Featured Image

Acidic oceans threaten fish

Posted by Hannah

Stocks could suffer as seas soak up more carbon dioxide.  Ocean acidification looks likely to damage crucial fish stocks. Two studies published today in Nature Climate Change reveal that high carbon dioxide concentrations can cause death and organ damage in very young fish. The work challenges the belief that fish, unlike organisms with shells or exoskeletons made of calcium carbonate, will be safe as marine CO2 levels rise. Fish could be most susceptible to carbon dioxide when in the egg, or just hatched. Oceans act like carbon sponges, drawing CO2 from the atmosphere into the water. As the CO2 mixes … Read more…

Featured Image

Frozen Assets

Posted by Hannah

Maclean’s Ice cores tell the history of Canada’s climate, but now the government doesn’t want them anymore.

No Featured Image

Canada’s ice cores seek new home

Posted by Hannah

Confusion over fate of valuable climate record chills researchers. An unusual ‘help wanted’ advertisement arrived in the inboxes of Canadian scientists last week. The e-mail asked the research community to provide new homes for an impressive archive of ice cores representing 40 years of research by government scientists in the Canadian Arctic. The note was sent out by Christian Zdanowicz, a glaciologist at the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) in Ottawa. He claimed that the collection faced destruction owing to budget cuts at Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), the government department that runs the survey, and a “radical downsizing” of the Ice Core … Read more…

Featured Image

Banking on biodiversity

Posted by Hannah

The diversity of life on Earth gives ecosystems the resilience they need to thrive. Yet every day scores of plants and animals go extinct, victims of activities we humans undertake to feed, clothe, house and trans­port ourselves. How can we meet our own needs without destroying that which sustains us? The west coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada, has a rugged, involuted shoreline, etched by fjords, sand dunes and shel­tered coves. It is sandwiched between two biospheres, the dark swelling sea and the emerald temperate rain forest, and it attracts all sorts—from salmon to surfers. As idyllic as … Read more…

Featured Image

Cold cash for cold science

Posted by Hannah

The recent funding wrap-up from the international polar year (IPY) has left many Canadian researchers scratching their heads, trying to find a way to continue their arctic science projects. A new grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada may help close that research-funding gap. In its announcement yesterday, NSERC opened a competition to fund large-scale research with a focus—for this round of funding—on northern earth systems. The Discovery Frontiers initiative will heft Can$4 million over five years on the successful research team to study the physical, chemical, biological and social factors that affect the North and its … Read more…