Satellite researcher Alan Belward works for the Institute for Environment and Sustainability, part of the European Commission’s Joint Research Center in Ispra, Italy. Dr. Belward heads the Land Resource Management Unit, which looks at changes to land cover and land use on a global scale. In 2011, Dr. Belward was part of the most comprehensive forest survey ever, which involved 190 countries. An essential tool for his research is data from the Landsat satellite program, which has taken detailed pictures of forest canopies for over 40 years. Dr. Belward spoke with EarthSky’s Jorge Salazar about tracking Earth’s forests from space.

Image Credit: David Patte/US Fish and Wildlife

Dr. Belward, you are the Head of the Land Resource Management Unit within the Institute for Environment and Sustainability at the European Commission’s Joint Research Center in Italy. Tell us about what you do.

The Land Resource Management Unit is one of eight scientific units. A unit is a group of scientists all working on a common theme. There are about 1,400 of us full-time here at this research center in northern Italy. We provide scientific evidence for European policy-making on issues like climate change, global development, and sustainable development programs. Our policy makers have an increasing demand for science-based evidence to support their work. One of our jobs is to provide that evidence.

In the land resource management area, the basic fact is that natural resources, like forests and land to grow crops, are getting more and more scarce. There’s a lot more pressure on them. There’s a lot of competition now. Do you use a forest as a carbon sink? Do you use it as a protected area for biodiversity? Or do you use it for fuel wood? There are all sorts of competing demands on our resources. To make sensible decisions on trade-offs between different uses, you need evidence on where these resources are, what sort of condition they’re in, and how they’re changing.

Tell us about your involvement in the Global Forest Remote Sensing Survey for the U.N., which assessed how humans are changing forests on a global scale. What did you find, and how was it done?

Bolivia 1987. This image and the one below depict deforestation in the same location in Bolivia. Green is vegetated area and the pink-magenta areas are non vegetated. You can see areas that were clear cut and that have new vegetation (crop lands most likely) as well as areas with no vegetation. Blue is water, and you can clearly see a major river on the left edge of the images. White puffy shapes are clouds. Image Credit: NASA

This is something that the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has actually been doing since the 1940s. Every few years they produce this detailed report on the state of the world’s forests. For the last few years these reports rely on statistics provided by the different countries around the world. I think more than 190 countries give them statistics on where the forests are and how much forest there is and what they’re doing with it.

Bolivia 2011. Both of these images were created using Landsat data, using a combination of true color and infrared to produce these results. Image Credit: NASA

But for the last few years, they’ve also been running a remote sensing survey. They have been using satellite imagery as an independent assessment of the state of forest resources. We work with them as one of the partners on that survey.

What they found is that about 30 percent of the whole planet’s land area, starting in 2005, was covered in forest. And rather worryingly between 1990 and 2005, we’ve lost about 180 million acres of forest. That’s rather a lot.

These big numbers are quite scary. Most of us can picture what a football field looks like. Now, if you can imagine that all covered in forest, it takes something less than four seconds to lose that entire area of forest. We’re losing about a football field worth of forest every four seconds of every minute of every day. That’s net loss. That’s including all the new trees that have been planted around the world. When I say we’ve lost 180 million acres, that’s really gone. It’s not been replaced by new stuff.

It doesn’t matter what you’re doing or where you’re doing it, somewhere around the planet there’s a tree falling, and it’s fallen for good.

How is satellite data from Landsat used in the Global Forest Remote Sensing Survey?

Landsat is a global system. We’re looking at every point on the Earth’s surface with the same amount of detail, with the same scientific rigor. We’re making the same measurements. That’s extremely important, because it means when I make a statement about forest cover change around me here in northern Italy, or in the center of the African Congo basin, we’re using the same measurement, the same precision today.

What we’ve done with colleagues at the UN FAO is we’ve taken about 13,000 plots around the world which are distributed uniformly, every 60 miles or so, north, south, east, and west. We take a sample plot and we map the change in an area of about 25 acres. That is done 13,000 times in 1990, in 2000, and in 2005. The other delightful thing about Landsat is, because it’s up there in orbit, it comes back time after time, so that we can look at this change over time. We can keep going back to the same 13,000 points and find out what’s happened.

Landsat provides us with a really quite detailed picture of the forest canopy. It’s not just a photograph. It’s actually measuring light outside the range of sensitivity to the human eye. So it’s giving us extra information than a normal photograph. We’re able to pick up subtle changes in the forest canopy. You can see where you’ve got largely undisturbed forests or where a logging road has gone in or where it’s been clear felled to convert it to other lands.

It depends where you are in the world as to what the main driver of deforestation is. In some parts of the world it’s clearing land to grow new crops. In other parts of the world it’s getting rid of the forest so you can convert it into ranch land for cattle. Elsewhere, it’s to make room for new forest so you can put in timber for oil palm.

Coastal redwoods in northern California. Image Credit: TFCforever

How important is Landsat in monitoring how humans are changing forests worldwide?

I have to say Landsat is an absolutely unique tool for us. I think it’s unique for three reasons, really.

One is the longevity of the program. Where else can we get a chance to look back at part of the world for 40 years? We can go back to 1972 for various points on the planet’s surface and look at how that forest has changed. Longevity is a dramatic factor. It’s the definitive source. It’s the only way we can go back that far in time consistently around the planet.

The second point is its consistency around the planet. It’s global. Right from the beginning, the people managing the Landsat program have gone out of their way to make sure that there’s imagery from different parts of the world. We’ve not just concentrated with the U.S., for example. We’ve looked everywhere.

The final real bonus is over the last few years, our data archive was opened up for free and open access.

Those three factors, the longevity, the global data acquisition program and the free and open data access, really it is a wonderfully valuable resource for forest monitoring.

