geo-news | College of Science

CO2 changes over past 66 M years

December 8, 2023

Gabriel Bowen

Today atmospheric carbon dioxide is at its highest level in at least several million years thanks to widespread combustion of fossil fuels by humans over the past couple centuries.

But where does 419 parts per million (ppm) — the current concentration of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere—fit in Earth’s history?

That’s a question an international community of scientists, featuring key contributions by University of Utah geologists, is sorting out by examining a plethora of markers in the geologic record that offer clues about the contents of ancient atmospheres. Their initial study was published this week in the journal Science, reconstructing CO₂ concentrations going back through the Cenozoic, the era that began with the demise dinosaurs and rise of mammals 66 million years ago.

Glaciers contain air bubbles, providing scientists direct evidence of CO2 levels going back 800,000 years, according to U geology professor Gabe Bo wen, one of the study’s corresponding authors. But this record does not extend very deep into the geological past.

“Once you lose the ice cores, you lose direct evidence. You no longer have samples of atmospheric gas that you can analyze,” Bowen said. “So you have to rely on indirect evidence, what we call proxies. And those proxies are tough to work with because they are indirect.”

Remembering Marta Weeks

November 28, 2023

With husband Karelton Wulf.

As a college student, Weeks worked in Caracas, Venezuela, teaching English during the summers, and eventually received a baccalaureate degree in political science from Stanford University. At age 62, she graduated from the Episcopal Seminary in Austin, Texas, with a master's degree in theology. She was ordained an Episcopal priest in 1992.

A longtime Associate Trustee of the Association of American Petroleum Engineers Foundation she embodied legendary civic promotion as well as historic philanthropic support to the Foundation as well as to the Department of Geology & Geophysics and the College of Mines & Earth Sciences at the University of Utah which honored her in 2010 with the Founder's Day Distinguished Alumna Award.

The daughter of a petroleum geologist and the wife and daughter-in-law of world-renowned petroleum geologists, Weeks generously and continuously supported the AAPG Foundation as well as a host of other cultural and humanitarian causes around the world.

Weeks had many careers (often publicly praised as a “Renaissance Woman”) and remained active and passionate about her roles well after the usual retirement age – she was ordained an Episcopal priest in 1992 – directly impacting thousands of lives through her involvement with a host of groups and organizations.

The world knew of her great and lasting work; friends and those close knew that she was, in the words of past Foundation Trustee Chairman William L. Fisher, “as modest as she is generous.”

With AAPG, she had been a Foundation Trustee Associate since 1976. For her, philanthropic engagement with AAPG was her opportunity of “giving back,” she said, and it was a lifetime pleasure.

“I give to AAPG to honor my father, my husband and my father-in-law,’ she said, “all of whom were involved in petroleum geology.”

For Weeks, advancing opportunities in education for new generations of geoscientists was an especially significant part of her life.

Her most recent gift to the Foundation was bequeathed just last year – a $5 million annuity that will be distributed through 2029, impacting geoscientists for decades to come.

Indeed, she and her family made many donations to the AAPG Foundation throughout its history, including a $10 million bequest in 2006, the largest gift ever received by AAPG.

A Life of Excellence

Marta Weeks receives AAPG Foundation's inaugural highest honor, the L. Austin Weeks Memorial Medal, at the 2008 Annual Convention & Exhibition in San Antonio, Texas.

Marta Joan Sutton Weeks was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where her father Fredrick Sutton worked as a petroleum geologist. She was raised in both North and South America, and petroleum geology was a constant in her life.

Her first job – at age 13, while residing with her family in Maracaibo, Venezuela – came as she started a small popcorn business for the outdoor oil camp moviegoers.

She attended high school in Salt Lake City, Utah before attending Beloit College in Wisconsin, then graduated with a degree in political science from Stanford University.

Her career then started with summers spent teaching English for the Mene Grande Oil Co. and the Centro-Venezolano Americano in Caracas, Venezuela. Again, the oil business was a regular part of her life.

She then married petroleum geologist Lewis Austin Weeks in 1951, who was the son of famed petroleum geologist Lewis Weeks, and subsequently resided with him in Utah, Colorado, California and Maryland before moving to Miami, Fla., in 1967.

In 1988 she returned to graduate school in Austin, Texas, earned a master’s degree in theology and in 1992 was ordained an Episcopal priest. Her ministry included chaplaincies at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Panama, the Bahamas, the American Cathedral in Paris, France, and ultimately the Diocese of Southern Florida.

In 2008 she was the first recipient of the L. Austin Weeks Memorial Medal, intended to recognize “extraordinary philanthropy and service directed to advance the mission of the AAPG Foundation.”

In addition to the geosciences, she was passionate in her support of the University of Miami, where she was an advocate for academics, the arts, health care and research.

A complete listing of all her connections, honors and activities would be exhaustive, but a partial listing includes:

Director of Weeks Petroleum Ltd., Omni-Lift Corp. and the Weeks Air Museum
University of Miami Board of Trustees (their first woman chairperson, 2007-09)
Founding member and president of the Stanford Club of Florida
A member of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church Foundation, board member of the SE Episcopal Foundation and a trustee of Beloit College and Bishop Gray Inns
A member of the National Advisory Council-University of Utah and the Order of St. John of Jerusalem (both as a chaplain and a Dame)
Supporter of the Center for Sexuality and Religion
Her name graces the YMCA building in Miami, a music school building at the University of Miami and the center at the Episcopal Theological Seminary of the Southwest
Chairs and scholarships are named for her and exist because of her generosity at numerous schools

And Foundation TAs know very well of her passion for golf and active participation at TA annual meetings – a plethora of stories of her exploits on the links will keep that part of her legacy alive for years to come. In addition to being a legendary philanthropist and woman of vision, she was a friend.

