Tag Archives: new research

Three Ancient Rivers, Long Buried by the Sahara, Created a Passage to the Mediterranean

by Hyatt Monien Posted on September 16, 2013

Photo: mtsrs

Around 130,000 to 100,000 years ago the Sahara desert was not the sea of sands it is today. Instead, three large rivers created green corridors that linked sub-Saharan Africa to the Mediterranean and could have provided a safe means of passage for migrating ancient humans, according to a new study.

Authors of a new PLoS One study simulated ancient rainfall and water patterns using a state-of-the-art computer climate model. This allowed them to peer into the palaeohydrology of around 12 million square kilometers of desert. The models revealed three ancient rivers that today are largely buried beneath the dunes. io9 describes the ancient landscape:

Much like the Nile, these rivers would have created narrow stretches of nutrient-rich soil, producing “green corridors” that would have allowed animals and plants to prosper in the otherwise inhospitable desert. What’s more, the simulations suggest the likely presence of “massive lagoons and wetlands” in what is now northeastern Libya, covering an estimated 27,000 square miles.

The study authors suspect these watery highways played a significant role in human migration. They write:

Whilst we cannot state for certain that humans migrated alongside these rivers, the shape of the drainage systems indicate that anyone moving from south to north from a 2000 km wide region in the mountains would be funnelled into three clear routes.

One river system, called the Irharhar, appears to have been a particularly popular travel route. Middle Stone Age artifacts have already turned up along that extinct waterway, and more likely await discovery. “It is likely that further surveys in this area will provide substantial evidence of Middle Stone Age activity, especially in the areas of buried palaeochannels,” the authors say.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Green Sahara May Have Provided Route out of Africa for Early Humans
A Ghostly Scream from the Sahara 

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Three Ancient Rivers, Long Buried by the Sahara, Created a Passage to the Mediterranean

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An Underwater Volcano the Size of New Mexico Is the World’s Largest

by Abby Bath Posted on September 6, 2013

A 3-D image of Tamu Massif on the sea floor. Photo: Will Sager

A massive volcano the size of New Mexico or the British Isles lurks deep beneath the Pacific, about 1,000 miles east off the coast of Japan. Called the Tamu Massif, scientists just confirmed that it is not only the world’s largest volcano (sorry, Manua Loa) but also one of the largest documented volcanoes in the solar system.

Researchers began studying the Tamu Massif, which is part of an underwater mountain range, about 20 years ago. But until now, they couldn’t determine whether it was a single giant or a cluster of multiple smaller volcanoes. A team from Texas A&M University (“Tamu”—get it?) confirmed the Tamu Massif was a single volcanic entity by studying its past patterns of lava flows and analyzing geochemical samples from the volcano.

National Geographic describes what we know about the volcano:

Tamu Massif is a rounded dome that measures about 280 by 400 miles (450 by 650 kilometers), or more than 100,000 square miles. Its top lies about 6,500 feet (about 2,000 meters) below the ocean surface, while the base extends down to about 4 miles (6.4 kilometers) deep.

Made of basalt, Tamu Massif is the oldest and largest feature of an oceanic plateau called the Shatsky Rise in the northwestern Pacific Ocean. The total area of the rise is similar to Japan or California.

Luckily for us, the volcano was only active for a few million years, NatGeo points out, going “extinct” about 145 million years ago.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Underwater Volcano
Volcano Obsession

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An Underwater Volcano the Size of New Mexico Is the World’s Largest

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The Star Tau Boo Flips Its Magnetic Field, Too

by Christopherd3o Posted on August 28, 2013

The Sun does a lot of crazy things: it spawns roiling loops of superheated plasma that stretch for thousands of miles, it blows huge chunks of itself off into space and, every 11 years or so, its insides do a little flip. The solar magnetic field turns on its head, and the north pole becomes the south, and the south, the north. The sun is actually gearing up for one of these flips, says NASA, and it should take place any time now.

