Category: Environment

{Scientists on Friday debunked a widely circulated news media report suggesting that recent record-high global temperatures were unrelated to climate change.}

The report, which first appeared in the British tabloid The Daily Mail and was summarized in Breitbart News, the right-wing opinion and news site, cited incomplete data and drew incorrect conclusions, the scientists said.

Federal and international agencies have said that 2016 will likely be the hottest year on record, eclipsing the record set last year. In its report, The Daily Mail cited a recent decline in temperatures over land since the weather phenomenon known as El Niño ended this year, and said that El Niño, and not climate change, was responsible for the record heat.

But scientists said that while the recent El Niño did contribute to the record warmth, climate change played a major role, too.

“Nobody said the record temperatures were exclusively the result of climate change,” said Mike Halpert, the deputy director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center.

Deke Arndt, the chief of the climate monitoring branch at the NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, said that the long-term warming trend was quite clear, and that the impact of El Niño was in addition to what were already higher temperatures. “You can have both climate change and a goose from El Niño,” he said.

In an El Niño, water temperatures increase in the eastern equatorial Pacific, affecting air temperatures and weather worldwide. Sea surface temperatures have declined since their peak earlier this year, and now the opposite condition — La Niña, with water temperatures lower than normal — prevails.

Scientists are not surprised that some global temperatures are falling and expect that temperatures next year will be below those of the past two years because of La Niña. “But it’s still likely to be quite a bit warmer than average,” Mr. Halpert said.

Scientists said the news media reports were also faulty in that they cited only temperatures over land, which account for about 30 percent of the earth’s surface. Temperatures over land are much more variable than those over water because land stores relatively little heat.

“If you’re going to be making global-scale assessments,” Dr. Arndt said, “you need to be looking at global-scale data.”

Global data show a slower decline in temperatures than land-only data, scientists said.

The House Committee on Science, Space and Technology posted about the Breitbart News report on Twitter on Thursday. The committee’s Republican chairman, Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, has accused the Obama administration of having a “suspect climate agenda.”

The House committee’s Twitter post drew sharp rebukes from scientists and others, including Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who wrote on Twitter referring to an academic expert cited in the article.

The Daily Mail report, which was written by David Rose, was also strongly disputed online. One blogger headlined a post on the subject: “How Stupid Does David Rose Think You Are?”

{Global study finds losses will be greatest in world’s coldest places.}

For decades scientists have speculated that rising global temperatures might alter the ability of soils to store carbon, potentially releasing huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and triggering runaway climate change. Yet thousands of studies worldwide have produced mixed signals on whether this storage capacity will actually decrease — or even increase — as the planet warms.

It turns out scientists might have been looking in the wrong places.

A new Yale-led study in the journal Nature finds that warming will drive the loss of at least 55 trillion kilograms of carbon from the soil by mid-century, or about 17% more than the projected emissions due to human-related activities during that period. That would be roughly the equivalent of adding to the planet another industrialized country the size of the United States.

Critically, the researchers found that carbon losses will be greatest in the world’s colder places, at high latitudes, locations that had largely been missing from previous research. In those regions, massive stocks of carbon have built up over thousands of years and slow microbial activity has kept them relatively secure.

Most of the previous research had been conducted in the world’s temperate regions, where there were smaller carbon stocks. Studies that focused only on these regions would have missed the vast proportion of potential carbon losses, said lead author Thomas Crowther, who conducted his research while a postdoctoral fellow at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology.

“Carbon stores are greatest in places like the Arctic and the sub-Arctic, where the soil is cold and often frozen,” Crowther said. “In those conditions microbes are less active and so carbon has been allowed to build up over many centuries.

“But as you start to warm, the activities of those microbes increase, and that’s when the losses start to happen,” Crowther said. “The scary thing is, these cold regions are the places that are expected to warm the most under climate change.”

The results are based on an analysis of raw data on stored soil carbon from dozens of studies conducted over the past 20 years in different regions of the world.

The study predicts that for one degree of warming, about 30 petagrams of soil carbon will be released into the atmosphere, or about twice as much as is emitted annually due to human-related activities (A petagram is equal to 1,000,000,000,000 kilograms). This is particularly concerning, Crowther said, because previous climate studies predicted that the planet is likely to warm by 2 degrees Celsius by mid-century.

