Draft Surat Underground Water Impact Report - part 3: Bubbling gas issues

In the last couple of days, the Lock the Gate Alliance which represents a coalition of landholders opposed to coal seam gas in the Surat Basin released a video called Condamine River Gas Leak. It shows footage from an organisation called Gasileaks taken along the River at an “undisclosed location”. There was bubbling activity at the surface of the river and some kind of meter that went berserk when placed near the bubbles.

Frackman in Roma July 2010

The footage was filmed by local landholder Dayne Pratzsky who has been a long-term vocal critic of the industry. I remember Pratzsky as “frackman” for his wonderful attention-grabbing outfit he wore  when he heckled the State Government Community Cabinet in June 2010.  When we published the Lock the Gate footage on our Facebook page today (without comment),  a local man named Andrew Thomas pointed out this phenomenon was not uncommon in the gasfields region. “I grew up at a location near Orallo and all the bores would light up if you wanted them to - the gas comes out of most bore holes,” Andrew said. “It has been happening for well over 150 years around Roma and Surat and lots of other places - get a life and move on.”

It might be difficult for Pratzky and other blockies in the Lock the Gate Alliance to do exactly that. This is their life and they don’t want to move on. Yet I fear they – and others who want a moratorium of the industry – are placing themselves too far outside the conversation about how the industry should evolve. Origin Energy, the petroleum tenure holder in the location where Pretsky filmed (a fishing spot south west of Chinchilla known as the "coal hole") confirmed what Thomas told the Western Star on Facebook “According to local knowledge it goes back at least 30 years and naturally occurring gas has been a phenomenon in the Queensland Western Downs region for more than 100 years,” Origin said.

The public face of Lock the Gate Alliance is its media-savvy president Drew Hutton. He was the one who publicly announced  the Chinchilla leak.  Hutton, a prominent member of Queensland Greens, said he was unconvinced by Origin’s response and challenged them to prove it. Hutton said Origin should “release its seismic and other data...to establish whether or not the leak is linked to the company's coal seam gas operations.” Hutton said he consulted “several highly competent hydrogeologists” who told him there was a good chance the leaks were “linked to the de-watering of the coal seam aquifers and possibly fracking opening up pathways for the methane.” 

With neither Origin nor Hutton willing to offer their sources, it is difficult to know who is right. And water quality remains one of the great unknowns of this massive new industry. Yet this problem can be solved just as land access and now water depletion. The 2010 Queensland land access laws redressed the power imbalance between gas companies and landholders and the new Draft Surat Basin Underground Water Impact Report  which I reported about on Monday (Part 1) and Tuesday (part 2) deals with the water depletion issue. The report specifically ruled out a role for monitoring water quality. That prompted an anonymous respondent to my Tuesday piece to ask the legitimate question: if "It will not monitor water quality (eg for contamination from fracking)", who WILL monitor water quality?  

The answer to that question is the same as the answer to who will monitor water depletion: a mix of the Queensland Government Department of Natural Resources and Mining and the petroleum tenure holders themselves. Many in the Roma forum on the report I attended asked if this was not leaving the fox in the charge of the henhouse. The Queensland Water Commission’s response to that was to say, if they did something wrong, they’d be found out. There would be anomalies in the results that would stand out.

If this is correct then we need to maintain trust. Trust of the companies to do the right thing and trust of the regulator to pick up the anomalies if the companies don’t do the right thing. The gas majors all have the profit imperative but are bound by a number of strict rules and environment conditions they have to satisfy to get the green light for their enterprises. With the pressure to meet their export commitments once the gas comes online in 2014, those companies will need to ensure they are squeaky clean so the regulator does not have a reason to hold them up.

What does need to be looked at is the quick gobbling up of Australia’s natural resources.  According to mining critic Paul Cleary, Australia has the 12^th largest reserve of gas but is the world’s second largest exporter and heading towards number one. Gladstone Port in Queensland is the home of four of the eight big LNG plants and Incentives by the Bligh Government drove gas consumption for the local market. Now the high price of oil is driving this massive investment in coal seam methane for LNG. The problem is the price of natural gas on the New York-based Henry Hub has been declining for over a year and will mean the companies will have to reforecast earnings or else dig for more gas.  

With governments greedy for the royalties, knowing when that saturation point comes will be critical for the success of the industry and the regions they serve. As the Surat DWIR proves, having good legislation supported by science will be critical in keeping an even keel.

Surat Underground Water Impact Report - part 2

This is the second post on the subject of the Draft Surat Underground Water Impact Report now out for review after the Queensland Water Commission today took its finding to Roma yesterday and Chinchilla today. See yesterday’s post on the background to the report and the geological formations involved.

This post looks at how the model was derived and examines the monitoring regime put in place by the QWC.  There were three key steps in designing the flow model: conceptualisation, construction and calibration.  In the conceptualisation phase, the designers took into account geological data and formation contacts in databases held by the Geological Survey of Queensland and the Department of Natural Resources Groundwater Database.

They also took into account the distribution and depth of the geological layers of the Walloon Coal Measures based on previous studies and developed hydraulic parameter estimates based on pump and drill tests, existing models and reported results.

They devised 19 model layers based the formations from the shallowest (Condamine Alluvium) to the deepest (Permian Sediments) and mapped out the groundwater flow between the layers. The layers are recharged by rain in the outcrop areas on the edges of the Basin. The model is further complicated by the Walloon Coal Measures (the main CSG bearing formation in the Surat Basin) which itself contains various layers of sediment of varying permeability. The model allocates three layers to the Walloon for simplicity.

The model covers an area 550km x 660km each divided into a 1.5sq km cell stacked into 19 layers.  Once constructed with initial hydraulic parameters, the model was calibrated to replicate pre-CSG conditions in 1995.  It was calibrated using groundwater levels from 1,500 bores in the groundwater database.  The model was designed to make predictions from the 1995 data both including and excluding petroleum impacts.  They added uncertainty analysis to provide 200 different predictions of drawdown for each model cell at different time periods. The upper and low five percent of the 200 were discarded as outliers and the maximum value of the remaining predictions was used in the report. 