It’s nice to see, every now and again, some of these behaviors elsewhere in the universe—to know that the sun might be strange, but not too strange. For the first time, says the American Museum of Natural History, scientists reported seeing another start go through a similar magnetic field flip.

As described in a new study, scientists have been watching as a star, known as Tau Boötis (and nicknamed Tau Boo), flipped its magnetic field back and forth. The behavior isn’t exactly the same as the Sun’s, though. Where the Sun takes 22 years to go through a full cycle, flipping and flipping back, Tau Boötis does it in just two.

It’s still mostly a bunch of conjecture, but the scientists in their study have already suggested a way that they think Tau Boötis’ flip is different than the Sun’s, other than the rapid clip. Tau Boötis has a huge planet orbiting right up close. The scientists think that this huge planet, much like Jupiter but with an orbit that takes just 3.3 days, may be affecting the star’s magnetic field. Astronomy explains:

For Tau Boo, tidal interactions between the star and the planet might be an important factor in accelerating the cycle, but we can’t be sure of the cause,” said Fares.

Tau Boo spins on its axis once every 3.3 days — the same amount of time as it takes the hot Jupiter to complete one orbit. One hypothesis for Tau Boo’s rapid cycle is that the planet makes it rotate faster than usual, and this is affecting the generation of the magnetic field.

“There are still some big questions about what’s causing Tau Boo’s rapid magnetic cycle,” said Fares. “From our survey, we can say that each planetary system is particular, that interactions affect stars and planets differently, and that they depend on the masses, distance, and other properties.”

We still don’t really know why the Sun’s magnetic field flips like this in the first place. So, having a second example of stellar magnetic field flipping to compare the sun’s behavior against should be extremely helpful to scientists working to understand this phenomenon.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Watch Five Years of the Sun’s Explosions
Why the Sun Was So Quiet for So Long
For the First Time, NASA Took a Photo of the Sun’s Tail

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The Star Tau Boo Flips Its Magnetic Field, Too

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The Moon Had Water Since the Day It Was Born

by Aaron Darek Posted on August 27, 2013

The Bullialdhus Crater. It looks little, but it ain’t. Photo: NASA

The Moon was birthed from the Earth—a blob of molten rock sent spiraling off into space in the aftermath of a massive collision 4.5 billion years ago. Years of volcanic activity and bombardment by asteroids beat the Moon into its current form—a dry, desolate land. But, below its battered surface the Moon hides traces of its parentage: deep inside the lunar material, there’s water, says new research.

Water on the Moon may sound strange, but it’s actually been reported and confirmed many times over. Water has been found lining the walls of lunar craters, buried within the lunar surface layers, and in rocks collected by Apollo astronauts. But there is a huge difference between that previously discovered water and the water described in the new study, a project spearheaded by NASA’s Rachel Klima.

Researchers think that the crater water and the soil water arrived after the Moon was formed. Water can be delivered by icy comets or produced through chemical interactions with the solar wind. In the new study, however, the researchers looked at the huge 38 mile-wide Bullialdhus Crater. Scientists think that a giant impact at the center of the crater forced some of the Moon’s subsurface to the top—it’s a window that looks 4 to 6 miles into the Moon’s interior. In these interior lunar rocks the researchers found a spike in hydroxyl, one half of a water molecule, chemically attached to the Moon’s original material—a sign that it’s been there since the Moon was formed.

“I think it would be very tough to have this water be anywhere other than original to the material that formed the moon,” said Klima to ABC.

