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Saima Iqbal is the fall 2023 science writing intern at Science News. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Harvard College, where she studied the history of medicine, conducted research on cancer immunotherapies, and fell in love with narrative science writing. More
Four decades ago, warm waters from an El Niño event killed off nearly all the corals surrounding the Galápagos. Most coral reefs never recovered (SN: 1/9/15). But in recent months, researchers have discovered vast landscapes of thriving corals in deeper waters surrounding the equatorial islands.
In April, scientists documented the first pristine deep coral reef found in the region, dubbed Cacho De Coral, which sits atop the ridge of an underwater volcano and stretches about 250 meters. On October 26, a second team announced the discovery of an even bigger reef, this one more than 800 meters long, spanning the length of eight football fields.
With coral reefs around the globe in peril due to climate change, the finds are a small piece of good news (SN: 8/9/23). These newfound reefs within the Galápagos Islands Marine Reserve have so far been protected from human influence and the direct impacts of warming waters.
Brittle stars and shrimps are among the creatures living in and around a newly discovered reef west of the Galápagos’ Fernandina Island.Schmidt Ocean Institute
The newest reef was discovered when oceanographer Stuart Banks and colleagues set out on a 30-day expedition to explore parts of the ocean using a remotely operated robot named SuBastian. While in the Galápagos Islands Marine Reserve, which included a visit to Cacho De Coral, the team spotted a second reef.
“It’s like coming into your house and realizing that you’ve got a basement that you never knew was there,” says Banks, of the Charles Darwin Research Station on Santa Cruz Island in the Galápagos. “And it’s full of really cool stuff.”
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The newly identified reefs are in cold waters up to 420 meters below the surface, the Schmidt Ocean Institute, a nonprofit based in Palo Alto, Calif., that operates ocean research vessels, announced in a news release. Such a location probably helped corals living there remain pristine. Unlike corals that flourish in warm, shallow water with lots of sunlight to fuel symbiotic algae, deep-sea corals survive in darker parts of the ocean that don’t warm up as quickly under climate change (SN: 12/11/18).
It’s rare to find so much living coral in one spot, and scientists often need to get close to glimpse everything that’s hiding inside rocky reefs, Banks says. “Seeing these things for the first time is always a big ‘wow.’”
[embedded content]
Using a remotely operated vehicle, researchers captured the marvels of pristine coral reefs found hundreds of meters below the surface of the ocean. Shown are various creatures the team observed on deep-sea reefs in the Galápagos Islands Marine Reserve, including one dubbed Cacho De Coral. More
PITTSBURGH — Salmon may now have their own version of human air conditioning.
This past summer, hundreds of fish in the Wrights River in Nova Scotia, Canada, found reprieve from the heat in human-generated plumes of cold water, civil engineer Kathryn Smith reported October 17 at the Geological Society of America meeting. The work, though only proof of concept, could aid efforts to conserve cold-water species amid the widespread warming of rivers due to climate change (SN: 10/20/22).
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When water temperatures get too hot, fish can become stressed or even die. In rivers, Atlantic salmon and other cold-water species sometimes escape the heat by flocking to cooler areas, which often arise near groundwater springs or relatively cool tributaries.
Lots of work has been done to preserve and augment these naturally occurring refuges, said Smith, of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, “but there hasn’t really been an emphasis or focus on if we can create cold-water habitat.”
So she and her colleagues pumped groundwater that was about 9° Celsius (or about 48° Fahrenheit) from a nearby well into the river, manifesting an artificial plume of water that could be as much as 20 degrees Celsius cooler than the surrounding water.
Researchers pumped groundwater into the Wrights River during the summer to create a plume of cooler water that fish could shelter in (image on the left). A thermal image (right) shows the effect: Cooler water appears darker purple while warmer water and sun-baked rocks are orange and yellow.Kathryn Smith
The plume attracted several hundred fish of varying life stages and species, including Atlantic salmon and brown trout. Most were alevins — juvenile fish still attached to yolk sacs — that occupied the plume throughout the tests. But when a heat wave brought on maximum water temperatures of about 30° C, more mature fish also took shelter in the plume.
For a pump-free approach, the team also rerouted some water from the river into an underground trench, where it cooled before reentering the river. Though this method lowered the water temperature by only a few degrees Celsius, fish were observed frequenting the passively cooled flow throughout the summer.
