Two-Thirds of Pre-Pandemic Jobs That Remain Lost Were in the Travel Industry

IMPACTING TRAVEL LAURIE BARATTI FEBRUARY 04, 2022

Checking into a hotel. 

(photo via monkeybusinessimages/iStock/Getty Images Plus)

The U.S. Travel Association (U.S. Travel)—the non-profit organization that represents the interests of the nation’s travel industry—today issued its reaction to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) revised January employment report.

The report reveals the past several months’ worth of corrected data, which confirms that 10 percent of pre-pandemic leisure and hospitality jobs remain lost due to the impact of COVID-19. That 10 percent of sector employment represents a whopping 61 percent of overall jobs in the U.S. that have been lost on account of the pandemic.

“While the overall jobs report today may be good news for some, the revised BLS data now confirms an even bigger revelation, that 61 percent, or nearly two-thirds, of all jobs still lost due to the pandemic are in the Leisure & Hospitality sector,” Executive Vice President of Public Affairs and Policy at U.S. Travel, Tori Emerson Barnes, said in a statement. “The uneven recovery of the travel sector is due in large part to the lack of inbound international travelers, and the deep reduction in business travel, and professional meetings and events.”

She added, “There could not be a more pressing time for Congress to implement short-term priorities to stimulate this vital contributor to the U.S. economy and rebuild American jobs.” For months now, U.S. Travel has been petitioning Congress to provide further financial relief and incentives that would help to bolster the ailing travel sector.

The organization has already put measures before Congress that would aid the travel industry’s recovery, including:

— A higher cap on H-2B visas, to ease the absence of labor for the over one million job openings in the leisure and hospitality industry.

— The Restoring Brand USA Act, which would provide $250 million in emergency funding for Brand USA.

— Targeted, temporary tax credits and deductions to stimulate spending on business travel, live entertainment and in-person events.

— Additional funding for relief grants to severely impacted travel businesses.

Larsen B Embayment Breaks Up

January 26, 2022

After more than a decade fastened to the coastline, a large expanse of sea ice has broken away from the Antarctic Peninsula. The ice, which had persisted in the Larsen B embayment since 2011, crumbled away over the span of a few days in January 2022, taking with it a Philadelphia-sized piece of the Scar Inlet Ice Shelf.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra and Aquasatellites acquired these natural-color images of the embayment and ice shelf. The right image shows the embayment on January 26, 2022, shortly after the sea ice broke up. For comparison, the left image shows the same area on January 16, 2022.

Scientists are still investigating the reason for the breakup, but the early clearing of seasonal sea ice along the Antarctic Peninsula suggests that the austral summer has been warm and wet. Scientist Rajashree Tri Datta of University of Colorado, Boulder, noted that foehn winds, influenced by a large atmospheric river, helped destabilize the ice pack. The phenomenon is apparent in this animation composed with images from NOAA’s GEOS-16 satellite.

The breakup is the latest in a series of notable events in the Larsen B embayment over the past 20 years. Prior to 2002, glacial ice on the Antarctic Peninsula flowed toward the sea and fed into a vast floating ice shelf known as Larsen B. The shelf helped buttress inland tributary glaciers, pushing back against them and slowing their seaward flow. But in early 2002, the shelf abruptly fractured. With 3,250 square kilometers (1,250 square miles) of ice suddenly gone, glaciers thinned and flowed more quickly into the open water.

Following the collapse of Larsen B, landfast sea ice grew atop the seawater each winter and melted away entirely in most summers. But the sea ice that started to grow in late March 2011 stuck around. “It was the first time since the early 2002 shelf collapse that the Larsen B embayment was seen to freeze up and stay frozen through multiple austral summers,” said Christopher Shuman, a NASA/UMBC glaciologist. The sea ice retreated slightly at its edges during summers, and its surface occasionally became coated with blue meltwater, but the ice persisted until this January.

Satellite images of the often-cloudy region show the breakup occurred between January 19-21, 2022. Sea ice splintered and floated away from the coast, along with icebergs from the fronts of Crane Glacier and its neighbors to the north and south. Shuman thinks strong outflows of ice from the Flank and Leppard tributary glaciers likely widened a rift that led the Scar Inlet Ice Shelf—the southern remnant of the Larsen B Ice Shelf—to shed several large icebergs.

Compared to a massive ice shelf (like the original Larsen B), sea ice adjacent to land is less effective at holding back the seaward flow of glaciers, but it still plays a role. This summer’s breakup of the sea ice in the embayment is important because—unlike the meltwater from an ice shelf, icebergs, and sea ice (already floating)—the meltwater from a glacier adds to the ocean’s volume and contributes directly to sea level rise. With the sea ice now gone, “the likelihood is that backstress will be reduced on all glaciers in the Larsen B Embayment and that additional inland ice losses will be coming soon,” Shuman said.

NASA Earth Observatory images by Joshua Stevens, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview. Story by Kathryn Hansen.

There’s a new gold rush in the American West. But is it safe?

Demand for gold has risen in recent years, but the environmental cost of mining remains high.

BY BECKI ROBINS / UNDARK | PUBLISHED FEB 1, 2022 

The site of an abandoned mine near Grass Valley, California, is marked by a weathered concrete silo. Becki Robins / Undark

Becki Robins lives in California’s gold country and writes about science and nature, history, and travel. Her work has appeared in Earth Island Journal, Lonely Planet, and on the YouTube series SciShow.