After Lewis Austin Weeks passed in 2005, Marta married Karleton Wulf in 2009. Wulf passed in 2020, and Marta spent her final years residing with her daughter, Leslie Anne Davies, on Jupiter Island.

In addition to her daughter, Marta Weeks is survived by her son, Kermit Austin Weeks; granddaughter, Katie Weeks; and grandsons, Bryce and Cole Davies.

UteQuake

September 22, 2023

This is how the new webpage of UteQuake introduces itsself as it returns to Rice-Eccles Stadium Saturday when the University of Utah faces No. 22-ranked UCLA for the football teams’ Pac 12 conference opener Saturday, Sept. 22.

During the game, which kicks off at 1:30 p.m., the University of Utah Seismograph Stations’ (UUSS) geoscientists from the Department of Geology & Geophysics will monitor amplitude signals recorded by a seismometer they installed Aug. 30 on the west side of the stadium, then tweet interesting observations during the game.

The idea is to help pump up No. 11-ranked Utes’ game-day excitement, while also promoting the Seismograph Stations’ vital public safety mission to “reduce the risk from earthquakes in Utah through research, education, and public service.” The UUSS operates a regional network of 200 seismographs stretching from the Grand Canyon in Arizona to Yellowstone National Park in Montana.

Tested during the Utes’ season opener against the Florida Gators when record attendance exceeded 53,000, the experiment proved a roaring success. So UteQuake will run for the remainder of the season, according to Jamie Farrell, a research associate professor of geology and geophysics.

During Saturday’s game, Mark Hale, one of the seismic analysts at the UUSS, will be tracking the seismic waveforms in real time, then tweeting analysis of readings at key moments, starting with the Ute players emerging onto the field.

Read the full article by Brian Maffly in @TheU.
Go Utes!

Photo credit: Utah Athletics

Thumping Thermometer

March 10, 2023

Old Faithful

While the crowds swarm around Old Faithful to wait for its next eruption, a little pool just north of Yellowstone National Park’s most famous geyser is quietly showing off its own unique activity, also at more-or-less regular showtimes. Instead of erupting in a towering geyser, though, Doublet Pool cranks up the bass every 20 to 30 minutes by thumping. The water vibrates and the ground shakes.

Doublet Pool’s regular thumping is more than just an interesting tourist attraction. A new study led by University of Utah researchers shows that the interval between episodes of thumping reflects the amount of energy heating the pool at the bottom, as well as in indication of how much heat is being lost through the surface. Doublet Pool, the authors found, is Yellowstone’s thumping thermometer.

“By studying Doublet Pool, we are hoping to gain knowledge on the dynamic hydrothermal processes that can potentially be applied to understand what controls geyser eruptions,” said Fan-Chi Lin, an associate professor in the department of geology and geophysics at the U and a study co-author, “and also less predictable and more hazardous hydrothermal explosions.”

The study is published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Not exactly like a geyser
Doublet Pool is, as the name implies, a pair of hydrothermal pools connected by a small neck. It would fit comfortably in one half of a tennis court. It’s situated on Geyser Hill in Yellowstone National Park, across the Firehole River from the hotels, visitor centers and parking lots that surround Old Faithful.

Fan-Chi Lin

“We knew Doublet Pool thumps every 20-30 minutes,” Lin said, “but there was not much previous knowledge on what controls the variation. In fact, I don’t think many people actually realize the thumping interval varies. People pay more attention to geysers.”

The thumping, Lin said, which lasts about 10 minutes, is caused by bubbles in the plumbing system that feeds water, heated by a magma system beneath Yellowstone, to Doublet Pool. When those bubbles of water vapor reach the cool upper reaches of the hydrothermal conduit, they collapse suddenly. Thump.

A similar process happens in geysers and excites “hydrothermal tremor,” Lin said, but occurs deeper in the hydrothermal system, at depths of about 30-60 ft and ends with the geyser releasing pressure through a narrow opening as an eruption. Doublet Pool does not have a plumbing structure that enables pressure accumulation and hence no eruption occurs. Also, scientific instruments placed in and around the pool aren’t at any risk for being regularly blown out.

So, to better understand how hydrothermal systems work, Lin and his colleagues, including Cheng-Nan Liu, Jamie Farrell and Sin-Mei Wu from the U and collaborators from the University of California, Berkeley and Yellowstone National Park, set up instruments called geophones around Doublet Pool in seven deployments between 2015 and 2021. In winter 2021 and spring 2022, with the permission of the National Park Service, they lowered temperature and water-level sensors into the pool itself. Then they watched, waited and listened.

Like blowing on a pot of pasta
The researchers focused on the silence interval, or the time between periods of thumping. They found that the silence interval varied both year-to-year and also hour-to-hour or day-to-day. Their results suggest that different processes of adding or removing heat to the hydrothermal system are behind the variation.

In November 2016, the silence interval was around 30 minutes. But by September 2018, that interval had been cut in half to around 13 minutes, and by November 2021, the interval was back up to around 20 minutes.

What else was happening on Geyser Hill during those same times? On September 15, 2018, Ear Spring, which is 200 feet (60 m) northwest of Doublet Pool, erupted for the first time since 1957. After the eruption, the water in Doublet Pool boiled.

Yellowstone’s hydrothermal system is like an Instant Pot, building up heat and pressure leading up to eruptions of geysers and other features. The unusual behavior of Ear Spring, Doublet Pool and other features suggests that in 2018 the heat under Geyser Hill may have been turned up more than usual. By 2021, like an Instant Pot on Natural Release, that heat and pressure had subsided and the silence interval at Doublet Pool had recovered.

The researchers also noticed that silence intervals varied from day to day, and even hour to hour. When they compared the weather conditions with the silence intervals, they found that wind speed over the pools was correlated with the silence interval. When wind speed was higher, the interval was longer. Nature was blowing over the top of Doublet Pool, cooling it off.

