Farming and land development in coastal areas breaks up soil in these areas, increasing run off into the ocean. This dirt (and the pollutants it carries) is dangerous for coral reefs. It can literally smother corals, covering them like a blanket, making them more sensitive to heat and starving the brightly colored photosynthetic algae, called zooxanthellae, that live inside of them. The new study, by an international team of researchers led by ecologist Andrés Suárez-Castro, set out to create a global map of corals that are most susceptible to these threats.

Using satellite data, soil information, and mathematical models of how water flows across land, the researchers calculated that at least six gigatons of soil (the weight of at least 33 million adult blue whales) are swept into the ocean within 150 miles of coral reefs each year. They also discovered that 41 percent of reefs worldwide are exposed to sediment runoff. They also saw that Southeast Asia is particularly at risk, with two-thirds of reefs there located in runoff zones.

The researchers also discovered that sediment-producing regions and sediment-affected regions are not necessarily the same. Sediment runoff was highest in Vietnam and China, but only about 2 percent of it reaches coral reefs. On the other hand, Fiji and the Solomon Islands produce very little sediment runoff, but nearly all of their nearby reefs are affected by it.

According to this analysis, coral reefs in Indonesia and the Philippines are — unfortunately — doubly endangered by sediment runoff. These two countries have both the highest area of affected coral reefs, and receive the most sediment, despite the fact that neither is near the top of the list of sediment-producing countries. Sediment runoff is just one of a handful of threats these reefs, part of the wildly productive and biodiverse Coral Triangle, face. Protecting them from further harm is a priority for conservationists, as they are home to at least 15 species of unique coral that can be found nowhere else, and 76 percent of all coral species worldwide.

Luckily, having the map of reefs affected by runoff also unlocks opportunities for a rescue. One such opportunity Suárez-Castro and his colleagues explored is a tried-and-true conservation method to save the corals: planting trees.

Their approach of examining how patterns of land use and other terrestrial human activities affect the ocean is an example of "ridge to reef" conservation. Marine and terrestrial conservation are often siloed, with forests and the ocean treated as separate entities. But this worldview can hold conservation back from identifying environmental problems and coming up with creative solutions to them.

When coastal forests are intact, the researchers reasoned, tree roots prevent soil from running off into the ocean. So, how much soil could targeted reforestation efforts prevent from eroding into the sea? The potential seems vast: research from the Ivory Coast suggests that soil runoff from treeless areas is 4,600 times greater than runoff from forested slopes.

Suárez-Castro's research team calculated that replanting up to 10 square kilometers of forest in each of thousands coral reef-linked coastal watersheds could reduce sediment runoff to 63,000 square kilometers of coral reefs by an average of 8.5 percent. These reefs comprise not only some of the most biodiverse regions of the planet, but are also irreplaceable resources for people who rely on tourism or fishing for their livelihoods.

The researchers also found that the most effective approach to reforestation differs depending on what region of the world they were focused on. In the Coral Triangle erosion tends to affect entire watersheds, and so tree planting efforts must be widespread to meaningfully reduce the amount of soil entering the ocean. The researchers highlight East Java and Sulawesi, both in Indonesia, along with Mindanao Island in the Philippines as examples. But in East Africa, the sources of soil runoff tend to be more aggregated in space, meaning that reforestation efforts can be more focused in a few specific locations — replanting trees in just a few watersheds along the coast of Mozambique could make a big difference for corals.

These regional assessments of the potential impacts of reforestation on sediment runoff — and coral health — are, of course, generalizations. The study authors were limited by the coarse spatial resolution of the data currently available. Higher-resolution data would enable them to make more complicated models of sediment runoff and to factor in how the shapes and arrangements of corals in reefs might determine how sediment runoff affects them.

There also remain practical challenges to reforestation. For example, sometimes coral reefs in one administrative boundary are affected by sediment runoff from another district. This is a common difficulty in addressing pollution of any kind, and fixing it requires political cooperation. And, in general, large-scale reforestation is not as easy as just planting a few trees — successful reforestation takes time, effort, and funding. It also requires knowing exactly where to plant and which tree species are best suited to local environments.

These findings demonstrate the strength of looking at forests and coral reefs as a single, interconnected system. Forest restoration is a hot topic at this moment in time, the first year of the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. Replanting forests that have been clear-cut or degraded for agriculture and other human use will help us fight climate change. Linking reforestation to coral reef conservation would not only rejuvenate lush tropical forests, but also preserve the countless species that rely on healthy reefs — including us.

The floods were caused by an extreme rain event, where nearly twice the amount of rain that the region usually sees in a month fell in just two days. This disaster should drive home the point that climate scientists have been frantically trying to communicate: Climate change is happening now.

There may well be more floods to come. A paper published in Nature last year examined flood data for Europe from the past 500 years. The scientists, members of 34 different research groups, found that the past 30 years belong to one of the most flood-rich time periods in Europe, one of just nine such periods over the past five centuries. They also discovered that, while the previous eight flood-rich periods occurred during relatively cold periods, the most recent one is markedly warmer (by about 1.4 °C) than all of the others. 

While the researchers did not explicitly attribute this current flood-rich period to climate change, they did highlight its "exceptional nature." As environmental journalist Andrew Revkin pointed out on Twitter, the reason this flood-rich period is so dangerous is that Europe is more developed and populated than it was over the past five centuries. Eighty-three million people live in Germany alone, and while the monetary damage has not yet been calculated, only about 45 percent of buildings are the country are insured against rain and flooding.

The flooding is also a reminder that climate change is affecting, and will continue to affect, the whole world. Yes, even the Global North. Everywhere. For instance, while the German floods have dominated the news, Oman is also seeing unseasonable rainfall and flooding that wiped out farmers' crops and disrupted the Eid Al Adha holiday.

We are currently way behind fighting climate change on all fronts. It is clear, though, that we have two main and urgent tasks ahead of us: mitigation and adaptation. The impacts of climate change are already deadly serious – let's get to work.  

Preventing human-elephant conflict is a key way to ensure that elephants continue to roam African (and Asian) forests and plains. While exact numbers of elephants killed in Gabon after dangerous run-ins with humans are unknown, in 2020 seven elephants were killed outside of Kenya's Amboseli National Park after coming into conflict with humans, and this is just one of a multitude of places where humans and elephants overlap. And in 2017, the World Bank launched a $9 million project to address human-wildlife conflict, specifically human-elephant conflict, in Gabon. 

But figuring out the best way to mitigate these conflicts, and therefore the best use of such conservation funding, remains a challenge, because it requires just as strong of an understanding human behavior as of elephant ecology. Getting people to honestly self-report how they might react, or have reacted in the past, to elephants trampling their fields isn’t always possible.

New research published in the journal Ecology and Society, led by University of Stirling, UK researcher Sarobidy Rakotonarivo (currently a researcher at Madagascar's University of Antananarivo) used a realistic multiplayer computer game to get around this challenge. Using gameplay to determine how people might act in various situations is not a novel idea; previous studies on pesticide use and irrigation use by farmers, among others, have also used games to examine human behavior. 

The game Rakotonarivo and her research team used was designed to be played by four participants at a time on tablet computers, connected by mobile hotspot, so the participants could see each other’s decisions. During each round of the game, players had access to nine plots of land. Digital elephants were distributed in and moved across the landscape just as they would in the real world. Participants had four choices each turn, depending on whether or not an elephant was present: they could farm the plot, farm and scare away a visiting elephant, farm and kill a visiting elephant, or decline to farm and set aside a plot as elephant habitat. (No real elephants were harmed in the making of this study.) Each decision incurred its own costs — for example, a participant’s choice to kill an elephant carried some risk of arrest, and choosing to farm without scaring off a nearby elephant cost them some crops. Rakotonarivo and her fellow researchers collected information from 260 farmers for the study.

Games like this one are uniquely suited to studying human-elephant conflict, particularly in a country like Gabon where retaliatory killings of elephants is illegal. “I was investigating a sensitive activity, elephant killing, and sometimes the participants are wary of revealing their engagement,” Rakotonarivo says. She and her team communicated to the participants that their choices while playing the game were were not seen as good or bad, “but at the same time I encouraged them to think seriously of their choices, as well as the consequences of their choices for their well being.”

The realistic game set-up allowed the researchers to test a few different potential conservation interventions to see how effective they were at keeping farmers happy and elephants safe. The first intervention involved deterring elephants (there are a few existing technologies for doing so, such as installing electric fencing, but the game didn’t specify which would be used). Another was a financial subsidy for farmers who set aside land for elephant habitat, and the third was a collective payment system designed to reward farmers who worked together to create larger habitat patches. 

