Saving endangered baleen whales could boost the carbon storage capacity of the Southern Ocean, suggests a new study of whale faeces. Whale faeces once provided huge quantities of iron to a now anaemic Southern Ocean, boosting the growth of carbon-sequestering phytoplankton.

So says Stephen Nicol of the Australian Antarctic Division, based in Kingston, Tasmania, who has found "huge amounts of iron in whale poo". He believes that before commercial whaling, baleen whale faeces may have accounted for some 12 per cent of the iron on the surface of the Southern Ocean.

Previous studies have shown that iron is crucial to ocean health because plankton need it to grow. "If you add soluble iron to the ocean, you get instant phytoplankton growth," says Nicol. The amount of iron in whale faeces means that protecting Antarctic whales could swell populations of phytoplankton, which absorb carbon dioxide.

Antarctic krill (Euphausia superba) feed on the phytoplankton, concentrating the iron in their tissue. And in turn, baleen whales eat the krill.

Canadian industries are pumping out more cancer-causing carcinogens than their U.S. counterparts in the Great Lakes region and Windsorites are among the hardest hit, says a binational coalition of environmental groups.

Four million kilograms of deadly chemicals -- including mercury, lead, formaldehyde and benzene -- were released by large industries into the air in 2007 from both sides of the border, according to the coalition's report Partners in Pollution 2.

The greatest level of toxins within the Great Lakes basin was found in the stretch between Sarnia and Windsor that included the St. Clair River, Lake St. Clair and Detroit River areas, the report said.

"The potential to be in contact with toxic substances are higher there than elsewhere," said John Jackson, program director for Great Lakes United, a coalition of citizens groups that monitors toxic substances and participated in the study. "Of course, health is at risk with that."

But determining exact health risks is difficult because of a lack of studies and funding to support that work, he said.

"Cancer is a horrible thing, but it's only one of the impacts," Jackson said. "You have higher numbers of birth deformities, disruption of development of the brain and the ability to reproduce because these substances give a wide range of negative impacts."

Tremors coming form Iceland's volcanic eruption stay strong, while the smoke and fumes have much less ash and the plume has stayed at low levels.

Huge ash clouds caused by the volcanic eruption under the southwestern Eyjafjallajokull glacier disrupted flights and paralyzed airports across northern Europe.

Scientists, however, announced strong tremors and lower plume on Wednesday, Reuters reported.

"Only the northernmost fissure is erupting now and the plume is occasionally reaching a height of 3 km (1.9 miles), but it is mostly below that," meteorological office geophysicist Steinunn Jakobsdottir told a news conference. "

"It (the plume) is kind of stable at a height of 2 to 3 km," she added.

Seismologist Bryndis Brandsdottir believes the tremors could be a sign for a lava build up or molten rock within the crater.

Global warming, which altered European winds, was partially to blame for flight disruptions in Europe caused by an ash cloud from an Icelandic volcano, the New Scientist has said, according to RIA Novosti.

Altered weather patterns worsened the effects of the eruption by causing ash clouds to stay over Europe for a longer period, according to Christophe Cassou and Eric Guilyardi of the European Centre for Research and Advanced Training in Scientific Computation in Toulouse, France.

The scientists have developed a climate model which shows that western winds common in the area are currently being blocked by a high-pressure weather system. Because of this, more and more ash-laden air is being blown over Europe.

Montreal - Five months after saying the exploitation of the tar sands was "one of the most serious threats to the human race," former U.S. vice-president Al Gore came back to Montreal this week with financial backing from Investors Group, a Power Corporation affiliate that is indirectly involved in Alberta's oil industry.

The man behind the documentary An Inconvenient Truth will participate Thursday in an international conference organized during the 2010 Millennium Summit. The event will also include Sarah Ferguson, duchess of York, and actress Kristin Davis of Sex and the City fame.

The event's main sponsor is Investors Group, a Power Corp. company owned by the Desmarais family. The Desmarais family and their Belgian partner, Albert Frere, are the largest shareholders in oil company Total, which hopes to take three billion barrels of oil from the Alberta tar sands over the next 30 years.

During a trip to Toronto at the end of November, Gore said the exploitation of the tar sands is the "largest source of polluting energy on earth" and represents "one of the most serious threats to the human race."

"The oil pulled from the tar sands gives a Toyota Prius the carbon footprint of a Hummer," Gore said at the time, after blasting the Canadian government for its soft position on the exploitation of the tar sands.

