NASA MODIS: The Shrinking of the Aral Sea 2001 - 2014

The Aral Sea in 2001

Although irrigation made the desert bloom, it devastated the Aral Sea.

This series of images from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite documents the changes.

At the start of the series in 2000, the lake was already a fraction of its 1960 extent (black line).

The Northern Aral Sea (sometimes called the Small Aral Sea) had separated from the Southern (Large) Aral Sea.

The Southern Aral Sea had split into eastern and western lobes that remained tenuously connected at both ends.

The Aral Sea in 2014

Read the full story and view the full series of images taken by MODIS from 2001 to 2014, here.

NASA GRACE Data Visualisation of groundwater Depletion

A new visualization of global groundwater depletion created using data from NASA's GRACE mission has premiered on New York’s Times Square to mark World Water Day 2012. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UC Irvine/USGS/Richard Vijgen/Peggy Weil/Heads Up! 2012

To highlight declines in the world's groundwater supplies, a new visualization of Earth's groundwater reserves, created in part with space data from the joint NASA/German Aerospace Center (DLR) Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission, debuted on New York's Times Square on March 22, International World Water Day.

The 30-second animation, titled "Visualizing Seasonal and Long-term Changes in Groundwater Levels," will be on display several times each hour through April 22 on Times Square's massive Thomson Reuters and NASDAQ digital signboards.

Viewers of the interactive animation are invited to use their mobile devices to submit their city and add a graph to the sign. The animation can be viewed at: http://vimeo.com/user10042778 .

Netherlands designer Richard Vijgen developed the animation using GRACE data analyzed by professor Jay Famiglietti, director of the UC Center for Hydrologic Modeling at the University of California, Irvine; and from United States Geological Survey data supplied by Leonard Konikow.

Vijgen was the winning entry in an international design visualization competition sponsored by the organization.

HeadsUP!, in collaboration with Visualizing.org. Founded by digital media artist Peggy Weil, HeadsUp! challenges designers to visualize critical global issues and create a shared sign for the public square.

Groundwater is a critical, but often overlooked, natural resource. According to a U.N. report, more than 1.5 billion people around the world depend on groundwater for their drinking water.

It comes from the natural percolation of precipitation and other surface waters down through Earth's soil and rock, accumulating in cavities and layers of porous rock, gravel, sand or clay.

Groundwater levels respond slowly to changes in weather and can take months or years to replenish once pumped for irrigation or other uses.

Famiglietti's analyses show that groundwater is being depleted at alarming rates in many of the world's major aquifers. "The GRACE data set is exciting, because it gives us the first global pictures of Earth's changing freshwater," he said.

The twin GRACE satellites, which celebrated their 10th year in orbit this week, measure minute changes in Earth's gravity field by measuring micron-scale variations in the separation between the two spacecraft, flying in formation 137 miles (220 kilometers) apart in low Earth orbit.

These variations in gravitational pull are caused by local changes in Earth's mass. Masses of water, ice, air and solid Earth can be moved by weather patterns, seasonal change, climate change and even tectonic events such as large earthquakes. GRACE was developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

Mammoth iceberg could alter ocean circulation: study

Mammoth iceberg could alter ocean circulation: study

An iceberg the size of Luxembourg knocked loose from the Antarctic continent earlier this month could disrupt the ocean currents driving weather patterns around the globe, researchers said Thursday.

While the impact would not be felt for decades or longer, a slowdown in the production of colder, dense water could result in less temperate winters in the north Atlantic, they said.

The 2550 square-kilometre (985 square-mile) block broke off on February 12 or 13 from the Mertz Glacier Tongue, a 160-kilometer spit of floating ice protruding into the Southern Ocean from East Antarctica due south of Melbourne, researchers said.

Some 400 metres (1300 feet) thick, the iceberg could fill Sydney Harbour more than 100 times over.

It could also disturb the area's exceptionally rich biodiversity, including a major colony of emperor penguins near Dumont d'Urville, site of a French scientific station, according to the scientists.

