Catastrophic Australian Fires Fueled Unprecedented Blooms in the Far South Pacific

By SARA E. PRATT, NASA EARTH OBSERVATORY NOVEMBER 6, 2021

January 6, 2020

Iron-rich aerosols from the 2019-2020 fires fertilized huge phytoplankton populations in the far South Pacific.

The catastrophic wildfires that scorched eucalyptus forests in southern and eastern Australia in the summer of 2019-2020 were unprecedented in their scale and intensity. Started in October 2019 and burning through January 2020, they scorched millions of hectares and killed or displaced an estimated 3 billion animals. The fires emitted vast amounts of carbon dioxide and lofted smoke plumes to record heights.

That smoky summer also affected marine ecosystems thousands of kilometers away, according to new research that combined satellite data and surface measurements. From December 2019 to March 2020, the deposition of aerosols emitted by the fires triggered phytoplankton blooms in the normally iron-limited waters of the South Pacific and Southern Ocean. Together the surface area of those blooms exceeded the size of Australia.

The image above, acquired on January 6, 2020, by the Japanese satellite Himawari-8, shows the plume of smoke and ash streaming away from the fires on the southeastern coast of Australia. As global climate warms, such fires are expected to increase in frequency and intensity, releasing more carbon dioxide, which further fuels climate change.

It is important to understand the effects of such fires, not just on local ecosystems but on distant ones as well, noted marine biogeochemist Weiyi Tang of Princeton and biogeochemist Nicolas Cassar of Duke University, lead authors of the study. “The fact that both the fires and the blooms were unprecedented in the satellite record initially gave us an inkling that they might be connected,” Cassar said.

To quantify the aerosols emitted by the fires, the team examined aerosol optical depth (AOD) data from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), which is based partly on measurements from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites. In the visible spectrum, AOD provides a measure of the amount of desert dust, sea salt, sulfate, organic matter, and black carbon in a column of air. The researchers looked specifically at black carbon AOD as a proxy for wildfire aerosols. Tang, Cassar, and colleagues found that black carbon emissions emanated mainly from wildfires in southern and eastern Australia and blew out to the broad South Pacific within a few days.

2019 – 2020

The team also examined chlorophyll concentrations recorded by the European Space Agency’s Ocean Color Climate Change Initiative. OCCI merges data from the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) on Envisat, Terra MODIS, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), and the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS).

The maps above show the monthly aerosol levels (left) and chlorophyll anomalies (right) from November 2019 to February 2020. The researchers identified two regions south and east of Australia where chlorophyll concentrations were double the normal seasonal levels—values never before observed in the 22-year satellite record. Those chlorophyll anomalies occurred within a few days to weeks after the peaks in black carbon aerosols. In those two regions, black carbon aerosol values were also 300 percent higher than normal, a level unprecedented in the 17-year aerosol record.

As the wildfire plumes streamed off the Australian continent, they passed over an air sampling station on the summit of Mount Wellington in Tasmania. Analyses of airborne aerosol samples collected there revealed the presence of iron and a saccharide molecule called levoglucosan that forms when cellulose burns—direct evidence that the aerosols came from the wildfires. Downwind, Argo floats in the ocean also detected elevated levels of chlorophyll in the bloom areas, affirming that the satellite chlorophyll signal was real.

The connection between the smoke aerosols and the bloom was also corroborated by a model that computed the trajectories of the air parcels leaving the fire. “The aerosol optical depth and the modeled air mass trajectories confirmed that the algal blooms were in the path of the aerosols from the wildfires,” Cassar said.

The team even considered whether natural variability in the ocean—such as the Indian Ocean Dipole, the Southern Annular Mode, or El Niño-Southern Oscillation—could explain the influx of nutrients fueling the bloom. “There was nothing that could explain the observations that we had,” Tang said. “It turns out that natural variability was relatively small compared to what we observed.”

January 4, 2020

In a related paper, another research team reported that the 2019-2020 fires emitted more than twice the carbon dioxide previously estimated, a magnitude exceeding Australia’s annual carbon dioxide emissions from fires and fossil fuels. The phytoplankton bloom initially took up a great deal of that carbon dioxide, but its ultimate fate—for example, whether it was respired at the surface or exported to the deep ocean—is not yet known. “For us, the holy grail is to figure out how much this bloom offset the carbon emissions associated with the Australian wildfires,” Cassar said.

Elucidating the links among wildfires, atmospheric carbon dioxide, and marine ecosystems could help improve global carbon cycle models. “We focused on the Australian wildfires because they were really unique in size, but I think it’s worth also looking at other wildfires, including in California, and other regions of the world,” Cassar noted. “And if it is important, globally, then it needs to be better represented in Earth system models.”

NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using data courtesy of Tang, W., et al. (2021) including data from the European Space Agency, and MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Himawari imagery courtesy of the Japan Meteorological Agency.

 

Animals Died in “Toxic Soup” During Earth’s Worst Mass Extinction – A Warning for Today

By UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT NOVEMBER 7, 2021

An artist’s rendering of the conditions during the End-Permian Mass Extinction, which wiped out nearly all life on earth. (Illustration by Victor Leshyk

‘The end-Permian is one of the best places to look for parallels with what’s happening now.’

The end-Permian mass extinction event of roughly 252 million years ago – the worst such event in earth’s history – has been linked to vast volcanic emissions of greenhouse gases, a major temperature increase, and the loss of almost every species in the oceans and on land.

Now, it seems that even the lakes and rivers were no safe havens. A recent study published by an international team of researchers including Professor and Head of the Department of Geosciences Tracy Frank and Professor Chris Fielding, both newly arrived at UConn, has identified a new cause of extinction during extreme warming events: toxic microbial blooms.

