Here are some of this week’s interesting science news:
- Arctic sea ice thinning twice as fast as previously thought.
- Bad fire year predicted for the Amazon and U.S. west coast.
- The human genome is nearly completely sequenced.
- The Biden administration will restore protections under the Endangered Species Act undone by the former guy.
- The endangered right whales are shrinking and Florida manatees are dying at alarming rates.
- Scientists evolve a fungus to battle the deadly honeybee parasite, Varroa destructor.
- The Permian Basin in Texas likely has methane emissions four times grater than currently estimated by the EPA.
- NASA sending two missions to Venus.
- Ten percent of the world’s giant sequoias were killed in a wildfire last year, and California and Oregon are likely to have a bad fire season this year too.
- The Maunakea summit observatory is to be decommissioned.
Details and links to sources below the fold.
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596,156 PEOPLE HAVE DIED FROM CORONAVIRUS IN THE U.S. 170.3 MILLION PEOPLE IN THE U.S. HAVE RECEIVED A VACCINATION DOSE
The Guardian
Climate tipping points could topple like dominoes, warn scientists
Ice sheets and ocean currents at risk of climate tipping points can destabilise each other as the world heats up, leading to a domino effect with severe consequences for humanity, according to a risk analysis.
Tipping points occur when global heating pushes temperatures beyond a critical threshold, leading to accelerated and irreversible impacts. Some large ice sheets in Antarctica are thought to already have passed their tipping points, meaning large sea-level rises in coming centuries.
The new research examined the interactions between ice sheets in West Antarctica, Greenland, the warm Atlantic Gulf Stream and the Amazon rainforest. The scientists carried out 3m computer simulations and found domino effects in a third of them, even when temperature rises were below 2C, the upper limit of the Paris agreement.
Arctic sea ice thinning twice as fast as thought, study finds
Sea ice across much of the Arctic is thinning twice as fast as previously thought, researchers have found. Arctic ice is melting as the climate crisis drives up temperatures, resulting in a vicious circle in which more dark water is exposed to the sun’s heat, leading to even more heating of the planet.
The faster ice loss means the shorter north-eastern shipping passage from China to Europe will become easier to navigate, but it also means new oil and gas extraction is more feasible.
Calculating the thickness of sea ice from satellite radar data is difficult because the amount of snow cover on top varies significantly. Until now, the snow data used came from measurements by Soviet expeditions on ice floes between 1954 and 1991. But the climate crisis has drastically changed the Arctic, meaning this information is out of date.
Reuters
Scientists warn of bad year for fires in Brazil’s Amazon and wetlands
Dry weather this year raises the risk of severe fires in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest and Pantanal wetlands, scientists say, warning that a drought could fuel destruction of biomes critical to curbing climate change.
Last year, dry weather helped fuel record fires in the Pantanal, while the Amazon experienced the worst rash of blazes since 2017, according to Brazil's national space research institute INPE.
This year's rainy season - running roughly from November to April - was even drier in parts of the Amazon under greatest threat, known as the "arc of deforestation," INPE data show. This year's drought in the Pantanal is more severe and widespread than what the region saw in 2020, the data show.
Nature
A complete human genome sequence is close: how scientists filled in the gaps
When the sequencing of the human genome was announced two decades ago by the Human Genome Project and biotech firm Celera Genomics, the sequence was not truly complete. About 15% was missing: technological limitations left researchers unable to work out how certain stretches of DNA fitted together, especially those where there were many repeating letters (or base pairs). Scientists solved some of the puzzle over time, but the most recent human genome, which geneticists have used as a reference since 2013, still lacks 8% of the full sequence.
Now, researchers in the Telomere-to-Telomere (T2T) Consortium, an international collaboration that comprises around 30 institutions, have filled in those gaps. In a 27 May preprint entitled ‘The complete sequence of a human genome’, genomics researcher Karen Miga at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her colleagues report that they’ve sequenced the remainder, in the process discovering about 115 new genes that code for proteins, for a total of 19,969.
Antibody-laden nasal spray could provide COVID protection — and treatment
A nasal spritz of a designer antibody offers strong protection against variants of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 — at least in mice. Since the early days of the pandemic, scientists have been developing antibodies as treatments for COVID-19. Today, several such antibodies are in late-stage clinical trials, and a handful have been approved for emergency use by regulatory agencies in the United States and elsewhere.