"The ice tongue was almost broken already. It was hanging like a loose tooth," said Benoit Legresy, a French glaciologist who has been monitoring the Metz Glacier via satellite images and on the ground for a decade in cooperation with Australian scientists.

The billion-tonne mass was dislodged by another, older iceberg, known as B9B, which split off in 1987.

Jammed against the Antarctic continent for more than 20 years, B9B smashed into the Metz tongue like a slow-motion battering ram after it began to drift.

Both natural cycles and manmade climate change contribute to the collapse ice shelves and glaciers.

Tide and ocean currents constantly beat against exposed areas, while longer summers and rising temperatures also take a toll.

"Obviously when there is warmer water, these ice tongues will become more fragile," said Legresy, who works at the Laboratory for Geophysics and Oceanographic Space Research in Toulouse, southern France.

ESA: Major Player in Monitoring Climate Changes

Over 30 000 people from 190 nations are gathered at the two-week UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. On Thursday about 150 distinguished guests attended an ESA-hosted side event entitled 'Global Monitoring of our Climate: the Essential Climate Variables'.

During the event, speakers from various agencies highlighted the role that Earth observation satellites play in providing systematic global climate observations. These observations are essential for climate change research and for managing mitigation and adaptation strategies.

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has long recognised the need for global observations of climate variables in order to quantify the state of our climate. Within ESA's Climate Change Initiative a set of long-term global records of essential climate variables will be provided using space technology.

These data are required by the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) - an organisation in the framework of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) - to support the UNFCCC and the International Panel on Climate Change.

Opening the side event, Dr Stephen Briggs, ESA's Head of Earth Observation Science, Applications and Future Technologies Department, explained how ESA is responding to the needs of UNFCCC with its new Climate Change Initiative.

"ESA has developed the Climate Change Initiative to generate, preserve and give access to long-term data sets of the essential climate variables and make them freely available to climate research and modelling communities worldwide," Briggs said.

The initiative will build on the availability of Europe's global data sets and on data delivered by a network of other space agencies. It will also guarantee the provision of space-based information for the future, in a form readily usable by scientific communities and government bodies.

Data from ESA satellites going back three decades, combined with data from new missions, will be used to produce information on a wide range of climate variables such as greenhouse-gas concentrations, sea-ice extent and thickness, and sea-surface temperature and height.

The Climate Change Initiative will implement all actions necessary to generate essential climate variables, including long-term data preservation, periodic reprocessing of the long-term climate archive, recalibration, algorithm development, product generation and validation, and quality assessment of climate records in the context of climate models.

These activities will be implemented by ESA, in partnership with key users (GCOS, UNFCCC), space agencies, relevant players in the field of climate change research and monitoring (EC, WMO, NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), EUMETSAT and national programmes).

ESA: Playing a Major Part in Monitoring Climate Changes

The Climate Change Initiative will implement all actions necessary to generate essential climate variables, including long-term data preservation, periodic reprocessing of the long-term climate archive, recalibration, algorithm development, product generation and validation, and quality assessment of climate records in the context of climate models.

These activities will be implemented by ESA, in partnership with key users (GCOS, UNFCCC), space agencies, relevant players in the field of climate change research and monitoring (EC, WMO, NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), EUMETSAT and national programmes).

Flooding: Half of Venice underwater

The city has for years been wrestling with the problems posed by the threat of rising sea levels. Last year local authorities confirmed they were looking at a scheme to raise the city's buildings to meet the problem.

Much of the historic Italian city of Venice, including St. Mark's Square, was underwater Monday following a meteorological depression combined with natural tide waters, officials said.

The tide monitoring centre said 45 percent of the Renaissance city was swamped when the lagoon rose 131 centimetres (more than four feet).

Venice was flooded 50 times between 1993 and 2002, with the worst 'acqua alta' on November 4, 1966, when the city was submerged by 1.94 metres of water amid catastrophic flooding throughout the country.

In February 1986, levels reached 1.58 metres above normal, and in December 2008 waters surged 1.56 metres.

The city has for years been wrestling with the problems posed by the threat of rising sea levels. Last year local authorities confirmed they were looking at a scheme to raise the city's buildings to meet the problem.

