Coldest Places on Earth Found - In Antarctica

Where is the coldest temperature ever measured on Earth?

"It's in Antarctica of course," Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., said here today (Dec. 9) at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

That temperature? A mind- — and body-numbing — minus 136 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 93.2 Celsius), measured in pockets scattered near a high ice ridge between Dome Argus and Dome Fuji, two summits on the East Antarctic Plateau.

The temperature measurement came from the most detailed global surface-temperature maps made to date, which were created using data from the new Landsat 8 satellite, launched in February, and 32 years' worth of data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instruments on NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites and instruments aboard several other satellites.

Researchers began looking at these frigid pockets after they noticed cracks in the snow between large snow dunes on the plateau and wondered if super low temperatures might be creating the cracks by causing the snow on the surface to shrink. This led them to begin the search for the coldest places on the planet.

Cold, colder, coldest

They turned to the temperature records from the satellites, whose instruments measure the thermal radiation emitted at Earth's surface. The coldest temperature they found occurred on Aug. 10, 2010 (winter in the Southern Hemisphere). The temperature is essentially the same "as if you were to take your hand and put it on the surface of the snow. I don't recommend that, as, in this case, that would be colder than dry ice," Scambos said. It's "50 degrees colder than anything that has ever been seen in Alaska, or Siberia," he added.

The temperatures in these pockets are able to drop so very, very low thanks to a combination of circumstances. Scambos and his colleagues think the stage is set for these record lows when clear skies above the domes cause the air to get colder as it radiates heat away to space. As the air near the Earth's surface gets colder, it also gets denser, and begins sliding down the dome, until it encounters one of these pockets, where it can become stuck. As it sits there possibly over several days, the air keeps radiating away heat and becomes colder and colder, until it reaches the record lows observed by the satellites.

The researchers think the air gets stuck on its way down the dome and toward the coast of the continent when atmospheric patterns conspire to "try to push the air back uphill," Scambos said.

Interestingly, the coldest temperatures measured in these pockets were all within a degree or two of each other, suggesting a potential floor to just how low the temperature can go.

"It's surprising that all of those places would have so similar a record," Scambos said.

The similarity could be explained in a few ways, he said: Thin clouds that form in the Earth's stratosphere (the layer of the atmosphere above the one humans live in and in which most weather occurs) could be limiting how much heat the air is able to radiate away into space. Or it could be that the weather systems that block the air only last for so long, among other possibilities.

Scambos and his team are planning to use Landsat 8's capabilities to examine the surface with a higher resolution than previous satellites to better understand the cold pockets and to nail down more accurately the exact temperatures reached in them.

No official record

The temperatures won't make it into the official record books though, since the World Meteorological Organization recognizes only temperatures made a couple of meters above the surface. The long-standing record for the coldest temperature by that measure was, of course, also in Antarctica, at the Vostok Research Station, where it reached minus 128.6 F (minus 89.2 C) in July 1983.

Read more at Discovery News

Green Lightning Revealed in Volcanic Eruption

Lightning researcher Arthur Few says he had probably looked at the two images of the May 3, 2008, volcanic lightning storm dozens of times before he noticed it: weird green channels of lightning. The volcano was Chaiten in Chile, which produced a spectacular light show caught by photographer Carlos Gutierrez.

“Has anyone here seen green lightning before?,” Few asked reporters gathered to learn about his discovery on Monday at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco. No one had, including me, which is why I was keen on getting Few to present his discovery and hypothesis about its cause to the media at the meeting (Full disclosure: in addition to writing for Discovery News, I freelance for AGU and helped them comb through the scientific program and find good stuff for press conferences).

Few, a professor emeritus at Rice University, thinks that green lightning is not really that unusual, but is perhaps hidden inside of regular thunderstorms. But the gigantic column of ash that was launched by Chaiten wore its green lightning on its sleeve, and Few wants to know why.

“What else do we have in the atmosphere that’s green?,” Few asked. One is the northern lights, or aurora, which glow green, red and white when electrons rain down from space and excite oxygen atoms, he said. Above 100 kilometers, the aurora are green. Higher up they are red.

“My working hypothesis is that the green ones are actually streamers,” Few said. A streamer is a lightning bolt that is effectively “a positive channel being pulled to a negative charge” higher up in the ash cloud.

