crushed by the weight of Earth’s atmosphere? Despite exerting a pressure equivalent to tons, this invisible force doesn’t seem to affect us. So, how does our body handle it without any issues? The answer lies in a fascinating balance that keeps us safe.
The Earth’s atmosphere exerts a constant pressure on everything at its surface, including us. Yet, this immense weight seems to have no noticeable effect on our daily lives. How can we explain this fascinating phenomenon? To understand it better, let’s explore the mechanisms that govern atmospheric pressure and its interaction with our bodies.
Atmospheric Pressure: What Is It?
The Earth’s atmosphere, though made up of light gases, has weight. The pressure exerted on us at sea level is about 101,300 pascals (Pa), which equals one kilogram per square centimeter. This pressure is evenly distributed across our bodies. Anthony Broccoli, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Rutgers University in the United States, states that “the total mass of Earth’s atmosphere is 5.1 trillion trillion kilograms.” While this may sound overwhelming, it’s important to note that this pressure is counterbalanced by the pressure inside our bodies, preventing us from feeling its weight.
The Balance of Forces
Atmospheric pressure is evenly distributed, meaning every part of our body experiences the same force. It’s not a crushing downward force, but more of a circulation that allows our bodies to balance it. Professor Michael Wood from Canisius University in Buffalo explains that “our bodies have evolved over time to withstand these pressures,” creating an equilibrium between the internal and external pressures.
Why Don’t We Feel It?
The key to not feeling this external pressure lies in the balance between the internal pressure of our bodies and the atmospheric pressure outside. The fluids inside us exert an internal pressure equal to that of the surrounding air, which helps maintain equilibrium and prevents us from being crushed. This subtle interaction protects us, and it has evolved over time to ensure our survival.
Exceptions: When Pressure Becomes a Problem
However, there are situations where this pressure can become an issue. For example, at high altitudes or on airplanes, when external pressure decreases, our bodies take time to adjust the internal pressure, which can cause discomfort, such as the “pop” felt in our ears. This is also why astronauts need space suits: in space, where external pressure is almost non-existent, these suits create an artificial internal pressure necessary for human survival.
The following table illustrates the main effects of atmospheric pressure on the human body in different contexts:
Situation
Pressure
Effect on the Body
Explanation
Sea level
101,300 Pa
Perfect balance
External pressure is balanced by the internal pressure of the body, creating a sensation of comfort.
High altitude (air travel)
Reduced pressure
Mild ear discomfort
The body slowly adjusts internal pressure due to the decrease in external pressure.
Space travel
Almost zero
Need for space suits
With virtually no external pressure, spacesuits maintain artificial internal pressure for survival.
The pressure exerted by Earth’s atmosphere, though impressive in terms of weight, doesn’t affect our well-being thanks to a subtle biological balance. Our bodies have evolved to maintain internal pressure that perfectly compensates for the external pressure. So, while the air exerts a force on us, we live in harmony with this pressure, safely shielded from the risk of being crushed.
In the depths of the ocean, where light can’t reach, scientists made a chilling discovery after dropping a camera into the abyss. What they captured was unlike anything they expected—a creature of unimaginable size and behavior. As the camera sank deeper, something terrifying approached. Was it a predator, or just a curious visitor?
A recent deep-sea expedition into the Tonga Trench in the Pacific Ocean led to an astonishing discovery: a massive Pacific Sleeper Shark was filmed at an astounding 1,400 meters below the surface. What followed left the scientific team in awe, and you won’t believe what the shark did when it encountered the camera.
A Shark So Big, It Might Just Swallow You Whole!
During an expedition into the Tonga Trench, a location in the South Pacific Ocean known for its extreme depths, researchers deployed a specialized camera designed to explore the world beyond human reach. This location, far from land and typically unexplored by humans, revealed one of the ocean’s most elusive predators: the Pacific Sleeper Shark (Somniosus pacificus).
Captured on video by the scientific team, this extraordinary shark was observed at a depth of 1,400 meters, swimming with a grace that belied its size. The shark was estimated to be around 3.5 meters long, though some can grow to over 7 meters, making it one of the largest sharks in the deep sea. This specific specimen was identified as female, as noted by Dr. Jessica Kolbusz, a marine biologist involved in the expedition.
Pacific Sleeper Shark (Somniosus pacificus).
The Shark’s Bite—Did It Really Try to Eat the Camera?
The footage from the camera is nothing short of extraordinary. At first, the curious shark approached the camera rig, seemingly investigating it. In a rare and dramatic moment, the shark took a bite out of the camera itself, likely out of curiosity since sharks often explore their environment with their mouths.
Dr. Kolbusz provided insight into the shark’s behavior, explaining that the creature “went straight for the camera” but soon realized it wasn’t a viable meal. She noted, “Not long after that, she realized it didn’t taste very good and moved on to the bait we had attached instead.”
This fascinating encounter offered scientists a unique inside look at the shark’s mouth, something rarely captured on film, especially at such a profound depth.
