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PSYCHOLOGY
Lights, Camera, Therapy
P.24
Do All Animals Play?
P.54
SCIENCE FOR THE CURIOUS
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JUNE 2017
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT
OUR MELTING PLANET NEWS FROM THE FRONT LINES OF CLIMATE CHANGE P.36
PLUS
The Last Question to Ask Your Doctor On a Mission to Mine Asteroids A Prescription for Solitude P.22
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Contents JUNE 2017 VOL. 38, NO. 5
Website access code: DSD1706 Enter this code at: www.DiscoverMagazine.com/code to gain access to exclusive subscriber content.
FEATURES
30 Let Your Mind Wander Daydreaming seems like a waste of time, something to avoid. But it actually can lead to creative ideas. BY MICHAEL HARRIS
36 Meltdown The warming of Antarctica and the shrinking of its glaciers could mean a grim future for the world’s coastal inhabitants. BY ERIC BETZ
48 The Universe According to Emmy Noether In the early 20th century, a young mathematician developed a theorem. Eventually it would become a bedrock of modern physics and be used to discover new particles and better understand black holes. BY STEVE NADIS
BRETT SEYMOUR, EUA/WHOI/ARGO
54 The Play’s the Thing
Diver Philip Short recovers a bronze spear from a sculpture lost in an ancient shipwreck near the Greek island of Antikythera. Read about the wreck and its relics on page 70.
Mammals aren’t the only ones who know how to have a good time. Turtles, spiders, birds and other critters can let loose, too. BY MARTA ZARASKA
June 2017 DISCOVER
3
Contents COLUMNS & DEPARTMENTS
6 EDITOR’S NOTE Studies in Solitude We take you to Antarctica and enlist your daydreaming, solitary mind.
7 INBOX Readers comment on bee deaths, the FDA’s heroine and more.
22 VITAL SIGNS
One More Thing With the checkup complete and the doctor headed for the door, a patient blurts out symptoms that could be nothing, or everything.
Read about the mission of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft and what we can learn from space rocks on page 60.
BY JULIA MICHIE BRUCKNER
24 MIND OVER MATTER
Movies are entertainment, a way of escape. But for people with personal challenges, movies also can put problems in perspective. BY AMY KRAFT
60 OUT THERE
Our Rocks, Ourselves Nearly 50 years ago, scientists found clues in a meteorite to how planets form. Last September, NASA set course for an asteroid that could reveal even more about the mysteries of the early solar system. BY DOUGLAS FOX
9
THE CRUX
A computer scientist unlocks ancient scrolls burned to a crisp; seven may be the lucky number for discovering life outside our solar system; facial expressions might not be as universal as we thought; mice could lose their title as the best lab test subjects; old mold fetches a high price at auction; and more.
4
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66 ORIGIN STORY
Rock-a-Bye-Baby’s Rocky Roots Lullabies may have evolved in prehistoric times as a way for busy moms to give “hands-free” attention to their children. BY YAOHUA LAW
Discover LIVING WORLD
PSYCHOLOGY
Lights, Camera, Therapy
P.24
Do All Animals Play?
P.54
SCIENCE FOR THE CURIOUS
®
JUNE 2017
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT
OUR MELTING PLANET NEWS FROM THE FRONT LINES OF CLIMATE CHANGE P.36
70 HISTORY LESSONS Treasures Beneath the Ancient Sands
A 2,000-year-old shipwreck off the coast of Greece has offered up artifacts since its discovery a century ago. This summer, excavation resumes. BY MARK BARNA
74 20 THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT …
Swamps Wetlands aren’t just full of mosquitoes and cattails. They also store carbon, act as storm buffers and boast carnivorous plants. BY GEMMA TARLACH
PLUS
The Last Question to Ask Your Doctor P.22 On a Mission to Mine Asteroids P.60 A Prescription for Solitude P.30
ON THE COVER Lights, Camera, Therapy p.24 Do All Animals Play? p.54 Our Melting Planet p.36 The Last Question to Ask Your Doctor p.22 On a Mission to Mine Asteroids p.60 A Prescription for Solitude p.30 Cover image: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
NASA GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER
Lights, Camera, Therapy
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Editor's Note
®
BECKY LANG Editor In Chief DAN BISHOP Design Director
Studies in Solitude Solitude. It’s an apt word for exactly one of our planet’s continents, and it’s a necessary state of being if we really want to let our minds wander. In this issue, solitude is key in two very different stories. We head south to Antarctica, flying low in a retrofitted DC-8 jet, measuring the toll of global warming (on page 36). Then we dive into daydreaming, where our unconscious minds get to work (on page 30). The Antarctica we think we know from a distance is one of stark isolation and desolation, an endless expanse of ice. But that rock-solid foundation is slipping away, and fast. The melting in some areas cannot be stopped. One crew of NASA pilots and scientists has watched it disappear. Discover Associate Editor Eric Betz traveled to their base in Punta Arenas, Chile, to fly with the unit as they crisscrossed over Antarctica in 12-hour stints. The data they collect are crucial to figuring out how much ice is melting and how that plays out in the global domino effect. The life span of those ice shelves directly affects how much water will swamp homes in Boston and how much drought parches entire neighborhoods and fields in Missouri. But how do you really wrap your head around that change? Squirrel yourself away, shut down your logical, bossy brain and let it meander as it likes. Don’t be surprised if you have an “aha” moment, as your mind makes newfound connections, off on its own.
EDITORIAL
KATHI KUBE Managing Editor GEMMA TARLACH Senior Editor BILL ANDREWS Senior Associate Editor MARK BARNA Associate Editor ERIC BETZ Associate Editor LACY SCHLEY Assistant Editor DAVE LEE Copy Editor ELISA R. NECKAR Copy Editor AMY KLINKHAMMER Editorial Assistant Contributing Editors
TIM FOLGER, JONATHON KEATS, LINDA MARSA, KENNETH MILLER, STEVE NADIS, ADAM PIORE, COREY S. POWELL, JULIE REHMEYER, STEVE VOLK, PAMELA WEINTRAUB, JEFF WHEELWRIGHT, DARLENE CAVALIER (SPECIAL PROJECTS)
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photographer Chris Baker. Available from 16” to 48” widths all limited editions.
BUZZKILL BY STEVE VOLK
PHOTO BY ALEX WILD
Dozens of dead worker bees lie headfirst in a hive. High mortality rates still affect bee colonies around the U.S.
30
What About Our Bees? I just finished reading the article about honeybee colony collapse (“Buzzkill,” March 2017). Besides this being a real catastrophe happening now, it has encompassed a whole set of political problems and issues. I’m curious to see what the new secretary of agriculture’s thoughts are on this. Dorothy Hill, Boise, ID
Legacy of Luck Regarding your article on Frances Kelsey (“The Heroine of the FDA,” March 2017): It sounds to me like all Kelsey did was allow the information about thalidomide to sit on her desk for more than a year, while
WEB FEEDBACK Potatoes on Mars After successfully growing potatoes in Mars-like conditions, researchers are hopeful about the spuds’ growing potential on the Red Planet. Here’s what readers thought:
Puzzling Out PANS As a PANS parent, I want to thank you for the excellent article in the April 2017 issue (“Hidden Invaders,” on infections that cause kids’ immune systems to turn against the brain, and the hunt for treatments). It is a ray of hope in what has been a very long, dark journey. This feels like a turning point for many of us. Again, thank you from the bottom of my heart. Angela Abide, Austin, TX
S E E A L L T H E O P T I O N S A T: www.cosmologychris.co.uk www.facebook.com/galaxyonglass or Call +44 (0)7814 181647
Letters are edited for space and clarity.
D
Jason Bain Who needs oxygen when you have potatoes.
D
Mike Richardson Potatoes are a good start. Wheat and soybeans would provide even more options, and should be suitable for cultivation in a similar controlled environment.
Kenneth Pezzi A lot of positive energy here! But no mention of the high radioactive levels in space and on Mars? Meaning the soil is full of it on Mars, so bring your own.
D pres1dentkang The video clearly shows dripping water. Sorry, but that water would sublimate rapidly at Martian air pressure. And plants are surviving the -130° C nighttime temperatures?
Doug Booker If potatoes grow there, then we’ll probably be able to make vodka as well . . . just saying.
Michael Banach @m1db @DiscoverMag How much organic material did Matt Damon contribute?
June 2017 DISCOVER
INTERNATIONAL POTATO CENTER
The science and politics of saving America’s bees gets messy. And the bees continue to die.
Merrell Co. badgered her to pass it for distribution in the USA. Had she done her job sooner, she might not have been so lucky, and she might not have become the heroine of the FDA. Luckily for her, news of the dreadful consequences this drug had on pregnant women and their babies started coming from Europe around that same time. I’m not sure Kelsey should have been lauded for this or given a medal. It was serendipitous at best. Joyce Weiss, Wynnewood, PA
7
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• Enjoy 2 minutes and 2 seconds of totality at a specially selected viewing location in central Oregon. • Discover some of the Pacific Northwest’s most notable cities, including Seattle, Bend, Portland, and San Francisco. • Explore Seattle’s historic Pike Place Market, nearby Mount St. Helens, the Columbia River Gorge, Crater Lake and Redwood National Park, and cross the Golden Gate Bridge.
• View 2 minutes of totality in the stunning sky above Jackson Hole, Wyoming. • Visit Lowell Observatory, journey through red rock country around Sedona, marvel at the cliffs of Zion National Park, enjoy a storied lodge in Yellowstone, visit the Grand Canyon, pay your respects at Mount Rushmore, and much more. • Enjoy the best of regional cuisine and accommodations in Salt Lake City and Jackson Hole.
• Experience 2 minutes and 40 seconds of totality near Nashville, Tennessee, the best viewing location in the country. • Enjoy 4-star accommodations in New Orleans, Memphis, and Nashville. • Tap your toes to traditional jazz, go behind the scenes at RCA’s recording studios, visit Graceland and the Grand Ole Opry, and much more. It’s a feast for the eyes — and the ears!
THE CRUX T H E L ATEST S C I E N C E N E WS A N D N O T ES
AN EYE FOR CAMOUFLAGE The red-eyed tree frog, as its name implies, has some pretty striking orbs. But those peepers can also be beacons for predators when the amphibian just wants to chill. So the Central America native covers its eyes with a semi-transparent lid called a nictitating membrane, which allows the tiny frog some limited vision during rest. Experts believe the membrane’s gold pattern functions as camouflage. Photographer Twan Leenders, president of New York’s Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History, snapped this shot in Costa Rica. It was part of a Biology Without Borders photography exhibit at the institute late last year. ERNIE MASTROIANNI; PHOTO BY TWAN LEENDERS
June 2017 DISCOVER
9
THE CRUX
A Mightier Mouse Key genetic differences between humans and mice make research rodents less than perfect patients.
“CANCER HAS BEEN CURED a thousand
times.” So says Christopher Austin, the director of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) at the National Institutes of Health. The catch? All those cures happened in mice. Hundreds of drugs have wiped out mouse tumors, only to fail in human trials. Or worse, they turned out to be toxic to humans. An astounding 90 percent of all drug trials never make it to FDA approval. The humble lab mouse shoulders much of the blame. But should scientists ditch their furry model altogether, or can they simply build a better mouse? Mice entered the lab back in the early 1900s. Geneticist Clarence Cook Little suspected cancer was an inherited disease, and mice — shortlived and low maintenance — were the ideal test subjects. His lab eventually sold mouse strains all over the country. He even secured the mouse as the official animal model for government-funded cancer research. Little wasn’t totally wrong. Humans and mice share about 97 percent of their genes. This similarity is a blessing and a curse. In some cases, the difference is just one nucleotide — a single G, T, A or C. But Austin says it’s like reading a word with a letter missing. “[If] you mess up a letter, that changes the meaning of the word,” says Austin. “And that’s true in DNA spelling, too. Sickle cell anemia is caused by one difference out of 3 billion.”
Even diet can dramatically change gene expression. “If you put [identical mice] in two different environments, in two different time zones, two locations, the results are different,” says Austin. Sterile labs could also be muddying results. A recent study showed that mice were better models when they were exposed to common human viruses. Lab mice bred to be “perfect” controls live a pampered lifestyle that alters their physiology. In other words, a dirty mouse isn’t such a bad thing. Another issue: Most scientists aren’t experts in mouse biology. “I think in the past, some investigators worked in a vacuum,” says Elizabeth Bryda, director of the Rat Resource and Research Center (RRRC). Scientists aren’t always thinking about the genetic differences between mice and humans because they’re focused elsewhere. “Maybe the species you’re working with isn’t the best species for the question, but you don’t know enough about the physiology or the genetics to recognize that,” she says. Like mice, rats are common in labs. The two have minor physiological differences and, more notably, psychological variations that affect how they interact. But the issues plaguing mouse research often appear in rats, too. RRRC helps solve that by acting as a kind of rat customization shop. Want a rat with pulmonary hypertension and a deficiency of serotonin? They’ve got the model for you. Or maybe one with cataracts? No problem. Thanks to
Humans and mice share about 97% of their genes. This similarity is a blessing and a curse.
10
DISCOVERMAGAZINE.COM
CRISPR gene-editing tools, researchers can tweak the rat genome to create so-called transgenic animals with human-like disease traits. Using gene editing to create rodents that are ideal research models could narrow the genetic divide between humans and their animal stand-ins. But scientists are still unraveling what makes a mouse tick. To this end, the International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium is doubling down on the mouse and picking through its genome with the finest of combs. Mice have around 20,000 genes that bear strong similarities to humans. We know the function of about half of these, says Kent Lloyd, who directs the Mouse Biology Program at the University of California, Davis. He and his colleagues at the consortium want to understand the other half. The process is painstaking and involves the systematic “knockout” — removal — of relevant genes in stem cell cultures. Once a gene is gone, researchers grow mice from the stem cells to see what happens. By 2020, the group hopes to fully understand the 20,000-gene bridge between us and our lab experiments. Some efforts, like Austin’s NCATS, have stopped chasing the perfect mouse entirely. They’re developing computer models that can re-create human cells and organs to test how virtual humans respond to new drugs. Other researchers are building what some call “organs on a chip.” Introducing new drugs to plastic microchips lined with human cells should let researchers watch what happens without ever involving a living creature. Scientists’ long relationship with lab mice has been one of incremental advances to improve a flawed system. Fittingly, this is exactly how most scientific research progresses — by critically examining what we know to expand our knowledge of what we don’t. NATHANIEL SCHARPING
PETER GINTER/GETTY IMAGES
BIG IDEA
A transgenic mouse — one with foreign genes swapped into its DNA — poses with its own gene sequence at Harvard Medical School.