After each group of participants played all four rounds — allowing the researchers to gauge their behavior in a baseline, no-intervention situation plus the three conservation scenarios — Rakotonarivo's team of researchers went through a detailed questionnaire with them to learn more about their thought processes during game play and to ensure the game accurately portrayed how they would act in real life.

Encouragingly, Rakotonarivo and her fellow researchers discovered that all three conservation interventions decreased the amount of elephant killings, and that both payment scenarios increased the likelihood of participants setting aside habitat for elephants. They also found that the farmers who participated in the study who lived near protected areas were 64 percent less likely to kill elephants than those who lived near logging concessions.

But the most promising result of this study for wildlife conservation was the important role of perceived social equity in participants’ behaviors. Conservation has a long history of ignoring the needs of Indigenous and local people and sidelining their contributions. Rakotonarivo’s team found that, when social equity levels were higher, elephant deterrent methods and communal payments were more likely to decrease elephant killings. According to Rakotonarivo, for the study participants, social equity means two main things: that they feel they have a voice in policy-making and are treated as equal stakeholders in the process, and that the costs and benefits of various conservation methods are equitably distributed. 

This discovery provides a roadmap for decreasing human-elephant conflict in Gabon. “Prior to mitigating the material impacts of elephant agricultural conflict, it is really important to address social equity,” Rakotonarivo said, “and this can mean empowering local people in leadership roles, in decision-making, and investing in their capacities as well as in their knowledge.” 

The future for Gabon’s elephant populations remains murky. As part of an effort to maintain food production in an increasingly urbanized country, the country's government is funding construction of electric fences to protect cropland. On one hand, fences could change the way that elephants experience and use the landscape; on the other, it would also cut down on human-elephant conflicts and, hopefully, prevent elephant killings. And the strategy of paying farmers to protect elephants is part of a wider conservation plan, but study participants didn’t think the implementation to this point had been effective.

In 2019, after analyzing the data, Rakotonarivo met with officials from Gabon's National Park Authority (Agence Nationale des Parcs Nationaux) to share the research team’s findings and policy recommendations. Two members of her research team, who were co-authors of the study, are also conservation practitioners working for the National Park Authority. 

Like many industries around the world, wildlife conservation in Africa has been hard-hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. It is difficult to gauge, at this point, whether the project has changed how officials engage with local communities. But Rakotonarivo’s results are clear: Without tackling social equity, conservation interventions might not be enough to save the elephants. That’s a lesson that all types of conservation organizations — no matter what species they focus on — should heed. 

It didn't take me long to figure out the reason: Musk, the richest person in the world, had announced that he was running a $100 million competition to identify the best carbon capture technology.

Elon Musk is not the first wealthy man to offer a prize to find a solution to climate change. In 2007, Virgin Group founder Richard Branson created the $25 million Virgin Earth Challenge to find commercial solutions for removing carbon dioxide from the air. Late in 2020, Prince William announced his Earthshot Prize, which will award five prizes of $1.3 million each for the next 10 years, a total of $65 million. The Earthshot Prize, in part, "aims to turn the current pessimism surrounding environmental issues into optimism that we can rise to the biggest challenges of our time."

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos's approach is similar: last February, he pledged to give grants worth a total of $10 billion to environmental organizations and scientists to fight climate change. The first 16 winners were announced in November 2020. Amazon's corporate climate change funding, like that of other technology companies, partially centers on finding carbon capture solutions, just like Musk's prize.

None of these prizes will make substantial dent in our fight against climate change. They may support some good individual work (I have no doubt that the NGO recipients of Bezos's first Earth fund grants deserved the money!), but funding competitions and prestigious prizes is a missed opportunity by the world's wealthiest – the individuals who, research shows, are most responsible for climate change – to make a real, material difference in the planet's trajectory. 

These prizes and pledges are hollow and egotistical. Despite the developments promoted on the slickly-designed sustainability section of their website, Amazon's carbon emissions rose by 15 percent in 2020. Elon Musk is already planning to abandon Earth and move to Mars, so it is hard to take his intentions to save our green planet seriously. And even Richard Branson, a vocal proponent of making aviation carbon-neutral, surely knows that $25 million just isn't going to save the world. 

Some scientists have said that we could temporarily halt the increase in global emissions for $300 billion – that's just 1.5 times the net worth of Jeff Bezos. That figure is just a stopgap measure to buy the planet time to come up with permanent solutions. If Bezos gave 98 percent of his worth to the cause (a la Jeremy Grantham), and asked his friends to do the same, we could raise that money in a snap. To completely halt climate change will cost trillions of dollars. On the one hand, climate tech prizes are agonizingly close to producing real change, if only a few billionaires decided to be selfless for once, and on the other are laughably paltry in comparison to the sum the world really needs. 

So, who are these prizes truly for? Scientists and policy makers know how to stave off the worst effects of climate change, and it is pretty straight-forward, though not easy: slash carbon emissions by 45 percent by 2030, and cut them to "net zero" by 2050. The carbon capture technologies that Musk and Branson are looking for with their flashy competitions will be part of the effort to hit net zero emissions, but that doesn't mean that on their own they are a magic-bullet technical solution, like a vaccine that will inoculate us against climate change. The bulk of our efforts to reduce emissions will require governments and societies to make difficult choices and weigh detailed trade-offs – real, functional, policy work. 

Funding prizes, making grants, and "inspiring optimism" is not the real work of addressing climate change. Instead, it is a clever diversion meant to convince us that the prize-givers are trying to help. While society is oohing and aahing over their perceived generosity, they are free to continue with their carbon-emitting (and space-polluting) business. Even viewed in the best, least cynical light, these acts of philanthropy are just tinkering around the edges of a crisis.

These men – Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Prince William, Jeff Bezos, and countless others – hold immense power, and their wealth means they have extensive networks of people who want to work with them. If they really want to help solve climate change, they must leverage their power and their networks to push governments toward taking substantial action for the planet. Now that the US is back in the Paris Agreement, vocally supporting comprehensive climate change action and pushing for the Green New Deal would be an excellent place to start. They should also follow the recommendations of Project Drawdown, and begin to quietly invest in revolutionizing our electric, agricultural, and education systems so that they work better for society and the planet.

To be fair, Amazon and other companies are making moves in the right direction, by investing in carbon dioxide-capturing concrete and forest conservation. Every dollar they give counts. But, given their enormous net worth (Amazon is reportedly worth over $1.6 trillion), they could easily and must do more – especially since their operations amp up global carbon emissions. Amazon, specifically, could start by investing in renewable energy to power its expansive data centers; as of 2019, it was falling appallingly short of its commitment to power Amazon Web Services with 100 percent renewable energy. 

Climate change is the most complicated economic, social, and environmental problem that humanity has ever faced. Unfortunately, there isn't going to be a single miracle technological solution to this challenge, no matter how many Earthshot prizes are offered. We got to this point through hundreds of years of perverse economic incentives and environmental externalities. Getting out of it will require us to drastically change our behavior, our expectations for how we engage with the world, and our priorities.

If the world's wealthiest truly want to alter the course of climate change, they'll need to do the same. Giving away billions of dollars to causes like composting, securing Indigenous land rights, and promoting women's health and education probably won't garner as much publicity as creating a flashy prize, but it will do vastly more good for the planet and the rest of us living on it.

Their trip was not simply another expedition documenting life at the world’s extremes: the data they collected is important in understanding what environmental factors limit plant life on earth. Their findings have recently been published in the journal Ecography.

The expedition team surveyed trees across Isla Hornos, a craggy island just nine square miles in size. Their approach to surveying its plant life was similar to methods used by forest ecologists around the world: they identified and measured trees, and took wood cores from them to determine their ages. But in contrast to tropical forests, which can have well over 500 species of tree per hectare, just three types of tree can be found on Isla Hornos. And, because the wind that whips across the island is so strong, the trees there grow horizontally instead of vertically. 

Most of the island was treeless, so the researchers found picking out the southernmost tree to be fairly easy. This record-holder is a 42-year-old Magellan’s beech tree (Nothofagus betuloides). It is just 57 centimeters tall – a little above knee-height – but stretches two meters horizontally. The wood core data told them that this tree was much younger than the trees in the more forested areas, which were over 100 years old.

From the wealth of data they collected during their expedition, the researchers concluded that at these southernmost reaches of the planet, trees are limited more by wind exposure than by temperature. This is unlike other treelines around the world. But similar to other trees, those on Isla Hornos will change as Earth’s climate does. The island is already one of the windiest places in the world, with wind speeds topping 72 kilometers per hour (~45 mph). 

Isla Hornos is projected to get even windier with climate change. If that happens, someday the world’s southernmost tree might not quite be so far south — the record-holding Magellan beech will die and the treeline's edge could contract to the north, where there is protection from other trees. And, given that the National Geographic staff writer that accompanied the research team, Craig Welch, noted that they “hiked and camped through gales that knocked us down,” I wonder if biologists will even be able to get there to see it.     