The report estimates the CSG industry will draw an average of 95,000 megalitres of water a year over the life of the industry.  It will be higher in the next three years as the industry expands with the QWC with an average of 125,000 ML a year over the period.  This is why getting the water monitoring strategy right is so important. 

The water monitoring strategy involves monitoring of water levels in coal seams and surrounding aquifers. It will not monitor water quality (eg for contamination from fracking) or the volume of water extracted from wells. QWC will not conduct the monitoring – that will be left to the gas companies. Someone said to me today that was like leaving Ned Kelly in charge of the bank vault but the QWC assures us the companies have legal responsibilities and any anomalies will quickly be exposed.

The monitoring has six broad objectives. 1. Establish background trends not attributable to CSG. 2.Identify changes in aquifer conditions in petroleum development areas. 3. Identify changes in aquifer conditions near critical groundwater use (eg towns that rely on groundwater), 4 Identify changes in aquifer conditions near springs. 5. Improve future groundwater flow monitoring 6. Improve understanding of connectivity between aquifers.

There will be a regional monitoring network which will have 142 monitoring sites across the region (27 already exist) which will have 498 monitoring points (104 already exist). These sites will target different strata of the Surat and Bowen Basin including the Condamine Alluvium, Main Range Volcanics, Mooga Sandstone, Orallo Formation, Gubberamunda Sandstone, Westbourne Formation, Springbok Sandstone, Walloon Coal Measures, Hutton Sandstone, Evergreen Formation, Precipice Sandstone, Clematis Sandstone and Bandanna Formation.

At each site, water data is collected at least once a fortnight.  Queensland’s regulatory requirements provide for the UWIR to be updated every three years but there will also be an annual report.

Draft Surat Underground Water Impact Report - part 1

Surat Cumulative Management Area

I had much underground water on my mind today.  That was because I attended both sessions today in Roma where the Qld Water Commission were explaining their Draft Underground Water Impact Report (pdf, 8 meg) for the Surat Cumulative Management Area to the public.  The quick and dirty bottom line is that I don’t think the data supports a moratorium of the industry and as a worst-case scenario says the impact is moderate and manageable. However this is the first of several posts that will drill down into the report in some detail.  

The Surat Cumulative Management Area is a rough triangle drawn between Emerald in the north, Roma in the west and Toowoomba in the south-east. The geology of the region is complicated as the nature of the water. I had several concepts challenged including what are the Bowen and Surat Basins, what is the Great Artesian Basin and where is the gas stored. The Great Artesian Basin is not a continuous geological formation but a hydrogeological basin across many alternating geological layers. Similarly I used to think the Bowen Basin as the land roughly inland of Mackay including all the big coalmining areas of Emerald and Moranbah. The Surat Basin roughly went from Dalby to Roma.  But it turns out my understanding is that is faulty too. The Bowen Basin lives below the Surat Basin, it is only in the strip-mining areas at Moranbah where its coal formations come to the surface. 

Petrol and gas is a different mining process to coal and covered by different legislation.  The Draft Underground Water Report was required because the law allows petroleum tenure owners to explore for petrol and gas on private property and by necessity, there is some interference with the water on those tenures including the removal of the water. This is particularly so in coal seam gas production which works by reducing water pressure in the seams to release the gas. In the Surat Cumulative Management Area most of the mining is done in the Walloon Coal Measures (Surat Basin) or Bandanna Formation (Bowen Basin) which are geological layers of the Great Artesian Basin which have low permeability rocks alternating with high economic value aquifers and feed important springs.

The problem is that when water is removed, it affects a wide area around the gas well. This is compounded if there are a number of nearby wells also drawing out water. Today most of the groundwater in the Surat Region that comes to the surface is used by agriculture, industry, stock and domestic – some  215,000 megalitres a year. CSG is only responsible for 17,000 ML at the moment but that will rise sharply in the coming years as the four big projects (Santos GLNG, Origin APLNG, British Gas QCLNG and Arrow Surat Gas Project) take off.

When water is removed from the coal formations, water from surrounding aquifers will flow in.  So when the water pressure is reduced, it doesn’t necessarily mean less water. However it does mean there will be a decline in the water level of the bore that taps that aquifer.  The question is by why how much and to answer that question the Queensland Water Commission developed a groundwater model to predict the impacts of the CSG industry. They used vast reams of already known data on water levels and bores which they added to the known plans of tenure holders plus some science about the way underground water moves through the region.

The resulting flow model was complex. There are 19 interacting layers and three million individual cells in the model. It was calibrated to get close matches with known 1995 results from bores giving the team a high degree of certainty they were in the ballpark. They also added ‘uncertainty analysis’ taking the 95 percentile of 200 different predictions for each well. In other words,  they were taking the worst case scenario in 20.

For each well the QWC set a trigger threshold of drawdown.  For consolidated aquifers such as sandstone, the trigger was five meters, it was two metres for unconsolidated (shallow alluvial) aquifers such as the Condamine Alluvium and just a 0.2 metre drop for springs, including watercourses connected to springs.

If the modelling showed the “Immediate Affected Area” (an IAA) of that well exceeded that threshold in the next three years, then the responsible CSG company must undertake restoration measures to restore the bore’s capacity to supply water, or provide the bore owner with an alternative water supply.  This is known in the legislation as “make good" requirements. It could mean adjusting the bore, improving the pressure, drilling a new bore or finding an alternative source. QWC have identified 85 bores in the Surat Region which will exceed the trigger, all of them in the Walloon Coal Measures.

There was also a secondary measure of long-term impact if an IAA exceeded the threshold at any time in the future. This modelling identified 528 bores affected, mostly in the Walloon but some in the Springbok Sandstone (104), Hutton Sandstone (23) and Gubberamunda Sandstone (1).  It is less clear what the Commission expects to happen with these bores though the Roma session talked about gas tenure holders being “proactive” with bore owners in this category.

