Can a supernova affect the Earth System?

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The easy answer is yes, simply because chemical elements with a greater relative atomic mass than that of iron are thought to be created in supernovae when dying giant stars collapse under their own gravity and then explode. Interstellar dust and gas clouds accumulate their debris. If the clouds are sufficiently dense gravity forms clumps that may become new stars and the planets that surround them. Matter from every once-nearby supernova enters these clouds and thus contributes to the formation of a planet. This was partly proven when pre-solar grains were found in the Murchison meteorite, some of which are as old as 7.5 billion years (Ga) – 3 Ga older than the Solar System (see: Mineral grains far older than the Solar System; January 15, 2020). Murchison is a carbonaceous chondrite, a class of meteorite which likely contributed lots of carbon-based compounds to the early Earth, setting the stage for the emergence of life. It has been estimated that a near-Earth supernova (closer than 1000 light years) would have noticeable effects on the biosphere, mainly because of the effects on atmospheric composition of the associated high-energy gamma-ray burst. That would create sufficient nitrogen oxides to destroy the ozone layer that shields the surface from harmful radiation. There are reckoned to have been 20 nearby supernovae during the last 10 Ma or so from the presence of anomalously high levels of the isotope 60Fe in marine sediment layers on the Pacific floor. Yet there is no convincing evidence that they coincided with detectable extinctions in the fossil record. But supernovae have been suggested as a possible cause of more ancient mass extinctions, such as that at the end of the Ordovician Period (but see: The late-Ordovician mass extinction: volcanic connections; July 2017).

Diorama of an Early Devonian reef with tabulate and rugose corals and trilobites (Credit: Richard Bizley)

The Late Devonian is generally accepted to be one of the ‘Big Five’ mass extinction events. However, unlike the others, the event was a protracted decline in biodiversity, with several extinction peaks). In particular it marked the end of Palaeozoic reef-building corals. Some have put down the episodic faunal decline to the effects of species moving from one marine basin to another as global sea levels fluctuated: much like the effects of the ‘invasion’ of the coral-eating Crown of Thorns sea urchin that has helped devastate parts of the Great Barrier Reef during present-day global warming (see: Late Devonian: mass extinction or mass invasion? January 2012). Recently, attention has switched to evidence for ultra-violet damage to the morphology of spores found in the strata that display faunal extinction; i.e. to the possibility of the ozone layer having been lost or severely depleted. One suggestion has been sudden peaks in volcanic activity, hinted at by spikes in the abundance of mercury of marine sediments. Brian Fields of the University of Illinois, with colleagues from the USA, UK, Estonia and Switzerland, have closely examined the possibility and the testability of a supernova’s influence (Fields. B.D. et al. 2020.  Supernova triggers for end-Devonian extinctions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, v. 117, article 202013774; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2013774117).

They propose the deployment of mass-spectrometric analysis for anomalous stable-isotope abundances in the sediments that contain faunal evidence for accelerated extinction, particularly those of 146Sm, 235U and the long-lived plutonium isotope 244Pu (80 Ma hal-life). They suggest that the separation of the extinction into several events, may be a clue to a supernova culprit. A gamma-ray burst would arrive at light speed, but dust – containing the detectable isotopes –  although likely to be travelling very quickly would arrive hundred to thousands of years later, depending on the distance to the supernova. Cosmic rays generated by the supernova, also a possible kill mechanism, given a severely depleted ozone layer, travel about half the speed of light. Three separate arrivals for the products of a single stellar explosion are indeed handy as an explanation for the Late Devonian extinctions. But someone needs to do the analyses. The long-lived  plutonium isotope is the best candidate: even detection of a few atoms in a sample would be sufficient proof. But that would require a means of ruling out contamination by anthropogenic plutonium, such as analysing the interior of fossils. But would even such an exotic discovery prove the sole influence of a galactic even?

Centenary of the Milanković Theory

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A letter in the latest issue of Nature Geoscience (Cvijanovic, I. et al. 2020. One hundred years of Milanković cycles, v. Nature Geoscience , v.13, p. 524–525; DOI: 10.1038/s41561-020-0621-2) reveals the background to Milutin Milanković’s celebrated work on the astronomical  driver of climate cyclicity. Although a citizen of Serbia, he had been born at Dalj, a Serbian enclave, in what was Austro-Hungary. Just before the outbreak of World War I in 2014, he returned to his native village to honeymoon with his new bride. The assassination (29 June 2014) in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Bosnian-Serb nationalist Gavrilo Princip prompted Austro-Hungarian authorities to imprison Serbian nationals. Milanković was interned in a PoW camp. Fortunately, his wife and and a former Hungarian colleague managed to negotiate his release, on condition that he served his captivity, with a right to work but under police surveillance, in Budapest. It was under these testing conditions that he wrote his seminal Mathematical Theory of Heat Phenomena Produced by Solar Radiation; finished in 1917 but remaining unpublished until 1920 because of a shortage of paper during the war.

