Focus on Arts and Ecology

The tusk, which belonged to a female mammoth, is more than 100,000 years old. 

By Joanna Thompson, November 30, 2021 

Researchers have discovered a Columbian mammoth's (Mammuthus columbi) tusk 185 miles (300 kilometers) off the coast of California. Scientists estimate that the tusk, which was found at a depth of about 10,000 feet (3,070 meters), is well over 100,000 years old.

"You start to 'expect the unexpected' when exploring the deep sea, but I'm still stunned that we came upon the ancient tusk of a mammoth," Steven Haddock, a marine biologist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) and one of the researchers who found the tusk, said in a statement.

In 2019, Haddock and submersible pilot Randy Prickett, also with the MBARI, were scanning the deep ocean off California using a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) when they came across a strange object: a 3-foot-long (1 m) tube that looked suspiciously tusk-like. The pair tried to collect the object, but they were initially only able to obtain a small piece that broke off from the tip, The New York Times reported. 

From this fragment, researchers found that the object was a tusk from a female mammoth. But they couldn't confirm how old it was or pinpoint the exact species.

Two years later, Haddock and Prickett returned to the site with a full team of paleontologists and genomics experts. This time, using the ROV's robotic arm, they collected the entire tusk, which was coated in a thick black crust of naturally deposited iron-manganese. Preserved mammoth tusks are usually discovered in Arctic permafrost, but in this instance, the combination of very cold water and high pressure acted like a refrigerator for a slab of meat, keeping the tusk in relatively pristine condition for thousands of years, according to Insider. 

"If the tusk had been found on land, deciphering its history would not be as straightforward," Terrence Blackburn, a geologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) who was involved in the research, said in a statement. 

Thanks to its exquisite preservation, the scientists were able to recover DNA from the tusk’s inner tissue. Katherine Moon, a paleogenomicist at UCSC, called this the team's "'Jurassic Park' moment" in an interview with the New York Times. So far, the team has determined the mammoth's species, sex, age at death, and even its geographic range during its lifetime. The results are not yet published.

Thousands of similar discoveries may await scientists on the deep ocean floor. But human activities, such as undersea oil drilling, have the potential to destroy these natural treasures.

"In this really unique, underexplored and largely underappreciated environment, there is a lot of value in having habitat that is undisturbed," Haddock told the New York Times.

Joanna Thompson is an intern for Live Science with a deep love for nature. She holds a B.S. in zoology and a B.A. in creative writing from North Carolina State University, and will complete her Master's degree from New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program in December 2021. Her work has appeared in Scientific American, Atlas Obscura, Audubon and In These Times.

(Sources: Live Science)

BY MATT SIMONNOVEMBER 22, 2021

OFF THE COAST OF CALIFORNIA lies an underwater forest of giant kelp, a kind of seaweed that grows to 100 feet tall at the rate of a foot a day. Just as a terrestrial forest sucks carbon dioxide out of the air, all that rapidly growing seaweed soaks up carbon from the water, playing an incredibly important role in climate mitigation. “With kelp goes a huge amount of carbon,” says Chris Wilmers, an ecologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “As a general rule, kelp forests are much more productive than most terrestrial forests, in that they’re churning through carbon much more quickly.”

But since the 18th century, California’s kelp forest has been steadily mowed down by purple urchins, thanks to the massacre of their natural predator—the sea otter—hunted for its one-of-a-kind fur. (Unlike other marine mammals, sea otters don’t rely on copious amounts of blubber for insulation, but instead on densely packed hairs. At their thickest, they have a million of them per square inch.) Over the last few centuries, otter numbers in California crashed from 20,000 to 50.

Without otters patrolling the kelp, the native urchin population balloons. The spiky invertebrates actually switch up their foraging strategy, from hiding in rock crevices and waiting for detritus to come to them to boldly venturing out and chowing down. “Once the otters are not present, those urchins can overrun the area, and it turns into what’s called an ‘urchin barren,’” says Jess Fujii, the sea otter program manager at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. “And you really won’t see anything else except rocks and hard substrate covered in urchins.” Parts of the West Coast have seen a 10,000 percent increase in urchins in recent years, and California has lost 95 percent of its kelp forests.

