Category Archives: History
3-Foot “Shrimp” Discovered—Dominated Prehistoric Seas
Anomalocaridids (model pictured) grew a third longer and survived 30 million years longer than thought. Image courtesy Esben Horn“It would have made enough scampi to feed an army for a month.”
Christine Dell’Amore
Published May 27, 2011
Fossils of a meter-long (3.3-foot) prehistoric ocean predator have been found in southeastern Morocco.
The specimens include the largest yet of its kind and suggests the spiny, somewhat shrimplike beasts dominated pre-dinosaur seas for millions of years longer than thought.
Early offshoots of an evolutionary line that led to modern crustaceans, the so-called anomalocaridids looked sort of like modern cuttlefish. But the fossil creatures had spiny limbs sprouting from their heads and circular, plated mouths, which opened and closed like the diaphragm of a camera.
Previous anomalocaridid fossils had shown the animals grew to perhaps 2 feet (0.6 meter) long, which already would have made them the largest animals of the Cambrian period (542 to 501 million years ago)—an evolutionarily explosive time, when invertebrate life evolved into many new varieties, such as sea lilies and worms.
(See “Earliest Animals Were Sea Sponges, Fossils Hint.”)
But at a foot longer than previous specimens, the largest of the new anomalocaridids suggests the segmented animals grew to bigger sizes than scientists had imagined.
“It would have made enough scampi to feed an army for a month—it was giant, and no doubt very tasty,” quipped study co-author Derek Briggs, director of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.
(Watch a video of Briggs describing the anomalocaridids’ odd body.)
Story continues -> 3-Foot “Shrimp” Discovered—Dominated Prehistoric Seas
Campaign launched to build Babbage''s steam-powered computer
Emma Woollacott
A campaign has been launched to build the first working model of Charles Babbage”s Analytical Engine – 173 years after it was designed.
The nineteenth-century mathematician produced detailed drawings of the steam-powered, general-purpose computer, which are now held at London”s Science Museum.
Parts of the machine have been constructed several times, by babbage himself, his family and others. But although his Difference Engine finally became a reality in 1991 and can be seen at the Science Museum no full version of the Analytical Engine has ever been created.
“What a marvel it would be to stand before this giant metal machine, powered by a steam engine, and running programs fed to it on a reel of punched cards,” says programmer and blogger John Graham-Cumming, who has launched the campaign.
“And what a great educational resource so that people can understand how computers work. One could even imagine holding competitions for people (including school children) to write programs to run on the engine. And it would be a way to celebrate both Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace. How fantastic to be able to execute Lovelace”s code!”
It won”t be easy. Unlike the Analytical Engine, for which Babbage left a complete set of blueprints, the Analytical Engine was still a work in progress at the time of his death.
The first stage of the project, therefore, would be to go carefully through all the different versions to devide which one to build from.
Graham-Cumming is attempting to raise funds for the project, which would require several people to work on it, as well as some rather expensive materials. He says that, when complete, the machine would be donated to either the Science Museum or the National Museum of Computing.
Graham-Cumming has a long way to go. He”s asking people to sign up here and pledge £10/$10, saying he reckons he needs about 50,000 people. So far, 2,403 have agreed.
Plants Kick-Started Evolutionary Drama of Earth''''s Oxygenation
A panser shark (predatory fish greater than 30 feet long) is a consequence of the Earth””s oxygenation event of 400 million years ago. (Credit: Staffan Waerndt / Swedish Museum of Natural History)
An international team of scientists, exploiting pioneering techniques at Arizona State University, has taken a significant step toward unlocking the secrets of oxygenation of the Earth””s oceans and atmosphere.
Evolution of the Earth””s multitude of organisms is intimately linked to the rise of oxygen in the oceans and atmosphere. The new research indicates that the appearance of large predatory fish as well as vascular plants approximately 400 million years ago coincided with an increase in oxygen, to levels comparable to those we experience today. If so, then animals from before that time appeared and evolved under markedly lower oxygen conditions than previously thought.
The researchers, including collaborators from Harvard, Denmark, Sweden and the United Kingdom, made use of a method developed at ASU by Ariel Anbar, a professor in the department of chemistry and biochemistry and the School of Earth and Space Exploration in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and his research group. The method can be used to estimate global oxygen levels in ancient oceans from the chemical composition of ancient seafloor sediments.
Their important findings are presented in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), titled “Devonian rise in atmospheric oxygen correlated to radiations of terrestrial plants and large predatory fish.”
“There has been a lot of speculation over the years about whether or not oxygen in the atmosphere was steady or variable over the last 500 million years,” explained Anbar, who leads ASU””s Astrobiology Program. “This is the era during which animals and land plants emerged and flourished. So it””s a profound question in understanding the history of life. These new findings not only suggest that oxygen levels varied, but also that the variation had direct consequences for the evolution of complex life.”
The Earth is 4,500 million years old. Microbial life has probably thrived in the oceans for most of that time. However, until about 2,300 million years ago, the atmosphere contained only traces of oxygen. During that time, some microbes in the oceans likely produced oxygen as a byproduct of photosynthesis. But the quantities they produced were insufficient to accumulate much in the atmosphere and oceans. The situation changed with the “Great Oxidation Event,” 2,300 million years ago. Oxygen levels rose again around 550 million years ago. The first animals appear in the fossil record at this time, marking the beginning of an era that geologists call the “Phanerozoic” — a Greek word meaning “evident animals.” This new work explores how oxygen levels changed during the Phanerozoic.
