Hubble Space Telescope Focuses on NGC 6380

Jul 12, 2021 by Enrico de Lazaro

NASA has released a beautiful close-up shot snapped by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope of the globular cluster NGC 6380.

This Hubble image shows NGC 6380, a globular cluster some 35,500 light-years away in the constellation of Scorpius. The very bright star at the top of the image is HD 159073, which is only around 4,000 light-years from Earth. The color image was made from separate exposures taken in the visible and near-infrared regions of the spectrum with Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). Three filters were used to sample various wavelengths. The color results from assigning different hues to each monochromatic image associated with an individual filter. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / E. Noyola.

Globular clusters are densely packed, spherical collections of hundreds of thousands or even millions of stars.

They are among the oldest known objects in the Universe and are relics of the first epochs of galaxy formation.

About 150-180 such clusters are known to exist around our Milky Way Galaxy.

One of them, NGC 6380, is located approximately 35,500 light-years away in the constellation of Scorpio.

“NGC 6380 is not a particularly exciting name, but it indicates that this cluster is catalogued in the New General Catalogue (NGC), which was originally compiled in 1888,” Hubble astronomers said.

“This cluster has, however, been known by many other names.”

“NGC 6380 was originally discovered by the Scottish astronomer James Dunlop in 1826, and he rather immodestly named it Dun 538,” they added.

“Eight years later, in 1834, it was independently rediscovered by the British astronomer John Herschel and he — similarly immodestly — went on to name it H 3688.”

“The cluster was re-rediscovered in 1959 by the Armenian-Mexican astronomer Paris Pişmiş, who catalogued it as Tonantzintla 1 — and who, to continue the pattern, also referred to it as Pişmiş 25.”

“In addition to its colorful history of rediscovery, up until the 1950s NGC 6380 was thought to be an open cluster,” the astronomers said.

“It was the British astronomer A. David Thackeray who realized that it was in fact a globular cluster.”

“Nowadays, this cluster is reliably recognized in widely available catalogues as a globular cluster, and referred to simply as NGC 6380.”

UH OH

Earth's Atmosphere Is Retaining Heat Twice as Fast as It Did Just 15 Years Ago


Sunset over the Indian Ocean as seen from the ISS, showing Earth's atmospheric layers. (NASA)

ANDY TOMASWICK, UNIVERSE TODAY
12 JULY 2021

These days it seems you can't walk through a bookstore without bumping into a book or magazine pointing out the negative consequences of climate change. Everything from the hottest years on record to ruining astronomy can be tied to climate change.

Now some new science lays another potential problem at climate change's feet – Earth is retaining more than twice as much heat annually as it was 15 years ago.

A team from NASA and NOAA found that Earth's "energy imbalance" doubled between 2005 and 2019. The energy imbalance is simple to understand but complex in its causes and impacts. It is the difference between the amount of energy absorbed by Earth and the amount of energy emitted by it.

Any increase in the energy imbalance means the overall Earth system is gaining energy, causing it to heat up

To quantify this change, the team used data from two separate sources – NASA's Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) and a system run by NOAA called Argo. CERES specializes in how much energy is entering and leaving Earth.

Most of the energy entering is in the form of solar radiation, while energy leaving the system could take a variety of forms, including some of that solar radiation bouncing off of white clouds.

Argo, on the other hand, estimates the rate of temperature increase for the oceans. Ninety percent of the energy that is absorbed by the Earth system is absorbed into the oceans, so any significant energy imbalance would be seen as a heating up of the oceans.

Graph of the radiation measured as part of the experiment. (NASA/NOAA)

Data from both sensing platforms pointed to the same conclusions – that Earth was absorbing more energy than it was emitting, that energy is then stored by the ocean, and the annual amount of energy stored has increased dramatically in the recent past. All of these findings have important implications for the future of understanding and coping with climate change.

First, understanding what caused the increase in absorbed heat in order to potentially mitigate it in the near future would be helpful. The researchers cite two main causes of the increasing energy imbalance.

First was a decrease in sea ice and clouds, the white surfaces of which increase the planet's albedo and therefore the amount of energy that is reflected back out into space. Some of that decrease in cloud coverage was caused by what is known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

In the middle of the survey period, a warm phase of this oscillation took hold, which caused a widespread reduction in cloud coverage, and thus lower albedo.

The second cause was an increase in both greenhouse gases caused by human emissions and water vapor, which can prevent specific types of radiation from escaping, increasing the overall energy amount of the system. So our own emissions are making it harder for heat to escape Earth.

Consequences of such a change in the energy imbalance are slightly less clear, as is the case with much climate science. There is a chance that this heat-trapping effect could speed the melting of the polar ice caps, thereby speeding up the rise in sea levels that many scientists fear will occur over the next 100 years.

Alternatively, higher ocean temperatures could mean more acidic oceans, which has its own impact on the ecosystems that are reliant on ocean chemistry.

