The shift to a more sustainable food system is inevitable: Here's how to make it happen

by Thomas Deane, Trinity College Dublin

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Europe's top scientists agree that a radical change is coming in how we produce and distribute food, to ensure food security and deliver healthy diets for all.

Now a new report from SAPEA, co-authored by Professor Anna Davies from Trinity's School of Natural Sciences, lays out the social science evidence on how that transition can happen in an inclusive, just and timely way.

Professor Davies said:

"The current crisis has revealed many fragilities in the way we live today and not least with respect to our food system. Food insecurity and sustainability are among the most significant global challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. It was an honour to be part of the SAPEA Review process, where we used social science insights to map and analyse food system dynamics in relation to sustainability objectives; to consider how a socially just and sustainable food system for the EU is best defined and described."

The Evidence Review Report 'A sustainable food system for the European Union' a base for the scientific opinion of the European Commission's Chief Scientific Advisors. It was requested by the College of Commissioners and written by a multidisciplinary group of leading scientists, nominated by academies across Europe.

Based on the best available evidence, the report concludes that the key steps towards the new model are not only to reduce food waste and to change our consumption patterns—but also to recontextualise how we think about food in the first place.

Professor Peter Jackson, the chair of the working group that wrote the report, said:

"Food is an incredibly complex system, with social, economic and ecological components. Yet, it contributes significantly to greenhouse gas emissions and plays a key role in driving climate change. The food system is responsible for around a third of global greenhouse gas emissions. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates the annual financial cost of wasted food to be €900 billion in economic costs and an additional €800 billion in social costs. That's why 'business as usual' is no longer an option."

"Our report doesn't stop at highlighting the problems, which are now widely recognised. It also provides a range of evidence-based examples about how the transition to a sustainable food system can happen."

Among the report's other main conclusions are:

The transition to a more just and sustainable food system needs to be coordinated at multiple levels of governance and involve a range of actors in both land-based and marine environments

To change how our society consumes food, we must first change people's routines, habits and norms. Behaviour change is best effected with joined-up actions, addressing groups rather than individuals

Taxation and legislation are key ways to drive change, while European policies in agriculture and fisheries offer great opportunities for developing robustness and sustainability in food production

The report informs the Scientific Opinion from the European Commission's Group of Advisors, also published today and which in turn informs the Commission's new 'Farm to Fork strategy for a sustainable food system'.


Explore further

Unsustainable food systems: Can we reverse current trends?
More information: A sustainable food system for the European Union: www.sapea.info/topics/sustainable-food/

Provided by Trinity College Dublin 

Piercing the dark birthplaces of massive stars with Webb

by Ann Jenkins, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

The Snake is a serpentine-shaped, extremely filamentary cloud. In this infrared image from the Spitzer Space Telescope, the blue dots are stars relatively undimmed by dust, while the red dots are embedded, forming stars. Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech/S. Carey (SSC/Caltech)

High-mass stars, which are eight or more times the mass of our Sun, live hard and die young. They often end their short lives in violent explosions called supernovas, but their births are much more of a mystery. They form in very dense, cold clouds of gas and dust, but little is known about these regions. In 2021, shortly after the launch of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, scientists plan to study three of these clouds to understand their structure.


"What we're trying to do is look at the birthplaces of massive stars," explained Erick Young, principal investigator of a program that will use Webb to study this phenomenon. He is an astronomer with the Universities Space Research Association in Columbia, Maryland. "Determining the actual structure of the clouds is very important in trying to understand the star formation process," he said.

These cold clouds—which can have up to 100,000 times the mass of the Sun—are so dense that they appear as big, dark blobs on the sky. While they seem devoid of stars, the clouds are actually just obscuring the light from background stars. These dark patches are so thick with dust that they even block out some wavelengths of infrared light, a type of light that is invisible to human eyes and can usually can penetrate through dusty clouds. That's why they are called "infrared-dark clouds." However, the unprecedented sensitivity of Webb enables observations of background stars even through these very dense regions.

Birth Environments and Cookie Dough

To understand how massive stars form, you have to understand the environment in which they form. But one of the things that makes studying massive star formation so difficult is that as soon as a star turns on, it radiates intense ultraviolet light and strong and powerful winds.

