Neuropeptides are small proteins in the brains of all animals that bind to receptor proteins and cause activity in cells. The researchers at Queen Mary University of London, led by Professor Maurice Elphick, were investigating whether a particular sea urchin neuropeptide was an evolutionary link between neuropeptides in humans and insects.
The last common ancestor of humans, sea urchins and insects probably lived over 600 million years ago but we’ll almost certainly never know what it looked like or even find an example of it in the fossil record but we can tell a lot about it by looking at genes and proteins in its evolutionary descendants.
Neuropeptide molecules are difficult to study in this way because they are small, often only a few amino acids long, much shorter than most proteins, and therefore patterns can be difficult to identify.
Dean Semmens, a PhD student at QMUL and first author of the paper said:
“The remarkable process of evolution means that molecules that once had the same function can, over hundreds of millions of years, change to control such different processes as anxiety in humans and moulting in insects.
“Despite their alien looking shape sea urchins are comparatively close relatives of humans, certainly much closer than insects. For this reason, as with this discovery, they can help us determine the evolutionary history and origins of important molecules in our brain.”
Reference:
‘Discovery of sea urchin NGFFFamide receptor unites a bilaterian neuropeptide family’ by Semmens DC, Beets I, Rowe ML, Blowes LM, Oliveri P, Elphick MR. 2015 is published in Open Biology. DOI: 10.1098/rsob.150030
Earth Day is an annual event, celebrated on April 22, on which day events worldwide are held to demonstrate support for environmental protection. It was first celebrated in 1970, and is now coordinated globally by the Earth Day Network, and celebrated in more than 192 countries each year.
In 1969 at a UNESCO Conference in San Francisco, peace activist John McConnell proposed a day to honor the Earth and the concept of peace, to first be celebrated on March 21, 1970, the first day of spring in the northern hemisphere. This day of nature’s equipoise was later sanctioned in a Proclamation written by McConnell and signed by Secretary General U Thant at the United Nations. A month later a separate Earth Day was founded by United States Senator Gaylord Nelson as an environmental teach-in first held on April 22, 1970. Nelson was later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom Award in recognition of his work. While this April 22 Earth Day was focused on the United States, an organization launched by Denis Hayes, who was the original national coordinator in 1970, took it international in 1990 and organized events in 141 nations. Numerous communities celebrate Earth Week, an entire week of activities focused on environmental issues.
The History of a Movement
Each year, Earth Day — April 22 — marks the anniversary of what many consider the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970.
The height of hippie and flower-child culture in the United States, 1970 brought the death of Jimi Hendrix, the last Beatles album, and Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water”. Protest was the order of the day, but saving the planet was not the cause. War raged in Vietnam, and students nationwide increasingly opposed it.
At the time, Americans were slurping leaded gas through massive V8 sedans. Industry belched out smoke and sludge with little fear of legal consequences or bad press. Air pollution was commonly accepted as the smell of prosperity. “Environment” was a word that appeared more often in spelling bees than on the evening news. Although mainstream America remained oblivious to environmental concerns, the stage had been set for change by the publication of Rachel Carson’s New York Times bestseller Silent Spring in 1962. The book represented a watershed moment for the modern environmental movement, selling more than 500,000 copies in 24 countries and, up until that moment, more than any other person, Ms. Carson raised public awareness and concern for living organisms, the environment and public health.
Earth Day 1970 capitalized on the emerging consciousness, channeling the energy of the anti-war protest movement and putting environmental concerns front and center.
The Idea
The idea came to Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, then a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, after witnessing the ravages of the 1969 massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, California. Inspired by the student anti-war movement, he realized that if he could infuse that energy with an emerging public consciousness about air and water pollution, it would force environmental protection onto the national political agenda. Senator Nelson announced the idea for a “national teach-in on the environment” to the national media; persuaded Pete McCloskey, a conservation-minded Republican Congressman, to serve as his co-chair; and recruited Denis Hayes as national coordinator. Hayes built a national staff of 85 to promote events across the land.
As a result, on the 22nd of April, 20 million Americans took to the streets, parks, and auditoriums to demonstrate for a healthy, sustainable environment in massive coast-to-coast rallies. Thousands of colleges and universities organized protests against the deterioration of the environment. Groups that had been fighting against oil spills, polluting factories and power plants, raw sewage, toxic dumps, pesticides, freeways, the loss of wilderness, and the extinction of wildlife suddenly realized they shared common values.
Earth Day 1970 achieved a rare political alignment, enlisting support from Republicans and Democrats, rich and poor, city slickers and farmers, tycoons and labor leaders. The first Earth Day led to the creation of the United States Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species Acts. “It was a gamble,” Gaylord recalled, “but it worked.”
As 1990 approached, a group of environmental leaders asked Denis Hayes to organize another big campaign. This time, Earth Day went global, mobilizing 200 million people in 141 countries and lifting environmental issues onto the world stage. Earth Day 1990 gave a huge boost to recycling efforts worldwide and helped pave the way for the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. It also prompted President Bill Clinton to award Senator Nelson the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1995) — the highest honor given to civilians in the United States — for his role as Earth Day founder.
Earth Day Today
As the millennium approached, Hayes agreed to spearhead another campaign, this time focused on global warming and a push for clean energy. With 5,000 environmental groups in a record 184 countries reaching out to hundreds of millions of people, Earth Day 2000 combined the big-picture feistiness of the first Earth Day with the international grassroots activism of Earth Day 1990. It used the Internet to organize activists, but also featured a talking drum chain that traveled from village to village in Gabon, Africa, and hundreds of thousands of people gathered on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Earth Day 2000 sent world leaders the loud and clear message that citizens around the world wanted quick and decisive action on clean energy.
Much like 1970, Earth Day 2010 came at a time of great challenge for the environmental community. Climate change deniers, well-funded oil lobbyists, reticent politicians, a disinterested public, and a divided environmental community all contributed to a strong narrative that overshadowed the cause of progress and change. In spite of the challenge, for its 40th anniversary, Earth Day Network reestablished Earth Day as a powerful focal point around which people could demonstrate their commitment. Earth Day Network brought 225,000 people to the National Mall for a Climate Rally, amassed 40 million environmental service actions toward its 2012 goal of A Billion Acts of Green®, launched an international, 1-million tree planting initiative with Avatar director James Cameron and tripled its online base to over 900,000 community members.
The fight for a clean environment continues in a climate of increasing urgency, as the ravages of climate change become more manifest every day. We invite you to be a part of Earth Day and help write many more victories and successes into our history. Discover energy you didn’t even know you had. Feel it rumble through the grassroots under your feet and the technology at your fingertips. Channel it into building a clean, healthy, diverse world for generations to come.
The Earth Day name
According to Nelson, the moniker “Earth Day” was “an obvious and logical name” suggested by “a number of people” in the fall of 1969, including, he writes, both “a friend of mine who had been in the field of public relations” and “a New York advertising executive,” Julian Koenig. Koenig, who had been on Nelson’s organizing committee in 1969, has said that the idea came to him by the coincidence of his birthday with the day selected, April 22; “Earth Day” rhyming with “birthday,” the connection seemed natural. Other names circulated during preparations—Nelson himself continued to call it the National Environment Teach-In, but national coordinator Denis Hayes used the term Earth Day in his communications and press coverage of the event was “practically unanimous” in its use of “Earth Day,” so the name stuck. The introduction of the name “Earth Day” was also claimed by John McConnell (see “Equinox Earth Day,” below).
The oceans and other water bodies contain billions of tons of dissolved uranium. Over the planet’s history, some of this uranium was transformed into an insoluble form, causing it to precipitate and accumulate in sediments. There are two ways that uranium can go from a soluble to an insoluble form: either through the action of live organisms – bacteria – or by interacting chemically with certain minerals. Knowing which pathway was taken can provide valuable insight into the evolution and activity of microbial biology over Earth’s history.
Publishing in the journal PNAS, an international team of researchers led by the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland describes a new method that uses the isotopic composition of uranium to distinguish between these alternative pathways.
The link between bacteria and the rock record is not new. Under certain conditions, bacteria interact biochemically with dissolved ions such as sulfur, or uranium, causing them to become insoluble and precipitate, contributing to their accumulation in oceanic sediments. But for the first time, scientists can determine whether bacteria were active at the time and place the sediments were formed by analyzing tiny amounts of uranium present in sediments.