Among doctors, however, antibody treatments have not been very popular, says Zhiqiang An, an antibody engineer at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. That’s partly because those available are delivered through intravenous infusions rather than directly to the respiratory tract, where the virus is mainly found — so it takes high doses for them to be effective. Another challenge is the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 variants that seem to be resistant to some existing antibodies.
Phys.org
Biden administration will restore key environmental protections
The administration of President Joe Biden on Friday announced it would restore protections under the Endangered Species Act, a law credited with saving iconic animals like the gray wolf and bald eagle, which were loosened by his predecessor Donald Trump.
Conservation groups welcomed the move but said they were concerned about how long the reversal might take.
"The US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) is committed to working with diverse federal, Tribal, state and industry partners to not only protect and recover America's imperiled wildlife but to ensure cornerstone laws like the Endangered Species Act are helping us meet 21st century challenges," said the agency's Martha Williams.
The executive branch doesn't have the power to change an act of Congress, but under Trump the protections for plants and wildlife were tweaked in key ways.
Fungus creates a fast track for carbon
Tiny algae in Earth's oceans and lakes take in sunlight and carbon dioxide and turn them into sugars that sustain the rest of the aquatic food web, gobbling up about as much carbon as all the world's trees and plants combined.
New research shows a crucial piece has been missing from the conventional explanation for what happens between this first "fixing" of CO2 into phytoplankton and its eventual release to the atmosphere or descent to depths where it no longer contributes to global warming. The missing piece? Fungus.
"Basically, carbon moves up the food chain in aquatic environments differently than we commonly think it does," said Anne Dekas, an assistant professor of Earth system science at Stanford University. Dekas is the senior author of a paper published June 1 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that quantifies how much carbon goes into parasitic fungi that attack microalgae.
OPB News
Endangered right whales are shrinking. Scientists blame commercial fishing gear
North Atlantic right whales now grow smaller than they did 40 years ago, and new research suggests a leading cause is the damage human activity inflicts on the critically endangered mammals.
The findings, published today in the journal Current Biology, reveal that when fully grown, a North Atlantic right whale born today would be expected to be about one meter shorter than a whale born in 1980. Currently, full-grown members of the species average 13 to 14 meters in length (43 to 46 feet).
"The first inkling that we had came from the folks who were collecting the data in the field, where, as the story goes, they saw what looked to be a really young whale, a calf, or maybe one- or two-year-old," said Joshua Stewart, a postdoctoral researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Marine Mammal and Turtle Division and lead author of the new study. "But it turns out that they were actually 5-year-old or 10-year-old whales that were smaller than a typical 2-year-old."
The Washington Post
An enormous missing contribution to global warming may have been right under our feet
Long before the era of fossil fuels, humans may have triggered a massive but mysterious “carbon bomb” lurking beneath the Earth’s surface, a new scientific study suggests. If the finding is correct, it would mean that we have been neglecting a major human contribution to global warming — one whose legacy continues.
The researchers, from France’s Laboratory of Climate and Environmental Sciences and several other institutions across the globe, suggest that beginning well before the industrial era, the mass conversion of carbon-rich peatlands for agriculture could have added over 250 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. That’s the equivalent of more than seven years of current emissions from the burning of fossil fuels for energy.
“Globally [peatlands] are only 3 percent of the land surface but store about 30 percent of the global soil carbon,” said Chunjing Qiu, a researcher at the laboratory, a joint institution supported by French government research bodies and the Versailles Saint-Quentin University, and the first author of the study published Friday in the journal Science Advances.
Florida manatees are dying at alarming rates: ‘We’ve never seen anything like this before’
Wildlife researchers first spotted the trend as the winter weather set in late last year. Florida manatees — the peaceful, lumbering marine mammals iconic to the Sunshine State — were dying in alarmingly high numbers. Many washed up emaciated, indicating they’d starved to death.
It didn’t take long to identify a likely cause. Florida’s community of manatee conservationists has warned for years that water pollution chokes off the sea grass that makes up the bulk of the manatee diet. The problem was now so bad that the underwater pastures in one manatee hot spot were almost completely wiped out.
