COVID Pandemic Mood: Much Worse Than a Bad Monday

By PETER DIZIKES, MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY MARCH 20, 2022

A new study led by MIT researchers attempts to measure how the pandemic affected public sentiment through a massive examination of hundreds of millions social media posts in about 100 countries. Credit: Christine Daniloff, MIT

Study uses social media to measure how much sentiment has been affected by the Covid-19 crisis, worldwide.

The Covid-19 pandemic has been depressing, demoralizing, and stressful for people around the world. But is there any way to measure exactly how bad it has made everyone feel?

A new study led by MIT researchers attempts just that, through a massive examination of hundreds of millions social media posts in about 100 countries. The research, which analyzes the language terms used in social media, finds a pronounced drop in positive public sentiment after the pandemic set in during early 2020 — with a subsequent, incremental, halting return to prepandemic status.

To put that downturn in perspective, consider a prepandemic fact that the same kind of analysis uncovered: Typically, people express the most upbeat emotions on social media on weekends, and the most negative ones on Monday. Worldwide, the onset of the pandemic induced a negative turn in sentiment 4.7 times as large as the traditional weekend-Monday gap. Thus the early pandemic months were like a really, really bad Monday, on aggregate, globally, for social media users.

“The takeaway here is that the pandemic itself caused a huge emotional toll, four to five times the variation in sentiment observed in a normal week,” says Siqi Zheng, an MIT professor and co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s results.

The paper, “Global evidence of expressed sentiment alterations during the Covid-19 pandemic,” was published on March 17, 2022, in Nature Human Behaviour.

The authors are Jianghao Wang, an associate professor at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Science, in Beijing; Yichun Fan, a PhD candidate in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) and the Sustainable Urbanization Lab (SUL); Juan Palacios, a postdoc at the MIT Center for Real Estate and SUL; Yuchen Chai, a researcher at DUSP and SUL; Nicolas Guetta-Jeanrenaud, a graduate student in the MIT Technology and Policy Program (TPP); Nick Obradovich, a senior research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in the Center for Humans and Machines; Chenghu Zhou; and Zheng, who is the Samuel Tak Lee Champion Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability at MIT and faculty director of the MIT Center for Real Estate and SUL.

To conduct the study, the researchers examined 654 million location-identified social media posts from Twitter in about 100 countries. The posts appeared between Jan. 1, 2020, and May 31, 2020, an early phase of the global pandemic.

The researchers used natural-language processing software to evaluate the content of the social media, and examined the language of pandemic-period posts in relation to historical norms. Having previously studied the effects of pollution, extreme weather, and natural disasters on public sentiment, they found that the pandemic produced bigger changes in mood than those other circumstances.

“The reaction to the pandemic was also three to four times the change in response to extreme temperatures,” Fan observes. “The pandemic shock is even larger than the days when there is a hurricane in a region.”

The biggest drops in sentiment occurred in Australia, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Colombia. The countries least affected by the pandemic in these terms were Bahrain, Botswana, Greece, Oman, and Tunisia.

The study also revealed a potentially surprising fact about temporary lockdown policies — namely, that lockdowns did not appear to have much of an effect on the public mood.

“You can’t expect lockdowns to have the same effect on every country, and the distribution of responses is quite wide,” says Fan. “But we found the responses actually largely centered around a very small positive reaction [to lockdowns]. … It’s definitely not the overwhelmingly negative impact on people that might be expected.”

As to why people might have reacted like this, Zheng says, “On the one hand, lockdown policies might make people feel secure, and not as scared. On the other hand, in a lockdown when you cannot have social activities, it’s another emotional stress. The impact of lockdown policies perhaps runs in two directions.”

Because many factors might concurrently affect public sentiment during a lockdown, the researchers compared the mood of countries during lockdowns to those with similar characteristics that simultaneously did not enact the same policies.

The scholars also evaluated patterns of sentiment recovery during the early 2020 period, finding that some countries took as long as 29 days to erase half of the dropoff in sentiment they experienced; 18 percent of countries did not recover to their prepandemic sentiment level.

The new paper is part of the Global Sentiment project in Zheng’s Sustainable Urbanization Lab, which studies public sentiment as expressed through social media, rather than public-opinion polling.