In a healthy ecosystem, microscopic algae and cyanobacteria provide oxygen to aquatic animals as a waste product of their photosynthesis. But when their numbers get out of control, these microbes deplete free oxygen, and even release toxins into the water. By studying the fossil, sediment, and chemical records of rocks near Sydney, Australia, the researchers discovered that several pulses of bloom events had occurred soon after the first volcanic rumblings of the end-Permian mass extinction. Once the bottom-feeder animals, or “detritivores,” were killed off, there was no one left to keep the microbes in check. The freshwater systems then seethed with algae and bacteria, delaying the recovery of animals for perhaps millions of years.

Frank and Fielding study sediment, and Frank explains their contribution to the work, which was performed while both were at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, was in gleaning details about the conditions of the environment, and the resulting toxic soup, from the layers of sediment.

“We are trying to understand what conditions these plants were living in, for instance were they lake deposits versus river deposits?” Frank says. “Then what can we determine details about the salinity and temperatures of the waters, those details come from the geochemistry.”

The three main ingredients for the toxic soup are accelerated greenhouse gas emissions, high temperatures, and abundant nutrients. The volcanic eruptions provided the first two, while sudden deforestation caused the third. When the trees were wiped out, the soils bled into the rivers and lakes, providing all the nutrients that the microbes would need. When the researchers compared the fossil records of different warming-related mass extinctions, the team found extremely similar fossil records. This implicates deadly microbial blooms as repeat offenders of freshwater extinctions during extreme warming events.

Today, humans have been following this recipe, and freshwater microbial blooms have been on the rise, illustrating how important the geosciences are in understanding the past in ways that offer crucial context for understanding contemporary changes in climate.

“We’re seeing more and more toxic algae blooms in lakes and in shallow marine environments that’s related to increases in temperature and changes in plant communities which are leading to increases in nutrient contributions to freshwater environments,” Frank says. “So, a lot of parallels to today. The volcanism was a source of CO₂ in the past but we know that the rate of CO₂ input that was seen back then was similar to the rate of CO₂ increases we’re seeing today because of anthropogenic effects.

“We can get a sense of how much climate has changed in the past, what the extremes are, how fast it can change, what the causes of climate change are and that gives us a nice backdrop for understanding what’s happening today.”

According to this year’s report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the influence of humans on the changing climate is “unequivocal,” creating conditions that favor the spread of these warmth-loving microbes. In combination with an influx of nutrients from water pollution, mostly from agriculture and deforestation, this has led to a sharp increase in toxic blooms. The results: mass fish die-offs, severe human and livestock health effects, and an annual cost measurable in billions of dollars.

“The end-Permian is one of the best places to look for parallels with what’s happening now,” says Fielding.

“The other big parallel is that the increase in temperature at the end of the Permian coincided with massive increases in forest fires. One of the things that that destroyed whole ecosystems was fire, and we’re seeing that right now in places like California. One wonders what the longer-term consequences of events like that as they are becoming more and more widespread.”

These are clear symptoms of an unbalanced ecosystem, and the present study indicates that the impacts of bloom events can echo for an extremely long time. However, unlike the species that suffered the mass extinctions of the past, we have the opportunity to prevent these toxic blooms by keeping our waterways clean and curbing our greenhouse gas emissions.

“The scary thing is we are used to thinking in terms of timescales of years, maybe tens of years, if we get really adventurous. The end-Permian mass extinction event took four million years to recover from. That’s sobering,” says Fielding.

 

Could our Universe be Someone’s Chemistry Project?

POSTED ONNOVEMBER 2, 2021 BY MATT WILLIAMS

It is a pivotal time for astrophysicists, cosmologists, and philosophers alike. In the coming years, next-generation space and ground-based telescopes will come online that will use cutting-edge technology and machine learning to probe the deepest depths of the cosmos. What they find there, with any luck, will allow scientists to address some of the most enduring questions about the origins of life and the Universe itself.

Alas, one question that we may never be able to answer is the most pressing of all: if the Universe was conceived in a Big Bang, what was here before that? According to a new op-ed by Prof. Abraham Loeb (which recently appeared in Scientific American), the answer may be stranger than even the most “exotic” explanations. As he argued, the cosmos as we know it may be a “baby Universe” that was created by an advanced technological civilization in a lab!

As the former chair (2011-2020) of the astronomy department at Harvard University, the founding director of Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative (BHI), the director of the Institute for Theory and Computation (ITC) at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), and one of the chief researchers with the Galileo Project, Loeb is no stranger to “exotic” theories about advanced intelligence and cosmic origins.

His credentials also include chairing the National Academies’ Board on Physics and Astronomy, the advisory board for Breakthrough Starshot, and being a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He is also the author of the bestselling book “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth,” which addressed the possibility that the interstellar object ‘Oumuamua was an artificial probe.

This time around, it’s the foundations of the Universe itself (and whether or not aliens may have been involved) that have attracted Loeb’s interest. For starters, there have been many conjectures as to what might have existed before the Big Bang. Some of the more well-known examples include that the Universe emerged from a vacuum fluctuation or that it is a cyclic process with repeated periods of contraction and expansion – Big Bang, Big Crunch, repeat.

There is even the notion that the Universe was born from matter collapsing inside a black hole in another Universe, which then rebounded to form the other side of the Einstein–Rosen bridge (a “wormhole”) where our Universe was conceived. A similar version of this argument states that the Big Bang could have been a supermassive “white hole” that formed from a supermassive black hole (SMBH) in our parent universe.

Yet another theory is that our Universe is a consequence of the string theory interpretation of the multiverse, where infinite Universes coexist, and every possibility plays out an infinite number of times. According to Loeb, this could take the form of our Universe being created in a laboratory by an advanced civilization. “Since our universe has a flat geometry with a zero net energy, an advanced civilization could have developed a technology that created a baby universe out of nothing through quantum tunneling.”

In the context of quantum physics, tunneling refers to a phenomenon where a wave function can propagate through a potential barrier. This plays an essential role in physical phenomena, ranging from nuclear fusion and tunneling electron microscopes to quantum computing. Unfortunately, the Standard Model of particle physics models cannot resolve how quantum mechanics and gravity interact, hence why a Theory of Everything (ToE) is still lacking.

