A group of Montana and federal officials has lined up in opposition to a $57 million concrete dam and bypass that the U.S. government says would help an ancient and endangered species in the Yellowstone River.

The U.S Army Corps of Engineers and Interior Department are proposing the irrigation dam and bypass on the lower Yellowstone near the - Dakota border. That's where aging pallid sturgeon have been trapped for decades downstream of their spawning grounds.

But officials belonging to a pallid sturgeon recovery group dismissed the proposed project's alleged benefits for the as "unfounded" and "purely theoretical."

The group, known as the Upper Basin Pallid Sturgeon Workgroup, includes representatives of state and federal agencies, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Interior's Bureau of Reclamation.

The group's concerns were detailed in a July 28 letter obtained by The Associated Press. It puts the Interior and Army Corps in the awkward position of promoting a costly construction project opposed by a group that includes members of their own staff and those from other agencies.

Project manager Tiffany Vanosdall said the Army Corps continues to believe the dam and bypass would help sturgeon. An environmental study of the project is due to be completed late this year, Vanosdall said.

"We are working on other analyses of why we believe the bypass channel would work," she said.

Pallid sturgeon — with their shark-like shape and long snout — have changed little over the past 200 million years, earning the species recognition among scientists as a "living fossil."

The bypass would be located northeast of Glendive, .

It's meant to give sturgeon access to upriver spawning grounds while maintaining an irrigation system that serves more than 50,000 acres of farmland in and North Dakota. The workgroup said it would be better to remove an existing rock weir on the river that traps the decades-old downstream.

"We believe the most beneficial alternative for pallid sturgeon would involve removing the existing barrier to provide full-river passage," the group wrote. "Across America, sturgeon species have exhibited little success with passage structures."

The July 28 letter was signed by the sturgeon recovery group's chairman, Zachary Shattuck, a native specialist with , and Parks.

Shattuck has since asked to rescind the letter, over concerns that it was not reviewed by senior officials at the U.S. and Service, which has oversight for the recovery group.

"The decision to rescind the letter doesn't reflect on the nature of the comments," said Greg Lemon, a spokesman for , and Parks. "It just reflects a mistake in the process."

Shattuck said Wednesday that the comments were made on behalf of the sturgeon recovery group, not just himself. But he said he did not want to send "mixed signals" about the project and referred further questions to the U.S. and Service, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A representative of Defenders of , Jonathan Proctor, said the recovery group's comments come at a crucial time for sturgeon, which face potential extinction in the Upper Missouri River Basin unless they can get upriver to spawn.

"Their own biologists have stated clearly that this will not work and the best solution is to restore a free-flowing Yellowstone River," Proctor said. Defenders of and the Natural Resources Defense Council sued to stop the project last year.

As a result, U.S. District Judge Brian Morris blocked construction of the dam just as it was set to begin last September. The government's plan includes a 2-mile concrete channel for sturgeon to get around the dam, but Morris said the agencies never proved it would work.

Ancient Ice Reveals Vital Clues About Earth's Past Climate

Inside a huge walk-in freezer in suburban Denver, a college student in a thick parka shoots a jolt of electricity through a yard-long column of ice extracted from Antarctica.

Just outside the freezer, in a much warmer room, a computer wired to the ice registers a sudden spike in a jagged red line crawling across the screen.

"Hey, we got a volcano," says T.J. Fudge, a University of Washington researcher. The electric current has detected a thin layer of volcanic residue in the ice, deposited by an eruption about 8,000 years ago.

This is the National Ice Core Laboratory in Lakewood, where ice pulled from the depths of Antarctica and Greenland is sliced up, photographed and tested. Most of it is shipped to other labs, where researchers do more experiments looking for clues about Earth's past and future.

Smooth and milky white, the 4- to 5-inch-diameter pieces — called ice cores — provide scientists with a wealth of historical information, from air temperature to greenhouse gases to evidence of cosmic events. The record reaches as far back as 800,000 years.

The ice is the remnant of centuries of snowfall, compressed by the weight of successive years of accumulation.

"You can drill into it, and it's much like looking at tree rings," Fudge said. "It's just year after year after year of climate information that's preserved out in the ice sheet."

