Biologists Find an Evolutionary Facebook for Monkeys and Apes

Why do the faces of some primates contain so many different colors -- black, blue, red, orange and white -- that are mixed in all kinds of combinations and often striking patterns while other primate faces are quite plain?

UCLA biologists reported last year on the evolution of 129 primate faces in species from Central and South America. This research team now reports on the faces of 139 Old World African and Asian primate species that have been diversifying over some 25 million years.

With these Old World monkeys and apes, the species that are more social have more complex facial patterns, the biologists found. Species that have smaller group sizes tend to have simpler faces with fewer colors, perhaps because the presence of more color patches in the face results in greater potential for facial variation across individuals within species. This variation could aid in identification, which may be a more difficult task in larger groups.

Species that live in the same habitat with other closely related species tend to have more complex facial patterns, suggesting that complex faces may also aid in species recognition, the life scientists found.

"Humans are crazy for Facebook, but our research suggests that primates have been relying on the face to tell friends from competitors for the last 50 million years and that social pressures have guided the evolution of the enormous diversity of faces we see across the group today," said Michael Alfaro, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology in the UCLA College of Letters and Science and senior author of the study.

"Faces are really important to how monkeys and apes can tell one another apart," he said. "We think the color patterns have to do both with the importance of telling individuals of your own species apart from closely related species and for social communication among members of the same species."

Most Old World monkeys and apes are social, and some species, like the mandrills, can live in groups with up to 800 members, said co-author Jessica Lynch Alfaro, an adjunct assistant professor in the UCLA Department of Anthropology and UCLA's Institute for Society and Genetics. At the other extreme are solitary species, like the orangutans. In most orangutan populations, adult males travel and sleep alone, and females are accompanied only by their young, she said. Some primates, like chimpanzees, have "fission-fusion societies," where they break up into small sub-groups and come together occasionally in very large communities. Others, like the hamadryas baboons, have tiered societies with harems, clans, bands and troops, she said.

"Our research suggests increasing group size puts more pressure on the evolution of coloration across different sub-regions of the face," Michael Alfaro said.

This allows members of a species to have "more communication avenues, a greater repertoire of facial vocabulary, which is advantageous if you're interacting with many members of your species," he said.

The research, federally funded by the National Science Foundation and supported through a postdoctoral fellowship from the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics, was published Nov. 11 in the journal Nature Communications.

Lead study author Sharlene Santana used photographs of primate faces for her analysis and devised a new method to quantify the complex patterns of primate faces. She divided each face into several regions; classified the color of each part of the face, including the hair and skin; and assigned a score based on the total number of different colors across the facial regions. This numerical score is called the "facial complexity" score. The life scientists then studied how the complexity scores of primate faces were related to primates' social systems.

The habitat where species live presents many potential pressures that could have influenced the evolution of facial coloration. To assess how facial colors are related to physical environments, the researchers analyzed environmental variables such as geographic location, canopy density, rainfall and temperature. They also used statistical methods that took into account the evolutionary history and relationships among the primate groups to better understand the evolution of facial diversity and complexity.

While facial complexity was related to social variables, such as group size and the number of closely related species in the same habitat, facial pigmentation was best explained by ecological and spatial factors. Where a species lives is a good predictor of its degree of facial pigmentation -- how light or dark the face is.

"Our map shows clearly the geographic trend in Africa of primate faces getting darker nearer to the equator and lighter as we move farther away from the equator," Lynch Alfaro said. "This is the same trend we see on an intra-species level for human skin pigmentation around the globe."

Species living in more tropical and more densely forested habitats also tend to have darker, more pigmented faces. But the complexity of facial color patterns is not related to habitat type.

"We found that for African primates, faces tend to be light or dark depending on how open or closed the habitat is and on how much light the habitat receives," Alfaro said. "We also found that no matter where you live, if your species has a large social group, then your face tends to be more complex. It will tend to be darker and more complex if you're in a closed habitat in a large social group, and it will tend to be lighter and more complex if you're in an open habitat with a large social group. Darkness or lightness is explained by geography and habitat type. Facial complexity is better explained by the size of your social group."

In their research on primates from Central and South America published last year, the scientists were surprised to find a different pattern. For these primates, species that lived in larger groups had more plain facial patterns.

"We expected to find similar trends across all primate radiations -- that is, that the faces of highly social species would have more complex patterning," said Santana, who conducted the research as a postdoctoral fellow with the UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and UCLA's Institute for Society and Genetics and who is now an assistant professor at the University of Washington and curator of mammals at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. "We were surprised by the results in our original study on neotropical (Central and South American) primates."