(NOAA/Thomas G. Andrews)

IMAGE: Over the course of a year the orientation of the axis remains fixed in space, producing changes in the distribution of solar radiation. These changes in the pattern of radiation reaching earth's surface cause the succession of the seasons.

No matter the consequences, this research is another data point in the argument that climate change is real and that humans are causing it.

It is also something we could potentially reverse in our efforts to fight climate change globally. So it is worth keeping an eye on the overall energy imbalance for the foreseeable future.

This article was originally published by Universe Today. Read the original article.

Changes in Our Planet’s Orbit May Have Allowed Life to Survive during ‘Snowball Earth’ Glaciations

Jul 8, 2021 by News Staff / Source


A team of researchers led by Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Professor Ross Mitchell has studied a succession of rocks laid down when most of Earth’s surface was covered in ice during severe ‘snowball Earth’ glaciations, about 720 to 635 million years ago (Cryogenian period).


An artist’s impression of a ‘snowball Earth.’ Image credit: NASA.

Professor Mitchell and colleagues ventured into the South Australian outback where they targeted kilometer-thick units of glacial rocks formed about 700 million years ago.

At this time, Australia was located closer to the equator, known today for its tropical climates.

The rocks the scientists studied, however, show unequivocal evidence that ice sheets extended as far as the equator at this time, providing compelling evidence that Earth was completely covered in an icy shell.

They focused their attention on ‘banded iron formations,’ sedimentary rocks consisting of alternating layers of iron-rich and silica-rich material. These rocks were deposited in the ice-covered ocean near colossal ice sheets.

During the snowball glaciation, the frozen ocean would have been entirely cut off from the atmosphere.

Without the normal exchange between the sea and air, many variations in climate that normally occur simply wouldn’t have.

“This was called the ‘sedimentary challenge’ to the snowball hypothesis,” Professor Mitchell said.

“The highly variable rock layers appeared to show cycles that looked a lot like climate cycles associated with the advance and retreat of ice sheets.”

“Such variability was thought to be at odds with a static snowball Earth entombing the whole ocean in ice.”

“The iron comes from hydrothermal vents on the seafloor,” said Dr. Thomas Gernon, a researcher at the University of Southampton.

“Normally, the atmosphere oxidizes any iron immediately, so banded iron formations typically do not accumulate.”

“But during the snowball glaciations, with the ocean cut off from the air, iron was able to accumulate enough for them to form.”

Snowball Earth - Wikipedia

Using magnetic susceptibility, a measure of the extent to which the rocks become magnetized when exposed to a magnetic field, the authors made the discovery that the layered rock archives preserve evidence for nearly all orbital cycles.

Earth’s orbit around the Sun changes its shape and the tilt and wobble of the planet’s spin axis also undergo cyclic changes.

Known as Milankovitch cycles, these astronomical cycles change the amount of incoming solar radiation that reaches Earth’s surface and, in doing so, they control climate.

“Even though Earth’s climate system behaved very differently during the snowball, Earth’s orbital variations would have been blissfully unaware and just continued to do their thing,” Professor Mitchell said.

The team concluded that changes in Earth’s orbit allowed the waxing and waning of ice sheets, enabling periodic ice-free regions to develop on snowball Earth.

“This finding resolves one of the major contentions with the snowball Earth hypothesis: the long-standing observation of significant sedimentary variability during the snowball Earth glaciations appeared at odds with such an extreme reduction of the hydrological cycle,” Professor Mitchell said.

The results help explain the enigmatic presence of sedimentary rocks of this age that show evidence for flowing water at Earth’s surface when this water should have been locked up in ice sheets.

“This observation is important, because complex multicellular life is now known to have originated during this period of climate crisis, but previously we could not explain why,” Dr. Gernon said.

“Our study points to the existence of ice-free oases in the snowball ocean that provided a sanctuary for animal life to survive arguably the most extreme climate event in Earth history.”

The findings were published in the journal Nature Communications.

_____

R.N. Mitchell et al. 2021. Orbital forcing of ice sheets during snowball Earth. Nat Commun 12, 4187; doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-24439-4

Beautifully Carved Sandstone Relief Uncovered at Vindolanda

Jul 5, 2021 by News Staff / Source

A sandstone relief which depicts a horseman has been uncovered during at the site of Vindolanda, an ancient Roman military fort and settlement on Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland, England.



The ancient sandstone relief found at Vindolanda, England. Image credit: Vindolanda Trust.

The sandstone relief was uncovered by two Vindolanda volunteers, Richie Milor and David Goldwater, who had been assigned to uncover a flagged floor inside a 4th century building of the ancient fort.

They quickly realized the rugged stone that lay face up amongst the larger smooth flag was something special.

“I saw one of the legs of the horse first and then the pointed top of the relief,” Goldwater said.

“We are just absolutely elated, very proud to be part of this discovery, it was actually very emotional,” Milor added.

