Tough Rocks

Eliminating the Chinese Rare Earth Chokepoint

Last Thursday, China’s Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM) announced a series of new export controls (translation), including a new regime governing the “export” of rare earth elements (REEs) any time they are used to make advanced semiconductors or any technology that is “used for, or that could possibly be used for… military use or for improving potential military capabilities.”

The controls apply to any manufactured good made anywhere in the world whose value is comprised of 0.1% or more Chinese-mined or processed REEs. Say, for example, that a German factory makes a military drone using an entirely European supply chain, except for the use of Chinese rare earths in the onboard motors and compute. If this rule were enforced by the Chinese government to its maximum extent, this almost entirely German drone would be export controlled by the Chinese government.

REEs are enabling components of many modern technologies, including vehicles, semiconductors, robotics of all kinds, drones, satellites, fighter jets, and much, much else. The controls apply to any seven REEs (samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium, and yttrium). China controls the significant majority of the world’s mining capacity for these materials, and an even higher share of the refining and processing capacity.

The public debate quickly devolved into arguments about who provoked whom (“who really started this?”), whether it is China or the US that has miscalculated, and abundant species of whataboutism. Like too many foreign policy debates, these arguments are primarily about narrative setting in service of mostly orthogonal political agendas rather than the actions demanded in light of the concrete underlying reality.

But make no mistake, this is a big deal. China is expressing a willingness to exploit a weakness held in common by virtually every country on Earth. Even if China chooses to implement this policy modestly at first, the vulnerability they are exposing has significant long-term implications for both the manufacturing of AI compute and that of key AI-enabled products (self-driving cars and trucks, drones, robots, etc.). That alone makes it a relevant topic for Hyperdimensional, where I have covered manufacturing-related issues before. The topics of rare earths and critical minerals have also long been on my radar, and I wrote reports for various think tanks early this year.

What follows, then, is a “how we got here”-style analysis followed by some concrete proposals for what the United States—and any other country concerned with controlling its own economic destiny—should do next.

A note: this post is going to concentrate mostly on REEs, which is a chemical-industrial category, rather than “critical minerals,” which is a policy designation made (in the US context) by the US Geological Survey. All REEs are considered critical minerals by the federal government, but so are many other things with very different geological, scientific, technological, and economic dynamics affecting them.

How We Got Here

If you have heard one thing about rare earths, it is probably the quip that they are not, in fact, rare. They’re abundant in the Earth’s crust, but they’re not densely distributed in many places because their chemical properties typically result in them being mixed with many other elements instead of accumulating in homogeneous deposits (like, say, gold).

Rare earths have been in industrial use for a long time, but their utility increased considerably with the simultaneous and independent invention in 1983 of the Neodymium-Iron-Boron magnet by General Motors and Japanese firm Sumitomo. This single materials breakthrough is upstream of a huge range of microelectronic innovations that followed.

Economically useful deposits of REEs require a rare confluence of factors such as unusual magma compositions or weathering patterns. The world’s largest deposit is known as Bayan Obo, located in the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia, though other regions of China also have substantial quantities.

The second largest deposit is in Mountain Pass, California, which used to be the world’s largest production center for rare earth magnets and related goods. It went dormant twenty years ago due to environmental concerns and is now being restarted by a firm called MP Materials, in which the US government took an equity position this past July. Another very large and entirely undeveloped deposit—possibly the largest in the world—is in Greenland. Anyone who buys the line that the Trump administration was “caught off guard” by Chinese moves on rare Earths is paying insufficient attention.

Rare earths are an enabling part of many pieces of modern technology you touch daily, but they command very little value as raw or even processed goods. Indeed, the economics of the rare earth industry are positively brutal. There are many reasons this is true, but two bear mentioning here. First, the industry suffers from dramatic price volatility, in part because China strategically dumps supply onto the global market to deter other countries from developing domestic rare earth supply chains.

Second, for precisely the same reasons that rare earth minerals do not tend to cluster homogeneously (they are mixed with many other elements), the processing required to separate REEs from raw ore is exceptionally complex, expensive, and time-consuming. A related challenge is that separation of the most valuable REEs entails the separation of numerous, less valuable elements—including other REEs.

In addition to challenging economics, the REE processing business is often environmentally expensive. In modern US policy discourse, we are used to environmental regulations being deployed to hinder construction that we few people really believe is environmentally harmful. But these facilities come with genuine environmental costs of a kind Western societies have largely not seen in decades; indeed, the nastiness of the industry is part of why we were comfortable with it being offshored in the first place.

China observed these trends and dynamics in the early 1990s and made rare earth mining and processing a major part of its industrial strategy. This strategy led to these elements being made in such abundance that it may well have had a “but-for” effect on the history of technology. Absent Chinese development of this industry, it seems quite likely to me that advanced capitalist democracies would have settled on a qualitatively different approach to the rare earths industry and the technologies it enables.

In any case, that is how we arrived to this point: a legacy of American dominance in the field, followed by willful ceding of the territory to wildly successful Chinese industrial strategists. Now this unilateral American surrender is being exploited against us, and indeed the entire world. Here is what I think we should do next.

by Dean Ball, Hyperdimensional |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. Think the stable genius and minions will have the intelligence to craft a well thought out plan (especially if someone else down the road gets credit)? Lol. See also: What It's Like to Work at the White House.]

China Has Overtaken America

In 1957 the Soviet Union put the first man-made satellite — Sputnik — into orbit. The U.S. response was close to panic: The Cold War was at its coldest, and there were widespread fears that the Soviets were taking the lead in science and technology.

In retrospect those fears were overblown. When Communism fell, we learned that the Soviet economy was far less advanced than many had believed. Still, the effects of the “Sputnik moment” were salutary: America poured resources into science and higher education, helping to lay the foundations for enduring leadership.

Today American leadership is once again being challenged by an authoritarian regime. And in terms of economic might, China is a much more serious rival than the Soviet Union ever was. Some readers were skeptical when I pointed out Monday that China’s economy is, in real terms, already substantially larger than ours. The truth is that GDP at purchasing power parity is a very useful measure, but if it seems too technical, how about just looking at electricity generation, which is strongly correlated with economic development? As the chart at the top of this post shows, China now generates well over twice as much electricity as we do.

Yet, rather than having another Sputnik moment, we are now trapped in a reverse Sputnik moment. Rather than acknowledging that the US is in danger of being permanently overtaken by China’s technological and economic prowess, the Trump administration is slashing support for scientific research and attacking education. In the name of defeating the bogeymen of “wokeness” and the “deep state”, this administration is actively opposing progress in critical sectors while giving grifters like the crypto industry everything that they want.

