How Dinosaurs Became Tyrants of the Prehistoric

Lukas Rieppel

Environmental History, emaa029, https://doi.org/10.1093/envhis/emaa029

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24 September 2020

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In the summer of 1902, a small crew of fossil hunters from the American Museum of Natural History left New York in search of dinosaur bones. Acting on a tip from the noted conservationist William Temple Hornaday, they ventured to a remote part of Montana with exposed rocks from the Cretaceous period known as the Hell Creek Formation. Although they were primarily looking for Triceratops bones, it was not long before something else caught their attention. As the young men gradually unearthed their discovery using dynamite and a heavy metal scraper dragged by a horse, it became clear...

© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Society for Environmental History and the Forest History Society. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com

This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)

 

Study: Greenland Is On Track To Lose Ice Faster Than In Any Century Over 12,000 Years

ATMOSPHERIC SCIENCE

On Sep 30, 2020

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The research places the ice sheet’s modern decline in historical context, providing a robust look at how this century’s losses could starkly outpace prior changes

Credit: Bob Wilder / University at Buffalo

BUFFALO, N.Y. — If human societies don’t sharply curb emissions of greenhouse gases, Greenland’s rate of ice loss this century is likely to greatly outpace that of any century over the past 12,000 years, a new study concludes.The research will be published on Sept. 30 in the journal Nature. The study employs ice sheet modeling to understand the past, present and future of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Scientists used new, detailed reconstructions of ancient climate to drive the model, and validated the model against real-world measurements of the ice sheet’s contemporary and ancient size.

The findings place the ice sheet’s modern decline in historical context, highlighting just how extreme and unusual projected losses for the 21st century could be, researchers say.

“Basically, we’ve altered our planet so much that the rates of ice sheet melt this century are on pace to be greater than anything we’ve seen under natural variability of the ice sheet over the past 12,000 years. We’ll blow that out of the water if we don’t make severe reductions to greenhouse gas emissions,” says Jason Briner, PhD, professor of geology in the University at Buffalo College of Arts and Sciences. Briner led the collaborative study, coordinating the work of scientists from multiple disciplines and institutions.

“If the world goes on a massive energy diet, in line with a scenario that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calls RCP2.6, our model predicts that the Greenland Ice Sheet’s rate of mass loss this century will be only slightly higher than anything experienced in the past 12,000 years,” Briner adds. “But, more worrisome, is that under a high-emissions RCP8.5 scenario — the one the Greenland Ice Sheet is now following — the rate of mass loss could be about four times the highest values experienced under natural climate variability over the past 12,000 years.”

He and colleagues say the results reiterate the need for countries around the world to take action now to reduce emissions, slow the decline of ice sheets, and mitigate sea level rise. The research was largely funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Combining ice sheet modeling with field work, real-life observations

The study brought together climate modelers, ice core scientists, remote sensing experts and paleoclimate researchers at UB, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the University of Washington (UW), Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO), the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and other institutions.

This multidisciplinary team used a state-of-the-art ice sheet model to simulate changes to the southwestern sector of the Greenland Ice Sheet, starting from the beginning of the Holocene epoch some 12,000 years ago and extending forward 80 years to 2100.

Scientists tested the model’s accuracy by comparing results of the model’s simulations to historical evidence. The modeled results matched up well with data tied to actual measurements of the ice sheet made by satellites and aerial surveys in recent decades, and with field work identifying the ice sheet’s ancient boundaries.

Though the project focused on southwestern Greenland, research shows that changes in the rates of ice loss there tend to correspond tightly with changes across the entire ice sheet.

“We relied on the same ice sheet model to simulate the past, the present and the future,” says co-author Jessica Badgeley, a PhD student in the UW Department of Earth and Space Sciences. “Thus, our comparisons of the ice sheet mass change through these time periods are internally consistent, which makes for a robust comparison between past and projected ice sheet changes.”

“We have significantly improved our understanding of how anomalous future Greenland change will be,” says co-author Joshua Cuzzone, PhD, an assistant project scientist at UCI who completed much of his work on the study as a postdoctoral researcher at JPL and UCI. “This work represents a massive success for multidisciplinary science and collaboration, and represents a framework for future successful multidisciplinary work.”

