Rapid Uplift

We All Need A Little Luck In Life

suvrat_k@yahoo.com (Suvrat Kher) — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 06:26:00 +0000

From Discovery News:

Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only person officially recognized as a survivor of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings at the end of World War II, has died at age 93....

Getty Images/WireImage

I am predicting that The Economist will carry an obituary.

Tasmanian Devils And One Selfish Gene

suvrat_k@yahoo.com (Suvrat Kher) — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 08:39:00 +0000

Genes don't have real motives. Selfish in the term "selfish gene" really reflects the metaphorical motives of genes and not the real motives of individuals carrying those genes.

Ordinarily, different genes in the multicellular bodies of organisms co-operate. Such a system has evolved because in sexually reproducing multicellular organisms the reproductive fate of any gene depends on the successful reproduction of the individual. Genes in the somatic cells of the body, cells which form the body mass can extend their lives only if a copy of themselves in the sex cells gets passed on. Co-operating to build successful bodies is the only way out.

But what if a gene is able bypass this system? What if a gene is able to unlink its reproduction from the reproduction of the individual?

Just such a situation has occurred in the spread of cancerous facial tumor in populations of the Tasmanian Devil - a carnivorous marsupial. Scientists working on these animals have identified a nerve cell type known as Schwann cells as the progenitor of this cancer which must have originated through mutations in one Schwann cell of one individual Tasmanian Devil.

Devils are aggressive creatures and they often bite each other especially during mating. The cancer cells graft themselves on facial tissue of the other individual and grow and spread.The tumor gene thus spreads from animal to animal by bypassing the normal channels of reproduction. The cancer cells have been able to successfully invade another body in this way because there is very little genetic variation in the immune system of the Tasmanian Devils. That may be because there are a small inbred population. Immune cells don't recognize grafted cancer cells as foreign and don't reject them.

The mutant gene (s) responsible for this cancer can be thought of as a special type of a selfish gene. A selfish gene is a mutant gene that enhances its own reproduction relative to the other copy of the gene or other genes in the cell. So it is not just any old mutation. Most copying accidents or mutations harm the gene as well as the body. But in this case the "selfish gene" is a mutation that natural selection favors at the level of the gene or the cell and opposes at the level of the individual.

Such genes will spread rapidly since the reproduction time of the gene via cellular replication is faster than the generation time of an individual.

We don't think of somatic cells as a separate life form. The cells that make up our bodies are us. But occasionally as in the case of the facial cancer in the Tasmanian Devils the us can morph into the other. Most cancerous cell types which rebel against the body don't have an extended evolutionary future. The cell lineage dies with the death of the individual. This particular cancer cell however, which was once part of the Tasmanian Devil is evolving into a parasite. It has developed a life of its own.

This study illustrates several broader principles of evolution.

Firstly that evolution has no foresight. There is no long term benefit of the Tasmanian Devils that evolution is striving towards. Evolution through natural selection is all about immediate advantage. Mutant cells have found a way to propagate independent of the body and selection will favor that regardless of whether that is harming Devil individuals and populations.

Second, it demonstrates that natural selection doesn't only act at the level of the individual. It can act on any entities which shows certain properties. If entities vary in certain traits, if these traits are heritable and if these traits affect "fitness" i.e. they enable one variant to reproduce more than the other then natural selection is off and running. In the natural world these conditions are most familiarly met by whole organisms but in principal they can be met by cells or genes within cells.

In this case, selection is operating at two levels. At a lower level cells which contain the mutant gene are fitter than cells that don't contain this gene. But at a higher level individuals that don't contain this mutant gene are fitter than individuals that do. In most cases the "interests" of the gene and the individual coincide. Here, because their reproductive fates have been decoupled the relationship has turned antagonistic.

Finally, the study shows that the reconstruction of a complete evolutionary narrative requires thinking across the entire (or as much as possible) hierarchy of life. The so called division between reductionists and practitioners of "holistic" biology is and always has been a false dichotomy. Genes, cells, individuals, social behavior and population history all go to make the unfortunate story of the Tasmanian Devils more complete.

** Wishing readers coming to this post via Desipundit a very Happy New Year. If you missed my earlier announcement do note that my blog Reporting on a Revolution has been renamed Rapid Uplift. ...more in tune with the broad earth sciences / geology theme I write about. Thanks for your support.

Hydrologist Will Be One Of Top Careers In 2010

suvrat_k@yahoo.com (Suvrat Kher) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 04:30:00 +0000

US News and World Report has a listing of best science and technology careers and hydrologists figures among the top.

Job opportunities should be plentiful for environmental scientists and especially for hydrologists. There were 8,100 hydrologist jobs in 2008, and employment should grow more than 18 percent by 2018. The government has stepped up environmental regulations and has begun cleaning up contaminated and hazardous waste sites—all efforts that increase the need for hydrological research. Competition for openings is limited by the small number of universities and colleges that offer degrees in hydrology.

The figures are for the United States but I would predict that a career to do with water holds a lot of promise in any country. This is not a new observation. Sometime back Science Careers carried a lengthy article on hydrogeology careers and called them "recession proof".

Population pressures, water reallocation challenges between rural and urban consumers, climate change and past mismanagement of water resources means there will be plenty of work for hydrologists and hydrogeologists for decades to come.

Now That's An Earthquake Cluster

suvrat_k@yahoo.com (Suvrat Kher) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 03:57:00 +0000

From my USGS magnitude 5+ earthquake feed:

Begining with a foreshock of mag 6.5, a bigger shock of 7.2 and then a series of aftershocks of 5+; all within several hours of immense rumbling and shaking in the Solomon islands at the junction of the Australian plate and the Pacific plate. In the map below the plate boundary trends NW-SE just south of the islands.