Part 2 of this will discuss the monitoring regime QWC is putting into place to determine the trigger points.

Charles Byrne's Body: A sorry science story

Back in the mid 18th century an oddity was born in Ireland who if he lived over 200 years later would have likely been one of Irish basketball’s best hopes. In a dwarfish country stunted by lack of access to nutritious foods, Charles Byrne stood out. He was believed by many to be over eight feet tall though skeletal evidence put him at 2.31m, which at seven foot seven was still head, shoulders and much of the upper torso over most of his contemporaries. Byrne did not have access to a better diet than others around him. It was a gene mutation caused by a pituitary tumour that caused the growth. He died in 1783 aged just 22 though it wasn’t the tumour that killed him.

Byrne lived 21 of those 22 years in Tyrone, born of unexceptional stock. The sly gossips said the reason for his height was his parents had a love affair on top of a huge haystack and this lofty situation somehow affected conception. No one said this to his face - if they could up into it. Although acknowledged as a freak of nature, Charles Byrne wasn’t generally treated as one. Australian historian Patrick O’Farrell said the Irish treated everyone on their merits. Writing about the Irish in Australia, O’Farrell noted that because they never tried to paternalise their relationship with Aborigines they never looked down on them as the WASPs did and instead treated them as equals. Byrne left Tyrone not ashamed of his freakdom but wanting to exploit it. His parents knew he could better capitalise on his status elsewhere.

His exceptional size had attracted a nearby carpetbagger named Joe Vance from Coagh. Vance wanted to astound Europe with Byrne. The pair arrived in London in 1782, and Byrne transfixed the capital as Vance’s creation “the Irish Giant”. He took a room next door to the fabled Cox’s Museum at Charing Cross. The choice was not accidental. James Cox was a jeweller and toy maker who exported luxury European items to the Far East. When China suddenly banned his goods, he turned his unsaleable cargo of exotic clocks, watches and earrings into a museum of “automata” which opened in 1772. This museum became known for its extravagant assemblage and quickly became “a seductive metaphor and a compelling stage for debating the troublesome issues of political and economic stability.”

While Cox had sold up by the time Byrne moved to London, his museum retained an aura that Vance knew he could capitalise on. Byrne entertained audiences next door for seven hours a day, six days a week. His gracious airs made him the talk of the town. Within a few weeks, Byrne was entertaining the Royal Family, members of the nobility and his baffling condition was examined by the Royal Society. When a fellow freak, Count Joseph Boruwlawski known as the “Polish Dwarf” met Byrne in London, their surprise was equal. As Boruwlawski remembered, Byrne was a moment speechless, “viewing me with looks of astonishment; then stooping very low to present me his hand, which easily have contained a dozen like mine, he made a very polite compliment. Had a painter been present, the contrast of our figures might have suggested to him the idea of an interesting picture; for having come very near him, the better to show the difference, it appeared that his knee was nearly upon level with the top of my head.”

Flushed with success, Byrne moved to Piccadilly where he continued to work six days a week (Sundays excepted). Admittance for ladies and gentlemen was 2s. 6d, children and “servants in livery” had to fork out a shilling. Vance and Byrne grew wealthy on the profits. By early 1783 the fickle public were tiring of the Irish Giant. News of his success drew other tall men to London including the Gigantic Twin Knipe brothers who were born only five miles away from Byrne in Tyrone. Another Irishman was advertised as a giant “upwards of Four Inches taller than the noted Burn”. Byrne’s problems were compounded by his love of gin and whiskey. He was frequently drunk on stage and cancelled many performances. Vance was forced to drop prices and soon everyone was paying the livery price of a shilling.

On 23 April 1783, Byrne went on a “lunar ramble” at the Black Horse public house. He fell asleep drunk and someone stole £700 from his pockets – his entire savings. Devastated, he redoubled his drinking and contracted tuberculosis. He deteriorated badly in May and died on 1 June 1783. In his final days his biggest fear was not death but the surgeons’ thirst for his body. His Irish Catholic upbringing gave him a horror of the coroner’s knife which he believed could deny his soul a place in heaven on Judgement Day.

One man had no time for Byrne’s scruples on the matter. His name was John Hunter, Surgeon Extraordinary to King George III. Hunter was a pivotal influence on modern surgery with his method and dissected thousands of cadavers he got from “resurrection men” – professional grave robbers. From the moment Hunter set eyes on Byrne he coveted his body for science. Byrne was aware of Hunter’s ambition and strove to thwart it in his dying days. His instructions were that his coffin should be guarded by Irish friends who would arrange to bury him at sea. Byrne scraped the last of his savings to the undertaker whom he entrusted to carry out the plan.

Hunter meanwhile was determined not to lose out. He employed a man named Howison to watch Byrne’s whereabouts at all times from a next door apartment. When Byrne died, a newspaper reported he wanted his bones “far out of the reach of the chirurgical fraternity”. The chirurgeons were in an arms race of demands for the body. One reportedly offered a ransom of 800 guineas to the undertakers. While the bidding went on, the promoters got one last meal ticket out of Byrne: they displayed his enormous coffin to the public for one shilling. Then on 6 June, the body was taken aboard a ship to Margate where it would be sunk in “20 fathoms of water” in the English Channel. At Margate another boat was chartered and the coffin was tipped into the sea.

But Byrne’s body was no longer in it. The Annual Register for 1873 said the sea burial report was “merely a tub thrown out to the whale.” While the whales had the tub, Hunter had the body. When Byrne died, Howison immediately told his paymaster. Hunter quickly bribed the undertaker for £500 who switched the body with paving stones while the oblivious funeral party was drunk. Hunter took the corpse back to his surgery but became terrified of the revenge of Byrne’s friends if they found out. There was no autopsy. Instead he He chopped up the body and boiled the pieces so only the bones were left. He then hid the huge skeleton for four years until Byrne’s name was forgotten. In his haste, it went brown.