“Whether you find something or not we love coming to this site, playing our small part in the research that takes place, but finding this made it a very special day indeed.”

The complete sandstone, which measures 16 by 31.5 cm (6.3 by 12.4 inches), would have originally been fitted into a recess.

Vindolanda archaeologist Marta Alberti and colleagues are now piecing together all the clues to try and establish who the carving may represent.

The nakedness of the man means he is probably a god, rather than a mere cavalryman, he is also carrying a spear in his left arm, a common attribute of the god of War — Mars,” Alberti said.

“However, when you look at his head, the two almost circular features could be identified as wings: a common attribute of Mercury — god of travel.”

“Horses and donkeys are also often associated with Mercury as a protector of travelers.”

“Another clue is not in the find itself but where it was found,” she added.

“The stone floor was very close to that of a large 4th century cavalry barrack.”

“The units residing in the part of the fort may have had their own interpretation of Mars, or Mercury, or a third and so far unidentified version of the god merging the qualities of both.”

CAPITALI$M IN SPACE

Can Europe’s satellite companies like Arianespace take on Elon Musk’s SpaceX?

 2021-07-12

Last year, Arianespace’s Vega launcher completed the first European “rideshare” mission for small satellites with 53 satellites for 21 customers on board. The launcher, which is part of the European Space Agency (ESA) programme, is tailored to carry small scientific spacecraft but in order to share the launch cost, it offers the service to private companies as well.

“We are moving on from a sector of launching, which was mostly geostationary satellites for 30 or 40 years to what is now called the new space,” Marino Fragnito, Arianespace’s senior vice-president and head of the Vega Business Unit, told Euronews Next. The rideshare service called Small Spacecraft Mission Service (SSMS) has attracted the attention of start-ups as well as bigger tech companies.

Traditionally, satellites have been used for communications and TV services but in recent years, tech companies have needed to launch their own satellites to create space internet networks to send data directly to people’s devices. “Start-ups are looking for opportunities in space because space is the new frontier,” said Fragnito, who added start-ups from the US are now also using the Vega launcher.

Why do we need satellites? “We’re moving on from the old space to the new space”.

“Space is full of new opportunities for a new kind of business to help life on Earth”. It’s communication and Internet of Things companies, however, that are the biggest sectors showing a real interest in space satellites, he explained.

Typically, sending a small satellite weighing 25-50 kilograms into low Earth orbit can cost between €85,000 and €840,000. But Arianespace is not the only company to offer such a service. SpaceX is leading the market for tech companies with its Falcon 9 rocket and has made satellite orbiting much cheaper. Since 2018, it has been launching batches of small satellites into orbit in order to form what is called a “constellation” to provide instant broadband on Earth.

News Highlights Space

Why Are Cauliflowers So Mathematically Beautiful? A New Study Has The Answer



TASTY ON A FRACTAL LEVEL. IMAGE CREDIT: MPH PHOTOS/SHUTTERSTOCK


By Katie Spalding 

09 JUL 2021, 16:35


If somebody asked you for a real-world example of transcendent mathematical beauty, it’s unlikely you’d reach for the vegetable drawer.

But if, in a moment of domestic self-reflection, you ever find yourself gazing into a head of cauliflower, you might be surprised at what you find. Hundreds of spirals of all different sizes form the florets of the vegetable, all of them replicas of each other. And the closer you look, the more intricate the pattern becomes.

These kinds of patterns are called fractals, and they can be found just about everywhere: from the littorally unending to the literally mindbending. As we’ve already seen, they can even turn up in the produce aisle. But there’s something particularly special about the cauliflower – and a new study published today in Science now has an explanation for it.

If you’ve ever looked at a sunflower, or a pinecone, or cactus, or really most any plant, you may have noticed that the petals seem to spiral out in a particularly satisfying way. Scientists have puzzled over just why this happens for more than two millennia, and they’ve come up with some pretty amazing explanations for the phenomenon over the years.

But cauliflowers, with their nested spirals repeated over many scales, have remained elusive – so elusive, in fact, that today’s study originated twelve years ago. That’s right: the vegetable you thought was just broccoli’s more pale cousin took over a decade to decode.

The clue came from a plant called Arabidopsis thaliana. It’s just a weed – you may even have it in your own backyard – but it’s important for two reasons. First, it’s been studied extensively, so there’s a lot of information out there about it. Second, it’s a brassica – just like cauliflower. That meant that by comparing the genetic makeup of Arabidopsis with a computer-generated model of a cauliflower, the team could figure out what was going on.

Now, while fractals in math repeat themselves forever, in the real world there’s a limit on how small things can get. When you look at a cauliflower, you can see the spirals getting tinier, but just how far down does this self-similarity go? You might be surprised to learn that the first spiral in every plant is actually microscopically tiny, and it governs precisely how the rest of the plant will grow via specific gene expressions.

