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Newsletter of the Geological Society of Africa

Geological

NEWSLETTER

GSAF MATTERS GSAF IN THE WEB AFFILIATIONS MOU’S OF GSAF WITH OYES-AFRICA NEWS OF/ON AFRICA NEWS OF/ON THE REST NEWS OF/ON THE SPACEINTERESTING SITES LITERATURE ON AFRICA OTHER INTERESTING LITERATUREEVENTS IN AFRICA AND ABOUT AFRICAREST OF THE WORLD PROFESSIONAL COURSESINTERESTING PHOTOS GEOLOGY OF AFRICAN COUNTRIES/TERRI

Edited by Lopo Vasconcelos Editor of the GSAf Newsletter [email protected]

Africa (GSAf) – Nr. 11; November, 2013 – Annum 3.

Geological Society of Africawww.geologicalsocietyofafrica.org

- Nr. 11 of 2013 – Annum

Contents

MOU’S OF GSAF WITH OTHER ORGANIZATIONS

NEWS OF/ON THE REST OF THE WORLD NEWS OF/ON THE SPACE / ASTRONOMY

TERATURE

AFRICA

PROFESSIONAL COURSES/WORKSHOPS/SCHOLARSHIPS

ICAN COUNTRIES/TERRITORIES

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Africa www.geologicalsocietyofafrica.org

Annum 3

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Newsletter of the Geological Society of Africa (GSAf) – Nr. 11; November, 2013 – Annum 3. 2

GSAf MATTERS

25TH COLLOQUIUM OF AFRICAM GEOLOGY – CAG25, 2015, Dar-e s-Salaam, Tanzania


Keep up-to-date on the latest happenings in geoscience, energy and environment news with EARTH Magazine. EARTH is your source for the science behind the headlines, giving readers definitive coverage on topics from natural resources, natural disasters and the environment to space exploration and paleontology. Order your subscription to EARTH online at www.earthmagazine.org.

GSAf IN THE WEB

Website of the GSAf : FaceBook of the GSAf:

www.geologicalsocietyofafrica.org Not a member of the Geological Society of Africa yet? What are you waiting for? You can apply online through our website (see address above)

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Geological-Society-of-Africa-GSAf/187410537966092

Visit our FB page; See news about Africa and the World; You can post information related to Geology, Earth Sciences. Please do not post propaganda and marketing material.

AFFILIATIONS The Geological Society of Affrica is affiliated to the following organizations:

AGI - American Geosciences Institute http://www.agiweb.org/

IUGS - International Union of Geological Sciences http://www.iugs.org/

GSA - Geological Society of America http://www.geosociety.org/

EarthScienceMatters Foundation http://earthsciencematters.org/

MoU’s OF GSAf WITH OTHER ORGANIZATIONS

The Geological Society of Affrica is SIGNED Memoranda of Understanding with the following organizations: International Association of Sedimentologists (IAS)

http://www.sedimentologists.org/

Elsevier

http://www.elsevier.com/

International Association of Geoethics

IAGETH has a new website. Please visit us at

IAGETH has recently created the ISAB - The IAGETH Senior Advisory Board - comprised of a prestigious group of internationally recognized experts, from different regions and geoscientific disciplines. Although ISAB members don’t have specific functional tasks in the working of the IAGETH, they act as a “Think Tank” offering observations, guidance and advice and providing unique perspectives and insights to help on some issues (http://www.icog.es/iageth/index.php/senior-advisory-board/)

http://www.icog.es/iageth/


YES-AFRICA

25TH COLLOQUIUM OF AFRICAM GEOLOGY – CAG25, 2015, Dar-e s-Salaam, Tanzania


NEWS OF/ON AFRICA Côte d'Ivoire has enormous gold exploration potenti al – Bristow By: Natasha Odendaal. 28th October 2013.

JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) - Despite facing its own drawn-out battles in establishing a sustainable mining operation in Côte d'Ivoire, Randgold Resources CEO Mark Bristow believes the West African country has the potential to become one of sub-Saharan Africa's key exploration destinations. The West African country was relatively unexplored but highly prospective for gold and other metals, which could potentially provide gold investors with a platform to establish a sustainable mining industry, Bristow said in a speech delivered at a media briefing at the weekend. He stated that the nation had, arguably, the most advanced infrastructure in the region and a competent civil service. However, he urged the government to ensure that its mining code, which was currently under review, remained investor-friendly, while government should act as a partner to the mining companies, to create long-term economic value to benefit all stakeholders. Randgold commissioned and started production at Côte d'Ivoire's largest

gold mine Tongon, in 2010, and already produced more than 600 000 oz of gold and contributed more than $50-million to the State in the form of royalties and taxes, despite a difficult start to the project. The mine was commissioned amid the unrest that followed a disputed outcome of the presidential election and had, in addition to suffering erratic power supply from the national grid, experienced some plant start-up issues, which were being dealt with through a number of plant expansion and upgrade projects. The mine's performance was steadily improving, Bristow commented. He added that Randgold remained committed to working with the country’s government to build a sustainable mining industry and would use its Tongon operation as a platform from which to find and develop world-class gold deposits. Randgold geologists were aggressively exploring its portfolio of 15 permits elsewhere in the country for further multimillion-ounce gold deposits. Edited by: Creamer Media Reporter. At http://www.miningweekly.com/article/cte-divoire-has-enormous-gold-exploration-potential-bristow-2013-10-28

Partnership signals a new era of coastal and marine research This map of Algoa Bay and St Francis Bay shows the observation equipment run by multiple partners working towards a greater observatory footprint in the SAEON Algoa Bay Sentinel Site, making it the most extensively monitored bay in Africa. Source: Dr Tommy Bornman, SAEON Elwandle Node

By Penny Haworth, Manager: Communications & Governance, SAIAB One of Nelson Mandela Bay's leading assets, Algoa Bay, is set to benefit from a partnership between three leading research and monitoring organisations. On 26 August, Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (NMMU) formalised its working relationship with the South African Environmental Observation Network (SAEON) and the South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity (SAIAB) in a wide range of initiatives to provide key research on Algoa Bay and surrounding coastline. According to Dr Tommy Bornman, Manager of the SAEON Elwandle Node who has been instrumental in the negotiations, the signing of this memorandum of understanding (MoU) signals "the start of a new era of coastal and marine research" in the Eastern Cape and Southern Africa. "It will give all involved a stronger platform from which to work in a number of areas," Dr Bornman said. Both SAEON and SAIAB are entities of the National Research Foundation (NRF), which works closely with the university, and in this case, NMMU's Coastal and Marine Research Unit. "We have always had a good working relationship with the two Grahamstown-based organisations. The MoU will allow us to further align our efforts," says NMMU's Science Faculty Dean, Prof. Andrew Leitch. Algoa Bay Algoa Bay, stretching from Cape Recife in the west to Cape Padrone in the east, is already acknowledged as one of the best researched bays in southern Africa and is often referred to as a health yardstick for bays nationally. The Bay is home to Bird Island with the world's largest Cape gannet colony, the St Croix Island group, and 43% of the global population of African

penguins. The Alexandria Dune Field, spanning the western half of Algoa Bay, is one of the largest coastal dunefields in the world. Signing ceremony The MoU signing at the university was attended by key stakeholders including the Chief Executive Officer of the NRF, Dr Albert van Jaarsveld, NMMU's Vice-Chancellor Prof. Derrick Swartz, Deputy Vice-Chancellor: Research and Engagement, Prof. Thoko Mayekiso, Dr Angus Paterson, Managing Director of SAIAB, Johan Pauw, Managing Director of SAEON, Dr Tommy Bornman, Manager of the SAEON Elwandle Node and Dr Juliet Hermes, Manager of the SAEON Egagasini Node. NMMU researchers Dr Linda Harris of the Zoology Department and Coastal and Marine Research Unit and botany doctoral student Dimitri Veldkornet shared short presentations on the effects of climate change in South Africa at the signing. Dr Harris focused on how these changes impact on marine ecosystems. Pooling resources The Elwandle Node of SAEON, which focuses on long-term ecological research (LTER) in the coastal zone, and SAIAB with its particular bent towards long-standing research in estuaries and the coastal environment, will now formally pool their resources with NMMU in terms of knowledge, equipment and researchers. This is further strengthened by the SAEON Egagasini Node's involvement in Algoa Bay through physical oceanography and data expertise. The Egagasini Node's Dr Wayne Goschen is an honorary research associate at NMMU and working with the university's Coastal and Marine Research Unit to set up postgraduate studies in oceanography. "In terms of research platform provision, SAIAB has hosted the SAEON Elwandle Node for the last seven years and between us we have developed a range of research platforms such as the Algoa Bay Sentinel Site and the Remote Operated Vehicle Unit. We have been collaborating with NMMU researchers for many years," says SAIAB's Managing Director Dr Angus Paterson. These researchers include Prof. Janine Adams, Prof. Tris Wooldridge, Dr Nadine Strydom, Dr Derek du Preez and the incumbent of NMMU's new Shallow Water Ecosystems research chair, Prof. Renzo Perissinotto More at http://www.saeon.ac.za/enewsletter/archives/2013/october2013/doc02


First-ever evidence of a comet strike on Earth An artist’s rendition of the comet exploding in Earth’s atmosphere above Egypt. Image credit: Terry Bakker)

When it exploded in Earth’s atmosphere, the comet rained down a shock wave of fire that obliterated every life form in its path. The first ever evidence of a comet entering

Earth’s atmosphere and exploding, raining down a shock wave of fire which obliterated every life form in its path, has been discovered by a team of South African scientists and international collaborators, and will be presented at a public lecture on October 10, 2013. The discovery has not only provided the first definitive proof of a comet striking Earth, millions of years ago, but it could also help us to unlock, in the future, the secrets of the formation of our solar system. “Comets always visit our skies – they’re these dirty snowballs of ice mixed with dust – but never before in history has material from a comet ever been found on Earth,” says Professor David Block of Wits University. The comet entered Earth’s atmosphere above Egypt about 28 million years ago. As it entered the atmosphere, it exploded, heating up the sand beneath it to a temperature of about 2 000 degrees Celsius, and resulting in the

formation of a huge amount of yellow silica glass which lies scattered over a 6 000 square kilometer area in the Sahara. A magnificent specimen of the glass, polished by ancient jewellers, is found in Tutankhamun’s brooch with its striking yellow-brown scarab. The research, which will be published inEarth and Planetary Science Letters, was conducted by a collaboration of geoscientists, physicists and astronomers including Block, lead author Professor Jan Kramers of the University of Johannesburg, Dr Marco Andreoli of the South African Nuclear Energy Corporation, and Chris Harris of the University of Cape Town. At the centre of the attention of this team was a mysterious black pebble found years earlier by an Egyptian geologist in the area of the silica glass. After conducting highly sophisticated chemical analyses on this pebble, the authors came to the inescapable conclusion that it represented the very first known hand specimen of a comet nucleus, rather than simply an unusual type of meteorite. Kramers describes this as a moment of career defining elation. “It’s a typical scientific euphoria when you eliminate all other options and come to the realisation of what it must be,” he said. The impact of the explosion also produced microscopic diamonds. “Diamonds are produced from carbon bearing material. Normally they form deep in the earth, where the pressure is high, but you can also generate very high pressure with shock. Part of the comet impacted and the shock of the impact produced the diamonds,” says Kramers. More at http://earthsky.org/science-wire/first-ever-evidence-of-a-comet-strike-on-earth?utm_source=EarthSky+News&utm_campaign=c052a22fb7-EarthSky_News&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c643945d79-c052a22fb7-393647361

Cobalt International Energy announces discoveries a t Lontra and Mavinga, offshore Angola

Location of the Lontra and Mavinga discoveries, offshore Angola (Source: Cobalt)

29 Oct 2013. Cobalt International Energy today announced a net loss of $160 million, or $0.39 per basic and diluted share for the third quarter of 2013, compared to a net loss of $39 million, or $0.10 per basic and diluted share, for the third quarter of 2012. The current quarter included $108 million, or $0.27 per share for the impairment of expenditures, including $94 million associated with the Ardennes #1 exploratory well and related prospect leases. Expenditures (excluding changes in working capital) for the quarter ending September 30, 2013 were approx. $290 million and for the nine months ending September 30, 2013 were approx. $671 million. Cobalt’s updated 2013 expenditure forecast is $850 to $950 million. Cash, cash equivalents, and investments at the end of the third quarter were approx. $2 billion. This includes about $395 million designated for future operations held in escrow and collateralizing letters of credit, but excludes approx. $109 million in the TOTAL drilling fund for the Gulf of Mexico. Operational Update Cobalt today also announced discoveries at its Lontra-1 and Mavinga-1 deepwater Pre-salt exploratory wells offshore Angola. On Block 20, the Lontra-1 well has reached total depth, and the drilling and evaluation results confirm an oil and gas discovery. Further evaluation, including a

drill stem test, is required to assess Lontra’s potential. Cobalt expects to be able to provide more information on the Lontra-1 well prior to year end. Upon completion of testing operations, Cobalt plans to mobilize the Petroserv SSV Catarina drilling rig to the Orca-1 Pre-salt exploratory well (formerly the Baleia Prospect), located approx. 15 miles (25 kms) northeast of Lontra in Block 20. Cobalt’s partners in Block 20 include Sonangol Pesquisa e Produção and BP Exploration Angola (Kwanza Benguela). In addition, Cobalt announced the Mavinga-1 Pre-salt oil discovery on Block 21. The Cobalt operated Mavinga-1 exploratory well, located approx. 8 miles (12.5 kms) northwest of Cobalt’s 2012 Cameia discovery, reached total depth and encountered approx. 100 feet (30 meters) of net oil pay. This discovery was confirmed by the successful production of oil from mini drill stem tests, direct pressure and permeability measurements, and log and core analyses. Efforts to establish a sustained flow rate from a full drill stem test were not successful. Cobalt is in the early stages of determining what operational issues may have prevented the production from the oil reservoir during the drill stem test. Cobalt estimates a gross oil column of up to 650 feet (200 meters) at the crest of the Mavinga structure updip of the Mavinga-1 well. Additional drilling will be required to confirm the ultimate gross thickness of the mound and its reservoir quality; however the Mavinga discovery is expected to be tied-back to and become part of the planned Cameia development complex in Block 21. Following the temporary abandonment of the Mavinga-1 well, Cobalt mobilized the Ocean Confidence drilling rig to proceed with the drilling of the Bicuar-1A Pre-salt exploratory well located south of the Cameia and Mavinga discoveries on Block 21. Cobalt’s partners in Block 21 include Sonangol Pesquisa e Produção, Nazaki Oil and Gaz, and Alper Limitada. 'While operations are still continuing at Lontra, it’s clear that each of Cobalt’s four wells to date has been successful in finding and delineating new hydrocarbon resources in the Angolan Pre-salt. This is a remarkable and highly unusual start to the exploration of such an immense new basin,' said Joseph H. Bryant, Cobalt’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. 'Our early success in exploring the Pre-salt offshore Angola and Gabon, coupled with our success to date in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico, are a testament to the depth of Cobalt’s portfolio.' Original article link - http://www.cobaltintl.com/newsroom/cobalt-international-energy-inc.-announces-third-quarter-2013-results-and-d At http://www.energy-pedia.com/news/angola/new-156627


Longreach commences significant Morocco drilling ca mpaign Longreach's Moroccan licences - including Foum Draa and Sidi Moktar 28 Oct 2013. Longreach Oil & Gas has commenced a significant drilling campaign in Morocco with the spudding of a well on the Cairn Energy-operated offshore Foum Draa licence and the mobilisation of a rig for drilling on the Longreach-operated onshore Sidi Moktar licence. Longreach notes the Cairn Energy Operational Updatepublished today announcing that drilling on the FD II Alpha-1exploration well, on the Foum Draa licence, offshore Morocco has commenced, using the Cajun Express, a fifth generation semi-submersible drilling unit. The Foum Draa licence is located in deep water in the Tarfaya basin, directly West of Agadir. The FD II Alpha-1 exploration well is located in 1,500 metres of water approx. 120 kms offshore Morocco. The well has a planned Total Depth of 5,500 metres TVDSS and operations are anticipated to take approx. 60 days. The Alpha

Prospect is a slope apron clastic fan of Cretaceous / Jurassic age. Under the terms of the farm-out agreement Cairn acquired a 50% operated interest in the licence from Longreach and each of its joint venture partners in exchange for paying the first US$ 60 million of the exploration well costs. Longreach retains a 2.5% interest in the Foum Draa licence. Sidi Moktar Update Longreach is also pleased to provide an update on the mobilisation of the Saipem Drillmec Mas 7000, a 2,000HP unit built in 2007 for the drilling of the Koba 1 well in its operated Sidi Moktar, onshore licence area. The rig arrived at Agadir Port on 12th October and is now on location and being assembled for a planned spud date for mid-November. Commenting, Andrew Benitz, CEO of Longreach, said: 'The Foum Draa well represents a significant opportunity for Longreach and its investors, given the size of the target prospect. The start of this well also kicks-off a wider drilling programme for Longreach in the near and medium term. The programme consists of the drilling of two sizable onshore prospects, starting with the imminent Koba 1 well, operated by the Company, as well as a further significant offshore well, where again Longreach benefits from a carry on the well'. Original article link: http://longreachoilandgas.com/press-releases.php?newsid=69 At http://www.energy-pedia.com/news/morocco/new-156614

Sterling Energy farms into Odewayne Block onshore R epublic of Somaliland

28 Oct 2013. AIM-listed Sterling Energy has announced that its wholly owned subsidiary, Sterling Energy (East Africa), has signed a Farmout Agreement for the Production Sharing Contract of the Odewayne Block, located onshore in the Republic of Somaliland, with Petrosoma. The current holders of the PSC are: Genel Energy Somaliland (Operator) 50%; Petrosoma 20%; Jacka Resources Somaliland 30%.

