Overshot and Kaput: Humankind Wears Out Its Welcome

John Kendall Hawkins

 November 6, 2024

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

When Noam Chomsky deflected questions about 9/11 — refused to speculate like a common theorist of conspiracies — but, in short, directed us to the Truth: We have bigger fish to fry and have to get to it ASAP.  No doubt, he wouldn’t deny that there were such men in the world who would be happy to be Insiders with sticks of dynamite. That shit built the world we know. People who spread opines like, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. This election is too important for the people to decide.” The Kissinger Doctrine, once so beloved, now junk.

Kissingers have been breeding like quazy wabbits since “we” double-tapped the Japs in ‘45. That is the way of the world.  The world we must change. What Chomsky wanted to draw our attention to was what we still had limited time to do something about, his Three Big Concerns: Climate Change, nuclear war, and the end of democracy. Any one of these could bring an end to the experiment/accident called human life on planet Earth. How do we force our leaders to address this problem?

In Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown (Verso 2024) by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton, we get a clear picture of where we, as a globe, are at regarding Climate Change policy. What we knew, when we knew it, and what we are doing about the crisis that definitely has Doom as a consequence of limited or non-action.  Malm and Carton begin by telling the reader that mitigation is what they mean by overshoot.  They write,  “Overshoot is here not a fate passively acquiesced to. It is an actively championed programme for how to deal with the rush into catastrophe: let it continue for the time being, and then we shall sort things out towards the end of this century.” This strikes Malm and Carton as hideous and maybe insane.

If mitigation, such as it is, doesn’t work, and it won’t, there is a post-mitigation plan.  “The dominant classes have to come up with secondary, backup measures for managing the consequences of excess heat.” Reassuring, isn’t it? they seem to enquire of the reader. The backup includes three options (or phases of bankruptcy, depending on how you look at it): Adaptation, carbon removal, and geoengineering.  “All three are also replete with repercussions, ranging from the annoying to the apocalyptic,” write the pair, who plan on publishing a separate analysis of the three backup options, already calling it The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late. “It will pay special attention to the psychic dimensions of the climate crisis,” they write, “notably the tremendous capacity of people in capitalist society to deny, and, when this no longer works, repress it.”

The authors focus on fossil fuels.  They can see that warnings fall on deaf ears.  They note that the world had a chance to take advantage of the proverbial silver lining that came with Covid-19 and its lockdown regimen.  They write,

“In 2020, the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, something highly unusual took place: global CO2 emissions fell…The lockdowns that closed the highways of the world economy cut their total by some 5 or 6 per cent…coincidentally, the pandemic broke out just as the wave of climate mobilisations on streets from Berlin to Bogotá and Luanda to London crested – in 2019, this had been ‘the fastest-growing social movement in history’ – and so proposals were floated for using the pandemic to start the transition by then long overdue. These came to nothing.”

Came to nothing.  Miracles from God have been precious few for  millennia — this we all know — but seeing the CO₂plummet in 2020 was almost like a sign from heaven that our so-called covenant since Noah was still solid. But no. Selfishness rules.

The authors continue the chronicle of our planet’s demise.  In 2021, “CO₂ emissions rose by 6 per cent, or two gigatonnes.” Then the authors got trippy.  To picture an abstract gigatonne as a concrete image, they wrote, see a gigatonne as a unit of mass “which equals the weight of over 100,000,000 African elephants.” Two gigatonnes, then, would be the equivalent of 200,000,000 African elephants. Phew, I whistled. That would be heaven on Earth for the Mbuti pygmies of the Ituri Forest, but then I actually pictured two-thirds of the American population replaced by African elephants. That’s a lot of elephant shit. And methane. Phew, I held my nose.

The authors list the damage done already by climate catastrophe ignored for what it is — potentially eschatological in scope — “The double blow of a cyclone and an early monsoon …one third of Bangladesh under water…Pantanal, the planet’s largest wetland..enveloped in flames…in the Atlantic – thirty named storms; within a fortnight, two hurricanes lacerating Nicaragua…for the first time, a hurricane struck Somalia…(cities more deeply flooded) or introducing novelties (wetlands ablaze)…Swathes of ,,,Turkey and Greece…aglow, while in the Chinese province of Henan, a year’s worth of rain fell in three days – downpours ‘unseen in the last 1,000 years’ – but in southern Madagascar, drought forced eight in ten inhabitants to fill their stomachs with leaves, cacti and locusts.”  Almost there. Almost at the point where a plague of locusts arrives and is welcomed as a much-needed meal served up.