Bentley was the first person to ever photograph a snowflake, which he did at his home in Vermont (now listed in the National Register of Historic Places) in 1885. He described these flakes of frozen water as, "tiny miracles of beauty."

We agree. Check out some of Bentley's stunning photos below. 

Cassie Freund: So, I gather that you look at Earth from space for a living. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

Africa Flores-Anderson: We use satellite imagery to understand our planet. I focus on environmental monitoring, to use satellite imagery for a range of different applications but particularly to identify land cover change and monitoring for water quality. And that's where I had been focusing a lot, using satellite data to monitor water quality in Lake Atitlán.

There [are] two main sources of satellite information. One is passive. So what the sensor is recording is either the energy that is being reflected from the sun back to the sensor, or the energy that is being emitted by the body that we're looking at. So, in short the sensor doesn't have its own source of energy, it is just measuring what it’s getting, what is being reflected or what is being emitted. The other type of satellite data is active remote sensing, when the sensor emits its own source of energy. LiDAR, Light Detection and Ranging, goes into that and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) also fits into that category. (Ed: LiDAR and SAR are both methods to measure and map features on Earth’s surface using lasers and radar, respectively).

It's amazing how research has changed since the dawn of all of this technology. What are your thoughts on that?

Well, I think that we are in a unique era for using satellite data. Even when I started to work with them, which was like in 2006, we didn't have freely available satellite images. Landsat was already there, but it wasn't freely available. It became freely available in 2008 and I think that that completely changed how we are able to use this type of data for decision making. Because Landsat became free, that opened everything for other missions to release their data, to also make the data freely available. Now every year that passes I feel like we have more sensors, more data that is available. And not only passive [data], but also active, with the European Space Agency also releasing Sentinel 2 which is optical and Sentinel 1 which is synthetic aperture radar. We never had that before. I think that the future only looks brighter in terms of the data that is available because there are more missions that are being prepared and launched. And I think that now, you know, in the past you just [made] do with one image, because it was hard to get one image. At first maybe you had to buy it and the computer resources that you needed to process it. And we are not only making data more accessible by making it freely available, but also the computer capacity has improved and increased and so we can work with more than one image. Now we can make temporal analyses and look at changes from image to image, compared to just looking at one image at a time. 

So it is completely different, what we can do now [compared to] what we could do in the past. And it just looks better in terms of everything because now we can look at different components, different characteristics of the same spot.

That's a great point. You mentioned decision making, being able to apply your science to policy or give it to managers. Do you think the fact that you're dealing with pictures and images makes a difference to those people who are making the decisions, like being able to see it with their own eyes?

Yes, definitely. You know, they say that one picture is worth more than 1000 words. That is true. In fact, the program that I work for, SERVIR, is a joint initiative between NASA and USAID. And [SERVIR] started because they were using satellite imagery to monitor the forest in Petén Guatemala. I'm originally from Guatemala. The border between Mexico and Guatemala was very visible in the Landsat satellite imagery at the time, because the Mexican side was completely deforested and the Guatemalan side still had a lot of forests. And that image [of the two sides of the border] became crucial, and the main reason behind the fact that the largest protected area in Guatemala was created, the Maya Biosphere Reserve. It was because of that satellite image, that showed so clearly from a space the intact forests from the Guatemalan side and the agricultural expansion, deforestation from the Mexican side. 

And, you know, that directly had an influence on decision making, and then because of that the Protected Areas council in Guatemala was established as well. So it had a lot of implications. But I think that satellite data has become evidence regarding how we are using our natural resources, and it becomes something that we can show to decision makers and policy makers about the impacts that humans are having on in the environment, [in a way] that everyone can understand. It is easier to communicate.

That's so interesting. I've never heard you know that story about the creation of the Guatemalan protected areas. That's really cool.

Yeah, and I think that that's also the narrative of our program behind how to use geospatial technology and observations for decision making, to improve decision making, to inform decision making. Because definitely, if it's used in the right way it can have that impact on the ground. It is hard, but it can. 

Are you working on something specific at the moment?

Well, I'm working on Lake Atitlán, which is this beautiful lake in Guatemala, the second most visited site in the country. It is a beautiful lake surrounded by volcanoes. And [I’m working on] a grant that that we got from National Geographic and Microsoft to monitor and forecast algae blooms in Lake Atitlán. We are using satellite technology to identify when algae blooms occur and how long they have lasted. But we are also using other sources of satellite data as variables that have explanatory value of when and why the algae blooms are happening. We use machine learning or artificial intelligence to do the analysis. Some of the main results [are] that runoff and precipitation [have large effects] in terms of when algae blooms are forming in Lake Atitlán. 

That's one of the things I'm working [on] directly linked to my country and where I have been able to pay back everything that my country has given me, like the passion to study environmental sciences and the interest to conserve and protect our resources in the country. And the other topic I have been working on is using synthetic aperture radar for forest monitoring and biomass estimation. We released a book…. last year? 2019? (laughs) I lost sense of time. 

That was worked [on] by six different experts on synthetic aperture radar, trying to collect all the methodologies and apply knowledge about how to use this technology for forest monitoring and biomass estimation.  

The other thing is that now we have data that we can use on [an] operational basis for using SAR, Sentinel-1. SAR has been around for a long time, but it wasn't freely available. But now the European Space Agency produces this data for free. NASA is also preparing and about to launch into a new mission together with the Indian Space Agency, ISRA. The mission is called NISAR and the data is going to be freely available. 

So we are preparing ourselves for this new mission that is going to provide freely available SAR. There are some archive data from ALOS-PALSAR, which is [from the] Japanese space agency. That is historical, but we also can use it for free. There are a lot of resources but there is not that much capacity in how to use this type of technology on an operational basis. So that has become my new interest and passion right now -- how to make these more usable and to try to extract as much information as possible [from] these new data sets.

Sounds like a big job.

Yeah. And it’s a bunch of us, of course. I rely so much on experts that have been doing this for a long time. And it has been a very nice and fruitful collaboration. 

So you study lakes, you study tropical forests. Is there another type of ecosystem that you eventually would like to get into?

(Laughing) No, that's a lot. I want to keep working on Lake Atitlán but maybe some of my research is going to be going more towards land cover for forests, but we will see. And I know that I have to focus on one thing. But my brain is always working...

Yep, I understand. Do you ever get to travel? Do you ever do field work to ground truth what you're looking at, or do you mostly rely on collaborations to do that? [Ed: “Ground truth” means to go look at and confirm something in person that you saw on a satellite image]

We rely a lot on collaborations. For example for Lake Atitlán we work very closely with entities that work on the lake like the Lake Authority [the Lake Authority for the Sustainable Management of Lake Atitlan Basin and its surroundings]. There is a university, Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, that has a campus near the lake. There are also other groups that are collecting water quality data around the lake and we partner with them. And so we have gotten in situ observations of this field work from them. I have gone a few times to the field, I have to admit that I used to do that more in the past, but now it is mostly through collaborations that we get the field data.

For water quality, the field observations are key, because that's the way that we calibrate and validate our analysis using satellite data. The best way [to obtain the measurements] so far has been through these collaborations, but also with the advance of technology, now we can use high resolution data to obtain those in situ observations, particularly when we are talking about land cover because that's quite easy to identify with high resolution data if you know the landscape. So, I will feel very comfortable, you know, doing some collection of data over Guatemala for land cover and land use change as long as I have the high resolution data to do it. A lot of this world has become very sedentary (laughs). Because the technology advances have been very significant we have these different sources of high resolution data that, given the limitations of price or accessibility, they may not be used to create the map itself. But we can use them for the calibration and validation. We are just inundated with information, with data. Which is good. It's a good problem to have.

That’s true. Have you always been interested in making maps?

Since I learned geographic information systems [GIS]. Yes. It was an elective course in my undergraduate in when I was studying in Guatemala. It was just GIS and I really liked it, and then I was the one in the group making the maps and I stayed working with it because it was so interesting and nice to be able to see the information that we had collected in the field (at that moment, I was doing a lot of fieldwork) in a two-dimensional plane and to see it on the map. It was very, very nice. And since then I stayed doing Geographic Information Analysis. 

I just have one more question for you: I'm wondering if you can describe the most beautiful thing you've ever seen on a satellite image. 

Oh, that's interesting. Let me see. There are a lot of very nice…there is one image that I really like. [It focuses on] how to represent the things that we cannot see with our eyes, because, you know, we collect information in different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. What we can see is only in the visible part of the spectrum. So that's why we can see images in RGB [red-green-blue, the usual coloration scheme in photographs] that are very compatible with what we see on the ground. And that  makes interpretation very easy: this is water, this is forest, this is soil. 

