Sunday, July 09, 2023

For the third time this week, Earth sets an unofficial heat record. What's behind those big numbers?

by Seth Borenstein

Earth's average temperature set a new unofficial record high on Thursday, the third such milestone in a week that already rated as the hottest on record and what one prominent scientist says could be the hottest in 120,000 years.

But it's also a record with some legitimate scientific questions and caveats, so much so that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has distanced itself from it. It's grabbed global attention, even as the number—63 degrees Fahrenheit (17.23 degrees Celsius)—doesn't look that hot because it averages temperatures from around the globe.

Still, scientists say the daily drumbeat of records—official or not—is a symptom of a larger problem where the precise digits aren't as important as what's causing them.

"Records grab attention, but we need to make sure to connect them with the things that actually matter," climate scientist Friederike Otto of the Imperial College of London said in an email. "So I don't think it's crucial how 'official' the numbers are, what matters is that they are huge and dangerous and wouldn't have happened without climate change."

Thursday's planetary average surpassed the 62.9-degree mark (17.18-degree mark) set Tuesday and equaled Wednesday, according to data from the University of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer, a tool that uses satellite data and computer simulations to measure the world's condition. Until Monday, no day had passed the 17-degree Celsius mark (62.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in the tool's 44 years of records.

Now, the entire week that ended Thursday averaged that much.

Johan Rockstrom, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, called the 63-degree mark "an exceptional outlier" that is nearly 6 degrees warmer than the average of the last 12,000 years. Rockstrom said it will "with high likelihood translate to even more severe extremes in the form of floods, droughts, heat waves and storms."

"It is certainly plausible that the past couple days and past week were the warmest days globally in 120,000 years," University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann said. He cited a 2021 study that says Earth is the warmest since the last age ended, and said Earth likely hasn't been as warm dating all the way to the ice age before that some 120,000 years ago.

Climate scientist Zeke Hausfather of the tech company Stripe and Berkeley Earth temperature monitoring group said he wouldn't be surprised if it is the warmest in 120,000 years. But he said long-term proxy measurements like tree rings aren't precise.

This week's average includes places that are sweltering under dangerous heat—like Jingxing, China, which checked in almost 110 degrees Fahrenheit (43.3 degrees Celsius)—and the merely unusually warm, like Antarctica, where temperatures across much of the continent were as much as 8 degrees Fahrenheit (4.5 degrees Celsius) above normal this week.

Temperatures were so brutally hot Thursday in Adrar, Algeria, that the temperature never got below 103.3 degrees (39.6 degrees Celsius ) even at night when it is supposed to cool. That was the hottest ever nighttime low for Africa, according to weather historian and climatologist Maximiliano Herrera.

The temperature is ramping up across Europe this week, too. Germany's weather agency, DWD, has predicted highs of 37 degrees C (99 degrees F) on Sunday and the Health Ministry has issued a warning to vulnerable people.

While there are small spots of cooler-than-normal temperatures across the globe, the University of Maine measurement is an average. That means some places—including both polar regions—will be extraordinarily warmer than normal and others will be cooler. On average it's about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) warmer than the 1979-2000 average, which is warmer than the 20th and 19th century averages.

And 70% of the world is covered by oceans, which have been spiking record heat for months.

Scientists say the heat is driven by two factors: Long-term warming from greenhouse gas emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and a natural El Nino warming of part of the Pacific that changes weather globally and makes an already warming world a bit hotter.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Thursday issued a note of caution about the Maine tool's findings, saying it could not confirm data that results in part from computer modeling, saying it wasn't a good substitute for observations.

Scientists don't understand and haven't delved much into daily fluctuations, said Princeton University climate scientist Gabriel Vecchi. Much more meaningful to them are global data over months, years and especially decades.

"The fact that we haven't had a year colder than the 20th century average since the Ford administration (1976) is much more relevant," Vecchi said.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said immediacy of daily records is important.

