**Key sentences extracted from the text, focusing on the extinction of the woolly mammoth and relevant environmental and human factors:**

1.

"Some of these animals at the site were actually potentially declining."

"This is a little colder than the last glacial maximum, so the animals that survived the blast got hit with the cold."

"McInerney and Wing speculate that the extinctions were mostly due to higher temperatures, but this is unclear."

"The primary focus of conservation efforts needs to be on the prevention of species loss, not on de-extinction."

“That would be an ideal set-up for intercepting a really big ticket meal item like a mammoth,” he said.

**Explanation:**
- Sentences 1, 2, and 3 reference possible environmental causes (climate fluctuations and temperature extremes) that contributed to extinction.

- Sentence 5 hints at the role of human hunters in mammoth decline, implying early humans may have targeted mammoths as prey.

- Sentence 4, while forward-looking, underscores the modern lesson from mammoth extinction events, emphasizing conservation to prevent species loss.

**Key sentences extracted from the text, focusing on the extinction of the woolly mammoth and relevant environmental and human factors:**

1.

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In-Breeding Likely Didn't End the Last of the Mammoth Population

A study of the last likely surviving mammoth population shows that genetics from in-breeding likely did not lead to their demise.

By Paul Smaglik
Jun 27, 2024 6:20 PMJun 27, 2024 6:22 PM
Wrangel Island mammoth tusk (Credit: Love Dalén)

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It would seem obvious that rising sea levels that cut off the last population of woolly mammoths on Wrangel Island from the Siberian coast 10,000 years ago caused in-breeding, leading to their eventual extinction. But a new genetic analysis, reported in Cell, counters that claim.

That result was unexpected, since an earlier report indicated that the mammoth population likely built up harmful genetic mutations, according to Love Dalén, a scientist with the Centre for Palaeogenetics of Sweden, and one of the paper’s authors.

“I was fairly surprised both at how few the mammoths on Wrangel Island were in the beginning (less than 10 individuals), and that we did not find any evidence for an accumulation of highly deleterious mutations,” Dalén says. He calls the relative lack of harmful mutations surprising, because an earlier paper published in 2017 in PLOS Genetics predicted they may have played a factor.

Natural Selection and Genetic Drift

The genetic story of this population — which likely started from 8 individuals and grew to 200 to 300 mammoths over 6,000 years within 20 generations — is a bit more complicated. Two sometimes competing genetic factors were at play.

Natural selection tends to purge harmful variants, because offspring carrying them would be less likely to survive. But genetic drift works to preserve mutations across generations.

This effect tends to be stronger in smaller populations, so it would make sense that it would impact the Wrangel Island mammoths.

Read More: Rapid Evolution Changes Species in Real Time

What Made the Island Mammoths go Extinct?

Although it appears that these two genetic forces competed, it wasn’t necessarily a fair fight.

“Whereas genetic drift affects all deleterious mutations in the same way, natural selection will be stronger the more deleterious a mutation is,” says Dalén. “That way, natural selection is expected to remove the very deleterious mutations from the population, while genetic drift leads to an increase in slightly deleterious ones.”

Therefore, over time, the most harmful mutations were purged, while a bunch of relatively innocuous ones remained. So, if inbreeding didn’t do in the mammoths, what did?

“This leaves us with some other possibilities, such as a disease outbreak, some sort of tundra fire, or very short-term climatic perturbation, where the latter two could have ruined the plant growth for one or a few seasons, which could have had disastrous consequences for such a small population,” Dalén says.

Read More: How Do We Know When a Species Is Extinct?

Conservation of Today

Although the interplay between natural selection and genetic drift didn’t appear to wipe out the mammoths of yore, it still has implications for conservation efforts of today.

For example, conservationists wishing to preserve a species that has almost gone extinct, but has partially recovered, could look to the Wrangel Island mammoths. The implication is that moving a few individuals between two isolated populations could slow genetic drift.

The study’s authors have yet to analyze DNA from the most recent Wrangel Island mammoths. However, researchers have found fossils from the last 300 years of the mammoths’ existence and plan to analyze their genomes.

Read More: Scientists Are Trying to Save These Animals From Extinction

Article Sources

Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:

Before joining Discover Magazine, Paul Smaglik spent over 20 years as a science journalist, specializing in U.S. life science policy and global scientific career issues. He began his career in newspapers, but switched to scientific magazines. His work has appeared in publications including Science News, Science, Nature, and Scientific American.

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"Some of these animals at the site were actually potentially declining."

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Easing Alberta drought conditions slowly ending rare archaeological opportunity

Some of the more productive sites are also known by collectors, who remove the artifacts before researchers can document them.
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"Blackfoot people have been saying, 'We've lived on this land since the day of creation,'" says Dr. Eldon Yellowhorn, archaeologist and a professor at Simon Fraser University.

The Blackfoot people say they have always lived here.

Western science is slowly coming to the same conclusion, helped in part by the exceptionally low water levels of the past two years.

"Because we have an oral history, the archaeological record is our only archive," Yellowhorn says.

"As an archaeologist, I can corroborate that (oral history) using my own research and lines of evidence that typically archaeologists don't explore."

As the major reservoirs in southern Alberta slowly approach the low end of their normal levels, that opportunity is coming to an end.

"Our ability to access the site is contingent upon water levels," says Kyle Forsythe, an archaeologist with the Royal Alberta Museum.

"When water levels reduce, that means that we are able then to access parts of the site that would normally be underwater."

Fieldwork is normally conducted in the fall when water levels are at their lowest but for the past two years, researchers have been able to explore rarely-seen locations for up to six months of the year.

Some of the more productive sites are also known by collectors, who remove the artifacts before researchers can document them.

Without the context of the surrounding soil, position in relation to other artifacts or nearby finds, the stone pieces lose their ability to teach us anything about the past.

In effect, after lasting millennia, a piece of Alberta's story is destroyed.

"It's not well known to people that it is actually illegal to collect artifacts privately," Forsythe says.

"The reason for that is the association between artifacts is integral to reconstructing the history of what happened in a place."