Article Continues -> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101008121348.htm
Volcanoes Wiped out Neanderthals, New Study Suggests
The Semeru volcano in Indonesia. New research suggests that climate change following massive volcanic eruptions drove Neanderthals to extinction and cleared the way for modern humans to thrive in Europe and Asia. (Credit: iStockphoto)
New research suggests that climate change following massive volcanic eruptions drove Neanderthals to extinction and cleared the way for modern humans to thrive in Europe and Asia.
The research, led by Liubov Vitaliena Golovanova and Vladimir Borisovich Doronichev of the ANO Laboratory of Prehistory in St. Petersburg, Russia, is reported in the October issue of Current Anthropology.
“[W]e offer the hypothesis that the Neanderthal demise occurred abruptly (on a geological time-scale) … after the most powerful volcanic activity in western Eurasia during the period of Neanderthal evolutionary history,” the researchers write. “[T]his catastrophe not only drastically destroyed the ecological niches of Neanderthal populations but also caused their mass physical depopulation.”
Evidence for the catastrophe comes from Mezmaiskaya cave in the Caucasus Mountains of southern Russia, a site rich in Neanderthal bones and artifacts. Recent excavations of the cave revealed two distinct layers of volcanic ash that coincide with large-scale volcanic events that occurred around 40,000 years ago, the researchers say.
Geological layers containing the ashes also hold evidence of an abrupt and potentially devastating climate change. Sediment samples from the two layers reveal greatly reduced pollen concentrations compared to surrounding layers. That”s an indication of a dramatic shift to a cooler and dryer climate, the researchers say. Further, the second of the two eruptions seems to mark the end of Neanderthal presence at Mezmaiskaya. Numerous Neanderthal bones, stone tools, and the bones of prey animals have been found in the geological layers below the second ash deposit, but none are found above it.
The ash layers correspond chronologically to what is known as the Campanian Ignimbrite super-eruption which occurred around 40,000 years ago in modern day Italy, and a smaller eruption thought to have occurred around the same time in the Caucasus Mountains. The researchers argue that these eruptions caused a “volcanic winter” as ash clouds obscured the sun”s rays, possibly for years. The climatic shift devastated the region”s ecosystems, “possibly resulting in the mass death of hominins and prey animals and the severe alteration of foraging zones.”
Article Continues -> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101006094057.htm
Oldest Evidence of Dinosaurs in Footprints: Dinosaur Lineage Emerged Soon After Massive Permian Extinction
Top: This is a reconstruction of cat-sized stem dinosaur Prorotodactylus isp. found in Stryczowice, Poland that was a quadruped with a dinosaur-like gait and orientation of the toes. Bottom: The 250 million year old footprints of Prorotodactylus isp. from the Early Olenekian of Stryczowice, Poland show reduced digits I and V and parallel three middle digits, traits of the dinosaur-lineage. The gait, though, was quadrapedal. These are the oldest known fossils of the dinosaur lineage. (Credit: Grzegorz Niedźwiedzki)
The oldest evidence of the dinosaur lineage — fossilized tracks — is described in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Just one or two million years after the massive Permian-Triassic extinction, an animal smaller than a house cat walked across fine mud in what is now Poland.
This fossilized trackway places the very closest relatives of dinosaurs on Earth about 250 million years ago — 5 to 9 million years earlier than previously described fossilized skeletal material has indicated. The paper also described the 246-million-year-old Sphingopus footprints, the oldest evidence of a bipedal and large-bodied dinosaur.
“We see the closest dinosaur cousins immediately after the worst mass extinction,” says Stephen Brusatte, a graduate student affiliated with the Division of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History. “The biggest crisis in the history of life also created one of the greatest opportunities in the history of life by emptying the landscape and making it possible for dinosaurs to evolve.”
The new paper analyzes three sets of footprints from three different sites in the Holy Cross Mountains of central Poland. The sites, all quarries within a 25-mile radius of each other, are windows into three ecosystems because they represent different times periods. The Stryczowice trackway is the oldest at 250 million years. The Baranów trackway is the most recent at 246 million years of age while the Wióry trackway is sandwiched in time between the others.
Because footprints are only an imprint of a small part of the skeleton, identification of trackmakers is often tricky. Luckily, dinosaurs have a very distinctive gait, especially when compared to their diapsid relatives (the evolutionary group that includes birds, reptiles, and extinct lineages) like crocodiles and lizards. While lizards and crocodiles have a splayed walking style, dinosaurs place their two feet closer together. The footprints at all three Polish sites show this feature as well as indisputable dinosaur-like features, including three prominent central toes and reduced outer two toes, a parallel alignment of these three digits (a bunched foot), and a straight back edge of footprints, additional evidence of a dinosaur-like simple hinged ankle.
