Knife found beneath Parliament to be returned to Algonquin nations in historic move

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The stone knife will be displayed in the revamped Centre

 Block

Marie Woolf · The Canadian Press · Posted: Oct 17, 2021

This stone knife, estimated to be 4,000 years old, is thought to have been used by the Algonquin people. It was discovered by archeologists on Parliament Hill during the renovation of Centre Block in Ottawa. It is to be returned to the stewardship of local First Nations and put on display when the renovation is complete. (The Canadian Press)

An ancient Indigenous knife unearthed during the renovation of Centre Block will be the first artifact found on Parliament Hill to be returned to the stewardship of the Algonquin people who live in the Ottawa region.

Archeologists say the return of the stone knife, which is estimated to be 4,000 years old, is a historic move that officially recognizes that Indigenous people inhabited the land — considered unceded territory — that is now the site of Parliament Hill.

The Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg, an Algonquin First Nation located about 130 kilometres north of Gatineau, Que., and the Algonquins of Pikwakanagan First Nation, about 150 kilometres west of Ottawa, are to share ownership of the artifact.

It will be displayed on Parliament Hill when the refurbishment of Centre Block finishes and the building reopens, which is not expected to happen until at least 2030.

Until then, it will be shown in Indigenous communities, including schools, according to Doug Odjick, a member of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg council.

The ground in front of Parliament Hill's Centre Block is excavated for the building of the new welcome centre in June. (Justin Tang/The Canadian Press)

The knife, shaped from Onondaga chert quarried in Ontario or New York state thousands of years ago, is not the first Indigenous artifact found in the parliamentary precinct. Shards of pottery and a shell bead were found on Parliament Hill in the 1990s.

A historic first for Ottawa

However, Ian Badgley, manager of the archeology program at the National Capital Commission, said the knife's discovery prompted a new approach by the federal government to returning First Nations artifacts.

"It's the first time that the government of Canada has accepted a pre-contact artifact as indicating use of Parliament Hill by the Indigenous population," said Badgley, who is also archeological consultant to the two First Nations who will take stewardship of the knife.

Scaffolding lines the Hall of Honour during a media tour of Centre Block renovations on Parliament Hill, in Ottawa in June. (Justin Tang/The Canadian Press)

"It's one artifact, but it is really remarkable how it has spawned an interest in the Canadian government in working with the Anishinaabe Algonquins."

Jeremy Link, a spokesperson at Public Services and Procurement Canada, said: "Discussions are ongoing on how to transfer joint ownership of this artifact to the communities."

• Anand says Senate's plans for Centre Block renovations are too costly

The knife's discovery by archeologists working on the revamp of Centre Block coincided with the capital's first archeological field school, aimed at training First Nations archeologists. The field school, which this year excavated the site of an Algonquin camp in Ottawa, will now be an annual event near the capital.

There are plans to establish field schools across Canada to train First Nations archeologists and give Indigenous people greater control over their own excavations.

Knife to be displayed in Parliament

For many thousands of years, the Ottawa Valley was a trading hub for First Nations from across North America because of its location at the confluence of rivers, which made travel by canoe easier. This has made the capital region a rich seam for archeologists.

They have dug up pre-contact artifacts originating from across North America, including shell beads and alligator teeth, as well as knives and other tools made from stone found far from Ottawa. These were likely passed on as trade goods by different Indigenous communities over many seasons.

"The things that have been found in and around Ottawa have come from places as far as New York, to Hudson Bay to the West Coast as far as California," said Odjick, who is responsible for the education, culture and language portfolio on the band council.

• Commons board recommending $733M plan to build Parliament Hill visitors centre

• Parliament Hill is getting the reno of the century — and some MPs say they're being kept in the dark

"The knife that was found on Parliament Hill still has a point. It's about two-and-a-half inches long and it kind of looks like a spearhead. It definitely had a handle. It was from the early Woodland to late Archaic period, 2,500 to 4,000 years old."

The two First Nations who will share the knife are in talks with the federal government about "showing it off," Odjick said. "We would like it to be at the main entrance of Parliament."

The refurbished Centre Block is to have more Indigenous elements, including carvings by Indigenous people who are being recruited to work there, according to Public Services and Procurement Canada, which is in charge of the renewal project.

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Beyond the
Frankfurt Book Fair

Poets of the apocalypse: Catherine Hernandez & Waubgeshig Rice's new works
Passer au contenu


What’s it like to release a post-apocalyptic book in the middle of a global pandemic?

