Footprints in the sand

Archeologists working along the shore of British Columbia have found the oldest known footprints in North America. The image above is from a NYT article describing the find: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/28/science/footprints-oldest-north-america.html
The article has a link to the actual scientific article that was published in PLOS One laste week.
The find adds a bit of evidence to the still contentious idea that the first human colonists to North America arrived via boat, takeing advantage of the rich coastal marine resources along the Pacific Coast of North America.  The hypthesized route has been called the "kelp highway".

Plugging Holes

The process that allowed us to came together as a global society to address the depletion of earth's ozone layer is one of the great success stories of ecosystem management.  First scientists provided a clear and unambiguous warning about the threat and what was causing it.  Policymakers, governments, and private industry used that information to design practical solutions and to implement them.  Governments came together and took collective and decisive action to support those solutions.  That culminated 30 years ago in the signing of the Montreal Protocol, which helped us phase out the use of chlorofluorocarbons and hydrochlorofluorocarbons that are the main enemies of stratospheric ozone.

 However, check out this BBC story about the rise of other compounds that are beginning to have a detrimental affect  http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-41585552

 One of the main ones is dichloroethane that is used in the manufacture of polyvinyl chloride (PVC).  PVC is everywhere.  Agriculture, is one example where it is increasingly being used for things like irrigation pipe, green houses, and row covers among other things.

This news story is based on a recent scientific paper.  Check out the original source here:
https://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/17/11929/2017/

Also note that there is still scientific controversy about this.  Unlike the case when the Montreal Protocol was signed

Check out this paper that came out today in PNAS:
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/long/1702078114v1

The lead author, William Ripple, is from OSU.

This is from the Significance section of the article:

Determining the drivers of extinction risk has been a key pursuit of conservation biology. Considering that body mass could be a strong predictor of extinction risk, we constructed a global database of body masses for 27,647 vertebrate species. Results show that the smallest- and largest-bodied vertebrates have elevated extinction risk. The largest vertebrates are mostly threatened by direct killing by humans, whereas the smallest species are more likely to have restricted geographic ranges—an important predictor of extinction risk—and be threatened by habitat degradation. Declines of large and small vertebrate species will truncate the size distributions characterizing these taxa, jeopardizing ecosystem services to humans, and generating cascading ecological and evolutionary effects on other species and processes.

Strange Brew

While we have made great strides in improving drinking water quality around the world, incidents like the crisis in Flint Michigan http://nyti.ms/1RuBB29 indicate that access to safe water can still be an issue even in the most developed countries.  Access to safe drinking water is probably most tenuous in parts of the developing and recently developed world.  Check out this news story from the NYT reporting on recently released Chinese water pollution statistics: http://nyti.ms/25UCOFi  The headline statistic is that over 80% of the tested groundwater wells is unfit for bathing.

The World Tomorrow

Despite (or perhaps because of) how adaptable humans are, we tend to have a hard time planing for the future.  This hinders our ability to grapple with issues that have no or few immediate impacts, but that potentially have big long term ones.  Climate change is one of these issues.  Even climate scientists and policy makers who are thinking about the long term impacts of climate change tend to have a short frame of reference relative to the history of life on the planet.  A paper that just came out in Nature Climate Change, tries to broaden our time horizon a bit.  It summarizes some of the predictions for what a warmer world (caused by us now) will look like 10,000 years from now.  You can read the actual article here: http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2923.html

and a news summary from the Washington Post here:

http://wpo.st/JBGA1

That story has a cool video from NASA showing actual data on the more recent sea level changes that have already happened over the last 23 years.

Age of the Humans?

As the class readings this week show, there is a lot of evidence that humans have profoundly altered the planet.  This BBC article:

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35259194
reports on the scientific panel of experts that is trying to decide if these changes are profound enough to officially declare a new geologic epoch called the Anthropocene.  The panel is also trying to settle details like when exactly the Anthropocene should be defined as starting.
 The Panel's interim findings have just been published in Science:
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/351/6269/aad2622

Currently, we are residing in the epoch classified as the Holocene that began about 12,000 years ago, which was preceded by the Pleistocene.

You Are What You Eat

The invention and global spread of agriculture is one of the most profound events in the history of the earth.  It  dramatically altered the distribution and abundance of plants and animals as well as the fundamental bio-geochemical cycles that regulate the planet.  There is now evidence that it also changed the genetic makeup of humans.  Check out this NYT article that describes a recently published study that has for the first time linked human genomic changes (i.e. evolution) with agriculture: http://nyti.ms/1jgdzZC
The actual scientific paper is here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature16152.html