ROME — Scientists on Wednesday inaugurated the first global repository of mountain ice cores, preserving the history of the Earth’s atmosphere in an Antarctic vault for future generations to study as global warming melts glaciers around the world.
An ice core is something of a time capsule, containing the history of the Earth’s past atmosphere in a frozen climate archive. With global glaciers melting at an unprecedented rate, scientists have raced to preserve ice cores for future study before they disappear altogether.
The first two samples of Alpine mountain ice core, drilled out of Mont Blanc in France and Grand Combin in Switzerland, are now being stored in a snow cave at the Concordia station in the Antarctic Plateau at a constant temperature of around -52°C/-61°F.
The Ice Memory Foundation, a consortium of European research institutes, inaugurated the frozen sanctuary on Wednesday, after boxes containing 1.7 tons of ice arrived via icebreaker on a 50-day refrigerated journey from Trieste, Italy.
“By safeguarding physical samples of atmospheric gases, aerosols, pollutants and dust trapped in ice layers, the Ice Memory Foundation ensures that future generations of researchers will be able to study past climate conditions using technologies that may not yet exist,” said Carlo Barbante, vice chair of the Ice Memory Foundation and a professor at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice.
The Ice Memory project was launched in 2015 by a consortium of research institutes: From France, the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), the French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development (IRD) and the University of Grenoble-Alpes; from Italy the National Council of Research (CNR) and the Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, and Switzerland’s Paul Scherrer Institute.
Scientists have already identified and drilled ice cores at 10 glacier sites worldwide and plan to transport them to the cave sanctuary for safekeeping in the coming years. The aim over the coming decade is to craft an international convention to preserve and safeguard the samples for future generations to study.
As temperatures globally rise, glaciers are disappearing at a rapid clip, and with them critical information about the atmosphere: Since 2000, glaciers have lost between 2% and 39% of their ice regionally and about 5% globally, the foundation said.
“These ice cores are not relics … they are reference points,” said Celeste Saulo, secretary-general of the U.N. World Meteorological Organisation. “They allow scientists now and in the future to understand what changed, how fast and why.”
Greenland’s harsh environment, lack of key infrastructure and difficult geology have so far prevented anyone from building a mine to extract the sought-after rare earth elements that many high-tech products require. Even if President Donald Trump prevails in his effort to take control of the arctic island, those challenges won’t go away.
Trump has prioritized breaking China’s stranglehold on the global supply of rare earths ever since the world’s number two economy sharply restricted who could buy them after the United States imposed widespread tariffs last spring. The Trump administration has invested hundreds of millions of dollars and even taken stakes in several companies. Now the president is again pitching the idea that wresting control of Greenland away from Denmark could solve the problem.
“We are going to do something on Greenland whether they like it or not,” Trump said Friday.
But Greenland may not be able to produce rare earths for years — if ever. Some companies are trying anyway, but their efforts to unearth some of the 1.5 million tons of rare earths encased in rock in Greenland generally haven’t advanced beyond the exploratory stage. Trump’s fascination with the island nation may be more about countering Russian and Chinese influence in the Arctic than securing any of the hard-to-pronounce elements like neodymium and terbium that are used to produce the high-powered magnets needed in electric vehicles, wind turbines, robots and fighter jets among other products.
“The fixation on Greenland has always been more about geopolitical posturing — a military-strategic interest and stock-promotion narrative — than a realistic supply solution for the tech sector,” said Tracy Hughes, founder and executive director of the Critical Minerals Institute. “The hype far outstrips the hard science and economics behind these critical minerals.”
Trump confirmed those geopolitical concerns at the White House Friday.
“We don’t want Russia or China going to Greenland, which if we don’t take Greenland, you can have Russia or China as your next door neighbor. That’s not going to happen,” Trump said
The main challenge to mine in Greenland is, “of course, the remoteness. Even in the south where it’s populated, there are few roads and no railways, so any mining venture would have to create these accessibilities,” said Diogo Rosa, an economic geology researcher at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland. Power would also have to be generated locally, and expert manpower would have to be brought in.
Another concern is the prospect of mining rare earths in the fragile Arctic environment just as Greenland tries to build a thriving tourism industry, said Patrick Schröder, a senior fellow in the Environment and Society program at the Chatham House think-tank in London.
“Toxic chemicals needed to separate the minerals out from the rock, so that can be highly polluting and further downstream as well, the processing,” Shröder said. Plus, rare earths are often found alongside radioactive uranium.
Besides the unforgiving climate that encases much of Greenland under layers of ice and freezes the northern fjords for much of the year, the rare earths found there tend to be encased in a complex type of rock called eudialyte, and no one has ever developed a profitable process to extract rare earths from that type of rock. Elsewhere, these elements are normally found in different rock formation called carbonatites, and there are proven methods to work with that.
“If we’re in a race for resources — for critical minerals — then we should be focusing on the resources that are most easily able to get to market,” said David Abraham, a rare earths expert who has followed the industry for decades and wrote the book “The Elements of Power.”
This week, Critical Metals’ stock price more than doubled after it said it plans to build a pilot plant in Greenland this year. But that company and more than a dozen others exploring deposits on the island remain far away from actually building a mine and would still need to raise at least hundreds of millions of dollars.
Even the most promising projects can struggle to turn a profit, particularly when China resorts to dumping extra materials onto the market to depress prices and drive competitors out of business as it has done many times in the past. And currently most critical minerals have to be processed in China.
The U.S. is scrambling to expand the supply of rare earths outside of China during the one-year reprieve from even tougher restrictions that Trump said Xi Jinping agreed to in October. A number of companies around the world are already producing rare earths or magnets and can deliver more quickly than anything in Greenland, which Trump has threatened to seize with military power if Denmark doesn’t agree to sell it.
“Everybody’s just been running to get to this endpoint. And if you go to Greenland, it’s like you’re going back to the beginning,” said Ian Lange, an economics professor who focuses on rare earths at the Colorado School of Mines.
Many in the industry, too, think America should focus on helping proven companies instead of trying to build new rare earth mines in Greenland, Ukraine, Africa or elsewhere. A number of other mining projects in the U.S. and friendly nations like Australia are farther along and in much more accessible locations.
The U.S. government has invested directly in the company that runs the only rare earths mine in the U.S., MP Materials, and a lithium miner and a company that recycles batteries and other products with rare earths.
Scott Dunn, CEO of Noveon Magnetics, said those investments should do more to reduce China’s leverage, but it’s hard to change the math quickly when more than 90% of the world’s rare earths come from China.
“There are very few folks that can rely on a track record for delivering anything in each of these instances, and that obviously should be where we start, and especially in my view if you’re the U.S. government,” said Dunn, whose company is already producing more than 2,000 metric tons of magnets each year at a plant in Texas from elements it gets outside of China.
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Funk reported from Omaha, Nebraska, and Naishadham reported from Madrid.
Have you ever watched as a child stares into an aquarium with awe? Whether it’s the song “Baby Beluga” or the movie Finding Nemo, kids love all things ocean! So you know they’ll be eager to dive into this collection of ocean activities and crafts. Whether it is a science experiment to learn how acid affects seashells, an art lesson where students create their own underwater scene, or a writing prompt about the ocean, students will learn all about our watery planet. Come on in … the water’s fine!
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Ocean Experiments and Learning Activities
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1. Learn about sea turtles and marine ecosystems
Make a splash with Wild Classroom’s free Sea Turtles and Oceans Toolkit. This ready-to-use resource helps students learn about ocean ecosystems by providing an educator’s guide, presentation, and fun, cross-curricular activities. You will also get bonus resources like quizzes and a video playlist, offering diverse ways to enrich your lessons. It is a great way to build critical thinking skills and inspire a love for ocean conservation.
2. Make an ocean in a bottle
Turn an old water bottle into a mini-aquarium. Fill it about a third of the way with sand. Then drop in some small shells and plastic fish and other sea creatures. Finally, top the bottle off with water (it’s up to you whether you want to dye it light blue first) and screw on the lid. (Avoid spills by adding a few drops of glue to the threads of the cap first.) Now kids can explore the ocean anywhere they go!
All you need for this science experiment is a shallow dish, hot and cold water, and some food coloring. Fill the dish about halfway with cold water that’s tinted light blue. Add some ice and stir so your water becomes very cold. Bring a few cups of water to a boil, adding food coloring to make it very bright red. Slowly (and carefully!) pour some hot water into one corner of the dish. Watch as the warm and cold water swirls and mixes, simulating the ocean currents that are formed the same way!
5. Assemble ocean zone bottles
Learn the zones of the ocean with this simple ocean activity. Round up four empty bottles and label them, one for each zone: sunlight, twilight, midnight, and abyssal. Use food coloring to dye the water in each deeper shades of blue to represent the amount of sunlight that reaches each zone. Finally, drop in a marine animal toy or fish that’s appropriate for each zone.
6. Watch an ocean documentary
Every streaming service is loaded with nature documentaries. Disney+ has an especially robust collection that’s perfect for kids. On Amazon, try Wildest Places or Ocean Mysteries. Netflix’s Our Planet series has episodes on coastal seas and high seas. So many options!
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7. Assign an ocean-themed writing prompt
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Use ocean-themed prompts for daily writing, journal entries, essay topics, bell ringers, or exit tickets. Some possible prompts:
If you were a marine animal, which zone of the ocean would you prefer to live in?
What would it be like to live in a coral reef?
Tell the story of a female sea turtle, from the time she hatches on the beach until she returns to that same beach years later to lay eggs of her own.
Write about a journey in a submarine to explore the deepest parts of the ocean.
Describe a day in the life of a marine biologist. What are they studying, and how do they go about it?
8. Turn paint sample strips into ocean layers
You’ll need paint sample strips in at least four deepening shades of blue; you can also add a beige color for the sandy bottom if you like. (Contact your local paint store for donations if you need more than just a few strips.) Label each paint color with one of the four zones, using deeper colors to represent deeper zones. Kids can write in descriptions of the zones, or add drawings and stickers of marine animals to each.
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9. See ocean waves in action
Adrienne Hathaway for We Are Teachers
Oil and water don’t mix, which makes them the perfect way to observe wave action up close. You’ll need a glass jar with a tight-fitting lid, plus water, oil, and blue food coloring. Fill the jar with water about halfway, add a few drops of food coloring, and mix. Fill the container the rest of the way with oil, getting as close to the top of the jar as possible, and put the lid on tightly. Turn the jar on its side and tilt it back and forth. Watch as the waves ripple and react to one another.
10. Host a marine animal fair
Let kids choose their favorite marine animal, then spend time teaching them how to research using trusted sources (see below for a list of kid-friendly ocean resources). Let them choose how they’ll present their animal—posters, dioramas, slideshows, presentations, etc. Then, set up your classroom as a “marine animal fair” and invite other classes and parents to come see what they’ve learned!