"These forces destroy the birth environment that the star was created in," explained infrared-dark-cloud expert Cara Battersby, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Connecticut. "The environment you're looking at after it formed is totally different from the environment that was conducive to its forming in the first place. And since we know that infrared-dark clouds are places where massive stars can form, if we look at their structure before stars have formed or have just started to form, we can study what environment is needed to form those massive stars."

Battersby likens the process to baking cookies: As soon as you bake them, they're totally different than the dough itself. If you've never seen dough before, you may not have a good idea of what that baking process would look like. The infrared-dark clouds are like the raw dough before you bake it. Studying these clouds is akin to getting a chance to look at the cookie dough, seeing what goes into it, and learning what its consistency is.


The Importance of Massive Stars

Understanding massive stars and their environments is important for a variety of reasons. First, in their explosive deaths, they release many elements that are essential for life. Elements heavier than hydrogen and helium—including the building blocks of life on Earth—come from inside massive stars. Massive stars have transformed a universe that was almost completely composed of hydrogen to the rich, complex environment that is able to produce planets and people.

Massive stars also produce enormous amounts of energy. As soon as they are born, they give off light, radiation and winds that can create bubbles in the interstellar medium, possibly sparking star formation in different locations. These expanding bubbles could also break up a region where new stars are forming. Finally, when a massive star dies in a spectacular explosion, it forever changes its surroundings.

The Targets

The study will focus Webb on the following three areas.

More than 100,000 times the mass of the Sun, the Brick doesn't seem to be forming any massive stars--yet. But based on its immense mass in such a small area, if it does form stars--as scientists think it should--it would be one of the most massive star clusters in the Milky Way galaxy. Credit: NASA, JPL-Caltech, and S.V Ramirez (NExSCI/Caltech)

The Brick: One of the darkest infrared-dark clouds in our galaxy, this roughly brick-shaped cloud resides near the galaxy's center, about 26,000 light-years from Earth. More than 100,000 times the mass of the Sun, the Brick doesn't seem to be forming any massive stars—yet. But it has so much mass in such a small area that if it does form stars, as scientists think that it should, it would be one of the most massive star clusters in our galaxy, much like the Arches and Quintuplet clusters, also in the neighborhood of the galaxy's center.

The Snake: With a name inspired by its serpentine shape, this extremely filamentary cloud is about 12,000 light-years away with a total mass of 100,000 Suns. Scattered along the Snake are warm, dense dust clouds, each containing about 1,000 times the mass of the Sun in gas and dust. These clouds are being heated by young, massive stars forming inside of them. The Snake may be a section of a much longer filament that is a "Bone of the Milky Way," tracing out the galaxy's spiral structure.

IRDC 18223: Located about 11,000 light-years away, this cloud is also part of a "Bone of the Milky Way." It shows active, massive star formation happening in one side of it, while the other side seems completely quiet and unperturbed. A bubble on the active side is already starting to destroy the initial filament that was there before. While the quiescent side has not started forming stars yet, it probably will soon.

The Technique
To study these clouds, Young and his team will use background stars as probes. "The more stars that you have, the more different lines of sight," said Young. "Each one is like a little pencil beam, and by measuring the color of the star, you can assess how much dust is in that particular line of sight."

The scientists will make maps—basically, very deep images—in four different infrared wavelengths. Each wavelength has a different ability to penetrate the cloud. "If you look at a given star and see that it's actually a lot redder than you expect, then you can surmise that its light has actually gone through some dust, and the dust has made the color redder than the typical, unobscured star," said Young.

By observing the difference in color based on these four different measurements in the near-infrared, and comparing that with a model of dust dimming and reddening, Young and his team can measure the dust in that particular line of sight. Webb will allow them to do that for thousands and thousands of stars that penetrate each cloud, giving them a wealth of data points. Since most stars of a given type are similar to each other in brightness and color, any marked differences that Webb can observe are mostly due to the effects of material between us and the stars.

Only with Webb

This work can only be done because of Webb's exquisite sensitivity and excellent angular resolution. Webb's sensitivity enables scientists to see fainter stars and a higher density of background stars. Its angular resolution, the ability to distinguish tiny details of an object, allows astronomers to discriminate between individual stars.

This science is being conducted as part of a Webb Guaranteed Time Observations (GTO) program. This program is designed to reward scientists who helped develop the key hardware and software components or technical and interdisciplinary knowledge for the observatory. Young was part of the original instrument team that built Webb's Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) instrument.

The James Webb Space Telescope will be the world's premier space science observatory when it launches in 2021. Webb will solve mysteries in our solar system, look beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probe the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.


