Michel Foucault: Biopolitics and Biopower

 by Rachel Adams • 10 May 2017

Key Concept  https://criticallegalthinking.com/keyconcepts/

Despite their prominence in subsequent academic writing,1 the concepts of “biopower” and “biopolitics” are perhaps the most elusive, and arguably the most compelling (given the attention they have subsequently received), concepts of Michel Foucault’s oeuvre. Within his published work, these concepts featured only in the last chapter of the slim first volume of History of Sexuality (The Will to Knowledge: History of Sexuality Volume I 1976).2 And, while biopolitics and biopower can be seen to figure within broader conceptualisations and genealogies of power and governmentality3 of his lecture series at the Collège de France (largely, 1975-76 ‘Society Must be Defended’4; 1977-78 Security, Territory Population5; and 1978-79 The Birth of Biopolitics6) these references remain ‘speculative’7 and incomplete, in part due to the genre of the lecture series which stand as unedited posthumous publications.8 Indeed, whether Foucault provides us with a coherent theory or concept of biopolitics is debatable.

This notwithstanding, biopolitics and biopower continue to hold significant purchase in and for discussions on modern forms of governance and modes of subjectification. However, rather than taking these concepts as standalone and independent theoretical contributions, it is – as I demonstrate here – more productive to understand biopolitics and biopower as they function together with some of the other ideas related to power and governmentality which Foucault develops over the same period (that is, the 1970s).

Biopolitics and Biopower

Let us begin with a brief definition of biopolitics and biopower, before situating these concepts within the broader context of Foucault’s oeuvre. In short, biopolitics can be understood as a political rationality which takes the administration of life and populations as its subject: ‘to ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put this life in order’.9 Biopower thus names the way in which biopolitics is put to work in society, and involves what Foucault describes as ‘a very profound transformation of [the] mechanisms of power’ of the Western classic age.10 In The Will to Knowledge, Foucault writes of

[A] power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavours to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations.11

Foucault is speaking here of a power he later designates as “biopower”, a power which –significantly – has a ‘positive influence on life’ (my italics). This new biopower constitutes a ‘profound transformation of [the] mechanisms of power’ insofar as it differs from what Foucault associates with ‘juridico-discursive’ conceptualisations of power as repressive and negative:12 a power whose ‘effects take the form of limit and lack’.13 Indeed, Foucault conducts a lengthy critique of this repressive functioning of power in both The Will to Knowledge14 and Society Must be Defended,15 demonstrating that such power functions to hide other productive or ‘positive’ capacities of power that are also at play particularly, for example, within the capitalist governmentality of the 19th century.

The new biopower operates instead through dispersed networks – what in Security, Territory, Population Foucault names the dispositif.16 This dispositif of power works from beneath, from the ‘level of life’ itself,17 and, as Foucault earlier described it in Society Must Be Defended, ‘[i]t was a type of power that presupposed a closely meshed grid of material coercions rather than the physical existence of a sovereign’.18

Importantly, biopower did not replace repressive and deductive functions of power, but worked together with such technologies of power. Foucault writes:

“Deduction” has tended to be no longer the major form of power but merely one element among others, working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.19

However, significantly too, the structural functioning of biopower, as it operates through the dispositif where lines of power triangulate outwards, enables new kinds of resistance; resistance which can take place at the multiple points of contact which these lines of power traverse.20

Genealogy of Biopower

In the last chapter of The Will to Knowledge entitled ‘Right of Death and Power over Life’, Foucault provides a brief genealogy of biopolitics. His opening sentence recalls the Schmittian view on the decisionism which determines sovereignty,21 speaking of how ‘[f]or a long time, one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power was the right to decide life and death’.22 This sovereign power was of a juridical form. It was a power over life which could only be attested ‘through the death he was capable of requiring’.23 Thus, as Foucault notes, sovereign juridical power was in fact only a power to ‘take life or let live’,24 whereas biopower constituted ‘a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death’.25

In the 17th century the sovereign-juridical form of power began to transform. Foucault traces the evolution of two forms of power which ‘were not antithetical’ to each other, constituting ‘two poles of development linked together by a whole intermediary cluster of relations’.26 The first pole was disciplinary power, an analysis of which Foucault had developed in his previous publication Discipline and Punish (1975),27 and which took the body as its focus of subjectification. The second pole, Foucault describes as follows:

The second, formed somewhat later, focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditions that can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a biopolitics of the population. (Italics in original).28

During this period there was, as Foucault recounts, ‘an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations, marking the beginning of an era of “biopower”’.29 Foucault’s genealogy continues as he observes that these two poles of power were ‘still […] clearly separate in the 18th century’,30 before starting to join together ‘in the form of concrete arrangements that would go to make up the great technology of power of the nineteenth century’.31 One of these arrangements he names as the discourse on sexuality.

At this point, Foucault states that ‘[t]his bio-power was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism’ which made possible ‘the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes’.32 This is a theme Foucault picks up from the Society Must be Defended lecture course of two years earlier, wherein he describes how ‘more general powers or economic benefits can slip into the play of these technologies of power, which are at once relatively autonomous and infinitesimal’.33 He goes on to analyse how the bourgeoisie grasped the disciplinary mechanisms of power – developed for example by the prison system – as a technology for the production of docile bodies for capitalist labour, explicitly linking the biopolitical rationality with the development of capitalism.

State Racism

Biopolitics marks a significant historical transformation from a politics of sovereignty to a politics of society. Hence genealogically, Foucault takes us from a ‘sovereign who must be defended’34 to – as the name of his earlier lecture series affirms – a society (a species, a population) who must be defended. In The Will to Knowledge Foucault describes how:

Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital.35

In Society Must be Defended Foucault articulates this further:

[A] battle that has to be waged not between races, but by a race that is portrayed as the one true race, the race that holds power and is entitled to define the norm, and against those who deviate from that norm, against those who pose a threat to the biological heritage.36

It is in this shift from the defence of the sovereign to the defence of society as the overriding political rationality of the state that Foucault’s notion of state racism is born. He describes it as ‘a racism that society will direct against itself, against its own elements and its own products […] the internal racism of permanent purification, and it will become one of the basic dimensions of social normalization’.37 State racism is thus for Foucault the essential characteristic of the modern biopolitical state: it is both the function of the modern state and that which constitutes it.