The mess of white lightning in the Chaiten image is the negative charges being generated throughout the cloud raining down and curving into the bottom of the ash cloud. And there is the positive green channel, or streamer, reversing the flow.

Read more at Discovery News

Hidden Details Revealed in Nearby Starburst Galaxy

Using the new, high-frequency capabilities of the National Science Foundation's Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT), astronomers have captured never-before-seen details of the nearby starburst galaxy M82. These new data highlight streamers of material fleeing the disk of the galaxy as well as concentrations of dense molecular gas surrounding pockets of intense star formation.

M82, which is located approximately 12 million light-years away in the constellation Ursa Major, is a classic example of a starburst galaxy -- one that is producing new stars tens- to hundreds-of-times faster than our own Milky Way. Its relatively nearby location made it an ideal target for the GBT's newly equipped "W-Band" receiver, which is capable of detecting the millimeter wavelength light that is emitted by molecular gas. This new capability makes the GBT the world's largest single-dish, millimeter-wave telescope.

"With this new vision, we were able to look at M82 to explore how the distribution of molecular gas in the galaxy corresponded to areas of intense star formation," said Amanda Kepley, a post-doctoral fellow at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in Green Bank, West Virginia, and lead author on a paper accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. "Having this new capability may help us understand why stars form where they do."

Astronomers recognize that dense molecular gas goes hand-in-hand with areas of star formation, but the connection is poorly understood and this relationship may be different in different types of galaxies. By creating wide-angle maps of the gas in galaxies, astronomers hope to better understand this complex interplay.

To date, however, these kinds of observations have not been easy since molecules that are used to map the distribution of dense gas, like HCN (hydrogen cyanide) and HCO+ (formylium), shine feebly in millimeter light. With its new W-Band receiver, the GBT was able to make highly sensitive, wide-angle images of these gases in and around M82.

"The GBT data clearly show billowing concentrations of dense molecular gas huddled around areas that are undergoing bursts of intense star formation," said Kepley. "They also reveal giant outflows of ionized gas fleeing the disk of the galaxy. These outflows are driven by star formation deep within the galaxy."

This capability will enable astronomers to quickly survey entire galaxies and different parts within galaxies. Such surveys would complement higher resolution observations with new Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) telescope in Chile.

Read more at Science Daily

Cold-Loving Cockroach Invades New York

A new species of cockroach that can withstand freezing temperatures has taken up residence in New York, scientists confirmed.

The resilient critter, Periplaneta japonica, had never been seen in the United States until an exterminator spotted some strange-looking roach carcasses last year on the High Line, a mile-long park built on an old elevated railway in Manhattan. Researchers confirmed the identity of the species, which is native to Asia and notable for its ability to thrive in cold climates, unlike the American cockroaches that populate New York and take shelter indoors when winter comes.

"About 20 years ago colleagues of ours in Japan reared nymphs of this species and measured their tolerance to being able to survive in snow," Rutgers insect biologist Jessica Ware said in a statement. "As the species has invaded Korea and China, there has been some confirmation that it does very well in cold climates, so it is very conceivable that it could live outdoors during winter in New York. That is in addition to its being well suited to live indoors alongside the species that already are here."

Ware and colleagues say it will be difficult to trace the source of the species, but they suspect Periplaneta japonica arrived in New York in the soil of one of the plants along the High Line, which first opened in 2009 and is still partially under construction. Though the High Line's gardens have a focus on native plants, Ware noted that many nurseries in the United States have native plants alongside imported ones.

"If we discover more populations in the U.S., we could trace their genes back to try to figure out their exact sources," Rutgers doctoral student Dominic Evangelista added in a statement.

It may be too soon to predict the impact of the species' arrival, but the researchers say the cockroaches are unlikely to be major nuisances in the Big Apple.

"Because this species is very similar to cockroach species that already exist in the urban environment, they likely will compete with each other for space and for food," said Evangelista. Ware added that their numbers inside buildings could actually drop if they start spending more time and energy competing with each other instead of reproducing.

And there's a chance that grime could be on New Yorkers' side. The Asian researchers only studied Periplaneta japonica in clean snow, Ware noted, saying, "I don't know how well it would do in dirty New York snow."

As for an Asian-American hybrid super-roach, the researchers said the possibility is unlikely.

