New Stories from “the Third Pole”
We’ve all heard of the North Pole and the South Pole. But “the Third Pole”? Huh?
That is how the Himalayas have been described because these mighty mountains contain the largest ice mass outside of our polar regions. In an article in the journal Science, Tanuj Shukla and Indra S. Sen call for greater use of real-time satellite monitoring of glacial lake catchments to predict and prepare for catastrophic flood events due to all that ice.
Such monitoring is especially important in a time of global warming and uncertainty. For instance, it’s noted that the number of glacial lakes has increased substantially in recent decades, as have “extreme events.” Such events often have had catastrophic effects on people living within and downstream from the Himalayas, sometimes resulting in thousands of deaths.
Along with increased potential for flood events, the Himalayan region also is vulnerable to landslides that could be lubricated by rapid snowmelt in an area already at high seismological risk. So says N. Purnachandra Rao (National Geophysical Research Institute, India) and colleagues. For instance, earlier this year a glaciated ridge in the western Himalayas gave way in a landslide that killed more than 100 souls while also destroying two hydroelectric projects. In addition to the satellite monitoring called for by Shukla and Sen, Rao and colleagues call for installation of a dense network of ground-based seismometers to assist in early warning of earthquake events and accompanying rockslides.
Both studies emphasize the importance of “real-time” monitoring if we are to mitigate or at least minimize damage and casualties in an area already long prone to geological hazard from natural Earth processes.
NO MORE PLANET X?
The idea of “Planet X” (or “Planet Nine”) has been around for well over 150 years. The theory involves an unknown, unseen giant planet in the outer reaches of our solar system far beyond Neptune and dwarf planet Pluto. Proponents claim that distant lumps of rock and ice are specifically clustered together way, way out there, and they must be clustered due to the gravitational pull of hypothetical Planet X or Planet Nine that circles our sun in an eccentric and inclined orbit.
Not so fast, say others in a recent report in Planetary Science Journal. The clustered debris may simply be the result of selective bias in where astronomers happen to have
focused their telescopes. These scientists say that there is likely far more debris out there, and it isn’t necessarily clustered together in any particular way.
Scientists hope that a new telescope—the Vera C. Rubin Observatory due to debut in Chile in 2023—will help settle the debate.
JUST HOW MANY TYRANT LIZARD KINGS POPULATED EARTH?
As America begins evaluating its latest census data, a census of a different sort has been tallied recently; namely, a census of how many creatures would have had us as appetizers had we co-existed!
I’m talking about Tyrannosaurus rex, or the “tyrant lizard king” of the Cretaceous Period. Researcher Charles R. Marshall (University of California, Berkeley) always wondered just how many T. rex individuals there were in all and how dense their populations may have been at any one time.
Fortunately for him, T. rex is one of the most extensively studied of all dinosaurs. Thus, he and his team of fellow researchers had a good amount of data from which to work. Still, their methods involved a lot of extrapolation based on body mass and population distribution and densities of existing creatures, as well as good old-fashioned guesswork. (I’ll spare you the detailed mathematical formulas and the margin-of-error.)
In a cover story for the April 16, 2021 issue of the journal
Science, Marshall and his colleagues suggest at least 2.5 billion T. rex trod Earth during their reign 68 to 66 million years ago. At any one time, there may have been 20,000 individuals thundering across North America.
WHEN FOSSILS AREN’T
Just when did life first bloom on Earth? That’s a question paleontologists have grappled with ever since paleontology was established as a formal science. The problem? Earliest life would have been microbial, and microbes seldom fossilize.
Still, under the right conditions, even single-celled organisms can leave a mark in rocks millions and billions of years old. But then, so can so-called “biomorphs.” Biomorphs are crystalline structures produced by inorganic or abiotic chemical processes that can look for all the world like spherical microfossils, especially in ancient rocks that have been heated, squeezed, and otherwise illtreated by earth processes over the course of two or three billion years.
In a recent online issue of the journal Geology, researchers including Julie Cosmidis (University of Oxford) and Chrstine Nims (University of Michigan) warn that many microscopic structures in rocks dating back two to three billion years may not be fossils, as some studies have suggested. Rather, they are likely “pseudofossils,” or mineralogical forms that mimic the shape of biological spheres, tubes, and filaments.