Here is the tectonic summary from USGS:

The Solomon Islands earthquake of January 3, 2010, likely occurred at the boundary between the Pacific and Australian plates, where the Australian plate subducts beneath the Pacific towards the northeast at a rate of approximately 95 mm/yr. The mechanism of the January 3rd earthquake is consistent with its occurrence in relation to underthrusting of the Australia plate beneath the Pacific plate, as part of this subduction process.

The Solomon Islands arc as a whole experiences a very high level of earthquake activity, and many shocks of magnitude 7 and larger have been recorded since the early decades of the twentieth century. The January 3rd, 2010 earthquake nucleated approximately 50 km to the southeast of a M8.1 earthquake in April 2007, which with an associated tsunami caused at least 50 fatalities and destroyed several coastal villages on nearby islands. An M6.5 foreshock occurred less than one hour before this main shock, in approximately the same location.

Reporting on a Revolution Has Been Renamed Rapid Uplift

suvrat_k@yahoo.com (Suvrat Kher) — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 07:32:00 +0000

I got me a new blog name this new year. In a civil ceremony Reporting on a Revolution has been rechristened Rapid Uplift.

I think the new name has a restless dynamic geologyey feel to it. It is more in tune with the broad theme of my blog of a changing planet..being reshaped and re sculpted through geological processes and biological evolution. I have to admit that the focus of this blog has changed somewhat over the last two years. My initial purpose of keeping a tab on poor and sensationalistic science reporting especially by the Indian media prompted the blog title Reporting on a Revolution.

Over time though I have found myself writing more and more on geology related themes often not taking cues from media reports or without any intent to criticize media reporting but writing simply because I found a particular story interesting.

Rapid Uplift will continue this geology centered science outreach attempt.

Do update your blogrolls. The page and feed URLs are unchanged.

Wishing everyone a Happy New Year!

Some Good Holiday Listening and Reading

suvrat_k@yahoo.com (Suvrat Kher) — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:36:00 +0000

Here's a list of holiday whiling-away's for you:

Literary and Musical Stuff:

1) The Definitive Dickens- Tom Ashbrook discusses a new biography of Charles Dickens with biographer Michael Slater

2) Alexander McCall Smith- Author of No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency talks about his work and life in Africa and Scotland.

3) Thelonius Monk - Terry Gross of Fresh Air talks with Robert D. G. Kelley about the Jazz genius.

Sciency Stuff:

1) Is Evolution Predictable? Simon Conway Morris writes about it in the context of evolutionary convergence.

2) A Christmas Carol - Economist Steve Landsburg explains why Scrooge has been getting a bum rap from society.

3) Gene Patenting - Should your genes be patented and how the process impacts research and you.

4) U.S. Health Care - David Brooks looks at it as an ultimately values question.

Silly Stuff:

1) Nazis and GIS - Adolf Hitler is not pleased with the latest version of ArcGIS software.

I won't be posting now until early January.

Wishing everyone Happy Holidays!

K-12 Earth Science Education Status Report For The U.S.

suvrat_k@yahoo.com (Suvrat Kher) — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 04:52:00 +0000

Something for geology / earth science educators. The American Geological Institute has released a status report for the year 2007 titled "The Pulse of Earth Science Education" which follows earth science education trends in 50 states.

Go here to access the information.

The AGI provides information on:

teacher certification requirements
relevant middle and high school courses
K-12 enrollment levels
Earth science within state science standards
state assessment of students
textbooks adopted and relevance to Earth science
contact information for state education agencies

via Geology.com

Geothermal Energy And Earthquakes

suvrat_k@yahoo.com (Suvrat Kher) — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 07:26:00 +0000

Theunis Bates at Sphere has a good write up about the link between geothermal energy projects and earthquakes.

These projects are controversial. The company that started a geothermal project in Basel, Switzerland is facing lawsuits for allegedly triggering earthquakes. Another project in California was recently canceled due to similar earthquake fears.

From the article:

Paul Younger, a professor of energy and environment at Britain's Newcastle University, says that it's not unusual for much smaller tremors to be felt on the surface when pressurized water is forced into rock deep underground. But, he adds, the process is normally only carried out in seismically stable areas, as the shakes caused by hydro-fracturing can interact with existing deep faults and cause larger trembles.

And Basel is anything but stable. The city has a long history of quakes and was all but wiped out in 1356 by an estimated magnitude 6.5 earthquake – the largest ever known to have occurred in Western Europe. "What they were doing was actually fairly conventional," Younger says. "It's where they were doing it that was unconventional. If you go drilling and stimulating near a known active fault, you're asking for trouble."

That may raise a question. Why not just drill in portions of the crust that are known to be structurally very stable and which have no active faults?

....geothermal projects will almost always be located in geologically active areas with lots of faults and which are earthquake prone because the required heat will be found at shallower depths making such locations economically more attractive than drilling deeper in colder more stable parts of the crust.

As our understanding of faults in geologically active regions increase it may be possible in the future to more carefully select sites based on how "stressed out" individual faults are....but there will always be a general overlap between geothermal sites and earthquake prone areas.

Here is the situation for India. Earthquake potential (increases in darker shaded areas) compared with geothermal potential. There is large overlap as expected.

According to a report by D. Chandrasekharam of the Indian Institute of Technology Mumbai, the geothermal provinces of India have a potential to produce around 10,600 MW of power. I haven't seen other government figures for this. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy website does not have the numbers for geothermal.

In any case, if this industry is to have a future, geologists and engineers will have to grapple with the connection between attractive geothermal energy sites and potential earthquake hazards and also importantly develop strong transparent public outreach mechanisms to disseminate information for review and debate.

