The summary, which is part of a comprehensive effort called the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP), was published in a recent special issue of Science of the Total Environment. Bjørn Munro Jenssen, a professor of biology at NTNU, was one of the authors of the summary, which reports in part on his work with polar bears on Svalbard.
While researchers could not document strong evidence that contaminants such as PCBs and DDT were adversely affecting animals throughout the Arctic, other factors, such as the impact of climate change, disease and the invasion of new species will affect the overall exposure that each animal has to pollutants. Climate change, in particular, will affect sea ice distribution and temperatures. This will in turn cause food web changes and changes in nutrition, which led the researchers to list animals at the highest risk from contaminant exposure.
The Arctic wildlife and fish considered to be most at risk are: Polar bears in East Greenland, Svalbard and Hudson Bay, killer whales in Alaska and northern Norway, several species of gulls and other seabirds from the Svalbard area, northern Norway, East Greenland, the Kara Sea, and the Canadian central high Arctic, ringed seals from East Greenland, and a few populations of Arctic char and Greenland shark.

“These calculations show that biochar can play a significant role in the solution for the planet’s climate change challenge,” said study co-author Jim Amonette, a soil chemist at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “Biochar offers one of the few ways we can create power while decreasing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. And it improves food production in the world’s poorest regions by increasing soil fertility. It’s an amazing tool.”
The study is the most thorough and comprehensive analysis to date on the global potential of biochar. The carbon-packed substance was first suggested as a way to counteract climate change in 1993. Scientists and policymakers have given it increasing attention in the past few years. The study was conducted by Dominic Woolf and Alayne Street-Perrott of Swansea University in Wales, U.K., Johannes Lehmann of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., Stephen Joseph of the University of New South Wales, Australia, and Amonette.
Biochar is made by decomposing biomass like plants, wood and other organic materials at high temperature in a process called slow pyrolysis. Normally, biomass breaks down and releases its carbon into the atmosphere within a decade or two. But biochar is more stable and can hold onto its carbon for hundreds or even thousands of years, keeping greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide out of the air longer. Other biochar benefits include: improving soils by increasing their ability to retain water and nutrients; decreasing nitrous oxide and methane emissions from the soil into which it is tilled; and, during the slow pyrolysis process, producing some bio-based gas and oil that can offset emissions from fossil fuels.
Making biochar sustainably requires heating mostly residual biomass with modern technologies that recover energy created during biochar’s production and eliminate the emissions of methane and nitrous oxide, the study also noted.
Crunching numbers and biomass
For their study, the researchers looked to the world’s sources of biomass that aren’t already being used by humans as food. For example, they considered the world’s supply of corn leaves and stalks, rice husks, livestock manure and yard trimmings, to name a few. The researchers then calculated the carbon content of that biomass and how much of each source could realistically be used for biochar production.
With this information, they developed a mathematical model that could account for three possible scenarios. In one, the maximum possible amount of biochar was made by using all sustainably available biomass. Another scenario involved a minimal amount of biomass being converted into biochar, while the third offered a middle course. The maximum scenario required significant changes to the way the entire planet manages biomass, while the minimal scenario limited biochar production to using biomass residues and wastes that are readily available with few changes to current practices.
Amonette and his colleagues found that the maximum scenario could offset up to the equivalent of 1.8 petagrams — or 1.8 billion metric tons — of carbon emissions annually and a total of 130 billion metric tons throughout in the first 100 years. Avoided emissions include the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. The estimated annual maximum offset is 12 percent of the 15.4 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions that human activity adds to the atmosphere each year. Researchers also calculated that the minimal scenario could sequester just under 1 billion metric tons annually and 65 billion metric tons during the same period.
But to achieve any of these offsets is no small task, Amonette noted.
“This can’t be accomplished with half-hearted measures,” Amonette said. “Using biochar to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at these levels is an ambitious project that requires significant commitments from the general public and government. We will need to change the way we value the carbon in biomass.”
Experiencing the full benefits of biochar will take time. The researchers’ model shows it will take several decades to ramp up biochar production to its maximum possible level. Greenhouse gas offsets would continue past the century mark, but Amonette and colleagues just calculated for the first 100 years.
Biochar and bioenergy work together
Instead of making biochar, biomass can also be burned to produce bioenergy from heat. Researchers found that burning the same amount of biomass used in their maximum biochar scenario would offset 107 billion metric tons of carbon emissions during the first century. The bioenergy offset, while substantial, was 23 metric tons less than the offset from biochar. Researchers attributed this difference to a positive feedback from the addition of biochar to soils. By improving soil conditions, biochar increases plant growth and therefore creates more biomass for biochar productions. Adding biochar to soils can also decrease nitrous oxide and methane emissions that are naturally released from soil.
However, Amonette and his co-authors wrote that a flexible approach including the production of biochar in some areas and bioenergy in others would create optimal greenhouse gas offsets. Their study showed that biochar would be most beneficial if it were tilled into the planet’s poorest soils, such as those in the tropics and the Southeastern United States.
Those soils, which have lost their ability to hold onto nutrients during thousands of years of weathering, would become more fertile with the extra water and nutrients the biochar would help retain. Richer soils would increase the crop and biomass growth — and future biochar sources — in those areas. Adding biochar to the most infertile cropland would offset greenhouse gases by 60 percent more than if bioenergy were made using the same amount of biomass from that location, the researchers found.
On the other hand, the authors wrote that bioenergy production could be better suited for areas that already have rich soils — such as the Midwest — and that also rely on coal for energy. Their analysis showed that bioenergy production on fertile soils would offset the greenhouse gas emissions of coal-fired power plants by 16 to 22 percent more than biochar in the same situation.
Plantations need not apply
The study also shows how sustainable practices can make the biochar that creates these offsets.
“The scientific community has been split on biochar,” Amonette acknowledged. “Some think it’ll ruin biodiversity and require large biomass plantations. But our research shows that won’t be the case if the right approach is taken.”
The authors’ estimates of avoided emissions were developed by assuming no agricultural or previously unmanaged lands will be converted for biomass crop production. Other sustainability criteria included leaving enough biomass residue on the soil to prevent erosion, not using crop residues currently eaten by livestock, not adding biochar made from treated building materials to agricultural soils and requiring that only modern pyrolysis technologies — those that fully recover energy released during the process and eliminate soot, methane and nitrous oxide emissions — be used for biochar production.
“Roughly half of biochar’s climate-mitigation potential is due to its carbon storage abilities,” Amonette said. “The rest depends on the efficient recovery of the energy created during pyrolysis and the positive feedback achieved when biochar is added to soil. All of these are needed for biochar to reach its full sustainable potential.
The study was funded by the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy, the Cooperative State Research Service of the Department of Agriculture, the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, the United Kingdom’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), and VenEarth Group LLC.

