It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Thursday, November 03, 2022
Do you speak extra-terrestrial?
New research hub considers response to life beyond Earth
IMAGE: IMAGE SHOWS ST ANDREWS SETI POST-DETECTION HUB TEAM, FROM LEFT: DEREK BALL, EMILY FINER, MARTIN DOMINIK, JOHN ELLIOTT, EMMA JOHANNA PURANEN, AND ADAM BOWERview more
CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS COMMUNICATIONS OFFICE
What does humanity do when we discover we are not alone in the cosmos? A new international research hub at the University of St Andrews will coordinate global expertise to prepare humanity for such an event and how we should respond.
While we might never learn about the existence of life beyond Earth, or even about another intelligent civilisation, there’s a chance it could be detected sooner rather than later. But are we prepared?
The new SETI Post-Detection Hub, hosted by the Centre for Exoplanet Science and the Centre for Global Law and Governance of the University of St Andrews, will act as a coordinating centre for an international effort bringing together diverse expertise across both the sciences and the humanities for setting out impact assessments, protocols, procedures, and treaties designed to enable a responsible response.
Dr John Elliott, Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Computer Science of the University of St Andrews and coordinator of the Hub, said: “Science fiction is awash with explorations of the impact on human society following discovery of, and even encounters with, life or intelligence elsewhere.
“But we need to go beyond thinking about the impact on humanity. We need to coordinate our expert knowledge not only for assessing the evidence but also for considering the human social response, as our understanding progresses and what we know and what we don’t know is communicated. And the time to do this is now.
“Scanning signals of assumed extra-terrestrial origin for structures of language and attaching meaning is an elaborate and time-consuming process during which our knowledge will be advanced in many steps as we learn ‘Extra-Terrestrial’.”
The SETI Post-Detection Hub will close a substantial policy gap and will also consider responsible science communication in the social media era.
Limited attention has been given to the topic, a rare exception being the Royal Society holding a Scientific Discussion Meeting on ‘The detection of extra-terrestrial life and the consequences for science and society’ in 2010, after which the then-Director of the United Nations Office of Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), Mazlan Othman, had to debunk the emerging news story of her having been appointed as ‘alien ambassador’.
There are now procedures and entities established with the United Nations for dealing with the threat posed by impacts of asteroids on Earth, but there is nothing similar in place for picking up a radio signal from E.T.
Currently, the only existing agreed ‘contact’ protocols are those drawn up by the SETI community itself in 1989, which were last revised in 2010. Focusing entirely on general scientific conduct, they constitute non-enforceable aspirations and fall short of being useful for managing in practice the full process of searching, handling candidate evidence, confirmation of detections, post-detection analysis and interpretation, and potential response.
The SETI Post-Detection Hub for the first time provides a permanent ‘home’ for coordinating the development of a fully comprehensive framework, drawing together interested members of the SETI and wider academic communities as well as policy experts to work on topics ranging from message decipherment and data analytics to the development of regulatory protocols, space law, and societal impact strategies.
Dr Elliott said: “Will we ever get a message from E.T.? We don’t know. We also don’t know when this is going to happen. But we do know that we cannot afford to be ill prepared – scientifically, socially, and politically rudderless – for an event that could turn into reality as early as tomorrow and which we cannot afford to mismanage.”
Vaccine uptake remains low among at-risk Canadians
As the flu season begins and the COVID-19 pandemic continues, pneumococcal vaccination is more important than ever, say researchers
As the flu season begins and the COVID-19 pandemic continues, pneumococcal vaccination is more important than ever to prevent disease and death from pneumonia and other forms of pneumococcal disease. But vaccine uptake remains low among adults at high risk, say researchers from McGill University.
Q&A with Giorgia Sulis, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health
What is pneumococcal disease?
Pneumococcus is the leading bacterial cause of pneumonia and can cause other serious infections, including sepsis and meningitis. Pneumonia is among the top 10 causes of death among adults in Canada. Most cases of pneumococcal disease are vaccine preventable.
What question did you set out to answer?