11. Draw a life-size whale
Did you know that blue whales are the largest creatures ever to have lived on Earth? They’re even bigger than dinosaurs! Head to the playground with some sidewalk chalk and a tape measure to measure out and draw a life-size blue whale. Kids will be astonished at the results. Find blue whale info from National Geographic here.
12. Explore saltwater density
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Use this easy ocean experiment to show that items float more easily in salt water than fresh. Fill two clear glasses with water about three-quarters of the way. Add 2 tbsp. of salt to one cup, 2 tbsp. of sugar to another, and mix thoroughly. Ask kids to predict what will happen when you drop grapes into each glass, then drop them in to see if they’re right. The grapes should float in the salt water. (Add more salt if they don’t.)
13. Sculpt an ocean floor relief map
Start by learning about Marie Tharp and her groundbreaking work mapping the ocean floor. (She proved plate tectonics with her meticulous work!) Then, use play dough, salt dough, or another medium to represent the depths of one or more of the world’s oceans. It’s an amazing world down there!
14. Put together an ocean animal notebook
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Turn a blank notebook into an ocean reference manual. Draw or paste a picture of an animal on each page, then write in interesting facts about them. This is an ocean activity that will appeal to kids of any age, since you can vary the level of details you include.
15. Discover how ocean acidification affects seashells
One consequence of climate change is the increasing acidification of the world’s oceans. Learn why this matters so much with a simple experiment using seashells and vinegar. Add a shell to a jar, then cover it completely with vinegar. Observe what happens—before long, you’ll see carbon dioxide bubbles form as the vinegar begins to dissolve the calcium in the shell. Leave it long enough and the shell will become fragile and eventually dissolve completely.
16. Dive into an ocean-themed sensory bin
Adrienne Hathaway for We Are Teachers
Make a bigger version of an ocean in a bottle so kids can splash around a bit. Round up shells, toy sea animals, and maybe even a boat or two, then drop them into a bin of water. Every kid will enjoy splashing around while they learn!
17. Simulate and clean up an oil spill
Oil spills at sea are major disasters, affecting life both in the water and on land. Learn about some of the more famous oil spoils in history, then try this experiment. Fill a shallow baking dish about halfway with water. Drop in some small toy fish and sea creatures. Then, add food coloring to some oil and “spill” it into the water. Now, experiment with different methods to clean up the oil. Is it even possible to fully restore the water to its pristine condition?
Ocean Crafts and Art Projects for Kids
18. Download free ocean coloring pages
Adrienne Hathaway for We Are Teachers
Our octopus, whale, and jellyfish coloring pages are perfect for when you need a quick and easy activity for kids. Keep them on hand for early finishers or use them as bell-ringer activities, or display a collection of them for a no-stress bulletin board.
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19. Create an ocean in an egg carton
Give each child an egg carton to paint blue like the ocean. After they’re dry, they can decorate the inside of the lid to look like a reef or sandy floor. Then, they can keep shells, rocks, or fish and marine animal toys in each compartment.
20. Upcycle an ocean zones container
For this ocean craft, you’ll need a tube-shaped container like an empty sanitizing-wipes tub or even a Pringles can. You’ll also need four shades of blue tissue or crepe paper: light, medium, dark, and midnight blue. Spread some glue on the container and wrap the crepe paper around it in an ombre effect, with the lightest blue at the top. Label each layer and add stickers representing the animals that live in each. Now you’ve got an upcycled storage container for your shells or ocean-themed toys.
21. Build LEGO sea creatures
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Pull out the tub of LEGO and set kids free to create. The whole class can work together to set up an ocean-themed diorama, using LEGO bricks to make coral, seaweed, fish, whales, jellyfish, and more.
22. Paint a coral reef with sponges
Here’s another surprisingly easy ocean craft for kids. Cut disposable sponges into coral shapes, then stamp an underwater scene onto blue paper. Use markers, paint, or stickers to add fish and other marine animals to complete the picture.
23. Illustrate inspirational ocean quotes
Have kids choose a quote they love from our big collection of ocean quotes, then turn that quote into a poster. These make perfect hallway displays that will educate and inspire other students!
Starfish, more properly known as “sea stars,” come in a wide variety of sizes and designs, but they all live in salt water. That makes salt dough the perfect medium for this ocean craft. To make it, just mix 2 cups of flour, 1 cup of salt, and 1 cup of water. Mix and knead until the dough is smooth, then store in an airtight container until you’re ready to use it.
25. Hang paper plate jellyfish
Adrienne Hathaway for We Are Teachers
Cut paper plates in half to create the bell-shaped body of a jellyfish, and let kids paint or color them any way they life. Then, show them how to use a hole punch to create a row of holes along the bottom flat part of the bell. Tie ribbon or yarn to each hole to create dangling tentacles, then hang your ocean crafts.
26. Make a cereal box aquarium diorama
The hardest part of this ocean craft is trimming one large side of the box to form a frame. After that, kids can use construction paper, paint, shells, rocks, and other art supplies to create their own undersea scene. They’ll love the creative aspect of this project.
27. Mix up ocean-themed slime
Use one of our foolproof recipes to show kids how to make their own slime. Then, provide mix-ins like glitter, sequins, and small fish or ocean animals to add to the fun. You know they’re going to love this ocean craft!
This easy ocean craft is a great way to use up old magazines. Kids choose a specific theme, like coral reefs, deep-water creatures, beaches, marine mammals, ocean pollution, and so on. Then, they cut out and paste pictures and words that match their theme. Making collages is a simple art activity that every kid loves.
Resources for Learning About the Ocean
29. Ocean Books for Kids
Adrienne Hathaway for We Are Teachers
Whether you’re looking for picture books or chapter books, fiction or nonfiction, our list of terrific ocean books has got you covered!
Our big list of reliably sourced facts will fascinate and amaze your students! You can even download a free set of Google Slides to share in the classroom.
Looking for online ocean activities? Try the Marine Life Encyclopedia. Kids will get in-depth information about all their favorite sea creatures, from sharks to otters and beyond.
Here’s another website full of online ocean activities. It simulates the thrill of joining actual underwater explorations, from coral reefs to deep-sea trenches.
Just as you’d expect from the Smithsonian, this website is full of information, photos, and more ocean activities. You’ll even find free lesson plans for teachers—score!
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a whole page full of ocean activities, articles, and videos just for kids! There’s a lot here to explore, including plenty of hands-on experiments and exploration ideas.
LONDON — Scientists in Britain say ancient humans may have learned to make fire far earlier than previously believed, after uncovering evidence that deliberate fire-setting took place in what is now eastern England around 400,000 years ago.
The findings, described in the journal Nature, push back the earliest known date for controlled fire-making by roughly 350,000 years. Until now, the oldest confirmed evidence had come from Neanderthal sites in what is now northern France dating to about 50,000 years ago.
The discovery was made at Barnham, a Paleolithic site in Suffolk that has been excavated for decades. A team led by the British Museum identified a patch of baked clay, flint hand axes fractured by intense heat and two fragments of iron pyrite, a mineral that produces sparks when struck against flint.
Researchers spent four years analyzing to rule out natural wildfires. Geochemical tests showed temperatures had exceeded 700 degrees Celsius (1,292 Fahrenheit), with evidence of repeated burning in the same location.
That pattern, they say, is consistent with a constructed hearth rather than a lightning strike.
Rob Davis, a Paleolithic archaeologist at the British Museum, said the combination of high temperatures, controlled burning and pyrite fragments shows “how they were actually making the fire and the fact they were making it.”
Iron pyrite does not occur naturally at Barnham. Its presence suggests the people who lived there deliberately collected it because they understood its properties and could use it to ignite tinder.
Deliberate fire-making is rarely preserved in the archaeological record. Ash is easily dispersed, charcoal decays and heat-altered sediments can be eroded.
At Barnham, however, the burned deposits were sealed within ancient pond sediments, allowing scientists to reconstruct how early people used the site.
Researchers say the implications for human evolution are substantial.
Fire allowed early populations to survive colder environments, deter predators and cook food. Cooking breaks down toxins in roots and tubers and kills pathogens in meat, improving digestion and releasing more energy to support larger brains.
Chris Stringer, a human evolution specialist at the Natural History Museum, said fossils from Britain and Spain suggest the inhabitants of Barnham were early Neanderthals whose cranial features and DNA point to growing cognitive and technological sophistication.
Fire also enabled new forms of social life. Evening gatherings around a hearth would have provided time for planning, storytelling and strengthening group relationships, which are behaviors often associated with the development of language and more organized societies.
Archaeologists say the Barnham site fits a wider pattern across Britain and continental Europe between 500,000 and 400,000 years ago, when brain size in early humans began to approach modern levels and when evidence for increasingly complex behavior becomes more visible.
Nick Ashton, curator of Paleolithic collections at the British Museum, described it as “the most exciting discovery of my long 40-year career.”
For archaeologists, the find helps address a long-standing question: When humans stopped relying on lightning strikes and wildfires and instead learned to create flame wherever and whenever they needed it.
WASHINGTON — As the saying went, all roads once led to Rome — and those roads stretched 50% longer than previously known, according to a new digital atlas published Thursday.
The last major atlas of ancient Roman road networks was published 25 years ago. Since then, advances in technology and other newly accessible sources have greatly expanded researchers’ ability to locate ancient roadways.
Over five years, a team of archaeologists combed through historical records, ancient journals, locations of milestones and other archival data. Scientists then looked for clues in satellite imagery and aerial photography, including recently digitized photos taken from planes during World War II.
When ancient accounts hinted at lost roads in a certain area, researchers analyzed the terrain from above to spot subtle traces — things like faint differences in vegetation, soil variations or shifts in elevation, as well as traces of ancient engineering like raised mounds or cut hillsides — that revealed where Roman lanes once ran.
“It becomes a massive game of connecting the dots on a continental scale,” said Tom Brughmans, an archaeologist and co-author of the study published in Scientific Data.
The data and an interactive digital map are also available online for scholars, history teachers or anyone with an interest in ancient Roman history.
Earlier research had focused on “the highways of the Roman Empire” — the large thoroughfares most often mentioned in familiar historical accounts, said Brughmans.
The updated map fills in more obscure details about “secondary roads, like the country lanes, that connected villas and farms” and other locations, said Brughmans, who’s based at Aarhus University in Denmark.
Researchers previously tallied the extent of Roman roads as covering around 117,163 miles (188,555 kilometers). The new work shows nearly 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers) of roads across the extent of the Roman Empire, allowing travel from Spain to Syria.
The study added a lot to archaeologists’ knowledge of ancient roads in North Africa, the plains of France and in the Peloponnese peninsula of Greece.
“This will be a very foundational work for a lot of other research,” said archaeologist Benjamin Ducke of the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin, who was not involved in the project.
But one caveat, he said, is that it’s still not clear if all the roads were ever open and active at the same time.
Being able to visualize the ancient routes that Roman farmers, soldiers, diplomats and other travelers took will provide a better understanding of key historical trends that depended on the movement of people during Roman times, said Brughmans, including the rise of Christianity across the region and the spread of ancient outbreaks.