The most obvious example of Trump’s war on a critical sector, and the most consequential for the next decade, is his vendetta against renewable energy. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill rolled back Biden’s tax incentives for renewable energy. The administration is currently trying to kill a huge, nearly completed offshore wind farm that could power hundreds of thousands of homes, as well as cancel $7 billion in grants for residential solar panels. It appears to have succeeded in killing a huge solar energy project that would have powered almost 2 million homes. It has canceled $8 billion in clean energy grants, mostly in Democratic states, and is reportedly planning to cancel tens of billions more. (...)

In his rambling speech at the United Nations, Donald Trump insisted that China isn’t making use of wind power: “They use coal, they use gas, they use almost anything, but they don’t like wind.” I don’t know where Trump gets his misinformation — maybe the same sources telling him that Portland is in flames. But here’s the reality:

Chris Wright, Trump’s energy secretary, says that solar power is unreliable: “You have to have power when the sun goes behind a cloud and when the sun sets, which it does almost every night.” So the energy secretary of the most technologically advanced nation on earth is unaware of the energy revolution being propelled by dramatic technological progress in batteries. And the revolution is happening now in the U.S., in places like California. Here’s what electricity supply looked like during an average day in California back in June: 

Special interests and Trump’s pettiness aside, my sense is that there’s something more visceral going on. A powerful faction in America has become deeply hostile to science and to expertise in general. As evidence, consider the extraordinary collapse in Republican support for higher education over the past decade:

Yet the truth is that hostility to science and expertise have always been part of the American tradition. Remember your history lesson on the Scopes Monkey Trial? It took a Supreme Court ruling, as recently as 2007, to stop politicians from forcing public schools to teach creationism. And with the current Supreme Court, who can be sure creationism won’t return?

Anti-scientism is a widespread attitude on the religious right, which forms a key component of MAGA. In past decades, however, the forces of humanism and scientific inquiry were able to prevail against anti-scientism. In part this was due to the recognition that American science was essential for national security as well as national prosperity. But now we have an administration that claims to be protecting national security by imposing tariffs on kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities, while gutting the CDC and the EPA.

Does this mean that the U.S. is losing the race with China for global leadership? No, I think that race is essentially over. Even if Trump and his team of saboteurs lose power in 2028, everything I see says that by then America will have fallen so far behind that it’s unlikely that we will ever catch up.

by Paul Krugman |  Read more:

Images: OurWorldInData/FT

[ed. See also: Losing Touch With Reality; Civil Resistance Confronts the Autocracy; and, An Autocracy of Dunces (Krugman).]

David Littschwager, Seawater sample
via:

In Praise of the Faroe Islands

In praise of the Faroe Islands 

Due to its small size and limited variation, I wouldn’t say it’s the singular most beautiful nation on earth (I’d give that to New Zealand), but it’s certainly at the very top tier of the most beautiful places on earth. What stands out about the Faroe Islands’ beauty is that every single place you set foot will be beautiful. There is no real need to go to any specific destinations (there aren’t even national parks or “nature zones” in the Faroe Islands), as there is incredible beauty at every point. And no matter where you go, you will always be in nature, surrounded by a quiet that feels completely removed from the modern world. (...)

In many places, “culture” feels like an aesthetic layer—a set of foods, clothing styles, or historical anecdotes. But in the Faroes, it feels deeper, like a shared operating system. When you speak to any person there, it’s immediately clear they are all operating from the same framework—a worldview that is both deeply felt and meaningfully distinct from the rest of the world.

Conservative intellectuals on Twitter and Substack are constantly sketching out their ideal society: a high-trust community rooted in family (fertility rates are high), self-sufficiency, and continuity with the past. They dream of a life lived closer to the land, with a strong sense of personal responsibility. By almost any of their metrics, the Faroe Islands is the most successful conservative nation on earth. And yet, it is also a profoundly liberal place. It’s cosmopolitan and highly educated. There is a massive social safety net and great equality, a deep belief in the collective over the individual, and a culture where economic aspiration doesn’t dominate life. It is, in many ways, the idyllic left-wing society. The Faroe Islands seems to have achieved the goals of both political tribes simultaneously, without any of the ideological warfare.

What makes the Faroe Islands special in my opinion is not that it’s so nice, but that it’s so nice yet has no desire to optimize or make more efficient (or exploit) anything to become even “nicer.” This is unusual, as most successful places reached their status by climbing a cutthroat ladder, trading off nearly everything in pursuit of greater efficiency.

To give the simplest example: the Faroe Islands are a series of islands, some of which have fewer than 10 people living on them, and are otherwise quite isolated from each other. No worry—the Faroe Islands, with a “we are all one” ethos, have power and internet going to every corner of their nation, with subsidized helicopter rides and ferries to even the smallest islands to make sure life can feel connected for all Faroese people. More well known, the Faroe Islands have built impressive and incredibly expensive undersea tunnels connecting all of the major and proximate islands to each other.

They spend this money not to make the islands more productive or efficient, but simply because they believe all Faroese people should be connected. The infrastructure exists for solidarity, not optimization. A consultant would call the tunnels and helicopter subsidies a spectacular misallocation of capital. But this misses the point entirely—they’re treating infrastructure as as a kind of social infrastructure, not economic.

by Daniel Frank, not not Talmud |  Read more:

Images: Daniel Frank

[ed. At first I thought this was about the Falkland Islands (off the tip of South America). Then realized I didn't know where the Faroes were at all.]

Monsters From the Deep

I get that the news cycle is packed right now, but I just heard from a colleague at the Smithsonian that this is fully a GIANT SQUID BEING EATEN BY A SPERM WHALE and it’s possibly the first ever confirmed video according to a friend at NOAA ~ Rebecca R. Helm

***

"From the darkness of the deep, the mother rose slowly, her great body pulsing with effort, while the calf clung close to her side. The faint shimmer of the surface light caught on something twisting in her jaws—long pale arms, still trembling, a giant calamari dragged from the black abyss.

The calf pressed its head against the mother’s flank, curious, its small eye turning toward the strange, sprawling catch. Around them, the other whales gathered, a circle of giants, each click and creak of their voices carrying through the water like an ancient council.

The mother released a cloud of ink the squid had left behind, now dissipating in ghostly ribbons. She let the prey dangle for a moment before tearing a piece free with a practiced shake of her head. The calf tried to imitate, nudging the slack arms of the squid, but only managed to tangle its mouth in the trailing suckers. The adults rumbled with what could only be described as laughter.

High above, a shaft of sunlight pierced the water, illuminating the drifting arms of the squid like banners in the deep. The feast had begun, but it was also a lesson—the calf’s first glimpse of the abyss’s hidden monsters, and of the power its mother carried up from the dark world below."

via: here and here

Plastic-Eating Fungus

A fungus from the Amazon rainforest can break down polyurethane plastic without oxygen. It's the first organism discovered with this capability, and it can survive using plastic as its only food source.

Most plastic waste ends up deep in landfills where oxygen doesn't reach, precisely where this fungus thrives. Polyurethane persists for centuries in these environments. It's everywhere: mattresses, insulation foam, shoe soles, adhesives, car parts. Annual global plastic production exceeds 400 million tons. Less than 10% gets recycled.

