scientificamerican--2020-09-17--The U.S. Has an Empathy Deficit

The U.S. Has an Empathy Deficit

America is a country in deep pain .
The coronavirus pandemic , racial injustice , economic insecurity , political polarization , misinformation and general daily uncertainty dominate our lives to the point that many people are barely able to cope .
And life wasn ’ t exactly a cakewalk before 2020 .
Out of all the fears , stresses and indignities our citizens are living with , there emerges a kind of primal insecurity that undermines every aspect of life right now .
It ’ s no wonder that anxiety , depression and other psychological problems are on the rise @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or dealing with serious problems , they want to feel that other people understand what they are going through and are concerned .
But opportunities to give and receive empathy feel less than adequate these days : decreased social interaction , online get-togethers , air hugs and masked conversations are not quite up to the task—and people are often so preoccupied with their own struggles that they aren ’ t as attuned to other people ’ s problems as they otherwise might be .
On top of that , everyone is confronted with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ our leaders have dismissed the seriousness of their fellow Americans ’ plight .
Some ordinary Americans convey a lack of concern when they refuse to socially distance and wear face coverings , or criticize those who do .
The fact that a recent Gallup poll showed that roughly a third of the country doesn ’ t think there ’ s a problem with race relations suggests that many people aren ’ t grasping other people ’ s perspectives .
You don ’ t have to be a social psychologist like we are to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ deficit .
People everywhere lack the sense that others care , which makes the medical , economic , political and societal assaults on our fundamental trust in the world even harder to handle .
Fixing this empathy deficit is a challenge because it is not just a matter of having good political or corporate leaders or people treating each other with good will and respect .
It is , rather , because empathy is a fundamentally squishy term .
Like many broad and complicated concepts , empathy can mean many things .
Even @ @ @ @ @ @ @ always say what they mean , or measure empathy in the same way in their studies—and they definitely do not agree on a definition .
In fact , there are stark contradictions : what one researcher calls empathy is not empathy to another .
When laypeople are surveyed on how they define empathy , the range of answers is wide as well .
Some people think empathy is a feeling ; others focus on what a person does or says .
Some think it is being good at reading someone ’ s nonverbal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ orientation of putting oneself in someone else ’ s shoes .
Still others see empathy as the ability or effort to imagine others ’ feelings , or as just feeling “ connected ” or “ relating ” to someone .
Some think it is a moral stance to be concerned about other people ’ s welfare and a desire to help them out .
Sometimes it seems like “ empathy ” is just another way of saying “ being a nice and decent person.
” Actions , feelings , perspectives , motives , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ according to someone .
None of these definitions is wrong .
Like all concepts , empathy isn ’ t a “ thing ” we can point to or describe objectively .
But , despite the conceptual squishiness , most people view empathy as having something to do with understanding what other people are going through and being concerned about them .
And , this , we think , is what many people today feel like they are lacking .
Empathy is clearly on people ’ s minds more than in times past .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” equaled its all-time high the first week of June .
There ’ s talk on television and radio about “ empathy gaps , ” and we hear the media compare politicians on how much empathy they have .
President Trump is routinely said to have little empathy , whereas Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand and Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York are described as having high empathy .
CNN reported that top Democrats praise Joe Biden as a man “ defined by his decency and empathy , ” and Time @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Americans as an “ empathy offensive.
” Even Michelle Obama devoted several minutes of her address at the 2020 Democratic Convention to the importance of empathy .
But rarely does anyone say what they mean by the word .
Whatever people think empathy is , it ’ s a powerful force and human beings need it .
These three things might help to remedy our collective empathy deficit : Take the time to ask those you encounter how they are feeling , and really listen .
Try to put yourself in their shoes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ underestimate other people ’ s emotional distress , and we ’ re most likely to do so when those people are different from us .
Remind yourself that almost everyone is at the end of their rope these days .
Many people barely have enough energy to handle their own problems , so they don ’ t have their normal ability to think about yours .
Finally , be aware that what is empathy for one person may not be empathy for another person .
It ’ s not a concept that speaks @ @ @ @ @ @ @ family , and coworkers what empathy is for them might open a new door to understanding and helping those around us .

America is a country in deep pain. The coronavirus pandemic, racial injustice, economic insecurity, political polarization, misinformation and general daily uncertainty dominate our lives to the point that many people are barely able to cope. And life wasn’t exactly a cakewalk before 2020. Out of all the fears, stresses and indignities our citizens are living with, there emerges a kind of primal insecurity that undermines every aspect of life right now. It’s no wonder that anxiety, depression and other psychological problems are on the rise.
Whenever people are troubled or hurting or dealing with serious problems, they want to feel that other people understand what they are going through and are concerned. But opportunities to give and receive empathy feel less than adequate these days: decreased social interaction, online get-togethers, air hugs and masked conversations are not quite up to the task—and people are often so preoccupied with their own struggles that they aren’t as attuned to other people’s problems as they otherwise might be.
On top of that, everyone is confronted with people who seem indifferent. Some of our leaders have dismissed the seriousness of their fellow Americans’ plight. Some ordinary Americans convey a lack of concern when they refuse to socially distance and wear face coverings, or criticize those who do. The fact that a recent Gallup poll showed that roughly a third of the country doesn’t think there’s a problem with race relations suggests that many people aren’t grasping other people’s perspectives.
You don’t have to be a social psychologist like we are to see that Americans are experiencing an empathy deficit. People everywhere lack the sense that others care, which makes the medical, economic, political and societal assaults on our fundamental trust in the world even harder to handle.
Fixing this empathy deficit is a challenge because it is not just a matter of having good political or corporate leaders or people treating each other with good will and respect. It is, rather, because empathy is a fundamentally squishy term. Like many broad and complicated concepts, empathy can mean many things. Even the researchers who study it do not always say what they mean, or measure empathy in the same way in their studies—and they definitely do not agree on a definition. In fact, there are stark contradictions: what one researcher calls empathy is not empathy to another.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern receives a hongi, a traditional Maori greeting, from Whale Watch Kaikoura General Manager Kauahi Ngapora after announcing further support for the tourism industry during the pandemic. Credit: Kai Shwoewer Getty Images
When laypeople are surveyed on how they define empathy, the range of answers is wide as well. Some people think empathy is a feeling; others focus on what a person does or says. Some think it is being good at reading someone’s nonverbal cues, while others include the mental orientation of putting oneself in someone else’s shoes. Still others see empathy as the ability or effort to imagine others’ feelings, or as just feeling “connected” or “relating” to someone. Some think it is a moral stance to be concerned about other people’s welfare and a desire to help them out. Sometimes it seems like “empathy” is just another way of saying “being a nice and decent person.” Actions, feelings, perspectives, motives, values—all of these are “empathy” according to someone.
None of these definitions is wrong. Like all concepts, empathy isn’t a “thing” we can point to or describe objectively. But, despite the conceptual squishiness, most people view empathy as having something to do with understanding what other people are going through and being concerned about them. And, this, we think, is what many people today feel like they are lacking.
Empathy is clearly on people’s minds more than in times past. Google searches for the word “empathy” equaled its all-time high the first week of June. There’s talk on television and radio about “empathy gaps,” and we hear the media compare politicians on how much empathy they have. President Trump is routinely said to have little empathy, whereas Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand and Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York are described as having high empathy. CNN reported that top Democrats praise Joe Biden as a man “defined by his decency and empathy,” and Time referred to Biden’s overtures to Americans as an “empathy offensive.” Even Michelle Obama devoted several minutes of her address at the 2020 Democratic Convention to the importance of empathy. But rarely does anyone say what they mean by the word.
Whatever people think empathy is, it’s a powerful force and human beings need it. These three things might help to remedy our collective empathy deficit:
Take the time to ask those you encounter how they are feeling, and really listen. Try to put yourself in their shoes. Remember that we all tend to underestimate other people’s emotional distress, and we’re most likely to do so when those people are different from us.
Remind yourself that almost everyone is at the end of their rope these days. Many people barely have enough energy to handle their own problems, so they don’t have their normal ability to think about yours.
Finally, be aware that what is empathy for one person may not be empathy for another person. It’s not a concept that speaks for itself. Asking your friends, family, and coworkers what empathy is for them might open a new door to understanding and helping those around us.


scientificamerican--2020-09-17--The Matador in Your Fish Tank

The Matador in Your Fish Tank

Guppies make unassuming pets , but in the wild they adopt a daring and counterintuitive tactic to avoid becoming dinner .
When they spot a predator , they suddenly darken their eyes from silver to jet black—enticing the attacker to go straight for the guppy 's head .
In a paper published in July in Current Biology , researchers report that this seemingly bizarre behavior may be a diversion that helps guppies dodge would-be hunters .
Robert Heathcote , a behavioral ecologist at the University of Exeter in England , says he came up with this hypothesis while eating a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had noticed in high-speed videos that ambush predator fish called pike cichlids seemed to aim their attacks at the heads of the guppies with black eyes .
“ The guppy would wait right until the last minute and then kind of reverse itself and dodge out of the way , ” says Heathcote , the study 's lead author .
To test how pike cichlids respond to black- versus silver-eyed guppies , Heathcote first tried using colored contact lenses , iPad videos and even tattooing the eye of a dead fish—but found the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ eye surface .
Eventually Heathcote and his colleagues built robotic guppies , pulled by fishing line , to test their hypothesis .
The cichlids targeted the heads of black-eyed fakes but the bodies of silver-eyed ones .
Another experiment , with live guppies protected by a transparent barrier , revealed how the guppies rapidly swung their heads away to flee from oncoming predators ' maws with an innate “ fast-start ” escape reflex .
Pike cichlid attacks are ballistic and do not deviate from their course once launched , so the researchers could @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have escaped without the barrier 's intervention .
Larger guppies , which are typically less agile and easier to catch , benefited the most from this matadorlike strategy .
“ It 's this misdirection , ” says senior author Darren Croft , also at Exeter .
“ By doing that , they can pivot the head away and escape.
” These guppies may not be the only prey animals using such a strategy .
Other fish also change their eyes ' tint , and species including epaulette sharks and rock doves have attention-grabbing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ This [ study ] opens a whole new area of research , and it might explain cases where eyes or eyespots are very conspicuous , ” says Karin Kjernsmo , a behavioral and evolutionary ecologist at the University of Bristol in England , who was not involved in the study .
“ Maybe together with an evasive strategy , [ these results ] could explain why that is so.
” In an eat-or-be-eaten world , there is always more than meets the eye .

