Posts tagged asia
CU scientists study high-Asian snowpack for GW clues
Dec 7th
WATER RESOURCES IN ASIA MOUNTAINS
A University of Colorado Boulder team is partnering with the United States Agency for International Development to assess snow and glacier contributions to water resources originating in the high mountains of Asia that straddle 10 countries.
Richard Armstrong and Mark Williams, the two faculty members leading the four-year study, said the aim is to provide a comprehensive and systematic assessment of freshwater resources in the so-called “High Asia” region, which encompasses five mountain ranges and watersheds totaling roughly 1 million square miles. The area under study is roughly equal to one-third of the contiguous United States.
This assessment will be crucial in helping to forecast the future availability and vulnerability of water resources in the region, beginning with accurate assessments of the distinct, separate contributions to river discharge from melting glacier ice and seasonal snow. Such data ultimately will provide a better understanding of the timing and volume of runoff in the face of climate change, said the CU-Boulder researchers.
The High Asia mountains funnel water into such major river basins as the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Indus, Amu Darya and Syr Darya. The High Asian mountain ranges under study include the Himalaya, Karkoram, Hindu Kush, Pamir and Tien Shan. The mountain ranges straddle Bhutan, Nepal, China, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
Through the partnership, scientists and students within the 10 countries will carry out collaborative research with CU-Boulder scientists. The project also will support satellite data processing by CU-Boulder staff and trainings for local institutions and observers within the study area to collect water and precipitation samples for the project.
While about one-third of the world’s population depends to some degree on fresh water within the High Asia hydrological system, not enough data exists on river and stream flows and the contribution of seasonal snow and glacier melt to paint an accurate picture of the water resources there, said Armstrong, a senior research scientist at CU-Boulder’s National Snow and Ice Data Center, or NSIDC. ”
The team requires an accurate quantitative portrait of each major river basin and sub-basin in High Asia. The Indus River, for example, which is fed by waterways from the Himalaya, Karakorum and Hindu Kush mountain ranges, comes together at the city of Besham, Pakistan, “where it immediately turns into the largest irrigation system in the world,” said Williams. “The sources of water in High Asia feeding the major foothill regions where most of the people live are really the crux of this study.”
Armstrong said there is a lot of misinformation in the public arena regarding glaciers, including reports that glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than anywhere else in the world and, if this rapid melting continues, rivers are on track to first flood and then dry up. “Those reports simply are not true,” Armstrong said.
USAID is an independent United States government agency that provides economic, development and humanitarian assistance around the world in support of the foreign policy goals of the United States.
“USAID wants to know how the High Asia water resources affect local populations,” said Armstrong, also a fellow at the CU-headquartered Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences. “They are looking at this challenge from a sustainability perspective, including what is going to happen to rivers like the Indus and the Brahmaputra in the next 20 years.”
The researchers will use remote-sensing satellite data from NASA, the European Space Agency and the Japanese Space Agency to develop time-series maps of seasonal snowfall amounts and recent changes in glacier extent, said Williams, a fellow at CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research and a CU-Boulder geography professor. They also will use local meteorological and river discharge data from throughout the High Asia study area.
“What’s really driving this study are questions about water security,” said Williams. “There is a lot of international interest in accurate water resource data from the High Asia region and what the water security consequences are, since water conflicts between countries can escalate rapidly. This study should provide answers as to what is real and what is false.”
“Once we have a picture of recent and current conditions, we can go forward and run computer ‘melt models’ based on the temperatures at various elevations, giving us trends in snowmelt and glacier melt by region and time,” said Armstrong. “That’s when we start to come up with water volumes for individual rivers and streams from both melting snow and ice.”
The modeling results will be verified using geochemical and water isotope “tracer” techniques developed at CU that allow researchers to follow water as it courses through mountain landscapes. Previous studies by Williams and his research group showed high mountain groundwater in Colorado dominated by snowmelt can be locked underground for decades before emerging into downstream waterways. “These isotopic and geochemical measurements provide unique fingerprints, allowing a CSI-like approach to tracing water sources,” said Williams.
Critical to the project is the university’s expertise in remote sensing research through NSIDC — including assessing changes in Earth’s snow and ice cover — and INSTAAR’s research on the physical, chemical and biological processes in “critical zones,” which are the areas between treetops and groundwater. INSTAAR administers both the Long-Term Ecological Research site at Niwot Ridge west of Boulder and the Critical Zone Observatory project in the Boulder Creek watershed for the National Science Foundation.
One of the biggest project challenges will be to obtain data from some of the most remote regions on Earth, said Williams. The water, rain and snow samples collected by collaborators within the study area will be sent back to CU-Boulder for analysis.