June 2017 DISCOVER
11
THE CRUX Q&A
History Unwrapped A computer scientist reveals the text of ancient documents beyond repair. of unlocking lost secrets. With specialized software he and his team developed, the University of Kentucky computer scientist can read ancient scrolls too fragile to unroll. Recently, he watched as Hebrew consonants from the charred remains of an ancient Jewish scroll flashed across a computer screen. Archaeologists discovered the scroll in 1970 at En-Gedi, the site of an ancient synagogue in Israel that burned in the sixth century. The fire reduced the document to a charred lump that crumbled at the slightest touch. But last
year, Seales’ software virtually unwrapped a three-dimensional scan of the scroll’s internal structure, flattening the text to two-dimensional images. Centuries after it was last read, the scroll’s writing was once again accessible. Inside were two chapters of the Book of Leviticus; researchers carbon dated the ink to as early as the third century. Discover spoke with Seales about his efforts to unwrap the EnGedi scroll, as well as his next project.
Computer scientist Brent Seales uses software to unravel damaged scrolls, like the one below, once thought unreadable. The work revealed the text of the En-Gedi scroll, left, which was untouched for 45 years after its discovery.
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FROM TOP: SETH PARKER/UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY; MATT BARTON/UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY; AMIR COHEN/REUTERS; STEPHEN BAILEY/CENTER FOR VISUALIZATION & VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS/UNIVERSITY OF KENTUCKY
BRENT SEALES has made a career
Kids in the U.S. need your help now more than ever.
Brent Seales and his team digitally unfurled this scroll from En-Gedi, an ancient synagogue in Israel. From the charred remains, scans revealed Hebrew text from the book of Leviticus.
Q
Tell us about the technology behind your method. What was key to “unrolling” this scroll?
A
scrolls are so fragile that even pulling them out of the collection causes damage. So the technology enables us to delve into a virtual world without having to deal with a physical world, where you might damage something.
Tomography [a 3-D version of X-rays, also used in hospital CT scans] is the basis for everything. But another key piece has been the acceleration of handling large datasets and being able to visualize them on ordinary computers. That’s been done only in the last five years.
Q
Q
A
Without getting too technical, how did you figure the way the letters from the scans would look if laid out?
A
The scanning data that comes from tomography is very unstructured and hard to visualize. So creating virtual meshes [the component of the software that represents the paper of the scroll], and developing how they should look, was key in that visualization. Those were things that had to happen to be able to read anything in such a complicated set of data.
Q
How is your software changing the way researchers study these sorts of damaged texts?
A
It’s completely noninvasive. You can read them without opening or disturbing the actual artifacts. These
Children often go without proper nutrition, and many do not have adequate clothing to protect them from inclement weather.
You’re now working with texts buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. What are you looking forward to with this latest project?
Your donation of just $30 a month - $360 a year – will provide clothing, school supplies, educational assistance, and much more.
Opening even some of those scrolls holds the promise of being the biggest discovery ever in antiquity literature. Some people think it will just be more philosophical texts. But some could be lost texts, and this technology could reveal them again to the world. That is really exciting.
Contact Children Incorporated today to begin fZdbg`Z]bƭ^k^g\^'
Q
How have these projects changed your perspective on software programming?
A
1-800-538-5381 childrenincorporated.org
I’ve learned that this stuff is more personal and connected to me than I thought. If you read the literature, you see everything we have now: love, conflict, people trying to understand their place in the world. I get pulled back and realize how special it is and what it means to be human. MARK BARNA
June 2017 DISCOVER
13
THE CRUX FAR, FAR AWAY
MARTIAN WINDS Earth isn’t the only place with blustery days. Mars also experiences gale-force winds that blow up to 60 mph, forming sand dunes that resemble those on our home planet. This photo, by the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, shows a field spanning 1 kilometer of wind-carved ripples in the Red Planet’s northern mid-latitudes. To reveal greater detail, the image was rendered in blue. Researchers compared this photograph with images taken four years earlier at the same site, one of more than 60 NASA is studying. The images will help scientists understand how wind changes the terrain over time. ERNIE MASTROIANNI; PHOTO BY NASA/JPL/UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
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THE CRUX
TRENDING BY LACY SCHLEY
U.S. Wildfires
Humans vs. Lightning*
84%
of wildfires in continental U.S. are ignited by humans
Degrees of Separation From pricey mold to deep-sea pollution.
LENGTH OF FIRE SEASON
154 days
Human-ignited fires
46 days
Lightning fires
SEASONALITY OF FIRE SPRING 38% SUMMER 24% FALL 19% WINTER 19%
SPRING 9% SUMMER 78% FALL 12% WINTER <1%
MOST COMMON DAY FOR FIRES
JULY
JUNE
4th
22nd
Human
Lightning
* Figures based on fires documented from 1992-2012 that were extinguished or managed by government agencies. Source: “Human-started wildfires expand the fire niche across the United States,” PNAS, 2017
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What experts think could be the new global life expectancy for those born in 2030 — but only for South Korean females. Sorry, everyone else.
69%
The bump in the energy-generating capacity of mitochondria — our cells’ power plants — seen in older participants aged 65-80 after 12 weeks of highintensity aerobic interval workouts.
How much data researchers can now store using just 1 gram of DNA. (In case you’re wondering just how much that is, a petabyte equals 1 million gigabytes.)
50,000
90
YEARS
100%
215
PETABYTES
0%
£11,875
The latest major deposit to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, based in the Arctic. Conservationists house these seeds as insurance for global food security in the face of war, natural disaster and climate change.
The depth (a little over 6 miles) at which marine experts have discovered human-caused pollution in the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the world’s oceans, located in the Pacific.
10,250
METERS
44%
The price of a sample of the same mold Alexander Fleming used to create penicillin, sold at a recent auction. (Based on exchange rates at sale time, that’s roughly $14,600.)
SAMPLES
Total area burned by human-caused fires:
TRAPPIST-1 and the Seven Exoplanets NASA’s news of the TRAPPIST-1 solar system generated quite the buzz recently. The agency announced that the system’s star — an ultra-cool dwarf just a bit bigger than Jupiter — has a collection of seven Earth-sized planets circling it. Researchers confirmed two of these planets in 2016 but upped the tally to
seven after they gathered more data. Three of the worlds lie in the star’s habitable zone, where there is the greatest likelihood of having liquid water and maybe even life. But researchers say water may exist on all seven planets, which, at the time of this writing, are still unnamed.
TRAPPIST-1 System
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
x d 25 rge a l n E
Inner Solar System
Mecury
Venus
Earth
Mars
(Note: Our sun isn't shown and the TRAPPIST-1 star isn’t to scale.)
Building Blocks
THE POWER OF PROTEINS
FROM TOP: NASA/JPL-CALTECH; DINGHUA YANG; SPL/SCIENCE SOURCE
HEARING HAIRS RESTORED
Tiny hairs in our inner ears, called cochlear hair cells, are vital to our natural perception of sound, and once we lose them, we don’t grow them back. But scientists published in Cell Reports that they’ve discovered a way to regenerate those cells in mouse, primate and human tissue samples. After exposing supporting cells — cells that can create new cochlear hairs — to a specialized drug mixture, the team saw significant new hair cell growth.
BABY BUMP
Birds don’t give birth to live young, but their distant ancestors did. Archosauromorphs, which existed about 250 million years ago, were the creatures that evolved into crocodiles, dinosaurs, birds and pterosaurs. Experts thought these beasts laid eggs, much like their modern descendants. But a new Nature Communications paper details the fossilized remains of an archosauromorph mother and her unborn baby. The mom — the marinedwelling Dinocephalosaurus — and her preserved pregnancy could give paleontologists a better idea of how her kind lived and evolved.
New work in Nature Neuroscience offers some promise for understanding cocaine addiction. Researchers genetically engineered mice to produce cadherin, a protein involved in learning that helps strengthen the brain’s neural connections. The mice cranked out this protein in their reward circuits, a brain area that drives us to seek pleasure-inducing experiences and a key component in addiction. After introducing the cadherin-laden mice to cocaine multiple times, experts expected the rodents to crave the drug. Instead, the critters carried on without interest: The excess protein actually clogged their reward center circuitry, preventing the mice from getting hooked. The results point to the importance of biochemistry in addiction.
June 2017 DISCOVER
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THE CRUX SCIENCE SMACKDOWN
Are Facial Expressions Universal? Scientists debate whether the faces humans make mean the same thing around the world. EVERYONE SMILES IN THE SAME LANGUAGE, RIGHT? For decades, psychologists have backed up the idea that facial expressions are universal. Paul Ekman’s research in the 1960s was a driving force behind this popular notion. He found cultures worldwide describe facial expressions the same way: For example, a scrunched-up nose signals disgust. Even in the isolated Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea, Ekman’s theory held up. But other researchers believe subtle differences in facial expressions exist between cultures. In Science Smackdown, we let experts argue both sides of the question. TEAL BURRELL
DIFFERENT PLACES, DIFFERENT FACES “The Ekman theory, that certain facial configurations signal specific emotions universally, just doesn’t hold up,” says James Russell, a psychologist at Boston College. In a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Russell and colleagues studied how two cultures, Spaniards and the Trobrianders, a different Papua New Guinea tribe, interpreted a wide-eyed gasping face. When the team asked Trobrianders what the person making the face might do next, they said he was likely to attack. “They looked at the wide-open eyes and the wide-open mouth that Ekman puts forward as a fear signal, they take it as a threat,” Russell says. In comparison, when Spaniards answered the same question, they said he was likely to run away scared.
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The Counterpoint A COMMON LANGUAGE Ekman — now retired from academia and promoting his theory through his company — isn’t convinced there’s a distinction. He points to recent evidence revealing distinct brain circuits for different emotions and the fact that facial expressions for some emotions, such as disgust, are present at birth, suggesting they’re innate. “The evidence is quite strong this is a universal signaling system,” Ekman says. “I need to learn different words or I need to learn different bodily gestures if I’m traveling to another country, but I don’t need to learn different expressions.”
A New Guinea man (top), culturally isolated, conveys emotions with supposed universal facial expressions. A Trobriander boy (right), also isolated from other cultures, identifies a so-called universally fearful expression as threatening.
Happiness, anger and disgust.
CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: COURTESY JAMES RUSSELL; PAUL EKMAN GROUP (4); CARLOS CRIVELLI/DE MONTFORT UNIVERSITY/LEICESTER, U.K.
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THE CRUX THAT WORD YOU HEARD
Syzygy “IN 18 YEARS PRECISELY, the planets will align ever so nicely.” This catchy rhyme from Disney’s Hercules was part of a prophecy meant for Hades, god of the underworld. But it’s also pretty darn close to this word’s most common scientific definition: when one astronomical object aligns with another. (The term, pronounced SIZ-uh-jee, also pops up in biology, math and psychology.) A familiar example of this phenomenon is an eclipse. In fact, every eclipse is a syzygy, but not all syzygies are eclipses — just like the prophetic example above, the term could be applied in situations where only planets are in alignment. LACY SCHLEY; ILLUSTRATION BY CHAD EDWARDS
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Vital Signs
During a checkup, a patient’s deepest concern is sometimes expressed at the last moment. BY JULIA MICHIE BRUCKNER
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My annual physical was nearly over. The doctor had asked routine questions, used her stethoscope to listen to my heart and lungs, and ordered tests of my cholesterol and vitamin D levels. Throughout the visit, which happened years ago, I pondered sharing what had been preoccupying me for weeks. It was embarrassing, unexpected and probably meant nothing, I thought. As my doctor’s hand clasped the doorknob, I finally sought reassurance. “I feel like I’ve been gaining weight,” I said hesitantly, “but it’s just in my belly.” “Well, you’re not pregnant, so your metabolism may be slowing down with age,” she said curtly. “That can happen
in your mid-20s. So just up the exercise to 30 minutes a day and watch your diet. Cut out alcohol and fatty foods.” She advised a follow-up in a few months and left the room. Since moving to New York City to start a master’s degree in public health, I had been eating healthfully and staying active. I felt better than ever. So I was surprised the doctor saw the problem as a lack of fitness,
Throughout the visit, I pondered sharing what had been preoccupying me for weeks.
LIVING IN UNCERTAINTY Later that school year in New York, I needed a physical for a new job and returned to my primary care doctor. Busy with graduate school midterms, I pleaded with the receptionist to
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but it seemed awkward to question her. I felt silly for mentioning my concern, especially at the end of the appointment. I changed back into my clothes, walked to the local market for a kale smoothie and started going to a yoga class twice a week. I didn’t know it at the time, but at my exam, I had unwittingly uttered what doctors call the “doorknob complaint” — a possible medical issue brought up at the last moment of an appointment. Now, after more than five years in medical practice and treating thousands of patients, I understand my doctor’s dilemma. Physicians are trained to think logically and eliminate diagnostic possibilities methodically and sequentially. We are also taught to manage patients’ expectations, prioritize complaints and see patients for short visits multiple times. Doorknob complaints counteract a doctor’s forward motion, inhibiting the patient-every-15-minutes pace often dictated by hospital administrators and insurance companies. With the next patient waiting in the neighboring exam room, it’s tempting for doctors to dismiss the complaint, defer it to a future appointment or assume that a simple symptom — gaining weight, occasional headaches or not sleeping well — has a straightforward cause. In medical school, students learn that common symptoms typically are common illnesses. “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras, unless you’re in Africa,” the medical saying goes. But when faced with the time limits of daily practice, doctors can rely too much on the common instead of searching for the unusual.
P. BROZE/GETTY IMAGES
just give me a form documenting my prior exam. “Sorry, it’s been nearly six months since your visit, so you need to be seen. It’s policy,” she insisted. I waited in the exam room, chilly in my underwear and oversized gown, thinking about my abdomen. After a shower recently, its reflection in the bathroom mirror had a strange asymmetry, the left side protruding more than the right. My belly felt firmer on the left. My pants were hard to button. I stepped on the bathroom scale. I weighed 6 pounds more than a few months ago, despite my active life. When the physician’s assistant came in, I shared my observations immediately. He began pushing gently to the right of my belly button, moving left then stopping abruptly. His expression went from relaxed concentration to slight awe to definite concern. He left the room as I lay on the exam table, belly exposed. He returned with two doctors, who pressed in the same areas and showed the same concern. Despite being 5 p.m. on a Friday, they were going to send me for a CT scan. I sensed their urgency but was given little explanation of what they’d found. They said only that there was a “mass.” I did not yet know that in medicine, mass almost always means cancer. The scan showed a tumor larger than a football. It had pushed nearly all of my left-side organs to the right side. It was liposarcoma, a rare cancer made up of fat cells gone awry. Diet and exercise would not shrink this malignant fat. And chemotherapy would not kill it because it was too big and the cells divided too slowly. The tumor had to be cut out quickly and carefully. But that wouldn’t be the end. Though survivable, the cancer in my case had a high chance of returning. My life was upended. Time became distorted. It marched briskly as I scheduled surgery and notified
I didn’t know it at the time, but at my exam, I had unwittingly uttered what doctors call the “doorknob complaint” — a possible medical issue brought up at the last moment of the appointment.
insurance. It slowed as I sat in endless waiting rooms, pondering whether I would finish my studies, have children or live past 30. Just a week and a half after the physical, a six-hour surgery removed my tumor completely. I left the hospital 15 pounds lighter. I fell into the anxious rhythm of the every-threemonths scans, looking for my tumor’s return. I tried to savor those months in between, but often felt hostage to a disease I could not prevent. Trust in my own body was shattered. My cancer has recurred twice since, once during medical school and then
in the middle of my pediatric residency training. In the second surgery, I lost organs — a kidney, my spleen, a piece of my intestine. I have learned to live in uncertainty.