“The traditional approach is to use surveys to measure well-being or happiness,” Zheng observes. “But a survey has smaller sample size and low frequency. This a real-time measure of people’s sentiment.”

Reference: “Global evidence of expressed sentiment alterations during the COVID-19 pandemic” by Jianghao Wang, Yichun Fan, Juan Palacios, Yuchen Chai, Nicolas Guetta-Jeanrenaud, Nick Obradovich, Chenghu Zhou and Siqi Zheng, 17 March 2022, Nature Human Behaviour.
DOI: 10.1038/s41562-022-01312-y

The MIT researchers were supported in part by the Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness; support for the other researchers was in part provided by the National Science Foundation of China and the Youth Innovation Promotion Association of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

 

Psychedelic Medicine: LSD, a Future 

Anti-Anxiety Pill?

By MCGILL UNIVERSITY MARCH 20, 2022

 

New study by Dr. Gabriella Gobbi reveals the neurobiological mechanisms by which LSD could relieve anxiety.

The craze for psychedelics used for therapeutic purposes is real. However, the scientific evidence supporting their effectiveness and explaining their mode of action in treating mental health disorders is still very thin. A new study led by Dr. Gabriella Gobbi, a senior scientist in the Brain Repair and Integrative Neuroscience (BRaIN) Program at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC), sheds light on previously unexplained neurobiological mechanisms by which LSD is believed to relieve anxiety.

While preliminary studies suggested that psychotherapy-assisted microdosing was effective in alleviating anxiety and depressive symptoms in people with severe psychiatric or neurological problems, the biological mechanisms underlying these effects had remained unclear to date. The study conducted by Dr. Gobbi’s team demonstrates for the first time that regular administration of low doses of LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) reduces anxiety symptoms through neurobiological mechanisms that are similar to some commonly prescribed classes of antidepressants and anxiolytics: selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs). SSRIs are better known by their trade names: Prozac, Zoloft, Celexa, Cipralex, etc.

“Our lack of knowledge of the biological processes associated with psychedelic drugs hinders the development of potential new treatments,” says Dr. Gabriella Gobbi, also a Professor and Head of the Neurobiological Psychiatry Unit in the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University. “Understanding the mechanisms of action and efficacy of psychedelics will allow us to develop a more precise indication of hallucinogenic drugs for psychiatric and neurological diseases,” she says.

The study, which was published today in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, was conducted in collaboration with researchers in psychiatry at McGill University, as well as researchers in neuroscience at Vita Salute San Raffaele University and in Pharmaceutical and Pharmacological Sciences at the University of Padua, Italy.

Neurobiological mechanisms under the microscope

According to the results of the study, the use of LSD increases the nervous transmission of serotonin, also called 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT). Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that plays an essential role in the state of well-being. It has been shown that prolonged periods of stress result in a decrease in the activity of the neurons that transmit serotonin (5-HT neurons). Like the SSRI antidepressants, LSD is believed to desensitize the receptors, which decrease the electrical activity of serotonin on these neurons, thereby stimulating them to release more serotonin.

Dr. Gobbi’s study also found that low doses of LSD promoted the formation of new dendritic spines in rodents. These spines are the branches of neurons that are responsible for transmitting the electrical signal to the nerve cell body. “We have shown that LSD can rebuild these branches that are ‘dismantled’ due to stress. This is a sign of brain plasticity,” explains Dr. Danilo De Gregorio, who is today an Assistant Professor of Pharmacology at San Raffaele University in Milan and first author of the study.

The research team evaluated the administration of low doses of LSD over a period of seven days on a group of mouse models subjected to chronic stress conditions. Repeated doses showed optimal results in decreasing anxiety-like behaviors caused by stress. More studies are needed to demonstrate the drug effectiveness for depressive and anxiety disorders in humans and the inherent mechanisms of action.

Another study by Dr. Gobbi, published in 2016, had already shown that low doses of LSD affected only the nerve transmission of serotonin while higher doses affected the dopamine system, causing the psychotic effects.

“I began my research on psychedelics several years ago out of personal curiosity. How is it possible that a simple drug can change your state of mind so profoundly? What is its mechanism of action? To my surprise, this research is now in the spotlight,” says Dr. Gobbi. The next step for her team will be to evaluate the mechanisms of action of other psychedelic substances, such as psilocybin (an active component of magic mushrooms) and ketamine.

