An Astrologer Issues a Challenge

Sometime back I slammed an article about astrology and earthquake prediction that was published by DNA. Mr. Amit Dave who made those predictions works for the Mumbai municipal corporation. He read my post and sent me quite a courteous reply along with a list of probable earthquakes for the month of September.

Here is the list:

8 th sept 2008 - 7.2 on Richter scale
10 th sept 2008 -7.3 on Richter scale
15/ 16 th sept 2008 - 7.5 Richter scale

He is not able to give locations but is apparently working on fine tuning his predictions. As September rolls along I will keep you posted :-)

Update: Was September 08 Earthquake Month?

Take That You Evolution Doubters!

Two fine examples of how evolution works and two sucker punches in the face of creationists and evolution doubters. But were is the missing link is one of the older arguments against evolution and despite thousands of examples of "transitional" forms creationists are never satisfied. I guess they never will be but its fun to poke them in the eye with great examples. The evidence is present in molecules as well as fossils of how great transformations were generated by evolution.

The transition from single celled to multi-celled organisms required that there be a complex system of cell signalling proteins for information to be passed from one cell to another. But how can multi-celled organisms evolve without these proteins and why would single celled organisms posses such molecules? A molecular study of single celled choanoflagellates, whose ancient ancestors most likely gave rise to multi-celluar animals have been found to possess three gene markers for cell to cell signalling proteins that are active in multi-cellular organisms. Researchers suspect that in these single celled organisms the signalling proteins play similar but different roles and were co-opted by evolution for signalling purposes during the evolution of multi-cellularity. Evolution tinkers around, building complex parts from what is lying around, moulding existing parts to serve new functions.

Fossils too occasionally throw up fine examples of transformation from one form to another. Flatfish which lie on sandy sea bottoms have both eyes on one side of the head staring into the water column above. Their ancestors presumable had a symmetrical eye arrangement, but evolution doubters argue what good is a slightly asymmetrical head which retains eyes of either side of the head. Natural selection could never have produced such slight asymmetry which would give the fish no adaptive advantage. Two recently discovered fossils of ancient Eocene flatfish from museum collections show exactly the beginnings of this partial asymmetry. The eye has begun its journey towards the other side of the head but not quite. A snapshot of an intermediate stage of evolution frozen in a 50 million years old limestone. The asymmetry of flatfish evolved gradually over time. No need for any mysterious mechanisms or sudden spontaneous origins.

Revising the Age of the Vindhyan Rocks

From Science Daily, a summary of research on the PreCambrian Vindhyan Group of rocks from central India. The Vindhyans are a sprawling east west oriented mountain chain. You encounter it when you travel on central railway from Pune to Delhi in the vicinity of Bhopal. All those flat lying, layered sandstones you see are the Vindhyans. The upper part of the Vindhyans, the Rewa and Bhander Groups have been thought to be about 700-500 million years old. This new research proposes that the Upper Vindhyans are about 1000 million years old, a revision of up to 500 million years. The bizarre part is that Science Daily never mentions that it is the upper part of the Vindhyans that have been studied and I had to dig into the abstract to settle that. Geologists are used to dates being revised by a few million years, but this revision if it stands is jaw dropping. Think about it for a minute. The entire Phanerozoic period from Cambrian to recent, defined by the first appearance of abundant skeletonized animal fossils is about 540 million years. This proposed correction represents about 11% of earth history. The images below depict the geological time scale and you get an idea about the ranges I am talking about. Notice how small a time period the Phanerozoic is compared with the PreCambrian.