Shark Facts You Didn’t Know — This Monster is a Silent Hunter!
The Pacific Sleeper Shark is a silent predator designed for the cold, dark depths of the ocean. These sharks can move quietly through the water, making them exceptional hunters of bottom-dwelling fish. What makes them even more interesting is their diet: they’re known to feast on giant Pacific octopuses and other deep-sea creatures that other sharks cannot access.
Dr. Kolbusz emphasized that these sharks thrive in the frigid waters found at extreme depths, often around 2.5°C (36.5°F). This shark, in particular, was observed in these sub-zero conditions, where it likely felt right at home.
Interestingly, these sharks are typically solitary and rarely encountered by humans, making footage like this all the more valuable. The discovery adds another fascinating layer to our understanding of deep-sea life in the Tonga Trench, a region that has long been an area of scientific intrigue due to its isolation and extreme conditions.
What’s Lurking in the Tonga Trench?
The Tonga Trench, located off the coast of New Zealand in the Pacific Ocean, is one of thedeepest places on the planet, plunging to depths of over 10,000 meters. Its remote location means that much of the wildlife in the region remains a mystery to scientists. The recent discovery of the Pacific sleeper shark offers a peek into this hidden world, but researchers want to discover what other strange and mysterious creatures may lurk in the deep.
This encounter with the Pacific Sleeper Shark may seem like a thrilling, once-in-a-lifetime event. But it is just one small piece of a much larger puzzle. Dr. Kolbusz and her team plan to continue their research in this part of the world, hoping to capture more incredible footage that could shed light on the many deep-sea species that remain largely unknown.
Deep beneath Antarctica’s frozen expanse, scientists have uncovered a mysterious form of life thriving in extreme conditions. This discovery could challenge everything we know about life’s resilience. How is this possible in such an inhospitable environment? Could it hold the answers to life on other planets? The implications for extraterrestrial research are nothing short of mind-blowing.
An exciting breakthrough under the Antarctic ice is changing our understanding of life on Earth. What was once thought to be a frozen, lifeless environment is now revealed to be home to thriving microorganisms. This startling revelation raises one of the most profound questions of modern science: If life can exist in these extreme conditions, where exactly do the boundaries of the impossible lie?
The Enigma Lake: A Frozen Mystery Finally Unraveled
Buried under the thick, impenetrable ice of Antarctica, Enigma Lake was long considered a lifeless, frozen body of water. However, recent research has shattered this assumption, revealing a surprising truth: the water remains liquid beneath layers of ice, even at depths of up to 12 meters. Temperatures in this region of the world can plummet to a shocking -40.7°C, and yet, this subglacial lake is home to an entire ecosystem that thrives under the surface. The international team of researchers involved in this breakthrough has raised an important question—how can life endure in such an extreme environment?
The researchers, from institutions in Italy, Australia, and the United States, used state-of-the-art ground-penetrating radar to explore the lake, mapping the water that remained liquid beneath a thick sheet of ice. Their findings defy everything we once believed about the frozen South Pole.
Investigation area, the Lake Enigma ice thickness and positioning of drilling points performed.
A Global Research Effort: Scientists Break New Ground
This astonishing discovery didn’t happen in isolation. It’s the product of an international collaboration that saw scientists from the National Institute of Polar Research in Italy, the University of Tasmania in Australia, and the University of Alaska working together. Drilling operations conducted in 2019 and 2020 allowed the team to extract water samples from the lake and analyze its chemical composition and microbial life.
Among the key figures leading the investigation are David Pearce, an environmental biology expert from the University of Tasmania, and Michael McClung, a glaciologist at the University of Alaska. Their team’s rigorous exploration of the lake has provided answers to questions no one thought to ask.
Bacteria in a Frozen World: The Surprising Resilience of Life
The greatest revelation of this research isn’t just the water itself—it’s what lives in it. Microorganisms, especially a previously under-studied group known as Patescibacteria, have been found flourishing in this harsh environment. These bacteria have reduced genomes and are known to be highly adapted to extreme conditions, such as the cold, high-pressure environment of Enigma Lake.
As the study describes, “Patescibacteria often need to interact with other organisms to survive, either symbiotically or parasitically.” Their presence in such a remote, seemingly inhospitable location raises profound questions about the boundaries of life. How are these organisms able to sustain themselves in an ecosystem that was once considered void of life?
A. Underwater survey at drilling point DP#2 (depth 9.3 m).
B. Additional view at drilling point DP#2 (depth 9.3 m).
C. Underwater survey at drilling point DP#4 (depth 22.5 m).
D. Additional view at drilling point DP#4 (depth 22.5 m).
E. Underwater survey at DP#C22 (sampling depth 22.0 m).
F. Complementary view at drilling point DP#C22 (sampling depth 22.0 m).
G. Inflow of supraglacial meltwater from the Amorphous Glacier towards the surface of Enigma Lake observed on 3 January 2020.