Caution and patience are required

There have been no major advances in psychiatric care in the last decade. It is essential to develop new therapeutic alternatives, because for a proportion of people with serious mental health problems, current treatments are not working. LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca and MDMA are among the drugs that are being developed to treat various psychiatric disorders such as anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and addiction, as well as certain neurodegenerative diseases. Health Canada authorized the use of psychedelic drugs in a very strict clinical setting last January.

However, there is still a long way to go, says Dr. Gobbi. “Interest in LSD stems from its ability to influence serotonin levels and produce feelings of happiness, confidence and empathy as well as improvement of social behavior. However, more studies are needed to identify safe and effective therapeutic uses, as psychedelics can cause psychosis and neurotoxic effects,” says the researcher, who warns the public about the dangers of self-medicating with illegal drugs.

Reference: “Repeated lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) reverses stress-induced anxiety-like behavior, cortical synaptogenesis deficits and serotonergic neurotransmission decline” by Danilo De Gregorio, Antonio Inserra, Justine P. Enns, Athanasios Markopoulos, Michael Pileggi, Youssef El Rahimy, Martha Lopez-Canul, Stefano Comai and Gabriella Gobbi, 17 March 2022, Neuropsychopharmacology.
DOI: 10.1038/s41386-022-01301-9

About the RI-MUHC

The Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) is a world-renowned biomedical and healthcare research centre. The institute, which is affiliated with the Faculty of Medicine of McGill University, is the research arm of the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) – an academic health centre located in Montreal, Canada, that has a mandate to focus on complex care within its community. The RI-MUHC supports over 450 researchers and around 1,200 research trainees devoted to a broad spectrum of fundamental, clinical and health outcomes research at the Glen and the Montreal General Hospital sites of the MUHC. Its research facilities offer a dynamic multidisciplinary environment that fosters collaboration and leverages discovery aimed at improving the health of individual patients across their lifespan. The RI-MUHC is supported in part by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Santé (FRQS).

Monkeys play to reduce group tension

Play amongst adult howler monkeys increases during competitive foraging

Date:

March 17, 2022

Source:

Anglia Ruskin University

Summary:

New research has discovered that monkeys use play to avoid conflict and reduce group tension. The study found that adult howler monkeys spend more time playing with other adults, rather than juveniles. And rather than being associated with fun or education, play increases when howler monkeys are foraging for fruit, which is a highly prized resource that generates competition.

New research has discovered that adult howler monkeys use play to avoid conflict and reduce group tension, with levels of play increasing when they are faced with scarce resources.

The study, carried out by a team of researchers from Spain, Brazil and the UK, and published in the journal Animal Behaviour, focuses on the activity of two subspecies of howler monkey: the Mexican howler (Alouatta palliata mexicana) and the golden-mantled howler (Alouatta palliata palliata).

The researchers examined how play varies with age, and they measured the amount of time adults play with other adults and with juvenile monkeys within their groups.

Howler monkey play involves individuals hanging from their tails and making facial expressions and signals, such as shaking their heads. However, play is an energy-costly activity for howler monkeys, who generally have an inactive lifestyle due to their mainly leaf-based diet.

By studying seven different groups of howler monkeys in the rainforests of Mexico and Costa Rica, the researchers found that the amount of adult play is linked to the number of potential playmates, increasing in line with the size of the group. Adults spend more time playing with other adults, rather than juveniles, and adult females spend more time engaged in play than adult males.

Crucially, the researchers found that play amongst adults increases in line with time spent foraging on fruit. Howler monkeys typically eat leaves, and fruit is a highly prized resource that generates competition amongst the monkeys.

Howler monkeys do not have a fixed social hierarchy within their groups to navigate competition and conflict, and they do not engage in collective grooming, which is used by some primates for group cohesiveness and tension reduction. Instead, the study authors believe play has a key role in helping howler monkeys regulate relationships within their social group and avoid conflict.

Co-author Dr Jacob Dunn, Associate Professor in Evolutionary Biology at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), said: "Despite its appearance and our own perception of what play means, play is not always associated with frivolity or education. Instead, we think it fulfils an important function in howler monkey society by reducing tension when there is competition over scarce resources.

