Revealed: What life on Earth will look like in 2100 - with entire cities plunged underwater and millions of people perishing in the heat

• READ MORE: Images reveal the cities that will be flooded by global warming 

By WILIAM HUNTER

From Snowpiercer to The Day After Tomorrow, countless movies and series have put forward their vision of how climate change might reshape the world.

Worryingly, scientists predict that the reality might be far more shocking than anything imagined by a Hollywood studio.

Now, artificial intelligence (AI) reveals what this might look like.

With Google's ImageFX AI image generator, MailOnline has used the latest scientific research to predict how the world will be in 2100.

As greenhouse gas levels continue to increase, scientists predict that entire cities will be plunged under water.

Meanwhile, climbing temperatures and punishing heatwaves could kill millions of people around the globe. 

Professor Julienne Stroeve, a climate scientist from University College London, told MailOnline: 'The largest impacts that affect all of us are sea level rise and changes in weather extremes.

'All of these will increase through the century if we do not do anything to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.'

Scientists say that the real impacts of climate change could be far more shocking than anything imagined in a Hollywood studio. Now AI has revealed what that might look like 

Rising temperatures  

Scientists have known for years that human-caused climate change is leading to a warmer climate.

As greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane build up in the atmosphere, they act like a blanket covering the planet, trapping heat from the sun and leading to rising temperatures.

This year, the Copernicus Climate Change Service confirmed that 2024 was the hottest year on record, reaching an average surface temperature of 15.1°C (59.2°F).

Last year was also the first year when average temperatures exceeded 1.5°C above the pre-industrial record.

In the future, scientists predict that temperatures will continue to get hotter on average.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) makes predictions about future climate change based on three different scenarios.

In the most optimistic scenario, the world achieves net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050, preventing any more significant increases in global temperatures.

Scientists predict that global temperatures could rise by as much as 4.4°C (7.92°F) above the pre-industrial average in the worst-case scenario. This would lead to widespread drought in water-shortage-prone countries like France 

In the middle scenario, CO2 emissions stay around current levels until the mid-century before declining towards net-zero by 2100.

Meanwhile, in the very high emissions scenario, the world does not take measures to curb greenhouse gas emissions and CO2 levels actually increase by 2100.

The IPCC predicts that global temperatures will be 2.7°C (4.86°F) higher than the pre-industrial average by 2100 in the medium scenario and 4.4°C (7.92°F) higher in the worst-case scenario.

In either of these scenarios, it could trigger widespread droughts with devastating impacts.

In a report last year, the UN warned that the spread of dry, arid areas was an 'existential crisis' threatening billions around the globe.

Since 1990, arid regions have expanded by an area a third larger than India and now cover 40 per cent of the Earth's land excluding Antarctica.

If nothing is done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the number of people living in drylands will more than double from 2.3 billion to 5 billion in 2100.

Likewise, one 2023 paper predicted that the risk of 'flash droughts', in which drought conditions occur abnormally fast, will increase from 32 per cent to 53 per cent in Europe by 2100.

That means that countries like France which already struggle with systematic water shortages are more likely to face devastating droughts.

Melting Ice and higher sea levels

As the atmosphere gets warmer over the next 75 years, the seas will also begin to warm.

In the 1980s, scientists recorded that ocean temperatures were rising at a rate of about 0.06°C per decade.

However, a recent study by experts from the University of Reading found that the rate has surged to a whopping 0.27°C per decade.

Looking ahead, the researchers say is 'plausible' that the ocean temperature increase seen over the past 40 years will be exceeded in just the next 20 years.

In turn, that will lead to potentially devastating impacts for all life on Earth.

Professor Stroeve says: ‘Summer sea ice for sure will be gone well before 2100 but there will be several months of ice-free conditions, not just one month.

By 2100, scientists say the Arctic will be 'unrecognisable' with sea ice totally vanishing in the summer, leaving months of ice-free waters (AI impression)

Antarctic sea ice also hit near-record lows during 2024. Reduced sea ice means that less energy from the sun is reflected back out of the atmosphere, triggering even faster rates of warming 

'This will warm up the Arctic even faster, leading to more melting from Greenland and faster sea level rise, destabilization of the permafrost areas, and disruption of the thermohaline [deep ocean currents] circulation.'

For any people or animals that rely on snow and ice, Professor Stroeve says this rate of change will simply be too fast to adapt to.

Studies predict that more than half of the world's glaciers will be gone by 2100, with the European Alps losing 75 per cent of its glaciers in a high emissions scenario. 

Combined with decreasing snow coverage, that will bring huge changes to the Arctic as well as now-popular skiing regions.

'The Arctic will be unrecognizable from its contemporary state,' says Professor Stroeve.

'Further, the ice-free conditions exposes the coastlines to waves from storms, and that combined with permafrost thaw results in entire communities to be moved.'

As the oceans warm, they will also expand, combining with fresh water from the melting ice caps to drive up sea levels.

Researchers from Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore have predicted that global sea levels could rise by a staggering 6.2ft (1.9 metres) by 2100 if carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions continue to increase.

In the European Alps, glaciers will be reduced by 75 per cent by volume and snow will be absent for much of the year (AI impression)

Global heating will melt the icecaps and cause the oceans to expand, leading to rising sea levels. UK cities like Hull (pictured in AI impression) could be completely submerged as the sea level rises by a staggering 6.2ft (1.9 metres) by 2100

If global sea levels were to rise this much, towns and cities around the world could be plunged underwater - including Hull, London, and Cardiff.

Meanwhile, in the US, people living on the East Coast would be hit the hardest - with large portions of New York City, Boston, Atlantic City and Miami submerged.

These findings also predict President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort, located in Palm Beach, Florida will also be underwater in about 75 years.

More extreme weather

By 2100, one of the biggest ways we will feel the impact of climate change will be in the massive increase in extreme weather events.

Dr Suzanne Bartington, associate professor of environmental health at the University of Birmingham, told MailOnline: 'Climate change is significantly increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, including heatwaves, heavy rainfall, droughts, wildfires which affect physical and mental health.'

As the atmosphere gets warmer, it is able to hold onto more water vapour before releasing it as precipitation leading to much heavier rainfall.

A Met Office study predicts that weather rivalling the wettest day ever recorded could become ten times more likely by 2100 thanks to climate change in a medium emissions scenario.

Even as sea levels rise, plunging cities like London underwater, scientists predict that there will be a significant increase in flooding. The UK will receive up to 35 per cent more precipitation in winter and record-breaking days of rain will be 10 times more likely 

The increased temperature led to record-breaking amounts of water vapour in the atmosphere which created more severe storms and flooding around the world 

At the same time, changing weather patterns mean that some places will experience very little rain at other times of the year.

By 2070, the Met Office predicts that average summer rainfall in the UK could decrease by up to 47 per cent.

Meanwhile, the same study found that there could be up to 35 per cent more precipitation in winter.

When these sudden bursts of rain hit areas where drought has already hardened the ground, the risk of flash flooding becomes extremely high.

Unfortunately, we do not need AI to help us imagine such a scenario.

Last year, Spain was hit by the worst ecological disaster in the country's history as flash floods tore through Valencia and the surrounding regions.

Leading climate scientists say there is 'no doubt' that these floods were made worse by climate change.

In the future, the situation is likely to become even more dire.

In Valencia, Spain a combination of high temperatures and a long time without rain led to devastating flash floods which killed at least 213 people. This photo shows residents and volunteers carry out clearing duties in the flood-hit municipality of Paiporta, Valencia province, Spain, November 4, 2024

Studies have shown that the Mediterranean region - which is home to more than 510 million people - is warming 20 per cent faster than the global average.

The UN predicts that, outside of summer, the Mediterranean will see up to 20 per cent more rainfall events by 2080.

Elsewhere in the world, the biggest concern will be the rise of catastrophic 'mega-hurricanes'.

Typhoons, hurricanes, and tropical storms, which are all essentially the same weather phenomena, are caused when warm moist air rises from the ocean.

As human-caused climate change warms the oceans where these form, there is more energy to drive the storm - leading to ever more powerful events.

Last year, a group of researchers called for the standard scale used to measure hurricanes, the Saffir-Simpson Windscale, to be extended to include these abnormally-strong storms.

A 'category-6' hurricane would unleash winds of 192 miles per hour or higher and a rise in seawater exceeding 25 feet.

For places like Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines, and the southern states of the US, these devastating storms may become much more common by 2100.

Warmer waters also mean more intense tropical storms in Asia and above the Gulf of Mexico. This puts cities like Toyko (depicted here by AI), which already experiences typhoons, at serious risk 

During 2023 and 2024 a natural weather phenomenon called the El Niño Southern Oscillation created exceptionally high sea surface temperatures. This event occurs once every 14 years, leading to warmer temperatures. However, the end of El Niño does not mean that temperatures will begin to decline 

Raging wildfires

While some parts of the world will be battered by intense storms, others will be baked by stifling droughts and heatwaves.

Scientists predict that this combination of intense heat and low rainfall will turn some regions into 'tinderboxes' - regions susceptible to wildfires.

Worryingly, there are clear signs that this process has already begun.

The devastating Los Angeles wildfires started on January 7 and spread quickly, killing at least 28 people and destroying more than 10,000 homes, racking up billions in costs and leaving thousands of people homeless.

At the time the fires started, LA was experiencing its driest start to the year since records began in 1944.

As of January, Los Angeles Airport had recorded just 0.03-inch (0.08cm) of rain since October 1, creating 'severe drought' conditions across Los Angeles County.

The World Weather Attribution - a network of researchers from the US, UK and a number of other European countries - warned the hot, dry and windy conditions that drove the fires were about 35 per cent more likely due to global warming.

Extreme wildfires are predicted to become 50 per cent more frequent by 2100 as drier, hotter conditions create highly flammable conditions. In cities like LA, these fires could cause huge destruction. This is an ultra-realistic AI depiction of Los Angeles affected by climate change

The devastating Los Angeles wildfires (pictured in this photo) started on January 7 and spread quickly, killing at least 28 people and destroying more than 10,000 homes, racking up billions in costs and leaving thousands of people homeless

By 2100, the UN Environment Programme predicts that climate change and changing land usage will make wildfires more intense and more frequent.

The frequency of extreme fires is predicted to increase by 14 per cent by 2030, 30 per cent by 2050, and 50 per cent by the end of the century.

The researchers warn that even the Arctic will face a growing wildfire risk unless radical steps are taken.

In areas like LA and Australia where fires are already common, the impact of these fires could be devastating.

Choking air pollution

If nothing is done to invest in cleaner technologies, scientists warn that air pollution could become one of humanity's deadliest challenges.

Over the last 160 years, the levels of toxic air pollution around our cities have generally decreased for most wealthy countries.

However, recent studies have shown that 99 per cent of the world's population still live in areas with dangerously dirty air.

Studies suggest that cities like Delhi (pictured) which already has deadly levels of air pollution could face even worse conditions. Warmer air and less rain mean pollution stays in the air longer 

Due to mass urbanisation, industrialisation, and population growth cities like Delhi, India (pictured) now have worse pollution than ever before

Studies have predicted that air pollution will lead to 260,000 deaths by 2100 as a result of the changes caused by climate change

In countries experiencing rapid industrial growth, poor environmental regulation has allowed pollution to reach unsafe levels.

Over the last few years, Delhi's air pollution levels have exceeded 100 micrograms per cubic meter - 20 times higher than the WHO recommendations.

By 2100, many researchers expect these conditions to get worse for many people around the globe.

Less rain and warmer temperatures mean that pollution tends to stay in the air for longer.

This means that climate change will increase the amount of ground-level ozone and fine particle pollution we breathe - leading to lung disease, heart conditions, and strokes.

Research published in Nature Climate Change found that if climate change continues, air pollution will cause an extra 60,000 deaths worldwide by 2030 and 260,000 deaths by 2100 as a result.

Millions dead

Through a combination of these factors, scientists believe that the world will see millions of extra deaths by 2100 thanks to human-caused climate change.

Excess heat alone is predicted to cause 5.8 million extra deaths in Europe by 2100. The worst affected city will be Barcelona (depicted in this AI impression) where 246,000 net extra deaths are forecast 

As the climate warms, more and more people will be exposed to the effects of deadly heatwaves.

This will be particularly harmful in areas which have never had to adapt to extreme heat conditions in the past.

A study published this year suggests that dangerous temperatures will kill 50 per cent more Europeans by the end of the century.

Even under the most optimistic scenario, an additional 8,000 people will be killed by the heat every year while an extra 80,00 could die in the worst-case scenario.

Dr Bartington says: 'Under current climate policies it is expected that heat-related deaths will increase, particularly among older people in the context of an ageing population.'

Between 2015 and 2099, heat alone will lead to 5.8 million extra deaths with the worst affected city in Europe being Barcelona - with 246,082 net deaths.

That is even after accounting for the number of people that climate change would save from death in the cold European winters - challenging the popular theory that global heating could be a net positive for cold countries.

Combined with rising air pollution, the effects on life around the globe could be even worse.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, recently predicted that air pollution and extreme temperatures could lead to 30 million excess deaths by 2100.

Even in the most likely scenario, an additional 10.8 million people could die each year due to heat while 19.5 million might be killed by air pollution.

Given that these figures do not even consider the increased risk of extreme weather, wildfires, and famine caused by disruption to agriculture, the true toll of climate change could be higher still.

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03-02-2025 om 20:56 geschreven door peter  

• READ MORE:  'Doomsday' fish found on beach sparks fears of looming disaster

By ELLYN LAPOINTE FOR DAILYMAIL.COM and JONATHAN CHADWICK FOR MAILONLINE 

Humanity is officially one second closer to world annihilation, scientists say. 

The Doomsday Clock has been revealed – and it now sits at 89 seconds to midnight, one second closer than last year. 

It's also the closest the clock has ever been to midnight in its 78-year history, meaning we're nearer to world-ending catastrophe than ever before. 

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which decides where the hands are set, cited the Russia-Ukraine war, ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, the threat of nuclear war, climate change, a looming bird flu pandemic and AI arms race for the update. 

The Chicago-based nonprofit created the Doomsday Clock in 1947 during the Cold War tensions that followed World War II to warn the public about how close humankind was to destroying the world. 

'We set the clock closer to midnight because we do not see sufficient positive progress on the global challenges we face,' said Daniel Holz, board member and physicist at the University of Chicago.

'Setting the Doomsday Clock at 89 seconds to midnight is a warning to all world leaders,' he added. 

Since 2023, it has been set at 90 seconds to midnight, but this year scientists predicted it would move forward to reflect the troubling global outlook.

Scientists unveiled the 2025 update for the 'Doomsday Clock' today, revealing that it has moved one second closer to midnight. Pictured with the clock, former President of Colombia Juan Manuel Santos (left) and Robert Socolow (right), professor emeritus at Princeton University and member of the Atomic Scientists' Science and Security Board

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which decides where the hands are set, cited the Russia-Ukraine war, ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, the threat of nuclear war, climate change, a looming bird flu pandemic and AI arms race

Why has the Doomsday Clock gone forward? 

Moving the Doomsday Clock one second closer on Tuesday signified humanity's failures to make progress from the global threats in the past 12 months. 

The Russia-Ukraine war, Israel's ongoing conflicts in the Middle East, and the threat of nuclear war, climate change and AI all mean the clock has gone forwards for the first time in two years. 

'The factors shaping this year's decision – nuclear risk, climate change, the potential misuse of advances in biological science and a variety of other emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence – were not new in 2024,' Holz said.

'But we have seen insufficient progress in addressing the key challenges, and in many cases this is leading to increasingly negative and worrisome effects.' 

Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine launched Europe's bloodiest conflict since World War II, while there's a growing sense 'a nation may end up using nuclear weapons'.

'The war in Ukraine continues to loom as a large source of nuclear risk,' Holz said. 

'That conflict could escalate to include nuclear weapons at any moment due to a rash decision or through accident and miscalculation.'  

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The Doomsday Clock was set at 89 seconds to midnight, the closest the Clock has ever been to midnight in its 78-year history. The symbolic clock edges closer to midnight to reflect human-made global catastrophes

An Israeli attack on al-Hudari family house reduces the building into rubble in Gaza City, Gaza on January 05, 2025

Harrowing fires in California this month were related to climate change, according to scientists. Pictured, a home is engulfed in flames, Los Angeles, January 8, 2025

President Donald Trump speaking in the White House's Roosevelt Room flanked by Masayoshi Son, Chairman and CEO of SoftBank Group Corp; Larry Ellison, Executive Charmain Oracle and Sam Altman, CEO of Open AI on January 21, 2025, to announce $500B AI investment. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin in November lowered the threshold for a nuclear strike in response to a broader range of conventional attacks, a move the Kremlin described as a signal to the West. 

