Report: “Game-Changing” Anti-Deforestation Agreements in Brazil are Actually Working

Rainforest around the world are in crisis: experts estimate that upwards of 80,000 acres of rainforest are destroyed across the world each day, taking with them over 130 species of plants, animals and insects.

Much of that deforestation has been attributed to the beef and cattle trade. Brazil's $4.4 billion beef industry is responsible for two-thirds of all pastures that are erected on deforested land.

In 2009, Brazil's three largest producers of leather and beef bowed to heavy pressure from Greenpeace and the local government, voluntarily agreeing to purchase cattle only from ranchers who ceased destroying rainforest and agreed to have their properties monitored for compliance.

Surprisingly, the agreement is working.

A new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison follows up with those companies, finding that the slaughterhouses are proactively blocking purchases from ranches that are complicit in deforestation. By 2013, almost all of the slaughterhouses' suppliers of cattle were registered with the local government and compliant with anti-deforestation policies. Less than 4% of the suppliers had recent deforestation violations, compared to 40% before the regulations went into effect.

"Public enforcement of environmental laws is a formidable task in the Brazilian Amazon, which covers an area six times the size of Texas,"says study lead author Holly Gibbs, environmental studies professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "But these market-based interventions are leading to rapid changes in the beef industry within a period of months, even in very remote areas."

However, Gibbs says that there is still work to be done. Some ranchers raise cattle on noncompliant ranches, and then transfer cattle to compliant facilities before they are sold in order to avoid detection. Furthermore, not all slaughterhouses are are required to participate in the program; these facilities have little (if any) government oversight.

Antarctica Ice Shelf Likely to Collapse Completely by 2020

Scientists have been concerned about the Larsen B Ice Shelf in Antarctica since its partial collapse in 2002. A new study from NASA finds the shelf in its final days, with a complete collapse likely before 2020.

"These are warning signs that the remnant is disintegrating," remarked study lead author Ala Khazendar, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "Although it's fascinating scientifically to have a front-row seat to watch the ice shelf becoming unstable and breaking up, it's bad news for our planet. This ice shelf has existed for at least 10,000 years, and soon it will be gone."

Khazendar and his team found that the glacier's water is flowing faster than ever, causing large cracks and thinning the ice significantly. Without ice shelves such as the Larsen B, glacial water flows uninhibited into the ocean, accelerating the rise of sea levels.

If the shelf's decomposition continues as forecast, a large portion of the glacier will break off and could push hundreds of icebergs further into the ocean.

"What is really surprising about Larsen B is how quickly the changes are taking place," added Khazendar. "Change has been relentless."

A new NASA study finds the last remaining section of Antarctica's Larsen B Ice Shelf, which partially collapsed in 2002, is quickly weakening and is likely to disintegrate completely before the end of the decade.

A team led by Ala Khazendar of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, found the remnant of the Larsen B Ice Shelf is flowing faster, becoming increasingly fragmented and developing large cracks. Two of its tributary glaciers also are flowing faster and thinning rapidly.

"These are warning signs that the remnant is disintegrating," Khazendar said. "Although it's fascinating scientifically to have a front-row seat to watch the ice shelf becoming unstable and breaking up, it's bad news for our planet. This ice shelf has existed for at least 10,000 years, and soon it will be gone."

Ice shelves are the gatekeepers for glaciers flowing from Antarctica toward the ocean. Without them, glacial ice enters the ocean faster and accelerates the pace of global sea level rise. This study, the first to look comprehensively at the health of the Larsen B remnant and the glaciers that flow into it, has been published online in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

Khazendar's team used data on ice surface elevations and bedrock depths from instrumented aircraft participating in NASA's Operation IceBridge, a multiyear airborne survey campaign that provides unprecedented documentation annually of Antarctica's glaciers, ice shelves and ice sheets. Data on flow speeds came from spaceborne synthetic aperture radars operating since 1997.

Khazendar noted his estimate of the remnant's remaining life span was based on the likely scenario that a huge, widening rift that has formed near the ice shelf's grounding line will eventually crack all the way across. The free-floating remnant will shatter into hundreds of icebergs that will drift away, and the glaciers will rev up for their unhindered move to the sea.

Located on the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula, the Larsen B remnant is about 625 square miles (1,600 square kilometers) in area and about 1,640 feet (500 meters) thick at its thickest point. Its three major tributary glaciers are fed by their own tributaries farther inland.

"What is really surprising about Larsen B is how quickly the changes are taking place," Khazendar said. "Change has been relentless."

The remnant's main tributary glaciers are named Leppard, Flask and Starbuck -- the latter two after characters in the novel Moby Dick. The glaciers' thicknesses and flow speeds changed only slightly in the first couple of years following the 2002 collapse, leading researchers to assume they remained stable. The new study revealed, however, that Leppard and Flask glaciers have thinned by 65-72 feet (20-22 meters) and accelerated considerably in the intervening years. The fastest-moving part of Flask Glacier had accelerated 36 percent by 2012 to a flow speed of 2,300 feet (700 meters) a year -- comparable to a car accelerating from 55 to 75 mph.