"We found that levels of play are at their highest when howler monkeys are feeding on fruit -- which is a valuable and defendable resource -- and female adults play more than males. This is striking, as females would be more vulnerable to food competition than males. Howler monkeys are a particularly energy-conservative species, and we would have assumed females would have played less, as they are also constrained by the energy requirements of reproduction."

Lead author Dr Norberto Asensio, of University of the Basque Country, said: "One theory for the positive effect of fruit consumption on play is that a fruit-based diet simply provides the howler monkeys with more energy compared to their typical diet of leaves.

"However, if this was the case, we should have observed adults engaging in more play with all members of the group during fruit foraging, rather than just with other adults. Because juveniles do not pose a threat or provide competition at fruit trees, we believe that play amongst adults is a mechanism for solving conflicts within the group, in a similar way that grooming is used by some other primate species."

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Story Source:

Materials provided by Anglia Ruskin University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

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Journal Reference:

1. Norberto Asensio, Eugenia Zandonà, Jacob C. Dunn, Jurgi Cristóbal-Azkarate. Socioecological correlates of social play in adult mantled howler monkeys. Animal Behaviour, 2022; DOI: 10.1016/j.anbehav.2022.01.017

Anglia Ruskin University. "Monkeys play to reduce group tension: Play amongst adult howler monkeys increases during competitive foraging." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 17 March 2022. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/03/220317094737.htm>.

 New form of ice discovered

Findings could have implications for our understanding of distant, water-rich planets

Date:

March 18, 2022

Source:

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Summary:

Researchers have discovered a new form of ice, redefining the properties of water at high pressures.

UNLV researchers have discovered a new form of ice, redefining the properties of water at high pressures.

Solid water, or ice, is like many other materials in that it can form different solid materials based on variable temperature and pressure conditions, like carbon forming diamond or graphite. However, water is exceptional in this aspect as there are at least 20 solid forms of ice known to us.

A team of scientists working in UNLV's Nevada Extreme Conditions Lab pioneered a new method for measuring the properties of water under high pressure. The water sample was first squeezed between the tips of two opposite-facing diamonds -- freezing into several jumbled ice crystals. The ice was then subjected to a laser-heating technique that temporarily melted it before it quickly re-formed into a powder-like collection of tiny crystals.

By incrementally raising the pressure, and periodically blasting it with the laser beam, the team observed the water ice make the transition from a known cubic phase, Ice-VII, to the newly discovered intermediate, and tetragonal, phase, Ice-VIIt, before settling into another known phase, Ice-X.

Zach Grande, a UNLV Ph.D. student, led the work which also demonstrated that the transition to Ice-X, when water stiffens aggressively, occurs at much lower pressures than previously thought.

While it's unlikely we'll find this new phase of ice anywhere on the surface of Earth, it is likely a common ingredient within the mantle of Earth as well as in large moons and water-rich planets outside of our solar system.

The team's findings were reported in the March 17 issue of the journal Physical Review B.

Takeaways

The research team had been working to understand the behavior of high-pressure water that may be present in the interior of distant planets.

To do so, Grande and UNLV physicist Ashkan Salamat placed a sample of water between the tips of two round-cut diamonds known as diamond anvil cells, a standard feature in the field of high pressure physics. Applying a little bit of force to the diamonds enabled the researchers to recreate pressures as high as those found at the center of the Earth.

By squeezing the water sample between these diamonds, scientists drove the oxygen and hydrogen atoms into a variety of different arrangements, including the newly discovered arrangement, Ice-VIIt.

Not only did the first-of-its-kind laser-heating technique allow scientists to observe a new phase of water ice, but the team also found that the transition to Ice-X occurred at pressures nearly three times lower than previously thought -- at 300,000 atmospheres instead of 1 million. This transition has been a highly debated topic in the community for several decades.

"Zach's work has demonstrated that this transformation to an ionic state occurs at much, much lower pressures than ever thought before," Salamat said. "It's the missing piece, and the most precise measurements ever on water at these conditions."

The work also recalibrates our understanding of the composition of exoplanets, Salamat added. Researchers hypothesize that the Ice-VIIt phase of ice could exist in abundance in the crust and upper mantle of expected water-rich planets outside of our solar system, meaning they could have conditions habitable for life.

