Feed aggregator

Climate change has found its way into courtrooms around the world more and more often in recent years: Plaintiffs have brought more than 1,500 cases of climate litigation since 1986, and an increasing number of cases are filed each year.

“The power of the courts as a force of climate action really should no longer be in dispute.”“In the last few years we’ve seen lawsuits in the Netherlands, Germany, Ireland, Belgium, and elsewhere that have shown that successful climate litigation is possible,” said Rupert Stuart-Smith, who researches climate systems and policy at the University of Oxford’s Sustainable Law Program in the United Kingdom. In most of those cases, courts ruled that a country or a company’s climate targets or progress toward meeting those targets needed to be significantly improved. “The power of the courts as a force of climate action really should no longer be in dispute.”

However, climate litigation has failed more often than not to hold greenhouse gas emitters accountable for climate-related impacts like flooding and damage from drought or wildfires. For lawsuits that try to establish a causal link between a defendant’s emission and the impacts on plaintiffs, Stuart-Smith and his team sought to understand why those types of cases tend to fail.

“Why aren’t these cases winning?” he asked. “What is the evidence that is being used in these cases, how does that compare to the state of the art in climate science…and how have the courts interpreted it?”

A Failure to Make the Connection

The researchers examined 73 cases across 14 jurisdictions worldwide that made a claim that a defendant’s emissions negatively impacted the plaintiffs. In those cases, courts did not dispute the general idea that greenhouse gases cause climate change. “What was more of a challenge,” Stuart-Smith said, “was establishing a causal relationship between greenhouse gas emissions of an individual entity…and specific impacts on a specific location.” Making that causal connection is key for the success of climate litigation, he said, and is the goal of climate attribution science, or science that quantifies the extent to which climate change alters an event.

“The evidence submitted and referenced in these cases does lag considerably behind the state of the art in climate science.”However, 73% of the cases the team examined did not bring forward peer-reviewed climate attribution science as evidence. Of the 54 cases that claimed that an extreme weather event caused the impacts suffered by plaintiffs, 26 claimed that climate change caused the extreme weather event but did not provide evidence of that claim. Six more did provide such evidence, but that evidence did not quantify how much more likely or how much worse climate change made the extreme weather event.

“We found that there is a clear role for attribution science evidence in these lawsuits,” Stuart-Smith said. In the few cases where climate science was submitted as evidence, “the evidence submitted and referenced in these cases does lag considerably behind the state of the art in climate science. And as a result…the evidence provided was not sufficient to overcome causation tests.”

Of the 73 cases they examined, only 8 have been successful so far. (Thirty-seven are pending, and 28 have been dismissed.) The researchers suggest that “growing use of attribution science evidence which is specific to the impacts experienced by plaintiffs…could overcome some of the key hurdles to the success of climate-related lawsuits.” These results were published in Nature Climate Change in June.

Establishing a Dialogue

Not every extreme weather event is caused by or made worse by climate change, but an increasing number of them are: Anthropogenic climate change has been making hurricanes, drought, and wildfires stronger and more frequent; has been tied to worsening health conditions around the world; and has started a climate refugee crisis. As recently as a decade ago, Stuart-Smith pointed out, climate science wasn’t advanced enough to claim that climate change caused any single extreme weather event, but that is no longer the case. For example, the World Weather Attribution initiative, an international collaboration of climate scientists, has already established that the June 2021 extreme heat wave in the North American Pacific Northwest “was virtually impossible without human-caused climate change” and that “this heatwave was about 2°C hotter than it would have been if it had occurred at the beginning of the industrial revolution.”

“We need better paths of communication between the legal and scientific communities.”This study highlights that “we need better paths of communication between the legal and scientific communities,” Stuart-Smith said. Lawyers need to be able to explain to climate scientists what type of evidence will be helpful and ensure that the claims they’re bringing forward are actually attributable to climate change. Climate scientists, too, need to consider providing evidence to litigators as “an opportunity to make one’s research relevant to important ongoing issues in the courts.…It’s got to come from both sides.”

Although climate attribution cases haven’t been very successful in the past, “it doesn’t seem farfetched anymore to suggest that future cases will force companies to pay compensation to communities impacted by climate change,” either after damage is already done or as communities try to mitigate or adapt to future impacts, Stuart-Smith said. “But that is only going to be the case if…the evidence submitted to courts clearly substantiates the alleged relationship between the defendants’ emissions and the impacts suffered by plaintiffs.”

—Kimberly M. S. Cartier (@AstroKimCartier), Staff Writer

For a successful result, managed retreat should not be considered a last resort, and the process should start today.The idea of moving from places endangered by rising seas, dangerous temperatures, or wildfires is a personal, communal, and national decision. The response at each level is based on which risks are tolerable and whose values are prioritized. But adaptation measures can provide a road map for how a person, a community, or even a country can proceed. Such road maps are laid out in papers recently published in a special issue of Science. The gist: For a successful result, managed retreat should not be considered a last resort, and the process should start today.

The Need for Adaptation Actions

Some degree of relocation is going to be necessary, said climate adaptation scientist Marjolijn Haasnoot of Deltares and Utrecht University in the Netherlands, lead author of one of the Science papers. Already, global average annual sea level rise has more than doubled its 20th-century rate to 3.6 millimeters. By 2100, sea-level rise may be 10-20 millimeters per year and seas could reach up to 1-2 meters above 2000 levels; seas will continue to rise beyond 2100.

So how much response will be necessary, and how do we do it?

Responding to rising seas—or other effects of the climate crisis, like wildfires and unlivable temperatures—requires adaptation. That response could look like resistance (e.g., building seawalls), accommodation (e.g., putting infrastructure on stilts), avoidance (limiting new development in hazardous locations), advance (building out into hazardous areas), or retreat, wrote Katharine Mach from the University of Miami and A. R. Siders from the University of Delaware in their Science paper. Retreat in the most basic sense means relocating homes and infrastructure in harm’s way. “Each adaptation action represents a distinct value-laden decision about what to preserve, purposefully change, or allow to change unguided,” Mach and Siders noted.

But strategic or managed retreat likely includes several different adaptation strategies, like relocating infrastructure and people, as well as restricting development and building protective barriers. Each adaptation action is probably going to be part of a community’s plan to deal with encroaching hazards, Mach said.

Water spills over from the Lafayette River in Norfolk, Va., after high tide even when there is no rain. Credit: Skyler Ballard/Chesapeake Bay Program, CC BY-NC 2.0

Haasnoot also added that managed retreat will look different in different places. That’s why she and her colleagues created a road map to help break managed retreat into bite-sized pieces—manageable, adaptable steps that align with goals like economic development, environmental conservation, and social justice. The Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways, or DAPP, approach is already being used by decisionmakers to address threats from rising seas in the Netherlands, United Kingdom, and New Zealand, Haasnoot said.

The authors break down retreat into three stages: a preparation or planning stage, an active retreat stage, and a cleanup stage. The planning stage alone can take decades, Haasnoot said. Within each stage are short-term, medium-term, and long-term plans and actions that should be adaptable as conditions change, she said. For example, she said, a community might start with declaring no-build zones for new development, then over time, relocate households in risky areas as opportunities arise and not allow new families to move in.

Community Engagement

Community engagement is of paramount importance.… Plans need to be “owned” by each community.At every step along the way, Haasnoot said, community engagement is of paramount importance. Mach agreed, adding that any plans need to be “owned” by each community.

The government in Miami-Dade County in Florida, a region at exceptionally high risk from rising seas, has developed a coalition to address sea level rise adaptation strategies, Mach said. The current strategy is a 40-year plan to adapt to 60 centimeters of sea level rise. Miami-Dade’s long-term planning is “impressive,” Mach said, and involves years of community action.

But there’s a problem, said Julie Maldonado, associate director of the Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network, who was not involved in any of the recent Science studies. “There isn’t just one Miami, for example.” Understanding who and what constitutes a “community” is important, she said, as is “recognizing that ‘community’ does not equal geography, but also people’s deep ties and connection to place.” Although decisionmakers might consider a whole city or county—say, the city of Miami or Miami-Dade County—one community, the county and city are made up of many diverse communities with their own leaders and cultures. So there can’t be a “homogenized approach to relocation, as if one size fits all,” Maldonado said. Relocation plans cannot be a one-directional engineered resettlement. The process needs to be community driven, with community leaders front and center on the decisionmaking team, not just another stakeholder, she said. And that’s often not happening.

Some communities are being told they need to leave, to abandon their homes and their lands, “with their sovereign rights and self-determination being ignored, rather than guiding the decisions as rightsholders,” Maldonado said. And then where do they go? What happens in the full cycle of the resettlement? Where are the funding mechanisms to support the full process? she questioned.

Challenging Plans

Although learning from other places that have successfully implemented adaptation and even relocation plans while forging community collaborations is worthwhile, road maps must be considered with caution. They can fall into a “check-the-box approach,” Maldonado said, where outside entities might say, “We held a public meeting, so we did community engagement. Check.” But that’s not real, authentic engagement, she said, and any relocation plan that’s equitable needs to be a collaboration that includes, and is guided by, each affected community’s values and is community led.

A prolonged, strategic, managed retreat can be equitable, Mach said, as opposed to relocation after disasters, which usually isn’t. In the United States, most government buyouts of homes occur after disaster strikes. Even if the government gives a homeowner the value of the home predisaster, that is probably not sufficient for replacement, she said. Elsewhere, “people are forced to relocate out of informal settlements often without access to jobs or other basic needs.” These situations need to be avoided, Mach said.

