EU consumers ‘export’ environment damage to Eastern neighbours

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM

European Union (EU) consumers are ‘exporting’ negative environmental impacts to their Eastern European neighbours, whilst keeping the bulk of economic benefits linked to consuming goods and services, a new study reveals.

Although the environmental impacts of EU consumption are felt around the world, countries in Eastern Europe have experienced the highest environmental pressures and impacts associated with EU citizens’ consumption.

Large shares of 10 major environmental pressures and impacts are ‘outsourced’ to countries and regions outside the EU while more than 85% of the economic benefits remain within member countries – albeit with uneven distribution of costs and benefits within the EU.

Publishing their findings today in Nature Sustainability, an international group of researchers studied the environmental indicators between 1995 and 2019.

These indicators included greenhouse gas emissions, material consumption, land use, consumption of surface and ground water, particulate matter formation, photochemical oxidation and biodiversity loss due to land coverage, as well as freshwater, marine and terrestrial ecotoxicity.

Researchers found that seven analysed pressures and impacts – ecotoxicity indicators, greenhouse gas emissions, particulate matter formation, photochemical oxidation and material consumption – increased notably outside the EU, while decreasing within the bloc.

Researchers at the Universities of Birmingham (UK), Groningen (NL) and Maryland (US), as well as Chinese Academy of Sciences, also also analysed value added by consumption of goods and services within the current 27 EU member countries to economies between 1995 and 2019..

Corresponding author Yuli Shan, associate Professor in Sustainable Transitions at the University of Birmingham, commented: “For the sake of our planet, environmental pressures and impacts from EU consumption need to decrease substantially – reducing the export of environmental damage beyond the borders of the wealthy EU states to poorer regions.

“The benefits of EU consumption are greater for most member countries than those outside the Union, whilst inducing higher environmental pressures and impacts for the EU’s eastern neighbours such as Albania, Montenegro, Serbia, Ukraine and Moldova.”

Eastern Europe consistently ranked as the region receiving the lowest share of economic value added compared to environmental pressures and impacts associated with EU consumption.

Pressures and impacts induced by EU consumption dropped in most of its member states - for the Netherlands and Sweden, indicators in all ten categories dropped from 1995 to 2019. Austria, Czechia, Italy, Poland, Romania and Slovenia all saw decreases in nine of ten analysed environmental pressures and impacts.

In contrast, all analysed impacts and pressures associated with EU consumption increased in Brazil, China, India, Japan, as well as in Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

First author Benedikt Bruckner, from the University of Groningen, commented: “As many super-affluent consumers contributing disproportionally to global environmental damage and resource use live in the EU, we must focus mitigation efforts on overconsumption.” 

The other corresponding author Klaus Hubacek, Professor at the University of Groningen, said: “We can reduce environmental pressures and impacts associated with EU over-consumption in a number of ways, including changing how people travel or their dietary choices, and creating new EU trade policies that lower environmental pressures and impacts associated with goods and services.”

ENDS

 

For more information, interviews or an embargoed copy of the paper please contact Tony Moran, International Communications Manager, on +44 (0)782 783 2312 or t.moran@bham.ac.uk. For out-of-hours enquiries, please call +44 (0) 7789 921 165.

Notes for editors

• The University of Birmingham is ranked amongst the world’s top 100 institutions, its work brings people from across the world to Birmingham, including researchers and teachers and more than 6,500 international students from over 150 countries
• ‘Ecologically unequal exchanges driven by EU consumption’ - Benedikt Bruckner, Yuli Shan, Christina Prell, Yannan Zhou, Honglin Zhong, Kuishuang Feng and Klaus Hubacek is published in Nature Sustainability.

Greenpeace Germany provided support with the initial data analysis, modelling and discussions as part of the project ‘Outsourced Environmental Degradation of the EU’. The research was also supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Shandong Natural Science Foundation of, and the Major Program of the National Social Science Foundation of China.

