Viruses that could save millions of lives

Agence France-Presse
April 04, 2022

Bacteria-eating viruses: Researchers at the Eliava Institute of Bacteriophages in Tbilisi 

Vano SHLAMOV AFP

It may seem strange after a pandemic that has killed millions and turned the world upside down, but viruses could save just as many lives.

In a petri dish in a laboratory in the Georgian capital Tbilisi, a battle is going on between antibiotic resistant bacteria and "friendly" viruses.

This small nation in the Caucasus has pioneered research on a groundbreaking way to tackle the looming nightmare of bacteria becoming resistant to the antibiotics on which the world depends.

Long overlooked in the West, bacteriophages or bacteria-eating viruses are now being used on some of the most difficult medical cases, including a Belgian woman who developed a life-threatening infection after being injured in the 2016 Brussels airport bombing.
After two years of unsuccessful antibiotic treatment, bacteriophages sent from Tbilisi cured her infection in three months.

"We use those phages that kill harmful bacteria" to cure patients when antibiotics fail, Mzia Kutateladze of the Eliava Institute of Bacteriophages told AFP.

Even a banal infection can "kill a patient because the pathogen has developed resistance to antibiotics," Kutateladze said.

In such cases, phagotherapy "is one of the best alternatives", she added.

Phages have been known about for a century, but were largely forgotten and dismissed after antibiotics revolutionized medicine in the 1930s.

Stalin's henchman

It didn't help that the man who did most to develop them, Georgian scientist Giorgi Eliava, was executed in 1937 on the orders of another Georgian, Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin's most notorious henchman and the head of his secret police.

Eliava had worked in the Pasteur Institute in Paris with French-Canadian microbiologist Felix d'Herelle, one of the two men credited with discovering phages, and persuaded Stalin to invite him to Tbilisi in 1934.

But their collaboration was cut short when Beria had Eliava killed, although his motive still remains a mystery.

With the World Health Organization now declaring antimicrobial resistance a global health crisis, phages are making a comeback, especially as they can target bacteria while leaving human cells intact.

A recent study warned that superbugs could kill as many as 10 million people a year when antimicrobial resistance due to overuse of antibiotics reaches a tipping point. That could come within three decades.

'Training' viruses

While phages-based medicines cannot completely replace antibiotics, researchers say they have major pluses in being cheap, not having side-effects nor damaging organs or gut flora.

"We produce six standard phages that are of wide spectrum and can heal multiple infectious diseases," said Eliava Institute physician Lia Nadareishvili.

In some 10 to 15 percent of patients, however, standard phages don't work and "we have to find ones capable of killing the particular bacterial strain," she added.

Tailored phages to target rare infections can be selected from the institute's massive collection -- the world's richest -- or be found in sewage or polluted water or soil, Kutateladze said.

The institute can even "train" phages so that "they can kill more and more different harmful bacteria."

"It is a cheap and easily accessible therapy," she added.

Last-resort treatment

A 34-year-old American mechanical engineer suffering from a chronic bacterial disease for six years told AFP he "already felt improvement" after two weeks at the Tbilisi institute.

"I've tried every possible treatment in the United States," said Andrew, who would only give his first name.

He is one of the hundreds of patients from around the globe who arrive in Georgia every year for last-resort treatment, said Nadareishvili.

With the traditional antimicrobial armory depleting rapidly, more clinical studies are needed so that phagotherapy can be more widely approved, Kutateladze argued.

In 2019, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authorized a clinical study on the use of bacteriophages to cure secondary infections in Covid patients.

Beyond medicine, phages are already being used to stop food going off, and they "can be used in agriculture to protect crops and animals from harmful bacteria," Kutateladze said.

The institute has already conducted research on bacteria targeting cotton and rice.

Bacteriophages also have potential to counter biological weapons and combat bioterrorism, with Canadian researchers publishing a 2017 study on using them to counter an anthrax attack on crowded public places.

© 2022 AFP

SEE  

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=PHAGES

 https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=BIOPHAGES

 https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=PHAGE

 https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=BACTERIOPHAGE

A new COVID wave is probably coming, and America just doesn’t seem to care



Erin Prater
Sat, April 9, 2022

It was a viral moment that elicited both nervous laughs and tears of joy from a pandemic-weary nation: Colorado Gov. Jared Polis awaiting his state's first COVID vaccine shipment in December 2020, staring at a delivery door like a child stares at a fireplace on Christmas Eve.

“Any minute now we’re going to hear a doorbell,” Polis says with childlike glee, his words muffled by a surgical mask.

“And then we’re going to ….” He dramatically pauses before saying, “of course, let the vaccine in.”

Before he finishes his sentence, a bell shrieks.

“Ope, there we go!” Polis exclaims, making a rapid rotation to hit a button and open the warehouse door.

“This is the Pfizer vaccine, arriving here in Colorado, to end the pandemic!” he exclaims as the door opens slowly, awkwardly revealing a delivery man who perhaps wasn’t aware he’d been chosen to save mankind—or at least Coloradans.

Polis’ giddy anticipation mirrored the mental state of so many Americans in those weeks before Christmas 2020. The potential side effects were unnerving, maybe, but the vaccine was coming.

To end the pandemic and nine months of isolation and tragedy.

That was the hope. But it wasn’t reality.

“I think some of it is just human nature, that you want to believe there will be a quick technological fix,” Fractal Therapeutics CEO Arijit Chakravarty told Fortune. His position is summed up by the headline of his searing new article published to Lancet-affiliated preprint journal medRxiv: “Endemicity is not a victory: the unmitigated downside risks of widespread SARS-COV2 transmission.”

Scenarios under which the U.S. sees surges of a variant more deadly than any seen before are plausible, Chakravarty and his colleagues contend.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths could ensue annually, they say. COVID could become the No. 1 cause of death in the U.S., beating out the most common maladies like heart disease and cancer.

“It’s not a specific prediction about the future,” Chakravarty hedged. “We’re not saying the world will end on Tuesday, April 7, 2024. But the goal is to make people say, ‘Gee, some scenarios out there are really quite ugly.’”
A ‘one-way ceasefire’

Chakravarty isn’t alone in worrying about what happens next. He has good company in Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease expert who has become the face of America’s COVID response. He said this week that a surge of COVID is likely this fall, and an increase in cases over even the next few weeks would not be surprising.

