08/09/2020

Land In Russia’s Arctic Blows ‘Like a Bottle Of Champagne’

New York Times - Andrew E. Kramer

Since finding the first crater in 2014, Russian scientists have documented 16 more explosions in the Arctic caused by gas trapped in thawing permafrost.

A crater that was discovered in 2014 on the Yamal Peninsula in northern Siberia. Credit...Vladimir Pushkarev/Russian Centre of Arctic Exploration, via Reuters

MOSCOW — A natural phenomenon first observed by scientists just six years ago and now recurring with alarming frequency in Siberia is causing the ground to explode spontaneously and with tremendous force, leaving craters up to 100 feet deep.

When Yevgeny Chuvilin, a Moscow-based geologist with the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, arrived this summer at the rim of the latest blast site, called Crater 17, “it left quite an impression,” he said.

The pit plunged into darkness, surrounded by the table-flat, featureless tundra. As Mr. Chuvilin stood looking in, he said, slabs of dirt and ice occasionally peeled off the permafrost of the crater wall and tumbled in.

“It was making noises. It was like something alive,” Mr. Chuvilin said.

While initially a mystery, scientists have established that the craters appearing in the far north of western Siberia are caused by subterranean gases, and the recent flurry of explosions is possibly related to global warming, Mr. Chuvilin said.

Since the first site was found in 2014, Russian geologists have located 16 more on the Yamal and Gydansk peninsulas, two slender fingers of land stretching into the Arctic Ocean.

Mr. Chuvilin said the conditions causing the explosions, which are still not fully understood, are probably specific to the geology of the area, as similar craters have not appeared elsewhere in Siberia or in permafrost zones in Canada and Alaska that are also affected by global warming.

The explosions occur underneath small hills or hummocks on the tundra where gas from decaying organic matter is trapped underground.

Contained beneath a layer of ice above and permafrost all around, the gas creates pressure that elevates the overlying soil. The explosions occur when the pressure rises or the ice layer thaws and breaks suddenly.

Where the gas comes from is a matter of debate, said Mr. Chuvilin, one of Russia’s leading experts on permafrost, the jumbled layer of soil, ice, prehistoric plants and the occasional frozen mammoth that covers 67 percent of Russia’s land surface. Permafrost also extends under the Arctic Ocean in some place.

The loss of permafrost has transformed the terrain in Yakutia, Russia, leaving an obstacle course of hummocks and craters caused by shifting temperatures underground. Credit...Emile Ducke for The New York Times

“In Russia, we have a lot of experience studying permafrost,” said Mr. Chuvilin, who graduated from the Department of Permafrost at Moscow State University, one of the few universities to have such a specialty.

From this icebox of the Arctic, bits or even whole frozen mammoths, musk ox, woolly rhinoceroses, prehistoric horses, wolves and other ancient beasts wash out from the banks of rivers. But Mr. Chuvilin said he found no animal parts in the debris field of frozen mud the explosions threw out.

The strata of perpetually frozen soil are usually a few hundreds of yards deep, but they go down almost a mile in some places in Siberia. Each summer, a portion near the surface, known as the active layer, thaws.

With warmer summers, the active layer is deepening, potentially melting and weakening the ice over the gas deposits.

The gases causing the explosions, said Mr. Chuvilin, may have built up to their current pressure tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago as the organic components of the permafrost partially decayed, before freezing.

Another possibility is that methane trapped in deeper layers of the permafrost in a crystalline, ice-like form known as methane hydrates is reverting to its gaseous state, possibly because of effects of global warming. In this theory, rising pressure rather than thawing on the surface is causing the gas pockets to burst.

“It goes off like a bottle of champagne,” Mr. Chuvilin said.

The most recent to blow, at Crater 17 site on the Yamal Peninsula, was one of the more dramatic.

A reindeer herder was near enough to hear the blast but was unhurt. The Russian scientific expedition arrived by helicopter about a month later, in August. The crater was at least 100 feet deep.

A road leading to the Bovanenkovo gas field on the Yamal peninsula. The area is still too sparsely populated for the explosions to pose much risk. Credit...Alexander Nemenov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Though the Russian government is encouraging oil, natural gas and mining ventures in the far north, the area is still too sparsely populated for the explosions to pose much risk, Mr. Chuvilin said. 

Reindeer herder communities had passed along tales of such eruptions before 2014, said Mr. Chuvilin, but Soviet and later Russian scientists had not documented any instances in earlier years. They have likely been rare occurrences until recently.

Global warming is heating the Arctic faster than the rest of Earth.