Curiously, Milanković was a graduate in civil engineering — parallels here with Alfred Wegener of Pangaea fame, who was a meteorologist — and practised in Austria. Appointed to a professorship in Belgrade in 1909, he had to choose a field of research. To insulate himself from the rampant scientific competitiveness of that era, he chose a blend of mathematics and astronomy to address climate change. During his period as a political prisoner Milanković became the first to explain how the full set of cyclic variations in Earth’s orbit — eccentricity, obliquity and precession — caused distinct variations in incoming solar radiation at different latitudes and changed on multi-thousand-year timescales. The gist  of what might have lain behind the cyclicity of ice ages had first been proposed by Scottish scientist James Croll almost half a century earlier, but it was Milutin Milanković who, as it were, put the icing on the cake. What is properly known as the Milanković-Croll Theory triumphed in the late 1970s as the equivalent of plate tectonics in palaeoclimatology after Nicholas Shackleton and colleagues teased out the predicted astronomical signals from time series of oxygen isotope variations in marine-sediment cores.

Appropriately, while Milanković’s revoluitionary ideas lacked corroborating geological evidence, one of the first to spring to his support was that other resilient scientific ‘prophet’, Alfred Wegener. Neither of them lived to witness their vindication.

The Younger Dryas and volcanic eruptions

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The issue of the Younger Dryas (YD) cold ‘hiccup’  between 12.9 to 11.7 thousand years (ka) ago during deglaciation and general warming has been the subject of at least 10 Earth-logs commentaries in the last 15 years (you can check them via the Palaeoclimatology logs). I make no apologies for what might seem to be verging on a personal obsession, because it isn’t. That 1200-year episode is bound up with major human migrations on all the northern continents: it may be more accurate to say ‘retreats’. Cooling to near-glacial climates was astonishingly rapid, on the order of a few decades at most. The YD was a shock, and without it the major human transition from foraging to agriculture might, arguably, have happened more than a millennium before it did. There is ample evidence that at 12.9 ka ocean water in the North Atlantic was freshened by a substantial input of meltwater from the decaying ice sheet on northern North America, which shut down the Gulf Stream (see: Tracking ocean circulation during the last glacial period, April 2005; The Younger Dryas and the Flood, June 2006). Such an event has many supporters. Less popular is that it was caused by some kind of extraterrestrial impact, based on various lines of evidence assembled by what amounts to a single consortium of enthusiasts. Even more ‘outlandish’ is a hypothesis that it all kicked off with radiation from a coincident supernova in the constellation Vela in the Southern sky, which is alleged to have resulted in cosmogenic 14C and 10Be anomalies at 12.9 ka. Another coincidence has been revealed by 12.9 ka-old volcanic ash in a sediment core from a circular volcanogenic lake or maar in Germany (see: Did the Younger Dryas start and end at the same times across Europe? January 2014). Being in a paper that sought to chart climate variations during the YD in a precisely calibrated and continuous core, the implications of that coincidence have not been explored fully, until now.

The Laacher See caldera lake in the recently active Eifel volcanic province in western Germany

A consortium of geochemists from three universities in Texas, USA has worked for some time on cave-floor sediments in Hall’s Cave, Texas as they span the YD. In particular, they sought an independent test of evidence for the highly publicised and controversial causal impact in the form of anomalous concentrations of the highly siderophile elements (HSE) osmium, iridium, platinum, palladium and rhenium (Sun, N. et al. 2020. Volcanic origin for Younger Dryas geochemical anomalies ca. 12,900 cal B.P.. Science Advances, v. 6, article eaax8587; DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aax8587). There is a small HSE ‘spike’ at the 12.9 ka level, but there are three larger ones that precede it and one at about 11 ka. Two isotopes of the element osmium are often used to check the ultimate source of that element through the 187Os/188Os ratio, as can the relative proportions of the HSE elements compared with those in chondritic meteorites. The presence of spikes other than at the base of the YD does not disprove the extraterrestrial causal hypothesis, but the nature of those that bracket the mini-glacial time span not only casts doubt on it, they suggest a more plausible alternative. The 187Os/188Os data from each spike are ambiguous: they could either have arisen from partial melting of the mantle or from an extraterrestrial impact. But the relative HSE proportions point unerringly to the enriched layers having been inherited from volcanic gas aerosols. Two fit dated major eruptions of  the active volcanoes Mount Saint Helens (13.75 to 13.45 ka) and Glacier Peak (13.71 to 13.41 ka) in the Cascades province of western North America. Two others in the Aleutian and Kuril Arcs are also likely sources. The spike at the base of the YD exactly matches the catastrophic volcanic blast that excavated the Laacher See caldera in the Eifel region of western Germany, which ejected 6.3 km3 of sulfur-rich magma (containing 2 to 150 Mt of sulfur). Volcanic aerosols blasted into the stratosphere then may have dispersed throughout the Northern Hemisphere: a plausible mechanism for climatic cooling.

Sun et al. have not established the Laacher See explosion as the sole cause of the Younger Dryas. However, its coincidence with the shutdown of the Gulf Stream would have added a sudden cooling that may have amplified climatic effects of the disappearance of the North Atlantic’s main source of warm surface water. Effects of the Laacher See explosion may have been a tipping point, but it was one of several potential volcanic injections of highly reflective sulfate aerosols that closely precede and span the YD.

