- An earthquake ran quickly east before turning west beneath the Atlantic Ocean near the equator in 2016.
- Such earthquakes are likely to pack significantly more destructive power.
- Land-based boomerang earthquakes may have been witnessed, but have never been recorded seismographically.
It was definitely an odd story Rosario García González told in the summer of 2010.
González is an elder of the indigenous Cucapah community in Baja, California/Mexico. He and his wife were in their trailer in Paso Inferior, about 12 miles south-southwest of Mexicali when they heard and felt the distinct, powerful rumble of earthquake moving across their valley. Looking outside, they watched as a cloud of light-colored dust was thrown up into the air along a path going in the opposite direction, as if a truck was retracing the earthquake's path. Except there was no truck.
It's not that scientists didn't believe González's story — they just couldn't figure out what he saw. Could an earthquake possible boomerang? The answer appears to be yes. A new study of seismic data has found clear evidence of another boomerang earthquake — technically a "back-propagating supershear rupture" — that shot back and forth deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean in 2016.
Boom and back
Reconstruction of Romanche fracture zone
Credit: Hicks et al., published in Nature Geoscience / © Imperial College London
The research was conducted by scientists from the University of Southampton and Imperial College, London in the U.K. First author Stephen Hicks of Imperial College says, "Whilst scientists have found that such a reversing rupture mechanism is possible from theoretical models, our new study provides some of the clearest evidence for this enigmatic mechanism occurring in a real fault."
The 2016 magnitude 7.1 quake occurred along the Romanche fracture zone — this is a 559 mile-long fault line near the Atlantic equator, about 650 miles west of the coast of Liberia.
Speaking to National Geographic, Hicks recalled the discovery of what at first seemed like a pair of pulses, which closer examination indicated might actually be two phases of the same quake. If so, the quake zipped eastward, and then west. "This was a weird sort of configuration to see," he says. Confirmation of the boomerang was provided by Ryo Okuwaki of Japan's University of Tsukuba via the identification of seismic echoes from the distant event.
"Even though the fault structure seems simple, the way the earthquake grew was not, and this was completely opposite to how we expected the earthquake to look before we started to analyse the data," admits Hicks.
When modeled, the data collected by 39 seismometers arrayed along the bottom of the ocean-floor gash depicted a temblor that moved rapidly in one direction before suddenly turning around and going back in the other at a blistering 11,000 miles per hour. This likely caused seismic waves to pile up similarly to what happens with air-pressure waves trigger a sonic boom, significantly magnifying the quake's power.
Land boomerangs
Rosario García González points to where the earthquake doubled back.
Image source: CISESE/USGS
While it's logistically simpler to record and study earthquakes on land thanks to the availability of seismometer networks, land-based temblors tend to track complex fault systems, with geological slips occurring in a series like falling dominoes. Sea-bottom quakes appear to be simpler, making it easier to discern their underlying mechanisms and travels.
Only a few boomerang quakes have ever been recorded, and examples of them on land are virtually nonexistent, making accounts such as González's that much more valuable. Clearly, quakes that double back on themselves stand to do considerably more damage than one-way shakers, allowing more outward propagation of destructive seismic waves in the direction of travel, an amount that would be doubled in a boomerang. Seismologist Kasey Aderhold tells National Geographic that "studies like this help us understand how past earthquakes ruptured, how future earthquakes may rupture, and how that relates to the potential impact for faults near populated areas."
Scientists developing computer models aimed at predicting seismic events haven't thus far been able to create worthy simulations of boomerang quakes, so the details provided the U.K. researchers provide some of the best information yet collected on these geologic oddities.
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An artist's depiction of Lola.
Five thousand and seven hundred years ago, "Lola" — a blue-eyed woman with dark skin and hair — was chewing on a piece of pitch derived from heating birch bark. Then, this women spit her chewing gum out into the mud on an island in Denmark that we call Syltholm today, where it was unearthed by archaeologists thousands of years later. A genetic analysis of the chewing gum has provided us with a wealth of information on this nearly six-thousand-year-old Violet Beauregarde.
This represents the first time that the human genome has been extracted from material such as this. "It is amazing to have gotten a complete ancient human genome from anything other than bone," said lead researcher Hannes Schroeder in a statement.
"What is more," he added, "we also retrieved DNA from oral microbes and several important human pathogens, which makes this a very valuable source of ancient DNA, especially for time periods where we have no human remains."
In the pitch, researchers identified the DNA of the Epstein-Barr virus, which infects about 90 percent of adults. They also found DNA belonging to hazelnuts and mallards, which were likely the most recent meal that Lola had eaten before spitting out her chewing gum.
