Behold this humble passage by Darwin, which is what immediately follows his discussion of the octopus. This passage is a touchstone to several important aspects of what Darwin was doing and thinking, and is a poignant link to what Darwin did not know:
Continue reading Darwin and the Voyage: 02 ~ Crossing The Atlantic
Proposals to give the latter part of the present geological period (the Holocene) a new name … the Anthropocene … are misguided, scientifically invalid, and obnoxious. However, there is a use for a term that is closely related to “Anthropocene” and I propose that we adopt that term instead. Continue reading Are We In The Anthropocene? No.
Did humans wipe out the Pleistocene megafauna? This is a question that can be asked separately for each area of the world colonized by Homo sapiens. It is also a question that engenders sometimes heated debate. A new paper coming out in the Journal of Human Evolution concludes that many Pleistocene megafauna managed to go extinct by themselves, but that humans were not entirely uninvolved.
The amount of ice lost to the sea from Antarctica has increased by 75 percent in the last 10 years. This is the result of an increase in glacial flow. It had previously been thought, and perhas was the case, that Greenland ice loss outpaced the Antarctica. This is no longer the case. Continue reading New Study of Antarctic Ice Loss
The end-Permian mass extinction event was the big daddy of all the known mass extinction events. Life on the planet Earth was almost entirely wiped out. A new paper explores the post-extinction recovery of ecological systems. Continue reading After the End Permian Mass Extinction
“A University of Alberta Arctic ice researcher is closing in on some real understanding about the process that might be feeding rising sea levels.” Continue reading Mapping of Greenland may aid understanding of sea-level mystery
Things are just not like what they used to be. You know this. You know that the Age of Dinosaurs, for instance, was full of dinosaurs and stuff, and before transitional fossil forms crawled out of the sea to colonize the land, all animals were aquatic, etc. But did you know that from a purely modern perspective, the Miocene was the most important geological period? Continue reading The Evolution of the Modern Climate: New Evidence from Plant Remains
Pumice is rock that is ejected from a volcano, and has so much gas trapped in it that it can float. So when a pumice-ejecting volcano (not all volcanoes produce pumice) goes off near a body of water, you can get a raft of rock floating around for quite some time. By and by, water replaces the gas within the rock and it sinks. Like a rock. So, you can get layers of pumice on the bed of lakes, seas and oceans. A forthcoming paper in Deep Sea Research I describes two such pumice deposits of “Drift Pumice” in the Indian Ocean. Continue reading Deep Sea Evidence of Major Volcanic Eruptions
Carbon is cycled from gas (C02) to solid (plant tissue) and and back (through fire, digestion, fermentation, etc.) again and again.Some of that carbon is trapped over long periods in the form of “fossil fuels.”The earth has, in a sense, grown accustom to having a huge chunk of the available carbon stored away in coal and oil, so the recent (last century or so) release of large quantities of this carbon is a problem. This is why fuels made of plants (ethanol, diesel) are of interest. But those fuels require two steps: The carbon is captured by plants, then the plant matter is converted to something that can be burned in machines.Why not cut out the middle-man, and replace the plant with a machine that may make the process more efficient? Continue reading Scientists Reinvent The Plant
Plant and animal fossils recently discovered from an island in the Bahamas tell a story of habitat change and human involvement in local extinction. Continue reading The Bahamas Yield Amazing Fossil Finds
Popular Mechanics (one of those magazines that genteel people refuse to admit they read, but that is actually a blast) has published a thing called “Geek the Vote.” According to an email from PM, this is:
…an online guide to all the candidates’ stances on issues related to science and technology including energy policy and climate change, gun control, science education and infrastructure investment. The full chart, which can be navigated by candidate or issue, is [provided]
The site is here.This is apparently in response to (maybe not, but there is evidence to suggest this) the Science Debate 2008 initiative (see this). Continue reading Geek the Vote
I’m putting this bit of human biogeography under the “species coming and going” category:
Greenland DNA could hold key to migration mysteries: researchers from PhysOrg.com
Danish researchers are to sieve through human and skeletal remains on Greenland in a quest to explain an enduring enigma over the island’s settlement over thousands of years, one of the scientists said Tuesday.[…]
This is a very large change in diet over a very short period of time. I call Macro Evolution!
Study links success of invasive Argentine ants to diet shifts from PhysOrg.com
The ability of Argentine ants to change from carnivorous insect eaters to plant sap-loving creatures has helped these invasive social insects rapidly spread throughout coastal California, according to a new study, displacing many native insects and creating ant infestations familiar to most coastal residents.[…]
A small group of US experts stubbornly insist that, contrary to what the vast majority of their colleagues believe, humans may not be responsible for the warming of the planet Earth. Continue reading Loony Climate Denialism Holdouts