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)
Tuesday, January 04, 2022
Paraguayan soldier killed by deer in presidential garden
A chital deer -- a herd of which is shown here in Guatemala in 2015 -- gored a soldier to death in the grounds of the Paraguayan presidential palace (AFP/JOHAN ORDONEZ)
Tue, January 4, 2022
A sergeant in the Paraguayan presidential guard died after he was gored by a deer roaming the grounds of the presidential palace, a military spokesman said on Tuesday.
Victor Isasi "died from a perforation in the thorax" after he was attacked by the deer at dawn, said Colonel Victor Urdapilleta.
The chital, a native of the Indian subcontinent, is among several animals kept in the 10 hectare gardens of President Mario Abdo Benitez's official residence near the capital Asuncion.
The grounds mostly host native species such as rheas, macaws and an mborevi (a South American tapir), said Urdapilleta.
"On the security camera you can see (the sergeant) enter the sector where these animals are and he makes a movement (lifts a hand) that provokes the deer's reaction," said Urdapilleta.
The soldier was on a routine patrol.
Urdapilleta said the next of kin would be compensated.
Frederic Bauer, director of wildlife at the environment ministry, said the chital was part of a litter reared on a government ranch in Paraguay.
He admitted that "it is not appropriate to have exotic animals in captivity but there is no regulation."
Urdapilleta also said the officials responsible for the presidential grounds had consulted with the environment ministry before incorporating chitals in the gardens.
hro/nn/bc/bgs
Israel agrees to release Palestinian prisoner on hunger strike
Hisham Abu Hawwash, who was detained without charge or trial, to end 141-day hunger strike after reaching deal with Israel to be released on February 26.
Relatives of Palestinian prisoner Hisham Abu Hawwash, who is held by Israel, celebrate after he ended his hunger strike, in Dura, occupied West Bank [Mussa Qawasma/Reuters]
Published On 4 Jan 20224 Jan 2022
A Palestinian prisoner who has been on hunger strike for 141 days to protest being imprisoned without charge has agreed to end his fast after reaching a deal with Israel to be released next month, his lawyer said.
Hisham Abu Hawwash, a 40-year-old father of five, is the latest of several Palestinians to go on hunger strike to protest being held under “administrative detention”, a measure where a prisoner is held indefinitely without charge or trial.
Administrative detainees are arrested on “secret evidence”, unaware of the accusations against them, and are not allowed to defend themselves in court.
Abu Hawwash’s lawyer, Jawad Boulos, said on Tuesday that he agreed to end the hunger strike after Israel pledged to release him on February 26. There was no immediate comment from Israeli officials.
Palestinians have rallied across the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip in support of Abu Hawwash. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad had threatened military action against Israel if he died in custody.
Prisoner groups had warned that Abu Hawwash faced “imminent danger of death”.
Abu Hawwash is the latest of several prisoners who have in recent weeks refused food and water to protest their detention. Hunger strikers are usually hospitalised for prolonged periods until Israeli authorities agree to their release.
Like many before him, Abu Hawwash was hospitalised last month. During the last few days, he slipped in and out of a coma, and temporarily lost his eyesight and his ability to speak, according to local media reports.
Al Jazeera’s Nida Ibrahim, reporting from Ramallah, said there had been “many fears” over Abu Hawwash’s life and that his wife and lawyer were in the hospital with him on Tuesday evening.
His hunger strike was the longest since an eight-month-long hunger strike launched by freed prisoner Samer Issawi that ended in 2013.
‘Risked his life’
The Palestinian Prisoners Club said Israel has recently intensified the use of administrative detention, which is why there has been an uptick in the number of prisoners launching hunger strikes in a bid to combat the measure that denies individuals the right to due process.
The group also said that more than 1,600 orders of administrative detention against Palestinian prisoners were issued in 2021 alone
To date, there are at least 500 administrative detainees held across Israeli prisons and detention facilities, according to the Addameer prisoners’ rights group.