Scientists have told EarthSky that deforestation, happening mainly in developing countries, is a big part of the carbon emissions that cause climate change. How useful is Landsat data to the international community concerned with climate?

It’s a fundamental part of the scientific armory in information gathering. With Landsat, we’ve got the opportunity to make consistent measurements on forest cover change. When we talk about deforestation accounting for 12 percent of all anthropogenic emissions, it’s something like 1.2 pentagrams of carbon a year emitted from deforestation — big scary numbers. The big issue is the uncertainty. The general estimates of deforestation could be off by 40 or 50 percent, based on all the different estimates that are made on the ground. The remote sensing survey is allowing us to stand back a bit, look at the whole planet consistently and make some of the most robust sets of measurements. Gradually over the years, we’re getting more and more precise understanding of what these rates of deforestation are. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is that it’s actually quickly moving to the point where it will provide us with very detailed maps of not just the statistics of the change, but actual maps of where these forests lie. The very first map of global land cover from Landsat is pretty much underway at the moment, with the Chinese actually running that one. This is beginning to become available to the scientific community. That will feed into a lot of climate models, because you need to know whether you’re dealing with a big, dark, wet, carbon-absorbing forest or a bright dry reflective desert. We’re getting very detailed maps now from Landsat and that all important measure of change.

Our thanks today to the NASA and USGS Landsat Program, creating an unparalleled record of Earth’s changing landscapes.

Listen to the 8-minute and 90-second EarthSky interviews with Alan Belward on tracking changes to Earth’s forests from space, at the top of the page.

Beauty isn’t in the eye of the beholder – it’s in the brain, according to a 2011 paper in the online journal PLoS One. And in a very specific part of the braia, too: the medial orbito-frontal cortex, located just behind the eyes. That’s according to co-author of the new PLoS One paper and brain expert Professor Semir Zeki, of the University College London. He told EarthSky’s Beth Lebwohl:

Philosophers have always been interested in: what is beauty, and what do all things that are experienced as beautiful have in common? And we are attacking these questions in an experimental setting. Can we answer any of these questions by reference to what happens in the brain?

Apparently, the answer is yes. Zeki exposed people from all kinds of different cultural/gender/age backgrounds to works of visual art and music. According to his paper:

The visual stimuli included paintings of portraits, landscapes and still lifes … The auditory stimuli included classical and modern excerpts.

Zeki found, by examining MRI images of his subjects’ brains, that when people look at something they find beautiful, a portion in the front part of the brain called the medial orbito-frontal cortex “lights up.” That is, there’s increased blood flow in this area. He believes it’s a near-universal response to beauty. Zeki added that the medial orbito-frontal cortex is a portion of the brain associated with pleasure, and also reward.

It really tells you seeking beauty is in fact seeking to reward your pleasure centers.

Seeking to reward them with the neurotransmitter dopamine, also known as the feel-good chemical of the brain. Zeki added that one thing that’s novel about his study – and a result he wasn’t expecting – is that beauty as perceived through the eyes (e.g., visual art), and beauty you receive through the ears (e.g., music) aren’t routed to different parts of the brain; they both “reward” the same spot. Not only that, he said, the degree of activity in the medial orbito-frontal cortex correlates very strongly to the degree to which you find a thing attractive. He explained:

Image Credit: was_a_bee

The extent of activity in the medial frontal cortex is directly proportional to the declared intensity of beauty. So if you experience something as very beautiful on a scale of 1 to 10 and you give it a 10, then the activity is going to be stronger than if you experience it as a 1 out of 10.

By contrast, Zeki said, he found that when people see something that’s aesthetically displeasing – something they find ugly – it lights up a completely different part of the brain.

… It is another region of the brain … called the amygdyla, which is also active when you look at frightening stimuli … also active with fear and anger … as if the body is being mobilized, or prepared, or planning some kind of motor action to avoid what is ugly.

Zeki said this research is most interesting to him because it offers a completely modern definition of beauty – instead of trying to find out which characteristics all beautiful objects (or musical works) have in common, he’s busy figuring out what they have in common in terms of how the brain perceives them.

Zeki added that his findings about how beauty affects the brain are so specific, the data could be useful to people like advertisers or the art community. But, he warned, applications of this research have certain ethical strings attached. Why? Because, just by looking at a person’s brain with an MRI, you can tell what they like, what they don’t like, and to what degree. In other words, looking into someone’s brain could translate into a real invasion of emotional privacy. He told EarthSky:

I think you’ll be able to tell what people like, what people dislike, what people find beautiful, what people find not beautiful. But this is of course an invasion into their subjective states, and invasion into their very private lives, and I’m not sure you want to do that. At any rate, this is not a question that should be left to [just] scientists. We are really interested in learning more about the brain. But all these studies done all over the world about value, judgment, reward pleasure and all these things are basically invading our very private worlds, and we have to be careful about this information.

Bottom line: According to co-author of the new PLoS One paper and brain expert Professor Semir Zeki, of the University College London, MRI scans show a specific part of the brain lighting up when something beautiful is seen or heard.

Astronomer Judy Cheng of the University of California, Santa Cruz was part of a science team that used a giant survey of stars to reveal something new about how our Milky Way galaxy formed. The team found evidence that the inner disk of the Milky Way grew organically from the inside out, like the rings of a tree. The surrounding outer disk, according to Cheng, likely formed all at once. EarthSky’s Jorge Salazar spoke to Cheng this week at the 219th meeting of the American Astronomical Society held in Austin, Texas, January 9-12, 2012.

Astronomer Judy Cheng of UC Santa Cruz.

Cheng’s study looked at data from the Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration 2 (SEGUE-2), which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey-III project, operating from the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. The star survey collected starlight of more than 118,000 stars to measure their motions and inner chemistry.

