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)
Credit: Tianzeng Chen, Biwu Chu, Jinzhu Ma, Qingxin Ma, Qian Liu, Shuxiao Wang, Kebin He, Jincai Zhao, Hong He
A Views & Comments article published in Engineering systematically unpacks the growing ozone pollution challenge across China and lays out two complementary technical frameworks to stabilise and lower tropospheric ozone concentrations, drawing on multi-year atmospheric monitoring, chamber simulation and field test evidence from national environmental research teams.
Since the launch of China’s Clean Air Action Plan, nationwide ambient PM₂.₅ levels have maintained steady declines, yet surface ozone has emerged as a persistent secondary air pollutant with fluctuating upward trends across major urban agglomerations including the expanded 2+36 city cluster around Beijing, Tianjin and Hebei. Ozone now outpaces fine particulate matter as the primary pollutant on more air quality monitoring days, with regional average daily maximum 8-hour ozone readings consistently exceeding the secondary grade threshold set by China’s National Ambient Air Quality Standard, and sitting far above the long-term exposure safety benchmark issued by the World Health Organization. The paper clarifies that ozone forms via nonlinear photochemical coupling cycles between nitrogen oxides (NOₓ) and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), with formation sensitivity split into three distinct regimes: NOₓ-limited, VOC-limited and transitional zones, differentiated by the regional ratio of the two precursor emissions as evaluated through empirical kinetic modelling approach (EKMA).
The study traces the core drivers of sustained ozone elevation to mismatched emission reduction progress between the two precursors. Anthropogenic NOₓ emissions recorded a notable drop between 2013 and 2017, while VOC abatement lagged significantly; uneven cuts weakened NO-driven titration effects and lifted ozone levels, with most Chinese urban and industrial zones currently operating under VOC-limited ozone formation conditions, while rural areas fall under NOₓ-limited chemistry. Meteorological shifts compound this trend: falling PM₂.₅ burdens increase surface solar radiation flux and reduce radical quenching by particulate surfaces, creating a chemical “seesaw relationship” between PM₂.₅ and ozone that has already broken down into positive pollutant correlation across southern China, allowing coordinated control of both pollutants. Warming temperatures further accelerate photochemical reaction rates and boost emissions of biogenic volatile organics and volatile chemical products, amplifying ozone generation amid China’s dense industrial and urban precursor loadings.
For mitigation, the paper identifies large-scale NOₓ reduction as a more practically deliverable short-term precursor control strategy compared to broad VOC cuts. VOC sources are widely dispersed, mixing biogenic and diffuse anthropogenic streams with immature end-of-pipe treatment technologies, whereas NOₓ mainly stems from stationary combustion facilities and vehicle engines with mature removal systems including coal plant NH₃-selective catalytic reduction and automotive three-way and urea-SCR devices. Smog chamber and box model simulations confirm urban ozone will shift to NOₓ-limited status and begin declining only after deep NOₓ emission cuts, a pattern validated by COVID-19 lockdown observational data where extreme NO₂ suppression reversed earlier ozone growth trends. The paper notes region-tailored coordinated NOₓ-VOC reduction at optimal ratios remains the most theoretically effective long-term control route, yet deep NOₓ cuts represent the more actionable near-term pathway.
As a supplementary technical solution, the paper outlines ambient ozone direct catalytic decomposition coatings engineered for urban artificial surfaces including building exteriors. Low-cost transition metal catalysts blended into standard exterior coatings enable spontaneous ozone breakdown into oxygen under ambient temperature and humidity without external energy input. Field trials confirm consistent ozone decomposition activity across different distances from coated surfaces, and the technology carries modest cost increments over conventional building paint. Widespread deployment across China’s dense built environments can deliver localized ozone removal at a far lower projected economic cost than joint NOₓ-VOC precursor abatement, forming the technical foundation of the proposed “environmental catalytic city” and self-purifying urban design frameworks aligned with national green building and dual-carbon development targets.
The paper “Ozone Pollution in China: Current Status and Control Strategies,” is authored by Tianzeng Chen, Biwu Chu, Jinzhu Ma, Qingxin Ma, Qian Liu, Shuxiao Wang, Kebin He, Jincai Zhao, Hong He. Full text of the open access paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.eng.2025.06.044. For more information about Engineering, visit the website at https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/engineering.