In the new study, they did find the predicted trends, but they also found differences across primate groups -- differences they said they found intriguing. Are primate groups using their faces differently?

"In the present study, great apes had significantly lower facial complexity compared to monkeys," Lynch Alfaro said. "This may be because apes are using their faces for highly complex facial expressions and these expressions would be obscured by more complex facial color patterns. There may be competing pressures for and against facial pattern complexity in large groups, and different lineages may solve this problem in different ways."

"Our research shows that being more or less social is a key explanation for the facial diversity that we see," Alfaro said. "Ecology is also important, such as camouflage and thermal regulation, but our research suggests that faces have evolved along with the diversity of social behaviors in primates, and that is the big cause of facial diversity."

Read more at Science Daily

Two-Headed Ray Fetus Found in Australia

They say two heads are better than one. That may or may not be true, but at the very least, two heads are more interesting.

While checking up on the pregnant female rays that he was caring for in an aquarium, Australian researcher Leonardo Guida saw that some of the animals had given birth, in April of this year. As he made note of the baby rays, an "oddly shaped, pale object in the water" caught his attention.

The object turned out to be a stillborn ray … with two heads. This is the first two-headed ray or shark discovered in Australia, and one of only a few examples worldwide of this rare birth defect found in sharks and rays, said Guida, who is a doctoral student at Monash University in Melbourne.

The defect arises when the neural tube (like a spinal cord) in a single fertilized egg is duplicated, which can happen as the result of a genetic defect or for other unknown reasons. It can also happen when an embryo begins to divide into two to form twins, but is stopped prematurely.

The cause in this case "is unknown but is likely to have been a developmental problem and not a genetic mutation per se," said Guida, co-author of a study describing the ray published Nov. 15 in the journal Marine and Freshwater Research. "Pollutants can potentially cause developmental issues, however we did not test for this nor were we able to determine the probable cause."

The researchers caught the southern fiddler rays (Trygonorrhina dumerilii) by hand while scuba diving in Swan Bay, a semi-enclosed section of Port Phillip Bay south of Melbourne, home to heavy ship traffic. The bay has recently undergone extensive dredging to enlarge shipping channels, re-suspending contaminated sediment into the ocean, according to the study. This developed, combined with the fact that rays eat bottom-dwelling creatures, may have exposed these animals to significant levels of pollutants. But whether or not they could've caused this birth defect is unknown, the study noted.

Other similar findings include the discovery of a two-headed bull shark fetus off Florida.

"There have been a number of reports of deformed shark and ray embryos in recent years— two heads, one eye, etc.," said David Shiffman, a shark researcher and doctoral student at the University of Miami. There's no evidence to suggest these defects represent a new phenomenon or that they are harmful to shark populations as a whole, said Shiffman, who wasn't involved in the ray study.

"However, we're learning about the deformed embryos, because [in many cases] fishermen are killing the sharks," Shiffman said.

Read more at Discovery News

'Meat Mummies' Fed Egyptian Royals After Death

Care for some ribs? The royal mummies of ancient Egypt apparently did, as a new study finds that "meat mummies" left in Egyptian tombs as sustenance for the afterlife were treated with elaborate balms to preserve them.

Mummified cuts of meat are common finds in ancient Egyptian burials, with the oldest dating back to at least 3300 B.C. The tradition extended into the latest periods of mummification in the fourth century A.D. The famous pharaoh King Tutankhamun went to his final resting place accompanied by 48 cases of beef and poultry.

But meat mummies have been mostly unstudied until now. University of Bristol biogeochemist Richard Evershed and his colleagues were curious about how these cuts were prepared. They also wondered if the mummification methods for meat differed from how Egyptians mummified people or pets.

The team analyzed four samples from meat mummies archived at the Cairo and British museums. The oldest was a rack of cattle ribs from the tomb of Tjuiu, an Egyptian noblewoman, and her courtier Yuya. The beef dates back to between 1386 B.C. and 1349 B.C.

The second sample dated to between 1064 B.C. and 948 B.C. and consisted of meat from a calf found in the tomb of Isetemkheb D, a sister and wife to a high priest in Thebes. The final two samples were from the tomb of a Theban priestess, Henutmehyt, who died around 1290 B.C. One of the meat mummies found in Henutmehyt's tomb was duck, and the other was probably goat.