Managed retreat is not easy, and some days it’s hard to be optimistic, Mach said. But “so many capable, brilliant, passionate people are working on this that it gives me hope,” she said. “And for adaptations, on a fundamental level, when things get bad, people dig deep and figure out solutions. That [also] gives me hope.”

—Megan Sever (@MeganSever4), Science Writer

24 July 2021: This article has been updated with changes throughout.

The mechanisms that generate streamflow are controlled by complex interactions between the climate and physiography of a catchment. Streamflow generation is critical for understanding the pathways and processes by which catchments produce stream and river flow. Therefore, identifying the dominant streamflow mechanisms operating in a catchment has important considerations for watershed management. However, there is no simple guidance beyond conceptual frameworks like the classic Dunne diagram to identify the dominant streamflow generation mechanisms for a catchment without a detailed field study.

Wu et al. [2021] developed a data-driven analysis to classify catchments based on characteristics from continuous rainfall and streamflow records and related those characteristics with climatic and physiographic properties to deduce dominant streamflow generation mechanisms of 432 catchments in the US. The analysis extended the conceptual framework of the Dunne diagram to a quantitative synthesis providing regional patterns of dominant streamflow generation mechanisms. The hope is that with a better understanding of potential streamflow generation mechanisms for a catchment, hydrologic model selection, process representation and accuracy will improve.

Citation: Wu, S., Zhao, J., Wang, H., & Sivapalan, M. [2021]. Regional patterns and physical controls of streamflow generation across the conterminous United States. Water Resources Research, 57, e2020WR028086. https://doi.org/10.1029/2020WR028086

—Kevin McGuire, Associate Editor, Water Resources Research

Mitigating climate change will require both reduced emissions and increasing carbon sinks. Nature-based Climate Solutions (NCS) refers to efforts to conserve ecosystems that could serve as effective carbon sinks to help mitigate climate change. But what if projected climate change renders these same ecosystems vulnerable to loss of carbon storage rather than gain?

Coffield et al. [2021] use several complementary statistical approaches to evaluate the projected permanence of carbon stored in forests and other wildlands of California. They project that several proposed areas for ambitious expansion of NCS may not be able to support carbon-rich forests at the end of this century.

In a companion Viewpoint piece, Anderegg [2021] explains the need to understand these risks when promoting NCS. He argues that NCS still has good potential, but it must be paired with significant emissions reductions to be a viable contributor to overall climate mitigation.

Citation: Coffield, S., Hemes, K., Koven, C. et al. [2021]. Climate-driven limits to future carbon storage in California’s wildland ecosystems. AGU Advances, 2, e2021AV000384. https://doi.org/10.1029/2021AV000384

—Eric Davidson, Editor, AGU Advances

This is an authorized translation of an Eos article. 本文是Eos文章的授权翻译。

火山猛烈喷发，火山灰和气体喷涌而出。热浆迅速上升到大气中，各种大气动力学相互作用，形成了火山云的组成、高度和辐射特性。火山云反射太阳辐射，给地球降温，导致极端天气，并延缓全球变暖，但科学家一直想知道火山物质在喷发后是如何演化和解析自身的。到目前为止，对强烈火山喷发初期阶段的观测还很少，而用于研究火山喷发影响的传统气候模型无法捕捉这一初始阶段的很多细节。

在一项新的研究中，Stenchikov等人对区域大气化学模型WRF-Chem进行了修改，以便更好地捕捉火山云发展的初始阶段。研究人员对1991年菲律宾皮纳图博火山爆发进行了模拟研究，他们假设，随着喷发的喷射流，大量的火山碎屑被送入平流层下部。他们进行了25公里网格间距的模拟，考虑到二氧化硫(SO2)、灰、硫酸盐和水蒸气的同时注入。此外，他们还考虑了包括气态二氧化硫在内的所有烟羽成分的辐射加热和冷却效应。

研究人员发现，局部加热起着至关重要的作用，影响着火山云的初始演化过程，分离成层，然后分散或落到地面。他们的新模型显示，在火山爆发后的第一周，火山云以每天1公里的速度上升到大气中，最初是由于火山灰对太阳的吸收，后来是由于硫酸盐气溶胶对太阳和陆地辐射的吸收。

研究人员指出，他们的发现可能对许多应用有帮助，从航空安全到了解气候和地球工程技术。(Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020JD033829, 2021)

-科学作家Sarah Derouin

This translation was made by Wiley. 本文翻译由Wiley提供。

Share this article on WeChat. 在微信上分享本文。

New Telescope, New Worlds • Exoplanets in the Shadows   • Overture to Exoplanets   • The Forecast for Exoplanets Is Cloudy but Bright   • “Earth Cousins” Are New Targets for Planetary Materials Research   • Oddballs of the Exoplanet Realm   • Thousands of Stars View Earth as a Transiting Exoplanet   • Taking Stock of Cosmic Rays in the Solar System   • Gap in Exoplanet Size Shifts with Age   • Unveiling the Next Exoplanet Act  

The Milky Way is home to billions of stars and probably an even larger number of planets. To search for these planets, scientists watch for minute, but periodic, dips in a star’s light, the telltale signature of a planet passing in front of its host star. And now a team of astronomers has turned that search homeward.

Lisa Kaltenegger and Jackie Faherty calculated the number of stars whose past, present, or future vantage points in space afford a look at Earth passing in front of the Sun. The planets that orbit these roughly 2,000 stars, some of which have additionally been bathed in human-made radio waves, are poised to spot Earth, the researchers suggest.

Turning the Tables

Astronomers have confirmed the existence of more than 4,000 extrasolar planets, and we’re now turning the tables, said Kaltenegger, an astronomer at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. “It’d be interesting to know if someone could have seen us.”

Kaltenegger and Faherty, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, mined data collected by the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission. The Gaia spacecraft, launched in 2013, is conducting the most precise survey to date of the motions and positions of more than a billion stars in the Milky Way. “It’s the greatest kinematic and astrometric catalog of our time,” said Faherty.

A Thin Ring in Space

The researchers honed in on stars within the so-called Earth transit zone, a ring-shaped region of space created by projecting Earth’s orbit around the Sun outward into the cosmos. Any stars—and, by extension, the planets orbiting them—located within this zone see Earth passing in front of the Sun. Astronomers on Earth have exploited this geometry, known as a transit, to detect thousands of far-away planets.

Recent studies of Earth’s transit zone have typically focused on the stars within it right now, said René Heller, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany not involved in the research. In 2016, Heller and a colleague published a study defining Earth’s transit zone and showing that roughly 80 stars could currently see Earth transiting the Sun. “We didn’t care too much about the temporal aspect,” he said.

But Kaltenegger and Faherty have now considered the changing vantage points of stars over time, into and out of Earth’s transit zone. That’s an important distinction, said Heller, because stars are in constant motion around the center of the galaxy. A solar system that observes Earth as transiting now might not have the same view in the future, he said.

Kaltenegger and Faherty restricted their analysis to the roughly 331,000 stars in the Gaia Catalog of Nearby Stars. These stars, all within roughly 300 light-years of Earth, are the best candidates for follow-up study given their relative proximity, said Faherty.

Past, Present, and Future Viewpoints

The researchers then propagated the motions of these stars backward and forward in time. At each annual time step over a 10,000-year window, they determined whether a star fell within Earth’s transit zone. The researchers found that 313 stars were in this zone in the past, 1,402 are in it currently, and 319 will enter it in the future. (Seventy-five of the closest stars in the sample receive yet another tip-off to Earth’s presence: These worlds are close enough to us to have already been bathed in human-produced radio waves.)

Astronomers already know that 7 of these 2,034 stars host planets—17 are known thus far, including 7 in the TRAPPIST-1 system. Many more, if not most, of the remaining stars likely also have their own planets, all of which could see Earth passing in front of the Sun. To get a handle on the total number of rocky, habitable planets potentially orbiting these stars, Kaltenegger and Faherty conservatively estimated that 25% of stars host such a planet. That means that more than 500 planets could witness Earth transiting the Sun, the team concluded.

These results were published in Nature in June.

Future observations in the search for extraterrestrial life ought to target these worlds, said Faherty. They’re the ones closest to us and most likely to have spotted Earth, she said. “These are our best shots.”

—Katherine Kornei (@KatherineKornei), Science Writer

Earth’s largest earthquakes happen on subduction zone megathrusts, and destructive tsunamis often accompany strong shaking. These earthquakes almost always have a puzzling seismic signature; the shallow parts of megathrust ruptures cause tsunamis but mostly emit low-frequency seismic waves that cause less damaging shaking. However, the deeper parts of the ruptures excite high-frequency waves that are especially dangerous to the built environment. Past studies have suggested that this dichotomy results from different fault properties with depth. However, Yin and Denolle [2021] show that rupture characteristics are very different nearer to the Earth’s surface than at greater depth, which causes the change in seismic signatures. The authors note that their use of more realistic Earth models enables them to capture complex interactions between seismic waves and near surface geology in dynamic rupture simulations that reproduce observations.