Heat transforms clusters of RNA into liquid-like droplets. The study found that temperature can alter the physical properties of RNA condensates, allowing a more networked structure to relax into rounded droplets.
BUFFALO, N.Y. — It’s one of the origins of life’s chicken-or-the-egg problems: How could RNA have helped give rise to the first cells before there were cells to contain them?
Without the compartmentalization of a cell, it would have been extremely difficult for these vulnerable molecules to have found enough of each other in the proverbial primordial soup, let alone survive the harsh conditions of the early Earth.
The answer could lie in RNA’s ability to assemble together into liquid-like droplets, or condensates. These membraneless compartments could have concentrated RNA molecules, increasing opportunities for them to interact and potentially sheltering them from a hot and acidic environment.
Now, a new study led by the University at Buffalo is shedding light on what makes RNA particularly adept at forming these droplets. Published July 31 inNature Communicationsunder the journal’s early access guidelines, the study found that a tiny chemical difference between RNA and DNA helps explain why RNA more readily organizes into droplets when temperatures rise — and why those droplets are more prone to becoming rigid, gel-like networked structures.
“These findings reveal, for the first time, how remarkably small changes in molecular chemistry can control the emergence of much larger, self-organized biomolecular structures like RNA condensates,” says lead corresponding author Priya R. Banerjee, PhD, Twentieth Century Club Professor in the UB Department of Physics. “They could allow us to eventually address even deeper questions, like whether these condensates helped bridge the gap between simple molecules and the earliest forms of life.”
The study was done in collaboration with Jerelle Joseph, PhD, assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering at Princeton University. It was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and Hypothesis Fund.
Study addresses questions on RNA world theory
The work is part of Banerjee’s research related to RNA world theory, which suggests that RNA played a central role in originating life on Earth. RNA molecules can both carry genetic information and catalyze chemical reactions, which could have allowed them to perform the chemistry that eventually gave rise to DNA, proteins and the first cells.
But RNA world theory faces fundamental questions, including how unstable RNA could have persisted under harsh prebiotic conditions and how enough RNA molecules could have become concentrated in one place to interact before cells existed.
RNA droplets could provide an answer. A 2023 study led by Banerjee found that RNA has a tendency to organize itself into liquid-like droplets under high temperatures.
Building off that work, the current study compared RNA’s droplet forming abilities with single-stranded DNA containing essentially the same sequences.
In their experiments, Banerjee’s group showed that RNA began forming droplets at temperatures roughly 10 degrees Celsius lower than the corresponding DNA, showing that RNA had a stronger tendency to condense. They also found that RNA molecules more readily formed interconnected networks within the droplets, transforming the material from fluid-like to more gel-like, which could protect RNA better under harsh environmental conditions.
A key reason appears to lie in the fact that RNA and DNA differ chemically by just one oxygen atom per sugar unit. Each sugar unit in RNA contains a chemical group called a 2′-hydroxyl (2′-OH) that is absent in DNA.
Using temperature-controlled microscopy, small-angle X-ray scattering and molecular-dynamics simulations performed by the Joseph group, the team found that the 2′-OH appears to help RNA interact more strongly with magnesium ions and retain fewer water molecules around its backbone than DNA does. Those differences help RNA molecules come together more readily as temperatures rise, the researchers found.
The researchers further tested the 2′-OH's role by chemically modifying it to 2′-Ome, similar to what’s found in many natural RNA. Doing so weakened RNA's tendency to condense and altered whether the resulting condensates remained fluid or became gel-like.
“This single oxygen-containing group on RNA’s sugar has a surprisingly powerful effect on whether these molecules come together, remain dynamic or become arrested into a gel-like material,” says first author Gable Wadsworth, PhD, a postdoc in Banerjee’s lab who will join the University of Texas at El Paso as an assistant professor this fall.
The Banerjee lab is now taking the next step: engineering RNA droplets to perform some basic functions of cells such as biochemical reactions. They are attempting to program the droplets to function as active, dynamic, cell-sized compartments, providing a potential foundation for designing all-RNA synthetic cells.
“These kinds of self-organizing RNA compartments were possibly a step along the way to single-cell organisms,” Banerjee says.
