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Breaking Science

The Breaking Science team come to BBC Radio Five Live to break open this week's science stories.

Benjamin Jantzen and Thomas Eisner have asked what at first sight seems a very odd question – does cutting off the wings of butterflies and moths affect their ability to fly? Now two things that we all notice about butterflies are that they are difficult to catch when flying and their wings are very large by comparison with their bodies. They are obviously highly manoeuvrable and this makes them a challenge for predators. 

Butterflies have two pairs of wings and they are not always of equal size. In some species the hind wings are much smaller in area than the front pair. Jantzen and Eisner have shown that the pairs of wings do not have the same role in flight. The front wings primarily drive flight – remove them while leaving the hind wings intact and the butterfly can’t fly. However, removing the hind wings while leaving the forewings intact does not prevent the insect flying nor does it seem to reduce endurance or altitude. The insects still manage the same flight trajectories as they did before, but the speed of flight is reduced and, crucially, acceleration. In short, their ability to manoeuvre is compromised.

A butterfly.

So what is the explanation for this observation? Clearly there has to be an evolutionary advantage to the possession of two pairs of large wings, if flight is possible with one pair. The selection pressure that favoured the large hind wings is almost certainly predation. Speed may help if you can outfly a predator, but if you turn faster and zigzag more often than the predator, escape is possible.

Butterflies and moths have forewings for flight, hind wings for manoeuvrability and speed. You can sometimes see this for yourself on a summer night when bats are hunting moths around street lamps and the moths zigzag down towards the ground so that their echo is lost amongst the echoes from the ground, before the bat can catch up with them.

Oh, and please don’t go out and pull wings of butterflies yourself!

Find out more about butterflies in episode 6 of Breaking Science.

Blogging about

Breaking Science

The Breaking Science team come to BBC Radio Five Live to break open this week's science stories.

Geologists often claim that the past is the key to the future, and so understanding climate change that occurred a few million years ago may help us understand how the planet will respond to rapid future increases in carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the atmosphere.

The main cause of climate change over the last 65 million years (the Cenozoic) was probably due to changing levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere. We think an increase in the CO₂ content of the atmosphere lead to the greenhouse effect which increased global temperatures (hothouse), and when the CO₂ content decreased it reduced temperatures, ultimately leading to an icehouse (glacial) world. For the period in question the climate during the first 30 million years was a warming period, whilst the last 35 million years was a period of cooling.

There are three related questions that we need to answer in order to understand the possible causes of climate change during the Cenozoic:

• How do biological shells remove CO₂ from the atmosphere?
• How was the hothouse world created in the past?
• How did the Earth recover from this state?

How does biological precipitation in the ocean deplete CO₂?

Marine biogenic materials are generally made up of:

• organic matter
• opal
• calcium carbonate

Organic matter is produced during photosynthesis by small marine organisms called phytoplanktons.

Opal is produced by organisms such as diatoms (phytoplankton), sponges (animals), radiolarians (protozoa), and silicoflagellates (phytoplankton).

Calcium carbonate occurs in two forms:

• calcite e.g., foraminifera (protozoa), coccolithophorids (phytoplankton) etc.
• aragonite e.g., pteropods (pelagic mollusc), corals etc.

All calcium carbonate is formed from dissolved calcium and carbonate or bicarbonate present in the ocean by the following process.

CO₂ from the atmosphere enters the surface of the oceans and forms aqueous carbonic acid. Aqueous carbonic acid is short lived and breaks down into hydrogen carbonate. The micro-organisms then use dissolved Calcium in seawater and hydrogen carbonate to form calcium carbonate as shell.

Example of calcium carbonate shell - foraminifera.

A calcium carbonate producing micro-organism uses twice as much CO₂ in forming a shell but it then returns back one CO₂ to the atmosphere, resulting into the net drawdown of CO₂. In addition, if organic matter is preserved in the sediments it will remove six times as much CO₂ . 

How CO₂ is released to create hothouse conditions during the Cenozoic?

The majority of biogenic materials are produced by micro-organisms in the surface waters of the ocean which sink to the seafloor to form sediments. As noted above, the calcium carbonate rich sediments capture CO₂ in order to make shells. When these sediments are caught in the friction between tectonic plates (a cause of volcanoes and earthquakes) they heat up and release the CO₂.

The carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere at subduction zones, such as the Andean margin of South America, by volcanic activity.

According to the recently published article by Dennis V. Kent and Giovanni Muttoni, this process was responsible for the unusually warm conditions in the early part of the Cenozoic era when the Indian plate was moving northward towards the Eurasian plate by subduction, so heating up abundant carbonate-rich sediments on the northern margin of the Indian plate.

Why did the climate turn cold in the later part of Cenozoic?

When India collided with Eurasia about 50 million years ago, subduction ceased and so did the heating of the subducted sediments and the associated release of CO₂ to the atmosphere. This removed a source of CO₂ but there was an additional process at work which actively reduced CO₂ in the atmosphere.

