The wildfire season is getting longer and more severe, and current models suggest that this trend will only continue as anthropogenic climate change gets worse. Wildfires dramatically alter the landscape they inundate, leaving vegetation charred and the atmosphere ashy. While jarring, there is one consequence of these natural disasters that isn’t fully understood: their effect on rivers and streams. While it may seem intuitive to think that wildfires disrupt the hydrologic cycle and cause rivers to dry up or shrink, Grady Ball and colleagues found the opposite: wildfires are making our rivers longer.
Featured Image: Lightning is a common high energy phenomenon on Earth, like here during a storm over Bucharest, Romania. Image credit: Catalin.Fatu (Wikimedia Commons), CC BY-SA 3.0.
Authors: Benjamin L. Hess, Sandra Piazolo, Jason Harvey
You might think of lightning as a violent and destructive force of nature, but it might have helped to spark life on Earth. The enormous energy released by lightning can weather or even melt rocks. During this short but intense heating phase, the rock’s or soil’s mineralogy changes and a very important element for life becomes available: phosphorus. A group of researches was able to show why the transformation of phosphorus minerals by lightning could have been an important source of this element during Earth’s infancy.
Authors: Dini, B., Bennett, G. L., Franco, A. M. A., Whitworth, M. R. Z., Cook, K. L., Senn, A., and Reynolds, J. M.
Nepal straddles the Himalayan arc – the collision boundary of the Indian and the Eurasian tectonic plates that crumbled to form the highest mountains in the world, the Himalayas. Its precarious location makes it among the most disaster-prone countries in the world. Its landscape has been shaped, and continues to be shaped by seismic activity – from landslides and earthquakes, to glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) where the glacier ice or rock debris at the periphery of a glacial lake break off, resulting in severe floods downslope.
Driving out from Kathmandu city towards Bhaktapur, towards Kodari at the Nepal-China border, the landscape transitions from pagoda-style temples, to settlements, further on to a bleak, boulder-strewn landscape. This is the Araniko highway, built on an old yak track, running alongside the Bhote Koshi river, known to the locals as a difficult, dangerous landscape prone to rockfalls and landslides, especially during the monsoons. Warning signs and steel wire mesh welded to the slopes to mitigate landslides define this stretch, and angular boulders mark where the valleys rise into mountains, and are testimony to the region’s disaster-prone legacy.
The Bhote Koshi river that flows along the Araniko highway is littered with boulders that have worked loose from the valley slopes. Image credit: Gerd Eichmann (CC BY-SA)
Boulder movement downslope happens due to different kinds of landslides, ranging from abrupt, free-falling rocks to slower flow-like movements. Large boulders are a threat to life and infrastructure, and may amplify landslides when they move downslope or cause floods if they block a river channel.
In fragile landscapes, understanding when and how boulders move downslope and into river networks could be essential to detecting hazards. A rolling stone or a boulder in this case gathers no moss, they say, but can it gather landslide data? A pilot study by Benedetta Dini et al., in the Bhote Koshi catchment, documents how technology can help detect land movement and find use as early warning systems.
Twenty-three long-range, wireless trackers were drilled into boulders along known landslide or debris flow channels. Movement could be triggered by different events including debris flow, large-scale events or collisions. The sensors were programmed to send routine GPS locations every 24 hours, and an accelerometer would report when the boulder moves. A camera was also set up with a field views across the channels to acquire an image every 30 min. Via image sequences, the location of the sensor-embedded boulders are able to compare to prominent trees to identify and validate the movement data. Based on changes in tilt and displacement of boulders, corresponding to movement within a mass of rocks or downslope respectively, the study found that the sensors could successfully detect both slow and rapid movements.
In conclusion, despite technical difficulties which could be a focus for future research, smart boulders have good potential as weather-proof, long-term, real-time, cost-effective monitoring tools, not just in Nepal but in other landslide-prone areas across the world.