“The permafrost is actually not very permanent, and it never was,” Mr. Chuvilin said.

Within a year or two of erupting, the craters fill with water and appear no more suspicious than small lakes.

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Q&A: Why Women Leading The Climate Movement Are Underappreciated And Sometimes Invisible

InsideClimate News - Ilana Cohen

A new anthology co-edited by two women climate leaders helps make the point that “the climate crisis is not gender neutral.” 

Students in New York demonstrate during the Climate Strike, part of a worldwide day of climate strikes on Sept. 20, 2019. Credit: Barbara Alper/Getty Images

The American scientist Eunice Newton Foote theorized in 1856 that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could produce global warming three years before similar work by the Irish physicist John Tyndall, whose research on warming is often cited as the beginning of climate science. 

Foote was also an early women's rights campaigner, signing the 1848 Seneca Falls "Declaration of Sentiments," a manifesto produced during the nation's first women's rights convention. 

She is, thus, a fitting historic figure for Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson to cite in opening their new book, "All We Can Save," an anthology of essays, poetry and original illustrations on climate change by a diverse range of women, to be published Sept. 22.

"Foote arrived at her breakthrough idea through experimentation," the co-editors write. "With an air pump, two glass cylinders, and four thermometers, she tested the impact of 'carbonic acid gas' (the term for carbon dioxide in her day) against 'common air'... From a simple experiment, she drew a profound conclusion: 'An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature...'"

Among 41 contributors to the book is Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist at Texas Tech University who is now working with other scholars to ensure that Foote receives the credit and recognition she deserves.

Other contributors include Jacqui Patterson, senior director of the NAACP's Environmental and Climate Justice Program; U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo; writer Alice Walker; Jainey K. Bavishi, director of the New York Mayor's Office of Resiliency; Christine E. Nieves Rodriguez, co-founder and executive director of Emerge Puerto Rico, and Tara Houska-Zhaabowekwe, an attorney, environmental and indigenous rights advocate and founder of the Giniw Collective.

"The climate crisis is not gender neutral," Johnson and Wilkinson write in the book's preface. "Climate change is a powerful 'threat multiplier,' making existing vulnerabilities and injustices worse. Especially under conditions of poverty, women and girls face greater risk of displacement or death from extreme weather disasters."

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson (left) and Katharine K. Wilkinson co-edited a book coming out later this month collecting diverse voices of women in the climate conversation. Credit: Laurel Graefe

Johnson, a Brooklyn native and marine biologist who is CEO of the Ocean Collectiv, a consulting firm, and Wilkinson, an author and teacher from Atlanta who is the editor-in-chief at Project Drawdown, a climate nonprofit, originally conceived of the book at about 65,000 words. It has ballooned to about 130,000 words, with 41 essays and 16 poems, selected quotes and artwork. 

In a recent interview, Johnson and Wilkinson spoke about their book process, how climate fits into a national reckoning over systemic racism, electoral politics and the Covid-19 pandemic. 

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Where did the inspiration for your book originate, and how did you two come together to co-edit it? 

Wilkinson: The inspiration for this book came from the women who are in it. Ayana and I were in Aspen together for a conference and [felt] a bit of frustration about how much the public discourse on climate is still dominated by primarily older white male voices, and how many brilliant innovative, hardworking, committed women are not getting the megaphone. We went on what Ayana has now deemed a "rage hike" in Aspen, really putting our heads together on, "How can we get women in climate the attention and resources they need to really be able to have the change that they're capable of making?"

Johnson: We knew that these women who were leading climate work were out there. They just weren't visible. They weren't household names, and because of that, they weren't getting the resources or support they needed. And we know that a lot of the way that people become considered as thought leaders is through writing books, and there haven't been nearly enough best-sellers on climate. But we knew that a lot of these women were not going to stop doing their work to write a book about their work—which is actually fine, because we want them doing the work—and so in lieu of that, we thought we could bring the book to them and use it as an opportunity to shine this spotlight on dozens of women climate leaders at once, and show the chorus and the mosaic of voices that is needed in this moment.

We have not been shown the full spectrum of climate work that is being done and very much needs doing. So this book contains Indigenous wisdom, writings on agriculture, on mothering and nurturing and the psychology of how we deal with a challenge this big, about frontline activism, and the science and policy. I had not appreciated how much I was missing these narratives and approaches that are not technocratic or techno-utopian. Climate change is not an engineering problem. It's a problem of how we live on this planet and interact with each other. 

How did you go about selecting the voices included in the book? And how does the range of women contributors, who vary in age, identity, and expertise, shape the book? 

