News on our present and past world
THIS week I think readers need to be updated on the happenings that have recently been recorded by scientists globally. These are but snippets of information but hopefully will be well received. Psychedelic clouds
Nacreous or mother of pearl clouds lie 30km above our heads in the stratosphere. Normally associated with polar latitudes, in February and March this year they were frequently seen at twilight just before dawn and after sunset in the United Kingdom. These skies must not be confused with the Northern Lights.
Polar air masses this year have been swept down, owing to a change in trajectory of the polar jet stream, over the UK.
This imbued the clouds with almost mother of pearl colours, beginning as yellow and orange pink, later to be followed by orange and purple.
This spectacle is the result of tiny acidic ice crystals at such high altitude which behave like prisms in refracting sunlight into ever-changing colours.
Alas, these very ice crystals assist chlorine pollutants to attack the ozone layer in our atmosphere, thus increasing our susceptibility to the harmful effects of the sun’s ultraviolet rays.
A hole in the ozone layer has this year been observed over the UK and parts of Europe. If travelling in that direction this year, do make sure you pack at least factor 25 sunscreen. Fireballs
These are chunks of broken asteroids and rotting comets shooting down into our upper atmosphere, when great frictional heat will burn them up into a ball of fire.
Their original size varies from one metre across to minute grains of dust. The Earth’s orbit moved through more space debris around the time of the Vernal Equinox (March 20).
On Feb 29 – a Leap Year – folk in North East England and Scotland heard, at night, super sonic booms like those generated by jet aircraft breaking the sound barrier, when suddenly total darkness was switched into daylight, albeit for a few seconds only of light flashes.
Where the remnants or particles of these fireballs landed is still a mystery. Eemian geological epoch
This was an episode in time when the world was gripped by the Ice Ages (1.4 million to 12,000 years before the present). Between massive continental invasions of ice sheets across North America and Eurasia there were interglacial periods of considerable ice melt when the climate became warmer.
One such inter-glacial epoch, the Eemian, resulted in rhinos’, hippos’, elephants’ and hyenas’ bones being discovered in a cave in North Yorkshire in the early 19th century.
With recent forensic evidence of the dating of these bones to about 130,000 years ago, it appears that this part of the UK was covered several times by advancing ice sheets, whereas in the Eemian interglacial period it experienced a subtropical climate not unlike today’s savannah grasslands in Kenya and Tanzania.
This lasted for just 15,000 years in the UK. These animals probably sought refuge in this cave as the last Ice Age advanced. Interestingly, geomorphologists have revealed that worldwide sea levels during the Eemian were six metres higher than today.
Why did this change in temperature occur to pluck Eurasia out of Ice Age conditions? The Eemian epoch was the direct result of a change in the Earth’s orbit around the Sun so that more solar heat bathed higher northern latitudes.
Meteorologists and climatologists forecast that this year will see temperatures worldwide even warmer than last year – the warmest year on record. This, however is due to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions. Recent research has revealed that the next Ice Age will not occur for the next 100,000 years. Otzi Man
This man was accidentally discovered, half buried in a glacial ice patch, by two high level hikers on the AustrianItalian Tirol Alps border in 1991. About 5,000 years ago, he was killed by an arrow, died on the glacier and was literally frozen stiff.
Upon the excavation of his body, which was fossilised by the ice, pathologists found that his last meal was venison and beans. In his stomach contents a certain bacterium was found particular only to Asians.
It is now thought that he may have migrated from Asia to Europe or that his family may have done so.
Very recently, a consultant at Bolzano hospital in northern Italy specialising in ear, nose, throat conditions has scanned Otzi man’s well-preserved lips and vocal chords.
The physician anticipates that through the use of a computer program, it will be possible to turn Otzi’s facial attributes, lip shapes and vocal chords into a synthetic voice, probably of robot-like quality. The wonders of technology.
Control of Zika virus The largest mosquito factory in the world, specialising in breeding infertile male mosquitoes, is based on a small island in China. Currently it produces 20 million mosquitoes per week, focussing on males which carry the Welbachia bacterium that sterilises them.
Female mosquitoes only mate once in their lives so if mating with a sterile male, the larvae produced will not hatch.
The Chinese experiment has nearly reached a 99 per cent elimination of mosquito larvae. Sun Yet-sen University in Guangzhou has trialled this technique for 10 years, not unlike the experiments at an off-shoot scientific research centre of Oxford University in the UK.
Beyond the horrific outcomes of the Zika virus, affecting newly-born babies in some parts of Brazil and the Pacific Islands, there is hope that all governments whose peoples are infected by malaria, dengue and even yellow fever will set aside significant monies to eradicate the inherent dangers of these life-threatening illnesses.
Irregular fogging of open drains is not enough in urban areas. Buying in proven genetically modified male mosquitoes could well be the answer. After all, nations run on their human resources and mosquitoes feed on humans. Coral bleaching
Recently scientists from a Norwegian University have discredited the claim that our oceans are becoming more acidic from their increased atmospheric absorption of CO2 and thus endangering the survival of coral reefs and their ecosystems.
They stress that to turn the alkalinity of salt water (above pH 7) to acid water (less than pH 7) is very unlikely. They attribute coral bleaching to overheating of sea water and the run-off of nitrate fertilisers from agriculture into rivers.
Just offshore from many river outlets there are coral reefs in tropical lands. Perhaps diluted nitric acid may be more potent than carbonic acid in affecting the departure of the algae that add the colours to our undersea world.
Very recently the future of the Great Barrier Reef has been brought into the public domain by a professor the University of Queensland, Australia.
He has studied this 344,470 square km coral system for 30 years. Based on scientific evidence, he said the coral bleaching was the worst he had ever witnessed.
This has been attributed to a 2.5 degrees increase in sea temperature surfaces above the average summer water temperature and thus the corals expelled their symbiotic algae.
The record-breaking Australian autumn this year has seen, last month, temperatures of 4 degrees Celsius above the norm and Sydney recorded in the same month 39 days with temperatures exceeding 26 degrees Celsius.