Hunter displayed the Irish Giant in his anatomical collection and was later put it in the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons. In 1909 American neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing got permission to open Byrne’s skull and he diagnosed the pituitary tumour. Byrne’s discoloured skeleton remains today in the Hunterian where many visitors including the current monarch have been fascinated by his extraordinary size.

Hunter got his way but the fight continues today between his legacy and Byrne’s modern day family anxious to carry out his dying wish. One of those relatives, Brendan Holland said Byrne’s body has been on display for 200 years and it was time for him to receive a proper burial. "He was quite a celebrity and he made a lot of money out of exhibiting himself," Holland said. "It's the person within that's important. It's very unfortunate that he didn't live long enough to understand that." His enthusiasm for a sea burial is not shared by the Hunterian’s current director Sam Alberti. Alberti was reluctant to hand over his star attraction saying “researchers were excited about the potential for future research.”

But the British Medical Journal agrees with the family Byrne has done his time and should be buried at sea. Fellow Northern Irishman and researcher at the school of law at Queen’s University Belfast, Thomas Muinzer wrote in the Journal it was time to respect his memory and reputation. “What has been done cannot be undone but it can be morally rectified,” Muinzer wrote. Mr Muinzer added there was nothing of any more use that could be deduced scientifically from Byrne’s bones. “We have now a full record of Byrne’s DNA and we also have numerous examinations of the skeleton,” he wrote. “With burial law, when you or I stipulate burial wishes in life, we rely on those wishes to be respected. Those wishes don’t have legal force, they have moral force.”

GFC provides temporary relief from rising greenhouse emissions

A new report shows the Global Financial Crisis has had a small dampening affect on greenhouse gas emissions with energy use down in Australia's eastern mainland states in 2009. It also showed that energy use varies radically from state to state. The report by non-profit international body The Climate Group shows that annual emissions were 5.3 million tonnes lower in 2009 than the previous year across Victoria, New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia. This represents a fall of 1.8 per cent and followed a rise in emissions of 1.3 per cent in 2008.

Now entering its fourth year, The Climate Group's Greenhouse Indicator Annual Report (pdf) tracks the main sources of greenhouse emissions in Australia from coal, natural gas and petroleum. The Climate Group tracks emissions on a weekly basis across the four states and provides useful real time information for policy makers, media and the general public alike. The 2009 annual report shows a decrease from 2008 but it is not uniform across the states. Emissions declined considerably in South Australia (4.2 percent) and NSW (3.1 percent) while barely changing in Queensland (1.1 percent) and Victoria (0.5 percent).

The reason for the decrease differed from state to state too. In Victoria most of the decrease was due to emissions reductions in both gas‐fired electricity generation and use of petroleum. This was counteracted by an increase in emissions from coal‐fired generators. In NSW and Queensland however, the coal-fired generators led the reduction while emissions from gas-fired generators rose a staggering 176 percent due to the commissioning of new stations. In SA it was gas-fired generators that led the reduction.

The use of petroleum decreased across the states except in South Australia. The reductions came despite positive population growth in each of the states, and growth in Gross State Product in each state. Again with petroleum-based products, results were different across the states. Diesel sales were up across all
states except for in Victoria which went down. Petrol sales fell in Victoria and Queensland (where the fuel subsidy ended this year), remained the same in NSW and increased in South Australia. Another Climate Group report shows petroleum emissions declined for the whole of Australia between October 2008 to September 2009.

Electricity use was also down 1.9 percent across the four states. Coal usage was slightly down but still represents a whopping 87.8 percent of all scheduled electricity generation. Gas is responsible for 9.3 percent and renewables is still a disgracefully paltry 2.8 percent (up just 0.1 percent in 12 months). Demand fell 2.0 percent in Victoria and 1.2 percent in NSW. By contrast demand rose 1.5 percent in Queensland and 0.1 percent in SA. Victoria in particular has an unhealthy reliance on higher emitting brown coal which rose 1.1 percent balanced out by the 27 percent decrease in gas-fired station.

Turning to the weather, 2009 was the second warmest year on record in Australia and the years 2000-2009 was the warmest decade on record. As the Bureau of Meteorology said these trends are “consistent with the background of global warming”. Going from causes to effects, the higher temperatures had and good bad aspects. There was less demand for heating over winter but more demand for cooling over summer. Demand across the national electricity market in the winter of 2009 was 3.4 per cent less than the winter of 2008. The summer of 08/09 saw demand increase by 1.7 per cent from 07/08.

The report said that all states recorded a growth in Gross State Product (GSP) over the period despite the GFC. Nevertheless it says “growth rates were reasonably low compared with previous years, and this would certainly have relieved upward pressure on emissions levels.” And so as the economy recovers, emissions are likely to increase substantially in the absence of any meaningful government action to throttle them.

New test to help crack down on illegal ivory trade

A new test to distinguish antique from modern ivory may help defeat the illegal trade in ivory. The EU allows the sale of antique ivory from before 1947, but once a tusk is carved there is no accurate way of distinguishing it from modern ivory. Until now, the only option has been to send samples to museums where experts tried to work out its age from signs such as how yellow it appeared. However this evidence would not stand up in court. A new method by an Edinburgh Zoo scientist can determine the age of ivory by looking at its level of carbon isotope. Because of nuclear testing which started in the 1950s, modern ivory has double the amount of carbon 14 than those of elephants that lived before the nuclear age. The test will now be rolled out to all European countries. (picture by wwarby)

While Europeans have killed elephants for trade since colonial times, the large-scale exploitation of elephant herds began in the 1970s. Organized gangs of poachers used automatic weapons while corrupt governments turned a blind eye. They laundered tons of elephant tusks through several African countries to destinations in the East and West. At its height, the ivory trade was driving the poaching of an estimated 100,000 African elephants a year for their tusks, as species numbers dropped from 1.3 million to 600,000.