The researchers conducted a chemical analysis of the bandages or the meat itself in all four samples. They found that animal fat coated the bandages of the calf and goat mummies; in the case of the calf, the fat was on bandages not in contact with the meat, suggesting it had been smeared on as a preservative rather than seeping through as grease.

The most intriguing chemical profile appeared on the beef mummy, however. The bandaging around the mummy contained remnants of an elaborate balm made of fat or oil and resin from a Pistacia tree, a shrubby desert plant. This resin was a luxury item in ancient Egypt, Evershed and his colleagues report today (Nov. 18) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It was used as incense and varnish on high-quality coffins, but it was not used as a human mummification resin for at least 600 years after the deaths of Tjuiu and Yuya.

Read more at Discovery News

Dino-Era Water Trapped Under Impact Crater

More than one kilometer beneath the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia, geologists discovered 100- to 150-million-year-old water from the Atlantic Ocean’s infancy. The ancient water hid under a more recent 56-mile-wide crater left after a massive rock or block of ice nailed the Earth near what is now the entrance to the bay.

U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) hydrologists didn’t know the water beneath the crater dated from dino days until they analyzed the chemicals in the water. The water held forms of chloride and bromide, along with other chemicals, that allowed the scientists to estimate the water’s age. And while older water is known from Canada, the Chesapeake Bay impact water is now the oldest large body of water known on the planet.

“Previous evidence for temperature and salinity levels of geologic-era oceans around the globe have been estimated indirectly from various types of evidence in deep sediment cores,” said lead author Ward Sanford, USGS research hydrologist, in a press release. “In contrast, our study identifies ancient seawater that remains in place in its geologic setting, enabling us to provide a direct estimate of its age and salinity.” Sanford and colleagues published their findings in the journal Nature.

The ancient water contained twice the salt content of the modern ocean and dates from the early Cretaceous Period, when dinosaurs dominated the planet and the newborn north Atlantic was more of a lake than an ocean.

In the late Jurassic Period, 150 million years ago, pieces of the Earth’s crust, called tectonic plates, split to divide Europe from North America and Africa. This split formed a rift basin filled with extremely salty water that would later become the Atlantic Ocean. However the Atlantic would have to wait 50 million years until the mid-Cretaceous for a space to open between what is now Central and South America, just as the narrow Strait of Gibraltar now allows the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea to mingle.

Before the north Atlantic connected with the rest of the world’s waters, some of that briny water became trapped underground beneath a coastal plain and isolated. The water remained largely unchanged until approximately 35 million years ago when a meteor or comet slammed into the Earth during the late Eocene Epoch. That impact created massive tsunamis that swept far inland and devastated the Atlantic coast of North America, yet helped to preserve the Cretaceous ocean water.

Read more at Discovery News

Amber Provides New Insights Into the Evolution of Earth's Atmosphere: Low Oxygen Levels for Dinosaurs

An international team of researchers led by Ralf Tappert, University of Innsbruck, reconstructed the composition of Earth's atmosphere of the last 220 million years by analyzing modern and fossil plant resins. The results suggest that atmospheric oxygen was considerably lower in Earth's geological past than previously assumed. This new study questions some of the current theories about the evolution of climate and life, including the causes for the gigantism of dinosaurs.

Scientists encounter big challenges when reconstructing atmospheric compositions in Earth's geological past because of the lack of useable sample material. One of the few organic materials that may preserve reliable data of Earth's geological history over millions of years are fossil resins (e.g. amber). "Compared to other organic matter, amber has the advantage that it remains chemically and isotopically almost unchanged over long periods of geological time," explains Ralf Tappert from the Institute of Mineralogy and Petrography at the University of Innsbruck. The mineralogist and his colleagues from the University of Alberta in Canada and universities in the USA and Spain have produced a comprehensive study of the chemical composition of Earth's atmosphere since the Triassic period.

The study has been published in the journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta. The interdisciplinary team, consisting of mineralogists, paleontologists and geochemists, use the preserving properties of plant resins, caused by polymerization, for their study. "During photosynthesis plants bind atmospheric carbon, whose isotopic composition is preserved in resins over millions of years, and from this, we can infer atmospheric oxygen concentrations," explains Ralf Tappert. The information about oxygen concentration comes from the isotopic composition of carbon or rather from the ratio between the stable carbon isotopes 12C and 13C.

