Transcript

8.20.26 · Science Show KY

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Radioized Diary of Science and Nature. Your reader's
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Speaker 1: Kelly Taylor. I have articles on the topics of science
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Speaker 1: and nature, but first a reminder that RADIOI is a
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Speaker 1: reading service intended for people who are blind or have
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Speaker 1: other disabilities that make it difficult to read printed material.
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Speaker 1: We'll start this week with an article from Vox, and
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Speaker 1: the headline reads why scientists are using cheap picnic coolers
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Speaker 1: to protect some of the world's most endangered animals. This
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Speaker 1: is dated August seventeenth, written by Benji Jones. The ride
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Speaker 1: out to see was, in a word, unpleasant. The coastal
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Speaker 1: waters of Palao, an island nation in the western Pacific,
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Speaker 1: are typically calm and electric blue, like what you might
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Speaker 1: see on a screen saver or postcard. The country has
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Speaker 1: put in place some of the world's most rigorous protections
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Speaker 1: to keep its marine environment pristine. But on this particular
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Speaker 1: morning in July, a super typhoon named Bobby was churning
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Speaker 1: north of us in the Philippine Sea. Clouds darkened the
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Speaker 1: water and battered us with rain as our boat seesawed
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Speaker 1: through the swell toward the horizon. Our destination was what
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Speaker 1: you might call a coral garden, a patch of coral
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Speaker 1: about two miles from shore that scientists had planted over
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Speaker 1: the past couple of years in an effort to rebuild
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Speaker 1: a damaged reef. I was wet, cold, and nauseated when
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Speaker 1: we arrived, so naturally I strapped on a mask and
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Speaker 1: jumped in. Below me, I could see dozens of star
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Speaker 1: shaped metal structures that researchers had attached to the seafloor.
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Speaker 1: They were studded with corals in all forms and colors,
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Speaker 1: neon blue antlers, fluffy green mittens, baseball sized brains. Some
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Speaker 1: of the corals looked like a collection of human vertebrae.
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Speaker 1: Others resembled miniature pine forests. In the past two decades, governments, nonprofits,
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Speaker 1: and even hotels around the world have dedicated hundreds of
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Speaker 1: millions of dollars to replanting coral reefs like this one.
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Speaker 1: Reefs are among the planet's most endangered ecosystems. Rising ocean temperatures, pollution,
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Speaker 1: and other threats have killed off and estimated fifty percent
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Speaker 1: of live coral globally since the nineteen fifties. Those steep
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Speaker 1: losses erode the irreplaceable benefits that coral reefs provide. They
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Speaker 1: go far beyond tourism. Healthy reefs lessen coastal flooding from
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Speaker 1: storms like Bobby. They also serve as nurseries and homes
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Speaker 1: for larger animal species, such as endangered sea turtles and
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Speaker 1: valuable fish like snapper and groupers that people eat. That's
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Speaker 1: why so much time and money has gone into restoring
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Speaker 1: these ecoscs systems globally, including here in Palau. A different
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Speaker 1: typhoon and warming waters had destroyed some of the region's
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Speaker 1: coral many years ago, which caused the local fishery to decline.
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Speaker 1: According to Sharp Sakuma, the governor of a Palowan state
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Speaker 1: where the coral garden is located. Quote, it's our food,
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Speaker 1: Sakuma said of fisheries, so a few years ago he
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Speaker 1: asked local researchers to help bring the reef back. But
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Speaker 1: reef restoration has a fatal flaw. Rising global temperatures are
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Speaker 1: heating up the ocean and fueling marine heat waves, which
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Speaker 1: kill reefs. That means that much of the coral that
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Speaker 1: people painstakingly plant often ends up dying months or years later,
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Speaker 1: simply because the ocean is too hot. It's like planting
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Speaker 1: trees to restore a forest that will soon burn in
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Speaker 1: a wildfire, and this raises serious doubts about the role
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Speaker 1: ref restoration can play in the recovery and ultimate survival
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Speaker 1: of these iconic ecosystems. The colorful antlers, mittens, and brains
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Speaker 1: below me, however, were not your typical planted corals. They
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Speaker 1: were different, and they may offer a new reason for hope.