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JOURNAL

Nature Sustainability

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Ecologically unequal exchanges driven by EU consumption

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

26-Jan-2023

Benefits of big city life – only for the elite

Urban scaling laws arise from within-city inequalities

Peer-Reviewed Publication

LINKÖPING UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: MARC KEUSCHNIGG, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AT THE INSTITUTE FOR ANALYTICAL SOCIOLOGY, LINKÖPING UNIVERSITY AND PROFESSOR AT THE INSTITUTE OF SOCIOLOGY, LEIPZIG UNIVERSITY. view more 

CREDIT: KEUSCHNIGG

Urban inequality in Europe and the United States is so severe that urban elites claim most of the benefits from the agglomeration effects that big cities provide, while large parts of urban populations get little to nothing. In a study published in Nature Human Behaviour, researchers at Linköping University show that the higher-than-expected outputs of larger cities critically depend on the extreme outcomes of the successful few.

In recent years, researchers from across disciplines have identified striking and seemingly universal relationships between the size of cities and their socioeconomic activity. Cities create more interconnectivity, wealth, and inventions per resident as they grow larger. However, what may be true for city populations on average, may not hold for the individual resident.  

“The higher-than-expected economic outputs of larger cities critically depend on the extreme outcomes of the successful few. Ignoring this dependency, policy makers risk overestimating the stability of urban growth, particularly in the light of the high spatial mobility among urban elites and their movement to where the money is“, says Marc Keuschnigg, associate professor at the Institute for Analytical Sociology at Linköping University and professor at the Institute of Sociology at Leipzig University.

In a study published in Nature Human Behaviour, the researchers analyze geocoded micro-data on social interactions and economic output in Sweden, Russia, and the United States. It shows that inequality is rampant in earnings and innovation, as well as in measures of urban interconnectivity.

An individual’s productivity depends on the local social environments in which they find themselves in. Because of the greater diversity in larger cities, skilled and specialized people are more likely to find others whose skills are complementary to their own. This allows for higher levels of productivity and greater learning opportunities in larger cities. 

But, not everyone can access the productive social environments that larger cities provide. Different returns from context accumulate over time which gives rise to substantial inequality.

The researchers traced 1.4 million Swedish wage earners over time and find that those who were initially successful in large cities flourished to a greater extent than the successful in smaller cities. By contrast, the typical individuals in both smaller and larger cities experienced almost identical wage trajectories. 

Consequently, the initially successful individuals in the bigger cities increasingly distanced themselves from both the typical individual in their own city, creating inequality within the big cities, and the most successful individuals in smaller cities, creating inequality between cities. 

The study also finds that top earners are more likely to leave smaller city than larger ones, and that these overperformers tend overwhelmingly to move to the largest cities. The disproportionate out-migration of the most successful individuals from smaller cities results in a reinforcement process that takes away many of the most promising people in less populous regions while adding them to larger cities. 

The biggest cities are buzzing because they also host the most innovative, sociable, and skilled people. These outliers add disproportionately to city outputs---a “rich get richer” process that brings cumulative advantage to the biggest cities.

From a policy perspective, the study considers the sustainability of city life against the backdrop of rising urban inequality. 

“Urban science has largely focused on city averages. The established approach just looked at one datapoint per city, for example average income. With their focus on averages, prior studies overlooked the stark inequalities that exist within cities when making predictions about how urban growth affects the life experiences of city dwellers”, says Marc Keuschnigg.

With respect to urban inequality, the study draws attention to the partial exclusion of most city dwellers from the socioeconomic benefits of growing cities. Their lifestyle, different than among the urban elite, benefits less from geographical location. When accounting for the cost of living in larger cities, many big-city dwellers will in fact be worse off as compared to similar people living in smaller places. 