A paper published today in the journal Science lays out a roadmap for broadening access to the process of discovering molecular tools that can benefit society, including medicines, materials, and a wide range of everyday consumer products. In parallel, the Molecule Maker Lab (MML) at the Beckman Institute, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, announced the formation of a global Task Force charged with prospectively developing safeguards to minimize the risks and maximize the benefits of democratizing molecular innovation.
In “Bonding Carbons Iteratively,” author Martin D. Burke, the May and Ving Lee Professor for Chemical Innovation at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and founding Director of the Molecule Maker Lab (MML) at the Beckman Institute, describes a modular approach for making molecules called “blocc chemistry.” This method builds small molecules via iterative assembly of prefabricated building blocks, or “bloccs.” Unlike traditional chemical synthesis — which for nearly two centuries has relied on highly specialized, largely inaccessible human expertise — blocc chemistry allows carbon-carbon bonds, the backbone connections in nearly all organic molecules, to be assembled iteratively and automatically. This feature opens the door to robotic synthesis, AI-guided molecular discovery, and participation by nonspecialists, including students and citizen scientists.
“Blocc chemistry enables automation of organic synthesis, rapid generation of modular datasets for training AI models, and broadened access to molecular innovation,” said Burke. Early demonstrations of the approach have already contributed to AI-guided discovery of top-in-class organic laser emitters, durable organic solar cell materials, and other functional molecules.
Burke also emphasized that broadened accessibility needs to be coupled with shared responsibility. As he writes in the paper, “it is important to establish safeguards and best practices to ensure that small-molecule discovery is leveraged safely and responsibly,” pointing to biosecurity models such as the International Biosecurity and Biosafety Initiative for Science as a starting point for what governance of democratized molecular innovation could look like — including centralized monitoring of automated synthesis, algorithmic flagging of potentially dangerous compounds, and independent auditing of governance practices.
To translate that call into action, the MML is assembling an international Task Force of global thought leaders — spanning chemistry, artificial intelligence, medicine, industry, science education, students, and community members — to prospectively shape safeguards that can guide and govern this technology as it scales.
“We wanted to be way out in front of this,” said Burke. “Democratized molecular innovation is coming, and the world needs to get ready for it. The caliber of people already stepping forward to join this Task Force shows just how seriously the field is taking this responsibility.”
The Task Force is expected to convene its first discussions this month, with a consensus report anticipated in early 2027.
About the Molecule Maker Lab (MML)
The Molecule Maker Lab is working to make blocc chemistry accessible to anyone in the search for new molecules that benefit society. This opens meaningful possibilities — think medicines for unmet medical needs, technologies for sustainable energy, and progress on some of the world's most pressing challenges.
The Perspective, “Bonding Carbons Iteratively” by Martin D. Burke, publishes in Science on August 20, 2026 (DOI: 10.1126/science.aeg5569).
A cell with in vitro transcribed mRNAs. The dots represent individual mRNAs. Red and cyan colors represent the RNA, while the green color represents antibodies detecting the translation signal. The scientists quantify the translation signal to measure translation dynamics.
In a new study, scientists from Johns Hopkins Medicine report that an experimental mRNA-based platform has the potential to help deliver next-generation mRNA therapeutics, including vaccines fighting against infectious disease, cancer and autoimmune conditions, faster and more efficiently than the industry standard.
In experiments with cells from people and mice, researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) compared an experimental mRNA platform, N4-acetylcytidine (ac4C), against the industry standard mRNA platform, N1-Methylpseudouridine (m1Ψ), the chemical modification used in COVID-19 mRNA vaccines, which is being widely studied for delivering potential cancer and autoimmune disease vaccines.
The study, funded and co-led by the NIH, was published July 1 in Nature.
“Our results show that ac4C causes cells to produce more therapeutic proteins to fight disease than the industry standard mRNA platform,” says Bin Wu, Ph.D., associate professor of biophysics and biophysical chemistry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. “This may eventually lead to more efficient drugs that require smaller doses.”
There are more than 170 known RNA modifications, but only a small subset of those have been studied for mRNA therapeutic purposes, Wu says. In experiments, the NIH scientists had previously demonstrated how ac4C, a naturally occurring modification, may enhance mRNA translation, thereby having the potential to speed up and build proteins.