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Speaker 1: These corals had all gone through what you might call
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Speaker 1: a fitness test in a lab. On shore marine scientists
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Speaker 1: exposed them to extreme heat and scored them for their
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Speaker 1: ability to tolerate warming. Corals on some of the metal
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Speaker 1: stars here got top marks. They appeared resistant to heat.
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Speaker 1: Those individuals may have more of a fighting chance at
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Speaker 1: surviving as ocean temperatures rise. These sorts of fitness tests
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Speaker 1: for corals are inexpensive and unexpectedly low tech. They take
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Speaker 1: place in cheap, store bought picnic coolers like what you
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Speaker 1: might bring to the park, But by helping researchers identify
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Speaker 1: the hardiest corals, the guests could help overcome one of
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Speaker 1: ref restoration's greatest challenges. Subjecting corals to hot water in
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Speaker 1: a plastic cooler may sound ridiculous until you consider the
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Speaker 1: stakes and the circumstances as the planet warms, simply protecting
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Speaker 1: our beloved life supporting places is no longer enough to
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Speaker 1: save them. Neither is restoring them to some former state.
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Speaker 1: To truly help coral reefs endure, we may actually need
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Speaker 1: to re engineer them. Scattered across a remote stretch of
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Speaker 1: the Pacific is a collection of more than three hundred islands,
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Speaker 1: which together form the nation of Palau. Many of those
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Speaker 1: islands are no longer than a small house, and because
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Speaker 1: they're eroding at the base, they look as though they're
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Speaker 1: floating above the ocean. When you're out at sea, it's
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Speaker 1: easy to pretend that you're flying through the floating mountains
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Speaker 1: of Avatars Pandora, But the real magic is, without a doubt, underwater.
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Speaker 1: Palao is surrounded by a vast network of coral reefs,
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Speaker 1: many of which are in near perfect condition. The region
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Speaker 1: has more than four hundred coral species. For comparison, the
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Speaker 1: Caribbean has about seventy, which form the basis of a
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Speaker 1: thriving marine ecosystem. On just one weekend of diving there,
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Speaker 1: I encountered close to one hundred sharks, more than a
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Speaker 1: dozen sea turtles, and three enormous manta rays. In my
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Speaker 1: more than twenty years of diving, I've rarely seen such
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Speaker 1: an abundance of sea life. In the last two decades,
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Speaker 1: Palao has become an epicenter for research on how warming
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Speaker 1: affects coral reefs. Part of that is practical. The country's
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Speaker 1: abundant corals allow scientists to study how different species and
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Speaker 1: populations respond to rising temperatures. It's also home to a
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Speaker 1: well equipped marine lab, the Palau International Coral Reef Center.
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Speaker 1: But there is also an urgent local need. Palao is
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Speaker 1: deeply dependent on its coral reefs. Its fisheries and tourism
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Speaker 1: make up more than a quarter of the country's GDP,
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Speaker 1: and while Palao is home to one of the world's
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Speaker 1: largest marine protected areas, which bans commercial fishing across eighty
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Speaker 1: percent of its national waters, that does little to protect
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Speaker 1: the reefs here from the existential global thread of global warming.
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Speaker 1: Why is heat such a dire problem? One coral is
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Speaker 1: not a single animal, but a colony of hundreds or
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Speaker 1: thousands of individual animals known as polyps. Those polyps are
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Speaker 1: all nearly genetically identical. They grow the colony the coral
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Speaker 1: structure that you see on a reef by cloning themselves
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Speaker 1: over and over again. Polyps fuel themselves in part by
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Speaker 1: grabbing particles out of water with tentacles. Up close, polyps
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Speaker 1: look a bit like sea anemonies, but most of their
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Speaker 1: food and much of their color comes from a kind
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Speaker 1: of algae that lives within their cells. Like plants that algae,
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Speaker 1: the algae photosynthesizes, and it passes the solar energy it
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Speaker 1: generates onto the coral in return for nutrients and a
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Speaker 1: place to live. This partnership is under extreme This partnership
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Speaker 1: fails under extreme heat. When the ocean is too warm,
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Speaker 1: the algae malfunction and the polyps kick them out. As
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Speaker 1: a result, the corals lose their primary source of food
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Speaker 1: and their iconic color. That's bleaching. A bleached coral is
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Speaker 1: not dead, but starving, and it will die unless the
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Speaker 1: water cools back down. Yet there's another key detail here.