Things improved after the African elephant was listed on Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) in 1989. This banned the ivory trade though it carried on illegally. And only 16 out of 35 African countries complied with the CITES system. The Born Free Foundation says thousands of elephants are still killed every year for their ivory. The British animal welfare group describes the slaughter as “horrifying”, with poachers shooting elephants with automatic weapons and hacking off their tusks with axes and chainsaws.

In November 2009 Tanzania and Zambia submitted a proposal for the relaxation of the ban to allow for the sale of 100 tonnes of stock-piled ivory to China and Japan. The proposal will be examined at an international meeting on wildlife conservation scheduled for March. There is a precedent for this. In 1997 regulations were relaxed for a one-off sale of 60 tonnes of stock-piled ivory. There was a similar sale in 2002. But Kenya has opposed the latest request for a relaxation saying it could lead to increased poaching in the region. It also wants the ban to include rhinos. Kenya’s elephant population dropped from 168,000 in 1969 to only 16,000 in 1989 when the ban was enforced. The population has now risen to 35,000 since the ban but the rhino population has decreased by a third in the same timeframe.

The Chinese market is now driving the demand for ivory. The problem has escalated in recent years as China forges more links with Africa. Chinese entrepreneurs, miners and tourists are coming to the continent in increasing numbers fuelling the illicit trade. Over 35 million tonnes of ivory has been illegally imported into China from Africa in the last 10 years and British-based wildlife trade monitoring network TRAFFIC is working with China to educate travellers about ivory smuggling. But there are concerns the Chinese government is reacting defensively to reports of Chinese people caught in the act. After an Interpol operation seized several tonnes of ivory in November and arrested three Chinese and 62 Africans, China Daily refuted the director of a Kenyan wildlife NGO, who blamed the growing number of Chinese workers in Africa for the rise in elephant poaching in Kenya.

Ominously, ivory trade has been on the rise across the continent since 2004 but increased sharply last year according to TRAFFIC. Their latest report said the surge in 2009 suggest an increased involvement of organized crime syndicates in the trade, connecting African source countries with Asian end markets. According to its analysis of 14,364 ivory seizure records from 85 countries between January 1989 and August 2009, the adjusted trend for illicit ivory trade has risen to over 25 tonnes, the second largest after a peak of 32 tonnes in 1998. CITES will submit the report to the upcoming meeting of member countries.

Unchartered waters: coral reefs, climate change and mass extinction

While Australian politicians and the media continue to lie or downplay the effects of human-caused climate change, Australian scientists continue to methodically pile up the evidence to the contrary. A new scientific paper has not only stated that the world’s coral reefs including the iconic Great Barrier Reef are in irreversible decline due to increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere but worse still, if these emissions are left unchecked they could cause a mass extinction event. This was the gloomy prognosis of a paper published in October’s edition Marine Pollution Bulletin. The paper says today’s co2 levels of 387 parts per million is enough to cause catastrophic mass bleaching of coral reefs given a time lag of ten years. (photo by mattk1979)

Written by ten Australian, British and Kenyan scientists, the paper entitled “The coral reef crisis: The critical importance of <350ppm CO2” states that if levels are allowed to rise to 450ppm by 2020 as the best effort proposed by the Copenhagen Accord then “reefs will be in rapid and terminal decline worldwide”. The scientists say this will be inevitable due to a synergy of mass bleaching, ocean acidification and other environmental impacts. But worse is to follow should levels reach a doomsday scenario of 600 ppm (not impossible given current unchecked rates of growth). In that case, a domino effect will occur affecting many other marine ecosystems. The paper states baldly that anthropogenic CO2 emission could trigger “the Earth’s sixth mass extinction event”.

Because reef systems have existed for 240 million years, they provide an unequalled window into the effects of climate change in geological time. Yet astonishingly scientists have found no parallel in the past with today’s conditions. “We are in unchartered waters,” say the scientists. Already 20 percent of the world’s reefs have been destroyed and another 35 percent is seriously threatened. Currently mass bleaching events are associated with El Nino weather patterns and normally occur even four to seven years. But now they are happening annually. Coral has a high dependence on light and temperature and even slight changes in either factor can cause irreversible damage.

There are no recorded instances of mass bleaching before the 1970s. Temperature-induced mass coral bleaching was first recorded in 1978 when co2 levels were 336 ppm. Given a ten year time lag, the problem probably began in 1968 or thereabouts when co2 levels first exceeded 320 ppm. By 1983, co2 levels had reached 340ppm and this was enough to cause a mass bleaching of 10 percent of the Great Barrier Reef and two-thirds of all inshore reefs. Another mass bleaching event in 1998 with CO2 levels at 365 ppm killed 16 percent of coral globally. Further events in 2002 and 2005 characterised a new phase of decline and diminishing complexity of the reefs.

The paper says by the time CO2 levels reach 450 ppm coralline algae will no longer be able calcify which will make coral brittle and subject to collapse. Reef building processes will be severely diminished or cease entirely. Rising sea levels, an increasing number of high intensity storms, impacts from fishing and deterioration of the water quality will exacerbate the effects of mass bleaching and ocean acidification.

Reefs are resilient and usually bounce back from bleaching events particularly if they are spaced many years apart. But as they become annual events and more intense, the capacity of the corals to regrow will decline. This is not helped by human factors such as water pollution and over-fishing. This reduces genetic diversity which in turn further hampers the corals’ ability to re-grow.
All the evidence suggests that reefs will be the first planetary-scale ecosystem to collapse due to rapid global warming. And while bleaching is confined to the reef, the impact acidification will be felt more widely. It could impact molluscs, crustaceans, plankton, fish, seagrass, mangroves, marine reptiles and mammals, and estuarine habitats.