Toronto-based writer Catherine Hernandez, whose 2020 novel Crosshairs describes a climate-related societal collapse followed by the rise of a fascist regime, can tell you that it makes it hard to ask fellow authors for feedback.

“It was, like, ‘Hi, I know that you’re fearing for your life, but can you read my book about fearing for your life and then write something nice about it,” says Hernandez, laughing but then quickly turning serious. “The book felt like a warning. I do think that writing is a form of mediumship, and what my ancestors wanted to say to the world was: this is a warning, but it’s also a model for hope.”

Though of course Hernandez had no way of knowing about the havoc that covid-19 was about to wreak on the world, she did foresee some of the forms of social unrest that might follow a modern-day disaster, especially those centred around dwindling resources. Journalist and author Waubgeshig Rice, whose 2018 dystopia Moon of the Crusted Snow received a renewed wave of attention as the first coronavirus lockdowns swept the globe, foresaw similar divisions but from a different perspective. Moon of the Crusted Snow tells the story of a remote northern Anishnaabe community’s struggle for survival after a widespread and seemingly permanent power outage. The story was born out of Rice’s experience of the 2003 blackout, and his desire to explore how Indigenous peoples might react in the face of a similar upheaval.

“Indigenous nations everywhere have already survived the ends of their worlds,” says Rice. “I knew the Anishnaabe closeness to land and more broadly the Indigenous perspective of land, and how it supports and sustains us in the face of catastrophe. I wanted to put that sort of lens on surviving something like that.”

Hope & survival within the apocalypse

But while both Crosshairs and Moon of the Crusted Snow contain some pretty grim scenes - they are, after all, books about apocalypses - they’re also ultimately hopeful books. One of the things Hernandez set out to do in her work was provide a “blueprint for hope.” Though the dystopian world she brings to life is characterized by anyone who is not white, able-bodied and cis being driven into hiding by an oppressive regime, she also writes about privileged characters who are willing to join the fight against the fascists. Specifically, she imagines “allies who really want to learn allyship [...] on their own dime, on their own time, and in their own bodies, so that QTBIPOC people can do whatever the heck they want to do with their lives while they figure themselves out. It felt hopeful to give ourselves rest while allies learn allyship.”

For Rice, it was important that narrative showed the possibility of survival and renewal after a world-changing disaster, especially through the cohesion of a community. Part of his inspiration came from his early experiences with classic dystopian novels like 1984 and Brave New World.

“I liked their ability to comment on the ills of modern society and show the reader how bad things can get if we don’t address those things,” says Rice. “But as years went on and I became more familiar with literature by people of colour, and I started to think about my own experiences as someone from the rez, I got to thinking about how all these books that we hold up in this so-called canon are written by white dudes, and they have this grim outlook on the future. I think it’s because [these authors] knew generally what colonizing white people are responsible for around the world, so there is that inherent knowledge of destroying things. I wanted to show how we see the world, and with that experience of survival already, how we can frame things differently. We’ve always looked to the future.”

Hernandez, a queer woman of colour, similarly relished the chance to write a dystopia that doesn’t focus on white heteronormative experiences. For her, that felt like another facet of her activism.

Says Hernandez, “Someone did a post when Crosshairs was released and said, ‘isn’t science fiction a form of organizing?’ That’s what feels so empowering about writing this kind of work, that I get to imagine into being a world that feels good to me, that centres our stories.”

Storytelling for a purpose, and a moment in time

Both authors also believe in the power of art to change perspectives, and even lives. Rice remembers reading Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man shortly after arriving in Toronto for his undergraduate degree. Up until then, Rice had lived in the Wasauksing First Nation near Parry Sound, and his knowledge of the Black experience in North America was limited. But while he learned a lot from Ellison’s book, he also saw the parallels between structural anti-Black racism and his experiences as an Indigenous person in a colonial society. He felt a camaraderie with the book’s protagonist right away, and he hopes to create similar feelings of empathy for Indigenous people with his own work.

“I want to humanize Indigenous people in whatever way I can,” says Rice. “I just want people to remember that there are beautiful, vibrant, complex Indigenous people living everywhere, people with the same hopes and dreams as anyone else. In that sense, fiction helps me get closer to the truth than journalism ever did.”

For Hernandez, it’s her Filipino heritage that provides one of her favourite examples of how art can have a real-time impact on the world. She describes a traditional practice in villages in the Philippines where local conflicts would be resolved by spoken word artists. Each would write a poem arguing one side of the issue, and then the community would decide what the outcome was based on the quality of the poems.

