James' World 2

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[Photo: Ralf Hiemisch/Getty Images]

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Even in the Southern Hemisphere’s summer, shards of sea ice surround the aptly named Danger Islands off the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. The 10 scientists and graduate students who sailed for the rocky archipelago in December 2015 didn’t know if they’d reach their destination, let alone accomplish their mission.

But the clouds and the ice parted, and the small, nimble expedition ship M/V Hans Hansson finally anchored off the coast of one of the seven islands. The biologists, zoologists, and robotics engineers rode an inflatable boat from the ship to land, looking for Adélie penguins.

Penguinologists frequently travel to Antarctica to check on the location and health of penguin populations and discover new penguin colonies — with the ultimate goal of understanding how the Southern Ocean is changing.

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Global Warming

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Mysterious mounds in the southwest corner of the Amazon Basin were once the site of ancient urban settlements, scientists have discovered. Using a remote-sensing technology to map the terrain from the air, they found that, starting about 1,500 years ago, ancient Amazonians built and lived in densely populated centers, featuring 22-meter-tall earthen pyramids, that were encircled by kilometers of elevated roadways.

The complexity of these settlements is “mind-blowing”, says team member Heiko Prümers, an archaeologist at the German Archaeological Institute headquartered in Berlin.

“This is the first clear evidence that there were urban societies in this part of the Amazon Basin,” says Jonas Gregorio de Souza, an archaeologist at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain. The study adds to a growing body of research indicating that the Amazon — long thought to have been pristine wilderness before the arrival of Europeans — was home to advanced societies well before that. The discovery was published on 25 May in Nature.

A shift in thinking

Humans have lived in the Amazon Basin — a vast river-drainage system roughly the size of the continental United States — for around 10,000 years. Researchers thought that before the arrival of Europeans in the sixteenth century, all Amazonians lived in small, nomadic tribes that had little impact on the world around them. And although early European visitors described a landscape filled with towns and villages, later explorers were unable to find these sites.

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Researchers uncovered ancient urban centers on forested mounds in the Bolivian Amazon Basin. Credit: Roland Seitre/Nature Picture Library

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Just how big was the January eruption of the Hunga-Tonga volcano? Four months of intensive science has only bumped up the scale. You could point to the audible booms that interrupted the night in Alaska, 6,000 miles away. Or perhaps to the tsunamis in the Caribbean, created by a rare form of acoustic wave that hopped over continents and stirred up the seas. In space, the weather changed too, NASA scientists said earlier this month, with winds from the blast accelerating up to 450 miles per hour as they left the atmosphere’s outermost layers. This briefly redirected the flow of electrons around the planet’s equator, a phenomenon that had previously been observed during geomagnetic storms caused by solar wind.

Which is why, when researchers started scouring the ocean floor immediately surrounding the volcano, they expected to find a gnarly landscape. Surely it would be reshaped by the blast and littered with debris. Scientists believe that the explosion was the result of an incendiary recipe: hot, gaseous magma meeting cold, salty seawater. But how exactly did those two ingredients come together with such force? Some of the leading theories centered on the idea of a landslide or other collapse of the volcano’s slopes that helped water intrude into the magma chamber. That would also help explain the tsunami that killed three people on nearby Tongan islands. A massive shift in submarine rock also means displacing a massive amount of water.

A team of scientists from New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, or NIWA, recently observed something different. Using ship-mounted acoustic instruments to map the seafloor, they found the terrain has indeed changed—it’s now covered with at least enough ash to fill 3 million Olympic swimming pools. But apart from that, it’s not all that different. The slopes of the underwater volcano are still largely as they were before the eruption; the same features still contour the surrounding seafloor. Within 15 kilometers of the volcano, some of those features are even still teeming with life, with starfish and corals clinging to rocky seamounts. “The first thing we did was a circle around the volcano, and I’m going, ‘What the hell?’” recalls Kevin Mackay, a marine geologist at NIWA who led the expedition. “It just defied expectations.”

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Photograph: Maxar/Getty Images

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What does a modern combine harvester and a Diplodocus have in common? One answer, it seems, may be their big footprints on the soil. A new study led by researchers from Sweden and Switzerland has found that the weight of farming machinery today is approaching that of the largest animals to have ever roamed the Earth – the sauropods.

Depicted as the giant, friendly “veggiesaurus” in the movie Jurassic Park, sauropods were the biggest of the dinosaurs. The heaviest were thought to weigh in at around 60 tonnes – similar to the weight of a fully laden combine harvester. Tractors and other machinery used on farms have grown enormously heavier over the past 60 years as intensive, large-scale agriculture has become widespread. A combine harvester is almost ten times heavier today than it was in the 1960s.

The weight of animals or machines matters because soils can only withstand so much pressure before they become chronically compacted. They may not look it, but soils are ecosystems containing fragile structures – pores and pathways which allow air to circulate and water to reach plant roots and other organisms. Tyres, animal hooves, and human feet all apply pressure, squashing the pores, not just at the surface but deeper down too.

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Braslavets Denys/Shutterstock

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In the early months of the coronavirus lockdowns, my wife shared with me a daily dose of cat videos. By shared, of course, I mean she flipped the screen of her phone and thrust it at me across the table: “Look!” And for the next 10 minutes, we’d scroll—cat taking a bubble bath, cat robbing a fishmonger, cat playing the piano to an audience of two cats and a dog. One afternoon, as I came in the door, covered in snow, she greeted me with “Cat Lawyer”—a video of a Texas lawyer stuck on kitten filter during a court case on Zoom. The snow melted off my hat, all over the mobile screen, but we kept watching.

“Cat Lawyer” went viral in February 2021, a year into the pandemic, when we had tried for several months to get an actual cat to live with us in northern Iceland. Animal shelters were empty, with hundreds of disappointed people yearning for the comfort and joy of a feline friend. Icelandic cat breeders did not answer their phones, and the local veterinary authority cracked down on illegal kitten dealers for the first time. Cats were having the best year since the invention of the internet—it seemed.

Today, as Icelanders embrace freedom again, Icelandic cats are fighting for theirs.

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