Flask's acceleration, while the remnant has been weakening, may be just a preview of what will happen when the remnant breaks up completely. After the 2002 Larsen B collapse, the glaciers behind the collapsed part of the shelf accelerated as much as eightfold -- comparable to a car accelerating from 55 to 440 mph.

The third and smallest glacier, Starbuck, has changed little. Starbuck's channel is narrow compared with those of the other glaciers, and the small glacier is strongly anchored to the bedrock, which, according to authors of the study, explains its comparative stability.

"This study of the Antarctic Peninsula glaciers provides insights about how ice shelves farther south, which hold much more land ice, will react to a warming climate," said JPL glaciologist Eric Rignot, a coauthor of the paper.

National Aquarium Initiative Saves 13 Million Pounds of Plastic From Landfills

Environmental advocacy organization 5 Gyres estimates that there are more than 268,000 tons of plastic floating freely in the world's oceans. Much of that non-biodegradable, petroleum-based waste comes in the form of single-use, "disposable" plastic products like grocery bags and drinking straws.

Baltimore's National Aquarium is taking a stand against the buildup of pollutants in our oceans by spearheading the 48 Days of Blue campaign, which challenges participants to make small changes in their daily lives that significantly impact the health of our oceans and planet.

The daily challenges are simple, but they have a measurable impact. For example, a recent challenge encouraged participants to skip the plastic straw in their restaurant drinks.

Halfway through the challenge, aquarium officials estimate that they've already saved 13,472,595 pounds of plastic from being thrown away - enough to fill more than 2,000 U-Haul trucks. They've also conserved enough electricity to power the average American home for 6 weeks and saved more than one million gallons of water.

"Everything we do on land has a downstream effect," said Eric Schwaab, National Aquarium Chief Conservation Officer. "By participating in our 48 Days of Blue challenge, we hope people begin to realize how simple it can be to improve and preserve our amazing blue planet for generations to come."

48 Days of Blue kicked off on Earth Day and runs until June 8, World Oceans Day.

Viral Campaign Encourages Citizens to Clean Up Pollution

The bank of the Schie before & after Tommy Kleyn removed 20 bags of litter.

A campaign going viral on Facebook is prompting citizens around the world to take a mere 30 minutes out of their day to pick up litter.Project Schone Schie (Dutch for "Clean River Schie") is the brainchild of Tommy Kleyn, a Netherlands-based artist who grew increasingly frustrated by the pollution that accumulated along the banks of South Holland's Schie river.

Armed with a trash bag and a gripper, Kleyn took 30 minutes out of his day each morning to collect litter from the riverbank. In five weeks, he removed 20 trash bags worth of plastic bottles, food containers and other litter. He was soon joined by members of the municipal government. Kleyn's work is already starting to pay off: during a recent visit, he noticed that a Eurasian Coot had taken up residence in an area he had recently cleaned.

He took to social media to share his story, and Project Schone Schiewas born. People all over the world have taken to the project's Facebook page to share photos of grassroots garbage collection initiatives:

Rare Plant Pinpoints Exact Location of Diamonds

Diamond prospecting just got a whole lot easier.

Florida International University researcher Stephen Haggerty has discovered a rare plant that grows exclusively over equally rare kimberlite pipes, the chutes that bring diamonds from Earth's mantle to the surface. His findings are published in the latest edition ofEconomic Geology.

The plant, Pandanus candelabrum, could revolutionize diamond prospecting in areas with dense vegetation. It grows to a height of 30 feet and sports palm-like fronds that make it easily identifiable against jungle flora.

Haggerty suspects that the plant can only thrive in the nutrient-rich kimberlite soil. "It sounds like a very good fertilizer, which it is," he told Science Magazine.

There’s diamond under them thar plants. A geologist has discovered a thorny, palmlike plant in Liberia that seems to grow only on top of kimberlite pipes—columns of volcanic rock hundreds of meters across that extend deep into Earth, left by ancient eruptions that exhumed diamonds from the mantle. If the plant is as choosy as it seems to be, diamond hunters in West Africa will have a simple, powerful way of finding diamond-rich deposits. Prospectors are going to “jump on it like crazy,” says Steven Shirey, a geologist specializing in diamond research at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C.

Miners have long known that particular plants can signal ore-bearing rocks. For example,Lychnis alpina, a small pink-flowering plant in Scandinavia, and Haumaniastrum katangense, a white-flowered shrub in central Africa, are both associated with copper. That’s because the plants are especially tolerant to copper that has eroded into soils from the mother lodes.