The team is still working to understand how the blowing wind at the surface of the pool impacts the heat at the bottom, but it’s clear that the wind removes heat energy from the water, just like blowing over a hot drink–or a pot of pasta about to boil over—cools it off.

Doublet Pool

“Right now, we are treating the pool as one whole system, which means energy taken away from the surface makes it harder for the system to accumulate enough energy to thump,” Lin said. “One possibility is that the pool is actively convecting so the cooling near the surface can affect the bottom of the pool in a relatively short time scale.”

Heat inputs and outputs
Using principles of heat transfer, the authors calculated the amount of heat and the heating rate needed to initiate thumping at Doublet Pool. Think again about blowing on a pot of pasta. You can prevent boiling over if you are removing heat (through blowing) at the same rate the heat is entering the pot.

“And as we know how to calculate the heat being removed from the wind,” Lin said, “we can estimate the heating rate at the base.”

The heating rate for Doublet Pool works out to around 3-7 megawatts of energy. For comparison, Lin said, it would take about 100 household furnaces burning at the same time to heat up Doublet Pool enough to thump. (This is also equivalent to more than $5,000 worth of energy daily, which highlights the potential of geothermal energy.)

Knowing that heating rate, scientists can use the silence interval as a measurement of how much heat is coming into the pool, since more heat means a shorter interval.

“A better understanding of the energy budget,” Lin said, “will also improve our understanding of how much energy from the Yellowstone volcano is released through these hydrothermal features.”

Ichthyosaurs Migrations

December 19, 2022

Complete tooth and partial jaws of the ichthyosaur.

Fossil CSI: Mysterious site was ancient birthing grounds for marine giants.

Today’s marine giants—such as blue and humpback whales—routinely make massive migrations across the ocean to breed and give birth in waters where predators are scarce, with many congregating year after year along the same stretches of coastline. Now, new research from a team of scientists—including researchers with the University of Utah (Natural History Museum of Utah and Department of Geology & Geophysics), Smithsonian Institution, Vanderbilt University, University of Nevada-Reno, University of Edinburgh, University of Texas at Austin, Vrije Universiteit Brussels, and University of Oxford—suggests that nearly 200 million years before giant whales evolved, school bus-sized marine reptiles called ichthyosaurs may have been making similar migrations to breed and give birth together in relative safety.

The findings, published today in the journal Current Biology, examine a rich fossil bed in the renowned Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park (BISP) in Nevada’s Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, where many 50-foot-long ichthyosaurs (Shonisaurus popularis) lay petrified in stone. Co-authored by Randall Irmis, NHMU chief curator and curator of paleontology, and associate professor, the study offers a plausible explanation as to how at least 37 of these marine reptiles came to meet their ends in the same locality—a question that has vexed paleontologists for more than half a century.

“We present evidence that these ichthyosaurs died here in large numbers because they were migrating to this area to give birth for many generations across hundreds of thousands of years,” said co-author and Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History curator Nicholas Pyenson. “That means this type of behavior we observe today in whales has been around for more than 200 million years.”

Over the years, some paleontologists have proposed that BISP’s ichthyosaurs—predators resembling oversized chunky dolphins which have been adopted as Nevada’s state fossil—died in a mass stranding event such as those that sometimes afflicts modern whales, or that the creatures were poisoned by toxins such as from a nearby harmful algal bloom. The problem is that these hypotheses lack strong lines of scientific evidence to support them.

To try to solve this prehistoric mystery, the team combined newer paleontological techniques such as 3D scanning and geochemistry with traditional paleontological perseverance by poring over archival materials, photographs, maps, field notes and drawer after drawer of museum collections for shreds of evidence that could be reanalyzed.

3D-modeled image of the Shonisaurus popularis fossil bed.

Although most well-studied paleontological sites excavate fossils so they can be more closely studied by scientists at research institutions, the main attraction for visitors to the Nevada State Park-run BISP is a barn-like building that houses what researchers call Quarry 2, an array of ichthyosaurs that have been left embedded in the rock for the public to see and appreciate. Quarry 2 has partial skeletons from an estimated seven individual ichthyosaurs that all appear to have died around the same time.

“When I first visited the site in 2014, my first thought was that the best way to study it would be to create a full-color, high-resolution 3D model,” said lead author Neil Kelley, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University. “A 3D model would allow us to study the way these large fossils were arranged in relation to one another without losing the ability to go bone by bone.”

To do this, the research team collaborated with Jon Blundell, a member of the Smithsonian Digitization Program Office’s 3D Program team, and Holly Little, informatics manager in the museum’s Department of Paleobiology. While the paleontologists were physically measuring bones and studying the site using traditional paleontological techniques, Little and Blundell used digital cameras and a spherical laser scanner to take hundreds of photographs and millions of point measurements that were then stitched together using specialized software to create a 3D model of the fossil bed.

“Our study combines both the geological and biological facets of paleontology to solve this mystery,” said Irmis. “For example, we examined the chemical make-up of the rocks surrounding the fossils to determine whether environmental conditions resulted in so many Shonisaurus in one setting. Once we determined it did not, we were able to focus on the possible biological reasons.”

Illustration by Gabriel Ugueto

The team collected tiny samples of the rock surrounding the fossils and performed a series of geochemical tests to look for signs of environmental disturbance. One test measured mercury, which often accompanies large-scale volcanic activity, and found no significantly increased levels. Other tests examined different types of carbon and determined that there was no evidence of sudden increases in organic matter in the marine sediments that would result in a dearth of oxygen in the surrounding waters (though, like whales, the ichthyosaurs breathed air).

These geochemical tests revealed no signs that these ichthyosaurs perished because of some cataclysm that would have seriously disturbed the ecosystem in which they died. The research team continued to look beyond Quarry 2 to the surrounding geology and all the fossils that had previously been excavated from the area.

