2018

130-million-year-old Insects Trapped in Amber Right When They Were Born

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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">One of the newly discovered millipede fossilized in Cretaceous amber from Myanmar (Burma).<br />
Credit: Dr Thomas Wesener </td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Since the success of the Jurassic Park film series, it is widely known that insects from the Age of the Dinosaurs can be found exceptionally well preserved in amber, which is in fact fossilised tree resin.</span><br />
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Especially diverse is the animal fauna preserved in Cretaceous amber from Myanmar (Burma). Over the last few years, the almost 100-million-year-old amber has revealed some spectacular discoveries, including dinosaur feathers, a complete dinosaur tail, unknown groups of spiders and several long extinct groups of insects.<br />
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However, as few as three millipede species, preserved in Burmese amber, had been found prior to the study of Thomas Wesener and his PhD student Leif Moritz at the Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig -- Leibniz Institute for Animal Biodiversity (ZFMK). Their research was recently published in the open-access journal Check List.<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Having identified over 450 millipedes preserved in the Burmese amber, the scientists confirmed species representing as many as 13 out of the 16 main orders walking the Earth today. The oldest known fossils for half of these orders were found within the studied amber.<br />
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The researchers conducted their analysis with the help of micro-computed tomography (micro-CT). This scanning technology uses omni-directional X-rays to create a 3D image of the specimen, which can then be virtually removed from the amber and digitally examined.<br />
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The studied amber is mostly borrowed from private collections, including the largest European one, held by Patrick Müller from Käshofen. There are thought to be many additional, scientifically important specimens, perhaps even thousands of them, currently inaccessible in private collections in China.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Four insects have been found in amber dating back 130-million years. They were found with their short-lived 'egg-bursters' and pieces of shell </td></tr>
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Over the next few years, the newly discovered specimens will be carefully described and compared to extant species in order to identify what morphological changes have occurred in the last 100 million years and pinpoint the speciation events in the millipede Tree of Life. As a result, science will be finally looking at solving long-standing mysteries, such as whether the local millipede diversity in the southern Alps of Italy or on the island of Madagascar is the result of evolutionary processes which have taken place one, ten or more than 100-million years ago.<br />
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According to the scientists, most of the Cretaceous millipedes found in the amber do not differ significantly from the species found in Southeast Asia nowadays, which is an indication of the old age of the extant millipede lineages.<br />
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On the other hand, the diversity of the different orders seems to have changed drastically. For example, during the Age of the Dinosaurs, the group Colobognatha -- millipedes characterised by their unusual elongated heads which have evolved to suck in liquid food -- used to be very common. In contrast, with over 12,000 millipede species living today, there are only 500 colobognaths.<br />
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Another curious finding was the discovery of freshly hatched, eight-legged juveniles, which indicated that the animals lived and reproduced in the resin-producing trees.<br />
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"Even before the arachnids and insects, and far ahead of the first vertebrates, the leaf litter-eating millipedes were the first animals to leave their mark on land more than 400-million-years ago," explain the scientists. "These early millipedes differed quite strongly from the ones living today -- they would often be much larger and many had very large eyes."<br />
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The larger species in the genus Arthropleura, for example, would grow up to 2 m (6.5 ft) long and 50-80 cm (2-3 ft) wide -- the largest arthropods to have ever crawled on Earth. Why these giants became extinct and those other orders survived remains unknown, partly because only a handful of usually badly preserved fossils from the whole Mesozoic era (252-66-million years ago) has been retrieved. Similarly, although it had long been suspected that the 16 modern millipede orders must be very old, a fossil record to support this assumption was missing.</span><br />
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</span> <u><i><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The above story is based on <a href="https://checklist.pensoft.net/article/30320/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">materials </a>provided by  <a href="http://www.pensoft.net/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Pensoft Publishers</a>.</span></i></u><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><br />
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130-million-year-old Insects Trapped in Amber Right When They Were Born

One of the newly discovered millipede fossilized in Cretaceous amber from Myanmar (Burma). Credit: Dr Thomas Wesener Sinc...