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Speaker 1: Some corals seem to resist this heat fueled bleaching. They
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Speaker 1: appear naturally more tolerant to warming than their peers, and
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Speaker 1: you can actually see this when you're snorkeling during the
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Speaker 1: heat wave. Some corals will be born will be bone white,
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Speaker 1: whereas other colonies of the same species nearby will appear
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Speaker 1: fully saturated. Heat tolerance is a trait with natural variation,
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Speaker 1: like height or eye color in humans. It's this detail
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Speaker 1: that underpins efforts to make refrustation less futile in a
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Speaker 1: warming world. If scientists can find local corals that can
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Speaker 1: tolerate warming, they can use them to regrow native reefs
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Speaker 1: that might endure some degree of climate change. Here and anywhere,
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Speaker 1: coral reefs can be found. What scientists Impalower trying to
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Speaker 1: demonstrate is how you can identify those heat tolerant colonies.
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Speaker 1: And then we'll turn to scientific American why solar power
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Speaker 1: is taking over the world. Forty seven years ago, US
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Speaker 1: President Jimmy Carter stood grinning in front of a set
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Speaker 1: of thirty two bulky solar panels. It was nineteen seventy nine,
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Speaker 1: and the oil crisis has sent fuel costs skyrocketing. Carter,
10:05
Speaker 1: in response, was making the White House an example of
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Speaker 1: conservation and alternative energy. Quote, solar energy will not pollute
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Speaker 1: our air or water, he said, we will not run
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Speaker 1: short of it. No one can ever embargo the sun
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Speaker 1: or interrupt its delivery to us. In quote, the panels
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Speaker 1: were expensive and rudimentary. By today's standards. They cost roughly
10:27
Speaker 1: one hundred and sixty five hundred dollars in twenty twenty
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Speaker 1: six dollars, and they didn't even generate electricity. All they
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Speaker 1: did was heat water for things such as kitchen use.
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Speaker 1: But Carter's argument still resonates today. In a globalized economy
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Speaker 1: in which a single conflict can shut down shipments of
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Speaker 1: millions of barrels of fossil fuel overnight, the allure of
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Speaker 1: the Sun as a power source is inarguable, and there's
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Speaker 1: no better deal on energy under the sun quote today.
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Speaker 1: Solar makes the cheapest electricity, says Wallabad Sampoth, site director
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Speaker 1: of the Center for Next Generation Photovoltaics at Colorado State University.
11:08
Speaker 1: Even before the US Iran conflict closed the Strait of
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Speaker 1: Ormuz for months, causing fossil fuel prices to spike, solar
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Speaker 1: was soaring Last year the world added six hundred tarrawat
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Speaker 1: hours of solar photovoltaic generation, enough to power Canada for
11:25
Speaker 1: a year. It was the first time that a renewable
11:28
Speaker 1: source took the top spot in global supplied growth. It
11:33
Speaker 1: was also the largest single year increase for any electricity
11:36
Speaker 1: generation technology. According to the IEA, the International Energy Agency.
11:43
Speaker 1: As energy think tank EMBER pointed out in April, today's
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Speaker 1: global solar generation is equal to the entire electricity demand
11:51
Speaker 1: of the European Union, and although solar is still catching
11:55
Speaker 1: up to natural gas and coal, its share of energy
11:58
Speaker 1: generation grew by nearly nine eighteen times from twenty fourteen
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Speaker 1: to twenty twenty five. The Trump administration has been hostile
12:06
Speaker 1: to solar power, cutting billions of dollars in funding for
12:10
Speaker 1: affordable projects and refusing to issue new permits through the
12:14
Speaker 1: Department of the Interior. But thanks in part to tax
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Speaker 1: incentives and investments that predated the administration, solar power still
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Speaker 1: has momentum in the US and the economics remain attractive.