Russia's updated doctrine set a framework for conditions under which Putin could order a strike from the world's biggest nuclear arsenal.

The Middle East has been another source of instability with the Israel-Gaza war and broader regional hostilities involving countries including Iran. 

'We are watching closely and hope that the ceasefire in Gaza will hold,' Holz said.  

Meanwhile, nuclear-armed China has stepped up military pressure near Taiwan, and nuclear-armed North Korea continues with tests of various ballistic missiles.

Climate change poses another existential threat. Last year was the hottest in recorded history, according to scientists at the UN World Meteorological Organization. The last 10 years were the 10 hottest on record, it said.

'While there has been impressive growth in wind and solar energy, the world is still falling short of what is necessary to prevent the worse aspects of climate change,' Holz said.

Last year also saw staggering advancements in artificial intelligence, prompting increasing concern among some experts about its military applications and its risks to global security.

The 2025 Clock time signals that the world is on a course of unprecedented risk, and that continuing on the current path is a form of madness

2024 also saw advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) that have contributed to the decision to move the time forward (file photo)

2024 was the hottest year on record, beating the record set by 2023. The average global temperature in 2024 reached 15.1°C (59.2°F), 0.72°C (1.3°F) warmer than the 1991-2000 average

Governments have addressed the matter in fits and starts. In the US, then-President Biden in October signed an executive order intended to reduce the risks that AI poses to national security, the economy and public health or safety. 

His successor Donald Trump revoked it last week, and also announced a private-sector $500 billion investment in AI infrastructure.

'Advances in AI are beginning to show up on the battlefield in tentative but worrisome ways, and of particular concern is the future possibility of AI applications to nuclear weapons,' Holz said.

'In addition, AI is increasingly disrupting the world's information ecosystem. AI-fueled disinformation and misinformation will only add to this dysfunction.'

What is the Doomsday Clock?

The Doomsday Clock is a symbolic timepiece showing how close the world is to a human-made global catastrophe, as deemed by experts. 

Every year, the clock is updated based on how close we are to the total annihilation of humanity ('midnight').

If the clock goes forward and gets closer to midnight (compared with where it was set the previous year), it suggests humanity has got closer to self destruction.

Moving the Doomsday Clock one second closer on Tuesday signified humanity's failures to make progress from the global threats of 2024. Scientists noted that a looming pandemic was part of their decision

In 2024, the hands did not move to reflect an unchanging global situation 

But if it moves back, further away from midnight, it suggests humanity has reduced the risks of global catastrophe in the past 12 months.

On some years, such as 2024, the hands of the clock haven't moved at all – which suggests the global situation has not changed.

The clock is set by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a nonprofit organization based in Chicago that publishes an academic journal.

Although symbolic and not an actual clock, the organization does unveil a physical 'quarter clock' model at an event when revealing if and how the hands have moved.

After the unveiling, the model can be found located at the Bulletin offices in the Keller Center, home to the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.

Every January, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists reveals its annual update to the Doomsday Clock – even if the hands are not moved. 

When was the Doomsday Clock created?

The Doomsday Clock goes back to June 1947, when US artist Martyl Langsdorf was hired to design a new cover for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists journal.

The Doomsday Clock goes back to June 1947, when US artist Martyl Langsdorf was hired to design a new cover for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists journal 

Dr Leonard Rieser, Chairman of the Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, moves the hand of the Doomsday Clock back to 17 minutes before midnight at offices near the University of Chicago on November 26, 1991

With a striking image on the cover, the organization hoped to 'frighten men into rationality', according to Eugene Rabinowitch, the first editor of the journal.

It came amid a backdrop of public fear surrounding atomic warfare and weaponry, just two years after the Second World War ended.

Langsdorf initially considered drawing the symbol for uranium before sketching a clock to convey a sense of urgency.

She set it at seven minutes to midnight because 'it looked good to my eye', Langsdorf later said.

On the cover of later issues in subsequent years, the hands of the clock were adjusted based on how close we are to catastrophe.

After the Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic bomb in 1949, Rabinowitch reset the clock from seven minutes to midnight to three minutes to midnight.

Since then, it has continued to move forwards and backwards.

In 2009, the Bulletin ceased its print edition, but the clock is still updated once a year on its website and is now a much-anticipated highlight of the scientific calendar.

The Doomsday Clock’s time is set by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board (SASB) in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes nine Nobel Laureates. Factors included nuclear weapons threats, the climate crisis, biological threats, and disruptive technologies like artificial intelligence (file photo)

Who decides what time to set the Doomsday Clock at?

Shortly after it was first created, Bulletin Editor Eugene Rabinowitch decided whether or not the hands should be moved.

Rabinowitch was a scientist, fluent in Russian, and a leader in the conversations about nuclear disarmament, meaning he was in frequent discussions with scientists and experts all over the world.

After considering the discussions, he would decide whether the clock should be moved forward or backward, at least in the first few decades of the clock's existence.

When he died in 1973, the Bulletin's Science and Security Board took over, made up of experts on nuclear technology and climate science, and has included 13 Nobel Laureates over the years.

The panel meets twice a year to discuss ongoing world events, such as the war in Ukraine, and whether a clock change is necessary.

When were the hands furthest away from midnight?

In 1991, following the end of the Cold War, the Bulletin set the clock hands to 17 minutes to midnight.

The end of the war saw the US and the Soviet Union sign the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.

This meant the countries would cut down their nuclear weapons arsenal, reducing the threat of nuclear war.

Unfortunately, the hands have not been as far away from midnight since then – and they do not look like moving back to this position any time soon.

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29-01-2025 om 23:45 geschreven door peter  

 Terrifying study predicts exactly how many people will DIE from climate change by 2099

• READ MORE: Earth is 'off-track' to limit global warming to 1.5°C, scientists warn

By JONATHAN CHADWICK FOR MAILONLINE 

A terrifying new study has predicted just how many people in Europe will die from climate change by the end of the century. 

In total, 5.8 million Europeans will be killed by excess heat between 2015 and 2099, scientists at London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine predict. 

However, the experts warn that their study doesn't include the effects of catastrophic weather events caused by climate change, such as wildfires and tropical storms – so the actual total will be even higher. 

While the team admit that rising temperatures will stop people dying of the cold, overall, the rise in heat deaths will outweigh fewer cold deaths. 

Barcelona will see the highest temperature-related death toll by the end of the century, they say, followed by Rome, Napes and Madrid. 

'Our results stress the urgent need to aggressively pursue both climate change mitigation and adaptation to increased heat,' said lead author Dr Pierre Masselot. 

'This is especially critical in the Mediterranean area where, if nothing is done, consequences could be dire. 

'By following a more sustainable pathway, we could avoid millions of deaths before the end of the century.' 

A terrifying new study reveals how many people in Europe will die from climate change by the end of the century (file photo)

According to the researchers, some people think that rising temperatures due to global warming will mean fewer people will die of the cold. 

This has created the assumption that climate change is 'beneficial' in that it will result in a 'net decrease' in temperature-related deaths.

In other words, the theory agrees that a certain number of people will die of heat, but a greater number of people who would otherwise have died of the cold will be saved. 

However, the new study shows that this theory – which is often cited in opposition to 'vital mitigation policies' – is not true, at least in Europe. 

'The increase in heat-related deaths consistently exceeds any decrease in cold-related deaths across all considered scenarios,' the experts say in their paper, published in Nature Medicine. 

For the new study, Dr Masselot and colleagues analysed temperature and mortality data to predict future temperature-related deaths in 854 European cities between 2015 and 2099. 

For each city, the researchers worked out a 'net' figure – the amount of deaths caused by heat minus deaths 'saved' from the cold.  

Under a scenario where there's high greenhouse gas emissions (where CO2 emissions double by 2100) and no adaption to heat there will be a total of 5,825,746 excess deaths in Europe due to heat, they found. 

Heat-related deaths include heat stress and severe dehydration, while cold-related deaths include hypothermia and frostbite. Pictured, heat in Rome in July 2023

The researchers say: 't. Questions remain as to whether climate change can result in a net decrease in temperature-related mortality'. Pictured, heatwave in Warsaw, Poland August 17, 2024

Top 10 European cities to see the highest temperature-related death tolls by 2099

1. Barcelona (Spain) - 246,082
2. Rome (Italy) - 147,738
3. Naples (Italy) - 147,248 
4. Madrid (Spain) - 129,716
5. Milan (Italy) - 110,131 
6. Athens (Greece) - 87,523 
7. Valencia (Spain) - 67,519 
8. Marseille (France) - 51,306 
9. Bucharest (Romania) - 47,468
10. Genoa (Italy) - 36,338 

Note: Figures are 'net' increase - so the amount of deaths caused by heat minus deaths 'saved' from the cold 

However, 3,480,336 deaths due to the cold will be avoided, giving an overall 'net' mortality rate in Europe by 2099 of 2,345,410. 

Researchers say the most vulnerable areas of Europe to heat deaths will be further south – namely the Mediterranean region and the Balkans. 

The European city with the highest temperature-related death toll by the end of the century will be Barcelona – at 246,082.

Next will be Rome with 147,738, followed by Naples (147,248), Madrid (129,716), Milan (110,131) and Athens (87,523).

On the other hand, most cities in the British Isles and Scandinavian countries, such as London, Copenhagen and Stockholm will see a 'net decrease' in deaths – meaning more people will be 'saved' from the cold than those killed by the heat. 

For example, in London 75,864 people will be killed by the heat but 103,320 will be saved from the cold – an overall net decrease of -27,455. 

'London and the UK generally tends to have high vulnerability to cold, and also a lower exposure to heat,' Dr Pierre Masselot told MailOnline. 

'In our model, this translates by a slight decrease of deaths in future climate.' 

These graphs plot net changes in temperature-related excess death rates from 2015 to 2099 under no adaptation to heat for three SSP scenarios across 854 cities

The new study focuses on daily mean temperature and does not account for specific weather events that could modify the estimated death toll - such as extreme nighttime temperatures and humidity conditions

However, with no adaptation to heat, the increase in heat-related deaths consistently exceeds any decrease in cold-related deaths across Europe, the study found. 

Read More

• The cities that will be 'submerged by global warming' 

Overall, the study shows that even when taking cold-related deaths into account, 2.3 million Europeans will perish due to the heat by 2099. 

It also focuses on daily mean temperature and does not account for specific weather events that could modify the estimated death toll. 

So the total number of European climate change deaths would likely be bigger once it includes events such as climate induced flooding and wildfires. 

It's worth noting the study does not look at the global picture, only Europe.  

'Our study, based on a comprehensive assessment of 854 European cities, provides clear evidence that net mortality will increase even under the mildest climate change scenario,' the team conclude in their paper. 

'This demonstrates the potential health benefits linked with the implementation of stringent mitigation strategies to strongly reduce greenhouse gas emissions as well as adaptation strategies aimed at the most vulnerable countries and population groups.' 

Carbon emissions and the greenhouse effect: A primer 

The greenhouse effect is the reason our planet is getting too hot to live on. 

CO2 released by human activity is accumulating as an 'insulating blanket' around the Earth, trapping more of the sun's heat in our atmosphere.  

Without the natural greenhouse effect, heat would pass outwards from the Earth’s surface into space - making it too cold to live. But emissions of gases such as CO2 and methane push the greenhouse effect too far - acting as a blanket that traps heat

CO2 - and other greenhouse gases - are emitted by actions such as burning fossil fuels like coal for energy, burning forests to make way for livestock and 

Fertilisers containing nitrogen produce nitrous oxide emissions - another greenhouse gas.

Meanwhile, fluorinated gases are emitted from equipment and products that use these gases. 

Such emissions have a very strong warming effect, up to 23,000 times greater than CO2.

Sources: European Commission/BGS/NASA 

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28-01-2025 om 00:00 geschreven door peter  

• READ MORE: 2024 was officially the hottest year on RECORD 

By SHIVALI BEST FOR MAILONLINE 

Global warming is quickly spiralling out of control, the Met Office has warned. 

According to the forecaster, Earth is 'off-track' to limit global warming to 1.5°C (2.7°F) - a key goal set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the Paris Agreement. 

Last year, measurements taken at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, revealed the fastest annual rise in carbon dioxide (CO2) since records began back in 1958.  

What's more, satellite measurements showed a 'very large rise' of CO2 across the globe. 

These were due to widespread hot, dry conditions, partly linked to El Niño and partly to other factors - including climate change, according to the Met Office. 

The study comes just one week after 2024 was confirmed to have been the hottest year on record.  

'Last week, it was confirmed that 2024 was the warmest year on record, with annual average temperatures higher than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels for the first time,' said Professor Richard Betts, who led the production of the forecast.

'While this does not represent a failure to achieve the Paris Agreement target, as that would require breaching warming 1.5°C over a longer period and we may see a slightly cooler year in 2025, the long-term warming trend will continue because CO2 is still building up in the atmosphere.'

Last year, measurements taken at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, revealed the fastest annual rise in carbon dioxide (CO2) since records began back in 1958

The study comes just one week after 2024 was confirmed to have been the hottest year on record. Pictured: wildfires in the West Hills section of Los Angeles on January 9

The measurements taken at Mauna Loa revealed a rise in CO2 of 3.58 parts per million (ppm) in 2024. 

This far exceeded the Met Office's prediction of 2.84ppm (± 0.54ppm). 

Worryingly, if global warming is to be limited to 1.5°C (2.7°F), calculations by the IPCC indicate that CO2 needs to be slowing by 1.8ppm per year. 

It's not all doom and gloom. 

Looking ahead, the CO2 rise between 2024 and 2025 is forecast to be less extreme than last year at 2.26 ± 0.56 ppm. 

According to the Met Office, this is due to a partial re-strengthening of carbon sinks linked to a shift from El Niño to La Niña conditions. 

However, even this slower rise will be too fast to limit global warming to 1.5°C. 

'La Niña conditions are expected to cause forests and other ecosystems to soak up more carbon than last year, temporarily slowing the atmospheric CO2 rise,' Professor Betts added. 

Worryingly, if global warming is to be limited to 1.5°C (2.7°F), calculations by the IPCC indicate that CO2 needs to be slowing by 1.8ppm per year

Hottest years on record

'However, stopping global warming needs the build-up of greenhouse gases in the air to come to a complete halt and then start to reduce. 

'Large, rapid emissions cuts could limit the extent to which global warming exceeds 1.5°C.

'But this needs urgent action internationally.'

The new study comes just one week after a report published by the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), revealed that temperatures last year were 0.12°C (0.22°F) above 2023, the previous warmest year on record.

That makes 2024 the first calendar year on record to exceed 1.5°C above the pre-industrial level.

Although this single year does not mean the targets of the Paris Agreement have already been missed, experts say that humanity is now 'dangerously close' to this milestone. 

The data shows that an exceptionally hot start to the year brought the average global air temperature in 2024 to 15.1°C (59.2°F).

While temporary patterns like El Niño helped push temperatures into the extremes, scientists say human-caused climate change remains the 'primary driver' of extreme temperatures.

And with the rate of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere even higher than in previous years, the planet's warming shows no signs of slowing any time soon.

Dr Friederike Otto, a climate policy expert from Imperial College London, says: 'This record needs to be a reality check. 

'The climate is heating to levels we've spent years trying to avoid because countries are still burning huge amounts of oil, gas and coal.'

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

17-01-2025 om 21:13 geschreven door peter  

'Prophet' who predicted assassination attempt on Trump claims mega earthquake is poised to hit US

• READ MORE:  Prophet makes disturbing prediction for 2025

By STACY LIBERATORE FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

A Christian 'prophet' who predicted the assassination attempt on Donald Trump three months prior to his near-miss in Pennsylvania has an alarming new prediction.

Brandon Dale Biggs, an Oklahoma pastor, claims God showed him another vision that would rock the heart of America this spring.

He said he saw a '10-magnitude' earthquake hit the New Madrid fault line, which stretches through Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky and Illinois.

He explained the major earthquake that hits New Madrid would create a 'chain reaction,' causing 'a 6.5 [magnitude] aftershock that impact Texarkana, Texas to Oklahoma.

'It was so big, there were 1,800 people who died [along that stretch],' Biggs said in the video. All the houses on cinder blocks were completely shaken to the foundation, they just fell.'

He claimed the Lord told him that the New Madrid earthquake would hit three days after 'they try to divide Jerusalem with the two-state solution,' which is a proposed approach to resolving the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in the Middle East.

Briggs' visions suggested that the earthquake would happen in the spring as he saw 'Sycamore leaves on the trees...trying to come out.. like they were fresh.' 

Biggs shared his eerie prediction in a video posted posted April 2024 — three months before the Trump assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania rally on July 13.

