July 2017

What Caused the World's Greatest Extinction?

Earth History, extinction, Fossils 10:00 PM

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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A quarter of a billion years ago, long before dinosaurs or mammals evolved, the 10-foot (0.3-meter) predator Dinogorgon, whose skull is shown here, hunted floodplains in the heart of today's South Africa. In less than a million years Dinogorgon vanished in the greatest mass extinction ever, along with about nine of every ten plant and animal species on the planet.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">A study by a researcher in the Syracuse University College of Arts and Sciences offers new clues to what may have triggered the world's most catastrophic extinction, nearly 252 million years ago.</span><br />
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James Muirhead, a research associate in the Department of Earth Sciences, is the co-author of an article in Nature Communications (Macmillan Publishers Limited, 2017) titled "Initial Pulse of Siberian Traps Sills as the Trigger of the End-Permian Mass Extinction."<br />
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His research involves Seth Burgess, the article's lead author and a geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, and Samuel Bowring, the Robert R. Shock Professor of Geology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.<br />
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Their findings suggest that the formation of intrusive igneous rock, known as sills, sparked a chain of events that brought the Permian geological period to a close. In the process, more than 95 percent of marine species and 70 percent of land species vanished.<br />
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"There have been five major mass extinctions, since life originated on Earth more than 600 million years ago," says Burgess, who works at the nexus of volcanic and tectonic processes. "Most of these events have been blamed, at various times, on volcanic eruptions and asteroids impacts. By reexamining the timing and connection between magmatism [the movement of magma], climate change and extinction, we've created a model that explains what triggered the end-Permian mass extinction."<br />
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Central to their study is a large igneous province (LIP) in Russia called the Siberian Traps. Spanning more than 500,000 square miles, this rocky outpost was the site of nearly a million years of epic volcanic activity. Broad, flat volcanoes likely dispelled significant volumes of lava, ashes and gas, while pushing sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide and methane to dangerous levels in the environment.<br />
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<b><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">But that's only part of the story.</span></b><br />
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"Until recently, the relative timing and duration of mass extinctions and LIP volcanism was obscured by age imprecision," Muirhead says. "Our model is based on new, high-resolution age data that suggests surface lava flows erupted too early to drive mass extinction. Instead, there was a subinterval of magmatism -- a shorter, particular part of the LIP -- that triggered a cascade of events causing mass extinction."<br />
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<span style="font-size: small;"><b><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The trigger? Extreme heat given off during the formation of sills.</span></b></span></h3>
"Heat from sills exposed untapped, gas-rich sediments to contact metamorphism [the process in which rock minerals and texture are changed by exposure to heat and pressure], thus liberating the massive greenhouse gas volumes needed to drive extinction," Muirhead says. "Our model links the onset of extinction with the initial pulse of sill emplacement. It represents a critical juncture in the evolution of life on Earth."<br />
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There are two ways that magma forms igneous rock. One way is extrusion, in which magma erupts through volcanic craters and cracks in the Earth's surface; the other is intrusion, whereby magma forces itself between or through existing formations of rock, without reaching the surface. Common types of intrusion are sills, dykes and batholiths.<br />
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Sills in Siberia's Tunguska Basin, where Muirhead's team carries out most of its research, likely pushed their way through limestone, coal, clastic rocks and evaporates. The mixture of hot, molten rock and hydrocarbon-bearing coals is thought to have set the stage for massive greenhouse gas release and global-scale climate change.<br />
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"Sediment composition and the amount of hydrocarbons [petroleum and natural gas] available within these sediments help us understand whether or not an LIP can trigger a mass extinction," says Burgess, adding that his team's model may apply to other extinction events coinciding with LIPs. "Mass extinction can take 10,000 years or less -- the blink of an eye, by geological standards -- but its effects on the evolutionary trajectory of life are still observable today."<br />
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<u><i><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The above story is based on <a href="http://asnews.syr.edu/newsevents_2017/releases/james_muirhead_geology.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Materials</a> provided by <a href="http://www.syr.edu/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Syracuse University</a>. Original written by Rob Enslin.</span></i></u></div>

What Caused the World's Greatest Extinction?

A quarter of a billion years ago, long before dinosaurs or mammals evolved, the 10-foot (0.3-meter) predator Dinogorgon, whose skull is s...

Scientists Set Sail to Unlock Secrets of 'Lost Continent' Zealandia

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Getting to the Root of Iceland's Molten Rock Origins

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Getting to the Root of Iceland's Molten Rock Origins

Molten Rock. New data reveal an unprecedented depiction of a region of partially molten rock deep within the Earth, which appears to ...

