiation Budget (GERB) experiment. As the name implies, the instrument sits in geostationary orbit. This means that it orbits the planet at exactly the same rate as the Earth turns beneath it, and hence looks down on the same part of the world at all times. Fortunately for those of us studying the Sahara, this region happens to be centred on Africa and the Atlantic, stretching out over Europe and parts of Arabia and South America. The instrument measures the total amount of shortwave energy reflected by the Earth, and the total amount of longwave energy emitted back into space, every 15 minutes, and is the first of its kind anywhere in the world. This means we can monitor how the energy balance over the Sahara varies throughout the day.
Dust over the desert

While being able to observe the Earths energy balance continuously is great, without extra
24
SETTLING DUST
information we cant tell what is causing any variations we see. Luckily, there is another instrument flying on the same satellite looking at exactly the same geographical region at the same time, but measuring the energy over several discrete wavelength ranges or channels from visible light to the mid-infrared. Because different climate variables behave differently at different wavelengths it is possible although certainly not easy to use these measurements to distinguish between, say, cloud and dust. Once we know whether or not we have dust at a particular location, the next step is to try to work out how much is there, and to isolate its effect on the energy balance. Over dark surfaces like the ocean, it is relatively straightforward to use observations at visible wavelengths made from a fixed viewpoint to measure the amount of dust from space. However, there is very little contrast between a bright desert surface and airborne dust, so this approach tends to fail over the Sahara. To get round this problem, we have developed a technique which uses observations at mid-infrared wavelengths rather than relying on visible light. We use two channels, one which is relatively transparent, meaning that on a clear, non-dusty day the satellite instrument effectively sees down to the Earths surface, and one which sees a little higher in the atmosphere. When dust is present, it partially blocks the surface channel, but it has less effect on the other channel. We can relate the signals we see in the two channels to what we expect from theory to obtain a measure of the amount of dust. Comparisons
We have developed a technique which uses observations at mid-infrared wavelengths rather than relying on visible light.
with available ground-based measurements using this approach show good agreement, giving us confidence that it works. To estimate the corresponding dust effect on the radiative energy fluxes, previous work has tended to compare dusty with non-dusty measurements made at the same location but at a different time. But because a large dust event will often be associated with a change in meteorological conditions for example, an influx of very dry air and because these changes will themselves alter the longwave energy fluxes, we have developed a method to account for these changes in order to isolate the dust signal. The results so far indicate that this approach is better at picking out the effect of the dust alone, and highlight some interesting discrepancies with the earlier studies that warrant further investigation. Whats next? So far we have implemented our method off-line, or outside of the usual satellite data processing chains. Fortunately, it is relatively simple and quick to run, so we aim to incorporate it into routine processing operations carried out by our project partners in Belgium. This should let us build up an extensive set of data relatively quickly, which, after quality control, will be available for the scientific community to use. Other plans include a project with colleagues at the UK Meteorological Office to investigate whether dust has a significant impact on regional weather forecast quality, and to test how far the forecast model can match the observed energy fluxes. We also plan to use the satellite-derived records in a forthcoming research campaign to obtain the first observationally-based characterisation of the Saharan Heat Low a region which is currently particularly poorly understood, is believed to be strongly affected by dust, and which may exert an important influence not just on the local climate, but also that of the Mediterranean, southern Europe and further afield.
MOre infOrMATiOn Dr Helen Brindley is a NERC advanced fellow in atmospheric physics at Imperial College, London. Email: h.brindley@imperial.ac.uk Dr Jacqui Russell is a research fellow and GERB project scientist. Email: j.e.russell@imperial.ac.uk
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Ocean of Bliss
Or, three days in search of stakeholder engagement
The voyage of the

Wandering the mangrove swamps of West Africa by night isnt the usual way of getting insights into ecosystem services. But as Richard Wadsworth describes, when youre trying to find out just how local people use the resources around them, unconventional methods can be called for.