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Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Original written by Natalie Bruzda. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

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Journal Reference:

1. Zachary M. Grande, C. Huy Pham, Dean Smith, John H. Boisvert, Chenliang Huang, Jesse S. Smith, Nir Goldman, Jonathan L. Belof, Oliver Tschauner, Jason H. Steffen, Ashkan Salamat. Pressure-driven symmetry transitions in dense H2O ice. Physical Review B, 2022; 105 (10) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.105.104109

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University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "New form of ice discovered: Findings could have implications for our understanding of distant, water-rich planets." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 18 March 2022. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/03/220318170514.htm>.

The oxidation of volcanoes -- a magma opus

Date:

March 17, 2022

Source:

Yale University

Summary:

A new study unlocks the science behind a key ingredient -- namely oxygen -- in some of the world's most violent volcanoes. The research offers a new model for understanding the oxidation state of arc magmas, the lavas that form some volcanoes, such as the one that erupted dramatically in Tonga earlier this year. The plume from Tonga's underwater volcanic eruption on Jan. 15 rose 36 miles into the air. Ash from the volcano reached the mesosphere, Earth's third layer of atmosphere.

A new, Yale-led study unlocks the science behind a key ingredient -- namely oxygen -- in some of the world's most violent volcanoes.

The research offers a new model for understanding the oxidation state of arc magmas, the lavas that form some volcanoes, such as the one that erupted dramatically in Tonga earlier this year.

The plume from Tonga's underwater volcanic eruption on Jan. 15 rose 36 miles into the air. Ash from the volcano reached the mesosphere, Earth's third layer of atmosphere.

"These eruptions occur in volcanic arcs, such as the Aleutian island chain, which are well known in the circum-Pacific region and produce the world's most explosive volcanic eruptions," said Jay Ague, the Henry Barnard Davis Memorial Professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences at Yale.

Ague is first author of the new study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience. Ague is also curator-in-charge of mineralogy and meteoritics for the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History.

Scientists have long known that arc magmas have a higher oxidation state than rocks in most of the Earth's mantle (its upper, rocky layer). This is surprising, they say, because arc magmas form in the mantle. There has been no consensus on the origins of the oxidizing signature.

Ague and his colleagues say the process begins with a layer of sediment that covers tectonic plates beneath the ocean floor. Tectonic plates are large slabs of rock that jockey for position in the Earth's crust and upper mantle.

The sediment covering these ocean plates is largely made up of weathered materials shed from continents or produced as a result of seafloor hydrothermal vent activity. Giant tube worms and other exotic sea creatures commonly thrive near these vents. But regardless of origin, the sediments covering oceanic plates are often highly oxidized.

Tectonic plates are constantly in motion, moving at about the rate that fingernails grow. Oceanic plates are generated at mid-ocean ridges and sink sharply into Earth's interior -- in a process called subduction.

That's where things get interesting for arc volcanism, Ague said.

When an ocean plate subducts, Ague explained, it heats up, is compressed, and begins to dehydrate. This metamorphism produces hot, water-rich fluids that rise toward the surface.

As these materials move upward through the oxidized sediment layer on top of slabs, the fluids themselves become oxidized -- setting the stage for an arc magma.

"As the fluids continue to rise they leave the slab behind and enter Earth's mantle," Ague said. "There, the fluids drive mantle melting, producing oxidized magmas that ascend and can ultimately erupt as lava from volcanoes."

Beyond the dramatic effects of volcanic eruptions, the oxidized character of arc magmas is also geologically significant, Ague said. Oxidation is critical for making certain kinds of ore deposits, particularly copper and gold, such as those found in western South America.

Also, the injection of highly-oxidized, sulfur-bearing gases into the atmosphere after an eruption can lead to transient global cooling of the troposphere, the lowest level of Earth's atmosphere.

"This was the case with the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines," Ague said. "It also occurred in a number of famous historical cases, such Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815. That was the most powerful volcanic eruption in human history and led to the so-called 'Year Without a Summer' in 1816."

Santiago Tassara, a Bateman Postdoctoral Associate in Yale's Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences, is a co-author of the new study. Other co-authors include researchers from Cornell University, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution, Freie Universität Berlin, and the University of Crete.