Overshoot is divided into a Preface and three main sections: The Limit Is Not a Limit; Fossil Capital Is a Demon, and Into the Long Heat. What we have going as mitigation is not enough; it’s not even a start. The culprit is the one we all know: Big Oil. The Long Heat means our children and children’s children will have to live underground to survive.  That’s what the book tells. Methodically. With detail. Last Chapter, like in its resignation to our fate. But — it does hold out the notion that some shock to the system’s dominant classes’s control of the shituation (h/t Peter Tosh) can lead to real mitigation.

I recall reading Daniel Ellsberg’s memoir, The Doomsday Machine. In it he relates how he and a RAND colleague went to see Dr. Strangelove when it came out, and how he and his companion agreed that the crazy shit they’d just seen came across as “essentially a documentary.”  In the film, one of the strangest scenes is the one where Dr. Strangelove explains how everyone, after the war, will have to live underground, but the good news is each man will be given a set of 10 beautiful women to restock the world with humans. Preferably of Nordic persuasion and pedigree. It is crazy thinking.

Some public policies are way too important for the elites and bloviators and technocrats to be put in charge of or to be ceded implicit control by the state in exchange for more and more money and power. In his most recent book, The Age of AI: And Our Human Future, a book co-written by ex-Google wonk Eric Schmidt and Henry Kissinger, wherein Schmidt writes, “AI…is being applied to more elements of our lives; it is altering the role our minds have traditionally played in shaping, ordering, and assessing our choices and actions.” Schmidt, who, in his previous book Empire of the Mind (later re-titled to The New Digital Age), envisioned hologram machines in the dens of dominant class families, so that spoiled kids could go on field trips to the slum of Mumbai, is all for ceding control of mind to machines.

I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a planet go to shit due to the irresponsibility of its elites. This crisis – these myriad crises — are too important for the dinosaur people to deride. It’s time to get tough, pinky. Where up against false Darwinism and stolen plans. The time for clownin’ around and making faces is over.

John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelancer based in Australia.  He is a former reporter for The New Bedford Standard-Times.

SPACE/COSMOS

Boeing-made satellite breaks up in space

Matt Oliver
Tue, October 22, 2024 

An artist’s impression of Boeing’s Intelstat IS-33e satellite, which was kept in geostationary orbit to provide telecoms, broadcasting and other services to customers back on Earth

A Boeing-made satellite has exploded in space, dealing a fresh blow to the crisis-hit aerospace company.

The IS-33e satellite, which is owned and operated by Intelsat, was kept in geostationary orbit to provide telecoms, broadcasting and other services to customers back on Earth.

However, on Saturday an “anomaly” caused it to unexpectedly break apart, a statement from Intelsat said, bringing a halt to communications.


The incident is the latest embarrassment for Boeing, which has been battling a reputational crisis since a major safety failure on one of its 737 Max 9 passenger planes in January.

In its space division, executives at the company were also left red-faced after their Starliner spacecraft was deemed insufficiently safe to return two astronauts to Earth from the International Space Station this summer.

Boeing has been battling a reputational crisis since a panel blew out mid-flight on one of its 737 Max 9 planes in January - NTSB/via REUTERS

After confirming the satellite incident over the weekend, Intelsat has now said it believes IS-33e is a “total loss”.

The US Space Force separately said it was tracking some 20 pieces of debris from the craft in orbit.

It said officials had “observed no immediate threats” but were continuing to monitor the situation.

Intelsat said customers who relied on the satellite’s services were being transferred to other assets or satellites operated by third parties.

In a statement, the company added: “We are coordinating with the satellite manufacturer, Boeing, and government agencies to analyse data and observations.

“A failure review board has been convened to complete a comprehensive analysis of the cause of the anomaly.”

The IS-33e satellite had suffered problems previously, according to the website Space News, with issues concerning its primary thruster delaying it entering service in January 2017.

Further problems with the craft’s thrusters while tests were being conducted in orbit then reduced the satellite’s planned 15-year lifespan by three and a half years.

IS-33e was designed and manufactured by Boeing, based on the company’s 702 communications satellite family.