However, a sufficiently advanced species may have already developed a ToE and the technology for creating baby Universes. In essence, this theory offers a possible origin story that appeals to the religious notion of a creator and the secular notion of quantum gravity alike. It suggests that a Universe like our own – which hosts at least one civilization (i.e., us) – is like a biological system that reproduces over generations. As Loeb explained to Universe Today via email:

“It explains the Big Bang as an infinite series of baby universes born inside each other, just like chicks hatching out of eggs and laying new eggs later in their life. If something predated this series of generations – it would have been something else, just as in the ‘chicken and egg dilemma.'”

This is reminiscent of the Kardashev Scale, which characterizes civilizations by Type (I, II, and III) based on the amount of energy they can harness. Whereas Type Is are able to harness the energy of their entire planet, Type II civilizations can harness the energy of their whole star systems, and Type IIIs can harness the energy of their entire galaxy. In this case, says Loeb, the metric is a civilization’s ability to reproduce the astrophysical conditions that led to their existence.

The Big Bang Theory: A history of the Universe starting from a singularity and expanding ever since. Credit: grandunificationtheory.com

For some, this whole Baby Universe theory might sound similar to the Zoo Hypothesis – a proposed resolution to the Fermi Paradox. But as Loeb explained, there’s a fundamental difference between the two:

“The Zoo is a place where you watch the animals, but a baby universe cannot be observed from the outside according to General Relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity. The interior of the baby universe disappears from view of the creator and snaps out of the creator’s spacetime. The situation is analogous to the formation of a black hole, where all the matter that falls into it cannot be observed once it enters the black hole horizon.

“As a result the creator of the baby universe will never know which type of civilization formed in it and will also not be able to intervene. Creating a baby universe might not consume energy because the negative gravitational energy cancels out the positive energy of matter and radiation in our universe, which is characterized by a flat geometry.

“The fate of our Universe is completely independent of the baby universe, just as the history of a person that enters the event horizon of a black hole has no influence on us. Based on everything we know, our own universe will expand forever.”

Another appealing feature of this theory is the way it’s free of anthropic reasoning, which essentially states that the Universe was selected for us to exist in. Formally known as the Anthropic Principle, this stands in opposition to the Copernican Principle (or Cosmological Principle) that asserts that there is nothing special or unique about humanity or the space we occupy in the Universe. However, the mere fact that slight variations in the laws of physics would rule out life would seem to suggest that we are fortunate.

Artist view of an active supermassive black hole. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada

In recent years, it has been suggested that multiverse theory is a possible resolution for the Anthropic Principle. The Baby Universe theory is consistent with this idea, as it theorizes that the Universe gives rise to advanced civilizations that are drivers of a cosmic Darwinian selection process. At present, humanity is not advanced enough to replicate the cosmic conditions that led to our existence.

Whereas a civilization that could recreate these cosmic conditions (i.e., produce a “baby Universe” in a laboratory) would fall into class A on this proposed cosmic scale, a class B civilization could adjust the conditions in its immediate environment to be independent of its host star. Given our present situation, humanity is currently a class C or D since we cannot recreate the habitable conditions on our planet (when our Sun dies) and are carelessly destroying planet Earth through climate change.

But eventually, humanity may reach the point where we become a class A civilization and can partake in the hypothesized process of cosmic reproduction. Who knows? Maybe we will even be able to create a baby Universe that is an improvement over our own. Loeb contends that such hopes may be a tad optimistic but that the prospect for cosmic procreation presents some very inspiring possibilities:

“We are getting close to producing synthetic life in our laboratories. Once we will understand how to unify quantum mechanics and gravity, we might know how to make a baby universe in the laboratory. The ethics of making another universe would be similar to making another human being...

“But ultimately, it would be flattering to our species if the abilities that past generations assigned to God, namely creating a universe and creating life in it, will be at our disposal as an advanced scientific civilization. If another civilization that predated us by a billion years had reached that goal already and we will encounter it one day, then that civilization will be a good approximation to what our past religions regarded as God.”

Further Reading: Scientific American

Pluto’s dark side revealed by moonlight in pictures from New Horizons

United News Team

After NASA’s New Horizons mission flew past Pluto in 2015, it turned around and took pictures of the dwarf planet’s back, revealing its moonlit dark side

5 November 2021

By Leah Crane

The dark side of Pluto is faintly illuminated by sunlight reflected by the moon Charon in images captured by the New Horizons spacecraft in 2015

Moonlight on Pluto has revealed some of the dwarf planet’s dark side. On its way past Pluto in 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft turned around and took pictures of this world’s back, and after a lengthy cleaning-up process, the images have revealed some of the first details we have ever seen of the side that wasn’t illuminated by the sun at the time.

Taking images of Pluto from beyond its orbit is difficult because at that position, it is backlit by the sun. “When you look back at Pluto’s dark side, you turn around and look almost right at the sun, and it’s pretty damn bright,” says Tod Lauer at the US National Optical Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory in Arizona, who is part of the New Horizons team. “It’s like driving in a car with a dirty window, looking into the sun without a sun visor, trying to read a street sign.”

To make the pictures from New Horizons usable, Lauer and his colleagues had to rework the mission’s data processing procedure to eliminate the parts of the images that were overexposed by sunlight and therefore didn’t contain any useful data. Once those parts of the images were cleared away, the researchers could manipulate what remained to see the moonlit surface of Pluto.

While Pluto’s major moon, Charon, is much smaller than Earth’s moon, it is shinier and closer to its host world than our moon is, so it provides about half as much light to the side of Pluto that’s facing away from the sun. Under this faint illumination, the researchers found one spot that was brighter than its surroundings, which is probably a deposit of nitrogen or methane ice.