“The Romans left a huge impact with this road network,” which created the blueprint for many roads still in use today, said study co-author and archaeologist Adam Pažout of the Autonomous University of Barcelona.
Roman engineering feats to build and maintain roads — including arched stone bridges and tunnels through hillsides — still shape the geography and economy of the Mediterranean region and beyond, he said.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
Science can be a heavy topic. Whether you’re learning or teaching, all that deep thinking can sometimes give you a brain cramp! Thank goodness science can be pretty humorous too. Here are our favorite cheesy science jokes and funny puns to share with your students. These science jokes are just the formula you need for a few good laughs!
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In the badlands of eastern Wyoming, the Lance Formation is a trove of prehistoric fossils. And one area in particular — a region less than 10 kilometers (6 miles) across — has provided scientists with at least half a dozen remarkably well-preserved dinosaur specimens complete with details of scaly skin, hooves and spikes.The paleontologist Dr. Paul Sereno and his colleagues dub it “the mummy zone” in a new study that aims to explain why this particular area has given rise to so many amazing finds and define exactly what a dinosaur “mummy” is.In the early 1900s, a fossil hunter named Charles Sternberg found two specimens of a large duck-billed dinosaur, Edmontosaurus annectens, in the Lance Formation. The skeletons were so pristine that Sternberg, along with H.F. Osborn, a paleontologist at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, could make out what appeared to be large swaths of skin with discernible scales and a fleshy crest that seemed to run along the reptile’s neck.Sereno, lead study author and a professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago, described the initial discovery as “the greatest dinosaur mummy — until maybe the juvenile that we found” in the year 2000.Separated by nearly a century, Sereno and his team’s find shared common traits with Sternberg’s: The skeletons were preserved in three-dimensional poses and showed clear evidence of skin and other attributes that don’t usually survive 66 million years in the ground. “Osborn said in 1912 he knew that it wasn’t actual, dehydrated skin, like in Egyptian mummies,” Sereno said. “But what was it?”Whatever it was, “we actually didn’t know how it was preserved,” he said. “It was a mystery.”The new research puts that mystery to rest and can help paleontologists find, recognize and analyze future mummy finds for tiny clues into how giant dinosaurs really looked.A dinosaur death cast in claySereno and his collaborators used CT scanning, 3D imaging, electron microscopy and X-ray spectroscopy to analyze two Edmontosaurus mummies they discovered in the Lance Formation in 2000 and 2001 — a juvenile and a young adult. “We looked and we looked and we looked, we sampled and we tested, and we didn’t find any” remnants of soft tissue, Sereno said.What the team found instead was a thin layer of clay, less than one-hundredth of an inch thick, which had formed on top of the animals’ skin. “It’s so real-looking, it’s unbelievable,” he said.Whereas Sternberg and Osborn referred to the “impression” of skin in their specimens, Sereno’s paper proposes an alternate term — “rendering” — which he argues is more precise.The study lays out the conditions that would produce such a rendering. In the Late Cretaceous Period, when Edmontosaurus roamed what is now the American West, the climate cycled between drought and monsoon rains. Drought has been determined to have been the cause of death of the original mummy found by Sternberg and described by Osborn, and of other animals whose fossils were found nearby. Assuming the same is true of the new specimens, the carcasses would have dried in the sun in a week or two.Then, a flash flood buried the bodies in sediment. The decaying carcasses would have been covered by a film of bacteria, which can electrostatically attract clay found in the surrounding sediment. The wafer-thin coating of clay remained long after the underlying tissues decayed completely, retaining their detailed morphology and forming a perfect clay mask.“Clay minerals have a way of attracting to and sticking onto biological surfaces, ensuring a molding that can faithfully reproduce the outermost surfaces of a body, such as skin and other soft tissues,” said Dr. Anthony Martin, professor of practice in the department of environmental sciences at Emory University in Atlanta, who was not involved in the research. “So it makes sense that these clays would have formed such fine portraits of dinosaurs’ scales, spikes and hooves.”Dr. Stephanie Drumheller-Horton, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who also was not involved in the study, is an expert in taphonomy, which she described as “the study of everything that happens to an organism from when it dies until when we find it.” She is particularly interested in how these fossils formed.“Dinosaur mummies have been known for over one hundred years, but there has definitely been more emphasis on describing their skin and less on understanding how they fossilized in the first place,” she said via email. “If we can understand how and why these fossils form, we can better target where to look to potentially find more of them.”A detailed portrait of a duck-billed dinosaurTogether, the two more recently unearthed mummies allowed Sereno and his team to create a detailed update of what Edmontosaurus probably looked like.According to their analyses, the dinosaur, which could grow to over 12 meters (40 feet) long, had a fleshy crest along the neck and back and a row of spikes running down the tail. The creature’s skin was thin enough to produce delicate wrinkles over the rib cage and was dotted with small, pebble-like scales.The clay mask revealed that the animal had hooves, a trait previously preserved only in mammals. That makes it the oldest land animal proven to have hooves and the first known example of a hoofed reptile, Sereno said. “Sorry, mammals, you didn’t invent it,” he joked. “Did we suspect it? Yeah, we suspected it had a hoof from the footprints, but seeing it is believing.”
In the badlands of eastern Wyoming, the Lance Formation is a trove of prehistoric fossils. And one area in particular — a region less than 10 kilometers (6 miles) across — has provided scientists with at least half a dozen remarkably well-preserved dinosaur specimens complete with details of scaly skin, hooves and spikes.
The paleontologist Dr. Paul Sereno and his colleagues dub it “the mummy zone” in a new study that aims to explain why this particular area has given rise to so many amazing finds and define exactly what a dinosaur “mummy” is.
In the early 1900s, a fossil hunter named Charles Sternberg found two specimens of a large duck-billed dinosaur, Edmontosaurus annectens, in the Lance Formation. The skeletons were so pristine that Sternberg, along with H.F. Osborn, a paleontologist at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, could make out what appeared to be large swaths of skin with discernible scales and a fleshy crest that seemed to run along the reptile’s neck.
Sereno, lead study author and a professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago, described the initial discovery as “the greatest dinosaur mummy — until maybe the juvenile that we found” in the year 2000.
Separated by nearly a century, Sereno and his team’s find shared common traits with Sternberg’s: The skeletons were preserved in three-dimensional poses and showed clear evidence of skin and other attributes that don’t usually survive 66 million years in the ground. “Osborn said in 1912 he knew that it wasn’t actual, dehydrated skin, like in Egyptian mummies,” Sereno said. “But what was it?”
Whatever it was, “we actually didn’t know how it was preserved,” he said. “It was a mystery.”
The new research puts that mystery to rest and can help paleontologists find, recognize and analyze future mummy finds for tiny clues into how giant dinosaurs really looked.
A dinosaur death cast in clay
Sereno and his collaborators used CT scanning, 3D imaging, electron microscopy and X-ray spectroscopy to analyze two Edmontosaurus mummies they discovered in the Lance Formation in 2000 and 2001 — a juvenile and a young adult. “We looked and we looked and we looked, we sampled and we tested, and we didn’t find any” remnants of soft tissue, Sereno said.
What the team found instead was a thin layer of clay, less than one-hundredth of an inch thick, which had formed on top of the animals’ skin. “It’s so real-looking, it’s unbelievable,” he said.
Whereas Sternberg and Osborn referred to the “impression” of skin in their specimens, Sereno’s paper proposes an alternate term — “rendering” — which he argues is more precise.
The study lays out the conditions that would produce such a rendering. In the Late Cretaceous Period, when Edmontosaurus roamed what is now the American West, the climate cycled between drought and monsoon rains. Drought has been determined to have been the cause of death of the original mummy found by Sternberg and described by Osborn, and of other animals whose fossils were found nearby. Assuming the same is true of the new specimens, the carcasses would have dried in the sun in a week or two.
Then, a flash flood buried the bodies in sediment. The decaying carcasses would have been covered by a film of bacteria, which can electrostatically attract clay found in the surrounding sediment. The wafer-thin coating of clay remained long after the underlying tissues decayed completely, retaining their detailed morphology and forming a perfect clay mask.
“Clay minerals have a way of attracting to and sticking onto biological surfaces, ensuring a molding that can faithfully reproduce the outermost surfaces of a body, such as skin and other soft tissues,” said Dr. Anthony Martin, professor of practice in the department of environmental sciences at Emory University in Atlanta, who was not involved in the research. “So it makes sense that these clays would have formed such fine portraits of dinosaurs’ scales, spikes and hooves.”
Dr. Stephanie Drumheller-Horton, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who also was not involved in the study, is an expert in taphonomy, which she described as “the study of everything that happens to an organism from when it dies until when we find it.” She is particularly interested in how these fossils formed.
“Dinosaur mummies have been known for over one hundred years, but there has definitely been more emphasis on describing their skin and less on understanding how they fossilized in the first place,” she said via email. “If we can understand how and why these fossils form, we can better target where to look to potentially find more of them.”
A detailed portrait of a duck-billed dinosaur
Together, the two more recently unearthed mummies allowed Sereno and his team to create a detailed update of what Edmontosaurus probably looked like.
According to their analyses, the dinosaur, which could grow to over 12 meters (40 feet) long, had a fleshy crest along the neck and back and a row of spikes running down the tail. The creature’s skin was thin enough to produce delicate wrinkles over the rib cage and was dotted with small, pebble-like scales.
The clay mask revealed that the animal had hooves, a trait previously preserved only in mammals. That makes it the oldest land animal proven to have hooves and the first known example of a hoofed reptile, Sereno said. “Sorry, mammals, you didn’t invent it,” he joked. “Did we suspect it? Yeah, we suspected it had a hoof from the footprints, but seeing it is believing.”
Scientists have long debated whether dinosaurs were in decline before an asteroid smacked the Earth 66 million years ago, causing mass extinction.
New research suggests dinosaur populations were still thriving in North America before the asteroid strike, but it’s only one piece of the global picture, independent experts say.
“Dinosaurs were quite diverse and now we know there were quite distinct communities” roaming around before being abruptly wiped out, said Daniel Peppe, a study co-author and paleontologist at Baylor University.
The latest evidence comes from analyzing a portion of the Kirtland Formation in northern New Mexico that’s been known for around 100 years to contain several interesting dinosaur fossils.
Scientists now say those fossils and the surrounding rocks date from around 400,000 years before the asteroid struck, which is considered a short interval in geologic time. The age was determined by analyzing small particles of volcanic glass within sandstone and by studying the direction of magnetic minerals within mudstone of the rock formation.
The results show “the animals deposited here must have been living close to the end of the Cretaceous,” the last dinosaur era, said Peppe.
Differences between the dinosaur species found in New Mexico and those found at a site in Montana that were previously dated to the same time frame “run counter to the idea that dinosaurs were in decline,” he said.
The fossils previously found at the New Mexico site include Tyrannosaurus rex, a huge, long-necked dinosaur, and a Triceratops-like horned herbivore.