Boeing has been contacted for comment.

A Fascinating Theory About a Ring of Asteroids Around Earth Has Some Wild Implications for Evolution

Riley Black
Mon, October 21, 2024 



Like many of us, Earth bears old pockmarks. Our planet’s crust has a band of ancient craters that formed around 465 million years ago. The divots were created at a time when animals in the seas were taking on a broad array of new forms, building complex ecosystems from plankton to jawless fish to spaceship-like filter feeders. Back then, those strange invertebrates might have been able to look up through the nighttime shallows and see the glow of Earth’s very own ring, which may have been something like Saturn’s.

Spotting the Milky Way on a clear night is awe-inspiring enough. I can only be envious of the early fish and archaic crabs that might have seen Earth’s temporary band of spinning debris. That band, which Monash University planetary scientist Andrew Tomkins and colleagues are arguing existed in a new paper, may have been the result of an asteroid’s passing just close enough to our prehistoric planet to break up into innumerable pieces. (Unlike Saturn’s ring, it wouldn’t have been composed of so much ice.) The small, iron-rich rocks stayed in orbit for a time, but—as expressed by my favorite new piece of technical jargon—“deorbited” around 465 million years ago, some of them crashing down into Earth. And although the band of ancient craters is the only physical evidence such a ring ever existed, life on Earth likely recorded the geological wonder too.

The new hypothesis that there was such a ring is still in its early stages, and not every proposed ring stays put in our scientific visions of the past. Geologists previously suggested that Earth had a ring during the Eocene, about 35.5 million years ago, but the idea had more to do with searching for a possible cause for ancient climate shifts than with hard evidence from the rock record. It’s possible that the Ordovician craters in Earth’s rock record were created by another astronomical phenomenon, like asteroid debris forming a miniature moon that then broke apart. Whatever transpired, we know that some unusual event showered chunks of rocks across our planet’s surface around 465 million years ago, a little sprinkle of space making its way to Earth.

Let’s assume that the provenance of those rocks was a ring, and follow through the consequences of such a debris field: When Earth wore a ring around its middle, it would have affected how sunlight reached the planet’s surface. The ring probably would have shaded the hemispheres of the planet experiencing winter, while slightly increasing summer heat on the other half, Tomkins and co-authors suggest. Vast quantities of dust from the asteroid and the impacts of the smaller pieces might have affected sunlight and global climate too, perhaps helping to explain why Earth became an icehouse between 444 and 463 million years ago. And as we well know from our present habit of turning an icehouse climate into a greenhouse one, an altered climate dramatically affects life on our planet.

During the time Earth may have gained and lost its ring, life was going through an incredible evolutionary burst. Paleontologists know this as the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event. Think of it as the sequel to the more famous, earlier Cambrian explosion, which saw the rapid origin of many different kinds of animal bodies and groups of living things in the seas. The GOBE was the following period’s expansion of those previous themes, everything from algae to early clams and fish evolving into new forms and creating ecosystems comparable to what we see in today’s oceans. It was the assembly of what we might think of as modern ocean ecosystems, a rich base of plankton allowing many other forms of life to thrive.

Working out what caused the GOBE is tricky if not impossible, given that this is not Sim Earth and we can’t simply replay different scenarios to see what fits our hypothesis best. Still, perhaps Earth’s ring and its climate consequences had a significant influence on Earth’s life, and was the sudden global shift that nudged life to evolve in different ways. And whether a ring, a miniature moon, or some other scenario, spattering our planet with space rocks may have created conditions that set up what we think of as “modern” oceans.

Half a century ago, such ideas were received by the scientific community as speculative at best and fanciful at worst. Evolution had usually been thought of in reference to earthbound processes. (It still is, in most cases.) But today, we can consider how a near-miss asteroid and a possible ring around Earth affected life in the distant past because we know that space debris had a deep impact on life at another time. Long after the GOBE, about 66 million years ago, when ecosystems on land were as full of varied living things as the seas, a 6-mile-wide asteroid struck Earth at a place we now call Chicxulub, on the Yucatán Peninsula. The heat pulse created by falling debris from the strike virtually wiped out every nonbird dinosaur on the planet within a day, soot and dust filled with sunlight-reflecting compounds then creating a global impact winter that lasted at least three years. The world didn’t just lose almost all the dinosaurs; it also lost the flying pterosaurs, the seagoing mosasaurs, and reef-building clams the size of a toilet seat, in addition to mass extinctions of mammals, lizards, birds, and even plankton. Just this year, planetary scientists identified the asteroid as a carbonaceous chondrite, an iron-heavy chunk of rock left over from our solar system’s formation that was pulled onto a collision course with Earth in the most catastrophic million-to-one shot of all time.

