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I have now compiled all the Earth-logs posts from 2023 into PDFs for the categories: Geohazards; Geomorphology; Human Evolution; Miscellaneous; Palaeobiology; Palaeoclimatology; Physical Resources; Planetary Science; Sediments and Stratigraphy, and Tectonics. They are available for download through the Annual logs pull-down in the main menu – just select a category, then scroll down to the 2023 list of contents and click on the link.

I hope this format is useful for reference purposes.

‘We are what we eat’ is certainly a truism, but it is neither a trope nor a cliché. The phrase is especially appropriate when scientists examine isotopes of a variety of elements in bones or teeth. For instance the relative proportions of two stable isotopes of the metal strontium – ⁸⁷Sr and ⁸⁶Sr – differ from place to place in soil because ⁸⁷Sr is the daughter isotope of radioactive ⁸⁷Rb. The older the rock from which a soil has formed the more of the radioactive rubidium isotope will have decayed. Not only does this increase the ⁸⁷Sr/ ⁸⁶Sr ratio in the rock and the soil derived from it, but vegetation inherits it too. So it gets into an animal’s diet and ultimately its teeth. A human who has migrated will carry the ratio of the geology of her early home geology in her adult teeth – fully developed by about 13 years-old – to wherever she dies. Likewise, the different oxygen isotopes in rainwater, which result from climate variation, end up in teeth thanks to what a person ate before adulthood. The two ‘signatures’ together allowed archaeologists to backtrack the famous ‘Amesbury Archer’, who may have brought Bronze Age culture to Britain, back to the Alps of Central Europe. Just what a human diet comprised can be roughly assessed from the carbon and nitrogen isotopes in collagen that fossil bone sometimes preserves: the proportion of seafood relative to the meat of land herbivores and the amount of terrestrial grains, nuts and fruits. The trouble is, collagen degrades with the age of human remains and another approach is needed to assess the diets of our distant forebears.

It turns out that calcium isotopes in teeth, which do not degrade over extremely long time spans, offer clues to diet. In particular the dental ⁴⁴Ca/⁴²Ca ratio decreases as its hosts rise in the food chain; effectively as the meat content in their diet increases. This approach has been applied to the hominin and non-human primate fauna of the Turkana Basin in Kenya (Martin, J.E. excess加速器安装教程. 2023. Calcium isotopic ecology of Turkana Basin hominins. Nature Communications, v. 11, article 3587; DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-17427-7). The shores of a large lake in the vicinity of modern Lake Turkana were occupied from 3.5 to about 2 Ma ago by early Homo, australopithecines, paranthropoids and baboons. Using dental Ca isotopes fails to distinguish Australopithecus anamensis and Kenyanthropus platyops, whereas carbon isotopes suggest that the first had a purely C3 plant diet – fruiting plants that thrive under cool, wet conditions, as beneath woodland canopies – whereas Kenyanthropus foraged on both these and the C4 plants – many grasses and sedges – that favour open, well-lit grassland. The ⁴⁴Ca/⁴²Ca ratios in Homo teeth span a wide range of values that point to omnivory and even a high dietary meat content: a similar isotopic pattern to those of fossil baboons and geladas. Paranthropus boisei is definitely the odd-one-out, among both ancient and modern primates, and even among paranthropoids as a whole. It most likely had a specialised diet. Its teeth show wear patterns that suggest soft plant material, which seems to rule out grasses which are abrasive. Perhaps it fed on succulent semi-aquatic plants of the lake shore. When Mary Leakey first discovered P. boisei in 1959, she and husband Louis considered that its huge molars with thick enamel indicated that it ate hard vegetable matter, hence its original nickname ‘Nutcracker Man’. It also had hands capable of precise manipulation, indeed the association of the first specimen with Oldowan-type stone tools led to speculation that it had made them. Some specimens are associated with long bones with worn ends, suggesting that they may have used them for digging.

Who the first Americans were is barely known outside of the tools that they left in the archaeological record. For most of the late 20^th century US researchers claimed that the first people to migrate into the Americas produced stone tools of the Clovis culture that first appear just before the Younger Dryas cold period, around 13.2 to 12.9 thousand years (ka) ago. The hallmark of Clovis culture is the finely-worked stone spear point, and its association with butchered large mammals: the Clovis people were apparently big-game hunters  Despite other, albeit less convincing, signs of earlier human habitation, this notion ossified for a seemingly irrefutable reason. To reach the Americas from NE Asia on foot, these people would have had to cross the Bering Straits via the Beringia land bridge exposed as sea level fell during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). That would have taken them to Alaska, but an exit to the south remained blocked by the huge Laurentian ice sheet until around 13 ka. Once an ice-free route had opened, the Clovis people migrated quickly to reach the site from which they take their name in New Mexico. But other archaeological sites discovered in the last couple of decades, extending as far south as Chile, have yielded ages that clearly predate the Clovis culture (see: Clovis First hypothesis dumped, May 2008). Beneath a Clovis-bearing layer at a site in Texas excavators unearthed thousands of totally different tools reliably dated to as far back as 15.5 ka (see: Clovis first hypothesis refuted, May 2011). This opened the realistic possibility that the earliest migrants had not necessarily walked from Asia, but may have followed a marine route along the Pacific coast and spread eastwards as opportunities presented themselves.