More work lies ahead to determine how many of these sites would need to be constructed and sustained to significantly benefit fish populations, and how to do so while keeping energy costs low, says John Ackerman, a consulting engineer based in Hazleton, Pa., who was not involved in the research. But the researchers are demonstrating that these solutions can work, he says. “The concept is solid.” More
Berkley Walker didn’t plan on becoming a scientist; he wanted to be an entrepreneur. And he got started early on that goal: In high school in Portland, Ore., he started a granola bar company, which helped pay for his bachelor’s degree in microbiology.
After college, Walker went to work as a product manager at an instrumentation company in Washington state, planning to go to business school and then into biotech. But a class on environmental biophysics at nearby Washington State University in 2009 changed his trajectory.
The course was about using mathematics to model physical systems in nature. “Working that math out to understand how energy and matter exchange within the environment,” Walker says — that was all it took. He decided to pursue a career as a plant scientist. “I wanted to have some kind of usefulness to the world,” Walker says. “Feeding people is where I settled.”
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Amazing but inefficient plants
Today, at Michigan State University, Walker wants to understand the intricate details of how photosynthesis works, with the ultimate aim of improving it.
He remains deeply fascinated by plants: “You just take this little seed, you put it in the dirt and then you get this plant,” he says. “And it spreads these leaves out. And those leaves just take the sun, and they scrub carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and they use that to make the food that we eat, the clothes that we wear, the air that we breathe, energy that we consume. And that’s just miraculous.”
But as impressive as photosynthesis is, it is surprisingly inefficient. A leaf converts just around 1 percent of the sun’s light into usable energy, Walker says. In part that’s because of mistakes in the first step of photosynthesis. The enzyme that captures CO2 molecules and sticks them to sugar makes a lot of mistakes, often grabbing oxygen instead. Those mistakes result in a compound that actually inhibits photosynthesis. Photorespiration, a kind of recycling process, gets rid of that compound — but photorespiration requires a lot of energy.
Losses due to this recycling in the American Midwest over an average wheat and soybean growing season add up to about 148 trillion dietary calories, Walker says. “If you were to convert these calories into doughnut equivalents,” he says, “you would have a stack of doughnuts that would go to the moon and back about 11 times.”
Any efficiency gain could make a huge difference in agricultural productivity. But first scientists have to better understand how photorespiration works.
To that end, Walker came up with an innovative technique to trace carbon molecules in leaves, research reported in a 2022 paper in Nature Plants. The researchers were using flux analysis, which reveals the movements of molecules through plants’ metabolic network. But they needed a better way to freeze the metabolism of a plant. The problem was, there was no way to spray liquid nitrogen into the instrument chamber that held the leaves.
After talking to engineers at the company that makes the instrument, Walker decided to drill a hole in the chamber so his team could insert a nozzle to spray in liquid nitrogen and hit the leaf surface instantaneously. “That’s a really critical step,” says Xinyu Fu, who has been a postdoc in Walker’s lab for the past four years. A lot could change in the 10 seconds it would take to open the chamber and take the leaf out.
Xinyu Fu, a postdoc in Berkley Walker’s lab, prepares to rapidly freeze a leaf for metabolic analysis.Chelsea Mamott/Wisconsin Energy Institute
The work revealed that up to about 40 percent of the carbon-bearing amino acid serine that is produced during photorespiration gets diverted by the plant to be used for something — perhaps protein synthesis — rather than going all the way through the recycling process. That suggests optimizing photorespiration in the context of climate change could result in more nutritious, protein-rich crops. But, “as we’re trying to change it,” Walker says, “we need to understand what trade-offs there might be.”
A generosity of spirit
Colleagues who know Walker best point to his eagerness to collaborate as one of his strengths, along with his generosity of spirit.
Don Ort, a plant scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Walker’s postdoc adviser for nearly three years, says Walker is a committed teacher and colleague. “Being involved in the education of graduate students and postdocs is a passion for him,” Ort says. “He’s very passionate about what he does. He does it with a very high level of enthusiasm and a very high level of optimism. And it’s infectious to people around him.”
Walker sees plant science as one big community that is trying to solve two big problems: How to make crops more productive to feed a growing population, and how to do it in a changing climate, which may pose any number of challenges to agriculture. And he believes we’ll start seeing solutions in the coming decades, whether they come out of his lab or someone else’s.
