Studying these faults can help geoscientists not only better understand the process of plate tectonics, which helped form the planet’s continents and mountains, but also better model their earthquake hazards. The problem is that most studies on these types of faults are (quite literally) shallow, looking only at the upper layer of the Earth’s crust where the faults form.

New research led by Brown University seismologists digs deeper into the Earth, analyzing how the part of the fault that’s near the surface connects to the base of the tectonic plate in the mantle. The scientists found that changes in how thick the plate is and how strong it is deep into the Earth play a key role in the location of Alaska’s Denali Fault, one of the world’s major strike-slip faults.

The findings begin to fill major gaps in understanding about how geological faults behave and appear as they deepen, and they could eventually help lead future researchers to develop better earthquake models on strike-slip faults, regions with frequent and major earthquakes.

“That means when geoscientists model earthquake cycles, they’ll have new information on the strength of the deeper rocks that would be useful for understanding the dynamics of these faults, how stress will build up on them, and how they might rupture in the future,” said Karen M. Fischer, a study author and geophysics professor at Brown.

The study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, was led by Brown alumna Isabella Gama, who completed the work last year while she was a Ph.D. student in the University’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences. The paper focuses primarily on the Denali Fault, a 1,200-mile-long fault that arcs across most of Alaska and some of Western Canada. In 2002, it was the site of a magnitude 7.9 earthquake that sloshed lakes as far away as Seattle, Texas and New Orleans.

The researchers used new data from a cutting-edge network of seismic stations to create a new 3D model of seismic wave velocities throughout Alaska. With this innovative tool, the researchers discovered changes in the thickness and internal strength of the tectonic plate that Alaska sits on. The model shows how these changes in plate strength, that extend as deeply as about 80 kilometers, feed back into the mechanics of where the Denali fault line is produced.

Geoscientists have known that the Earth’s crust that is south of the Denali Fault is thicker, while north of the fault, the crust is thinner. What’s been less clear is data on changes in the deeper, mantle portion of the plate.

In the new study, the researchers documented for what is believed to be the first time that the Denali Fault forms because of an increase in strength on the northern side of the fault that goes all the way through the upper plate.

They found that when they looked at the base of the plate or lithosphere, the lithosphere is stronger and thicker on the northern side of the fault vs. being much thinner and weaker on the southern side. The deeper part of the plate to the north can act almost as a backstop, they describe in the paper. They conclude that the fault at the surface formed and stayed at the edge of this thicker, stronger lithosphere.

“There has been this controversy that faults in the shallower brittle crust wouldn’t connect to structures in the deepest part of the plate, but here we show that they do,” Gama said. “And this could mean a variety of things. For example, it means that we could expect earthquakes occurring deeper than previously thought for strike-slip faults such as the Denali fault, and that plate motions could occur on clear boundaries that extend from shallow faults all the way to the base of the plate.”

The scientists’ avenue of research opened up when IRIS, a research consortium funded by the National Science Foundation and dedicated to exploring the Earth’s interior, deployed the EarthScope Transportable Array in Alaska from 2014 to 2021. The advanced technology — a large collection of seismographs installed temporarily at sites across the U.S. — gave researchers like Gama and Fischer the capability to measure properties of the deeper crust and mantle that hadn’t been possible before.

The researchers next plan to look closer at other strike-slip fault lines around the world to see if they can find similar variations in the structure of tectonic plates the deeper they go. Other well-known strike-slip fault lines include the San Andreas Fault in California and the Anatolian Fault in Turkey, both of which have caused major earthquakes in the past. The San Andreas Fault, for instance, caused the earthquake of 1906 in San Francisco that killed thousands.

“We hope that projects such as the EarthScope Transportable Array will continue to receive support so that we can obtain higher-resolution images of the Earth’s interior from anywhere on the planet,” Gama said. “We hope to gain a better understanding of plate tectonics by using these images and will begin by investigating how other strike-slip faults appear and behave, looking for parallels with Alaska. This information could then be fed back into improving models for how earthquakes occur.”

This research was supported by the NSF EarthScope Program.