They also found that the south pole appeared to be much less bright than the north pole. “You expect the poles should be more or less the same, and this difference is intriguing – it may indicate a seasonal thing,” says Lauer. New Horizons flew by Pluto at the end of the small world’s southern summer, so this may be a hint that bright ice deposits don’t survive that relatively warm period, or that haze particles from the tenuous atmosphere are deposited on the surface in the summer.

Reference: arxiv.org/abs/2110.11976

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If the universe is a giant computer simulation, here's how many bits would be required to run it


By Adam Mann 

3 days ago

How many bits does the universe contain? A lot.

 (Image credit: Yuichiro Chino via Getty Images)

The visible cosmos may contain roughly 6 x 10^80 — or 600 million trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion — bits of information, according to a new estimate.

The findings could have implications for the speculative possibility that the universe is actually a gigantic computer simulation.

Underlying the mind-boggling number is an even stranger hypothesis. Six decades ago, German-American physicist Rolf Landauer proposed a type of equivalence between information and energy, since erasing a digital bit in a computer produces a tiny amount of heat, which is a form of energy.

Because of Albert Einstein's famous equation E = mc^2, which says that energy and matter are different forms of one another, Melvin Vopson, a physicist at the University of Portsmouth in England, previously conjectured that a relationship might exist between information, energy and mass.

"Using the mass-energy-information equivalence principle, I speculated that information could be a dominant form of matter in the universe," he told Live Science. Information might even account for dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up the vast majority of matter in the cosmos, he added.

Vopson set out to determine the amount of information in a single subatomic particle, such as a proton or neutron. Such entities can be fully described by three basic characteristics: their mass, charge and spin, he said.

"These properties make elementary particles distinguishable [from] each other, and they could be regarded as 'information,'" he added.

Information has a specific definition first given by American mathematician and engineer Claude Shannon in a groundbreaking 1948 paper called "A Mathematical Theory of Communication." By looking at the maximum efficiency at which information could be transmitted, Shannon introduced the concept of the bit. This can have a value of either 0 or 1, and is used to measure units of information, much like distance is measured in feet or meters or temperature is measured in degrees, Vopson said.

Using Shannon's equations, Vopson calculated that a proton or neutron should contain the equivalent of 1.509 bits of encoded information. Vopson then derived an estimate for the total number of particles in the observable universe — around 10^80, which accords with previous estimates — to determine the total information content of the cosmos. His findings appeared Oct. 19 in the journal AIP Advances.

Even though the resulting number is enormous, it still isn't large enough to account for the dark matter in the universe, Vopson said. In his earlier work, he estimated that approximately 10^93 bits of information — a number 10 trillion times larger than the one he derived — would be necessary to do so.

"The number I calculated is smaller than I expected," he said, adding that he is unsure why. It could be that important things were unaccounted for in his calculations, which focused on particles like protons and neutrons but ignored entities like electrons, neutrinos and quarks, because, according to Vopson, only protons and neutrons can store information about themselves.

He admits that it’s possible that the assumption is wrong and perhaps other particles can store information about themselves as well.

This may be why his results are so different from prior calculations of the universe's total information, which tend to be much higher, said Greg Laughlin, an astronomer at Yale University who wasn't involved in the work.

"It's sort of ignoring not the elephant in the room, but the 10 billion elephants in the room," Laughlin told Live Science, referring to the many particles not considered in the new estimate.

While such calculations may not have immediate applications, they could be of use to those who speculate that the visible cosmos is, in reality, a gigantic computer simulation, Laughlin said. This so-called simulation hypothesis is "a really fascinating idea," he said.

"Calculating the information content — basically the number of bits of memory that would be required to run [the universe] — is interesting," he added.

But, as of yet, the simulation hypothesis remains a mere hypothesis. "There's no way to know whether that's true," Laughlin said.

Originally published on Live Science.

Evolution led to similarities in the melodies of animal vocalizations and human languages

by University of Vienna

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

When listening closely, the melodies of human languages and animal vocalizations are very similar. However, it is not yet fully resolved if similar patterns in languages and animal vocalizations also have similar meanings. Researchers of the University of Vienna present a new method to decode the meaning of animal vocalizations: the comparison of their melodies with human languages. The proposal was published in the journal Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society B.

Dog barking, birdsong and human languages sound very different at first hearing. However, when analyzing these vocalizations more closely, one can find many similarities: for example, almost all human languages and animal vocalizations are structured by pauses and variations in their syllable length and pitch. Only the precise specifications of these characteristics differ between different human languages and animal vocalizations. In a review article, Theresa Matzinger and Tecumseh Fitch from the departments of English and Cognitive Biology took a closer look at the melodies of different languages and the vocalizations of non-human tetrapod species.

Similarities in the melodies of languages and animal vocalizations are conditioned by evolution

The similarities between melodies of different languages and animal vocalizations can be explained by their parallel evolution. Because of their shared evolutionary pathways over long timespans, humans and other tetrapods have similar vocal tracts and brain structures responsible for vocal production. Differences in the melodies of their vocalizations result from individual adaptations of different groups to the conditions in their respective environment. These individual adaptations are flexible: for example, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, birds sang with a lower pitch and amplitude to react to the reduced traffic noise.

Investigations of how animals perceive language-universal melodic structures are promising

"It has been widely investigated how animals produce sounds and how their vocalizations are structured. However, there is hardly any data on how animals perceive and interpret the melodies in their vocalizations", explains Matzinger, who currently works as a guest researcher at the University of Toruń (Poland). But how should researchers start to investigate the meaning of melodic patterns in animal vocalizations? "Promising candidates for the investigation of animals' interpretation of melodic patterns are those melodic patterns that occur and are interpreted similarly across all human languages", says Matzinger.