Now Mesoamerica has convincingly verified migration more than twice as long ago as that which littered North America with Clovis tools. It emerged from the Chiquihuite Cave 2.7 km high in the Astillero Mountains of northern Mexico. Almost 2000 stone artefacts were found throughout a 3 m thick layer of sediment beneath the cave floor that spans 27 to 13  ka, (Ardelean, C.F. and 27 others 2023. Evidence of human occupation in Mexico around the Last Glacial Maximum. Nature, published online; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2509-0). The technology revealed by the tools is more primitive than that of the Clovis culture. Artefacts occur throughout the layer, which extends back in time from the Younger Dryas, through the preceding period of warming and the LGM itself. Although colder than the present equitable climate of the high mountain valleys of Northern Mexico environmental data obtained from the layer show that it was viable for occupation through the LGM. Of the 42 highly precise and accurate radiocarbon dates those from some of the stratigraphically deepest part of the layer exceed 33 ka, which the authors suggest may establish the initial human occupation of the cave. Incidentally, although the paper was published online in July 2023 it was submitted to Nature in October 2018. That is a very long time in the editorial and review process. There is no indication as to why there was such a delay: maybe an indication of some continuing defence of the Clovis First hypothesis among the reviewers …

The radiocarbon dating in the paper was carried out at the state-of-the-art accelerator mass spectrometer unit at the University of Oxford, UK, by two of the co-authors (Lorena Becerra-Valdivia and Thomas Higham). They too published a Nature paper in late July 2023, which discusses their new dating of 42 archaeological sites in North America and Siberia (Becerra-Valdivia, L. & Higham, T. 2023. The timing and effect of the earliest human arrivals in North America. Nature, published online; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2491-6). In Mesoamerica and North America (the Clovis heartland) their results suggest that, as in Chiquihuite Cave, ‘people were present in different settings before, during and immediately following the LGM’, their ranges increasing over time. These people would likely not have followed the same route suggested for the later Clovis people, i.e. across Beringia and then parallel to the topographic grain in the Western Cordillera, ice-cap melting permitting. An interesting suggestion by Becerra-Valdivia and Higham is that post-LGM expansion in numbers and range of these early American contributed to the famous extinction of the North American Pleistocene megafauna. Dating the extinctions of different genera suggests that disappearance of the megafauna may not have been a single event during the Younger Dryas, but seems to have been during at least two other episodes peaking at about 40 and 24 ka. Both the ecological devastation supposedly associated with the Clovis people and the impact theory for its cause depend on a single event.

See also:  Gruhn, R. 2023. 銀河英雄傳說 - 维基百科，自由的百科全书:2021-6-9 · 概要 背景设定为人类生存圈扩展到全銀河系的未来时空。 由於財富帶來糜爛，人們對政治失去信心，漸漸疏於履行民主之義務，野心家趁機奪權，重回專制體制，建立「銀河帝國」。 不滿帝制的人民展開逃亡，成立自由行星同盟。从此兩國互相爭戰达150多年，加上夾在中間之强大经济体——獨立 .... Nature (online News & Views); DOI: 10.1038/d41586-020-02137-3; Rincon, P. 2023. Earliest evidence for humans in the Americas (BBC News, 22 July 2023); Keys, D. 2023. Humans reached the Americas 11,000 years earlier than previously thought, archaeologists discover (Independent, 22 July 2023)

East Africa is traversed from the Afar Depression in the north to Malawi in southern Africa by several great depressions bounded by active normal fault systems: grabens in the old terminology. They are regions of active crustal extension and thinning decorated by chains of active volcanoes. The last 50 years has witnessed more than 3400 major earthquakes (magnitude 4 to 7); unsurprising for the Earth’s largest active continental rift system. In Afar, the East African Rift system links to two others that have extended sufficiently to create oceanic crust: the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden rifts. Afar is the site of the best documented tectonic triple junction. In Ethiopia, the rifting began after the whole of the Horn of Africa and Yemen had been smothered by continental flood basalts 30 Ma ago, during the Oligocene Epoch. The East African rifts are repositories for younger sediments that contain a continuous record of hominid evolution from about 5 Ma ago. This is no coincidence, for adjacent bulging of the continental crust resulted both from its unloading by thinning along the rifts and the buoyancy conferred by high heat flow in the mantle beneath. The uplifted areas have risen as high as 4 kilometres elevation (in Ethiopia), and present some of the world’s most spectacular land forms. This N-S barrier disrupted earlier climatic patterns that had much of tropical Africa blanketed by dense woodland and resulted in a strongly seasonal climate during the last few million years and the development of open savannah land. Put simply, open grassland with widely spaced trees was no place for diminutive forest apes to scamper on all-fours. Being able to leg-it nimbly on two gave the apes that developed such a gait a decisive evolutionary advantage: the rest, as they say, is human evolutionary history.