Other scientists on the team include Mark Bradford, professor of terrestrial ecosystem ecology at Yale; Clara Rowe, who earned a Master of Environmental Management degree at Yale in 2015; and Yale doctoral candidate Noah Sokol, as well as collaborating researchers from more than 30 other institutions.

For Bradford, the analysis provides important clarity on the question of why soil-warming studies appear to provide contradictory evidence, with some showing losses of soil carbon and some showing no change.

“The effects are strongly dependent on where you look,” Bradford said. “Now that we know this, we can begin to develop more confidence in the idea that this biological feedback is real, and hence likely to accelerate human-induced climate change.”

The study considered only soil carbon losses in response to warming. There are several other biological processes — such as accelerated plant growth as a result of carbon dioxide increases — that could dampen or enhance the effect of this soil carbon feedback. Understanding these interacting processes at a global scale is critical to understanding climate change, the researchers said.

“Getting a handle on these kinds of feedbacks is essential if we’re going to make meaningful projections about future climate conditions,” said Crowther, who is now completing a Marie Curie Fellowship at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology. “Only then can we generate realistic greenhouse gas emission targets that are effective at limiting climate change.”

{The fact that animals can use tools, have self-control and certain expectations of life can be explained with the help of a new learning model for animal behaviour. Researchers at Stockholm University and Brooklyn College have combined knowledge from the fields of artificial intelligence, ethology and the psychology of learning to solve several problems concerning the behaviour and intelligence of animals.}

Animals are often very effective; an oystercatcher opens mussels quickly, a baboon takes every opportunity to steal food from tourists or a rat navigates with ease between the bins in a park. Previously these behaviours have been considered to be inherited instincts, even though it is well known that animals have great learning abilities. Researchers from Stockholm University and Brooklyn College have now created an associative learning model that explains how effective behaviours can arise. This means that an animal does not only learn that the last step of a behaviour chain, the one that is rewarding, is valuable. An animal can learn that all steps towards the reward are valuable.

“Our learning model may also explain how advanced behaviours are created at an individual level. Behaviours like self-control, chimpanzee tool use as well as other phenomena like animals having certain expectations of live,” says Magnus Enquist, professor of ethology at Stockholm University. “Similar models are used in the field of artificial intelligence, but they have been ignored in animal studies.”

Since the 1970s it has been known that animals weigh the cost of a certain behaviour against the profit and that they, to a high degree, make optimal decisions, which is assumed to be genetically determined. The research group’s new model deals not only with learning, it also takes into account the idea that what animals are able to learn can be genetically regulated.

“Young animals are often a bit clumsy, while adult animals are extremely skilled. A small cub does not even consider a vole as food, while an adult fox is an expert vole catcher,” says Johan Lind associate professor of ethology at Stockholm University. “Our model shows how genetic regulation of learning can influence the development of species-specific behaviour and intelligence since evolution can affect curiosity and the speed of learning among other things.”

The researchers’ new model could also explain counterproductive behaviour in artificial environments.

“Many learning models can explain optimal behaviour, but to explain counterproductive behaviour an understanding of the mechanisms of the behaviour is needed. Using our model, we manage to explain why animals get stuck in suboptimal behaviour. Like a hamster running in its hamster wheel despite having food next to it. Our model has captured fundamental aspects of learning,” says Stefano Ghirlanda, professor of psychology at Brooklyn College in New York.

The learning model and the research results were recently published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

{How the cold 1430s led to famine and disease.}

While searching through historical archives to find out more about the 15th-century climate of what is now Belgium, northern France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands, Chantal Camenisch noticed something odd. “I realised that there was something extraordinary going on regarding the climate during the 1430s,” says the historian from the University of Bern in Switzerland.

Compared with other decades of the last millennium, many of the 1430s’ winters and some springs were extremely cold in the Low Countries, as well as in other parts of Europe. In the winter of 1432-33, people in Scotland had to use fire to melt wine in bottles before drinking it. In central Europe, many rivers and lakes froze over. In the usually mild regions of southern France, northern and central Italy, some winters lasted until April, often with late frosts. This affected food production and food prices in many parts of Europe. “For the people, it meant that they were suffering from hunger, they were sick and many of them died,” says Camenisch.

