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Life on Mars? Billion-year-old water found near Timmins could offer glimpse into the past – Toronto Star

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Scientists are hoping water found near Timmins, Ont., that is more than a billion years old can provide insight into the possibility that life once existed on Mars.

Dr. Barbara Sherwood Lollar, a University of Toronto geochemist, first found the ancient salt water 2.4 kilometres underground in Kidd Creek Mine in 2009.

It took Sherwood Lollar’s team four years to verify the age of the water. They then began sampling it for microscopic life. Four to five years later, they confirmed that microbes lived in the water.

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The discovery “opened up our understanding of the frontiers of the planet,” the geochemist said.

Sherwood Lollar has been sampling water in mines across Canada, in southern Africa and northern Europe for about 34 years. She knew that mines had salty water and wanted to understand why.

She took the trip to the Kidd Creek Mine, which is about 24 kilometres north of Timmins, in search of water as old or older than water the scientist had found in South African gold mines between 2003 and 2011. Sherwood Lollar confirmed that water to be anywhere from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of years old.

The Kidd Creek sample was the first time particles of flowing water were verified to be more than a billion years old.

While miners have long known about the salty water, research into why it was salty “flew under the radar of the scientific community,” Sherwood Lollar said. In fact, most Canadian geologists working on the Canadian Shield weren’t aware of any water in the mines, said Sherwood Lollar. It wasn’t until the 1980s and ’90s that scientists began investigating.

Sherwood Lollar hypothesized the salinity was a product of chemical reactions between the water and rock over long periods of time. The resulting chemicals made the ancient water habitable and could indicate that life exists in it, in the form of rock-eating microbes, or chemolithotrophs, the geochemist thought.

The rocks in the Canadian Shield, the exposed portion of the continental crust underneath the majority of North America that makes up about half of Canada’s land mass, are some of the oldest on Earth, with most ranging from 2.7 to three billion years old.

The Earth is 4.5 billion years old, but the oldest rocks are usually not preserved because they have been destroyed over time, Sherwood Lollar said. The rock at Kidd Creek, however, is quite well-preserved, she said.

By 2019, Sherwood Lollar and her team confirmed the hypothesis that the life forms do, indeed, exist in the ancient water.

The rock-eating microbes can live deep within the Earth because they are not photosynthetic, and therefore, do not rely on the sun for energy, Sherwood Lollar said.

Discovering that the water at Kidd Creek was more than a billion years old led Sherwood Lollar’s team to compare it to Mars and other planets.

Organisms in ecosystems deep beneath the surface of the Earth could provide insight into life that may have existed under similar conditions on Mars, three or four billion years ago, she said.

“The big question is … could any signs of that life still be preserved in the subsurface of Mars, where water might still be in evidence?

“We know now that Mars is a cold, dry desert. Nothing’s living on the surface of Mars,” Sherwood Lollar said. “But early in its history, Mars had a much more habitable environment, or potentially habitable environment, similar to Earth.”

Sherwood Lollar’s team extracted various samples of the ancient water for research and teaching purposes. In 2019, she approached Ingenium’s National Museum of Science and Technology in Ottawa.

A conservation lab at the Ingenium Centre, next to the Museum of Science and Technology, now hosts a 60 millilitre sample of the ancient water, in a vial that can fit in the palm of a hand.

Rebecca Dallgoy, curator of natural resources and industrial technologies at Ingenium, said she feels “honoured, humbled and responsible,” for the water now under Ingenium’s stewardship.

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The sample is being kept at room temperature in a silicate glass vial to ensure it does not evaporate.

There are plans to house the sample at other facilities within the Ingenium Centre, such as the Digital Innovation Lab and Research Institute. There, the museum can host researchers and make the water available for digital projects.

“We mostly do research on the artifacts in our collection and on material culture and on relationships with visitors,” Dolgoy said. “We won’t be analyzing the water sample in the lab. It’s more of the interpretive possibilities and the meanings.”

Sherwood Lollar is excited about the timing of the Ingenium exhibit, “because it’s coming about right about the same time that we’re finally able to tell you something about the organisms that are living in that ancient water.”

The geochemist never predicted that she would find water so ancient at Kidd Creek.

“We expected to find something old, but as happens with science, sometimes it still manages to surprise you,” Sherwood Lollar said.

When her team learned the water was more than a billion years old, they took their time to retrieve more samples and run more tests, Sherwood Lollar said.

In fact, her team didn’t publish its first paper on the water until four years later, in 2013.

The scientists used nine factors to determine the water’s age, including the amount of noble gases present. Noble gases are highly unreactive, so they accumulate over time. In turn, the concentration indicates how long the water has been present, Sherwood Lollar said.

“We wanted to be so sure that we were getting this right because it was such a game changer,” Sherwood Lollar said. “It literally pushed back our understanding of how old flowing water could be.”

In 2019, Sherwood Lollar was named co-director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research program “Earth 4D — Subsurface Science and Exploration.”

The scientist will continue working with international partners to research the system found at the Kidd Creek Mine and whether or not it could exist elsewhere on Earth.

