The shrinking of the world’s glaciers in places like Alaska

The Cordyceps fungus has become a staple of "stranger than fiction" nature stories: Its complex and lethal parasitism of ants, causing the cheap louis vuitton sunglasses insects to climb as high as they can before the fungus bursts like a horn from their heads, is both bizarre and captivating. Now scientists report that the parasite is getting a dose of its own medicine, as it finds itself under attack from yet another parasitic fungus — one that targets Cordyceps. It's nature's way to pile weirdness upon weirdness. Researchers led by David Hughes at Penn State University were looking into how some groups of ants were able to survive a Cordyceps attack. The fungus is extremely virulent and can often wipe out an entire colony. Ants groom each other to remove potentially troublesome fungus and microbes, but that couldn't account for the survival rates they were occasionally seeing. What they found (and reported in PLoS One) was another fungus growing in and around the ant colonies — just as much a specialist as the first fungus. This newly discovered fungus attacked the "zombie-ant" fungi and effectively neutered them, sabotaging their spore-producing organs and preventing them from fruiting. Some ants would still be infected (the researchers described a "high density of zombie-ant cadavers in the graveyard"), but the spread of zombie-ism was largely stopped. Each species of Cordyceps fungus targets only one species; the ant-zombifying variety is just the best-known type. That there could be a fungus that was parasitic in such a fascinating way on a single species is amazing enough, but that a second fungus would specialize in attacking the first is almost beyond belief. It's an example of the density and biodiversity that one finds in, as Hughes puts it, "the exciting theater played out on the rainforest floor." Like so much of climate science, the latest insight from the frozen world of Greenland offers one of those good news/bad news outlooks for the future of the world’s new louis vuitton sunglasses 2012 oceanfront real estate. A decade-long, eye-in-the-sky study of nearly 200 major outlet glaciers found that they haven’t been tumbling into the ocean with the dramatic acceleration once feared -- and that means these colossal rivers of ice might not contribute as much to a catastrophic sea-level rise as predicted by some worst-case scenarios. Some climate studies had suggested that Greenland’s coastal glaciers were poised to produce enough fresh water to raise the global sea level by 2.5 to 6.5 feet over the next 90 years. But their tidewater meltdown -- if it doesn’t speed up beyond the rates seen during the past 10 years -- will likely deliver a sea level boost measured in inches rather than feet, according to a new study published this week in the journal of Science. “Our wide sampling of actual 2000 to 2010 changes shows that glacier acceleration across the ice sheet remains far below (the high-end) estimates, suggesting that sea level rise associated with Greenland glacier dynamics remains well below the low-end scenario (of about four to five inches by 2100) at present,” wrote lead researcher Twila Moon and three co-authors. Still, there’s enough uncertainty in the outlook -- 21st-Century Evolution of Greenland Outlet Glacier Velocities -- to put coastal denizens on alert. The many fast-moving outlet glaciers around the Greenland coast are constantly calving ice into the ocean, where the melting ice affects sea level. “A decade-long record of nearly all of Greenland's major glaciers suggests that Earth's sea level may not rise 2 full meters over the next century, as some recent studies have suggested,” the scientists added in a summary. “However, if ice loss in that region continues to accelerate, lv bracelet for women then sea level could rise 0.8 meters by 2100.” Moon, a graduate student and Greenland ice velocity specialist at the University of Washington, cautioned that much remains unknown about Greenland ice. "We don't have a really good handle on it and we need to have that if we're going to understand the effects of climate change," she said in a story about the work. "We are going to need to continue to look at all of the ice sheet to see how it's changing, and we are going to need to continue to work on some tough details to understand how individual glaciers change." The shrinking of the world’s glaciers in places like Alaska, as well as the mammoth ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, sends almost unfathomable volumes of fresh water into the ocean. Add it all up, and 21st century ice melt has the potential to directly raise the sea level enough to flood coastal zones and displace millions. As a result, estimating how fast the world’s terrestrial ice might transform into liquid water has become one of the most important and challenging tasks of climate science. Sea levels were hundreds of feet lower during the height of the last ice age, when continental glaciers locked up vast quantities of water. The disintegration of that ice beginning about 14,000 years ago released enough water to boost sea height to near the current levels over thousands of years. Since the 1800s, however, new climate warming has been melting what’s left of the world’s ice, and sea levels have continued to sneak higher -- maybe more than seven inches since 1900. Take into account all factors -- expansion of sea water as it warms, disintegrating mountain glaciers, the shrinking ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica -- and global black lv suits sea level may still surge another couple of feet by 2100, and possibly another 70 feet during coming centuries, according to a recent paper in the journal of Geology. Even if no one alive today will see it, a catastrophe appears to be looming unless global warming abates or something else changes, many researchers warn.