The first generation of stars in the Milky Way are thought to have consisted entirely of the elements hydrogen and helium. Over time, those early stars turned some of their hydrogen and helium into heavier elements, like calcium or iron. When those stars died, the heavier elements they produced became part of the next generation of stars. As new stars were born and the Milky Way disk grew, each generation had more calcium, iron, and other heavy elements. Thus, scientists can learn which parts of our galaxy have seen several generations of stars come and go, simply by looking at the metal content of stars in that part of the galaxy. Judy Cheng told EarthSky:

The thick and thin of it. Disks of our Milky Way Galaxy.

What we did was, we looked at the elemental abundances of stars at different positions in the disk of the Milky Way. The disk is what you normally see when you go out on a clear night and you see a bright band of stars across the sky. That’s the Milky Way disk. What we looked at was how the amount of metals in the stars varied as you looked at different positions in the galaxy.

Stars in the plane of our galaxy showed a drop off in metals the further out from center; not so for stars away from the galactic plane.

Cheng’s team looked at different parts of the entire galactic disk. That disk can be divided into two components. There’s a thin disk, which is the milky band of stars what one can actually see in the sky on a clear night. Then there’s a surrounding thick disk, which is not visible from the Earth but is made up of much older stars, according to Cheng. Those stars can go very far from the plane of the galaxy, which is why it’s called a thick disk. Cheng told EarthSky what she found:

What we are finding is that when we look at how the metals vary as a function of distance from the center of the galaxy, when we looked at the thin disk, we see that there are more metals in the inner part of the galaxy than in the outer parts. And that tells us that the thin disk of the galaxy formed from the inside out. But when we look at the thick disk of the galaxy, we don’t see any change in the metals as you look farther from the center of the disk. So that tells us either that the thick disk all formed at once, and so that all of the metals in the disk accumulated the metal content at the same rate. Or it could also be that the thick disk formed inside out, like the thin disk, but things have gotten mixed around so well over time that we don’t see any change in the metal content farther from the center of the galaxy.

The 2.5-meter Sloan telescope at Apache Point Observatory, which did the SEGUE-2 star survey.

Cheng explaineed that one goal of the SEGUE surveys is to understand how the Milky Way got assembled. In a sense, how all the pieces of the puzzle of our galaxy came together. Cheng told EarthSky:

The idea behind SEGUE is to use the stars that we observe and study their chemical compositions, look at their motions and also their positions in the galaxy to understand how the stars got there, when they were born, and how they fit into our picture of the galaxy as having this thin disk, and a thick disk. And there’s also different components of the galaxy as well. There’s a halo that goes out farther and is made up of even older stars. And by looking at all of these types of stars in SEGUE, we can try to put together a picture of how these stars got to where we see them today.

Bottom line: Astronomer Judy Cheng of UC Santa Cruz led a survey of stars called SEGUE-2 that found the thin disk of our Milky Way galaxy grew differently than its thick disk.

Milky Way has 100 billion planets, astronomers say

Doomed gas cloud stretched as nears Milky Way black hole

A young astrophysicist, Sukanya Chakrabarti, assistant professor of physics at the Charles E. Schmidt College of Science at Florida Atlantic University, has developed a way to discover and map the dark matter halos of distant galaxies, using gravitational ripples caused by the passing of their dim satellite galaxies. She spoke with EarthSky at the January 2012 meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, TX, where she was announcing the results of her research. She told us:

Sukanya Chakrabarti. Image Credit: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Dark matter is dark because it doesn’t emit any electromagnetic radiation. But it is massive. So that means that it will interact gravitationally with whatever else.

Chakrabarti mapped the ripples in gigantic clouds of gas that surround spiral galaxies. Those ripples, said Chakrabarti, are made by dark matter. She told EarthSky:

The cold gas is a great tracer because it’s very responsive. It’s basically like dropping pebbles into a pond and looking at the ripples in the pond, trying to figure out how massive was the pebble. If you sort of understood the physics of that well enough you might be able to do it, even if you didn’t see the pebble fall in.

Projected density of a dark matter halo from a distant galaxy. The visible part of the galaxy (not shown in the image) would lie at the dense center of the halo. Satellite galaxies each would have their own subhalos, visible as a region of high dark matter density in the image. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Chakrabarti first demonstrated her method of mapping dark matter with the Whirlpool Galaxy, about 23 million light years away. She said:

I think the hunt for dark matter has a lot in common with the hunt for planets, back in the 1800s. There’s a lot of potential to understand dark matter from its gravitational effects on other things. I think that’s a very promising thing, similar in spirit to the way Neptune was discovered. It’s a kind of indirect means of hunting for this thing that we can’t see. And if these kind of methods turn out to be successful, it gives us a way of hunting for dim things, kind of like looking for you car in a fog. If you kind of know approximately where to look, you’re going to do much better than if you have to do a completely blind search.

Chakrabarti’s paper – “A New Probe of the Distribution of Dark Matter in Galaxies” – is published online.

The galaxies we see around us in space have extended gas disks that are very fragile and respond easily to the gravitational pull of passing satellites, Chakrabarti said. She added that the ripples in the outer gas disks of spiral galaxies act like a mirror of the potential depth of the dark matter halo in the primary galaxy.

Thus, even though the dark matter halo cannot be seen directly, scientists can essentially map a galaxy’s dark matter, using this method.

Chakrabarti previously developed a mathematical method called tidal analysis to find unseen satellite galaxies by analyzing the ripples in the hydrogen gas distribution of large spiral galaxies. Many dwarf galaxies are very dim, so it is useful to have a way of finding them that does not rely on their optical light, she said.