Guppies make unassuming pets, but in the wild they adopt a daring and counterintuitive tactic to avoid becoming dinner. When they spot a predator, they suddenly darken their eyes from silver to jet black—enticing the attacker to go straight for the guppy's head.
In a paper published in July in Current Biology, researchers report that this seemingly bizarre behavior may be a diversion that helps guppies dodge would-be hunters.
Robert Heathcote, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Exeter in England, says he came up with this hypothesis while eating a blueberry muffin on a train. He had noticed in high-speed videos that ambush predator fish called pike cichlids seemed to aim their attacks at the heads of the guppies with black eyes. “The guppy would wait right until the last minute and then kind of reverse itself and dodge out of the way,” says Heathcote, the study's lead author.
To test how pike cichlids respond to black- versus silver-eyed guppies, Heathcote first tried using colored contact lenses, iPad videos and even tattooing the eye of a dead fish—but found the needle could not pierce the surprisingly tough eye surface. Eventually Heathcote and his colleagues built robotic guppies, pulled by fishing line, to test their hypothesis. The cichlids targeted the heads of black-eyed fakes but the bodies of silver-eyed ones.
Another experiment, with live guppies protected by a transparent barrier, revealed how the guppies rapidly swung their heads away to flee from oncoming predators' maws with an innate “fast-start” escape reflex. Pike cichlid attacks are ballistic and do not deviate from their course once launched, so the researchers could “simulate” whether a guppy would have escaped without the barrier's intervention.
Larger guppies, which are typically less agile and easier to catch, benefited the most from this matadorlike strategy. “It's this misdirection,” says senior author Darren Croft, also at Exeter. “By doing that, they can pivot the head away and escape.”
These guppies may not be the only prey animals using such a strategy. Other fish also change their eyes' tint, and species including epaulette sharks and rock doves have attention-grabbing color patterns on their backs.
“This [study] opens a whole new area of research, and it might explain cases where eyes or eyespots are very conspicuous,” says Karin Kjernsmo, a behavioral and evolutionary ecologist at the University of Bristol in England, who was not involved in the study. “Maybe together with an evasive strategy, [these results] could explain why that is so.”
In an eat-or-be-eaten world, there is always more than meets the eye.


scientificamerican--2020-09-17--Ice Age Temperatures Help Predict Future Warming

How much colder was it at the peak of the last ice age ?
That ’ s a question scientists have been trying to answer for decades .
And now they have a new best guess : 11 degrees Fahrenheit .
That ’ s a lot , especially considering it ’ s a global average .
Parts of North America were much colder .
“ First of all , large areas of the northeast were completely under ice .
So that would have been pretty chilly ; you wouldn ’ t be living there .
But even here in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t covered by an ice sheet , it would have been something like 20 degrees Fahrenheit lower.
” Jessica Tierney , a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona .
Tierney and her colleagues spent years compiling information about Earth ’ s climate at the height of the last glacial period , about 20,000 years ago .
“ We obviously don ’ t have thermometers in the glacial period , so we have to instead look for these kinds of stand-in indicators.
” One kind of stand-in is plankton that lived in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Scientists use these fossils to infer past ocean temperatures by studying changes in the chemistry of their shells and in the kinds of fats and other compounds they produced .
Tierney and her team then combined these data with a climate model to give a full picture of glacial conditions .
“ It ’ s actually a technique used every day in weather forecasting .
What ’ s new is we ’ re using it for the past , not the future .
We are actually hindcasting , if you will , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the journal Nature .
[ Jessica E. Tierney et al.
, Glacial cooling and climate sensitivity revisited ] The findings suggest that the last ice age was significantly colder than scientists thought .
And that matters today .
“ The reason that we want to know how cold the last ice age is , beyond the fact that it ’ s just a cool thing to know , is that we can actually use it to understand a quantity called climate sensitivity.
” Climate sensitivity is a measure of how much the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gases .
In this long-ago case , we know how much carbon dioxide concentrations increased between the last ice age and preindustrial period from air bubbles trapped in ancient ice .
And now we have Tierney ’ s new results on the temperature difference between glacial and interglacial conditions .
Together , these data suggest that low-end estimates of climate sensitivity—in which greenhouse gases don ’ t cause much warming—are unlikely to be correct .
“ If we had low climate sensitivity , then we would be less worried , you know , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ going to do .
And so we can kind of rule that possibility out—that ’ s not great news.
” [ The above text is a transcript of this podcast . ]

Full Transcript
How much colder was it at the peak of the last ice age? That’s a question scientists have been trying to answer for decades. And now they have a new best guess: 11 degrees Fahrenheit.
That’s a lot, especially considering it’s a global average. Parts of North America were much colder.
“First of all, large areas of the northeast were completely under ice. So that would have been pretty chilly; you wouldn’t be living there. But even here in the west, right, where we weren’t covered by an ice sheet, it would have been something like 20 degrees Fahrenheit lower.”
Jessica Tierney, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Arizona. Tierney and her colleagues spent years compiling information about Earth’s climate at the height of the last glacial period, about 20,000 years ago.
“We obviously don’t have thermometers in the glacial period, so we have to instead look for these kinds of stand-in indicators.”
One kind of stand-in is plankton that lived in the ocean and got preserved in marine sediments. Scientists use these fossils to infer past ocean temperatures by studying changes in the chemistry of their shells and in the kinds of fats and other compounds they produced.
Tierney and her team then combined these data with a climate model to give a full picture of glacial conditions.
“It’s actually a technique used every day in weather forecasting. What’s new is we’re using it for the past, not the future. We are actually hindcasting, if you will, rather than forecasting.”
The study is in the journal Nature. [Jessica E. Tierney et al., Glacial cooling and climate sensitivity revisited]
The findings suggest that the last ice age was significantly colder than scientists thought. And that matters today.
“The reason that we want to know how cold the last ice age is, beyond the fact that it’s just a cool thing to know, is that we can actually use it to understand a quantity called climate sensitivity.”
Climate sensitivity is a measure of how much the planet warms in response to rising greenhouse gases. In this long-ago case, we know how much carbon dioxide concentrations increased between the last ice age and preindustrial period from air bubbles trapped in ancient ice. And now we have Tierney’s new results on the temperature difference between glacial and interglacial conditions. Together, these data suggest that low-end estimates of climate sensitivity—in which greenhouse gases don’t cause much warming—are unlikely to be correct.
“If we had low climate sensitivity, then we would be less worried, you know, about what all the CO 2 emissions are going to do. And so we can kind of rule that possibility out—that’s not great news.”
— Julia Rosen
[The above text is a transcript of this podcast.]


scientificamerican--2020-09-16--COVID-19 and Smoke Inhalation Symptoms are Hard to Tell Apart

