300,000-Year Human Footprints Found in Spain

Current intertidal zone surrounding El Pichilín, Castilla beach, Matalascañas.

Footprints indicate the presence of humans in Southern Spain in the Chibanian (Middle Pleistocene) 200,000 years earlier than previously thought. More than 300 footprints have been found, of which 10% are considered well-preserved.

The discovery in June 2020 of human footprints more than 106,000 years old next to El Asperillo cliff (Matalascañas, Huelva) was considered one of the most important discoveries of that year. But now it has confirmed that those footprints are in fact 200,000 years older than previously thought, with a margin of error of 17,800 years, according to the data collected from the four samples of sedimentary levels in the cliffs of El Asperillo.

Researcher and GRS Radioisotopes technician Jorge Rivera applied an optically-stimulated luminescence technique at the Center for Research, Technology and Innovation laboratories at the University of Seville (CITIUS) and at CENIEH to the Matalascañas footprints to determine that the footprints are in fact 200,000 years older than previously suspected.

The Matalascañas discovery establishes the scenario that prevailed on the coast of the Gulf of Cádiz, with human settlements in a more temperate and humid climate than in the rest of Europe. In that period the sea level would have been about 60 meters below its current level. This implies that there would have been a great coastal plain, with large flood-prone areas, in which the footprints discovered in mid-2020 would have been made.

The site’s new dating also affects the vertebrate animals found, since the hominin traces there also included footprints of large mammals such as straight-tusked elephants, gigantic bulls (aurochs) and boars. It was the fauna that inhabited what is today Doñana National Park 300,000 years ago and not 100,000 years ago, as earlier reported.

The Chibanian includes the transition in palaeoanthropology from the Lower to the Middle Palaeolithic, which includes the emergence of modern humans between 300,000 and 400,000 years ago. As of 2016, the oldest known human DNA dates to the Middle Pleistocene, around 430,000 years ago. 

Related reading: Footprints Indicate Human Presence in Spain in the Middle Pleistocene

Effects of the Tonga-Hunga Eruption

(Image not to scale.) The Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption on Jan. 15, 2022, caused many effects. Some of those effects, like extreme winds and unusual electric currents were picked up by NASA’s ICON mission and ESA’s (the European Space Agency) Swarm. Credits: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Mary Pat Hrybyk-Keith

On 20 December 2021, an eruption began on Hunga Tonga–Hunga Haʻapai, a submarine volcano in the Tongan archipelago in the southern Pacific Ocean. The eruption reached a powerful climax on 15 January when it sent a tsunami racing around the world and set off a sonic boom that circled the globe twice. 

The underwater eruption blasted an enormous plume of water vapor into Earth’s stratosphere. The plume sent enough water into the upper layers of the atmosphere to fill 58,000 Olympic-size swimming pools. That’s nearly four times the amount of water vapor that scientists estimate the 1991 Mount Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines lofted into the stratosphere.

The height of the plume can reveal how much ice was sent into the stratosphere and where ash particles were released. The height is also critical for aviation safety because volcanic ash can cause jet engine failure.

The Tonga volcanic eruption created a plume of ash and water so strong it reached the mesosphere, about 50-80 km above Earth’s surface, where meteors and meteorites usually burn up. 

Researchers seek to understand the impact the eruption might have on Earth's climate. Massive volcanic eruptions like Krakatoa and Mount Pinatubo typically cool Earth’s surface by ejecting gases, dust, and ash that reflect sunlight back into space. The Tonga volcano did not inject large amounts of aerosols into the stratosphere, and the huge amounts of water vapor from the eruption may have a small, temporary warming effect, since water vapor traps heat.

The eruption of Tonga-Hunga produced a 6-acre island in the Pacific Ocean. The new island is likely to disappear due to volcanic rock degradation caused by the erosion of the waves. According to NASA, islands created by submarine volcanoes are often short-lived, though they occasionally persist for years. For example, an island formed by a 12-day eruption from nearby Late'iki Volcano in 2020 washed away after two months, while an island created in 1995 by the same volcano remained for over two decades.

Related reading: NASA report: "Tonga Eruption Blasted Unprecedented Amount of Water Into Stratosphere"; Volcanic Eruptions and Climate

The Brunswick Magnetic Anomaly

 

Georgia coastal plains sediment

The Brunswick Magnetic Anomaly is a belt of volcanic rocks that formed around 200 million years ago at the time when the Atlantic Ocean took shape. The ribbon of rock is buried about 9 to 12 miles below the surface. It snakes from Alabama across Georgia, and offshore to North Carolina's Outer Banks.

It is believed that the Brunswick Magnetic Anomaly was created when the crusts of Africa and North America were yanked apart. As North America broke from Pangaea, deep troughs formed along the line of separation. These troughs filled with thick layers of coarse red sandstones, conglomerates, shales, and other nonmarine sediments. Similar sediment-filled troughs (called "rift valleys") occurred along North America’s east coast, from Georgia to Nova Scotia, Canada.

Though North America's east coast is relatively quiet now, clues to these ancient tectonic collisions remain buried deep underground. Using special instruments, geophysicists can discover important information about the large-scale motion of Earth’s outermost shell by determining the source of distinct striped magnetic anomalies.

The Brunswick Magnetic Anomaly may mark the original collision zone between the African and North American plates. At least part of this belt of volcanic rock may represent a suture between the plates east of Georgia. 