Picky electron donors
The fact that bacteria and uranium interact at all may sound somewhat surprising. But as Rizlan Bernier-Latmani, the study’s principal investigator explains, to complete certain metabolic processes, the bacteria need to get rid of electrons, and dissolved uranium just happens to be capable of taking them up. Uranium is far from being the only metal to which bacteria donate extra electrons. But once it precipitates in its insoluble form, uranium is the only metal known to date that preserves a signal that scientists can analyze to detect whether bacteria were involved in its transformation.
What makes uranium unique is that bacteria are picky when it comes to the atomic weight of the uranium to which they donate electrons. Of the two most abundant uranium isotopes found on earth – uranium-238 and uranium-235 – bacteria seem to prefer the heavier uranium-238. The chemical transformation pathway, by contrast, treats both forms of uranium equally. As a result, a slightly higher ratio between heavy and light isotopes in solid uranium extracted from the ground points at a bacterial transformation process.
The evolution of life
Being able to discriminate between both pathways gives researchers a unique tool to probe into environmental niches occupied by bacteria billions of years ago. Applying their methodology to existing data of Archean sediments from Western Australia, the authors argue that uranium found in oxygen-depleted sediments there was immobilized biologically. Bacteria, they argue, were active there already 2.5 billion years ago when the sediments were formed.
To an environmental biogeochemist like Bernier-Latmani, knowing whether or not bacteria were active at that time and place is exciting, as it could provide new insight into the planet’s chemical evolution, for example on the abundance free oxygen in the oceans and the atmosphere. “We have some understanding of how oxygen concentrations in the atmosphere and oceans evolved over time. There is increasing evidence that traces of oxygen were available already billions of years ago in an overall anoxic world – and bacteria existed that indirectly used it. These changes have a direct bearing on the evolution of life and on mass extinctions,” she says. In the complex puzzle of the planet’s early history, uranium could be holding some of the missing pieces.
The research was carried out in collaboration with researchers from the Institute of Mineralogy at Leibniz University in Hannover, Germany, and the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University in Arizona, USA.
Edited by Donald E. Canfield, Institute of Biology and Nordic Center for Earth Evolution, University of Southern Denmark, Odense M., Denmark, and approved March 23, 2015
Excavators at Lomekwi, Kenya, in 2011. Credit: MPK/WTAP
The oldest stone tools on record may spell the end for the theory that complex toolmaking began with the genus Homo, to which humans belong. The 3.3-million-year-old artefacts, revealed at a conference in California last week, predate the first members of Homo, and suggest that more-ancient hominin ancestors had the intelligence and dexterity to craft sophisticated tools.
“This is a landmark discovery pertaining to one of the key evolutionary milestones,” says Zeresenay Alemseged, a palaeoanthropologist at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, who attended the talk at the annual meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society in San Francisco, on 14 April.
More than 80 years ago, anthropologist Louis Leakey found stone tools in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. Decades later, he and his wife Mary and their team found bones from a species that the Leakeys named Homo habilis — ‘the handy man’. This led to the prevailing view that human stone-tool use began with Homo, a group that includes modern humans and their big-brained and tall forebears. The oldest of these Oldowan tools date to 2.6 million years ago — around the time of the earliest Homo fossils. Climate upheavals that transformed dense forest into open savannah might have catalysed ancient humans into developing the new technology so that they could hunt or scavenge grass-eating animals, the theory goes.
Chimpanzees and other non-human primates use stones to crack nuts, for instance, but their tools lack the craftsmanship of the Oldowan toolmakers, who would strike one rock against another, breaking off flakes to leave a sharp-edged stone core.
In 2010, Alemseged and his team reported an intriguing find at a site called Dikika in Ethiopia (S. P. McPherron et al. Nature 466, 857–860; 2010). They saw cut marks on bones from 3.4 million years ago, when ape-like creatures such as Australopithecus afarensis — the same species as the famous fossil called Lucy — roamed eastern Africa. This hinted at even earlier manufacturing of stone tools. Other researchers questioned the find, attributing the marks to natural wear and tear such as trampling, or bites inflicted by crocodiles.
Aware of this controversy, a team led by Sonia Harmand of Stony Brook University in New York set out in 2011 to find tools older than 3 million years, at a site west of Kenya’s Lake Turkana. On a July day, the team took a wrong turn and happened upon a patch of land that seemed worth exploring. By tea time, they had found pieces of rock lying on the ground that looked like flakes left over from the manufacture of stone tools. Careful excavation of the patch revealed 19 buried artefacts, including stone core forms, and dozens more on the surface. One key surface find was a small rock flake, which fitted in a gap in a buried core as snugly as a jigsaw puzzle piece, confirming that the tools were made through a flaking process.
The tools come from sediments that Harmand’s team dated to around 3.3 million years ago and are much larger than the Oldowan artefacts: some weigh as much as 15 kilograms. The team concluded that the tools represent a distinct culture, which they have named the Lomekwian culture after the site where the implements were found. “Lomekwi marks a new beginning to the known archaeological record,” Harmand said at the meeting.
Hominin fossils and cut-marked animal bones have not been found at the site, so the team cannot yet say who made the tools or how they were used. But their discovery may deliver a fatal blow to the already fragile idea that complex toolmaking began with Homo. Harmand suggests that earlier species, such as Kenyanthropus platyops, bones of which have been found on the western shore of Lake Turkana, and A. afarensis, may have made tools by building on the cruder abilities seen in apes and monkeys. The Lomekwi tools were made in a forest environment, also questioning the idea that open landscapes catalysed tool use, said Harmand.
Alemseged sees the Lomekwi tools as vindication for his team’s controversial find of cut-marked bones. Before Harmand’s presentation, Alemseged’s colleague Jessica Thompson, an archaeologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, presented an analysis of other animal bones from Dikika. None contained similar patterns to those reported in 2010, suggesting that the marks were made by something other than wear and tear — probably by tools.
The Lomekwi talk left David Braun, an archaeologist at George Washington University in Washington DC, itching for further details. He says that the tools look authentic, as does the date that Harmand and her team assert. The identity of their makers has aroused his curiosity: “What the hell do these things look like if they can use 15-kilogram tools?”
But he is most interested in what the Lomekwi tools meant for their creators. Did they offer an advantage over the other hominins that were around at the time, or was toolmaking more common 3 million to 4 million years ago than existing evidence suggests? “They’re a game-changer,” he adds, “no matter what.”
Note : The above story is based on materials provided by Nature.
Diagram showing the divisions of the worlds oceans. Credit: Chris huh
Large amounts of methane – whether as free gas or as solid gas hydrates – can be found in the sea floor along the ocean shores. When the hydrates dissolve or when the gas finds pathways in the sea floor to ascend, the methane can be released into the water and rise to the surface. Once emitted into the atmosphere, it acts as a very potent greenhouse gas twenty times stronger than carbon dioxide. Fortunately, marine bacteria exist that consume part of the methane before it reaches the water surface. Geomicrobiologists and oceanographers from Switzerland, Germany, Great Britain and the U.S. were able to show in an interdisciplinary study that ocean currents can have a strong impact on this bacterial methane removal. Nature Geoscience has published the study today.
The data was collected during an expedition in the summer of 2012 aboard the research vessel MARIA S. MERIAN. At that time, the international research team was studying the methane seeps off the west coast of the Norwegian Svalbard archipelago. “Already then, we were able to see that the level of activity of the methane consuming bacteria changed drastically over very short time spans, while at the same time many oceanographic parameters such as water temperature and salinity also changed”, explains Lea Steinle, first-author of the study and PhD student at the University of Basel and the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel. For her PhD thesis, Steinle studies where and how much methane is consumed in the ocean water column by bacteria.
In order to test if the fluctuations measured during the four weeks of the expedition were only random observations or based on typical and recurring processes, oceanographers of the GEOMAR later took a closer look at the region with a high resolution ocean model. “We were able to see that the observed fluctuations of the oceanographic data and the activity level of the bacteria can be traced back to recurring shifts in the West Spitsbergen Current”, says Prof. Dr. Arne Biastoch from the GEOMAR. The West Spitsbergen Current is a relatively warm, salty current that carries water from the Norwegian Sea to the Arctic Ocean. “It mostly runs very close to the coast. Shifts in the current strength are responsible for the meandering of the current. Then, in a matter of a few days, the current moves miles away from the coast”, explains Professor Biastoch further.
If the current runs directly over the methane seeps near the coast or continues on the open sea, impacts the methane filtration. “We were able to show that strength and variability of ocean currents control the prevalence of methanotrophic bacteria”, says Lea Steinle, “therefore, large bacteria populations cannot develop in a strong current, which consequently leads to less methane consumption.”