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Speaker 1: In fact, this may solar outpaced coal's monthly power share
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Speaker 1: in the US for the first time ever. Here's why
12:36
Speaker 1: one niche energy source became a global powerhouse. When Sampath
12:43
Speaker 1: started in the field in the early nineteen nineties, the
12:45
Speaker 1: thinking was that no solar panel could ever recapture enough
12:49
Speaker 1: energy from the sun to offset what went into building it. Today,
12:54
Speaker 1: a standard solar setup reclaims its production energy in a
12:58
Speaker 1: year or two. When a home system costs roughly twenty
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Speaker 1: five thousand dollars, making it much more practical than what
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Speaker 1: Carter installed at the White House. The cost effectiveness of
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Speaker 1: solar energy is partly attributable to technological advances that have
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Speaker 1: driven efficiency up. A state of the art IBM panel
13:18
Speaker 1: used for research in nineteen seventy seven had an efficiency
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Speaker 1: of twenty two percent, which is now achievable with the
13:25
Speaker 1: best home systems. Standard systems run about twenty percent. One
13:31
Speaker 1: major advance made in the late nineteen eighties was a
13:34
Speaker 1: type of solar cell called passivated emitter and rear cell
13:40
Speaker 1: or PERC, which included an extra reflective layer on the
13:45
Speaker 1: back of the cell that captured more light to turn
13:48
Speaker 1: into electricity and blocked longer wavelengths that could damage the equipment.
13:54
Speaker 1: Since twenty twenty four, another technology, the crystalline silicon based
13:59
Speaker 1: tunnel side passivated contact cell, has pulled ahead of PERCs
14:06
Speaker 1: because of its advantage in efficiency and easy high volume production. Quote.
14:12
Speaker 1: Higher efficiency means you need a smaller sized panel, You
14:16
Speaker 1: need less land, less wiring, less racking, or the mounts
14:21
Speaker 1: for the panels to generate a given amount of energy.
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Speaker 1: Sanmpas says, all of that goes down as the efficiency
14:27
Speaker 1: goes up. The plummeting price over the past decade is
14:33
Speaker 1: also a result of advances in the production side. The
14:36
Speaker 1: materials are purer and the manufacturing process is more precise.
14:41
Speaker 1: Scale has contributed as well. The Chinese solar energy is
14:45
Speaker 1: now highly integrated and efficient, and larger factories can churn
14:49
Speaker 1: out panels at a lower cost per unit than when
14:52
Speaker 1: solar was a niche industry with smaller production lines. The world,
14:56
Speaker 1: led by China, can now produce enough solar module in
15:00
Speaker 1: one year to generate a collective one thousand, four hundred
15:04
Speaker 1: and five gigawatts of energy. All of this adds up
15:08
Speaker 1: to cheap electricity. Last year, financial advisory from a firm Lazard,
15:15
Speaker 1: published a report showing that the levelized cost of energy,
15:19
Speaker 1: the cost of a project divided by its expected lifetime
15:21
Speaker 1: production for a utility scale solar was thirty eight to
15:27
Speaker 1: seventy eight dollars per megawatt hour, compared to forty eight
15:32
Speaker 1: dollars to one hundred nine dollars per megawat hour for
15:35
Speaker 1: new natural gas plants. Indeed, in twenty twenty, the IEA
15:40
Speaker 1: declared that many solar projects are now the cheapest form
15:43
Speaker 1: of electricity production. Not just today, but in all of history.
15:48
Speaker 1: Even in places where government support is weak or has declined,
15:52
Speaker 1: such as the US, solar will continue to be at
15:55
Speaker 1: a competitive price. Says Christopher Namowitz and analysts at the
16:00
Speaker 1: US Energy Information Administration, Solar has now irrevocably joined coal
16:06
Speaker 1: and natural gas as an inexpensive way to power the world.