"Tell me that yesterday was the hottest day on record and I can relate the claim to ways in which yesterday's heat constrained my behavior," she said. "I can't do the same with monthly or yearly data. ... We experience the world hour-by-hour, day-by-day, not in monthly or yearly averages."

Discussions about how official the records are aren't as important as the public getting the message "that Earth is warming and humans are responsible," said Max Boykoff, a University of Colorado environmental studies professor who tracks media coverage of climate change.

"The issue of climate change doesn't often get its 15 minutes of fame. When it does, it's usually tied to something abstract like a scientific report or a meeting of politicians that most people can't relate to," said George Mason University climate communications professor Ed Maibach.

"Feeling the heat—and breathing the wildfire smoke, as so many of us in the Eastern U.S. and Canada have been doing for the past month—is a tangible shared public experience that can be used to focus the public conversation," he said.

Monday may have set a global record for the hottest day ever. Tuesday broke it

Study examines centuries of identity lost because of slavery

On average, a random African American born between 1960 and 1965 has about 300 African and 50 European ancestors dating back to 1619, researchers say

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

Many Americans can trace some lines of their family tree back to the 1600s. However, African Americans descended from enslaved Africans, who began arriving in North America in 1619, lack ancestral information spanning several centuries.

A new USC and Stanford study, recently published in Genetics, provides insight into who occupies these missing branches of family trees — and gives a glimpse of how many branches there are.

“Slavery was not that many generations ago, so my family still tells stories about our enslaved ancestors, like who they were and, in my case, how we ended up as light as we are,” said first author Jazlyn Mooney, the Gabilan Assistant Professor of Quantitative and Computational Biology at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. “But these are just stories and that is what most African Americans have left. We don’t have any records or numbers. There’s no tangible data.”

For Mooney, the study sheds light on her personal ancestry. “It’s fairly easy to trace my mother’s side of the family all the way back to the early 1500s,” Mooney said, noting that her mother’s family traces to the medieval Jewish expulsion from Spain and is part of a community that came to New Mexico in the 1600s. “But my father is African American. And in that case, very quickly, we are no longer able to trace anything because of the lack of genealogical records.”

That’s because enslaved African Americans were rarely included in any official records. The 1870 federal census recorded formerly enslaved African Americans by name, and though it is a vital tool for genealogical research, many African Americans are still not able trace their family members to or beyond this document.

This study helps fill in those blank spaces along a typical African American’s family tree. Using computational methods informed by genetic data, researchers estimate that a random African American born between 1960 and 1965 is descended from, on average, 314 African and 51 European ancestors reaching back to 1619. “The rough outline of African-American family trees is well-known. There are many enslaved Africans, as well as some Europeans. But how many? The study asks a new question and gives some estimates,” Mooney said.

Although the research doesn’t reveal precisely who the African and European individuals were, the historical record can provide a general storyline. For example, many of the European ancestors appear in the family tree during the time of slavery, a period marked by prevalent sexual violence and exploitation of enslaved women. What’s more, many of the African ancestors — untraceable through written records — are people who survived the deadly Middle Passage of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, imprisoned and packed into slave ships for trips lasting as long as 80 days.

To conduct the study, researchers created a 14-generation model divided into three time periods:

The first period, 1619-1808, includes the founding of the African American population, with the population formed by Africans and Europeans.
The second period, 1808-1865, is marked by the end of legal importation of enslaved African captives into the United States. The number of new African ancestors declines sharply, and the African American population continues to grow with contributions from Europeans and European Americans continuing.
The third period, 1865-1965, begins with the end of legal enslavement and continues to many African Americans living today. With the end of legal slavery comes reduced contributions from the European and European-American sources; contributions from African sources remain low due to low immigration.

"It’s a powerful method,” said co-author Noah Rosenberg of Stanford. “Genetic ancestry studies usually focus on clustering the genomes of living people. The approach here is different. The ancestry is modeled with an explicit sense of genealogical descent over time.”

The study also notes that some of the famous African Americans whose genealogies have been publicly reported, such as Michelle Obama, were born during the 1960-1965 period.