Research Reveals 'Fundamental Finding' About Earth's Outer Core

earth, Tectonic 7:24 PM

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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Researchers used cutting-edge supercomputing techniques to make a critical discovery about the chemical composition of the Earth's outer core. Image credit: Argonne National Labs</td></tr>
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</span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">The Earth’s core is an exceptionally difficult place to study. Its depths descend a staggering 2,900 kilometers — about the distance from New York City to Denver — and its extreme, otherworldly conditions are extraordinarily challenging to simulate in the lab.<br />
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For scientists like Florida State University Assistant Professor Mainak Mookherjee and his postdoctoral scholar Suraj Bajgain, whose lives’ work is to penetrate the mysteries hidden in the core’s impossible depths, these are serious and stubborn roadblocks. But in a new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, Mookherjee and his team used high-powered supercomputing techniques to sidestep these obstacles and make a critical discovery about the core’s chemical composition.<br />
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Along with colleagues at Rice University and Louisiana State University, Mookherjee and Bajgain used meticulously calibrated simulations to determine the maximum amount of nitrogen that can possibly exist in the Earth’s outer core: around 2 percent by weight at the core-mantle boundary, and about 2.6 percent by weight at the inner-core boundary.<br />
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“This is an insightful exercise because it gives the upper-most bound of nitrogen in the outer core,” Mookherjee said. “We are providing maximum constraint on the abundance of an element that is a major component of the atmosphere of a habitable planet. That’s the fundamental finding.”<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">Nitrogen is key to organic matter, and how nitrogen is stored in the planet’s rocky and metallic interior is a crucial but elusive piece of information.<br />
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“When a planet is forming, size of the planet and how much nitrogen — or any other light element — is sucked into the core is very important,” Mookherjee said. “If you’re thinking of life as organic life, carbon and nitrogen are important constituents. But if all the nitrogen goes into the core, there’s nothing left to fuel organic life.”<br />
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Questions of which elements roil in the cauldron of the Earth’s core have long puzzled Earth scientists. Important dissonances in prevailing seismological and geochemical models have gone unexplained, and analyses of meteorites that closely model Earth’s bulk rocky material tend to suggest that we should be seeing more nitrogen in our planet’s interior. These inconsistencies provoke perplexing questions.<br />
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“Geochemical evidence often points to the fact that the Earth’s interior might be depleted in terms of nitrogen inventory,” Mookherjee said. “Are we lacking it? Is it hidden in the core? These are unknowns. There are various models, but it’s impossible to access the Earth’s core, and we do not have direct evidence of the planet’s formation process, including redistribution of elements. We’re trying to make inferences by piecing evidence together.”<br />
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Mookherjee circumvented the considerable challenges of experimenting at extreme core conditions by simulating those conditions on powerful supercomputers. Using facilities at LSU, as well as the National Science Foundation’s <br />
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After a battery of benchmark tests to ensure the simulations were running properly, the team added nitrogen to the system. Their goal was to identify the effects of nitrogen on the density and sound wave velocity of liquid iron at conditions analogous to the Earth’s core — readings that would better allow them to determine the core’s nitrogen content.<br />
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Ultimately, the simulations successfully revealed a first-ever, geophysical data-based hint about how much nitrogen might be trapped deep in the Earth’s inhospitable interior.<br />
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“Our estimates on the maximum limit of nitrogen in the Earth’s outer core is based on the assumption that Earth’s core is composed of an iron-nitrogen binary mixture, but more research is needed to incorporate the effect of multiple elements alloying with iron,” Mookherjee said.</span><br />
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<u><i><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The above story is based on <a href="https://news.fsu.edu/news/science-technology/2018/12/20/research-reveals-fundamental-finding-about-earths-outer-core/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">materials </a>provided by <a href="https://www.fsu.edu/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Florida State University.</a></span></i></u></div>

Research Reveals 'Fundamental Finding' About Earth's Outer Core

Researchers used cutting-edge supercomputing techniques to make a critical discovery about the chemical composition of the Earth's ou...

Earth Loses Hundreds of Tons of Atmosphere to Space Every Day

earth, Researches 7:10 PM

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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Credit: ESA/AOES Medialab</td></tr>
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</span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Scientists have known for some time that Earth's atmosphere loses several hundred tons of oxygen each day. They understand how this oxygen loss happens on Earth's night side, but they're not sure how it happens on the day side. They do know one thing though; they happen during auroras.</span><br />
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According to a press release from NASA's Earth Observatory, no two oxygen outflow events are exactly the same, which makes understanding them a challenge. They call the events 'fountains of gas' that escape the Earth during auroral activity, and the Earth Observatory has a mission dedicated to understanding them.<br />
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The mission is part of the NASA's Earth Observatory program called VISIONS-2 (Visualizing Ion Outflow via Neutral Atom Sensing-2), and it requires certain conditions. It's set in Ny Alesund, Svalbard, Norway for good reason. It's the northernmost year-round civilian settlement in the world. It has an ice-free harbour year round, and a modern rocket launch facility. There's also no sun in the winter night here to interfere with studying the auroras.<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;">But there's something else that makes this the perfect setting for the VISIONS-2 mission. Every morning, Ny Alesund passes under a weak point in Earth's magnetic bubble. The weak point is like a funnel that channels the fierce solar wind into our upper atmosphere. That causes auroral displays, and boils the gases of our atmosphere off into the vacuum of space in an auroral fountain.<br />
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Recently, researchers with VISIONS-2 launched two sounding rockets to investigate oxygen loss during auroras. Sounding rockets are small, targeted rockets that can be launched quickly. In this case, the two rockets were loaded with cameras and other instruments, and prepared for launch.<br />
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The launch team has to be very patient. But of course, they have technology on their side. They don't have to wait until they see the aurora, they have advanced notice of an aurora thanks to the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite.<br />
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DSCOVR is the NOAA's solar wind observatory. It sits out at the LaGrange point between the Earth and the Sun and tells the VISIONS-2 team when the solar wind is powerful enough and oriented the right way to cause auroras. At best, the team gets about an hour warning.<br />
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Even with advanced warning, the team is cautious. If the solar wind turns out to be too weak, then they will have wasted the launch. If terrestrial wind conditions in Earth's atmosphere are too strong, that's also a problem. The rockets are unguided, so they have to be oriented before launch to account for winds. Luckily, the team has another tool at their disposal, weather balloons launched every 30 minutes, as needed, to test the wind.<br />
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 The rockets were staged in Ny-Ålesund, Svalbard (Norway), and the researchers waited for an aurora before launching the pair. On December 7th, 2018, the researchers launched the two rockets during an aurora. The photo below is a long exposure of the rockets, which captures both launches even though they occurred a couple minutes apart.<br />
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The mission used a pair of rockets so they could use a mix of different instruments in each. Some instruments required a spinning platform and some didn't. A pair of rockets launched with a couple minutes between them also allowed similar instruments to take readings over time. The above image shows the first stage ignitions and burnouts of the two rockets, as they were sent on their mission to study oxygen loss in Earth's atmosphere.<br />
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"We had such an amazing experience building these very complex and capable payloads, integrating and testing them at Wallops, then bringing them to the field," said Doug Rowland, principal investigator for the mission and a space physicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "The launch was a very emotional moment, even more so when we saw that all the instruments had performed well and the science conditions were good."<br />
After launch, there's ten minutes for the rocket to do its work in the atmospheric fountain. Neutral atom imaging cameras build a picture of the fountain from within and without. The auroral camera documents the aurora itself, its temperature, intensity, and height. If all goes well, the research team is rewarded with a 'wall of science.'<br />
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The December 7 launch appears to have been successful. An early look at the data shows that the instruments functioned properly and returned the intended data. "I believe we did see the 'atmospheric fountain,'" said Rowland. The data still need to be analyzed and scaled, "but we may have evidence of it from multiple perspectives."<br />
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Earth, obviously, is a dynamic, living, active planet. There's a lot going on here. The VISIONS-2 project is designed not only to help us understand our own planet better, but other planets as well. Which planets are habitable? Why are some so desolate? How did a planet like Mars, which once had an atmosphere, lose it?<br />
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Earth's atmosphere won't be gone anytime soon. Not until the sun goes red giant in about 5 billion years, anyway. At that distant point in time, the expanding Sun will boil our atmosphere away like nothing. Then we're done.<br />
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The amount of oxygen (and hydrogen) lost from Earth's atmosphere during these auroras is miniscule. Several hundred tons each day might sound like a lot, but it isn't. In any case, photosynthesis helps restore oxygen. It's still an important piece of the puzzle for understanding how things work, though, and what the details are in the relationship between Earth and its star.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><u><i><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The above post is reprinted from <a href="https://www.universetoday.com/140917/did-you-know-that-the-earth-loses-several-hundred-tons-of-atmosphere-to-space-every-day/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Universe Today</a>.</span></i></u><br />
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Earth Loses Hundreds of Tons of Atmosphere to Space Every Day