Understanding vaccine uptake and the factors associated with non-vaccination has important implications for reducing the risk of pneumococcal disease and can save lives. To find answers, our study analyzed self-reported data of pneumococcal vaccine uptake from 33,061 Canadian community-dwelling adults enrolled in the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA). Specifically, we examined two key groups at high risk: older adults (i.e. those aged 65 or older) and adults aged 47-64 who had underlying chronic medical conditions.
What did you find?
While most cases of pneumococcal disease are vaccine-preventable, pneumococcal vaccine uptake remains low among those at high risk, particularly among adults aged 65 and older and adults with an underlying chronic health condition. We found that about half of those aged 65 and older, and over 80% of those aged 47 to 64 who had an underlying chronic condition reported never receiving a pneumococcal vaccine in their lifetime. While the proportion of non-vaccinated adults was lower among those who got the flu shot or had contact with a family doctor in the previous year, many people missed opportunities for vaccination. This contrasts sharply with the 80% vaccination coverage target set by the Canadian National Immunization Strategy, to be achieved by 2025.
What is the significance of these findings?
Our study is the largest analysis of pneumococcal vaccine uptake and factors associated with non-vaccination among high-risk adults in Canada. It also sheds new light on the problem of missed opportunities for vaccination. We hope that our study can contribute to raise awareness about this problem and promote effective strategies aimed at increasing pneumococcal vaccine uptake to reduce hospitalizations and mortality.
Pneumococcal vaccination uptake and missed opportunities for vaccination among Canadian adults: A cross-sectional analysis of the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA)
Bacterial sensors send a jolt of electricity when triggered
Rice labs’ Nature paper introduces groundbreaking bioelectronic devices
IMAGE: PUCKLIKE BIOELECTRONICS DESIGNED AT RICE UNIVERSITY CONTAIN PROGRAMMABLE BACTERIA AND ARE ATTACHED TO AN ELECTRODE THAT DELIVERS A SIGNAL WHEN THEY DETECT A TARGET CONTAMINANT, ENABLING REAL-TIME SENSING.view more
CREDIT: BRANDON MARTIN/RICE UNIVERSITY
HOUSTON – (Nov. 2, 2022) – When you hit your finger with a hammer, you feel the pain immediately. And you react immediately.
But what if the pain comes 20 minutes after the hit? By then, the injury might be harder to heal.
Scientists and engineers at Rice University say the same is true for the environment. If a chemical spill in a river goes unnoticed for 20 minutes, it might be too late to remediate.
Their living bioelectronic sensors can help. A team led by Rice synthetic biologists Caroline Ajo-Franklin andJonathan (Joff) Silberg and lead authors Josh Atkinson and Lin Su, both Rice alumni, have engineered bacteria to quickly sense and report on the presence of a variety of contaminants.
Their study in Nature shows the cells can be programmed to identify chemical invaders and report within minutes by releasing a detectable electrical current.
Such “smart” devices could power themselves by scavenging energy in the environment as they monitor conditions in settings like rivers, farms, industry and wastewater treatment plants and to ensure water security, according to the researchers.
The environmental information communicated by these self-replicating bacteria can be customized by replacing a single protein in the eight-component, synthetic electron transport chain that gives rise to the sensor signal.
“I think it’s the most complex protein pathway for real-time signaling that has been built to date,” said Silberg, director of Rice’s Systems, Synthetic and Physical Biology Ph.D. Program. “To put it simply, imagine a wire that directs electrons to flow from a cellular chemical to an electrode, but we’ve broken the wire in the middle. When the target molecule hits, it reconnects and electrifies the full pathway.”
“It’s literally a miniature electrical switch,” Ajo-Franklin said.
“You put the probes into the water and measure the current,” she said. “It’s that simple. Our devices are different because the microbes are encapsulated. We’re not releasing them into the environment.”
The researchers’ proof-of-concept bacteria was Escherichia coli, and their first target was thiosulfate, a dichlorination agent used in water treatment that can cause algae blooms. And there were convenient sources of water to test: Galveston Beach and Houston’s Brays and Buffalo bayous.
They collected water from each. At first, they attached their E. coli to electrodes, but the microbes refused to stay put. “They don’t naturally stick to an electrode,” Ajo-Franklin said. “We’re using strains that don’t form biofilms, so when we added water, they’d fall off.”
When that happened, the electrodes delivered more noise than signal.