Milena Ansari, prisoner support advocate from Addameer, welcomed the announcement that Abu Hawwash would be released.
“This is excellent news,” Ansari told Al Jazeera from Ramallah. “[But] not being immediately released isn’t fair … since there is no charge,” she said.
This is to “emphasise the mockery of the trials that take place … without any charges or any fair trial guarantees,” Ansari said.
Abdel Latif al-Qanou’, spokesman for Hamas – the group that governs Gaza – said a “new victory” has been made by Abu Hawwash that “confirms our people and our detainees’ ability to win every battle they wage against the occupation”.
UN Spokesman Stephane Dujarric welcomed the deal agreed with Abu Hawwash.
“We have always made it clear that detainees must be tried according to legal procedures or released,” Dujarric said.
The 2.5 million Palestinians living in the West Bank are subject to Israeli military courts, while Jewish settlers living in illegal settlements and outposts are citizens subject to Israel’s civilian justice system.
Israel captured the West Bank in the 1967 war, but Palestinian leaders want it to form the main part of their future state.
SOURCE: AL JAZEERA AND NEWS AGENCIES
Yamaha And Kawasaki Join Forces To Build Hydrogen Engines
Could carbon-neutral fuels just be the internal combustion engine’s saving grace?
Jan 04, 2022 By: Enrico Punsalang
With electric motorcycles popping up left and right, and from a multitude of manufacturers both big and small, has the motorcycle industry all but resigned itself to the eventual demise of the internal combustion engine. Well, simply put, the answer is no. We’ve talked about how several companies such as Ducati and Porsche are investing heavily in the research of alternative fuels with bio-renewable components, also known as biofuels.
On top of that, a middleground between the outright electrification of two-wheelers seems to be hybridization—something we’re seeing in small scooters in the Asian market. There’s also hydrogen power, something that Kawasaki has been working on for a while now. Now, in an interesting turn of events, another renowned Japanese manufacturer is joining forces with Kawasaki. Yamaha has taken a seat at the table alongside Team Green. The two companies will be working together to develop new hydrogen engines for use in future motorcycle models.
Kawasaki has long seen hydrogen as an alternative fuel for its vehicles. It currently has technology that demonstrates the feasibility of hydrogen made from Australian brown coal in internal-combustion engines. Additionally, Kawasaki Heavy Industries is also the proprietor of the world’s first liquefied hydrogen carrier, called ‘The Suiso Frontier.’ Apart from motorcycles, Kawasaki also seeks to manufacture hydrogen powered-engines for heavy-duty vehicles and equipment such as land and sea craft, as well as a hydrogen-powered turbine generator.
Meanwhile, Yamaha, too, has expressed its solid intentions of going green. In fact, the company has goals of achieving 100 percent carbon-neutrality by 2050. In the not-so-distant-future, we can expect to see other major players join Kawasaki and Yamaha in the race to produce hydrogen-powered two-wheelers. Suzuki and Honda have also laid out plans of exploring alternative fuels and carbon-neutral solutions alongside the development of electric vehicles.
A new, Yale-led study suggests the 21st century will see an expansion of hurricanes and typhoons into mid-latitude regions, which includes major cities such as New York, Boston, Beijing, and Tokyo.
Writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, the study's authors said tropical cyclones—hurricanes and typhoons—could migrate northward and southward in their respective hemispheres, as the planet warms as a result of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. 2020's subtropical storm Alpha, the first tropical cyclone observed making landfall in Portugal, and this year's Hurricane Henri, which made landfall in Connecticut, may be harbingers of such storms.
"This represents an important, under-estimated risk of climate change," said first author Joshua Studholme, a physicist in Yale's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and a contributing author on the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sixth assessment report published earlier this year.
"This research predicts that the 21st century's tropical cyclones will likely occur over a wider range of latitudes than has been the case on Earth for the last 3 million years," Studholme said.
