As Arctic ice melts, U.S. military adapting strategy, forces
U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced on Friday the Pentagon’s first Arctic strategy to guide changes in military planning as rapidly thawing ice reshapes global commerce and energy exploration, possibly raising tensions along the way.
Ice on the Arctic Ocean shrank last year to its lowest levels since satellite observations began in the 1970s, and many experts expect it will vanish in summers by mid-century due to climate change.
As the sea ice thaws, ships are increasingly using a shortcut between the Atlantic and the Pacific, and competition is intensifying for Arctic oil and gas, estimated at around 15 percent and 30 percent respectively of undiscovered reserves.
Hagel, addressing a security forum in Canada, said the military would “evolve” its infrastructure and capabilities and would keep defending U.S. sovereignty in and around Alaska while working to help ensure freedom of the seas.
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Toxic Lakes From Tar-Sand Projects Planned for Alberta
Canada is blessed with 3 million lakes, more than any country on Earth — and it may soon start manufacturing new ones. They’re just not the kind that will attract anglers or tourists.
The oil sands industry is in the throes of a major expansion, powered by C$20 billion ($19 billion) a year in investments. Companies including Syncrude Canada Ltd., Royal Dutch Shell Plc and Exxon Mobil Corp. affiliate Imperial Oil Ltd. are running out of room to store the contaminated water that is a byproduct of the process used to turn bitumen — a highly viscous form of petroleum — into diesel and other fuels.
By 2022 they will be producing so much of the stuff that a month’s output of wastewater could turn an area the size of New York’s Central Park into a toxic reservoir 11 feet (3.4 meters) deep, according to the Pembina Institute, a nonprofit in Calgary that promotes sustainable energy.
To tackle the problem, energy companies have drawn up plans that would transform northern Alberta into the largest man-made lake district on Earth. Several firms have obtained permission from provincial authorities to flood abandoned tar sand mines with a mix of tailings and fresh water.
Climate talks near end without clarity on targets
U.N. climate talks are likely to run overtime with more than 190 countries arguing over the building blocks for a new pact to slow global warming.
A draft text presented Friday, the last scheduled day of the two-week conference in Warsaw, gave only vague direction on when countries should present their targets for restricting carbon emissions. That’s a key element of the deal that’s supposed to be adopted in Paris in 2015.
Despite a push by the European Union and the U.S. for a clear timeline for announcing targets, the draft text said only that commitments should be presented “well in advance” of the Paris summit.
U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern called for “stronger language” to drive the work forward.
The EU wants to present its target in 2014 and the U.S. is aiming for early 2015 to leave time for a review process before the Paris conference. But some countries, including China, the world’s biggest carbon polluter, have been reluctant to set a deadline.
“We should talk, and we should deliver and announce during the process of negotiations,” Chinese delegate Liu Zhenmin told reporters. “I don’t know when. I cannot say timeframe.”
The U.N. climate talks were launched in 1992 after scientists warned that humans were warming the planet by pumping CO2 and other heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, primarily through the burning of fossil fuels. Though governments agree global emissions need to come down, they’ve been unable to agree on how to divide those cuts.
Scientists witness massive gamma-ray burst, don’t understand it
An exploded star some 3.8 billion light-years away is forcing scientists to overhaul much of what they thought they knew about gamma-ray bursts – intense blasts of radiation triggered, in this case, by a star tens of times more massive than the sun that exhausted its nuclear fuel, exploded, then collapsed to form a black hole.
Last April, gamma rays from the blast struck detectors in gamma-ray observatories orbiting Earth, triggering a frenzy of space- and ground-based observations. Many of them fly in the face of explanations researchers have developed during the past 30 years for the processes driving the evolution of a burst from flash to fade out, according to fourresearch papers appearing Friday in the journal Science.
“Some of our theories are just going down the drain,” said Charles Dermer, an astrophysicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and a member of one of the teams reporting on their observations of the burst, known as GRB 130427A.
The event, dubbed a long-duration gamma-ray burst (GRB), is typically seen in the distant, early universe, Dr. Dermer said during a briefing Thursday. This one was much closer. And while typical long-duration bursts last from a few seconds to a few minutes, GRB 130427A put on its display for 20 hours.
The event’s duration, relatively close proximity, and the range of observatories in space and on the ground that could monitor it at a range of wavelengths has provided scientists with an unprecedented opportunity to explore the workings of one of the more extreme ends a star can inflict on itself.
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