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Earth's past volcanic eruptions revealed

Alexandra Witze
Nature
Tue, 14 Mar 2017 18:59 UTC
Deccan Traps
© Dinodia Photos/GettyIndia’s Western Ghats mountains contain igneous rock deposited 66 million years ago by a volcanic eruption in the Deccan Traps.
Enormous volcanoes vomited lava over the ancient Earth much more often than geologists had suspected. Eruptions as big as the biggest previously known ones happened at least 10 times in the past 3 billion years, an analysis of the geological record shows.

Such eruptions are linked with some of the most profound changes in Earth's history. These include the biggest mass extinction, which happened 252 million years ago when volcanoes blanketed Siberia with molten rock and poisonous gases.

"As we go back in time, we're discovering events that are every bit as big," says Richard Ernst, a geologist at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and Tomsk State University in Russia, who led the work. "These are magnificent huge things."

Knowing when and where such eruptions occurred can help geologists to pinpoint ore deposits, reconstruct past supercontinents and understand the birth of planetary crust. Studying this type of volcanic activity on other planets can even reveal clues to the geological history of the early Earth.

Ernst presented the findings this month to an industry consortium that funded the work (see 'Earth's biggest eruptions'). He expects to make the data public by the end of the year, through a map from the Commission for the Geological Map of the World in Paris.
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Dig

Six ancient cities built one on top of the other for over 2,000 years unearthed in Kaifeng, China


Archaeology News Network
Mon, 13 Mar 2017 17:30 UTC
Ancient city in China
Six ancient cities buried deep underground and spanning several dynasties over 2,000 years, have been unearthed in Kaifeng, in the east of China's Henan province.

The 2000-square-meter site boasts cultural relics from the Warring States Period (475-221 BC) to the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), with each city piled one on top of the other.

It includes city gates and walls form the Song Dynasty (960-1279), roads from the Song to the Qing Dynasties, civilian homes and courtyards from the Qing Dynasty, plus courtyard walls from Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368).
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Archaeology

400,000 yr-old half-skull found in Portuguese cave points to mystery people

Kerry Sheridan
Yahoo News
Tue, 14 Mar 2017 14:22 UTC
aroeira neanderthal skull
© Javier TruebaThe skull found in the Aroeira cave, which dates from the mid-Pleistocene about 400,000 years ago
The discovery of a 400,000-year-old half skull in Portugal has offered tantalizing hints about a possible ancestor of the Neanderthals, researchers said Monday.

The fossil was unearthed from the Aroeira cave site, and marks the oldest human cranium fossil ever found in Portugal, said the report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed US journal.

But there is plenty of mystery around the skull. Researchers don't know if it was from a male or female, how the person died, or even what form of early human it was.

"There is a lot of question about which species these fossils represent. I tend to think of them as ancestors of the Neanderthals," co-author Rolf Quam, an anthropologist at Binghamton University, State University of New York, told AFP.

"It is not a Neanderthal itself," he added. "It has some features that might be related to the later Neanderthals," including a lump of bone near the ear called the mastoid process.
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Meteor

Prehistoric Native American culture may have been wiped out by an asteroid


RT
Tue, 14 Mar 2017 09:33 UTC
Asteroids in space
© NASA
The Clovis people were a prehistoric Native American culture that existed roughly 13,200 to 12,900 years ago who suddenly died out at the end of the last Ice Age, along with 35 iconic species of animals with little or no explanation as to why - until now.

A team of three archaeologists at the University of South Carolina recently published a study which looked at 11 dig sites across North America and found elevated levels of platinum in very specific soil layers.

"The presence of elevated platinum in archaeological sites is a confirmation of data previously reported for the Younger-Dryas onset several years ago in a Greenland ice-core," Christopher Moore, the lead author of the study, told the Archaeology News Network.

This 'Younger-Dryas' period is best known as one of extreme cooling that began around 12,800 years ago and lasted for roughly 1,400 years. This period coincided with the end of the Clovis culture and the extinction of over 35 species of Ice Age animals, including woolly mammoths, mastodons and saber-tooth tigers. But why would they die out if they had already managed to survive through an ice age.

"Platinum is very rare in Earth's crust, but it is common in asteroids and comets," Moore said. In other words, North America may well have witnessed an extinction-level event similar to the one that killed the dinosaurs, but one third of its size.
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Info

Albert Einstein's thoughts on the meaning of life

Paul Ratner
Big Think
Sun, 12 Mar 2017 19:22 UTC
Albert Einstein
© AFP/Getty ImagesPortrait taken 06 February 1938 at Princeton University of physicist Albert Einstein, author of theory of relativity.
Albert Einstein was one of the world's most brilliant thinkers, influencing scientific thought immeasurably. He was also not shy about sharing his wisdom about other topics, writing essays, articles, letters, giving interviews and speeches. His opinions on social and intellectual issues that do not come from the world of physics give an insight into the spiritual and moral vision of the scientist, offering much to take to heart.

The collection of essays and ideas The World As I See It gathers Einstein's thoughts from before 1935, when he was as the preface says "at the height of his scientific powers but not yet known as the sage of the atomic age".