This story originally featured on Undark.

On the outskirts of the northern California town of Grass Valley, a massive concrete silo looms over the weeds and crumbling pavement. Nearby, unseen, a mine shaft drops 3,400 feet into the earth. These are the remains of Grass Valley’s Idaho-Maryland Mine, a relic from the town’s gold mining past. Numerous mines like this one once fueled Grass Valley’s economy, and today, Gold Rush artifacts are part of the town’s character: A stamp mill, once used to break up gold-bearing rock, now guards an intersection on Main Street, and old ore carts and other rusty remnants can be spotted in parking lots and storefronts around town.

Gold still exists in the veins of the abandoned mine, and Rise Gold, the mining corporation that purchased the mine in 2017, has reason to believe that reopening it makes financial sense. When the mine shut down in 1956, it wasn’t because the gold was drying up; it was because of economic policy. The 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement had established a new international monetary system to create stability in exchange rates. As part of the effort, the price of gold was fixed at $35 per ounce. Gold mining became unprofitable in the U.S.

Today, the price of gold is no longer fixed, and prices have risen in response to the economic uncertainty wrought by COVID-19. At the start of the pandemic, the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates in an effort to stimulate the US economy and encourage borrowing money. But those record-low rates decreased the returns on bonds and savings accounts, making gold a relatively more attractive business investment.

Now, with inflation rising and renewed economic uncertainty over the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, demand for gold remains high, even despite some recent dips. In 2020, roughly 43 percent of gold consumed globally went towards exchange-traded funds and central banks. As prices have risen and mining technology has become more sophisticated, mines are opening and reopening in places where mining was once thought economically unfeasible.

Still, mining isn’t as simple as it used to be. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that of the world’s known gold, roughly 63,000 tons are still in the ground, compared with roughly 206,000 tons that have already been mined. And the world’s unmined gold is generally only unmined because it’s deeper underground and thus less accessible. To obtain it, companies have to figure out what to do with huge amounts of mining waste, some of which contains heavy metals and other toxic substances.

Rise Gold has pledged to mitigate the environmental impact of its new mining operation in part by employing a technique called paste backfilling, which involves injecting a mixture of water, mine waste, and a binder (often cement) into mining tunnels. The practice helps provide structural support and reduce the amount of aboveground mine waste. There is some science to support the benefits of this approach, but it’s only a partial solution, and there are lingering uncertainties about its long-term impact. While Rise Gold reports that there is strong support for the project throughout Nevada County, where Grass Valley is located, some local residents remain skeptical. Among other things, they are concerned that the new mining operation will not be able to adequately contain its waste.

Given these challenges, some economists are asking whether it makes sense to mine gold when the precious mineral is merely destined for a bank vault. “The cost of mining is high,” says financial economist Dirk Baur. Much of the value of gold is tied up in the cost of just digging it out of the ground, he says. “There’s some profit for the mining company, but a big, big chunk is just an expense.”

Over the past couple of decades, proposals to develop or expand gold mining facilities have popped up across Europe and North America. In Northern Ireland, Dalradian Gold plans to open a mine in the Sperrin Mountains. In Newfoundland, Marathon Gold is slated to open an open-pit mine that the company says will be the largest gold mining operation in Atlantic Canada. In the United States, which, as of 2020, had the fourth-largest gold mine reserves in the world, mining operations have expanded in northwestern Arizona in recent years, and there are plans to reopen a mine in central Idaho. Many companies seeking to find new riches in old places face community pushback similar to what is happening in Grass Valley.

Gold mine opponents have good reason to be wary. Mining creates a lot of waste, including the rock that doesn’t contain enough gold to extract (called “waste rock”) and also the slurry left over after gold has been extracted from ore (called “tailings”). Both waste rock and tailings can contain toxic substances that threaten to pollute groundwater and surface waters if not properly mitigated.

Grass Valley has been dealing with the fallout of Gold Rush-era mining for decades. Arsenic, which occurs naturally in the gold deposits of the Sierra Nevada foothills, remains an ongoing problem in the area. Old tailings can still leach heavy metals decades after mining operations have ceased. In Grass Valley, the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board documented high concentrations of arsenic in a pile of tailings nicknamed “the Red Dirt Pile.” In 2020, high concentrations of lead, mercury, and arsenic were found in samples taken from a former mine waste disposal area that now supports approximately 4.5 acres of wetland habitat. That disposal area, known as the Centennial site, is owned by a subsidiary of Rise Gold called Rise Grass Valley.

Equipment labeled “Rise Gold Corp” sits at the Centennial site. The area now supports 4.5 acres of wetland habitat and was considered for listing as a federal Superfund site. Becki Robins / Undark

The Centennial site was polluted enough to warrant consideration for listing as a federal Superfund site, but Rise Gold avoided federal regulation by agreeing to undertake its own cleanup. Ralph Silberstein, president of the Community Environmental Advocates Foundation, a local environmental organization, says his group welcomes Rise Gold’s plan to address the hazardous substances that currently mar the area. But, he says, the group is troubled by what might come next. According to Rise Grass Valley’s Remedial Action Plan, the company may take the freshly cleaned-up site and use it for dumping waste from “future mining operations,” though they’ll first have to get permission from the state.