Specialized drilling rigs pull the cores from as deep as 9,800 feet below the surface of the ice sheets. Crews then tuck them into protective tubes, pack them in chilled containers and ship them to the U.S. Refrigerated trucks haul them to Colorado lab, which is funded by the National Science Foundation.

In a bustling, white-walled workroom in the Lakewood freezer — kept at about minus 11 Fahrenheit — workers push the cores through a series of saws on metal frame benches, divvying up the ice according to a prearranged pattern for different experiments.

Part of every ice core is archived in another, larger room at about minus 33 degrees, so future researchers can verify old results or try new tests. The archive contains nearly 56,000 feet of ice.

Scientists tease data from the ice in various ways. Differences in the weight of molecules in the frozen water hold clues about the air temperature at the time the snow fell.

Air trapped in bubbles can be analyzed to measure how much carbon dioxide and other gases were in the atmosphere when the ice formed.

A solar flare or other cosmic events can leave distinctive radioactive atoms on the snow. Dust blown in from distant continents offers clues about atmospheric circulation.

"The ice sheets are in direct contact with the atmosphere," said Mark Twickler, the lab's science director. "Everything that's in the atmosphere we capture as time goes by, and it gets buried in snow."

The depth of the core and evidence of volcanoes help determine how old the ice is.

Scientists already know when major eruptions occurred, so a layer of volcanic residue indicates the year the adjacent ice formed. That becomes a reference point for annual layers above and below.

The record is remarkably precise, even reflecting seasonal changes, scientists say.

"It's as if we're standing on the ice sheet writing down the temperature for the last 800,000 years," said Bruce Vaughn, a University of Colorado-Boulder lab manager who works with the ice. "It's that good."

Without a record of its depth and age, the ice has little research value, said Geoffrey Hargreaves, curator of the Lakewood lab.

"An ice core without any depth references — I shouldn't say this — it's good for margaritas," he said, poker-faced.

No, Hargreaves said, scientists don't actually do that.

"There's drill fluids in these things that you really don't want to drink," he said.

Some experiments are done only on ice from the core's interior, away from the fluids.

Ice cores have led scientists to significant conclusions about climate, including that CO2 levels in the atmosphere today are higher than at any other time recorded in the ice.

"The only reason we can make that statement is because we have the ice core air archived," said Murat Aydin, a researcher at the University of California-Irvine.

Ice cores also help refine computer models used to make climate predictions.

"If we run them backwards with the parameters that we measure in the ice core and we get it right, that gives us a lot more confidence in the climate models going forward," Vaughn said.

As technology improves, researchers find new ways to analyze the ice. A technique called continuous flow analysis allows them to slowly melt a one-yard stick of ice and analyze it drop-by-drop, instead of cutting it into small pieces, melting them one-by-one and averaging the results. The new technique gives scientists up to 2,400 measurements per yard instead of 20, Vaughn said.

"There'll be science for dozens of years with researchers who are maybe only now getting their degrees or learning about this," Vaughn said. "It's exciting. How could you not be excited about it?"

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Follow Dan Elliott at http://twitter.com/DanElliottAP. His work can be found at http://bigstory.ap.org/content/dan-elliott.

 

Study: Pacific Coast Was Route for Colonizing the Americas

Researchers have found new evidence that the first Americans migrated south from Alaska via the Pacific coast, rather than a route hundreds of miles inland along the Rocky Mountains.

The colonization of the Americas began after people arrived from Siberia, crossing an ancient land bridge called Beringia into Alaska. Huge ice sheets largely blocked the way south, but a gap in western Canada was long thought to provide an ice-free corridor for migration into the continent.

That idea ran into a problem as archaeologists documented human presence in the Americas at earlier and earlier times. The corridor appeared some 15,000 to 14,000 years ago as the ice sheets retreated, but studies suggest that people had reached South America by at least 14,700 years ago. Even if one accepts the earliest date for the corridor, it's hard to believe the migration could have gone so far south, so fast.

So in recent years, many scientists have concluded that the first southward migrants traveled along the Pacific coast instead, either in boats or on land.

The new research, released Wednesday by the journal Nature, casts further doubt on the inland corridor. It suggests that even after the corridor appeared, it wasn't suitable for migration until about 12,600 years ago.