“I tell people that’s why I won’t get into governance,” says Hernandez. “Because I’m already the poet.”

As Canada and the rest of the world continue to try to figure out how to live through this pandemic, we’re fortunate to have storytellers like Rice and Hernandez to fill a similar role to those poets. Their blueprints (as Hernandez would say) for how to survive are beyond timely, even if that timing was accidental.

Catherine Hernandez & Waubgeshig Rice are both members of the official literary delegation at the Frankfurt Book Fair from October 20th to 24th, 2021 where Canada is the Guest of Honour. Learn more about them and other Canadian authors and illustrators.

To get the books, click here:
Catherine Hernandez : Original language
Waubgeshig Rice : Original language 

Scientists propose new ‘salty,’ non-toxic gold extraction process

Valentina Ruiz Leotaud | October 16, 2021 |

Gold. (Image by Robert von Bonsdorff, courtesy of Aalto University).

Researchers at Finland’s Aalto University published a paper in the journal Chemical Engineering where they describe a new scalable, non-toxic alternative to cyanide for gold extraction from ore.


The new process is based on the use of chloride, one of two elements in table salt, for the leaching and recovery of the yellow metal.

“With our process, the amount of gold we’ve been able to recover using chloride is as high as 84%,” Ivan Korolev, lead author of the study, said in a media statement. “In comparison, using the standard cyanide process with the same ore yielded only 64% in our control experiment.”

The novel approach is called electrodeposition-redox replacement (EDRR) and it combines electrolysis, which uses electric currents to reduce gold or other metals present in the leaching solution, and cementation, which adds particles of other metals to the solution to react with the gold.

THE NEW PROCESS IS BASED ON THE USE OF CHLORIDE, ONE OF TWO ELEMENTS IN TABLE SALT, FOR THE LEACHING AND RECOVERY OF THE YELLOW METAL

Using copper to test it out, Korolev and his colleagues applied short pulses of electricity to create thin layers of metal on the electrode and cause a reaction that encourages gold to replace the copper layer by layer.

“The method has low energy consumption and doesn’t require the addition of any other elements,” the researcher said.

The lab work was conducted in collaboration with Finnish mining-technology giant Metso Outotec, which invited the scientists to work at its research center in western Finland.

“Collaborating with Metso Outotec allowed us to develop the method in a way that’s much closer to real-world implementation,” Korolev said. “We started with about 9% recovery, but it then grew to 25%, and soon we were hitting 70% — sometimes we even achieved close to 95%.”

According to the doctoral candidate, it is the first time that an experiment like this is conducted in a large-scale setting. Given the positive results, he expects to see mining companies interested in the technology and willing to test with their own ore on site.

“The extraction methods of the past have always left some valuable metals behind. Now, as demand for metals grows all the time, even these small amounts are important,” he said. “I think we can still increase the yield with our EDRR technology. Perhaps we cannot reach 100%, but I believe we can hit the 90% mark or more.”

Revisiting the Out of Africa Theory: New Narrative From Genetic Analysis and AI

By ESTONIAN RESEARCH COUNCIL OCTOBER 16, 2021

West African migrations. Credit: The graph is made by Saoni Banerji, and the map was downloaded from Wikimedia

Researchers from Estonia and Italy developed an innovative method by combining neural networks and statistics. Using this newly developed method, they refined the “Out of Africa” scenario. The researchers claimed that the African dynamics around the time of the Out of Africa expansion are more complex than previously thought.

Archaeologists and geneticists agree that all modern humans originated somewhere in Africa around 300 thousand years ago. The population movement that colonized the rest of the globe occurred approximately 60-70 thousand years ago. Both Y-chromosomal data (which follows patrilineal lineage) and the Mitochondrial genome (which follows the matrilineal line) agree on this. However, the exact relationship between the people who left Africa and the human populations currently inhabiting the continent is not fully understood.

A simplistic model would see the first phase of within-Africa population subdivisions, followed by a separation between the ancestors of modern Eurasians and the ancestors of modern East or North-East Africans. New research on this topic, recently published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, argues that the Out of Africa expansion was preceded by a significant population turnover from East to West Africa. This event likely homogenized West and East Africans. This turnover, which may account for up to 90% of the contemporary West African gene pool, increased the affinity between West Africans and Eurasians. This event better explains the lower bound (~60 thousand years ago) inferred from genetic data for the separation time between Africans and non-Africans.