But we also collect information in other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum like the near infrared. And SWIR (short-wave infrared) and we cannot see that with our eyes. And when we combine all of that information you create beautiful false color images that mean something -- for example, vegetation reflects a lot in the near infrared. Healthy vegetation is a super bright color and we cannot see that with our eyes. So having that understanding and having that information, visualizing it is very nice. There is a nice image, a false color image for Lake Atitlán that just looks beautiful. The lake was clean at the moment and you can see the mountains, the forest, the agriculture around in the basin around the lake, with different colors -- it is not a natural color image, it is a false color image. But it just looks so, so beautiful. 

And I think that just to see what the surface of the earth looks like with other lenses is beautiful. And it means something! When you go to those bands and you say, oh, it is bright because maybe it has more chlorophyll or it has less chlorophyll, or because it has this constituent and not this one. It makes so much sense when you get into the details as well. So for me, that's very, very interesting to see what my eyes cannot see.

That was a wonderful answer.

There are a lot of very beautiful images like that. And we create them using these other bands, this false color images, and they look amazing and some in the RGB, just in the natural color, they also look beautiful. But the Earth is beautiful, honestly.

All We Can Save is an unusual climate change book. Edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson, it consists of 60 essays and poems, many of which aren't written by scientists. All of the essays are by women,  from a huge range of different countries, racial and ethnic backgrounds, ages, and professions. 

The book's central theme is made immediately clear: addressing the climate crisis requires inclusive, collective, and radical action. And, where it seems most climate change books take on one of two tones (either, "everything is doomed," or "WE MUST HAVE HOPE!"), All We Can Save brings every emotion to the table. Grief, fear, confidence, and enthusiasm about our collective future are all equally welcome and valid.

It's not fluff. The book centers racism and environmental justice to make the point that we can't successfully address climate change without every person and type of knowledge. In lawyer and activist Sherri Mitchell's "Indigenous Prophecy and Mother Earth," Mitchell discusses how to align Indigenous knowledge with Western ways of thinking – which is not how Western science has traditionally happened – and how Indigenous world views emphasize harmony with the Earth.  In the same vein, climate reporter Kendra Pierre-Louis' essay, "Wakanda Doesn't Have Suburbs," challenges readers to re-imagine our social constructs, namely the idea that humans have an innate compulsion to destroy the planet. 

Pierre-Louis takes the reader on a journey through dozens of pop-culture stories (Avatar, Waterworld, The Hunger Games, and many more) that feed this belief. She argues that the most hopeful vision for civilization in popular media is Black Panther's Wakanda. "Wakandans elected to tell a story about themselves...that it was possible to improve the quality of their lives without degrading the environment that they depend on – and then they did it," she writes. 

I myself am guilty of having the pessimistic view that humans always destroy nature. Pierre-Louis' essay, among others, made me question my outlook. The fact that so many of the writers in this group, who know an immense amount about what humanity has already accomplished and what remains to be tackled, still have hope that we can overcome the climate crisis was encouraging to me. I'm not yet entirely convinced that it is possible, but I hope I'm wrong.

Both of these essays embody the central thesis of the book: that we cannot overcome the challenges of climate change without real, structural change. The way that traditional long-form essays are punctuated with free-form poetry, where words are scattered across the pages, subtly makes this point. The essayists say it bluntly. 

For example, in her essay "A Field Guide for Transformation," Leah Cardamore Stokes reflects on her own efforts to address climate change at increasingly large scales. She started as a child by getting her friends to recycle their milk boxes from school lunch, convinced her local grocery store to stop selling Chilean sea bass as a teenager, and eventually ran a campaign to get residence halls at her university to cut their energy usage. Now an assistant professor of political science who studies energy and environmental policy, Stokes writes, "No one can unilaterally choose to live in a low-carbon economy." Climate change is an institutional and political challenge that will be solved if we can change these systems for the better.

Together, the essays provide a roadmap for that change. The book is arranged in eight sections laying out the path: we must root, advocate, reframe, reshape, persist, feel, and nourish, until we finally rise. 

There was one sentence in nearly every essay that was so compelling I needed to write it down to digest later. Take writer and editor Sarah Miller's "Heaven or High Water." Miller set out to understand how Miami's luxury real estate market is addressing the threat of sea level rise by posing as a wealthy home buyer in meetings with Miami real estate agents. Along the way, she brilliantly illustrates the ways in which humans fool ourselves into thinking that we will be fine in the face of climate change – despite expansive evidence to the contrary. By 2100 Miami could be six feet underwater, and the city already experiences regular sunny-day flooding (when water rises up through the ground), and yet it is still billed as one of the most lucrative places for real estate investment.

It is unclear whether the real estate agents that Miller speaks with are outright lying when they say that Miami's flooding problem is under control, if they have been misled by city officials, or if they just misunderstand the science behind climate change. The answer is probably a combination of all three. But Miller's rendition of her interactions with them highlights the immense cognitive dissonance that we all face each day. We do mundane things like buy homes and go on vacation knowing that in a few short decades those places where we are buying homes and vacationing could very well not exist anymore. But we can't focus on that big scary reality –  it is much easier to live our daily lives in myopic bliss. 

We all do this. It's impossible to be a person who understands the science of climate change without drowning in anxiety about the future. Amy Westervelt's essay called, "Mothering in an Age of Extinction," focuses on the grief and power she feels as a mother and a climate change journalist. And artist Naima Penniman's poem "Being Human" asks, "I wonder if the sun debates dawn / some mornings / not wanting to rise / out of bed."

I found myself wanting to ask these women if and how the COVID-19 pandemic has changed their views on how the climate crisis will proceed. The parallels between these disasters have struck me many times during the past few months. Everyone seems to think that humans (or just they themselves) are special and magically safe from the rules of nature or the rules of a pandemic. But we aren't: if you don't wear a mask and keep partying with your friends, you will catch the virus. COVID-19 should have been a relatively "easy" disaster to handle – in a recent episode of the podcast "On the Bubble," Ed Yong called it a starter planetary problem, and said that climate change is the next big one. If we don't reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and right the wrongs in our global economic systems, climate change is going to rearrange the entire way we experience the world. If you turn on the news, you'll see that it has already started.

It is easy, and tempting, to keep your head in the sand about such things. But the courageous women who have written essays in this book have lifted their heads and are looking at our future possibilities clearly. They see the promises the world holds, and are arguing for a new system that integrates Indigenous knowledge, racial justice, and environmental awareness to create economies and societies that work for all of us. They are turning their talents into construction tools to build this new system, celebrating the victories along the way. And more importantly, they are dispelling the myth that the world is already lost, together working toward one collective goal: to save all that we can.

One of the dark sides of social media and other internet sites is that they have become virtual wildlife markets, where hunters can easily sell their wares to buyers around the world. In a new study published in Global Ecology and Conservation, scientists from Australia's University of Adelaide and the UK's Oxford Brookes University searched 11 online social media and retail sites in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore — including popular platforms like Instagram, Alibaba, and Lazada — for porcupine bezoars for sale. Over a three-month study period, they found 121 listings marketing nearly 450 porcupine bezoars. Over a third of them were posted on Instagram, and the bezoars were selling for an average of $152 USD per gram.

These findings are concerning. Porcupines must be killed to retrieve the bezoars, and relatively few porcupines have them (the actual incidence rate, however, is unknown). This means that, if every listing the researchers found was real, far more than 450 porcupines had been killed for their bezoars over a relatively short amount of time. 

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which maintains a list of which species are vulnerable and endangered, currently lists all Asian porcupine species except for the Philippine porcupine as "least concern," meaning that, as far as conservationists know, the animals are still common. But with rapid deforestation and the hunting of these animals for food and the wildlife trade, this may not be true for long. Stronger international and domestic trade laws in Southeast Asian countries would be a good first step toward protecting porcupines, along with all of the animals that share their habitats. 

Ancient Egypt held women in high esteem. Many of the Egyptian deities were goddesses, including Hathor (goddess of love and fertility), Ma'at (goddess of truth and order), and Nut (goddess of the sky). The goddess Sekhmet, depicted with a human body but the head of a lion, was the patron of doctors and healers. Women had equal rights to men. They could own land and businesses, wear whatever they wanted, divorce their husbands, and hold powerful social positions. Merit-Ptah, rumored to be the first recorded woman physician in history, was thought to be the chief doctor of the royal court around 2700 BC. Her picture was even on one of the pyramids in the Valley of the Kings.  

Or, was it?

Late in 2019, microbiologist and medical historian Jakub Kwiecinski published an article in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences debunking the myth of Merit-Ptah. "Almost like a detective, I had to trace back her story, following every lead, to discover how it all began and who invented Merit-Ptah," he said in a press release.