The geologic evidence indicates that when the ichthyosaurs died, their bones eventually sank to the bottom of the sea, rather than along a shoreline shallow enough to suggest stranding, ruling out another hypothesis. Even more telling though, the area’s limestone and mudstone was chock-full of large adult Shonisaurusspecimens, but other marine vertebrates were scarce. The bulk of the other fossils at BISP come from small invertebrates such as clams and ammonites (spiral-shelled relatives of today’s squid).

“There are so many large, adult skeletons from this one species at this site and almost nothing else,” said Pyenson. “There are virtually no remains of things like fish or other marine reptiles for these ichthyosaurs to feed on, and there are also no juvenile Shonisaurus skeletons.”

The researchers’ paleontological dragnet had eliminated some of the potential causes of death and started to provide intriguing clues about the type of ecosystem these marine predators were swimming in, but the evidence still didn’t clearly point to an alternative explanation.

The research team found a key piece of the puzzle when they discovered tiny ichthyosaur remains among new fossils collected at BISP and hiding within older museum collections. Careful comparison of the bones and teeth using micro-CT x-ray scans at Vanderbilt University revealed that these small bones were in fact embryonic and newborn Shonisaurus.

“Once it became clear that there was nothing for them to eat here, and there were large adult Shonisaurusalong with embryos and newborns but no juveniles, we started to seriously consider whether this might have been a birthing ground,” said Kelley.

Further analysis of the various strata in which the different clusters of ichthyosaur bones were found also revealed that the ages of the many fossil beds of BISP were separated by at least hundreds of thousands of years, if not millions.

“Finding these different spots with the same species spread across geologic time with the same demographic pattern tells us that this was a preferred habitat that these large oceangoing predators returned to for generations,” said Pyenson. “This is a clear ecological signal, we argue, that this was a place that Shonisaurusused to give birth, very similar to today’s whales. Now we have evidence that this sort of behavior is 230 million years old.”

The team said the next step for this line of research is to investigate other ichthyosaur and Shonisaurus sites in North America with these new findings in mind to begin to recreate their ancient world by perhaps looking for other breeding sites or for places with greater diversity of other species that could have been rich feeding grounds for this extinct apex predator.

“One of the exciting things about this new work is that we discovered new specimens of Shonisaurus popularis that have really well-preserved skull material,” Irmis said. “Combined with some of the skeletons that were collected back in the 1950s and 1960s that are at the Nevada State Museum in Las Vegas, it’s likely we’ll eventually have enough fossil material to finally accurately reconstruct what a Shonisaurus skeleton looked like.”

The 3D scans of the site are now available for other researchers to study and for the public to explore via the open-source Smithsonian’s Voyager platform, which is developed and maintained by Blundell’s team members at the Digitization Program Office, and anyone can take a deeper dive with the 3D model @ thesmithsonian.com.

“Our work is public,” said Blundell. “We aren’t just scanning sites and objects and locking them up. We create these scans to open up the collection to other researchers and members of the public who can’t physically get to a museum.”

The paper includes a wide variety of paleobiological and geological data, including geochemical data analyzed at SIRFER, petrographic thin sections that were imaged using Kathleen Ritterbush's system, and involvement of G&G graduate students (Conny Rasmussen is a co-author and her contribution was done when she was a PhD student here).

This research was conducted under research permits issued by the U.S. Forest Service and Nevada State Parks, and was supported by funding from the Smithsonian, University of Nevada, Reno, Vanderbilt University, and University of Utah.

Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park is part of Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest in the Shoshone Mountains of west-central Nevada. It is within the ancestral homelands of the Northern Paiute and Western Shoshone peoples.

GSL Meteorite

December 14, 2022

The impact site.

On the morning of Aug. 13, 2022, a loud boom was heard across the Salt Lake Valley. As it turned out, it was the sound of a falling meteorite that eventually landed in the salt flats west of Salt Lake City.

“I was just getting up, I was in my driveway, I heard a loud sonic boom and then some rumbling, kind of like thunder after that,” said Dr. James Karner, a research professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics. “I actually thought that could be what a meteorite sounds like when it breaks through the atmosphere.”

Karner’s suspicions were confirmed when the ski resort Snowbasin released video footage of a fireball falling through the sky.

“The relative rarity of an event like this — the only other witnessed fall ever in Utah was in 1950,” Karner said. “Before this meteor hit, there had only been 26 meteorites ever found in Utah.”

The meteorite was found in the salt flats by a meteorite hunter from Nevada named Sonny Clary. Clary then agreed to donate a slice of the meteorite to the University of Utah in order to have it studied further, as well as named by The Meteoritical Society.

James Karner

“If you’re the first finder of a meteorite, apparently, you’re very keen on getting your name in the archives,” Karner said. “In order to have a meteorite named, you have to have an institution classify it, just figure out what kind of meteorite it is and write up a little report then propose a name for it, so he agreed to let the University of Utah do that.”

Karner, as the U’s resident meteoriticist, is head of the team tasked with the analysis. “There’s not a lot of people that study meteorites here like at Arizona State or Portland State,” Karner said. “But [Clary] said, ‘I think, Utah, it’d be good for you to have this meteorite since it’s such a community event.’”

So, the process of analyzing and naming the meteorite began.

“The goal of meteoritics is to understand the origins of the solar system,” said Dr. Benjamin Bromley, professor of Physics and Astronomy. “These samples that people find are billions of years old, and many of them were formed as rocks at the beginning of the solar system, as all the solids came together.”

Bromley said the analysis of such samples could contain clues for how Earth and other planets in the solar system were formed.

“These are, in some sense, failed planets because they’re just little bits of debris,” he said. “They’re composed of pretty primordial stuff in many cases. So I think they’re really beautiful and really informative with the clues they have for understanding our solar system.”