Because all of these features are seen in footprints at the oldest site, Brusatte and colleagues conclude that the Stryczowice prints — which are only a few centimeters in length — are the oldest evidence of the dinosaur lineage. These dinosaurs, though, are considered “stem dinosaurs,” or the immediate relatives of dinosaurs not part of the slightly more derived clade that technically defines dinosaurs. Also, this animal did walk on all four limbs, an abnormal posture for early dinosaurs and their close relatives, although it appears that its forelimbs were already being reduced to more dinosaur-like proportions since the footprints overstep handprints.
The Baranów and Wióry trackways show changes early in the evolutionary history of dinosaurs. Wióry at 248-249 million years ago shows slight diversification in the types of tracks, but all tracks remain quadrupedal. Footprints from Baranów at 246 million years ago, however, may be the earliest evidence of moderately large-bodied and bipedal true dinosaurs. These tracks, which are called Sphingopus, are 15 centimeters long.
“Poland is a new frontier for understanding the earliest evolution of dinosaurs,” says Grzegorz Niedźwiedzki of the University of Warsaw and the Polish Academy of Sciences, who led the project and has been excavating footprints from the three sites for nearly a decade. “It used to be that most of the important fossils were from Argentina or the southwestern U.S., but in Poland we have several sites that yield footprints and bones from the oldest dinosaurs and their closest cousins, stretching throughout the entire Triassic Period.”
Finally, although the dinosaur group emerged soon after the Permian extinction, dinosaur-like tracks are rare in the footprint assemblages, representing only 2-3 percent of the prints discovered as opposed to 40-50 percent for crocodile-like archosaurs. Dinosaurs became more abundant tens of millions of years later.
“For the first 20-50 million years of dinosaur history, dinosaurs and their closest relatives were living in the shadow of their much more diverse, successful, and abundant crocodile-like cousins,” says Brusatte. “The oldest dinosaurs were small and rare.”
In addition to Brusatte and Niedźwiedzki, Richard Butler of the Bayerische Staatssammlung für Paläontologie und Geologie in Germany was an author of the paper. Brusatte is also affiliated with Columbia University. The research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation, the Percy Sladen Fund, the Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship, and the University of Warsaw.
Story Source:
The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by American Museum of Natural History, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
Journal Reference:
- Stephen L. Brusatte, Grzegorz Niedźwiedzki, Richard J. Butler. Footprints pull origin and diversification of dinosaur stem lineage deep into Early Triassic. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2010; DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2010.1746
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101006085311.htm
"Hidden" Language Found in Remote Indian Tribe
Photograph by Chris Rainier, National Geographic – Koro speakers gather at a house in Arunachal Pradesh, India, in an undated photo.Koro tongue documented in a linguistic “black hole.”
Dan Morrison – for National Geographic News
A “hidden” language has been documented in an isolated hill tribe in a northeastern Indian region considered a “black hole” in the study of languages, linguists announced today.
The new language, Koro, is spoken by about a thousand people in Arunachal Pradesh (map), a state for which little linguistic data exist, due to restrictive entry policies, according to the linguists behind the findings.
(See pictures of Koro speakers.)
Koro belongs to the Tibeto-Burman language family, which includes 400 languages such as Tibetan and Burmese. About 150 Tibeto-Burman languages are found in India, but a team with the National Geographic Society”s Enduring Voices Project discovered that Koro was distinct from all other languages in its family. (The Society owns National Geographic News.)
The linguists happened upon the language in 2008 while researching another two poorly known languages—Aka and Miji—which are spoken in one small district.
While listening to these tongues, the researchers detected a third language, Koro.
(Related: “”Lost” Language Found on Back of 400-Year-Old Letter.”)
“This is a language that had been undocumented, completely unrecognized, and unrecorded,” said researcher Gregory Anderson, director of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages.
What”s more, the newly identified Koro tongue may be endangered: Only about 800 people are speakers—most of them older than 20—and the language hasn”t been written down, Anderson noted.
Newfound Language in a Class By Itself
The team climbed steep hillsides and took to bamboo rafts to access the remote villages, where people make a living raising pigs and cultivating rice and barley.
Going door-to-door among the stilted bamboo houses, the team recorded villagers speaking the newfound language.
It”s unknown how the Koro, who number between 800 and 1,200 people, came to live as a subtribe of the 10,000-person Aka tribe.
But it”s clear that Koro differs greatly from Aka, the team found.
For instance, Koro”s inventory of sounds is completely different, as is the way sounds combine to form words. Words and sentences are built differently in Koro too.
For example, the Aka word for “mountain” is “phù” while the Koro word is “nggõ.” Aka speakers call a pig a “vo,” while to Koro speakers, a pig is a “lele.” The groups share about 9 percent of their vocabulary.
“Koro could hardly sound more different from Aka,” linguist K. David Harrison of Swarthmore College writes in his new book The Last Speakers. The linguist is also a National Geographic Society fellow.
“They sound as different as, say, English and Japanese.“
Language Differences Downplayed
Though they lack a common language, Koro speakers and Aka speakers insist there is no difference between them, Harrison noted.
The coexistence of separate languages between two integrated groups that don”t acknowledge an ethnic difference is very unusual, the Living Tongues Institute”s Anderson noted.
Typically, the minority language in such an arrangement would lose ground to the majority language and in time die out—or the smaller group would maintain its own language by asserting a unique identity.
(Related: “Languages Racing to Extinction in Five Global ”Hotspots.””)
