Earth-logs

Subduction and the water cycle

Published on February 11, 2014 by zooks777Leave a comment

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For many geoscientists and lay people the water cycle is considered to be part of the Earth’s surface system. That is, the cycle of evapotranspiration, precipitation and infiltration involving atmosphere, oceans, cryosphere, terrestrial hydrology and groundwater. Yet it links to the mantle through subduction of hydrated oceanic lithosphere and volcanism. The rate at which water vapour re-enters the surface part of the water cycle through volcanoes is reasonably well understood, but the same cannot be said about ‘recharge’ of the mantle through subduction.

Subducted oceanic crust is old, cold and wet: fundamentals of plate theory. The slab-pull that largely drives plate tectonics results from phase transitions in oceanic crust that are part and parcel of low-temperature – high-pressure metamorphism. They involve the growth of the anhydrous minerals garnet and high-pressure pyroxene that constitute eclogite, the dense form taken by basalt that causes the density of subducted lithosphere to exceed that of mantle peridotite and so to sink. This transformation drives water out of subducted lithosphere into the mantle wedge overlying a subduction zone, where it encourages partial melting to produce volatile-rich andesitic basalt magma – the primary magma of island- and continental-arc igneous activity. Thus, most water that does reenter the mantle probably resides in the ultramafic lithospheric mantle in the form of hydrated olivine, i.e. the mineral serpentine, and that is hard to judge.

Water probably gets into the mantle lithosphere when the lithosphere bends to begin its descent. That is believed to involve faults – cold lithosphere is brittle – down which water can diffuse to hydrate ultramafic rocks. So the amount of water probably depends on the number of such bend-related faults. A way of assessing the degree of such faulting and thus the proportion of serpentinite is analysis of seismic records from subduction zones. This has been done from earthquake records from the West Pacific subduction zone descending beneath northern Japan (Garth, T. & Rietbrock, A. 2014. Order of magnitude increase in subducted H₂O due to hydrated normal faults within the Wadati-Bennioff zone. Geology, on-line publication doi:10.1130/G34730.1). The results suggest that between 17 to 31% of the subducted mantle there has been serpentinised.

In a million years each kilometre along the length of this subduction zone would therefore transfer between 170 to 318 billion tonnes of water into the mantle; an estimate more than ten times previous estimates. The authors observe that at such a rate a subduction zone equivalent to the existing, 3400 km long Kuril and Izu-Bonin arcs that affect Japan would have transferred sufficient water to fill the present world oceans 3.5 times over the history of the Earth. Had the entire rate of modern subduction along a length of 55 thousand kilometres been maintained over 4.5 billion years, the world’s oceans would have been recycled through the mantle once every 80 million years. To put that in perspective, since the Cretaceous Chalk of southern England began to be deposited, the entire mass of ocean water has been renewed. Moreover, subduction has probably slowed considerably through time, so the transfer of water would have been at a greater pace in the more distant past.

A first for geochronology: ages from Mars

Published on February 10, 2014 by zooks777Leave a comment

Remote sensing, including mapping of topographic elevation, and the recent exploits of three surface vehicles – the Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity Rovers – have provided lots of data for a host of geological interpreters. Producing a time frame for Martian geological and geomorphological events has, understandably, been limited mainly to the use of stratigraphic principles. Various rock units and surface features can be placed in relative time order through simple stratigraphic principles, such as what sits on top of what and which features cut through pre-existing rock units or are masked by them. The most important guide up to now has been interpretation of the relations between impact craters and both rock units and other geomorphological features. The Inner Planets are assumed to have recorded the same variation through time of the frequency and energies of bombardment, and that has been calibrated to some extent by radiometric dating of impact-related rocks returned from the Moon by the crewed Apollo missions. Some detail of relative timings also emerge from some craters cutting earlier ones. The only other source of Martian ages has been from rare meteorites (there are only 114 of them) whose stable isotope compositions are different from those of terrestrial rocks and more common meteorites. By a process of elimination it is surmised that they were flung from Mars as a result of large impacts in the past to land eventually on Earth. The oldest of them date back to 4.5 Ga, much the same as the estimated age of the earliest crystallisation of magmas on Earth.

MOLA colorized relief map of the western hemis... — Colorised relief map of the western hemisphere of Mars, showing Valles Marineris at centre and the four largest volcanoes on the planet (credit: Wikipedia)

But all Martian stratigraphy is still pretty vague by comparison with that here, with only 4 time divisions based on reference to the lunar crater chronology and 3 based on evidence from detailed orbital spectroscopy and Rover data about the alteration of minerals on the Martian surface. Apart from meteorite dates there is very little knowledge of the earliest events, other than Mars must have had a solid, probably crystalline crust made of mainly anhydrous igneous minerals. This was the ‘target’ on which much of the impact record was impressed: by analogy with the Moon it probably spanned the period of the Late Heavy Bombardment from about 4.1 to 3.7 Ga, equivalent to the Eoarchaean on Earth. That period takes its name – Noachian – from Noachis Terra (‘land of Noah’), an intensely cratered, topographically high region of Mars’s southern hemisphere, whose name was given to this large area of high albedo by classical astronomers. Perhaps coincidentally, the Noachian provides the clearest evidence for the former presence of huge amounts of water on the surface of Mars and its erosional power that formed the gigantic Valles Marineris canyon system. The rocky surface that the craters punctured is imaginatively referred to as the pre-Noachian. A major episode of volcanic activity that formed Olympus Mons and other lava domes is named the Hesperian (another legacy of early astronomical nomenclature). It is vaguely ascribed to the period between 3.7 and 3.0 Ga, and followed by three billion years during which erosion and deposition under hyper-arid conditions formed smooth surfaces with very few craters and rare evidence for the influence of surface water and ice. It is named, inappropriately as it turns out, the Amazonian.

Remote sensing has provided evidence of episodes of mineral alteration. Clay minerals have been mapped on the pre-Noachian surface, suggesting that aqueous weathering occurred during the earliest times. Sulfates occur in exposed rocks of early Hesperian age, suggesting abundant atmospheric SO₂ during this period of massive volcanicity. The last 3.5 billion years saw only the development of the surface iron oxides whose dominance led to Mars being nickname the ‘Red Planet’.

Curiosity Rover's Self Portrait at 'John Klein... — A ‘selfie’ of Curiosity Rover drilling in Gale Crater (credit: Euclid vanderKroew)

A recent paper (Farley, K.A. and 33 others plus the entire Mars Science Laboratory 2014. In Situ Radiometric and Exposure Age Dating of the Martian Surface. Science, v. 343, online publication DOI: 10.1126/science.1247166) suggests that radiometric ages can be measured ‘in the field’, as it were, by instruments carried by the Curiosity rover. How is that done? Curiosity carries a miniature mass spectrometer and other analytical devices. Drilling a rock surface produces a powder which is then heated to almost 900°C for half an hour to drive off all the gases present in the sample. The mass spectrometer can measure isotopes of noble gases, notably ⁴⁰Ar, ³⁶Ar, ²¹Ne and ³He. Together with potassium measured by an instrument akin to and XRF, the ⁴⁰Ar yields a K-Ar age for the rock. A sample drilled from a fine-grained sedimentary in Gale Crater gave an age of 4.2 Ga, most likely that of the detrital feldspars derived from the ancient rocks that form the crater’s wall, rather than an age of sedimentation. The values for ³⁶Ar, ²¹Ne and ³He provide a means for establishing how long the rock has been exposed at the surface: all three isotopes can be generated by cosmic-ray bombardment. The sample from Gale Crater gave an age of about 78 Ma that probably dates the eventual exposure of the rock by protracted wind erosion.

By themselves, these ages do not tell geologists a great deal about the history of Mars, but if Curiosity makes it through the higher levels of the sediments that once filled Gale Crater – and there is enough power to repeat the mass spectrometry at other levels – it could provide a benchmark for Noachian events. The exposure age, interesting in its own right, also suggests that sediments in the crater have not been exposed to cosmic-ray bombardment for long enough to have destroyed any organic materials that the science community longs for.

First Rock Dating Experiment Performed on Mars

Plate tectonics and the Cambrian Explosion

Published on January 27, 2014 by zooks777Leave a comment

A rough-and-ready way of assessing the rate at which silicic magmatic activity has varied through time is to separate out grains of zircon that have accumulated in sedimentary rocks of different ages. Zircon is readily datable using the U-Pb method, if you have access to mass spectrometry. While some of the zircons will date from much older continental crust that was exposed while the sediments originated, sometimes there are grains that formed only a few million years before the sediments accumulated. Those are likely to have crystallized from silica-rich volcanic rocks above subduction zones where ocean-floor has been driven beneath continental crust; i.e. at continental volcanic arcs. Such young zircons therefore help assess the tectonic conditions close to sedimentary basins. The potential of detrital zircon geochronology was first suggested to me by Dr M.V.N. Murthy of the Geological Survey of India in 1978, long before anyone could aspire to mass zircon dating. M.V.N. had by then amassed kilograms of zircon grains from every imaginable source in India, and may have been the first geologist to realise their potential. It has become a lot quicker and cheaper in the last two decades, thanks to methods of dating single zircon grains both precisely and accurately and M.V.N.’s prescient suggestion has been borne out globally.