Read more at Discovery News

Weather at Tolkien's Middle Earth Mapped

J.R.R. Tolkien created a masterfully detailed world in his classic Lord of the Rings trilogy, right down to the topography and languages. Now a British climate researcher who might have too much time on his hands has plugged Tolkien’s maps into a supercomputer and predicted weather patterns for Middle Earth.

Dan Lunt, a scientist at the University of Bristol who specializes in climate modeling research, decided to put the Advanced Computing Research Center’s supercomputer to a dorktastic test. Lunt took Tolkien’s detailed maps of Middle Earth showing continents and mountains, and essentially “scanned” them into the supercomputer, the Guardian reported. Then he ran the numbers to get a 70-year model.

In a mock research paper published under the name Radagast the Brown, Lunt details climate details and weather predictions for Tolkien’s fictional world. He compared the climate surrounding Mount Doom in the heart of Mordor to that of Los Angeles and western Texas. I mean, obviously. But Lunt argued that those areas have dry, hot climates with little vegetation and therefore match the conditions in fictional Mordor.

Lunt also concluded that the Shire’s climate would have been close to that of real UK “shires” Lincolnshire or Leicestershire. Other insights: “The climate of Middle Earth has a similar distribution to that of Western Europe and North Africa” and “Ships sailing for the Undying Lands in the West set off from the Grey Havens due to the prevailing winds in that region.”

Dwarfs and elves can read the mock paper, too. Lunt translated it for them here and here. That’s a true LOTR fan. I obviously can’t speak for the man, but imagine Tolkien would approve of this level of dedication.

Plugging fictitious data into reality-based computer interfaces is incredibly tempting. Anyone else remember that Google Maps gem that came up when asking for walking directions to Mordor? Heck, if I had access to that University of Bristol supercomputer I’d probably do similar number crunching.

Read more at Discovery News

Mars Rover Finds Ancient Life-Supporting Lakebed

The site where NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity landed last year contains at least one lake that would have been perfectly suited for colonies of simple, rock-eating microbes found in caves and hydrothermal vents on Earth.

Analysis of mudstones in an area known as Yellowknife Bay, located inside the rover’s Gale Crater landing site, show that fresh water pooled on the surface for tens of thousands -- or even hundreds of thousands -- of years.

“The results show that the lake was definitely a habitable environment,” Curiosity lead scientist John Grotzinger, with the California Institute of Technology, told Discovery News.

The really big surprise, however, was that clays drilled out from inside two mudstones and analyzed by the rover are much younger than scientists expected, a finding that extends the window of time for when Mars may have been suitable for life.

“These numbers now overlap with the oldest rocks on Earth that contain evidence of a former biosphere on Earth,” Grotzinger said.

The rover explored Yellowknife Bay before heading toward a three-mile high mountain of layered sediments rising from the floor of Gale Crater known at Mount Sharp.

Curiosity landed in August 2012 to assess if Gale Crater had the right ingredients and environments to support ancient microbial life. Within six months, scientists had the answer to that question: Yes.

Now, in addition to characterizing specific potential habitats, scientists are coming up with a search strategy to determine which sites hold the most promise for finding organic carbon, a far more difficult and complex challenge and the focus of future studies at Mount Sharp.

“Habitability only requires that the chemicals and minerals in the rock preserve evidence of an ancient environment. To search for organic carbon you’re actually looking for particular material ... that is not really compatible with the present environment of Mars. To find something you need a guidebook, you need some rules,” Grotzinger said.

One of those rules involves how much radiation a rock has been exposed to. Mars today has only has a thin atmosphere and no protective magnetic field, so scientists have been thinking they will need to dig deep to find carbon-laced samples, or they will have to probe craters relatively recently excavated by an impact.

Analysis of the Yellowknife Bay rocks points to another path. Dating the ages of the rocks’ surfaces show they are as young as about 70 million years, the result of being sand-blasted by Martian winds.

“In the future, if we find a rock that looks like a place where organics were accumulating and if it looks like the chemistry would have been favorable for preservation ... we can now very deliberately manage the risk that the rock would have been cooking away in the presence of radiation for hundreds of millions of years by looking for these scarps, these miniature cliffs, and then drilling the rock and date it to see how long it’s been laying around,” Grotzinger said.