Citation: Yin, J. & Denolle, M. [2021]. The Earth’s surface controls the depth-dependent seismic radiation of megathrust earthquakes. AGU Advances, 2, e2021AV000413. https://doi.org/10.1029/2021AV000413

—Tom Parsons, Editor, AGU Advances

North America’s Basin and Range Province is home to some of the most extreme environments on the continent, including Death Valley. Stretching from the Wasatch Mountains in Utah to the Sierra Nevada in California and into northwestern Mexico, this area experiences near-constant drought and extreme summer heat.

The Basin and Range Province is also seismically active. For example, the 1887 Sonoran earthquake in the southern Basin and Range caused extensive damage and dozens of deaths. However, deformation rates in the southern Basin and Range are hard to quantify because of few young faults and infrequent seismic events. Furthermore, the adjacent San Andreas and Gulf of California fault systems of the Pacific–North America plate boundary can mask strain rates in the southern Basin and Range.

In a new paper, Broermann et al. explored deformation in a large area including Arizona, New Mexico, and southern portions of Utah and Colorado, within the southern Basin and Range and the Colorado Plateau. The authors observed crustal motion using the EarthScope Plate Boundary Observatory. The array of GPS sensors, seismometers, and other instruments monitor seismology and the tectonic plates underlying North America. The authors used the data to develop models of crustal surface velocity and strain rates in the study area. They concluded that accumulated strain in the crust is the primary driver of future continental earthquakes.

The authors separated the effects of the plate boundary and fluctuating impacts of coseismic and postseismic deformation on strain rates in the region. The results revealed three distinct regions with unique characteristics: a western region, an eastern region, and the Colorado Plateau interior block. Each area differs in the strain rate and motion it experiences, which can affect the probability of future earthquakes. For example, the western region features higher strain rates and an approximately east–west principal axis. In contrast, the eastern region has lower strain rates and a more west–southwest trending axis.

The highest strain rate in the study area includes southwestern Arizona, an expanse with sparse faults and low seismicity. The high strain rate in the region may indicate a potential for future large-magnitude earthquakes, although strain accumulation may be reduced through other processes. (Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020JB021355, 2021)

—Aaron Sidder, Science Writer

This is an authorized translation of an Eos article. Esta es una traducción al español autorizada de un artículo de Eos.

Cada primavera, el fitoplancton florece en el océano. Estos organismos unicelulares y fotosintéticos extraen dióxido de carbono de la atmósfera y producen oxígeno, formando así parte de un sistema de captación de carbono conocido como bomba biológica.

Los modelos numéricos y satelitales que se utilizan ampliamente suponen que la producción primaria y la producción comunitaria neta (o la cantidad neta de carbono removida de la atmósfera a través de la bomba biológica) son mayores en los ecosistemas dominados por el plancton mayor a 20 micrómetros, conocido como microplancton, y menores en aquellos dominados por el plancton de menos de 2 micrómetros, conocido como picoplancton. Sin embargo, el papel del plancton entre esos tamaños, conocido como nanoplancton, se ha ignorado en gran medida. Ahora Juranek et al. demuestran que el nanoplancton puede desempeñar un papel más importante de lo que se pensaba.

El equipo estudió la relación entre el tamaño y la productividad en una región de la Zona de Transición del Pacífico Norte (NPTZ), una zona subtropical-subpolar del tamaño de una cuenca, caracterizada por fuertes gradientes físicos, químicos y ecológicos. Los miembros del equipo llevaron a cabo tres transectos en la NPTZ en la primavera o principios del verano de 2016, 2017 y 2019, cruzando una rasgo conocido como el frente de clorofila de la zona de transición, donde las tasas de producción de la comunidad neta fueron hasta 5 veces más altas que las del sur de la zona de transición.

Los autores utilizaron una combinación de enfoques para caracterizar el tamaño y la diversidad del plancton de 0.5 a 100 micrómetros de diámetro. Estas mediciones se compararon con las tasas de productividad determinadas tanto por un método basado en la incubación como por el seguimiento de la relación entre el oxígeno disuelto y el argón en el agua de mar, que está relacionada con la producción neta de carbono orgánico.

Estos flujos de datos coordinados revelaron un vínculo fuerte y no identificado anteriormente entre la variación de la producción neta de la comunidad y la biomasa del nanoplancton. Con ayuda de la modelización, los autores sugieren que tanto los factores ascendentes, como el suministro de nutrientes, como los descendentes, como el pastoreo de depredadores por tamaños específicos, contribuyen a la importancia del nanoplancton en la zona de transición.

Según los investigadores, los modelos que no tienen en cuenta este plancton de tamaño medio pueden subestimar la producción primaria y la eficacia de la bomba biológica. Comprender el papel del nanoplancton será fundamental para que los científicos entiendan cómo puede afectar el cambio climático al ciclo del carbono en el futuro. (Global Biogeochemical Cycles, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GB006702, 2020)

—Kate Wheeling, Escritora de ciencia

Although many things about ancient animals’ lives remain a mystery, paleoecologists are able to find out a lot about food webs that existed thousands of years ago by studying the carbon isotopes present in the animals’ bones and teeth.

Humans are changing the isotopic signature of the atmosphere and, subsequently, of the oceans.But humanity’s continual burning of fossil fuels has made this carbon isotope analysis tricky. By burning fossil fuels, said Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife marine biologist Casey Clark, humans are actually changing the isotopic signature of the atmosphere and, subsequently, of the oceans.

This human-induced change is called the Suess effect, named for physical chemist Hans Suess, who first noted this effect in work published in 1955. Scientists have to account for this effect if they want to accurately analyze ancient isotopes. But, said Clark, there isn’t necessarily a lot of agreement about the best way to perform this correction, and different techniques may be used in different subfields, which can make it difficult to compare results from different studies.

That’s why Clark and a team of researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the University of Washington, the University of Minnesota, and Idaho State University collaborated to create SuessR, a free, customizable tool that will allow researchers to easily and consistently perform region-specific corrections for the Suess effect. A paper introducing the new tool was published earlier this year in the journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution.

Eric Guiry, a biomolecular archaeologist at the University of Leicester, said this tool could make data analysis easier for many scientists. “What I think is interesting about the program is that it should be a user-friendly way of doing [the Suess correction], which has been a bit of an obstacle. I think that there’s a fairly steep learning curve if you want to do a more nuanced and accurate Suess correction for your data. So in the past a lot of people just kind of had a one-size-fits-all approach.… Doing something that’s more bespoke to your region and aware of the kinds of complications you should be incorporating—that takes quite a bit of effort and background knowledge, so this should help people get over that hurdle.”

Modern-Day Ecology

Clark and the research team found measurable differences in the magnitude of the Suess effect when comparing data over a span of just 8 years.Clark explained that correcting for the Suess effect is becoming increasingly important in ecological research, in addition to paleoecological research, where it is more widely used. That’s because the magnitude of the Suess effect is growing exponentially over time. Although the change in the magnitude of the Suess effect might have been undetectably small for a 10-year data set collected in the 1970s, that’s no longer the case. Clark and the research team found measurable differences in the magnitude of the Suess effect when comparing data over a span of just 8 years in a recent data set.

Clark said that being able to properly correct for the Suess effect has major implications for how we understand what’s happening in our oceans today. For example, he said there has been a long-term decline in carbon isotope ratios in some marine systems, but there has been some disagreement about how those declines should be interpreted.

“One of the conclusions that’s been drawn, particularly for the Bering Sea and the North Pacific, is that a long-term decline in carbon isotope ratios is actually indicative of a decline in primary production,” he said. “Some people have said this is an indication that the ocean overall is becoming less productive around here. And that has huge implications—for how many salmon we can expect to see in the future and what will food webs’ structures look like and how much food will there be feeding these systems.”

However, upon reanalysis of these data sets, Clark said it seems that a substantial amount of this decline in carbon isotope ratios is actually due to the Suess effect and that primary productivity is likely not declining nearly as much as some have suggested. The Suess effect, therefore, is not just an abstract concept, but a key piece of our understanding as we try to answer important questions about conservation and food production.

Future Directions

Clark doesn’t see the present iteration of SuessR as the final version of the tool. Instead, he hopes it will become a project shared by the scientific community, with many people from all over the world contributing data and suggestions for improvement.

SuessR currently includes built-in corrections for four regions in the North Atlantic and North Pacific, but Clark wants to add more, as the Suess effect can vary somewhat across regions, especially across different latitudes.

—Hannah Thomasy (@HannahThomasy), Science Writer

In August 2018, Alex Normandeau was on a research cruise in the Southwind Fjord of Canada’s Baffin Island, attempting to study landslides on the seafloor. Normandeau, a research scientist at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, was aboard the CCGS Hudson collecting bathymetry data and core samples of the seafloor when the crew spotted an iceberg. “We took a bunch of photos and didn’t think anything of it at the time,” Normandeau remembered.

A year later, Normandeau and his colleagues determined that the same iceberg may have initiated a new submarine landslide. Scientists had never shown that icebergs could cause landslides before. Their findings were published in June in Nature Geoscience.

An Iceberg Aground

Submarine landslides can threaten sea life, cause tsunamis, and damage infrastructure such as subsea Internet cables.

Despite these risks, scientists don’t fully understand the causes of submarine landslides. In some cases, earthquakes are the culprits. But because most of the ocean floor is irregularly mapped, it is difficult to know when landslides occur and link them with a causal event.

When the researchers returned to Southwind Fjord in 2019, they learned a new landslide had occurred since their previous visit, providing a rare opportunity to look within a short time window and determine what might have caused it.