Under Operation "Rialto", local officials and engineers were looking at using piston-supported-poles placed at the bottom of each structure to lift buildings by up to a metre.

In April 2007, the United Nations cultural organisation UNESCO warned that Venice was one of its designated World Heritage sites that was threatened by climate change.

Climate Change Predictions for this Century

Following is a summary of expert opinion of potential impacts from climate change by the end of the century.

The source is the Fourth Assessment Report, published in 2007 by the UN's Nobel-winning scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The magnitude of impacts will mainly depend on the level of warming, which the panel predicted would be in a range of 1.8-4.0 C (3.2-7.2 F) by 2100, a figure that two recent studies have said could be under-estimated by up to 2.4 C (4.3 F).

ASIA: Between 120 million to 1.2 billion Asians will experience increased water stress by 2020, and 185 to 981 million by 2050. Cereal yields in South Asia could drop in some areas by up to 30 percent by 2050.

Even modest sea-level rises will cause flooding and economic disruption in densely-populated mega-deltas, such as the Yangtze, Red River and Ganges-Brahmaputra.

Cholera and malaria could increase, thanks to flooding and a wider habitat range for mosquitoes.

In the Himalayas, glaciers less than four kilometers (2.5 miles) long will disappear entirely if average global temperatures rise by 3 C (5.4 F). This will initially cause increased flooding and mudslides followed by an eventual decrease in flow in rivers that are glacier-fed.

Per-capita water availability in India will drop from around 1,900 cubic metres (66,500 cubic feet) currently to 1,000 cu. metres (35,000 cu. ft.) by 2025.

AFRICA: Likely to be the worst-hit continent. Hundreds of millions are "very likely" -- a 90 percent certainty -- to face severe shortfalls in food and drinkable water by 2080, probably sooner.

Climate change will shorten growing seasons and render swathes of land unusable for agriculture, with yields declining by as much as 50 percent in some countries. A rise of 60 to 90 million hectares (150 to 220 million acres) of arid and semi-arid land is projected by 2080.

Food security will be "severely compromised", with an additional 80 to 200 million people at risk of hunger by 2080. By that date, sub-Sahara Africa may account for 40 to 50 percent of the world's undernourished, compared with about 25 percent today.

Half a billion Africans will face acute scarcities of drinkable water if average global temperatures rise only 2 C (3.6 F) compared to 1990 levels. Cholera, meningitis and dengue fever will increase in extent and impact.

Big deltas such as the Nile and the Niger face flooding and economic disruption caused by rising sea levels.

EUROPE: Mediterranean countries can brace for a higher risk of severe droughts, reduced harvests and deadly heatwaves.

High-latitude European nations will face flooding and severe weather, but this could be balanced by longer growing seasons and expanded areas for agriculture and forestry.

In Alpine regions, rising temperatures could badly damage the ski industry and wipe out up to 60 percent of plant and animal species.

The percentage of river basin areas that are "severely water stressed" is predicted to jump from 19 percent today between 34 and 36 percent in the 2070s.

Wintertime floods are likely to increase in Europe's maritime regions, while snowmelt-related floods and flash floods will hit central Europe.

Hydropower potential is expected to decline by 20-50 percent in the Mediterranean region but increase by 15-30 percent in Northern and Eastern Europe.

Biodiversity will be badly affected: "A large percentage of the European flora is likely to become vulnerable, endangered, or committed to extinction by the end of this century," the report says.

AMERICAS: Global warming will power up tropical storms and heatwaves in North America and threaten species extinction and hunger in the South.

Common to each American hemisphere will be a greater burden from water stress and health risks from heat, storms, infectious disease and urban smog.

In Alaska and Canada, thawing of permafrost and loss of sea ice are set to accelerate, posing a threat to mammals such as seals and polar bears, encouraging invasive species and "severely" challenging the lifestyle of the native Inuit.

Fast-growing cities on the coast will be increasingly vulnerable to storms, which will be amplified by sea-level rise.

In the first decades of the 21st century, climate change will boost forest production and rain-fed agriculture. But this will be partly balanced by a greater range of insect pests and diseases.