Under the terms of the Farmout Agreement, Sterling will on completion: � assume a 10% interest in the PSC from Petrosoma; � pay Petrosoma US$2 million with future conditional payments of $8m

based on various operational milestones being met; and � be carried by Genel for the costs of all exploration activities during � the Third Period of the PSC (expiring November 2014) with an outstanding

minimum work obligation of 500 km of 2D seismic; and � the Fourth Period of the PSC (expiring May 2016) with a minimum work

obligation of 1,000 km of 2D seismic and one exploration well

The PSC, awarded in 2005, is in the Third Period and covers Block SL6 and part of Blocks SL7 and SL10, onshore Somaliland, comprising an area of 22,840 sq kms. During 2013, an aero-magnetic and gravity survey confirmed the geometry of a broad basin over the Odewayne block believed to be of Jurassic to Cretaceous origin, analogous to productive basins in Yemen. Fieldwork in the block has highlighted the presence of numerous seeps giving encouragement that a working hydrocarbon system is present in this undrilled basin. The forward work programme includes acquisition of an extensive 2D seismic programme in 2014 to define drillable targets. Completion of the transaction remains subject to approval by the Government of Somaliland. Sterling Energy Plc.'s Chairman, Alastair Beardsall, said: 'We are very pleased to have entered into a Farmout Agreement for the Odewayne Block in Somaliland; by purchasing a 10% carried interest our financial exposure during the Third and Fourth Periods is limited to the immediate and deferred consideration. We consider the Odewayne Block to be highly prospective and look forward to working with our joint venture partners in the exploration of this largely unexplored block.' Original article link: http://www.sterlingenergyuk.com/pdf/announcements/2013-10-28_farmin_to_Somaliland.pdf At http://www.energy-pedia.com/news/somaliland/new-156603

Metals of Africa begins drilling at Rio Mazoe proje ct in Mozambique Published 31 October 2013. East African focused exploration company Metals of Africa Limited has confirmed that drilling has commenced at the Rulio prospect within its 100% owned Rio Mazoe project located in the Tete province of Mozambique. This is the maiden drill program at the Rulio Prospect and will comprise four to five holes for approximately 1,500 metres of diamond (NQ) core drilling. First assay results are expected early in 2014, and any visible indication of mineralisation identified will be disclosed to the market immediately. The aim of the drill program is to define Broken Hill Type (BHT) mineralization, typically comprised of lead (Pb), zinc (Zn) and silver (Ag). This exploration program will also include down-hole electromagnetic (EM) geophysics and is expected to be completed in mid-December 2013. Recent reconnaissance exploration by the Company at the Rulio Prospect has identified extensive alteration and associated high-grade mineralisation, coincident with a regionally significant geophysical anomaly. The main Rulio vein boasts outstanding high grade lead and silver results at surface, of up to 75.7% lead and 229 g/t silver, with average grades of 59.6% lead and 115 g/t silver (see ASX announcement 4 October 2013).

The maiden Rulio drill program is designed to explore for the source of this mineralisation, which has been observed at surface within six mineralised veins in the area. Drill Program Details A 1,500 metre NQ diamond core drilling program has been designed to test down dip of the BHT alteration package as well the high grade Pb vein and multi element geochemical-geophysical anomaly previously reported at the Rulio Prospect. The program will test all three targets at the prospect. Planned drill depths will range from 200 metres to 375 metres, with a planned average end-of-hole depth of 300 metres. Downhole EM surveying will be conducted in existing drill holes at the Cocodeza zinc anomaly and high grade Meque Pb-Zn-Ag mineralisation. At Cocodeza, mapping has been inhibited by extensive colluvium and it is thought EM may facilitate the identification of potential conductive bodies in the area, which present additional drill targets. At http://mineralsandmaterials.energy-business-review.com/news/metals-of-africa-begins-drilling-at-rio-mazoe-project-311013


Triton Minerals finds high grade large flake graphi te at Ancuabe Project Triton Minerals has identified high grade large flake graphite at its Ancuabe Project in Mozambique.

October 31, 2013 by Proactive Investors Triton Minerals (ASX: TON) has identified high grade large flake graphite from initial reconnaissance rock chip sampling at its Ancuabe Project in Mozambique.

Although early days, this demonstrates the prospectivity of Ancuabe to potentially host a high grade and large flake graphite deposit. Laboratory analysis returned up to 9.43% total graphitic content with petrographics confirming large flake graphite with flakes up to 4 mm in length. “These are very encouraging preliminary results and they provide the Company with a further insight into the overall potential of the Ancuabe project,” managing director Brad Boyle said. “These results continue to support Triton’s initial interpretation that the Anucabe project is highly prospective for graphite as the Company looks to undertake further mapping and sampling on the project.” He added the company is keen to build on these initial results and has

started planning to expand exploration activities and consider potential synergies with neighbouring land holders. “Taking into account the historical graphite production at the Ancuabe mine, these are very positive results which are helping demonstrate the potential of Ancuabe project to host a high grade, coarse-flake graphite deposit,” he said. The samples were taken from two separate areas that are over 9 kilometres apart on Licences 5380 and 5336, which make up the project. Future work Triton’s next stage of exploration will better refine the area of graphite mineralisation. This will include further mapping and trenching to expand the identified zones. This will be followed by a drilling program to provide additional information on the structure, orientation and grades of the graphite mineralisation. Analysis While the company is focused on its Balama North project, the discovery of large flake graphite at the Ancuabe Project adds another arrow to its quiver. While only limited samples have been collected, it is a promising start given the high grade tenor. Efforts to look at potential synergies with neighbouring land holders might also lead to joint ventures or other collaboration that could accelerate exploration of the Project. At http://www.proactiveinvestors.com.au/companies/news/49720/triton-minerals-finds-high-grade-large-flake-graphite-at-ancuabe-project-49720.html

Early Humans—Not Climate Change—Decimated Africa’s Large Carnivores

Image: David Palumbo

By Lars Werdelin. Africa once harbored a far greater variety of large carnivores than it does today. Competition with early humans for access to prey may have brought about their decline East Africa's Small Carnivores Flourished While Large Ones Died Out Sunrise on the Serengeti, and life on the savanna is in full swing. Zebras and wildebeests graze the dewy grass;

elephants and giraffes munch on acacia leaves; and lions and hyenas survey the scene, looking for their next meal. To visit this place is, in some ways, to

see the world as it looked to our ancestors millions of years ago, long before humans began to wreak havoc on the planet—or so the conventional wisdom goes. Indeed, much of eastern Africa is often thought of as a pristine ecosystem, largely unchanged by our kind in the more than two million years since our genus, Homo, arose. But new research paints a rather different picture of this supposedly unaltered place. In my studies of the fossil record of African carnivores, I have found that lions, hyenas and other large-bodied carnivores that roam eastern Africa today represent only a small fraction of the diversity this group once had. Intriguingly, the decline of these carnivores began around the same time that early Homo started eating more meat, thus entering into competition with the carnivores. The timing of events hints that early humans are to blame for the extinction of these beasts—starting more than two million years ago, long before Homo sapiens came on the scene. At http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=early-humans-not-climate-change-decimated-africas-large-carnivores&WT.mc_id=SA_Facebook

Syrah Resources upgrades graphite resource at Balam a West

Syrah Resources has upgraded graphite Resources at the Ativa Zone within its Balama West project in Mozambique.

Tuesday, November 12, 2013 by Bevis Yeo Syrah Resources (ASX: SYR) has updated Indicated and Inferred Resources at the Ativa Zone in the Balama West Project, Mozambique, to 51 million tonnes at 19.9% total

graphitic carbon and 0.38% V2O5 at a 13% TGC cut-off. Using a higher 20% cut off, Ativa’s Resource stands at 30Mt at 21.8% TGC. To put this in context, while this is just a small part of the billion plus Inferred Resource for the overall Balama West Project, Ativa has as tonnage that far exceeds that of Mason Graphite's (CVE:LLG) Lac Guéret and Focus Graphite’s (FRA: FKC, OTCMKTS: FCSMF) Lac Knife deposits in Canada combined and at a higher grade than both. Lac Guéret has a Measured and Indicated Resource of 7.6Mt at 20.4% TGC while Lac Knife has a Measured and Indicated Resource of 8Mt at 16% TGC. These are reported to be the world’s highest grade graphite deposits based on claims by their owners. The latest Resource at Ativa is more than double the previous Inferred Resource of 21Mt at 20.8% TGC and 0.38% V2O5 and comprises an

Indicated Resource of 13.5Mt at 19.8% TGC and 0.4%V2O5 and an Inferred Resource of 12Mt at 19.9%TGC and 0.4% V2O5. In addition, anticipated mining costs are anticipated to be very low for the initial years of mining as the graphitic rocks in the oxidation zone, which extends to about 60 metres, is very friable, allowing the graphite flakes to be liberated with very little energy required. Details From 0 to 50 metres, the Indicated Resource currently stands at 5.5Mt at 20.2% TGC and 0.38% V2O5 for 1.1 million tonnes of contained graphite and 21,000 tonnes of contained vanadium. From 0 to 100 metres, the Indicated Resource is 12Mt at 19.9% TGC and 0.40% V2O5 for 2.4 million tonnes of contained graphite and 48,000 tonnes of contained vanadium. The contained graphite is considered sufficient to sustain an envisaged Ativa pit life of well over 10 years. The Inferred Resource is considered to be readily upgradable to the higher confidence Indicated category given that the company has drilled only a limited number of holes greater than 100 metres in depth as its recent infill drilling program was focused on proving up an Indicated Resource at shallow depth. Accordingly, most of the resource below 100 metres is still in the Inferred Resource category. More at http://www.proactiveinvestors.com.au/companies/news/50089/syrah-resources-upgrades-graphite-resource-at-balama-west-50089.html


Feasibility study confirms Houndé economic potentia l By: Esmarie Swanepoel, 7th November 2013. PERTH (miningweekly.com) – A feasibility study into dual-listed Endeavour Mining’s Houndé gold project, in Burkina Faso, has confirmed the project’s economic potential. The ASX- and TSX-listed Endeavour reported on Thursday that Houndé could achieve yearly production of some 178 000 oz over an eight-year life-of-mine (LoM), with the project producing a total of 1.44-million ounces. The project currently has a proven and probable reserve of some 25-million tonnes, grading 1.95 g/t gold. The feasibility study estimated that an initial capital investment of A$315-million would be required, with LoM sustaining capital estimated at A$62-million, with a further A$26-million assigned to rehabilitation and closure costs. “Houndé is a strong gold project with potential to produce around 180 000 oz/y at an all-in sustaining cost of under A$800/oz. At a gold price of A$1 300/oz, the project has an attractive after-tax internal rate of return of 22%, illustrating strong cash flow generation,” said Endeavour CEO Neil Woodyer.

He noted that the project would also benefit from excellent infrastructure, the company’s current Agbaou mine building expertise, and its Burkina Faso operating experience at the Youga mine. The project permitting process has now started and would take six to nine months to complete. Engineering, procurement and construction of the Houndé operation would take an estimated 21 months from board approval, to first gold. “While work continues on obtaining the Houndé mining permit, we are evaluating how best to integrate Houndé into Endeavour’s production growth plans,” Woodyer said. The company’s gold production was forecast to exceed 400 000 oz during 2014, as production started at the Agbaou mine, in Côte d’Ivoire during the first quarter of 2014. At http://www.miningweekly.com/article/fs-confirms-hound-economic-potential-2013-11-07

Oils and gas companies set up exploration in Morocc o While vast hydrocarbon reserves have long driven neighbouring Algeria’s economy, Morocco has been heavily reliant on imported crude and gas to fuel growth. However, investors are increasingly turning their attention to Morocco’s largely unexplored offshore hydrocarbons assets. The interest has been driven by a number of factors, including promising results from seismic studies and favourable investment terms. With 10 new wells planned in 2013-14, the North African country could see a boost in its oil and gas production in the medium term, reducing its energy imports and providing some relief to its growing trade deficit. Resource scramble There has been a flurry of corporate activity over the past two years, as oil and gas players have looked to pick up the remaining available acreage. Five oil companies were awarded new blocks, and there has been a series of acquisitions and other agreements as international oil companies (IOCs), such as Chevron, Total and Galp, and independents including Genel Energy, Cairn Energy and Kosmos Energy, have moved to increase their offshore coverage. According to Morocco’s National Office for Hydrocarbons and Mines (Office National des Hydrocarbures et des Mines, ONHYM), up to 10 offshore exploratory wells are planned for 2013-14, twice what was drilled in the past decade. Since 1968, just 34 wells have been sunk; of them, 28 were drilled before 2003 and at relatively shallow depths. UK-based independent Cairn Energy gained a presence through its acquisition of Nautical Petroleum in June 2012, taking over a 37.5% stake in the Juby Maritime licence, which includes the Cap Juby heavy oil discovery, Morocco’s first major offshore find. Cairn then purchased an interest in the Foum Draa block in August 2012, obtaining a 50% position and operatorship in exchange for an investment of €44.1m toward the drilling of an exploration well. The Anglo-Turkish independent Genel Energy obtained a 37.5% stake in the Juby Maritime licence in mid-2012 through its acquisition of Barrus Petroleum. While Cap Juby has not produced commercial deposits, the ONHYM reports that recent testing confirms the presence of oil and gas systems on the block, and Cairn and Genel are expected to launch exploratory wells starting in 2014. Genel also plans to drill wells in 2014 on its Sidi Moussa block, in which it purchased a 60% interest in late 2012 for a reported €36.8m, and Mir Left block, which it was awarded in November 2012. The offshore Mazagan licence has generated optimism for potential resource holds. In September 2012, the independent group DeGoyler & MacNaughton announced that the area could hold 7bn barrels based on new seismic data,

a considerable increase on the previous estimate of 2.4bn barrels. Plains Exploration acquired a 52% working interest in the Mazagan permit from the previous operator Pura Vida in January 2013 and is slated to begin exploratory drilling in 2014. The region has seen increased activity from major IOCs as they seek to expand their frontier exploration. Chevron was awarded licences for three blocks in the deep-water Doukkala basin in January 2013, and Galp acquired a 50% stake in the Tarfaya offshore block from Tangiers Petroleum in 2012. A previous test well, MO-2, in Tarfaya indicated potential flow of more than 2300 barrels per day (bpd). Attracting investment Excessive enthusiasm for discoveries in Morocco may be premature, as the country has yet to produce a large-scale commercial deposit. Emboldened in part by the increase in output from non-traditional producers elsewhere on the continent, including Uganda and Ghana, investors are nonetheless showing interest, in part due to the government’s attractive investment terms. Under the 2000 Hydrocarbons Law, ONHYM’s stake in all exploration and production ventures is limited to 25%, one of the lower levels in the region and far below Algeria’s 51% participation for all domestic ventures. Royalties are also relatively modest, at 10% for oil production and 5% for gas, which ensures that the government’s take does not exceed 35% of any venture. In addition, companies benefit from a 10-year tax exemption for all new discoveries. According to UK-based Longreach Oil & Gas, the profit value for the production of one barrel of oil in Morocco is equivalent to 13 barrels in Algeria, seven barrels in Nigeria, and two barrels in Egypt. Morocco’s efforts to encourage exploration are critical to its objective of reducing the growing trade deficit. Spending on oil and gas imports climbed 17.9% year-on-year to reach Dh106.5bn (€9.49bn) in 2012. Energy accounted for 27.6% of total imports in 2012, up from 25.3% in 2011, and contributed to a record trade deficit of Dh197.2bn (€17.57bn) in 2012. Foreign oil and gas firms are increasingly picking up on Morocco’s potential, and the next 18 months should be a telling period as operators accelerate drilling projects in search of a discovery that will propel the sector forwards and the deficit backwards. At http://www.oxfordbusinessgroup.com/economic_updates/intensification-de-la-prospection-p%C3%A9troli%C3%A8re-et-gazi%C3%A8re-au-maroc#english Contribution by Youssef DRIOUCH

North River starts diamond drilling in Namibia North River holds 100 percent of the Namib Lead Zinc Project (NLZM), which is centred on the underground Namib Lead Mine. According to the company, the campaign involving approximately 5,000m of drilling is designed to upgrade and expand the Project’s compliant resources. The Namib mine currently has resources of 668,000 tonnes with 6.6 percent zinc, 2.5 percent lead and 46g/t silver. North River Managing Director, Martin French, said that the work at Namib project has commenced, and hoped for good result from it. The firm is also mobilising a second diamond drill, an Atlas Copco 262, to expedite the drilling. This drill is a larger and more powerful diamond drill and as a result some excavations are required to prepare drill pads.

The firm said that planning and preparation for this drill campaign is well advanced, with mining equipment onsite, and the installation of explosives magazines, ventilation and water systems already constructed underground to facilitate operations. The drill is expected to start in mid November 2013. Early this year, North River Resources expanded its Namib Lead Zinc Project area having been granted a new Exclusive Prospecting Licence (EPL No. 5075) which covers an area contiguous to the existing EPL (No. 2902,). The new EPL represents a significant expansion to the Company’s exploration area, from 4,523 ha to 16,918 ha. At http://www.ambriefonline.com/news/latest/2137-north-river-starts-diamond-drilling-in-namibia


Angola’s diamond production eyes bright future A new study has revealed that the future of Angola’s diamond production is likely to brighten due to new mining law and higher quality diamonds. The country’s mining is an activity with great economic potential since the country has one of the

largest and most diversified mining resources of Africa. Angola has won a place of the third largest producer of diamonds in Africa although it has only explored 40 percent of the diamond-rich territory within the country. According to analysts at the Sinese economic geology consultancy and the sub-Saharan investment bank Eaglestone, the wave of increasing Asian luxury goods market would boost Angola’s diamond output. The report said that the country is endowed with both kimberlites and alluvial diamond deposits, many of those still await development. Eaglestone’s managing partner Manuel Reis, said that the state has made remarkable effort in simplifying the law relating to mining, adding that mining

and diamond production should be important beneficiaries of the upgrading of the country’s road and power infrastructure. In 2011, Angola approved a new Mining Code with an aim of providing the mining sector with a modern set of rules regarding the exploration of its vast mining resources. The Mining Code aimed to establish a compromise between the acquisition of rights for the exploration of mining resources by both national and foreign investors vis-a-vis the public interest, and the State-domain principle of natural resources. The chairman of Endiama, diamond mining company, Carlos Sumbula, anticipated that the Mining Code would make possible for investors to take a majority stake in mining companies, to reduce their tax burden from 35 percent to 25 percent and allow a single contract to be signed covering prospecting and exploration. Sumbula noted that the strategy of storing diamonds adopted by the Angolan government had led to a rise in prices, which currently stands at US$130 per carat, as compared to US$30 at the time of the international crisis in 2008/2009. At http://www.ambriefonline.com/news/latest/2128-angola-s-diamond-production-eyes-bright-future

Other stories!!!! - Zambia revokes suspension of export duty on unprocessed metal.