The research will bring together scientists and government officials in the countries of High Asia to coordinate and compare results on what part of river flows come from glaciers and seasonal snow. This sharing of information is important because the rivers of Asia can cross several country borders. USAID support will contribute to the research and coordination and CU-Boulder will make its archived and new data on snow and ice easily available to all the countries and their citizens.
The CU team will hire Asian project managers and collaborate with research scientists affiliated with various Asian institutes. “We already have some good scientific contacts in the region, people we know who are reliable and who can deliver,” said Armstrong.
A number of CU undergraduate and graduate students will be involved in the study and support will be available to Asian students by way of the funding provided to Asian project partners.
“One of the main project goals is to transfer scientific understanding to people in the region who can continue these measurements and analysis once the USAID project is finished,” said Armstrong. “The idea is to provide the local population with the information they need to make decisions that will increase sustainability as land use and climate change.
CU Boulder scientists uncover molded brass artifact from Asia in Alaska
Nov 14th
UNEARTHED AT ALASKA ARCHAEOLOGY SITE
A team of researchers led by the University of Colorado Boulder has discovered the first prehistoric bronze artifact made from a cast ever found in Alaska, a small, buckle-like object found in an ancient Eskimo dwelling and which likely originated in East Asia.
The artifact consists of two parts — a rectangular bar, connected to an apparently broken circular ring, said CU-Boulder Research Associate John Hoffecker, who is leading the excavation project. The object, about 2 inches by 1 inch and less than 1 inch thick, was found in August by a team excavating a roughly 1,000-year-old house that had been dug into the side of a beach ridge by early Inupiat Eskimos at Cape Espenberg on the Seward Peninsula, which lies within the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve.
Both sections of the artifact are beveled on one side and concave on the other side, indicating it was manufactured in a mold, said Hoffecker, a fellow at CU-Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research. A small piece of leather found wrapped around the rectangular bar by the research team yielded a radiocarbon date of roughly A.D. 600, which does not necessarily indicate the age of the object, he said.
“I was totally astonished,” said Hoffecker. “The object appears to be older than the house we were excavating by at least a few hundred years.”.
Hoffecker and his CU-Boulder colleague Owen Mason said the bronze object resembles a belt buckle and may have been used as part of a harness or horse ornament prior to its arrival in Alaska. While they speculated the Inupiat Eskimos could have used the artifact as a clasp for human clothing or perhaps as part of a shaman’s regalia, its function on both continents still remains a puzzle, they said.
Since bronze metallurgy from Alaska is unknown, the artifact likely was produced in East Asia and reflects long-distance trade from production centers in either Korea, China, Manchuria or southern Siberia, according to Mason. It conceivably could have been traded from the steppe region of southern Siberia, said Hoffecker, where people began casting bronze several thousand years ago.
Alternatively, some of the earliest Inupiat Eskimos in northwest Alaska — the direct ancestors of modern Eskimos thought to have migrated into Alaska from adjacent Siberia some 1,500 years ago — might have brought the object with them from the other side of the Bering Strait. “It was possibly valuable enough so that people hung onto it for generations, passing it down through families,” said Mason, an INSTAAR affiliate and co-investigator on the Cape Espenberg excavations.
The Seward Peninsula is a prominent, arrowhead-shaped land mass that abuts the Bering Strait separating Alaska from Siberia. The peninsula was part of the Bering Land Bridge linking Asia and North America during the last ice age when sea level had dropped dramatically, and may have been used by early peoples as a corridor to migrate from Asia into the New World some 14,000 years ago.
The artifact was discovered in August by University of California, Davis, doctoral student Jeremy Foin under 3 feet of sediment near an entryway to a house at Cape Espenberg. Other project members included Chris Darwent of UC Davis, Claire Alix of the University of Paris, Nancy Bigelow of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Max Friesen of the University of Toronto and Gina Hernandez of the National Park Service.
“The shape of the object immediately caught my eye,” said Foin, who spotted the soil-covered artifact in an archaeological sifting screen. “After I saw that it clearly had been cast in a mold, my first thought was disbelief, quickly followed by the realization that I had found something of potentially great significance.”
The CU-led excavations are part of a National Science Foundation-funded project designed to study human response to climate change at Cape Espenberg from A.D. 800 to A.D. 1400, a critical period of cultural change in the western Arctic, said Mason. Of particular interest are temperature and environmental changes that may be related to Earth’s Medieval Warm Period that lasted from about A.D. 950 to 1250.
“That particular time period is thought by some to be an analog of what is happening to our environment now as Earth’s temperatures are rising,” said Mason. “One of our goals is to find out how these people adapted to a changing climate through their subsistence activities.”
The Cape Espenberg beach ridges, wave-swept deposits made of sand and sediment running parallel to the shoreline that were deposited over centuries, often are capped by blowing sand to form high dunes. The Cape Espenberg dwellings were dug into the dunes and shored up with driftwood and occasional whale bones.
