Research Resource and Assignment Page

Class Research Resources and Assignments

Week 2

Basic Concepts of Ecology
Week's Assigned Readings
Videos of Week 2 Lectures
Slides to Class 2 Lectures - Part 1 & Part 2
Supplementary Material for Week 1

"Civilizations exist by geological consent, subject to change without notice."

Will Durant

Read and consider the following recent news items.

Question: What, in your judgment, are the implications of these kinds of events for the formulation of environmental ethics in the "real world"? What is the relevant "real world" for the discussion of environmental ethics? [ Think about these issues and be prepared to discuss this in class if called upon to do so.]

Etna's rising anger
Wednesday, 29 August, 2001, 19:07 GMT 20:07 UK
Europe's most active volcano, Mount Etna, is getting more violent.
That is the assessment of French researchers who have studied the chemical composition of the lavas spewed out of the Sicilian mountain over the last half million years.....

Supervolcanoes could trigger global freeze
Thursday, 3 February, 2000, 10:34 GMT
    The threat of climate change caused by human activity could turn out to be a minor problem by comparison with a scarcely acknowledged natural hazard.
    Geologists say there is a real risk that sooner or later a supervolcano will erupt with devastating force, sending temperatures plunging on a hemispheric or even global scale.
    A report by the BBC Two programme Horizon on one supervolcano, at Yellowstone national park in the US, says it is overdue for an eruption.

Giant sunspot erupts
Friday, 30 March, 2001, 14:04 GMT 15:04 UK

Sunspot expert Jim Baker
explains how we might be affected
By BBC News Online science editor Dr David Whitehouse
     Two major flares have erupted on the surface of the Sun in the region of the giant sunspot group designated Noaa 9393.
     The group is the biggest seen on the surface of our star for more than a decade.
     One of the flares (explosions in the Sun's atmosphere) was so energetic that it ejected a cloud of superhot gas into space.
     Solar observers say that the cloud, called a coronal mass ejection (CME), is heading towards the Earth and will reach us within the next 24 to 36 hours.
     Scientists are predicting a "geomagnetic storm" when it reaches us. There may be radio and communications interference, and possibly a fine display of the Northern, and Southern, Lights, visible from lower latitudes than is usually possible.

Mystery space blast 'solved'
Tuesday, 30 October, 2001, 18:13 GMT
By BBC News Online science editor Dr David Whitehouse
     Astronomers may have solved the puzzle of what it was that brought so much devastation to a remote region of Siberia almost a century ago.
     In the early morning of 30 June, 1908, witnesses told of a gigantic explosion and blinding flash. Thousands of square kilometres of trees were burned and flattened.
     Scientists have always suspected that an incoming comet or asteroid lay behind the event - but no impact crater was ever discovered and no expedition to the area has ever found any large fragments of an extraterrestrial object.

DAN DAMON: KILLER ASTEROIDS, Friday, September 20, 2002

     In the past month, meteor fever has reached new heights.
     First came the news that a giant space rock was heading for Earth and could devastate part of the planet in 2019. Further calculations proved that that meteorite would actually miss.
     But a few days later another meteor flew as close to the Earth as the Moon ... and yet another was only detected after it had just missed us.
     In Analysis, Dan Damon looks at whether an asteroid could end life on earth, and the efforts being made to ensure it does not happen.