For all the destruction that space rock caused, it cleared the way for so much other life. Without that asteroid, we wouldn’t be here or recognize the planet we now call home.

Primates were already around by the time the asteroid struck, in a Northern Hemisphere spring 66 million years ago. When they emerged from their hiding places in the aftermath of the first day and scrounged for food in the following years of darkness, the world was fundamentally changed. Angiosperms, or flowering plants, grew back faster and denser than the previously ubiquitous conifer relatives had been. Iron from the immense asteroid was distributed in the dusty debris and enriched soils across the planet, allowing Earth to host the very first rainforests in the tropics. And without hulking dinosaurs to plow down vegetation and keep forests relatively open, plants grew dense into multitiered habitats that acted as the crucible of mammal evolution. It was here that our ancestors, among many other forms of life, found themselves in a world of thick, novel habitats. Dinosaurs were out of the way, but competition for space and food among these smaller creatures nudged surviving species into new forms. Had the asteroid missed or even struck a different place on the planet, then the world would have continued to be covered in forests of resin-oozing monkey puzzle trees and ginkgoes, and a place where dinosaurs of all shapes and sizes proliferated while mammals thrived only at diminutive size.

The evolution of Earth’s life is often discussed and debated in terms of what’s happening on our planet. Life adjusts according to cooperation and competition, climate change and human impact. But Earth exists as part of a solar system, galaxy, and universe too—and sometimes other parts of our universe come to visit us. Earth isn’t an isolated terrarium, and life upon it has been as influenced by impacts and near misses as by continental drift. We can’t answer why birds are the only dinosaurs still alive, or perhaps even how our oceans built up their complex ecosystems, without speaking of asteroids and their consequences. Speeding rocks have altered life’s unfolding so unpredictably that it’s often easier to write them off as a rare and unusual part of the story. We’re starting to see evidence otherwise. We owe our very existence to an asteroid, after all, our story connected more than 9 billion miles away to the cusp of our solar system. It’s bittersweet, owing even the possibility of my existence to a cold chunk of rock that took away the dinosaurs I wish I could see alive.


Webb telescope spots extremely bright objects. They shouldn't be there.

Mashable
Tue, October 22, 2024 

An artist's depiction shows how a quasar, which is the extremely bright core of a galaxy, unleashes torrents of energy from its central black hole.


Scientists didn't build the James Webb Space Telescope simply to find answers. They've sought new questions and mysteries.

And they've just found another.

Using the Webb telescope to peer back into the earliest periods of the universe, researchers spotted a handful of some of the brightest objects in the cosmos — quasars — adrift in the empty voids of space, isolated from other galaxies. This is strange. Quasars are black holes at galactic centers, millions to billions times more massive than the sun, that shoot potent bursts of energy into space (from material falling toward or rapidly spinning around black holes). The prevailing, and logical, theory was that such massive, hungry objects could only form in regions of dense matter.

But that's not always the case.

"Contrary to previous belief, we find on average, these quasars are not necessarily in those highest-density regions of the early universe. Some of them seem to be sitting in the middle of nowhere," Anna-Christina Eilers, a physicist at MIT who led the research, said in a statement. "It’s difficult to explain how these quasars could have grown so big if they appear to have nothing to feed from."

SEE ALSO: NASA scientist viewed first Voyager images. What he saw gave him chills.

The research was recently published in a science journal called the Astrophysical Journal.

In the image below, you can see one of these isolated quasars, circled in red. Astronomers expect to find quasars amid regions flush with other galaxies. There, bounties of cosmic matter could support the creation of such giant and luminous objects. (In fact, "a quasar’s light outshines that of all the stars in its host galaxy combined," NASA explains.)

An isolated quasar in deep space, circled in red.

An isolated quasar in deep space, circled in red. Credit: Christina Eilers / EIGER team

In this research, astronomers endeavored to view some of the oldest objects in the universe, created some 600 to 700 million years after the Big Bang. For perspective, our solar system wouldn't form for another 8.5 billion years or so.