Fauci’s remarks contrast with a sudden vanishing of the Omicron wave that gripped the country in December and January (and ruined many people’s holiday plans). Cases fell so far so fast that big cities like New York relaxed mandates that had been in place for nearly two years. In New York’s case, famously unvaccinated celebrities like basketball star Kyrie Irving are free to play indoors again, and masks are off at most restaurants and retail outlets, bringing it in line with the rest of the country.

March is seeing cases creep back up again as bosses consider a widespread return to the office.

When it comes to the blissful oblivion of many to the pandemic’s continued existence, “motivated reasoning” is to blame, says psychologist Paul Thagard, a philosopher and cognitive scientist who authored the paper “The cognitive science of COVID-19: Acceptance, denial, and belief change.”

Another term for motivated reasoning: “a complicated version of wishful thinking.”

“People look at what makes them happy instead of evidence,” Thagard says. “This virus has been very unpredictable. People want to believe it’s going to get better and better. It’s not based on solid knowledge of the biology of the virus.”

If another severe wave of COVID were to hit the U.S., Thagard predicts the country would see a similarly large wave of denial, “one more application of motivated reasoning.”

“Right now things don’t look that bad in North America, generally, because hospitals aren’t that full. That could change fairly quickly.”
Vaccines aren't enough

Current vaccines have failed to end the pandemic.

That’s a key argument Chakravarty and his coauthors make in their new paper.

It’s a reality, they say, that so many are failing to recognize as they buy into the scenario that the pandemic is becoming milder and will continue to, and that the pandemic is shrinking to endemicity and will continue to shrink in scale.

“Public-health authorities in many countries have advocated for a strategy of using the vaccines to limit morbidity and mortality while permitting unchecked SARS-CoV-2 spread (‘learning to live with the disease’),” Chakravarty’s team writes.

But that strategy seems to rely on future waves of COVID being less deadly, either due to weaker but more transmissible strains of the virus taking hold, or due to population immunity that is inevitably temporary, the authors write. And it ignores the fact infection fatality rates of future COVID variants may wax and wane.

“Omicron was mild. Maybe if there’s a BA.3, it will be mild too,” Chakravarty says. “But just because it was named Omicron 3 doesn’t mean it couldn’t be its own beast.”

Writing the paper wasn’t easy, Chakravarty says.

“We, as a team, went back and forth—this took months to write,” he says. “Emotionally, it’s a difficult conclusion to come to. It doesn’t help you sleep well at night.”

Regarding COVID, “You have to mitigate the risk of the worst thing without having a big debate about whether or not it’s going to happen today. People aren’t really having that conversation.”

He and his colleagues realize an approach like China’s zero COVID policy isn’t sustainable. The team recommends an approach of “subtle changes” that “don’t require endless amounts of personal sacrifice,” and that “slow down evolution and work on limiting the spread.”

Among their proposals: upgrading air quality and ventilation in buildings, since most transmission occurs indoors; widespread surveillance of virus transmission; and focusing on the development of preventative medicines and next-generation vaccines that can reduce the spread.

But with Congress bickering over a $10 billion COVID aid bill and the U.S. running out of funds for things like vaccines and research, the U.S. is quickly losing its ability to “see what’s happening and react nimbly.”

“We’re more and more flying blind,” he says.

A World Health Organization official recently aid we may be entering a "period of ceasefire" with the virus, but Chakravarty says "it takes two parties to agree to a ceasefire. Another word for a one-way ceasefire? Surrender.”

'We get comfortable with what happens'

Chakravarty says America is now rolling the dice with its COVID strategy.

Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, says it’s the no-plan plan.

In short: The American approach to COVID seems to be “ignore it and hope it goes away, and hope the interventions we have right now are functional enough to make it tolerable,” he says.

“And the answer is, not yet. We have good tools. We’re better than we were two years ago, but this virus is pretty tricky. It’s fooled us every time we thought we understood something.

“In many ways, we were unprepared and playing catch-up.”

COVID isn’t the only public health crisis about which Americans have become complacent, Benjamin says.

“We get tired of an issue,” he says. “We park it. We get comfortable with what happens. Thousands of people die from gun violence every year. That’s something that, when it happens, particularly mass shootings, everyone says, ‘It’s terrible. We must do something.’

“But the political will to do something about it quickly fades.”

He worries the most about politicians getting COVID fatigue and potentially failing to pass another COVID aid bill to fund, among other things, surveillance of the virus and research on new variants.

“Resource allocators have a tendency to, when something happens, throw a lot of money at it—usually not quite enough, never for long enough,” he says. “Then they withdraw funding, and their expectation of performance far exceeds the money put into it.

“We’re seeing that happen right now.”
A cautionary tale

This isn’t the first time Americans have turned a blind eye toward disease, says John M. Barry, author of “The Great Influenza: The story of the deadliest pandemic in history.”

The 1918 flu pandemic “killed young people and children, and the elderly largely escaped it—despite that, people grew tired of taking precautions.”

The flu, an H1N1 virus thought to have originated in birds, was first identified in the U.S. in the spring of 1918. It spread worldwide in waves, infecting about a third of the world’s population and killing at least 50 million, with about 675,000 deaths in the U.S. alone, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Many were previously healthy young adults and young children.

When it comes to America’s collective memory, the flu pandemic was left out, a seeming historical amnesia.

“That’s the single question I was asked most when my book came out in 2004: ‘How come I never heard of this?’” he says.

He’s not entirely sure, though it might have something to do with people at the time being more accustomed to death by infectious disease, World War I, and historians writing about “what people did to people,” but not about what nature did to people.

Thagard offers a cautionary tale: a fourth wave of the 1918 flu pandemic that came in 1920 at a time when the public was weary.

“They pretty much entirely ignored it—and the fourth wave, in some cities, was the deadliest yet,” Barry says.

“People just didn’t want to deal with it, just as we don’t want to deal with it.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Amazon Has a Secret Weapon Against Rising Labor Costs

Amazon workers popped champagne celebrating successful unionization, but the company's robotics could blunt the worker revolution.

TONY OWUSU
APR 8, 2022 4:02 PM EDT

For decades Amazon's (AMZN) - Get Amazon.com, Inc. Report story has been about growth as the company transformed from a small online bookstore to the global e-commerce behemoth that it is today.

To fuel that growth, the company has invested hundreds of billions of dollars in acquisitions, technology and, perhaps most importantly, warehouses, to deliver goods with unprecedented efficiency.

