YouTube video from the AFP news agency
Feb 212014
Feb 212014
Original story by John Cook at The Conversation
Global warming is increasing the risk of heatwaves. This isn’t a hypothetical abstraction that our grandchildren may experience in the distant future. Heatwaves are currently getting hotter, they’re lasting longer and they’re happening more often. This is happening right now.
Tony Abbott has pledged to help drought-stricken farmers while dismissing the link to climate change. Photo: AAP
Of course, heatwaves have happened in the past, including before humans started altering the climate. But it’s faulty logic to suggest that this means they’re not increasing now, or that it’s not our fault.
Sadly, this logical fallacy pervades the debate over heatwaves, not to mention other extreme events such as droughts, bushfires, floods and storms and even climate change itself. What’s more, we’re hearing it with worrying regularity from our political leaders.
Heatwaves on the rise
First, the science. As the Climate Council has reported, hot days have doubled in Australia over the past half-century. During the decade from 2000 to 2009, heatwaves reached levels not expected until the 2030s. The anticipated impacts from climate change are arriving more than two decades ahead of schedule.
The increase in heatwaves in Australia is part of a larger global trend. Globally, heatwaves are happening five times more often than in the absence of human-caused global warming. This means that there is an 80% chance that any monthly heat record is due to global warming.
As the figure below indicates, the risk from heatwaves is expected to increase in the near future. Assuming our greenhouse gas emissions peak around 2040, heat records will be about 12 times more likely to occur three decades from now.
Increase in the number of heat records compared to those expected in a world without global warming. Image: Coumou, Robinson, and Rahmstorf
The impacts of heatwaves go a lot further than tennis players’ burnt bottoms. As we are now coming to realise, heatwaves kill more Australians than any other type of extreme weather. Floods, cyclones, bushfires and lightning strikes may capture more media coverage, but heatwaves are deadlier. On top of this comes new research linking heatwaves to increased rates of suicide.
Why are heatwaves increasing? Put simply, our planet is building up heat. Over the past few decades, our climate system has been building up heat at a rate of four Hiroshima bombs every second. As we continue to emit more heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the warming continues unabated.
“But it’s happened before!”
This is the point at which some people’s logic tends to go off the rails, distorting the science and insidiously distracting us from the risks. The reasoning is that as heatwaves have happened throughout Australia’s history, it follows that current heatwaves must also be entirely natural. This is a myth.
This is the classic logical fallacy of non sequitur – Latin for “it does not follow”. It’s equivalent to arguing that as humans died of cancer long before cigarettes were invented, it therefore follows that smoking does not cause cancer.
The non sequitur logical fallacy
This non sequitur is routinely used by Prime Minister Tony Abbott. He invoked it to deny that human-caused global warming was influencing bushfires (a phenomenon strongly influenced by heatwaves) and floods:
“Australia has had fires and floods since the beginning of time. We’ve had much bigger floods and fires than the ones we’ve recently experienced. You can hardly say they were the result of anthropic global warming.”
Like a magician’s misdirection, this false argument distracts from the fact that the risk is increasing. Fire danger has been rising across many Australian locations since the 1970s. Fire danger days are happening not just in summer but also in spring and autumn.
Environment Minister Greg Hunt has followed the Prime Minister’s lead. The fact that Hunt used Wikipedia rather than scientific experts to inform his views caused many to overlook his logically flawed argument in downplaying the increasing risk from bushfires:
“I looked up what Wikipedia says for example, just to see what the rest of the world thought, and it opens up with the fact that bushfires in Australia are frequently occurring events during the hotter months of the year. Large areas of land are ravaged every year by bushfires. That’s the Australian experience.”
This week, Abbott reportedly denied the link between climate change and drought using the same fallacy:
“If you look at the records of Australian agriculture going back 150 years, there have always been good times and bad times. There have always been tough times and lush times and farmers ought to be able to deal with the sorts of things that are expected every few years.”