“A similar hypothesis was proposed before for the Y chromosome. But this is the first time we demonstrated it for autosomal DNA,” said Francesco Montinaro, a Lead author in this study from the University of Bari. Autosomal DNA comes from both parents, instead of Y-chromosome or Mitochondria, which comes only from one of our parents.

“It is fascinating to see how our understanding of the human past becomes ever more complex and detailed. Our new model can give us a clue why West Africa shows such a young separation time from the out of Africa populations,” said Vasili Pankratov, a lead co-author from the University of Tartu.

Reference: “Revisiting the out of Africa event with a deep-learning approach” by Francesco Montinaro, Vasili Pankratov, Burak Yelmen, Luca Pagani and Mayukh Mondal, 8 October 2021, American Journal of Human Genetics.
DOI: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2021.09.006

New Nutrient Profiling System: Ranking Healthfulness of Foods From First to Worst

By TUFTS UNIVERSITY OCTOBER 16, 2021

The Food Compass nutrient profiling system, developed by researchers at the Friedman School at Tufts, incorporates cutting-edge science on how characteristics of more than 8,000 foods positively or negatively impact health. Credit: Tufts University

New nutrient profiling system, most comprehensive and science-based to date, clears up confusion to benefit consumers, policymakers.

A scientific team at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts has developed a new tool to help consumers, food companies, restaurants, and cafeterias choose and produce healthier foods and officials to make sound public nutrition policy.

Food Compass is a new nutrient profiling system, developed over three years, that incorporates cutting-edge science on how different characteristics of foods positively or negatively impact health. Important novel features of the system, reported on October 14, 2021, in Nature Food, include:

• Equally considering healthful vs. harmful factors in foods (many existing systems focus on harmful factors);
• Incorporating cutting-edge science on nutrients, food ingredients, processing characteristics, phytochemicals, and additives (existing systems focus largely on just a few nutrients); and
• Objectively scoring all foods, beverages, and even mixed dishes and meals using one consistent score (existing systems subjectively group and score foods differently).

“Once you get beyond ‘eat your veggies, avoid soda,’ the public is pretty confused about how to identify healthier choices in the grocery store, cafeteria, and restaurant,” said the study’s lead and corresponding author, Dariush Mozaffarian, dean of the Friedman School. “Consumers, policy makers, and even industry are looking for simple tools to guide everyone toward healthier choices.”

The new Food Compass system was developed and then tested using a detailed national database of 8,032 foods and beverages consumed by Americans. It scores 54 different characteristics across nine domains representing different health-relevant aspects of foods, drinks, and mixed meals, providing for one of the most comprehensive nutrient profiling systems in the world. The characteristics and domains were selected based on nutritional attributes linked to major chronic diseases such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular problems, and cancer, as well as to risk of undernutrition, especially for mothers, young children, and the elderly.

Food Compass was designed so that additional attributes and scoring could evolve based on future evidence in such areas as gastrointestinal health, immune function, brain health, bone health, and physical and mental performance; as well as considerations of sustainability.

Potential uses of Food Compass include:

• Encouraging the food industry to develop healthier foods and reformulate the ingredients in popular processed foods and snacks;
• Providing food purchasing incentives for employees through worksite wellness, health care, and nutrition assistance programs;
• Supplying the science for local and national policies such as package labeling, taxation, warning labels, and restrictions on marketing to children;
• Enabling restaurants and school, business, and hospital cafeterias to present healthier food options;
• Informing agricultural trade policy; and
• Guiding institutional and individual investors on environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) investment decisions.

Each food, beverage, or mixed dish receives a final Food Compass score ranging from 1 (least healthy) to 100 (most healthy). The researchers identified 70 or more as a reasonable score for foods or beverages that should be encouraged. Foods and beverages scoring 31-69 should be consumed in moderation. Anything scoring 30 or lower should be consumed minimally.

Across major food categories, the average Food Compass score was 43.2.

• The lowest scoring category was snacks and sweet desserts (average score 16.4).
• The highest scoring categories were vegetables (average score 69.1), fruits (average score 73.9, with nearly all raw fruits receiving a score of 100), and legumes, nuts, and seeds (average score 78.6).
• Among beverages, the average score ranged from 27.6 for sugar-sweetened sodas and energy drinks to 67 for 100% fruit or vegetable juices.
• Starchy vegetables scored an average of 43.2.
• The average score for beef was 24.9; for poultry, 42.67; and for seafood, 67.0.

