War Disrupts Paleontology
Per a news report by Freda Kreier for the journal Nature, Russia’s “brutal war in Ukraine is threatening the research and relationships that help uncover the past.” Collaborations and eldwork involving multi-national teams have been halted. Per researcher Love Dalén (Swedish Museum of Natural History, Stockholm), “we will know less about the past because of this war.”
Treasure troves of Pleistocene (Ice Age) fossils in Siberia — including beautifully preserved specimens such as a 39,000-yearold baby mammoth recently found in permafrost —now may never be fully examined outside of Russia. As much as 90 percent of mammoth fossils come from the Yakutia region of Siberia, where preservation within permafrost enables scientists to dig into the DNA of critters as old as 1.6 million years. But most of that DNA analysis takes place in labs within North America and Western Europe.
Paleontologists who once worked closely with Russian colleagues now say “it feels dirty” and “it’s horrible” when describing their once benign work. Said one researcher who wished to remain anonymous, “I honestly don’t want to end up in a Russian prison” should he return to Russia to pursue paleontological excavations as a Western scientist. And their Russian colleagues also are reticent to cooperate in international studies. A¤er more than 8,000 Russian scientists signed a letter denouncing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, all signatories are being monitored by Putin’s regime.
While many scientists don down vests and brave the ice elds of Greenland or Antarctica to pull up ice cores in search of climate data from the not-so-distant past, some don T-shirts and shorts to brave tropical heat. Per an article in the journal Nature, scientists are examining a core of mud pulled from the ground in Peru that is helping them examine 700,000 years of climate history.
A team led by D. T. Rodbell (Union College, New York) is peering into hundreds of thousands of years of deposits le by tropical Andean glaciation to better parse glacial-interglacial intervals of the recent Pleistocene Epoch. In particular, they are examining sediments from a “piston core” derived from Lake Junin in the upper Amazon basin. eir results match a 100,000-year periodicity shown by ice cores in Greenland and Antarctica with variations matched to regional monsoons because of overall climate changes.
Wild res are nothing new, but who knew they extended back some 430 million years?!
at’s what researchers are saying based on bits of ancient charcoal found within rocks from the Silurian Period in Wales and Poland. Writing in the journal Geology, paleobotanists Ian Glasspool and Robert Gastaldo (both of Colby College, Maine) report evidence indicating wild res began almost as soon as plant life emerged on land. e plants may have been small and scrubby, but they were all it took to ignite when lightning struck.
While some scientists suspected oxygen levels on Earth may have been low during the Silurian, this report suggests otherwise. Glasspool and Gastaldo believe levels at that time may have been around 16 percent. By comparison, the level of oxygen in today’s atmosphere clocks in at 21 percent.