Credit: ESA/AOES Medialab Scientists have known for some time that Earth's atmosphere loses several hundred tons of oxyge...

Why Is Sea Level Rising Faster in Some Places Along the US East Coast Than Others?

climate, Environment, USA 6:39 PM

Why Is Sea Level Rising Faster in Some Places Along the US East Coast Than Others?

(Photo courtesy Joseph R. Melanson, skypic.com) Sea levels are rising globally from ocean warming and melting of land ice, but the se...

Rare-earth Elements Discovered in Georgia Kaolin Mines, Study Finds

Geochemistry, Mining 8:09 PM

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</span></span><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"> <span style="font-size: medium;">The high-density minerals in the Georgia kaolin mines are potential sources of rare-earth elements, including the heavy rare-earth elements that are in high demand for many important uses and are mostly imported to the United States from China, according to a study led by Georgia State University and Thiele Kaolin Co.<br />
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Rare-earth elements are used to make critical products, including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) contrast agents, X-ray intensifying screens, portable X-ray machines, medical lasers, fiber optics, optical lenses, pressure sensors, monitors and television screens, fluorescent lamps, rechargeable battery electrodes and permanent magnets.<br />
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There are 17 rare-earth elements, which include the 15 elements of the lanthanide series (atomic numbers 57 to 71 on the periodic table), plus scandium (Sc) and yttrium (Y). The heavy rare-earth elements are from gadolinium (Gd) to lutetium (Lu), atomic numbers 64 to 71 on the periodic table.<br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><ins class="adsbygoogle" data-ad-client="ca-pub-1021498709184325" data-ad-format="fluid" data-ad-layout="in-article" data-ad-slot="6157425841" style="display: block; text-align: center;"></ins><br />
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Thiele Kaolin Co. mined for kaolin in two quarries near Sandersville, Ga., and provided Georgia State researchers with the leftover mineral samples, or grit, for analysis. The minerals present were identified using X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy and chemical analysis. The findings, published in the journal Clays and Clay Minerals, suggest a new, potential source of rare-earth elements, including the less common heavy rare-earth elements.<br />
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"We were interested in looking at the very course, sand-sized material from the kaolin ore that they call grit. It accounts for about 10 percent of the mined material and is removed before they make finished kaolin products for a variety of applications, such as paper, paints, adhesives, plastics, ceramics, etc.," said Dr. W. Crawford Elliott, senior author of the study and associate professor in the Department of Geosciences at Georgia State.<br />
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"They gave us samples of the grit. When we processed these samples, we found a particular enrichment in the heavy rare-earth elements, gadolinium through lutetium. An enrichment in the heavy rare-earth elements is interesting and useful because in most cases, the Earth's crust is enriched in the lighter rare-earth elements. The heavy rare-earth elements tend to be more technologically important.<br />
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"After we did a heavy liquid separation on that material, we found the Buffalo Creek Kaolin Member is about 100 times more enriched in the heavy rare-earth elements relative to concentrations in upper continental crust. Our work suggests a way to obtain heavy rare-earth elements from kaolin ore, which hasn't been done before. This constitutes a new resource for the rare-earth elements, which we are getting all from China."</span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
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</span> <span style="font-family: inherit;"><u><i><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The above story is based on <a href="https://news.gsu.edu/2018/12/14/rare-earth-elements-discovered-in-georgia-kaolin-mines-study-finds/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">materials </a>provided by <a href="https://news.gsu.edu/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Georgia State University.</a></span></i></u></span></div>

Rare-earth Elements Discovered in Georgia Kaolin Mines, Study Finds

Scheelite. Photo: Rob Lavinsky The high-density minerals in the Georgia kaolin mines are potential sources of rare-earth elem...