Beyond Biopolitics

Foucault’s work on biopolitics and biopower has not been without criticism, not only insofar as his work in this area appears fleeting and incomplete. Achille Mbembe, for example, notes Foucault’s lack of a theoretical contribution on how biopower is put to work in systems of violence and domination, thus developing his notion of necropolitics which names sovereign decisionism on death: ‘the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die’.38

Another seeming limitation with biopower and biopolitics has been its apparent disregard for subjectivity. In Foucault’s focus on a politics of a population and species, the biopolitical subject is not explicitly conceived within his oeuvre. This seems limiting for understanding the place of biopolitics and biopower within Foucault’s oeuvre particularly given his assertion in 1982 that ‘the goal of my work during the last twenty years […] has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects’.39 However, it is in this context that biopower and biopolitics must be seen as working together with other technologies of power – repressive and disciplinary power – which operate more directly on the body and on subjectivity. Moreover, Mbembe’s creates critical space for a consideration of the biopolitical – or necropolitical – subject in his analysis, noted above.

Rachel Adams is a Chief Researcher at the Human Sciences Research Council, South Africa  

The Birth of Biopolitics”: Michel Foucault's Lecture at the Collège de France on Neo-liberal Governmentality

Article (PDF Available) in Economy and Society 30(2) · May 2001
DOI: 10.1080/03085140120042271

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228853767_The_Birth_of_Biopolitics_Michel_Foucault's_Lecture_at_the_College_de_France_on_Neo-liberal_Governmentality

This paper focuses on Foucault's analysis of two forms of neo-liberalism in his lecture of 1979 at the Collège de France: German post-War liberalism and the liberalism of the Chicago School. Since the course is available only on audio-tapes at the Foucault archive in Paris, the larger part of the text presents a comprehensive reconstruction of the main line of argumentation, citing previously unpublished source material. The nal section offers a short discussion of the methodological and theoretical principles underlying the concept of governmentality and the critical political angle it provides for an analysis of contemporary neo-liberalism.

Biopolitics: An Overview

“To say that power took possession of life in the nineteenth century, or to say that power at least takes life under its care in the nineteenth century, is to say that it has, thanks to the play of technologies of discipline on the one hand and technologies of regulation on the other, succeeded in covering the whole surface that lies between the organic and the biological, between body and population. We are, then, in a power that has taken control of both the body and life or that has, if you like, taken control of life in general – with the body as one pole and the population as the other.” ~ M. Foucault (1976:252-3)

“What we are dealing with in this new technology of power is not exactly society (or at least not the social body, as defined by the jurists), nor is it the individual body. It is a new body, a multiple body, a body with so many heads that, while they might not be infinite in number, cannot necessarily be counted. Biopolitics deals with the population, with the population as a political problem, as a problem that is at once scientific and political, as a biological problem and as power’s problem.” ~M. Foucault (1976:245)



Biopolitics is a complicated concept that has been used and developed in social theory since Michel Foucault, to examine the strategies and mechanisms through which human life processes are managed under regimes of authority over knowledge, power, and the processes of subjectivation. As Thomas Lemke points out, a great deal of the inconsistency with which the concept of biopolitics has been deployed in more recent decades results depending upon whether one takes as their starting point the notion that life is the determining basis of politics, or alternatively, that the object of politics is life. Meanwhile, as Nikolas Rose and Paul Rabinow point out, the original interests in and conceptions of biopower drawn out by Foucault, quite usefully, do not grapple with these opposing positions- something that has remained underappreciated by many theorists who have worked to develop alternative conceptions of biopower to match more contemporary phenomena. As Lemke states most clearly, Foucault avoids this conflict by taking as his starting point the assumption that “life denotes neither the basis nor the object of politics. Instead, it presents a border to politics- a border that should be simultaneously respected and overcome, one that seems to be both natural and given but also artificial and transformable” (2011:4-5). In what follows within this post, I attempt to pull out the foundational underpinnings upon which Foucault began to develop a theory of biopolitics. Paying attention to the historicizing treatment Foucault gives to a notion of power in relation to the rise of biopolitics, I ultimately reflect upon present-day phenomena which have been taken by scholars as signalling the movement and transformation of biopolitics into new forms and trajectory

In “The Birth of Biopolitics”, Foucault begins to theorize liberalism as a practice and as a critique of government, the rise of which he argues is inseparable from the rise of biopolitical technologies of governance, which have extended political control and power over all major processes of life itself, through a transferral of sovereign power into “biopower”- that is, technologies and techniques which govern human social and biological processes. Pointing to the fact that liberal thought takes society, and not the state, as its starting point; it follows, consequently, the critique of state governing institutions that is internal to liberalism must always, in practice, be negotiating its legitimacy of governance in a relationship between changing internalities and externalities foregrounded in the state, between self-governing “liberal” individuals and the population. This results in liberalism’s necessary ability to take many forms and strategies for self-rationalization. For example- the neoliberalism of the U.S., in which the logic of a free market economy has been extended over non-economic domains of human social and biological existence, so that we now conceive of a number of life processes, such as family and reproduction, in economic terms.

The 17th-century historical rupture in the flow of power over life and death that occurred with liberalism should be seen as more of an integration of sovereign power (the “right of the sword”) into what Foucault calls “biopower”, as opposed to seeing the process as a moment of disjuncture in which biopower came to replace the classical notion of sovereign power. As he writes in “Society Must Be Defended” (1976:241),

“I think that one of the greatest transformations political right underwent in the nineteenth century was precisely that, I wouldn’t say exactly sovereignty’s old right- to take life or let live- was replaced, but it came to be complemented by a new right which does not erase the old right but which does penetrate it, permeate it. This is the right, or rather precisely the opposite right. It is the power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die. The right of sovereignty was the right to take life or let live. And then this new right is established: the right to make live and to let die.”

The effects of the process through which these mutations in the exercise of power occurred can be characterized as having formed two opposite poles of a continuum. The first of these occurred through the development of techniques that operated in and on the individual body as apparatuses of discipline: and “that discipline tries to rule a multiplicity of men to the extent that their multiplicity can and must be dissolved into individual bodies that can be kept under surveillance, trained, used, and…punished” (Foucault 1976:242). This pole is referred to as “anatamo-politics”, and it is chiefly concerned with the atomization of a collectivity for the purpose of governance and productivity to a certain end. The second pole is of explicitly biopolitics, concerning the whole of a population, with the ultimate effect being characterizable as “massifying, that is directed not at man-as-body but as man-as-species” (1976:243). Said otherwise, biopolitics takes population as its problematic, making it both scientific and political, “as a biological problem and as power’s problem”.

What does all this mean in less-theoretical terms? To begin, it means that the contemporary historical era in which we exist and have come to know in very particular ways, is governed over by means of particular mechanisms that simultaneously operate on our bodies and subjective selves, and on our collective relations taken as a whole- as a global human race. “Biopower” can be understood as a social field of power and struggle, in which the vital aspects of human life are intervened upon for the purpose of rationalizing regimes of authority over knowledge, the generation of truth discourses about life, and the modes through which individuals construct and interpellate subjectivities between a sense of self and the collective.