“We were hoping for something like this. But to see it happen? It was a lot of luck.”Because no earthquakes had occurred within 300 kilometers of Southwind Fjord, the researchers looked for other mechanisms. By comparing the bathymetry data from their two visits to the fjord, they found an intriguing piece of evidence. They noticed a characteristic pit left when an iceberg impacts the seafloor—right at the initiation point of the landslide, known as a head scarp. Using satellite images from Sentinel-2, they realized that the iceberg they saw the year before eventually ran aground. A few days later, it capsized and slammed into the ocean floor, regrounding several meters away.

NGeo: Iceberg gouging of continental slopes can initiate submarine landslides, potentially far from the iceberg source region@SediAlex; @GSC_CGC; @NRCan; @ClarkGRichards; @DCalvinCampbellhttps://t.co/TMZfbscUlc pic.twitter.com/bS9T7DQk6q

— Nature Geoscience (@NatureGeosci) June 24, 2021

“We interpret that it’s that impact that created the landslide because when you look at where the iceberg regrounded, that’s exactly where the landslide head scarp is,” said Normandeau. “We were hoping for something like this. But to see it happen? It was a lot of luck.”

For further evidence that the iceberg initiated the landslide, the researchers went back to the core samples they collected in 2018 near the landslide but before it occurred. By analyzing the sediment composition and the slope of the seafloor, they found that the sediment in the area was stable under gravitational load, but the estimated load of the iceberg would have been enough to initiate the slide.

Morelia Urlaub, a marine geoscientist at GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, Germany, who wasn’t involved in the study, is researching ways to monitor the seafloor and identify new landslides. She said that when researching submarine landslides, researchers must be in the right place at the right time. “That’s what I found fascinating about this iceberg study. They basically caught one,” Urlaub said. “The study is important because it brings up a new mechanism and because the observation is good as it gets.”

Iceberg Impacts Run Deep

After discovering the landslide in Southwind Fjord, the researchers explored maps of the seafloor in other locations. They found several other iceberg pits at landslide head scarps. “The most surprising result was off the continental slope of Nova Scotia,” Normandeau said. “They’re much bigger [landslides] than what we see in the fjords.” Normandeau hypothesizes that when there was an ice sheet in the region around 20,000 years ago, big icebergs broke off and impacted the seabed, causing landslides. He’s hoping to address this hypothesis in future research.

As climate change causes more icebergs to break off the existing ice sheets, understanding the risks that icebergs pose could mitigate damage to new infrastructure projects. In Canada, there is a push to connect northern communities with subsea Internet cables, which would be especially at risk. But icebergs can also travel thousands of kilometers, potentially causing landslides far from the Arctic. “It’s important to be aware of the triggering mechanisms when we’re planning seafloor infrastructure,” Normandeau said. The gouges left when icebergs collide with the seafloor might be only the tip of the problem.

—Andrew Chapman (@andrew7chapman), Science Writer

Sometime this decade, humans will probably stand on the Moon for the first time since 1972. U.S. president Joe Biden recently committed to NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to land the first woman and the first person of color on the lunar surface by 2024. Other countries and private companies want to send people, too.

This time, they might take more than photographs and a few rocks.

Mining on the Moon is becoming increasingly likely, as growing numbers of countries and corporations hope to exploit its minerals and molecules to enable further exploration and commercial gain. The discovery of water on the lunar surface has raised the possibility of permanent human settlement, as well as making the Moon a potential pit stop on the way to Mars: Water can be split into hydrogen and oxygen and used to make rocket fuel.

Click image for an infographic on how Moon mining could work. Credit: David Michaud, 911metallurgist.com

In 2015, the U.S. Congress and President Barack Obama passed legislation that unilaterally gave American companies the right to own and sell natural resources they mine from celestial bodies, including the Moon. In 2020, President Donald Trump issued an executive order proclaiming that “Americans should have the right to engage in commercial exploration, recovery, and use of resources in outer space…and the United States does not view it as a global commons.”

Other countries are also interested in exploring our nearest celestial neighbor. In 2019, China landed a probe on the farside of the Moon. Russia is resurrecting its Moon program, planning a series of missions starting in 2021 to drill into the surface of the lunar south pole and prospect for water ice, helium-3, carbon, nitrogen, and precious metals.

Corporations have been plotting out their own ways to claim resources on the Moon, including U.S.-based SpaceX and Blue Origin, and the Japanese lunar exploration company ispace—which, according to its website, aims to mine water and “spearhead a space-based economy.” The company also anticipates that by 2040 “the Moon will support a [permanent] population of 1,000 people with 10,000 visiting every year.”

But what effects might these activities have on Earth’s only natural satellite? Who gets to decide what happens on the Moon?

We, the People of Earth

In a bid to get more people thinking about these questions, and to start a conversation about the ethics of exploiting the lunar landscape for profit, a group of mainly Australian academics have come up with a draft Declaration of the Rights of the Moon, which they hope members of the global public will sign and discuss.

“We the people of Earth,” the declaration begins, and goes on to assert that the Moon is “a sovereign natural entity in its own right and…possesses fundamental rights, which arise from its existence in the universe.” These rights include “the right to exist, persist and continue its vital cycles unaltered, unharmed and unpolluted by human beings; the right to maintain ecological integrity…and the right to remain a forever peaceful celestial entity, unmarred by human conflict or warfare.”

Given the acceleration of planned missions and ongoing legal uncertainty over what private companies are allowed to do in space, the authors said, “it is timely to question the instrumental approach which subordinates this ancient celestial body to human interests.” Now is the time, they said, to have a clear-eyed global debate about the consequences of human activity in a landscape that has remained largely unchanged for billions of years.

The aim of the declaration is to give the Moon a voice of its own, as a celestial body with an ancient existence separate from human perceptions.The declaration was penned after a series of public fora organized by Thomas Gooch, a Melbourne-based landscape architect. The discipline of landscape architecture is well suited to having a voice in Moon exploration, he said: “We walk the line of science, art, creativity, nature, and human habitation.”

Existing international space agreements address safety, conflict reduction, heritage preservation, sharing knowledge, and offering assistance in emergencies. These are all people-centric concerns; the aim of the declaration is to give the Moon a voice of its own, as a celestial body with an ancient existence separate from human perceptions, Gooch said.

The Moon might not have inhabitants or biological ecosystems—or, at least, we haven’t found any yet—but that doesn’t mean it is a “dead rock,” as it is sometimes described. “Once you see something as dead, then it limits the way you engage with it,” said Gooch.

The declaration, as coauthor Alice Gorman sees it, is a position statement to which companies and countries operating on the Moon could be held accountable. Gorman is a space archaeologist studying the heritage of space exploration (and the junk humans leave behind) at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia.

“Have they respected the Moon’s own processes?” she asked. “Have they respected the Moon’s environment? Some of the time, the answer to that is going to be no, because you can’t dig up huge chunks of a landscape and expect there to be no impact.

“But if that’s the guiding principle, if that’s something that they’re attempting to achieve from the beginning, then that’s surely got to give us a better outcome than if we turn around in 10 years’ time and realize that if you look at the Moon with the naked eye you can see the scars of mining activities.”

The Dusty, Living Moon

Recent discoveries suggest the Moon is a much more complex and dynamic place than was previously thought, said Gorman.

Mining will require extraction machinery, processing facilities, transportation infrastructure, storage, and power sources. “It’s not just, ‘Let’s dig a hole on the Moon.’”It has seismic activity, including moonquakes and fault lines. Ancient water ice was directly observed at both lunar poles in 2018, hiding in shadowy areas that haven’t seen sunlight in 2 billion years. “Surely that’s environmentally significant,” said Gorman. “Even in completely human terms, 2-billion-year-old shadows are aesthetically significant.”

Individual water molecules have also recently been identified on the Moon’s sunlit surface, and there may even be a water cycle happening, with the molecules bouncing around over the course of a lunar day.

Gorman is vice chair of an expert group affiliated with the Moon Village Association, an international organization that hopes to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon. “I’m as motivated by the excitement of space science as the most hardcore space nut,” she said.

As such, she recognizes it’s inevitable that human activities—building a village, conducting scientific experiments, or extracting minerals—will have some kind of environmental impact on the Moon. Mining will require extraction machinery, processing facilities, transportation infrastructure, storage, and power sources, Gorman said. “It’s not just, ‘Let’s dig a hole on the Moon.’”

Lunar dust coats the boots of astronaut Edgar Mitchell in 1971. Credit: NASA

Lunar dust, for instance, is an important concern. Sticky, abrasive, and full of sharp fragments of obsidian, it eroded the seals on Apollo astronauts’ spacesuits and coated their instruments, making data hard to read. It smelled of “spent gunpowder,” gave Apollo 17’s Harrison Schmitt a kind of hay fever, and turned out to be extremely hazardous to respiratory health—the grains are so sharp they can slice holes in astronauts’ lungs and cause damage to their DNA.

Machinery designed to operate on the Moon will need to be resistant to abrasion by the lunar dust. And some research suggests that too many rockets landing on and taking off from the Moon could lift significant quantities of dust into the exosphere. “There’s the potential to create a little dust cloud around the Moon,” said Gorman, “and we don’t yet know enough about how the Moon operates in order to properly assess those impacts.”

A Space for Capitalism

In theory, existing space law should already protect the Moon from commercial exploitation, said Gbenga Oduntan, a reader in international commercial law at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom. Originally from Nigeria, Oduntan was inspired to study law by the fact that nations got together to agree on and create the Outer Space Treaty—a “beautiful” idea that made him “proud of mankind.”