Atmospheric oxygen between 10 and 15 percent

The research team analyzed a total of 538 amber samples from from well-known amber deposits worldwide, with the oldest samples being approximately 220 million years old and recovered from the Dolomites in Italy. The team also compared fossil amber with modern resins to test the validity of the data. The results of this comprehensive study suggest that atmospheric oxygen during most of the past 220 million years was considerably lower than today's 21 percent. "We suggest numbers between 10 and 15 percent," says Tappert. These oxygen concentrations are not only lower than today but also considerably lower than the majority of previous investigations propose for the same time period. For the Cretaceous period (65 -- 145 million years ago), for example, up to 30 percent atmospheric oxygen has been suggested previously.

Effects on climate and environment

The researchers also relate this low atmospheric oxygen to climatic developments in Earth's history. "We found that particularly low oxygen levels coincided with intervals of elevated global temperatures and high carbon dioxide concentrations," explains Tappert. The mineralogist suggests that oxygen may influence carbon dioxide levels and, under certain circumstances, might even accelerate the influx of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. "Basically, we are dealing here with simple oxidation reactions that are amplified particularly during intervals of high temperatures such as during the Cretaceous period." The researchers, thus, conclude that an increase in carbon dioxide levels caused by extremely strong vulcanism was accompanied by a decrease of atmospheric oxygen. This becomes particularly apparent when looking at the last 50 million years of geological history. Following the results of this study, the comparably low temperatures of the more recent past (i.e. the Ice Ages) may be attributed to the absence of large scale vulcanism events and an increase in atmospheric oxygen.

Read more at Science Daily

Deformed, Pointy Skull from Dark Ages Unearthed

The skeleton of an ancient aristocratic woman whose head was warped into a deformed, pointy shape has been unearthed in a necropolis in France.

The necropolis, found in the Alsace region of France, contains 38 tombs that span more than 4,000 years, from the Stone Age to the Dark Ages.

Rich valley

The Obernai region where the remains were found contains a river and rich, fertile soil, which has attracted people for thousands of years, Philippe Lefranc, an archaeologist who excavated the Stone Age burials, wrote in an email.

Archaeologists first found the tombs in 2011 while doing a preliminary excavation of the area prior to the start of a big industrial building project. This year, Lefranc and his colleagues went back to do a more in-depth excavation.

They found that the tombs were well preserved by the limestone rock in which they were buried. One of the burials contained 20 tombs of men, women and children.

"The corpses are lying on their backs, with outstretched legs and heads turned westwards," Lefranc said.

The tombs, which date to between 4900 B.C. and 4750 B.C., also contained a few stone vases and tools, along with ornaments such as mother-of-pearl elbow bracelets and collars. The small group may have been a family from a Neolithic farming and animal-herding culture that lived in long houses and buried their dead in cemeteries, Lefranc said.

Eastern transplants

In the second burial, which was in a separate area, they found 18 tombs from either the late Roman period or the early Dark Ages, about 1,650 years ago. One of the tombs held a woman, likely an aristocrat, who had a deformed, flattened forehead.

"The deformation of the skull with the help of bandages (narrow strips of cloth) and small boards is a practice coming from central Asia," Lefranc said in an email. "It was popularized by the Huns and adopted by many German people."

In those times, the deformed, alienlike skull was a privilege reserved for the aristocracy.

"In France, Germany and eastern Europe, these deformed skulls appear in tombs rich in objects," Lefranc said.

Read more at Discovery News

Ancient City Found Beneath Biblical-Era Ruins

Archaeologists have unearthed traces of a previously unknown, 14th-century Canaanite city buried underneath the ruins of another city in Israel.

The traces include an Egyptian amulet of Amenhotep III and several pottery vessels from the Late Bronze Age unearthed at the site of Gezer, an ancient Canaanite city.

Gezer was once a major center that sat at the crossroads of trade routes between Asia and Africa, said Steven Ortiz, a co-director of the site's excavations and a biblical scholar at the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.

The remains of the ancient city suggest the site was used for even longer than previously known.

The ancient city of Gezer has been an important site since the Bronze Age, because it sat along the Way of the Sea, or the Via Maris, an ancient trade route that connected Egypt, Syria, Anatolia and Mesopotamia.

The city was ruled over many centuries by Canaanites, Egyptians and Assyrians, and Biblical accounts from roughly the 10th century describe an Egyptian pharaoh giving the city to King Solomon as a wedding gift after marrying his daughter.

"It's always changed hands throughout history," Ortiz told LiveScience.

The site has been excavated for a century, and most of the excavations so far date to the the 10th through eighth centuries B.C. Gezer also holds some of the largest underground water tunnels of antiquity, which were likely used to keep the water supply safe during sieges.

