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There's enough natural gas frozen 2,000 feet below the permafrost on Alaska's icy North Slope to heat 100 million homes for up to a decade, the U.S. Geological Survey said Wednesday. Look alive, Palin pipeline!

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The Arctic Ocean holds up to 20 percent of the world's undiscovered, technically recoverable oil and gas reserves, according to new research from the U.S. Geological Survey. A four-year study found that the region contains up to 90 billion barrels of oil and almost a third of the world's undiscovered natural gas -- about 1,670 trillion cubic feet. However, even with climate change improving drilling conditions in the Arctic (i.e., melting more and more of that pesky ice), it will be decades before the oil and gas there could be developed. While environmentalists and others want to try to limit the impacts of Arctic drilling before it happens, the USGS characterized the oil and gas survey as a precursor to such protections. "Before we can make decisions about our future use of oil and gas and related decisions about protecting endangered species, native communities, and the health of our planet, we need to know what's out there," said USGS Director Mark Myers. So now that we know, where are those protections already?

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Uber-ironic 1962 ad touts oil’s ability to melt glaciers!

You may think you're prepared for climate change -- solar-powered fan, flood insurance, nostalgic polar-bear picture, check, check, check -- but are you prepared for 20-foot, 250-pound snakes? Giant Burmese pythons could find some one-third of the United States to be habitable climate by 2100, according to a new map published by the U.S. Geological Survey. The pythons, which were originally dumped in the Florida Everglades by disenchanted pet owners and now number in the thousands, aren't generally a threat to humans, but do count deer, bobcats, and alligators among their squeeze-'n'-gulp prey. However, alligators also eat pythons. But before you get any ideas, "we are not recommending you import alligators into California," says one USGS zoologist. "That would not be a good idea."

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The U.S. Geological Survey released a grim study of polar bears on Friday, concluding that two-thirds of the world's polar bears will be gone by 2050. Polar bears in Alaska and other areas outside the very far north will be most out of luck, according to the study; it forecasts that precisely zero polar bears will be left in Alaska by 2050. "Sea ice conditions would have to be substantially better than even the most conservative computer simulations of warming and sea ice" for the bears to avoid the forecasted steep drop in population, the report said. For those desperately seeking an upside to all this, the survey team said the polar bears' fate was likely only 84 percent linked to the extent of sea ice, which means the remaining bears will only theoretically be 84 percent screwed when all of it disappears from the Arctic. Phew! Meanwhile, for just $35,000 or so, kick-'em-while-they're-down types can pay to go on polar-bear safari and bag a trophy kill. But hey, for an extra $100,000, we know a guy who can arrange a cage match with a polar bear and your own remote-controlled robot. Just let us know.

sources:

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Katrina and Rita destroyed 217 square miles of Louisiana coastline

Hurricanes Katrina and Rita drowned 217 square miles of Louisiana's fragile coastline, turning wetlands, undeveloped dry land, and farmland into open water, says a new study by the U.S. Geological Survey. The research underscores the urgent need for a storm buffer of plants, soils, and barrier islands. "We need a new evaluation of the wetlands system as a whole," says USGS scientist Jimmy Johnston. A separate report from an expert federal panel convened by the National Research Council recommends major changes in land-use regulations for sheltered U.S. coasts -- estuaries, bays, lagoons, and mudflats -- in order to avoid hefty erosion damage. The panel suggests doing away with local regulation in favor of regional regulation with an eye to long-term effects, and pooh-poohs typical protection methods such as seawalls and bulkheads as doing more harm than good.