This argument overlooks the relationship between climate change and drought. Global warming intensifies the water cycle, making wet areas get wetter while drying other regions such as Australia’s south and east. Drier conditions, along with increased heatwaves, also drive the increase in bushfire danger.
Abbott doesn’t restrict his fallacies to extreme weather. Several years ago, he also presented the non sequitur to a classroom of schoolchildren, arguing that past climate change casts doubt on whether humans are now causing global warming:
“OK, so the climate has changed over the eons and we know from history, at the time of Julius Caesar and Jesus of Nazareth the climate was considerably warmer than it is now. And then during what they called the Dark Ages it was colder. Then there was the medieval warm period. Climate change happens all the time and it is not man that drives those climate changes back in history. It is an open question how much the climate changes today and what role man plays.”
This flies in the face of decades of peer-reviewed research. My colleagues and I have found that among climate research stating a position on the causes of global warming, more than 97% endorse the consensus that humans are responsible.
It is greatly concerning that Australian policy is being dictated by science-distorting false logic. The science is sending us a clear message: human-caused global warming is increasing the risk of heatwaves as well as other extreme weather events such as floods, drought and bushfires. We need to look this problem square in the face, rather than have our attention misdirected.
John Cook created and maintains the Skeptical Science website
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.
Feb 212014
Original story by Geoff Spinks, University of Wollongong at The Conversation
Sometimes in research the answer is right under your nose.
The humble fishing line. Photo: Flickr/derfian
In our case, we spent nearly two decades developing exotic materials as artificial muscles – to now show in a paper published in Science today that the best performing systems can be made from ordinary, everyday fishing line.
Or sewing thread, if you prefer.
Not only are these materials cheap and readily available, they can be converted into high performance artificial muscles easily – just start twisting!
Polymer coil muscles.
We attached one end of the fishing line to an electric drill and hung a weight off the other to apply some tension. We stopped the weight from rotating as we used the drill to twist the fibre.
At first the twisted fibre shortened but maintained a uniform shape. But at a critical point, a loop or coil formed in the fibre and further twisting produced more coils. Before too long the whole fibre was a spring-like coil.
To set this shape we applied a little bit of heat using a hairdryer and let it cool. If we then hung a weight off the polymer coil and applied some more heat, the coil contracted.
For more convenience and better temperature control, we wrapped a conductive material around the fibre and applied heat by passing a current.
Muscle-like performance
The amount of contraction and the force generated can be impressive and in most respects compare favourably with our own muscle.
In one example, we used a 16cm length of coiled Nylon-6 fishing line 0.86mm in diameter to lift a 500g weight about 20mm in 2 seconds.
A similar sized natural muscle would also contract about 20mm in slightly shorter time (~1 second) but lifting only 150g.
Comparing ‘muscles’ made by coiling (from top to bottom) 2.45mm, 0.86mm, 0.28mm and 0.15mm Nylon-6 monofilament fibres. Photo: Science/AAAS
By optimising our coil structures we can easily achieve 50% or more contraction in length and increase contraction speed to 7.5Hz.
Our polymer coil muscles also last a long time – we gave up testing after 1.2 million cycles where the muscle reversibly contracted 10% in length in 1 second per cycle.
Power textiles
One application that we are pursuing with the polymer coil muscles is in our massage sleeve designed to reduce the effects of lymphoedema, a condition that affects around a third of women diagnosed with invasive breast cancer.
Lymph sleeve animation.
Breast cancer‐related lymphoedema (BCRL) is the swelling of the arm caused by the build-up of lymphatic fluids and leads to heaviness, swelling and discomfort for patients.
Massage is an effective treatment and the “lymph sleeve” is meant to be worn by BCRL patients during their daily lives. The lightweight actuating fabric will detect swelling and then respond by “squeezing” the arm to enhance lymph flow.
A twisty tale
The discovery of the polymer coil muscles is the outcome of more than five years of collaborative effort from researchers around the world.