“It was helpful to think about these well-known people,” Mooney said.

Mooney said that she and her colleagues are working on a computational model that will break the numbers down into their male and female components, which could add more context to African American population history.

“We could also explore adding in different ancestry components,” Mooney said. “For example, some African American individuals have Native American ancestry. This could be studied as well.”

About the study

In addition to Jazlyn Mooney and Noah Rosenberg, other authors of the study are Lily Agranat-Tamir and Jonathan Pritchard, both of Stanford. The work was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (BCS-2116322), by the National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology, by a Council for Higher Education of Israel Scholarship for Outstanding Postdoctoral Fellows in Data Science and by the Stanford Center for Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics.

# # #

JOURNAL

Genetics

DOI

10.1093/genetics/iyad079

Legends of Norse Settlers drove Denmark towards Greenland

The Danish colonisation of Greenland in the 18th century was in part driven by the desire to re-establish contact with early Norse settlers that vanished from the island in the course of the 15th century

Book Announcement

UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN - FACULTY OF HUMANITIES

In 985, Viking explorer Erik the Red led a group of Icelandic farmers to Greenland, where they established a settlement on the west coast. Archaeological evidence suggests that the settlement existed for over 400 years, but the impact of the settlement lasted much longer. It is little recognised today that the hope of finding the descendants of the settlers dominated European and American perspectives on Greenland for centuries

In his new book The Vanished Settlers of Greenland: In Search of a Legend and Its Legacy, Associate Professor Robert Rix argues that the lost Norse settlement played a decisive role in Denmark’s efforts to colonise Greenland during the 18th century.

“Like other New World lands, Greenland became part of European history as a place where a hunt for resources took place. Denmark's possession of Greenland and its waters was challenged especially by the Dutch and the English. Danish claims to the island relied in large parts on the memory of the settlers. Therefore, several manuscripts, books, and maps were produced not only reminding competitors of the settlers but also promoting the idea that their descendants were still cultivating Greenland fields,” says Robert Rix.

He adds:

“The loss of communication with Norse Greenland in the early 15th century gave rise to speculations about the settlers’ fate, and many believed that the settlement still stood. This led to numerous attempts at contacting them, not least because rumours of the settlement’s wealth were circulating in European books. King Christian IV launched as many as three expeditions to look for the vanished settlers and their riches.”

The actual colonisation began in 1721 with the establishment of a colony by missionary Hans Egede, who wanted to convert the Inuit to Christianity and to finance the colony by reconnecting with the Norse settlement and exploiting its resources.

The fantasy of an unspoilt Norse civilisation

Just as other expeditions before his, Egede’s failed to locate the Norsemen, and during the 19th century people began to accept that the Norse settlers were no longer to be found in Greenland.

“Instead, scientists and explorers turned their attention to other parts of the Arctic as potential locations where the vanished settlers might have emigrated. Between 1870 and 1920 this inspired the publication of many adventure stories about isolated colonies of Norsemen, supposed descendants of the bold Viking explorers, who were strong, healthy, and physically impressive,” remarks Robert Rix.

According to Rix, the wide fascination with the Norse settlers in Western culture reflected public anxieties about the detrimental effects of immigration and the decline of civilisation.

“This fantasy is in line with a general critique of supposedly impure societies, which gained prevalence with the advent of eugenics. The fictional Arctic colonies had become communities frozen in time that served as an antidote to the cultural and physical decline of modernity.”

Well into the 20th century, it was hoped that the descendants of the settlers could be found. On a 1912 expedition to Canada’s Victoria Island, the explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson discovered Inuit of a slender build and red-brownish hair. He measured their heads and came to the conclusion that they were descendants of the European settlers who had survived by mixing with the Indigenous population.

The existence of ‘Blond Eskimos’ became a huge media sensation. Modern DNA analysis has disproven any Norse ancestry, but at the time Stefansson’s claim rekindled the old hope that the mystery of the vanished settlers’ fate could be solved.