See also: Cooling of Earth caused by eruptions, not meteors (Science Daily, 31 July 2020)

Kicking-off planetary Snowball conditions

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Untitled-1
Artist’s impression of the glacial maximum of a Snowball Earth event (Source: NASA)

Twice in the Cryogenian Period of the Neoproterozoic, glacial- and sea ice extended from both poles to the Equator, giving ‘Snowball Earth’ conditions. Notable glacial climates in the Phanerozoic – Ordovician, Carboniferous-Permian and Pleistocene – were long-lived but restricted to areas around the poles, so do not qualify as Snowball Earth conditions. It is possible, but less certain, that Snowball Earth conditions also prevailed during the Palaeoproterozoic at around 2.4 to 2.1 billion years ago. This earlier episode roughly coincided with the ‘Great Oxidation Event’, and one explanation for it is that the rise of atmospheric oxygen removed methane, a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, by oxidizing it to CO2 and water. That may well have been a consequence of the evolution of the cyanobacteria, their photosynthesis releasing oxygen to the atmosphere. The Neoproterozoic ‘big freezes’ are associated with rapid changes in the biosphere, most importantly with the rise of metazoan life in the form of the Ediacaran fauna, the precursor to the explosion in animal diversity during the Cambrian. Indeed all major global coolings, restricted as well as global, find echoes in the course of biological evolution. Another interwoven factor is the rock cycle, particularly volcanism and the varying pace of chemical weathering. The first releases CO2 from the mantle, the second helps draw it down from the atmosphere when weak carbonic acid in rainwater rots silicate minerals (see: Can rock weathering halt global warming, July 2020). All such interplays between major and sometimes minor ‘actors’ in the Earth system influence climate and, in turn, climate inevitably affects all the rest. With such complexity it is hardly surprising that there is a plethora of theories about past climate shifts.

As well as a link with fluctuations in the greenhouse effect, climate is influenced by changes in the amount of solar heating, for which there are yet more options to consider. For instance, the increase in Earth’s albedo (reflectivity) that results from ice cover, may lead through a feedback effect to runaway cooling, particularly once ice extends beyond the poorly illuminated poles. Volcanic dust and sulfate aerosols in the stratosphere also increase albedo and the tendency to cooling, as would interplanetary dust. More complexity to befuddle would-be modellers of ancient climates. Yet it is safe to say that, within the maelstrom of contributory factors, the freeze-overs of Snowball conditions must have resulted from our planet passing through some kind of threshold in the Earth System. Two theoretical scientists from the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have attempted to cut through the log-jam by modelling the dynamics of the interplay between the ice-albedo feedback and the carbon-silicate cycle of weathering (Arnscheidt, C.W. & Rothman, D.H. 2020. Routes to global glaciation. Proceedings of the Royal Society A, v. 476, article 0303 online; DOI: 10.1098/rspa.2020.0303). Their mathematical approach involves two relatively simple, if long-winded, equations based on parameters that express solar heating, albedo, surface temperature and pressure, and the rate of volcanic outgassing of CO2; a simplification that sets biological processes to one side.

Unlike previous models, theirs can simulate varying rates, particularly of changes in solar energy input. The key conclusion of the paper is that if solar heating decreases faster than a threshold rate the more a planet’s surface water is likely to freeze from pole to pole. The authors suggest that a Snowball Earth event would result from a 2% fall in received solar radiation over about ten thousand years: pretty quick in a geological sense. Such a trigger might stem from a volcanic ‘winter’ scenario, an increase in clouds seeded by spores of primitive marine algae or other factors. The real ‘tipping point’ would probably be the high albedo of ice. There is a warning in this for the present, when a variety of means of decreasing solar input have been proposed as a ‘solution’ to global warming.

Because the Earth orbits the Sun in the ‘Goldilocks Zone’ and is volcanically active even global glaciation would be temporary, albeit of the order of millions of years. The cold would have shut down weathering so that volcanic CO2 could slowly build up in the atmosphere: the greenhouse effect would rescue the planet. Further from the Sun, a planet would not have that escape route, regardless of its atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases: a neat lead-in to another recent paper about the ancient climate of Mars (Grau Galofre, A. et al. 2020. Valley formation on early Mars by subglacial and fluvial erosion. Nature Geoscience, early online article; DOI: 10.1038/s41561-020-0618-x)

A Martian channel system: note later cratering (credit: European Space Agency)

There is a lot of evidence from both high-resolution orbital images of the Martian surface and surface ‘rovers’ that surface water was abundant over a long period in Mars’s early history. The most convincing are networks of channels, mainly in the southern hemisphere highlands. They are not the vast channelled scablands, such as those associated with Valles Marineris, which probably resulted from stupendous outburst floods connected to catastrophic melting of subsurface ice by some means. There are hundreds of channel networks, that resemble counterparts on Earth. Since rainfall and melting of ice and snow have carved most terrestrial channel networks, traditionally those on Mars have been attributed to similar processes during an early warm and wet phase. The warm-early Mars hypothesis extends even to interpreting the smooth low-lying plains of its northern hemisphere – about a third of Mars’s surface area – as the site of an ocean in those ancient times. Of course, a big question is, ‘Where did all that water go?’ Another relates to the fact that the early Sun emitted considerably less radiation 4.5 billion years ago than it does now: a warm-wet early Mars is counterintuitive.