Rise Gold’s plans to minimize the mine’s impact are outlined in a draft environmental report, which Nevada County released this month, and which the company describes as “favorable.” In an interview with Undark, Rise Gold’s CEO, Ben Mossman, defended his company’s plan to use the Centennial site for some of the waste produced in conjunction with the reopening of Grass Valley’s Idaho-Maryland Mine. This particular mine is unique, said Mossman, because the company found “very little metal content” in the areas where it plans to dig. Because the waste will largely consist of non-toxic materials such as sand and rock, he says, “there’s no geochemical concerns to the environment or human health”—a claim that activists question.

Even when rock has little or no heavy metals, disposing of it can be a significant challenge. According to Rise Gold’s website, the Idaho-Maryland mining operation historically had to remove a ton of rock for every half ounce of gold it recovered. “These mining companies come along and they want us to not notice that they’re going to have a huge amount of mine waste rock,” says Elizabeth Martin, who recently retired as CEO of the Sierra Fund, a local conservation group based in nearby Nevada City. Rise Gold’s draft environmental impact report says the plan will result in approximately 182,500 tons of material produced per year that will need to be transported then used as engineered fill. By comparison, a large dump truck can carry about 14 tons. Multiply that by more than 10,000, and the visual is “beyond most people’s imagination,” says Martin.

Rise Gold plans to reduce its aboveground footprint at the Grass Valley mine with cemented paste backfill, which was first used in the 1970s as a way to recycle mine materials and help stabilize the underground workings. In essence, the mine becomes safer and the waste goes back to where it came from.

Paste backfilling is widely regarded as a more environmentally friendly way to dispose of mine waste. There is evidence that locking tailings up in cement decreases their permeability and stabilizes any heavy metals within them. There are still questions, though, about whether or not arsenic and heavy metals will stay put in the paste backfill material over the long term. The leaching behavior of arsenic depends on a lot of different factors, including the binder used in the backfill and the chemical content of the tailings. The biggest unknown is what happens in the future, when the mine closes and the pumps shut down, which will let groundwater flow into the backfilled tunnels. Some studies have noted that even low levels of leaching could continue for years, potentially contaminating drinking water or nearby rivers and streams.

Heavy metal leaching is high on the list of concerns in Grass Valley. Rise Gold promises their operations will be clean, but even so, the company’s hydrology report does note arsenic leaching from some test samples. The leaching tests, meant to simulate what might happen to a waste rock pile when it rains, found that arsenic leached at concentrations 17 times greater than the water quality standards from samples of the mineral type serpentinite. Rise says that’s not a concern since there will be very little serpentinite in the waste rock. Its report also notes that tests on tailings indicated arsenic leaching, but only at concentrations that would not exceed regulatory limits.

A sign in the East Bennett neighborhood of Grass Valley reads “NO MINE.” Several community groups in the area, concerned about heavy metal pollution and the vast amount of waste rock, are opposed to the mining project. Becki Robins / Undark

Underground mining operations also intersect with the water table, which means the existing tunnels have to be dewatered, and the water that’s pumped out of the tunnels has to be treated before it’s released aboveground. “The water coming from these mines that they’re dewatering is full of arsenic, manganese, iron, and other heavy metals,” says biologist Josie Crawford, executive director of the Wolf Creek Community Alliance, another local group that opposes the mine. “It will be treated, but it needs to be treated forever.”

The water also has to go somewhere after it’s been treated. Rise Gold plans to flush it down nearby South Fork Wolf Creek, a move that Crawford fears could cause damage to the riparian habitat. “It’s a trout stream, so it’s sensitive,” she says. “If the dewatering starts scouring the creek, they could lose a lot of those invertebrates and ruin the trout habitat.”

Conservationists and community opposition groups often see gold mining as a battle between nature and greed, and question whether the pursuit of gold is really worth so much environmental destruction. So does Baur, the financial economist, who says it makes sense from both an environmental and economic perspective to just not mine for gold at all. Much of the gold that already exists above ground, he says, is held by banks and investment companies. Investors can buy shares of gold they’ve never even seen. Baur says they might as well just buy shares of gold that companies promise to leave in the ground. “You buy something that doesn’t disrupt the land as much,” he says, “and you don’t have all the negative effects of the actual gold mining.”

Baur recently explored this idea with a couple of his colleagues at the University of Western Australia Business School. In a 2021 paper, they proposed leaving unmined gold in the ground and letting “nature act as a natural vault and custodian legally protected by gold firms and the government.” In this scenario, investors could buy stock in gold exploration companies that have identified underground gold but have no plans to mine it. This would give investors an alternative to purchasing shares of the aboveground gold that currently sits in bank vaults around the globe.

Would the unmined gold, which the paper calls “green gold,” actually earn money for its investors? Baur and his coauthors considered the costs of gold exploration and gold mining, and the uncertainty of the quality and amount of gold that might exist in any given underground location. They then ran an empirical analysis, and concluded that unmined gold can still be a valuable investment.

Baur says his paper has, unsurprisingly, received negative feedback from the gold industry. “They hate the idea, of course,” he says. “It’s the end of their business, essentially.” He thinks investors, though, may be more willing to entertain the idea, especially those who are looking for green investments. “But there’s also a lot of greenwashing,” he says, adding that investors may say they want to invest green, but may not be as willing to try new ideas when the time comes.

