Researchers trace geologic origins of Gulf of Mexico 'super basin' success

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

Research News

 

IMAGE: THE SUN LIGHTS UP THE TEXAS AND LOUISIANA COAST. ACCORDING TO RESEARCHERS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS INSTITUTE FOR GEOPHYSICS, THE UNIQUE GEOLOGY OF THE GULF OF MEXICO HAS HELPED... view more 

CREDIT: NASA

The Gulf of Mexico holds huge untapped offshore oil deposits that could help power the U.S. for decades.

The energy super basin's longevity, whose giant offshore fields have reliably supplied consumers with oil and gas since the 1960s, is the result of a remarkable geologic past - a story that began 200 million years ago among the fragments of Pangea, when a narrow, shallow seaway grew into an ocean basin, while around it mountains rose then eroded away.

The processes that shaped the basin also deposited and preserved vast reserves of oil and gas, of which only a fraction has been extracted. Much of the remaining oil lies buried beneath ancient salt layers, just recently illuminated by modern seismic imaging. That's the assessment of researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, who reviewed decades of geological research and current production figures in an effort to understand the secret behind the basin's success.

Because of its geological history, the Gulf of Mexico remains one of the richest petroleum basins in the world. Despite 60 years of continuous exploration and development, the basin's ability to continue delivering new hydrocarbon reserves means it will remain a significant energy and economic resource for Texas and the nation for years to come, said lead author John Snedden, a senior research scientist at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG).

"When we looked at the geologic elements that power a super basin - its reservoirs, source rocks, seals and traps - it turns out that in the Gulf of Mexico, many of those are pretty unique," he said.

The research was featured in a December 2020 special volume of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists Bulletin focused on the world's super basins: a small number of prolific basins that supply the bulk of the world's oil and gas.

According to the paper, the geologic elements that have made the Gulf of Mexico such a formidable petroleum resource include a steady supply of fine- and coarse-grained sediments, and salt: thick layers of it buried in the Earth, marking a time long ago when much of the ancient sea in the basin evaporated.

Geologically, salt is important because it can radically alter how petroleum basins evolve. Compared to other sedimentary rocks, it migrates easily through the Earth, creating space for oil and gas to collect. It helps moderate heat and keeps hydrocarbon sources viable longer and deeper. And it is a tightly packed mineral that seals oil and gas in large columns, setting up giant fields.

"The Gulf of Mexico has a thick salt canopy that blankets large portions of the basin and prevented us for many years from actually seeing what lies beneath," Snedden said. "What has kept things progressing is industry's improved ability to see below the salt."

According to the paper, the bulk of the northern offshore basin's potential remains in giant, deepwater oil fields beneath the salt blanket. Although reaching them is expensive and enormously challenging, Snedden believes they represent the best future for fossil fuel energy. That's because the offshore -- where many of the giant fields are located -- offers industry a way of supplying the world's energy with fewer wells, which means less energy expended per barrel of oil produced.

Snedden said there is still much to learn about hydrocarbons beneath the Gulf of Mexico, how they got there and how they can be safely accessed. This is especially true in the southern Gulf of Mexico, which was closed to international exploration until 2014. One of the few publicly available datasets was a series of UTIG seismic surveys conducted in the 1970s. Now, a wealth of prospects is emerging from new seismic imaging of the southern basin's deepwater region.

"When you look at recent U.S. oil and gas lease sales, Mexico's five-year plan, and the relatively small carbon footprint of the offshore oil and gas industry, I think it's clear that offshore drilling has an important future in the Gulf of Mexico," Snedden said.

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Snedden's research was conducted within UTIG for the Gulf Basin Depositional Synthesis project (which he directs). The project has been continuously funded by an industry consortium since 1995. UTIG is a unit of the Jackson School of Geosciences.

New fossil provides clarity to the history of Alligatoridae

VIRGINIA TECH

Research News

 

IMAGE: MICHELLE STOCKER AND RACHEL WALLACE, A FORMER GRADUATE STUDENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN, ARE SEEN EXCAVATING THE CAIMAN FOSSIL FROM SANDSTONE IN JANUARY OF 2011. PHOTO COURTESY... view more 

CREDIT: VIRGINIA TECH

Families are complicated. For members of the Alligatoridae family, which includes living caimans and alligators - this is especially true. They are closely related, but because of their similarity, their identification can even stump paleontologists.

But after the recent discovery of a partial skull, the caimans of years past may provide some clarity into the complex, and incomplete, history of its relatives and their movements across time and space.

Michelle Stocker, an assistant professor of vertebrate paleontology in Virginia Tech's Department of Geosciences in the College of Science; Chris Kirk, of the University of Texas at Austin; and Christopher Brochu, of the University of Iowa, have identified a 42-million-year-old partial skull that may have belonged to one of the last prehistoric caimans to roam the United States.