Pestalotiopsis microspora was discovered in 2011 in Ecuador's Yasuní National Forest, isolated from plant stems. The endophytic fungus lives inside plant tissues without harming its host. Laboratory testing revealed its remarkable ability: it degrades plastic equally well with or without oxygen present.

The fungus secretes an enzyme that breaks apart the chemical bonds holding polyurethane together. In laboratory tests, concentrated enzyme extracts can completely break down polyurethane polymer in under an hour. The fungus also produces a second enzyme that degrades PET plastic, splitting it into simpler compounds the fungus then consumes as food.

What makes this significant? Other plastic-degrading organisms need oxygen to function. When tested without oxygen, fungi like Lasiodiplodia and Pleosporales slowed down or stopped working. P. microspora maintained the same performance. This ability to work without oxygen directly addresses the actual problem—plastic buried in oxygen-depleted landfill depths.

The enzyme production is adaptive. When the fungus grows in a basic environment with only plastic available, it ramps up enzyme output. These enzymes spread through the surrounding material, breaking down plastic well beyond where the fungus itself is growing. The enzyme breakdown converts long-lasting polymer into simple compounds the fungus uses as food.

This fungus offers a biological solution that works precisely where the problem exists, in oxygen-depleted landfills where an ever-increasing amount our plastic waste collects.

by Sam Knowlton, The Confluence |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Always a good reason to preserve natural habitats - who knows what other plants have undiscovered special properties? See also: A fungus that eats polyurethane (Yale Magazine).]

***

AI Overview:

Q. How long does it take Pestalotiopsis microspora to eat plastic?

Pestalotiopsis microspora can degrade plastic in a matter of weeks to months, with experiments showing significant degradation in as little as two weeks and over 60% breakdown in six weeks under ideal conditions. The specific timeframe varies, with some sources noting a few months for complete digestion in certain projects.

Marc Lester, Anchorage, Alaska
via: Anchorage Daily News

Do Coconuts Go With Oysters? For Saving the Delaware Shore, Yes.

For the past 50 years, Gary Berti has watched as a stretch of Delaware’s coastline slowly disappeared. Rising tides stripped the shoreline, leaving behind mud and a few tree stumps.

“Year after year, it gradually went from wild to deteriorated,” said Mr. Berti, whose parents moved to Angola by the Bay, a private community in Lewes, Del., in 1977, where he now lives with his wife, Debbie.

But in 2023, an extensive restoration effort converted a half-mile of shoreline from barren to verdant. A perimeter of logs and rolls of coconut husk held new sand in place. Lush beds of spartina, commonly known as cordgrass, grew, inviting wading birds and blue crabs.

Together, these elements have created a living shoreline, a nature-based way of stabilizing the coast, to absorb energy from the waves and protect the land from washing away. 

Mr. Berti had never seen the waterfront like this before. “The change has just been spectacular,” he said.

Before

After

The practice of using natural materials to prevent erosion has been around for decades. But as sea levels rise and ever-intensifying storms pound coastlines, more places are building them.

The U.S. government counts at least 150 living shorelines nationwide, with East Coast states like Maryland, South Carolina and Florida remediating thousands of feet of tidal areas. Thanks to the efforts of the Delaware Living Shorelines Committee, a state-supported working group, Delaware has led the charge for years. (...)

“The living component is key,” said Alison Rogerson, an environmental scientist for the state’s natural resources department and chair of the living shoreline committee.

The natural materials, she said, provide a permeable buffer. As waves pass through, they leave the mud and sand they were carrying on the side of the barrier closer to the shore. This sediment builds up over time, creating a stable surface for plants. As the plants grow, their roots reinforce the barrier by holding everything in place. The goal is not necessarily return the land to how it was before, but to create new, stronger habitat.

More traditional rigid structures, like concrete sea walls, steel bulkheads and piles of stone known as riprap, can provide instant protection but inevitably get weaker over time. Bulkheads can also backfire by eroding at the base or trapping floodwaters from storms. And because hardened structures are designed to deflect energy, not absorb it, they can actually worsen erosion in nearby areas.

Though living shorelines need initial care while they start to grow, scientists have found they can outperform rigid structures in storms and can repair themselves naturally. And as sea levels rise, living shorelines naturally inch inland with the coastline, providing continuous protection, whereas sea walls have to be rebuilt.

When the engineers leave after creating a gray rigid structure, like a sea wall, “that’s the strongest that structure is ever going to be, and at some point, it will fail,” said David Burdick, an associate professor of coastal ecology at the University of New Hampshire. “When we install living shorelines, it’s the weakest it’s going to be. And it will get stronger over time.”

And just as coastal areas come in all shapes and sizes, so do living shorelines. In other places that the committee has supported projects, like Angola by the Bay and the Delaware Botanical Garden, brackish water meant that oysters wouldn’t grow. Instead, the private community opted for large timber logs while the botanical garden built a unique crisscross fence from dead tree branches found on site. (...)

Sometimes, an area’s waves and wind are too powerful for a living shoreline to survive on its own, Mr. Janiec said. In these situations, a hybrid approach that combines hard structures can create a protected zone for plants and oysters to grow. And these don’t need to be traditional sea walls or riprap. Scientists can also use concrete reef structures and oyster castles to break up waves while allowing wildlife to thrive.

Gregg Moore, an associate professor of coastal restoration at the University of New Hampshire, said homeowners often choose rigid structures because they don’t act on erosion until the situation is urgent. When it comes to a person’s home, “you can’t blame somebody for wanting to put whatever they think is the fastest, most permanent solution possible,” he said. (...)

“Living shorelines are easier than people think, but they take a little time,” Mrs. Allread said. “You have to trust the process. Nature can do its own thing if you let it.”

by Sachi Kitajima Mulkey, NY Times |  Read more:

Images: Erin Schaff

[ed. Streambank and coastal restoration/rehabilitation using bioengineering techniques has been standard practice in Alaska for decades (in fact, my former gf wrote the book on it - literally). I myself received a grant to rehabilitate 12 state park public use sites on the Kenai River (see here and here) that were heavily damaged and eroding from constant foot traffic and boat wakes. Won a National Coastal America Award for innovation. As noted here, most people want a quick fix, but this is a better, long-term solution.]

Scientists Unlock Secret to Venus Flytrap’s Hair-Trigger Response

To trap its prey, the Venus flytrap sends rapid electrical impulses, which are generated in response to touch or stress. But the molecular identity of the touch sensor has remained unclear. Japanese scientists have identified the molecular mechanism that triggers that response and have published their work in a new paper in the journal Nature Communications.