So since 2002, the aquarium has been on a mission to bring back the otters with the cutest adoption program in the world. Sea otter moms in captivity take in orphaned pups—often left parentless thanks to great white sharks, which bite but don’t actually eat otters, since sharks prefer blubber to fur. The new moms teach the pups how to do sea otter things—like clean themselves, float on their backs, and use rocks to crack open sea urchins on their bellies. “We’re not hand-feeding them and imprinting them on humans—they’re learning how to be an otter from an otter,” says Fujii. “Some of these animals come in when they’re only a day old. They don’t have any notion of what home used to be.”

When the adoptees are ready, Fujii’s team sets them loose in the coastal habitats of California. Each is tagged and monitored closely for the first two weeks to make sure they’re getting along fine. (Along with observational surveys in Monterey Bay, tagging helps scientists conduct censuses of the otter population.) If not, they’re brought back in and returned to otter school. But the team found that the 37 adopted otters released between 2002 and 2016 have survived just as well as if they’d grown up fully in the wild. The reintroduced otters go on to reproduce and make more otters. Thanks in part to this first-of-its-kind program, the sea otter population along the California coast has swelled to 3,000.

A sea otter is a ravenous ecosystem engineer of the highest order. To stay warm and healthy, they eat a quarter of their body weight a day, repeatedly diving to the seafloor to gather urchins, crabs, and bivalves like clams. “By having to eat as much as they do in order to survive in their environment, they have really drastic impacts on those habitats, and they’re overwhelmingly positive,” says Fujii. (Another program further up the California coast has tried bringing back a different kind of “urchin slayer”—human divers.)

Keeping the urchin population in check preserves the kelp, which is vital for the ecosystem in two main ways. First, the forest is a habitat for fish, which are the food source for birds and other marine mammals, like sea lions. Second, the seaweed is part of what scientists call a “blue carbon” ecosystem, meaning a coastal or marine area that sequesters carbon. (Other areas include wetlands and mangroves.)

But it’s tricky to quantify exactly how much carbon a healthy kelp forest gobbles up. A redwood tree, for instance, grows to be massive over hundreds of years, locking away lots of carbon over long timescales. (Unless it catches on fire, in which case the carbon goes back into the atmosphere.) Things are more in flux underwater. All manner of critters, including sea urchins, are nibbling on kelp—and pooping out the carbon. Plus, the churning sea breaks off bits of the forest, which fall to the seafloor and decompose, releasing stored carbon. So a kelp forest constantly decays and grows back, sequestering and releasing carbon all the while.

It’s hard to be sure how long the carbon stays trapped. “The fate of all this kelp is not well understood,” says Wilmers. “Imagine that all that stuff that’s sloughing off is simply sinking to the deep ocean and isn’t going to come back up again for like 1,000 years. That’s a much more significant carbon sequestration benefit than just sloughing off and immediately decomposing and going right back into the atmosphere.”

With that uncertainty in mind, Wilmers has done some estimates of the potential carbon benefits of healthy otter populations farther north on the Pacific coast, between the Canadian border and the tip of the Aleutian Islands. If a kelp forest grows well, and half the carbon it absorbs is sequestered in the deep sea, it’d be the equivalent of canceling the emissions from 5 million automobiles. Even if just 1 percent of the carbon stays sequestered in the depths, that would be equal to the emissions from 100,000 cars.

In Monterey Bay, the otters don’t only protect the kelp. They also venture up the Elkhorn Slough, a large tidal marsh, where they encourage the growth of eelgrass, another coastal plant that sequesters carbon—although the otters affect the plant in a more indirect way. The otters eat crabs, which in turn eat invertebrates like sea slugs, which eat the algae that grows on the eelgrass. Reducing the number of crabs preying on the slugs actually helps the eelgrass because when the slugs remove the algae, it keeps the plants clean, which allows them to absorb more sunlight. Thanks to the return of the otters, the amount of eelgrass in Elkhorn Slough has jumped 600 percent in the last three decades.