But the upfront costs Amazon had to pay to become one of the world's most valuable companies could pale in comparison to the ancillary costs the company now faces.

Amazon was so aggressive with its anti-union tactics that the National Labor Relations Board sued Amazon in federal court last month before workers began voting in the union election.

This week the NLRB counsel issued a memo calling for a ban on mandatory anti-union meetings.

The U.S. unemployment rate fell to 3.6% in April. Employers have raised wages in order to entice workers back into the labor market in recent months, leading to a 5.6% increase in wages to $31.73, according to the Bureau for Labor Statistics.

Amazon says it took a $4 billion charge in the fourth quarter driven mainly by labor costs.

"The early wave disruption was handling volume without the capacity to handle it and then quickly playing catch-up," Amazon Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said during the company's earnings call.

"And as that was starting to improve, labor took a turn in the United States, especially labor availability, and we've really had to scramble to add workers."

That scramble led to the company raising hourly wages and offering improved benefits to draw workers, and while those initiatives helped the company get through the holiday season, it came at a steep cost.

Now, with unionization efforts, those costs could rise.


Amazon Is Losing Unionization Battle

Last week, workers at a warehouse in Staten Island became the first to successfully unionize.

Workers at the warehouse nicknamed JFK8 voted 2,654 to 2,131 in favor of of forming the union, a wide margin of victory for the pro-union side.

The company was trounced despite an anti-unionization campaign that included walls at JFK8 papered with "Vote No" banners, an anti-union website and weekly mandatory meetings.

For years Amazon did everything it could to head off unionization efforts at its fulfillment centers. As part of that, the company paid $4.3 million to anti-union consultants in just 2020 alone, according to documents filed with the Department of at Inflation

Now, the union could potentially challenge Amazon's labor practices, disrupting the breakneck pace of work Amazon sets for warehouse and delivery employees, and set new hourly wage requirements, according to CNBC.

“We’re disappointed with the outcome of the election in Staten Island because we believe having a direct relationship with the company is best for our employees,” an Amazon spokesperson told CNBC.

Amazon undoubtedly now looking for a solution to its labor issues.

Amazon's Long-Term Labor Solution

Investors reward companies for keeping labor costs down.

Any time a public company announces mass layoff, you can bet there will be an accompanying bump in the company's stock price.

The reason is that investors often believe that if a company can maintain production levels while trimming labor costs, gross margins will invariably rise.

Amazon currently employs about 1.1 million people in the United States. That headcount is augmented by the 200,000 robots the company has working, according to Automation World.

In 2012, Amazon acquired robot-coordinated order fulfillment company Kiva Systems for $775 million in cash.

Amazon Australia opened the largest warehouse ever built on the continent. The 200,000 square-meter facility is the size of 24 rugby fields.

But its size isn't the only thing interesting about the facility. It is also the first "robotics fulfillment center" in the southern hemisphere.

Robots will team with 1,500 workers to house and move around 20 million items. For comparison sake, JFK8 is about 80,000 square meters with a human head count above 8,000 workers.

Amazon has specifically built many of its warehouses to accommodate mobile robots, which can autonomously transport entire shelf units around the facility to complete fulfillment and delivery.

Those robots currently work in conjunction with human workers who do the packing and shipping.

The company is set to open a massive robotics facility in Tallahassee, Florida later this year.

Going Beyond Robots

But robotics will only become a larger part of the Amazon ecosystem, and the shipping industry in general.

The Warehouse Robotics Market was valued at $9.88 billion in 2021, according to Mordor Intelligence, but it is expected to jump to $23.09 billion by 2027 with a compound annual growth rate of 15.33%.

According to Bank of America, it is estimated that by 2025, 45% of all manufacturing tasks will be executed by robotic technology.

According to DHL, 80% of warehouses are still manually operated with no supporting automation.

"While significant advances have been accomplished in robotics, the human workforce still holds the upper hand in running a well-organized warehouse," Mordor Intelligence said.

"Forecast of long-term labor shortages across the United States and Europe, as well as sustained pressure on supply chains to deliver orders quicker and more precisely, has caused operations executives to seriously assess that question as they look for answers to staffing challenges."

Workers at JFK8 popped champagne bottles at the news conference announcing the union vote. But their efforts to improve their working situation may eventually lead to Amazon accelerating its own efforts to trim its warehouse headcount in the name of the all mighty bottom-line.

Amazon admits that it needs human workers. It hired more than 400,000 people during the pandemic and still complained of staff shortages in its most recent earnings call.

But as time goes on and the company refines its robotics, those staff shortages could become a relic of a bygone era.

USA
The jobs market favors workers for the first time in a half-century. 

No one in the press corps can hear it

Image via Shutterstock.

Jason Sattler

April 08, 2022

It’s easy to forget how dire the job market was – and just about everything was – during the last year of the Trump presidency.

Americans were forced to consider theft and murder to make sure their families had enough toilet paper amid a once-a-century plague that will, by the time it’s over, have killed more than a million of us.

I guess we’re just supposed to pretend that never happened, like a fresh hell of a sermon interrupted by the sudden toot of a pastor’s fart – or Donald Trumps’ trademarks in China – or Michael Avenatti.

But letting the memory of the wreckage left behind by Republican presidents is why we get so many more Republican presidents.

So prepare for a haunting flashback.

Before 2020, America had never seen more than a million weekly unemployment claims, not even during the Great Recession.

Late in March 2020, nearly 3 million workers filed claims.

That was followed by 5.9 million, then 6.1 million. Pretty much the populations of Los Angeles and Chicago combined were out of work.

That weekly hemorrhaging didn’t drop below a million until last August. It didn’t hit pre-pandemic levels until last October.

The American Rescue Plan – along with various pandemic-related reprieves – built on previous and considerable efforts to soften the pain of the pandemic by putting money into workers’ pockets.

The result of this sort of bottom-up economics?

An explosion of job growth unlike any seen before.

We are now seeing the lowest unemployment claims in more than 50 years. 2021 was literally the best year of job growth ever recorded.

You’d think that’d be big news.

Sure, if the president were Republican.

Look, it’s easy to pretend this remarkable recovery, which has seen all jobs lost regained six years faster than it took the job market to recover from the Great Recession, was inevitable or predictable.

It wasn’t.