The Vanished Settlers of Greenland: In Search of a Legend and Its Legacy has been published by Cambridge University Press.

DOI

10.1017/9781009359450

Ontario starts pre-development work for new, large-scale nuclear plant

An aerial view of the Bruce Power site.

The Canadian Press
Published Wednesday, July 5, 2023

TIVERTON, Ont. - Ontario is looking to build the first new, large-scale nuclear plant in more than 30 years in order to meet the province's growing electricity demands.

Energy Minister Todd Smith is announcing today that the government is looking at a new plant to generate up to 4,800 megawatts - enough to power 4.8 million homes - on the site of Bruce Power's current generating station on the shore of Lake Huron in Tiverton, Ont.

The plans are part of the province's attempts to meet electricity demand with non-emitting sources, though in the short- to medium-term the province is also relying on more natural gas generation.

A report late last year by the Independent Electricity System Operator found that the province could fully eliminate natural gas from the electricity system by 2050, starting with a moratorium in 2027, but it will require about $400 billion in capital spending and more generation including new, large-scale nuclear plants.

The province launched consultations on that idea, and Smith says he heard a lot of support for new nuclear, in order to prepare for surging electricity demand in the 2030s from electric vehicles, new electric vehicle and battery manufacturing and electric arc furnaces for steelmaking.

Smith says Bruce Power will now start community consultations and conduct an environmental assessment for federal approval to determine the feasibility of another nuclear plant.

“They have the world's largest operating nuclear facility here right now, with about 6,550 megawatts, providing clean, reliable, emissions-free power to the grid, baseload power,” Smith said in an interview.

“On a daily basis about 30 per cent of Ontario's electricity comes from this site right now. There's room alongside (units) Bruce A and Bruce B, potentially, for a Bruce C and that's what this pre-development work is intended to begin today.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 5, 2023.

The Atomic Blueprint: Algorithmic Breakthrough Unlocks Materials Path to Sustainable Technologies

By UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL JULY 9, 2023

Algorithmic Breakthrough Fuels Quest for New Crystals

The atomistic structure of the crystalline material garnet corresponds to the crater on the potential energy surface full of rough mountains, hills, and valleys. Finding it computationally is very hard, but by fixing a mesh on this surface, advanced algorithms and quantum computers can be used to find the lowest lying vertex. A subsequent tweak reveals the garnet structure, which comes with the optimality guarantee. Credit: University of Liverpool

A mathematical algorithm developed by University of Liverpool researchers could signal a step change in the quest to design the new materials that are needed to meet the challenge of net zero and a sustainable future.

New research by the University of Liverpool could signal a step change in the quest to design the new materials that are needed to meet the challenge of net zero and a sustainable future.

Publishing in the journal Nature, the Liverpool researchers have shown that a mathematical algorithm can guarantee to predict the structure of any material just based on knowledge of the atoms that make it up.

Developed by an interdisciplinary team of researchers from the University of Liverpool’s Departments of Chemistry and Computer Science, the algorithm systematically evaluates entire sets of possible structures at once, rather than considering them one at a time, to accelerate the identification of the correct solution.

This breakthrough makes it possible to identify those materials that can be made and, in many cases, to predict their properties. The new method was demonstrated on quantum computers that have the potential to solve many problems faster than classical computers and can therefore speed up the calculations even further.

Our way of life depends on materials – “everything is made of something”. New materials are needed to meet the challenge of net zero, from batteries and solar absorbers for clean power to providing low-energy computing and the catalysts that will make the clean polymers and chemicals for our sustainable future.

This search is slow and difficult because there are so many ways that atoms could be combined to make materials, and in particular so many structures that could form. In addition, materials with transformative properties are likely to have structures that are different from those that are known today, and predicting a structure that nothing is known about is a tremendous scientific challenge.

Professor Matt Rosseinsky, from the University’s Department of Chemistry and Materials Innovation Factory, said: “Having certainty in the prediction of crystal structures now offers the opportunity to identify from the whole of the space of chemistry exactly which materials can be synthesized and the structures that they will adopt, giving us for the first time the ability to define the platform for future technologies.

