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Swearing video’s release ‘unusual’
9:51AM LABOR’S leadership battle escalates, with Kevin Rudd suggesting video of himself swearing was held in the PM’s office or department.
ScienceDaily (Feb. 17, 2012) — It’s not a take on climate change we often hear about. But Mark Collard, a Simon Fraser University Canada Research Chair and professor of archaeology, will talk about how climate change impacts human evolution at the world’s largest science fair.
The 2012 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference runs Feb. 16 to 20 at the Vancouver Convention Centre in downtown Vancouver.
Collard will give a talk called Environmental drivers of technological evolution in small-scale populations during a seminar called Climate Change and Human Evolution: Problems and Prospects.
Collard will argue, “we need to better understand the ways that climate and related environmental variables have affected historically-documented small-scale societies before we can accurately track the impact of climate change on human evolution.”
The director of SFU’s Human Evolutionary Studies program, Collard will also present data that his research team is analyzing. Their research suggests environmental variation significantly influenced the number and intricacy of food-gathering tools that historical hunter-gatherers made.
“The basic pattern,” explains Collard, “is that people living in harsh, risky environments, such as the Arctic, produced and used many more complex tools than people living in less harsh and risky environments, such as tropical rainforests. Food gathering tools make up a large part of known early archaeological records. So our findings are providing us with a way to track the impact of climate change on human evolution.”
Collard can relate his findings to current thinking about the impact of climate change on the dispersal of modern humans globally and the evolution of their cultures during the last couple of hundred thousand years. Our species, Homo sapiens, evolved during that time period.
As a discussant in another seminar, Constructing a Human World Fit for Nature, Collard will look for common themes in six speakers’ presentations. They will flesh out the research behind an evolutionary conundrum that is the central theme of this seminar.
The conundrum — while evolution has enabled ancestral hominins (humans) to adapt well to diverse ecological niches, modern humans are now transforming local ecosystems and the global climate at the peril of their own existence.
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October 6, 2000 — The Earth is going to be a very different place 250 million years from now.
Africa is going to smash into Europe as Australia migrates north to merge with Asia. Meanwhile the Atlantic Ocean will probably widen for a spell before it reverses course and later disappears.
Two hundred and fifty million years ago the landmasses of Earth were clustered into one supercontinent dubbed Pangea. As Yogi Berra might say, it looks like “deja vu all over again” as the present-day continents slowly converge during the next 250 million years to form another mega-continent: Pangea Ultima.
Above: A map of the world as it might appear 250 million years from now. Notice the clumping of most of the world’s landmass into one super-continent, “Pangea Ultima,” with an inland sea — all that’s left of the once-mighty Atlantic Ocean. Image courtesy of Dr. Christopher Scotese.
The surface of the Earth is broken into large pieces that are slowly shifting — a gradual process called “plate tectonics.” Using geological clues to puzzle out past migrations of the continents, Dr. Christopher Scotese, a geologist at the University of Texas at Arlington, has made an educated “guesstimate” of how the continents are going to move hundreds of millions of years into the future.
“We don’t really know the future, obviously,” Scotese said. “All we can do is make predictions of how plate motions will continue, what new things might happen, and where it will all end up.” Among those predictions: Africa is likely to continue its northern migration, pinching the Mediterranean closed and driving up a Himalayan-scale mountain range in southern Europe.
What’s it like to see two continents collide? Just look at the Mediterranean region today.
Africa has been slowly colliding with Europe for millions of years, Scotese said. “Italy, Greece and almost everything in the Mediterranean is part of (the African plate), and it has been colliding with Europe for the last 40 million years.”
That collision has pushed up the Alps and the Pyrenees mountains, and is responsible for earthquakes that occasionally strike Greece and Turkey, Scotese noted.
Above: The possible appearance of the Earth 50 million years from now. Africa has collided with Europe, closing off the Mediterranean Sea. The Atlantic has widened, and Australia has migrated north. Image courtesy of Dr. Christopher Scotese.
“The Mediterranean is the remnant of a much larger ocean that has closed over the last 100 million years, and it will continue to close,” he said. “More and more of the plate is going to get crumpled and get pushed higher and higher up, like the Himalayas.”
Australia is also likely to merge with the Eurasian continent.
“Australia is moving north, and is already colliding with the southern islands of Southeast Asia,” he continued. “If we project that motion, the left shoulder of Australia gets caught, and then Australia rotates and collides against Borneo and south China — sort of like India collided 50 million years ago — and gets added to Asia.”
Meanwhile, the Americas will be moving further away from Africa and Europe as the Atlantic Ocean steadily grows. The Atlantic sea floor is split from north to south by an underwater mountain ridge where new rock material flows up from Earth’s interior. The two halves of the sea floor slowly spread apart as the ridge is filled with the new material, causing the Atlantic to widen.