Cuzzone and other researchers at UCI and JPL led ice sheet modeling, leveraging the work of colleagues at UW, who used data from ice cores to create maps of temperatures and precipitation in the study region that were used to drive the ice sheet model simulations up to the year 1850. Previously published climate data was used to drive the simulations after that date.

UB and LDEO scientists partnered on field work that helped validate the model by identifying the ice sheet’s boundaries in southwestern Greenland thousands of years ago.

“We built an extremely detailed geologic history of how the margin of the southwestern Greenland Ice Sheet moved through time by measuring beryllium-10 in boulders that sit on moraines,” says co-author Nicolás Young, PhD, associate research professor at LDEO. “Moraines are large piles of debris that you can find on the landscape that mark the former edge of an ice sheet or glacier. A beryllium-10 measurement tells you how long that boulder and moraine have been sitting there, and therefore tells you when the ice sheet was at that exact spot and deposited that boulder.

“Amazingly, the model reproduced the geologic reconstruction really well. This gave us confidence that the ice sheet model was performing well and giving us meaningful results. You can model anything you want and your model will always spit out an answer, but we need some way to determine if the model is doing a good job.”

A continuous timeline of changes to the Greenland Ice Sheet

The study makes an important contribution by creating a timeline of the past, present and future of the Greenland Ice Sheet, Briner says. The results are sobering.

“We have long timelines of temperature change, past to present to future, that show the influence of greenhouse gases on Earth’s temperature,” Briner says. “And now, for the first time, we have a long timeline of the impacts of that temperature — in the form of Greenland Ice Sheet melt — from the past to present to future. And what it shows is eye-opening.”

“It is no secret that the Greenland Ice Sheet is in rough shape and is losing ice at an increasing rate,” Young says. “But if someone wants to poke holes in this, they could simply ask, ‘how do you know this isn’t just part of the ice sheet’s natural variability?’ Well, what our study suggests is that the rate of ice loss for this century will exceed the rate of ice loss for any single century over the last 12,000 years. I think this is the first time that the current health of the Greenland Ice Sheet has been robustly placed into a long-term context.”

Despite these sobering results, one vital takeaway from the model’s future projections is that it’s still possible for people and countries around the world to make an important difference by cutting emissions, Briner says. Models of the RCP2.6 and RCP8.5 scenarios yield very different results, with high-emission scenarios producing massive declines in the ice sheet’s health, and significant sea level rise.

“Our findings are yet another wake-up call, especially for countries like the U.S.,” Briner says. “Americans use more energy per person than any other nation in the world. Our nation has produced more of the CO2 that resides in the atmosphere today than any other country. Americans need to go on an energy diet. The most affluent Americans, who have the highest energy footprint, can afford to make lifestyle changes, fly less, install solar panels and drive an energy-efficient vehicle.”

“This study shows that future ice loss is likely to be larger than anything that the ice sheet experienced in the Holocene — unless we follow a low-carbon emission scenario in the future,” Badgeley says.

###

The study’s authors include Jason P. Briner, Alia J. Lesnek, Elizabeth K. Thomas, Allison A. Cluett and Beata Csatho from the University at Buffalo; Joshua K. Cuzzone from the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL); Jessica A. Badgeley, Eric J. Steig and Gregory J. Hakim from the University of Washington; Nicolás E. Young and Joerg Schaefer from Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory; Mathieu Morlighem from UCI; Nicole-Jeanne Schlegel and Eric Larour from JPL; Jesse V. Johnson and Jacob Downs from the University of Montana; Estelle Allan and Anne de Vernal from the Université du Québec à Montréal; Ole Bennike from the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland; and Sophie Nowicki from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who joined UB’s faculty in fall 2020.

In addition to the NSF, the research received support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Fonds de recherche du Québec, NASA and the G. Unger Vetlesen Foundation.

Additional photos, a 50-second video and b-roll are available by contacting Charlotte Hsu in UB Media Relations at chsu22@buffalo.edu.

Breathing? 