DIGGING DEEPER I’ve often wondered if the cancer could have been found sooner. If I’d asked the doctor earlier, or if she’d examined my abdomen more thoroughly, would she have found the mass? Was it there and overlooked? Or as a cancer known to be insidious, would it have escaped detection? A life in medicine has shown me that we doctors are fallible. Like anyone, we can be tired, overworked, irked by disorder, biased by experience, lulled by pattern. We tire of the messiness of illness and become frustrated when time is not ours to control. The relentless volume of patients in an emergency room or clinic can create a treadmill that’s hard to step off of. Physicians can resist anything that changes their forward movement. But when a patient exerts a force — the doorknob complaint — doctors are wise to take heed. The complaint, which usually requires significant effort from the patient to disclose, unmasks that person’s deeper concerns. These moments require respect, attention and investigation. I have since asked myself: Am I a doctor who pauses, thinks thoughtfully, listens actively — the one who treats people with all their imperfections, instead of as numbers and diagnostic codes? Can I resist a medical system that often prioritizes productivity over health? Self-inquiry helps me pause, dig deeper, take my hand off the doorknob and listen to the patient. D Julia Michie Bruckner is a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Colorado in Aurora. This article was adapted from one of Bruckner’s blog posts at juliamd.com. The cases described in Vital Signs are real, but names and certain details might be changed.
June 2017 DISCOVER
23
Mind Over Matter
Lights, Camera, Therapy How movies helped me recover from substance abuse. BY AMY KRAFT
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With popcorn and soda in hand, my friends and I settled into our seats. The lights dimmed. Ghostly music filled the room, and Cate Blanchett’s narration surrounded us: “The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost. For none now live who remember it.” I let out a sigh of relief. I was seven months sober from alcohol and crack cocaine, still struggling to remain abstinent. Despite going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, the cravings were overpowering,
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It seemed a strange realization. How, after AA meetings failed to help me overcome my cravings, could seeing a film about a quest to destroy an evil ring do the trick?
BREAKING DOWN DEFENSES As it turns out, cinematherapy, or movie therapy, is a tool many psychologists have studied and used. “Cinema is a therapy because it touches everyone singularly and subjectively,” says Capt. Laurent Brulin, a clinical psychologist in the health department of the army near Bordeaux, France. It “allows a better understanding of the problem and helps to break down psychological defenses, like denial.” In a paper published in 2013 in the French journal Médecine & Armées, Brulin examined the use of cinematherapy to treat people who had trouble controlling their alcohol
ERIK DREYER/THE IMAGE BANK/GETTY IMAGES
compounded by emotional turmoil in my personal life. I was an 18-year-old college student and couldn’t imagine life without drugs and alcohol. But seated in the theater, watching The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, I was mesmerized. For three hours, I forgot about my troubles, instead cheering on Frodo and Sam as they sought to destroy the “One Ring to rule them all.” Much like the film’s ring, alcohol and drugs controlled me, despite the fact they were killing me. That night, I walked out of the theater more confident than when I walked in, more sure of myself and my own sobriety. The story of the ring paralleled my own and gave me a sense of hope that I could triumph. It seemed a strange realization. How, after AA meetings failed to help me overcome my cravings, could seeing a film about a quest to destroy an evil ring do the trick?
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Mind Over Matter
A VERSATILE TOOL Cinematherapy can also help people deal with other complications,
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“Psychological counseling will help to discover what the patient’s own life scenario is, what are his patterns of thinking, qualities, defects, strengths [and] weaknesses.”
including anxiety, depression or repressed emotions. A 2015 study led by Brie Turns and published in the Journal of Family Therapy found that films can help adolescents verbalize internal feelings or work through issues in their home life, like divorce, rebelliousness or selfishness. Using film to facilitate therapy
sessions can help families see things from a different perspective, providing a new way to discuss what’s going on, says Turns, a doctoral student in the Marriage and Family Therapy program at Texas Tech University. “Kids don’t communicate like adults do,” she says. “When children watch movies, they are subconsciously identifying with characters.” And if a child is asked to talk about the movie they watched, they subconsciously talk about themselves. This also helps patients view the problem as something separate from themselves, making it easier to overcome, Turns explains. As for adults, even though it’s clearly possible to have successful outcomes with cinematherapy, it is harder to get grown-ups to talk about themselves through watching movies, Turns says. They’re more inclined to view therapy or selfimprovement as work, and “aren’t always expecting to go into therapy to watch a movie,” she says.
CHOOSE WHAT’S BEST FOR YOU For cinematherapy to be most effective, a therapist or counselor must carefully consider the client’s age, life circumstances, background and the problem for which he or she is seeking help. Choosing the wrong film could have negative consequences, according to Turns. For example, a May 2015 study in the journal Pediatrics involved more than 5,000 15-year-olds in the U.K. and measured their exposure to films featuring alcohol use. Teens who watched booze-infused movies were more likely to try alcohol and
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consumption. Anywhere from two to six patients met once a week for 15 weeks. Each therapy session consisted of participants viewing a film with themes of alcohol dependence, such as Leaving Las Vegas and When a Man Loves a Woman, followed by a onehour discussion led by a psychologist. The setup reminded me of when I was at a rehab center in Illinois attempting to get sober. We watched 28 Days, a movie about a woman, Gwen, who goes to rehab to deal with her alcoholism. Watching Gwen ruin her sister’s wedding, I realized how inconsiderate I was to the people in my own life. And watching her jump out a window to get a pill bottle on the ground a few floors down made me realize I went to similar extremes — for instance, hustling guys in bars for money — to get my drug of choice. The moment struck me, and I felt shame. Similarly, Brulin found that cinematherapy helped increase participants’ motivation to change as they viewed films about people overcoming similar issues. But for this type of therapy to stick and be effective, Brulin emphasizes it needs to be accompanied by discussion either in a group setting or in individual psychological consultations. “Psychological counseling will help to discover what the patient’s own life scenario is, what are his patterns of thinking, qualities, defects, strengths, weaknesses, etc.,” Brulin says. “The patient must learn to become a writer, director and actor of his own life.”
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Mind Over Matter binge drink than kids who didn’t see such movies. These sorts of consequences fit my own experience. Counselors in rehab often warned me of watching films like Pulp Fiction or Requiem for a Dream, which have a reputation for glorifying drug use and could have led me to a relapse. Despite the impact movies had on me during my struggles, they might not be effective for everyone. Turns notes that some children may not have the attention span to watch a film, and some adults may not be interested in such a form of entertainment. “It’s a matter of finding what works,” she says. For me, movies continue to be not only a form of entertainment, but also a way to interpret my own life. The Secret Lives of Dentists helped me
For me, movies continue to be not only a form of entertainment, but also a way to interpret my own life. to get over a breakup. Into the Woods helped me understand how much my father loved me despite how horribly I treated him in the throes of my alcoholism. And Little Miss Sunshine helped me realize it’s OK to be a little weird. For me, movies are just what the doctor ordered. D Amy Kraft is a health reporter based in New York, where she resides with her husband, daughter and cat, Siegfried.
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LET YOUR MIND WANDER
The new science of daydreaming will induce ‘aha’ moments — if you can handle the solitude. BY MICHAEL HARRIS
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ALL ILLUSTRATIONS BY AGSANDREW/SHUTTERSTOCK
D
r. Edith Bone has decided not to cry. On this autumn afternoon in 1956, her seven years of solitary confinement have come to a sudden end. Beyond the prison gates, the Hungarian Revolution’s final, scattered shots are echoing down the streets of Budapest. Inside the gates, Bone emerges through the prison’s front door into the courtyard’s bewildering sunlight. She is 68 years old, stout and arthritic. Bone was born in Budapest in 1889 and proved an intelligent — if disobedient — child. She wished to become a lawyer like her father, but this profession was closed to women. Her options were schoolmistress or doctor; she accepted the latter. The Great War began soon after her graduation, and so she went to work in a military hospital. Perhaps it was there, seeing the suffering of the poorer classes, that her communist sympathies bloomed: She watched an illiterate Romanian soldier, a shepherd before the war, as he cried at the window for days, cradling a shattered arm and worrying about his lost children. He was only one broken man among many. After the war, Bone devoted herself to political work in England for 16 years, and it was this foreign connection that would excite the suspicions of authorities when she returned to communist Budapest in 1949. Secret police stopped her at the airport on her way back to England. Inside headquarters, a slim man presented himself, decked in fine clothing and smooth manners. He took her into a little office and told her they knew she was a spy, an agent of the British secret service. “Until you tell us what your instructions were, you will not leave this building.” Bone replied: “In that case I shall probably die here, because I am not an agent of the secret service.” What followed — her seven years and 58 days of solitary confinement — is the stuff of horror films. She was held in filthy, freezing cells; the walls either dripped with water or were furred with fungus. She was generally half-starved and always isolated except when confronted by guards. Twenty-three ill-trained officers interrogated her with insults and threats — once for a 60-hour stretch. For one period of six months, she was plunged into total darkness. And yet her captors received no false June 2017 DISCOVER
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confessions, no pleas for mercy; their only bounty was the tally of her insolent replies. It became a kind of recreation for Bone to annoy the prison authorities on the rare occasions when she saw them. But Bone’s most extraordinary stratagem was not the way she toyed with her captors, it was the way she held sway over her self — the dogged maintenance of her own sanity. From within that enforced void she slowly, steadily, built for herself an interior world that could not be destroyed or stripped from her. She recited poetry, for starters, translating the verses she knew by heart into each of her six languages. Then she began composing her own doggerel poems. One, made up during those six months without light, praised the saving grace of her mind’s “dark-born magic wand.” Inspired by a prisoner she remembered from a Tolstoy story, Bone took herself on imaginary walks through all the cities she’d visited. She strolled the streets of Paris and Rome and Florence and Milan; she toured the Tiergarten in Berlin and Mozart’s residence in Vienna. Later, while her feet wore a narrow furrow into the concrete beside her bed, she set out in her mind on a journey home to London. She walked a certain distance each day and kept a mental record of where she’d left off. She made the trip four times, each time stopping when she arrived at the Channel, as it seemed too cold to swim. Bone’s guards were infuriated, but she proved to be proficient in the art of being alone. They cut her off from the world and she exercised that art, choosing peace over madness, consolation over despair, and solitude over imprisonment. Far from being destroyed, Bone emerged from prison, in her words, “a little wiser and full of hope.” I found her story remarkable. As I became more familiar with her attitude toward solitary confinement — and her bottomless capacity to endure it — I felt a creeping kind of envy coming over me. I wasn’t envious of her circumstances, of course. But I was envious of her faculties. Even the handful of solitary hours it took to read her story were difficult for me to endure. How to be alone. And why. There must be an art to it, I thought. A certain practice, or alchemy, that turns loneliness into solitude, blank days into blank canvases. A lost little art that, year by year, fades in the bleaching light of the future. 32
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SHOCK OVER THOUGHT “I’m sorry, Julie, but it’s just a fact — people are terrified of being in their heads,” I say. “I read this study where subjects chose to give themselves electric shocks rather than be alone with their own thoughts.” It’s the summer of 2015 and the University of British Columbia’s half-vacated grounds droop with bloom. Julie — an old friend I’ve run into on campus — gives me a skeptical side-eye and says she’s perfectly capable of being alone with her thoughts. Proving her point, she wanders out of the rose garden in search of caffeine. I glower at the plants. The study was a real one. It was published in 2014 in Science and was authored by University of Virginia professor Timothy D. Wilson and his team. Their research revealed that, left in our own company, most of us start to lose it after six to 15 minutes. The shocks are preferable, despite the pain, because anything — anything — is better than what the human brain starts getting up to when left to its own devices. Or so we assume. What the brain in fact gets up to in the absence of antagonizing external stimuli (buzzing phones, chirping people) is daydreaming. I am purposefully making it sound benign. Daydreaming is such a soft term. And yet it refers to a state of mind that most of us — myself included — have learned to suppress like a dirty thought. Perhaps we suppress it out of fear that daydreaming is related to the sin of idle hands. From at least medieval times onward, there’s been a steady campaign against idleness, that instigator of evil. Today, in the spaces where I used to daydream, those interstitial moments on a bus, in the shower, or out on a walk, I’m hounded by a guilt and quiet desperation — a panicked need to block my mind from wandering too long on its own. The mind must be put to use. I’ve come to UBC to ask if daydreaming matters, and why. The campus is home to the Cognitive Neuroscience of Thought Laboratory, and one of their specialties is “undirected thought processes,” which is shoptalk for daydreaming and mind-wandering. Their research is fueled by volunteers who subject themselves to fMRI brain scans middaydream. Today’s brain — let’s call her Haley — arrives and is promptly asked whether she has any metal in her body (MRI machines are, among other things, enormously powerful magnets). She reports that she’s metal-free and so is handed a pair of earplugs — things are going to get frighteningly loud.
Daydreaming is such a soft term. And yet it refers to a state of mind that most of us have learned to suppress like a dirty thought.
Haley is positioned on the sliding bed, and the technologist fits a “birdcage” over her head. It’s the birdcage that actually does the scanning. The giant gray doughnut she’s now being slid into is only needed to create a uniform magnetic field; it’s the brain’s deviations from that field that the birdcage maps. When the technologist turns on the scanner, it is deafening. Eventually her mind grows accustomed to the noise and does what any mind without new stimuli will do — it wanders. Her daydreaming moments are plotted and the data takes six hours to process. Then, bingo: a portrait of a daydream, in electric blue and red.
OUT OF THE BLUE Ultimately, such images give us only a very raw notion of what’s happening in the mind of a daydreamer. Despite the 90-minute session’s $900 price tag, what it produces is a child’s drawing, a base attempt to represent the dance of 86 billion neurons. (If I showed you a brain scan from a besotted person or a terrified one, what would you really learn about love or fear?) A floppy-haired Ph.D. student called Matt Dixon describes it to me this way: “You know, it’s like we’re getting a distant snapshot of something — it’s real but it’s
fuzzy. In this image, we see what’s happening in the brain every two seconds, but the brain is actually changing every hundredth of a millisecond.” We do get some telling intimations. We now know that when the brain drops its focus on the outside world but remains awake and alert (in other words, when it begins to daydream), it activates something called the default mode network, or DMN. The default mode is anything but a comatose experience. A review of research on the DMN led by Mary Helen ImmordinoYang at the University of Southern California found that a particular style of neural processing is suppressed when we pay direct attention to things, and it emerges when the brain switches to default mode. This daydreaming DMN activity processes personal memories and leads to identity formation. Daydreaming constitutes an intense and heterogeneous set of brain functions. Yet this industrious activity plays out while the conscious mind remains utterly unaware of the work. Our thoughts (sometimes really great thoughts) emerge without our anticipation or understanding. They emerge from the blue. Daydreaming can be pointless fantasizing, complex planning or the generation of creative ideas. But, whatever their June 2017 DISCOVER
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utility, its products arrive unbidden. You could call it an involuntary process, like the pumping of a heart. Studying spontaneous thought and mindwandering was unpopular when the UBC lab’s founder, Kalina Christoff, was a student. And she still sees the work of her peers biased against it: “Our culture puts a premium on control in all things,” she tells me. A lack of control is considered inferior, and so thinking that’s uncontrolled becomes suspect. Those idle hands again.
