Giant ice island breaks off Arctic shelf
Staff and agencies
Friday December 29, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
An ice island the size of a small city is adrift in the Arctic after breaking free from one of Canada's largest ice shelves, scientists said today.
The ice island is 37 metres (120ft) thick and measures 9 miles by 3 miles, according to the CanWest News Service. It broke clear from Ellesmere island, about 500 miles south of the North Pole, 16 months ago, triggering tremors so powerful they were picked up by earthquake monitors 155 miles away.
Scientists have only just released details about the island after piecing together the break-up from seismic monitors and satellite images.
Within days of breaking free from its fjord on Ellesmere, the floating ice island had drifted a few miles offshore. It travelled west for 31 miles until it froze into the sea ice in early winter.
The island was part of the Ayles ice shelf, one of six major ice shelves in Canada's Arctic. Scientists believe the shelf's break-up - the largest of its kind in the Canadian Artic in 30 years - is the result of global warming.
The Artic expert Warwick Vincent, of Laval University in Quebec, said he had never seen such a dramatic loss of sea ice and suggested the break-up indicated that climate change was accelerating.
Dr Vincent, who has travelled to the ice island, said yesterday: "This is a dramatic and disturbing event. It shows that we are losing remarkable features of the Canadian North that have been in place for many thousands of years. We are crossing climate thresholds, and these may signal the onset of accelerated change ahead.
"We think this incident is consistent with global climate change. We aren't able to connect all of the dots ... but unusually warm temperatures definitely played a major role."
He said Canada's remaining ice shelves were 90% smaller than when they were first discovered 100 years ago.
The huge ice island could pose a hazard to shipping and the oil and gas industry if it drifts further south into the Beaufort sea in the spring thaw.
Laurie Weir, who monitors ice conditions for the Canadian Ice Service, said: "Over the next few years this ice island could drift into populated shipping routes. There's significant oil and gas development in this region as well, so we'll have to keep monitoring its location over the next few years."
Ms Weir was poring over satellite images in 2005 when she noticed that the shelf had split and separated.
She notified Luke Copland, head of the new global ice laboratory at the University of Ottawa, who initiated an effort to find out what happened.
Using US and Canadian satellite images, as well as data from seismic monitors, Professor Copland discovered that the ice shelf collapsed on the afternoon of August 13 2005.
"What surprised us was how quickly it happened," he said. "It's pretty alarming. Even 10 years ago scientists assumed that when global warming changes occur that it would happen gradually so that perhaps we expected these ice shelves just to melt away quite slowly, but the big surprise is that, for one they are going, but secondly, that when they do go, they just go suddenly, it's all at once, in a span of an hour."
http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1979937,00.html
FDA says food from clones is safe
Some critics say such products ought to bear a label. However, the agency's report does not address that issue.
By Karen Kaplan, Times Staff Writer
10:12 AM PST, December 29, 2006
The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday formally endorsed the meat and milk from cloned cattle, pigs and goats as safe, but the agency's 678-page report failed to satisfy critics who cite concerns rooted in ethics, not science.
"Neither the agency nor animal scientists are qualified to tell us whether and when it is ethically acceptable for humans to alter the essential nature of animals," said Carol Tucker Foreman of Washington-based Consumer Federation of America's Food Policy Institute.
She and others said it was time for a national discussion on whether tailor-making animals in laboratories was wise.
"Congressional hearings might start a robust societal dialogue on those issues," said Gregory Jaffe, biotechnology director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
Polls show Americans are hardly clamoring for bacon cheeseburgers made from cloned animals or their offspring. In a survey released this month by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology, 64% of respondents were at least somewhat "uncomfortable with animal cloning."
Such sentiments were outside the scope of the FDA's scientific review. The agency's Center for Veterinary Medicine focused on the health of cloned animals and their progeny, tracking them with physical examinations and blood tests and comparing the results with animals bred conventionally. Researchers also conducted detailed chemical analyses of meat and milk from clones and their offspring.