Tip: Geology.com

Get The Beer Out: The Geologists Are Coming

suvrat_k@yahoo.com (Suvrat Kher) — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 04:20:00 +0000

Wired Science has a fun article by Betsy Mason on why geologists like beer. The fluid has been flowing freely at the recent AGU meeting in San Francisco and bartenders are swearing that geology conferences see more of that stuff being consumed than at any other science meeting.

Why do geologists love beer so much?

When it’s hot, and you’ve been hiking all day carrying 50 pounds of rocks, do you want a Merlot? - Jim Metcalf of Syracuse University

It goes down a lot easier than water because a lot of the places we go, we can’t drink the water - Jonathan Gourley of Trinity College.

Science doesn’t work when people keep secrets and don’t share their data, And what could be better to help with the free flow of information? - Daniel Jaffe of the University of Washington.

More theories here:

In India you get a decent collection of lagers but not much selection in ales. Hopefully that might be changing soon. I attended a wine festival in Pune last year and there were stalls by a couple of breweries showing off their new ales which will be in shops soon.

Good stuff.

I drink mostly Okocim Palone a Polish malt lager which is now being brewed in India. In my opinion it is the best of the Indian lagers. Richer, toastier and more flavorful than the rest.

....geologists in India gulp down a lot too.

Unfolding The Earth With Some Novel Map Projections

suvrat_k@yahoo.com (Suvrat Kher) — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 04:58:00 +0000

New Scientist has run a piece describing the work of Dutch computer scientist Jack van Wijk's work on novel map projections.

From the press release:

"Myriahedral projection" was developed by Jack van Wijk, a computer scientist at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands.

"The basic idea is surprisingly simple," says van Wijk. His algorithms divide the globe's surface into small polygons that are unfolded into a flat map, just as a cube can be unfolded into six squares.

Cartographers have tried this trick before; van Wijk's innovation is to up the number of polygons from just a few to thousands. He has coined the word "myriahedral" to describe it, a combination of "myriad" with "polyhedron", the name for polygonal 3D shapes.

Check this out: You can try to fit the earth's surface on unfolded nets of different shapes.

The new algorithms though go a step further. The nets have many more sides and are shaped more intelligently in ways that arrange continents and oceans in different configurations but with minimum distortion to their shapes where they are cut and unfolded.

For example here the oceans are one continuous expanse surrounded by coastlines

You can see the rest of the maps at this picture gallery

Jack van Wijk won the Cartographic Journal's Henry Johns award for the best map-making research paper of the year.

Weather Ain't The Same As Climate Mr. Aiyar

suvrat_k@yahoo.com (Suvrat Kher) — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 14:45:00 +0000

It's amazing how much confusion there still is between weather and climate.

Mr. S A Aiyar writes a well read and well respected economics column in the Times of India. I like his columns. He has a gift for explaining complex topics in a succinct and simple manner. He gets it right a lot. Rarely though is he so completely wrong.

Like here where he tries to explain why climate projections can't be trusted:

If new technologies cannot reduce emissions by 80% save at a huge cost that causes economic distress, governments will abandon emission targets. They will not deliberately create deep recessions just to curb emissions.

Will this lead to climate disaster? Maybe and maybe not. Scientific knowledge of the weather is very limited, and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections are just intelligent guesstimates. IPCC scientists may be the best in the world, yet they cannot predict the weather more than five days ahead.

Can they predict the next drought in India? No. The next El Nino? No. The number of hurricanes in the Caribbean next year? No. So, can they accurately predict the weather 100 years hence? Surely not. When we know very little about a problem, we tend to worry endlessly about worst-case scenarios. That does not make the worst case certain, or even probable.

He's right when he says that climate scientists cannot predict the weather 100 years hence.

But they are not trying to. That's not what climate scientists do.

Weather is the day to day or short term atmospheric conditions. Climate and climate change is about long term changes in average weather. If you want to know what the weather will be on a Sunday 100 years from now you will still have to rely on a meteorologist to tell you 3 days before that Sunday.

Climate scientists on the other hand will tell us that if you take a ten or twenty year interval 100 years from now, the average temperature of that interval will be higher than today.

That much is a near certainty and it follows from the basic greenhouse effect. If we keep emitting greenhouse gases the earth will warm up. What is uncertain is by how much and what exact regional effects will it have. That's where the climate models and IPCC projections come in. And they show a range of possibilities depending on assumptions made of starting conditions, emission trajectories for different economies and not yet well understood positive and negative feedback's in the climate system.

For drafting sensible policies to reduce emissions we don't need to know whether a series of powerful hurricanes will hit New Orleans in year 2102 or whether they will hit it in 2105 or the exact year in which India might face a crippling drought in the future.

Its enough to know that 100 years from now these events will be more common (update: or more intense). And our current and improving understanding of climate change does provide enough confidence on that issue, more than Mr. Aiyar wants to give it credit for.

Its a shame that a person as erudite as Mr Aiyar has misrepresented climate science and misinformed the public in so blatant a manner.

Can India Cut Emission Intensity Without Carbon Sequestration?

suvrat_k@yahoo.com (Suvrat Kher) — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 08:12:00 +0000

Yes, is the answer at least according to the Indian government.

A reader left a comment on my previous post on the distribution of potential basalt and ophiolite carbon reservoirs asking:

In your original post you suggested this was probably a non-starter for India, given our unwillingness to implement cuts in emissions. Do you think recent moves by China (and now more modest ones by India) to cut emission intensity will change the equation at all?

The original post was the one on Deccan Basalts as a potential reservoir for carbon sequestration projects.

I don't know about the Chinese plan but the 5 point plan put forward by Mr. Jairam Ramesh the Minister of Environment and Forest, India, to cut carbon emission intensity does not include carbon sequestration as a strategy.