Co-authors of the study are Alexey Fedorov, a professor of oceanic and atmospheric sciences at Yale, Sergey Gulev of the Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Kevin Hodges of the University of Reading.
While an increase in tropical cyclones is commonly cited as a harbinger of climate change, much remains unclear about how sensitive they are to the planet's average temperature. In the 1980's, study co-author Emanuel used concepts from classical thermodynamics to predict that global warming would result in more intense storms—a prediction that has been validated in the observational record.
Yet other aspects of the relationship between tropical cyclones and climate still lack physically based theory. For example, there is no agreement among scientists about whether the total number of storms will increase or decrease as the climate warms, or why the planet experiences roughly 90 such events each year.
"There are large uncertainties in how tropical cyclones will change in the future," said Fedorov. "However, multiple lines of evidence indicate that we could see more tropical cyclones in mid-latitudes, even if the total frequency of tropical cyclones does not increase, which is still actively debated. Compounded by the expected increase in average tropical cyclone intensity, this finding implies higher risks due to tropical cyclones in Earth's warming climate."
Typically, tropical cyclones form at low latitudes that have access to warm waters from tropical oceans and away from the shearing impact of the jet streams—the west-to-east bands of wind that circle the planet. Earth's rotation causes clusters of thunderstorms to aggregate and spin up to form the vortices that become tropical cyclones. Other mechanisms of hurricane formation also exist.
As the climate warms, temperature differences between the Equator and the poles will decrease, the researchers say. In summer months, this may cause weakening or even a split in the jet stream, opening a window in the mid-latitudes for tropical cyclones to form and intensify.
For the study, Studholme, Fedorov, and their colleagues analyzed numerical simulations of warm climates from Earth's distant past, recent satellite observations, and a variety of weather and climate projections, as well as the fundamental physics governing atmospheric convection and planetary-scale winds. For example, they noted that simulations of warmer climates during the Eocene (56 to 34 million years ago) and Pliocene (5.3 to 2.6 million years ago) epochs saw tropical cyclones form and intensify at higher latitudes.
"The core problem when making future hurricane predictions is that models used for climate projections do not have sufficient resolution to simulate realistic tropical cyclones," said Studholme, who is a postdoctoral fellow at Yale. "Instead, several different, indirect approaches are typically used. However, those methods seem to distort the underlying physics of how tropical cyclones form and develop. A number of these methods also provide predictions that contradict each other."
The new study derives its conclusions by examining connections between hurricane physics on scales too small to be represented in current climate models and the better-simulated dynamics of Earth's jet streams and north-south air circulation, known as the Hadley cells.More hurricanes likely to slam Connecticut and region due to climate change, says study
More information:Studholme, J. et al, Poleward expansion of tropical cyclone latitudes in warming climates.Nat. Geosci.(2021).doi.org/10.1038/s41561-021-00859-1
In August 2021, Elon Musk announced that Tesla would build a humanoid robot designed to “eliminate dangerous, repetitive, boring tasks” and respond to voice commands, promising to show off a prototype in 2022. Can the company deliver on Musk’s goal?
Tesla has achieved a great deal since Musk founded the electric car firm in 2003: building a valuation of $1 trillion, selling in excess of half a million cars and installing a global network of more than 2000 charging stations for them. But there have also been failures and delays.
Musk promised to have a million self-driving taxis on the road by 2020. He has long touted the imminent arrival of full autonomy for his cars; scheduled a Tesla lorry for production in 2020 and a Cybertruck soon after in 2021. All of those deadlines have been or are due to be missed. Musk himself has admitted that he lacks punctuality but insists that most of his predictions come to pass eventually. Advertisement
The robot, referred to as Optimus inside the company, will be 173 centimetres tall and weigh 57 kilograms, and it will be able to carry a cargo of up to 20 kilograms, according to Musk’s presentation in August.
He said much of the technology in Tesla’s self-driving cars is applicable to humanoid robots and should give them a head start. “Tesla is arguably the world’s biggest robotics company because our cars are like semi-sentient robots on wheels,” he said. “It kind of makes sense to put that onto a humanoid form.” Read more: What’s next now Tesla is worth a trillion dollars?