CENSOR NOTHING Christoff is a petite woman with a calm gaze to match her methodic voice — and such sureness has served her well. Even as an undergrad, her interests diverged from her peers. While they wanted to study analytical thought, she preferred
watch for those epiphanies, which she didn’t need an MRI machine to witness. “What impressed me was the complete lack of traditional logic as people wandered toward their solutions,” she tells me. The wandering mind also solves problems in the real world. We tend to think of problem-solving as the implementation of logical steps toward an answer that is predetermined and inevitable. In this way, we assert control over things. But Christoff found that people were solving her insight problems, instead, by a process of association that was actually very poetic. The solutions participants arrived at could never have been deduced via strict logic. (Rebus puzzles are common examples of insight problems, e.g., what is meant by “sta4nce”? Answer: “for instance.”) Christoff found hardly anyone around her was interested in this dark space of human ingenuity.
Given enough solitude and enough time, the mind explores problems with a curiosity and openness we might never choose to entertain.
to give people “insight problems” — problems with no clear answer — that required an “aha moment” in order to be solved. Christoff might, for example, give a participant a glass tube with a ball of wax lodged inside, then hand the participant a pile of objects and tell her to remove the wax without breaking the glass. The participant must “aha” herself to an answer by arriving at a fresh use for a paper clip or a scrap of paper. Christoff loved to
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“It was uncharted territory,” she says. After earning a Ph.D. at Stanford University and doing postdoc work at the University of Cambridge, Christoff went to UBC and founded her lab. As the initial brain-scan data flooded in, it made her imagine the mind as a sort of muscle system that relied on opposing forces. To bend your arm, for example, you flex one muscle while relaxing another — straightening your
arm requires the reverse. Similarly, Christoff’s new vision of a well-tuned mind included an interplay between concentration and stream of consciousness. Overexercise one or the other and you impair the functioning of the whole apparatus. “In our culture, we’re always encouraged to practice concentrating,” she tells me, “but we’re discouraged from the wide-ranging modes of thought we experience in solitude.” Given enough solitude and enough time, the mind shifts into default mode and pans through connections that at first seem wholly random. It explores problems with a curiosity and openness we might never choose to entertain. But this randomness is crucial. “The power of the wandering mind,” Christoff says, “is precisely the fact that it censors nothing. It can make connections you would never otherwise make.” Daydreaming is an inherently creative process, she says, because the daydreamer is open to bizarre new options. Fresh insights and methods that don’t already exist in the larger culture are revealed through this solitary style of brainwork. By contrast, analytical thinking, logical thinking, is all about the exclusion and critiquing of ideas so that the brain can become a guided laser that operates with surgical precision. The conscious, analytical style of thinking that our schools train us to use always silences the bizarre or unpopular ideas that the daydreaming mind might try on. “Analytical thinking is ideal for weighing options in a well-defined problem,” Christoff says. But that power is also its weakness. “Analytical thinking is antithetical to inspiration,” she adds.
LONE GENIUSES Albert Einstein famously noticed this separation of duties in the mind. He believed that the daydreaming mind’s ability to link things is, in fact, our only path toward fresh ideas. There is a kind of assembly line, one could argue, with knowledge and conversation pouring in at the start and, later down the track, a stretch of silence and daydreaming. Both ends of the factory are necessary to produce the crucial product — insight. Isaac Newton labored over his own research in almost complete isolation. A lonely childhood gave way to a disaffected time at Cambridge, where absurd Aristotelian physics was still being taught. But then, in 1665, the plague struck Cambridge and — in perhaps the only wonderful thing to come of that disaster — Newton was obliged to retreat to the isolation of his family’s farmhouse in Woolsthorpe. It was there, forcibly removed from the university’s community, that Newton discovered the laws of motion and gravity. It was there, in a garden and not in a lecture hall, that he saw a falling apple and wondered why.
Physicists like Einstein and Newton are among our most fundamental thinkers, and they were peculiarly aware of what solitude brings to serious thought. Felicity Mellor, a researcher at Imperial College London, criticizes the new generation of advanced study institutes for emphasizing collaboration and social atmospheres at the expense of such solitary contemplation. Peter Higgs, the Nobel Prize–winning godfather of the Large Hadron Collider, backs Mellor up, saying his trailblazing work would be impossible today because the peace and solitude he enjoyed in the 1960s has vanished. We can only imagine how premature sharing could deflate a unified field theory or mangle an explanation for the origination of gamma-ray bursts. What is true for institutions is also true for individuals. We all have daily proof that moments alone allow the drifting, unfocused mind to be inspired. Like others, I’m hit by my better ideas first thing in the morning, even lying in bed, before the world has poured any noise or hassle onto me. A novel thought might strike me in the shower. It’s as though the brain is allowed to have its genius moment before our lumbering, bureaucratic idea of thinking puts on a tie and gets in the way. As we continue to chat about all this, Christoff moves toward surprisingly philosophical places: “If our mode of life leaves us feeling empty sometimes,” she tells me, “it may be because we aren’t left to our own devices, we aren’t allowed to mull things over. We’re deprived of that sense of meaning and happiness that mind-wandering can produce.” An extended stare out the rain-streaked window may be as key to consolidating our thoughts as REM sleep. Alison Gopnik, an acclaimed psychology professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has pushed this notion even further. She argues that the rush of pleasure we get from an “aha moment” is the equivalent of an orgasm for the thinking mind. The pleasure of an orgasm, after all, is just a motivating bit of trickery that our bodies employ to make sure we procreate; similarly, the pleasure of an “aha” may be built into our DNA to ensure that we learn more about the world. This is a deeply encouraging thought. If we’ve evolved to take great pleasure from the moment when fresh connections are forged, then letting our mind wander is no longer a guilty indulgence — it is crucial to our success and survival. Our blueprint demands it. D
From Solitude by Michael Harris. Copyright © 2017 by the author and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Press.
A NASA research plane, the DC-8, flies over the Antarctic Peninsula’s northern tip. The aircraft is retrofitted to take measurements of land and sea ice.
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After watching over Earth’s poles for decades, NASA aviators see new warnings of the chaos to come. BY ERIC BETZ PHOTO BY JEREMY HARBECK
“Terrain! Terrain! Pull up!”
Mission patches (left) identify crew as NASA aviators. Geoscientist David Gallaher (right) works in the DC-8’s former baggage compartment, now fitted with instruments that collect data such as glacial thickness and changes in Earth’s gravitational field.
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MISSION TO EARTH Scientists knew more than a century ago that adding carbon dioxide to our atmosphere would warm temperatures. Yet it was partly observations of another planet altogether that helped launch the effort to understand what was happening on Earth. The first explorations of Venus showed how
MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES (3)
The programmed alarm rings throughout the plane’s cockpit, announcing a fast-approaching rocky outcrop. Pilot David Fedors casually reaches out a hand and overrides the warning. Twisting the altitude knob to the left, he aims the plane down toward an endless expanse of white, gleaming in the midday sun. He levels it NASA’s crew members navigate the dicey off at a cruising altitude of 1,500 feet. weather and terrain at Earth’s poles. NASA’s Airborne Laboratory is flying low over the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Inside, a team of scientists is taking the temperature of a mapping the seafloor’s rocky bottom. continent blanketed in 5 million square miles of ice, equivalent These tools reveal what’s invisible to the eye. Warm ocean to about 60 percent of the planet’s freshwater. water is washing up and melting the ice from below. Decades Their instruments are zeroed in on the Amundsen Sea of data from the Amundsen Sea Embayment show glaciers Embayment, a vast region rich in volcanoes, ice shelves and are disappearing faster here than anywhere else on Earth. glaciers, some as big as Washington state. Here and across And now, new insights into the terrain suggest the melt is Antarctica, eons of storms have piled snow, inch by inch, layer unstoppable. These coastal glaciers hold back inland glaciers, by layer, until the ice was miles high. Glaciers deliver that ice so their collapse would set off a chain reaction ending with from the inner reaches of the continent to the ocean, where the West Antarctic Ice Sheet pouring into the Southern Ocean. massive frozen shelves float atop the water. That could mean 10 feet of sea level rise. Coastal cities would In the belly of the plane, an array of instruments stares at the flood worldwide. But when? This question is the new frontier ice through a window cut into the nearly 50-year-old DC-8’s of climate research. former baggage compartment. Radar signals pass through “The big challenge of the future is to figure out these each ice layer, gauging its depth. Infrared waves measure heat. timescales,” says Eric Rignot, a glaciologist and professor Laser pulses calculate the surface height. And a gravimeter at the University of California, Irvine. “It may go fast. picks up tiny changes in Earth’s gravitational field, perfectly It may go slow.” Scientists are probing these glaciers from land, air, sea and satellite. And they’re plugging that data into cutting-edge computer models. The answers they find — and humanity’s response — could forecast the planet’s future for millennia.
FAR RIGHT FROM TOP: RAINER LESNIEWSKI/SHUTTERSTOCK; NASA/GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER SCIENTIFIC VISUALIZATION STUDIO
TURN UP THE HEAT
greenhouse gases trap heat and stifle a planet. James Hansen, now one of the world’s most recognized climate scientists, was spearheading NASA’s Pioneer mission to Venus in the late 1970s. Astronomers were learning that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels hundreds of times greater than Earth’s made our nearest neighbor boiling hot at its surface. Venus helped call Hansen’s attention to the climate problems at home. So he resigned his post and set about reworking a sophisticated weather model into a long-term climate projection. Then, Hansen and his colleagues asked the model a simple question: How would Earth respond if carbon dioxide emissions double? The journal Science published the alarming answer in 1981: Regional droughts. Sea level rise. Global warming. Other scientists were reaching similar conclusions. “The details have been filled in much better,” Hansen says, “but that 1981 paper had an outline of the problem that we now have thousands of scientists struggling on.” Amid the fresh scientific questions emerging on Earth — and sweeping budget cuts for space exploration — Congress in 1984 gave NASA a new mandate: increase “human knowledge of the Earth.” By the early 1990s, the space agency was laying the groundwork for what would become the Earth Observing System, its main climate science contribution. Eventually the space agency deployed a team of scientists and crack flyers, some of them NASA test pilots, to Greenland. They circumnavigated harsh weather and unforgiving terrain until they found the first proof for vanishing ice sheets. Jim Yungel was an early recruit to this “Mission to Planet Earth.” With the threat that a warmer world would melt glaciers, NASA wanted his group to measure the ocean’s height and track sea level rise. “That’s very difficult to do,” Yungel says. Tides, waves, even large ships make it nearly impossible to detect changes.
At its core, Earth’s climate system is actually quite simple. Sunlight is most intense in the tropics along the planet’s equator. And physics is constantly trying to push heat from the tropics toward the poles, where it can radiate back to space. “All the atmospheric circulations that occur, and all the ocean circulations that occur, are basically doing that — they’re transporting heat,” says veteran climatologist Gerald Meehl of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. For example, the Gulf Stream moves heat into the North Atlantic, bringing Europe a pleasant climate, and then it radiates the heat out into space. The poles also have their own currents. Antarctica’s strong Circumpolar Deep Current circles the entire continent, driven by strong winds called westerlies, which also create the Southern Ocean’s dangerous and choppy waters. Incoming currents drive warm water up from the bottom. In some places, like the Amundsen Sea, the warm water even reaches the continental shelf. And this water is getting warmer. Circumpolar “All we know so far is that currents Deep Current are changing. And the waters where those currents come from, those waters are getting warmer,” says Alek Petty, a climatologist on the Operation IceBridge team. “That makes sense with our general ideas of what happens during global warming, but the actual mechanisms are still uncertain.” E.B.
Earth’s ocean currents, shown in this NASA animation, cycle warmer water from the equator toward far-flung regions.
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Finger rafting, when floating sea ice collides and overlaps, creates sharp angles across the Amundsen Sea off West Antarctica’s coast.
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TROUBLE BELOW Unlike in Greenland, it’s typically too cold for ice to melt on Antarctica’s surface. But temperature measurements taken off the continent’s coast found warm water brewing up from the ocean depths. By 1998, satellites revealed that Pine Island Glacier in the Amundsen Sea Embayment was retreating. In the past, experts thought the undersides of glaciers would melt only a few inches each year. This glacier was losing more than 150 feet annually. Pine Island and its neighbor glacier Thwaites both act like a stopper for the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Scientists worry that their melting might unleash inland floes that would also flood into the sea. “The basic concept is that if these glaciers are going down, the rest of West Antarctica is going down as well,” says Rignot. In 2002, the NASA team headed south to help with the Antarctic efforts. They hoped to fly 12-hour round trips from the southern tip of South America to the remote reaches of Antarctica. But there were no reliable weather forecasts back then. If they encountered any significant problems, they’d be stuck there — or worse. “It’s very cold, and a long way from any help,” Sonntag says. “I remember the first flight that we were on,” Rignot recalls. “When we went out there, the winds were actually the opposite [of predictions], and they slowed us down.” It looked like the plane would reach Antarctica and have just enough fuel to fly straight back without collecting any data, proving their mission was truly impossible. “Midway through, the winds changed direction and pushed us through to the Antarctic,” he says. “We gained back everything we had lost.” Perfect blue skies greeted them. And as they descended toward Pine Island Glacier, 23 excited scientists and technicians crammed into the cockpit to take pictures. “That was an awesome moment,” Rignot says. “We needed measurements from an airplane to measure the thickness of the ice. We can’t do that from space.” The team’s findings added to glaciologists’ worst fears for the Amundsen Sea Embayment.
THIS PAGE FROM TOP: NASA; JEREMY HARBECK. OPPOSITE: NASA/GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER SCIENTIFIC VISUALIZATION STUDIO (BACKGROUND); BRITISH ANTARCTIC SURVEY (2)
An Operation IceBridge plane lands at Greenland’s Thule Air Base. In the 1990s, data collected on flights showed dramatic glacial melt.
So they’d map Greenland instead. At the time, scientists had hints from satellites, but they weren’t sure if the world’s major ice sheets were melting. GPS was in its infancy. The plan was for NASA pilots to crisscross the continent in jets loaded with new technology that promised precision measurements unlike any made before. “For decades, glaciologists had sort of been toiling in obscurity with small-scale tools,” says NASA’s John Sonntag, a veteran of those early flights and still part of the team. Test runs over Greenland in the early 1990s showed that the upstart team could measure ice sheet height to within just a few inches. By 1993 and 1994, they were flying scientific grids over the glaciers. “We didn’t know what changes we were looking for, but we thought they’d be pretty small,” Sonntag says. So when the team returned to their flight paths five years later, they were surprised at how fast the coastal glaciers had melted. Greenland was losing 12 cubic miles of ice each year. Their research, published in Science in 2000, was the first to measure the shrinking of a major ice sheet. It wouldn’t be the last.