Anna Grau Galofre of the University of British Columbia and co-authors found that many of the networks on Mars clearly differ in morphology from one another, even in small areas of its surface. Drainage networks on Earth conform to far fewer morphological types. By comparing the variability on Mars with channel-network shapes on Earth, the authors found a close match for many with those that formed beneath the ice sheet that covered high latitudes of North America during the last glaciation. Some match drainage patterns typical of surface-water erosion, but both types are present in low Martian latitudes: a suggestion of ‘Snowball Mars’ conditions? The authors reached their conclusions by analysing six mathematical measures that describe channel morphology for over ten thousand individual valley systems. Previous analyses of individual systems discovered on high-resolution images have qualitative comparisons with terrestrial geomorphology

See also: Chu, J. 2020. “Snowball Earths” May Have Been Triggered by a Plunge in Incoming Sunlight – “Be Wary of Speed” (SciTech Daily 29 July 2020); Early Mars was covered in ice sheets, not flowing rivers, researchers say (Science Daily, 3 August 2020)

2019 Annual Logs added

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I have now compiled all the Earth-logs posts from 2019 into PDFs for the categories: Geohazards; Geomorphology; Human Evolution; Miscellaneous; Palaeobiology; Palaeoclimatology; Physical Resources; Planetary Science; Sediments and Stratigraphy, and Tectonics. They are available for download through the Annual logs pull-down in the main menu – just select a category, then scroll down to the 2019 list of contents and click on the link.

I hope this format is useful for reference purposes.

Isotopic clues to diet of early hominins

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‘We are what we eat’ is certainly a truism, but it is neither a trope nor a cliché. The phrase is especially appropriate when scientists examine isotopes of a variety of elements in bones or teeth. For instance the relative proportions of two stable isotopes of the metal strontium – 87Sr and 86Sr – differ from place to place in soil because 87Sr is the daughter isotope of radioactive 87Rb. The older the rock from which a soil has formed the more of the radioactive rubidium isotope will have decayed. Not only does this increase the 87Sr/ 86Sr ratio in the rock and the soil derived from it, but vegetation inherits it too. So it gets into an animal’s diet and ultimately its teeth. A human who has migrated will carry the ratio of the geology of her early home geology in her adult teeth – fully developed by about 13 years-old – to wherever she dies. Likewise, the different oxygen isotopes in rainwater, which result from climate variation, end up in teeth thanks to what a person ate before adulthood. The two ‘signatures’ together allowed archaeologists to backtrack the famous ‘Amesbury Archer’, who may have brought Bronze Age culture to Britain, back to the Alps of Central Europe. Just what a human diet comprised can be roughly assessed from the carbon and nitrogen isotopes in collagen that fossil bone sometimes preserves: the proportion of seafood relative to the meat of land herbivores and the amount of terrestrial grains, nuts and fruits. The trouble is, collagen degrades with the age of human remains and another approach is needed to assess the diets of our distant forebears.

Calcium isotope data from early hominins and some modern primates. Increasingly negative values of δ44/42Ca signify lower values of the ratio compared with a standard. (Credit: Martin et al. 2020; Fig. 1)

It turns out that calcium isotopes in teeth, which do not degrade over extremely long time spans, offer clues to diet. In particular the dental 44Ca/42Ca ratio decreases as its hosts rise in the food chain; effectively as the meat content in their diet increases. This approach has been applied to the hominin and non-human primate fauna of the Turkana Basin in Kenya (Martin, J.E. et al. 2020. Calcium isotopic ecology of Turkana Basin hominins. Nature Communications, v. 11, article 3587; DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-17427-7). The shores of a large lake in the vicinity of modern Lake Turkana were occupied from 3.5 to about 2 Ma ago by early Homo, australopithecines, paranthropoids and baboons. Using dental Ca isotopes fails to distinguish Australopithecus anamensis and Kenyanthropus platyops, whereas carbon isotopes suggest that the first had a purely C3 plant diet – fruiting plants that thrive under cool, wet conditions, as beneath woodland canopies – whereas Kenyanthropus foraged on both these and the C4 plants – many grasses and sedges – that favour open, well-lit grassland. The 44Ca/42Ca ratios in Homo teeth span a wide range of values that point to omnivory and even a high dietary meat content: a similar isotopic pattern to those of fossil baboons and geladas. Paranthropus boisei is definitely the odd-one-out, among both ancient and modern primates, and even among paranthropoids as a whole. It most likely had a specialised diet. Its teeth show wear patterns that suggest soft plant material, which seems to rule out grasses which are abrasive. Perhaps it fed on succulent semi-aquatic plants of the lake shore. When Mary Leakey first discovered P. boisei in 1959, she and husband Louis considered that its huge molars with thick enamel indicated that it ate hard vegetable matter, hence its original nickname ‘Nutcracker Man’. It also had hands capable of precise manipulation, indeed the association of the first specimen with Oldowan-type stone tools led to speculation that it had made them. Some specimens are associated with long bones with worn ends, suggesting that they may have used them for digging.