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JOURNAL

Nature Human Behaviour

DOI

10.1038/s41562-022-01509-1 

ARTICLE TITLE

Urban scaling laws arise from within-city inequalities

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

26-Jan-2023

23 years of WHO Disease Outbreak News reports reveal how global threats posed by disease outbreaks have shifted over time

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PLOS

 

IMAGE: THE DISTRIBUTION OF OUTBREAKS THROUGH TIME. (TOP) NUMBER OF REPORTS PER YEAR, BROKEN DOWN TO HIGHLIGHT THE TOP FOUR DISEASES, WHICH ARE REPORTED SUBSTANTIALLY MORE OFTEN THAN ALL OTHERS (SEE TABLE 1). (BOTTOM) THE PROPORTION OF TOTAL REPORTS OF A DISEASE, ACROSS YEARS, THAT OCCUR IN A GIVEN YEAR, FOR THE TOP 25 REPORTED DISEASES IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER. view more 

CREDIT: CARLSON ET AL., 2023, PLOS GLOBAL PUBLIC HEALTH, CC-BY 4.0 (HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/4.0/)

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Article URL: https://journals.plos.org/globalpublichealth/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgph.0001083

Article Title: The world health organization’s disease outbreak news: A retrospective database

Author Countries: United Kingdom, USA

Funding: This work was funded by the Open Philanthropy Project to RK. CJC and ALP were additionally supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York (Grant G-21-58414). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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JOURNAL

PLOS Global Public Health

DOI

10.1371/journal.pgph.0001083 

ARTICLE TITLE

The world health organization’s disease outbreak news: A retrospective database

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

25-Jan-2023

COI STATEMENT

Tracking online hate speech that follows real-world events

Some spikes in hate speech target groups that appear uninvolved in triggering events

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PLOS

 

IMAGE: LEVELS ARE NORMALIZED TO 100 A FEW DAYS BEFORE THE MURDER. ONLINE RACIST HATE SPEECH INCREASED BY 250% IN THE DAYS AFTER MURDER AND REMAINED ELEVATED WELL AFTER THESE EVENTS. OTHER TYPES OF ONLINE HATE SPEECH, INCLUDING ANTI-LGBT, ANTI-ETHNIC, GENDER-RELATED, AND ANTI-SEMITISM ALL INCREASED BY ABOUT 50% OR MORE DURING THESE EVENTS. view more 

CREDIT: LUPU ET AL., CC-BY 4.0 (HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/4.0/)

A machine-learning analysis has revealed patterns in online hate speech that suggest complex—and sometimes counterintuitive—links between real-world events and different types of hate speech. Yonatan Lupu of George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on January 25.

Prior research has uncovered key insights into hate speech posted publicly by users of online communities. Real-world events can trigger increases in online hate speech, and spikes in online hate speech have been linked to spikes in real-world violent hate crimes. However, most earlier studies have focused on a limited number of communities from moderated platforms that have policies against hate speech.

Lupu and colleagues combined manual methods with a computational strategy known as supervised machine learning to analyze seven kinds of online hate speech in 59 million posts published between June 2019 and December 2020 by users of 1,150 online hate communities. Some communities were on the moderated platforms Facebook, Instagram, or VKontakte, and others on the less-moderated platforms Gab, Telegram, and 4Chan.

This analysis revealed spikes in online hate speech rates that appeared associated with certain real-world events. For instance, after a crisis involving Syrian refugees, anti-immigration hate speech spiked significantly.

Following the November 2020 U.S. election, more sustained waves of increased online hate speech occurred. For example, there was an increase in the use of anti-LGBTQ slurs to describe various political targets, and Vice President Kamala Harris was a prominent target of increased gender-related hate speech.

Within the study period, the murder of George Floyd and subsequent protests were associated with the biggest spike in hate speech rates, including racially-based hate speech. However, other types of hate speech also spiked significantly, including hate speech targeting gender identity and sexual orientation—a topic with little intuitive connection to the murder and protests.

While the research cannot provide causal conclusions, the findings suggest a complex relationship between triggering events and online hate speech, with potential implications for strategies to mitigate such speech. The authors call for additional research to further examine this relationship, especially given users’ tendency to migrate to unmoderated communities.