As previously reported, the Venus flytrap attracts its prey with a pleasing fruity scent. When an insect lands on a leaf, it stimulates the highly sensitive trigger hairs that line the leaf. When the pressure becomes strong enough to bend those hairs, the plant will snap its leaves shut and trap the insect inside. Long cilia grab and hold the insect in place, much like fingers, as the plant begins to secrete digestive juices. The insect is digested slowly over five to 12 days, after which the trap reopens, releasing the dried-out husk of the insect into the wind.

In 2016, Rainer Hedrich, a biophysicist at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany, led the team that discovered that the Venus flytrap could actually "count" the number of times something touches its hair-lined leaves—an ability that helps the plant distinguish between the presence of prey and a small nut or stone, or even a dead insect. The plant detects the first "action potential" but doesn't snap shut right away, waiting until a second zap confirms the presence of actual prey, at which point the trap closes. But the Venus flytrap doesn't close all the way and produce digestive enzymes to consume the prey until the hairs are triggered three more times (for a total of five stimuli).

And in 2023, scientists developed a bioelectronic device to better understand the Venus flytrap's complex signaling mechanism by mapping how those signals propagate. They confirmed that the electrical signal starts in the plant's sensory hairs and then spreads radially outward with no clear preferred direction. And sometimes the signals were spontaneous, originating in sensory hairs that had not been stimulated.

Glowing green

This latest research is an outgrowth of a 2020 paper detailing how the Japanese authors genetically altered a Venus flytrap to gain important clues about how the plant's short-term "memory" works. They introduced a gene for a calcium sensor protein called GCaMP6, which glows green whenever it binds to calcium. That green fluorescence allowed the team to visually track the changes in calcium concentrations in response to stimulating the plant's sensitive hairs with a needle. They concluded that the waxing and waning of calcium concentrations in the leaf cells seem to serve as a kind of short-term memory for the Venus flytrap, though precisely how calcium concentrations work with the plant's electrical network remained unclear.

by Jennifer Ouellette, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Naturfoto Honal|Getty

No Public Comment Allowed

No public comment or hearings on environmental review of oil leasing in Alaska’s Cook Inlet. The U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management is cutting out a public comment process, citing a Trump administration policy aimed at ‘streamlining’ development.

Federal regulators will accept no public comments on a pending environmental study of oil leasing in Alaska’s Cook Inlet, a U.S. Department of the Interior agency announced through a Federal Register notice published Thursday.

There will be no public comment period and no public hearing on a draft supplemental environmental impact statement for a Cook Inlet lease sale that was held in 2022 but found to be legally flawed, said U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which manages oil and gas development in federal offshore areas.

The rejection of public comments is in accordance with Trump administration changes to the National Environmental Policy Act, the 55-year-old law that guides federal decisions about activities that may have environmental impacts. The changes are aimed at speeding up environmental reviews and developing infrastructure projects.

BOEM is following the administration’s updated NEPA regulations and a new department handbook on the law, which went into effect on July 3, said Elizabeth Pearce, a U.S. Department of the Interior senior public affairs specialist.

“This Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement is narrowly focused on addressing the court’s concerns, without a separate public-comment round – streamlining what is typically a protracted, multi-year process down to a few months.” Pearce said by email on Thursday.

Although no public comments will be accepted, the public will be able to read the new environmental impact statement when it is finished, Pearce added. “The completed Supplemental EIS will be posted online so Alaskans and other stakeholders can see exactly how we addressed the court’s limited concerns,” she said. [ed. How nice. God forbid the government would want us to know what it's doing.]

The Cook Inlet environmental study stems from a federal lease sale that was held on Dec. 30, 2022. It drew only one bid. (...)

BOEM’s announcement about the lack of public comment opportunities was blasted by environmental plaintiffs in the case.

“BOEM’s decision to exclude the public from its supplemental environmental statement is unacceptable. Public participation is not a box to check — it is the heart of NEPA,” Loren Barrett, co-executive director the water conservation non-profit Cook Inletkeeper, said in an emailed statement. (...)

“This secrecy around exploiting public waters for fossil fuels is completely unacceptable. It would only take one oil spill to devastate Cook Inlet and its beluga whales, which is why the law requires transparency for these dangerous sales,” Monsell said in a statement. 

by Yereth Rosen, Alaska Beacon |  Read more:

Image: Yereth Rosen

[ed. This is what I did (among other things) during my career. Never in my 30+ years overseeing oil and gas leasing in Alaska was the public ever excluded from commenting on lease sales or any other major federal action. Presumably this recent edict applies to the State of Alaska, as well. It isn't legal, but it's not surprising either. What happened to state's rights?]

Decades of Public-Lands Planning, Overturned in a Day

On the sagebrush plains of eastern Montana, cattle graze alongside mule deer, and pumpjacks rise from coal seams. For nearly a decade, the future of this landscape was hammered out in the Miles City Resource Management Plan, a compromise shaped by ranchers, tribes, hunters, energy companies and conservationists. Now, with one vote in Washington, Congress has thrown that bargain into doubt, and with it, decades of public-lands decisions across the West.

Finalized in November 2024 after years of debate and litigation, the Miles City plan is one of the nation’s largest, governing 12 million acres of BLM land and 55 million acres of federal mineral estate across eastern Montana.

But on Sept. 3, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to overturn three Bureau of Land Management plans, including Miles City, under the Congressional Review Act, the first time the law has ever been applied to land-use planning. Legal experts and conservation groups warn that the consequences could be far-reaching, enabling Congress to unravel decades of environmental protections and management decisions on public lands.

Resource management plans serve as guidelines for how the BLM manages the public lands it oversees. The plans are developed through a lengthy process that combines local and tribal input with environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act. The goal is to create a blueprint for “multiple use” management, balancing economic activities such as grazing and oil and gas development with other concerns, including wildlife habitat, outdoor recreation and conservation.

In Montana, the disappearance of that blueprint will have immediate consequences. Ranchers face uncertainty on how many cattle they can run, when their permits will be renewed, and what will happen during a serious drought. Tribal cultural sites are likely to be left unprotected and years of tribal consultation overridden. Conservation groups warn that congressional vetoes could sideline science-based safeguards for vulnerable habitats. In Miles City, the resource management plan would have reformed coal seam leases near the Powder River Basin; without those reforms, habitat for elk, mule deer, sharp-tailed grouse and pheasants could be fragmented by new energy development.

The Miles City plan drew input from ranchers, tribes, energy companies, hunters, outdoor recreation groups and conservation groups, and its supporters argue that undoing it sets a dangerous precedent.

“It’s disregarding all the conversations that have happened on the ground,” said Land Tawney of American Hunters and Anglers. “That balance sometimes isn’t perfect for anybody, but it’s a path forward for all.” (...)

The 1996 Congressional Review Act allows Congress to overturn agency rules within a 60-day window using only a simple majority, bypassing the filibuster. This is the first time resource management plans have ever been treated as “rules.”

“That’s why we’re at an inflection point,” said Chris Winter, director of the Getches-Wilkinson Center at the University of Colorado Law School. (Disclosure: Winter serves on High Country News’ board of directors.) Resource management plans, he said, have never been submitted to Congress for review. “Applying it now could unravel decades of land-use planning practice,” he said.