By: Reuters. 28th October 2013. http://www.miningweekly.com/article/zambia-revokes-suspension-of-export-duty-on-unprocessed-metal-2013-10-28

- Algeria: BP delays Algerian gas expansion projects. 29 Oct 2013. http://www.energy-pedia.com/news/algeria/new-156638

- Gabon awards 13 oil and gas blocks in deepwater round. 29 Oct 2013. http://www.energy-pedia.com/news/gabon/new-156630

- Tunisia/Libya: Sonde Resources provides update on Viking farmout in North Africa. 29 Oct 2013. http://www.energy-pedia.com/news/tunisia/new-156617

- Newmont Ghana announces commercial production at Akyem, Henry Lazenby, 6th November 2013. http://www.miningweekly.com/article/newmont-ghana-announces-commercial-production-at-akyem-2013-11-06

- Ncondezi initiates final EPC contract proposals process for Moz energy project. By Leandi Kolver. 7th November 2013. http://www.miningweekly.com/article/ncondezi-initiates-final-epc-contract-proposals-process-for-moz-energy-project-2013-11-07

NEWS OF/ON THE REST OF THE WORLD Flash Floods and Debris Flows: How to Manage Nature 's Runaway Freight Trains Oct. 27, 2013 — Last month's torrential rains and flooding in Colorado made headlines, but there's another, far more common and growing weather-related threat western states are facing in the wake of longer and worsening fire seasons: flash floods and debris flows. These runaway freight trains made of rock, mud, and water can barrel down mountain channels with little or no warning and take out roads, homes, and anything else in their path. Denuded, flame-dried soils of recently burned landscapes are especially prone to more runoff and greater danger of these destructive events. The good news is that as the frequency of fires and subsequent debris flows and flash floods has increased, progress has also been made in figuring out how these sudden events are created and what can be done to safeguard life and property. Understanding how a burned landscape responds to rainfall after a wildfire is a big step forward. "There has been a great deal of improvement in our understanding of debris flows, erosion and flash flooding coming-out of burned areas," says Jerry DeGraff, a 36-year veteran of the U.S. Forest Service in California. "This is even more important considering the number of large fires that are occurring and recurring in the U.S. and other parts of the world." DeGraff is one of the organizers of a session on flash floods and debris flows at the meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver, Colorado. The session, Geomorphology and Hydrology Impacts from Wildfires: Advances in Our Understanding over the Last 50 Years, features a range of talks covering flash floods and debris flows in a variety of landscapes -- from forests to scrubby chaparral that cover just about every kind of flammable landscape in the Western U.S.

"Structures -- meaning homes and other buildings -- have become a growing concern over the years as more people move into undeveloped areas whether nearer chaparral in Southern California or forests in the Intermountain West,:" says DeGraff. "The talks in the session reflect natural responses to wildfires and runoff that create hazards that may not even occur to the folks moving there." One of the big science advances has been in the U.S. Geological Survey's debris flow models. These models have helped explain, for instance, where these potentially deadly flows are most likely to happen and how large they might be. "We've learned that debris flows are likely from burned area for the first two years after a wildfire." says DeGraff. "But the chance of flash floods lasts a little longer." This kind of information helps determine what kinds of treatments might be done to mitigate damage. "The more we can do to eliminate immediate hazards and longer-term impacts the better it is for emergency responders, residents, and government agencies." DeGraff says. "It's important to understand all the relative aspects: not only for immediate floods but also for the long term. It makes a difference to things like downstream municipal water supplies and road networks." The session of brief talks makes up only half of the presentations. The talks focused on specific processes and what we have learned, and some also look at ecosystem effects. The other half of the presentations will take place at a poster session, where ongoing research will be presented. At http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131027123553.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fearth_climate+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Earth+%26+Climate+News%29


Toxic Ocean Conditions During Major Extinction 93.9 Million Years Ago Quantified: Doesn't Take Much Sulfide to Impact Ocean Life Oct. 28, 2013 — Oxygen in the atmosphere and ocean rose dramatically about 600 million years ago, coinciding with the first proliferation of animal life. Since then, numerous short lived biotic events -- typically marked by significant climatic perturbations -- took place when oxygen concentrations in the ocean dipped episodically. The most studied and extensive of these events occurred 93.9 million years ago. By looking at the chemistry of rocks deposited during that time period, specifically coupled carbon and sulfur isotope data, a research team led by University of California, Riverside biogeochemists reports that oxygen-free and hydrogen sulfide-rich waters extended across roughly five percent of the global ocean during this major climatic perturbation -- far more than the modern ocean's 0.1 percent but much less than previous estimates for this event. The research suggests that previous estimates of oxygen-free and hydrogen sulfide-rich conditions, or "euxinia," were too high. Nevertheless, the limited and localized euxinia were still sufficiently widespread to have dramatic effect on the entire ocean's chemistry and thus biological activity. "These conditions must have impacted nutrient availability in the ocean and ultimately the spatial and temporal distribution of marine life," said team member Jeremy D. Owens, a former UC Riverside graduate student, who is now a postdoctoral scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. "Under low-oxygen environments, many biologically important metals and other nutrients are removed from seawater and deposited in the sediments on the seafloor, making them less available for life to flourish." "What makes this discovery particularly noteworthy is that we mapped out a landscape of bioessential elements in the ocean that was far more perturbed than we expected, and the impacts on life were big," said Timothy W. Lyons, a professor of biogeochemistry at UCR, Owens's former advisor and the principal investigator on the research project. Study results appear online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Across the event 93.9 million years ago, a major biological extinction in the marine realm has already been documented. Also associated with this event are high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which are linked to elevated ocean and atmospheric temperatures. Associated consequences include likely enhanced global rainfall and weathering of the continents, which further shifted the chemistry of the ocean. "Our work shows that even though only a small portion of the ocean contained toxic and metal-scavenging hydrogen sulfide, it was sufficiently large so that changes to the ocean's chemistry and biology were likely profound," Owens said. "What this says is that only portions of the ocean need to contain sulfide to greatly impact biota." For their analysis, the researchers collected seafloor mud samples, now rock, from multiple localities in England and Italy. They then performed chemical extraction on the samples to analyze the sulfur isotope compositions in order to estimate the chemistry of the global ocean. According to the researchers, the importance of their study is elevated by the large amount of previous work on the same interval and thus the extensive availability of supporting data and samples. Yet despite all this past research, the team was able to make a fundamental discovery about the global conditions in the ancient ocean and their impacts on life. "Today, we are facing rising carbon dioxide contents in the atmosphere through human activities, and the amount of oxygen in the ocean may drop correspondingly in the face of rising seawater temperatures," Lyons said. "Oxygen is less soluble in warmer water, and there are already suggestions of such decreases. In the face of these concerns, our findings from the warm, oxygen-poor ancient ocean may be a warning shot about yet another possible perturbation to marine ecology in the future." At http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131028163011.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fearth_climate+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Earth+%26+Climate+News%29

Neutrons, Electrons and Theory Reveal Secrets of Na tural Gas Reserves

Scanning electron microscope image illustrating mineralogy and texture of unconventional gas reservoir. Note that nanoporosity is not resolvable with this image. SANS and USANS analysis is required to quantify pore size distribution and interconnectivity. (Credit: Image courtesy of DOE/Oak Ridge National Laboratory)

Oct. 28, 2013 — Gas and oil deposits in shale have no place to hide from an Oak Ridge National Laboratory technique that provides an inside look at pores and reveals structural information potentially vital to the nation's energy needs. The research by scientists at the Department of Energy laboratory could clear the path to the more efficient extraction of gas and oil from shale, environmentally benign and efficient energy production from coal and perhaps viable carbon dioxide sequestration technologies, according to Yuri Melnichenko, an instrument scientist at ORNL's High Flux Isotope Reactor.

Melnichenko's broader work was emboldened by a collaboration with James Morris and Nidia Gallego, lead authors of a paper recently published in Journal of Materials Chemistry A and members of ORNL's Materials Science and Technology Division. Researchers were able to describe a small-angle neutron scattering technique that, combined with electron microscopy and theory, can be used to examine the function of pore sizes. Using their technique at the General Purpose SANS instrument at the High Flux Isotope Reactor, scientists showed there is significantly higher local structural order than previously believed in nanoporous carbons. This is important because it allows scientists to develop modeling methods based on local structure of carbon atoms. Researchers also probed distribution of adsorbed gas molecules at unprecedented smaller length scales, allowing them to devise models of the pores. "We have recently developed efficient approaches to predict the effect of pore size on adsorption," Morris said. "However, these predictions need verification -- and the recent small-angle neutron experiments are ideal for this. The experiments also beg for further calculations, so there is much to be done." While traditional methods provide general information about adsorption averaged over an entire sample, they do not provide insight into how pores of different sizes contribute to the total adsorption capacity of a material. Unlike absorption, a process involving the uptake of a gas or liquid in some bulk porous material, adsorption involves the adhesion of atoms, ions or molecules to a surface. This research, in conjunction with previous work, allows scientists to analyze two-dimensional images to understand how local structures can affect the accessibility of shale pores to natural gas. "Combined with atomic-level calculations, we demonstrated that local defects in the porous structure observed by microscopy provide stronger gas binding and facilitate its condensation into liquid in pores of optimal sub-nanometer size," Melnichenko said. "Our method provides a reliable tool for probing properties of sub- and super-critical fluids in natural and engineered porous materials with different structural properties.


"This is a crucial step toward predicting and designing materials with enhanced gas adsorption properties." Together, the application of neutron scattering, electron microscopy and theory can lead to new design concepts for building novel nanoporous materials with properties tailored for the environment and energy storage-related technologies. These include capture and sequestration of human-made greenhouse gases, hydrogen storage, membrane gas separation, environmental remediation and catalysis.

Other authors of the paper, titled "Modern approaches to studying gas adsorption in nanoporous carbons," are Cristian Contescu, Matthew Chisholm, Valentino Cooper, Lilin He, Yungok Ihm, Eugene Mamontov, Raina Olsen, Stephen Pennycook, Matthew Stone and Hongxin Zhang. At http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131028162936.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fearth_climate+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Earth+%26+Climate+News%29

El Niño Is Becoming More Active Oct. 28, 2013 — A new approach to analyzing paleo-climate reconstructions of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon resolves disagreements and reveals that ENSO activity during the 20th century has been unusually high compared to the past 600 years. The results are published inClimate of the Past by a team of scientists from the University of New South Wales, the University of Hawaii International Pacific Research Center and the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. El Niño events can wreak havoc across the globe, spawning floods or giving rise to droughts in many regions of the world. How ENSO behaves as a result of a warming planet, however, is still uncertain. One window to determine its sensitivity to climate change is a look into the past. Because the instrumental record is too short for getting a reliable picture of natural variations in ENSO magnitude and frequency, climate scientists rely on geological and biological clues, such as from lake sediment cores, corals, or tree rings as proxies for past ENSO behavior. The problem has been, though, that reconstructions of ENSO from such paleo-proxies have not been telling the same story. Some of these discrepancies in ENSO reconstructions arise because the methods typically applied to combine individual paleo-proxy records do not handle small dating uncertainties amongst the proxies well. The usual approach has been to combine the individual ENSO proxies and then to calculate the activity of this combined ENSO signal. McGregor and his team found that by turning this analysis around -- first calculating the activity of

ENSO in each of the individual paleo-climate reconstructions and then combining the activity time series -- yields a much more consistent and robust view of ENSO's past activity. The scientists confirmed this new approach with virtual ENSO data obtained from two multi-century-long climate model simulations. Applying their improved method of reconstructing ENSO activity by synthesizing many different existing proxies and comparing these time series with instrumental data, the scientists found that ENSO was more active during 1979-2009 than during any 30-year period between 1590 and 1880. "Our results represent a significant step towards understanding where current ENSO activity sits in the context of the past." says Axel Timmermann, professor at the University of Hawaii and co-author of the study. "Climate models provide no clear indication of how ENSO activity will change in the future in response to greenhouse warming, so all we have to go on is past records," explains McGregor. "We can improve the projections of climate models, however, by selecting those that produce past changes in ENSO activity consistent with the past instrumental records. "Our new estimates of ENSO activity of the past 600 years appear to roughly track global mean temperature," says McGregor, "but we still don't know why." At http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131028101113.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fearth_climate+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Earth+%26+Climate+News%29

Thawing Permafrost: The Speed of Coastal Erosion in Eastern Siberia Has Nearly Doubled

This picture shows the enormous coastal erosion on Muostakh, a small east-Siberian island. The photo on top was made in August 2011, the one on the buttom one year later. (Credit: P.P. Overduin / M.N. Grigoriev, Alfred Wegener Institute)

Oct. 29, 2013 — The high cliffs of Eastern Siberia --

which mainly consist of permafrost -- continue to erode at an ever quickening pace. This is the conclusion which scientists of the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research have reached after their evaluation of data and aerial photographs of the coastal regions for the last 40 years. According to the researchers, the reasons for this increasing erosion are rising summer temperatures in the Russian permafrost regions as well the retreat of the Arctic sea ice. This coastal protection recedes more and more on an annual basis. As a result, waves undermine the shores. At the same time, the land surface begins to sink. The small island of Muostakh east of the Lena Delta is especially affected by these changes. Experts fear that it might even disappear altogether should the loss of land continue. The interconnectedness is clear and unambiguous: The warmer the east Siberian permafrost regions become, the quicker the coast erodes. "If the average temperature rises by 1 degree Celsius in the summer, erosion accelerates by 1.2 metres annually," says AWI geographer Frank Günther, who investigates the causes of the coastal breakdown in Eastern Siberia

together with German and Russian colleagues, and who has published his findings in two scientific articles. In these studies, he and his team evaluated high resolution air and satellite photos from 1951 to 2012 as well as measurements of the past four years. In addition, the researchers surveyed four coastal sections along the Laptev Sea (see map) and on the island of Muostakh. One example of the changes documented in their research are the warming summers. While the temperatures during the period of investigation exceeded zero degrees Celsius on an average of 110 days per year, the scientists counted a total of 127 days in the years 2010 and 2011. The following year, 2012, the number of days with temperatures above freezing increased to 134. This increase in temperature is not without consequences. Whereas a thick layer of sea ice used to protect the frozen soil almost all year round, it now recedes in this part of the Arctic for increasing periods of time during the summer months. The number of summer days on which the sea ice in the southern Laptew Sea vanishes completely grows steadily. "During the past two decades, there were, on average, fewer than 80 ice-free days in this region per year. During the past three years, however, we counted 96 ice-free days on average. Thus, the waves can nibble at the permafrost coasts for approximately two more weeks each year," explains AWI permafrost researcher Paul Overduin. More at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131029133807.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fearth_climate+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Earth+%26+Climate+News%29


Paleontologist Presents Origin of Life Theory Most researchers believe that life originated in deep-sea hydrothermal vents. About 4 billion years ago, Earth was a watery planet; ocean stretched from pole to pole; any life synthesis would be dilated. It needed a protected basin. (Credit: Image courtesy of Texas Tech University)

Oct. 29, 2013 — It has baffled humans for millennia: how did life begin on planet Earth? Now, new research from a Texas Tech University paleontologist suggests it may have rained from the skies and started in the bowels of hell. Sankar Chatterjee, Horn Professor of Geosciences and curator of paleontology at The Museum of Texas Tech University believes he has found the answer by connecting theories on chemical evolution with evidence related to our planet’s early geology. “This is bigger than finding any dinosaur,” Chatterjee said. “This is what we’ve all searched for – the Holy Grail of science.” Thanks to regular and heavy comet and meteorite bombardment of Earth’s surface during its formative years 4 billion years ago, the large craters left behind not only contained water and the basic chemical building blocks for life, but also became the perfect crucible to concentrate and cook these chemicals to create the first simple organisms. He will present his findings Oct. 30 during the 125th Anniversary Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver. As well as discovering how ancient animals flew, Chatterjee discovered the Shiva Meteorite Crater, which was created by a 25-mile-wide meteorite that struck off the coast of India. This research concluded this giant meteorite wreaked havoc simultaneously with the Chicxulub meteorite strike near Mexico, finishing the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Ironically, Chatterjee’s latest research suggests meteorites can be givers of life as well as takers. He said that meteor and comet strikes likely brought the ingredients and created the right conditions for life on our planet. By studying three sites containing the world’s oldest fossils, he believes he knows how the first single-celled organisms formed in hydrothermal crater basins. “When the Earth formed some 4.5 billion years ago, it was a sterile planet inhospitable to living organisms,” Chatterjee said. “It was a seething cauldron of erupting volcanoes, raining meteors and hot, noxious gasses. One billion

years later, it was a placid, watery planet teeming with microbial life – the ancestors to all living things.” Recipe for Living “For may years, the debate on the origins of life centered on the chemical evolution of living cells from organic molecules by natural processes. Chatterjee said life began in four steps of increasing complexity – cosmic, geological, chemical and biological. In the cosmic stage, a still-forming Earth and our solar system took a daily pounding from rocky asteroids and icy comets between 4.1 to 3.8 billion years ago. Plate tectonics, wind and water have hidden evidence of this early onslaught on our planet, but ancient craters on the surfaces of Mars, Venus, Mercury and our moon show just how heavy the meteorite showers once were. Larger meteorites that created impact basins of about 350 miles in diameter inadvertently became the perfect crucibles, he said. These meteorites also punched through the Earth’s crust, creating volcanically driven geothermal vents. Also, they brought the basic building blocks of life that could be concentrated and polymerized in the crater basins. After studying the environments of the oldest fossil-containing rocks on Earth in Greenland, Australia and South Africa, Chatterjee said these could be remnants of ancient craters and may be the very spots where life began in deep, dark and hot environments. Because of Earth’s perfect proximity to the sun, the comets that crashed here melted into water and filled these basins with water and more ingredients. This gave rise to the geological stage. As these basins filled, geothermal venting heated the water and created convection, causing the water to move constantly and create a thick primordial soup. “The geological stage provides special dark, hot, and isolated environments of the crater basins with the hydrothermal vent systems that served as incubators for life,” he said. “Segregation and concentration of organic molecules by convective currents took place here, something like the kinds we find on the ocean floor, but still very different. It was a bizarre and isolated world that would seem like a vision of hell with the foul smells of hydrogen sulfide, methane, nitric oxide and steam that provided life-sustaining energy.” Then began the chemical stage, Chatterjee said. The heat churning the water inside the craters mixed chemicals together and caused simple compounds to grow into larger, more complex ones. More at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131029133124.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fearth_climate+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Earth+%26+Climate+News%29