There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production - with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas - parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia - where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.

The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree - a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars' worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.

To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world's weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth's climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. "A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale," warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, "because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century."

The latest volcano eruption in Iceland is now being used as an example by the Global Warming fanatics of how thinning ice caps can actually cause volcanoes to erupt. The latest is how thinning ice caps in Iceland are releasing pressure on the ground and creating liquid magma. Freysteinn Sigmundsson, a vulcanologist at the University of Iceland, goes on to say that melting ice caused by Global Warming can influence magmatic systems as seen from the increasing volcano activity at the end of the Ice Age 10,000 years ago apparently because as the ice caps melted, the land rose.

Carolina Pagli, a geophysicist at the University of Leeds in England warns of the risk of volcano eruptions in other ice covered areas such as Antarctica and Alaska because the decrease in pressure on the ground from decreasing ice caps can have effects in deep areas where magma is produced.

Pagli and Sigmundsson wrote a 2008 paper in the scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters about possible links between global warming and Icelandic volcanoes.

Their report said that about 10 percent of Iceland's biggest ice cap, Vatnajokull, has melted since 1890 and the land nearby was rising about 25 millimetres (0.98 inch) a year, bringing shifts in geological stresses.

They estimated that the thaw had led to the formation of 1.4 cubic km (0.3 cubic mile) of magma deep below ground over the past century.

At high pressures such as under an ice cap, they believe that rocks cannot expand to turn into liquid magma even if they are hot enough. "As the ice melts the rock can melt because the pressure decreases," she said.

Iceland is known as the land of fire and ice and on the slopes of the Eyjafjallajokull glacier this has never been more true as these pictures show its volcano spewing molten ash into the sky at around 100 metres a second.

This is the dramatic crucible of lava and lightning which has grounded flights across the Atlantic and northern Europe, bring chaos to hundreds of thousands of passengers.

Ripping a half-mile fissure in a field of ice just over four weeks ago, the volcano ejected lava bombs and created forks of lightning, thought to be caused by charge-inducing collisions in volcanic dust. And, as these pictures taken late on Sunday show, it is still wreaking havoc.

As people in Britain and the rest of Europe are caught up with the unprecedented travel chaos caused by the eruption, those in Iceland are living with blankets of ash falling from the sky and fears of volcanic floods.

Almost completely blocking out an otherwise blue sky, the cloud released from the volcano resembles a tornado as it sweeps across the landscape.

On remote farms, animals, houses and nearby mountain ranges have been coated in grey as the wall of fog moves across the sky, creating the impression it is the middle of the night.

A handful of flights are now running from European airports after some airspace was reopened. This follows five days of inactivity caused by the spread of volcanic ash from Iceland. Planes have been taking off from major cities across Europe - however many flights remain cancelled. According to meteorologists, the skies over Europe begin to clear as the volcano ash cloud was pushed away from European airspace. However, the situation for the UK looks gloomy as recent weather reports suggest the ash cloud is returning to British air space.

Volcanic ash has left hundreds of thousands of people trapped in airports putting the aviation industry in meltdown. But as the airspace slowly starts to reopen, the question is raised by many if the reaction to the ash cloud was indeed an OVER-reaction. RT's Gayane Chichakyan investigates.

Free Port - A rarely seen species of whale was stranded yesterday at the shoreline of Barangay Cawag in Subic, Zambales, the first time that such a stranding of an "elusive" deep-sea creature was documented in the Philippines.

The whale, a male specimen of the Blainville's Beaked Whale (Mesoplodon densirostris), was seen circling the area for two days, then ended up dead at the seashore on Wednesday morning, witnesses said.

Residents of sitio Matangib, located near the Hanjin shipyard at the Redondo Peninsula here, said they tried to push back the whale to deeper waters, "but it kept coming back to the shallows."

The stranding was documented by authorities from the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority's Ecology Center, the local office of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources, and the Ocean Adventure Marine Park.

Dr. Leo Suarez, a marine biologist at the Ocean Adventure, said this was the first time for biologists to document the beaching of a Blainville's Beaked Whale in the country.

"This is certainly a rare sighting," Suarez said. "I believe this is the first time that a Blainville's Beaked Whale has stranded itself here in the Philippines."

He added that the cause of the stranding was not known, as the whale species is known to inhabit waters from 1,600 to 3,000 feet deep.