But earlier this summer, Ortiz and his colleague Samuel Wolff of the Israel Antiquities Authority noticed traces of an even more ancient city from centuries before King Solomon's time. Among the layers was a section that dated to about the 14th century B.C., containing a scarab, or beetle, amulet from King Amenhotep III, the grandfather of King Tut. They also found shards of Philistine pottery.

During that period, the ancient site was probably a Canaanite city that was under Egyptian influence.

The findings are consistent with what scholars suspected of the site, said Andrew Vaughn, a biblical scholar and executive director of the American Schools of Oriental Research, who was not involved in the study.

"It's not surprising that a city that was of importance in the biblical kingdoms of Israel and Judah would have an older history and would have played an important political and military role prior to that time," Vaughn told LiveScience. "If you didn't control Gezer, you didn't control the east-west trade route."

Read more at Discovery News

'Gate to Hell' Guardians Recovered in Turkey

Archaeologists digging in Turkey have found the guardians of the "Gate to Hell" -- two unique marble statues which once warned of a deadly cave in the ancient Phrygian city of Hierapolis, near Pamukkale.

Known as Pluto's Gate -- Ploutonion in Greek, Plutonium in Latin -- the cave was celebrated as the portal to the underworld in Greco-Roman mythology and tradition. It was discovered in March by a team led by Francesco D'Andria, professor of classic archaeology at the University of Salento.

"The statues represent two mythological creatures," D'Andria told Discovery News. "One depicts a snake, a clear symbol of the underworld, the other shows Kerberos, or Cerberus, the three-headed watchdog of hell in the Greek mythology."

Rolled onto itself, the snake looks threateningly toward anybody trying to approach it, while the 4-foot-tall Kerberos resembles the Kangal, the Anatolian shepherd dog.

"It's a pretty scary statue," D'Andria said.

The sculptures were found as archaeologists further excavated the area where in March they unearthed the remains of the Plutonium, which included an inscription dedicated to the deities of the underworld -- Pluto and Kore.

The dig revealed the source of the thermal springs, which produce the famous white travertine terraces.

"Pamukkale's springs originate right from this cave," D'Andria said.

Believed to have healing properties, the hot springs made the Roman city of Hierapolis -- now a World Heritage Site -- a popular destination for pilgrimages.

Both marble statues emerged from the thermal water, leaving little doubt that the site was indeed Pluto's Gate. The cave was described in historic sources as filled with lethal mephitic vapors.

"This space is full of a vapor so misty and dense that one can scarcely see the ground. Any animal that passes inside meets instant death," the Greek geographer Strabo (64-63 B.C. to about 24 A.D.) wrote about the site.

"I threw in sparrows and they immediately breathed their last and fell," he added.

"They were instantly killed by the carbon dioxide fumes," D'Andria said.

Strabo's account was confirmed during the excavation, as D'Andria and colleagues found several dead birds and insects near the opening.

In the previous excavation, the archaeologists also found the remains of a temple, a pool and a series of steps placed above the cave -- all matching the descriptions of the site in ancient sources.

The site represented an important destination for pilgrims. People watched the sacred rites from steps above the cave opening, while priests sacrificed bulls to Pluto. The ceremony included leading the animals into the cave, and dragging them out dead.

Only the eunuchs of Cybele, an ancient fertility goddess, were able to enter the hell gate without any apparent damage.

"They hold their breath as much as they can," Strabo wrote, adding that their immunity could have been due to their "menomation," "divine providence" or "certain physical powers that are antidotes against the vapor."

According to D'Andria, the site was a famous destination for rites of incubation. Pilgrims took the waters in the pool near the temple, slept not too far from the cave and received visions and prophecies, in a sort of oracle of Delphi effect. Indeed, the fumes coming from the depths of Hierapolis' phreatic groundwater produced hallucinations.

The popularity of the site is testified by dozens of lamps unearthed in front of the cave opening. Among the most precious objects, the archaeologists also found a marble head representing the goddess Aphrodite.

"These votive offerings shows the relentless vitality of the pagan cults in Hierapolis between the 4th and 6th centuries A.D., when the Roman empire was progressively Christianized by emperors such as Constantine and up to Justinian," Alister Filippini, a researcher in Roman history at the Universities of Palermo, Italy, and Cologne, Germany, told Discovery News.

It is possible that during the 5th century the Plutonium's entrance was blocked, preventing access to the underground cave, so that the related pagan rites could not be performed. However pilgrims continued to venerate the area by leaving offerings to the deities, who were believed to miraculously heal the sick people taking the thermal waters near the Plutonium.