For example, syllables that are articulated longer than others are interpreted as boundaries between sentences or phases independently of the speakers' native language. This similar function of lengthened syllables across languages makes it likely that very basic physiological and cognitive processes are responsible not only for the production but also for the perception of melodic patterns. It is highly probable that because of the parallel evolution between humans and other tetrapods, other tetrapods also interpret lengthened sounds as phrase boundaries. A next important step in decoding the meaning of melodies in animal vocalizations would therefore be to experimentally test the perception and interpretation of lengthened sounds in animals.

The research was published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.


Explore furtherAncestors may have created 'iconic' sounds as bridge to first languages

More information: Theresa Matzinger et al, Voice modulatory cues to structure across languages and species, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2021).

  DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2020.0393

Provided by University of Vienna

Op-Ed

Artists Can Help Us Imagine a New Relationship with the Earth. That’s Why We Need Their Voices at COP26

Art and science are partners in this urgent conversation.

Christopher Smith, November 9, 2021

Tongan artist and climate activist, Uili Lousi is seen with John Gerrard's Flare Oceania (2021) on November 5 in Glasgow, on the occasion of COP26. 

Photo: Peter Summers/Getty Images.

One of the most famous images of German romanticism is Caspar David Friedrich’s painting from 1818, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. A man with his back to us stares out over a mountainous landscape. His thoughts are unknowable, the landscape is sublime yet empty—it is nature at its most inscrutable.

This image reminds us of the unique ability of art to question the relationship between humanity and nature. And it is because of this ability that we must ensure that art has a place at high-level climate discussions such as COP26, the United Nations Climate Change Conference summit taking place in Glasgow this month. Our task must be to adapt and mitigate. We need to think through how to live in a broken world and how to begin to mend it. Here, arts and humanities are key alongside political action and scientific education.

There are three ways in which art is core to helping solve the climate emergency, the most pressing challenge facing the globe.

An LED installation by artist collective Still/Moving projects a message across the River Clyde to delegates attending COP26 on November 03, 2021 in Glasgow, Scotland. Photo: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images.

We Need Powerful Depictions of Nature

Artistic expressions of the devastating challenge of climate change offer an immediacy that graphs and data, which are often complex or overwhelming, cannot match. It is artists who can bring simplicity to the message. I remember hosting Wolfgang Buttress, the brilliant artist and architect behind the Hive sculpture that is currently in Kew Gardens, when it was chosen as part of the British Pavilion for the World Expo in Milan in 2015. As part of the UK events around the Expo, Buttress presented a three-minute film of his soundscape of bees and light, and most of the audience was in tears, moved to the core by the music and the extraordinary complexity of the creatures’ behaviour. The takeaway was clear: Without bees, there is no humanity.

No words or data could communicate as poignantly as that film—and that is just one example of how art has a specific power to change perspectives and behaviour. If we want the innovation being created in the fields of environmental science to really catch hold, we need strong messaging. And it is precisely for that reason that art, like John Gerrard’s Flare Oceania, are rightfully being showcased alongside COP26 in Glasgow. They will be essential to sustaining thoughtful pressure on ourselves and our leaders.



A couple stands underneath Wolfgang Buttress’ illuminated Hive Installation at Kew Gardens in London, England. Photo: Jack Taylor/Getty Images.
We Need to Locate Humanity in the Environment

The system is broken, but we are still part of it. Art, which reflects us back at ourselves, reminds us of this. We must insist on our position in this complex world—we cannot survive elsewhere. Yet more of us are living in cities, and few of us can or should travel to the most endangered of parts of this world to experience them. Many people today see little of nature or the realities of our impact on the natural world.

Artists can transport us to these places and render them unforgettable. Last year, artist Adam Laity was presented with the award for Best Climate Emergency Film at a recent virtual ceremony held by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the UK’s national art research funding agency of which I am executive chair. Laity’s work, called A Short Film About Ice, combines stunning visuals and aerial footage of Arctic landscapes with poetry and literary extracts from authors such as Lord Byron and Allen Ginsberg. This is a place where most of us will never travel to, but we must consider it—it is where we are seeing some of the most drastic effects of climate change.

Touching on themes of cultural responsibility and eco-anxiety, Laity’s work shows us that humans and nature are interconnected in ways that are hard to understand, and that the lack of understanding has caused the break-down of our global climate system.

Still from Adam Laity’s A Short Film About Ice. Courtesy the artist and the AHRC.

These are two poles of a crucial dialogue over the relationship of humanity and the natural world, which has been a critical theme for art. In different ways, two of the most famous English artists, J. M. W. Turner and John Constable, placed the human as a tiny figure within vast landscapes or seascapes; mastered not mastering. Sculptor Andy Goldsworthy’s landscape interventions challenge notions of what is a real or an artificial landscape and focus our attention on the passage of time.

Each of the three examples uses scientific research. Turner and Constable were fascinated by optics and meteorology; Goldsworthy researches archaeology and Laity worked closely with the scientists from the British Antarctic Survey. Art and science are partners in this shared conversation.

Installation view of Hyundai Commission “Anicka Yi: In Love With the World” at Tate Modern, October 2021. Photo by Will Burrard Lucas.
We Need to Imagine a New Relationship with the Earth

Running concurrently to COP26 at the Glasgow Science Centre, artist and AHRC-funded art researcher Wayne Binitie, is displaying a piece of the Antarctic ice core which contains within it air captured from 1765, a key final moment of the pre-industrial era. We now know that ice cores contain traces of growing pollution—in Binitie’s work, you can see the impact of the amount of fuel burnt to support the Roman empire’s economy.

As this piece of ice slowly melts, it releases air from a time before machines and we are forced to reflect on our history, the impact we have had on our world, and the shocks to the Earth’s system which we have inflicted. It is an example of the collective conversation that we can encourage when art takes centre stage at crucial moments for climate action, and especially when art is in conversation with science, giving it shape and visibility, translating it into immediacy, and feeding back into core questions.