“Whoever comes up with those, and if they’re shown to work and work repeatedly in a lot of crops, then that’s a really big deal,” he says. “That’s the kind of idea that we’re chasing.” More
From 2018 to 2021, an estimated 10 billion snow crabs disappeared from the eastern Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska, with the population plummeting to record lows in 2021. Researchers had only speculated as to what happened to the missing crabs. Now, a study in the Oct. 20 Science finds that a marine heat wave probably spurred a mass die-off, in part by causing crabs to starve.
“It’s a fishery disaster in the truest sense of the word,” says Cody Szuwalski, a fishery biologist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Alaska Fisheries Science Center in Seattle.
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On average, snow crabs bring in about $150 million of annual revenue for Alaskan fisheries. In the 2021-2022 crabbing season, that revenue fell to around $24 million. With marine heat waves becoming more common because of human-caused climate change, the future of such fisheries and arctic marine ecosystems, more broadly, is uncertain, researchers say (SN: 7/13/23).
The new research can help fishery managers anticipate and prepare for similar events such as the crab collapse in the future, Szuwalski says, particularly when it comes to getting proper disaster aid to affected fishers quickly.
Usually, cold, arctic water makes ideal habitat for snow crabs (Chionoecetes opilio) and other crustaceans. As winter’s thick sea ice melts, the frigid meltwater settles on the seafloor, creating a cold-water pool with temperatures below 2˚ Celsius. Crabs thrive in this chilly sanctuary on the eastern Bering Sea shelf. But a marine heat wave in the region in 2018 and 2019 prevented the usual amount of sea ice from forming, and, according to yearly temperature and population survey data, the cold pool never appeared and then the crab population collapsed.
Szuwalski and colleagues used computer models to analyze temperature data combined with population surveys, fishing catch numbers and lab experiments to look for drivers behind the sudden collapse. Two causes stood out: higher water temperatures and an initially dense crab population.
The water temperature probably didn’t kill the crabs directly, as snow crabs in laboratories can survive in waters up to 12° C. Instead, the crabs might have starved to death, Szuwalski says.
Data show the crab population initially boomed in 2018 — reaching historic highs — thanks to ideal ocean conditions for newborn crabs around 2010. But the crabs also occupied a smaller area than normal, though Szuwalski and colleagues are uncertain why. That means more crabs were crammed onto less space on the shelf. Then came the heat wave. Higher water temperatures can rev the cold-blooded crabs’ metabolism; previous research has shown that the calorie requirements of snow crabs in labs almost double as water temperature rises from 0° to 3° C.
As a result, the crowded crabs probably needed more food, but because of the smaller foraging area they had even fewer resources to sink their claws into. Compared with similar-sized crabs from the previous year, those surveyed in 2018 had lower body weights, another clue starvation played a role in the missing crabs.
“It’s just yet another example of something we didn’t expect, but now we have to live with,” says Christopher Harley, a marine ecologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, who was not involved with the research. In the eastern Bering Sea, it could take at least four years before more crabs of a fishable size start showing up, meaning fishers there will remain in a lurch.
Such effects of marine heat waves are likely to extend beyond snow crabs. Ecosystems in northern latitudes, such as Alaska’s, are changing more rapidly in response to climate change than anywhere else (SN: 8/11/22). Scientists can typically use data from the past to help predict and prepare for changes in the future. But the future increasingly holds events that have never happened on record before — like the snow crab population collapse — so they’re harder to prepare for, Harley says.
That’s especially true, he says, because there hasn’t been enough attention on the secondary effects of marine heat waves on cold-blooded creatures, such as higher calorie needs and the risk of starvation. More
Nearly 20 years ago, the first global assessment of amphibians found the animals facing widespread declines. Now, a second, updated report shows that many amphibians are still in trouble, but with some silver linings, researchers report October 4 in Nature.
“We are realistic and hopeful at the same time,” says Jennifer Luedtke, a conservationist at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which tracks extinction risk trends for species around the world.
In particular, the wealth of data in the new report, which includes about 8,000 amphibian species, could help focus conservation efforts for years to come, says Luedtke, who also works from Washington, D.C., for Re:wild, a conservation organization based in Austin, Texas. That’s what happened after the first Global Amphibian Assessment in 2004, which brought awareness to the amphibian crisis and galvanized researchers to coordinate efforts.
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Having two assessments that can be compared is a big deal, experts say. “It’s important not just to have a picture, but actually to have a sequence of pictures … where you can see what’s happening over time,” says conservation ecologist Ana Rodrigues of CNRS in Montpelier, France, who worked on the first assessment but was not involved in the second. “I’m really happy to see this done.”