The patients walk into Dr. Melissa Marshall ’ s community clinics in Northern California with the telltale symptoms .
They ’ re having trouble breathing .
It may even hurt to inhale .
They ’ ve got a cough , and the sore throat is definitely there .
A straight case of COVID-19 ?
Not so fast .
This is wildfire country .
Up and down the West Coast , hospitals and health facilities are reporting an influx of patients with problems most likely related to smoke inhalation .
As fires rage largely uncontrolled amid dry heat and high winds @ @ @ @ @ @ @ settling on coastal areas like San Francisco and cities and towns hundreds of miles inland as well , turning the sky orange or gray and making even ordinary breathing difficult .
But that , Marshall said , is only part of the challenge .
Facilities already strapped for testing supplies and personal protective equipment must first rule out COVID-19 in these patients , because many of the symptoms they present with are the same as those caused by the virus .
“ Obviously , there ’ s overlap in the symptoms , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a collection of six clinics in Yolo County , near Sacramento , that treats mostly underinsured and uninsured patients .
“ Any time someone comes in with even some of those symptoms , we ask ourselves , ‘ Is it COVID ?
’ At the end of the day , clinically speaking , I still want to rule out the virus.
” The protocol is to treat the symptoms , whatever their cause , while recommending that the patient quarantine until test results for the virus come back , she said .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ numerous hospitals .
Administrators and physicians , finely attuned to COVID-19 ’ s ability to spread quickly and wreak havoc , simply won ’ t take a chance when they recognize symptoms that could emanate from the virus .
“ We ’ ve seen an increase in patients presenting to the emergency department with respiratory distress , ” said Dr. Nanette Mickiewicz , president and CEO of Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz .
“ As this can also be a symptom of COVID-19 , we ’ re treating these patients as we would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we can rule them out through our screening process.
” During the workup , symptoms that are more specific to COVID-19 , like fever , would become apparent .
For the workers at Dominican , the issue moved to the top of the list quickly .
Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties have borne the brunt of the CZU Lightning Complex fires , which as of Sept. 10 had burned more than 86,000 acres , destroying 1,100 structures and threatening more than 7,600 others .
Nearly a month after they began , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but thousands of people remained evacuated .
Dominican , a Dignity Health hospital , is “ open , safe and providing care , ” Mickiewicz said .
Multiple tents erected outside the building serve as an extension of its ER waiting room .
They also are used to perform what has come to be understood as an essential role : separating those with symptoms of COVID-19 from those without .
At the two Solano County hospitals operated by NorthBay Healthcare , the path of some of the wildfires prompted officials to review their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
They ultimately avoided the need to evacuate patients , and new ones arrived with COVID-like symptoms that may actually have been from smoke inhalation .
Huddleston said NorthBay ’ s intake process “ calls for anyone with COVID characteristics to be handled as [ a ] patient under investigation for COVID , which means they ’ re separated , screened and managed by staff in special PPE.
” At the two hospitals , which have handled nearly 200 COVID cases so far , the protocol is well established .
Hospitals in California @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cases , are dealing with multiple issues they might typically face only sporadically .
In Napa County , Adventist Health St. Helena hospital evacuated 51 patients on a single August night as a fire approached , moving them to 10 other facilities according to their needs and bed space .
After a 10-day closure , the hospital was allowed to reopen as evacuation orders were lifted , the fire having been contained some distance away .
The wildfires are also taking a personal toll on health care workers .
CommuniCare ’ s Marshall @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rural Winters , along with 20 acres of olive trees and other plantings that surrounded it , in the Aug. 19 fires that swept through Solano County .
“ They called it a ‘ firenado , ’ ” Marshall said .
An apparent confluence of three fires raged out of control , demolishing thousands of acres .
With her family safely accounted for and temporary housing arranged by a friend , she returned to work .
“ Our clinics interact with a very vulnerable population , ” she said , “ and this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ While she pondered how her family would rebuild , the CEO was faced with another immediate crisis : the clinic ’ s shortage of supplies .
Last month , CommuniCare got down to 19 COVID test kits on hand , and ran so low on swabs “ that we were literally turning to our veterinary friends for reinforcements , ” the doctor said .
The clinic ’ s COVID test results , meanwhile , were taking nearly two weeks to be returned from an overwhelmed outside lab , rendering contact tracing almost useless @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at least temporarily , Marshall said .
But although the West Coast is in the most dangerous time of year for wildfires , generally September to December , another complication for health providers lies on the horizon : flu season .
The Southern Hemisphere , whose influenza trends during our summer months typically predict what ’ s to come for the U.S. , has had very little of the disease this year , presumably because of restricted travel , social distancing and face masks .
But it ’ s too early to be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ entail .
“ You can start to see some cases of the flu in late October , ” said Marshall , “ and the reality is that it ’ s going to carry a number of characteristics that could also be symptomatic of COVID .
And nothing changes : You have to rule it out , just to eliminate the risk.
” This story was originally published by Kaiser Health News on September 16 2020 .
Read the original story here .

The patients walk into Dr. Melissa Marshall’s community clinics in Northern California with the telltale symptoms. They’re having trouble breathing. It may even hurt to inhale. They’ve got a cough, and the sore throat is definitely there.
A straight case of COVID-19? Not so fast. This is wildfire country.
Up and down the West Coast, hospitals and health facilities are reporting an influx of patients with problems most likely related to smoke inhalation. As fires rage largely uncontrolled amid dry heat and high winds, smoke and ash are billowing and settling on coastal areas like San Francisco and cities and towns hundreds of miles inland as well, turning the sky orange or gray and making even ordinary breathing difficult.
But that, Marshall said, is only part of the challenge. Facilities already strapped for testing supplies and personal protective equipment must first rule out COVID-19 in these patients, because many of the symptoms they present with are the same as those caused by the virus.
“Obviously, there’s overlap in the symptoms,” said Marshall, the CEO of CommuniCare, a collection of six clinics in Yolo County, near Sacramento, that treats mostly underinsured and uninsured patients. “Any time someone comes in with even some of those symptoms, we ask ourselves, ‘Is it COVID?’ At the end of the day, clinically speaking, I still want to rule out the virus.”
The protocol is to treat the symptoms, whatever their cause, while recommending that the patient quarantine until test results for the virus come back, she said.
It is a scene playing out in numerous hospitals. Administrators and physicians, finely attuned to COVID-19’s ability to spread quickly and wreak havoc, simply won’t take a chance when they recognize symptoms that could emanate from the virus.
“We’ve seen an increase in patients presenting to the emergency department with respiratory distress,” said Dr. Nanette Mickiewicz, president and CEO of Dominican Hospital in Santa Cruz. “As this can also be a symptom of COVID-19, we’re treating these patients as we would any person under investigation for coronavirus until we can rule them out through our screening process.” During the workup, symptoms that are more specific to COVID-19, like fever, would become apparent.
For the workers at Dominican, the issue moved to the top of the list quickly. Santa Cruz and San Mateo counties have borne the brunt of the CZU Lightning Complex fires, which as of Sept. 10 had burned more than 86,000 acres, destroying 1,100 structures and threatening more than 7,600 others. Nearly a month after they began, the fires were approximately 84% contained, but thousands of people remained evacuated.
Dominican, a Dignity Health hospital, is “open, safe and providing care,” Mickiewicz said. Multiple tents erected outside the building serve as an extension of its ER waiting room. They also are used to perform what has come to be understood as an essential role: separating those with symptoms of COVID-19 from those without.
At the two Solano County hospitals operated by NorthBay Healthcare, the path of some of the wildfires prompted officials to review their evacuation procedures, said spokesperson Steve Huddleston. They ultimately avoided the need to evacuate patients, and new ones arrived with COVID-like symptoms that may actually have been from smoke inhalation.
Huddleston said NorthBay’s intake process “calls for anyone with COVID characteristics to be handled as [a] patient under investigation for COVID, which means they’re separated, screened and managed by staff in special PPE.” At the two hospitals, which have handled nearly 200 COVID cases so far, the protocol is well established.
Hospitals in California, though not under siege in most cases, are dealing with multiple issues they might typically face only sporadically. In Napa County, Adventist Health St. Helena hospital evacuated 51 patients on a single August night as a fire approached, moving them to 10 other facilities according to their needs and bed space. After a 10-day closure, the hospital was allowed to reopen as evacuation orders were lifted, the fire having been contained some distance away.
The wildfires are also taking a personal toll on health care workers. CommuniCare’s Marshall lost her family’s home in rural Winters, along with 20 acres of olive trees and other plantings that surrounded it, in the Aug. 19 fires that swept through Solano County.
“They called it a ‘firenado,’” Marshall said. An apparent confluence of three fires raged out of control, demolishing thousands of acres. With her family safely accounted for and temporary housing arranged by a friend, she returned to work. “Our clinics interact with a very vulnerable population,” she said, “and this is a critical time for them.”
While she pondered how her family would rebuild, the CEO was faced with another immediate crisis: the clinic’s shortage of supplies. Last month, CommuniCare got down to 19 COVID test kits on hand, and ran so low on swabs “that we were literally turning to our veterinary friends for reinforcements,” the doctor said. The clinic’s COVID test results, meanwhile, were taking nearly two weeks to be returned from an overwhelmed outside lab, rendering contact tracing almost useless.
Those situations have been addressed, at least temporarily, Marshall said. But although the West Coast is in the most dangerous time of year for wildfires, generally September to December, another complication for health providers lies on the horizon: flu season.
The Southern Hemisphere, whose influenza trends during our summer months typically predict what’s to come for the U.S., has had very little of the disease this year, presumably because of restricted travel, social distancing and face masks. But it’s too early to be sure what the U.S. flu season will entail.
“You can start to see some cases of the flu in late October,” said Marshall, “and the reality is that it’s going to carry a number of characteristics that could also be symptomatic of COVID. And nothing changes: You have to rule it out, just to eliminate the risk.”
This story was originally published by Kaiser Health News on September 16 2020. Read the original story here.


scientificamerican--2020-09-16--Hurricane Sally Rumbles Onshore with Echoes of Harvey

With much of the nation ’ s attention focused on Western wildfires , a different climate disaster arrived overnight with a roundhouse kick .
Hurricane Sally this morning is lashing parts of Mississippi , Alabama and the Florida Panhandle with torrential rain and life-threatening storm surge , according to the National Hurricane Center .
By lunch , it could dump between 10 and 30 inches of rain along densely developed beaches and bays from Biloxi , Miss.
, to Pensacola , Fla. “ If that materializes , there will be devastation , ” said Josh Alland , an atmospheric scientist @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for Atmospheric Research in Boulder , Colo. , yesterday afternoon .
“ It ’ s not just the rainfall , which will be unprecedented for some parts of the coast , but we also have to remember the surge , which could be very large.
” Sally spent much of previous 36 hours teeter-tottering through the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico .
Experts say the storm may be slow-moving but is hardly a weakling .
In fact , Sally is exhibiting some of the same characteristics of Hurricane Harvey , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 50 inches of rain on Houston and Harris County , Texas , flooding more than 150,000 homes .
Recent research indicates slow-moving , water-laden hurricanes like Harvey and Sally could become more common in the future under climate change ( Climatewire , June 16 ) .
Sally was forecast to make landfall between the Mississippi and Alabama coasts , but was tracking slightly eastward by last night—meaning severe impacts could extend to Pensacola and Fort Walton Beach , Fla. Storm surge estimates ranged from 4 to 6 feet at Dauphin Island off Alabama @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Ala. , and Pensacola Beach , Fla. , reported tidal flooding across roadways yesterday—still hours before landfall—and public beaches were closed “ due to life-threatening rip currents and surf conditions.
” On Monday , Alabama Gov .
Kay Ivey ( R ) issued a supplemental state of emergency closing all beaches and ordering voluntary evacuations for flood-prone areas south of Interstate 10 .
The storm ’ s outer bands were passing over bay-front communities near Mobile , Ala. , at 5 p.m. EDT , and winds were expected to reach 70 to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of 190,000 is especially prone to storm surge because surface winds can push water up Mobile Bay toward the city , said Scott Douglass , an environmental engineer and coastal zone expert in Fairhope , Ala .
While coastal Mississippi , Alabama and northwest Florida are far less populated than Houston , the risk to life and property remains high due to the density of beachfront development and a coastal landscape marked by bays and inlets , many of which are lined with homes and businesses .
“ What I ’ m worried @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the storm will be just close enough to some of these bays that people are not going to be prepared , ” Alland said .
“ Things could get even worse if it stalls out , which is very possible .
It ’ s moving extremely slow at 2 mph .
I can walk faster than that.
” Experts cautioned that a stalled storm could lead to repeated high-water events due to tidal action—making initial damage assessments more difficult and more dangerous .
The National Weather Service in Mobile also warned against “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Sally crawls north into east Mississippi , Alabama and Georgia .
In a tweet late Monday , President Trump said , “ My team and I are closely monitoring extremely dangerous Hurricane Sally , ” adding that the federal government stood ready to assist “ the great people of Alabama , Louisiana and Mississippi.
” Louisiana was largely out of the hurricane ’ s cone of uncertainty by last night , but high waves and riptides were forecast as far west as southeast Louisiana .
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E & @ @ @ @ @ @ @ daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news at www.eenews.net .