In a storage room at the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton, he shows off a stone point made in the Clovis style – an elaborately chipped piece of stone that was likely fastened to a spear or atlatl dart.

Somewhere around 11,000 or 12,000 years ago, a family group used it to survive.

The point shows signs of care and use.

"You can see the twist in there," he says, running his finger along an asymmetry in the blade that's obvious once he points it out.

"That suggests that it was re-sharpened intentionally on either side to maintain that cutting edge."

The point came from a private collector in southern Alberta.

It may have been accidentally dropped or discarded, or it may have been lost with a wounded animal that changed a family’s fortunes.

Any clues to exactly when or why or who last held it are gone, lost forever when someone placed it in their pocket.

Not just people

The earliest evidence of people and animals in Alberta dates to about 13,500 years ago, as plant life filled in behind retreating glaciers.

Plants brought animals, and the animals brought people.

"We have, for example, evidence of directly hunting things like musk ox and bison in particular, but also horse," Forsythe says.

"And we have horse bones with associated stone tools that show people were hunting horses and camels."

The earliest people lived alongside camels, scimitar (sabretooth) cats, cave bears, giant ground sloths and an ancestor of the modern domestic horse – a wide array of animals that died out here for reasons not well understood.

Christina Barron-Ortiz is a paleobiologist, studying the tracks and bones left all those years ago.

"Sites like this one that just predate the extinction event can tell us about how the populations of these animals were doing leading up to the extinctions," she says.

As the reservoirs dried out in 2022 and 2023, they exposed a fragile picture of that chapter in our history.

She holds up a cast of a mammoth track, taken from the mud of a reservoir.

These tracks are important because they offer a look at animals' behaviours, how many appear to be travelling together and the age and sex makeup of the herds.

"Some of these animals at the site were actually potentially declining. So they were starting to have fewer younger individuals and more older individuals," Barron-Ortiz says.

These finds are also at risk of being destroyed by unwitting foot traffic.

Some of the tracks are only visible for a few hours.

Others are buried under the mud – broken up without ever being seen when feet sink down through the layers.

Human footprints discovered in White Sands National Park in New Mexico have a generally accepted date of 23,000 years, based partly on seeds found preserved in the mud at the site.

The finds align with genetic drift models which predict when Indigenous North Americans last shared a common Asian ancestor.

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From time crystals to cannibal toads, 2021 was a wild year for science

2021 was full of innovation and discovery in the world of science, covering everything from biological discovery and archeology to not one but two burgeoning space races.

We learned some fascinating things about ancient animal species, including some surprising facts about dinosaurs, and we learned a lot about humanity as well.

Quantum computers jumped from the realm of practical technology to potentially physics defying breakthroughs while some of our most cherished scientific achievements started to show their age.

We broke the record for the coldest temperatures ever achieved and might have caught sight of our first exoplanet in another galaxy.

There was a lot going on this year, but we pulled out the major stories throughout the year that helped define the year in science for 2021.

January

We're not going to lie, January was tough, as several studies and reports showed just how quickly the climate crisis was advancing. One study showed that the triple-threat of climate change, biodiversity loss, and overpopulation could spell calamity for humanity by the end of this century.

Following up on that study, another showed that Earth is now hotter than its been in at least 120,000 years, seeming to settle a major conflict over climate models in favor of "Yeah, it really is that bad."

We also got some stunning photography of Mars' Valles Marineris, the single largest canyon in the solar system. The gash cuts across one side of Mars for thousands of miles and about 10 times longer and three times deeper than the Grand Canyon in Arizona.

February

Ok, February was Mars' month to really shine.

First, the United Arab Emirates also sent its first probe to Mars on February 9, a major milestone for a country that only launched its first satellite a decade ago.

Not to be outdone, China's first interplanetary spacecraft, the Tianwen-1 orbiter, arrived in orbit around the Red Planet the next day on February 10, beaming back spectacular video in the process.

The big show came a little over a week later when the NASA Perseverance rover successfully touched down on Mars in an ancient lake bed called Jezero Crater after "seven minutes of terror" as the rover's landing sequence played out via automated programming.

It went off flawlessly and Perseverance has been doing science on Mars ever since. Even better, Perseverance was able to send back the first audio ever recorded on another planet: a recording of the Martian wind blowing past the rover.

A little closer to home, NASA also chose SpaceX's Falcon Heavy to carry the first pieces of NASA's Gateway Station to the Moon's orbit, with an expected launch date sometime in 2024. NASA picking SpaceX for stuff is going to be a big theme for 2021, in case you're wondering.

March

Hubble had some trouble in March, suffering a software glitch that knocked it out of commission for several days. While in itself not terrible, it would end up foreshadowing more serious problems later in the year.

We also got a new digital recreation of the complete Antikythera Mechanism, a roughly 2,000-year-old device discovered in an ancient Roman shipwreck in 1900 and considered the world's first mechanical computer.

The mysterious device is missing many key parts and is covered in two millennia of corrosion and sediment buildup, so figuring out how the device actually worked is one of archeology's greatest ongoing challenges.

We do know some things about it though, like the fact that it charted the positions of the planets, predicted lunar eclipses, and even counted down to the next Olympic games in Athens.

April

April was a historic month on Mars, as the Ingenuity helicopter drone made its first test flight after arriving on the planet with the Perseverance rover back in February.

It was the first time a human aircraft ever flew on another world, making it something of a Wright Brothers moment for NASA engineers.

"I don't think I can ever stop watching it over and over again," Ingenuity project manager MiMi Aung said afterward.

Back here on Earth, just a really long time ago, we learned something remarkable about every kid's favorite dinosaur: Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Looking at new simulations of how a T. rex's tail would have moved given what we know of its physiology, it turns out its typical walking speed was a sluggish 3 mph (5km/h)

Speed doesn't scale well with weight, so this shouldn't be surprising, but given how many other huge dinosaurs were around at the time, T. rex hunting prey might have been history's slowest chase scene. Considering that T. rex possibly numbered in the millions right up until 66 million years ago, it seems to have gotten along just fine. Until the asteroid hit anyway.

