Humans

Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2, key gas pipelines between Russia and Europe, have sprung large leaks within hours of each other, sparking fears of deliberate sabotage

Humans

27 September 2022

By Matthew Sparkes

Two key gas pipelines designed to bring Russian gas to Europe have developed leaks within hours of each other, prompting speculation about sabotage. The Nord Stream pipes, which run under the Baltic Sea, have at times been a focal point of diplomatic tensions around Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. European Union leaders have previously accused Russian president Vladimir Putin of leveraging energy supplies in response to strong sanctions from Europe and the US.
The Danish Energy Agency said in a statement that two leaks have been detected on Nord Stream 1 – one in Danish territory and one in Swedish – and one was also found on Nord Stream 2. The agency raised its alert level to orange, the second highest.
Kristoffer Böttzauw, the agency’s director, said in a statement: “Breakage of gas pipelines is extremely rare, and therefore we see reason to raise the preparedness level as a result of the incidents we have seen over the past 24 hours. We want to ensure thorough monitoring of Denmark’s critical infrastructure in order to strengthen security of supply going forward.”

Reports suggest that the leaks are large holes, rather than small cracks.Advertisement
A European security source told Reuters there were indications that the leaks were caused by “deliberate damage”. Denmark’s prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, said, “It’s hard to imagine that these are coincidences. We can’t rule out sabotage.”
The gas leak at Nord Stream 2 seen from a Danish fighter jetDanish Defence Command
Denmark has imposed a prohibition area around the leaks, banning all ships and aircraft from getting within 5 nautical miles. It says there is a risk of ignition and ships could lose buoyancy due to the escaping gas.
The Petroleum Safety Authority Norway said in a statement on Monday that it had recently received a number of warnings from oil and gas companies about unidentified drones and aircraft flying close to offshore facilities. The organisation also issued a reminder that there is an exclusion zone with a radius of 500 metres around all offshore oil and gas facilities, and it says encroaching on them could be punishable by law. But it said it did not wish to speculate about the causes of the Nord Stream leaks.
Anthony King at the University of Warwick, UK, says the development is odd, and that sabotage and accident were both possibilities.
“The Russians have the capability to carry out something like this – and they regularly threaten the internet fibres in the Atlantic to show that they could cut them if necessary. So it could be the Russians,” he says. “But I don’t see what they’d gain – they want to sell gas. It may indeed be an accident.”

A spokesperson for the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences told New Scientist that it detected two large and distinctive spikes in seismic activity under the Baltic Sea on Monday, one at 00:03 UTC and one at 17:03 UTC. This was followed by “much stronger” than usual seismic noise than before the spikes. “We have no information on the cause of the spikes and the noise,” they say.
Each of the two affected pipelines actually comprises two pipelines, made up of approximately 100,000 sections, each 12 metres long. None of the pipelines was in operation at the time the leaks were discovered, but they all still contained pressurised gas. Environmental impact documents relating to the network reportedly point to the pipes being 26.8 millimetres thick and covered in anti-corrosion material and steel-reinforced concrete.
Nord Stream 2 hadn’t yet been put into normal operation, but was filled with 177 million cubic metres of natural gas. Scientists are divided on how great the effect of that gas leaking will be on the atmosphere, and on climate change.

Joe von Fischer at Colorado State University says that the effect of the leaks on levels of atmospheric methane would be low because the methane will become carbon dioxide, which is less potent as a greenhouse gas, as it rises through the water. “When methane is released at the bottom of a deep body of water, nearly all of it is oxidised by methanotrophic bacteria in the water column,” he says.
But Grant Allen at the University of Manchester, UK, says that the amount of gas rising might change the picture. “My intuition, and this is only intuition, is that those leaks are so big that a column of bubbles going up to the surface is so pure and so intense that nature isn’t going to have a chance to to act on it,” he says. “You can see how violently it’s coming out. I suspect this event is going to be all over in the timescale of hours.”
Allen estimates that the contents of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline alone would create the equivalent methane emissions as 124,000 average UK homes do each year.
The pipelines aren’t the first pieces of energy infrastructure to be affected since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Fighting around the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant – Europe’s largest nuclear plant – and Chernobyl have caused experts to warn of the prospect of an accidental release of radioactive material in recent months.