"We looked at essential elements like vitamins, fatty acids — a whole array of different components — to try to determine if there was any distinguishable difference between foods from clones and their offspring compared to foods from conventionally raised animals," said Stephen F. Sundlof, director of the Center for Veterinary Medicine. "There was no difference."
The report didn't address whether products derived from clones would require special labeling.
Cloning allows farmers and ranchers to create what is essentially a delayed identical twin of a prized animal — perhaps a dairy cow that's an unusually prolific milk producer or a bull whose offspring make for consistently lean and juicy steaks.
A voluntary moratorium has kept most cloned animals and their offspring out of the food supply. The moratorium will remain in effect until the FDA issues its final ruling, possibly by the end of 2007.
If the report is adopted, the United States will be the first country to approve the use of animal cloning in food production, Sundlof said.
To create a clone, the genes of a normal egg are replaced with DNA from the desired animal. An electric shock induces the egg to grow with the copied genetic material; the egg is then implanted into a uterus.
Cloning is simply an extension of assisted reproduction technologies that ranchers have been using since the 1950s, said Amy Iager, co-owner of a midsize dairy farm in Fulton, Md.
Because clones are expensive to produce — about $20,000 — they are used primarily for breeding; their offspring head to slaughterhouses or milking barns.
The FDA's risk assessment found that cloned animals were more likely to have birth defects and other life-threatening problems in utero or shortly after birth. But those problems have been seen with other breeding technologies as well; and current federal inspections would keep any unsuitable animals out of the food supply, Sundlof said.
In fact, he said, there's no reason to treat a clone differently from the rest of a herd.
That conclusion makes consumer advocates fear that products from clones will wind up in grocery stores and restaurants without special labeling that would give shoppers the opportunity to avoid the products.
Sundlof said the FDA could only require labeling if a food contained a harmful substance or lacked an essential element — neither of which appears to be the case with cloned animal products. Still, he said, the agency will hold off on making a decision on labeling until it reviews public comments received over the next 90 days.
Some producers may be able to advertise that their products are not derived from cloning, just as milk producers can say that their animals were not treated with supplemental bovine growth hormone, he said.
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-fda29dec29,0,4189619.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Staff and agencies
Friday December 29, 2006
Guardian Unlimited
An ice island the size of a small city is adrift in the Arctic after breaking free from one of Canada's largest ice shelves, scientists said today.
The ice island is 37 metres (120ft) thick and measures 9 miles by 3 miles, according to the CanWest News Service. It broke clear from Ellesmere island, about 500 miles south of the North Pole, 16 months ago, triggering tremors so powerful they were picked up by earthquake monitors 155 miles away.
Scientists have only just released details about the island after piecing together the break-up from seismic monitors and satellite images.
Within days of breaking free from its fjord on Ellesmere, the floating ice island had drifted a few miles offshore. It travelled west for 31 miles until it froze into the sea ice in early winter.
The island was part of the Ayles ice shelf, one of six major ice shelves in Canada's Arctic. Scientists believe the shelf's break-up - the largest of its kind in the Canadian Artic in 30 years - is the result of global warming.
The Artic expert Warwick Vincent, of Laval University in Quebec, said he had never seen such a dramatic loss of sea ice and suggested the break-up indicated that climate change was accelerating.
Dr Vincent, who has travelled to the ice island, said yesterday: "This is a dramatic and disturbing event. It shows that we are losing remarkable features of the Canadian North that have been in place for many thousands of years. We are crossing climate thresholds, and these may signal the onset of accelerated change ahead.
"We think this incident is consistent with global climate change. We aren't able to connect all of the dots ... but unusually warm temperatures definitely played a major role."
He said Canada's remaining ice shelves were 90% smaller than when they were first discovered 100 years ago.
The huge ice island could pose a hazard to shipping and the oil and gas industry if it drifts further south into the Beaufort sea in the spring thaw.
Laurie Weir, who monitors ice conditions for the Canadian Ice Service, said: "Over the next few years this ice island could drift into populated shipping routes. There's significant oil and gas development in this region as well, so we'll have to keep monitoring its location over the next few years."
Ms Weir was poring over satellite images in 2005 when she noticed that the shelf had split and separated.