Brandon Dale Biggs, an Oklahoma pastor, claims he receives visions from God about future events. He predicted the assassination of Donald Trump three months prior

The 150-mile-long New Madrid Seismic Zone (NMSZ) stretches through parts of Missouri , Arkansas , Tennessee , Kentucky and Illinois. A pastor who claims to see visions from God said a major earthquake will hit the area

In that same video, in which he was interviewed by Christian author Steve Cioccolanti, Biggs revealed how he foresaw the attempt on the now president-elect's life.

'This bullet flew by his ear, and it came so close to his head that it busted his eardrum,' he said

Three months later, Matthew Crooks, 20, took several shots at Trump, with one grazing his ear. But the bullet did not burst his eardrum.

Also during the segment, Biggs said he saw red waves in Michigan and Oklahoma during the 2024 Election, which went on to happen in both states.

Now that those predictions have come and passed, portions of the video showing Biggs discussing the major earthquake in the New Madrid Seismic Zone (NMSZ) have resurfaced.

'[The] New Madrid earthquake [is] so big [and] when it happens the Mississippi River starts it goes out another direction,' he said.

In 1811 and 1812, the fault line unleashed a trio of powerful jolts - measuring magnitudes 7.5 to 7.7 - that rattled the central Mississippi River Valley.

Biggs shared his visions with pastor and Christian author Steve Cioccolanti, saying how he foresaw the attempt on the now president-elect's life. He said he saw a bullet pass through Trump's ear. The prediction was shared in a video posted in April 2024

Chimneys fell and boats capsized. Farmland sank and turned into swamps. The death toll is unknown, but experts don't believe there were mass casualties because the region was sparsely populated then. 

Were that to happen today, more than 5,000 people would be killed, but the pastor's '10 magnitude' would possibly see a death toll ranging in the hundreds of thousands to millions, according to experts. 

Experts have also said that there is a 'virtually zero' likelihood of such a major earthquake. 

The strongest earthquake ever recorded was the 1960 Valdivia earthquake in Chile (magnitude 9.5), which occurred in a subduction zone.  

The NMSZ is a mid-continental fault system, not a subduction zone that sits on the coast that is prone to much larger earthquakes.

While a 10 magnitude is not off the table, scientists have speculated it would only be possible long a fault system that is at least 6,200 miles long. 

The NMSZ stretches for 150 miles.

But the scientific data has not caused Biggs to backpedal on his prophecy. 

He told Cioccolanti that he saw Chinook helicopters flying in to bring aid, saying: 'They were flying so low that they were shaking the houses.'

'The Lord told me that when they try to divide Jerusalem with the two-state solution... you will see a three-day window,' said the pastor. 'That the time for people to flee.'

Biggs released a video two months ago where he saw visions of an attack in New Orleans, which happened on January 1

During the same vision, Biggs said an attack would also happen in Las Vegas. Matthew Livelsberger detonate explosives he packed into a Cybertruck outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas

Scientists have said that the NMSZ is likely to see a major earthquake in the next 50 years, which would be a 6.0 magnitude or higher.

'They were not able to bring in supply trucks from east to west,' Briggs said, noting that was because there were no bridges left standing. 

He added that all aid came by airplanes, but food and medicine. was transported through the Mississippi.

'it was so bad, I remember it lasted for months,' said Briggs.

While the prediction was made last year, the pastor shared another vision in October that appeared to also come true. 

'I just seen a glimpse of Vegas,' he said in the video with his eyes closed.

'Oh, these are are these all on the same day. I pray over Las Vegas.

'It is interesting, I now just seen a glimpse of New Orleans Bourbon Street, it it is an attack simultaneously.

On January 1, at 3:15am CST, Shamsud-Din Jabbar drove a pickup truck into a crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans.

And about five hours later,  Matthew Livelsberger detonated explosives he packed into a Cybertruck outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas.

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

11-01-2025 om 20:22 geschreven door peter  

The 18 Best Tech Innovations From CES 2024 That Could Reshape Our Future

From AI pocket companions to transparent TVs to flying cars, CES 2024 offered a look into the near future.

by Raymond Wong

Anadolu/Getty Images

It’s a wrap for CES 2024! We told you AI would be the loudest buzzword at the show, finding its way into all kinds of consumer tech, and we were right. AI was everywhere, but the future isn’t only AI.

At Inverse, we obsess over the past, present, and future of technology. The past shows us the progress we’ve made, the present keeps us grounded in reality, and the future opens our eyes to what’s possible.

CES 2024 had plenty of announcements for devices that you’ll be able to buy in the next 12 months, but it was the experimental, ambitious, and far-flung tech innovations that had us at the edge of our seats. The future is exciting only when you have dreamers trying to build it with wild ideas and products, after all. Not all of these 18 CES 2024 tech innovations will stick the landing, but we hope most of them do.

18. Infinix AirCharge

CES 2024 had Qi 2 chargers aplenty, but looking further out, what we really want is for our gadgets to charge wirelessly over the air without contact with a pad. Enter Infinix’s AirCharge, a base that can supply 7.5W of power to devices. Over-the-air charging tech has a long way to go — the AirCharge only works up to a distance of 20cm or about 7.87 inches — but it is double the distance of similar technology from Oppo, according to Engadget. The progress is slow, but we’re making some. Hopefully, air charging will be mainstream by the end of the decade.

17. Hyundai Mobion Crab-Walking EV

Automakers are obsessed with self-driving car tech, but if you think about it, better self-parking features should be the higher priority. Hyundai’s Mobion EV has an “e-Corner System” aka crab-walking tech, which is exactly the kind of feature every car should have. Many cars now have self-parallel-parking or some kind of assistance for backing into a parking space, so why not the ability for the wheels to rotate and shift the car into a cramped space?

16. C Seed N1 Folding TV

Everyone loves a new TV, but one trend that is gaining traction is hiding the black screen in plain sight. Samsung’s Frame TV has done a good job disguising TVs as picture frames. The natural next step might be TVs that fold up and contract into an art piece or media center. C Seed’s N1 does just that, unfolding into a 137-inch 4K TV with micro-LEDs and then compressing into an unassuming metal sculpture.

15. Xpeng AeroHT eVTOL Flying Car

Still waiting for flying cars? XPeng AeroHT’s electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) might be the closest thing on the horizon. The flying car is basically a supercar with rotors strapped to the top. Xpeng AeroHT, an eVTOL-focused sibling to Xpeng Motors, says the eVTOL flying car isn’t a concept and is preparing to mass produce it for a launch in 2025, with pre-orders in the fourth quarter of the year. We’ve heard similar promises from other companies, but if the company does pull it off, we’ll finally be able to cross flying cars off our list of sci-fi tech that’s made a reality.

14. Sennheiser Momentum Sport Wireless Earbuds

Smartwatches have proven to be an excellent form factor for health and fitness-tracking functionality. However, the next wearable for sensors to call home might be wireless earbuds. Sennheiser's Momentum Sport give us an early look at the near future with real-time body temperature and heart rate monitoring. It also makes us wonder: Can technology miniaturization lead to wireless earbuds, not smartwatches, becoming the more dominant companion to our phones?

13. Thunderbolt 5 In the Razer Blade 18

Compared to the rest of the innovations in this roundup, Intel’s Thunderbolt 5 is pretty boring. While it won’t garner the same kind of attention as a transparent TV, Thunderbolt 5 will be the backbone that enables next-gen computing. We’re looking at data transfers of 80Gbps and 120Gbps for video output in a USB-C port. The first laptop with Thunderbolt 5 at CES 2024 was Razer’s Blade 18, but expect laptops and desktops to adopt the new protocol fairly soon.

12. Samsung Ballie and LG Agent Personal Robots

Samsung’s Ballie and LG’s AI Agent personal robots promise to understand our needs using computer vision and AI. Ballie can patrol the home and project videos onto surfaces. The AI Agent can also patrol homes and functions more like an autonomous smart home hub on wheels, capable of doing stuff like switching the lights on and off for you. Amazon’s Astro robot may have fizzled out, but the dream of home robots doing our bidding so we can live more leisurely lives.

11. Acer 57-inch Predator Z57 Gaming Monitor

VR headsets and smart glasses may displace TVs and monitors one day, but until that happens, gaming companies are going bigger with their physical screens. The biggest one announced at CES 2024 was Acer’s Predator Z57, a 57-inch curved ultra-wide behemoth. With an 8K resolution and 120Hz, the 32:9 aspect ratio monitor shows gamers have a preference for even larger screens. Check back in a few years and 57-inchers will be as commonplace as 27-inch monitors are today.

10. Honda Sallon and Space-Hub EV Concepts

We don’t see eye to eye with Elon Musk about a great many things, but we do agree on one thing: the future of cars should look like they’re from the future. We’re not saying the Cybertruck’s sharp, brutalist design is not it, but most people would prefer EVs with a curvier body. Something more like the Saloon and Space-Hub concepts that are part of Honda’s Zero Series EVs. From gull-wing doors to spacious cabins with massive glass roofs to infinity head and tail lights, Honda's EV concepts are more like a step into zen retreat than a vehicle to escape the apocalypse.

9. MSI Claw A1M Handheld PC

Sony’s PS5 continues to sell well for a gaming box that you put under your TV, but Valve’s Steam Deck, along with the dozens of Windows-powered handheld PCs released in the last year, strongly favors the hybrid console design that Nintendo popularized with the Switch. MSI’s Claw A1M is a first look at what will surely be a trend of more increasingly powerful Windows handheld PCs; it’s already got the Asus ROG Ally beat in a number of ways. Handheld PCs like the Claw A1M prove you don't need to decide between performance and portability. You can get both in one device.

8. Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 5 Hybrid Windows Laptop and Android Tablet

You can always count on Lenovo to show up at CES with a form factor that, at the very least, has a shock factor. Case in point: the ThinkBook Plus Gen 5 Hybrid. It’s a Windows 11 laptop with a display that snaps off and functions as an Android tablet — two birds with one stone. What we’re saying is that different platforms can play nice, and we want to see more companies making hardware that acknowledges the strengths of each one.

7. Samsung Display Flex In & Out Flip

Have you ever looked at a foldable phone and wished that it could fold all the way backward? Samsung's Flex In & Out concept takes the foldable screen of the Galaxy Z Flip 5 and pairs it with a hinge that lets you bend it 360 degrees. How practical such a screen and design will be in a commercial device is questionable, but it’s nice to see that Samsung is still working hard to come up with new phone form factors. Somebody has to!

6. Volkswagen EVs with ChatGPT

We told you that AI would be the major theme of CES 2024, flowing through everything, even if it might seem unnecessary. So it’s no surprise to see Volkswagen integrating ChatGPT into its IDA voice assistant. Leveraging large language models (LLMs), you'll be able to talk to your car with natural language, like Michael Knight did with his car KITT in Knight Rider, as opposed to commanding a voice assistant like it’s some robot serf. As AI makes its way into every computer we own, we'll look back in the distant future at this integration and chuckle at how tame it was.

5. Xreal Air 2 Ultra and Asus AirVision M1 Smart Glasses

In about three weeks, we'll find out whether Apple Vision Pro really is the start of the “spatial computing” era. Even if it isn’t, we feel confident that video glasses such as Xreal’s Air 2 Ultra and Asus’ AirVision M1 that offer multiple high-res virtual screens are here to stay. They’re also more nails in the coffin for physical TV and monitor screens. We’re starting to think physical screens might not have many years left in this world.

4. Samsung Micro-LED and LG OLED T Transparent TVs

If folding TVs don’t become mainstream (the C Seed N1 is $200,000), we could settle for transparent TVs. Both Samsung's Transparent Micro LED TV and LG’s OLED T tout holographic-like visual experiences. The idea is the same as any folding or rollable TV — fully or partially hiding it so your home can look more like photos featured in an interior design magazine. Transparent TVs are still 2D for now, but give them a few years, and maybe they’ll be capable of 3D holograms.

3. Segway Xyber and Xafari E-Bikes

Are these e-bikes or e-motorcycles? Both? Now that the e-bike revolution is well on its way, e-bikes like Segway’s Xyber and Xafari will blur the lines between what requires and doesn't require a motorcycle license. Honestly, we're all for beefier e-bikes with motorcycle-like builds, suspension, speed, and range. We’re also into the Cybertruck-like aesthetic.

2. Razer Project Esther Haptics Gaming Cushion

Video games have been chasing immersion since Pong, and while the term can mean many things (more realistic graphics, controls, and in-game physics), tactile feedback is one that always comes up. Razer’s Project Esther is a cushion for gaming chairs with 16 “Sensa HD” vibration actuators. The idea is that you can feel the action of a game around your body instead of only on your controller. You can think of Project Esther as a mini version of the 4D movie theater experiences that vibrate your chair. Do we want to feel like we've been shot in the back? Razer thinks so, or its designers have watched Ready Player One too many times.

1. Rabbit R1 AI Pocket Companion

AI, specifically generative AI through ChatGPT and chatbots and “copilots” that make use of LLMs took the world by storm in 2023. This year, the AI hardware arrives. Leading the pack is Rabbit’s R1, a $199 “pocket companion” designed by Teenage Engineering that doesn't just understand what it “sees” through its rotating camera and “hears” via its two far-field microphones, but can take actions on them on your behalf. Essentially, the R1 will control your apps and services instead of you having to tap and click your way through. Having pre-sold over 30,000 units since its announcement, maybe Rabbit is on to something here; maybe it’s really time we move away from apps and let AI do repetitive computing for us.

CES 2024… a glimpse into our AI-powered future

This article was originally published on Jan. 15, 2024

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

11-01-2025 om 18:32 geschreven door peter  

11-01-2025 om 18:00 geschreven door peter  

Urgent warning to seafood lovers as scientists discover dangerous microplastics in six popular species - with prawns the worst offenders

• READ MORE: 10 foods high in microplastics - and 'the easy swaps' to avoid them

By JONATHAN CHADWICK FOR MAILONLINE 

Next time you chomp down on your favourite seafood, it may not just be the shell that gives it an unexpected crunch. 

A concerning new study reveals the presence of microplastics in six species of fish and seafood which are commonly consumed by humans. 

Microplastics – plastic fragments less than 5 mm in diameter, invisible to the naked eye – have been linked with toxic impacts on the body, such as cancer. 

Scientists in Oregon conducted a lab analysis of more than 1,800 individual marine creatures, including Pacific herring and a species of Pacific salmon. 

In all, microplastics were found in 99 per cent of samples, in their gut or even in their tissue – but none more so than the pink shrimp. 

Scientists warn that the foreign fragments travel 'from the ocean to our kitchen table' before being consumed by humans in restaurants and homes.  

'It's very concerning that microfibers appear to move from the gut into other tissues such as muscle,' said Professor Susanne Brander, an ecotoxicologist at Oregon State University. 

'This has wide implications for other organisms, potentially including humans too.' 

Pink shrimp, which filter-feed right below the surface of the water, had the highest concentrations of particles in their edible tissues, the study found 

The researchers found human-made particles in the edible tissue of six species - (clockwise from top left) Chinook salmon, lingcod, black rockfish, pink shrimp, Pacific herring and Pacific lamprey

For the study, six fish were caught by a fishing vessel in Oregon waters or bought from a supermarket or seafood vendor. 

In all, the researchers sampled 182 individual fish of the six species – pink shrimp, pacific herring, pacific lamprey, black rockfish, lingcod and chinook salmon. 

The six species are that are 'economically or culturally important' in Oregon but don't necessarily represent global eating habits. 

Lab dissection and microscopic analysis revealed 1,806 suspected particles across the vast majority of individual samples – 180 of 182, or 98.9 per cent. 

The fish contained a wide range of anthropogenic particles (APs), a broad category of materials produced or modified by humans. 

Microplastics – plastic fragments less than 5 mm in diameter, invisible to the naked eye – come under the category of APs. 

The study found 1,806 suspected particles across 180 of 182 individual samples – mostly fibres but also fragments and films. 

According to the researchers, the smaller marine species tend to contain a higher quantity of particles in them, but the reason for this exactly is unclear. 

Pink shrimp, which filter-feed right below the surface of the water, had the highest concentrations of anthropogenic particles (APs) in their edible tissues (R = retail, V = vessel). Chinook salmon had the lowest concentrations. AP concentrations were also fairly low in black rockfish and lingcod

Australian man reveals microplastics inside fish fingers

Pacific lamprey (pictured) are a culturally important food source for indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest

Black rockfish (pictured) are harvested in Oregon, California, Washington, British Columbia, Alaska, and the Pacific

Food & drink shown to contain microplastics 

• Seafood
• Meat (pork, beef and chicken) 
• Fruit and vegetables 
• Tofu 
• Veggie burgers 
• Sugar
• Honey
• Beer 
• Tea 
• Bottled water 

... and much more

Shrimp and small fish, like herring, eat smaller food items like zooplankton, the small swimming animals towards the bottom of the marine food chain. 

'Other studies have found high concentrations of plastics in the area in which zooplankton accumulate,' said said study author Professor Elise Granek at Portland State University.