H. Visual evidence of supraglacial meltwater influx during the XXXV Italian Antarctic Expedition.
The Glacial Secret: How Water Remains Liquid Beneath Ice
Another fascinating aspect of this discovery is the possibility that the nearby Amorphous Glacier plays a role in maintaining liquid water beneath Enigma Lake. Some scientists speculate that the glacier continuously releases meltwater that feeds into the lake, keeping it liquid despite the freezing temperatures. This theory, while still under investigation, adds yet another layer to the mystery of how life survives in such an extreme environment.
In January 2020, researchers observed a surge of supraglacial meltwater from the Amorphous Glacier toward Enigma Lake, sparking fresh debate about the dynamics of the region’s water cycle. How does this water, coming from a glacier that has been largely isolated for millions of years, remain chemically stable? This question is at the forefront of ongoing investigations.
Water That Defies Chemistry: A Glimpse into Extraterrestrial Life?
Perhaps the most puzzling finding of all is the chemically stable water beneath the ice. The water in Enigma Lake remains remarkably stable, despite the total isolation of the lake for countless millennia. This raises intriguing possibilities not just for Earth’s ecosystems, but also for extraterrestrial research.
Scientists have long speculated that there could be similar bodies of water on other planets, such as Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, where subsurface oceans might harbor life. The chemical stability of Enigma Lake’s water could serve as a model for understanding how life might survive in similarly extreme environments on distant worlds.
Rethinking Life: What Does This Mean for Extraterrestrial Research?
This discovery challenges our conventional understanding of extremophiles—organisms that thrive in environments previously thought to be hostile to life. If life can thrive in subglacial lakes under the Antarctic ice, it’s not a stretch to think that similar ecosystems could exist on other icy planets or moons in the solar system. Enigma Lake could be a window into understanding how life might survive on planets with extreme climates, like Mars or Europa.
Astrobiologists are already considering the implications of this research for future missions to these distant worlds. Could the microbial life discovered in Enigma Lake be a model for the kinds of organisms that might be found in subglacial lakes on Mars? Or even deeper, in the frozen ocean beneath Europa’s icy shell? This discovery could hold the key to understanding the broader question of whether life exists beyond Earth.
In a first, researchers have shown that adding more “qubits” to a quantum computer can make it more resilient. It’s an essential step on the long road to practical applications.
Introduction
How do you construct a perfect machine out of imperfect parts? That’s the central challenge for researchers building quantum computers. The trouble is that their elementary building blocks, called qubits, are exceedingly sensitive to disturbance from the outside world. Today’s prototype quantum computers are too error-prone to do anything useful.
In the 1990s, researchers worked out the theoretical foundations for a way to overcome these errors, called quantum error correction. The key idea was to coax a cluster of physical qubits to work together as a single high-quality “logical qubit.” The computer would then use many such logical qubits to perform calculations. They’d make that perfect machine by transmuting many faulty components into fewer reliable ones.
“That’s really the only path that we know of toward building a large-scale quantum computer,” said Michael Newman(opens a new tab), an error-correction researcher at Google Quantum AI.
This computational alchemy has its limits. If the physical qubits are too failure-prone, error correction is counterproductive — adding more physical qubits will make the logical qubits worse, not better. But if the error rate goes below a specific threshold, the balance tips: The more physical qubits you add, the more resilient each logical qubit becomes.
Now, in a paper(opens a new tab) published today in Nature, Newman and his colleagues at Google Quantum AI have finally crossed the threshold. They transformed a group of physical qubits into a single logical qubit, then showed that as they added more physical qubits to the group, the logical qubit’s error rate dropped sharply.
A Google Quantum AI researcher works on Google’s superconducting quantum computer.
Google Quantum AI
“The whole story hinges on that kind of scaling,” said David Hayes(opens a new tab), a physicist at the quantum computing company Quantinuum. “It’s really exciting to see that become a reality.”
Majority Rules
The simplest version of error correction works on ordinary “classical” computers, which represent information as a string of bits, or 0s and 1s. Any random glitch that flips the value of a bit will cause an error.
You can guard against errors by spreading information across multiple bits. The most basic approach is to rewrite each 0 as 000 and each 1 as 111. Any time the three bits in a group don’t all have the same value, you’ll know an error has occurred, and a majority vote will fix the faulty bit.
But the procedure doesn’t always work. If two bits in any triplet simultaneously suffer errors, the majority vote will return the wrong answer.
To avoid this, you could increase the number of bits in each group. A five-bit version of this “repetition code,” for example, can tolerate two errors per group. But while this larger code can handle more errors, you’ve also introduced more ways things can go wrong. The net effect is only beneficial if each individual bit’s error rate is below a specific threshold. If it’s not, then adding more bits only makes your error problem worse.
As usual, in the quantum world, the situation is trickier. Qubits are prone to more kinds of errors than their classical cousins. It’s also much harder to manipulate them. Every step in a quantum computation is another source of error, as is the error-correction procedure itself. What’s more, there’s no way to measure the state of a qubit without irreversibly disturbing it — you must somehow diagnose errors without ever directly observing them. All of this means that quantum information must be handled with extreme care.