The weathering of continental silicate rocks leads to removal of CO₂ from the atmosphere.

According to Kent and Muttoni’s story, when India entered into the equatorial humid belt 35 million years ago the hot and humid conditions enhanced the weathering of silicate rocks (as found in the volcanic materials of the Deccan traps of India and in the uplifted Himalayan mountains) and so shifted the delicate balance of the carbon cycle towards much cooler conditions. The ice house world lasted for tens of millions of years, setting the stage for our current climate.

This explanation for Cenozoic climate change appears to be simple, if one just considers the CO₂ story related to northward movement of India and its collision with Asia. However, in reality the story is much more complex because of the wide range of sources and sinks for CO₂ that come into play in the Earth system.

Many other factors must also have played a part in changing climate. These include North Atlantic rifting, the release of methane hydrate during Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, plate reorganisation and reduction of seafloor spreading rates, changes in the ocean circulation due to opening and closing of ocean gateways, and the burial of organic carbon by sediments eroded from the growing Himalayan mountains. Clearly all these variables contributed to the long term climate trend during the Cenozoic and ongoing research is unravelling which of these different processes provided a dominant control on climate change.

Find out more about this development in episode 2 of Breaking Science.

Further reading

'Equatorial convergence of India and early Cenozoic climate trends'
by Dennis V Kent and Giovanni Muttoni
in PNAS (published ahead of print September 22, 2008)

'GEOCARB III: a revised model of atmospheric CO₂ over Phanerozoic time'
by RA Berner and Z Kothavla
in American Journal of Science 301

'The role of the Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateau in climate control'
by NBW Harris
in Science Spectra 23

About the author

Pallavi Anand was born in India. She completed her study in India and PhD from Cambridge. Currently, she is a research fellow at The Open University.

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Perspective is a truly wonderful thing. Concerns that were presented to me in a way that asked me to view them from a new perspective have had a tendency to stick with me.

An example of one such concern was when I first saw Carl Sagan discuss the Pale Blue Dot as part of his amazing Cosmos series (I’m not a fan of the accompanying music, I think the words are powerful enough alone). The image of the Earth as seen from a space craft leaving our solar system really is a significant one.

I also enjoyed reading the A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. The book is a whistle stop tour of scientific discovery through human history. I especially enjoyed it not only because it talked about things that have already inspired me but because Bill Bryson is, by his own admission, not a scientist. It was great to read how as a layman he had taken in all these ideas, long talks with experts and then how he had decided to present them within the book.

Out of all the interesting side lines and observations the one point made which really remains with me is the remark by Bryson that at roughly the same time Isaac Newton was jotting down how gravity worked someone was clubbing the last ever Dodo to death. The idea that such unbridled genius could exist at the same time as such uncaring action really left a bitter taste in my mouth.

Most recently however the perspective that has really brought home to me some important issues is the Worldmapper website. This website “is a collection of world maps, where territories are re-sized on each map according to the subject of interest.” For example:

The traditional land area map:

 
Traditional land area map. [image by Worldmapper]

 And now the population map:

Population map. [image by Worldmapper]

You can see China and India swell in size as their population is massive compared to other countries. Europe and Japan swell as their populations are disproportionate to their land mass and the Americas, Africa and Australia shrink due to their large size but comparatively modest populations.

I first saw these maps presented as part of a TED Prize Wish talk by Neil Turok. Neil’s wish was for an African Einstein as he saw the development of science as a way for a country to work their way out of hardship. A major hurdle for development in Africa (where he focused his work) was the crippling poverty much of the continent finds itself in. The worldmapper plots demonstrated very coldly the scale of the problem.

World poverty:

World poverty map. [image by Worldmapper]

Compared to population, China shrinks due to its major economic upheaval. Europe and Japan shrivel to nothing. The Americas and Australia also disappear to a few threads. South Asia is led by its large population and is made nearly spherical as a result. Africa swells despite its comparatively small population with land area.

Couple this picture with a major disease such as HIV:

Major disease map. [image by Worldmapper]

It paints a fairly grim picture. However, as I began, it’s all about perspective. It would be too easy to feel powerless to tackle such a major issue but as within Neil’s talk he uses these maps to focus his efforts. It provided himself and now his audience with a new perspective and a better grasp of the problem.

Neil’s work is unquestionably inspiring. He has pioneered university projects across the continent to help put in place part of the infrastructure required for the continent to tackle the problems it faces. From Neil’s point of view the questions of how to tackle poverty within Africa are massive but not unanswerable. I’m happy I got to see the world through his eyes.

The Worldmapper images are used under a creative commons license and are © Copyright 2006 SASI Group (University of Sheffield) and Mark Newman (University of Michigan).