In order to verify if these results are only valid for Spitsbergen or are of global importance, the researchers studied in a second, global ocean model how ocean currents are varying in other regions of the world with methane seeps. “We saw that strong and fluctuating currents are often found above methane seeps”, says Dr. Helge Niemann, biogeochemist at the University of Basel and one of the initiator of the study. His colleague Prof. Dr. Tina Treude, geomicrobiologist at the University of California Los Angeles adds: “This clearly shows that one-time or short-term measurements often only give us a snapshot of the whole situation.” In the future, fluctuations of bacterial methane consumption caused by oceanographic parameters will have to be considered, both during field measurements as well as models.
Reference:
Water column methanotrophy controlled by a rapid oceanographic switch, Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/ngeo2420
A team of specialists from four Australian universities, including The University of Western Australia, has established the exact source of a diamond-bearing rock for the first time.
These rocks, orangeites, are already commonly found in South Africa. However, the new study now reveals that they may be present in much higher abundance worldwide, including in Australia.
While rough on the outside, orangeites contain not only treasured diamonds but also tiny fragments of mantle and crustal rocks. By using highly sophisticated geochemical and isotopic analytical techniques, the scientists were able to link those fragments to the source of the orangeites, deep in the interior of the planet.
The work was carried out by Associate Professor Marco Fiorentini from UWA’s Centre for Exploration Targeting and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Core to Crust Fluid Systems, and colleagues from a team of Australian universities.
“We found strong evidence that orangeites are sourced from MARID (Mica-Amphibole-Rutile-Ilmenite-Diopside) mantle, which up until recently had only been recognised in South Africa,” Professor Fiorentini said. “However, ongoing studies suggest that MARID mantle may occur in other continents, including here in Australia.”
The team found that orangeites were formed from lava produced by massive volcanic eruptions several tens of millions of years ago. “With such an ancient age perhaps diamonds truly are forever,” joked Professor Fiorentini. “What is certain is that the new study provides key information about the composition of the deep Earth.
“Orangeites are the solidified product of lavas from explosive volcanic eruptions, forming shallow craters and rock-filled fractures (or diatremes) in the Earth’s crust. Diatremes breach the Earth’s surface and produce a steep inverted cone shape, where diamonds are usually found.”
The team presented its findings on the composition of the source that generated orangeites in a paper published online today in Nature Communications.
Elemental map of a cross section through a pseudofossil. It can be seen that the artefact consists of a complex stack of plate like aluminium-rich clay minerals (green, stacked from left to right). Some of these are coated with later generation of carbon (yellow) and iron (red) giving the false impression of cellular compartments. Credit: University of Western Australia
New analysis of world-famous 3.46 billion-year-old rocks by researchers from The University of Western Australia is set to finally resolve a long-running evolutionary controversy.
The new research, published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, shows that structures once thought to be Earth’s oldest microfossils do not compare with younger fossil candidates but have, instead, the character of peculiarly shaped minerals.
In 1993, US scientist Bill Schopf described tiny (c. 0.5-20 micrometres wide), carbon-rich filaments within the 3.46 billion-year-old Apex chert from the Pilbara region of Western Australia, which he likened to certain forms of bacteria, including cyanobacteria. (Chert is fine-grained, silica-rich sedimentary rock.)
These ‘Apex chert microfossils’ soon became enshrined in textbooks, museums displays, popular science books and online reference guides as the earliest evidence for life on Earth. In 1996, these structures were even used to test and help refute the case against ‘microfossils’ in the Martian meteorite ALH 84001.
Even so, their curious colour and complexity gave rise to some early questions. Gravest doubts emerged in 2002, when a team led by Martin Brasier of Oxford University (co-author of this current study) revealed that the host rock was not part of a simple sedimentary unit but rather came from a complex, high-temperature hydrothermal vein, with evidence for multiple episodes of subsurface fluid flow over a long time. His team advanced an alternative hypothesis, stating that these curious structures were not true microfossils but pseudofossils formed by the redistribution of carbon around mineral grains during these hydrothermal events.
Although other research teams have since supported the hydrothermal context of Brasier, the ‘Apex microfossil’ debate has remained hard to resolve because scientific instrumentation has only recently reached the level of resolution needed to map both chemical composition and morphology of these ‘microfossils’ at the sub-micrometre scale.
Now scientists based in UWA’s Centre for Microscopy, Characterisation and Analysis, in collaboration with the late Professor Brasier, have come up with new high-spatial resolution data that clearly demonstrate that the ‘Apex chert microfossils’ comprise stacks of plate-like clay minerals arranged into branched and tapered worm-like chains. Carbon was then absorbed on to the edges of these minerals during the circulation of hydrothermal fluids, giving a false impression of carbon-rich cell-like walls.
UWA researchers Dr David Wacey and Professor Martin Saunders used transmission electron microscopy to examine ultrathin slices of ‘microfossil’ candidates, to build up nanoscale maps of their size, shape, mineral chemistry and distribution of carbon.
Dr Wacey said it soon became clear that the distribution of carbon was unlike anything seen in authentic microfossils. “A false appearance of cellular compartments is given by multiple plates of clay minerals having a chemistry entirely compatible with a high temperature hydrothermal setting,” he said.
“We studied a range of authentic microfossils using the same transmission electron microscopy technique and in all cases these reveal coherent, rounded envelopes of carbon having dimensions consistent with their origin from cell walls and sheaths. At high spatial resolution, the Apex ‘microfossils’ lack all evidence for coherent, rounded walls. Instead, they have a complex, incoherent spikey morphology, evidently formed by filaments of clay crystals coated with iron and carbon.”
Before his death Professor Brasier said: “This research should, at long last, provide a closing chapter for the ‘Apex microfossil’ debate. Such discussions have encouraged us to refine both the questions and techniques needed to search for life remote in time and space, including signals from Mars or beyond. It is hoped that textbooks and websites will now focus upon recent and more robust discoveries of microfossils of a similar age from Western Australia, also examined by us in the same article.”
An international group of specialists in the field of planetary sciences has found strong evidence that lava flows on Mars may also host base and precious metals.
The Martian surface geology is dominated by volcanic rocks, which are broadly similar to ancient lava flows on earth, such as komatiites and ferropicrites.
On Earth, these rocks are significant hosts of precious and base metals such as nickel, copper and the immensely valuable platinum group elements.
In a paper published online today in Ore Geology Reviews Professor Marco Fiorentini and Ph.D. researcher Raphael Baumgartner, from the Centre for Exploration Targeting (CET) at The University of Western Australia and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Core to Crust Fluid Systems (CCFS), together with an international group, present their findings on whether lava flows on the Red Planet also host base and precious metals.
“We found strong evidence that mechanisms crucial in the formation of ore deposits on Earth also acted on our neighbour planet, where lava flows may have formed base and precious metal rich mineralisation,” Ph.D. researcher Raphael Baumgartner said.
The study’s lead scientist and project coordinator, Professor Marco Fiorentini, added: “Answering the question of whether this style of mineralisation also exists on Mars offers a chance to enhance our fundamental understanding of the processes governing the evolution of such mineral systems on Earth – improving the scientific foundation upon which mineral exploration models are built.”
David Baratoux, a project collaborator from the Université de Toulouse, said the outcomes of the study provide a comprehensive foundation for further research targeting individual Martian igneous provinces to host precious and base metal rich mineralisation.
“As a first step, we examined the prospectivity of Mars at the planetary scale. We are confident that our future work will shed light on specific settings where these mineralised occurrences likely occur on Mars,” he said.
Kerim Sener, a project sponsor from Matrix Exploration Pty. Ltd., a private mineral resources consultancy, emphasised the importance of the research for future Martian exploration.
“Understanding how and where potential ore forming processes occurred on Mars is a prerequisite for long-term planning for future space missions to the planet and for designing exploration criteria for certain sample-return programmes,” he said.
The Martian geology is surprisingly well documented. Orbiting satellites have imaged and analysed Mars surface remotely, Landers and Rovers have directly observed and analysed the Martian surface, and even limited rock specimens are available to the scientific community – with the Martian meteorites representing fragments of the Martian crust ejected by asteroid impacts.
Baumgartner RJ, Fiorentini M, Baratoux D, Micklethwaite S, Lorand JP, Sener AK, McCuaig C. Magmatic Controls on the Genesis of Ni-Cu±(PGE) Sulphide Mineralisation on Mars. Ore Geology Reviews (in press).
Chemical Formula: Au Locality: Sierra Nevada Mountains, Nome, Alaska and many other places in the world. Name Origin: Anglo Saxon, of uncertain origin.