Finally, just before the end of the month, China put the first section of the Tianhe space station into orbit. Called the Tianhe core module, the module provides life support and living space for up to three crew members, and includes the necessary guidance and navigation controls for the station as more modules are added in the months ahead.

May

Following up on NASA's Perseverance, China landed its first rover, Zhurong, on Mars in May.

See more

The Mars landing is a historic feat for China, making it only the second country to put a rover on another planet, after the United States. This is a further sign of the brewing space race between the two countries that is expected to accelerate in the years ahead.

Zhurong is equipped with panoramic and multispectral cameras and equipment to analyze rock compositions, as well as ground penetrating radar to explore subsurface features of the Utopia Planitia region of the planet.

Looking out a little bit past Mars, scientists were able to watch and document a star being eaten by a black hole in a process known as spaghettification

This is where the tidal forces of the black holes gravity on the side of the star nearest it is so much greater than the gravity on the star's far side that the difference in gravity literally tears the star apart, turning it into a stream of material that eventually forms an accretion disk around the black hole as it slowly consumes the material.

We knew that this process happened, but this was the first time astronomers got to watch it happen to an actual star.

Finally, there was news in May that scientists have determined that the longest a human can ever live, biologically, is about 150 years. After that point, the body is simply no longer able to repair itself. So, it turns out humans do have a definite shelf life.

June

June saw some disturbing news on the climate front, as a satellite photos taken from 2017 to 2020 showed Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier – one of the continent's most endangered – dramatically losing up to 20% of its supporting ice shelf in just four years.

The consequences of this kind of rapid ice loss will be dire, as melting ice from collapsing glaciers and ice sheets contribute to catastrophic sea level rise.

While we're talking about Antarctica, the southern most continent on Earth now officially has its own ocean, the Southern Ocean

While the idea of the Southern Ocean isn't new, it wasn't officially listed alongside the four other recognized oceans: the Altantic, the Pacific, the Indian, and the Arctic.

June also saw more evidence emerge that a comet fragment impacted Earth 13,000 years ago and caused the Younger Dryas period, a 1,500 year stretch starting around 11,000 BCE where Earth's climate suddenly snapped back into ice age conditions just as the last ice age was coming to an end.

The comet fragment theory – or the Clovis comet impact hypothesis, as it is known – has been a controversial one over the years.

New research into a global layer of platinum and other deposits in the geological record right at the start of the Younger Dryas though are pointing more and more to an impact, providing crucial support for the theory.

More research needs to be done, but it's looking increasingly like humanity survived an apocalyptic impact event 13,000 years ago, and the subsequent impact winter might have forced hunter-gatherer societies to work the Earth to try and grow food as it became more scarce – essentially forcing human tribes to form civilization as we know it in response to the crisis.

July

There was a lot that happened in July, but arguably the most important story of the month was the Billionaire Space Race kicking into high gear.

Both Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos launched themselves into someone's definition of space, and we'll leave it to Bezos and Branson to pull out the measuring tape on that one and argue over where "outer space" actually begins.

Throw in half a year of Elon Musk's SpaceX launching a crewed mission to the International Space Station, several tests of SpaceX's Starship (many of which met a fiery end on a landing platform), and trash talk on Twitter, and one of the most obnoxious spectacles of the past decade spilled out into the open in July.

The saddest part about it all is that the future of space exploration is likely in their hands, and especially in the case of SpaceX, they are actually delivering results. So we're likely destined to have to put up with this for the foreseeable future as these companies become more integrated into our official space agencies in the US, Europe, and even in Russia.

Moving on from all that for now, there was also an exciting little tidbit of astronomy this August, with the discovery of a moon-forming disk around an exoplanet in a solar system in the earliest stages of its formation.

It was the first time we've ever seen anything like this, and it's a huge discovery for scientists researching solar system formation to actually see this process playing out.

As for the disk, it is surrounding an exoplanet that is about the size of Jupiter, and the disk itself is gargantuan, estimated to be about 500 times larger than the rings of Saturn, or comparable to the distance between the Earth and the Sun.

August

August was a huge month for quantum computing fans as Google announced that they had creating physics-breaking "time crystals", a quantum phenomenon that violates the principle of entropy laid out by the second law of thermodynamics.

The results have to be confirmed, and that isn't a simple task, obviously. No one just has a spare quantum computer lying around that researchers can use.

Still, if Google's Sycamore quantum computer has managed to create time crystals, all we can say is it's a big friggin' deal, and the implications of it still aren't clear even to physicists who do this for a living.

August also saw the announcement that researchers had identified the source of the dinosaur-killing asteroid that hit the Yucatan Peninsula in the Gulf of Mexico 66 million years ago.

Examining samples from the Chicxulub crater, the asteroid was determined to be a carbonaceous chondrite, an ancient class of asteroid that originates on the darkest, outer edges of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

It's suspected that Jupiter's gravitational influence nudged the space rock into the inner solar system, and simulation models show that this happens more often than we originally suspected, with impacts with Earth occurring about once every 250 million years. So we've got time, yet.

While not the most ground-breaking event in science this year, it's still really cool that researchers spotted a metal-laden white dwarf rocketing against the rotation of the Milky Way at nearly 2 million mph (about 3.2 million km/h) like it was shot out of a cosmic cannon.

And in a lot of ways, it probably was. Astronomers suspect that the white dwarf was the companion to a star that went supernova, and the blast was so violent that the white dwarf remnant shooting through the galaxy has enough velocity to escape the Milky Way entirely and fly off into intergalactic space.

Oh, and if you thought you were done with the Jeff Bezos-Elon Musk fight over who gets dibs on outer space, you'd be wrong. By the middle of August, Jeff Bezos was suing NASA over its awarding SpaceX the Artemis lunar lander program, even though Bezos's Blue Origin bid was almost twice what SpaceX's bid was.

While this isn't really a fight between Musk and Bezos as much as it is a fight between Musk's SpaceX and the legacy military-industrial complex mainstays like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Northrup Grumman, Bezos's lawsuit did manage to delay the Artemis mission and push it back to 2025 at the earliest.