Yellowstone Volcano Was Hit by Earthquake Swarm of 2,500 Tremors

Earthquakes, Tectonic, Yellowstone 6:57 PM

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Last summer, Yellowstone National Park was hit by a huge earthquake swarm. Over the course of three months, the park experienced over 2,500 tremors, making it one of the biggest and longest swarms on record.<br />
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Earthquake swarms are completely normal. They account for about 50 percent of the seismic activity in the Yellowstone area. Last month, for example, seismologists recorded 126 earthquakes in the National Park, 57 of which were part of a swarm in an area known as Maple Creek.<br />
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This is the same area that the mega-swarm of 2017 took place. It started at the western edge of Yellowstone National Park in June and persisted for three and a half months, coming to an end at the start of October. What caused the earthquake swarm is not known.<br />
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At the time, Mike Poland, the scientist-in-charge at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, said that after the swarm ended, scientists would be able to “gather up all of the available data and start crunching numbers.<br />
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"[This is] certainly a fascinating event and one that we hope to learn more about through some post-swarm analysis. There's a lot to work on this winter, for sure."<br />
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Now, scientists at the USGS believe they have determined the driving force behind the event. David Shelly, seismologist with the government agency, wrote a blog post about what they had found in the Yellowstone Caldera Chronicles.<br />
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He said that recent upgrades to the seismic network at the park meant the swarm had been captured in incredible detail. Scientists had more data to work with than ever before. The team compared the waveforms of thousands of earthquakes in order to precisely locate each tremor. This allowed them to build up a map showing how the swarm moved.<br />
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“The patterns of seismicity from the swarm in time and space that have been revealed from this processing are striking—the swarm involved numerous fault structures over its course,” Shelly wrote. “Many of these faults are parallel and oriented along east-northeast trends, but some faults with orientations that are nearly perpendicular to that trend were also activated. Over the 3 months of the swarm, seismicity migrated outward from its initial activation area, both laterally and in depth. At times, this migration was rapid; at other times it was slow.”<br />
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He said the pattern observed does not fit with the movement of magma. Instead, it looks like the swarm was caused by “water…diffusing through small cracks in the subsurface.”<br />
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Shelly continued: “The involvement of this water may in part explain why these swarms are sometimes long-lived, why they expand dramatically over time, and why the fault structures are so complex. This also may explain why swarms are common in volcanic areas, where water is a byproduct released from deeper magma as it cools.<br />
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“Because this water is under great pressure in the deep crust where it is released, it tends to migrate upward and sometimes laterally. When it interacts with cooler, more brittle rocks stressed by tectonic and volcanic processes, this water may trigger earthquakes. In fact, earthquakes themselves may allow the fluid to migrate more efficiently, through faults in the rock.”<br />
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He said that while the swarm of 2017 was “a larger-than-average example,” earthquake swarms on their own—without signs of unrest, like surface deformation or changes to gas emissions—do not signal an increased risk of eruption.<br />
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<i><u><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The above story is based on <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/yellowstone-supervolcano-earthquake-swarm-volcano-yellowstone-volcano-1255302" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">materials </a>provided by <a href="https://volcanoes.usgs.gov/volcanoes/yellowstone/article_home.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">USGS</a>.</span></u></i></div>

Yellowstone Volcano Was Hit by Earthquake Swarm of 2,500 Tremors

Last summer, Yellowstone National Park was hit by a huge earthquake swarm. Over the course of three months, the park experienced over 2...

Largest Known Diamond in North America Found

Diamonds, famous, gemstones 4:08 PM

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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The record-setting stone was found in October, according to Dominion Diamond Mines. The find is said to be more than double the weight of the last record-setting stone. (Submitted by Dominion Diamond Mines)</td></tr>
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The biggest diamond ever found in North America has been unearthed by Dominion Diamond Mines and Rio Tinto Group at a mine in Canada's frozen north.<br />
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The 552-carat yellow gem was found at the Diavik mine in the Northwest Territories, and is almost three times the size of the next largest stone ever found in Canada.<br />
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While Diavik and the neighbouring Ekati mine produce some very high quality diamonds, they're not renowned for the sort of huge gems normally found in southern African mines.<br />
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Dominion chief executive officer Shane Durgin said the diamond is gem quality, meaning it's suitable for jewellery, but gave few additional details that help determine its value.<br />
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Yellow stones typically sell at a discount to Type IIa top whites often found in the best African mines. Still, the highest quality fancy vivid yellow or fancy intense yellow stones can sell for a premium.<br />
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"We can label it fancy yellow, but beyond that, due to its rough nature and the abrasions received through the processing facility, that's all we can comment on," Mr Durgin said in an interview. "It's very hard to give a ballpark estimate. It all depends on, again, the cutting and the resulting stone it ends up."<br />
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The discovery is the seventh-biggest this century, according to Bloomberg calculations, and would be among the 30 largest stones ever unearthed. The biggest was the 3,106-carat Cullinan, found near Pretoria in South Africa in 1905. It was cut into several polished gems, the two largest of which - the Great Star of Africa and the Lesser Star of Africa - are set in the Crown Jewels of Britain.<br /><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The 552-carat Yellow Diamond Discovered at Canada's Diavik Diamond<br />
Photo: Minedominion Diamond Mines<br />
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There have been a slew of big finds in recent years as better technology helped miners first detect, and then not break big stones that are susceptible to being smashed in the mining process. Among those are diamonds found by Lucara Diamond Corp and Gem Diamonds that fetched between US$40 million (S$55 million) and US$63 million.<br />
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While the Diavik mine is 60 per cent-owned and fully operated by Rio, Dominion bought the stone in an internal auction process from its partner. Dominion said it will select someone soon to cut and polish the stone.<br />
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"It's a beautiful gem-quality diamond," Mr Durgin said, adding that it was somewhat of a "miracle" that the stone survived the mining process. "It's very unusual for a diamond of this size in this part of the world. So it's a very unique discovery."<br />
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In 2015, Rio unearthed a 187.7 carat gem-quality diamond from Diavik. "Foxfire" narrowly escaped being pulverised because its elongated shape allowed it to slip sideways through a filtering screen. The diamond was exhibited at the Smithsonian before being turned into a pair of pale yellow earrings weighing a total of 77.7 carats. The earrings sold for over US$1.5 million at Christie's earlier this month.<br />
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This year's find comes at a good time for Dominion. Since billionaire Dennis Washington bought the company for US$1.2 billion last year, there's been a management merry-go-round with at least five senior personnel leaving. That includes CEO Patrick Evans, who left last week after just over a year at the helm. Dominion needs to decide if it will pull the trigger on expansion projects that would extend the life of the Ekati mine.<br />
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Diamond mining in this area of Canada's sub-arctic is incredibly difficult. There are no permanent roads, meaning the only access is by air or, for a few months a year, ice roads that have to be rebuilt each winter.<br />
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Meanwhile, the global market has been under pressure, especially for smaller and lower quality stones. There's currently an oversupply of such diamonds, and a weaker Indian rupee has put pressure on manufacturers in the country where about 90 per cent of gems are cut and polished. Major cutting centres have also been squeezed by low margins and a drop in trade finance.<br />
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<u><i><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The above post is reprinted from <a href="https://www.ddmines.com/dominion-diamond-mines-announces-the-recovery-of-the-largest-diamond-ever-found-in-north-america-at-diavik/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Dominion Diamond Mines.</a></span></i></u></div>