The Whirlpool Galaxy and its satellite, left. Image Credit: Todd Boroson (NOAO), AURA, NOAO, NSF

Earlier, she applied the method to the nearby Whirlpool Galaxy, which has an optically visible satellite, to infer the mass and location of the satellite. She found these values to be observationally corroborated, thus proving her method.

Listen to the 8-minute and 90-second EarthSky interviews with Sukanya Chakrabarti on mapping the distribution of mass in the unseen dark matter halo of a galaxy, using gravitational ripples caused by passing satellite galaxies (at top of page).

EarthSky spoke with Researcher Amelia Wolf, an ecologist and post-doctoral fellow at the Carnegie Institution of Science in the Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University about growing biofuels in the U.S. Southwest.

Biofuel production in the dry southwestern United States might have potential to add to the country’s existing biofuels portfolio, according to a study conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and presented at the Auguest 2011 meeting of the Ecological Society of America, in Austin, Texas.

The study looked broadly at the potential of growing crops for biofuels in five southwestern U.S. states: California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona. Those crops include “first-generation” biofuel feedstocks – food crops such as corn, soy and sugarcane. And they include the “next-generation” biofuel feedstocks of switchgrass and algae.

The U.S. Renewable Fuel Standard, part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, sets a goal for biofuel use in the U.S. by 2022. It suggests that 20 percent of the nation’s estimated fuel use in 2022 – about 36 billion gallons – can be from biofuels. Researchers with the study reported that although 25 percent of corn grown in the U.S. is currently used for biofuels, corn-based ethanol only accounts for about 1.3 percent of U.S. fuel. They say switchgrass has the potential to yield about 790 million gallons, or two percent of the 2022 renewable fuel standard. The upper limits for growing fuel from algae were found to be about 5.3 billion gallons, or 14 percent of the 2022 renewable fuel standard.

Switchgrass might be grown and harvested for biofuels in the U.S. Southwest.

Researcher Amelia Wolf, an ecologist and post-doctoral fellow at the Carnegie Institution of Science in the Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, told EarthSky:

The most important thing to think about when considering the future of biofuels is that there are tradeoffs with growing biofuels in any part of the country.

And in the Southwest, especially, there are tradeoffs with water use. There is a lot of potential land availability, but there are also potential overuses of water. And one of the great things in the Southwest is that the infrastructure is just getting developed. And so we have a chance here, a real opportunity to approach this at the beginning and think about how best to proceed and really be able to say, this is going to be the equation when we think about water use.

And this is where the potentials are. This is the uppermost production possibility.

Also, there’s unique habitat in the Southwest. So there are ecological issues to think about. Algae doesn’t take up a lot of land space, so that’s a positive. But this is going to involve basically paving over some areas. Photobioreactors are kind of a factory. And so what the unique biological resources of the land are need to be considered. A lot of tradeoffs need to be thought about. It’s a great time to start doing that as all this technology is being developed.

A photobioreactor, used to grow algae to make biodiesel. Image Credit: Jurveston

Dr. Wolf explained why the southwestern U.S. is being looked at as a place to grow biofuels.

There are some really big potential benefits of using land in the U.S. Southwest. There’s a lot of public land, first of all. And there’s a lot of available land that might be able to be used. There’s high incoming sunlight in the U.S. Southwest – that’s obviously is a requirement of growing plants. And there’s very little food production that goes on there. So competition for food would be very low. But there’s not a lot of water.

So what we wanted to do is look at what the potential for biofuels production would be without increasing the pressure for water use in the Southwest. That really takes out of contention a lot of what we call first-generation biofuels. These are biofuels produced from corn, soy, and sugarcane. It makes the southwestern U.S. a possible candidate for these next generation biofuels that are really in the exciting research and development stage.

A cotton farm in Arizona. Future site for biofuels?

Farmers could switch from growing hay to growing switchgrass, which could be collected and turned into cellulosic ethanol, said Wolf.

About 75 percent of water use in the Southwest is actually used for agriculture, which surprised me when I first learned that. And a good chunk of that goes to producing hay. And so there’ve been some analyses that if we really start moving to being able to create cellulosic biofuels, switchgrass fields might start replacing hay.

The story, said Dr. Wolf, is a little different when considering algae and its potential as a biofuel.

Algae is in an earlier stage of research and development. They can be grown either in open ponds or in closed systems. These are called photobioreactors. They have some real advantages in that, per area land, a lot of fuel can be produced from these photobioreactors. Where production is relatively low per acre of land with the traditional crop, putting algae on an acre of land produces a lot more biofuel. So that leads to a lot less land conversion.

But it’s also very energy-intensive – it’s kind of like putting up a factory. And so one of the things you can do to reduce the footprint of putting these things on land is to put these algae photobioreactors next to either a wastewater treatment facility or a CO2 source, such as a power plant. People might have heard of flue gas that comes off of a power plant. That’s mostly CO2. And in order to grow plants, you need both CO2 as well as water and nutrients, which you can get from wastewater.

The researchers in the study include Amelia Wolf and Sasha C. Reed of the U.S. Geological Survey in Moab, Utah.

This video features researcher Jonathan Trent of NASA Ames Research Center describing algae-growing experiments.

Bottom Line: Biofuel production in the southwestern United States could help meet the nation’s future goals for renewable fuels, according to a study done by the U.S. Geological Survey. EarthSky spoke to Amelia Wolf of the Carnegie Institution of Science in the Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University, one of the researchers, who was in Austin, Texas for the 96th annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America, held August 6-12, 2011.

Kristin O'Brien

Kristin O’Brien is a biologist at University of Alaska Fairbanks, who studies an unusual family of fishes called icefishes. They’re found only in the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica. They are unique because they are the only vertebrates in the world that lack the oxygen-binding protein hemoglobin, which is the protein that transports oxygen throughout the body and gives blood its red color. In other words, the blood of an icefish isn’t red. Instead, its blood runs a cloudy white. “I think these animals are among the most fascinating creatures on Earth,” Dr. O’Brien said.