The CRA was employed only once before 2017, but the first Trump administration dramatically expanded its use. If this resolution stands, it would subject all RMPs to possible congressional approval, throwing every element of the planning process into doubt. According to Michael Blumm, a professor at Lewis & Clark Law School, this reinterpretation “calls into question the legitimacy” of the more than 100 plans finalized since the Congressional Review Act became law.

by Zoë Rom, High Country News | Read more:
Image: Luna Anna Archey

[ed. See also: Trump looks to suffocate public lands; and, How to comment on the planned roadless rule rollback (HCN).]

Hawaiʻi Loves ‘Genki Balls’. New Studies Say They Don’t Work

A new two-year research project found the balls not only were ineffective, they might make water quality worse. Supporters of the effort don’t believe it.

In the past six years, several thousand elementary school students and other volunteers have tossed over a quarter million tennis ball-sized globs of soil, molasses and rice bran into the Ala Wai Canal in a valiant effort to help clean Hawaiʻi’s most notoriously polluted urban waterway.

The goal is to get those globs, known as “genki balls,” to release special sludge-eating microbes into the Waikīkī canal’s murky depths and boost its water quality. Since the effort started, canoe paddlers and others have at times observed clearer water and more fish. They’ve even spotted the occasional monk seal and an eagle ray.

But new research from Hawaiʻi Pacific University done on Oʻahu’s Windward side casts doubt on whether the genki balls actually led to any of that improvement — or if the novel approach that inspired the community is too good to be true. (...)

The balls, according to HPU Associate Professor Olivia Nigro and Assistant Professor Carmella Vizza, did nothing to improve water quality in the marsh canal. And in the aquarium tanks, the microbes the balls were supposed to release failed to appear in any meaningful way, the researchers said, plus the water quality actually got worse.

Specifically, phosphate levels were almost 20 times higher in the tanks with the balls than in tanks without them, Vizza said, and oxygen levels in the tanks with the balls fell by about 50%.

The nonprofit that organizes those cleanups, Genki Ala Wai Ball Project, is firmly pushing back against the research, saying insufficient genki material was used and its ball tosses into the Ala Wai remain effective. Yet one of the project’s leaders sold the balls used in the HPU study and recommended how the researchers should use them.

The HPU ecologists who completed the study don’t want to dampen any of the community enthusiasm. But far more rigorous study of the Ala Wai is needed, they say, to know exactly how the genki balls are impacting water quality there, if at all. (...)

If We Do This, We Can Do Anything

The Ala Wai, a 1.5-mile canal that developers carved across Waikīkī in the 1920s to sell real estate, has long been a stark symbol of how much urban runoff is affecting Hawaiʻi’s fragile watersheds. (...)

It now bears the brunt of storm debris from Hawaiʻi’s densest and most heavily populated watershed, in the heart of Honolulu. For decades, state officials have prohibited anyone from fishing or swimming in its waters.

In one high-profile 2006 incident, an Oʻahu man who fell in the Ala Wai died of “massive bacterial infection” following weeks of heavy rain across the state. Canoe clubs and high school teams regularly paddle up and down the canal and do their best not to huli, or flip over, into its murky waters.

... the Genki Ball Ala Wai Project launched with a goal of making the canal safe for swimming and fishing within seven years by deploying 300,000 balls. Genki translates to “health” or “energy” in English.

The key ingredient baked into every dry, cured ball tossed in the water is a trademarked substance called “EM,” short for “effective microorganisms.”

It was pioneered in the early 1980s by a horticulture professor in Okinawa, Japan, who combined naturally occurring yeasts and bacteria to help boost farm crop yields. Since then, people also found that they could take it to improve digestion and gut health.

by Marcel Honoré, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Images: David Croxford

[ed. Ouch.]

Can This Tree Still Save Us?

ʻUlu, bia, uru, mā: Breadfruit has been lauded as a climate-resilient solution to world food security. That’s not proving true in the Marshall Islands, where some have relied on it for centuries.

A breadfruit tree stands in the middle of Randon Jother’s property, its lanky trunks feeding a network of sinewy limbs. The remnants of this season’s harvest weigh heavy on its branches. Its vibrant leaves and football-sized fruit may appear enormous to the untrained eye, but Jother is concerned.

They used to be longer than his hand and forearm combined. He points to his bicep, to show how fat they once were. Now they’re small and malformed by most people’s standards here in the Marshall Islands. Mā, the Marshallese term for breadfruit, used to ripen in May. Now they come in June, sometimes July.

 

It’s been headed this way for the past seven years, Jother says as he toes the tree’s abundant leaf litter. It’s a concerning development on this uniquely agricultural and fertile part of Majuro Atoll, home to the country’s highest point: eight feet above sea level.

“I think it’s the salt,” Jother says. His home is less than 100 yards from Majuro lagoon, a body of seawater that threatens to overflow onto the land during a storm or king tide, which over the past decade years has happened several times in Majuro and across the islands. The Pacific Ocean also threatens to salt the island’s ever precious groundwater, which Jother says is already happening. When he showers, he can feel it in his hair, on his skin.

The record heat waves, massive droughts and an increasing number of unpredicted and intense weather events don’t help his trees either.

Most assume the assailant is climate change, to which researchers and experts have said the Indigenous Pacific crop would be almost immune — a potential salve for the world’s imperiled food system. For places like Hawaiʻi, they have predicted breadfruit growing conditions may even get better.

But here, on Majuro and throughout the Marshall Islands, the future appears bleak for a crop that has helped sustain populations for more than 2,000 years.

 

Rice has overtaken the fruit’s status as the preferred staple over the past century, along with other ultraprocessed imports, a change that feeds myriad health complications, including outsized rates of diabetes, making non-communicable diseases the leading cause of death across these islands.

The diseases are a Pacific-wide issue, one Marshall Islands health and agriculture officials are eager to counter with a return to a traditional diet. Climate change is working against them. (...)

Mā is part of an important trinity for the Marshall Islands, which also includes coconut (ni) and pandanus (bōb), that made their way to the islands’ shores on Micronesian seafarers’ boats somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 years ago.

Six varieties are most common in the Marshall Islands, though at least 20 are found throughout the islands. Hundreds more breadfruit types can be found in the Pacific, tracing back to the breadnut, a tree endemic to the southwestern Pacific island of New Guinea.

The tree provided security for island populations, requiring little upkeep to offer abundant harvests. Each tree produces anywhere from 350 to 1,100 pounds of breadfruit a year, with two harvest seasons. Every tree produces half a million calories in protein and carbohydrates.

 

Like many Pacific island countries, the mā tree’s historic uses were diverse. Its coarse leaves sanded and smoothed vessels made with the tree’s buoyant wood. Its roots were part of traditional medicine. The fruit was cooked underground and roasted black over coals. And it was preserved, to make bwiro, a tradition that survives through people like Angelina Mathusla.