Results for the late Precambrian to early Palaeozoic have recently been compiled (McKenzie, N.R. et al. 2014. Plate tectonic influences on Neoproterozoic-early Paleozoic climate and animal evolution. Geology, online publication doi:10.1130/G34962.1). One of the striking correlations is between the abundance of ‘young’ zircons relative to Cambrian sedimentary deposition and the pace of diversification of animal faunas during the Cambrian. During the Cambrian Period there may have been far more continental-margin arc volcanism than in the preceding late Neoproterozoic or later in the early Palaeozoic. That would match with evidence for the Cambrian atmosphere having reached the greatest CO₂ concentration of Phanerozoic times and the fact that the Gondwana supercontinent (comprising the present southern continents plus India) was assembled at that time by collision of several Precambrian continental masses. Global temperatures must have been rising.

The rapid emergence of all the major animal groups by the middle Cambrian – the Cambrian Explosion – took place during and despite climatic warming. Environmental stress, perhaps increased calcium and bicarbonate ions in sea water as a result of acid conditions, may have forced animals to develop means of getting both ions out of their cells to form carbonate skeletons: the Cambrian Explosion really marks the first appearance of shelly faunas and a good chance of fossilisation. Yet at the peak of volcanically-induced warming faunal diversity, especially of reef-building animals, fell-off dramatically to create what some palaeobiologsts have termed the Cambrian ‘dead interval’. Marine life really took-off in a big way during the Ordovician while temperatures were falling globally; so much so that the close of the Ordovician was marked by the first major glaciation focused on Gondwana. The zircon record indicates that continental-arc volcanism also declined during the Ordovician, and maybe the Cambrian silicic volcanics were chemically weathered during that Period to remove carbon-dioxide from the atmosphere, along with renewed reef building to bury carbonate fossils.

Volcanic mayhem drove major burst of evolution

Did ice-age climate changes across Europe happen at the same time?

Published on January 23, 2014 by zooks7771 Comment

Although the frigid conditions at the last glacial maximum, around 19 to 20 thousand years ago, gradually relinquished their grip through slow global warming, this amelioration came to sudden stop around 12 800 years before the present. Northern hemisphere ice-core and other climate records show that there was a return to glacial conditions over a period of a few decades at most, to launch what is known as the Younger Dryas stadial that lasted over a thousand years until about 11 500 years ago, with the onset of the warm, climatically more stable Holocene that launched the transformation of the human way of life. The start of the Younger Dryas had dramatic effects throughout the northern hemisphere, the cold conditions emerging suddenly from an immense oceanographic change; a weakening or the halt of the North Atlantic thermohaline circulation in which cold, very salty surface waters at the fringe of the Arctic Ocean sink to drag warmer water to high latitudes. In short, the Gulf Stream slowed or stopped its warming influence at high northern latitudes. Current thoughts centre on a freshening of surface sea water following the collapse of the North American ice sheet to gush meltwater and icebergs into the North Atlantic to buoy-up surface waters.

Most of the data about this climatic shock can only be dated accurately to within a few centuries: it is clear that the initial cooling was very rapid, on the scale of a few years, as was the warming that closed the Younger Dryas and marked the start of the Holocene, but the ‘when’ is known only to within a few hundred years. To resolve the start and stop ages needs records that include several indicators: clear signs of the beginning and end of the episode, an accurate means of dating them and confirmation from other sites, which presupposes a cast-iron means of correlating the records over large distances. The most reliable markers for correlation are volcanic ashes that can be dated radiometrically and which drift on the wind to be deposited over very large areas. If sedimentary sequences that accumulated continuously preserve such ashes, contain clear signs of climatic change and clearly record the passage of time in great detail, there is a chance of resolving climatic events very accurately; but they are no common. A British-German team have located and analysed two such promising sites (Land, C.S. et al. 2013. Volcanic ash reveals time transgressive abrupt climate change during the Younger Dryas. Geology, v. 41, p. 1251-1254). One of them is from the bed of a lake that formed by a single volcanic eruption (Meerfelder Maar) in the Eifel region of western Germany. Quiet sediment accumulation has occurred there continuously to form very narrow, alternating dark and light layers, the variegation being due to sedimentation under ice in winter and open water in summer respectively. Twelve thousand of these annual varves provide a means of dating potentially with a precision of ± 1 year, but calibration to absolute time is necessary. The maar sediments contain three ash layers, two of which are from small local eruptions; the older having an age of 12 900 years before 2000 AD, the other being 11 000 years old, showing that the entire Younger Dryas is spanned by the Meerfelder Maar sediments. The third was dated by varve counting, showing the eruption had taken place 12 140 years ago. That age coincides closely with that of major eruption in Iceland.

One prominent climatic feature of the Younger Dryas of Europe is a shift around halfway through: it started with the fiercest cold and then ameliorated. This change shows up in the Meerfelder Maar record as a reduction in mean varve thickness and an increase in the titanium content of the clays, the latter taking place in about a year (12 250 years ago) some 100 years before the Icelandic ash was deposited. The same kind of change occurs in records from lakes as far north as the Arctic Circle. One of the core records from Kråkenes in Northern Norway also contains the tell-tale Icelandic ash (as do ice cores from Greenland), but in its case it occurs 20 years before the abrupt climate shift. This clearly shows that major climate changes at the end of the last ice age occur at different times from place to place. The authors ascribe the 120 year difference between the two records to the times when prevailing, warm westerly winds began to affect central and northern Europe, linked to a gradual northward migration of the polar front. The data from both lakes also suggest that the Younger Dryas ended about 20 years earlier in Norway than in Germany, although Lane et al. do not comment..

Hitherto, correlation between climate records has been based on an assumption that major climate changes were at the same time, so that climate proxies such those discussed here have been ‘wiggle-matched’. Quite probably a lot of subtleties have thereby been missed.

Water cycle amplifies abrupt climate change

Land almost colonized during the Cambrian Explosion

Published on January 20, 2014 by zooks777Leave a comment

One of the major shale-gas source strata in the eastern USA, the Middle Cambrian Conasauga Shale, formed in a shallow inland sea. Consequently the sedimentology of the lowest Palaeozoic Era of the region and the strange structures affecting it during deformation that formed the Appalachian Mountains have become a focus of intense tectonic and stratigraphic interest – economic potential generally helps fund academic research at a time when money for pure science is short. This has extended into the deepest part of the Cambrian lying unconformably just above the crystalline Precambrian basement. The Lower Cambrian of the Appalachians marks the earliest stage of rifting that flooded former dry land and comprises the multicoloured mudstones, siltstones and sandstones of the Rome Formation. Though only sparsely fossiliferous, the Rome formation contains archetypical trilobites of the genus Olenellus, typical of the Lower Cambrian and used to correlate sedimentary rocks of this age far and wide. They occur far across the North Atlantic in coeval rocks of the Northwest Highlands of Scotland, but not in those a mere couple of hundred kilometres to the south in Wales. This faunal disparity forms a major line of evidence that the olenelid fauna occupied one side of a once major ocean – Iapetus – another different bunch of early trilobites being characteristic of its opposite flank. The almost hemispherical extent of similar faunas was long regarded as an indication that they inhabited open ocean water. In fact, their wide distribution is as much due to juvenile arthropods being planktonic, while adults may have occupied all sorts of marine environments. It now turns out that Olenellus lived in very shallow water (Mángano, M.G. et al. 2014. Trilobites in early Cambrian tidal flats and the landward expansion of the Cambrian explosion. Geology, online pre-publication doi:10.1130/G34980.1).

Gabriela Mángano of the University of Saskatchewan and colleagues from Argentina and the US found that the Rome Formation is full of sedimentary structures typical of modern intertidal zones. Tidal-flat strata are full of suncracks but are also criss-crossed by tracks made by substantial arthropods, only fossil olenellid trilobites being big enough to have made them while feeding , maybe on microbial mats formed on the mudflats or on worms that burrowed the muds. Clearly these animals were literally only a few steps away from colonising the land very shortly after abundant, sturdy animal life appeared in the Cambrian Explosion. Currently the dominant hypothesis for permanent entry of animals onto land is that the colonizers first adapted to fresh- or brackish water habitats. Yet, apparently, there was little to stop a direct invasion from the sea.

Human evolution: bush or basketwork?

Published on January 8, 2014 by zooks777Leave a comment

Analysis of DNA from ancient humans has revealed its power decisively in the last few years, and especially at the beginning of 2014 with publication of the sixth full genome of an individual who was not an anatomically modern human (Prüfer, K. and 44 others 2014. The complete genome sequence of a Neanderthal from the Altai Mountains. Nature, v. 505, p. 43-49). The newly sequenced material came from a toe bone found in the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia; the same location made famous in 2010 by genetic evidence for unknown late hominins, the Denisovans . The bone occurred in the same layer of cave sediment, dated at 50.3 ka, which yielded the Denisovan finger bone, but from a lower sublayer. So there is no firm evidence that both groups cohabited the cave.