Earth's Magnetic Field 'Simpler Than We Thought'

Earth's magnetic field, Tectonic 10:31 PM

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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The geomagnetic field is critical to life on Earth. </td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Scientists have identified patterns in Earth's magnetic field that evolve on the order of 1,000 years, providing new insight into how the field works and adding a measure of predictability to changes in the field not previously known.</span><br />
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The discovery also will allow researchers to study the planet's past with finer resolution by using this geomagnetic "fingerprint" to compare sediment cores taken from the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.<br />
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Results of the research, which was supported by the National Science Foundation, were recently published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters.<br />
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The geomagnetic field is critical to life on Earth. Without it, charged particles from the sun (the "solar wind") would blow away the atmosphere, scientists say. The field also aids in human navigation and animal migrations in ways scientists are only beginning to understand. Centuries of human observation, as well as the geologic record, show our field changes dramatically in its strength and structure over time.<br />
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Yet in spite of its importance, many questions remain unanswered about why and how these changes occur. The simplest form of magnetic field comes from a dipole: a pair of equally and oppositely charged poles, like a bar magnet.<br />
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"We've known for some time that Earth is not a perfect dipole, and we can see these imperfections in the historical record," said Maureen "Mo" Walczak, a post-doctoral researcher at Oregon State University and lead author on the study. "We are finding that non-dipolar structures are not evanescent, unpredictable things. They are very long-lived, recurring over 10,000 years -- persistent in their location throughout the Holocene.<br />
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"This is something of a Holy Grail discovery," she added, "though it is not perfect. It is an important first step in better understanding the magnetic field, and synchronizing sediment core data at a finer scale."<br />
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Some 800,000 years ago, a magnetic compass' needle would have pointed south because Earth's magnetic field was reversed. These reversals typically happen every several hundred thousand years.<br />
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While scientists are well aware of the pattern of reversals in Earth's magnetic field, a secondary pattern of geomagnetic "wobble" within periods of stable polarity, known as paleomagnetic secular variation, or PSV, may be a key to understanding why some geomagnetic changes occur.<br />
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Earth's magnetic field does not align perfectly with the axis of rotation, which is why "true north" differs from "magnetic north," the researchers say. In the Northern Hemisphere this disparity in the modern field is apparently driven by regions of high geomagnetic intensity that are centered beneath North America and Asia.<br />
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"What we have not known is whether this snapshot has any longer-term meaning -- and what we have found out is that it does," said Joseph Stoner, an Oregon State University paleomagnetic specialist and co-author on the study.<br />
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When the magnetic field is stronger beneath North America, or in the "North American Mode," it drives steep inclinations and high intensities in the North Pacific, and low intensities in Europe with westward declinations in the North Atlantic. This is more consistent with the historical record.<br />
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The alternate "European mode" is in some ways the opposite, with shallow inclination and low intensity in North Pacific, and eastward declinations in the North Atlantic and high intensities in Europe.<br />
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"As it turns out, the magnetic field is somewhat less complicated than we thought," Stoner said. "It is a fairly simple oscillation that appears to result from geomagnetic intensity variations at just a few recurrent locations with large spatial impacts. We're not yet sure what drives this variation, though it is likely a combination of factors including convection of the outer core that may be biased in configuration by the lowermost mantle."<br />
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The researchers were able to identify the pattern by studying two high-resolution sediment cores from the Gulf of Alaska that allowed them to develop a 17,400-year reconstruction of the PSV in that region. They then compared those records with sediment cores from other sites in the Pacific Ocean to capture a magnetic fingerprint, which is based on the orientation of the magnetite in the sediment, which acts as a magnetic recorder of the past.<br />
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The common magnetic signal found in the cores now covers an area spanning from Alaska to Oregon, and over to Hawaii.<br />
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"Magnetic alignment of distant environmental reconstructions using reversals in the paleomagnetic record provides insights into the past on a scale of hundreds of thousands of years," Walczak said. "Development of the coherent PSV stratigraphy will let us look at the record on a scale possibly as short as a few centuries, compare events between ocean basins, and really get down to the nitty-gritty of how climate anomalies are propagated around the planet on a scale relevant to human society."<br />
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The magnetic field is generated within Earth by a fluid outer core of iron, nickel and other metals that creates electric currents, which in turn produce magnetic fields. The magnetic field is strong enough to shield Earth from solar winds and cosmic radiation. The fact that it changes is well known; the reasons why have remained a mystery.<br />
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Now this mystery may be a little closer to being solved.<br />
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<u><i><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The above story is based on <a href="http://oregonstate.edu/ua/ncs/archives/2017/jul/study-finds-earth%E2%80%99s-magnetic-field-%E2%80%98simpler-we-thought%E2%80%99" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Materials</a> provided by <a href="http://www.orst.edu/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Oregon State University</a>.</span></i></u></div>

Earth's Magnetic Field 'Simpler Than We Thought'

The geomagnetic field is critical to life on Earth. Scientists have identified patterns in Earth's magnetic field that evolve on t...