Wu says this research began when co-corresponding author Shalini Oberdoerffer, Ph.D., senior investigator in the Laboratory of Receptor Biology and Gene Expression at National Cancer Institute, gave a talk about ac4C at Johns Hopkins University in 2024. Wu, who uses biophysics to study mechanisms of mRNA modifications, proposed a research collaboration to better understand the behavior of individual RNA molecules.
While m1Ψ is a safe and effective mechanism for drug delivery, the researchers say this study reveals how ribosomes that travel along single strands of mRNA containing m1Ψ may slow down and cause traffic jams, which in turn creates less protein that trigger an immune response, Wu says.
In their experiments, the scientists used lipid nanoparticles to mimic how vaccines work, inserting the mRNA modifications, ac4C and the industry m1Ψ, into cultured human dendritic cells derived from monocytes, or white blood cells that support the immune system, and mouse liver cells.
Comparing the two mRNA modifications, the scientists used an imaging technique developed by Wu’s lab, called single-molecule imaging of nascent peptides, using an advanced microscope to track individual mRNAs as they produced therapeutic proteins within the cells.
“Our imaging revealed that ribosomes travel nearly twice as fast on the ac4C-modified mRNA, preventing the ribosomal traffic jam we may encounter with the industry standard mRNA platform,” Wu says.
Further, Wu says, the imaging demonstrated that these irregularly translated ribosomes on the m1Ψ platform caused premature termination or frameshifting, making less or compromised proteins. In contrast, the ac4C platform resulted in smoother mRNA translation, preventing ribosomal roadblocks and producing more and better proteins that may boost therapeutic effects, Wu says.
“We propose this ribosome collision as a model for why the industry standard may create less proteins,” Wu says. “In the future, this could help us investigate potential therapeutics that require smaller doses, but which create more protein and a better immune response.”
In addition to Wu and Oberdoerffer, other scientists who contributed to this research include Blake W. Nelson, Leslie Watkins, Yining Zhu, Jingyao Ma and Hai-Quan Mao from Johns Hopkins Medicine; Sarah Schiffers, Maria Prigge, Shriya Krishna, Nishu Tyagi, Hamid Beiki and Ayush Raman from NCI; and Sudipto Das and Thorkell Andresson from Leidos Biomedical Research.
Funding for this research was provided by the National Institutes of Health (R01GM138770, R35GM161776, RF1NS113820, T32GM007445, T32GM144272, P41EB028239 and U01AI155313).
Journal
Nature
Paleontologists spent 20 years carbon-dating thousands of marine fossils, then used them to decode a process fundamental to Earth’s history
Scientists carbon-dated more than 7,500 marine fossils from ocean beds around the world and used that data to determine which environmental factors are most responsible for mixing together fossils from different time periods in the same stratum.
Paleontologists spent 20 years carbon-dating thousands of marine fossils, then used them to decode a process fundamental to Earth’s history
Key points
Over the course of 20 years, an international team of scientists collected and carbon-dated more than 7,500 marine fossils from ocean beds around the world.
Scientists used the dataset to determine which of several environmental factors contributes most to time averaging, a phenomenon in which organisms that lived in different time periods are mixed and preserved together in the same fossil bed.
The results indicate that sedimentation is more important than other factors, such as the number of burrowing animals in a given area or the durability of fossils.
The study, published in the journal PNAS, establishes guidelines regarding the types of research questions paleontologists can investigate using fossil samples.
GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- In productive marine environments, a square meter of seafloor can be perforated by hundreds to thousands of isolated and interconnected tunnels through which crawl and writhe a cornucopia of clams, shrimp, sea stars, sand dollars, snails, worms and other animals. All that excavation mixes up the sediment, along with any shells and other skeletal remains that happen to be there. This temporal smearing is a problem for paleontologists, because when that piece of seafloor is buried and becomes part of the fossil record, it’s difficult and expensive to figure out how much mixing took place.
“What continually amazes me is just how much time a bunch of fossils collected from a single sediment layer can represent. In some cases, well-preserved fossil organisms that are found next to each other might have lived hundreds or thousands of years apart,” wrote Rafal Nawrot, a paleontologist at the University of Vienna.