A mangrove or a tidal marsh like Elkhorn Slough traps loads of carbon. “They’re removing carbon dioxide at rates that are up to 10 times as fast as we see in terrestrial systems on a per area basis,” says Emily Pidgeon, vice president of ocean science and innovation at the nonprofit Conservation International. “They bury it in the soil below them, and it basically gets locked away for millennia. And so you end up with these very deep, rich stores of carbon in these ecosystems much denser—and hence, with larger amounts of carbon—than you see in forests.”

Restoring marshland plays other crucial roles in the ecosystem, says Aimee David, vice president of ocean conservation policy strategy at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. “We need these habitats for the services that they provide for us: buffering from storms, food production, filtered water quality,” she says. “That is a great role that otters have played in the Elkhorn Slough estuary, which is one that is notorious for being at the epicenter of a lot of different industrial uses, including agriculture.”

Healthy ecosystems also support sustainable fisheries, providing livelihoods for community members. And the sea otters in Monterey have the added benefit of being very cute, which brings in tourists and their money. These kinds of knock-on benefits are why conservationists are increasingly campaigning for blue carbon-related nature-based solutions: restoring ecosystems to fight climate change. Everyone wins—the locals, the climate, the ecosystem. Well, maybe not the sea urchins and crabs. But they won’t be missed.

(Sources: Atlas Obscura)

BY ROBIN GEORGE ANDREWS NOVEMBER 22, 2021

Excerpted from Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal About Earth and the Worlds Beyond. Copyright (c) 2021 by Robin George Andrews. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

The science is in: Lava, while molten, is bad for life. It flambés it to death. But microbes can thrive in conditions most animals would find abhorrent. The same is true for much of the East African Rift, with watery pools home to all kinds of life sitting between fresh, jagged lava flows still baking underneath a thin crust.

And then you’ve got Ethiopia’s Danakil Depression.

Sitting within the larger Afar Depression near the top of the rift, the tectonically active area where the African plate has been slowly splitting for around 20 million years, Danakil is more than 330 feet below sea level. Only a volcanic mound along the coast stops it from being flooded. “But when the sea level was higher” in the distant past, says Christopher Jackson, an expert in geologic basins at Imperial College London, “there used to be marine waters in the Danakil Depression.” Ancient coral reefs, marine terraces, and salty minerals stand as memories to the watery land this once was.

To say it is a hostile place today is a gross understatement. This 160-​mile-​long bowl has daily average temperatures of 94 degrees Fahrenheit, making it one of the most sun-​scorched places on Earth. Rain is a rarity, with only four inches of the good stuff falling on Danakil each year. And within Danakil you can find a volcano named Dallol, flanked by countless hydrothermal ponds and pools. It is a polychromatic hellscape. Volcanic chemicals brought up by the East African mantle monster—the plume of super-heated magma that is sundering the continent from below—decorate the waters in vibrant greens, luminous oranges, milky whites, and sickly yellows. The air bakes in the stench of rust, eggy sulfur, and acrid chlorine. These viscous vapors bite the inside of your nasal cavities and fire tiny splinters into your lungs if you dare to approach the small mineralized mounds looming over the wheezing pools.

Purificación López-​García, a microbial diversity expert at the French National Center for Scientific Research, has worked around Dallol in temperatures exceeding 122 degrees Fahrenheit. You have to drink water constantly and move very slowly so you don’t overheat. Working here and in the surrounding region was, she says, “the most extreme experience I had in my life.” Felipe Gómez, a microbiologist with the Astrobiology Center in Madrid, Spain, says that Dallol looks very beautiful, but it is incredibly hot and full of death. “Some birds see water and dive down [to drink] and die over there,” he says. “It’s possible to see some of the small pools surrounded by birds that have died. Yeah, it’s horrible.”

But, as the axiom goes: Where there is water, there is life. As long as there is water and some chemical compounds that can be used to make energy, certain species of microbes—​extremophiles—​can make Dallol their domicile. Remarkably, some microbes can exist in a combination of two of these environmental extremes, making them polyextremophiles. And showoffs.

The same applies to Dallol, at least up to a point. Hardy microbes have evolved to withstand very high temperatures. Some can live in extremely salty environments too, while others thrive in remarkably acidic (low pH) environments. “We normally say that pH is zero, because we have no probes adapted to measure a negative pH. In theory, a negative pH doesn’t exist,” says Gómez. But here, some pools almost certainly have a negative pH. And yet, life finds a way.