Merit-Ptah as we conceive of her today seems to have been born from a real  healer named Pesehet, whose tomb is dated to the 25th - 22nd centuries BCE. Kwiecinski believes that another medical historian, Kate Campbell Hurd-Mead, accidentally conflated Pesehet and an unnamed woman mentioned on her son's tomb as a chief physician. The son was a high priest during Egypt's fifth dynasty around 2700 BC. 

From there, the legend of Merit-Ptah blossomed. Hurd-Mead's historical work was published in the early 1930s. World War II caused huge changes in women's roles in society, and Kwiecinski notes that Merit-Ptah again appeared in an article on women in medicine in 1940. Then in the 1960s and early 1970s, women successfully pushed back against discrimination in medical school admissions. The story of Merit-Ptah was revived and repeated in several books and articles over the next few decades and her status as a feminist academic icon was cemented.

"It was associated with an extremely emotional, partisan – but also deeply personal – issue of equal rights," noted Kweicinski in the press release. "Altogether this created a perfect storm that propelled the story of Merit-Ptah into being told over and over again."

Merit-Ptah's life was a myth. But her popularity reflects the very real hunger of women to be seen as equals in science and medicine. And although Merit-Ptah's story started, and initially proliferated, in white and Eurocentric circles, Kwiecinski notes that she also featured in Afrocentric black history, where she shined as "an example of the scientific genius of the black Africans."

In a way, it doesn't matter that the exact person we consider to be Merit-Ptah never existed. She still stands as a figurehead and an inspiration for women – doctors, nurses, healers, scientists – around the world. As Kwiecinski says: "She is a very real symbol of the 20th century feministic struggle to write women back into the history books, and to open medicine and STEM to women."

Biologists are turning to genetics to understand what might happen to marine mammals – specifically, the mythical and magical narwhal – as the Arctic warms. At the end of the Last Glacial Maximum, about 19,000 years ago, the vast Greenland ice sheet rapidly melted, pushing sea levels up by about ten meters. Scientists know that populations of North Atlantic bowhead whales, another Arctic inhabitant, flourished as ice sheets retreated. But exactly how past climatic change affected narwhals, one of only three whale species in the Arctic, was, until recently, unknown. In a paper published in April in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, a group of evolutionary biologists led by Marie Louis of the University of Copenhagen's Globe Institute unravels how shifting ice patterns in Arctic seas affected narwhals in the past.

The researchers analyzed the mitochondrial genomes of 121 narwhals from 11 of the 12 main groups of narwhals (called stocks). Existing tissue samples collected during satellite tagging campaigns or subsistence hunts meant the researchers did not have to chase down wild narwhals. From the samples, the team extracted mitochondrial DNA, which is passed from mother to offspring with no paternal input. This makes it easy to piece together how population sizes changed through history by comparing each narwhal's unique mix of maternal genes.

Louis and the other researchers found that there was very little genetic variation across those 121 narwhals, even compared to the other Arctic whales. Their genetic diversity is on par with that of sperm whales, which are thought to have all descended from a single female ancestor 80,000 years ago. 

The shallow narwhal gene pool is a clue to their recent history. It suggests that, like the bowhead whales, narwhal populations increased as the glaciers melted 19,000 years ago. Based on the lack of genetic variety in the narwhal stocks, the researchers estimated that there were just 3,000 female narwhals on the planet up until the Last Glacial Maximum. But after the ice began to retreat, the population exploded to 9,000 female narwhals. This huge group probably all bred with each other.

Louis and colleagues also found that the 121 narwhals could be grouped into 64 genetically similar groups, called haplotypes. But, oddly, the haplotypes were mixed up across all of the stocks. Think of haplotypes like different types of berries: some of the narwhals were blackberries, some were blueberries, and some were raspberries. They are all related, but you would expect the apples to come from the same stock as each other. That was not the case: they were all mixed up like a narwhal fruit salad.

The researchers attribute this genetic intermingling to narwhal behavior. Although the different narwhal stocks occupy different parts of the Arctic during the summers, several share the same wintering grounds. A 2012 study of 45 satellite-tagged narwhals Canada and West Greenland also found that three of them diverged from their traditional migratory routes, which could lead to interbreeding with narwhals from other stocks. 

Past narwhals clearly fared well in warming temperatures for the female narwhal population to triple as the ice retreated. So, what does this mean for future narwhal populations? Unfortunately, it is doubtful that they will prosper like their ancestors.

In the past, retreating glaciers opened up more marine mammal habitat with the perfect mix of open water and sea ice for hunting, mating, and raising young. Today, the warming climate and loss of Arctic sea ice has the opposite effect, decreasing available narwhal habitat. 

Perhaps the starkest difference is that, unlike 19,000 years ago, climate isn't the only major factor in narwhal survival – humans are. There were likely people in the Arctic before the Last Glacial Maximum, but human populations were nowhere near today's 7.8 billion people. And our negative impacts on Arctic oceans are substantial, even for those of us who live nowhere near them.

The ocean and its inhabitants, including many fish species that narwhals depend on for food, are in constant flux as global temperatures increase and sea ice decreases. This has already had tangible effects on narwhal diets. Less sea ice cover in the Arctic means more large ships passing through narwhal habitat, putting them at risk from noise pollution. And if narwhals shift their migration patterns to track sea ice changes, it is very possible that they come into contact with killer whales, one of their main predators, more often.

Previous episodes of climate change on Earth can be a valuable predictive tool, but the results of this study drive home the fact that our climate future is unprecedented. The narwhal DNA showed that in the past, narwhals have greatly benefited from melting ice. But the Last Glacial Maximum was just that: glaciers were at their maxima, covering much of the globe. Compared to then, our current global sea ice cover is paltry. It will only continue to shrink. And we know that animal populations with low genetic diversity are also not likely to be able to adapt or survive as environmental conditions change. This seems to spell doom twice for narwhals.

Black scientists have been posting about their experiences, which range from repeated microaggressions to physical threats. One common theme is of white academics not believing that Black scientists are who they say they are. Another is of white faculty telling Black students that they won't be successful in their chosen field/program. A third is Black academics being prominently featured in university brochures and "diversity and inclusion" media, but never recognized otherwise. But this summary can't do the range of stories justice — go read them for yourself.

An important point that many Black scholars have made in addition to these stories is that they are just the ones that people feel safe sharing publicly, and they don't include stories from Black people who were pushed out of academia before reaching the "ivory tower." There are countless others that are more horrifying that will remain untold. And the sheer volume of stories drives home the point that this is a systemic problem that should not be swept under the rug as isolated instances or just the viewpoints of a few old, white men who should get a pass because they are "from another time" (to be clear, they should not). 

Dr. Davis was shocked that the hashtag that she had started became such a sensation, but she wasn't surprised at the volume of stories that Black academics had bottled up. "White academics need to know that we [Black academics] are hurt. And that intention doesn’t matter. What matters is the impact of their behavior... I’m not shocked by the volume of responses to #BlackintheIvory because these are the stories that we often share in Black-only spaces. The current socio-political climate emboldened Black academics to speak their truth and Joy and I simply created the space," she said to me in an interview. 

I asked her if she was hopeful that things would change now that such a strong spotlight has been shined on anti-Black academic racism. "I have some hope. I think that there are a number of white academics, university presidents, deans, provosts, and the like who are getting it in a way that they haven’t before. Prior to this moment in time, many white academics knew that racism existed; they knew that Black folks could experience racial macro and microaggressions, but I don’t think those academics thought that it could be them causing the harm. I think some, (not all) but some were oblivious to their complicity in perpetuating anti-Black racism in the academy."

But there is a limit to her hope: "Are we going to move from white folks understanding it to white folks leveraging their privilege to enact structural change and bringing Black academics along, and compensating us for our time as we work with the university to make that structural change? That part, I don’t know. Time will tell if folks do what they are supposed to do to make structural change in a way that is appropriate. Meaning, we [Black academics] don’t need people making decisions on our behalf. We need our white colleagues to leverage their racial privilege to draw attention to these issues and to ensure that we are integrally involved when those conversations occur and decisions are made."

And that's part of the problem: roots are very difficult to study because they are hidden below layers of soil. To measure and observe roots, plant biologists must either dig up the plant, an approach aptly referred to as "destructive sampling," or install a see-through chamber called a rhizotron. A rhizotron is kind of like an ant farm: it allows you to observe what is going on in the soil though a clear panel. But rhizotrons can be expensive and, depending on a scientist's research goals, not worth the effort it takes to construct them.

Now, a group of biologists from the University of Pittsburgh have developed an inexpensive and simple mini-rhizotron from a now-defunct household object: a plastic CD case. Their method was published in April in Applications in Plant Sciences. The case itself is filled with soil, and the growing plants protrude from the hinge. Because plants can sense and grow in the direction of gravity, storing the CD cases at an angle forces the roots to grow up against the see-through sides of the cases, making them easy to see and measure without disturbing the plant.

