The 16 tiny islands straddle the equator, and were inhabited by Micronesians for thousands of years before they were discovered by the west and renamed for a British sea captain.

They later became part of the British Empire, and played a strategic role in the battles between the US and Japan during World War II.

Today, the tiny islands are part of the republic of Kiribati.

And they may become the center of yet another battle – the effort to protect coral reefs from the effects of global warming.

The answer to our Geo Quiz is the Gilbert Islands.

Coral islands and reefs around the world face bleaching from temperature changes in global warming.

Some scientists think the corals of the Gilbert Islands might be spared some of the worst effects because of the Islands’ geography.

At the national aquarium in Baltimore, children ooh and aah at the colors of fish and coral waving and squirming in the Pacific Coral Reef tank in front of them. A fleshy colored Brent Whittaker, the aquarium’s senior director for biological programs, watches from a foot away. Whittaker says the colors in the corals actually come from symbiotic algae that live within them.

But one day, he says he came up to the tank and all the color was gone.

“The corals were bleaching,” Whittaker says. It turns out a construction crew doing renovation work was to blame. The lights were being left on all night long, which Whittaker says may have raised the temperature in the tank ever so slightly.

Corals are very sensitive to temperature. A rise of just one degree Celsius can mess up their relationship with the algae. The algae leave, Whittaker says, and if it goes on too long, “they basically starve to death without them.”

With the corals go the fish, the eels, the shrimp – all the things that live on reefs. And that’s important to people, because while coral reefs take up less than one percent of the surface area of the ocean, it’s estimated that a quarter of all marine life call coral reefs their home at some point in their life, including 25% of seafood consumed by humans.

What happened in the National Aquarium tank was an unintentional demonstration of a situation that’s playing out in real life in reefs all around the world’s oceans.

“Globally, the numbers of corals have reduced substantially,” says the Smithsonian’s Mary Hagerdorn. “Everyone has a different number, but it’s going down, it’s not going up.”

That’s because like the lights above the aquarium’s coral reef tank, global warming is heating up the world’s oceans.

The Gilbert Islands, part of the nation of Kiribati, are coral atolls, strips of land surrounding shallow lagoons. Seen from space, the central lagoons are aqua; deeper water appears black; and low-lying land, composed of broken coral skeleton, forms a bright, narrow border along the lagoons. (Image: NASA)

Scientists predict that in the South Pacific, in particular, the reefs are basically going to cook over the next century. Anne Cohen, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod says the area includes some of the most remote and pristine coral reefs in the world, but that climate models predict it will warm by three degrees Celsius or more by the end of the century.

“That is a huge rate of warming. Much more than we know corals can actually survive,” Cohen says.
But the rate won’t be the same everywhere. And the variation was driven home when Cohen and her colleague Kris Karnauskas began looking at satellite photos of the Pacific.

They saw some funny little dots, zoomed in on them, and found what they call a “signature” of cold water in an otherwise warm part of the ocean. A handful of coral islands near the equator—the Gilbert Islands, in the nation of Kiribati–were cooler and livelier than their neighbors. Karnauskas says it turns out there’s an ocean-long deep-water cooling current full of nutrients that wells up in the region, like air rushing over a mountain, and fuels the islands.

The WHOI researchers ran some numbers with supercomputers and found that as the climate changes, that current will strengthen. It’ll be like an air conditioning unit, slowing the rate of warming by about .7 degrees Celsius.

“That doesn’t sound like a lot,” Karnauskas says, “and this effect may not spare the corals the inevitable warming for the region as a whole. But that the rate of warming will be slower in these key pockets of coral life may offer them a better chance in the long run for adaptation and survival.”

Anne Cohen puts it a bit more directly. “It’s not looking good for anybody,” she says. “But it’s looking marginally better for a small subset of islands that are geographically well placed.”

Cohen says the Gilbert Islands should get special protections from short term threats like sewage dumping, runoff and fishing so the corals there at least have a chance.

George Stanley, a paleobiologist at the University of Montana, says corals have been around for hundreds of millions of years and have survived mass extinction events. He says they might yet survive climate change too, but that recovery of ecosystems can takes 3-10 million years.

“That’s an incredible amount of time from our standpoint,” Stanley says.

And just a bit too long for humans to wait.