“It’s intrinsically more delicate,” said John Preskill(opens a new tab), a quantum physicist at the California Institute of Technology. “You have to worry about everything that can go wrong.”
At first, many researchers thought quantum error correction would be impossible. They were proved wrong in the mid-1990s, when researchers devised simple examples of quantum error-correcting codes. But that only changed the prognosis from hopeless to daunting.
When researchers worked out the details, they realized they’d have to get the error rate for every operation on physical qubits below 0.01% — only one in 10,000 could go wrong. And that would just get them to the threshold. They would actually need to go well beyond that — otherwise, the logical qubits’ error rates would decrease excruciatingly slowly as more physical qubits were added, and error correction would never work in practice.
Nobody knew how to make a qubit anywhere near good enough. But as it turned out, those early codes only scratched the surface of what’s possible.
The Surface Code
In 1995, the Russian physicist Alexei Kitaev(opens a new tab) heard reports of a major theoretical breakthrough in quantum computing. The year before, the American applied mathematician Peter Shor had devised a quantum algorithm for breaking large numbers into their prime factors. Kitaev couldn’t get his hands on a copy of Shor’s paper, so he worked out his own version(opens a new tab) of the algorithm from scratch — one that turned out to be more versatile than Shor’s. Preskill was excited by the result and invited Kitaev to visit his group at Caltech.
“Alexei is really a genius,” Preskill said. “I’ve known very few people with that level of brilliance.”
That brief visit, in the spring of 1997, was extraordinarily productive. Kitaev told Preskill about two new ideas he’d been pursuing: a “topological” approach to quantum computing that wouldn’t need active error correction at all, and a quantum error-correcting code based on similar mathematics. At first, he didn’t think that code would be useful for quantum computations. Preskill was more bullish and convinced Kitaev that a slight variation(opens a new tab) of his original idea was worth pursuing.
That variation, called the surface code, is based on two overlapping grids of physical qubits. The ones in the first grid are “data” qubits. These collectively encode a single logical qubit. Those in the second are “measurement” qubits. These allow researchers to snoop for errors indirectly, without disturbing the computation.
This is a lot of qubits. But the surface code has other advantages. Its error-checking scheme is much simpler than those of competing quantum codes. It also only involves interactions between neighboring qubits — the feature that Preskill found so appealing.
In the years that followed, Kitaev, Preskill and a handful of colleagues fleshed out the details(opens a new tab) of the surface code. In 2006, two researchers showed(opens a new tab) that an optimized version of the code had an error threshold around 1%, 100 times higher than the thresholds of earlier quantum codes. These error rates were still out of reach for the rudimentary qubits of the mid-2000s, but they no longer seemed so unattainable.
Despite these advances, interest in the surface code remained confined to a small community of theorists — people who weren’t working with qubits in the lab. Their papers used an abstract mathematical framework foreign to the experimentalists who were.
“It was just really hard to understand what’s going on,” recalled John Martinis(opens a new tab), a physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara who is one such experimentalist. “It was like me reading a string theory paper.”
In 2008, a theorist named Austin Fowler(opens a new tab) set out to change that by promoting the advantages of the surface code to experimentalists throughout the United States. After four years, he found a receptive audience in the Santa Barbara group led by Martinis. Fowler, Martinis and two other researchers wrote a 50-page paper(opens a new tab) that outlined a practical implementation of the surface code. They estimated that with enough clever engineering, they’d eventually be able to reduce the error rates of their physical qubits to 0.1%, far below the surface-code threshold. Then in principle they could scale up the size of the grid to reduce the error rate of the logical qubits to an arbitrarily low level. It was a blueprint for a full-scale quantum computer.
John Martinis (left) and Austin Fowler developed a blueprint for a quantum computer based on the surface code.
From left: Courtesy of John Martinis; Courtesy of Austin Fowler
Of course, building one wouldn’t be easy. Cursory estimates suggested that a practical application of Shor’s factoring algorithm would require trillions of operations. An uncorrected error in any one would spoil the whole thing. Because of this constraint, they needed to reduce the error rate of each logical qubit to well below one in a trillion. For that they’d need a huge grid of physical qubits. The Santa Barbara group’s early estimates suggested that each logical qubit might require thousands of physical qubits.
“That just scared everyone,” Martinis said. “It kind of scares me too.”
But Martinis and his colleagues pressed on regardless, publishing a proof-of-principle experiment(opens a new tab) using five qubits in 2014. The result caught the eye of an executive at Google, who soon recruited Martinis to lead an in-house quantum computing research group. Before trying to wrangle thousands of qubits at once, they’d have to get the surface code working on a smaller scale. It would take a decade of painstaking experimental work to get there.
Crossing the Threshold
When you put the theory of quantum computing into practice, the first step is perhaps the most consequential: What hardware do you use? Many different physical systems can serve as qubits, and each has different strengths and weaknesses. Martinis and his colleagues specialized in so-called superconducting qubits, which are tiny electrical circuits made of superconducting metal on silicon chips. A single chip can host many qubits arranged in a grid — precisely the layout the surface code demands.