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Scientists worry about West Antarctica because the ground under its ice sheet sits below sea level (right). This means that as glaciers recede, warm water quickly rushes in to melt more ice. In the graphic below, the darkest blue regions represent the highest elevations and the white areas represent the lowest on the continent.
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WEAK UNDERBELLY It’s tough to tell Earth from sky. As we fly 1,500 feet over West Antarctica, a thin layer of puffy clouds surrounds the aircraft, casting cloud shadows across miles of ice. The team’s work environment inside the carved-out DC-8 is far less picturesque. Faded blue upholstery peels around the cockpit windows; the cabin smells like aging vinyl; and computer cables dangle from the overhead compartments. NASA’s legacy of airborne climate research lives on in these humble surroundings. Former Air Force aviators and NASA test pilots fly stateof-the-art scientific instruments up and down the ice sheets on a mission called Operation IceBridge. And this bridge of data is essential: NASA’s polar-observing satellite ICESat died in 2009, and the much-delayed launch of ICESat-2 isn’t expected until next year. The aircraft breaks free of the clouds, and a plane-shaped shadow slides across the ice sheet between crevasses more than 100 feet deep. Flying past Pine Island Bay takes the plane over a glacial graveyard. This is where Pine Island and Thwaites meet the sea. Massive ice shelves — Antarctica’s largest is bigger than California — get shoved off and float atop the ocean. The boundary between glacier and ice shelf is called a grounding line. This is “where ice detaches from the ground and starts floating,” says Bernd Scheuchl, a UC Irvine climatologist who’s mapped ice movements across the continent. “It’s the boundary between grounded ice and floating ice.” Much of the bottom melt can be blamed on unfortunate topography. East Antarctica’s ice sheet hides a mountain range that rivals the Alps. West Antarctica, though, is a different story. Its mile-high glaciers rest on ground that’s largely below sea level. Scientists refer to this sunken expanse as the continent’s weak underbelly. Scrape off the glaciers, and water will rush in, with just a few islands poking above the ocean surface. As warm ocean water erodes the bottom of the ice shelf, the grounding line retreats inland. Natural underwater ridges and hills help stabilize a retreating glacier. They act like a brick behind a car tire, stopping a downhill roll. But recent surveys Thinning Previous profile of ice sheet
Receding Previous edge of ice shelf ICEBERG
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Warm ocean water circulates under ice shelves, melting the glacier’s underbelly and pushing the grounding line, where ice meets rock, farther inland. This destabilizes the glacier and quickens its retreat.
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LEFT: JEREMY HARBECK. RIGHT: JAY SMITH AFTER NATIONAL SNOW & ICE DATA CENTER
A series of deep crevasses form as Pine Island Glacier slowly slides toward the sea.
MOWING THE LAWN
CHILE
Operation IceBridge launches from its home base in Chile. Pilots refer to the crisscrossing flights above West Antarctica to take measurements as “mowing the lawn.”
BEFORE Jan. 24, 2017
AFTER Jan. 26, 2017
TOP: NASA/GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER SCIENTIFIC VISUALIZATION STUDIO. BOTTOM: NASA EARTH OBSERVATORY (2)
indicate there are hardly any stable ridgelines left to stop the glacial retreat.
UNSTOPPABLE RETREAT Over the past 15 years, NASA’s airborne team Pine Island Glacier calved a Manhattan-sized iceberg earlier this year. The glacier is has flown hundreds of zigzag patterns across Pine a main route for moving ice from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to the ocean. Island, Thwaites and their neighboring glaciers: Pope, Smith, Haynes and Kohler. Pilots call the crisscrossing flights “mowing the lawn.” in Earth’s gravity field. As the weight of ice sheds and melts Their collected data has allowed Rignot, Scheuchl and their into the ocean, the gravity field in the area changes slightly. team at UC Irvine to map the seafloor in the region. Satellite The European Space Agency’s CryoSat mission shows that data also helped them make a detailed map of grounding lines the continent’s volume dropped by 30 cubic miles each year across Antarctica and determine where glaciers were retreatfrom 2011 to 2014. That data backs up observations from ing fastest. “The ocean bed is quite complex, and there are NASA and ESA satellites confirming that the loss was most some regions that provide access for warm, deep ocean water extreme in the Amundsen Sea region. to those glaciers,” Scheuchl says. THWAITES INVASION These detailed maps of the landmass under the glaciers The recent data have stoked fears that Thwaites might pose show that the retreat can’t be stopped. Pine Island, Thwaites the biggest threat. Because of the changes already underway and some of their neighbors have used up their stable grounding lines and are retreating miles inland. “There’s no big bump here, Thwaites’ melting rate doubled in just six years, and it now inland that could potentially slow down or stop the retreat generates some 10 percent of global sea level rise. The glacier’s of these glaciers,” Rignot says. “If the ocean gets warmer total collapse could push sea levels 2 feet higher. and warmer, it’s going to get faster and faster.” Brooke Medley, who was on the flight, studies ice sheets at The high-resolution maps have also helped explain how the NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. As the warm water reaches the undersides of glaciers in the Amundsen glacier passes by outside the airplane window, she notes that Sea Embayment. In a study published in Geophysical Research Thwaites could take perhaps 200 years or more to collapse. Letters in February, the UC Irvine team used Operation Already, it’s responsible for half the water being added to the IceBridge data to spot deep channels under the floating ice ocean along the Amundsen Coast. shelves. Carved by growing glaciers during colder times, these “We don’t know how much the ice sheet beneath it is going seafloor valleys extend thousands of feet below Pine Island to melt,” she says. But her team found grim results when they and Thwaites. Other channels reach perhaps more than tried to model what might happen. “No matter what scenario 5,000 feet deep under the Dotson and Crosson ice shelves, we threw at it, Thwaites collapsed,” Medley says. which sit at the mouth of Smith, Pope and Kohler glaciers. Scientists aren’t sure how long that will take, and the uncertainty has turned new attention to Thwaites. A deep, narrow The ice loss is already enough for satellites to detect changes Continued on page 47 June 2017 DISCOVER
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If the West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapsed, it would cause some 10 feet of sea level rise, and nearly every mile of the southeast U.S. coastline would be inundated. Large regions of Florida and Louisiana would flood.
As the atmosphere warms, heat is transferred to the oceans, which causes water expansion and rising sea levels. Today, Earth’s oceans are warmer than they have been in 100,000 years, according to research published in Science in January. Scientists discovered this by using sediment cores from around the world to reconstruct sea surface temperatures from the last interglacial period, which started roughly 129,000 years ago. At that time, temperatures were similar to those from before the Industrial Revolution. The study also showed that 4,000 years later — so, 125,000 years ago — sea surface temperatures had warmed up to nearly match today’s readings. That means that, during the interglacial period, it took the planet millennia for a temperature increase that humans managed in just centuries. Alarmingly, sea levels back then were at least 20 feet higher than today’s. The study is just one of a growing number that look at how the Antarctic Ice Sheet behaved in the past and suggest sea level rise could be higher — and come sooner — than scientists expected even a few years ago. Dozens of feet of sea level rise could take millennia, but the latest estimates suggest as much as 8 feet by the end of the century on the extreme end of projections. That timeline is still one of the biggest unknowns. If Earth is now locked into many feet of ocean rise, it would be enough to flood major metro areas. And the risk to some low-lying areas will rise in mere decades, not centuries. For example, New York City is expected to see regional sea levels rise as much as 30 percent more than the global average. Mud cores pulled from marshes in the city show that the sea level is already rising faster there than at any time in the past 1,500 years, according to research published in the Holocene Journal in January. Using their sample site in the Bronx, the scientists found local ocean levels have risen by more than a foot since 1850. In New York City, studies estimate that adding several more feet of sea level rise would cause some $26 billion in damage and displace nearly 100,000 people by the end of the century. E.B. Rising oceans could soak many areas of New York City. Mud cores show that sea level rise is happening in the region faster than at any other time over the past 1,500 years.
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TOP: CRESIS/UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS/HASKELL INDIAN NATIONS UNIVERSITY/NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION. BOTTOM: CLIMATE CENTRAL.ORG/GOOGLE EARTH
RISING TIDE
BACK BAY’S WAKE To visualize what rising seas would look like in real life, artist Nikolay Lamm enlisted help from Climate Central scientist Remik Ziemlinski to manipulate images of major cities using the latest science. In the example below, Lamm combined sea level data and topographical flood maps to estimate how high medium tide waters would rise in Boston’s Back Bay area. The white cones on the maps indicate the exact location and direction the viewer would be facing. Lamm says his goal was to show people that the places they cherish today might not be there for future generations. BOSTON, today
BOSTON, 5-foot rise
CLIMATE CENTRAL.ORG/NIKOLAY LAMM (6)
BOSTON, 12-foot rise
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LARSEN’S MELTDOWN
A 70-mile-long crack runs across the Larsen C Ice Shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula.
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Remnants of Larsen B
Larsen B Ice Shelf
Scientists are tracking a large crack in the Larsen C Ice Shelf that will calve an iceberg the size of Delaware.
Early April 2017 June 2016 August 2015 Larsen C Ice Shelf
November 2010
Progression of crack
TOP: NASA/GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER SCIENTIFIC VISUALIZATION STUDIO. BOTTOM: JEREMY HARBECK
The narrow and mountainous Antarctic Peninsula extends north from West Antarctica some 800 miles toward Chile. This picturesque region has warmed at least twice as fast as Earth’s overall average. That’s led to the collapse of ice shelves. Larsen A, at the peninsula’s northern tip, crumbled in 1995. By 2002, its neighbor Larsen B collapsed. Both ice shelves were thousands of years old. Since then, scientists have kept a close watch on Larsen C. It’s the biggest ice shelf on the peninsula and the continent’s fourth largest. A 70-mile-long crack is currently causing Larsen C to calve a Delaware-sized iceberg into the Southern Ocean. The mammoth iceberg — roughly 10 percent of the entire ice shelf — now dangles like a broken tree limb, tethered by just 12 miles of ice. “A calving event is expected soon,” Adrian Luckman of Swansea University said in mid-March. “My guess is days to weeks, but it could be months.” Once this iceberg drifts into the ocean, the shelf behind it might collapse. That’s similar to what happened at Larsen B, which will likely disintegrate completely by 2020. However, NASA JPL ice shelf scientist Ala Khazendar cautions that Larsen C’s future remains uncertain. Ice shelves naturally shed icebergs, and this ice shelf could recover and avoid the fate of Larsens A and B. If the floating Larsen C does collapse, it won’t raise sea levels directly. But once an ice shelf is gone, the glacier feeding it flows faster to the sea. And that will speed up sea level rise. Beyond that, scientists also worry what the collapse would mean for the rest of the continent as warming continues. “If the fourth-largest ice shelf in Antarctica disintegrates, bigger ice shelves with bigger drainage basins could also be in danger,” Khazendar says. E.B.
Continued from page 43
trough helps constrain Pine Island Glacier. Thwaites isn’t so lucky. The glacier will widen as it retreats deeper inland. Medley says this geometry means Thwaites will also start to draw more stable ice from neighboring glaciers. A $25 million expedition next year, funded by the National Science Foundation and the United Kingdom’s Natural Environment Research Council, will collect data on Thwaites that might offer a better expiration date. The field excursion, which scientists are calling “Thwaites invasion,” won’t be easy. The glacier is one of the most hostile places in Antarctica. Rignot says Operation IceBridge has given his team the data they need to start computing high-resolution models. Their next step is to harness some significant computer power — and pair it with better observations of ocean heat — to try and more precisely forecast sea level rise. “We’ve sort of mapped the heck out of this sector,” Rignot says. “We’ve reached the point now where we have some really nice datasets for the models to run.” The research from West Antarctica has already prompted the U.S. government to revise its predictions for sea level rise by 2100. A January report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reviewed the latest observations from Antarctica and Greenland. It estimated that oceans could rise by 8 feet this century under the worst-case scenario. Their optimistic case: 1 foot. Rignot says the team’s goal isn’t to watch ice sheets collapse. It is to collect evidence so policymakers will listen and take action, even if there’s no way to stop the inevitable. “We can have an effect on the speed of the retreat of these glaciers,” he says. “If the retreat were to proceed on timescales of 1,000 years instead of a century, it would make a big difference.” D Eric Betz is an associate editor at Discover. He’s on Twitter: @ericbetz
JEREMY HARBECK (2)
Fly over Antarctic glaciers with Operation IceBridge by visiting DiscoverMagazine.com/Meltdown
Icebergs calve from Thwaites Glacier and float on Pine Island Bay.
NASA’s most recent workhorse for Operation IceBridge has been a DC-8 jet airliner, a model that went out of production in the early 1970s. Here, technicians prepare the plane for a flight to Antarctica from an airport in Punta Arenas, Chile.
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The Universe According to Emmy Noether How a deceptively simple theorem from a century ago still shapes modern physics. BY STEVE NADIS
PICTORIAL PARADE/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JAY SMITH
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In her 53 years, many spent bucking a system that impeded her pursuit of mathematics, Noether had an extraordinary impact on both algebra and physics. There’s no telling what else she might have accomplished if society and fate had been more kind.
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A LIFE OF WORK Who was this woman, called upon by two renowned mathematicians to help rescue Einstein’s masterwork? On the face of it, Noether (pronounced NUR-tuh) appears to have been a curious choice. She did not have an actual job in mathematics and was barely able to get an education in the field. Yet she had published some important papers, and Hilbert felt that her expertise could help clear up the problem with general relativity. Born in Erlangen, Germany, in 1882, Noether hoped to follow in the footsteps of her mathematician father, Max. But German universities did not admit women when she reached college age, so Noether had to audit classes instead. Eventually she did so well in the final exams that she earned an undergraduate degree. In 1904 she was permitted to enroll in a doctoral program at the University of Erlangen. She received a Ph.D. in 1907 and spent nearly eight years working there without pay or an official position, relying on her family for financial support while occasionally filling in for her father as a substitute teacher. After her trip to Göttingen in 1915, she stayed on as a lecturer, again receiving no pay. After years of working essentially as a volunteer, Noether finally became an untenured associate math professor in 1922 at Göttingen, where she was allotted a modest salary. But 11 years later, she lost her job when she and other Jews were cast out of academia in Nazi Germany. Soon after, she left the country and landed a job at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, with the help of Einstein. She died just 18 months later due to complications from surgery to remove an ovarian cyst.