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NASA to launch sounding rockets into moon's shadow during solar eclipse – Phys.org

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This photo shows the three APEP sounding rockets and the support team after successful assembly. The team lead, Aroh Barjatya, is at the top center, standing next to the guardrails on the second floor. Credit: NASA/Berit Bland

NASA will launch three sounding rockets during the total solar eclipse on April 8, 2024, to study how Earth’s upper atmosphere is affected when sunlight momentarily dims over a portion of the planet.

The Atmospheric Perturbations around Eclipse Path (APEP) sounding rockets will launch from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia to study the disturbances in the created when the moon eclipses the sun. The sounding rockets had been previously launched and successfully recovered from White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico, during the October 2023 .

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They have been refurbished with new instrumentation and will be relaunched in April 2024. The mission is led by Aroh Barjatya, a professor of engineering physics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, where he directs the Space and Atmospheric Instrumentation Lab.

The sounding rockets will launch at three different times: 45 minutes before, during, and 45 minutes after the peak local eclipse. These intervals are important to collect data on how the sun’s sudden disappearance affects the ionosphere, creating disturbances that have the potential to interfere with our communications.

The ionosphere is a region of Earth’s atmosphere that is between 55 to 310 miles (90 to 500 kilometers) above the ground. “It’s an electrified region that reflects and refracts and also impacts as the signals pass through,” said Barjatya. “Understanding the ionosphere and developing models to help us predict disturbances is crucial to making sure our increasingly communication-dependent world operates smoothly.”

A sounding rocket is able to carry science instruments between 30 and 300 miles above Earth’s surface. These altitudes are typically too high for science balloons and too low for satellites to access safely, making sounding rockets the only platforms that can carry out direct measurements in these regions. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

The ionosphere forms the boundary between Earth’s lower atmosphere—where we live and breathe—and the vacuum of space. It is made up of a sea of particles that become ionized, or electrically charged, from the sun’s energy or .

When night falls, the ionosphere thins out as previously ionized particles relax and recombine back into neutral particles. However, Earth’s terrestrial weather and space weather can impact these particles, making it a dynamic region and difficult to know what the ionosphere will be like at a given time.

It’s often difficult to study short-term changes in the ionosphere during an eclipse with satellites because they may not be at the right place or time to cross the eclipse path. Since the exact date and times of the are known, NASA can launch targeted sounding rockets to study the effects of the eclipse at the right time and at all altitudes of the ionosphere.

As the eclipse shadow races through the atmosphere, it creates a rapid, localized sunset that triggers large-scale atmospheric waves and small-scale disturbances or perturbations. These perturbations affect different radio communication frequencies. Gathering the data on these perturbations will help scientists validate and improve current models that help predict potential disturbances to our communications, especially high-frequency communication.

This conceptual animation is an example of what observers might expect to see during a total solar eclipse, like the one happening over the United States on April 8, 2024. Credit: NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio

The APEP rockets are expected to reach a maximum altitude of 260 miles (420 kilometers). Each rocket will measure charged and neutral particle density and surrounding electric and magnetic fields. “Each rocket will eject four secondary instruments the size of a two-liter soda bottle that also measure the same data points, so it’s similar to results from fifteen rockets while only launching three,” explained Barjatya. Embry-Riddle built three secondary instruments on each rocket, and the fourth one was built at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

In addition to the rockets, several teams across the U.S. will also be taking measurements of the ionosphere by various means. A team of students from Embry-Riddle will deploy a series of high-altitude balloons. Co-investigators from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Haystack Observatory in Massachusetts and the Air Force Research Laboratory in New Mexico will operate a variety of ground-based radars taking measurements.

Using this data, a team of scientists from Embry-Riddle and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory are refining existing models. Together, these various investigations will help provide the puzzle pieces needed to see the bigger picture of ionospheric dynamics.

The animation depicts the waves created by ionized particles during the 2017 total solar eclipse. Credit: MIT Haystack Observatory/Shun-rong Zhang. Zhang, S.-R., Erickson, P. J., Goncharenko, L. P., Coster, A. J., Rideout, W. & Vierinen, J. (2017). Ionospheric Bow Waves and Perturbations Induced by the 21 August 2017 Solar Eclipse. Geophysical Research Letters, 44(24), 12,067-12,073. https://doi.org/10.1002/2017GL076054

When the APEP- launched during the 2023 annular solar eclipse, scientists saw a sharp reduction in the density of charged particles as the annular eclipse shadow passed over the atmosphere.

“We saw the perturbations capable of affecting radio communications in the second and third rockets, but not during the first rocket that was before peak local eclipse,” said Barjatya. “We are super excited to relaunch them during the total eclipse to see if the perturbations start at the same altitude and if their magnitude and scale remain the same.”

The next total solar eclipse over the contiguous U.S. is not until 2044, so these experiments are a rare opportunity for scientists to collect crucial data.

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Royal Sask. Museum research finds insect changes may have set stage for dinosaurs' extinction – CTV News Regina

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Research by the Royal Saskatchewan Museum (RSM) shows that ecological changes were occurring in insects at least a million years before dinosaur extinction.