"Any fossil that we find has unique information that it contributes to understanding the history of life," said Stocker, who is an affiliated faculty member of the Fralin Life Sciences Institute and the Global Change Center. "From what we have, we are able to understand a little bit more about the evolutionary history of caimans and the alligatorid group, which includes alligators and caimans."

Their findings were published in PeerJ, an open access peer-reviewed scientific mega journal covering research in the biological and medical sciences.

The fossil was discovered in 2010 at Midwestern State University's Dalquest Desert Research Site, which includes extensive exposures of the Devil's Graveyard Formation, a geologic formation in the Trans-Pecos volcanic field of West Texas.

The Devil's Graveyard Formation preserves fossils from the latter portion of the Eocene epoch, a period of time covering 15 million years of prehistory.

In 2011, Stocker and the team returned to the site to collect a key bone that remained in the hard sandstone block that once encapsulated the caiman skull.

"The Devil's Graveyard Formation provides a unique window into the evolution of North American vertebrates during the middle and late Eocene," said Kirk. "There are a host of extinct species that are only known from the Devil's Graveyard, including several primates, rodents, lizards, and now this new fossil caiman."

What they discovered was a partial skull. At the time of the discovery, paleontologists were convinced that the skull came from a closer relative to alligators than to caimans.

"When you are at the early diversification of groups, their features aren't as differentiable," said Stocker. "It was harder to tell if this is more closely related to caimans or to alligators because those two are really closely related already. And the differences between them are subtle, especially early in their evolutionary history."

The skull's braincase was a key component in the identification of the fossil. The braincase encases and protects the brain from injury. Since no two species have the same braincase, finding one can provide some much needed information for paleontologists.

After further investigation into this fossil's braincase, Stocker and the team were able to determine that this was, without a doubt, a caiman.

The caiman was deemed to be 42 million years old by using a combination of investigative techniques, including radiometric dating, biochronology, and biostratigraphy, where paleontologists use the relative order of the fossilized animals to find out how old the rocks are.

With the age of the fossil and its location in mind, paleontologists are able to add to an ever-growing story about a large biogeographic range contraction, or a climate-related extirpation, that occurred millions of years ago.

Roughly 56 million years ago, the planet was experiencing temperatures so hot and methane levels so high that no polar ice caps could form. For large cool-blooded reptiles like alligators and caimans, it was their time to thrive and soak up the sun. In fact, the conditions were so favorable that these early reptiles roamed as far north as northern Canada.

"The presence of a fossil caiman in the Devil's Graveyard, about 1,200 kilometers north of where caimans are found today, really says something about how different the climate of West Texas was in the middle Eocene", said Kirk.

But one epoch later, in the Oligocene, the entire world was experiencing cooler temperatures, forcing many species that require warm and humid conditions into more restricted geographic ranges.

Caiman populations, in particular, are now only found in South and Central America. Although, a small number of caimans have been found outside of this range and are thought to be invasive species.

"This caiman seems out of place," said Brochu."Caimans today are a South American radiation, and data from modern forms, including DNA, would suggest a very simple single origin from a North American ancestor. This new form, along with some older North American fossil caimans, suggests a far more complex early history with multiple crossings of the seaway that separated North and South America until fairly recently."

There is even more to know about caiman history. Since the specimen was an incomplete skull, and far from a complete skeleton, paleontologists still have some knowledge gaps to fill about their relationships.

"If we can find another individual, we will get a better sense of its relationships, and it might be able to say something about what variation could be present in this taxon, or how they grow, or where else they might be found," said Stocker. "This is a one-and-done kind of fossil right now. Hopefully there are more out there."

The fossil will be housed at the Texas Vertebrate Paleontology Collections at the University of Texas at Austin where it will be preserved and maintained in perpetuity.

There is more research to be done on other fossils that have been retrieved from Central and South American specimens, as well. Those fossils, in particular, are critical for understanding the early southern record of caiman history and clearing up the morphological and chronologic gaps that currently exist in the caiman fossil record.

In the end, all that lies on the horizon is to do more fieldwork, collect more fossils, and conduct more study.

Without museums, this identification couldn't have been possible. When paleontologists find new fossils, they must travel to museums, where they compare the new fossils with other specimens that have been collected.

Stocker maintains that the preservation and maintenance that museums do is just one reason that they need to be supported.

"Museums are important for science and for everybody who wants to understand our shared evolutionary history," said Stocker. "And collaboration is the way that science moves forward."

WSU scientists identify contents of ancient Maya drug containers

WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

IMAGE: FRONTAL AND LATERAL VIEW OF A MUNA-TYPE (AD 750-900) PANELED FLASK WITH DISTINCTIVE SERRATED-EDGE DECORATION. view more 

CREDIT: WSU

PULLMAN, Wash. - Scientists have identified the presence of a non-tobacco plant in ancient Maya drug containers for the first time.

The Washington State University researchers detected Mexican marigold (Tagetes lucida) in residues taken from 14 miniature Maya ceramic vessels.