“With this new tool, we will be able to define how to use those chemical elements that are widely available and begin to create materials to replace those based on scarce or toxic elements, as well as to find materials that outperform those we rely on today, meeting the future challenges of a sustainable society.”

Professor Paul Spirakis, from the University’s Department of Computer Science, said: “We managed to provide a general algorithm for crystal structure prediction that can be applied to a diversity of structures. Coupling local minimization to integer programming allowed us to explore the unknown atomic positions in the continuous space using strong optimization methods in a discrete space.

Our aim is to explore and use more algorithmic ideas in the nice adventure of discovering new and useful materials. Joining efforts of chemists and computer scientists was the key to this success.”

The paper “Optimality Guarantees for Crystal Structure Prediction” was published on July 5 in the journal Nature.

Reference: “Optimality guarantees for crystal structure prediction” by Vladimir V. Gusev, Duncan Adamson, Argyrios Deligkas, Dmytro Antypov, Christopher M. Collins, Piotr Krysta, Igor Potapov, George R. Darling, Matthew S. Dyer, Paul Spirakis and Matthew J. Rosseinsky, 5 July 2023, Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06071-y

The research team includes researchers from the University of Liverpool’s Departments of Computer Science and Chemistry, the Materials Innovation Factory and the Leverhulme Research Centre for Functional Materials Design, which was established to develop new approaches to the design of functional materials at the atomic scale through interdisciplinary research.

This project has received funding from the Leverhulme Trust and the Royal Society.

Unearthing Rare Earth Elements – Scientists Use AI To Find Rare Materials

By PNAS NEXUS JULY 9, 2023

Pink crystal spodumene. Credit: Robert Lavinsky

By harnessing patterns in mineral associations, a new machine-learning model can predict the locations of minerals on Earth and potentially, other planets. This advancement is of immense value to science and industry, as they continually explore mineral deposits to unravel the planet’s history and to mine resources for practical applications, such as rechargeable batteries.

A team led by Shaunna Morrison and Anirudh Prabhu aimed to develop a method for identifying the occurrence of particular minerals, an objective that has traditionally been considered as much an art as it is a science. This process has often been dependent on individual experience along with a healthy dose of luck.

The team created a machine learning model that uses data from the Mineral Evolution Database, which includes 295,583 mineral localities of 5,478 mineral species, to predict previously unknown mineral occurrences based on association rules.

The authors tested their model by exploring the Tecopa basin in the Mojave Desert, a well-known Mars analog environment. The model was also able to predict the locations of geologically important minerals, including uraninite alteration, rutherfordine, andersonite, and schröckingerite, bayleyite, and zippeite.

In addition, the model located promising areas for critical rare earth elements and lithium minerals, including monazite-(Ce), and allanite-(Ce), and spodumene. Mineral association analysis can be a powerful predictive tool for mineralogists, petrologists, economic geologists, and planetary scientists, according to the authors

Reference: “Predicting new mineral occurrences and planetary analog environments via mineral association analysis” by Shaunna M Morrison, Anirudh Prabhu, Ahmed Eleish, Robert M Hazen, Joshua J Golden, Robert T Downs, Samuel Perry, Peter C Burns, Jolyon Ralph and Peter Fox, 16 May 2023, PNAS Nexus.
DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad110

Stunning View of powerful Cyclone Mocha Closing In on Mount Everest

By EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY (ESA) JULY 9, 2023

The Copernicus Sentinel-3 satellite captured a comprehensive image of Cyclone Mocha, a record-breaking storm that originated in the Indian Ocean and ravaged the Bay of Bengal in May 2023. With peak winds of 280 km per hour, it ranks among the strongest storms ever in the North Indian Ocean. Despite weakening slightly before reaching Bangladesh and Myanmar, it still caused widespread damage upon landfall, leading to the loss of homes, infrastructural damage, and inundated croplands. Credit: Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2023), processed by ESA

Cyclone Mocha, a powerful storm, wreaked havoc across the Bay of Bengal in May 2023. The Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission provided vital satellite imagery, aiding disaster response and revealing large-scale global dynamics, including the eastern part of the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau.