“It’s about as fast as your fingernails grow. Maybe a little bit slower,” Scotese said. Still, over millions of years that minute movement will drive the continents apart.
Left: NASA’s LAGEOS II satellite measures tiny shifts in continental positions from Earth orbit. [more information]
That part of the prediction is fairly certain, because it is just the continuation of existing motions. Beyond about 50 million years into the future, prediction becomes more difficult.
“The difficult part is the uncertainty in (new behaviors),” Scotese said.
“It’s like if you’re traveling on the highway, you can predict where you’re going to be in an hour, but if there’s an accident or you have to exit, you’re going to change direction. And we have to try to understand what causes those changes. That’s where we have to make some guesses about the far future — 150 to 250 million years from now.”
In the case of the widening Atlantic, geologists think that a “subduction zone” will eventually form on either the east or west edges of the ocean. At a subduction zone, the ocean floor dives under the edge of a continent and down into the interior of the Earth.
“The subduction zone turns out to be the most important part of the system if you want to understand what causes the plates to move,” Scotese said.
Like cold air drifting down from an open attic in winter, the cold, dense seabed at the ocean’s edges sometimes starts sinking into the playdough-like layer beneath the crust, called the “mantle.”
Above: A diagram showing the major processes of plate tectonics.
“As it sinks, it pulls the rest of the plate with it,” like a tablecloth sliding off a table. This accounts for most of the force that moves the plates around, Scotese said.
This “slab pull” theory for the mechanism driving the motion of the plates stands in opposition to the older “river raft” theory.
“For a long time, geologists had this model that there were ‘conveyer belts’ of mantle convection, and the continents were riding passively on these conveyer belts, sort of like a raft on a river,” Scotese said. “But that theory’s all wrong.”
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If a subduction zone starts on one side of the Atlantic — Scotese thinks it will be the west side — it will start to slowly drag the sea floor into the mantle. If this happens, the ridge where the Atlantic sea floor spreads would eventually be pulled into the Earth. The widening would stop, and the Atlantic would begin to shrink.
Tens of millions of years later, the Americas would come smashing into the merged Euro-African continent, pushing up a new ridge of Himalayan-like mountains along the boundary. At that point, most of the world’s landmass would be joined into a super-continent called “Pangea Ultima.” The collision might also trap an inland ocean, Scotese said.
“It’s all pretty much fantasy to start with. But it’s a fun exercise to think about what might happen,” he said. “And you can only do it if you have a really clear idea of why things happen in the first place.”
For now it appears that in 250 million years, the Earth’s continents will be merged again into one giant landmass…just as they were 250 million years before now. From Pangea, to present,
to Pangea Ultima!
Web Links
PALEOMAP — Web site for the project that produced the predictions of the future positions of Earth’s continents. The site also has reconstructions of the past positions of the continents, as well as estimates of past climate.
Information on Plate Tectonics — By the U.S. Geological Survey
On the Move — Continental Drift and Plate Tectonics –Learn more about NASA’s Role in Investigating Continental Drift
Dr. Christopher Scotese — Information about the scientist from the University of Texas at Arlington Web site.
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| For lesson plans and educational activities related to breaking science news, please visit Thursday’s Classroom | Author: Patrick L. Barry Production Editor: Dr. Tony Phillips Curator: Bryan Walls Media Relations: Steve Roy Responsible NASA official: John M. Horack |
Scientists have raised new concerns about the frontline strategy to reduce the impact of bushfires in Australia.
As Victorian authorities strive to triple the amount of prescribed burning they do in response to the Royal Commission recommendations after the Black Saturday fires, other states are also adopting the policy.
But several scientists have told Radio National’s Background Briefing program they may be adopting a deeply flawed policy.
Michael Clarke, who heads Zoology at LaTrobe University, was on the Royal Commission’s expert panel on fuel reduction.
He says the push to burn so much more bush means big areas of bush away from human populations are being targeted ahead of the forest surrounding human populations.
“My observation is there is strong pressure on the Department of Sustainability and Environment to meet the 5 per cent target, which equates to something like 390,000 hectares,” he said.
It’s bad enough for [the bushfire strategy] to be applied at a state-wide level and to say ‘well, here’s a rule of thumb’. To then say this is applicable to south-west Tasmania and also to tropical Queensland is ecological madness.
Michael Clarke, LaTrobe University
“That’s incredibly hard for them. I don’t think they’re adequately resourced to do that.
“I think it creates a false impression of security in the public’s mind if we meet this target, are the people in the Dandenongs and Mt Macedon that much safer?
“I think that’ll be the big question at the next Royal Commission, heaven forbid that we have one.”
Dr Clarke says not only are the people most at risk from bushfires being potentially short-changed, but there could be serious ecological consequences of burning so much more forest.
“We have real concern based on our data that this could have negative consequences for a range of wildlife. I mean that there is a risk that some species, may go locally extinct and that certainly isn’t the intention of the Royal Commission’s recommendation.”