For Mathusla, who lives just over a mile from farmer Jother, making bwiro is a process that comes with every harvest.

The process begins with a pile of petaaktak, a variety of breadfruit common around Majuro and valued for its size and lack of seeds. On this occasion, a relative rhythmically cleaves the football-sized mā in half with a machete, then into smaller pieces, before tossing them into a pile next to a group of women. Some wear gloves to avoid the sticky white latex that seeps from the fruit’s dense, white flesh, used by their forebears to seal canoes or catch birds.

Mā trees use that latex to help heal or protect themselves against diseases and insects. The tree’s adaptation to the atolls and their soils has traditionally been partly thanks to symbiotic relationships with other flora. (...)

A Shallow Body Of Research

Four framed photographs hang on a whitewashed wall of Diane Ragone’s Kauaʻi home. Two black-and-white photos, taken by her late videographer husband, show Jimi Hendrix and Jerry Garcia playing guitar on stage. The other two are of breadfruit.

Now in the throes of writing a memoir, of sorts, Ragone is revisiting almost 40 years of records — photos and videos, and journal entries, some of which leave her asking “Damn, why was I so cryptic?”

But Ragone’s research, since her arrival to Hawaiʻi from Virginia in 1979, forms the bedrock of most modern research into the tree’s history and its survival throughout the Pacific. The most obvious example spans 10 acres in Hāna, on Maui, where more than 150 cultivars of the fruit Ragone collected thrive at the National Tropical Botanical Garden’s Kahanu Garden.

Less obvious is how her work has helped researchers like Noa Kekuewa Lincoln track the plant’s place in global history and the environment. Lincoln, who says “Diane’s kind of considered the Queen of Breadfruit,” has been central to more recent research into how the plant will survive in the future.

Together with others, they act as breadfruit evangelists, promoting the crop as a poverty panacea and global warming warrior — a touchstone for Pacific islanders not only to their past but a more sustainable future.

Ragone, as the founding director of the 22-year-old Breadfruit Institute, helped distribute more than 100,000 trees around the world, to equatorial nations with poverty issues and suitable climes, like Liberia, Zambia and Haiti. But it all started in Hawaiʻi with just over 10,000 young breadfruit.

 

In some places, rising temperatures and changes in rainfall will actually help breadfruit, according to research from Lincoln and his Indigenous Cropping Systems Laboratory, which assessed the trees’ performance under different climate change projections through 2070.

Running climate change scenarios on 1,200 trees across 56 sites in Hawaiʻi, Lincoln’s lab found breadfruit production would largely remain the same for the next 45 years.

“Nowhere in Hawaiʻi gets too hot for it,” Lincoln says. “Pretty much as soon as you leave the coast, you start getting declining yields because it’s too cold.”

Compare breadfruit to other traditional staples — rice, wheat, soybeans, corn. The plant grows deep roots and lives for decades, requires little upkeep or annual planting, resists most environmental stressors and can withstand high temperatures.

Few nations know the urgency of climate change better than the Marshall Islands, its islands and atolls a bellwether for how heat, drought, intense and sporadic natural disasters and sea level rise can upend lives.

The trees can even survive some saltwater intrusion, according to Lincoln’s research. But a consistent presence of salt is another matter, attacking the roots and making trees unable to absorb freshwater and nutrients. As roots rot, leaves and fruit die.

“The salinity,” Ragone says, before letting out a sigh. “How do you even address the salinity issue?”.

Marshall Islands government officials have turned to the International Atomic Energy Association for help, asking its experts about using nuclear radiation to create mutant hybrids of the nation’s most important crops — giant swamp taro, sweet potatoes and, of course, breadfruit.

The technique has been used for almost a century by the atomic association and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, predominantly on rice and barley, never on breadfruit or for a Pacific nation.

They have their work cut out for them. To find a viable candidate, immune to salty soils and heat, about 2,000 plants would need to be irradiated, according to Cinthya Zorrilla of the atomic energy association’s Centre of Nuclear Techniques in Food and Agriculture. One of those plants, once mutated, might exhibit the desired traits. (...)

Even if those obstacles were overcome, it wouldn’t be a quick fix. Hybridizing plants through radiation can take about 10 years, Zorrilla says, with a need to compare, contrast and correlate results from labs and field plots and laboratories. For breadfruit, the timeframe may be even longer.

“It’s really complicated,” Zorilla says. “All this is a huge investment, in monetary terms and also in time.”

by Thomas Heaton, Honolulu Civil Beat |  Read more:

Images: Thomas Heaton/Chewy Lin

Warming Seas Threaten Key Phytoplankton Species

For decades, scientists believed Prochlorococcus, the smallest and most abundant phytoplankton on Earth, would thrive in a warmer world. But new research suggests the microscopic bacterium, which forms the foundation of the marine food web and helps regulate the planet’s climate, will decline sharply as seas heat up.

A study published Monday in the journal Nature Microbiology found Prochlorococcus populations could shrink by as much as half in tropical oceans over the next 75 years if surface waters exceed about 82 degrees Fahrenheit (27.8 Celsius). Many tropical and subtropical sea surface temperatures are already trending above average and are projected to regularly surpass 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 Celsius) over that same period.

“These are keystone species — very important ones,” said François Ribalet, a research associate professor at the University of Washington’s School of Oceanography and the study’s lead author. “And when a keystone species decreases in abundance, it always has consequences on ecology and biodiversity. The food web is going to change.”

These tiny organisms hold a vital role in ocean life

Prochlorococcus inhabit up to 75% of Earth’s sunlit surface waters and produce about one-fifth of the planet’s oxygen through photosynthesis. More crucially, Ribalet said, they convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into food at the base of the marine ecosystem.

“In the tropical ocean, nearly half of the food is produced by Prochlorococcus,” he said. “Hundreds of species rely on these guys.”

Though other forms of phytoplankton may move in and help compensate for the loss of oxygen and food, Ribalet cautioned they are not perfect substitutes. “Evolution has made this very specific interaction,” he said. “Obviously, this is going to have an impact on this very unique system that has been established.”

The findings challenge decades of assumptions that Prochlorococcus would thrive as waters warmed. Those predictions, however, were based on limited data from lab cultures. For this study, Ribalet and his team tested water samples while traversing the Pacific over the course of a decade.

Over 100 research cruises — the equivalent of six trips around the globe — they counted some 800 billion individual cells taken from samples at every kilometer. In his lab at the University of Washington, Ribalet demonstrated the SeaFlow, a box filled with tubes, wires and a piercing blue laser. The custom-built device continuously pulls in seawater, which allowed the team to count the microbes in real time. “We have counted more Prochlorococcus than there are stars in the Milky Way,” Ribalet said.