Gold is a chemical element with symbol Au (from Latin: aurum) and atomic number 79. It is a bright yellow dense, soft, malleable and ductile metal. The properties remain when exposed to air or water. Chemically, gold is a transition metal and a group 11 element. It is one of the least reactive chemical elements, and is solid under standard conditions. The metal therefore occurs often in free elemental (native) form, as nuggets or grains, in rocks, in veins and in alluvial deposits. It occurs in a solid solution series with the native element silver (as electrum) and also naturally alloyed with copper and palladium. Less commonly, it occurs in minerals as gold compounds, often with tellurium (gold tellurides).
Gold’s atomic number of 79 makes it one of the higher atomic number elements that occur naturally in the universe, and is traditionally thought to have been produced in supernova nucleosynthesis to seed the dust from which the Solar System formed. Because the Earth was molten when it was just formed, almost all of the gold present in the Earth sank into the planetary core. Therefore most of the gold that is present today in the Earth’s crust and mantle is thought to have been delivered to Earth later, by asteroid impacts during the late heavy bombardment, about 4 billion years ago.
Gold resists attacks by individual acids, but it can be dissolved by aqua regia (nitro-hydrochloric acid), so named because it dissolves gold into a soluble gold tetrachloride cation. Gold compounds also dissolve in alkaline solutions of cyanide, which have been used in mining. It dissolves in mercury, forming amalgam alloys; it is insoluble in nitric acid, which dissolves silver and base metals, a property that has long been used to confirm the presence of gold in items, giving rise to the term acid test.
Dinosaur footprints at Gantheaume Point near Broome. Credit: Bjarni Thorbjornsson
While audiences in Perth attend Walking with Dinosaurs this weekend palaeontologists working near Broome will be documenting the extinct vertebrates’ extensive fossilised footsteps using laser scanning technology.
The researchers are using the hand-held scanner Zebedee to help build three-dimensional images of the prints, as part of the government-funded Walking with Dinosaurs in the Kimberley project.
Queensland University senior lecturer Steven Salisbury is leading the project.
He returned to Broome this week, to take advantage of massive tides (up to 12m) at this time of year which expose tracks on rock platforms which are mostly underwater.
He says it is an intense period of research, trying to gather as much data as possible at low tide for interpretation back in the laboratory.
Dr Salisbury says some areas are exposed just a few hours, a few days of the year.
“So we don’t get many chances,” he says.
“At one time in the past, you’d have been able to lay out some tape measures and transect line and using some graph paper go about casually recording it but we can’t do that here because we’d be washed away.”
Previous expeditions have used on-ground and aerial photography from drones and aircraft and photogrammetry to build-up 3D images but it is the first time Zebedee has been deployed.
It is a lightweight LiDAR laser scanner developed by CSIRO that fires lasers into the atmosphere from a spinning mirror. Distance is measured when the lasers bounce back.
The scanner earned its name from the spring-loaded children’s TV character Zebedee from The Magic Roundabout.
Dr Salisbury says Zebedee is better suited to 3D spaces like caves and its use on flat terrain has needed some modifications.
However, the results are very exciting.
“The more you do it, the bigger the three dimensional point cloud and you can build-up a three-dimensional terrain,” he says
“What we are doing now is trying to overlay the three dimensional photographs into that terrain.
“We obviously have a lot of processing and cataloguing to do back at the uni but already we are able to do a lot of work with what we’ve got.
“Two student on the team are working on interpreting one of the nice sauropod track site close to Broome which we haven’t been able to do previously because it’s too tricky with tides and the extent of the track sites.
Dr Salisbury says the Kimberley has the only example of Australian dinosaurs, up to 20 different types, from 130 million years ago.
An ancient footprint from Ileret, Kenya: one of several sets showing evidence of Homo erectus males travelling in groups. Credit: Brian Richmond
A long-past hunting party left a permanent sign of its outing — and it was not empty beer cans. Dozens of 1.5-million-year-old human footprints in Kenya may be evidence of an early antelope hunt, offering a rare look at the lives of ancient humans, researchers reported at a conference in California this week.
Footprints are the rarest of human relics. They tend to erode away very quickly; only the choicest of conditions keep them preserved for thousands or millions of years. But unlike collections of bones and tools — which are difficult to link to a single individual or group — footprints offer a snapshot of daily life.
In the late 2000s, researchers exploring the area near a village in northwestern Kenya, called Ileret, for human bones and tools instead stumbled on a collection of 22 human footprints. Their 2009 publication on the discovery, in Science1, focused on the anatomy of the people who left the prints: tall individuals who probably belonged to the species Homo erectus, and who walked very much like modern humans (Homo sapiens).
But Neil Roach, a palaeoanthropologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, saw the prints as an opportunity to catch a glimpse in the day of a life of Homo erectus. He and his colleagues returned to Ileret to take a closer look at the prints and to search for more.
They have now found around 100 human footprints, split between several sets that were probably each laid down on the same day. Roach says that the prints represent groups of multiple individuals, rather than lone ramblers. The size of the prints point to adult males, he told the annual meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society in San Francisco.
One direction
To get a better sense of the purpose of these jaunts, Roach and his colleagues looked at the prints of other animals, including crocodiles, antelopes and other bovids, and birds such as storks and pelicans. This mix suggests that the ancient humans were walking on a lakeside buffered by grasslands, Roach says. And unlike the grass-eating bovids, whose prints tended to lead from the grasslands to the lake shore, the humans all walked in one direction along the lake — similar to the movements of other hunting animals.
Roach and his team propose that the tracks represent group hunts for antelope or wildebeest. “What we can say is that we have a number of individuals, probably males, that are moving across a lake shore in a way that is consistent with how carnivores move,” he says. The researchers now plan to study the movement patterns of present-day subsistence hunters in Africa to get a better idea of what their footprints look like. “Hunting is a difficult thing to prove in human evolution,” Roach says. The presence of numerous adult males also points to some level of cooperation.
Other evidence suggests that Homo erectus — a forebear to modern Homo sapiens — were more predatory than their ancestors, who may have scavenged the meat that they ate. Stone tools and cut-marked bones become more common in the archaeological record after around 2 million years ago (when Homo erectus emerged). And some researchers have speculated that their svelte bodies helped them to track down fast-moving prey, while their bulging brains demanded loads of calories. “There’s starting to be a consensus that around 2 million years ago we see more carnivory that has to do with hunting,” Roach says.
“Who knows what they’re doing there,” says Curtis Marean, a palaeoanthropologist at Arizona State University in Tempe. “It could be a group hunt, but it could also be lakeshore foraging.” Some lakeshore plants produce nutritious bulbs on which the footprint-makers may have gorged.
But Marean thinks that Roach and his team are onto something by using footprints to study daily life. “It’s a completely novel piece of data,” he says. “I think it’s a really interesting way to get an angle on what communities were doing in the past.”
Note : The above story is based on materials provided by Nature
This marine scene shows an assortment of marine tetrapods that lived in Cretaceous oceans near the end of the “Age of Reptiles,” including a sea turtle, an early flightless marine bird, a large mosasaur and a long-necked elasmosaur. Artwork by Karen Carr
For more than 250 million years, four-limbed land animals known as tetrapods have repeatedly conquered the Earth’s oceans. These creatures–such as plesiosaurs, penguins and sea turtles–descended from separate groups of terrestrial vertebrates that convergently evolved to thrive in aquatic environments.
In a new scientific review, a team of Smithsonian scientists synthesized decades of scientific discoveries to illuminate the common and unique patterns driving the extraordinary transitions that whales, dolphins, seals and other species underwent as they moved from land to sea. Drawing on recent breakthroughs in diverse fields such as paleontology, molecular biology and conservation ecology, their findings offer a comprehensive look at how life in the ocean has responded to environmental change over time. The paper also highlights how evolutionary history informs an understanding of the impact of human activities on marine species today. More information is available in the April 17 issue of Science.
Marine tetrapods represent a diverse group of living and extinct species of mammals, reptiles, amphibians and birds that all play–or played–a critical role as large ocean predators in marine ecosystems. The repeated transitions between land and sea have driven innovation, convergence and diversification against a backdrop of changing marine ecosystems and mass extinctions dating back to the Triassic period. In this way, they provide ideal models for testing hypotheses about the evolution of species over long periods of time. Modern species of marine tetrapods now face a suite of human-driven impacts to their environment, including climate change, habitat degradation, ship collisions and underwater noise.