This blog is part of Blog Action Day 2008: Poverty

About the author

Andrew Morris is currently studying for a PhD at the Planetary and Space Sciences Research Institute (PSSRI) sited at the Open University working with a co-sponsoring company in developing instrumentation for terrestrial and non-terrestrial applications. Previous to this he undertook a master’s degree in Physics with Space Science and Technology at the University of Leicester.

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We’ve spent the morning popping in and out of the restaurant for a read through of Paradise Lost – everyone read a few lines. Not looked at the text for more than a decade but feels the natural thing to do here and now as we sail south back to port.

KT Tunstall and Emily Venables follow our route south on a map.
[image by Nathan Gallagher © copyright Nathan Gallagher]

A couple of my posts have referred to people’s anxieties about the Baffin-Boot-sized carbon footprint that coming on this trip entails. Sin and redemption are so woven into western culture that we shouldn’t be surprised that we frame these questions about individual responsibility in terms of sin and the pursuit of redemption. A few years ago Patriarch Bartholemew (leader of the orthodox church) announced that environmental harm was a sin (the Pope followed suit soon after). Of course they have a natural advantage over science and policy people when it comes to finding a language that seems to have the right kind of scale: they’ve been phrasemaking on the big questions for centuries.

But we might yet work towards a secular language, a set of references, that help us make sense of the moment we’re in. This expedition is an experiment, a model society, a mad throw together of very different personalities and talents. And we’ve been busy, creative and above all happy.

This afternoon a session on positivity in response to climate change. Marcus Brigstocke ran the session and asked me to talk about the book I edited with Andrew Simms from new economics foundation: Do Good Lives Have to Cost the Earth. My vanity satisfied by finding that the essays have made a big impact on his work and he’s been pushing it on friends.

I’m hoping that some of the people here on the boat will contribute to another product of the Interdependence Day project - the Encyclopedia of Interdependence that I’ll be working on over the next couple of years with my wife Renata Tyszczuk.

To sign off I’m going to borrow a quote from Ian McEwan’s brilliant essay written in the wake of an earlier Cape Farewell voyage A Boot Room in The Frozen North.The piece plays off the gradual collapse of civilised behaviour in the wet, cold, cramped boot room of the ship. He concludes thus:

We must not be too hard on ourselves. If you were banished to another galaxy tomorrow, you would soon be fatally homesick for your brothers and sisters and all their flaws: somewhat co- operative, somewhat selfish, and very funny. But we will not rescue the earth from our own depredations until we understand ourselves a little more, even if we accept that we can never really change our natures. All boot rooms need good systems so that flawed creatures can use them well. Good science will serve us well, but only good rules will save the boot room. Leave nothing to idealism or outrage, or even good art. (We know in our hearts that the very best art is entirely and splendidly useless). On our last morning, when all the packing has been done and the last reluctant skidoo had been started up, and as the pure northern air is rent by the howls and stink of our machines, our tirelessly tolerant hosts (as forgiving as God has not yet learned to be ) come down the gang plank and set down on the ice a vast plastic sack with all the recovered gear found in every corner of the ship. A few of us gather around this treasure, and poke about in it, not ashamed or even faintly embarrassed, but innocently amazed. Here's our stuff! Where's it been hiding all this time? We barely know ourselves, and our collective nature is still a source of wonder - why else write fiction? We haven't stopped surprising ourselves yet, and the fate of all our boot rooms hangs in the balance.

About the author

Joe Smith is a lecturer in the environment at the Open University and chair of Interdependence Day. He has written books on climate change and sustainability, the media and global issues, and the green movement.

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Hello Joe, Good question. Yes, the sealing and whaling issues are intense in the Canadian Arctic. Whether it is even sharper than in Greenland, I am not sure. That’s a tough question.

Sustainability is a grave concern in the communities in both parts of the Arctic. But in Greenland, the relative independence of the government (called ‘Home Rule’) means they don’t have as much pressure from Denmark when worrying about the future of their communities. And they do follow the rules and regulations of the International Whaling Commission. Nonetheless, Greenlanders face immense pressures from environmental and animal-rights activist groups from the industrialized world, who are not only worried about the whale population and sustainability, but also – from a very different cultural perspective – whether the communities have the right to hunt the whales at all.

Unloading a whaling vessel.
[image by Nathan Gallagher © copyright Nathan Gallagher]

I don’t think communities in the Canadian Arctic have not had to face such pressures – at least not in regard to whaling (seal harvests are another matter). But I think Inuit people in Canada do face more federal government involvement in matters of marine mammal management, on top of their own concerns about the local whale population and the sustainability of a human-animal relationship that has been so central to their community. So, how would one compare the intensity of the problem in the coastal communities of Greenland vs the Canadian Arctic? I really don’t know.

Yet the Canadian side of the question brings up an interesting story about the use of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). You and I have talked about TEK, Joe, while working on material for that new Open University environment course.