That's because it lacked plants and game that people would need to sustain themselves on the long journey, researchers concluded.

The paper, by Eske Willerslev of Cambridge University and others, analyzed pollen and traces of animal DNA from ancient sediments of two lakes near Fort St. John in northeastern British Columbia. That general area is where the corridor last opened.

The paper follows another recent study of the corridor that also concluded it became habitable too late for the first migration south.

The earlier paper used a different method to assess habitability, and one of its authors, Beth Shapiro of the University of California, Santa Cruz, said in an email that "it's great when two different (approaches) agree on an issue that has been unresolved for such a long time."

Study Finds Ship Noise Disrupting Humpback Whale Feeding

One of the biggest threats to humpback whales spending their summers in New England is being hit by a passing ship.

But a collision isn't all they have to fear. A study published Wednesday found that low-frequency noise from passing freighters and cargo ships near the coast could be disrupting their ability to feed.

A team of researchers examining the foraging behavior of 10 whales in the Gulf of Maine found that some of these 40-ton cetaceans descended more slowly in the presence of ships, giving them less time to find the food they'd normally consume. The whales also conducted fewer side-roll maneuvers — a technique they use to feed on a type of fish known as a sand lance that's found just above the sea floor.

"Overall, I was kind of surprised that we were able to detect any response statistically just because these humpback whales are very adaptable," said Hannah Blair, a graduate student at Stony Brook University in New York who led the analysis on the data.

Whales, dolphins and other marine life depend heavily on sound to communicate with one another and to search for food. A growing body of evidence in recent decades suggests noise caused by humans, including ship noise, is wreaking havoc on marine life. It masks sounds produced by prey and alters the behavior of prey.

Findings like these prompted the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in July to announce a project to address noise that impacts aquatic species and their habitat over the next 10 years. The goals include educating the public about the problem and "minimizing the acute, chronic and cumulative effects of noise on marine species and their habitat."

The study offers the first evidence that noise could be harming the feeding behavior of humpback whales.

"They've been having to put up with this for decades probably," said David Wiley, a co-author of the study and a NOAA research coordinator at Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. "It's another warning that we do need to be very concerned about noise in the oceans because we don't know the impacts."

Using an acoustic tag with underwater microphones and multiple sensors, the researchers studied 10 whales in and around the Stellwagen Bank from 2006 to 2009. They took data from 218 dives by the whales and found that the presence of ship noise reduced the number of their side rolls by 29 percent per dive and reduced the descent rate by 14.5 percent and the ascent rate by 12.8 percent.

Several researchers who did not participate in the study praised the finding and said it adds to evidence about the harmful role ships pose to whales. One said it makes sense, considering a disruption can spoil a dining experience for humans.

"If you sit at a black-tie dinner, and someone blows a tuba in your ear, you might get up and leave. Same with the whales and the ship," said G.M. "Hans" Thewissen, an anatomy professor at Northeast Ohio Medical University.

He said the study shows statistically how whales are disturbed by noise. "The critical question next is how badly it disrupts the dinner of the whales," he said.

John Hildebrand, an expert on marine mammals and ocean acoustics at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, disagrees with paper's conclusion. He said researchers confused the "flow noise" of the whale moving with ship noise and thus misinterpreted the data. The paper's authors dismissed the criticism.

The researchers acknowledged it's too early to say what impact the findings will have on the whales. They said more research is needed to determine how the noise affects whales of various ages and at various times of day, and how they may be compensating for the change.

They warned that "chronic cessation of feeding" could lead to decreased fitness in the whales.

"The next step is to determine whether ... it impacts their survival or whether they are able to adapt," Blair said.

 

 

APNewsBreak: Uber Files Complaint With EU Against Hungary

Ride-hailing app Uber filed a complaint on Wednesday with the European Commission against Hungary, where legislation came into force in July practically banning the service.

Rob Khazzam, Uber's general manager for Central Europe, told The Associated Press that the company's aim was to return the service to Budapest, where it began operations in late 2014. Uber had 160,000 users and 1,200 drivers in Hungary.