“We know from the fossil record that previous times of profound change in the oceans were important turning points in the evolutionary history of marine species,” said Neil Kelley, a Peter Buck post-doctoral researcher in the National Museum of Natural History’s department of paleobiology and lead author in the study. “Today’s oceans continue to change, largely from human activities. This paper provides the evolutionary context for understanding how living species of marine predators will evolve and adapt to life in the Anthropocene.”
Recent investigations in the fossil record have provided new insight into the evolution of traits that allowed marine tetrapods to thrive in the sea. In some cases, similar anatomy evolved among lineages that adapted to marine lifestyles. For example, modern dolphins and extinct marine reptiles called ichthyosaurs descended from distinct terrestrial species, but independently converged on an extremely similar fish-like body plan although they were separated in time by more than 50 million years. The repeated transformation of legs adapted for walking on land into fins is another classic example of convergent evolution. Species ranging from seals to mosasaurs independently developed streamlined forelimbs as they transitioned from living on land to the ocean, allowing them to move quickly and efficiently in the water. This transformation may have been achieved by parallel changes at the genome level.
“Land to sea transitions have happened dozens of times among reptiles, mammals and birds, across major mass extinctions,” said Nicholas Pyenson, the museum’s curator of fossil marine mammals. “You often get similar looking results but convergence is more than skin deep. It can be seen on a broad range of scales, from molecules to food webs, over hundreds of millions of years.”
In the case of deep divers such as beaked whales and seals, these species have independently evolved to have positively charged oxygen-binding proteins called myoglobin in their muscles, allowing them to survive underwater for long periods of time. Scientists also have found identical genetic sequences in different marine species, such as whales, seals and sea cows. Whether these invisible molecular similarities account for larger-scale visible patterns of convergent evolution, or whether convergent anatomy follows different genetic pathways in different groups, remains an important open question to be tackled as genomic sequences become available for more species.
Not all adaptations observed in marine tetrapods can be attributed to convergent evolution. For instance, as baleen whales evolved to live underwater, they developed a unique filter-feeding system that depends on hair-like plates instead of teeth. In contrast, toothed whales evolved to catch and feed on prey by emitting calls and using echolocation, a kind of sonar, to process the echoes from these noises and detect objects in the sea.
Kelley and Pyenson synthesized research from existing studies and referenced the Smithsonian’s paleobiology collections during the course of their research. They intend that this comprehensive review will encourage future collaboration between researchers across scientific fields and lead to new insights about evolutionary biology, paleontology and marine conservation.
Reference:
Neil P. Kelley, Nicholas D. Pyenson. Evolutionary innovation and ecology in marine tetrapods from the Triassic to the Anthropocene. Science, 2015 DOI: 10.1126/science.aaa3716
This image shows a meteorite fragment found after a 17-20 meter asteroid disrupted in the atmosphere near Chelyabinsk, Russia on Feb. 15, 2013. Credit: Vishnu Reddy, Planetary Science Institute
Through a combination of data analysis and numerical modeling work, researchers have found a record of the ancient Moon-forming giant impact observable in stony meteorites. Their work will appear in the April 2015 issue of the Journal Science. The work was done by NASA Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI) researchers led by Principal Investigator Bill Bottke of the Institute for the Science of Exploration Targets (ISET) team at the Southwest Research Institute and included Tim Swindle, director of the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory.
The inner Solar System’s biggest known collision was the Moon-forming giant impact between a large protoplanet and the proto-Earth. The timing of this giant impact, however, is uncertain, with the ages of the most ancient lunar samples returned by the Apollo astronauts still being debated. Numerical simulations of the giant impact indicate this event not only created a disk of debris near Earth that formed the Moon, but it also ejected huge amounts of debris completely out of the Earth-Moon system. The fate of this material, comprising as much as several percent of an Earth mass, has not been closely examined until recently.
However, it is likely some of it blasted main belt asteroids, with a record plausibly left behind in their near-surface rocks. Collisions on these asteroids in more recent times delivered these shocked remnants to Earth, which scientists have now used to date the age of the Moon.
The research indicates numerous kilometer-sized fragments from the giant impact struck main belt asteroids at much higher velocities than typical main belt collisions, heating the surface and leaving behind a permanent record of the impact event. Evidence that the giant impact produced a large number of kilometer-sized fragments can be inferred from laboratory and numerical impact experiments, the ancient lunar impact record itself, and the numbers and sizes of fragments produced by major main belt asteroid collisions.
Once the team concluded that pieces of the Moon-forming impact hit main belt asteroids and left a record of shock heating events in some meteorites, they set out to deduce both the timing and the relative magnitude of the bombardment. By modeling the evolution of giant impact debris over time and fitting the results to ancient impact heat signatures in stony meteorites, the team was able to infer the Moon formed about 4.47 billion years ago, in agreement with many previous estimates. The most ancient Solar System materials found in meteorites are about one hundred million years older than this age.
Insights into the last stages of planet formation in the inner solar system can be gleaned from these impact signatures. For example, the team is exploring how they can be used to place new constraints on how many asteroid-like bodies still existed in the inner Solar System in the aftermath of planet formation. They can also help researchers deduce the earliest bombardment history of ancient bodies like Vesta, one of the targets of NASA’s Dawn mission and a main belt asteroid whose fragments were delivered to Earth in the form of meteorites. It is even possible that tiny remnants of the Moon-forming impactor or proto-Earth might still be found within meteorites that show signs of shock heating by giant impact debris. This would allow scientists to explore for the first time the unknown primordial nature of our homeworld.
Co-author Swindle, who specializes in finding the times when meteorites or lunar samples were involved in large collisions, said: “Bill Bottke had the idea of looking at the asteroid belt to see what effect a Moon-forming giant impact would have, and realized that you would expect a lot of collisions in the period shortly after that.
“Here at LPL, we had been determining ages of impact events that affected meteorites, and when we got together, we found that our data matched his predictions,” he added. “It’s a great example of taking advantage of groups that work in two different specialties — orbital dynamics and chronology — and combining their expertise.”
Intriguingly, some debris may have also returned to hit the Earth and Moon after remaining in solar orbit over timescales ranging from tens of thousands of years to 400 million years.
“The importance of giant impact ejecta returning to strike the Moon could also play an intriguing role in the earliest phase of lunar bombardment,” said Bottke, who is an alumnus of the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. “This research is helping to refine our time scales for ‘what happened when’ on other worlds in the Solar System.”
Yvonne Pendleton, Director of the NASA SSERVI Institute, notes: “This is an excellent example of the power of multidisciplinary science. By linking studies of the Moon, of main belt asteroids, and of meteorites that fall to Earth, we gain a better understanding of the earliest history of our Solar System.”
Video
One possible realization of the Moon-forming impact event is animated. Here it is assumed that a Mars-sized protoplanet, defined as having 13 percent of an Earth-mass, struck the proto-Earth at a 45-degree angle near the mutual escape velocity of both worlds. The “red” particles, comprising 0.3 percent of an Earth-mass, were found to escape the Earth-Moon system. Some of this debris may eventually go on to strike other solar system bodies like large main belt asteroids. “Yellow-green” particles go into the disk that makes the Moon. “Blue” particles were accreted by the proto-Earth. The details of this simulation can be found in Canup, R. (2004, Simulations of a late lunar-forming impact, Icarus 168, 433-456).
Credit: Robin Canup, Southwest Research Institute
Reference:
W. F. Bottke, D. Vokrouhlický, S. Marchi, T. Swindle, E. R. D. Scott, J. R. Weirich, H. Levison. Dating the Moon-forming impact event with asteroidal meteorites. Science, 2015 DOI: 10.1126/science.aaa0602
A key question in the climate debate is how the occurrence and distribution of species is affected by climate change. But without information about natural variation in species abundance it is hard to answer. In a major study, published in the scientific journal Current Biology, researchers can now for the first time give us a detailed picture of natural variation.
The impact of climate change on species occurrence and distribution is a central issue in the climate debate, since human influence on the climate risks posing threats to biodiversity. But until now methods for investigating how natural climate variation in the past has affected the abundance of species have been lacking.
Now, for the first time, Krystyna Nadachowska-Brzyska and Hans Ellegren of Uppsala University’s Evolutionary Biology Centre in collaboration with researchers at the Beijing Genomics Institute, have managed to clarify the issue in detail by analysing the whole genome of some 40 bird species. By studying the genetic variation of DNA molecules, they have succeeded in estimating how common these species were at various points in time, from several million years ago to historical times.
Ellegren says: ‘The majority of all species exhibit cyclical swings in numbers and these swings often coincide with the periods of ice ages.’