It seems that, in March of 1990, Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans based here in Ottawa (where I live) drastically cut the quota of beluga whales that could be harvested in three small arctic communities on Baffin Island. They said each village could only take five animals annually. They did so in response to a study, by federal scientists in Canada, that found the beluga whale population in the area had declined drastically and risked extinction. The Inuit communities protested vigorously, and the federal scientists agreed to work with them to conduct a new survey of the beluga whales. The collaboration of science and TEK revealed some interesting things.

Everyone agreed that there were fewer beluga whales in the area. But the scientists and the Inuit hunters gave different reasons. Biologists said the prior history of commercial whaling had reduced the beluga population; the Inuit argued the whales had dispersed to other areas. That was partly because of increased boat traffic in recent years, but also because of the disappearance of one particular whale who led the rest into the area. They had named that whale “Luuq” and deliberately left it alone.

Another problem was that the scientists thought there were too few breeding females in the local beluga population. The Inuit hunters reminded them that the sample data they had been providing to the scientists simply did not include any adults with calves. The hunters always made a point of avoiding them in their hunt. The scientists also said there used to be 5000 animals in the area, but local historic records supported the Inuit claim that the number had always been much less than that, even before commercial harvests began decades earlier.

That collaboration in the early 1990s, Joe, is a good example of how environmental scientists can generate better results when they work with Inuit TEK. Better knowledge is always important, but especially so in cases like this.

About the author

Dr Matthew Kurtz is a geographer in Ottawa, Ontario. He has served as an academic at The Open University and University of Alaska Anchorage, and much of his research concerns the cultures of colonialism in arctic Alaska.

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Is it too late to do anything about climate change? Absolutely not – our actions now will make a big difference in the next decades! Is it too late to save the Greenland ice sheet from melting very significantly? Perhaps – we don’t know. We do know that it is going to get significantly warmer before it starts to stabilize and even cool again, but our knowledge about ice sheet dynamics is too poor to predict even roughly right now what is going to happen. Indeed, even if we had a crystal ball and knew definitely what future regional temperatures where going to be 200 years from now, we still wouldn’t be able to predict the future accurately.

Polar scientists want to know more about the physics of basal lubrication, so they can build better ice sheet models to investigate the potential impacts of different amounts of global and regional warming that may occur in the next 1-200 years. It would be handy to have a better handle on the regional warming we might expect – but that’s another very complex story that integrated climate models are trying to address.

There’s no doubt among scientists that observed regional climatic change and impacts in the Arctic are very significant: the region is warming twice as fast as the global average; summer sea ice, vegetation zones, and animal species diversity and ranges, are all changing rapidly consistent with significant regional warming; and indigenous communities are feeling and facing major economic and cultural changes.

Iceberg.
[image by Nathan Gallagher © copyright Nathan Gallagher]

The Arctic is both a beautiful and isolated place. Travellers enjoying its unique beauty experience many different psychological responses: from the spiritual to vulnerable - from “oh my god, it’s so beautiful, there must be a god”, to “give me a hug, we need to stick together” and lots more in between. Imagining the dramatic change and loss of our current Arctic comes as a shock. Hope and despair are part of the same psychological chain reaction of emotions that can happen when we are confronted with bad news such as the loss of something or someone that we treasure.

Environmentalists have made the link between the knowledge that our behaviours, lifestyles, activities, are causing rapid climate change and psychological theories of how we react and cope in such situations. One such theory is Elizabeth Kubler Ross’ grief cycle that proceeds from bad news (such as losing the Arctic ice sheet). Faced with bad news we begin an emotional journey that may consist of some or all of the following stages:

1. Shock at hearing the bad news.
2. Denial to avoid the inevitable.
3. Anger as the outpouring of bottled-up emotion.
4. Bargaining such as seeking in vain for a way out.
5. Depression with the realization of the inevitable.
6. Testing more realistic solutions.
7. Acceptance and finally finding the way forward.

How can we walk the line between hope and despair? One answer is that we need both emotions to move forward and it is quite normal to cycle through these and others in the course of coming to terms with the actions that we can do individually and collectively that will make a difference.

The Arctic is on the front line of global climate change impacts. That’s why this expedition and many like it happen. They are designed to focus the world’s attention on rapid climate change. The region is a harbinger of what is to come – a place to go to see something of the future – so we shouldn’t be too surprised if we come away shocked at its vulnerability as well as charmed by its beauty. Just as global warming is amplified considerably in the polar regions (warming at twice the average rate) our hope must be that through expeditions such as this we can amplify individual, community and governmental actions across the world on behalf of future generations. 

So it may be too late to prevent massive melting of the Greenland ice sheet. Is that any reason to give up? No, quite the opposite. Whatever actions we take today will not have immediate effects but will have significant effects in the future.