Largest Known Diamond in North America Found

The record-setting stone was found in October, according to Dominion Diamond Mines. The find is said to be more than double the weight of...

Oceans Are Being Sucked Into Earth’s Interior Through World’s Deepest Trenches

earth, ocean, Tectonic 7:52 PM

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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">File photo of a deep sea trench. The Mariana Trench is the deepest natural point on Earth.<br />
Photo: ISTOCK</td></tr>
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Three times more water is being sucked into Earth’s interior through its subduction zones than was previously thought, scientists have discovered. These huge fissures that scar the planet’s surface appear at the boundaries of tectonic plates. When they collide, they drag water down miles and miles, locking it up inside the rocks in the plates.<br />
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Slow-motion collisions of tectonic plates under the ocean drag about three times more water down into the deep Earth than previously estimated, according to a first-of-its-kind seismic study that spans the Mariana Trench.<br />
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The observations from the deepest ocean trench in the world have important implications for the global water cycle, according to researchers in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.<br />
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"People knew that subduction zones could bring down water, but they didn't know how much water," said Chen Cai, who recently completed his doctoral studies at Washington University. Cai is the first author of the study published in the journal Nature.<br />
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"This research shows that subduction zones move far more water into Earth's deep interior -- many miles below the surface -- than previously thought," said Candace Major, a program director in the National Science Foundation's Division of Ocean Sciences, which funded the study. "The results highlight the important role of subduction zones in Earth's water cycle."<br />
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"Previous estimates vary widely in the amount of water that is subducted deeper than 60 miles," said Doug Wiens, the Robert S. Brookings Distinguished Professor in Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences and Cai's research advisor for the study. "The main source of uncertainty in these calculations was the initial water content of the subducting uppermost mantle."<br />
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To conduct this study, researchers listened to more than one year's worth of Earth's rumblings -- from ambient noise to actual earthquakes -- using a network of 19 passive, ocean-bottom seismographs deployed across the Mariana Trench, along with seven island-based seismographs. The trench is where the western Pacific Ocean plate slides beneath the Mariana plate and sinks deep into the Earth's mantle as the plates slowly converge.<br />
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The new seismic observations paint a more nuanced picture of the Pacific plate bending into the trench -- resolving its three-dimensional structure and tracking the relative speeds of types of rock that have different capabilities for holding water.<br />
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Rock can grab and hold onto water in a variety of ways.<br />
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Ocean water atop the plate runs down into the Earth's crust and upper mantle along the fault lines that lace the area where plates collide and bend. Then it gets trapped. Under certain temperature and pressure conditions, chemical reactions force the water into a non-liquid form as hydrous minerals -- wet rocks -- locking the water into the rock in the geologic plate. All the while, the plate continues to crawl ever deeper into the Earth's mantle, bringing the water along with it.<br />
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Previous studies at subduction zones like the Mariana Trench have noted that the subducting plate could hold water. But they could not determine how much water it held and how deep it went.<br />
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"Previous conventions were based on active source studies, which can only show the top 3-4 miles into the incoming plate," Cai said.<br />
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He was referring to a type of seismic study that uses sound waves created with the blast of an air gun from aboard an ocean research vessel to create an image of the subsurface rock structure.<br />
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"They could not be very precise about how thick it is, or how hydrated it is," Cai said. "Our study tried to constrain that. If water can penetrate deeper into the plate, it can stay there and be brought down to deeper depths."<br />
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The seismic images that Cai and Wiens obtained show that the area of hydrated rock at the Mariana Trench extends almost 20 miles beneath the seafloor -- much deeper than previously thought.<br />
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The amount of water that can be held in this block of hydrated rock is considerable.<br />
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For the Mariana Trench region alone, four times more water subducts than previously calculated. These features can be extrapolated to predict the conditions under other ocean trenches worldwide.<br />
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"If other old, cold subducting slabs contain similarly thick layers of hydrous mantle, then estimates of the global water flux into the mantle at depths greater than 60 miles must be increased by a factor of about three," Wiens said.<br />
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And for water in the Earth, what goes down must come up. Sea levels have remained relatively stable over geologic time, varying by less than 1,000 ft. This means that all of the water that is going down into the Earth at subduction zones must be coming back up somehow, and not continuously piling up inside the Earth.<br />
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Scientists believe that most of the water that goes down at the trench comes back from the Earth into the atmosphere as water vapor when volcanoes erupt hundreds of miles away. But with the revised estimates of water from the new study, the amount of water going into the earth seems to greatly exceed the amount of water coming out.<br />
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"The estimates of water coming back out through the volcanic arc are probably very uncertain," said Wiens, who hopes that this study will encourage other researchers to reconsider their models for how water moves back out of the Earth. "This study will probably cause some re-evaluation."<br />
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Moving beyond the Mariana Trench, Wiens along with a team of other scientists has recently deployed a similar seismic network offshore in Alaska to consider how water is moved down into the Earth there.<br />
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"Does the amount of water vary substantially from one subduction zone to another, based on the kind of faulting that you have when the plate bends?" Wiens asked. "There's been suggestions of that in Alaska and in Central America. But nobody has looked at the deeper structure yet like we were able to do in the Mariana Trench."<br />
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<u><i><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The above story is based on <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0655-4" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">materials </a>provided by <a href="https://wustl.edu/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Washington University in St. Louis.</a></span></i></u></div>

Oceans Are Being Sucked Into Earth’s Interior Through World’s Deepest Trenches

File photo of a deep sea trench. The Mariana Trench is the deepest natural point on Earth. Photo: ISTOCK Three times more wa...