What do you find so fascinating about them?

Antarctic icefishes – which are within the Channichthyidae family – are an example of the wondrous possibilities that can arise during evolution in a cold environment. Icefishes are aptly named for their translucent bodies and blood. They’re the only vertebrates on the planet that don’t have red blood. Instead, white blood circulates through their blood vessels.

Blood on the left is from a red-blooded Antarctic fish. Blood on the right is from a white-blooded Antarctic icefish. Image Credit: Kristin O’Brien

An icefish off the coast of Antarctica. Its body and blood is translucent. This image has been identified as one of the best pictures on Wikipedia. Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Icefishes don’t synthesize the molecule hemoglobin. Oxygen-binding proteins like hemoglobin were once thought to be imperative for life for large, multicellular organisms because of their crucial role in delivering oxygen throughout the body.

Yet icefishes defy this paradigm.

What caused icefishes to evolve in this peculiar way?

One way is by living in the chronically cold environment of the Southern Ocean. Only one species of the 16 within the family, Champsocephalus esox, has strayed north of the polar front [zone of transition between polar and tropical air masses, during the winter is at about 30° latitude and during summer at about 60° latitude], where it inhabits the Patagonian Shelf extending from Uruguay to the Strait of Magellan.

Cold is critical for the survival of icefishes because the amount of oxygen dissolved in their watery blood plasma is inversely proportional to temperature. As a result, an icefish swimming in the icy cold waters of the Southern Ocean has about one and one-half times more oxygen in its blood plasma than a fish swimming off of the coast of California.

Unfortunately, the Southern Ocean might not remain a cold and hospitable environment for icefishes. Many members of the icefish family inhabit the Western Antarctic Peninsula region, which is one of the most rapidly warming regions on Earth. Working with Dr. Elizabeth Crockett from Ohio University, we’ve shown – and others have shown – that icefishes are more sensitive to warming temperatures than their red-blooded relatives. Further studies will be necessary to determine if icefishes and other Antarctic fishes have the flexibility to adapt to climate change.

Chaenocephalus aceratus - one of the 16 members of the icefish family. Image Credit: Bill Baker

Gills of an icefish. Image Credit: Paula Dell

The translucent body of an icefish makes its brain visible from above. Image Credit: Herb Baker

Bottom line: Kristin O’Brien of University of Alaska Fairbanks studies icefishes of the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica. These fishes are the only vertebrates in the world that lack the oxygen-binding protein hemoglobin, which gives blood its red color. In other words, the blood of an icefish isn’t red. Instead, its blood runs cloudy white. Working with and Dr. Elizabeth Crockett of Ohio University, Dr. O’Brien and her team are trying to determine what will happen to the icefishes if, as expected, Earth’s oceans continue to warm.

Nina Federoff, the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, talked with EarthSky about the important role science can play in helping different countries work together on the big issues confronting the world. Those issues include food, energy and water. Her own work is in the area of food – and she spoke of scientific solutions to some of the 21st century’s most difficult agricultural challenges. This podcast is part of the Thanks To Chemistry series, produced in cooperation with the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Generous sponsorship support was provided by the BASF Corporation. Additional production support was provided by The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, DuPont, and ExxonMobil.

What are the global agricultural challenges? What are the issues?

The issue is very simple. We have grown to be seven billion people on the planet. And the population experts are telling us that we’ll be somewhere between 9 and 10 billion by the middle of the century. The amount of land for growing food hasn’t changed in more than half a century. And we’ve been keeping agriculture alive in many places by pumping ground water from what’s called fossil aquifers. That’s aquifers that don’t get recharged.

At the same time, we have a very productive agriculture right now. We have, until recently, been decreasing the fraction of people who are hungry in the world. But the number of hungry people has suddenly gone up. We are rapidly approaching a crisis in simply being able to grow enough food to supply humanity.

In many places in the developed world, we eat or waste probably twice as many food calories as we really need. We’re wasteful of food. We ship all over the world. We’re now realizing that generating the energy to ship the food around the world is also ruining our climate. As the climate warms, there will be places that will get hotter and drier. We’re seeing that around the world. And that’s going to make it even more difficult to increase the food supply.

Experts are saying that we have to double the food supply by the middle of the century. And we don’t have any more land and water to use. So how are we going to do that? That’s the dilemma.

Image Credit: fishhawk

How many people in the world today are hungry?

Until 2008, there were perhaps between a half a billion and 800 million people that were hungry. Today, it’s over a billion people.

Think about what happened in the last half of the 20th century. Even as the population doubled from three to six billion, we managed to race ahead with all kinds of technological and scientific events in agriculture – from using more fertilizers to mechanization to advanced plant breeding. We managed to stay ahead of things so that we decreased the fraction of humanity that was perpetually hungry from half to about a sixth.

But those advances are not continuing. The number of hungry people is going up. We here in developed countries are used to paying a very small fraction of our income for food. But there are places in the world where people spend to 50 to 70 percent of everything they earn on food. And when the price of basic grains doubles, those folks are in trouble.

You’re a molecular scientist. In the century ahead, what will molecular science have to do with the food we eat? How will it address the global agricultural challenges?

It depends. It depends on whether we allow it to. Over the past 30 or 40 years, we’ve had a molecular revolution. People know the terms genes and genomes and sequencing the genome. Well, that revolution has happened in plant biology as well. Genes are nothing more than instructions for making proteins or other molecules. We’ve learned how to pick the genes we want and add them back into plants or animals to do a specific job. So, for example, molecular biology has been used to introduce a little tiny gene for a protein that is toxic to certain kinds of insects – but not to people. And that’s been introduced into corn and cotton plants. These plants are grown all over the world. That makes it possible to use less toxic chemicals to kill the insects. What a great advantage.

