Behind the ongoing back-and-forth fights over climate change that usually focus on carbon, there has lingered the threat of the powerful greenhouse gas methane being released into the atmosphere and causing even worse trouble. In August we reported on a study that noted methane bubbling up from the seafloor near islands north of Norway, giving scientists a scare. This week in Science, another team reports seeing the same thing during thousands of observations of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf on Russia’s north coast, which is even more worrisome because it’s a huge methane deposit.

The shelf, which covers about 800,00 square miles, was exposed during the last ice age. When the region was above sea level, tundra vegetation pulled carbon dioxide from the air as plants grew. That organic material, much of which didn’t decompose in the frigid Arctic, accumulated in the soil and is the source of modern methane [Science News]. Now underwater, it’s covered by a layer of permafrost. But that permafrost seems to be becoming unstable, thanks to the fact that the water on top of it is warmer than the air it was exposed to back when it was on dry land.

The study said about 8 million tonnes of methane a year, equivalent to the annual total previously estimated from all of the world’s oceans, were seeping from vast stores long trapped under permafrost [Reuters]. Study leader Natalia Shakhova says methane levels in the Arctic haven’t been this high in 400,000 years. While we’re not about to teeter off a cliff—that 8 million tons is a small portion of the global emissions of 440 million tons—we should be concerned, the scientists say. Methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, absorbing at least 25 times more heat, NOAA says.

It is possible that climate change could be contributing to the release, with warmer seas causing more methane to come out, creating a feedback loop. But methane has long been leaking, and there’s no record of the previous levels with which to verify how much methane emissions are increasing, or whether people are playing a part. While Shakhova says the warmer runoff into the Arctic ocean is probably contributing, the team can’t say that for sure.

What they can say for sure is that the methane levels there are extremely high. Most undersea methane oxidizes into CO2 as it enters the atmosphere, but Shakhova says the East Siberian Ice Shelf methane is too close to the surface for that to happen. As a result, she said, atmospheric levels of methane over the Arctic are 1.85 parts per million, almost three times as high as the global average of 0.6 or 0.7 parts per million. Concentrations over the shelf are 2 parts per million or higher [The New York Times].

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Image: University of Alaska Fairbanks

The Iraq war and its aftermath have left physical and psychic wounds on both local residents who lived through the American invasion and many U.S. soldiers. But anecdotal reports suggest that another demographic may have suffered as well: unborn babies. Doctors in Fallujah, Iraq have reported a high number of children born with birth deformities ever since the massive battle between Iraqi insurgents and U.S. forces that raged there in 2004.

While no medical studies have been done or official reports have been issued, many Fallujah locals suspect that U.S. weaponry used in the assault has left a lingering effect.

A debate is expected to come up in the British parliament sometime next week on the subject. The call for debate came up after the latest report by BBC’s John Simpson, in which an Iraqi pediatrician said she was seeing two to three deformed babies each day; most of the children had cardiac complications. The doctor clarified that while she didn’t have any official figures, she had noted an increase in the number of cases since the American invasion. The current level of cardiac birth defects in Fallujah, said the BBC, is 13 times higher than that in Europe.

In his report, Simpson also encountered children who were missing limbs, who had extra fingers and toes, with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each limb and an other child with spinal cord deformities so severe, he couldn’t bear to have it filmed. Many Iraqis, says Simpson, blame American weapons for increasing birth defects in the area. At a clinic he visited, he was told the worst problems were to be found in the neighborhood of al-Julan, near the river. This was the heart of the resistance to the Americans during the two major offensives of April and September 2004, and was hit constantly by bombs and shells [BBC].

Local people told the BBC they suspect US forces used white phosphorus and depleted uranium (DU) [in the battle of Fallujah], although this has not been proved [New Scientist]. White phosphorous can be found in incendiary weapons but is more often used as a smokescreen, while depleted uranium, which is toxic and weakly radioactive, can be found in some armor-piercing shells.

The allegations aren’t new. In a 2009 investigation, The Guardian asked pediatrician Samira Abdul Ghani to keep precise records over a three-week period. Her records reveal that 37 babies with anomalies, many of them neural tube defects, were born during that period at Fallujah general hospital alone [The Guardian]. That report observed that Fallujah’s doctors were hesitant to link the deformities with the war, and suggested that they might be wary of embarrassing the government. Instead, Fallujah general hospital’s director and senior specialist, Dr Ayman Qais, listed other possible causes of the birth defects: “These include air pollution, radiation, chemicals, drug use during pregnancy, malnutrition, or the psychological status of the mother,” said Dr Qais. “We simply don’t have the answers yet” [The Guardian].

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Image:Wikimedia

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: when I was a kid, Mars was a dead planet. Dry, frozen, with hardly any atmosphere, I always figured it wasn’t very interesting.

Heh.

Mars may or may not be alive in the biological sense, but it’s certainly active geologically! And images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera verify it. It’s spotted migrating ripples across Martian sand dunes:

These before and after images (part of a trio of them) show the motion. The image on the left was taken June 30, 2007, and the one on the right in October of that year. During that time, just a few months, the ripples can clearly be seen to have moved by a few meters (the inset diagram shows the ridges on the dunes schematically). This means that the wind blowing in this part of the planet is not only actively pushing around the sand, but also doing it on a timescale we can measure.

And on a spatial scale, too. Note the scalebar in the images: it’s 20 meters long, about the size of a house! This strongly suggests that these dunes are loose piles of sand, and not heavily crusted over or cemented (the grains stuck together). That, plus the time and size of the migration, yields yet more clues about the way the surface of Mars is put together.

Amazingly, this comes at the same time as other news showing that dunes in another region of Mars haven’t moved for at least 100,000 years, and possibly as long as three times that age! So while some regions of Mars are dynamic, active, and changing on a timescale of weeks, other regions are static, unchanging, and rigid for hundreds of millennia.

I used to think Mars was uninteresting. I was dead wrong. Mars is weird, and in astronomy and space exploration, weird is always interesting.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/International Research School of Planetary Sciences

The Web site for POM pomegranate juice makes some pretty extreme claims, strongly implying that the juice can prevent or help treat diseases like cancer, hypertension, diabetes, and even erectile dysfunction. Now, the Food and Drug Administration has said such claims are misleading and are not allowed on food products, according to a report in The New York Times. If POM wants to make such claims, the FDA stated, it will have to be regulated as a drug.

In a crackdown on companies with misleading labels, the FDA shot off warning letters asking 17 companies to clean up their act.

POM is not the only company to be chastised by the FDA for misleading labeling. Other offenders included several products whose labels trumpet the fact that they contain no transfats, even though they contain high levels of saturated fat, writes The New York Times:

The products included Gorton’s Fish Fillets, Spectrum Organic All Vegetable Shortening and two products from Dreyer’s, the Dibs bite-size ice cream snacks and the vanilla-fudge Drumsticks. According to Dreyer’s, the Dibs contain 17 grams of saturated fat per serving. Federal guidelines recommend that a person not consume more than 20 grams in a day.

The FDA also wagged its finger at some baby foods made by Gerber and Beech-Nut, saying those foods made several unwarranted health claims, because dietary levels for the nutrients cited on their labels haven’t been established for babies.

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Image: POM Juice