Hot topics within Earth and Planetary sciences 2012

Every third month Science direct lists the twentyfive hottest articles within a specific field of research. The present Hot topics list is based on number of downloads for each article during the full year of 2012.  However, the list is still a good indicator if one wants to find out what’s hot in geosciences.

Based on the Science Direct list for 2012, I have compiled the three hottest topics within Earth and Planetary sciences, and these are:

1. Fresh water treatment/resources 6/25
2. Ecology/Palaeoecology/Evolution 5/25
3. Climate change/ocean acidification 5/25

Compared to the last published list the research focus of 2012 based on the most downloaded papers from Science Direct have changed somewhat. The most downloaded papers are now within Fresh water treatment/resources and three of these papers deal with reverse osmosis desalination. Reverse osmosis is one of the main technologies for producing fresh water from saline water and other wastewater sources. Fresh water shortage has become an important issue affecting the economic and social development in many countries, but there are still many challenges with reverse osmosis, as discussed by Kang & Kao (2012) and Pérez-Gonzaléz et al. (2012).

Papers on Ecology/Palaeoecology/Evolution and Climate change/ocean acidification have also attracted a lot of attention of the research community during 2012. The two subjects are tightly linked as exemplified by one of the most downloaded papers (nr 10 of 25), a review paper by Leslie Hughes from 2000: Biological consequences of global warming: is the signal already apparent?

Interestingly, the top downloaded paper within Earth and Planetary Sciences 2012 is a paper demonstrating the potential of microbial U(VI) reduction as an alternative technology to currently used physical/chemical processes for treatment and recovery of uranium in the nuclear industry (Chabalala & Chirwa, 2010). Perhaps this signals an increasing global need to find new methods in order to retreive natural resources that were previously considered to costly and technologically challenging?

To me, the 2012 hottest topics list signals increasing awareness within the research community that climatic and environmental changes, pollution and exploitation of natural resources presents new challenges in a world with increasing population pressure and demand of economic development!

Open letter to the President and to the Vice-President of the European Geosciences Union

Reblogged from Barbara Wohlfarth:

Vienna, April 9, 2013

Dear colleagues,

It has been a few years since I last attended the EGU General Assembly, which has always been an excellent forum for me to catch up on latest research results, to learn more about new research directions, and of course to meet colleagues. This year I am attending the EGU General Assembly again, mainly because the Earth Science Women’s Network had invited me to give a lecture.

Read more… 555 more words

Gender equality within the European Geosciences Union? Apparently not...

A new three-year project on the Triassic-Jurassic boundary :-)

Me and my colleagues at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), the Department og Geography and Geology (IGN) at Copenhagen University, and the Department of Earth Sciences (IG) at Århus University, have received a large strategic research grant from Geocenter Denmark to continue our research on the Triassic-Jurassic boundary. This three-year project will focus on the Danish Basin, where we are fortunate enough to have preserved not only a thick marginal marine to fully marine TJ-boundary succession in the subsurface of southern Sweden and Denmark,  but also marginal marine to terrestrial strata outcropping in Scania (S Sweden) and on the Danish island Bornholm.

Wintery scenery from our latest fieldwork session in March 2013 (Photo: G.K. Pedersen).

The new project is partly a continuation of our three-year (2010-2013) starting grant from Geocenter Denmark which also dealt with the TJ-boundary of the Danish Basin, the results of which were published in Lindström et al. 2012 in Geology and Petersen and Lindström 2012 in PlosOne, and participated to Richoz et al. 2012 in Nature Geoscience.

By joining forces, our team now incorporates sedimentology, palynology, micropalaeontology, isotope geochemistry, inorganic and organic geochemistry, organic petrography, magmatic petrography and diagenesis.

We are delighted to be able to continue our research on the TJ-boundary and the events leading up to, and succeeding the end-Triassic mass extinction.

Closing in on Jurassic Park

Several years ago, while I was still working at Lund University, one of my colleagues Dr Johan Lindgren came to me one day with a microscope slide and asked me if I could help him check if there was anything in it. The only things we found were very small (ca 10-15 μm) spiny oval things, definitely not something palynological but most likely something organic of some sort.

Johan Lindgren showed me a paper by Mary Schweizer et al. (2007) which depicted small spiny cells from soft-tissue preserved inside bones from three different dinosaurs Tyrannosaurus rex, Triceratops horridus and Brachylophosaurus canadensis.

These cells were believed to be osteocytes, small star-shaped cells that reside inside bones and which can live as long as the organism itself and are capable of bone deposition and resorption.

The small spiny oval things that Johan Lindgren had in his slide definitely looked similar, although they did not come from a dinosaur but from a 70 million year old Mosasaur.  Because this bone came from a marine reptile, a creature that had lived and died in the ocean, Johan Lindgren was determined to rule out that contamination from sea-sediment or other organisms was the source of the small spiny cells, and after years of research he finally published his results in the highly acclaimed open-access journal PLos One: Lindgren et al. 2011: Microscopic evidence of Cretaceous Bone Proteins. The photographic plate below from the Lindgren et al. (2011) paper shows the tiny spiny osteocytes still looking amazing after 70 million years!!

Fig. 1. from the Lindgren et al. (2011) paper showing the spiny osteocytes in photos A-F.

Research performed on soft-tissue preserved in fossil bones are bringing us closer to the plot of Stephen Spielberg’s 1993 motion picture “Jurassic Park”, after a novel by Michael Crichton. Mary Schweitzer and her colleagues have just published a new paper in the journal Bone: Schweitzer et al. (2013): Molecular analyses of dinosaur osteocytes support the presence of endogenous molecules, in which their data are the first to support preservation of multiple proteins and to present multiple lines of evidence for material consistent with DNA in dinosaurs.