In the treaty, which came into effect in 1967, nations agreed that space (including the Moon) “is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty” and that “exploration and use of outer space shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries and shall be the province of all mankind.” For Oduntan, the meaning is clear: Mining on the Moon would be legal if the resources were used for further exploration and scientific research on behalf of all humanity, “but appropriation for sale is a vastly new territory which we cannot allow countries, not to mention companies, to run along with on their own,” he said.

Successive U.S. administrations have had a different interpretation: that outer space is a space for capitalism. In 1979, the United States refused to sign the Moon Agreement, another United Nations treaty that specifically declared that lunar resources were the “common heritage of mankind” and committed signatories to establishing an international regime of oversight when resource extraction was “about to become feasible.” (Lack of support from the major space powers led to only 18 countries signing it, and it remains one of the most unpopular multilateral treaties.)

“Just because an area is beyond sovereignty doesn’t make it a global commons.”Instead, in 2015, once extraction actually was about to become feasible, the Space Act explicitly gave U.S. companies the right to own and sell resources they mine from space, as well as 8 more years mostly free of government oversight. (In a 2015 article, Oduntan called it “the most significant salvo that has been fired in the ideological battle over ownership of the cosmos.”)

Scott Pace, a professor of international affairs at George Washington University and director of the U.S. Space Policy Institute, said that legally speaking, space is not a global commons. (In his former role as head of the National Space Council, Pace worked on the 2020 Trump executive order—which also explicitly repudiated the Moon Agreement.)

“Just because an area is beyond sovereignty doesn’t make it a global commons,” he said. “Commons implies common ownership and common responsibility, which means…[other countries get] a say in what the United States does out there.”

Instead, the official American view is that “rules on frontiers and shared domains are made by those who show up, not by those who stay behind,” as Pace put it. To that end, the United States has signed nonbinding bilateral agreements—the Artemis Accords—with, so far, 11 other countries that hope to work with the United States on upcoming lunar missions. The accords aim to set norms of behavior for activity on the Moon, Pace said, although some experts have pointed out that they might also be designed to reinforce the U.S. interpretation of the Outer Space Treaty on resource exploitation.

Oduntan believes that all countries should get a say in what happens in space and on the Moon, even countries that are not yet capable of or interested in going there. Such a perspective is not about “exporting communism into outer space,” he said. Instead, the point is to recognize that conflict over resources is inevitable. “Commercialization of outer space in a Wild West mode is going to lead faster to disputes. There will be turf wars. And experience shows us that lack of regulation leads to tears.”

Rock Rights

So could giving the Moon its own rights be one way to provide that kind of oversight and help ensure that countries and companies act in ways that minimize harm to its environment?

The Declaration of the Rights of the Moon was inspired by the growing Rights for Nature movement and uses some of its language. In the past 5 years, some natural entities—like New Zealand’s Whanganui River and Urewera forest, India’s Ganges River, and Colombia’s Atrato River—have been granted legal rights as part of efforts to protect and restore them. (Similarly, some astronomers have been investigating legal action to stop constellations of satellites, like Space X’s Starlink, from ruining their observations and altering the night sky.)

New Zealand’s Whanganui River is one of a growing number of natural entities that have been granted legal rights. Credit: James Shook/Wikimedia, CC BY 2.5

Pace was skeptical of the concept and said the Declaration of the Rights of the Moon has no legal standing.

“This [declaration] is saying that there should be something called rock rights—that a lunar rock has a right. It’s an interesting metaphor, but it doesn’t have any legal foundation, and it’s politically meaningless.”“The idea that the Moon as an inanimate object possesses fundamental rights as a result of its existence in the universe doesn’t make any sense. Rights are something which attach to human persons. We can have an argument about animal rights, but this is saying that there should be something called rock rights—that a lunar rock has a right. It’s an interesting metaphor, but it doesn’t have any legal foundation, and it’s politically meaningless.”

New Zealand’s Whanganui River might now have legal rights, Pace explained, but that’s because those rights were granted by the sovereign government of New Zealand. Countries agreed in the Outer Space Treaty that the Moon was beyond any nation’s sovereignty. That means there is no sovereign power that could legally grant the Moon rights, Pace reasoned—and efforts to have the Moon declared a national park or a World Heritage Site have failed for the same reason.

Erin O’Donnell, an expert on water law and the Rights for Nature movement at the University of Melbourne, foresees a different problem. Her research has shown that granting rights to rivers has frequently had unintended consequences for environmental protection.

Depending on the exact legal instrument used, some rivers now have the right to sue, enter into contracts, or own property. “But,” she said, “none of them have rights to water.”

“This is the real tension at the heart of the rights of nature advocacy movement: If something’s not legally enforceable, then it may not necessarily lead to a lot of change, because you can’t rely on it then in situations of conflict.”

Emphasizing legal rights can set up an adversarial atmosphere that can actually make conflict more likely, she said, and even weaken community support for protecting an environment, because people assume that if something has rights, it can look after itself. “If you emphasize the legal rights to the exclusion of all else, you can end up fracturing the relationship between people and nature, and that can be very hard to recover from.”

Where rights of nature movements have had success, she said, is in “reframing and resetting the human relationship with nature,” often by elevating Indigenous worldviews.

Our Beloved Moon

For Pace, the declaration is premature. Norms of behavior will evolve over time, he said, once we actually get to the Moon and figure out what we can possibly achieve there.

“What you don’t do is have a group of lawyers, no matter how smart, sit down in a room and try to draft up rules for things that are totally hypothetical. Environmental ethics considerations are rather speculative and not really necessary right now.”

“It sounds blunt, but the rules are made by the people who show up. Find a way to get in the game, and then you have a say.”If people really want to have an influence on space policy, Pace said, they should lobby their governments to get involved in the new space race. “Make sure you’re at the table. It sounds blunt, but the rules are made by the people who show up. Find a way to get in the game, and then you have a say.”

But Oduntan, O’Donnell, and Gorman disagreed. “By the time there’s a problem, it’s massively too late,” said O’Donnell. “We see that in the case of the rivers every day. All of the rivers around the world that have received legal rights are beloved, but heavily impacted.” The Moon is beloved, too, she said, but is as yet undamaged. “It would be nice if in this case we could act preventatively.”

The Declaration of the Rights of the Moon may not result in any legal outcomes, O’Donnell said, but it’s “a really important conversation starter.”

Most of us will never walk on its surface, but all human cultures tell stories about the Moon. It lights our nights, is a presence in our myths and legends, powers the tides, triggers animal (and, in limited ways, human) behavior, and marks the passing of time.

“The more of us who talk about these kinds of things,” said O’Donnell, “the more we’re likely to normalize seeing the Moon as something other than a piece of territory to be fought over by nation states and corporate investors.”

Supporters of the declaration want to democratize that conversation and give everyone a chance to take part.

“Every single person on Earth has a right to have a say in what happens to the Moon,” said Gorman. “It’s important for the environments in which we live, and for our cultural and scientific worldviews. It really does not belong to anyone.”

Author Information

Kate Evans (@kate_g_evans), Science Writer

Earthquakes occur when tectonic strain that has gradually accumulated along a fault is suddenly released. Measurements of how much Earth’s surface deforms over time, or the strain rate, can be used in seismic hazard models to predict where earthquakes might occur. One way that scientists estimate strain rate is via orbiting satellites and detailed measurements of how much GPS stations on Earth’s surface move.

There are challenges, however, to using such geodetic data. The stations provide measurements only at specific locations and aren’t evenly distributed—constructing a continuous strain rate map requires that scientists make estimates to fill in data gaps. These interpolated data add uncertainty to resulting mathematical models.

To tackle these issues, Pagani et al. developed a transdimensional Bayesian method to estimate surface strain rates in the southwestern United States, with a focus on the San Andreas Fault. Their method essentially divided the study area into nonoverlapping triangles and calculated velocities within each triangle by incorporating measurements from the GPS stations located inside.

The team didn’t rely on just one such model. They used a reversible-jump Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm to produce up to hundreds of thousands of such models, with slightly tweaked coordinates for those 2D triangles. In fact, across these models, even the number of triangles could change—because the method is transdimensional, the authors didn’t predetermine any parameters. Finally, they stacked all these models together to generate a final continuous strain rate map.

Using test data, the authors found that their approach handled data errors and uneven data distribution better than a standard B spline interpolation scheme. In addition, because the approach included information from many models, it produced a range of strain rate estimates at each point and probabilities for those values.

When the team used the new approach to calculate strain rates around the San Andreas Fault system, they found that their map agreed with past studies. It even successfully identified creeping sections of the fault system from locked segments. The newly described technique could potentially be used by researchers to develop other strain rate maps and may generally have application to other interpolation problems in the geosciences. (Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth, https://doi.org/10.1029/2021JB021905, 2021)

—Jack Lee, Science Writer

Every so often, somewhere beneath our feet, rocks rupture, and an earthquake begins. With big enough ruptures, we might feel an earthquake as seismic waves radiate to or along the surface. However, a mere 15% to 20% of the energy needed to break rocks in the first place translates into seismicity, scientists suspect.