Tetsuya Ogata at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan, believes that engineering of the robot must be progressing well, or the company wouldn’t make such bold claims. But he expects that it will not only run into AI problems, where Tesla certainly has a lot of experience, but hardware problems, where it doesn’t, because humanoid robots are much more complex than cars.
“It’s very difficult to develop robot hands that can perform the same tasks as a human,” he says. “How to reproduce senses that allow tactile feedback is also a big problem.”
Zhongyu Li at the University of California, Berkeley, says he admires the vision, but thinks the deadline is “very ambitious”. He expects Tesla to hit its target of demonstrating a prototype of some kind, but perhaps encounter problems bringing it to market.
“Getting a prototype to walk for some short demos is not that challenging for their clever engineers, but getting humanoid robots to reliably operate in daily life is another story. It needs reliable hardware, a robust control algorithm that can prevent the robot falling, recover from a fall, and detect and avoid obstacles, and these may take years,” he says.
Others believe that the technology is possible, but not in the slender form that Musk promises. Florian Richter at the University of California, San Diego, points to the Atlas robot from Boston Dynamics which can run, jump and perform a range of tasks, but which also has a bulky body and a large backpack-style battery pack.
“They have a lot of work to do. I think their goal of a hardware prototype within a year is totally feasible, but with probably half of their desired power and some sort of weight compromise,” says Richter. “They also should be able to get it walking around on flat surfaces pretty quickly, but other human-level tasks like grasping will take a few years of research and a lot of innovation.”
Neither Tesla nor Elon Musk responded to a request for interview.
DECRIMINALIZE IT Germany’s medicinal cannabis start-ups are blooming as it eyes move to legalise recreational use Image shows a person handling a cannabis plant. Germany's new governing coalition is taking steps to legalising the sale of the drug to adults for recreational use. - Copyright Pexels
By Euronews and AP • Updated: 04/01/2022 - 13:54
A former slaughterhouse in Dresden, Germany is now home to row after row of cannabis plants.
They were planted in November, with the first harvest due in January which will mark the first legal, large scale harvest of cannabis on German soil.
The leaves will be turned into cannabis flour and used in legal medical marijuana products.
The company behind the plantation is called Demecan.
The Berlin-based company was one of three to win tenders from the German cannabis agency to produce cannabis in Germany. The two other companies are still working on their production.
"It is actually something very new. It is a unique facility that we have here in Germany. One of the only German facilities to cultivate medicinal cannabis," said Constantin von der Groeben, managing director of Demecan
"And what we see here is our first batch of medicinal cannabis that we are currently cultivating. This facility will then, next year, output one tonne of dried cannabis flour. So, a thousand kilograms."
Medical cannabis products were legalised by the Federal Government in Germany in 2016. But the new government, under Chancellor Olaf Scholz, that took over in December 2021, wants to go a step further and legalise the sale of cannabis for recreational use to adults in specialised, licensed shops. It would be similar to the legislation that is in place in Canada and some US states.
In Berlin, several start-ups with a cannabis focus have been founded over the last few years.
One is the Sanity Group which specialises in medical cannabis products as well as self-care products containing cannabis CBD oil, which is extracted from the cannabis plant.
Fabian Friede, co-founder of Sanity Group, welcomes the move towards legalisation.
"So, I think overall, on the macro level, the direction is the right one. I think moving towards recreational use of cannabis is awesome. Also, easing up the prescription of medicinal cannabis is awesome," he says.
"But as you already said, it is all about the details. And therefore, I think we are super curious, and the waiting time is the hardest because we would love to start preparing and of course, we do that already. Preparing in every direction, because we don't know exactly in which direction it is going."
Germany’s new coalition
The new German government consists of three parties in a coalition: the Social democratic party, the Green Party, and the Liberal Free Democrats party.