The genome reveals that the individual was female and related to the three Neanderthals from Croatia and another infant Neanderthal from the Caucasus, also analysed previously by Svante Pääbo’s team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany (Note that the toe-bone team also includes co-workers from US, Chinese, Austrian, French and Russian institutions). The closest statistical link is to the Caucasian infant Neanderthal’s DNA. Interestingly, it proved possible to demonstrate that the Siberian Neanderthal woman was from a population that was clearly inbred, her parents having been related at the level of half siblings. Her mtDNA shows that she shared a common ancestor with all 6 Neanderthals from whom mtDNA has been analysed.

Comparing genomes from the single Denisovan, the 5 Neanderthals and living humans from sub-Saharan Africans gives an estimated 550 to 765 ka time of divergence of a population leading to anatomically modern humans from the progenitors of Neanderthals and the Denisovan. The Neanderthal-Denisovan split was roughly 380 ka ago. It was already known that non-African living humans contain genetic evidence for past interbreeding with Neanderthals and that some people in Asia, Australia, Melanesia and the Philippines had acquired genes from Denisovans. More refined comparisons now show Oceanians to have 3 to 6% Denisovan make-up with Asians in general sharing 0.2%. Neanderthal to modern non-African gene flow is now estimated at between 1.5 and 2.1%, with Asians and Native Americans being at the high end. Neanderthals and Denisovans also interbred, but only at the level of about 0.5% inheritance. However, that genetic sharing involved DNA regions known to confer aspects of immunity and sperm function, that also made their way into living non-African humans.

Since the common ancestor of Neanderthals and Denisovans left Africa long before modern humans appeared on the scene it would be expected that living Africans’ genomes would show the same level of similarity with both the now extinct groups, if all three originally shared a common ancestor. A surprising outcome from comparison of Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes with those of living sub-Saharan Africans is that there is a significant bias towards Neanderthal rather than Denisovan comparability. There are three possibilities for this bias. After the Neanderthal-Denisovan split the former group may have continued to interbreed with the group leading to modern Africans (and indeed to modern non-Africans): that would require Neanderthal genetics to have originated in Africa before they migrated to Eurasia. Secondly, the gene flow could have been from the ancestors of modern humans to Neanderthal progenitors, making descendant Neanderthals more like modern humans. Prüfer et al. suggest that the evidence is less supportive of both and weighs towards a third possibility; that the Denisovans interbred with an unknown contemporary hominin, whose genetic make-up was yet more different from that of all three known groups of the late Pleistocene and therefore their common ancestor . This may have been Homo antecessor or possibly H. erectus who survived until as late as 20 ka in SE Asia.

Family tree of the four groups of early humans living in Eurasia 50,000 years ago and the gene flow between the groups due to interbreeding. Image credit: Kay Prüfer et al.

As other commentators on the paper (Birney, E. & Pritchard J.K. 20113. Four makes a party. Nature, v. 505, p. 32-34) have observed, ‘…Eurasia during the late Pleistocene was an interesting place to be a hominin, with individuals of at least four quite diverged groups living, meeting and occasionally having sex.’ All this arises quite convincingly from the genetics of only 7 ancient individuals, to show that it may no longer be appropriate to consider human evolution as a tree or a bush linking permanently separated species. Either it is the history of a single, polymorphic species – remains of 1.7 Ma old Homo georgicus show clear evidence of such polymorphism – or a better metaphor for human development is an interwoven basket or twine. Rumour has it that attempts are being made to sequence an H. antecessor dated at 900 ka from Gran Dolina Cave in the Atapuerca Mountains in Northern Spain: as they say, ‘Watch this space’!

How the great Tohoku-Sendai earthquake and tsunami happened

Published on December 30, 2013 by zooks777Leave a comment

The great Tohoku earthquake (moment magnitude 9.0) of 11 March 2011 beneath the Pacific Ocean off the largest Japanese island of Honshu resulted in the devastating tsunami that tore many kilometres inland along its northern coast line and affected the entire Pacific Basin (see NOAA animation of the tsunami’s propagation) .

English: Sendai Rinkai Railway locomotive(SD55... — Railway locomotive thrown aside by the 11 March 2011 Tsunami in Japan. (credit: Wikipedia)

This article can now be read in full at Earth-logs in the Geohazards archive for 2017

An early magma ocean on Mars?

Published on December 24, 2013 by zooks777Leave a comment

The division of the lunar surface into two petrological domains – ancient anorthositic highlands and younger basaltic maria – spurred the idea, as long ago as the early 1970s, that the early Moon had a deep ocean of magma at the surface, whose cooling caused fractional crystallization. Low density plagioclase feldspar, dominated by high-calcium anorthite and bytownite, floated to the surface to form the lunar anorthosites leaving a more mafic mantle from which the mare basalts formed by partial melting. The key evidence in support of this hypothesis lies in the rare-earth elements of the two terrains. Because plagioclase feldspar has a much stronger affinity to incorporate the element europium (Eu) than the other REEs, the lunar anorthosites are enriched in Eu compared with its related elements. If the highland anorthosites did form by fractional crystallisation the remaining magma that formed the lunar mantle would be depleted in Eu yet enriched in the remaining REE. Although there are no samples of the Moon’s mantle there are plenty of the mare basalts that formed when it partially melted, probably as a result of huge impacts around 3.8 billion years ago. They should have inherited dominant features of mantle geochemistry, and indeed they do show characteristic depletion of Eu.

The giant-impact hypothesis for the Earth-Moon system presupposes that such a cataclysm would have left much of the outer Earth in much the same molten condition and destined to fractionate in the same manner. There are geochemical hints from terrestrial rocks that do support such an idea. An important target for exploration of Mars has been to check if a magma ocean also existed early in its history. Of the various missions in recent years only two have the capacity to shed useful light on the issue: the US Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey. Both orbiters carry more sophisticated remote sensing instruments than any circling the Earth. The first has the hyperspectral Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer for Mars (CRISM) that senses visible to short-wave infrared (VNIR) radiation, the other deploys the Thermal Emission Imaging System (THEMIS) that captures different parts of the longer wavelength thermal infrared (TIR) spectrum emitted by surface materials. Both allow spectra of surface materials to be reconstructed and compared with the features of known minerals from the Earth and Moon.

Feldspars are highly reflective for the most part of the VNIR range but show a shallow, broad absorption feature centred on a wavelength of 1.26 micrometres. Such spectra have been detected using CRISM from parts of the Martian surface in the highlands of its southern hemisphere (Carter, J. & Poulet, F. 2013. Ancient plutonic processes on Mars inferred from the detection of possible anorthositic terrains. Nature Geoscience, v. 6, p. 1008-1012). The authors, from Chile and France, acknowledge that the plagioclase-rich rocks occur only in small patches, unlike the vast tracts on the Moon, and also that on Earth anorthosites are known to have formed by a variety of processes from far smaller magma systems than a veritable ocean of molten rock. Feldspars also show spectral features in the TIR, though not so distinctive, both plagioclase and alkali feldspars being very similar. Moreover, THEMIS deploys sensor for only 10 thermal wavebands, compared with 544 on CRISM. A team of US remote sensers (Wray, J.J. and 8 others 2013. Prolonged magmatic activity on Mars inferred from the detection of felsic rocks. Nature Geoscience, v. 6, p. 1013-1017) used both CRISM and THEMIS data. While noting resemblances to lunar anorthosites, they adopt a more cautious approach to the spectra and prefer the broad, ‘sack’ term ‘felsic rocks’. It seemed possible from their work that feldspar-rich magmas may have formed by partial melting of common andesitic crust noted from the Martian surface: high spatial resolution images of the occurrences bear some resemblance to outcrops of granitic rocks in arid environments on Earth. That is, there may be highly evolved rocks akin to terrestrial continental crust.

The interesting spectral observations on Mars can only be validated by actual rock samples. While rovers still operating on the Martian surface are well able to produce geochemical data that would petrologically characterise most rocks that they encounter, none of them is in a terrain suitable for resolving this particular issue. Yet, coincidentally, a meteorite found in West Africa shows hallmarks of having been blasted from the surface of Mars and sheds useful light on various hypotheses about the Martian crust http://earth-pages.co.uk/2013/11/21/a-glimpse-of-early-martian-crust/. It is a breccia that may represent the soil or regolith that accumulated from early impacts that shattered and melted surface materials, and it is extremely old: zircons yielded an age of 4428 Ma. The clasts set in a fine matrix consist of a variety of igneous rocks, none of which are anorthosites. Some are coarse grained, plutonic rocks containing both alkali feldspars and plagioclase, which match terrestrial monzonites; broadly speaking members of the granite family. Having formed from the ejecta of large impacts, such regolith materials represent the breadth of compositions across the planet and extending deep into its crust. This one suggests that anorthosites may have been rare on early Mars.

Mars once had oceans of liquid hot magma (abc.net.au)
Evidence found for granite on Mars (eurekalert.org)

Fresh offshore groundwater resources

Published on December 8, 2013 by zooks7771 Comment

There are paradoxes with groundwater: while over-use of coastal aquifers may draw in seawater to become undrinkable, on reef islands with no surface water adequate supplies may be had from fresh groundwater ‘floating’ on deeper, denser salt water. Seemingly even more odd, there are places several kilometres off some coastlines where freshwater rises in large volumes to the surface from springs on the sea floor.

