Pacific Standard May-June 2013 Cover

Fracking Away the Wildlife

Pronghorn

The population of Wamsutter, Wyoming may have grown four times over in the last three years, but the town on the southeastern edges of some of the largest natural gas fields on the continent is still a dusty pit stop off Interstate 80. The augmented volume of trucks flowing through this isolated interchange only affirms the energy boom of the Intermountain West—and the fracturing of the habitat of the American pronghorn. Once ubiquitous on the Great Plains and high deserts of the American West, these antelope rely on thousands of miles of unspoiled ranges to avoid their predators, and to ... Read More

Burning Ice: The Next Energy Boom?

Set a lighter to an icy block of methane hydrate, a naturally frozen combo of methane gas and water, and flames spew forth at random. However unlikely this fluke of nature may appear — burning ice — it could hold the keys to a vast wealth of untapped, clean-burning methane gas thought to exist deep beneath the outer margins of most continental shelves. Its contribution may be peripheral to the immediate needs of Western Europe and North America, currently drowning in cheap natural gas, but it present a potential lifeline to resource-poor nations like Japan, which already imports more ... Read More

Prop Planes: The Future of Eco-Friendly Aviation?

Glenn Research Center

Since the days of Kitty Hawk, propeller-driven engines have been at aviation’s forefront — even today’s jet-powered turboprops are arguably mere extensions of this century-old technology. Now NASA and companies such as General Electric and Rolls-Royce are developing a new generation of fuel-efficient “open rotor” engines that are definitely not your granddaddy’s propeller. The goal is to introduce these new engines into a regional jet market with the promise of boosting airlines’ struggling bottom lines while meeting future international fuel-efficiency ... Read More

New Dirt on Climate Change

Bighorn Basin

For decades, geologists have been drilling — literally — for clues that would help them understand ancient wholesale changes in Earth’s climate, clues that could shed light on current global warming. Usually, their efforts have been aimed at sea sediments taken from cores extracted hundreds of feet beneath the ocean floor. But in a more terrestrial project this past summer, an international geological team led by the University of New Hampshire began deep-core drilling at three sites in Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin east of Yellowstone National Park. These six new core samples from ... Read More

Long Slog for the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker

Long Slog for the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker

Against all odds, the critically endangered ivory-billed woodpecker may still be hanging on in a desolate handful of bottomland swamps in the American Southeast. Depending on who's asked, the last putative sighting of the large black-and-white bird occurred in early 2007 in the Florida Panhandle or the spring of 2008 in a Louisiana bayou. And there hasn't been an undisputed report of ivory-bills for nearly 70 years, more than twice the bird's maximum lifespan. The putative rediscovery of the bird in 2005, announced with much fanfare at a Washington, D.C., press conference that included ... Read More

Crazy Weather and Climate: Do Dots Connect?

Climate change and weather

At the end of one of the Northern Hemisphere’s wildest winters in memory, we thought it would be a good time to ask a climatologist what’s up with such extreme weather. Even Australia’s normally calm summer has been anything but: First there was drought, then typhoons and then floods of biblical proportions. Granted, such extreme weather has been exacerbated both by recent El Niños (warmer-than-normal sea surface temperatures) and La Niñas (colder-than-normal sea surface temperatures) in the equatorial Pacific. But it does give pause to wonder: Is this global warming on steroids, or ... Read More

Financial Expert: Global Free Trade Necessary

Financial Expert: Global Free Trade Necessary

In an age when spikes in the local price of milk can arguably be tracked to riots on the streets of Cairo, it’s only fair to wonder — just how did we become so economically interconnected? In his 2008 economic history, A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World, William J. Bernstein, a retired Oregon neurologist turned financial theorist, author and adviser, is remarkably adept at providing answers. In less than 400 pages, Bernstein’s ambitious tome is surprisingly successful in tracing globalization’s long route from ancient camel trains to air-conditioned container ... Read More

Trumpeter Swans Try to Dodge a Bullet

At first glance, Crescent Lake, a shallow body abutting a cornfield in upper Snohomish County, Wash., would appear to be perfectly pristine. Mallard and pintail ducks skirt the edges of its banks on waters that — in this contaminated age at least — would seem to be as untouched as anyone could hope. But as wildlife biologist Martha Jordan explained on a recent rain-sodden Northwest afternoon, the lake has become lethal to the celebrated trumpeter swan, the world's largest waterfowl. The trumpeter swan, or cygnus buccinators, winters along hundreds of miles of the Pacific Northwest. ... Read More

Making Sense of the Crazy Horse Memorial

More than 60 years in the making and still incomplete, the South Dakota mountain that is being continually transformed into the Crazy Horse Memorial sculpture lies only a few miles from the shadow of Mount Rushmore. When complete, this provocative granite tribute to the larger-than-life, late 19th century Sioux warrior will be the largest sculpture in the world — a three-dimensional, mountain-sized homage 563 feet high and 641 feet long. The sculpture’s face, head and hair alone could hold the granite faces of all four presidents from the nearby Mount Rushmore National ... Read More

Grasslands Preserve the Lonely Prairie

West from Sioux Falls, hundreds of miles of rolling South Dakota corn eventually morph into one of this country's largest remaining national grasslands, a portion of what is now the North American continent's largest endangered ecosystem. Miles beyond the wide Missouri River, a small sign announces the beginning of the Buffalo Gap National Grassland's 600,000 acres; part of nearly 4 million acres of national grasslands administered by the U.S. Forest Service. The Buffalo Gap grassland is just one integral part of a tenuous sea of grass that stretches from southern Canada to Mexico; ranging ... Read More