In the book, Einstein comes back to the question of the purpose of life on several occasions. In one passage, he links it to a sense of religiosity.
"What is the meaning of human life, or, for that matter, of the life of any creature? To know an answer to this question means to be religious. You ask: Does it make any sense, then, to pose this question? I answer: The man who regards his own life and that of his fellow creatures as meaningless is not merely unhappy but hardly fit for life," wrote Einstein.
Was Einstein himself religious? Raised by secular Jewish parents, he had complex and evolving spiritual thoughts. He generally seemed to be open to the possibility of the scientific impulse and religious thoughts coexisting.
"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind," said Einstein in his 1954 essay on science and religion.
Some (including the scientist himself) have called Einstein's spiritual views as pantheism, largely influenced by the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. Pantheists see God as existing but abstract, equating all of reality with divinity. They also reject a specific personal God or a god that is somehow endowed with human attributes.
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Fish

420 million-year-old 'armored' fish fossil found in SW China


RT
Sun, 12 Mar 2017 21:33 UTC
Life restoration of Sparalepis tingi (foreground) and other fauna from the Kuanti Formation
© journals.plos.orgLife restoration of Sparalepis tingi (foreground) and other fauna from the Kuanti Formation.
Scientists in China have discovered a rare fossil fragment of an "armored" fish, which may prove that the so-called Fish Age happened much earlier in Earth's evolutionary history than previously thought.

A partial fossil of the Sparalepis tingi, a 20cm-long fish, found in China's Yunnan province could turn the paleontological world on its head. Named after the Sparabara infantry of the Persian Empire, the fish's scales resemble the wicker shields the warriors carried into battle.

For decades, the fossil evidence has led the scientific community to believe the surge in global vertebrate, jawed fish populations began during the Devonian Period (419.2 million to 358.9 million years ago).
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5066 yo tree is considered the oldest known living organism on Earth


The Vintage News
Mon, 20 Feb 2017 00:00 UTC
Oldest tree
Hidden in the mountains of California, Nevada, and Utah, lurk some of the oldest known long-living species of the Great Basin bristlecone pine, or Pinus longaeva. One member of this species, noted to be 5066 years old, is considered the oldest known living organism on Earth. The ancient tree can be found in the White Mountains in California, but its exact location is kept secret. The tree was cored by specialist Edmund Shulman, dedicated researcher and explorer of long-lived trees, and its age was determined by Tom Harlan.

The age of the tree means that it was alive while Stonehenge was under construction and around the time when the first writing system was invented in Sumeria.

Dating from the Bronze Age, the Great Basin bristlecone pine belongs to a species that does not grow taller than 15 meters, and its trunk does not extend in diameter more than 3.6 meters. These ancient trees have knotted and gnarled appearance, especially those growing at higher altitudes. They also have reddish-brown bark with deep fissures.

The Great Basin bristlecone pine differentiates from the Rocky Mountain bristlecone pine in its needles; the first always have a pair of unceasing resin canals, and so lack the emblematic small white resin flecks of the second. Unique too are its cones that are more rounded compared to the more pointed ones of the other species.
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Book 2

Margaret Atwood: What 'The Handmaid's Tale' means in today's world

Margaret Atwood
New York Times
Fri, 10 Mar 2017 23:10 UTC
Handmaids tale
In the spring of 1984 I began to write a novel that was not initially called The Handmaid's Tale. I wrote in longhand, mostly on yellow legal notepads, then transcribed my almost illegible scrawlings using a huge German-keyboard manual typewriter I'd rented.

The keyboard was German because I was living in West Berlin, which was still encircled by the Berlin Wall: The Soviet empire was still strongly in place, and was not to crumble for another five years. Every Sunday the East German Air Force made sonic booms to remind us of how close they were. During my visits to several countries behind the Iron Curtain — Czechoslovakia, East Germany — I experienced the wariness, the feeling of being spied on, the silences, the changes of subject, the oblique ways in which people might convey information, and these had an influence on what I was writing. So did the repurposed buildings. "This used to belong to . . . but then they disappeared." I heard such stories many times.

Having been born in 1939 and come to consciousness during World War II, I knew that established orders could vanish overnight. Change could also be as fast as lightning. "It can't happen here" could not be depended on: Anything could happen anywhere, given the circumstances.
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Video

Unique, uncensored color footage of Stalin's funeral shot by US diplomat unearthed


RT
Sat, 11 Mar 2017 00:41 UTC
Stalin's funeral
© Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty / YouTube
The death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was one of the most momentous occasions in Russia's history, but previously only official reels had been available. Now, 64 years later, a new film captured by a US diplomat later expelled for spying, has been published.

Army Major Martin Manhoff was assigned to the USSR in 1952, with the Cold War in the ascendant, and over the next two years took hundreds of pictures, and filmed hours of 16 mm color footage, for reasons that may have been personal, professional or both.

On March 5, 1953, it was announced that 73-year-old Josef Stalin had died of a cerebral hemorrhage. The exact details of his last days as he lay paralyzed and helpless, while none of his subordinates intervened, remain a source of historical controversy.

Comment: See also: Previously unseen photographs of Stalin's Russia revealed by US historian

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Pyramid

Ancient Egyptian statue believed to depict Pharaoh Ramses II discovered in Cairo wasteland


RT
Sun, 05 Mar 2017 15:37 UTC
Pharoah Ramses statue Cairo
© Khaled Desouki / AFP
Remains of an ancient Egyptian statue believed to depict Pharaoh Ramses II have been found hidden in an area of flooded wasteland in Cairo.

The statue's head and broken torso were recovered from a pit of earth and water by a team of German and Egyptian archaeologists in Cairo's Matareya district on Thursday, reports Almasry Alyoum.

Modern day Matareya is where the ancient Egyptian city of Heliopolis once stood and archaeologists suspect the newly discovered eight-meter-tall effigy could be a tribute to a pharaoh who ruled Egypt between 1279-1213 BCE.
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