EMILIANA AND MONICA NOETHER VIA MATHEMATICAL ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA/FLICKR
n 1915, two of the world’s top mathematicians, David Hilbert and Felix Klein, invited Emmy Noether to the University of Göttingen to investigate a puzzle. A problem had cropped up in Albert Einstein’s new theory of gravity, general relativity, which had been unveiled earlier in the year. It seemed that the theory did not adhere to a wellestablished physical principle known as conservation of energy, which states that energy can change forms but can never be destroyed. Total energy is supposed to remain constant. Noether, a young mathematician with no formal academic appointment, gladly accepted the challenge. She resolved the issue head-on, showing that energy may not be conserved “locally” — that is, in an arbitrarily small patch of space — but everything works out when the space is sufficiently large. That was one of two theorems she proved that year in Göttingen, Germany. The other theorem, which would ultimately have a far greater impact, uncovered an intimate link between conservation laws (such as the conservation of energy) and the symmetries of nature, a connection that physicists have exploited ever since. Today, our current grasp of the physical world, from subatomic particles to black holes, draws heavily upon this theorem, now known simply as Noether’s theorem. “It is hard to overstate the importance of Noether’s work in modern physics,” Durham University physicist Ruth Gregory said a century later. “Her basic insights on symmetry underlie our methods, our theories and our intuition. The link between symmetry and conservation is how we describe our world.”
In her 53 years, many spent bucking a system that impeded her pursuit of mathematics, Noether had an extraordinary impact on both algebra (her main field) and physics. There’s no telling what else she might have accomplished if society and fate had been more kind. Nevertheless, her body of work was more than enough to secure her place in the pantheon of great scientists, with her namesake theorem perhaps her most durable contribution.
THE THICK OF THE THEOREM Noether’s theorem is a simple and elegant link between seemingly unrelated concepts that is, today, almost obvious to physicists. But nonphysicists can get the gist of it, too. Basically, it states that every “continuous” symmetry in nature has a corresponding conservation law, and vice versa. Let’s break down a few of those terms. Symmetry, in this context, refers to an operation that can be done to an object or system that leaves it unchanged. Rotating a square by 90 degrees is an example of “discrete” symmetry. The square still looks the same, whereas a 45-degree rotation yields something different (commonly called a diamond). A circle, on the other hand, possesses continuous symmetry since rotating it by any degree, or a fraction thereof, doesn’t alter its appearance. This is the kind of symmetry to which Noether’s theorem applies. A conservation law, meanwhile, refers to a physical quantity that remains fixed and hence does not fluctuate over time. Energy, for example, cannot be created or destroyed; once you’ve computed its value, there’s no need to repeat the calculation. Noether’s theorem uncovered a hidden relationship between two basic concepts — symmetries and conserved quantities — that until then had been treated separately. The theorem provides an explicit mathematical formula for finding the symmetry that underlies a given conservation law and, conversely, finding the conservation law that corresponds to a given symmetry. Here’s a glimpse of the theorem in action: Imagine a hockey puck gliding along a perfectly smooth, endless and frictionless sheet of ice. Let’s further suppose that no external forces are acting on the puck whatsoever. Under these idealized conditions, the puck will continue to glide in a straight line without ever slowing down. Its momentum, the product of its mass and velocity, will be retained, or conserved. The only thing that could cause the puck to alter its course, or to gain or lose speed, would be if space itself — the surface of the ice, in this case — were to vary. Nothing will change, however, if the ice remains smooth and space remains unchanged. Noether’s theorem shows that the puck’s conservation of momentum is tied to its “symmetry of space translation,” which is another way of saying that physics is not affected by linear movements (or translations) within a uniform space. The puck moves the same way on one part of the smooth ice as on another. Similarly, Noether’s theorem shows that symmetry under rotation, or rotational invariance, leads to the conservation of angular momentum, which measures how much an object is rotating. Physics, in other words, has no preferred direction. If you do an experiment on a table and then rotate that table by 45 degrees, or indeed by any amount, the experimental results will not differ. The theorem also links the symmetry of “time translation” to the
symmetry
conservation law
conservation of momentum
conservation of angular momentum
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conservation of energy, so physics also doesn’t care if you do an experiment today, next Tuesday or the third Sunday in October. Physicists had known about the conservation of momentum, angular momentum and energy long before Noether’s theorem came along. They are foundational precepts of classical mechanics. But it was not known that these hallowed laws shared a common origin, each bound to a particular symmetry. This new insight, which sprang from Noether’s work, is a guiding principle that permeates physics research, while informing our views of the universe at large. conservation of energy
conservation of electric charge
color symmetry
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PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER Noether’s theorem applies not only to these intuitive symmetries — rotations and shifts in time or space — but also to more abstract, “internal” symmetries that underlie the forces of nature. For example, the conservation of electric charge, a central tenet of the theory of electromagnetism, stems from a symmetry related to details of the particle’s spin. Another example: A symmetry called isospin that allows electrons to be substituted for neutrinos, and neutrinos for electrons, helped physicists develop a theory in the 1960s that unified the electromagnetic force and the weak force (which explains particle decays and radioactive processes) into a single electroweak force. The conserved quantity here is “hypercharge” — a kind of charge, analogous to electric charge, that is associated with this electroweak force. A decade later, physicists devised a theory for the strong nuclear force, which binds protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus. At the heart of this force is something called color symmetry. (Color is a property of the quarks that make up protons and neutrons, which physicists view as another kind of charge.) In the 1970s, physicists put all the known particles (including a few whose existence had not yet been confirmed, like the Higgs boson) and the forces that govern their interactions — the electromagnetic, weak and strong — into a single theoretical framework known as the Standard Model. According to Stanford University physicist Michael Peskin, Noether’s theorem was a basic tool in the construction of this amazingly successful model. “In quantum mechanics, you identify two or three particles that are supposed to be tied by a symmetry and then see if the inferred conservation law is valid. That’s how you learn whether it is a real symmetry of nature, and that’s how the Standard Model was built” — through a cumulative, step-bystep process like this. It’s also how researchers are now trying to move forward. A SUPER LEGACY The hunt is on to find new particles and deeper, broader symmetries from which they stem, a process in which Noether’s theorem continues to play a pivotal role. Much of the current effort focuses on looking for signs of supersymmetry — a theory that postulates a symmetry between the particles that make up matter (fermions) and the particles that transmit forces, like electromagnetism (bosons). If supersymmetry is right, every known fermion has a yet-to-beobserved bosonic “superpartner,” and every known boson, likewise, has an as-yet-unseen fermionic superpartner. The hypothetical supersymmetric particles, which physicists hope to discover at giant particle accelerators like the Large Hadron
Collider, would be “a reflection of all the Standard Model particles, using a mirror that is slightly distorted,” explains Joseph Incandela, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “The particles on the other side of the mirror look just like Standard Model particles, except that their spins have been slightly shifted.” One possibility that has been associated with this assumed symmetry, says Incandela, is the conservation of something called r parity, which implies that the lightest supersymmetric particle has to be stable and can never decay. If r parity is indeed conserved, every ordinary particle’s unseen supersymmetric partner will eventually decay into the lightest supersymmetric particle, which sticks around forever. That particle, whatever it may be, would be available in abundant quantities and could thus be a good candidate for the mysterious dark matter believed to account for more than one-quarter of the stuff in the universe.
ILLUMINATING BLACK HOLES Noether’s theorem, however, is crucial to more than just the search for new particles; it extends to all branches of physics. Harvard physicist Andrew Strominger, for example, has identified an infinite number of symmetries related to soft particles, which are particles that have no energy. These particles come in two varieties: soft photons (particles that transmit the electromagnetic force) and soft gravitons (particles that transmit the gravitational force). Recent papers by Strominger and his colleagues, Stephen Hawking and Malcolm Perry of Cambridge University, suggest that material falling into a black hole adds soft particles to the black hole’s boundary, or event horizon. These particles would in effect serve as recording devices that store information, providing clues about the original material that went into the black hole. The idea proposed by the three physicists offers a new strategy for addressing a long-standing conundrum in physics known as the black hole information paradox. Hawking showed in the 1970s that every black hole will eventually evaporate and disappear, potentially destroying all the information the object once contained about how it formed and evolved over time. The permanent loss of information in Hawking’s scenario was troubling to theorists — including Hawking — as it would violate a cherished law of quantum physics holding that information, like energy, is always conserved. The presence of soft particles along the event horizon, and their attendant symmetries, may point toward a way out of this dilemma. “We quickly realized through Noether’s theorem that there were conservation laws corresponding to the new symmetries that place very stringent constraints on the formation and evaporation of black holes,” says Strominger, although he acknowledges this work is still at an early stage. It is just one more setting in which Noether’s theorem looms large, and the list of examples keeps growing. “The relationship between symmetries and conservation laws is a never-ending story,” says Strominger. “One hundred years later, Noether’s theorem keeps finding more and more applications.” While no one knows what will come next, the incredible power, and longevity, of Emmy Noether’s theorem is undeniable. D
soft particles
event horizon
black hole information paradox
Noether’s theorem is crucial to more than just the search for new particles; it extends to all branches of physics.
Steve Nadis, a contributing editor to Discover and Astronomy, is co-author of From the Great Wall to the Great Collider.
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PLAY’S the THING Once thought to be limited to mammals, playful behavior is important across the animal kingdom.
BY MARTA ZARASKA ILLUSTRATIONS BY ANDREA COBB June 2017 DISCOVER
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in april ,
on board the unmanned spacecraft BION-M, a thick-toed gecko wriggled out of its polyurethane collar. In microgravity, the object floated away, then floated back toward the animal, then away again, approaching another gecko, and then a third. The animals got curious. One pushed the collar with its snout. Another tried inserting its head into it. Yet another pinned the thing down to the floor. As the spacecraft orbited Earth, the geckos started to play.
Russian scientists described this particular instance of reptile play in 2015, after observing the astronaut-geckos with cameras inside the spacecraft. The experiment, designed to study general behavior of reptiles in weightlessness, added to growing evidence that it’s not just kittens and baby chimps that play, but also birds, reptiles, fish and even invertebrates, including spiders and wasps. We have reports of octopuses fooling around with Lego blocks and Komodo dragons waging tug of war with their keepers. In 2015, a study of tooth marks on fossils showed that the bones may have served as a toy for a tyrannosaurid more than 65 million years ago. Play in non-mammalian species offers us novel insights into the activity’s function and evolution. Until recently, however, researchers doubted these diverse species were even capable of the behavior. For decades, if not centuries, scientists rejected the notion that animals other than mammals actually play, even when faced with observational reports of frolicking fish or apparently fun-loving birds. “People tried to find every possible explanation,” says Gordon Burghardt, a behavioral biologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. “They thought maybe the animals just tried to knock parasites off their bodies, even though there was no evidence they were doing that. Or they’d say that the animals were so stupid they didn’t know the thing they were playing with wasn’t edible, even though you wouldn’t say that about a cat playing with a rubber mouse.” At the close of the 20th century, as extensive use of video and computers allowed scientists to analyze animal behavior in detail, the consensus began to change. Consider the case of Pigface, a Nile soft-shelled turtle who spent nearly his entire life alone in an enclosure at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. In the 1980s, when Pigface was already in his 40s, he began biting himself and clawing at his face.
“He used to self-mutilate so bad he’d get fungal growth on his skin,” recalls Burghardt. “So the reptile curator thought, ‘Hey, maybe he’s bored?’ No one back then thought that reptiles could get bored.” In 1991, Burghardt and other researchers gave Pigface two basketballs and a round hoop fashioned from a garden hose, then recorded his behavior. The turtle’s playfulness wasn’t immediately apparent on the video until Burghardt decided to speed up the film. Suddenly, Pigface resembled a frolicking dog: He’d nose, bite, push and shake the toys with his mouth. “That was the first pretty good proof that reptiles could play,” he says. Boredom cured.
PLAY ON THE BRAIN Researching nonmammalian play got a boost in 2005, when Burghardt, based on years of research, outlined five criteria defining the activity. That made it easier to qualify if certain behavior was play or something entirely different. According to Burghardt, play is a behavior that is voluntary, repeated several times, doesn’t have an obvious function (so running for fun, yes, but not running away from a predator) and differs in significant ways from regular, functional behavior. It’s also initiated by healthy, largely unstressed animals. “Play is a kaleidoscope, a mix of different behaviors from lots of different contexts, like predatory behavior, aggressive behavior, sexual behavior, and it’s this mix that allows animals to know that it’s play and not something serious,” says Marc Bekoff, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Colorado Boulder and another researcher whose widely accepted definition of play helped researchers
For decades, if not centuries, scientists rejected the notion that animals other than mammals actually play.
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Social
BASIC TYPES OF ANIMAL PLAY
Locomotion
Object
spot this behavior in a broader range of animals. Play is far from uniform, though, which can make it challenging to recognize. In our mammalcentric ways, we tend to think of play as something that is quite complicated and, as Bekoff says, “cerebral.” But there are many different types of play, some of them simpler than others. Take ravens, for example. In an experiment published in 2014, researchers from Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Ornithology and Lund University in Sweden observed a group of ravens interacting with a small stuffed mouse and a plastic spider. Sometimes, the birds would manipulate the toys with their beaks or feet — what scientists call object play. Sometimes, if one raven started to play with a toy, another would join — that’s social play. And sometimes, the birds would just hang upside down from a branch, seemingly enjoying themselves. That’s play at its simplest and most primitive: the running, jumping and romping around that’s defined as locomotion play. No big brain required. A comparison across 15 orders of mammals showed that larger-brained orders contained more playful species. However, within a given order, such as, say, primates, some of the most playful species were those with the tiniest brains.
Regardless of size, play may enhance a brain’s functionality. Experiments done on rats show that play changes the brain, affecting development of the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for complex thoughts and regulating emotions. In one such experiment published in 2013 by scientists from the University of Lethbridge in Canada, playing enhanced the young rats’ neural plasticity, which helped them to be more flexible in their behavior later in life.
SPIDER SEXY-TIME So what if you are a spider and you don’t have a cortex at all? Can you still play? Most likely, yes. “Spiders don’t really have a brain, just a decentralized nervous system with three clusters of neurons,” says Jonathan Pruitt, an evolutionary ecologist who studies spider behavior at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “They can barely see each other, they live in a vibratory world and yet they are doing something that is consistent with what you could define as play.” In a study published in 2012, Pruitt, Burghardt and Susan Riechert from the University of Tennessee described a peculiar behavior of the Anelosimus studiosus spider. Males and immature females of this species engage in what Pruitt calls “almost-sex,” and they do it over and over again. From a functional perspective, it doesn’t make sense: The females are not yet able to reproduce. The first thought that comes to mind is that the spiders just don’t know they can’t mate successfully, but Pruitt doesn’t believe this to be true. The “almost-sex” differs in quite important ways from the real deal, one of them being that the male doesn’t end up being eaten. Under normal reproductive conditions, there’s a 30 percent chance that a female will eat the male. “But they June 2017 DISCOVER
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never kill any of the males during these play interactions,” Pruitt says. Toning down on aggression is a typical feature of play; it’s even been noted in wasps. Back in 2006, Italian scientists studying young paper wasps noticed that when the insects aggregate in clusters to keep each other warm and survive the winter, they engage in something very much resembling play-fighting in mammals. They beat the antennae of other wasps, lick them and bite them, behaviors that don’t serve any obvious function. “You don’t need a big brain to play,” Burghardt says. “How it is organized is probably more important. Honeybees have tiny brains and yet they are capable of pretty advanced communication and learning.” It all goes back to how play evolved in the first place.
colleague, Roland Anderson of the Seattle Aquarium, gave a few bored octopuses old pill bottles just to see what would happen. And the animals played. They jetted water at the bottles, pushing the “toy” away, waited for it to float back on the aquarium intake’s current and pushed it away again, over and over, seemingly enjoying themselves. This discovery of play in octopuses was
The discovery of play in octopuses was fundamental for our understanding of the activity.