Insights into ancient peoples
The birch pitch was found on the island of Lolland (the inspiration for Lola's name) at a site called Syltholm. "Syltholm is completely unique," said Theis Jensen, who worked on the study for his PhD. "Almost everything is sealed in mud, which means that the preservation of organic remains is absolutely phenomenal.
"It is the biggest Stone Age site in Denmark and the archaeological finds suggest that the people who occupied the site were heavily exploiting wild resources well into the Neolithic, which is the period when farming and domesticated animals were first introduced into southern Scandinavia."
Since Lola's genome doesn't show any of the markers associated with the agricultural populations that had begun to appear in this region around her time, she provides evidence for a growing idea that hunter-gatherers persisted alongside agricultural communities in northern Europe longer than previously thought.
Her genome supports additional theories on northern European peoples. For example, her dark skin bolsters the idea that northern populations only recently acquired their light-skinned adaptation to the low sunlight in the winter months. She was also lactose intolerant, which researchers believe was the norm for most humans prior to the agricultural revolution. Most mammals lose their tolerance for lactose once they've weaned off of their mother's milk, but once humans began keeping cows, goats, and other dairy animals, their tolerance for lactose persisted into adulthood. As a descendent of hunter-gatherers, Lola wouldn't have needed this adaptation.
A hardworking piece of gum
A photo of the birch pitch used as chewing gum.
Theis Jensen
These findings are encouraging for researchers focusing on ancient peoples from this part of the world. Before this study, ancient genomes were really only ever recovered from human remains, but now, scientists have another tool in their kit. Birch pitch is commonly found in archaeological sites, often with tooth imprints.
Ancient peoples used and chewed on birch pitch for a variety of reasons. It was commonly heated up to make it pliable, enabling it to be molded as an adhesive or hafting agent before it settled. Chewing the pitch may have kept it pliable as it cooled down. It also contains a natural antiseptic, and so chewing birch pitch may have been a folk medicine for dental issues. And, considering that we chew gum today for no other reason than to pass the time, it may be that ancient peoples chewed pitch for fun.
Whatever their reasons, chewed and discarded pieces of birch pitch offer us the mind-boggling option of learning what someone several thousands of years ago ate for lunch, or what the color of their hair was, their health, where their ancestors came from, and more. It's an unlikely treasure trove of information to be found in a mere piece of gum.
Dumpster-diving trash parrots
In a study about these smart birds just published in Science, researchers define animal culture as "population-specific behaviors acquired via social learning from knowledgeable individuals."
Co-lead author of the study Barbara Klump of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany says, "[C]ompared to humans, there are few known examples of animals learning from each other. Demonstrating that food scavenging behavior is not due to genetics is a challenge."
An opportunity presented itself in a video that co-author Richard Major of the Australian Museum shared with Klump and the other co-authors. In the video, a sulphur-crested cockatoo used its beak to pull up the handle of a closed garbage bin — using its foot as a wedge — and then walked back the lid sufficiently to flip it open, exposing the bin's edible contents.
Major has been studying Cacatua galerita for 20 years and says, "Like many Australian birds, sulphur-crested cockatoos are loud and aggressive." The study describes them as a "large-brained, long-lived, and highly social parrot." Says Major, "They are also incredibly smart, persistent, and have adapted brilliantly to living with humans."
(Research regarding some of the ways in which wild animals adapt to the presence of humans has already produced some fascinating results and is ongoing.)Clever cockie opens bin - 01 youtu.be
The researchers became curious about how widespread this behavior might be and saw a research opportunity. After all, says John Martin, a researcher at Taronga Conservation Society, "Australian garbage bins have a uniform design across the country, and sulphur-crested cockatoos are common across the entire east coast."
Martin continues, "In 2018, we launched an online survey in various areas across Sydney and Australia with questions such as, 'What area are you from, have you seen this behavior before, and if so, when?'"
Word gets around
Credit: magspace/Adobe Stock
Although the cockatoos' maneuver was reported in only three suburbs before 2018, by the end of 2019, people in 44 areas reported observing the behavior. Clearly, more and more cockatoos were learning how to successfully dumpster dive.
As further proof, says Klump, "We observed that the birds do not open the garbage bins in the same way, but rather used different opening techniques in different suburbs, suggesting that the behavior is learned by observing others." One individual bird in north Sydney invented its own method, and the scientists saw it grow in popularity throughout the local population.
To track individual birds, the researchers marked 500 cockatoos with small red dots. Subsequent observations revealed that not all cockatoos are bin-openers. Only about 10 percent of them are, and they are mostly males. The other cockatoos apparently restrict their education to a different lesson: hang around with a bin-opener, and you will get supper.
Thanks to the surveys, the researchers consider the entire project to be a valuable citizen-science experiment. "By studying this behavior with the help of local residents, we are uncovering the unique and complex cultures of their neighborhood birds."