The work started with the discovery by University of Wollongong PhD student (and now ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award Fellow) Javad Foroughi of a “torsional” type of actuation movement in electrochemically charged carbon nanotube yarns.
Subsequently, our collaborators at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) – who make the yarns – also found that similar torsional actuation response could be produced by filling the yarn pore volume with candle wax to make hybrid yarn muscles.
Heating the wax generated the torsional or twisting movement. It was also observed that overtwisting these yarns generated coils and that these coils contracted by up to 10% in length when the wax was heated.
Old theories still help
At that stage we did not know why the coiling amplified the length-wise tensile actuation.
But our most recent collaboration has revealed more on the coupling between the torsion and the coil contraction by applying the mechanics theory that had been developed for more than a century and applied to helically-coiled springs.
Finally, we also discovered that similar effects occur in highly oriented polymer fibres when they are twisted into coils.
The pathway to discovery was by no means obvious. If we had not been investigating exotic materials – such as carbon nanotubes – then we would not have observed the very large torsional actuation in these materials.
That work led us to investigate further the effect of twist and the discovery of overtwist-induced coiling. From there we were able to produce high performing contractile muscles from both overtwisted carbon nanotube yarns, and more recently, ordinary polymer fibres like fishing line.
What’s next?
While it’s impossible to predict what the next breakthrough will be, we do know the areas where improvements are needed.
Efficiency is well below that of muscle. Approximately 20% of the input chemical energy for muscle is converted to mechanical work.
Our muscles convert about 2% of electrical heat energy to muscle work, similar to shape memory alloys.
We would also like to use stimuli other than heat and our preliminary work has shown that movement is possible with light or chemical agents.
Geoff Spinks receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.
Feb 202014
Original story by Miriam Hall, ABC Rural
Feral pigs, wild dogs and cars are just a few of the threats facing the turtles that nest along the Queensland coast.
The Queensland and Federal Governments are launching a joint $7 million dollar campaign, they say will protect these vulnerable creatures and continue the so-called ‘the war on pests’.
Reef Turtle. Photo ABC
Indigenous rangers are welcoming the investment, saying there needs to be a focus on employment.
Traditional owner Jim Gaston has watched out for turtles for decades.
“They’ve been around for as long as we have, maybe longer, so we’ve got to look after them for the next generation.”
In his years patrolling beaches, he’s seen, first hand, the type of destruction that pests do to turtles’ nests.
“They eat the eggs and destroy the nests,” he says.
One north Queensland conversation group says the joint campaign is merely a ‘minuscule gesture’ when ‘major action’ is needed to protect marine wildlife and the reef.
Co-ordinator Wendy Tubeman says 7 million dollars won’t go far.
“It’s the case of putting a band-aid on your finger, and ignoring the cancer.”
Feb 202014
Original story by Erin Parke, ABC News
Wildlife authorities are ramping up efforts to prevent a fatal crocodile attack amid a population spike in waters around Broome.
Crocodile trap in waters near Broome. A permanent crocodile trap has been installed in Dampier Creek amid an increase in crocodile numbers. Photo: ABC News, Erin Parke
The Department of Parks and Wildlife’s Dave Woods says for the first time, a $4,000 trap will be permanently installed at a popular fishing spot to help rangers deal with the increasing number of crocodiles in local waterways.
The five-metre aluminium contraption has a trapdoor system on it which is attached to a bait.
Night patrols are planned, and computer technology will be used to map where and when the animals come close to shore.
The program is part of a push to raise awareness of the risks of crocodiles, and Western Australia is looking to the Northern Territory for pointers.
“The Northern Territory have been the leaders in crocodile management for some time, and rather than reinventing the wheel, we’re pretty much drawing on what they’ve learnt,” Mr Woods said.
“We’re following a standard operating procedure that the Northern Territory Department of Parks and Wildlife is using.”
He said the department was going through a process of increasing skills and undertaking extra training.
Feb 192014
Media release from UQ News
Scientists from The University of Queensland have discovered a microbe that is set to play a significant role in future global warming.