Earliest Americans, and plenty of them

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Who the first Americans were is barely known outside of the tools that they left in the archaeological record. For most of the late 20th century US researchers claimed that the first people to migrate into the Americas produced stone tools of the Clovis culture that first appear just before the Younger Dryas cold period, around 13.2 to 12.9 thousand years (ka) ago. The hallmark of Clovis culture is the finely-worked stone spear point, and its association with butchered large mammals: the Clovis people were apparently big-game hunters  Despite other, albeit less convincing, signs of earlier human habitation, this notion ossified for a seemingly irrefutable reason. To reach the Americas from NE Asia on foot, these people would have had to cross the Bering Straits via the Beringia land bridge exposed as sea level fell during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). That would have taken them to Alaska, but an exit to the south remained blocked by the huge Laurentian ice sheet until around 13 ka. Once an ice-free route had opened, the Clovis people migrated quickly to reach the site from which they take their name in New Mexico. But other archaeological sites discovered in the last couple of decades, extending as far south as Chile, have yielded ages that clearly predate the Clovis culture (see: Clovis First hypothesis dumped, May 2008). Beneath a Clovis-bearing layer at a site in Texas excavators unearthed thousands of totally different tools reliably dated to as far back as 15.5 ka (see: Clovis first hypothesis refuted, May 2011). This opened the realistic possibility that the earliest migrants had not necessarily walked from Asia, but may have followed a marine route along the Pacific coast and spread eastwards as opportunities presented themselves.

Now Mesoamerica has convincingly verified migration more than twice as long ago as that which littered North America with Clovis tools. It emerged from the Chiquihuite Cave 2.7 km high in the Astillero Mountains of northern Mexico. Almost 2000 stone artefacts were found throughout a 3 m thick layer of sediment beneath the cave floor that spans 27 to 13  ka, (Ardelean, C.F. and 27 others 2020. Evidence of human occupation in Mexico around the Last Glacial Maximum. Nature, v. 584 p. 87–92; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2509-0). The technology revealed by the tools is more primitive than that of the Clovis culture. Artefacts occur throughout the layer, which extends back in time from the Younger Dryas, through the preceding period of warming and the LGM itself. Although colder than the present equitable climate of the high mountain valleys of Northern Mexico environmental data obtained from the layer show that it was viable for occupation through the LGM. Of the 42 highly precise and accurate radiocarbon dates those from some of the stratigraphically deepest part of the layer exceed 33 ka, which the authors suggest may establish the initial human occupation of the cave. Incidentally, although the paper was published online in July 2020 it was submitted to Nature in October 2018. That is a very long time in the editorial and review process. There is no indication as to why there was such a delay: maybe an indication of some continuing defence of the Clovis First hypothesis among the reviewers …

Dated pre-Clovis sites in Mexico and North America and possible expanding distribution of people from 31.3 to 14.2 ka (Credit; Becerra-Valdivia and Higham; Extended Data Fig. 4)

The radiocarbon dating in the paper was carried out at the state-of-the-art accelerator mass spectrometer unit at the University of Oxford, UK, by two of the co-authors (Lorena Becerra-Valdivia and Thomas Higham). They too published a Nature paper in late July 2020, which discusses their new dating of 42 archaeological sites in North America and Siberia (Becerra-Valdivia, L. & Higham, T. 2020. The timing and effect of the earliest human arrivals in North America. Nature, v. 584, p. 93-97; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2491-6). In Mesoamerica and North America (the Clovis heartland) their results suggest that, as in Chiquihuite Cave, ‘people were present in different settings before, during and immediately following the LGM’, their ranges increasing over time. These people would likely not have followed the same route suggested for the later Clovis people, i.e. across Beringia and then parallel to the topographic grain in the Western Cordillera, ice-cap melting permitting. An interesting suggestion by Becerra-Valdivia and Higham is that post-LGM expansion in numbers and range of these early American contributed to the famous extinction of the North American Pleistocene megafauna. Dating the extinctions of different genera suggests that disappearance of the megafauna may not have been a single event during the Younger Dryas, but seems to have been during at least two other episodes peaking at about 40 and 24 ka. Both the ecological devastation supposedly associated with the Clovis people and the impact theory for its cause depend on a single event.

See also:  Gruhn, R. 2020. Evidence grows for early peopling of the Americas. Nature, v. 584, p. 47-48; DOI: 10.1038/d41586-020-02137-3; Rincon, P. 2020. Earliest evidence for humans in the Americas (BBC News, 22 July 2020); Keys, D. 2020. Humans reached the Americas 11,000 years earlier than previously thought, archaeologists discover (Independent, 22 July 2020)

Submarine landslides and formation of the East African Rift System

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The East African Rift System (Credit: P.C. Neupane, M.Sc thesis 2011; Fig. 1)

East Africa is traversed from the Afar Depression in the north to Malawi in southern Africa by several great depressions bounded by active normal fault systems: grabens in the old terminology. They are regions of active crustal extension and thinning decorated by chains of active volcanoes. The last 50 years has witnessed more than 3400 major earthquakes (magnitude 4 to 7); unsurprising for the Earth’s largest active continental rift system. In Afar, the East African Rift system links to two others that have extended sufficiently to create oceanic crust: the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden rifts. Afar is the site of the best documented tectonic triple junction. In Ethiopia, the rifting began after the whole of the Horn of Africa and Yemen had been smothered by continental flood basalts 30 Ma ago, during the Oligocene Epoch. The East African rifts are repositories for younger sediments that contain a continuous record of hominid evolution from about 5 Ma ago. This is no coincidence, for adjacent bulging of the continental crust resulted both from its unloading by thinning along the rifts and the buoyancy conferred by high heat flow in the mantle beneath. The uplifted areas have risen as high as 4 kilometres elevation (in Ethiopia), and present some of the world’s most spectacular land forms. This N-S barrier disrupted earlier climatic patterns that had much of tropical Africa blanketed by dense woodland and resulted in a strongly seasonal climate during the last few million years and the development of open savannah land. Put simply, open grassland with widely spaced trees was no place for diminutive forest apes to scamper on all-fours. Being able to leg-it nimbly on two gave the apes that developed such a gait a decisive evolutionary advantage: the rest, as they say, is human evolutionary history.