"We want to bring back a service that has been embraced by so many people," Khazzam said. "We want to ensure that people in Hungary have access to a service that is available in almost all other European Union countries."

Legislation approved by parliament in June and enforced from July 24 allows authorities to fine Uber and similar services, block their websites and apps, ban the cars of drivers for up to three years and suspend their licenses for six months.

The government denied banning Uber, saying that the company itself decided to leave the country.

"We are ready to undergo any 'examination,'" government spokesman Zoltan Kovacs said regarding Uber's complaint. "We only asked one thing of Uber — to respect the rules which apply to everyone in Hungary."

Uber suspended its activities in Hungary indefinitely at noon on July 24, offering regular users a farewell gift of one free trip in any of the 21 European countries where it is available.

Hungary claimed the company gained a competitive advantage by ignoring rules that apply to taxi services.

"Uber's decision indicates that the company is not willing to engage in fair market competition and legal operations," the government said in July, while Uber said that its drivers were abiding by the rules.

Uber said earlier that Hungarian authorities, who insisted they welcomed innovation, were unwilling to engage in substantial talks about finding a way for Uber to remain in Hungary.

At the same time, transport officials held several meetings with representatives of taxi companies and drivers, mostly after taxi drivers held protests slowing traffic and blocking bridges across the Danube River in downtown Budapest.

Thai Gov't Plan Would Track Foreigners Through SIM Cards

Thailand's telecommunications regulator has approved in principle a plan to issue special SIM cards to foreign tourists so they can be tracked through their mobile phones.

Officials at the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission said the plan would apply to tourists only, backtracking on an earlier announcement that it would cover all foreigners, including resident aliens on long-term visas, the Bangkok Post and other media reported Wednesday.

The commission said the plan would be studied further after its endorsement Tuesday. Foreign and Thai users are already required to register when purchasing SIM cards.

State surveillance of online activity is high under the military government installed after a 2014 coup, and there have been dozens of arrests of people for political material posted on Facebook and other sites.

NBTC Secretary-General Thakorn Tanthasit suggested that the plan would not only help catch terrorists and criminals, but also help find travelers who have gotten in trouble or gone missing.

"We are not limiting any rights. The National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission has no authority to check on the location of users," he was quoted as saying by the Bangkok Post. "But if tourists commit wrong, or there is a court warrant, we will then forward the warrant to a mobile phone operator and seek cooperation."

His failure to explain details of the plan has caused skepticism, since it is unclear how the special cards would differ from normal SIM cards, which already can be used for tracking phones. He was not available to answer repeated calls to his office.

AIS, the country's leading cell phone service provider, said in a statement Wednesday to The Associated Press that it "would be happy to comply" with the plan if it helps ensure national stability. The statement noted the existing requirement for everyone, Thai and foreigner alike, to register when buying a SIM card.

Poomjit Sirawongprasert, president of Thai Hosting Service Providers Club and a strong advocate of free speech online, described the plan as useless, especially if is meant to capture criminals or terrorists. The use of roaming SIMs from other countries, or having a Thai citizen purchase a card for a foreigner, could evade monitoring, she said.

The heavens will be bursting with shooting stars this week.

Thursday night into early Friday, the annual Perseid (PUR'-see-ihd) meteor shower is expected to peak with double the normal number of meteors. Scientists call this an outburst, and they say it could reach up to 200 .

Prime viewing should be in the pre-dawn hours of Friday, after the moon sets.

The last Perseids outburst was in 2009. Thanks to a gravity nudge from Jupiter, debris from comet Swift-Tuttle could stray closer to Earth again. These scattered specks of dust — a trail in the comet's wake — are what flash as they enter the atmosphere at a mind-blowing 132,000 mph and burn up.

"Here's something to think about. The meteors you'll see this year are from comet flybys that occurred hundreds if not thousands of years ago," NASA meteor expert Bill Cooke said in a statement. "And they've traveled billions of miles before their kamikaze run into Earth's atmosphere."

Scientists hope to capture the action with a new instrument at the International Space Station. The U.S.-Japanese experiment's name is appropriately named Meteor.

An August tradition, the Perseids are so named because the meteors appear to emanate from the constellation Perseus, the Medusa-killing hero of Greek mythology.