Food Compass is the first major nutrient profiling system to use consistent scoring across diverse food groups, which is especially important for mixed dishes. For example, in the case of pizza, many other systems have separate scoring algorithms for the wheat, meat, and cheese, but not the finished product itself. Consistent scoring of diverse items can also be helpful in assessing and comparing combinations of food and beverages that could be sold and consumed together, such as an entire shopping basket, a person’s daily diet pattern, or a portfolio of foods sold by a particular company.

“With its publicly available scoring algorithm, Food Compass can provide a nuanced approach to promoting healthy food choices–helping guide consumer behavior, nutrition policy, scientific research, food industry practices, and socially based investment decisions,” said last author Renata Micha, who did this work as a faculty member at the Friedman School and is now at the University of Thessaly.

Additional authors are Naglaa H. El-Abbadi, Meghan O’Hearn, Josh Marino, William A. Masters, Paul Jacques, Peilin Shi, and Jeffrey B. Blumberg of the Friedman School.

The study is part of the Food-PRICE (Policy Review and Intervention Cost-Effectiveness) project, a National Institutes of Health-funded research collaboration working to identify cost-effective nutrition strategies that can have the greatest impact on improving health outcomes in the United States. This work was supported by Danone and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health under award numbers R01HL130735 and R01HL115189. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health. Please see the study for conflicts of interest.

Reference: “Food Compass is a nutrient profiling system using expanded characteristics for assessing healthfulness of foods” by Dariush Mozaffarian, Naglaa H. El-Abbadi, Meghan O’Hearn, Josh Erndt-Marino, William A. Masters, Paul Jacques, Peilin Shi, Jeffrey B. Blumberg and Renata Micha, 14 October 2021, Nature Food.
DOI: 10.1038/s43016-021-00381-y

A Sunny Outlook for Solar: New Research Demonstrates Great Promise for Improving Solar Cell Efficiency

By UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - SANTA BARBARA OCTOBER 17, 2021

All-inorganic perovskites compare well with their hybrid counterparts in terms of efficiency. Credit: Illustration by Xie Zhang

New research demonstrates great promise of all-inorganic perovskite solar cells for improving the efficiencies of solar cells.

Hybrid organic-inorganic perovskites have already demonstrated very high photovoltaic efficiencies of greater than 25%. The prevailing wisdom in the field is that the organic (carbon- and hydrogen-containing) molecules in the material are crucial to achieving this impressive performance because they are believed to suppress defect-assisted carrier recombination.

New research in the UC Santa Barbara materials department has shown not only that this assumption is incorrect, but also that all-inorganic materials have the potential for outperforming hybrid perovskites. The findings are published in the article “All-inorganic halide perovskites as candidates for efficient solar cells,” which appears on the cover of the October 20, 2021, issue of the journal Cell Reports Physical Science.

“To compare the materials, we performed comprehensive simulations of the recombination mechanisms,” explained Xie Zhang, lead researcher on the study. “When light shines on a solar-cell material, the photo-generated carriers generate a current; recombination at defects destroys some of those carriers and hence lowers the efficiency. Defects thus act as efficiency killers.”

To compare inorganic and hybrid perovskites, the researchers studied two prototype materials. Both materials contain lead and iodine atoms, but in one material the crystal structure is completed by the inorganic element cesium, while in the other, the organic methylammonium molecule is present.

Sorting out these processes experimentally is exceedingly difficult, but state-of-the-art quantum-mechanical calculations can accurately predict the recombination rates, thanks to new methodology that was developed in the group of UCSB materials professor Chris Van de Walle, who credited Mark Turiansky, a senior graduate student in the group, with helping to write the code to calculate the recombination rates.

“Our methods are very powerful for determining which defects cause carrier loss,” Turiansky said. “It is exciting to see the approach applied to one of the critical issues of our time, namely the efficient generation of renewable energy.”

Running the simulations showed that defects common to both materials give rise to comparable (and relatively benign) levels of recombination. However, the organic molecule in the hybrid perovskite can break up; when loss of hydrogen atoms occurs, the resulting “vacancies” strongly decrease efficiency. The presence of the molecule is thus a detriment, rather than an asset, to the overall efficiency of the material.

Why, then, has this not been noticed experimentally? Mainly because it is more difficult to grow high-quality layers of the all-inorganic materials. They have a tendency to adopt other crystal structures, and promoting the formation of the desired structure requires greater experimental effort. Recent research has shown, however, that achieving the preferred structure is definitely feasible. Still, the difficulty explains why the all-inorganic perovskites have not received as much attention to date.

“We hope that our findings about the expected efficiency will stimulate more activities directed at producing inorganic perovskites,” concluded Van de Walle.