Despite this and the fact that onshore aquifers extend far out to sea on continental shelves, hydrogeologists have paid scant attention to the potential water supplies that they might offer. Indeed, around the Persian Gulf where many submarine fresh springs are known petrodollars have poured into desalination rather than cheaper drilling and pipelines to the aquifers feeding the springs.

Reviewing the known potential of offshore groundwater, which occurs seawards of most continental shores, Vincent Post of Flinders University, Australia and colleagues from Holland, the US and Britain, consider that the global potential might be as high as half a million cubic kilometres (Post, V.E.A. et al. 2013. Offshore fresh groundwater reserves as a global phenomenon. Nature , v. 504, p. 71-78), around one tenth that of shallow (<750 m deep) groundwater onshore . It should be noted that the maximum safe level of salts dissolved in drinking water is about 1 gram per litre, and double that for irrigation water. The best prospects are where aquifers are trapped beneath impermeable sedimentary layers that prevent downward contamination by salt water.

The key to explaining such huge reserves is dating the water. In those places where that has been done the water is older than the Holocene (i.e. > 11 ka), which suggests infiltration when sea level was as much as 130 m lower than in interglacial periods, due to storage of evaporated seawater in major ice sheets. That would have exposed vast areas of what is now the sea floor to recharge. Modelling downward diffusion of seawater as sea level rose suggests that interglacials have too short to fully flush fresh water from the now submarine aquifers. Nevertheless, recharge is not continual, so that exploiting the resource is akin to ‘mining’ water. Yet the potential may prove essential in some coastal regions, and the authors caution against contamination by human activities offshore, such as exploration drilling for petroleum and carbon dioxide sequestration.

The review points out that submarine hydrogeology is one of the last great challenges in analysis of sedimentary basins.

Huge Fresh Groundwater Reserves Found beneath Ocean Floor (sci-news.com)

Mitochondrial DNA from 400 thousand year old humans

Published on December 6, 2013 by zooks7771 Comment

The Sima de los Huesos (‘pit of bones’) site in the cave complex of Atapuerca in northern Spain has yielded one of the greatest assemblages of hominin bones. Well-preserved remains of at least 28 individuals date to the Middle Pleistocene (>300 ka). Anatomically the individuals have many Neanderthal-like features but also show affinities with earlier Homo heidelbergensis, who is widely considered to be the common ancestor for anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals, and perhaps also for the mysterious Denisovans. Most palaeoanthropologists have previously considered this Atapuerca group to be early Neanderthals, divergent from African lineages because they migrated to and became isolated in Europe.

The riches of the Sima de los Huesos ossuary made it inevitable that attempts would be made to extract DNA that survived in the bones, especially as bear bones from the area had shown that mtDNA can survive more than 4300 ka. There has been an air of expectancy in hominin-evolution circles, and indeed among the wider public, since rumours emerged that the famous Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany had initiated genetic sequencing under the direction of Svante Pääbo: perhaps another ‘scoop’ to add to their reconstructing the first Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes. The news came out in the 5 December 2013 issue of Nature, albeit published on-line (Meyer, M. and 10 others 2013. A mitochondrial genome sequence of a hominin from Sima de los Huesos, Nature, v. 504; doi:10.1038/nature12788) with a discussion by Ewan Callaway (Callaway, E. 2013. Hominin DNA baffles experts Nature, v. 504, p. 16-17).

The bafflement is because the mtDNA from a femur of a 400 ka individual does not match existing Neanderthal data as well as it does that of the Denisovan from Siberia by such a degree that the individual is an early Denisovan not a Neanderthal. Northern Spain being thousands of kilometres further west than the Denisova cave heightens the surprise. Indeed, it may be on a lineage from an earlier hominin that did not give rise to Neanderthals. The full Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes suggest that they shared a common ancestor up to 700 ka ago. So the Sima de los Huesos individual presents several possibilities. It could be a member of an original population of migrants from Africa that occupied wide tracts of Eurasia, eventually to give rise to both Neanderthals and Denisovans. That genetic split may have arisen by the female line carrying it not surviving into populations that became Neanderthals – mtDNA is only present in the eggs of mothers. Mind you, that begs the question of who the Neanderthal females were. Another view is that the Sima de los Huesos individual may be descended from even earlier H. antecessor, whose 800 ka remains occur in a nearby cave. Pääbo’s team have even suggested that Denisovans interbred with a mysterious group: perhaps relics of the earlier H. antecessor colonists.

Established ideas of how humans emerged, based on bones alone and very few individuals to boot, are set to totter and collapse like a house of cards. Interbreeding has been cited three times from DNA data: modern human-Neanderthal; modern human-Denisovan and Denisovan with an unknown population. Will opinion converge on what seems to be obvious, that one repeatedly errant species, albeit with distinct variants, has been involved from far back in the human evolutionary journey? There seems only one avenue to follow for an answer, which is to look for well preserved H. heidelbergensis. H. antecessor and H. erectus remains and apply ever improving techniques of genetic retrieval. Yet there is a chance that stretches of ancient DNA can be teased out of younger fossils.

Discovery of Oldest DNA Scrambles Human Origins Picture (news.nationalgeographic.com)
Earliest Human DNA Shows Unforeseen Mixing with Mystery Population (scientificamerican.com)

Greening the Earth, Devonian forest fires and a mass extinction

Published on November 28, 2013 by zooks7772 Comments

Land plants begin to appear in the fossil record as early as the late Ordovician (~450 Ma), show signs of diversification during the Silurian and by the end of the Devonian Period most of the basic features of plants are apparent. During the Carboniferous Period terrestrial biomass became so high as to cause a fall in atmospheric carbon dioxide, triggering the longest period of glaciation of the Phanerozoic, and such a boost to oxygen in the air (to over 30%) that insects, huge by modern standards, were able to thrive and the risk of conflagration was perhaps at its highest in Earth’s history. Yet surprisingly, the first signs of massive forest fires appear in the Devonian when vegetation was nowhere near so widespread and luxuriant as it became in the Carboniferous (Kaiho, K. et al. 2013. A forest fire and soil erosion event during the Late Devonian mass extinction. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, v. 392, p. 272-280). Moreover, Devonian oxygen levels were well below those of the present atmosphere and CO₂ was more than 10 times even the post-industrial concentration (387 parts per million in 2013). Such atmospheric chemistry would probably have suppressed burning.

Kunio Kaiho of Tohoku University in Japan and colleagues from Japan, the US and Belgium analysed organic molecules in Belgian marine sediments from the time of the late-Devonian mass extinction (around the Frasnian-Famennian boundary at 372 Ma). A range of compounds produced by hydrocarbon combustion show marked ‘spikes’ at the F-F boundary. The thin bed that marks the extinction boundary also shows sudden increase then decrease in δ¹³C and total organic carbon, indicative of increase burial of organic material and a likely increase in atmospheric oxygen levels. Another biomarker that is a proxy for soil erosion follows the other biogeochemical markers, perhaps signifying less of a binding effect on soil by plant colonisation: a likely consequence of large widlfires. Unlike the biomarkers, magnetic susceptibility of the boundary sediments is lower than in earlier and later sediments. This is ascribed to a decreased supply of detrital sediment to the Belgian marine Devonian basin, probably as a result of markedly decreased rainfall around the time of the late-Devonian mass extinction. But the magnetic data from 3 metres either side of the boundary also reveal the influence of the 20, 40, 100 and 405 ka Milankovich cycles.

This set of environmentally-related data encourages the authors to suggest a novel, if not entirely plausible, mechanism for mass extinction related to astronomically modulated dry-moist climate changes that repeatedly killed off vegetation so that dry woody matter could accumulate en masse during the Frasnian while atmospheric oxygen levels were too low for combustion. A mass burial of organic carbon at the end of that Age then boosted oxygen levels above the burning threshold to create widespread conflagration once the wood pile was set ablaze. Makes a change from continental flood basalts and extraterrestrial impacts… Yet it was about this time that vertebrates took it upon themselves to avail themselves of the new ecological niche provided by vegetation to haul themselves onto land.

Earth’s first major glacial epochs

Published on November 27, 2013 by zooks7771 Comment

The global glaciations of the Neoproterozoic that reached low latitudes – the so-called ‘Snowball Earth’ events have dominated accounts of ancient glaciations since the start of the 21^st century. Yet they are not the oldest examples of large-scale effects of continental ice sheets. Distinctive tillites or diamictites that contain large clasts of diverse, exotic rocks occur in sedimentary sequences of Archaean and Palaeoproterozoic age.