Rare Earths in Bacteria: Methane-Decomposing Bacter ia from Hot Springs Need the Valuable Metals to Produce Energy Oct. 30, 2013 — Rare earths are among the most precious raw materials of all. These metals are used in mobile telephones, display screens and computers. And they are apparently indispensable for some organisms as well. A team of researchers, including scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Medical Research in Heidelberg, has discovered a bacterium which needs rare earths to grow -- in a hot spring. Methylacidiphilum fumariolicum requires lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium or neodymium as co-factor for the enzyme methanol dehydrogenase, with which the microbes produce their energy. The use of rare earths is possibly more widespread among bacteria than previously thought. In reality, the 17 metals that belong to the group of rare earths are not rare at all. The Earth's crust contains larger quantities of rare earths than of gold or platinum, for example. The problem is that the elements have a relatively even distribution, so that mining is economical in only a few places. In living organisms, the rare earths really are rare, on the other hand. As they dissolve hardly at all in water, most organisms cannot use them for their metabolism. This makes their discovery in a mudpot of volcanic origin in the Solfatara crater in Italy all the more surprising. Microbiologists from the Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, have found a microbe

which cannot live without some of the rare earths. Methylacidiphilum fumariolicum belongs to a group of bacteria which have chosen an extremely inhospitable habitat: They thrive best at a pH value of between 2 and 5 and temperatures of between 50 and 60 degrees -- conditions which are lethal for other organisms. Methylacidiphilum even tolerates pH values below 1, which corresponds to concentrated sulphuric acid. The microbes produce their energy from methane. They have a special enzyme, methanol dehydrogenase, which processes the methanol produced in the decomposition of methane with the aid of metal co-factors. Most of these bacteria use calcium for this process. In the course of their investigations, the Nijmegen researchers noticed that Methylacidiphilum thrives only with original water from the mudpot. None of the trace elements which the researchers added to the Petri dishes encouraged the bacteria to grow. An analysis of the water showed that it contained concentrations of rare earths that were one hundred to one thousand times higher than normal. More at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131030125433.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fearth_climate+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Earth+%26+Climate+News%29


Ozone hole 2013 Image credit: NASA

The ozone hole over the South Pole on September 16, 2013. The ozone hole was slightly smaller in 2013 than the average for recent decades. The ozone hole over Antarctica was slightly smaller in 2013 than the average for recent decades, according to data from the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI) on NASA’s Aura satellite and the Ozone Monitoring and Profiler Suite

(OMPS) on the NASA-NOAA Suomi NPP satellite. The average size of the hole in September–October 2013 was 21.0 million square kilometers (8.1 million square miles). The average size since the mid 1990s is 22.5 million square kilometers (8.7 million square miles). The single-day maximum area reached 24.0 million square kilometers (9.3 million square miles) on September 16—an area about the size of North America. The largest single-day ozone hole ever recorded by satellite was 29.9 million square kilometers (11.5 million square miles) on September 9, 2000. The image above shows ozone concentrations over the South Pole on September 16, 2013, as measured by OMI. The animation below shows the evolution of the ozone hole, including a plot of the area and concentrations,

from July 1 to October 15, 2013. To see ozone holes since 1979, visit World of Change: Antarctic Ozone Hole. The ozone hole is a seasonal phenomenon that starts during the Antarctic spring (August and September) as the sun begins rising after winter darkness. Pole-circling winds keep cold air trapped above the continent, and sunlight catalyzes reactions between ice clouds and chlorine compounds that begin eating away at natural ozone in the stratosphere. In most years, the conditions for ozone depletion ease by early December, when the seasonal hole closes. “There was a lot of Antarctic ozone depletion in 2013, but because of above average temperatures in the Antarctic lower stratosphere, the hole was a bit below average compared to ozone holes observed since 1990,” said Paul Newman, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. The size of the hole in any particular year is not enough information for scientists to determine whether the atmospheric conditions that cause the ozone hole have permanently improved. Levels of most ozone-depleting chemicals in the atmosphere have gradually declined as the result of the Montreal Protocol, an international treaty to phase out production of ozone-depleting chemicals. In the decades since the treaty, the hole has stabilized, with some meteorologically driven variations from year to year. Via NASA Earth Observatory More at http://earthsky.org/science-wire/ozone-hole-2013?utm_source=EarthSky+News&utm_campaign=401f19ecc2-EarthSky_News&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c643945d79-401f19ecc2-393647361

Global Map Provides New Insights Into Land Use

Global land system archetypes: world map. The data for this classification refer to the year 2005. (Credit: Tomáš Václavík/UFZ)

Nov. 5, 2013 — In order to assess the global impacts of land use on the environment and help provide appropriate countermeasures, a group of researchers under the leadership of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) has created a new world map of land use systems. Based on various indicators of land-use intensity, climate, environmental and socio-economic conditions, they identified twelve global patterns called land system archetypes. The scientists from UFZ with colleagues from the Humboldt-University Berlin and University Bonn have recently published their results in the journal Global Environmental Change. Land use changes come in various forms: maize fields replace meadows and grasslands, tropical forests are cleared for pastures, steppes become cropland. The reasons are complex, the impacts are immense: animal and plant communities change, ecosystem functions disappear, carbon emissions contribute to climate change. Whatever happens regionally has global consequences. In order to better assess these impacts and help provide effective countermeasures, the researchers from UFZ created a world map that identifies twelve global land-use systems, also called archetypes. These include barren lands in the developing world, pastoral systems or extensive cropping systems. Germany, for instance, together with most of the Western Europe, Eastern USA and Western Australia represents the 'intensive cropping system' that covers about 5% of the terrestrial Earth surface. This system is characterized by high density of cropland, high inputs of nitrogen fertilizers, temperate climate, high crop yields, large capital

investments in the agricultural sector, low proportion of GDP originating from agriculture and good access to market places. What is novel about this research is the fact that the scientists analyzed significantly more data and indicators than what is common in similar studies. In contrast to traditional models of land use, over 30 factors with more than one million data points were processed. "For example, we didn't know before which regions had an unfulfilled potential for agricultural intensification given the environmental and socio-economic conditions, or in which regions the maximum agricultural yields were already achieved," says Tomáš Václavík, a scientist and leading author from UFZ. The information that was usually hidden behind the complexity of data is now revealed. "If we had analyzed only the environmental indicators, we could not identify where viable opportunities for yield improvements exist." This new analysis also shows a different picture of land use than scientists had before. China, for example, belongs to five different archetypes. "It was surprising to see that the intensity and type of land use in some regions of China was quite similar to the situation in Western Europe or the United States. Thus, parts of China, together with particular regions of India and, of course, large areas of Europe, were assigned to the 'intensive cropping systems' archetype," says Tomáš Václavík. According to the co-author and the head of the Department of Computational Landscape Ecology at UFZ Leipzig, Prof. Ralf Seppelt, this representation of land systems is useful also because we can now provide science-based policy recommendations for regions in certain land-use types on how to avoid negative consequences of land use. This can be easily explained with examples from Latin America and Southeast Asia: many areas in these regions are classified as 'degraded forest/cropland systems in the tropics' characterized by extremely high soil erosion. Because the socio-economic data show that agriculture plays an important role in the national economy of the local countries, it is essential to develop and apply erosion control measures for these regions. Only then the agricultural yields could increase without negatively affecting the environment. In other land systems the situation is quite different. The extensive cropping systems of Eastern Europe or India still have a high potential to increase the agricultural yields. Such opportunities, however, are largely exhausted in the intensive cropping systems of Western Europe and the USA At http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131105081400.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fearth_climate+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Earth+%26+Climate+News%29


Clay May Have Been Birthplace of Life On Earth, New Study Suggests Nov. 5, 2013 — Clay, a seemingly infertile blend of minerals, might have been the birthplace of life on Earth. Or at least of the complex biochemicals that make life possible, Cornell University biological engineers report in the Nov. 7 online issue of the journal Scientific Reports, published by Nature Publishing. "We propose that in early geological history clay hydrogel provided a confinement function for biomolecules and biochemical reactions," said Dan Luo, professor of biological and environmental engineering and a member of the Kavli Institute at Cornell for Nanoscale Science. In simulated ancient seawater, clay forms a hydrogel -- a mass of microscopic spaces capable of soaking up liquids like a sponge. Over billions of years, chemicals confined in those spaces could have carried out the complex reactions that formed proteins, DNA and eventually all the machinery that makes a living cell work. Clay hydrogels could have confined and protected those chemical processes until the membrane that surrounds living cells developed. To further test the idea, the Luo group has demonstrated protein synthesis in a clay hydrogel. The researchers previously used synthetic hydrogels as a "cell-free" medium for protein production. Fill the spongy material with DNA, amino acids, the right enzymes and a few bits of cellular machinery and you can make the proteins for which the DNA encodes, just as you might in a vat of cells. To make the process useful for producing large quantities of proteins, as in drug manufacturing, you need a lot of hydrogel, so the researchers set out to find a cheaper way to make it. Postdoctoral researcher Dayong Yang noticed that clay formed a hydrogel. Why consider clay? "It's dirt cheap," said Luo. Better yet, it turned out unexpectedly that using clay enhanced protein production. But then it occurred to the researchers that what they had discovered might answer a long-standing question about how biomolecules evolved. Experiments by the late Carl Sagan of Cornell and others have shown that amino acids and other biomolecules could have been formed in primordial

oceans, drawing energy from lightning or volcanic vents. But in the vast ocean, how could these molecules come together often enough to assemble into more complex structures, and what protected them from the harsh environment? Scientists previously suggested that tiny balloons of fat or polymers might have served as precursors of cell membranes. Clay is a promising possibility because biomolecules tend to attach to its surface, and theorists have shown that cytoplasm -- the interior environment of a cell -- behaves much like a hydrogel. And, Luo said, a clay hydrogel better protects its contents from damaging enzymes (called "nucleases") that might dismantle DNA and other biomolecules. As further evidence, geological history shows that clay first appeared -- as silicates leached from rocks -- just at the time biomolecules began to form into protocells -- cell-like structures, but incomplete -- and eventually membrane-enclosed cells. The geological events matched nicely with biological events. How these biological machines evolved remains to be explained, Luo said. For now his research group is working to understand why a clay hydrogel works so well, with an eye to practical applications in cell-free protein production. Luo collaborated with professor Max Lu of the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology at the University of Queensland in Australia. The work was performed at the Cornell Center for Materials Research Shared Facilities, supported by the National Science Foundation At http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131105132027.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fearth_climate+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Earth+%26+Climate+News%29

Oldest Ice Core: Finding a 1.5 Million-Year Record of Earth's Climate

Antarctic locations (in bright blue) where 1.5 million years old ice could exist. The figure is modified from Van Liefferinge and Pattyn (Climate of the Past, 2013). (Credit: Van Liefferinge and Pattyn) Nov. 5, 2013 — How far into the past can ice-core records go? Scientists have now identified regions in Antarctica they say could store information about Earth's climate and greenhouse

gases extending as far back as 1.5 million years, almost twice as old as the oldest ice core drilled to date. The results are published today in Climate of the Past, an open-access journal of the European Geosciences Union (EGU). By studying the past climate, scientists can understand better how temperature responds to changes in greenhouse-gas concentrations in the atmosphere. This, in turn, allows them to make better predictions about how climate will change in the future. "Ice cores contain little air bubbles and, thus, represent the only direct archive of the composition of the past atmosphere," says Hubertus Fischer, an experimental climate physics professor at the University of Bern in Switzerland and lead author of the study. A 3.2-km-long ice core drilled almost a decade ago at Dome Concordia (Dome C) in Antarctica revealed 800,000 years of climate history, showing that greenhouse gases and temperature have mostly moved in lockstep. Now, an international team of scientists wants to know what happened before that. At the root of their quest is a climate transition that marine-sediment studies reveal happened some 1.2 million years to 900,000 years ago. "The Mid Pleistocene Transition is a most important and enigmatic time interval in the more recent climate history of our planet," says Fischer. Earth's climate naturally varies between times of warming and periods of extreme cooling (ice ages) over thousands of years. Before the transition, the period of

variation was about 41 thousand years while afterwards it became 100 thousand years. "The reason for this change is not known." Climate scientists suspect greenhouse gases played a role in forcing this transition, but they need to drill into the ice to confirm their suspicions. "The information on greenhouse-gas concentrations at that time can only be gained from an Antarctic ice core covering the last 1.5 million years. Such an ice core does not exist yet, but ice of that age should be in principle hidden in the Antarctic ice sheet." As snow falls and settles on the surface of an ice sheet, it is compacted by the weight of new snow falling on top of it and is transformed into solid glacier ice over thousands of years. The weight of the upper layers of the ice sheet causes the deep ice to spread, causing the annual ice layers to become thinner and thinner with depth. This produces very old ice at depths close to the bedrock. However, drilling deeper to collect a longer ice core does not necessarily mean finding a core that extends further into the past. "If the ice thickness is too high the old ice at the bottom is getting so warm by geothermal heating that it is melted away," Fischer explains. "This is what happens at Dome C and limits its age to 800,000 years." To complicate matters further, horizontal movements of the ice above the bedrock can disturb the bottommost ice, causing its annual layers to mix up. "To constrain the possible locations where such 1.5 million-year old -- and in terms of its layering undisturbed -- ice could be found in Antarctica, we compiled the available data on climate and ice conditions in the Antarctic and used a simple ice and heat flow model to locate larger areas where such old ice may exist," explains co-author Eric Wolff of the British Antarctic Survey, now at the University of Cambridge. The team concluded that 1.5 million-year old ice should still exist at the bottom of East Antarctica in regions close to the major Domes, the highest points on the ice sheet, and near the South Pole, as described in the new Climate of the Past study. These results confirm those of another study, also recently published in Climate of the Past. More at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131105081228.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fearth_climate+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Earth+%26+Climate+News%29


Russian Fireball Yields Scientific Treasure Trove: Researchers Obtain Crucial Data from Meteoroid Impact Nov. 6, 2013 — A team of NASA and international scientists for the first time have gathered a detailed understanding of the effects on Earth from a small asteroid impact. The unprecedented data obtained as the result of the airburst of a meteoroid over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk on Feb. 15, 2013, has revolutionized scientists' understanding of this natural phenomenon. The Chelyabinsk incident was well observed by citizen cameras and other assets. This provided a unique opportunity for researchers to calibrate the event, with implications for the study of near-Earth objects (NEOs) and developing hazard mitigation strategies for planetary defense. Scientists from nine countries have now established a new benchmark for future asteroid impact modeling. "Our goal was to understand all circumstances that resulted in the shock wave," said meteor expert Peter Jenniskens, co-lead author of a report published in the journal Science. Jenniskens, a meteor astronomer at NASA's Ames Research Center and the SETI Institute, participated in a field study led by Olga Popova of the Institute for Dynamics of Geospheres of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow in the weeks following the event. "It was important that we followed up with the many citizens who had firsthand accounts of the event and recorded incredible video while the experience was still fresh in their minds," said Polpova. By calibrating the video images using the position of the stars in the night sky, Jenniskens and Popova calculated the impact speed of the meteor at 42,500 mph (19 kilometers per second). As the meteor penetrated through the atmosphere, it efficiently fragmented into pieces, peaking at 19 miles (30 kilometers) above the surface. At that point the light of the meteor appeared brighter than the sun, even for people 62 miles (100 kilometers) away. Due to the extreme heat, many of the pieces of the debris vaporized before falling out of the orange glowing debris cloud. Scientists believe that between 9,000 to 13,000 pound (4,000 to 6,000 kilograms) of meteorites fell to the ground. This included one fragment approximately 1,400 pound (650 kilogram) recovered from Lake Chebarkul on October 16, 2013, by professional divers guided by Ural Federal University researchers. NASA researchers participating in the 59 member consortium study suspect that the abundance of shock fractures in the rock contributed its break up in the upper atmosphere. Meteorites made available by Chelyabinsk State

University researchers were analyzed to learn about the origin of the shock veins and their physical properties. "One of these meteorites broke along one of these shock veins when we pressed on it during our analysis," said Derek Sears, a meteoriticist at Ames. Mike Zolensky, a cosmochemist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, may have found why these shock veins (or shock fractures), were so frail. They contained layers of small iron grains just inside the vein, which had precipitated out of the glassy material when it cooled. "There are cases where impact melt increases a meteorite's mechanical strength, but Chelyabinsk was weakened by it," said Zolensky. The impact that created the shock veins may have occurred as long ago as 4.4 billion years. This would have been 115 million years after the formation of the solar system, according to the research team, who found that the meteorites had experienced a significant impact event at that time. "Events that long ago affected how the Chelyabinsk meteoroid broke up in the atmosphere, influencing the damaging shockwave," said Jenniskens. Research is being conducted to better understand the origin and nature of NEOs. These essential studies are needed to inform our approach to preparing for the potential discovery and deflection of an object on a collision course with the Earth. NASA's recently announced asteroid initiative will be the first mission to capture and relocate an asteroid. It represents an unprecedented technological feat that will lead to new scientific discoveries and technological capabilities that will help protect our home planet. Aside from representing a potential threat, the study of asteroids and comets represent a valuable opportunity to learn more about the origins of our solar system, the source of water on the Earth, and even the origin of organic molecules that lead to the development of life. For more information about the Chelyabinsk field study visit: http://cams.seti.org/index-chelyabinsk.html For more information on asteroids and comets, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/asteroids/main/ At http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131106164150.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fearth_climate+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Earth+%26+Climate+News%29