So those are the kinds of things that people have done already. But there are lots and lots of people who have made up their mind that it’s dangerous, that it’s bad and immoral. In many countries – including this country – there are protests against what has come be called genetic modification or genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Before we talk about GMOs – which is really a touchstone issue – let’s talk about your own work on “jumping genes” in the 1970s. They’ve become fundamental to global agriculture. We understand that jumping genes are linked to mutations that – for example – might make a plant more resistant to insects, drought or heat. Tell us about that.

Jumping genes are little bits of DNA that know how to move around in your chromosomes. And in fact, almost half of the DNA in people is jumping genes. And more than half in some plants is jumping genes.

Jumping genes are fundamental because they’re agents of change. Everybody knows that organisms evolve. What makes them evolve is that their genes are dynamic and in motion. A familiar example is the stripe-y corn – called Indian corn – that you buy in the fall. Those are patterns that are caused by jumping genes inserted into a gene that’s necessary for making the pigment, and then jumping out again. So you have a mixture of colorless and colored tissue. Many of the patterns in nature are caused by transposable elements such as these.

In agriculture, people have taken wild plants that can’t be eaten by people – and turned them into wonderful food sources. And that’s because genomes can change, and people working with plants have picked mutations. Mutations are nothing more than genetic changes. Some of them are caused by transposable elements – or jumping genes – but some of them happen just in the chemistry of the DNA. And people have transformed inedible plants into plants that feed the world.

Here’s a familiar example. The huge ear of corn that we’re so familiar with is not natural. It’s manmade. In fact, the closest relative is a wild grass that makes its seeds at the top. People made those genetic changes. That’s a huge transformation. So the ability of plant genomes to change – which is largely promoted by jumping genes – is essential to the whole process of creating enough food to support this enormous population of people that we have today. And more tomorrow.

Image Credit: Tracy O

Even before the 20th century, people were very observant. Spontaneous changes happened because we’re constantly bombarded by radiation from outer space. People were observant and picked mutations when they happened spontaneously. In the 20th century, we learned how to make those mutations through our understanding of genetics. We did that with radiation. We did that with chemicals. We would treat seeds or pollen of plants with chemicals or irradiate them and then plant out lots and lots and lots of plants – and look for things that were an improvement.

For example, ruby red grapefruits are a favorite at Christmastime. Everybody ships them to their relatives. Those were created by sending little shoots of grapefruit off to Brookhaven National Laboratories, irradiating them, and then sending them back to Texas, and planting them out and looking for mutations. That’s how it was done in the 20th century.

Toward the end of the 20th century – because of the genetic revolution, the genomic revolution, the sequencing revolution – we could get down right into the genes and understand what they do. We can now take a gene for what we want it to do – and put it in another place where we want it. It’s the biggest advance in being able to change plants exactly as we want them that’s ever been made.

And just at this juncture people have said, oh my goodness, that’s not right. That’s messing with nature. We’ve been messing with nature for 10,000 years to create our current crops.

Where do you fit into the picture that you just painted?

When I started working on plants, no genes had been cloned. There was no molecular biology of plants. My laboratory developed some of the basic procedures that we now use in every laboratory to clone and sequence genes. I did some of the first DNA sequencing that was done. That was only a few decades ago. This has all happened very, very rapidly. We’ve had a real revolution in biology.

Let’s get back to genetically modified foods as a touchstone issue. What would you say to people who are against growing or eating genetically modified foods?

The simplest answer is that there’s virtually no food that isn’t genetically modified. Except, you know, wild blueberries, or wild fish, are not genetically modified. But everything that’s grown in fields – that is the vast majority of what we eat – has all been genetically modified. It’s just that we’ve gotten better at it now.

Let’s look at it carefully. Let’s put experts together to help regulate it, and go forward.

Over the last 25 or 30 years we’ve accumulated immense amount of experience with GMOs. The European Union is quite against GMOs, but the EU has invested more than 300 million Euros in biosafety research. They recently published a summary of the 25 years of research that they’ve done, and basically their conclusion was that these methods are no more than dangerous than any of the other methods used throughout history to modify plants, and to make them better crop plants.

And yet we’re stuck in this place where a lot of people are against it. And it’s not easy to see how to get unstuck.

I’d like to end on a positive note. I have spent the last year looking at different growing techniques in a number of different countries. And I’m very optimistic. The most productive facilities I’ve seen – particularly very modern greenhouse facilities – can grow five to 10 times as many vegetables and fruits as open-field agriculture, using sometimes as little as a tenth as much water.

So there’s lots of room for what’s called agricultural intensification. But one of the biggest challenges is how to raise the grain crops, the soybeans, the corn, the wheat that will thrive in a much harsher climate. And that’s the challenge of the future.

What is the most important thing you’d like to say to EarthSky’s global audience?

It’s that science really matters. And what individuals do really matters. Truth really matters. And in today’s age of the Internet, we seem to be trapped in all kinds of urban legends and myths and beliefs – and yet all of the information that we need is there. We really need to be attentive to reality. And the reality going forward is that our climate is changing. We’ll need to use the most up-to-date science and technology, not only to address that problem directly, but to adapt our agricultural techniques and our medical techniques to cope with the consequences of climate change.

Listen to the 90-second and 8-minute podcasts of EarthSky’s interview with Dr. Nina Fedoroff on global agricultural challenges (see top of page). For this and other free science interview podcasts, visit the subscribe page at earthsky.org. This podcast is part of the Thanks To Chemistry series, produced in cooperation with the Chemical Heritage Foundation. EarthSky is a clear voice for science.