16:11
Speaker 1: Although the technology behind solar power has been around since
16:14
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties, its recent rise can be traced in
16:17
Speaker 1: part to developments in two countries in the early two thousands,
16:21
Speaker 1: Germany and China. At that time, the German Green Party
16:25
Speaker 1: leveraged a power sharing arrangement to demand subsidies for rooftop solar,
16:32
Speaker 1: says climate writer and environmentalist Bill mckibbon. Around the same time,
16:37
Speaker 1: China was massively expanding its manufacturing capacity. The German subsidies
16:42
Speaker 1: helped to create a European market for solar modules and components,
16:48
Speaker 1: and Chinese firms built factories to meet that demand. After
16:53
Speaker 1: the two thousand and nine economic crisis caused demand for
16:56
Speaker 1: solar panels to drop, the Chinese government stepped in to
16:59
Speaker 1: negotia cate minimum import prices with the EU to prop
17:04
Speaker 1: up exports and set up national solar targets to jumpstart
17:08
Speaker 1: domestic demand. China had domestic supply but little domestic market,
17:14
Speaker 1: and pollution was emerging as an issue, so it fit
17:18
Speaker 1: multiple priorities, says Laurie malaverta co founder of the nonprofit
17:23
Speaker 1: think tank Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air.
17:28
Speaker 1: Beijing later forced firms to consolidate, preventing competition that might
17:33
Speaker 1: wipe them all out, which led to a vertically integrated,
17:37
Speaker 1: highly efficient industry, says Mike Davidson, professor of policy and
17:43
Speaker 1: engineering at the University of California, San Diego. The government
17:47
Speaker 1: also began investing billions in clean energy research and development.
17:52
Speaker 1: China's solar industry drove innovations in production too, so the
17:57
Speaker 1: processing of raw materials became much more consistent. The silicon
18:01
Speaker 1: that goes into commercial panels today is ninety nine point
18:05
Speaker 1: nine nine percent pure. The fact that China makes the
18:11
Speaker 1: vast majority of the world's photovo takes also gives it
18:15
Speaker 1: an edge because large scale manufacturing pays off in cost
18:20
Speaker 1: quote they put their mind to it stayed with the improvements,
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Speaker 1: Sampath says. Now China is not only the largest producer,
18:27
Speaker 1: but also the largest market. Last year, renewables met all
18:33
Speaker 1: of China's new demand, allowing it to stabilize greenhouse gas
18:37
Speaker 1: emissions even as its energy requirements continued to grow. The
18:42
Speaker 1: country reduces so much solar equipment that it has struggled
18:45
Speaker 1: to find enough buyers, although the recent war in Iran
18:48
Speaker 1: has boosted demand. This past March, solar exports reached a
18:54
Speaker 1: record high, equivalent to the entire solar capacity of Spain.
18:59
Speaker 1: China's also in listing heavily in the development of next
19:01
Speaker 1: generation solar cells. The country will almost certainly be the
19:05
Speaker 1: first to commercialize higher efficiency tandem solar cells, which often
19:10
Speaker 1: combine silicon with materials called perovskites. In other words, China's
19:15
Speaker 1: solar energy is likely to dominate the world for a
19:18
Speaker 1: long time to come. Davidson says, quote the Chinese firms
19:22
Speaker 1: are still miles ahead and are more competitive than any
19:25
Speaker 1: other global firm. In quote, let's turn out to popular Mechanics,
19:32
Speaker 1: and they have an article that's headlined scientists say our
19:36
Speaker 1: water cycle has started breaking down. Think back to elementary
19:43
Speaker 1: school science class, and you'll likely remember studying the water cycle,
19:47
Speaker 1: staring at an illustration filled with arrows forming an overall
19:51
Speaker 1: circular motion and annotated with words like evaporation, transpiration, condensation,
19:57
Speaker 1: and precipitation. This system forms the bedrock of life on
20:02
Speaker 1: Earth as it moves moisture across the planet. But now
20:06
Speaker 1: scientists think that, for the first time in human history,
20:09
Speaker 1: that system is malfunctioning. That's the conclusion of a new
20:13
Speaker 1: report published this week by the Global Commission on the
20:16
Speaker 1: Economics of Water, a group of leading scientists and economists
20:20
Speaker 1: formed in twenty twenty two. When mission, whose mission is
20:24
Speaker 1: to assess the state of Earth's hydrological systems and how
20:29
Speaker 1: those systems are being managed. The results are not encouraging.
20:33
Speaker 1: The report finds that demand for fresh water will outstrip
20:36
Speaker 1: supply by more than forty percent by the end of
20:39
Speaker 1: the decade, mostly due to stress is caused by climate change.