The extension and rapid uplift along the rift flanks to this day pose severe risk of landslides. Indeed, some are so large as to resemble fault blocks in their own right. Vast amounts of the upper crust have been stripped off by rapid erosion driven by the uplift. The debris has not only ended-up on the rift floors as sedimentary fill but far more has made its way eastward to be deposited on the Indian Ocean continental shelf. Until recently, piecing together the history of rifting and uplift has been restricted to the rifts themselves and their adjacent flanks. Such terrains have extremely complex and usually discontinuous geological sequences, so signs of the onset of extensional tectonics and uplift may differ from region to region. Agreement is limited to some time between 25 and 17 Ma. The whole tectonic process may, in fact, have begun at different times along the length of the rift. A clearer picture should emerge from studies of the post-30 Ma sedimentary pile along the Indian Ocean continent shelf. A sure-fire way of getting the needed data is from offshore areas that are prospective for oil and natural gas. Such is the case off the Tanzanian coastline at the southern limit of the rift system.

The Tanzania Petroleum Development Corporation and Shell have conducted seismic reflection surveys and drilled some test wells to the SE of Zanzibar Island, an area of major deposition from the eastward flowing Ruaha–Rufiji and Rovuma Rivers. Vittorio Maselli of Dalhousie University in Halifax Nova Scotia and colleagues from the UK, Italy and the Netherlands analysed a wealth of data from these surveys, to discover one of the biggest landslides on Earth (Maselli, V. and 10 others 2023. 限定:excess loan 每次发言 限定 在15分钟之内。Speeches were limited to 15 minutes each. 加速臂向前(后) 转动 限定 面 площадка ограничения разворота рычага досылателя вперёд назад 限定 力(与运动方向相垂直的) вынуждающие силы .... Nature Communications, v. 11, article 3456; DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-17267-5). The Mafia mega-slide is represented in seismic profiles by a sedimentary unit, up to 300 m thick. It has a highly irregular base that cuts across strata in late-Oligocene to early-Miocene (25-23 Ma) sediments. It covers an area of more than 11,600 km² and has a volume of at least 2500 km³. The unit’s upper surface is also irregular, suggesting that the unit’s thickness varies considerably. Younger sediments are draped across the irregular top of the slide body. In other, parallel sections the deposit is absent. Unlike the clearly bedded nature of sediments above and below it, the seismic response of the slide deposit is featureless, except for zones of chaotic stratification that reveal slump-folds. Nor is this the only sign of major submarine slides: there are others of lesser extent that predate the base of the Pliocene (5.3 Ma).

维生素c_百度百科:2021-8-29 · 维生素C 的结构类似葡萄糖，是一种多羟基化合物，其分子中第2及第3位上两个相邻的烯醇式羟基极易解离而释出H+，故具有酸的性质，又称抗坏血酸。维生素C 具有很强的还原性，很容易被氧化成脱氢维生素C，但其反应是可逆的，并且抗坏血酸和脱氢抗坏血酸具有同样的生理功能，但脱氢抗坏血酸若 ...

The Lockdown has hardly been a subject for celebration, but there have been two aspects that are, to some extent, a comfort: the trickle of road traffic and the absence of convection trails. As a result the air is less polluted and much clearer, and the quietness, even in cities, has been almost palpable. Wildlife seems to have benefitted and far less CO₂ has been emitted. Apart from the universal tension of waiting for one of a host of potential Covid-19 symptoms to strike and the fact that the world economy is on the brink of the greatest collapse in a century, it is tempting to hope that somehow business-as-usual will remain this way. B*gger the gabardine rush to work and the Great Annual Exodus to ‘abroad’. The crisis in the fossil fuel industry can continue, as far as I am concerned, But then, of course, I am retired, lucky to have a decent pension and live rurally. Despite the health risks, however, global capital demands that business-as-it-was must return now. A planet left to that hegemonic force has little hope of staving off anthropogenic ecological decline. But is there a way for capital to ‘have its cake and eat it’? Some would argue that there are indeed technological fixes. Among them is sweeping excess of the main greenhouse gas ‘under the carpet’ by burying it. There are three main suggestions: physically extracting CO₂ where it is emitted and pumping it underground into porous rocks; using engineered biological processes in the oceans to take carbon into planktonic carbohydrate or carbonate shells and disposing the dead remains in soil or ocean-floor sediments; enhancing and exploiting the natural weathering of rock. The last is the subject of a recent cost-benefit analysis (Beerling, D.J. and 20 others 2023. Potential for large-scale CO₂ removal via enhanced rock weathering with croplands. Nature, v. 583, p. 242–248; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2448-9).