Originally buried more than 1,000 years ago on Mexico's Yucatán peninsula, the vessels also contain chemical traces present in two types of dried and cured tobacco, Nicotiana tabacum and N. rustica. The research team, led by anthropology postdoc Mario Zimmermann, thinks the Mexican marigold was mixed with the tobacco to make smoking more enjoyable.

The discovery of the vessels' contents paints a clearer picture of ancient Maya drug use practices. The research, which was published today in Scientific Reports, also paves the way for future studies investigating other types of psychoactive and non-psychoactive plants that were smoked, chewed, or snuffed among the Maya and other pre-Colombian societies.

"While it has been established that tobacco was commonly used throughout the Americas before and after contact, evidence of other plants used for medicinal or religious purposes has remained largely unexplored," Zimmermann said. "The analysis methods developed in collaboration between the Department of Anthropology and the Institute of Biological Chemistry give us the ability to investigate drug use in the ancient world like never before."

Zimmermann and colleagues' work was made possible by NSF-funded research which led to a new metabolomics-based analysis method that can detect thousands of plant compounds or metabolites in residue collected from containers, pipes, bowls and other archaeological artifacts. The compounds can then be used to identify which plants were consumed.

Previously, the identification of ancient plant residues relied on the detection of a limited number of biomarkers, such as nicotine, anabasine, cotinine and caffeine.

"The issue with this is that while the presence of a biomarker like nicotine shows tobacco was smoked, it doesn't tell you what else was consumed or stored in the artifact," said David Gang, a professor in WSU's Institute of Biological Chemistry and a co-author of the study. "Our approach not only tells you, yes, you found the plant you're interested in, but it also can tell you what else was being consumed."

Zimmermann helped unearth two of the ceremonial vessels that were used for the analysis in the spring of 2012. At the time, he was working on a dig directed by the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico on the outskirts of Mérida where a contractor had uncovered evidence of a Maya archeological site while clearing lands for a new housing complex

CAPTION

PARME staff archaeologists excavating cist burial at the Tamanache site, Mérida, Yucatan.

Zimmermann and a team of archeologists used GPS equipment to divide the area into a checkerboard-like grid. They then hacked their way through dense jungle searching for small mounds and other telltale signs of ancient buildings where the remains of important people such as shamans are sometimes found.

"When you find something really interesting like an intact container it gives you a sense of joy," Zimmermann said. "Normally, you are lucky if you find a jade bead. There are literally tons of pottery sherds but complete vessels are scarce and offer a lot of interesting research potential."

Zimmermann said the WSU research team is currently in negotiations with several institutions in Mexico to get access to more ancient containers from the region that they can analyze for plant residues. Another project they are currently pursuing is looking at organic residues preserved in the dental plaque of ancient human remains.

"We are expanding frontiers in archaeological science so that we can better investigate the deep time relationships people have had with a wide range of psychoactive plants, which were (and continue to be) consumed by humans all over the world," said Shannon Tushingham, a professor of Anthropology at WSU and a co-author of the study. "There are many ingenious ways in which people manage, use, manipulate and prepare native plants and plant mixtures, and archaeologists are only beginning to scratch the surface of how ancient these practices were."

CAPTION

Maya cist burial with typical ceramic offerings - Plate covering the head of the deceased individual and cup placed likely with food.

The end of domestic wine in 17th century Japan

September 1632 document likely shows the order for the last batch of Japanese wine in the Edo period

KUMAMOTO UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: JAPANESE DOMESTIC WINEMAKING, WHICH BEGAN IN 1627, IS THOUGHT TO HAVE ENDED IN THE WAKE OF THE HOSOKAWA CLAN'S TRANSFER TO THE HIGO DOMAIN (MODERN-DAY KUMAMOTO PREFECTURE). THE DOCUMENTS WERE... view more 

CREDIT: PROFESSOR TSUGUHARU INABA

Researchers from Kumamoto University (Japan) have found an Edo period document that clearly indicates the Hosokawa clan, rulers of the Kokura Domain (modern-day Fukuoka Prefecture), completely stopped producing wine in 1632, the year before the shogunate ordered them to move to the Higo Domain (now Kumamoto Prefecture). The researchers believe that the discontinuation of wine production was directly related to this move and because it was considered to be a drink of a religion that was harshly suppressed in Japan at that time, Christianity.

Previous analysis of historical documents revealed that the lord of the Hosokawa clan, Tadatoshi Hosokawa, ordered wine production from 1627 to 1630 for medicinal use. His vassals, who were experienced in various western customs and technologies#mdash;from foods to watches, used black soybeans and wild grapes in their brewing process. Those documents are the earliest known proof of Japanese wine production.

Until now, no historical records regarding wine production after 1631 had been found. Previously, researchers understood there to be a four-year period of Japanese winemaking. Production was thought to be halted because it was a stereotypically Christian drink and making it could have been a dangerous prospect due to the shogunate's strict prohibition of Christianity during the Edo period.