Johnson: We really do think of this as like 41 different doors into climate work. We had some pretty amazing spreadsheets as we tried to track all of this, and make sure that we really were thinking about diversity in the broadest possible sense ... to make sure that we could create a book that would welcome people in, and that everyone would be able to see at least a glimmer of themselves among the essayists.

Wilkinson: I think that "quilting" is a good metaphor for how we put the book together. And one of the things we wanted to be super intentional about was not just pulling in women who write in some capacity for a living. ... We also wanted to work with folks who maybe had never written about their work before in this way—they haven't told their story. And that was a particularly exciting part of the project for us, supporting folks in doing that writing for the first time.

The spirit that brought us into collaboration to begin with was around community-building, and so we really wanted this book to be a community-building effort in some way. So we're working on designing what we're calling "All We Can Save" circles ... [to facilitate] 10 weeks of small group dialogue that helps folks kind of dig into the content of the book and the questions that it raises together.

Many people can feel overwhelmed by the scale of the climate crisis and experience a kind of "ecological grief." How do you grapple with these feelings and keep yourselves motivated to keep fighting for climate action, and how can others do the same? 

Wilkinson: The only way that I really have been able to kind of hold that grief and keep moving forward is to hold it with others. I think the "All We Can Save" circles will be more than just grief circles, but certainly, that will be a piece of it—having a space for conversation with people who may be having a bunch of the same "feels" that you're having.

How did the confluence of the Covid-19 pandemic and a surging racial justice movement impact your editing process, given that you started working on the book before then? 

Johnson: I think it's an opportunity to connect the crisis of racial injustice, the economic crisis that's been instigated by coronavirus, [and] the inequality crisis more broadly with the climate crisis because they are connected. As much as it would be simpler to deal with them alone, it's just not possible—it simply won't work. A lot of the essays in the book talk directly about those intersections. ... And also the climate crisis doesn't stop because of these other things—it's not going away. And so it's more important than ever to understand the interconnections so that we can collaborate across movements that have been far too disparate to this point.

Wilkinson: My observation is that it tends to be a strength of women in the movement to be able to hold multiple things at the same time—to understand that this is about health, and this is about justice, and this is about good jobs, and this is about science, and it's also about story and the kaleidoscope through which we need to see and try to understand the climate crisis. ... That comes through in lots of different ways in these pieces.

Johnson: When we re-read the full manuscript in this new world, we were so nervous that it was not going to hit the right tone because the world had changed so much—turns out, all these women have been thinking about these issues that were just coming to the fore in a new way. ... One of the things that the pandemic and everyone sort of staying at home has shown us is that individual behavioral change is not enough to lower emissions. This is a collective problem; this is going to require government and transformation of our energy system and agriculture and manufacturing and all of it.

What is the significance of your book coming out so close to the 2020 election, given the larger role climate now seems to be playing in U.S. electoral politics? 

Johnson: We specifically made sure the book was coming out before the election in the hopes that it would be able to seed some conversations around the importance of the candidates' climate platforms at all state and federal levels and in the upcoming election. So that timing was deliberate. In fact, it was a total sprint to get the book done in time to make that possible.

There is a lot of writing about policy in this book—how it's shaped, how it should be shaped, a behind-the-scenes look at the Green New Deal and how the candidates' climate platforms are developed and iterated on. Maggie Thomas, who was an advisor to Jay Inslee's campaign and then became Elizabeth Warren's climate advisor, wrote a piece a week after Warren dropped out of the race, describing her experience in this Democratic primary, which is the first time climate has become a major issue in the history of our elections. ... And Varshini Prakash [wrote] about her work leading Sunrise Movement and how that ended up having a huge impact on the way that we're talking about climate policy in the United States—the fact that any candidate now has to have essentially a climate platform and stance. 

Wilkinson: It was also really important to us to make sure we had truly youth voices—the opening essay is by a youth climate leader, and there's another essay by a youth climate leader in the closing section—making sure that the perspectives of really intergenerational justice are coming through and to give a sense of the spirit that the youth movement is bringing. That whole notion of "the climate crisis is a leadership crisis," so much of that is about how we are showing up as leaders—not just who, but how—in a spirit of collaboration and creativity and deep commitment to justice and frankly, just doing things differently than the mainstream climate movement had been doing them.

Finally, what are your personal next steps, and do you plan to collaborate further?

