The swamps of Canada

Ellesmere Island would be high on the list of the Earth's most inhospitable places.

It's huge, only slightly smaller in area than Britain, and is part of the territory of Nunavut in Canada.  It is entirely above the Arctic Circle.  The record high temperature there was 15.6 C (60 F); the average high is 7 C (45 F).  The record low, on the other hand, is -47 C (-52.6 F).  It's also exceedingly dry, averaging a little over six inches of total precipitation a year.  It's no wonder that although the Inuit use some of it as summer hunting grounds, the permanent resident population stands at 144 brave souls.

Honestly, I'm a bit mystified as to why anyone lives there.

It wasn't always that way, though.  As hard as it is to fathom, Ellesmere Island used to be a swamp, back during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, a period about fifty-five million years ago during which the global average temperature was about eight degrees hotter than it is now.  The reasons it occurred are still a matter of discussion amongst climatologists, but from the chemistry and deposition of sedimentary rocks, it clearly came from a massive increase in the levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, and was accompanied by the sea levels reaching levels between three hundred and four hundred meters higher than they are today.

If that happened now, where I'm currently sitting in upstate New York would be beachfront property.

What's most interesting about the climate of Ellesmere back then is that even though it was a warm swamp, it was pretty much located where it is today (i.e. above the Arctic Circle).  But even though for a couple of months of the year it was plunged into darkness, there were still trees -- fossils of the conifers Metasequoia and Glyptostrobus have been found in regions that now host little else besides mosses and lichens.

And a paper in PLOS-One this week showed that it isn't just subtropical trees that used to live on Ellesmere -- so did some long-lost cousins of primates.

We usually think of primates as being tropical, and for good reason; most of the primate species in the world live in areas not too far from the equator.  We originated there, too, of course; the ancestral home of Homo sapiens is Kenya and Tanzania (that's all humans -- sorry, racists).  We've since expanded our territory a little, but our relative hairlessness is a good indicator that we originally came from warmer climes.

But back during the PETM, Ellesmere was a warmer clime, and paleontologists have found in sedimentary rock strata the fossils of two proto-primates, Ignacius mckennai and Ignacius dawsonae.  The genus Ignacius is part of a much larger group called the plesiadapiforms, who are all extinct but whose closest living relatives are modern primates.  Ignacius was a genus confined to the northern half of North America, and when the temperatures warmed up and the forests spread north, Ignacius followed them.

This makes these remains the northernmost primate fossils ever found.

A reconstruction of Ignacius dawsonae [Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Kristen Miller/Biodiversity Institute/University of Kansas (CC-BY 4.0)]

What is amazing to me about this is... well... everything.  That trees could flourish in a swampy environment well above the Arctic Circle.  That non-human primates ever got this far north.  And most especially, that the Earth's climate was this drastically different, only fifty-five million years ago -- a long time ago on our usual timeline, but pretty much day before yesterday on the geological scale.

Of course, this should be a cautionary tale for us cocky humans, and probably won't be.  Things can change drastically.  Have changed drastically, and will again.  What we're doing right now is spiking the atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and thus the temperature, at a far faster rate than just about anything in the geological record -- perhaps even exceeding the carbon dioxide pulse that set off the Permian-Triassic Mass Extinction.

And that cataclysm killed an estimated ninety percent of life on Earth.

All I can say is, we damn well better start paying attention, or else we'll find out that Santayana's famous quote about not learning from history also applies to not learning from prehistory.  Or, put more succinctly, that the best strategy is not "fuck around and find out."

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Listening to Cassandra

Yesterday's post, in which I skated backward through geologic time into the deep past, alluded to a few really bad times the Earth has been through.  Episodes of trap volcanism, which make the biggest volcanoes you can think of look like wet firecrackers.  Mass extinctions.  Asteroid collisions.

Bad as 2020 has been, the planet has seen worse.

A lot worse.

One awful event I didn't mention, however, is the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.  It occurred about 56 million years ago.  The gist is that over a period of maybe fifty thousand years, there was a spike of carbon dioxide injected into the atmosphere -- over 44,000 gigatons (that's 44 trillion tons) of excess carbon dioxide.  The result was a greenhouse-effect temperature surge that was on the order of five to eight degrees Celsius, on average, worldwide.