You can read more about this study on: ScienceDaily

However, there is still a long way to go before anyone can genetically modify frog-DNA and recreate Tyrannosaurus rex or any other dinosaurs like they did in “Jurassic Park”.

Jurassic Park logo, borrowed from the official website: http://www.jurassicpark.com/
Check it out!

Alberta’s famous dinosaur palaeontologist…

The highly acclaimed dinosaur palaeontologist Professor Phil Currie of the University of Alberta recently added the Royal Canadian Geographical Society gold medal to a long list of awards and accomplishments. Alberta Primetime has published a very nice on-line film about Phil Currie called “Alberta’s doctor of dinosaurs”, which I highly recommend.

Phil Currie is one of the world’s leading experts on dinosaurs, especially theropods of the Tyrannosauridae, and has also worked extensively with the origin of birds. He is also married to Eva B. Koppelhus, a dear old palynology-colleague of mine

Hot topics within Earth and Planetary Sciences (September 2012)

Every third month Science direct lists the twentyfive hottest articles within a specific field of research. The list is based on number of downloads for each article. Unfortunately there is a lagtime between the download count over a three month period and the time the list is published, which means that the Hot topics list today (4/1 2013) still displays the most downloaded papers during July to September 2012. However, the list is still a good indicator if one wants to find out what’s hot in geosciences.

Based on the Science Direct list for July to September last year, I have compiled the three hottest topics within Earth and Planetary sciences, and these are:

1. Ecology/Palaeoecology/Evolution 11/25
2. Water treatment/resources 7/25
3. Environment and pollution 2/25

Since the last published list the research focus of the most downloaded papers have changed somewhat. The most downloaded papers are still within Ecology/Palaeoecology/Evolution but most of those papers deal primarily with evolution.

Number two on the list, Water treatment/rescources, deals primarily with the quality and supply of freshwater, a topic that is of growing importance in our overpopulated world. Strangely, only two papers deal with Environment and pollution, and both those papers are focused on plastic pollution of the marine realm.

Global warming, ocean acidification and mass extinctions

On-going anthropogenic carbon emissions has reached levels 40% higher than pre-industrial ones in 1750, due to human burning of fossil fuels. Despite international discussions and various national efforts to decrease carbon emissions, the amount of heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached a record 390.9 parts per million (ppm) in 2011, according to a report recently released by the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO). As a result, 30% more  atmospheric heat was kept from escaping to space than in 1990. The increased amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere has lead to a 1°C increase in average temperatures worldwide. This may not sound much, but with the long retention time of CO2 in the atmosphere the average temperature will continue to rise for a long time even if we should manage to limit our carbon emissions extensively. The World bank estimates an average temperature rise to as much as 4°C by 2060 unless we start reducing our carbon emissions significantly! The effects of such a dramatic global warming would mean serious threats to the human civilization, with extreme weather, heat waves and sea-level rise, but that is not all…

The geological record testifies to the effects of global warming. Numerous scientific articles dealing with the causes and consequences of the mass extinctions at the end-Permian (252 million years ago) and end-Triassic (201 million years ago) have provided evidence of the dire effects of intense global warming. Both events are linked to massive volcanism from large igneous provinces (LIPs) that emitted huge amounts of CO2 and methane to the Earth’s atmosphere. As discussed by Payne and Clapham (Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, May 2012) such mass extinction events in the geological record may serve as an important ancient analog for the twenty-first century! Climate change and increased temperatures, possibly coupled with destruction of the ozone layer, can account for the extinctions on land, whereas changes in ocean oxygen levels, CO₂, ocean acidification, and temperature made life difficult for marine animals, resulting in the demise of as much as 96% and 80% of all species for the end-Permian and end-Triassic events, respectively.

Recent scientific reports provide warning signals. One of the most well documented consequences of the increased CO2-levels at the end-Permian and end-Triassic events is referred to as the biocalcification crisis. The increased CO2-levels caused upper ocean acidification due to lowering of the pH of surface waters, causing problems for calcareous organisms such as calcareous phytoplankton and reef-building organisms, e.g. bivalves and corals. Scientists have long discussed the on-going coral bleeching as one result of our anthropogenic carbon emissions, but now Bednarsek et al. (Nature Geoscience, advanced on-line publication 2012) report alarming evidence of dissolution of shells on living pteropods (shell-bearing free-swimming sea-snails) in the Southern Ocean, providing further warning signals of on-going ocean acidification.

In addition, Arneborg et al. (Nature Geoscience, advanced on-line publication 2012) show increased inflow of warm and salty bottom waters to the central Amundsen shelf in Antarctica where the thinning of glaciers have persisted over the last decades. The Amundsen shelf is part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet that contains enough ice to raise global sea level by several metres and, because it is grounded mainly below sea level, it is extra sensitive to ocean warming.

These reports, among many others, should serve as serious warning signals to world leaders that we need to take immediate action to reduce carbon emissions. So far, we have not managed to act efficiently on reducing emissions. At the UN-sponsored climate meeting in Copenhagen in 2009 the relatively weak agreement was to a non-binding target of limiting the world’s greenhouse-gas-triggered temperature increase to no more than 2°C (3.6°F) above preindustrial levels to limit the potential damage. The 2011 numbers provided by  the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) clearly show that we are failing to keep even that!