Climate change has undisputable global effects on ecosystems and ecological community compositions, but why certain communities are better able to resist the effects of climate change than others remains unclear. In a recent scientific study covering nearly all North American bird species, researchers studied community composition changes and community diversity over half a century. Consistently, bird communities with higher species richness and a larger variety of functional properties changed less radically in their community composition following climate change.

“For example, if a community contained birds of prey, insectivores, and seed-eaters rather than birds from just one feeding guild, it was better safeguarded against the negative impacts of climate change,” highlights PhD Emma-Liina Marjakangas, the leading researcher of the study from University of Helsinki.

Community-level diversity works as a buffer against negative climate change impacts, especially during winter, i.e the season that has shown strongest climatic warming across the Northern Hemisphere. On the other hand, biodiversity played a smaller role during the breeding season. Indeed, earlier studies have shown that bird communities change faster during winter than summer, which explains this pattern.

“Habitat and available food determine a species’ flexibility for changing its breeding and wintering areas. For example, grassland species have shifted their distributions northwards slower than forest passerines, such as the American robin, or habitat generalists, such as the mourning dove,” explains Senior curator Aleksi Lehikoinen from the University of Helsinki.

Functionally diverse bird communities help maintain ecosystems via plant seed dispersal, pest insect control and even pollination of flowering plants. Climate change reshuffles the composition of these important bird communities and therefore threatens their ability to provide ecosystem services.

“Our results strengthen the understanding that biodiversity safeguards ecosystem functioning and that the biodiversity and climate crises need to be mitigated simultaneously to avoid multiplicative effects,” Marjakangas emphasizes.

The study is based on a community science database from 1966-2016 covering all of North America, and it was published in the international journal Scientific Reports.

In the study, researchers surveyed 644 elementary school children about how motivated they were to act in ways that would help the environment — such as by using a reusable water bottle at home or refusing to use plastic straws in restaurants — before and after participating in an environmental education program.

The program, developed by the Duke University Marine Lab, focuses on trash in oceans and other waterways, and includes lessons on how long different types of trash persist in waterways, a trash clean-up, and hands-on investigations of challenges related to marine debris. After the program, students scored higher on average on the survey gauging their motivation to act for the environment. Bilingual or multilingual students saw bigger gains on average compared to students who spoke English primarily at home — a finding researchers say is promising, and needs to be investigated further.

“What we saw was that in aggregate, the programs seemed to encourage environmentally friendly actions among everybody, but when we dug down, most of the program’s effect was explained by the response from linguistically diverse children,” said study co-author Kathryn Stevenson, associate professor of parks, recreation and tourism management at NC State. “This is encouraging, as linguistically diverse children are making up more and more of the U.S. population, and we want our programs to resonate with everyone. It also highlights how young people with different backgrounds can make important contributions. It also makes us wonder: Are students bringing these lessons home?”

The study is part of a research series looking at how environmental education can impact children, their families and their communities. In a previous study, researchers found parents’ climate change concern increases after their children are educated. In another study, they found that local leaders’ as well as voters’ views shifted after watching children’s presentations on an environmental issue.

“We’ve been interested in the mechanisms of inter-generational learning,” Stevenson said. “We saw this program can impact all children involved, but this suggests it might work differently for children who speak more than one language. For kids who act as translators for their family, they might be even more practiced at translating on many levels — linguistically or culturally — and we want to know how that might impact inter-generational learning about the environment.”

“This warming trend is alarming,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “Our warming climate is already making a mark: Forest fires are intensifying; hurricanes are getting stronger; droughts are wreaking havoc and sea levels are rising. NASA is deepening our commitment to do our part in addressing climate change. Our Earth System Observatory will provide state-of-the-art data to support our climate modeling, analysis and predictions to help humanity confront our planet’s changing climate.”

The past nine years have been the warmest years since modern recordkeeping began in 1880. This means Earth in 2022 was about 2 degrees Fahrenheit (or about 1.11 degrees Celsius) warmer than the late 19th century average.

“The reason for the warming trend is that human activities continue to pump enormous amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and the long-term planetary impacts will also continue,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of GISS, NASA’s leading center for climate modeling.