An update last week from state wildlife officials captured the full magnitude of the devastation: At least 761 Florida manatees — more than 10 percent of the estimated manatee population — have perished so far this year, already surpassing the total manatee deaths recorded in 2020. The current manatee die-off could top 1,000 by year’s end, experts say, exceeding the recent high of 824 deaths in 2018 and threatening to upend the fragile recovery the species has made.
Greg Francek thought he was looking at a piece of petrified wood. But the fossil wasn’t a singular find — it was a key to a 10.8-mile fossil discovery that is being called one of California’s greatest ever.
Since Francek, a ranger for the East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD), came across the specimen last year, he and researchers from California State University at Chico have uncovered hundreds more. They say the site, which covers hundreds of acres, is home to hundreds and possibly thousands of fossils, including specimens from long-extinct species like mastodons and giant camels.
“This is fantastic,” Dick Hilton, an expert on California dinosaurs who has been helping excavate the giant site, tells Chico State’s Ashley Gebb in a feature article about the find. “I’ve never seen anything like this in California. It’s simply prolific.”
Deutsche Welle
Virus variants in Asia threaten the whole world
If the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread worldwide, vaccines could become ineffective and strains could escape immunity. The right vaccines need to go to the places where they are needed.
According to genome databases, such as nextstrain.org, there are now more than 1,000 known variants of the SARS CoV-2 virus.
Up to now, the "variants of concern" have been named after the places where they were first discovered. But in a move to avoid stigmatizing particular countries, the World Health Organization has now introduced a new naming system based on the letters of the Greek alphabet. The UK/Kent, South African, Brazilian and Indian variants will now be given the letters Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta respectively. But the labels will not replace their more complex scientific names.
Science
Scientists evolve a fungus to battle deadly honey bee parasite
The biggest scourge to bees is tiny—a mite the size of a pinhead that feeds on them and spreads deadly viruses. Getting rid of the parasite, Varroa destructor, is tough: Chemicals can kill it, but the mite has started to evolve resistance to the usual pesticides; moreover, these and other treatments can harm the bees themselves. Now, researchers have toughened up a mite-killing fungus so it can slay the bee slayers inside a hot beehive. If the new strain passes further tests, it could help honey bees around the world avoid a gruesome fate, and reduce the use of chemical pesticides.
“The beekeeping industry has a great need for alternatives,” says Margarita López-Uribe, an entomologist at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, who was not involved in the fungal research. “So it is very exciting to see that there is potential for a nonchemical treatment.”
The rise and fall of the world’s largest lake
When continental plates smashed together about 12 million years ago, they didn’t just raise new mountains in central Europe—they created the largest lake the world has ever known. This vast body of water—the Paratethys Sea—came to host species found nowhere else, including the world’s smallest whales. Two new studies reveal how the sea took shape and how surrounding changes helped give rise to elephants, giraffes, and other large mammals that wander the planet today.
To build that timeline, paleo-oceanographer Dan Palcu of the University of São Paulo and his colleagues at the main campus assembled clues from geological and fossil records. At its largest extent, the ancient sea stretched from the eastern Alps into what is now Kazakhstan, covering more than 2.8 million square kilometers. That’s an area larger than today’s Mediterranean Sea, they note this week in Scientific Reports. Their analyses further estimate the lake once contained more than 1.77 million cubic kilometers of water, more than 10 times the volume found in all of today’s fresh- and saltwater lakes combined.
Gizmodo
Archaeologists Open Frozen Wooden Box Found on Viking Mountain Pass
Melting glacial ice along a mountain passageway in Norway has resulted in the discovery of hundreds of ancient artifacts. One of these items, a wooden box with the lid still firmly in place, has finally been opened, revealing its precious contents.
Bits of beeswax. Yep, the wooden box was holding a plain old candle. Not gold, not jewelry, not a book of spells—just a beeswax candle.
Now, a candle might seem like an anti-climactic thing to discover, and perhaps it is, but this artifact and its well-preserved box tell an interesting story nonetheless—one having to do with annual treks made across a well-traveled mountain pass.
