World’s largest chain of volcanoes discovered in Australia
Melbourne: The world’s longest chain of continental volcanoes created over the past 33 million years have been found in Eastern Australia stretching for over 2,000 kms.
The ancient volcanic chain is reportedly running from Cape Hillsborough on the central Queensland coast, south-west through central New South Wales to Cosgrove in Victoria.
“This volcanic chain was created over the past 33 million years, as Australia moved north-northeast over a mantle plume hotspot which we believe is now located in Bass Strait,” study’s lead author Rhodri Davies of Australian National University, said.
“This track, which we’ve named the Cosgrove hotspot track, is nearly three times as long as the famous Yellowstone hotspot tracks on the North American continent,” he said adding this kind of volcanic activity is surprising because it occurs away from tectonic plate boundaries where most volcanoes are found.
The newly discovered volcanic chain is the most westerly of three major volcanic chains running along eastern Australia.
The authors examined 15 extinct volcanoes in eastern Australia that had been known about for quite some time and appeared to follow a generally similar track.
“The volcanoes in central Queensland showed an age progression, so they got younger towards the south, and so too did those in New South Wales and Victoria,” Davies said.
The researchers looked at the movement of the Australian tectonic plate. “Australia is actually the fastest moving continent on Earth, moving towards Indonesia at around seven centimetres per year,” Davies said.
“It is always nice to discover something like this. We are getting much better at understanding volcanism in Australia. People don’t realise we have the most extensive volcanoes on Earth but there are still some individual provinces yet to explore,” he said.
The researchers found the chain of now-extinct volcanoes in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria had all passed over the same fixed mantle plume hotspot as the Australian continental plate tracked north-northeast.
“We showed that these volcanoes are surface manifestations of the same mantle plume. However, the two groups of volcanoes were geochemically very distinct from each other and were separated by a gap of 700 kilometres, so no-one ever put these two volcanic chains together,” Davies said. (PTI)
2015 and 2016 set to break global heat records
London:Earth’s climate has reached a major “turning point” with the next two years likely to be the hottest on record globally, the UK Met Office has warned.
Natural climate cycles in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans are reversing and will amplify the strong manmade-driven global warming, according to a new report from the UK Met Office.
This will change weather patterns around the world including more heatwaves, the report said. “We will look back on this period as an important turning point,” said Professor Adam Scaife, who led the Met Office analysis.
“That is why we are emphasising it, because there are so many big changes happening at once. This year and next year are likely to be at, or near, record levels of warming,” said Scaife. The record for the hottest year was broken in 2014, when heat-waves scorched China, Russia, Australia and parts of South America, Guardian reported.
According to the new report, all the signs are that the pause in rising air temperatures is over and the rate of global warming will accelerate fast in coming years. “None of the debate around the pause has changed our long term understanding of greenhouse-gas-driven climate change,” said Professor Rowan Sutton, at the University of Reading and who reviewed the Met Office report, said.
“The fact that 2014, 2015 and 2016 look like being among the very warmest years on record is a further reminder about climate change,” said Sutton. The report analysed the latest data on all the key factors that combine to determine the global climate.
The warming caused by carbon emissions is the largest influence and continues to rise. (PTI)
Cheetah, tiger embryos cloned from frozen skin cells
Beijing: Argentinean scientists have successfully produced embryos of endangered species such as Asiatic cheetah, tiger and Bengal cat using frozen skin cells, in order to preserve the planet’s biodiversity.
“We are working on non-native species as a first step. Our main objective is to avoid the extinction of indigenous species, such as the jaguar,” said Daniel Salamone, associate professor of agronomy at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA).
“The Buenos Aires zoo has a genetic data bank in which all of its species are preserved, both indigenous and exotic ones,” Salamone told state-run ‘Xinhua’ news agency.
“We took frozen skin cells from that data bank to produce cheetah embryos. We were successful, making this a valid new cloning technique,” said Salamone, also a member of Conicet, Argentina’s foremost scientific body. Salamone said the technique allows for the production of embryos with a great number of stem cells. “This project began with the cloning of domestic cats before we transferred the process to wild felines. So far, we have been successful with cheetah, tiger, and Bengal cat cells,” said Lucia Moro, a biotechnology specialist at UBA.
“We now believe this process is transferable to other feline species, as long as the genetic material is available and cells are in good condition,” Moro said. However, the team has not been able to take the project past the embryonic stage as their agreement with the zoo mandates they must follow the ethical standards of the Latin American Association of Zoos and Aquariums, which only allows work on embryos.
“We began with the cheetah, as it is in risk of extinction, but it is also related to the puma and the jaguar,” said Adrian Sestelo, director of the Buenos Aires Zoo genetic data bank and biotechnology lab. (PTI)
‘Birds, like humans, fall in
love too’
Berlin:Birds and humans are often remarkably similar when it comes to mate choice and falling in love, a new speed dating experiment suggests.
The study by researchers at the the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany describes an elegant experiment designed to tease apart the consequences of mate choice. Researchers took advantage of the fact that the zebra finch shares many characteristics with humans, mating monogamously for life, and sharing the burden of parental care.
Using a population of 160 birds, researchers set up a speed-dating session, leaving groups of 20 females to choose freely between 20 males.
Once the birds had paired off, half of the couples were allowed to go off into a life of ‘wedded bliss’. For the other half, however, the authors intervened like overbearing Victorian parents, splitting up the happy pair, and forcibly pairing them with other broken-hearted individuals. Bird couples, whether happy or somewhat disgruntled, were then left to breed in aviaries, and the authors assessed couples’ behaviour and the number and paternity of dead embryos, dead chicks and surviving offspring. Strikingly, the final number of surviving chicks was 37 per cent higher for individuals in chosen pairs than those in non-chosen pairs. The nests of non-chosen pairs had almost three times as many unfertilised eggs as the chosen ones, a greater number of eggs were either buried or lost, and markedly more chicks died after hatching.(PTI)