Benjamin Bromley

The first step was to determine the composition of the sample. “Most meteorites are called stony meteorites, and they come from asteroids,” Karner said.

To explain this, he had a sample of another meteorite, separate from the one found in the salt flats, and pointed to little silver specks within the sample. “Those are little grains of iron-nickel metal. Those are unique to meteorites because all the iron has been oxidized on the surface of the Earth, but in space, you can get iron-nickel metal, and that tells you you have a meteorite.”

He explained the amount of metal in meteorites could vary from little specks in the stone to a meteorite that was an entire chunk of iron. The meteorite that fell in Utah is known as a high iron chondrite, meaning that, like most meteorites, it is a stony type that came from an asteroid, but with a high amount of iron in its composition.

Once the meteorite was classified, more information could be determined regarding its origin. Karner described how sometimes asteroids divert from their original orbits into elliptical ones, which pass much closer to Earth.

“Asteroids that have gotten knocked out of their regular circular orbit, and now they’re in this Earth-crossing orbit,” he said. “So sometimes we get lucky, we get pieces that break off that little sub-asteroid and come to Earth as meteorites.”

This origin is fairly common as far as meteorites go, but according to Bromley, the high iron quantity reveals something rare about the rock. He said because of the process in which asteroids are formed, known as differentiation, the metals in them sink to the center and the lighter materials rise to the top.

The Great Salt Lake Meteorite.

“So a heavy metal object like this undoubtedly didn’t come from the surface of some asteroid,” he said. “It likely came from a deeper impact that kind of ripped out the interior of something closer to the center of the object.”

The next step is getting the meteorite officially named by The Meteoritical Society. Karner’s proposed name is The Great Salt Lake Meteorite.

“Meteorites are named for usually the closest geographic place name,” Karner said. “I think Great Salt Lake would be cool since they found this near the Salt Lake, and there’s probably pieces that went into the Salt Lake.”

Aside from the science of it all, Karner also stressed how unique of an opportunity this is for the U and the broader community.

“There’s a lot of rock hounds in Utah, people that think they found meteorites, but they’re super rare,” he said. “More rare than diamonds and gold and anything you can think of. Even more rare than that is to see a fireball, hear the explosion and then find the rock that came with it.”

Bromley said he feels U students should care about and take a genuine interest in this science.

“This is studying our origins; this is studying where the Earth came from,” he said. “This is contributing to the body of knowledge for how habitable planets form and that’s extremely important towards understanding what other planets may be out around nearby stars.”

Even limited to Earth, Bromley believes this science has serious application and implications.

“It also speaks to the importance of our own planet and nurturing our planet,” he said. “I view this as a contribution to our own home, understanding it and caring for it.”

Stolen Ivory

October 20, 2022

Isotope data strengthens suspicions of ivory stockpile theft.

In January 2019, a seizure of 3.3 tons of ivory in Uganda turned up something surprising: markings on some of the tusks suggested that they may have been taken from a stockpile of ivory kept, it was thought, strictly under lock and key by the government of Burundi.

A new study from University of Utah distinguished professor Thure Cerling and colleagues, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, uses carbon isotope science to show that the marked tusks were more than 30 years old and somehow had found their way from the guarded government stockpile into the hands of illegal ivory traders. The results suggest that governments that maintain ivory stockpiles may want to take a closer look at their inventory.

Thure Cerling

“Due to the markings seen on some samples of the ivory, it was thought that quite a few samples in this shipment could be related to material held in a government stockpile in Burundi.”

Ivory’s isotope signatures

Cerling is a pioneer in the use of isotopes to answer questions about physical and biological processes. “Isotopes” of a given element refer to atoms of the element that vary in their number of neutrons, and thus vary oh-so-slightly in mass. A carbon-14 isotope has one more neutron than carbon-13, for example.

Some isotopes are stable and some are unstable. Unstable isotopes decay into other isotopes or elements through radioactive decay. Since the rate of decay is known for unstable isotopes, we can use the amounts present in a sample to determine ages. That’s how carbon dating works—it uses the rate of decay of unstable carbon-14 to determine the age of organic matter.

Sam Wasser

Around a decade ago, Cerling attended a presentation at the U by Sam Wasser of the University of Washington, who was studying the genetics of wildlife and using those tools to investigate the date and place of wildlife poaching. Cerling, recognizing that his expertise in isotope science might be able to add useful information, began an ongoing collaboration with Wasser.

In 2016, Cerling, Wasser and colleagues published a study that addressed a key question in the ivory trade: how old is the ivory seized by governments? Some traders have claimed their ivory is old, taken before 1976, and thus exempt from sales bans. And with the average size of ivory seizures more than 2.5 tons, researchers, governments and conservationists wonder how much of the ivory is recent and how much is coming from criminal stockpiles—or is stolen from one of several ivory stockpiles held by the governments of some countries in Africa.

“Governments keep their stockpiles for multiple reasons,” Wasser says. “They hope to sell the ivory for revenue, sometimes to support conservation efforts. However, they can only sell ivory from elephants that died of natural causes or were culled because they were problem animals. They can’t sell seized ivory because they don’t know it came from the country.”

With the combination of Cerling’s isotope data and Wasser’s genetic data, the 2016 study found that more than 90% of seized ivory was from elephants that had been killed less than three years before. It was a sobering result, showing active and well-developed poaching and export networks. The study seemed to show that little ivory from government stockpiles had ended up on the black market.

Marked tusks

But the 2019 seizure of ivory in Uganda showed something concerning. Some of the tusks sported markings that looked suspiciously like the markings that CITES, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, uses to inventory stockpiled ivory.

Due to the markings seen on some samples of the ivory,” Cerling says, “it was thought that quite a few samples in this shipment could be related to material held in a government stockpile in Burundi. We were asked to date samples from this, and three other recent ivory seizures, to see if some samples could possibly be from older stockpiles.”