With respect to populations and governance in the present day, scholars such as Lemke, Rose and Rabinow emphasize the viability of Foucauldian biopolitics in understanding the operability of truth discourses, or regimes of truth, when approaching the study of mutating biopolitical spaces in the contemporary. These spaces, such as genomics and reproductive choice, represent profound biopolitical efforts to exercise the power “to make live” and “let die”. As such, questions concerning choice and every day modes of practice surface as the most critical issues when theorizing the border that, according to Foucault, is posed by life, to politics, as it continues to transform within both new and old biopolitical spaces like race, reproduction, medicine, health, science, technology, and so on.

Sources:

1. M. Foucault. 1997. “The Birth of Biopolitics,” 73-79 in Ethics, Subjectivity, and Truth: P. Rabinow and J.D. Faubion eds. New Press.

2. M. Foucault. 2003. Lecture 11, 17 March 1976, 239-264 in Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France. Picador Press.

3. T. Lemke. 2011. Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction. New York University Press.

4. P. Rabinow & N. Rose. 2006. “Biopower Today,” Biosciences 1(2):195-217

Posted on January 21, 2013 by anthrobiopolitics

The Anthropology of Biopolitics
A blog about Knowledge, Power, and the Individual in Society Today

Covid-19 Is Accelerating Human Transformation—Let’s Not Waste It

The Neobiological Revolution is here. Now's the time to put lessons from the Digital Revolution to use.

FOUCAULT'S BIOPOLITICS

JANE METCALFE
IDEAS 07.05.2020
Sequencing the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the patients that have had adverse reactions to it is providing valuable learnings that can expedite research already underway.PHOTOGRAPH: NIAID/NIH/SCIENCE SOURCE











BACK WHEN WE started WIRED magazine, it was all digital, all the time. In Silicon Valley, bodies were treated like the somewhat inconvenient and sometimes embarrassing things that needed to be fueled and occasionally rested so that they could support big heads that housed big ideas about the future. Human biology wasn’t exactly on our radar, except in science fiction, where pandemics always seemed du jour.
WIRED OPINION
ABOUT

Jane Metcalfe is the founder, with Louis Rossetto, of WIRED. After a stint as the president of TCHO Chocolate, she created NEO.LIFE to track the ways we are changing as we bring an engineering mindset to our own biology. For more on this topic, read Neo.Life: 25 Visions for the Future of Our Species. To share your thoughts, please send email to visions@neo.life.

Then, in 1995, we published Scenarios, our first special issue, which imagined the future in 25 years, i.e. 2020. One article from that issue, “The Plague Years,” almost reads like a report from the current pandemic.


In it, a virus from China, of course named Mao flu, afflicts the elderly and the immunocompromised. A bio conference becomes a significant vector for infection. Singapore is initially able to contain the virus using draconian measures. The whole world goes into lockdown and cities empty as those who can afford it escape to the countryside. There’s an extensive loss of lives among medical personnel. Mao flu research becomes the only medical research taking place. The transgenic source of the virus is eventually traced back to a lab in China. There is even a cruise ship involved in our version. Ultimately, the cure is open sourced.

Our imagined solutions were based on a lot of computational and bioengineering virtuosity. In Scenarios, genomics, big data, sophisticated modeling, and immunotherapy end up solving the problem and saving our future selves. And that’s pretty close to what’s happening now. But what we didn’t predict back in 1995 is the unprecedented amount of collaboration, cooperation, and data sharing that’s going on now worldwide. And we certainly didn’t anticipate the general disregard for who owns the intellectual property or who gets academic credit.

In Scenarios, it took 20 years to find the solution. Today we envision a vaccine within two years, and for frontline health care workers, probably much sooner. It’s remarkable how fast science can happen when everyone is focused on the same problem. This devastating pandemic, with all its worldwide chaos and horror, has at the same time created a perfect alignment of technology, science, need, and opportunity. The global impact of Covid-19 could change science forever.


In the mid-20th century, World War II and the space race ignited the fields of computer science and communications. In the 1990s, the digital revolution came along and transformed, well, pretty much everything, from the way we communicate with each other to the way we do business, education, entertainment, and politics. Now, the next phase of technological innovation—we call it the Neobiological Revolution—is literally transforming our species. From gene editing to brain computer interfaces, our ability to engineer biological systems will redefine our species and its relation to all other species and the planet.

And Covid-19 is accelerating this transformation.

News of the future, now.Get WIRED.Subscribe Now
PHOTOGRAPH: STEPHEN JAFFE/GETTY IMAGES

Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the day the White House announced the first draft of the human genome. In Bill Clinton’s words, it was “the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind.” Since then, we have gone on to sequence over 12,000 other eukaryotes (which include humans, animals, plants, and fungi), along with even larger numbers of prokaryotes, viruses, plasmids, and organelles. We rapidly sequenced the SARS-CoV-2 virus and are watching it mutate in almost real time. We are sequencing individual patients who have had particularly adverse reactions to it, and using our big data technologies to help us understand why.




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The pandemic is also accelerating the development of new vaccine platforms, including RNA- and DNA-based vaccines, as well as platforms that use attenuated virus or bacteria to introduce microbial DNA into cells.

This worldwide laser focus on Covid-19 is providing hugely valuable learnings that can expedite research already underway pairing omics data sets (genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, etc.) with machine learning to identify why people get sick, why we age, which pathways to target, and which drugs to use. In addition to the known risk factors for Covid-19, there may be a genetic reason why some people experience a life-threatening reaction. That would help pinpoint the people who critically need a vaccine, sparing us the gargantuan task of trying to inoculate most people on the planet in the next two years.

Some people don’t want to know about their genetic predisposition for disease. But from a public health point of view, this is invaluable information. Sequencing everyone—with proper safeguards to insure privacy and nondiscrimination, of course—would advance clinical practice as well as scientific knowledge, and accelerate our progress toward true precision medicine.

Our ability to manipulate RNA and DNA, bacteria, viruses, algae, and fungi gives us the power to engineer life. Advanced imaging technologies allow us unprecedented views inside the body while big data sets, machine learning, and AI are helping us read those images and giving us correlations and predictions ... and ultimately root causes. The only problem is, as Edward O. Wilson so succinctly put it, “we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” So how do we overcome our Paleolithic emotions (like fear, jealousy, and greed) and our medieval institutions (US health care, anyone?) to deploy our godlike technologies?