“The genes expressed in a spot determine whether this spot will grow into a branch, a leaf or a flower,” study co-author Etienne Farcot wrote in a piece for The Conversation. “But the genes are actually interacting with each other, in complex “gene networks” – leading to specific genes being expressed in specific domains and at specific times.”

Farcot explained that there are four main genes that govern how a plant will develop: “their initials are S, A, L and T, which we obviously joked about,” he said. But in cauliflower-like Arabidopsis plants, one of these genes is missing: the “A” gene. Normally, this is the gene that triggers the development of flowers, so its absence explains why the vegetables are notably more “cauli” than “flower”.

But just because a cauliflower can’t grow actual flowers doesn’t mean it won’t try – and that’s how it grows its distinctive fractal geometry. Instead of being able to grow flowers, the spiral can only develop a stem, Farcot said, which in turn develops a stem, and so on until eventually a cauliflower is formed. Leaves and flowers cannot be grown, and so we are left with these layers upon layers of intricately spiraling cauliflower buds.

“It is amazing how complex nature is,” concluded Farcot. “The next time you have cauliflower for dinner, take a moment to admire it before you eat it.”

China Harvests First Crop of ‘Space Rice’ in Food Security Push

(Bloomberg) -- China harvested its first batch of “space rice” from seeds that returned from a lunar voyage last year, with scientists hoping it could help create new plant varieties and safeguard the country’s food security.

The crop was grown from the 40 grams of seeds that traveled with the Chang’e-5 lunar probe in November, state television reported. More tests and plantings are needed to determine the best varieties that could be promoted nationwide to help improve China’s grain harvest.

China’s ramped up its focus on food security and supply in the past year, boosting imports and urging greater self-sufficiency in staple crops to feed its population of 1.4 billion. The seed sector is a pillar of this push, with the government approving a plan on Friday to make seed sourcing a matter of strategic security and vowing support for research and agriculture projects.

The country has been taking seeds of rice and other crops to space since 1987. More than 200 space plant varieties including cotton and tomatoes have been approved for planting. In 2018, the total plantation area for space crops approved in China reached more than 2.4 million hectares, according to state media.

After being exposed to cosmic radiation and zero gravity, some seeds can mutate and produce higher yields when planted back on Earth. It may take three to four years before space rice enters the market, Global Times said, citing an official at the space breeding research center.


©2021 Bloomberg L.P.

CLIMATE CHANGE WARMING WATERS

Great White Sharks Have Returned to Cape Cod in Droves

(AP Photo/Charles Krupa, File)


by Sarah Sax - Undark

July 12, 2021

On a windy morning in March, two older surfers at LeCount Hollow Beach, on Cape Cod, look out at the gray Atlantic. They are scanning the water closest to shore for seals, with whom they increasingly have to share the frigid water, which can dip as low as 37 degrees Fahrenheit in winter. The seals are a growing demographic. They have been rebounding since the 1970s, after almost being hunted to extinction. They are recolonizing what was once their native habitat, migrating seasonally up and down the coast. The surfers, too, have started to migrate, with many now surfing exclusively in the winter — not to avoid the crowds in this popular summer tourist destination, but to avoid another growing demographic: great white sharks.

One of the surfers, Charles Cole, who goes by Ch’arlie or Ch, has a long flowing beard bleached a light yellow from years of sea and sun. He has been surfing here off the coast of Massachusetts since the 1960s. “There used to be one or two sharks every summer,” he says. Now there are too many to even count. Cole has painted the bottom of his kneeboard with alternating stripes of white, black, and gray — a signal to let the sharks know he isn’t a seal. But just in case, his surf leash attached to the back of the board has a mechanical ratcheting buckle for tightening. “I bought one of these because it's a tourniquet,” says Cole. Devices like this are usually used to stop heavy bleeding after traumatic injuries from gunfire, road accidents — and shark bites.

Even with these precautionary measures in place, Cole says he won’t go out if the water appears too “sharky” — a sixth sense he has developed to tell him if sharks are present. And from about July to October, during peak shark season for what has now become one of the greatest concentrations of great white sharks in the world, the waters are very, very sharky.

For ecologists, the return of the sharks is hailed as a cascading conservation success story. Protection of Cape Cod’s unique seashore and the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act are credited with the return of the region’s gray seals — a preferred food source for great white sharks. The seals’ main stomping ground is the eastern shoreline of the Outer Cape, which extends like a forearm from the peninsula’s southern elbow to its northern fist. Here, 3,000 miles of open ocean, wind, and waves ram into the land, forming dramatic dunes that can reach 100 feet and attract millions of visitors every year. As the seal population has grown, so has the number of sharks and shark interactions, causing the Outer Cape’s four small towns and the National Park Service to grapple with competing demands of conservation and public safety.