Meteor impact trapped ancient swamp plants in glass 13 November 2013 by Lisa Grossman. Remnants of an ancient swamp have been found preserved inside glass created during a meteorite strike, offering the first direct evidence that traces of life can survive the heat and pressure of such an impact. The discovery adds weight to arguments that microbes travelling on space rocks could have seeded the planets. Astrobiologists have long suggested that simple life forms could have come to Earth inside meteors, or that impacts on early Earth could have sent terrestrial microbes to other worlds on ejected chunks of our planet. But this concept, known as panspermia, assumes that the organic compounds essential to life as we know it can survive the extreme pressures and temperatures of a crash-landing. Now, evidence has been found around the 800,000-year-old Darwin crater in Tasmania, Australia. Kieren Torres Howard was conducting research into the distribution and composition of the crater's impact glass at the University of Tasmania in Hobart. Taking a closer look with an X-ray diffraction machine, Howard and his colleagues found that the glass is unexpectedly shot through with spherical inclusions (coloured blue in image below), which are riddled with air pockets. The team ground up the glass and combed the fragments to pick out the inclusions. Chemical analysis showed that they were rich in organic material similar to that in a peat swamp, including cellulose and polymers that might derive from leaf cuticles (Nature Geosciences, http://doi.org/p2k). "They looked really pristine," says Howard, now at the City University of New York. "It's not just that you see a signature of organic materials, it's almost as if you took the signature of a swamp today." Previous evidence found at the

crater site suggests that it was indeed a swamp or rainforest when the impact occurred. The team suggests that a meteorite smacked into the ground and melted some of the upper rock to form the impact glass. Bits of plant matter found their way into the molten glass as debris was hurled away by the impact. Water and other volatile compounds in the plants immediately boiled, making a froth that froze inside the glass as it cooled, creating the pockets. So could pieces of an ancient swamp on Earth have gone flying off into space? It's plausible, the researchers say. What's more, organics trapped inside glass would be somewhat protected from harmful cosmic radiation on an interplanetary journey. NASA's Curiosity rover may have already found Martian impact glass in the Red Planet's Gale crater, according to a presentation at the Geological Society of America meeting in Colorado last month. Curiosity is not dextrous enough to pick up these shards and run analyses on them, says John Mustard of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. But such glasses could be good targets for future missions aiming to bring Mars rocks back to Earth. Scientists here could run tests to see if terrestrial material has landed on Mars, or if the glass contains preserved traces of long-lost Martian vegetation. "Could it have been the mechanism by which panspermia happened? Sure," says Mustard. "It allows for the packaging and interplanetary transfer of organic material." At http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029432.600-meteor-impact-trapped-ancient-swamp-plants-in-glass.html#.UoUQ-BpmiSp


Volcanic Rock Probe Helps Unlock Mysteries of How E arth Formed Nov. 6, 2013 — New insights gleaned from volcanic rock are helping scientists better understand how our planet evolved billions of years ago. Studies of basalt, the material that forms from cooling lava, are being used to develop a timeline of how the planet and its atmosphere were formed. Scientists examined liquid basalt -- or magma -- at record high pressures and temperatures. Their findings suggest molten magma once formed an ocean within Earth's mantle, comprising two layers of fluid separated by a crystalline layer. Scientists agree that Earth formed around 4.5 billion years ago, at which time much of the planet was molten. As it cooled, Earth's crust was formed. Researchers are keen to pin down how the planet's core and crust took shape and how its volcanic activity developed. The discovery by a European team of scientists involving the University of Edinburgh, using hi-tech laboratories, supports current theories of how and when our planet evolved. To recreate conditions at Earth's core, scientists placed basalt under pressures equivalent to almost one billion times that of

Earth's atmosphere and temperatures above 2000 Celsius. They found that at high pressure, silicon atoms in the basalt change the way in which they form bonds, which results in a denser magma. Their discovery helps pinpoint how magma behaves deep in Earth and is a missing piece in the puzzle of how Earth's core formed. The study, published in Nature, was supported by the Scottish Universities Physics Alliance and European Research Council and carried out with the DESY Photon Science facility at Hamburg, the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, Vrije Universitat Amsterdam, and Goethe-Universitat Frankfurt. Dr Chrystele Sanloup, of the University of Edinburgh's School of Physics and Astronomy, who took part in the study, said: "Modern labs make it possible for scientists to recreate conditions deep in Earth's core, and give us valuable insight into how materials behave at such extremes. This helps us build on what we already know about how Earth formed." At http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131106131950.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fearth_climate+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Earth+%26+Climate+News%29

Newly Discovered Predatory Dinosaur 'King of Gore' Reveals the Origins of T. Rex

This skull, which includes pieces of real fossil, shows the unique features of this new tyrannosaur. (Credit: Mark Loewen, NHMU)

Nov. 6, 2013 — A remarkable new species of tyrannosaur has been unearthed in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM), southern Utah. The huge carnivore inhabited Laramidia, a landmass formed on the western coast of a shallow sea that flooded the central region of North America, isolating western and eastern portions of the continent for millions

of years during the Late Cretaceous Period, between 95-70 million years ago. The newly discovered dinosaur, belonging to the same evolutionary branch as the famous Tyrannosaurus rex, was announced today in the open-access scientific journal PLOS ONEand unveiled on exhibit in the Past Worlds Gallery at the Natural History Museum of Utah at the Rio Tinto Center in Salt Lake City, Utah. Among tyrannosaurs, a group of small to large-bodied, bipedal carnivorous dinosaurs including T. rex that lived during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, the newly discovered species,Lythronax argestes, possesses several unique features, a short narrow snout with a wide back of the skull with forward-oriented eyes. Lythronax translates as "king of gore," and the second part of the name, argestes, refers to its geographic location in the American Southwest. Previously, paleontologists thought this type of wide-skulled tyrannosaurid only appeared 70 million years ago, whereas Lythronax shows it had evolved at least 10 million years earlier. The study, funded in large part by the Bureau of Land Management and the National Science Foundation, was led by Dr. Mark Loewen, research associate at the Natural History Museum of Utah, and adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Utah. Additional collaborative authors include Dr. Randall Irmis (Natural History Museum of Utah and Dept. of Geology and Geophysics, University of Utah), Dr. Joseph Sertich (Denver Museum of Nature & Science), Dr. Philip Currie (University of Alberta), and Dr. Scott Sampson (Denver Museum of Nature & Science). The skeleton was discovered by BLM employee Scott Richardson, and excavated by a joint NHMU-GSENM team. Lythronax lived on Laramidia, along the western shores of the great seaway that separated North America; this landmass hosted a vast array of unique dinosaur species and served as the crucible of evolution for iconic dinosaur

groups such as the horned and duck billed dinosaurs. This study also indicates that tyrannosaurid dinosaurs (the group of tyrannosaurs that includesT. rex) likely evolved in isolation on this island continent.Lythronax stands out from its contemporaries in having a much wider skull at the eyes and a narrow short snout, similar to its relative T. rex, which lived 10-12 million years later. Dr. Mark Loewen, the study's lead author, noted, "The width of the back of the skull of Lythronax allowed it to see with an overlapping field of view -- giving it the binocular vision -- very useful for a predator and a condition we associate with T. rex." Previously, paleontologists thought this type of wide-skulled tyrannosaurid only appeared ~70 million years ago, whereas Lythronax shows it had evolved at least 10 million years earlier Paleontologists have recently determined that the dinosaurs of southern Laramidia (Utah, New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico), although belonging to the same major groups, differ at the species level from those on northern Laramidia (Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, and Canada). Lythronax and its tyrannosaurid relatives on southern Laramidia are more closely related to each other than the long snouted forms from northern Laramidia. Dr. Joseph Sertich, a co-author of the study, stated that, "Lythronax may demonstrate that tyrannosaurs followed a pattern similar to what we see in other dinosaurs from this age, with different species living in the north and south at the same time." These patterns of dinosaur distribution across Laramidia lead the researchers to ask what might have caused the divisions between the north and south, given that an enterprising dinosaur could have walked from Alaska to Mexico if given enough time. Dr. Randall Irmis, a study co-author, explained that by analyzing the evolutionary relationships, geologic age, and geographic distribution of tyrannosaurid dinosaurs, the team determined that "Lythronax and other tyrannosaurids diversified between 95-80 million years ago, during a time when North America's interior sea was at its widest extent. The incursion of the seaway onto large parts of low-lying Laramidia would have separated small areas of land from each other, allowing different species of dinosaurs to evolve in isolation on different parts of the landmass." As the seaway gradually retreated after 80 million years ago, these differences in dinosaur species may have been reinforced by climate variations, differences in food sources (different prey and plants), and other factors. This hypothesis explains why the iconic Late Cretaceous dinosaurs of western North America are so different from those of the same age on other continents More at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131106131836.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fearth_climate+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Earth+%26+Climate+News%29


'Tiger Stripes' Underneath Antarctic Glaciers Slow the Flow

This map shows the Pine Island and Thwaites Glaciers, at far left, in West Antarctica. (Credit: NASA) Nov. 8, 2013 — Narrow stripes of dirt and rock beneath massive Antarctic glaciers create friction zones that slow the flow of ice toward the sea, researchers at Princeton University and the British Antarctic Survey have found. Understanding how these high-friction regions form and subside could help researchers understand how the flow of these glaciers responds to a warming climate. Just as no-slip strips on flooring prevent people from slipping on a wet floor, these ribs or "tiger stripes" -- named in reference to Princeton's tiger mascot -- provide friction that hinders the glaciers from slipping along the underlying bed of rock and sediment, the researchers report online in the journal Science. The researchers discovered these tiger stripes, which occur in large, slippery regions under the glaciers, using mathematical modeling based on data from the National Snow and Ice Data Center and the British Antarctic Survey. The work was conducted by Olga Sergienko, an associate research scientist in Princeton's Program in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, and Richard Hindmarsh, a scientist at the British Antarctic Survey. Researchers would like to understand what factors determine the flow of glaciers, which are massive, moving ice sheets that, when they flow into the ocean, can contribute substantially to sea-level rise. The researchers studied two glaciers, the Pine Island Glacier and the Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica, which together contribute about 10 percent of the observed sea-level rise over the past 20 years,

despite their small areas. The Pine Island Glacier moves at a velocity of about 1.5 miles per year, according to the researchers. Studying the bottom of these glaciers is next to impossible due to the inability to see through the ice, which is over a mile-and-a-half thick. Instead, the researchers used satellite measurements of the ice velocity and ground-penetrating radar collected from airplane flyovers to detect bedrock and surface topography, as well as field observations. Using the data, Sergienko created a mathematical model that calculated what happens inside the glacier as it flows along the bedrock. The model predicted the formation of the tiger stripes or ribs, which Hindmarsh had theorized some years earlier. The friction at the interface of the bedrock and glacier ice is a major factor in the speed of a glacier, Sergienko said. When friction is high, the glacier moves slowly. When friction is low, as when melting ice provides a liquid layer that allows the ice to slide over the bedrock, the glacier moves more quickly. The tiger stripes, which the researchers also call ribs due to their slightly curved structure, lie at roughly 30-degree angles to the direction of the glacier's movement. These ribs arise and decay in response to natural processes over roughly 50 to 100 years, according to the researchers' calculations. The process is strongly affected by how water, which comes from ice melting due to the inherent heat trapped in Earth, infiltrates the space between the ice sheet and the bedrock, the researchers found. "The ribs may play an important role in buffering the effects of a warming climate, since they slow the movement of ice that reaches the ocean and contributes to sea-level rise," said Sergienko. "These changes can happen independently of climate change, too," she added. More investigations are needed to verify models of rib formation, according to the researchers. "Our guess is that these ribs are related to typical landforms that exist in the formerly glaciated areas of North America and Europe," said Hindmarsh. "A great example are the drumlins -- raised areas of soil and rock -- that make the hills in Seattle or Glasgow," he said. The study reveals new patterns of friction that help control the speed of ice flow and determine the effect of Antarctic ice on sea level, according to Douglas MacAyeal, a professor of glaciology at the University of Chicago who was not involved in the work. "This is strongly suggestive of a new style of physical controls over friction, like water flow in the thin zone between the rock of the bed and the ice," he said. "The results of this study will drive new theoretical and observational efforts to understand what causes this pattern." The study, "Regular patterns in frictional resistance of ice-stream beds seen by surface data inversion," was published online in the journal Science on Nov. 7. The research was supported by National Science Foundation grant CMG-0934534 and the British Antarctic Survey Polar Science for Planet Earth program At http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131108091341.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fearth_climate+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Earth+%26+Climate+News%29

Magma Boils Beneath Antarctic Ice 17 November 2013. Marie Byrd Land is a desolate region of Antarctica buried deep beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. But while the surface of Earth may be frozen, underneath is a different story. Historic eruptions have punctured the ice sheet, creating a chain of volcanoes amid the ice. Now, researchers have shown that molten rock still stirs deep underground. Only the largest eruptions could melt all the ice above them and poke through to the surface, but even smaller eruptions could potentially cause global sea level to rise, although no one knows how big the rise might be. The curiously named Executive Committee Range is a series of volcanoes in Marie Byrd Land lying in a roughly straight line, with the volcanoes becoming progressively younger as one heads south from Whitney Peak, which is between 13.2 million and 13.7 million years old, to Mount Waesche, which formed in the last 1 million years. The crust is thinned by the West Antarctic Rift System, a series of giant rift valleys beneath the ice sheet, and erupted lava from underground magma chambers has burst through the ice repeatedly over geological history as the plates moved over the top. No one knew whether magma was still stirring underneath the Executive Committee Range, however, until seismic monitoring stations were installed on the ice between 2007 and 2010. Researchers built the stations to study the shifting crustal blocks of the West Antarctic Rift System. But seismologist Amanda Lough of Washington

University in St. Louis in Missouri and colleagues in California, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Texas, Washington, and Ohio found another use. They noticed a series of small earthquakes, mainly occurring during two “seismic swarms” in January and February 2010 and March 2011. These earthquakes were unusual: The ground was shaking much more slowly during the quakes than one would expect from the plates grinding against each other. Lough worked out the origin of these tremors. “I looked at two different types of waves that come in—the P wave, which is the primary wave, and the S wave, which is the secondary wave,” she says. Her calculations revealed that the waves had come from 25 to 40 kilometers below Earth's surface and were centered around a point 55 kilometers south of Mount Waesche—approximately the point the volcanic activity should have reached if it had continued the linear trend of volcanoes to the south. The exact cause of these deep quakes is not understood, but they are thought to result from the movement of magma deep below active or soon-to-be active volcanoes. Scientists have recorded them around other active volcanoes in Hawaii, for example, sometimes around the time of eruptions. Geomagnetic data and radar mapping by Lough's colleagues confirmed the presence of magmatic activity within the rocky crust. They found that the area showed a slightly higher magnetic field than the surrounding area and that there was a bump in the crust—common signals of magmatic activity.


Radar mapping also indicated a layer of volcanic ash embedded in the ice. The team thinks this probably came from an eruption of Mount Waesche about 8000 years ago—very recent geological history. There is no evidence of an actual eruption since then, but, because magma is still moving deep under the Earth, an eruption could occur at any time, the team reports online today in Nature Geoscience. The current center of volcanic activity is covered by at least 1 kilometer of ice, and it would take an exceptionally large eruption to melt all this. But an eruption could make its presence felt in subtler ways. As fresh snow adds to

their own mass, ice sheets flow downward into the sea. By melting the base of the ice sheet, an eruption could speed up this flow, potentially raising the level of the ocean. No one knows how significant such a rise might be. Any effect on the ice sheet above, and thus any effect on the oceans, would probably be quite small, says glaciologist Robert Bindschadler of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who was not involved in the work. Still, he says, a proper study is needed to find out how significant volcanic activity could be to future sea levels. “It's a wild card.” At http://news.sciencemag.org/earth/2013/11/magma-boils-beneath-antarctic-ice

Other stories!!!! - Researchers Turn to Technology to Discover a Novel Way of Mapping Landscapes. Oct. 28, 2013. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131028162932.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fearth_climate+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Earth+%26+Climate+News%29

- First Study of Russian Meteor: Chelyabinsk Was Largest Meteoroid Strike Since Tunguska Event of 1908. Nov. 6, 2013. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131106131946.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=em

ail&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fearth_climate+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Earth+%26+Climate+News%29

- Evidence of 3.5-Billion-Year-Old Bacterial Ecosystems Found in Australia. Nov. 12, 2013. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131112163220.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fearth_climate+%28ScienceDaily%3A+Earth+%26+Climate+News%29

NEWS OF/ON THE SPACE / ASTRONOMY United Nations to Adopt Asteroid Defense Plan Earth is not prepared for the threat of hazardous rocks from space, say astronauts who helped formulate the U.N. measures – By Clara Moskowitz When a meteor exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia in February, the world’s space agencies found out along with the rest of us, on Twitter and YouTube. That, says former astronaut Ed Lu, is unacceptable—and the United Nations agrees. Last week the General Assembly approved a set of measures that Lu and other astronauts have recommended to protect the planet from the dangers of rogue asteroids. The U.N. plans to set up an “International Asteroid Warning Group” for member nations to share information about potentially hazardous space rocks. If astronomers detect an asteroid that poses a threat to Earth, the U.N.’s Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space will help coordinate a mission to launch a spacecraft to slam into the object and deflect it from its collision course. Lu and other members of the Association of Space Explorers (ASE) recommended these steps to the U.N. as a first step to address at the long-neglected problem of errant space rocks. “No government in the world today has explicitly assigned the responsibility for planetary protection to any of its agencies,” ASE member Rusty Schweickart, who flew on the Apollo 9 mission in 1969, said at the museum. “NASA does not have an explicit responsibility to deflect an asteroid, nor does any other space agency.” The ASE advocates that each nation delegate responsibility for dealing with a potential asteroid impact to an internal agency—before the event is upon us.