Diamictite from the Palaoproterozoic Gowganda Formation in Ontario Canada (credit: Candian Sedimentology Research Group) — Diamictite from the Palaeoproterozoic Gowganda Formation in Ontario Canada (credit: Canadian Sedimentology Research Group)

This item can be read in full at Earth-logs in the Palaeoclimatology archive for 2013

The origins of the first Americans

Published on November 21, 2013 by zooks777Leave a comment

Whatever controversies still linger about when they arrived in the Americas, there can be little doubt that humans crossed what are now the Bering Straits from NE Asia using the landmass of Beringia exposed by sea-level fall during the last ice age. Of course, there have been controversies too about who they were; probably of East Asian origin but the waters muddied by the celebrated case of 9300 year-old Kennewick Man whose skull bears close resemblance to those of modern Europeans but also to those of the Ainu of northern Japan. Genetic studies of Y-chromosome DNA suggested that all early Americans stemmed from 4 separate colonising populations who may have entered via Beringia by different routes (coastal and across the interior of North America) and at different times. Now, perhaps unsurprisingly, a new kind of data seems set to stir things up immeasurably.

After the triumphs of reconstruction of the Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes and the corollary that both interbred with anatomically modern humans, it was only a matter of time before the palaeogenetics of humans would be pushed back in time. The oldest remains to yield DNA are those of a boy from near Lake Baikal in Siberia excavated by Soviet archaeologists along with a rich trove of cultural remains, including female effigies. Such figurines are rare in Siberia, most being known from western Eurasia. Radiocarbon dating of the bones gave an age of around 24 ka, just before the last glacial maximum. The genetic information, specifically mtDNA and Y-chromosome DNA are potentially revolutionary (Raghavaan and 30 others 2013. Upper Palaeolithic Siberian genome reveals dual ancestry of Native Americans. Nature online doi:10.1038/nature12736).

The mtDNA (passed down the female line) places the individual in haplogroup U, but with little relation to living members with that ‘signature’. Modern haplogroup U is mainly confined to people now living in North Africa, the Middle East, south and central Asia, Europe and western Siberia up to the area where the skeleton was found but rare further to the northeast. The male-specific Y-chromosome DNA is related to haplogroup R widely spread today among men living in western Eurasia, south Asian and in the vicinity of the find. When the data were subject to statistical tests routinely used in distinguishing existing p[populations and lineages within them (principal component analysis) a surprise emerged. The boy plots separately from all living populations but halfway between modern Europeans and the genetic trend of native Americans: i.e. descendants from the population to which he belonged could have evolved towards both extant groups but certainly not to East Asians. Plotted on a map, the degree of shared genetic history of the ice-age south Siberian boy to modern humans shows links westward to Europeans and eastwards to northeastern Siberians and hence to native Americans. Up to 38% of native American ancestry may have originated by gene flow from the population to which the boy belonged, similarly for Europeans as a whole.

The research helps explain traces of European genetic ‘signatures’ in native Americans rather than the commonly held view that this resulted from post-Columbian admixture with European invaders. It also links with the European-looking skulls of a number of early Americans which do not resemble those of East Asians once thought to be their forebears.

Were American Indians part European 10,000 years ago? (isteve.blogspot.com)
Americas’ Natives Have European Roots (scientificamerican.com)
Siberian Upper Palaeolithic genome links Europe and America (globalpalaeonews.wordpress.com)
Ancient DNA from Upper Paleolithic Lake Baikal (Mal’ta and Afontova Gora) (dienekes.blogspot.com)

A glimpse of early Martian crust

Published on November 21, 2013 by zooks7771 Comment

That planetary scientists are eager for chemical information about the rocks of planet Mars is probably unnecessary information, a vast amount of money having been spend to get three spindly vehicles equipped with miniaturized petrographic instruments onto the Martian surface. Meteoriticists might say, ‘Well, we already have some Mars rock in our lab, and we can collect some more from deserts or ablated blue ice in Antarctica’. Four classes of meteorites are alleged to have been flung from Mars by impacts: the allegation is supported by the materials having oxygen isotope proportions that are different from those in rocks from the Earth or Moon.

Another class of meteorite has joined the Martian family, and it it’s a doozy. Found in the northwestern Sahara Desert the rock is a breccia containing a variety of rocks in the form of clasts (Humayun, M. and 10 others 2013. Origin and age of the earliest Martian crust from meteorite NWA7533. Nature online doi:10.1038/nature12764). In fact four other meteorites looking much the same were found near NWA7533. The bulk of the material is impact melt rock, now devitrified. Some of the clasts are also melt fragments and spherules, while others are fine-grained basalts, broken crystals and, most exciting, coarser igneous rocks rich in alkali and plagioclase feldspar. Their rare-earth element contents, like those of the Earth’s average continental crust, show evidence of fractional crystallization, particularly the removal of plagioclase to produce a marked depletion in the element europium. Slowly cooled and evolved monzonites of this kind are candidates for Martian crustal material. Overall, the texture of the breccia meteorites closely resembles the material that coats the lunar surface – regolith – but it has been lithified rather than remaining a dust.

Meteorite NWA7533 showing a variety of clasts, including light-coloured monzonite (credit: Humayun et al. 2013; doi:10.1038/nature12764)

Highly evolved igneous rocks, broadly speaking those of granitic composition, are the most likely to contain the mineral zircon, and the monzonite clasts yielded five that the US-Australian-French team subjected to U-Pb dating. The results are astonishing. These zircons formed around 4425 Ma ago, in the first hundred million years of the planet’s evolution, at the same time – within statistical error – as did the earliest materials from Earth and the Moon. Other putative Martian meteorites have yielded evidence from their neodymium isotopes that the earliest event there was the formation of a magma ocean, much as postulated for the Earth-Moon system. The latter is widely regarded as having resulted from a mega impact of the proto-Earth with an object roughly the size of Mars. The Martian monzonites may well be products of fractionation from that magma, subsequently excavated and shattered by a series of later, lesser impacts. If it did come from Mars, NWA7533 probably represents part of the early, heavily cratered highlands of the southern hemisphere of that planet.

The four hemispheric views shown above have be... — Full-color global map showing the regions of Mars imaged by the Hubble telescope (credit: Wikipedia)

It will be a long time before rocks can be lifted from the actual surface of Mars and transported back to Earth, and meteorites with a Martian provenance are so rare, that one can foresee a lot of very frustrated planetary petrogeneticists in the near term and a great deal of field work on desert and ice-cap surfaces looking for similar lumps of far-flung regolith.

Mars Meteorite Reveals 1st Look at Ancient Martian Crust (space.com)

Evidence for comet impact in the Sahara Desert

Published on November 15, 2013 by zooks7771 Comment

The desert surface of the remote Sahara of SW Egypt and adjacent Libya is strewn with silica-rich glass over an area of up to 6500 km². Pale yellow in colour and translucent, the glass clearly attracted Pleistocene hunter gatherers who manufactured edged tools from it. Pieces cut en cabouchon are also found in pharaonic jewellery, including an item found in the tomb of Tutankhamun. Evidence for its formation at very high temperature is the melting temperature of pure silica around 2000°C and the presence of baddeleyite, a breakdown product of zircon. The glass fragments are undoubtedly the product of shock heating of desert sand or the local Nubian Sandstone of Cretaceous age by some kind of extraterrestrial impact. Fission-track dating suggests the glass formed around 29 Ma ago. A possible source is a 30 km wide crater on the Gilf Kebir Plateau made famous by Michael Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient that was centered on Pleistocene rock art discovered at the Cave of Swimmers in the Nubian Sandstone.

Neither the crater nor the glass strewn field yields meteoritic material despite several expeditions but the platinum-group metal content of the glass indicates an impact origin. Some specimens include enigmatic, graphite-rich banding. However, recently a South African-French team studied a strange, irregular 30 g fragment picked up in 1996 by an Egyptian postgraduate student collecting samples from the strewn field. He discovered that the dark fragment contained diamond by using X-ray diffraction. The dominant element in the fragment is carbon with less than 5% silicates and the new study used a battery of geochemical tests that confirmed the presence of abundant tiny diamonds (Kramers, J.D. and 13 others 2013. Unique chemistry of a diamond bearing pebble from the Libyan Desert Glass strewn field, SW Egypt: Evidence for a shocked comet fragment. Earth and Planetary Science Letters, v. 382, p. 21-31).

Conceivably, the diamonds could have formed by shock metamorphism of a coal seam or other carbonaceous sediments at the site of an impact – the K-T boundary layer formed by the huge Chicxulub impact contains nano-diamonds. However none of the chemical characteristics, including noble gas isotopic proportions and those of carbon, match terrestrial organic matter. Nor do they match carbonaceous chondrite meteorites that could have been another potential source, in its case an impactor of that composition. Instead, much evidence suggests the fragment is chemically akin to interplanetary dust and dust from the coma of comet 81P/Wild2 captured by NASDA’s Stardust mission in 2004. A plausible explanation, therefore, for the glass strewn field is an airburst explosion of a comet nucleus above the Sahara, the particle being a shocked fragment of the comet itself.

‘Black glass’ could be first comet chunk found on Earth (newscientist.com)

Could volcanism have spread organisms?

Published on November 7, 2013 by zooks777Leave a comment

Recently there have been worrying accounts about pathogens, for instance the viruses that cause foot and mouth disease in livestock, flu in humans and other animals and the sheep disease bluetongue carried by tiny midges, being transported for thousands of kilometres in dust storms. They raise the question of whether or not in the past organisms small enough to be carried by winds in aerosol suspension might have helped colonise regions distant from where they evolved.