J-C&D Pratt/Photononstop/Photolibrary.com
ets go to Nitti. But I didnt think you wanted to go to Nitti. I dont, but if we get there at least well know where we are! Were lost in the mangroves in Sierra Leone. Well, not exactly lost between the six of us on the boat weve four hand-held GPS units, so we know precisely where we are, but as we dont have a map or a chart this information is of precisely no use to us. Were sitting in a pam pam (a large motorised sea-going canoe) at the junction of two rivers in the last big mangrove forest in Sierra Leone. The sun set two hours ago and on both sides the mangroves are rising like a black wall 20 or 30 metres tall straight out of the river. About the only thing thats going well for us is that it is three days before the full moon so theres some light to see by and so far weve managed to spot the fishing nets stretched across the rivers before getting the propeller tangled in them. The captain has never been to this part of the country before, and it turns out that the guide wed hired in Shenge hasnt actually ever visited (let alone navigated to) any of the places he can name. Were sailing around in the mangroves trying to assess what ecosystem services the local
communities think the mangroves are providing. We are interested in how the villagers use the mangroves, how they decide who can use them, what biodiversity is still there and, most importantly, why these forests still exist when so many other mangroves in the country have been cleared. The mangrove forests of the Shabro River estuary cover about 700km2 with three or four times that area of sand, mud and water. It is the easternmost forest of the West African mangroves with nothing of comparable size between here and Nigeria. A major problem which has emerged on the trip is that every time we turn the Ocean of Bliss towards some fishermen, they take one look at us, paddle as fast as they can towards the mangroves, drag their boat into the trees and hide. We then have to sit on the prow of our boat and shout at them that we need help until finally one is willing to come close enough to hold a shouted conservation. Ive been visiting and working in farming villages in Sierra Leone off and on since 1981 and Ive never encountered anything like this before. Why are they behaving like this? we ask; the useless guide declares that they are frightened of pirates. A day later we discover that the Government Fisheries Officers
are seizing monofilament fishing nets as a conservation measure and promising to come back later with replacement cotton nets. The cunning plan was that we should spend the night in a fishing village so we would have the whole evening to gradually get to know the locals. It turns out that the size of many of the villages is determined by the amount of dry(ish) land that they have, so housing density is extremely high. Plus, of course, all the men and boys will be out at night fishing, so the idea of leaving six strange men in the village is not appealing to them. Long after almost everybody had gone to bed (and having gone past Nitti three times) we arrived at the important market town of Gbangatok right on the edge of the mangroves. Fortunately it wasnt a market day and even more fortunately someone felt sorry enough for us to find us a room.
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THE VOYAGE OF THE OCEAN OF BLISS
Local lessons
So, by the end of the trip what had we discovered? Well, firstly that the fishing communities are fundamentally different to farming communities and that there is little overlap in the two livelihoods; once youve invested in a boat and a net you need to use them full time to get your money back before they decay. That you can easily conduct an interview in Krio (the lingua franca for trade), but to have a conversation on a complex subject like ecosystem services you need Mende, the local vernacular. That drinking water is a serious problem; we met women paddling canoes filled with battas (25-litre plastic containers). They had paddled for a couple of hours, beached the canoes, walked inland, filled the containers, carried them back and now had a few hours paddling back to the village with the weeks water supply. That the government is having an effect on the local fishermen with the ban on monofilament nets, but not on the foreignowned trawlers, although perhaps we should take comfort from the fact that one of the trawlers tried to sink us at least they knew they shouldnt be there. That the swamps are in remarkably good condition with little competition for forest resources; the short scrubby mangroves that surround many of the villages are a particular species (red mangrove, Rhizophora mangle) and an indication of drier conditions, not of harvesting as the fishermen prefer to cut the bigger single-stemmed species (black mangrove, Rhizophora racemosa and Avicennia germinans). That despite the number of fishermen there are still manatees, crocodiles and dolphins in the estuary and there is diverse and vibrant bird life. The local people value the ecosystem services delivered by the mangroves, but sadly this is not true of the foreign-owned trawlers. The voyage of the Ocean of Bliss was funded as part of the activities of the Darwin Initiative Project, sustainable mining in Sierra Leone, under our conservation offsets work package. Id especially like to thank Dr Abu Sundufu of Njala University for his insights and help during the trip. Id also like to thank Tommy Garnett and Abdul Jalloh of the Environmental Foundation for Africa for logistical and material support.
MOre infOrMATiOn Dr Richard Wadsworth is a mathematical modeller at the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology in Lancaster. Email: rawad@ceh.ac.uk Mangrove trees provide an additional income to the fishermen.
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Afloat on a sea of noise

Global geophysicists map the Earths interior using seismic waves. But until recently the oceans have been largely off-limits. Frederik Simons describes creating a floating instrument that he hopes will change that.
ack in 2002, when I was a freshly minted PhD en route from MIT to Princeton for post-doctoral work, I received a brown envelope in the mail, marked confidential. It was Guust Nolet letting me in on a pet project and long-time dream of his to build a versatile earthquake recorder for use in the oceans. I decided making this happen was going to be my thing. At the time, much of my research was devoted to seismic tomography the science, and art, of making three-dimensional maps of how fast seismic waves propagate inside the Earth. Wave speeds vary according to the composition of the rocks they pass through, and also according to temperature and pressure. So seismic CAT scans can be interpreted to yield clues on the structure and evolution of the Earths deep interior. What we know of the fate of subducting slabs (where tectonic plates sink into the mantle), the role of mantle plumes (where hot material rises up to the surface), or the detailed structure of the inner core, is partly thanks to seismic tomography. Much of the Earths crust, mantle and core have now been studied this way, by oil companies looking for oil and gas in the shallow subsurface using explosives, and by global geophysicists looking thousands of kilometres into the planet with earthquake sources and recorders, sophisticated broadband seismometers, on much of the available land surface including some ocean islands. Theres the rub. There just isnt enough dry land to ensure adequate coverage its as if the terrestrial MRI machine has had three quarters
of its detectors knocked out by flooding. Putting earthquake detectors on the ocean floor is an enormously expensive undertaking. Its being tried with considerable success, but its hard to imagine this leading to large-scale and long-term networked arrays on a par with what
There just isnt enough dry land to ensure adequate coverage its as if the terrestrial MRI machine has had three quarters of its detectors knocked out by flooding.
we have available on the continents. In the few years following my receipt of the brown envelope, first together at Princeton University and subsequently, for me, at University College London, Guust and I worked with scientists and engineers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography to put together a truly novel instrument. From the ocean scientists we borrowed the technology known as SOLO floats. Short for Sounding Oceanographic Lagrangian Observers, these can drift at depths of anywhere between the surface and about 1500m. Currently, well over 3000 similar instruments are floating at large, measuring conductivity, temperature and depth in a largescale multinational effort to contribute data to study how the oceans influence and regulate our climate. Onto our own SOLO float we grafted
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AFLOAT ON A SEA OF NOISE
a hydrophone, an off-the-shelf instrument that detects sound waves underwater effectively, a single-component seismometer. In principle, our MERMAID Mobile Earthquake Recording in Marine Areas by Independent Divers was now born.
Sounds of the sea

In fact, the research had just started. Turns out that seismologists are much more demanding than oceanographers. To be of use to global seismology, the water pressure variations that may contain the tiny signals due to distant earthquakes have to be logged at a rate of 20 samples per second recorded, filtered, analysed and reported in real time. A demanding task for an instrument whose battery energy is both finite and small, due to space and weight restrictions. Moreover, if the instrument oscillates by as little as a millimetre relative to its equilibrium cruising depth, this might be falsely interpreted as a sign of earthquake activity. This could unnecessarily trigger the costly resurfacing procedure. Ideally, MERMAID would spend as much time as possible hunting for signals, coming up only to report interesting (deep and distant) earthquakes, while turning a deaf ear to the noise caused by the uninteresting ones. Not to mention the sounds of storms, whales or passing ships. Rapid, precise identification of the signal, exact timing and location accuracy, and a high signal-to-noise ratio are of vital importance for the improvement of seismic tomography. After all, we are trying to map three-dimensional
seismic wave speed variations that may be only as small as one per cent of the global average. In the meantime I had moved to University College London, and with the help of the Nuffield Foundation and a NERC New Investigator Grant I set about designing algorithms that could identify and pick out arriving seismic sounds, efficiently and reliably, from a sea of noise. I quickly settled on a mathematical technique called wavelet analysis. Wavelets are the fundamental building blocks of time series, and thus also of noisy seismograms. What wavelets have on more traditional ways of analysing and representing information such as the Fourier transform is that they can be calculated with great speed. Also, wavelet transforms mean only a very small number of coefficients are needed to represent the signal at hand very faithfully. Not surprisingly, the FBI in the US use wavelets to store and search through vast databases of fingerprints, and these days most cameras use them to compress and denoise digital pictures. With these algorithms onboard, MERMAID can quickly filter through the incoming stream of sound, identify seismic arrivals that could be useful for seismic tomography, and send the results as a series of small messages to one of the many IRIDIUM satellites, which will relay them to land. We tested the MERMAID prototype at sea on numerous occasions, and it works! Many further tests await, however, before our dream of building a fleet of such devices to collect large quantities of new seismic waveforms
from previously inaccessible oceanic areas will become a reality. For one thing, we are planning tests in different and less hospitable areas than our relatively cushy spot offshore La Jolla, California. The software needs to be more fully integrated with the instrument, and the next model will have a GPS receiver and an IRIDIUM transmitter on board. While I have moved from Europe back to Princeton, in the United States, the development of MERMAID continues on both continents, as Guust moved to the University of Nice in Sophia Antipolis, where he received a large sum from the European Research Council. As for me, I hope to keep the US National Science Foundation and any other organisations interested in funding my work. In Bud Vincent from the University of Rhode Island I have found an additional partner to help bring seismic data acquisition to the seas. The Son-o-Mermaid, our latest brainchild, will take the concept several steps further with the addition of a green energy source based on water wave motion, a full-ocean depth fathometer, and not one but three hydrophones mounted in sequence. But thats a story for another issue.
MOre infOrMATiOn Dr Frederik Simons is assistant professor of geophysics at Princeton University. Email: fjsimons@alum.mit.edu, www.frederik.net
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Pounds, shillings & pence

ExxonMobil used a valuation method to identify damage costs and settle compensation claims following the Exxon Valdez disaster.
How much are natural resources worth? It's a knotty question, but finding the answer could help us conserve them more effectively. Caroline Hattam sets out the latest thinking on how to put a value on the environment.
ardly a week goes by without an environmental story hitting the newspaper headlines. Its clear from this that the environment is important to us and we value the resources it provides. But how much do we value it, and is there a way to quantify this value? Value takes many forms: an object or resource has a market value when it is sold, but this same object also has an aesthetic value as well as a social and intellectual value. This makes it hard to decide what its full value is. So consider how difficult it must be when scientists want to estimate the value of biodiversity and natural resources. In late 2008, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) commissioned Plymouth Marine Laboratory to explore how the scientists at the research centres it funds are addressing the challenge of biodiversity and natural-resource valuation. But why would scientists want to value biodiversity and natural resources in the first place? The simple reason is to support environmental management decisions and practice. The idea is that by putting a value on biodiversity and natural resources, especially a monetary value, we can make the decisionmaking playing-field more level. Arguments for or against economic and social plans routinely come with a breakdown of the financial costs and benefits they are likely to generate. If we dont value the consequences of development for biodiversity and natural resources in the same way, many people believe that the environmental arguments for or against the proposal are weaker the real impacts of changes in biodiversity and natural resources are underestimated or even ignored. For example, a proposed new road may be expected to produce economic and social benefits. But building it may also damage local habitats and harm biodiversity. If planners dont
Mark Newman/FLPA
30
POUNDS, SHILLINGS & PENCE
take these costs into account when deciding whether or not to go ahead, they will probably overestimate the roads overall value to society. By applying a common unit of value to environmental, social and economic factors, decision-makers will be better able to appreciate the trade-offs they are making when taking decisions. All the research centres funded by NERC are directly involved in research that contributes to environmental management. But although we did find considerable interest in the valuation
others suggested that biological methods, which provide a summary of biological communities and indicate trends, are more appropriate. Nevertheless, they all recognised that valuation is gaining popularity among decisionmakers and is a field with which they need to engage more fully. Part of the concern that some scientists voiced about the valuation of biodiversity and natural resources is that current valuation methods are limited. Although researchers from across disciplines have been trying to
By putting a value on biodiversity and natural resources, we can make the decision-making playing-field more level.