These questions will take time to sort out. In the meantime, the Grass Valley mining project still needs to overcome public opposition and significant financial hurdles. Opening a mine is expensive. Before Rise Gold bought the mineral rights in 2017, EmGold Mining Corporation had plans to reopen the mine. They spent $1 million just on consultants, according to one estimate, and the project never got past the preliminary stages. Locals like Silberstein hope Rise Gold’s plans will meet a similar fate.

“They’re talking about bringing gold up from 3,000 feet below the surface,” he says, “which means restoring a badly damaged, probably collapsed-in gold mine to get less than an ounce per ton of gold out.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” he adds. “It’s not a smart thing to do if we want to have a sustainable, livable world.”

A new database reveals how much humans are messing with evolution

Some animals and plants are rapidly adapting to our warming, polluted world.

AMIT KATWALA, WIRED.COM - 2/5/2022, 5:44 AM

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Natalie Fobes | Getty Images

Charles Darwin thought of evolution as an incremental process, like the patient creep of glaciers or the march of continental plates. “We see nothing of these slow changes in progress until the hand of time has marked the long lapse of ages,” he wrote in On the Origin of Species, his famous 1859 treatise on natural selection.

But by the 1970s, scientists were finding evidence that Darwin might be wrong—at least about the timescale. Peppered moths living in industrial areas of Britain were getting darker, better for blending in against the soot-blackened buildings and avoiding predation from the air. House sparrows—introduced to North America from Europe—were changing size and color according to the climate of their new homes. Tufted hairgrass growing around electricity pylons was developing a tolerance for zinc (which is used as a coating for pylons and can be toxic to plants).

In the late 1990s, biologist Andrew Hendry noticed similarly quick changes in phenotype while studying salmon. (Phenotype refers to the trait that actually exists in the animal, even if it’s not reflected by a change in its underlying genetic code.) “We had this impression that, well, actually, maybe this rapid evolution thing is not so exceptional,” says Hendry, now a professor at McGill University in Montreal. “Maybe it’s actually occurring all the time, and people just haven’t emphasized it.”

With a colleague, Michael Kinnison (now at the University of Maine), Hendry pulled together a database of examples of rapid evolution and wrote a 1999 paper that kickstarted interest in the field. Now, Hendry and colleagues have updated and expanded the original data set with more than 5,000 additional examples: everything from the cranial depth of the common chaffinch to the lifespan of the Trinidadian guppy. Scientists are using this data to answer questions about how fast and far the natural world is changing and how much of the change is due to humans.

In an initial paper published in November 2021 using the new data set (which is called Proceed, for Phenotypic Rates of Change Evolutionary and Ecological Database), Hendry and colleagues reexamined five key questions raised by previous work. They confirmed, for instance, that on average, all over the world, animal species seem to be getting smaller. This runs contrary to a theory of evolution called Cope’s rule, which posits that species should increase in size over time. “It’s better to be larger,” says Kiyoko Gotanda, a coauthor on the paper who is now at Brock University in Ontario. “You’ll get more mates, you have a better survival rate.” But when they analyzed the new data, the results confirmed a finding from a previous paper by Gotanda. “There seems to be an overall decline in body size due to things like climate change, and other types of human influences,” she says.

Hunting and harvesting are the biggest drivers of this trend: if humans pluck the fattest fish from the ocean each time they cast their nets, it follows that only the smaller ones will survive to pass on their genes. But climate could also play a role because of a basic rule of biology: larger creatures have a bigger surface area-to-volume ratio and therefore find it easier to retain heat. “The theory is that you don’t need to maintain that larger body size as the temperatures are warming, and so you can be smaller,” Gotanda says.Page: 1 2 Ne

Human Evolution in the Modern Age

Humans are still evolving, and modern technology

 and culture both play a role.

By Avery HurtFeb 4, 2022 

(Credit: laikavoyaj/Shutterstock) 

In 2000, famed evolutionary theorist Stephen Jay Gould said, “There’s been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we’ve built with the same body and brain.” Now, 22 years later, most evolutionary biologists beg to differ. Natural selection is still operating on humans, they say — and they have evidence to back up the claim.  

Take, for example, lactose tolerance. Most people lose the ability to digest lactose after they’re weaned. However, roughly 35 percent of adults worldwide have one specific genetic variant that allows them to digest lactose throughout life. Recent genetic research has found that this variant became common only after humans domesticated animals and started drinking their milk. Even today, the trait is more common in populations with a history of dairy farming than in populations whose ancestors did not raise animals for milk.  

Sarah Tishkoff, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Pennsylvania, studies genomic changes and disease risk in human populations. She cites an example of natural selection still going on today: the development of resistance to infectious disease. Malaria, for example, infects over two hundred million people every year, and kills almost half a million of those, most of them children in sub-Saharan Africa. However, some people have a genetic variant that protects them from malaria. These people will be more likely to live and pass on that variant to their children. This is “a really clear-cut case of ongoing evolution,” says Tishkoff.  

Tishkoff and her team have also found that some people living in the Andes and in Tibet have developed an adaptation to life at high altitudes. Other research has found that indigenous people in the Andes may have developed resistance to arsenic poisoning. And those are just a few of the ways that humans are continuing to evolve today.

