It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
A new analysis published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment shows that the world's protected areas (PAs) are experiencing major shortfalls in staffing and resources and are therefore failing on a massive scale to safeguard wildlife.
A new analysis shows that the world's protected areas are experiencing major shortfalls in staffing and resources and are therefore failing on a massive scale to safeguard wildlife [Credit: Julie Larsen Maher/WCS]
The analysis looked at more than 2,100 protected areas around the world and found that less than a quarter report having adequate resources in terms of staffing and budget. The authors then looked at nearly 12,000 species of terrestrial amphibians, birds, and mammals whose ranges include protected areas and found only 4-9 percent are represented within the borders of the adequately resourced PAs.
"This analysis shows that most protected areas are poorly funded and therefore failing to protect wildlife on a scale sufficient to stave off the global decline in biodiversity," said Dr. James Watson of WCS and the University of Queensland, and one of the study's co-authors. "Nations need to do much more to ensure that protected areas fulfill their role as a major tool to mitigate the growing biodiversity crisis."
The authors acknowledge that countries are on target to fulfill a global commitment of setting aside 17 percent of terrestrial areas and 10 percent of the marine realm as PAs by 2020 (known as Aichi Target 11 of the Convention on Biological Diversity). However, the findings show that protected areas are grossly under-funded, and that simply measuring the amount of area protected is insufficient in conserving biodiversity.
The authors recommend the use of a restricted set of simple, robust indicators that capture the essence of effective PA resourcing and management. These indicators should be used for reporting toward international targets, prioritizing conservation actions, and achieving new PA standards, such as the IUCN's Green List.
Said Watson: "While continued expansion of the world's protected areas is necessary, a shift in emphasis from quality over quantity is critical to effectively respond to the current biodiversity crisis. If metrics of management effectiveness are not included in measurements of progress toward target 11 before 2020, we risk mistakenly reporting success in achieving Target 11, and sending a false message that sufficient resources are being committed to biodiversity protection."
Protected areas provide the core of the last remaining strongholds for nature on planet Earth. If our efforts to hold on to these last intact natural areas remains inadequate, life as we know it will be threatened. Emphasis needs to be placed on building capacity, increasing and sustaining financial resources, scaling up conservation interventions, and improving overall effectiveness.
Urban expansion and hunting have pushed chimpanzees, humanity's closest relative in the animal kingdom, into shrinking islets of wildness, top experts said Tuesday after a three-day meeting in Germany.
All four sub-species of the African chimpanzee are threatened with extinction, with at least one - the western chimpanzee - declining in number by more than 80 percent over three generations [Credit: Rob Elliott/AFP]
All four sub-species of the African primate are threatened with extinction, with at least one -- the western chimpanzee -- declining in number by more than 80 percent over three generations.
Forty chimp experts from around the world -- with a combined 300 years of field experience -- issued a collective appeal to save the only animal whose DNA overlaps with humans by 98 percent.
"Over the decades that we have been working with wild chimpanzee communities, we have all seen our study groups become isolated," they said in a statement. "Chimpanzees are being reduced into living in forest ghettos."
The main threat to chimps and other large mammals is habitat loss. Africa still has large tracts of undisturbed savannah and forest, but these areas are shrinking rapidly due growing cities, mining, deforestation, and industrial agriculture.
All four sub-species of the African primate are threatened with extinction, with at least one - the western chimpanzee - declining in number by more than 80 percent over the last three generations [Credit: STR/AFP]
The continent's human population of more than 1.2 billion is expected to double by mid-century, and could top four billion by the end of the century.
Chimps number in the thousands for three of the sub-species, and about 250,000 for the eastern chimpanzee, found mainly in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Western chimpanzees have already been wiped out in Burkina Faso, Benin, Gambia, and possibly Togo.
"Forty years ago, we drove 100 kilometres (60 miles) on a mud road to reach the park boundaries while encountering chimpanzees and elephants," said Christopher Boesch, a professor at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, referring to the Tai National Park in Ivory Coast. "Nowadays, you have to reach the park boundaries to see the first patch of forest."