The Copernicus Sentinel-3 mission captured this image of the powerful Cyclone Mocha on May 13, 2023, as it made its way across the Bay of Bengal heading northeast towards Bangladesh and Myanmar.

Cyclone Mocha originated in the Indian Ocean, and it gradually intensified while moving toward the Bay of Bengal. Winds topped 280 km per hour (175 miles per hour), making it one the strongest storms on record in the North Indian Ocean, similar to Cyclone Fani, which hit the same area in May 2019.

Although the storm weakened slightly as it approached Myanmar and Bangladesh, it caused widespread destruction as it made landfall on May 14.

With thousands of people losing their houses, infrastructure seriously damaged and croplands inundated, both the International Charter Space and Major Disasters and the Copernicus Emergency Mapping Service were triggered to supply maps based on satellite data to help civil protection authorities and the international humanitarian community with their emergency response efforts.

Satellites orbiting Earth can provide indispensable up-to-date information to observe such events, as shown here from Copernicus Sentinel-3. The mission is designed to measure, monitor and understand large-scale global dynamics and provides essential information in near-real time for ocean and weather forecasting.

Acquired with the Ocean and Land Colour Instrument, this wide view covers an area of over 2000 km from north to south. The storm is estimated to be more than 1000 km (600 miles) across.

In the cloud-free portion on top of the image, we can see parts of India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Myanmar, as well as the entire country of Bhutan. The white snow-capped mountains of the eastern part of the Himalayas, including Mount Everest, the highest mountain on the planet, are clearly visible. The Tibetan Plateau – part of China – appears in brownish colors owing to the absence of vegetation.

Moss: An Unassuming Pillar of Planetary Health

By UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES JULY 9, 2023

Mosses, often overlooked and misunderstood, play a vital role in the health of the global environment, according to a study by UNSW Sydney. The research, conducted across diverse ecosystems worldwide, revealed mosses’ importance in ecosystem health, carbon capture, soil nutrient cycling, organic matter decomposition, pathogen control, and preventing erosion.

While many individuals view the growth of moss in their gardens as a nuisance, they may not know that this ancient ancestor of all vegetation carries numerous advantages for our green spaces, including its significant role in combating soil erosion.

Now, a comprehensive global study led by UNSW Sydney discovered that mosses are not merely advantageous to our gardens, but they also critically contribute to the overall health of our planet, especially when growing on the topsoil. Mosses establish the groundwork for plant growth in ecosystems worldwide, and could potentially play a pivotal role in climate change mitigation through their substantial carbon capture capabilities.

In a study published today in the journal Nature Geoscience, lead author Dr. David Eldridge and more than 50 colleagues from international research institutions described how they collected samples of mosses growing on soil from more than 123 ecosystems across the globe, ranging from lush, tropical rainforest, to barren polar landscapes, through to arid deserts like those found in Australia. The researchers found that mosses cover a staggering 9.4 million km2 in the environments surveyed, which compares in size to Canada or China.

“We were originally really interested in how natural systems of native vegetation that haven’t been disturbed much differ from human-made systems like parks and gardens – our green spaces,” says Dr Eldridge, who is with UNSW’s School of Biological, Earth & Environmental Sciences.

“So for this study, we wanted to look at a bit more detail about mosses and what they actually do, in terms of providing essential services to the environment. We looked at what was happening in soils dominated by mosses and what was happening in soils where there were no mosses. And we were gobsmacked to find that mosses were doing all these amazing things.”

It turns out that mosses are the lifeblood of plant ecosystems, that plants actually benefit from having moss as a neighbor. The researchers assessed 24 ways that moss provided benefits to soil and other plants. In patches of soil where mosses were present, there was more nutrient cycling, decomposition of organic matter, and even control of pathogens harmful to other plants and people.