The new document, from September 1632, was found in the Eisei Bunko Library's Hosokawa clan repository and is a clear order for one more batch of wine. A note written on the document by the magistrate dated October 3rd, 1632 (No. 10.7.13) is as follows.

[Original Japanese]

一、ぶだう酒御作せ可被成候間、がらミをとらセ上田太郎右衛門所へ遣可申旨、則太郎右衛門を以被仰出候事、

[Rough translation]

Taroemon Ueda has personally informed the magistrate's office that he received an order from the lord to have wild grapes collected and brought to him for wine production.

Taroemon Ueda was a Hosokawa clan vassal who had training in Western techniques and had been making wine since 1627. Later in the document, the magistrate wrote another note.

[Original Japanese]

がらミ、太郎右衛門へ渡候、

[Rough translation]

Wild grapes were provided to Taroemon.

The document does not say when wine production was completed. However, earlier documents revealed that Taroemon usually took about 10 days to finish making wine, so researchers believe that this batch was probably finished by mid-October 1632 at the latest. On January 18th of the following year, the shogunate ordered the Hosokawa clan to move from the Kokura Domain, where all of the wine was made, to the Higo Domain.

Historical documents related to wine production in the Higo domain have not been found. The researchers believe that the Hosokawa clan stopped making wine as a direct result of their move to a new domain and because wine was heavily associated with Christianity.

Soon after the move to the Higo Domain, the Hosokawa clan faced off with Western-influenced rebels. They were on the front lines of Christian oppression which led to the suppression of the "Shimabara-Amakusa Revolt" in 1637. The tightening prohibition of Christianity, outbreaks of Christian revolts, and the suppression of the revolt brought the history of Japanese domestic wine in the 17th century to a close.

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Eisei Bunko Research Center

The Eisei Bunko Research Center was established in FY2009 to retain and care for ancestral works of art, literature, and other historical materials of the Hosokawa family, the once daimyo of Kumamoto. In 1964, several pieces from the Hosokawa Mansion in Kumamoto City's Kitaoka Nature Park were entrusted to the Kumamoto University Library. Currently, the collection contains over 100,000 historical documents that the university uses for education and research.

Extreme fire weather

Researchers model the regional impacts of specific anthropogenic activities and their influence on extreme fire weather risk

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - SANTA BARBARA

Research News

 

When the Thomas Fire raged through Ventura and Santa Barbara counties in December 2017, Danielle Touma, at the time an earth science researcher at Stanford, was stunned by its severity. Burning for more than a month and scorching 440 square miles, the fire was then considered the worst in California's history.

Six months later the Mendocino Complex Fire upended that record and took out 717 square miles over three months. Record-setting California wildfires have since been the norm, with five of the top 10 occurring in 2020 alone.

The disturbing trend sparked some questions for Touma, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Barbara's Bren School for Environmental Science & Management.

"Climate scientists knew that there was a climate signal in there but we really didn't understand the details of it," she said of the transition to a climate more ideal for wildfires. While research has long concluded that anthropogenic activity and its products -- including greenhouse gas emissions, biomass burning, industrial aerosols (a.k.a. air pollution) and land-use changes -- raise the risk of extreme fire weather, the specific roles and influences of these activities was still unclear.

Until now. In the first study of its kind, Touma, with fellow Bren School researcher Samantha Stevenson and colleagues Flavio Lehner of Cornell University and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and Sloan Coats from the University of Hawaii, have quantified competing anthropogenic influences on extreme fire weather risk in the recent past and into the near future. By disentangling the effects of those man-made factors the researchers were able to tease out the roles these activities have had in generating an increasingly fire-friendly climate around the world and the risk of extreme fire weather in decades to come.

Their work appears in the journal Nature Communications.

"By understanding the different pieces that go into these scenarios of future climate change, we can get a better sense of what the risks associated with each of those pieces might be, because we know there are going to be uncertainties in the future," Stevenson said. "And we know those risks are going to be expressed unequally in different places too, so we can be better prepared for which parts of the world might be more vulnerable."

Warm, Dry and Windy

"To get a wildfire to ignite and spread, you need suitable weather conditions -- you need warm, dry and windy conditions," Touma said. "And when these conditions are at their most extreme, they can cause really large, severe fires."

Using state-of-the-art climate model simulations available from NCAR, the researchers analyzed the climate under various combinations of climate influences from 1920-2100, allowing them to isolate individual effects and their impacts on extreme fire weather risk.

According to the study, heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions (which started to increase rapidly by mid-century) are the dominant contributor to temperature increases around the globe. By 2005, emissions raised the risk of extreme fire weather by 20% from preindustrial levels in western and eastern North America, the Mediterranean, Southeast Asia and the Amazon. The researchers predict that by 2080, greenhouse gas emissions are expected to raise the risk of extreme wildfire by at least 50% in western North America, equatorial Africa, Southeast Asia and Australia, while doubling it in the Mediterranean, southern Africa, eastern North America and the Amazon.

