Early Animals, Hominin Diets, Groundwater Governance

 A few links to interesting listening and reading.

1) Tracking the first animals on earth:  Unequivocal evidence of animals is preserved in soft sediments from about 570 million years ago. The fossil record of the Ediacaran to early Cambrian times (570 to 500 million years ago) has yielded rich information about the patterns of animal evolution. Apart from fossils, comparative genetic studies have given insights into how different animal groups are related to each other and the order of branching of these groups. Amazingly, organic molecules recovered from enigmatic fossilized taxa have been used to differentiate between animal and non-animal remains. Zoologist Matthew Cobb explains all this and much more about early animal evolution in about 30 minutes. Give it a listen! 

2) Plant-eating and meat-eating in Australopithecus: What did our ancient relatives eat? By ancient, I mean going back a million years or more. We can use isotopes of nitrogen to tease out information about diets. Carnivores have more nitrogen-15 enriched tissue than plant eaters. Carbon isotopes (C13 and C12) also yield information about the diet of herbivores. Grazers munching on grass take in more of the heavier isotope of carbon than browsers eating leaves and stems. Paleoanthropologist John Hawks discusses some recent work on nitrogen and carbon isotopes of Australopithecines and how the patterns of isotopic variation extracted from tooth enamel can be interpreted in terms of diets and life history. Fascinating stuff. 

3) Addressing Depletion in Alluvial Aquifers: Why Context Matters in Participatory Groundwater Management: India relies a lot on groundwater for agriculture. There are signs from many parts of the country of acute groundwater distress. Participatory Groundwater Management initiatives have had some success in addressing this distress. Pratik Kumar and Veena Srinivasan point out that these cooperative movements have been more successful in hard rock aquifers from different parts of the country than alluvial aquifers of northwest India. Geology matters. Aquifer properties matter. Hard rock aquifers are more sensitive to abstraction and are rapidly de-watered and recharged seasonally. Alluvial aquifers are spread over vast areas and water levels are less sensitive to abstraction. The amount you can extract doesn't vary with lowering of water level. 

People depending on hard rock aquifers experience the limitation of the resource yearly and are more willing to join cooperative initiatives to manage the resource.

I have just given a gist of the more elaborate arguments in the paper. The graphic below very neatly compares hard rock and alluvial aquifers. 

 Source: Pratik Kumar and Veena Srinivasan 2025

The paper is open access.

Lithospheric Dehumidifier

A few years ago a friend decided to demolish his old house due to extensive and expensive water damage to the ground floor. 

Could this be the explanation for the damage?

xkcd comics

A spanking new apartment building now stands at the spot of the old bungalow. There are no signs of any water damage so far. A giant lithospheric dehumidifier may have been used during construction.

There is no end to the add on and perks developers promise these days.

Oil Hunters Of India

At Independence in 1947, India had just a few operational oil wells situated in the northeastern region of the country. Most of the subcontinent's sedimentary basins remained unexplored for their hydrocarbon potential. The Oil Hunter: Journey of a Geologist for India's Oil Exploration by Dr. Shreekrishna Deshpande is a personal recollection of the immense effort undertaken by Indian geologists to re imagine these basins as hydrocarbon source and reservoir rocks. It is the story of the development of India's oil industry told with unconcealed pride.

Russia, France, and the U.S. offered personnel and technical help along the way, but the lion's share of the credit goes to geologists of the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation for their perseverance and resilience in the face of immense challenges.

Dr. Deshpande joined the ONGC in its early days in 1961 and describes vividly his field experience in remote locales all across the country, from scorching Kutch, to steep Himalaya terrain, to facing personal danger during an insurgency in Assam. There were inevitable career challenges along the way due to changing institutional structure and unrealistic political expectations. Their impact on company work culture and productivity is described in honest and direct language.

One of my favorite passages comes towards the end of the book where he explains the divergence between geologists and management in their basic understanding of exploration and discovery.

"Subsurface discoveries of oil reserves cannot be projected with certainty. The inputs to the discoveries are always deterministic, but the result is never so, and there is a strong factor of probability. Exploration efforts are to reduce the risk factor and increase the probability of discovery. Methods for direct detection of  hydrocarbons from the surface, are  yet to be evolved. This contrasts with any other industry, where the output is more predictable and proportionate to the input. 

.... As a simplistic approach the management decides the cost of discovery of one tonne of oil by dividing the amount of discovered oil by the expenditure met. It is expected by them that similar expenditure should proportionately result in additional discoveries.

When a sedimentary basin turns old and mature, the addition to the existing stock of subsurface oil becomes increasingly difficult. Non-geoscientists then blame geologists for such uncertainty. Only the high profitability in the oil industry is visible; its probabilistic nature and the risks involved are not so obvious. The stochastic nature of oil discoveries is not appreciated by non-explorationists". 

My one complaint about this book is that there is very little geology in it! Dr. Deshpande describes the geology work he and others undertook in very broad strokes. I felt that a few examples of how specific types of geologic data is useful for petroleum exploration would be illuminating for the non specialist reader. 