Instead the government is aiming to reduce emission intensity by 20-%-25% by 2020 using:

1) Mandatory fuel efficiency standards for vehicles by December 2011
2) Mandatory green building code
3) Amendments to energy conservation Act
4) Progress report on forest cover
5) 50% of new capacities in power plants to be based on clean coal technologies

If you think these are big concessions by the Indian government you would be wrong. There is nothing really radically new about the way India plans to achieve its voluntary target of reducing emission intensity. That process was already underway much before Mr. Jairam Ramesh's announcement.

Emission Intensity is a measure of the energy efficiency of your economy - emissions per unit GDP - and between 1990 and 2005 India reduced its emission intensity i.e. improved its energy efficiency by about 17%.

Automobile makers have been steadily improving vehicle efficiency for years. Other industries too in an effort to be competitive have been streamlining their processes and improving efficiency. The Indian government years ago has set targets for expanded forest cover. Even India's notoriously wasteful coal power plants have been improving their efficiency over the last few years and a large fraction - as high as 60% to 70% - of new coal plants from both the public and private sector will be built using cleaner technology, the so called supercritical coal plants which use advanced coal combustion technology. This trend is being driven not by government fiat but by the rising price of coal due to increased demand and the need to import larger quantities of the fuel.

All this implies that this new target the government has announced won't require politically difficult decisions. Instead, the government is relying along with a few nudges and pushes on the naturally growing efficiency of industry to achieve a large fraction of the target of reducing emission intensity.

On the other hand geoengineering strategies like carbon sequestration which avoid emissions altogether face several hurdles. For at least the immediate target of reducing intensity by 2020 the science and technology may not be ready. Sequestration is also expensive. This means coal plants will have to bear much higher costs than they would voluntarily agree to. And that means government regulations and tough political decisions. And there are potential land acquisition issues that may come up if the sites chosen for sequestration projects underlie agricultural or forest land.

So emission intensity riding on the back of increasing efficiency of the Indian economy is likely going to be the government mantra for some time to come.

Unfortunately increased warming is a result of the total amount of greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere. And those despite a reduction in emission intensity will keep increasing, although at a slower rate.

Nice Map Of Basalt and Ophiolite Potential Carbon Reservoirs

suvrat_k@yahoo.com (Suvrat Kher) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 05:13:00 +0000

Here is a great looking world map which shows the distribution of continental basalts (a) and ophiolite complexes (b). Ophiolites are slices of the earth' s oceanic crust and upper mantle that have been exposed on land by tectonic forces. They are found along ancient and modern convergent plate settings i.e. regions where two plates are converging and colliding with each other.

Can these mafic igneous rocks act as reservoirs for storing carbon dioxide?

Source: Permanent storage of carbon dioxide in geological reservoirs by mineral carbonation

The article is open access. I posted about this article before but more from the perspective of the Deccan Basalts as a potential CO2 reservoir and how that might conflict with other more immediate uses of that rock body.

I thought I'd pass along the link to this map too.

Nature Geoscience Issue On Carbon Dioxide Sequestration

suvrat_k@yahoo.com (Suvrat Kher) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 05:00:00 +0000

The December issue of Nature Geosciences has a series of articles on carbon sequestration. The editorial is behind a pay wall but the Correspondences and Commentaries are open access.

There is an interesting article on the geopolitics of geoengineering in which the author Philip Boyd raises the concern that the benefits and unintended detriments of geoengineering strategies would be spatially non-uniform and might lead to conflict between nations:

....A key concern is the scale on which geoengineering strategies, both for solar radiation management and carbon removal proposals, are used. Stratospheric sulphur injection and ocean fertilization would need to be adopted on a large scale and sustained over long periods of time if they are to have any globally significant effects. But it is the very scale and longevity of these schemes that makes regionally heterogeneous side effects more likely, and the potential for discord between nations more real. The unintended dispersal of geoengineering agents will only exacerbate the problem. For instance, ocean circulation will rapidly disperse modified surface and subsurface waters, which may be depleted in both nutrients and oxygen owing to fertilization-driven increases in productivity and carbon export. Such low-quality waters could infiltrate marine exclusive economic zones....

Getting global or regional political consensus on anything is damn difficult and geoengineering too will face that test. Overall the articles lean towards implementing some sort of geoengineering for controlling atmospheric CO2 levels and climate change.

Why Didn't Darwin Come To India?

suvrat_k@yahoo.com (Suvrat Kher) — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 09:24:00 +0000

Mauritius is the closest he got but he did use examples from India's biodiversity to bolster his case for evolution. Vikram Doctor writes an excellent article in the Times of India on Darwin's India connection.

That connection was Edward Blyth - self taught zoologist and curator of the museum of the Royal Asiatic Society Calcutta - who maintained a long and fruitful correspondence with Darwin about the animals and plants native to India.

Darwin acknowledges this contribution as

"his large and varied stores of knowledge , I should value more than that of almost any one."

This is the second impressive intellectual conversation about evolution I have come across in India via outreach and media over the last few weeks. Earlier in November at the British Library in Pune, biologist Madhav Gadgil talked about early evolutionary thinking, Darwin's contributions and recent advances in evolutionary theory.

Doctor's article too covers a lot of ground. He gives us a sense of the work and social environment struggling scientists had to face in India. I read and posted on David Gilmour's The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj recently. It describes the day to day lives of British civil servants in 1800's India. Their lives were hard but Blyth faced an additional problem. He stood outside the administrative hierarchy and was on a weaker social standing than other officers of the civil services. Self taught scientists from poor backgrounds were looked down upon by the Raj officers who during the mid 1800's mostly came from Britain's upper classes. There is a lot packed in the article on the difficulties and tribulations Blyth faced during his career in India.