GAME THEORY In the late 1990s, aside from documented incidents among birds, non-mammalian play was still considered a weird idea. Then Jennifer Mather, a psychologist focused on cephalopod behavior at the University of Lethbridge, and her
Voluntary
Repetitive
No obvious function
ELEMENTS OF PLAY
Predatory Aggressive
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fundamental for our understanding of the activity. It suggested that play was not the sole domain of mammals and birds, but that it evolved multiple times throughout the animal kingdom. As for why play evolved at all, there is no simple answer. Burghardt believes it may have been, initially, a side effect: If an animal had some excess resources, enough food and time and safety, it might have gotten bored and started to play. Mather thinks this is also the case with octopuses. “It’s an outflow of their curiosity, cognitive ability and their wish to explore the environment — and probably boredom,” she says. The surplus resource theory, as Burghardt calls it, also helps explain why geckos on board the spacecraft started to play while their cousins on Earth — the control group — didn’t. Significantly Reptiles depend on external sources different from of heat, and have a metabolic rate functional much slower than that of birds or behavior mammals. It’s harder and more costly for them to engage in vigorous activities in normal circumstances. But in space, near-weightlessness made it less energetically costly to play, and so they did. Initiator is Burghardt and other researchers healthy, largely also argue that when play first evolved, it didn’t necessarily have unstressed any benefits for the animals. It was simply just there. Only later on in the evolutionary process would play — at least in some cases — get added functional value. Sometimes, the benefits would be simple and immediate: exercising muscles, or Sexual exploring the environment. Other times, the benefits would be delayed until adulthood. Among the best examples of such a scenario is the almost-sex of spiders: Both females and males who practice
this courtship are later more successful in real reproductive behaviors. “They seem to be gaining experience,” Pruitt explains.
THE QUESTION OF FUN All these benefits aside, one question remains unanswered: Are spiders and wasps and geckos actually having fun? In a 2014 paper, Burghardt and his colleagues from the University of Tennessee and the Smithsonian National Zoological Park described how three cichlid fish played with a thermometer in their tank, bouncing the “toy” repeatedly. The animals were clearly playing, but how much (or even if) they were enjoying themselves was impossible to tell. On the other hand, Bekoff and others who have observed ravens rolling down mounds of snow, sometimes doing so on their backs with sticks held in their feet, had a much clearer feeling that fun was involved. When we observe mammals, telling whether the animals are enjoying themselves appears fairly obvious — we check their body language and facial expressions and compare them to our own — but such an answer is mostly intuitive. Trying to understand the emotions of fish or invertebrates may force researchers to look deeper into what makes play really fun. Experiments done in rats hint that specific chemical messengers in the brain, such as dopamine and endocannabinoids, may have a role in the pleasure of play. The endocannabinoid system, which is involved in processing sensations such as pain and regulating mood, was once thought to exist only in mammals. But it does occur in fish, birds, amphibians and possibly even in sea urchins. As for dopamine, long known to be a gatekeeper for the brain’s pleasure center, “it’s present in spiders, and we know it has large influence on behavior,” says Pruitt, yet he admits that we still have zero idea whether it could make play fun for spiders. While the question of spider fun remains unanswered, understanding that play is not limited to mammals changes our perspective on the activity. “One thing we might learn is that play is a very basic behavior and a very needed one in the repertoire of very diverse species,” Bekoff says. “Ant play may be different from dog play, but it may be important for the ants.” And if even octopuses and spiders need play, if it’s indeed such a basic behavior, maybe we should let our own children engage in it more, rather than rushing them from one extracurricular activity to another. Non-mammalian play may also change our perspective on how much we differ from other species. “I think we have to get rid of some of our anthropocentrism,” Mather says. “The history of science is littered with, ‘Gee, we humans are special.’ And we are not special. You have to realize this when you see octopuses play.” D Marta Zaraska is the author of Meathooked: The History and Science of Our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession With Meat.
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Out There
Our Rocks, Ourselves Astronomers are cracking the secrets of our solar system within the oldest rocks — on Earth and beyond. BY DOUGLAS FOX
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For decades, astronomers have tried piecing together the solar system’s history with insights gained from fallen space rocks. Now, we have the technology — in the form of NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, illustrated above — to look for secrets within rocks still in space.
meteorite has spurred research into our planetary origins, leading most recently to a NASA mission, launched last fall, to collect more of this primitive material right from the source. Scientists are unraveling the oldest story on Earth — and it’s fantastic.
THE FIRST ROCKS Astronomers have long suspected that our solar system coalesced from a vast cloud of gas and dust. In the beginning, a tiny piece of that cloud collapsed under its own gravity and created the faint protosun. A disk of gas swirling around it eventually formed the planets.
Ever since the Allende meteorite (above) fell in 1969, scientists have been analyzing its older-than-Earth components. The piece at right shows the white and gray nuggets throughout the rock, as well as the rind it acquired during its fall.
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Sounds good for the broad strokes, but the details remained a mystery. What ingredients were in that primordial mix? Could planets really emerge from dust? And did our solar system arise from slow, quiet coagulation — or from unspeakable violence? As astronomers studied Allende, they quickly realized they had some of the answers in their hands. The key was in the countless nuggets inside the meteorite, which had once tumbled through the ancient protoplanetary disk, bathed in hot gases and dust. Each nugget provided a time capsule, recording conditions from those first several million years when the sun was still forming. Allende’s white-colored spheres, known as CAIs (for calciumaluminum-rich inclusion), stood out first. These spheres were rich in metals that remain solid even at extremely high temperatures. The inclusions
FROM TOP: NASA GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER; SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION ARCHIVE; NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
The oldest object known to humans fell from the sky on Feb. 8, 1969, with the furor of a divine omen. The blue-white fireball streaked over northern Mexico at 1:05 a.m., ending with a staccato of booms heard from hundreds of miles away. A small asteroid had struck Earth’s atmosphere and exploded — raining thousands of fragments over the desert. NASA dispatched scientists to the site, and days later they returned with 13 fragments of the space rock. Each was coated with a smooth, glassy rind, the heat of atmospheric entry having melted the exterior. But when the rocks were cracked open, their insides looked pristine: gray-black stone jumbled with numerous white and gray nuggets the size of peas. The Allende meteorite, named for the Mexican village near the landing site, truly was a portent from heaven. It contained the secrets of our past — exotic materials from our solar system’s birth, and the ashes of stars that died long before our own sun was born. In the 48 years since it fell to Earth, the
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Out There
were sometimes arranged in delicate the University of Copenhagen. At crystals, with thin whiskers that 4,567,300,000 years old, “they define protruded outward. the formation age of the solar system.” “We don’t have any similar objects MAKING PLANETS on Earth,” says Guy Libourel, a But CAIs tell only part of the story. cosmochemist at the Côte d’Azur Most of the nuggets inside Allende Observatory in France. Scientists of were darker, rich in glassy silicate the 1960s surmised that CAIs were the minerals that form when molten liquid first solid objects to form in the solar cools rapidly. Scientists suspect they’re system — the first rocks. As the inner the remains of primordial dust clumps regions of the protoplanetary disk flash-heated and melted by shock cooled below 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, waves or collisions. they reasoned, those elements Bizzarro believes these objects, called condensed out of the hot vapor to chondrules, were pivotal to planet form delicate mineral crystals, just as formation. The prevailing theory had the intricate branches of a snowflake held that asteroids grew into planets condense from water vapor. by gathering up fine dust. But large Libourel tested these ideas and published the results in 2006, creating the same crystal structures, whiskers Chondrule and all, out of hot gas in the lab. “[It’s] a strong hint that CAIs came from the condensation of gas,” Calcium-aluminumLibourel says. rich inclusion (CAI) Another supporting fact that CAIs are the oldest rocks? Their age. “They are A close-up of an Allende meteorite fragment shows the white the oldest dated objects,” calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions and the darker chondrules. says Martin Bizzarro, Scientists believe the former are the first rocks in the solar system, and the latter helped form the planets. a planetary scientist at
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objects like asteroids couldn’t have grown efficiently by sweeping up dust; the tiny particles would just waft away from the approaching asteroid, like a drifting dandelion seed swishing out of the path of an oncoming car. Instead, in 2015, Bizzarro and colleagues published simulations showing that floating pea-sized chondrules would smack into the oncoming asteroid. Through this process, an asteroid just about 30 miles across can grow “all the way up to a Mars-sized body within 3 to 4 million years,” says Bizzarro. Thanks to Allende, we now have a working theory of how the oldest rocks and our planets formed.
ASTEROID MINING Allende plunged to Earth at a pivotal moment in science: It arrived just as NASA was outfitting laboratories to study rocks that Apollo astronauts would bring back from the moon. Those labs turned out to be well suited for analyzing meteorites, too. All told, scientists studying meteorites, moon rocks and cosmic dust have discovered over 70 new minerals never seen on Earth — 15 of them from Allende alone.
TOP: NASA. BOTTOM: CHIP CLARK/NATIONAL METEORITE COLLECTION/SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION
The early solar system was little more than a faint protosun surrounded by gas, dust and the odd protoplanet, as in this illustration. How those pieces evolved into today’s planets has been a difficult question to answer.
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Out There
But even Allende provides an After spending one year mapping imperfect view of the protoplanetary Bennu’s surface, OSIRIS-REx will drift disk, since the space rock could have down to a carefully chosen spot — been altered during its fiery fall to within the lip of a shallow crater would Earth. So the study of our solar make sense, since materials there are system’s origins is entering a new phase: more shaded from the sun’s destructive retrieving samples directly from space. radiation. The spacecraft will touch Last September, an Atlas V rocket down for several delicate seconds, blasted off from Cape jet nitrogen gas Canaveral, Fla., with a into the asteroid’s 4,650-pound space probe in surface, catch the its nose known as the Origins, stirred-up gravel Spectral Interpretation, and dust, then lift Resource Identification, off again. Security-Regolith Explorer If all goes well, — or just OSIRIS-REx. The OSIRIS-REx will NASA spacecraft will begin return to Earth in approaching a small asteroid 2023 with at least named 101955 Bennu, roughly 2 ounces of material a third of a mile across, in from Bennu. It September 2018. Observations will be only the from Earth-based telescopes second sample suggest that Bennu is rich in ever returned OSIRIS-REx launched from carbon, with a composition from a primitive, Cape Canaveral last September, similar to Allende and other carbon-rich the first U.S. mission to return a sample from an asteroid. primitive meteorites. asteroid — and by
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far, the largest. (Hayabusa2, a Japanese mission, is expected to return from another asteroid in 2020, with around three-millionths of an ounce of dust.) For people trying to peer some 4.57 billion years back in time — assuming Bizzarro’s numbers are correct — this will be nothing short of a revolution. For decades, scientists had to make do with whatever random rocks happened to hit Earth, not even knowing where they came from. “[It’s] like if you are a geologist and you only receive rocks by mail, and you never go into the countryside,” says Libourel. For the first time, NASA is finally venturing out, visiting one of the oldest objects in the solar system — older than the planets themselves — and returning home with a piece of that ancient history. “This,” says Libourel, “will be very, very, very important.” D Douglas Fox is a science journalist who also writes for National Geographic, Nature and Scientific American.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: NASA/DIMITRI GERONDIDAKIS; NASA (2); NASA/SANDY JOSEPH AND TIM TERRY
NASA technicians and engineers work on the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx, above), which launched last year. The plan is for it to briefly touch down on asteroid Bennu, stir up dust and capture a sample (illustrated at right), before returning it to Earth in 2023. If successful, it’ll provide scientists at least 2 ounces of genuine space rock to study.
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Origin Story
Rock-a-Bye Baby’s Rocky Roots Did the soothing sounds of lullabies evolve out of an arms race? BY YAO-HUA LAW
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We are at our cutest as infants. We’re most helpless then, too. But every infant has a help button: Cry, and most likely any adult within earshot will rush over to hold and soothe them with a gentle song. Other primate species, including chimpanzees and macaques, also cradle and carry their fussy young. But human caregivers do something extra. “We added the singing,” says psychologist Sandra Trehub, professor
emeritus at University of Toronto Mississauga. No one knows when parents first sang to infants, but the practice is ancient and universal. “There seems to be evidence of singing to infants throughout recorded history,” says Trehub, who has studied musicality in infants and children for decades. All human cultures perform songs specifically for babies — so-called “infant-directed songs.” Simpler, slower and repetitive, these lullabies
seem to soothe distressed infants better than other song types. But how — and why — did humans create infant-directed songs? In January, Harvard University evolutionary psychologist Max Krasnow and grad student Samuel Mehr published the first formal theory on the origins of lullabies in Evolution and Human Behavior. The songs, the researchers say, may have been the result of parents and infants clashing over a precious resource: parental attention.
Mary Cassatt’s 1891 Mother’s Kiss shows a loving parent’s touch. Lullabies also soothe, hands-free.
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“From a genetic perspective, parents and infants don’t have the same interests,” Krasnow says. “Infants want more of all resources than parents are willing to give.” In broad strokes, Krasnow and Mehr’s new theory fleshes out the field’s general consensus about how lullabies may have originated. Shannon de l’Etoile, a professor of music therapy at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music, cites a theory that infant-directed songs evolved out of the need for “handsfree parenting.” “Think about the period when
GRANGER, NYC
Other primate species, including chimpanzees and macaques, also cradle and carry their fussy young. But human caregivers do something extra.
RMN-GRAND PALAIS/ART RESOURCE, NY
early humans became bipedal,” says de l’Etoile. “That coincided with the pelvis narrowing, to allow walking upright, which limited the size of the infant at time of birth — all humans are born in a certain state of prematurity. We’re not like, say, horses, which are up and walking after a couple minutes.” Our inherent vulnerability as infants means human babies need an extended period of hands-on care, explains de l’Etoile, who studies infant-directed song but was not involved in Krasnow and Mehr’s research. She adds: “At the same time, the baby is growing at an exponential rate. There comes a time when it’s too big to carry all the time but still needs care. But the mom also needed to move around, to get water, prepare food.” Singing allowed the mother, the traditional caregiver, to put the infant down while still reassuring the child. “If the infant’s making a fuss, it could attract a predator,” says de l’Etoile, “A mother effective at using her voice to calm her infant would be more likely to survive — and the infant would be more likely to survive, too. Infant-directed song could be evidence of the very first music.” While not contradicting this take on the origins of lullabies, Krasnow and Mehr propose a darker element to the evolution. “The parent-infant relationship is not all cupcakes and sunshine,” says Mehr. “There is a lot of conflict.” Krasnow and Mehr believe the tug of war between an infant seeking as much attention as possible and the caregiver dividing attention among other offspring and tasks crucial for survival may have set the stage for an evolutionary arms race.