Reference: “All-inorganic halide perovskites as candidates for efficient solar cells” by Xie Zhang, Mark E. Turiansky and Chris G. Van de Walle, 11 October 2021, Cell Reports Physical Science.
DOI: 10.1016/j.xcrp.2021.100604

Funding for this research was provided by the Department of Energy Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences; the computations were performed at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center.

 

Auroras Announce the Solar Cycle: More Frequent Opportunities To See the Northern and Southern Lights

By MICHAEL CARLOWICZ, NASA EARTH OBSERVATORY OCTOBER 17, 2021

October 12, 2021

The 25th cycle is underway, and it brings more frequent opportunities to see the northern lights and southern lights.

Solar Cycle 25 is underway, and that means more frequent opportunities to see auroras—more commonly known as the northern lights and southern lights. One of the best opportunities in recent years occurred on October 11-12, 2021.

In the early morning hours of October 12, 2021, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the NOAA-NASA Suomi NPP satellite acquired images of the aurora borealis, or northern lights, around the Northern Hemisphere. The scene above is a mosaic of several satellite passes showing auroras over eastern North America, the North Atlantic, and Greenland. (Click on the downloadable image to see a wider view stretching to Alaska.) The nighttime satellite image was acquired with VIIRS “day-night band,” which detects light in a range of wavelengths from green to near-infrared and uses filtering techniques to observe signals such as airglow, auroras, city lights, and reflected moonlight.

That same night, astronaut Shane Kimbrough photographed the aurora (image below) from his perch on the International Space Station. The night brought the first sustained, widespread glance at the northern lights for mid-latitude viewers in several years. Many photographers and aurora chasers captured photos that night, some of which were shared with the Aurorasaurus citizen science project.

October 12, 2021

Solar cycles track the activity level of the Sun, our nearest star. A cycle is traditionally measured by the rise and fall in the number of sunspots, but it also coincides with increases in solar flares, coronal mass ejections (CMEs), radio emissions, and other forms of space weather. These bursts of magnetized plasma and energetic waves from the Sun’s atmosphere energize the gases and particles in Earth’s magnetosphere and send them plunging down in colorful light displays in the upper atmosphere. Scientists have forecasted the next peak of solar activity (solar maximum) will be reached in mid-2025.

According to the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center, the Sun erupted with a solar flare and CME on October 9, 2021, and the storm arrived at Earth late on October 11. Geomagnetic storm activity reached G2 on a scale from G1 to G5. It was likely the first head-on CME impact of the new solar cycle. NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO-A) and the Solar Dynamics Observatory captured images of the flare and CME.

You can participate in aurora citizen science through Aurorasaurus. The project team tracks auroras around the world via reports to its website and on Twitter, then generates a real-time global map of those reports. Citizen scientists log in and verify the tweets and reports, and each verified sighting serves as a valuable data point for scientists to analyze and incorporate into space weather models. The Aurorasaurus team, in collaboration with citizen scientists and the scientific community, published the first scientific study of Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement (STEVE), an aurora-like phenomenon that appears closer to the equator and flows from east to west. The project is a public-private partnership with the New Mexico Consortium supported by the National Science Foundation and NASA.

Astronaut photograph acquired on October 12, 2021, with a Nikon D5 digital camera. The photograph was provided by the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, Johnson Space Center. NASA Earth Observatory image by Joshua Stevens, using VIIRS day-night band data from the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership.

Seismology and Geophysics: Understanding the Devastating Haiti Earthquakes

By SARAH COSTELLO, MIT SCHOOL OF SCIENCE OCTOBER 17, 2021

Haiti earthquake damage.

Assistant professors Camilla Cattania and William Frank discuss the science behind the 2010 and 2021 earthquakes in Haiti.

On August 14, 2021, a magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck Haiti. The largest earthquake in the region since 2010, the disaster left at least 2,000 people dead, 12,000 people injured, and nearly 53,000 houses destroyed. Two assistant professors in the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences discuss why the region is susceptible to earthquakes and what has changed — in Haiti and in earthquake science — since the devastating 2010 event, when the country had only one seismometer.

Camilla Cattania is a seismologist with experience in numerical modeling, earthquake physics, and statistical seismology; and William Frank is a geophysicist focused the physical mechanisms that control deformation within the Earth’s crust.

Camilla Cattania (left) and William Frank are assistant professors in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences focused on earthquake science. Credit: Photos courtesy of the faculty

Q: Why is Haiti prone to earthquakes?

