New discoveries of the way plants transport important substances across their biological membranes to resist toxic metals and pests, increase salt and drought tolerance, control water loss and store sugar can have profound implications for increasing the supply of food and energy for our rapidly growing global population.

That’s the conclusion of 12 leading plant biologists from around the world whose laboratories recently discovered important properties of plant transport proteins that, collectively, could have a profound impact on global agriculture. They report in the May 2nd issue of the journalNature that the application of their findings could help the world meet its increasing demand for food and fuel as the global population grows from seven billion people to an estimated nine billion by 2050.

“These membrane transporters are a class of specialized proteins that plants use to take up nutrients from the soil, transport sugar and resist toxic substances like salt and aluminum,” said Julian Schroeder, a professor of biology at UC San Diego who brought together 11 other scientists from Australia, Japan, Mexico, Taiwan, the U.S. and the U.K. to collaborate on a paper describing how their discoveries collectively could be used to enhance sustainable food and fuel production.

Schroeder, who is also co-director of a new research entity at UC San Diego called Food and Fuel for the 21st Century, which is designed to apply basic research on plants to sustainable food and biofuel production, said many of the recent discoveries in his and other laboratories around the world had previously been “under the radar”—known only to a small group of plant biologists—but that by disseminating these findings widely, the biologists hoped to educate policy makers and speed the eventual application of their discoveries to global agriculture.

“Of the present global population of seven billion people, almost one billion are undernourished and lack sufficient protein and carbohydrates in their diets,” the biologists write in their paper. “An additional billion people are malnourished because their diets lack required micronutrients such as iron, zinc and vitamin A. These dietary deficiencies have an enormous negative impact on global health resulting in increased susceptibility to infection and diseases, as well as increasing the risk of significant mental impairment. During the next four decades, an expected additional two billion humans will require nutritious food. Along with growing urbanization, increased demand for protein in developing countries coupled with impending climate change and population growth will impose further pressures on agricultural production.”

“Simply increasing inorganic fertilizer use and water supply or applying organic farming systems to agriculture will be unable to satisfy the joint requirements of increased yield and environmental sustainability,” the scientists added. “Increasing food production on limited land resources will rely on innovative agronomic practices coupled to the genetic improvement of crops.”

One of Schroeder’s research advances led to the discovery of a sodium transporter that plays a key role in protecting plants from salt stress, which causes major crop losses in irrigated fields, such as those in the California central valley. Agricultural scientists in Australia, headed by co-author Rana Munns and her colleagues, have now utilized this type of sodium transporter in breeding research to engineer wheat plants that are more tolerant to salt in the soil, boosting wheat yields by a whopping 25 percent in field trials. This recent development could be used to improve the salt tolerance of crops, so they can be grown on previously productive farmland with soil that now lies fallow.

Another recent discovery, headed by co-authors Emanuel Delhaize in Australia and Leon Kochian at Cornell University, opens up the potential to grow crops on the 30 percent of the earth’s acidic soils that are now unusable for agricultural production, but that otherwise could be ideal for agriculture.

“When soils are acidic, aluminum ions are freed in the soil, resulting in toxicity to the plant,” the scientists write. “Once in the soil solution, aluminum damages the root tips of susceptible plants and inhibits root growth, which impairs the uptake of water and nutrients.”

From their recent findings, the plant biologists now understand how transport proteins control processes that allow roots to tolerate toxic aluminum. By engineering crops to convert aluminum ions into a non-toxic form, they said, agricultural scientists can now turn these unusable or low-yielding acidic soils into astonishingly productive farmland to grow crops for food and biofuels.

Other recent transport protein developments described by the biologists have been shown to increase the storage of iron and zinc in food crops to improve their nutritive qualities. “Over two billion people suffer from iron and zinc deficiencies because their plant-based diets are not a sufficiently rich source of these essential elements,” the biologists write.

The scientists also discovered transporters in plants and symbiotic soil fungi that allow crops to acquire phosphate—an element essential for plant growth and crop yield—more efficiently and to increase the uptake of nitrogen fertilizers, which are costly to produce. “Nitrogen fertilizer production consumes one percent of global energy usage and poses the highest input cost for many crops,” the scientists write. “Nevertheless, only 20 to 30 of the phosphate and 30 to 50 percent of the nitrogen fertilizer applied are utilized by plants. The remainder can lead to production of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide, or to eutrophication of aquatic ecosystems through water run-off.”

The biologists said crops could be made more efficient in using water through discoveries in plant transport proteins that regulate the “stomatal pores” in the epidermis of leaves, where plants lose more than 90 percent of their water through transpiration. Two other major goals in agriculture are increasing the carbohydrate content and pest-resistance of crops. A recent discovery of protein transporters that move sugar throughout the plant has been used to develop rice plants that confer pest resistance to crops, the biologists said, providing a novel way to simplify the engineering of crops with high yields and pest resistance, which could lead to reduced use of pesticides in the field.