The authors add: “Hate speech continues to be a persistent and pervasive problem across the social media landscape, and can rise in dramatic and sometimes unexpected ways following offline events.”

#####

In your coverage please use this URL to provide access to the freely available article in PLOS ONE: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0278511

Citation: Lupu Y, Sear R, Velásquez N, Leahy R, Restrepo NJ, Goldberg B, et al. (2023) Offline events and online hate. PLoS ONE 18(1): e0278511. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278511

Author Countries: USA

Funding: YL and NFJ received funding from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (FA9550-20-1-0382 and FA9550-20-1-0383) and National Science Foundation (SES-2030694). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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JOURNAL

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0278511 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Offline events and online hate

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

25-Jan-2023

When birch trees are grown in highly polluted areas, their pollen contains higher levels of the main allergen, according to Polish study

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PLOS

 

IMAGE: BIRCH TREES. view more 

CREDIT: DOROTA MYSZKOWSKA, CC-BY 4.0 (HTTPS://CREATIVECOMMONS.ORG/LICENSES/BY/4.0/)

Article URL:  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0279826

Article Title: Air pollution in the places of Betula pendula growth and development changes the physicochemical properties and the main allergen content of its pollen

Author Countries: Poland

Funding: The study was supported by the grant of the National Science Centre, No2016/21/N/NZ8/01369. Grant holder was the corresponding author: Monika Ziemianin. The FT-Raman measurements were financed by DNWZ.711.58.2022.PBU statutory research project of Pedagogical University of Krakow, Poland, led by Ph.D. Iwona Stawoska. In both cases, the funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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JOURNAL

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0279826 

ARTICLE TITLE

Air pollution in the places of Betula pendula growth and development changes the physicochemical properties and the main allergen content of its pollen

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

25-Jan-2023

52-million-year-old fossils show near-primates were cool with colder climate

The fossils were discovered on Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada, in layers of sediment linked with the early Eocene, an epoch that could foretell how ecosystems will fare in coming years

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS

 

IMAGE: ARTIST'S RECONSTRUCTION OF IGNACIUS DAWSONAE SURVIVING SIX MONTHS OF WINTER DARKNESS IN THE EXTINCT WARM TEMPERATE ECOSYSTEM OF ELLESMERE ISLAND, ARCTIC CANADA. view more 

CREDIT: KRISTEN MILLER, BIODIVERSITY INSTITUTE, UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS

LAWRENCE — Two sister species of near-primate, called “primatomorphans,” dating back about 52 million years have been identified by researchers at the University of Kansas as the oldest to have dwelled north of the Arctic Circle. The findings appear today in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS ONE.

According to lead author Kristen Miller, doctoral student with KU’s Biodiversity Institute and Natural History Museum, both species — Ignacius mckennai and I. dawsonae — descended from a common northbound ancestor who possessed a spirit “to boldly go where no primate has gone before.”

The specimens were discovered on Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, Canada, in layers of sediment linked with the early Eocene, an epoch of warmer temperatures that could foretell how ecosystems will fare in coming years due to human-driven climate change.

“No primate relative has ever been found at such extreme latitudes,” Miller said. “They’re more usually found around the equator in tropical regions. I was able to do a phylogenetic analysis, which helped me understand how the fossils from Ellesmere Island are related to species found in midlatitudes of North America — places like New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana. Even down in Texas we have some fossils that belong to this family as well.”

The Arctic Circle was much warmer when these close evolutionary cousins of primates lived — a boreal ecosystem that hosted a plethora of early Cenozoic vertebrates, including ancient crocodiles — but like today was still mostly dark for half of the year. This darkness, according to Miller, may have triggered both species to evolve more robust teeth and jaws compared with other primate relatives of the time.

“A lot of what we do in paleontology is look at teeth — they preserve the best,” said Miller, who analyzed high-resolution microtomography of the fossil teeth described in the paper. “Their teeth are just super weird compared to their closest relatives. So, what I've been doing the past couple of years is trying to understand what they were eating, and if they were eating different materials than their middle-latitude counterparts.”