On top of that, the authors say mosses may be instrumental in reabsorbing carbon dioxide. They estimated that compared to bare soils where there was no moss, this ancient precursor to plants is supporting the storage of 6.43 gigatonnes – or 6.43 billion tonnes – of carbon from the atmosphere. These levels of carbon capture are of a similar magnitude to levels of carbon release from agricultural practices such as land clearing and overgrazing.

“So you’ve got all the global emissions from land use change, such as grazing, clearing vegetation, and activities associated with agriculture – we think mosses are sucking up six times more carbon dioxide, so it’s not one to one, it’s six times better,” Dr Eldridge says.

The researchers say that the positive ecological functions of soil mosses are also likely associated with their influence on surface microclimates, such as by affecting soil temperature and moisture.

What exactly is moss?

Mosses are different from vascular plants. They have roots and leaves, but their roots are different, with root-like growths called rhizoids that anchor them to the soil surface.

“Mosses don’t have the plumbing that an ordinary plant has, called a xylem and a phloem, which water moves through,” Dr Eldridge says.

“But moss survives by picking up water from the atmosphere. And some mosses, like the ones in the dry parts of Australia, curl when they get dry, but they don’t die – they live in suspended animation forever. We’ve taken mosses out of a packet after 100 years, squirted them with water, and watched them come to life. Their cells don’t disintegrate like ordinary plants do.”

Without moss, our ecosystems would be in big trouble, says Dr Eldridge. He is amazed that people often see moss as a problem in urban settings when it’s actually playing an important role in nature.

“People think if moss is growing on soil it means the soil is sterile or has something wrong with it. But it’s actually doing great things, you know, in terms of the chemistry of the soil, like adding more carbon and nitrogen, as well as being primary stabilizers when you get lots of disturbance.”

He says when you lose moss through land clearing or natural disturbances, you lose the ability to hold the soil together, leading to erosion.

“And it means you’re going to lose nutrients, you’re going to lose habitat for microbes, the whole system becomes destabilized.”

Moss can even come to the rescue in disturbed ecosystems. Dr. Eldridge points to research examining the area around Mount St Helens Volcano following a devastating eruption in the early 1980s. Most of the flora and fauna were denuded near the eruption site, but researchers who tracked how life returned to the mountain noticed that mosses were among the first forms of life to reappear.

“The first things to come back were cyanobacteria, blue-green algae, because they’re very primitive, and then mosses came back,” he says.

“What we show in our research is that where you have mosses you have a greater level of soil health, such as more carbon and more nitrogen. So they’re helping to prime the soil for the return of trees, shrubs, and grasses, that eventually end up getting out-competed in the process. So they’re the first guys that get in there and fix things up and then first to leave.”

Up next

Future research aims to examine whether urban mosses can create healthy soils as effectively as those growing in natural areas.

“We are also keen to develop strategies to reintroduce mosses into degraded soils to speed up the regeneration process,” Dr Eldridge says. “Mosses may well provide the perfect vehicle to kick start the recovery of severely degraded urban and natural area soils.”

Reference: “The global contribution of soil mosses to ecosystem services” by David J. Eldridge, Emilio Guirado, Peter B. Reich, Raúl Ochoa-Hueso, Miguel Berdugo, Tadeo Sáez-Sandino, José L. Blanco-Pastor, Leho Tedersoo, César Plaza, Jingyi Ding, Wei Sun, Steven Mamet, Haiying Cui, Ji-Zheng He, Hang-Wei Hu, Blessing Sokoya, Sebastian Abades, Fernando Alfaro, Adebola R. Bamigboye, Felipe Bastida, Asunción de los Ríos, Jorge Durán, Juan J. Gaitan, Carlos A. Guerra, Tine Grebenc, Javier G. Illán, Yu-Rong Liu, Thulani P. Makhalanyane, Max Mallen-Cooper, Marco A. Molina-Montenegro, José L. Moreno, Tina U. Nahberger, Gabriel F. Peñaloza-Bojacá, Sergio Picó, Ana Rey, Alexandra Rodríguez, Christina Siebe, Alberto L. Teixido, Cristian Torres-Díaz, Pankaj Trivedi, Juntao Wang, Ling Wang, Jianyong Wang, Tianxue Yang, Eli Zaady, Xiaobing Zhou, Xin-Quan Zhou, Guiyao Zhou, Shengen Liu and Manuel Delgado-Baquerizo, 1 May 2023, Nature Geoscience.
DOI: 10.1038/s41561-023-01170-x