“Pre-Rescue Act, CBO projected the unemployment rate would be 5.1 percent this past quarter, not go below 4 percent until 2026, and would never go below 3.9 percent. In fact, it fell to 3.6 percent in March,” Seth Hanlon, a former special assistant to President Obama for economic policy, noted.

You may not be aware of the good news.

You’re not alone.

A recent poll found only 12 percent of Americans knew we’d just experienced the best year of job growth ever. In comparison, 43 percent of our fellow citizens believe in the existence of demons.

What explains this catastrophic cognitive dissonance?

Some of it is complicated.

Much of the good news has been buried in constant positive revisions by the government of job numbers. That process dulled deadlines.

It’s also hard to celebrate the good news during a pandemic that’s still killing the unvaccinated, immunocompromised and the unlucky.

(And anyway, work sucks.)

But the simple reason for Americans not knowing how effective the American Rescue Plan has been is psychological abuse.

The Washington press corps, warped by the influence of rightwing media, tends to ignore good job news under Democratic presidencies.

Consider this: Do you know more jobs were created in 2014, the year Obamacare went into effect, than any year so far in the century before 2021? That’s after five years of Republicans predicting the opposite?

What’s going on now is more nefarious, though, It comes from people who know better. They understand well this newfound labor power.

It’s Corporate America.

That’s why workers having the best job security in their lives is continually framed not as victory for Joe Sixpack, but as a crisis.

"US businesses are not laying off workers because they know the enormous challenges they're facing in filling open positions," Ryan Sweet, of Moody's Analytics, told Reuters. "If initial claims remain below 200,000 for a period of time, it will raise a red flag with the Fed."

Not enough layoffs should raise a red flag?

Is the job market too good?

(How dare you ask for a raise! I should be on my superyacht!)\

These Scrooge-before-Ghosts-Scared-Him headlines are more common than headlines about the balance of power shifting toward the interests of labor. An excellent example of this comes courtesy of Axios: “Worker shortage thwarts Biden’s ‘millions’ of jobs pledge.”

More nefarious, however, is the fixation by the press corps on the allegation that “inflation” is driven by workers' newfound advantages.

For Republicans, the advantages of discounting the best job market for workers in half a century are obvious. They need to justify resuming power. For Corporate America, record profits are not enough.

They are acutely aware of the success of unionizing efforts at an Amazon warehouse and at multiple Starbucks’ locations. They see how hard it is to hire when workers don’t live in terror of unemployment.

They see Democratic majorities in the Congress having the power, though not yet the votes, to clawback some of the massive giveaways corporations racked up during the Trump administration.

And they want their layoffs back.

Unfortunately, the press corps is happy to help.

So is the Fed – with rate increases likely to deflate the jobs market than help mitigate inflation, which has as much to do with the pandemic and the flimsiness of anti-worker supply chains as anything.

Workers haven’t had much to celebrate for a long time. It’s hard to celebrate an economy fundamentally rigged to fluff the super rich.

But we better understand the power we have.

Corporations want it back, fast.

How a deluge of lockdown volunteers rescued UK’s hidden weather history


THE CONVERSATION
Published: March 25, 2022

When it rains, it pours. Make hay while the sun shines. Save for a rainy day. Come rain or shine. The English language is overflowing with phrases about the weather, especially rain, or the lack of it. Fascination with the weather seems embedded in the UK’s national identity, but there is much people still need to learn about it.

Scientists know there were terrible floods and brutal droughts in the country’s past which could happen again. And as the climate changes, intense downpours in particular are likely to become more common and even more extreme.

The government advises that defences must be able to withstand floods which are so rare that they only occur once every 100 years. What does such a flood look like? We need as much data from the past as possible to accurately describe these events so that homes are properly protected.

Sadly, much of this information is stored in hand-written paper records which amateur meteorologists compiled over centuries. But thanks to the work of modern volunteers, millions of rainfall measurements were recently made available to science, vastly expanding our understanding of Britain’s climate, revealing new records and shedding light on just how extreme the weather can get.

A treasure trove of data

Starting in the 1860s, The British Rainfall Organisation (BRO), led by meteorologist George Symons, collected rainfall observations from around Britain and Ireland by calling on volunteers to send in their records. They dug up measurements from as far back as 1677, from newspapers and other publications, as well as diaries kept by weather enthusiasts.

The BRO collated these observations on 66,000 pieces of paper. Each sheet contained measurements of the rain that fell each month during a particular decade in a particular location.

New rainfall data was immediately stored on computers from 1960 onwards, and the paper sheets were carefully stored in archives where they were largely forgotten. Turning the five million handwritten measurements into digital data a computer can analyse is an enormous task which requires human eyes to recognise the often hard-to-read numbers.

A ten-year rainfall sheet for Forbury Gardens in Reading during the 1890s. National Meteorological Archive, Author provided

An opportunity arose in early 2020 during the first national lockdown. The National Meteorological Archive had scanned the paper sheets and made the images available online. The University of Reading launched a citizen science project called Rainfall Rescue, asking the public to help make these measurements available to science once more.

Volunteers were shown an image of a single sheet and asked to type the values for a particular year into the website. Each sheet was shown to at least four different volunteers to iron out any mistakes. We estimated the process would take many months. It took just 16 days.

We had not expected 16,000 volunteers to pitch in. Whether it was people with more spare time or those looking for a distraction during the pandemic, the public response was extraordinary. Night and day the data poured in. Some volunteers looked at more than 1,000 pages, and 100 million keystrokes later, the project has yielded more than 3.3 million rainfall measurements taken between 1677 and 1960 from thousands of locations. These are now available online and have been processed by the Met Office to improve the national rainfall statistics.
New weather records

Before Rainfall Rescue began, UK records stretched back to 1862, but only data from 19 rain gauges were available for that year. Thanks to the efforts of volunteers, data from more than 700 rain gauges are now available for 1862, allowing us to map rainfall variation in far greater detail than ever before.
Additional data uncovered by Rainfall Rescue could expand available statistics further. Ed Hawkins/National Centre for Atmospheric Science, Author provided

We can also look further back in time and map rainfall across the UK for every month since 1836. This is the year that Charles Darwin returned to the UK on the Beagle with Vice-Admiral Robert Fitzroy (who later set up the Met Office), and is the year before Queen Victoria began her reign.

The data from Rainfall Rescue before 1862 is new to science, and so our records need updating. The driest year on record for the UK used to be 1887. It is now 1855.