At the same time, between the 4th and 6th centuries, the statues of Kerberos and the snakes were scarred, most likely by Christian pilgrims.

Read more at Discovery News

Ker-pow! Batkid Saves Gotham City

A five-year-old boy recovering from cancer became a superhero for a day, as San Francisco transformed itself into Gotham City and thousands turned out to see the Batkid fly to the rescue.

Even President Barack Obama got in on the act after the story went viral, sending pint-size caped crusader Miles Scott a video message telling him "Way to go!"

Scott, who was diagnosed with leukemia when he was 18 months old, was cheered as he roared out in his Batmobile to nab arch-villain Riddler and save a damsel in distress tied to the city's famous tram tracks.

Police chief Greg Suhr ordered his men to help the diminutive crime-fighter take on his nemesis the Penguin, while he also got messages from San Francisco's baseball and NFL teams for his day in the limelight.

"Our hero has arrived. The streets of San Francisco are safe today" the San Francisco 49ers tweeted, as social media went wild for the youngster, prompting huge crowds to follow him.

The story then took off, making national and international news, with live coverage by outlets including CNN.

"I've never seen anything go viral like this, with the outpouring of support from across the world," said Patricia Wilson of Make-a-Wish Foundation, the charity which organized the dream day.

Thousands gathered in the city's Union Square when the Batkid took a break to refuel at a local restaurant. "Even superheroes have to have lunch," explained one TV reporter, surveying the throng stretching across the square.

The city's San Francisco Chronicle printed a special edition for, with a "Gotham City Chronicle" masthead and a screaming headline: "Batkid Saves City!"

The US Attorney's office put out a spoof press release -- datelined "San Francisco/Gotham" -- announcing that the Riddler and the Penguin had been charged with conspiracy and kidnapping.

"Duo faces long prison terms thanks to Batkid," it said.

In Washington, Obama released a message via the Vine video sharing service, looking into the camera and saying "Way to go, Miles! Way to Save Gotham City."

The First Lady added, on her Twitter feed: "Thanks for catching all those bad guys #SFBatKid! You're an inspiration to us all. -mo"

Scott, whose leukemia is currently in remission, was also due to be given the keys to the city by San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, during his day as the famous comic-book hero.

The US Attorney's press release said "The Riddler" and "The Penguin" were pseudonyms for Edward "E" Nigma, and Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot.

"We?ve been chasing Nigma and Cobblepot for years and just when I was about to give up hope that we would ever bring them to justice, wouldn't you know it ? Batkid shows up and saves the day,? said US Attorney Melinda Haag.

"I've been involved in some unbelievable cases and I've worked with some pretty remarkable law enforcement officers, but the bravery displayed by Batkid is off the charts. I'm absolutely certain that there is no villain this remarkable superhero can't defeat," she added.

Read more at Discovery News

Volcanic Rumblings Under Antarctic Ice

What could be more trivial and inconsequential than tiny earthquakes in the icy wastes of Antarctica? Plenty, when the quakes might be from magma moving in the crust beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet — a possible hint that an eruption is on the way to open the flood gates for water and ice pouring out of that vast region.

Two deep, low-magnitude earthquake swarms recorded by a seismic network in 2010 and 2011 have been detected near what’s called Mount Sidley, but are from the ground under deep ice, according to a new report in Nature Geoscience.

“Such earthquakes occur beneath active volcanoes, are caused by deep magmatic activity and, in some cases, precede eruptions,” writes the team led by Amanda Lough of Washington University. The same sorts of pre-eruption swarms of tiny quakes were recorded at Mount Pinatubo in 1991, they said.

In this case, however, any eruption would happen under 1,400 meters (almost 4,600 feet) of ice, and probably never melt through to the surface. But that wouldn’t stop all that hot rock from melting a lot of ice and drastically increasing the melt water draining from under this gigantic basin. All that liquid water under the ice could also lubricate ice streams so they flow faster. If that was to happen, it would be a new and unwelcome addition to the worrisome problem of polar ice losses from global warming that’s already measurably raising sea levels worldwide.

As additional evidence that the regions volcanoes are not dead, the researchers also cites ice-penetrating radar data which has spotted a plume of volcanic ash buried in the ice. The ash is thought to have come from the nearby Mount Waesche. Based on how fast ice accumulates in the area, the ash is estimated to have rained down on the ice surface about 8,000 years ago — less than the wink of an eye ago in geological terms.

Read more at Discovery News