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What on earth

October 2009

( Monthly archive )

Too much rain, too soon, in Somalia

Saturday, 31. October 2009, 10:49:46

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Previously, the area around El-Waq had been suffering from drought. Flash floods caused by four days of torrential rains have now displaced more than 15,000 people in the south-western Somalian town of El-Waq near the Kenyan border and submerged most homes and businesses. A lot of livestock (weakened by the drought) have died due to the ongoing rains. El-Waq, like the rest of Somalia, was waiting for the rain but it was too much in too short a time.





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Post Number 700

Thursday, 29. October 2009, 14:23:15

I see that I have reached post number 700 today - and there is still so much more to write about. Unbelievable in fact. You are not rid of me yet.

Thanks to all my readers that keep coming. This month the counter has passed 8000 unique visitors this month alone (most of them to visit some of the 699 older posts to be sure).

A special thanks to those that have followed me more or less regularly for the last four years (or less), and to subscribers by email and news feeders. And of course the kind people that link to my blog, without your support I would be nowhere.

Thank you all !



Academics

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Dinosaurs died out, but what about Insects?

Thursday, 29. October 2009, 10:11:16

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The Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, which occurred approximately 65 million years ago, was a large-scale mass extinction of animal and plant species in a geologically short period of time. The most famous victims were the dinosaurs. More than half of the species that lived in the sea died out at this time - including ammonites and rudists.

What happened to the insects?

Gunnar Ries at Amphibol commented in a post of 28 October 2009 some of the different causes used to explain the extinction event. His post is in German. This post drew my attention (thank you!) to a publication by a team of biologists form Bonn in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

Previous studies of insect-damaged fossil leaves in the US Western Interior showed major plant and insect herbivore (plant feeding) extinction at the Cretaceous–Palaeogene boundary. The Bonn team studied leaf fossils from the middle Palaeocene Menat site, France, which has the oldest well-preserved leaf assemblage from the Palaeocene of Europe, to test the generality of the observed Palaeocene US pattern. Apparently the insects were harder hit in the US than in Europe, and where it took about 10 million years for the insect fauna in the US to recover, Europe did in half that time, namely only 5 million years.

The diversity and complexity of plant–insect interactions at Menat suggest that the net effects of the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction were less at this greater distance from the Chicxulub, Mexico, impact site. Along with the available data from other regions, the study seems to show that the end-of-Cretaceous event did not cause a uniform, long-lasting depression of global terrestrial ecosystems. Rather, it gave rise to varying regional patterns of ecological collapse and recovery that appear to have been strongly influenced by distance from the Chicxulub structure.

This does not end the discussion, but seems to back up the Chicxulub hypothesis. Who makes the next goal?

Reference:
Wappler et al.
No post-Cretaceous ecosystem depression in European forests? Rich insect-feeding damage on diverse middle Palaeocene plants, Menat, France
Published online before print September 23, 2009
doi: 10.1098/rspb.2009.1255

Unfortunately NOT open access !

The Palaeocene Epoch is a geologic epoch that lasted from around 65 to around 56 million years ago.
The Palaeogene Period (that began around 65 and ended around 23 million years ago) on the other hand comprises the Palaeocene, Eocene and Oligocene





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Open Access is Good Business

Wednesday, 28. October 2009, 20:50:10

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Hereby a few quotes from a press release from Denmark’s Electronic Research Library.

“Denmark could make millions if researchers at universities and educational institutions made their reports freely available online.”

“Currently, most research results are published in scientific journals run by commercial publishers, but the results would reach a much broader audience if access were free. This would make research act as a knowledge dynamo, supporting the further development within the segment of small businesses. The study shows that open access to research would yield societal benefits worth DKK 300 million annually (approx. EUR 40 million).”

“It’s common sense to make publicly funded research freely available online so we can all benefit from it ... Currently, you have to pay to gain access to the newest knowledge in research, and that’s why we don’t benefit from the large public investments in research. Knowledge and innovation are Denmark’s most important raw materials and open access to research results will contribute to a larger dissemination and therefore a better utilisation of those raw materials.”

“Denmark is among the countries who have committed to the promotion of the EU policy of free online access to research results.”







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Pagophiles on Thin Ice

Tuesday, 27. October 2009, 08:54:24

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Pagophile is Greek for lover of ice. And some arctic animals are so fond of ice that they collectively are termed pagophiles. One of these is the polar bear, which I treated separately in a post on Climate Change and Polar Bears. But there are others, like Harp Seal and Hooded Seal, and they are in deep trouble, or should I say within shortly in deep waters.

Their breeding and moulting take place on pack ice. Harp seals and hooded seals need the ice to give birth to their pups. They need a solid stable ice platform for three or four weeks, in order to give birth and to allow the pups to nurse enough to build up strength. If the ice isn't there when the mother seals are ready to give birth, they are forced to abort the pups in the water, where they drown instantly.

Higher temperatures in the Arctic have already lead to problems for the populations, and their situation is not improving.

πάγος = ice
φιλία = love

In Norwegian:




Academics

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Bulletin of the Geological Society of Denmark now Open Access

Monday, 26. October 2009, 14:45:45

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Good news from the Geological Society of Denmark (DGF). All papers published on the DGF website will now be Open Access for free download. The pages will be updated in the coming weeks.

The Bulletin of the Geological Society of Denmark is a peer-reviewed journal written in English. The Bulletin publishes contributions of international interest in all fields of geological interest, with a natural emphasis on results of new work on material from Denmark, The Faroes and Greenland.