The WIRED Guide to Crispr
Everything you need to know about how scientists can repurpose a bacterial immune system to alter DNA, making everything from cheap insulin to extra starchy corn.

In 2018, a Chinese scientist claimed to be the first person to have created human babies with Crispr-edited DNA . But some couples using IVF had already been selectively editing their families for years. As more couples elect to freeze embryos, they will turn to preimplantation genetic screening to determine which embryo is the most viable. You can imagine a parent-to-be not selecting one that was genetically predisposed to mental illness, for instance. But what would our future civilization be like if it didn’t include people such as Isaac Newton, Beethoven, Van Gogh, Ada Lovelace, Winston Churchill, and Norbert Wiener? These are the difficult questions this next phase will force us to reckon with.


Of course, we are curious by nature, and it is in our nature to make tools. So we will pursue these lines of research and we will develop these tools. Through technology, we have already extended our locomotion, senses, cognition, and even asserted control over the very creation of life with birth control, advanced reproductive technologies, and now gene editing. This is possibly the ultimate definition of progress, like it or not.

If we move too fast, we increase the risk of unintended consequences, and a backlash from patients, consumers, regulators, religious groups, and more. But what if we move too slowly, or choose not to pursue these possibilities at all? Eliminating genetically inherited diseases is our obligation, isn’t it? To not do so seems like a crime against humanity. Imagine the day when your great grandchild sues her parents for not genetically engineering her to protect her from cystic fibrosis, or thalassemia, or sickle cell anemia. Or maybe she could sue because they failed to enhance her in order to compete effectively.
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Let’s suppose the answer to the novel coronavirus lies in our genome. Would you edit it out of all embryos to prevent a future lockdown? How far is too far? Our opinions about all this are likely to change rapidly.

Some people thought IVF was outrageous and unnatural 40 years ago, but today, many would consider it a basic human right. What are we shocked by today that will be considered a basic human right in another 40 years? Or maybe it will only take 10.

The digital revolution fulfilled so many of our hopes and dreams, but it also brought us some very complex new problems—some foreseeable, others unimaginable. The web evolved without centralized control or regulation and we fervently believed that whatever was good for the internet was good for humanity.

What if we actively imagined this next phase, and consciously designed it for particular outcomes, including a focus on equity? Perhaps we’re wiser this time. The stakes are certainly higher—literally life and death. We need to manage this next revolution more closely and oversee it more openly. I’m not suggesting we draft a master plan for humanity. After all, random mutations would probably foil our plans. But culture, including the scenarios we imagine, the stories we tell, and our decisions about which technologies to fund or buy, will determine our future. Now is the time to make sure the culture we create includes all voices.

We have survived and evolved because we are alert to the dangers lurking everywhere. But Homo sapiens are unique among species in that we can also visualize a future and then make it happen. Without that ability, we wouldn’t dare leave our caves. People at the forefront of life sciences are showing us enormous potential technological, public health, environmental, financial, and social benefits.

What we imagine becomes what we build. It’s time to outline possible futures people can rally for rather than fear.


Let’s not let the coronavirus crisis go to waste.

Astronomers Are Uncovering the Magnetic Soul of the Universe

Researchers are discovering that magnetic fields permeate much of the cosmos. If these fields date back to the Big Bang, they could solve a cosmological mystery.

VELIKOVSKY WAS RIGHT 
IT'S AN ELECTROMAGNETIC UNIVERSE

Hidden magnetic field lines stretch millions of light years across the universe.
ILLUSTRATION: PAULINE VOSS/QUANTA MAGAZINE

ANYTIME ASTRONOMERS FIGURE out a new way of looking for magnetic fields in ever more remote regions of the cosmos, inexplicably, they find them.

These force fields—the same entities that emanate from fridge magnets—surround Earth, the sun, and all galaxies. Twenty years ago, astronomers started to detect magnetism permeating entire galaxy clusters, including the space between one galaxy and the next. Invisible field lines swoop through intergalactic space like the grooves of a fingerprint.

Last year, astronomers finally managed to examine a far sparser region of space—the expanse between galaxy clusters. There, they discovered the largest magnetic field yet: 10 million light-years of magnetized space spanning the entire length of this “filament” of the cosmic web. A second magnetized filament has already been spotted elsewhere in the cosmos by means of the same techniques. “We are just looking at the tip of the iceberg, probably,” said Federica Govoni of the National Institute for Astrophysics in Cagliari, Italy, who led the first detection.

The question is: Where did these enormous magnetic fields come from?

“It clearly cannot be related to the activity of single galaxies or single explosions or, I don’t know, winds from supernovae,” said Franco Vazza, an astrophysicist at the University of Bologna who makes state-of-the-art computer simulations of cosmic magnetic fields. “This goes much beyond that.”


One possibility is that cosmic magnetism is primordial, tracing all the way back to the birth of the universe. In that case, weak magnetism should exist everywhere, even in the “voids” of the cosmic web—the very darkest, emptiest regions of the universe. The omnipresent magnetism would have seeded the stronger fields that blossomed in galaxies and clusters.

The cosmic web, shown here in a computer simulation, is the large-scale structure of the universe. Dense regions are filled with galaxies and galaxy clusters. Thin filaments connect these clumps. Voids are nearly empty regions of space.ILLUSTRATION: SPRINGEL & OTHERS/VIRGO CONSORTIUM

Primordial magnetism might also help resolve another cosmological conundrum known as the Hubble tension

The problem at the heart of the Hubble tension is that the universe seems to be expanding significantly faster than expected based on its known ingredients. In a paper posted online in April and under review with Physical Review Letters, the cosmologists Karsten Jedamzik and Levon Pogosian argue that weak magnetic fields in the early universe would lead to the faster cosmic expansion rate seen today.

Primordial magnetism relieves the Hubble tension so simply that Jedamzik and Pogosian’s paper has drawn swift attention. “This is an excellent paper and idea,” said Marc Kamionkowski, a theoretical cosmologist at Johns Hopkins University who has proposed other solutions to the Hubble tension.

Kamionko

Meanwhile, astrophysicists kept collecting data. The weight of evidence has led most of them to suspect that magnetism is indeed everywhere.
The Magnetic Soul of the Universe

In the year 1600, the English scientist William Gilbert’s studies of lodestones—naturally magnetized rocks that people had been fashioning into compasses for thousands of years—led him to opine that their magnetic force “imitates a soul.” He correctly surmised that Earth itself is a “great magnet,” and that lodestones “look toward the poles of the Earth.”

Magnetic fields arise anytime electric charge flows. Earth’s field, for instance, emanates from its inner “dynamo,” the current of liquid iron churning in its core. The fields of fridge magnets and lodestones come from electrons spinning around their constituent atoms.