“Just as our cell phones will need more advanced technology to carry more information, plants need better or new transporters to make them work harder on existing agricultural land,” said Dale Sanders, director of the John Innes Centre in the U.K. and a corresponding co-author of the paper. “Synthetic fertilizers and pesticides are the current solution, but we can make plants better at finding and carrying their own chemical elements.”

These recent developments in understanding the biology of plant transporters are leading to improved varieties less susceptible to adverse environments and for improving human health. Says Schroeder, “More fundamental knowledge and basic discovery research is needed and would enable us to further and fully exploit these advances and pursue new promising avenues of plant improvement in light of food and energy demands and the need for sustainable yield gains.”

In addition to Schroeder and Sanders, the co-authors of the paper are Emmanuel Delhaize of CSIRO in Canberra, Australia; Wolf Frommer of the Carnegie Institution of Science; Mary Lou Guerinot of Dartmouth College; Maria Harrison of the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research in Ithaca, NY; Luis Herrera-Estrella of the Center for Research and Advanced Studies of the National Polytechnic Institute in Iraputo, Mexico; Tomoaki Horie of Shinshu University in Nagano, Japan; Leon Kochian of Cornell University; Rana Munns of the University of Western Australia in Perth; Naoko Nishizawa of Ishikawa Prefectural University in Japan; and Yi-Fang Tsay of the National Academy of Science of Taiwan.

Damocracy is a powerful new documentary that debunks the myth of large-scale dams as clean energy and a solution to climate change. It records the priceless cultural and natural heritage the world would lose in the Amazon and Mesopotamia if two planned large-scale dams are built – the Belo Monte dam in Brazil, and Ilisu dam in Turkey. Damocracy is a story of resistance by the thousands of people who will be displaced, and a call to the world to support their struggle to save the rivers and their way of life.

From Amazon Watch

A street vendor in Bangkok sells a variety of insects—valuable sources of protein that are quite sustainable. Photo: Dawn Starin

In 2010 David Letterman asked Hollywood actress Salma Hayek if she routinely eats bugs. “Look,” she responded. “I’m salivating! They’re delicious!”

Insect eating, officially called entomophagy, is an age-old custom found throughout the world and often considered standard dietary practice. Nearly 2,000 species of insects are eaten by approximately 2.5 billion people worldwide.^1,2

We come from a long line of bug eaters. Our earliest primate ancestors were insectivores, and our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, make rudimentary tools to fish termites out of narrow tunnels in their mounds. Among the laws of Leviticus codified by the Israelites millennia ago is permission to eat “the locust after its kind, and the bald locust after its kind, and the cricket after its kind, and the grasshopper after its kind.” Roman naturalist Pliny wrote that beetle grubs were so prized that they were fattened on meal to enhance their flavor. And the German explorer Heinrich Barth wrote in his 1857 Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa that people who ate locusts could “enjoy not only the agreeable flavor of the dish, but also take a pleasant revenge on the ravagers of their fields.”³

Insects now contribute to the diet of some 2.5 billion people worldwide.

Some of the most interesting bits on entomophagy are found in Vincent M. Holt’s 1885 booklet Why Not Eat Insects?⁴ Holt recognized that it would be difficult for many people to overcome squeamishness, but he also felt that with a “fair hearing,” an “impartial consideration of arguments,” and an “unbiased judgement,” they would be persuaded to rid themselves of their “stupid prejudices” and use insects as food. To this end, he drew up menus of curried cockchafers, moths on toast, devilled chafer grubs, and slug soup.

Quite simply, over centuries and across the globe, eating insects has been the norm.

In contemporary Western Europe and North America, entomophagy occupies only a tiny (but growing) culinary niche—at this point, perhaps, more curiosity than anything else. In London, the high-end department store Selfridges now sells toffee-flavored candies and vodka-flavored lollipops containing scorpions, worm-salt infused with chili and agave, and oven-baked worm crisps. Buggy fare has been available at the Audubon Insectarium in New Orleans and at entertaining educational events such as BugFest at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, Bug Bowl at Purdue University in Indiana, City of Insects at the Netherlands’ Wageningen University, and Bug Fair at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Oxford University’s Museum of Natural History hosted a multicourse “Grand Banquet of Rainforest Insects” to garner support for rain forest protection.