September

Poisonous cane toads that even notoriously prickly Australian wildlife won't mess with have nothing to fear but themselves – literally.

The invasive cane toad, first introduced into Australia in the 1930s from South America as a pest control measure has spiraled out of control and now 200 million cane toads in Australia have made cannibalizing the young a key part of their development out of the tadpole stage, according to a recent study.

This in turn has made the cane toad hatchlings evolve to mature faster so that they can defend themselves against their older counterparts. This in turn is making the cane toads evolve to be even more ferocious in hunting down hatchlings to eat in a twisted evolutionary arms race.

"These toads have gotten to the point where their own worst enemy is themselves," the study author said.

We also saw new research in September that quantified the damage that a particularly strong solar flare could cause, and it's not good.

A powerful solar flare wouldn't harm any of us on the ground, not directly anyway. Earth's magnetic field protects us from any danger from the charged particles flying off the Sun during a solar flare event. But electronics? Yeah, they're toast.

The research revealed that there aren't enough redundancies in internet transmission capacity, particularly with undersea cables, which could be fried during a solar flare event and which could take months to replace.

Meanwhile, North America could be cut off from the rest of the world's internet until the cables were replaced, causing $7 billion dollars of economic damage a day while the internet remains out of commission.

In happier news, SpaceX's Inspiration4 mission, the first privately chartered space flight to orbit the Earth, helped raise tens of millions of dollars for St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital, which treats pediatric cancers and other diseases.

Inspiration4 also gave us something new from SpaceX: a cupola on the Dragon Crew capsule. This domed window gave the crew members stunning views of the Earth as they orbited, making everyone else on Earth jealous as hell.

See more

October

We had a couple of choice bits in October as well. First, there was news that researchers in Germany broke the record for the coldest temperature ever achieved in a lab.

Using a special state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, made from 100,000 rubidium atoms held in place with magnetic fields and cooled to about 2 billionths of a degree Celsius, the researchers dropped the condensate from a 120-foot tall freefall tower while flipping the magnetic field off and on rapidly.

This dropped the temperature of the atoms to just 38 picokelvins, or about 38 trillions of a degree Kelvin above absolute zero, for roughly two seconds.

Speaking of cold, a comprehensive study of wooly mammoth fossils and other environmental samples collected over 20 years claims to prove that the mammoths weren't hunted to extinction, but rather died off because of climate change.

Coming out of the last ice age, mammoths were adapted to finding and eating a tough kind of plant life that can survive in snowy climates, but when the snows melted, those plants got pushed out by the marshy plant life of a tundra, which the mammoths apparently couldn't eat, or which at least didn't provide the proper nutrients.

Finally, we got word toward the end of October that we might have spotted our first exoplanet in another galaxy. Unfortunately, it appears to be orbiting far enough away from a black hole or neutron star that we won't be able to confirm it using the transit method for about 70 years.

November

In November, we learned that it's no use hiding from you cat, they know where you are at all times thanks to some special process that can link sound to location like pinning audio cues on a 2D mental map.

Even when they're not looking, they're still watching you, apparently.

We also got new evidence of a unique kind of fast radio burst, one whose source appears to be repeatedly exploding, as many as 1,652 times in a single 60 hour period of observation.

The researchers who spotted it are at a loss to describe what could be causing such an unusual, and rapid, pattern, but they have some guesses.

We saw more space debris make the news in November as well, as several incidents involving space debris threatening the International Space Station made the news, including an anti-satellite weapons test conducted by Russia that sent shrapnel from the satellite into the path of the ISS, forcing astronauts to enter their Dragon and Soyuz capsules as an emergency precaution.

December

Closing out the year, we had a new EP drop from Mathematician and electronic music artist Dr. Valery Vermeulen that used data from black hole collisions and black hole simulations to create sometimes-haunting soundscapes.

We interviewed Vermeulen and explored the overlap between art and science, how we can use unorthodox tools to make complex science more accessible to the masses, and why that ultimately matters.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from black holes, the Parker Solar Probe finally touched the Sun's outer layer this year.

The announcement in December was met with a lot of understandable fanfare and wonder, but the accomplishment will also better help us understand solar winds and other space weather produced by the Sun.

And we obviously can't close out the year without talking about the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) launch. The successor to Hubble, JWST will be the next-generation observation platform for astronomers for the next five to ten years, and probably longer.

The incredibly delicate deployment is still underway as you read this, but we're getting closer to having an entirely new eye on the universe that will let us see further back in time to the earliest galaxies and stars to ever have formed. Exciting stuff, assuming everything goes right.

Fingers crossed, otherwise that'll be a crappy way to kick off the year in science for 2022.

John (He / Him / His) is TechRadar's Computing Staff Writer and is also a programmer, gamer, activist, and Brooklyn College alum currently living in Brooklyn, NY. Named by the CTA as a CES 2020 Media Trailblazer for his science and technology reporting, John specializes in all areas of computer science, including industry news, hardware reviews, PC gaming, as well as general science writing and the social impact of the tech industry.

You can find him online on Twitter at @thisdotjohn

Currently playing: Back 4 Blood, Metroid Dread, EVE Online

"This is a little colder than the last glacial maximum, so the animals that survived the blast got hit with the cold."

Title:

Content: AR6 and The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum

By Andy May

The PETM or Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum was a warm period that began between 56.3 and 55.9 Ma (million years ago). The IPCC AR6 report (actually a draft, not a final edited report), released to the public on August 9, 2021, suggests that this warm period is similar to what is happening today and they expect to happen in the future (IPCC, 2021, pp. 2-82 & 5-14). During the PETM, it was very warm and average global surface temperatures probably peaked between 25.5°C and 26°C briefly, compared to a global surface temperature average of about 14.5°C today, as shown in Figure 1.

Today we have tens of thousands of daily temperature measurements around the world and can calculate a fairly accurate global average surface temperature. To construct a global average for the PETM we must rely on proxy temperatures, such as oxygen isotope ratios, Calcium/Magnesium ratios in fossil shells, and fossil membrane lipids that are sensitive to temperature like Tex86. Proxy temperature values are sparsely located and have a temporal resolution, 56 Ma, of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. Thus, in terms of rate of temperature change, they are not comparable to today’s monthly global averages.

Before diving into the PETM, we will provide some geological perspective. According to Christopher Scotese, the highest global average temperature in the Phanerozoic (the age of complex shelled organisms, or the past 550 million years) was the Triassic hothouse event, following the end of the Karoo Ice Age, around 250-300 Ma. Global average surface temperatures peaked then at about 27.9°C.

The Late Cretaceous was the next warm period and global temperatures reached 24°C by 80 Ma. Around 65 Ma, the famous Chicxulub bolide impact occurred near the Yucatan Peninsula creating a 100 million megaton blast that ended the dinosaurs, except for birds. Global temperatures decreased rapidly to a minimum of around 12°C. This is a little colder than the last glacial maximum, so the animals that survived the blast got hit with the cold. This cold period was brief, perhaps only ten years, but very cold.

After recovering from the blast, the world returned to a global surface temperature of 22°C, just above its Phanerozoic average surface temperature of 20°C. Then, about nine million years later, the PETM warming occurred, it is labeled in Figure 1. In addition to the PETM, the EECO (Early-Eocene Climatic Optimum, mismarked in Scotese’s figure as EEOC), the MECO (Middle-Eocene Climatic Optimum), the EOT (Eocene-Oligocene Transition) Cooling, MMCO (Middle-Miocene Climatic Optimum), the LGM (last glacial maximum), and the preindustrial (Little Ice Age) temperature of 13.8° are identified in Figure 1. The current global average surface temperature of 14.5°C, and the possible “PAW” or projected anthropogenic global warming temperature of 19.8°C are also identified. Even if the most extreme projected anthropogenic warming occurs, it only takes Earth to its Phanerozoic average temperature of 20°C. This gives us an idea of just how historically, or geologically, cold it really is today.

Mixing proxy temperature resolutions of hundreds of thousands of years and modern instrumental temperature averages must be done with care. Scotese’s proxy temperatures are based on geological glacial signatures and estimated equator-to-pole temperature gradients. They are reasonable, but they have a temporal resolution of tens-of-millions of years. Given this resolution, we cannot compare past rates of warming, or cooling, to the past 170 years, the period with daily global thermometer coverage. His points do not have the temporal resolution or accuracy to allow for that.

The PETM

Near the beginning of the EECO, there was an abrupt, but geologically short (< ~200,000 years) period of extreme warming usually called the “PETM” (Scotese, 2015). The PETM is the warmest of several short, very warm periods or “hyperthermals” that occurred in the late Paleocene and early Eocene between 56 and 53 Ma.

The PETM hyperthermal may have caused Earth’s surface to warm to nearly 26°C (79°F) at its peak, nearly 12°C warmer than today. At this time, SSTs (sea surface temperatures) reached 33°C in the North Atlantic, near Denmark (Stokke, Jones, Tierney, Svensen, & Whiteside, 2020). The PETM latitude of Denmark was about 45°N, south of its present latitude of 55.6°N, see Figure 3 for its location at the time. The warming is contemporaneous with a small-scale marine extinction event. The high temperatures also occur at about the same time as a carbon isotopic excursion (CIE) event. This means the carbon-13 and carbon-12 ratio changed abruptly for a short time, geologically. The CIE suggests a flow of carbon compounds, enriched in carbon-12, into the ocean and atmosphere. Hydrocarbons are enriched in carbon-12 because plants prefer it over carbon-13, so the source could be hydrocarbons, such as methane clathrates. Clathrates are compounds in which molecules of one component, in this case methane, are trapped in another, like water. Methane clathrates are sometimes called methane hydrates.

Figure 2 shows the section studied by Stokke, et al. There is an unconformity below the section, but the PETM deposit is thought to be complete. Sedimentation was very rapid and the entire 24-meter PETM section was probably deposited in 100,000 years. NAIP (North Atlantic Igneous Province, see Figure 3) ash deposits within the PETM body are dated to 55.6 Ma. Contemporaneously ocean pH and deep-ocean oxygen levels lowered (anoxia) (IPCC, 2021, p 2-82).

It is only barely visible in Figure 2, but after the unconformity, and just prior to the PETM warming event, North Sea SSTs drop to 14.5°C, before rising rapidly to 33°C. Today’s global, area-weighted, average SST is about 18.3°C, using NOAA MIMOC and University of Hamburg multiyear ocean mixed layer temperature data. Today’s average North Sea SST is about 11°C according to Climate-Data.org, so the temperature of 14.5°C prior to the PETM is a little warmer than today. According to NOAA MIMOC data, the global average SST, in the mixed layer, at 45°N is about 10°C today.

NAIP volcanism was active during and before the PETM. Basalts, five kilometers thick, were emplaced on eastern Greenland and the Faroe Islands between 56 and 55.6 Ma. This pre-PETM volcanic episode would have generated sulfur compounds. The sulfur compounds (such as SO2 and SO3), when combined with water, generate sulfuric acid, which cooled the atmosphere and oceans, lowered ocean pH, and removed oxygen from both the atmosphere and oceans.

Francesca McInerney and Scott Wing have also written about the PETM (McInerney & Wing, 2011). They emphasize the global impact of the event. They believe that global surface temperature increased 5-8°C. While Stokke, et al. place the beginning of the PETM at 55.9 Ma, McInerney and Wing place it at 56.0 to 56.3 Ma. The time difference is not significant, given the dating uncertainty.

The data suggests that the PETM extinctions were quite limited and coincident with a large increase in mammalian species. Approximately 30-50% of benthic (bottom dwelling) foraminifera and dinoflagellates (microscopic marine animals) went extinct. The benthic foraminifera that went extinct were mostly from the middle to deeper depths in the oceans. Some speculate that the extinctions were due to greater corrosivity of deeper waters, lower oxygen levels, and/or higher temperatures (McInerney & Wing, 2011). Other benthic animals, such as ostracodes, living in the same environment as the foraminifera did not show the same loss in numbers. McInerney and Wing speculate that the extinctions were mostly due to higher temperatures, but this is unclear. Temperatures were higher at the surface and on land, yet life thrived in these environments at the time.

Oddly, while benthic forams did not do well during the PETM, McInerney and Wing report their planktonic (floating) cousins did very well, increasing in both size and diversity. Some planktonic species greatly increased their range and numbers during the PETM.

On land, new mammals, especially primates, evolved at this time and spread widely. The PETM and EECO saw a “burst of mammalian first appearances.” The period is sometimes called the “mammalian dispersal event” (McInerney & Wing, 2011). This burst of new mammalian first appearances is seen in both North America and Europe, and coincides with the onset of the PETM CIE.

Besides mammals, the PETM and EECO saw the evolution and dispersal of numerous new and existing species of turtles and lizards. Suggestions that the PETM was so warm it was deadly in the tropics are unlikely to be true “because terrestrial ﬂoras from the tropics become more rather than less diverse during the PETM” (McInerney & Wing, 2011).

During the PETM, temperatures increased 6 to 12°C and there was no polar ice. Palm trees grew in the Arctic, and Antarctica was covered in forests. Biological diversity greatly increased during the PETM, especially among terrestrial plants (McInerney & Wing, 2011). Some plant species appeared to disappear during the PETM but reappeared later, suggesting they did not extirpate, but were simply not preserved for a short time. Many species flourished and expanded into new areas. The first occurrence of mangrove palms dates to the PETM. Overall, nature blossomed when global temperatures were likely 12°C warmer than today.

The cause of the PETM is unknown. As mentioned above, Ella Stokke’s work suggests that the warm period and the extinctions are closely related to, and possibly caused by, contemporaneous North Atlantic Igneous Province (NAIP) volcanism. The volcanism could have caused oxygen deprivation in the Atlantic Ocean, especially in the deep Atlantic, causing the benthic foraminifera extinctions. The NAIP region and the Fur Island, Denmark, area studied by Stokke and her colleagues are shown in Figure 3. The Fur Island outcrops provide a fairly complete geological record spanning the Paleocene-Eocene boundary. The sediments include volcanic ash beds from NAIP, fossil-rich claystones, and shales with clear records of the carbon isotope excursion and the PETM event. They used the TEX86 temperature proxy to estimate SST. The NAIP emplacement was most active between 56 and 54 Ma during the opening of the North Atlantic.

Many theories for the warming have been proposed, including a sudden release of CO2 and methane, but the evidence is ambiguous. Initially it was speculated that volcanism caused the release of a large amount of methane clathrates, which then caused temperatures to rise.

A lot of carbon dioxide and methane certainly entered the atmosphere during this time. The main problem with the methane clathrate theory is that there were not enough of them to supply the necessary carbon (McInerney & Wing, 2011). Other possible sources of the excess carbon in the atmosphere and oceans at the time, enriched in carbon-12, are volcanism and contact metamorphism in the NAIP (Stokke, Jones, Tierney, Svensen, & Whiteside, 2020). McInerney and Wing prefer the theory that Antarctic peat and permafrost melted and were the source of the excess carbon-12.

While total atmospheric carbon did increase in the PETM, climate models have not been able to reproduce the large temperature increase with reasonable parameters. The CO2 estimates (see Figure 4) that we have from the period are far too low. Even if the atmosphere is assumed to contain 16 times the preindustrial concentration of CO2 (4,800 ppm) many times the level suggested by the fossil evidence shown in Figure 4, and the climate sensitivity is assumed to be 3°C/2xCO2 (McInerney & Wing, 2011), the CO2 forcing is still not enough to cause the warming observed in the sedimentary record (IPCC, 2021, 5-14). The abbreviation “°C/2xCO2” means the rise in temperature due to doubling the CO2 atmospheric concentration.

NASA claims their simulations can model the PETM temperature rise if they incorporate very high CO2 sensitivity. Jiang Zhu and colleagues successfully simulated the PETM with existing data, but their model suggests a climate sensitivity of 6.6°C/2xCO2, which is not reasonable (Zhu, Poulsen, & Tierney, 2019). The IPCC AR6 very likely range of sensitivity is 2°C to 5°C/2xCO2 (IPCC, 2021, pp. TS-58). In AR5, the IPCC is more explicit: “ECS is very unlikely greater than 6°C is an expert judgment informed by several lines of evidence.” (IPCC, 2013, p. 1111). AR5 follows with a list of the evidence why ECS is not greater than 6.

Between 55 and 56 Ma, there are 16 proxy estimates of CO2 levels (Beerling & Royer, 2011, S.I. Table 1). The 16 proxy samples represent seven unique sample times, which are plotted in Figure 4. According to a summary paper by David Beerling and Dana Royer in Nature Geoscience, the CO2 concentration was about 487 ppm (328-667 ppm) during the PETM event. The dating error for the samples is estimated to be ±500,000 years and the error in the CO2 estimates is ±235 ppm (Beerling & Royer, 2011). There are four methods of determining ancient CO2 atmospheric concentrations according to Beerling and Royer. The two terrestrial methods are the abundance of stomatal pores on fossil leaves and the carbon isotope composition of carbonates in fossil soils. Leaf stomata reduce in number when CO2 becomes abundant and gain in number when it is lower, as it is today.

The two marine methods are the carbon isotope composition of phytoplankton fossils and the boron isotope composition of fossil foraminifera. I refer you to Beerling and Royer’s paper and their references for the details of how these methods work. There is also a decent summary in AR6 (IPCC, 2021, 2-15). The general uncertainty in CO2 concentration estimates in the Eocene is nearly 100%, that is the actual value is between twice the most likely value and half of it.

Stokke’s Denmark SSTs are also plotted in Figure 4 for comparison. The CO2 estimates are somewhat lower than other PETM estimates and only slightly higher than today, but global average temperatures were 10-12°C higher.

Today we measure atmospheric CO2 continuously, many times a day, and each sample has a precise date and time. The data from 56 Ma is obviously not comparable to today. Beerling and Royer claim the highest CO2 level occurred 52 Ma, over four million years after the PETM, see Figure 5. They have two CO2 estimates from that time period: 1,868 ppm (1,092 – 3.501 ppm) and 659 ppm (439 – 878 ppm). Elevated CO2 levels existed from 54 to 32 Ma and average around 800 ppm. The lack of correlation between increasing CO2 and temperature from the period 52 to 57 Ma is easily seen in Figure 4.

During the PETM, we can be confident that CO2 levels were only slightly higher than today, not high enough to be a significant factor in the warming event, as acknowledged in AR6 (IPCC, 2021, p 5-14). We certainly do not have any idea about the rate of PETM warming or the rate of CO2 increase, relative to today, since the estimates are thousands to hundreds of thousands of years apart.

The IPCC wants to use the PETM as an example of what can happen today, but they admit low to medium confidence in the amount of carbon released during the PETM and their inferred increase in CO2 can only account for half the estimated warming during that time (IPCC, 2021, p. 5-14). They are also trying, without success so far, to model global temperatures in the PETM. Their models of the CO2 impact on climate in the PETM and other selected periods do not predict the warming observed, so one could reasonably conclude that this means the models are not working. But, in AR6, they conclude that it means the feedbacks to surface temperature are changing with surface temperature. Thus the feedbacks have feedbacks (IPCC, 2021, p. 7-78). They do not believe the models can be incorrect, they conclude that we simply need to introduce another factor. This is Karl Popper’s definition of pseudoscience, a hypothesis that cannot be falsified. The PETM is an interesting time in geological history, but the causes of the warming, the lower ocean pH, the limited ocean extinctions, and increasing mammalian diversity are unclear. One thing for sure, the PETM is not an analogue for today.

The bibliography can be downloaded here.

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What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

"McInerney and Wing speculate that the extinctions were mostly due to higher temperatures, but this is unclear."

According to most recent research, what is the primary cause of wooly mammoth extinction?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

What aspects of climate change contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

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During the last ice age, woolly mammoths were among the largest creatures to walk the North American landscape. Now, a team of American and Canadian researchers has discovered that the elephantine beasts took the “walking” part of their job description quite seriously.

Based on an analysis of a single tusk from an adult male woolly mammoth found in Alaska, the scientists determined that the animal journeyed about 70,000 kilometres over the course of its life – a trip equivalent to nearly twice around the world.

“The range is staggering. ... He definitely moved across a huge, huge area,” said Clement Bataille, an assistant professor of earth and environmental science at the University of Ottawa and a co-author on the study.

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Dr. Bataille said the high degree of mobility may have been part of the mammoth’s mating strategy. In comparison, African elephants can travel a lot, too, he added, and males typically depart from the groups they are born into once they reach sexual maturity.

However, Dr. Bataille and his colleagues note that the requirement for such a large range to roam in may have ultimately hastened the extinction of the species once the climate warmed and the shaggy grazers were hemmed in by shifting vegetation patterns. That, in turn, would have left them more vulnerable to predators, including human hunters.

The study began in 2018 when Matthew Wooller, director of the Stable Isotope Facility at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, invited Dr. Bataille and other colleagues to join an effort to extract information from a mammoth fossil discovered in 2010 on the north side of the Brooks mountain range, a few hundred kilometres from the Arctic Ocean. The fossil dates back 17,000 years, to a time when much of Alaska was a glacier-free grass plain connected to Siberia by the Bering land bridge.

The researchers nicknamed their specimen “Kik,” after a river system near the place where it was found.

Using the mammoth’s sliced-open tusk, they obtained detailed measurements of oxygen and strontium isotopes that were locked in the ivory material. The mammoth acquired the isotopes, which vary according to local geology, through the vegetation and water it consumed over the course of its life. As the tusks grew at the rate of about five to six centimetres each year, they recorded changes in isotope levels, which reveal when and how often the animal moved between locations with different geology.

The team also tested isotope levels in rodents that were gathered in different parts of Alaska as part of museum collections. That allowed them to match their mammoth isotope measurements to geographic locations. Finally, they used artificial intelligence software to reconstruct possible paths the mammoth may have taken, working backward from the location where it died at the age of 28.

The results suggest that Kik began its life in the Yukon River basin of central Alaska. As a juvenile it moved regularly in a north-south pattern, during a time when it was likely part of a herd, the researchers said. At about age 16 its movements transitioned to longer distance travel, often centred on certain core areas where it stayed for periods of time before setting out for new pastures.

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“It just takes off and goes on these 500- to 600-kilometre trips all at one time, going from one core area to the next,” Dr. Bataille said. The study found that some of the places where the mammoth lingered are frequented today by migrating herds of caribou.

Jeffrey Rasic, a study co-author and archaeologist with the U.S. National Parks Service based in Fairbanks, said the data suggest that Kik followed a predictable sequence of movements. If that was typical for Alaskan mammoths, it would have provided a huge incentive for hunters moving into the area from Asia to situate themselves in places where they could reliably expect to meet their quarry at certain times of the year, rather than pursuing them over a vast landscape.

“That would be an ideal set-up for intercepting a really big ticket meal item like a mammoth,” he said.

Vincent Lynch, an evolutionary biologist at the University at Buffalo who was not involved in the study, said that while it’s not surprising to find animals moving over great distances, it’s quite a different matter to show that it happened in a species that no longer exists.

“That’s the trick that makes this study interesting,” he said. “It helps us better reconstruct the behaviour and ecology of mammoths in a way that’s really remarkable for an extinct species.”

Dr. Lynch, who has studied the genetics of the last known population of woolly mammoths, which died out about 4,000 years ago, said it’s an open question whether large-scale movement was a disadvantage.

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“We tend to think that widely distributed species which are mobile ... might be better able to find new habitats should the environment change. But could mammoths find refuge in a world that was warming?” he said.

One obvious limitation of the study is that its conclusions depend entirely on the movements of a single individual. Dr. Bataille said that he and his colleagues plan to perform a similar analysis on a female mammoth specimen for comparison.

The team’s study was published Thursday in the journal Science.