The results were catastrophic, starting with the extinction of close to half of the species of foraminifera, single-celled organisms that form the basis of the oceanic food chain and whose calcareous shells were literally dissolved away by increasingly acidic water.  Life eventually bounced back -- it always seems to -- leading to diversification amongst a number of mammalian lineages, including ungulates and carnivores.

But for a while, things were pretty unpleasant.  Unbearably hot, a choking, acrid atmosphere laden with carbon dioxide and methane, and oceans like a sweltering vinegar bath.

Scientists at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory just published a paper this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that looks at why this sudden and catastrophic event occurred.  What they found out has two conclusions, one of interest only to folks who like geology, and the other which should terrify the absolute shit out of every human being on Earth.

Let's deal with the tame one first.

In "The Seawater Carbon Inventory at the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum," the researchers, Laura Haynes and Bärbel Hönisch, found that the cause of all this global havoc was a series of volcanic eruptions in what is now the North Atlantic.  The Mid-Atlantic Ridge had only recently formed, and North America was still in the process of separating from Europe.  Today the processes at the Ridge are relatively slow and steady -- London is moving away from New York City at about 2.5 centimeters a year -- because the area at the junction is made up of thin, fragile oceanic crust that is easy to tear apart.

But back in the Paleocene Epoch, the rift was forming underneath, old, cold, thick continental crust, and when that opened up, it was sudden and catastrophic.  Upwelling lava burned through deep layers of sedimentary rocks, not only coal seams but limestone.  Carbon dioxide was pumped into the atmosphere at a phenomenal rate.  If that wasn't bad enough, disturbance of sea floor sediments caused a massive ejection of methane, which is not only toxic but is a powerful greenhouse gas in its own right.

The result: a huge ecological shift causing a mass extinction.  "If you add carbon slowly, living things can adapt," said study co-author Bärbel Hönisch, in an interview with Science Daily.  "If you do it very fast, that's a really big problem."

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Which brings us to the second conclusion.  This is the part you should really pay attention to.

The estimated rate of carbon injection that caused all this havoc was on the order of one gigaton per year.  (Estimates from the available evidence are between 0.3 and 1.7 Gt/year, so somewhere in the vicinity of one Gt/year is a ballpark average.)  The current measurements of the rate of carbon injection into today's atmosphere are around 10 Gt/year.

Ten times higher than during the catastrophic Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum event.

I don't like to keep ringing the changes on the same topic, but dammit, we need someone in power to take charge of this situation and at least make a passing attempt to do something about it.  This "Meh, we've always used fossil fuels and it's been fine" attitude is seriously imperiling the long-term habitability of the Earth.  The data from today's atmospheric scientists and climatologists are unequivocal; analogous events in the past (the colossal Permian-Triassic Extinction has also been linked to a massive carbon spike) should be an indicator of where all this could lead.

People cite "economic catastrophe" as a potential result of unhooking ourselves from fossil fuels, and use that as a justification for jamming the brakes on any move toward renewable energy.  My response is, if you want to see a fucking economic catastrophe, just keep doing what you're doing.

Economic catastrophe will be the least of our worries.

More and more, people who are warning about the ultimate outcome of climate change -- both actual scientists, and also concerned laypeople like myself -- are seeming like Cassandra, the woman in Greek mythology who was given the power of perfect foresight, but simultaneously cursed to have no one believe her.  I don't know what it will take for elected officials to start listening to today's Cassandras.  Increasingly it's seeming like the only option is voting out damn near every politician currently in office.

The problem is that the political system is propped up by corporate money, with the result that rich donors and lobbyists have a stranglehold on the country.  How to solve that piece of the problem is beyond my ability to parse.

All I can do is keep sounding the alarm, and hope that someone --anyone -- influential is finally listening.

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Author Mary Roach has a knack for picking intriguing topics.  She's written books on death (Stiff), the afterlife (Spook), sex (Bonk), and war (Grunt), each one brimming with well-researched facts, interviews with experts, and her signature sparkling humor.

In this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in Space, Roach takes us away from the sleek, idealized world of Star Trek and Star Wars, and looks at what it would really be like to take a long voyage from our own planet.  Along the way she looks at the psychological effects of being in a small spacecraft with a few other people for months or years, not to mention such practical concerns as zero-g toilets, how to keep your muscles from atrophying, and whether it would actually be fun to engage in weightless sex.