Scientists who weren’t involved in the study cautioned that evidence found at a single location might not point to a broader trend.
“This new evidence about these very late-surviving dinosaurs in New Mexico is very exciting,” said University of Bristol paleontologist Mike Benton, who was not involved in the study. But he added, “This is just one location, not a representation of the complexity of dinosaur faunas at the time all over North America or all over the world.”
Although scientists have found dinosaur fossils on every continent, accurately dating them can be a challenge, said paleontologist and study co-author Andrew Flynn of New Mexico State University. Easily datable material such as carbon doesn’t survive in fossils, so scientists must look for surrounding rocks with precise characteristics that can be used to determine ages.
Further research might help complete the picture of what range of dinosaur species was alive globally on the eve of the asteroid crash, said Flynn.
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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance has uncovered rocks in a dry river channel that may hold potential signs of ancient microscopic life, scientists reported Wednesday.
They stressed that in-depth analysis is needed of the sample gathered there by Perseverance — ideally in labs on Earth — before reaching any conclusions.
Roaming Mars since 2021, the rover cannot directly detect life. Instead, it carries a drill to penetrate rocks and tubes to hold the samples gathered from places judged most suitable for hosting life billions of years ago. The samples are awaiting retrieval to Earth — an ambitious plan that’s on hold as NASA seeks cheaper, quicker options.
Calling it an “exciting discovery,” a pair of scientists who were not involved in the study — SETI Institute’s Janice Bishop and the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Mario Parente — were quick to point out that non-biological processes could be responsible.
“That’s part of the reason why we can’t go so far as to say, ‘A-ha, this is proof positive of life,’’’ lead researcher Joel Hurowitz of Stony Brook University told The Associated Press. “All we can say is one of the possible explanations is microbial life, but there could be other ways to make this set of features that we see.”
Either way, Hurowitz said it’s the best, most compelling candidate yet in the rover’s search for potential signs of long-ago life. It was the 25th sample gathered; the tally is now up to 30, with six more to go.
“It would be amazing to be able to demonstrate conclusively that these features were formed by something that was alive on another planet billions of years ago, right?” Hurowitz said. But even if that’s not the case, it’s “a valuable lesson in all of the ways that nature can conspire to fool us.”
Collected last summer, the sample is from reddish, clay-rich mudstones in Neretva Vallis, a river channel that once carried water into Jezero Crater. This outcrop of sedimentary rock, known as the Bright Angel formation, was surveyed by Perseverance’s science instruments before the drill came out.
Along with organic carbon, a building block of life, Hurowitz and his team found minuscule specks, dubbed poppy seeds and leopard spots, that were enriched with iron phosphate and iron sulfide. On Earth, these chemical compounds are the byproducts when microorganisms chomp down on organic matter.
The findings appeared in the journal Nature.
Ten of the titanium sample tubes were placed on the Martian surface a few years ago as a backup to the rest aboard the rover, the main target in NASA’s still fuzzy return mission.
When Perseverance launched in 2020, NASA expected the samples back on Earth by the early 2030s. But that date slipped into the 2040s as costs swelled to $11 billion, stalling the retrieval effort.
Until the samples are transported off of Mars by robotic spacecraft or astronauts, scientists will have to rely on Earthly stand-ins and lab experiments to evaluate the feasibility of ancient Martian life, according to Hurowitz.
On Earth, microorganisms commonly interact with minerals in Antarctic lakes.
“There is no evidence of microbes on Mars today, but if any had been present on ancient Mars, they too might have reduced sulfate minerals to form sulfides in such a lake at Jezero Crater,” Bishop and Parente wrote in an accompanying editorial.
___
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
ABOARD LIFTBOAT ROBERT, North Atlantic — Deep in Earth’s past, an icy landscape became a seascape as the ice melted and the oceans rose off what is now the northeastern United States. Nearly 50 years ago, a U.S. government ship searching for minerals and hydrocarbons in the area drilled into the seafloor to see what it could find.
It found, of all things, drops to drink under the briny deeps — fresh water.
This summer, a first-of-its-kind global research expedition followed up on that surprise. Drilling for fresh water under the salt water off Cape Cod, Expedition 501 extracted thousands of samples from what is now thought to be a massive, hidden aquifer stretching from New Jersey as far north as Maine.
It’s just one of many depositories of “secret fresh water” known to exist in shallow salt waters around the world that might some day be tapped to slake the planet’s intensifying thirst, said Brandon Dugan, the expedition’s co-chief scientist.
“We need to look for every possibility we have to find more water for society,” Dugan, a geophysicist and hydrologist at the Colorado School of Mines, told Associated Press journalists who recently spent 12 hours on the drilling platform. The research teams looked in “one of the last places you would probably look for fresh water on Earth.”
They found it, and will be analyzing nearly 50,000 liters (13,209 gallons) of it back in their labs around the world in the coming months. They’re out to solve the mystery of its origins — whether the water is from glaciers, connected groundwater systems on land or some combination.
The potential is enormous. So are the hurdles of getting the water out and puzzling over who owns it, who uses it and how to extract it without undue harm to nature. It’s bound to take years to bring that water ashore for public use in a big way, if it’s even feasible.
Why try? In just five years, the U.N. says, the global demand for fresh water will exceed supplies by 40%. Rising sea levels from the warming climate are souring coastal freshwater sources while data centers that power AI and cloud computing are consuming water at an insatiable rate.
The fabled Ancient Mariner’s lament, “Water, water, every where, nor any drop to drink,” looms as a warning to landlubbers as well as to sailors on salty seas.
In Virginia alone, a quarter of all power produced in the state goes to data centers, a share expected to nearly double in five years. By some estimates, each midsize data center consumes as much water as 1,000 households. Each of the Great Lakes states has experienced groundwater shortages.
Cape Town, South Africa, came perilously close to running out of fresh water for its nearly 5 million people in 2018 during an epic, three-year drought. South Africa is thought to have a coastal undersea freshwater bonanza, too, and there is at least anecdotal evidence that every continent may have the same.
Canada’s Prince Edward Island, Hawaii and Jakarta, Indonesia, are among places where stressed freshwater supplies coexist with prospective aquifers under the ocean.
Enter Expedition 501, a $25 million scientific collaboration of more than a dozen countries backed by the U.S. government’s National Science Foundation and the European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling (U.S. money for it was secured before budget cuts sought by the Trump administration).
Scientists went into the project believing the undersea aquifer they were sampling might be sufficient to meet the needs of a metropolis the size of New York City for 800 years. They found fresh or nearly fresh water at both higher and lower depths below the seafloor than they anticipated, suggesting a larger supply even than that.
Their work at sea unfolded over three months from Liftboat Robert, an oceangoing vessel that, once on site, lowers three enormous pillars to the seafloor and squats above the waves. Normally it services offshore petroleum sites and wind farms. This drill-baby-drill mission was different.
“It’s known that this phenomena exists both here and elsewhere around the world,” Expedition 501 project manager Jez Everest, a scientist who came from the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh, Scotland, said of undersea water. “But it’s a subject that’s never been directly investigated by any research project in the past.”
By that, he means no one globally had drilled systematically into the seabed on a mission to find freshwater. Expedition 501 was quite literally groundbreaking — it penetrated Earth below the sea by as many as 1,289 feet or nearly 400 meters.
But it followed a 2015 research project that mapped contours of an aquifer remotely, using electromagnetic technology, and roughly estimated salinity of the water underneath.
That mission, by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, reported evidence of a “massive offshore aquifer system” in this area, possibly rivalling the size of America’s largest — the Ogallala aquifer, which supplies water to parts of eight Great Plains states.
Two developments in 1976 had stirred interest in searching for undersea freshwater.
In the middle of Nantucket island, the U.S. Geological Survey drilled a test well to see how far down the groundwater went. It extracted fresh water from such great depths that it made scientists wonder if the water came from the sea, not the sky.
The same year, that federal agency mounted a 60-day expedition aboard the drilling vessel Glomar Conception along a vast stretch of the Continental Shelf from Georgia to Georges Bank off New England. It drilled cores in search of the sub-seabed’s resources, like methane.
It found an eye-opening amount of fresh or freshened water in borehole after borehole.
That set the stage for the water-seekers to do their work a half-century later.
Soon after Robert arrived at the first of three drilling sites May 19, samples drawn from below the seabed registered salinity of just 4 parts per thousand. That’s far below the oceans’ average salt content of 35 parts per thousand but still too briny to meet the U.S. freshwater standard of under 1 part per thousand.
“Four parts per thousand was a eureka moment,” Dugan said, because the finding suggested that the water must have been connected to a terrestrial system in the past, or still is.
As the weeks wore on and Robert moved from site to site 20 to 30 miles (30 to 50 kilometers) off the coast, the process of drilling into the waterlogged subsea sediment yielded a collection of samples down to 1 part per thousand salt content. Some were even lower.
Bingo. That’s what you find in many bodies of fresh water on land. That’s water you can drink, in theory. No one did.
In months of analysis ahead, the scientists will investigate a range of properties of the water, including what microbes were living in the depths, what they used for nutrients and energy sources and what byproducts they might generate; in other words, whether the water is safe to consume or otherwise use.
“This is a new environment that has never been studied before,” said Jocelyne DiRuggiero, a Johns Hopkins University biologist in Baltimore who studies the microbial ecology of extreme environments and is not involved in the expedition.
“The water may contain minerals detrimental to human health since it percolated through layers of sediments,” she said. “However, a similar process forms the terrestrial aquifers that we use for freshwater, and those typically have very high quality.”
By sequencing DNA extracted from their samples, she said, the researchers can determine which microorganisms are there and “learn how they potentially make a living.”
Techniques will also be used to determine whether it came from glacial ice melt thousands of years ago or is still coming via labyrinthian geologic formations from land.
Researchers will date the water back in the lab, and that will be key in determining whether it is a renewable resource that could be used responsibly. Primordial water is trapped and finite; newer water suggests the aquifer is still connected to a terrestrial source and being refreshed, however slowly.
“Younger means it was a raindrop 100 years ago, 200 years ago,” Dugan said. “If young, it’s recharging.”
Those questions are for basic science. For society, all sorts of complex questions arise if the basic science affirms the conditions necessary for exploiting the water. Who will manage it? Can it be taken without an unacceptable risk of contaminating the supply from the ocean above? Will it be cheaper or environmentally friendlier than today’s energy-hungry desalination plants?
Dugan said if governments decide to get the water, local communities could turn to the aquifers in time of need, such as drought, or when extreme storms flood coastal freshwater reserves and ruin them. The notion of actually using this old buried water is so new that it has not been on the radar of many policymakers or conservationists.
“It’s a lesson in how long it can take sometimes to make these things happen and the perseverance that’s needed to get there,” said Woods Hole geophysicist Rob Evans, whose 2015 expedition helped point the way for 501. “There’s a ton of excitement that finally they’ve got samples.”