More from Smithsonian.com:

The Water On the Moon Probably Came From Earth
T Minus Three Days Until NASA Sends Two Satellites Crashing Into the Moon

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The Moon Had Water Since the Day It Was Born

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These Complex, Beautiful Board Game Pieces Are 5,000 Years Old

by y3kyabkl Posted on August 16, 2013

The Royal Game of Ur is one of the oldest known board games, but newly discovered pieces may be even older. Photo: The British Museum

If you think that board games with fancy pieces and weird dice and other complex features are a relatively modern invention, archaeologists would like to have a word with you. Over the years, field research has unveiled the complexity of ancient gaming. Today, Discovery News is reporting on what may be some of the oldest gaming pieces ever found:

Found in a burial at Başur Höyük, a 820- by 492-foot mound near Siirt in southeast Turkey, the elaborate pieces consist of 49 small stones sculpted in different shapes and painted in green, red, blue, black and white.

“Some depict pigs, dogs and pyramids, others feature round and bullet shapes. We also found dice as well as three circular tokens made of white shell and topped with a black round stone,” Haluk Sağlamtimur of Ege University in İzmir, Turkey, told Discovery News.

The pieces date to around 5,000 years ago, they say, and were dug up in two sites, one in Syria and one in Iraq. The region is known as the Fertile Crescent and is traditionally thought to be one of the birthplaces of modern agricultural human societies. Discovery has a whole photo gallery showcasing the pieces.

The pieces are old, really old. But there’s another game, the Royal Game of Ur, that’s about contemporary—it dates from around 4,800 years ago in southern Iraq. And then there’s an Egyptian game, Senet, that is at least that old, if not older. Researchers think that basic board games may have been invented up to 11,000 years ago.

According to a story in Discovery News from last year, early board games were a status symbol:

“Many of the first board games appear to have been diplomatic gifts to signify status,” co-author Mark Hall told Discovery News. “We have early examples of quite splendid playing pieces belonging to elite, privileged people.”

More from Smithsonian.com:

Playing Pandemic, the Board Game

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These Complex, Beautiful Board Game Pieces Are 5,000 Years Old

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Climate Change Is Sending Marine Life to the Poles in Search of Colder Waters

by london Posted on August 6, 2013

Many marine creatures, including whale sharks, are expect to move closer to the planet’s poles as the ocean waters warm because of climate change. Photo: Noodlefish

According to a new study, led by Australian researcher Elvira Poloczanska, marine creatures are heading to the poles. Of all the extra energy trapped on Earth because of global warming, more than 80 percent of it has gone into the world’s oceans. And the animals that live there? They’ve noticed. They’re swimming towards the poles, heading for colder waters, as the ocean warms around them.

Most studies looking at how changing ocean temperatures are affecting marine life have focused on specific animals or specific places, often over a limited time period. Poloczanska and her team were interested in a bigger view, so they pulled together all the information they could find—208 different studies, looking at 1,735 different populations of a total 857 different species of marine animal. (And, for the haters out there, the scientists “included responses irrespective of whether they were consistent with expectations under climate change or not, as well as null responses.”)

Then they looked for big picture trends.

Not every animal that was studied is responding to climate change, they found, but around 82 percent are. And those animals are moving. The team found that, because of climate change, the ranges of these animals are growing towards the poles at around 45 miles per decade, on average. The more mobile critters, like fish and phytoplankton, are moving at around 172 and 292 miles per decade, respectively. This is way, way faster than the 3.75 miles per decade on average that land animals are moving to escape the heat.

So, climate change is here, and the marine critters have noticed. What happens next is the big question. After all, what happens when you tug on the threads of the food web? Poloczanska and her colleagues sum it up:

In conclusion, recent climate studies show that patterns of warming of the upper layers of the world’s oceans are significantly related to greenhouse gas forcing. Global responses of marine species revealed here demonstrate a strong fingerprint of this anthropogenic climate change on marine life. Differences in rates of change with climate change amongst species and populations suggest species’ interactions and marine ecosystem functions may be substantially reorganized at the regional scale, potentially triggering a range of cascading effects.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Warming, Rising Acidity and Pollution: Top Threats to the Ocean
A Warming Climate Is Turning the Arctic Green
2012 Saw the Second Highest Carbon Emissions in Half a Century

