the-BA : Science News Digest - 21 September 2007

The BBC reported this week on the shrinking of the ice in the Arctic Sea. The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) said the minimum extent of 4.13 million sq km (1.59 million sq miles) was reached on 16 September. The figure shatters all previous satellite surveys, including the previous record low of 5.32 million sq km measured in 2005.

A study by US researchers in December 2006 forecast that the Arctic could be ice-free in summers by 2040. A team of scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), the University of Washington, and McGill University, found that "positive feedbacks" were likely to accelerate the decline of the region's ice system.

Sea ice has a bright surface which reflects 80% of the sunlight that strikes it back into space. However, as the ice melts during the summer, more of the dark ocean surface becomes exposed. The ocean absorbs 90% of sunlight, rather than reflecting it, causing the waters to warm and increase the rate of melting.

This wasn't the only melting ice story however. The European Space Agency announced that the most direct shipping route from Europe to Asia, the Northwest Passage, was finally clear of ice for the first time since monitoring began, according to the BBC. The political landscape is just beginning to hot up, with Canada claiming full rights over those parts of the Northwest Passage that pass through its territory, reserving the right to bar transit. This has been disputed by the US and the European Union who argue that the new route should be an international strait for use by any vessel.

Away from the North Pole, the Guardian reports on the latest evidence on the so-called "Hobbit" skeleton, discovered on Flores, Indonesia in 2003. Now scientists from the Smithonian Institute have analysed fossilised wrist bones that were part of the original discovery in 2003 but had not been looked at in detail. They say they prove the Hobbit really was a distinct and previously unknown type of human, and not just an abnormally small member of our own species.

Fans of Jurassic Park may recall the Velociraptor as a fearsome beast, but recent research has changed that view, according to a paper in Nature, as reported in the Telegraph. Palaeontologists studying the forearm of a Velociraptor specimen found in Ukhaa Tolgod, Mongolia, noticed that one of the forelimb bones has regularly-spaced bumps called quill knobs. Quill knobs are also found in many living bird species and are most evident in birds that are strong flyers. This comes on top of other recent research stating that the Velociraptor was not man sized but about twice the size of a turkey. And a British team concluded, from a study of its foot claw, that it was used to hold its prey, not slice flesh and disembowel its victims, in a study that is still controversial.

And finally, research published in Nature and reported by the Independent, shows that the orchid, the most pized flower of them all, could be up to 85 million years old. A team of American scientists in the Dominican Republic found grains of orchid pollen attached to the wings of a 20-million-year-old bee. Plant historians were, until now, forced to rely on scant fossil records to chart the origins of the plant.

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