Doctor's article also clarifies the controversy on whether Darwin really deserved the credit for his work or whether as some say he plagiarized Alfred Russel Wallace's ideas who had coincidentally discovered natural selection around the same time. That Wallace proposed a theory of evolution through natural selection is undeniable, but both Wallace and Blyth recognized that just presenting an idea is half the work in science. Backing it up with evidence is harder. Darwin besides proposing a theory also did the hard work of compiling the evidence for evolution through natural selection. He can rightly claim most of the credit.

As an aside and something Doctor does not get into is that Wallace too has been painted in extremes. For some, he should be placed on a higher pedestal than Darwin. Others say - unkindly - that his only real contribution was that he hastened Darwin into publishing a shorter, streamlined and more accessible version of his theory. Darwin's earlier plan to publish a tome running into several thousand pages was shelved in fear of being scooped upon receipt of Wallace's theory. Still others point to the latter part of Wallace's career when he doubted that the human brain could be a product of evolution and use that to discredit him.

That is in my opinion just...well unkind. Wallace did discover natural selection independently and contributed valuable insights into other fields like biodiversity, natural variability of populations and bio-geography. That he could not compile evidence like Darwin did or that he leaned towards mysticism later in his life does not diminish the originality and importance of his earlier work.

Having said that, convincing people that evolution had occurred required evidence. And there is no doubt that Darwin made a better case for it than anyone else in his times with a little help from friends and colleagues like Edward Blyth.

Vikram Doctor's article is a pleasure to read. And...yes he does offer an answer to why Darwin didn't come to India. Don't miss it.

Mapping India: Land Degradation and Desertification

suvrat_k@yahoo.com (Suvrat Kher) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:43:00 +0000

In the November 25 issue of Current Science, researchers from the Indian Space Research Organization release a map and some important estimates of the extent of land degradation and desertification affecting mainly dry, semi-arid and dry- sub humid areas of India.

Source: Desertification/land degradation status mapping of India

About 69% of the total land area of the country - about 228 million hectares - falls in one of these three climatic categories. The numbers from this mapping project is cause for concern. They indicate that land degradation has affected just under half the extent - 105 million hectares of these dryland regions, roughly 32% of the land area of India.

The main processes of degradation are water erosion, wind erosion and vegetal degradation through deforestation and overgrazing. The paper gives the extents affected by various degradation processes grouped state-wise.

I wish they had included estimates of degradation by land use. For example how much of agricultural land in each state is being degraded, how much forest and so on. These have been no doubt calculated. They show up as classes on the map, but the paper does not present the results by type of land use affected.

If predictions about changing rainfall patterns over India because of climate change turn out to be accurate they will accentuate many of these degradation processes. Rainfall is predicted to fall in shorter more intense bursts over many regions of India. This would mean more powerful surface runoff and greater soil erosion.

Regions of country which are hot and arid like Gujarat and Rajasthan are likely to get hotter and drier. That would mean more stress on vegetation and great wind erosion.

I come back to the National Action Plan For Climate Change (15 MB) There are 8 missions or strategies to deal with climate change. None of these directly includes the problem of land degradation and desertification in dryland regions. However the National Water Mission, National Mission for a Green India and the National Mission for Sustainable Agriculture seem to have the right overlapping goals that could be focused to address this problem.

I mentioned earlier about the estimates of land degradation according to land use. These numbers matter a lot. Farmers occupying dryland regions are usually poor farmers cultivating marginal lands. If you look at the above map, you will see large regions classified as Agriculture Unirrigated being affected by various processes of land degradation. These are farmlands that are out of the reach of irrigation canals and other State largesse. Millions of farmers cultivate small land holdings, depending only on monsoons and groundwater. Warming and changing rainfall patterns will have a larger impact on these marginal farmers. Their livelihoods and the food security for large number of people in these drylands is at risk from continuing damage to the land.

The National Action Plan For Climate Change needs to single them out for special help.

Charles Darwin Has Been Sighted In Pune

suvrat_k@yahoo.com (Suvrat Kher) — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 08:22:00 +0000

Its been 150 years - November 24th 1859 - that Darwin's book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was published.

The British Library on Fergusson College Road, Pune, has a poster exhibit on the theory of evolution. There are 14 poster boards encompassing the gamut of thinking on evolution beginning with Charles Darwin's voyage to the Galapagos to his subsequent theories of common descent and natural selection to current understanding on topics like speciation, group selection, the evolution of attributes like musical ability - which provides food for thought on whether every feature can be explained as an adaptation or whether some traits originate as spandrels or byproducts of the evolution of some other general feature - to recent thinking on the genome and the importance of mechanisms like epigenetics and gene regulation.

Source: British Council

Earlier on November 12th, biologist Madhav Gadgil gave quite a good talk on the relative roles of cooperation and competition in evolution. He spent quite a bit of time clarifying some common misconceptions about evolution, most notably the (mis)concept of an ideal type. That there is an ideal type or a narrow collection of attributes defining species and populations can be traced to essentialist thinking prevalent since...well since recorded philosophy of thought. One consequence of this thinking is that any individual of that group who exhibits variation outside that "ideal" or narrow range is considered an aberration of nature, a degenerate. Madhav Gadgil very eloquently dispelled that notion and stressed that variation is the norm of life, the fuel which drives evolution.

The sizable crowd which had gathered for the talk asked some thought provoking and challenging questions. There were more technical questions - does the theory of the selfish gene underlie co-operation?...I don't quite remember Dr. Gadgil's answer but here is my take on this. In his book The Selfish Gene Richard Dawkins argues that you can think of natural selection as acting on genes and not the individual. All genes are selfish since their "goal" is to replicate themselves at the expense of their alternative version. Can this explain co-operation? Yes ...in a very general sense if one is thinking of evolution in terms of gene selectionism then co-operation like any other attribute spreads through the spread of selfish genes.