How can such a massive revision come about and why were geologists so unsure and so off base regarding the age of the Vindhyans? The advantage when working in the Phanerozoic is the presence of fossils. We can use changes in fossil composition to subdivide the geological record into finer time periods which reflect changing ecology's, climates and sea-levels. The PreCambrian, a vast time period ranging from about 4.2 billion years to 542 million years has a very scanty fossil record. This combined with severe metamorphism -especially in the Archean, the earlier part of the PreCambrian- which destroys original sedimentary structures makes paleo-ecological reconstructions difficult. It has been hard to create a meaningful and fine scale subdivision of the rock record that reflects biological evolution and geological changes occurring worldwide. Geologists have been using continent scale thermal and tectonic events that may leave a characteristic and correlatable rock record to subdivide the PreCambrian but such events are far and few between. One such example though is the kimberlite magmatism that affected Peninsular India around 1100 million years ago. This magmatism includes the famous diamond bearing rocks of Panna district, Madhya Pradesh. This activity has left a marker horizon throughout the Peninsular Indian sedimentary basins that is used to identify the base of the NeoProterozoic. Overall, the situation is somewhat alleviated in the Proterozoic, the younger portion of the PreCambrian. Here there are examples of un-metamorphosed sediment from all over the world including India. More detailed studies are finding evidence of evolution preserved as trace fossils and early forms of skeletal organisms, especially in the NeoProterozoic. But the lack of a consistent fossil record has certainly limited the fine scale subdivision of PreCambrian earth history.

The report in Science Daily makes it seem as if the much older age proposed has come as a complete surprise. But that is not so. For long the Vindhyans, which are mainly composed of sandstone, shale and limestones were thought to have lacked minerals which could be used for absolute radiometric dating. But that has changed recently. Geo-chronological work on the Vindhyan group has been going on for several years now and many earlier studies have shown that the Vindhyans are much older. Many of this earlier studies had fixed the age of the lower part of the Vindhyans to be around 1600 million years old, leaving the age of the Upper Vindhyans somewhat unresolved. This current work though focuses on the Upper Vindhyans and uses two independent methods as cross-reference. I find the collective evidence quite persuasive. This may turn out to be one of those findings where geology textbooks may have to be altered.

Science Daily also points out some exciting implications of this finding. First, that it removes an objection to the Snowball earth theory, which says that from 790-630 million years ago, the earth was covered with glaciers that extended up to 10 deg of the equator. There is no physical evidence of this carved on the Vindhyans so pushing back the age of the Upper Vindhyans, making them much older than the snowball earth gets rid of this obstacle. Another implied paradigm shift is regarding the timing of the origin of multi cellular animals. Skeletal remains of metazoans begin appearing in the fossil record by 580 million years ago. The accepted date for the origin of metazoans based on fossils and molecular phylogeny is in the NeoProterozoic between 700-600 million years ago, and the body and skeletal fossil record of that and the slightly younger early Cambrian indicates several rapid evolutionary radiations whereby successive grades of complex animals evolved geologically rapidly and filled empty ecologic niches. On the other hand, some studies in the Vindhyans claim preservation of traces and burrows of triploblastic animals in rocks older than 1 billion years ago, dates which were not accepted by many geologists. No body fossils or skeletal remains of metazoans have been found in rocks this old anywhere. If these trace fossils do represent triploblasts then that would push the origin of complex animals much further back in time and implies a much more stately and slow evolution of complexity. In this view much of the evolution of complexity has been cryptic, not revealed by the fossil record perhaps because animals lacked hard skeletons. The relatively sudden appearance of body fossils by late NeoProterozoic -early Cambrian is then a preservation artifact. Animals already had evolved complex body parts, the explosion of fossils simply indicating a new ability to secrete skeletons. This latter view has gained in popularity among some geologists working on the Vindhyans. But the interpretations of the trace fossils from the Vindhyans has been criticized as not indicative of triploblasts, and basically most paleobiologists think that the metazoan body fossil patterns of the NeoProterozoic and early Cambrian are a faithful record of evolutionary history i.e. metazoans arose relatively late in the NeoProterozoic and evolved morphological complexity rapidly thereafter. Now a more reliable geo-chronological framework for the Vindhyans may open up these old findings to better scrutiny.

India Launches National Action Plan on Climate Change

The Prime Minister Mr. Manmohan Singh finally unveiled the National Action Plan on Climate Change (pdf: 15 mb). It is a 52 page document. There are 8 missions to combat, mitigate and adapt to climate change: 1. Solar Energy 2. Enhanced Energy Efficiency 3. Sustainable Habitat4. Conserving Water 5. Sustaining the Himalayan Ecosystem 6. A “Green India” 7. Sustainable Agriculture 8. Strategic Knowledge Platform for Climate Change. I have not read the document yet but I plan to and maybe post on some topics of interest. Meanwhile I was struck by this statement by the PM that India's per-capita greenhouse gas emissions will "at no point exceed that of developed countries."