The extension and rapid uplift along the rift flanks to this day pose severe risk of landslides. Indeed, some are so large as to resemble fault blocks in their own right. Vast amounts of the upper crust have been stripped off by rapid erosion driven by the uplift. The debris has not only ended-up on the rift floors as sedimentary fill but far more has made its way eastward to be deposited on the Indian Ocean continental shelf. Until recently, piecing together the history of rifting and uplift has been restricted to the rifts themselves and their adjacent flanks. Such terrains have extremely complex and usually discontinuous geological sequences, so signs of the onset of extensional tectonics and uplift may differ from region to region. Agreement is limited to some time between 25 and 17 Ma. The whole tectonic process may, in fact, have begun at different times along the length of the rift. A clearer picture should emerge from studies of the post-30 Ma sedimentary pile along the Indian Ocean continent shelf. A sure-fire way of getting the needed data is from offshore areas that are prospective for oil and natural gas. Such is the case off the Tanzanian coastline at the southern limit of the rift system.

Seismic reflection profile parallel to the Tanzanian coastline with the Mafia mega-slide highlighted in green (Credit: Maselli et al. 2020; Fig. 5) Click to view full resolution

The Tanzania Petroleum Development Corporation and Shell have conducted seismic reflection surveys and drilled some test wells to the SE of Zanzibar Island, an area of major deposition from the eastward flowing Ruaha–Rufiji and Rovuma Rivers. Vittorio Maselli of Dalhousie University in Halifax Nova Scotia and colleagues from the UK, Italy and the Netherlands analysed a wealth of data from these surveys, to discover one of the biggest landslides on Earth (Maselli, V. and 10 others 2020. Large-scale mass wasting in the western Indian Ocean constrains onset of East African rifting. Nature Communications, v. 11, article 3456; DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-17267-5). The Mafia mega-slide is represented in seismic profiles by a sedimentary unit, up to 300 m thick. It has a highly irregular base that cuts across strata in late-Oligocene to early-Miocene (25-23 Ma) sediments. It covers an area of more than 11,600 km2 and has a volume of at least 2500 km3. The unit’s upper surface is also irregular, suggesting that the unit’s thickness varies considerably. Younger sediments are draped across the irregular top of the slide body. In other, parallel sections the deposit is absent. Unlike the clearly bedded nature of sediments above and below it, the seismic response of the slide deposit is featureless, except for zones of chaotic stratification that reveal slump-folds. Nor is this the only sign of major submarine slides: there are others of lesser extent that predate the base of the Pliocene (5.3 Ma).

A mass movement of this magnitude would have generated a tsunami larger than that which possibly wiped out Mesolithic habitation on the east coast of Britain 8200 years ago due to the even larger Storegga Slide at the edge of the Norwegian continental shelf. The Mafia slide event would have flooded wide tracts of the East African coast. Its estimated age, between 22.9 to 19.8 Ma, is roughly coeval with the initiation of volcanism in the Tanzanian segment of the East African Rift and the onset of rifting and uplift of its flanks. It was probably launched by a major earthquake (>7 on the Richter scale). Such is the pace of current deposition and the thickness of sedimentary build-up since the Pliocene, there is a danger of future slides, albeit of lesser magnitude: the system continues to be seismically active, with recently recorded quakes offshore of Tanzania.

Can rock weathering halt global warming?

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The Lockdown has hardly been a subject for celebration, but there have been two aspects that are, to some extent, a comfort: the trickle of road traffic and the absence of convection trails. As a result the air is less polluted and much clearer, and the quietness, even in cities, has been almost palpable. Wildlife seems to have benefitted and far less CO2 has been emitted. Apart from the universal tension of waiting for one of a host of potential Covid-19 symptoms to strike and the fact that the world economy is on the brink of the greatest collapse in a century, it is tempting to hope that somehow business-as-usual will remain this way. B*gger the gabardine rush to work and the Great Annual Exodus to ‘abroad’. The crisis in the fossil fuel industry can continue, as far as I am concerned, But then, of course, I am retired, lucky to have a decent pension and live rurally. Despite the health risks, however, global capital demands that business-as-it-was must return now. A planet left to that hegemonic force has little hope of staving off anthropogenic ecological decline. But is there a way for capital to ‘have its cake and eat it’? Some would argue that there are indeed technological fixes. Among them is sweeping excess of the main greenhouse gas ‘under the carpet’ by burying it. There are three main suggestions: physically extracting CO2 where it is emitted and pumping it underground into porous rocks; using engineered biological processes in the oceans to take carbon into planktonic carbohydrate or carbonate shells and disposing the dead remains in soil or ocean-floor sediments; enhancing and exploiting the natural weathering of rock. The last is the subject of a recent cost-benefit analysis (Beerling, D.J. and 20 others 2020. Potential for large-scale CO2 removal via enhanced rock weathering with croplands. Nature, v. 583, p. 242–248; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2448-9).