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Story Source:

Materials provided by Yale University. Original written by Jim Shelton. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

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Journal Reference:

1. Ague, J.J., Tassara, S., Holycross, M.E. et al. Slab-derived devolatilization fluids oxidized by subducted metasedimentary rocks. Nat. Geosci., 2022 DOI: 10.1038/s41561-022-00904-7

Yale University. "The oxidation of volcanoes -- a magma opus." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 17 March 2022.

 Effects of ancient carbon releases suggest possible scenarios for future climate

Date:

March 16, 2022

Source:

University of California - Santa Cruz

Summary:

A massive release of greenhouse gases, likely triggered by volcanic activity, caused a period of extreme global warming known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) about 56 million years ago. A new study now confirms that the PETM was preceded by a smaller episode of warming and ocean acidification caused by a shorter burst of carbon emissions. The short-lived precursor event represents what might happen if current emissions can be shut down quickly, while the much more extreme global warming of the PETM shows the consequences of continuing to release carbon into the atmosphere at the current rate.

A massive release of greenhouse gases, likely triggered by volcanic activity, caused a period of extreme global warming known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) about 56 million years ago. A new study now confirms that the PETM was preceded by a smaller episode of warming and ocean acidification caused by a shorter burst of carbon emissions.

The new findings, published March 16 in Science Advances, indicate that the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere during this precursor event was about the same as the current cumulative carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities. As a result, the short-lived precursor event represents what might happen if current emissions can be shut down quickly, while the much more extreme global warming of the PETM shows the consequences of continuing to release carbon into the atmosphere at the current rate.

"It was a short-lived burp of carbon equivalent to what we've already released from anthropogenic emissions," said coauthor James Zachos, professor of Earth and planetary sciences and Ida Benson Lynn Chair of Ocean Health at UC Santa Cruz. "If we turned off emissions today, that carbon would eventually get mixed into the deep sea and its signal would disappear, because the deep-sea reservoir is so huge."

This process would take hundreds of years -- a long time by human standards, but short compared to the tens of thousands of years it took for Earth's climate system to recover from the more extreme PETM.

The new findings are based on an analysis of marine sediments that were deposited in shallow waters along the U.S. Atlantic coast and are now part of the Atlantic Coastal Plain. At the time of the PETM, sea levels were higher, and much of Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey were under water. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has drilled sediment cores from this region which the researchers used for the study.

The PETM is marked in marine sediments by a major shift in carbon isotope composition and other evidence of dramatic changes in ocean chemistry as a result of the ocean absorbing large amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The marine sediments contain the microscopic shells of tiny sea creatures called foraminifera that lived in the surface waters of the ocean. The chemical composition of these shells records the environmental conditions in which they formed and reveals evidence of warmer surface water temperatures and ocean acidification.

First author Tali Babila began the study as a postdoctoral fellow working with Zachos at UC Santa Cruz and is now at the University of Southampton, U.K. Novel analytical methods developed at Southampton enabled the researchers to analyze the boron isotope composition of individual foraminifera to reconstruct a detailed record of ocean acidification. This was part of a suite of geochemical analyses they used to reconstruct environmental changes during the precursor event and the main PETM.

"Previously, thousands of foraminifera fossil shells were needed for boron isotope measurement. Now we are able to analyze a single shell that's only the size of a grain of sand," Babila said.

Evidence of a precursor warming event had been identified previously in sediments from the continental section at Big Horn Basin in Wyoming and a few other sites. Whether it was a global signal remained unclear, however, as it was absent from deep-sea sediment cores. Zachos said this makes sense because sedimentation rates in the deep ocean are slow, and the signal from a short-lived event would be lost due to mixing of sediments by bottom-dwelling marine life.

"The best hope for seeing the signal would be in shallow marine basins where sedimentation rates are higher," he said. "The problem there is that deposition is episodic and erosion is more likely. So there's not a high likelihood of capturing it."

The USGS and others have drilled numerous sediment cores (or sections) along the Atlantic Coastal Plain. The researchers found that the PETM is present in all of those sections, and several also capture the precursor event. Two sections from Maryland (at South Dover Bridge and Cambridge-Dover Airport) are the focus of the new study.

"Here we have the full signal, and a couple of other locations capture part of it. We believe it's the same event they found in the Bighorn Basin," Zachos said.

Based on their analyses, the team concluded that the precursor signal in the Maryland sections represents a global event that probably lasted for a few centuries, or possibly several millennia at most.

