Environment
By Ian Williams, NBC News correspondent
TASMANIA, Australia-Will Howard used to think the biggest threat to the World's oceans came from the things you could see - like the detritus clogging so many of our estuaries and coastal regions. Now the researcher at the Antarctic Climate & Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre at the University of Tasmania has found new evidence of how invisible changes in the chemistry of the water pose a disturbing new threat to life in the oceans.
"The impact has already begun," he told me. "It's not a matter for laboratory experiments. It's happening now."
As they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the world's oceans are becoming more acidic, and Howard has discovered the first direct field evidence of the impact on marine life - tell-tale changes in tiny sea snails the size of a grain of sand, which are struggling to make their shells.
"These organisms are the base of the marine food web, and what happens to them reverberates throughout the eco-system - right up to whales and penguins," says Howard.
It was the raw beauty of this remote corner of Australia that drew Howard here from his native New York fourteen years ago. He came on a short-term research project and never left. I met him in his Hobart laboratory, where researchers weighed the shells of sea snails collected from deep beneath the southern ocean, which separates Australia from Antarctica. The weight had fallen by half in a decade.
"The fact that we are seeing it now, that it's already happening, came as a bit of a surprise to us," he says. "If these organisms are seeing the impact, the rest of the system can't be far behind."
VIDEO: Oceans offer warning on climate change
Photo by Ian Williams
Dr. Will Howard of Australia's Antarctic Climate and
Ecosystems Co-operative Research Centre
Because the oceans naturally absorb carbon, they've been seen as a buffer against climate change. Around half the carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere is absorbed by the oceans, and scientists say acidity levels have risen 30 percent in the last 100 years. The impact has been faster in the cold waters of the southern ocean, which is why it is such a good laboratory, and why Tasmania-based scientists have been at the forefront of this emerging research. They believe the oceans' natural processes are now being overwhelmed.
"We're just pumping carbon into the ocean at too rapid a pace for the system to adjust itself and offset this problem," says Bronte Tilbrook, who heads an acidification project a the Australian government's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Hobart.
Shell-making is one the processes by which carbon is absorbed and then transferred to the depths of the ocean, and if this is inhibited, so ultimately might be the oceans ability to buffer against climate change.
"So if they're not making shells, it means the mechanism that transfers carbon from atmosphere to the ocean depths is also altered," Howard says.
What's more difficult to predict is just how quickly the rest of the eco-system might be affected by the changes. Ron Thresher, another New Yorker now based at the CSIRO in Hobart, thinks we will soon have a clearer picture thanks to ground-breaking research on recently discovered reefs near the Antarctic shelf.
In January, an unmanned submarine, the Jason, was able to collect the first coral samples from highly acidic water up to ten thousands of feet beneath the ocean.
"Look, you can see the effects of acidification," he said, handing me a small piece of coral, which started to disintegrate like a piece of chalk as I rubbed it. "See how fragile it is. It's flaking away."
The submarine collected live coral from a depth of around four thousand feet; below which the coral began to die off. Thresher calls this the "saturation point", the point at which the acidity is so high that the reef can no longer live. That point is moving higher as more and more carbon goes into the ocean. Coral reefs are vital marine habitats - nurseries for thousands of fish.
"As these things die off, all the associated things that live with them can't survive either," Thresher told me as we stood in front of a large cupboard stacked with coral.
It's early still, but he now believes his coral samples will yield more precise information than ever before about the pace and impact of acidification on marine eco-systems.
"It will enable us to predict the ultimate fate of these things," he says. The information will also hopefully help them devise strategies for mitigating the effects.
Before we left Australia, we visited Sydney, where we wanted to catch up with a young PhD student at the University of Western Sydney. Laura Parker was suddenly thrust into the scientific limelight when she discovered abnormalities in the shells subjected to rising levels of acidity in the laboratory.
"It was a bit scary," she told me. "Because oysters are bioindicators, so anything that happens to them might happen to other organisms in the environment."
Rock oysters are also big business in Australia - worth US $30 million a year in New South Wales alone, and Parker's findings not only re-enforced the Hobart research, but is a reminder - a wake-up call to the more hard-headed - that there also the serious economic issues at stake.
The Hobart research has led to an extraordinary meeting of Australia's leading marine scientists - and a call for more and urgent global research.