She joined forces with Kathrin Keller, a climate modeller at the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research in Bern, and other researchers, to find out more about the 1430s climate and how it impacted societies in northwestern and central Europe. Their results are published in Climate of the Past, a journal of the European Geosciences Union.

They looked into climate archives, data such as tree rings, ice cores, lake sediments and historical documents, to reconstruct the climate of the time. “The reconstructions show that the climatic conditions during the 1430s were very special. With its very cold winters and normal to warm summers, this decade is a one of a kind in the 400 years of data we were investigating, from 1300 to 1700 CE,” says Keller. “What cannot be answered by the reconstructions alone, however, is its origin — was the anomalous climate forced by external influences, such as volcanism or changes in solar activity, or was it simply the random result of natural variability inherent to the climate system?”

There have been other cold periods in Europe’s history. In 1815, the volcano Mount Tambora spewed large quantities of ash and particles into the atmosphere, blocking enough sunlight to significantly reduce temperatures in Europe and other parts of the world. But the 1430s were different, not only in what caused the cooling but also because they hadn’t been studied in detail until now.

The climate simulations ran by Keller and her team showed that, while there were some volcanic eruptions and changes in solar activity around that time, these could not explain the climate pattern of the 1430s. The climate models showed instead that these conditions were due to natural variations in the climate system, a combination of natural factors that occurred by chance and meant Europe had very cold winters and normal to warm summers. [See note]

Regardless of the underlying causes of the odd climate, the 1430s were “a cruel period” for those who lived through those years, says Camenisch. “Due to this cluster of extremely cold winters with low temperatures lasting until April and May, the growing grain was damaged, as well as the vineyards and other agricultural production. Therefore, there were considerable harvest failures in many places in northwestern and central Europe. These harvest failures led to rising food prices and consequently subsistence crisis and famine. Furthermore, epidemic diseases raged in many places. Famine and epidemics led to an increase of the mortality rate.” In the paper, the authors also mention other impacts: “In the context of the crisis, minorities were blamed for harsh climatic conditions, rising food prices, famine and plague.” However, in some cities, such as Basel, Strasbourg, Cologne or London, societies adapted more constructively to the crisis by building communal granaries that made them more resilient to future food shortages.

Keller says another decade of very cold winters could happen again. “However, such temperature variations have to be seen in the context of the state of the climate system. Compared to the 15th century we live in a distinctly warmer world. As a consequence, we are affected by climate extremes in a different way — cold extremes are less cold, hot extremes are even hotter.”

The team says their Climate of the Past study could help people today by showing how societies can be affected by extreme climate conditions, and how they should take precautions to make themselves less vulnerable to them. In the 1430s, people had not been exposed to such extreme conditions before and were unprepared to deal with the consequences.

“Our example of a climate-induced challenge to society shows the need to prepare for extreme climate conditions that might be coming sooner or later,” says Camenisch. “It also shows that, to avoid similar or even larger crises to that of the 1430s, societies today need to take measures to avoid dangerous anthropogenic climate interference.”

{Study raises new questions about what climate change will do to tornado outbreaks and what is responsible for recent trends.}

Tornadoes and severe thunderstorms kill people and damage property every year. Estimated U.S. insured losses due to severe thunderstorms in the first half of 2016 were $8.5 billion. The largest U.S. impacts of tornadoes result from tornado outbreaks, sequences of tornadoes that occur in close succession. Last spring a research team led by Michael Tippett, associate professor of applied physics and applied mathematics at Columbia Engineering, published a study showing that the average number of tornadoes during outbreaks — large-scale weather events that can last one to three days and span huge regions — has risen since 1954. But they were not sure why.

In a new paper, published December 1 in Science via First Release, the researchers looked at increasing trends in the severity of tornado outbreaks where they measured severity by the number of tornadoes per outbreak. They found that these trends are increasing fastest for the most extreme outbreaks. While they saw changes in meteorological quantities that are consistent with these upward trends, the meteorological trends were not the ones expected under climate change.