NASA Has Spotted Sneaky Methane Emissions From the Biggest Oilfield in America
There’s no such thing as easy climate fixes, but when it comes to methane emissions from oil and gas production, a couple of little patches could go a long way. A new study suggests that just 123 sites in the Permian Basin in Texas could be responsible for a huge chunk of the region’s accidental methane leaks—and that fixing the problems at those sites could slash emissions by an incredible amount.
Oil and gas production in the Permian has exploded over the past decade, quadrupling in output between 2011 and 2019; the Energy Information Administration now says that 38% of U.S. oil and 17% of its gas is now produced in the region. This increase in production has been accompanied by a surge of methane into the atmosphere. Because production is expanding so rapidly, and because wells and other production facilities have leaks operators might not know about, it’s been difficult to quantify how much methane these facilities are actually emitting.
The Environmental Defense Fund calculated recently that methane emissions from the Permian could be four times higher than current EPA estimates at around 1.4 million metric tons each year. Since methane is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide over the near-term, it’s important to put the brakes on these kinds of emissions, and fast.
Science Daily
How an elephant's trunk manipulates air to eat and drink
New research from the Georgia Institute of Technology finds that elephants dilate their nostrils in order to create more space in their trunks, allowing them to store up to nine liters of water. They can also suck up three liters per second -- a speed 50 times faster than a human sneeze (150 meters per second/330 mph).
The Georgia Tech College of Engineering study sought to better understand the physics of how elephants use their trunks to move and manipulate air, water, food and other objects. They also sought to learn if the mechanics could inspire the creation of more efficient robots that use air motion to hold and move things. […]
The paper, "Suction feeding by elephants," is published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
Waking just one hour earlier cuts depression risk by double digits, study finds
Waking up just one hour earlier could reduce a person's risk of major depression by 23%, suggests a sweeping new genetic study published May 26 in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.
The study of 840,000 people, by researchers at University of Colorado Boulder and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, represents some of the strongest evidence yet that chronotype -- a person's propensity to sleep at a certain time -- influences depression risk.
It's also among the first studies to quantify just how much, or little, change is required to influence mental health.
Scientific American
Transcendence Happens All the Time
The ongoing coronavirus pandemic might not seem like an obvious cue for thinking about biological transcendence. But the strange thing is that in our response to this crisis we’ve been unwitting participants in just such an event. […]
Take the novel coronavirus SARS-Cov-2. Its genetic material is a single strand of RNA with 29,903 nucleotides (the “letters” of the genetic code common to all known life on Earth) that contain information for about 30 genes for making proteins. (A virus is “simply a piece of bad news wrapped up in protein,” in words that have been attributed to biologists Peter and Jean Medawar.)
Whatever the precise origin of this specific type of coronavirus, the informational content of that strand of RNA had, until early 2020, never existed in the world in any other form than the polymerized nucleotides of biochemistry. Every single copy of SARS-Cov-2 was a bundle of molecules and nothing more. But then, almost overnight, it jumped to an entirely new substrate.
Pupil Size Is a Marker of Intelligence
It has been said that “the eyes are the window to the soul,” but new research suggests that they may be a window to the brain as well.
Our pupils respond to more than just the light. They indicate arousal, interest or mental exhaustion. Pupil dilation is even used by the FBI to detect deception. Now work conducted in our laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology suggests that baseline pupil size is closely related to individual differences in intelligence. The larger the pupils, the higher the intelligence, as measured by tests of reasoning, attention and memory. In fact, across three studies, we found that the difference in baseline pupil size between people who scored the highest on the cognitive tests and those who scored the lowest was large enough to be detected by the unaided eye. […]
We found that a larger baseline pupil size was correlated with greater fluid intelligence, attention control and, to a lesser degree, working memory capacity—indicating a fascinating relationship between the brain and eye. Interestingly, pupil size was negatively correlated with age: older participants tended to have smaller, more constricted, pupils. Once standardized for age, however, the relationship between pupil size and cognitive ability remained.
Mongabay
A novel tree nursery gives the Caatinga a fighting chance against desertification
The Caatinga is the most densely populated semiarid region in the world and the only exclusively Brazilian biome. The region needs assistance to prevent it from becoming an immense desert.