When Howard isn't pouring over his microscope in his lab near Hobart's spectacular harbor, he often found sailing along the coast, where the abundance of life--from birds to penguins and dolphins--is a reminder to him of why he settled here, but also of just how much is at stake.
He and Thresher believe they've found the ocean equivalent of the "canary in the coal mine," an early warning of what is fast emerging as the biggest threat to our oceans.
By Peter Alexander, NBC News correspondent
There we were, in the Arctic and on a ship for 23 days. Pass the Dramamine!
It promised to be one of those rare opportunities to visit one of the world's most extreme environments -- a place few people, including scientists, ever get to explore. Producer Paul Manson and I -- along with cameraman Callan Griffiths and soundman Ben Adam -- were sent on assignment to report on climate change and its impact on the Arctic. The primary news peg for our trip? For only the second time in recorded history the Northwest Passage was ice free this summer, effectively clearing this shortcut between Europe and Asia.
Our intention was to stay on board for 10 days, shooting video and interviews. Mother Nature, apparently, had other plans. Inclement weather, along with an emergency search and rescue mission, spoiled all five of our attempts to disembark the ship. Getting stuck in the Arctic -- due to bad weather -- isn't uncommon; getting stuck five times -- on a swaying ship, no less -- is mentally exhausting.
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By Justin Balding, NBC News producer
Editor's note: Ann Curry's report on saving the Congo's gorillas airs tonight on the broadcast.
"My director died immediately," he recalled.
During his 17 years as a park ranger in eastern DR Congo's Virunga National Park, Pierre Kakule had many close calls, but none as close as the time he was riding with his boss. Their car hit a land-mine, and though Kakule survived, his forehead is still decorated with scars caused by the blast. In other instances he was involved in gun battles. And he has lost many friends and relatives.
Some 120 park rangers in the last 10 years have been killed trying to keep the war-torn Virunga National Park safe from poachers and armed groups looking to make money out of killing animals. Antelopes, buffaloes and elephants are all routinely slaughtered, their "bushmeat" sold in nearby towns and villages. But most sickening of all to Kakule is the killing of gorillas.
The gorilla is not just an iconic living ancestor to him, but a part of the human family tree nearing extiction. In the last two decades the worldwide gorilla population has been cut in half -- mainly by by deforestation and disease. In eastern Congo, the gorillas' plight is complicated by a 10-year war which has left hundreds of thousands of people displaced and desperate for money and food.
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By Ian Williams, NBC News correspondent
Editor's note: Ian Williams's report airs tonight on the broadcast. Watch a preview here.
Phi Phi Islands, Thailand--Andrew Hewett fished a small fragment of coral from a bucket of water and held it between his fingers.
"It's been knocked off, broken by an anchor or somebody standing on it," he said, explaining that while the devastating 2004 tsunami caused a lot of damage to the area's coral reefs, the bigger threat to the reefs comes not from nature, but from man.
He then showed how to drill a small hole in the fragment and attach it to a metal rack (see photo, right). Moments later, a production line was up and running on the deck of the dive boat, students threading hundreds of fragments and pulling them tightly to the racks.
"If I can't pull it off, then a fish certainly can't," said Nichole Niewald, a biology major at the University of Missouri.
The fragments had been collected from the ocean floor, the remains of a badly damaged reef.
"Day by day people are walking on the reef, not paying enough attention, and not treating the coral like the animals they actually are," said Steve Monson, who studies food science at Mizzou.
Eighteen students and staff traveled from Missouri to the Phi Phi islands in Thailand to take part in a pioneering coral rehabilitation project. Their trip was organized by Bob Sites, Professor of Entomology at Mizzou's Division of Plant Sciences, a regular visitor to the Kingdom. It's the second year he's brought students to the coral project. All the students are from Mizzou's College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources. (Photo, left: NBC cameraman Kyle Eppler videotapes as Andrew Hewett and the students examine coral fragments.)< CONTINUED >>
Editor's note: Anne Thompson's full report from Costa Rica airs tonight on the broadcast.
By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
One of the great gentlemanly travel writers of a bygone era, Norman Lewis, once observed that “the lives of the people of the Far East are lived in public…. The street is the extension of the house and there is no sharp dividing line between the two.”
Here in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, the street is the river.
And the people’s lives are played out on the muddy waters of the world’s ninth longest river system.