“Eating insects is, unfortunately, something that will not be of immediate interest to the majority of the people living in the West,” said Marc Dennis, an artist, professor, and amateur chef who launched insectsarefood.com, a comprehensive online resource for entomophagists. “But when considering all the benefits of entomophagy, it amounts to a viable means of solving a wide range of ecological, economic, and health-related issues and concerns.”⁵

Not Just for Novelty or Fundraising

Indeed, novelty and fundraising are far from the only motivations for entomophagy. Today there are one billion hungry people on the planet and that number is going to grow as population expands. Based on a medium level of average fertility, the United Nations (UN) predicts a global population of 9.3 billion people by 2050 and 10.1 billion in the next 90 years.⁶ Taking into account existing levels of malnutrition, the UN estimates that food production will need to increase by 70 percent to feed this new population.⁷

Alongside this challenge are soaring food costs and ecological pressures. Global food prices rose sharply in 2007–2008 and have remained high since. While prices are expected to ease somewhat, they will still average 20–30 percent higher in the next decade than over the past 10 years.⁸

Agriculture is also “the main driver of most ecological problems on the planet,” said economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute. “We are literally eating away the other species on the planet.”⁹

The Livestock Issues

Huge amounts of land, feed crops, and water are required to rear livestock. Conversion of vegetable-based calories to animal-based calories is inefficient and, in a resource-constrained world, we need to think about that equation.

In most Western diets protein is derived from farm-raised livestock. This process, which could be partially offset by raising insects, is rife with adverse environmental and social impacts. Photo Socially Responsible Agriculture Project

The livestock sector also contributes heavily to greenhouse gas emissions, causes widespread deforestation and biodiversity loss, accounts for 8 percent of global water use (mostly through irrigation for pasture and feed crops), and is probably the largest single source of water pollution. In the United States, livestock alone are responsible for an estimated 55 percent of erosion and sediment, 37 percent of pesticide use, 50 percent of antibiotic use, and a third of the loads of nitrogen and phosphorus into freshwater resources.¹⁰

“When the turmoil of the World War threatened to imperil the food resources of civilized nations, the question of ‘substitutes’ became a serious one, and, among other suggestions, experiments were urged by the eminent entomologist Dr. L. O. Howard to ascertain the food value of insects,” wrote naturalist Joseph Bequaert in 1921.¹¹ His article, entitled “Insects as Food,” in Natural History Magazine may again be gaining relevance as we grapple with a potentially looming nutritional and environmental crisis.

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), insects have the potential to supplement the growing global demand for protein. Since insects are cold-blooded, they don’t need as much feed as birds and mammals, which consume more energy to maintain their body temperatures. This means insects convert feed into protein of comparable quality to other animal meat sources much quicker and more efficiently than traditional livestock. Insects are also a significant source of iron, zinc, and vitamin A—important in light of the fact that some two billion people are deficient in zinc, one billion have iron-deficiency anemia, and vitamin A deficiency affects some 250 million people, mainly young children and pregnant women in developing countries.¹²

Insects produce less waste, too. The proportion of livestock that is not edible after processing is approximately 30 percent for pork, 35 percent for chicken, 45 percent for beef and 65 percent for lamb. By contrast, only 20 percent of a cricket is inedible.¹³

As an added benefit, because human physiology differs more from insects than from mammals, the chance that a pathogen will jump from a cooked insect to a human diner is smaller than the chance it will jump from another mammal to a human. The more evolutionary distance we have from a food source, the less danger there is that a disease could actually affect a human after the meal has been cooked.¹⁴

Entomophagy can also indirectly increase incomes in poor communities. In Mexico, farmers who once spent money on pesticides to keep bugs off their crops have realized that by collecting and selling the insects, candy-coated or fried, they can make larger profits and reduce pesticide payments. In South Africa, approximately 9.5 billion mopane worms (emperor moth caterpillars) are harvested annually from 7,700 square miles of mopane forests. They are worth $85 million, of which approximately 40 percent goes to the collectors (primarily poor, rural women).

Unfortunately, as in all harvesting of wild creatures, overexploitation can occur. In Southern Africa, there are areas where the mopane worm has been extirpated. Tshireletso Lorraine Lucas, who studied the harvesting of mopane worms in Central Botswana, found that their numbers are declining, and that this is in part due to overharvesting, which is increasingly motivated by commerce rather than subsistence. Leah Snow Teffo of the University of Pretoria and her team, working in South Africa, have shown that the demand for edible stink bugs already exceeds supply.

Insect Farms

One solution to the problem of overharvesting is insect farming. In Thailand, for example, approximately 20,000 farmers are engaged in raising insects.¹² Some arthropods are already reared on an industrial scale, such as edible scorpions in China. In temperate zones, where insect rearing companies produce insects as feed or fishing bait, some growers have set up special production lines geared toward human consumption.