During the Quaternary Period (the past two million years, including the Pleistocene epoch, i.e. up to some 11,500 years ago), inland ice periodically spread across large land areas of Earth. Species distribution then became compressed with falling numbers of individuals as a result. When the climate became milder and the ice sheets retreated, many species expanded.
Rising and falling species numbers thus seem to result naturally from climate variation. Nevertheless, Ellegren warns of the effects of human influence on the environments in which many birds live, and in the long term on the climate as well.
‘The last Ice Age (110,000-12,000 years ago) had a particularly heavy impact on birds. Many species suffered their most dramatic falls in numbers then.’
Accordingly, there is a risk of the relatively recent influence exerted by human beings on environments and habitats, and of course the climate, having a particularly adverse effect on species that have already ‘declined’. Anthropogenic impact may therefore be what irrevocably pushes their decline beyond the ‘tipping point’ to eventual extinction.
‘We’ve analysed several species classified as “endangered” in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Several, such as the crested ibis, crowned crane, brown mesite and kea, were already at a low level even before human activities affected their ranges,’ says Ellegren.
The survey, which is based on advanced mathematical calculations of how many individuals of each species have existed at different periods, yielding the genetic variation in the genome that is now observable, is the most extensive of its kind to date.
Reference:
Nadachowska-Brzyska K, Li C, Smeds L, Zhang G & Ellegren H. Temporal Dynamics of Avian Populations during Pleistocene Revealed by Whole-Genome Sequences. Current Biology, April 2015 DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2015.03.047
“The answers to extinction, survival and evolution are right here in the dirt,” says University of Cincinnati Quaternary science researcher Ken Tankersley, associate professor of anthropology and geology. “And we are continually surprised by what we find.”
While many scientists focus on species’ extinction wherever there has been rapid and profound climate change, Tankersley looks closely at why certain species survived.
For many years he has invited students and faculty from archeology and geology, and representatives from the Cincinnati Museum Center and Kentucky State Parks to participate in an in-the-field investigation at a rich paleontological and archeological site not too far from UC’s campus.
Through scores of scientific data extracted from fossilized vegetation and the bones and teeth of animals and humans, Tankersley has been able to trace periods of dramatic climate change, what animals roamed the Earth during those epochs and how they survived. And his most recent evidence reveals when humans came on the scene and how they helped change the environment in Big Bone Lick, Kentucky.
“What we found is that deforestation efforts over 5,000 years ago by humans significantly modified the environment to the degree that the erosion began filling in the Ohio River Valley, killing off much of the essential plant life,” says Tankersley. “At that point animals had to either move, evolve or they simply died off.”
Tankersley will present the culmination of his years of Surviving Climate Change research – including countless hours in the field and in the lab as well as multiple published works – at the Society for American Archeology annual meeting, April 15-19 in San Francisco titled, Quaternary Chronostratigraphy of Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, USA. He also has a paper published online in the March issue of the prestigious journal Quaternary Research titled, “Quaternary chronostratigraphy and stable isotope paleoecology of Big Bone Lick, Kentucky, USA.”
STUDENTS DIG DEEP FOR ANSWERS
Big Bone Lick (BBL) State Park in north-central Kentucky has over 25,000 years of well-preserved bones, rocks and other archeological treasures that have been easily accessible since the 1700s. But until recently, the evidence for why some of this region’s former inhabitants evolved into present-day animals, while others simply died off, was buried deep in the sediment.
Only 20 minutes away from UC’s main campus by interstate, Tankersley and his students have been taking advantage of BBL’s rich and accessible history for the past three years. By digging through layers of soil, scavenging around in creek bottoms and scraping specimens from bone fragments, they have unearthed a treasure trove of ancient specimens – some more than 25,000 years old.
“One of my students, Stephanie Miller, discovered a 10-foot mastodon tusk beneath the water table at the bottom of a creek when she reached below the mud and felt a hard object pointed at the end,” says Tankersley. “That tusk is now on display at the Cincinnati Museum Center.”
Possessing a proud ancestry of part Native American Cherokee, Tankersley feels a strong need for all this discovery is in his bones, too.
Tankersley originally thought that when the ice reached its maximum advance 25,000 years ago – covering the area now known as Sharonville – the mammoths were grazing on C4 tundra vegetation of herbaceous plants and sedges. To his surprise, what he found is that he couldn’t have been more wrong.
While mammoths and mastodons are two distinct species of the proboscidean family, they were originally thought to have lived in different epochs in time and in separate areas of the world:
Mastodons existed earlier, about 27-30 million years ago primarily in North and Central America.
Mammoths came on the scene 5.1 million years ago arising out of Africa.
The evidence at BBL now shows that mammoths and mastodons both roamed together – possibly through intercontinental migration – and were both eating the same vegetation, even with the difference in the shape of their molars.
The original model of the changing landscape botanically, and in terms of the animals’ diet was completely wrong, and was a big shock to Tankersley.
Tankersley’s evidence also revealed significant periods of radical shifts in environmental temperature since the last glacial maximum more than 25,000 years ago, which caused an increase in the deposit of sediment that was greater than the system was able to support. And those radical shifts from cold and dry to warm and moist significantly altered the landscape and the vegetation and plant life.
“To determine what animals roamed the area and how they survived, we looked at the stable carbon and nitrogen isotope chemistry of both the animals and plants that were in the sediment for the past 25,000 years,” says Tankersley. “Since we are what we eat, we discovered that the mammoths, mastodons and bison were not eating the plants we originally thought. As it turns out, they were eating more C3 vegetation, which is tree leaves and weedy vegetation more like we see outside today.”
After incidents like cataclysmic cosmic events caused temperatures to drop and darkened the air with clouds of poisonous gas, the resulting climate change presented challenges for most plant and animal species to continue living. According to Tankersley, life at that time became a true test of survival skills for all living things, so those that could move or adapt to their new surroundings survived – many by evolving into a smaller, lighter and faster species.
Larger animal species that could not move fast or for long distances starved or were imprisoned in the muddy landscape and became easy prey for hungry predators.
“My students discovered all of this,” says Tankersley. “My job in this ‘Surviving Climate Change’ project was to give them the resources and tools and teach them the scientific techniques we use, but then let them be the discoverers, which is exactly what happened.”
SURVIVAL OF THE MOST FLEXIBLE
At BBL, Tankersley focused on which species survived and which ones went extinct. They determined that during times when food sources were declining, animals had to move to more fruitful environments or learn to do with less food, which ultimately led to the evolution of today’s surviving species.
Looking closer at those survival patterns, Tankersley found that species like caribou could no longer make a living in this area, but they could up north. And although bison are still around, they are a lot smaller than they were thousands of years ago.
The moral to this story, explains Tankersley, is that many species evolved into smaller animals over time as their food sources started to decline. While some larger species simply died off from a lack of necessary resources, bison and deer were two mammals that were able to survive by evolving with a smaller body mass and shorter stature.
“If you look at a species and you have an environmental downturn or major change in the amount of solar radiation, the amount of water moisture and the amount of frost-free days, can all plants respond to that equally? Of course not,” says Tankersley. “As individuals, we all have different tolerance levels for change. So in the case of the caribou, when the climate changed rapidly and profoundly it could no longer make a living at BBL. But it could continue to make a living up north where it had the environment for survival.
“Species get bigger when there is a lot of food available and smaller when there is not. So the bison downsized, but the mammoth and mastodon did not. They could neither move nor downsize quickly enough so they simply died off.”
BEAVERS THE SIZE OF BLACK BEARS – OH MY! Tankersley’s team also discovered different species within a species. For example, while there were small beavers then just like there are now, from 25,000 until 10,000 years ago there were also large beavers the size of black bears.
“The larger extinct beaver lost its battle to survive because it was dependent on a certain environment that was dying off, but the modern beaver could make its own environment and consequently survived,” says Tankersley. “So there is a lesson there. Animals had to adapt, downsize or go extinct.”
Last year Tankersley and his students excavated over 17,000 specimens that are now housed at the Cincinnati Museum Center. While digging up animal bones they found evidence of humans who had butchered these animals.
ENTER THE HUMANS
To effectively date the plant and animal specimens, Tankersley’s students examined radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence (OSL) ages. Dating much of the material to 5,000 years ago using OSL procedures, Tankersley was shocked to find the evidence for human activity and a new anthropological time period now called the Anthropocene – when humans became the most powerful, natural force.
“So much of science is serendipitous,” claims Tankersley. “What the students discovered serendipitously, by dating these deposits, was that humans came in and broke the sod.