As well as teaching and communicating, one way in which I make sure I stay positive is that I volunteer for the Cambridge Carbon Footprint (CCF), usually talking to the public in homes, shopping malls or company offices to people and groups interested in making changes to lower their carbon footprints. CCF has what I think is a neat and positive “to do” list that should be a tonic for anyone feeling despair around the extent to which what an individual can do matters or indeed the extent to which is might be too late to avoid significant disruption and ecological, economic and social impacts. Here it is:

• Be informed
  • Know your carbon footprint
  • Find out about climate change
  • Understand the issues - Don't Panic!
• Communicate
  • Talk to your friends and colleagues about the issue
  •  Join with others - support each other in making changes
  • Ask your employer, councillor, MP what they are doing to help
• Act now!
  • Start today. Do the simple things first.
  • Be smart. Buy wisely. Keep the environment in mind.
  • Think ahead. Plan for next year's improvements

For detailed advice, look at our website or, if you're in the Cambridge area, the leaflets on the stall.

About the author

Dr Stephen Peake is Senior Lecturer in Environmental Technology at the Open University and Teaching Fellow at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. He's an expert in global environmental change and has served as an official at the International Energy Agency in Paris.

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The Argo buoy is launched – might seem banal to scientists, but it really helps the rest of us to visualise science as a practice rather than a set of reported results. Think the winning entry for naming it was 'Disko(very) Bob', crafted by Jarvis Cocker.

Disko(very) Bob.
[image by Nathan Gallagher © copyright Nathan Gallagher]

Climate change is just one of the reasons why there is more oceanography and geology going on in the region. Sovereign states in the region are investing a good deal in trying to establish the best evidence to support resource claims. There has been a flurry of news stories over the last year or so about a scramble for Arctic resources by the countries of the region. The planting of a Russian flag by a mini-sub on the seabed at the North Pole was interpreted in reports around the world as a form of land grab.

In practical terms it was meaningless and there are due legal processes for working out sovereign rights over the seabed. The reporting was a little shrill (that was the point for Putin I guess, above all domestically). But there will be jockeying for position for the mineral resources that will become more easily accessible as higher temperatures melt the sea ice.

The Arctic offers a textbook example of how exploration, exploitation and sovereignty frequently lock together. Reading in advance of the trip, and for writing part of the Arctic materials for the new Open University environment course, delivered a few surprises.

The term British Empire was first coined in relation to a claim to the region drawn up by polymath John Dee for Elizabeth I in the sixteenth century. He rooted the claim in an argument that King Arthur had colonised the Arctic lands (he drew on references to an evidently less than authoritative monk – 11th C I recall).

The explorer (read pirate) Martin Frobisher made three voyages to Arctic Canada, and brought back huge quantities of what the alchemists had promised was gold ore. Despite the best efforts of the largest smelting plant in England it turned out to be no more interesting than heavy black rocks (basalt?). You can see them today – they were recycled into an Elizabethan manor house wall that still stands in Deptford.

Afternoon taken up with rehearsals for a whole group performance of Paradise Lost and a discussion on 'Creativity and Change'. In an hour we barely got going but did lay out some useful markers.

Stephen: in the context of the discussions about resources, climate change and the Arctic, people are asking what hope there is of Copenhagen 2009 UN FCCC meeting delivering a meaningful progress.

What's your reading? Will either US presidential candidate make enough of a difference to the process?

Now that we're at sea heading south we've all a little more time to ourselves and am missing home – and that's after a little more than a week. How did Nansen and friends cope for a year locked in the ice? How do the Polar scientists cope spending months in a hut in these very lonely places?

About the author

Joe Smith is a lecturer in the environment at the Open University and chair of Interdependence Day. He has written books on climate change and sustainability, the media and global issues, and the green movement.

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For almost everyone on board time is a very precious resource – to take ten days out to make this expedition is a big investment. But the sense I get is that we're all pathetically grateful to have had the chance to come to this place, and to do it in this eclectic gaggle with enough time to absorb the place, to learn something and to cross-pollinate.

To be in the Arctic is inspiring but the responses and needs vary widely. Some want to engage in some slow careful thinking about new work (ceramics, opera, theatre, writing), others want to work out how they can do their environmental housekeeping and understand the issues well enough to help engage their huge audiences in the topic (musicians).

Today a high point among high points in terms of multi-sensory experience of the place. Went ashore to the foot of the glacier again but in a much smaller group. A dozen of us scattered across the beach and glacier pursuing individual projects and finding some space to ourselves. Aggressive wind – emptied the rucksack and wore every last shred. More layering than an onion.

Ryuichi Sakamoto recording sound near the mouth of a glacier
[image by Nathan Gallagher © copyright Nathan Gallagher]

Sublime went out of fashion as a word and notion a while back, but it's a good word to start with in making sense of the experience of travelling through a fjord – the only humans for many miles. Some great talkers were mute as we cruised through a Fjord. Correct me if I'm wrong Mark, but I understand that we passed Wegener's camp from which he set out on an expedition that gave birth to the theory of plate tectonics. The concept of a 'whole earth' came out of earth sciences and is one of the lines of descent that arrives at today's urgent and vital climate science.

About the author

Joe Smith is a lecturer in the environment at the Open University and chair of Interdependence Day. He has written books on climate change and sustainability, the media and global issues, and the green movement.