Studies of volcanic ash thought to have been transported at high latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere from a 25 thousand-year old major volcanic eruption on the North Island of New Zealand add volcanic activity to violent meteorological phenomena as a possible means of transport (Van Eaton, A.R. et al. 2013. High-flying diatoms: Widespread dispersal of microorganisms in an explosive volcanic eruption. Geology, v. 41, p. 1187-1190). Ash from as far as 850 km from the volcano turns out to incorporate abundant remains of diatoms – species of algae that secrete distinctively intricate skeletons made from silica. The volcano, Taupo, erupted from beneath a lake bed, explaining the diatoms’ origin from lake muds and the water column itself. Even details of the organisms’ soft parts and pigmentation are preserved in the ash, suggesting that at least some of them might have been transported alive. Astonishingly, the New Zealand authors’ counts of organic material in the ash suggest that as much as 0.6 km³ of diatom remains were dispersed during the eruption.

English: Circle of diatoms on a slide — Assorted species of diatoms on a microscope slide (credit: Wikipedia)

Violent sub-aqueous eruptions can entrain liquid water as spray as well as water vapour and glassy magma shards, carrying the mixture into the stratosphere, far above wind belts in the lower atmosphere. At such altitudes transport can spread fine aerosols through an entire hemisphere because they remain in suspension for long periods.

Different species of diatom live in subtly different environments, so that their relative proportions and presence or absence in ash provide a ‘fingerprint’ for the volcano responsible. So the discovery by the team from the Victoria University of Wellington (a ‘first’) presents a new tool for identifying the source of ash layers in the volcanic record that came from other volcanoes associated with caldera lakes – common for those capable of launching huge volumes of material aloft, such as Toba that erupted in Sumatra at around 74 ka and may have influenced the first modern human migrants from Africa. But could minute organisms survive both the volcanic heat and blast and a traverse through the dry stratosphere to result in colonisation? If that were possible it would have significant implications for the spread of early life forms during the far more volcanically active Hadean and Archaean Eons of Earth’s history.

Commenting on the article, Jennifer Pike of Cardiff University, UK (Pike, J. 2013. Of volcanoes and diatoms. Geology, v. 41, p. 1199-2000) surmises that diatoms might survive drying out in the stratosphere, provided they were in the form of spores encased in silica. Such spores were not found in the Taupo ash, but who is to say that they will not be discovered in other ancient volcanic ash layers? Spores are extremely durable and other micro-organisms than diatoms produce them and have done in the past.

Super-Eruption Launched Algae Army Into the Sky (livescience.com)

An iconic early human skull

Published on October 23, 2013 by zooks7775 Comments

The earliest known human fossils outside of Africa were found at a site near Dmanisi in Georgia, between 1991 and 2005, following the discovery there in 1984 of primitive stone tools together with early Pleistocene animal bones. The Dmanisi finds occur with those of sabre-toothed cats and giant cheetahs, and so are probably not interments or in some kind of dwelling but were probably dragged into an underground carnivore den.

The five Dmanisi skulls of Homo erectus georgicus (credits; M.S. Ponce de Leon & P.E. Zollkofer, University of Zurich)

Initially the remains were assigned to a new species – Homo georgicus – but are now believed to be a subspecies of H. erectus. The finds are anatomically rich, with fossils of at least 5 individuals, both male and female, including 5 well-preserved skulls. Analysing them has been a long process. Details of the best preserved, indeed the most complete early Homo skull ever found, have taken 8 years since its discovery in 2005 to reach publication (Lordkipanidze, D. et al. 2013. A complete skull from Dmanisi, Georgia, and the evolutionary biology of early Homo. Science, v. 342, p. 326-331, DOI: 10.1126/science.1238484).

To the surprise of palaeoanthropologists, this specimen of Homo erectus georgicus has some ape-like features, including a protruding upper jaw in a relatively large face that most resembles the oldest African H. habilis, from Ethiopia, dated at 2.3 Ma. With a braincase of 546 cm³, the skull is on the small side of H. habilis and in the range of late australopithecines. Yet, like the much younger Homo floresiensis – dubbed ‘the Hobbit’ – the association with tools, of the most basic Oldowan type, places it a cut above non-human hominins. The rest of the skeletal fossils show individuals with modern human proportions, albeit somewhat diminutive.

Surprises multiplied when comparative studies of all 5 skulls were complete. They are so different that, if found in widely separated specimens, would be placed in different species by most anatomists. Ruling out the chance association of several human species far from their Africa origins – few would suggest that up to 5 species left Africa at the same time and stuck together – a suggested explanation is that they represent a population of a human lineage in the process of evolving to a new species. The strength of this hypothesis contradicts the other recent view that several human species may have cohabited environments at different times. It also seems to throw into question the adoption of the name H. erectus for later human populations in both Africa and Eurasia: unless, as the authors tentatively suggest, there was genetic continuity and connectivity over large distances between both evolving populations

Skull of Homo erectus throws story of human evolution into disarray (theguardian.com)
Blow to multiple human species idea (bbc.co.uk)
Imagining Hominid Aesthetics (paulmullins.wordpress.com)

An early oxygenated atmosphere

Published on October 9, 2013 by zooks777Leave a comment

The Earth’s earliest atmosphere undoubtedly had a chemistry dominated by carbon dioxide and nitrogen, together with transient water vapour, outgassed from volcanoes giving pervasive reducing conditions at the surface and in the oceans. Until the last couple of decades the only clear evidence of a switch to oxidising conditions and presumably significant atmospheric oxygen was direct, mineralogical evidence. The most obvious signs are ancient, reddened soils formed when soluble Fe²⁺ lost electrons to molecular oxygen to form the distinct red, orange and brown oxides and hydroxides of insoluble Fe³⁺that impart a deep staining in even small quantities. Others include the disappearance from river-transported sediments of clearly transported grains of metal sulfides and uranium oxide that remain stable under reducing conditions but quickly break down in the presence of oxygen.

Widespread observations in Precambrian sediments, eventually linked with reliable radiometric ages, strongly suggested a fundamental environmental change at around 2.3 billion years ago: the Great Oxidation Event. A few such signs emerge from somewhat older rocks back to 2.7 Ga, but only the 2.3 Ga event created a permanent feature of our home world; at first toxic to many of the prokaryote life forms of earlier times but eventually a prime condition for the rise of the Eukarya and eventually metazoan animals. Isotopic analysis of sulfur from Precambrian sediments also gave hints of a more complex but much debated transition because of the way S-isotopes fractionate under different environmental conditions. Now other indirect, isotopic approaches to redox conditions have become feasible, with a surprising result: powerful evidence that about 3 billion years ago there was appreciable atmospheric oxygen (Crowe, S.A. et al. 2013. Atmospheric oxygenation three billion years ago. Nature, v. 501, p. 535-538).

The Danish-South African-German-Canadian group relied on a fractionation process among the isotopes of chromium, which can exist in several oxidation states. When minerals that contain Cr³⁺ are weathered under oxidising conditions to release soluble Cr⁶⁺ the loss in solution preferentially removes the ⁵³Cr isotope from residual soil. If the isotope enters groundwater with reducing conditions to precipitate some Cr³⁺-rich material yet more ⁵³Cr remains in solution. Eventually such enriched water may enter the oceans, where along with iron and other transition-group metal ions chromium can end up in banded iron formations (BIFs) to preserve isotopic evidence for oxidising conditions along it route from land to sea.

The team analysed both a palaeosol and a BIF unit from a stratigraphic sequence in the Achaean of NE South Africa that is between 2980 and 2924 Ma old. A substantial proportion of the palaeosol is depleted in ⁵³Cr whereas the lower part of the slightly younger BIF is significantly enriched. Changes in the concentration of redox sensitive elements, such as chromium itself, uranium and iron, in the two lithologies helps confirm the isotopic evidence for a major ~3 Ga oxidation event. It is possible to use the data to estimate what the atmospheric oxygen content might have been at that time: not enough to breathe, but significant at between 6 x 10^-5 to 3 x 10^-3 the atmospheric level at present. Oxygen can be produced abiogenically through irradiation of water vapour in the atmosphere as well as by organic photosynthesis. However, the first route seems incapable of yield more than a billionth of present atmospheric concentrations, so the spotlight inevitably falls on a ‘much deep history’ of the action of blue-green bacteria (cyanobacteria) than hitherto suspected.

Ancient soils provide early whiff of oxygen – BBC News (topbreakingnews.info)
Signs of oxygen in 3-billion-year-old soil (arstechnica.com)

Tectonics of the early Earth

Published on October 8, 2013 by zooks7771 Comment

Tectonics on any rocky planet is an expression of the way heat is transferred from its deep interior to the surface to be lost by radiation to outer space. Radiative heat loss is vastly more efficient than either conduction or convection since the power emitted by a body is proportion to the fourth power of its absolute temperature. Unless it is superheated from outside by its star, a planet cannot stay molten at its surface for long because cooling by radiation releases all of the heat that makes its way to the surface. Any football supporter who has rushed to get a microwaved pie at half time will have learned this quickly: a cool crust can hide a damagingly hot centre.