Miller and her co-authors believe food was much tougher to find during dim winter months when the Artic primate relatives likely were forced to consume harder material.

“That, we think, is probably the biggest physical challenge of the ancient environment for these animals,” said corresponding author Chris Beard, senior curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Biodiversity Institute and Foundation Distinguished Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary biology at KU. “How do you make it through six months of winter darkness, even if it's reasonably warm? The teeth and even the jaw muscles of these animals changed compared to their close relatives from midlatitudes. To survive those long Arctic winters, when preferred foods like fruits were not available, they had to rely on 'fallback foods' like nuts and seeds.”

Miller and Beard’s other co-author is Kristen Tietjen, a scientific illustrator at the Biodiversity Institute. 

Additionally, the researchers found both species were slightly larger than their closest relatives farther to the south — a group of primate cousins dubbed “plesiadapiforms.”

“But they're still pretty small,” Miller said. "Some plesiadapiforms from the midlatitudes of North America are really, really tiny. Of course, none of these species are related to squirrels, but I think that's the closest critter that we have that helps us visualize what they might have been like. They were most likely very arboreal — so, living in the trees most of the time.”

The researchers think adaptations displayed by both Arctic species during a time of global warming show how some animals likely could evolve new traits in response to climate change driven by human activity today.

“It does show how something like a primate or a primate relative that’s specialized to one environment can change based off of climate change,” Miller said. “I think probably what it says is primates’ range could expand with climate change or move at least towards the poles rather than the equator. Life starts to get too hot there, perhaps we’ll have a lot of taxa moving north and south, rather than the intense biodiversity we see at the equator today.”

Because both fossil species are new to science, the investigators bestowed them with scientific names honoring a pair of paleontologists who worked on Ellesmere Island decades ago. One of these namesake paleontologists was a KU alumna and pioneer for women in the field of paleontology.

“Mary Dawson was an amazing person,” Beard said. “She earned her doctorate at KU back in the '50s and was among the first, if not the first, American women to get a Ph.D. in paleontology — and one of the first women to make a name for herself as a paleontologist in the United States. I worked closely with Mary for more than 20 years in my former career at the Carnegie Museum, where she spent her whole career. Mary was the leader of a big project on Ellesmere Island. Of course, we were going to name one of the species after her. The other species is named after Malcolm McKenna, a contemporary, close friend and colleague of Mary Dawson and a former mentor of mine.”

Indeed, the fossil species Ignacius mckennai and I. dawsonae were part of a collection of fossils left behind by Dawson and McKenna for further analysis.

“Mary and Malcolm bequeathed me with those fossils and asked me to study them,” Beard said. “I said, ‘Yes, of course — I'm happy to do that.’ They just sat like a fine wine and got better and better through time until Kristen showed up — and it was clear that Kristen had everything that it took to carry the ball over the finish line.”

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JOURNAL

PLoS ONE

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0280114 

ARTICLE TITLE

Basal Primatomorpha colonized Ellesmere Island (Arctic Canada) during the hyperthermal conditions of the Early Eocene Climatic Optimum

SEE 

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2023/01/bigfoot-yeti-sasquatch-fossils-reveal.html

THIRD WORLD U$A

Heart failure risk higher in rural areas

Peer-Reviewed Publication

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER

 

IMAGE: LOREN LIPWORTH, SCD, PROFESSOR OF MEDICINE AND ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR OF THE DIVISION OF EPIDEMIOLOGY view more 

CREDIT: VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY MEDICAL CENTER

Heart failure risk is 19% higher for adults living in rural areas of the U.S., as compared to urban areas, and 34% higher for Black men living in rural areas, according to a large, observational study supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and co-led by Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) researchers.

 

The study, one of the first to look at the link between first-time cases of heart failure and patients living in rural areas, was published today in JAMA Cardiology. 