With much of the nation’s attention focused on Western wildfires, a different climate disaster arrived overnight with a roundhouse kick.
Hurricane Sally this morning is lashing parts of Mississippi, Alabama and the Florida Panhandle with torrential rain and life-threatening storm surge, according to the National Hurricane Center. By lunch, it could dump between 10 and 30 inches of rain along densely developed beaches and bays from Biloxi, Miss., to Pensacola, Fla.
“If that materializes, there will be devastation,” said Josh Alland, an atmospheric scientist and hurricane expert at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., yesterday afternoon. “It’s not just the rainfall, which will be unprecedented for some parts of the coast, but we also have to remember the surge, which could be very large.”
Sally spent much of previous 36 hours teeter-tottering through the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Experts say the storm may be slow-moving but is hardly a weakling. In fact, Sally is exhibiting some of the same characteristics of Hurricane Harvey, the 2017 monster storm that dumped more than 50 inches of rain on Houston and Harris County, Texas, flooding more than 150,000 homes.
Recent research indicates slow-moving, water-laden hurricanes like Harvey and Sally could become more common in the future under climate change (Climatewire, June 16).
Sally was forecast to make landfall between the Mississippi and Alabama coasts, but was tracking slightly eastward by last night—meaning severe impacts could extend to Pensacola and Fort Walton Beach, Fla. Storm surge estimates ranged from 4 to 6 feet at Dauphin Island off Alabama’s Mobile Bay.
Gulf Shores, Ala., and Pensacola Beach, Fla., reported tidal flooding across roadways yesterday—still hours before landfall—and public beaches were closed “due to life-threatening rip currents and surf conditions.”
On Monday, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) issued a supplemental state of emergency closing all beaches and ordering voluntary evacuations for flood-prone areas south of Interstate 10.
The storm’s outer bands were passing over bay-front communities near Mobile, Ala., at 5 p.m. EDT, and winds were expected to reach 70 to 80 mph overnight. The port city of 190,000 is especially prone to storm surge because surface winds can push water up Mobile Bay toward the city, said Scott Douglass, an environmental engineer and coastal zone expert in Fairhope, Ala.
While coastal Mississippi, Alabama and northwest Florida are far less populated than Houston, the risk to life and property remains high due to the density of beachfront development and a coastal landscape marked by bays and inlets, many of which are lined with homes and businesses.
“What I’m worried about right now is the track of the storm will be just close enough to some of these bays that people are not going to be prepared,” Alland said. “Things could get even worse if it stalls out, which is very possible. It’s moving extremely slow at 2 mph. I can walk faster than that.”
Experts cautioned that a stalled storm could lead to repeated high-water events due to tidal action—making initial damage assessments more difficult and more dangerous. The National Weather Service in Mobile also warned against “historic, life-threatening riverine flooding” as Sally crawls north into east Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.
In a tweet late Monday, President Trump said, “My team and I are closely monitoring extremely dangerous Hurricane Sally,” adding that the federal government stood ready to assist “the great people of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi.”
Louisiana was largely out of the hurricane’s cone of uncertainty by last night, but high waves and riptides were forecast as far west as southeast Louisiana.
Reprinted from Climatewire with permission from E&E News. E&E provides daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news at www.eenews.net.


scientificamerican--2020-09-16--What Ancient Mass Extinctions Tell Us about the Future