'These anthropogenic particles may resemble zooplankton and thus be taken up by animals that feed on zooplankton.'

Despite the findings, the researchers are not advising people to stay away from seafood.

Microplastics are ubiquitous, having already been found in bottled water, beer, honey, beef, chicken, veggie burgers and tofu. 

Therefore, omitting seafood from your diet is unlikely to stop your consumption of microplastics. 

'If we are disposing of and utilizing products that release microplastics, those microplastics make their way into the environment, and are taken up by things we eat,' Professor Granek said. 

'What we put out into the environment ends up back on our plates.' 

The Chinook salmon (pictured) is the largest and most valuable species of Pacific salmon. It is eaten by people as well as wildlife such as orcas and sea lions

Lingcod (pictured) is a relatively large species of ground fish with habitats in the Pacific Ocean, according to Wild Alaskan Company

There are around 200 different species of herring although it's just three that are usually caught for food - Atlantic, Pacific (pictured) and Araucanian

Microplastics - plastic particles less than 5 millimetres in diameter - can come from larger plastic products that have broken down, textile fibres, cigarette filters or even beauty products (file photo) 

Read More

• Scientists issue urgent warning about drinking TEA 

Other fish are also likely to contain microplastics too, but the study focused on six species that are commonly consumed in Oregon. 

It's not the first time microplastics have been found in seafood, or even food in general for that matter. 

A 2020 study discovered microplastics inside every single sample of seafood bought at a market – squid, prawns, oysters, crabs and sardines. 

The following year, an Australian scientist demonstrated on TikTok how there's microplastics in store-bought fish fingers. 

Studies have reported the presence of microplastics in several foods, including salt, seafood, sugar, beer, bottled water, honey and milk. 

The human health risks of ingesting microplastics and other APs are understudied, but have been linked to cancer, DNA damage and cellular damage. 

What are microplastics?

Microplastics are defined as tiny pieces of plastic that are less than 5mm in length - about the size of a sesame seed.

There's an even smaller type of microplastic – nanoplastic – which is the result of microplastics breaking down even further and are less than 100 nanometers (nm).

The most common causes for microplastics entering the environment are surface run-off after heavy rain or a flood, treated and untreated wastewater effluent, industrial effluent, sewer overflows and atmospheric deposition.

Primary and secondary microplastics

Primary microplastics are intentionally manufactured in the size of a microplastic size for either industrial abrasives used in sandblasting and microbeads used in cosmetics and skin care products.

Secondary microplastics are formed by the weathering of larger plastic items after being released into the environment.

Credit: Choice.com.au

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07-01-2025 om 20:26 geschreven door peter  

(NASA/Earth Observatory)

According to NASA’s Earth Observatory, which provides data, imagery, and resources related to climate, geology, as well as other Earth systems, TIRS-2 collected the thermal data as Landsat 9 passed overhead on January 16, which has now been superimposed over a digital elevation model of the affected region.

In the imagery provided by Earth Observatory below, the central warmest regions are shown in yellow, with surrounding the lightest temperatures in the region, shown in light blue, indicating cloud coverage.

In December, nearly 4,000 residents were evacuated from Grindavik, followed by a volcanic fissure eruption on December 18 on Sundhnúkagígaröðin, located east of Mt. Sýlingarfell, according to a statement provided by Iceland’s Meteorological Office.

The December eruption was preceded by a “powerful seismic swarm” that began at approximately 21:00 the same day.

Activity has continued since that time, with an additional fissure eruption that began on the morning of January 14, 2024, just one kilometer away from Grindavík. Although barriers constructed in the area since the recent eruptions began were able to divert some of the lava flow, a second fissure that opened shortly after noon local time erupted outside the barrier, resulting in lava flows that reached three homes on the edge of the town.

Fortunately, the volcanic activity subsided within 48 hours, according to the Icelandic Met Office. Although barriers have been used to prevent the flow of the lava from reaching residences during the recent eruptions, in decades past, efforts have included the use of millions of tons of sea water used to cool lava before it could destroy homes and infrastructure.

Based on current models, magma has moved beneath the region, causing uplift and deformation of the surrounding Earth.

“Clear signals of a continued land uplift are still being detected beneath Svartsengi,” read an update from Iceland’s Met Office on January 19. “It is yet too early to assert whether the rate of the land uplift has increased since prior to the eruption on January 14.”

The Met Office says that although it does appear that uplift has increased based on initial measurements, these readings “can fluctuate from one day to the next, and a longer timeline of measurement is needed to be able to interpret the long-term development of the land uplift.”

Fortunately, the Office says that seismic activity overall continues to decrease in the area and that current data suggests a “significant slow down of ground movement compared to previous days.”

“This information suggest[s] that magma is no longer flowing into the dyke and the eruption has ended,” the January 19 statement read.

• Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. He can be reached by email at micah@thedebrief.org. Follow his work at micahhanks.com and on X: @MicahHanks.

{ https://thedebrief.org/category/science/ }

05-01-2025 om 00:00 geschreven door peter  

From underworld portals to UFO landing zones, 'lakes of blood' and 'undiscovered pyramids' in Egypt, the strangest Google Earth images

By TARYN PEDLER

Google Earth, although a useful locator tool, has on occasion boggled the minds of internet users who have stumbled across images of objects and scenes which appear to hold no logical explanation.

People are free to explore the planet in a few clicks of a button on the site, but some users have found themselves accidentally discovering chilling and disturbing sights.

Some UFO hunters claim the tool has captured proof of alien life while others have used the world mapping feature to investigate some of the spookiest areas on earth. 

From 'lakes of blood' to 'undiscovered pyramids' in Egypt - ancient mysteries have been quizzed and questioned as internet users scratch their heads trying to unlock the truth behind the bizarre finds.

And it's not just creepy scenarios that have been unearthed on the virtual maps, but man-made installations too, from multi-billion-pound companies to local artists.

In one strange discovery, a portal to an ominous underworld was spotted tearing through an unknown street as onlookers gathered to watch.

Meanwhile, in another, a suspicious door buried in the deep snow of Antarctica seemed as if it could transport a visitor to the home of Bigfoot.

And if those weren't mind-boggling enough, a giant pentagram found on the ground in Kazakhstan sparked wild theories around satanism - but the truth was eventually revealed to be far more innocent.

Doorway to Bigfoot, Antarctica 

A mysterious 'doorway' was spotted on Google Earth in Antarctica, just southeast of the Japanese-run Showa Station.

The bizarre discovery sparked a range of theories across the internet, including Bigfoot's vacation home or a shuttle from Star Trek.

The unusual structure was discovered by a Reddit user on Google Maps at the co-ordinate 69°00'50'S 39°36'22'E.

Posting to the forum, they wrote: 'Massive door in Antarctica?', along with the co-ordinates.

'Just a blown off Boeing door,' one user replied, while another wrote: 'That's actually Bigfoots vacation home.'

One user suggested it was the 'door to Agartha', while another claimed it could be a 'big seed vault like the one in Svalbard, Norway

Sadly, the structure's true identity is much less exciting than these theories might lead you to believe.

Professor Bethan Davies, a Professor of Glaciology at the University of Newcastle, looked at the coordinates on Google Earth Pro, allowing her to see historic imagery.

'This feature is in an area of fast sea ice in East Antarctica, just offshore of the coast,' she explained to MailOnline.

'There are a series of islands there and the water is pretty shallow.

'This is an iceberg that became grounded and is now stuck and melting out in situ. You can see many other icebergs in the area.'

A mysterious 'doorway' was spotted in Antarctica, just southeast of the Japanese-run Showa Station

Blood lake, Iraq

On the outskirts of Sadr City in Iraq there was once a blood-red lake that baffled Google Earth users. 

Part of a stretch of water called Lago Vermelho, the lake runs through the city and is separated by sections of concrete and crossings. 

It is within one of the central panels of water that the bright red color could be seen, giving the appearance of blood.

Speculation as to what may have caused the red coloring was rife at the time it was spotted by an eagle-eyed internet user, with some suggesting the lake was close to a slaughter house and the coloration was the result of dead animals being dumped there.

Others put forward the more sensible suggestion that the lake was near a sewage treatment plant, or perhaps water treatment was the cause of the colour.

But speculation aside, science offered a different explanation: tiny organisms. 

In some salty lakes, special algae or bacteria can bloom, turning the water red. 

A red lake in Iraq sparked fears it was filled with blood when it was spotted on Google Earth

Undiscovered pyramids, Egypt

This Google Earth image shows a seemingly sunken sand patch which some internet users believed could be an unexcavated pyramid.

The deep crater in the sand appears to be triangular in shape, leading some to the theory that this may be a monumental ancient Egyptian pyramid that has been missed by archaeologists.

Due to the nature of its position, and it's hole-like structure, the undiscovered pyramid is thought to have sank thousands of years ago, leaving a giant three-sided space in its wake.

Less than one percent of Egypt has been excavated, so there are almost certainly ruins we haven't found yet.

But an amateur satellite researcher from Maiden, North Carolina, in 2012 asked an Egyptologist what their thoughts were on the strange apparent pyramid.

'Looks to me more like the sand dunes have moved into the area and the local people were intent on saving some of the sites soon to be covered by sand. So they have kept up and excavation of this area for a reason.' the expert said.

'Looks to be something round sitting on top of a square feature. I think it may be an old well, like a lot of these features usually are. Or at least some sort of religious site that is being kept open by the locals'. 

A bizarre triangle shaped crater in Egypt sent theories swirling that it could be an undiscovered pyramid 

UFO landing tracks, England

There are bizarre structures discovered on US and British air bases, such as this one located near Norwich in England. 

With its concrete base and rogue swirling patterns, alien-lovers across the internet claimed it could be a UFO landing track.

Seemingly placed in the middle of a field of sorts, with not many buildings around it, the mystery of what exactly the was home to deepened.

But despite the random, spaced-out designs, what is believed to be the truth behind the track was revealed almost a decade ago.

The area has been deemed a motorcycle range by the UK Ministry of Defense, though some believe it could potentially serve as a calibration mechanism for satellites. 

What was thought to be a UFO landing track turned out to be a motorcycle range

Portal to the underworld, Unknown

Google Earth in 2018 captured a mysterious black space floating in the middle of a road.

The location of the unnerving siting remains unknown adding to the mystery.

Pictured, is what appears to be a typical construction site next to a public footpath.

Three people can be spotted; two older men are standing on the left with one man dressed in black and the other in a red coat.

A younger man appears to be about to the cross the road on the other side, BUT in between the men is a particularly ominous black hole.

After being posted online, internet users went wild with conspiracy theories, speculating that it could be a secret portal to the underworld.

But a more logical explanation later emerged.

As Google stitches images together, there a good chance this was just another Google glitch.

Or, perhaps, an oil spill from the heavy duty vehicles working on the construction site.

A glitch in Google Earth made it seem as if a portal to the underworld had opened up in the middle of the road

Crash-landed alien spaceship, South Georgia Island

Conspiracy theorists claimed to have spotted a 'crash-landed spaceship' in 2018 after a Google Earth image revealed a mysterious object buried in the snow on South Georgia Island in the South Atlantic Ocean.

Alien hunters were convinced it was of extra terrestrial origin but the truth would seem to lie closer to home.

Rather than evidence of little green men, it is the result of a large avalanche from a nearby mountain depositing a rock or large chunk of ice onto a glacier below.

Dr Richard Waller, senior lecturer in physical geography at Keele University, was behind the claim. 

The unidentified mass was discovered near Antarctica on the remote South Georgia Island in the South Atlantic Ocean, where just 20 people live.

The avalanche is located in the upper part, known as the accumulation area, of the Novosilski Glacier, he said.

Speaking to MailOnline in 2018, Dr Waller explained: 'It looks to me as though this feature is related to a large avalanche from a nearby mountain.

'Part of a hanging glacier appears to have collapsed, you can see the avalanche debris at the foot of the slope, and this could be a large block of ice that has travelled further as a consequence.

'The track shows that it's sliding over a snow-covered glacier before it comes to a rest.'

Bizarre tracks could be seen running up behind the object, suggesting it slid through the snow for some distance before coming to a halt. 

A Google Earth image revealed a mysterious object buried in the snow on South Georgia Island in the South Atlantic Ocean

Upon closer inspection, the object was revealed to be the result of a large avalanche from a nearby mountain depositing a rock or large chunk of ice onto a glacier below

The Pentagram, Kazakhstan

A giant five-pointed star etched into the ground deep in Kazakhstan sparked wild ideas after it was spotted on Google Earth. 

As a symbol, pentagrams have a rich history across various cultures and religions, but conspiracy theories run wild, with some folks thinking it could be a sign of devil worship.

But as usual, the explanation is much simpler. 

The massive star, captured within a circle, located near a lake close to the city of Lisakovsk, is actually the remains of an unfinished Soviet-era park. 

Back when Kazakhstan was still part of the Soviet Union, stars were used on buildings, flags, and monuments across the country.

Archaeologists believe what happened on the ground near the popular lake followed that very tradition. 

Roads were built to follow the star shape, and though the park was never completed, those roads are still visible from above, making the star stand out even more against the navy water. 

Today, the site is abandoned and overgrown, adding to its creepy atmosphere.

The star-shaped etching in Kazakhstan appeared to be a satanic symbol, but the reason behind its creation is much more innocent 

Bloody murder scene, Netherlands 

In 2013, a Google Earth image prompted fears that it revealed a chilling and bloody murder scene.  

The shot, which showed what looked like a trail of blood leading down a jetty in the Dutch city of Almere, sparking speculation a body had been dragged along it. 

A shadowy, though unidentifiable figure is seen standing at the edge of the water in the shot, which was taken by a Google Earth helicopter.

However, an online sleuth revealed that is no grisly murder scene, but rather the work of a wet golden retriever called Rama.

Owner Jacquelina Koenen told The Sun in 2013: 'When I saw the picture I realised tt's my dog. He loves the water.

'He jumps off the end of the jetty, swims round to the bridge and runs down to the edge again.

'It's hilarious that everyone thought it was murder. But it's great he's now world famous.'

The paper added that local police confirmed Koenen's story, putting many people's mind at ease after believing they had seen a horror murder scene.

What seemed to be a bloody trail turned out to be the marks left behind by a soggy dog in Almere

The Gates of Hell, Turkmenistan 

The Darvaza gas crater, also known as the 'Gates of Hell,' looks like a giant black hole in the middle of Turkmenistan's Karakum Desert.

But the 230ft wide hole has been on fire for over 50 years, after being created in 1971 when a Soviet drilling rig accidentally punched into a massive underground natural gas cavern, causing the ground to collapse and the entire drilling rig to fall in.

After puncturing a pocket of gas, poisonous fumes began leaking at an alarming rate.

In an attempt to avoid a potential environmental catastrophe, the Soviets set the hole alight, assuming it would stop burning within a few weeks.

But decades later it is still burning and the pit has become a major tourist attraction, drawing in around 10,000 visitors a year.

At night, the spectacle is truly awe-inspiring. The flames illuminate the night sky, creating an otherworldly atmosphere. 

While the temperatures can reach up to 1,000 degrees Celsius, the flames burn without any smoke and offer a clear view of the inferno below.

Turkmenistan's government has considered putting out the fire due to environmental concerns and the waste of valuable natural gas, but the Gates of Hell continue to burn to this day.

The Gates of Hell in Turkmenistan appears as a mysterious black hole in the middle of a barren desert on Google Earth

In reality, the crater is lit up by an orange blaze that has been alive for over 50 years

Billionaire's name in sand, UAE

Hamad bin Hamdan al Nahyan, a billionaire Sheikh and a member of Abu Dhabi's ruling family, had his name etched into the sand on the island of al Futaisi, which he owns. 

The name is written half a mile in height and two miles in length and is allegedly visible from space, with Google Earth imagery capturing the deep lettering stretching through a sandy area and into the ocean.

Whereas the sea would typically wash away any markings in the sand, these letters are so huge they form waterways that fill with the tides but do not vanish. 

Images show the word 'HAMAD' gradually turning blue as the seawater seeps into the giant etchings.

The name HAMAD can be seen etched into sand in the UAE 

KFC space logo, Nevada

From space, extraterrestrials and astronauts can look back to earth and see The Great Wall of China -- and KFC's Colonel Sanders.

The KFC Corp. in 2007 launched a rebranding campaign with an 87,500 square-foot image of Colonel Sanders in the Nevada desert which the company said makes Kentucky Fried Chicken the world's first brand visible from space.

'If there are extraterrestrials in outer space, KFC wants to become their restaurant of choice,' KFC President Gregg Dedrick said in a statement.

The logo consists of 65,000 one-foot by one-foot painted tile pieces that were assembled like a giant jigsaw puzzle.