“In the early morning hours of August 5, 2010, an ice island four times the size of Manhattan was born in northern Greenland,” said Andreas Muenchow, associate professor of physical ocean science and engineering at the University of Delaware’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment. Muenchow’s research in Nares Strait, between Greenland and Canada, is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Satellite imagery of this remote area at 81 degrees N latitude and 61 degrees W longitude, about 620 miles [1,000 km] south of the North Pole, reveals that Petermann Glacier lost about one-quarter of its 43-mile long [70 km] floating ice-shelf.

Trudy Wohlleben of the Canadian Ice Service discovered the ice island within hours after NASA’s MODIS-Aqua satellite took the data on Aug. 5, at 8:40 UTC (4:40 EDT), Muenchow said. These raw data were downloaded, processed, and analyzed at the University of Delaware in near real-time as part of Muenchow’s NSF research.

Petermann Glacier, the parent of the new ice island, is one of the two largest remaining glaciers in Greenland that terminate in floating shelves. The glacier connects the great Greenland ice sheet directly with the ocean.

The new ice island has an area of at least 100 square miles and a thickness up to half the height of the Empire State Building.

“The freshwater stored in this ice island could keep the Delaware or Hudson rivers flowing for more than two years. It could also keep all U.S. public tap water flowing for 120 days,” Muenchow said.

The island will enter Nares Strait, a deep waterway between northern Greenland and Canada where, since 2003, a University of Delaware ocean and ice observing array has been maintained by Muenchow with collaborators in Oregon (Prof. Kelly Falkner), British Columbia (Prof. Humfrey Melling), and England (Prof. Helen Johnson).

“In Nares Strait, the ice island will encounter real islands that are all much smaller in size,” Muenchow said. “The newly born ice-island may become land-fast, block the channel, or it may break into smaller pieces as it is propelled south by the prevailing ocean currents. From there, it will likely follow along the coasts of Baffin Island and Labrador, to reach the Atlantic within the next two years.”

The last time such a massive ice island formed was in 1962 when Ward Hunt Ice Shelf calved a 230 square-mile island, smaller pieces of which became lodged between real islands inside Nares Strait. Petermann Glacier spawned smaller ice islands in 2001 (34 square miles) and 2008 (10 square miles). In 2005, the Ayles Ice Shelf disintegrated and became an ice island (34 square miles) about 60 miles to the west of Petermann Fjord.

A new study has found geochemical clues near the summit of Mauna Kea that tell a story of ancient glacier formation, the influence of the most recent ice age, more frequent major storms in Hawaii, and the impact of a distant climatic event that changed much of the world.
The research was published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters by scientists from Oregon State University, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, University of British Columbia and U.S. Geological Survey. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation.
“Mauna Kea had a large glacial ice cap of about 70 square kilometers until 14,500 years ago, which has now all disappeared,” said Peter Clark, a professor of geosciences at OSU. “We’ve been able to use new data to determine specifically when, where and most likely why the glacier existed and then disappeared.”
Mauna Kea, at 13,803 feet above sea level, is in a sense the tallest mountain in the world because it rises 30,000 feet from the sea floor. Dormant for thousands of years, it once featured a large glacier on its massive peak at the height of the last ice age about 21,000 years ago. As the ice age ended and the global climate warmed, the glacier began to disappear.
However, the new research found that the glacier on Mauna Kea began to re-advance to almost its ice age size about 15,400 years ago. That coincides almost exactly with a major slowdown of what scientists call the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, or AMOC, in the North Atlantic Ocean.
The AMOC is part of a global ocean circulation system that carries heat from the tropics to the North Atlantic. This transported heat is the primary reason that much of Europe is warmer in the winter than would be expected, given the latitude of the continent.
Studies of past climate change indicate that the AMOC has slowed a number of times, in surprisingly short periods, causing substantial cooling of Europe. Because of that, the potential future decline of the current is of considerable interest.
But scientists have found that the AMOC does more than just keep northern Europe habitable. Its effects can extend far beyond that.
“The new data from Mauna Kea, along with other findings from geological archives preserved in oceans and lakes in many other areas, show that the decline of the AMOC basically caused climate changes all over the world,” Clark said. “These connections are pretty remarkable, a current pattern in the North Atlantic affecting glacier development thousands of miles away in the Hawaiian Islands.
“The global impact of the AMOC changes,” Clark added, “was just massive.”
The formation, size and movement of glaciers can provide valuable data, he said, because these characteristics reflect current and historic changes in temperature, precipitation or both.
The study concludes that the growth of the Mauna Kea glacier caused by the AMOC current changes was a result of both colder conditions and a huge increase of precipitation on Mauna Kea — triple that of the present — that scientists believe may have been caused by more frequent cyclonic storm events hitting the Hawaiian Islands from the north.
The findings were supported by measurements of an isotope of helium being produced in boulders left by the Mauna Kea glacier thousands of years ago. The amount of this helium isotope reveals when the boulders were finally uncovered by ice and exposed to the atmosphere.
The deposits containing the boulders are the only record of glaciation in the northern subtropical Pacific Ocean. Nearby Mauna Loa probably also was glaciated, but evidence of its glaciation has since been destroyed by volcanic eruptions.
The study by Clark and colleagues provides additional evidence that rapid changes in the AMOC can trigger widespread global change. Some past abrupt decreases in the AMOC have been linked to an increase of freshwater flowing off the continents into the North Atlantic.
The potential under global warming for increases in freshwater from melting ice and changes in precipitation patterns have heightened concerns about the AMOC and related climate effects in the future, researchers said.