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Climate Change Is Sending Marine Life to the Poles in Search of Colder Waters

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Arctic Forests Are On Fire Now More Than at Any Point in the Past 10,000 Years

by anjunonstennyao Posted on July 24, 2013

Wildfires burning in Alaska. Photo: Alaska Fire Service

The temperature in the Arctic is rising, the snow is melting, and the landscape is getting greener—that is, when it’s not on fire. In the 10,000 years since the end of the last ice age, says a new study lead by Ryan Kelly, the severity of Arctic fires—the damage they do to the areas, particularly the soil, that they burn—is the highest it’s ever been. The closest match, the researchers say, was a 500-year stretch known as the Medieval Climate Anomaly, a period that ended around 750 years ago and was defined by warm, dry conditions in the Northern Hemisphere.

The modern boreal forest of Alaska, where the scientists did their study, took shape around 3,000 years ago. Along with the sharp increase in fire severity, the frequency of Arctic wild fires has been increasingly recently, too. Kelly and the others write that the frequency of fires is the highest it has been in this 3,000 year stretch.

Predictions of future Arctic wildfires, say the scientists, “almost ubiquitously suggest increased frequency, size, and/or severity of burns in coming decades as a result of future warming.” But Kelly and colleagues point out that making these sorts of predictions might not be quite so simple. They say that some trees are more flammable than others, and just like during the Medieval Climate Anomaly, an increase in strong fires may be increasing the prevalence of less flammable species. During the Medieval Climate Anomaly, this type of shift capped the extent of the fires, and, the scientists write, a similar change that seems to be going on now “may stabilize the fire regime, despite additional warming.”

So, Arctic greening and changes in the types of plants might put a damper on the recent increases in Arctic fire frequency. Or, it might not. “The present fire regime seems to have surpassed the vegetation-induced limit that constrained burning during the [Medieval Climate Anomaly],” Kelly and his colleagues say. Modern climate change seems to be more dramatic than even that five-hundred-year warm period centuries ago, so we’re really not entirely sure what’s going to happen to the Arctic. Maybe something will dampen the blaze, like it has in the past, or maybe it won’t. We might, as the scientists say, be headed for a “novel regime of unprecedented fire activity” in the Alaskan Arctic.

More from Smithsonian.com:

A Warming Climate Is Turning the Arctic Green

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Arctic Forests Are On Fire Now More Than at Any Point in the Past 10,000 Years

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Scientists Just Measured the True Color of a Far-Off Planet

by Aaren Smith Posted on July 11, 2013

The Pale Blue Dot, Earth as seen by Voyager 1. Photo: NASA / Voyager 1

Twenty three years ago and from 3.8 billion miles away the Voyager 1 probe turned and snapped a photo of Earth—the Pale Blue Dot. The photo showed our Earth as a speck in the dark sky—all of human existence wrapped up in a pixel.

Though the Earth is still all we’ve got, in recent years astronomers discovered potentially billions of other planets, many seemingly just like ours. Now, astronomers have found a new, simple parallel between one of these far-off planets and Carl Sagan’s famous blue dot, says the European Space Agency. For the first time ever, astronomers have directly measured the color of a planet in another solar system. And it’s blue—“a deep azure blue, reminiscent of Earth’s colour as seen from space,” says the ESA.

Pale Blue Dots parallelisms aside, though, the planet, HD 189733b, is more like Neptune’s evil twin than a distant Earth.

This “deep blue dot” is a huge gas giant orbiting very close to its host star. The planet’s atmosphere is scorching with a temperature of over 1000 degrees Celsius, and it rains glass, sideways, in howling 7000 kilometre-per-hour winds.

An artist’s rendering of the planet HD 189773b. Photo: NASA / ESA / M. Kornmesser

The planet orbits the star HD 189733 in the Vulpecula constellation, and to figure out its color, researchers used Hubble to measure the light coming from the star, both when the planet was in front and when it wasn’t. Looking at the subtle shifts in the color of the light let them figure out the color of the planet’s atmosphere.