Here are five big takeaways from the new report.
1. Amphibians remain more threatened with extinction than any other vertebrate group.
About 41 percent of amphibian species, which include frogs, toads and salamanders, are threatened with extinction, Luedtke and her colleagues found. That’s more than any other group of vertebrates, beating out sharks and rays (37 percent), mammals (27 percent), reptiles (21 percent) and birds (13 percent).
Amphibians held this title in 2004 too, when 39 percent of species were threatened. As part of the 2022 update, researchers also used data to reconstruct the situation in 1980. They found that even in 1980, that number was already high, at 38 percent. Basically, amphibians have been really threatened for a really long time, Luedtke says.
The most common threat that affects amphibians is habitat loss and degradation, with agriculture affecting as many as 77 percent of the studied species. Other threats include climate change and disease, each affecting 29 percent of species. Of course, “these things are never completely isolated,” says Rodrigues, and each threat may increase the likelihood of other threats.
2. Many of the worst amphibian declines are being caused by climate change now, instead of disease.
Luedtke and colleagues also wanted to know which threats were most responsible for driving the worst declines. So they looked at a subset of 788 species that, between 1980 and 2022, moved down an IUCN Red List status level — for instance, from vulnerable to endangered. They found that, in 2004, disease was the primary driver behind the drop in conservation status for 58 percent of that species subset. At the time, the fungal pathogen chytrid was devastating frog populations around the world (SN: 8/23/02). Climate change, on the other hand, was a significant contributor to declines in only 1 percent of species.
Now, less than 20 years later, climate change is behind a status drop for 39 percent of species. That makes it the most common primary driver of declines across the amphibian group, the researchers found. And still the finding is probably an underestimate, Luedtke says, as studies continue to emerge detailing how climate change–related temperature increases, changes in precipitation, extreme weather events and wildfires impact amphibians.
“It’s very worrying,” Rodrigues says. “We’re at the beginning of climate change.… What’s ahead of us?”
Amphibian species in the tepuis, or tabletop mountains, of Venezuela, like this Chimantá poison frog (Anomaloglossus rufulus), are particularly vulnerable to climate change, as they are unable to shift much higher in altitude to escape warming temperatures.F.J.M. ROJAS-RUNJAIC
3. It’s bad around the world. But amphibians are doing worse in some regions than others.
Each region faces its own set of threats. The chytrid outbreak, for example, has affected much of the world, but it hit Central and South America especially hard from the 1970s to the 2000s. That likely explains why that region contains the largest proportion of species in the IUCN Red List categories of highest concern, the researchers say. New Guinea and Africa were spared much of the devastation, though the pathogen has recently started to emerge in sub-Saharan Africa.
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Across Europe and East Asia, habitat loss is the leading cause of decline, followed by a newly emerging fungal pathogen in Europe called Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans, this time that affects salamanders (SN: 9/3/13). It hasn’t yet spread to North America, which would be disastrous, Rodrigues says. The continent is home to more than 200 types of salamanders, over a quarter of the world’s salamander species.
For now, North America’s amphibian declines are most associated with climate change, the report found. South and Southeast Asia are seeing an improving trend among their species’ extinction risk, probably due to better management of protected areas.
4. Scientists know a lot more about amphibians now than they did in 2004.
One of the assessment’s few bright spots is its sheer amount of data. The update includes more than 2,000 additional species — all newly described since 2004. There was also a decrease in species labeled as “data deficient” by the IUCN, from 23 percent in 2004 to only 11 percent in 2022. By comparison, though, less than 1 percent of bird species are listed as data deficient.
While there’s still a long way to go for amphibians, researchers are thrilled by the new amount of information. “It’s like, wow, all the knowledge!” Rodrigues says. “So that’s absolutely good news.” With more data, she says, conservation efforts can be better focused.
This indigo bush frog (Raorchestes indigo) has moved from critically endangered to vulnerable thanks to habitat protection efforts in the Kudremukh Massif mountain range of India.Saurabh Sawant
5. Some amphibian species have improved since 2004.
The new report didn’t just find declines — 120 species saw their IUCN conservation status improve.
About half of those species recovered unaided. Many of those had suffered declines due to chytrid and are now bouncing back, possibly as frogs become resistant to the pathogen (SN: 3/29/18). It’s a source of hope that “we have these little frogs evolving, in front of our eyes, resistance to chytridiomycosis,” Luedtke says.