There will be more start-ups. There will be more companies. There will be a whole industry, a sector being around. From regulation, from delivery to the dispensaries, to the logistics
Finn Hänsel
Co-founder, Sanity Group
Before the parties started governing together, they agreed on a coalition contract of over 170 pages which is where the move towards legalisation of cannabis for recreational use is set out.
The documents specify that licensed shops will be allowed to sell cannabis to adults, but apart from that there are not many details.
There is also no firm time plan, but since the government has a mandate period of four years, it is implied that this is the longest possible time frame.
"There will be more start-ups. There will be more companies. There will be a whole industry, a sector being around. From regulation, from delivery to the dispensaries, to the logistics," said Finn Hänsel co-founder of the pharmaceutical company Sanity Group.
"So, I think that it will really be a boom, creating a lot more jobs, creating a lot more tax revenues for the government. So, I actually think, even though it will obviously be competition for us, I think it is good for the market. And to be honest, there is nothing better than healthy competition."
There has been some criticism of the plan, specifically from parts of the Christian democratic CDU party that governed Germany for 16 years under Angela Merkel.
There are worries that younger people will have easier access to cannabis from older friends and relatives, and there are people that say it won't decrease crime, but that criminal gangs will move to other drugs or sell the cannabis cheaper than the stores.
The view of the police is that we are adding another drug to the drugs that are already legal, such as nicotine and alcohol, and that we might get another widely used 'people's- drug' in the form of cannabis. And as a police officer I have my doubts about this because it will change the society. But also, for us in the police, we will with some certainty get more work to do.
Jörg Radek
Vice-president, German Police Union GdP
Friede says the concerns will need to be addressed in the final legislation.
"Yes, I understand that there are risks involved with it. I mean, if we are looking at the usage of cannabis for minors and everything, then of course, we need to address that in the details," he said.
"We need to address these risks. But I think not doing anything is also not a solution. Because people are using cannabis, they are just using it in a lower quality, coming from a black market, supporting organised crime. How is that better than the alternative?"
The argument that organised crime will have one less market and the state will in turn have one more avenue for tax revenue was often raised in debates about legalising cannabis in Germany.
But one of two major police unions in the country is sceptical.
"The view of the police is that we are adding another drug to the drugs that are already legal, such as nicotine and alcohol, and that we might get another widely used 'people's- drug' in the form of cannabis," said Jörg Radek, vice president of the German Police Union GdP
"And as a police officer I have my doubts about this because it will change the society. But also, for us in the police, we will with some certainty get more work to do."
Centerra outlines expected settlement terms with Kyrgyz government
Seized mine settlement?
The Canadian Press - Jan 3, 2022 / Photo: Centerra
Centerra Gold Inc. has outlined its expected terms to settle a dispute with the Kyrgyz Republic over a gold mine the country seized last year.
The government took over the Kumtor mine in May 2021 citing environmental and safety concerns, though the country has also long accused the company of not paying enough taxes.
The Toronto-based gold miner has denied those allegations and says it is in ongoing negotiations with government representatives to settle matters.
It says it expects any settlement to include Centerra receiving the 26.1 per cent of its shares held by Kyrgyzaltyn JSC, a state-owned company, and for the two nominees from that company on Centerra's board to resign.
Centerra says it also expects the Kyrgyz Republic to take all responsibility for the Kumtor mine and to release the company of any claims and to stop all legal proceedings.
It says as part of a settlement it will pay the cash dividends to the Kyrgyz company that it did not pay last year.
Centerra reported a US$926.4 million loss last August on the change of control of Kumtor, while the company continues to operate mines in British Columbia and Turkey. Centerra Gold confirms talks with Kyrgyzstan for out-of-court settlement over mine dispute
Canada’s Centerra Gold on Monday confirmed it was in talks with the Kyrgyzstan government for an out-of-court settlement over a dispute in which the state seized the company’s Kumtor mine.