And, of course, raising insects appears to be slightly more humane than raising other animals. Marcel Dicke and Arnold van Huis, professors of entomology at Wageningen University, note that housing cattle, swine, or chicken in high densities causes stress to the animals, but insects, such as mealworms and locusts, naturally like to live in dense quarters and thus can be guiltlessly crowded into vertical, stacked trays or cages.13 Nor do bug farms have to be restricted to rural areas; they could sprout up anywhere, from a suburban strip mall to an apartment building. Enterprising gourmets could even keep a few trays of mealworms in the garage to ensure a fresh supply.

It would be sheer madness to ignore this flying protein or to use chemical pesticides to kill insects that are possibly more nutritious than the crops they prey on. 

In some cases, insect harvesting could even serve as a method of biological pest control. Swarms of millions upon millions of locusts can wipe out entire crops in Africa. It would be sheer madness to ignore this flying protein or to use chemical pesticides to kill insects that are possibly more nutritious than the crops they prey on. Furthermore, cultivating and harvesting insects requires that forests be preserved, not felled. So, in the end, insect eating may result in benefits across the board: for people’s stomachs and bank accounts, for local agricultural crops and forests, and for the planet.

The aversion to entomophagy among North Americans and Europeans, who do not grow up with the custom and often find it difficult or disgusting, remains one of the major challenges to its widespread adoption. Authors P. J. Gullan and P. S. Cranston write in their book The Insects: An Outline of Entomology that, “Typical Western repugnance of entomophagy is cultural rather than scientific or rational. After all, other invertebrates such as certain crustaceans and mollusks are favored culinary items.”¹⁵ Certainly, crabs, shrimps, and lobsters, which are also arthropods, don’t seem to elicit the same “yuck” factor in westerners.

Gullan and Cranston also argue that objections to eating insects cannot be justified on the grounds of taste or food value, since many have a nutty flavor and studies report favorably on the nutritional content of insects. We also already use many insect products to dye our foods, such as the red dye cochineal in imitation crab sticks, Campari, and various candies. And no processed food is really free of insects, anyway: we already consume up to a half-kilogram of insects per year in tomato soup, apple sauce, peanut butter, chocolate, coffee, and various other processed foods.

Cultural Differences

Different cultures consume different types of foods. Clearly, what is edible in one culture may not be in another. Cultural differences in food tastes are often said to have an economic or geographical basis. The anthropologist Marvin Harris has said that when people reject certain foods, there must be a logical and economic reason for doing this. According to Harris, entomophagy was taboo in cultures with protein sources that required less work, like farmed birds or cattle.^16,17 In other words, Harris felt the insect diet was less efficient and less reliable than the fish, fowl, and meat diet preferred in Europe and North America. In temperate climates, there are generally fewer edible insects, and therefore, in the past, it may have been an inefficient use of time and energy to incorporate insects into the diet. Quite simply, it may not have been worth it.

Unfortunately, westerners’ fear of insect feeding can be taken to extremes and lead to ecologically, nutritionally, and economically foolish behaviors. In Central Africa, missionaries often convinced local people that insect eating was disgusting—and thus persuaded them to abandon a valuable source of high-quality protein and mineral nutrition.¹⁸

Harvesting insects for food could provide secondary income for farms while lightening the environmental load from pesticides. Photo: Wisconsin Dept of Natural Resources

But times change. And insect cuisine is now becoming the subject of cookbooks and the object of praise from various chefs. David George Gordon, a Seattle-based science writer, is the author of The Eat-a-Bug Cookbook: 33 Ways to Cook Grasshoppers, Ants, Water Bugs, Spiders, Centipedes, and Their Kin. According to Gordon, “food insects and other arthropods will find their way into our diets sooner than we have forecasted, probably in the form of ‘animal protein’ additives to some of our familiar foods. Raising cattle as a source of protein is untenable—studies have shown that we’re already using all of the available land on our planet for farming and we simply can’t boost production to keep up with the pace of population growth. For the sake of our planet, we need to start eating lower down on the food chain and we need to do it fairly soon.”¹⁹

Thomasina Miers, cookbook author, chef of the award-winning London restaurant Wahaca, and an avid environmentalist, feels that the global population expansion and an increasing reliance on fish and meat will put critical pressures on an already-stressed food system—a pressure that insects can help alleviate.