Read more at Discovery News

Electrical Control of Single Atom Magnets

The energy needed to change the magnetic orientation of a single atom -- which determines its magnetic stability and therefore its usefulness in a variety of future device applications -- can be modified by varying the atom's electrical coupling to nearby metals.

This striking result was published today in the journal Nature Nanotechnology by an international group of scientists working at the London Centre for Nanotechnology (LCN) at UCL (UK), the Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory (Portugal), the University of Zaragoza (Spain), and the Max Planck Institute of Microstructure Physics (Germany).

Anyone playing with two magnets can experience how they repel or attract each other depending on the relative orientation of their magnetic poles. The fact that in a given magnet these poles lie along a specific direction rather than being randomly oriented is known as magnetic anisotropy, and this property is exploited in a variety of applications ranging from compass needles to hard drives.

"For 'large' pieces of magnetic material," emphasized Dr Joaquín Fernández-Rossier from the INL, "magnetic anisotropy is determined primarily by the shape of a magnet. The atoms that form the magnetic material are also magnetic themselves, and therefore have their own magnetic anisotropy. However, atoms are so small that it is hardly possible to ascribe a shape to them, and the magnetic anisotropy of an atom is typically controlled by the position and charge of the neighbouring atoms."

Using a scanning tunnelling microscope, an instrument capable of observing and manipulating an individual atom on a surface, LCN researchers and their colleagues discovered a new mechanism that controls magnetic anisotropy at the atomic scale.

In their experiment, the research team observed dramatic variations in the magnetic anisotropy of individual cobalt atoms depending on their location on a copper surface capped with an atomically-thin insulating layer of copper nitride.

These variations were correlated with large changes in the intensity of another phenomenon -- the Kondo effect -- that arises from electrical coupling between a magnetic atom and a nearby metal. With the help of theoretical and computational modelling performed in Germany and Portugal, the researchers found that, in addition to the conventional structural mechanisms, the electronic interactions between the metal substrate and the magnetic atom can also play a major role in determining magnetic anisotropy.

"Electrical control of a property that formerly could only be tuned through structural changes will enable significant new possibilities when designing the smallest possible devices for information processing, data storage, and sensing," said LCN researcher Dr Cyrus Hirjibehedin.

Read more at Science Daily

Surprising Diversity in Aging Revealed in Nature

In our youth we are strong and healthy and then we weaken and die -- that's probably how most would describe what aging is all about. But, in nature, the phenomenon of aging shows an unexpected diversity of patterns and is altogether rather strange, conclude researchers from The University of Southern Denmark.

Not all species weaken and become more likely to die as they age. Some species get stronger and less likely to die with age, while others are not affected by age at all. Increasing weakness with age is not a law of nature.

Researchers from the University of Southern Denmark have studied aging in 46 very different species including mammals, plants, fungi and algae, and they surprisingly find that there is a huge diversity in how different organisms age. Some become weaker with age -- this applies to e.g. humans, other mammals, and birds; others become stronger with age -- this applies to e.g. tortoises and certain trees, and others become neither weaker nor stronger -- this applies to e.g. Hydra, a freshwater polyp.

"Many people, including scientists, tend to think that aging is inevitable and occurs in all organisms on Earth as it does for humans: that every species becomes weaker with age and more likely to die. But that is not the case," says evolutionary biologist and assistant professor Owen Jones from the Max-Planck Odense Center at the University of Southern Denmark .

He is the lead author of an article on the subject in the scientific journal Nature. Other authors are from the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany, the University of Queensland in Australia, University of Amsterdam in Holland and elsewhere.

Owen Jones and his colleagues studied aging in species ranging from oak trees, nematodes, baboons and lice to seaweed and lions. The species included 11 mammals, 12 other vertebrates, 10 invertebrates, 12 plants and one algae.

"The diversity of mortality and fertility patterns in these organisms surprised us, and there is clearly a need for more research before we fully understand the evolutionary causes of aging and become better able to address problems of aging in humans," says Owen Jones.

He points out that while there is plenty of scientific data on aging in mammals and birds, there is only sparse and incomplete data on aging in other groups of vertebrates, and most invertebrates, plants, algae, and fungi.