CRY HAVOC The competition begins simply enough: The infant makes a demand for attention, and the parent seeks to
Leon-Maxime Faivre’s 1888 Two Mothers captures prehistoric multitasking.
“If the infant’s making a fuss, it could attract a predator. A mother effective at using her voice to calm her infant would be more likely to survive — and the infant would be more likely to survive, too.” provide enough to satisfy the infant. But how does the parent express that attention hands-free, and how can the infant assess the quality of the attention received? Through
vocalizations, according to Krasnow and Mehr’s theory. A simple vocalization is easy to produce. But more complex vocalizations — such as singing — require memory, focus and skill, which could convey a higher quality to an infant. More demands for attention from the infant through crying might be answered with more complex vocalizations from the caregiver. “Attention is invisible. You need an honest signal of its quality,” says Krasnow. “That’s where singing comes in. I can’t be singing to you while I’m running away from a predator, or while I’m just having a conversation with someone else. Even turning the head affects the quality of the voice.
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Origin Story An infant can gauge where the parent’s attention is oriented. These are things that can’t be faked.” And infants are very attentive to that particular signal, other researchers have found. For example, over the past several years de l’Etoile has studied infants’ response to lullabies. In multiple studies, they were exposed to a range of stimuli, including either their mother or a stranger singing to them. In all cases, “all the infants were very attentive to all the singers. The infant-directed song was what was attracting attention,” says de l’Etoile. Krasnow and Mehr stress that their research is theoretical. It lays out a possible route from general calls between individuals keeping in touch when out of sight, to specific, more complex vocalizations with infants,
and eventually into lullabies. “Our theory on its own cannot predict that we are going to get a ‘Rock-a-Bye Baby,’ ” says Mehr, “but it points us in that direction.”
SOUND CHECK Not everyone is singing Mehr and Krasnow’s tune. Trehub doubts that the need to soothe infants pushed vocalizations to evolve into lullabies. Humans use various means to calm infants: Rocking and carrying on their own, for example, can lull an infant to sleep. “Songs are not a unique solution for soothing infants,” Trehub says, which makes creating a solely evolutionary basis for them problematic. For Krasnow and Mehr, the promise of their new paper is not the theory itself — it’s that they
have developed a number of ways to test its validity. The team is already conducting studies with children and adults who have genetic conditions that may alter the normal response to hearing lullabies. They’re also planning additional research with infants. These follow-up studies will test different aspects of their evolutionary theory for infantdirected song, potentially resolving not only its origins, but also the very roots of music in general. “What we know so far is that parents singing to infants is a human universal,” says Krasnow. “That’s a shock when you think of how different cultures can be. It suggests to us that there is something deeper and more functional going on.” D Additional reporting by Gemma Tarlach.
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History Lessons
Treasures Beneath the Ancient Sands One of the world’s most famous shipwrecks likely has more surprises in store. BY MARK BARNA
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Metal detectors show that some of the shipwreck and its artifacts remain entombed in sand, which acts like a hermetic seal to keep out the ravages of the sea. Perhaps another mechanism or collection of sculptures waits to be freed, says Brendan Foley, a marine archaeologist at Lund University in Sweden and co-director of the international project. “Part of the excitement of this wreck,” he says, “is that the possibility of finding something stupendous is great.”
SAILING ANCIENT SEAS We already know a fair amount about the vessel itself. Around 65 B.C., when
The Antikythera shipwreck has long been a fascinating site. A new excavation is still finding artifacts, including an ancient skeleton that may have preserved DNA.
Rome ruled over the Mediterranean world, a Greek merchant ship set out west across the Aegean Sea. Measuring 165 feet long, a behemoth at the time, it was loaded with luxury items probably picked up at eastern Mediterranean ports, as well as livestock and scores of travelers, Foley says. Merchant vessels were the only way people could travel to many cities. A storm likely cut the vessel’s trip short, smashing it against the cliffs of Antikythera. The heavily loaded ship would have sunk fast. Underwater, the boat skidded down a 70-degree slope
BRETT SEYMOUR/EUA/WHOI/ARGO
→
Off the coast of Greece, near the tiny island of Antikythera, a 2,000-year-old shipwreck continues to offer up its bounty. When the wreck was discovered 117 years ago, divers recovered life-size bronze and marble statues and a mysterious clockwork device. And last year, researchers found a partial skeleton beneath the sloping seafloor that, through DNA analysis, promises to reveal the biological details of a passenger. Other significant finds might be just a shovel away as the ambitious Return to Antikythera, the first systematic excavation of the shipwreck, continues this summer.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: NATIONAL ARCHAEOLOGICAL MUSEUM, ATHENS/ANTIKYTHERA MECHANISM RESEARCH PROJECT/KOSTAS XENIKAKIS; JOSÉ ANTONIO PEÑAS/SCIENCE SOURCE; ALISON MACKEY/DISCOVER/NASA; JOE MCKENDRY
The Antikythera mechanism’s interlocking gears, above and illustrated at right, perplexed scientists for over a century. Historians now believe it was an elaborate conversation piece that tracked celestial movements and kept time.
before stopping 160 feet or so below the sea’s surface, unleashing a plume of debris that might have covered some cargo instantly. The ship would not be disturbed again until 1900, when a sponge diver clad in a clunky dry suit and brass helmet saw an unattached bronze arm from a sculpture on the seabed, says Alexander Jones, a historian of the ancient world at New York University who has studied the shipwreck and its cargo. Subsequent dives revealed relics strewn across the floor, and Greek officials orchestrated a recovery. Among the finds were 36 marble statues of heroes, gods and horses. Remnants of bronze statues, ceramics
Around 65 B.C., a 165-foot-long commercial boat, illustrated above, sank near the island of Antikythera on the western side of the Sea of Crete. Its wreckage was found in 1900.
with unbelievable precision. Not until clock manufacturing in 14th-century Europe were interlocking gears again used in a similar manner. “We have nothing surviving from the GrecoRoman world in metalwork . . . that is anywhere near so complex and refined,” Jones says. It’s taken decades of interdisciplinary scholarship to reveal the mechanism’s secrets. While THE MYSTERIOUS MECHANISM historians had mostly figured it out in Though ancient Greek writings made the 2000s, last year the science, history reference to wondrous astronomical and philosophy journal Almagest devices, scholars had no idea the published the most precise details yet Greeks could build something as on what it actually does. In effect, sophisticated as this mechanism. the Greeks crammed nearly all their When whole, its tiny pieces fit together extensive astronomical knowledge into something the size and shape of a shoebox. Potamos Bay The device had Site of wreck faceplates on the front Aegean Sea and back framed GREECE by a wooden case, Ionian Sea enclosing about 60 gears, Jones says. The front plate had a circular dial with Sea of Crete pointers tracking the ANTIKYTHERA movement of the sun, ISLAND moon and five known Mediterranean Sea planets across the and personal belongings — like golden earrings, silver coins and jewelry — also emerged. In 1902, fragments of what became known as the Antikythera mechanism were found while sifting through debris at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. The discovery brought enormous public and scientific attention to the shipwreck.
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History Lessons
sky during the calendar year. Doing this is harder than it sounds: From Earth’s perspective, the planets appear to stutter in the sky rather than freely circle. The Greeks compensated for this through ingenious engineering that periodically slowed and reversed the direction of the gears controlling the orbits. The back faceplate was similarly impressive. It had two large dials: One showed a Greek lunar month calendar while the other showed the biennial and quadrennial cycles of athletic competitions, including the Olympics. A crank on a side of the device turned the gears to set the front and back dials in motion. Jones and Paul Iversen, a Greek scholar at Case Western Reserve University, believe that craftsmen on the Greek island of Rhodes, in the eastern Mediterranean, likely created the device. It was probably aboard the ship for delivery to a customer in northwest Greece when the storm struck. Most scholars agree that the mechanism was not a marine navigation device, and there is some consensus that it was not a science research tool. Its purpose may have been to educate and amaze small groups about the cosmos. A wealthy noble or philosopher might have brought it out as a curio during
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an evening gathering of wine and conversation. With its future secured as a museum piece, the device in a way has returned to its original function of fascinating audiences.
A SKELETON’S SECRETS Though no similar mechanisms have yet been found, the Return to Antikythera project has made several discoveries since it began excavating the site in 2014. Divers have recovered treasures such as gold jewelry, two bronze spears from oversized warrior statues and a “war dolphin” — a teardrop-shaped lead weight dropped
This bronze statue from the Antikythera shipwreck, probably depicting Perseus or Paris, is attributed to the famed sculptor Euphranor.
from a ship’s sails to smash the deck of hostile vessels. “It’s the only one ever found,” Foley says. But the most promising recovery has been the partial skeleton. Last year, Foley and his international team recovered bones from an individual’s skull, torso and limbs inches beneath the seafloor. Hannes Schroeder, a DNA analyst at the Natural History Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen and the first person to examine the skeleton, says the bones look to be from a male between age 15 and 25. Remarkably, the petrous bone, a thick area behind the ear known for its preservation of DNA, is intact. That, plus the cold water and the skeleton’s preservation by silt and sand, bodes well for collecting usable genetic material. The results from DNA analysis are expected this fall, potentially revealing geographic ancestry, inherited diseases and even finer characteristics like hair, eye and skin color. “We see in museums statues and personal possessions from the shipwreck, but who were the people who owned this stuff ?” Schroeder says. “Here, for once, we have the chance to get really close to an individual, and nothing is closer than a person’s DNA.” D Mark Barna is an associate editor at Discover.
TOP: BRETT SEYMOUR/EUA/WHOI/ARGO (2). BOTTOM: THE FINE ART SOCIETY, LONDON, UK/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
Archaeologists have found human remains at the Antikythera shipwreck. At left, a skull, leg and arm bones lie on the seafloor; above, parts of a nearly intact skull. The site’s conditions may have preserved DNA within these finds.
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20 Things You Didn’t Know About …
Thousands of African-Americans fleeing slavery sought refuge in the Great Dismal Swamp, as shown in an oil painting from 1888 (above). The Great Dismal spans the border of Virginia and North Carolina and includes Lake Drummond (below).
BY GEMMA TARLACH
1 Is a swamp any swampier than, say, a marsh or mire? It depends. Some dictionaries and government agencies define swamps as forested. 2 Other institutions get less bogged down in the details and consider any soggy spot a swamp. The preferred general term by researchers, however, whether talking swamp, marsh or mire, is wetlands. 3 Wetlands, generally speaking, are any land where the water table is at or near the surface and the level of water saturation determines the flora and fauna that live there, as well as the substrate, or soil. 4 Most plants and animals not specifically adapted to live in wetlands don’t. The omnipresent water makes it too difficult for outsiders to thrive there. 5 Species native to wetland ecosystems can be rather enterprising. Many carnivorous plants evolved in swampy settings, adapting to eat insects and other critters because they couldn’t get needed nutrients from the substrate. 6 The English word swamp had evolved by the early 17th century, but its etymology is a quagmire. Similar words existed in several archaic Germanic languages, though some sources suggest it’s akin to the Greek word for spongy: somphos. 7 There’s been a lot of political talk of “draining the swamp,” but environmentally speaking, that’s a very bad idea. Wetlands perform crucial functions, including inland flood control and coastal storm buffers. 8 Swamps are also stars when it comes to carbon sequestration. Although wetlands comprise 5 to 8 percent of the planet’s land surface, they’re holding up to 30 percent of Earth’s stored carbon. 9 Fast-growing vegetation in wetland ecosystems captures the carbon. While some of it is released back into the atmosphere, most of the carbon remains in the swampy ground. 10 This soggy soil is often oxygen-free, so organic matter decomposes very slowly, which allows for stable, long-term carbon storage. 11 That’s the good news. The bad news is that wetlands are also responsible for up to a quarter of global methane emissions. 12 Overall, however, wetlands do much more good than harm for the planet. But many are under pressure from land
development. The Great Dismal Swamp spanning the Virginia-North Carolina border, for example, is less than half as great in size than it was in the 18th century. 13 Once more than a million square acres, the Great Dismal Swamp started shrinking when a company co-founded by George Washington began draining and logging operations. 14 For decades, this boggy corner of the Atlantic Seaboard was a stop on the Underground Railroad, though for many it became a destination. Up to 50,000 African-Americans fleeing slavery settled in the swamp’s more remote areas. 15 Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp has an evocative name, but Siberia’s Great Vasyugan Mire is a lot bigger. At more than 20,000 square miles, the megamire, which has no permanent human settlements, is nearly the size of West Virginia. 16 The Siberian swamp isn’t the largest on Earth, though. For that, you’ll have to travel to the Pantanal in Brazil, where 80 percent of its more than 55,000 square miles flood in the rainy season. Bring your boat shoes. 17 Of course, it’s much better to have a boat in a swamp than a swamped boat. Rogue waves — defined as unexpectedly large surface waves — are a rare but particularly dangerous swamping threat on open seas. The tallest such confidently measured wave was about 84 feet high. 18 A different sort of wall of water — a storm surge — swamped low-lying ground some 360 million years ago in what’s now Scotland. The rush of water washed ashore marine worms, microfossils of which were recently unearthed. It’s possible a surge also brought vertebrates onto land for the first time. 19 A pair of recent studies reconstructing the environment of our earliest terrestrial ancestors at the same Scottish site found they lived in a floodplain. 20 The studies’ analysis of sedimentary layers deposited with early terrestrial vertebrate fossils established that portions of our distant ancestors’ environment dried out seasonally, but year-round much of it was, yep, a swamp. D Gemma Tarlach is senior editor at Discover.
DISCOVER (ISSN 0274-7529, USPS# 555-190) is published monthly, except for combined issues in January/February and July/August. Vol. 38, no. 5. Published by Kalmbach Publishing Co., 21027 Crossroads Circle, P.O. Box 1612, Waukesha, WI 53187-1612. Periodical postage paid at Waukesha, WI, and at additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to DISCOVER, P.O. Box 62320, Tampa, FL 33662-2320. Canada Publication Agreement # 40010760. Back issues available. All rights reserved. Nothing herein contained may be reproduced without written permission of Kalmbach Publishing Co., 21027 Crossroads Circle, P.O. Box 1612, Waukesha, WI 53187-1612. Printed in the U.S.A.
TOP: FUGITIVE SLAVES IN THE DISMAL SWAMP VIRGINIA, BY DAVID EDWARD CRONIN/NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY/GIFT OF DANIEL PARISH, JR. BOTTOM: JOMO333/SHUTTERSTOCK
Swamps
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