The Google Quantum AI team spent years improving their qubit design and fabrication procedures, scaling up from a handful of qubits to dozens, and honing their ability to manipulate many qubits at once. In 2021, they were finally ready to try error correction with the surface code for the first time. They knew they could build individual physical qubits with error rates below the surface-code threshold. But they had to see if those qubits could work together to make a logical qubit that was better than the sum of its parts. Specifically, they needed to show that as they scaled up the code — by using a larger patch of the physical-qubit grid to encode the logical qubit — the error rate would get lower.
They started with the smallest possible surface code, called a “distance-3” code, which uses a 3-by-3 grid of physical qubits to encode one logical qubit (plus another eight qubits for measurement, for a total of 17). Then they took one step up, to a distance-5 surface code, which has 49 total qubits. (Only odd code distances are useful.)
Mark Belan/Quanta Magazine
In a 2023 paper(opens a new tab), the team reported that the error rate of the distance-5 code was ever so slightly lower than that of the distance-3 code. It was an encouraging result, but inconclusive — they couldn’t declare victory just yet. And on a practical level, if each step up only reduces the error rate by a smidgen, scaling won’t be feasible. To make progress, they would need better qubits.
The team devoted the rest of 2023 to another round of hardware improvements. At the beginning of 2024, they had a brand-new 72-qubit chip, code-named Willow, to test out. They spent a few weeks setting up all the equipment needed to measure and manipulate qubits. Then in February, they started collecting data. A dozen researchers crowded into a conference room to watch the first results come in.
“No one was sure what was going to happen,” said Kevin Satzinger(opens a new tab), a physicist at Google Quantum AI who co-led the effort with Newman. “There are a lot of details in getting these experiments to work.”
Then a graph popped up on the screen. The error rate for the distance-5 code wasn’t marginally lower than that of the distance-3 code. It was down by 40%. Over the following months, the team improved that number to 50%: One step up in code distance cut the logical qubit’s error rate in half.
“That was an extremely exciting time,” Satzinger said. “There was kind of an electric atmosphere in the lab.”
The team also wanted to see what would happen when they continued to scale up. But a distance-7 code would need 97 total qubits, more than the total number on their chip. In August, a new batch of 105-qubit Willow chips came out, but by then the team was approaching a hard deadline — the testing cycle for the next round of design improvements was about to begin. Satzinger began to make peace with the idea that they wouldn’t have time to run those final experiments.
“I was sort of mentally letting go of distance-7,” he said. Then, the night before the deadline, two new team members, Gabrielle Roberts and Alec Eickbusch, stayed up until 3 a.m. to get everything working well enough to collect data. When the group returned the following morning, they saw that going from a distance-5 to a distance-7 code had once again cut the logical qubit’s error rate in half. This kind of exponential scaling — where the error rate drops by the same factor with each step up in code distance — is precisely what the theory predicts. It was an unambiguous sign that they’d reduced the physical qubits’ error rates well below the surface-code threshold.
“There’s a difference between believing in something and seeing it work,” Newman said. “That was the first time where I was like, ‘Oh, this is really going to work.’”
The Long Road Ahead
The result has also thrilled other quantum computing researchers.
“I think it’s amazing,” said Barbara Terhal(opens a new tab), a theoretical physicist at the Delft University of Technology. “I didn’t actually expect that they would fly through the threshold like this.”
At the same time, researchers recognize that they still have a long way to go. The Google Quantum AI team only demonstrated error correction using a single logical qubit. Adding interactions between multiple logical qubits will introduce new experimental challenges.
Then there’s the matter of scaling up. To get the error rates low enough to do useful quantum computations, researchers will need to further improve their physical qubits. They’ll also need to make logical qubits out of something much larger than a distance-7 code. Finally, they’ll need to combine thousands of these logical qubits — more than a million physical qubits.
Meanwhile, other researchers have made impressive(opens a new tab) advances(opens a new tab) using different qubit technologies, though they haven’t yet shown that they can reduce error rates by scaling up. These alternative technologies may have an easier time implementing new error-correcting codes that demand fewer physical qubits. Quantum computing is still in its infancy. It’s too early to say which approach will win out.
Martinis, who left Google Quantum AI in 2020, remains optimistic despite the many challenges. “I lived through going from a handful of transistors to billions,” he said. “Given enough time, if we’re clever enough, we could do that.”
A footprint hypothesized to have been created by a Paranthropus boisei individual. Credit: Kevin Hatala/Chatham University
Footprints from two hominin species found in Kenya suggest they lived and interacted together over a million years ago.
Over a million years ago, two different species of hominins may have crossed paths as they walked along the shore of what is now Lake Turkana in Kenya.
Researchers reached this conclusion after examining 1.5-million-year-old fossils they unearthed, which may represent the first instance of two sets of hominin footprints made about the same time on an ancient lake shore. This discovery will provide more insight into human evolution and how species cooperated and competed, the researchers said.