Scientists document the temperature of soil, one layer above permafrost. Photo: Dr Virginia Rich, University of Arizona.
UQ’s Australian Centre for Ecogenomics researcher Ben Woodcroft said the methane-producing micro-organism, known as a ‘methanogen’, was thriving in northern Sweden’s thawing permafrost in a thick subsurface layer of soil that has previously remained frozen.
Mr Woodcroft said no one knew of the microbe’s existence or how it worked before the research discovery.
He said global warming trends meant vast areas of permafrost would continue to thaw, allowing the microbes to flourish in organic matter and drive methane gas release, which would further fuel global warming.
“The micro-organism generates methane by using carbon dioxide and hydrogen from the bacteria it lives alongside,” Mr Woodcroft said.
Lead researcher and UQ’s Australian Centre for Ecogenomics Deputy Director Associate Professor Gene Tyson said the findings were significant.
“This micro-organism is responsible for producing a substantial fraction of methane at this site,” he said.
“Methane is a potent greenhouse gas with about 25 times the warming capacity of carbon dioxide.”
The researchers showed the organism and its close relatives live not just in thawing permafrost but in many other methane-producing habitats worldwide.
The team made the discovery by using DNA from soil samples and reconstructing a near-complete genome of the microbe, bypassing traditional methods of cultivating microbes in the lab.
The ‘Discovery of a novel methanogen prevalent in thawing permafrost’ research is published here in the journal Nature Communications.
PhD candidate Rhiannon Mondav who is student of UQ and Uppsala University based in Sweden, co-authored the paper alongside ACE researchers and international collaborators.
The work was funded by the United States Department of Energy Office of Biological and Environmental Research’s Genomic Science Program and the Australian Research Council.
Media: ACE Deputy Director Associate Professor Gene Tyson, 07 3365 3829,g.tyson@awmc.uq.edu.au or UQ Faculty of Science Communications Officer Monique Nevison, 07 3346 4129, m.nevison@uq.edu.au.
Feb 192014
By Andrew Campbell, Charles Darwin University and Stephen Garnett, Charles Darwin University at The Conversation
Rising sea levels are typically written about as a “threat to future generations” – something to worry about by 2050 or 2100, not now. But if you want to see why even relatively small increases in sea levels matter, come to Darwin.
Riding underwater on Darwin’s most popular bike path, on 1 February 2014. Photo: Andrew Campbell
The Arafura and Timor Seas off northern Australia are a global hotspot for warming oceans and rising sea levels. Image: CSIRO
Australia’s top end is a global hotspot for rising sea levels. In Darwin and the World Heritage-listed floodplains of Kakadu National Park, we’re seeing how the combination of gradual sea level rise and “normal” weather events – such as storms and king tides – can have surprisingly big impacts.
Small changes adding up to big damage
Storms and heavy rain are not unusual in the Darwin wet season. But recent weather has been spectacular, as monsoonal onshore winds coincided with king tides to batter the shoreline. Crowds gathered to see waves crashing over cliffs and jetties that usually overlook calm seas. Tragically, two people got into trouble in these rough seas, losing their lives, and a young boy drowned in a flooded stormwater drain.
Sea levels around Darwin, which abuts the warm, shallow Arafura Sea, have risen by about 17 centimetres over the past 20 years. As the CSIRO noted in its last State of the Climate report, the rates of sea-level rise to the north and northwest of Australia have been 7 to 11 millimetres per year, which is two to three times the global average. Along the eastern and southern coasts of Australia, rates of sea-level rise are around the global average.
Sea-level rise rates around Australia, as measured by coastal tide gauges (circles) and satellite observations (contours) from January 1993 to December 2011. Source: CSIRO State of the Climate 2012
Seventeen centimetres may not seem much, especially with a 7 to 8 metre daily tidal range. However, raising the underlying base makes a big difference, not just to the ultimate penetration of big tides and storm surges, but also in the everyday hydrodynamic fluxes on beaches, estuaries and floodplains.