'If we hear back from a life form in space today - whether NASA astronauts or a signal from some life form on Mars - we'll send up some Original Recipe Chicken,' said Dedrick.

The logo also depicts an updated version of KFC icon Colonel Sanders who wears his signature string tie but with a red apron instead of his classic white double-breasted suit.

The logo was built at the remote Area 51 desert near Rachel, Nevada, which KFC said was known as the UFO capital of the world and famous for its association with UFO conspiracy theories. 

The KFC Corp. in 2007 launched a rebranding campaign with an 87,500 square-foot image of Colonel Sanders in the Nevada desert

The Boneyard, Arizona

The Boneyard appears on Google earth as unbelievably large green space filled with hundreds of abandoned planes.

Although they may seem like toy figures, the aircraft dumped on these grounds are in fact, real.

The Boneyard is the largest plane cemetery in the world, and is located in Tuscon, Arizona.

The site's massive size is equal to an astounding 1,430 football fields, providing ample space for the extensive collection of over 4,000 retired aircraft.

The Boneyard, also known as the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group, annually receives 300 aircraft for storage and processes out about the same number (with 50 to 100 of those returning to flying service). 

Aircraft that fly again either return to the US military, US government agencies such as the US Coast Guard, US Forest Service, and NASA, or are sold to allied governments under either the Foreign Military Sales  program of the Arms Export Control Act, or the Excess Defence Articles  program of the Foreign Assistance Act.

The Boneyard, located in Tuscon, Arizona, is the largest plane cemetery in the world

Scarecrow Village, Japan

One Google Earth user was left baffled after stumbling across a village of scarecrow people in Nagoro, Japan.

Once a bustling community, the village has an ever shrinking population, except from the 300 life-sized scarecrows that are dotted around the area.

Their faces seem so real that Google has blurred them out in its digital maps. 

The bizarre scarecrows were created by a local artist named Tsukimi Ayano and allegedly resemble past villagers or imagined characters.

They have been set up by Ayano to make them appear as if they are tending to gardens, fishing by the river, or even waiting for a bus.

She stuffs old clothes with newspaper and cotton wool to make the plush figures that ca be seen on Google Earth placed around the village.

Ayano even started creating dolls that follow international trends. 

Visitors can play a game of real-life 'Where's Waldo,' and can attempt to find the US President Donald Trump scarecrow doppelganger or characters from the Harry Potter series. 

There are also famous Japanese celebrities and comedians. 

On the first Sunday of October, Nagoro holds a festival that exhibits the scarecrows and Ayano's other works. 

She’s just one of approximately thirty people still living in the village. 

One Google Earth user was left baffled after stumbling across a village of scarecrow people in Nagoro, Japan

Local resident and artist Tsukimi Ayano making the head of a life-size doll at her house in the tiny village of Nagoro

Eerie images show the life-sized scarecrows dotted across the village

The dolls are made to appear as if they are carrying out everyday human tasks 

Floating forest, Australia 

Seen on Google Earth as what looks like a floating forest is the shipwreck of SS Ayrfield.

It lies deep in the heart of Sydney, Australia, and over time has been consumed by nature - turning it into a haunting relic.

The large silhouette of the ship appears on the map to be a lonely island, but in reality, it marks an abandoned piece of history that has been left to the elements.

Built in 1911, the SS Ayrfield spent its life hauling cargo up and down Australia's coast. 

But by 1972, its working days were over. It was sent to a scrapyard in Homebush Bay –but they never finished the job.

Over the years, a vibrant mangrove forest established itself within the rusting hull of the wreckage, creating an incredible visual contrast with the dark waters below.

The deteriorating ship has over time been transformed into the floating forest seen from above today, and the natural reclamation has turned the SS Ayrfield into a popular destination for photographers and tourists, providing a unique view of the interaction between human history and nature.

Google Earth shows the SS Ayrfield shipwreck appearing as a small island near Australia

The wreckage has been left to the elements and the vessel is now covered in trees

The SS Ayrfield sits on the shallow harbour bottom with mangroves growing out of her rusting shell

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

14-12-2024 om 18:25 geschreven door peter  

places

History holds many oddities that we may never fully understand, either through incomplete documentation, disinterest at the time, or simply a big question mark that hangs over all. Among these are mysterious lost tribes of people that have been encountered and confronted in all corners of the globe, often vanishing before we really understand them or only known from sparse accounts, and leaving us perplexed at just who they were or where their origins lie. Here we will look at mysterious lost tribes of ape-men, blue-eyed Indians, mystical tribes with telepathic powers, and more. 

The remote jungles of South America have long been the source of tales of strange creatures and legends, and among these are numerous sightings of a tribe of large, ape-like beings living in the wilderness. The descriptions of these creatures often vary, with sizes ranging from a diminutive 3 feet tall all the way up to hulking, 12-foot-tall hairy giants, and are often claimed by the natives of the region and witnesses to live in villages of their own, to use tools and primitive bows and arrows, and to have a language of grunts and whistles. Although regional names may vary, they are now mostly filed under the blanket name Maricoxi, and they are for the most part more or less a complete enigma. 

Perhaps one of the most well-documented and harrowing encounters with these mysterious creatures was detailed by the famed British explorer Colonel Percival H. Fawcett, more often called Percy Fawcett, who vanished into the jungle during an ill-fated expedition to find a mysterious lost city he called simply Z. Fawcett was known to write extensive journals of his travels, many of which would later be compiled into books by his son Brian Fawcett. In one of these books, called Lost Trails, Lost Cities, there is to be found within its pages a rather curious and spectacular tale of encountering the Maricoxi.

The encounter supposedly happened in 1914, as Fawcett was on an expedition to map out the uncharted southwestern region of an area called Matto Grosso. From Bolivia they penetrated the dark jungle up the Guapore River, and already they had become well acquainted by local tribes with the bizarre stories of hairy man-beasts said to dwell out there in that sea of trees, and although it seemed rather fantastical it was enough to keep them wary of their surroundings and what they would find out there on their journey. Ivan Sanderson wrote of the stories Fawcett heard in his 1967 book Things, in which he writes:

“These creatures were apparently called Maricoxis by the Maxubis. They dwelt to their northeast. Due east there were said to be another group of short, black people, covered with hair, who were truly cannibalistic and hunted humans for food, cooking the bodies over a fire on a bamboo spit and tearing off the meat. These the Maxubis regarded as merely loathsome and lowly people. On a later trip, Colonel Fawcett was told of an "ape-people" who lived in holes in the ground, were also covered with dark hair, and were nocturnal, so that they were known in surrounding areas as the Morcegos or Bat-People. These types are called Cabelludos or "Hairy People" by the Spanish-speaking, and Tatus, or armadillos, by several Amerindian groups because they live in holes like those animals. Fawcett also records forest Amerinds as telling him that the Morcegos have an incredibly well-developed sense of smell which prompts even these acute hunters to suggest that they have some "sixth sense.”"

They nevertheless bravely ventured out along the river, coming across some oddities along the way. The first interesting discovery was a previously unknown Amerindian tribe, who identified themselves as the Maxubis and displayed some curious traits, such as their religion of worshiping the Sun and demonstrating an inexplicable knowledge of the planets of the solar system, which they could draw out with rather shocking accuracy. This would have been interesting to have studied further, but Fawcett and company were not there to do anthropological work, and after staying with the tribe for a few days they headed back out into the mist-shrouded jungle once more, leaving these fascinating people behind to the mist of history and crossing over into a region that was completely unseen by outsiders and ws so remote and alien it may as well have been the surface of some alien planet.

After several days of dealing with the numerous perils of this untamed land, the expedition found themselves faced with a mysterious trail out there in the middle of nowhere, which they presumed to be one used by the Natives of the region. As they stood there deciding whether to follow the trail or not and which way to go, Fawcett writes that they saw two figures moving about 100 yards away, apparently chattering away in some unknown language and carrying bows and arrows. Although they were at first presumed to be from a local tribe, closer inspection showed them to be decidedly odder, and Fawcett described them:

“We could not see them clearly for the shadows dappling their bodies, but it seemed to me they were large, hairy men, with exceptionally long arms, and with foreheads sloping back from pronounced eye ridges, men of a very primitive kind, in fact, and stark naked. Suddenly they turned and made off into the undergrowth, and we, knowing it was useless to follow, started up the north leg of the trail.”

It seems quite obvious by this point that Fawcett did not regard what he had glimpsed as completely human beings. This was perhaps all odd enough as it was, but it got even more bizarre that evening at dusk when the forest suddenly came alive with the sound of what seemed to be braying horns from out in the distant dark. The expedition members were immediately on alert, as they instinctively knew that this was an aggressive sound issued forth with the promise of threat. Fawcett would write of these horns and what followed:

“In the subdued light of evening, beneath the high vault of branches in this forest untrodden by civilized man, the sound was as eerie as the opening notes of some fantastic opera. We knew the savages made it, and that those savages were now on our trail. Soon we could hear shouts and jabbering to the accompaniment of the rough horn calls--a barbarous, merciless din, in marked contrast to the stealth of the ordinary savage.

Darkness, still distant above the treetops, was settling rapidly down here in the depths of the wood, so we looked about us for a camping site which offered some measure of safety from attack, and finally took refuge in a tacuara thicket. Here the naked savages would not dare to follow because of the wicked, inch-long thorns. As we slung our hammocks inside the natural stockade we could hear the savages jabbering excitedly all around, but not daring to enter. Then, as the last light went, they left us, and we heard no more of them.”

It is an eerie image to be sure, this solitary camp of bedraggled explorers terrified by the sight of hairy men and now harassed by these mysterious horns in the night, punctuated by the chattering of some rough, alien language, and it was still not over for them. The next morning the team warily checked their surroundings and could find no sign of any of the “savages” having intruded into the vicinity. They continued along one of the well-delineated trails they were finding and camped once again that evening without incident. The next morning, they struck out from the camp and within just about a mile stumbled across what seemed to have been the actual village of the strange tribe, populated by creatures who were obviously not exactly human. Fawcett rather spectacularly describes what happened:

“In the morning we went on, and within a quarter of a mile came to a sort of palm-leaf sentry-box, then another. Then all of a sudden we reached open forest. The undergrowth fell away, disclosing between the tree boles a village of primitive shelters, where squatted some of the most villainous savages I have ever seen. Some were engaged in making arrows, others just idled--great apelike brutes who looked as if they had scarcely evolved beyond the level of beasts.

I whistled, and an enormous creature, hairy as a dog, leapt to his feet in the nearest shelter, fitted an arrow to his bow in a flash, and came up dancing from one leg to the other till he was only four yards away. Emitting grunts that sounded like 'Eugh! Eugh! Eugh!' he remained there dancing, and suddenly the whole forest around us was alive with these hideous ape-men, all grunting 'Eugh! Eugh! Eugh!' and dancing from leg to leg in the same way as they strung arrows to their bows. It looked like a very delicate situation for us, and I wondered if it was the end. I made friendly overtures in Maxubi, but they paid no attention. It was as though human speech were beyond their powers of comprehension.

The creature in front of me ceased his dance, stood for a moment perfectly still, and then drew his bowstring back till it was level with his ear, at the same time raising the barbed point of the six-foot arrow to the height of my chest. I looked straight into the pig-like eyes half hidden under the overhanging brows, and knew that he was not going to loose that arrow yet. As deliberately as he had raised it, he now lowered the bow, and commenced once more the slow dance, and the 'Eugh! Eugh! Eugh!’"

This brutish ape-man allegedly continued to do this several more times, aiming the bow only to continue with his odd, disjointed dance and then aim it again. However, Fawcett seemed to know that at any point that arrow could unleash, and his hand was firmly kept upon the butt of his pistol as he took in the whole outlandish scene. At some point Fawcett says he began to seriously fear for his life and decided to try scaring it off with his sidearm, shooting off a round that pinged the earth by the beast’s feet and sent a thunderous boom echoing through the jungle. He says of this sequence of events:

“I drew out a Mauser pistol I had on my hip. It was a big, clumsy thing, of a caliber unsuitable to forest use, but I had brought it because by clipping the wooden holster to the pistol-butt it became a carbine, and was lighter to carry than a true rifle. It used .38 black powder shells, which made a din out of all proportion to their size. I never raised it; I just pulled the trigger and banged it off into the ground at the ape-man's feet.

The effect was instantaneous. A look of complete amazement came into the hideous face, and the little eyes opened wide. He dropped his bow and arrow and sprang away as quickly as a cat to vanish behind a tree. Then the arrows began to fly. We shot off a few rounds into the branches, hoping the noise would scare the savages into a more receptive frame of mind, but they seemed in no way disposed to accept us, and before anyone was hurt we gave it up as hopeless and retreated down the trail till the camp was out of sight. We were not followed, but the clamor in the village continued for a long time as we struck off northwards, and we fancied we still heard the 'Eugh! Eugh! Eugh!' of the enraged braves.”

This account may seem to be completely sensational to the point that it might be easy for the more skeptical-minded to dismiss it out of hand, but there are a few reasons why it has warrant and deserves consideration, the first being that this was likely not some fictional story Fawcett was telling. It was part of his very serious and typically meticulous notes on his expedition and sitting right there amongst more mundane observations of the wildlife and region’s various peoples. He was a consummate professional and member of the Royal Geographical Society, as well as a very respected, experienced explorer and surveyor, and there is no rational reason at all for why he should want to concoct such a story to drop in the middle of his otherwise meticulous journal. Why would he do that and risk his reputation? To what ends? It also means he would not likely have made misidentifications of local tribes or wildlife, as he was as familiar with these jungles as one could possibly be in the era.

Fawcett has also been accused of having perhaps exaggerated his dealings with the Natives and in this case, made them out to be hairy brutes out of some racist agenda, but if that were the case then why are there other records of his dealings with locals that are completely accurate in their depiction of their appearances and behavior? It is somewhat true that Fawcett was known to have some strong opinions on the more primitive tribes, but he seems to have never let it compromise the matter-of-fact way in which he recorded the people themselves. Sanderson has much to say about this aspect of the journal entries, writing:

“He (Fawcett) was not an ethnologist, anthropologist, or archaeologist but it was with these disciplines that he clashed, and it was towards the protagonists of the first that he most often expressed himself as feeling most bitter. In his extensive travels through hitherto unexplored territories he discovered many groups of people for the first time, lived with them, often acquired not a little of their language, recorded what of their customs he could, and attempted some classification of their origins. Much of all of this conflicted with established beliefs among ethnologists, and Fawcett's historical theories were at complete variance with what was then, and still is, accepted. Yet, while those theories were strongly criticized, the veracity of the facts he collected were never questioned. It was his assessment of them that was considered invalid.

This puts his account of the hairy Maricoxis in an entirely different light, quite apart from the fact that his word was never doubted, that he had two reliable witnesses, and that what he saw was both before and afterwards confirmed by others, in that reports relayed to him by several people described exactly what he had seen without the relaters knowing anything of what he did see. We are therefore compelled to accept this report in toto; and this means simply that, in the year 1914, there were living to the northeast of the Parecis Range in the Matto Grosso, what were apparently tribal groups of fully-haired hominids of grossly primitive aspect, and in no possible way descended from or related to the Amerindian aborigines of the Americas.”

While Sanderson may seem perhaps too quick to buy the whole tale, it certainly is an account that stands out among Fawcett’s writings, and which ultimately leaves more questions than answers. What did Fawcett and his fellow expedition members encounter out there in that jungle? Were these indeed the legendary Maricoxi or something else? It is truly unfortunate that considering that Fawcett was not particularly interested in following up on it, and seems to have considered it mostly an obstacle and oddity, he never did make any effort to find out what they were, and the creatures of his account just sort of fade into the background to remain perplexing enigmas. Did this tribe of hairy ape-men really exist the way Fawcett described them, and if so what were they and how did they fit into the Maricoxi legend? The answer may forever remain hidden out there in that forbidden jungle lair.

Besides tribes of man-like apes, one persistent legend that has been around since 16th-century Spanish missionaries came to the Amazon region is that of tribes of tall, fair-skinned, blonde, blue-eyed, decidedly Caucasian-looking natives living out in the most remote and inaccessible areas of the jungle. One of the earlier accounts of encountering these mysterious people was made by the Spanish Dominican missionary Gaspar de Carvajal, who wrote in 1542 of coming across a group of very tall, very white, European-looking tribal women who wore their long, light hair braided and wound about their heads. The account was included in his book Account of the Recent Discovery of the Famous Grand River.

Another popular account of these white Amazonians comes from the American explorer Alexander Hamilton Rice, Jr., who journeyed into the Amazon for a 1924-1925 expedition. Upon returning from the perilous expedition, Rice told of one of the expedition members, a Lieutenant Hinton, who had spied a tribe of white Indians while making a flight over the headwaters of the Parima River. Intrigued, Rice organized a trip by canoe up the river in order to try and find out where the mysterious white natives came from. Eventually, they located a hut that was believed to belong to the white Indians, and they then heard a series of shrieking yells which scared some of the expedition members off and put the remaining group on edge, reaching for their weapons. It was then that two of the white natives came out of the forest, apparently in peace.