A footprint hypothesized to have been created by a Homo erectus individual. Credit: Kevin Hatala/Chatham University
Hominin Footprints: A Window into the Past
“Hominin” is a newer term that describes a subdivision of the larger category known as hominids. Hominins includes all organisms, extinct and alive, considered to be within the human lineage that emerged after the split from the ancestors of the great apes. This is believed to have occurred about 6 million to 7 million years ago.
The discovery, published recently in Science, provides direct proof that different hominin species lived contemporaneously in time and space, overlapping as they evaded predators and weathered the challenges of safely securing food in the ancient African landscape. Hominins belonging to the species Homo erectus and Paranthropus boisei, the two most common living human species of the Pleistocene Epoch, made the tracks, the researchers said.
A 3D computerized model of the surface of the area near Lake Turkana in Kenya shows fossil footprints of Paranthropus boisei (vertical footprints) with separate footprints of Homo erectus forming a perpendicular path. Credit: Kevin Hatala/Chatham University
“Their presence on the same surface, made closely together in time, places the two species at the lake margin, using the same habitat,” said Craig Feibel, an author of the study and a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and Department of Anthropology in the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences.
Feibel, who has conducted research since 1981 in that area of northern Kenya, a rich fossil site, applied his expertise in stratigraphy and dating to demonstrate the geological antiquity of the fossils at 1.5 million years ago. He also interpreted the depositional setting of the footprint surface, narrowing down the passage of the track makers to a few hours and showing they were formed at the very spot of soft sediments where they were found.
If the hominins didn’t cross paths, they traversed the shore within hours of each other, Feibel said.
A trackway of footprints hypothesized to have been created by a Paranthropus boisei individual. Credit: Neil Roach
Discovering Ancient Locomotion and Interaction
While skeletal fossils have long provided the primary evidence for studying human evolution, new data from fossil footprints are revealing fascinating details about the evolution of human anatomy and locomotion and giving further clues about ancient human behaviors and environments, according to Kevin Hatala, the study’s first author, and an associate professor of biology at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pa.
“Fossil footprints are exciting because they provide vivid snapshots that bring our fossil relatives to life,” said Hatala, who has been investigating hominin footprints since 2012. “With these kinds of data, we can see how living individuals, millions of years ago, were moving around their environments and potentially interacting with each other, or even with other animals. That’s something that we can’t really get from bones or stone tools.”
A site in northern Kenya has yielded 1.5-million-year-old fossils. Credit: Louise N. Leakey
Advanced Techniques Unveil Hominin Behaviors
Hatala, an expert in foot anatomy, found the species’ footprints reflected different patterns of anatomy and locomotion. He and several co-authors distinguished one set of footprints from another using new methods they recently developed to enable them to conduct a 3D analysis.
“In biological anthropology, we’re always interested in finding new ways to extract behavior from the fossil record, and this is a great example,” said Rebecca Ferrell, a program director at the National Science Foundation who helped fund this portion of the research. “The team used cutting-edge 3D imaging technologies to create an entirely new way to look at footprints, which helps us understand human evolution and the roles of cooperation and competition in shaping our evolutionary journey.”
Rutgers Professor Craig Feibel has been studying fossils in Kenya since the 1980s. Credit: Craig Feibel/Rutgers University
Feibel described the discovery as “a bit of serendipity.” The researchers uncovered the fossil footprints in 2021 when a team organized by Louise Leakey, a third-generation paleontologist who is the granddaughter of Louis Leakey and daughter of Richard Leakey, discovered fossil bones at the site.
The field team, led by Cyprian Nyete, mainly consists of a group of highly trained Kenyans who live locally and scour the landscape after heavy rains. They noticed fossils on the surface and were excavating to try and find the source. While cleaning the top layer of a bed, Richard Loki, one of the excavators, noticed some giant bird tracks and then spotted the first hominin footprint. Leakey coordinated a team in response that excavated the footprint surface in July 2022.
Feibel noted it has long been hypothesized that these fossil human species coexisted. According to fossil records, Homo erectus, a direct ancestor of humans, persisted for 1 million years more. Paranthropus boisei, however, went extinct within the next few hundred thousand years. Scientists don’t know why.
Both species possessed upright postures and bipedalism, and they were highly agile. Little is yet known about how these coexisting species interacted, both culturally and reproductively.
The footprints are significant, Feibel said, because they fall into the category of “trace fossils” – which can include footprints, nests, and burrows. Trace fossils are not part of an organism but offer evidence of behavior. Body fossils, such as bones and teeth, are evidence of past life but are easily moved by water or a predator.
Trace fossils cannot be moved, Feibel said.
“This proves beyond any question that not only one, but two different hominins were walking on the same surface, literally within hours of each other,” Feibel said. “The idea that they lived contemporaneously may not be a surprise. But this is the first time demonstrating it. I think that’s really huge.”