There were also discussions on social Darwinism and how a clearer understanding of evolution - by removing misconceptions like racial purity and group superiority - can help us become a better society...never forget....fitness is local and ever changing and variation is everything....

A few canards were repeated during the talk and discussion, most notably how Hitler was directly influenced by Darwin. He wasn't. He had not read Darwin and had no understanding of evolution and neither did his coterie. Maybe there were a few people throwing around phrases like survival of the fittest but really a heady mix of a radical Christian sense of racial superiority and extreme nationalism more convincingly explain his conversion to arch fascist. Check out this article and this one for a humorous but informative take on the subject.

If you are in town go stop by the British Library. The exhibition runs until November 29th.

California Droughts And Carbonate Cycles

suvrat_k@yahoo.com (Suvrat Kher) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:14:00 +0000

When I was a graduate student in the mid 1990's one of the hot research topics in carbonate sedimentology was the study of shallow marine carbonate depositional cycles. Sediments in shallow marine and even deeper environments are deposited in packages or cycles during periodic sea-level rise and fall. There is a rhythmic beat to this, regulated by the waxing and waning of polar ice sheets or by periodic tectonic subsidence or by an internal clock beating to changing currents and sediment distribution patterns. The periodicity of these cycles is on the scale of tens of thousands of years.

Which of these mechanisms is dominant? That was the big question and the big fight.

GSA meetings used to be fun listening to rival research groups intellectually slug it out. Over the years the waning and waxing of ice sheets (allocyclicity) has been recognized as a common mechanism of generating sediment cyclicity but to give other processes their due, tectonic subsidence and autocyclicity i.e internal forcing due to self regulated sediment accumulation and distribution patterns are also recognized from specific environments.

We worry about a lot of other problems these days, global warming and its effects of rainfall being one. Scientists involved earlier in their career in the study of marine carbonate cycles have started paying attention to geological beats taking place on a much higher frequency.

Isabel Montanez who has published a lot on marine carbonate cycles has a paper with graduate student and colleagues on the rhythmic precipitation of carbonate minerals within cave stalagmites from the Sierra Nevada mountains of California.

Late Pleistocene California droughts during deglaciation and Arctic warming - Earth and Planetary Science Letters

And here is the Science Daily press release.

Cave stalagmites form by minerals precipitating from water dripping from the roofs of caves. Growth speeds up during the rainy season and slows or stops during the dry periods. Growth bands can thus reflect yearly growth much like tree rings. This allows scientists to resolve changes taking place over tens of years. One fairly long stalagmite can record growth over hundreds to few thousand years. In this study the scientists have a record of stalagmite growth - radiometrically calibrated - over a time interval from about 16.5 thousand to about 8.8 thousand years ago covering the end of the last ice age.

During this time interval the climate record from Greenland indicates alternating warm and cold periods lasting a few hundred to a few thousand years. In California the chemical composition of the stalagmite measured over the same time period indicates that during the Greenland warm periods California became drier while Greenland cold periods corresponded with a wetter California.

How do you find this out? Of major interest are the variations in the oxygen isotopes and to a lesser extent the carbon isotope composition of the calcite in the stalagmite.

A graphic makes the geochemical life of oxygen isotopes easier to conceptualize.

Source: SAHRA

The ratio of two oxygen isotopes ¹⁸O and ¹⁶O are measured. The notation d¹⁸O refers to the ratio of ¹⁸O to ¹⁶O. The more negative value of d¹⁸O means enrichment in ¹⁶O. ¹⁶O being the lighter isotope is preferentially enriched in the vapor phase. So if it rains only a little then the precipitation is going to be enriched in ¹⁸O. If it rains a lot i.e. if most of the moisture in the air condenses then eventually the rains will become more and more enriched in ¹⁶O.

This is called the rain out or amount effect.

This oxygen in the rain eventually ends up in the mineral calcite precipitating on the floor of the cave. In the graphic above substitute initial precipitation and later precipitation taking place in different places to less rain and more rain taking place at the same location.

Drier conditions will result in the mineral calcite that makes up the stalagmite growing from relatively ¹⁸O enriched water (elevated d¹⁸O )and wetter periods will result in growth from relatively ¹⁶O enriched waters (depleted d¹⁸O). These changing values are encoded in the calcite growth bands of the stalagmite. The scientists have found with disturbing implications for future California climate that in the past, a decline of ice sheets and warmer climate resulted in a drier California. History is giving us a warning about the expected rainfall patterns over California.

A quick note on carbon isotopes. Here two isotopes ¹³C and ¹²C are measured. Organic carbon is enriched in the lighter isotope because plants preferentially take up the lighter isotope during photosynthesis. During wet periods when the ground above the cave roof supports a lot of vegetation, the water seeping through the vegetation will incorporate a lot of the lighter isotope. During dry periods the water seeping through the cave roof will have relatively less of the lighter isotope. So dry periods will have an elevated d¹³C value (ratio of ¹³C and ¹²C).

So rhythmic deposition or precipitation of carbonate cycles over a wide range of time scales gives us different types of information about earth processes.

Cycles deposited over tens of thousands of years in marine basins tell us about either external controls on sea-level rise and fall like the periodic changes in the earth axial tilt or orbital parameters. Or they tell us about local tectonics changes or other internal regulating mechanisms.

On a decadal scale, precipitation cycles of calcite in stalagmites, may tell us about changing rainfall patterns and warn us about future droughts and water shortages.