These white-skinned natives were described as having pigment painted across their faces that obscured their features, but they were said to be “undeniably white.” The two were said to look undersized and undernourished, wore no clothing, and carried with them bows with poison-tipped arrows. They spoke in a unique language not known to be spoken by any other tribe, which made communication difficult. When the expedition members offered beads and handkerchiefs as gifts, the two tribesmen reportedly called out into the jungle, which brought more of the fair-skinned natives out of hiding.

These odd, white tribespeople were offered food, but it was declined, and it seemed that they preferred to eat plantains which had curiously been garnished with cocaine, although it was unclear where they had acquired the drug. Throughout the encounter, the strange tribe showed no particular interest in or awe of the Westerners’ clothes, equipment, guns, or hydroplane. The expedition made further efforts to try and communicate with the tribe, but the language barrier made it difficult, and after a while the white Indians melted away back into the forest, moving “between the trees like jaguars without making a sound or causing a rustle of the leaves.”

The 1920s were indeed a period of many sightings of these white-skinned natives, and feature heavily in accounts from the explorer Percy Fawcett, who was convinced that these people were denizens of a mystical lost city deep in the jungle, which he called simply “Z.” So convinced was he that this mystical city and its people existed that they would inevitably lead him to obsession and lure him to his final, ill-fated expedition in search of the city of Z in 1925. Fawcett would journey out into uncharted jungle in search of his fabled city and seemingly step off the face of the earth. No trace of him or his expedition was ever found.

Accounts and sightings of the white natives continued sporadically into the 1940s, and in 1945 the British Journalist Harold T. Wilkins took it upon himself to compile a variety of reports stretching back to the 16th century in his book Mysteries of Ancient South America. Even in modern times, there have been accounts of coming across these enigmatic people. In 1977 one joint British/ Brazilian expedition reported being surrounded by a tribe of uncommonly tall, blonde natives with blue eyes and strikingly white pigmentation, some of who had thick beards and all of who were naked. The strange white tribesmen allegedly spoke a dialect that no expert had ever heard before. These people were called the Acurinis and were again encountered by another expedition to the same region in 1979. In this case, the mysterious tribesmen were seen only briefly before vanishing into the underbrush.

Theories abound over what could be behind these accounts. One is that they are the descendants of shipwrecked sailors, Vikings, lost explorers, or even missionaries or other Westerners who willingly left civilization behind to live amongst the natives, where they invariably intermingled. Indeed there are theories that Percy Fawcett himself did this and that the descendants of both him and his expedition members may be behind some of these encounters with fair-skinned natives. In recent years there has been one tribe called the Aché, who are known for having light skin, hair, eye color, and thick beards, and although it has been shown that they show no genetic evidence of having ever mixed with Europeans, their unique appearance could make it possible that they might be the source of at least some of the accounts. It is unlikely we will ever know for sure the precise origins of these stories.

One very odd account that comes from the Amazon wilds is that of an intrepid explorer who came here looking for mysteries and would soon get more than he bargained for, embarking on a quest that would include lost, uncontacted tribes and strange powers of the mind. Loren McIntyre was a seasoned explorer, photojournalist, and writer for such esteemed publications as National Geographic, Time, Life, Smithsonian, GEO, Audubon, and South American Explorer, and was in many ways a sort of real-life Indiana Jones figure, spending much of his life doggedly exploring the forbidding, uncharted, and most impenetrable reaches of the Amazon rainforest of South America. Indeed, it was he who would be the first one to discover the source of the mighty Amazon River, when he made an expedition in search of it in 1971. He would make history when he found that the largest, longest, and most powerful river in the world began with a runoff of snow at a mountain in the Andes called Mismi, some 6,400 kilometers from the Atlantic Ocean, which trickled down to pond now called Laguna McIntyre, which in turn emptied into a brook named Carhuasanta, in Peru, after which it began its inexorable growth and meandering journey through some of the most remote wilds on earth. Yet, although this is McIntyre’s most famous discovery it certainly wasn’t his only one, and he would have a very mysterious encounter out in those jungles that he would keep to himself for years.

In 1969, McIntyre embarked on an excursion into the unexplored depths of the Amazon jungle of Brazil. His target was the little-known Mayoruna tribe, also called the Matsés, who were so elusive that they had never been successfully contacted by outsiders and were known as “The Cat People,” due to the arrays of imposing spikes that they wore implanted into their faces. Next to nothing was known about this enigmatic tribe, and they were only ever fleetingly glimpsed. They were like ghosts, and McIntyre had little to go on when he was dumped off on the shores of the Amazon River in a place called the Javari valley, on the border between Brazil and Peru, and left to continue on his own, penetrating dense jungle that no outsider had ever set eyes on in an attempt to find these mysterious people. Little did he know that it would be they who found him.

As the brave, seasoned explorer made his way through a mosquito-infested jungle he got perhaps too focused on finding the lost tribe, and soon realized that he was hopelessly lost. His journey then turned into aimlessly wandering through the perilous wilderness, and it became obvious that he was not going to be in time for his scheduled pick-up at the point where he had been dropped off. He began to resign himself to the fact that he just might end up another mysterious lost explorer, like his childhood idol Percy Fawcett before him, a fellow explorer who had mysteriously vanished while looking for his mythical city “Z.” Making this trek more ominous was when at some point McIntyre would stumble across a clearing littered with the bodies of what appeared to be four lumberjacks, half devoured by ants and with arrows sticking out from their silent corpses.

This grim discovery had the explorer watching the trees carefully as he aimlessly wandered around half expecting death to come for him at any moment through the shadows, and more sure than ever that he would not see civilization again. It was as he was in this fog of panic and fear that some figures crept out of the forest before him, spikes embedded into their faces, necklaces made of bones, possibly human, around their necks, and looking upon him with a mixture of apprehension and surprise, but not aggressiveness. These were the Mayoruna, and this was the closest any outsider had ever gotten to them. At least any who were still alive.

The frightened explorer immediately and very slowly pulled out some gifts that he had brought in the event that he actually made contact. From his bag, he produced some cloth and mirrors, which he dropped before the tribesmen as they looked on with inscrutable expressions on their pierced faces. They stepped closer to accept the gifts and then seemed to beckon for him to follow them as they began to melt back into the forest. The weary McIntyre stumbled after them, barely able to keep up with their nimble navigation of the jungle, and so would begin the next chapter of his strange adventure.

They arrived at what seemed to be a makeshift camp full of other members of the tribe, and they seemed to show a strange mixture of curiosity and aggression toward him. Upon examining his tennis shoes they went about burning them to ashes, and his watch they found fascinating, but they destroyed that too. Indeed, most of his possessions would be either stolen from him or destroyed, and even his camera, which they oddly showed no interest in, was broken when a monkey descended from the trees to take it from him. Although there was no outright aggression against him, there were some grim reminders that he was very much in danger. He would claim that they possessed trinkets made of human bone and that they drank out of hollowed-out skulls. They were also very well armed and never far from their bows, and one tribesman with red face paint, who he called “Red Cheeks,” took to menacing him and scowling at him.

McIntyre would end up staying with this lost tribe for two months, and during this time made many observations. He noticed that they were constantly on the move, perpetually moving to a new camp, sometimes suddenly and without warning, and they clearly had a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. They also seemed to have no concept of individual possessions, freely sharing everything with each other and taking or using whatever they liked without repercussions. Even odder still, he noticed that these people often moved quite bizarrely in sync, knowing what the others would do or acting in precise tandem without speaking to each other. For some time, he pondered this anomaly, but he would soon learn that the explanation was far odder than anything that he had ever guessed at.

One day he was approached by the one he took to be the chief of the tribe, an ancient-looking, sinewy and grizzled tree trunk of a man, covered in warty growths that would earn him McIntyre’s nickname “Barnacle.” When the chief approached he spoke to McIntyre, and the explorer found that bizarrely, after weeks of being unable to understand anything any of them had said, he clearly comprehended what Barnacle had to say. This utterly perplexed him, but he soon realized that this chief was not moving his mouth when he spoke, and that he was talking directly into his mind, using a sort of telepathy that McIntyre would later call “beaming,” and which Barnacle called “the other language.”

Barnacle explained that the tribe existed as a sort of hive mind consciousness and that their thoughts were all linked to each other, although only the tribal elders were proficient at focusing this telepathic power and truly using it to its full potential. Here he learned that there was no real “self” as Westerners would think of it and that to them the concept of an individual “self” made little sense. The chief also telepathically explained that they were under constant threat from loggers and other outsiders and that the reason the tribe moved so often was that they were on a spiritual journey to what he called “The Beginning,” or the literal beginning of time, where they hoped to be beyond the reach of the intruding outside world. Indeed, the tribe seemed to have a very strange grasp of how time worked that was rather alien to anything the explorer was familiar with. A 1991 article in The Los Angeles Times about McIntyre’s bizarre experience explains the tribe’s philosophy on time as follows:

“The main feature of time, by western definition, is its passage. But for the Mayoruna, time is at once mobile and static. It moved with man, stopped with him, advanced and retreated with him. It is not the implacable judge, condemning man to a tragically brief life. Time is a shelter, an escape into safety and regeneration, a repository whose chief function is not piling up the past, intact yet dead, but rather keeping it alive and available. And, in the face of violent encroachment on their land by white settlers, that past assisted them with an alternative to a menacing present.”

The chief invited McIntyre to come along with them on their journey to “The Beginning,” and for the next few weeks he followed them on their mystical quest and engaged in their rituals, often taking psychoactive jungle concoctions that warped his perceptions. He found that if he concentrated he could pick up on a sort of static fuzz that contained the interlinked thoughts of all of the tribe members, through processes he could never hope to fathom. However, he knew at some point he would have to part ways with them and try to leave this land of jungle, telepathy, and time travel behind him to get back to the civilization that was no doubt convinced he had vanished. The only problem was that he had no idea where he was, and on top of this, although he had been invited and was not physically threatened by the Mayoruna in any way, he had no illusions that he was anything other than their prisoner and wondered what they would do if he tried to flee. However, in the end, the decision was made for him, a flood swept through during a torrential rain, and McIntyre was whisked away as he clung to a balsa raft, emptied into the river and incredibly found the next day by a pilot flying over.

Upon getting back to civilization, McIntyre would keep what had happened to him a secret for years, and it is quite likely that the whole fantastical tale would have died with him in 2003 if it hadn’t been for a Romanian-American writer, director and movie producer, by the name of Petru Popescu. In 1987 Popescu met McIntyre by chance while on a riverboat trip up the Amazon River. The two men hit it off, and for some reason McIntyre confided to him about what had happened all of those years ago with the mysterious Mayoruna tribe. It was all rather amazing, and when Popescu asked why he had never told anyone about it, McIntyre said that he didn’t think anyone would ever believe him, and he had been worried about maintaining his reputation as a respected explorer, writer, and photographer. He would say of this:

“I’m pretty reluctant to voice very much about the beaming experience because I didn’t want my friends to think I’d gone around the bend. ‘What is this? The guy’s hallucinating?’”

Popescu would finally manage to convince McIntyre to let him write a book on his adventures, and in 1991 released The Encounter: Amazon Beaming. The explorer would claim that in his dealings with dozens of other tribes in the same region he had never before or since experienced anything like he did during his time with the Mayoruna, and he did not know what became of them. We are left to wonder just how much of this account is true, and if it is just what was going on with these elusive people of the jungle. The tribe itself has sort of disappeared, they have never been formally studied, and since McIntyre passed away in 2003, we are left only with Popescu’s book as a window into this strange tribe and their world and ways. One wonders if they are still out there, or if they managed to make that journey to “The Beginning,” finally at peace and forevermore out of our reach.

The Amazon is not the only place for such stories, and one tale of a mysterious lost race comes to us from the Appalachian Mountains of the United States, it tells of a strange race of albino, sun-fearing pygmies who supposedly roamed this land long before even the Natives arrived. In the untamed wildernesses along the Southern Appalachian Mountains of the United States, the Native Cherokee people have long told of a strange race of beings they call “The Moon-Eyed People.” This mysterious tribe was supposedly smaller than average humans, almost dwarfish in nature, very pale skinned, like pure white alabaster, with shocking white hair, generous beards and body hair, and inhumanly large blue eyes, sensitive to light to the point that they were said to be unable to see in the daytime, hence their name. These Moon-Eyed people were purportedly completely nocturnal, hiding in dank caves and underground caverns during the day only to come out at night when the sun had retreated, and indeed sunlight was said to be enough to kill them if they ever got caught out in the open during daylight hours.

These strange, diminutive nocturnal denizens of the land were said to have been here long before the first Native peoples had settled the area, and according to most legends, they were eventually expelled by local Natives, although what form this expulsion takes varies from tradition to tradition. In some tales, it was the Creek people from the south who cast them out, whereas in others it was the Cherokees themselves who waged a relentless campaign and full-out war against these pale-skinned creatures to drive them to other lands. The American botanist, naturalist, and physician, Benjamin Smith Barton, wrote of these people and their downfall back in 1797, in his book New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America, thus:

“The Cheerake tell us, that when they first arrived in the country which they inhabit, they found it possessed by certain 'moon-eyed-people,' who could not see in the day-time. These wretches they expelled.”

Whatever happened to this enigmatic race, their legacy has supposedly remained behind in the ancient rock structures and mysterious pre-Columbian mounds and ruins that dot the landscape along the Appalachians from North Carolina all the way down through Georgia and Alabama, all said to have been erected by the Moon-Eyed People. Perhaps the most famous of these is an 850-foot-long stone wall dated to 400 - 500 C.E., which meanders through Fort Mountain State Park, just over the North Carolina border in Georgia, and is said to be a vestige of the bloody war between the mysterious Moon-Eyed People and the native Cherokee. There are countless other crude rock structures, walls, mounds and forts scattered throughout the Appalachians, as well as anomalous carvings, figurines, and a soapstone carving of conjoined figures now on display at the Cherokee County Historical Museum, said to be of these strange people, and no one really knows who made any of them except for the Cherokee themselves, who say it was the work of the Moon-Eyed People.

Whoever built such structures has long remained a mystery, and when Europeans first came to the region the Natives, who were not known for making such fort-like structures themselves, claimed that they had always been there, saying that they were constructions of the Moon-Eyed People. Interestingly, while Cherokee folklore has many tales of supernatural beings and various spirits, the Moon-Eyed People are never spoken of in such a manner, rather being described matter-of-factly as physically another race inhabiting the same lands.

Of course, with such an oddity as a cryptic tribe of bizarre dwarf subterranean albino people, almost like vampires in their intolerance for sunlight, and who predated the native peoples and constructed their mysterious mounds and forts, there is bound to be theorizing as to who or what they may have been. One of the most popular ideas is that they are evidence of Native contact with European explorers who had made it to the New World long before history says they did, possibly connected to the legend of the “Welsh Speaking Indians.”

The story of white-skinned, Welsh-speaking Indians in the New World originates with a 16th-century manuscript published by Welsh antiquarian Humphrey Llwyd, in which he writes of Welsh settlers coming to these shores in the 12th century, in particular a Prince Madoc, who along with his followers was said to have emigrated to America from Wales in about 1170, landing somewhere in the vicinity of Mobile Bay, Alabama. Madoc would supposedly end up shipping over hundreds of his followers to the New World, where they would disappear into the wilderness, never to return. In the following centuries, there were many stories of fair-skinned, blue-eyed natives who spoke a form of Welsh from the area, and these have been speculated to have been the descendants of these settlers.

Another idea put forth by Benjamin Smith Barton is that they were out-of-place descendants of members of the Guna people of Panama, who have such an uncommonly high rate of albinism that they were once referred to as the “White Indians,” and who were also reportedly able to see better at night. Another theory is that, rather than go to war, the Natives of the land actually integrated with the Moon-Eyed People and absorbed them. Still other more far-out theories are that these were some other species of human, a new race, or even ancient astronauts from another world.

It is still unclear who or what the Moon-Eyed people may have been, and they remain a distinctly enigmatic lost civilization if they ever even existed at all. Who were these albino, sun-fearing people? Were they some lost race, descendants of pre-Columbian explorers, or even a new species or alien interlopers? Or were these just a figment of folklore and myth? The answers to such questions remain obscure, but the tales of the Moon-Eyed People have persisted for over a millennium, and the idea that such a race of lost humanoids has been lost to history captures the imagination.