Technology and Evolution

Scientists have been able to discover many of these examples of ongoing natural selection thanks to a technology much enhanced since Gould made his pronouncement: the ability to sequence the human genome quickly and inexpensively. Using huge genetic data sets to track changes, scientists can pinpoint genetic changes in populations and catch evolution in action.   

But not all the tools that uncover such evidence are so high tech. Church records that list births, marriages, and deaths offer a unique window into evolution on a population-wide level, as do large, ongoing epidemiological studies. Researchers who mined data from the Framingham Heart Study — a multigenerational study of cardiovascular disease among residents of Framingham, Massachusetts — were able to untangle the effects of natural selection in action, predicting that the community's next generation of women will have lower cholesterol.

Scott Solomon, an evolutionary biologist at Rice University, dug into this type of data for his book Future Humans: Inside the Science of our Continuing Evolution. That kind of population data is useful, he explains, because it provides information about fertility, such as trends in the age of women when they had their first child, and how many children they had. Multiple studies like this, he says, have found that natural selection favors an earlier start to reproduction and a later age for the onset of menopause — in other words, more time to have children. And, of course, the more children, the more chances for mutations and more opportunities for evolution.  

Improved health care means that, on average around the world, most people live to adulthood. That would seem to neutralize the effect of natural selection — or as it is sometimes called, survival of the fittest. But Solomon points out that it’s not always about survival; these days it’s more often about reproduction. That’s why changes in the timing and number of births are still so important.  

Improved health care and new technologies do play a role, though. But there’s another important actor in this evolutionary play: culture.  

Enter Culture 

According to Solomon, another big factor in modern evolution is gene flow, the movement of genes between different populations. When people move from one population to another, they take their genes with them, and that changes the prevalence of certain traits in both the populations they leave and the ones they join. “That is actually one of the most important mechanisms for modern human evolution,” he says. “In the last couple of hundred years, and certainly in the last century, human populations have been mixing like never before.”  

Other cultural changes are likely affecting modern human evolution in ways we don’t yet understand. For example, research has shown that women rely on scent when choosing mates. But these days, we use all sorts of products to mask our scents. In addition, hormonal birth control can change the way women react to the scent of potential mates. One study found that hormonal birth control caused women to be more attracted to men who were genetically similar to them, while women not on hormonal birth control were more likely to be attracted to men who were genetically different.  

Future Humans 

There is no way of knowing the long-term effects of modern cultural practices and technologies on human evolution. But scientists can make some educated guesses. For example, it’s possible, says Solomon, that the increasing use of in vitro fertilization could lead to more infertility. When infertility has a genetic cause, in vitro fertilization preserves in the population a gene that without the technology would have been weeded out by natural selection.  

Modern technology may also be helping us evolve different bodies. Caesarian sections make the healthy birth of babies too large to make it through the birth canal possible. Increased use of these procedures could possibly lead to an increase in the average size of humans. A 2016 study models how that might already be happening in some populations.  

The workings of evolution are complex, involving myriad small adaptations that — over time — may result in significant changes. While scientists can’t predict what that will mean for future humans, there’s one thing most of them agree on: We’re still evolving, bit by bit.  

When Europe was flooded by the oceans

by University of Bristol

Reconstruction drawing of the reptile Pachystropheus. Credit: Harriet Williams

About 200 million years ago, much of Europe was transformed by a huge flood. What had been land, occupied by early dinosaurs and other reptiles, was covered by shallow seawater, from Poland in the east to Wales and south-west England in the west.

In a new study, University of Bristol Palaeobiology Masters student Harriet Williams and colleagues have just published details of a site in Gloucestershire that shows just how the flooding occurred.

The site, near Gloucester, on the banks of the Severn, shows red-colored sediments at the bottom of the cliff, reflecting the dry land and freshwater pools of the Triassic landscape.

Footprints in similar sites in South Wales, show that small dinosaurs were walking around these areas. Then there is a sudden change, to black mudstones laid down under seawater, and full of fossils.

Harriet Williams said that "the fossils show us that the land had become seashore. We find large numbers of burrows and trails made by worms, clams, and king crabs. In fact, the king crab tracks and resting marks show that this had become a tidal zone, where the sea flooded in and out. King crabs today live on sea shores and in shallow seawater."

Deborah Hutchinson, geology curator at Bristol City Museum, added that "the site was first described in the 1840s. Early geologists were keen to collect the fossils and to try to understand what was going on, and they recognized the sudden environmental shift from land to sea."

A key discovery at the site is that there are several bone beds. These contain fossils of the bony fishes, sharks and marine reptiles that lived around Gloucester in the latest Triassic period.

Dr. Chris Duffin, one of the project supervisors, said that they "can identify the sharks and other fishes by comparison with similar bone beds across Europe. The Rhaetian Transgression, as it is called, flooded across Europe and brought with it the same fishes, which we can identify in Germany, Luxemburg, France, and the UK."

Professor Michael Benton from Bristol's School of Earth Sciences, another supervisor, said that "one of the most exciting finds is the small marine reptile Pachystropheus. This slender reptile was less than a meter long, like a long-necked salamander, chasing fish through the shallow waters. Its delicate bones are only found at this locality and we are keen to learn more about it, but the skeletons are broken up."

In her work, Harriet was able to visit the site and collect fossils, but she also relied on fossils in collections in Bristol. Claudia Hildebrandt, Curator of the Geological Collections at the University of Bristol, added that "it's wonderful to see our older collections being re-studied and reinterpreted. These localities around Bristol and Gloucester document key events in the history of the British Isles, and it's good to link our fossil collections from Victorian times with new collections in the field."