The next step in defending Earth against dangerous asteroids is to find them, Lu said. “There are 100 times more asteroids out there than we have found. There are about 1 million asteroids large enough to destroy New York City or larger. Our challenge is to find these asteroids first before they find us.” Early warning is important because it increases the chance of being able to deflect a threatening asteroid once it is found. If a spacecraft struck an asteroid 5 or 10 years before the rock was due to hit Earth, a slight orbital alternation should be enough to make it pass Earth by; if the asteroid wasn’t detected soon enough, evacuating the impact zone may be the only option available. “If we don’t find it until a year out, make yourself a nice cocktail and go out and watch,” Schweickart quipped. The B612 Foundation, a non profit Lu founded to address the problem of asteroid impacts, is developing a privately funded infrared space telescope called Sentinel, which it hopes to launch in 2017. The telescope would begin a systematic search for hazardous near-Earth objects. The ASE astronauts are also asking the United Nations to coordinate a practice asteroid deflection mission to test out the technologies for pushing a rock off course should the need arise. The meteor in Chelyabinsk, which injured 1,000 people but killed none, was an ideal warning shot across the bow, said American Museum of Natural History astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson, who hosted Friday’s event—now, it’s time for Earth’s citizens to take action. Lu agreed: “Chelyabinsk was bad luck,” he said. “If we get hit again 20 years from now, that is not bad luck—that’s stupidity.” At http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=un-asteroid-defense-plan

Scientists find Earth-sized rocky exoplanet

Artist’s impression of the planet Kepler-78b and its host star. Art by Karen Teramura (UHIfA)

With a radius about 1.2 times that of Earth and a mass equal to about 1.7 times Earth’s, Kepler-78b has a density is the same as Earth’s, suggesting that it also made primarily of rock and iron. A team of astronomers has found the first Earth-sized planet outside the solar system that has a rocky composition

like that of Earth. This exoplanet, known as Kepler-78b, orbits its star very closely every 8.5 hours, making it much too hot to support life. The results are being published in the journal Nature. This Earth-sized planet was discovered using data from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, and confirmed and characterized with the W. M. Keck Observatory. Every 8.5 hours the planet passes in front of its host star, blocking a small fraction of the starlight. These telltale dimmings were picked up by researchers analyzing the Kepler data. The team led by Dr. Andrew Howard (Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii at Manoa) then measured the mass of the planet with the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea, in Hawaii. Using the ten-meter Keck I telescope fitted with the HIRES instrument, the team employed the radial velocity method to measure how much an orbiting planet causes its star to wobble, to determine the planet’s mass. This is another excellent example of the synergy between the Kepler survey, which has identified more than 3,000 potential exoplanet


candidates, and Keck Observatory, which plays a leading role in conducting precise Doppler measurements of the exoplanet candidates. A handful of planets the size or mass of Earth have been discovered recently. This is the first one with both quantities measured. “When you have both the size and the mass of an object, you can calculate its density, and thereby determine what it is made of,” explained Howard. With a radius about 1.2 times that of Earth and a mass equal to about 1.7 times Earth’s, Kepler-78b has a density is the same as Earth’s, suggesting that it also made primarily of rock and iron. Its star is slightly smaller and less massive than the sun and is located about 400 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus. Kepler-78b is a member of a new class of “ultrashort period” planets recently identified by the Kepler spacecraft. These newfound worlds all orbit their stars with orbital periods of less than 12 hours. They’re also small, about one-to-two times the size of Earth. Kepler-78b is the first planet in this new class to have its mass measured. It is a mystery how these planets formed

and made it so close to their host stars (only 1 percent of the Earth-sun separation in the case of Kepler-78b). In a rather unique arrangement, a companion study led by Dr. Francesco Pepe (University of Geneva, Switzerland) that used the same Kepler data but independent radial velocity observations is being published in the same issue. The two studies found very similar results. “The gold standard in science is having your findings reproduced by other researchers,” explained Howard. “In this case, we did not have to wait for this to happen.” The other members of Howard’s team are Roberto Sanchis-Ojeda (MIT), who analyzed the transit data taken by the Kepler spacecraft to find the planet and calculate its size, Dr. Geoffrey Marcy (University of California, Berkeley), Dr. John Johnson (Harvard), Dr. Debra Fischer (Yale), Benjamin Fulton and Evan Sinukoff (UHM graduate students), and Dr. Jonathan Fortney (University of California, Santa Cruz). At http://earthsky.org/science-wire/scientists-find-earth-sized-rocky-exoplanet

One in five stars has Earth-sized planet in habitab le zone

Artist’s representation of the “habitable zone,” the range of orbits where liquid water is permitted on the surface of a planet. CREDIT: PETIGURA/UC BERKELEY, HOWARD/UH-MANOA, MARCY/UC BERKELEY

EARTHSKY // SCIENCE WIRE, SPACE RELEASE DATE: NOV 05, 2013. “What this means is, when you look up at the thousands of stars in the night sky, the nearest sun-like star with an Earth-size planet in its habitable zone is probably only 12 light years away and can be seen with the naked eye.” – Erik Petigura Scientists from University of California, Berkeley, and University of Hawaii, Manoa, have statistically determined that twenty percent of Sun-like stars in our galaxy have Earth-sized planets that could host life. The findings, gleaned from data collected from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft and the W. M. Keck Observatory, now satisfy Kepler’s primary mission: to determine how many of the 100 billion stars in our galaxy have potentially habitable planets. The results are being published November 4 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “What this means is, when you look up at the thousands of stars in the night sky, the nearest sun-like star with an Earth-size planet in its habitable zone is

probably only 12 light years away and can be seen with the naked eye. That is amazing,” said UC Berkeley graduate student Erik Petigura, who led the analysis of the Kepler and Keck Observatory data. “For NASA, this number – that every fifth star has a planet somewhat like Earth – is really important, because successor missions to Kepler will try to take an actual picture of a planet, and the size of the telescope they have to build depends on how close the nearest Earth-size planets are,” said Andrew Howard, astronomer with the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii. “An abundance of planets orbiting nearby stars simplifies such follow-up missions.” Earth-size may not mean habitable The team, which also included planet hunter Geoffrey Marcy, UC Berkeley professor of astronomy, cautioned that Earth-size planets in Earth-size orbits are not necessarily hospitable to life, even if they orbit in the habitable zone of a star where the temperature is not too hot and not too cold. “Some may have thick atmospheres, making it so hot at the surface that DNA-like molecules would not survive. Others may have rocky surfaces that could harbor liquid water suitable for living organisms,” Marcy said. “We don’t know what range of planet types and their environments are suitable for life.” Just last week, Howard, Marcy and their colleagues provided hope that many such planets actually are rocky. They reported that one Earth-sized planet discovered – albeit, a planet with a likely temperature of 2,000 Kelvin, which is far too hot for life as we know it – is the same density as Earth and most likely composed of rock and iron, like Earth. “This gives us some confidence that when we look out into the habitable zone, the planets Erik is describing may be Earth-size, rocky planets,” Howard said. Via W.M. Keck Observatory. More at http://earthsky.org/space/one-in-five-stars-has-earth-sized-planet-in-habitable-zone?utm_source=EarthSky+News&utm_campaign=8abced5928-EarthSky_News&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c643945d79-8abced5928-393647361

Moon’s craters remeasured

Maps from the GRAIL spacecrafts reveal more large craters (big circles) and thinner crust (blue) on the moon's nearside (left) than on the farside (right), where the crust is thicker (red).

By Ashley Yeager, 5:15PM, November 7, 2013. Large craters cover more of the moon’s surface on its nearside than its farside, according to new maps from NASA’s GRAIL spacecrafts (http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/grail/main/index.html). Scientists haven’t always agreed on the size of lunar craters because lava filled many of the biggest impact basins on the side of the moon that faces Earth. For nine months in 2012, astronomers used GRAIL to map the thickness of the crust in and around the craters. Based on the data and simulations of lunar impacts, the hotter nearside of the moon would have formed craters with up to twice the diameter compared with similar impacts on the cooler farside. The GRAIL data also suggest that astronomers should not use measurements of the basins on the nearside of the moon to draw conclusions about the rate at which craters struck the planets of the inner solar system 4 billion years ago, the researchers report November 8 in Science (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6159/724)0. At https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/science-ticker/moon%E2%80%99s-craters-remeasured


Evidence That Organic Material Can Survive the Impa ct of a Meteorite False-coloured

scanning electron microscope image showing organic material in meteorite debris.

November 13, 2013 by Staff. In a newly published study, researchers from

the Natural History Museum provide the first evidence that any organic material, either inside a meteorite or already on Earth, can survive the impact of a meteorite striking the planet at high speed. New research shows that organic molecules, on which life is based, can survive the impact from a meteorite. Reporting in the journal Nature Geoscience, mineralogist Dr Kieran Howard and his team have discovered intact organic molecules inside debris from a meteorite impact. Dr Howard was a researcher at the Museum when he performed the analyses. This is the first evidence that any organic material, either inside a meteorite or already on Earth, can survive the impact of a meteorite striking the planet at high speed.

The discovery lends weight to the idea of panspermia – the suggestion that life on our planet was seeded by material falling from space. The debris studied by the team was thrown up by a meteorite impact in Western Tasmania, Australia, leaving a 1.2km diameter crater known as Darwin Crater. The meteorite crash-landed on Earth approximately 800,000 years ago at a speed of up to 18kms per second, and with a possible temperature on impact of more than 1,700°C. It was thought that any organic material would be vaporized by the extreme temperature and pressure of a collision. But the researchers found organic matter within the impact debris from local swamps and rainforests present when the meteorite struck. Extra-terrestrial life ‘We were surprised by our discovery,’ said Dr Howard. ‘We have long assumed any organic molecules, such as amino acids would not survive a meteorite impact. The evidence we have now supports an old hypothesis that impacts might have delivered the building blocks of life to the early Earth.’ It has been experimentally proven that some bacteria can survive the heat and speed of entering our atmosphere, but whether anything could survive an actual impact was uncertain. More at http://scitechdaily.com/evidence-organic-material-can-survive-impact-meteorite/

Evidence Found for Granite On Mars: Red Planet More More Geologically Complex Than Thought

NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is providing new spectral "windows" into the diversity of Martian surface materials. Here in a volcanic caldera, bright magenta outcrops have a distinctive feldspar-rich composition. (Credit: NASA/JPL/JHUAPL/MSSS) Nov. 18, 2013 — Researchers now have stronger evidence of granite on Mars and a new theory for how the granite -- an igneous rock common on Earth -- could have formed there, according to a new study. The findings suggest a much more geologically complex Mars than previously believed. Large amounts of a mineral found in granite, known as feldspar, were found in an ancient

Martian volcano. Further, minerals that are common in basalts that are rich in iron and magnesium, ubiquitous on Mars, are nearly completely absent at this location. The location of the feldspar also provides an explanation for how granite could have formed on Mars. Granite, or its eruptive equivalent, rhyolite, is often found on Earth in tectonically active regions such as subduction zones. This is unlikely on Mars, but the research team concluded that prolonged magmatic activity on Mars can also produce these compositions on large scales. "We're providing the most compelling evidence to date that Mars has granitic rocks," said James Wray, an assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the study's lead author. The research was published November 17 in the Advance Online Publication of the journal Nature Geoscience. The work was supported by the NASA Mars Data Analysis Program. For years Mars was considered geologically simplistic, consisting mostly of one kind of rock, in contrast to the diverse geology of Earth. The rocks that cover most of Mars's surface are dark-colored volcanic rocks, called basalt, a type of rock also found throughout Hawaii for instance. But earlier this year, the Mars Curiosity rover surprised scientists by discovering soils with a composition similar to granite, a light-colored, common igneous rock. No one knew what to make of the discovery because it was limited to one site on Mars. The new study bolsters the evidence for granite on Mars by using remote sensing techniques with infrared spectroscopy to survey a large volcano on Mars that was active for billions of years. The volcano is dust-free, making it ideal for the study. Most volcanoes on Mars are blanketed with dust, but this volcano is being sand-blasted by some of the fastest-moving sand dunes on

Mars, sweeping away any dust that might fall on the volcano. Inside, the research team found rich deposits of feldspar, which came as a surprise. "Using the kind of infrared spectroscopic technique we were using, you shouldn't really be able to detect feldspar minerals, unless there's really, really a lot of feldspar and very little of the dark minerals that you get in basalt," Wray said. The location of the feldspar and absence of dark minerals inside the ancient volcano provides an explanation for how granite could form on Mars. While the magma slowly cools in the subsurface, low density melt separates from dense crystals in a process called fractionation. The cycle is repeated over and over for millennia until granite is formed. This process could happen inside of a volcano that is active over a long period of time, according to the computer simulations run in collaboration with Josef Dufek, who is also an associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech. More at http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131118091506.htm


INTERESTING SITES

NASA Interactive Poster - http://nasaesw.strategies.org/interactive/ Time Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Ever on Earth http://memolition.com/2013/10/16/time-lapse-map-of-every-nuclear-explosion-ever-on-earth/ LITERATURE ON AFRICA

• Karlos G. D. Kochhann, Eduardo A. M. Koutsoukos, Gerson Fauth, and Alcides N. Sial. Aptian-Albian Planktic Foraminifera From Dsdp Site 364 (Offshore Angola): Biostratigraphy, Paleoecology, And Paleoceanographic Significance. Journal of Foraminiferal Research. 2013; 43(4): p. 443-463 http://jfr.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/43/4/443?ct=ct

• Omeje Maxwell, Husin Wagiran, Noorddin Ibrahim, Siak Kuan Lee, and Soheil Sabri. Measurement of 238U, 232Th and 40K in boreholes at Gosa and Lugbe, Abuja, north central Nigeria. Radiat Prot Dosimetry. 2013; 157(2): p. 271-277 http://rpd.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/157/2/271?ct=ct

• A. Tubosun, P. Tchokossa, F. A. Balogun, M. K. Fasasi, O. Ocan, and C. A. Adesanmi. Natural radioactivity in some rocks employed as dimension and decorative stones in the Nigerian building industry. Radiat Prot Dosimetry. 2013; 157(2): p. 265-270 http://rpd.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/157/2/265?ct=ct

• Mohamed A. S. Youssef and Shadia T. Elkhodary. Utilization of airborne gamma ray spectrometric data for geological mapping, radioactive mineral exploration and environmental monitoring of southeastern Aswan city, South Eastern Desert, Egypt. Geophys. J. Int. 2013; 195(3): p. 1689-1700 http://gji.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/195/3/1689?ct=ct

• Tesfaye Kidane, Valerian Bachtadse, Mulugeta Alene, and Uwe Kirscher. Palaeomagnetism of Palaeozoic glacial sediments of Northern Ethiopia: a contribution towards African Permian palaeogeography. Geophys. J. Int. 2013; 195(3): p. 1551-1565 http://gji.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/195/3/1551?ct=ct

• Roland Martin, Vadim Monteiller, Dimitri Komatitsch, Stephane Perrouty, Mark Jessell, Sylvain Bonvalot, and Mark Lindsay. Gravity inversion using wavelet-based compression on parallel hybrid CPU/GPU systems: application to southwest Ghana. Geophys. J. Int. 2013; 195(3): p. 1594-1619 http://gji.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/195/3/1594?ct=ct

• Janire Prudencio, Edoardo Del Pezzo, Araceli Garcia-Yeguas, and Jesus M. Ibanez. Spatial distribution of intrinsic and scattering seismic attenuation in active volcanic islands - I: model and the case of Tenerife Island. Geophys. J. Int. 2013; 195(3): p. 1942-1956 http://gji.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/195/3/1942?ct=ct

• J. Barry Maynard. The Kalahari Manganese Field--The Adventure Continues. Economic Geology. 2013; 108(8): p. 2021 http://economicgeology.org/cgi/content/full/108/8/2021?ct=ct

• Marina A. Yudovskaya, Judith A. Kinnaird, Alexander V. Sobolev, Dmitry V. Kuzmin, Iain McDonald, and Allan H. Wilson. Petrogenesis of the Lower Zone Olivine-Rich Cumulates Beneath the Platreef and Their Correlation with Recognized Occurrences in the Bushveld Complex. Economic Geology. 2013; 108(8): p. 1923-1952 http://economicgeology.org/cgi/content/abstract/108/8/1923?ct=ct

• Andreas Malm. Sea Wall Politics: Uneven and Combined Protection of the Nile Delta Coastline in the Face of Sea Level Rise. Crit Sociol. 2013; 39(6): p. 803-832 http://crs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/39/6/803?ct=ct

OTHER INTERESTING LITERATURE • David A.D. Evans. Reconstructing pre-Pangean supercontinents. Geological Society of America Bulletin. 2013; 125(11-12): p. 1735-1751

http://gsabulletin.gsapubs.org/cgi/content/abstract/125/11-12/1735?ct=ct • R.A. Jamieson and C. Beaumont. On the origin of orogens. Geological Society of America Bulletin. 2013; 125(11-12): p. 1671-1702

http://gsabulletin.gsapubs.org/cgi/content/abstract/125/11-12/1671?ct=ct • Linda A. Hinnov. Cyclostratigraphy and its revolutionizing applications in the earth and planetary sciences. Geological Society of America Bulletin.