Another such “blue-eyed tribe” appeared to explorers as something quite European in nature, although their ways and beginnings have always been cloaked in shadows. Known mostly from historical accounts, their origins remain murky, their lineage uncertain, and they are a historical curiosity we may never fully understand. During the era of early European contact, the native peoples of North America held many curiosities for explorers and settlers coming to this new, wild land. These tribes were numerous and displayed rich variety between different cultures, as well as myriad languages, customs, and traditions that inspired awe, wonder, curiosity, bafflement, and even fear in the European adventurers who bravely delved into this uncharted new world and tried to tame it. Yet as fascinating as these new peoples were, perhaps the most interesting was an alleged tribe of natives who were said to look decidedly Caucasian in nature.

The first reports of what would come to be known as the Mandan tribe began to trickle out from French explorers in the region of the Missouri River in present-day North and South Dakota in the early 1700s. These natives were said to have rather fair skin and to have red or blonde hair and blue or grey eyes, and indeed especially the women were purportedly so Nordic in appearance that if it were not for their clothing they were said to be nearly indistinguishable from whites. In 1738, the French Canadian trader Sieur de la Verendrye made the first official outside contact with the Mandan and described them as living in 9 villages at a tributary of the Missouri River called the Heart River, and noted that they also exhibited customs that were decidedly more European than the neighboring tribes.

By 1784 the word had gotten out on this mysterious tribe of blue-eyed Indians, and they were featured in the media, with the August 24, 1784 edition of the Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser proclaiming that a new tribe of white people had been discovered and that they were “acquainted with the principles of the Christian religion" and "extremely courteous and civilized.” Perhaps one of the more famous of the explorers to come across the Mandan was none other than Lewis and Clark, who visited the tribe in 1804 and described them as “half-white,” as well as peaceful, civilized, courteous, and polite. They also noted that the tribe’s numbers had dwindled significantly due to the frequent smallpox epidemics that terrorized them, as well as attacks against them by neighboring tribes, namely the Assiniboine, Lakota, Arikara and the Sioux.

Of course, this all led to intense speculation as to what the origins were of this bizarre tribe, and one of the earliest ideas put forward was that they were the descendants of pre-Columbian explorers to the New World. For instance, there were many legends from various regions of the present-day United States of Welsh-speaking natives, perhaps descended from Welsh settlers coming to these shores in the 12th century, in particular a Prince Madoc, who along with his followers was said to have emigrated to America from Wales in about 1170. One Welsh explorer by the name of John Evans became so convinced that this was the case with the Mandan that he launched an expedition up the Missouri River in 1796 to search for them and prove that their language was derived from Welsh and contained Welsh vocabulary. Evans would trek up the river in the winter of 1796 and he could find no evidence whatsoever of the Welsh influence he had been so sure he would find, forcing him to concede that this was not where the Mandan origins lay. Indeed, he became extremely skeptical that there were any of these legendary “Welsh Indians” at all, saying in a letter to Dr. Samuel Jones:

“Thus having explored and charted the Missurie for 1,800 miles and by my Communications with the Indians this side of the Pacific Ocean from 35 to 49 degrees of Latitude, I am able to inform you that there is no such People as the Welsh Indians.”

Another explorer who believed that the Mandan had European roots, perhaps even Welsh, was the frontiersman and pictorial historian George Catlin, who spent several months with the tribe in North Dakota, living amongst and drawing and painting them in 1832. One of the things that first struck him about these mysterious people was just how European they looked, describing that many of them were nearly white and had light hair and blue eyes, and he also noticed that they had more advanced techniques for manufacturing goods and dwellings, customs, traditions, town layouts, and language vastly different from neighboring tribes. Caitlin would say of the Mandan:

“They are a very interesting and pleasing people in their personal appearance and manners, differing in many respects, both in looks and customs, from all the other tribes I have seen. So forcibly have I been struck with the peculiar ease and elegance of these people, together with their diversity of complexions, the various colours of their hair and eyes; the singularity of their language, and their peculiar and unaccountable customs, that I am fully convinced that they have sprung from some other origin than that of the other North American Tribes, or that they are an amalgam of natives with some civilized race.”

Even some of the legends of the Mandan people themselves expressly mentioned that they had been descended from a strange white man who had appeared to them aboard a canoe in ancient times after an enormous flood had wiped out everything in sight. They claimed that this stranger had taught them about medicine and had influenced their religion, which oddly featured many of the same beats as Christianity, such as a great flood, a virgin birth, and a child born who could work magical miracles, among others. This was noticed by other later expeditions as well, such as an 1833-34 expedition led by German naturalist A.P. Maximilian, who felt that the similarities between Christianity and the Mandan religion were too close to be mere coincidence. Caitlin would write of this:

“It would seem that these people must have had some proximity to some part of the civilized world; or that missionaries or others have been formerly among them, inculcating the Christian religion and the Mosaic account of the Flood.”

Another idea on the Mandan origins is that they came from pre-Columbian visitations by Viking explorers. The first official European to ever officially make contact with the Mandan tribe, Sieur de la Verendrye, claimed that at the time he had found a strange runestone with Nordic inscriptions on a riverside near the village. The stone was allegedly sent to France to be studied but it is unclear what happened to the “Verendrye Runestone” after that, and indeed it is uncertain if it ever really existed at all. Unless the stone ever turns up again it remains just as mysterious as the Mandan.

The idea of Vikings in the New World before the days of Columbus has been talked about for some time, with one prevalent and somewhat controversial theory having to do with Eric Thorwaldsson, also more famously known as "The Red," who established two colonies on the coast of Greenland in 986. The story goes that Eric The Red then abandoned these outposts when the wild, rugged land proved to be too cold and forbidding, and made his way to North America along with the colonists. The theory then claims that the King of Norway is then said to have sent an expedition to the New World to find out what had happened to them, and that this expedition made their way up the rivers to end up in the Dakotas and other areas, after which they became stranded and then assimilated into the native tribes, giving them their Nordic genes.

However, there is very little evidence to prove that Vikings ever actually reached North America. The Verendrye Runestone vanished without a trace and then there is the hotly debated Kensington Runestone, which was a giant slab covered in runes allegedly found by Swedish immigrant Olof Ohman in Minnesota in 1898. In this case, the inscriptions claimed that the runes had been created by 14th-century Scandinavian explorers, and although the authenticity of the runestone is still debated it has mostly been classified as a hoax by the scientific community.

Regardless of where the Mandan really came from, the fact is that we will probably never know for sure. In 1838 the tribe was hit by a devastating smallpox epidemic, and although this was a specter they had been haunted by for centuries, this time it was absolutely catastrophic, wiping them out at such a rate that after only a few months there were only an estimated 30 to 140 of them left. With the Mandan teetering on the edge of extinction, enemy tribes swept in and took them as slaves, after which they were assimilated and absorbed. Consequent intermarriage and interbreeding meant that any unique genetic heritage they may have had was quickly erased, and the last known full-blooded Mandan was Mattie Grinnell, who died in 1971. Since there are no more full-blooded Mandan left and only an estimated 8 speakers of its language left today, it is difficult to get a grip on their heritage, even with our advanced DNA testing techniques, and their origins and history will likely forever remain shrouded in mystery, leaving us to merely speculate and debate on it.

It is somewhat sad that this tribe disappeared before we were ever able to really comprehend who they were. In all of the cases we have looked at here, all we are left with is the tales and accounts from explorers, but other than that their legacies have evaporated into the tides of history. They are seemingly vanished peoples who sowed bafflement and wonder, but ultimately left numerous questions swirling about them, doomed to a limbo of superstition, speculation, and rumor. Who were these people? Why did they look and act so differently, and what was the meaning behind their strange ways? To the alien explorers just starting to penetrate this wilderness at the time they may have seemed to be baffling anomalies, and interestingly they still are.

VIDEOS

Uncontacted Tribes - 5 Most Mysterious and Recently Discovered

5 Strange Remote Tribes You've Never Heard Of

15 Scariest Tribes You Don’t Want to Meet

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

12-12-2024 om 18:24 geschreven door peter  

6 watershed moments in science from 2024 that will shape the future

From oceans found on distant planets to a detailed map of a fly’s brain, these findings deepened our understanding of the world.

By Robin George Andrews

It’s easy to reflect on 2024 as a tumultuous year, but there is some comfort in knowing that  humanity can now claim to know more about the universe than ever before. As a species, we have never been more enlightened, because scientists are always learning more, and because science is always unfinished.

But which scientific discoveries of 2024 proved to be the most thrilling and revelatory? 

Making this determination is a somewhat difficult task. Sometimes, there is an obvious eureka moment, one whose paradigm-shifting implications for humanity, the wider world, or the cosmos itself, are immediately evident. But often, what may seem like a small step forward in our scientific understanding of something in the present is just another domino falling on the way to something unimaginably epic and game-changing. 

Whether it’s expanding our knowledge of the microscopic world, or transforming the way we perceive our galactic neighborhood, every advance is noteworthy. 

But, for our money, these are the most astonishing scientific discoveries of 2024.

1. Astronomers discover hidden oceans in the outer solar system

Earth’s oceans were long thought to be unique. As far as scientists could tell, Mars was a radioactive desert, Venus was an arid volcanic hellscape, and the myriad icy moons of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune were frozen balls of ice. But in the 1980s, strange electrical signals coming from Jupiter’s moon Europa strongly suggested that an ancient, warm, salty liquid-water ocean was hiding beneath its ice shell. 

This revelation precipitated the launch of NASA’s Europa Clipper mission, a spacecraft that left Earth this October with the hope of remotely studying that ocean and determining if it’s amenable to life.

Nowadays, scientists cannot stop finding compelling evidence for oceans in the outer solar system.

Saturn’s Enceladus is certain to contain another watery ocean, but several others are extremely promising candidates—and this year, we got several more. In February, astronomers announced that they had found evidence of an ocean hidden on Saturn’s moon Mimas. Then, in October, convincing data pointed to yet another ocean buried within Miranda, a Uranian moon.

Finding evidence that oceans are common in the solar system matters.

Life as we know it loves water and, although we do not know if these aquatic moons contain life (whether that’s microbial of something fishier), we now have so many more places to search for it in our own cosmic backyard than scientists could have ever dreamt of. 

2. Fruit fly brain mapped out

You probably haven’t given much thought to the humble, sometimes irritatingly persistent, fruit fly. But to many scientists, this little critter—Drosophila melanogaster—is one of the most important species on the planet. It may have a tiny brain, but it performs many of the same basic neurological processes as a human’s, whether that’s when the fly is searching for food or when it’s “socializing” with another member of its species. That means its minuscule brain can tell us about every type of brain, including our own.

In October, the brain of an adult fruit fly was comprehensively mapped out, with 50 million connections between around 140,000 individual neurons placed upon a special sort of map.

Cerebral cartography of any organism is as difficult as it is promising.

What does a healthy or an unhealthy connection between brain cells looks like? How is 3D navigation wired into the brain? Where does behavior come from? What exactly is a thought, or a memory? 

A fruit fly’s brain is considerably less complex than a human’s, but this map will provide clues that can help neuroscientists understand what makes you, well, you.

3. The 1.5°C global warming limit will (almost certainly) be breached

In some ways, this isn’t surprising at all: the world’s most prolific greenhouse gas emitters have comprehensively failed to stem their output, and the planet has continued to warm at a breakneck pace, bringing with it all sorts of climatic chaos. But this year, for the first time, global average temperatures were extremely likely to jump to more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. 

The oft-cited 1.5°C boundary is somewhat arbitrary; nothing dramatic (other than the extreme weather and climatic convulsions we are already witnessing today) is suddenly going to happen the moment we cross this Rubicon. But that boundary still matters.

Under the Paris Agreement, nearly 200 countries agreed to prevent Earth’s temperature from rising above 2°C above pre-industrial levels, but ideally, they wanted to keep it below 1.5°C. The warmer the planet gets, the more deleterious effects of climate change we will experience; every 0.1°C increase in the average global temperature raises the risk of more potent storms, lengthier heatwaves, catastrophic flooding, and so on. 

1.5°C was an aspirational target. Crossing it marks this as a grim discovery, but an important one. Alarm bells are ringing louder than ever before: if this temperature rise isn’t reversed, or at the very least stopped, all our futures will be increasingly troubled by the wrath of climate change. 

4. Humans age in bursts 

It’s not uncommon to wake up one day, try to tie a shoelace, painfully pull something in our lower backs, and suddenly feel much older than you were yesterday. 

Weirdly, although we do indeed age on a daily basis, scientists discovered in August that the human body appears to go through two rapid aging bursts: once around the age of 44, and again when we reach 60.

Using 108 volunteers, who handed researchers all sorts of biological samples, scientists tracked the changing inventory of various biochemicals and microbes across different ages. For reasons unclear to scientists, both men and women seem to undergo a major shift in their mid-40s: the way our bodies handle cardiovascular disease, and how we break down things like alcohol, fats, and caffeine, changes. Then, when we enter our 60s, our bodies undergo shifts in (among other things) immune regulation and carbohydrate metabolism. 

Although it’s not yet clear how many of these shifts are influenced by lifestyle changes (people tend to drink a lot more during their oft-stressful 40s, for example), as opposed to being purely biological, the fact that we age in spurts is still fascinating and downright unexpected.

In 2020, the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, and Security-Regolith Explorer spacecraft managed to briefly touchdown on the asteroid Bennu, steal some of its pristine material, then drop it off back on Earth in September 2023. This isn’t the first time a spacecraft has stolen matter from an asteroid (Japan has accomplished this twice), but OSIRIS-REx’s 121.6 grams of asteroidal grains is by far the largest sample of pristine matter ever retrieved.

Asteroids are the debris left over from the violent formation of the solar system. These building blocks not only contain the minerals that went into making the planets_—including Earth—but also the chemistry that created our seas and oceans, and perhaps even the compounds that seeded the very first lifeforms.

This year, scientists got their very first look at OSIRIS-REx’s sample, and they are in awe at what it’s telling them: the Sun was forged via the deaths of multiple stars, from low-mass ones to those big enough to detonate as powerful supernovae; strange molecules in the sample suggest it came from a destroyed geologically active world; and an array of prebiotic compounds, including all sorts of amino acids, were found within that primeval asteroid. 

In short, this sample is already rewriting what we know about the solar system’s origins—and scientists have only studied one percent of it. Who knows what else it has in store? 

6. Artificial Intelligence unravels the secrets of proteins

As AI becomes more visibly part of our lives, it’s regarded with more suspicion, but this year, it became clear that it was going to help reveal how life itself works.

Proteins are crucial to almost every fundamental biological process necessary for life. They do everything from create and maintain the shape of cells to serving as both signal and receiver for cellular communications. Proteins are composed on long chains of amino acids and they perform their varied tasks by folding themselves into precise 3D structures that determine how they function and interact with other molecules.

In October, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to several researchers involved in studying proteins, the squiggle-like machines that underpin much of biochemistry. 

Understanding how proteins work means (among other things) knowing how diseases—from Malaria to Parkinson’s—proliferate, then identifying ways to stop them. 

Notably, two of the three recipients of the prize—Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, both at Google DeepMind—owe their revelations  to their AI model, named AlphaFold2. 

With ruthless efficiency, this AI was able predict the structure of pretty much all the 200 million proteins that scientists have found to exist—meaning that scientists now have a tool that can quickly and accurately work out what sorts of proteins will be involved in, or result from, all sorts of chemical reactions or sets of starting conditions. 

The ability of scientists to decode so many puzzling aspects of biochemistry, from antibiotic resistance to neurological illnesses, has never been more acute.

{ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science }

04-12-2024 om 15:08 geschreven door peter  

Scientists Still Can’t Believe It: Giant Worms Are Hiding in Cavities Beneath the Ocean!

30-11-2024 om 23:54 geschreven door peter  

Giant Animal Life in the Oceanic Crust: An Unexpected Discovery

 Samir Sebti

Among the most striking discoveries are giant worms reaching lengths of up to three meters. These colossal creatures, along with various gastropods, cephalopods, and previously undocumented mollusks, have adapted to survive in this extreme environment. The presence of larvae in these cavities suggests that juvenile specimens may colonize this habitat through hydrothermal vent fluids, indicating a potential interconnection with seafloor ecosystems.

This revelation is particularly significant as it marks the first time such large animals have been observed in these geological structures. While microorganisms were known to inhabit hydrothermal vents, the presence of complex, macroscopic life forms in the ocean crust was entirely unexpected.

The geological marvels supporting life in the deep

The key to this thriving ecosystem lies in the unique geological formations known as hydrothermal chimneys. These structures create favorable conditions for life to flourish in what was once thought to be an inhospitable environment. The interaction between cold seawater and hot hydrothermal fluids creates a dynamic system that supports a variety of life forms.