The Webb telescope, which orbits 1 million miles from Earth, captures profoundly faint, stretched-out light as it existed eons ago. This light is just reaching us now.

"It’s just phenomenal that we now have a telescope that can capture light from 13 billion years ago in so much detail," Eilers said. "For the first time, JWST enabled us to look at the environment of these quasars, where they grew up, and what their neighborhood was like."

"It’s just phenomenal that we now have a telescope that can capture light from 13 billion years ago in so much detail."

This latest cosmic quandary is not just about how these quasars formed in isolation, but how they formed so rapidly. "The main question we’re trying to answer is, how do these billion-solar-mass black holes form at a time when the universe is still really, really young? It’s still in its infancy," Eilers said.

Although the Webb telescope is designed to peer through the thick clouds of dust and gas in the universe, the researchers do say it's possible that these enigmatic quasars are in fact surrounded by galaxies — but the galaxies are shrouded. To find out, more observation with Webb is necessary.

An artist's illustration of the James Webb Space Telescope observing the cosmos 1 million miles from Earth.

An artist's illustration of the James Webb Space Telescope observing the cosmos 1 million miles from Earth. Credit: NASA-GSFC / Adriana M. Gutierrez (CI Lab)
The Webb telescope's powerful abilities

The Webb telescope — a scientific collaboration between NASA, ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency — is designed to peer into the deepest cosmos and reveal new insights about the early universe. It's also examining intriguing planets in our galaxy, along with the planets and moons in our solar system.

Here's how Webb is achieving unparalleled feats, and likely will for decades to come:

- Giant mirror: Webb's mirror, which captures light, is over 21 feet across. That's over two-and-a-half times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope's mirror. Capturing more light allows Webb to see more distant, ancient objects. The telescope is peering at stars and galaxies that formed over 13 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang. "We're going to see the very first stars and galaxies that ever formed," Jean Creighton, an astronomer and the director of the Manfred Olson Planetarium at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, told Mashable in 2021.

- Infrared view: Unlike Hubble, which largely views light that's visible to us, Webb is primarily an infrared telescope, meaning it views light in the infrared spectrum. This allows us to see far more of the universe. Infrared has longer wavelengths than visible light, so the light waves more efficiently slip through cosmic clouds; the light doesn't as often collide with and get scattered by these densely packed particles. Ultimately, Webb's infrared eyesight can penetrate places Hubble can't.

"It lifts the veil," said Creighton.

- Peering into distant exoplanets: The Webb telescope carries specialized equipment called spectrographs that will revolutionize our understanding of these far-off worlds. The instruments can decipher what molecules (such as water, carbon dioxide, and methane) exist in the atmospheres of distant exoplanets — be they gas giants or smaller rocky worlds. Webb looks at exoplanets in the Milky Way galaxy. Who knows what we'll find?

"We might learn things we never thought about," Mercedes López-Morales, an exoplanet researcher and astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics-Harvard & Smithsonian, told Mashable in 2021.

Already, astronomers have successfully found intriguing chemical reactions on a planet 700 light-years away, and have started looking at one of the most anticipated places in the cosmos: the rocky, Earth-sized planets of the TRAPPIST solar system.

NASA captures star duo spraying plasma a quarter-trillion miles

Mashable
Mon, October 21, 2024 

The Hubble Space Telescope has been monitoring the binary star system R Aquarii.


New images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope demonstrate how a withered star remnant is only mostly dead — that is until a bloated nearby star reanimates it, a la Frankenstein.

The legendary observatory has monitored a double star system about 700 light-years away from Earth for more than 30 years, capturing how it dims and brightens over time as a result of strong pulses from the primary star. The binary, composed of a white dwarf star and a red giant star, has a caustic relationship, releasing tangled streams of glowing gas into the cosmos like an erratic lawn sprinkler.

Astronomers have dubbed this toxic pair in the constellation Aquarius a "stellar volcano" for how it sprays streams of glowing gas some 248 billion miles in space. For comparison, that's 24 times farther than the diameter of our solar system.

NASA is watching the stars to study how they recycle elements into the universe through nuclear energy.

