California's Long Drought Has Killed 100 Million Trees
The lingering drought in California has killed more than 100 million trees, according to the U.S. Forest Service's latest aerial survey.
The recent death count found that 62 million trees have died just this year in California, bringing the six-year total to more than 102 million. More than five years of drought are to blame for the tree deaths, scientists said, adding that tree "fatalities" increased by 100 percent in 2016. While die-off is expected under drought conditions, the rate of the forests' death is faster than scientists expected, according to U.S. Forest Service (USFS) officials.
The agency said that millions of additional trees are expected to die in the coming months and years. California's drought has affected 7.7 million acres of forests, putting the region's whole ecology at risk, the scientists said.
"These dead and dying trees continue to elevate the risk of wildfire, complicate our efforts to respond safely and effectively to fires when they do occur, and pose a host of threats to life and property across California," U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack said in a statement.
With more dead trees in forests, wildfires have a "fuel buildup" that could lead to large, unpredictable fires, Vilsack said. California has experienced longer, hotter fire seasons in recent years, and USFS scientists said that they expect tree mortality to continue at elevated levels in 2017.
The fight against wildfires and the need for other safety measures have also taken a toll on the USFS budget. In the 2016 fiscal year, California redirected $43 million to drought and wildfire restoration, and 56 percent of the USFS' total budget last year was used for fire management, the agency said. The USFS anticipates a rise to 67 percent by 2025, officials added.
Limited budget resources and a changing climate have hampered the USFS' ability to address tree mortality, according to Forest Service officials. "We must fund wildfire suppression like other natural disasters in the country," Vilsack said.
A majority of the 102 million dead trees are located in just 10 counties in California, in the southern and central Sierra Nevada region. However, tree mortality is increasing in northern areas as well, the agency said.
The drought conditions, along with a rise in bark beetle infestations and warmer temperatures, led to such historic levels of tree die-off that California Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency in October 2015. The unprecedented tree die-off also resulted in the formation of a Tree Mortality Task Force, which is focused on the safe removal of dead and dying trees.
"California is facing the worst epidemic of tree mortality in its modern history," Brown said in a letter to Vilsack in 2015. "A crisis of this magnitude demands action on all front
Legal Pot Farmers Hope to Grow a Green Energy Revolution
After a flood of pro-pot ballot measures in November, recreational marijuana use will soon be legal in eight U.S. states plus the District of Columbia, and medical marijuana will be legal in 29 states. Barring a federal clampdown from the incoming Trump administration, analysts expect legal cannabis to be a boom industry, particularly in California, the world's sixth largest economy.
But as billions in investment dollars flow westward to build large new cannabis production facilities, conservation groups and eco-conscious growers are troubled by the growing carbon footprint of pot production.
"Marijuana is the most energy-intensive manufacturing process in America," said Timothy Hade, co-founder of Scale Energy Solutions, a startup that consults cannabis producers on energy efficiency. "Producing a pound of marijuana uses 300 times the amount of energy than producing a pound of aluminum."
That's because more than 90 percent of legal weed in the United States is grown indoors using lights. Conventional grow lights not only suck up tons of electricity, but they produce intense residual heat. To keep grow room temperatures in the high 80s, indoor operations have to pump in air conditioning, another huge electric load. Then there are the fans to circulate air and the water pumps to feed the hydroponic channels. By various estimates, the energy demands of an indoor growing operation make up between 20 and 40 percent of the total cost of production.
As electric utilities in Western states work to meet ambitious emissions standards, legal pot is becoming the newest environmental nuisance. In Colorado, the Denver-based utility Xcel Energy reported that electricity use rose 1.2 percent in 2015 and nearly half of the increase was from indoor pot farms.
A 2011 report estimated that indoor cannabis production consumed 1 percent of total U.S. electricity and equaled the greenhouse gas emissions of three million cars per year.
"One percent may sound like a small number, but in context of our electrical grid, it's massive," said Hade, whose own calculations puts the number a little lower, between 0.4 and 0.8 percent of total electricity use. "We spend six times more electricity growing cannabis than the entire pharmaceutical industry."
Conservationists fear that if energy-efficient growing standards aren't put into place now, marijuana has the potential to become one of the "dirtiest" industries in America in terms of energy burned per pound of product.
Derek Smith is the founder and executive director of the Resource Innovation Institute (RII), an Oregon-based nonprofit working to create green standards for the cannabis industry before it's too late.