Cattania: I’ll start with the broad tectonics setting. The island of Hispaniola, which comprises Haiti and the Dominican Republic, is sandwiched between the North American plate to the north and the Caribbean plate to the south. Haiti is primarily on a tiny plate that’s sandwiched between the two. At each plate boundary it has faults, fractures within the Earth’s crust, running approximately east to west. The earthquake happened in the southern-most fault system, called the Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault system, where there are faults with slightly different orientations, creating complex fault geometry. The northern plate is moving to the west while the southern plate is moving to the east, causing earthquakes along this fault zone.

Frank: Not only do you have the sliding motion from east to west, but you also have compressive, or squeezing, motion at the plate boundary that is accommodated by other nearby faults. For example, one of the big questions for the 2010 earthquake is: What fault did it actually occur on? It looked like it was right next Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault system, but was it was on a translational, or sliding, fault or a compressive fault? There are lots of outstanding questions about the complexity of what, from far away, looks simple.

Cattania: The region transitions between horizontal motion, in which plates slide past each other, to the compressive motion William described, which has some vertical motion. Even in this earthquake, preliminary models show that there was a bit of both.

Another question would be: Why now? Why have there been two earthquakes recently? The Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault system has been associated with earthquakes in 1751, 1770, 1860, without much in between. A long period of time without seismicity can increase the likelihood that you will have an earthquake because you have had more time to accumulate stresses. Moreover, the 2010 earthquake, which happened on a subsidiary fault, further increased the stress at the location of the 2021 earthquake.

The Gonâve microplate and surrounding fault zones. Credit: NASA WorldWind (retouched by mikenorton)

Q: What is the same and what is different about this earthquake versus the 2010 earthquake?

Frank: The 2010 earthquake happened on a fault that wasn’t previously identified, one of the faults that accommodates the compressive motion of the plate boundary. The question we have now is whether this recent earthquake is on the main translational fault, or whether it’s also on another fault that accommodates compressive motion. If that were the case, it would be the same plate boundary, but a different faulting regime.

Cattania: The reason there are so many unknowns is because this region was very sparsely instrumented up until 2010, when Haiti had no permanent seismic network. Now the region has more seismometers, and people also have portable, low-quality seismometers in their homes that provide a large quantity of measurements. The quality of the data that we have from this earthquake is superior compared to anything we would have had in 2010 or before. I think we’ll have more answers in the future to some of these questions than we did before because the instrumentation has improved between these two events.

Frank: Increased instrumentation allows us to get a better image of what’s happening in the fault zone during the main earthquake and the aftershocks that follow. The parallel story on why that’s possible is that during the 2010 earthquake, there was no seismology at the State University of Haiti. Now, there’s a geoscience department that’s recruiting and training seismologists.

There’s an informational website that is the result of an exciting collaboration between geoscience researchers in Haiti and the University of Nice in France, where they publish real-time locations and detections of aftershocks. It provides enormous amounts of data that is publicly available. Overall, there’s much more activity within Haiti, of instrumentation, of general interest in earthquake hazard, and of people to study the data, than there was during the 2010 earthquake.

Cattania: Another difference between these events was their magnitude. The first one was 7; this latest was 7.2. But the location was also different — the first was closer to Port-au-Prince and generally more populated areas. The fact that this one is stronger doesn’t necessarily imply that it’s more damaging.

Q: What does your research tell us about future earthquakes in this area? What do we know as a scientific community?

Cattania: We cannot predict with certainty the location or the magnitude of huge earthquakes in this area, or anywhere else; however, we do know the typical properties of aftershocks. Basically, you will feel hundreds of earthquakes in the first few weeks, and then this number gradually goes down unless one of these earthquakes happens to be large enough to start a new sequence.

How does the earthquake affect the fault system? We had an earthquake in 2010 that happened to the east of the current earthquake, and it increased the amount of stress where the 2021 earthquake happened. If you look at a map of this area, it’s clear that there are other segments of this same fault system on which major earthquakes haven’t happened for a long time. There is a possibility of other damaging earthquakes occurring on the same fault system.

Frank: For me, what’s most related to my research is developing efficient ways to detect, identify, and characterize the aftershocks. We’ve developed signal processing techniques that we can use on the seismic data to identify the earthquakes, and once we’re able to identify them, we’re able to get good locations. We’re able to study the occurrence rate of these aftershocks.

These aftershock catalogs are extremely important to understanding the extent of rupture and to identifying the actual faults and planes that they occur on. There are two simple ways to identify the structure. You can look at the main earthquake itself, or at the rupture zone of the main earthquake, where the aftershocks often delineate where the main earthquake happened. And once you can identify, locate, and characterize those aftershocks, you can better model the earthquake.