“This study raises new questions about what climate change will do to severe thunderstorms and what is responsible for recent trends,” says Tippett, who is also a member of the Data Science Institute and the Columbia Initiative on Extreme Weather and Climate. “The fact that we don’t see the presently understood meteorological signature of global warming in changing outbreak statistics leaves two possibilities: either the recent increases are not due to a warming climate, or a warming climate has implications for tornado activity that we don’t understand. This is an unexpected finding.”

The researchers used two NOAA datasets, one containing tornado reports and the other observation-based estimates of meteorological quantities associated with tornado outbreaks. “Other researchers have focused on tornado reports without considering the meteorological environments,” notes Chiara Lepore, associate research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who is a coauthor of the paper. “The meteorological data provide an independent check on the tornado reports and let us check for what would be expected under climate change.”

U.S. tornado activity in recent decades has been drawing the attention of scientists. While no significant trends have been found in either the annual number of reliably reported tornadoes or of outbreaks, recent studies indicate increased variability in large normalized economic and insured losses from U.S. thunderstorms, increases in the annual number of days on which many tornadoes occur, and increases in the annual mean and variance of the number of tornadoes per outbreak. In the current study, the researchers used extreme value analysis and found that the frequency of U.S. outbreaks with many tornadoes is increasing, and is increasing faster for more extreme outbreaks. They modeled this behavior using extreme value distributions with parameters that vary to match the trends in the data.

Extreme meteorological environments associated with severe thunderstorms showed consistent upward trends, but the trends did not resemble those currently expected to result from global warming. They looked at two factors: convective available potential energy (CAPE) and a measure of vertical wind shear, storm relative helicity. Modeling studies have projected that CAPE will increase in a warmer climate leading to more frequent environments favorable to severe thunderstorms in the U.S. However, they found that the meteorological trends were not due to increasing CAPE but instead due to trends in storm relative helicity, which has not been projected to increase under climate change.

“Tornadoes blow people away, and their houses and cars and a lot else,” says Joel Cohen, coauthor of the paper and director of the Laboratory of Populations, which is based jointly at Rockefeller University and Columbia’s Earth Institute. “We’ve used new statistical tools that haven’t been used before to put tornadoes under the microscope. The findings are surprising. We found that, over the last half century or so, the more extreme the tornado outbreaks, the faster the numbers of such extreme outbreaks have been increasing. What’s pushing this rise in extreme outbreaks is far from obvious in the present state of climate science. Viewing the thousands of tornadoes that have been reliably recorded in the U.S. over the past half century or so as a population has permitted us to ask new questions and discover new, important changes in outbreaks of these tornadoes.”

Adds Harold Brooks, senior scientist at NOAA’s National Severe Storms Laboratory, who was not involved with this project, “The study is important because it addresses one of the hypotheses that has been raised to explain the observed change in number of tornadoes in outbreaks. Changes in CAPE can’t explain the change. It seems that changes in shear are more important, but we don’t yet understand why those have happened and if they’re related to global warming.”

Better understanding of how climate affects tornado activity can help to predict tornado activity in the short-term, a month, or even a year in advance, and would be a major aid to insurance and reinsurance companies in assessing the risks posed by outbreaks. “An assessment of changing tornado outbreak size is highly relevant to the insurance industry,” notes Kelly Hererid, AVP, Senior Research Scientist, Chubb Tempest Re R&D. “Common insurance risk management tools like reinsurance and catastrophe bonds are often structured around storm outbreaks rather than individual tornadoes, so an increasing concentration of tornadoes into larger outbreaks provides a mechanism to change loss potential without necessarily altering the underlying tornado count. This approach provides an expanded view of disaster potential beyond simple changes in event frequency.”

Tippett notes that more studies are needed to attribute the observed changes to either global warming or another component of climate variability. The research group plans next to study other aspects of severe thunderstorms such as hail, which causes less intense damage but is important for business (especially insurance and reinsurance) because it affects larger areas and is responsible for substantial losses every year.

The study was partially funded by Columbia University Research Initiatives for Science and Engineering (RISE) award; the Office of Naval Research; NOAA’s Climate Program Office’s Modeling, Analysis, Predictions and Projections; Willis Research Network; and the National Science Foundation.