Occasionally they may even give us insights into social and cultural upheavals such as the rise and fall of Chinese dynasties. Check out this finding. Its uses the same isotope principles from cave deposits to unravel Chinese climate history over the last thousand years or so and its impact on the Tang, Yuan and Ming dynasties in China.

None of these press releases though have actually explained the isotope effect.

Which kind of irritated me and prompted this post.

Israel -Jordan Border: Rodents Too Behave Differently

suvrat_k@yahoo.com (Suvrat Kher) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 03:50:00 +0000

This from a Science Daily press release on the differences in ecosystems and animal behavior across the Israeli Jordanian border :

....the differences between Israel and Jordan are primarily in the higher level of agriculture and the higher number of agricultural farms in Israel as opposed to Jordan's agriculture that is primarily based on nomadic shepherding and traditional farming. The agricultural fields on the Israeli side of the border not only create a gulf between habitats and thereby cause an increase in the number of species in the region, but they also hail one of the most problematic of intruders in the world: the red fox. On the Jordanian side, the red fox is far less common, so that Jordanian gerbils can allow themselves to be more carefree. The higher reproduction rate of ant lions on Israel's side is also related to the presence of another animal: the Dorcas gazelle. This gazelle serves as an "environmental engineer" of a sort, as it breaks the earth's dry surface and enables ant lions to dig their funnels. The Dorcas gazelle is a protected animal in Israel, while hunting it in Jordan is permitted and compromises the presence of the Jordanian ant lions' soil engineers.

Important lessons for conservation here.

Speeding Up Mineral Reactions To Fight Global Warming

suvrat_k@yahoo.com (Suvrat Kher) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:01:00 +0000

The more familiar method of carbon dioxide sequestration involves capturing and pumping the gas into underground reservoirs where geological traps that have sealed natural gas for millions of years will serve to lock captured CO2 for eons as well.

Nature has published a paper by Jürg M. Matter and Peter B. Kelemen that proposes another method of CO2 sequestration, locking CO2 as carbonate minerals by reaction with a host rock.

Anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions continue to increase rapidly despite efforts aimed at curbing the release of such gases. One potentially long-term solution for offsetting these emissions is the capture and storage of carbon dioxide. In principle, fluid or gaseous carbon dioxide can be injected into the Earth's crust and locked up as carbonate minerals through chemical reactions with calcium and magnesium ions supplied by silicate minerals. This process can lead to near-permanent and secure sequestration, but its feasibility depends on the ease and vigour of the reactions. Laboratory studies as well as natural analogues indicate that the rate of carbonate mineral formation is much higher in host rocks that are rich in magnesium- and calcium-bearing minerals. Such rocks include, for example, basalts and magnesium-rich mantle rocks that have been emplaced on the continents. Carbonate mineral precipitation could quickly clog up existing voids, presenting a challenge to this approach. However, field and laboratory observations suggest that the stress induced by rapid precipitation may lead to fracturing and subsequent increase in pore space. Future work should rigorously test the feasibility of this approach by addressing reaction kinetics, the evolution of permeability and field-scale injection methods.

The advantage here is that the gas is converted into a solid phase and so exists in a more stable form. The principle may be sound but I'm going to think out aloud on bridging the very long distance between scientific possibility and its practical realization in the field for a country like India.

First come the political and economic issues with a scheme of this nature. Those hurdles are immense. India's stated position is of no mandatory limits on emissions, so there is no political urgency in examining CO2 sequestration projects like this one. And this method is going to be expensive as well. Transporting CO2 from emission points to suitable storage sites and then drilling and pumping gas in hard rock ain't going to come cheap. It might work if the price of emitting CO2 is very high. But under the current scenario in India with no limits or penalties on emissions there will be no economic incentives for polluters to even explore a scheme like this.

Besides, there are other urgent practical matters that need to be carefully thought out before rock masses can be given out for CO2 storage.

There is no problem in India finding a suitable host rock. In Maharashtra and adjoining states of Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh there is half a million square km of Deccan Basalts, a rock rich in magnesium and calcium that will provide plenty of reaction surface and storage volume. This potential reservoir is up to 2 km thick in the central portions and along the western ghats. Other areas of the country too have mafic igneous rocks of the right composition that may extend to even deeper crustal levels.

However... where do you drill and store and to what depth before the project becomes too expensive?...

A crustal thickness of up to 1 km underlying cultivated areas must be kept untouched only for groundwater storage. That may seem excessive since groundwater is extracted mostly from the upper few tens to a hundred feet or so. But the Deccan Basalts and other mafic crystalline rocks have deeper aquifers too. Already these are being exploited by groundwater bore-wells that are reaching a few hundred meters in many parts of the country as demand for the groundwater increases.

Water in these crystalline rocks is stored and moves along fractures and cracks. Fracture systems in these rock masses penetrate to great depths and must be kept open if the rock is to act as an effective aquifer. The danger is that gas pumped to depths even greater than 1 km may seep up through these deep penetrating fractures depositing carbonate minerals and plugging up the shallow permeability pathways for groundwater.

You could in principle go to very great depths say much more than 2 km, but at some point drilling through the hard crystalline rock will make the project uneconomic.

So then.... if the choice is between pumping CO2 into the crust to economically viable depths to keeping aquifers healthy, then the health of the aquifers must win out. Timely groundwater access improves crop yield and farmer income. The relation is direct and the benefits immediate. Risking reducing the porosity and permeability of these rocks with carbonate minerals to attain a more nebulous benefit (for people who depend on groundwater) of lowered atmospheric CO2 content will be a suicidal course to take and I unfortunately mean that literally. Groundwater irrigates a major share of cultivated areas and access to it offers the best chance of alleviating grinding farmer poverty in face of uncertain rains and lower crop yields due to increased temperatures.