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New Scientist’s weekly round-up of the best books, films, TV series, games and more that you shouldn’t miss

Humans

21 September 2022

KIRSTEN MCTERNAN
Watch
Galwad is a week-long mix of live performance and multimedia. Telling the time-travelling story of Efa (Alexandria Riley, pictured above), it ends with a live broadcast and a drama set in Wales in 2052. See the finale on Sky Arts on 2 October.
Read
Tales from a Robotic World by Dario Floreano and Nicola Nosengo mixes speculation, fact and fiction to create a future where robotic tech brings love, companionship and well-organised traffic to the world. On sale from 27 September.

Read
The Thousand Earths by Stephen Baxter dovetails the story of … More

Ling Ma’s Bliss Montage and Christopher Priest’s Expect Me Tomorrow use fantasy to address real issues. Will this perspective energise people to do something about the future, asks Sally Adee

Humans

21 September 2022

By Sally Adee

Real glaciology is at the core of Christopher Priest’s climate fantasyCokada/Getty Images
Bliss Montage
Ling Ma (Text Publishing)

IN LING MA’S Bliss Montage, the discomforts that define everyday reality are stretched and deformed until they detonate like a balloon that has been twisted too tightly.
Ma, whose 2018 novel, Severance, won the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, uses short stories to work through the barbed scenarios in her latest book. These include a frenemy so diabolical she can make you disappear, a woman who marries … More

Emerging research suggests that, alongside genes and environment, much of who we become is down to chance occurrences in the developing brain. Does that mean parents are off the hook?

Humans

| Leader

21 September 2022

A-photographyy/Shutterstock
DO YOU have your mother’s DIY skills, your father’s sense of humour or your granddad’s love of cooking? What or who is to blame for your short temper, your inability to draw or your hatred of radishes?
Whether the differences between people are down to nature or nurture, genes or environment, has long divided scientists and philosophers alike. Now, it appears we have all been overlooking a third factor: sheer chance.
It turns out that random fluctuations of molecules inside our developing brain cells may play a role in their eventual wiring diagram, swaying developmental outcomes such as how extroverted, … More

Set on an Earth where the ecosystem has collapsed, this ravishing sci-fi film is centred on Vesper, a young girl struggling to find a cure for her paralysed father

Humans

21 September 2022

By Davide Abbatescianni
Vesper (Raffiella Chapman) struggles to survive on an Earth with a ruined ecosystemIFC Films
Vesper
Directed by Kristina Buožytė and Bruno Samper
General release in US cinemas; UK cinemas to be announced
FOR a good example of what European science fiction has to offer, you need look no further than Vesper, a beautifully crafted film that premiered at the Czech Republic’s Karlovy Vary film festival in July.
It is set in a dystopian world where Earth’s ecosystems have totally collapsed as a result of an unspecified catastrophe. Many people now have … More

In some parts of England in Anglo-Saxon times, more than three-quarters of the population’s ancestry could be traced to recent migration from Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands

Humans

21 September 2022

By Clare Wilson
The analysis of a grave at Issendorf cemetery in GermanyLandesmuseum Hannover
In Anglo-Saxon times, more than three-quarters of the ancestry of people in parts of England was from recent north European migrants.
The finding, which comes from sequencing the DNA of people buried in the UK and mainland Europe during this time period, may settle an ongoing debate about just how much migration happened in Anglo-Saxon times, says Duncan Sayer at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, UK.
The traditional view, based on written records and archaeological finds, is there was an influx of Europeans into Britain in Anglo-Saxon times – classed as from the end of Roman Empire control, at about AD 400, until 1066.Advertisement
But more recently, there has been debate over just how many people migrated.
There could have been just small numbers of migrants, who then spread aspects of their culture, such as their buildings and pottery styles. “There are many respectable historians who think there was very little migration, says Robin Fleming at Boston College in Massachusetts.

To learn more, Sayer’s team sequenced the DNA of 460 people who were buried in graves between AD 200 and 1300, of whom 278 were from England.
This showed that during the 7th century AD, people buried in the east of England could trace 76 per cent of their ancestry to recent migration from Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands.
This would be equivalent to someone having three of their four grandparents born in Europe, says Sayer’s colleague, Stephan Schiffels at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
Bodies taken from graves further to the west of England had a lower proportion of their ancestry from Europe, implying that the migrants first made their homes in the east.
Fleming says the findings confirm there was mass migration from Europe into some parts of Britain. “This does something a lot of us have been looking for.”
“This brings the idea of migration back onto the table again,” says Sayer.
Journal reference: Nature , DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05247-2

