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The weather of 2011: a waste or a wake-up call?

2011-09-12T22:28:00.001-04:00

We've been having a difficult time with weather this year in the North Country. But let's not write off the floods of spring and summer 2011 as mere freaks of nature. Rather than let these hard-earned lessons go to waste, here are some things to keep in mind for future reference.

This spring, a combination of rains and heavy snowmelt raised the level of Lake Champlain to record levels (>103 feet), inundating the low-lying shorelines. The photos below were taken in June, several weeks after the peak of flooding.

Above: cottage near Rouse's Point (NY).

Below: the high stand stained these cliffs at Split Rock (NY).

When tropical storm Irene struck in late summer, we got more flooding. The total amount of water unleashed was not enough to lift Lake Champlain back up to the spring level (it was at 98-99 feet last week) but it came too fast for local streams and rivers to hold it. The effect was like trying to drink from a firehose, and seemingly benign brooks morphed into destructive torrents.

The owner of this almost-lost home in Keene told me last week that the steep cut-away bluff formed in his yard when the stream smashed the back end of the fire station (left foreground) and ricocheted off the fallen roof to crash against the opposite bank. Now you can barely see the shurnken stream at all amid the cobbles and boulders.

Notice, by the way, that the station is standing fully upright again. Volunteers had it rebuilt in less than a week (see earlier postings for comparison). The fire trucks will be housed here over the winter while folks decide whether - and where - to relocate.

What can we learn from these experiences?

One take-home lesson is that floodplains are called FLOOD-plains for a reason.

Here's a stretch of the Ausable River near Jay, NY (above). Such flats make nice level ground for planting, for roads, for buildings. But they're flat because the river made them so, and the river's work is ongoing.

The short time scales that we normally operate on are often too short to capture the natural variability of the landscapes we live on. "I've never seen anything like this in the 30 years I've lived here" doesn't mean much from the perspective of a river that builds its floodplain in violent fits and starts over many centuries or millennia.

The headwaters of the Ausable look out of place to us when they chew into the bed of Route 73 like this (below). But the river has wandered all over its floodplain in the past, including this very spot, as the newly exposed cobbles attest.

By the way; this critical road has been repaired as of today, thanks largely to pressure from Governor Cuomo (as in "tires will roll soon, or heads will roll").

TAKE-HOME LESSON: These floodplains are likely to flood again in the future.

But how often? Nobody can answer that with precision, but some basic patterns are clear enough to offer some guidance.

Tropical storms like Irene rarely hit this region, and the spring flooding was caused by an unusual mix of rains, spring thaw, and abundant snowpack. Such events are rare, but there are several good reasons to expect what we now call "extreme" precipitation to become more common in the future than it has been in the last century.

Climate models and weather records show that there is a trend embedded in our recent precipitation patterns that would be likely to continue if, as the weight of evidence suggests, it is at least partially due to global warming. If it does continue, then floods are likely to become increasingly common and powerful in this region.

Here's what daily weather records from Dannemora, NY, and Cornwall, VT, tell us about the magnitudes of large local rainfall events during the last century (below).

The blue dots on these charts represent single-day rainfall events between 1908 and 2010 that dropped 2 inches or more of precipitation. Reading from left to right shows that the wettest storms tend to crowd closer to the recent end of the time scale. In other words, our wettest storms have been getting wetter.

These data are available online if you'd like to check them yourself (http://cdiac.ornl.gov/epubs/ndp/ushcn/ushcn_map_interface.html). They're limited to months when rain is more common than snow (April through November) because I was most interested in storms that could trigger immediate floods. I chose Dannemora and Cornwall because their records are longer and more complete than those of most North Country stations, but most of the other sites show a similar pattern.

The differences among these records most likely reflect the patchy nature of rainfall, like that shown on this map of Irene's rainfall from the National Weather Service (below):

The Paul Smiths area only got a 2-3 inch dump from Irene, and Whiteface registered 7.5 inches in 24 hours. But some places were 'way off the scale by comparison, especially in the steep, narrow headwater areas of the Ausable Valley. One person from Upper Jay told me that she measured 9 inches of rain that day, a resident of Keene caught 11 inches in a bucket in his driveway, and another person got 13.5 inches at Johns Brook Lodge. If those measurements are accurate, then it's small wonder that those places suffered the most severe flooding, too.

TAKE-HOME LESSON: Local rainfall and flooding can be more severe than you might expect from the average rainfall of a given storm, thanks to the lay of the land, how fast the rain falls, and how much of it falls on a particular site. So if there's a big storm coming, it's a good idea to pay attention.

Will the last century's wetting trend continue? Personally, I suspect that the answer is more likely "yes" than "no."

Higher temperatures evaporate more moisture from oceans and landscapes into the air, so common sense says that more water should fall when it rains in a warming world. Tropical storms may become more common and more waterlogged under such conditions, and seasonal runoff may increase if heavier rains fall on the typically water-soaked landscapes of spring. This line of reasoning, along with the trend of increasingly extreme rainstorms, suggests that it would be wise to plan for more floods to come even if we don't know exactly when they may happen next.

In addition, climate models that focus specifically on the North Country suggest that our annual precipitation totals are likely to increase by several inches over the course of this century. You can check this out on the Climate Wizard website (http://www.climatewizard.org/), or the report on climate in the Champlain watershed that Mary Thill and I published last year for The Nature Conservancy (http://www.nature.org/idc/groups/webcontent/@web/@vermont/documents/document/prd_002936.pdf).

What can we do about such changes?

General preparedness is always a good place to start. We also experience blizzards, ice storms, landslides, forest fires, and other challenges here, and North Country folks are usually ready for just about anything that the elements throw at us.

This year's floods, however, also showed us which locations are most vulnerable to extreme spring runoff or big storms. Some of those sites came as a surprise - like that little stream channel in Keene - so let's not forget what happened and where. And when we rebuild, let's remember that our roads, bridges and buildings may some day have to withstand a repeat of 2011.

In some cases, an equally valid strategy may be to build things cheaply enough to be replaced easily. When one privately owned bridge in the Keene Valley area was washed out by the spring floods, the owners were able to rebuild it quickly because it was made of sturdy telephone poles. They just fetched the poles from where they had lodged downsteam and laid them back down on the original bridge site.

But more than anything else, the resilience, cohesiveness, and sheer gumption of our local communities will continue to be a major asset for dealing with emergencies.

TAKE-HOME LESSON: North Country folks can really pull together when things get tough.

You can see plenty of evidence of this throughout these blog posts, and here's a bit more. Last Saturday, the tiny settlement of Whallonsburg put on a spaghetti dinner and dance at the Grange to raise money for neighbors who lost their homes when the Boquet River flooded (below).

Keene already looked much better by last week, thanks to massive efforts by the entire community, Cuomo's "Labor for your Neighbor" initiative, and generous support from people outside the area (below).

And here's a final take-home message from Keene (below).

Remember, just because it's not on national TV now doesn't mean that this story is over yet. Far from it; lots of people still need help. Here are 3 suggestions for ways you can get involved:

1. Henrietta Jordan posted this comment on behalf of Keene: "The community will need lots of help recovering from the storm and rebuilding businesses and homes ravaged by flooding Please send your tax-deductible contributions to Keene Flood Recovery Fund, c/o Adirondack Community Fund, PO Box 288, Lake Placid, NY 12946. (Checks should be made payable to ACT/ Keene Flood Recovery Fund.)"

2. North Country Public Radio's site with suggestions for ways to help: http://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/hurricaneirene.html

3. Labor for Your Neighbor: http://www.governor.ny.gov/laborforyourneighbor

The Power of Moving Water

2011-09-06T16:20:00.006-04:00

Spread your arms out sideways and your hands will be roughly one meter apart. Use that span to sculpt an imaginary cube measuring one meter on each side, which would represent a cubic meter, more or less. If you could fill such a cube with water, it would weigh a metric ton.

Now imagine setting millions of those water-cubes in motion.

That's one way to get a clearer sense of why last week's floods were so destructive.

Here are photos from the Ausable Valley, taken last Saturday, which show some of what the Ausable River did when Irene's downpours forced it out of its channel.

Between Jay and Ausable Forks, the entrance to Fred's Auto Repair suggests that the river, which is now barely visible in the background, rose eight feet above the road during the storm. Notice the level of the "former record flood" from last spring, indicated in blue.

Farther down the road, you can see where water ripped up the access ramp to a steel bridge that spans the river.

Bridge closed, indeed.

The debris that still lies on top of the bridge shows that the river flowed right over it. That would have required quite a rise above the normal level, as this photo illustrates

(see Kary for scale in the photo below).

Splintered wood clogs the underside of the bridge, as well.

Amazingly, the bridge withstood that tremendous pressure.

This bridge in Ausable Forks was also overtopped

(photos below by Kary Johnson).

You can see roiling currents seemingly frozen in time by the vegetation where the river overran its banks. Photos like this one (below) can look like they were taken in the midst of a storm, though the day was virtually windless.

I walked into a grove of saplings by the side of the road where the trees were caked with weeds and trash reaching higher than my head (I'm 5' 10"" tall).