2013; 125(11-12): p. 1703-1734 http://gsabulletin.gsapubs.org/cgi/content/abstract/125/11-12/1703?ct=ct • Axel K. Schmitt, Arturo Martin, Bodo Weber, Daniel F. Stockli, Haibo Zou, and Chuan-Chou Shen. Oceanic magmatism in sedimentary basins of the

northern Gulf of California rift. Geological Society of America Bulletin. 2013; 125(11-12): p. 1833-1850 http://gsabulletin.gsapubs.org/cgi/content/abstract/125/11-12/1833?ct=ct

• Javiera Cervini-Silva, Antonio Nieto-Camacho, Hilda Cornejo-Garrido, Paz del Angel, Noel Maya, Eduardo Palacios, Jose Ascencion Montoya, Virginia Gomez-Vidales, and Maria Teresa Ramirez-Apan. Biological dissolution and activity of the Allende meteorite. Geological Society of America Bulletin. 2013; 125(11-12): p. 1865-1873 http://gsabulletin.gsapubs.org/cgi/content/abstract/125/11-12/1865?ct=ct

• John S. Bridge. Fluvial Facies Models: Recent Developments. Facies Models Revisited. 2011; 1(1): p. 85-170 http://sp.sepmonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/1/1/pg_85?ct=ct

• Janok P. Bhattacharya. Deltas. Facies Models Revisited. 2011; 1(1): p. 237-292 http://sp.sepmonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/1/1/pg_237?ct=ct • John R. Suter. Facies Models Revisited: Clastic Shelves. Facies Models Revisited. 2011; 1(1): p. 339-397

http://sp.sepmonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/1/1/pg_339?ct=ct • Nigel P. Mountney. Eolian Facies Models. Facies Models Revisited. 2011; 1(1): p. 19-83 http://sp.sepmonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/1/1/pg_19?ct=ct • Ron Boyd, Robert W. Dalrymple, And Brian A. Zaitlin. Estuarine and Incised-Valley Facies Models. Facies Models Revisited. 2011; 1(1): p. 171-235


http://sp.sepmonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/1/1/pg_171?ct=ct • Henry W. Posamentier And Roger G. Walker. Deep-Water Turbidites and Submarine Fans. Facies Models Revisited. 2011; 1(1): p. 399-520

http://sp.sepmonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/1/1/pg_399?ct=ct • Jeremy D. Owens, Benjamin C. Gill, Hugh C. Jenkyns, Steven M. Bates, Silke Severmann, Marcel M. M. Kuypers, Richard G. Woodfine, and Timothy

W. Lyons. Sulfur isotopes track the global extent and dynamics of euxinia during Cretaceous Oceanic Anoxic Event 2. PNAS. published 29 October 2013, 10.1073/pnas.1305304110 http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/1305304110v1?ct=ct

• J. D. A. Piper. Supercontinent integrity between 0.8 and 0.6 Ga: the nemesis of Rodinia? Geological Society, London, Special Publications. published 28 October 2013, 10.1144/SP389.8 http://sp.lyellcollection.org/cgi/content/abstract/SP389.8v1?ct=ct

• M. Edgeworth. The relationship between archaeological stratigraphy and artificial ground and its significance in the Anthropocene. Geological Society, London, Special Publications. published 25 October 2013, 10.1144/SP395.3 http://sp.lyellcollection.org/cgi/content/abstract/SP395.3v1?ct=ct

• M. Giba, J. J. Walsh, A. Nicol, V. Mouslopoulou, and H. Seebeck. Investigation of the spatio-temporal relationship between normal faulting and arc volcanism on million-year time scales. Journal of the Geological Society. 2013; 170(6): p. 951-962 http://jgs.lyellcollection.org/cgi/content/abstract/170/6/951?ct=ct

• Xie-Yan Song, Lie-Meng Chen, Yu-Feng Deng, and Wei Xie. Syncollisional tholeiitic magmatism induced by asthenosphere upwelling owing to slab detachment at the southern margin of the Central Asian Orogenic Belt. Journal of the Geological Society. 2013; 170(6): p. 941-950 http://jgs.lyellcollection.org/cgi/content/abstract/170/6/941?ct=ct

• Ana-Voica Bojar and Jan Smit. Isotopic studies in Cretaceous research: an introduction. Geological Society, London, Special Publications. published 25 October 2013, 10.1144/SP382.12 http://sp.lyellcollection.org/cgi/content/abstract/SP382.12v1?ct=ct

• David A.D. Evans. Reconstructing pre-Pangean supercontinents. Geological Society of America Bulletin. published 24 October 2013, 10.1130/B30950.1 http://gsabulletin.gsapubs.org/cgi/content/abstract/B30950.1v1?ct=ct

• Agnieszka Galuszka, Zdzislaw M. Migaszewski, and Jan Zalasiewicz. Assessing the Anthropocene with geochemical methods. Geological Society, London, Special Publications. published 24 October 2013, 10.1144/SP395.5 http://sp.lyellcollection.org/cgi/content/abstract/SP395.5v1?ct=ct

• Orencio Duran and Laura J. Moore. Vegetation controls on the maximum size of coastal dunes. PNAS. 2013; 110(43): p. 17217-17222 Open Access http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/110/43/17217?ct=ct

• B. Ronald Frost, Robert L. Bauer, James S. Scoates, and Jeffrey S. Ingram. The Laramie anorthosite complex and its contact metamorphic aureole. Field Guides. 2013; 33(0): p. 237-258 http://fieldguides.gsapubs.org/cgi/content/abstract/33/0/237?ct=ct

• Antoine Benard and Dmitri A. Ionov. Melt- and Fluid-Rock Interaction in Supra-Subduction Lithospheric Mantle: Evidence from Andesite-hosted Veined Peridotite Xenoliths. J. Petrology. 2013; 54(11): p. 2339-2378 http://petrology.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/54/11/2339?ct=ct

• Christophe Thomazo and Dominic Papineau. Biogeochemical Cycling of Nitrogen on the Early Earth. Elements. 2013; 9(5): p. 345-351 http://elements.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/9/5/345?ct=ct

• Pierre Cartigny and Bernard Marty. Nitrogen Isotopes and Mantle Geodynamics: The Emergence of Life and the Atmosphere-Crust-Mantle Connection. Elements. 2013; 9(5): p. 359-366 http://elements.geoscienceworld.org/cgi/content/abstract/9/5/359?ct=ct

• Brad Murray and Andrew D. Ashton. Instability and finite-amplitude self-organization of large-scale coastline shapes. Phil Trans R Soc A. 2013; 371(2004): p. 20120363 http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/cgi/content/abstract/371/2004/20120363?ct=ct

• Lie-Meng Chen, Xie-Yan Song, Reid R. Keays, Yu-Long Tian, Yu-Shan Wang, Yu-Feng Deng, and Jia-Fei Xiao. Segregation and Fractionation of Magmatic Ni-Cu-PGE Sulfides in the Western Jinchuan Intrusion, Northwestern China: Insights from Platinum Group Element Geochemistry. Economic Geology. 2013; 108(8): p. 1793-1811 http://economicgeology.org/cgi/content/abstract/108/8/1793?ct=ct

• Nicholas Arndt. The Lithospheric Mantle Plays No Active Role in the Formation of Orthomagmatic Ore Deposits. Economic Geology. 2013; 108(8): p. 1953-1970 http://economicgeology.org/cgi/content/abstract/108/8/1953?ct=ct

•

EVENTS The events not announced in former Bulletins are highlighted with dates in yellow

In Africa and about Africa Next Month: 2013.12.02 Oil & Gas Mozambique, 2013, Maputo, Mozambique. http://www.oilandgas-africa.com/Pricing.aspx 2013.12.05-06 4th World Geothermal Energy Summit, Nairobi, Kenya, http://www.arcmediaglobal.com/geothermal/ 2014.01.19-22 IMSC 2014 - 6th Annual Igneous and Metamorphic Studies Group, Grahamstown, South Africa. http://www.ru.ac.za/geology/imsg2014/ 2014.03.04-05 SAIMM Coal Conference, Johannesburg, South Africa.

http://fs2.majesticinteractive.co.za/admin/uploads/53/documents/SAIMM%20Coal%20Conference%20March%202014.pdf 2014.03.16-22 Nigerian Mining and Geosciences Society – 50th Annual International Conference & Exhibitions, Benin, Nigeria. Contact

[email protected] or [email protected] 2014.03.17-19 Power Gen Africa 2014, Cape Town, South Africa. http://www.events-africa.com/power-gen-africa-2014-events-africa.html 2014.03.24-26 1st International Symposium on Medical Geology in Africa (ISMGAf), Johannesburg, South Africa.

http://iugs.org/uploads/1stSYMPOSIUM_MedicalGeologyInAfrica.pdf 2014.03.27-29 MMEC2014 – Mozambique Mining & Energy Confereccne, Maputo, Mozambique. http://www.mozmec.com/ 2014.04.05-10 THE 11th International Conference On The Geology Of The Arab World (GAW 11), Cairo, Egypt. http://gaw.cu.edu.eg/ 2014.04.14-16 Republic of Congo International Hydrocarbons Conference & Exhibition 2014, Brazzaville, Congo. http://ciehc.com/englishhome/ 2014.04.14-16 20th Western Africa Oil, Gas/LNG & Energy 2014, Windhoek, Namibia, http://www.petro21.com/events/?id=858 2014.04.28-30 5th Eastern Africa Oil, Gas/LNG & Energy 2014, Naitobi, Kenya. http://www.petro21.com/events/?id=851 2014.05.04-14 6th International Orogenic Lherzolite Conference Marrakech, Morocco, http://yes-morocco.blogspot.com.es/2013/07/sixth-international-orogenic-

lherzolite.html 2014.05.06-08 Esri Africa User Conference, Cape Town, South Africa. http://www.esri-southafrica.com 2014.05.22-23 Uganda Mining & Energy Conference and Exhibition, Kampala, Uganda, http://www.umec-uganda.com/the-event/an-overview/


2014.06.10-12 The Premier East Africa Oil & Gas Summit, London, UK. http://eastafrica-oil-gas.com/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=The+CWC+Group&utm_campaign=3335130_JK+-+EAOG+2014+EM1&dm_i=S3A,1ZHEI,6U8J7E,750YT,1

2014.06.24-25 4th Zambia International Mining and Energy Conference. Lusaka, Zambia, http://www.zimeczambia.com/ 2014.07.07-11 Changing Climates, Ecosystems and Environments of Arid Southern Africa. A Tribute to Louis Scott. Bloemfontein, South Africa. http://lscott-

tribute.co.za/ 2014.08.11-14 3rd Young Earth Scientists-YES Congress, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. http://www.yescongress.org/2014/ 2014.08.14-16 25th Colloquium of African Geology-CAG25, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. 2014.07.14-19 The African Association of Women in Geosciences (AAWG) - 7TH Conference - Earth Sciences and Climate Change: Challenges to Development

in Africa, Nairobi, Kenya. http://www.aawg.org/ 2014.07.14-19 Earth Sciences and Climate Change: Challenges to Development in Africa, Nairobi, Kenya. http://www.aawg.org 2014.07.27-2014.08.02

Inaugural Workshop On West African Sedimentology And Sedimentary Basins, Ibadan, Nigeria.http://www.sedimentologists.org/docs/meetings/index/102.pdf

2014.08.18-20 The Roy Miller Symposium - A conference to recognise a lifetime of service to the geological sciences in Namibia, Windhoek, Namibia. For more information http://www.geolsocnamibia.org/symp Please reply to: [email protected] (new website)

2014.09.01-0 The 21st General Meeting of the International Mineralogical Association (IMA). Johannesburg, SA. http://www.ima2014.co.za/ 2014.09.09-11 2nd Geological Congress of Mozambique and 12th Geochemocal Congress of the Portuguese Speaking Countries, Maputo, Mozambique. 2014.09.11-13 Kimberley Diamond Symposium and Trade Show. Kimberley, Northern Cape, South Africa. Contact: http://www.gssa.org.za/event/kimberley-

diamond-symposium-trade-show/ 2014.09.23-25 Africa Petroleum Storage and Transport Conference and Exhibition (APESTRANS 2014), Yaounde, Cameroon. http://apestrans.com/ 2014.11.04-06 3rd Senegal International Mining Conference & Exhibitions 2014, Dakar, Senegal, http://www.events-africa.com/senegal-international-mining-

conference-&-exhibitions-events-africa-2014.html# 2015 67th Annual Meeting of the ICCP (International Committee for Coal & Organic Petrology), Tete, Mozambique. 2016.08.27-2016.09.04

35th International Geological Congress (35IGC), Cape Town, South Africa. http://www.35igc.org/

Rest of the World Next Month: 2013.12.01-03 Saudi Water Power Forum & Exhibition, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. http://www.ksawpf.com 2013.12.01-04 Asian Crystallographic Association – AsCA’13, Dhaka, Bangladesh. http://www.asca2013.org/ 2013.12.02-04 Kurdistan-Iraq Oil & Gas Conference, Erbil, Iraq. http://www.cwckiog.com 2013.12.03-05 Sustainable City 2013 - 8th International Conference on Urban Regeneration and Sustainability, Putrajaya, Malaysia. http://www.wessex.ac.uk/13-

conferences/sustainable-city-2013.html 2013.12.07-10 12th Conference of the Asian Crystalographic Association, Hong Kong, PR China, http://asca13.ust.hk/web/asca/ 2013.12.09-10 Kuwait Oil & Gas Summit, Kuwait. http://www.cwckuwait.com 2013.12.09-13 American Geophysical Union’s 46th annual Fall Meeting, San Francisco, Ca., USA, http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2013/ 2013.12.13-14 5th Conference on the Quaternary, Porto, Portugal. http://apeq.pt/jornadas/?q=en 2014.01.06-08 Volcanic and Magmatic Studies Group, Edinburgh, UK, 50th Anniversary Meeting, http://www.vmsg.org.uk/vmsg-edinburgh/ 2014.01.06-11 2014 Winter Conference on Plasma Spectrochemistry, Amelia Island, Florida, USA.

http://icpinformation.org/uploads/2014_Winter_Conference_General_Information.pdf 2014.01.29-30 2014 Geodesign Summit, Redlands, California, USA. http://www.geodesignsummit.com/index.html?WT.mc_id=EmailCampaign16766 2014.02.03-06 7th Workshop on Remote Sensing of Land Ice and Snow: Remote Sensing of the Earth's Cryosphere. Bern, Switzerland.

http://www.earsel.org/SIG/Snow-Ice/workshop/call.php 2014.02.06-07 Vertical geology conference 2014, Lausanne, Switzerland, http://www3.unil.ch/wpmu/vgc14/ 2014.02.17-18 EAGE/FESM Joint Regional Conference Petrophysics Meets Geoscience"From Nano Pores to Mega Structures", Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

http://www.eage.org/events/index.php?eventid=1058&Opendivs=s3 2014.02.23-28 2014 Ocean Sciences Meeting, Honolulu, Hawai, USA. http://www.sgmeet.com/osm2014/default.asp 2014.02.23-26 SME Annual Meeting and Exhibit, Salt Lake City, USA. http://www.smenet.org/calendar/detail.cfm?eventKey=1052 2014.02.25-27 SPE/EAGE European Unconventional Resources Conference and Exhibition Unlocking European Potential, Vienna, Austria.

http://www.eage.org/events/index.php?eventid=948&Opendivs=s3 2014 March 5th Rio Gas Forum, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. http://www.cwcriogas.com 2014.03.10-14 International Symposium on Sea Ice in a Changing Climate, Hobart, Australia, http://seaice.acecrc.org.au/igs2014/ 2014.03.17.18 5th Land Use & Land Cover Workshop. Berlin, Germany. http://www.geographie.hu-berlin.de/labs/geomatics/events/earsel-en/workshop/ 2014.03.17-20 Asia Mining Congress, Singapore. http://www.terrapinn.com/2014/asia-mining-congress/ 2014.03.18-20 Intersol 2014, Lille, France, http://www.intersol.fr/ 2014.03.19-21 North Atlantic Craton Conference 2014, Fife, Scotland, UK, http://www.nac-conference2014.org.uk 2014.03.24-28 9th EGU Alexander von Humboldt International Conference on High Impact Natural Hazards Related to the Euro-Mediterranean Region, Istanbul,

Turkey, http://static2.egu.eu/media/filer_public/2013/10/01/avhistanbul_first_circular_1oct2013.pdf 2014.03.25-28 World CTX 2014 Conference, Beijing, China. http://www.worldctx.com/ 2014.03.26-28 Tools in Quaternary research: environmental indicators and geochronology, Lyon, France http://www.afeq.cnrs-

bellevue.fr/Documents/colloques/Q9%20Lyon%202014_09092013.pdf 2014.04.06-09 9th South American Symposium on Isotope Geology (9th SSAGI). SãoPaulo, Brazil. http://www.acquacon.com.br/9ssagi/ 2014.04.07-10 Saint Petersburg 2014 - Geosciences – Investing in the Future, Saint Petersburg, Russia

http://www.eage.org/events/index.php?eventid=1010&Opendivs=s3 2014.04.07-12 Arctic Science Summit Week (ASSW) 2014 , Helsinki, Finland, http://www.assw2014.fi/ 2014.04.21-25 Engineering Geophysics 2014 Conference and Exhibition Gelendzhik, Russia,

http://www.eage.org/events/index.php?eventid=1096&Opendivs=s3http://www.eage.org/events/index.php?eventid=1096&Opendivs=s3


2014.04.23-25 Energy Production and Management in the 21st Century – The Quest for Sustainable Energy, Ekaterinburg, Russia, http://www.wessex.ac.uk/14-conferences/energy-quest-2014.html

2014.04.23-25 Energy Quest 2014 - Energy Production and Management in the 21st Century – The Quest for Sustainable Energy, Ekaterinburg, Russia. http://www.wessex.ac.uk/14-conferences/energy-quest-2014.html

2014.04.27-30 The Geosciences Information For Teachers workshop, Vienna, Austria, http://www.egu.eu/news/75/educators-apply-now-to-take-part-in-the-2014-gift-workshop/