"There's definitely a gold-rush mentality," said Smith, whose technical advisory team is busy creating a "competitive facility checklist" as an energy-efficiency blueprint for new growers. "Frankly, we don't have time to wait for standards to be perfected if we want to influence the way these facilities are designed and constructed and maintained."
With the right standards in place, though, Smith and his consortium of "green" pot advocates believe that the cannabis industry can not only shed its nagging reputation as an "energy hog," but become a shining model of sustainability.
Jeremy Plumb, a Portland-based grower, dispensary owner and adviser to the RII, is building a 40,000 square-foot greenhouse facility called Newcleus Nurseries as a laboratory and showcase for green growing technology. The glass-walled growhouse will use the most efficient (and expensive) LED lighting to supplement Portland's skimpy sunshine, and tap its own 12-acre field of solar panels for electricity.
"Cannabis can be the new 'green revolution,'" said Plumb. "The same technology we're using could be used to grow food in vertical farms."
LED lighting represents the biggest efficiency upgrade for any indoor growing operation. The upfront costs can be substantial — a high-efficiency LED light costs more than $1,300 compared to around $400 for a conventional high-pressure sodium bulb — but the long-term savings add up. For starters, a conventional bulb needs to be replaced twice a year, while an LED can last for several years. But the biggest savings come through lower energy use and lower cooling costs.
Fluence Bioengineering is a producer of high-end LED grow lights for cannabis and indoor agriculture at large. According to field studies from cannabis clients, a Fluence LED uses 40 percent of the energy as a conventional bulb. And because LEDs produce far less heat, the load on the HVAC system was reduced by 35 percent per square foot of growing space.
The trick is convincing anxious new cannabis investors to think past short-term profits toward long-term sustainability. Benjamin Franz is director of research and development for MJardin, a cannabis cultivation management company with more than 500,000 square feet of legal weed in production.
"A lot of newer clients are increasingly interested in the energy-efficient technologies, but the minute the see the price tag of some of the lighting solutions, they often reconsider the importance," said Franz.
If the recent price volatility in Colorado is any indication, cannabis growers might be forced to turn to energy efficient technologies simply to cut costs.
"At the beginning of year in Colorado, the price of wholesale flower was $2,000 a pound. Today's it's between $1,000 and $1,200 a pound," said Hade of Scale Energy Solutions. "If you run an energy-efficient facility that can produce the product for five to 10 percent cheaper, those growers are going to win."
Hade himself is a newcomer to the cannabis industry. He and his partners used to work as clean energy consultants in the healthcare sector, until he realized that cannabis cultivation was the perfect match for a sustainable microgrid, Hade's specialty.
"Because of the way the crop is grown, most of the energy in a cultivation facility is being used 24/7/365," said Hade, which results in a stable and predictable electricity load, unusual in any building or factory. "They also have a really big thermal load, and one of best opportunities for energy efficiency in the country today is using waste heat to offset thermal load."
Hade's ideal high-efficiency growing facility would be powered by a sustainable microgrid composed of three elements: solar PV panels for supplemental energy, lithium-ion batteries for storage and a natural gas-powered electric generator. The waste heat produced by the generator would be recaptured and used to power the cooling system. Such a system would cost between $2 and $3 million to set up.
Like the folks at the Resource Innovation Institute, Hade sees sustainable cannabis as a test case and a proving ground for technologies that could reduce energy consumption across all industrial sectors.
"We're very, very confident that the cannabis industry has the potential to be a springboard for the 'clean tech' industry," said Hade, with an emphasis on "potential."
Hade's startup has only been in business for six months and has yet to land its first paying cannabis client.
Slowing of Earth's Spin Revealed in Ancient Astronomers' Tablets
The work of ancient astronomers reveals that the Earth's spin is slowing down — though not as much as scientists believed.
Each century, the length of the solar day, or the time it takes the planet to do a full rotation, grows by 1.8 milliseconds, according to a new study using astronomical observations going back to 750 B.C. Researchers have known that the planet's rotation is slowing because of friction caused by the tides, as water that's being tugged on by the moon's gravity sloshes against the solid Earth. However, measurements of this tidal effect suggest that the planet should be slowing in its rotation by 2.3 milliseconds per century, slightly more than the new research finds.
The difference between 2.3 milliseconds and 1.8 milliseconds over a century may seem trivial, said study researcher Leslie Morrison, who worked at the Royal Greenwich Observatory for nearly 40 years. But those fractions of milliseconds are important for understanding the ways that the Earth has changed shape since the end of the last ice age, about 12,000 years ago, Morrison told Live Science.