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A trip to a glacier edge in small rib boats. At last geology lessons of decades ago make sense. Film and photos can’t begin to capture the scale.

Plenty of talk on responsibility and how (and whether) people manage to justify our own ‘climate tour’. I could do with some help from my colleague Stephen (that’s Stephen Peake: for the non OU readers – Stephen is a climate change policy specialist who used to work with the UN’s policy body the UN FCCC).

One of the blog posts has asked whether we feel powerless to affect the way the Arctic is changing. In short – is it too late to do anything about climate change? Is the arctic certain to melt? Is action futile? Stephen and I have talked these issues through hundreds of times over more than 16 years of friendship and collaboration. How to walk the line between hope and despair? [read Stephen's answer] My own response? No – there’s plenty that can be done, and optimism costs nothing. Pessimism however could be very expensive indeed.

1750 marked the birth of a new geological era – the Anthropocene. There’s no doubt that human activity since the industrial revolution is intervening in natural processes of change. It’s the first time a geological era has been associated with the impact of just one animal. This naming of a new stratigraphic layer isn’t just due to climate change: plastics and other new materials and impacts of agriculture and urbanisation also help to win humanity this dubious honour.

There’s plenty of loose and exaggerated language around climate change for sure, but it is not too grand to say that we’re at a hinge point  in history (both ‘big time’ and small: geological and human). The CO2 emissions already committed to the atmosphere promise climate change for a century and more into the future, and that will change the Arctic. Can we preserve what Inuit leader Sheila Watt-Cloutier calls their ‘right to be cold’? Yes there will be further impacts on this extraordinary place even if CO2 emissions nose-dived tomorrow.

Exploring the arctic at the current time forces you to think on potential loss. Whether by coming here (not all at once please) or (better) by engaging with the scientific or cultural responses that echo out from an expedition like Cape Farewell it is inevitable that people will be moved by the prospect of losing something unique and important. But being here has really lifted us all. Whether we work with climate change professionally or are coming to it with pretty fresh eyes there is a really positive energy on board that must be coming from the mad mix of people and from simply being this ‘last imaginary place’.

Joe Smith
[image by Nathan Gallagher © copyright Nathan Gallagher]

Greenlander guide Ludovig’s home town of Uummannaq. Houses sprinkled across a rocky island. In Jan-Feb the sea ice in these parts will be very thick, and you won’t see the sun for 2.5 months.

Uummannaq.
[image by Nathan Gallagher © copyright Nathan Gallagher]

Spring is 10-15 degrees below zero. The first thing people talk about, if you ask what they miss when they’re away in Denmark to study or work, is driving a dog sled and sleeping on the sea ice.

Mostly a fishing and hunting economy, but jobs scarce. Greenland is heavily dependent on Danish subsidy and social problems are rife. The afternoon spent in a children’s home that roots its therapy in confidence building. Achieved through plenty of music and art, but also the less familiar technique of taking kids out on 2-3 month long hunting and sledding trips on the ice…

The toughest Duke of Edinburgh award really does look like a walk in the park by comparison. The carers want to instil a sense of adaptability, cooperation and self-confidence amongst children that have often had a very tough start in life. These are precisely the qualities that our global community will need in coping with the effects of climate change. If we do half as well as the youngsters we came across then we’re in with a good chance.

The home is an extraordinary institution. There are both local staff and Danish and Faroese. They are proud of the transformative effect of their work, but also evidently delighted to live in such a wonderful place.

A few local treats on offer including seal liver, meat and blubber, narwhal and a dried halibut delicacy. Rene at the children’s home makes clear, while stroking a heartbreakingly sweet little puppy, that the dogs that most households keep (chained outside for 8 months of the year) are just sled engines. And if a part is broken and unfixable on the engine (illness or injury) it is simply shot. The wild meats and the way he and his colleagues talk about the dogs and the hunting leave us with a few things to talk about as the rib boats shuttle us back to the mother ship.

There are declining populations of all the main animal species and it seems to be a struggle to balance hunting, so central to many Greenlanders identity and everyday lives, and to ensure that species aren’t threatened. Matthew – the sealing and whaling issues are probably even sharper in Canada: any thoughts? [Matthew's response]

The dogs can’t survive the summers south of the arctic, and the purity of their breed is carefully protected. Climate change will mean that  dogs and sledding will die away at ever-higher latitudes. Am considering whether the frequent definition of the arctic as the area north of the tree line might be re-labelled as the dog line.

Another gig by the musicians, comedian and poet aboard in the local hotel. Hermaphrodite polar bear gag didn’t seem to fully translate into Greenlandic, but was a fine evening out. Topped off with a northern lights display.

About the author

Joe Smith is a lecturer in the environment at the Open University and chair of Interdependence Day. He has written books on climate change and sustainability, the media and global issues, and the green movement.

