Mass Extinction in the Capitanian Age – Monday Map

Major Extinction Event Previous Missed By Science

According to a paper published in the Geological Society of America Bulletin

Capitanian
Earth During Capitanian Age – photo: University of Chicago

Another Near Miss

In the Svalbard archipelago, far to the north of Scandinavia is the island of Spitzbergen. There scientists have discovered what appears to be strong evidence of sixth major extinction on earth, which had been left out of the history of our home planet. Similar mass extinctions have killed off over 90% of all life on Earth.

According to an article a depletion of oxygen in the seas wiped out brachiopods, marine animals whose shell resembles the logo of Shell Oil, during the Capitanian Age of the Permian period, about 260 million years ago, some 30 million years before the first dinosaur. This was likely do to extreme volcanic activity.

Virtually no soft tissue from plants and animals can be detected from so long ago, so scientists rely on hard shells of marine life, since bones had yet to evolve.

Abstract of the Article

The controversial Capitanian (Middle Permian, 262 Ma) extinction event is only known from equatorial latitudes, and consequently its global extent is poorly resolved. We demonstrate that there were two, severe extinctions amongst brachiopods in northern Boreal latitudes (Spitsbergen) in the Middle to Late Permian, separated by a recovery phase. New age dating of the Spitsbergen strata (belonging to the Kapp Starostin Formation), using strontium isotopes and δ13C trends and comparison with better-dated sections in Greenland, suggests that the first crisis occurred in the Capitanian. This age assignment indicates that this Middle Permian extinction is manifested at higher latitudes. Redox proxies (pyrite framboids and trace metals) show that the Boreal crisis coincided with an intensification of oxygen depletion, implicating anoxia in the extinction scenario. The widespread and near-total loss of carbonates across the Boreal Realm also suggests a role for acidification in the crisis. The recovery interval saw the appearance of new brachiopod and bivalve taxa alongside survivors, and an increased mollusk dominance, resulting in an assemblage reminiscent of younger Mesozoic assemblages. The subsequent end-Permian mass extinction terminated this Late Permian radiation.

Received 7 October 2014.
Revision received 27 January 2015.
Accepted 4 March 2015.

Full text version of the article can be downloaded for free at the GSoA Bulletin website HERE

 

Dark Matter Survey – Monday Map

Mapping the cosmos: Dark Energy Survey creates detailed guide to spotting dark matter

“Analysis will help scientists understand the role that dark matter plays in galaxy formation,” so says the official press release.

photo

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

This is the first Dark Energy Survey map to trace the detailed distribution of dark matter across a large area of sky. The color scale represents projected mass density: red and yellow represent regions with more dense matter. The dark matter maps reflect the current picture of mass distribution in the universe where large filaments of matter align with galaxies and clusters of galaxies. Clusters of galaxies are represented by gray dots on the map – bigger dots represent larger clusters. This map covers three percent of the area of sky that DES will eventually document over its five-year mission.
Dark Matter Map

Image: Dark Energy Survey

Scientists on the Dark Energy Survey have released the first in a series of dark matter maps of the cosmos. These maps, created with one of the world’s most powerful digital cameras, are the largest contiguous maps created at this level of detail and will improve our understanding of dark matter’s role in the formation of galaxies. Analysis of the clumpiness of the dark matter in the maps will also allow scientists to probe the nature of the mysterious dark energy, believed to be causing the expansion of the universe to speed up.

The new maps were released today at the April meeting of the American Physical Society in Baltimore, Maryland. They were created using data captured by the Dark Energy Camera, a 570-megapixel imaging device that is the primary instrument for the Dark Energy Survey (DES).

Dark matter, the mysterious substance that makes up roughly a quarter of the universe, is invisible to even the most sensitive astronomical instruments because it does not emit or block light. But its effects can be seen by studying a phenomenon called gravitational lensing – the distortion that occurs when the gravitational pull of dark matter bends light around distant galaxies. Understanding the role of dark matter is part of the research program to quantify the role of dark energy, which is the ultimate goal of the survey.

This analysis was led by Vinu Vikram of Argonne National Laboratory (then at the University of Pennsylvania) and Chihway Chang of ETH Zurich. Vikram, Chang and their collaborators at Penn, ETH Zurich, the University of Portsmouth, the University of Manchester and other DES institutions worked for more than a year to carefully validate the lensing maps.