Alien-Like' Skulls Excavated in Mexico
Human skulls deliberately warped into strange, alien-like shapes have been unearthed in a 1,000-year-old cemetery in Mexico, researchers say.
The practice of deforming skulls of children as they grew was common in Central America, and these findings suggest the tradition spread farther north than had been thought, scientists added.
The cemetery was discovered by residents of the small Mexican village of Onavas in 1999 as they were building an irrigation canal. It is the first pre-Hispanic cemetery found in the northern Mexican state of Sonora.
The site, referred to as El Cementerio, contained the remains of 25 human burials. Thirteen of them had deformed skulls, which were elongate and pointy at the back, and five had mutilated teeth.
Dental mutilation involves filing or grinding teeth into odd shapes, while cranial deformation involves distorting the normal growth of a child's skull by applying force — for example, by using cloths to bind wooden boards against their heads.
"Cranial deformation has been used by different societies in the world as a ritual practice, or for distinction of status within a group or to distinguish between social groups," said researcher Cristina García Moreno, an archaeologist at Arizona State University. "The reason why these individuals at El Cementerio deformed their skulls is still unknown."
"The most common comment I've read from people that see the pictures of cranial deformation has been that they think that those people were 'aliens,'" García added. "I could say that some say that as a joke, but the interesting thing is that some do think so. Obviously we are talking about human beings, not of aliens."
Of the 25 burials, 17 were children between 5 months and 16 years of age. The high number of children seen at the site could suggest inept cranial deformation killed them due to excessive force against the skull. The children had no signs of disease that caused their deaths.
Although cranial deformation and dental mutilation were common features among the pre-Hispanic populations of Mesoamerica and western Mexico, scientists had not seen either practice in Sonora or the American Southwest, which share a common pre-Hispanic culture. The researchers suggest the people at El Cementerio had been influenced by recent migrants from the south.
"The most important implication would be to extend the northern boundary of the Mesoamerican influence," García told LiveScience.
A number of skeletons also were found with earrings, nose rings, bracelets, pendants and necklaces made from seashells and snails from the Gulf of California. One person was buried with a turtle shell on the chest. It remains uncertain why some of these people were buried with ornaments while others were not, or — another mystery — why only one of the 25 skeletons was female.
During the next field season, the researchers aim to determine the cemetery's total size and hope to find more burials to get a clearer idea of the society's burial customs. "With new information, we also hope to determine whether there was any interaction between these and Mesoamerican societies — how it was and when it happened," they said.
García and her colleagues completed their analysis of the skeletal remains in November. They plan to submit their research to either the journal American Antiquity or the journal Latin American Antiquity.
Editor's Note: This article was updated to correct the spelling of El Cementerio, which had been spelled El Cemeterio.
70-Mile-Long Crack Opens Up in Antarctica
An ominous crack in an Antarctic ice shelf as wide as a football field is long takes on an otherworldly beauty in a new aerial image.
Snapped by scientists on NASA's IceBridge mission, the shot shows a rift in Larsen C, an ice shelf that is floating off the Antarctic Peninsula. When the crack eventually spreads across the entire ice shelf, it will create an iceberg the size of the state of Delaware, according to IceBridge. That's around 2,491 square miles (6,451 square kilometers).
As of Nov. 10, when the IceBridge scientists observed this crack, it was 70 miles (112 km) long and more than 300 feet (91 meters) wide. The dark depths of the crack plunge down about a third of a mile (0.5 km), all the way through the ice to the ocean below.
According to NASA Ice, an Earth sciences program at NASA, this rift is relatively new — it showed growth on satellite imagery just this year. The U.K.-based Antarctic research group the MIDAS Project first observed the rift in 2014 and has been tracking it ever since.
Larsen C is Antarctica's fourth-largest ice shelf, and it holds back the land-based glaciers just behind it: Once the ice shelf goes, those slow-flowing glaciers have one less barrier in their journey toward the sea. In 2002, the nearby ice shelf Larsen B partially collapsed after showing similar rifting, NASA's Earth Observatory reported earlier this year, when it showed the collapse alongside a satellite image of the growing Larsen C crevasse.
According to the MIDAS Project, the eventual calving of the Delaware-size sheet of ice would remove between 9 percent and 12 percent of Larsen C's surface area and may lead to the crumbling of the entire ice shelf.
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