But in the villages of the Aka and the Koro, in the shadow of India”s contested border with China, everyone maintains the tribe and subtribe are the same but for a small variation in dialect.
“Local people downplay the difference in the languages,” said Swarthmore”s Harrison, who helped Anderson in his research, along with Ranchi University”s Ganesh Murmu. “But they are radically different.”
Koro Language Origin “Pressing Concern”
“Linguistically, their enigmatic origin is a pressing concern,” said the Living Tongues Institute”s Anderson, who will describe Koro”s documentation in an upcoming edition of the journal Indian Linguistics.
“When did the Koro end up submerged within the Aka, and how did that come to be? Our most pressing task is getting decent documentation out into the professional domain so that specialists in other Tibeto-Burman languages can weigh in.”
K.V. Subbarao, a professor at the Centre for Applied Linguistics and Translation at the University of Hyderabad in India, said Koro”s uniqueness is an “interesting case.”
“It is quite possible that two living communities can coexist and still maintain their separate languages,” said Subbarao, who was not involved in the research.
“Certainly, it is uncommon for them to deny a distinction—the smaller group usually insists they are different.”
Follow link for Video -> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/10/101005-lost-language-india-science/
Coal Firms to Strip-Mine Historic Battlefield?
Photograph by Kenneth King – A strip-mined peak (foreground) may be a sign of things to come for Blair Mountain, a portion of which is visible at center.Preservationists fight uphill battle for West Virginia mountain, site of labor-rights clash.
Heather Pringle
for National Geographic magazine
Published June 2, 2010
On a sultry August morning in 1921, some 15,000 coal miners converged at the foot of the steep, brambly slopes of West Virginia‘s Blair Mountain. On a high ridge above, coal industry forces, private detectives, and state police officers peered out from fortified positions, training Thompson submachine guns and high-powered rifles on the men below.
After years of violent confrontations with mine operators in West Virginia coalfields, the miners were marching to Mingo County, West Virginia, to free miners imprisoned by state authorities and unionize workers who lived in dire poverty in company towns. But the 1,952-foot-tall (595-meter-tall) Blair Mountain stood in the marchers’ path. So the miners—armed with machine guns and other weapons, and wearing red bandannas around their necks—started up the slopes.
The ensuing battle, the second largest civil insurrection in U.S. history, lasted about five days and claimed dozens of lives. And while the miners eventually decided to lay down their arms when federal troops arrived, the battle of Blair Mountain focused national attention on the oppressive company towns of West Virginia and dangerous mines, resulting in part from lagging state safety regulations.
Twelve years later the federal government passed an act giving workers the right to form unions and bargain collectively, and the United Mine Workers of America dispatched its organizers across the United States. Blair Mountain, said Barbara Rasmussen, a historic preservation consultant in Morgantown, West Virginia, “was the flash point. This was where it all boiled over.”
(Related: “The High Cost of Cheap Coal.”)
Second Battle of Blair Mountain
Today, Blair Mountain is again the focus of a pitched battle—this time pitting preservationists against coal companies. Subsidiaries of two of the United States’ largest coal producers—Arch Coal, Inc., and Massey Energy Company, the owner of the Upper Big Branch Mine that in April claimed the lives of 29 miners in Montcoal, West Virginia—hold permits to blast and strip-mine huge chunks of the upper slopes and ridge of Blair Mountain, removing much of the mountaintop. (See mountaintop-removal mining pictures.)
This strip mining, some say, would bring welcome employment to struggling local communities. “Mining-occupation jobs are the highest paid [blue-collar jobs] in our region, if not in the country,” said Jason Bostic, vice-president of the West Virginia Coal Association, an organization that represents coal-mine operators, “and the economic effects ripple out from there.”
But many local residents are incensed by the devastation left by mountaintop-removal operations elsewhere in West Virginia. And they deeply oppose any such operation on Blair Mountain, seen as one of the most important historic sites in the U.S. labor movement. “It’s like they’re trying to destroy anything that the union had to do with,” said retired West Virginia coal miner Paul Nelson. “I think they want to destroy Blair Mountain and all memory of it.”
(Watch a time-lapse of satellite pictures showing the spread of a mountaintop-mining operation in one West Virginia county.)
Artifacts Unearthed
The president of the United Mineworkers of America, Cecil Roberts, has called publicly for the protection of the entire battleground. “Blair Mountain,” he noted in a formal statement in 2005, “stands as a pivotal event in American history, where working men and women stood up to the lawless coal barons of the early 20th century and their private armies and fought for their rights as Americans and indeed, the rights of working families all over the world.”
To protect the mountain’s historic battlefield, an informal coalition of concerned citizens, archaeologists, historians, and environmentalists from the Sierra Club are now fighting to list Blair Mountain in the National Register of Historic Places—a battle hampered, they say, by interference from a state government hooked on tax revenue from the coal industry.
Two leaders in the movement to protect the mountain are Harvard Ayers, an archaeologist and professor emeritus at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina, and Kenneth King, a local avocational archaeologist. In the summer of 2006, they put together a small team and began a three-week field survey of Blair Mountain, searching for traces of the historic battle.