Thank Volcanoes, Tectonics And Bacteria

Study points to one cause for several mysteries linked to breathable oxygen


Credit: Image by J. Eguchi/University of California, Riverside

HOUSTON — (Dec. 2, 2019) — Earth’s breathable atmosphere is key for life, and a new study suggests that the first burst of oxygen was added by a spate of volcanic eruptions brought about by tectonics.

The study by geoscientists at Rice University offers a new theory to help explain the appearance of significant concentrations of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere about 2.5 billion years ago, something scientists call the Great Oxidation Event (GOE). The research appears this week in Nature Geoscience.

“What makes this unique is that it’s not just trying to explain the rise of oxygen,” said study lead author James Eguchi, a NASA postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Riverside who conducted the work for his Ph.D. dissertation at Rice. “It’s also trying to explain some closely associated surface geochemistry, a change in the composition of carbon isotopes, that is observed in the carbonate rock record a relatively short time after the oxidation event. We’re trying explain each of those with a single mechanism that involves the deep Earth interior, tectonics and enhanced degassing of carbon dioxide from volcanoes.”

Eguchi’s co-authors are Rajdeep Dasgupta, an experimental and theoretical geochemist and professor in Rice’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences, and Johnny Seales, a Rice graduate student who helped with the model calculations that validated the new theory.

Scientists have long pointed to photosynthesis — a process that produces waste oxygen — as a likely source for increased oxygen during the GOE. Dasgupta said the new theory doesn’t discount the role that the first photosynthetic organisms, cyanobacteria, played in the GOE.


“Most people think the rise of oxygen was linked to cyanobacteria, and they are not wrong,” he said. “The emergence of photosynthetic organisms could release oxygen. But the most important question is whether the timing of that emergence lines up with the timing of the Great Oxidation Event. As it turns out, they do not.”

Cyanobacteria were alive on Earth as much as 500 million years before the GOE. While a number of theories have been offered to explain why it might have taken that long for oxygen to show up in the atmosphere, Dasgupta said he’s not aware of any that have simultaneously tried to explain a marked change in the ratio of carbon isotopes in carbonate minerals that began about 100 million years after the GOE. Geologists refer to this as the Lomagundi Event, and it lasted several hundred million years.

One in a hundred carbon atoms are the isotope carbon-13, and the other 99 are carbon-12. This 1-to-99 ratio is well documented in carbonates that formed before and after Lomagundi, but those formed during the event have about 10% more carbon-13.

Eguchi said the explosion in cyanobacteria associated with the GOE has long been viewed as playing a role in Lomagundi.


“Cyanobacteria prefer to take carbon-12 relative to carbon-13,” he said. “So when you start producing more organic carbon, or cyanobacteria, then the reservoir from which the carbonates are being produced is depleted in carbon-12.”

Eguchi said people tried using this to explain Lomagundi, but timing was again a problem.

“When you actually look at the geologic record, the increase in the carbon-13-to-carbon-12 ratio actually occurs up to 10s of millions of years after oxygen rose,” he said. “So then it becomes difficult to explain these two events through a change in the ratio of organic carbon to carbonate.”

The scenario Eguchi, Dasgupta and Seales arrived at to explain all of these factors is:


A dramatic increase in tectonic activity led to the formation of hundreds of volcanoes that spewed carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.


The climate warmed, increasing rainfall, which in turn increased “weathering,” the chemical breakdown of rocky minerals on Earth’s barren continents.


Weathering produced a mineral-rich runoff that poured into the oceans, supporting a boom in both cyanobacteria and carbonates.


The organic and inorganic carbon from these wound up on the seafloor and was eventually recycled back into Earth’s mantle at subduction zones, where oceanic plates are dragged beneath continents.


When sediments remelted into the mantle, inorganic carbon, hosted in carbonates, tended to be released early, re-entering the atmosphere through arc volcanoes directly above subduction zones.


Organic carbon, which contained very little carbon-13, was drawn deep into the mantle and emerged hundreds of millions of years later as carbon dioxide from island hotspot volcanoes like Hawaii.