Pangaea , 252 million years ago—The world is over .
Siberia has been erupting for 300,000 years , is still erupting and wo n't stop .
Not a volcano , mind you , but Siberia—two million square miles of it .
A suppurating , billowing , continent-scaled wasteland of glowing rock and steam .
The seas , once resplendent with horn corals and sponge reefs , are now sour and laden with mercury .
Hot as soup , they bubble deathly swamp gas that feeds vile , hurricane-churned slicks of slime .
The seabed is vacant , as scuttling trilobites @ @ @ @ @ @ @ billion years .
Beside this rancid ocean , on the shores of a blasted supercontinent , the forests are gone .
Instead hot rivers now spill over the dead land in wide braids .
Fungus blooms where vanished groves of ferns once held contests full of fangs and armor—gorgonopsids battling pareiasaurs .
Their final bones are now scoured by hot winds and bleached by a searing sunlight , unfiltered by ozone .
Night falls and brings odd constellations that light the dead waves , lapping at dead shores , tossing old bits of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It smells awful .
The planet is ruin and slime and heat .
The ocean suffocates .
Bacterial mounds spread .
A hundred thousand suns rise and fall on a hopeless world .
A hundred thousand springtimes arrive with no respite .
It 's still all but barren .
A million years of misery pass .
Ten million .
At long last , the planet is finally reborn—this time with dinosaurs and ichthyosaurs and pterosaurs and mammals and turtles and sturgeon—almost as if a new story entirely has begun , exuberant , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The old story , too dark to retell , has long been filed away somewhere deep in the great cabinets of Earth , along with an epitaph in the rocks , written in geochemistry : carbon dioxide destroyed this world .
Mass extinctions are not merely bad days in Earth history .
They are not even very bad days .
They are the very , very worst days in the entire half-billion-year history of complex life .
They are supremely horrifying , astronomically rare , global Ragnaroks that end the lineages of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ They are terrible , surreal things : 20,000 years of suffocating greenhouse heat punctuated by volcanic winter blasts or an afternoon of celestial terror and tsunamis .
And until around 1980 , they were mostly thought to be disreputable speculation .
Over the past two centuries the field of geology , like the fossil record itself , has been characterized by long periods of stasis punctuated by exhilarating moments of upheaval and innovation .
It would be arbitrary to identify one founding figure for the modern study of geology , but one could @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , who did much to reveal the “ abyss of time ” underneath us .
At a salt-sprayed Siccar Point on the eastern coast of Scotland in 1788 , he spied an outcrop made of two kinds of rock , one stacked on top of the other , meeting abruptly in the middle .
But the rock on the bottom—laminations of deep-sea muck—had been formed at the bottom of the ocean , tilted sideways , thrust up into the air and planed off by wind and erosion .
And the rock on the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on dry land .
The missing time implied between the two rocks , now conjoined but separated by an unthinkable gap , shattered Hutton .
The body of his writing is notoriously obtuse and unimpressive ; he apparently saved all his eloquence for one haunting observation that , in the confusi on of Earth beneath our feet , “ we find no vestige of a beginning , no prospect of an end.
” Although the history of humanity has played out in the shallows so far , time , it turns out , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ strictures of biblical time and Noah 's flood , and their new field matured over the decades , spurred by a significant material reward for finding coal and minerals in a strange new industrial age .
The story of life on Earth , however fragmentary and tantalizing , slowly revealed itself .
At this magazine 's founding , the field was in its adolescence .
It was still dominated by men of means—the kind of ascotted dilettantes rendered humorlessly in oil and lithograph portraits .
The contributions of women such as Mary Anning @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the English shoreline unearthing the local “ snakestones ” and “ stone crocodiles ” that littered the wave-battered Jurassic Coast , were acknowledged only sheepishly .
Although Scientific American headlines from the time still hint at a somewhat rudimentary state of affairs ( “ Experts Doubt the Sun Is Actually Burning Coal ” ) , by midcentury geology had nonetheless been established as an empirical , systematized field of inquiry with roots in antiquity—one of the many such intellectual eddies that swirled out of Enlightenment-era “ natural philosophy.
” That is , it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ deceptively simple and powerful .
Layers of ocean rock now propped up at unusual angles on land must have once laid flat on a seafloor in some distant age .
Dikes of old magma that pierced this stony tiramisu must have worked their shoots into the layered rock sometime after .
The fossils entombed in these rock layers could be correlated to those fossils and those rocks with the same layers , way over there .
In 1860 English geologist John Phillips drew on the fossil-collecting labor of decades prior , and a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ elegant monographs , to plot a surprisingly modern curve of the richness of life over Earth history , the first ever such diagram .
The graph ominously included two profound dips in life : one crash that separated the trilobite-spangled Paleozoic era from the dinosaur-haunted Mesozoic era and another plunge that separated the Mesozoic from our own Cenozoic time ( all terms of Phillips 's invention ) .
The dramatic breaks in fossil life hinted at some kind of ancient calamity that divided the great ages and supported the blasphemous idea that species—that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ extinct , which had been proposed half a century earlier by the renowned French naturalist Georges Cuvier .
On considering the odd elephant bones that littered the New World , of mammoths and mastodons ( “ animal de l'Ohio ” ) , Cuvier had proposed that life on Earth , like French rule , could be swept away in “ revolutions.
” Phillips 's graph provided something close to quantitative proof , and Phillips himself thought that each recovery consisted of separate acts of divine creation .
Yet it would take more than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ idea of mass extinctions seriously again .
This is because , by the end of the 19th century , the field was still dominated , and would continue to be dominated for decades , by the enduring framework of “ uniformitarianism.
” This concept , popularized by Charles Lyell , is summarized in a catchphrase still taught to geology students : “ The present is the key to the past.
” That is , the unhurried processes at work on the face of Earth today—the relentless if unimpressive work of rain on rock @ @ @ @ @ @ @ highlands or the piling of sand into desert dunes—have always been plying the planet in the same tedious fashion and could account for everything we find in the rock record .
Painting on this vast new canvas of time , Charles Darwin would propose that similarly small but steady biological changes over generations , filtered by the relentless tournament of life and death , and given Hutton 's eons to ramify , could produce the “ endless forms ” of life “ most beautiful ” on Earth today .
Pointedly absent from this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gauche cataclysms of Cuvier and Phillips .
Geology was upended in the middle of the 20th century by the plate tectonic revolution—the validation of the once fringe idea that continents drifted across the world like rudderless ships .
Even so , the idea of sudden apocalyptic global mass extinctions remained suspect at best .
Catastrophism was spooky , reminiscent of a benighted prescientific world where capricious gods subjected the world to cleansing acts of global destruction .
Worse , speculation about why the dinosaurs had disappeared had become something of a cottage industry @ @ @ @ @ @ @ nervous about associating with a crowd who proposed , among dozens of other incoherent ideas for their demise , “ dwindling brain and consequent stupidity , ” development of heads that became “ too heavy to lift , ” “ psychotic suicidal factors , ” “ competition with caterpillars , ” “ terminal hay fever ” and “ methane poisoning from dinosaur flatulence.
” And yet the orthodoxy began to crack .
“ Neokatastrophismus ?
” the iconoclastic German scientist Otto Schindewolf asked of his fellow paleontologists in 1963 , attempting to revive @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Because his question was posed in German , few English-speaking scientists felt the need to reply .
But Schindewolf could no longer overlook the ominous interruption of life he saw—among other places—exposed in the ancient rocks of the Salt Range in Pakistan .
There appeared to be a dreadful global collapse of the ocean ecosystem at the end of the Permian period a quarter of a billion years ago ( in fact , the greatest mass extinction in Earth history ) , just as Phillips had plotted more than a century prior @ @ @ @ @ @ @ vision of the apocalypse , proposing that it might have irradiated Earth and seeded the biosphere with ruinous mutations .
In that same year American Norman Newell , plotting the fates of 2,500 animal families over Earth history , noted six intervals when extinction seemed to cut a broad swath through all of life , instead proposing dramatic sea-level changes as his preferred Grim Reaper .
And at the end of the decade Digby McLaren , director of the Canadian Geological Survey 's Institute of Sedimentary and Petroleum Geology , insisted in his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that his fellow paleontologists were trying to “ define out of existence ” the obvious breaks in the fossil record , such as a devastating wave of death 375 million years ago that wiped out the largest global reef system in the history of life .
“ I can not accept a uniformitarian explanation , ” he said of the catastrophe , glaringly apparent in ancient rocks from Iran to Alberta .
McLaren had an idea for what could cause such a discontinuity .
“ I shall , therefore , land a large @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Pacific , ” he announced , capable of generating “ a wave twenty thousand feet high .
This will do.
” McLaren 's address , it is reported , was “ met with embarrassed silence , ” and many paleontologists in the audience , still under Lyell 's spell , assumed he must have been joking .
Then , in 1980 , an asteroid landed in the field .
Walter Alvarez , then a young University of California , Berkeley , professor , was traipsing the Apennines above the medieval Italian town of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ancient limestone seafloor , pushed up by the grinding advance of Africa into Europe , there was a sharp break—a lifeless clay layer—between the placid sea life of dinosaur times and the impoverished life of the early age of mammals .
Perhaps this transformative interval took place over millions of years , validating the uniformitarian view .
Or perhaps Cuvier and Phillips had it right all along , and the turnover was devastatingly short .
Curious , Alvarez recruited his father , Luis , a Nobel-winning physicist , to help tackle the question @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for the elder Alvarez , a pioneer of military radar technology and Manhattan Project alum who helped to develop the atomic bomb and even watched “ Little Boy ” explode over Hiroshima from an attending B-29 .
His wartime work became unexpectedly relevant to the catastrophe they were investigating , which throttled the planet some 66 million years earlier .
The Alvarezes knew that unusual elements like iridium were delivered to Earth from above by an eternal drizzle of space dust , at a steady rate .
Measure the iridium in the ominous @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if there 's just a little bit , the dramatic turnover in life could n't have taken very long .
Conversely , if there 's a lot of iridium , it took a very long time indeed .
But what if , as they discovered , there was 100 times more iridium than they ever expected ?
After bombarding the clay samples with neutrons from a nuclear reactor and analyzing them , the Alvarezes were astonished .
The only vehicle large enough for this much exotic material was not a light drizzle of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rock .
( Often omitted in this account , though not by the Alvarezes themselves , is the fact that Dutch geologist Jan Smit and Belgian geologist Jan Hertogen made the very same discovery among ancient ocean rocks in Spain at the very same time and even published their results in the journal Nature two weeks earlier than the Alvarezes ' landmark Science paper . )
The resulting chaos from such an impact would be like all-out nuclear warfare , only worse .
There would be the unimaginable heat from the initial explosion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ times more powerful than the detonation of all the nuclear weapons on Earth at the height of the cold war , all in one place , all at once .
“ Certainly enough , ” as one impact modeler put it to me , “ to lift a mountain back into space at escape velocity.
” It has been proposed that as this spacebound ejecta encircled the globe , it might have turned the atmosphere into a pizza oven for 20 minutes ( with dinosaurs playing the role of pepperoni ) .
Then @ @ @ @ @ @ @ darkness and cold from the nuclear winter to follow , starving any lingering creature lucky enough to have avoided being evaporated outright by the asteroid , swept up in its tsunamis , or turned to charcoal by the ballistic reentry of its debris into the atmosphere .
In 1991 whatever lingering skepticism about the impact that remained among uniformitarian hardliners was wiped away by the discovery of a 110-mile crater buried under tens of millions of years of limestone on Mexico 's Yucatán peninsula .
In fact , the crater had already been @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Mexican national oil company Pemex , but they had announced their findings at a geophysics conference that had escaped notice of paleontologists for more than a decade .
And the structure had been found some 1,000 years earlier by the Maya , who built settlements around limestone sinkholes that pock the Yucatán and that provided freshwater .
The pattern of these sinkholes reflects the deeply disturbed rock far below and maps almost exactly onto the crater 's edge , in a 110-mile ring .
Popular culture took note .
The 1990s saw @ @ @ @ @ @ @ movies strewn with bad CGI , which—along with the astounding , apocalypse-scaled collision of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter in 1994—were sufficient to convince the public of the dangers of space rocks .
This is typically where the story ends .
As far as most people are concerned , mass extinctions are what happen when big things fall out of the sky .
But something funny happened over the next 30 years as geologists fanned out across the globe to look for convincing evidence of impacts—such as layers of iridium , shocked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ boundaries that mark the four other major mass extinctions in Earth history .
They did n't find any .
And all but one of the so-called Big Five mass extinctions were even more severe than the catastrophe that wiped out the nonbird dinosaurs .
In fact , there even existed major impact structures , such as the Triassic-age 62-mile-wide Manicouagan Crater in Quebec ( now a circular system of lakes amid a boreal paradise of blackflies ) or the massive crater that created the Chesapeake Bay 36 million years ago , that did @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all .
Given the remarkable correlation of the Yucatán impact with the disappearance of the large dinosaurs ( and much of the rest of life on Earth at the end of the Cretaceous period ) , this came as a surprise .
Stranger still , the stunning finale of the age of dinosaurs was also accompanied not only by an envoy from outer space but by one of the largest volcanic events in the history of animal life : a swath of eruptions that drowned much of India miles deep in lava .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ did most of the damage , this was the same class of world-changing eruptions responsible not only for dozens of minor mass extinctions and climate misadventures throughout Earth history but several of the other major mass extinctions as well , including the worst ever at the end of the Permian 252 million years ago .
In the past few decades a subtler story about mass extinctions has emerged .
Geologists are now armed with powerful techniques Hutton could n't have dreamed of .
Scattering to remote rock outcrops around the world or to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the ocean by drill ships , they wring secrets out of old seashells with mass spectrometers , and from age-battered hunks of granite with radioisotope geochronology , and from fossil and geochemical databases with neural networks underwritten by blistering processing power .
And in this diffuse project to understand Earth history , geologists have in recent years revealed a roster of existential threats to life far more intimate than simply death from above .
The most frequent mass killer of life on Earth , it turns out , is Earth itself .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ carbon dioxide .
One hundred and thirty-five million years before a mindless hunk of space garbage intercepted Earth 's orbit and ruined a perfectly good dinosaur world , the planet was gripped by a mass extinction that was even worse .
A world of bizarre crocodilians , giant amphibians , stony corals , a ubiquity of strange but venerable eel-like creatures , and 80 percent of the rest of complex life on Earth was destroyed .
As the supercontinent Pangaea pulled apart at the seams , stretching like taffy , an open sore @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the surface , covering three million square miles in lava in pulses over 600,000 years .
While the eruptions would have caused all sorts of chaos , perhaps most important they injected thousands of gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere , and the oceans overdosed on this volcanic CO2 .
The seawater acidified as a simple matter of chemistry , and the temperature of the planet soared as a simple matter of physics .
This is what CO2 does .
Today the New Jersey Palisades across the Hudson River from New York @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from these titanic eruptions of the Triassic end times , old magma that is matched by the same volcanic rock , of the same age , as far afield as Morocco , Brazil , Nova Scotia and Spain .
Hundreds of millions of years earlier the two oldest major mass extinctions destroyed planets we would n't recognize , their continents misshapen and scattered about unfamiliar oceans .
The oceans of these alien planets were patrolled by gigantic cephalopods and , later , even more gigantic fish , guillotine-mawed and fortified by helmets of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stuff of life—through rocks , air , water and life in a balance that keeps the climate habitable and ocean chemistry hospitable .
But these archaic worlds saw this carbon cycle suddenly derailed—unraveled by CO -sucking episodes of tropical mountain building , accelerated rock weathering and the novel global geoengineering project of land plants .
These kill mechanisms are somewhat more convoluted , and admittedly less dramatic , than an asteroid , but they did the trick .
These bygone planets spun out of control , alternately freezing and broiling as Earth struggled @ @ @ @ @ @ @ global carbon cycle gone haywire .
But it was 252 million years ago , on the forsaken planet that opened this tour of ancient apocalypses—that sun-bleached world , with oceans almost absent of animals—when the story of life on Earth nearly came to its premature conclusion .
This was Pangaea , a world before dinosaurs or mammals or flowers .
But it was still a rich world , one with conifers and lithe , vaguely leonine predators and lumbering , warty , reptile prey .
And then , it was over .
It @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rock , brief volcanic winters issuing from the eruptions and a roster of billowing volcanic gases , many of which would be banned on a battlefield—such as chlorine gas and mercury .
As the magma incinerated underground seams of salt and gypsum , eruptions of halocarbons would have obliterated the ozone layer—and indeed , plant fossils bear the mutations wrought by this ancient atmospheric destruction .
But it was n't until the seams of magma feeding these eruptions hit huge deposits of natural gas , coal and carbon-rich rocks underground that the greatest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Methane and carbon dioxide exploded out of the ground by the tens of thousands of gigatons .
Temperatures spiked by almost 22 degrees Fahrenheit .
And in the oceans , where spreading anoxia and acidification wiped out 96 percent of life , it was as hot as a jacuzzi .
And then , in the fossil record , silence .
At the start of the industrial revolution , long slumbering forests of carbon were resurrected from the ancient Earth and pressed into service in the furnaces of modernity .
We know that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ forever without immiserating our world .
At 416 parts per million , carbon dioxide is already higher than it has been in millions of years and is perhaps rising even faster than in these greatest calamities of all time .
Meanwhile centuries—millennia even—of hunting , land clearing and pollution have impoverished the natural world .
By one estimate , at the rate at which we are currently driving species extinct , we could match the biological devastation of those towering mass extinctions of the ancient past within 300 to 12,000 years .
This @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , but from a geologic perspective , it is downright subliminal .
More worryingly , there may yet exist unseen ecological cliff edges along the way , beyond which the biosphere does not simply suffer the onslaught of attrition but collapses suddenly in cascading failures .
In other words , there may be tipping points—points of no return .
We know what we have to do to avoid being inducted into the wretched Pantheon of the worst things that have ever happened in Earth history .
We must set aside swaths of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , natural reserves and corridors for migration—to allow the living world to recover from the uppercut we have already delivered it .
Then , we must simply stop digging up old life from deep in Earth 's crust and lighting it on fire at the surface .
As humanity leans on the very same levers pulled in the very worst things that have ever happened in history , we must consult the ages and listen to the counsel of broken worlds past .