Explore furtherOn the origin of massive stars
More information: For more information about Webb, visit http://www.nasa.gov/webb.

WIND TURBINES

Monitoring, deterrence and curtailment make skies safer for bats

by National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Through research collaborations, NREL is working to minimize wind energy impacts on wildlife like the hoary bat, pictured above. Credit: Kathleen Smith, Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission

The German word for bat is Fledermaus, which translates literally to "flutter mouse." But while some bats do look like mice fluttering on leathery wings, bats are more closely related to humans than rodents. And, as NREL reported last year, bats are amazing. Whether they are providing pest control by hunting mosquitoes, pollinating flowers by drinking nectar, or dispersing seeds by eating fruit, bats are vital to the health of our planet.

Yet these beneficial mammals face many threats, including the wind turbines that occupy their airspace. Tree-roosting species like the hoary bat, eastern red bat, and silver-haired bat account for the most activity around wind turbines, and endangered species like the Hawaiian hoary bat and Indiana myotis are at risk as well. Complicating matters, bats seem to be attracted to wind turbines.

Bats are notoriously difficult to study, and there is still much we do not know about them. To help improve understanding of bats and their behavior around wind turbines, NREL is collaborating on several research and development projects funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Wind Energy Technologies Office. These efforts are helping minimize wind turbine-bat encounters through monitoring, deterrence, and curtailment.

Deterring Bats with Ultrasound Devices

Ultrasound has proven an effective deterrent for some species at wind sites, but additional research is needed to improve ultrasound's success in discouraging more bats from approaching the turbines.

NREL is involved with two projects focused on ultrasound bat deterrents. The laboratory is leading a project that uses thermal video and acoustic detectors to record the behavior of bats inside an "open-air" flight cage with acoustic deterrent devices mounted on either end. With the data gained from observing bats' behavior around these devices, the team hopes to better understand the frequency range needed to effectively deter bats from approaching turbines.

NREL is also collaborating with Midé Technology to develop a self-powered, blade-mounted ultrasound deterrent.

"The device operates according to the same basic fluid dynamic principle as a hydroelectric generator," said NREL researcher Jason Roadman. "Air moves through the device as it rotates on the turbine blade, which generates the power the device needs to generate the acoustic deterrent."

This design puts the deterrent device directly on the turbine blade, repelling bats from the point they need to avoid most and minimizing the effect of the ultrasonic noise dissipating with distance.

Monitoring Bat Behavior with Thermal Imaging

Thermal imaging is a useful tool for monitoring bats and other airborne wildlife at wind sites, as it can help researchers develop deterrent and curtailment systems and determine how well existing systems are working.

NREL is supporting two projects focused on thermal monitoring technology. In collaboration with the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and Bat Conservation International, NREL is supporting the advancement of 3-D video analysis to capture tracks of flying targets and developing an accompanying software package. The software is currently in a beta testing phase and will be published, along with the underlying code, later this year.

In addition, NREL is working with the United States Geological Survey to improve thermal imaging target detection and classification with the development of binary and multi-class machine learning algorithms in an open-source language, which will be published in the coming months.

"Thermal video shows the most promise in helping us understand how bats interact with turbines," said NREL researcher Bethany Straw. "Then we can focus research and development on using what we know about bat behavior to inform more effective solutions."

Curtailing Turbines with Real-Time Data

Curtailed turbine blades move slowly when wildlife is likely to be present, allowing species to more easily navigate around the blades. However, this strategy has a few drawbacks.

"Curtailment may not be effective for all species, results in a loss of power generation, and can be cost-prohibitive, particularly in relatively low wind regions," said NREL Researcher Cris Hein. "This means we need smart curtailment methods, which use additional variables to limit curtailment to the highest periods of risk."

NREL is working with the Electric Power Research Institute and Natural Power, an independent renewable energy consulting company, to develop the Turbine-Integrated Mortality Reduction (TIMR) system and the Bat Smart Curtailment (BSC) system, respectively. These technologies use real-time data on bat presence and wind speed to determine whether a turbine should be curtailed. Once completed, these systems will reduce both impacts on bats and unnecessary curtailment while reducing loss in annual energy production.

Right now, it is more important than ever that we learn about and protect these often misunderstood creatures. Through these efforts, NREL researchers are finding innovative solutions for making the skies safer so bats can do what they do best: eat bugs, pollinate flowers, scatter seeds, and keep our planet healthy.