Sculptor Wayne Binitie looks at his glass sculpture containing air from the year 1765 which is on display at a new immersive exhibition ‘Polar Zero,’ created in collaboration with British Antarctic Survey and global engineering and design firm Arup, at the Glasgow Science Centre to coincide with the Cop26 summit. Photo: Jane Barlow/PA Images via Getty Images.

The arts have rightly taken a central place at key climate summits, for art has always shown us to ourselves—it is an unflinching mirror. Art is as important for policy makers as it is for the rest of us. And we need to see far more of this, but not only as illustration Rather it is precisely the role of the artist as a thinker and a radical that we need to see more of, not depicting other people’s debates but asking the questions we need to ask and answer, and sometimes are too keen to avoid.

Caspar David Friedrich portrayed a man alone before nature. Today, all of us need to face up to what we have done to our planet, and what we now need to do.

Christopher Smith is a professor and executive chair of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the UK’s national art research funding agency.

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Tracked bottom-crawling robot gathers valuable deep-sea data

By Ben Coxworth
November 05, 2021

The Benthic Rover II autonomously moves across the deep ocean floor for a year at a time
MBARI

Although the deep ocean floor may seem isolated from life on the rest of the planet, it actually plays a vital role in the global carbon cycle. Scientists are now gaining a better understanding of that role, thanks to a tracked robotic underwater rover.

Known as the Benthic Rover II, the deep-sea autonomous vehicle was designed by a team at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI).

For the past seven years, it has been continually in use at a site named Station M, located 225 km (140 miles) off the coast of central California. There, it's been gathering data on the manner in which organisms on and in the abyssal seafloor recycle the carbon that continuously falls from above – that carbon is contained within organic matter such as dead plants and animals, and excreted waste.

The Benthic Rover II measures 2.6 m long by 1.7 m wide by 1.5 m high (8.5 by 5.6 by 4.9 ft)
MBARI

At the start of each of its one-year cycles, the largely titanium-bodied rover is lowered into the water from the deck of a crewed surface support vessel, then released and allowed to fall 4,000 m (13,123 ft) down to the bottom – it's rated to a maximum depth of 6,000 m (19,685 ft). Once it lands on its dual rubber tank-like tracks, it first checks the direction of the current, then proceeds to move forward to an undisturbed section of seafloor.

It subsequently sets about measuring the amount of freshly fallen phytoplankton and plant debris in the area, using a blue light that causes the chlorophyll in them to fluoresce. It also records the water temperature and oxygen concentration, plus it measures the oxygen consumption (and thus carbon dioxide output) of organisms living in the mud.

The latter is achieved utilizing two transparent respirometer chambers, which are lowered onto the mud then left in place for 48 hours. Once that time period is up and the chambers are raised, the rover moves forward by 10 m (32 ft) and performs all of the tests over again – it continues doing so for approximately one year, during which time it's powered by onboard batteries.


Because the rover can't transmit directly to the shore (radio waves don't travel well through water), a Wave Glider autonomous surface vehicle travels out to Station M four times a year. The rover then transmits its location and operational status through the water in the form of acoustic pulses, which are picked up by the Glider – it in turn relays the information to the shore via satellite.

The Benthic Rover II uses onboard cameras to record images of sea life, such as this rattail fish (Coryphaenoides sp.)

MBARI

After a year, the rover is hauled back up to a ship on the surface, so its batteries can be changed, its recorded data can be downloaded, and any required maintenance can be performed. It's then returned to the seabed.

In a recently-published paper, MBARI scientists have outlined some of the ways in which the Benthic Rover II has contributed to our knowledge of the abyssal seafloor. Among these is the discovery that between November 2015 and 2020, there was a large increase in the amount of dead phytoplankton and plant matter sinking to the bottom, accompanied by a decrease in dissolved oxygen in the water above the seabed.

The researchers state that if traditional short-term data-gathering equipment had been used, these changes would not have been detected.

You can see the rover in action, in the video below.

Deep-sea rover provides long-term data on carbon cycle and climate change

Source: Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute

‘No power to stop it’: optimism turns to frustration over east Africa pipeline

Promised an income, those affected by $20bn oil project are losing their land and resources instead

Adrin Tugume shows the documents she signed that promised her compensation, which she has yet to receive. 

Photograph: Nicholas Bamulanzeki/Floodlight

Alex Tumuhimbise in Kijungu for Floodlight and Internews’ Earth Journalism Network
Sun 7 Nov 2021

LONG READ

A bumpy, mud-spattered road leads deep into Kakumiro district in western Uganda, where the longest heated oil pipeline in the world will pass through its homes, farms and wetlands.

The villagers in the Kijungu settlements welcomed the project when the route was announced in 2017, hoping that the government and companies involved would buy their land and change their lives for good. Their optimism has since given way to frustration.

Adrin Tugume, 53, depends on her land to feed her 10 children and sell bananas, cassava, beans and maize. Although construction is not yet under way, she has been asked to stay off the portion of land where the pipeline will be built.

“I was stopped from using my land for three years. It is where we get food for our children. My land had several crops, trees and herbal medicines, which I use to treat people locally,” she said. “I am not happy at all. I wish they could get another route for this pipeline and leave our land. We are only going to suffer instead of gaining and getting our lives changed.”

Local residents say they have been offered a pittance for their properties, and their compensation has not yet materialised.

Edison Basheija, 73, has vowed never to accept the 39,715 Ugandan shillings (£8.30) he was offered for his land. “I have two wives and several children and grandchildren. Our survival depends on land,” he said.

Edison Basheija shows documents he signed allowing the east African crude oil pipeline to pass through his land.

 Photograph: Nicholas Bamulanzeki/Floodlight

Local activists fighting the project have been arrested and detained in recent months, and they say they are the target of intentional intimidation by the government. Ugandan authorities claim the group is violating registration laws for non-governmental organisations.

The opposition to the project is not just about humanitarian concerns. The east African crude oil pipeline (EACOP) will transport oil 900 miles (1,450km) from the shores of Lake Albert on the border between Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo through Tanzania to the port of Tanga on the Indian Ocean. In April, Uganda and Tanzania signed agreements with the French oil and gas company Total and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC).