So, no playing around with rock masses under cultivated areas...that might leave sections of the crust underlying wastelands, forests and urban areas as potential sites. Of these wastelands appear as the most promising sites in terms of the least political and civic resistance to such a project. This provided field experiments demonstrate the feasibility of this project and the political and economic conditions allow its implementation.

India's National Action Plan for Climate Change (15 MB) has very little to say about carbon sequestration. None of the eight missions or strategies meant to deal with climate change include carbon capture and sequestration.

It is under the political radar and it is expensive and India can best mitigate the effects of global warming by keeping the shallow crust fractured and permeable so as to act as an effective aquifer for groundwater.

My feeling is for India at least in the near term this method of preventing atmospheric CO2 buildup is a non-starter.

Meteorite Impact Ended Banded Iron Formation Deposition

suvrat_k@yahoo.com (Suvrat Kher) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 10:09:00 +0000

From the November issue of Geology:

Extraterrestrial demise of banded iron formations 1.85 billion years ago; John F. Slack and William F. Cannon

In the Lake Superior region of North America, deposition of most banded iron formations (BIFs) ended abruptly 1.85 Ga ago, coincident with the oceanic impact of the giant Sudbury extraterrestrial bolide. We propose a new model in which this impact produced global mixing of shallow oxic and deep anoxic waters of the Paleoproterozoic ocean, creating a suboxic redox state for deep seawater. This suboxic state, characterized by only small concentrations of dissolved O₂ (~1 μM), prevented transport of hydrothermally derived Fe(II) from the deep ocean to continental-margin settings, ending an ~1.1 billion-year-long period of episodic BIF mineralization. The model is supported by the nature of Precambrian deep-water exhalative chemical sediments, which changed from predominantly sulfide facies prior to ca. 1.85 Ga to mainly oxide facies thereafter.

I don't have access to the full paper but if this holds up here is another example of how extraterrestrial matter has shaped the geological and biological evolution of earth. A chance meteorite impact ends a prolonged process of iron oxide deposition and enables greater amounts of oxygen to accumulate in the oceans and eventually the atmosphere. That was a precursor for the evolution of more complex cell types like the eukaryotes.

Coincidentally in the October 29 issue of Nature is another paper which hypothesizes that the earth was dry very early in its history and much of the earth's water and hence the ultimate source of the oceans has been derived from ice rich asteroid bombardment about 100 million years after the formation of the solar system. Science Daily has the summary.

Arctic: Carbon Sink Or Source?

suvrat_k@yahoo.com (Suvrat Kher) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 04:43:00 +0000

The USGS has quite an informative press release via Geology.com and a graphic depicting how warming will affect the physical structure of the soil and permafrost in the Arctic region resulting in the release of carbon dioxide and methane.

Image: Zina Deretsky, National Science Foundation

There is still some uncertainty whether warming will result in the Arctic being a net source of greenhouse gases in the short term. Example warming could extend the growing season and this extra plant growth and the migration of the tree line northwards could end up sequestering more carbon dioxide than before. However sustained thawing and release of trapped gases over several decades may eventually overwhelm this balance and result in the Arctic becoming a net source of greenhouse gases.

Interesting statistic: Currently the Arctic releases about 50 million tons of methane per year. That might increase to several times more in the years to come. Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, about 23 times more effective in trapping heat than CO2 on a 100 year time scale, so Arctic warming effects are a real cause for worry.

You'll Understand Homeopathy If You Understand Einstein

suvrat_k@yahoo.com (Suvrat Kher) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 04:57:00 +0000

....Homeopathy - can it get more stupid than this...?

Warning: Advanced degree in physics and chemistry required to follow this discussion:

Now you know why those white pills pack so much punch! They are literally powder kegs of energy.

Isolating Nuclear Waste At Yucca Mountain

suvrat_k@yahoo.com (Suvrat Kher) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 05:32:00 +0000

BLDGBLOG has an interview with Abraham Van Luik, a geoscientist with the U.S. Department of Energy.

Its a long interview about isolating nuclear waste. Yucca mountain and its geology feature prominently.

Definitely worth reading.

Teaching Human Evolution In Pakistan Can Be Dangerous

suvrat_k@yahoo.com (Suvrat Kher) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 05:19:00 +0000

Kenneth Chang of New York Times has written an interesting summary on the teaching and acceptance of evolution across Muslim countries and among Muslim immigrants in many western nations.

Atomic physicist Pervez. A Hoodbhoy went through a dramatic moment while lecturing at a university in Pakistan:

Pervez A. Hoodbhoy, a prominent atomic physicist at Quaid-e-Azam University in Pakistan, said that when he gave lectures covering the sweep of cosmological history from the Big Bang to the evolution of life on Earth, the audience listened without objection to most of it. “Everything is O.K. until the apes stand up,” Dr. Hoodbhoy said.

Mentioning human evolution led to near riots, and he had to be escorted out. “That’s the one thing that will never be possible to bridge,” he said. “Your lineage is what determines your worth.”

Its scary that this took place not at some isolated madrassa but at a national university. Overall acceptance of evolution - especially human evolution - is low in Muslim countries. The technological advancement engulfing these countries is not necessarily paralleled by a more scientific mindset among citizenry. Religious beliefs are playing a large role in driving a wedge between the two. Turkey is a great example. Just 2-3 decades ago creationism was not a factor affecting science education in Turkey. Today, the influence of Islamic parties is greater in society, evolution teaching is diluted at the school level and creationist textbooks are influencing biology syllabus.

The article does not mention Muslims in India but I doubt if attitudes towards evolution are significantly different among Indian Muslims.

And I wonder what the break up would be according to educational level and how it compared to Hindus.