Still, he sees some red flags. One is that tapping undersea aquifers could draw water away from onshore reserves. Another is that undersea groundwater that seeps out to the seafloor may supply nutrients vital to the ecosystem, and that could be upset.
“If we were to go out and start pumping these waters, there would almost certainly be unforeseen consequences,” he said. “There’s a lot of balance we would need to consider before we started diving in and drilling and exploiting these kinds of things.”
For most in the project, getting to and from Liftboat Robert meant a voyage of seven hours or more from Fall River, Massachusetts, on a supply boat that made round trips every 10 days or so to replenish stocks and rotate people.
On the platform, around the clock, the racket of metal bore pipes and machinery, the drilling grime and the speckled mud mingled with the quieter, cleaner work of scientists in trailers converted to pristine labs and processing posts.
There, samples were treated according to the varying needs of the expedition’s geologists, geochemists, hydrologists, microbiologists, sedimentologists and more.
Passing through clear plastic tubes, muck was sliced into disks like hockey pucks. Machines squeezed water out. Some samples were kept sealed to enable study of ancient gases dissolved in the water. Other samples were frozen, filtered or left as is, depending on the purpose.
After six months of lab analysis, all the science teams of Expedition 501 will meet again — this time in Germany for a month of collaborative research that is expected to produce initial findings that point to the age and origin of the water.
On July 31, Liftboat Robert cranked up its legs from this place of hidden water to end a mission that lent credence to another passage from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s classic poem about life, death and mysteries at sea.
In a prelude to the poem, in some editions, Coleridge wrote: “I readily believe that there are more invisible than visible Natures in the universe.”
___
Woodward reported from Seekonk, Massachusetts.
___
The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment
ABOARD LIFTBOAT ROBERT, North Atlantic — Deep in Earth’s past, an icy landscape became a seascape as the ice melted and the oceans rose off what is now the northeastern United States. Nearly 50 years ago, a U.S. government ship searching for minerals and hydrocarbons in the area drilled into the seafloor to see what it could find.
It found, of all things, drops to drink under the briny deeps — fresh water.
This summer, a first-of-its-kind global research expedition followed up on that surprise. Drilling for fresh water under the salt water off Cape Cod, Expedition 501 extracted thousands of samples from what is now thought to be a massive, hidden aquifer stretching from New Jersey as far north as Maine.
It’s just one of many depositories of “secret fresh water” known to exist in shallow salt waters around the world that might some day be tapped to slake the planet’s intensifying thirst, said Brandon Dugan, the expedition’s co-chief scientist.
“We need to look for every possibility we have to find more water for society,” Dugan, a geophysicist and hydrologist at the Colorado School of Mines, told Associated Press journalists who recently spent 12 hours on the drilling platform. The research teams looked in “one of the last places you would probably look for fresh water on Earth.”
They found it, and will be analyzing nearly 50,000 liters (13,209 gallons) of it back in their labs around the world in the coming months. They’re out to solve the mystery of its origins — whether the water is from glaciers, connected groundwater systems on land or some combination.
The potential is enormous. So are the hurdles of getting the water out and puzzling over who owns it, who uses it and how to extract it without undue harm to nature. It’s bound to take years to bring that water ashore for public use in a big way, if it’s even feasible.
Why try? In just five years, the U.N. says, the global demand for fresh water will exceed supplies by 40%. Rising sea levels from the warming climate are souring coastal freshwater sources while data centers that power AI and cloud computing are consuming water at an insatiable rate.
The fabled Ancient Mariner’s lament, “Water, water, every where, nor any drop to drink,” looms as a warning to landlubbers as well as to sailors on salty seas.
In Virginia alone, a quarter of all power produced in the state goes to data centers, a share expected to nearly double in five years. By some estimates, each midsize data center consumes as much water as 1,000 households. Each of the Great Lakes states has experienced groundwater shortages.
Cape Town, South Africa, came perilously close to running out of fresh water for its nearly 5 million people in 2018 during an epic, three-year drought. South Africa is thought to have a coastal undersea freshwater bonanza, too, and there is at least anecdotal evidence that every continent may have the same.
Canada’s Prince Edward Island, Hawaii and Jakarta, Indonesia, are among places where stressed freshwater supplies coexist with prospective aquifers under the ocean.
Enter Expedition 501, a $25 million scientific collaboration of more than a dozen countries backed by the U.S. government’s National Science Foundation and the European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling (U.S. money for it was secured before budget cuts sought by the Trump administration).
Scientists went into the project believing the undersea aquifer they were sampling might be sufficient to meet the needs of a metropolis the size of New York City for 800 years. They found fresh or nearly fresh water at both higher and lower depths below the seafloor than they anticipated, suggesting a larger supply even than that.
Their work at sea unfolded over three months from Liftboat Robert, an oceangoing vessel that, once on site, lowers three enormous pillars to the seafloor and squats above the waves. Normally it services offshore petroleum sites and wind farms. This drill-baby-drill mission was different.
“It’s known that this phenomena exists both here and elsewhere around the world,” Expedition 501 project manager Jez Everest, a scientist who came from the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh, Scotland, said of undersea water. “But it’s a subject that’s never been directly investigated by any research project in the past.”
By that, he means no one globally had drilled systematically into the seabed on a mission to find freshwater. Expedition 501 was quite literally groundbreaking — it penetrated Earth below the sea by as many as 1,289 feet or nearly 400 meters.
But it followed a 2015 research project that mapped contours of an aquifer remotely, using electromagnetic technology, and roughly estimated salinity of the water underneath.
That mission, by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, reported evidence of a “massive offshore aquifer system” in this area, possibly rivalling the size of America’s largest — the Ogallala aquifer, which supplies water to parts of eight Great Plains states.
Two developments in 1976 had stirred interest in searching for undersea freshwater.
In the middle of Nantucket island, the U.S. Geological Survey drilled a test well to see how far down the groundwater went. It extracted fresh water from such great depths that it made scientists wonder if the water came from the sea, not the sky.
The same year, that federal agency mounted a 60-day expedition aboard the drilling vessel Glomar Conception along a vast stretch of the Continental Shelf from Georgia to Georges Bank off New England. It drilled cores in search of the sub-seabed’s resources, like methane.
It found an eye-opening amount of fresh or freshened water in borehole after borehole.
That set the stage for the water-seekers to do their work a half-century later.
Soon after Robert arrived at the first of three drilling sites May 19, samples drawn from below the seabed registered salinity of just 4 parts per thousand. That’s far below the oceans’ average salt content of 35 parts per thousand but still too briny to meet the U.S. freshwater standard of under 1 part per thousand.
“Four parts per thousand was a eureka moment,” Dugan said, because the finding suggested that the water must have been connected to a terrestrial system in the past, or still is.
As the weeks wore on and Robert moved from site to site 20 to 30 miles (30 to 50 kilometers) off the coast, the process of drilling into the waterlogged subsea sediment yielded a collection of samples down to 1 part per thousand salt content. Some were even lower.
Bingo. That’s what you find in many bodies of fresh water on land. That’s water you can drink, in theory. No one did.
In months of analysis ahead, the scientists will investigate a range of properties of the water, including what microbes were living in the depths, what they used for nutrients and energy sources and what byproducts they might generate; in other words, whether the water is safe to consume or otherwise use.
“This is a new environment that has never been studied before,” said Jocelyne DiRuggiero, a Johns Hopkins University biologist in Baltimore who studies the microbial ecology of extreme environments and is not involved in the expedition.
“The water may contain minerals detrimental to human health since it percolated through layers of sediments,” she said. “However, a similar process forms the terrestrial aquifers that we use for freshwater, and those typically have very high quality.”
By sequencing DNA extracted from their samples, she said, the researchers can determine which microorganisms are there and “learn how they potentially make a living.”
Techniques will also be used to determine whether it came from glacial ice melt thousands of years ago or is still coming via labyrinthian geologic formations from land.
Researchers will date the water back in the lab, and that will be key in determining whether it is a renewable resource that could be used responsibly. Primordial water is trapped and finite; newer water suggests the aquifer is still connected to a terrestrial source and being refreshed, however slowly.
“Younger means it was a raindrop 100 years ago, 200 years ago,” Dugan said. “If young, it’s recharging.”
Those questions are for basic science. For society, all sorts of complex questions arise if the basic science affirms the conditions necessary for exploiting the water. Who will manage it? Can it be taken without an unacceptable risk of contaminating the supply from the ocean above? Will it be cheaper or environmentally friendlier than today’s energy-hungry desalination plants?
Dugan said if governments decide to get the water, local communities could turn to the aquifers in time of need, such as drought, or when extreme storms flood coastal freshwater reserves and ruin them. The notion of actually using this old buried water is so new that it has not been on the radar of many policymakers or conservationists.
“It’s a lesson in how long it can take sometimes to make these things happen and the perseverance that’s needed to get there,” said Woods Hole geophysicist Rob Evans, whose 2015 expedition helped point the way for 501. “There’s a ton of excitement that finally they’ve got samples.”
Still, he sees some red flags. One is that tapping undersea aquifers could draw water away from onshore reserves. Another is that undersea groundwater that seeps out to the seafloor may supply nutrients vital to the ecosystem, and that could be upset.
“If we were to go out and start pumping these waters, there would almost certainly be unforeseen consequences,” he said. “There’s a lot of balance we would need to consider before we started diving in and drilling and exploiting these kinds of things.”
For most in the project, getting to and from Liftboat Robert meant a voyage of seven hours or more from Fall River, Massachusetts, on a supply boat that made round trips every 10 days or so to replenish stocks and rotate people.
On the platform, around the clock, the racket of metal bore pipes and machinery, the drilling grime and the speckled mud mingled with the quieter, cleaner work of scientists in trailers converted to pristine labs and processing posts.
There, samples were treated according to the varying needs of the expedition’s geologists, geochemists, hydrologists, microbiologists, sedimentologists and more.
Passing through clear plastic tubes, muck was sliced into disks like hockey pucks. Machines squeezed water out. Some samples were kept sealed to enable study of ancient gases dissolved in the water. Other samples were frozen, filtered or left as is, depending on the purpose.
After six months of lab analysis, all the science teams of Expedition 501 will meet again — this time in Germany for a month of collaborative research that is expected to produce initial findings that point to the age and origin of the water.
On July 31, Liftboat Robert cranked up its legs from this place of hidden water to end a mission that lent credence to another passage from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s classic poem about life, death and mysteries at sea.
In a prelude to the poem, in some editions, Coleridge wrote: “I readily believe that there are more invisible than visible Natures in the universe.”
___
Woodward reported from Seekonk, Massachusetts.
___
The Associated Press receives support from the Walton Family Foundation for coverage of water and environmental policy. The AP is solely responsible for all content. For all of AP’s environmental coverage, visit https://apnews.com/hub/climate-and-environment
This story originally appeared on WIRED Italia and has been translated from Italian.