While insects contribute significantly to the food security and livelihoods of millions of people as a reliable source of protein, carbohydrate, vitamins, and traditional medicines, it must be remembered that entomophagy is not just a behavior taken up as a last resort. In some countries, like Thailand, demand for edible insects increases as living standards improve.¹² David George Gordon, who has made a career out of educating people about edible bugs, is dismayed by events and reality television programs that focus more on the gross-out factor, than on showing people the culinary side of insects. He feels strongly that “We kind of like to think all these other cultures are so suffering from lack of nutrition that they eat bugs. Which is kind of like saying we eat oysters on the half shell because we need protein. This is not just about nutrition. This is legitimate comfort food in many parts of the world.”¹⁹

And, as Miers points out, insects are not just for the starving and the poor: “In Mexico, insect dishes like escamoles (ants’ eggs) and gusantes (roast worms) are considered real delicacies. Perhaps it is only a matter of time before culinary inventiveness and environmental necessity change our food map forever.”²⁰

A previous version of this paper appeared in a 2011 issue of Natural History magazine.

References:

1. Food and Agriculture Organization. Edible forest insects: Which insects? [online] (www.fao.org/forestry/edibleinsects/65425/en).
2. LAO PDR. Case Study on Regional Standard for Edible Crickets and Their Products [online] (2012) (www.maff.go.jp/e/ccasia/18/pdf/10_crickets.pdf).
3. Barth, H. Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa: Being a Journal of an Expedition undertaken under the Auspices of H. B. M.’s Government, in the Years 1849–1855 Vol. 1 (Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, & Roberts, London, 1857).
4. Holt, V. Why Not Eat Insects? (Leadenhall, London, 1885).
5. Dennis, M. Personal communication, October 2012
6. United Nations. World Population Prospects, the 2010 Revision [online] (2010) (esa.un.org/wpp).
7. Food and Agriculture Organization. How to Feed the World in 2050 [online] (2009) (www.fao.org/wsfs/forum2050/wsfs-forum/en).
8. Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development. Food prices [online] (www.oecd.org/general/foodprices.htm).
9. Biello, D. Another inconvenient truth: The world’s growing population poses a Malthusian dilemma. Scientific American (October 2, 2009).
10. ftp://ftp.fao.org/docrep/fao/010/a0701e/a0701e00.pdf
11. Bequaert, J. Insects as food. Natural History Magazine 21(2) 191-200 (1921).
12. Food and Agriculture Organization. Assessing the Potential of Insects as Food and Feed in assuring Food Security[online] (2012) (http://foris.fao.org/preview/31654-08b9c12f60eda84d122b1ad454c381bb4.pdf).
13. Dicke, M & van Huis, A. The six-legged meat of the future. The Wall Street Journal (February 19, 2011).
14. Oonincx, D. Personal communication, December 2012.
15. Gullan, PJ & Cranston, PS. The Insects: An Outline of Entomology (Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford, 2010).
16. Harris, M. Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture (Random House, New York, 1974).
17. Harris, M Good to Eat: Riddles of Food and Culture (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1985).
18. Anderson, EN. Everyone Eats: Understanding Food and Culture (New York University Press, New York, 2005).
19. Gordon, DG. Personal communication, October 2012.
20. Miers, T. Personal communication, November 2012

Dawn Starin is an honorary research associate at University College London and has spent decades doing research in Africa and Asia. Her articles have appeared in publications as varied as Critical Asian Studies, The Ecologist, Gastronomica, the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, Natural History, New Internationalist, New Statesman, The New York Times, and Philosophy Now. A previous version of this article appeared in Natural History magazine in October 2011 and a related article is forthcoming in The Solutions Journal in the spring of 2013.
Originally published in Solutions Journal; republished through a Creative Commons-Share Alike license.

In the three years since it first provided images of the sun in the spring of 2010, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has had virtually unbroken coverage of the sun’s rise toward solar maximum, the peak of solar activity in its regular 11-year cycle. This video shows those three years of the sun at a pace of two images per day.

SDO’s Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) captures a shot of the sun every 12 seconds in 10 different wavelengths. The images shown here are based on a wavelength of 171 Angstroms, which is in the extreme ultraviolet range and shows solar material at around 600,000 Kelvin. In this wavelength it is easy to see the sun’s 25-day rotation as well as how solar activity has increased over three years.

During the course of the video, the sun subtly increases and decreases in apparent size. This is because the distance between the SDO spacecraft and the sun varies over time. The image is, however, remarkably consistent and stable despite the fact that SDO orbits the Earth at 6,876 miles per hour and the Earth orbits the sun at 67,062 miles per hour.

Such stability is crucial for scientists, who use SDO to learn more about our closest star. These images have regularly caught solar flares and coronal mass ejections in the act, types of space weather that can send radiation and solar material toward Earth and interfere with satellites in space. SDO’s glimpses into the violent dance on the sun help scientists understand what causes these giant explosions — with the hopes of some day improving our ability to predict this space weather.