“It’s kind of a big cyclic process,” Eguchi said. “We do think the amount of cyanobacteria increased around 2.4 billion years ago. So that would drive our oxygen increase. But the increase of cyanobacteria is balanced by the increase of carbonates. So that carbon-12-to-carbon-13 ratio doesn’t change until both the carbonates and organic carbon, from cyanobacteria, get subducted deep into the Earth. When they do, geochemistry comes into play, causing these two forms of carbon to reside in the mantle for different periods of time. Carbonates are much more easily released in magmas and are released back to the surface at a very short period. Lomagundi starts when the first carbon-13-enriched carbon from carbonates returns to the surface, and it ends when the carbon-12-enriched organic carbon returns much later, rebalancing the ratio.”

Eguchi said the study emphasizes the importance of the role that deep Earth processes can play in the evolution of life at the surface.

“We’re proposing that carbon dioxide emissions were very important to this proliferation of life,” he said. “It’s really trying to tie in how these deeper processes have affected surface life on our planet in the past.”

Dasgupta is also the principal investigator on a NASA-funded effort called CLEVER Planets that is exploring how life-essential elements might come together on distant exoplanets. He said better understanding how Earth became habitable is important for studying habitability and its evolution on distant worlds.

“It looks like Earth’s history is calling for tectonics to play a big role in habitability, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that tectonics is absolutely necessary for oxygen build up,” he said. “There might be other ways of building and sustaining oxygen, and exploring those is one of the things we’re trying to do in CLEVER Planets.”

###

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation (OCE-1338842), NASA (80NSSC18K0828) and the Deep Carbon Observatory.

High-resolution IMAGES are available for download at:

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2019/11/1129_OXYGEN-amesmural-lg.jpg

CAPTION: The evolution of life as depicted in a mural at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. The rise of oxygen from a trace element to a primary atmospheric component was an important evolutionary development. (NASA Ames/David J. Des Marais/Thomas W. Scattergood/Linda L. Jahnke)

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2019/11/1129_OXYGEN-authors-lg.jpg

CAPTION: Geoscientists (from left) James Eguchi, Johnny Seales and Rajdeep Dasgupta published a new theory that attempts to explain the first appearance of significant concentrations of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere about 2.5 billion years ago as well as a puzzling shift in the ratio of carbon isotopes in carbonate minerals that followed. (Photos courtesy of Rice University)

https://news-network.rice.edu/news/files/2019/11/1129_OXYGEN-fig-lg.jpg

CAPTION: This figure illustrates how inorganic carbon cycles through the mantle more quickly than organic carbon, which contains very little of the isotope carbon-13. Both inorganic and organic carbon are drawn into Earth’s mantle at subduction zones (top left). Due to different chemical behaviors, inorganic carbon tends to return through eruptions at arc volcanoes above the subduction zone (center). Organic carbon follows a longer route, as it is drawn deep into the mantle (bottom) and returns through ocean island volcanos (right). The differences in recycling times, in combination with increased volcanism, can explain isotopic carbon signatures from rocks that are associated with both the Great Oxidation Event, about 2.4 billion years ago, and the Lomagundi Event that followed.

(Image by J. Eguchi/University of California, Riverside)

https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/SearchPhotos/photo.pl?mission=ISS013&roll=E&frame=54329

CAPTION: Earth’s atmosphere as seen from the International Space Station July 20, 2006. (Image courtesy of NASA)



Links and resources:

The DOI of the Nature Geoscience paper is: 10.1038/s41561-019-0492-6

A copy of the paper is available at: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-019-0492-6

This release can be found online at news.rice.edu.

Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.

Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,962 undergraduates and 3,027 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 4 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance.

Related Journal Article
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41561-019-0492-6

Safe Flight: New Method Detects Onset Of Destructive Oscillations In Aircraft Turbines

On Sep 30, 2020

New method for early flutter detection will help in the development of safer and more eco-friendly turbines in aircraft



Credit: Tokyo University of Science

Despite humanity’s remarkable engineering prowess, sometimes completely unexpected or poorly understood physical phenomena can rapidly lead to catastrophic failures. Such was the case in Braniff International Airways Flight 542 in 1959 and Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 710 in 1960, where both aircrafts spontaneously disintegrated in mid-air due to a mechanical phenomenon known as “flutter.”