Reference: “Footprint evidence for locomotor diversity and shared habitats among early Pleistocene hominins” by Kevin G. Hatala, Neil T. Roach, Anna K. Behrensmeyer, Peter L. Falkingham, Stephen M. Gatesy, Erin Marie Williams-Hatala, Craig S. Feibel, Ibrae Dalacha, Martin Kirinya, Ezekiel Linga, Richard Loki, Apolo Alkoro, Longaye, Malmalo Longaye, Emmanuel Lonyericho, Iyole Loyapan, Nyiber Nakudo, Cyprian Nyete and Louise N. Leakey, 28 November 2024, Science.
DOI: 10.1126/science.ado5275
An illustration from the paper, depicting Ninumbeehan digging a burrow in a riverbed for the dry season and then re-emerging when the monsoon returned. Credit: Copyright: Gabriel N. Ugueto
Ancient amphibians in Wyoming adapted to extreme weather by burrowing, offering insights into current amphibian survival strategies amid climate change.
Two hundred and thirty million years ago, in what is now Wyoming, the seasons were extreme. Torrential rain would batter the region for months, and once the mega-monsoon ended, the area would become extremely dry. Such drastic conditions would have posed a significant challenge to amphibians, which need moist skin to survive. However, one group of salamander-like creatures developed a remarkable adaptation to the extreme seasonal changes, as demonstrated by their unusual fossils.
In a study published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, researchers described a new species of fossil amphibian preserved in torpedo-shaped burrows. These ancient amphibians likely waited out the dry season in these burrows, then re-emerged once the monsoon returned.
“Based on how the rocks in the area formed and what they’re made of, we can tell that Wyoming experienced some of the most drastic seasonal effects of the mega-monsoon that affected the whole supercontinent of Pangea,” says Cal So, the study’s lead author and an incoming postdoctoral scientist at the Field Museum in Chicago. “So how did these animals stay moist and prevent themselves from drying out during the hot and dry season that lasted several months? This is the cool thing. We find these fossils inside these cylindrical structures up to 12 inches long, which we’ve interpreted as burrows.”
Fossil skull of the newly described amphibian. Credit: David Lovelace
Early Research and Discovery of Burrows
So, who recently obtained their PhD from George Washington University, first encountered the strange fossil burrows when they were an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, working with Research Scientist David Lovelace of the University of Wisconsin Geology Museum.
In 2014, Lovelace was searching for fossils in Wyoming, in an area stewarded by the Bureau of Land Management in a rock layer he would eventually call the Serendipity Beds. “One of my passions is ichnology– the hidden biodiversity that can be shown through tracks of animals or traces of other living organisms,” says Lovelace. He spotted a small cylindrical structure and several larger ones that looked “like a Pringle can” made of rock. Lovelace recognized the structures as in-filled burrows made by an animal long ago, but a small one stood out. “It was tiny, it was so cute,” he says. He collected several of the cylinders for his research.
Cal So and Adam Fitch using a rock saw to excavate fossil burrows. Credit: Hannah Miller
Uncovering Fossil Secrets and Their Implications
Back in the lab, Lovelace took a hammer to one of the preserved burrows to see if there were any fossils inside, and he found a tiny, toothy skull. “I saw sharp, pointy teeth, and my first thought was that it was a baby crocodile,” Lovelace says. “But when we put it all together and prepared it, we realized it was some sort of amphibian.”
Lovelace reached out to Jason Pardo, a postdoctoral researcher at the Field Museum who specializes in fossil amphibians, who created high-resolution CT scans of another of the fossil burrows and revealed a tiny skeleton inside. “At this point, we were like, ‘Oh my god, we have something really cool,’” says Lovelace. “I went back to put together the geological story of the site, and then we were just finding these burrows everywhere. We couldn’t not find them, the site was ridiculously loaded.”
On one of his return trips, he dispatched So, who was then an undergraduate, to collect more of the burrows. Ultimately, the team gathered around 80 fossil burrows, most of which contained skulls and bones of the ancient amphibians. These bones contained clues to the animals’ lifestyles. No complete skeletons have been found, but based on the partial remains, they were probably about a foot long. They had tiny, underdeveloped arms, but the researchers think they had another way to dig their burrows.
“Their skulls have kind of a scoop shape, so we think they used the head to scoop their way underground at the bottom of a riverbed and go through a period of having a lower metabolic rate so that they could survive the dry season. That’s similar to what some modern-day salamanders and fish do,” says So. Essentially, the ancient, aquatic amphibians spent the rainy part of the year swimming in rivers, but when those rivers dried up, they dug head-first into the muddy riverbed. They spent the dry season underground, in a state somewhat similar to hibernation, until the monsoon returned a few months later, and the rainwater replenished the rivers. The fossils found by So and Lovelace just happened to be unlucky in that the rivers’ paths changed from year to year. The spots where these animals buried themselves were no longer kept moist, so the animals never emerged and instead died in their burrows.