Meanwhile, biomass burning and land-use changes have more regional impacts that amplify greenhouse gas-driven warming, according to the study -- notably a 30% increase of extreme fire weather risk over the Amazon and western north America during the 20th century caused by biomass burning. Land use changes, the study found, also amplified the likelihood of extreme fire weather in western Australia and the Amazon.

Protected by Pollution?

The role of industrial aerosols has been more complex in the 20th century, actually reducing the risk of extreme fire weather by approximately 30% in the Amazon and Mediterranean, but amplifying it by at least 10% in southeast Asia and Western North America, the researchers found.

"(Industrial aerosols) block some of the solar radiation from reaching the ground," Stevenson said. "So they tend to have a cooling effect on the climate.

"And that's part of the reason why we wanted to do this study," she continued. "We knew something had been compensating in a sense for greenhouse gas warming, but not the details of how that compensation might continue in the future."

The cooling effect may still be present in regions such as the Horn of Africa, Central America and the northeast Amazon, where aerosols have not been reduced to pre-industrial levels. Aerosols may still compete with greenhouse gas warming effects in the Mediterranean, western North America and parts of the Amazon, but the researchers expect this effect to dissipate over most of the globe by 2080, due to cleanup efforts and increased greenhouse gas-driven warming. Eastern North America and Europe are likely to see the warming and drying due to aerosol reduction first.

Southeast Asia meanwhile, "where aerosols emissions are expected to continue," may see a weakening of the annual monsoon, drier conditions and an increase in extreme fire weather. risk.

"Southeast Asia relies on the monsoon, but aerosols cause so much cooling on land that it actually can suppress a monsoon," Touma said. "It's not just whether you have aerosols or not, it's the way the regional climate interacts with aerosols."

The researchers hope that the detailed perspective offered by their study opens the door to more nuanced explorations of the Earth's changing climate.

"In the broader scope of things, it's important for climate policy, like if we want to know how global actions will affect the climate," Touma said. "And it's also important for understanding the potential impacts to people, such as with urban planning and fire management."

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Scientists shed light on how and why some people report "hearing the dead"

TAYLOR & FRANCIS GROUP

Research News

 

IMAGE: THE FOX SISTERS: KATE (1838-92), LEAH (1814-90) AND MARGARET (OR MAGGIE) (1836-93). LITHOGRAPH AFTER A DAGUERREOTYPE BY APPLEBY. PUBLISHED BY N. CURRIER, NEW YORK. IN 1848, TWO SISTERS FROM UPSTATE... view more 

CREDIT: N. CURRIER, NEW YORK

Spiritualist mediums might be more prone to immersive mental activities and unusual auditory experiences early in life, according to new research.

This might explain why some people and not others eventually adopt spiritualist beliefs and engage in the practice of 'hearing the dead', the study led by Durham University found.

Mediums who "hear" spirits are said to be experiencing clairaudient communications, rather than clairvoyant ("seeing") or clairsentient ("feeling" or "sensing") communications.

The researchers conducted a survey of 65 clairaudient spiritualist mediums from the Spiritualists' National Union and 143 members of the general population in the largest scientific study into the experiences of clairaudient mediums.

They found that these spiritualists have a proclivity for absorption - a trait linked to immersion in mental or imaginative activities or experience of altered states of consciousness.

Mediums are also are more likely to report experiences of unusual auditory phenomena, like hearing voices, often occurring early in life.

Many who experience absorption or hearing voices encounter spiritualist beliefs when searching for the meaning behind, or supernatural significance of, their unusual experiences, the researchers said.

The findings are published in the journal Mental Health, Religion and Culture. The research is part of Hearing the Voice - an interdisciplinary study of voice-hearing based at Durham University and funded by the Wellcome Trust.

Spiritualism is a religious movement based on the idea that human souls continue to exist after death and communicate with the living through a medium or psychic.

Interest in Spiritualism is increasing in Britain with several organisations supporting, training, and offering the services of practising mediums. One of the largest, the SNU, claims to serve at least 11,000 members through its training college, churches, and centres.

Through their study, the researchers gathered detailed descriptions of the way that mediums experience spirit 'voices', and compared levels of absorption, hallucination-proneness, aspects of identity, and belief in the paranormal.

They found that 44.6 per cent of spiritualist participants reported hearing the voices of the deceased on a daily basis, with 33.8 per cent reporting an experience of clairaudience within the last day.

A large majority (79 per cent) said that experiences of auditory spiritual communication were part of their everyday lives, taking place both when they were alone and when they were working as a medium or attending a spiritualist church.

Although spirits were primarily heard inside the head (65.1 per cent), 31.7 per cent of spiritualist participants said they experienced spirit voices coming from both inside and outside the head.

When rated on scales of absorption, as well as how strongly they believe in the paranormal, spiritualists scored much more highly than members of the general population.

Spiritualists were less likely to care about what others thought of them than people generally, and they also scored more highly for proneness to unusual hallucination-like auditory experiences.