Scientists use night vision to save bats

Bailout or subsidy: Oil in the age of pandemic

by University of Pennsylvania

Oilprice.com: WTI Crude, one year. Downloaded on 03/27/2020. Credit: University of Pennsylvania

COVID-19 is disrupting all sectors of the global economy, and the energy sector is far from immune. As economic activity slows precipitously on its way to catastrophically, the fossil energy sector that drives part of that activity is responding. With crashing demand due to the pandemic, the first response is seen in prices. A barrel of oil now sells for $25 or less, down from over $60 at the beginning of 2020. The second response is seen in production. So far production has remained stable in the last two months, but companies have announced massive spending cuts that will soon constrain production.


But production hasn't stopped completely. Extraction and refining companies are likely selling for reduced profits or perhaps even at a loss. But there is something else going on that has big implications for both the government stimulus efforts and the shape of future economic recovery.

That something else is storage. Energy companies employ a variety of ways to store crude and refined products. There are vast storage tank facilities or underground caverns at points along the oil supply chain. There are also large capacities for storage in facilities normally devoted to transporting oil and its derivatives: tanker ships, tanker rail cars, tanker trucks, as well as long distance pipelines.

Fossil energy companies have strong incentives to continue extracting and refining as long as there is a place to store products until demand and price recover. The estimated gap between world oil supply and demand will be 7.4million barrels/d for the first quarter of 2020. Storage facilities are filling fast around the globe and soon will be full. According to commodity data, there are currently over 3.5 billion barrels of global crude oil inventories. This enormous global supply has large and complex implications for the eventual recovery of the global economy.
 

EIA Weekly U.S. Field Production of Crude Oil. Release Date 3/25/2020. Credit: University of Pennsylvania

But our concern here focuses on the urgent question of how to design government assistance to fossil energy companies. This assistance is rightly characterized as a bailout, an extraordinary government effort to soften the blow of crashing demand and ensure that the damage done does not persist after demand returns.

In the United States, the recently approved Coronavirus Relief Package excluded $3 billion to "bail out" the oil industry. But that exclusion was at the last minute and at the behest of the Democratic caucus; next time, a stimulus package may well include a bailout for oil. In Canada, plans to rescue the industry are in the making. As prices continue to plummet, oil state producers in the U.S. and around the world will likely be exploring ways to provide relief to oil companies. Any of that assistance made available for oil must be designed to prevent an appropriate bailout from becoming a hidden subsidy. Any compensation for the costs of storing oil that sells for $25 a barrel now but might sell for $100 a barrel in a future recovery is not a bailout. Instead, it is subsidy that provides a future windfall for oil companies.


Assistance must soften the temporary effects of low demand: worker emergency pay, the costs of safe idling of refining equipment, and so on. In places where oil revenues represent a substantial part of government income, this assistance should be directed to ensure continuity in public expenditure.

Credit: University of Pennsylvania

And assistance must not further subsidize obstacles to a clean energy system—a system that provides lower total costs, safer operations, and healthier environmental performance.

Reasonable people can have a lively policy debate over how to subsidize a transition from fossil-fueled energy to carbon-free energy. But calling a subsidy a bailout is not how to do it.


Explore further

Oil price crash: will it affect the move to green energy?

Provided by University of Pennsylvania

Social distancing: We should take our cues from birds

by Bryan Watts, The College of William & Mary

Social distancing in the sky: An example of three-dimensional social distancing within a cormorant colony. Nests are spaced along individual limbs and are also staggered between upper and lower limbs. Such spacing is forced by aggressive interactions. Credit: Bryan Watts

One of many things that the COVID-19 pandemic will be remembered for is the introduction of the term "social distancing" to the global lexicon. The term is being used to describe a collective behavior designed to maintain distances between individuals that are beyond the expected range of the normal person-to-person virus transmission.


Distancing is one of several strategies being employed to dampen the rate of contagion, blunt the peak of active cases and hopefully reduce the overall number of people that will contract the disease. As a highly social species, the concept of behavioral spacing is foreign to most people and the term is unfamiliar.

For bird behaviorists, the term social distance and its variants (territoriality, individual space, social spacing) are familiar and have been in use for over a century. Social distancing was initially used to describe the common observation that birds often exhibit a uniform distribution with incredibly even distances between individuals.