The structure of the mica leaves it prone to kinking, rather than buckling or folding.The remaining energy can dissipate as frictional heat, leaving behind melted planes of glassy rock called pseudotachylyte. The leftover energy may also fracture, pulverize, or deform rocks that surround the rupture as it rushes through the crust, said Erik Anderson, a doctoral student at the University of Maine. Because these processes occur kilometers below Earth’s surface, scientists cannot directly observe them when modern earthquakes strike. Shear zones millions of years old that now reside at the surface can provide windows into the rocks around ancient ruptures. However, although seismogenically altered rocks remain at depth, heat and pressure can erase clues of past quakes, said Anderson. “We need some other proxy,” he said, “when we’re looking for evidence of earthquakes in the rock record.”

Micas—sheetlike minerals that can stack together in individual crystals that often provide the sparkle in kitchen countertops—can preserve deformation features that look like microscopic chevrons. On geology’s macroscale, chevrons form in layered strata. In minuscule sheaves of mica, petrologists observe similar pointy folds because the structure of the mica leaves it prone to kinking, rather than buckling or folding, said Frans Aben, a rock physicist at University College London.

In a new article in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, Anderson and his colleagues argue that these microstructures—called kink bands—often mark bygone earthquake ruptures and might outlast other indicators of seismicity.

Ancient Kink Bands, Explosive Explanation

To observe kinked micas, scientists must carefully cut rocks into slivers thinner than the typical width of a human hair and affix each rock slice to a piece of glass. By using high-powered microscopes to examine this rock and glass combination (aptly called a thin section), Anderson and his colleagues compared kink bands from two locations in Maine, both more than 300 million years old. The first location is rife with telltale signs of a dynamically deformed former seismogenic zone, like shattered garnets and pseudotachylyte. The second location exposes rocks that changed slowly, under relatively static conditions.

Comparing the geometry of the kink bands from these sites, the researchers observed differences in the thicknesses and symmetries of the microstructures. In particular, samples from the dynamically deformed location display thin-sided, asymmetric kinks. The more statically deformed samples showcase equally proportioned points with thicker limbs.

Kink bands, said Aben, can be added to a growing list of indicators of seismic activity in otherwise cryptic shear zones. The data, he said, “speak for themselves.” Aben was not involved in this study.

To further cement the link between earthquakes and kink band geometry, Anderson and colleagues analyzed 1960s era studies largely driven by the development of nuclear weapons. During that time, scientists strove to understand how shock waves emanated from sites of sudden, rapid, massive perturbations like those produced at nuclear test sites or meteor impact craters. Micas developed kink bands at such sites, as well as in complementary laboratory experiments, said Anderson, and they mimic the geometric patterns produced by dynamic strain rate events—like earthquakes. “[Kink band] geometry,” Anderson said, “is directly linked to the mode of deformation.”

Stressing Rocks, Kinking Micas

In addition to exploring whether kinked mica geometry could fingerprint relics of earthquake ruptures, Anderson and his colleagues estimated the magnitude of localized, transient stress their samples experienced as an earthquake’s rupture front propagated through the rocks, he said. In other words, he asked, might the geometry of kinked micas scale with the magnitude of momentary stress that kinked the micas in the first place?

By extrapolating data from previously published laboratory experiments, Anderson estimated that pulverizing rocks at the deepest depths at which earthquakes can nucleate requires up to 2 gigapascals of stress. Although stress doesn’t directly correspond to pressure, 2 gigapascals are equivalent to more than 7,200 times the pressure inside a car tire inflated to 40 pounds per square inch. For reference, the unimaginably crushing pressure in the deepest part of the ocean—the Mariana Trench—is only about 400 times the pressure in that same tire.

With micas, once they’re kinked, they will remain kinked, preserving records of ancient earthquakes in the hearts of mountains.By the same conversion, kinking micas requires stresses 8–30 times the water pressure in the deepest ocean. Because Anderson found pulverized garnets proximal to kinked micas at the fault-filled field site, he and his colleagues inferred that the stresses momentarily experienced by these rocks as an earthquake’s rupture tore through the shear zone were about 1 gigapascal, or 9 times the pressure at the Mariana Trench.

Aben described this transient stress estimate for earthquakes as speculative, but he said the new study’s focus on earthquake-induced deformation fills a gap in research between very slow rock deformation that builds mountains and extremely rapid deformation that occurs during nuclear weapons testing and meteor impacts. And with micas, he said, “once they’re kinked, they will remain kinked,” preserving records of ancient earthquakes in the hearts of mountains.

—Alka Tripathy-Lang (@DrAlkaTrip), Science Writer

Sea level is rising worldwide, thanks in large part to climate change. Rising seas threaten coastal communities and ecosystems, including marshes that lie at the interface between salt water and freshwater. Tidal marsh ecosystems feature distinct plants and play key ecological roles, such as serving as nurseries for fish. It is known that some tidal marshes can avoid destruction by migrating inland or through formation of new soil that raises their elevation, but a better understanding of how they are affected by rising seas could inform efforts to plan for and mitigate the effects.

New research by Holmquist et al. investigates the vulnerability of tidal marshes to sea level rise across the contiguous United States. The findings show, for the first time, that opportunities for resilience differ between more northerly and more southerly marshes across the country.

To help clarify the fate of tidal marshes in the contiguous United States, the researchers combined tide gauge data on sea level rise rates with soil formation rates reported in previous studies. They also incorporated information from local maps of water level, elevation, and land cover. Using these data, they calculated the potential for the marshes to adapt to rising seas by 2100 under several climate change scenarios.

The analysis revealed that different tidal marshes have different pathways for resilience to sea level rise. Specifically, more northerly marshes are more likely to lack opportunities to migrate inland, whereas more southerly marshes are more likely to lack the capacity to form and build up enough soil to sufficiently keep pace with sea level rise.

The researchers also found that depending on the degree of climate change, 43%–48% of tidal marsh area in the contiguous United States is vulnerable to destruction by sea level rise. These vulnerable areas tend to occur along the Gulf of Mexico and mid-Atlantic coasts, at sites where opportunities for both inland migration and vertical soil buildup are limited.

This study highlights the importance of considering local conditions when gauging the vulnerability of tidal marshes to rising seas. The findings could aid future research and planning efforts. (Earth’s Future, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020EF001804, 2021)

—Sarah Stanley, Science Writer

There is no escaping the reality of the climate crisis: There is no Planet B. A group of astronomers, united under the name Astronomers for Planet Earth (A4E), is ready to use their unique astronomical perspective to reinforce that important message.

A good number of exoplanets may potentially be habitable, but humans cannot simply cross the vast distances required to get there. And other planets of the solar system, although accessible, are all inhospitable. “Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand,” Carl Sagan famously wrote in his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot. The book’s title is based on the eponymous image showing Earth as small, fragile, and isolated. Sagan’s reflection on the image shows that astronomers can have a powerful voice in the climate debate.

Astronomy, a Field with a Reach The Voyager 1 spacecraft took a picture of Earth from a distance of more than 6.4 billion kilometers. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

The beginnings of A4E go back to 2019 when two groups of astronomers, one from the United States and the other from Europe, decided to join forces. Today the network numbers over a thousand astronomers, students, and astronomy educators from 78 countries. “We’re still trying to get ourselves together,” said Adrienne Cool, a professor at San Francisco State University. “It’s a volunteer organization that’s grown rapidly.”

Astronomy, its practitioners note, has a surprisingly wide earthly reach. “We teach astronomy courses that are taken by, just in the U.S., a quarter million students every year,” said Cool. “That’s a lot of students that we reach.”

And their influence goes way beyond students. About 150 million people visit planetariums around the world each year. Astronomers also organize countless stargazing nights and public lectures. Perhaps more than any other discipline, some researchers think, astronomy has the opportunity to address masses of people of all ages and occupations.

Toward Sustainable Science

There is no guide for how best to incorporate climate science into an astronomy lecture. A4E works as a hub of knowledge and experience where astronomers can exchange teaching and outreach material. Members also learn about climate science and sustainability from regularly organized webinars.

However, although astronomers are spreading their message, they also acknowledge the need to address the elephant in the room: Astronomy can leave a significant carbon footprint. “I don’t feel comfortable telling the public, ‘Look, we really need to make a change,’ and the next moment I’m jumping on a plane for Chile [to use the telescopes],” said Leonard Burtscher, a staff astronomer at Leiden University in the Netherlands. “That’s a recipe for disaster in terms of communication.”

On average, an astronomer’s work-related greenhouse gas emissions are about twice as high as those of an average citizen in a developed country. The emissions per person are many times above the goal set by the Paris Agreement to limit the global increase in average temperature to less than 1.5°C relative to preindustrial levels.

“Let’s get real, and let’s figure out how to make sustainability the key part of what our institutions do in addition to astronomy.”At a recent virtual conference of the European Astronomical Society, hosted by Leiden University, A4E organized a session in which astronomers and climate crisis experts discussed the measures that would help reduce the carbon footprint of astronomy. Observatories and institutes are moving toward a greater reliance on renewable energy, and plans for future facilities take carbon assessment into account.

Perhaps the most contentious topic of discussion in academia is air travel. One solution is to hold fewer in-person conferences, as studies have shown that moving conferences to a virtual setting dramatically reduces the carbon footprint. “Good things [come] out of virtual meetings,” said Burtscher. “Better inclusivity, lower costs, often a higher legacy value, recordings of talks and discussions.” On the other hand, proponents of face-to-face meetings argue that a virtual setting impedes fruitful collaborations and networking that are especially important for young scientists. In the end, the community will likely have to make a compromise.