The scientists say the speed at which events are happening give little time for evolution to take adaptive measures. It recommends some immediate remedial measures such as reducing the harvesting of herbaceous fish, protecting sharks and other top predators, managing water quality, and minimising “anthropogenic impact”. Given that Copenhagen failed singularly in that last task, hopes are not high the scientists hopes will be realised. “Only drastic action starting now will prevent wholesale destruction of reefs and similarly affected ecosystems,” concludes the paper. “Should humanity not be successful in preventing these threats from becoming reality, no amount of management or expenditure will save future generations from the consequences of our failed guardianship.”

Norman Borlaug: forgotten benefactor of humanity is dead

The father of the green revolution, Norman Borlaug, has died in Texas. He died at his home in Dallas on Saturday due to cancer complications. He was 95. Borlaug was an agricultural scientist who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his role in combating world hunger and saving hundreds of millions of lives. Thanks to the green revolution, world food production more than doubled between 1960 and 1990 and his work was feted in a 2006 book entitled The Man Who Fed the World.

Borlaug was no great fan of the phrase Green Revolution which he described as a “miserable term” but his high-yielding crops saved many parts of the world from famine in the 1960s. Kenneth Quinn, President of the World Food Prize, said the world had lost a great hero. “Dr. Borlaug’s tireless commitment to ending hunger had an enormous impact on the course of history,” he said. “He will be remembered with love and appreciation around the globe.”

Norman Ernest Borlaug was born in Saude, Iowa in 1914 to parents of Norwegian stock. Borlaug left the family farm to study at the University of Minnesota where he obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in 1937 and gained some fame as a champion wrestler. Borlaug continued studying and got a PhD in plant pathology and genetics in 1942. During the war, Borlaug worked at a military lab where he helped develop a glue that stopped food containers rotting in saltwater.

In 1944 he went to Mexico to work for an agricultural development program run by the Mexican government with support from Washington and the Rockefeller Foundation. He would spend the next 40 years of his life on this project. Borlaug looked at the problem of cultivating wheat which was susceptible to the parasitic fungus known as rust. He experimented with double wheat seasons and dwarf plants which were disease resistant and gave higher yield. By 1963 nearly all of Mexico’s wheat came from Borlaug varieties. The harvest had grown sixfold in two decades and Mexico was now a net exporter of wheat.

Borlaug’s success attracted interest in the sub-continent. At the time India and Pakistan were at war with each other and both were close to widescale famine. India was importing huge quantities of food grains from the US. In 1965 Mexico exported a large quantity of wheat to both countries with almost immediate effect. Pakistan’s wheat yield doubled in five years and India became self-sufficient in ten. He then took those varieties, and improved strains of rice and corn, to Asia, the Middle East, South America and Africa.

For his work, his ancestral nation of Norway awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. Accepting the honour, he said the destiny of world civilization depended upon providing a decent standard of living for all. He said "green revolution” was too broad in scope and only wheat, rice, and maize yields had increased. He compared the forgetfulness of the West and its abundance with the underprivileged billions in the Third World for whom “hunger has been a constant companion, and starvation has all too often lurked in the nearby shadows.”

With his reputation safely established, Borlaug continued to press for improvements across the developing world, especially Africa. He helped found the Sasakawa Africa Association in the early 1980s to improve African food production. With the help of local researchers he concluded that the existing products and information could greatly expand the African food production, but the improved technologies were not reaching the smallholders who produced most of Africa's food, and the extension systems were failing to link research to farmers.

But while his work was greatly respected in Africa and Asia, he remained almost unknown in his homeland. Writing in 1997 in The Atlantic Online, Gregg Easterbrook said that the US had three living Peace Prize winners of which two were household names (Elie Wiesel and Henry Kissinger) and the other was Borlaug. Easterbrook suggested that one reason for Borlaug’s anonymity was the fact that his life and work were done in developing nations far from the media spotlight. But he added a second more sinister reason: “More food sustains human population growth, which [critics] see as antithetical to the natural world.” Most of the criticism of Borlaug’s work has been around environmental concerns not humanitarian. These relate to large-scale factory farming which is biased towards agribusinesses as well as issues with inorganic fertilisers and controlled irrigation causing environmental stress. Borlaug never resiled from these arguments and said high-yield farming actually helps preserve natural habitats.

Borlaug remained active in his older years. In 2006 he was awarded America’s highest civilian honour, the Congressional Gold Medal. His long-time colleague and friend Professor M.S. Swaminathan called him one of the greatest Americans and humanists of all times. In his acceptance speech, Borlaug stressed the importance of continuing the fight against hunger. "We need better and more technology, for hunger and poverty and misery are very fertile soils into which to plant all kinds of 'isms,' including terrorism," he said.

Two new papers support Homo floresiensis as new species

Two new research paper published by Nature last week support the evidence that the so-called Indonesian “hobbit” skeletons belong to a separate human species. Homo floresiensis arrived on the island of Flores in the Lesser Sunda Islands a million years ago and lasted until they were probably wiped out by a volcano 10,000 years ago. Scientists have been unable to agree on the characterisation of the hobbit because although its brain is tiny, it has developed complex tools. The two new papers corroborate evidence to suggest they are a new species and not modern humans with abnormally small brains.

The first Nature paper says the feet of recently discovered miniature hominins found on Flores have a combination of human and more primitive features. An analysis of a Homo floresiensis fossil shows the dwarf-like creature walked in a different way from modern humans. The research does not take a definitive position on whether h. floresiensis is a new species or not. However the shape of the foot’s navicular bone similar to those of great apes, which means that they lacked an arch and were not efficient long-term runners. "Arches are the hallmark of a modern human foot," says William Harcourt-Smith, one of the paper’s authors. "This is another strong piece of the evidence that the 'hobbit' was not like us."

The research backs up similar findings about the fossil’s skull announced in January. The skull’s uneven shape was compared to modern humans and apes, as well as the fossil brain cases of early human ancestors. Karen Baab, a biological anthropologist at Stony Brook University in New York State said the unevenness was due to fossilisation. "The shape of the skull is consistent with what we would expect for a small archaic Homo," she said.