Carbon dioxide in the rock cycle (Credit: Skeptical Science, in Wikipedia)

Research into the climatic effects of rock weathering has a long history, for it represents one of the major components of the global carbon cycle, as well as the rock cycle. Natural chemical weathering is estimated to remove about a billion metric tons of atmospheric carbon annually. That is because the main agent of weathering is the slightly acid nature of rainwater, which contains dissolved CO2 in the form of carbonic acid (H2CO3). This weak acid comprises hydrogen ions (H+), which confer acidity, that are released by the dissolution of CO2 in water, together with HCO3–ions (bicarbonate, now termed hydrogen carbonate). During weathering the hydrogen ions break down minerals in rock. This liberates metals that are abundant in the silicate minerals that make up igneous rocks – predominantly Na, Ca, K, and Mg – as their dissolved ions, leaving hydrated aluminium silicates (clay minerals) and iron oxides as the main residues, which are the inorganic basis of soils. The dissolved metals and bicarbonate ions may ultimately reach the oceans. However, calcium and magnesium ions in soil moisture readily combine with bicarbonate ions to precipitate carbonate minerals in the soil itself, a process that locks-in atmospheric carbon. Another important consequence of such sequestration is that it may make the important plant nutrient magnesium – at the heart of chlorophyll – more easily available and it neutralises any soil acidity built-up by continuous agriculture.  But carbon sequestration naturally achieved by weathering amounts to only about a thirtieth of that emitted by the burning of fossil fuels, and we know that is incapable of coping with the build-up of anthropogenic CO2 in the atmosphere: it certainly has not since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

What could chemical weathering do if it was deliberately enhanced?  One of the most common rocks, basalt, is made up of calcium-rich feldspar and magnesium-rich pyroxene and olivine. In finely granulated form this mix is particularly prone to weathering, and the magnesium released would enrich existing soil as well as drawing down CO2. Hence the focus by David Beerling and his British, US and Belgian colleagues on systematic spreading of ground-up basalt on cropland soils, in much the same way as crushed limestone is currently applied to reverse soil acidification. It is almost as cheap as conventional liming, with the additional benefit of fertilising: it would boost to crop yields. The authors estimate that removal of a metric ton of CO2 from the atmosphere by this means would cost between US$ 55 to 190, depending on where it was done. One of their findings is that the three largest emitters of carbon dioxide – China, the US and India – happen to have the greatest potential for carbon sequestration by enhanced weathering. Incidentally, increased fertility also yields more organic waste that itself could be used to increase the actual carbon content of soils, if converted through pyrolysis to ‘biochar’ .

It all sounds promising, almost ‘too good to be true’. The logistics that would be needed and the carbon emissions that the sheer mass of rock to be finely ground and then distributed would entail, for as long as global capital continues to burn fossil fuels, are substantial, as the authors admit. The grinding would have to be far more extreme than the production of igneous-rock road aggregate. Basalt or related rock is commonly used for resurfacing motorways, not especially well known for degrading quickly to a clay-rich mush. It would probably have to be around the grain size achieved by milling to liberate ore minerals in metal mines, or to produce the feedstock for cement manufacture: small particles create a greater surface area for chemical reactions. But there remains the issue of how long this augmented weathering would take to do the job: its efficiency. Experimental weathering to test this great-escape hypothesis is being conducted by a former colleague of mine, using dust from an Irish basalt quarry to coat experimental plots of a variety of soil types. After two months Mg and Ca ions were indeed being released from the dust, and tiny fragments of olivine, feldspar and pyroxene do show signs of dissolution. Whether this stems from rainwater – the main objective – or from organic acids and bacteria in the soils is yet to be determined. No doubt NASA is doing much the same to see if dusts that coat much of Mars can be converted into soils  Beerling et al. acknowledge that the speed of weathering is a major uncertainty. Large-scale field trials seem some way off, and are likely to be plagued by cussedness! Will farmers willingly change their practices so dramatically?

See also: Lehmann, J & Possinger, A. 2020. Removal of atmospheric CO2 by rock weathering holds promise for mitigating climate change. Nature, v. 583, p. 204-205; DOI: 10.1038/d41586-020-01965-7

Note (added 15 July 2020): Follower Walter Pohl has alerted me to an interesting paper on using ultramafic rocks in the same way (Kelemen, P.B. et al. 2020. Engineered carbon mineralization in ultramafic rocks for CO2 removal from air: Review and new insights. Chemical Geology, v.  550, Article 119628; DOI:10.1016/j.chemgeo.2020.119628). Walter’s own blog contains comments on the climatic efficacy of MgCO3 (magnesite) formed when olivine is weathered.