Last common ancestor
Human encroachment and the hunting of chimpanzees for "bush meat" has also altered the social life and behaviour of the animals, said Crickette Sanz, an associate professor at Washington University in Missouri who has worked for decades in the Republic of Congo's Goualougo Triangle.
The last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees lived about seven million years ago [Credit: Guillaume Souvant/AFP]
"When we first arrived in the Ndoki forest, the chimpanzees would often approach us with curiosity," she recalled.
Now they hide.
"It is wise that they have changed their behaviour -- their survival depends on it," Sanz added.
Compared to chimpanzees in pristine forests, those in areas disrupted by humans also showed a decrease in the diversity of learned behaviour, according to a recent study.
Scientists studying nearly 150 chimpanzee communities across 17 countries identified 31 actions -- including cracking nuts, extracting termites or ants with tools, collected honey, throwing stones as a form of communication -- that were done differently from one group to the next.
The more humans had carved up the environment -- building roads, clear-cutting trees, setting up palm oil plantation -- the more uniform these actions became.
"We did not evolve from bonobos or chimpanzees but we share with them a common ancestry," said Martin Surbeck, a primatologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, also in Leipzig [Credit: STR/AFP]
The last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees lived about seven million years ago.
"We did not evolve from bonobos or chimpanzees but we share with them a common ancestry," said Martin Surbeck, a primatologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, also in Leipzig.
The famed anthropologist Irven DeVore once marvelled at humanity's indifference to our closest primate cousins.
"If we, in our travels in space, should encounter a creature that shared 98 percent of our genetic makeup, think of the money we would spend to study this species," he said.
"Such creatures exist on Earth and we are allowing them to become extinct."
Atmospheric carbon dioxide continued its rapid rise in 2019, with the average for May peaking at 414.7 parts per million (ppm) at NOAA's Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory.
The measurement is the highest seasonal peak recorded in 61 years of observations on top of Hawaii's largest volcano and the seventh consecutive year of steep global increases in concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2), according to data published today by NOAA and Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
The 2019 peak value was 3.5 ppm higher than the 411.2 ppm peak in May 2018 and marks the second-highest annual jump on record. Monthly CO2 values at Mauna Loa first breached the 400 ppm threshold in 2014.
"It's critically important to have these accurate, long-term measurements of CO2 in order to understand how quickly fossil fuel pollution is changing our climate," said Pieter Tans, senior scientist with NOAA's Global Monitoring Division.
"These are measurements of the real atmosphere. They do not depend on any models, but they help us verify climate model projections, which if anything, have underestimated the rapid pace of climate change being observed."
The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increases every year, and the rate of increase is accelerating. The early years at Mauna Loa saw annual increases averaging about 0.7 ppm per year, increasing to about 1.6 ppm per year in the 1980s and 1.5 ppm per year in the 1990s. The growth rate rose to 2.2 ppm per year during the last decade. There is abundant and conclusive evidence that the acceleration is caused by increased emissions, Tans said.
The Mauna Loa data, together with measurements from sampling stations around the world, are collected by NOAA's Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network and produce a foundational research dataset for international climate science.
The highest monthly mean CO2 value of the year occurs in May, just before plants start to remove large amounts of the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere during the northern hemisphere growing season. In the northern fall, winter and early spring, plants and soils give off CO2, which cause levels to rise through May.
Charles Keeling was the first to observe this seasonal rise and subsequent fall in CO2 levels embedded within annual increases, a cycle now known as the Keeling Curve.
Source: NOAA [June 04, 2019] Read more at https://archaeologynewsnetwork.blogspot.com/2019/06/carbon-dioxide-levels-in-atmosphere-hit.html#vwHPSyvhuaiA7kpv.99
A new study by University of Alberta scientists shows that banded iron formations originated from oxidized iron, confirming the relevance and accuracy of existing models--a finding of great importance to the geological community.