Led by Denmark and the United States, and comprised of scientists from 14 countries, the NEEM team has been working to get at the ice near bedrock level because that ice dates back to the Eemian interglacial period, about 115,000 to 130,000 years ago, when temperatures on Earth were warmer by as much as 5 degrees Fahrenheit than they are today. The Eemian period ice cores should yield a host of information about conditions on Earth during that time of abrupt climate change, giving climate scientists valuable data about future conditions as our own climate changes.

“Scientists from 14 countries have come together in a common effort to provide the science our leaders and policy makers need to plan for our collective future,” said Jim White, director of University of Colorado at Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research and an internationally known ice core expert. White was the lead U.S. investigator on the project, and his work there was supported primarily by the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs. Other U.S. institutions collaborating on the NEEM effort include Oregon State University, Penn State, the University of California, San Diego, and Dartmouth College.

Greenland is covered by an ice sheet thousands of feet thick that built up over millennia as layers of snow and ice formed. The layers contain information about atmospheric conditions that existed when they were originally formed, including how warm and moist the air was, and the concentrations of various greenhouse gases. While three previous Greenland ice cores drilled in the past 20 years covered the last ice age and the period of warming to the present, the deeper ice layers, representing the warm Eemian and the period of transition to the ice age were compressed and folded, making them difficult to interpret, said White.

After radar measurements taken through the ice sheet from above indicated that the Eemian ice layers below the NEEM site were thicker, more intact and likely contained more accurate and specific information, researchers began setting up an extensive state-of-the-art research facility there. Despite being located in one of the most remote and harsh places on Earth, the NEEM team constructed a large dome, the drilling rig for extracting three-inch-diameter ice cores, drilling trenches, laboratories and living quarters, and officially started drilling in June 2009.

According to Simon Stephenson, Director of the Arctic Sciences Division at NSF, the accomplishment at NEEM “is important because the ability to measure gases and dust trapped in the ice at high resolution is likely to provide new insight into how the global climate changes naturally, and will help us constrain climate models used to predict the future.” Stephenson added that the NEEM ice cores will allow scientists to measure conditions in the past with more specificity–down to single years.

“We are delighted that the NEEM project has completed the drilling through the ice-sheet,” Stephenson said. “This has been a very successful international collaboration, and NSF is pleased to have supported the U.S. component.”

Accurate climate models based in part on the data collected at NEEM could play an important role in helping human civilization adapt to a changing climate. During the Eemian period, for example, the Greenland ice sheet was much smaller, and global sea levels were about 15 feet higher than they are today, a height that would swamp many major cities around the world.

Now that drilling is complete, scientists will continue to study the core samples and analyze other data they have collected. For his part, White hopes the NEEM project establishes a blueprint for future scientific collaborations.

“I hope that NEEM is a foretaste of the kind of cooperation we need for the future,” White said, “because we all share the world.”