But the new plant, identified as Pandanus candelabrum, is the first indicator species for diamond-bearing kimberlite, says Stephen Haggerty, a researcher at Florida International University in Miami and the chief exploration officer of Youssef Diamond Mining Company, which owns mining concessions in Liberia. Haggerty suspects that the plant has adapted to kimberlite soils, which are rich in magnesium, potassium, and phosphorus. “It sounds like a very good fertilizer, which it is,” says Haggerty, who has published the discovery in the June-July issue of Economic Geology.

Stephen Haggerty

A grove of Pandanus candelabrum, which appears to grow only in diamond-bearing kimberlite soils.

Diamonds are formed hundreds of kilometers below the surface, as carbon is squeezed under intense temperatures and pressures. Kimberlite pipes bring the gems to the surface in eruptions that sometimes rise faster than the speed of sound. The pipes are rare. Haggerty says a rule of sixes applies: Of the more than 6000 known kimberlite pipes in the world, about 600 contain diamonds. Of these, only about 60 are rich enough in quality diamonds to be worth mining. West Africa has many “artisanal” operations in which people sift through river sediments for the occasional diamond eroded from a kimberlite pipe upstream. But few pipes have been found in the thick jungle. “The bush is absolutely impenetrable,” he says.

Haggerty, who has worked in Liberia off and on since the late 1970s, has in recent years focused his prospecting efforts in the northwest part of the country. To look for diagnostic kimberlite minerals, he used corrugated steel rods to dredge up samples from the swampy soil. In 2013, near an area called Camp Alpha, he discovered a new kimberlite pipe 500 meters long and 50 meters wide. The soil above the pipe has already yielded four diamonds, he says: two in the 20-carat range, and two in the 1-carat range.

More importantly, Haggerty noticed a plant that seemed to grow only in the soil above the pipe. It has a stiltlike aerial root system, similar to mangrove trees, and rises to a height of 10 meters or more, spreading spiny, palmlike fronds. He says local people use the fronds for thatching their roofs. Working with botanists from the Royal Botanic Garden, Kew, in the United Kingdom, and the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis, he has tentatively identified the plant as P. candelabrum, a poorly understood species in a family that ranges from Cameroon to Senegal. He says it could be a subspecies or a new species altogether. Haggerty has confirmed the presence of the plant at another kimberlite pipe 50 kilometers to the southeast, but it does not seem to grow elsewhere.

“It’s a brilliant observation, particularly in a heavily forested area that’s difficult to do exploration in,” says Karin Olson Hoal, a diamond geologist at the Colorado School of Mines in Golden. Shirey says the same pandanus species could guide prospectors in Brazil, another heavily forested place at similar latitudes, if it exists there.

Haggerty now has some heavy machinery in place, and early next year, after the rainy season is over, he will evaluate bulk samples of the soil above the Camp Alpha pipe to see if it is worth mining. He wants to continue analyzing the plant and the kimberlite soil to see exactly how nutrients are exchanged. He also wants to see if the plant can be recognized from aerial or satellite imagery. That could help West African nations find and develop diamond deposits, he says.

For those countries, which have suffered through wars and the Ebola epidemics, kimberlite mining could offer revenue without great damage to the environment, Shirey says. Kimberlite mines tend to be narrow and vertical, with much smaller footprints than, say, open-pit copper mines, and their effluent—ground-up kimberlite—is benign. “It’s about as toxic as the fertilizer in your garden,” Shirey says.

As a scientist, Shirey would like to get hold of a diamond sample from the new region. Although many kimberlite eruptions took place relatively recently, the diamonds themselves are ancient: typically about 3 billion years old. Sometimes they trap minerals that offer clues to the temperatures the diamonds experienced deep in the earth. A sample from the new pipe in Liberia, he says, could offer insight into conditions in the mantle about 150 million years ago, when a rift opened up between Africa and South America and created the Atlantic Ocean. “It would probably have some interesting secrets,” he says.

Study: ‘Energy Hog’ NYC Uses One Supertanker of Oil Every 36 Hours

A comprehensive study of resource usage in the world's 27 largest metropolitan areas has named New York City among the world's most wasteful cities.

The study, published in the current edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, examined the flow of resources in and out of the world's 27 cities with a population over 10 million. Although these 27 cities house less than 7% of the world's population, they consume 9% of the world's electricity and disproportionately produce almost 13% of the world's waste.

In the study, New York City stands out from other large cities as particularly resource-hungry.

"The New York metropolis has 12 million fewer people than Tokyo, yet it uses more energy in total: the equivalent of one oil supertanker every 1.5 days," said University of Toronto industrial ecologist Chris Kennedy. "When I saw that, I thought it was just incredible."

Kennedy and his team attribute energy efficiency in megacities to progressive public policy and effective urban planning. He cites Moscow's centralized heating and electricity infrastructure, Seoul's wastewater reclamation and London's waste tax as smart policies that have caused a noticeable decrease in energy usage and waste.

"What we're talking about are not short-term, one-election issues, but long-term policies on infrastructure that shape cities over years or decades," he added.