The other half improved thanks to conservation efforts, the report found. One of those species is India’s indigo bush frog (Raorchestes indigo), which was classified as critically endangered in 2004. A couple years later, a legal battle led to the end of all mining in the Kudremukh Massif mountain range, and the species’ IUCN status has since improved to vulnerable.
Stories like that are evidence that effective habitat protection can make a noticeable difference, the researchers say, and yet, with most amphibians still facing declines, it’s clear that current efforts are not enough. The assessment’s accompanying State of the World’s Amphibians Report focuses on action steps based on the new findings. Among other things, it identifies 50 target conservation areas around the world — including Jamaica, Brazil’s Atlantic Forest and the Central Annamite Highlands in Vietnam — that feature a high density of threatened species.
“Yes, the number of threatened amphibians continues to increase, but our understanding is improving,” Luedtke says. “And because we understand them better, we can act in a more accurate and effective way.” More
Native to the Brazilian Amazon, pied tamarins have always used vocal calls to communicate. But noise pollution from car traffic and other human activity are forcing some tamarins to complement those voice calls with smell markings to alert others to dangers, researchers report September 20 in Ethology Ecology & Evolution.
Most pied tamarins (Saguinus bicolor) live in Manaus, Brazil, inhabiting fragmented patches of forest scattered around urban environments. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, this small, black and whitish-yellow primate is critically endangered.
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Vocal communication is crucial for pied tamarins’ survival; they use it to alert other individuals to danger — an important feat considering the urban environment surrounding them. “Pied tamarins have 12 different types of vocalization with several uses, from pointing to food and cuddling each other to calling out for some danger,” says Tainara Sobroza, a biologist at the Federal University of Amazonas in Manaus.
The “danger” vocalization is particularly important for these animals, Sobroza says, as many are hit by cars and killed when they cross streets to move between forest patches. “We wanted to understand if this type of vocalization is being affected by the noise of urban environments,” she says.
Sobroza and colleagues spent about a year observing pied tamarins, which normally wander in groups of less than 10 individuals. Using radio collars, the team tracked nine groups in Manaus for 10 days each from November 2018 to December 2019. While physically following the groups, the researchers measured the loudness of the alpha female’s alert call and visually counted how often individuals rubbed their chest and lower parts on the ground and trees, spreading an odorous, waxy substance to signal which direction they were heading.
The team thought the tamarins would use fewer vocal callings and more smell-spreading to communicate effectively between groups — but that is not what happened. Estimates of the behaviors suggest tamarins complemented one with the other: They maintained the loudness and quantity of their vocal calls while also marking the terrain with their scents.
“It is just like being at a noisy party, and you want to call a friend that can’t hear you from the other side of the room,” Sobroza says. “Added to calling him or her, you also usually wave and do arm gestures to call the attention of that person.”
The new observations bring extra knowledge about the ecology and behavior of this species, says Luciane Lopes de Souza, a biologist at the University of the State of Amazonas in Manaus who did not take part in the study. “It is very interesting to see that pied tamarins can adapt to use [a scent-marking] form of communication, which we see much more frequently in other species such as the squirrel monkey.”
Human activity is changing the behavior of several species such as birds, spiders and crabs (SN: 6/26/16, SN: 7/16/03). Understanding these changes is crucial if humans want to mitigate their impacts through conservation.
“I do hope this study goes on, as it is of extreme importance we have research like this running for longer periods,” Souza says. “This way, we can understand annual or seasonal changes in animal behavior and think of evolutionary changes they might be facing.” More
For decades, scientists have vigorously debated whether an asteroid strike or massive volcanic eruptions ended the reign of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. Roughly three-quarters of all life on Earth, including all nonbird dinosaurs, went extinct at that time, putting a dramatic end to the Cretaceous Period.
Now, researchers have devised a new way to identify the true dino killer: Let computers take a crack at it.
The result of that computational effort suggests that massive bursts of gas produced by the Deccan Traps eruptions were solely capable of causing the extinction event, the team reports in the Sept. 29 Science. Those eruptions, which lasted roughly a million years, spewed massive amounts of gas-ridden lava across what’s now western India.
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“Rather than come at it from the perspective of ‘let’s blame the volcanoes and explain why’ or ‘let’s blame asteroids and explain why,’” the goal was to have as little human input or bias in the process as possible, says Dartmouth computational geologist Alexander Cox.