The Mysterious Penitentes Transform the Desert Into an Alien Landscape

Desert, earth 10:18 PM

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<img border="0" data-original-height="671" data-original-width="1024" height="418" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Y8w-id9GxtI/WXo7R6ybSCI/AAAAAAAAM-8/d9Tf3gbXPzIUksVJeu_hI1jznSw1OUxeACLcBGAs/s640/Snow%2Bpenitents%2Bin%2Bthe%2BAndes%2Bof%2BChile.jpg" width="640" /><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The penitentes are a curious natural phenomenon found in high altitude regions, typically more than 4000 metres above sea level where it’s very cold and very dry.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The formation evokes the tall, pointed habits and hoods worn by brothers of religious orders in the Processions of Penance during Spanish Holy Week. In particular the brothers' hats are tall, narrow, and white, with a pointed top.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">These spires of snow and ice grow over all glaciated and snow-covered areas in the Dry Andes above 4,000 metres or 13,120 feet. They range in size from a few centimetres to over 5 metres or 16 feet.</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Penitentes near the summit of the Agua Negra Pass on the border between Chile and Argentina.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Louis Lliboutry noted that the key climatic condition for the differential ablation that leads to the formation of penitentes is that the dew point is always below freezing. Thus, snow will sublimate. Once the process of differential ablation starts, the surface geometry of the evolving penitente produces a positive feedback mechanism, and radiation is trapped by multiple reflections between the walls. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The hollows become almost a black body for radiation, while decreased wind leads to air saturation, increasing dew point temperature and the onset of melting. In this way peaks, where mass loss is due only to sublimation, will remain, as well as the steep walls, which intercept only a minimum of solar radiation. In the troughs, the ablation is enhanced, leading to a downward growth of penitentes. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Penitentes may be present on Europa, a satellite of Jupiter.  According to recent study, NASA's New Horizons has discovered penitentes on Pluto, in a region informally named Tartarus Dorsa.</span><br />
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The Mysterious Penitentes Transform the Desert Into an Alien Landscape

The penitentes are a curious natural phenomenon found in high altitude regions, typically more than 4000 metres above sea level where i...

Epitactic Overgrowth of Hinsdalite on Corkite Hemispheres

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The Feathery Gemstone Seraphinite

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Scientists Believe They Finally Found The 8th Wonder Of The World

earth, Earth History, News 9:24 PM

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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The lost pink and white terraces, the eight natural wonder of the world</td></tr>
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Scientists believe they have finally discovered the "Eighth Wonder Of The World" in New Zealand, buried by a massive volcanic eruption. Now, 131 years since the natural wonder of the world disappeared, scientists have likely found the location of New Zealand's magical pink and white terraces of Lake Rotomahana.<br />
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Once hailed as a natural wonder of the world, and the largest silica deposits of their kind on Earth, it was feared that these terraces were destroyed by the 1886 eruption of Mount Tarawera. But now researchers say they've located where they were buried, and suspect some of them have been preserved this whole time.<br />
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"They became the greatest tourist attraction in the Southern Hemisphere and the British empire, and shiploads of tourists made the dangerous visit down from the UK, Europe, and America to see them," one of the team, Rex Bunn, told The Guardian.<br />
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"But they were never surveyed by the government of the time, so there was no record of their latitude or longitude."<br />
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During the heyday, the pink and white terraces of New Zealand were thought to be the largest silica 'sinter' deposits on the planet. Sintering occurs when a mineral spring or geyser deposits enough sediment to form a crust, creating natural mounds, terraces, or cones around the water supply.<br />
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There was a 'white terrace', which sat on the north-east end of Lake Rotomahana in northern New Zealand, and the 'pink terrace', which sat on another shore nearby.<br />
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It's thought that the pink hue found in some of the terraces was likely due to the presence of extensive colonies of a pigmented bacteria, such as Thermus ruber - relatives of the micro-organisms that inhabit the famously technicolour Morning Glory pool at Yellowstone.<br />
<br />
Bunn, an independent researcher, got his big break in 2016 when Sascha Nolden from the National Library of New Zealand shared with him an old field diary he'd discovered some years prior.<br />
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The diary belonged to 19th century geologist Ferdinand von Hochstetter, who in 1859 was commissioned by the government of New Zealand to make a geological survey of the islands.<br />
<br />
In his notes, von Hochstetter had recorded raw data from a compass survey of Lake Rotomahana, located 20 kilometres (12 miles) to the south-east of the city of Rotorua in northern New Zealand.<br />
<br />
Because this was almost three decades before the volcanic eruption, the pink and white terraces were plainly marked in the area. <br />
<br />
So, case closed? Not quite, because that eruption didn't just bury one of the world's most spectacular natural wonders - it shifted the landscape around it so severely that even an 'X marks the spot' no longer applies today.<br />
<br />
Bunn and Nolden set about reconstructing von Hochstetter's lake map using a technique called forensic cartography, which involved comparing current topographic maps to the 1859 data, and matching up certain geological features until they'd narrowed down the most likely location of the terraces.<br />
<br />
That might sound fairly simple, but the actual process was far from it.<br />
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"We would have put in 2,500 hours of research in the last 12 months," Bunn told Hannah Martin at Stuff.co.uk. <br />
<br />
"We're confident, to the best of our ability, we have identified the terrace locations. We're closer than anyone has ever been in the last 130 years."<br />
<br />
That last point is important - there have been several claims in recent years from other teams that they'd found the terraces, with some dispute over whether the landmark had been destroyed or partially preserved in the eruption.<br />
<br />
Based on their research, Bunn claims to have developed an algorithm that's pinpointed the location of the pink and white terraces with a margin of error of plus or minus 35 metres.<br />
<br />
He says when you're talking about a landmark that spans hundreds of metres, that's a close enough estimate to make digging them out a reality.<br />
<br />
The decision to excavate the area has been given to the local Tuhourangi tribal authority, but Bunn expects that if they do decide to dig the terraces out, they will find some part of them still intact.<br />
<br />
It's too soon to know if Bunn's and Nolden's claims of locating the terraces, and their continued existence, will pan out, but it would be incredible if they did.<br />
<br />
As Bunn told Martin, "The pink and white terraces may in some small way return, to delight visitors to Rotorua as they did in the 19th century."<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><u><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The research has been published in the Journal of <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03036758.2017.1329748?tokenDomain=eprints&tokenAccess=udvDKhIh7cpfpy3GMBpB&forwardService=showFullText&doi=10.1080%2F03036758.2017.1329748&doi=10.1080%2F03036758.2017.1329748&journalCode=tnzr20" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">the Royal Society of New Zealand</a>.</span></u></i></div>