	In terms of the cosmic encounters discussed in class we on Earth have experienced some recent "close calls" -- although virtually all of us remained blissfully ignorant of these events. Consider, for example, the following news items related to the broadcast compiled by Dan Damon above:
	see:	Monday, 9 September, 2002, 12:19 GMT 13:19 UK Near-Earth objects pose threat By Dr David Whitehouse BBC News Online science editor This summer, as India and Pakistan faced-off over the disputed Kashmir region, US early warning satellites detected an explosion in the Earth's atmosphere with an energy of 12 kilotonnes of explosive. The detonation, equivalent to the blast that destroyed Hiroshima, fortunately occurred over the Mediterranean Sea. But according to US Brig Gen Simon Worden, if it had occurred at the same latitude a few hours earlier, the result could have been much worse. Had the explosion occurred over India or Pakistan, the resulting panic could have sparked a nuclear war, Worden says.
	and	Wednesday, 24 July, 2002, 04:38 GMT 05:38 UK Space rock 'on collision course' Astronomers say they've discovered a large object in space which poses the greatest risk of colliding with the Earth, ever detected. They've calculated that the mile and a half-wide rock COULD collide with the earth on the first of February, 2019, with enough force to cause widespread destruction.
	and	Thursday, 20 June, 2002, 16:29 GMT 17:29 UK Space rock's close approach By Dr David Whitehouse BBC News Online science editor Astronomers have revealed that on 14 June, an asteroid the size of a football pitch made one of the closest ever recorded approaches to the Earth. It is only the sixth time an asteroid has been seen to penetrate the Moon's orbit, and this is by far the biggest rock to do so. What has worried some astronomers, though, is that the space object was only detected on 17 June, several days after its flyby.
	In addition, evidence is accumulating about more ancient and remote encounters:
		Friday, 23 August, 2002, 09:01 GMT 10:01 UK Meteorite 'changed Earth's history' Scientists say they have found evidence that a gigantic meteorite, twice as big as the one which is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs, collided with Earth billions of years ago. Deposits of the rock were found in South Africa and Australia, said a report in the Science journal. The 20-kilometre (12-mile) wide asteroid is believed to have hit the planet with such force that it would have caused tidal waves kilometres high and torn up the bottom of the ocean. Researchers from Stanford University in California and Louisiana State University say the cataclysmic event happened about 3.4 billion years ago, before continents were formed and when only bacteria existed.
	Closer to home other real threats exist to our familiar forms of civilization:
		Giant wave devastation feared The BBC's Robert Nisbet "It is not a case of if - but when" Wednesday, 29 August, 2001, 00:26 GMT 01:26 UK By BBC News Online's environment correspondent Alex Kirby An immense wave could one day wreak havoc on the eastern seaboard of the US and elsewhere around the Atlantic. Scientists say a volcanic eruption on the Canary Islands, off West Africa, could trigger a vast undersea landslide. This would set off a tsunami wave capable of inundating coastal regions thousands of kilometres away.

Supplementary Material

Perhaps the most striking aspect of potential global discontinuities may well prove to be those that are derived not so much from dramatic cosmic impacts but rather from endogenously generated interacting processes that stimulate global "chain reations," or more precisely, a series of cascading events which -- once they are "tripped" into action -- cannot be reversed for a very long time in geological terms.

Consider, for example, the news that has become available in the popular press over the few months, weeks and days...

David Shukman
2006	"Fresh fears on global warming," BBC News Online, (12 September 2006).
		Global warming may be occurring at a far faster rate than current predictions would suggest, according to new research. Scientist in Siberia say that ground frozen for thousands of years has now started to melt. David Shukman reports.

Jack Harvey
2006	"Solar Storms" BBC - Science in Action, (25 August 2006).
		The solar activity of our Sun tends to run in 11 year cycles and all the signs point to a new cycle starting right now. Solar Cycle 24 will be characterised by sunspots, dark features, moving across the surface of the sun, solar flares and geomagnetic storms. Astronomers now have some the most sophisticated instruments developed at their disposal to study the activity. Jack Harvey, astronomer at the National Solar Observatory at Tuscon, Arizona, says that the last couple of cycles have been relatively weak but predicts that this one is likely to be a big one.

For an extended discussion of solar influence on global climate you can listen to:
BBC	"Solar Contribution to Climate Change," BBC - Discovery, (26 June 2003).

NOVA
2006	"Diming the Sun," PBS - WGBH - NOVA, (18 April 2006).

Fred Pearce
2006	"One degree and we're done for'," The New Scientist, (27 September 2006).

Peter D. Ward

"Impact from the Deep," Scientific American, (October 2006) 64-71.

Philosopher and historian Thomas S. Kuhn has suggested that scientific disciplines act a lot like living organisms: instead of evolving slowly but continuously, they enjoy long stretches of stability punctuated by infrequent revolutions with the appearance of a new species--or in the case of science, a new theory. This description is particularly apt for my own area of study, the causes and consequences of mass extinctions--those periodic biological upheavals when a large proportion of the planet's living creatures died off and afterward nothing was ever the same again.

Since first recognizing these historical mass extinctions more than two centuries ago, paleontologists believed them to have been gradual events, caused by some combination of climate change and biological forces such as predation, competition and disease. But in 1980 the understanding of mass extinctions underwent a Kuhnian revolution when a team at the University of California, Berkeley, led by geologist Walter Alvarez proposed that the famous dinosaur-killing extinction 65 million years ago occurred swiftly, in the ecosystem catastrophe that followed an asteroid collision. Over the ensuing two decades, the idea that a bolide from space could smite a significant segment of life on the earth was widely embraced--and many researchers eventually came to believe that cosmic detritus probably caused at least three more of the five largest mass extinctions.

But does cosmic detritus explain all mass extinctions? Perhaps not. There may be endogenous processes operating as well that build to a dynamic of relatively abrupt mass extinctions.

These circumstances, then, form a part of the ecological context for our reflections in this course on the ethics of human behavior in the evolving ecosystem.

Return to Syllabus