In May 2021, Centerra kicked off arbitration against the former Soviet republic after it took over the country’s biggest mine for allegedly posing danger to human lives or the environment. The company has denied all the allegations.
The company also froze the government’s stake when it seized the mine, meaning it does not have voting rights, nor is it entitled to dividends.
Centerra on Monday laid out a framework for any resolution of the dispute, saying it should receive around 26.1% of its common stock held by state-owned Kyrgyzaltyn JSC.
It also said the state should assume all responsibility for the company’s two Kyrgyz subsidiaries as well as the Kumtor mine.
“At present, the parties are finalizing the discussion of an amicable agreement, including, among other things, the condition for the full transfer of the Kumtor Gold Company to the Kyrgyz Republic,” Kyrgyzstan President Sadyr Zhaparov said in a statement dated Jan. 2.
Centerra and Kyrgyzstan have a long history of disputes over how to share profit from the 550,000-ounce gold mine.
(By Rithika Krishna; Editing by Ramakrishnan M.)
Wildfires Are Digging Carbon-Spewing Holes in the Arctic
Soaring temperatures are rapidly thawing permafrost, leading to huge sinkholes called thermokarst. Northern fires are making the situation even worse.
PHOTOGRAPH: CHRISTIAN ANDRESEN AND MARK LARA
A PERFECT STORM is ravaging the Arctic—literally. As the world warms, more lightning systems are igniting more peat fires. They burn through ancient buried plant material and release great plumes of greenhouse gases, which further warm the planet. At the same time, as plant species march north thanks to a more hospitable climate, the Arctic is greening. That darkens the landscape and absorbs more of the sun’s energy, further heating the region. It also provides more fuel to burn; dried plants above ground ignite more readily than permafrost, which is made from frozen dirt or sand or gravel mixed with dead plants. But permafrost is now thawing so rapidly that it’s creating massive sinkholes in the earth, up to 100 feet wide and 10 feet deep, a process known as thermokarst.
New research shows how wildfires are exacerbating this land-gouging in north Alaska. After analyzing satellite and aircraft imagery going back to the 1950s, scientists calculated that thermokarst formation has accelerated by 60 percent since then. In the past 70 years, wildfires have burned 3 percent of the landscape but are responsible for 10 percent of thermokarst formation.
“We found that after wildfire activity, the rate in which thermokarst occurs on the landscape is higher for upwards of eight decades,” says plant biologist Mark Lara of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, coauthor of a paper describing the research published in December in the journal One Earth. The cratering creates pits of melted ice and organic matter, which absorb far more solar energy than snow. “If you follow those pits over years to decades, they start to grow and keep growing and getting larger and larger and larger over time. And they all stemmed from that initial small depression after a fire disturbed the tundra,” he continues.
Tundra brings to mind desolation, but this region is in fact packed with life. There aren’t tall trees, but there are lots of grasses and shrubs. These typically trap a layer of snow on the ground; the snow insulates the earth by bouncing the sun’s energy back into space. This encourages the growth and persistence of permafrost, which can sequester thousands of years’ worth of carbon.
PHOTOGRAPH: DIGITAL GLOBE
But that insulation is being undone by climate change, which is heating the Arctic four times as fast as the rest of the planet. “In an undisturbed tundra ecosystem, permafrost is protected by the overlying vegetation and soil organic layers from warming climate,” says climate scientist Yaping Chen of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, lead author on the new paper. “However, when fire occurs, it kills vegetation and removes the insulating organic layers to allow heat to penetrate downward along the soil profile that melts the permafrost.”
That’s allowing vegetation to dry out more easily and giving it more opportunities to ignite during increasingly frequent lightning storms. (More heat means more hot air rising into the atmosphere, which is how thunderclouds form.) Hotter temperatures due to climate change already trigger the thawing that creates thermokarst, the way an ice cube might melt slowly on your countertop. But a wildfire is like holding a flame to that cube.