Scientists Believe They Finally Found The 8th Wonder Of The World

The lost pink and white terraces, the eight natural wonder of the world Scientists believe they have finally discovered the "Eigh...

Mysterious, Gross Yellow Fluff Balls Wash Up on French Shores

earth, News 9:42 PM

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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image courtesy Sea-Mer Association</td></tr>
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</div><br />
Hundreds of yellow, fluffy blobs of mystery material have washed up on the shores of northern France in the past week.<br />
<br />
The balls of goo have been found along many miles of the English Channel coastline, according to the Sea-Mer Association, a nonprofit organization that protects coastlines from pollution. <br />
<br />
The mysterious yellow clumps look like sponges, very unappetizing hunks of butterscotch mousse or possibly the biggest balls of earwax ever. Tons of them have washed up along a tourist-magnet stretch of France's Opal Coast.<br />
<br />
So far, nobody knows exactly what the mystery material is, though one leading contender is paraffin wax.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image courtesy Sea-Mer Association</td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
<b><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Mystery balls</span></b><br />
<br />
Authorities claim the yellow spongey masses aren't dangerous, at least to their knowledge, the daily news site The Local reported. The samples are being sent to CEDRE (The Center for Documentation, Research and Experimentation on Accidental Water Pollution), which should have results within a week, La Voix du Nord reported.<br />
<br />
However, Jonathan Hénicart, president of the Sea-Mer Association, told a local French TV news channel that there's no way to know for sure if the material is safe and so it shouldn't be touched.<br />
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</div>"It seems to come from an oil product," Hénicart told channel BFMTV. "It could come from a polyurethane product commonly used for building. And it smells very, very lightly of paraffin."<br />
<br />
Hénicart told La Voix du Nord that the brittle material is greasy to the touch, but looks a bit like yellowpolyurethane balls. One theory is that the material comes from the hot grease in boat exhaust, which freezes when it hits frigid seawater, La Voix du Nord reported.<br />
<br />
In an email to Live Science, Hénicart said the material that washed ashore this week does not look like polyeurethane foam, but instead looks more like paraffin, or candle wax, which frequently washes ashore along coastlines. <br />
<br />
For instance, in May, waxy yellow clumps washed ashore North Yorkshire beaches, the BBC reported. In the aftermath of German beachcontamination with paraffin, the North and Baltic seas were extensively polluted with paraffin wax, according to a 2014 report by the independent Unilever Environmental Group. However, this material doesn't melt in the sun like paraffin.<br />
<br />
Paraffin wax is typically made up of long strands of hydrocarbons and is used for insulation, lubrication, corrosion protection, cosmetics and candles. Paraffin is often transported in large quantities by tanker ships, and because it floats, will rise to the top of the water and wash ashore in clumps, where it mixes with sand and other contaminants, according to the 2014 report.<br />
<br />
The coastline of the English Channel, where the goo was sighted, sees heavy shipping traffic. As a result, weird things washing ashore are not uncommon. In general, beaches are both idyllic and the source of some truly weird flotsam. From dead, rotting whales, to ice balls, to mysterious sea pickles, odd, gross and perplexing items are always being tossed onto land by the sea.<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> </span> <span style="font-size: small;"><i><u>Originally published on Live Science.</u></i></span></div>

Mysterious, Gross Yellow Fluff Balls Wash Up on French Shores

Image courtesy Sea-Mer Association Hundreds of yellow, fluffy blobs of mystery material have washed up on the shores of northern France...

Did Life Begin on Land Rather Than in the Sea?