The two carbon pulses -- the short-lived precursor and the much larger and more prolonged carbon emissions that drove the PETM -- led to profoundly different mechanisms and time scales for the recovery of the Earth's carbon cycle and climate system. The carbon absorbed by the surface waters during the precursor event got mixed into the deep ocean within a thousand years or so. The carbon emissions during the PETM, however, exceeded the buffering capacity of the ocean, and removal of the excess carbon depended on much slower processes such as the weathering of silicate rocks over tens of thousands of years.

Zachos noted that there are important differences between Earth's climate system today and during the Paleocene -- notably the presence of polar ice sheets today, which increase the sensitivity of the climate to greenhouse warming.

In addition to Babila and Zachos, the coauthors of the paper include Gavin Foster and Christopher Standish at University of Southampton; Donald Penman at Utah State University; Monika Doubrawa, Robert Speijer, and Peter Stassen at KU Leuven, Belgium; Timothy Bralower at Pennsylvania State University; and Marci Robinson and Jean Self-Trail at the USGS. This work was funded in part by the National Science Foundation.

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Story Source:

Materials provided by University of California - Santa Cruz. Original written by Tim Stephens. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

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Related Multimedia:

• Microscopic shells of organisms called foraminifera

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Journal Reference:

1. Tali L. Babila, Donald E. Penman, Christopher D. Standish, Monika Doubrawa, Timothy J. Bralower, Marci M. Robinson, Jean M. Self-Trail, Robert P. Speijer, Peter Stassen, Gavin L. Foster, James C. Zachos. Surface ocean warming and acidification driven by rapid carbon release precedes Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. Science Advances, 2022; 8 (11) DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abg1025

University of California - Santa Cruz. "Effects of ancient carbon releases suggest possible scenarios for future climate." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 16 March 2022. 

Conversion process turns pollution into cash

Converting carbon dioxide to ethylene holds commercial promise, professor says

Date:

March 18, 2022

Source:

University of Cincinnati

Summary:

Engineers have developed a promising electrochemical system to convert emissions from chemical and power plants into useful products while addressing climate change.

Engineers at the University of Cincinnati have developed a promising electrochemical system to convert emissions from chemical and power plants into useful products while addressing climate change.

UC College of Engineering and Applied Science assistant professor Jingjie Wu and his students used a two-step cascade reaction to convert carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide and then into ethylene, a chemical used in everything from food packaging to tires.

The study was published in the journal Nature Catalysis in collaboration with the University of California Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

UC College of Engineering and Applied Science graduate Tianyu Zhang, one of the study's lead authors, led a similar study last year that examined ways to convert carbon dioxide into methane that could be used as rocket fuel for Martian exploration.

"The significance of the two-stage conversion is that we can increase the ethylene selectivity and productivity at the same time with the low-cost strategy," Zhang said. "This process can be applied to various reactions because the electrode structure is general and simple."

Selectivity means isolating the desired compounds. Productivity is the amount of ethylene the reactor can produce.

"We're selectively reducing carbon emissions into something considered valuable because of its many downstream applications," Zhang said.

Applications include a variety of industries from steel and cement plants to the oil and gas industry, he said.

"In the future, we can use this technique to reduce carbon emissions and make a profit from it. So, reducing carbon emissions will not be a costly process anymore," he said.

Ethylene has been called "the world's most important chemical." It's used in a range of plastics from water bottles to PVC pipe, textiles and rubber found in tires and insulation.

Professor Wu said the chemical they produce is known as "green ethylene," because it is created from renewable sources.

"Ideally we can remove greenhouse gas from the environment while simultaneously making fuels and chemicals," Wu said. "Power plants and ethylene plants emit a lot of carbon dioxide. Our goal is to capture the carbon dioxide and convert it to ethylene using electrochemical conversion."

So far, the process requires more energy than it produces in ethylene. By using tandem electrodes, UC engineers were able to boost productivity and selectivity, both of which are key indicators toward making the process commercially attractive to industry, Wu said.

There are huge environmental advantages to containing and converting greenhouse gases, Wu said.

"It's being pushed by the government. In the future, we'll need sustainable development so we'll need to convert carbon dioxide," he said.