Deeper into the sediment, Tankersley found that humans had dug pits into the ground to process animal skins to wear as clothing. Based on ethnographic French literature, the Native Americans had put piles of rocks inside the pits along with hickory nuts, then they used hot rocks to boil the water. The oily, greasy meat of the hickory nut would float to the top and the non-edible remains like the shell and hull would sink to the bottom.
“They would skim it off and drink the water, as it was very nutritious,” says Tankersley. “When they were finished, they would grab the softened deerskin and leave the rocks and nutshells behind, which is what we found.”
To protect their hickory-nut trees from squirrels and other animals, Tankersley found evidence for human deforestation, where large areas of trees were cleared to create separate hickory-tree orchards, protecting them from animal invasion. That deforestation and degradation resulted in substantial erosion of the uplands, which caused the overbank and backwater flooding of the Ohio Valley area.
The changing vegetation, as a result of this deforestation also contributed to the demise, adaptation or evolution of several species.
Furthermore, Tankersley and his students uncovered evidence for animals being hunted by humans during this same period. Looking closely at the hash marks in animal bones, there was strong clues that humans had greatly contributed to the extinction of some of the species in BBL like the larger bison.
Consequently, through deforestation and arboriculture behavior, and the hunting and extinction of many species of animals, Tankersley found clear evidence that humans indeed contributed to the changing landscape even as far back as 5,000 years ago.
“It’s hard to believe, but there is no volcano, no earthquake or tsunami that is moving more sediment than we are,” says Tankersley. “Humans are the most powerful force on the planet right now.”
To help prevent an underlying assumption of landscape change or stability where it does not exist, Tankersley’s team efforts show that both natural and human anthropogenic erosional processes were taking place 5,000 years ago. This activity is directly responsible for the primary and secondary deposits of animal, plant and human artifact remains at Big Bone Lick, Kentucky.
The planet Mercury reflects only one-third of the amount of light that the moon reflects. At last, scientists may know why. (NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington)
A Mercury-like body smashed into a young Earth and gave our planet’s core the radioactive elements necessary to generate a magnetic field, two Oxford geochemists say.
Without that magnetic field, there would be no shield to protect us from the onslaught of radiation constantly bombarding Earth from space, making the existence of life as we know it impossible, scientists say.
The study, published in the journal Nature, offers insight into how Earth’s magnetic field – and, perhaps, the moon – came to be.
Our planet is thought to have formed from small rocky bodies like the ones in the asteroid belt today, study co-author Bernard Wood, a geochemist at the University of Oxford, said in an interview. It’s a theory that fits quite well with what’s been studied on Earth, though it’s not a perfect fit, he said.
“That sort of roughly works, but there are all kinds of little questions that don’t quite work,” Wood said, “and one of them is, what is the energy source that drives the Earth’s magnetic field?”
Here’s the problem. To drive Earth’s magnetic field, you need radioactive elements like potassium, thorium or uranium – elements that give off heat as they decay – to also be in the planet’s churning iron core. Those elements love getting together with oxygen, making oxides – but oxides are really light and would float toward the planet’s surface; they wouldn’t be heavy enough to stay in the core. These elements also hate getting together with iron.
“They love oxygen so much and they hate being metals so much that they shouldn’t go into the Earth’s core,” Wood said.
So there’s no good way, under current models, to keep enough radioactive material in Earth’s center to power our vital magnetic field – a conundrum for planetary scientists.
But Wood and Oxford colleague Anke Wohlers realized that if you had a source of reduced sulfides – sulfur compounds that don’t have oxygen – into the iron core, it would make it easier for these iron-hating radioactive elements to hang with the metal.
“We said OK, we’ll re-create those conditions in our high-pressure apparatus and we’ll look and see whether the radioactive elements uranium and thorium, and also some of the so-called rare earth elements, would partition into the sulfur-rich metal under those conditions,” Wood said. “And we found much to our pleasure and surprise that uranium very strongly partitions into sulfur-rich metal under those very oxygen-poor or -reducing conditions.”
It would also explain why the ratio of two such rare-earth elements, samarium to neodymium, is higher in the crust and mantle than it is in the rest of the solar system, he added. Because neodymium mixes with iron sulfides more easily than samarium, it more easily sinks into the core, leaving relatively more samarium behind in Earth’s upper layers.
But how did Earth, which is full of oxides, get all these reduced sulfides in the first place? It probably came from a body that looked a lot like Mercury, which is rich in sulfur and very poor in oxygen.
The scientists think that, early in the planet’s history, Earth gobbled up a Mercury-like body, and those sulfides allowed the uranium to stay in the core, which is what has allowed it to power our magnetic field for an estimated 3.5 billion years.
“Before Wohlers and Wood’s experiments, there was only limited (and controversial) experimental evidence that either uranium or potassium can be incorporated in iron metal at the high temperatures and pressures of core formation,” Richard Carlson of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, who was not involved in the study, wrote in a commentary on the paper.
However, he added, “a more stringent test” of whether uranium made it into the core in this way would be to study the radio of different isotopes of neodymium in Earth’s crust and mantle.
This body, by the way, was Mercury-like in composition, but it was not Mercury-sized, Wood said. It was probably closer to the mass of Mars.
That’s interesting, because scientists think that a Mars-sized body’s dramatic collision with Earth is what gave birth to the moon. It’s possible that this Mercury-like body was in fact that selfsame Earth-shattering missile.
“We think that that is quite conceivable,” Wood said. “It’s kind of exciting to think that this reduced body could actually be the thing which caused the moon.”
Reference:
A Mercury-like component of early Earth yields uranium in the core and high mantle 142Nd, Nature 520, 337–340 (16 April 2015) DOI: 10.1038/nature14350
Note : The above story is based on materials provided by Los Angeles Times, Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
This is the Kapp Starostin Formation, Festningen section, Spitsbergen. The uppermost of the 3 yellow limestone beds records the Middle Permian mass extinction. This is the first high latitude record of this crisis, which is now seen to be of global extent. The photo, from Isfjorden, Spitsbergen, was taken by Dierk Blomeier. Credit : Dierk Blomeier. For David P.G. Bond and colleagues, GSA Bulletin, 2015.
Since the Cambrian Explosion, ecosystems have suffered repeated mass extinctions, with the “Big 5” crises being the most prominent. Twenty years ago, a sixth major extinction was recognized in the Middle Permian (262 million years ago) of China, when paleontologists teased apart losses from the “Great Dying” at the end of the period. Until now, this Capitanian extinction was known only from equatorial settings, and its status as a global crisis was controversial.
David P.G. Bond and colleagues provide the first evidence for severe Middle Permian losses amongst brachiopods in northern paleolatitudes (Spitsbergen). Their study shows that the Boreal crisis coincided with an intensification of marine oxygen depletion, implicating this killer in the extinction scenario.
The widespread loss of carbonates across the Boreal Realm also suggests a role for acidification. The new data cements the Middle Permian crisis’s status as a true “mass extinction.” Thus the “Big 5” extinctions should now be considered the “Big 6.”
Reference:
David P.G. Bond et al., University of Hull, Hull, UK. Published online ahead of print on 14 Apr. 2015; DOI: 10.1130/B31216.1
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s new geothermal stimulation fluid could make geothermal power production more environmentally friendly and less costly where conventional geothermal doesn’t work. The nontoxic fluid is designed to be used in enhanced geothermal systems, where fluids are injected into drilled wells that lead to underground geothermal reservoirs. The fluid expands when exposed to carbon dioxide underground, which creates tiny, but deep cracks in otherwise impermeable rock. Credit: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
More American homes could be powered by the earth’s natural underground heat with a new, nontoxic and potentially recyclable liquid that is expected to use half as much water as other fluids used to tap into otherwise unreachable geothermal hot spots.
The fluid might be a boon to a new approach to geothermal power called enhanced geothermal systems. These systems pump fluids underground, a step that’s called “reservoir stimulation,” to enable power production where conventional geothermal doesn’t work.
The new reservoir stimulation fluid features an environmentally friendly polymer that greatly expands the fluid’s volume, which creates tiny cracks in deep underground rocks to improve power production. This fluid could also substantially reduce the water footprint and cost of enhanced geothermal systems. A paper describing the fluid has been published by the Royal Society of Chemistry in an advance online version of the journal Green Chemistry.
“Our new fluid can make enhanced geothermal power production more viable,” said lead fluid developer Carlos Fernandez, a chemist at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “And, though we initially designed the fluid for geothermal energy, it could also make unconventional oil and gas recovery more environmentally friendly.”