For several species mortality increases with age -- as expected by evolutionary scientists. This pattern is seen in most mammal species including humans and killer whales, but also in invertebrates like water fleas. However, other species experience a decrease in mortality as they age, and in some cases mortality drops all the way up to death. This applies to species like the desert tortoise (Gopherus agassizii) which experiences the highest mortality early on in life and a steadily declining mortality as it ages. Many plant species, e.g. the white mangrove tree (Avicennia marina) follow the same pattern.

Amazingly, there are also species that have constant mortality and remain unaffected by the aging process. This is most striking in the freshwater polyp Hydra magnipapillata which has constant low mortality. In fact, in lab conditions, it has such a low risk of dying at any time in its life that it is effectively immortal.

"Extrapolation from laboratory data show that even after 1400 years five per cent of a hydra population kept in these conditions would still be alive," says Owen Jones.

Several animal and plant species show remarkably little change in mortality throughout their life course. For example, these include rhododendron (Rhododendron maximum), great tit (Parus major), hermit crab (Pagurus longicarpus), common lizard (Lacerta vivapara), collared flycatcher (Ficedula albicollis), viburnum plants (Viburnum furcatum ), oarweed (Laminaria digitata), red abalone (Haliotis rufescens), the plant armed saltbush (Atriplex acanthocarpa), red-legged frog (Rana aurora) and the coral red gorgonian (Paramuricea clavata).

When you look at the fertility patterns of the 46 surveyed species, there is also a great diversity and some large departures from the common beliefs about aging. Human fertility is characterized by being concentrated in a relatively short period of life, and by the fact that humans live for a rather long time both before and after the fertile period.

A similar pattern of a concentrated fertile period is also seen in other mammals like killer whales, chimpanzees, and chamois (Rupicapra rupicapra), and also in birds like sparrow hawks (Accipiter nisus).

However, there are also species that become more and more fertile with age, and this pattern is especially common in plants such as the agave (Agave marmorata) and the rare mountain plants hypericum (Hypericum cumulicola) and borderea (Borderea pyrenaica).

On the contrary fertility occurs very early in the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans. Actually this species starts its life with being fertile, then it quite quickly and quite suddenly loses the ability to produce offspring.

Read more at Science Daily

Scientists Discover Quick Recipe for Producing Hydrogen

Scientists in Lyon, a French city famed for its cuisine, have discovered a quick-cook recipe for copious volumes of hydrogen (H2).

The breakthrough suggests a better way of producing the hydrogen that propels rockets and energizes battery-like fuel cells. In a few decades, it could even help the world meet key energy needs -- without carbon emissions contributing to the greenhouse effect and climate change.

It also has profound implications for the abundance and distribution of life, helping to explain the astonishingly widespread microbial communities that dine on hydrogen deep beneath the continents and seafloor.

Describing how to greatly speed up nature's process for producing hydrogen will be a highlight among many presentations by Deep Carbon Observatory (DCO) experts at the American Geophysical Union's annual Fall Meeting in San Francisco Dec. 9 to 13.

The DCO is a global, 10-year international science collaboration unraveling the mysteries of Earth's inner workings -- deep life, energy, chemistry, and fluid movements.

Muriel Andreani, Isabelle Daniel, and Marion Pollet-Villard of University Claude Bernard Lyon 1 discovered the quick recipe for producing hydrogen:

In a microscopic high-pressure cooker called a diamond anvil cell (within a tiny space about as wide as a pencil lead), combine ingredients: aluminum oxide, water, and the mineral olivine. Set at 200 to 300 degrees Celsius and 2 kilobars pressure -- comparable to conditions found at twice the depth of the deepest ocean. Cook for 24 hours. And voilà.

Dr. Daniel, a DCO leader, explains that scientists have long known nature's way of producing hydrogen. When water meets the ubiquitous mineral olivine under pressure, the rock reacts with oxygen (O) atoms from the H2O, transforming olivine into another mineral, serpentine -- characterized by a scaly, green-brown surface appearance like snake skin. Olivine is a common yellow to yellow-green mineral made of magnesium, iron, silicon, and oxygen.

The process also leaves hydrogen (H2) molecules divorced from their marriage with oxygen atoms in water.

The novelty in the discovery, quietly published in a summer edition of the journal American Mineralogist, is how aluminum profoundly accelerates and impacts the process.