Research into the climatic effects of rock weathering has a long history, for it represents one of the major components of the global carbon cycle, as well as the rock cycle. Natural chemical weathering is estimated to remove about a billion metric tons of atmospheric carbon annually. That is because the main agent of weathering is the slightly acid nature of rainwater, which contains dissolved CO₂ in the form of carbonic acid (H₂CO₃). This weak acid comprises hydrogen ions (H⁺), which confer acidity, that are released by the dissolution of CO₂ in water, together with HCO₃^–ions (bicarbonate, now termed hydrogen carbonate). During weathering t论车保险的重要性 - 在英国开车出事故后的处理方法 | 小赖子 ...:2021-2-15 · 论车保险的重要性 - 在英国开车出事故后的处理方法 当时留着电话号码和车牌，等媳妇回家的时候就接到短信让赔偿 45英镑修自行车费用和 她孩子的书包等物品。媳妇问我怎么处理，我果断的说走汽车保险，这是对我伊的保护，也是对受害者负责任的做法。₂ in the atmosphere: it certainly has not since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

What could chemical weathering do if it was deliberately enhanced?  One of the most common rocks, basalt, is made up of calcium-rich feldspar and magnesium-rich pyroxene and olivine. In finely granulated form this mix is particularly prone to weathering, and the magnesium released would enrich existing soil as well as drawing down CO_2. Hence the focus by David Beerling and his British, US and Belgian colleagues on systematic spreading of ground-up basalt on cropland soils, in much the same way as crushed limestone is currently applied to reverse soil acidification. It is almost as cheap as conventional liming, with the additional benefit of fertilising: it would boost to crop yields. The authors estimate that removal of a metric ton of CO₂ from the atmosphere by this means would cost between US$ 55 to 190, depending on where it was done. One of their findings is that the three largest emitters of carbon dioxide – China, the US and India – happen to have the greatest potential for carbon sequestration by enhanced weathering. Incidentally, increased fertility also yields more organic waste that itself could be used to increase the actual carbon content of soils, if converted through pyrolysis to ‘biochar’ .

It all sounds promising, almost ‘too good to be true’. The logistics that would be needed and the carbon emissions that the sheer mass of rock to be finely ground and then distributed would entail, for as long as global capital continues to burn fossil fuels, are substantial, as the authors admit. The grinding would have to be far more extreme than the production of igneous-rock road aggregate. Basalt or related rock is commonly used for resurfacing motorways, not especially well known for degrading quickly to a clay-rich mush. It would probably have to be around the grain size achieved by milling to liberate ore minerals in metal mines, or to produce the feedstock for cement manufacture: small particles create a greater surface area for chemical reactions. But there remains the issue of how long this augmented weathering would take to do the job: its efficiency. Experimental weathering to test this great-escape hypothesis is being conducted by a former colleague of mine, using dust from an Irish basalt quarry to coat experimental plots of a variety of soil types. After two months Mg and Ca ions were indeed being released from the dust, and tiny fragments of olivine, feldspar and pyroxene do show signs of dissolution. Whether this stems from rainwater – the main objective – or from organic acids and bacteria in the soils is yet to be determined. No doubt NASA is doing much the same to see if dusts that coat much of Mars can be converted into soils  Beerling et al. acknowledge that the speed of weathering is a major uncertainty. Large-scale field trials seem some way off, and are likely to be plagued by cussedness! Will farmers willingly change their practices so dramatically?

See also: Lehmann, J & Possinger, A. 2023. Removal of atmospheric CO₂ by rock weathering holds promise for mitigating climate change. Nature, v. 583, p. 204-205; DOI: 10.1038/d41586-020-01965-7

Note (added 15 July 2023): Follower Walter Pohl has alerted me to an interesting paper on using ultramafic rocks in the same way (Kelemen, P.B. et al. 2023. Engineered carbon mineralization in ultramafic rocks for CO₂ removal from air: Review and new insights. Chemical Geology, v.  550, Article 119628; DOI:10.1016/j.chemgeo.2023.119628). Walter’s own blog contains comments on the climatic efficacy of MgCO₃ (magnesite) formed when olivine is weathered.

That activities in the global political-economic system are now dramatically forcing change in natural systems is clear to all but the most obdurate. In turn, those changes increase the likelihood of a negative rebound on humanity from the natural world. In the first case, data from ice cores suggests that an anthropogenic influence on climate may have started with the spread of farming in Neolithic times. Metal pollution of soils had an even earlier start, first locally in Neanderthal hearths whose remains meet the present-day standards for contaminated soil, and more extensively once Bronze Age smelting of copper began. Global spread of anomalously high metal concentrations in atmospheric dusts shows up as ‘spikes’ in lead within Greenland ice cores during the period from 1100 BCE to 800 CE. This would have resulted mainly from ‘booms and busts’ in silver extraction from lead ores and the smelting of lead itself. In turn, that may reflect vagaries in the world economy of those times

Precise dating by counting annual ice layers reveals connections of Pb peaks and troughs with major historic events, beginning with the spread of Phoenician mining and then by Carthaginians and Romans, especially in the Iberian Peninsula. Lead reaches a sustained peak during the acme of the Roman Republic from 400 to 125 BC to collapse during widespread internal conflict during the Crisis of the Republic. That was resolved by the accession of Octavian/Augustus as Emperor in 31 BCE and his establishment of Pax Romana across an expanded empire. Lead levels rose to the highest of Classical Antiquity during the 1^st and early 2^nd centuries CE. Collapse following the devastating Antonine smallpox pandemic (165 to 193 CE) saw the ice-core records’ reflecting stagnation of coinage activity at low levels for some 400 years, during which the Empire contracted and changed focus from Rome to Constantinople. Only during the Early Medieval period did levels rise slowly to the previous peak.