Both high levels of absorption and proneness to such auditory phenomena were linked to reports of more frequent clairaudient communications, according to the findings.

For the general population, absorption was associated with levels of belief in the paranormal, but there was no significant corresponding link between belief and hallucination-proneness.

There was also no difference in levels of superstitious belief or proneness to visual hallucinations between spiritualist and non-spiritualist participants.

Spiritualists reported first experiencing clairaudience at an average age of 21.7 years. However, 18 per cent of spiritualists reported having clairaudient experiences 'for as long as they could remember' and 71 per cent had not encountered Spiritualism as a religious movement prior to their first experiences.

The researchers say their findings suggest that it is not giving in to social pressure, learning to have specific expectations, or a level of belief in the paranormal that leads to experiences of spirit communication.

Instead, it seems that some people are uniquely predisposed to absorption and are more likely to report unusual auditory experiences occurring early in life. For many of these individuals, spiritualist beliefs are embraced because they align meaningfully with those unique personal experiences.

Lead researcher Dr Adam Powell, in Durham University's Hearing the Voice project and Department of Theology and Religion, said: "Our findings say a lot about 'learning and yearning'. For our participants, the tenets of Spiritualism seem to make sense of both extraordinary childhood experiences as well as the frequent auditory phenomena they experience as practising mediums.

"But all of those experiences may result more from having certain tendencies or early abilities than from simply believing in the possibility of contacting the dead if one tries hard enough."

Dr Peter Moseley, co-author on the study at Northumbria University, commented: "Spiritualists tend to report unusual auditory experiences which are positive, start early in life and which they are often then able to control. Understanding how these develop is important because it could help us understand more about distressing or non-controllable experiences of hearing voices too"

Durham's researchers are now engaged in further investigation of clairaudience and mediumship, working with practitioners to gain a fuller picture of what it is like to be on the receiving end of such unusual and meaningful experiences.

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A new archaeology for the Anthropocene era

MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR THE SCIENCE OF HUMAN HISTORY

Research News

 

IMAGE: ARCHAEOLOGICAL STUDIES OF LOW-DENSITY, AGRARIAN-BASED CITIES SUCH AS ANCIENT ANGKOR WAT IN CAMBODIA ARE INCREASINGLY BEING USED TO INFORM THE DEVELOPMENT OF MORE SUSTAINABLE URBAN CENTRES IN THE FUTURE.... view more 

CREDIT: ALISON CROWTHER

Indiana Jones and Lara Croft have a lot to answer for. Public perceptions of archaeology are often thoroughly outdated, and these characterisations do little to help.

Yet archaeology as practiced today bears virtually no resemblance to the tomb raiding portrayed in movies and video games. Indeed, it bears little resemblance to even more scholarly depictions of the discipline in the entertainment sphere.

A paper published today in Nature Ecology and Evolution aims to give pause to an audience that has been largely prepared to take such out-of-touch depictions at face value. It reveals an archaeology practiced by scientists in white lab coats, using multi-million-euro instrumentation and state of the art computers.

It also reveals an archaeology poised to contribute in major ways to addressing such thoroughly modern challenges as biodiversity conservation, food security and climate change.

"Archaeology today is a dramatically different discipline to what it was a century ago," observes Nicole Boivin, lead author of the study and Director of the Institute's Department of Archaeology. "While the tomb raiding we see portrayed in movies is over the top, the archaeology of the past was probably closer to this than to present-day archaeology. Much archaeology today is in contrast highly scientific in orientation, and aimed at addressing modern-day issues."

Examining the research contributions of the field over the past few decades, the authors reach a clear conclusion - archaeology today has a great deal to contribute to addressing the challenges of the modern era.

"Humans in the present era have become one of the great forces shaping nature," emphasizes Alison Crowther, coauthor and researcher at both the University of Queensland and the MPI Science of Human History. "When we say we have entered a new, human-dominated geological era, the Anthropocene, we acknowledge that role."

CAPTION

Information from disciplines like archaeology, history, historical ecology and palaeoecology has an important role to play in shaping sustainable solutions to the challenges of the Anthropocene.

CREDIT

Michelle O'Reilly

How can archaeology, a discipline focused on the past, hope to address the challenges we face in the Anthropocene?

"It is clear that the past offers a vast repertoire of cultural knowledge that we cannot ignore," highlights Professor Boivin.

The two researchers show the many ways that data about the past can serve the future. By analysing what worked and didn't work in the past - effectively offering long-term experiments in human society - archaeologists gain insight into the factors that support sustainability and resilience, and the factors that work against them. They also highlight ancient solutions to modern problems.

"We show how researchers have improved the modern world by drawing upon information about the ways people in the past enriched soils, prevented destructive fires, created greener cities and transported water without fossil fuels," notes Dr. Crowther.

People also continue to use, and adapt, ancient technologies and infrastructure, including terrace and irrigation systems that are in some cases centuries or even millennia old.

But the researchers are keen to highlight the continued importance of technological and social solutions to climate change and the other challenges of the Anthropocene.