One afternoon, off the River Can Tho, everywhere we looked there was human activity. An elderly man with a caved-in chest was washing his neck. A woman swung in a hammock hooked up inside a boat cabin. Teenage girls, fresh from a meal at a nearby hawker stall, rinsed their feet and hands in the water. A young man squatting on a makeshift dock was sorting eggs. Thin long boats cruised the canals, more than a few of them sporting a potted green shrub and the day’s washing. On some, dogs or cats lounged in the shade - one even sported a rooster pecking around the deck.
Further along the river, the pace stepped up. A lone fisherman gathered his net from the water, the skeleton of a new bridge (one of two in the immediate area) looming over him. We chanced upon a crane unloading loose rock and gravel from a barge onto a construction site by the riverbank. Not far, on another barge, four men sifted slowly through a pile of wood logs a dozen feet tall.
THE RIVER IS THE ROAD
Seeing all the cargo shuttled about, we begin to appreciate that here the rivers are roads.
Puttering along the water, narrow long boats and cargo ships criss-cross the Mekong’s tributaries and canals all day long -- ferrying people and goods. Lots of goods.
In Ben Tre province, we were transfixed by the sight of four men in a longboat tossing coconuts several feet UP to fellow workmen standing on a huge freighter. On a second ship moored not more than a few hundred feet away, groups of men stacked large bales of straw on top of one another.
At the early morning floating market -- a defining feature of Vietnam’s Delta region -- we filmed tradesmen plying regular and potential customers with lychees, pineapples, coconuts, limes, in fact, all manner of tropical fruits from boats bursting with locally-grown produce.
Later, as the light fell, and the sky behind us erupted into a mixture of pink and orange, the riverbank was dotted with the day’s last bit of activity. We smelled - rather than saw - cooking. Even at the widest point of one canal, fried garlic and baked bread (no joke; to the western palate, the Vietnamese baguette ranks among the finest bread in Asia) wafted out to our longboat zipping down the middle of the water.
Men of all ages - shirtless and gaunt -- washed their torsos with river water. Strips of fluorescent lighting dotted the landscape before us as families gathered for a meal. Teenagers took a last dip as the rain began to come down.
It was hard not to summon Norman Lewis once again. Although his description below from A Dragon Apparent comes from Saigon in the 1950s, it seems befitting of the Mekong Delta in the 2000s:
“Here it was the diversity of occupation that was so remarkable. There must have been many hundreds of people in sight, all busily living their own lives and most of them independently of the actions of others in their immediate neighbourhood.”
view photos from along the journey
By Anne Thompson, NBC News chief environmental affairs correspondent
We've all heard a lot about our "carbon footprint." Tonight, on Nightly News we are going to take a look at our "water footprint." I know, you're thinking this is going to be about low-flow toilets and drip irrigation systems. That is part of the story, but the bigger part is learning about how Americans use water. It impacts almost every aspect of our lives in large and small ways. Do you have any idea how much water it takes to produce the food you'll eat today? How about where Americans use the most water? Is it inside our homes or outside? As a country, are we using more or less water today than a couple of decades ago?
As you ponder those questions, think about Phoenix, Arizona. This desert metropolis is in the second decade of a drought, yet there are no water restrictions. Though desert landscaping is becoming more and more popular, producer Clare Duffy and I saw some people there watering their very green lawns in the middle of the day when the temperature topped 100 degrees! Clare's mom and my brother, who live about a mile apart in the coastal town of Hingham, Massachusetts would be envious. They are under water restrictions and they can't water their lawns at all.
Conservation is a hot topic in Phoenix. (Please feel free to groan at the pun) The area's water is imported. And with projections that the population will double by 2040, concerned citizens and entrepreneurs are trying to find smarter ways to use this precious resource. Growth is a big part of the economy, but Phoenix can't grow without water.
One of the most ingenious things we saw concerns pools. In Phoenix, pools are almost as plentiful as cacti. How else would you survive temperatures that top 100 degrees? But pools take a lot of water... some 16-thousand gallons on average. That water is hard, filled with minerals, and only becomes "harder" as it evaporates, leaving the minerals behind that can aggravate your skin, hair and ruin the filters and machinery needed to keep pools clean. To change the water, homeowners would have to use some 32-thousand gallons. So what's a pool owner, who doesn't want to waste water to do?