A cross-section of the lobate lava formations reveals :

• Lava plates with interspersed cavities
• Lava drips on cavity ceilings
• Fissures throughout the lava plates
• A recharge zone where cold seawater mixes with hot hydrothermal fluid

This complex geological structure provides niches for various species, including :

Implications for deep-sea research and conservation

This groundbreaking discovery has far-reaching implications for our understanding of marine ecosystems. It suggests that vast portions of the oceanic crust may harbor complex life forms, dramatically expanding the potential habitats for deep-sea creatures. This finding could revolutionize our approach to studying ocean biodiversity and may lead to the discovery of new species adapted to extreme conditions.

The interconnectedness of these subterranean ecosystems with those on the ocean floor raises new questions about the dynamics of deep-sea life. It also highlights the potential vulnerability of these unique habitats to human activities, particularly the growing interest in deep-sea mining. Recent advancements in deep-sea sound analysis have already revealed the presence of elusive ocean predators, further emphasizing the complexity of these underwater ecosystems.

As scientists continue to explore the ocean depths, more surprises may be in store. The recent discovery of a massive blue hole in the ocean depths serves as a reminder of how much remains unknown about our planet’s underwater realms. These findings underscore the importance of continued research and conservation efforts to protect these fragile and unique ecosystems.

Future explorations and unanswered questions

While this discovery is groundbreaking, many questions remain unanswered. The full extent of this subterranean habitat is yet to be determined, with some scientists speculating that life could extend much deeper into the Earth’s crust. However, as depth increases, conditions become increasingly extreme, posing challenges for both life forms and scientific exploration.

Future research will likely focus on :

1. Mapping the extent of these subterranean ecosystems
2. Studying the adaptations of creatures living in these extreme environments
3. Investigating the potential for undiscovered species
4. Assessing the impact of deep-sea mining on these fragile habitats

As we delve deeper into the mysteries of the ocean, it’s clear that our understanding of marine life is constantly evolving. The discovery of giant creatures in the Earth’s crust beneath the ocean floor serves as a powerful reminder of the wonders that still await us in the unexplored corners of our planet.

{ https://dailygalaxy.com/category/science/ }

30-11-2024 om 23:14 geschreven door peter  

Unexplained heatwave hotspots are popping up like 'angry skin blotches' around the globe - including one over the UK, concerning map reveals

• READ MORE: The 10 deadliest extreme weather events in 20 years revealed

By JONATHAN CHADWICK FOR MAILONLINE 

Heatwaves around the world in recent years have been so intense that they cannot be explained by global warming alone, a new study claims. 

Scientists in New York say unexplained heatwave 'hotspots' are popping up on every continent except Antarctica like 'giant, angry skin blotches'. 

Marked out on a new map, these 10 distinct heatwave regions are so extreme, they fall far beyond what any model of global warming can predict or explain. 

They are located in central China, Japan and Korea, the Arabian peninsula, eastern Australia and north Africa. 

Others include Canada's Northwest Territories and its High Arctic islands, northern Greenland, the southern end of South America and scattered patches of Siberia.

There's even a heatwave 'hotspot' over the UK and northwest Europe, leading to lethal summer temperatures in 2022 and 2023. 

'These regions become temporary hothouses,' said lead study author Kai Kornhuber, a research scientist at Columbia Climate School. 

'Due to their unprecedented nature, these heat waves are usually linked to very severe health impacts, and can be disastrous for agriculture, vegetation and infrastructure. We're not built for them, and we might not be able to adapt fast enough.'

Unexplained heatwave 'hotspots' are popping up across the globe, so extreme, they cannot be explained by global warming models

The UK and northwest Europe had a heatwave hotspot in June-July 2022. Europe also suffered a heatwave the following year

These 'hotspots' see repeated heatwaves cropping up in multiple summers – so even though temperatures cool down after the summer ends, they reappear in the same region again. Pictured, raging wildfires north of Bly, Oregon on July 17, 2021

The researchers do not argue against global warming as a concept, as evidence shows that it's the cause of soaring temperatures. 

Rather, their study identifies a new phenomenon – unexplained heatwave hotspots – that global warming can't explain, meaning other factors are surely at play too. 

'This is about extreme trends that are the outcome of physical interactions we might not completely understand,' added Kornhuber. 

The study identifies areas of extreme heat over the past 65 years, where temperatures are accelerating considerably faster than anywhere else, leading to increasingly wild weather events, infrastructure damage and death. 

These hotspots see repeated heatwaves cropping up in multiple summers. 

So, even though temperatures cool down after the summer ends, they reappear in the same region again. 

One hotspot is the US Pacific Northwest and southwestern Canada, which saw a nine-day heatwave starting in June 2021. 

During this astonishing heat event, temperatures broke daily records in some locales by 54°F (30°C), while Canada's highest ever temperature (121.3°F/49.6°C) was recorded in Lytton, British Columbia. 

A nine-day heatwave hammered the US Pacific Northwest and southwestern Canada in June 2021 - described by researchers as a heat anomaly 

The extreme 2021 heatwave struck the North American Pacific Northwest. Pictured, hot conditions in Portland, Oregon, June 26, 2021

The town burned to the ground the next day in a wildfire driven in large part by the drying of vegetation in the extraordinary heat. 

Meanwhile, in Oregon and Washington state, hundreds of people died from heat stroke and other health conditions. 

Another unexplained heatwave hotspot is an area in northwestern Europe covering several countries including Germany, France, the Netherlands and the UK. 

In this hotspot, abnormally high temperatures caused 60,000 deaths in 2022 and 47,000 deaths in 2023. 

In northern Europe, few people in this region have air conditioning because it is generally not needed, and this probably upped the death toll, the team say. 

While the cause of heatwave hotspots is yet to be identified, one potential explanation involves the jet stream – the fast, narrow current of air flowing from west to east that encircles the globe. 

As the Arctic is warming on average far more quickly than most other parts of the Earth, this appears to be destabilizing the jet stream.

This is causing the jet stream to develop so-called Rossby waves, which suck hot air from the south and park it in temperate regions that normally do not see extreme heat for days or weeks at a time.

The heatwave hotspots are located in central China, Japan, Korea, the Arabian peninsula, eastern Australia and north Africa. Others include Canada's Northwest Territories and its High Arctic islands, northern Greenland, the southern end of South America and Siberia

European nations including France, Italy, Spain, Germany and the UK faced one of the most dangerous periods of heat in the summer of 2022. Pictured, Hackney, east London on July 18, 2022

Jet streams are fast flowing, narrow currents of air that carry warm and cold air across the planet, much like the currents of a river

However, this is only one hypothesis, and it does not seem to explain all the extreme heatwave events of recent years. 

The researchers conclude that extreme heat is increasing significantly and faster in magnitude than what state-of-the-art climate models have predicted.

Unprecedented climate impacts can cause huge damage infrastructure and ecosystems while threatening human life. 

According to another recent study, there were at least 2,325 heat-related deaths in the US – more than double since 1999. 

There's now calls for heatwaves to be given names in the same way as hurricanes, to heighten public awareness and motivate governments to prepare. 

'Our findings highlight the need to better understand and model extreme heat and to rapidly mitigate greenhouse gas emissions to avoid further harm,' the team say in their paper, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

Researchers have already named 2023 as Earth's hottest recorded year ever, at 2.12°F (1.18°C) above the 20th-century average. 

Last year's global average temperature was 58.96°F (14.98°C), around 0.3°F (0.17°C) higher than the result in 2016, the previous hottest year. 

2023 is confirmed as the warmest calendar year in global temperature data records going back to 1850. The global average air temperature was 58.96°F (14.98°C), around 0.3°F (0.17°C) higher than the result in 2016

The 10 hottest years on record have occurred in the past 15 years, according to the EU's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). 

At the top of the list is 2023, followed by 2016 and then 2020, 2019, 2017, 2022, 2021, 2018, 2015 and 2010. 

2024 has already recorded the hottest summer and hottest single day (July 21), but the records are not expected to stop there. 

Experts have warned that 2024 is almost certainly going to be Earth's warmest year on record, beating the record set by 2023. 

'After 10 months of 2024 it is now virtually certain that 2024 will be the warmest year on record and the first year of more than 1.5ºC above pre-industrial levels,' said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of C3S. 

How does climate change make weather worse? 

As scientists already know, climate change results in more intense rainfall because warmer air can hold more moisture. 

And because rainfall is increasing on average across the world, the chances of flooding are getting higher. 

Climate warming also increases evaporation on land, which can worsen drought and create conditions more prone to wildfire and a longer wildfire season. 

Earth's warmer and moister atmosphere and warmer oceans are linked with stronger and more intense hurricanes.

In addition, rising sea levels - partly caused by melting ice in the poles - increases the amount of seawater that is pushed on to shore during coastal storms, which, along with more rainfall produced by the storms, can result in more destructive storm surges and flooding. 

Source: Met Office/ Royal Society  

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

28-11-2024 om 22:25 geschreven door peter  

Freek Vonk ontdekt nieuw soort reuzenslang in de Amazone: verschillen zijn genetisch gezien enorm

Jeannette Kras

{ https://scientias.nl/ }

27-11-2024 om 22:39 geschreven door peter  

(Daniel10ortegaven / Wikimdeia Commons CC 3.0)

According to accounts shared by the Waorani people of the Ecuadorian Amazon, stories of a variety of large anacondas said to exist in the region were compelling enough to warrant a ten-day expedition to the Baihuaeri Waorani Territory’s Bameno region.

Anacondas are large aquatic snakes that thrive throughout rivers and wetlands in parts of South America east of the Andes. Currently, four species are recognized in the Eunectes genus, the largest of which, the Green Anaconda (Eunectes murinus), lives mostly in tropical regions like the Amazonian basin and the parts of the Orinoco River.

Stories of particularly large anacondas have existed for more than a century. In 1906, explorer Percy Fawcett made his first in a series of expeditions to South America on behalf of the Royal Geographic Service to map a region of jungle in Brazil near the Bolivian border. During his travels, Fawcett claimed to have observed several animal species undocumented by science, the most impressive—and questionable—of them being an alleged encounter with a massive, 62-foot-long anaconda he and his companions claimed to have shot and killed.

Fawcett’s claim was met with derision from the scientific community at the time. However, during his travels, he was told of even larger snakes in the Araquaya and Tocantin basins that locals called Dormidera, meaning “sleeper,” due to the sounds of the massive reptiles were said to make while sleeping.

Such stories are still met with skepticism, although the invitation from the Waorani to come to see the snakes they said were rumored to be among the world’s largest seemed almost too good for the University of Queensland team to pass up.

Joining hunters in boats as they paddled through the Bameno region’s rivers, University of Queensland biologist Bryan Fry said the team went for several days before encountering “several anacondas lurking in the shallows, lying in wait for prey.”

Fry said that one of the largest anacondas they encountered, a female, measured a remarkable 20.7 feet in length. However, during their travels Fry and the team were told of even larger snakes that reportedly measured as much as 24.6 feet that had been seen in the same area.

Based on their research, a new paper detailing the team’s findings identifies “two distinct clades within Eunectes murinus, revealing two species as cryptic yet genetically deeply divergent.”

“This has led to the recognition of the Northern Green Anaconda as a separate species (Eunectes akayima sp. nov), distinct from its southern counterpart (E. murinus), the Southern Green Anaconda,” the team writes.

{ https://thedebrief.org/category/science/ }

24-11-2024 om 23:43 geschreven door peter  

Onderzoekers ontdekken nieuwe bron van opwarming. En die leidt tot hetere zomers in Europa

Jeannette Kras

 

{ https://scientias.nl/ }

23-11-2024 om 23:56 geschreven door peter  

World’s Largest Worm Lizard Lived 47 Million Years Ago

 by Enrico de Lazaro

Paleontologists have described a new genus and species of trogonophid amphisbaenian (worm lizard) from fossilized specimens found in Tunisia.

Life reconstruction of Terastiodontosaurus marcelosanchezi ready to prey on a large snail of the family Bulimulidae.

Image credit: Jaime Chirinos.

Terastiodontosaurus marcelosanchezi lived in what is now Africa during the Eocene epoch, some 47 million years ago.

The new species belongs to Trogonophidae, a small family of limbless, carnivorous, lizard-like reptiles within the clade Amphisbaenia.

“Amphisbaenians are a charismatic group of fossorial squamates, with bizarre morphological features and extreme anatomical modifications,” said lead author Dr. Georgios Georgalis from the Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals at the Polish Academy of Sciences and his colleagues.

“In particular, their unique skeletal anatomy has attracted and puzzled researchers since the 19th century.”

“Before the advent and broad acceptance of phylogenetic systematics, amphisbaenians were considered to be the third major group of Squamata, together with Serpentes and the paraphyletic ‘Lacertilia’.”

“Recent phylogenetic analyses, however, have placed them as the sister group of lacertid lizards, a topology that has been supported by both molecular and combined morphological and molecular evidence: a name, Lacertibaenia, was even proposed for the clade Amphisbaenia + Lacertidae.”

“Amphisbaenians have a relatively rich fossil record across the Cenozoic of Europe and North America, coupled with a few Neogene and Quaternary occurrences from South America, a few Palaeogene, Neogene, and Quaternary occurrences from Africa, a very few Neogene occurrences from the Arabian Peninsula, and a very few occurrences from the Neogene of southwestern Asia.”

“Trogonophidae are a rather distinctive group of amphisbaenians that are today distributed in northern and north-central Africa (including Socotra Island, Yemen) and the Middle East,” they added.

“Four living genera are currently recognized, i.e. Agamodon, Diplometopon, Pachycalamus, and the type genus, Trogonophis.”

The most distinctive feature of trogonophids is their acrodont dentition, a feature that, within squamates, is otherwise present solely in the iguanian group Acrodonta.”

“Trogonophids also possess other unique features among amphisbaenians, including locomotion and burrowing patterns, shoulder girdle or hemipenial morphology, chromosomes, vertebral arrangement, the absence of caudal autotomy, and a triangular body in cross-section.”

Several specimens of Terastiodontosaurus marcelosanchezi were found at a fossil-bearing locality in the Natural Park of Djebel Chambi in Tunisia.

“The Djebel Chambi National Park is situated in the Kasserine area, in the Central Western part of Tunisia,” the paleontologists said.

“The material of this study comes from a fossil-bearing site (Chambi locus 1), which consists of fluvio-lacustrine deposits situated at the base of the continental sequence of Chambi.”

“These localities have yielded a diverse assemblage of aquatic and terrestrial vertebrates, including fishes, amphibians, turtles, crocodiles, squamates, birds, and mammals, such as bats, primates, eulipotyphlans, hyaenodonts, hyracoids, an elephant shrew, a marsupial, a rodent, and a sirenian.”

{ https://www.sci.news/ }

23-11-2024 om 23:28 geschreven door peter  

By SHIVALI BEST FOR MAILONLINE 

At first glance at this creature, you'd be forgiven for mistaking it for a sparkly pair of fake eyelashes.

But the creature is very much real and was discovered at the junction of three tectonic plates in the Pacific Ocean.

Researchers from the Schmidt Ocean Institute spotted the animal while using an underwater robot to scour the seabed.

The animal is a polychaete - a class of marine worms, more widely known as bristle worms.

'To describe this polychaete, one simply must use jazz hands — it is the only way to capture this deep-sea worm's dazzle!' the experts said in an Instagram post about the polychaete.

Footage of the creature has garnered huge interest on Instagram, with thousands of viewers flocking to the comments to discuss it.

One viewer described it as a 'forbidden toilet scrubber', while another called it a 'deep sea Xmas tree'.

And one joked: 'It looks like two eyelashes put together.'

At first glance at this creature, you'd be forgiven for mistaking it as a sparkly pair of fake eyelashes. But the creature is very much real and was discovered at the junction of three tectonic plates in the Pacific Ocean

One viewer described it as a 'forbidden toilet scrubber', while another called it a 'deep sea Xmas tree'

The polychaete was spotted while ROV (remotely operated vehicle) pilots were exploring the Chile Margin.

'The international science team is exploring along the margin, a nearshore deep-sea feature where a submerged continental shelf extends from the country's west coast and drops steeply and suddenly into the Pacific Ocean,' the Schmidt Ocean Institute explained on Instagram.

'It runs the entire length of South America due to the subduction of the Pacific plate under the South American plate.

'The confluence of tectonic forces and terrestrial influences makes this margin a natural laboratory for investigating chemosynthetic and deep-sea environments that host animals like this [queue jazz hands] shimmering deep-sea worm.'

In a video posted to Schmidt Ocean Institute's Instagram account, the animal can be seen inching along the sea bed, with its iridescent bristles glimmering in the light.

Polychaete means 'many bristles', the experts explained.

'Each body segment has a pair of fleshy protrusions called parapodia covered in bristles called chaetae,' they wrote.

'Some worms are bioluminescent, but this sassy sparkler has protein structures in the bristles that make them iridescent.

In a video posted to Schmidt Ocean Institute's Instagram account, the animal can be seen inching along the sea bed, with its iridescent bristles glimmering in the light

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

18-11-2024 om 21:28 geschreven door peter