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Landscape shows earliest effects of modern humans using fire to shape ecosystem
Humans have used fire for millennia to lure out game when hunting and to convert woodland to agricultural land, leaving their mark on the landscape. New archaeological and paleoenvironmental evidence from Lake Malawi, Africa, shows that the effects on the landscape of humans’ use of fire is tens of thousands of years older than previously thought, according to an international team of researchers.
“The vegetation in the area around Lake Malawi is a little mysterious,” said Sarah Ivory, assistant professor of geosciences at Penn State. “It’s right in the middle of the tropics, and we think of tropical forests as being these icons of biodiversity where all the world’s species are housed. Yet here, in the middle of tropical Africa, is this extensive forest that is really species poor.”
55). The primary aim was to understand the subsurface distribution of artifacts and fan deposits across the larger landscape. Artifacts are typically deeply buried within the Chitimwe Beds in all places except at the margins, where erosion has begun to remove the top part of the deposit. During informal survey, two people walked across Chitimwe Beds that appear as mapped features on Government of Malawi geological maps. As these people encountered the shoulders of Chitimwe Bed deposits, they began to walk along the margins where they could observe artifacts eroding from the deposits. By placing excavations slightly (3 to 8 m) upslope from actively eroding artifacts, excavations could reveal their in situ locations relative to their containing sediments, without the necessity of laterally extensive excavations. Test pits were emplaced so that they would be 200- to 300-m distant from the next-nearest pit and thus capture the variation across Chitimwe Bed deposits and the artifacts they
Powerful earthquake could hit Israel within a decade
Dead Sea research reveals a pattern of tremors indicating that we are living in a tectonically active period.
Drilling barge in the Dead Sea, 2010.Photo courtesy of Tel Aviv University
As if Israelis didn’t have enough to worry about with Covid-19 and threats from enemies like Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, now Israeli researchers are warning that a devastating earthquake measuring at least 6.5 on the Richter scale is expected to hit the region in the coming years.
The dire prediction comes from drilling in the Dead Sea to analyze some 220,000 years of underwater geology.
Italy is to help Iceland in the perforation process of the Krafla volcano located in the north of the country.
The news that the southern European nation is to help its northern counterpart in the Krafla Magma Drilling Project (IMDP) was announced by the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology (INGV) on Tuesday.
The project has been designed as a way of helping to learn the conditions that lead to a volcanic eruption, and look at the possibilities of extracting energy when conditions are deemed “secure” from similar volcanoes across Europe. The Krafla volcano was particularly active between the mid-1970s and mid-80s, erupting on a number of occasions.
Scientists Worry Mideast Is Threatened By Powerful Future Earthquake
Scientists Worry Mideast Is Threatened By Powerful Future Earthquake
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Israelis can add natural disasters to their current worries about COVID-19 and threats from Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas.
Now, Israeli researchers are warning a devastating earthquake measuring at least 6.5 on the Richter scale is expected to hit the region in the coming years.
The dire prediction comes from drilling in the Dead Sea to analyze some 220,000 years of underwater geology.
According to the researchers’ analysis, a strong earthquake occurs every 130 to 150 years, although there have also been lulls of a few decades between them.