For more than 10 years, Andrew Sweetman and his colleagues have been studying the ocean floor and its ecosystems, particularly in the Pacific’s Clarion-Clipperton Zone, an area littered with polymetallic nodules. As big as potatoes, these rocks contain valuable metals—lithium, copper, cobalt, manganese, and nickel—that are used to make batteries. They are a tempting bounty for deep-sea mining companies, which are developing technologies to bring them to the surface.
The nodules may be a prospective source of battery ingredients, but Sweetman believes they could already be producing something quite different: oxygen. Typically, the element is generated when organisms photosynthesize, but light doesn’t reach 4,000 meters below the ocean’s surface. Rather, as Sweetman and his team at the Scottish Association for Marine Science suggest in a new paper, the nodules could be driving a reaction that produces this “dark” oxygen from seawater.
Sweetman first noticed something strange in 2013. With his team, he’d been working to measure oxygen flow in confined areas within nodule-rich areas of the seabed. The flow of oxygen seemed to increase at the seafloor, despite the fact that there were no photosynthesizing organisms nearby, so much so that the researchers thought it was an instrumental anomaly.
The same finding, however, was repeated in 2021, albeit using a different measurement approach. The scientists were assessing changes in oxygen levels inside a benthic chamber, an instrument that collects sediment and seawater to create enclosed samples of the seabed environment. The instrument allowed them to analyze, among other things, how oxygen was being consumed by microorganisms within the sample environment. Oxygen trapped in the chamber should have decreased over time as organisms in the water and sediment consumed it, but it did the opposite: Despite the dark conditions preventing any photosynthetic reactions, oxygen levels in the benthic chamber increased.
The issue needed to be investigated. First, the team ascertained with certainty that any microorganisms capable of producing oxygen weren’t present. Once they were sure, the scientists hypothesized that polymetallic nodules captured in the benthic chamber might be involved. After several laboratory tests, Sweetman says, they found that the nodules act like a geobattery: They generate a small electric current (about 1 volt each) that splits water molecules into their two components, hydrogen and oxygen, in a process called electrolysis.
How the nodules produce oxygen, however, is not entirely clear: It’s not known what generates the electric current, whether the reaction is continuous, and crucially, whether the oxygen production is significant enough to sustain an ecosystem.
Then there’s an even bigger question: What if the electrolysis induced by the polymetallic nodules was the spark that started life on Earth? According to Sweetman, this is an exciting hypothesis that should be explored further. It might even be possible that this could take place on other worlds, and be a potential source of alien life.
These possibilities add weight to the argument that the deep seabed is a delicate environment that needs to be protected from industrial exploitation. (There is already a petition, signed by more than 800 marine scientists from 44 different countries, that highlights the broader environmental risks of deep sea mining and calls for a pause on its development.)
But with many questions unanswered, some are casting doubt on the findings. The biggest criticisms have come from within the seabed-mining world: Patrick Downes of the Metals Company, a seabed-mining company that works in deep water—the same waters Sweetman studied and that partly funded Sweetman’s research—says the results are the result of oxygen contamination from outside sources, and that his company will soon produce a paper refuting the thesis put forward by Sweetman’s group.
NASA is working with students at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Meyers, Florida. They are using technology to work with future scientists to analyze water quality.”We are looking for people to make an impact on the whole ecosystem that uses NASA’s earth science information,” NASA DEVELOP program manager Kenton Ross said. Dr. Rachel Rotz, a professor in the FGCU Department of Marine and Earth Sciences, will have the water school host this research team. NASA DEVELOP selected five future scientists to participate. Nathan Hewitt is one of them. He is working on getting his master’s degree right now at FGCU. He heard about this research opportunity and wanted to apply.”My main goal for this was to learn more coding,” Ross said. “So the coding workshops have been fantastic. Even some of the stuff I didn’t really think about the project, but kind of working as a team, but utilizing our strengths and learning about the different kind of personality types and how they best built the team has been really interesting.”Over the next 10 weeks, Hewitt and the four other researchers will spend part of their day at the water school looking under a microscope.”They’re looking into cyanobacteria and understanding how organisms do their thing on a microscopic scale,” Ross said.They are analyzing water quality near Seminole tribes in Southwest Florida.”They’re really testing out if this information from NASA is relevant to the tribe,” Ross said. “So is the tribe is thinking about water quality in the area in their location, in and around them. They’re interested in how nutrients are flowing through those natural systems.”They are looking at different types of algae, seeing where it is located. Then they take a look from a wider scope, up in space!”Our purpose is to help them rise in their career, and that’s going to happen when they are energized about the knowledge they can gain and about the skills they can apply to problems like this,” Ross said.Hewitt said he will take what he has learned from this research program and apply it to his future, maybe even working for NASA one day.To learn more about NASA DEVELOP and how to apply for the next research study, visit this website.
FORT MYERS, Fla. —
NASA is working with students at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Meyers, Florida. They are using technology to work with future scientists to analyze water quality.
“We are looking for people to make an impact on the whole ecosystem that uses NASA’s earth science information,” NASA DEVELOP program manager Kenton Ross said.
Dr. Rachel Rotz, a professor in the FGCU Department of Marine and Earth Sciences, will have the water school host this research team. NASA DEVELOP selected five future scientists to participate. Nathan Hewitt is one of them. He is working on getting his master’s degree right now at FGCU. He heard about this research opportunity and wanted to apply.
“My main goal for this was to learn more coding,” Ross said. “So the coding workshops have been fantastic. Even some of the stuff I didn’t really think about the project, but kind of working as a team, but utilizing our strengths and learning about the different kind of personality types and how they best built the team has been really interesting.”
Over the next 10 weeks, Hewitt and the four other researchers will spend part of their day at the water school looking under a microscope.
“They’re looking into cyanobacteria and understanding how organisms do their thing on a microscopic scale,” Ross said.
They are analyzing water quality near Seminole tribes in Southwest Florida.
“They’re really testing out if this information from NASA is relevant to the tribe,” Ross said. “So is the tribe is thinking about water quality in the area in their location, in and around them. They’re interested in how nutrients are flowing through those natural systems.”
They are looking at different types of algae, seeing where it is located. Then they take a look from a wider scope, up in space!
“Our purpose is to help them rise in their career, and that’s going to happen when they are energized about the knowledge they can gain and about the skills they can apply to problems like this,” Ross said.
Hewitt said he will take what he has learned from this research program and apply it to his future, maybe even working for NASA one day.
To learn more about NASA DEVELOP and how to apply for the next research study, visit this website.
June 2023 did not seem like an exceptional month at the time. It was the warmest June in the instrumental temperature record, but monthly records haven’t exactly been unusual in a period where the top 10 warmest years on record all occurred in the past 15 years. And monthly records have often occurred in years that are otherwise unexceptional; at the time, the warmest July on record had occurred in 2019, a year that doesn’t stand out much from the rest of the past decade.
But July 2023 set another monthly record, easily eclipsing 2019’s high temperatures. Then August set yet another monthly record. And so has every single month since—a string of records that propelled 2023 to being the warmest year since tracking started.
On Wednesday, the European Union’s Earth-monitoring service, Copernicus, announced that it has now been a full year where every month has been the warmest version of that month since there’s been enough instruments in place to track global temperatures.
The history of monthly temperatures shows just how extreme the temperatures have been over the past year.Courtesy of C3S/ECMWF
As you can see from this graph, most years feature a mix of temperatures—some higher than average, some lower. Exceptionally high months tend to cluster, but those clusters also tend to be shorter than a full year.
In the Copernicus data, a similar yearlong streak of records happened once before, in 2015/2016. NASA, which uses slightly different data and methods, doesn’t show a similar streak in that earlier period. NASA hasn’t released its results for May’s temperatures yet—they’re expected in the next few days—but it’s very likely that the results will also show a yearlong streak of records.
Beyond records, the EU is highlighting the fact that the one-year period ending in May was 1.63 degrees Celsius above the average temperatures of the 1850–1900 period, which is used as a baseline for preindustrial temperatures. That’s notable because many countries have ostensibly pledged to try to keep temperatures from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial conditions by the end of the century. While it’s likely that temperatures will drop below the target again at some point within the next few years, the new records suggest that we have a very limited amount of time before temperatures persistently exceed it.
For the first time on record, temperatures have held steadily in excess of 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial average.Courtesy of C3S/ECMWF
Friday morning at around 10:30 local time, a magnitude 4.8 earthquake popped three miles below Whitehouse Station, New Jersey. Though nowhere near the magnitude of the West Coast’s monster quakes, the seismic waves traveled hundreds of miles, jostling not just nearby New York City, but Philadelphia and Boston and Washington, DC. The United States Geological Survey is urging the region to prepare for aftershocks of smaller magnitude.
For a region not accustomed to earthquakes, it was a jolt. Its wide-ranging impact turns out to be not a quirk, but a byproduct of the East Coast’s unique geology of ancient fault lines and rock composition.
“Earthquakes in this region are uncommon, but not unexpected,” said seismologist Paul Earle, of the USGS National Earthquake Information Center, on a press call Friday. “Earthquakes on the East Coast are felt much farther—four or five times farther—than a similar earthquake on the West Coast.”
Back in 2011, for instance, people felt the shock of a 5.8 quake in Virginia from up to 600 miles away, whereas a 6.8 a few years later in Napa, California—which produced twice as much energy—traveled less than half that distance. Given how much more densely populated the East Coast is than the West Coast, that means a whole lot of people over a much wider area will feel at least a little shaking, even if the magnitude is significantly smaller than something like a Loma Prieta earthquake, which devastated the Bay Area in 1989.
Jostled East Coasters can blame the geology underneath their feet. On the West Coast, a vast web of faults pop off all the time along an active plate boundary, sending shocks across the landscape. “We have new faults forming, we have old faults taking on strain and rupturing in big earthquakes,” says Columbia University structural geologist Folarin Kolawole.
But when an earthquake happens in a given fault, there are neighboring faults through which the energy is distributed. Basically, because the western US has so many faults along an active plate, it has a lot of channels to absorb earthquake energy—subterranean shock-absorbers, of sorts.
While the USGS hasn’t yet pinpointed the exact fault responsible for today’s earthquake, it occurred in a region where the fault system is more static than on the West Coast. It appears an inactive fault was reactivated Friday morning under New Jersey, somewhere in the Ramapo fault system.
The relative stability of the East Coast fault system is due to its geological age: Its rocks formed hundreds of millions of years before rocks on the West Coast. Geologically speaking, the East Coast is a quiet old man, while the West Coast is a rambunctious teenager.
“We don’t have that tectonic complexity on the East Coast,” says Gregory Mountain, a geophysicist at Rutgers University. “We had it in the geologic past, hundreds of millions of years ago, but things are pretty well solidified—is one way to call it—and stabilized. For that reason, on the East Coast, seismic energy could actually probably travel quite a bit farther and have less energy loss with distance.”
Every day is chock-full of new discoveries when you are a kindergartner! These hands-on kindergarten science experiments and activities take advantage of kids’ boundless curiosity. They’ll learn about physics, biology, chemistry, and more basic science concepts, gearing them up to become lifelong learners.