The mixing of fossils that lived at different times but are preserved together is called time averaging.
According to Daniele Scarponi, a colleague of Nawrot’s and an associate professor at the University of Bologna, time averaging dictates the types of questions paleontologists can ask.
“Before interpreting a fossil assemblage, we need to know the interval it represents. Some fossil assemblages are like the ruins of Pompeii — buried rapidly and thus providing a snapshot of past communities frozen in time. Others are more akin to a prehistoric graveyard used continuously over centuries, in which human remains from different generations are slowly accumulating over time. Both types can provide valuable insights into the past, but the kinds of data we can extract from them will be different in each case,” Scarponi wrote.
In addition to burrowing animals, several other factors influence time averaging, including:
The durability of organic material is important. Most organisms decompose or get picked apart by scavengers before they become fossilized. For this reason, both the marine and terrestrial fossil records are primarily composed of hard skeletal material, like shells and bones. But even these break and disintegrate if they aren’t preserved quickly enough.
Another important factor is the rate of sedimentation, which occurs unevenly in different parts of the ocean and changes through time. Deltas, for example, have high rates of sedimentation, whereas other areas might only receive a fine dusting over long periods of time. If sedimentation is slow, skeletal remains of organisms accumulate over long periods of time, but if sedimentation is fast, the remains are buried quicker, and age mixing is reduced.
Biological productivity is also crucial. The number of fossils paleontologists can expect to find while digging in one spot is strongly correlated with the number of organisms that were previously around to be fossilized in the first place.
Through a project that was 20 years in the making, members of an international consortium of scientists say they have determined which of these factors is the most important for time averaging and thus primarily controls the temporal resolution of paleontological data.
“Our results demonstrate that if we know how quickly sediment accumulates — which can be deduced from the environmental context — we can determine how much time is captured by a given fossil assemblage: The faster individual shells or bones are buried below the sediment surface, the less likely it is that remains from multiple generations of organisms will accumulate and be preserved together,” Nawrot wrote.
Sedimentation rates have long been anticipated to be an important component of time averaging, but gathering data needed to rigorously and comprehensively assess this issue is difficult, time-consuming and very expensive.
By integrating multiple projects, the authors analyzed more than 7,500 fossils, which were dated using radiocarbon and other methods and collected from a variety of oceanic environments around the world, from shallow coastal settings to the edges of continental shelves.
The various research groups involved in the project — which includes scientists based in Australia, Austria, the Bahamas, Brazil, Italy, Germany, Slovakia and the United States — separately collected, studied and published papers on the fossils over a period of two decades. When they learned of each other’s work, they decided to join forces and share data.
“Nothing of this scale has ever been attempted before because it’s simply not feasible to do so, but thanks to the fact that we had a whole bunch of teams that worked on similar topics and used similar methods, we were able to compile it,” said the study’s co-lead author, Michal Kowalewski, the Thompson chair of invertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History.
Radiometric dating, one of the primary methods the authors used, takes advantage of the fact that radioactive atoms always decay into more stable, non-radioactive atoms at a steady, predictable rate. This allows scientists to estimate the age of minerals and fossils.
Many animals have skeletons that contain a type of radioactive isotope called carbon-14. Plants absorb carbon-14 during photosynthesis and use it to make more of themselves. Herbivores get carbon-14 secondhand by eating plants, carnivores get it from herbivores, and decomposers get it from all of the above. This list includes humans. Any part of your body that contains carbon — which is every part of your body — is radioactive. Fortunately, carbon-14 emits radiation in the form of electrons, which for us is kind of like receiving a constant but imperceptibly low-level electric shock — not at all like the cell-shredding gamma rays emitted by uranium.
Carbon-14 has a half-life – the amount of time it takes for half of any given number of radioactive atoms to decay — of around 5,730 years. That meant the authors were restricted to the most recent fossil record, up to 55,000 years old, which is about the cutoff when any remaining carbon-14 in a fossil can be reliably measured.
The researchers also used a technique known as amino-acid racemization, which uses ratios of amino acids. As in the case of carbon isotopes, the ratio of different forms of a given amino acid also changes through time in a predictable way.