Earth-logs has previously summarised how natural events, mainly volcanic eruptions, had a profound influence in prehistory. The gigantic eruption of Toba in Sumatra (~73 ka ago) may have had a major influence on modern-humans migrating from Africa to Eurasia. The beginning of the end for Roman hegemony in the Eastern Mediterranean was the Plague of Justinian (541–549 CE), during which between 25 to 50 million people died of bubonic plague across the Eastern Empire. This dreadful event followed the onset of famine from Ireland to China, which was preceded by signs of climatic cooling from tree-ring records, and also with a peak of volcanogenic sulfate ions in the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps around 534 CE. Regional weakening of the populace by cold winters and food shortages, also preceded the Black Death of the mid-14^th century. In the case of the Plague of Justinian, it seems massive volcanism resulted in global cooling over a protracted period, although the actual volcanoes have yet to be tracked down. Cooling marked the start of a century of further economic turmoil reflected by lead levels in ice cores (see above). Its historical context is the Early Medieval equivalent of world war between the Eastern Roman Empire, the Sassanid Empire of Persia and, eventually, the dramatic appearance on the scene of Islam and the Arabian, Syrian and Iraqi forces that it inspired (see: Holland, T. 2013. In the Shadow of the Sword: The battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World. Abacus, London)

An equally instructive case of massive volcanism underlying social, political and economic turmoil has emerged from the geochemical records in five Greenlandic ice cores and one from the Siberian island of Severnaya Zemlya (McConnell, J.R. and 19 others 2023. Extreme climate after massive eruption of Alaska’s Okmok volcano in 43 BCE and effects on the late Roman Republic and Ptolemaic Kingdom. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, recent article (22 June 2023);excess加速器安装教程10.1073/pnas.2002722117). In this case the focus was on ice layers in all six cores that contain sulfate spikes and, more importantly, abundant volcanic dust, specifically shards of igneous glass. Using layer counting, all six show major volcanism in the years 45 to 43 BCE. The Ides (15^th) of March 44 BCE famously marked the assassination of 立马加速器, two years after the Roman Republic’s Senate appointed him Dictator, following four years of civil war. This was in the later stages of the period of economic decline signified by the fall in ice-core levels of Pb (see above). The Roman commentator Servius reported “…after Caesar had been killed in the Senate on the day before, the sun’s light failed from the sixth hour until nightfall.” Other sources report similar daytime dimming, and unusually cold weather and famine in 43 and 42 BCE.

As well as pinning down the date and duration of the volcanic dust layers precisely (to the nearest month using laser scanning of the ice cores’ opacity), Joseph McConnell and the team members from the US, UK, Switzerland, Germany and Denmark also chemically analysed the minute glass shards from one of the Greenlandic ice cores. This has enabled them to identify a single volcano from 6 possible candidates for the eruption responsible for the cold snap: Okmok, an active, 8 km wide caldera in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. Previous data suggest that its last major eruption was 2050 years ago and blasted out between 10 to 100 km³ of debris, including ash. Okmok is an appropriate candidate for a natural contributor to profound historic change in the Roman hegemony. The authors also use their ice-core data to model Okmok’s potential for climate change: it had a global reach in terms of temperature and precipitation anomalies. Historians may yet find further correlations of Okmok with events in other polities that kept annual records, such as China.

See also: Eruption of Alaska’s Okmok volcano linked to period of extreme cold in ancient Rome (Science Daily, 22 June 2023); Kornei, K. 2023. Ancient Rome was teetering. Then a volcano erupted 6,000 miles away. (New York Times, 22 June 2023)

Whether or not the return to a glacial climate between 12.8 and 11.7 thousand years (ka) ago, known as the Younger Dryas (YD), was triggered by some kind of extraterrestrial impact has been a hot and sometimes fractious issue since 2007 (see: Whizz-bang view of Younger Dryas; Earth-logs, July 2007). Before then the most favoured causal mechanism was a shutdown of the Gulf Stream’s Arctic warming influence as a result of some kind of catastrophic flooding of fresh water into the North Atlantic. That would have lowered the density of surface waters, thereby preventing them from sinking to drive the deep circulation that draws surface water from the tropics into high northern latitudes (see: The Younger Dryas flood; May 2010). In 2008 the melt-water flood supporters were sufficiently piqued by the suggestion of a hitherto unsuspected impact event to mount a powerful rejoinder (see: Impact cause for Younger Dryas draws flak; May 2008), casting doubt on the validity of the data that had been presented. It seemed like a repeat of the initial furore over claims for a ‘mountain falling out of the sky’ wiping out the dinosaurs and much else. Yet, like the claims by Alvarez pere et fils for the K-T impact, accumulated weight of evidence published by its protagonists eventually has given the idea of an impact trigger for the YD a measure of respectability. This began with evidence of an impact crater beneath the Greenland icecap (see: Subglacial impact structure in Greenland: trigger for Younger Dryas?; November 2018), then signs of a 12.8 ka fire storm in Chile followed by geochemical evidence from South Carolina, USA for a coinciding impact (see: More on the Younger Dryas causal mechanism; November 2023).