Earth History, Fossils 9:02 PM

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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Stromatolites.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">For three years, Tara Djokic, a Ph.D. student at the University of New South Wales Sydney, scoured the forbidding landscape of the Pilbara region of Western Australia looking for clues to how ancient microbes could have produced the abundant stromatolites that were discovered there in the 1970s.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br />
</span>Stromatolites are round, multilayered mineral structures that range from the size of golf balls to weather balloons and represent the oldest evidence that there were living organisms on Earth 3.5 billion years ago.<br />
<br />
Scientists who believed life began in the ocean thought these mineral formations had formed in shallow, salty seawater, just like living stromatolites in the World Heritage-listed area of Shark Bay, which is a two-day drive from the Pilbara.<br />
<br />
But what Djokic discovered amid the strangling heat and blood-red rocks of the region was evidence that the stromatolites had not formed in salt water but instead in conditions more like the hot springs of Yellowstone.<br />
<br />
The discovery pushed back the time for the emergence of microbial life on land by 580 million years and also bolstered a paradigm-shifting hypothesis laid out by UC Santa Cruz astrobiologists David Deamer and Bruce Damer: that life began, not in the sea, but on land.<br />
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Djokic's discovery -- together with research carried out by the UC Santa Cruz team, Djokic, and Martin Van Kranendonk, director of the Australian Centre for Astrobiology -- is described in an eight-page cover story in the August issue of Scientific American.<br />
<br />
"What she (Djokic) showed was that the oldest fossil evidence for life was in fresh water," said Deamer, a lanky 78-year-old who explored the region with Djokic, Damer, and Van Kranendonk in 2015. "It's a logical continuation to life beginning in a freshwater environment."<br />
<br />
The model for life beginning on land rather than in the sea could not only reshape our idea about the origin of life and where else it might be, but even change the way we view ourselves.<br />
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The right conditions for life</span></h3>
For four decades, ever since the research vessel Alvin discovered deep-sea hydrothermal vents that were habitats for specialized bacteria and worms that looked like something out of a science-fiction novel, scientists have theorized that these mineral- and gas-pumping vents were just what was needed for life to begin.<br />
<br />
But Deamer, who describes himself as a scientist who loves playing with new ideas, thought the theory had flaws. For instance, molecules essential for the origin of life would be dispersed too quickly into a vast ocean, he thought, and salty seawater would inhibit some of the processes he knew are necessary for life to begin.<br />
<br />
Deamer had spent the early part of his career studying the biophysics of membranes composed of soap-like molecules that form the microscopic boundaries of all living cells. Later, given a piece of the Murchison meteorite that had landed in Australia in 1969, Deamer found that the space rock also contained soap-like molecules nearly 5 billion years old that could form stable membranes. Still later, he demonstrated that membranes helped small molecules join together to form longer information-carrying molecules called polymers.<br />
<br />
Trekking to volcanoes from Russia to Iceland and hiking through the Pilbara desert, Deamer and his colleagues observed volcanic activity that suggested the idea that hot springs provided the right environment for the beginning of life. Deamer even built a machine that simulated the heat, acidity, and wet-and-dry cycles of hot springs and installed it in his lab on the UC Santa Cruz campus.<br />
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"I think, every once in awhile, you have to be brave enough and bold enough to try new ideas," Deamer said. "Of course, some of my colleagues think even 'foolish enough.' But that's the chance you take."<br />
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Rethinking the timeline</span></h3>
In Deamer's vision, ancient Earth consisted of a huge ocean spotted with volcanic land masses. Rain would fall on the land, creating pools of fresh water that would be heated by geothermal energy and then cooled by runoff. Some of the key building blocks of life, created during the formation of our solar system, would have fallen to Earth and gathered in these pools, becoming concentrated enough to form more complex organic compounds.<br />
<br />
The edges of the pools would go through periods of wetting and drying as water levels rose and fell. During these periods of wet and dry, lipid membranes would first help stitch together the organic compounds called polymers and then form compartments that encapsulated different sets of these polymers. The membranes would act like incubators for the functions of life.<br />
<br />
Deamer and his team believe the first life emerged from the natural production of vast numbers of such membrane-encased "protocells."<br />
<br />
While there is still debate about whether life began on land or in the sea, the discovery of ancient microbial fossils in a place like the Pilbara shows that these geothermal areas -- full of energy and rich in the minerals necessary for life -- harbored living microorganisms far earlier than believed.<br />
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">The search for life on other planets</span></h3>
According to Deamer and his colleagues, this discovery and their hot-springs-origins model also have implications for the search for life on other planets. If life began on land, then Mars, which was found to have a 3.65-billion-year-old hot spring deposits similar to those found in the Pilbara region of Australia, might be a good place to look.<br />
<br />
For Damer, the new "end-to-end hypothesis" of how life began on land offers something else: that the origin of life was not just a simple story of individual, competing cells. Rather that a plausible new vision of life's start could be a communal unit of protocells that survived and evolved through collaboration and sharing of innovation rather than strict competition.<br />
<br />
"That," he said, "is a fundamental shift that might impact how we think of our world, ourselves, and our future: as dependent on collaboration as much as being driven by competition."<br />
<br />
Sitting in his fourth-floor office on campus, Deamer smiled as he recounted the letter Charles Darwin wrote to a friend in 1871, which speculated that life might have begun in "some warm little pond."<br />
<br />
That's not far off the mark, Deamer said, "except we call ours 'hot little puddles.'"<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
<u><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The above story is based on <a href="https://news.ucsc.edu/2017/07/origin-life.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Materials</a> provided by <a href="http://www.ucsc.edu/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">University of California - Santa Cruz</a>. Original written by Peggy Townsend.</span></u></div>
</div>

Did Life Begin on Land Rather Than in the Sea?