20:45
Speaker 1: The report also mentions that governments currently underestimate how much
20:50
Speaker 1: water a person needs to live a dignified life. According
20:55
Speaker 1: to the report, while fifty to one hundred liters are
20:57
Speaker 1: required for essential health and hygiene per person per day,
21:03
Speaker 1: that number balloons to four thousand liters per person per
21:07
Speaker 1: day when considering estivation beyond mere survival. The one hundred
21:16
Speaker 1: and ninety ninety page report highlights two types of water,
21:20
Speaker 1: green water found in plants and soils, and blue water,
21:25
Speaker 1: which makes up rivers and lakes. Every one degree celsius
21:30
Speaker 1: increases moisture in the atmosphere, which powers up the hydrological cycle,
21:35
Speaker 1: not to mention, making hurricanes, typhoons, and other tropical storms
21:38
Speaker 1: more frequent. The destruction of forests also interrupts the piece
21:43
Speaker 1: of the water cycle that relies on vegetation to store
21:46
Speaker 1: water and release moisture through transparation. It also doesn't help
21:51
Speaker 1: that eighty percent of wastewater around the world isn't recycled.
21:57
Speaker 1: Government water subsidies have also greatly packed the water cycle
22:01
Speaker 1: by encouraging wasteful use of a precious resource. In the
22:05
Speaker 1: United States, this has been especially true of the Colorado River,
22:09
Speaker 1: though in twenty twenty three, Arizona, Nevada, and California agreed
22:15
Speaker 1: to terms that would reduce their reliance on the beleaguered
22:18
Speaker 1: waterway by three million acre feet by twenty twenty six.
22:23
Speaker 1: While the American West certainly faces a litany of issues
22:26
Speaker 1: as the climate warms, the regions most impacted by this
22:30
Speaker 1: water shortage, at least according to this report, will be
22:34
Speaker 1: northwestern Indian, northeastern China, in southern and eastern Europe. But
22:41
Speaker 1: like all climate change impacts, repairing the world's malfunctioning water
22:46
Speaker 1: cycle will require a global effort. Quote. The Chinese economy
22:51
Speaker 1: depends on sustainable forage management in Ukraine, Kazakhstan and the
22:56
Speaker 1: Baltic region. Johan Rockstrom, the director of the Potsdam Institute
23:01
Speaker 1: for Climate Impact researching co chair of the commission, says, quote,
23:07
Speaker 1: you can make the same case for Brazil supplying freshwater
23:10
Speaker 1: to Argentina. This interconnectedness just shows that we have to
23:14
Speaker 1: place fresh water in the global economy as a global
23:18
Speaker 1: common good. There is no easy solution to fortifying one
23:22
Speaker 1: of the planet's most fundamental life support systems. That said,
23:27
Speaker 1: the report urges that it's not too late and calls
23:30
Speaker 1: to redeploy six hundred billion dollars in annual agriculture subsidies.
23:36
Speaker 1: According to Reuters, It also emphasizes that the crisis needs
23:40
Speaker 1: more attention. In addition to the UN's recently appointed Envoy
23:45
Speaker 1: on Water, water is life's most precious necessity for the
23:50
Speaker 1: survival of humanity. We can't let that global well run dry.
23:57
Speaker 1: Now Again from Popular Mechanics, the headline is as scientists
24:01
Speaker 1: say they've solved part of Stone hinges biggest mystery. Solving
24:08
Speaker 1: the mystery of how stone Hinges massive stones arrived on
24:12
Speaker 1: the Salisbury Plain some five thousand years ago remains a
24:16
Speaker 1: constant juggle of theories and studies. Now we have a
24:19
Speaker 1: new option in the mix, one that combines the power
24:21
Speaker 1: of ice floe with Neolithic ingenuity to explain how the
24:26
Speaker 1: thirteen thousand pounds Central Sandstone journeyed over four hundred and
24:30
Speaker 1: thirty miles from Scotland to southwest of London. In a
24:35
Speaker 1: new study published in the Journal of Quaternary Science, researchers
24:39
Speaker 1: admit they haven't definitely proved how the stone got from
24:43
Speaker 1: or Katie and Basin in south northeast Scotland to southwest England.
24:48
Speaker 1: It probably wasn't only by ice floe or only by
24:52
Speaker 1: the hands of Neolithic humans. It might have been both.