The YD played havoc with humans who had begun to repopulate northern Europe from their Ice Age refuges in the south and those who had first ventured into the Americas  across the Beringia land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. The climate decline was extremely rapid, spanning a mere decade or so, and many would have been trapped to perish in what again became frigid steppe land. There is now evidence that late-Palaeolithic to Mesolithic hunter gatherers living far south of the reglaciated zone also suffered devastation at the start of the YD (Moore, A.M.T. and 13 others 2023. TCL2021秋季新品驰骋“万物互联”时伋:2021-10-23 · 2021-10-23 本刊记者 彭心冬 点击: 322 李东生一身戈行服在新品发布会上 9 月 28 日，“ 2021 TCL 秋季新品发布会”在深圳召开。 除了有在 IFA 上大展光彩的 QLED2.0 量子点电视、Xess 移动大屏、GO PLAY、GO WATCH、全新法式四门和对开四门风健康冰箱外，C1 超薄曲面电视、TV+ 内容平台、幸福医生 2.0、智能空调 .... Nature Science Reports, v. 10, p. 1-22; doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-60867-w). Abu Hureyra is a tell – a mound settlement – originally on the banks of the Euphrates in northern Syria. It now lies beneath Lake Assad, but was excavated in the early 1970s to reveal a charcoal-littered habitation surface with signs of a settlement and some cultivation. Charcoal from archived samples yielded a precise radiocarbon age of 12825 ± 55 ka, coinciding with the start of the YD. The sediment from the habitation floor also contained signs compatible with ejecta from a high-energy impact: tiny diamonds and glass spherules. Analyses of the glass by the authors suggests that it formed at a temperature up to 2200°C, far greater than that of magma associated with a volcanic eruption or in hearths used by the inhabitants. However, others have analysed the glass and suggest more mundane temperatures that could be explained more simply by accidental burning of thatched huts. That possibility might explain the lack of other impact indicators, such as shocked mineral grains and anomalous geochemistry, particularly the platinum-group metals that were the original ‘smoking gun’ for the K-T boundary event and other major impacts. Incidentally, these crucial indicators have been reported from other YD sites investigated by several members of the team behind this paper. My view is that what seems to be a remarkable coincidence will not settle the matter, but will probably draw the same kind of ‘flak’ as did others on this topic. It is hardly likely that new samples will be collected from the now submerged Abu Hureyra site.

See also: Cometary Debris may have destroyed Paleolithic settlement 12,800 years ago (Science News. 2 July 2023)

The end of the Permian Period (~252 Ma ago) saw the loss of 90% of marine fossil species and 70% of those known from terrestrial sediments: the greatest known extinction in Earth’s history. In their naming of newly discovered life forms, palaeontologists can become quite lyrical. Extinctions, however, really stretch their imagination. They call the Permo-Triassic boundary event ‘The Great Dying’. Why not ‘Permageddon’? Sadly, that was snaffled in the 1980s by an astonishingly short-haired heavy-metal tribute band. Enough bathos … The close of the Palaeozoic left a great many ecological niches to be filled by adaptive radiation during the Triassic and later Mesozoic times. Coinciding with the largest known flood-basalt outpouring – the three million cubic kilometres of Siberian Traps – the P-Tr event seemed to be ‘done and dusted’ after that possible connection was discovered in the mid 1990s. Notwithstanding, the quest for a gigantic, causative impact crater continues (see: Palaeobiology Earth-logs, May, September and October 2004), albeit among a dwindling circle of enthusiasts. The Siberian Traps are suitably vast to snuff the fossil record, for their eruption must have belched all manner of climate-changing gases and dusts into the atmosphere; CO₂ to encourage global warming; SO₂ and dusts as cooling agents. There is also evidence of a role for geochemical toxicity (see: Nickel, life and the end-Permian extinction, June 2014). The extinctions accompanied not only climate change but also a catastrophic fall in atmospheric oxygen content (see: Homing in on the great end-Permian extinction, April 2003; When rain kick-started evolution, December 2023). Recovery of the biosphere during the early Triassic was exceedingly slow.

Research focussed on the P-Tr boundary eventually uncovered an element of pure chance. Shales in Canada that span the boundary show major, negative δ¹³C excursions in the carbon-isotope record that coincide with fly ash in the analysed layers. This material is similar in all respects to that emitted from coal-fired power stations (see: Coal and the end-Permian mass extinction, March 2011). The part of Siberia onto which the flood basalts were erupted is rich in Permian coal measures and oil shales that lay close to the surface 252 Ma ago. The coal ash and massive emissions of CO2 may have resulted from their burning by the flood basalt event. Now evidence has emerged that this did indeed happen (Elkins-Tanton, L.T. et al. 2023. Field evidence for coal combustion links the 252 Ma Siberian Traps with global carbon disruption. Geology, v. 48, early publication; DOI: 10.1130/G47365.1).