“The warming in the Red Sea and the resultant decline in the health of this coral is a clear regional impact of global warming,” said Neal E. Cantin, a WHOI postdoctoral investigator and co-lead researcher on the project. In the 1980s, he said, “the average summer [water] temperatures were below 30 degrees Celsius. In 2008 they were approaching 31 degrees.”
Cantin and WHOI Research Specialist Anne L. Cohen, the other lead investigator, said the findings were unexpected because D. heliopora did not exhibit one of the typical signs of thermal stress: bleaching. “These corals looked healthy,” said Cohen.
But CT scanning of the coral’s skeletal structure in the laboratory revealed “the secrets that the skeletons are hiding,” she said. “The CT scans reveal that these corals have actually been under chronic stress for the last 10 years, and that the rates of growth were the lowest in 2008,” the final year of the study.
The other WHOI researchers who participated in the study are climate dynamicist Kristopher B. Karnauskas, coral biologist Ann M. Tarrant and chemical oceanographer Daniel C. McCorkle.
Cohen and WHOI graduate student Casey Saenger had previously used CT scanning to quantify skeletal growth in Atlantic corals, but she credits Cantin with “pioneering” the technique for this type of oceanographic research. “He really took it to another level,” she said. “What Neal really did was to adapt the imaging software, previously developed for bodies, specifically for our coral needs. This was an excruciatingly difficult task but it certainly paid off. We could not have used conventional techniques on this coral. The skeletal architecture is too complicated.”
Historically, scientists have used x-rays to examine coral skeletons, which display annual growth bands much like tree rings, Cantin explained. But that method usually entails cutting into the skeleton, he said. CT allows non-invasive 3-D observation of the skeletons and bands.
“The biggest advantage we have over x ray is that we can scan intact cores without cutting the core into thin slices,” said Cantin. “Since corals do not grow in a straight line, when the core is cut, inevitably the growth axis will be lost from a thin cut. Maintaining the vertical growth axis is crucial for us to visualize the annual density banding patterns.
“With CT scanning we are able to work with a complete 3-D reconstruction of the entire core. We can then make digital slices from the core, as many times as we need to in order to continually visualize the annual density bands. CT scanning is the evolution of x-ray.”
With CT, adds Cohen, “We have a 3-D visualization of the skeleton from which we can make ‘virtual’ cuts on the computer that have the exact thickness, orientation and location that we need for a particular coral to get the most precise measurements. X-ray requires that we cut the core ‘blind’ beforehand, before we know what the orientation of growth is. Whole cores can be sacrificed this way. With CAT scanning, our cores are imaged intact, nothing else is required. This is a huge leap forward over x-ray.”
Like MDs diagnosing a sick patient, the researchers scanned six skeletal cores of D. heliopora and were able to pinpoint two high-density growth bands, indicating high thermal stress in 1998 and 2001. This correlates with an abrupt drop in skeletal growth after 1998, which has continued steadily since then.
The corals are building skeleton, or calcifying, at a progressively slower rate because they are losing symbiotic algae that live in the coral tissue. By performing photosynthesis, the algae provide the fuel for the corals to make new skeleton.
But, says Cohen, “when the corals are thermally stressed, they lose algae and many will eventually starve and die. When corals lose enough algae, they actually turn white, and that’s what bleaching is. We think these corals are on their way to bleaching.”
It was the CT technique that enabled early detection of the problem. “The corals look healthy, but looking inside at the skeleton gives you an idea of things to come,” she said. “It’s like osteoporosis. You look at a person and, on the outside, everything seems fine, but inside there are signs of trouble.