Listen to an audio version of the article.
Pangaea, 252 million years ago—the world is over. Siberia has been erupting for 300,000 years, is still erupting and won’t stop. Not a volcano, mind you, but Siberia—two million square miles of it. A suppurating, billowing, continent-scaled wasteland of glowing rock and steam. The seas, once resplendent with horn corals and sponge reefs, are now sour and laden with mercury. Hot as soup, they bubble deathly swamp gas that feeds vile, hurricane-churned slicks of slime. The seabed is vacant, as scuttling trilobites die out after a quarter of a billion years. Beside this rancid ocean, on the shores of a blasted supercontinent, the forests are gone. Instead hot rivers now spill over the dead land in wide braids. Fungus blooms where vanished groves of ferns once held contests full of fangs and armor—gorgonopsids battling pareiasaurs. Their final bones are now scoured by hot winds and bleached by a searing sunlight, unfiltered by ozone. Night falls and brings odd constellations that light the dead waves, lapping at dead shores, tossing old bits of a dead reef from a dead sea. It smells awful. The planet is ruin and slime and heat. The ocean suffocates. Bacterial mounds spread. A hundred thousand suns rise and fall on a hopeless world. A hundred thousand springtimes arrive with no respite. It’s still all but barren. A million years of misery pass. Ten million.
At long last, the planet is finally reborn—this time with dinosaurs and ichthyosaurs and pterosaurs and mammals and turtles and sturgeon—almost as if a new story entirely has begun, exuberant, confident, vital: the Mesozoic era. The old story, too dark to retell, has long been filed away somewhere deep in the great cabinets of Earth, along with an epitaph in the rocks, written in geochemistry: carbon dioxide destroyed this world.
Mass extinctions are not merely bad days in Earth history. They are not even very bad days. They are the very, very worst days in the entire half-billion-year history of complex life. They are supremely horrifying, astronomically rare, global Ragnaroks that end the lineages of most living creatures on the planet. They are terrible, surreal things: 20,000 years of suffocating greenhouse heat punctuated by volcanic winter blasts or an afternoon of celestial terror and tsunamis. And until around 1980, they were mostly thought to be disreputable speculation.
Over the past two centuries the field of geology, like the fossil record itself, has been characterized by long periods of stasis punctuated by exhilarating moments of upheaval and innovation. It would be arbitrary to identify one founding figure for the modern study of geology, but one could do worse than Scottish geologist James Hutton, who did much to reveal the “abyss of time” underneath us. At a salt-sprayed Siccar Point on the eastern coast of Scotland in 1788, he spied an outcrop made of two kinds of rock, one stacked on top of the other, meeting abruptly in the middle. But the rock on the bottom—laminations of deep-sea muck—had been formed at the bottom of the ocean, tilted sideways, thrust up into the air and planed off by wind and erosion. And the rock on the top had been formed by tropical rivers on dry land. The missing time implied between the two rocks, now conjoined but separated by an unthinkable gap, shattered Hutton. The body of his writing is notoriously obtuse and unimpressive; he apparently saved all his eloquence for one haunting observation that, in the confusion of Earth beneath our feet, “we find no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.” Although the history of humanity has played out in the shallows so far, time, it turns out, is deep.
Geologists cast off the strictures of biblical time and Noah’s flood, and their new field matured over the decades, spurred by a significant material reward for finding coal and minerals in a strange new industrial age. The story of life on Earth, however fragmentary and tantalizing, slowly revealed itself.
Trilobites swam the seas for a quarter of a billion years before being annihilated in history's worst mass extinction. Credit: Ed Reschke Getty Images
At this magazine’s founding in the mid-1800s, the field was in its adolescence. It was still dominated by men of means—the kind of ascotted dilettantes rendered humorlessly in oil and lithograph portraits. The contributions of women such as Mary Anning, the unmatched fossil hunter who scoured the English shoreline unearthing the local “snakestones” and “stone crocodiles” that littered the wave-battered Jurassic Coast, were acknowledged only sheepishly. Although Scientific American headlines from the time still hint at a somewhat rudimentary state of affairs (“Experts Doubt the Sun Is Actually Burning Coal”), by midcentury geology had nonetheless been established as an empirical, systematized field of inquiry with roots in antiquity—one of the many such intellectual eddies that swirled out of Enlightenment-era “natural philosophy.” That is, it now had rules. The rules were deceptively simple and powerful. Layers of ocean rock now propped up at unusual angles on land must have once laid flat on a seafloor in some distant age. Dikes of old magma that pierced this stony tiramisu must have worked their shoots into the layered rock sometime after. The fossils entombed in these rock layers could be correlated to those fossils and those rocks with the same layers, way over there.
In 1860 English geologist John Phillips drew on the fossil-collecting labor of decades prior, and a growing body of paleontology literature scattered across elegant monographs, to plot a surprisingly modern curve of the richness of life over Earth history, the first ever such diagram. The graph ominously included two profound dips in life: one crash that separated the trilobite-spangled Paleozoic era from the dinosaur-haunted Mesozoic era and another plunge that separated the Mesozoic from our own Cenozoic time (all terms of Phillips’s invention). The dramatic breaks in fossil life hinted at some kind of ancient calamity that divided the great ages and supported the blasphemous idea that species—that is, God’s very Creation—might go extinct, which had been proposed half a century earlier by the renowned French naturalist Georges Cuvier. On considering the odd elephant bones that littered the New World, of mammoths and mastodons (“animal de l’Ohio”), Cuvier had proposed that life on Earth, like French rule, could be swept away in “revolutions.” Phillips’s graph provided something close to quantitative proof, and Phillips himself thought that each recovery consisted of separate acts of divine creation. Yet it would take more than a century for anyone to take the idea of mass extinctions seriously again.
1867 rendering of a woolly mammoth, whose bones led Georges Cuvier to propose that life could be extinguished in “revolutions.” Credit: Alamy
This is because, by the end of the 19th century, the field was still dominated, and would continue to be dominated for decades, by the enduring framework of “uniformitarianism.” This concept, popularized by Charles Lyell, is summarized in a catchphrase still taught to geology students: “The present is the key to the past.” That is, the unhurried processes at work on the face of Earth today—the relentless if unimpressive work of rain on rock, the inexorable incision of rivers into highlands or the piling of sand into desert dunes—have always been plying the planet in the same tedious fashion and could account for everything we find in the rock record. Painting on this vast new canvas of time, Charles Darwin would propose that similarly small but steady biological changes over generations, filtered by the relentless tournament of life and death, and given Hutton’s eons to ramify, could produce the “endless forms” of life “most beautiful” on Earth today. Pointedly absent from this measured account of planetary history were the gauche cataclysms of Cuvier and Phillips.
Geology was upended in the middle of the 20th century by the plate tectonic revolution—the validation of the once fringe idea that continents drifted across the world like rudderless ships. Even so, the idea of sudden apocalyptic global mass extinctions remained suspect at best. Catastrophism was spooky, reminiscent of a benighted prescientific world where capricious gods subjected the world to cleansing acts of global destruction. Worse, speculation about why the dinosaurs had disappeared had become something of a cottage industry among cranks, and serious scientists were nervous about associating with a crowd who proposed, among dozens of other incoherent ideas for their demise, “dwindling brain and consequent stupidity,” development of heads that became “too heavy to lift,” “psychotic suicidal factors,” “competition with caterpillars,” “terminal hay fever” and “methane poisoning from dinosaur flatulence.” And yet the orthodoxy began to crack.
“Neokatastrophismus?” the iconoclastic German scientist Otto Schindewolf asked of his fellow paleontologists in 1963, attempting to revive Cuvier’s catastrophism for the 20th century. Because his question was posed in German, few English-speaking scientists felt the need to reply. But Schindewolf could no longer overlook the ominous interruption of life he saw—among other places—exposed in the ancient rocks of the Salt Range in Pakistan. There appeared to be a dreadful global collapse of the ocean ecosystem at the end of the Permian period a quarter of a billion years ago (in fact, the greatest mass extinction in Earth history), just as Phillips had plotted more than a century prior. Schindewolf conscripted a supernova for his vision of the apocalypse, proposing that it might have irradiated Earth and seeded the biosphere with ruinous mutations.
In that same year American Norman Newell, plotting the fates of 2,500 animal families over Earth history, noted six intervals when extinction seemed to cut a broad swath through all of life, instead proposing dramatic sea-level changes as his preferred Grim Reaper. And at the end of the decade Digby McLaren, director of the Canadian Geological Survey’s Institute of Sedimentary and Petroleum Geology, insisted in his 1969 presidential address to the Paleontological Society that his fellow paleontologists were trying to “define out of existence” the obvious breaks in the fossil record, such as a devastating wave of death 375 million years ago that wiped out the largest global reef system in the history of life. “I cannot accept a uniformitarian explanation,” he said of the catastrophe, glaringly apparent in ancient rocks from Iran to Alberta. McLaren had an idea for what could cause such a discontinuity.
“I shall, therefore, land a large or very large meteorite in the Paleozoic Pacific,” he announced, capable of generating “a wave twenty thousand feet high. This will do.” McLaren’s address, it is reported, was “met with embarrassed silence,” and many paleontologists in the audience, still under Lyell’s spell, assumed he must have been joking.
Exposed seam in Colorado of the K-T boundary, which marks the mass extinction that ended the reign of the dinosaurs. Credit: Julie Mowbray Alamy