"The plasma is shooting into space over 1 million miles per hour – fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in 15 minutes!" NASA said in a statement. "The filaments are glowing in visible light because they are energized by blistering radiation from the stellar duo."

SEE ALSO: This nova is on the verge of exploding. You could see it any day now.

White dwarf star swinging close to red giant star

When a white dwarf star swings close to a red giant star, it draws away hydrogen. Credit: NASA Goddard illustration

The binary star system, known collectively as R Aquarii, is a special type of double star, called symbiotic, and it's the closest such pair to Earth. In this system, an elderly red giant, bloated and dying, and a white dwarf, the shriveled core of a dead medium-sized star, are orbiting each other.

The big star is over 400 times larger than the sun and varies dramatically in brightness over a 400-day period. At its peak, the red giant is 5,000 times brighter than the sun. Like the big star in R Aquarii, the sun is expected to bloat into a red giant in about 5 billion years.

When the white dwarf in R Aquarii gets close to its hulking companion along its 44-year orbit, the dead star steals stellar material away with gravity, causing hydrogen gas to heap onto its cool surface. That process makes the corpse rise from the dead, so to speak, warming up and eventually igniting like a bomb.


NASA and the European Space Agency created the above timelapse video of R Aquarii using Hubble images that spanned 2014 to 2023.

This thermonuclear explosion is called a "nova" — not to be confused with a supernova, the obliteration of an enormous star before it collapses into a black hole or neutron star. The nova doesn't destroy the white dwarf — rather, the explosion merely causes it to spew more elements, like carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and iron, back into space.

This year scientists have been on the edge of their seats, waiting for a nova to emerge from T Coronae Borealis, or T CrB, a binary star system about 3,000 light-years away in the Milky Way. This particular nova, which should be visible to the naked eye, is intriguing because it experiences periodic outbursts. Experts have determined it detonates about every 80 years.

A few months ago, experts believed the white dwarf would go nova sometime before September. Curiously, that sudden brightening hasn't happened yet.


"Recurrent novae are unpredictable and contrarian," said Koji Mukai, a NASA astrophysicist, in a June statement. "When you think there can’t possibly be a reason they follow a certain set pattern, they do — and as soon as you start to rely on them repeating the same pattern, they deviate from it completely."

These events are critical to understand because of how important they are for generating and distributing the ingredients for new stars, planets, and life. And this is what astronomer Carl Sagan meant when he said humans are made of "star stuff." The same substances that make our bodies were literally forged within the cores of stars, then flung through the cosmos when the stars burst.

R Aquarii blasts glowing jets that twist up and out following strong magnetic fields. The plasma seems to loop back onto itself, weaving an enormous spiral.

Chumash people in California to co-steward marine sanctuary in historic partnership
JAIMIE DING
Fri, October 18, 2024 









California Marine Sanctuary Tribe
Dancers perform during celebration of "Indigenous Peoples' Day Picnic In The Park 2024" and Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary at Dinosaur Caves Park, Pismo Beach on Monday, October. 14, 2024. (Robert Schwemmer via AP)

For more than 10,000 years, Native Americans have been living along California’s central coast, an area of breathtaking beauty with stunning turquoise waters rich in biodiversity. Now, in the first partnership of its kind, the area will soon be part of a new national marine sanctuary that Native people will co-steward with a federal agency.

It will give the Chumash people, once the largest cultural group in California, a say in the way the marine sanctuary is preserved. The Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary, designated by the Biden administration last week, is the first tribally nominated sanctuary in the United States.

It covers 116 miles (187 kilometers) of California coastline. The more than 4,500 square miles (11,655 square kilometers) of coastal and offshore waters that will be included contain diverse marine life increasingly threatened by climate change and pollution from human activities.

The designation, which was announced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, will take effect after Congress has 45 days to consider it.

The Chumash people, which span several tribes, including the federally recognized Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, have long depended on the ocean for fishing and shellfish, and today some are involved in environmental monitoring and advocacy work.

Some collaborative projects may include coastal signage, or scientific studies along the shoreline where there may have been Indigenous villages in the past that are now submerged.

“The waterways adjacent to the aboriginal territory are areas that our tribal people have thrived and lived off of for many years,” said Kenneth Kahn, chairman of the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians. “The legacy of all Chumash people in the namesake of the Marine Sanctuary is certainly very important.”

