1 December 2016, SEI, Arctic Resilience Report: This report is the concluding scientific product of the Arctic Resilience Assessment, a project launched by the Swedish Chairmanship of the Arctic Council. The project’s 2013 Interim Report provided the conceptual foundations for this final report, as well as a detailed survey of resilience research in the Arctic to date. This Final Report extends that effort by providing a novel assessment of Arctic change and resilience, including factors that appear to support or weaken resilience. It provides an overview of tools and strategies that can be used to assess and build resilience in the Arctic, and considers how the Arctic Council can contribute to those efforts. The authors hope that the insights presented in the report will help Arctic nations to better understand the changes taking place in the region, and contribute to strengthening Arctic people’s capacity to navigate the rapid, turbulent and often unexpected changes they face in the 21st century. Access full report here
Tag Archives: oceans
6 December 2016, The Conversation. At first glance, the progress reports on the Great Barrier Reef released last week by the Australian and Queensland governments might seem impressive. The update on the Reef 2050 Plan suggests that 135 of the plan’s 151 actions are either complete or on track. The Australian government’s apparent intention in releasing five recent reports is to reassure UNESCO that the Great Barrier Reef should not be listed as “World Heritage in Danger” (as the World Heritage Committee has previously threatened). Sadly, behind the verbosity and colour of these reports, there is disappointingly little evidence of progress in the key areas needed to make a significant difference to a World Heritage Area that is in crisis. Poor baseline The government framework for protecting and managing the Reef from 2015 to 2050, the Reef 2050 Plan, has been widely criticised as failing to provide a sound basis for the necessary long-term protection of the Reef. As well as providing a shaky basis to build effective actions, the Reef 2050 Plan has few measurable or realistic targets. It is therefore not easy to report on the actual progress. Several of the actions that will have the greatest impacts on the overall health of the Reef are shown in the progress reports as “not yet due”. In some cases, such as climate change, the Reef 2050 Plan is silent, instead simply referencing Australia’s national efforts on climate change. Read More here
2 December 2016, Reuters, Biggest-Ever Coral Die-Off Reported on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Warm seas around Australia’s Great Barrier Reef have killed two-thirds of a 700-km (435 miles) stretch of coral in the past nine months, the worst die-off ever recorded on the World Heritage site, scientists who surveyed the reef said on Tuesday. Their finding of the die-off in the reef’s north is a major blow for tourism at reef which, according to a 2013 Deloitte Access Economics report, attracts about A$5.2 billion ($3.9 billion) in spending each year. “The coral is essentially cooked,” professor Andrew Baird, a researcher at James Cook University who was part of the reef surveys, told Reuters by telephone from Townsville in Australia’s tropical north. He said the die-off was “almost certainly” the largest ever recorded anywhere because of the size of the Barrier Reef, which at 348,000 sq km (134,400 sq miles) is the biggest coral reef in the world. Bleaching occurs when the water is too warm, forcing coral to expel living algae and causing it to calcify and turn white. Mildly bleached coral can recover if the temperature drops and the survey found this occurred in southern parts of the reef, where coral mortality was much lower. Read More here
28 November 2016, Geophysical Research Letters (REPORT) Pine Island Glacier has undergone several major iceberg calving events over the past decades. These typically occurred when a rift at the heavily fractured shear margin propagated across the width of the ice shelf. This type of calving is common on polar ice shelves, with no clear connection to ocean-ice dynamic forcing. In contrast, we report on the recent development of multiple rifts initiating from basal crevasses in the center of the ice shelf, resulted in calving further upglacier than previously observed. Coincident with rift formation was the sudden disintegration of the ice mélange that filled the northern shear margin, resulting in ice sheet detachment from this margin. Examination of ice velocity suggests that this internal rifting resulted from the combination of a change in ice shelf stress regime caused by disintegration of the mélange and intensified melting within basal crevasses, both of which may be linked to ocean forcing. Read More here