The US, Canadian and Russian team found large quantities of burnt coal and woody material, and bituminous blobs in 600 m thick volcanic ashes at the base of the Siberian traps themselves. They concluded that the magma chamber from which the flood basalts emerged had incorporated sizeable volumes of the coal measures, leading to their combustion and distillation. This would have released CO₂ enriched in light ¹²C due to isotopic fractionation by biological means, i.e. its δ¹³C would have been sufficiently negative to affect the carbon locked up in the Canadian P-Tr boundary-layer shales that show the sharp isotopic anomalies. The magnitude of the anomalies suggest that between six to ten thousand billion tons of carbon released as CO₂ or methane by interaction of the Siberian Traps with sediments through which their magma passed could have created the global δ¹³C anomalies. That is about one tenth of the organic carbon originally locked in the Permian coal measures beneath the flood basalts

Another paper whose publication coincided with that by Elkins-Tanton et al. suggests that environmental mercury appears to have followed the same geochemical course as did carbon at the end of the Palaeozoic Era (Dal Corso, J. and 9 others 2023. Permo–Triassic boundary carbon and mercury cycling linked to terrestrial ecosystem collapse. Nature Communications, v. 11, paper 2962; DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-16725-4). This group, based at Leeds and Oxford Universities, UK and the University of Geosciences in Wuhan, China, base their findings on biogeochemical modelling of the global carbon and mercury cycles at the end of the Permian. Their view is that the coincidence in marine sediments at the P-Tr boundary of a short-lived spike in mercury and an anomaly in its isotopic composition with the depletion in ¹³C, described earlier, shows an intimate link between mercury and the biological carbon cycle in the oceans at the time. They suggest that this synergy marks ecosystem collapse and derives ‘from a massive oxidation of terrestrial biomass’; i.e. burning of organic material on the land surface. Their modelling hints at huge wildfires in equatorial peatlands but also a role for the Siberian flood-basalt volcanism and the incorporation of coal measures into the Siberian Trap magma chamber.

The older a fossil, no matter how well preserved it is, the less chance it has to contain enough undegraded DNA for it to be extracted and sequenced using the most advanced techniques. At present the oldest fossil DNA not to have passed its ‘sell-by’date is that of a 560 to 780 thousand year-old horse’s legbone found in Canadian permafrost. For human remains the oldest mtDNA is that of a ~430 ka individual from the Sima de los Huesos in northern Spain (see: Mitochondrial DNA from 400 thousand year old humans; Earth-logs December 2013). But there is another route to establishing genetic relatedness from the amino-acid sequences of proteins recovered from ancient individuals (see: Ancient proteins: keys to early human evolution?). Fossil teeth have proved to be good repositories of ancient protein and are the most commonly found hominin fossils.

A key species for unravelling the origins of the three most recent human groups (ourselves, Neanderthals and Denisovans) is thought to be Homo antecessor who inhabited the Gran Dolina Cave in the Atapuerca Mountains in northern Spain between about 1.2 Ma and 800 ka ago (see: Human evolution: bush or basketwork? Earth-logs, January 2014). Palaeoanthropologists excavated 170 skeletal fragments from six individuals in the most productive layer at Gran Dolina. Incomplete facial bones suggest a ‘modern-like’ face, although the remains as a whole are insufficient to reconstruct the oldest Europeans with sufficient detail to place them in anatomical relation to the younger groups. But there are several teeth. One of them, a permanent molar, has yielded informative proteins (Welker, F. and 26 others 2023. The dental proteome of Homo antecessor. Nature, v. 580, p. 235-238; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2153-8) and has been dated to between 772 to 949 ka.

Amino acids in the dental proteins, sequenced using mass spectrometry, were compared with those of other hominins. Because protein sequences are coded by an animal’s genome they are a ‘proxy’ for DNA. The outcome is that the Gran Dolina proteins are roughly equally related to Denisovans, Neanderthals and ourselves, suggesting that, although the younger three groups are closely related, express加速器ios下载 is an ‘outlier’. Being significantly older, it is likely to be the common ancestor of all three. Another species with close anatomical affinities is H. heidelbergensis (700 to 300 ka) found in Africa as well as in Europe. Its mtDNA (see: END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT | Xsolla:License limitations. Except as otherwise permitted under this Agreement, or under applicable law notwithstanding these restrictions, you may not, in whole or in part, copy, photocopy, reproduce, publish, distribute, translate, reverse engineer, derive source code from, modify, disassemble, decompile, create derivative works based on, or remove any proprietary notices or labels from the ...; Earth-logs December 2013) matches that of Denisovans better than it does Neanderthals, yet without protein and full-genome analysis all that can be concluded is that it may be an intermediary between H. antecessor and the well known interbreeding triad of more recent times.

We are getting closer to a documented web of interrelationships between humans in general whose time span from 2 Ma ago is now well established. The remaining genetic link to be documented is that to express加速器ios下载, the longest lived and most travelled of all ancient humans. Frido Welker and co-workers also had a shot at the proteomics of one of the first humans known to have migrated from Africa, using an isolated, presumably excessⅴpn安卓, molar found at the 1.77 Ma site at Dmanisi in the Caucasus foothills of Georgia. Although inconclusive in placing that precociously intrepid group firmly in the human story, the fact that dental proteins were discovered is cause for optimism.