Finding the reaction completed in the diamond-enclosed micro space overnight, instead of over months as expected, left the scientists amazed. The experiments produced H2 some 7 to 50 times faster than the natural "serpentinization" of olivine.

Over decades, many teams looking to achieve this same quick hydrogen result focused mainly on the role of iron within the olivine, Dr. Andreani says. Introducing aluminum into the hot, high-pressure mix produced the eureka moment.

Dr. Daniel notes that aluminum is Earth's 5th most abundant element and usually is present, therefore, in the natural serpentinization process. The experiment introduced a quantity of aluminum unrealistic in nature.

Jesse Ausubel, of The Rockefeller University and a founder of the DCO program, says current methods for commercial hydrogen production for fuel cells or to power rockets "usually involve the conversion of methane (CH4), a process that produces the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) as a byproduct. Alternatively, we can split water molecules at temperatures of 850 degrees Celsius or more -- and thus need lots of energy and extra careful engineering."

"Aluminum's ability to catalyze hydrogen production at a much lower temperature could make an enormous difference. The cost and risk of the process would drop a lot."

"Scaling this up to meet global energy needs in a carbon-free way would probably require 50 years," he adds. "But a growing market for hydrogen in fuel cells could help pull the process into the market."

"We still need to solve problems for a hydrogen economy, such as storing the hydrogen efficiently as a gas in compact containers, or optimizing methods to turn it into a metal, as pioneered by Russell Hemley of the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory, another co-founder of the DCO."

Deep energy, Dr. Hemley notes, is typically thought of in terms of geothermal energy available from heat deep within Earth, as well as subterranean fluids that can be burned for energy, such as methane and petroleum. What may strike some as new is that there is also chemical energy in the form of hydrogen produced by serpentinization.

At the time of the AGU Fall Meetings, Dr. Andreani will be taking a lead role with Javier Escartin of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in a 40-member international scientific exploration of fault lines along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. It is a place where the African and American continents continue to separate at an annual rate of about 20 mm (1.5 inches) and rock is forced up from the mantle only 4 to 6 km (2.5 to 3.7 miles) below the thin ocean floor crust. The study will advance several DCO goals, including the mapping of world regions where deep life-supporting H2 is released through serpentinization.

Aboard the French vessel Pourquoi Pas?, using a deep sea robot from the French Research Institute for Exploitation of the Sea (IFREMER), and a deep-sea vehicle from Germany's Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences (GEOMAR), the team includes researchers from France, Germany, USA, Wales, Spain, Norway and Greece.

Notes Dr. Daniel, until now it has been a scientific mystery how the rock + water + pressure formula produces enough hydrogen to support the chemical-loving microbial and other forms of life abounding in the hostile environments of the deep.

With the results of the experiment in France, "for the first time we understand why and how we have H2 produced at such a fast rate. When you take into account aluminum, you are able to explain the amount of life flourishing on hydrogen," says Dr. Daniel.

Indeed, DCO scientists hypothesize that hydrogen was what fed the earliest life on primordial planet Earth -- first life's first food.

And, she adds: "We believe the serpentinization process may be underway on many planetary bodies -- notably Mars. The reaction may take one day or one million years but it will occur whenever and wherever there is some water present to react with olivine -- one of the most abundant minerals in the solar system."

Enigmatic evidence of a deep subterranean microbe network

Meanwhile, the genetic makeup of Earth's deep microbial life is being revealed through DCO research underway by Matt Schrenk of Michigan State University, head of DCO's "Rock-Hosted Communities" initiative, Tom McCollom of the University of Colorado, Boulder, Steve D'Hondt of the University of Rhode Island, and many other associates.

At AGU, they will report the results of deep sampling from opposite sides of the world, revealing enigmatic evidence of a deep subterranean microbe network.

Using DNA, researchers are finding hydrogen-metabolizing microbes in rock fractures deep beneath the North American and European continents that are highly similar to samples a Princeton University group obtained from deep rock fractures 4 to 5 km (2.5 to 3 miles) down a Johannesburg-area mine shaft. These DNA sequences are also highly similar to those of microbes in the rocky seabeds off the North American northwest and northeastern Japanese coasts.

"Two years ago we had a scant idea about what microbes are present in subsurface rocks or what they eat," says Dr. Schrenk. "Since then a number of studies have vastly expanded that database. We're getting this emerging picture not only of what sort of organisms are found in these systems but some consistency between sites globally -- we're seeing the same types of organisms everywhere we look."