Many societies have coexisted with large apex predators for centuries, but Western countries have tended to favor either eradication or separation. In Western Europe, for example, bears and gray wolves were largely exterminated by the late 19th century, and even though wolves have successfully returned, countries such as France, Norway, and Finland still routinely cull them. Separation looks a little different: In the United States, grizzly bears are largely tolerated within designated wildlife reserves and national parks, but if they go outside those boundaries, they risk being relocated or euthanized.



As one of the ocean’s top apex predators, great whites have been the target of intense management plans. Countries around the world have spent millions of dollars to install nets, barriers, and bait-lines to keep sharks away from humans, with mixed success. But now, increasingly sophisticated satellite and tracking technology might offer new, more detailed insight into how sharks behave. Among other things, researchers are creating a tool to predict the presence of sharks in the water. “Like a weather forecasting system just for sharks,” says Greg Skomal, a senior scientist at the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries and a leading shark researcher.

That tool is what’s known as a heat map — a color-coded graphical representation of data. In this case, the goal is to map shark swimming behaviors and their relationship to environmental conditions, like water temperature, tides, and even lunar cycles. Researchers hope this heat map will give beachgoers and public safety officials the ability to predict the likelihood of a shark swimming near the shore. It’s not just a novel experiment for understanding shark behavior. Some researchers see it as emblematic of a growing shift in conservation science, as well as in Western societies, to finding more equitable ways of living with wild animals. In Cape Cod, being able to predict the presence of sharks in the water could allow beachgoers to coexist with the 2.5-ton animals whose ancestors have dominated the ocean for 450 million years.

Sharks were once abundant in the Northwest Atlantic. Almost 200 years ago, Henry David Thoreau took a series of trips from his home, about 20 miles west of Boston, to the windswept landscapes of Cape Cod. In his book about the region, he observed that no one swam on the eastern side “on account of the undertow and the rumor of sharks.” Thoreau recounts a local’s story of using oxen to drag a 14-foot “regular man-eating shark” he had killed out of the ocean. The author even spots a possible shark swimming not far from shore.

Published in 1865, the book, titled “Cape Cod,” gives a glimpse of the region before governments in New England wiped out the seal population by offering a bounty on seal noses, after inaccurately blaming them for declining fish stocks. As many as 135,000 seals were killed between 1888 to 1962, according to some estimates. By the time the Marine Mammal Protection Act was enacted in 1972, seals had been all but exterminated. Since then, though, the seals have returned in the tens of thousands to Cape Cod, a small slice of the roughly 450,000 gray seals that now live in the Northwest Atlantic.

Sharks, too, were nearly wiped out. The loss of their primary food source combined with a deadly mixture of trophy hunting, culling, and industrial fishing led to the near extirpation of coastal shark species. And as coastal development ramped up across the country and human-shark interactions increased, so did the perception that sharks were dangerous to humans. This spurred an increase in programs aimed at managing human-shark conflicts, often through lethal means. For example, the state government of Hawaii spent more than $300,000 on shark control programs between 1959 and 1976, killing almost 5,000 sharks in the process.

In the Northwest Atlantic, shark populations hit a dizzying low. By 2003, a few years after fishing for great whites was officially banned, their population had declined by as much as 75 percent in the previous 15 years. The species has since rebounded; Cape Cod has become the world's newest hotspot, with great white sharks steadily returning since at least 2009, when the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries began to consistently tag them. “A lot of people recognize it as a conservation success story,” says Megan Winton, a research scientist at the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, an organization dedicated to research, public safety, and conservation of great white sharks. “But now the community is really trying to figure out how to coexist, as people who like to use the water.”

Heather Doyle looks out at the ocean from the Newcomb Hollow Beach parking lot, which is covered in sand from a late winter storm. A few miles to the south, in 2017, her friend’s paddleboard was bitten by a shark just 90 feet from shore. “That was a big eye opener for everybody,” says Doyle. The following year, a few miles to the north of Newcomb Hollow Beach, a doctor was bit in the torso and leg. He survived; but then a month later, another shark fatally wounded college student Arthur Medici. Doyle points down the shore: a small, inconspicuous cross commemorating Medici teeters at the edge of a dune.

Medici’s death was the first shark fatality in Massachusetts since 1936. “We’re on a trajectory, right?” says Doyle. “It was three bites in 14 months.” After her friend’s paddleboard scare, Doyle co-founded Cape Cod Ocean Community, a community group that eventually became a nonprofit dedicated to increasing public safety. The group has helped connect pilots with lifeguards to alert them to possible sharks. It has raised funds for drones and giant car-sized balloons with high-definition cameras that could spot sharks, and it has advocated for devices such as the Clever Buoy, a marine monitoring and alert system that detects large marine life in the water.

But a six-month study commissioned by the Outer Cape towns and released in October 2019 looked at the efficacy of more than two dozen shark mitigation strategies, including the Clever Buoy, as well as nets, virtual barriers, electromagnet devices to deter sharks, and drones, among others. The report ultimately concluded that most either didn’t have enough evidence they actually worked, had limited efficacy, or wouldn’t work on Cape Cod’s shoreline — except one: modifying human behavior.