You can find similar sights right in the midst of homes and businesses, like here in Upper Jay (below). Small wonder that the flood did so much damage here.

(see the previous posts).

Somehow, people are still managing to find sparks of humor in the midst of their losses,

as the wall at Fred's Auto Repair attests (below).

But how likely is this request, "don't come back," to be fulfilled?

I'll be looking into that for a forthcoming post.

Upper Jay, six days after Irene.

2011-09-03T23:42:00.008-04:00

Six days after Irene drove the Ausable River and its tributaries over their banks, Kary and I visited the heavily hit stretch of the valley between Ausable Forks and Keene Valley.

Here's what we found in Upper Jay.

Residents of Upper Jay have been cleaning up as best they can.
The contents of people's homes lie along the roadsides in sodden heaps.

The Ausable often overflows its banks in spring, due to snowmelt and ice jams, and when it does it sometimes floods basements and covers fields and roads with several inches of water. But nobody we spoke to remembers seeing anything like this.

This shed was lifted by several feet of flood water and dropped in an adjacent field.

Farther along in the same field lies an entire house that suffered the same fate (below).

Fortunately, nobody was living in it at the time.

The same house from a distance (above), with freshly deposited river cobbles in the foreground.

Here's the foundation it came from (below).

Julie Robards showed us what happened to her store, Red Barn Antiques, and the adjacent buildings. The vegetation still leans as if blown by a gale, but it's dead calm, sunny, and muggy-hot.

"The water came up to here," she said, pointing to a prow-like, antique glass greenhouse room that had just been added a short time ago.

"I think this might have saved the place, because it seems to have split the current so it flowed around the building. It's hard to believe but only one small piece of this glass wall was broken."

"But the water was angry when it reached around to the far side of the building," she added. "It caused a lot of damage there, and even more damage inside." Around the back, friends and neighbors were helping to clean out the water-soaked rooms and merchandise. "This barn was built in back 1840, but it's never gone through such a flood before."

"This community," she said, "is just incredible."

"Things were already tough because of the economy, but this is just a disaster," Carol continued. The store was full of antiques on consignment, many of which are now ruined. "I had no flood insurance, FEMA won't cover the costs because this is a business rather than a residence, and I can't have the power restored because the line runs underground rather than on poles."

As she spoke, a friend offered to set up a generator for her.

Back out on the road, we noticed two pink flamingos and lawn chairs in front of the barn. "Those aren't just any old lawn ornaments," Carol explained.

"I'm an expert on old plastics, and there was a whole flock of antique plastic flamingos out there until the river swept them away. Those two are all that's left."

A short distance away was the home of Carol McDowell. The river had torn through her house and dropped tons of sand and gravel all over the yard. She was standing outside with her daughter, who had just found some of Carol's high school photos amid the mess.

"My husband used to keep this lawn neater than what you'd see in a magazine," she told me. "He passed away last October." She shook her head; "I suppose it's a good thing he didn't have to see this."

Carol said that she considers herself lucky because she had flood insurance. But the place is totaled, and the prospect of starting over is daunting. "I was thinking of moving closer to the rest of my family anyway, now that my husband is gone," she said. "I just didn't plan on doing it so soon."

A mile or so downstream, between the fire station and the library, a speed limit sign represents an informal flood gage. We were told that the water reached the middle of the zero on this sign.

Spared by its location just beyond the reach of last Sunday's flood, the Brookside Motor Inn has opened its doors to those in need of shelter, and is also running an impromptu food pantry.

The sign below reads, simply, "Take what you need."

Owner Marlene Prescott has been busy coordinating volunteers and donations.

"Just stop on by if you need a meal, or if you'd like to contribute food or money or labor," she said.

"We're a close community, and we help each other out."

More from the Ausable Valley to come in later posts.

One good place to look for info on ways you can help

is the North Country Public Radio website:

http://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/hurricaneirene.html

Irene devastates the Ausable Valley

2011-08-30T21:44:00.000-04:00

Former hurricane ("tropical storm") Irene did relatively little damage last Sunday near my home in Paul Smiths, here in the Adirondack mountains of upstate New York.

But the Ausable Valley is another matter entirely.

Here are some photos of what I saw when I drove down there today.

The first sign of major damage I came across was just east of Lake Placid.

A massive tangle of tree trunks, branches, and roots was jammed against the bridge below the ski jumps by the force of the swollen Ausable River.

In the town of Keene, one of the streams that feeds the Ausable jumped its banks and carved a new route for itself right through the heart of town. Sand and gravel now lies among what used to be homes and yards. The chunk of red siding in the left foreground used to be part of the fire station.

Meet The Turtle Moms

2011-06-18T01:15:00.009-04:00

Snapping turtle laying eggs beside a road in Paul Smiths, NY.

June is egg-laying time for snapping turtles here in the North Country, and on the Paul Smith's College campus and along nearby roadsides, snapper moms are wandering in search of soft sand.

When one of them finds a good site, she scoops a shallow depression with her back legs and drops a dozen or more soft, white golf balls into it.

When she's finished, she scrapes the sand back over the hole and heads back to the water, leaving her offspring to take their chances on their own.

Those chances are pretty slim, all in all. Our local foxes probably find most of those nests, judging from the abundant excavations and the papery shreds of egg shells that litter the ground like candy wrappers.

If the eggs last until August without being eaten, the hatchlings dig their way out and crawl to the nearest water body which, in our case, is Lower Saint Regis Lake. If they make it past the gulls and crows, they'll still have to face a host of predators in the lake, as well. Even the water itself can be a threat because snappers are bottom-walkers, and the babies must struggle to swim up through deep water to catch a breath. Considering the risks involved, it's amazing that any of them reach adulthood at all.

But some clearly do, and have been doing so for at least 40 million years, according to evolutionary biologists.

It hasn't been an easy trip, though. At least 2 dozen ice ages have repeatedly pushed snappers out of these parts over the last 2 or 3 million years, only letting them crawl back in for 10,000 years or so at a stretch during interglacial warm spells such as the one we're in now.

Today, there's also a new climatic problem for Chelydra serpentina. Temperature in the nest determines the sex of the embryos, and the atmosphere is warming due to our greenhouse gas emissions. By the end of this century, it could be as warm or warmer than the last interglacials ever were, and biologists suggest that such a change could skew turtle sex ratios in favor of females (many lizards and crocodilians have the opposite response to warming, producing more males).

At first, that might actually be a good thing up here in the North Country. Females are more likely than males to be hit by cars when they cross roads in search of nest sites in the sandy shoulders. Some people even swerve to hit them when they're safely off the pavement, perhaps because they're under the mistaken impression that snappers are dangerous to people or waterfowl (when defending themselves they usually stop short of actually biting you, and they don't eat birds, being mostly herbivorous). A boost in female births might therefore help to address the presumed population imbalance for a while.

Fortunately, most of us are sympathetic towards, even protective of our local turtle moms. Just the other day, an office worker overheard Kary and me talking about a recent sighting and chimed in with a heart-warming story. "I was driving near Malone when a police car in the opposite lane suddenly turned around and sped off in the direction it had just come from. 'Someone's about to get a ticket,' I thought."

Hardly. A short distance farther along, the cruiser was parked on the side of the road with lights flashing. "The officer got out, stopped traffic, and then started to nudge something in the middle of the road with his foot." It was a snapping turtle. "He finally picked it up and carried it back into the weeds where it had come from. I thought that was so cool!"

A good deed indeed, and one that reassures me about humankind in general. But please take note, if you do decide to help one of these critters across a road; don't pick it up by the tail (the weight can dislocate it), and put it down on the side of the road it was heading towards, not the one it came from (it's likely to repeat the same journey later).

Over the long term, sustained warming will mean that snapper territory may shift northwards on average, unless some mutation ends up adjusting the temperature sensitivity of their eggs. But the Adirondacks lie near the northern limit of the species' range, so it would take a long time and a massively extreme warming to drive them out of here altogether.

In light of that, I like to think that snapper moms will be doing their motherly duty around here far into the future.

And despite the damage done by our cars and climate disturbances, we can at least chalk up one favor that we've done for them as well. The latest research shows that our heat-trapping fossil carbon emissions will persist long enough to prevent ice ages from pushing the turtles out of here again for at least 130,000 years. How generous of us!

Big landslide on Little Porter Mountain

2011-06-04T10:07:00.009-04:00

New York State's largest landslide is slowly dismembering the Machold family's home. Covering 82 acres of a steep, wooded slope on the western flank of Keene Valley, it isn't exactly what you might expect if you have rockfalls or avalanches in mind; it moves only a few inches per day. But that doesn't mean it's any less destructive to structures sitting on it or anything else, trees included, that lies in its ponderous path. Just a few months ago, the Machold house was valued at $600,000; now it's worthless. So are several other residences nearby which are also being abandoned.

The Machold home, with the ground slipping off to the lower right.

Tree roots stretching as the forest floor pulls apart.

A tree trunk splits as the top of the slide drops away downhill.

NYS Museum geologist Andrew Kozlowski gave a presentation about the new slide at Keene Central School a few days ago, partly as a public service to the kids who live in the immediate vicinity of this thing, but also to offer a forum to curious citizens and the press. Here are some gleanings.