Enlisting co-author Xu Zhang, a postdoctoral researcher in Ajo-Franklin’s lab, they encapsulated sensors into agarosein the shape of a lollipop that allowed contaminants in but held the sensors in place, reducing the noise.
“Xu’s background is in environmental engineering,” Ajo-Franklin said. “She didn’t come in and say, ‘Oh, we have to fix the biology.’ She said, ‘What can we do with the materials?’ It took great, innovative work on the materials side to make the synthetic biology shine.”
With the physical constraints in place, the labs first encoded E. coli to express a synthetic pathway that only generates current when it encounters thiosulfate. This living sensor was able to sense this chemical at levels less than 0.25 millimoles per liter, far lower than levels toxic to fish.
In another experiment, E. coli was recoded to sense an endocrine disruptor. This also worked well, and the signals were greatly enhanced when conductive nanoparticles custom-synthesized by Su were encapsulated with the cells in the agarose lollipop. The researchers reported these encapsulated sensors detect this contaminant up to 10 times faster than the previous state-of-the-art devices.
The study began by chance when Atkinson and Moshe Baruch of Ajo-Franklin’s group at Berkeley Lawrence National Laboratory set up next to each other at a 2015 synthetic biology conference in Chicago, with posters they quickly realized outlined different aspects of the same idea.
“We had neighboring posters because of our last names,” said Atkinson. “We spent most of the poster session chatting about each other’s projects and how there were clear synergies in our interests in interfacing cells with electrodes and electrons as an information carrier.”
“Josh’s poster had our first module: how to take chemical information and turn it into biochemical information,” Ajo-Franklin recalled. “Moshe had the third module: How to take biochemical information and turn it into an electrical signal.
“The catch was how to link these together,” she said. “The biochemical signals were a little different.”
“We said, ‘We need to get together and talk about this!’” Silberg recalled. Within six months, the new collaborators won seed funding from the Office of Naval Research, followed by a grant, to develop the idea.
“Joff’s group brought in the protein engineering and half of the electron transfer pathway,” Ajo-Franklin said. “My group brought the other half of the electron transport pathway and some of the materials efforts.” The collaboration ultimately brought Ajo-Franklin herself to Rice in 2019 as a CPRIT Scholar.
“We have to give so much credit to Lin and Josh,” she said. “They never gave up on this project, and it was incredibly synergistic. They would bounce ideas back and forth and through that interchange solved a lot of problems.”
“Each of which another student could spend years on,” Silberg added.
“Both Josh and I spent several years of our Ph.D.s working on this, with the pressure of graduating and moving on to the next stage of our careers,” said Su, a visiting graduate student in Ajo-Franklin’s lab after graduating from Southeast University in China. “I had to extend my visa multiple times to stay and finish the research.”
Silberg said the design’s complexity goes far beyond the signaling pathway. “The chain has eight components that control electron flow, but there are other components that build the wires that go into the molecules,” he said. “There are a dozen-and-a-half components with almost 30 metal or organic cofactors. This thing’s massive compared to something like our mitochondrial respiratory chains.”
All credited the invaluable assistance of co-author George Bennett, Rice’s E. Dell Butcher Professor Emeritus and a research professor in biosciences, in making the necessary connections.
Silberg said he sees engineered microbes performing many tasks in the future, from monitoring the gut microbiome to sensing contaminants like viruses, improving upon the successful strategy of testing wastewater plants for SARS-CoV-19 during the pandemic.
“Real-time monitoring becomes pretty important with those transient pulses,” he said. “And because we grow these sensors, they’re potentially pretty cheap to make.”
To that end, the team is collaborating with Rafael Verduzco, a Rice professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and of materials science and nanoengineering who leads a recent $2 million National Science Foundation grant with Ajo-Franklin, Silberg, bioscientist Kirstin Matthews and civil and environmental engineer Lauren Stadler to develop real-time wastewater monitoring.
“The type of materials we can make with Raphael takes this to a whole new level,” Ajo-Franklin said.
Silberg said the Rice labs are working on design rules to develop a library of modular sensors. “I hope that when people read this, they recognize the opportunities,” he said.