Cosmological simulations illustrate two possible explanations for how magnetic fields came to permeate galaxy clusters. At left, the fields grow from uniform “seed” fields that filled the cosmos in the moments after the Big Bang. At right, astrophysical processes such as star formation and the flow of matter into supermassive black holes create magnetized winds that spill out from galaxies.

However, once a “seed” magnetic field arises from charged particles in motion, it can become bigger and stronger by aligning weaker fields with it. Magnetism “is a little bit like a living organism,” said Torsten Enßlin, a theoretical astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, “because magnetic fields tap into every free energy source they can hold onto and grow. They can spread and affect other areas with their presence, where they grow as well.”

Ruth Durrer, a theoretical cosmologist at the University of Geneva, explained that magnetism is the only force apart from gravity that can shape the large-scale structure of the cosmos, because only magnetism and gravity can “reach out to you” across vast distances. Electricity, by contrast, is local and short-lived, since the positive and negative charge in any region will neutralize overall. But you can’t cancel out magnetic fields; they tend to add up and survive.

Yet for all their power, these force fields keep low profiles. They are immaterial, perceptible only when acting upon other things. “You can’t just take a picture of a magnetic field; it doesn’t work like that,” said Reinout van Weeren, an astronomer at Leiden University who was involved in the recent detections of magnetized filaments.

In their paper last year, van Weeren and 28 coauthors inferred the presence of a magnetic field in the filament between galaxy clusters Abell 399 and Abell 401 from the way the field redirects high-speed electrons and other charged particles passing through it. As their paths twist in the field, these charged particles release faint “synchrotron radiation.”

The synchrotron signal is strongest at low radio frequencies, making it ripe for detection by LOFAR, an array of 20,000 low-frequency radio antennas spread across Europe.

The team actually gathered data from the filament back in 2014 during a single eight-hour stretch, but the data sat waiting as the radio astronomy community spent years figuring out how to improve the calibration of LOFAR’s measurements. Earth’s atmosphere refracts radio waves that pass through it, so LOFAR views the cosmos as if from the bottom of a swimming pool. The researchers solved the problem by tracking the wobble of “beacons” in the sky—radio emitters with precisely known locations—and correcting for this wobble to deblur all the data. When they applied the deblurring algorithm to data from the filament, they saw the glow of synchrotron emissions right away.
 
LOFAR consists of 20,000 individual radio antennas spread across Europe.
PHOTOGRAPH: ASTRON

The filament looks magnetized throughout, not just near the galaxy clusters that are moving toward each other from either end. The researchers hope that a 50-hour data set they’re analyzing now will reveal more detail. Additional observations have recently uncovered magnetic fields extending throughout a second filament. Researchers plan to publish this work soon.

The presence of enormous magnetic fields in at least these two filaments provides important new information. “It has spurred quite some activity,” van Weeren said, “because now we know that magnetic fields are relatively strong.”
A Light Through the Voids

If these magnetic fields arose in the infant universe, the question becomes: how? “People have been thinking about this problem for a long time,” said Tanmay Vachaspati of Arizona State University.

In 1991, Vachaspati proposed that magnetic fields might have arisen during the electroweak phase transition—the moment, a split second after the Big Bang, when the electromagnetic and weak nuclear forces became distinct. Others have suggested that magnetism materialized microseconds later, when protons formed. Or soon after that: The late astrophysicist Ted Harrison argued in the earliest primordial magnetogenesis theory in 1973 that the turbulent plasma of protons and electrons might have spun up the first magnetic fields. Still others have proposed that space became magnetized before all this, during cosmic inflation—the explosive expansion of space that purportedly jump-started the Big Bang itself. It’s also possible that it didn’t happen until the growth of structures a billion years later.

The way to test theories of magnetogenesis is to study the pattern of magnetic fields in the most pristine patches of intergalactic space, such as the quiet parts of filaments and the even emptier voids. Certain details—such as whether the field lines are smooth, helical, or “curved every which way, like a ball of yarn or something” (per Vachaspati), and how the pattern changes in different places and on different scales—carry rich information that can be compared to theory and simulations. For example, if the magnetic fields arose during the electroweak phase transition, as Vachaspati proposed, then the resulting field lines should be helical, “like a corkscrew,” he said.

The hitch is that it’s difficult to detect force fields that have nothing to push on.

One method, pioneered by the English scientist Michael Faraday back in 1845, detects a magnetic field from the way it rotates the polarization direction of light passing through it. The amount of “Faraday rotation” depends on the strength of the magnetic field and the frequency of the light. So by measuring the polarization at different frequencies, you can infer the strength of magnetism along the line of sight. “If you do it from different places, you can make a 3D map,” said Enßlin.

ILLUSTRATION: SAMUEL VELASCO/QUANTA MAGAZINE

Researchers have started to make rough Faraday rotation measurements using LOFAR, but the telescope has trouble picking out the extremely faint signal. Valentina Vacca, an astronomer and a colleague of Govoni’s at the National Institute for Astrophysics, devised an algorithm a few years ago for teasing out subtle Faraday rotation signals statistically, by stacking together many measurements of empty places. “In principle, this can be used for voids,” Vacca said.

But the Faraday technique will really take off when the next-generation radio telescope, a gargantuan international project called the Square Kilometer Array, starts up in 2027. “SKA should produce a fantastic Faraday grid,” Enßlin said.

For now, the only evidence of magnetism in the voids is what observers don’t see when they look at objects called blazars located behind voids.

Blazars are bright beams of gamma rays and other energetic light and matter powered by supermassive black holes. As the gamma rays travel through space, they sometimes collide with other passing photons, morphing into an electron and a positron as a result. These particles then collide with other photons, turning them into low-energy gamma rays.

But if the blazar’s light passes through a magnetized void, the lower-energy gamma rays will appear to be missing, reasoned Andrii Neronov and Ievgen Vovk of the Geneva Observatory in 2010. The magnetic field will deflect the electrons and positrons out of the line of sight. When they create lower-energy gamma rays, those gamma rays won’t be pointed at us.

ILLUSTRATION: SAMUEL VELASCO/QUANTA MAGAZINE

Indeed, when Neronov and Vovk analyzed data from a suitably located blazar, they saw its high-energy gamma rays, but not the low-energy gamma-ray signal. “It’s the absence of a signal that is a signal,” Vachaspati said.