Intercultural Collaboration and Naming the Discovery
The ancient amphibians lived in what’s now the ancestral lands of the Eastern Shoshone people, with whom the researchers have an ongoing collaborative relationship. “Our interest is in education, so we met with the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the Eastern Shoshone, and he connected us with the schools,” says Lovelace. “It was a great multi-generational collaboration. We invited seventh-grade students from Fort Washakie School, their teachers, and elders into the field with us. The elders told us about their understanding of the rock and their history on the land, and the students got to find burrows and bones.”
The middle school students are learning the Shoshone language, and they worked with Elders to create a name for the fossil amphibian in Shoshone: Ninumbeehan dookoodukah. In their paper, the researchers explained, “Ninumbee is the name for the mountain-dwelling Little People who hold an important place in Shoshone culture (among others), –han is the possessive affix indicating an affiliation with the Ninumbee, dookoo means ‘flesh’ and dukah means ‘eater.’ Altogether, Ninumbeehan dookoodukah means ‘Little People’s flesh eater,’ honoring the Little People and referencing the sharp teeth of the fossil. Our intent is to pay tribute to the Eastern Shoshone people, their language and the land to which they belong.”
“The collaboration between our school district (Fremont County School District # 21) and Dr. Lovelace and his team illustrates reciprocity in action and the long-term, transformational impacts that can occur through authentic relationship building between researchers and communities,” says Amanda LeClair-Diaz, Office of Indian Education Coordinator and a co-author of the paper. “This process of scientists, community members, educators, middle school students, and Eastern Shoshone elders coming together to learn about these fossils and choosing a Shoshone name for the fossil, Ninumbeehan dookoodukah, solidifies the intergenerational connection we as Shoshone people have to our homeland and the beings that exist within this environment.”
Ninumbeehan offers scientists a tantalizing clue about what life was like in Wyoming 230 million years ago. “Small amphibians are really rare in the Triassic, and we don’t know why that is,” says Pardo. “We find some big ones, but these small ones are really quite challenging to find.”
The newly described amphibians also could shed some light on how modern amphibians might fare in the extreme weather conditions brought on by the climate crisis. “Modern amphibian diversity is under substantial threat, and climate change is a huge part of that,” says Pardo. “But the way that Ninumbeehan could slow down its metabolism to wait out the dry weather indicates that some lineages of modern amphibians that have similar seasonal behavior might allow for greater survivorship than some of the models suggest. It’s a little glimmer of hope.”
Reference: “Fossil amphibian offers insights into the interplay between monsoons and amphibian evolution in palaeoequatorial Late Triassic systems” by Calvin So, Aaron M. Kufner, Jason D. Pardo, Caian L. Edwards, Brandon R. Price, Joseph J. Bevitt, Amanda LeClair-Diaz, Lynette St. Clair, Josh Mann, Reba Teran and David M. Lovelace, 30 September 2024, Proceedings B.
DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2024.1041
A group of submariners returned from the Southern Ocean with a strange story that they had heard the ocean quack.
Strange enough as it was, it turned out not to be a one-time event either.
The strange quack sound became a widespread topic and quickly earned itself the name ‘bio duck’.
In the 1980s, a team of researchers mapping the sounds of the South Fiji Basin recorded four bursts of quack-like noises.
Four years into the project in 1986, Ross Chapman from the University of Victoria joined the project and described their scepticism in a statement: “We discovered that the data contained a gold mine of new information about many kinds of sound in the ocean, including sounds from marine mammals.”
Mark Meredith / Getty
Commenting on the bizarre sound, he added: “The sound was so repeatable, we couldn’t believe at first that it was biological.”
After consulting with Australian colleagues, they found similar sounds recorded in other locations near New Zealand and Australia.
Chapman now believes the quacks were conversations between sea creatures.
“Maybe they were talking about dinner, maybe it was parents talking to children, or maybe they were simply commenting on that crazy ship that kept going back and forth towing that long string behind it,” he described.
That “crazy ship” was fitted with acoustic antennas and hydrophones which helped pinpoint where the sounds were coming from.
The unique design of the ship allowed the scientists to identify the direction the sounds were originating from which resulted in different directions all around the ship.
Chapman noticed the speakers almost took turns like people in a conversation.
Mark Meredith / Getty
“The most amazing thing was that when one speaker was talking, the others were quiet, as though they were listening. Then the first speaker would stop talking and listen to responses from others,” Chapman noted.
Strangely, none of the animals making the sounds were actually visually identified.
“The most amazing thing was that when one speaker was talking, the others were quiet, as though they were listening,” said Chapman.
“Then the first speaker would stop talking and listen to responses from others.”
Further evidence was gathered in 2014 from a study which found that the noise comes from the Antarctic minke whale.
Researchers believe the ‘bio duck’ noises’ matched the frequency and pulse patterns of the whales’ calls.
In November this year, Chapman presented his findings at the 187th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America.
“We discovered that the data contained a gold mine of new information about many kinds of sound in the ocean, including sounds from marine mammals,” he recalled at the meeting.