Roach's books are all wonderful, and Packing for Mars is no exception.  If, like me, you've always had a secret desire to be an astronaut, this book will give you an idea of what you'd be in for on a long interplanetary voyage.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Warming up for disaster

In today's installment of Ruminations About Science That Should Scare The Piss Out Of You, we have: the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.

This event, that occurred about 55 million years ago, is the peak of a slow climb in average global temperature that began around the time of the Cretaceous Extinction (the one the knocked out the dinosaurs), and ended with the Earth's temperature a good seven degrees warmer than they started (and an estimated eight degrees warmer than it is now).

The result was catastrophic, especially for some life forms that aren't exactly charismatic megafauna -- the foraminifera.  These are protists, related to amoebas, that are part of the "zooplankton" -- small, free-floating organisms that form a lot of the underpinning of the oceanic food web.  During the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, over a third of them went extinct, with predictable results for the rest of the life in the oceans.  The thought is that the extinction wasn't just because of the heat, but because the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused oceanic acidification, a drop in the pH of ocean water that would have caused any organisms with shells made of calcium carbonate -- like many foraminifera -- simply to dissolve.

What kicked off the warming is uncertain, and at first it was relatively slow.  But new research out of Pennsylvania State University, published last week in Nature - Geoscience, suggests that once it began, it triggered some positive feedback cycles that intensified the effect.  "What we found in records were signatures of carbon transport that indicated there were massive erosion regimes occurring on land," co-author Shelby Lyons said.  "Carbon was locked on land and during the PETM it was moved and reburied.  We were interested in seeing how much carbon dioxide that could release...  We found evidence for a feedback that occurs with rapid warming that can release even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere."

So the more carbon dioxide was dumped into the atmosphere, the more processes were initiated that dumped carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  The result: the melting of every ice sheet and glacier on the planet, and sea levels four hundred meters higher than they are now.

Meaning that here in upstate New York, I'd have beachfront property.

Coastline loss on Assateague Island, Maryland/Virginia [Image is in the Public Domain, courtesy of the National Park Service]

The pertinence of this research to today's fossil-fuel-happy society is obvious.  We're sending carbon into the atmosphere that has been sequestered underground for 250 million years, triggering warming at a phenomenal rate.  It's not that there haven't been thermal ups and downs for all of Earth's history; but the speed with which this is happening is unprecedented.

Oh, and I didn't tell you the scariest part.  The research from Penn State found that once that maximum had been reached, 55 million years ago, it took a hundred thousand years for the planet to recover.  "One lesson we can learn from this research is that carbon is not stored very well on land when the climate gets wet and hot," study co-author Katherine Freeman said.  "Today, we're pushing the system out of equilibrium and it's not going to snap back, even when we start reducing carbon dioxide emissions."

Of course, I doubt this is going to have any effect, given that the current administration here in the United States is bound and determined to ignore scientific research and hard evidence in favor of hand-waving wishful thinking and short-term expediency.  You'd think that terrifying people into recognizing the peril for the long-term habitability of the Earth would impel them to act, for their children's and grandchildren's sakes if not for people here and now.

But no.  I guess being in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry has that effect.

So that's today's research about the past that has scarier-than-hell ramifications for the present.  Me, I'm going to keep writing about this stuff in the hope that someone influential is listening.  Because if not, I'm afraid we're in for a very hot time.

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In 1983, a horrific pair of murders of fifteen-year-old girls shook the quiet countryside of Leicestershire, England.  Police investigations came up empty-handed, and in the interim, people who lived in the area were in fear that there was a psychopath in their midst.

A young geneticist from the University of Leicestershire, Alec Jeffreys, stepped up with what he said could catch the murderer -- a new (at the time) technique called DNA fingerprinting.  He was able to extract a clear DNA signature from the bodies of the victims, but without a match -- without any one else's DNA to compare it to -- there was no way to use it to catch the criminal.