Papers published in the scientific journal, Current Biology, describe the first insect fossils found in amber from Saskatchewan and the unearthing of three new ant species from an amber deposit in North Carolina, according to a release from the province.

The amber deposit from in the Big Muddy Badlands of Saskatchewan, which was formed about 67 million years ago, preserved insects that lived in a swampy redwood forest about one million years before the extinction of dinosaurs.

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“Fossils in the amber deposit seem to show that common Cretaceous insects may have been replaced on the landscape by their more modern relatives, particularly in groups such as ants, before the extinction event,” Elyssa Loewen, curatorial assistant, said.

The research team was led by Loewen and Dr. Ryan McKellar, the RSM’s curator of paleontology.

“These new fossil records are closer than anyone has gotten to sampling a diverse set of insects near the extinction event, and they help researchers fill in a 17-million-year gap in the fossil record of insects around that time,” Dr. McKellar said.

The three ant species discovered in North Carolina also belonged to extinct groups that didn’t survive past the Cretaceous period.

“When combined with the work in Saskatchewan, the two recent papers show that there was a dramatic change in ant diversity sometime between 77 and 67 million years ago,” Dr. McKellar said in the release.

“Our analyses of body shapes in the fossils suggests that the turnover was not related to major differences in ecology, but it may have been related to something like the size and complexity of ant colonies. More work is needed to confirm this.”

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Meteors, UFOs or something else? Dawson City, Yukon, residents puzzled by recent sightings in night sky – CBC.ca

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Some residents in Dawson City, Yukon, say they’ve been seeing unusual things in the night sky lately — and it’s not the Northern Lights. 

But some might say it’s equally as fascinating.

Over the past few weeks, some residents have taken to social media to report seeing what they described as a fireball or meteor overhead. And last week, two residents said they both saw something similar.

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Naomi Gladish lives in Henderson Corner, a subdivision approximately 20 kilometres from downtown Dawson City. She told CBC News she saw something while walking her dog Friday morning.

“I looked up and saw a bright star,” Gladish said. “Or what I thought was a star.” 

“Within a fraction of a second, I realized it was actually moving quickly. And then as I watched it, a second later it grew a long tail.”

Dawson City resident Naomi Gladish said she saw something similar to the fireball shown in this image from the American Meteor Society. (American Meteor Society)

Gladish said the unknown object started to change into a pale blue colour, like a gas flame. Then, a few seconds later, it appeared to burn out.

“I could see fire, or coal,” Gladish said. “Like red glowing bits, breaking off of it. And then that was it. I tried watching to see if I could see any dark chunks falling from that spot, or carrying on from that spot, but the sky was dark.”

A minute or two after Gladish saw what she thought was a meteor, she heard a boom in the distance.

“My dog and I both turned our head to that exact direction that I had just seen it,” she said.”I figured it was related.”

Two women walking through snowy mountain terrain.
Naomi Gladish hiking with her sister at Tombstone Park. (Submitted by Naomi Gladish)

Dawson resident Jeff Delisle reported seeing something similar at about the same time. He then took to social media to ask if anyone else had seen it. Two people responded saying they had. 

“It flew right above me,” Delisle wrote.

“Pretty cool looking…. What is it?”

Likely not a meteor, says astronomer

Christa Van Laerhoven, president of the Yukon Astronomical Society, came across Delisle’s post and got in touch. She asked about what he’d seen, such as how long it was in the sky and the colour.

Van Laerhoven told CBC News that based on descriptions from both Delisle and Gladish, she doesn’t believe it could have been a meteor.

She says a meteor would have been moving much faster, and the colouring would have appeared differently. 

“Meteors can be any colour but … as a rule, are a consistent colour. What these people were describing had different colours. So the head looked blue and then the tail was more of an orange,” van Laerhoven said.

“That’s just something that doesn’t happen with meteors.”

a meteor
This zoomed-in still from a dashcam video captured in 2020 by Louise Cooke from Mount Lorne, Yukon, shows what one space science expert said appears to be an unusually-bright meteor travelling across the sky. (Submitted by: Louise Cooke)

Van Laehoven believes there may be another explanation for the recent unusual sightings: space junk, falling to earth.

“Space junk, when it comes in … comes through the atmosphere and starts glowing that can be more irregular, because of the variety of materials that go into a spacecraft.”

Van Laerhoven also suggested it could a very fast plane, or someone playing with rockets.

Gladish, however, doesn’t think anyone in Dawson was playing with rockets on Friday morning.

“Unless they’re talking about someone in China, or like a distant land playing with very high, powerful rockets … then sure,” she said.

“This was not something that someone in Dawson was doing … This came from much, much higher and it was much, much different to anything that would be locally caused.”

Van Laerhoven also dismissed another possibility: alien visitors.

“If aliens were coming to Earth, we would know,” she said.

“Simply because it would take them so much effort to get here that it would be very hard to imagine them getting here and not doing something dramatic enough that we would actually know about it.”

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