Human-driven greenhouse gas emissions have rebounded following a short-lived dip in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Recently, NASA scientists, as well as international scientists, determined carbon dioxide emissions were the highest on record in 2022. NASA also identified some super-emitters of methane — another powerful greenhouse gas — using the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation instrument that launched to the International Space Station last year.

The Arctic region continues to experience the strongest warming trends — close to four times the global average — according to GISS research presented at the 2022 annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, as well as a separate study.

Communities around the world are experiencing impacts scientists see as connected to the warming atmosphere and ocean. Climate change has intensified rainfall and tropical storms, deepened the severity of droughts, and increased the impact of storm surges. Last year brought torrential monsoon rains that devastated Pakistan and a persistent megadrought in the U.S. Southwest. In September, Hurricane Ian became one of the strongest and costliest hurricanes to strike the continental U.S.

Tracking Our Changing Planet

NASA’s global temperature analysis is drawn from data collected by weather stations and Antarctic research stations, as well as instruments mounted on ships and ocean buoys. NASA scientists analyze these measurements to account for uncertainties in the data and to maintain consistent methods for calculating global average surface temperature differences for every year. These ground-based measurements of surface temperature are consistent with satellite data collected since 2002 by the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder on NASA’s Aqua satellite and with other estimates.

NASA uses the period from 1951-1980 as a baseline to understand how global temperatures change over time. That baseline includes climate patterns such as La Niña and El Niño, as well as unusually hot or cold years due to other factors, ensuring it encompasses natural variations in Earth’s temperature.

Many factors can affect the average temperature in any given year. For example, 2022 was one of the warmest on record despite a third consecutive year of La Niña conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean. NASA scientists estimate that La Niña’s cooling influence may have lowered global temperatures slightly (about 0.11 degrees Fahrenheit or 0.06 degrees Celsius) from what the average would have been under more typical ocean conditions.

A separate, independent analysis by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) concluded that the global surface temperature for 2022 was the sixth highest since 1880. NOAA scientists use much of the same raw temperature data in their analysis and have a different baseline period (1901-2000) and methodology. Although rankings for specific years can differ slightly between the records, they are in broad agreement and both reflect ongoing long-term warming.

NASA’s full dataset of global surface temperatures through 2022, as well as full details with code of how NASA scientists conducted the analysis, are publicly available from GISS.

GISS is a NASA laboratory managed by the Earth Sciences Division of the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The laboratory is affiliated with Columbia University’s Earth Institute and School of Engineering and Applied Science in New York.

For more information about NASA’s Earth science programs, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/earth

Earth911 is honoring the 52 years of Earth Day with 52 Actions for the Earth. Each week through Earth Day 2023, we will share an action you can take to invest in the Earth and make your own life more sustainable. The environmental impact of the global textile and fashion industry is so big that EarthDay.org has made sustainable fashion one of its major campaigns. While fashion magazines are filled with quizzes to help you figure out your personal style, EarthDay.org’s quiz will help you understand the environmental impacts of the fashion industry better and help you avoid making the wrong kind of fashion impact. This week, you can take action for the Earth by testing – and growing – your (environmental) fashion knowledge.

Fashion for the Earth

The history of Earth Day is the history of collective action by individuals. But over time, the organizers realized that while individual action is necessary to stop climate change, it will not be enough unless industry and governments are also committed to investing in the Earth to create a green economy. It’s not easy to envision how government, businesses, and consumers can work together to transform a polluting industry into a model for the green economy. EarthDay.org chose the fashion industry as both an example of the possibilities of change and a place to begin making a difference. The Fashion for the Earth campaign is designed both to change how people think about shopping and to encourage clothing companies to adopt more sustainable practices.

The Impacts of Fashion

Regular readers of Earth911 are already familiar with some of the environmental impacts of the fashion industry and many of the strategies for making fashion sustainable. We’ve learned how to choose eco-friendly fabrics and considered the environmental trade-offs of different natural fibers, various synthetic fabrics, and even leather and leather alternatives. All of these materials have significant environmental impacts at all stages of their life cycle. Agricultural and industrial pollution are generated during textile manufacture. Human rights and labor abuses occur during the manufacturing of garments. Laundry results in chemical and microplastic pollution. And thanks to fast fashion, both the retail and consumer stages waste tremendous quantities of textiles and garments, resulting in mountains of textile garbage.