There are several noteworthy events that appear briefly in this video. They include the two partial eclipses of the sun by the moon, two roll maneuvers, the largest flare of this solar cycle, comet Lovejoy, and the transit of Venus. The specific time for each event is listed below, but a sharp-eyed observer may see some while the video is playing.

00:30;24 Partial eclipse by the moon

00:31;16 Roll maneuver

01:11;02 August 9, 2011 X6.9 Flare, currently the largest of this solar cycle

01:28;07 Comet Lovejoy, December 15, 2011

01:42;29 Roll Maneuver

01:51;07 Transit of Venus, June 5, 2012

02:28;13 Partial eclipse by the moon

More information about this video, as well as full HD version of all four wavelengths and print-resolution stills are public domain and can be viewed and downloaded at:http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/…

The following is part twelve in a series on the National Science Foundation’s Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network. 

Visit parts one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten and eleven in this series.

Tracking high-elevation snowfall at NSF's Niwot Ridge LTER site in Colorado. Credit: NSF Niwot Ridge LTER Site

An American exodus, it’s been called, the largest “migration” of people in modern U.S. history.

It happened during the 1930s Dust Bowl, when severe drought conditions coupled with erosion brought about an environmental catastrophe. Choking dust storms caused major economic, ecological and agricultural damage in Texas, Oklahoma and parts of New Mexico, Kansas and Colorado.

Ill winds blew across fields, plucking deep-rooted grasses and carrying them hundreds of miles. Farmlands disappeared and homes were destroyed. These “black blizzards” swirled all the way to East Coast cities such as New York and Washington.

On April 14, 1935–”Black Sunday”–20 of the worst of the storms turned day into night. More than 500,000 people were left homeless. Most headed due west in search of work. Some, victims of dust pneumonia or malnutrition, never made it.

For today’s residents of states like Colorado, that scene is long ago and far away. Or is it? On Earth Week, with much of the Mountain West in an extreme drought, people in the Four Corners are wondering.

The Search for White Gold

The answer lies in white gold: snowmelt.

“Snow and its meltwaters are indeed white gold, and they’re getting harder and harder to find,” says Mark Williams, an ecologist at the University of Colorado-Boulder and principal investigator of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Niwot Ridge Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) site in Colorado.

In western North America, snow typically begins to fall in November. It piles up, reaching its peak in April. In the Rocky Mountains region, 85 percent of the water resources come from snow as it eventually melts.

At Niwot Ridge, ecologists are prospecting for white gold, no easy task at 9,800 feet up.

Niwot Ridge is one of 26 NSF LTER sites in mountain, prairie, coastal and other ecosystems around the world. The sites are primarily supported by NSF’s Directorate for Biological Sciences, with major additional funding from its Directorate for Geosciences.

Niwot Ridge is part of the Boulder Creek, Colorado, watershed, where scientists at NSF’s Boulder Creek Critical Zone Observatory (CZO) are also looking for white gold.

Their search takes them into Earth’s critical zone–the region between the top of the forest canopy and the base of unweathered rock. Boulder Creek is one of six such NSF CZOs in watersheds across the country.

“The depth of winter’s snowpack and timing of spring snowmelt determine how much water we will have the following summer,” says Williams, who is also affiliated with the Boulder Creek CZO, “and the extent of a drought that’s the most severe since the Dust Bowl.”

It’s 2013, not 1935. But farmers are again asking whether there will be enough water for their fields.

Water Well Running Dry

Facing blizzard conditions, researchers prepare to measure high-peak snow properties. Credit: Ryan Vachon

At Niwot Ridge and Boulder Creek, scientists face howling winter winds to measure snow depth.

Without deep snows, the researchers are discovering, our water well is running dry.

“Water is critical for recharging soil moisture, keeping plants alive and replenishing stream networks,” says Williams. “Those streams and rivers are what feed our reservoirs.”

Water in all its forms–vapor, liquid and solid–distinguishes our planet, says John Wingfield, NSF assistant director for Biological Sciences.

“Much remains to be learned about the complex biological processes, and interactions of the biosphere and geosphere, in snow and ice cover,” Wingfield says. “Large-scale shifts of snow and ice fields will have major downstream effects. The implications for ecosystems even far removed from high altitude and latitude snow and ice are unknown.”

To find answers, Williams, Suzanne Anderson, principal investigator of the Boulder Creek CZO, and colleagues recently conducted a study of water flow on hillslopes of the Colorado Front Range. They published the results in the journal Hydrological Processes.

Other authors of the paper are Eve-Lyn Hinckley and Robert Anderson of the University of Colorado-Boulder, Brian Ebel of the U.S. Geological Survey and Rebecca Barnes of Bard College. Hinckley is the lead author.