Banded iron formations, such as this one pictured in Western Australia, precipitated out of the Earth's early oceans billions of years ago, and are providing new clues to the evolution of ancient seawater and the microbes that inhabited it [Credit: Tom Price]
Banded iron formations are a distinct type of sedimentary rock with layers of iron deposited as horizontal bands. The majority of these formations formed over the last 2.5 billion years and are a major source of iron today. "We've been using banded iron formations with great success to track the evolution of seawater chemistry and evolution of the biosphere," explained Kurt Konhauser, professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and co-author on the paper. "But these experiments are based on the assumption that we understand the primary minerals that compose these rocks."
In the last decade, a new model was proposed, suggesting that the formations began as ferrous iron that was later oxidized by oxygen in the environment--a model that, if correct, would require a major paradigm shift in this area of study.
To examine this possibility, a group of researchers led by Konhauser's PhD student Leslie Robbins tested the theory using a hydrogeological model, designed to determine how long it would take oxygen to oxidize such a formation. The research team included Professor Ben Roston, Assistant Professor Daniel Alessi, and Professor Larry Heaman.
"Essentially, we found that this would be possible in only one per cent of cases in the suggested time frame of 250 million years," said Konhauser. "Moreover, we had to create unrealistic conditions in order to make the new proposed model work--for instance, an extremely steep slope, or rock that was actually sand, or a great deal of oxygen."
These results confirmed that the newly proposed model is inaccurate, indicating that existing models and our current understanding remains the most effective method of studying banded iron formations.
"This is a powerful result that stems from the simple question about whether recently proposed models for banded iron formations are plausible when extrapolated to the size of a depositional basin," said Robbins, now a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University in New Haven, United States. "This result has fundamental implications for the formation of these deposits, and this work benefited greatly from strong collaborations both within Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and with our external collaborators."
One of the world's most important plant families has a history extending much farther south than any live or fossil specimen previously recorded, as shown by chinquapin fruit and leaf fossils unearthed in Patagonia, Argentina, according to researchers.
Discovery photo of the mature Castanopsis fruiting spike fossil with four nuts enclosed in scaly cupules, showing the part and counterpart on the split surface at Laguna del Hunco [Credit: Peter Wilf, Penn State University]
"The oak and beech family is recognized everywhere as one of the most important plant groups and has always been considered northern," said Peter Wilf, professor of geosciences and associate in the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute, Penn State. "We're adding a huge spatial dimension to the history of the Fagaceae family, and that's exciting." The plant family also includes chestnuts and the closely related chinquapins.
Common in the Northern Hemisphere and Asian tropics, Fagaceae cross the equator only in Southeast Asia, and even there just barely. The latest study, published in Science, extends the family's biogeographical history and suggests a Gondwanan supercontinent legacy in Asian rainforests larger than previously thought.
The researchers first found fossils resembling some oak leaves, with straight secondary veins and one tooth per secondary vein, at Laguna del Hunco, Chubut province. The leaves comprise about 10 percent of the thousands of 52-million-year-old leaf fossils, representing almost 200 species, found at the site over two decades in a long-term project between Penn State, Cornell University and Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio (MEF), Trelew, Argentina.
Detail of the mature Castanopsis fruiting spike fossil with four nuts, dark and turned to coal, enclosed in scaly cupules. Cupule at top is splitting open [Credit: Peter Wilf, Penn State University]
For years the researchers hesitated to classify the leaves, because paleobotanist Edward Berry had assigned similar fossils to another family, and any claim of Fagaceae at so remote a location would require much more supporting evidence.
Later, the team unearthed rare fruit fossils -- two fruit clusters, one with more than 110 immature fruits -- at the site and compared them to living relatives. They found that these were fossils of ancient Castanopsis, an Asian chinquapin that today dominates the biodiverse, lower elevation mountain rainforests of Southeast Asia.
"One of the first clues was a little lip where the fruit is splitting open," Wilf said. "I recognized this lip as being similar to the fruit of the Japanese chinquapin. Then I realized there's a nut inside."
Detail of a single immature fruit of living Castanopsis acuminatissima, New Guinea, showing scaly surface and preservation of three slender styles (pollen-receiving organs) at top [Credit: Peter Wilf, Penn State University]
The nuts are fully encased in a scaly outer covering, or cupule, that splits open when the fruits mature. The cupules are arranged on a spike-like fruiting axis, and the young nuts retain delicate parts from their flowering stage. Their features are just like the living Castanopsis, Wilf said, and the fruits confirm that the leaves are Fagaceae.
