A rare opportunity has allowed a team of biologists to evaluate corals and the essential, photosynthetic algae that live inside their cells before, during, and after a period in 2005 when global warming caused sea-surface temperatures in the Caribbean Ocean to rise.
The team, led by Penn State Assistant Professor of Biology Todd LaJeunesse, found that a rare species of algae that is tolerant of stressful environmental conditions proliferated in corals as the more-sensitive algae were being expelled from corals. The results will be published in the online version of the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B on 9 September 2009.
“Symbiodinium trenchi is normally a rare species of micro-alga in the Caribbean,” said LaJeunesse. “Because …

Chemistry researchers uncover why the archean world was not frozen solid
When Planet Earth was just cooling down from its fiery creation, the sun was faint and young. So faint that it should not have been able to keep the oceans of earth from freezing. But fortunately for the creation of life, water was kept liquid on our young planet.
For years scientists have debated what could have kept earth warm enough to prevent the oceans from freezing solid. Now a team of researchers from Tokyo Institute of Technology and University of Copenhagen’s Department of Chemistry have coaxed an explanation out of ancient rocks, as reported in this week’s issue of PNAS
A perfect greenhouse gas
- “The young …

Drives events similar to El Niño, La Niña
Establishing a key link between the solar cycle and global climate, research led by scientists at the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., shows that maximum solar activity and its aftermath have impacts on Earth that resemble La Niña and El Niño events in the tropical Pacific Ocean.
The research may pave the way toward predictions of temperature and precipitation patterns at certain times during the approximately 11-year solar cycle.
“These results are striking in that they point to a scientifically feasible series of events that link the 11-year solar cycle with ENSO, the tropical Pacific phenomenon that so strongly influences climate variability …

Global food security in a changing climate depends on the nutritional value and yield of staple food crops. Researchers at Monash University in Victoria, Australia have found an increase in toxic compounds, a decrease in protein content and a decreased yield in plants grown under high CO2 and drought conditions.
The research, to be presented by Dr Ros Gleadow on 29 June 2009 at the Society for Experimental Biology Annual Meeting in Glasgow, has shown that the concentration of cyanogenic glycosides, which break down to release toxic hydrogen cyanide, increased in plants in elevated CO2.
This was compounded by the fact that protein content decreased, making the plants overall more toxic as the ability of herbivores to …

Climate change will bring about major shifts in worldwide fire patterns, and those changes are coming fast, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, in collaboration with scientists at Texas Tech University.
The findings are reported in the April 8 issue of PLoS ONE, an open-access, peer-reviewed journal of the Public Library of Science.
Researchers used thermal-infrared sensor data obtained between 1996 and 2006 from European Space Agency satellites in their study of pyrogeography – the distribution and behavior of wildfire – on a global scale. They not only got a global view of where wildfires occur, but they determined the common environmental characteristics associated with the risk of those …