Authors: Ulrike Braeckman, Francesca Pasotti, Ralf Hoffmann, Susana Vázquez, Angela Wulff, Irene R. Schloss, Ulrike Falk, Dolores Deregibus, Nene Lefaible, Anders Torstensson, Adil Al-Handal, Frank Wenzhöfer, Ann Vanreusel
Nothing compares to the ethereal beauty of a clear lake. Looking down, you can see a whole world flourishing below: plants, fish, and critters. Compare that to a cloudy, or turbid, lake and suddenly you may feel very small, worried about what’s lurking beneath you. New research shows that the Antarctic ocean is transitioning from clear to turbid water, with big implications for ocean ecosystems.
Featured Image: Shewanella putrefaciens CN-32 (a microbe capable of eating iron) on hematite (a rock containing iron). Image courtesy Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL). Used with permission.
Authors: André Friese, Kohen Bauer, Clemens Glombitza, Luis Ordoñez, Daniel Ariztegui Verena B. Heuer, Aurèle Vuillemin, Cynthia Henny, Sulung Nomosatryo, Rachel Simister Dirk Wagner, Satria Bijaksana, Hendrik Vogel, Martin Melles, James M. Russell, Sean A. Crowe, Jens Kallmeyer
Just as a crow may use a rock to crack a nut, certain microbes can use solid iron to crack open methane. This consumption limits the amount of methane lost from lakes into the atmosphere, making it a crucial process in mitigating production of greenhouse gasses. These microbes are abundant in freshwater sediments, and their specialized mechanism for cracking open methane is most likely one of the oldest metabolisms on Earth, providing a modern-day window into the past.
As with any job tasked with predicting the future, climate scientists have a tough but important responsibility: understand how the climate will be different at the end of the century. Predicting future climate is especially critical in areas with large, vulnerable populations and that grow a large part of the food supply. California, for example, has a population of over 39 million and is a source of two-thirds of the fruits and one-third of the vegetables grown in the US. Changes to its climate will impact not only its own residents but also the population and economy of the whole country.
We are entering a new dawn of Mars exploration: Perseverance rover touched down on Mars earlier this year, which marks the start of what will be a decade-long effort to return samples from Mars. In 2022 the European Space Agency (ESA) will launch the ExoMars rover, which will team up with the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) to find evidence of past or present life on Mars.
Authors: Jamie E. Elsila, Natasha M. Johnson, Daniel P. Glavin, José C. Aponte, Jason P. Dworkin
All known life on Earth relies on amino acids. Many important biomolecules like proteins are made up of them. Scientists were surprised when they found these molecules, which are so strongly connected to living systems, in meteorites. How amino acids form in non-biological systems is still not entirely understood and is closely tied to the question of how life emerged on our young planet.
Featured image: Soviet authorities investigate a mangled tent involved in the Dyatlov Pass Incident. This work is in the public domain and is not an object of copyright according to article 1259 of Book IV of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation No. 230-FZ of December 18, 2006.
In 1959, a group of nine hikers led by Igor Dyatlov trekked through the Ural Mountains in Eastern Russia on a skiing trip. After no word by telegram from the hikers for eight days, their families grew nervous and demanded a search and rescue effort. Over two weeks after the hikers planned contact with their base camp, investigators located an abandoned and mangled tent on the slope of Kholat Syakhl (“Dead Hill” in the local dialect of Mansi).
Mid March 2021, I set out with 2 other wildlife enthusiasts to explore the Sundarbans delta in east India. The 3-hour journey from Kolkata city, on a busy road fringed by industrial towns tapered off at Gadkhali port – civilization’s last ‘land’ frontier before the largest continuous mangrove stretch in the world. We arrived after dusk, boarded our boat (with a crew of 2 naturalists, 3 boatmen, and a chef!), and were adrift upon dark waterways guided by twinkling village lights. In our haste, we thought little of just how ‘remote’ this wilderness was.