Two Earthquakes Shake Eastern Tennessee, Felt by Some in Upstate

Earthquakes, News, USA 6:25 PM

Two Earthquakes Shake Eastern Tennessee, Felt by Some in Upstate

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Scientists Reveal a Massive Biosphere of Life Hidden Under Earth's Surface

earth, Researches 9:24 PM

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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A nematode (eukaryote) in a biofilm of microorganisms. This deep-dwelling creature (Poikilolaimus sp.) was discovered in the Kopanang gold mine in South Africa, and was found 0.86 miles (1.4 km) below the surface. Credit: Gaetan Borgonie (Extreme Life Isyensya, Belgium)</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">The Earth is far more alive than previously thought, according to “deep life” studies that reveal a rich ecosystem beneath our feet that is almost twice the size of all the world’s oceans.</span><br />
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Despite extreme heat, no light, minuscule nutrition and intense pressure, scientists estimate this subterranean biosphere is teeming with between 15bn and 23bn tonnes of micro-organisms, hundreds of times the combined weight of every human on the planet.<br />
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Researchers at the Deep Carbon Observatory say the diversity of underworld species bears comparison to the Amazon or the Galápagos Islands, but unlike those places the environment is still largely pristine because people have yet to probe most of the subsurface.<br />
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“It’s like finding a whole new reservoir of life on Earth,” said Karen Lloyd, an associate professor at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. “We are discovering new types of life all the time. So much of life is within the Earth rather than on top of it.”<br />
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The team combines 1,200 scientists from 52 countries in disciplines ranging from geology and microbiology to chemistry and physics. A year before the conclusion of their 10-year study, they will present an amalgamation of findings to date before the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting opens this week.<br />
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Samples were taken from boreholes more than 5km deep and undersea drilling sites to construct models of the ecosystem and estimate how much living carbon it might contain.<br />
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The results suggest 70% of Earth’s bacteria and archaea exist in the subsurface, including barbed Altiarchaeales that live in sulphuric springs and Geogemma barossii, a single-celled organism found at 121C hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the sea.<br />
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One organism found 2.5km below the surface has been buried for millions of years and may not rely at all on energy from the sun. Instead, the methanogen has found a way to create methane in this low energy environment, which it may not use to reproduce or divide, but to replace or repair broken parts.<br />
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Lloyd said: “The strangest thing for me is that some organisms can exist for millennia. They are metabolically active but in stasis, with less energy than we thought possible of supporting life.”<br />
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Rick Colwell, a microbial ecologist at Oregon State University, said the timescales of subterranean life were completely different. Some microorganisms have been alive for thousands of years, barely moving except with shifts in the tectonic plates, earthquakes or eruptions.<br />
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“We humans orientate towards relatively rapid processes – diurnal cycles based on the sun, or lunar cycles based on the moon – but these organisms are part of slow, persistent cycles on geological timescales.”<br />
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Underworld biospheres vary depending on geology and geography. Their combined size is estimated to be more than 2bn cubic kilometres, but this could be expanded further in the future.<br />
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The researchers said their discoveries were made possible by two technical advances: drills that can penetrate far deeper below the Earth’s crust, and improvements in microscopes that allow life to be detected at increasingly minute levels.<br />
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The scientists have been trying to find a lower limit beyond which life cannot exist, but the deeper they dig the more life they find. There is a temperature maximum – currently 122C – but the researchers believe this record will be broken if they keep exploring and developing more sophisticated instruments.<br />
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Mysteries remain, including whether life colonises up from the depths or down from the surface, how the microbes interact with chemical processes, and what this might reveal about how life and the Earth co-evolved.<br />
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The scientists say some findings enter the realm of philosophy and exobiology – the study of extraterrestrial life.<br />
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Robert Hazen, a mineralogist at the Carnegie Institution for Science, said: “We must ask ourselves: if life on Earth can be this different from what experience has led us to expect, then what strangeness might await as we probe for life on other worlds?”<br />
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<u><i><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The study was published in the  <a href="https://fallmeeting.agu.org/2018/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">2018 American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting</a>.</span></i></u><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; display: inline; float: none; font-family: "open sans" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 18px; font-style: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><br />
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Scientists Reveal a Massive Biosphere of Life Hidden Under Earth's Surface

A nematode (eukaryote) in a biofilm of microorganisms. This deep-dwelling creature (Poikilolaimus sp.) was discovered in the Kopanang gol...

NASA: Arctic Sea Ice Decline Slows Down Temporarily

climate, NASA 11:09 PM

NASA: Arctic Sea Ice Decline Slows Down Temporarily

Captured on Landsat 8, the image shows a view of the Anzhu Islands in the Arctic Ocean during the summer melt season. (Photo courtesy: Na...