TOP (Present): At present at the equatorial Pacific Gilbert Islands, east-to-west trade winds produce a surface current along the equator. The Equatorial Undercurrent (EUC) flows in the opposite direction at 100 to 200 meters depth. When it hits a barrier (such as an island), the cooler, higher-nutrient water in the EUC flows up toward the surface. The waters near the island exhibit both cooler temperatures (shown as blue) and higher productivity of chlorophyll-containing marine phytoplankton, both of which diminish to the west.BOTTOM (Future): In the future, global climate models predict a sea surface temperature rise of nearly 3 degrees C (5.4 degrees F) by the end of the century. According to Karnauskas’s and Cohen’s fine-scale model, equatorial trade winds will weaken, causing a weakening of the surface current. In turn, the frictional drag on the EUC will lessen, and the EUC will strengthen, carrying more cool, nutrient-enriched water to the surface around the Gilbert Islands. The result will be enhanced productivity close to the islands, and slower warming during the coming century than neighboring islands not in the EUC’s path. The slower warming may allow corals to adapt and survive, making the Gilberts a refuge for coral reef ecosystems. (Illustrations: Amy Caracappa-Qubeck, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

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In Marvin Gaye Park in Washington, D.C., there’s a trash trap over the creek that skims the surface for floating trash. There’s a plastic water bottle, an ice cream container, a potato chip bag, a beer can. All in all, the trap catches about 800 pounds of trash a month.

But over almost all the other streams in the area, there are no trash traps. In most streams, trash like this will float into the river and out into the ocean. And then a tiny bit of it might end up in the plastic archive collection, at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

Mary Engels, SEA’s science coordinator, pulls out a little shoe polish-like tin and points to the dozens of tiny pieces of plastic inside.

“These samples were taken in the Sargasso sea to the east of Bermuda,” Engels says.

The Sargasso Sea is about a thousand miles out in the Atlantic, part of what’s called a subtropical gyre–a giant swirl of calm water near the equator. The earth has five big ones, each thousands of miles across. The way the planet spins and the currents flow, the gyres end up collecting all kinds of trash.

SEA researchers skimmed the surface of the North Atlantic gyre with a meter-wide net for about a mile. They came up with blue, green, and white plastic specks, pieces of opaque sheet plastic, even plastic fibers.

Plastic specks were once fishing gear, clothing, plastic bags, and Styrofoam

It’s hard to tell by looking at the bits what they once were or where they came from, but Giora Proskurowski, a research scientist at the University of Washington who’s worked with SEA, has a pretty good idea. There’s a lot of polypropylene, Proskurowski says, “which is a lot of fishing gear, lines, nets. Clothing is often polypropylene, yogurt containers.
Polyethylene, which are your plastic bags. And the last is your Styrofoam.”

As for where it came from? Proskurowski says in the North Atlantic, “it’s almost certain that the sources of plastic are the United States, Europe, the Gulf and Caribbean region.”

Each one of the five big oceanic gyres sucks in trash from the countries along the surrounding coast. Scientists have known about these giant swirls of trash for years, but Proskurowski says there is probably much more of it than anyone ever thought, because most of it is usually swirling below the surface.

Proskurowski’s “aha” moment came when he was in the middle of the North Pacific gyre.

“The surface of the ocean was flat calm, (and) all of a sudden I saw hundreds of thousands of little tiny pieces of white and blue plastic. It was like when a photograph comes into focus perfectly, and everything just pops out. And as soon as the wind started kicking up, within a half an hour you could no longer see those plastic pieces.”

Proskurowski went on to research this, and found that the wind was pushing the garbage down in the water column.
“After that we started doing subsurface tows, where we towed three meters below the surface, five meters below the surface, and on every one of those tows I caught plastic,” he says.

North Pacific Trash up “100 times”

There is conflicting research from different oceans, but one recent survey by researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego found that the amount of plastic in the North Pacific has increased by 100 times over the last four decades.

But despite the huge influx, Scripps graduate student Miriam Goldstein says there is no “island” of trash.
“There’s this misconception that there’s a big floating garbage dump you can see and walk on. But actually, most of the plastic is really small.”

Bits and piece of plastic from the north Atlantic Subtropical gyre. (Photo: Sabri Ben-Achour)

So what then is the big deal?

Goldstein says when it comes to plastic trash in the oceanic gyres, small is probably worse than big, “because if there was an island, it’d be easy to fix–send a barge out there, pick it up, done.”