Although the underlying benefits of spacing to birds and the mechanisms that maintain spacing are not always apparent to the observer, the spacing itself can often be visually stunning. Swallows perched on telephone lines exhibit amazingly precise and consistent spacing.

Seabird nests are often uniformly spaced within breeding colonies. A flock of starlings foraging across a lawn appear to march in formation with all individuals, maintaining their personal distances. Grasshopper sparrow nesting territories are evenly spaced across a grassland. We see examples of spacing in birds all around us.

Why is social distancing so common in birds and how is it maintained? One of the most common forces shaping social distancing is the availability of resources. Spacing ensures that consumer density is matched to available resources.

Although not all birds defend territories, those that do defend patches of resources that are critical to the survival of themselves or their young. Territory spacing is maintained by individuals aggressively defending resources. Whether a foraging territory during the winter or a nesting territory during the breeding season, defending space from interlopers results in the social distancing that we observe from afar.

Another common force that shapes social distance is the need to reduce interference of an important activity. Most seabirds and other bird groups that nest in dense colonies place nests equidistant from one another. For some species, inter-nest distances may be consistent throughout the colony down to a fraction of an inch—everyone in their cubicle like a New York apartment building.

Such distancing allows the birds to raise their young without intrusion from neighbors. The incredibly precise inter-nest distances are set by how far birds can lean over and peck their neighbors (if you get pecked by your neighbor, you are building your nest too close).

The same mechanism maintains order and discipline within foraging flocks. The benefit of maintaining distance between flock members is to reduce the interference of one member on the foraging rate of another. Shorebird flocks spread out evenly over a mudflat because if every bird moved randomly over the surface it would disturb prey and reduce the foraging rate for all of them.

While there is no question that many diseases are spread through bird populations via bird-to-bird contact and that distance between individuals influences the likelihood of an individual being infected, it is not clear at all that disease has been a driving force for the evolution of social distancing in birds.

This is not to say that it may not be a factor in some species and in some circumstances as has been shown in the transmission of certain parasites. Much work remains to be done on the role that disease has played in the evolution of bird spatial behavior.

Social distancing works: Here's the math

Elephants reverse the cattle-caused depletion of soil carbon and nutrient pools

by National Science Foundation

Elephants and cattle in Africa may be able to co-exist sustainably. Credit: Dino Martins

Wild herbivore populations are declining in many African savannas, a result of replacement by livestock (mainly cattle) and the loss of large plant-eaters, or megaherbivores, such as elephants.

Although some livestock management practices may be compatible with the conservation of native savanna biodiversity, the sustainability of these integrated wild herbivore/livestock management practices is unknown.

For example, how will herbivore mixes influence key processes for the long-term functioning of savanna ecosystems, such as soil carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus pools and cycling? Scientists affiliated with the Kenya Long-term Exclosure Experiment are studying the ecosystem consequences of manipulating the presence of wild herbivores and cattle at moderate densities in a "black cotton" savanna.

In a paper published in the journal Nature Sustainability, the National Science Foundation-funded researchers show that after 20 years, cattle presence decreased total soil carbon and nitrogen pools, while the presence of megaherbivores, mainly elephants, increased these pools and reversed the negative effects of cattle.

The results suggest that a mix of cattle at moderate densities and wild herbivores can be sustainable, provided that the assemblage of wild herbivores includes the largest species, according to ecologist Truman Young of the University of California, Davis, a co-author of the new paper.

"By experimentally manipulating both domestic and wild herbivores in combinations that occur in the real world, this research demonstrates the importance of megaherbivores to sustaining natural savanna ecosystems," said Betsy von Holle, program director in NSF's Division of Environmental Biology.

Rewilding can mitigate climate change, researchers report after global assessment

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More information: Judith Sitters et al. Negative effects of cattle on soil carbon and nutrient pools reversed by megaherbivores, Nature Sustainability (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41893-020-0490-0

Journal information: Nature Sustainability Provided by National Science Foundation

RACISM AGAINST THE ROMA

The inequities of a pandemic: 

Spain's illustration of socioeconomic vulnerability and disease

by University of St Andrews

Apartment block in Spain. Credit: Alamy

New research, led by the University of St Andrews, highlights that the Spanish Roma (Gitano) community suffer disproportionate socioeconomic and health factors that make them extremely vulnerable during the current pandemic.