The same corals had a similar reaction to a “warm event” in 1941-42 but recovered within three years as the ocean cooled. The recovery was possible because that warming episode was probably triggered by El Nino, a natural, short-term climate anomaly.
In contrast, the current warming trend — which Cantin says has been going on since 1980–”is due to human-induced climate change,” he says, and appears unlikely to be slowed or reversed before coral health deteriorates further. Climate models from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predict that “summer temperatures in the central Red Sea will continue to rise as atmospheric CO2 concentration rises through the 21st century,” the WHOI researchers report in Science.
Co-author Karnauskas concurs that there is little doubt that the Red Sea phenomenon is attributable to long-term climate change. “El Nino events typically last about one year, and in a few rare cases last for two years.,” he says. “El Nino–and its ‘cold’ counterpart, La Nina–are quite well known with a very distinct signature in the Pacific Ocean, where they originate. In the past few decades, there have been several El Nino and La Nina events.
“Therefore, there is no way El Nino could account for a ‘trend’ that persists for decades. These are simply superimposed upon the human/CO2-induced warming trend. There is probably nobody in the scientific community who would argue the rising temperatures in the Red Sea are related to El Nino. So, in the past few decades, the Red Sea temperature has been going up just like the global mean temperature, and the corals are suffering accordingly.”
The IPCC models forecast another 2.5-3-degree C rise in Red Sea temperature by the end of the 21st century. But the authors project that D. heliopora will cease calcifying altogether by 2070, when the models predict that temperatures will reach 1.85 degrees C higher than they are now.
Even that “is probably a conservative estimate,” they say. Cohen suggests the end for this species of Red Sea coral may come as early as 2050.
The scientists point out that the results show that, at least in this case, the culprit is sea surface temperatures and not ocean acidification, another effect of CO2 emissions that has become an increasing concern for scientists.
“We were able to pinpoint temperature as the driver of the declining growth rates because we have long records of skeletal growth going back to around 1930,” Cohen said, “and we were able to correlate skeletal growth with temperature records that span the same time period. We were also able to rule out ocean acidification because we have actual measurements of the aragonite saturation state of seawater–a measure of acidity–at our study sites.
She cautions against drawing conclusions about other coral species based on these results. “This study reports the impact of rising temperature on one coral species,” she says. “It’s an important reef-building coral in the Red Sea, but there are about 250 species of stony corals in this region and we have no idea what the other species are doing. Some might be doing much worse; some might be doing a little better in terms of thermal tolerances. We need much more of this type of work to be able to predict what the coral reefs will look like over the next few decades.”
These corals, Cantin says, have demonstrated that they are capable of recovering from the transient high-temperature event in the early 1940s. “However” he says, “”this species [in this study] has not [recovered] from the last decade of global warming.”
On a long-term scale, he says, “This [CT] technique allows us to assess reef recovery rates without monitoring that reef for 30 years. We can establish an ecological baseline of coral growth for as far back as the corals lived. We can assess this coral colony’s physiological performance back through time.”
But now, for D. heliopora, the outlook appears bleak. “The data in hand suggest that without immediate, aggressive global intervention to reduce carbon emissions,” they conclude in their report, “the pressures of predicted annual heat stress will most certainly result in further deterioration of coral health in the central Red Sea over the next century.”
The work was funded by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.