The sanctuary comes nearly a decade after it was originally nominated by the late Chief Fred Collins of the Northern Chumash Tribal Council in 2015.

“When he passed away three years ago … he asked me to complete this for him, and I promised him I would,” said Violet Sage Walker, chairwoman of the Northern Chumash Tribal Council.

There have been other national marine sanctuaries that involved collaboration with tribes, but this will be the first one where it is written into the final management plan with Indigenous partners included in the conversation from the beginning, Walker said.

A growing Land Back movement has been returning Indigenous homelands to the descendants of those who lived there for millennia before European settlers arrived. That has seen Native American tribes taking a greater role in restoring rivers and lands to how they were before they were expropriated.

Earlier this year, the Yurok Tribe in Northern California became the first Native people to manage tribal land with the National Park Service under a historic memorandum of understanding signed by the tribe, Redwood National and State Parks and the nonprofit Save the Redwoods League.

Stretching from around the San Louis Obispo County area in central California down to the border of the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary off the coast of Santa Barbara, the Chumash marine sanctuary represents a unique mix of ecological zones of the northern and southern parts of the coast, said Stanford University professor Stephen Palumbi, who is conducting research in the area.

The waters are home to at-risk species, such as snowy plovers, southern sea otters, leatherback sea turtles, abalone and blue whales. It also includes ecologically rich features like the Rodriguez seamount, formed from an extinct volcano.

When Palumbi and his team were examining a set of silvery fish called grunions that beach themselves when they spawn in the southern part of the coast, they brought their findings to their partners at the Northern Chumash Tribal Council.

“They were saying, ’Oh yeah, we usually get them in the south just like you’re seeing, but you know, just a couple generations ago we could get them further north,'” Palumbi said, giving an example of the value of the tribal members' knowledge.

The latest national marine sanctuary will advance the White House’s America the Beautiful initiative, which set a goal of conserving and restoring at least 30% of U.S. lands and waters by 2030.

Some advocates had originally hoped the boundaries of the sanctuary would extend north to the edges of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, past Diablo Canyon, which houses California’s last operating nuclear power plant. However, after concerns from wind energy companies, NOAA decided to carve out an area planned for off-shore wind farm development but laid out a process for potential sanctuary expansion in the future.

“It’s really a balancing act of trying to accomplish the renewable energy goals of the Biden-Harris and Newsom administrations and America the Beautiful,” said Paul Michel, NOAA regional policy coordinator.

The final management plan includes a framework for co-stewardship that involves an advisory group with a voting seat for the the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians and two “Indigenous Cultural Knowledge voting seats," as well as a policy council consisting of the Santa Ynez Band, NOAA, and California government.

“We not only protected our homeland but we protected our spiritual connection to our ancestors and our future generations for everybody,” said Walker. “This is something that will live long beyond my lifetime.”

 

Flea toads, dwarf pygmy goby fish and bumblebee bats: Researcher aims to solve the riddle of miniature animals

Just seven millimeters long, flea toads are among the smallest vertebrates on Earth. Despite their diminutive size, their organs and functions hardly differ from animals a thousand times larger. While examples of extreme miniaturization abound in nature

University of Copenhagen - Faculty of Science

 

image: 

Mini mum is one of the smallest frogs in the world, described by Mark D. Scherz and his colleagues in 2019. These tiny frogs from southeastern Madagascar live in amongst the leaf litter and feed on tiny mites. They are amongst the target species of the GEMINI project, because their closest relatives are ten times larger. Photo: Andolalao Rakotoarison

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Credit: Andolalao Rakotoarison

Just seven millimetres long, flea toads are among the smallest vertebrates on Earth. Despite their diminutive size, their organs and functions hardly differ from animals a thousand times larger. While examples of extreme miniaturisation abound in nature, just how these creatures get so small remains a scientific mystery. Now, a researcher from the University of Copenhagen has received DKK 11 million (roughly €1.5 m) from the European Research Council to get to the bottom of this phenomenon.

What do flea toads and smartphones have in common? Despite their innards having shrunken to extremes, their organs and components are the same as those found in much larger animals – and computers – yet still able to fit in their small "bodies". With regards to technology, we have long since become accustomed to things shrinking in stride with innovation. Though few consider the ability of animals to miniaturize – for them to get smaller while retaining the same well-functioning organs, senses and behaviour as animals hundreds of times larger – it happens everywhere in nature.