The reason no one has attempted dating on such a grand scale before is primarily due to the high cost of radiocarbon and amino-acid dating. Most research groups can afford to obtain data for only a few dozen specimens, but thousands of specimens are needed to fully evaluate the scale and drivers of time averaging. Distributing the cost across multiple labs over two decades helped significantly reduce this barrier, as did recent technological advances in radiometric dating that lowered the cost and made it possible to use much smaller samples than was previously possible.
Through this unique collaboration, Kowalewski and his colleagues have what is possibly the largest collection of fossil carbon dates ever compiled, which can now be used on a variety of research topics that would have been intractable otherwise.
“The dataset is incredibly powerful. We’re now working on multiple follow-up projects that explore various aspects of time averaging and related processes. You can use it to answer a lot of questions, but of course, we started with the big one,” he said.
After compiling the carbon dates from their fossil specimens, the authors simulated age distributions by varying the rates of bioturbation (mixing caused by burrowing animals), sedimentation and fossil destruction. Then they compared the real age distribution of carbon-dated fossils with the different simulated distributions to see which of the models most closely matched the actual patterns observed in the data.
The results were unambiguous.
“Sometimes life turns out to be more exciting than you thought,” Kowalewski said. “In this case, the outcome is beyond any dreams we may have had when we started.”
Knowing that the rate of sedimentation is the single most important factor in determining the extent to which fossils of different ages become mixed will unlock research avenues that were previously restricted. And assuming the same pattern holds true for oceans further back in time, the results can be extended to fossils that are much older than the ones that still contain residual amounts of carbon-14.
The authors published their results in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Additional co-authors of the study are: Adam Tomašových of the Slovak Academy of Sciences; Martin Zuschin, Bettina Bachmann, Michaela Berensmeier and Jan Steger of the University of Vienna; Paolo Albano of the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn; Quan Hua of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation; Darrell Kaufman of Northern Arizona University; Susan Kidwell of the University of Chicago; Matias Ritter of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul; Marcello Simões of the Universidade Estadual Paulista; Luis Torres Jr. of the Florida Museum of Natural History; Lukas Schweigl of the University of Bologna; Troy Dexter of the University of The Bahamas; Ivo Gallmetzer of the Natural History Museum Vienna; Claudio Pellegrini of the National Research Council of Italy; and Matthew Kosnik of Macquarie University.
Sediment accumulation rate predicts the temporal resolution of marine fossil assemblages
SUNY Potsdam Faculty awarded National Science Foundation grant to study paleosalinity of ancient sedimentary rocks
SUNY Potsdam professors Dr. Page Quinton and Dr. Michael Rygel awarded $411,477 from National Science Foundation to further research on Devonian-Permian sedimentary rocks
Seen here placing minerals in the Geology Museum displays at SUNY Potsdam, Dr. Michael Rygel (left) and Dr. Page Quinton (right) were recently awarded a new grant from the National Science Foundation to support their research on the salinity of ancient sedimentary rocks.
Two SUNY Potsdam geoscientists have been awarded a National Science Foundation grant to investigate the chemistry of ancient waters preserved in sedimentary rocks across Atlantic Canada, research that could shed new light on the evolution of life on land and the distribution of energy and mineral resources.
Dr. Page Quinton and Dr. Michael Rygel, faculty members in SUNY Potsdam’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, were recently awarded $411,477 from the NSF for their project, "Salinity, Source Rocks, and Cyclothems: Using Paleosalinity Proxies to Track Marine Influence in the Maritimes Basin.” This three-year project will provide paid research experiences for SUNY Potsdam undergraduates and will involve field work in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland.
“Beyond its pure scientific value, gaining a better understanding of the chemistry of these ancient waters could potentially improve our understanding of the distribution of energy and mineral resources in this part of the world,” Quinton said. “The techniques are new, and our background and expertise make us uniquely well qualified to do this work. Many of these rocks are exposed along remote and rugged parts of the coast… some are even along the shore of the Bay of Fundy and subject to the world’s highest tides.”
The Maritimes Basin contains thousands of feet of Devonian-Permian (about 419 to 251-million-year-old) sedimentary rocks of global significance. These strata comprise two UNESCO World Heritage Sites, have supported more than 200 years of resource-based economic activity, and have yielded important insights into Earth's organisms, ecosystems and evolutionary patterns.