Silberg is the Stewart Memorial Professor of BioSciences and a professor of bioengineering at Rice. Ajo-Franklin is a professor of biosciences. Atkinson is a visiting National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Aarhus University, Denmark, and has an affiliation with the University of Southern California. Su is a postdoctoral research associate and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge.
The research was supported by the Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences of the U.S. Department of Energy (DE-SC0014462), the Office of Naval Research (0001418IP00037, N00014-17-1-2639, N00014-20-1-2274), the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (RR190063), the National Science Foundation (1843556), the Department of Energy Office of Science Graduate Student Research Program (DE SC0014664), the Lodieska Stockbridge Vaughn Fellowship and the China Scholarship Council Fellowship (CSC-201606090098).
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Pucklike devices designed by Rice University scientists and engineers contain multitudes of programmable bacteria that can detect contaminants and report their presence in real time. The bacteria release an electrical signal when triggered.
Rice University synthetic biologists Caroline Ajo-Franklin and Joff Silberg and their labs have developed programmable bacteria that sense contaminants and release an electronic signal in real time.
Rice University postdoctoral researcher Xu Zhang prepares a water sample for testing with programmable bacteria that test for contaminants and release an electronic signal for detection in real time.
Pucklike bioelectronics designed at Rice University contain programmable bacteria and are attached to an electrode that delivers a signal when they detect a target contaminant, enabling real-time sensing. (Credit: Brandon Martin/Rice University)
Pucklike devices designed by Rice University scientists and engineers contain multitudes of programmable bacteria that can detect contaminants and report their presence in real time. The bacteria release an electrical signal when triggered. (Credit: Brandon Martin/Rice University)
Xu Zhang, a postdoctoral researcher at Rice University, pulls a water sample from Houston’s Buffalo Bayou for testing with engineered living microbes designed to detect contaminants. When the microbes find evidence of a target contaminant, they release an electrical signal that can be read almost immediately. (Credit: Brandon Martin/Rice University)
Rice University synthetic biologists Caroline Ajo-Franklin and Joff Silberg and their labs have developed programmable bacteria that sense contaminants and release an electronic signal in real time. (Credit: Brandon Martin/Rice University)
Rice University postdoctoral researcher Xu Zhang prepares a water sample for testing with programmable bacteria that test for contaminants and release an electronic signal for detection in real time. (Credit: Brandon Martin/Rice University)
Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 4,240 undergraduates and 3,972 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just under 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is ranked No. 1 for lots of race/class interaction and No. 1 for quality of life by the Princeton Review. Rice is also rated as a best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance.
Real-time environmental monitoring of contaminants using living electronic sensors
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
2-Nov-2022
COI STATEMENT
J.J.S., J.T.A., and G.N.B. have submitted a patent application (No 16/186,226) covering the use of fragmented proteins as chemical-dependent electron carriers, entitled “Regulating electron flow using fragmented proteins.”
Peatlands as climate tipping points
Researchers decipher the history and sensitivity of the largest tropical peatland in Congo
MARUM - CENTER FOR MARINE ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES, UNIVERSITY OF BREMEN
IMAGE: DR. JOHANNA MENGES (MARUM, BREMEN) SAMPLING A PEAT CORE IN THE CUVETTE CONGOLAISE DURING THE 2022 EXPEDITION. PHOTO: MÉLANIE GUARDIOLA, CEREGEview more
CREDIT: MÉLANIE GUARDIOLA, CEREGE
Not only seas and oceans sequester carbon from the atmosphere, but also peatlands. They are considered to contain the largest terrestrial carbon stores. Plant remains, and thus carbon, that break down in areas covered with water are stored under oxygen-poor conditions as long as the peat remains covered with water. Peatlands, therefore, can only function as a carbon sink if the swamps do not dry out, for example, as a result of climate change or due to human activities such as agriculture, peat mining or road construction.
The Congo Basin is one of the largest river basins in the world. It is largely characterized by tropical forests, but in the central basin, known as the Cuvette, swamp forests predominate. Until the year 2000, it was believed that the area was only rain forest. Around that time, however, satellite observations revealed that the land under the trees is covered by water. Mapping in 2017 discovered that this area contains the world’s largest peatland complex, covering more than 167,600 square kilometers, which is more than four times the area of Baden-Württemberg. At the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference in 2021, 1.5 billion US dollars were committed to promote the preservation of this unique ecosystem, in part by the European Union and Germany.