Related reading: Weird Magnetic Anomaly Reveals Ancient Tectonic Crash; Piece of Africa Found Under Alabama; Earth's First Continents Sank into the Planet Before Rising Again

Counting and Measuring Tree Rings

 

Dendrochronology is the science of dating events such as volcanic eruptions, forest fires, and environmental changes by studying the characteristic patterns of annual growth rings in timber and tree trunks. Tree cell anatomy contributes to a better understanding of past climate events.

Irina Panyushkina pioneered one of the earliest wood anatomy studies in 1998.She spent the late ’90s in Krasnoyarsk at the Russian Academy of Sciences hunched over a microscope, peering down at paper-thin slices of wood from Arctic larch trees.

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Tree cell anatomy measurements have advanced understanding of past climate events.

Panyushkina painstakingly counted and measured thousands of wood cells to create a 350-year climate chronology, dating from 1642 to 1993. It was among the most rigorous tree-ring–based reconstructions of past climate at the time, but it was also prohibitively tedious. To image the cells, each thin section first had to be photographed under a microscope, and then the images were imported into a computer and displayed onscreen. Panyushkina then had to click on every cell to tell the program to measure it.

Panyushkina took 9,460 photographs from 1,896 tree rings, in just 11 tree samples. The work took her four years. “It was so intensive and laborious,” says Panyushkina, who’s now at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research at the University of Arizona. “I said I’ll never do it again.

Fortunately, since Panyushkina's research there have been significant advances in dendrochronology and paleoclimate research because of analytical software and computing power. What would have taken weeks in the ’90s now takes days, says Jesper Björklund at the Swiss Federal Research Institute in Birmensdorf. “Using the same amount of time you can obtain roughly 100 times more data, increasing the potential for robustness and scope of each study,” he says. 

The “big jump,” Björklund says, was the development of a software called ROXAS in the early 2000s, which identifies and measures cells from high-resolution scans of tree rings.

Read more here.

Related reading: Tree Story by Valerie Trouet, Johns Hopkins University, 2020

The Chibanian Age of Geologic Time

 

Schematic illustration of Earth's magnetic field.

Credits: Peter Reid, The University of Edinburgh

A geomagnetic reversal is a change in a planet's magnetic field such that the positions of magnetic north and magnetic south are interchanged.

About 770,000 years ago, Earth’s magnetic fields reversed, swapping magnetic north and south for the last known time. That ushered in a new geological age which scientists have now named the Chibanian.

The Chibanian age is named after the Japanese prefecture Chiba where a cliff wall was found with an exposed layer of marine deposits and mineral debris about 770,000 years old.

When geologists studied the minerals inside, they found evidence of the last known shifting of Earth’s magnetic fields. The planet’s outer core generates its magnetic field, a kind of shield that protects Earth from solar wind.

As molten rock cools, iron-bearing minerals form. They align themselves with the magnetic field, then solidify, acting as a kind of snapshot of Earth’s magnetic field at the time cooling occurred.

The minerals in Chiba allowed geologists to date the last known switch of magnetic fields to about 774,000 years ago. They named the reversal event the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal in honor of the French geophysicist Bernard Brunhes (1867-1910) and the Japanese geophysicist Motonori Matuyama (1884-1958).

Matuyama was the first to provide systematic evidence that the Earth's magnetic field had been reversed in the early Pleistocene and to suggest that long periods existed in the past in which the polarity was reversed.

Antoine Joseph Bernard Brunhes was a pioneer in paleomagnetism. His 1906 discovery of geomagnetic reversal has since been verified. The current period of normal polarity, called Brunhes Chron, is named for him.

Related reading: Earth Has a New Geologic Age: The Chibanian; Earth's Inconstant Magnetic Field

The 2022 American Scientific Affiliation Annual Meeting

 

Tell your friends and join the meeting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtyvKEhf8kY

Plenary I: "Reductionism, Emergence, and Free Will: Are We Bound by the Laws of Physics?" on July 29.

Plenary II: "The Scientist and the Questions of Race and Justice." Don't miss his workshop either, "Key Advances in the Science of Adam, Eve, and Evolution" on July 30.

Plenary III: "Mathematics for Human Flourishing" on July 31.

Plenary IV: "Flourishing Future: Keeping God's Creation "Good" So All Can Thrive" on August 1.

James Clerk Maxwell: A Man of Faith

James Clerk Maxwell

1831-1879

James Clerk Maxwell was a Scottish mathematician and scientist responsible for the classical theory of electromagnetic radiation, the first theory to describe electricity, magnetism and light as different manifestations of the same phenomenon. He also made fundamental contributions to mathematics, astronomy and engineering.

He was a strong Christian and one of Einstein's heroes. Albert Einstein said, "One scientific epoch ended and another began with James Clerk Maxwell."

"The special theory of relativity owes its origins to Maxwell's equations of the electromagnetic field."

From an early age, James Clerk Maxwell had an astonishing memory and an unquenchable curiosity about how things worked. His first teacher, his mother, encouraged him to "look up through Nature to Nature's God."

Campbell, L. and W. Garnett. 1882. The Life of James Clerk Maxwell: With Selections from His Correspondence and Occasional Writings. London: Macmillan and Co. reports on p. 32:

His knowledge of Scripture, from his earliest boyhood, was extraordinarily extensive and minute.... These things were not known merely by rote. They occupied his imagination and sank deeper than anybody knew.

 

Maxwell is held in high regard by the scientific community, but few acknowledge his Christian faith or his conviction in the authority of God's Word. Virtually every part of his brief, but remarkable, life was spent exploring the wonder of God's creation.

Related: James Clerk Maxwell: A Christian World Changer