This method only works for studying small plants — there is no CD case large enough to grow a tropical tree! But it's a clever method that fills a scientific need, and one that the authors hope will make root research accessible to teachers, ecologists, agricultural scientists, and other researchers no matter what financial resources they have available.

The game — free to download in the Apple and Google Play stores  — opens with you being assigned a mission from Amyra, the Wildeverse project leader. It's "Where in the World is Carmen San Diego?"-esque, which, as a 90's child, I thoroughly appreciated. Amyra sends you to a swamp forest in Borneo to try to track down wild orangutan Fio. The jungle trees, outlined as brilliant blue holograms spring up around you. Your first task is to find evidence of Fio on the ground (hint: 💩).

I haven't found the poop yet, but earlier this week I did chat with Gautam Shah, the founder of Internet of Elephants, the company behind the game. It was a strange twist of fate that Gautam, who I had previously spoken to about how games like his can advance wildlife conservation, partnered with an NGO I used to work with (Borneo Nature Foundation) to bring Fio and his gibbon counterpart Chilli to the smartphone screen. Buka and Aida, the game's other stars, live in the Congo, where Internet of Elephants partnered with the Goualougo Triangle Ape Project.

The game has already been downloaded 10,000 times, with minimal marketing outside of the UK. Gautam told me that the game had gotten good responses and that people like having a tropical jungle appear when they open their phones, "especially the first time they see Fio walk by." The game also has built-in questions to help track how people feel about wildlife, and how those feelings change as they play the game. As a conservation biologist I can tell you that data like that is highly valuable for figuring out what makes people want to protect nature and change their behaviors accordingly, which is one of Gautam's main goals for the game. 

If you are looking for something new to entertain you during social distancing, why not celebrate Earth Day in the Wildeverse? I think I'll join you!

Luckily there are lots of things you can do on your own to help ease the stress. Here are a few that work for me personally (note: I am not a medical professional). Not all of these will work for everyone, so don't beat yourself up if you try something to lessen your anxiety and it doesn't do much. Each of us is unique in our experiences and reactions to stressors!

Create something: Make something with your hands. You can cook or bake, put together a puzzle, color or draw, work in your garden or yard (if you have one), or even clean out your car. Whatever you choose, try to really focus on what you are doing instead of letting your mind wander. Don't worry about making something perfect — just enjoy the process!

Go outside or get moving inside: Unless you are currently under lockdown, and assuming you stay at least 6 feet from others, it is safe to go outside. Exercise can help you redirect nervous energy. It also gets your feel-good neurotransmitters flowing. By the way, dancing in your living room counts as exercise!

Step away from your phone: Put the phone down. Leave it in another room while go about your other activities. It will feel weird, but I promise you that logging off Twitter and other social media for half an hour will not harm you. To be clear, your phone isn't the root cause of your anxiety, but a constant barrage of COVID-19 related news isn't helpful, either. 

Give yourself a break: If you are really feeling anxious and it is keeping you from your daily activities, try just letting yourself be. A lot of times the pressure we put on ourselves to stay productive, keep working, clean the house, and so on keeps us paralyzed. Banish the word "should" from your vocabulary for now, and just do the best you can. Sometimes just giving yourself permission to slack off is enough to get your motivation and focus back. 

Try mindfulness: Mindfulness seems like the hip, hot thing to do lately, but there's a reason for that — it works. There are tons of online resources and apps for learning mindfulness. I am most familiar with Headspace, and the thing I like most about it is that students (including grad students!) can get access to the full app for $10/year (usually $70). There is a lot of material in the app, and in my opinion it's worth it. 

If full-on mindfulness isn't for you, but you need a way to stay calm when it feels like the world is falling apart around you, the 54321 method of grounding yourself is a good place to start. Take a deep breath, then look around you for five things that stick out to you in the moment, and say them out loud. Then repeat that with four things you can feel, three sounds you hear, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste. Then take another deep breath. 

We're all in this together. While you may have to stay physically distant from people right now, don't forget to connect socially in any way you can. And if you are feeling totally overwhelmed or depressed, please reach out to a mental health professional.

FoldIt: We wrote a great article outlining one of the major scientific discoveries made with this protein-folding game a few months ago. Try it yourself – there are even coronavirus puzzles that you can do, if you want to take out your stress on (a virtual copy of) the virus itself.

Zooniverse: This site has an enormous range of projects you can contribute to. You can do everything from helping scientists classify bird breeding behavior on NestCams, to identifying wildlife from camera trap photos as part of Snapshot Ruaha, to locating black holes on Radio Galaxy Zoo. There is truly something for everyone!

March Mammal Madness: The basketball version of March Madness has been canceled, but this animal-themed competition is still going. Although several battles have already been fought, it's not too late to fill out a bracket (assistant editor Max Levy is cheering for the Australian feral camel to win it all!). You can catch up on the competition and get some great science content ⁠— complete with references to peer-reviewed research ⁠— on the competition's Twitter feed. 

Kerbal Space Program: This is co-founder Allan Lasser's pick. In this fictional game you are the leader of a space program for an alien race called the Kerbals, and you get to construct spacecraft, perform space experiments, and even make budgeting decisions for your organization (because funding science is important). This game would be great for kids who want to learn physics and astronomy alongside some real-life space scientists.

Eyewire: In this game, your goal is to map neurons in the brain. You are presented with a cross-section of a real brain map, and your job is to trace a neuron through that cross-section. Consortium member Dori Grijseels, who sent me this suggestion, calls it "weirdly addictive!" If you're interested in the science behind the game, here's a TED talk by the game's director. 

The tool, called a "digital guide," is a monocular, which functions similar to binoculars, but consists of just one tube. After you spot a bird through the lens, you can take its photo, which the guide then sends straight to your cell phone. Then, with the help of Cornell's Merlin bird identification app, it automatically returns a list of birds that might be what you are looking at. The integration of this amazing technology is the latest example of the "gamification" of nature, allowing anyone with the digital guide quickly identify birds and add new species to their lifetime list. 

This could level the playing field for people who want to start observing nature but lack the background knowledge to identify what kinds of birds they are seeing. It could also standardize data collection by field scientists, which would particularly be a welcome tool in tropical countries with high bird diversity. 

But one variable remains unknown: the price. If the digital guide is too expensive, it will only be accessible to wealthy folks and the most well-funded researchers. And for many casual nature observers, the pleasure of just being outside without technology may be a key reason they find birding so relaxing. So, don't throw those bird identification books out just yet! 

Or if you do, can you send them my way?

She was the first female geologist to be hired by the Geological Survey of Canada, to be admitted to the Geological Society of America, and first to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. She mapped over 14,000 square kilometers of the Ottawa-St. Lawrence Lowlands, complete with information on the geology and fossils found in this region — and she did it alone, because the Geological Survey of Canada barred her from doing fieldwork with men.

Alice was born in 1881 in Cobourg, Ontario. Her father was a professor at Victoria University, so she was encouraged to be a scholar, but her family also greatly enjoyed the outdoors. Wilson spent her summers camping, canoeing, and collecting fossils with her family, and she developed an avid interest in paleontology. This experience provided her with skills and self-confidence that would later help her conduct geological field work.

Wilson found her footing as a scientist in her first job as an assistant at the Museum of Mineralogy at the University of Toronto, and then, starting in 1909, as a clerk for the invertebrate paleontology section at the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC). She wanted to further her formal education but World War I, illness, and disagreeable GSC officials interfered with her plans. Wilson finally earned her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1929. Despite this, it took the GSC an additional seven years to promote her to the rank she deserved. But other professional societies recognized her expertise, and in 1936 she was also elected as a Fellow of the Geological Society of America. She was the first woman to be selected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada just two years later.

Professional recognition was not the only courtesy that GSC refused Wilson; she also had to fight for the right to do fieldwork. She was forbidden to work at remote field sites with her male colleagues, so she made the case that she could work alone into the St. Lawrence Valley, an area easily accessible from her home. She successfully argued that "while not heavily built, I am muscularly very strong, and from earliest childhood have been accustomed to an out-of-door life."

She explored the St. Lawrence area for the next 50 years. She covered more than 16,000 square kilometers despite her poor health and the limitations placed upon her. For example, the GSC provided all its male geologists with vehicles, but wouldn’t do the same for Alice: she had to walk or bike until she bought her own car. Nonetheless, Alice became the authority on the fossils and rocks of the St. Lawrence Valley, especially invertebrates from the Ordovician Period (444-485 million years ago). The GSC otherwise barred women from fieldwork until 1970.