The impact of recent Darwin weather on infrastructure — both built and natural — has profound implications for coastal planning, design, management and regulation. The recent confluence of 8-metre king tides with strong onshore winds after weeks of wet monsoonal weather was unusual, but well short of being even a Category 1 cyclone.
By Darwin standards, there has been nothing exceptional about this wet season’s wind or tides. There was heavier than average rain last month – but even that has been a long way short of the records, or even a 1-in-10 year event.
The chunk of bitumen with the white line used to be the bike path. Photo: Andrew Campbell
Yet the damage we are seeing in Darwin has been considerable. Near where we live, a significant stretch of the city’s most popular bike path (right) was washed away. Further north, a large casuarina tree, which 10 years ago stood atop the landward side of two dunes, toppled into the surf. A blowhole emerged where waves had undercut the cliffs.
As the City of Darwin has acknowledged for years, eroding coastlines are a growing problem for Darwin.
And as global maps in a recent article in the journal Nature showed, Darwin is just one of many cities – including heavily populated centres such as New York City, Kolkata and Shanghai – at growing risk of coastal flooding, in part due to accelerating sea-level rise.
How can we manage change better?
In Darwin, like other low-lying coastal settlements, we essentially have three options: start managing our retreat from the sea; try to engineer coastal defences; or get used to much more volatile and risky life on the edge, and modify our systems, policies and behaviour accordingly.
Of course, we could simply do nothing. But we contend that is the least credible and potentially most expensive option in the long run.
The other three options of managed retreat, investment in coastal defences, and accepting greater risk are not mutually exclusive. They can be blended within a well-conceived long-term strategy.
Managed retreat is the most confronting option, which some communities are already facing. Some low-lying coastal areas simply cannot be defended cost-effectively, and even the best adaptation strategies may be inadequate.
But there are also significant opportunities to reconfigure coastal settlement in ways that minimise social disruption.
In places with valuable assets, such as parts of some cities or Kakadu, we can improve coastal defences, natural and/or engineered.
On the Tommycut Creek: this used to be a freshwater melaleuca forest, like those seen in the film Ten Canoes, but saltwater intrusion has turned it into a hypersaline swamp. Photo: Eric Valentine
After our recent storms, Darwin’s coasts were more intact in sections where mangroves, trees and shrubs protected the soil. While the shoreline did retreat, damage was less than in cleared sections. We need to be replanting the dunes we want to keep, and retaining or restoring mangroves in estuarine and low-lying areas.
The North Australian Biodiversity Hub is working with Kakadu Traditional Owners to look at options for managing the impacts of weeds and sea level rise on the floodplains that are so important for food for local people, and more broadly for Top End fishing and tourism experiences.
A casuarina tree that used to be on the landward side of two dunes, now toppled on the beach. Photo: Andrew Campbell
In Darwin, hard protection of foreshore made some difference. But even rock-walled sections were disassembled in places, with the rocks dragged back into the sea or thrown, with astonishing force, onto the tops of cliffs.
If expensive hard protection is going to be used, it needs to be done at a scale that is engineered to last for decades and withstand extreme weather events, taking into account projected future sea levels.
Darwin residents protest against a proposed residential island between Nightcliff and East Point. Photo: Andrew Campbell
The latest climate science suggests that northern Australia may have less frequent cyclones in future, but a higher proportion of extremely intense (Category 5 or worse) tropical cyclones.
Thirdly, the construction of new residential or tourism infrastructure in exposed zones of the coastal environment is inherently risky. At the very least, coastal planning must take into account the amplified risks from continuing sea-level rise.
Prepare now, or pay later
What we are seeing now in Darwin is a taste of things to come in many coastal areas of the world if we don’t take preventative and adaptive measures.
This has major implications for residents, investors, insurers, planners and policymakers. It also promises to create fertile grounds for litigation in the future, if people approving developments are not seen to be basing their decisions on the best available information.