A nonsignal is hardly a smoking gun, and alternative explanations for the missing gamma rays have been suggested. However, follow-up observations have increasingly pointed to Neronov and Vovk’s hypothesis that voids are magnetized. “It’s the majority view,” Durrer said. Most convincingly, in 2015, one team overlaid many measurements of blazars behind voids and managed to tease out a faint halo of low-energy gamma rays around the blazars. The effect is exactly what would be expected if the particles were being scattered by faint magnetic fields—measuring only about a millionth of a trillionth as strong as a fridge magnet’s.

Cosmology’s Biggest Mystery

Strikingly, this exact amount of primordial magnetism may be just what’s needed to resolve the Hubble tension—the problem of the universe’s curiously fast expansion.

That’s what Pogosian realized when he saw recent computer simulations by Karsten Jedamzik of the University of Montpellier in France and a collaborator. The researchers added weak magnetic fields to a simulated, plasma-filled young universe and found that protons and electrons in the plasma flew along the magnetic field lines and accumulated in the regions of weakest field strength. This clumping effect made the protons and electrons combine into hydrogen—an early phase change known as recombination—earlier than they would have otherwise.

Pogosian, reading Jedamzik’s paper, saw that this could address the Hubble tension. Cosmologists calculate how fast space should be expanding today by observing ancient light emitted during recombination. The light shows a young universe studded with blobs that formed from sound waves sloshing around in the primordial plasma. If recombination happened earlier than supposed due to the clumping effect of magnetic fields, then sound waves couldn’t have propagated as far beforehand, and the resulting blobs would be smaller. That means the blobs we see in the sky from the time of recombination must be closer to us than researchers supposed. The light coming from the blobs must have traveled a shorter distance to reach us, meaning the light must have been traversing faster-expanding space. “It’s like trying to run on an expanding surface; you cover less distance,” Pogosian said.

The upshot is that smaller blobs mean a higher inferred cosmic expansion rate—bringing the inferred rate much closer to measurements of how fast supernovas and other astronomical objects actually seem to be flying apart.

“I thought, wow,” Pogosian said, “this could be pointing us to [magnetic fields’] actual presence. So I wrote Karsten immediately.” The two got together in Montpellier in February, just before the lockdown. Their calculations indicated that, indeed, the amount of primordial magnetism needed to address the Hubble tension also agrees with the blazar observations and the estimated size of initial fields needed to grow the enormous magnetic fields spanning galaxy clusters and filaments. “So it all sort of comes together,” Pogosian said, “if this turns out to be right.”

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

Correction: 7-6-2020 6:15 PM EST: An earlier version of this article stated that gamma rays from blazars can turn into electrons and positrons after striking microwaves. In fact, the change can happen when gamma rays strike many different kinds of photons. The text and the accompanying graphic have been changed.

https://www.wired.com/story/astronomers-are-uncovering-the-magnetic-soul-of-the-universe/#intcid=recommendations_wired-right-rail_7e137b89-15db-4e0b-b89f-5c34ac0fb506_virality-uplift-1

"The Pseudo-Science Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the ...

https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu › sociology_articles

by C Bader - ‎2014

Immanuel Velikovsky, a Russian catastrophist who published Worlds in Collision in 1950, ignited a national controversy when he argued that Jupiter ejected ...

Velikovsky - Stanford University

www-leland.stanford.edu › ~meehan › donnelly › velikov

More than a decade has now passed since Velikovsky's death, and there may be some among you who do not know of his work. Velikovsky was a Russian ...

Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky - His scientific work, catastrophes ...

julia-white.com › velikovsky › work

Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky, one of the great scientists since Galileo Galilei, Biography, Vita, Books, catastrophism, history of the Earth, Geology.

KILLER WEATHER
How a ‘Heat Dome’ Forms—and Why This One Is So Perilous
A massive, intense heat wave is settling over the continental US. The ravages of the Covid pandemic are going to make it all the more deadly.

PHOTOGRAPH: NIVEK NESLO/GETTY IMAGES

A PERFECT STORM of crises is forming across the United States. Above our heads, a “heat dome” of high pressure could blast 80 percent of the continental US with temperatures over 90 degrees for the next few weeks. This coming in a summer when the Covid-19 lockdown has trapped people indoors, many without air-conditioning—and mass unemployment may mean that residents with AC units can’t afford to run them. Deeper still, the heat and the pandemic are exacerbating long-standing and deadly inequities that will only get deadlier this summer.

A heat dome “is really just sort of a colloquial term for a persistent and/or strong high-pressure system that occurs during the warm season, with the end result being a lot of heat,” says climate scientist Daniel Swain of UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.

That high-pressure air descends from above and gets compressed as it nears the ground. Think about how much more pressure you experience at sea level than at the top of a mountain—what you’re feeling is the weight of the atmosphere on your shoulders. As the air descends and gets compressed, it heats up. “So the same air that's maybe 80 degrees a few thousand feet up, you bring that same air—without adding any extra energy to it—down to the surface in a high-pressure system and it could be 90, 95, 100 degrees,” says Swain.

At the same time, a high-pressure system keeps clouds from forming by inhibiting upward vertical motion in the atmosphere. Oddly enough, it’s this same phenomenon that produces extremely cold temperatures in the winter. “If you don't have that upward vertical motion, you don't get clouds or storms,” Swain says. “So when it's already cold and dark, that means the temperatures can get really cold because of clear skies, as things radiate out at night. In the warm season, that lack of clouds and lack of upward motion in the atmosphere means it can get really hot because you have a lot of sunlight.”

That heat can accumulate over days or weeks, turning the heat dome into a kind of self-perpetuating atmospheric cap over the landscape. On a normal day, some of the sun’s energy evaporates water from the soil, meaning that solar energy isn’t put toward further warming the air. But as the heat dome persists, it blasts away the soil’s moisture, and that solar energy now goes full-tilt into heating the air.

“So after a certain point, once it's been hot enough for long enough, it becomes even easier to get even hotter,” says Swain. “And so that's why these things can often be really persistent, because once they've been around for a little while, they start to feed off of themselves.”

Unfortunately for the southwestern US, this is likely to unfold in the next week or two. Normally at this time of year, monsoons would be drenching the landscape, but no such storms are on the horizon. “And so those super dry land surfaces are going to amplify the heat and the persistence of this heat dome,” says Swain. The central US and mountain states will also be sweltering particularly badly over the next few weeks—heat domes tend to perpetuate inland, where they more easily dry out the surface than in wetter regions—though over three-quarters of the Lower 48 will be under the dome’s influence.

This won’t be the last heat dome, or the most severe one. On a warming planet, the conditions are ripe for these systems to perpetuate themselves. Harsher droughts mean ever-drier soils, so when future heat domes settle over the US, they’ll start from the beginning with more solar energy heating the air instead of the wet ground. And thanks to climate change, those air temperatures will be hotter even before a heat dome arrives.