The impetus for change is strong. More than 2,700 astronomers signed an open letter released on Earth Day 2021 in which they recognized the urgency of the climate crisis and called for all astronomical institutions to adopt sustainability as a primary goal. But this is just the beginning, and the time for action is ticking away. “So let’s get real, and let’s figure out how to make sustainability the key part of what our institutions do in addition to astronomy,” said Cool.

—Jure Japelj (@JureJapelj), Science Writer

Machine learning techniques are becoming important tools to solve questions in Earth system sciences. In recent years, Earth system data has grown dramatically. These data come from a variety of sources such as remote sensors, in situ observations, citizen science, and increasingly high-quality computer simulations of the Earth. Scientists use this data to make better predictions (such as weather forecasts or epidemic projections), test new hypotheses, improve existing models, and develop new theories. However, scientists are currently unable to fully benefit from these large volumes of data because our current ability to collect and generate data surpasses our ability to process, understand, and use them.

This sharp increase in data volumes has been accompanied by recent advances in machine learning algorithms from within the computer science community. “Machine learning” is a generic term for a variety of emerging data science algorithms that use data to learn to perform tasks without being explicitly programmed to. Such machine learning models can perform a variety of tasks with near-human-level skill including image recognition, classification, prediction, and pattern recognition. These algorithms have already revolutionized several domains, such as computer vision (He et al. 2015), natural language processing (Devlin et al., 2018), and video games (Justesen et al., 2019).

Atmospheric scientists, oceanographers, and climate scientists are now using machine learning algorithms to better predict, process, analyze, and learn from large volumes of Earth systems data.The success of machine learning has been adopted by atmospheric scientists, oceanographers, and climate scientists who are now using machine learning algorithms to better predict, process, analyze, and learn from large volumes of Earth systems data.

For example, machine learning has become a common approach in pattern identification and prediction of weather and climate phenomena such as synoptic fronts (Lagerquist et al., 2019) and El Niño (Ham et al., 2019). It is possible that, in the near future, a machine learning algorithm could provide a more accurate weather forecast than traditional numerical weather models. The idea that a purely data-driven algorithm could outperform state-of-the-art numerical weather models which are based on our physical knowledge is remarkable and could change our approach to the simulation of weather and climate (Balaji, 2021). Benchmarking community datasets to formalize data-driven numerical weather prediction intercomparisons to this end is emerging (Rasp et al., 2020).

For longer-term climate projection, another modeling approach that is gaining popularity is combining machine learning with traditional climate models to create hybrid climate models. This approach relies on (a) mathematical equations derived from physical laws for simulation of processes that are accurately captured in climate models­­­ and (b) machine learning for the simulation of processes, such as clouds, that are not well captured by current climate models, but for which high-fidelity training datasets can be generated (Gentine et al. 2018, Brenowitz and Bretherton 2018, Rasp et al. 2018, Yuval and O’Gorman 2020). This hybrid approach has been attracting scientists because it might answer some pressing questions regarding the climate sensitivity of Earth. However, there are still non-trivial issues with this approach. For example, using out-of-the-box machine-learning algorithms as a part of a climate model can lead to physically inconsistent results, such as the violation of conservation laws (Brenowitz and Bretherton, 2019).

Failure of machine learning algorithms to produce physically consistent results is one reason why there is a growing recognition that machine-learning approaches should be used in nuanced ways that incorporate ideas from existing scientific knowledge.Failure of machine learning algorithms to produce physically consistent results is one reason why there is a growing recognition that machine-learning approaches should be used in nuanced ways that incorporate ideas from existing scientific knowledge.

Such approaches are commonly referred to as knowledge-guided machine learning approaches. The idea of these approaches is to find ways to integrate scientific knowledge into machine learning algorithms; for example, by designing algorithms that can enforce physical constraints (Beucler et al. 2021), or tailoring training data to allow strategically emulating subprocesses in ways that also enable constraints be satisfied (Yuval et al. 2021).

Much remains to be explored in this new subfield, including what combination of algorithmic versus knowledge-guided approaches will lead to reliably robust operational process emulators. Since machine learning is empirical, and the decisions of how to optimize neural networks can also have a major effect on their performance in hybrid climate models (Ott et al. 2020), a healthy technical debate in the machine learning assisted climate simulation literature is emerging.

One promising thread is the advent of explainable artificial intelligence. Most machine learning applications lead to improvements in our predictive abilities but provide little information regarding how these machine learning algorithms provide accurate prediction, and many scientists perceive machine learning algorithms as uninterpretable “black-boxes.” However, in recent years, atmospheric scientists, oceanographers, and climate scientists have been adapting methods that help to interpret machine learning algorithms. For example, these interpretability methods can help us to understand when and why these algorithms can provide reliable subseasonal forecasts (Mayer and Barnes, 2021) and assist in discovering unknown equations for ocean turbulence (Zanna and Bolton, 2020). These ideas give us hope that machine learning algorithms together with the abundance of Earth system data could lead to scientific breakthroughs.

A new special collection aims to bring together new research that uses machine learning to advance Earth system modeling.To accelerate this important application and communication within the fields of atmosphere, ocean, and land, a new special collection in Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems (JAMES), entitled “Machine Learning Application to Earth System Modeling” aims to bring together new research that uses machine learning to advance Earth system modeling.

The collection is open to manuscripts covering use of new machine learning methodologies developed for advancing Earth system science (for example, interpretability of machine learning algorithms, physics-guided algorithms, causal inference, and hybrid modeling) and applications of Machine learning to Earth system modeling (for example, predictability of weather and climate, Machine learning parameterizations, uncertainty quantification). Manuscripts should be submitted via the GEMS website for JAMES.

—Janni Yuval (janniy@mit.edu, 0000-0001-7519-0118), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA; Mike Pritchard ( 0000-0002-0340-6327), University of California Irvine, USA; Pierre Gentine ( 0000-0002-0845-8345), Columbia University, USA; Laure Zanna ( 0000-0002-8472-4828), New York University, USA; Jiwen Fan ( 0000-0001-5280-4391), Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, USA

Graduate student Christopher Sterpka remembers the first time he saw ball lightning, as a 9- or 10-year-old staying at his grandparents’ house in West Hartford, Conn. He was home alone and watching a thunderstorm from a window one summer night.

“I remember this blue, kind of fuzzy ball just sort of descended diagonally out of the clouds,” said Sterpka, who conducts research in lightning physics at the University of New Hampshire’s Space Science Center. He watched the ball of light float down to the ground in the distance and disappear out of sight in a matter of 5–10 seconds. “I was terrified.”

Sterpka told his grandfather, a science teacher, when he returned home. His grandfather had no idea what it was but asked around. That’s when they heard what the strange sighting may have been: ball lightning. “It’s actually one of the incidents that probably got me interested in lightning in the first place.” Sterpka saw ball lightning again in his twenties while driving near a thunderstorm in Massachusetts.

“Nobody has correlated any of the observations with any other measurements.”Ball lightning has been reported for centuries but hasn’t been reliably observed by scientific instruments. A new website hosted by New Mexico Tech physicist Richard Sonnenfeld and Texas State University engineer Karl Stephan is collecting eyewitness accounts to improve the basic understanding of the phenomenon. They’ll compare the accounts with weather radar systems to characterize the factors that could lead to ball lightning.

“This is one thing that hasn’t been done,” said Martin Uman, a lightning scientist at the University of Florida who is not involved in the research. When it comes to ball lightning, there are lots of observations, but “nobody has correlated any of the observations with any other measurements.”

If ball lightning turns out to be explainable by science, the findings could revolutionize our understanding of physics. As it stands, nothing can explain a glowing ball with no fuel source that can last up to a minute, said Sonnenfeld. “That’s fascinating physics,” he said. “Revolutionary physics even, if you can believe it.”

A Scientific Riddle In 1886, Dr. G. Hartwig illustrated ball lightning arriving through a chimney. Credit: Dr. G. Hartwig/NOAA, CC BY 2.0

Eyewitness accounts describe hovering balls of light typically about 20 centimeters in diameter, roughly the size of a bowling ball. The balls appear white, yellow, orange, blue, or (rarely) green and can last from mere seconds to up to a minute before fading, flashing, or exploding into nothing.

People have seen ball lightning outside their windows from a distance, mere meters away in their kitchen, roving down the aisles of airplanes, and coming down their chimneys. Other reports are widely different, like a luminous ring the size of a truck that lasted 10 minutes, as described by an Austrian woman. The balls of light typically happen during thunderstorms and may have led, in very rare cases, to burn injuries or deaths.

“In my opinion, there are probably multiple causes for what’s described as ball lightning,” Uman said.

Despite hundreds of eyewitness accounts from across the world and going back centuries, scientists can’t explain ball lightning or re-create it in the lab. Theories abound: Ball lightning is the result of a failed lightning bolt, of hot ionized silica, or of chains of charged particles. One paper even proposed that ball lightning came from magnetic stimulation in the brain. “I think that a lot of the theories have a piece of the truth,” Stephan said, “but none of them have the whole truth.”

“Since there [are] virtually no data, anybody can come up with a theory, and you can’t prove them wrong.”“There are literally dozens of ball lightning theories because it’s an unconstrained situation,” Stephan said. “Since there [are] virtually no data, anybody can come up with a theory, and you can’t prove them wrong.”