Thermal power is delivered to a planet’s surface by convection deep down and conduction nearer the surface because rocks, both solid and molten, are almost opaque to radiation. The vigour of the outward flow of heat might seem to be related mainly to the amount of internal heat but it is also governed by limits imposed by temperature on the form of convection. Of the Inner Planets only Earth shows surface signs of deep convection in the form of plate tectonics driven mainly by the pull exerted by steep subduction of cool, dense slabs of old oceanic lithosphere. Only Jupiter’s moon Io shows comparable surface signs of inner dynamics, but in the form of immense volcanoes rather than lateral movements of slabs. Io has about 40 times the surface heat flow of Earth, thanks largely to huge tidal forces imposed by Jupiter. So it seems that a different mode of convection is needed to shift the tidal heat production; similar in many ways to Earth’s relatively puny and isolated hot spots and mantle plumes.

Shortly after Earth’s accretion it would have contained far more heat than now: gravitational energy of accretion itself; greater tidal heating from a close Moon and up to five times more from internal radioactive decay. The time at which plate tectonics can be deduced from evidence in ancient rocks has been disputed since the 1970s, but now an approach inspired by Io’s behaviour approaches the issue from the opposite direction: what might have been the mode of Earth’s heat transport shortly after accretion (Moore, W.B. & Webb, A.A.G. 2013. Heat-pipe Earth. Nature, v. 501, p. 501-505). The two American geophysicists modelled Rayleigh-Bénard convection – multicelled convection akin to that of the ‘heat pipes’ inside Io – for a range of possible thermal conditions in the Hadean. The modelled planet, dominated by volcanic centres turned out to have some surprising properties.

The sheer efficiency of heat-pipe dominated heat transfer and radiative heat lost results in development of a thick cold lithosphere between the pipes, that advects surface material downwards. Decreasing the heat sources results in a ‘flip’ to convection very like plate tectonics. In itself, this notion of sudden shift from Rayleigh-Bénard convection to plate tectonics is not new – several Archaean specialists, including me, debated this in the late 1970s – but the convincing modelling is. The authors also assemble a plausible list of evidence for it from the Archaean geological record: the presence in pre- 3.2 Ga greenstone belts of abundant ultramafic lavas marking high fractions of mantle melting; the dome-trough structure of granite-greenstone terrains; granitic magmas formed by melting of wet mafic rocks at around 45 km depth, extending back to second-hand evidence from Hadean zircons preserved in much younger rocks. They dwell on the oldest sizeable terranes in West Greenland (the Itsaq gneiss complex), South Africa and Western Australia (Barberton and the Pilbara) as a plausible and tangible products of ‘heat-pipe’ tectonics. They suggest that the transition to plate-tectonic dominance was around 3.2 Ga, yet ‘heat pipes’ remain to the present in the form of plumes so nicely defined in the preceding item Mantle structures beneath the central Pacific.

Was Ancient Earth Like Jupiter’s Super-Volcanic Moon Io? (space.com)

Mantle structures beneath the central Pacific

Published on September 26, 2013 by zooks777Leave a comment

Since it first figured in Earth Pages 13 years ago seismic tomography has advanced steadily as regards the detail that can be shown and the level of confidence in its accuracy: in the early days some geoscientists considered the results to be verging on the imaginary. There were indeed deficiencies, one being that a mantle plume which everyone believed to be present beneath Hawaii didn’t show up on the first tomographic section through the central Pacific. Plumes are one of the forms likely to be taken by mantle heat convection, and many now believe that some of them emerge from great depths in the mantle, perhaps at its interface with the outer core.

The improvements in imaging deep structure stem mainly from increasingly sophisticated software and faster computers, the data being fed in being historic seismograph records from around the globe. The approach seeks out deviations in the speed of seismic waves from the mean at different depths beneath the Earth’s surface. Decreases suggest lower strength and therefore hotter rocks while abnormally high speeds signify strong, cool parts of the mantle. The hotter mantle rock is the lower its density and the more likely it is to be rising, and vice versa.

Using state-of-the-art tomography to probe beneath the central Pacific is a natural strategy as the region contains a greater concentration of hot-spot related volcanic island chains than anywhere else and that is the focus of a US-French group of collaborators (French, S. et al. 2013. Waveform tomography reveals channeled flow at the base of the oceanic lithosphere. Science, v. 342, 227-230; doi 10.1126/science.1241514). The authors first note the appearance on 2-D global maps for a depth of 250 km of elongate zones of low shear-strength mantle that approximately parallel the known directions of local absolute plate movement. The most clear of these occur beneath the Pacific hemisphere, strongly suggesting some kind of channelling of hot material by convection away from the East Pacific Rise.

Seismic tomograhic model of the mantle beneath the central Pacific. Yellow to red colours represent increasing low shear strength. (credit: Global Seismology Group / Berkeley Seismological Laboratory — Seismic tomographic model of the mantle beneath the central Pacific. Yellow to red colours represent increasingly low shear strength. (credit: Global Seismology Group / Berkeley Seismological Laboratory)

Visually it is the three-dimensional models of the Pacific hot-spot ‘swarm’ that grab attention. These show the low velocity zone of the asthenosphere at depths of around 50 to 100 km, as predicted but with odd convolutions. Down to 1000 km is a zone of complexity with limb-like lobes of warm, low-strength mantle concentrated beneath the main island chains. That beneath the Hawaiian hot spot definitely has a plume-like shape but one curiously bent at depth, turning to the NW as it emerges from even deeper mantle then taking a knee-like bend to the east . Those beneath the hot spots of the west Pacific are more irregular but almost vertical. Just what kind of process the peculiarities represent in detail is not known, but it is almost certainly a reflection of complex forms taken by convection in a highly viscous medium.

Beneath Earth’s surface, scientists find long ‘fingers’ of heat (esciencenews.com)
New model of Earth’s interior reveals clues to hotspot volcanoes (eurekalert.org)

Pushing back DNA sequencing: a Spanish cave bear

Published on September 25, 2013 by zooks777Leave a comment

At the time, only 3 years ago, publication of the first full Neanderthal genome seemed miraculous. Yet the apparent magic proved repeatable, including for an obscure but distinct group of extinct humans – the Denisovans – known only from their DNA in a single pinkie bone. These advances astonished the world by showing that anatomically modern humans were capable of interbreeding with both groups; and did so that many people now living outside of Africa carry the genetic evidence. But the samples analysed for DNA were little more than 40 thousand years old. Older fossils of extinct animals have given up their genetic features, such as the wooly mammoth and a horse about 700 ka old, but only from samples frozen into permafrost at high northern latitudes.

The degradation of DNA over time seemed destined to limit palaeo-genetics, even when slowed down by natural freezing. The degradation breaks down any surviving genetic material into shorter and shorter fragments of the DNA molecule, ultimately to its atoms being recombined in new molecules of totally unrelated compounds through the chemical processes of fossilisation. Reassembling the fragments correctly becomes increasingly difficult the smaller they are. Few outside of a highly skilled specialists were optimistic of breaking the 100 ka barrier, even using frozen fossils. Unsurprisingly, having had such dramatic successes, the specialists continue to ride their luck and their ingenuity.

Excavations at the site of Gran Dolina, in Ata... — Excavations at Gran Dolina, in Atapuerca, Spain. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The cave complex of the Atapuerca Mountains in northern Spain, whose sediments range in age from almost a million years ago to recent times, contain rich accumulations of human remains, including the pre-Neanderthal Homo heidelbergensis and H. antecessor dating back to more than 800 ka. If ever there was a magnet for archaeo-geneticists Atapuerca is definitely one. Moreover, physical anthropologists seem never to stop disputing their interpretations. Jesse Dabney of the now famous Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and co-workers from Britain, New Zealand, Spain and Australia are now beginning to report results. The first are from a cave bear (probably Ursos deningeri) known to be older than 300 ka (Dabney, J. and 10 others 2013. Complete mitochondrial genome sequence of a Middle Pleistocene cave bear reconstructed from ultrashort DNA fragments in one of its foreleg bones. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, v. 110, doi/10.1073/pnas.1314445110). The bear’s mitochondrial DNA was pieced together from fragments as small as 50 base pairs, and shows its ancestry to bears (U. spelaeus) from the later Pleistocene that became extinct at about 28 ka.

It may be only a matter of time before human DNA emerges from the rich Atapuerca fossil hoard; indeed the authors strongly hint that they are working on that now.

Researchers reconstruct mitochondrial genome of Middle Pleistocene cave bear (phys.org)
It’s Barely There – 300,000 Year Old DNA (genedork.wordpress.com)

The East African Orogen: Neoproterozoic tectonics on display

Published on September 19, 2013 by zooks777Leave a comment

Over a period of about 300 Ma the fragmentation of a supercontinent, Rodinia, drove a round of sea-floor spreading and continental drift that culminated in reassembly of the older continental pieces and entirely new crust in a new supercontinent, Gondwana. The largest source of evidence for this remarkable tectonic turnaround is a belt stretching N-S for over 3000 km from southern Israel through East Africa to Mozambique. At its widest the belt exposes Neoproterozoic rocks and structures for some 1700 km E-W from west of the Nile in northern Sudan almost to Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. This Arabian-Nubian Shield tapers southwards to thin out completely in northern Tanzania between far older cratons and in a state of high-grade metamorphism.