Adam Parker, one of the technical staff at Bristol, added that they "were able to use new methods in processing the bonebed fossils. It's wonderful to see how new generations of students can bring new insights on these classic localities."

The research was published in Proceedings of the Geologists' Association.New finds of a living fossil

More information: Harriet Williams et al, Microvertebrates from the Rhaetian bone beds at Westbury Garden Cliff, near Gloucester, UK, Proceedings of the Geologists' Association (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.pgeola.2022.01.002

Provided by University of Bristol 

 Edmonton

NDP MLAs quit legislative committee tasked with studying opioid safe supply programs

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Government MLAs call Opposition move a political stunt

Janet French · CBC News · Posted: Feb 04, 2022 

NDP MLA Lori Sigurdson says she and her Opposition colleagues refuse to participate in a legislative committee studying the safe supply of opioids. (Scott Neufeld/CBC )

Alberta NDP MLAs are quitting a legislative committee struck to examine whether safe supply programs could reduce drug poisoning deaths in Alberta.

The United Conservative Party caucus called the move a "political stunt" and said the committee's work will continue without Opposition members.

At a news conference on Friday, NDP MLA Lori Sigurdson said the committee is "rigged" to reach a predetermined conclusion about whether safe supply could do more harm than good in Alberta. 

"We refuse to take any further part in this," she said, along with colleagues David Shepherd, Kathleen Ganley and Janis Irwin.

Late last year, the legislature agreed to strike the committee to examine the concept of "safe supply," in which opioids are prescribed to people struggling with addiction, and for whom other treatments have often been ineffective.

• Alberta safe supply committee starts work

The Opposition said they lost patience when they saw the list of 21 presenters government MLAs intend to invite.

Shepherd said government members "scoured the world" for people opposed to the practice.

The list includes American author Michael Shellenberger, who wrote the book San FranSicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities.

The committee heard on Thursday Alberta Health lacks any in-house expertise on safe supply, and had asked Simon Fraser University psychologist and professor Julian Somers to compile current research on the issue. Somers has previously publicly criticized safe supply.

Shepherd said the committee is a "political circus" inappropriate for a health crisis that's killing thousands of Albertans.

In safe supply programs, doctors prescribe participants otherwise-illegal opioid drugs to prevent them from consuming potentially more toxic substances sold on the street. (George Frey/Reuters)

In the first 10 months of 2021, 1,247 Albertans died from opioid poisonings, making it the deadliest year on record, with two months still to be tallied.

"This is something that needs to be taken seriously," Shepherd said. "And unfortunately this is not something that we see happening with this committee and we do not want to validate it with our presence."

The Opposition members proposed six presenters, including advocacy group Moms Stop the Harm and the Alberta Medical Association.

• Alberta's safe consumption review biased and flawed, researcher says

• Alberta government to end funding for intensive opioid therapy program

In a Friday afternoon statement, the United Conservative Party caucus said the committee will continue to meet and will invite presenters suggested by the Opposition. They also said the NDP could have proposed more participants.

UCP MLA and committee spokesperson Mickey Amery said members want to hear from a range of experts.

Alberta legislature library staff were unable to find a past example where Opposition members had quit an all-party committee.

Gillian Kolla, a post-doctoral fellow with the University of Victoria's Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research, said it is "striking" that the guest list is missing anyone who participated, worked on or researched an existing Canadian safe supply program.

"You're getting a very, very biased view by excluding the people who have essentially the most experience providing these services and conducting research around them," she said.

Kolla and her collaborators' research has found participants in Ontario and B.C. programs say the services have saved their lives, prevented drug poisonings, and connected them with more health-care and social services.

Gen Z in China and India more environmentally conscious: Report

Credit Suisse Research Institute survey suggests youth in emerging economies more likely to buy sustainable products.

A new survey suggests young people in China and India are more environmentally conscious than their peers in developed economies [Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters]

By Todd Woody

Bloomberg
Published On 3 Feb 2022

Gen Z and millennial consumers in China, India and other emerging economies are more environmentally conscious, more likely to buy sustainable products and more distrustful of corporate sustainability claims than their counterparts in developed countries, according to a Credit Suisse Research Institute report released Tuesday.

The survey of 10,000 young consumers in 10 countries suggests significant opportunities in the food, fashion, travel, tourism and housing industries for companies that offer products that align with their values, and risks for those that do not.

Gen Z and millennials account for 54% of the global population and 48% of consumer spending, rising to 68% by 2040, according to the report.

“Of particular importance in this regard is the role of the young emerging consumer, given the potential rise in spending power across the emerging world and the fact that, demographically, developing countries are skewed more toward younger consumers,” wrote the report’s authors.

The survey also found more support among Gen Z and millennials in emerging economies for government regulation of unsustainable products or for banning them altogether from the market.

Eugène Klerk, Credit Suisse’s head of global ESG & thematic research, said in an email that the survey did not directly answer why Gen Z and millennial consumers in emerging economies are more sustainably minded than those in developed nations. But he said climate change may explain the difference in attitudes.