2014.04.27-2014.05.02

European Geosciences Union General Assembly 2014. Vienna, Austria http://www.egu2014.eu/abstract_management/how_to_submit_an_abstract.html

2014.05.05-09 Geospatial World Forum, 2104, Geneve, Switzerland, http://www.geospatialworldforum.org/ 2014.05.11-16 5th International Congress on Arsenic in the Environment, Buenos Aires, Argentina, http://www.as2014.com.ar/home.html 2014.05.14-16 Environmental Impact 2014 - 2nd International Conference on Environmental and Economic Impact on Sustainable Development, Ancona, Italy.

http://www.wessex.ac.uk/14-conferences/environmental-impact-2014.html 2014.05.21-23 2014 Geological Association of Canada–Mineralogical Association of Canada Joint Annual Meeting, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada,

http://www.unb.ca/conferences/gacmac2014/ 2014.05.25-28 4th INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON SiAlONs AND NON-OXIDES (ISSNOX4), Shiga, Japan, http://ceramics.ynu.ac.jp/issnox4/index.html 2014.05.26-28 Water Pollution 2014 - 12th International conference on Modelling, Monitoring and Management of Water Pollution, The Algarve, Portugal.

http://www.wessex.ac.uk/14-conferences/water-pollution-2014.html 2014.05.26-28 EUROCK 2014 - ISRM European Regional Symposium - Rock Engineering and Rock Mechanics: Structures in and on Rock Masses, Vigo, Spain,

http://www.isrm.net/conferencias/detalhes.php?id=3119&show=conf 2014.05.26-30 E-MRS 2014 SPRING MEETING (European Materials Research Society), Lille, France, http://www.emrs-

strasbourg.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=691&Itemid=1619 2014.05.27-29 Urban Water 2014 - 2nd International Conference on the Design, Construction, Maintenance, Monitoring and Control of Urban Water Systems, The

Algarve, Portugal. https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?tab=wm#inbox/13dd7831e9db6b64 2014.05.28-29 GEO Business 2014, London, UK, http://www.geobusinessshow.com/ 2014.06.01-06 International Conference on Atmospheric Dust – DUST 2014, Castellaneta Marina, Italy http://www.dust2014.org/index.html 2014.06.02-06 World Landslide Forum III. Beijing, China http://icl.iplhq.org/HomePage.aspx?TabID=4945&Site=Portal&Lang=en-US 2014.06.02-06 XIX Congreso Geológico Argentino (19th Argenitinain Geological Congress) Córdoba, Argentina. http://www.congresogeologico.org.ar/ 2014.06.03-05 13th International Conference on Structures Under Shock and Impact, New Forest, UK http://www.wessex.ac.uk/14-conferences/susi-2014.html 2014.06.04-06 9th International Conference on Risk Analysis and Hazard Mitigation, New Forest, UK. http://www.wessex.ac.uk/14-conferences/risk-analysis-

2014.html 2014.06.08-09 20th World Congress of Soil Science (WCSS) in Korea. http://www.20wcss.org/ 2014.06.08-13 Goldschmidt Conference 2014, Sacramento, USA. http://goldschmidt.info/ 2014.06.09-13 IC EST2014 - The Seventh International Conference on Environmental Science and Technology. Houston, Texas, USA.

http://www.aasci.org/conference/env/2014/index.html 2014.06.11-12 3rd Tight & Shale Gas Summit, Edinburgh, UK, http://www.wplgroup.com/aci/conferences/eu-eug3.asp 2014.06.16-19 76th EAGE Conference & Exhibition 2014 - Experience the Energy, Amsterdam, Netherlands,

http://www.eage.org/events/index.php?eventid=1000&Opendivs=s3 2014.06.16-20 34th EARSeL Symposium. Warsaw, Poland. http://www.earsel.org/symposia/2014-symposium-Warsaw/ 2014.06.17-19 Sustainable Irrigation 2014 - 5th International Conference on Sustainable Irrigation and Drainage: Management, Technologies and Policies, Poznan,

Poland. http://www.wessex.ac.uk/14-conferences/sustainable-irrigation-2014.html 2014.06.17-26 14th International Multidisciplinary Scientific GeoConference & EXPO SGEM2014, Albena, Bulgaria, http://sgem.org/ 2014.06.18-20 4th International Conference on Flood Recovery, Innovation and Response, Poznan, Poland. http://www.wessex.ac.uk/14-conferences/friar-2014.html 2014.06.18-21 EUCOP4 - 4th European Conference on Permafrost, Évora, Portugal, http://www.eucop4.org/ 2014.06.23-27 Integrated Marine Biogeochemistry and Ecosystem Research (IMBER) Open Science Conference, Bergen, Norway.

http://www.imber.info/index.php/Meetings/IMBER-OSC-2014 2014.06.26-31 9th European Palaeobotanical Palynological Conference (EPPC), Padua, Italia. http://www.geoscienze.unipd.it/9th-european-palaeobotany-

palynology-conference 2014.06.29-2014.07.04

Shechtman International Symposium on Sustainable Mining, Minerals, Metal and Materials Processing, Cancun, Mexico, http://www.flogen.org/conferences.php?spage=1

2014.06.30 – 2014.07.03

17th Joint Geomorphological Meeting, Liege, Belgium. http://www.17th-jgm-liege2014.org/ 2014.06.30 – 2014.07.04

30th International Conference of the Society of Environmental Geochemistry and Health - European Section, will be held at Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/sd/academic/ee/news/2832658

2014.07.01-03 The 2014 Norwich Conference on "Access and Allocation in the Anthropocene". University of East Anglia, UK. http://www.earthsystemgovernance.org/news/2013-09-21-norwich-conference-earth-system-governance-call-papers

2014.06.29-2014.07.04

Australasia Quaternary Association. Mildura/Mungo, Australia, http://aqua.org.au/?page_id=301 2014.07.05-11 CIMP General Meeting 2014 - "What’s trending in palynology?!" Liège, Belgium

http://cimp.weebly.com/uploads/6/4/0/5/6405206/lettre_annonce_congrs.pdf 2014.07.07-09 Air Pollution 2014 - 22nd International Conference on Modelling, Monitoring and Management of Air Pollution, Opatija, Croatia.

http://www.wessex.ac.uk/14-conferences/air-pollution-2014.html 2014.07.13-18 Gondwana 15 international conference, Madrid, Spain. http://www.gondwana15.org/ 2014.07.12-15 2014 Esri Education GIS Conference, San Diego, Ca., USA. http://www.esri.com/events/educ/call-for-papers?WT.mc_id=EmailCampaignb2801 2014.07.13-17 BIOGEOMON, Bayreuth, Germany, http://www.bayceer.uni-bayreuth.de/biogeomon2014/ 2014 August 24th Congress and General Assembly of the International Union of Crystallography, Montreal, Canada. http://www.iucr2014.org/ 2014.08.02-10 40th COSPAR (Committee on Space Research) Scientific Assembly; Moscow, Russia. http://cosparhq.cnes.fr/Meetings/sciass.htm 2014.08.05-12 Congress of the International Union of Crystallography, Montreal, Canada. http://www.iucr2014.org/welcome_e.shtml 2014.08.11-14 XII International Platinum Symposium, Yekaterinburg, Russia. http://12ips.uran.ru 2014.08.11-15 22nd IAHR International Symposium on Ice, Singapore, http://www.iahr-ice2014.org/


2014.08.13-16 XXVIII Nordic Hydrological Conference, Stockholm, Sweden, http://nhf-hydrology.squarespace.com/nhc-2014-2/ 2014.08.16-21 World Weather Open Science Conference 2014, Montréal, Canada. http://www.ecmwf.int/publications/cms/get/ecmwfnews/327 2014.08.18-22 GeoBaikal 2014 - Exploration and Field Development in East Siberia, Irkutsk, Russia,

http://www.eage.org/events/index.php?eventid=1131&Opendivs=s3 2014.08.19-22 14th Quadrennial IAGOD Symposium, Urumqi, China. http://www.iagod.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=11&Itemid=13 2014.08.24-29 Second European Conference on Earthquake Engineering and Seismology; 15th European Conference on Earthquake Engineering; 34th General

Assembly of European Seismological Commission, Istanbul, Turkey. http://www.2eceesistanbul.org/ 2014.08.26-31 9th European Paleobotany and Palynology Conference, Padova, Italy, http://www.geoscienze.unipd.it/eppc2014/index.html 2014.09.07-12 The International Microscopy Congress 2014, Prague, Czech Republic, http://www.imc2014.com/ 2014.09.08-11 ECMOR XIV - 14th European Conference on the Mathematics of Oil Recovery, Catania, Sicily, Italy.

http://www.eage.org/events/index.php?eventid=1093&Opendivs=s3 2014.09.09-13 Cities on Volcanoes 8, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, http://citiesonvolcanoes8.com/ 2014.09.14-18 Near Surface Geoscience 2014, Athens, Greece. http://www.eage.org/events/index.php?eventid=1013&Opendivs=s3 2014.09.15-17 First Applied Shallow Marine Geophysics Conference, Athens, Greece, http://www.eage.org/events/index.php?eventid=1120&Opendivs=s3 2014.09.15-19 IAEG XII Congress – Engineering Geology for Society & Territory, Torino, Italy. http://www.iaeg2014.com 2014.09.17-22 5th International Maar Conference, Querétaro, Mexico, http://maar2014.geociencias.unam.mx/ 2014.09.19-22 6th International Unesco Conference on Global Geoparks, Saint John New Brunswick, Canada http://www.geoparks2014.com/main.html 2014.09.21-26 47º Congresso Brasileiro de Geologia (47th Brazilian Congress of Geology) Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. http://www.47cbg.com.br/ 2014.09.23-25 Sustainable City 2014 - 9th International Conference on Urban Regeneration and Sustainability, Siena, Italy. http://www.wessex.ac.uk/city2014?e=1-

225297 2014.09.24-26 XX Congress of Carpathian Balkan Geological Association, Tirana, Albania, http://www.cbga2014.org/ 2014.09.27-30 SEG 2014, Keystone, CO, USA, http://www.seg2014.org 2014.09.28-2014.10.05

4th International Paleontological Congress, The history of life: a view from the Southern Hemisphere. Mendoza, Argentina, http://ipa.geo.ku.edu/pdf/IPC4.pdf

2014.10.21-23 Petroleum 2014. 2nd International Conference on Petroleum and Mineral Resources. Koya, Kurdistan, Irak, http://www.wessex.ac.uk/14-conferences/petroleum-2014.html

2014.10.27-29 KazGeo 2014 - From Challenges to Opportunities, Almaty, Kazakhstan. http://www.eage.org/events/index.php?eventid=1108&Opendivs=s3 2014.11.02-05 XIV ALAGO (Latin-American Association of Organic Geochemistry) Congres Armação dos Búzios (Rio de Janeiro, Brasil). http://alago.co/blog/xiv-

congresso-da-alago 2014.11.06-08 2nd International Conference – Urban Transitions and Transformations: Science, Synthesis and Policy, Taipei, Taiwan. http://ugec.org/2nd-

international-ugec-conference/ 2014.11.16-19 Second EAGE Integrated Reservoir Modelling Conference - Uncertainty Quantification: Are we Doing it Right? Dubai, United Arab Emirates,

http://www.eage.org/events/index.php?eventid=1147&Opendivs=s3 2014.12.07-09 Second EAGE Forum for Students & Young Professionals - Mentoring, Empowering & Valuing Young Talents, Muscat, Oman.

http://www.eage.org/events/index.php?eventid=1123&Opendivs=s3 2014.12.16-18 Energy and Sustainability 2014 - 5th International Conference on Energy and Sustainability, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, http://www.wessex.ac.uk/14-

conferences/energy-and-sustainability-2014.html 2015 27th International Cartographic Conference and 16th General Assembly of ICA. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. http://icaci.org/calendar 2015.02.22-25 SME Annual Meeting and Exhibit, Denver, USA. http://www.smenet.org/calendar/detail.cfm?eventKey=1052 2015.04.29-2015.05.06

ISRM 13th International Congress on Rock Mechanics, Montreal, Canada, http://www.isrm.net/conferencias/detalhes.php?id=3024&show=conf 2015.06.01-04 77th EAGE Conference & Exhibition 2015, Madrid, Spain. http://www.eage.org/index.php?evp=4021 2015.06.22-2014.07.02

IAVCEI General Assembly, Prague, Czech Republic, http://www.iugg2015prague.com/ 2015.08.07-15 18th International Congress on the Carboniferous and Permian, Kazan, Russia. http://www.iccp2015.ksu.ru 2015.08.16-21 Goldschmidt Conference 2015, Prague, Czech Republic, http://goldschmidt.info/2015/ 2015.08.23-28 European Crystallographic Meeting – ECM 29, Rovinj (Croatia). http://ecm29.ecanews.org/ 2015.11.01-04 GSA 2015, Baltimore, USA, http://www.globaleventslist.elsevier.com/events/2015/11/the-geological-society-of-america-gsa-2015-annual-meeting/ 2016.06.26-2016.07.01

Goldschmidt Conference 2015, Yokohama, Japan, http://goldschmidt.info/2016/


http://www.arcmediaglobal.com/geothermal/

[email protected] or [email protected]


http://www.africangeoparknetwork.org

http://www.sedimentologists.org/docs/meetings/index/102.pdf


PROFESSIONAL COURSES/WORKSHOPS/SCHOLARSHIPS

Georg Forster Research Fellowship Programme Every year, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation enables highly-qualified academics from transition and developing countries to spend time in Germany working on research under theGeorg Forster Research Fellowship Programme. In this way, the Foundation promotes the sharing of knowledge and methods between Germany and the researchers’ own countries. For this fellowship programme, which is funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the Humboldt Foundation has managed to acquire approx. seven million EUR in additional funding from the EU. This additional EU support will be available until 2018. The EU funding will be used to finance additional benefits: • a subsidy towards a pension plan to compensate for any disadvantages ensuing from a fellowship in comparison with an employment contract • a bridging grant to cover periods of unemployment in Germany • improved family allowances • a subsidy towards the costs of chi ld care to help reconcile research and family life Post-doctoral researchers (up to a maximum of four years after completing a doctorate) receive a monthly fellowship of 2,650 EUR. Experienced researchers (up to a maximum of 12 years after completing a doctorate) receive 3,159 EUR per month. Georg Forster Research Fellowships are granted on the strength of the applicant’s academic qualifications and the relevance of the proposed research project to development. If the conditions for conducting research in a given country are difficult, this will be taken into account. We should be most grateful if you would publicise the Georg Forster Research Fellowship Programme in your networks and encourage potential candidates to apply. Please note that individuals who have already been sponsored by the Humboldt Foundation are not eligible to apply for another of the Foundation’s fellowships. The first selection meeting for Georg Forster Research Fellowships (HERMES) will take place in February 2014. Visit www.humboldt-foundation.de/georgforster for additional information on the programme. You can also download our information leaflet at www.humboldt-foundation.de/web/gf-short-information.html. If you have any other questions, please do not hesitate to send an email to [email protected].

The International School on Foraminifera Urbino, It aly 3 June – 21 June 2014

Since its inception in 2006, the International School on Foraminifera in Urbino has been the world’s leading training school devoted to the study of foraminifera. The three-week training course is held at the newly-refurbished Collegio Internazionale at the University of Urbino. The school boasts an international teaching faculty who are among the world’s leading experts in their respective research fields. The full course consists of approximately 50 hours of lectures and 50 hours of practical work. The course consists of four modules: Introduction to the Foraminifera, smaller benthic foraminifera, larger benthic foraminifera, and planktonic foraminifera. Course participants have the option of registering for one or more modules, or participating in the entire course. The course includes a one-day field trip to visit the classic micropaleontological localities near Gubbio, Italy. The course is primarily intended for young researchers at the PhD or MSc stages of their careers and industrial staff working with Foraminifera, Meiofauna, Micropalaeontology, Paleoceanography, Paleoecology, and Climate History. For industrial staff, additional training modules or individual tutorials may be arranged upon request after the course. Contact Details: Email: [email protected] Tel: (+39) 0722 304309 Fax: (+39) 0722 304220

Geology of Gold Deposits February 1-2, 2014

Location: University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, Lecture Room 101 | South Africa Register Online: https://www.segweb.org/custom/eventsredirect.aspx?eventcode=14RGOLD SEG is again offering its highly successful Gold Workshop at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg on February 1-2, 2014, the weekend prior to the Mining Indaba meeting. The course will focus on the distribution, geology, important characteristics (geochemistry, geophysics, structure, alteration, mineralogy), genesis, and exploration criteria of the most important gold deposit types. Upper level undergraduate and graduate students in economic geology, as well as industry geologists, will find the course useful. Deposit examples include material from Africa, as well as throughout the world. This course filled up quickly in Cape Town in 2013--We recommend registering early for the 2014 event! Instructors: Hartwig Frimmel, Richard J. Goldfarb, Brian Rusk, and Stuart F. Simmons.


INTERESTING PHOTOS Richat Structure – Mauritania

1. http://earth.imagico.de/large.php?site=mauretania1 2. http://jp-lugaresfantasticos.blogspot.com/2012/06/estrutura-de-richat-mauritania.html 3. http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/sahara%20desert?language=pt_ 4. http://www.computervisiononline.com/showcase/eye-africa 5. http://www.worldtravelattractions.com/five-odd-looking-landscapes-of-the-world/ 6. http://forum.xcitefun.net/richat-structure-the-eye-of-africa-mauritania-t39430.html 7. http://www.kuriositas.com/2011/03/richat-structure-earths-bulls-eye.html Location: 21°06'12.07"N / 11°23'41.22"W The Richat Structure, also known as the Eye of the Sahara, is a prominent circular feature in the Sahara desert of west–central Mauritania near Ouadane. This structure is a deeply eroded, slightly elliptical, 40-km in diameter, dome (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richat_Structure).


GEOLOGY OF AFRICAN COUNTRIES/TERRITORIES

TANZANIA

Adapted from: Schlüter, T., 2006. Geological Atlas of Africa. Ed. S pringer. 272 pp: CD-ROM