Cattania: My work has been about including geometrical complexity in aftershock forecasts. When you’re trying to figure out where aftershocks will happen, you need to know as much as possible about the orientation of existing faults, and sometimes you have to make simplified assumptions about it. I’ve developed methods that help better include everything we know, using data and the type of information that William was describing, to try to infer how an aftershock will evolve given what the fault geometry looks like and how variable it is in this region. My methods allow you to take refined information about fault geometry to produce better aftershock forecasts.

Frank: That’s why I’m excited to be here with Camilla — because we can make that direct connection.

 

Primates’ Ancestors May Have Left Trees To Survive Asteroid That Wiped Out the Dinosaurs

By CORNELL UNIVERSITY OCTOBER 17, 2021

A chimpanzee in Kibale National Park, Uganda. Credit: Daniel J. Field

When an asteroid struck 66 million years ago and wiped out dinosaurs not related to birds and three-quarters of life on Earth, early ancestors of primates and marsupials were among the only tree-dwelling (arboreal) mammals that survived, according to a new study.

Arboreal species were especially at risk of extinction due to global deforestation caused by wildfires from the asteroid’s impact.

In the study, computer models, fossil records, and information from living mammals revealed that most of the surviving mammals did not rely on trees, though the few arboreal mammals that lived on – including human ancestors – may have been versatile enough to adapt to the loss of trees.

The study points to the influence of this extinction event, known as the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary, on shaping the early evolution and diversification of mammals.

 “One possible explanation for how primates survived across the K-Pg boundary, in spite of being arboreal, might be due to some behavioral flexibility, which may have been a critical factor that let them survive,” said Jonathan Hughes, the paper’s co-first author and a doctoral student in the lab of Jeremy Searle, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Co-first author Jacob Berv, Ph.D. ’19, is currently a Life Sciences Fellow at the University of Michigan.

The study, “Ecological Selectivity and the Evolution of Mammalian Substrate Preference Across the K-Pg Boundary,” was published on October 11, 2021, in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

The earliest mammals appeared roughly 300 million years ago and may have diversified in tandem with an expansion of flowering plants about 20 million years prior to the K-Pg event. When the asteroid struck, many of these mammal lineages died off, Hughes said.

“At the same time, the mammals that did survive diversified into all the new ecological niches that opened up when dinosaurs and other species became extinct,” Hughes said.

In the study, the researchers used published phylogenies (branching, tree-like diagrams that show evolutionary relatedness among groups of organisms) for mammals. They then classified each living mammal on those phylogenies into three categories – arboreal, semi-arboreal and non-arboreal – based on their preferred habitats. They also designed computer models that reconstructed the evolutionary history of mammals.

Mammal fossils from around the K-Pg are very rare and are difficult to use to interpret an animal’s habitat preference. The researchers compared information known from living mammals against available fossils to help provide additional context for their results.

Generally, the models showed that surviving species were predominantly non-arboreal through the K-Pg event, with two possible exceptions: ancestors of primates and marsupials. Primate ancestors and their closest relatives were found to be arboreal right before the K-Pg event in every model. Marsupial ancestors were found to be arboreal in half of the model reconstructions.

The researchers also examined how mammals as a group may have been changing over time.

“We were able to see that leading up to the K-Pg event, around that time frame, there was a big spike in transitions from arboreal and semi-arboreal to non-arboreal, so it’s not just that we are seeing mostly non-arboreal [species], but things were rapidly transitioning away from arboreality,” Hughes said.

Reference: “Ecological selectivity and the evolution of mammalian substrate preference across the K–Pg boundary” by Jonathan J. Hughes, Jacob S. Berv, Stephen G. B. Chester, Eric J. Sargis and Daniel J. Field, 11 October 2021, Ecology and Evolution.
DOI: 10.1002/ece3.8114

Co-authors include Daniel Field, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Cambridge; Eric Sargis, a professor of anthropology at Yale University; and Stephen Chester, an associate professor of anthropology at Brooklyn College.

The study was funded by the National Science Foundation.

 Carbon Capture: A green way forward? | Plan It Green

Oct 17, 2021

Al Jazeera English

With fossil fuel emissions still rising, we need innovative answers to how we can slow global warming, and fast. Carbon capture and storage is one such idea. But as our Environment Correspondent Nick Clark finds out, there are fears it could divert attention from other sustainable solutions.