Johnson: We have seen so much interest in the book that we are actually building an organization around it called the "All We Can Save" project, a non-profit that will carry this work forward of supporting women climate leaders and deepening the conversations about the work that needs to be done by everyone. This idea of reading circles to engage with the book is one element that we'll be supporting through the "All We Can Save" project. Another is making sure the book is used as an educational tool, more in academic settings. Another is creating an award for women climate leaders, named after Eunice Newton Foote, who actually discovered that carbon dioxide would cause planetary warming in 1856 and has basically not been recognized by the Ministry of Science. And then more generally, [we'll be] just supporting women climate leaders.

Wilkinson: There's this upwelling that's happening. ... How do we help it upwell more wholly and fully and quickly and to greatest possible effect?

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(US) California's Record-Breaking Heatwave Sparks Wildfires And Raises Health Concerns

The Guardian - 
  • Triple-digit temperatures spread over much of the state
  • Heat sparks new wildfires and one hiker dies on trail
Heatwave amid coronavirus pandemic in Venice Beach, California Photograph: Étienne Laurent/EPA

California is sweltering under a record-breaking heatwave this holiday weekend, with dangerous conditions that have sparked several new wildfires and raised widespread public health concerns.

Triple-digit temperatures have spread over much of the state, including a record-high of 125F (52C) in Death Valley on Saturday. Los Angeles County registered 121 degrees F (49 C) on Sunday afternoon, a record for the National Weather Service office that covers the metropolitan area. Temperatures in inland parts of the San Francisco Bay Area were soaring to the low 100s.

The heat, coupled with a forecast of possible dry, gusty winds, has made for dangerous weekend fire weather, at a time when nearly 13,000 firefighters are currently battling to contain nearly two dozen major fires around California.

A wildfire that broke out near Shaver Lake in the Sierra National Forest prompted evacuation orders Saturday as authorities urged people seeking relief from the heat wave to stay away from the popular lake. That blaze, called the Creek fire, has burned 45,000 acres, trapping at least 150 people near a reservoir in Fresno county and injuring dozens who had to be airlifted to the hospital.

In San Bernardino county east of Los Angeles, a fast-moving fire in the foothills of Yucaipa forced the evacuation of Oak Glen, a farm community that just opened its apple-picking season this weekend. .

In San Diego County, the sheriff’s department issued a voluntary evacuation order on Sunday afternoon as the 5,350-square acre Valley Fire there raged unchecked on the eastern edge of the metropolitan area of more than 3 million people.

Throughout the weekend, families flocked to the beaches across southern California, where authorities closed parking lots after they filled to capacity, and lifeguards reported massive crowds. Health authorities warned that beaches could be closed if they become too crowded, due to concerns about the spread of coronavirus, which the state continues to battle.

Gatherings during the Fourth of July weekend were blamed in part for Covid-19 spikes earlier this summer, and authorities have urged people to continue practicing social distancing and mask-wearing this weekend. Indoor gatherings are more dangerous, though the heat and poor air quality has made it difficult to be outside in some parts of California this weekend.

Campgrounds in the popular San Bernardino national forest east of LA were also full, and rangers were out in force on “marshmallow patrols” – keeping an especially close watch for campfires and barbecues outside of designated sites that pose a potential risk of setting a wildfire.

“On a day like today I’m glad I work inside and I can eat ice cream all day,” said Mai Emami, who said a steady number of customers were coming to the Cup & Cone Ice Cream shop in Woodland Hills to pick up their orders.

Malibu authorities reported that one hiker died due to heat while on a trail in the Santa Monica mountains.

The heatwave has also raised concerns about power outages, with officials urging people to conserve electricity to ease strain on the state’s power grid.

The weather service predicted “brutally hot” temperatures through Monday as a high pressure system perches over the western US. Heat warnings were also in effect in Arizona and Nevada.

The extreme weather can also be brutal for people in California prisons, which have suffered major Covid outbreaks as well as terrible air quality from nearby fires.

The heatwave also poses significant challenges for the state’s large homeless population, with thousands living outside in encampments and cars and other makeshift living quarters.

The Rev Andy Bales, president and CEO of Union Rescue Mission at Skid Row, the epicenter of LA’s homeless epidemic, said he told staff to hand out “the coldest of cold water bottles” to those coming by for to-go lunches over the weekend. “And I said if anyone comes to the door overheated and in peril, welcome them in,“ he said. “We do have an air-conditioned chapel.”

Volunteers with the CHAM Deliverance Ministry in San Jose planned to deliver bottled water and sports drinks to homeless people in Silicon Valley.

“When it’s 105F and you’re living in a creek bed in a tent, it’s a lot of health issues out there. It’s a formula for disaster,” pastor and founder Scott Wagers said.

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