TORONTO A new study has discovered that warm pockets of Pacific water, referred to as heat bombs, are migrating to the Arctic Ocean and accelerating the sea ice melt. The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, detail findings from a team of oceanographers from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego. The study examines how the migrating warm pockets of Pacific water are thawing mass amounts of sea ice by flowing through the Bering Strait, up the Pacific Ocean and into the Arctic. The Pacific water is warmer and saltier than its Arctic counterpart, so it travels under cool surface waters in the Beaufort Gyre ocean current.
TORONTO A dispute is brewing between a foreign-owned aquaculture company and local conservationists and tour operators off the coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia over plans to dump pesticides in the water. Cermaq, a Japanese-owned company that operates a salmon farm near Tofino, B.C., is seeking approval to dump nearly one million litres of pesticide in Clayoquot Sound Biosphere Reserve waters. The pesticide contains hydrogen peroxide, and Cermaq wants to use it to get rid of sea lice that affect farmed salmon. The company already had a three-year permit to dump pesticides in the water, but is looking to renew the permit as it is set to expire this year.
TORONTO Sometimes scientists come up empty. The phenomenon they thought they d find simply doesn t seem to exist. That s what one team of researchers thought had happened to them when they tried to investigate how fish harvesters in Cambodia were dealing with climate change. The fishers reported that even though the weather was warmer, their annual fish hauls were not any different than before. What the researchers didn t realize until later was that climate change was actually affecting the fishers in two significant ways that weren t at all obvious from their data. In this week s Riskin Report, CTV News Science and Technology Specialist Dan Riskin explains what the researchers had been missing, and why it s a rare positive outcome.
The warming Arctic tundra will make it harder for the world to curb climate change, as thawing permafrost and wildfires release greenhouse gases that are not fully accounted for in global emissions agreements, a new study says.
TORONTO Canadian researchers have observed how a species of fish evolves adapts to extreme environmental changes in real time, and say that their work might be key to understanding how species might be able to adapt to as the effects of climate change continue to increase in severity, As described in a study published in March, researchers from McGill University looked at six populations of threespine stickleback, a species of fish that is found in California, and sought out to observe natural selection happen in real-time. Using genome sequencing, they measured genetic changes in the populations as they were exposed to different environments.