In aerospace research, flutter generally refers to undesired and self-sustained vibrations in turbine blades that can readily grow out of control, destroying them along with the engine, and even the aircraft’s wings. It is not very surprising that flutter remains an area of active research and one of the main concerns when designing turbines. In fact, flutter has been placed once again under the spotlight in a project (advanced-fan-jet-research: aFJR) launched by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) aimed at designing highly efficient and environment-friendly turbines.

In a new study published in Physical Review Applied, scientists from the Tokyo University of Science (TUS), in collaboration with researchers from JAXA, tackle the problem of developing a novel methodology for early detection of flutter in the design state of blades. Dr. Hiroshi Gotoda (corresponding author of the paper) from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at TUS explains the problem at hand and how they tried to solve it, “The onset of cascade flutter has impeded the technological development of advanced jet engines and its early detection is a long-standing problem in current aerospace propulsion engineering. Our main aim was to explore the applicability of a methodology combining complex networks and synchronization to detect a precursor of cascade flutter.”

The main idea behind their approach is that the turbine fan can be mathematically modeled as a complex network of interrelated oscillators and that flutter is ultimately the result of the progressive synchronization of more and more blades as a result of increased airflow going through the turbine. In another study, published in the Journal of Applied Physics, the same group had explored an artificial intelligence-based method for detecting the onset of flutter from time-series data using the permutation entropy of the system, which is a measure of the randomness of the turbine’s complex dynamics. In their current work, they demonstrate that a network representation of the system based on synchronization is closely related to the actual oscillatory behavior of the blades.

Through experiments on an actual turbine test rig conducted at JAXA’s Altitude Test Facility, the research team found that, before the onset of flutter, one particular blade begins to act as a “central hub” in the network and adjacent blades start to oscillate in sync with it. This “local” synchronization quickly expands and leads to the collective synchronization of all blades, resulting in potentially catastrophic “flutter.”


In this context, the network representation of the system proposed in this study serves two important purposes, as explained by Dr. Gotoda, “We demonstrate the applicability of two local and global measures as potential detectors of cascade flutter: the connecting strength between individual network nodes and the network’s synchronization parameter. The former is valid for specifying the dominant blades for the onset of cascade flutter. In contrast, the latter, which ranges from 0 to 1, is more suitable for determining a threshold for this onset.”

The combined findings of these new studies shed light on the complex phenomenon of flutter, and contribute to the academic systemization of nonlinear problems in the field of aeronautical engineering and related nonlinear science. They could represent promising techniques for the early detection of flutter onset in the design state of blades. The efforts of this research team from TUS and JAXA would help the development of safer and more eco-friendly turbine designs.

###

Reference

Titles of original papers:

(1) Early Detection of Cascade Flutter in a Model Aircraft Turbine Using a Methodology Combining Complex Networks and Synchronization

(2) Experimental study on early detection of cascade flutter in turbo jet fans using combined methodology of symbolic dynamics, dynamical systems theory, and machine learning

Journals:

(1) Physical Review Applied

(2) Journal of Applied Physics

DOI:

(1) 10.1103/PhysRevApplied.14.014093

(2) 10.1063/1.5143373

About the Tokyo University of Science

Tokyo University of Science (TUS) is a well-known and respected university, and the largest science-specialized private research university in Japan, with four campuses in central Tokyo and its suburbs and in Hokkaido. Established in 1881, the university has continually contributed to Japan’s development in science through inculcating the love for science in researchers, technicians, and educators.

When the media loses everyone loses

BY JUDE MATHURINE - 28 September 2020

If you are deeply passionate about news journalism as a social good, there is something you can do, writes Jude Mathurine
Image: www.pexels.com

Did you know news is hard-wired into human behaviour?

Palaeoanthropologists (those who study fossils to learn how early humans originated and developed) have theorised that language evolved to gossip so that large groups could get along.

Social news strengthens and polices the bonds and values that form the basis for a stable society.  

“It is not enough for individual men and women to know the whereabouts of lions and bison,” historian Noah Yuval Harari wrote in his 2015 best-seller, Sapiens.

“It's much more important for them to know who in their band hates whom, who is sleeping with whom, who is honest and who is a cheat.”

The headlines that shout off front pages and news bulletins suggest that the purpose and formula for news has not evolved much over the millennia.