More in the Thanks to Chemistry series:
Robert Langer on targeted drug delivery for future medicine

“Most people hear what they know about climate change from a politician, from a headline, from a sound bite, from a joke in a bar,” said climate scientist Gavin Schmidt, who was selected by EarthSky’s 1,000+ Global Science Advisors as our Science Communicator of the Year. “They don’t know where to go to get the real information.”

llustration provided courtesy of MCKIBILLO

Schmidt – a climate scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who uses computer models to research the variability of ocean circulation and climate – is co-founder and contributor to the website RealClimate. He said he believes that telling people about how scientists work is a key to communicating the science of climate change. He spoke with EarthSky’s Jorge Salazar.

Give us a sense of what’s really happening with climate change on our planet right now.

I think you want to side-step that question and talk about what people are doing to study this problem. Who are these people who are going out and measuring ocean temperatures? Who are these people who are tracking the year-on-year retreat of the Arctic sea ice? Who are these people who are going out and measuring the small processes involved in cloud formation, in soil moisture retention, in ocean eddies, in evaporation? It’s these things that we then put together to build the numerical simulations that I work on, these climate models, that we’re using to help us piece together what’s happened in the past, what’s happening now, and what’s likely to happen in the future.

I think it’s far more important that people get a sense of the science as a work in progress, rather than one particular message or piece of content knowledge getting hammered home.

Taking an ice core sample. Image Credit: USGS

Most of the science news is concerned with stuff at the cutting edge, stuff at the uncertainty bounds, the edge of what we know. Very few of the stories are telling people what we know quite well. They’re always focused on what the uncertainties are. And that’s because that’s where scientists are focused. But it isn’t necessarily where the public sees the need for information.

So there’s a huge need for the context. What was the process that led to these climate change science stories coming out? I know that’s more complicated. It’s not a soundbite. It’s not something that one can encapsulate in a headline. But it is one of the things that scientists can provide much more readily than advocates, or journalists, or commentators. It’s that sense of progression. That sense of science as a process.

Minimum level of Arctic sea ice since 1979, Image Credit: NASA

What have you found that works in communicating science to non-scientists?

Telling people about scientists, not just about science. People respond very well to narratives, to stories involving people. Science is not just a dry, computational effort. It is, in fact, one of the greatest, most successful human endeavors that we’ve ever embarked upon.

There’s a great story there, the story of how we’ve wrestled information out of the records that have been left in the ice, or in ocean mud, or in tree rings, of how the system has changed in the past and how we worked out why these things have changed in the past. Those are all human stories. The conclusions are very interesting. But how we got to those conclusions are far more fascinating to average people than actual knowledge. People want to know that the people who are investigating this are doing their best and are competent at what they’re doing. And some of them are brilliant.

You can get that across by talking to people about people. One of my presentations that I give to the general public involves photographs and imagery of scientists in the field, trying to wrestle that information out of the system. That’s a really hard job and people realize the challenge involved. They realize the challenge involved in putting it all together and trying to make sense of the big picture changes that we can see happening now. It’s that human story, that human narrative that gets people’s attention.

Scientists in East Antarctica. Photo credit: Tom Neumann

We can spend a lot of time looking at graphs and talking about equations, but people don’t have a visceral response to equations, unless you actually are a scientist (sometimes.) But people do have a visceral response to images of how glaciers have retreated over the last hundred years. They have a visceral response to changes in landscape. They have a visceral response to seeing scientists at work, from the South Pole to the middle of the Pacific to the top of some mountain somewhere. People empathize with that.

Scientists are enormously respected in the public discourse, far more so than politicians or journalists. And that respect can’t be taken for granted. It has to be continually re-earned. And we do that by showing what scientists are actually doing. I think that one of the roles for science communicators is really to showcase the depth and breadth of experiences and work that’s going on in all parts of the world, from all kinds of different people, but who are all contributing to the body of work that is climate science.

Do you think people today are more informed or less informed about climate change, compared to, say, five years ago?

It depends very much on where you are in the world and what is it you’re trying to convey. In the last few years in the U.S. the discussion about climate change has become more politicized. That’s made it harder to have serious conversations without people taking it to some whole other level very, very quickly in some quarters.

But ten years ago we would be getting calls from staffers, or from policy makers, or from politicians themselves asking us, is this a problem that we need to be thinking about? And we told them ten years ago, yes, this is a problem you need to be thinking about. This is not going to go away.

Now when we get calls, people want to know, for example, how black carbon regulation can fit alongside the Kyoto Six gases and have it all work in a coherent manner that we can measure. The questions are much more technical. They’re much more to the point. And they work from a basis of shared understanding, although that isn’t necessarily reflected in statements that politicians make on the stump. But I think that we all understand that when people are campaigning, they’re not necessarily the most nuanced of communicators of what’s going on.

There has been an unfortunate tendency in a segment of the American political landscape to turn away from what the science is saying. But if you talk to the people who are making decisions and formulating policies, you find that people have a much more nuanced understanding of what’s going on than they did five or ten or fifteen years ago. And I think that’s a very positive sign.

What’s the most important thing you’d like people today to know about communicating science?

I think you can’t go wrong communicating about scientists. Tell people what you do, why you get out of bed in the morning, what excites you, why it excites you, and where’s that’s led you. People are fascinated by that story. And they’re amazed that the efforts of individuals like scientists have led to such a profound understanding of how the world works and our place in it. Talk about what you do why you love it. That’s the bottom line.

Listen to the 90-second and 8-minute interviews with Gavin Schmidt about communicating climate change, at the top of the page.

