Check out today’s eclectic coverage of programs broadcast and streamed on the (occasionally “far side”) state of affairs on our pale blue dot, signaling our existence to possible exo-civilizations.
“FM signals and those of broadcast television travel out to space at the speed of light. Any eavesdropping alien civilization will know all about our TV programs (probably a bad thing), will hear all our FM music (probably a good thing), and know nothing of the politics of AM talk-show hosts (probably a safe thing).” –Neil deGrasse Tyson, Death By Black Hole
The EU research team selected one of the most barren and lifeless places on Earth: Antarctica’s “Little Dome C” to retrieve the oldest ice core on the planet, located around 30 kilometers – or a couple of hours by snowmobile – away from the Concordia Research Station, which is jointly run by France and Italy. The station is 3233 meters above sea level, it experiences extremely little precipitation and the average annual temperature is a chilly -54.5 °C. The temperature never rises above -25 °C and can drop to -80 °C in winter.
New research on how glaciers in the European Alps will fare under a warming climate has come up with concerning results. Under a limited warming scenario, glaciers would lose about two-thirds of their present-day ice volume, while under strong warming, the Alps would be mostly ice free by 2100. The results, now published in the European Geosciences Union (EGU) journal The Cryosphere, are presented today at the EGU General Assembly 2019 in Vienna, Austria.
“It’s quite a head scratcher,” says Waldan Kwong, a University of British Columbia postdoctoral research fellow and lead author for a team of scientists that have found an organism that can produce chlorophyll but does not engage in photosynthesis that may provide clues as to how to protect the world’s coral reefs in the future. “We don’t know why these organisms are holding on to these photosynthesis genes. There’s some novel biology going on here, something we haven’t seen before.”
“It seems we’re now pushing our home planet beyond any climatic conditions experienced during the entire current geological period, the Quaternary,” says Matteo Willeit of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “A period that started almost 3 million years ago and saw human civilization beginning only 11,000 years ago. So, the modern climate change we see is big, really big; even by standards of Earth history.”
The mass extinction brought about at the end of the 50-million-year-long Permian period, brought about the end the entire Paleozoic era, in progress since the dawn of animal life. The Paleozoic, with its ancient seas filled with trilobites, brachiopods, and strange reefs, was as starkly different from the age to come as the age of dinosaurs is from our world today.