This spring's combination of copious snowmelt and wet weather was the primary trigger for the "rotational slump" on Little Porter Mountain, perhaps in part by adding weight to the sloping blanket of loose soils and debris, but most likely by mobilizing the underlying sediments. Nobody knows exactly what lies between the surface and bedrock there, but Kozlowski guesses that it's crumbly sand in old beach deposits left over from the end of the last ice age when the valley was a deep glacial lake. When water soaks into the spaces between sand grains, they can lose their grip on each other and roll around like tiny ball bearings under the tug of gravity.

As the slide draws this boulder aside, it reveals the underlying groundwater that may be setting the slope in motion.

Nobody knows yet how far the slide will move or when it will stop. But now that experts are looking closely at it we find that it's actually not as unusual as one might think. Step-like patterns in the surface contours tell of earlier flows that broke the terrain into blocks and sent them drifting downhill like rafts on a sluggish flood. Judging from the century-scale age of trees growing on it (which also hid the evidence of instability from casual view until now), the slope may have been moving off and on since the proglacial lake drained away thousands of years ago.

The foot of the slide rolling through the woods downslope like a slow-motion tsunami...

... rolling over any trees in its path.

Many of us in the audience that day wondered what this means for the rest of the rugged Adirondack landscape. Are other sites at risk? "Yes," was the short answer we got, and I imagined realtors and homeowners all over the Park drawing a sharp breath. Nobody's been watching for this sort of thing as pricy houses are built on high slopes with nice views, and it will take detailed region-wide mapping to reveal the trouble spots. Kozlowski suggests that he best tool for the job would be an aerial survey done with LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging), which apparently costs roughly $150K per county. But at this early stage in the story, it's anybody's guess as to whether it will be carried out or who's going to pay for it.

The residences now perched along the upper rim of the Porter slide - or riding it downhill - were part of Adrian's Acres, a collection of high-end, thoughtfully designed properties developed by Adrian Edmonds who passed away recently at age 96. I met him at his home in Keene Valley several years ago with another topic in mind; I wanted to learn about the old days when his family originally settled next to one of the Cascade Lakes, back two centuries ago when people around here called it "Edmonds Pond." Though I came to his door as a nosy stranger, he was very gracious, warm-hearted, and generous with his time and knowledge despite the recent loss of his wife. Now I can't help feeling grateful that he didn't have to watch this happen. He seemed to be very proud of Adrian's Acres, and I suspect this spring's sudden destruction might have broken his heart.

Adrian Edmonds, 1909-2005.

For more information, here's a link to a piece that aired recently on North Country Public Radio (http://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/story/17764/20110602/keene-valley-slide-accelerating-driven-by-rain).

Rising waters in the North Country

2011-04-29T22:55:00.000-04:00

Rising river engulfs a boardwalk and starts to spill over into public parking lot, downtown Saranac Lake, NY. Several streets were closed to traffic, many basements were flooded, and some homes and businesses had to be evacuated.

It wasn't long ago that the news was full of stories about massive flooding in Australia, thanks to an unusual combination of La Nina rains and typhoons. Now it's our turn up here in the North Country, but for different reasons.

As best I can tell, our rivers are rising so unexpectedly and dangerously high right now because of several factors, including heavy spring rains and a thick snow cover that persisted through most of a winter without major warm spells that would normally have removed some of the stored water before the main runoff pulse began. Two unlucky combinations of weather conditions on opposite sides of the planet, within just a few months of each other.

None of this can be tied directly to global warming, but these problems do make me realize that even relatively small or gradual climatic changes can have dramatic effects if they push runoff beyond whatever threshold engineers and hydrologists originally used in designing local roads, culverts, dams, shoreline setbacks, and such.

The stream running through Bloomingdale bog was almost too high to fit under the road when this photo was taken a week or so ago; now it's even higher.

Most climate models suggest that we'll get more precipitation overall in this part of the world during the rest of this century; not a whole lot more, just a few more inches per year on average (report posted at: http://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/regions/northamerica/unitedstates/vermont/howwework/champlain_climate_report_5_2010-2.pdf). But if this kind of small change eventually pushes high-water marks above what we've previously assumed was "as high as it will ever get," then the extra nudge could presumably turn an otherwise routine spring surge or summer gully-washer into a real problem, overtopping roads and bridges and dams over large areas all at once.

Back-country road blocked by rising waters, stranding several homes on the other side of the swollen river.

On the other hand, warmer winters in coming decades might also bring more frequent mid-season thaws on average, thus releasing snowmelt into groundwater and streams little by little over several months rather than turning it all loose at once, as seems to be happening now. Not the best situation for the ski industry, but perhaps a bit easier on people living near large water bodies.

In any case, these big North Country floods of April, 2011, will surely go down in local history as memorable - and hopefully not as the New Normal!

A friend's home near Bloomingdale, NY, with the river already covering the yard about a week ago. They've recently had to evacuate the house altogether as the water continues to rise.

Happy birthday to "Deep Future"

2011-03-15T13:01:00.000-04:00

"Deep Future" was officially released today by Thomas Dunne Books (details at http://www.curtstager.com/). Here's what it looks like in the United States (above), but its cover has also morphed into different species in other places around the world.

For example, in Canada (Harper Collins) it looks like this:

And downunder in Australia or New Zealand (Scribe), it looks like this...

...which makes sense because the Earth in this view has been turned to reveal Australia and New Zealand in all their glory.

In any case, I hope you like it.

But if not, then I hope that you'll at least be willing to bury the thing rather than burning it.

Burying books sequesters carbon.

The Sun Of Big Mama Star

2011-03-06T21:07:00.002-05:00

I've been thinking a lot about atoms lately, trying to wrap my feelings around some things that my head has known for years. It's easy to say that we're made of inconceivably tiny particles, but to really grasp that concept and truly feel it from one's innards is difficult. I can only do it for fleeting moments before the emotional awareness overwhelms me and melts away like a mirage, leaving me talking about something that I don't really "believe" any more than I believe in demons or faeries. I suppose our brains aren't built to handle such strange, abstract concepts easily, being more suited to dealing with things we can more readily sense and deal with in the here and now of our daily lives.

But just the other day my atomic musings triggered a new realization, one that pushed my imagination outward from the realm of the invisibly small to the incredibly huge.

It was one of those gloriously cloudless, crisp winter days in the Adirondacks, and I was skiing across the open powdery snow-plains of a local marsh. The mid-day sun was dazzling, and as its light rebounded from the bright white flatness between the sparsely scattered silhouettes of larch and spruce saplings, only the clean chill of the air reminded me that this wasn't some sandy summer beach or desert but a frozen wetland.

I felt the rays warming my face, and imagined them hurtling across 93 million miles of space to reach me from the surface of the sun. The tingling reminded me that heat makes atoms vibrate faster than usual, and that led me back to my musings about those tiny little things. This time, however, my mind also made a connection between the atoms in my skin and the sun itself.

In my Evolution course, I tell my students that Joni Mitchell's phrase "we are stardust" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aOGnVKWbwc) is literally true, that the atoms in our bodies arose from fusion reactions in the guts of stars. I'm not an astrophysicist, though, and until now I hadn't dug very deeply into the details of stellar evolution. But something about that claim stopped me in my (ski) tracks.

I had been giving my students the impression that our atoms originally came from the sun. I suddenly realized that this is wrong. The sun is too small to produce anything but the smallest elements in its fiery belly. So where did the carbon and iron atoms in my flesh and blood come from? Or the oxygen in those sparkling snow crystals, or the silicon in the bedrock hidden beneath them? Relatively heavy elements such as these form in much larger stars, but there's no such giant anywhere near enough to have spawned our stardust.

As luck would have it, I got my answer that evening when scientist-educator Michio Kaku described stellar evolution on a TV documentary. (See, even science profs watch TV, and it's not all bad!). I later found more of the same information online and in notes I've taken from speakers over the years but never thought much about until now.

My confusion was well-founded; the sun really is much too small to be the ultimate source of all Earthly atoms. Kaku put it succinctly thus - "the sun is our step-mother," not our "real" mother. He also confirmed that most of our atoms had to have formed in a star that was thousands of times larger than the sun, and only when such a mega-star grew old and died in a spectacular "super-nova" explosion.

So where is our real Big Mama Star? Well - she's dead. And that's a good thing as far as we're concerned, because many of the atoms in our bodies wouldn't exist yet if she were still alive.

Big Mama Star lived and died before the sun was born, billions of years ago. Imagine that, a gigantic star was here before the sun.

When she finaly exploded, she gave birth to a vast and diverse spray of atoms that drifted about as a cloudy-looking nebula until gravity gradually pulled many of them back together into clumps. One of those globs drew in so much matter that it became dense enough to burst into a flaming ball of nuclear fusion reactions, and it's still burning today with enough blinding energy output to reach across millions of miles and drive photosynthesis and, indirectly, almost all life on this Earth - which itself is another gift delivered to us through the ages from Big Mama, a floating anchor to live on and to borrow the stuff of our bodies from.