Western Australia already had a higher prescribed burn target than Victoria and evidence on prescribed burning in WA strongly informed Victoria’s new policy.
But since the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission, Victoria’s plan to burn 5 per cent of public lands has gained popularity nationally.
Dr Clarke says it would be foolhardy for other areas of Australia to adopt a hectare-based target.
“I think that’s really disturbing, it’s bad enough for it to be applied at a state-wide level and to say ‘well, here’s a rule of thumb’. To then say this is applicable to south-west Tasmania and also to tropical Queensland is ecological madness,” he said.
Dr Clarke is not the only scientist to raise the alarm – a number of other ecologists and fire experts support his concerns.
Associate Professor Ian Lunt from Charles Sturt University says the top-down approach of the target does have the potential to skew the results.
He says large areas of bush must be burnt to make up the target and the danger is that fuel reduction burning is being done under the name of ecological burning.
“We’re looking at really large scales huge areas where there is a very clear conflict potentially between those two agendas and we are burning under the name of ecological burning for what is essentially a political response to the need to preserve to save assets,” he said.
But Dean of Agriculture at the University of Sydney, Professor Mark Adams, who was another of the Royal Commission’s experts on fuel reduction, says more prescribed burning is needed to manage ecosystems properly and the risk of bushfire to people.
“If we’re really about using prescribed fire to protect lives and property then we’re going to need to have a landscape-wide approach,” he said.
If we’re really about using prescribed fire to protect lives and property then we’re going to need to have a landscape-wide approach.
Mark Adams, University of Sydney
“We can’t just have ‘well we’ll run a little fire around the back fences of the settlements and call that strategic and leave it at that’.
“If we take that approach those defences will be overcome by the next crown fire that heads towards us.”
The Victorian Minister for Bushfire Response, Peter Ryan, says the Royal Commission was one of a number of inquiries which have said Victoria must increase its prescribed burning.
“The commission went through this painstakingly. They called evidence from anybody and everybody. Before that we had a very protracted and extensive all-party consideration of this by our environment and natural resources committee who also reported on it,” he said.
He says the policy has been carefully designed to protect biodiversity.
“These [burns] are very, very carefully planned, they are very, very carefully conducted and they are modified to accord whatever might be the topography – what is the biodiversity, what is the fuel load, do we need a cool burn which can be just lit and and allowed to creep through [or] do we need something stronger,” he said.
“You have to just adjust all these things and … [along] with the prevailing weather conditions, all these things are taken into account by the experts we have engaged to undertake this task.”
Tune into Background Briefing on Radio National for the full program.
Topics:bushfire, disasters-and-accidents, fires, royal-commission-victoria-2009-bushfires, states-and-territories, vic, australia
First posted
The island of Java in Indonesia seen in a 2006 MODIS image. Volcanoes and ash plumes are labelled in white. Red squares are thermal anomalies – fires or actively erupting volcanoes.
One shot from space, 18 potentially active volcanoes. This shot is only part of the island of Java in Indonesia and the dozen-and-a-half volcanoes seen are only a portion of all the volcanoes on the island – the Global Volcanism Program lists no less than 39 potentially active volcanoes across the island. This represents only a fraction of the over 150 potentially active volcanoes (76 of which have had historical eruptions) across Indonesia, giving it the largest number of potentially active volcanoes for any country on Earth – along with one of the highest proportions of people living near active volcanoes.
This NASA Earth Observatory image was taken on June 15, 2006 and shows two of the 18 volcanoes producing ash plumes – Merapi to the west (left) and Semeru to the east (right). Currently, there are six volcanoes on Java listed as on Alert Status 2-3, meaning they are showing signs of unrest above background. The two most active right now are off the image – Papandayan in West Java and Ijen in East Java.
Across all of Indonesia, the last two Global Volcanism Program Weekly Volcanic Activity Reports (for February 1-7 and February 8-14) list 6 volcanoes across Indonesia that have shown signs of changing activity – some have seen their rumblings decline (Ijen, Papandayan) while others have seen no change in their heightened activity or an increase (Dukono, Semeru, Lokon-Empung, Galunggung). This increase in the Alert Status at Galunggung was precipitated by an increase in temperature and color of the summit crater lake – signs that there is likely increased degassing, possibly from rising magma, into the bottom of the lake. All of this activity is perfectly normal for an active volcanic arc like Indonesia, where the Indo-Australian plate is being subducted under the Eurasian plate along the southern edge of the island chain. It also explains the high occurrence of earthquakes in Indonesia as the friction on the subduction builds and is released periodically in the form of seismic events. All in all, Java is one of the most geologically active spots on the planet.
Image: Part of Java in Indonesia, image in June 2006. Image courtesy of the NASA Earth observatory.
Bill Gates and Richard Branson Back Geoengineering to Counter Climate Change
Posted: 16 Feb 2012 12:02 PM PST
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