The iconic ‘Keeling curve’, a 56-year record of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, will continue with support from American philanthropists Eric and Wendy Schmidt. A five-year, US$500,000 grant, announced on 3 September, will help ease funding pressure on the greenhouse-gas monitoring effort run by researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. 

The measurements were started at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, in 1958 by Charles Keeling. His son, Ralph, a geochemist at Scripps, now runs an expanded monitoring programme that tracks atmospheric CO₂ and oxygen. In July 2013, when Keeling’s funding from US government agencies was in doubt, the scientist launched a ‘crowdfunding’ campaign to support his work.

That raised about $20,000, Keeling says, enough to keep programme staff on his payroll during lean months earlier this year. The new Schmidt grant will allow the Scripps team to chip away at a years-long backlog of air samples to measure changes in the ratio of carbon isotopes, which provides information about manmade sources of CO₂. And Keeling’s pioneering oxygen-monitoring programme, which helps researchers to calculate how much CO₂ is being absorbed by oceans and plants, has received roughly $400,000 from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

“The [financial] need now is not the same as it was eight months ago,” Keeling says.

Keeling has documented a decrease in oxygen levels that is due to fossil-fuel combustion, which uses up oxygen and releases CO₂. By accounting for both CO₂ and oxygen levels in the atmosphere, scientists have calculated that oceans and plants each absorb roughly one-quarter of humanity’s CO₂ emissions, leaving half to build up in the atmosphere.

While NOAA maintains its own atmospheric CO₂ record, it does not track atmospheric oxygen, says Jim Butler, director of the agency’s Global Monitoring Division in Boulder, Colorado. “Ralph is one of the few people in the world who do this,” he says. “He has the longest ongoing record. We intend to continue funding this programme.”

Update, 23 August 23:27 BST: As of this evening, Icelandic experts are reconsidering whether an eruption has begun or not. With no surface changes visible, and no meltwater rushing downriver as of yet, the Icelandic Meteorological Office reports “there are no signs of ongoing volcanic activity”. The aviation alert remains red, “as an imminent eruption cannot be excluded”.

 A volcanic eruption has begun near the caldera of Bárðarbunga, the Icelandic Meteorological Office (IMO) announced on 23 August. Officials have raised the area’s aviation colour code to red, signifying that an “eruption is imminent or in progress”.

All is quiet on the surface above the Bárðarbunga caldera. {credit}Halldór Björnsson/Icelandic Meteorological Office{/credit}

The eruption is taking place beneath 150–400 metres of ice, north and east of the Bárðarbunga caldera. For the past week magma has been rising from the deep and forming a long underground sheet of freshly cooled rock, known as a dyke. The formation of the dyke has been marked by a series of intense earthquakes stretching from Bárðarbunga towards a glacier called Dyngjujökull (see ‘Icelandic volcano shakes ominously’).

Scientists from the IMO and the University of Iceland flew over the eruption today and reported no visible signs at the surface. The eruption was probably detected by seismic stations monitoring the region, as the shaking produced when water interacts with magma and turns to steam has a distinctive energy signature. Since the earthquake swarm began on 16 August, Icelandic scientists have been peppering the region with extra seismic and global-positioning instruments to capture just such an event.

Officials have also moved mobile radar observation stations into place around Bárðarbunga, to monitor any plumes if the volcano starts to emit ash. All airports in Iceland remain open, although airspace of approximately 140 by 100 nautical miles (260 by 185 kilometres) has been closed over the eruption site. If the eruption begins to produce ash, the volcanic ash advisory centre responsible for the region may issue an alert. Those alerts can be monitored here.

How the eruption proceeds will depend on how much magma is forcing its way upward and at what rate. The last eruption in Iceland happened in 2011 at the Grímsvötn volcano and was the most powerful in nearly a century. Like this new one, it took place under the Vatnajökull ice cap, and it broke through the ice to spew ash 20 kilometres high. So far, there is no indication that the new eruption will do anything like that, although the interaction of magma and ice is notoriously unpredictable.