What has changed is the scale and sophistication of society, and the channels and practices for communicating news — from cave walls to the internet.

Like prehistoric humans, modern news journalism, which emerged alongside mass media like the printing press and broadcast signals, forms and informs views of the world and each other.

Journalism practice supported by a free media is the bedrock of modern democracy and vibrant economies.

Performed independently and competently, journalism can enlighten public opinion and inform (hopefully) intelligent action that serves individual or collective interests.

Like the gossip of our forebears, news journalism is also the glue of contemporary societies.

However, unlike gossip that feeds audience curiosity, a public interest philosophy — informs news journalism.

Jude Mathurine
Image: Jude Mathurine

Put another way, knowing that Atul Gupta owns a Ferrari or that Tony Gupta loves vindaloo is less important than knowing which ministers supped with the notorious family at Saxonwold and how they took South Africans for a ride.

Even though the media are imperfect entities, it is the methods that ensure that news is relatively fair, balanced and complete that make journalism such a valued and valuable form of public communication.

Reality is messy and complex.

Truths can only be explored by fact-finding and research.

Find the story, search for the facts, context and evidence, seek valid perspectives and tell a story on whatever platform helps audiences make sense of their world to exercise their agency.

However, there are fewer journalists than ever before who are up to the task and fewer media organisations committed to this kind of journalism. A perfect storm of waning audience attention and appetite to pay for news, as well as advertiser flight to more powerful marketing tools like Google and Facebook have stripped media companies of resources.

In her new book, Power and Loss in South African Journalism, Prof Glenda Daniels writes that the number of journalists in SA has halved over the past 10 years — from 10,000 to 5,000.

Daniels’s research predates the devastation of Covid-19.

Closures, reduced circulations and frequency, layoffs, pay cuts and reduced hours have all been used to keep media groups and titles afloat.

A recent report by the SA National Editor’s Forum suggests up to 80 community newspapers have vanished — leaving many towns and cities without a voice.

A paywalled press, limping community media and a weak public service broadcaster generally results in a news service for elites.

While some rub their hands in glee, claiming this is SA media’s comeuppance, when the media loses everyone loses.

Imagine a world where Muldergate (the Info Scandal that brought down the government of BJ Vorster), Nkandlagate (a Mail & Guardian investigation that led to public protector findings that up to R246m of public money had been spent to upgrade former president Jacob Zuma’s homestead) and GuptaLeaks (a leaked e-mail treasure trove that revealed the extent of the Gupta state capture project) had not come to light.

If the powerful can’t control the media, they attempt to control the audience perceptions which come to serve as some people’s reality.

Methods of networked influence transforms the public sphere into a vehicle for the pursuit of vested interests, often at the expense of the social good.

Look no further than the Guptas’ attempt to weaponise their media empire at ANN7 and the New Age, as well as the services of international PR firm Bell-Pottinger on a £100,000 (R1,7m) a month retainer.

What  the public doesn’t know that it doesn’t know can easily hurt it (or make you a useful idiot to use against others).  

Despite the reach of cellphones and social media, channels like WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter just don’t fill the gap.

They mainly recirculate the same main stories that originate from the sweat of hardworking journalists and invest little to produce original news content.

Eye-witness news and paid-for social media influencers are an essential part of today’s news mix but they cannot replace independent, competent and sustainable journalism.

The job of a journalist is not merely to provide balance.

There are clear rights and wrongs.

Giving credence to all views simply creates the space for audiences to fall for anything.

The views of trolls, sock-puppets, bots, misogynists, racists, flat-earthers, holocaust deniers and climate change objectors would generally not be entertained by serious reporters.

However, these views are frequently amplified on social media timelines.

And there’s even more reason to worry after a 2018 study, published in the journal Science, showed that fake news on Twitter circulated six times faster than the truth.

It is no wonder then that social media was regarded as the least trustworthy form of media in the Edelman 2019 Trust Barometer.

In the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma, former employees of trillion-rand tech companies like Facebook show how algorithms fill the news feeds of more than 24 million SA users with hot-button topics that provoke emotions like anger and fear.