When she was allowed to work with other people, Wilson was an iconoclast in the field. She was famously opposed to smoking, hacking and coughing until whoever had lit their cigarette put it out. Whenever other male scientists started fighting over discoveries and things got heated, Wilson "never raised her eyes from her book, never spoke a harsh word herself."

Alice was superannuated and forced by to retire at age 65, but she kept teaching at Carleton College (now called Carleton University) until her death. She said, “The earth touches every life. Everyone should receive some understanding of it.” She also wrote a famous children's book on geology called "The Earth Beneath our Feet," which you can read for yourself at the link. Every chapter starts with a poem, and short verse in the dedication states, "...it is not the hills but the sea that is everlasting" (an interesting thing to say since Marie Tharp wouldn't definitively prove plate tectonics until 1953, six years after the book's publication).

 Wilson was such a force that five people had to be hired to replace her upon her retirement: "We never understood how she could do all she did in a day, first to the Survey, then a two-hour lecture with us, then back to the Survey, and then a field trip in the afternoon" said a colleague from Carleton. 

A few months before her death, she told the Survey's director that she wouldn't need her office anymore. When told she could continue to have it, she said with finality, "No, my work is done."

Scientific theories for how life evolved broadly fall into three categories. The first is the "panspermia" hypothesis, which is that the organic molecules that eventually gave rise to life were deposited on Earth by meteorites and other cosmic rubble. It sounds wild, but organic compounds have recently been identified from the Zag meteorite that was discovered the northwest corner of Africa in 1998.

A second theory of the origin of life is the Oparin-Haldane model, or the "primordial soup" hypothesis. This suggests that the chemical makeup of early Earth's atmosphere, sparked by electricity, led to the spontaneous formation of organic molecules. A set of famous experiments by chemist Stanley Miller in the 1950s showed that amino acids – the building blocks of proteins – could be synthesized in this way. 

The final major theory for the origin of life hinges on the last major ecosystem discovered on our planet: deep-sea hydrothermal vents. These rifts in the Earth, thousands of meters below the sea surface, are home to creatures unlike anything seen elsewhere, like a species of eyeless shrimp with a light-sensing organ on their backs, or giant tube worms that lack digestive tracts that get all their food from bacteria living in their bodies. But even these strange life-forms are not the most interesting feature of this ecosystem.

These hydrothermal vents spew scalding hot water and various combinations of metals, sulfur, and other chemicals. They contain elements and conditions conducive to metabolic pathways that scientists believe were necessary for the evolution of life, but are missing from the other hypotheses. But it has been difficult to find evidence in support of the hydrothermal vent origin of life theory because researchers have so far been unable to replicate the formation of "prebiotic" chemical compounds – those that logically had to be in place before the evolution of Earth's earliest life forms. A paper published in November 2019 in Nature Ecology & Evolution has changed that. 

Our lives are enabled by membranes. The membranes in the cells of every plant, animal, and bacterium on Earth all function in about the same way, which suggests that nature has been using the same basic blueprint for membrane construction since life first evolved. This blueprint consists of two layers of molecules, where one side of each molecule is hydrophobic (water-repelling) and the other side is hydrophilic, meaning it will co-exist with water. The hydrophilic heads of the molecules face out on each side of the membrane, and the hydrophobic tails – which consist of chains of carbon atoms – make up the interior. This structure is called a lipid bilayer. Proteins and other molecules drift around within the membrane where the hydrophilic tails meet. 

Biologists think that the first life form on Earth also had a lipid bilayer membrane. But instead of each molecule having two tails, like ours do, they were simpler molecules with just one tail. In chemistry, this type of molecule is called a single-chain amphiphile (SCA). Specific biochemical characteristics of SCAs strongly suggest that, if they did originate on Earth, they were forged in hot, aquatic, high-pH environments, like deep-sea vents. 

For SCAs to be the precursor to biological cells, they must to be able to form vesicles, tiny round structures which are lipid bilayers with liquid inside. But previous studies trying to find evidence in favor of the hydrothermal vent origin of life have not been able to achieve this, leading scientists to conclude that life might have originated elsewhere. 

The research team behind the new study, led by University College London postdoctoral scientist, Sean Jordan, saw a key flaw in those previous studies: they all used simple mixtures of just one to three SCAs to try to generate vesicles. But nature can produce about 40 types of SCAs. So Jordan and the team decided to try using more varied mixtures of SCAs to recreate the range of these membrane building blocks that were likely present when the earliest life on Earth emerged, between 3.5-4 billion years ago. 

They attempted to induce vesicle formation with mixtures of six different SCAs, all of which were fatty acids with tails consisting of 10-15 carbon atoms. They found that vesicles spontaneously formed at pH levels of up to nine, about the same pH as toothpaste. Sea water in the open ocean has a pH of about eight. Further tests showed that when they added six alkanol SCAs to the fatty acid SCA mixture, vesicles formed at pHs as high as 13 – about that of bleach or oven cleaner.

With that mixture of 12 fatty acid and alkanol SCAs, Jordan and the team then tested for vesicle formation at varied concentrations of magnesium chloride and calcium chloride to simulate an oceanic environment. And again, they observed vesicles forming in every trial when the pH of the solution was 12.

Then came the biggest test: they looked for vesicle formation in a solution with a very high pH (greater than 12) and the same levels of magnesium and calcium chloride as are in today's seawater. This trial was intended to replicate the conditions at a deep-sea vent. It was a success: stable vesicles, a key component necessary for the evolution life on Earth, readily formed in this salty, alkaline environment.

Although the methods previously employed to study vesicle formation had some of the right ingredients, it appears that the process is just a little bit more complicated in nature. And surprisingly, Jordan and the research team saw vesicles form under very harsh environmental conditions – those that scientists were ready to rule out as being conducive for vesicle formation. 

Their findings show that, beyond being merely acceptable for vesicle formation, very hot and alkaline conditions are actually ideal. While this study doesn't prove that the genesis of life occurred on deep ocean vents, it shows that it is certainly a possibility.

One hypothesis for why menopause has persisted is called the "grandmother effect." Female animals (and humans) who live long enough to see their children have children are thought to earn additional evolutionary currency by helping their grandchildren, who carry 25% of grandma's genes, survive ⁠— a concept called inclusive fitness. There is some evidence that the grandmother effect is a factor in why humans are so long-lived, but we are still learning whether this is true for other animals. 

Now, a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences establishes strong evidence for the grandmother effect in orcas, colloquially known as killer whales. Orcas live in female-led, or matrilineal, societies and travel in tightly-knit family groups. Using a 30-year dataset comprised of photographs of two groups of killer whales and long-term observations of their behavior, they found that the support of grandmothers substantially increased survival of their grand-offspring. Given average values of salmon abundance (a key food source for these two groups of orcas), young whales who lost their maternal grandmother within the past two years were 4.5 times more likely to die than a young whale with a living maternal grandmother. This is because grandmothers help provide safety and food to the young whales, and teach them how to make their way in the world.

This study, combined with previous findings about the reproductive  costs incurred by both mother and grandmother whales when they are both raising children at the same time (an effect that this study was able to replicate), tells us a great deal about the evolutionary rationale for menopause. Grandmotherly support is key for long-lived organisms, like us and our whale cousins, to raise our young, and this effect is so powerful that it may have enabled us to live into our nineties and beyond. So next time you see her, give your grandma (or someone else's!) an extra big hug.

Making smartphones, laptops, and other tech takes a lot of resources. This is partly due to the carbon emissions from the manufacturing process, but the biggest toll comes from the mining of the rare earth metals that make your phone work. If you're reading this on your phone right now, you're holding about 0.034 grams of gold, 0.34 grams of silver, and smaller amounts of palladium, platinum, yttrium, terbium, and gadolinium — among others. These are tiny amounts, but consider the demand for smartphones around the world. 

All of these rare elements have to be mined from inside the Earth, in places like China and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mining is hugely environmentally destructive: forests are decimated, the ground is disturbed, and water quality in the area takes a dive. Worse still, the cobalt mining industry in the DRC depends on child labor. And elsewhere in the DRC, mining for coltan, another smartphone ingredient, threatens a key population of Grauer's gorillas.

Now take these environmental risks, and combine them with the fact that the average lifespan of a smartphone is just two years, the length of your contract with your cell phone company. After that, if you're lucky, you get a "free" upgrade. Awesome, right? Sure, if you ignore the fact that the environmental impact of a new phone is about the same as using  your old one for a decade. 

It's nearly impossible to live in the 21st century without contributing to environmental destruction and climate change. I am guilty as well — I eat meat and occasionally fly. But that doesn't mean that we should stop trying to do better by our planet, or ignore the consequences of our actions. This Christmas, I urge you to think carefully about that smartphone purchase, not matter what the Black Friday ads are telling you. 