The pipeline will pass through the habitats of at-risk species. It could jeopardise community water sources and pollute the air, and its construction will be intrusive and noisy. In Shinyanga in Tanzania, local government authorities have admitted that environmental disturbance is inevitable.

The $20bn (£14.8bn) project – forecast to deliver 1.7bn barrels of crude oil starting in 2024 or 2025 – comes as world leaders are aiming to divest from fossil fuels. The pipeline will contribute to the climate crisis, locking in more oil use and planet-heating emissions for decades to come.

Total did not respond to a request for comment, while CNOOC’s spokesperson said it was committed to avoiding environmental damage.

Buffalo gather around the a wetland site in Murchison Falls national park in Uganda. Photograph: Nicholas Bamulanzeki/Floodlight

In the Murchison Falls national park in Uganda, heavy trucks and road construction machinery are generating noise and appear to be fighting for space with animals. The Ugandan government has argued that the paved routes will attract tourism, but environmental activists view the asphalt roads as a means to make oil extraction easier.

Total is planning to drill more than 400 oil wells at its Tilenga project, which is inside the ecologically fragile national park. CNOOC will develop its Kingfisher project with 31 wells, about 90 miles to the south. Pipelines from the two sites will merge at Kasenyi, where oil will be processed and separated from other fluids. Then it will be pumped across the Albertine Rift valley to begin its journey to a port in Tanzania. Along the way, the pipeline will cross the basin of Lake Victoria, Africa’s largest lake, which is an essential watershed for more than 40 million people in the region and feeds into the Nile.

The pipeline will be buried up to two metres underground, will be 61cm wide and heated to 50C, so that the crude oil does not solidify, according to the project managers. Above ground, a corridor 30 metres wide would be cleared of all structures, trees and shrubland.

The pipeline would skirt the Murchison Falls’ Ramsar site, a wetland designated as being of international importance that is home to a diverse species of birds, including critically endangered shoebill storks. The drilling could also harm the Ugandan species of Rothschild’s giraffes, giant pangolins, spotted hyenas and white-headed vultures, all of which are on the IUCN’s red list of threatened species. Other animals affected may include lions, chimpanzees, buffalos, hippos, hartebeests, waterbucks, warthogs, oribis, Uganda kobs and grey duikers.

In Tanzania, too, an environmental impact statement prepared for the companies noted that vulnerable or endangered species had been found in the pipeline’s path, including elephants, hippos and lions.

Elephants in Murchison Falls national park in Uganda, where the Nile River meets Lake Albert. 

Photograph: Nicholas Bamulanzeki/Floodlight

Activists and hundreds of local and international civil society organisations in April launched a campaign called #StopEACOP, condemning the oil extraction and pipeline for its threats to endangered species in the park and other conservation areas. They also asked international banks and other financial institutions to stop financing the projects.

Gloria Sebikari, a spokesperson for the Petroleum Authority of Uganda (PAU), said a number of biological baseline surveys were being undertaken in an effort to understand the “behaviour, ranging patterns and habitat utilisation” of involved species.

“The information from the studies is being used in designing appropriate mitigation measures for the impacts of oil and gas activities on biodiversity, monitoring wildlife population dynamics, and also in the preparation of species-specific management plans,” she said.

The PAU maintains that the oil companies have secured all the necessary environmental and social impact approvals to move forward with the project.

While addressing local leaders in Kakumiro district in October 2021, Zakalia Lubega, a corporate affairs manager for CNOOC, said the company had “developed environment, social, monitoring and management plans” that were “going to be our bible during the project development”. He said the plans would make sure the “relevant mitigation measures” were in place.

Local advocates, though, say the government is not requiring any protections for the drilling, processing sites or pipeline.

A 2020 report by Oxfam that surveyed communities along the path of the pipeline found they feared it could “burst and explode, causing property damage, injuries and major disruption of the aquatic life of [Lake Victoria]”. “A spill would not only affect Uganda but rather become a transboundary issue affecting all the east African states,” the report noted.

The environmental and social impact assessment reports also failed to include mitigation agreements in case of oil spills, and had no detailed plan on combating climate change, said Brian Nahamya, a programme associate at Global Rights Alert, an 

He said the National Environment Management Authority, the government agency responsible for approving the project, was “pursuing its mandate to impress oil companies and the central government without putting the interests of the country at the centre for sustainable exploitation of oil”.

Tourists admire a kob in the Murchison Falls national park. 

Photograph: Nicholas Bamulanzeki/Floodlight

The pipeline project is in direct conflict with the recommendation by the International Energy Agency that there must be no new fossil fuel development if global heating is to be limited to 1.5C.

The #StopEACOP campaigners estimate that the pipeline would lead to more than 34m tonnes of CO2 each year, exacerbating the global climate emergency. That is equivalent to the emissions from nearly 7m passenger vehicles driven for a year.

The pipeline’s developers are not unaware of these impacts. A recent study claimed Total was aware of evidence about the climate consequences of burning fossil fuels as early as 1971. In a statement to the Agence France-Presse, a spokesperson said the company “openly acknowledged the findings of climate science 25 years ago”, as well as “the link with the petroleum industry”.

This year, Total renamed itself TotalEnergies and announced new clean energy goals, in a climate branding push that campaigners say belies the company’s investment in EACOP. Meanwhile, China recently announced that it would not build new coal plants abroad, but it is continuing to invest in Uganda’s CNOOC.

Several local non-governmental organisations launched a lawsuit against the project, alleging that it poses imminent dangers to the climate, environment, biodiversity and human rights.

Onesmus Mugyenyi, deputy executive director of Advocates Coalition for Development and Environment, based in Kampala, argued that some of the money going into the new oil projects should go to clean energy.