To make things even easier, we’ve rated every one of these kindergarten science experiments based on difficulty and materials:
Difficulty:
Easy: Low or no-prep experiments you can do pretty much any time
Medium: These take a little more setup or a longer time to complete
Advanced: Experiments like these take a fairly big commitment of time or effort
Materials:
Basic: Simple items you probably already have around the house
Medium: Items that you might not already have but are easy to get your hands on
Advanced: These require specialized or more expensive supplies to complete
Jump to:
Food Science Experiments for Kindergarten
What better way to dive into the world of science than to play with your food? These food science experiments for kindergartners are sure to grab their interest.
Use apples to learn what science is all about
Preschool Play & Learn
Difficulty: Easy / Materials: Basic
This apple investigation is a great way to start. It encourages kids to examine an apple using a variety of techniques to learn its properties. Get a free printable worksheet for this activity at the link.
Layer a variety of foods to represent the soil layers, from bedrock on up. If candy doesn’t fit your school’s nutritional guidelines, use fruits, yogurt, granola, and other healthy options. Either way, the results are scrumptious!
Have students dry grapes in the sun over a period of days to see them turn into raisins. Then talk about the process of dehydration as a method of preserving food.
Just like real glass, this edible glass is made from tiny opaque grains, but in this case from sugar instead of sand. Cooked and then cooled, it becomes what’s known as an “amorphous solid.” So cool!
OK, little learners probably won’t remember the word “hygroscopic,” but they’ll enjoy watching the salt absorb and transfer colors in this neat kindergarten science experiment.
Sometimes science seems like magic! In this case, dish soap breaks down milk fats and causes a colorful swirling reaction that will mesmerize little learners.
Expand your exploration of buoyancy with this cool demo. Kids will be surprised to learn that even though an orange feels heavy, it floats. That is, until you peel off the skin!
Sound may be invisible to the naked eye, but you can see the waves in action with this demo. The plastic wrap–covered bowl is the perfect stand-in for an eardrum.
Engage your students in the steps of the scientific method to create these stunning lab-grown geodes. Compare the results using sea salt, kosher salt, and borax.
Water play is a kindergarten favorite, so use it to engage them in these projects and activities. They make science for kindergarten students to much fun!
Change the color of flowers
Fun Learning for Kids
Difficulty: Easy / Materials: Medium
This is one of those classic kindergarten science activities everyone should try at least once. Learn how flowers “drink” water using capillary action, and create beautiful blooms while you’re at it!
Help your students make their very own lava lamp using simple household ingredients. Then personalize the lamps by adding a couple of drops of food coloring to each bottle.
Create a tower of instant ice
Only Passionate Curiosity
Difficulty: Easy / Materials: Basic
Place a water bottle in the freezer for a couple of hours, but don’t let it freeze all the way through. Then, pour some of the water onto a couple of ice cubes perched on top of a ceramic bowl and watch a tower of ice form.
Learn more: Instant Ice at Only Passionate Curiosity
Watch colored water walk
Messy Little Monster
Difficulty: Easy / Materials: Basic
Fill three small jars with red, yellow, and blue food coloring and some water. Then place empty jars in between each. Fold paper towel strips and place them in the jars as shown. Kids will be amazed as the paper towels pull the water from full jars to empty ones, mixing and creating new colors!
As you fill in the weather during daily calendar time, you might have a chance to talk about severe storms and tornadoes. Show your students how twisters form with this classic tornado jar experiment.
Lots of kindergarten science activities involve water, which is terrific because kids love to play in it! In this one, show your students how air pressure keeps water in a jar, even when it’s upside down.
Here’s an activity that always feels a bit like magic. Drop an Alka-Seltzer tablet into a glass of water with popcorn kernels, and watch as the bubbles cling to the kernels and make them rise and fall. So cool!
Kids learn about the property of buoyancy and get some practice making predictions and recording the results with this easy experiment. All you need is a container of water to get started.
Here’s another neat weather-related science experiment. Make shaving cream “clouds” on top of the water, then drop food coloring in to watch it “rain.”
Light refraction produces some incredible results. Your students will think it’s magic when the arrow on the paper changes direction … until you explain that it’s all due to the way water bends the light.
We’ve got even more ideas about teaching science to kindergarten students here, from plant and dirt science to static electricity and more.
Craft some recycled paper
The Craftaholic Witch
Difficulty: Medium / Materials: Medium
Teach your kindergartners how to transform something old into something new. Use scrap paper, old newspapers, and magazine pages to create beautiful handcrafted paper.
Kids love to play with balloons! Find out all about the properties of static electricity with these three fun and super-easy balloon experiments. (Get more fun balloon experiments here.)
Create a model of the human spine
Mombrite
Difficulty: Easy / Materials: Basic
Kindergarten science students love to learn through play. Make this simple egg carton spine model to encourage your students’ interest in the human body and how it works.
Teach your students the magic of chemical reactions using a plastic bottle, vinegar, and baking soda to inflate a balloon. This classic experiment is a wonderful way to explore science for kindergarten kids.
Introduce little ones to the laws of motion with easy-to-make balloon rockets. When the air shoots out one end, the balloons will sail off in the other direction. Whee!
You’ll need helium balloons for this one, and kids are gonna love it. Ask them to guess (hypothesize) how many balloons it will take to lift various items in a bag attached to the strings.
There’s never been a better time to add a handwashing experiment to your list of kindergarten science activities. Use glitter as a stand-in for germs, and learn how important washing your hands with soap really is.
Explore the properties of mystery items
Raising Lifelong Learners
Difficulty: Easy / Materials: Basic
Mystery bags are always a hit with kids. Tuck a variety of objects inside, then encourage kids to feel, shake, smell, and explore as they try to determine what the items are without looking.
Learn more: Mystery Bags at Raising Lifelong Learners
Play with fizzing ice cubes
The Play-Based Mom
Difficulty: Easy / Materials: Basic
While kinders may not entirely understand the concept of acid-base reactions, they’ll still get a kick out of spraying these baking soda ice cubes with lemon juice and watching them fizz away!
Here’s another way to engage the senses. Drop essential oils onto cotton balls, then seal them inside spice bottles. Kids sniff the bottles and try to identify the smell.
Magnet play is one of our favorite kindergarten science activities. Place a variety of items into small bottles, and ask kids which ones they think will be attracted to the magnets. The answers may surprise them!
This experiment lets kindergartners try their hand at “waterproofing” a boot with a variety of materials. They use what they already know to predict which materials will protect the paper boot from water, then experiment to see if they’re right.
Perhaps no book leads so perfectly into a science lesson as Dr. Seuss’s Bartholomew and the Oobleck. Just what is oobleck? It’s a non-Newtonian fluid that looks like a liquid but takes on the properties of a solid when squeezed. Weird, messy … and so much fun!
No list of kindergarten science activities would be complete without a crystal project! Use pipe cleaners to make the letters of the alphabet (numbers are good too), then grow crystals on them using a supersaturated solution.
You don’t need a microscope to look at fingerprints up close! Instead, have each student make a print on a balloon, then blow it up to see the whorls and ridges in detail.
Tell kids they’re going to move a marble without actually touching it, and watch their eyes widen in surprise! They’ll have fun drawing mazes to guide a metal marble through with a magnet from underneath.
There’s something about seeing a seed develop roots and shoots with your very eyes that’s just so incredible. Sprout bean seeds in paper towels inside a glass jar to give it a try.
Any kid who’s ever seen The Lion King certainly already knows a bit about food chains and food webs (“It’s the CIIIIRRRR-CLE … the circle of LIFE!”). It’s a topic that can be tricky to cover, but it can be done successfully with a little finesse on the part of teachers. These activities help students understand how important these concepts are, and why healthy food webs and chains are necessary for the whole planet to thrive. So try one of our food web or food chain activities with your class this year.
A food chain follows the direct path of energy between species. Food webs are more complex and involve a give-and-take between many organisms in an environment. This clever anchor chart helps explain the difference between the two.
2. Introduce food webs and food chains during story time
Amazon
Books are a great way to segue into discussions about food chains and food webs. Here are some of our favorites.
3. Let The Lion King explain the concept
Seriously, Mufasa’s speech in The Lion King is one of the best explanations of food chains and webs around. This video covers the idea in more detail.
Scholastic’s StudyJams work for both in-person and online classrooms. Watch the entertaining video, then use the self-assessment tool to check kids’ knowledge.
We love that this food web activity is not just a science project but an art project as well! Kids choose a food chain to illustrate, then represent each part of it inside the mouth of the next.
Use this interactive game with your whole class online or in person. Teams fight it out to see which animal can create the best food web and ecosystem for survival.
This very literal interpretation of a food chain is one that kids can easily do on their own, whether in the classroom or at home. All they need is paper, glue, scissors, and a little creativity.
Visit Super Simple for a free printable to make these adorable ocean food chain nesting dolls. Then challenge kids to choose another ecosystem and create their own.
Each of these cups represents one part of a food chain. Stack them to show how they all fit together. Challenge kids to see who can stack their cups correctly in the fastest time!
13. Watch a food web video
This food web activity may not be hands-on, but it is a good way to introduce the concept to kids. This video does a terrific job teaching them about food webs and chains and will surely be a hit with kids.
Use a bulletin board, pushpins, and rubber bands to demonstrate how interconnected a food chain can become. Use this in a classroom science station, or complete the activity together as a whole class virtually.
We love how this activity turns a biology lesson into a STEM challenge. Kids will get a kick out of playing with their food web marble mazes, so the learning never stops.
Head out to the playground for a socially distanced interactive food web game! Lay out cards showing all the organisms in a food web and have kids help place arrows for the flow of energy. Then, kids can walk along the web by following the arrows to really understand how it all interacts.
18. Play a food web PE Game
A science lesson that also doubles as a PE game? Yes, please. This food web activity gets kids moving, which will help reinforce the concept of food chains, especially for kids who have trouble sitting still!
There are few things kids love more than snacks. Make food webs come alive with snacks that stand in for various plant and animal life. You’re definitely going to want to have extra goodies on hand since kids will be sure to snack while learning!
This is another food web option that utilizes toy animals. Before doing this activity, you will want to gather all those little animal and food toys you have lying around. Once you’ve gathered your toys, add in some arrows and a sun and have your students show food chains. This food web activity will feel more like playing than learning!
Assign each student a plant or animal and then have one student start holding a ball of yarn or string. Have students connect their string to whoever they eat and so on and so forth until a web is spun!
22. Color and cut out foldable food chains
These puppet-like fold-outs are the perfect way to introduce the concept of food webs while also working on some gross motor skills. Kids will have fun coloring, cutting, and pasting these templates.
These food chain chains are the perfect project for kids to create during a food chain and web unit. First, have them choose a biome and then create a chain that shows the transfer of energy from producers to consumers and decomposers.