To determine the ivory’s age, the researchers collected small samples from the tusks and analyzed them for the amount of carbon-14 isotopes in each sample. They were looking specifically for the amount of “bomb carbon” in the tusks. Between 1945 and 1963, nuclear weapons testing doubled the amount of carbon-14 in the atmosphere, so anything living that’s consumed carbon since then—including you—has a measurable carbon-14 signature. The amount of carbon-14 in a sample of ivory that hasn’t yet radioactively decayed can tell scientists when the ivory stopped growing, or when the elephant died.

Paula Kahumbu

The method takes some calibration, using samples from organisms living in the same area. Some of the samples came from schoolchildren in Kenya, through a program called “Kids and Goats for Elephants.” Because most families in rural Kenya keep goats the program, run by Cerling and Paula Kahumbu of WildlifeDirect, engages children in collecting hair samples from goats for isotopic analysis. The isotope data is useful for many applications, including fighting elephant poaching and, in this case, calibrating the bomb carbon decay rate for more accurate dating of ivory.

A consequential result

The researchers analyzed ivory from four seizures in Angola, Hong Kong, Singapore and Uganda. Genetic data ensured that they weren’t sampling two tusks from the same individual. The results of analysis from the Angola, Hong Kong and Singapore seizures were as expected – the results showed ages mostly around three years after the death of the elephant, with no tusks having been taken more than 10 years previous.

But the Uganda seizure, with the inventory markings on the tusks, showed something very different. Nine of the 11 tusks tested had been taken more than 30 years before, with the dates of death ranging between 1985 and 1988. Those dates are consistent with the age of ivory in the stockpile of the government of Burundi, which was inventoried and stored in sealed containers in 1989.

“My suspicions were affirmed,” Wasser says. “The bigger surprise was how near to 1989 the elephants were killed.” At the time Burundi assembled its stockpile, a condition of joining CITES, which assists governments in managing ivory reserves, was that the ivory to be stockpiled was old. The results suggest that that wasn’t the case, Wasser says, which would have violated conditions for Burundi to join CITES.

“The hope is that CITES will request the stockpile to be re-inventoried,” Wasser says, “including aging randomly selected tusks and secure the remaining stocks.”

Find the full study here.

Utah F.O.R.G.E.

October 5, 2022

The Utah FORGE Project

The Frontier Observatory for Geothermal Research

There is something deceptively simple about geothermal energy. The crushing force of gravity compacts the earth to the point where its molten metal center is 9,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Even thousands of miles out near the surface, the temperature is still hundreds of degrees.

In some places, that heat reaches the surface, either as lava flowing up through volcanic vents, or as steaming water bubbling up in hot springs. In those places, humans have been using geothermal energy since the dawn of time.

But what if we could drill down into the rock and, in essence, create our own hot spring? That is the idea behind “enhanced geothermal systems,” and the most promising such effort in the world is happening in Beaver County.

Called Utah FORGE (Frontier Observatory for Geothermal Research), the site 10 miles north of Milford is little more than a drill pad and a couple of buildings on Utah School and Institutional Trust Lands Administration land. But it is the U.S. Department of Energy’s foremost laboratory for enhanced geothermal research, and the University of Utah is the scientific overseer. Seven years ago, the U of U’s proposal won out in a national competition against three of the DOE’s own national laboratories.

“If you have to pick the best area in the country to build an EGS plant, you’re going to be driven to Milford. DOE recognized that in 2015,” said Joseph N. Moore, a University of Utah Professor with the Department of Geology & Geophysics and the principal investigator for Utah FORGE.

Professor Joseph N. Moore

Among the advantages:

It’s in a known area of thermal activity. Nearby is Roosevelt Hot Springs, and a small nearby geothermal plant has been producing electricity for about 30,000 homes for years.
It has hundreds of cubic miles hot granite below the surface with no water flowing through it.
There is accessible water that can’t be used for drinking or agriculture because it contains too many naturally occurring minerals. But that water can be used for retrieving heat from underground.
It has access to transmission lines. Beaver County is home to a growing amount of wind and solar power generation, helping access to consumers.

DOE has invested $50 million in FORGE, and now it’s adding another $44 million in research money. The U of U is soliciting proposals from scientists.

“These new investments at FORGE, the flagship of our EGS research, can help us find the most innovative, cost-effective solutions and accelerate our work toward wide-scale geothermal deployment and support President Biden’s ambitious climate goals,” said Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.

The idea is to drill two deep wells more than a mile down into solid granite that registers around 400 degrees. Then cold water is pumped down one well so hot water can be pulled out through the second well. One of those wells has been drilled, and the second is planned for next year.

But if it’s solid rock, how does the water get from one well to the other? The scientists have turned to a technology that transformed the oil and gas industry: hydraulic fracturing, also known as “fracking.” They are pumping water down under extremely high pressures to create or expand small cracks in the rock, and those cracks allow the cold water to flow across the hot rock to the second well. They have completed some hydraulic fracturing from the first well.

Moore is quick to point out that using a fracturing process for geothermal energy does not produce the environmental problems associated with oil and gas fracking, largely because it doesn’t generate dirty wastewater and gases. Further, the oil released in the fracturing can lubricate underground faults, and removing the oil and gas creates gaps, both of which lead to more and larger earthquakes.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm

The fracturing in enhanced geothermal does produce seismic activity that seismologists are monitoring closely, Moore said, but the circumstances are much different. In geothermal fracturing, there is only water, and it can be returned to the ground without contamination. And producing fractures in an isolated piece of granite is less likely to affect faults. The hope, he said, is that once there are enough cracks for sufficient flow from one pipe to the other, it can produce continuous hot water without further fracturing.