Stromatolites. For three years, Tara Djokic, a Ph.D. student at the University of New South Wales Sydney, scoured the forbidding land...

World's Second Largest Rough Diamond Too Big to Sell

Diamonds, famous, Mining, News 10:24 PM

World's Second Largest Rough Diamond Too Big to Sell

Lesedi la Rona is the largest diamond discovered in more than a century, and the second-biggest ever found. A Canadian diamond-mining...

Larimar: The Blue Stones of Atlantis

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Underwater Photos That Show the Growing Gap Between Two Tectonic Plates

earth, places to visit, Tectonic 10:08 PM

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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-jJa955RyHyQ/WW0IBpQcoNI/AAAAAAAAM5o/z5TQ2aYEdM8ZT14F-cTt_QgTfQuoN0wlQCLcBGAs/s1600/Underwater%2BPhotos%2BThat%2BShow%2Bthe%2BGrowing%2BGap%2BBetween%2BTwo%2BTectonic%2BPlates%2B%25285%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="539" data-original-width="960" height="358" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-jJa955RyHyQ/WW0IBpQcoNI/AAAAAAAAM5o/z5TQ2aYEdM8ZT14F-cTt_QgTfQuoN0wlQCLcBGAs/s640/Underwater%2BPhotos%2BThat%2BShow%2Bthe%2BGrowing%2BGap%2BBetween%2BTwo%2BTectonic%2BPlates%2B%25285%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Growing gap: Alex Mustard, dived 80ft into the crevice between the North American and Eurasian plates near Iceland to capture these spectacular photos</td></tr>
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<br />
Swimming through an area of extreme natural beauty, this diver surveys the underwater canyons on his either side.<br />
<br />
But this British scuba diver is actually between two tectonic plates.<br />
<br />
<b>Alex Mustard</b>, 36, dived 80ft into the crevice between the North American and Eurasian plates near Iceland to capture these spectacular photos.<br />
<br />
The area is riddled with faults, valleys, volcanoes and hot springs, caused by the plates pulling apart at about one inch per year.<br />
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Mr Mustard snapped away as he and his dive partners swam through fresh water canyons Silfra, Nes and Nikulasargja, which are up to 200ft deep.<br />
<br />
He also took photos of the Arnarnes Strytur chimney, which forms a cloudy plume as 80C water is ejected from Earth's crust and hits the cool 4C seawater.<br />
<br />
Mr Mustard, from Southampton, said: 'The photos show diving in the unique underwater world of Iceland which, like on land, is formed by the volcanic landscape of the country.<br />
<br />
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-eNSYep2M80k/WW0I704DT0I/AAAAAAAAM5s/LLEIjXQq4wM7UNSDPIsZH2fD0h03TJhMgCLcBGAs/s1600/Underwater%2BPhotos%2BThat%2BShow%2Bthe%2BGrowing%2BGap%2BBetween%2BTwo%2BTectonic%2BPlates%2B%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="637" data-original-width="960" height="424" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-eNSYep2M80k/WW0I704DT0I/AAAAAAAAM5s/LLEIjXQq4wM7UNSDPIsZH2fD0h03TJhMgCLcBGAs/s640/Underwater%2BPhotos%2BThat%2BShow%2Bthe%2BGrowing%2BGap%2BBetween%2BTwo%2BTectonic%2BPlates%2B%25281%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-baLyeO-7J_M/WW0JRB3AC2I/AAAAAAAAM5w/kKogD1CFsGcDEjTd3fA2rb0JUU71JnMpgCLcBGAs/s1600/Underwater%2BPhotos%2BThat%2BShow%2Bthe%2BGrowing%2BGap%2BBetween%2BTwo%2BTectonic%2BPlates%2B%25282%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="641" data-original-width="962" height="426" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-baLyeO-7J_M/WW0JRB3AC2I/AAAAAAAAM5w/kKogD1CFsGcDEjTd3fA2rb0JUU71JnMpgCLcBGAs/s640/Underwater%2BPhotos%2BThat%2BShow%2Bthe%2BGrowing%2BGap%2BBetween%2BTwo%2BTectonic%2BPlates%2B%25282%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: Alex Mustard</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: Alex Mustard</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-MtLm0R7-Xp0/WW0JZtHRSvI/AAAAAAAAM54/IQGLWO28C04eNK1-TVghsoazpYl5ddM7gCLcBGAs/s1600/Underwater%2BPhotos%2BThat%2BShow%2Bthe%2BGrowing%2BGap%2BBetween%2BTwo%2BTectonic%2BPlates%2B%25284%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="639" data-original-width="960" height="426" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-MtLm0R7-Xp0/WW0JZtHRSvI/AAAAAAAAM54/IQGLWO28C04eNK1-TVghsoazpYl5ddM7gCLcBGAs/s640/Underwater%2BPhotos%2BThat%2BShow%2Bthe%2BGrowing%2BGap%2BBetween%2BTwo%2BTectonic%2BPlates%2B%25284%2529.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: Alex Mustard</td></tr>
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Underwater Photos That Show the Growing Gap Between Two Tectonic Plates

Growing gap: Alex Mustard, dived 80ft into the crevice between the North American and Eurasian plates near Iceland to capture these spect...