The problem is that marine animals and sea birds eat this plastic. SEA’s Karen Lavender Law, who’s collaborated with Giora Proskurowski, has seen it first hand.

“We brought aboard this beautiful fish,” Law says, “and in the name of science we dissected it, and in the name of dinner we filleted it, and in the gut there was some piece of plastic, gridded material two by three inches in size.”

It’s worrisome because plastics can gum up an animal’s systems. Law says they also act like sponges for more harmful persistent pollutants like PCB’s, which they then transfer to animal’s fatty tissue. And the plastics themselves can break down into harmful chemicals.

There’s little data on exactly what all this plastic is doing to ocean going life. But researcher Giora Proskurowski says “the fact that there’s any plastic there at all is what’s important. When you’re 2,000 miles away from land and can dip your net in the water and get 200 pieces of plastic, that seems insane to me. It’s like going to the very farthest part of the Amazon and seeing plastic bags in every single tree.”

Proskurowski says it’s something to think about next time you buy something in a plastic bag or toss out a plastic bottle.

The TV executive was fined for threatening public morals.

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Marco Werman: I am Marco Werman and this is The World. When Tunisia became the first country to oust its dictator in the Arab Spring last year, there were heady expectations of new freedoms and democracy. That included press freedoms, but today a Tunisian court fined the head of a TV station there for disturbing public order and threatening public morals; the crime – broadcasting the Franco-Iranian animated film “Persepolis” by Marjane Satrapi. Sabri Ben-Achour reported on press freedoms in Tunisia in the weeks after the revolution. Sabri, what was the objection to this film?

Sabri Ben-Achour: There is a very short scene in the film where this little girl is flying through the air in a dream and sees a giant cloudy figure of God. In Islam, you cannot depict prophets or God in any way like that.

Werman: So, what does this ruling mean for freedom of expression then in Tunisia right now?

Ben-Achour: Well, even though the fine was pretty small in some ways, $1,700, it was levied based on old laws, pre-revolutionary laws that are very vague and that send a signal to both journalists or the public that when it comes to these moral issues you have to watch out.

Werman: So, what do Tunisians make of the verdict then?

Ben-Achour: Well, they’re split. There are some who say it’s an affront to their faith and he should have gotten a lot more than a fine. I spoke to his lawyer; his lawyer says, you know this is a sad day for freedom in Tunisia, for freedom of expression in Tunisia. There are lots of people commenting even on Facebook saying this was a really shameful ruling. So, you know, take your pick.

Werman: What happens to the TV executive now who allowed “Persepolis” to be broadcast?

Ben-Achour: Well, he’ll pay the fine and that will be that but, before this trial, he received death threats, his house was sacked, his family threatened. So, his lawyer says he’s still fearful of those kinds of consequences.

Werman: So Sabri, this is a ruling on morality. What about political free speech there?

Ben-Achour: Well, it’s important to note that Tunisia in terms of political speech is night and day from what it was before the revolution. So, this ruling does not appear to have any bearing on political speech. It does have a major bearing on this morality, public morals question. Politically, people are still making fun of their politicians on the radio.

Werman: Reporter Sabri Ben-Achour, thanks very much for the update.

Ben-Achour: You’re welcome.

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The scene that caused controversy

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In the middle of the night, in the middle of a rainforest in Central Panama, biologist Brian Gratwicke slogs through a stream with a group of researchers looking for little green blobs sitting on a green leaf.

“Anything that makes the leaf hang unusually,” Gratwicke says.

A colleague spots a set of tiny eyes glimmering in the beam of a flashlight. But it’s a false alarm—probably just a spider, one of the team says, and spiders are not the scientists’ quarry. Nor are the venomous snakes or the very large lizard the team catches sight of. No, the little green blobs Gratwicke and his colleagues are looking for are frogs, and after 90 minutes in the jungle, they have yet to find a single one.

It might just be bad luck, but probably not. Frogs around the world are in trouble. Scientists estimate that over the last 30 years more than 100 species have gone extinct, and that more than a third of the remaining amphibian species are at risk of extinction.

Habitat loss and climate change are both playing a role in the disappearances, but another big reason is a virulent fungal disease that likely originated in Africa and has been spreading around the globe for decades—Amphibian Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or chytrid for short.