For many vulnerable Americans, that climactic hellscape isn’t approaching—it’s already here, and it’s colliding with the Covid-19 pandemic. Cooling centers, where folks without air-conditioning can go to chill, are shuttered. Public pools, too. And wandering malls is certainly out of the question. Skyrocketing evictions could mean more people are forced onto the street, completely exposed to the heat. Even among those who do have an air conditioner at home, people may have lost their jobs thanks to the Covid-19 economic slump and now can’t afford to pay their utility bills.

“Already, we knew before Covid that one in three American households was struggling to pay their energy bills,” says Chandra Farley, director of the Just Energy program at the Partnership for Southern Equity, which promotes policies and institutional actions that advance racial equity. “We knew folks were already keeping their homes at uncomfortable temperatures for fear of running up their bills.”

The heat assault on lower-income households is twofold. For one, these residents spend a much bigger fraction of their income on energy bills than the rich do, a phenomenon known as the energy burden. And two, low-income neighborhoods are actually hotter than high-income ones all across the US, according to a 2019 joint analysis by National Public Radio and the University of Maryland's Howard Center for Investigative Journalism. That's because the suburbs are dotted with single-family homes separated by lots of greenery, which provides shade and cools the air via the evaporation of water from leaves. Urban neighborhoods tend to turn into “heat islands,” absorbing the sun’s energy during the day and slowly releasing it at night.

“Low-income groups and communities of color are more likely to be located in urban heat islands,” says Linda Rudolph, senior adviser at the Public Health Institute, a nonprofit that promotes health equity. “These are areas that have fewer trees, less green space, more buildings, and more asphalt and concrete. Nighttime temperatures can be as much as 22 degrees higher than the surrounding area.”

Residents of low-income communities have also historically had less access to health insurance and health care, even before the pandemic hit. “These are also communities that have a higher underlying baseline prevalence of the illnesses that make people more susceptible to severe heat illness,” says Rudolph. “And those are the same illnesses that make people more susceptible to severe Covid outcomes—so obesity, diabetes, respiratory illness, cardiovascular disease.”


Extreme heat also worsens air pollution, which already disproportionately affects people of color, Farley notes. According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, Black children are four times more likely to be hospitalized for asthma than white children, and 10 times more likely to die from it. And Covid is at least primarily a respiratory disease. “From a respiratory pandemic perspective, when we think about the existing morbidities and existing medical vulnerabilities of certain communities, we really can begin to get our hands around the disproportionate and expansive impacts of this health pandemic and the pandemic of structural racism,” Farley says.

This heat dome is also setting up the perfect conditions for wildfires, which could pour smoke into cities in the western US in particular—dry, hot air means super dry brush. Wildfire smoke deposits particulate matter in the lungs, leading to inflammation, even in healthy people. In one study done on mice, wildfire smoke decreased the antimicrobial activity of the cells that clear the lungs of harmful microbes. And the novel coronavirus is one seriously harmful microbe.

Put it all together and you’ve got a compounding threat to human health now unfolding across the US, particularly for low-income Americans: Covid-19 is wreaking economic devastation and trapping people indoors just as a weeks-long heat dome parks itself over the country. But this also might be an opportunity to better prepare these communities for life on an ever-hotter planet. The stimulus package following the 2008 economic collapse injected $5 billion into the Weatherization Assistance Program, started in 1976, which compensates homeowners to hire contractors to make improvements like better windows and insulation. By 2012, the revitalized program had weatherized a million houses.

To juice our now even more crippled economy, stimulus packages might do the same. This might take the form of infusing the Weatherization Assistance Program with cash at the federal level, or states might add weatherization to their own Covid-19 stimulus efforts. It can even happen more locally: Vermont’s Burlington Electric Department, a municipally owned electric utility, has included weatherization in its Green Stimulus in response to the pandemic.

“So it's a way to target both jobs for the construction industry and that problem of the energy burden,” says Elizabeth Sawin, codirector of Climate Interactive, a nonprofit that focuses on the intersection of climate change and inequity. Weatherization efforts in the 2008 stimulus package “also improved the quality of the housing stock enough that they saw things like improvements in hospitalizations or emergency room visits for asthma,” she says. “So to me, it's a no-brainer. It gets at the direct source of climate change because it's going to improve efficiency—so less greenhouse gas emissions from the building sector—while providing these essential, positive, life-saving improvements in the community.”

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Read all of our coronavirus coverage here



Matt Simon is a science journalist at WIRED, where he covers biology, robotics, cannabis, and the environment. He’s also the author of Plight of the Living Dead: What Real-Life Zombies Reveal About Our World—And Ourselves, and The Wasp That Brainwashed the Caterpillar, which won an Alex Award.

UK
Meat factory staff 'going into work sick' as they fear being hurled into poverty

EXCLUSIVE: Union reps have claimed some meat packing workers do not want to be tested for coronavirus - because they fear falling back onto £95-a-week sick pay

CLOSE ALL MEATPACKERS GLOBALLY

PAY ALL WORKERS A LIVING WAGE WITH UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME WHILE THE PLANT IS CLOSED FOR A MONTH!

Chickens before being slaughtered for food (stock photo)

Meat packing workers are going in sick and even failing to get coronavirus tests because they fear isolation will hurl them into poverty, union reps claim.

Officials raised the alarm after a string of food processing plants were hit by outbreaks of deadly Covid-19.

By June 25, four food factories had reported more than 450 workers between them testing positive with the virus.

But unions fear the full total across England and Wales could be far higher.

In a meeting between unions and Labour, attended by the Mirror, reps said some low-wage food workers cannot afford to isolate on £95.85-a-week Statutory Sick Pay.

People "simply cannot afford to have the time off" (stock photo) (Image: Getty Images)

Unite regional officer Brian Troake said “people simply cannot afford to have the time off”.

He claimed some workers do not want to be tested “because when they’re tested, they can’t earn any money.”

He added: “We’ve got thermal CCTV cameras now on the entrance to the sites.

“And even when the alarms are going off, you’ve got a manager stood there saying ‘don’t worry about that, keep on going.’ They need you in the factory. Because they need to make the numbers.”

Asked if he had heard of similar cases, Eamon O'Hearn, National Officer at GMB, said a survey of the union’s food and drink members found 70% could not afford to stay away from work.
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He added the “response rate fell through the floor” when the same people were then asked if they’d keep going to work, even if they had symptoms.

The British Meat Processors Association has disputed Unite’s claims that workers are exploited or on precarious contracts.