A self-described “wet blanket” in the niche world of ball lightning scholarship, Stephan wants to “clear the underbrush” of scientific theories and see what’s left.

The public reporting website launched last year might help with that. Eyewitnesses fill out a Google form with the location, date, time, and description of the ball lightning sighting and send photos or videos to an email address.

Stephan and Sonnenfeld have received written reports of sightings from decades ago, like Sterpka’s account. Those are helpful, Sonnenfeld said, but he hopes for more recent sightings with more exact information.

Thunderstorms are tracked across the globe using national and global lightning networks that record every flash (with some error). With precise location and time information of a ball lightning sighting, the team could check how close a thunderstorm was to the event. The team could also investigate the charge of the nearby cloud-to-ground lightning (positive or negative) and the current of the lightning to learn more about the conditions. This kind of technology was not around 20 years ago, said Sonnenfeld.

Identifying Sprites

It turns out there is a precedent for eyewitness accounts of strange lightning occurrences that turn out to be real.

For decades, pilots spoke of strange pink flashes of light above thunderclouds, but scientists had no explanation for the phenomenon. It wasn’t until a physicist accidentally captured a similar event on a low-light television camera while testing equipment for a rocket launch that the phenomenon came to light, wrote Matthew Cappucci for the Washington Post. This special type of lightning is called a sprite, and it occurs 50–90 kilometers above the ground, in the mesosphere. (For comparison, airplanes fly about 9–11 kilometers up.) Sprites flash reddish light over massive patches of sky for less than a tenth of a second. They’re said to happen after a positive bolt of lightning hits the ground from a thunderstorm below.

The perfect sighting of ball lightning would include multiple witnesses with accounts that agree, videos from more than one angle, the object casting a shadow, and enough detail to compare with radar. “No ball lightning sighting has had all that good stuff happen yet,” Stephan said. “But maybe it will someday.”

—Jenessa Duncombe (@jrdscience), Staff Writer

Hawaii’s Kīlauea volcano is very large, very active, and very disruptive. Its recent activity belched tons of sulfur dioxide into the air every day. But aside from gases, eruptions from basaltic volcanoes like Kīlauea release metals and metalloids, including ones considered pollutants, like copper, zinc, arsenic, and lead. These metal pollutants have been found in the ground, water, rain, snow, and plants near vents posteruption, as well as in the air downwind.

But how these volcanic metals are transported from active eruptions, their longevity in the environment, and how much and where they end up settling were open questions until recently. “We know that volcanoes are a huge natural source of these metals, which are environmentally very important,” said Evgenia Ilyinskaya, an associate professor at Leeds University in the United Kingdom. “But there’s just not very much known about what happens to them after emission—how long do they stay in the atmosphere, and where do they go?”

Sampling the Wind

To better understand how concentrations of metals change as the plume travels downwind during an active ongoing eruption, Ilyinskaya and fellow researcher and University of Cambridge doctoral student Emily Mason set up sampling stations around the Big Island of Hawaii. Intermittently over the course of almost a year, samples were collected as close as possible to Kīlauea’s eruptive vent and at another six sites around the island. The farthest site was more than 200 kilometers distant, and all were in the path of the trade wind. Samples were also collected 300 meters above the plume using a drone.

“Kīlauea is a wonderful natural laboratory for studying volcanism and particularly that type of basaltic volcanism.”“Kīlauea is a wonderful natural laboratory for studying volcanism and particularly that type of basaltic volcanism,” said Mason. “It’s a well-understood system, and that makes it a very appealing target.”

The research, published in Communications Earth and Environment, is the biggest study of volcano metal emissions ever done.

Ilyinskaya, Mason, and their colleagues found an enormous difference between pollutant levels during and after the eruption—up to 3 times higher than periods without volcanic activity. They discovered that different pollutants fall out at different rates: Some pollutants, like cadmium, remain in the plume for only a few hours, whereas others, like cerium, remain for much longer. “It was quite striking to see that there is such a large difference,” said Ilyinskaya. “That’s something we didn’t really expect.”

The researchers think that metal deposition may be very sensitive to atmospheric conditions like winds, rain, and humidity. Different environments could mean different patterns of volcanic metal dispersal and pollution. For example, drier and colder environments, like Iceland, may have different patterns than hot and humid environments like Hawaii.

Laze Plumes and Copper

Mason also studied laze plumes, created when the heat of the lava very quickly evaporates seawater, by taking samples where the lava entered the ocean. The phenomenon is relatively rare, as there aren’t that many basaltic volcanoes near sea level where lava can reach the ocean. But laze plumes are worth studying, says Mason, because there have historically been much larger basaltic eruptions that created large igneous provinces, like the Deccan Traps. These eruptions may have released tons of metals and metalloids into the surrounding environment. “It’s possible that laze plumes are a slightly underestimated force in those events,” said Mason.

The amount of copper being released by laze plumes is surprising, said Mason. Seawater is rich in chlorine, and she thinks it enables more copper to degas. Laze plumes could even release more copper into the environment than large magmatic plumes, she said. This copper would also be released directly into the ocean and could affect marine environments, either by worsening ocean acidification or adding nutrients. “The fact that copper emissions could be comparable between the laze plume and the magmatic plume is definitely surprising to me,” said Mason.

Volcanologist and geochemist Tobias Fischer of the University of New Mexico, who was not involved in either study, said this research is “a really nice approach and really advances our understanding of not only the quantity of metal emissions but also their life cycle in a volcanic plume like this one.”

Health Risks

At some point during the 3 hours the plume took to reach the closest sampling station, its metals were radically depleted. Researchers hypothesize that the heavy-metal pollutants may have formed a very water soluble chemical species that fell out in rain close to the eruption site. Ilyinskaya is collecting samples from Iceland’s Fagradalsfjall volcano to learn more about what happens in those first 3 hours of a plume’s lifetime.

“If this process is really happening, then it could be disproportionately impacting people living close to the volcano,” she said. “On the other hand, it may be lessening the impact on the communities further away.”

A researcher wearing protective gear walks toward a laze plume created by Kīlauea’s lava entering the ocean. Credit: Evgenia Ilyinskaya/USGS

One goal of studies like this is to create a pollution map that models where the plume will go, concentration of metals, and atmospheric conditions to help communities avoid exposure.Volcanic pollutants have been linked to health problems like thyroid cancer, multiple sclerosis, and respiratory diseases. One goal of studies like Ilyinskaya’s and Mason’s is to create a pollution map that models where the plume will go, concentration of metals, and atmospheric conditions to help communities avoid exposure. Fischer said a pollution map would be a wonderful contribution. “Then you can probably make some pretty good predictions of where you get high concentrations of metal deposition and what kind of metals,” he said.

More research needs to be done on how metals are stratified within a plume and also their long-term accumulations in water and plants, said Mason. “Volcanic metals are an insidious threat in terms of the way that they build up in the environment,” said Mason.

—Danielle Beurteaux (@daniellebeurt), Science Writer

 

Correction, 19 July 2021: This article was updated to correct a quote from Evgenia Ilyinskaya: “But there’s just not very much known about what happens to them after emission.”

This is an authorized translation of an Eos article. Esta es una traducción al español autorizada de un artículo de Eos.

Un suelo sano es fundamental para la vida en la Tierra. Además de su importancia en la agricultura, el suelo es la base de casi todos los ecosistemas terrestres de la Tierra. El carbono orgánico del suelo (COS) se utiliza con frecuencia como indicador de la salud del suelo, desempeña un papel importante en el ciclo del carbono terrestre y tiene enormes implicaciones para la adaptación al cambio climático. Entender esta dinámica a escala planetaria será vital cuando la humanidad intente alimentar a una población en aumento bajo el creciente estrés de un planeta que se calienta.

En un nuevo estudio, Endsley et al. utilizaron la teledetección para estudiar la dinámica del COS en la superficie a nivel mundial, usando los datos del satélite Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) de la NASA, que combina las mediciones radiométricas de las emisiones de microondas de baja frecuencia en la superficie de la Tierra con la modelización para calcular la humedad del suelo y el estado de congelación-descongelación. En particular, los datos de los radiómetros de microondas del SMAP pueden combinarse con un modelo físico de absorción de carbono por parte de las plantas y de descomposición del suelo para estimar el presupuesto global de carbono terrestre en el producto SMAP Level 4 Carbon (L4C). El equipo utilizó el SMAP L4C en combinación con otros datos de satélite, como las observaciones de la vegetación procedentes de los instrumentos del espectrorradiómetro de imágenes de resolución moderada, para crear un modelo que caracterizaría específicamente el COS.

El resultado es una estimación global del COS hasta una profundidad de 5 centímetros con una resolución horizontal de 9 kilómetros cuadrados. Los científicos compararon sus estimaciones con mediciones anteriores y registros de inventarios de suelos de COS y descubrieron que su modelo coincidía generalmente con ellos. Los investigadores afirman que el nuevo modelo les permitirá monitorear cambios estacionales y anuales del COS y ofrecerá también una visión de cómo los ecosistemas y el planeta en general responden a las inundaciones, las sequías y otros acontecimientos de corta duración. (Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, https://doi.org/10.1029/2020JG006100, 2020)

—David Shultz, Escritor de ciencia

This translation by Monica Alejandra Gomez Correa (@Mokasaurus) of @GeoLatinas and @Anthnyy was made possible by a partnership with Planeteando. Esta traducción fue posible gracias a una asociación con Planeteando.