"It's not about glorifying the past, or vilifying progress," emphasizes Professor Boivin. "Instead, it's about bringing together the best of the past, present and future to steer a responsible and constructive course for humanity."

CAPTION

Around the world today, we can find many examples of how past cultural and technological practices and solutions are being revived to address pressing environmental and land management challenges. Examples include (left to right) mobilization of ancient terra preta (anthropogenic dark earth) technology, revitalization of landesque capital (long-term landscape investments) and adoption of traditional fire management regimes.

CREDIT

Michelle O'Reilly

New management approach can help avoid species vulnerability or extinction

New tools will help ecologists predict when species may be at risk

ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY

Research News

 

IMAGE: NEW RESEARCH CAN HELP ECOSYSTEM MANAGERS IDENTIFY SPECIES VULNERABILITIES AND PREVENT POPULATIONS FROM BECOMING AT RISK, LIKE THE ENDANGERED MEXICAN GRAY WOLF. view more 

CREDIT: U.S. FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE

More than 3,000 animal species in the world today are considered endangered, with hundreds more categorized as vulnerable. Currently, ecologists don't have reliable tools to predict when a species may become at risk.

A new paper published in Nature Ecology and Evolution, "Management implications of long transients in ecological systems," focuses on the transient nature of species' and ecosystem stability and illustrates how management practices can be adjusted to better prepare for possible system flips. Some helpful modeling approaches are also offered, including one tool that may help identify potentially endangered populations.

One of the challenges of predicting species at risk is presented when a shift from relative security to vulnerability is that transient risk factors may not be known.

"A species or an ecosystem may seem perfectly stable when it unpredictably becomes vulnerable, even in the absence of an obvious stressor," said Tessa Francis, lead ecosystem ecologist at the Puget Sound Institute, University of Washington Tacoma, managing director of the Ocean Modeling Forum, University of Washington, and lead author of the paper. "In some cases, modeling interactions between species or ecosystem dynamics can help managers identify potential corrective actions to take before the species or system collapses."

Ying-Cheng Lai, a professor of electrical engineering and physics at Arizona State University, focused on the mathematical modeling process of the research.

"The Mexican gray wolf is an example of an endangered species that is experiencing a population resurgence in some areas, yet remains vulnerable in others," said Lai. "The predator-prey relationship between the Mexican gray wolf and elk, mule, white-tailed deer, pronghorn, javelina, rabbits, and other small mammals is an example of how interspecies relationships can affect endangerment. In a general predator-prey relationship, a significant reduction in the prey population can make the predator endangered.

"These kinds of interactions, plus other factors such as the species decay rate, migration, the capacity of the habitat, and random disturbances, are included in the mathematical prediction model," Lai continued, "and it turns out that, more common than usually thought, the system evolution dynamics can just be transient. Transients in ecosystems can be good or bad, and we want to develop control strategies to sustain the good ones and eliminate the bad ones," said Lai.

Alan Hastings, a theoretical ecologist at UC Davis and an external faculty member at the Santa Fe Institute, notes that "As we apply these mathematical models to understanding systems on realistic, ecologic time scales, we unveil new approaches and ideas for adaptive management.

"The goal is to develop management strategies to both extend a positive ecosystems as long as possible and to design recovery systems to support resurgence from vulnerable states," said Hastings. "Over time, as successful predictions are incorporated into the mathematical model, the tool will become more accurate."

But mathematical models are not a panacea, cautions Dr. Francis. "While models can be useful in playing out 'what ifs' and understanding hypothetical consequences of management interventions, just as important is changing the way we view ecosystems and admitting that things are often less stable than they appear."

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Additional contributors to the research include: Karen C. Abbott, Case Western Reserve University; Kim Cuddington, University of Waterloo; Gabriel Gellner, University of Guelph; Andrew Morozov, University of Leicester, Russian Academy of Sciences; Sergei Petrovskii: University of Leicester, and Mary Lou Zeeman: Bowdoin College.

The team, with sponsorship from the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) through the University of Tennessee, has been working together as a study group named "NIMBioS Working Group: Long Transients and Ecological Forecasting." The group has produced a number of papers focused on developing mathematical models to understand long transients in ecosystems.

A 'super-puff' planet like no other

UNIVERSITY OF MONTREAL
NEWS RELEASE 18-JAN-2021


IMAGE: ARTISTIC RENDITION OF THE EXOPLANET WASP-107B AND ITS STAR, WASP-107. SOME OF THE STAR'S LIGHT STREAMS THROUGH THE EXOPLANET'S EXTENDED GAS LAYER. view more

CREDIT: ESA/HUBBLE, NASA, M. KORNMESSER.

The core mass of the giant exoplanet WASP-107b is much lower than what was thought necessary to build up the immense gas envelope surrounding giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn, astronomers at Université de Montréal have found.

This intriguing discovery by Ph.D. student Caroline Piaulet of UdeM's Institute for Research on Exoplanets (iREx) suggests that gas-giant planets form a lot more easily than previously believed.