This is a clever statement. It re enforces our commitment to the per-capita method of looking at CO2 emissions, which India has argued is the only equitable way of addressing emissions, but at the same time issues a challenge to developed countries to reduce their emissions as much as possible. It also gives us a huge space to increase our own emissions. Currently per-capita emissions of developed nations average to about 15 tons of CO2 per year. India emits per-capita about 1.3 tons CO2 per year. The G8 have made various pledges to reduce emissions by 60-80% by 2050. Even if they are able to reduce emissions by 50%, an amount considered very optimistic by many, India will theoretically be able to increase its per-capita emissions about 5 fold while maintaining levels below those of the developed nations. Our emissions will most likely not grow that much. The projections are for a 2-3 fold increase in our emissions by 2050 with the business as usual scenario, but might be a lot less (pdf: 8 mb) if we enlarge our energy efficiency and renewable energy programs, both of which feature in the National Action Plan on Climate Change.

We need to look at reducing our CO2 emissions not only from the perspective of combating global warming but all the associated pollution that accompany CO2 emissions. Coal burning power plants, industrial emissions, emissions from transportation are all adding to the rapid growth of sulphate pollution one of the main ingredients of soot. This not only has damaging local health effects but may even impact monsoon patterns. Climate models predict an overall increase in the Indian monsoons over the next several decades, but a recent study shows that an increase in soot also known as brown haze which hangs over the Indian subcontinent may weaken the monsoon by blocking sunlight reaching the Indian ocean. While an uneven increase in rainfall due to a warming trend will come with its own problems, even a short to medium term decrease in overall rainfall might prove to be disastrous for India. Flipping or rather scrolling through the report I noticed that there is not much enthusiasm on carbon capture and storage strategies (CCS) for coal power plants. This is a pity since much of our expansion in power generation in the 11th 5-year plan will be through increased coal plants. I think this is where we should be proactive in pursuing technology transfer for CCS under the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol. Power generation will account for about 50% of our emissions in 2050 and a shift towards cleaner technologies for coal plants and a larger component of renewable energy in power sector will go a long way in achieving emission reductions.

Reducing these emissions is in our own interest and I hope we don't get too caught up in our "right" to emit as much per-capita as developed countries to ignore the impacts of increasing emissions and associated pollution on our own citizens. We keep making the argument of our per-capita emissions being lower than developed countries but what is never pointed out by the government but has been pointed out by others is that there is a huge disparity in our emissions. Although the average per-capita emissions of an Indian is about 1.3 ton CO2 per year, about 150 million Indians already emit considerably more than the sustainable limit (2.5 tCO2 per year) needed to restrict CO2 levels to about 450 ppm corresponding to about a 2 deg centigrade increase in temperature (this is considered a threshold figure, any temperature increase more than this will increase the risk of catastrophic changes to the climate system). The rest of the 800 million or so emit much less, but this is the section of society which will feel the impacts of local pollution as well as long term climate change the most. If through a scientific evaluation we have come to a consensus cutoff value for our emissions, then an exceeding of that limit by rich Indians is as unjust on poor Indians as exceeding that limit by a rich European. So while we argue for the right to equitable per-capita emissions with developed countries we need to extend the same principle to address disparities in our society.

I am sure there is a lot more to say about various aspects of our response to climate change but this will do for now.

Immigrating to America

A couple of days ago I finished reading The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America And Its Peoples by Tim Flannery, the Australian mammal expert and ecologist. I really enjoyed the book. It is written on an epic scale covering the natural history of the continent over last 65 millions years. The earth went through a rapid period of reorganization of its terrestrial and marine ecosystems following a mass extinction and Flannery chooses that event to begin his exploration. Covering 65 million years in 300 odd pages means that the book moves along at a fairly brisk pace but I thought Flannery has done an exceptionally skillful job of identifying the higher level geological and climatic controls on the transformation of North America over this period. This gives the book a well defined framework within which to think through the ecologic, bio geographic and evolutionary patterns exhibited by the continents fauna and flora. Cultural patterns too as Flannery devotes the last segment to the arrival of humans and their considerable impact on the terrestrial and marine biosphere.