Experts warn of ‘big consequences’

Paul Berube, a research scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies Prochlorococcus but was not involved in the work, said the breadth of data is “groundbreaking.” And he said the results fit with what is known about the microbe’s streamlined genome, which makes it less adaptable to rapid environmental changes.

“They’re at the very base of the food web, and they feed everything else — the fish eat the things that eat the phytoplankton and we eat the fish,” he said. “When changes are being made to the planet that influence these particular organisms that are essentially feeding us, that’s going to have big consequences.”

To test whether Prochlorococcus might evolve to withstand hotter conditions, Ribalet’s team modeled a hypothetical heat-tolerant strain but found that even those would “not be enough to fully resist the warmest temperature if greenhouse emissions keep rising,” Ribalet said.

He stressed that the study’s projections are conservative and don’t account for the impacts of plastic pollution or other ecological stressors. “We actually tried to put forth the best-case scenario,” Ribalet said. “In reality, things may be worse.”

by Annika Hammerschlag, Seattle Times | Read more:
Image: Annika Hammerschlag
[ed. Probably fake news. Better to believe an old bitter pedophile scammer.... nothing to see here, move along. See also: We Are Watching a Scientific Superpower Destroy Itself (NYT):]

***

According to the latest annual Nature Index, which tracks research institutions by their contributions to leading science journals, the single remaining U.S. institution among the top 10 is Harvard, in second place, far behind the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The others are:

• The University of Science and Technology of China

• Zhejiang University

• Peking University

• The University of Chinese Academy of Sciences

• Tsinghua University

• Nanjing University

• Germany’s Max Planck Society

• Shanghai Jiao Tong University

A decade ago, C.A.S. was the only Chinese institution to figure in the top 10. Now eight of the 10 leaders are in China. If this does not constitute a Sputnik moment, it is hard to imagine what would.

But if America’s response to Sputnik reflected a nation united in its commitment to science and determined to invest in the country’s intellectual potential, we see in our response to China today a bitterly divided, disoriented America. We are currently governed by a leader indifferent to scientific consensus if it contradicts his political or economic interests, hostile to immigrants and intent on crippling the research universities that embody our collective hope for the future. The menace now is within. And with very few exceptions, the leaders of American universities have done little more than duck and cover.

Roadside Attractions

Man walking his dinosaur, Murdo, South Dakota. June 2018

via:

Human Exceptionalism

A terrific new book, The Arrogant Ape, by the primatologist Christine Webb, will be out in early September, and I don’t think a nonfiction book has affected me more, or taught me more, in a long time. It’s about human exceptionalism and what’s wrong with it.

It also has illuminating things to say about awe, humility, and the difference between optimism and hope. (...)

Here’s my review:

Here are some glimpses from the review:

***

Christine Webb, a primatologist at New York University, is focused on “the human superiority complex,” the idea that human beings are just better and more deserving than are members of other species, and on the extent to which human beings take themselves as the baseline against which all living creatures are measured. As Hamlet exclaimed: “What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason!… The paragon of animals!” In Webb’s view, human exceptionalism is all around us, and it damages science, the natural environment, democratic choices, and ordinary (human) life. People believe in human superiority even though we are hardly the biggest, the fastest, or the strongest. Eagles see a lot better than we do. Sea sponges live much longer. Dolphins are really good at echolocation; people are generally really bad at it. And yet we keep proclaiming how special we are. As Webb puts it, “Hamlet got one thing right: we’re a piece of work.” [. . .]

I have two Labrador Retrievers, Snow and Finley, and on most days, I take them for a walk on a local trail. Every time, it is immediately apparent that they are perceiving and sensing things that are imperceptible to me. They hear things that I don’t; they pause to smell things that I cannot. Their world is not my world. Webb offers a host of more vivid examples, and they seem miraculous, the stuff of science fiction.

For example, hummingbirds can see colors that human beings are not even able to imagine. Elephants have an astonishing sense of smell, which enables them to detect sources of water from miles away. Owls can hear the heartbeat of a mouse from a distance of 25 feet. Because of echolocation, dolphins perceive sound in three dimensions. They know what is on the inside of proximate objects; as they swim toward you, they might be able to sense your internal organs. Pronghorn antelopes can run a marathon in 40 minutes, and their vision is far better than ours. On a clear night, Webb notes, they might be able to see the rings of Saturn. We all know that there are five senses, but it’s more accurate to say that there are five human senses. Sharks can sense electric currents. Sea turtles can perceive the earth’s magnetic field, which helps them to navigate tremendous distances. Some snakes, like pythons, are able to sense thermal radiation. Scientists can give many more examples, and there’s much that they don’t yet know.

Webb marshals these and other findings to show that when we assess other animals, we use human beings as the baseline. Consider the question of self-awareness. Using visual tests, scientists find that human children can recognize themselves in a mirror by the age of three—and that almost no other species can do that. But does that really mean that human beings are uniquely capable of recognizing themselves? It turns out that dogs, who rely more on smell than sight, can indeed recognize themselves, if we test by reference to odor; they can distinguish between their own odor and that of other dogs. (Can you do that?) In this sense, dogs too show self-awareness. Webb argues that the human yardstick is pervasively used to assess the abilities of nonhuman animals. That is biased, she writes, “because each species fulfills a different cognitive niche. There are multiple intelligences!”

Webb contends that many of our tests of the abilities of nonhuman animals are skewed for another reason: We study them under highly artificial conditions, in which they are often miserable, stressed, and suffering. Try caging human beings and seeing how well they perform on cognitive tests. As she puts it, “A laboratory environment can rarely (if ever) adequately simulate the natural circumstances of wild animals in an ecologically meaningful way.” Suppose, for example, that we are investigating “prosociality”—the question of whether nonhuman animals will share food or cooperate with one another. In the laboratory, captive chimpanzees do not appear to do that. But in the wild, chimpanzees behave differently: They share meat and other food (including nuts and honey), and they also share tools. During hunting, chimpanzees are especially willing to cooperate. In natural environments, the differences between human beings and apes are not nearly so stark. Nor is the point limited to apes. Cows, pigs, goats, and even salmon are a lot smarter and happier in the wild than in captive environments. (...)

It would be possible to read Webb as demonstrating that nonhuman animals are a lot more like us than we think. But that is not at all her intention. On the contrary, she rejects the argument, identified and also rejected by the philosopher Martha Nussbaum, that the nonhumans animals who are most like us deserve the most protection, what Nussbaum calls the “so like us” approach. (This is also part of the title of an old documentary about Jane Goodall’s work.) Webb sees that argument as a well-meaning but objectionable form of human exceptionalism. Why should it matter that they are like us? Why is that necessary? With Nussbaum, Webb insists that species are “wonderfully different,” and that it is wrong to try to line them up along a unitary scale and to ask how they rank. Use of the human yardstick, embodied in the claim of “so like us,” is a form of blindness that prevents us from seeing the sheer variety of life’s capacities, including cognitive ones. As Nussbaum writes, “Anthropocentrism is a phony sort of arrogance.”

by Cass Sunstein, Cass's Substack |  Read more:

Image: Thai Elephant Conservation Center

[ed. See also: this.]