February 2020 had been the wettest on record for many regions of the UK, while May was the driest in many places. But those record-breakers have now lost their status. For many regions, February 1848 was wetter than 2020 and, for others, May 1844 was drier than 2020.

Other significant events emerge from the data too. April 1842 is now the driest April on record for the UK. November and December 1852 set records for being extremely wet, with significant flooding across the country.

We’re just beginning to analyse the new data, and still adding information from more locations. This will offer invaluable insight into how the UK’s climate is changing and put recent weather in perspective, preparing us for the future with better understanding of what the weather has thrown at us in the past.

Rainfall Rescue has extended the UK’s rainfall statistics by 26 years. Ed Hawkins/National Centre for Atmospheric Science, Author provided

The sheets of paper which made this possible were assembled by an earlier army of volunteers who dedicated themselves to recording rainfall, every day, often for many decades. Lady Bayning took measurements from 1835 to 1887, even bringing her rain gauge as she travelled from Norfolk to London for the social season. William Buckley Pugh contributed 65 years of rainfall observations at his mill near Hull and later in retirement.

Thousands of other people took measurements at waterworks, factories, vicarages, canals, railway stations, lighthouses and hospitals across the length and breadth of Britain and Ireland. Their efforts, the vision of George Symons, and now the time and commitment of thousands of online volunteers have transformed our knowledge of rainfall in these islands.

Author

Ed Hawkins
Professor of Climate Science, University of Reading
Disclosure statement
Ed Hawkins receives funding from the National Centre for Atmospheric Science and the Natural Environment Research Council.

How did cockroaches survive the asteroid that led to the extinction of dinosaurs?

THE CONVERSATION
Published: March 28, 2022 

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com.

How did cockroaches survive the asteroid that led to the extinction of dinosaurs? – Kinjal, age 11, Delhi, India

When the rock now known as the Chicxulub impactor plummeted from outer space and slammed into the Earth 66 million years ago, cockroaches were there. The impact caused a massive earthquake, and scientists think it also triggered volcanic eruptions thousands of miles from the impact site. Three-quarters of plants and animals on Earth died, including all dinosaurs, except for some species that were ancestors of today’s birds.

How could roaches a couple of inches long survive when so many powerful animals went extinct? It turns out that they were nicely equipped to live through a meteoric catastrophe.





If you’ve ever seen a cockroach, you’ve probably noticed that their bodies are very flat. This is not an accident. Flatter insects can squeeze themselves into tighter places. This enables them to hide practically anywhere – and it may have helped them survive the Chicxulub impact.
Cockroaches have flat bodies that help them squeeze through tiny spaces. They’re also strong and fast.

When the meteor struck, temperatures on Earth’s surface skyrocketed. Many animals had nowhere to flee, but roaches could take shelter in tiny soil crevices, which provide excellent protection from heat.

The meteor’s impact triggered a cascade of effects. It kicked up so much dust that the sky darkened. As the sun dimmed, temperatures plunged and conditions became wintry around the globe. With little sunlight, surviving plants struggled to grow, and many other organisms that relied on those plants went hungry.

Not cockroaches, though. Unlike some insects that prefer to eat one specific plant, cockroaches are omnivorous scavengers. This means they will eat most foods that come from animals or plants as well as cardboard, some kinds of clothing and even poop. Having appetites that aren’t picky has allowed cockroaches to survive lean times since the Chicxulub extinction and other natural disasters.

Another helpful trait is that cockroaches lay their eggs in little protective cases. These egg cartons look like dried beans and are called oothecae, which means “egg cases.” Like phone cases, oothecae are hard and protect their contents from physical damage and other threats, such as flooding and drought. Some cockroaches may have waited out part of the Chicxulub catastrophe from the comfort of their oothecae.

Cockroach egg cases are about 0.5 inches long (10 millimeters) and contain up to 50 eggs, depending on the species. VitalisG/iStock via Getty Images

Modern cockroaches are little survivors that can live just about anywhere on land, from the heat of the tropics to some of the coldest parts of the globe. Scientists estimate that there over 4,000 cockroach species.

A handful of these species like to live with humans and quickly become pests. Once cockroaches become established in a building, it’s hard to rid every little crack of these insects and their oothecae. When large numbers of roaches are present in unsanitary places, they can spread diseases. The biggest threat they pose to human health is from allergens they produce that can trigger asthma attacks and allergic reactions in some people.

Cockroach pests are hard to manage because they can resist many chemical insecticides and because they have the same abilities that helped their ancestors outlive many dinosaurs. Still, cockroaches are much more than a pest to control. Researchers study cockroaches to understand how they move and how their bodies are designed to get ideas for building better robots.

As a scientist, I see all insects as beautiful, six-legged inspirations. Cockroaches have already overcome odds that were too great for dinosaurs. If another meteorite hit the Earth, I’d be more worried for humans than for cockroaches.

Author

Brian Lovett
Postdoctoral Researcher in Mycology, West Virginia University

Hidden away in a museum, we found the skull of a rare armoured dinosaur that roamed Queensland 105 million years ago

THE CONVERSATION
Published: March 28, 2022 

You might think all important dinosaur “discoveries” are made as soon as fossils are collected in the field – that palaeontologists instantly know the significance of what they’ve found.

This is often true. But sometimes, and maybe more often than you’d think, fossils will be stored in museum collections for years before the right researchers come along to “rediscover” them. This was the case for one Australian ankylosaur skull, which we’ve published about today in the journal Frontiers in Earth Sciences.

Originally discovered in 2005 near the regional Queensland town of Boulia, the specimen remained at the South Australian Museum until we enquired about the museum’s dinosaur collection.

Ankylosaurs, the so-called “armoured” dinosaurs, are a group of dinosaurs that lived from the Early Jurassic to the Late Cretaceous – roughly 196 to 66 million years ago.

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Compared to other dinosaurs, such as the long-necked sauropods and smaller herbivorous ornithopods, ankylosaur remains are rarely found in Australia and the broader southern hemisphere. So you can imagine our excitement when we “rediscovered” Australia’s second ankylosaur skull.

An analysis of the skull bones and teeth suggests it belongs to the genus Kunbarrasaurus, which also contains the first Australian ankylosaur skull.

Read more: Introducing Australotitan: Australia's largest dinosaur yet spanned the length of 2 buses

What were ankylosaurs like?