North America at various times over the past 65 million years has been attached to Asia and Europe through land "bridges". That has enabled it to be the land of immigrants as mammalian groups of Asian and European stock made their way into the continent and evolved a unique north American characteristic over time. This has mostly been a one way traffic, of all the modern placental mammals, only camels, horses and dogs are north American exports of ancient pedegree. Apparently, no one wants to leave once inside the continent and Flannery sees a continuity in the immigration patterns of another mammal - Homo sapiens. Since I am not a vertebrate paleontologist or a mammal expert, I liked the part of the book that dealt with human arrival and impact more than some of the early pre-human history. The modern north American ecosystems have been rendered depauperate of mammalian megafauna and other animal and plant groups and Flannery gives ample evidence in the form of timings of extinctions and some ingenious research on mammoth tusks that it has been mostly human influence and not climatic changes that is to blame. The book deals with big themes, extinction, migration and evolutionary adaptation of groups of organisms over large periods of time, but I found enough small details and asides that weave through the narrative and makes reading a pleasure in the first place. Details that you can ruminate over, those that suddenly crystallize some nebulous ideas and thoughts you have. You also now possess some fodder to impress friends over coffee. Why is cactus common in the Sonaran desert of Arizona and not in the Australian desert? Answer: Even if scant, the plant does needs predictable rainfall and nutritious soil. The Australian desert is bereft of either. Why did the field of vertebrate paleontology develop to the extent it did in the U.S and not in Canada? Answer: The ice age glaciers covering large expanses of Canada but not the U.S. ground up literally to dust the sediment cover and entombed fossils. The Canadians had little to work with. And this gem: The key to the bison's role in the prairie ecosystem lay in the fact that the great grassland were piss-driven. Buffalo urine fertilized the grasslands!

Flannery is pretty severe on the human propensity and ability to devastate the environment and treat fellow human beings with astonishing intolerance. He has a lot to say about the relationship of native Indians and the Europeans. The conflicts and wars were known to me, but I learnt something new in his explanation on the different approaches taken by the Spanish, French and English settlers. The Spanish came as a state and having defeated the incumbent Indian state, simply took over possession of state property. They never worked the land themselves, but collected taxes and used labor just as the native Indian chiefs had done. This though limited their influence over only the captured property and not much beyond. The French came as fur traders and developed a sort of a business relationship with the Indians. This meant they had to maintain good relations with the Indians. Grabbing land was self-defeating as they had to rely on the Indians for sources of fur and other goods. The English though came either as Puritan rebels with a belief that this was the chosen land, or as commerical expansionists, who saw Indians are competitors for the rich soil and resources they craved for. Winning land became an all consuming goal and the eventual victory handed them the biggest share of the continent.

Flannery identifies three phases of human occupation in North America. A pioneer phase, a period of ecologic release and finally adaptation. According to him much of North America is still stuck in the second phase, one in which people are living as if on the frontier, appropriating resources with scant regard to the consequences. Adaptation, where one learns to live within the constraints imposed by the environment is slow in coming. It's hard to disagree with the general tone of this argument, but humans do have an ability to reinvent themselves, none more so than North Americans and change is slowly coming. Two recent news items caught my eye that gives me some hope. Plans are afoot to restore part of the great plains prairie, the vast sea of grasslands that was home to the great buffalo herds of the past. And yesterday came the news that Florida is planning to acquire several thousand hectares of land from sugar companies and revert in back into a marshland, connecting Lake Okeechobee to the southern everglades national park. This won't transform the landscape to a pre-human form, for the prairie and the everglades have themselves been forged by early human activity. There is a radical remedy proposed in the book to correct that too, namely the re-introduction of fauna which disappeared from North America 13,000 to 10,000 years ago. Let lions, camels and peccaries roam again on reserve lands. This may make ecologic sense, but just take notice of the vociferous objections by ranchers to the re-introduction of one carnivore species, the wolf, in Yellowstone and I have doubts about anything more ambitious being put into action in the foreeable future. As managers of the biosphere we need to find a compromise between development and bringing reserve areas back to an acceptable state of "pristineness", and these two experiments on the prairie and the everglades look promising.

This is a cracking good book. Go get it.