More from Smithsonian.com:

You Can’t Throw a Rock in the Milky Way Without Hitting an Earth-Like Planet
This Is an Actual Photo of a Planet in Another Solar System

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Scientists Just Measured the True Color of a Far-Off Planet

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For the First Time, NASA Took a Photo of the Sun’s Tail

by f45 Posted on July 11, 2013

Interstellar material builds up in front of the star LL Ori. Photo: NASA / Hubble Heritage Team

Yesterday we wrote about how the Earth is awash in the solar wind, charged particles that flow from the Sun and interact with everything in their reach. When the aurora light up the poles, that’s the solar wind. When people talk about the Voyager probes ‘leaving the solar system,’  they’re talking about the the edge of the reach of the solar wind.

Solar wind particles can stream from the Sun at speeds of more than two million miles per hour. When these particles hit the Earth, they push against our planet’s magnetic field—squashing it in the front and stretching it into a long tail in the back. The solar wind does this to all the other things in the solar system with a magnetic field, too—the tail of Jupiter’s magnetic field stretches up to 304 million miles. But the Sun’s magnetic field is being pushed as well, and for the first time researchers with NASA have taken a photo of the Sun’s stretched out tail. It may not look like much, but science is often just a bunch of colored blotches:

The Sun’s tail, or ‘heliotail,’ as seen by IBEX. Photo: NASA / IBEX

As the Sun orbits the center of the Milky Way, it passes through what’s known as the interstellar medium, a mélange of dust and gas and cosmic rays. Like a ship passing through the ocean, the Sun’s passage through the interstellar medium causes the Sun’s magnetic field to build up in front of the solar system, and to sweep the Sun’s magnetic field back in a long tail behind it. According to NASA, though we’re learning a lot about the Sun’s magnetic field because of a relatively new satellite known as the Interstellar Boundary Explorer, we still don’t know how far the Sun’s tail may be.  NASA has more detail on how they took their photo:

More from Smithsonian.com:

When the Sun Gets Violent, It Shoots Antimatter at the Earth

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For the First Time, NASA Took a Photo of the Sun’s Tail

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When the Sun Gets Violent, It Shoots Antimatter at the Earth

by iscciaglewstrone123 Posted on July 10, 2013

The Earth hangs some 93 million miles from the Sun, with the seemingly empty void of space as a backdrop. But space, though vast, is hardly empty. The Earth is bathed in the solar wind, a stream of charged particles that emanates from our star. Once in a while, when the Sun gets uppity, a gigantic solar flare will plow through the solar wind and slam into the Earth. The collision sends a torrent of charged particles arcing along the Earth’s magnetic field and triggers beautiful auroral displays.

But the northern lights aren’t the only thing solar flares bring to the Earth

New observations, says Space, show that solar storms produce a spout of antimatter.

Solar flares were predicted to release some antimatter particles among the deluge of charged particles spat out during these eruptions. But this is the first time researchers have observed antimatter coming from the sun.

Antimatter particles have the same mass and other characteristics as their regular-matter counterparts, but they have opposite charge. When the universe was born about 13.8 billion years ago in the Big Bang, there was probably about as much matter as antimatter, scientists think. Somehow, collisions with matter destroyed most of the antimatter (when matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate), leaving a slight surplus of matter, which became the planets, stars and galaxies in our universe.

The Sun isn’t the only thing spouting antimatter, though. A weird kind of lightning here on Earth, called Dark Lightning, sends a shock of antimatter flying into space.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Dark Lightning Is Just One of the Crazy Types of Lightning You’ve Never Heard Of
What Damage Could Be Caused by a Massive Solar Storm?

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When the Sun Gets Violent, It Shoots Antimatter at the Earth

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