Ankylosaurs were medium-to-giant herbivorous dinosaurs (anywhere between 200-5,000kg) that walked on four legs and were covered in armoured plates or spikes. Some are recognisable by tail clubs, such as the five-tonne Ankylosaurus magniventris from North America.

Of the 75 recognised ankylosaur species, only five are from the southern hemisphere. Several small and incomplete fossils are spattered across the ancient Gondwana supercontinent – which is now dispersed and broken up into Australia, India (which back then was in the southern hemisphere), Africa, Antarctica and South America.

These fossils offer tantalising hints of what was once a widespread ankylosaur presence in these regions. The five Gondwanan ankylosaur species are Kunbarrasaurus ieversi and Minmi paravertebra from Australia, Antarctopelta oliveroi from Antarctica, Spicomellus afer from Africa, and Stegorous elengassen from Chile.

A dinosaur from Boulia

The bones of the ankylosaur from Boulia were found encased in a large, hard rock called a concretion. Concretions often form around organic matter, and likely helped the initial preservation of the fossil. When it was discovered, all that was visible was a series of rock chunks that could have easily been overlooked.

The Boulia ankylosaur was excavated from the Warra station in 2005. 

(Block in the bottom left contains ankylosaur limb bones)

 Benjamin Kear (Uppsala University)

The collected fossils include limbs, vertebrae, many armoured plates and, excitingly, a partial skull. Along with several skull bones, the skull also includes the impressions of many teeth from the upper jaw.

The entire skull block was scanned at the Australian Synchrotron in Melbourne. The synchrotron shoots x-rays at the specimen, generating a series of images that can be processed to reveal the bones in 3D (as seen below).

This technique is often used for fossils that may otherwise get damaged or lose important information if physically removed from the rock.

We analysed the scans and discovered the bones are those of the roof of the mouth (or the palate). We also found several teeth “floating” within the block.

Placing southern ankylosaurs in the family tree

Identifying this new ankylosaur as Kunbarrasaurus suggests this particular dinosaur was potentially more widespread in Queensland than previously thought, and may have existed for more than five million years. But what do ankylosaurs from Australia, and Gondwana more generally, tell us about the group’s evolution as a whole?

As it stands, the vast majority of ankylosaurs are from either North America, Europe, or Asia. And most are from the late Cretaceous (100 to 66 million years ago). However our study suggests a separate and possibly earlier diversity of ankylosaurs in the south, a theory which is supported by recent discoveries from South America and Africa.

The southern radiation of ankylosaurs includes the species from Australia, Chile and Antarctica, all of which together form the group called Parankylosauria.

A reconstruction of Kunbarrrasaurus ieversi from Richmond, Queensland. Australian Geographic

The importance of the Boulia ankylosaur

Because the fossil block was scanned with x-rays and reconstructed in 3D, we were able to explore aspects of the ankylosaur’s airways, or “choanae”. These were not well preserved in the first and only other known Kunbarrasaurus skull.

Typically ankylosaur choanae are long, located close to the front of the snout and can have multiple openings within the palate. Coupled with complex nasal passages, these features point to the group generally having a keen sense of smell.

However, in the Boulia ankylosaur there is only one opening on each side, and they are located towards the back of the palate. This suggests Kunbarrasaurus did not have the complex nasal system seen in ankylosaurs such as Pawpawsaurus campbelli and Euplocephalus tutus. As such, it may have had a reduced sense of smell compared to most of its northern counterparts.

There is still a lot we don’t know about ankylosaur evolution, especially the Gondwanan species. Perhaps more of these discoveries await us in museum troves.

Read more: Dinosaurs were already in decline before the asteroid wiped them out – new research

Authors

Timothy Frauenfelder
PhD Candidate in Palaeontology, University of New England

Nicolas Campione
Senior lecturer, University of New England

Phil Bell
Palaeontologist, Earth Science Faculty, University of New England

Disclosure statement

Nicolas Campione receives funding from Australian Research Council.

Phil Bell received funding from the Australian Research Council.

Timothy Frauenfelder does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Researchers identified over 5,500 new viruses in the ocean, including a missing link in viral evolution

THE CONVERSATION

Published: April 7, 2022

The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.

The big idea
Diagram of the biological classification system, showing phylum is a broad grouping. VectorMine/iStock via Getty Images Plus

An analysis of the genetic material in the ocean has identified thousands of previously unknown RNA viruses and doubled the number of phyla, or biological groups, of viruses thought to exist, according to a new study our team of researchers has published in the journal Science.

RNA viruses are best known for the diseases they cause in people, ranging from the common cold to COVID-19. They also infect plants and animals important to people.

These viruses carry their genetic information in RNA, rather than DNA. RNA viruses evolve at much quicker rates than DNA viruses do. While scientists have cataloged hundreds of thousands of DNA viruses in their natural ecosystems, RNA viruses have been relatively unstudied.

There are more RNA viruses in the oceans than researchers previously thought. Guillermo Domínguez Huerta, CC BY-ND

Unlike humans and other organisms composed of cells, however, viruses lack unique short stretches of DNA that could act as what researchers call a genetic bar code. Without this bar code, trying to distinguish different species of virus in the wild can be challenging.

To get around this limitation, we decided to identify the gene that codes for a particular protein that allows a virus to replicate its genetic material. It is the only protein that all RNA viruses share, because it plays an essential role in how they propagate themselves. Each RNA virus, however, has small differences in the gene that codes for the protein that can help distinguish one type of virus from another.

So we screened a global database of RNA sequences from plankton collected during the four-year Tara Oceans expeditions global research project. Plankton are any aquatic organisms that are too small to swim against the current. They’re a vital part of ocean food webs and are common hosts for RNA viruses. Our screening ultimately identified over 44,000 genes that code for the virus protein.

Our next challenge, then, was to determine the evolutionary connections between these genes. The more similar two genes were, the more likely viruses with those genes were closely related. Because these sequences had evolved so long ago (possibly predating the first cell), the genetic signposts indicating where new viruses may have split off from a common ancestor had been lost to time. A form of artificial intelligence called machine learning, however, allowed us to systematically organize these sequences and detect differences more objectively than if the task were done manually.

This diagram shows the five previously known phyla of RNA viruses automatically organized by our methods. Reprinted with permission from Zayed et al., Science Volume 376:156(2022).