Dallol has hyperthermal pools, hypersaline ponds, and hyperacidic puddles. But what makes it such a draw for microbiologists is that, thanks to its anomalous and enormous volcanic fuel source, it has bodies of water that check all three boxes, making it the most extreme environment for life on Earth. Life flits about in some of these watery pools, but others, says Gómez, are completely sterilized. Sometimes the extremes are, well, a little too extreme for life. Sometimes the water in the pools is so bound up with other chemical compounds that not enough is available for microorganisms to use themselves.

“In every extreme environment where I have been, if I found water, I found life,” he says, speaking of his adventures to both the North and South Poles, the Atacama Desert, and so on. “The only exception is here at Dallol.”

Barbara Cavalazzi, a geobiologist and astrobiologist at the University of Bologna, says that this is the perfect place to study astrobiology, or the search for and study of life beyond Earth. If life is found in these pools, then it is living right at the limits of biology on this planet. If life is absent, then perhaps we have found a set of conditions that prevents any life from existing, a concept that may apply to environments on other worlds. That makes finding where the limit lies in Dallol—​arguably the most otherworldly consequence of the East African Rift—​a scientific endeavor with profound consequences.

In 2019, Gómez and his colleagues published a paper that looks to have pushed the limits to life even further into the unfathomable beyond. A few years back, while using the Danakil Depression to calibrate a scientific instrument that would ultimately end up on NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars, they poked about in the pools around Dallol and found fatty acids, the sort that can be found in cells. While ruling out possible contamination from scientists, tourists, and animal life, they identified minuscule round structures entombed within mineral deposits. They concluded that these were the cells of bacteria.

This was a huge surprise. Life on Earth had never been found in a simultaneously hyperacidic, hyperthermal, and hypersaline environment, the combination seemingly proving too much to handle. And yet, in this pool of death, it appears that something could survive. Stranger still, these sorts of microbes had been found before in other salty environments, but not in this most extreme of settings. Gómez and his team are currently trying to unravel the biophysical mechanisms that permit the microbes’ survival, work that is truly at the leading edge of microbiology.

Later that year, López-​García and her colleagues published a paper that indirectly ran contrary to this discovery. Looking in similar pools with all three environmental extremes, they came away empty-handed. They found that the preponderance of salt and acidity proved to be too disruptive to life. High concentrations of magnesium salts present were capable of shattering chains of molecules and the protective membranes wrapped around cells. “They suck up the water” that cells need, she says—​a fatal blow for microbes. The team also suggested that tiny grains within the pools certainly resemble cells, but are nothing more than mineralogic mimics that can be misinterpreted as evidence for life.

Gómez remains upbeat and confident. A few years ago, he says, he would not have believed the results of his paper either. But the limits for life seem to only extend further away as each year passes.

What everyone does agree on, though, is that the only reason life can function at all at Dallol is because of the volcanism that permeates East Africa. Volcanoes provide crucial heat and the flow of chemicals that microbes can use as energy sources. Sprinkle on some water, and you have a home for adventurous little critters.

Volcanoes can be dangerous. “But from a scientific perspective, it’s quite the opposite,” says Gómez. “The origin of planet Earth is volcanoes.” And no one knows for certain, but these sorts of habitats are probably like those that first gave rise to life, from which every living thing today has descended.

(Sources: Atlas Obscura)

 BY WINNIE LEE NOVEMBER 19, 2021

When Tsitakakoike, one of the largest Grandidier’s baobab trees in Madagascar, with a circumference of almost 90 feet, split and collapsed in 2018 after years without rain, it was a huge loss. Not only are the fruit and bark of this species, also known as the “mother of the forest,” useful as food and rope-making material, but Tsitakakoike was estimated to be 1,400 years old and sacred to the residents of nearby Andombiro village. The villagers believed that the huge, ancient tree, whose name means “the tree where one cannot hear the cry from the other side,” housed the spirits of their ancestors.