This Beach Has Sand That Looks Exactly Like Popcorn

earth, places to visit 9:05 PM

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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo By: @_irens_/Instagram</td></tr>
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If you thought there were only sand and pebble beaches in the world, then you’re in for a surprise.<br />
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There’s a bay in the Canary Islands where the coastline looks like it’s paved with popcorn and it’s a big hit on Instagram.<br />
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Situated in Corralejo, a town on the island of Fuerteventura, the stretch of coastline is known as Popcorn Beach or Popcorn Bay.<br />
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From afar, it looks just like any other beach on the Spanish island. But look closely and you will see what looks like pieces of popped corn covering the surface.<br />
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White coral, which has been eroded by the sea and washed out to shore is intermingled with black sand and volcanic rocks, making it look very much like popcorn.<br />
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The coral varies in size — some look exactly like popcorn while others are huge.<br />
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Thousands of tourists visit the Cycladic island every year and post photos of what could be mistaken for a landscape on the planet Mars, with beaches featuring dramatic and craggy red cliffs hugged by velvety black volcanic sands.<br />
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In Crete meanwhile, Elafonisi beach is known for is soft and powdery pink sands which tease the turquoise Aegean waters.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7xM5s-kyM2E/XA6uGhDZeRI/AAAAAAAAQpA/PWWox3PSK8oeaf_oLGx_EryXdOFYFyVJgCLcBGAs/s1600/This%2BBeach%2BHas%2BSand%2BThat%2BLooks%2BExactly%2BLike%2BPopcorns%2B%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="This Beach Has Sand That Looks Exactly Like Popcorn" border="0" data-original-height="1080" data-original-width="1080" height="640" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7xM5s-kyM2E/XA6uGhDZeRI/AAAAAAAAQpA/PWWox3PSK8oeaf_oLGx_EryXdOFYFyVJgCLcBGAs/s640/This%2BBeach%2BHas%2BSand%2BThat%2BLooks%2BExactly%2BLike%2BPopcorns%2B%25281%2529.jpg" title="" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo By: @latemoon83/Instagram</td></tr>
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This Beach Has Sand That Looks Exactly Like Popcorn

Photo By: @_irens_/Instagram If you thought there were only sand and pebble beaches in the world, then you’re in for a surprise. Th...

Gemstone Turns Out to Be Fossil of an Unknown Dinosaur

dinosaur, Earth History, Fossils 9:06 PM

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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Opal boulders in Coober Pedy, Australia. Dmitry Chulov/Shutterstock</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">A new kelpie-sized dinosaur has been identified in the Lightning Ridge opal fields, 100 million years after it roamed prehistoric floodplains.</span><br />
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A new dinosaur has been added to the more than 700 already named after a chance discovery of a jawbone fragment in a bucket of opal rubble from near Lightning Ridge, New South Wales.<br />
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The kelpie-sized reptile, which lived in the Cretaceous Period about 100 million years ago, has been dubbed Weewarrasaurus pobeni – a name that recognises the fossil’s unearthing in the Wee Warra opal field, and honours Mike Poben, an Adelaide-based opal buyer who donated the specimen for research.<br />
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It is the first new dinosaur to be named in NSW in nearly a century.<br />
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Weewarrasaurus was an ornithopod dinosaur, part of a group of small plant-eating species that moved around on two legs and that were particularly abundant on the ancient floodplains that covered the region 100 million years ago.<br />
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Like all fossils from the Lightning Ridge opal mines, the lower jaw—the only piece of the animal recovered—is preserved in opal. Precious opal gives off a rainbow of colours, in this case shimmering green and blue.<br />
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Lightning Ridge is the only place in the world where dinosaur bones routinely turn to opal.<br />
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Palaeontologist Dr Phil Bell from the University of New England in Armidale, who led the research, said, “I remember Mike showing me the specimen and my jaw dropped. I had to try hard to contain my excitement, it was so beautiful”.<br />
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Although only the lower jaw of the new animal has been identified so far, even that might never have been found if it were not for Mr Poben’s keen eyes.<br />
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“I was sorting some rough opal when, astonishingly, I saw two fan-like ridges protruding from the dirt around one oddly-shaped piece," said Mr Poben. “Time froze: if these were teeth, then this was an opalised jawbone fragment.”<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-p9MK_ABm1Nc/XA1VHcR1JiI/AAAAAAAAQoo/6rnFToa4ZrU2OFFt3kfncPDqBX0di97sgCLcBGAs/s1600/Opal%2Bboulders%2Bin%2BCoober%2BPedy%252C%2BAustralia..png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="665" data-original-width="886" height="480" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-p9MK_ABm1Nc/XA1VHcR1JiI/AAAAAAAAQoo/6rnFToa4ZrU2OFFt3kfncPDqBX0di97sgCLcBGAs/s640/Opal%2Bboulders%2Bin%2BCoober%2BPedy%252C%2BAustralia..png" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Right Lower Jaw of Weewarrasaurus Showcases the Rainbow Hues of Opal in the Fossil.<br />
Photograph by Robert a. Smith</td></tr>
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Dr Bell regards Lightning Ridge as a world-class fossil resource because it preserves a unique suite of Cretaceous fauna. “If these fossils were in surface rock, like those found in China and Mongolia, it would be an absolute treasure-trove,” he said.<br />
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“Unfortunately, the fossil remnants we see are almost always part of mining spoil, because they sit in rock strata that is lies up to 30 metres underground. The mining process breaks the fossils into fragments – but on the other hand, we would never get to see even those fragments if it wasn’t for mining.”<br />
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Jenni Brammall, palaeontologist, gemmologist and manager of the Australian Opal Centre in Lightning Ridge, describes the jawbone as “a supremely rare and unlikely discovery”.<br />
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"This incredible little object is both the 100 million-year-old jaw of a new dinosaur species and a precious gemstone," she said.<br />
The Weewarrasaurus jaw is now part of the Australian Opal Centre collection, the world's most diverse public collection of opalised fossils.<br />
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<br />
<u><i><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">The above story is based on <a href="https://www.une.edu.au/connect/news/2018/12/dog-sized-dinosaur-emerges-from-opal-rubble" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">materials </a>provided by <a href="https://www.une.edu.au/__data/assets/image/0011/344/une-logo.png?v=0.1.7" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The University of New England.</a></span></i></u></div>

Gemstone Turns Out to Be Fossil of an Unknown Dinosaur

Opal boulders in Coober Pedy, Australia. Dmitry Chulov/Shutterstock A new kelpie-sized dinosaur has been identified in the Lightning R...