In Latin America, tropical glaciers are "very likely" to disappear by the early 2020s, reducing water availability and hydropower generation in several countries.

Frequency and intensity of hurricanes in the Caribbean basin is likely to increase.

By the 2020s, between seven and 77 million people in Latin America are likely to suffer from inadequate water supplies, a figure that could rise to 60-150 million by 2100.

A rise of 2 C (3.6 F) and decreases in soil water would turn eastern Amazonia and the tropical forests of central and southern Mexico into savannah.

what if climate refugees have no place to go?

The UN refugee agency says some 24 million people worldwide have fled their homes due to environmental factors, and warns their ranks could grow tenfold by mid-century, spurred greatly by climate change.

Sheer numbers and the lack of legal status under international law mean a vicious humanitarian crisis is looming, say experts. Bottom line? Millions of hungry, poor, vulnerable people may simply have nowhere to go. "In the future, who is going to open their doors to all this misery?" is the rhetorical question asked by Jean-Francois Durieux, in charge of climate change at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

A decade ago, the threat of mass migrations driven by global warming seemed remote. Predicting how climate change might affect the planet was already vexingly difficult, and trying to calculate the additional impact on human communities only compounded the uncertainty.

It was also feared that extending "refugee" status to those driven from homelands by floods, drought or damaged ecosystems would dilute efforts to help those fleeing political persecution as defined under UN provisions. But today these reservations have given way to alarm as scientists say we are on track for worst-case scenarios laid out only two years ago by the Nobel-winning UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Two studies issued before the December 7-18 climate conference in Copenhagen say that, on current trends, Earth is on track for warming of up to 6.4 degrees Celsius this century and sea-level rise of at least a metre. The outcome would be catastrophic, in terms of drought, floods and storm surges, leading inevitably to widespread homelessness.

"Environmentally induced migration has the potential to become a phenomenon of unprecedented scale and scope," said Koko Warner at the UN University Institute of Environment and Human Security in Bonn, Germany. "At 4.0 C, climate-driven migration redraws the map of population distribution across the surface of the globe," said Francois Gemmene of France's Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (IDDRI).

At least three forces are likely to push people in search of more hospitable terrain: rising sea levels, drought and dying coral reefs. If the world's population peaks at about nine billion in 2050, a large chunk of humanity will live in mega-cities spread across deltas vulnerable to the twin threats of submergence and subsidence.

In the Ganges, Mekong and Nile deltas, for example, a one-metre increase would inundate 23.5 million people and destroy 1.5 million hectares \of farmland, according to the 2009 UN State of the World Population report. Vietnam would be hit hardest: 10.8 percent of its population would be uprooted, 10 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) wiped out, and a quarter of fertile wetlands destroyed, according to the report.

Several low-lying island nations, including Tuvalu and the Maldives, are already shopping for new homelands. Drought due to changing weather patterns and melting glaciers is another looming driver of involuntary migration.

The Ganges, Brahmaputra, Irawaddy, Salween, Mekong Yangtze and Yellow rivers, which nourish some 1.4 billion people in Asia, depend on Himalayan glaciers melting under temperature hikes several fold the global average.

Predicted decreases in rainfall would wreak havoc across a wide swathe of arid and semi-arid Africa where fresh water is already in critically short supply. Then there are the half-billion people whose livelihood depends directly on coral reefs already in steep decline due to warming seas and increased ocean acidification.

"What are you going to do with 500 million people if - probably 'when' - that problem hits you?", asked Pavan Sukhdev, a leading authority on the economics of ecosystems.

Climate Change: Netherlands Building Dams Higher

More than 18 million cubic metres of sand are set to be poured onto the new coastal band of dunes until 2011. Photo courtesy AFP.



On the beach at Monster, bulldozers painstakingly turn sand dredged from the bottom of the North Sea bed into dunes in an ambitious effort to safeguard the Netherlands from flooding.

Stretching more than 20 kilometres (15 miles) southwards from The Hague, the project is one of many in a never-ending battle against rising sea levels attributed to global warming.