24:56
Speaker 1: The team wrote that compatible dispersal rates could have moved
24:59
Speaker 1: the stone roughly halfway from the Orticadian Basin to Stonehenge,
25:04
Speaker 1: suggesting that glacial transport may have provided an intermediate stage
25:10
Speaker 1: in the stone's journey, but alone cannot account for the
25:13
Speaker 1: final emplacement on Salisbury Plane. Even that theory leaves additional questions,
25:19
Speaker 1: as the authors readily admit. Remy Veness, lecturer in glaciology
25:25
Speaker 1: at Sheffield Hallam University, wrote in the Conversation, just how
25:30
Speaker 1: the process may have played out, and it would have
25:32
Speaker 1: taken some serious forethought. The Altarstone is the largest and
25:37
Speaker 1: heaviest of Stonehenges bluestones, and is thought to have arrived
25:41
Speaker 1: at Stonehenge some two thousand years before the larger, more
25:46
Speaker 1: local stones that form the monument's arches. At thirteen feet long,
25:50
Speaker 1: though it's no trifle to move, geologists agree the Altarstone
25:55
Speaker 1: was formed of sandstone from the sediments of ancient Lake
25:59
Speaker 1: Orrica in what's now northeastern Scotland. Leading theories on how
26:04
Speaker 1: the stone made its way to England have included glacial
26:06
Speaker 1: transportation or Neolithic humans moving it by hand, whether over
26:12
Speaker 1: land or by sea. The researchers combined sandstone provenance analysis
26:17
Speaker 1: with ice flow modeling to map potential transport pathways. Vaness
26:23
Speaker 1: wrote that at the end of the Last Ice Age,
26:25
Speaker 1: the glacial mass was so thick and prevalent that it
26:28
Speaker 1: flowed from the Orcadian basin like a slow moving river
26:32
Speaker 1: to the region of the modern United Kingdom, picking up
26:35
Speaker 1: and carrying rock and debris with it. Using a model
26:39
Speaker 1: that Vaness spent five years developing, the researchers determined that
26:43
Speaker 1: the ultrastone could have been carried around twelve thousand years
26:47
Speaker 1: ago to dogger Bank, a Neolithic site that's now beneath
26:51
Speaker 1: the North Sea quote dogger Bank represented a local topographic
26:56
Speaker 1: high point within the Doggerland region Biness Road, which in
27:00
Speaker 1: archaeological evidence, but dogger Bank was the last stop on
27:06
Speaker 1: a glacial conveyor belt. Even if the ice low carried
27:09
Speaker 1: the altarstone to dogger Bank, which Vaness said would have
27:12
Speaker 1: looked like a cross being between a building demolition site
27:17
Speaker 1: and an interesting rock museum ten thousand years ago, it
27:21
Speaker 1: still needed to move another two hundred and fifty miles
27:23
Speaker 1: to stone Hinge for the theory to hold up. We
27:26
Speaker 1: have another wrinkle. Doggerland was above sea level only until
27:30
Speaker 1: about eight thousand years ago. Doggerland was once a land
27:34
Speaker 1: bridge connecting Europe in Britain, but rising seas gradually transformed
27:38
Speaker 1: it into a small island before submerging it entirely. Vaness
27:43
Speaker 1: suggests that the Neolithic people of Britain had the foresight
27:45
Speaker 1: to see the sinking land and move their prized stones
27:49
Speaker 1: to a new site. Once the Altarstone was safely on
27:52
Speaker 1: England's east coast, the idea that it was moved by
27:55
Speaker 1: humans to Salisbury Plain becomes more plausible. Adding that and
28:00
Speaker 1: he adds that the Altar Stone only needed to move
28:03
Speaker 1: about the same distance as stone hinges other bluestones, although
28:07
Speaker 1: there's still ten times farther than the more locally sourced
28:11
Speaker 1: and larger Sarsen stones. If nothing else, we now have
28:15
Speaker 1: a new stone hinge theory to consider. So that's all
28:20
Speaker 1: for today's Diary of Science and Nature. Your reader was
28:22
Speaker 1: Kelly Taylor. Stay tuned for further programming on RADIOI