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Unnatural Global Warming

Monday, 26. October 2009, 08:45:09

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Is the current climate change simply a natural variation like others that have occurred throughout geologic time. Some people still believe it, but more and more evidence points to human beings being (at the very least partly) responsible. The current global warming is in other words not natural. There is an abbreviation for the phenomenon - AGW (anthropogenic global warming).

In a paper, titled "Recent Changes in a Remote Arctic Lake are Unique Within the Past 200,000 Years", sediments retrieved by University at Buffalo geologists from a remote Arctic lake show that recent variations are unlike those that have been seen during previous warming episodes. The environmental transformations going on in the Arctic are dramatic.

The 20th century is the only period during the past 200,000 years in which aquatic indicators reflect increased warming, despite the declining effect of slow changes in the tilt of the Earth's axis which, under natural conditions, would lead to climatic cooling.

Reference:
Recent Changes in a Remote Arctic Lake are Unique Within the Past 200,000 Years
by Axford et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Published online before print October 19, 2009
doi: 10.1073/pnas.0907094106
(requires a subscription or payment of US$10.00)





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Tweetday

Sunday, 25. October 2009, 09:14:15

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Seen on Twitter:
Shame you can't retweet chocolate over the Intertubes
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” - Stephen Hawking

My tweeted links:
First international Open Access Week - October 19-23, 2009 - http://bit.ly/rmp7Y - Great idea !
Road to Copenhagen: http://bit.ly/2qeZFr

Interesting twitter hashtags:
(Because Twitter provided no easy way to group tweets or add extra data, the Twitter community came up with their own way: hashtags. A hashtag is similar to other web tags - it helps add tweets to a category. Hashtags have the 'hash' or 'pound' or “number” symbol (#) preceding the tag, like so: #traffic, #followfriday ...)

The geotweeters, that is geoscience tweeters (on Twitter), have recently got their own hashtag:
#geotweeters

ScienceOnline2010, the fourth annual conference on science and the Web (including geoblogging), will be held on January 14-17th, 2010 and has this hashtag:
#scio10

Love links:
Problems of Melting Permafrost, Siberia - http://coldgeomorph.blogspot.com/2009/10/problems-of-melting-permafrost-siberia.html
Dinosaurs and people co-existed - http://chinleana.blogspot.com/2009/10/proof-dinosaurs-and-people-co-existed.html




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Greenland and Oil

Saturday, 24. October 2009, 14:54:00

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So-called self-government began in Greenland on 21 June 2009. Greenland wants, fair enough, more independence to explore its own natural resources. On the other hand it needs to exploit the same natural resources to “buy” more independence. Is this a vicious circle?

Roughly 76 percent of the voters in a referendum in 2008 wanted greater self-rule; on June 21 2009, they got it. But as part of that self-rule deal, Denmark will end up reducing its annual subsidy to Greenland—about €7.300 per person, representing about 60 percent of the island’s budget. Hence the high hopes for oil revenue. Some estimates, including those of the U.S. Geological Survey, suggest Greenland’s coastal waters could hold anywhere from 16 billion to 47 billion barrels of oil, or 800,000 barrels for every man, woman, and child.

The race has begun. 13 oil firms have been pre-qualified for the first license round for 14 enormous blocks in the Baffin Bay area off the west coast of Greenland. A second round is planned for 2012.

The water depths are typically 300-400 metres, not particularly deep by today’s standards, but the wells are still expected to cost about 67 million € a time, and drilling is likely to be confined to the summer months. After all it is still a bit dark, cold and rough in the Arctic winters.

Where will the money go? and what will the impact be on the pristine environment?



In Danish:




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Algae Key To Mass Extinctions?

Friday, 23. October 2009, 13:10:25

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There are lots of hypotheses about what causes mass extinctions, one more fanciful than the other. Two ideas taken more seriously are volcanoes and cosmic impacts. Now a new hypothesis suggests algae may be the killer behind the world's great fauna annihilations.

The idea was introduced in "Hypothesis for the role of toxin-producing algae in Phanerozoic mass extinctions based on evidence from the geologic record and modern environments" , a paper published in the March 2009 issue of the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Geosciences, and also presented in a talk on 19 October 2009, at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of American in Portland, Oregon, USA. (The full paper by Castle and Rodgers from March can be downloaded from this Clemson University site).

Castle and Rodgers have spent two years analyzing data from ancient stromatolite structures finding evidence that blue-green algae, which produce poisons and deplete oxygen, were present in sufficient quantities to kill off untold numbers of plants and animals living on land or in the sea. The geologic record demonstrates a pronounced increase in abundance and environmental range of algae, including stromatolitic cyanobacterial mats, coincident with the first four of the five major Phanerozoic (the last 545 million years) mass extinctions. During these past events of algal expansion, population decline of animals could have been caused by effects of algal blooms, including algal-produced toxins, at a scale sufficient to generate a fossil record of mass extinction.


Mass extinctions have often been attributed to climate changes, sea level, volcanic activity, and asteroids. Castle and Rodgers claim that these causes are contributors, but algae were the mass killer.

Environmental changes such as climatic warming, sea level fluctuation, and increased nutrient supply may have promoted algal blooms over vast expanses of marine to freshwater environments. and indeed, in my humble opinion toxic algae may just be another contributor together with other factors leading to (too) harsh environmental conditions.


Schematic profiles illustrating the influence of climate-induced sea level change on algal growth. (A) Sea level is low, shelves are narrow, and water temperatures are less favorable for algal growth during periods of cool global climate. (B) During periods of warm global climate, sea level is high resulting in extensive areas of shallow marine and coastal environments favourable for algal growth. Warm water temperatures promote the growth of algal blooms, domal and columnal stromatolites, and stromatolitic mats, which increases the potential for toxin production and release.





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