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EPA whistleblower says agency misled on health hazards of 9/11 dust

A U.S. EPA whistleblower has gone public with accusations that the agency downplayed the health hazards of dust from the collapsed World Trade Center. EPA senior scientist Cate Jenkins -- who has long clashed with her employer -- says the agency relied on misleading test reports in 2002 and 2003. A few months after 9/11, the U.S. Geological Survey found that the dust was highly alkaline, some of it as corrosive as drain cleaner, and even capable of causing burns. But the EPA used data from independent New York University scientists, who found that while more than 95 percent of the dust was high-alkaline large particles, smaller particles, which are more likely to be inhaled deeply, were pH neutral. Recovery workers and residents have complained of various ailments since the attack, which some doctors attribute to high-alkaline dust.

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Feds won't press charges against scientists who falsified Yucca documents

Scientists accused of falsifying quality-assurance documents for the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear-waste site in Nevada will not be charged by federal prosecutors. Emails between U.S. Geological Survey hydrologists from 1998 to 2000 indicate that dates were invented and inconvenient data was deleted as hydrologists conducted a data review before the Energy Department sought a license for the nuke-waste dump. The White House is pushing to speed up construction at Yucca, which is supposed to store 77,000 tons of waste from nuclear power plants. Despite the decision not to file charges, the Energy Department's inspector general admitted that the scientists' lapse has "had the effect of undermining public confidence in the quality of the science associated with the Yucca Mountain Project." Because that confidence was sky-high before, don't you know.

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Melting Arctic leads to black-gold rush

A quarter of the world's undiscovered oil and gas reserves may lie beneath the Arctic Ocean. For centuries they've been stuck under a thick layer of ice, but luckily, the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet and all that bothersome ice is melting! Oil companies around the world are drooling over the black gold up north. Under the auspices of International Polar Year, a 60-nation project designed to tackle global warming and study how it will affect polar regions, the U.S. Geological Survey is teaming up with Brit oil giant BP and Norwegian oil giant Statoil to scope out drilling prospects in the Arctic. The director of the British Antarctic Survey has criticized the venture, saying, "I don't think that fits very comfortably within either the scientific guidelines or the ethical underpinning of the IPY." Ethics? We're talking about oil here! Meanwhile, oil prices hit a record high of $71.79 a barrel today.

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Antarctic glaciers rapidly melting

Wanna travel to Antarctica, but worried about all that ice? Worry no more. On the Antarctic Peninsula, a 1,200-mile-long mountain chain 600 miles south of Argentina, about 212 of the 244 glaciers are retreating, fast. Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey and the British Antarctic Survey studied photos and satellite data from the 1940s to 2001, concluding in the journal Science that, as temps have risen more than 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit on the peninsula since the 1950s, the glaciers that wrap the mountains there have been retreating at an average rate of about 164 feet a year. "Fifty years ago most glaciers were slowly growing in length," said BAS's Alison Cook, "but the pattern is now reversed and they're shrinking." So now the research team is worried about another problem if the glacial retreat continues apace: If bare rock is uncovered, it could attract invasive species to the continent. Happy Earth Day!

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Sierra Nevada Glaciers Are Shrinking

Glaciers that have topped California's Sierra Nevada Mountains for the past 1,000 years are shrinking markedly and even vanishing altogether, according to research by scientists from Portland State University and the U.S. Geological Survey. Seven Sierra Nevada glaciers that were surveyed over the summer are smaller than they were a century ago, including the Darwin Glacier near Bishop, Calif., which is about 50 to 100 feet thinner than it was in the early 1900s. Nathan Stephenson of the USGS was surprised to see notable changes in another glacier, the Goddard, just since 1976, the last time he photographed the area. "I thought, 'Oh, my gosh. In my lifetime I'm seeing this change,'" Stephenson said. He declined to attribute all of the warming causing the glacial melt to human causes. "But maybe we are speeding it up now," he said.

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Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.)