Mammoth Task: Billionaire-Funded Effort to Resurrect Woolly Beast

extinction, Fossils, News 9:36 PM

Mammoth Task: Billionaire-Funded Effort to Resurrect Woolly Beast

Mammoths went extinct more than 10,000 years ago, with scientists unsure whether human hunting or climate change finished them off. Now M...

Spectacular Azurite Flowers in Vug

Minerals 9:00 PM

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<br />
Azurite |‪#‎Geology‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬<br /><br />Formula:  ‎Cu<sub>3</sub>(CO<sub>3</sub>)<sub>2</sub>(OH)<sub>2</sub><br />System: Monoclinic<br />Colour: Azure blue, blue, light ...<br />Lustre: Vitreous<br />Hardness:3½ - 4<br />A secondary copper mineral frequently found in the oxidized zones of Cu-bearing ore deposits.<br /><br />
From: Kozári Quarry, Pécs, Hungary.<br />
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<b><i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Photo Credit: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100006877873735" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Tóth László</a></span></i></b><br /></div>

Spectacular Azurite Flowers in Vug

Azurite |‪#‎Geology‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬‬ Formula: ‎Cu 3 (CO 3 ) 2 (OH) 2 System: Monoclinic Colour: Azu...

Nickel Is Crucial for Earth's Magnetic Field

earth, Earth's magnetic field, Geochemistry 9:39 PM

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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Earth creates its own magnetic field, suggests new research.</td></tr>
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<b><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Scientists are changing our idea of the Earth's magnetic field: iron alone cannot explain the concept of the geodynamo</span></b><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">It only takes a simple compass to demonstrate that Earth has a magnetic field -- but it is quite difficult to explain how exactly it is created. Without any doubt, our planet's hot core, consisting mainly of iron, plays an important part. In combination with Earth's rotation, it builds up a powerful "dynamo effect," which creates a magnetic field.</span></i><br />
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But with iron alone, this effect cannot be explained. A team of researchers, led by Prof. Alessandro Toschi and Prof. Karsten Held (TU Wien) and Prof. Giorgio Sangiovanni (Würzburg University) has now published calculations in the journal "Nature Communications," which show that the theory of the geodynamo has to be revised. As it turns out, it is crucial for the dynamo effect that Earth's core contains up to 20% nickel -- a metal, which under extreme conditions behaves quite differently from iron.<br />
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
<b><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Extreme Heat and Pressure</span></b></h3>
Earth's core is about as big as the moon and as hot as the surface of the sun. There is a pressure of hundreds of gigapascals -- that is comparable to the pressure which several railway locomotives would exert if they could be balanced on one square millimetre.<br />
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"Under these extreme conditions, materials behave in a way which may be quite different from what we are used to," says Karsten Held. "It is hardly possible to recreate these conditions in a lab, but with sophisticated computer simulations, we are able to calculate the behaviour of metals in Earth's core on a quantum mechanical level."<br />
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The heat of Earth's core has to find a way to escape. Hot material rises up to the outer layers of the globe, creating convection currents. At the same time, Earth's rotation leads to strong Coriolis forces. In combination these effects produce a complicated spiralling flow of hot material.<br />
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"When electrical currents are created in such a system of flows, they can cause a magnetic field which in turn increases the electrical current and so forth -- and finally the magnetic field becomes so strong that we can measure it on the surface of Earth," says Alessandro Toschi.<br />
<h3 style="text-align: left;">
<b><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Conducting Heat</span></b></h3>
Up until now, however, nobody could really explain how these convection currents emerge in the first place: iron is a very good heat conductor and at high pressure its thermal conductivity increases even more.<br />
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"If Earth's core consisted only of iron, the free electrons in the iron could handle the heat transport by themselves, without the need for any convection currents," says Karsten Held. "Then, earth would not have a magnetic field at all."<br />
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However, our planet's core also contains almost 20% nickel. For a long time, this fact was not considered to be particularly important. But as it turns out, nickel plays a crucial role: "Under pressure, nickel behaves differently from iron," says Alessandro Toschi. "At high pressure, the electrons in nickel tend to scatter much more than the electrons in iron.<br />
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As a consequence, the thermal conductivity of nickel and, thus, the thermal conductivity of Earth's core is much lower than it would be in a core consisting only of iron." Due to the significant proportion of nickel, the heat of the high-temperature earth core cannot flow towards the planet's surface by means of the motion of the electrons alone. As a result, convection currents have to emerge, which eventually build up Earth's magnetic field.<br />
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To obtain these results, different metallic structures had to be analysed in large-scale computer simulations, and the behaviour of their electrons had to be calculated. The many-particle-calculations were performed by Andreas Hausoel (University of Würzburg), some of them on the Vienna Scientific Cluster (VSC).<br />
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"Together with our colleagues from Würzburg, we did not only have a look at iron and nickel, but also at alloys of these two materials. We also had to take imperfections and irregularities into account, which made the computer simulations even more challenging," says Karsten Held.<br />
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These advanced simulation methods are not only important to obtain a better understanding of Earth's magnetic field, they also provide new insights into the electronic scattering processes in different materials.  Alessandro Toschi is convinced: "Soon, these improvements of computational material algorithms will also lead to exciting forefront applications in chemistry, biology, industry and technology."<br />
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<br />
<u><i><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The above story is based on <a href="http://www.tuwien.ac.at/en/news/news_detail/article/125110/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Materials</a> provided by <a href="http://www.tuwien.ac.at/en/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Vienna University of Technology</a>.</span></i></u></div>