“We measured the barely perceptible distortions in the shapes of about 2 million galaxies to construct these new maps,” Vikram said. “They are a testament not only to the sensitivity of the Dark Energy Camera, but also to the rigorous work by our lensing team to understand its sensitivity so well that we can get exacting results from it.”

The camera was constructed and tested at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and is now mounted on the 4-meter Victor M. Blanco telescope at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The data were processed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

The dark matter map released today makes use of early DES observations and covers only about three percent of the area of sky DES will document over its five-year mission. The survey has just completed its second year. As scientists expand their search, they will be able to better test current cosmological theories by comparing the amounts of dark and visible matter.

Those theories suggest that, since there is much more dark matter in the universe than visible matter, galaxies will form where large concentrations of dark matter (and hence stronger gravity) are present. So far, the DES analysis backs this up: The maps show large filaments of matter along which visible galaxies and galaxy clusters lie and cosmic voids where very few galaxies reside. Follow-up studies of some of the enormous filaments and voids, and the enormous volume of data, collected throughout the survey will reveal more about this interplay of mass and light.

“Our analysis so far is in line with what the current picture of the universe predicts,” Chang said. “Zooming into the maps, we have measured how dark matter envelops galaxies of different types and how together they evolve over cosmic time. We are eager to use the new data coming in to make much stricter tests of theoretical models.”

View the Dark Energy Survey analysis.

The Dark Energy Survey is a collaboration of more than 300 scientists from 25 institutions in six countries. Its primary instrument, the Dark Energy Camera, is mounted on the 4-meter Blanco telescope at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, and its data is processed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Education of Spain, the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, ETH Zurich for Switzerland, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico and the Ministério da Ciência e Tecnologia, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the collaborating institutions in the Dark Energy Survey. The DES participants from Spanish institutions are partially supported by MINECO under grants AYA2012-39559, ESP2013-48274, FPA2013-47986 and Centro de Excelencia Severo Ochoa SEV-2012-0234, some of which include ERDF funds from the European Union.

Fermilab is America’s premier national laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research. A U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science laboratory, Fermilab is located near Chicago, Illinois, and operated under contract by the Fermi Research Alliance, LLC. Visit Fermilab’s website at www.fnal.gov and follow us on Twitter at @Fermilab.

The DOE Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.

Media contacts:

  • Andre Salles, Fermilab Office of Communication, 630-840-3351, media@fnal.gov

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Alan Lomax Music Archive Going On Line

For half a century, musicologist Alan Lomax recorded and preserved priceless cultural treasure.

Thousands of recordings have been digitized for posterity, discovered in the coal country of Kentucky to the cane fields of Haiti, including many legendary voices who would have toiled in obscurity and been forgotten.

With 2015 marking the Alan Lomax centennial, the Association for Cultural Equity is making these recordings available for free.

Read more about that and HERE

Working alongside his folklorist father, John Lomax, the young Alan traveled through the South and West, shining a light on local musicians, allowing the wider world to discover the blues of a prison inmate known as Leadbelly and the ballads of an itinerant laborer named Woody Guthrie.

Those are just two of the voices first recorded by Alan Lomax, out of thousands, and tens of thousands of songs and tunes now preserved for and us and future generations.

The 2002 New York Times Obituary of Alan Lomax is found HERE

Association of Cultural Equity’s website is HERE

The Lomax Family Collection at the American Folklife Center is HERE

 

April Fools!

I didn’t really mean that. Yes, I did. Not really. Yes. It is April Fools, but these stories actually true.

Even if they concern some serious fools in April.

The BBC Website has collected a series of news items that either seem too foolish to be true including:

A story in the Daily Mail tells us that the Swedish Parliament have backed a ban on unlicensed dancing in public or “illegally moving your feet to music”. Bar, restaurant and nightclub owners without permits can be fined if customers “dance spontaneously and without permission” as a result of a vote in the nation’s parliament. Police say dancing can cause fighting and disorder.

While the daily mirror reports that Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes would like to create a version of the period drama set in the decade of punk rock, flares and disco. It would feature the show’s aristocratic characters “struggling in the 1970s”, Fellowes said. He added that he had several spin-off ideas “up his sleeve”.

You find links to these and several other too odd to be true stories at http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32144005