The debate over oil and gas drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has been in the limelight a lot lately -- but what about energy exploitation in the rest of the state? On Friday, the Bush administration released a report on the likely environmental impact of new drilling in the National Petroleum Reserve, an Indiana-sized chunk of Alaska set aside in 1923 as an energy source for the U.S. Navy. The administration is weighing the benefits of leasing off parts of the reserve to private energy companies. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the reserve is home to between 6 billion and 13 billion barrels of oil; it is also home to spotted seals, arctic peregrine falcons, and beluga whales, among other species. Environmentalists fear that Interior Secretary Gale Norton will call for oil and gas leasing in nearly all of the 9 million acres of the reserve's currently untouched northwest corner.

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Here's some news to make you think twice about the reliability of government figures: The U.S. Geological Survey has announced that there is far more coal bed methane gas available in the Powder River Basin than previously thought -- while simultaneously acknowledging that the Rocky Mountain West contains far less oil than the agency had claimed in earlier estimates. In the Powder River Valley, which straddles Montana and Wyoming, the USGS says there is a whopping 14 times more coal bed methane than suggested in initial studies, for a total of some 14.3 trillion cubic feet. (That estimate reflects all gas in the region, not just the portion that would be economically feasible to extract.) Despite environmental concerns, the basin is widely seen as a cornerstone of the Bush administration's energy policy. Meanwhile, the USGS estimated that it had exaggerated its 1995 estimate of oil in the Rocky Mountain West, another favored Bush energy source, by 844 million barrels.

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Perhaps the clearest and most visible sign of climate change in America won't be around for much longer: The glaciers of Glacier National Park in Montana are melting and will be gone within 30 years, scientists say. Dan Fagre, the 49-year-old leader of the U.S. Geological Survey team studying the problem, says, "It's not just going to happen in my lifetime. It's going to happen during my career." More than a century ago, there were 150 glaciers in the high alpine-valley park; today, there are only 35. Ice fields are vanishing from mountain ranges everywhere, from the Andes to the Himalayas. Still, with all the data amassed by scientists, mystery abounds: For example, even as most glaciers in Glacier head toward extinction, a few still cling inexplicably to their mountain peaks.

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Before you celebrate too much ... The Bush administration has already set its sights on another drilling target: the Rocky Mountains. Dozens of petitions to drill on public lands throughout the Rocky Mountain states have been submitted to the White House, which has established a Task Force on Energy Project Streamlining "to expedite the increased supply and availability of energy to our nation," according to President Bush. That's great news for industry reps, who have long lobbied the government to cut the red tape and ease regulatory hurdles to drilling, but bad tidings for environmentalists, who fear the impact on wildlife and the land. The U.S. Geological Survey says there are roughly 137 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and several billion barrels of oil under public lands in the Rocky Mountains.

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One week after a study by the U.S. Geological Survey showed that oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge could harm caribou, the agency has completed another study claiming that the drilling scenarios most likely to be approved by Congress would not affect the species. The two-page report was commissioned by Interior Secretary Gale Norton shortly after the release of the initial study, which was widely interpreted as a major blow to the Bush administration's drilling plan. Opponents of that plan decried the follow-up report as desperate political maneuvering by the Interior Department; Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), an outspoken critic of opening the refuge to drilling, said he found it "hard to believe" that a seven-day study could be more accurate than the original one, which surveyed 12 years' worth of scientific literature on Arctic wildlife. Advocates of drilling insisted, however, that the original study was based on scenarios that do not resemble those actually being considered by Congress.

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James Bond calls for more marine protected areas

Dealing a blow to advocates of natural resource extraction in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, biologists working for the U.S. Geological Survey have produced a report finding that oil and gas drilling in the refuge could substantially threaten caribou, musk oxen, polar bears, migrating birds, and other wildlife. Although the report acknowledges that the risk could be mitigated by careful management, it nonetheless belies the repeated assertions of Interior Secretary Gale Norton that drilling would not pose any threat to wildlife in the refuge. "Once again the administration has released a report undermining its own case," said Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.). To prepare the 78-page report, the biologists examined 12 years of research into the ecology of the area targeted for development, the Arctic Refuge's 1.5 million-acre coastal plain.

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