"This is the first confirmed evidence that Fagaceae, considered restricted to the Northern Hemisphere, was in the Southern Hemisphere," said Maria Gandolfo, associate professor, Cornell University. "This is remarkable and allows us to rethink the origins of the fossil flora."
The fossils date to the early Eocene 52.2 million years ago. They are the only fossilized or living Fagaceae ever found south of the Malay Archipelago, the island chain just north of Australia.
Large fossil Fagaceae leaf from Laguna del Hunco with well-preserved details [Credit: Peter Wilf, Penn State University]
During the globally warm early Eocene there was no polar ice, and South America, Antarctica and Australia had not completely separated, comprising the final stage of the Gondwanan supercontinent. The researchers think animals had helped disperse the chinquapin's ancestors from North to South America at an earlier time. The plants thrived in the wet Patagonian rainforest, whose closest modern analog is the mountain rainforests of New Guinea.
The chinquapins may have also ranged into then-adjacent Antarctica and on to Australia, said Wilf. Castanopsis may have survived in Australia until the continent collided with Southeast Asia, where today chinquapins are keystone species, providing forest structure and food and habitat for birds, insects and mammals.
The Laguna del Hunco fossil site in Chubut, Patagonian Argentina. Paleontologists at centre of frame are collecting diverse plant fossils, including abundant leaves of Fagaceae [Credit: Peter Wilf, Penn State University]
"We're finding, in the same rocks as Castanopsis, fossils of many other plants that live with it today in New Guinea and elsewhere, including ferns, conifers and flowering plants," said Wilf. "You can trace some of the associations with Castanopsis seen in Eocene Argentina to southern China and beyond."
Today, Castanopsis plays an important role in intercepting year-round mountain precipitation that delivers clean water for drinking, fishing and agriculture to more than half a billion people and sustains diverse freshwater and coastal ecosystems. However, humans are clearing these rainforests for timber, development and crop cultivation, and modern climate change is increasing droughts and fire frequency.
"These plants are adaptable if given time and space," Wilf said, adding Castanopsis' trek from Patagonia to Southeast Asia occurred over millions of years and thousands of miles. "But the pace of change today is hundreds of times faster than in geologic time. The animals that depend on these plants are adaptable only to the extent that the plants are, and we are one of the animals that depend on this system. If we lose mountain rainforests, really fast we lose reliable water flows for agriculture, clean coral reefs offshore, biodiversity and much more."
This study has implications for extinction in the face of climate change, according to Kevin Nixon, professor and L.H. Bailey Hortorium curator, Cornell University. He said Castanopsis went extinct in Patagonia due to a major extinction caused by the slow cooling and drying of the climate that occurred with the glaciation of Antarctica and the rise of the Andes.
"Those kinds of climate changes can have massive effects on biodiversity," Nixon said. "The relevance of understanding this is we can start to look at extinction processes. The better we can understand what causes extinction, the better we can deal with it."
Chinquapin fossils found in Patagonia, Argentina are 52.2 million years old and represent
the earliest fruit of this family of trees and were found south of the tropics
[Credit: Strategic Communications, Penn State University]
Glacial Sediments Greased The Gears Of Plate Tectonics
Earth's outer layer is composed of giant plates that grind together, sliding past or dipping beneath one another, giving rise to earthquakes and volcanoes. These plates also separate at undersea mountain ridges, where molten rock spreads from the centers of ocean basins.
This view of the Grand Canyon shows the Great Unconformity, a boundary where nearly a billion years' worth of sedimentary deposits is missing from the geologic record. The boundary can be seen at roughly the middle of this image, separating the older, lumpy and angular rocks below from the younger horizontal layers above. New research suggests that the missing sediments, likely scrubbed away by glaciers during the global "snowball Earth" that ended roughly 635 million years ago, washed away to the oceans, where they lubricated subduction faults and kick-started the modern age of plate tectonics [Credit: USGS/Alex Demas]
But this was not always the case. Early in Earth's history, the planet was covered by a single shell dotted with volcanoes--much like the surface of Venus today. As Earth cooled, this shell began to fold and crack, eventually creating Earth's system of plate tectonics.