Then, in 1980, an asteroid landed in the field. Walter Alvarez, then a young University of California, Berkeley, professor, was traipsing the Apennines above the medieval Italian town of Gubbio. In this mountainous pile of ancient limestone seafloor, pushed up by the grinding advance of Africa into Europe, there was a sharp break—a lifeless clay layer—between the placid sea life of dinosaur times and the impoverished life of the early age of mammals. Perhaps this transformative interval took place over millions of years, validating the uniformitarian view. Or perhaps Cuvier and Phillips had it right all along, and the turnover was devastatingly short. Curious, Alvarez recruited his father, Luis, a Nobel-winning physicist, to help tackle the question. It was quite the second act for the elder Alvarez, a pioneer of military radar technology and Manhattan Project alum who helped to develop the atomic bomb and even watched “Little Boy” explode over Hiroshima from an attending B-29. His wartime work became unexpectedly relevant to the catastrophe they were investigating, which throttled the planet some 66 million years earlier.
The Alvarezes knew that unusual elements like iridium were delivered to Earth from above by an eternal drizzle of space dust, at a steady rate. Measure the iridium in the ominous clay layer, they reasoned, and if there’s just a little bit, the dramatic turnover in life couldn’t have taken very long. Conversely, if there’s a lot of iridium, it took a very long time indeed. But what if, as they discovered, there was 100 times more iridium than they ever expected? After bombarding the clay samples with neutrons from a nuclear reactor and analyzing them, the Alvarezes were astonished. The only vehicle large enough for this much exotic material was not a light drizzle of space dust but one truly gigantic space rock. (Often omitted in this account, though not by the Alvarezes themselves, is the fact that Dutch geologist Jan Smit and Belgian geologist Jan Hertogen made the very same discovery among ancient ocean rocks in Spain at the very same time and even published their results in the journal Nature two weeks earlier than the Alvarezes’ landmark Science paper.)
The resulting chaos from such an impact would be like all-out nuclear warfare, only worse. There would be the unimaginable heat from the initial explosion, which would have been thousands of times more powerful than the detonation of all the nuclear weapons on Earth at the height of the cold war, all in one place, all at once. “Certainly enough,” as one impact modeler put it to me, “to lift a mountain back into space at escape velocity.” It has been proposed that as this spacebound ejecta encircled the globe, it might have turned the atmosphere into a pizza oven for 20 minutes (with dinosaurs playing the role of pepperoni). Then there might have been the decades of darkness and cold from the nuclear winter to follow, starving any lingering creature lucky enough to have avoided being evaporated outright by the asteroid, swept up in its tsunamis, or turned to charcoal by the ballistic reentry of its debris into the atmosphere.
In 1991 whatever lingering skepticism about the impact that remained among uniformitarian hardliners was wiped away by the discovery of a 110-mile crater buried under tens of millions of years of limestone on Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula. In fact, the crater had already been discovered in 1978 by geophysicists working for the Mexican national oil company Pemex, but they had announced their findings at a geophysics conference that had escaped notice of paleontologists for more than a decade. And the structure had been found some 1,000 years earlier by the Maya, who built settlements around limestone sinkholes that pock the Yucatán and that provided freshwater. The pattern of these sinkholes reflects the deeply disturbed rock far below and maps almost exactly onto the crater’s edge, in a 110-mile ring.
Popular culture took note. The 1990s saw a rash of impact-inspired cable specials and movies strewn with bad CGI, which—along with the astounding, apocalypse-scaled collision of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter in 1994—were sufficient to convince the public of the dangers of space rocks. This is typically where the story ends. As far as most people are concerned, mass extinctions are what happen when big things fall out of the sky.
But something funny happened over the next 30 years as geologists fanned out across the globe to look for convincing evidence of impacts—such as layers of iridium, shocked quartz or giant craters—at the ominous rock boundaries that mark the four other major mass extinctions in Earth history. They didn’t find any. And all but one of the so-called Big Five mass extinctions were even more severe than the catastrophe that wiped out the nonbird dinosaurs.
In fact, there even existed major impact structures, such as the Triassic-age 62-mile-wide Manicouagan Crater in Quebec (now a circular system of lakes amid a boreal paradise of blackflies) or the massive crater that created the Chesapeake Bay 36 million years ago, that did not seem to bother life much at all. Given the remarkable correlation of the Yucatán impact with the disappearance of the large dinosaurs (and much of the rest of life on Earth at the end of the Cretaceous period), this came as a surprise. Stranger still, the stunning finale of the age of dinosaurs was also accompanied not only by an envoy from outer space but by one of the largest volcanic events in the history of animal life: a swath of eruptions that drowned much of India miles deep in lava. While the consensus is that the asteroid did most of the damage, this was the same class of world-changing eruptions responsible not only for dozens of minor mass extinctions and climate misadventures throughout Earth history but several of the other major mass extinctions as well, including the worst ever at the end of the Permian 252 million years ago.
In the past few decades a subtler story about mass extinctions has emerged. Geologists are now armed with powerful techniques Hutton couldn’t have dreamed of. Scattering to remote rock outcrops around the world or to archives of muck hoisted from the bottom of the ocean by drill ships, they wring secrets out of old seashells with mass spectrometers, and from age-battered hunks of granite with radioisotope geochronology, and from fossil and geochemical databases with neural networks underwritten by blistering processing power. And in this diffuse project to understand Earth history, geologists have in recent years revealed a roster of existential threats to life far more intimate than simply death from above. The most frequent mass killer of life on Earth, it turns out, is Earth itself. And the most reliable murder weapon is carbon dioxide.
One hundred and thirty-five million years before a mindless hunk of space garbage intercepted Earth’s orbit and ruined a perfectly good dinosaur world, the planet was gripped by a mass extinction that was even worse. A world of bizarre crocodilians, giant amphibians, stony corals, a ubiquity of strange but venerable eel-like creatures, and 80 percent of the rest of complex life on Earth was destroyed. As the supercontinent Pangaea pulled apart at the seams, stretching like taffy, an open sore of oozing, incandescent rock erupted at the surface, covering three million square miles in lava in pulses over 600,000 years. While the eruptions would have caused all sorts of chaos, perhaps most important they injected thousands of gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and the oceans overdosed on this volcanic CO 2 . The seawater acidified as a simple matter of chemistry, and the temperature of the planet soared as a simple matter of physics. This is what CO 2 does. Today the New Jersey Palisades across the Hudson River from New York City are the volcanic plumbing that remains from these titanic eruptions of the Triassic end times, old magma that is matched by the same volcanic rock, of the same age, as far afield as Morocco, Brazil, Nova Scotia and Spain.
Hundreds of millions of years earlier the two oldest major mass extinctions destroyed planets we wouldn’t recognize, their continents misshapen and scattered about unfamiliar oceans. The oceans of these alien planets were patrolled by gigantic cephalopods and, later, even more gigantic fish, guillotine-mawed and fortified by helmets of bone. Our planet endlessly cycles carbon—the stuff of life—through rocks, air, water and life in a balance that keeps the climate habitable and ocean chemistry hospitable. But these archaic worlds saw this carbon cycle suddenly derailed—unraveled by CO 2 -sucking episodes of tropical mountain building, accelerated rock weathering and the novel global geoengineering project of land plants. These kill mechanisms are somewhat more convoluted, and admittedly less dramatic, than an asteroid, but they did the trick. These bygone planets spun out of control, alternately freezing and broiling as Earth struggled to regain its composure and wrangle a global carbon cycle gone haywire.
But it was 252 million years ago, on the forsaken planet that opened this tour of ancient apocalypses—that sun-bleached world, with oceans almost absent of animals—when the story of life on Earth nearly came to its premature conclusion. This was Pangaea, a world before dinosaurs or mammals or flowers. But it was still a rich world, one with conifers and lithe, vaguely leonine predators and lumbering, warty, reptile prey. And then, it was over. It ended in a continent-scaled flood of glowing rock, brief volcanic winters issuing from the eruptions and a roster of billowing volcanic gases, many of which would be banned on a battlefield—such as chlorine gas and mercury.
As the magma incinerated underground seams of salt and gypsum, eruptions of halocarbons would have obliterated the ozone layer—and indeed, plant fossils bear the mutations wrought by this ancient atmospheric destruction. But it wasn’t until the seams of magma feeding these eruptions hit huge deposits of natural gas, coal and carbon-rich rocks underground that the greatest mass extinction ever hit its appalling crescendo. Methane and carbon dioxide exploded out of the ground by the tens of thousands of gigatons. Temperatures spiked by almost 22 degrees Fahrenheit. And in the oceans, where spreading anoxia and acidification wiped out 96 percent of life, it was as hot as a jacuzzi. And then, in the fossil record, silence.
At the start of the industrial revolution, long slumbering forests of carbon were resurrected from the ancient Earth and pressed into service in the furnaces of modernity. We know that this artificial fire can’t go on forever without immiserating our world. At 416 parts per million, carbon dioxide is already higher than it has been in millions of years and is perhaps rising even faster than in these greatest calamities of all time. Meanwhile centuries—millennia even—of hunting, land clearing and pollution have impoverished the natural world. By one estimate, at the rate at which we are currently driving species extinct, we could match the biological devastation of those towering mass extinctions of the ancient past within 300 to 12,000 years. This might sound like a long time frame, but from a geologic perspective, it is downright subliminal. More worryingly, there may yet exist unseen ecological cliff edges along the way, beyond which the biosphere does not simply suffer the onslaught of attrition but collapses suddenly in cascading failures. In other words, there may be tipping points—points of no return.
We know what we have to do to avoid being inducted into the wretched Pantheon of the worst things that have ever happened in Earth history. We must set aside swaths of the planet—in the form of marine protected areas, natural reserves and corridors for migration—to allow the living world to recover from the uppercut we have already delivered it. Then, we must simply stop digging up old life from deep in Earth’s crust and lighting it on fire at the surface. As humanity leans on the very same levers pulled in the very worst things that have ever happened in history, we must consult the ages and listen to the counsel of broken worlds past.


