News from the environment...for those interested

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NIKI2

Wednesday, May 9, 2012 4:47 PM

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Meet the latest player in the fractious debate over "fracking" for natural gas: the pronghorn. Disturbance from drilling is causing the fleet-footed ungulates to vacate their prime wintering grounds in Wyoming.



In winter, pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) migrate from higher ground to the Upper Green River basin – which in recent years has experienced a boom in gas drilling.

To study the effects of this development, a team led by Jon Beckmann, of the Wildlife Conservation Society, based in Bozeman, Montana, put GPS collars on 125 female pronghorn and tracked their movement.

Between 2005 and 2009 the researchers documented a five-fold decline in the use of habitat patches predicted to be of the highest quality, as the animals avoided areas disturbed by drilling. "We are seeing the abandonment of crucial winter range," says Beckmann.

Pronghorn populations haven't yet begun to fall, but a parallel study of the area's mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus), a more sedentary species, doesn't bode well: its numbers declined by 50 per cent over the same period.

By 2009 more than 3300 wells had been drilled in the Upper Green River basin, many of which are fracked, and thousands more are expected to follow. The researchers want the federal Bureau of Land Management, which must approve drilling operations, to minimise wildlife disturbance. That could be done by concentrating wells onto fewer drill pads, and using "directional drilling" techniques to extend the wells horizontally. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21786-fracking-drives-pronghorn-
herds-out-of-wyoming-habitat.html decade-long drought ends

It's official. Australia's decade-long drought ended this week. But that doesn't mean the region is in the clear, warn hydrologists.

"No predictions have been made on the timing of the next drought, but the scientific view is that in the southeast of Australia, we should expect droughts to become more severe and more frequent," says Bill Young, a leading hydrologist at CSIRO, Australia's national science agency.

Young says that elements of the recent drought are consistent with what is expected from an event that is driven by climate change.

Australia's extremes of drought and flood see-saw with the cycles of the El Niño and La Niña climate oscillation. The warming effect of emissions complicates this cycle, so modelling the overall effect is fraught with uncertainty.

The official end of the "Big Dry" came on Monday when meteorologists declared the country's two remaining drought-hit areas – Bundarra and Eurobodalla in New South Wales – free of drought.

The Australian government has a water-management plan which aims to ensure that water will be available in times of drought, says Young. This plan will be reviewed in 2015 to deal better with the consequences of climate change. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21765-australias-decadelong-drou
ght-ends.html

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It could have been so much worse. Over 100 tornadoes ripped through several Plains states in just 24 hours over the weekend. Cars were tossed through the air and houses were pulverized. Hail the size of baseballs fell from the sky, crushing anything left in the open. More than what is ordinarily a month's worth of cyclones struck in a single day, yet miraculously, only one, in the Oklahoma town of Westwood, proved fatal, killing six victims who lived in and around a mobile-trailer park. "God was merciful," Kansas Governor Sam Brownback told CNN on Sunday.

But it wasn't just God or chance. The low death toll was also due to a faster and more insistent warning system by weather forecasters, who put the word out early and often and over many platforms that the past weekend could be a dangerous one for the Midwest, thanks to an un

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