"It is easy to understand how birds or fish might be similar oceans apart, but it challenges the imagination to think of nearly identical microbes 16,000 km apart from each other in the cracks of hard rock at extreme depths, pressures, and temperatures" he says.

"In some deep places, such as deep-sea hydrothermal vents, the environment is highly dynamic and promotes prolific biological communities," says Dr. McCollom. "In others, such as the deep fractures, the systems are isolated with a low diversity of microbes capable of surviving such harsh conditions."

"The collection and coupling of microbiological and geochemical data made possible through the Deep Carbon Observatory is helping us understand and describe these phenomena."

How water behaves deep within Earth's mantle

Among other major presentations, DCO investigators will introduce a new model that offers new insights into water / rock interactions at extreme pressures 150 km (93 miles) or more below the surface, well into Earth's upper mantle. To now, most models have been limited to 15 km, one-tenth the depth.

"The DCO gives a happy twist to the phrase 'We are in deep water'," says researcher Dimitri Sverjensky of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD.

Dr. Sverjensky's work, accepted for publication by the Elsevier journal Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, is expected to revolutionize understanding of deep Earth water chemistry and its impacts on subsurface processes as diverse as diamond formation, hydrogen accumulation, the transport of diverse carbon-, nitrogen- and sulfur-fed species in the mantle, serpentinization, mantle degassing, and the origin of Earth's atmosphere.

In deep Earth, despite extreme high temperatures and pressures, water is a fluid that circulates and reacts chemically with the rocks through which it passes, changing the minerals in them and undergoing alteration itself -- a key agent for transporting carbon and other chemical elements. Understanding what water is like and how it behaves in Earth's deep interior is fundamental to understanding the deep carbon cycle, deep life, and deep energy.

This water-rock interaction produces valuable ore deposits, creates the chemicals on which deep life and deep energy depend, influences the generation of magma that erupts from volcanoes -- even the occurrence of earthquakes. Humanity gets glimpses of this water in hot springs.

Says Dr. Sverjensky: "The new model may enable us to predict water-rock interaction well into Earth upper mantle and help visualize where on Earth H2 production might be underway."

The DCO is now in the 5th year of a decade-long adventure to probe Earth's deepest geo-secrets: How much carbon is stored inside Earth? What are the reservoirs of that carbon? How does carbon move among reservoirs? How much carbon released from Earth's deep interior is primordial and how much is recycled from the surface? Are there deep abiotic sources of hydrocarbons? What is the nature and extent of deep microbial life? And did deep Earth chemistry play a role in life's origins?

The $500 million global collaboration is led by Dr. Robert Hazen, Senior Staff Scientist at the Geophysical Laboratory, Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Read more at Science Daily

Possibility of Cloning Quantum Information from the Past

Popular television shows such as "Doctor Who" have brought the idea of time travel into the vernacular of popular culture. But problem of time travel is even more complicated than one might think. LSU's Mark Wilde has shown that it would theoretically be possible for time travelers to copy quantum data from the past.

It all started when David Deutsch, a pioneer of quantum computing and a physicist at Oxford, came up with a simplified model of time travel to deal with the paradoxes that would occur if one could travel back in time. For example, would it be possible to travel back in time to kill one's grandfather? In the Grandfather paradox, a time traveler faces the problem that if he kills his grandfather back in time, then he himself is never born, and consequently is unable to travel through time to kill his grandfather, and so on. Some theorists have used this paradox to argue that it is actually impossible to change the past.

"The question is, how would you have existed in the first place to go back in time and kill your grandfather?" said Mark Wilde, an LSU assistant professor with a joint appointment in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and with the Center for Computation and Technology, or CCT.

Deutsch solved the Grandfather paradox originally using a slight change to quantum theory, proposing that you could change the past as long as you did so in a self-consistent manner.

"Meaning that, if you kill your grandfather, you do it with only probability one-half," Wilde said. "Then, he's dead with probability one-half, and you are not born with probability one-half, but the opposite is a fair chance. You could have existed with probability one-half to go back and kill your grandfather."