Let me give an example. Early in his career he is sent to Osmania University, Hyderabad, to analyze some sedimentary rock samples using Differential Thermal Analysis. He simply mentions that the results were used by ONGC in their exploration efforts, but how so? DTA is a way to understand whether the sedimentary rock was baked during burial to temperatures that are conducive for hydrocarbon formation. 

Another example, and one that involves his specialization, could have been a brief passage describing his work on limestones. What is a carbonate sedimentologist looking for in these rocks? The main reservoir of Mumbai High, India's biggest oilfield, are Miocene age limestone beds which were deposited repeatedly during phases of oscillating sea level. Among other things, exploration geologists want to know how open spaces or porosity in these rocks has evolved over time and whether its occurrence can be predicted throughout the sedimentary section. There was a geological detective story waiting to be told there. 

But these are mere quibbles. Overall, this is a very readable account of the productive and remarkable career of a pioneer exploration geologist of India.  Popular accounts of Indian geology and industry are rare. Recently, Himalaya geology expert Dr. Om N. Bhargava released his memoir, Travails and Ecstasy of a Geologist Addicted to the Himalaya, on his experiences of working in the Himalaya. Indian earth scientists are beginning to share the good work they have done with a more general audience, bringing a much needed familiarity with a lesser appreciated but critical field of study. 

20,000 Days In The Life Of A Clam

My Whatsapp profile description says, "what's a million years here and there".

It is a tongue in cheek acknowledgment of the vast spans of time geologists often have to contend with. If I am studying a rock that formed more than a billion years ago, a 5 to 10 million year uncertainty in nailing down its exact time of formation is acceptable. Uncertainty in estimating the time of formation may occur due to our as yet not so perfect understanding of the decay rate of various radioactive isotopes being used for dating, or due to limits of sensitivity of the instruments measuring the radioactive isotopes in the mineral. We are making great strides in measurement techniques with a 0.1 % accuracy now achievable. 

Sedimentary rocks are harder to date than igneous rocks since minerals with radioactive elements rarely form in them at the time of their deposition (some limestones and black shales are exceptions). Often, using some indirect methods we can bracket their maximum and minimum age. Take the example of the Alwar Group sedimentary rocks which occur in the northern Aravalli mountains in Rajasthan. They are estimated to have been deposited sometime between 2.1 billion years ago and 1.8 billion years ago, an uncertainty of 300 million years! We know from our understanding of sediment accumulation processes that deposition was not uniformly spread out over the 300 million years. Rather, the sequence of sediments would have been deposited in discrete pulses lasting 10 to 20 million years, separated by long phases of non-deposition. 

Amazingly, even though we don't know exactly when during the 300 million year interval these sediments came to be deposited, we can track fairly accurately what was happening then on a daily basis. Some strata of the Alwar Group are of shallow marine origin. As the daily tide flooded in and ebbed, a thin layer of sand was deposited during each of these high energy phases. During the slack phase in between, a thin layer of mud was deposited. Stacks of these tidal bundles made of a sand and mud couplet record the passage of daily tides. Observing the stacking pattern closely reveals even more details. Sets of bundles of thicker sand-mud couplets alternate with sets of thinner bundles. Each set formed during alternating spring (thick layers) and neep tide (thin layers) cycles. 

We can interpret the ancient record by comparing the patterns with those forming today in different settings. The principle "present is the key to the past" is used with some caution, but it works well in this case.

Such tidal rhythmites are fairly common in the geologic record. The pictures to the left is a section of a core from  Cretaceous age sediments laid down in an estuary. The sedimentary section is made up of sets of thicker silt layers capped by a darker mud layer, overlain by a set of thinner silt and mud couplets. Each silt layer represents deposition during the flood or ebb tide. During the slack period, stirred up organic rich mud settled down. Again, we don't know the exact age of the rock to a certainty of few hundred thousand years, but we can track daily events. Image source: G. Shanmugan; AAPG Bulletin v. 84, 2000.

Speaking of tides, the earth's rotation is slowing down due to tidal friction. Marine organisms like corals, brachiopods, and clams build a calcium carbonate skeleton to house their soft tissues. Their shell grows by a daily addition of a thin mineral layer. Geologists have studied the pattern of skeleton growth of Paleozoic corals. Besides daily growth bands, they can identify seasons too, as corals lay down thicker bands during the dry season and thinner bands during the wet phase. The number of days in the year are estimated by counting the number of daily bands in each season. It turns out that there were about 420 days in a year during the early and middle Silurian (between 443 million to 419 million years ago). By middle Devonian (roughly 370 million years ago), some 50 million years later, the number of days had reduced to about 410. Using bivalve shells, scientists estimate that there were 370 days in a year by Late Cretaceous times (about 80 to 70 million years ago). 