Two previous archaeological surveys, commissioned Arch Coal, had recorded little evidence of the fighting, leading many to conclude that the battleground had been heavily disturbed by loggers, collectors, and others. But Ayers, a researcher experienced in Civil War archaeology, wanted to take another look.
Walking along the upper slopes and the 1,599-acre (647-hectare) ridge between the mountain’s north and south crests, the team mapped 15 combat sites and discovered more than a thousand artifacts, from rifle and shotgun shell casings to coins and batteries.
Moreover, the sites, buried beneath two to three inches (five to eight centimeters) of topsoil, revealed little sign of disturbance. In one site, for example, the team found a tight grouping of 13 shell casings, each fired by the same gun. “If these casings had been stirred around and disturbed,” Ayers said, “they wouldn’t have all been lying there together.”
Reversal of Fortune
Strongly impressed by the integrity of the site, Ayers and his colleagues stored the artifacts locally and nominated Blair Mountain for listing on the National Register for Historic Places, a measure that would prohibit any strip mining on the site. And when Janet Matthews, then Keeper of the Register, announced in the early spring of 2009 that Blair Mountain was officially listed, the coalition celebrated, convinced that they had succeeded in preserving a lasting memorial.
But one week later, West Virginia’s State Historic Preservation Officer (SHPO) Randall Reid-Smith, a political appointee, formally requested that Blair Mountain be taken off the register. A majority of Blair Mountain property owners, he claimed, opposed the listing.
Those who fought to preserve Blair Mountain were shocked. “But I got busy,” Ayers said, “because I was distraught.” Suspecting errors in Reid-Smith’s list of property owners and objectors, the archaeologist hired a West Virginia real estate lawyer, John Kennedy Bailey, to pore over tax records, property deeds, death records, and other relevant documents.
The list of objectors, Bailey discovered, included two dead men—one of whom had perished nearly three decades earlier—as well as a property owner who had sold her land years before the nomination process. In addition, Bailey identified 13 property owners who did not appear on the SHPO list at all. “The final count we reached was 63 landowners and only 25 objectors,” Ayers said.
The archaeologist submitted these findings and the pertinent records to the SHPO and to the office of the Keeper of the Register. But the new findings failed to trigger a comprehensive investigation. Susan Pierce, West Virginia’s Deputy State Historic Preservation Officer, concluded that the information Bailey had provided was insufficient for an accurate assessment of the property-owner list. Moreover, she determined that his findings had arrived too late under SHPO regulations.
In December 2009, Paul Loether, Chief of the National Register of Historic Places, officially accepted the SHPO list of property owners and objectors. The task of evaluating West Virginia property records, Loether explained, was the sole responsibility of the SHPO. Interim Keeper of the Register Carol Shull then officially removed Blair Mountain from the historic-places list.
The preservationists were stunned. “My sense is that if we can’t protect this mountain, we can’t protect any mountain,” said Denise Giardina, West Virginia State University’s writer-in-residence and a novelist who has published a book on the 1921 battle of Blair Mountain.
(Related: “Coal Mining Causing Earthquakes, Study Says.”)
New Offensive
Today the coal companies applaud Loether’s decision. The events of 1921, noted Massey Energy spokesperson Blair Gardner, “do not dictate—and the federal National Historic Preservation Act in no manner supports—an outcome that treats the entire nominated area as a shrine that may be visited by the curious, but unused and undeveloped by those who actually own it.”
Arch Coal spokesperson Kim Link noted, “we respect the decision of the National Register to remove Blair Mountain from the list of historic sites,” but she declined to answer questions on the company’s specific plans for mining the mountain.
The preservationists haven’t given up yet. Only a listing on the National Register, Ayers said, can “do justice to the men who fought and died on Spruce Ridge Fork [on Blair Mountain] almost 90 years ago.” So Ayers and his colleagues are now launching a new offensive, mounting a major public letter-writing campaign to Carol Shull, the interim Keeper of the National Register, to relist Blair Mountain, and contacting the Archaeological Conservatory, a nonprofit organization that purchases and preserves important endangered archaeological sites.
Moreover, for many in the region who view coal companies as intent on leveling the mountains of Appalachia, the miners who fought on Blair Mountain have become potent symbols of resistance. “The activists are all wearing red bandannas around their necks,” said Brandon Nida, a University of California, Berkeley, doctoral student who has been studying the modern fight, “just like the miners did in 1921.”
Strip mining operations on one part of the battlefield could conceivably begin at any time, and while Ayers, King, and other historic preservationists are clearly in for a tough battle, they vow to fight every step of the way. “I know I’m doing the right thing,” concluded King, whose grandfather marched with the miners. “I’m trying to save some of our heritage.”
Global Glaciation Snowballed Into Giant Change in Carbon Cycle
Princeton graduate students Catherine Rose and Nicholas Swanson-Hysell stand at the boundary of the Cryogenian and Ediacaran periods, distinguishable by the different colors of the glacial rocks below and the carbonate rock above. (Credit: Adam Maloof)
For insight into what can happen when the Earth’s carbon cycle is altered — a cause and consequence of climate change — scientists can look to an event that occurred some 720 million years ago.
New data from a Princeton University-led team of geologists suggest that an episode called “snowball Earth,” which may have covered the continents and oceans in a thick sheet of ice, produced a dramatic change in the carbon cycle. This change in the carbon cycle, in turn, may have triggered future ice ages.