Take the Quiz

If you want to cram, read through the Get the Facts section on EarthDay.org’s sustainable fashion page. But if you don’t feel like studying, never fear. The quiz reveals each correct answer as you go, then totals your score at the end.

After you take the Sustainable Fashion Quiz, you might be inspired to do something more. You can take immediate action by signing the sustainable fashion petition. You can go further by making your own wardrobe more sustainable and learning how to quit fast fashion for good. Read up on retailer take-back programs before you clean out your closet and host a clothing swap to recycle the clothes you don’t wear. Maybe you will create a capsule wardrobe to eliminate impulse shopping or learn more sustainable laundry methods and dry-cleaning options. You can learn how to mend to extend the life of your clothes and upcycle worn out clothes into napkins.

Lee esta nota de prensa en español here.

Earth’s average surface temperature in 2022 tied with 2015 as the fifth warmest on record, according to an analysis by NASA. Continuing the planet’s long-term warming trend, global temperatures in 2022 were 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit (0.89 degrees Celsius) above the average for NASA’s baseline period (1951-1980), scientists from NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York reported.

“This warming trend is alarming,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “Our warming climate is already making a mark: Forest fires are intensifying; hurricanes are getting stronger; droughts are wreaking havoc and sea levels are rising. NASA is deepening our commitment to do our part in addressing climate change. Our Earth System Observatory will provide state-of-the-art data to support our climate modeling, analysis and predictions to help humanity confront our planet’s changing climate.”

The past nine years have been the warmest years since modern recordkeeping began in 1880. This means Earth in 2022 was about 2 degrees Fahrenheit (or about 1.11 degrees Celsius) warmer than the late 19th century average.

“The reason for the warming trend is that human activities continue to pump enormous amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and the long-term planetary impacts will also continue,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of GISS, NASA’s leading center for climate modeling.

Human-driven greenhouse gas emissions have rebounded following a short-lived dip in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Recently, NASA scientists, as well as international scientists, determined carbon dioxide emissions were the highest on record in 2022. NASA also identified some super-emitters of methane – another powerful greenhouse gas – using the Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation instrument that launched to the International Space Station last year.

The Arctic region continues to experience the strongest warming trends – close to four times the global average – according to GISS research presented at the 2022 annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, as well as a separate study.

Communities around the world are experiencing impacts scientists see as connected to the warming atmosphere and ocean. Climate change has intensified rainfall and tropical storms, deepened the severity of droughts, and increased the impact of storm surges. Last year brought torrential monsoon rains that devastated Pakistan and a persistent megadrought in the U.S. Southwest. In September, Hurricane Ian became one of the strongest and costliest hurricanes to strike the continental U.S.

Tracking Our Changing Planet

NASA’s global temperature analysis is drawn from data collected by weather stations and Antarctic research stations, as well as instruments mounted on ships and ocean buoys. NASA scientists analyze these measurements to account for uncertainties in the data and to maintain consistent methods for calculating global average surface temperature differences for every year. These ground-based measurements of surface temperature are consistent with satellite data collected since 2002 by the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder on NASA’s Aqua satellite and with other estimates.

NASA uses the period from 1951-1980 as a baseline to understand how global temperatures change over time. That baseline includes climate patterns such as La Niña and El Niño, as well as unusually hot or cold years due to other factors, ensuring it encompasses natural variations in Earth’s temperature.

Many factors can affect the average temperature in any given year. For example, 2022 was one of the warmest on record despite a third consecutive year of La Niña conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean. NASA scientists estimate that La Niña’s cooling influence may have lowered global temperatures slightly (about 0.11 degrees Fahrenheit or 0.06 degrees Celsius) from what the average would have been under more typical ocean conditions.

A separate, independent analysis by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) concluded that the global surface temperature for 2022 was the sixth highest since 1880. NOAA scientists use much of the same raw temperature data in their analysis and have a different baseline period (1901-2000) and methodology. Although rankings for specific years can differ slightly between the records, they are in broad agreement and both reflect ongoing long-term warming.