But the Grandfather paradox is not the only complication with time travel. Another problem is the no-cloning theorem, or the no "subatomic Xerox-machine" theorem, known since 1982. This theorem, which is related to the fact that one cannot copy quantum data at will, is a consequence of Heisenberg's famous Uncertainty Principle, by which one can measure either the position of a particle or its momentum, but not both with unlimited accuracy. According to the Uncertainty Principle, it is thus impossible to have a subatomic Xerox-machine that would take one particle and spit out two particles with the same position and momentum -- because then you would know too much about both particles at once.

"We can always look at a paper, and then copy the words on it. That's what we call copying classical data," Wilde said. "But you can't arbitrarily copy quantum data, unless it takes the special form of classical data. This no-cloning theorem is a fundamental part of quantum mechanics -- it helps us reason how to process quantum data. If you can't copy data, then you have to think of everything in a very different way."

But what if a Deutschian closed timelike curve did allow for copying of quantum data to many different points in space? According to Wilde, Deutsch suggested in his late 20th century paper that it should be possible to violate the fundamental no-cloning theorem of quantum mechanics. Now, Wilde and collaborators at the University of Southern California and the Autonomous University of Barcelona have advanced Deutsch's 1991 work with a recent paper in Physical Review Letters. The new approach allows for a particle, or a time traveler, to make multiple loops back in time -- something like Bruce Willis' travels in the Hollywood film "Looper."

"That is, at certain locations in spacetime, there are wormholes such that, if you jump in, you'll emerge at some point in the past," Wilde said. "To the best of our knowledge, these time loops are not ruled out by the laws of physics. But there are strange consequences for quantum information processing if their behavior is dictated by Deutsch's model."

A single looping path back in time, a time spiral of sorts, behaving according to Deutsch's model, for example, would have to allow for a particle entering the loop to remain the same each time it passed through a particular point in time. In other words, the particle would need to maintain self-consistency as it looped back in time.

"In some sense, this already allows for copying of the particle's data at many different points in space," Wilde said, "because you are sending the particle back many times. It's like you have multiple versions of the particle available at the same time. You can then attempt to read out more copies of the particle, but the thing is, if you try to do so as the particle loops back in time, then you change the past."

To be consistent with Deutsch's model, which holds that you can only change the past as long as you can do it in a self-consistent manner, Wilde and colleagues had to come up with a solution that would allow for a looping curve back in time, and copying of quantum data based on a time traveling particle, without disturbing the past.

"That was the major breakthrough, to figure out what could happen at the beginning of this time loop to enable us to effectively read out many copies of the data without disturbing the past," Wilde said. "It just worked."

However, there is still some controversy over interpretations of the new approach, Wilde said. In one instance, the new approach may actually point to problems in Deutsch's original closed timelike curve model.

"If quantum mechanics gets modified in such a way that we've never observed should happen, it may be evidence that we should question Deutsch's model," Wilde said. "We really believe that quantum mechanics is true, at this point. And most people believe in a principle called Unitarity in quantum mechanics. But with our new model, we've shown that you can essentially violate something that is a direct consequence of Unitarity. To me, this is an indication that something weird is going on with Deutsch's model. However, there might be some way of modifying the model in such a way that we don't violate the no-cloning theorem."

Other researchers argue that Wilde's approach wouldn't actually allow for copying quantum data from an unknown particle state entering the time loop because nature would already "know" what the particle looked like, as it had traveled back in time many times before.

But whether or not the no-cloning theorem can truly be violated as Wilde's new approach suggests, the consequences of being able to copy quantum data from the past are significant. Systems for secure Internet communications, for example, will likely soon rely on quantum security protocols that could be broken or "hacked" if Wilde's looping time travel methods were correct.

"If an adversary, if a malicious person, were to have access to these time loops, then they could break the security of quantum key distribution," Wilde said. "That's one way of interpreting it. But it's a very strong practical implication because the big push of quantum communication is this secure way of communicating. We believe that this is the strongest form of encryption that is out there because it's based on physical principles."

Today, when you log into your Gmail or Facebook, your password and information encryption is not based on physical principles of quantum mechanical security, but rather on the computational assumption that it is very difficult for "hackers" to factor mathematical products of prime numbers, for example. But physicists and computer scientists are working on securing critical and sensitive communications using the principles of quantum mechanics. Such encryption is believed to be unbreakable -- that is, as long as hackers don't have access to Wilde's looping closed timelike curves.

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