Recent events in Darwin underline that sea level, especially in the monsoonal north, is rising fast, and old assumptions should no longer hold.
So we need to think long-term about which bits of coastal infrastructure we want to try to keep, and for how long, while steadily moving essential services to more secure places.
And we should remember that recent storms have been mild compared to the cyclone that will likely whack Darwin again sooner or later.
The Research Institute for the Environment and Livelihoods undertakes research and monitoring in Darwin Harbour and other coastal areas in northern Australia and south-east Asia, funded by a wide range of NT and Commonwealth agencies and industry, including the Bushfires and Natural Hazards CRC.
Stephen Garnett receives funding from the Australian Research Council for research on Indigenous land and sea management and has received funding from the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility on climate change adaptation for birds.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.
Feb 192014
Original story by Ross Large, University of Tasmania at The Conversation
Evolution of life on Earth began about 3.5 billion years ago but it has not been a constant or continuous process.
Slime on Earth… that’s all there was for a billion years. Photo: www.shutterstock.com
During the middle years of Earth’s history (1.8 billion to 800 million years ago), evolution stagnated. Life remained as little more than a layer of slime for a billion years. This period has become known as the “boring billion” years.
So what was going on? A research team led by geologists at the University of Tasmania has developed new mineral technology to track the trace metal content of the ocean and oxygen content of the atmosphere over the past 3.5 billion years. This has never been achieved before.
Why is it important? Evolution of life in the oceans is strongly influenced by trace metals, as many metals (such as copper, zinc, cobalt and selenium) are taken up by marine species and are critical for life and evolutionary change.
Studying the ocean floor
Our UTAS research team – of which I was a part – with help from many other international geologists, have been collecting seafloor sediments from all around the world over the past six years.
Ross Large and Valeriy Maslennikov (from the Russian Academy of Science) on location in Siberia. Photo: Ross Large
We found pyrite (iron sulfide) in each sample and analysed for 22 different trace metals with a cutting edge laser system at UTAS, and built a unique database of more than 3,000 pyrite laser analyses to track changes in ocean chemistry spanning a 3.5-billion-year period through time.
Some exciting and totally unexpected outcomes emerged from this ocean tracking technology. The most significant outcome relates to how trace metals in the oceans have influenced the evolution of life.
Back in the early part of Earth’s history, from 3.5 billion to 1.8 billion years ago, single celled life evolved slowly but progressively, related to an abundance of available trace metals in the oceans. But during the “boring billion”, from 1,800 million to 800 million years ago, evolution slowed. This has been a puzzle to scientists.
Ocean life nearly collapsed
Our research, published in the Earth and Planetary Science Letters, suggests that the reason for the slow down is that the trace metal content of the oceans declined. This resulted in a depletion of critical trace metal nutrients to the point that oxygen content dropped and life in the oceans was in great danger of total collapse.
But rather than causing a mass extinction, marine life and evolutionary change was put on hold for a billion years.
Following the boring billion, our research shows that the trace metal content in the oceans rose steeply in a series of steps over a 200-million-year period, from 750 million to 550 million years ago.
This was accompanied by a steep rise in oxygen in the atmosphere (known as a Great Oxidation Event, see below) that led to the Cambrian explosion of life and progressive evolution to the present time.
The essential trace elements
Bio-essential trace elements are critical to life and evolution. These include cobalt, selenium, copper, zinc, molybdenum, vanadium and cadmium. Certain species need these trace elements to survive.
The elements are linked into the chemical structure of the cells and become a natural nutrient for survival. Cobalt is a central atom in the structure of vitamin B12, whereas zinc is essential for growth in many species.
The UTAS research team showed that at certain periods of earth history these trace elements were in short supply (such as the boring billion period) leading to evolutionary decline, whereas in other periods the bio-essential elements were in great abundance, causing rapid evolutionary change.