Tiny free-floating algae called phytoplankton dominate biological production in the world’s oceans and sit at the base of the marine food web. Their population dynamics are controlled by sunlight, nutrient availability, grazing by tiny planktonic animals (zooplankton) and mortality caused by viral infection.
“Viruses are the most abundant organism in the world’s oceans, and it is thought that all phytoplankton species are susceptible to infection. Our aim was to model the interaction between viruses, phytoplankton, zooplankton grazing and nutrient levels,” said Dr Adrian Martin of the National oceanography Centre (NOC), who collaborated in the project with Dr Christopher Rhodes, a bio-mathematician at Imperial College London.
The researchers took an ‘eco-epidemic’ modelling approach, taking into account the mutual interaction between the effects of ecology and disease epidemiology. This approach has been used previously to model the effects of infection by pathogens on the population dynamics of mammals and invertebrate animals.
They considered only the case of lytic viruses, which are the commonest type of virus infecting marine phytoplankton. Lytic viruses inject their DNA into host cells and use the host’s replication machinery to produce new viral particles. The host cell eventually ruptures, releasing the new viruses along with their cell contents, which are incorporated back into the ambient nutrient pool.
The interaction between viruses, phytoplankton, zooplankton grazing and nutrient levels produces subtle feedbacks and complex dynamics, which present a challenge to modellers. Rhodes and Martin therefore used three models of sequentially increasing complexity, so as to understand the key factors driving the dynamics and to increase confidence in the robustness of the model predictions.
The models predict that decreased nutrient levels correspond to high viral infection rates among phytoplankton.
On the other hand, increased nutrient levels are predicted to decrease viral infection rates. This means that more of the carbon contained in phytoplankton would be available to zooplankton and other creatures higher up the food chain.
When these organisms die, a proportion of the associated carbon would sink down to the deep ocean, where it could be locked away for centuries, rather than being released back to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. This mechanism for exporting carbon to the deep ocean is called the biological carbon pump.
Artificial enhancement of the biological carbon pump by fertilizing the oceans with nutrients has been proposed as a possible geo-engineering ‘fix’ for global warming caused by the increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide from anthropogenic sources.
“The decrease in viral infection rates caused by artificially adding nutrients to the sea could in the future benefit humans by increasing the efficiency of the biological carbon pump, making these proposed ocean geo-engineering schemes more viable,” said Dr Rhodes.
The research was supported by the Research Councils of the United Kingdom (RCUK) and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).
The researchers are Christopher Rhodes (Imperial College London) and Adrian Martin (NOC).

“The negative effect of high temperature does not operate in Cane Toads, meaning that toads will do very well with human induced global warming,” explains Professor Frank Seebacher from the University of Sydney.
Unlike fish and other cold-blooded creatures, whose oxygen transport system suffers at high temperatures, the cardiovascular system (heart and lungs) of Cane Toads performs more efficiently.
The researchers present their new findings at the Society for Experimental Biology Annual Conference in Prague on Friday 2nd July 2010.
When tested over an ambient temperature range of 20 — 30 ?C, Cane Toads acclimatised perfectly to increased temperatures and resting oxygen demands remained constant.
Furthermore, the efficiency of the oxygen transport system in the Cane Toad increased with increasing temperature, showing not only an ability to function over a broad thermal range but remarkably, a preference for higher temperatures.
This is in contrast to previous studies suggesting an increase in temperature results in a higher basic oxygen demand, coupled with decreased efficiency of the circulation system, leading to oxygen starvation.
“Warmer temperatures are advantageous and there is no indication that high temperatures limit oxygen delivery,” explained Professor Seebacher.
The scientists say this positive effect may also apply to other anurans (the class of amphibians that includes frogs and toads), but more research needs to be done to find out.
“The impact of global warming doesn’t have to be negative. Global average temperatures at present may in fact be cooler than many animals would like,” explained Professor Seebacher.
“There will be winners and there will be losers but that needs to be judged on a species by species basis,” added Dr Craig Franklin, co-author of the research.
The Cane Toad can adapt its physiology in response to a changing environment repeatedly and completely reversibly many times during its lifetime.
Originally introduced as agricultural pest-control due to its voracious appetite for the Cane Beetle, populations have now escalated out of control. The skin of the Cane Toad is toxic and deadly when ingested by other animals, many of them native predators.

“The negative effect of high temperature does not operate in Cane Toads, meaning that toads will do very well with human induced global warming,” explains Professor Frank Seebacher from the University of Sydney.
Unlike fish and other cold-blooded creatures, whose oxygen transport system suffers at high temperatures, the cardiovascular system (heart and lungs) of Cane Toads performs more efficiently.
The researchers present their new findings at the Society for Experimental Biology Annual Conference in Prague on Friday 2nd July 2010.
When tested over an ambient temperature range of 20 — 30 ?C, Cane Toads acclimatised perfectly to increased temperatures and resting oxygen demands remained constant.
Furthermore, the efficiency of the oxygen transport system in the Cane Toad increased with increasing temperature, showing not only an ability to function over a broad thermal range but remarkably, a preference for higher temperatures.
This is in contrast to previous studies suggesting an increase in temperature results in a higher basic oxygen demand, coupled with decreased efficiency of the circulation system, leading to oxygen starvation.
“Warmer temperatures are advantageous and there is no indication that high temperatures limit oxygen delivery,” explained Professor Seebacher.
The scientists say this positive effect may also apply to other anurans (the class of amphibians that includes frogs and toads), but more research needs to be done to find out.
“The impact of global warming doesn’t have to be negative. Global average temperatures at present may in fact be cooler than many animals would like,” explained Professor Seebacher.
“There will be winners and there will be losers but that needs to be judged on a species by species basis,” added Dr Craig Franklin, co-author of the research.
The Cane Toad can adapt its physiology in response to a changing environment repeatedly and completely reversibly many times during its lifetime.
Originally introduced as agricultural pest-control due to its voracious appetite for the Cane Beetle, populations have now escalated out of control. The skin of the Cane Toad is toxic and deadly when ingested by other animals, many of them native predators.

The newest addition is the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES) instrument on NASA’s Aura spacecraft, launched in 2004. TES measures the state and composition of Earth’s troposphere, the lowest layer of Earth’s atmosphere, located between Earth’s surface and about 16 kilometers (10 miles) in altitude. While TES was not originally designed to measure carbon dioxide, a team led by Susan Kulawik of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., has successfully developed and validated a TES carbon dioxide tool.
Kulawik’s team analyzed three years of carbon dioxide data from TES and compared them to other carbon dioxide data sources. These sources included the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument on NASA’s Aqua spacecraft, aircraft and ground station samples, and two National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration carbon dioxide research tools: GLOBALVIEW-CO2 and CarbonTracker. The TES data were found to be in good agreement with the other data. The TES study appears in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics.
Kulawik says TES data may be able to help significantly reduce uncertainties in annual regional estimates of where carbon dioxide is being created (sources) and where it is being stored (sinks).
“It’s easy to see why you need measurements near Earth’s surface, but TES measurements in the region of the atmosphere where carbon dioxide gets transported around the globe are also key to understanding carbon dioxide sources and sinks,” Kulawik said.
Study co-authors Ray Nassar and Dylan Jones of the University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, found that TES data can reduce — by approximately 70 percent — uncertainties in estimates of how much carbon dioxide is being released and stored in South America’s tropical rain forests and Africa’s grasslands. These include the Amazon, Congo and surrounding savannahs.
“These regions have a major influence on the global carbon cycle,” said Jones. “The new carbon dioxide data from TES will help scientists reduce uncertainties in our understanding of carbon dioxide, particularly in tropical regions, where there are currently very few surface or aircraft measurements.”
Carbon dioxide is the most important human-produced greenhouse gas. Its current global average concentration in Earth’s atmosphere is about 389 parts per million by volume, increasing by about two parts per million each year. This concentration varies seasonally and by hemisphere. Estimates are challenging, as it varies by less than two percent globally in the mid-troposphere.
Currently, about 55 percent of human-produced carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere; the rest is stored in the ocean and by land plants, but exactly where remains a mystery. Recent studies have shown carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion have been increasing faster than predicted, while the southern hemispheric oceans’ capacity for storing carbon dioxide may be diminishing. Scientists want to better understand carbon dioxide sources and sinks so they can more reliably predict future atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, assess the impact of land use changes on atmospheric carbon dioxide, develop mitigation strategies and verify international treaties.
The new TES carbon dioxide data complement the available international space-based resources for measuring carbon dioxide. These include AIRS; Envisat’s European Scanning Imaging Absorption Spectrometer for Atmospheric Chartography (SCIAMACHY); the European MetOp Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI); and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Greenhouse gases Observing Satellite (GOSAT). The Orbiting Carbon Observatory mission, NASA’s first spacecraft dedicated to studying carbon dioxide and its sources and sinks, was lost in a launch vehicle mishap in February 2009. It is currently being rebuilt for a planned launch in 2013.
TES will measure carbon dioxide in the troposphere at altitudes between 2 and 8 kilometers (1.2 to 5 miles), with peak sensitivity at around 5 kilometers (3.1 miles). It will produce carbon dioxide products at latitudes between 40 degrees south and 45 degrees north. The team expects to release daily and monthly TES carbon dioxide data products to the public starting this July.
Other institutions participating in the study include the National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba-City, Ibaraki, Japan; the Meteorological Research Institute, Tsukuba-City, Ibaraki, Japan; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, Calif.; and NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory, Boulder, Colo.