NASA’s full dataset of global surface temperatures through 2022, as well as full details with code of how NASA scientists conducted the analysis, are publicly available from GISS.

GISS is a NASA laboratory managed by the Earth Sciences Division of the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The laboratory is affiliated with Columbia University’s Earth Institute and School of Engineering and Applied Science in New York.

For more information about NASA’s Earth science programs, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/earth

News Media Contacts

Tylar Greene

Headquarters, Washington

202-358-0030

[email protected]

Jacob Richmond

Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.

301-286-0535

[email protected]

The researchers report their findings in the journal Frontiers in Genetics.

“We combined existing methodologies in such a way that we are now able to use noninvasive samples to generate genome-scale data,” said Alida de Flamingh, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who led the work with U. of I. animal sciences professor Alfred Roca. “This allows us to assess wildlife populations without having to dart, capture or immobilize animals.”

Collecting DNA from elephant dung is not new, Roca said.

“Elephant fecal samples have been used for decades to study the genetics of elephants,” he said. “But this relies on very cumbersome methods, often involving chemicals that in some cases may be dangerous. The collections are bulky, they’re hard to ship and they have to be refrigerated, making the whole process very costly.”

De Flamingh tested a relatively inexpensive alternative: using postcard-sized data-collection cards that have been treated to prevent the samples from degrading. Previous research has shown that once samples are smeared on the cards, they can be stored for months without refrigeration.

The inspiration for the study came from de Flamingh’s work with U. of I. anthropology professor and study co-author Ripan Malhi, whose laboratory focuses on ancient DNA.

“Ancient DNA can be problematic because samples are degraded and may yield very low levels of target species DNA,” de Flamingh said. Obtaining genomic data from dung can be similarly challenging, with lower elephant DNA concentrations than are available from blood samples. “I thought, this sounds like an excellent opportunity to test whether the same methodologies can be applied to noninvasive samples to generate the same type of data.”

The team first collected samples from zoo elephants in experiments designed to determine how long after defecation the dung would yield viable genomic data. The Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens in Florida and the Dallas Zoological Gardens allowed the team to collect samples from their African savanna elephants. The researchers retrieved the samples immediately after defecation and 24, 48 and 72 hours later.

Their tests revealed that even three-day-old dung yielded enough DNA for genomic studies of the elephants.

The researchers next tested their approach on samples collected from wild African savanna elephants. Study collaborator and co-author Rudi van Aarde, a professor emeritus of zoology and entomology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, and his colleagues used the cards to collect elephant dung samples after identifying a geographically and ecologically diverse set of wild areas across South Africa.

By running the sequence data obtained from the cards through genomic databases, the team found a treasure trove of information in the dung.

“I was surprised,” Roca said. “I thought we might get some elephant DNA from the cards, but I was thinking on the order of 2%. However, on average, more than 12% of the DNA was attributed to the elephant.”

This was achieved without using laboratory methods that target only elephant DNA, a costly and time-consuming procedure, the researchers said. As a result, each sample yielded a vast amount of data about the elephant, the microbial composition of its gut, its habitat and diet. The researchers even detected the DNA of butterflies and other arthropods that interact with the dung after it is deposited.

“It’s really beneficial to get an idea of everything that’s in there because now you can start asking questions, not only about elephant genomes but also about things like their health, their diet and whether there are pathogens or parasites present,” de Flamingh said.

When it comes to the elephant genomes, the results are comparable to those obtained via blood samples, Roca said.

“You can explore the connectivity of different elephant populations, the level of genetic diversity, the level of inbreeding and relatedness among elephants,” he said. “And I would say there are lots of reasons you don’t want to have to collect blood samples from wild elephants.”

“It’s possible to do what you could do with blood, but it goes beyond that,” de Flamingh said. “You now can do analyses that you couldn’t do before with blood DNA, which only provides information about the elephant’s genome.”

De Flamingh is a postdoctoral researcher and Malhi and Roca are professors at the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the U. of I.

The International Fund for Animal Welfare, the Conservation Ecology Research Unit of the University of Pretoria, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service African Elephant Conservation Fund supported this research.