This has been the primary way that public safety officials have mitigated shark risk over the past eight to nine years, said Suzanne Grout Thomas, director of community services for Wellfleet, a fishing town about 15 miles from the tip of Cape Cod. Since Medici’s death, towns have stepped up their protocols, limiting how far out people can swim and closing beaches to swimming sometimes several times a day. Lifeguards and even some members of the public are trained in “stop the bleed” practices for bites, while signs warn about the presence of sharks. “Our biggest contribution to this is educating the general public as to how sharks can be anticipated to behave,” says Thomas. And she already sees signs it is working. People swim closer to shore, or don’t swim at all, and they react faster when the lifeguards blow their whistles to clear the water.

Last summer, Wellfleet had two buoys that sent a signal to lifeguards. If a tagged shark came within 200 yards, they could call swimmers out of the water. “There were hundreds and hundreds of sharks that pinged those buoys last summer,” says Thomas. Her goal is to have one at every beach.

But this approach, she acknowledges, has its limitations. Not every great white shark is tagged, and cellphone network service at the Outer Cape beaches is still spotty at best, meaning any live notification systems are difficult to share widely.


As researchers and residents consider the best mitigation strategies, one strategy — culling — has stayed off the table. That’s an approach some countries have tried. Western Australia, for example, implemented a regional policy in 2012 to track, catch, and destroy sharks that have posed an “imminent threat” to beachgoers. But according to the International Shark Attack File, a global database, shark attacks in Western Australia have been on a downward trend, but in the past couple years have spiked again. While estimating the effects is difficult, many experts still say culling projects don’t work.

Now, technological advances and a growing understanding of animal intelligence are giving researchers hope that another management option may be on the table, one that seeks to understand, rather than modify, shark behavior.

The ocean floor of the Cape is an immense patchwork of sandbars, shoals, and deep trenches. Sharks have learned how to navigate this underwater labyrinth. They now hunt in what some call “the trough,” a deep area of water that forms like the letter C between the outer sandbar and the beach. Because seals are often found in these shallow waters close to the shore, the sharks have learned how to attack laterally, rather than ambush from below. In fact, unlike in other areas of the world, sharks on Cape Cod spend around half of their time in water shallower than 15 feet, according to a recent study that analyzed data collected about eight great whites.

“It was really powerful for us to be able to come up with a number to tell people,” says Winton, the shark researcher who co-authored the study along with Skomal. “It really helps increase awareness of these animals and their presence.”

Winton and her colleagues hope to take this data point and layer it onto other data points about shark behavior and environmental conditions. The goal is to create a dynamic heat map akin to a weather forecast that can indicate the probability of a great white shark in the water, similar to maps used by commercial fishermen to indicate fish abundance. This, in turn, would help beach managers and would-be swimmers assess the risk of going in the water.

To estimate the great white shark population, Winton has already spent years following the sharks around Cape Cod in a boat, getting close enough to take videos of their unique scars and other identifiers with a GoPro stuck to the end of a painter’s pole. She and her research team have sifted through more than 3,000 videos and identified more than 400 individual sharks, often by their unique scars or fins, along with another possible 104 that require additional documentation to confirm.

She has also collaborated with colleagues and organizations that collect data from other kinds of devices: Acoustic telemetry, pop-up-satellite tags, smart position and temperature (SPOT) transmitting tags, and underwater drones. Each device gives scientists a unique data set. Acoustic tags, for example, emit a high frequency sound that is picked up by hundreds of receivers in Massachusetts coastal waters. Researchers can then use these to study where great white sharks spend their time, when they arrive, and when they leave. The researchers can track individuals in the water, as well as where the sharks travel from year to year. And as the scientists collect more data, they can figure out not only which sharks are doing what, but also whether their behavior is changing over time. The long-term goal is to use all these devices to produce heat maps on an automated daily basis for towns and public safety officials. A hotter color around a specific beach or area would signify a higher likelihood of running into a great white.

As far as Winton knows, she and her colleagues are the first to develop this type of map of sharks’ behavior, and she hopes it will be a useful tool for public safety. “This is a way to provide science-based information to people alerting them to when sharks are likely to be present,” she says.

Or as Cole might say, the map is just a scientific way to assess whether the ocean is “sharky” or not.

For now, residents and officials on Cape Cod interviewed for this article seem intent on figuring out ways to coexist with, rather than manage, the sharks — though not all of them used the term “coexistence.” That term has only recently gained prominence among Western academics and conservationists. At its core, coexistence describes a state in which humans and wildlife share the same landscape. And while that may sound Pollyanna-ish, scholars and policymakers don’t frame it as such. “Coexistence doesn't require you to love your neighbor, or your enemy, or that marauding beast,” says Simon Pooley, a researcher at the University of London. “It requires you to figure out a way of existing in the same space and getting what you need.”