Gavin Schmidt is the EarthSky Science Communicator of the Year

Science journalist Jennifer Ackerman is the author of the book Ah-choo! The uncommon life of your common cold!. She said that scientists used to think a cold worked just like a flu, which attacks and kills cells inside the body. But that’s not so. She told EarthSky:

Cold viruses aren’t causing our misery by tearing up our cells. They’re caused by the body’s own inflammatory response to the intruders. That’s what causes our nose to run and our throats to swell, but it also summons white blood cells, which will produce antibodies to that particular virus.

Image Credit: James Gathany

Here’s the good news. Ackerman said our body’s inflammatory response to a cold – which, to us, feels like a stuffed up nose – is really a sign that our immune system is working normally. She said that’s why products claiming to boost the immune system might not help when you’re in the grip of a bad cold.

Some of them may contain ingredients that have been shown in lab studies to effect elements of the immune system, But boosting any old part of the immune system is not always a good thing. You can actually end up boosting those very inflammatory agents that cause the symptoms of the cold, thereby aggravating the symptoms.

Ackerman said a number of scientists believe that colds and other illnesses may be integral to building the immune system, especially among children. Some studies have shown that children who are exposed to ‘microbial challenges’ early in life – colds included – suffer less from allergies and asthma later on. Research is ongoing, Ackerman said.

The evidence is all epidemiological and it’s important to understand that this is not necessarily cause and effect. There’s a correlation between kids who are born amidst great microbial challenges, kids who live on farms or who are in day care who have stuffy noses all the time, that they have less risk of later developing allergies and asthma than children who are not in those settings. It’s a correlation, it remains to be determined.

A lot of current cold research concerns prevention, Ackerman said. She said a cold vaccine has been elusive because there are hundreds of different cold viruses out there. She said that what they’d need to do is find something that all these viruses have in common that they can produce a vaccine against.

And even antibacterial hand lotions are mostly ineffective against viruses, she said. The best way to prevent a cold is to keep your hands away from your face. She told us:

It hasn’t happened yet, but one of the dreams of cold scientists is to have a genome-wide study looking at all of the genes that are involved the response to the common cold. A very interesting observation that scientist have made that about ¼ of people who are infected with a cold virus don’t actually come down with symptoms. There’s probably some kind of genetic difference, it would be very interesting to know what that is. It’s possible that they’re not making the normal amount of inflammatory mediators.

You might be familiar with contrails, those wispy strands of clouds made by jet exhaust high in the sky. But you might never have seen a hole-punch cloud. They’re very strange clearings in the cloud cover – clear patches of sky, often with a circular shape. Sometimes people report them as UFOs. Some thought airplanes created hole-punch clouds – but just how they did it was unclear.

Hole-punch cloud image provided by Andrew Heymsfield. Used with permission

EarthSky spoke with Andrew Heymsfield, a senior scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research. He led a team that showed a relationship between these strange-looking clouds, jet aircraft and snowfall. He told EarthSky:

This whole idea of jet aircraft making these features has to do with cooling of air over the wings that generates ice.

His team found that – at lower altitudes – jets can punch holes in clouds and make small amounts of rain and snow. As a plane flies through mid-level clouds, it forces air to expand rapidly and cool. Water droplets in the cloud freeze to ice and then turn to snow as they fall. The gap expands to create spectacular holes in the clouds. He said:

Image Credit: NOAA

Image Credit: Editor B

Image Credit: NOAA

We found an exemplary case of hole-punch clouds over Texas. From satellite imagery you could see holes just pocketing the sky, holes and long channels where aircraft had been flying at that level of the cloud for a while.

Dr. Heymsfield used a weather forecast model developed at NCAR – and radar images of clouds from NASA’s CloudSat satellite – to explain the physics of how jet aircraft make hole-punch clouds.

Heymsfield’s team found that every measurable commercial jet aircraft, private jet aircraft and also military jets as well as turbo props were producing these holes. He said a hole-punch cloud expands for hours after being created. Major airports, where there’s a lot of aircraft traffic, would be a good place to study cloud holes. He said:

What we decided to do was look at major airports around the world, especially where there’s low cloud cover and cold clouds in the wintertime, and found that the frequency of occurrence suitable for this process to occur is actually reasonably high, on the order of three to five percent. In the winter months, it’s probably two to three times higher, 10 to 15 percent.

Hole-punch cloud image provided by Andrew Heymsfield. Used with permission

He said people who look out their airplane window in flight can see for themselves how the wing changes a cloud.

When an aircraft lands or takes off sometimes – especially in humid, tropical areas – you see a little veil of clouds over the wings of the aircraft. And basically, what’s happening over the wings of the aircraft, there’s cooling. And the cooling produces a cloud.

It’s basically a super-cooled cloud. It’s just like a fog you see at the ground except that its temperature is zero degrees centigrade. So in that process of expanding, the air expands over the wing and cools. And that cooling can be as much as 20 degrees centigrade.

The cooling of air over the wings generates ice, said Heymsfield. He said:

We speculated on that and suggested that this was another process to produce holes in clouds. Our results were published in July 2011 in the journal Science.

About the Texas incident where satellite imagery showed many hole-punch openings and channels, Heymsfield said:

What we found was that there were about a hundred of these little features. We decided to, first of all, identify their location and see if we could link them to particular aircraft. Then the second thing we did was say, okay, why do these long channels last for the period of time it would take for a satellite to take a snapshot of them? We got high-time-resolution satellite imagery and were able then to track these features, these holes, and watch them develop with time, watch how they developed.

Bottom Line: Scientists have found that, at mid-altitudes, jet aircraft can punch holes in clouds and make small amounts of rain and snow. These are the strange hole-punch clouds that are sometimes reported as UFOs. Andrew Heymsfield, a senior scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, led a team that showed a relationship between these strange-looking clouds, airplanes and snowfall.