Piaulet is part of the groundbreaking research team of UdeM astrophysics professor Björn Benneke that in 2019 announced the first detection of water on an exoplanet located in its star's habitable zone.

Published today in the Astronomical Journal with colleagues in Canada, the U.S., Germany and Japan, the new analysis of WASP-107b's internal structure "has big implications," said Benneke.

"This work addresses the very foundations of how giant planets can form and grow," he said. "It provides concrete proof that massive accretion of a gas envelope can be triggered for cores that are much less massive than previously thought."

As big as Jupiter but 10 times lighter

WASP-107b was first detected in 2017 around WASP-107, a star about 212 light years from Earth in the Virgo constellation. The planet is very close to its star -- over 16 times closer than the Earth is to the Sun. As big as Jupiter but 10 times lighter, WASP-107b is one of the least dense exoplanets known: a type that astrophysicists have dubbed "super-puff" or "cotton-candy" planets.

Piaulet and her team first used observations of WASP-107b obtained at the Keck Observatory in Hawai'i to assess its mass more accurately. They used the radial velocity method, which allows scientists to determine a planet's mass by observing the wobbling motion of its host star due to the planet's gravitational pull. They concluded that the mass of WASP-107b is about one tenth that of Jupiter, or about 30 times that of Earth.

The team then did an analysis to determine the planet's most likely internal structure. They came to a surprising conclusion: with such a low density, the planet must have a solid core of no more than four times the mass of the Earth. This means that more than 85 percent of its mass is included in the thick layer of gas that surrounds this core. By comparison, Neptune, which has a similar mass to WASP-107b, only has 5 to 15 percent of its total mass in its gas layer.

"We had a lot of questions about WASP-107b," said Piaulet. "How could a planet of such low density form? And how did it keep its huge layer of gas from escaping, especially given the planet's close proximity to its star?

"This motivated us to do a thorough analysis to determine its formation history."

A gas giant in the making

Planets form in the disc of dust and gas that surrounds a young star called a protoplanetary disc. Classical models of gas-giant planet formation are based on Jupiter and Saturn. In these, a solid core at least 10 times more massive than the Earth is needed to accumulate a large amount of gas before the disc dissipates.

Without a massive core, gas-giant planets were not thought able to cross the critical threshold necessary to build up and retain their large gas envelopes.

How then do explain the existence of WASP-107b, which has a much less massive core? McGill University professor and iREx member Eve Lee, a world-renowned expert on super-puff planets like WASP-107b, has several hypotheses.

"For WASP-107b, the most plausible scenario is that the planet formed far away from the star, where the gas in the disc is cold enough that gas accretion can occur very quickly," she said. "The planet was later able to migrate to its current position, either through interactions with the disc or with other planets in the system."

Discovery of a second planet, WASP-107c

The Keck observations of the WASP-107 system cover a much longer period of time than previous studies have, allowing the UdeM-led research team to make an additional discovery: the existence of a second planet, WASP-107c, with a mass of about one-third that of Jupiter, considerably more than WASP-107b's.

WASP-107c is also much farther from the central star; it takes three years to complete one orbit around it, compared to only 5.7 days for WASP-107b. Also interesting: the eccentricity of this second planet is high, meaning its trajectory around its star is more oval than circular.

"WASP-107c has in some respects kept the memory of what happened in its system," said Piaulet. "Its great eccentricity hints at a rather chaotic past, with interactions between the planets which could have led to significant displacements, like the one suspected for WASP-107b."

Several more questions

Beyond its formation history, there are still many mysteries surrounding WASP-107b. Studies of the planet's atmosphere with the Hubble Space Telescope published in 2018 revealed one surprise: it contains very little methane.

"That's strange, because for this type of planet, methane should be abundant," said Piaulet. "We're now reanalysing Hubble's observations with the new mass of the planet to see how it will affect the results, and to examine what mechanisms might explain the destruction of methane."

The young researcher plans to continue studying WASP-107b, hopefully with the James Webb Space Telescope set to launch in 2021, which will provide a much more precise idea of the composition of the planet's atmosphere.

"Exoplanets like WASP-107b that have no analogue in our Solar System allow us to better understand the mechanisms of planet formation in general and the resulting variety of exoplanets," she said. "It motivates us to study them in great detail."

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About this study

"WASP-107b's density is even lower: a case study for the physics of gas envelope accretion and orbital migration," by Caroline Piaulet et al., was posted today in the Astronomical Journal. DOI: 10.3847/1538-3881/abcd3c. In addition to Piaulet (iREx Ph.D. student, Université de Montréal) and professors Björn Benneke (iREx, Université de Montréal) and Eve Lee (iREx, McGill Space Institute, McGill University), the research team includes Daniel Thorngren (iREx Postdoctoral Fellow, Université de Montréal) and Merrin Peterson (iREx M.Sc student), and 19 other co-authors from Canada, the United States, Germany and Japan.