Nearly half of the Caatinga has already been destroyed — some 840,000 square kilometers (324,300 square miles) — and there are indications that this symbol of resilience — home to diverse and endemic species — is undergoing a desertification process that has already consumed 13% of its territory. […]
But one simple and innovative idea from the Restoration Ecology Lab at Rio Grande do Norte Federal University’s Ecology Department could turn the tables on failed Caatinga restoration projects, in which 70% of the seedlings transplanted by traditional methods are often lost
The key to averting environmental catastrophe is right beneath our feet
[…] Soil is central to our relationship with the land and plays a vital role in nearly every key Earth system process responsible for keeping conditions on our planet stable. Civilization, humanity, and other terrestrial life are all dependent on good, ongoing soil health for their survival.
Healthy soils are biodiversity hotspots, providing a home to diverse communities of bacteria, fungi and invertebrates, many of which are beneficial, and even vital, to plants. Soils hold 80% of all the carbon stored on land, making them key to meeting global greenhouse gas emissions targets. And they are important to the freshwater cycle, storing water and filtering out pollutants.
But soils are in global crisis. An estimated 75 billion metric tons of soil is lost each year due to erosion from arable land, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). In the process, large amounts of greenhouse gases are released, and vital ecosystem services are diminished.
The Atlantic
After decades away, NASA is sending not one, but two missions to Venus.
[…] NASA has picked not one, but two new spacecraft missions to study the second planet from the sun. The missions—a probe that will plunge into Venus’s atmosphere and an orbiter that will remain circling overhead—are expected to leave Earth at the end of this decade. All day, the astronomy community waited for NASA Administrator Bill Nelson to make an unspecified announcement about future missions, and when he spoke the word Venus, planetary scientists, to use less-than-scientific parlance, kind of lost it. There's a spacecraft in orbit around Venus now—a Japanese spacecraft called Akatsuki—but NASA hasn’t sent a mission to the planet in more than 30 years. One mission would have been thrilling, but two feels almost surreal.
The decision was particularly satisfying for many planetary scientists, especially those who believe that NASA has overlooked Venus in favor of our other next-door neighbor, Mars. In the past three decades, NASA has sent more than a dozen robots to the red planet. Where was the love for Venus?
The West Can End the Water Wars Now
Far-right radicals in Southern Oregon are threatening to bust open an irrigation canal. Instead, the region could be a model for managing watersheds in a warmer world.
In my experience, out here in the West, people are, by and large, aggrieved. This is not entirely their fault. Federal and state governments have made lots of promises to people in the West, or to their parents or grandparents. Some people were promised that their land would not be taken, while other people were promised free land. Some were told that they could withdraw water from this or that lake or river every year until the end of time, others that their right to hunt or fish on their territory would never be infringed.
But the natural abundance those promises were based on has been squandered by generations of mismanagement. In the Klamath Basin, in Southern Oregon and Northern California, where I live, Klamath tribal members haven’t been able to exercise their “exclusive right of taking fish in the streams and lakes,” as protected in a 1864 treaty, for decades, because the fish keep dying. The water quality is just that poor now. And as the climate changes, water is no longer predictably available when it is needed most.
Visalia Times Delta
Shocking study finds 10% of world's giant sequoias killed by Castle Fire
What was once a lush forest is now a "moonscape."
At least a tenth of the world's mature giant sequoias were destroyed by a single wildfire that tore through the southern Sierra Nevada late last year, according to a draft report prepared by scientists with the National Park Service and shared with the Visalia Times-Delta.
The catastrophic discovery that forest managers called "mind-blowing" comes five months after firefighters contained the Castle Fire — which scorched 175,000 acres across the Sequoia National Park and forest.
AP News
Oregon fall firestorms cautionary tale in worsening drought
[…] The warming climate means snow on Oregon’s famous peaks melts earlier, leaving soil and vegetation parched by late summer even if it does rain, said Erica Fleishman, director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute at Oregon State University.
Last fall’s blazes were driven by “extremely rare” powerful, sustained winds, and in combination with the arid conditions, a major wildfire was almost inevitable, she said. “If we had a spark — and any time we have people, we have a spark — there was a high likelihood that a fire would ignite.”