Pooley and other researchers maintain that promoting coexistence will be important for sustaining wild animal populations into the future. “Many of the places where these dangerous animals persist — they persist because there is coexistence in those places,” he says. This is especially apparent in Indigenous-managed lands that contain about 80 percent of global biodiversity, including vital habitats for predators like jaguars, polar bears, and lions. He himself studies communities in Western India that coexist with wild crocodile populations. And in India's Sunderbans, a region of marshy land and mangrove forests populated by both humans and tigers, provides the largest remaining Bengal tiger habitat in the world.

Whether Cape Cod will become a model for coexistence is an open question. Currently there are no plans to put up barriers, or to bait and cull sharks, although a more heated debate has erupted around whether and how to deal with the tens of thousands of seals that have recolonized the Cape. Winton, who hopes to have beta versions of the predictive maps ready by the end of this year, is excited about the immense amount of data still out there that could be used to better understand sharks and their behavior.

“The more we learn about these animals, the more we just realize we've only started to scrape the surface understanding them,” she says. “I am just so excited for what the future holds — for not just shark science, for all of wildlife science.”

UPDATE: An earlier version of this article incorrectly described India's Sunderbans region as being "further south" of coastal communities in Western India where crocodile populations are common. The Sunderbans are roughly 1,000 miles east of this location, on the Bay of Bengal.

Sarah Sax is an environmental journalist based out of Brooklyn who writes about the intersection of people, nature, and society. You can find her on Twitter @sarahl_sax.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.

Sharks evolved over millions of years as an apex predator, yet are no match for humans

Megan Marples
CNNDigital
Published Sunday, July 11, 2021


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Sharks have called the Earth's oceans home for hundreds of millions of years and adapted to thrive in harsh environments.

While these top hunters of the deep blue have evolved to survive cold and dark climates, sharks are no match for the ultimate predator -- humans.

That's why Shark Week, running from July 11 through July 18, was launched 33 years ago by Discovery Channel to encourage shark conservation and educate the public on these underwater predators.

The world's shark and ray populations plummeted 70 per cent from 1970 to 2018, with overfishing as a primary cause, according to a 2019 study published in the journal Nature.

Of the 31 oceanic species of sharks and rays, 24, or over three-quarters, of the species are now threatened with extinction due to their steep drop in numbers, the study said.

With Hollywood blockbusters like "Jaws" and "The Meg" fanning the flames of fear and paranoia in humans, these underwater animals have suffered a serious image problem.

However, sharks play a crucial role in their environment and keep the animal kingdom in check.

Sharks balance the food chain

As sharks were killed off from overfishing in the Sea of Cortez, located between Baja California and the Mexican mainland, other creatures swooped in to take their place on the food chain.

Wahoo and hammerhead sharks, along with other fish species like marlin and swordfish, have seen a steep decline in population due to commercial and local fishing in the area.

Scientists believe the decline in sharks is one of the reasons the Humboldt squid now call the Baja home in greater numbers. The creature can grow up to 7 feet (2.1 meters) long and weigh over 100 pounds (45.4 kilograms).

The squid only live for a couple years, but they reproduce at a much faster rate than sharks.

Some sharks are partially warm-blooded

Despite having a reputation of being cold-blooded, some sharks -- like the great white and the salmon shark -- are able to internally regulate their temperature, according to a June study published by the British Ecological Society.

The study found endothermic fish, which are able to regulate their own body temperature, swam over one-and-a-half times faster than ectotherms, animals that rely on the outside temperature to regulate their body heat.

Researchers weren't able to make any conclusions on how the warm-bloodedness could be helpful to sharks, but they hypothesized that it could help them when searching for food or migrating.

Sharks can live for hundreds of years

Sharks tend to have one of the longest life spans of creatures in the animal kingdom.

Using radiocarbon dating to estimate how old Greenland sharks were for a 2016 study, researchers discovered the underwater creatures lived to be at least 272 years old, with the largest of the group clocking in at around 392 years old.

The animals don't reach maturity until the ripe age of 150 years old, and they are the longest-lived vertebrate known to humans.
Some can glow in the dark

A small number of sharks are bioluminescent and glow hundreds of feet below the ocean's surface, according to a February study published in Frontiers in Marine Science.

One of the sharks is the kitefin shark (Dalatias licha), which spans nearly 6 feet (1.8 meters). It's also the world's largest known bioluminescent shark.

Very little is known about sharks that glow because the sharks mostly roam in the deep sea, which begins over 656 feet (200 meters) below the ocean surface.


Researchers also discovered the southern lanternshark (Etmopterus granulosus) and blackbelly lanternshark (Etmopterus lucifer) have bioluminescent abilities.
They nearly went extinct millions of years ago

Despite having the reputation as an apex predator, sharks died off at alarming rates millions of years ago.