According to new research, the transition to plate tectonics started with the help of lubricating sediments, scraped by glaciers from the slopes of Earth's first continents. As these sediments collected along the world's young coastlines, they helped to accelerate the motion of newly formed subduction faults, where a thinner oceanic plate dips beneath a thicker continental plate.
The new study, published this week in the journal Nature, is the first to suggest a role for sediments in the emergence and evolution of global plate tectonics. Michael Brown, a professor of geology at the University of Maryland, co-authored the research paper with Stephan Sobolev, a professor of geodynamics at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam.
The findings suggest that sediment lubrication controls the rate at which Earth's crust grinds and churns. Sobolev and Brown found that two major periods of worldwide glaciation, which resulted in massive deposits of glacier-scrubbed sediment, each likely caused a subsequent boost in the global rate of plate tectonics.
The most recent such episode followed the "snowball Earth" that ended sometime around 635 million years ago, resulting in Earth's modern plate tectonic system.
"Earth hasn't always had plate tectonics and it hasn't always progressed at the same pace," Brown said. "It's gone through at least two periods of acceleration. There's evidence to suggest that tectonics also slowed to a relative crawl for nearly a billion years. In each case, we found a connection with the relative abundance--or scarcity--of glacial sediments."
Just as a machine needs grease to keep its parts moving freely, plate tectonics operates more efficiently with lubrication. While it may be hard to confuse the gritty consistency of clay, silt, sand and gravel with a slippery grease, the effect is largely the same at the continental scale, in the ocean trenches where tectonic plates meet.
"The same dynamic exists when drilling Earth's crust. You have to use mud--a very fine clay mixed with water or oil--because water or oil alone won't work as well," Brown said. "The mud particles help reduce friction on the drill bit. Our results suggest that tectonic plates also need this type of lubrication to keep moving."
Previous research on the western coast of South America was the first to identify a relationship between sediment lubrication and friction along a subduction fault. Off the coast of northern Chile, a relative lack of sediment in the fault trench creates high friction as the oceanic Nazca plate dips beneath the continental South America plate. This friction helped to push the highest peaks of the central Andes Mountains skyward as the continental plate squashed and deformed.
In contrast, further south there is a higher sediment load in the trench, resulting in less friction. This caused less deformation of the continental plate and, consequently, created smaller mountain peaks. But these findings were limited to one geographic area.
For their study, Sobolev and Brown used a geodynamic model of plate tectonics to simulate the effect of sediment lubrication on the rate of subduction. To verify their hypothesis, they checked for correlations between known periods of widespread glaciation and previously published data that indicate the presence of continental sediment in the oceans and trenches. For this step, Sobolev and Brown relied on two primary lines of evidence: the chemical signature of the influence of continental sediments on the chemistry of the oceans and indicators of sediment contamination in subduction-related volcanoes, much like those that make up today's "ring of fire" around the Pacific Ocean.
According to Sobolev and Brown's analysis, plate tectonics likely emerged on Earth between 3 and 2.5 billion years ago, around the time when Earth's first continents began to form. This time frame also coincides with the planet's first continental glaciation.
A major boost in plate tectonics then occurred between 2.2 to 1.8 billion years ago, following another global ice age that scrubbed massive amounts of sediments into the fault trenches at the edges of the continents.
The next billion years, from 1.75 billion to 750 million years ago, saw a global reduction in the rate of plate tectonics. This stage of Earth's history was so sedate, comparatively speaking, that it earned the nickname "the boring billion" among geologists.
Later, following the global "snowball Earth" glaciation that ended roughly 635 million years ago, the largest surface erosion event in Earth's history may have scrubbed more than a vertical mile of thickness from the surface of the continents. According to Sobolev and Brown, when these sediments reached the oceans, they kick-started the modern phase of active plate tectonics.