Continents away, in California, photographer Beth Moon also mourned the news. In her new photo book, Baobab published by Abbevllle Press, Moon writes, “Thinking of the trees, I am filled with anxiety. How can I ignore the onslaught of information directed to my notice? Do I move ahead in indifference? Sleepless nights indicate otherwise.” Having photographed other baobab trees in Africa in 2006, she felt compelled to make the long and arduous trip to photograph what remained of Tsitakakoike, and say goodbye. But on the same journey, Moon found wonder and hope while making portraits of baobabs she hadn’t seen before. The photographer spent a lot of time with a special tree that is Tsitakakoike’s sacred successor, whose grand bulbous trunk takes 32 steps to circumnavigate.

Moon’s book also documents the beautiful and distinctive-looking baobabs of Botswana, South Africa, and Senegal with platinum and hand-colored prints with an incredible level of detail. Her medium-format camera produced detail that sometimes even surprised her. Upon examining some images that she stitched together into a panorama of eight total frames, Moon says, “I thought, ‘Oh, there’s a line in the sky, I wonder what that is,’ and I blew it up closer, closer, closer. I could see a spider hanging from one of the branches … from like a football field’s length away.”

Atlas Obscura spoke with the artist about her first trip to Madagascar, building relationships with trees, and how she got special permission to photograph the fallen Tsitakakoike.

What first brought you to Africa to photograph the baobab trees?

It was just a logical progression of the work I was doing [documenting majestic, ancient trees], which started in England and then moved to California, right in my backyard, or really all of California, with Joshuas, sequoias, redwoods, and bristlecones. This whole project gained momentum and I went forward with it, and print sales kind of funded further trips. The Avenue of the Baobabs, or the Allée des Baobabs, in Madagascar, it just captured my imagination beyond belief. It was a dream destination. This was 2006, and unfortunately I have seen changes in a relatively short span of time.

How do you choose which trees to photograph?

On my first trip in 2006, I had specific destinations because the Allée is a famous spot. From there, there were two other locations nearby that I knew of that were also somewhat famous, if even just to the local area. My next trip to Madagascar was when I heard of the death of one of the largest trees [Tsitakakoike]. It was in the process of dying, half of it had fallen. And by that time, I heard local media pick up a study by a scientist I had been in contact with, Adrian Patrut [about how many of the oldest trees were dying from increased temperatures and lack of water]. It just troubled me so much that when he wrote to me and sent me a picture of the tree dying, I decided that I would make a special trip specifically to see it. On that trip, because of flooding, we took different routes into the forest and I discovered new trees. So not only did I record the death of this tree, but I also wanted to have some hope and record the trees that were remaining.

The photos of the collapsed trees are heartbreaking. How did you even begin to capture them?

Luckily I had enough time to make numerous visits because it’s just really too much to take in. I did it in pieces. When I say I did it in pieces, I did it in a number of short trips, but photographically, the best way to capture it was in panoramic images that were stitched together. I found it hard to get it in one frame. The whole spectacle is quite a large area.

It sounds like you went through a lot of trouble for that tree. What was the biggest challenge?

I was in a bit of a time constraint because I didn’t know how long the tree would last. This poor village, they’ve gone three-and-a-half years without rain, but when I arrived, it was 10 days straight of rain. So the biggest challenge was when we weren’t able to take a car into the forest. No vehicles could get through the mud and water. We ended up going by zebu carts, and these very, very resilient and sturdy African cattle were able to pull a cart with all my equipment.

You mention the village closest to the tree. How did the locals feel about you wanting to photograph this sacred site?

I was with my guide [Leong] and driver [Reevay]. In order to photograph the tree, we had to get permission from the chief [of Andombiro, named Botiharo] because it is a sacred tree. The Malagasy believe their ancestors reside in the tree, so it is marked off with a spiked boundary. A small ceremony had to be held to get permission, where the chief asks the ancestors permission. The chief and the villagers are very proud of their tree, and it’s really quite a loss to them. But he was also very happy to show me the successor, which is Tsitakakansa. He took me about three-quarters of a mile to the new tree, which was pretty spectacular. They had a ceremony after the old tree had fallen and transferred the souls to the new one. Tsitakakansa means “the tree where one cannot hear the song from one side to the other.”

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

(Sources: Atlas Obscura)