The research, led by social anthropologist Dr. Paloma Gay y Blasco from the School of Philosophical Anthropological and Film Studies and Maria Félix Rodriguez Camacho, Universidad de Alicante, Spain, warns that Roma, one of the most marginalized and poorest minorities in Europe, with the poorest health and lowest life expectancy, are likely to suffer the impact of coronavirus in extreme ways.

Spanish Gitanos, like Roma elsewhere in Europe, have entered the pandemic from an exceptionally disadvantaged position. More than 80% of Gitanos live in poverty, with almost 50% having a monthly income of less than €310. Gitanos experience greater levels of COPD, obesity and diabetes, and they are more likely to suffer serious health conditions which may impact whether individuals survive COVID-19. Substandard housing conditions in inner-city areas or in slums, residential segregation in purpose-built ghettos, and overcrowding all affect the Gitano community disproportionately. More than 60% of Gitanos live in multi-generational households, with two or more related nuclear families living together in small apartments, which makes the avoidance of contagion through self-isolation extremely difficult. Additionally, almost 44% of Gitano men and 27% of Gitano women earn their income through street vending, either in open-air markets or on foot. The compulsory quarantine makes it impossible for large numbers of Gitano families to earn a living. Additionally, many Gitano families have poor access to the limited financial aid the Spanish government is providing for the self-employed.

All these factors combined place large sectors of the Gitano community in a highly vulnerable situation. According to a statement issued by the Fundación Secretariado Gitano on the 24th March 2020, approximately 47,000 people lack basic food or supplies necessary for survival. Qualitative data gathered by Dr. Gay y Blasco and Ms Rodriguez Camacho also reveal the desperate conditions that many Gitano families are facing.

Dr. Gay y Blasco also highlights the negative stereotyping of the Gitano community in some sectors of the media, which characterizes them as disorderly outsiders to Spanish society, unfairly portraying them as less willing to adhere to government policies and to the enforced lockdown imposed to combat the pandemic.

NGOs and some governmental bodies have mobilized their resources to assist. Yet the authors warn that, "Without quick, decisive and inclusive action in the part of local and national state institutions these initiatives will be insufficient. This action must be taken and the suffering that so many Gitano families are undergoing must not, once again, be treated as an 'unfortunate given rather than an intolerable failure."

Self-isolating is impossible for thousands of New Zealanders unless we help them fast

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More information: COVID-19 and its Impact on the Roma Community: The Case of Spain: somatosphere.net/forumpost/cov … oma-community-spain/

Ancient teeth from Peru hint now-extinct monkeys crossed Atlantic from Africa

by Keck School of Medicine

Tiny molar teeth of the parapithecid monkey Ucayalipithecus from the Oligocene of Perú. Credit: Erik Seiffert

Four fossilized monkey teeth discovered deep in the Peruvian Amazon provide new evidence that more than one group of ancient primates journeyed across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa, according to new USC research just published in the journal Science.


The teeth are from a newly discovered species belonging to an extinct family of African primates known as parapithecids. Fossils discovered at the same site in Peru had earlier offered the first proof that South American monkeys evolved from African primates.

The monkeys are believed to have made the more than 900-mile trip on floating rafts of vegetation that broke off from coastlines, possibly during a storm.

"This is a completely unique discovery," said Erik Seiffert, the study's lead author and Professor of Clinical Integrative Anatomical Sciences at Keck School of Medicine of USC. "It shows that in addition to the New World monkeys and a group of rodents known as caviomorphs—there is this third lineage of mammals that somehow made this very improbable transatlantic journey to get from Africa to South America."

Researchers have named the extinct monkey Ucayalipithecus perdita. The name comes from Ucayali, the area of the Peruvian Amazon where the teeth were found, pithikos, the Greek word for monkey and perdita, the Latin word for lost.

Ucayalipithecus perdita would have been very small, similar in size to a modern-day marmoset.

Flying out of Breu, Perú, the closest town to the Santa Rosa fossil site. The site is found along the banks of the Rio Yurúa near the border with Brazil. Credit: Erik Seiffert

Dating the migration

Researchers believe the site in Ucayali where the teeth were found is from a geological epoch known as the Oligocene, which extended from about 34 million to 23 million years ago.

Based on the age of the site and the closeness of Ucayalipithecus to its fossil relatives from Egypt, researchers estimate the migration might have occurred around 34 million years ago.