While traditional media arguably tries to get sides to understand each other — the goal of social media is keep the hype cycle going to market your attention and specific online profile for purposes of advertising, promotion and influence.

Often in the debate the loudest, most populist, persistent or well-financed voices win, resulting in a zero-sum game.

Yes, social media has diversified news production and even helped to mobilise for the overthrow of authoritarian regimes.

However, its use for polarising purposes result has also resulted in a further fragmented public sphere.

This is anathema to the cohesion for social action to resolve issues like gender-based violence, climate change or Day Zero where conversations become fragmented, leaving the status quo intact.

If you are deeply passionate about news journalism as a social good, there is something you can do:

• Support the ethical news media by paying for news when you can and only sharing information from reliable news outlets;
• Get media literate — learn media and platform bias by watching Influence and The Social Dilemma on Netflix;
• If you have a gripe against the media, complain to the SA Press Council not just on Twitter.
• Join spaces where audiences and the media debate their role and shape a relevant and responsive news agenda
• Support and donate to media engaging in social justice reporting and investigation.

As President Cyril Ramaphosa said in his weekly letter in September: “Whether it is electing to pay for content, supporting crowdfunded journalism, paying our SABC licence fees or simply buying a newspaper, we can all play our part to support this industry in crisis.”

Then, maybe, we wouldn’t have to imagine a world without news.

Jude Mathurine lectures in journalism, new media and communication at the Media and Communication Department of Nelson Mandela University

Google searches for ‘move to Canada’ spike after presidential debate


By Vincent Barone NYPOST

September 30, 2020 

A sign near the border crossing to Canada at Roseau, Minnesota.AP

The presidential debate may send people up north instead of to the ballot box.

Google searches for moving to Canada spiked after the 2020 presidential debate between President Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden.

Queries for “how to apply for Canadian citizenship” skyrocketed about an hour into the yelling match between the two men, peaking around 10:30 p.m., according to Google.

The search was most popular in the state of Massachusetts, followed by Ohio and Michigan.

“How to move to Canada” and “move to Canda” also experienced a surge in searches during the debacle of a debate, which was fraught with interruptions, unfinished points and nasty attacks.

“Cheering you all on from this side of the border! You got this!” one Twitter user wrote.

Other Canadians were less supportive.

“Sorry, we’ve built a wall on our southern border,” another joked.

 

Taiwan in Time: Resting in stone

Prehistoric slate coffins found in countless archaeological sites across Taiwan were often tailor-made to fit the size of the deceased, including miniature ones for miscarried fetuses

• By Han Cheung / Staff reporter

Sept. 28 to Oct . 4

A large number of 3000-year-old slate coffins were unearthed on a hill near Nanhe Village (南和村) in Pingtung County on Sept. 30, 1985. Unfortunately, the United Daily News (聯合報) noted that they had been seriously damaged by construction, and no artifacts or human remains were found.

Although the newspaper called the find a “significant discovery,” little information can be gleaned about this specific site because it’s just one of countless locations where stone sarcophagi have been unearthed across southern and eastern Taiwan, and as north as Yilan County.

Nenozo Utsurikawa, front row in kimono, former head of Taihoku Imperial University’s Institute of Ethnology, was the first anthropologist to discover slate coffins in Taiwan in 1930.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

These stone receptacles for the dead were first found in 1930 at a site in Kenting (墾丁) by a Japanese team led by anthropologist Utsurikawa Nenozo, who unearthed 31 coffins after four excavations. They contained abundant artifacts such as jade and pottery shards, and this venture is considered Taiwan’s first academic archeological excavation. According to contemporary research by Kenting National Park Headquarters, human activity in the area can be traced back to over 6,500 years, encompassing over 70 archaeological sites.

The best-known mass stone coffin site is the Beinan site (卑南遺址) in Taitung County, which was revealed in 1980 during a railroad rerouting project. It is Taiwan’s largest known prehistoric settlement with a sophisticated culture that included indoor burials, teeth extraction and a social hierarchy, and boasting about 2,000 coffins with many more either destroyed or still buried. It’s the largest prehistoric stone graveyard ever found around the Pacific Rim.

Throughout the years, coffins continued to be found at various construction projects, the latest coming in 2011 when three, 4,000-year-old sarcophagi were found in Taitung.