 

“The study demonstrates the relationship between rurality and the occurrence of heart failure and is the first to do so in a predominantly low-income population of Black and white adults residing in the southeastern U.S.,” said Loren Lipworth, ScD, professor of Medicine and associate director of the Division of Epidemiology, who co-led the study for VUMC along with Deepak Gupta, MD, associate professor of Medicine and director of the Vanderbilt Translational and Clinical Cardiovascular Research Center, Division of Cardiovascular Medicine.

 

Researchers from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) – which is part of the NIH – and VUMC analyzed data from The Southern Community Cohort Study, comparing rates of new onset heart failure among rural and urban residents in 12 states (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia). 

 

The population, which included 27,115 adults without heart failure at enrollment, were followed for about 13 years. Nearly 20% of participants lived in rural areas and roughly 69% were Black adults recruited from community health centers that care for medically underserved populations.



 

At the end of the study period, the researchers found that rurality was associated with an increased risk of heart failure among both women and Black men, even after adjustment for other cardiovascular risk factors and socioeconomic status. 

 

The study showed white women living in rural areas had a 22% increased risk of heart failure compared to white women in urban areas, and Black women had an 18% higher risk compared to Black women in urban areas. 

 

No association was found between rurality and heart failure risk among white men.

 

“Our findings in the Southern Community Cohort Study highlight race- and sex-based inequities in heart failure risk that have important implications for the primary prevention of heart failure, including a need to focus on community or contextual factors that may preferentially impact women or Black men living in rural areas,” Lipworth said.

 

Heart failure, which affects an estimated 6.5 million adults in the U.S., develops when the heart does not pump enough blood for the body’s needs or requires higher pressure to do so. Its symptoms may include shortness of breath during daily activities or trouble breathing when lying down, among others. Patients with heart failure often have lower quality of life and shorter survival, which raises the importance of preventing heart failure.  

 

“Approximately 1 million new cases of heart failure are diagnosed in the U.S. each year,” Gupta said. “Our findings demonstrate substantial variability in susceptibility to heart failure. The results not only emphasize the importance of identifying these differences but also suggest heart failure prevention may require varied approaches across individuals.  

 

“As Vanderbilt is a leader in precision medicine, our next step should be to translate these observational findings into targeted interventions to prevent heart failure, particularly among individuals who bear a disproportionate burden of risk,” he added.   

 

The exact reasons behind these rural-urban health disparities are unclear and are still being explored. But the researchers said a multitude of factors may be at play, including structural racism, inequities in access to health care, and a dearth of grocery stores that provide affordable and healthy foods, among others. 

 

The study was funded by the NIH Medical Research Scholars Program; NHLBI’s Division of Intramural Research; the NHLBI Training Award in Cardiovascular Research (T32 367 HL007411); the Intramural Research Program of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities; the National Cancer Institute (grants R01 CA092447 and 368 U01 CA202979); and supplemental funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (3R01 CA 029447-0851). 

 

Other VUMC co-authors include Meng Xu, Debra Dixon, and Michael Mumma.

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JOURNAL

JAMA Cardiology

DOI

10.1001/jamacardio.2022.5211 

ARTICLE TITLE

Association of rurality with risk of heart failure

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

25-Jan-2023

Kill dates for re-exposed black mosses

New Geology Science published online ahead of print

Peer-Reviewed Publication

GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA

 

IMAGE: CAPE RASMUSSEN, ONE OF THE STUDY SITES MENTIONED IN THE PAPER. CREDIT: DEREK J. FORD. view more 

CREDIT: DEREK J. FORD

Boulder, Colo., USA: In their new paper for the Geological Society of America journal Geology, Dulcinea Groff and colleagues used radiocarbon ages (kill dates) of previously ice-entombed dead black mosses to reveal that glaciers advanced during three distinct phases in the northern Antarctic Peninsula over the past 1,500 years.

