Six on Geography and Science: Watch the warming ocean devour Alaska’s coast; "Huh" Is the Closest Thing We've Found to a Univ

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Six on Geography and Science: Watch the warming ocean devour Alaska’s coast; "Huh" Is the Closest Thing We've Found to a Universal Word; Scientists acknowledge key errors in study of how fast the oceans are warming; Do gut bacteria make a second home in our brains?; The Camp, Hill, and Woolsey Fires Are Climate Change at Work

Watch the warming ocean devour Alaska’s coast in this striking time-lapse video

"Jones and his colleagues, in their new study in Environmental Research Letters, calculate that the coast on average is retreating inland by 56 feet per year, or just under 20 yards. That’s an increase of 2.5 times above measured rates.

A decade of remotely sensed observations highlight complex processes lin...

In the most extreme year, 2016, the coast retreated by 72 feet. Most strikingly, all of this is occurring during a relatively narrow window of roughly 90 days, or the open water season, when the coast is beset by waves. The length of the open water season has also doubled in recent decades.

Calculating the consequences over a five-and-a-half mile stretch of coastline, Jones said means that about 30 football fields are being lost annually, and about 300 were lost in total between 2007 and 2016.

Few other stretches of Arctic coastline are being watched in the same way. Jones estimates that only 1 to 2 percent of Arctic coastlines have been surveyed to study how much they’re eroding, and few to the extent that Drew Point has been.

Yet vulnerable permafrost — the reason for what’s happening at Drew Point — is present across the Arctic.

The bluffs at Drew Point are composed of a mixture of frozen soil and thick wedges of ice. They are very sensitive to temperature — and both the air and the sea alike in this location have been getting warmer.

Perhaps more important, though, is that with the retreat of Arctic sea ice, the period of open water offshore, when waves can break free from winter ice, is getting longer. This allows waves to slam into the coast, the most immediate trigger of the loss of land.

“Bringing the level of the sea up to the base of the bluff, eats away at the base of the ice-rich permafrost, eroding it both thermally and mechanically,” said Jones."

Watch the warming ocean devour Alaska’s coast in this striking time-lapse video

Watch the warming ocean devour Alaska’s coast in this striking time-laps... https://www.facebook.com/chriscmooney A permafrost coastline is receding dramatically along Alaska's north slope. It could be an indicator of far more...

"Huh" Is the Closest Thing We've Found to a Universal Word

https://curiosity.com/topics/huh-is-the-closest-thing-weve-found-to-a-universal-word-curiosity/

Scientists acknowledge key errors in study of how fast the oceans are warming - The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/energy-environment/2018/11/14/scientists-acknowledge-key-errors-study-how-fast-oceans-are-warming/

Do gut bacteria make a second home in our brains?

"If we really have the brain microbiome Roberts proposes, “There is much to investigate,” says Teodor Postolache, a psychiatrist at the University of Maryland in Baltimore. He has studied the protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii, which invades the brain but doesn’t always cause obvious disease. “I’m not very surprised that other things can live in the brain, but of course, it’s revolutionary if it’s so,” he says. If these common gut bacteria are a routine, benign presence in and around brain cells, he says, they might play a key role in regulating the brain’s immune activity. “It’s a long road to actually prove that,” he says, but “it’s an exciting path.”

Do gut bacteria make a second home in our brains?

Do gut bacteria make a second home in our brains? Preliminary finding turns heads at neuroscience meeting

The Camp, Hill, and Woolsey Fires Are Climate Change at Work | WIRED

https://www.wired.com/story/climate-change-reckoning/