Bulletin boards are a great resource in a classroom for reinforcing information since they are on display all day. Have your students help create the plant and animal cards so they can feel like they had a hand in the process!
JAKARTA, Indonesia — A strong earthquake shook parts of Indonesia’s main island of Java on Saturday, causing panic and sending people into the streets, but there were no immediate reports of casualties. Officials said there was no danger of a tsunami.
The U.S. Geological Survey measured the quake at magnitude 5.7 and said it was centered about 18 kilometers (11 miles) southeast of Banjar, a city between West Java and Central Java provinces, at a depth of 112 kilometers (70 miles).
A magnitude 5.6 earthquake on Nov. 21 killed at least 331 people and injured nearly 600 in West Java’s Cianjur city. It was the deadliest quake in Indonesia since a 2018 quake and tsunami in Sulawesi killed about 4,340 people.
Dwikorita Karnawati, head of Indonesia’s Meteorology, Climatology, and Geophysical Agency, said there was no danger of a tsunami but warned of possible aftershocks.
The agency put a preliminary magnitude at 6.4. Variations in early measurements are common.
High-rises in Jakarta, the capital, swayed for more than 10 seconds and some ordered evacuations, sending streams of people into the streets. Even two-story homes shook in Central Java’s cities of Kulon Progo, Bantul, Kebumen and Cilacap.
Earthquakes occur frequently across the sprawling archipelago nation, but it is uncommon for them to be felt in Jakarta.
The country of more than 270 million people is frequently struck by earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tsunamis because of its location on the arc of volcanoes and fault lines in the Pacific Basin known as the “Ring of Fire.”
In 2004, an extremely powerful Indian Ocean quake set off a tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people in a dozen countries, most of them in Indonesia’s Aceh province.
KAILUA-KONA, Hawaii — Rivers of glowing lava oozing from the world’s largest volcano could swallow the main highway linking the east and west coasts of Hawaii’s Big Island as early as this weekend, and there’s nothing humans can do to stop it, experts said.
Mauna Loa awoke from its 38-year slumber Sunday, spewing volcanic ash and debris into the sky. The molten rock is drawing thousands of awestruck viewers to Route 200 as it passes near Volcanoes National Park, and they endure a thick smell of volcanic gases and sulfur to watch the wide stream of lava creep closer.
“It’s a thrill,” said Kathryn Tarananda, 66, of Waimea. She set two alarms to make sure she didn’t miss her chance to see the sun rise against the backdrop of the eruptions. “We’re out in the middle of raw nature. It’s awe inspiring that we live in this place. … I feel really, really fortunate to be an islander.”
The lava tumbling slowly down the slope has drawn within several miles of the highway, which runs through old lava flows. Known as Saddle Road, it bisects the island, connecting the cities of Hilo and Kailua-Kona. If it becomes impassable, the alternative is a longer coastal road, adding several hours of driving time.
Ken Hon, scientist in charge at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory, said Wednesday that at the current flow rate, the lava could reach the road in as little as two days, though it will likely take longer. “As the lava flow spreads out, it will probably interfere with its own progress,” Hon said.
Lava crossed the Mauna Loa Observatory access road Monday night and cut off its power, Hon said. It’s the world’s premier station that measures heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The federal government is looking for a temporary alternate site on the Hawaiian island and is contemplating flying a generator to the observatory to get its power back so it can take measurements again.
Meanwhile, scientists are trying to measure the gas emitted from the eruption.
Anne Andersen left her overnight shift as a nurse to see the spectacle Wednesday, afraid the road would soon be closed.
“It’s Mother Nature showing us her face,” she said, as the volcano belched gas on the horizon. “It’s pretty exciting.”
Gordon Brown, visiting from Loomis, California, could see the bright orange lava from the bedroom of his rental house, so he and his wife went out for a closer view. “It is so bright, it just blows my mind,” Brown said.
Mauna Loa last erupted in 1984. The current eruption is its 34th since written record keeping began in 1843. Its smaller neighbor, Kilauea, has been erupting since September 2021, so visitors to the national park were treated to the rare sight of two simultaneous eruptive events: the glow from Kilauea’s lava lake and lava from a Mauna Loa fissure.
Officials were initially concerned that lava flowing down Mauna Loa would head toward the community of South Kona, but scientists later assured the public the eruption had migrated to a rift zone on the volcano’s northeast flank and wasn’t threatening communities.
Gov. David Ige has issued an emergency proclamation to allow responders to arrive quickly or limit access as needed. He’s dealt with multiple volcanic eruptions during his eight years as governor, and said it’s impossible to redirect the glowing rock.
“There is no physical way or technological way to change the course of where the lava flows,” Ige told a news conference, recalling how many wished it was possible in 2018, when Kilauea sent lava pouring across homes, farms and roads.
“The power of Mother Nature and Madam Pele overwhelms anything that we can do,” Ige said, referring to the Hawaiian deity of volcanoes and fire.
If lava does cross the highway, the Hawaii National Guard can help plan for alternatives and try to set up bypass routes, the governor said.
———
Kelleher reported from Honolulu. Selsky reported from Salem, Oregon. Contributing to this report were Associated Press journalists Audrey McAvoy in Honolulu and Greg Bull and Haven Daley in Hilo.
KAILUA-KONA, Hawaii — Waves of orange, glowing lava and ash blasted and billowed from the world’s largest active volcano in its first eruption in 38 years, and officials told people living on Hawaii’s Big Island to be ready in the event of a worst-case scenario.
The eruption of Mauna Loa wasn’t immediately endangering towns, but the U.S. Geological Survey warned the roughly 200,000 people on the Big Island that an eruption “can be very dynamic, and the location and advance of lava flows can change rapidly.”
Officials told residents to be ready to evacuate if lava flows start heading toward populated areas. Monday night, hundreds of people lined a road as lava flowed down the side of Mauna Loa and fountained into the air.
The eruption migrated northeast throughout Monday and spread out over the side of the volcano, with several distinct streams of lava running down the hillside.
The eruption began late Sunday night following a series of fairly large earthquakes, said Ken Hon, scientist-in-charge at the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory.
The areas where lava was emerging — the volcano’s summit crater and vents along the volcano’s northeast flank — are both far from homes and communities.
Officials urged the public to stay away from them, given the dangers posed by lava, which is shooting 100 to 200 feet (30 to 60 meters) into the air out of three separate fissures roughly estimated to be 1 to 2 miles (1.6 to 3.2 kilometers) long.
Volcanic gases wafting out of the vents, primarily sulfur dioxide, are also harmful.
Air quality on the Big Island more generally is good right now, but officials are monitoring it carefully, said Dr. Libby Char, the director of the state Department of Health.
Hon said air quality could deteriorate while the eruption lasts, which scientists expect will be about one or two weeks if the volcano follows historical patterns.
Lifelong Big Island resident Bobby Camara, who lives in Volcano Village, said everyone across the island should keep track of the eruption. He said he’s seen three Mauna Loa eruptions in his lifetime and stressed the need for vigilance.
“I think everybody should be a little bit concerned,” he said. “We don’t know where the flow is going, we don’t know how long it’s going to last.”
Gunner Mench, who owns an art gallery in Kamuela, said he awoke shortly after midnight and saw an alert on his phone about the eruption.
Mench and his wife, Ellie, ventured out to film the eerie red glow cast over the island, watching as lava spilled down the volcano’s side.
“You could see it spurting up into the air, over the edge of this depression,” Mench said.
“Right now it’s just entertainment, but the concern is” it could reach populated areas, he said.
Seeing Mauna Loa erupt is a new experience for many residents of the Big Island, where the population has more than doubled from 92,000 in 1980.
More than a third of the island’s residents live either in the city of Kailua-Kona to the west of the volcano, or about 23,000 people, and Hilo to the east, with about 45,000. Officials were most worried about several subdivisions some 30 miles (50 kilometers) to the volcano’s south that are home to about 5,000 people.
A time-lapse video of the eruption from overnight showed lava lighting up one area, moving across it like waves on the ocean.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the eruption had migrated to a rift zone on the volcano’s northeast flank. Rift zones are where the mountain rock is cracked and relatively weak — making it easier for magma to emerge.
Lava could move toward the county seat of Hilo, but that could take about a week, Hon said at a news conference.
Scientists hope the flow will parallel the 1984 eruption, where the lava was more viscous and slowed down.
Mauna Loa has another rift zone on its southwest flank. Lava could reach nearby communities in hours or days if the volcano erupts from this area. But Hon said historically Mauna Loa has never erupted from both rift zones simultaneously.
“So we presume at this point that all of the future activity is going to be on the northeast rift zone of Mauna Loa and not on the southeast rift zone,” he said. “So those residents in that area do not have to worry about lava flows.”
Hawaii County Civil Defense announced it had opened shelters because it had reports of people evacuating from along the coast on their own initiative.
The USGS warned residents who could be threatened by the lava flows to review their eruption preparations. Scientists had been on alert because of a recent spike in earthquakes at the summit of the volcano, which last erupted in 1984.
Portions of the Big Island were under an ashfall advisory issued by the National Weather Service in Honolulu. It said up to a quarter-inch (0.6 centimeters) of ash could accumulate in some areas.
“Volcanic gas and possibly fine ash and Pele’s hair may be carried downwind,” Gov. David Ige said, referring to glass fibers that form when hot lava erupts from a fissure and rapidly cools in the air. The wind stretches the fibers into long strands that look like hair. “So certainly we would ask those with respiratory sensitivities to take precautions to minimize exposure.”
Mauna Loa is one of five volcanoes that together make up the Big Island of Hawaii, the southernmost island in the Hawaiian archipelago.
Mauna Loa, rising 13,679 feet (4,169 meters) above sea level, is the much larger neighbor of Kilauea, which erupted in a residential neighborhood and destroyed 700 homes in 2018. Some of Mauna Loa’s slopes are much steeper than Kilauea’s, so lava can flow much faster when it erupts.
During a 1950 eruption, the mountain’s lava traveled 15 miles (24 kilometers) to the ocean in under three hours.
Mauna Loa’s volume is estimated at least 18,000 square miles (75,000 square kilometers), making it the world’s largest volcano when measured from the ocean floor its summit.
Tourism is Hawaii’s economic engine but Big Island Mayor Mitch Roth predicted few problems for those vacationing during the eruption.
“It will be spectacular where it is, but the chances of it really interrupting the visitor industry — very, very slim,” he said.
Tourism officials said no one should have to change Big Island travel plans.
For some, the eruption might cut down on some travel time, even if there is more volcanic smog caused by higher sulfur-dioxide emissions.
“But the good thing is you don’t have to drive from Kona over to Hawaii Volcanoes National Park to see an eruption anymore,” Roth said. “You can just look out your window at night and you’ll be able to see Mauna Loa erupting.”
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Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Jennifer Sinco Kelleher and Audrey McAvoy in Honolulu; Alina Hartounian in Phoenix; and Mark Thiessen in Anchorage, Alaska.