The Cambrian Explosion
The Cambrian explosion was the relatively rapid appearance, around 542 million years ago, of most major animal phyla, as demonstrated in the fossil record.
Fossil tracks form the Cambrian explosion. Photo: Flickr/Maitri
This was accompanied by major diversification of other organisms. Before about 580 million years ago, most organisms were simple, composed of individual cells occasionally organised into colonies.
Over the following 70 million or 80 million years, the rate of evolution accelerated by an order of magnitude and the diversity of life began to resemble that of today.
The Cambrian explosion has generated intense scientific debate. The seemingly rapid appearance of fossils in the “Primordial Strata” was noted as early as the 1840s. In 1859 Charles Darwin discussed it as one of the main objections that could be made against his theory of evolution by natural selection.
The long-running puzzlement about the seemingly abrupt appearance of the Cambrian fauna 540 million years ago centres on three key questions:
- was there really a mass diversification of complex organisms over a relatively short period of time during the early Cambrian, and are we lacking evidence of what really happened?
- what might have driven such rapid change – was it all due to rising oxygen?
- implications about the origin and evolution of animals?
This latest research by the UTAS team demonstrates, for the first time, a rapid increase in bio-essential trace elements in the ocean starting 660 million years ago. So was this the cause of the Cambrian explosion of life?
Great Oxidation Events (GOEs)
GOEs are large increases in oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere and there have been two in Earth’s history – one at 2.4 billion to 2.5 billion years ago and one at around 700 million to 550 million years ago corresponding with the Cambrian Explosion.
There are several schools of thought about GOEs’ origin. The most favoured theory is that the GOEs are produced by a dramatic increase in ancient marine organisms (cyanobacteria) that released oxygen as a by-product of photosynthesis.
But which came first? Did the increase in oxygen speed up evolution of life or did an increase in life result in a rapid rise in atmosphere oxygen?
Either way, the oxygen did eventually accumulate in the atmosphere, providing a new opportunity for biological diversification as well as tremendous changes in the nature of chemical interactions between the atmosphere, rocks, oceans and living organisms.
The research team at UTAS, using a novel approach to the problem, demonstrated major changes in trace element concentrations in the ocean at both GOEs, which may be the answer to the rapid expansion of life.
This is the start of a new journey for the Tasmanian research team and we will be doing much more with this technology.
But it’s already becoming clear that there have been many fluctuations in trace metal levels over the millennia and these may help us understand a host of events including the emergence of life, fish, plants and dinosaurs, mass extinctions, and the development of seafloor gold and other ore deposits.
Ross Large receives funding from Australian Research Council and Australian Mineral Industry Research Association.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.
Feb 182014
Original story by Alexandra Back, Sydney Morning Herald
The source of a bright orange plume in Botany Bay is still a mystery after early tests by the NSW Environmental Protection Authority.
The orange shore at Botany Bay. Photo: Roger Pearce
People walking on Foreshore Beach in south Sydney noticed about a square kilometre of ocean coloured bright orange on Monday afternoon.
Foreshore Beach at Botany Bay. Photo: NSW EPA
“I saw this orange and thought it must be that rain we had,” Roger Pearce said.
Shells stained orange at Foreshore Beach. Photo: Roger Pearce
“But I’m looking at the shells on the beach and they’re bleached orange.”
Walking back along the shore, Mr Pearce said security guards told him that he had to get off the sand. But he returned on Tuesday afternoon and found the water still stained the unusual colour.
Sydney Ports has closed the beach to swimming and fishing as a precaution.
The Authority has tested the plume and the preliminary results show that while it is high in iron, it is not toxic.
It does not yet know where the plume comes from, but it might be from natural causes.
An “insignificant” amount of algae is associated with the orange plume, but is not the cause of the colour, the Authority said.
The Authority will continue to monitor the water.
Feb 182014
A thought provoking perspective of the world from XKCD
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
This comic shows estimated average frequency. I wanted to include the pitch drop experiment, but it turns out the gif format has some issues with decade-long loops. Source XKCD