The way police and geneticists teamed up to catch an insane child killer is the subject of Joseph Wambaugh's book The Blooding.  It is an Edgar Award nominee, and is impossible to put down.  This case led to the now-commonplace use of DNA fingerprinting in forensics labs -- and its first application in a criminal trial makes for fascinating reading.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Aiming for the maximum

In what can only be described as a confluence of terrible news, catastrophically strong Hurricane Florence is now taking direct aim at North Carolina at the same time as the Trump administration has announced its plans to roll back Obama-era methane emission standards.  The reasons for this are the same as the reasons they've done every other damnfool thing they've done; (1) it benefits Trump's corporate sponsors in the petroleum industry, and (2) it allows him to check off another thing that Obama accomplished that he's undone.  Methane is one of the most powerful greenhouse gases known, having a heat-trapping capacity over seventy times higher than carbon dioxide's.

Some methane does occur naturally from decomposition.  This is why thawing of the Arctic permafrost is a grave concern; the anaerobic decomposition of the thick layer of organic matter underneath is feared to create a huge methane spike.  Methane also is present in cow farts, so the beef industry shares some of the blame, here.

But increasing the allowable amount of methane leakage from oil and natural gas drilling makes no sense unless you honestly have a short-term profit über alles attitude toward the habitability of the Earth.  The new proposal is a nasty confection of handouts to the fossil fuel industry at the expense of environmental health.  It includes:

• increasing the time between required inspections on drilling equipment from six months to a year
• increasing the time required for repairing known leaks from thirty to sixty days
• allowing states that have laxer emissions standards to follow those standards instead of the federal ones

Unsurprisingly, the petroleum industry is thrilled by all of this, and projections are that they will recoup nearly all of the $530 million that they'd have had to invest into following the Obama-era regulations.

If that's not enough, last week it was announced that William Happer has joined the National Security Council.  Happer has stated outright that "there's no problem with CO2," and had the following to say about climate change science:

There is no problem from CO2.  The world has lots and lots of problems, but increasing CO2 is not one of the problems.  So [the accord] dignifies it by getting all these yahoos who don't know a damn thing about climate saying, "This is a problem, and we're going to solve it."  All this virtue signaling. You can read about it in the Bible: Pharisees and hypocrites and phonies...  [T]he significance of climate change has been tremendously exaggerated, and has become sort of a cult movement in the last five or ten years.

If a monster storm at the same time as all of this isn't sufficiently ironic for you -- increasing strength of hurricanes, after all, was predicted as an outcome of anthropogenic climate change thirty years ago -- last week a study from the University of Geneva was released that gives us some rather horrifying news about where all this could lead.  The warmest point in (relatively) recent Earth history is the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, which occurred 56 million years ago and is thought to have been triggered by a double whammy of intense volcanic activity and destabilization of frozen methane hydrates on the ocean floor.  And I'm not talking about a little warm spell, here; the average global temperature shot up by five to eight degrees in a phenomenally short amount of time, and the recent study found that very quickly broad swaths of equatorial regions became effectively uninhabitable.  By the middle of this event, the amplitude of catastrophic flooding events had increased by a factor of eight, and there were palm trees growing above the Arctic Circle.

And I haven't told you the real kicker; once that maximum was reached, it took several hundred thousand years for the Earth's systems to recover.

Scientists are uncertain where we are with respect to the tipping point -- the point where feedbacks (like the thawing of the permafrost I mentioned earlier) begin to amplify, rather than counteract, the effect of global warming.  I'm convinced that the Trump administration doesn't disbelieve in climate change as much as it simply considers the question irrelevant.  So what if the world warms? seems to be the attitude.

We'll already have banked our share of the profit.  To hell with everyone, and everything, else.

Perhaps as of November, we'll see some new faces in Congress -- with luck, ones who not only care about science, but take the time to understand it.  Between now and then, I can only hope that the damage and loss of life from Florence and the other storms currently brewing in the Atlantic is as low as possible, and that maybe -- just maybe -- enough voters will wake up and see where we're headed before it's too late.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a charming inquiry into a realm that scares a lot of people -- mathematics.  In The Universe and the Teacup, K. C. Cole investigates the beauty and wonder of that most abstract of disciplines, and even for -- especially for -- non-mathematical types, gives a window into a subject that is too often taught as an arbitrary set of rules for manipulating symbols.  Cole, in a lyrical and not-too-technical way, demonstrates brilliantly the truth of the words of Galileo -- "Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe."