Tag • #geology

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Renovation relic: Man finds hominin jawbone in parents’ travertine kitchen tile

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Yesterday - 21:16 · 1 minute

closeup of fossilized jawbone in a piece of travertine tile

Enlarge / Reddit user Kidipadeli75 spotted a fossilized hominin jawbone in his parents' new travertine kitchen tile. (credit: Reddit user Kidipadeli75)

Ah, Reddit! It's a constant source of amazing stories that sound too good to be true... and yet! The latest example comes to us from a user named Kidipadeli75, a dentist who visited his parents after the latter's kitchen renovation and noticed what appeared to be a human-like jawbone embedded in the new travertine tile. Naturally, he posted a photograph to Reddit seeking advice and input. And Reddit was happy to oblige.

User MAJOR_Blarg, for instance, is a dentist "with forensic odontology training" and offered the following:

While all old-world monkeys, apes, and hominids share the same dental formula, 2-1-2-3, and the individual molars and premolars can look similar, the specific spacing in the mandible itself is very specifically and characteristically human, or at least related and very recent hominid relative/ancestor. Most likely human given the success of the proliferation of H.s. and the (relatively) rapid formation of travertine.

Against modern Homo sapiens, which may not be entirely relevant, the morphology of the mandible is likely not northern European, but more similar to African, middle Eastern, mainland Asian.

Another user, deamatrona, who claims to hold an anthropology degree, also thought the dentition looked Asiatic, "which could be a significant find." The thread also drew the attention of John Hawks , an anthropologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and longtime science blogger who provided some valuable context on his own website. (Hawks has been involved with the team that discovered Homo naledi at the Rising Star cave system in 2013.)

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Adventures in Volcanoland by Tamsin Mather review – fire and brimstone

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 2 days ago - 11:00 · 1 minute

A magical scientific exploration of volcanoes, and how they’ve shaped both nature and human destiny

Volcanoes are the homes of gods, language tells us – across most of Europe, people who may never have laid eyes on one call them after the smoking forge of Vulcan, Roman god of fire and smithery. (In the tectonic hotspot of Iceland, where people live cheek-by-jowl with 130-odd volcanoes, they are simply “fire mountains”.) Even in our unenchanted modern age, they are capable of inspiring a kind of divine madness in devotees such as the French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, who died in an eruption on Japan’s Mount Unzen in 1991. In recent documentaries by Werner Herzog and Sara Dosa , the Kraffts appear astronaut-like in eerie silver fire-proximity suits, silhouetted against glowing torrents of the Earth’s molten innards. “If I could eat rocks, I’d stay in the volcanoes and never come down,” Maurice proclaims.

Tamsin Mather, professor of Earth sciences at Oxford University, is an altogether more sober kind of scientist. Adventures in Volcanoland, the result of two decades of painstaking international research, is structured around pragmatic questions such as “What messages do volcanic gases carry from the deep?” But its roots lie in childhood memories of perhaps the most famous volcano of all: Vesuvius, and the plaster casts of the townspeople it killed in Pompeii in AD79. “It was the fear and distress twisted into the bodies of the people it claimed that stayed with me,” Mather writes. This isn’t simply a geological study, it’s a book about the entwined destiny of humans and volcanoes: how they helped create the conditions for our life on Earth, how they have threatened and destroyed communities, and how they point to the consequences of our current planet-destroying behaviours.

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Don’t stand in the door frame: what to do in an earthquake

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Friday, 5 April - 20:53

Experts say the US east coast earthquake was an opportunity for people to learn the official protocol: ‘drop, cover and hold on’

Millions of people across the US east coast were jolted on Friday morning when a rare 4.8 magnitude earthquake struck the region.

With its epicenter in New Jersey, the temblor jostled densely populated areas where residents are less accustomed to earthquakes, including in the New York City metropolitan area . There are no early-warning systems in place for this region, unlike on the earthquake-prone west coast, where they give people a few moments to ready themselves before the shaking starts. On the east coast, fewer people have had practice or experience with what to do when an earthquake hits.

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Tiny cracks in rocks may have concentrated chemicals needed for life

news.movim.eu / ArsTechnica · Friday, 5 April - 18:18 · 1 minute

Cartoon of a geologically active area, showing sub-surface channels in different colors to represent various temperatures.

Enlarge / Active geology could have helped purify key chemicals needed for life. (credit: Christof B. Mast)

In some ways, the origin of life is looking much less mystifying than it was a few decades ago. Researchers have figured out how some of the fundamental molecules needed for life can form via reactions that start with extremely simple chemicals that were likely to have been present on the early Earth. (We've covered at least one of many examples of this sort of work.)

But that research has led to somewhat subtler but no less challenging questions. While these reactions will form key components of DNA and protein, those are often just one part of a complicated mix of reaction products. And often, to get something truly biologically relevant, they'll have to react with some other molecules, each of which is part of its own complicated mix of reaction products. By the time these are all brought together, the key molecules may only represent a tiny fraction of the total list of chemicals present.

So, forming a more life-like chemistry still seems like a challenge. But a group of German chemists is now suggesting that the Earth itself provides a solution. Warm fluids moving through tiny fissures in rocks can potentially separate out mixes of chemicals, enriching some individual chemicals by three orders of magnitude.

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Andean alarm: climate crisis increases fears of glacial lake flood in Peru

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Tuesday, 26 March - 11:00

In 1941, thousands of people died in Huaraz when the natural dam on a lake above the city gave way. Now, melting glaciers are raising the chances of it happening again

• Photographs by Harriet Barber

Lake Palcacocha is high in the Cordillera Blanca range of the Peruvian Andes, sitting above the city of Huaraz at an altitude of about 4,500 metres. When the lake broke through the extensive moraines, or natural dams, holding it in place on 13 December 1941, it sent nearly 10m cubic metres of water and debris into the narrow valley towards the city, 1,500 metres below.

The result was one of the most devastating glacial lake outburst floods – or “GLOFs” – ever recorded. The force of the water altered the area’s geography for ever, and killed at least 1,800 people, and possibly as many as 5,000 .

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Geologists reject declaration of Anthropocene epoch

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Friday, 22 March - 13:58

Critics say it is a missed chance to recognise that the planet irrevocably left its natural state in the mid-20th century

The guardians of the world’s official geological timescale have firmly rejected a proposal to declare an Anthropocene epoch, after an epic academic row.

The proposal would have designated the period from 1952 as the Anthropocene to reflect the planet-changing impact of humanity. It would have ended the Holocene epoch, the 11,700 years of stable climate since the last ice age and during which human civilisation arose.

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Cosmic cleaners: the scientists scouring English cathedral roofs for space dust

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Sunday, 17 March - 15:00

Mini missions are being launched amid the spires – a haven for dust particles that may contain clues about the cosmos and the early Earth

On the roof of Canterbury Cathedral, two planetary scientists are searching for cosmic dust. While the red brick parapet hides the streets, buildings and trees far below, only wispy clouds block the deep blue sky that extends into outer space.

The roaring of a vacuum cleaner breaks the silence and researcher Dr Penny Wozniakiewicz, dressed in hazmat suit with a bulky vacuum backpack, carefully traces a gutter with the tube of the suction machine.

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What lies beneath: the hidden caves buried under Auckland back yards

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Friday, 8 March - 19:00

Rich history to 200 caves – from housing a secret printing press to widow’s shelter – as steps taken to protect the ‘sacred’ sites

Hidden behind a tropical garden in the affluent Auckland suburb of Mount Eden is a subterranean secret – a cave opening from the ground like the yawning mouth of a giant.

“People come down here and drop their jaws,” says its owner, Sean Jacob, who stands in the centre of the quiet rock chamber.

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Quest to declare Anthropocene an epoch descends into epic row

news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 7 March - 13:16

Vote against formal geological recognition of ‘age of the humans’ is claimed to have violated committee rules

The quest to declare the Anthropocene an official geological epoch has descended into an epic row, after the validity of a leaked vote that apparently killed the proposal was questioned.

Supporters of the idea have been working on the proposal for 15 years. They say it would formalise the undeniable and irreversible changes that human activity has wreaked on the planet. It would mark the end of the Holocene epoch, the 11,700 years of stable global environment in which the whole of human civilisation developed.