{Both male and female birds use traits like plumage brightness to size each other up, but a new study on Northern Cardinals in The Auk: Ornithological Advances shows that the meanings of female birds’ markings may vary from one place to another, even within the same species.
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Though they’re often not as showy as the males, female birds have plumage ornaments that can convey information to other members of their species. A previous study found that among Northern Cardinals in Ohio, the brightness of females’ facial markings indicated how aggressive they would be in defending their nests. However, when Caitlin Winters and Jodie Jawor of the University of Southern Mississippi repeated the study in Mississippi’s longleaf pine forest to determine if the same held true there, they were surprised to learn that the variation among females’ facial masks in their southern study population had no relationship to their aggressive behavior.

One of the key differences between the northern and southern cardinal populations studied is that unlike in Ohio, the researchers did not observe any evidence of brood parasitism, where one female cardinal sneaks an egg into another’s nest, among cardinals in Mississippi. The Mississippi birds also had more habitat available to them and defended larger territories, leaving female cardinals there with less need to defend their nests. “This is an indication that selection pressures vary between northern and southern populations and that the information a female in the north needs to convey to other cardinals differs from what a female in the south has to say,” explains Jawor, who has since moved on to New Mexico State University. “The ornament and behavior are both malleable.”

To collect their data, Winters and Jawor captured female cardinals early in the breeding season and measured the brightness of their face masks with a color reflectance spectrometer. They tested aggressive nest defense behavior by waiting until a female left for a break in incubation and then placing a female Northern Cardinal decoy near the nest, observing the bird’s reaction when it returned.

“This is a timely paper, as current research is demonstrating that the factors involved in the display of female aggression are widely varied throughout species,” according to M. Susan DeVries of Edgewood College, who was not involved in the current study. “Considering that different populations are potentially subjected to different selective pressures that can influence behavior, this study’s findings imply that the rules governing aggressive signals and behavior in females are much more complex than we once realized.”

{Changes in social status affect the way genes turn on and off within immune cells.}

The richest and poorest Americans differ in life expectancy by more than a decade. Glaring health inequalities across the socioeconomic spectrum are often attributed to access to medical care and differences in habits such as smoking, exercise and diet.

But a new study in rhesus monkeys shows that the chronic stress of life at the bottom can alter the immune system even in the absence of other risk factors.

The research confirms previous animal studies suggesting that social status affects the way genes turn on and off within immune cells. The new study, appearing in the journal Science, goes further by showing that the effects are reversible.

The team studied adult female rhesus monkeys housed at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University. They found that infection sends immune cells of low-ranking monkeys into overdrive, leading to unwanted inflammation, but improvements in social status or social support can turn things back around.

In the first part of the study, Yerkes scientists put 45 unrelated females that had never met each other one by one into new social groups. Then they watched how the monkeys treated each other to see, for every interaction, who did the bullying and who cowered.

Captive female rhesus macaques in these newly created groups formed a pecking order in order of seniority. The females that were introduced to their groups earlier tended to rank higher than those that came later.

To find out how rank affected their health, the researchers took immune cells from the monkeys and measured the activity of roughly 9,000 genes. More than 1,600 of them were expressed differently in lower-ranking than in higher-ranking females, particularly within a type of white blood cell called natural killer cells, the first line of defense against infection.

In the second part of the study, the researchers rearranged the females into nine new social groups. Once again, the females sorted themselves in order of arrival. The first females to join the newly-formed groups ranked higher than latecomers.

In the re-sorting, the researchers made females that were previously high on the dominance ladder move down one or more rungs, and those that were low were moved up.

Those whose status improved became more sought-after grooming partners once they were promoted, giving them more opportunities to relieve stress through bonding.

The immune cells of formerly low-ranking females also became more like high-ranking females, in terms of which genes were turned on or off, when they improved their social standing.

“This suggests the health effects of status aren’t permanent, at least in adulthood,” said study co-author Jenny Tung, assistant professor of evolutionary anthropology and biology at Duke University.

The results provide solid causal evidence that low social status leads to disparities in health, not just the other way around, as some have argued.

The differences between higher- and lower-ranking females were even more pronounced when their immune systems were triggered to fight a potential pathogen.

When the animals’ white blood cells were mixed in test tubes with a bacterial toxin called lipopolysaccharide, or LPS, pro-inflammatory genes in the cells from subordinate females went into overdrive.

Similar responses could help explain why poor and working class people have higher rates of inflammatory disorders such as heart disease and diabetes, said study co-author Luis Barreiro, assistant professor of immunogenomics at the University of Montreal.