Gratwicke, a researcher with the Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington, D.C., said amphibian chytrid affects an entire class of vertebrates. “Imagine a similar kind of disease in mammals that could spread from dogs to cats to cows to bats, and cause the extinction of half of those species. That’s what we’re looking at with this disease.”

In parts of Central America chytrid is spreading around 20 miles a year. That’s why biologists here in Panama are racing to collect frogs and other amphibians ahead of the fungus.

Finally, on this night in the jungle, success—a glass frog guarding a gelatinous pile of eggs, with tiny tadpoles wiggling inside. The glass frog’s skin is transparent, and right above its stomach, you can see its tiny white heart beating.

It’s a stunning sight, but that’s it for this expedition—just a single frog.

The researchers have had better luck elsewhere, and when they do find frogs, they pack them into plastic bags and medevac them out of the forest like injured soldiers, to tightly controlled buildings like the ones Angie Estrada works in at the Summit Zoo, in Gamboa, Panama. The buildings are basically converted shipping containers that Estrada calls “pods”—a safe, “chytrid free” population of frogs in captivity.

Each pod holds row upon row of aquariums, fog machines, and UV lights, which Estrada says are meant to reproduce the specific conditions of each species’ natural habitats.

“Some of these frogs are coming from cloudy mountain forests,” Estrada says, “so our pods need to keep up with high humidity and low temperatures. They need to have light–white lights resembling night light and day light. We also need to do UV lights (to allow them) to go through metamorphosis.”

The frogs in the pods are some of the most remarkable you’ll see anywhere. Some look like bright yellow decomposing leaves, others are black as tar and have a crown like a triceratops.

And the pods hold some of the very last of their kind.

”We call them arks,” Estrada says, “amphibian arks, because we’re basically keeping them alive for future generations.”

And yet it’s a bit of a rag-tag effort, as scientists race to keep up with a disease that they say is killing frogs fast.

Edgardo Griffith, who runs the El Valle Amphibian Conservation Center in Western Panama, where the fungus swept through several years ago, says scientists there were “behind the chytrid wave.” When chytrid arrived in El Valle, Griffith says, “we didn’t even have a facility. So we had to keep frogs in hotel rooms.”

Griffith’s new facility is slightly more sophisticated. His quarantined building is home to a dozen vulnerable local species.

But being as exotic as they are also means there’s no rule book on how to take care of these frogs. Nobody knew exactly what some of them ate, or what they needed to mate. The researchers are learning as they go. And Griffith says they “lost a lot” of frogs along the way.

Now, you might be asking yourself, why go to all this trouble to save a bunch of amphibians? Well, the Smithsonian’s Brian Gratwicke says some of them may prove important to humans.

“There’s a species of frog in Australia that produces a chemical called asirin, which blocks HIV transmission to T-cells,” Gratwicke says. And he says the skin of other frogs has produced compounds that kill “superbugs” in hospitals. That’s why Gratwicke believes that every extinction is a lost opportunity for humans.

“The untapped resources of our amphibian biodiversity are virtually unknown,” he says.

But Gratwicke says there’s another important reason. “’To keep every cog and wheel is the first rule of intelligent tinkering,’” Gratwicke says, quoting the legendary ecologist Aldo Leopold. In this case, he says, “amphibians are more than just the cogs and wheels. They are the entire middle of the food chain. They eat all of the bugs that are then eaten by snakes and birds and other things. So we just want to make sure we look after them.”

Of course frogs can only play their vital ecological roles if they can survive in the wild. And that likely can’t happen for most of the species now being sheltered here in Panama without some kind of solution to the Chytrid problem. There is promising research in the United States, where scientists have discovered bacteria that confer immunity to the fungus for some amphibians. But so far there is no miracle cure that will work in the wild.

Meanwhile, Angie Estrada has had a breakthrough in her efforts to save at least one endangered species in her frog pod in Gamboa, where about 80 miniature black and green frogs hop around a critter keeper. Estrada says they’re a brood of Atelopus certus babies, “one of the first Atelopus born in captivity ever!”

The species is native to a sliver of Panamanian forest called the Darien. There may be 150 species of frogs there altogether, and it’s still chytrid free. But scientists estimate that the fungus will arrive there in a year or two, and that ninety percent of them will die.

Estrada hopes that some day, though, her baby frogs may be able to leave her amphibian arc and go back to their parents’ forest home.

“I know it’s crazy,” Estrada says, “but these may be the founders for repopulating these areas.”