“The rocks that we will be working on in Atlantic Canada provide a remarkably detailed and complete record of life fully conquering the terrestrial realm. Specifically, these rocks contain things like trackways of early amphibians, skeletal material from the oldest unequivocal reptiles, the first land snails, spectacular fossilized forests, the oldest evidence of parental care in synapsids (mammals and their extinct mammal-like ancestors), and the first evidence of coordinated movement of groups of organisms across the landscape,” Rygel said. “All of these things happened in or adjacent to wetlands that could have been fresh, brackish, or marine … we have no idea. Geologists have been wondering about the chemistry of these wetlands for nearly 200 years, and I’ve been thinking about it for over 25 years.”
Despite the importance of these rocks, fundamental questions about water chemistry during their deposition remain unanswered. This research will identify intervals that were influenced by marine waters and provide new information about the conditions that shaped the evolution of plant and animal life on land and the nature and distribution of economic resources in the basin.
“Traditionally, understanding how salty the waters were requires finding certain types of fossils. Despite nearly 200 years of looking, we’ve not found more than a handful of useful fossils. It could be that we’ve just not found them yet, it could be that something about the water chemistry made it difficult for certain types of life, or maybe the conventional approaches don’t work there. Rather than hoping we get lucky and finding the right kind of fossils, the new geochemical techniques that we will use will allow us to analyze the rocks directly and determine the chemistry of the waters that they formed in,” Quinton said.
The project will also provide paid hands-on research experience for undergraduate students, as well as teaching and research experience for future K-12 Earth science teachers—giving SUNY Potsdam undergraduates the opportunity to take part in high-impact practices.
“We will have our students participate in every aspect of the research process and operating as a research team will be great preparation for graduate school or the workforce. This experience will make them more competitive for what comes next because it will provide them with direction about what kinds of projects (field-based, lab-based, or both) they are interested in pursuing,” Rygel said. “These kinds of experiences allow students to take the theory they learn about in lecture and the skills they learn in lab and apply them to real world problems.”
This is not the first NSF-funded collaboration for Quinton and Rygel. In 2021, they received a $370,113 NSF Research in Undergraduate Institutions grant to investigate Earth's ancient climate cycles while mentoring student researchers through field studies in Montana and Texas.
They have also collaborated on developing a campus Geoscience Garden, and co-authored an open educational research textbook to benefit their students.
Dr. Page Quinton is a stable isotope geochemist who studies the connection between the carbon cycle, ancient climate change, and major mass extinction events. Research she conducted with colleagues at El Kef, Tunisia, received international attention when it was published in the journal Science in 2018. Recent work has included research focusing on the role of climate change in the dinosaur mass extinction event, understanding the impact of early land plants on shallow seas, and understanding the connection between sea level change and carbon cycling. This work has taken her to Australia, Canada and all over the U.S.
Dr. Michael Rygel has deep family ties to the steel mills and coal mines of western Pennsylvania, and his research focuses on understanding the Paleozoic-aged rocks that these industries were built on. Specifically, he is a sedimentologist and stratigrapher who specializes in understanding ancient environments. His past research projects have focused on outcrops in the coal-bearing rocks in the Appalachian Basin in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, and the Maritimes Basin in Atlantic Canada, as well as coeval ancient glacial deposits in southeastern Australia.
SUNY Potsdam’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences prepares students for in-demand careers in the sciences, or for further study on the graduate or professional level. The department offers majors in environmental science and geology, including an option leading to geologic licensure, with a strong focus on both lab and field experience. SUNY Potsdam’s location in the St. Lawrence Valley near the Adirondack Mountains provides a natural laboratory for students.
About SUNY Potsdam:
Founded in 1816, The State University of New York at Potsdam is one of America’s first 50 colleges—and the oldest institution within SUNY. Now in its third century, SUNY Potsdam is distinguished by a legacy of pioneering programs and educational excellence. The College currently enrolls approximately 2,500 undergraduate and graduate students. Home to the world-renowned Crane School of Music, SUNY Potsdam is known for its challenging liberal arts and sciences core, distinction in teacher training and culture of creativity. To learn more, visit www.potsdam.edu.