There are other examples closer to our own existence on earth of natural rhythms being preserved in rock. Geologists and climate experts routinely use mineral bands in cave stalagmites to understand variations in rainfall. A recent study by Gayatri Kathayat and colleagues from Uttarakhand, North India, reveals details of the course of Indian monsoons over thousands of years, mapping dry and wet phases lasting few centuries each. Despite an uncertainty of a few decades in the absolute age of each layer, it gives us a broad picture of climate change through the Holocene. 

We accept the fuzziness of our estimates of the age of an event while being able to sharply resolve the changes taking place in that cloud of uncertainty.

I could have named this post "Ode to Laminae", an appreciation of thin layers that form in tune with earth cycles and which preserve in their layering valuable information on ancient tides, earth moon dynamics, changing of seasons, and longer term climate change.  I just thought the title of the post and the paper it refers to is better click bait. 

Sometime in the Late Miocene (about 10 million years ago, what's a few tens of thousands of years here and there) a giant clam living on the western margin of the Makassar Strait (Indonesia) built a shell with daily growth increments. I will post the entire abstract of the paper below so you can get an idea of the details of ocean conditions scientists can tease out today with sophisticated instrumentation.  

 Iris Arndt et.al., 20,000 days in the life of a giant clam reveal late Miocene tropical climate variability.

Giant clams (Tridacna) are well-suited archives for studying past climates at (sub-)seasonal timescales, even in ‘deep-time’ due to their high preservation potential. They are fast growing (mm-cm/year), live several decades and build large aragonitic shells with seasonal to daily growth increments. Here we present a multi-proxy record of a late Miocene Tridacna that grew on the western margin of the Makassar Strait (Indonesia). By analysing daily elemental cycle lengths using our recently developed Python script Daydacna, we build an internal age model, which indicates that our record spans 20,916 ± 1220 days (2 SD), i.e. ∼57 ± 3 years. Our temporally resolved dataset of elemental ratios (El/Ca at sub-daily resolution) and stable oxygen and carbon isotopes (δ18O and δ13C at seasonal to weekly resolution) was complemented by dual clumped isotope measurements, which reveal that the shell grew in isotopic equilibrium with seawater. The corresponding Δ47 value yields a temperature of 27.9 ± 2.4 °C (2 SE) from which we calculate a mean oxygen isotopic composition of late Miocene tropical seawater of −0.43 ± 0.50 ‰. In our multi-decadal high temporal resolution records, we found multi-annual, seasonal and daily cycles as well as multi-day extreme weather events. We hypothesise that the multi-annual cycles (slightly above three years) might reflect global climate phenomena like ENSO, with the more clearly preserved yearly cycles indicating regional changes of water inflow into the reef, which together impact the local isotopic composition of water, temperature and nutrient availability. In addition, our chronology indicates that twice a year a rainy and cloudy season, presumably related to the passing of the ITCZ, affected light availability and primary productivity in the reef, reflected in decreased shell growth rates. Finally, we find irregularly occurring extreme weather events likely connected to heavy precipitation events that led to increased runoff, high turbidity, and possibly reduced temperatures in the reef.

Tell me geology isn't the coolest field of study.

Plastic In Sediment, Antarctica Ice Core, Alfred Wallace

A few interesting readings:

1) Sedimentation Shifted - How rivers move sediment along their course to the sea is an important aspect of sedimentology research. Grain size, shape, and density, all affect how currents move sediment, and where and in what proportions sand, silt, and mud particles come to be deposited. Now there is a new kid on the block: plastic. Catherine Russell has written a fascinating article diving deep into experimental work on how plastic impacts sediment transport. The work she describes has important implications for our understanding of plastic pollution in rivers, and the role plastic particles plays in enhancing erosion rates and sediment redistribution in riverbeds. 

2) Antarctica: 1.2-Million-Year-Old Ice- Scientists use gases trapped in old ice to measure ancient atmospheric composition and estimate past climatic conditions. A long running drilling program in Antarctica had so far recovered 800,000 year old ice. That record has been recently broken. Scientists have reached the very bedrock of the Antarctica continent. The oldest ice at the very bottom is 1.2 million years old. This is the longest continuous record of our climate that we have so far.  It hold much valuable information on climate fluctuations through the Pleistocene and Holocene. This article is a press release of the University of Bern. 

3) Beyond Evolution: Alfred Russel Wallace’s critique of the 19th century world- Alfred Russel Wallace is the co-discover of evolution through natural selection along with Charles Darwin. He was a brilliant naturalist and made foundational contributions to natural history. But he also was very sympathetic to the plight of local people suffering under colonialism and the environmental degradation the race to strip the land of resources was causing. Marshall A. summarizes nicely Wallace's observations on the impact of environmental damage, both in his native Wales and also during his travels in the far away Malay archipelago. 

Let me take this opportunity to share again this lovingly crafted documentary on the life and work of Alfred Wallace. It is made as a paper-puppet animation, produced by Flora Litchman and Sharon Shattuck and narrated by George Beccaloni of the  Natural History Museum London and Andrew Berry of Harvard University.

 

What a fine example of science outreach.