Uganda’s investment in renewable energy has so far been limited. According to a June 2020 report by International Growth Centre, a UK research centre, solar power accounts for 4% of Uganda’s energy production, just 1% of the country’s 2040 goals.

According to the project resettlement action plan prepared for Uganda by the government and EACOP partners, almost 4,000 people will be affected by the pipeline. It will cut through 219 residential dwellings and 1,157 additional structures. including grain stores, livestock enclosures and outhouses. In Tanzania, more than 2,000 will be directly affected.

And there is still frustration at the delay of payment to those who sold their land. Local activists have condemned the government’s failure to address the delayed compensation.

Under Uganda’s guidelines, people affected by the pipeline should be resettled or compensated with cash based on what they will have to spend to replace their land.

Geresemu Busingye has been waiting several years for compensation for his land. Photograph: Nicholas Bamulanzeki/Floodlight

Geresome Busingye, an elder of a village in the Kijungu settlements, said he had exhausted his appeals in the land valuation process and that he was praying that the president would intervene. “I welcomed the government’s project because I have no power to stop it,” he said. “I am not happy because my land and crops were undervalued. I no longer have the energy to move to different offices to seek help. I signed the compensation disclosure forms because I have no other alternative.”

Nahamya said the compensation delays violate property ownership rights and “go against best international standards and practices for land acquisition and resettlement … There are a number of environmental and human rights issues that remain unresolved.”

Those behind the EACOP have acknowledged that the project presents “many challenges”. Fred Bazarabusa, the land and community engagement officer, told local leaders in Kakumiro: “We have realised that there are many challenges in this project and the failure to pay the affected people will pile [on] more challenges.”

The project plans to pay those impacted an additional 15% for each year their payment has been delayed since 2018, he said.

Ezra Twinomujjuni, the leader of an informal group of pipeline-affected residents in Kakumiro. 

Photograph: Nicholas Bamulanzeki/Floodlight

But local frustration over the project is not just about money. For many, this upheaval is not an entirely new experience. Some in Kakumiro were resettled there in 1992, when their lands were acquired to create the Mpokya forest reserve. The oil project has now plunged communities into land conflicts, as wealthy individuals have shown up to claim properties that people have been living on for decades.

“Before the pipeline project was announced, we were living peacefully,” said Ezra Twinomujjuni, the leader of an informal group of pipeline-affected residents in Kakumiro. “If our issues are not worked on, I will mobilise my people and we will reject the project.”

Emily Holden contributed to this story

Jason Kenney's Best Summer Ever about to be musically roasted by Grindstone crew

Author of the article:Fish Griwkowsky
Publishing date:Nov 04, 2021 • 

Donovan Workun and Abby Vanderberghe

 as Premier Jason Kenney and Dr. Deena Hinshaw. 

PHOTO BY SUPPLIED /Postmedia

In the midst of a global pandemic with a rising Delta variant, you could almost hear the collective eyeroll scraping province-wide when Premier Jason Kenney boldly declared 2021 would be the “Best Summer Ever.”

And we all certainly, tragically witnessed how that act of questionable branding played out — Alberta reliably leading the country in COVID-19 infection stats as numbers inevitably continued an upward trend, and with it the premier’s approval rating dropping to 22 per cent in October, the lowest of all Canadian premiers.

A feeling of mass frustration and helplessness was — and clearly is — widespread. But after a series of hilarious, biting parody videos of Kenney and Dr. Deena Hinshaw’s once-frequent online updates, which culminated in a streaming Christmas special last year, a number of the brighter minds over at Grinsdtone Theatre have turned this awful backdrop into — what else — comedy theatre.

Specifically, as a musical, no less.

Starting Nov. 10, and running most nights at 7 p.m. through Nov. 21, Jason Kenney’s Hot Boy Summer the Musical will play at Campus Saint-Jean over in Bonnie Doon.

Directed by Byron Martin, who co-wrote the play with Simon Abbott, the premier is played by Donovan Workun as its hard-done-by main character. He’s backed by Abby Vanderberghe as Hinshaw, Stephanie Wolfe as Rachel Notley and Malachi Wilkins as Justin Trudeau who happens to be Notley’s boyfriend in this Kenney-centric college summer world.

“They’re all in summer semester at Alberta University,” explains Martin, “and Kenney’s just won student union president. And he promises his frat the best party ever.”

Martin assures audiences of a number of things, including the material being fresh.

“We did 90 per cent of the writing in the last six weeks — we turned this around in a crazy fast amount of time,” he explains. “People are going to come and see, basically, a classic frat movie, so it’s kind of interesting because everything we wrote had to kind of fit into that world.”

Rounding out the cast are Kathleen Sera, Mark Sinongco, Tyre Banda and Sarah Dowling playing various roles including Tyler Shandro in the ‘80s frat party song cycle about Kenney trying to throw this perfect party, despite scolding opposition from his various buzzkills including, you know, the earth-wide plague.

And, speaking of which, proof of vaccination is absolutely required to get in.

Kenney is very much the hero of the play; Notley and Trudeau the villains.

“It’s pretty heavy satire,” Martin notes. “It’s kind of like this is the play he wrote with the ‘War Room’ when he disappeared for all those weeks.”

Asked if he hopes the premier shows up, Martin laughs, “I’m kind of terrified he will. I kind of hope so. I don’t know, it depends if he has a sense of humour.

“I’m also nervous for Notley to see it, because we don’t actually see her as a villain.

“Malika is so funny as Justin Trudeau, he’s been killing me. And so, if you’re a conservative who complains about Trudeau all the time like people I know? They’re going to love it.”

Songs in the cycle include Kenney singing about a rodeo, Trudeau trying to woo Notley to Ottawa and a theatre version of former municipal affairs minister Tracy Allard singing a number called Aloha.

Tickets are $30, available at grindstonetheatre.ca, and keep an eye out for our a review in the Journal next week.

fgriwkowsky@postmedia.com

@fisheyefoto