Discoveries

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The risk of a devastating flood hitting New York City and the New Jersey coast has increased significantly. “A storm that occurred once in seven generations is now occurring twice in a generation,” says Benjamin Horton, a marine and coastal sciences professor at the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences.

Flood Warning in Effect
New York region vulnerable to frequent storm surges.

The risk of a devastating flood hitting New York City and the New Jersey coast has increased significantly during the last 1,000 years because of hurricanes and accompanying storm surges, according to a study by Rutgers, Penn State University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, and Tufts University.

For the first time, climate researchers compared the rates at which sea levels rise with storm-surge heights in prehistoric and modern eras, and they found that the increases have raised the likelihood of a devastating  500-year flood occurring not every  500 years but as often as every  25 years.

“A storm that occurred once in seven generations is now occurring twice in a generation,” says Benjamin Horton, a marine and coastal sciences professor at the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences who is also the principal investigator on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and National Science Foundation grants that funded the research.

Flooding heights increased 1.2 meters from the prehistoric era to the modern era, researchers found. “This is mainly due to the rising sea level. Sea levels have been rising in the modern era because of human activity,” Horton says. “Sea-level rise between hurricanes raises the ‘baseline’ water level and makes flooding more likely.”

The study, “Increased Threat of Tropical Cyclones and Coastal Flooding During the Anthropogenic Era,” was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

— Dory Devlin

Food Shortage
Lack of high-energy foods threatens orangutans.

The loss of habitat is the greatest threat to the endangered orangutans, and now a Rutgers study says their existence could be further jeopardized if conservation efforts don’t include reintroducing these great apes into natural environments that have enough high-energy food for them to survive.

The study, published in PLOS ONE, found that the density of Bornean orangutans is almost two times greater in an Indonesian peat-swamp forest—just 39 miles from similar surroundings where orangutans must survive on far fewer calories each day for most of the year. 

“This study gives us a better understanding of how living in an unpredictable environment can influence the population density of large animals that spend the majority of their time in trees,” says Erin Vogel, an evolutionary anthropologist. “If animals can’t obtain enough energy, reproductive output and population sizes will suffer.”

The study is the first to compare variations of food and nutrition at similar tropical rain forest sites, some of the oldest forests on Earth, that are in proximity to one another. Vogel, and her colleague from the University of Leicester, Mark Harrison, found that the orangutans living in the Tuanan Forest, located in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia, consumed almost 2,500 more calories each day when fruit was readily available and more than 800 calories when fruit was scarce—compared to orangutans living in the nearby Sabangau Forest, which has a thicker layer of acidic peat, resulting in fewer nutrients  reaching the vegetation through the soil.

“Walking through the forest you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference,” said Vogel, an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology within the School of Art and Sciences, who has spent the last decade studying the relationship between orangutan nutrition and health. “The sites look the same, but one of the habitats appears to support a healthier population.”

— Robin Lally

Fit to Print
Top newspapers show bias in covering climate change.

In reporting on climate change, the nation’s four most widely read newspapers are influenced by management’s political position, despite the tradition in American print journalism that a newspaper’s editorial stance should not influence news coverage. In evaluating climate change coverage at the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, and the Wall Street Journal, the Rutgers study found that the conservative Wall Street Journal reported the impact of climate change the least among the four.

“This makes me feel concerned about the media’s role in potentially fueling the polarization around climate change,” says Lauren Feldman, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor of journalism and media studies in the School of Communication and Information.

The six-year study of 642 news articles, the findings of which appeared in Public Understanding of Science, revealed that the newspapers published two types of news stories: the impact of climate change as well as steps that could be taken to avert it. In the case of the former, the Journal published stories with half the frequency of its competitors. However, the newspaper was much more likely to discuss actions that might be taken to address climate change, which constituted 93.3 percent of its climate change stories. But the paper was likely to frame possible actions in a negative light, citing the cause of climate change, for example, as a conflict between environmentalists and business or between citizens and government.

Feldman said that all four papers shared one great failing: they didn’t usually report on climate change and possible ways to address it in the same stories. “Across papers, there was relatively little emphasis on solutions,” says Feldman. “Discussion of actions tended to focus on political conflict and strategy rather than whether a particular action might work or not.”  

— Ken Branson