The industry body insisted its members pay a “fair wage” and branded Unite’s claims ”false and misleading”, adding there have been 10 outbreaks in food plants so far.

It comes after the government's own scientific advisors called for extra financial support for people forced to go into 14 days' coronavirus isolation.

People who develop symptoms, or have contact with a confirmed case, are told to isolate for 14 days. They can receive Statutory Sick Pay - but any further payments are up to their employer.

Chief Scientific Advisor Patrick Vallance has highlighted the cold, noisy environment factories as a risk for food factory workers. Environment Secretary George Eustice suggested canteens or car-sharing could be to blame.

But Unite accused ministers of ignoring the financial element.

The union said they were alerted to one possible factory outbreak by bus drivers, who rang the union worried about the state of people they were taking to factory gates.

Unite national officer Bev Clarkson said many workers who live in crowded shared houses due to low wages could not afford to fall back onto Statutory Sick Pay.

She said: "It’s appalling. These workers are living a nightmare at the moment. They don’t know what’s the right thing to do.

"Stay at home and starve, or go to work and risk contracting the disease, then passing it on to their family?

“They’ve no choice whatsoever. I think in this day and age it’s absolutely disgusting we’ve got workers living and working in these conditions.”

The unions raised their fears in a meeting with Shadow Environment Secretary Luke Pollard.

One union, UNISON, wrote to the Health and Safety Executive on Friday to demand the Food Standards Agency carry out “thorough” individual visits to meat factories.

The union called for the HSE to launch an urgent investigation into the FSA, claiming it has used a “generic” risk assessment that “covers hundreds of workplaces”.

National Officer Paul Bell told the meeting some meat plants were a “Wild West situation”, adding: “Everyone’s on top of each other.

“When you enter and leave these plants, everybody goes through the same entrance or exit. They are very secure places… and everyone is grouped together.”

In his formal complaint to the HSE, he wrote: “UNISON expects the FSA to protect its workforce and contractors.

“We believe the duty of care has not [been] met nor satisfied under the Health & Safety at Work Regulations Act 1974.

“The generic risk assessment written by the FSA does not adequately cover the risk and the FSA has so far refused to provide the risk assessments from local FSA managers.

“UNISON would faithfully request that the Health & Safety Executive urgently investigate the FSA for potential breaches to The Act in order that our members are protected as the key workers necessary for the food supplies of the country.”

The Food Standards Agency hit back, saying the HSE had decided to take no action.

An FSA spokeswoman said: ”It is incorrect to say that the FSA applied a generic risk assessment to hundreds of food business operator sites where its inspectors and veterinarians work.

"The FSA developed a generic methodology which was then applied on a site-by-site basis."

"We welcomed the opportunity to explain this approach to the HSE and we will continue to keep each work location under review."

During the meeting, reps agreed low temperatures and loud volume make meat packers more at risk of catching Covid-19.

But Ms Clarkson accused the government of “burying their heads in the sand” for blaming car-sharing and canteens.

“A lot of the meat companies have dealt with the canteens”, she said. “They’ve put in booths for people to sit and have their lunch - but they only spend 5% of their working day in a canteen.”

She added some workers are agency staff who work in multiple plants, risking cross-contamination.

Mr Troake said workers are “literally shoulder-to-shoulder” in some plants despite social distancing improvements.

Mr O’Hearn added: “What we’ve seen is basically business as usual, some modifications - sometimes curtains or screens - but nothing that is particularly suitable.

“Because a lot of the infrastructure is very old and the ability to expand and move is very limited.”

The British Meat Processors Association said claims workers face "widespread exploitation" were "false and misleading".

BMPA Chief Executive Nick Allen said: “Far from offering insecure or zero-hours contracts... our members seek to hold on to their staff by offering them stable, permanent employment and a fair wage.

"Indeed, most overseas workers typically stay for two years or more”.

A BMPA spokeswoman said one Unite survey covered only 150 people, who all worked at one plant with an outbreak.

The BMPA said last week that "only 10 out of 1079 UK meat plants (less than 1%) have experienced instances of Covid-19 over what’s already prevalent in the wider community."

DRILLING IN THE WEST ANTARCTICA ICE SHEET FOR EVIDENCE OF COLLAPSE
125,000 YEARS AGO 




By Paul Voosen Jul. 10, 2020 , 3:50 PM

Scientists have long suspected that 125,000 years ago, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapsed, drowning a world not much warmer than today in 3 meters of rising tides. But hard evidence of whether such a collapse occurred—and if it did, how fast the melt went—has remained scarce.

Next week, the National Science Foundation will fund a 5-year project, costing more than $3 million, that will seek evidence of this collapse from gases trapped in tiny bubbles encased in a 2.5 kilometer-long tube of ice. The core drilling, likely to start in 2023, will target Hercules Dome, an expanse of ice 400 kilometers from the South Pole. Hercules sits at the saddle between the continent’s western and eastern ice sheets; if the western one collapsed, “Hercules Dome would be sitting on the waterfront, so to speak,” says Eric Steig, the project’s principal investigator and a glaciologist at the University of Washington, Seattle.

The Eemian, the last warm period between the ice ages, lasting from 129,000 to 116,00 years ago, is one of the best analogs for modern Earth. Temperatures were about 1° warmer than now, yet sea levels were 6 meters to 9 meters higher. And recent work, some still unpublished, has suggested much of this melt must have come from Antarctica.

If the ice collapsed, then the gases trapped at Hercules Dome would capture such a shift. It would be as if a set of protective mountains suddenly dropped away, exposing the Hercules ice to the warm storms that regularly strike Antarctica’s edge before petering out inland. Sodium would spike, and variations in oxygen isotopes would capture the warmer, wetter weather. And not only could the ice core capture whether the melt happened—it might also say how fast it occurred, Steig says, a hugely important variable for projections of future sea-level rise.

Much of the land in western Antarctica sits below sea level, leaving the ice on top at risk of melt from intruding warm ocean waters, and glaciers fringing it are retreating fast. Some scientists fear such a collapse is already unstoppable, which has prompted climate scientists to attack the question from all angles: NSF and U.K. government are supporting an expansive study of the western glacier most at risk of collapse, Thwaites, while marine drilling has targeted past evidence of collapse in the sediments off of the continent’s shore.

One reason the Hercules project was funded now, even though drilling remains years away, is that it will include community workshops to develop scientific proposals for other ways the core might be used. Deep ice drilling is a tight-knit, homogenous group; Steig and NSF hope these workshops will help bring in scientists “beyond the usual suspects,” he says.

doi:10.1126/science.abd7704


Paul Voosen is a staff writer who covers Earth and planetary science.