I know I am.

I'm a field biologist, so I've spent plenty of time in the company of creepy crawlies, and I wouldn't call myself an arachnophobe, but something about sitting in a room where the lights have been shut off to prevent massive fires driven by a climate change-induced drought surrounded by migrating tarantulas sounds like my "The Day After Tomorrow" nightmare.

The mass tarantula migration is actually the least worrisome part of this story. Male tarantulas across the western part of the United States are migrating right now in search of mates. Tarantulas, with their huge, hairy bodies, look intimidating, but actually are not dangerous to humans. They have intricate courtship rituals that occasionally end up with the male as a meal instead of just a mate. And although this year's migration is slightly larger than it usually is, this is a normal phenomenon that happens from about mid-August to mid-October each year. Even if you (understandably) don't want to share your space with these eight-legged furballs, experts say that if you spot one you should just leave it alone. 

But something much more frightening than migrating tarantulas is happening in California at the same time. Pacific Gas and Electric Co. (PG&E), the main power company for much of the heavily-populated Bay Area, has shut off power to 800,000 customers in the region in the face of a red-flag wildfire and wind warning. High winds and increasingly dry weather caused by climate change mean that the entire area is — again — at risk of going up in flames. 

And this lack of preparation is, on some level, just a combination of greed, incompetence, and willful disregard for the environment. PG&E was found responsible for last year's deadly Camp Fire in Paradise, California, after faulty power lines sparked the blaze. And in April, the company was admonished by a judge for paying out shareholder dividends instead of trimming trees around dangerous lines. Now a large portion of California residents are paying the price as they spend unknown amounts of time in darkness.

U.S. infrastructure is simply not prepared for climate change. Hundreds of thousands in California are now reaping the whirlwind of that inaction. PG&E's sloth and ignorance put people, particularly those that rely on electricity for medical devices, in grave danger. There's many horrifying aspects of this story, but the one that stands out to me is that the only backup plan for people who need power for life sustaining medical equipment is for them to call an ambulance (presumably on their own dime).

As many have said time and time again, the most vulnerable among us will be the first to experience — and are already experiencing — the impacts of climate change. People are going to suffer and die, and it won't just happen in huge dramatic ways like hurricanes and drought. It'll happen in lots of mundane, insidious, and unnecessary ways. Like not having access to electricity to power a breathing machine, or not having an air conditioner during a heat wave. 

So by comparison I'm fine with the tarantulas.  

Sea otters are called "keystone" species, meaning that they are the linchpin that holds their ecosystem's food web together. A long-running line of ecological research has found that when sea otters are present in coastal ecosystems, populations of sea urchins (one of their favorite foods) are kept in check, allowing marine kelp forests to proliferate. This is a balanced, healthy coastal ecosystem. But when sea otters disappear, sea urchin numbers explode, they eat all the kelp, and the coast starts to look pretty bleak.   

Sea otter populations are still recovering from the effects of hunting for the fur trade in the 18th and 19th centuries, and their protection remains an important objective for California's Monterey Bay Aquarium. Between 2002 and 2015, a team of aquarium scientists, led by Karl Mayer, rescued 37 stranded and orphaned sea otter pups along the coast. They brought them back to the aquarium and gave them to captive female otters to raise as their own. After the pups were weaned, they were released into the Elkhorn Slough wetland, an estuary that is managed by state and federal natural resource agencies. This in itself was a great success, but Mayer and his team wondered about the fate of these released pups and how much they contributed to their newly adopted wild population — an important mark of how successful the aquarium's rehabilitation and reintroduction project truly is.

They found that released female otters reproduced at the same rate as fully wild otters, an encouraging sign that reintroduction can contribute to a healthy wild sea otter population. In fact, over the lifetime of their study, the reintroduced females and their own wild pups accounted for 55% of the growth of the Elkhorn Slough sea otter population! This is fantastic news for California's sea otters, and shows how captive animals can contribute to conservation of their wild counterparts. 

You probably didn't need another reason to love sea otters, with their hilarious old-man whiskers and their penchant for hand-holding, but let's add this conservation triumph to the list, anyway.

Today's international society functions like a giant ecological food web. Perturbations at one end ripple across the global economy and have unpredictable consequences, making it imperative for individual countries to have sound, well-considered economic policies.

But in his typical "I know better than everyone" approach to policy, Donald Trump provoked a trade war with China as soon as he was elected president of the United States. The heightened tensions between these two countries have shifted the movement patterns of agricultural products around the world, particularly soybeans. As of 2015, purchases from China accounted for 60% of U.S. soybean exports. But as a result of the escalating trade war — including a 25% duty on U.S.-grown soy implemented in retaliation for the Trump administration's tariffs on Chinese products — U.S. exports of soybeans to China declined by 98% in 2018.

The beneficiary of the U.S.-China agricultural spat? Brazil. They have provided the bulk of China's soy imports since Trump first proposed tariffs on China in April 2018. Although Brazilian soy exports to China had slipped a little earlier this year, they spiked again in mid-May after another round of failed U.S.-China trade talks.

But Brazil needs more agricultural land on which to plant enough soy to meet global demands — land which the country's new president, Jair Bolsonaro, is more than happy to take from the Amazon rain forest. To be fair, Bolsonaro has not publicly directly ordered that the Amazon be cleared for cultivation, and this problem does pre-date him: deforestation of the Amazon for soy (and agriculture in general) has been happening for decades. However, like his U.S. counterpart, Bolsonaro is notoriously anti-environment. His Minister of the Environment disingenuously claims that the way to save the Amazon is by opening it up to logging and mining. And after Brazilian officials allegedly looked the other way when they were warned that local farmers planned to set a series of fires to "show the president that we want to work," Bolsonaro floated the idea that NGOs were responsible for the fires.

Amazonian fires can occur naturally, and in the past they have been mainly linked to very dry periods caused by El Niño. But the current fires are different. Like the major fires that are currently raging in the rain forests of Indonesian Borneo and Sumatra, they are intentionally lit by farmers and land developers to cheaply and quickly prepare land for planting. The occurrence of human-ignited fires on top of increasing deforestation (which makes forests drier) combined with warmer, drier weather means that today's forest fires are larger and more frequent than they have been in the past. Ecologists have even declared this to be a "new Amazonian fire regime." 

This was all foreseeable: Trump's willful ignorance contributing to an ecological disaster (not to mention an economic crisis for U.S. farmers), the ignition of the Amazon, and Bolsonaro's gleefully callous response to the fires. Brazil's contribution to the global soybean market has been growing steadily since the 1960s, and surpassed the U.S. as the crop's main global exporter in 2013. Crops, and the roads needed to transport them to ports, have to go somewhere, and the Amazon rain forest is a huge expanse of fertile land. Scientists from Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology even warned us about the soybean-fire problem in late March.

The environmental costs of our failure to heed this warning are huge: 10% of the animal species on earth are found in the Amazon, and scientists estimate that the Brazilian fires have already released as much carbon dioxide into the air as the annual emissions of at least 22 million cars. The fires are also a human rights issue; the territories and lives of Brazil's Indigenous populations are at grave risk. Last week Bolsonaro sent the Brazilian military into the Amazon, a move that many believe is really designed to forcefully take Indigenous lands under the guise of "firefighting," given his genocidal language and targeted campaign against Indigenous communities and the fact that the military has been deployed to their territories. Although they deserve a huge portion of the blame, the soybean and cattle industries, and even Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump, aren't solely responsible for the destruction of the Amazon. Dark money and shady companies with political connections to anti-environment politicians, including Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, were a problem before Bolsonaro was elected. Major international banks and even furniture and shoe companies also contribute to deforestation.

The conservation of the Amazon rain forest, as well as other natural wonders, will always be as much a political and economic problem as an environmental one — let's hope the trees are still around when we solve it.

The obsession with colonizing space from many people (especially the ultra rich) has always been baffling to me. Space is big, and dead. It always struck me as a kind of anti-environmentalism, where we can solve all the problems we've made here on Earth by just packing up and leaving. It isn't happening. -DS

Dying from heatstroke seems like something that can only happen to extreme athletes or particularly unlucky folks. This article (the partner to Outside's piece on what it's like to die of hypothermia) dispels that myth. Human physiology piled onto mildly questionable choices -  that certainly wouldn't be deadly in other circumstances - can easily result in a very dangerous situation for anyone spending time outdoors in the summer sun. Read this article as a reminder to keep yourself and your loved ones safe on your next hike or beach day. - CF

 Algae's kind of gross but harmless as long as you’re not a kid or a dog and don’t swim in it. Also PSA, don’t let your dog eat algae chips: “It’ll get all crunchy like potato chips, and the dogs love to eat that.” - GSM

No explanation necessary. -DS