And Wu said copper isn't necessarily the best catalyst for this reaction, so industry experts have likely alternatives that could boost productivity and efficiency even more.

"Our system is very general, but you can use preferred catalysts," Wu said. "But even with commercial copper we were able to more than double the performance. With an even better catalyst, we could solve the economic issue."

Wu last year applied for patents for their design.

Zhang said the system will take some time to become economical. But already they have made tremendous strides, he said.

"The technology has improved a lot in 10 years. So in the next 10 years, I'm optimistic we'll see similar advances. This is a game changer," Zhang said.

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Story Source:

Materials provided by University of Cincinnati. Original written by Michael Miller. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

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Journal Reference:

1. Tianyu Zhang, Justin C. Bui, Zhengyuan Li, Alexis T. Bell, Adam Z. Weber, Jingjie Wu. Highly selective and productive reduction of carbon dioxide to multicarbon products via in situ CO management using segmented tandem electrodes. Nature Catalysis, 2022; DOI: 10.1038/s41929-022-00751-0

University of Cincinnati. "Conversion process turns pollution into cash: Converting carbon dioxide to ethylene holds commercial promise, professor says." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 18 March 2022. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/03/220318161451.htm>.

Smart coatings in the pipeline

Made from cheap chemicals, this polymer packs a punch

Date:

March 20, 2022

Source:

Flinders University

Summary:

An imaginative approach to polymer surface coating has produced a sustainable way to remove mercury from water -- while providing a wide range of protection including for preventing metal corrosion and solvent damage of plastic PVC pipes. The smart coating, made from low-cost chemicals from oil refining and other sources, also can prevent acid and water damage of concrete surfaces and be repaired in situ by a simple heating process.

An imaginative approach to polymer surface coating has produced a sustainable way to remove mercury from water -- while providing a wide range of protection including for preventing metal corrosion and solvent damage of plastic PVC pipes.

The smart coating, made from low-cost chemicals from oil refining and other sources, also can prevent acid and water damage of concrete surfaces and be repaired in situ by a simple heating process, says Flinders University project leader Max Mann.

"Made easily from elemental sulfur and dicyclopentadiene (DCPD is a by-product of petroleum refining), this new coating is multi-functional which gives us wide scope to use it in a wide range of useful ways and for longer lasting industrial products and components," says Flinders University PhD candidate Mr Mann, lead author of the cover article in this month's issue of Polymer Chemistry.

"This exciting new area of research extends fundamental chemistry to several practical applications."

"The method for making the coating is safer than methods previously used for related coatings. The team developed a lower temperature process that prevented runaway reactions," adds co-author University of Liverpool researcher Dr Bowen Zhang.

Along with its protective powers against corrosion, solvent damage and acid and water damage, the research found the active coating can capture toxic metals such as mercury.

The coating is repairable and scratches and damage can be prepared by the simple application of heat, the Flinders-Liverpool team found.

This process is possible because of the coating's chemical structure which allows sulfur-sulfur bonds to be broken and re-formed.

Flinders University chemistry Professor Justin Chalker says the research is a significant step forward in multi-functional coatings.

"The unique chemical composition of the smart coating enables protection of substrates, active removal of toxic mercury species from water and oil, and is repairable which ensures its sustainability," says Matthew Flinders Professor Chalker, from the Institute of Nanoscale Science and Technology at Flinders University.

"The coating is solvent resistant and can also remove mercury from oil and water mixtures, which is of importance to remediation in the petroleum and gas industry."

Mr Mann conducted part of this study in the UK on an exchange at Dr Tom Hasell's University of Liverpool lab as part of ongoing collaboration between the Chalker Lab and Hasell Lab in Liverpool.

The project was funded by the Australian Research Council (DP200100090).

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Story Source:

Materials provided by Flinders University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

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Journal Reference:

1. Maximilian Mann, Bowen Zhang, Samuel J. Tonkin, Christopher T. Gibson, Zhongfan Jia, Tom Hasell, Justin M. Chalker. Processes for coating surfaces with a copolymer made from sulfur and dicyclopentadiene. Polymer Chemistry, 2022; 13 (10): 1320 DOI: 10.1039/D1PY01416A

Flinders University. "Smart coatings in the pipeline: Made from cheap chemicals, this polymer packs a punch." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 20 March 2022. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/03/220315095015.htm>.