Nickel Is Crucial for Earth's Magnetic Field

Earth creates its own magnetic field, suggests new research. Scientists are changing our idea of the Earth's magnetic field: iron ...

Glass Could Be a Mysterious New State of Matter

Crystal, Researches 9:17 PM

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<b><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The mysterious new phase of matter that could show how glass behaves </span></b><br />
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New research solves a long-standing mystery about glass—and a mysterious new state of matter.<br />
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Zoom in on a crystal and you will find an ordered array of atoms, evenly spaced like the windows on the Empire State Building. But zoom in on a piece of glass, and the picture looks a bit messier—more like a random pile of sand, or perhaps the windows on a Frank Gehry building.<br />
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The highly-ordered nature of crystals makes them fairly simple to understand mathematically, and physicists have developed theories that capture all sorts of crystal properties, from how they absorb heat to what happens when they break.<br />
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But the same can’t be said of glassy, amorphous, or otherwise “disordered” materials such as the glass in our windows and vases, frozen food, and certain plastics. There are no widely agreed-upon theories to explain their physical behavior.<br />
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For nearly 30 years, physicists have debated whether a mysterious phase transition, present in theoretical models of disordered materials, might also exist in real-life glasses. With the help of some mathematical wizardry borrowed from particle physics—plus dozens of pages of algebraic calculations, all done by hand—Duke University postdoctoral fellow Sho Yaida has laid this mystery to rest.<br />
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Yaida’s insights open up the possibility that some types of glass may exist in a new state of matter at low temperatures, influencing how they respond to heat, sound, and stress, and how and when they break.<br />
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“We found hints of the transition that we didn’t dare say was evidence of the transition because part of the community said that it could not exist,” says Patrick Charbonneau, associate professor of chemistry at Duke and Yaida’s advisor. “What Sho shows is that it can exist.”<br />
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Mind-boggling as it may seem, Charbonneau says, the mathematics behind glasses and other disordered systems is actually much easier to solve by assuming that these materials exist in a hypothetical infinite-dimensional universe. In infinite dimensions, their properties can be calculated relatively easily—much like how the properties of crystals can be calculated for our three-dimensional universe.<br />
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“The question is whether this model has any relevance to the real world.” Charbonneau says. For researchers who carried out these calculations, “the gamble was that, as you change dimension, things change slowly enough that you can see how they morph as you go from an infinite number of dimensions to three,” he says.<br />
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One feature of these infinite dimensional calculations is the existence of a phase transition—called the “Gardner transition” after pioneering physicist Elizabeth Gardner—which, if present in glasses, could significantly change their properties at low temperatures.<br />
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See the bizarre way these glass ‘tadpoles’ shatter<br />
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But did this phase transition, clearly present in infinite dimensions, also exist in three? Back in the 1980s, a team of physicists produced mathematical calculations showing that no, it could not. For three decades, the prevailing viewpoint remained that this transition, while theoretically interesting, was irrelevant to the real world.<br />
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That is, until recent experiments and simulations by Charbonneau and others started showing hints of it in three-dimensional glasses.<br />
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“The new drive to look at this is that, when attacking the problem of glass formation, they found a transition very much like the one that appeared in these studies,” Charbonneau says. “And in this context it can have significant materials applications.”<br />
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Yaida, who has a background in particle physics, took a second look at the old mathematical proofs. These calculations had failed to find a “fixed point” in three dimensions, a prerequisite for the existence of a phase transition. But if he took the calculation one more step, he thought, the answer might change.<br />
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One month and 30 pages of calculations later, he had it.<br />
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“Moments like these are the reason why I do science,” Yaida says. “It is just a point, but it means a lot to people in this field. It shows that this exotic thing that people found in the seventies and eighties does have a physical relevance to this three-dimensional world.”<br />
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<u><i><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">After a year of checks and re-checks, plus another 60-odd pages of supporting calculations, the results are published in <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.118.215701" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Physical Review Letters</a>.</span></i></u></div>

Glass Could Be a Mysterious New State of Matter

The mysterious new phase of matter that could show how glass behaves New research solves a long-standing mystery about glass—and a my...

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