And it never runs out. Moore said that even 2% of the available geothermal energy in the United States would be enough the power the nation by itself.

This next round of $44 million in federal funding is about taking that oil and gas process and making it specific to enhanced geothermal. That includes further seismic study, and coming up with the best “proppant” — the material used to keep the fracture open. Oil and gas use fracking sand to keep the cracks open, and the higher temperatures of geothermal make that challenging.

“FORGE is a derisking laboratory,” said Moore, meaning the U of U scientists, funded by the federal government, are doing some heavy lifting to turn the theory of EGS into a practical clean-energy solution. He said drilling wells that deep costs $70,000 a day. They drill 10 to 13 feet per hour, and it takes six hours just to pull out a drill to change the bit, something they do every 50 hours. That early, expensive work makes it easier for private companies to move the technology into a commercially viable business. Moore said all of the research is in the public domain.

Moore said FORGE doesn’t employ many full-time employees in Beaver County at this point, but it has used local contractors for much of the work, and it has filled the county’s hotel rooms for occasional meetings. High school students have also been hired to help with managing core samples from the deep wells.

“They’ve collaborated really well with the town,” said Milford Mayor Nolan Davis. Moore and others have made regular presentations to his city council, and they’ve sponsored contests in the high school to teach students about geothermal energy. People in town, Davis said, are well aware that the world is watching Utah FORGE, and there is hope geothermal energy will become a larger presence if and when commercial development begins. “We hope they can come in and maybe build several small power plants.”

Davis also noted that the power from Beaver County’s solar and wind plants are already contracted to California. “We’d like to get some power we can keep in the county.”

Hollywood Dinosaurs

July 20, 2022

Cinematic dinosaur representation. Accurate?

Have you ever wondered if “Jurassic Park” is realistic? Jeff Goldblum’s sexual magnetism is most certainly accurate, but what of the dinosaurs?

Enter Mark Loewen, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum of Utah and associate professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the U. In June, Loewen critiqued the accuracy of Hollywood’s depictions of dinosaurs for Vanity Fair in a video that has racked up nearly 2.5 million views on YouTube. You can watch the video below.

Mark Loewen

“I view myself as an evangelist for science. Movies are a sneaky way of showing students how cool these concepts are. I mean, isn’t this one of the most awesome classes you could take? Get a science credit to watch movies and learn about the science!”

“I love these movies—some of them are horrible, but I still love them,” said Loewen. “Before being a paleontologist, I became a geologist because I wanted to time travel. By looking at rocks, you can literally see what past worlds looked like! Seeing dinosaurs reconstructed in movies is the same thing. It’s fun to see how we can use fossils to imagine what these animals could have looked like.”

Loewen is uniquely suited for the job. In the early 2000s, he and his mentor Scott Sampson created a class called World of Dinosaurs, GEO 1040, where students watched movie clips and analyzed the veracity of dino representation. He expanded this idea to create Science and Cinema, GEO 1000, a non-majors science class that analyzes science in movies. By studying the dinosaurs, natural disasters and science fiction presented on screen, students learn science fundamentals while having fun celebrating—or berating—various motion pictures.

An alum of the Science of Cinema class now works at Vanity Fair and recommended Loewen for the video series, which coincides with the release of “Jurassic World: Dominion” (2022). A professional film crew shot his interview in the paleontology collections at the museum. If you watch the video closely, you can see specimens of dinosaurs that Loewen himself has discovered and named. U students can use their UCard to visit the museum for free, and during the museum’s annual Behind-the-Scenes event you can tour the collections and see fossils and specimens not displayed on the main floor.

“I’ve named 13 dinosaurs, and many of them are in the museum,” Loewen said, “My favorite is Lythronax, an earlier cousin of the T-Rex. Lythronax means ‘King of Gore’ or ‘Gore King.’ It’s a big, bloody dinosaur on its way to becoming a T-Rex.”

Loewen cites the Disney classic “Fantasia” (1940) segment, “Extinction of the Dinosaurs,” as an early catalyst for his love of dinosaurs. He analyzes the scene in the Vanity Fair video and gives it props for being the first movie to show dinosaurs living in their ecosystem. He calls it an important movie because it “sets the stage of dinosaurs being these iconic beasts of the past.” However, he explains that the animation reflected people’s understanding of the creatures in the 40s—the animals were sluggish and dragged their tails while moving around. It wasn’t until much later that we understood that many dinosaurs were agile and fearsome hunters.

For all y’all older millennials out there, be relieved–Loewen confirms that fossils of baby long-necked dinosaurs such as Little Foot in “The Land Before Time” (1988) did have big, puppy eyes and delicate little beaks—so they really were as cute as the cartoon. However, Sara the Triceratops and Little Foot the Brontosaurus didn’t co-exist at the same time, so would never have met to become friends.

He also critiques some aspects of the original "Jurassic Park.” However, Loewen does applaud the movie for being accurate based on our understanding in the early 90s.

“’Jurassic Park’ was one of the first accurate depictions of dinosaurs. They’re not acting like lizards. They’re acting like ferocious birds of prey,” said Loewen. “But when it came out, we didn’t know that dinosaurs had feathers. At the time, lots of scientists would have told you that dinosaurs didn’t become birds. Forty years later, 100% of dinosaur paleontologists will tell you that birds are actually dinosaurs, and we have evidence of feathers for almost every type of dinosaur. In the new movies, most of the dinosaurs have feathers.”

Editor’s note on conflict of interest: The author’s favorite movie is “Jurassic Park.”

Biomimetic Cephalopods

July 11, 2022

Bringing ancient animals back to life—as robots.

In a university swimming pool, scientists and their underwater cameras watch carefully as a coiled shell is released from a pair of metal tongs. The shell begins to move under its own power, giving the researchers a glimpse into what the oceans might have looked like millions of years ago when they were full of these ubiquitous animals.