scientificamerican--2020-09-16--Life on Venus? Breakthrough Initiatives Funds Study of Possible Biosignature

The detection of a possible sign of life in Venus ’ clouds is just the beginning .
On Monday ( Sept. 14 ) , researchers announced that they ’ d spotted the fingerprint of phosphine in Venus ’ atmosphere , at an altitude where temperatures and pressures are similar to those here on Earth at sea level .
On our planet , phosphine is produced only by microbes and by human industrial activity , as far as we can tell .
So , finding the gas on another world , in an environment that astrobiologists had already flagged as potentially @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But it ’ s unclear at the moment what the new results actually mean , discovery team members stressed .
Venusian microbes may be emitting the phosphine , but it ’ s also possible that the stuff is being generated by exotic chemical reactions that we don ’ t understand , and that have nothing to do with life .
“ We have what could be a biosignature , and a plausible story about how it got there , ” Pete Worden , executive director of the nonprofit Breakthrough Initiatives , said in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is to do the basic science needed to thoroughly investigate the evidence and consider how best to confirm and expand on the possibility of life.
” The Breakthrough Initiatives will help scientists take that next step , by funding a team to study the phosphine find and its potential implications in detail .
The researchers will be led by MIT planetary scientist Sara Seager , an expert on exoplanet atmospheres and potential biosignatures who ’ s also a member of the phosphine discovery team .
“ The group will investigate the scientific case @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of an exploratory mission in the event that such evidence proves compelling , '' Breakthrough Initiatives representatives said in the statement , which did not reveal how much money will be disbursed or how long the study will last .
“ We are thrilled to push the envelope to try to understand what kind of life could exist in the very harsh Venus atmosphere and what further evidence for life a mission to Venus could search for , ” Seager said in the same statement .
To give you an idea of how @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are composed primarily of sulfuric acid , which would likely kill Earth-like microbes quickly unless they were surrounded by some sort of protective shell , Seager said during a press conference yesterday .
But Venus life , if it exists , does not have to be Earth-like .
Microbes may have arisen independently on the second rock from the sun , in which case they ’ d be very different than the water-dependent organisms on our planet .
( And if Venus microbes do indeed represent a “ second genesis , ” we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ common throughout the universe . )
Seager will be the newly announced project ’ s principal investigator ( PI ) .
Joining her on the leadership team are : • Chris Carr of the Georgia Institute of Technology ; • Bethany Ehlmann of the California Institute of Technology ; • David Grinspoon of the Planetary Science Institute , a long-time and leading advocate for the idea that Venus ’ clouds are a possible abode for life ; The new project is a natural fit for the Breakthrough Initiatives , a five-year-old series of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ billionaire Yuri Milner that aims to help answer some of humanity ’ s biggest questions .
Other projects funded by the Initiatives include Breakthrough Listen , a $ 100 million effort to scan the cosmos for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence , and the $ 100 million Breakthrough Starshot , which is developing technology to explore nearby exoplanets up close with tiny robotic probes .
“ Finding life anywhere beyond Earth would be truly momentous , ” Milner said in the same statement .
“ And if there ’ s a non-negligible chance that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Venus , exploring that possibility is an urgent priority for our civilization.
” Copyright 2020 Space.com , a Future company .
All rights reserved .
This material may not be published , broadcast , rewritten or redistributed .

The detection of a possible sign of life in Venus’ clouds is just the beginning.
On Monday (Sept. 14), researchers announced that they’d spotted the fingerprint of phosphine in Venus’ atmosphere, at an altitude where temperatures and pressures are similar to those here on Earth at sea level.
On our planet, phosphine is produced only by microbes and by human industrial activity, as far as we can tell. So, finding the gas on another world, in an environment that astrobiologists had already flagged as potentially habitable, is exciting news indeed.
But it’s unclear at the moment what the new results actually mean, discovery team members stressed. Venusian microbes may be emitting the phosphine, but it’s also possible that the stuff is being generated by exotic chemical reactions that we don’t understand, and that have nothing to do with life.
“We have what could be a biosignature, and a plausible story about how it got there,” Pete Worden, executive director of the nonprofit Breakthrough Initiatives, said in a statement. “The next step is to do the basic science needed to thoroughly investigate the evidence and consider how best to confirm and expand on the possibility of life.”
The Breakthrough Initiatives will help scientists take that next step, by funding a team to study the phosphine find and its potential implications in detail. The researchers will be led by MIT planetary scientist Sara Seager, an expert on exoplanet atmospheres and potential biosignatures who’s also a member of the phosphine discovery team.
“The group will investigate the scientific case for life and analyze the technical challenges of an exploratory mission in the event that such evidence proves compelling," Breakthrough Initiatives representatives said in the statement, which did not reveal how much money will be disbursed or how long the study will last.
“We are thrilled to push the envelope to try to understand what kind of life could exist in the very harsh Venus atmosphere and what further evidence for life a mission to Venus could search for,” Seager said in the same statement.
To give you an idea of how harsh that atmosphere is: Venusian clouds are composed primarily of sulfuric acid, which would likely kill Earth-like microbes quickly unless they were surrounded by some sort of protective shell, Seager said during a press conference yesterday.
But Venus life, if it exists, does not have to be Earth-like. Microbes may have arisen independently on the second rock from the sun, in which case they’d be very different than the water-dependent organisms on our planet. (And if Venus microbes do indeed represent a “second genesis,” we could be pretty sure that life is common throughout the universe.)
Seager will be the newly announced project’s principal investigator (PI). Joining her on the leadership team are:
Janusz Petkowski of MIT (deputy PI);
Chris Carr of the Georgia Institute of Technology;
Bethany Ehlmann of the California Institute of Technology;
David Grinspoon of the Planetary Science Institute, a long-time and leading advocate for the idea that Venus’ clouds are a possible abode for life;
Pete Klupar of the Breakthrough Initiatives (chief engineer).
The new project is a natural fit for the Breakthrough Initiatives, a five-year-old series of science programs founded and funded by tech billionaire Yuri Milner that aims to help answer some of humanity’s biggest questions.
Other projects funded by the Initiatives include Breakthrough Listen, a $100 million effort to scan the cosmos for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, and the $100 million Breakthrough Starshot, which is developing technology to explore nearby exoplanets up close with tiny robotic probes.
“Finding life anywhere beyond Earth would be truly momentous,” Milner said in the same statement. “And if there’s a non-negligible chance that it’s right next door on Venus, exploring that possibility is an urgent priority for our civilization.”
Copyright 2020 Space.com, a Future company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.