“The interaction of climate and ecosystems is an example of the critical questions that lie at the interface between scientific disciplines,” says Roger Wakimoto, NSF assistant director for Geosciences. “The results from this study will greatly improve our understanding of the hydrologic cycle.”

The research, conducted in the headwaters of the Rockies, shows that higher temperatures are shifting the timing of maximum snow accumulation ever-earlier and decreasing the ratio of snow-to-rain.

“It’s raining a heck of a lot more than it used to,” says Williams. “In times past, it did nothing but snow.”

Scientist Mark Williams samples snow with help from Katya Hafich and Kendall Gotthelf. Credit: University of Colorado

A flash-in-the-pan, rain is gone more quickly than snow. Within hours of falling, it evaporates or seeps into the ground, and doesn’t have snow’s longer residence time on mountainsides.

“The slow melt of mountain snow is what keeps streams and rivers running like spigots turned on,” says Williams. “Eventually, they lead right to the taps in our kitchens, bathrooms and yards.”

Where, exactly, does the white gold come from?

As scientists at Niwot Ridge and Boulder Creek have discovered, the mother lode is hidden in snow “water towers.”

“Water towers” for the Mountain West–and beyond

Mountain ecosystems serve as “water towers” that store winter snow until it’s released during spring runoff.

The water towers, however, have sprung leaks.

Subalpine forests are becoming warmer and drier during all seasons. At higher elevations, alpine tundra has longer growing seasons, warmer summers and cool and wet versus cold and snowy winters.

How long a snowpack lasts is affected by what scientists call aspect: whether a hillslope faces north or south.

In the Rockies, lodgepole pines, which prefer colder, wetter climes, dot north-facing slopes; Ponderosa pines cover south-facing, drier slopes.

“You can pretty well guess how much snow a slope will have by which way it faces,” says Williams, “and by which tree species grows there.”

A Tale of Two Trees

Lodgepole pine-covered, north-facing slopes are usually laden with snow straight through the winter. South-facing slopes, with their Ponderosa pines, have only intermittent snow.

“North- and south-facing slopes at the Boulder Creek CZO are an excellent natural laboratory for studying the effects of climate change on water availability and soil geochemistry,” says Enriqueta Barrera, NSF program director for the CZO network, supported by the agency’s Directorate for Geosciences.

Williams agrees. “North-facing slopes store more water in the ‘near-surface’ than south-facing slopes,” he says. “On south-facing slopes, water sinks quickly into the deep bedrock.”

How will alpine species such as pikas fare in a warmer world? Biologists are finding out. Credit: Ryan Vachon

Earlier snowmelt may be changing those patterns, “which could have consequences for the health and composition of the forest,” Williams says, and for water resources.

“Research at sites such as the Niwot Ridge LTER shows how catastrophic large-scale shifts in snowmelt will be,” says Saran Twombly, NSF program director for the LTER network.

Lack of snow, for example, led to forest fires like Colorado’s High Park Fire of June, 2012, and Waldo Canyon Fire less than a month later. The Waldo Canyon Fire was the most expensive wildfire in Colorado history. It was also the most destructive.

“White blizzard” falling

It’s April 8, 2013: date of the average peak snowpack in the Colorado mountains. Despite this winter’s snow drought, the day, perhaps, of a good omen.

“Heavy snow will blanket much of the west,” intoned weather forecasters. Blizzard watches went up. Snowplows, fallow too long, once again geared down.

When all was said and done, more than a foot of snow fell across high peaks and low prairies.

It sparkled across the land, until spring sunlight turned it into a precious commodity: white gold.

Source: National Science Foundation

For those who have seen the Earth from space, and for the hundreds and perhaps thousands more who will, the experience most certainly changes your perspective. The things that we share in our world are far more valuable than those which divide us.

~ Donald Williams, Space Shuttle Astronaut

Of its more than 7 billion inhabitants, just over 500 have had the privilege of seeing the Earth from space, with their own eyes. This transformational experience is called the Overview Effect.

This view of earth as one fragile organism, devoid of manmade boundaries, inspires a sense of interconnectedness appropriate to the task of crafting a sustainable future.

‘Overview’ is a short film featuring the insights of five astronauts, and others who share their thoughts on the relevance of this emerging consciousness to our relationship with planet Earth.

Overview

The following quotations are from astronauts who have experienced this unique Overview perspective, paired with photos from NASA:

It’s tiny out there…it’s inconsequential. It’s ironic that we had come to study the Moon and it was really discovering the Earth.

~ Bill Anders, Apollo 8

Earthrise - Apollo 8, December 24, 1968

I think the one overwhelming emotion that we had was when we saw the earth rising in the distance over the lunar landscape . . . . It makes us realize that we all do exist on one small globe. For from 230,000 miles away it really is a small planet.