Pinpointing the causes and effects of the extreme shift in the way carbon moved through the oceans, the biosphere and the atmosphere — the magnitude of which has not been observed at any other time in Earth history — is important for understanding just how much Earth’s climate can change and how the planet responds to such disturbances.
Publishing their findings in the April 30 issue of the journal Science, the researchers also put forth a hypothesis to explain how changes to Earth’s surface wrought by the glaciers of the Neoproterozoic Era could have created the anomaly in carbon cycling.
“The Neoproterozoic Era was the time in Earth history when the amount of oxygen rose to levels that allowed for the evolution of animals, so understanding changes to the carbon cycle and the dynamics of the Earth surface at the time is an important pursuit,” said Princeton graduate student Nicholas Swanson-Hysell, the first author on the paper.
The Neoproterozoic era, which lasted from 1,000 million years ago to 542 million years ago, is divided into three distinct periods, beginning with the Tonian, extending through the Cryogenian and ending with the Ediacaran. The Cryogenian period is notable in Earth history for the extensive and repeated ice ages that took place, beginning with the massive Sturtian glaciation at the start of the period. This marked the first ice age on Earth in roughly 1.5 billion years, which is an unusually long time span between glaciations. Since the Cryogenian, Earth has endured an ice age about once every 100 to 200 million years.
The “snowball Earth” theory suggests that the Sturtian glaciation was global in scope, literally encasing the planet in ice, which could have wreaked havoc on the normal functioning of the carbon cycle. While the theory is controversial and the extent of the deep freeze is under investigation, research team member Adam Maloof co-wrote a March 2010 Science paper demonstrating that glaciers reached the equator some 716.5 million years ago, providing further evidence to support the existence of a Cryogenian “snowball Earth.”
In the latest research, Swanson-Hysell, Maloof and their collaborators collected samples of limestone from Central and South Australia dating back to the Tonian and Cryogenian periods. Using a technique known as isotope analysis to learn how the carbon cycle worked in ancient times, the team pieced together clues that are hidden in the atomic composition of the carbon found in inorganic limestone sediment and ancient organic material. In addition, the geologists recorded where the samples were found in the rock layers to determine crucial information about the relative age of the samples and the environmental conditions under which they formed.
Their results documented a peculiar and large shift in the carbon cycle based on analyses of samples obtained from tropical limestone sediments known as the Trezona Formation, which dates to the end of the Cryogenian period approximately 650 million years ago and was deposited between “snowball Earth” events.
“The disturbance we’re seeing in the Neoproterozoic carbon cycle is larger by several orders of magnitude than anything we could cause today, even if we were to burn all the fossil fuels on the planet at once,” said Adam Maloof, a research team member and assistant professor of geosciences at Princeton.
Previous data from the Ediacaran period at the end of the Neoproterozoic era have shown a similar perturbation to the carbon cycle, and in 2003 Massachusetts Institute of Technology geophysicist Daniel Rothman suggested that a buildup of a huge pool of organic carbon in the ocean could have led to the observed disturbance.
The perturbation studied by the Princeton researchers shows this same behavior during an event that was roughly 25 percent larger and 100 million years older than the previously recognized disturbance. The team also documented that the carbon cycle was not operating in this bizarre fashion 800 million years ago prior to the first Neoproterozoic glaciations, constraining in time the onset of such behavior and linking it to the proposed “snowball Earth” event.
“The new carbon isotopic data shows a whopping … downshift in the isotopic composition of carbonate, possibly the largest single isotopic change in Earth history, while the isotopic composition of organic carbon is invariant,” said Rothman, who was not part of the research team. “The co-occurrence of such signals is enigmatic, suggesting that the carbon cycle during this period behaved fundamentally differently than it does today.”
Building on Rothman’s framework, the Princeton-led geologists set out to explain how an ice-covered globe in the early Cryogenian period could have prompted the accumulation of massive amounts of organic carbon in the ocean, leading to the observed disturbance to the carbon cycle later in the period.
According to their proposed hypothesis, the passage of the Sturtian glaciers across continental surfaces would have removed the weathered material and debris, which had accumulated in the 1.5 billion years since the preceding ice age. When the glaciers receded, this would have exposed vast amounts of bedrock to the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for weathering, freeing up nutrients in the rock for delivery into the oceans.
This process would have generated a relatively large influx of iron into the oceans, which could have interrupted biomechanisms used by marine bacteria during the Tonian to process, or eat, the organic carbon in the water and convert it into carbon dioxide and other dissolved inorganic carbon compounds. If the organic carbon was not eaten by bacteria, it would have accumulated into a massive oceanic reservoir and resulted in the strange carbon cycle of the Cryogenian and early Ediacaran.
The interaction of carbon dioxide with the continental surfaces during the weathering process also would have removed some of the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, lowering the global temperatures and creating conditions conducive to the series of glacial events that were observed throughout the Cryogenian.
According to Rothman’s hypothesis, over millions of years the levels of oceanic and atmospheric oxygen would have grown as a consequence of the altered carbon cycle, ultimately leading to the oxidation of the large reservoir of organic carbon, removing the extra organic carbon from the oceans and returning the carbon cycle to a steady state more similar to how it functions today. Increased levels of oxygen in the atmosphere also would have provided the conditions that were necessary for the explosive diversification of animal life at the end of the Neoproterozoic and into the Cambrian Period.