of biodiversity and natural resources, few are actively involved in valuation research. Many of the research centres already collect data relevant to valuation research from largescale ecosystem monitoring and experiments on ecosystem functions. Some researchers are also involved in developing ecosystem models to explore how biodiversity and other natural resources change over time and space. These models can also simulate how human activities may influence biodiversity and natural resources, and help us understand how the monetary values we place on these resources change as the environment changes. value aspects of the environment since the 1960s, and considerable advances have been made, problems still exist. The monetary values that result can only be estimates and need to be used with caution, especially as the level of uncertainty surrounding these value estimates is difficult to define. Another concern highlighted how we decide how to value the environment. This is often determined by the availability of data, but data of suitable spatial and temporal scales are often lacking. This restricts the choice of method, and so affects the validity of the estimated values we end up with. So what does all this mean for valuation studies and environmental management? The findings from our scoping studies suggest that researchers urgently need to develop and improve existing valuation methods. This must include developing methods that let us incorporate multiple values and engage with multiple stakeholder groups. The gap between the data currently available
and the data that are required also needs closing. This will require close collaboration between natural and social scientists to ensure that those undertaking the valuation exercises work closely with those exploring the fundamental science behind biodiversity and natural resources. We also need better communication between scientists and decision-makers. The latter need to be made more aware of what valuation can and cannot do, of the limitations and uncertainties in the values estimated, and how best to incorporate the estimated values into the decision-making process. Despite these limitations there is a small but growing number of examples where biodiversity and natural resource valuation has already been used to support environmental decisionmaking. Perhaps the most widely-known example is that of water management in New york. The surrounding watersheds of the Catskill, Delaware and Croton supply New york City with about five million litres of water a day. Planners calculated that it would be cheaper to invest in the natural capacity of the watershed to purify water than to build and maintain water treatment works. Similarly, in Ecuador, an electricity company estimated that it is saving $30-40 million on removing obstructions in a hydroelectric dam by investing in watershed conservation that helps stop these blockages happening in the first place, rather than relying on technical fixes. And ExxonMobil set a precedent in the US courts by using a valuation method to identify damage costs and settle compensation liability claims following the Exxon Valdez oil spill. So biodiversity and natural-resource valuation may be in its infancy, but its already making a positive contribution to natural resource and biodiversity management.
MOre infOrMATiOn Dr Caroline Hattam is an environmental economist at Plymouth Marine Laboratory. E-mail: caro4@pml.ac.uk This research was carried out in collaboration with a team of researchers from the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, the British Geological Survey and the University of York. The full reports are available at www.nerc.ac.uk/research/themes/tap/reports/2008/ valuationofbiodiversity.asp and www.nerc.ac.uk/research/themes/tap/reports/2008/ valuationofnatres.asp
Valuing the invaluable?

Not all researchers we spoke to agreed that placing monetary values on biodiversity and natural resources is necessary. Some felt that for moral and ethical reasons it should not be attempted at all. Some thought that monetary value alone is too limited and fails to capture the full value of an object; while
31
Whats hiding in the basement?

A Royal Society Industry Fellowship has taken Ken McCaffrey from a quiet academic existence in Durham to working in some of the worlds most rugged locales. Tom Marshall talked to him to find out more.
Fieldwork in Azerbaijan in association with BP. The geologist is using a laser scanner to build a detailed topographic model of a fold structure developed in Pliocene-aged sedimentary rocks.
All pictures courtesy BP
few years ago, Dr Ken McCaffrey wanted a change of pace from the life of an academic geologist. He certainly got one. A reader in Durham Universitys Department of Earth Sciences, hes now nearing the end of a four-year research project in collaboration with international energy company BP. Hes spent much of this time looking at how the formation of geological structures that can later fill with oil or gas is conditioned by the older structures theyve formed on top of what geologists call their basement. Traces of basement structures are hard to find, but they can offer crucial insights into how later formations arose and what rock types
they might contain. In Azerbaijan, for example, analysis of basement structures is helping geologists understand relatively young underground structures in which oil is forming. McCaffrey sees his project as combining the strengths of academic and private-sector researchers. Academic geologists have time to develop and refine sophisticated theoretical models of how tectonic plates move and interact. Conversely, exploration all over the world for new oil and gas reserves gives the private sector a wealth of data that most scientists never get to see. BPs project in Libya recently produced one of the biggest datasets ever from a marine
seismic survey, McCaffrey says. By working with them I get instant access to that data, whereas many geologists wont get to see it for years, if at all. Shipborne seismic surveys, which map the structure of the ground under our feet by directing powerful sound waves into it and monitoring how they are reflected back, cost hundreds of millions of pounds. So theyre a rare undertaking in academia, although there are international initiatives supplying data in areas of particular interest. For energy companies, by contrast, such surveys are a routine necessity when looking for new oil- and gas-fields. McCaffrey is working on bringing the
32
WHATS HIDING IN THE BASEMENT?