There's a company that can change the water without wasting a drop. Calsaway patented a process that does just that. Watch how it works. It is truly a fascinating process. We will also show you how one developer in Phoenix is conserving water with style. And we will answer those questions I raised at the start. I think the answers will surprise you.
By Martin Fletcher, NBC News correspondent
You hear a lot these days about sustainable resources, forest degradation, sensitive ecosystems and water-borne disease. So much that it all begins to fade into incomprehensible eco-jargon. A bit like the war of the Bosnian-Herzogovians against the Serbo-Croats, which one writer described as a war of the unspellables against the unpronounceables. It all seems a long way away. What’s it got to do with me?
But up close and personal, it’s different. In a clinic near the Masai Mara in Kenya, the smallest unit of the Kenyan health system, my NBC News team and I crammed into the tiny room of surgical officer Richard Lemiso, and watched as a stream of worried mothers entered carrying their sick babies. Most had walked miles to visit this last beacon of hope, the man in the white coat.
Fever, diaorreah, stomach cramps, vomiting, sweating. The tiny faces either serene in sleep, or contorted in pain. The mood – resigned. The cause was almost always the same – dirty water. The diagnosis – typhoid, dysentery, dehydration, all potential killers.
This is the process, put very simply: trees have been cut for firewood, or died from disease, or been broken by large animals like elephants near the water springs. This allows other animals and cattle to approach and their feces and germs to enter the water source. That changes the balance between water for animals and water for people, dirtying the water available for villagers.
In other words, forest degradation harms the sensitive ecosystem, which reduces sustainable resources and leads to water-borne disease.
And so twelve-year-old Patrick sits in front of Nursing Officer Richard Lemiso and hears the verdict – typhoid. Again. He’s suffered from one water-borne disease or another every year of his life. His father James says it wasn’t always like this. Once his Masai village drank water from the same spring and nobody fell sick.
“So what’s changed?” I asked.
“Too many people today, too many animals, the water gets dirty.” he answered. Population growth, increased herd sizes, and all competing for declining amounts of water, because more is used for agriculture, which is expanding.
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By Lee Cowan, NBC News correspondent
Along our journey, our production crew Christiana Arvetis, Ray Farmer, Dennis Frye and I sought the perfect spot to capture the essence of this remote area for my standup.
There are few better places to show just how beautifully desolate the Great Basin valley is than along parts of I-93 between Baker and Castleton. The Wilson Creek mountains rise up off the flat desert floor into picture perfect blue skies. There are nothing but jack rabbits, crows and sage brush that seems to stop crowing when it gets about knee high. Even the clouds here look different here. If you're looking for a place to be truly alone -- whether to think, whether to camp, whether to just go for a long dive. This place is it. Just bring your own water and a full tank of gas. Rest stops are few and far between.
By Ian Williams, NBC News correspondent
I heard the squelch of Anil’s feet on the waterlogged path well before he arrived at the door of my hut.
“Problem with boat,” he announced in a very matter-of-fact way.
“Problem?” I asked groggily, having just emerged from under my thick mosquito net.
“Yes,” he replied. “Boat sank. You want tea?”
All night the heavy rain had pounded our huts. It came in intense waves, the wind rattling doors and window frames, and by morning the village was sitting in a mud soup, the bloated river lapping high against protective dirt walls.
Our small boat had been among several moored in what the night before had been a protected inlet, and several young boys were now working with old pans and leaking buckets to bail them out and pull them further up the receding river bank. They chatted and laughed, slipping and falling in the mud. But with the rain still falling it seemed like a hopeless task.
For Anil, our taciturn Bengali host – a man who could coolly describe the latest cobra attacks or the tiger tracks he’d found in the village – the tropical storm sweeping from the Bay of Bengal was little more than an annoyance.
Within two hours he’d rustled up a bigger boat – “this one will make it,” he told us in an attempt to reassure - and the mud-splattered NBC team, guided by the helping hands of scores of amused villagers, was soon making its way gingerly across a thin plank and onboard the bobbing vessel for the five-hour river and road journey back to Calcutta.
The village in which we’d spent the night was on a small island in the Sundarbans, which lie at the mouth of the River Ganges, where India’s most revered river empties into the Bay of Bengal.
The monsoon rains here are intense, and being caught in the middle of it does leave you wondering how India could possibly have a water shortage.
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