Replica stone coffins are on display at Beinan Cultural Park in Taitung County.

Photo: CNA

FIRST FINDS

After receiving his PhD in anthropology from Harvard University, Utsurikawa became the head of the newly established Institute of Ethnology at Taihoku Imperial University (today’s National Taiwan University), where he conducted extensive field research on the island’s various Aboriginal groups.

According to the National Taiwan Museum of History, Utsurikawa’s dig at the Kenting site was by no means up to modern standards and techniques, but it still paved the way for future endeavors. In 1935, the colonial government deemed the site a National Historic Site and put it under protection. But war soon broke out between Japan and China and the findings at the site remained unpublished until the 1990s.

A member of an archeological team dusts off the top of a slate coffin during a dig.

Photo: Tung Chen-kuo, Taipei Times

Later research determined that the site was up to 4,000 years old, and may have belonged to the neolithic Niuchoutzu (牛稠子) culture, of which there are about 15 sites alone within the national park. Rice grain imprints were found in some of the pottery at one of the sites, which is the earliest evidence of cultivation in the Hengchun peninsula. From the human remains, they determined that the inhabitants practiced teeth extraction and chewed betel nuts.

Due to the rapid development of the area, the Kenting site has been seriously damaged over the years, and by 2004, anthropologist Lien Chao-mei (連照美) lamented its condition. Lien collected and edited the Japanese findings into a book that was published in 2007.

EQUALITY IN DEATH

This stone coffin contained multiple corpses.

Photo: Huang Ming-tang, Taipei Times

Long before the stone coffins were unearthed at the Beinan site, the location was already known to Japanese scholars, who had examined two large stone pillars in 1896. Later archaeologists found that there were numerous such pillars in the area. Japanese-era research mostly focused on these monoliths, and only in 1945 did two archaeologists conduct a brief dig despite American airstrikes across the island. They found pottery and the remains of old slate dwellings.

No further excavations were conducted until the site was damaged by the railway project in 1980, which drew public attention, which forced the government to preserve the artifacts. Lien and Sung Wen-hsun (宋文薰) were in charge of the efforts, which took 13 phases over nine years to complete. It was determined that the Beinan culture began about 5,300 years ago and reached its peak between 3,500 and 2,300 years ago.

The stone coffins found at this site were all positioned along a north-south axis, which was also how the inhabitants arranged their dwellings. The dead were placed lying down with their toes pointed northward toward Dulan Mountain (都蘭山), which is believed to be their sacred mountain and the resting place of their souls.

Several miniature slate coffins, the smallest one measuring 40cm long, were found in Taitung in 2007.

Photo: CNA

Although most coffins only held one corpse, there were larger ones that held at least five. These were usually the resting places for powerful families as they contained precious burial objects. One 183-cm long coffin contained a whopping 4,449 artifacts, from jade to weapons and all manner of tool.

Archaeologists also found tiny 18-cm ones that probably held miscarried fetuses. Infants and children were usually buried in their own small sarcophagi, and those under 130cm long made up roughly one-third of the 2,000 odd coffins found on site — indicating a high child mortality rate. The fact that coffins were made for even miscarriages, shows how equally the Beinan people treated all deaths, states a National Museum of Prehistory report, although the underage corpses were seldom buried with any artifacts. Child coffins have also been found at other sites across Taiwan.

Many sarcophagi were buried inside the house, “to accompany those who were still alive,” the report states, showing a close attachment between the dead and the living.

There is still no concrete evidence that these “rock coffins” were used for corpses.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Aside from slate coffins, experts have also discovered “rock coffins,” which are directly carved onto the surface of a large volcanic tuff. These were found mostly on the east coast, and, with only 16 discovered so far, are quite rare.

Although the sizes of the rectangular depressions are almost all large enough to fit a fully-grown human, there’s still no concrete evidence that they were actually used to contain corpses.

Amis Aborigines once chipped pieces off of these ancient “coffins” during droughts to pray for rain, but their original purpose remains a mystery.

Taiwan in Time, a column about Taiwan’s history that is published every Sunday, spotlights important or interesting events around the nation that either have anniversaries this week or are tied to current events.