"Because it is a low-lying delta, the Netherlands is very sensitive to climate change," Water Management Deputy Minister Tineke Huizinga said on a recent visit to the bustling work site.

"If sea and river levels rise, the Netherlands will be under threat," Huizinga said, walking in yellow boots along a pipeline of several hundred metres (yards) spewing out dredged sand.

"Fortunately, the coast is safe today, but we are investing in the security of people who will live here in 50 years."

More than 18 million cubic metres of sand -- enough to fill 7,200 Olympic-sized swimming pools -- are set to be poured onto the new coastal band of dunes until 2011.

The project got underway last year at a total cost of 130 million euros (about 200 million dollars) to the Dutch state.

Sand is dredged from the bottom of the North Sea, about 15 kilometres from shore, by two specialised vessels that work in turns, day and night. The sand is then relayed to the beach via the pipeline.

Bulldozers then amass the sand to create the dunes, broaden the beach and gain territory from the sea, metre by metre.

"We had no choice but to extend the coast towards the sea," the area's flood prevention chief Michiel van Haersma Buma said.

"Our coast is relatively narrow. Houses and greenhouses lie just beyond the dunes. This area is so densely populated that we had no space to construct more dunes and dykes further inland."

The new dunes -- 30 to 60 metres wide, and rising up to 10 metres above sea level -- are going up next to an existing band of dunes. Covering them is a special type of grass with long roots to keep the sand intact.

"The more dunes there are, the less sea water can infiltrate," thus reducing the danger of contamination of fresh water inland, Haersma Buma explained.

When completed, the project would have made the 20-kilometre stretch of dune-lined beach up to 200 metres wide at low tide, compared to 180 metres at present.

The economic stakes are high: Up to 65 percent of the Netherlands' gross domestic product comes from areas that are located below sea level.

"We want to to be able to live and work in security," Huizinga said.

"It is a big investment, but the cost of protecting this area is a fraction of the cost that a flood would cause to the economy -- and that does not even take into account the social disruption and loss of life."

The government is due to unveil a new programme next year for protecting the nation from water-related consequences of global warming, at a cost to the state of around one billion euros (1.5 billion dollars) per year from 2020, water ministry spokeswoman Marie-Christine Lanser-Reusken said.

In September last year, a government-appointed commission warned that the Netherlands must spend more than 100 billion euros over the next century on dyke upgrades and coastal expansion.

The Delta commission predicted a sea level rise of between 0.65 and 1.3 metres (2.15 and 4.3 feet) by 2100, and said about nine million of the country's 16 million inhabitants already lived in areas directly shielded from the sea and rivers by dykes and dunes.

Floods in 1953 killed 1,835 people and left 72,000 homeless when a total 200,000 hectares of land in the southern provinces of Zeeland, Noord Brabant and Zuid-Holland were inundated.

Controversial Climate Change report criticised

A British study suggests Earth's ecosystems and oceans have a much greater capacity to absorb carbon dioxide than has been previously estimated.

The study, led by researcher Wolfgang Knorr at the University of Bristol, found the balance between the airborne and the absorbed fraction of carbon dioxide has stayed approximately constant since 1850, despite emissions of carbon dioxide having risen from about 2 billion tons a year in 1850 to the current 35 billion tons a year.

Knorr said his results run contrary to a significant body of recent research that suggests the capacity of terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans to absorb CO2 should start to diminish as CO2 emissions increase, allowing greenhouse gas levels to skyrocket.

He said the strength of his research is that it rests solely on measurements and statistical data, and does not rely on computations with complex climate models.

However, Knorr urges caution.

"Like all studies of this kind, there are uncertainties in the data, so rather than relying on nature to provide a free service, soaking up our waste carbon, we need to ascertain why the proportion being absorbed has not changed."

The study appears in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

Climate Change and the Greenhouse Effect

Balmy water once bathed Mars: Rocks claimed to host life

Balmy water once bathed Mars: Rocks claimed to host life - New Scientist

Possible Climatic Changes on ancient Mars brought about water losses and atmospheric deterioration






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