We identified a total of 5,504 new marine RNA viruses and doubled the number of known RNA virus phyla from five to 10. Mapping these new sequences geographically revealed that two of the new phyla were particularly abundant across vast oceanic regions, with regional preferences in either temperate and tropical waters (the Taraviricota, named after the Tara Oceans expeditions) or the Arctic Ocean (the Arctiviricota).

We believe that Taraviricota might be the missing link in the evolution of RNA viruses that researchers have long sought, connecting two different known branches of RNA viruses that diverged in how they replicate.

This map shows the distribution of RNA viruses across the ocean. Wedge size is proportional to the average abundance of viruses present in that area, and wedge color indicates virus phyla. Reprinted with permission from Zayed et al., Science Volume 376:156(2022).

Why it matters

These new sequences help scientists better understand not only the evolutionary history of RNA viruses but also the evolution of early life on Earth.

As the COVID-19 pandemic has shown, RNA viruses can cause deadly diseases. But RNA viruses also play a vital role in ecosystems because they can infect a wide array of organisms, including microbes that influence environments and food webs at the chemical level.

Mapping out where in the world these RNA viruses live can help clarify how they affect the organisms driving many of the ecological processes that run our planet. Our study also provides improved tools that can help researchers catalog new viruses as genetic databases grow.

Viruses do more than just cause disease.

What still isn’t known

Despite identifying so many new RNA viruses, it remains challenging to pinpoint what organisms they infect. Researchers are also currently limited to mostly fragments of incomplete RNA virus genomes, partly because of their genetic complexity and technological limitations.

Our next steps would be to figure out what kinds of genes might be missing and how they changed over time. Uncovering these genes could help scientists better understand how these viruses work.

Authors

Guillermo Dominguez Huerta
Science Consultant in Microbiology, The Ohio State University

Ahmed Zayed
Research Scientist in Microbiology, The Ohio State University

James Wainaina
Postdoctoral Research Associate in Microbiology, The Ohio State University

Matthew Sullivan
Professor of Microbiology, The Ohio State University

Disclosure statement

Guillermo Dominguez Huerta receives funding from U.S. National Science Foundation (DBI# 2022070). He was also supported by a Ramon-Areces Foundation postdoctoral fellowship.

Ahmed Zayed receives funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation (DBI# 2022070)

James Wainaina receives funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation (DBI# 2022070)

Matthew Sullivan received funding for this research from the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

The South African ship that found Antarctica’s Endurance wreck is vital for climate science

THE CONVERSATION
Published: April 6, 2022 

The SA Agulhas amid the ice of Antarctica. © Raquel Flynn

It was 1914 when the English explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton set sail on his Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition aboard a ship called Endurance. It was an ill-fated journey: the ship got trapped in the ice and eventually crushed by pack ice in 1915. It sank to the bottom of Antarctica’s Weddell Sea. (Shackleton and his entire crew survived the ordeal by escaping in smaller boats.)

It was difficult to believe that the Endurance might ever be found. The icy Weddell Sea is inhospitable and the wreck lay in more than 3000 metres of water. But thanks to a South African vessel, the SA Agulhas II, Endurance was found in March 2022. It was the second time the polar icebreaker reached the coordinates that Endurance’s Captain Frank Worsley recorded as the ship went down. The first was in 2019; the ship was not located on that occasion.

Read more: Finding Shackleton's ship: why our fascination with Antarctica endures

The tale of the Endurance is fascinating. But so is the story of the SA Agulhas II. Because of this ship, South Africa is becoming a leader in aspects of Antarctic science. For example, it is highly unusual to make in situ measurements of the physics, chemistry, and biology of the open Southern Ocean and its sea ice in winter because of the darkness, inhospitable weather conditions and high concentrations of sea ice.

Yet, since 2012, the SA Agulhas II has undertaken at least five wintertime voyages between Cape Town and the Antarctic sea ice, a journey of nearly 3,000 kilometres. These expeditions have yielded data that are essential to understanding the changing Southern Ocean, and to validate numerical models developed to predict future climate. My research group, comprising mainly postgraduate students, has collected samples on numerous cruises aboard the SA Agulhas II that, following their measurement in the Marine Biogeochemistry Lab at the University of Cape Town, are improving our understanding of Southern Ocean nutrient and carbon cycling.

The SA Agulhas II has also served – and continues to serve – as a training ground for hundreds of students, most of them South African, in a range of disciplines: oceanography, marine biology, atmospheric science and more. It annually supports SEAmester, a ship-based educational programme dubbed “South Africa’s first class afloat”. During this government-funded capacity-building expedition, approximately 50 postgraduate students from across the country spend 10 days aboard the ship. They are introduced to interdisciplinary, applied, and hands-on marine science.

Shackleton’s so-called “Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration” was fundamentally a show of European colonial might. It kicked off decades of Antarctic research that was open near-exclusively to white men.

So it is fitting that one of the world’s most impressive icebreaking research vessels is today owned and operated by the only African signatory of the 1961 Antarctic Treaty – which protects Antarctica and its surrounding ecosystems from exploitation and annexation – and is a platform to train African researchers undertaking globally-relevant research.

Fully equipped

The SA Agulhas II is a Polar Class 5 vessel owned by the South African Department of Forestry, Fisheries and Environment and operated by African Marine Solutions.

She was built in the shipyard of STX Finland in Rauma, Finland, and handed over to the South African government in 2012. Cape Town is her home port.

At 134 metres long, with ten decks, a crew of 45 and berth space for 100 scientists, the SA Agulhas II was uniquely designed as both a polar supply ship and scientific research vessel. As part of the ship’s mandate, she annually supplies fuel, food, personnel, and other essential resources to South Africa’s research bases in Antarctica and on the Subantarctic Marion and Gough Islands.

She is also equipped with eight permanent scientific laboratories (with space on the stern for six additional specialised labs in shipping containers). The ship’s infrastructure allows for various instruments and sample collection equipment (and even people) to be deployed over the side or through the centre of the vessel via an opening in the hull known as a “moon pool”.

A 1916 image of the Endurance trapped in ice. Bettmann collection/Getty Images

These and other features are critical when exploring a location as remote, vast and inhospitable as the Southern Ocean, which is typically defined as the waters south of 40ºS that connect the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific Oceans. The westerly winds can exceed 60 km/hr, driving swells of over 10 metres. Sea ice more than a metre thick often extends over 1,000 km north of Antarctica. These factors make the region arguably the most logistically challenging and expensive ocean in which to conduct research.

