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Each credit is a promise to reduce or remove carbon dioxide in one place for every ton of it pumped out in another. Done right, they have huge potential, experts say. But a study by researchers at CAS and the Clean Air Task Force has found some of these efforts might not be doing much good. Writing in the journal Earth\u2019s Future<\/em>, the researchers recommend a series of new guidelines and improvements to the carbon market system.<\/p>\n For the study, Lucy Hutyra, a Distinguished Professor and chair of Earth and environment, and her colleagues examined voluntary forest credit markets in North America, focusing on the standards that govern how they\u2019re run and certified. For example, most schemes require that the carbon will be stored for a set period and will have a risk protocol to mitigate against potential threats like a forest fire.<\/p>\n According to Hutyra, the management of risk is one of the biggest areas for enhancement. To insure against disaster, a forest carbon credit scheme will set aside buffer zones in case the primary preservation land is damaged. Hutyra offers two easy fixes: bigger buffer zones and area-specific risk maps.<\/p>\n The researchers\u2014including Rebecca Sanders-DeMott (GRS\u201917,\u201917), the Clean Air Task Force\u2019s director of ecosystem carbon science\u2014list four other areas for change, from better monitoring to an overhaul of the general market structure, and suggest 22 specific changes. The study recommendations also provide a useful way for companies to make sure they\u2019re buying effective credits.<\/p>\n View extended version of the story<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Over 12,000 feet below the surface of the sea, in the Pacific Ocean\u2019s Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), million-year-old rocks cover the seafloor.<\/strong> These rocks may seem lifeless, but tiny sea creatures and microbes nestle on their surfaces.<\/p>\n These deep-sea rocks, called polymetallic nodules, don\u2019t only host a surprising number of sea critters. A team of scientists has discovered they also produce oxygen on the seafloor.<\/p>\n The discovery flips conventional wisdom on its head, considering oxygen is typically created by photosynthesis, which requires the sun. \u201cThis was really weird, because no one had ever seen it before,\u201d says Jeffrey Marlow, an assistant professor of biology and coauthor on the study, which was published in Nature Geoscience<\/em>.<\/p>\n The research team used deep-sea chambers that land on the seafloor and enclose the seawater, sediment, polymetallic nodules, and living organisms. They then measured how oxygen levels changed in the chambers over 48 hours. If there are plentiful organisms breathing oxygen, then the levels would normally decline. But in this case, oxygen was increasing.<\/p>\n The team concluded that the polymetallic nodules\u2014which are made of rare metals, including copper, nickel, cobalt, iron, and manganese\u2014are likely triggering \u201cseawater electrolysis\u201d and creating enough energy to split water molecules into oxygen and hydrogen. They named this \u201cdark oxygen.\u201d<\/p>\n Marlow and his coauthor Peter Schroedl (GRS\u201925,\u201925) use microbes found in extreme environments as templates for finding single-celled life on other planets and moons. \u201cIf photosynthesis isn\u2019t required to make oxygen, then other planets with oceans and metal-rich rocks like these nodules could sustain a more evolved biosphere than we\u2019ve thought possible in the past,\u201d Marlow says<\/p>\n View extended version of the story<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n According to the New York Times<\/em>, foreign museums and private collections stash perhaps 4,000 stolen Cambodian pieces\u2014artifacts dating back a millennium and more\u2014purloined from temples and holy places.<\/strong><\/p>\n When museums and collectors don\u2019t know, or care, that they\u2019re holding stolen art, recovery is tricky. Dealers in stolen merchandise \u201care doing everything they can to pass it off as legal,\u201d says Hallie Baker (CAS\u201925, GRS\u201925), who recently graduated from the joint BA\/MA in archaeology program and received a Marshall Scholarship to study in England. \u201cSo they are faking provenance histories, they\u2019re faking documents about where it came from.\u201d<\/p>\n She and Robert Murowchick, director of archaeology undergraduate studies, tapped artificial intelligence to aid human detectives hunting for plunder. They\u2019ve created a database, the Khmer Statuary Project (KSP), that uses machine learning algorithms\u2014trained on images from archives, art catalogs, museum databases, and private collections\u2014to automate the identification of potentially stolen Cambodian statues.<\/p>\n For now, the KSP is a work in progress and not quite ready for use by governments, institutions, or the public. Murowchick, who\u2019s also a CAS lecturer of archaeology, is now seeking additional, crowdsourced photos for the database, to continually train the algorithm and improve its accuracy. Eventually, the tool could have a broad reach.<\/p>\n \u201cLooting is not just happening in Cambodia,\u201d says Baker, just the sixth Marshall Scholar in BU history. \u201cIt\u2019s happening around the world. And so this same solution can be applied to other regions.\u201d<\/p>\n
\nThe Discovery of Dark Oxygen<\/h6>\n
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\nTCan AI Locate Stolen Art?<\/h6>\n
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