The study was funded by the British Ecological Society, the Hermon Slade Foundation, the Spanish Ministry of Science, the European Research Council, the AEI Project, the Program for Introducing Talents to Universities, the Slovenian Research Agency, and the NSF Biological Integration Institutes.

Native Americans demand land back from Ben & Jerry's after stolen land tweet

NO THEY DON'T ARTICLE IS A SET UP

The Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk Abenaki Nation has expressed interest in reclaiming the land after the ice cream company called for the return of "stolen" lands.

JPOST STILL PISSED AT B&J BDS CALL

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
Published: JULY 9, 2023 00:01

Ben & Jerry's ice creams on sale at a shop in Jerusalem on July 19, 2021.
(photo credit: YONATAN SINDEL/FLASH 90)
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The Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk Abenaki Nation, an indigenous tribe descended from the Native American nation that originally inhabited the land where Ben & Jerry's headquarters is located in Vermont, has expressed interest in reclaiming the land after the ice cream company called for the return of "stolen" lands, according to a report by Newsweek.

Chief Don Stevens of the Nulhegan Band stated that they were "always interested in reclaiming the stewardship of our lands," but Ben & Jerry's has not yet approached them on the matter.

Ben & Jerry's recent statement

This development follows Ben & Jerry's recent statement ahead of the United States' Independence Day, acknowledging that the United States was founded on stolen indigenous land and calling for the return of such lands to indigenous people.

The company emphasized the "land back" movement, which aims to restore governance of ancestral lands to indigenous communities who inhabited them for thousands of years.

Ben & Jerry's ice cream sundae (credit: Wikimedia Commons)

"This 4th of July, it's high time we recognize that the US exists on stolen Indigenous land and commit to returning it," Ben & Jerry's wrote on their Twitter with a picture with the statement "The United States was founded on stolen Indigenous land. This Fourth of July, let's commit to returning it."

This 4th of July, it's high time we recognize that the US exists on stolen Indigenous land and commit to returning it. Learn more and take action now: https://t.co/45smaBmORH pic.twitter.com/a6qp7LXUAE— Ben & Jerry's (@benandjerrys) July 4, 2023

While Ben & Jerry's focused primarily on the land taken from the Lakota in South Dakota, it prompted discussions about the return of land to various Native American tribes across the nation.

The question of acknowledging historic tribal lands is complex and contentious, as it involves reconciling the claims of Native Americans, who suffered violent persecution and displacement, with the established borders of a modern nation.

Whose land is the Ben & Jerry's factory sitting on?

Maps reveal that the Abenaki, a confederacy of tribes untied against rival tribal confederacies, controlled a vast area stretching from northern Massachusetts to New Brunswick, Canada, and from the St. Lawrence River to the East Coast.

Ben & Jerry's headquarters, situated in southern Burlington, falls within the western portion of this historic territory, although it does not reside within any present-day tribal lands.

Chief Don Stevens expressed the tribe's interest in reclaiming stewardship of their lands and providing opportunities to uplift their communities.

However, he clarified that the Nulhegan Tribe has not been approached by Ben & Jerry's regarding any land restitution opportunities.

Stevens stated that if such discussions were to occur, careful conversations and considerations would be necessary to determine the best way forward for all parties involved.

Ben & Jerry's has not responded publicly to the calls for returning the land on which their headquarters is situated.

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Sunday, July 09, 2023