Volcanoes Fueled by 'Mush' Reservoirs, Not Magma Chambers

Magma, volcano 5:40 PM

Volcanoes Fueled by 'Mush' Reservoirs, Not Magma Chambers

Photo: (USGS) Volcanoes are not fed by molten magma formed in large chambers finds a new study, overturning classic ideas about volcan...

Fossil Algae Reveal 500 Million Years of Climate Change

Earth History, Fossils 6:17 PM

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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fossil Algae. Photo: James St. John</td></tr>
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Earth scientists are able to travel far back in time to reconstruct the geological past and paleoclimate to make better predictions about future climate conditions. Scientists at the Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ) and Utrecht University succeeded in developing a new indicator (proxy) of ancient CO<sub>2</sub>-levels, using the organic molecule phytane, a debris product of chlorophyll. This new organic proxy not only provides the most continuous record of CO2-concentrations ever, it also breaks a record in its time span, covering half a billion years. The data show the present idea that rises in CO2-levels that used to take millions of years, are now happening in a century. These findings are published in Science Advances on November 28th.<br />
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As CO<sub>2</sub>  increases today, it's vital to understand what impact these changes will have. To better predict the future, we must understand long-term changes in CO<sub>2</sub> over geologic history. Direct measurements of past CO<sub>2</sub> are available, e.g. bubbles in ice cores containing ancient gases. However, ice cores have a limited time span of one million years. To go farther back in time, earth scientists have developed various indirect measurements of CO<sub>2</sub> from proxies e.g. from algae, leaves, ancient soils and chemicals stored in ancient sediments to reconstruct past environmental conditions.<br />
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<h4 style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Phytane, a new way to travel in time</span></h4>
<div style="text-align: left;">
A new proxy, using a degradation product of chlorophyll, allows geochemists to infer a continuous record of historic CO<sub>2</sub>-levels in deep time. Scientists at NIOZ have recently developed phytane as a promising new organic proxy that uncovers half a billion years of CO<sub>2</sub>-levels in the oceans, from the Cambrian until recent times.<br />
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Using the new proxy, they were able to make the most continuous record of ancient carbon dioxide levels ever. "We developed and validated a new way to time travel -- going farther back in time and to more places," says NIOZ-scientist Caitlyn Witkowski. "With phytane, we now have the longest CO<sub>2</sub>-record with one single marine proxy. This new data is invaluable to modelers who can now more accurately make predictions of the future."<br />
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Witkowski and colleagues selected more than 300 samples of marine sediments from deep sea cores and oils from all over the globe, reflecting the majority of geological periods in the last 500 million years.</div>
<h4 style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Fossil molecules</span></h4>
<div style="text-align: left;">
Past chemical reactions can be 'stored' in fossil molecules, and so they may reflect various ancient environmental conditions. Geochemists are able to 'read' these conditions, such as seawater temperature, pH, salinity and CO<sub>2</sub>-levels. Organic matter, such as phytane, reflects the pressure of CO<sub>2</sub> in ocean water or the atmosphere (pCO<sub>2</sub>).</div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Little green miracles</span></h4>
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Although all organic matter has the potential to reflect CO<sub>2</sub>, phytane is special. Phytane is the pigment responsible for our green world. Anything that uses photosynthesis to absorb sunlight, including plants, algae, and some species of bacteria, has chlorophyll from which phytane comes. Plants and algae take in CO<sub>2</sub> and produce oxygen. Without these little green miracles, our world just wouldn't be the same.<br />
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Because chlorophyll is found all around the world, phytane is also everywhere and is a major constituent of decayed and fossilized biomass. "Phytane doesn't chemically change over the course of time, even if it is millions of years old," Witkowski says.</div>
<h4 style="text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Carbon isotope fractionation</span></h4>
<div style="text-align: left;">
CO<sub>2</sub> of the past is estimated from organic matter, such as phytane, through the phenomenon of carbon isotope fractionation during photosynthesis. When taking up CO<sub>2</sub>, plants and algae prefer the light carbon isotope (12C) over the heavy carbon isotope (13C). They only use the heavy carbon isotope when CO<sub>2</sub>-levels in the surrounding water or atmosphere are low. The proportion between these two isotopes therefore reflects the level of carbon dioxide in the environment at the moment of growth.<br />
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This also explains why Witkowski didn't use terrestrial plants as a source for her research, exclusively using phytane from (fossilized) marine sources. The plant world is divided into so-called C3- and C4-plants, each with their own unique ratio of light-to-heavy carbon. Phytoplankton all have very similar ratios compared to their plant counterparts. Witkowski: "By choosing only marine sources, we could limit uncertainty of the phytane source in the dataset."<br />
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"In our data, we see high levels of carbon dioxide, reaching 1000 ppm as opposed to today's 410 ppm. In this respect, present day levels are not unique, but the speed of these changes have never been seen before. Changes that typically take millions of years are now happening in a century. This additional CO<sub>2</sub>-data may help us understand the future of our planet." In future research, phytane can be used to go even further back in time than the Phanerozoic, the earliest found in two billion-year-old samples.</div>
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<u><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">The above story is based on Materials provided by <a href="http://www.nioz.nl/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research</a>.</span></u></div>
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