In field work this summer, the Princeton team will continue to investigate the disturbances to the Cryogenian and Ediacaran carbon cycles, and conduct research on the Tonian-Cryogenian-Ediacaran geologic, isotopic and paleogeographic history of northern Ethiopia and southern Australia. The geologists will explore some of the many questions that remain, such as what enabled the Cryogenian growth of ice sheets after a 1.5 billion year hiatus.
In addition to Swanson-Hysell and Maloof, the Princeton researchers on the team were graduate student Catherine Rose and former postdoctoral fellow Claire Calmet. The team also included Galen Halverson of the University of Adelaide, now at McGill University, and Matthew Hurtgen of Northwestern University.
Story Source:
Adapted from materials provided by Princeton University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
Journal Reference:
- N. L. Swanson-Hysell, C. V. Rose, C. C. Calmet, G. P. Halverson, M. T. Hurtgen, A. C. Maloof. Cryogenian Glaciation and the Onset of Carbon-Isotope Decoupling. Science, 2010; 328 (5978): 608 DOI: 10.1126/science.1184508
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100501013533.htm
Resurrected Mammoth Blood Very Cool
Professor Alan Cooper is pictured here with a mammoth bone. (Credit: University of Adelaide)
A team of international researchers has brought the primary component of mammoth blood back to life using ancient DNA preserved in bones from Siberian specimens 25,000 to 43,000 years old.
Studies of recreated mammoth hemoglobin, published May 3 in Nature Genetics, reveal special evolutionary adaptations that allowed the mammoth to cool its extremities down in harsh Arctic conditions to minimize heat loss.
“It has been remarkable to bring a complex protein from an extinct species, such as the mammoth, back to life,” says Professor Alan Cooper, Director of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) at the University of Adelaide, where the mammoth hemoglobin sequences were determined.
“This is true paleobiology, as we can study and measure how these animals functioned as if they were alive today.”
Professor Cooper is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and a member of the University’s Environment Institute.
“We’ve managed to uncover physiological attributes of an animal that hasn’t existed for thousands of years,” says team leader Professor Kevin Campbell of the University of Manitoba, Canada. “Our approach opens the way to studying the biomolecular and physiological characteristics of extinct species, even for features that leave no trace in the fossil record.”
The project began over seven years ago when Professor Campbell contacted Professor Cooper, who was then based at the University of Oxford, to suggest resurrecting mammoth hemoglobin.
“At the time, I thought ‘what a great idea’ — but it’s never going to work,” says Professor Cooper. “Still, bringing an extinct protein back to life is such an important concept, we’ve got to try it.”
The team converted the mammoth hemoglobin DNA sequences into RNA, and inserted them into modern-day E. coli bacteria, which then manufactured the authentic mammoth protein.
“The resulting hemoglobin molecules are no different than ‘going back in time’ and taking a blood sample from a real mammoth,” says Professor Campbell.
The team used modern scientific physiological tests and chemical modelling to characterise the biochemical properties that confer mammoths with physiological cold tolerance.
Team member Professor Roy Weber of the University of Aarhus, Denmark, who performed the physiological testing on the mammoth proteins, says the findings help show how the mammoth survived the extreme Arctic cold.
“Three highly unusual changes in the protein sequence allowed the mammoth’s blood to deliver oxygen to cells even at very low temperatures, something that indicates adaptation to the Arctic environment,” Professor Weber says.
“We can now apply similar approaches to other extinct species, such as Australian marsupials,” says team member Dr Jeremy Austin, ACAD Deputy Director, who is currently using ancient DNA to study the evolution and extinction of the thylacine and Tasmanian Devil.
Story Source:
Adapted from materials provided by University of Adelaide.
Journal Reference:
- Kevin L Campbell, Jason E E Roberts, Laura N Watson, Jörg Stetefeld, Angela M Sloan, Anthony V Signore, Jesse W Howatt, Jeremy R H Tame, Nadin Rohland, Tong-Jian Shen, Jeremy J Austin, Michael Hofreiter, Chien Ho, Roy E Weber, Alan Cooper. Substitutions in woolly mammoth hemoglobin confer biochemical properties adaptive for cold tolerance. Nature Genetics, 2010; DOI: 10.1038/ng.574
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100503111826.htm
Noah’s Ark Found in Turkey?
Near the top of Mount Ararat (seen from Armenia in a file photo) in Turkey, explorers claim to have found Noah’s ark. Photograph by Martin Gray, National GeographicThe expedition team is “99.9 percent” sure. Others, well, aren’t.
Ker Than
Published April 28, 2010
A team of evangelical Christian explorers claim they’ve found the remains of Noah’s ark beneath snow and volcanic debris on Turkey‘s Mount Ararat (map).
But some archaeologists and historians are taking the latest claim that Noah’s ark has been found about as seriously as they have past ones—which is to say not very.
(See “Noah’s Ark Discovered in Iran?” and “Noah’s Ark Quest Dead in Water—Was It a Stunt?”)
“I don’t know of any expedition that ever went looking for the ark and didn’t find it,” said Paul Zimansky, an archaeologist specializing in the Middle East at Stony Brook University in New York State.