Over 90 per cent of open-ocean sharks disappeared from the planet around 19 million years ago, scientists said.

Researchers said they could not confirm what caused the near-mass extinction event, and it could have lasted from a single day to 100,000 years.

Based on current research, there was no climate or ecosystem crisis during this time, which leaves a gaping hole of knowledge for scientists to do more research on and unlock the mystery.




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Elisa Loncón: From poverty to PhD to writing Chile's constitution

By Eva Ontiveros
BBC World Service
Published1 day ago

Elisa Loncón is the first person to preside over Chile's newly created Constitutional Convention

In the 1970s, as Elisa Loncón was growing up, she had to travel 8km (five miles) to reach school. Her family, from Chile's Mapuche indigenous community, lived in poverty in a remote village in the southern Araucanía region. There was no-one to take her to classes, and very often, the only way to make the journey was on foot through dirt roads.

Her mother was a housemaid who loved poetry. Her father, a carpenter, had taught himself how to read at the age of 17. Life was difficult and, some days, her parents struggled to give Loncón and her six siblings food to eat. It was not easy at school either, because of the constant abuse she suffered over her indigenous roots.

But she did not give up.

"I come from a simple family. Like all Mapuche families we faced hardship," she said recently in an interview to Spanish newspaper El País. The Mapuche are Chile's largest indigenous ethnic group, with a common language, and a shared social, religious, and economic structure. But they have almost no guaranteed rights. "We stayed true to our values," she said, "inspired by collective norms, memory, history".

She eventually left the village called Lefweluan, where most of her relatives still live, and graduated as an English teacher. She went on to earn a PhD in humanities from the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands, and another PhD in literature from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, before becoming a full-time professor at the University of Santiago.

Alongside her impressive academic work, Loncón embarked on a fight to defend the Mapuche. She became a well-known activist and, earlier this year, was elected for one of the 17 seats reserved for representatives of native peoples in the Constitutional Convention, the body that will write a new constitution for a deeply divided Chile.

"It's possible, brothers and sisters, to re-found this Chile," Dr Loncón said in her speech


It was a historic moment. Native communities have had little say in the running of the country to date, and Chile has never before defined itself as a multicultural nation. Indigenous people are not even mentioned in the current constitution, which dates back to the right-wing military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, who ruled between 1973 and 1990.


And this month, in a decision charged with symbolism, she was elected to preside over the 155-member convention which, for the first time, proposes the recognition of the country's native peoples.


With her fist clenched above her head, Loncón, who is 58, accepted the position, amid noisy celebrations. "I salute the people of Chile from the north to Patagonia, from the sea to the mountains, to the islands, all those who are watching us today," she said, holding up a Mapuche flag.


"I'm grateful for the support of the different coalitions that placed their trust and their dreams in the hands of the Mapuche nation, who voted for a Mapuche person, a woman, to change the history of this country."



Who are the Mapuche?

Before the Spanish arrived in the16th Century, the Mapuche inhabited a vast swathe of land in southern Chile
Renowned for their ferocity, they successfully resisted conquest until the late 19th Century, when they were rounded up into small communities
Much of their land was sold off to farmers and forestry companies
About 12% of Chileans define themselves as indigenous, most of them as Mapuche




The convention, which has parity between male and female members, a first in the world, is made up by a majority of independent and left-leaning names. This has raised hopes for profound reforms, replacing a constitution blamed for social inequalities that sparked deadly protests in 2019.


Among the demands of the Mapuche and the other nine native Chilean peoples is the creation of a plurinational state, within which their autonomy and rights are accepted, as well as the recognition of their cultures and languages. Loncón herself wrote a series of books teaching the official Mapuche language, the mapudungun.



The communities also want guarantees in territorial terms. Indigenous groups have ancestral claims to their lands, which often enter into conflict with those of current landowners. Any dramatic changes are likely to raise questions over property rights, or about the more complicated issue of reparations.


"It's possible to dialogue with us, you do not need to fear us," Loncón told Chilean newspaper La Tercera, ahead of the vote for the commission. "There is a lot of prejudice [against the Mapuche]. So, this is also a call to free ourselves from our prejudices and relate to each other on equal terms."

There is often tension between Mapuche communities and the state

Loncón's election to preside over the body indicates the majority of the commission is keen on updating the country, but it is unlikely to be plain sailing. The opening session was delayed by almost an hour due to protests by a group of constituents, which followed clashes between police and demonstrators in the capital, Santiago .

The agreement among parties is that the presidency of the convention will rotate, although it has not yet been decided how long each term will last. The first draft of the new Chilean constitution is expected by 2022, and will be followed by another plebiscite, with mandatory voting.

"It's a dream of our ancestors and this dream has come true," Loncón said in her acceptance speech. "It's possible, brothers and sisters, to re-found this Chile, to establish a relationship between the Mapuche people... and all the nations that make up this country."

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