Flea toads, dwarf pygmy goby fish and bumblebee bats are just a few examples of vertebrates that have shrunk through evolution, without losing any of their basic physical characteristics. But what exactly happens in a vertebrate, right down to the genetic level, when evolutionarily, a species miniaturizes? And is there really anything preventing the smallest vertebrates from getting even smaller?

These are some of the questions that Dr. Mark D. Scherz from the Natural History Museum of Denmark will investigate over the next five years with the help of a DKK 11 million grant (roughly €1.5 m) from the European Research Council (ERC).

"Large animals are often the ones to grab our attention. But I think it to be just as fascinating how nature has managed to miniaturize the exact same vital organs and cram them into a less than one-centimetre-long frog. Today, we know surprisingly little about how it all happens, and I want to change that," says Mark D. Scherz.

It’s hard to picture just how small some of the world’s smallest vertebrates are 

It’s hard to picture just how small some of the world’s smallest vertebrates are, but comparing them to standard household objects sometimes helps. Here, a BIC pen dwarfs many of the smallest frogs, fishes, salamanders, lizards, birds, and mammals. Each of these animals has, in essence, all of the same senses and organs of their much larger relatives and ancestors, squeezed into a tiny package. Illustrations: Mark D. Scherz

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Mark D. Scherz

Natures tech sector

Since its dawn, the tech industry has gradually shrunk the size of transistors in phones and computers to allow room for more of them and higher performance. Similarly, scientists believe that extreme miniaturisation is often associated with innovation and evolution in nature, without fully understanding it.

The new research project, GEMINI (Genomics of Miniaturisation in Vertebrates), is purposed with identifying exactly what happens in the DNA of vertebrates when they shrink. The project will thus develop a kind of genetic template for what happens as animals miniaturise.

"In several independent studies that looked at the genomes of miniaturized animals, a kind of clean-up and innovation takes place, where the genome becomes smaller. A lot of this happens in repetitive bits of the genome that we used to call ‘junk’ DNA. But some of it happens in other genes as well, which is what we need to learn more about," says the researcher.

In fact, it was previously believed that animal populations would constantly trend towards larger sizes as they evolved – the so-called "Cope’s rule". Today, however, it is known that this is not unequivocally true – and with good reason. 

“Dyr kan ikke bare blive ved med at vokse sig større og større. På et tidspunkt sætter fysiologien - udveksling af varme, vand og ilt - en grænse, og det samme gør tyngdekraften. Derfor skal der være faser, hvor kropsstørrelsen reduceres, for at der overhovedet kan være en tendens til øget størrelse,” forklarer Mark D. Scherz og tilføjer:

”Vi tror også, at den lille størrelse kan være der, hvor de virkelig store innovationer sker, som vi så ser udbygget, når efterkommerne bliver større igen. Det gør disse miniaturiserede dyr særligt spændende at se på, når vi prøver at finde ud af, hvordan nyskabelser udvikler sig i naturen.”

T-Rex and Moby Dick steal the spotlight

According to Mark D. Scherz, the field of 'miniaturisation' has not been a high priority among scientists for decades. Indeed, some of the most recent groundbreaking results in the field date back to the 1990s. Instead, researchers have focused on large animals.

"Everyone’s attention is on blue whales and elephants. Any child you ask can tell you about the largest land mammal and the largest marine mammal and the largest dinosaur that has ever lived. But scaling up and getting bigger is not a big problem. It is a far more impressive feat to have [practically] everything in a twenty-three-tonne blue whale compressed into a seven-millimetre package," says the researcher. 

But now, the researcher speaks of a renewed focus on animal miniaturisation – thanks in part to a number of spectacular recent finds.  Earlier this year, researchers in Brazil discovered the world's smallest vertebrate, the flea frog, which measures just seven millimetres.

"We live at a time when probably the smallest vertebrates ever are around us, but they are too easy to overlook, so we just forget about them. This project will allow us to gain a genetic understanding of what controls this 'miniaturisation process' and investigate whether there is something that keeps animals from becoming even smaller," concludes Scherz.

About ERC Starting grants

European Research Council Starting Grants are awarded to promising young research talents two to seven years after they have received their PhDs. Up to EUR 1.5 million will be allocated to ground-breaking research projects over a five-year period. Read more