Dr. Enno Schefuß of MARUM – the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences, has long been studying the Congo Basin and its importance for the global carbon cycle. He led a sampling expedition to the area in the spring of 2022. The ongoing German-French cooperative project is financed in part by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft – DFG). He and his colleagues are now studying the sensitivity of this unique ecosystem in relation to climate change. “Almost nothing is known about the origin and history of this peatland area, or about its carbon dynamics,” says Enno Schefuß, one of the main authors of the Nature article. “But this knowledge is crucial for evaluating the susceptibility of the ecosystem to climate change and providing information about the impacts of logging, oil exploration and agriculture.”
Dating of the peat cores reveals a pattern that is consistently repeated in the region. Between around 7,500 and 2,000 years ago, there was a phase during which the peat was highly condensed. Geochemical analyses have shown that peat was being deposited during that time, but it decomposed and lost most of its carbon. The peat that now exists from that time interval is merely a remnant of the original peat, which was several meters thick. At the same time, in marine sediments off the coast of the Congo River, refractory, i.e. non-degraded parts of the older peat were deposited. This input of terrestrial organic material into the ocean by rivers is an important component of the global carbon cycle, which is a focus of research within the “Ocean Floor” Cluster of Excellence at MARUM.
What happened? “Using the technique of paleohydrological reconstruction, which allows the inference of precipitation conditions in the past, we concluded that the swamp dried out during this phase,” Schefuß reports. “We were able to obtain estimates of the amount of rainfall before, during and after the phase of decomposition.” It is interesting to note that the decomposition affected not only the peat formed during that time, but also older peat layers beneath it. “It could be said that the degradation ‘burned-down’ into the peat.”
Using modern climate data, the precise peat distribution, and the reconstruction of rain patterns, Schefuß and his colleagues were able to determine the conditions of peat formation, the decomposition conditions, and the present-day situation. Prior to the decomposition phase, the rainfall conditions were similar to today’s tropical swamps in North and South America, Asia and Oceania. During the decomposition, the rainfall averaged around one meter less each year. It was only about 2,000 years ago that the situation became sufficiently stabilized for the peat to start forming again. The peat swamps in tropical Africa today, however, exist under significantly drier climate conditions than are found in other tropical swamps. The authors of the study thus conclude that it is precariously close to a tipping point.
“As scientists, it is our task to produce robust data that will empower policy makers to protect vulnerable ecosystems while enabling sustainable development,” explains Schefuß. “Our results show that the peat in the tropical Congo Basin is close to the tipping point from being a carbon sink to becoming a carbon source, but also that it is resilient and can recover under favorable conditions. I would strongly emphasize the need for improving assessments of the vulnerability of these species- and carbon-rich ecosystems to climate change in the 21st century through continued research involving local colleagues, in order to predict their future development.”
MARUM produces fundamental scientific knowledge about the role of the ocean and the seafloor in the total Earth system. The dynamics of the oceans and the seabed significantly impact the entire Earth system through the interaction of geological, physical, biological and chemical processes. These influence both the climate and the global carbon cycle, resulting in the creation of unique biological systems. MARUM is committed to fundamental and unbiased research in the interests of society, the marine environment, and in accordance with the sustainability goals of the United Nations. It publishes its quality-assured scientific data to make it publicly available. MARUM informs the public about new discoveries in the marine environment and provides practical knowledge through its dialogue with society. MARUM cooperation with companies and industrial partners is carried out in accordance with its goal of protecting the marine environment.
IMAGE: CONGO BASIN PEATLANDS EXPEDITION, FROM 2018view more
CREDIT: GREENPEACE/KEVIN MCELVANEY
Climate change could trigger the Congo peatlands to release billions of tonnes of carbon
New research finds the peatlands are fragile and vulnerable to drought
As the peatlands dry, the peat decomposes and releases carbon dioxide which accelerates global warming
Study says this process has already happened once in the peatlands history - and could happen again
New research published in Nature today (Wed, Nov 2) reveals that the world’s largest tropical peatland turned from being a major store of carbon to a source of damaging carbon dioxide emissions as a result of climate change thousands of years ago.