The idea was to work backward using evidence from the scene of the crime. Scientists do have a smoking gun: Cores drilled into deep-ocean sediments contain geologic data pointing to deadly bursts of gas to the atmosphere, particularly planet-warming carbon dioxide and ocean-acidifying sulfur dioxide.
But such gases could have come from the asteroid strike, as it incinerated rocks on the planet’s surface, Cox says, or from the Deccan Traps eruptions.
Previous efforts to understand the source of the gases have focused on timing, examining pulses of lava emplacement during the Deccan Traps eruptions, Cox says (SN: 2/21/19). But “we only have best guesses about how much initial gas was in [the lava].” Estimated carbon dioxide concentrations in the lava, for example, vary by an order of magnitude, he says. “So that’s why we approached this from a gas-emissions perspective rather than a lava-flow perspective.”
Vast hardened lava flows, known as the Deccan Traps, cover much of what’s now western India. The lava is the remnant of a massive volcanic event about 66 million years ago. New computer analyses suggest that gases emitted during this event were enough to shift Earth’s temperature and may have led to the demise of nonbird dinosaurs.Baajhan at English Wikipedia
To disentangle the relative contributions of each potential culprit, Cox and Dartmouth geologist C. Brenhin Keller used a statistical model called a Markov chain Monte Carlo approach. That approach systematically considers the probability of different scenarios of gas emissions from the different sources, converging toward possible solutions as the results of the simulations move closer and closer to geologic observations.
What made the researchers’ approach particularly powerful is that they harnessed 128 different processors to run scenarios in parallel, Cox says. “All the processors then compared how they’re doing at the end of every model run, like classmates comparing answers.” That parallel computing meant that computations that would otherwise have taken a year took only a few days.
The observations Cox and Keller used were data collected from three cores drilled into deep-sea sediments, each spanning 67 million to 65 million years ago. In those sediments are foraminifera, ocean-dwelling microorganisms whose carbonate shells contain different isotopes, or forms, of carbon and oxygen. The shells’ chemical makeup records the ocean chemistry at the time of their formation, and so can be used as a proxy to infer past global temperatures as well as how many creatures were thriving in the oceans, and how much carbon was moving between the atmosphere, ocean and land (SN: 1/16/20).
The computer simulations determined that the amount of gas spewed into the atmosphere from the volcanism alone was enough to account for the changes in temperature and carbon cycling determined from the foraminifera data in the drill cores.
As for the asteroid strike, which formed the massive Chicxulub crater in what’s now Mexico, it probably did not produce a big spike in carbon dioxide or sulfur dioxide, the analysis found (SN: 1/25/17).
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But many scientists are not convinced that these findings provide the ultimate answer to this long-standing, complex question. “It’s an elegant way to address this problem,” says Sierra Petersen, a geochemist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Modeling in this way “gives the freedom to find the consensus solution, taking multiple proxy records into account. However, like any model, output depends on input.”
Petersen notes that foraminifera shells are not an ideal proxy for ancient temperatures: The oxygen isotope ratios in foraminifera shells can change not only due to temperature but also due to seawater composition. Different temperature proxies would likely lead to different patterns of gas release reproduced in models, Petersen says.
As for the mass extinction culprit, she adds, “it’s a bit of a leap to say that this study shows the impact didn’t cause the extinction. I think what they show is that the impact was likely not associated with a large [gas] release.” But the asteroid, she says, still could have had other deadly impacts on the planet’s environment.
Indeed, “the Chicxulub impact led to many devastating effects beyond the carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide emissions explored in this study,” says Clay Tabor, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs.
Those include massive clouds of soot and dust kicked up from pulverized rocks due to the impact, he says. Previous research has suggested this dust may have dimmed the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth by as much as 20 percent, inducing a frigid winter that swiftly killed off plants and destroyed habitats (SN: 7/17/20).
What’s more, the new study suggests that the asteroid impact didn’t have a long-term effect on the planet’s carbon cycle, based on carbon isotope data recorded in the foraminifera shells for the million years after the extinction. But there was an abrupt drop in the abundance of those creatures corresponding to the time of the impact, Tabor says. “The rapid rate of change caused by the Chicxulub impact was likely responsible for its effects on life.”
“Many geochemical records spanning the [extinction event], as well as this modeling work, cannot capture well the rates of change associated with the Chicxulub impact,” he says. “The impact may have released significantly less CO2 and SO2 than the Deccan Traps, but it did so almost instantaneously.” So even if the asteroid impact released fewer gases overall, Tabor says, the speediness of that release could have been devastating all the same. More