However, some scientists remain sceptical about the controversial find. Robert Eckhardt is a professor of developmental genetics and evolutionary morphology in the kinesiology department at Pennsylvania State University and co-author of a 2006 paper which concluded the shape of the skull represented “developmental abnormality." Eckhardt’s concern is the fossil’s tiny brain. "If it was three million years old, it wouldn't be a problem,” he said. “The problem is it is only 18,000 years old and it sticks out like a sore thumb."

A thumb is an accurate simile for the one meter tall Homo floresiensis. The first fossil was discovered at Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003. It had human-like teeth with a receding forehead and no chin. The fossil was deemed to be somewhere between 38,000 and 18,000 years old. Archaeological evidence in the area found more bones from other individuals dating from 95,000 and 13,000 years ago. The first (and most complete) find was fully bipedal with a very small brain size of 417cc. It is this last statistic that causes most angst in scientific circles. It is similar to chimpanzees but only about one third the size of modern human brains.

But the second paper in last week’s “Nature” may have an answer to that puzzle too. An American Museum of Natural History study showed that dwarf mammals that live on islands evolved much smaller brains in relation to their body size than those on continental landmasses. The study looked at extinct pygmy hippos that lived on Madagascar and found their brain mass was 30 percent less than similar species on mainland Africa. Natural History Museum palaeontologist, Dr Eleanor Weston, says it may be advantageous to have smaller brains on isolated islands. “The brain is a costly organ that uses a lot of energy,” she said. "Whatever the explanation for the tiny brain of floresiensis relative to its body size, it’s likely that the fact that it lived on an island played a significant part in its evolution.”

It was long believed that no humans arrived on the isolated island of Flores until relative recent times (about 11,000 years ago) when homo sapiens arrived on boats. However in the 1960s a priest and part-time archaeologist Theodor Verhoeven found signs of a much earlier human presence. In the Soa Basin he found stone artefacts near stegodont (elephant ancestors) fossils, he said were around 750,000 years old. In the 1990s his claims were backed up when tools were dated and found to be 840,000 years old.

But no-one could find remains of actual humans until the first hobbit was found in Liang Bua which means "cool cave" in the local Manggarai language. The finders took the bones back to Jakarta where Peter Brown, a paleoanthropologist from Armidale’s University of New England, supervised cleaning, conservation, and analysis. The pelvic structure told him the bones were from a female. Brown soon realised he was dealing with an entirely new human species: Homo floresiensis. "To find that as recently as perhaps 13,000 years ago, there was another upright, bipedal…creature walking the planet at the same time as modern humans is as exciting as it was unexpected," he said. This find will keep on giving to science for many years to come. The challenge will now to find out how widespread the hobbits were and whether they came into contact with homo sapiens.

Dark matters: life, the universe and everything

On Wednesday NASA launched a rocket carrying its new $690 million long distance telescope it hopes will provide answers to some of the universe’s enduring mysteries. The Delta II rocket blasted off from Kennedy Space Center carrying aboard the Gamma Ray Large Area Space (GLAST) telescope. After a 75 minute flight, GLAST was deployed into a low Earth orbit and NASA expect it to transmit its first data in three weeks time. “After a 60-day checkout and initial calibration period, we'll begin science operations," said Steve Ritz, project scientist at Goddard Space Flight Center in Washington DC. "Glast soon will be telling scientists about many new objects to study, and this information will be available on the internet for the world to see."

GLAST is designed to study high energy sources of radiation in the universe. The project is a five to ten year operation designed to detect high energy gamma ray bursts, pinpoint their origin and shed light on the black holes where they mostly seem to reside. According to NASA, the new telescope will give astronomers a superior tool to “study how black holes, notorious for pulling matter in, can accelerate jets of gas outward at fantastic speeds.” The idea is to use a form of light invisible to the human eye to study and trace the origins of one of the most powerful forms of energy known - gamma ray bursts.

Gamma rays are energy-laden electromagnetic radiation produced by sub-atomic particles. They sit at the lowest end of the electromagnetic spectrum beyond ultraviolet and x-rays with a tiny wavelength of 0.00001 millimetres (ten to the power of minus five). They are found in the hottest areas of the universe and are produced by dramatic events such as supernova explosions, destruction of atoms, and the decay of radioactive material in space. A gamma ray burst release can travel across vast distances of the universe, and are absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere. Gamma ray bursts are spectacular events and can release more energy in ten seconds than the Sun will emit in its entire ten billion year life.

Scientists are particularly interested in gamma ray bursts because they throw light on some of the earliest events in the universe. They are so bright they can be detected as far back as the earliest five percent of the universe’s life time – over 13 billion years ago. One of the aims of GLAST is to investigate the link between gamma rays and dark matter. They hope to confirm that gamma ray bursts from the centre of our galaxy will reveal the presence of dark matter. Although known to science since 1933, dark matter remains one of science’s more hypothetical concepts. Yet it is believed to account for the majority of the mass of the observable universe.

The discovery of dark matter was made by Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky who worked at the California Institute of Technology in the 1930s. Zwicky was aware of Edwin Hubble’s discovery that the universe was expanding. But he was also aware that galaxies tend to cluster in complicated local movements. He measured the red shift from individual galaxies to see what was holding them together. What he found astonished him: a cluster of galaxies can remain bound together for billions of years, but only if it contains enough material to trap the individual members. But when Zwicky calculated the combined gravity of the known components – stars, gas and dust – it was nowhere near sufficient to form the cluster.

Zwicky concluded there must be an extra contribution to the gravitational pull. This unknown force outweighed the visible stuff hundreds of times over. He called this material “dark matter”. While Zwicky’s findings were initially ignored, a gradual weight of evidence emerged to show, as scientist Paul Davies says, “the luminous parts of galaxies represent just the tip of the iceberg, and that most of the matter in the universe is in fact dark”.