Traveling from the Santa Rosa fossil site to Breu, Perú, by canoe. Credit: Erik Seiffert

"We're suggesting that this group might have made it over to South America right around what we call the Eocene-Oligocene Boundary, a time period between two geological epochs, when the Antarctic ice sheet started to build up and the sea level fell," said Seiffert. "That might have played a role in making it a bit easier for these primates to actually get across the Atlantic Ocean."

Erik Seiffert identifying a small fossil from the Santa Rosa site where Ucayalipithecus was found, in Amazonian Perú. Credit: Dorien de Vries

An improbable discovery

Two of the Ucayalipithecus perdita teeth were identified by Argentinean co-authors of the study in 2015 showing that New World monkeys had African forebears. When Seiffert was asked to help describe these specimens in 2016, he noticed the similarity of the two broken upper molars to an extinct 32 million-year-old parapithecid monkey species from Egypt he had studied previously.

Paleontologists dry sediment collected from the Santa Rosa site where Ucayalipithecus was found, in Amazonian Perú. Credit: Erik Seiffert

An expedition to the Peruvian fossil site in 2016 led to the discovery of two more teeth belonging to this new species. The resemblance of these additional lower teeth to those of the Egyptian monkey teeth confirmed to Seiffert that Ucayalipithecus was descended from African ancestors.


"The thing that strikes me about this study more than any other I've been involved in is just how improbable all of it is," said Seiffert. "The fact that it's this remote site in the middle of nowhere, that the chances of finding these pieces is extremely small, to the fact that we're revealing this very improbable journey that was made by these early monkeys, it's all quite remarkable."


Explore further World's smallest fossil monkey found in Amazon jungle

More information: E.R. Seiffert at University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA el al., "A parapithecid stem anthropoid of African origin in the Paleogene of South America," Science (2020). science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi … 1126/science.aba1135


M. Godinot at Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, France el al., "Rafting on a wide and wild ocean," Science (2020). science.sciencemag.org/cgi/doi … 1126/science.abb4107
Journal information: Science 

Provided by Keck School of Medicine

Scientists use underwater microphones to study calving Arctic glacier

by National Science Foundation

Surface waves are produced by iceberg calving near the terminus of a glacier in Svalbard, Norway. Credit: SIO

Researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography are eavesdropping on an Arctic glacier in the name of science. In a new study, scientists Oskar Glowacki and Grant Deane describe a method of measuring glacier mass loss from iceberg calving, a process in which ice breaks off from the edges of a glacier and ultimately contributes to sea level rise. The researchers are analyzing underwater acoustic recordings of icebergs as they fall into the ocean and make a splash.


As the planet warms, calving is expected to increase, but accurate estimates of ice loss at the ice-ocean boundary are hard to obtain, say the researchers. This difficulty is due to the remote locations of many glaciers, as well as the dangerous conditions that prevent scientists from making direct measurements at unstable ice cliffs.

To address these challenges, the National Science Foundation-funded team deployed two underwater microphones, or hydrophones, near the Hansbreen Glacier in Hornsund Fjord, Svalbard, an Arctic archipelago north of Norway. Divers placed the hydrophones on the ocean floor more than 900 meters (almost 3,000 feet) from the glacier cliff. Over the course of a month and a half, the hydrophones captured the sounds made by icebergs falling into the ocean.

The underwater sound recordings allowed the researchers to derive a mathematical formula that calculates the mass of the ice block from the noise it makes. This model can be used to measure ice loss due to calving.

What does iceberg calving sound like? "An iceberg breaking off an ice cliff and falling into the water sounds like a cracking, rumbling splash," said Deane. "It has a real bass feel to it." (Listen to a sample here.)

Distinctive sounds announce iceberg births

More information: Oskar Glowacki et al. Quantifying iceberg calving fluxes with underwater noise, The Cryosphere (2020). DOI: 10.5194/tc-14-1025-2020

Provided by National Science Foundation

Survey investigates carbon dioxide use in oil recovery and underground storage

NOT CLEAN NOR GREEN
by Cathy Evans, University of Kansas

A rig at the first IMSCS-HUB well site in Kearny County. Credit: University of Kansas

As part of a national effort to reduce the release of carbon dioxide into the air, the Kansas Geological Survey has joined forces with private and public partners to help determine whether carbon dioxide (CO2) from industrial sources can be safely and economically injected underground for long-term storage and to produce hard-to-reach oil.