To make matters worse, the wildfire darkens the ground by charring it, so it will now heat up even more quickly in the sun. If the landscape is level, a neat pit of melted ice will form and grow, because water also readily absorbs solar radiation. All the vegetation that was previously locked in the ice will also sink to the bottom of the watery pit, darkening it even more.
Permafrost is basically a refrigerator for organic matter—and if it warms and thaws, microbes start to proliferate within it, just as they would on your food if you unplugged your fridge. Only these tundra microbes are chewing through millennia-old organic matter, releasing methane, a greenhouse gas that’s 80 times as potent as carbon dioxide. (If there isn’t standing water in the thawed permafrost and the plant material is drier, the microbes will release CO2 instead, but that’s less likely because the craters tend to create little ponds.)
“With thermokarst you expose deeper and deeper layers of permafrost to the thawing, much more efficiently than without thermokarst,” says University of Alaska Fairbanks permafrost geophysicist Vladimir Romanovsky, who wasn’t involved in the work. “The thermokarst process can turn a surface which was relatively dry into some sort of wetland, and wetlands are producers of of methane.”
PHOTOGRAPH: CHRISTIAN ANDRESEN AND MARK LARA
New vegetation grows in the pit, and when it dies it rots in this soggy environment, also producing planet-warming gases. So a landscape that was once fairly dry, with carbon locked in the ground, is now much more actively belching emissions. A gradual permafrost thaw would have done this slowly, but the creation of thermokarst kicks the process into overdrive.
At the moment, climate models just aren’t equipped to consider such complexity. “Presently, most studies—especially modeling works—are focused on gradual permafrost thaw, which releases carbon from ground surface,” says Chen. “However, thermokarst formation will expose ancient carbon deep in the soil column to active decomposition. Once initiated, the carbon loss from these horizons may never recover.” According to one study from a separate international team of scientists, without taking this kind of abrupt thaw into account, scientists may be underestimating the climate effect of thawing permafrost by 50 percent.
Across the Arctic, hotter temperatures are already pockmarking landscapes with thermokarst pits, but climate change is also changing the wildfire “regime,” or the way that blazes start and behave. Hotter temperatures create more dry fuel, which allows for fires to become bigger and more intense, and therefore more destructive to the ecosystem and underlying permafrost. And while the team’s modeling only looked at northern Alaska, Lara says that this tundra system is similar to others around the world, particularly in Siberia. “That region is just being lit up and really, really heavily disturbed by wildfire,” says Lara. “A lot of the implications for the amount of thermokarst could be applicable to what they're seeing over there as well.”
“It's really an upending of a system,” Lara adds. “It's pretty crazy how fast things are changing.”
Why don’t we throw all our trash into a volcano and burn it up?
Volcanoes might seem like nature’s incinerators, but using them to burn up trash would be dangerous and disrespectful to indigenous people who view them as sacred.
But not all lavas are the same temperature. The eruptions in Hawaii produce a type of lava called basalt. Basalt is much hotter and more fluid than the lavas that erupt at other volcanoes, like the thicker dacite lava that erupts at Mount St. Helens in Washington state. For example, the 2004-2008 eruption at Mount St. Helens produced a lava dome with surface temperatures less than about 1,300 F (704 C).
There are 161 volcanoes in 14 U.S. states and territories. Scientists monitor them and warn nearby communities if they see signs that a volcano may erupt. USGS
Beyond temperature, there are other good reasons not to burn our trash in volcanoes. First, although lava at 2,000 degrees F can melt many materials in our trash – including food scraps, paper, plastics, glass and some metals – it’s not hot enough to melt many other common materials, including steel, nickel and iron.
The third problem is that dumping trash into those eight active lava lakes would be a very dangerous job. Lava lakes are covered with a crust of cooling lava, but just below that crust they are molten and intensely hot. If rocks or other materials fall onto the surface of a lava lake, they will break the crust, disrupt the underlying lava and cause an explosion.
This happened at Kilauea in 2015: Blocks of rock from the crater rim fell into the lava lake and caused a big explosion that ejected rocks and lava up and out of the crater. Anyone who threw garbage into a lava lake would have to run away and dodge flaming garbage and lava.