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Walk along the edge of the icefjord at Ilulissat and stand staring out at the ice field and calving icebergs. The weather and appearance of the landscape change completely four times in the space of our three hour walk.

People here live in a very dynamic environment, and cope with some unique hazards. A sign on the approach to a little beach warns

‘Extreme danger: Do not walk on the beach. Death or Serious Injury may Occur. Risk of Sudden Tsunami Waves Caused by Calving Icebergs’.

We giggle a little at finding such an alarmist sign on a seemingly innocent little stretch of sand and rock.

Lori Majewski takes in the scenery.
[image by Nathan Gallagher © copyright Nathan Gallagher]

People up here know from toddler age upwards that their environment is always changing – and dangerous. Whether it be seas or glaciers they live with constant flux. And climate change (sila allangornera – literally ‘weather changes’) promises to deliver more unpredictability and a wider range of extreme events. There are positive changes that climate change is bringing, such as vegetable growing and lamb raising in the south and access to minerals as glaciers retreat, but I could find no-one that would suggest that these benefits outweigh the potentially devastating costs to the identity and way of life of Greenlanders.

About the author

Joe Smith is a lecturer in the environment at the Open University and chair of Interdependence Day. He has written books on climate change and sustainability, the media and global issues, and the green movement.

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The field site at Wittenham Clumps is on the Northmoor Trust Estate with fabulous views over the Thames in one direction and Didcot power station in the other. The plan was to set up equipment in Little Wittenham Woods to detect the ultrasonic calls of the speckled bush cricket and to estimate the height in the pine trees from which they were singing.

The speckled bush cricket

Quentin Cooper would then visit for the Material World radio programme. The insects sing at dusk and after dark – but only in dry weather. The weather in August was almost continually wet. The first possible week for recording was a wash-out.

In the following week the weather forecast for Tuesday was light showers so as the weather was due to get worse later in the week, we took a risk and happened to catch a gap in the rain showers, although it was a bit cold and there were only a few animals singing.

So, in darkness we set up the ultrasound recording equipment and Quentin interviewed us about the project in general. He then followed us as we made some estimates of how high some of the individuals were. The animals are only about two centimetres long, but were singing from over ten metres up in the fir trees.

The height of the problem!

In darkness, of course, things are not quite so simple and Quentin commented that he had not interviewed somebody before where all he could see of them was their head-torch! Interestingly, he was unaware of the bats flying low over his head, illuminated in the head torch beam.

The equipment.

The technique we use is to set up two ultrasound detectors at the end of a 12m long base line. Each detector is quite directional so we align each to a singing animal and measure the angle of inclination and the bearing. From these measurements we can work out the elevation of the animal, using trigonometry.

Using trigonometry to position the creature.

The speckled bush cricket is notable for the brief and extremely fast communication between males and females. In a typical exchange, which is used to bring the sexes together, the male calls with a series of around five short bursts of ultrasound each only one thousandth of a second long, with about the same time between each burst.

The female replies very rapidly – as fast as twenty-five thousandths of a second – with one or two burst of sound around a thousandth of a second long. The male uses her reply to locate her.

For the female to reply so rapidly, her nervous system must have very few interconnections, and certainly there is no time for her brain to process the information. Her reply is a reflex. The sound of these insects is the fastest love song in the insect world.

So imagine the scene in the dark high up in the trees – and we have just measured one at a height of 14 metres – where the male is calling to the female and then using her short ultrasonic reply to locate her and to work out his path through the trees towards her in the darkness.

And, to add a final twist, the male recognises the female only if her reply falls within a small time window - twenty-five to thirty-five thousandths of a second after his call. He can compensate for the speed of sound through air, if she is distant from him, but if she does not reply within his time window he ignores her.

So, we got the data we needed and Quentin and Deborah got their recordings. It rained for the rest of the week!

Want to know what the cricket sounded like? Download the mp3.

David Robinson was recording speckled bush crickets for BBC Radio 4's Material World programme.

Find out more

How do we listen to nature?
What sounds do humans miss?
Why is nature making so much noise?

Wittenham Clumps - managed by the Northmoor Trust

Want to know more about insects? Try the Amateur Entomologists Society

Study science with the Open University

Take Me To Your Fisherman Pass through the icebergs coming off the Ilulissat glacier – it produces the largest icebergs in the northern hemisphere. The glacier’s retreat has been accelerating markedly across the last fifty years, making it one of the easy reference points for climate change storytelling. This is one of the place journalists practise the green virtue of recycling as they re-tread the same stories time and again.

Ilulissat glacier.
[image by Nathan Gallagher © copyright Nathan Gallagher]

A New York Times piece from earlier this year wrote an idiots guide to climate change journalism. Pieces should include an indigenous arctic dweller  who  is willing to provide the following sentences: "just a few years ago", "I’ve never seen that before" and "well usually, but I’ve never seen that before".