To put this into more immediate human terms, the sun is Big Mama's son, as well as a life-supporting foster care-giver to us.

Should we therefore spell it "Here comes the SON?"

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6tV11acSRk)

Foxy find feels fine, if fairly fishy

2011-02-19T20:50:00.007-05:00

It's rare that a story about dusty old bones comes across as heartwarming, but when I heard on NPR's All Things Considered that a red fox skeleton found in a 16-17,000 year old grave site in Jordan may have been a pet, it hit me square in the soft spot. (http://www.npr.org/2011/02/19/133898499/mans-first-best-friend-might-have-been-a-fox)

Of course, I was primed for that hit. In recent months, Kary and I have gained a red fox "friend" who often stops by around dinnertime to scrounge the day's leftover sunflower seeds from under the bird feeder. This also places him/her right under our dining room window, and we let ourselves pretend that "Foxy" comes around in order to enjoy our company and not just to get the free chow. Of course, we don't really let our little game fool us, and we know that we're just one particularly safe and bountiful stop along this animal's long nightly trap-line, which is marked most mornings by fresh paw-prints in the latest dustings of snow.

In like manner, the bit about the Jordanian fox bones representing a pet may also be nothing more than wishful thinking on the part of the archaeologists who found them and the journalists who are passing the tale around the media-verse.

Apparently, dog skeletons also began to show up with human remains in burial sites several thousand years after this particular fox-human burial took place, so the hypothesis is reasonable in theory. However, foxes are more difficult to turn into pets than wolves are because, although wolves are social pack animals, foxes are solitary and a lot more skittish around people. Some experts do speculate that certain early dog breeds might have descended from foxes, but domestic dogs primarily came from wolf stock.

According an article in Archnews (http://www.archnews.co.uk/featured/5192-oldest-cemetery-in-the-middle-east-found.html?print), the pet idea is more strongly documented for dogs in Jordanian excavations that are several thousand years younger. For example, one woman's skeleton was found with its hand on the bones of a puppy; in another grave, three people were buried with two dogs.

In the case of this fox burial, though, a closer look at the details makes the pet claim seem like more of a stretch, though still plausible. There were actually two main finds of interest at the same site. In one spot, a fox's upper arm bone and ochre-painted skull were found in a human grave along with various bones from aurochs-cattle, deer, gazelle, and tortoises. To me, that sounds more like a sign of ritual than clear evidence of an owner-pet relationship.

In another nearby grave, according to the Archnews story, was "...the nearly complete skeleton of a red fox, missing its skull and right upper arm bone, suggesting that portions of a single fox had been moved from one grave to another in prehistoric times." A deer antler and wild goat horn core were also present along with artifacts and several other animal bones. Supposedly, a fox was killed and buried with its owner, and then “...the grave was reopened for some reason and the human’s body was moved. But because the link between the fox and the human had been significant, the fox was moved as well.”

Much as I'd like to believe the pet idea, this just didn't convince me. It seems perfectly reasonable to conclude from this evidence that the same fox's bones appear in two adjacent graves, but where's the solid evidence for it being a pet? Why couldn't it have been a totem, for example, representing a spiritual connection to foxes in general rather than a personal bond with that individual critter?

This led me to the source article that spawned all of this, which was recently published online by PlosOne under the title :"A Unique Human-Fox Burial from a Pre-Natufian Cemetery in the Levant (Jordan)." (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0015815).

In it I found that the pet claim was indeed made explicitly by the authors, who are based at Cambridge and Toronto. But they presented it as a suggestion only, and also noted that when fox jaw bones are found in human graves of younger ages, they're typically considered to be ritual objects. The most unusual things about this older fox find are (1) that it's older, in fact the oldest fox-human find yet, and (2) the whole animal went into the ground, rather than just a piece or two.

For those of you who knew about this story beforehand and enjoyed it mainly for the pet aspect (as in "Foxes Maybe Our First Best Friends"), my apologies for poking at it like this. To try to make up for that, here is some far more reliable evidence that foxes can indeed sometimes live among us as pets:

It's certainly possible that, 16-17,000 years ago, a Jordanian hunter-gatherer had such a close bond with a fox that they both ended up in a grave together. But as much as I'd like to believe that the relationship was as close as the ones in these photos seem to be, I want better evidence of it first.

For all we know, when Thag finally met his maker, the rest of the family may have said "Sorry to see the Old Man go, but at least now we can finally get rid of that pesky old wild fox that he's been leaving his nicest leftovers out in the bushes for, rather than giving them to us! And I think I know just the place to put it, too..."

"On the Origin of Feces," or Do Scientists Have a (Sick) Sense of Humor?

2011-01-29T18:15:00.004-05:00

Well, judging from the last post, I suppose the answer to this question is probably moot (at least the "sick" part). But I hope you'll indulge me nonetheless for another brief probe into the murky depths of scientific so-called humor, using the sordid story of my own personal (d)evolution as a guiding thread before I move on to other topics in later posts.

Scientists have a reputation among the general public for being strictly rational, fact-obsessed, and devoid of feeling (apart from the "mad" varieties who cackle gleefully as they plan to destroy the world, etc.). But if you hang out with enough of them for long enough, you'll find quite a bit of humor bubbling up here and there like unexpected springs in a desert. Much of it, of course, is distinctly nerdy in flavor, often salty as well, and even more often eccentric enough to reinforce the "mad" characterization of our kind.

One of the classic figures in this regard is satirical musician/science-math guy Tom Lehrer. Perhaps my favorite piece of his is "The Elements," a fast-paced run-down of the first 102 elements on the periodic table set to a Gilbert and Sullivan melody. (listen here, if you dare: http://www.archive.org/details/elements_0).

I would KILL to be able to perform this myself, but even after listening to Lehrer's recordings for the last 4 decades I still can't fully wrap my brain around it. Even so, I suppose I can attribute at least some of my own twisted psyche to having imprinted on this crazed genius at an early age.

During my college years at Bowdoin, my fellow students and I were occasionally stunned to realize that our science profs were at least semi-human enough to attempt humor in front of the class. My anatomy professor, the late Jim Moulton, once shocked us by bursting into song as a way of illustrating the history of vertebrate evolution, singing about Amphioxus (a primitive marine vertebrate, pictured here) to the tune of "It's a Long Way To Tipperary:"

"It's a long way from Amphioxus. It's a long way to us.
It's a long way from Amphioxus to the meanest human cuss.
Well, it's goodbye to fins and gill slits, and it's welcome lungs and hair!
It's a long, long way from Amphioxus, but we all came from there."

(a YouTube version here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNoHBU1He1o )

Geology professor Art Hussey used to spice up his lectures by punning on geological terms ("Don't take it for granite.") and occasionally delving into the raunchy side (typically in reference to minerals with such choice names as "virginite," pictured here).

One of our favorite geo-tales from "Huss" was about two paleontologists who lost their long-standing friendship when one of them named a newly discovered fossil creature after his buddy-colleague. The tiny marine snail was found attached to a fossil crinoid (a kind of stalked starfish), and it later transpired that such snails are indeed typically found with crinoids, usually attached to... the place where, um, waste is excreted. One can quickly deduce what the snail's diet probably was. Sadly, the fellow for whom the poop-eating snail was named refused to believe that his former friend hadn't done it on purpose, and never forgave him for it.

As a graduate teaching assistant at Duke, I watched master teacher and biomechanics guru Steve Vogel use vivid imagery to get otherwise abstract scientific points across to his undergrad non-major science classes.

One particularly memorable explanation had to do with "positive feedback loops," in which a process makes itself more and more extreme the longer it continues (a key concept in biology and also in climate change; for example, warming thaws permafrost which releases more methane which causes more warming, etc.). I'll paraphrase him here.

"Imagine you're in bed, naked, with the partner of your dreams," he'd say. Nodding heads invariably jerked to attention at that. "The room is chilly, but you've both got an electric blanket over you. However, in the distractions of the moment, you didn't notice that the control mechanisms for your individual blankets have been switched."

More giggles. "As you feel the chill, you turn up the thermostat on your blanket. But all that does is warm your partner up, thanks to the switch. They feel too warm and turn their own thermostat down, which makes you feel even colder. Pretty soon, you're freezing while your partner is roasting. That, my friends, is how a positive feedback loop works."

While on a 3-month expedition through the South Pacific Islands in 1983, botanist John Kress used to lighten our mood by making jokes about potholes in the local tarmac that made travel a trial. "Those are dug by the Excavatia bird," he'd say. "It digs those holes in hopes of causing an accident so it can feed on unlucky tourists."

When swerving to avoid said potholes caused an overhanging arm to rip through the pricker bushes lining the road, he'd say "Ah, that was another species, 'Excavatia talon.' It places the potholes in such a way as to divert cars close to the vegetation where it lurks, ready to reach out and snag pieces of arm with its claws."

And whenever I'm feeling queasy at sea, I think of my friend and fellow Dukie, oceanographer Larry "Caboom" Cahoon, who used gallows humor on any students foolish enough to show up late and hung-over for one of our early-morning sampling cruises along the Carolina coast. As soon as the breeze picked up and the sea started turning rough, he'd sidle up close to the greenest-looking miscreant and hold forth.

"So, listen up," he'd say to all within earshot. "Here's today's physiology lecture. There are three stages of seasickness. Stage one is when you're afraid you're going to die. That's apparently where some of you are at right about now. But don't worry, losing a few cookies is no big deal."

By that, he meant that things were only going to get worse from there on out, as he'd then proceed to explain in his usual deadpan fashion.

"Before too long, you'll probably move on to stage two, which is when you KNOW you're going to die. But that's nothing. Just wait until you finally reach stage three, which is when you're going to WANT to die!"

With all this exposure to the twisted side of science, I suppose it's no surprise that I've been terminally affected by it. During grad school, though, it led me to the greatest heights (or depths) when my pal/colleague Kurt Haberyan published a paper describing what appeared to be the fossilized dropping of copepods (tiny, shrimp-like plankton animals) in a billion-year-old rock deposit. He and his advisor got the discovery into print in a major journal because it seemed to represent some of the earliest signs of animal life ever found.

Some reviewers, however, were skeptical because nobody had ever found fossils of copepods themselves from rocks of that age. "He must have misidentified the pellets," they claimed, "because copepods hadn't evolved yet."

In a flash of inspiration, I experienced my first "eureka moment" as a budding scientist. The skeptics had completely missed the most important aspect of Haberyan's discovery. By finding copepod pellets that pre-dated the origin of copepods, my friend had demonstrated something that would revolutionize evolutionary biology.

Scribbling feverishly, I penned what would later become a short article in the Journal of Irreproducible Results (the very existence of which was a testament to the secret depravity of scientists), under the title "The Origin of Feces." Its thesis (no almost-pun intended) was that the evidence should be taken at face value; clearly, feces evolved before animals did.

It made sense then and, to my continuing horror, it still does. See if you can disprove it. If you can, I'll eat a copepod pellet.

Here are the basics. Feces evolved in the organic, bacteria-rich, primordial ooze at the bottom of the sea; that's why they look and smell as they do. Animal bodies evolved later as shelters, means of transport, and nutrition-collecting mechanisms that pass resources down into the intestinal breeding grounds from which fecal progeny continually emerge. Sewer systems which eventually drain into the oceans are actually migration routes along which young feces seek to return to their ancestral home. Genes are merely the blueprints with which feces construct more host-bodies for themselves. The primacy of feces over bodies is perhaps most clearly illustrated when an animal is in deadly, terrifying danger. At such times, notice what often happens at the rear end of the animal, as the small, brown residents slip quickly and quietly out in an effort to escape...

OK, I know it's over the edge, and what little reputation as a serious scientist that I may have had before has surely been demolished now by this posting. Just remember that I was merely a young, naive grad student at the time, not the all-knowing paragon of professional respectability that I am today.

But there's another reason why I'm confessing this Origin of Feces thing to you-all here. I think it's a potentially useful teaching tool, not unlike the Flying Spaghetti Monster (Bless His noodly appendages, and learn more about Him at http://www.venganza.org/ ). I sometimes use both of them in my classes now that I'm all grown up and can inflict sick science-humor on my own crops of hapless college students.

Like the "F.S.M.," my older but far less famous "O.O.F." hypothesis illustrates an important concept, that just because an idea fits a given array of facts doesn't necessarily mean that it's correct. That's the problem with most arguments in support of so-called "intelligent design" or climate denial, in which an incomplete set of data is presented and may even seem to make some sense when strung together in a certain way. But it doesn't really prove the point that the creationist/denier is trying to make.

It's also a reminder to scientists and their supporters that seemingly loony ideas are not always totally irrational or baseless, and that a single array of reputable facts may sometimes yield different yet more or less reasonable interpretations among people who have different worldviews.

So don't worry. I don't really believe in the FSM, and most certainly not in The Origin of Feces.

No, really.

I mean, it simply can't be true because... um, well, because...

Hmmmm.

"Always look on the BRIGHT side of... global warming."

2011-01-15T16:36:00.006-05:00

The ironic closing song from the Monty Python movie, Life of Brian ("Always Look On the Bright Side of Life"), came to mind after a friend passed this news along. According to a story in the Daily Mail, dawn came two days early to a coastal settlement in Greenland this winter.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1346936/The-sun-rises-days-early-Greenland-sparking-fears-climate-change-accelerating.html#ixzz1B1XeKod5

Because of the high latitude there, the sun doesn't rise over the horizon in mid-winter, causing a weeks-long "midday moon/gloom" as opposed to a "midnight sun" in summer. Normally, the residents of Ilulissat watch it re-appear over the eastern horizon on January 13. But, according to the Daily Mail, the sun showed its face two days earlier than expected last week.

Is global warming making days longer?

Ilulissat, western Greenland.

Well, assuming that the report is accurate (I'll assume here that it is), then the answer is a qualified "yes." In Ilulissat, anyway.

The best-sounding explanation seems to be related to local geography. Ilulissat lies on the edge of Greenland between the sea and the western flank of the mile-or-more-thick inland ice sheet. Because the downward-sloping margins of the gigantic ice slab lie low enough to dip below the freezing point in spring/summer/fall, and because of the ongoing warming trend, it stands to reason that the surface of the ice may have dropped somewhat. That, in turn, might expose the horizon-hugging sun a bit earlier in January.

Again, I don't know if the story is even true. The reader-comments below the online story certainly do hurl a torrent of abuse at it, but that's sadly typical of any global warming story these days.

OK, I admit it. I WANT it to be true. Even though it suggests that massive environmental changes are afoot, this story is kind of cool, and it seems too crazy-sounding to be fictional. And it's nice to think of finding a tiny bright spot in what can otherwise be a dark, depressing topic.

I am therefore not going to dig into it any farther online, for fear of finding out that it's a bunch of hooey. Instead, I'm going to take off my "dispassionate scientist cap" now and just run with the idea.

First thought to play with: how could such a big change happen so suddenly? The article makes it sound like it all happened within the past year.

Maybe there's a reasonable-sounding mechanism by which such a rapid change could occur. Greenland's largest outlet glacier, the Jakobshavn Ice Stream, lies nearby. It's always been a major source of icebergs, and probably spawned the one that sank the Titanic. Maybe some surge in that outlet has drained enough ice to drop the surface noticeably where the sun normally appears on that particular skyline?

Jakobshavn ice stream draining the main ice sheet, with a conveyor belt of icebergs flowing from right to left. The edge of the solid stuff at the head of the ice stream has retreated inland over the years.

So with that hypothetical explanation in mind, let's say it's true. Daylight season is getting longer in Ilulissat, thanks to global warming. And in a warming future, the trend is likely to continue, perhaps until all of the marginal ice is gone.

Now with the aforementioned hypothetical explanation paving the way to more speculation, let's move on to this question...

Isn't that kind of a GOOD thing, in a way?

The more ice that melts, the more sun they get in Ilulissat (and, presumably, all along the eastern and western coastlines). Longer growing seasons over time could mean more fresh produce on local dinner tables - nowadays, most veggies are imported at great cost, which puts them beyond the reach of many Greenlanders.

Wouldn't it make for shorter "Seasonal Affective Disorder" seasons, as well?   And cheaper heating and lighting bills?

On the other hand, the longer sunlit season should also add to the local heating trend, I suppose. More sunlight hitting Greenland's dark, ice-free rind of rock could produce something akin to the urban "heat island" effect that makes cities hotter than they otherwise would be, thanks to heat-absoring roads, roofs, and parking lots. And if this is true, then maybe it also holds true in Antarctica, which could be scarier. The unstable ice sheet on the West Antarctic Peninsula is being warmed especially intensely by air and ocean currents, and there's a good chance that much of it could slide off into the ocean as a result. That would raise global sea levels by several feet over several decades.

If melting has lowered skylines there as well, then maybe locally extended light-seasons could be amplifying ice losses there, too, thereby increasing the risk of a slide-off?   However, there are no "native Antarctican" towns there to have kept track of such things for us, so it's just a guess.

But this is all just speculation, of course. For all I know, the whole Ilulissat sunrise thing could be fake. If you find out that it is, DON'T TELL ME.   :)

And besides, we all know that this global warming stuff is just a bunch of propaganda anyway, right? At least, that's what the critics of the Daily Mail article tell us. So if global warming has been getting you down, just remember to take Eric Idle's advice - always look on the BRIGHT side of life...

He'll even sing it for you here, if you like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1loyjm4SOa0

Always look on the right side of life...
(Come on guys, cheer up!)
Always look on the bright side of life...
(Worse things happen at sea, you know.)
Always look on the bright side of life...
(I mean - what have you got to lose?)
(You know, you come from nothing - you're going back to nothing.
What have you lost? Nothing!)
Always look on the right side of life...

Where have all the cave-relatives gone?

2011-01-08T00:34:00.001-05:00

Most of us think of humans as being exceptional among Earth's organisms because, well, because we're the only ones that are so... human.

But that's not how it used to be. And some of this past year's discoveries in the world of paleo-anthropology really drive the point home.

Anatomically modern humans date back roughly 200,000 years, having arisen in Africa from "archaic" types who in turn probably arose from Homo erectus. Nowadays, we're the only living members of our genus and species, which makes it especially easy to focus on our uniqueness. Such alone-ness also feeds into mistaken ideas that evolution is a linear process with the singular aim of producing modern humans like ourselves.

But for most of our existence, we had company, and plenty of it.

Neanderthals split somewhat from our direct lineage about half a million years ago, but they continued to share Europe and the Middle East with our forebears until about 30,000 years ago, and according to DNA analyses published in 2010 by a team headed by Ed Green of UC Santa Cruz, they also shared in more intimate ways. As this web article explains, they also interbred with our ancestors. (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/05/100506-science-neanderthals-humans-mated-interbred-dna-gene)

A Neanderthal-female reconstruction based on both fossil anatomy and DNA. Photograph by Joe McNally, National Geographic.

Strictly speaking, Neanderthals and our direct ancestors were therefore members of a single species, representing two slightly different branches of the same family tree. In other words, they were "people," too; or maybe "people-cousins" is a better term to use. Either way, we lost them about 30,000 years ago, for reasons that are as yet unknown.

And then there were the human-like, Neanderthal-like "Denisovans," whose DNA was recently coaxed from a 30-50,000 year old finger bone that was found along with a molar in Denisova cave, southern Siberia. We don't know much about them yet other than that they (or at least their fingers and molars) lived in southern Asia, and that much of their genetic heritage lives on among Papuans and Aboriginal Australians. ( http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=new-hominin-species )

Apparently, the ancestors of today's Melanesians interbred with Denisovan people-cousins in Asia on their way to New Guinea, Australia, and Pacific islands farther eastward. In other words, the Denisovans were enough like us to bear and/or produce viable human children. But now they're gone, too.

The following chart suggests that a walk in the woods or steppes of Europe or Asia 40,000 years ago could have been a wildly multicultural experience. Back then, you could have encountered all sorts of "regular" folks, plus Neanderthals and Denisovans (and, as noted on the chart, the pint-sized Homo floresiensis "hobbits," as well, though we don't have the full genetic scoop on them yet).

http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://resources1.news.com.au/images/2010/12/23/1225975/325457-denisovans2.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/meet-the-denisovans-indigenous-australias-siberian-kin/story-e6frg8y6-1225975312349&usg=__hLf3KXpd_u4pnnPL2Y3e27J8HWI=&h=366&w=650&sz=70&hl=en&start=2&sig2=qI9RS7M_sSyfoADl4hVC1Q&zoom=1&um=1&itbs=1&tbnid=A09DlAuSvxL1WM:&tbnh=77&tbnw=137&prev=/images%3Fq%3Ddenisovans%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN%26tbs%3Disch:1&ei=6eknTfDOOIL98Aal4onGDQ

This is pretty cool stuff, prime material for daydreaming about stone artifacts and bones and digs and Indiana Jones hats.

But when I stop and really think about it, it's more than that.

Don't simply think of them as having disappeared tens of thousands of years ago, or you'll fall into the usual trap of assuming that they were just half-baked evolutionary dead-ends that are naturally "supposed" to be extinct. Think instead of the whole half-million-year span of our mutual co-existences, and you'll notice that they lasted quite a long time alongside us and then vanished relatively recently. If that time period were shrunk down to the span of a single day, our people-cousins would have disappeared just an hour or two ago after spending all day and most of the night with us.

From this paleo perspective, it's rather odd that we're now the only form of humanity on Earth. And that realization makes it easier to take the next step and ask: what would it be like if those people-cousins were still with us today?

Have you seen any of these "Geico cave man" ads (below) on TV or YouTube? If not, look some of them up on Google and check them out. They're hilarious, but also somehow oddly troubling, as well. Sometimes I think they make us laugh so hard because they also make us uncomfortable.

The main premise of these skits is that we try hard to avoid being "politically incorrect" when discussing different ethnic groups nowadays, but we still get away with speaking of cave people as dimwitted brutes. These characters bring cave men into the present day to confront us with those negative stereotypes, and we laugh to hear them chastise us for our modern-human-chauvinist-piggery.

Entertainment and marketing techniques aside, I think it's a fantastic way to force ourselves to think of these close relatives as being the real people that they actually were.

We normally tend to think of "cave men" as non-humans, as barbarian "others," as symbols of humankind's basest instincts and behaviors...just as people have so often done to members of other racial/cultural/religious/political groups throughout history. It happens most often when people don't know each other very well on a personal basis and, of course, it's particularly hard to get to know someone who has been dead for 40,000 years.

But even so, I sometimes wonder what the modern world might be like if, in addition to the many differences that so often seem to divide and trouble us, we also had to deal with the ethics and complexities of interacting with Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Would they be subject to the same rights and expectations as the rest of us, or would we treat them as we do chimps, which have only now become our closest living relatives?

What would religion be like with people-cousins still among us? Would some neo-evangelists claim that God actually created the world for Neanderthals to hold dominion over, and then point to the environmental damage that we "regular" humans cause as a sign that we're just the lowly spawn of Satan, sent to desecrate the Creation?

Are the widespread and diverse legends of "the little people," elves, dwarves, leprechauns, and such actually ancient folk memories of life among former relatives?

And the darkest question of all - did we kill them all off?

I don't have answers to these questions, though that's not surprising. It's tough to deal with them intellectually while navigating such great depths of time and mystery, and it's also difficult emotionally to fully acknowledge that we've lost entire branches of humanity in the not-so-distant past.

Sometimes when I do grasp that absence, the world suddenly seems emptier and un-naturally quiet, as if I've fallen asleep in the midst of a party and then woken up to find most of my friends gone. At other times, placing our people-cousins back onto the scale of human diversity where they belong seems to shrink the differences that we use to distinguish today's various ethnic/cultural groups from one another.

Above all, I just enjoying thinking about this stuff.

How about you, my fellow people-cousin?

Hyenas should live in Paris

2011-01-01T19:49:00.004-05:00

I just came across an interesting paper in Quaternary Science Reviews that also got some international press coverage when it came out last September, though I missed it at the time (this article is from Wired: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/what-killed-europes-hyenas/)

The main finding of the study was that spotted hyenas, the giggling hunter/scavengers that we normally think of as living in tropical Africa, also lived in much of Europe for the last million years or more, and they only vanished from those former haunts around the end of the last ice age when the mammoths and wooly rhinos that they coexisted with also died out. Their European range stretched from Spain to the Urals, meaning that they did well in seasonally chilly environments as well as in hot ones. In other words, hyenas "should" still live in Europe.

Photo here by Silvain de Munck; Original article = Varela, S., Lobo, J., Rodríguez, J., & Batra, P. 2010. Were the Late Pleistocene climatic changes responsible for the disappearance of the European spotted hyena populations? Hindcasting a species geographic distribution across time. Quaternary Science Reviews, 29: 2027-2035

Two things come to mind, the first one being that this is just one more example of humans being implicated in mass extinctions. Some scientists still argue that the charismatic "ice age" mammals must have died out because of climate change, but as I mentioned in an earlier post and as these authors clearly demonstrate, the weight of evidence strongly suggests otherwise. If the end of the last ice age killed off Europe's hyenas, then how come they lasted at least a million years under similar conditions, and why do they still live in tropical Africa today?

But the second realization may be more important for modern times. As the authors point out, we tend to associate species with particular environments on the basis of where we find them today, and as we try to anticipate the effects of future climate change on animals and plants we may be misled if we forget that today's home ranges are not normal, either.

Human activity has radically re-sculpted the distributions of countless species in recent centuries to millennia, so how can we be sure where species really COULD live if given the opportunity? Are some species actually more geographically adaptable than we think and, if so, which ones?

We run into this same kind of problem when some people claim that global warming will allow malaria to invade North America - without realizing that it's actually already native to this continent but has been extirpated by massive mosquito-control efforts (pesticides, window screens, etc.).

We also encounter it when some people present computerized predictions about the effects of future warming on North America trees and birds, such as the much-cited, interactive atlases offered online by the USDA Forest Service (http://www.nrs.fs.fed.us/atlas/). Here, for example, is where sugar maples live today (left) and where they might prefer to live in a warmer future (right).

Such projections can seem impressive because they're based on "the latest super-computer models" and they make colorful, detailed maps of where sugar maples or loons supposedly may or may not exist in a warmer future. But they all suffer from a core problem that's difficult to remedy in a world that's so heavily human-impacted; the supposed "normal" ranges are largely based on today's patchwork remnant of former ranges that don't necessarily reflect where species would live if our forebears hadn't shot/lumbered/burned/infected so many of their ancestors.

In the long run, the only thing we can be sure of in this regard is that future climates will differ from those of today (mostly being warmer than now for the next tens of thousands of years), and that human activity will continue to play a hugely powerful role in determining what lives where on the Future Earth.

Welcome, for better or for worse, to the "Anthropocene" - the Age of Humans.

And "Vive la hyène!"

Green Nukes: Saviors or Charlatans?

2010-12-27T15:33:00.002-05:00

As we struggle to deal with greenhouse gas pollution, it's easy to treat the search for alternative fuels as a secondary issue, as a way to resist global warming, ocean acidification, and such.

But I see it differently. I think we need to do it ASAP for lots of reasons that are even more pressing than global warming, because we're going to run out of cheap oil and coal in the relatively near future. When that happens, the consequences for us, our descendants, and the environments we live in could be devastating, potentially escalating rapidly from frustrating inconvenience to a cause of increased poverty, famine, social unrest, ecological degradation, and/or war. Reducing climatic impacts is a great side benefit to this important issue, but even those who deny a human role in climate change can get behind the search for lucrative new energy sources.

At the moment, at least as much governmental-scale attention also seems to focus on reducing energy usage, mainly by trying to make it too expensive to use as we do now. But there's much political resistance to that idea, and although I worry about climate change I think that trying to use economics to artifically choke off fossil fuel consumption is short-sighted and will harm too many people who live at or below the poverty line.

Some say that rich nations could avoid that pitfall by subsidizing less wealthy nations for the increased costs, but I seriously doubt that it can be done without millions of innocent, struggling folks falling through the cracks. What are we going to do; simply send millions of compensatory dollars to some "wonderful" government head like Robert Mugabe to disseminate fairly among all impoverished Zimbabweans, then watch him use it to fill his pockets and those of his supporters? And what about the impoverished folks who happen to live in the rich nations - how will they all be found, evaluated, and compensated? And what about the resultant inflation in the prices of fertilizers, plastics, or anything that needs to be imported from another country, not to mention the fuel costs themselves... anyway, you get the picture.

As far as I can see, the only way to treat the whole political, social, and economic spectrum of humanity fairly, effectively, and with a minimum of controversy is for a new generation of sustainable, cheap, non-carbon fuels to come on line soon and naturally replace the fossil stuff.

This is where "green nukes" come in.

The only environmental action I ever took in college was protesting the use of nuclear power plants in New England. My uncle, aunt, and cousins stayed with my family as refugees of the Three Mile Island accident. And I remember being told to avoid reindeer meat in the grocery stores when I lived in Sweden because the free-range commercial herd was contaminated with Chernobyl fallout. Not surprisingly, the first word that arises in my mind when I hear the words "nuclear power" is "no," as in "no nukes."

Imagine my shock when arch-environmentalist Bill McKibben recently began to tout nuclear power as an energy source that emits no greenhouse gases. What? Has he drunk so much of the global warming Koolaid that he's now talked himself into making a pact with THE DEVIL????

But now I'm starting to come around, too, thanks mainly to my geologist friend David Franzi. We were exploring the Altona Flatrock in the northeastern Adirondacks this past summer, looking for wetlands that might contain long climatic records in their underlying peat and mud deposits. In the course of conversation, he mentioned a new kind of nuke that lacks most of the problems that have made "regular" nukes so objectionable.

They're called "thorium reactors." Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be much easly readable info about them on the web yet; most of the items online are too full of nuclear/engineering jargon to be decipherable by non-experts. But the gist of the topic sounds almost too good to be true.

If I have this right, thorium reactors can't melt down; they shut themselves down naturally if they get too hot. They produce little or no waste, and what waste they do make breaks down fairly rapidly. Thorium is cheap and abundant, and safe enough to carry in your pocket. And thorium reactors don't make plutonium or other isotopes suitable for bombs (the one form of uranium waste product that might do so is easily diluted on site so it's unusable).

So why aren't we using them now? You might be able to guess if you put on your cynic cap and re-read the last paragraph. Apparently, it's mainly because you CAN'T make bombs from thorium reactor fuels or wastes. In other words, the main reason the regular nukes are the machines of choice, despite the risks of meltdowns, contamination, storage leaks, and terrorism, is that they enable the countries that have them to build nuclear arsenals.

Now, suddenly, the Iranian nuclear power plant controversy make more sense...

Anyhow, what if the world switched quickly to these new "green nukes?" They would make lots of cheap electricity, enough to generate yet another green fuel as well; hydrogen gas, from the electrical hydroloysis of water. No coal mining disasters or strip mines. No fuel cartels. No wars over oil fields. No fossil greenhouse gases or soot or nasty smog chemicals; the waste product from the burning of hydrogen is water.

So what are we waiting for?

From the little I know thus far, I'm cautiously optimistic, but part of me is also still suspicious. In my experience, if it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is. Unfortunately, as I said earlier, there isn't much online that's very readable, even for a nerd like myself who has some scientific background (well, I didn't do all that well in physics, either, come to think of it).

The closest thing to a good online summary that I've found so far is this one, from Wired:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/

I'm hoping that someone who reads this post and knows more about the subject will pass along some truly useful links or other info sources. If thorium reactors are really as great as they seem, then there's real HOPE for civilization and the ecosystems we depend on.

Crossing the final ecological threshold: some Arctic lakes are disappearing.

2010-12-21T16:27:00.003-05:00

My friend John Smol is a noted paleolimnologist (lake historian) at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, who has a knack for finding dramatic stories to investigate with sediment corer and microscope. But this story may top them all.

Normally, paleolimnologists reconstruct human impacts on lakes that have changed them from a clear, clean-looking condition to a silty or algae-choked state, or that make them more or less deep, acidic, or salty. Such changes occur along spectra that range from low to high intensity, but John and his colleagues have recently found a situation among certain lakes and ponds of the Canadian High Arctic that pushes them completely off the scale of relative environmental impact.

He calls it "crossing the final ecological threshold," and describes it in detail on his lab's website (http://post.queensu.ca/~pearl/Threshold.htm) and in several high-profile papers, but there's a simpler way to put it.

The shallow ponds are disappearing.

Here's a photo of what used to be one of his larger ponds at Cape Herschel on Ellesmere Island, taken from the lab website.

And here's another photo that he sent to me recently, showing some of his colleagues collecting the last water sample from a vanishing pond in the same locale.

We often hear that most of the Arctic is warming faster than the global average, that ice is retreating on the Arctic Ocean, and that melting of the Greenland ice sheet is speeding up. But the lakes, ponds, and wetlands up there are also changing, though we rarely hear about it. They're losing ice, as well, and it's making many of them more prone to evaporation and drying out.

Smol told me, "Until recently, the Ellesmere ponds remained frozen until July in some cases, and some of the deeper lakes would maintain at least a partial cover throughout the summer, with only a narrow moat of open water around the edges." Now that it's getting so much warmer up there, the ice shrinks enough seasonally to let larger and larger amounts of water evaporate from the lakes' exposed blue surfaces under the 24-hour daylight of summer. There are no major rivers feeding most of them, and they aren't replenished by groundwater because they sit in depressions in solid bedrock. As a result of the new boost in annual evaporation, many of them now lose more water than they gain. In more and more cases, that imbalance is driving them over the edge into what amounts to hydrological bankruptcy.

Is it just part of some repetitive "natural cycle?"

Being lake historians, John and his colleagues are well qualified to adress that question, which often remains unanswered when it's raised in discussions about human-driven climate change.

The sediment cores that they've collected there over the years show that these lakes have existed for thousands of years with no sign of desiccation, which would show up clearly in the sediment record. The remains of diatom algae in the cores also show that the ice cover has been shrinking for the last century or so, another change that is unique in their long history and that can only be logically attributed to warming (see the papers posted on the lab's website if you'd like more technical info in support of that claim).

How does John feel about watching his study lakes vanish before his eyes? "Depressed," he says. "But not quite despairing, either. I still rage about what's going on, but that's because I still have hope than we can stop things from getting a lot worse."

What's an "Ice Age Mammal?"

2010-12-20T14:07:00.001-05:00

Nice story on musk oxen by Natalie Angier in the NYTimes (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/14/science/14angier.html?_r=1&emc=eta1). She's an excellent and entertaining nature/science writer (check out her book, "The Canon," some time), and she does a great job of describing these shaggy brown beasts as icons of the Arctic and as resilient holdovers from the last ice age.

But that's not what stuck in my mind after I finished reading "Musk Oxen Live to Tell a Survivor's Tale."

When she described musk oxen as "holdovers from the Pleistocene," as has been so often said of them before, my admittedly strange paleo-nerd imagination did an unexpected double take. First came the intended imagery of ice sheets, mammoths, and wooly rhinos. But then the other Arctic animals mentioned in the piece - the polar bears, caribou, and such - entered the picture as well and triggered a question that I've never heard asked before.

Why do we think of hairy Arctic musk oxen as survivors of the Pleistocene epoch, and of mammoths and wooly rhinos as "ice age mammals," when virtually ALL of the mammal species alive today also lived through the last ice age and are therefore also survivors of the Pleistocene?

Polar bears, caribou, and real oxen (aurochs, anyway) were here on Earth along with musk oxen during the peak of the last ice age 20,000 years ago, and so were tropical African elephants and rhinos. So were armadillos, and beavers, and whales, and squirrels, and manatees. So were people, for that matter. Technically speaking, we too are "ice age mammals" and resilient survivors of the Pleistocene. In fact, most of the 200,000-odd year history of anatomically modern Homo sapiens took place during that geological epoch, mainly during times when mile-thick slabs of ice smothered Canada.

I suppose some of the confusion arises from how our imaginations tend to envision the distant past. When we think "ice age" we immediately think of ice sheets, but they only covered the higher latitudes and altitudes during the repeated continental glaciations of the last 2-3 million years. The tropics were still tropical, if a bit cooler and generally less rainy than they are now, and few animals went extinct as a result of climatic changes during the last glaciation. There were plenty of ice-free, even toasty places to live in back then, as there are today.

We also focus on mammoths and wooly rhinos and such because they're cool, and because they're not with us any more. But that's because our spear-toting ancestors killed them, not primarily because of climate change. Yes, some scientists do think otherwise, but they're in the minority among their peers, and their arguments just don't stand up well against the overwhelming evidence for a non-climatic cause. To put it simply and, to me at least, decisively; if climate change killed off so many of the big mammals at the end of the last ice age, then why didn't it do so when the previous dozens of ice ages ended?

Anyhow, this mini-epiphany was a nice little thrill for me. I like it when something makes me snap out of a mistaken or clouded point of view, leaving me wondering why I didn't notice this or that amazing thing before.

Hey, everybody - I'm an ice age mammal! A hold-over from the Pleistocene (as many of my students would likely attest).

And if you can read this... so are you. :)

Only 6% of scientists are Republican: Why? And so what?

2010-12-17T00:07:00.000-05:00

Interesting and thought-provoking piece by Daniel Sarewitz here in Slate, titled "Lab Politics: most scientists in this country are Democrats. And that's a problem " (LINK: http://www.slate.com/id/2277104/pagenum/all/).

According to a recent Pew poll, only 6% of U.S. scientists are Republican, while 55% are Democrat and 32% are Independent. Sarewitz ties this to the polarized nature of public discussion about climate change and considers various possible explanations for the imbalance.

What's going on here? What is it about U.S. scientists that makes them so unlikely to be Republican? Or, for that matter, what makes them so likely to be Democrats?

Although I don't have any firm answers to those questions, the documentation of such a large political imbalance among my peers helps me to better understand why my own work on climate change in the Adirondack-Champlain region generates so many politically-tinged write-in responses when it appears in the media. Many of the writers seem to be surprisingly angry, and they also tend to link my work - which I've taken great pains to conduct in a balanced, scientifically rigorous manner - to Al Gore, left-wing politics, and big-government agendas.

You can see one example of such a response to a piece that ran in the Press Republican this past summer, over in the panel to the right of the article (http://pressrepublican.com/0100_news/x2016067674/Report-studies-climate-change-in-Champlain-Valley). I'd estimate that 90% of the email responses to newspaper and radio coverage of the Champlain Climate Report were of this sort.

In light of the Pew findings, maybe it's not so surprising that these respondents seem to sense a political target when they come across someone like me.

But I wouldn't say that Republicans are necessarily more anti-science than Democrats are, either. I suspect that most of the New Age alternative-healer-types, civil-disobedient environmental radicals, extreme "natural" health product proponents, and such with whom I've also tangled in the past were Democrats rather than Republicans, but they certainly weren't very interested in hearing scientific information that challenged their beliefs, either.

In fact, scientists are usually the oddballs of society, catching it from all sides except when some party finds certain scientific info useful in support of their agenda. And right now, Republican agendas just don't seem to mesh well with climate science, perhaps in part because Democrats are seen to have made an unholy alliance with the scientists. In that view, scientists can seem like deceitful charlatans from the get-go; "how dare they claim to be impartial seekers of truth?"

This unfortunate situation sometimes makes me wish that "An Inconvenient Truth" had been produced by someone other than Al Gore. His prominence in the public sphere certainly helped it to draw widespread attention to the issue of climate change... but it also linked the whole subject to a prominent Democrat who was Clinton's VP, ran against GWBush, and so on. I suppose it may therefore have closed as many minds as it opened, at least in this country.

There was one bit from Sarewitz himself that I disagree with. I'll quote it here:

"As a first step, leaders of the scientific community should be willing to investigate and discuss the issue. They will, of course, be loath to do so because it threatens their most cherished myths of a pure science insulated from dirty partisanship. In lieu of any real effort to understand and grapple with the politics of science, we can expect calls for more "science literacy" as public confidence begins to wane. But the issue here is legitimacy, not literacy. A democratic society needs Republican scientists."

First, I disagree that "insulation of pure science from dirty partisanship" is a mere "myth." Nonpartisanship is a vitally important and absolutely attainable goal, a thing that distinguishes science from most other human behaviors. It's specifically designed to detect, dissect, and reject self-delusions, cherished but incorrect preconceptions, and biases. To claim otherwise is to hurl the worst possible insult at those of us who devote our hearts, minds, and professional lives to following that noble ideal.

Science is our best hope for probing physical reality in a sane, rigorous, repeatable, reliable manner, and to have Sarewitz call it partisan surprises me more than the attacks of politicized climate naysayers. I didn't expect it from him (I believe he has a geoscience degree), and in my personal experience it's generally just plain false. I'm extremely careful to keep politics from interfering with my scientific work, and I can confidently say the same for the colleagues I work with, at least. In my field, to do otherwise is to kiss your reputation and your profession goodbye. As responsible voting citizens, we scientists may of course aim to support a political agenda of our choosing, but our science shouldn't and, as far as I know, it usually doesn't.

I also disagree with Sarewitz' claim that we need more Republican scientists, as if a "Republican thermometer" will somehow measure a different global average temperature. Please keep politics out of it altogether. Otherwise, it's not science at all.

Global COOLING ahead.

2010-12-14T11:03:00.000-05:00

Ice and reflections on Lower Saint Regis Lake, by Kary Johnson (http://www.wildsowstudio.com/).

One of the many things I like about this beautiful photo is that it's not necessarily obvious whether it represents winter freeze-up or spring ice-out. It reminds me of the changes that are going on in the Arctic today, with the retreat of summer sea ice progressing farther and farther, year after year. But it also reminds me of what lies farther ahead of us in the deep future, when "climate whiplash" eventually flips the world into global cooling recovery mode.

The thinning and drawing back of summer ice is already revolutionizing the ecology of the Arctic Ocean (http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews). Harbor seals, orcas, and other marine species of the Atlantic and Pacific are moving north into the shrinking territories of ice-loving ringed seals, narwhals, and such,. Eventually the open summer waters of the Arctic Ocean will support vast plankton-based marine communities powered by the Arctic midnight sunlight, which is now largely blocked out by the ice ceiling, and commercial fishing industries are already gearing up to exploit them.

Today, it seems incredible that such huge changes could occur as a result of our carbon-based lifestyles; no ice at the North Pole! And it makes many of us feel uneasy, too, as if blue water at zero degrees North is somehow unnatural or inherently awful.

Well, of course it certainly can be mostly bad if you're on the losing end of things in a warming world.

But consider this; how might a cooling world look, instead? In the Big Picture, most of the recovery from our modern-day carbon emissions pulse will involve global cooling back towards more moderate temperatures over tens of thousands of years.

How will people and species of the deep future respond to the changes that will come AFTER our enormous carbon dioxide pulse begins to fade, thereby allowing northern climates to begin their long, slow cool-off? Thousands of years from now, what by then will have become ancient temperate-climate cultures and ecosystems will face an entirely new threat as the surface of the polar ocean slowly beings to re-freeze.

What will it feel like to watch ice creep over the waves, gradually choking off shipping lanes and traditional fishing grounds? Imagine living in a centuries-old settlement on an Arctic coast, watching the sea begin to solidify around your home. Will the rebirth of a polar ice cap seem like a return to the way things "should" be, or like a horrible end of days for you and the world as you know it?

In the Big Picture, perhaps it's not so much warming or cooling as change itself that we fear, especially when it comes at us on a global scale as the collective, unintended consequences of things we do in our daily lives. There's a whole lot more to the story of our carbon legacy than global warming alone!

What happens AFTER global warming?

2010-12-13T14:56:00.000-05:00

This is the central theme of my book, "Deep Future," which was largely inspired by the pioneering work of David Archer and colleagues (Archer is based at the University of Chicago). Here's a link to one the seminal (and quite technical) papers behind this revolutionary, long-term view of carbon pollution, by Archer and Brovkin (http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/reprints/archer.2008.tail_implications.pdf).

I was shocked when I first saw their computer-generated outlines of the future. Our carbon dioxide emissions will peak during the next few centuries, then pivot sharply from a "climate whiplash" phase into long-term cooling mode. And I mean truly LONG-term... the last dregs of our carbon fumes will hang around in the atmosphere for tens of thousands of years, and possibly for as long as half a million years depending on how much coal we end up burning in the next century or two.

Here's a chart based on two basic scenarios, a "moderate" total carbon emission of 1000 Gtons that we follow by switching ASAP to non-carbon fuels, and an "extreme" 5000 Gton emission scenario in which we simply continue to plow ahead as usual and end up burning through most of our coal reserves:

Up until I saw these findings, my view of the climatic future was mainly informed by charts that ran from the present until 2100 AD, as is still the case for most folks. But the deep future of our fossil fuel pollution is truly immense, long enough to interfere with future Ice Age cycles.