This East African Orogen has long been considered the best exposed bowels of former mountain building that there are: results of continent-continent collision and the bulldozing together of many oceanic arcs and remnants of oceanic lithosphere that once separated the cratons. This was much more complex than a case of head-on tectonics, the northward-swelling Arabian-Nubian Shield showing all the signs of being like a gigantic ‘pip’ squeezed out northwards from two cratonic jaws during the last stages of what is often called the Pan African Orogeny. Interestingly, the line of the orogen is roughly followed by East Africa’s other giant feature, the Rift Valley; actually two of them following Pan African terranes. A continental scale anisotropy has been reactivated and subject to extensional tectonics, and maybe in future a new round of sea-floor spreading as has begun in the Red Sea, some half a billion years after it formed.

Simplified geological map of the East African Orogen courtesy of the authors of Fritz et al 2013

Now there is an opportunity for anyone to download and read a digest of East African orogenic processes compiled by researchers from several countries along the belt and their colleagues from North America, Europe and Australia who have been privileged to work in this vast area (Fritz, H and 13 others 2013. Orogen styles in the East African orogen: A review of the Neoproterozoic to Cambrian tectonic evolution. Journal of African Earth Sciences, v. 86, p. 65-106 Click on the link, scroll to the Open Access article to download the 12 Mb PDF version). The authors present superb simplified geological maps of each major part of the orogen, a vast array of references and well-written accounts of its sector-by-sector tectonic and metamorphic evolution, variations in style and broad tectonic setting.

Explosive erosion in the Himalaya

Published on September 17, 2013 by zooks777Leave a comment

As the Yalung-Tsangpo River on the northern flank of the Himalaya approaches a bend the rotates its flow by almost 180 degrees to become the Brahmaputra it enters one of the world’s largest canyons. Over the 200 km length of the Tsangpo Gorge the river descends two kilometres between peaks that tower 7 km above sea level. Since the area is rising tectonically and as a result of the unloading that attends erosion, for the Tsangpo to have maintained its eastward flow it has been suggested that an average erosion rate of 3 to 5 km per million years was maintained continuously over the last 3 to 5 Ma. However, new information from the sediments downstream of the gorge suggests that much of the gorge’s depth was cut during a series of sudden episodes (Lang, K.A. et al. 2013. Erosion of the Tsangpo Gorge by megafloods, Eastern Himalaya. Geology, v. 41, p. 1003-1006).

English: Map of the Yarlung Tsangpo River wate... — The Yarlung Tsangpo River watershed which drains the north slope of the Himalayas. (credit: Wikipedia)

It has become clear from a series of mountainside terraces that during the Pleistocene glaciers and debris from them often blocked the narrow valleys through which the river flowed along the northern flank of the Himalaya. Each blockage would have impounded enormous lakes upstream of the Tsangpo Gorge, containing up to 800 km³ of water. Failure of the natural dams would have unleashed equally spectacular floods. The researchers from the University of Washington in Seattle examined the valley downstream of the gorge, to find unconsolidated sediments as much as 150 m above the present channel. They have similar grain size distributions to flood deposits laid down some 30 m above the channel by a flood unleashed in 2000 by the failure of a temporary dam caused by a landslide. The difference is that the higher level deposits are densely vegetated and have well-developed soils: they are almost certainly relics of far larger floods in the distant past from the lakes betrayed by the terraces above the Tsangpo Gorge.

By measuring the age of zircons found in the megaflood deposits using the U/Pb methods the team have been able to show that the sediments were derived mainly from 500 Ma crystalline basement in the Tsangpo Gorge itself rather than from the younger terranes in Tibet. There are four such deposits at separate elevations above the modern river below the gorge. Like the 2000 AD flood deposit, each terrace is capped by landslide debris suggesting that flooding and associated erosion destabilised the steep slopes so characteristic of the region. Because the valleys are so narrow (<200 m at the bottom), each flood would have been extremely deep, flows being of the order of a million cubic metres per second. The huge power would have been capable of moving blocks up to 18 m across with 1 m boulders being carried in suspension. It has been estimated that each of the floods would have been capable of removing material that would otherwise have taken up to 4000 years to erode at present rates of flow.

Massive Himalayan gorge partly carved by Lake Erie-sized floods (arstechnica.com)

Electricity from ‘black smokers’

Published on September 13, 2013 by zooks7771 Comment

Occasionally, journals not usually associated with mainstream geosciences publish something startling, but easily missed. Nature of 12 September 2013 alerted me to just such an oddity. It seems that the chemistry of sea-floor hydrothermal vents potentially can generate electrical power (Yamamoto, M. et al. 2013. Generation of electricity and illumination by an environmental fuel cell in deep-sea hydrothermal vents. Angewandte Chemie, online DOI: 10.1002/ange.201302704).

The team from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, the Riken Centre for Sustainable Resource Science and the University of Tokyo used a submersible ROV to suspend a fuel cell based on a platinum cathode and iridium anode in hydrothermal vents that emerge from the Okinawa Trough off southern Japan at a depth of over 1 km. It recorded a tiny, but significant power generation of a few milliwatts.

The fluids issuing from the vents are at over 300°C while seawater is around 4°C, creating a very high thermal gradient. More importantly, the fluid-seawater interface is also a boundary between geochemically very different conditions. The fluids are highly acidic (pH 4.8) compared with the slight alkalinity of seawater, and contain high concentrations of hydrogen and hydrogen sulfide but undetectable oxygen (sea water is slightly oxygenated).

The fuel cell was designed so that iridium in the anode speeds up the oxidation of H₂S at the geochemical interface which yields the electrons necessary in electrical currents. The experiment neatly signified its success by lighting up three light-emitting diodes.

Does this herald entirely new means of renewable power generation? Perhaps, if the fuel cell is scaled-up enormously. Yet, the very basis of oxidation and reduction is expressed by the mnemonic OILRIG (Oxidation Is Loss Reduction Is Gain – of electrons) and any potential redox reaction in nature has potential, even plants can be electricity producers. In fact all fuel cells exploit oxidation reactions of one kind or another.

Scientists Generate Electricity Using Human Brain! (techandfacts.com)

Estimating arsenic risks in China

Published on September 4, 2013 by zooks7772 Comments

Two weeks after Earth pages featured arsenic in groundwater below the Mekong Delta another important paper has emerged about modelling risk of arsenic contamination throughout the People’s Republic of China (Rodriguez-Lado, L. et al. 2013. Groundwater arsenic contamination throughout China. Science, v. 341, p. 866-868). Scientists based in the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and technology and the China Medical University follow up the results of geochemical testing of groundwater from almost 450 thousand wells in 12% of China’s counties; part of a nationwide aim to test millions of wells. That is a programme likely to last for decades, and their work seeks to develop a predictive model that might better focus such an enormous effort and help in other large regions where well sampling is not so advanced.

As well as the well-known release of arsenic-containing ions through the dissolution of iron oxy-hydroxides in aquifers that exhibit reducing conditions, aridity that causes surface evaporation can create alkaline conditions in groundwater that also desorbs arsenic from similar minerals. The early results from China suggested 16 environmental factors available in digital map form, mainly geological, topographic and hydrogeochemical, that possibly encourage contamination; a clear indication of the sheer complexity of the problem. Using GIS techniques these possible proxies were narrowed down to 8 that show significant correlation with arsenic levels above the WHO suggested maximum tolerable concentration of 10 micrograms per litre (10 parts per billion by volume). Geology (Holocene sediments are most likely sources), the texture of soils and their salinity, the potential wetness of soils predicted from topography and the density of surface streams carrying arsenic correlate positively with high well-water contamination, whereas slope, distance from streams and gravity (a measure of depth of sedimentary basins) show a negative correlation. These parameters form the basis for the predictive model and more than 2500 new arsenic measurements were used to validate the results of the analysis.

Estimated probability of arsenic in Chinese groundwater above the WHO acceptable maximum concentration (Credit:Rodriguez-Lado, et al. 2013)

The results graphically highlight possible high risk areas, mainly in the northern Chinese provinces that are partly confirmed by the validation. Using estimated variations in population density across the country the team discovered that as many as 19.6 million people may be affected by consumption of arsenic contaminated water. In fact if groundwater is used for irrigation, arsenic may also be ingested with locally grown food. It seems that the vast majority of Chinese people live outside the areas of risk, so that mitigating risk is likely to be more manageable that it is in Bangladesh and West Bengal.

As well as being an important input to environmental health management in the PRC the approach is appropriate for other large areas where direct water monitoring is less organised, such as Mongolia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan in central Asia, and in the arid regions of South America.

New risk model sheds light on arsenic risk in China’s groundwater (phys.org)
New predictive method pinpoints arsenic hotspots (terradaily.com)
Risk Management: Building a Model That Can Predict Arsenic Contamination Of Drinking Wells In China (medicaldaily.com)

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