The team is examining the timing and formation of the beach ridges as well as the contents of peat and pond sediment cores to help them reconstruct the sea-level history and the changing environment faced by Cape Espenberg’s settlers. Information on past climates also is contained in driftwood tree rings, and the team is working with INSTAAR affiliate Scott Elias, a University of London professor and expert on beetle fossils, who is helping the team reconstruct past temperatures at Cape Espenberg.
While the hunting of bowhead whales was a way of life for Inupiat Eskimos at Barrow and Point Hope in northwestern Alaska 1,000 years ago, it is still not clear if the Cape Espenberg people were whaling, said Mason. While whale baleen — a strong, flexible material found in the mouths of whales that acts as a food filter — and a variety of whale bones have been found during excavations there, the sea offshore is extremely shallow and some distance from modern whale migration routes. However, there is evidence of fishing and seal and caribou hunting by the group, he said.
The Inupiat Eskimos are believed to have occupied Cape Espenberg from about A.D. 1000 until the mid-1800s, said Hoffecker. They are part of the indigenous Eskimo culture that lives in Earth’s circumpolar regions like Alaska, Siberia and Canada.
The Cape Espenberg site has yielded a treasure trove of several thousand artifacts, including sealing harpoons, fishing spears and lures, a copper needle, slate knives, antler arrow points, a shovel made from a walrus scapula, a beaver incisor pendant, ceramics, and even toy bows and toy harpoons. The bronze artifact unearthed in August is currently under study by prehistoric metallurgical expert and Purdue University Assistant Professor H. Kory Cooper.
A video news story on the discovery is available by going to http://www.colorado.edu/news/ and clicking on the story headline. A podcast on the find can be found at http://www.colorado.edu/news/podcasts/
Will the House of Saud Be the Next to Go Down? wiki leaks and asia times reports
Feb 23rd
Asia Times / By Pepe Escobar
Here’s a crash course on how one of “our” – monarchic – dictators treats his own people during the great 2011 Arab revolt.
The king of Bahrain, Hamad al-Khalifa, has blood on his hands after his mercenary security forces – Pakistani, Indian, Syrian and Jordanian – with no previous warning, attacked sleeping, peaceful protesters at 3 am on Thursday at the Pearl roundabout, the tiny Gulf country’s version of Cairo’s Tahrir Square.
In the brutal crackdown, at least five people have been killed – including a young child – and 2,000 injured, some by gunshots, two of these in critical condition. Riot police targeted doctors and medics and prevented ambulances and blood donors from reaching the Pearl roundabout. A doctor at Salmaniya hospital told al-Jazeera there was a refrigerated truck outside the hospital, which he fears the army has used to remove more dead bodies.
The resourceful Maryama Alkawaka of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights was there; “It was very violent, [the police] were not showing any mercy.” An avalanche of tweets from Bahrainis denounced an “Israeli-style” sneak attack and shoot-to-kill approach. And many have denounced al-Jazeera for not having kept a live satellite link as it had in Cairo, and for implying that this was only a Shi’ite protest. The Pearl roundabout is now surrounded by nearly 100 tanks at every entrance and exit. Downtown Manama has been turned into a ghost city.
The Shi’ite opposition described it as “real terrorism”. Reem Khalifa, senor editor at the opposition newspaper al-Wasat, said, “The regime forces just came and massacred a crowd of people as they slept.” They had been “chanting together, shouting ‘neither Sunni nor Shi’ite but Bahraini’. We have not seen this before. And this is what annoyed the government agents the most – they are always trying to divide the people … And now the regime is spreading lies about me and other journalists who are trying to say what is happening.”
Khalifa had the courage to stand up and harshly confront Bahrain’s foreign minister at a press conference, totally debunking his version of events (he called the deaths “regrettable” but insisted protesters were sectarian, and armed).
The Gulf Cooperation Council – the scandalously wealthy club of local kingdoms which holds over US$1 trillion stashed away in foreign reserves and almost 50% of the world’s proven oil reserves still underground – issued, what else, a bland statement supporting Bahrain.
Kill them, but with a velvet glove
Is Washington remotely outraged by all this? The record speaks for itself. United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed “deep concern”, according to the State Department, and “urged restraint”. The Pentagon said Bahrain was “an important partner”; later Secretary of Defense Robert Gates called Bahrain’s Crown Prince Salman – certainly to make sure everything was dandy with the US Navy’s 5th Fleet and its 2,250 personnel housed in an isolated compound inside 24 hectares in the center of Manama.