Turmoil in Roman Republic followed Alaskan volcanic eruption

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That activities in the global political-economic system are now dramatically forcing change in natural systems is clear to all but the most obdurate. In turn, those changes increase the likelihood of a negative rebound on humanity from the natural world. In the first case, data from ice cores suggests that an anthropogenic influence on climate may have started with the spread of farming in Neolithic times. Metal pollution of soils had an even earlier start, first locally in Neanderthal hearths whose remains meet the present-day standards for contaminated soil, and more extensively once Bronze Age smelting of copper began. Global spread of anomalously high metal concentrations in atmospheric dusts shows up as ‘spikes’ in lead within Greenland ice cores during the period from 1100 BCE to 800 CE. This would have resulted mainly from ‘booms and busts’ in silver extraction from lead ores and the smelting of lead itself. In turn, that may reflect vagaries in the world economy of those times

Precise dating by counting annual ice layers reveals connections of Pb peaks and troughs with major historic events, beginning with the spread of Phoenician mining and then by Carthaginians and Romans, especially in the Iberian Peninsula. Lead reaches a sustained peak during the acme of the Roman Republic from 400 to 125 BC to collapse during widespread internal conflict during the Crisis of the Republic. That was resolved by the accession of Octavian/Augustus as Emperor in 31 BCE and his establishment of Pax Romana across an expanded empire. Lead levels rose to the highest of Classical Antiquity during the 1st and early 2nd centuries CE. Collapse following the devastating Antonine smallpox pandemic (165 to 193 CE) saw the ice-core records’ reflecting stagnation of coinage activity at low levels for some 400 years, during which the Empire contracted and changed focus from Rome to Constantinople. Only during the Early Medieval period did levels rise slowly to the previous peak.

The Okmok caldera on the Aleutian island of Umnak (Credit: Desert Research Institute, Reno, Nevada USA)

Earth-logs has previously summarised how natural events, mainly volcanic eruptions, had a profound influence in prehistory. The gigantic eruption of Toba in Sumatra (~73 ka ago) may have had a major influence on modern-humans migrating from Africa to Eurasia. The beginning of the end for Roman hegemony in the Eastern Mediterranean was the Plague of Justinian (541–549 CE), during which between 25 to 50 million people died of bubonic plague across the Eastern Empire. This dreadful event followed the onset of famine from Ireland to China, which was preceded by signs of climatic cooling from tree-ring records, and also with a peak of volcanogenic sulfate ions in the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps around 534 CE. Regional weakening of the populace by cold winters and food shortages, also preceded the Black Death of the mid-14th century. In the case of the Plague of Justinian, it seems massive volcanism resulted in global cooling over a protracted period, although the actual volcanoes have yet to be tracked down. Cooling marked the start of a century of further economic turmoil reflected by lead levels in ice cores (see above). Its historical context is the Early Medieval equivalent of world war between the Eastern Roman Empire, the Sassanid Empire of Persia and, eventually, the dramatic appearance on the scene of Islam and the Arabian, Syrian and Iraqi forces that it inspired (see: Holland, T. 2013. In the Shadow of the Sword: The battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World. Abacus, London)

An equally instructive case of massive volcanism underlying social, political and economic turmoil has emerged from the geochemical records in five Greenlandic ice cores and one from the Siberian island of Severnaya Zemlya (McConnell, J.R. and 19 others 2020. Extreme climate after massive eruption of Alaska’s Okmok volcano in 43 BCE and effects on the late Roman Republic and Ptolemaic Kingdom. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, recent article (22 June 2020); DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2002722117). In this case the focus was on ice layers in all six cores that contain sulfate spikes and, more importantly, abundant volcanic dust, specifically shards of igneous glass. Using layer counting, all six show major volcanism in the years 45 to 43 BCE. The Ides (15th) of March 44 BCE famously marked the assassination of Julius Caesar, two years after the Roman Republic’s Senate appointed him Dictator, following four years of civil war. This was in the later stages of the period of economic decline signified by the fall in ice-core levels of Pb (see above). The Roman commentator Servius reported “…after Caesar had been killed in the Senate on the day before, the sun’s light failed from the sixth hour until nightfall.” Other sources report similar daytime dimming, and unusually cold weather and famine in 43 and 42 BCE.

As well as pinning down the date and duration of the volcanic dust layers precisely (to the nearest month using laser scanning of the ice cores’ opacity), Joseph McConnell and the team members from the US, UK, Switzerland, Germany and Denmark also chemically analysed the minute glass shards from one of the Greenlandic ice cores. This has enabled them to identify a single volcano from 6 possible candidates for the eruption responsible for the cold snap: Okmok, an active, 8 km wide caldera in the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. Previous data suggest that its last major eruption was 2050 years ago and blasted out between 10 to 100 km3 of debris, including ash. Okmok is an appropriate candidate for a natural contributor to profound historic change in the Roman hegemony. The authors also use their ice-core data to model Okmok’s potential for climate change: it had a global reach in terms of temperature and precipitation anomalies. Historians may yet find further correlations of Okmok with events in other polities that kept annual records, such as China.

See also: Eruption of Alaska’s Okmok volcano linked to period of extreme cold in ancient Rome (Science Daily, 22 June 2020); Kornei, K. 2020. Ancient Rome was teetering. Then a volcano erupted 6,000 miles away. (New York Times, 22 June 2020)