Locals describe journalists showing up in town imagining they’re the first to tell the story, little knowing that they are the 1000th to come looking for 1. a fisherman, 2. a mayor and 3. a nature advisor. So yet again the arctic is being imagined and described by people from the South: it is being defined by outsiders.

Greenlanders now want to make their own contribution to how it is defined. They also want to make sure that the climate tourists – the latest to come to exploit the place, albeit with good intentions – take away some new knowledge but also share their stories and their findings with people here. A new centre in Ilulissat is planned for next year to make all that come together.

A sparkling night out at Murphy’s pub in Ilulissat. Other blogs at CF give fuller account, but not many UK festivals, let alone arctic circle small town bars will have seen the like.

About the author

Joe Smith is a lecturer in the environment at the Open University and chair of Interdependence Day. He has written books on climate change and sustainability, the media and global issues, and the green movement.

Subscribe to Joe Smith's posts

 

Hello Joe,

Great to hear from you, and wonderful to hear about the Lutheran service there.

Regarding climate tourism, that’s an interesting question. Let me relate two stories that I happen to have seen just in the past two days. I wasn’t looking for them, Joe, on account of your question.

First was a story from University of Alaska Anchorage (where I used to teach) about two advanced students who just came back from western Greenland, where they studied the effects on the soil from warming, the melting ice sheet, and the local musk ox population. They went to Greenland, not to another part of Alaska, to study this. Of course, other students and faculty are studying changes closer to home, but I suspect the story says something about Greenland’s attraction in this regard.

Second was a story from February 2008 in Alaska Magazine about Governor Sarah Palin. The writer tells of a quick visit by the British consul from San Francisco, in port as part of a popular passenger cruise along the southeast coast.

“The consul, after several minutes of chitchat, reminds Palin that something must be done about global warming.”

Bear in mind that Alaska’s Governor is not convinced that there is a strong link between climate change and carbon dioxide emissions.

“Palin listens intently and responds with patience that, according to many in the Capitol, is refreshing.”

It’s anecdotal of course, and let me get back to these two stories in just a second. The short answer is that climate tourism is largely a ship-bound phenomenon: cruising past the glaciers off Greenland, or through the Northeast Passage off Russia’s arctic coast. Tourism in the Arctic has increased overall by almost 50% in the last two decades, and some part of that is definitely driven by the attention it is getting as the hotspot of climate change. But most of those who travel to see arctic Canada, or to visit Yupik Eskimo communities or other villages in rural Alaska, fly to their destination. The vast majority of such tourists go there primarily for other reasons (although climate change is now often in the mix), and they rarely take a ship for part of their journey.

That arrangement makes a difference. You do have scientists, journalists, foreign dignitaries, and government officials flying into villages like Shishmaref (on Alaska’s northwest coast) to see the rapid shoreline erosion and melting tundra, and to talk to the longtime residents about the effects. But as a new phenomenon, they consist of smaller groups. They are not as visible, and not as regular as they are in Greenland, and that makes climate tourism more difficult to brand as such in Alaska and Canada.

Maybe that irregularity is just as well, given the effects of jet exhaust in the stratosphere. For those who do choose to jet to/from their destination or ‘helicopter in’ (as they say), I have no doubt that it makes a positive difference in the form, for example, of research and discussion and getting other students interested in the science, or patiently bending the ear of a policy-maker on still another occasion. The effect of these things takes time.

About the author

Dr Matthew Kurtz is a geographer in Ottawa, Ontario. He has served as an academic at The Open University and University of Alaska Anchorage, and much of his research concerns the cultures of colonialism in arctic Alaska.

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Blogging about

Breaking Science

The Breaking Science team come to BBC Radio Five Live to break open this week's science stories.

A recent study has investigated the use of stem cells as a treatment of ischaemic stroke. Stem cells are an attractive therapy since they have the potential to develop into many different types of cells in the body. 

In adults, one of the main sources of stem cells is the bone marrow, a tissue found in the hollow interior of bones. Stem cells found in the bone marrow are called mesenchymal stem / stromal cells (MSCs). 

Scientists have recently demonstrated that injection of MSCs into the brains of mice can help improve functional outcome after transient ischaemia, which models a blockage or blood clot in the brain like a stroke. It appears that these MSCs modify the inflammatory response in the brain by changing the expression of certain genes, largely affecting the immune cells called microglia and macrophages. By promoting an anti-inflammatory and pro-survival response, the number of nerve cells dying as a result of ischaemia was greatly reduced, leading to a better outcome. 

One of the major benefits of these cells over other currently used anti-inflammatory agents is that they exert most of their effects locally at the site of injury, potentially reducing side effects. However there are some disadvantages including the difficulty of delivering cells directly into the brain. Whilst this study is promising there is still much research that needs to be carried out before stem cells are used routinely in the clinic to treat stroke patients.

Find out more

• Episode 1 of Breaking Science
• Stem cell therapy
• Cellular issues
• Q&A: Stem cells
• New Scientist – Special Report on Stem Cells