“First, consumers across emerging markets might have been more exposed to the impact of global warming than those living in developed markets, which might explain why they are more engaged with finding solutions,” he wrote. “Another reason could be that younger consumers in developed countries have a lifestyle that is less sustainable than that of consumers in developing economies.”
Environmentally apprehensive cohort

Research firm Nielsen surveyed young consumers in five emerging economies (Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa) and in five developed countries (France, Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the U.S.)

It’s an environmentally apprehensive cohort. The survey found that 65% to 90% of respondents in the 10 countries had a “high level of anxiety” about issues related to sustainability. Three-quarters of those worried about the environment said they intend to live more sustainably by spending more on such things as solar panels and electric cars while shunning fast food and meat.

The survey found that 80% of young consumers intend to buy sustainable products as much as possible, while in China and India, more than 15% of respondents said that all their purchases are now for sustainably made goods.

In good news for automakers phasing out fossil fuel vehicles, 63% of Gen Z and millennials expect to own an electric or hybrid electric car. In China, more than half of respondents said they already own such vehicles.

A majority of young consumers in developed countries, however, said they had no plans to curtail flying, whereas a majority in emerging economies expect to minimize time spent on planes.

Giving up environmentally destructive fast fashion is a harder ask of young consumers. While 41% of those surveyed said they believe the fashion industry is unsustainable, given its greenhouse gas emissions and consumption of water and plastics, only 20% to 40% intend to decrease fast fashion purchases. The outlier was China, where more than half said they would buy less fast fashion.

The survey found that Gen Z and millennials view corporate proclamations of sustainability with suspicion, with 63% saying that they don’t believe such claims. About 60% of respondents in India, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico and the U.S. believe that management compensation should be tied to the sustainability of a company’s products.

Climate change contributes to poorer mental health: study


Deena ZaidiCTVNews.ca Data Journalist

Wednesday, February 2, 2022 

Concerns and anxiety over climate change are increasingly becoming mental health issues that affect people's everyday lives, a theory researchers say is supported by a new study showing the impact of record-breaking heatwaves in B.C. last summer.

Devastating heatwave conditions across the Pacific Northwest last summer increased anxiety amongst the residents of British Columbia, according to the study published in the Journal of Climate Change and Health.

The study revealed that the residents in the westernmost province were more anxious about climate change after the heat wave than they were before it.

“Climate anxiety has increasingly been on the radar of therapists, who had patients reporting about the environmental concerns,” Dr. Kiffer Card, co-author of the study and a social epidemiologist at Simon Fraser University, told CTVNews.ca in a phone interview. He said climate anxiety can disrupt someone’s mental health by interfering with their everyday life.

Between June 25 and July 1, 2021, British Columbia experienced a heat dome, a high-pressure weather system that traps heat, with record-high temperatures reaching up to 49.6°C in the province. At the time, an international team of climate scientists disclosed that the magnitude of the B.C. heat dome was made 150 times more likely and was impossible without human-caused climate change.

Heat wave across B.C.
Infogram

Climate anxiety is slowly drawing the attention of researchers and mental health experts. Card, who is also the director of the Mental Health and Climate Change Alliance, said the heat dome happened right after they closed the first survey in early June, and so they grabbed the opportunity to monitor how the responses had changed after the heat dome event.

“We certainly heard anecdotally that it did. And so we had a strong hypothesis to see increases in climate anxiety,” he said.

More participants were worried about climate change post-heat dome

The results from the survey showed that the heat dome event increased climate anxiety— a form of psychological distress related to the climate crisis.

The survey results revealed that there had been a 13 per cent increase in average levels of anxiety after the heat wave.

The post-heat dome results revealed that two-thirds of the surveyed participants (close to 60 per cent) were either “somewhat” or “much more” worried about climate change after the heat dome and subsequent fires across the province. Respondents who perceived their environment to be at risk due to climate change nearly doubled after the event, increasing from about 17 per cent before the heat dome event to nearly 30 per cent after.

Similarly, there were more respondents concerned about the climate change impact on the industry they worked in after the heat dome event and believed their homes would be more vulnerable to climate-related disasters such as floods, forest fires, and drought after the heat dome event.

Surveys were rolled out before and after the heat dome to get real-time data

Even though there have been prior studies linking climate change to the growing sense of fear, sadness, and existential dread, the study is the first to use a “natural experiment” to describe the impact of climate-induced extreme heat on mental health and anxiety levels among the general public in BC.

The study is also the first to incorporate a validated climate change anxiety measurement to quantify the impacts of extreme heat on mental health in real-time data at two different time periods.

Surveys were rolled out in two phases—one before the devastating heat wave and one after.

Both waves of surveys—before and after the heat wave, included more than 400 respondents in each wave.

The first wave of data collection ended four days before the start of the heat dome, and the second wave of data collection commenced only two weeks after the heat dome ended.

More policies are needed to address climate change anxiety

The study shows pressing concern around growing climate anxiety that is fuelled by extreme weather conditions. The results indicate that mental health indicators around climate change need to be incorporated into decision-making policies across Canada.

Card said while the study is meant to capture the impact of climate anxiety on people, it also aims to help understand the considerable threats climate issues can have on communities and the potential impacts on human infrastructure and human capital.

He said, for example, if people are living in fear in rural areas because of increasing environmental threats such as forest fires, then it could result in population declines or people wanting to have fewer children. This in turn would significantly reshape the rural communities of B.C.