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Your genes and environment play a big part in forming you, but there is an unexplored third element at play too: luck. The chance events that shape your brain in the womb may influence who you become as much as your genetics, and perhaps even more than the effect of parenting

Humans

21 September 2022

By Clare Wilson
Chance events in the developing brain may be important for shaping who you becomeJiri Hera/Shutterstock
BATMAN became a vigilante after seeing his parents murdered. Wonder Woman’s crime-fighting abilities are thanks to her supernatural creation and childhood of athletic training. Many of us mortals have origin stories too, albeit less dramatic ones. You may feel, for instance, you have inherited cleverness from your mother or confidence from your father, or a love of cooking from fun times in the kitchen with grandparents.
One of the most fascinating questions about what makes us the way we are is how much of our personalities, abilities and interests is down to our genes and how much to our early environment – nature or nurture. But there is a third influence that has, until recently, gone under the radar: randomness. Specifically, chance events that affect nerve cells as the brain is developing. That is a colossal oversight. The latest research suggests that the role of this randomness in shaping who we are could be far greater than environmental factors, and in some cases as much as genetic ones. If so, we should really see ourselves as the product of nature, nurture and “noise”.
This isn’t just of interest to neuroscientists: it has profound implications for us all. We could stop fretting quite so much about our parenting choices and – sorry, Freud – we may also have to allocate less blame to our own parents for how we have turned out. “We have a tendency to develop narrative explanations for differences we see in people,” says Benjamin de Bivort … More

Ancient dung hints that 12,000 years ago, a population of hunter-gatherers in what is now Syria kept animals like sheep or gazelles around – probably for food

Humans

14 September 2022

By Christa Lesté-Lasserre
Dung spherulites were found in samples of archaeological sediment from Abu Hureyra in SyriaAndrew Moore (CC-BY 4.0)
Some hunter-gatherers probably kept sheep, or possibly gazelles, outside their huts before they even started farming crops, according to traces of ancient animal dung.
Alexia Smith at the University of Connecticut and her colleagues have found spherulites – tiny spheres of calcium found primarily in the faeces of grass-eating ruminants like cattle, sheep and antelopes – outside groups of huts belonging to humans who lived in what is now Syria more than 12,000 years ago.
They also found charred spherulites in fireplaces. This suggests that humans lived with herbivores, like sheep, in this region approximately 2000 years earlier than previously thought and were using their dung as a fuel source, says Smith.Advertisement

“They’re still hunters and gatherers, and they’re still relying on hunted gazelle, but now they’re starting to bring live animals to the site and keep them for however long they need them,” says Smith. “And this result is a bit surprising, because it’s earlier than agriculture, and earlier than what we see in adjacent regions.”
Ruminants release significant quantities of spherulites in their faeces, whereas omnivores, including humans, release very small amounts, and carnivores and horses – which are herbivores but not ruminants – release even fewer, says Smith.

Smith was originally curious about when ancient populations first started burning animal dung as fuel, which is done because it can maintain a very high heat. So, she started looking for spherulites – which are about 5 to 20 micrometres across – in the dust at a human settlement at Abu Hureyra – in modern-day Syria near the Euphrates river – which was inhabited between about 13,300 and 7800 years ago.
In dust from as far back as 12,300 to 12,800 years ago, she found darkened spherulites suggesting that dung had been burned at high temperatures, probably as a heat source, she says. But to her surprise, she also found undarkened spherulites all around the outside of huts, suggesting these people were tending to sheep, goats, cows or gazelles just outside their front doors. The earliest evidence we have for crop farming in the region dates back to about 11,000 years ago.

“Very quickly, I realised, ‘Oh, my goodness, we have an opportunity here to actually consider the antiquity of live animals on the site’,” she says.
By the late Neolithic period, about 8000 years ago, though, spherulites started to disappear from around the huts, says Smith. That may be because the herds had become so large that people were tending to them on pastures further away from the settlement. “It seems like kind of the opposite of what you’d expect,” she says. “But then, it makes sense, because if you have a huge number of animals, it’s not sustainable to keep them on site.”
This doesn’t mean the animals were domesticated, though, adds Smith. Nor does it indicate which ruminants were living outside the huts. What is more likely is that humans tethered wild animals and fed them to keep them alive as a later meat source. “At the end of the day, these animals were dinner,” she says.
Journal reference: PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0272947
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