She notified Luke Copland, head of the new global ice laboratory at the University of Ottawa, who initiated an effort to find out what happened.
Using US and Canadian satellite images, as well as data from seismic monitors, Professor Copland discovered that the ice shelf collapsed on the afternoon of August 13 2005.
"What surprised us was how quickly it happened," he said. "It's pretty alarming. Even 10 years ago scientists assumed that when global warming changes occur that it would happen gradually so that perhaps we expected these ice shelves just to melt away quite slowly, but the big surprise is that, for one they are going, but secondly, that when they do go, they just go suddenly, it's all at once, in a span of an hour."
http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1979937,00.html
FDA says food from clones is safe
Some critics say such products ought to bear a label. However, the agency's report does not address that issue.
By Karen Kaplan, Times Staff Writer
10:12 AM PST, December 29, 2006
The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday formally endorsed the meat and milk from cloned cattle, pigs and goats as safe, but the agency's 678-page report failed to satisfy critics who cite concerns rooted in ethics, not science.
"Neither the agency nor animal scientists are qualified to tell us whether and when it is ethically acceptable for humans to alter the essential nature of animals," said Carol Tucker Foreman of Washington-based Consumer Federation of America's Food Policy Institute.
She and others said it was time for a national discussion on whether tailor-making animals in laboratories was wise.
"Congressional hearings might start a robust societal dialogue on those issues," said Gregory Jaffe, biotechnology director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest.
Polls show Americans are hardly clamoring for bacon cheeseburgers made from cloned animals or their offspring. In a survey released this month by the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology, 64% of respondents were at least somewhat "uncomfortable with animal cloning."
Such sentiments were outside the scope of the FDA's scientific review. The agency's Center for Veterinary Medicine focused on the health of cloned animals and their progeny, tracking them with physical examinations and blood tests and comparing the results with animals bred conventionally. Researchers also conducted detailed chemical analyses of meat and milk from clones and their offspring.
"We looked at essential elements like vitamins, fatty acids — a whole array of different components — to try to determine if there was any distinguishable difference between foods from clones and their offspring compared to foods from conventionally raised animals," said Stephen F. Sundlof, director of the Center for Veterinary Medicine. "There was no difference."
The report didn't address whether products derived from clones would require special labeling.
Cloning allows farmers and ranchers to create what is essentially a delayed identical twin of a prized animal — perhaps a dairy cow that's an unusually prolific milk producer or a bull whose offspring make for consistently lean and juicy steaks.
A voluntary moratorium has kept most cloned animals and their offspring out of the food supply. The moratorium will remain in effect until the FDA issues its final ruling, possibly by the end of 2007.
If the report is adopted, the United States will be the first country to approve the use of animal cloning in food production, Sundlof said.
To create a clone, the genes of a normal egg are replaced with DNA from the desired animal. An electric shock induces the egg to grow with the copied genetic material; the egg is then implanted into a uterus.
Cloning is simply an extension of assisted reproduction technologies that ranchers have been using since the 1950s, said Amy Iager, co-owner of a midsize dairy farm in Fulton, Md.
Because clones are expensive to produce — about $20,000 — they are used primarily for breeding; their offspring head to slaughterhouses or milking barns.
The FDA's risk assessment found that cloned animals were more likely to have birth defects and other life-threatening problems in utero or shortly after birth. But those problems have been seen with other breeding technologies as well; and current federal inspections would keep any unsuitable animals out of the food supply, Sundlof said.
In fact, he said, there's no reason to treat a clone differently from the rest of a herd.
That conclusion makes consumer advocates fear that products from clones will wind up in grocery stores and restaurants without special labeling that would give shoppers the opportunity to avoid the products.
Sundlof said the FDA could only require labeling if a food contained a harmful substance or lacked an essential element — neither of which appears to be the case with cloned animal products. Still, he said, the agency will hold off on making a decision on labeling until it reviews public comments received over the next 90 days.
Some producers may be able to advertise that their products are not derived from cloning, just as milk producers can say that their animals were not treated with supplemental bovine growth hormone, he said.
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-fda29dec29,0,4189619.story?coll=la-home-headlines
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