Around the time that Stonehenge was built, 5,000 years ago, the climate of central Congo began to dry leading to the peatlands emitting carbon dioxide. The peatlands only stopped releasing carbon and reverted back to taking carbon out of the atmosphere when the climate got wetter again in the past 2,000 years, according to a major international study co-coordinated by the University of Leeds.
Scientists involved in the study are warning that if modern-day global heating produces droughts in the Congo region, history could repeat itself, dangerously accelerating climate change.
If that were to happen, up to 30 billion tonnes of carbon could be released from the peatlands into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas. That is equivalent to the global emissions from fossil fuel burning over a three-year period.
Professor Simon Lewis, from the University of Leeds and University College London, a senior author of the study, said: “Our study brings a brutal warning from the past. If the peatlands dry beyond a certain threshold they will release colossal quantities of carbon to the atmosphere, further accelerating climate change.
“There is some evidence that dry seasons are lengthening in the Congo Basin, but it is unclear if these will continue. But evidence from our study shows that drier conditions have existed in the past and did trigger a breakdown of the peatlands as a store of carbon.
“This is an important message for world leaders gathering at the COP27 climate talks next week. If greenhouse gas emissions drive the central Congo peatlands to become too dry, then the peatlands will contribute to the climate crisis rather than protect us.”
Warnings from the past
The Congo peatlands in central Africa are the world’s largest tropical peatlands complex, occupying an area of 16.7 million hectares, bigger than England and Wales combined.
Congolese and European scientists took peat samples from beneath the remote swamp forests of central Congo. By analysing plant remains, the researchers were able to build a record of the vegetation and rainfall in the central Congo basin over the last 17,500 years when the peat began to form.
Waxes from plant leaves, which were preserved in the peat, were used to calculate rainfall levels at the time the plant was living.
The findings - Hydroclimatic vulnerability of peat carbon in the central Congo Basin - paint a picture of a drier climate developing in central Africa, which began around 5,000 years ago.
At the most intense period of drought, rainfall was reduced by at least 800 mm a year. This caused the water table in the Congo peatlands to drop, exposing older layers of peat to the air, causing oxidation and release of carbon dioxide.
Ghost interval in the peat record
Between 7,500 and 2,000 years ago, the peat layers either decomposed or never accumulated. The researchers described this as the “ghost interval”. This same ghost interval was found in peat samples from hundreds of kilometres away in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) indicating it happened across the whole peatland region.
Dr Yannick Garcin, from the National Research Institute for Sustainable Development of France and lead author of the study, said: “The peat samples show us that there was a period of around 5,000 years when there was almost no build-up of peat, less than 0.1 mm per year.
“The samples also reveal what the rainfall and vegetation was like when the peat was formed. Together they give a picture of a drying climate that got progressively drier until about 2,000 years ago.
“This drought led to a huge loss of peat, at least 2 metres. The drought flipped the peatland to a huge carbon source as the peat decomposed. This decomposition only stopped when the drought stopped allowing peat to start accumulating again.”
Peatlands are ‘vulnerable’
The scientists warn that while the peatlands are currently largely intact and managed sustainably by local people, they are vulnerable.
Apart from the threat of the peatlands getting drier from climate change, the region is subject to additional pressures which could cause damage to the fragile peatland ecosystem, from draining the peatland for industrial-scale agriculture, logging, and oil exploration.
Professor Corneille Ewango, from the University of Kisangani in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and who led the expeditions to collect the peat samples from the DRC, said: “This is another astonishing finding about the peatlands. They are more vulnerable than we thought, and everyone must play their role in protecting them.
“Polluting countries must cut their carbon emissions fast, to limit the possibility of droughts pushing the peatlands past their tipping point. The DRC will also need to strengthen protection of the peatlands. At stake is one of the most wildlife and carbon-rich ecosystems on Earth.”
END
Congo basin peatlands expedition, from 2018
CREDIT
Greenpeace/Kevin McElvaney.
JOURNAL
Nature
METHOD OF RESEARCH
Case study
SUBJECT OF RESEARCH
Not applicable
ARTICLE TITLE
Hydroclimatic vulnerability of peat carbon in the central Congo Basin
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