{credit}Icelandic Meteorological Office{/credit}

{credit}Mohammed Al Momany/NOAA{/credit}

Don’t just gather data, do something. Scientists need to stop using a lack of knowledge as an excuse for not doing more to protect threatened species, a major gathering of marine conservationists has been warned.

“Science matters deeply, but we can’t let ourselves be trapped by the need to gather more data,” Amanda Vincent, a marine researcher at the University of British Columbia, told delegates at the opening of the International Marine Conservation Congress, which kicked off on 14 August in Glasgow, UK.

Vincent’s work with seahorses has involved fighting for better control of the international trade in these animals, many of which are endangered. Trade in seahorses is now restricted under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). If scientists had waited until they knew everything about every species – or even until they had enough data to propose detailed plans for managing catches in individual countries – this protection would never have arrived, she says.

Vincent told the meeting that every speaker who called for more data on a conservation issue should also be prepared to present a recommendation for something that could actually be done now.

Making an analogy with the medical profession, she told the meeting that doctors use all available evidence when deciding how to treat their patients, but when there is a lack of evidence for a particular condition they don’t generally stand by and do nothing. The oceans are under threat, says Vincent, and “you don’t do research while your patient is dying”.

She warned the gathering of conservation researchers that “we’re a bit weasely sometimes in hiding behind our lack of knowledge” and told them to “just get going”.

Follow the meeting on twitter via @dpcressey and #IMCC3

Posted on behalf of Mark Zastrow.

Google’s fleet of city-mapping cars are now working to measure urban natural gas leaks.

The technology giant’s collaboration with the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), announced on 16 July, equips Google’s Street View cars with sensors to detect methane leaking from ageing city pipes, through city streets and into the atmosphere. The sensors were developed by researchers at Colorado State University in Fort Collins.

The project has released online methane maps for Boston, Massachusetts; Staten Island in New York; and Indianapolis, Indiana. The team found thousands of leaks in Boston and Staten Island at a rate of roughly one per every mile (1.6 kilometres) of road driven, whereas Indianapolis’s roads are leaking only once every 200 miles (322 kilometres) — a sign of newer infrastructure.

These leaks are too small to be a health or explosion risk, but they are also a growing climate concern; methane is 86 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, over a 20-year period, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Massachusetts passed legislation in June that requires utilities to speed up their pipe replacement, and California is considering following suit.

“We think [this technique] will offer a new way for utilities and regulators to evaluate their ongoing leak detection and repair programs,” says Mark Brownstein, the leader of the EDF’s natural gas efforts. The group says that utilities could reduce their emissions 2–3 times faster by prioritizing those larger leaks.

But just how utilities might actually use the data in practice remains to be seen, says Susan Fleck, vice-president of pipeline safety for National Grid, a London-based private utility that is also collaborating on the mapping project. “You know, I just have to be really up front about this. This is a pilot programme, right? So it’s kind of hard to say exactly how this is going to work out,” she told reporters.

Nathan Phillips, an ecologist at Boston University in Massachusetts, is sceptical that the data will help utility operators identify specific leaks. Phillips’ team pioneered car-borne urban methane mapping in Boston and has a separate project funded by the EDF, but is not involved with the Google effort. He points out that utilities already know from their own records where the ageing and leak-prone cast iron pipes are. “It doesn’t take a lot of guesswork to say, ‘There’s a 120 year old pipe running under this street, it’s probably a leaky street.’”

What excites him are the project’s plans to go nationwide and the opportunity to compare data across cities. Already, he says he is struck by how few leaks Indianapolis has compared to Boston and Staten Island, a sign of its newer infrastructure. He wonders if publicly owned gas networks (such as that of Indianapolis) will prove less leaky than those owned by private companies that need to balance expansion and market share with maintenance of existing infrastructure; it’s the type of question ‘Big Data’ could answer.

“That’s the beauty of what Google and EDF are getting into,” he says. “This is just a kind of teaser.”