BPs Clair oil field off Shetland.
View of the Caspian Sea towards the Absheron peninsula in the background. BP Caspian Sea oilfield is in the foreground and is located on an elongate ridge that has formed along a basement fault zone between the Eurasian and Arabian tectonic plates. Pipelines can be seen connecting the field to terminals on the coast.
two sets of expertise together, combining the latest academic theoretical insights with the three-dimensional maps that BPs seismic data can create. In effect, hes applying the latest theoretical insights to new data from comparatively little-explored regions. The results wont just help future efforts to find fossil-fuel reserves theyll also shed light on much wider questions about how the Earths crust developed. The research is still primarily academic in focus it wont directly influence BPs day-today commercial decision-making. But in the long term, McCaffrey hopes itll improve our understanding of where to look for oil and gas. BP recently negotiated agreements to drill in Azerbaijan, based partly on analysis and mapping involving McCaffrey. And its now planning where to drill its first exploratory boreholes in Libya a decision that McCaffreys work will influence. Increasingly oil and gas reserves held within the basement rocks themselves are being targeted for exploration. An example is the Clair Field, west of Shetland, which is the biggest on the UK continental shelf. Here, knowledge of basement structures is directly relevant to how much oil or gas a field can produce. Knowledge of basement structures could also help us forecast and manage the effects of geohazards like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions or landslides. Even in the UK, for example, there are places where old faults have been put under stress by present-day tectonic forces, McCaffrey explains. Where there is a basement component it can mean these faults behave in a different way from what youd normally expect; you get unusual earthquakes that happen on different cycles
Our work will be useful for making better hazard maps, an important consideration for any future carbon or radioactive waste storage facilities.
from what youd otherwise expect. So our work will be useful for making better hazard maps, an important consideration for any future carbon or radioactive waste storage facilities in the UK and elsewhere The idea for the project arose after a chance meeting at a conference in 2005. McCaffrey had worked with BP before, and on running into one of their employees whod been a PhD student alongside him, he happened to mention he was looking for a break from the academic routine. They suggested he should come to work at BP for a while. Serendipitously, a few days later McCaffrey spotted an advertisement in his department for the Royal Society Industry Fellowship scheme, which supports collaboration between academics and the private sector. A grant application later, he found himself working in BPs headquarters alongside their petroleum geologists. This has certainly provided the change of pace he was hoping for; working with BP has taken him over the world, to places including Libya, Azerbaijan, Canada and Brazil. And hes developed a new respect for the speed at which private companies must make decisions waiting a few years to gather all possible evidence before making a decision simply isnt an option. He says hed recommend the scheme to any scientist looking to expand their horizons. There have been difficulties, of course. He undertook his fellowship part time, so hes had to juggle two jobs at different ends of the country Durham and Sunbury-on-Thames. On top of family commitments, this has proved tiring and occasionally difficult. I have sometimes found myself asking why BP couldnt be based somewhere in yorkshire, he admits. These are minor objections, though. There are immense benefits Ive gained huge insight into parts of the world Ive never been able to study before. And its been incredibly invigorating to take a break from the cycle of lectures, exam marking and teaching, says McCaffrey. Most people go off on sabbatical and write a book or something, he continues. Ive acquired a huge new pile of knowledge, and it should improve my teaching and research for years to come.
MOre infOrMATiOn Dr Ken McCaffrey is a reader in the Department of Earth Sciences at Durham University. Email: k.j.w.mccaffrey@durham.ac.uk. To find out more about Royal Society Industry Fellowships, visit http://royalsociety.org/funding.asp?id=1125
33
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