“A strong inflammatory response can be life-saving in the face of infectious agents,” Barreiro said. But the same self defense mechanisms — the ones that make infected tissue swollen and red — can also cause damage if not properly controlled.

If similar molecular mechanisms underlie the link between social status and health in humans, interventions that improve a person’s social support network could be just as important as drugs for mitigating the physiological costs of low status, said co-author Mark Wilson, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory.

“Social adversity gets under the skin,” said co-first author Noah Snyder-Mackler, postdoctoral researcher at Duke. “If we can help people improve their social standing, and reduce some of these hierarchies, we may be able to improve people’s health and well-being.”

{A team of Hokkaido University scientists has unraveled a 150-year-old mystery surrounding the surface melting of ice crystals in subzero environments by using an advanced optical microscope.}

“Ice is wet on its surface”: Since this phenomenon, called surface melting, was mentioned by British scientist Michael Faraday more than 150 years ago, the question of why water on the surface of ice does not freeze in a subzero environment remained unanswered.

In their search for the underlying mechanism behind surface melting, the team used a special optical microscope jointly developed with Olympus Corp. to observe how thin water layers, or quasi-liquid layers (QLLs), are born and disappear at various temperatures and vapor pressure levels.

According to the researchers’ findings, thin water layers do not homogeneously and completely wet the surface of ice — a discovery that runs contrary to conventional wisdom. QLLs, therefore, are not able to stably exist at equilibrium, and thus vaporize.

Furthermore, the team discovered that QLLs form only when the surface of ice is growing or sublimating, under supersaturated or unsaturated vapor conditions. This finding strongly suggests that QLLs are a metastable transient state formed through vapor growth and sublimation of ice, but are absent at equilibrium.

“Our results contradict the conventional understanding that supports QLL formation at equilibrium,” says Ken-ichiro Murata, the study’s lead author at Hokkaido University. “However, comparing the energy states between wet surfaces and dry surfaces, it is a corollary consequence that QLLs cannot be maintained at equilibrium. Surface melting plays important roles in various phenomena such as the lubrication on ice, formation of an ozone hole, and generation of electricity in thunderclouds, of which our findings may contribute towards the understanding.”

The research is likely to provide a universal framework for understanding surface melting on other crystalline surfaces, too.

{A mineral far below Earth’s surface may hold the key to how much water is stored in the planet, a Florida State University researcher says.}

In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, FSU Assistant Professor of Geology Mainak Mookherjee reports that water exists far deeper in Earth than scientists previously thought.

Mookherjee and Andreas Hermann from the University of Edinburgh estimate that in the deep Earth — roughly 400 to 600 kilometers into the mantle — water is stored and transported through a high-pressure polymorph of the mineral brucite.

Previously, scientists thought brucite was not thermodynamically stable that deep in Earth. “This opens up a Pandora’s Box for us,” Mookherjee said.

“We didn’t think water could be stored by hydrous minerals such as brucite at these depths. But now that we know it’s there, we need to figure out how much water could be effectively stored inside it.”

Based on high-pressure experimental studies, scientists knew minerals that transported water — such as brucite — had limited stability and that these minerals decomposed in the deep Earth. As they decomposed, they released the water, which is recycled back to surface via volcanic activity.

But this discovery of a new high-pressure phase of brucite indicates that water could be efficiently transported to far deeper realms without decomposition.

“We had to do quantum-mechanical calculations on thousands of potential structures until we found the one we now reported,” Hermann said. “It really is remarkable that such a well-studied mineral as brucite has something so surprising to offer.”

Water plays a critical role in sustaining geological activity below Earth’s surface. Scientists have been working for years to quantify the oceans’ worth of water that lay hidden in the crust and mantle.

“For the activity of the planet, deep Earth water is equally important to water on the surface,” Mookherjee said. “My goal is to understand how much water is stored in the deep Earth. If the planet becomes dry on the inside, the planet dies because geodynamic activity within the planet ceases.”

Mookherjee said he and Hermann plan to follow up on this paper with additional simulations to better understand the physical properties of brucite at that depth and try to decipher the amount of water that is potentially stored in the deep Earth along the cold-subduction zones.