This isn’t Jurassic Park, but it is an effort to learn about ancient life by recreating it. In this case, the recreations are 3-D-printed robots designed to replicate the shape and motion of ammonites, marine animals that both preceded and were contemporaneous with the dinosaurs.

David Peterman

"Evolution dealt them a very unique mode of locomotion after liberating them from the seafloor with a chambered, gas-filled conch. These animals are essentially rigid-bodied submarines propelled by jets of water."

The robotic ammonites allowed the researchers to explore questions about how shell shapes affected swimming ability. They found trade-offs between stability in the water and maneuverability, suggesting that the evolution of ammonite shells explored different designs for different advantages rather than converged toward a single best design.

“These results reiterate that there is no single optimum shell shape,” says David Peterman, a postdoctoral fellow in the University of Utah’s Department of Geology and Geophysics.

The study is published in Scientific Reports and supported by the National Science Foundation.

Bringing ammonites to “life”

For years, Peterman and Kathleen Ritterbush, assistant professor of geology and geophysics, have been exploring the hydrodynamics, or physics of moving through the water, of ancient shelled cephalopods, including ammonites. Cephalopods today include octopuses and squid, with only one group sporting an external shell—the nautiluses.

Before the current era, cephalopods with shells were everywhere. Although their rigid coiled shells would have impacted their free movement through the water, they were phenomenally successful evolution-wise, persisting for hundreds of millions of years and surviving every mass extinction.

“These properties make them excellent tools to study evolutionary biomechanics,” Peterman says, “the story of how benthic (bottom-dwelling) mollusks became among the most complex and mobile group of marine invertebrates. My broader research goal is to provide a better understanding of these enigmatic animals, their ecosystem roles, and the evolutionary processes that have shaped them.”

Peterman and Ritterbush previously built life-sized 3-D weighted models of cone-shaped cephalopod shells and found, through releasing them in pools, that the ancient animals likely lived a vertical life, bobbing up and down through the water column to find food. These models’ movements were governed solely by buoyancy and the hydrodynamics of the shell.

But Peterman has always wanted to build models more similar to living animals.

Diagram of a Biometic Cehalapod.

“I have wanted to build robots ever since I developed the first techniques to replicate hydrostatic properties in physical models, and Kathleen strongly encouraged me as well,” Peterman says. “On-board propulsion enables us to explore new questions regarding the physical constraints on the life habits of these animals.”

Buoyancy became Peterman’s chief challenge. He needed the models to be neutrally buoyant, neither floating nor sinking. He also needed the models to be water-tight, both to protect the electronics inside and to prevent leaking water from changing the delicate buoyancy balance.

But the extra work is worth it. “New questions can be investigated using these techniques,” Peterman says, “including complex jetting dynamics, coasting efficiency, and the 3-D maneuverability of particular shell shapes.”

Three kinds of shells

The researchers tested robotic ammonites with three shell shapes. They’re partially based on the shell of a modern Nautilus and modified to represent the range of ancient ammonites’ shell shapes. The model called a serpenticone had tight whorls and a narrow shell, while the sphaerocone model had few thick whorls and a wide, almost spherical shell. The third model, the oxycone, was somewhere in the middle: thick whorls and a narrow, streamlined shell. You can think of them occupying a triangular diagram, representing “end-members” of different shell characteristics.

“Every planispiral cephalopod to ever exist plots somewhere on this diagram,” Peterman says, allowing the properties for in-between shapes to be estimated.

Once the 3-D-printed models were built, rigged and weighted, it was time to go to the pool. Working first in the pool of Geology and Geophysics professor Brenda Bowen and later in the U’s Crimson Lagoon, Peterman and Ritterbush set up cameras and lights underwater and released the robotic ammonites, tracking their position in 3-D space throughout around a dozen “runs” for each shell type.

No perfect shell shape

By analyzing the data from the pool experiments, the researchers were looking for the pros and cons associated with each shell characteristic.

“We expected there to be various advantages and consequences for any particular shapes,” Peterman says. “Evolution dealt them a very unique mode of locomotion after liberating them from the seafloor with a chambered, gas-filled conch. These animals are essentially rigid-bodied submarines propelled by jets of water.” That shell isn’t great for speed or maneuverability, he says, but coiled-shell cephalopods still managed remarkable diversity through each mass extinction.

“Throughout their evolution, externally shelled cephalopods navigated their physical limitations by endlessly experimenting with variations on the shape of their coiled shells,” Peterman says.

So, which shell shape was the best?

David Peterman

“The idea that one shape is better than another is meaningless without asking the question—‘better at what?’” Peterman says. Narrower shells enjoyed less drag and more stability while traveling in one direction, improving their jetting efficiency. But wider, more spherical shells could more easily change directions, spinning on an axis. This maneuverability may have helped them catch prey or avoid slow predators (like other shelled cephalopods).

Peterman notes that some interpretations consider many ammonite shells as hydrodynamically “inferior” to others, limiting their motion too much.

“Our experiments, along with the work of colleagues in our lab, demonstrate that shell designs traditionally interpreted as hydrodynamically ‘inferior’ may have had some disadvantages but are not immobile drifters,” Peterman says. “For externally shelled cephalopods, speed is certainly not the only metric of performance.” Nearly every variation in shell design iteratively appears at some point in the fossil record, he says, showing that different shapes conferred different advantages.

“Natural selection is a dynamic process, changing through time and involving numerous functional tradeoffs and other constraints,” he says, “Externally-shelled cephalopods are perfect targets to study these complex dynamics because of their enormous temporal range, ecological significance, abundance, and high evolutionary rates.”

Find the full study @ Nature.com.

CO2 Atmospheric changes

Carbon dioxide has not been as high as today's concentrations in 14 million years thanks to fossil fuel emissions now warming the planet.