Turkish and Chinese explorers from a group called Noah’s Ark Ministries International made the latest discovery claim Monday in Hong Kong, where the group is based.
“It’s not 100 percent that it is Noah’s ark, but we think it is 99.9 percent that this is it,” Yeung Wing-cheung, a filmmaker accompanying the explorers, told The Daily Mail.
Noah’s Ark Location in Turkey a Secret
The team claims to have found in 2007 and 2008 seven large wooden compartments buried at 13,000 feet (4,000 meters) above sea level, near the peak of Mount Ararat. They returned to the site with a film crew in October 2009.
Many Christians believe the mountain in Turkey is the final resting place of Noah’s ark, which the Bible says protected Noah, his family, and pairs of every animal species on Earth during a divine deluge that wiped out most of humanity.
“The structure is partitioned into different spaces,” said Noah’s Ark Ministries International team member Man-fai Yuen in a statement. “We believe that the wooden structure we entered is the same structure recorded in historical accounts. … “
The team says radiocarbon-dated wood taken from the discovery site—whose location they’re keeping secret for now—shows the purported ark is about 4,800 years old, which coincides roughly with the time of Noah’s flood implied by the Bible.
(Related: “‘Noah’s Flood’ May Have Triggered European Farming.”)
“Noah’s Ark” Wood “Way, Way, Way Too Young”
Skepticism of the new Noah’s ark claim extends to at least one scholar who interprets the Bible literally.
Biologist Todd Wood is director of the Center for Origins Research at Bryan College in Tennessee, which pursues biology in a creationist framework.
As a creationist, Wood believes God created Earth and its various life-forms out of nothing roughly 6,000 years ago.
“If you accept a young chronology for the Earth … then radiocarbon dating has to be reinterpreted,” because the method often yields dates much older than 6,000 years, Wood said.
Radiocarbon dating estimates the ages of organic objects by measuring the radioisotope carbon 14, which is known to decay at a set rate over time. The method is generally thought to reach its limit with objects about 60,000 years old. Earth is generally thought to be about four and a half billion years old.
Across the board, radiocarbon dates need to be recalibrated, Wood believes, to reflect shorter time frames.
Given this perceived overestimation in radiocarbon dating, the wood the Noah’s Ark Ministries International team found should have a “traditional” radiocarbon date of several tens of thousands of years if the wood is truly 4,800 years old, Wood said.
“I’m really, really skeptical that this could possibly be Noah’s Ark,” he added. The wood date is “way, way, way too young.”
Wood thinks Noah’s ark will never be found, because “it would have been prime timber after the flood,” he said.
“If you just got off the ark, and there’s no trees, what are you going to build your house out of? You’ve got a huge boat made of wood, so let’s use that,” he said. “So I think it got torn apart and scavenged for building material basically.”
(Related: National Geographic’s search for Noah’s flood.)
“Noah’s Ark” Found in Right Country, on Wrong Mountain?
Another reason scholars are skeptical of the latest Noah’s ark discovery claim is that Genesis—the first book of the Bible—never specifies which peak the vessel supposedly landed on in Turkey.
“The whole notion is odd, because the Bible tells you the ark landed somewhere in Urartu,”—an ancient kingdom in eastern Turkey—”but it’s only later that people identified Mount Ararat with Urartu,” said Jack Sasson, a professor of Jewish and biblical studies at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.
Stony Brook’s Zimansky agreed. “Nobody associated that mountain with the ark” until the tenth century B.C., he said, adding that there’s no geologic evidence for a mass flood in Turkey around 4,000 years ago. (See “‘Noah’s Flood’ Not Rooted in Reality, After All?”)
The Noah’s Ark Ministries International explorers are “playing in a very different ballpark than the rest of us,” Zimansky said. “They’re playing without any concern for” the archaeological, historical, and geological records.
Better Explanations for “Noah’s Ark” Structure?
Even if the Noah’s Ark Ministries International team did find a wooden structure or even a boat on Mount Ararat, there are other explanations for what the structure might be.
For example, it could be a shrine constructed by early Christians to commemorate the site where they believed Noah’s Ark should be, Zimansky said.
Even in that speculative case, it wouldn’t be 4,000 years old. “The Bible hadn’t even been written yet,” he said.
Bible scholar Sasson said he thinks biblical writers intended the story of Noah’s ark to be allegorical, not a true recounting of historical events. By presenting a scenario in which humanity is punished for its wickedness, “they were trying to draw us to the notion of a God who asks us to be acceptable,” Sasson said.
(Related: “Bible-Era Mystery Vessel Found—Code Stumps Experts.”)
UN to Consider “Noah’s Ark”?
On its Web site, Noah’s Ark Ministries International says the Turkish government plans to apply to the United Nations to put the Noah’s ark discovery site on the UNESCO World Heritage list, a designation given to places of special cultural or physical significance.
But the agency hasn’t received any official requests from Turkey for “the inscription of ‘Noah’s ark’” into the list, UNESCO spokesperson Roni Amelan said in an email.
Such a move would take time, Amelan added. “This cannot be done overnight.”
Follow link for Video Clip -> http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/04/100428-noahs-ark-found-in-turkey-science-religion-culture/