Morning golf 

Image: markk

36,000 feet above Sahara Desert

via:

90% of Frozen Raspberries Grown in the U.S. Come From This WA Town

LYNDEN, Whatcom County — Even if you’ve never been to Lynden, there’s a good chance you’ve eaten the raspberries grown here. They’re just not the ones you find in the plastic clamshell in the produce section.

Labeled generically as “U.S.-grown raspberries,” you’ll find them all over the grocery store: in the frozen triple berry blend and the raspberry lemon muffins at Costco. In Tillamook’s Washington raspberry yogurt, Smuckers’ raspberry jam and Rubicon’s vegan raspberry cupcakes. Raspberry Uncrustables, raspberry crumbles in the smoothies at Jamba Juice … you get the point.

Farms in Lynden — a town of roughly 16,000 people about 5 miles south of the Canadian border — grow 90% of the frozen red raspberries that are grown and harvested in the United States each year. Since 2015, these berries have generated more than $1 billion in sales, according to the Washington Red Raspberry Commission.

From June to early August every summer, across 54 farms, roughly 50 million pounds of red raspberries are mechanically harvested and processed in Lynden. Most berries get flash-frozen whole in tunnels, minutes from where they’re picked, and packaged into familiar foods like the ones above. You’ve probably got a few in your house right now. (...)

The process is fascinating. The only wrinkle? Raspberries — although delicious, and even when they get flash-frozen right away — are a pain to grow.

“They’re finicky,” said Markwell Farms owner Mark Van Mersbergen, running his hands over a deep-green raspberry cane last month, halfway through the picking season. “They have to have it their way, and if they get a curveball thrown at them, it’s tough to adjust.”

by Jackie Varriano, Seattle Times | Read more:
Images: Nick Wagner/Esri (Mark Nowlin)/The Seattle Times

[ed. 90%!]

Arctic Beavers

Beavers are poised to invade and radically remake the Arctic.

In the summer of 2023, University of Alaska Fairbanks ecologist Ken Tape walked across the tundra on the outskirts of Nome, Alaska, to a site where a shallow stream just a few meters wide had flowed 2 years before. In its place he found an enormous pond, created by a dam made of branches bearing the distinctive marks of beaver incisors.

It was a vivid illustration of how beavers are transforming the Arctic. In Tape’s past work studying Arctic landscapes, such places changed little over decades. “It gives you a sense of timelessness,” he says. “With beavers, that couldn’t be further from the truth,” as the chunky rodents quickly replumb vast areas by building dams that can stretch hundreds of meters.

Soon, the land-altering power of beavers could be felt in a region currently beyond their reach: the farthest northern parts of the Alaskan Arctic. In a 30 July paper in Environmental Research Letters, Tape and James Speed of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology forecast that as a warming climate eases Arctic temperatures, beaver populations will march northward, sweeping across Alaska’s North Slope this century. Their arrival could bring dramatic change, the researchers say, upending ecosystems in places such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and accelerating the loss of permafrost that stores vast amounts of carbon. (...)

Tape has spent the past decade documenting this upheaval in parts of the Alaskan Arctic farther south and west, including the Seward Peninsula, where Nome is located. When he and colleagues scrutinized aerial photos of the region from the middle of the 20th century, they found no sign of the distinctive ponds beavers create to protect their mound-shaped lodges, accessible only underwater, and to cache branches for food in winter.

Today, satellite images show more than 11,000 beaver ponds dotting the Arctic tundra south of the Brooks Range, a wall of mountains running east to west that isolates the North Slope. The number there doubled from 2003 to 2017. (...)

Tape suspects warmer weather is critical because it means more unfrozen water in winter. A completely frozen pond can trap beavers in their lodges and make food caches inaccessible. Milder winters could preserve pockets of liquid water around springs or ponds. Melting permafrost also creates more groundwater-fed springs. And earlier spring thaws enable beavers to forage just as their food supplies dwindle.

“The ecological bottleneck for beavers is the end of winter,” Tape says. “Now imagine that comes 2 weeks earlier.”

Using computer models that forecast how a warming climate could expand the amount of Alaskan tundra suitable for beavers, the researchers found that the area dotted with ponds could nearly double by 2050, and more than triple by the end of the century, from 30,000 square kilometers to 99,000 square kilometers. In these scenarios, beavers would breach the Brooks Range and spread across the North Slope to the shores of the Beaufort Sea. (...)

This isn’t the first time beavers have occupied the Arctic, notes Emily Fairfax, an ecohydrologist at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. There is fossil evidence of beavers in the Alaskan Arctic—though none has been found in the North Slope—dating to between 6000 and 10,000 years ago, when temperatures there were warmer and the landscape more forested. In fact, it’s thought that beavers might have evolved to build dams and cache food to adapt to one of the Arctic’s cooling phases millions of years ago. Still, Fairfax says the forecast that sensitive North Slope ecosystems “will probably be full of beavers is probably going to cause a lot of strong reactions.”

Residents of the Arctic have mixed feelings about their new neighbors. Ezra Adams, a member of the Native Village of Noatak, just south of the Brooks Range, says his father first saw a beaver there in the late 1990s, when Adams was 6 years old. Now, the animals have altered his family’s way of life. Their dams have reduced creeks where Adams once caught whitefish and salmon to a trickle. When out trapping or gathering firewood in the winter, he must beware of breaking through the ice on beaver ponds. Whereas his father once drank straight from lakes in the backcountry, Adams now brings treated water to avoid giardia in beaver feces. There are some upsides. Adams uses beaver meat to bait traps and beaver pelts for garments. “They provide a lot for our trapping,” Adams says. “But then for the general population it would be beneficial if there weren’t as many.”

Researchers, too, see both risks and benefits in beaver expansion. New ponds could become hot spots for songbirds and other wildlife. But they also hasten the thaw of permafrost, promoting the release of planetwarming carbon dioxide. A soon-to-be-published survey of 11 beaver pond systems in Arctic Alaska, for example, found that the water-covered area increased more than 600% once beavers arrived. Nearby ground thawed so much that researchers could plunge 1.2-meter-long rods used to test permafrost all the way to the tip.

Ponds could also create ample new habitat for microorganisms that convert carbon to methane, an even more potent warming gas, Griffin notes. “If we are going to start having expansion of wetlands because of beaver dams, how is that going to tip the balance between carbon and methane?” he wonders.

He might soon find out. Tape has already stumbled on one beaver pond on the northern slope of the Brooks Range. Although it disappeared a few years later, the pond showed beavers can cross the mountains. To spread even farther north, Tape notes, “they just have to swim downstream.”

by Warren Cornwall, Science |  Read more:

Image: Ken Tape