Even the New York Times was forced to acknowledge that US President Barack Obama had “yet to issue the blunt public criticism of Bahrain’s rulers that he eventually leveled against President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt – or that he has repeatedly aimed at the mullahs in Iran”. But he can’t; after all, Bahrain’s I-shot-my-people king is another usual suspect, a “pillar of the American security architecture in the Middle East”, and “a staunch ally of Washington in its showdown with Iran’s Shi’ite theocracy”.
Under these strategic circumstances, it’s hard to dismiss Lebanese political scientist and blogger at the Angry Arab website As’ad AbuKhalil, when he stresses, “The US had to plot the repression of Bahrain to appease Saudi Arabia and other Arab tyrants who were mad at Obama for not defending Mubarak to the every end.”
Incidentally, Saudi Arabia’s prince Talal Bin Abdulaziz – father of the billionaire darling of the West prince Al Waleed bin Talal – told the BBC there’s a danger the protests in Bahrain could spill into Saudi Arabia.
It’s never enough to stress Bahrain is all about Iran vs Saudi Arabia (see All about the Pearl roundabout Asia Times Online, February 18).
The US naval base in Manama translates as a cop on the (Persian Gulf) beat. Moreover, 15% of Saudi Arabia’s population is Shi’ite, living in the eastern provinces, where the oil is. That makes it very hard for Bahrainis – Shi’ite and even Sunni – to threaten the ruling, Sunni, al-Khalifa dynasty, as the House of Saud will immediately rush in with all sorts of logistical and military support.
Moreover, Saudi Arabia has huge leverage over Bahrain’s oil, which comes from the shared Abu Saafa oilfield, explored by Saudi Aramco and shared with a Bahraini refiner.
Bahrain is far from swimming in oil. According to International Monetary Fund figures, in 2010 Saudi Arabia produced roughly 8.5 million barrels of oil a day; the United Arab Emirates 2.4 million barrels; Kuwait 2.3 million barrels; and Bahrain only 200,000 barrels.
According to Moody’s, to balance its budget the Bahrain government needs oil at $80 a barrel, “one of the highest budgetary ‘break-even’ points in the region”, says the Financial Times. As a Barclays Capital report puts it with typical corporate contortionism, “The announcements of street protests, concessions by the government at the cost of a deteriorating fiscal position and simmering political tensions have created a backdrop that has clearly caused investors to view Bahrain with increased caution.”
So if protesters really want to hit the al-Khalifa where it hurts, they should aim at the nexus oil business/financial sector. It will be an extraordinary uphill struggle against a nasty police state crammed with mercenaries – especially Jordanian military consultants (the “master torturer” of the Mukhabarat is a Jordanian) and now also counting on “help” from Saudi tanks and troops. Moreover, the riot police and special forces don’t speak the local dialect, and in the case of Balochis from Pakistan, don’t even speak Arabic.
Prospects are bleak. The inside dope in Manama is of a split within the royal family. The dreaded, sectarian Khalid bin Ahmed, responsible for the policy of naturalizing “imported” Sunnis to alter the demographic balance and dilute even more the voting rights of the indigenous Shi’ite population, would be on one side; and the king plus Crown Prince Salman (Gates’ pal) would be on the other. The king may be losing control. And in this case Saudi Arabia would be lobbying for bin Ahmed to take over and get one of the king’s sons, Nasir Bin Hamed to be crown prince. This does make sense if seen under the angle of the brutal crackdown.
Time to cross the bridge
What Bahrain’s Shi’ites can certainly accomplish is to inspire Shi’ites in Saudi Arabia in terms of a long fight for greater social, economic and religious equality. It’s wishful thinking to bet on the House of Saud reforming itself – not while enjoying extraordinary oil wealth and maintaining a vast repression apparatus, more than enough to buy or intimidate any form of dissent.
Yet there may be reasons to dream of Saudi Arabia following the winds of new Egypt. The average age of the House of Saud trio of ruling princes is 83. Of the country’s indigenous population of 18.5 million, 47% is under 18. A medieval conception of Islam, as well as overwhelming corruption, is under increasing vigilance on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
The middle class is shrinking. 40% of the population actually lives under the seal of poverty, has access to virtually no education, and is in fact unemployable (90% of all employees are “imported” Sunnis). Even crossing the causeway to Manama is enough to give people ideas.
Once again, talk about an extraordinary uphill struggle – in a country with no political parties – or labor unions, or student organizations; with any sort of protests and strikes outlawed; and with members of the shura council appointed by the king.
The Arab News newspaper anyway has already warned that those winds of freedom from northern Africa may hit Saudi Arabia. And it may all revolve around youth unemployment, at an unsustainable 40%. There’s no question; the great 2011 Arab revolt will only fulfill its historic mission when it shakes the foundations of the House of Saud. Young Saudi Sunnis and Shi’ites, you have nothing to lose but your fear.
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