Natural power beneath us
Geothermal power is generated by tapping the heat that exists under the Earth’s surface to extract steam and turn power plant turbines. Conventional geothermal power plants rely on the natural presence of three things: underground water, porous rock and heat. Existing U.S. geothermal power plants generate up to 3.4 gigawatts of energy, making up about 0.4 percent of the nation’s energy supply.
Enhanced geothermal power can be generated at sites where heat exists, but isn’t easily accessible because of impermeable rock or insufficient water. A 2006 report led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimates enhanced geothermal systems could boost the nation’s geothermal energy output 30-fold to more than 100 gigawatts, or enough to power 100 million typical American homes.
Interested in this potential, DOE has funded five enhanced geothermal system demonstration projects across the country. At one demonstration project in Nevada, enhanced geothermal methods increased a conventional geothermal plant’s productivity by 38 percent. But the use of enhanced geothermal systems has been limited due to technical challenges and concerns over their cost and heavy use of water.
Creating enhanced geothermal systems requires injecting millions of gallons of water – a valuable resource in the arid American West, where enhanced geothermal has the most potential. That water is sometimes mixed with a very small amount of chemicals to help the fluid better create and spread tiny cracks underground, which ultimately extends the life of a geothermal power plant.
Some geothermal reservoir stimulation fluids are similar to oil and gas hydraulic fracturing fluids in that a small percentage of their volume can include proprietary chemicals, according to a 2009 paper in Geothermics and other sources. These chemicals can be toxic if ingested, leading geothermal developers to retrieve and treat used fluids. This protects aquifers, but increases the cost of power generation as well. Environmental reviews must be conducted to receive permits for enhanced geothermal injections.
A better solution
PNNL’s fluid is a solution of water and 1 percent polyallylamine, a chemical made of a long carbon chain with nitrogen attachments that’s similar to well-understood polymers used in medicine. The fluid is pumped into a well drilled at a geothermal hot spot. Soon after, workers also inject pressurized carbon dioxide, which could come from carbon captured at fossil fuel power plants.
Within 20 seconds, the polyallylamine and carbon dioxide link together to form a hydrogel that expands the fluid up to 2.5 times its original volume. The swelling gel pushes against the rocks, causing existing cracks to expand while also creating new ones. The expansion is expected to cut in half the amount of water and time needed to open up an enhanced geothermal reservoir, which shrinks the cost of power generation.
Passing the test
To test the fluid’s performance, geophysicist and co-author Alain Bonneville led the development of an experimental set up. Five cylindrical samples of rocks, about the size of C batteries, taken near a working enhanced geothermal power plant in California, were placed inside a high-pressure, high-temperature test cell created by the PNNL team. Small amounts of the fluid and liquid carbon dioxide were injected into the test cell. Pressure and temperature were gradually adjusted to match the conditions of underground geothermal reservoirs.
The researchers found their fluid consistently created small, but effective cracks in rock samples. Some of the new fractures were too small to be seen with a high-resolution imaging method called X-ray microtomography. But when they watched fluids such as water or carbon dioxide being injected, the team saw liquids moving through the previously impermeable rock samples. Moving liquids did not pass through rock samples that were injected with plain water or the common hydraulic fracturing chemicals sodium dodecyl sulfate and xanthan gum. The team reasoned larger-scale tests might produce bigger cracks.
Reduce, reuse & recycle
Two other benefits are the fluid’s potential to be recycled and cut costs. The fluid could be recycled by reducing or stopping the fluids that are pumped underground, or by injecting an acid. Modeling shows either would cause the hydrogel to disassemble into its original components: the water-polyallylamine solution and carbon dioxide. A pump would move the separated fluids to the surface, where they would be retrieved and used again. The fluid’s recyclability hasn’t been tested in the lab yet, however.
The operational cost of enhanced geothermal systems could also be reduced with the new fluid. With less liquid to pump underground, there will be less water to purchase, capture and treat, which lowers project costs. However, a detailed analysis is needed to precisely quantify by how much the fluid could lower enhanced geothermal’s price tag.
Additional studies are needed to further evaluate the fluid’s performance for enhanced geothermal systems. Fernandez and his team are planning lab studies to examine the fluid’s recyclability and its ability to fracture larger pieces of rock. Their ultimate goal is to conduct a controlled field test.
The Geothermal Technologies Office within the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy funded this research. This study used X-ray computed tomography and magic angle spinning nuclear magnetic resonance instruments at EMSL, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory DOE user facility at PNNL.
The team also recently started a PNNL-funded study to examine a similar fluid for unconventional oil and gas recovery. The oil and gas extraction fluid being considered would use a different polyamine that is related to the chemical used in the geothermal extraction fluid. Both fluids are stable and can withstand extreme temperatures, pressures and acidity levels. Many of the fluids used for oil and gas recovery degrade, making them less effective over time. That characteristic, combined with the fluid’s decreased water use, its nontoxic nature and its potential to be recycled, makes the PNNL fluid a candidate for oil and gas extraction.
Video
Reference:
HB Jung, KC Carroll, S Kabilan, DJ Heldebrant, D Hoyt, L Zhong, T Varga, S Stephens, L Adams, A Bonneville, A Kuprat & CA Fernandez, “Stimuli-responsive/rheoreversible hydraulic fracturing fluids as a greener alternative to support geothermal and fossil energy production,” Green Chemistry Advance Online, March 25, 2015, DOI: 10.1039/C4GC01917B
Research reveals fossil record may have been impacted by the appetite of Osedax. Credit: Image copyright Nicholas Higgs, courtesy of University of Plymouth
A species of bone-eating worm that was believed to have evolved in conjunction with whales has been dated back to prehistoric times when it fed on the carcasses of giant marine reptiles.
Scientists at Plymouth University found that Osedax — popularised as the ‘zombie worm’ — originated at least 100 million years ago, and subsisted on the bones of prehistoric reptiles such as plesiosaurs and sea turtles.
Reporting in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters this month, the research team at Plymouth reveal how they found tell-tale traces of Osedax on plesiosaur fossils held in the Sedgwick Museum at the University of Cambridge.
Dr Nicholas Higgs, a Research Fellow in the Marine Institute, said the discovery was important for both understanding the genesis of the species and its implications for fossil records. “The exploration of the deep sea in the past decades has led to the discovery of hundreds of new species with unique adaptations to survive in extreme environments, giving rise to important questions on their origin and evolution through geological time.” said Nicholas. “The unusual adaptations and striking beauty of Osedax worms encapsulate the alien nature of deep-sea life in public imagination.
“And our discovery shows that these bone-eating worms did not co-evolve with whales, but that they also devoured the skeletons of large marine reptiles that dominated oceans in the age of the dinosaurs. Osedax, therefore, prevented many skeletons from becoming fossilised, which might hamper our knowledge of these extinct leviathans.”
The finger-length Osedax is found in oceans across the globe at depths of up to 4,000m, and it belongs to the Siboglinidae family of worms, which, as adults, lack a mouth and digestive system. Instead, they penetrate bone using root-like tendrils through which they absorb bone collagen and lipids that are then converted into energy by bacteria inside the worm.
Typically they consume whale bones, prompting many scientists to believe that they co-evolved 45 million years ago, branching out from their cousins that used chemosysnthesis to obtain food.
But Nicholas, and research lead Dr Silvia Danise, of Plymouth’s School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, studied fossil fragments taken from a plesiosaur unearthed in Cambridge, and a sea turtle found in Burham, Kent.
Using a computed tomography scanner at the Natural History Museum — essentially a three-dimensional X-ray — they were able to create a computer model of the bones, and found tell-tale bore holes and cavities consistent with the burrowing technique of Osedax.
Dr Danise said: “The increasing evidence for Osedax throughout the oceans past and present, combined with their propensity to rapidly consume a wide range of vertebrate skeletons, suggests that Osedax may have had a significant negative effect on the preservation of marine vertebrate skeletons in the fossil record.
“By destroying vertebrate skeletons before they could be buried, Osedax may be responsible for the loss of data on marine vertebrate anatomy and carcass-fall communities on a global scale. The true extent of this ‘Osedax effect’, previously hypothesized only for the Cenozoic, now needs to be assessed for Cretaceous marine vertebrates.”
Reference:
S. Danise, N. D. Higgs. Bone-eating Osedax worms lived on Mesozoic marine reptile deadfalls. Biology Letters, 2015; 11 (4): 20150072 DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2015.0072
Note: The above story is based on materials provided by University of Plymouth. The original article was written by Andrew Merrington.