Such research is critical. The Southern Ocean is the most important of all oceanic regions for Earth’s climate. Waters originating near Antarctica transport large quantities of heat and dissolved gases, such as the powerful greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO2), around the planet and into the deep ocean to be stored for hundreds of years.

Read more: An ocean like no other: the Southern Ocean's ecological richness and significance for global climate

Nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, critical to all life on Earth, flow from the Southern Ocean to the tropical and temperate latitudes. There they are believed to support at least two-thirds of global ocean productivity. Without the Southern Ocean, our planet would not be habitable: continued research and monitoring of this marine system is critical.

The SA Agulhas II was able to reach the Endurance wreck site partly because of lighter than normal summertime ice conditions in the Weddell Sea. This is almost certainly a consequence of human-driven warming of the natural world. Significant reductions in Antarctic ice cover due to atmospheric and oceanic warming, along with related changes to the Southern Ocean and its ecosystems, present a very real threat to Earth’s habitability.

Broader value

Across the world, and in South Africa, government funding for research is declining; proportionally more science is being supported by private funders. A significant risk of this model is that a handful of powerful people, rather than a community of scientists reliant on peer-review and subject to checks and balances, get to set the global research agenda.

The SA Agulhas II stands out because she belongs to the people of South Africa. The ship’s success, under the leadership of master mariner Captain Knowledge Bengu, in locating the the Endurance is a reminder of her value not only to South African research, but to current and future global science initiatives.

Author

Sarah Fawcett
Senior Lecturer, University of Cape Town
Disclosure statement
Sarah Fawcett receives funding from the National Research Foundation (South African National Antarctic Programme) and the University of Cape Town Vice-Chancellor Future Leaders 2030 Fund.

Volcanoes, diamonds, and blobs: a billion-year history of Earth’s interior shows it’s more mobile than we thought

THE CONVERSATION
Published: March 30, 2022 

Deep in the Earth beneath us lie two blobs the size of continents. One is under Africa, the other under the Pacific Ocean.

The blobs have their roots 2,900km below the surface, almost halfway to the centre of the Earth. They are thought to be the birthplace of rising columns of hot rock called “deep mantle plumes” that reach Earth’s surface.

When these plumes first reach the surface, giant volcanic eruptions occur – the kind that contributed to the extinction of the dinosaurs 65.5 million years ago. The blobs may also control the eruption of a kind of rock called kimberlite, which brings diamonds from depths 120-150km (and in some cases up to around 800km) to Earth’s surface.

Scientists have known the blobs existed for a long time, but how they have behaved over Earth’s history has been an open question. In new research, we modelled a billion years of geological history and discovered the blobs gather together and break apart much like continents and supercontinents.

Earth’s blobs as imaged from seismic data. The African blob is at the top and the Pacific blob at the bottom. Ömer Bodur

A model for Earth blob evolution

The blobs are in the mantle, the thick layer of hot rock between Earth’s crust and its core. The mantle is solid but slowly flows over long timescales. We know the blobs are there because they slow down waves caused by earthquakes, which suggests the blobs are hotter than their surroundings.

Scientists generally agree the blobs are linked to the movement of tectonic plates at Earth’s surface. However, how the blobs have changed over the course of Earth’s history has puzzled them.

One school of thought has been that the present blobs have acted as anchors, locked in place for hundreds of millions of years while other rock moves around them. However, we know tectonic plates and mantle plumes move over time, and research suggests the shape of the blobs is changing.

Our new research shows Earth’s blobs have changed shape and location far more than previously thought. In fact, over history they have assembled and broken up in the same way that continents and supercontinents have at Earth’s surface.

We used Australia’s National Computational Infrastructure to run advanced computer simulations of how Earth’s mantle has flowed over a billion years.

These models are based on reconstructing the movements of tectonic plates. When plates push into one another, the ocean floor is pushed down between them in a process known as subduction. The cold rock from the ocean floor sinks deeper and deeper into the mantle, and once it reaches a depth of about 2,000km it pushes the hot blobs aside.
The past 200 million years of Earth’s interior. Hot structures are in yellow to red (darker is shallower) and cold structures in blue (darker is deeper).

We found that just like continents, the blobs can assemble – forming “superblobs” as in the current configuration – and break up over time.

A key aspect of our models is that although the blobs change position and shape over time, they still fit the pattern of volcanic and kimberlite eruptions recorded at Earth’s surface. This pattern was previously a key argument for the blobs as unmoving “anchors”.

Strikingly, our models reveal the African blob assembled as recently as 60 million years ago – in stark contrast to previous suggestions the blob could have existed in roughly its present form for nearly ten times as long.

Remaining questions about the blobs

How did the blobs originate? What exactly are they made of?  We still don’t know.

The blobs may be denser than the surrounding mantle, and as such they could consist of material separated out from the rest of the mantle early in Earth’s history. This could explain why the mineral composition of the Earth is different from that expected from models based on the composition of meteorites.

Alternatively, the density of the blobs could be explained by the accumulation of dense oceanic material from slabs of rock pushed down by tectonic plate movement.

Regardless of this debate, our work shows sinking slabs are more likely to transport fragments of continents to the African blob than to the Pacific blob. Interestingly, this result is consistent with recent work suggesting the source of mantle plumes rising from the African blob contains continental material, whereas plumes rising from the Pacific blob do not.

Tracking the blobs to find minerals and diamonds

While our work addresses fundamental questions about the evolution of our planet, it also has practical applications.

Our models provide a framework to more accurately target the location of minerals associated with mantle upwelling. This includes diamonds brought up to the surface by kimberlites that seem to be associated with the blobs.

Magmatic sulfide deposits, which are the world’s primary reserve of nickel, are also associated with mantle plumes. By helping target minerals such as nickel (an essential ingredient of lithium-ion batteries and other renewable energy technologies) our models can contribute to the transition to a low-emission economy.

Authors

Nicolas Flament
Senior Lecturer, University of Wollongong

Andrew Merdith
Research fellow, University of Leeds

Ömer F. Bodur
Postdoctoral research fellow, University of Wollongong

Simon Williams
Research Fellow, Northwest University, Xi'an

Disclosure statement

Nicolas Flament receives funding from the Australian Research Council and from De Beers.

Andrew Merdith was supported by the Deep Carbon Observatory and the Richard Lounsbery Foundation.

Ömer F. Bodur receives funding from the Australian Research Council and from De Beers.

Simon Williams receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.