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This week:
Earth has a 27.5-million-year ‘pulse’ of major geological events, says study
The worldwide demand for sand
Maritime startup invents Lego-style bricks made from recycled plastic
Earth has a 27.5-million-year ‘pulse’ of major geological events, says study
(Earth Sciences and Image Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center/Associated Press)
The Earth behaves cyclically, and major geologic events like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that could lead to extinctions cluster in cycles, a new study has found.
The research team, led by Michael Rampino, a professor in New York University’s department of biology, even has a special name for it.
“All of these things, when you add them all together, seem to occur in pulses,” said Rampino. “Not at random, but in pulses.”
Rampino and his colleagues looked at recently published data about a period of 89 geological events in the past 260 million years in order to identify peaks in which they occurred.
These so-called pulses have a cycle of happening roughly every 27.5 million years.
“It means that there’s an ongoing cycle running through all of these various and seemingly unrelated geological events,” said Rampino.
The research team analyzed mass geological episodes, such as fluctuations in the global sea level caused by changes in sea-floor spreading rates, that affected sea and land organisms. The extinction of dinosaurs dating back 66 million years — or three cycles ago — was one of the events the researchers looked at to find a pattern.
The research notes how many of these catastrophic events seem to happen during the same period. Giant earthquakes and volcanic eruptions still happen outside these peaks, and scientists are still unsure what is causing them.
According to the study, the most recent cluster of disastrous geological episodes was about seven to 10 million years ago, so it is safe to say that Earth is at least 15 million years away from experiencing this series of catastrophic events that will likely wipe out most, if not all, humankind.
If you were wondering, human-induced climate change is separate from these cycles, but anything we do to damage the environment will continue to affect our living conditions.
“I don’t know what we could do 20 million years from now,” said Rampino. “But for now, these cycles don’t seem to be in the control of human beings.”
Even if humans survive and develop the technology to deal with these events millions of years from now, Rampino said the Earth’s pulse will keep on beating.
The geologist said that for a long time, scientists lacked accurate enough age data to make co-ordinated, statistics-based calculations about these geological events.
“Back in the early 20th century, no one had very good evidence to show whether they were cycles or not,” said Rampino. “And many or most geologists thought that these cycles were random.”
Other research studies have proposed cycles for various geological occurrences on a global scale, like volcanic activity, leading to climate changes.
Rampino himself published studies in the past that looked at the cycle of some of these events separately. In September 2020, his team found the same interval of 27.5 million years in astudy about the mass extinction cycle of four-legged land animals.
It was difficult for scientists to perform any quantitative investigations until a couple of years ago. With the improvement of radio-isotope dating techniques and updates in the geologic timescale, new data has been compiled that makes it possible to search for correlations in these events accurately.
Geologists want to know how the Earth behaves, and this evidence shows that the Earth has behaved in a cyclical way for a long time, according to Rampino.
The researcher said this is an important finding because the question isn’t why, but how these things happen.
“You need to know the age of these events very precisely,” said Rampino. “Now [we] can see there’s a periodicity.”
“Of course, the whole swimsuit problem goes away if you use the swimwear we are born with: fits perfectly, lightweight, colour matched so no tan lines, drip, sun or air dry, can be washed with household soap (dry cleaning especially forbidden). Unfortunately, social issues make it difficult to use in urban areas.”
Daniel Zung, meanwhile, addressed Colin Butler’s story on helium balloons ending up in the Great Lakes. “It is probably best not to be inflating balloons with helium to be released. While apparently the shortage of helium has decreased over the past year, potentially due to fewer parties, once more balloons are demanded, helium prices might rise as demand for the gas returns. Best to keep helium for … science and manufacturing where as a society we might have better use of the gas rather than polluting the environment by using balloons (in general).”
There’s also a radio show and podcast! Protests against old-growth logging in British Columbia have drawn international attention to the importance of ancient forests. This week, What on Earth guest host Lisa Johnson hears about the role these trees play in fighting climate change. What on Earthairs Sunday at 12:30 p.m., 1 p.m. in Newfoundland. Subscribe on your favourite podcast app or hear it on demand at CBC Listen.
The Big Picture: Sand mining
In response to a recent story we did on the push to make more environmentally friendly concrete, several readers pointed out the ecological impact of one of concrete’s biggest ingredients: sand. Fact: no commodity is mined more than sand. No mineral or metal comes close. Its greatest use is in concrete, but sand can also be found in everything from glass to toothpaste. As countries continue to urbanize, sand use is only expected to go up. While we have deserts that would seem to contain more than enough of the grainy stuff, the sand found in places like the Sahara is so weathered and dry that it is unusable for applications like concrete. Prime sand is found along shorelines (such as the Congo River near Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, as in the photo below). But in meeting the global demand for sand, mining operations are eroding coastlines and destroying ecosystems.
(Marco Longari/AFP via Getty Images)
Hot and bothered: Provocative ideas from around the web
“Heat domes,” like the one preying on Western Canada and the U.S., are made more intense by climate change, says this essay in the New York Times.
Maritime startup invents Lego-style bricks made from recycled plastic
(Submitted by Dustin Bowers)
In a social media video shot in a shipping container in his backyard, Dustin Bowers can be seen wearing protective goggles and throwing plastic garbage into a funnel that grinds it up into shreds.
From these shreds, the Hampstead, N.B.-based founder and product developer of PLAEX Building Systems Inc. has created a no-cut, mortarless and reusable system of interconnecting bricks and finish panels — basically Lego for real-life structures.
Bowers is a carpenter from a family of tradespeople. But after a few years managing multimillion-dollar construction projects out west, he said he could no longer ignore the “insane” amount of waste it generates.
“If we keep doing this, there ain’t going to be a planet for our kids.”
Producing PLAEX uses less energy than current recycling methods and very little water, all of which helps lessen its ecological impact, said Bowers.
He first came up with the idea in 2017 and has developed a prototype that is being tested for Canadian Standards Association (CSA) approval and should be ready for purchase orders by August.
Although the product will initially only be certified for use in non-occupied structures — such as retaining walls, flood walls, garages and sheds — eventually he hopes to have it approved for building houses.
When it came to securing a reliable source of plastic waste, Bowers saw another problem he could tackle. He has experience in market gardening and knows how integral plastic is in even the most eco-conscious farm and garden practices.
“A lot of farmers have to bribe their garbage man to get rid of it,” he said. “It’s a problem.”
He reached out to David Wolpin, who runs a farm supply company in Bloomfield, N.B.
Wolpin supplies farms with plastic for row cover, ground cover, insect netting, greenhouses and irrigation, among other things.
“I said, ‘Well, actually, I can help you set up your whole supply chain,'” said Wolpin. “‘Basically, if you take all the stuff that I sell a few years after I sell it, you’re in business.'”
Raised by “recovering hippies,” Wolpin said the fact that he sells tonnes of plastic every year weighs on his conscience. Most of that plastic is used for between three and 10 years.
Ultimately, he said, he feels great about supporting local producers — they help reduce carbon emissions from importing food and keep food dollars in the local economy. The plastic he sells helps them extend the local growing season and reduces the use of toxic pesticides by discouraging weed growth and pest damage.
Wolpin is working with Bowers on a Maritime-wide plastic waste collection service for farmers.
Green building expert Keith Robertson of Solterre Design in Halifax thinks PLAEX is innovative in a Canadian context, and likes that it tackles waste in two ways.
First, he said, it diverts plastic from the landfill, where it has been a big problem for municipal waste management.
Secondly, if the Lego-like, no-cut system can eliminate or even greatly reduce construction waste, “it’s a big plus.”
— Rose Murphy
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More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.
That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.
“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”
The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.
Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.
Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.
Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.
Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.
“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”
The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.
North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.
Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”
Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.
Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.
For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.
“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”
Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.
On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.
They call it “Big Sam.”
The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.
It didn’t die alone.
“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.
She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”
“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.
The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.
The discovery was a long time coming.
The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.
“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.
When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”
“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.
Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.
About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.
Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.
“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.
“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”
The genders of the two adults are unknown.
Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.
The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.
She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.
“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.
“It’s pretty exciting.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.
Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.
Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.
The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.
The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.
It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.
Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.
Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.
Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.
Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.
Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.
The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”