The terrestrial cryosphere and biosphere of the Antarctic Peninsula are changing rapidly as “first responders” to polar warming. We know from other studies that large glaciers of the Antarctic Peninsula are responding quickly to warmer summer air temperatures, and scientists have modeled that the glaciers expanded in the past because of cooler temperatures, and not increased precipitation. However, we know much less about how this plays out at sea level where ice, ocean, and sensitive coastal life interact. Knowing when glaciers advanced and retreated in the past would improve our understanding of biodiverse coastal ecosystems—thriving with seals, penguins, and plants—and their sensitivity in the Antarctic Peninsula. One of the limitations of reconstructing glacier history is that there are not that many types of terrestrial archives we can use to constrain past glacier behavior. Re-exposed dead plants, abandoned penguin colonies, and rocks can be dated to better know the timing of permanent snow or glacier advance in the past.

Mosses are one of the few types of plants living in Antarctica and can get overridden and killed by advancing glaciers. The timing of when the glacier killed the moss provides an archive of glacier history. For example, when glaciers expand or advance, they can entomb or cover the plant—starving it of light and warmth. The date the plant died is the same time the glacier advanced over that location. As glaciers recede, these previously entombed mosses are exposed and are dead and black. “What’s so valuable about these kill dates compared to other records (like the ages of glacial erratics or penguin remains) is their accuracy,” says Groff. They provide a clearer picture of the climate history owing to their direct carbon exchange with the atmosphere and decreased error around the age estimate.

Groff and colleagues collected black mosses around the northern Antarctic Peninsula by exploring the edges of glaciers and nunataks at several locations. By radiocarbon dating the mosses, they found that glaciers advanced three times in the past 1,500 years. This is evidence for phases of cooler and potentially wetter conditions than today. On Anvers Island, they learned that the last time the glacier was at its 2019 position was around 850 years ago as it expanded over the course of several centuries. Their estimates of glacier advance are much slower than recent retreat. “Interestingly, we found that the glacier front with the fastest advance also had the fastest retreat, suggesting that hotspots of rapid coastal glacier dynamics occur in the Antarctic Peninsula, says Groff.

This is a unique dataset because it’s rare to have past net advance rates in the literature because glacial records tend to be destroyed when the glacier advances. These black mosses can reliably be used to estimate glacier advances in the past. “There are other lines of evidence that support our moss kill dates for past cooler conditions, such as peat records indicating lower biological productivity, as well as evidence for sea-level change from raised beaches as a result of changing ice mass. It’s also possible that the climate conditions that led to glacier advances involved wetter conditions and would have had a negative impact on penguins, as we know they do today. Many of the recent abandoned penguin colonies are the same age as our youngest black moss,” says Groff.

FEATURED ARTICLE

Kill dates from re-exposed black mosses constrain past glacier advances in the northern Antarctic Peninsula
Dulcinea V. Groff; David W. Beilman; Zicheng Yu; Derek Ford; Zhengyu Xia
Contact: Dulcinea V. Groff, dulcineavgroff@gmail.com, Department of Geology & Geophysics, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming 82073, USA; Department of Earth & Environmental Sciences, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania 18015, USA
 

GEOLOGY articles are online at https://geology.geoscienceworld.org/content/early/recent . Representatives of the media may obtain complimentary articles by contacting Kea Giles at the e-mail address above. Please discuss articles of interest with the authors before publishing stories on their work, and please make reference to GEOLOGY in articles published. Non-media requests for articles may be directed to GSA Sales and Service, gsaservice@geosociety.org.

https://www.geosociety.org

Cape Rasmussen, one of the study sites mentioned in the paper. Credit: Derek J. Ford.

CREDIT   Derek J. Ford

Drone Video of Cape Rasmussen [VIDEO] | EurekAlert! Science News Releases

JOURNAL

Geology

DOI

10.1130/G50314.1 

ARTICLE TITLE

Kill dates from re-exposed black mosses constrain past glacier advances in the northern Antarctic Peninsula