An eruption from the Cumbre Vieja volcano on the Spanish island of La Palma on Sept. 30, 2021, produced clouds of toxic gas.
Suppose it was possible to dump trash safely into a lava lake: What would happen to the trash? When plastics, garbage and metals burn, they release a lot of toxic gases. Volcanoes already give off tons of toxic gases, including sulfur, chlorine and carbon dioxide.
Finally, many indigenous communities view nearby volcanoes as sacred places. For example, Halema’uma’u crater at Kilauea is considered the home of Pele, the native Hawaiian goddess of fire, and the area around the crater is sacred to native Hawaiians. Throwing trash into volcanoes would be a huge insult to those cultures.
According to legend, the devil once took a walk down the side of a volcano in southern Italy, each step preserved forever in solid rock.
The tracks are known as the "Ciampate del Diavolo"' or "Devil's Trail" – but details published in 2020 reveal a less diabolical yet far more interesting story on how they came to be.
The mysterious footprints are well known to those living near Roccamonfina, an extinct volcano in southern Italy that hasn't erupted in tens of thousands of years.
Since 2001, researchers have sought to explain the dozens of impressions left by a small group of human ancestors and even a few animals snaking their way down the mountainside.
But a paper published in January 2020 suggested some individuals were actually heading back up.
Over recent years numerous expeditions have provided detailed measurements on a total of 67 indentations left by the scuffle of feet, hands, and legs, all divided across three distinct tracks headed away from the mountain's summit.
Thanks to the contributions by a team of scientists from institutes across Italy, we obtained details on a further 14 prints – these even larger than the others – some of which head up the mountain rather than down.
Radiometric and geological dating of the various rock strata have already established that the imprints were cast in the soft blanket of ash left in the wake of an eruption around 350,000 years ago, making them some of the oldest preserved human footprints on record.
But just who left these tracks? It's impossible to say for certain based on an assortment of dull shapes pressed awkwardly in time-worn volcanic sediment.
There seemed to be at least five different bodies behind the marks. Further investigations could help whittle down ideas on the sex, body mass, and perhaps even heights of the trekkers.
Given our own Homo sapiens ancestors developed their characteristic traits only 315,000 years ago, we can be pretty confident they weren't members of our own species.
But the researchers have some clues.
One of the clearer imprints provides clear evidence of a grown human male.
And the shapes of many of the footprints point to an interesting possibility. The broad nature of the hindfoot area, with the low rise of the arch, looks suspiciously like the feet of individuals buried in the Sima de los Huesos "Pit of Bones".
Assuming they truly are Neanderthals, it's a reasonable – even if not solid – bet that the footprints were left by a gang of young Neanderthal adults.
Still, the researchers were careful about jumping to conclusions.
"We have decided to keep the attribution to a specific species still pending," lead researcher Adolfo Panarello told New Scientist's Michael Marshall back in January 2020.
Just what inspired an ancient group of hominids to go trouncing through the cooling soot and debris after the mountain violently blew its lid is anybody's guess, though it's clear from the impressions that nobody was in a hurry.
Based on the leisurely pace of around 1 meter per second (3.2 feet per second), the handful of footsteps heading uphill, and a scattering of basalt artifacts found in the vicinity, we might imagine this was just another day in the life by an active volcano.
Slowly treading barefoot through material freshly deposited by a 300 degree Celsius (572 Fahrenheit) flow of billowing pyroclastic insanity isn't exactly for the faint-hearted either, no matter how tough your soles might be.
Going on a back-of-the-envelope calculation, the researchers estimated the blanket would need to have cooled to at least 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit), meaning at least several hours needed to have passed between an eruption and the trek.
We might well imagine members of a community living in the shadow of a mountain known to occasionally spew out hot clouds of poisonous gas and muddy ash, with a small band setting across a familiar path to check out the carnage.
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