It is dark matter that keeps the galaxy in the familiar disk shape and it is dark matter that ensures the Sun stays firm on its 250 million year circuit of the Galaxy. Without it, the Milky Way would unravel like an exploding flywheel. Ever keen to find human significance in the universe, Scientists have come up with bizarre anthropomorphic names to describe the types of dark matter they think might be out there. There are two broad categories: MACHOs and WIMPs. MACHOs are “Massive Compact Halo Objects”. These are concentrations of mass residing in the galactic halo. They include dwarf stars and giant planets as well as smaller objects such as asteroids and comets. These objects are too dim to show up in telescopes but still exist in abundance. Yet MACHOs probably count for only a small percentage of dark matter. The rest are likely to be WIMPs.

WIMPs are Weakly Interactive Massive Particles. They are not so much dark as invisible, mostly passing through ordinary matter without betraying their existence. Because dark matter is concentrated at the centre of galaxies, scientists envisage a thick invisible soup of WIMPs through which stars swim as they perform their loop across the Milky Way. As WIMPs are weakly interacting, they only very rarely hit an ordinary atom; and as they are massive particles, possibly as heavy as a uranium atom they could account for the remaining dark matter in the galaxy.

Most importantly, dark matter played an essential role in shaping the universe. The smoothness of the early life of the universe was removed as regions over-dense in dark matter drew on surrounding material to amplify their denseness. Normal matter alone would have been too feeble to create galaxies, stars and planets and dark matter was needed to assist the clumping process. Peter Michelson, a Stanford astrophysicist and a lead investigator on the GLAST project, describes dark matter as “"mysterious, unseen substance that gravitationally holds the universe together”. He hopes the glimpses of gamma ray bursts will provide clues as to how dark matter formed the universe. "When you look at the night sky with your eyes, it is fairly quiescent and peaceful," Michelson said. "The gamma ray sky is not. It's a very different view of the universe. We're seeing exotic things like black holes and neutron stars and coalescing binary systems at the end of their life when they collapse into a black hole and there's an explosion."

Australia to vote on embryonic stem cell research

Embryo stem cell research is currently illegal in Australia. However that is likely to change after PM John Howard indicated last week he would allow a conscience vote in Federal Parliament on the use of stem cells. MPs from all parties have agreed to work together on a private member's bill to extend stem cell research. In December 2005, a government-commissioned review of biotechnology recommended scientists should be allowed to use therapeutic cloning to generate stem cells for research into specific diseases. Instead, the cabinet voted to maintain 2002 laws allowing only spare embryos left over from in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures to be used for research. Scientists hope that stem cells can be grown into a variety of tissues and cells which will help treat degenerative diseases such as Parkinson's and motor neurone disease

Stem cells in animals are primal undifferentiated cells that retain the ability to produce an identical copy of themselves when they divide (self-renew) and differentiate into other cell types. Medical researchers believe stem cell research has the potential to change the face of human disease by being used to repair specific tissues or to grow organs.

However there is widespread controversy over the research, which arises from the techniques used in the creation and usage of the stem cells. The creation of a stem cell 'line' requires either the destruction of a human embryo, removal of some embryonal cells, and/or therapeutic cloning. A stem cell line is a family of constantly-dividing cells which are obtained from human or animal tissues. Most stem cell lines are created from embryos. An embryonic cell is kept in a petri dish and provided with nutrients it would normally find in a womb. The stem cell debates have reinvigorated the ‘pro-life’ movement who have concerned themselves with the rights and status of the embryo as an early-aged human life. The embryo itself is the earliest stage of reproduction. As soon as a sperm fertilises an egg cell, the resultant cell, called a zygote will contain the DNA of its parent cells. The zygote divides by a process called mitosis and separates into two identical halves. The term embryo is used to describe the early stages of this development, after the zygote has divided at least once, but before the process has completed to produce the next stage of development.

Many opponents of the research say scientists should focus on adult stem cell research without the use of embryonic stem cells. These claims are usually made on the basis that the embryonic stem cell research causes the destruction of human life. In 1969 the first human in vitro fertilization (IVF) was accomplished. In 1995, the American Human Embryo Research Panel advised the Clinton administration to permit federal funding for research on embryos left over from IVF treatments and also recommended federal funding of research on embryos specifically created for experimentation. However this request was turned down based on moral and ethical concerns. The moral problem is that many believe that life begins at conception. The influential US conservative spokesman, Jerry Falwell, believes new medical research needs to pass a three part test "Is it ethically correct? Is it biblically correct? Is it morally correct?” While the biblical dilemma may only be of direct relevance to Falwell’s constituency, secular scientists do understand that personal morality and professional ethics carry weight in the argument. The moral and ethical quandary is how to apply the principles of life given the advances in biotechnology that have made traditional definitions on when commences life difficult to apply.

The issue becomes further clouded with the principle of therapeutic cloning. Therapeutic cloning is currently legal for research purposes in the UK and a few other countries. In 2004 a Korean team headed by Professor Hwang Woo-suk was feted for its announcement that it produced the world's first cloned human embryos. At the time he described the breakthrough as "a giant step forward towards the day when some of mankind's most devastating diseases and injuries can be effectively treated through the use of therapeutic stem cells. But allegations he used unacceptable practices to acquire eggs from human donors, then faked two landmark pieces of research into cloning human stem cells, have left his reputation in tatters. Dr Hwang admitted that female researchers in his own lab had supplied eggs for his research. In 2006, he was fired from his professorship at Seoul National University (SNU) and in May was charged with fraud and embezzlement.

The controversy of Dr Hwang was a set-back for therapeutic cloning and stem cell research as a whole. But the technology is not about to disappear any time soon. The overall problem is that the moral and ethical view on the beginnings and sanctity of life is macroscopic whereas science has moved on to astonishing microscopic levels of distinction of how cells are created. The debate needs to focus on how to cross the apparent unbridgeable chasm between the philosophy and the science.