Pore space in subsurface rock units has been used for more than a century to dispose of waste fluids produced through industrial processes, petroleum production, municipal water treatment and other operations. Now CO2 disposal is being considered as a commercially viable way to combat climate change.

The joint effort, known as the Integrated Midcontinent Stacked Carbon Storage Hub (IMSCS-HUB), is the second phase in the U.S. Department of Energy's multiphase CarbonSAFE program. Its objective is to investigate the subsurface geology at sites in southwest Kansas and southwest Nebraska to verify the viability of injecting CO2 into underground rock layers.

"Our main goals during this phase are to provide all necessary background work such as geological and engineering characterization of the storage site, capture-facility design, infrastructure design and injection permitting," said Eugene Holubnyak, petroleum engineer and the project's lead investigator at the geological survey.

The IMSCS-HUB project tasks include drilling two wells in Kearny County, Kansas, and one in Red Willow County, Nebraska, conducting a seismic survey and analyzing acquired data. Among its contributions, KGS will provide geologic modeling and characterization, petroleum engineering, 3-D seismic interpretation and outreach.

Cores pulled up from more than 5,400 feet beneath the surface at the IMSCS-HUB well site in Kearny County. Credit: University of Kansas

Battelle, the scientific research and technology company leading the IMSCS-HUB project, has already completed seismic work at the Kearny County site. A noninvasive seismic reflection survey is carried out by creating a vibration with explosives or specially equipped vehicles. The resulting seismic (sound) waves, which rebound off different subsurface rocks and structures in unique ways, are recorded at the surface and used to produce images of rock layers, voids, faults and other geologic structures.


An affiliate of Berexco, a Wichita-based exploration and production company, is currently drilling the first Kearny County well to approximately 6,600 feet in depth. About 800 feet of that will be cored at key geologic intervals, including the oil-bearing rock layers. Cores are cylindrical segments, about 2 to 4 inches in diameter, that are brought up intact. Although coring is more expensive than rotary drilling, which chops the rock into small pieces, cores provide a more complete picture of the subsurface environment than chopped rock.

The cores, drilling records, and 3-D seismic data will be made available to the public once the project is complete. Besides being essential for Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS) projects, the results will be a valuable resource for conventional oil and gas exploration, geologic research and other activities.

The 3-D model (top) shows storage potential of rock layers from the top of the Meramec formation—more than 4,000 feet deep in Kearny County—to the top of the basement. The map above is the top of the Morrow formation overlying the Meramec. The cross section (bottom) shows formations underlying line A-A' on the 3-D model. Credit: University of Kansas

"Extensive 3-D seismic datasets, such as the one acquired at the Kearny County site, are expensive and not often available to the public," Holubnyak said. "This dataset will provide insight on the architecture of structures in the subsurface throughout the region, where there are many similar structures. We hope that by analyzing this data we will better understand the Ordovician-age Arbuckle and Precambrian basement interface and other geologic formations in Kansas."

The Arbuckle Group is a porous rock formation that contains extremely saline water in western Kansas, where it is separated from shallower, freshwater aquifers by thousands of feet of impermeable rock. The formation is the key target for CO2 storage, and data gathered during the IMSCS-HUB investigation will help determine whether it can safely contain CO2 for the long term. The Precambrian basement, composed of igneous and metamorphic rock, directly underlies the Arbuckle in Kansas.

"Data on the Precambrian/Arbuckle interface is sparse, but it is essential for both fundamental science and applications such as CCUS," Holubnyak said.

Seismic-generated model showing contours on the top of the Arbuckle formation in the vicinity of the Kearny County IMSCS-HUB well site. Credit: University of Kansas
In the past 10 years, the KGS Energy Research Section has led or played a key role in five large-scale CCUS projects funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. KGS-led ICKan (Integrated Carbon Capture and Storage for Kansas) was one of three Phase I projects in DOE's CarbonSAFE program. In that phase, KGS was tasked with developing a plan to address the challenges and opportunities for commercial-scale CCUS in Kansas.

Interest in capturing and storing carbon emissions was regenerated in 2018 when the Internal Revenue Service updated a tax incentive, known as 45Q, for companies willing to capture and store CO2. Oil and gas production, ethanol, electrical-power generation, pipeline, agriculture and other industries are eligible.

Kansas Geological Survey to test use of CO2 in oil recovery and storing it underground

Provided by University of Kansas