~ Frank Borman, Gemini 7 & Apollo 8

Andes Mountains - Gemini 7, December 4 - 18, 1968

When you’re finally up on the moon, looking back at the earth, all these differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend and you’re going to get a concept that maybe this is really one world and why the hell can’t we learn to live together like decent people?

~ Frank Borman, Gemini 7 & Apollo 8

There was a startling recognition that the nature of the universe was not as I had been taught… I not only saw the connectedness, I felt it.… I was overwhelmed with the sensation of physically and mentally extending out into the cosmos. I realized that this was a biological response of my brain attempting to reorganize and give meaning to information about the wonderful and awesome processes that I was privileged to view.

~ Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 - Sixth man on the Moon

The Blue Marble, Apollo 17, December 7, 1972

I stood in the blue darkness and looked in awe at the Earth from the lunar surface. What I saw was almost too beautiful to grasp.

~ Eugene Cernan,  Apollo 17 – Last man to walk on the Moon 

This planet is not terra firma. It is a delicate flower and it must be cared for. It’s lonely. It’s small. It’s isolated, and there is no resupply. And we are mistreating it. Clearly, the highest loyalty we should have is not to our own country or our own religion or our hometown or even to ourselves. It should be to, number two, the family of man, and number one, the planet at large. This is our home, and this is all we’ve got.

~ Scott Carpenter, Mercury 7

For more information:
The Overview Institute
Fragile Oasis
Earth from Space – NASA
Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth – NASA

“Before we invented civilization our ancestors lived mainly in the open out under the sky. Before we devised artificial lights and atmospheric pollution and modern forms of nocturnal entertainment we watched the stars. There were practical calendar reasons of course but there was more to it than that. Even today the most jaded city dweller can be unexpectedly moved upon encountering a clear night sky studded with thousands of twinkling stars. When it happens to me after all these years it still takes my breath away.”

~ Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

As over half the world population now lives in urban areas, an understanding of the ecological relationships with light, and the impact of light pollution on humans and other species is emerging. Widespread use of artificial light is not only diminishing our enjoyment of the stars above, but is threatening astronomy, disrupting ecosystems and circadian rhythms, while wasting billions of dollars of energy.

The International Dark Sky Association’s Dark Sky Week, April 5 – 11, is intended to inspire us to look up in awe at the night sky, and to look around our homes and communities to see how we can help to reduce light pollution.

In observation of International Dark Sky Week we have compiled a selection of photo galleries, articles, videos and links to inform and inspire you:

Dark Skies – Nighttime Imaging

The FullMoonscapes of 2012

National Dark Sky Week offers Bright Ideas on Light Pollution

Earth at Night

Look Up for a Change

Losing the Dark

Our Vanishing Night

Hidden Costs of Light Pollution

For More Information:

International Dark Sky Association
UNESCO Starlight Reserves
Astronomers Without Borders
The Astro Society Publications – Light Pollution

According to the World Bank, Madagascar has seen a 10 percent increase in temperature and a 10 percent decrease in rainfall in the past 50 years, with a devastating impact on the farming and fishing communities. Years of drought in the south of the country have left people there facing chronic hunger and high rates of malnutrition. In this film, we look at the charcoal industry in the south, and discover how the prolonged drought has driven farmers – whose barren fields can no longer support them – into the forests in search of a livelihood. In a country that relies almost exclusively on charcoal as a cooking fuel, wood is one of the few resources left for them to exploit. (2011)

From IRIN

Shimon Steinberg looks at the difference between pests and bugs — and makes the case for using good bugs to fight bad bugs, avoiding chemicals in our quest for perfect produce.

“My dream is to narrow the gap even more by finding more robust and reliable good bugs we can mass produce or conserve in the field, as well as create more public demand for natural pest control and increase awareness among growers.”

Shimon Steinberg’s biotech lab researches ways to harness the natural benefits of insects on a massive scale. Beneficial bugs are replacing the use of chemical sprays in greenhouse vegetables and open field crops, producing pesticide-free food and eliminating hazardous exposure of millions of workers in third world countries.) These insects are shipped worldwide, where they go to work protecting thousands of hectares of greenhouses and open fields, in vegetables, field crops, fruit trees, ornamental plants and more.

Yellowstone National Park, which is part of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, is located in the northwest corner of Wyoming, extending into Idaho and Montana. It is the oldest, largest and most popular National Park in the continental United States. Filmmaker Nathaniel Maddox captures the stunning, diverse scenic landscapes of Yellowstone: pine-clad forests, geysers, gorges and most famous waterfall, complete with beautiful tableaus of Yellowstone’s protected wildlife, including bison, elk and deer.