U.S. and Russian scientists exploring the Arctic ocean finally reached ice on Monday, about 435 miles (700 km) northwest of Barrow, Alaska.

    On a year when the Arctic sea ice has receded in the summer to its third-smallest on record, researchers on the RUSALCA expedition got the opportunity to study the water, sea life and the ocean floor at a location where there is rarely open water.

    The mission’s science chief, Terry Whitledge, said it he did not expect explore such a northerly location without an icebreaker. 

    The team took core samples from the seabed, more than 600 metres (1,968 feet) down from the surface.

    “We think that is our biggest scientific gain,” Whitledge, of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said by satellite phone from the bridge of the research vessel Professor Khromov.

    The scientists are on a six-week expedition through the Bering Strait and Chukchi Sea, coordinated by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Russian Academy of Sciences, to gauge the impact of climate change on the region.

    The weather has been mostly moderate for the time of year, but one recent Russian cold front made work on the ship tough by icing up the deck and freezing up some gear used to lower equipment into the ocean, Whitledge said.

    Microbiologist Alexander Savvichev said he has been surprised by the lack of methane concentrations in sediment where pockmarks, or deep depressions on the sea floor, had been identified. Such features can be caused by gas seeps, so the formation of these is a mystery.

    “The success is that we have collected enough samples for laboratory analysis, and we are taking them home. Experiments will show exactly what the situation is,” he said.

    The expedition runs to the end of September.

    (Photo: The Professor Khromov at its northernmost location in the Arctic Ocean, 77 27.5 N, 166 25.6 W, on Monday, Sept 21, 2009. Photo courtesy of RAS-NOAA)

You have to be creative when you’re a Russian scientist, bad weather is preventing your research ship from picking you up for your expedition and you’ve got time to kill in Nome, Alaska.

Such was the case for a group waiting to begin a joint mission with U.S. researchers in the Bering Sea in late August.

But a side trip into the rolling, lichen-covered hills around Nome, the one-time gold rush town on the Alaskan coast, proved to be more than worth their while for the prize they stumbled upon — mushrooms.

A hillside was spotted with the large, red-topped variety Russians crave in soup or fried with onions and potatoes. Thrilled, the team fanned out to gather armfuls of the fungi.

The scientists are part of the RUSALCA expedition, brought together by the Russian Academy of Sciences and U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They will spend the next month and a half studying the impact of climate change on the water, air and organisms in the body of water between the two countries.

But today is about mushrooms, and there’s no concern whatsoever about anyone mistakenly plucking a poisonous one. “Russians know what these mushrooms look like,” said Elizaveta Ershova, a zooplankton specialist.

The plan is to give them to the chefs on the research ship Professor Khromov, after it finally enters port to load people and gear, to whip up a dinner with the delicacy.

“There’s a similarity to the gold rush,” Aleksey Ostrovskiy, an expedition coordinator, said of the excitement of discovering the mushrooms. “We just don’t have them like this in the Moscow area.”

(Photo - Elizaveta Ershova, Aleksey Ostrovskiy and Alexander Savvichev toast mother lode of mushrooms outside Nome, Alaska, on August 22, 2009. REUTERS/Jeffrey Jones)

Slow-moving Morakot stormed into Taiwan’s typhoon hall of infamy this past week, rescue teams complained, largely because clouds hovered in the hardest hit areas even after the killer storm had passed.

The clouds blocked any aerial views of mountain villages in southern Taiwan where hundreds of people are presumed dead from landslides.

Disaster officials on this western Pacific island, a veteran of raging late summer typhoons, couldn’t even confirm the biggest landslide, which buried a village that was home to more than 1,000 people, until a day after it had happened.

But Taiwan’s National Space Organization aims to change that in five to six years by designing a radiometer that could be launched into space on one of its heavier satellites, Formosat-2 or Formosat-5. Positioned around 800 km (500 miles) above earth, the radiometer would check water levels, potentially showing whether a river had suddenly changed course, said Nick Yen, a space organisation programme director.

The same radiometer could also detect changes in the sea level, hinting at tsunamis after an earthquake, for which Taiwan is also known.

“The National Space Organisation isn’t able to do this yet, but we are working on that,” Yen said in an interview. “It’s quite a useful tool for rescue operations.”

Taiwan will seek help from academia and possibly from the United States, which has already developed the technology, Yen said. He did not specify a budget but said developing the radiometer would cost more in labour than in materials. Taiwan, the world’s No. 37 space power, would share radiometer data internationally but keep the technology to itself, he said.

(Pictures - Top: Family members of flood victims look at the site of a major landslide that destroyed the mountain village of Hsiao Lin in Kaohsiung County, southern Taiwan, August 15, 2009. REUTERS/Stringer. Centre right: A destroyed home lies partially submerged in a river in Gaushu township after Typhoon Morakot swept through Pingtung county, southern Taiwan, August 14, 2009. REUTERS/Stringer. Bottom left: Taiwan’s first satellite is launched into orbit atop a U.S. Lockheed Martin Athena 1 rocket from Florida, in January 1999. REUTERS/Stringer.)

Stuart Gaffin is a climate researcher at Columbia University and a regular contributor with his blog “Exhausted Earth”. Thomson Reuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) editorial page occupies a uniquely obnoxious place in commentary on global warming. Over the many years that I have read with trepidation what they write, I have yet to see accurate presentation of the science issues.

They have fed their readers so much misinformation and confusion one can only conclude they consider complete fabrication fair play in the discussion.

The Director of the Columbia University Earth Institute, Jeff Sachs, has in the past invited the WSJ editorial board, along with any scientists they wish to bring, to discuss the science at the University — an invitation they assuredly have not accepted even though it’s a short subway ride away.

In response to President Obama’s revolutionary new efforts to cap CO2 emissions, WSJ editorial member Holman Jenkins Jr. tells us to “…Put away the global warming panic…” and writes an impressive number of fictions in two sentences:

“… Mankind’s contribution to rising CO2 levels raises serious questions, but the tens of billions poured into climate science have, by now, added up only to a negative finding. We don’t really have the slightest idea how an increase in the atmosphere’s component of CO2 is impacting our climate, though the most plausible indication is that the impact is too small to untangle from natural variability…”

What does “… contribution to rising CO2 levels …” mean — implying as it does that natural sources are raising CO2 levels? Does not Mr. Jenkins know that mankind’s activities are wholly responsible for the increasing CO2 emissions? This can be seen in many ways such as looking at the ice core records of stable CO2 concentrations since the end of the last ice age or from carbon isotope data for fossil fuel carbon for example.

What does it mean to write all “ … climate science has added up to a negative finding …”? Even if you have never seen an IPCC report, do you really believe that all the news you have been hearing for decades about global warming and IPCC has been due to a single “negative finding”? What is this so-called bottom line negative finding among the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of findings?

What does it mean to write “ …We don’t really have the slightest idea how an increase in [atmospheric] CO2 is impacting our climate …” Really? Scientists studying atmospheric physics don’t have the slightest idea how CO2 affects heat radiation and the Earth’s energy balance, not to mention the gazillion other facts we know about CO2 and climate?

Then, remarkably, in the same sentence that claims science knows nothing about CO2, somehow he (or science?) knows enough about it to conclude that “ …the impact is too small to untangle from natural variability …” Which one is it? Science knows nothing or science has actually demonstrated something very technically precise: “…the impact [of CO2] is too small to untangle from natural variability …”

By the way, the last statement is a flat out contradiction to current research which concluded with 90%  confidence that current warming is due to human activities. But what the heck. This is the world of the Wall Street Journal of Atmospheric Sciences.