Card said that they want to scale up the current survey to more provinces and have currently applied for federal funding for similar research across Canada. “We hope to create a national monitoring framework to understand the impacts of climate change on mental health.”

“A lot of the attitude around climate change is that we'll wait until those effects are happening. But I think studies like these tell us as those things are happening now and we are seeing real effects on real people's lives today and therefore, the time to do the research was yesterday,” said Card.

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Nearly 14,500 Hongkongers apply for work, study permits in Canada, taking advantage of new pathway to emigration

William Yiu 

MACLEANS

Last year's applicants include 9,100 seeking jobs and record 5,355 wanting to study in Canada

Many blue-collar jobs available but younger Hongkongers shun them, emigration consultants say

Canada's relaxed immigration pathway for Hongkongers drew a strong response last year, with nearly 14,500 applying to work or study there as a step towards obtaining permanent residence (PR).

Most Hongkongers hoping to emigrate eyed moving to Britain, but Canadian applications helped raise to almost 100,000 the total who left or applied to go to the two countries in the first nine months of last year.

A record 38,167 Hongkongers also applied to police last year for certificates of no criminal conviction (CNCC), a requirement for emigration to Canada, the United States and Australia.

© Provided by South China Morning Post Canada announced easier immigration for Hong Kong residents last February. Photo: Shutterstock

Canada's immigration authority, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), told the Post the country's Hong Kong Pathway programme received 9,110 applications in the first nine months of last year.

The scheme, providing work permits valid for up to three years and leading to PR there, was announced last February. To qualify for PR, applicants must work full-time in Canada for at least one year, or chalk up 1,560 hours in total.

IRCC said 698 of the work permit applications were either refused or withdrawn, but gave no details.

Canada also announced that those who graduated from designated postsecondary learning institutes in the country would be allowed to apply for PR.

That led to a record 5,355 Hongkongers obtaining study permits in the first 11 months of last year, more than double the total in 2020.

Canada announced easier immigration for Hong Kong residents last February, after Beijing imposed the national security law on the city in June 2020, banning acts of secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces.

The schemes providing work or study routes to PR remain open for applications until August 31, 2026.
Majority of Hongkongers with BN(O) visas in UK won't come back, survey finds

Elmer Ho Ngai-heng, director of Hire Nation Consultants, a Hong Kong firm helping people who want to work in Canada, said most jobs available for Hongkongers applying through the new immigration schemes were "lower class" jobs.

"Around half the Hongkongers, particularly the young, refuse to take up blue-collar jobs such as working in fast food shops or as hotel door attendants," he said. "Instead, the middle-aged are more willing to accept such jobs, as they just want to obtain citizenship for the whole family in the shortest time."

He knew of a 50-year-old, with a master's degree and holding a senior position in Hong Kong, who accepted a job as a cashier in a fast-food restaurant in Canada, all for the sake of his two children in secondary school.

 Provided by South China Morning Post

Immigration consultant Chan Yuet-sum of immi898, a firm specialising in emigration to Canada, said the jobs pathway to PR mainly attracted fresh graduates or young managers willing to work in hospitality and catering for a start.

She said it was not hard for Hongkongers to land jobs in Canada, and many found work with the help of relatives already living there.

According to Statistics Canada, the national statistical office, job vacancies reached an all-time high of 912,600 in the third quarter of last year, with nearly two fifths of vacancies in Ontario.

As for wages, those aged 15 to 24 working in some customer service jobs earned around C$17 (US$13.50) per hour. A person working eight hours a day, 22 days a month, could earn around C$2,992 a month.

Fresh graduates in Hong Kong earned HK$22,100 (US$2,840) a month on average in 2020, according to official data

.

© Provided by South China Morning Post A record 38,167 Hongkongers applied to police last year for certificates of no criminal conviction, a requirement for emigration to Canada, the United States and Australia. Photo: Warton Li

Meanwhile, the number of Hongkongers applying to police to prove their clean criminal records last year leapt by 30 per cent from 2020 to 38,167.

The previous peak of such CNCC applications was in 1989, the year of Beijing's crackdown on protests at Tiananmen Square, when there were 57,339 applications.

A spokesperson for the Security Bureau said the CNCC was used for emigration, studying abroad and also for adopting children.

Emigration consultants, however, said it was used mainly by those who were emigrating, and the number of CNCC applications has long been regarded as an indicator of the city's brain drain.

Applicants may fill in a survey on their reasons for wanting the CNCC and the Security Bureau uses their responses to estimate emigration figures.

The 2020 survey showed that Australia, the United States and Canada were the top three emigration destinations for Hongkongers who sought the CNCC.
8,800 Hongkongers eligible for new Australian pathways to permanent residency

Britain, which does not require the certificate, launched its British National (Overseas) passport visa scheme on January 31 last year in response to the imposition of the national security law on Hong Kong.

It said last November that about 88,900 Hongkongers had applied for the visa scheme between its introduction and the end of September.

Australia has announced new migration policies aimed at Hongkongers, due to kick off in March.

Given political developments in Hong Kong in the wake of the national security law, senior immigration consultant Willis Fu Yiu-wai, of Goldmax Associates, expected interest in emigration to continue, especially among those aged 23 to 40.

"The political climate and the recent closure of Stand News may have affected some Hongkongers, the trend of emigration will continue," he said.


This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (www.scmp.com), the leading news media reporting on China and Asia.

Copyright (c) 2022. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.