See also: Campbell, M. 2023. Protein analysis of 800,000-year-old human fossil clarifies dispute over ancestors (excess加速器安装教程, 1 April 2023)

‘Everybody knows’ that mountains grow: the question is, ‘How?’ There is a tale that farmers once believed that they grew from pebbles: ‘every year I try to rid my field of stones, but more are back the following year, so they must grow’… Geoscientists know better – or so they think[!] – and for 130 years have referred to ‘orogeny’, a classically-inspired term (from the Ancient Greek óros and excess加速器购– high-ground creation’) adopted by the US geologist Grove Gilbert. It incorporates the concept of crustal thickening that results from lateral forces and horizontal compression. Another term, now rarely used, is ‘epeirogeny’ (coined too by G.K. Gilbert), wherein the continental surface rises or falls in response to underlying gravitational forces. That could include: changing mantle density over a hot, rising plume; detachment or delamination into the mantle of dense lower lithosphere; loading or unloading by ice during glacial cycles. Epeirogeny is bound up with isostasy, the maintenance of gravitational balance of mass in the outermost Earth.

In 1990, Peter Molnar and Philip England pointed out that the incision of deep valleys into mountain ranges results in stupendous and rapid removal of mass from orogenic belts, which adds a major isostatic force to mountain building (Molnar, P. & England, P. 1990. 手机搜狐网:手机搜狐网，懂手机，更懂你！手机搜狐是国内最大的移动门户之一，利用搜狐门户矩阵资源，内容覆盖新闻、财经、体育、娱乐、汽车、房产、图库、视频等资讯，为10亿手机用户打造随时随地的掌上资讯生活。手机搜狐网，手机搜狐触版- m.sohu.com Nature, v. 346, p. 29–34; DOI: 10.1038/346029a0). In their model, the remaining peaks are driven higher by isostasy. They, and others, coupled climate change with compressional tectonics in a positive feedback that drives peaks to elevations that they would otherwise never achieve. Molnar and England’s review saw complex interplays contributing to mountain building, accompanying chemical weathering even changing global climate by sequestering atmospheric CO₂ into the minerals that it produces. As well as the height of peaks in active zones of crustal shortening and thickening, such as the Himalaya, Molnar and England’s theory explained the aberrant high peaks at the edge of high plateaus that are passively subject to erosion. Examples of the latter are the isolated peaks beyond the eastern edge of the Ethiopian Plateau that locally have the greatest elevation than the flood basalts that form the plateau: unloading around these peaks has caused them to rise isostatically.

Thirty years on, this paradigm is being questioned, at least as regards active orogens (Dielforder, A. et al. 2023. Megathrust shear force controls mountain height at convergent plate margins. Nature, v. 582, p. 225–229; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2340-7). Armin Dielforder and colleagues at the German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam and The University of Münster consider that overall mountain height is sustained by interactions between three forces. 1. They are prevented from falling apart under their own weight or being pushed up further against gravity by lateral tectonic force. 2. Climate controlled erosion limits mountain height by removing material from the highest elevations. 3. Isostasy keeps the mountains ‘afloat’ above the asthenosphere. The authors have attempted to assess and balance all three major forces that determine the overall elevation of mountain belts.

At a convergent plate margin where one plate is shoved beneath another, the megathrust above the subduction zone behaves in a brittle fashion, with associated friction, towards the surface. At depth this transitions to a zone of ductile deformation dominated by viscosity. A major assumption in this work is that stress in the crust below a mountain belt is neutral; i.e. horizontal, tectonic compression is equal to the weight of the mountains themselves and thus to their height. So, the greater the tectonic compressive force the higher the mountain range that it can support. The test is to compare the actual elevation with that predicted from plate-tectonic considerations. For 10 active orogenic belts there is a remarkable correspondence between the model and actuality. the authors conclude that variation over time of mountain height reflects log-term variations in the force balance, in which they find little sign of a climatic/erosional control. But that doesn’t resolve the issue satisfactorily, at least for me.

The study focuses on the mean elevation, and this leaves out the largest mountains; for instance, their maximum mean elevation for the Himalaya is about 5.46 km (in fact for a narrow  NE-SW swath that may not be representative of the whole range). Yet the Himalaya contains 10 of the world’s highest mountains, all over 8 km high and 50 peaks that top 7 km, adjacent to the Tibetan Plateau. The mean elevation of the whole Himalayan range is 6.1 km. Consequently, it seems to me, the range’s maximum mean elevation must be somewhat higher than that reported by Dielforder et al.  The difference suggests that non-tectonic forces do contribute significantly to Himalayan terrain

See also:  Wang, K. 2023. 銀河英雄傳說 - 维基百科，自由的百科全书:2021-6-9 · 概要 背景设定为人类生存圈扩展到全銀河系的未来时空。 由於財富帶來糜爛，人們對政治失去信心，漸漸疏於履行民主之義務，野心家趁機奪權，重回專制體制，建立「銀河帝國」。 不滿帝制的人民展開逃亡，成立自由行星同盟。从此兩國互相爭戰达150多年，加上夾在中間之强大经济体——獨立 .... Nature, v. 582, p. 189-190; DOI: 10.1038/d41586-020-01601-4