Fire on the Oregon coast isn’t without precedent. A series of blazes starting in the 1930s scorched 355,000 acres (143,663 hectares) in what’s known as the Tillamook Burn. In 1936, a wind-driven fire killed 10 people in the seaside town of Bandon. But what happened last fall across western Oregon was extreme, said Larry O’Neill, Oregon’s state climatologist.
Maine’s blueberry crop faces climate change peril
Maine’s beloved wild blueberry fields are home to one of the most important fruit crops in New England, and scientists have found they are warming at a faster rate than the rest of the state.
The warming of the blueberry fields could imperil the berries and the farmers who tend to them because the rising temperatures have brought loss of water, according to a group of scientists who are affiliated with the University of Maine.
The scientists analyzed 40 years of data and found that the state experienced a 1.1 degrees Celsius (1.98 degrees Fahrenheit) increase in average temperature, but the blueberry fields of Down East Maine experienced an increase of 1.3 degrees Celsius (2.34 degrees Fahrenheit).
That seemingly small difference is significant because rising temperatures could lead to water deficits that put the blueberries at risk, said Rafa Tasnim, a doctoral candidate in ecology and environmental science at UMaine and the study’s lead author. Lack of water could result in smaller crop sizes and blueberries that are less likely to survive to be harvested.
Hawaii Tribune-Herald
Board OKs decommissioning plan for Caltech observatory
The Maunakea Management Board approved on Monday a decommissioning plan for a Maunakea summit observatory.
The Caltech Submillimeter Observatory is the first of five summit observatories scheduled for decommissioning in exchange for the planned construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope, and ceased operations in 2015.
Jim Hayes, president of Honolulu consultancy firm Planning Solutions, Inc., presented a preliminary environmental assessment and conservation district use application for the decommissioning process to the board Monday, which encompasses the total restoration of the site to pre-development conditions.
NPR News
Why NASA Is Blasting Water Bears And Bobtail Squid Into Space
When SpaceX makes its 22nd resupply mission to the International Space Station on Thursday, it will be carrying two very special guest species: water bears and bobtail squid.
The animals are being launched into the cosmos in the name of science, as NASA researchers attempt to learn more about how the conditions of spaceflight can affect biological organisms and, by extension, future astronauts. […]
Thousands of microbes live inside the human body and work to keep us healthy.
But scientists don't have a clear picture of how microgravity — which allows the kind of floating weightlessness experienced by astronauts when they travel into space — affects those microbes.
Al Jazeera
‘Hero rat’ Magawa retires from Cambodian bomb sniffing career
Magawa, an award-winning giant African pouched rat, is retiring after five years of sniffing out land mines and unexploded ordnance in Cambodia.
The seven-year-old rodent, originally from Tanzania, was trained by the Belgian charity APOPO which says Magawa helped clear mines from 225,000 square metres of land in his career, the equivalent of 42 football pitches.
But after detecting 71 landmines and 38 items of unexploded ordnance “he is getting a bit tired,” Michael Heiman, the charity’s programme manager in Cambodia, told AFP news agency on Saturday.
Ars Technica
Early adopters of Chinese vaccines see case surges; China plows ahead anyway
Despite a sluggish start, China is now vaccinating its people against COVID-19 at an impressive clip, currently averaging nearly 20 million doses administered per day. As of Friday, the country had given more than 720 million vaccinations since mid-December, with nearly 400 million of those were given in May alone.
The dramatic ramp up comes at an awkward time, however. Early adopters of China’s vaccines have seen dramatic surges in COVID-19 cases—despite high vaccination rates—and are now backing away from the country’s offerings.
The world saw a shark-pocalypse 19 million years ago, and we don’t know why
Sharks have been swimming and hunting in the world's oceans for 450 million years, and though their numbers have recently declined because of human activity, they're still with us. But the world once had many more, and many more varieties of, the large marine predators compared to today. In fact, new research published in Science suggests that 19 million years ago, the vast majority of sharks and shark species died off. We don't understand why or how this large extinction event occurred.
“Sharks have... weathered a large number of mass extinctions. And this extinction event is probably the biggest one they've ever seen. Something big must have happened,” Elizabeth Sibert, one of the authors of the paper, told Ars.
Sibert is a Hutchinson postdoctoral fellow at the Yale Institute for Biospheric Sciences, and she was a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows for the initial phases of this research back in 2017.