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"The primary focus of conservation efforts needs to be on the prevention of species loss, not on de-extinction."

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The Future

A zoologist explains why the project to resurrect the wooly mammoth should go extinct

De-extinction, if it is ever possible, will not be simple.
Key Takeaways
  • Over the past couple of decades, a handful of de-extinction projects have explored the potential of "resurrecting" the wooly mammoth.
  • The term is a bit misleading: Rather than resurrecting an extinct species, the process would essentially modify the genome of an existing species in order to give it traits an extinct species once possessed.
  • The British zoologist Matthew Cobb argues that the primary focus of conservation efforts needs to be on the prevention of species loss, not on de-extinction.

Excerpted from As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age by Matthew Cobb. Copyright © 2022. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

The most truly god-like ability provided by genetic engineering is the apparent possibility of resurrecting extinct species – ‘de-extinction’. The most attention-grabbing proposal, which has been around for over a decade, is the idea of recreating the woolly mammoth, using our knowledge of the mammoth genome, obtained from tissue frozen in the tundra. It is claimed that de-extincting mammoths and other large tundra-dwelling mammals would not only enable us to encounter fantastic beasts but would also help mitigate some of the effects of climate change – as these creatures trampled and disturbed the ground, they would supposedly allow the winter frost to penetrate deeper, keeping carbon trapped for longer.

Leaving aside the obvious lessons of Jurassic Park, the technical issues involved in recreating a mammoth appear insurmountable. It would require taking the genome of the mammoth’s closest living relative – an Asian elephant – and introducing all the relevant changes (synthesising a whole chromosome is an incredibly arduous process and has not yet been performed in an animal; a woolly mammoth had twenty-nine pairs of chromosomes). These two species split between 2.5 and 5 million years ago; there are millions of base pairs that differ between them. Not all of those differences are significant, and we do not know which are the ones that count, but it is technically possible that all the relevant differences could be identified and then introduced into the elephant genome (the Asian elephant has one fewer pair of chromosomes than a mammoth, so the whole process might prove problematic).

Assuming these difficulties can be overcome, the modified chromosomes would then have to be introduced into an elephant cell and safely interact there with all of the cell’s organelles and molecules. But this cellular environment would be different in so many unknown ways to the cells that the mammoth genome co-evolved with that there is no guarantee that this would work. As an indication of the challenge involved, it took Venter’s group twenty years to master this procedure in a bacterial cell, which has only one chromosome and does not have a nucleus or any of the complex structures found in eukaryotes such as elephants and mammoths and does not develop into a large, hairy, intelligent animal.

Even if all this went smoothly, the resultant embryo would have to be implanted into a surrogate – again, an Asian elephant would be best – and the myriad interactions between embryo and mother would have to function appropriately for months and not kill either or both. This is much trickier than you might think – a few years ago a Spanish-led team of researchers tried to clone an extinct subspecies of Pyrenean ibex; hundreds of embryos were created and implanted in a series of surrogate mothers of the same species, but only one animal was born and she died a few minutes after birth. Things could so easily go awry using a surrogate from a different species.

Perhaps for this reason, one version of the project involves artificial wombs (these are currently hypothetical), like those in Brave New World, but which would presumably have to be the size of a small car. Finally, mammoths were not simply bags of cells and DNA, but complex social animals that lived in an environment that has now disappeared along with the cultural aspects of their social organisation. Even if every one of those unbelievably complex steps could be overcome, there would be profound ethical questions about the well-being of these extraordinary animals in the alien world in which they would find themselves.

As a result of these very real problems, the woolly mammoth de-extinction scheme, initially the brainchild of George Church, has recently become less mammoth in scope. The current version of the project, partly funded by Revive & Restore (R&R), a US foundation co-founded by Stewart Brand, focuses on identifying those alleles that adapted the mammoth to cold temperatures, with the dream of maybe some day creating an elephant with enough mammothy characteristics to enable it to live in northern climes. By 2022, a biotech start-up co-founded by Church called Colossal Biosciences had raised $75 million* to try to create a ‘cold-resistant elephant’, which it was claimed would be ‘functionally equivalent’ to a mammoth. So not a mammoth.

All these nuances were lost in the inevitable media excitement at the Colossal announcement, which yet again led to headlines about de-extincting mammoths (these have recurred every few years). Tori Herridge, a mammoth expert at the Natural History Museum in London, was invited to be involved but declined. She explained why in a thoughtful article in Nature:

Colossal has committed to ‘radical’ transparency, inclusion and community engagement, but has the chance to set the bar even higher, by empowering the public as part of its de-extinction journey. … The ethical road to de-extinction has to include informed citizen voices, alongside experts and activists. This might mean that the process takes longer than five years, but private enterprises working for the common good shouldn’t shy away from the views of those they seek to serve. Let the people decide the future world they want to build.

As evolutionary biologist and R&R board member Beth Shapiro explains in her best-selling if somewhat misleadingly titled How to Clone a Mammoth, it is extremely unlikely that we will ever truly recreate any extinct species, not only because it is technically extremely difficult, but also because the ecological relationships that made up their world have all been lost. In that respect, extinction is indeed forever.

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Even more disturbing and god-like are the semi-serious, profoundly problematic proposals involving the recreation of Neanderthals – extinct humans who lived in Europe, Asia and the Middle East before us. Leaving aside some absurd internet fantasists, no scientist is actually considering such an experiment – cloning a Neanderthal and implanting the embryo in a surrogate human mother would be nauseatingly unethical on every level. However, researchers have studied the function of Neanderthal genes in human brain organoids – lentil-size blobs of tissue that can be grown in the laboratory from stem cells. A Neanderthal allele in a gene that plays a role in neural development and function altered the organisation and activity of otherwise human tissue. Brain organoid research is slightly creepy (they spontaneously grow eye-like structures that respond to light) as well as being a potential ethical minefield (could such a structure become even dimly conscious? How would we know?), but the researchers involved claim that this kind of study might shed light on how the functions of some of our genes may have differed in our close relatives.

Despite all the substantial technical and ethical issues relating to de-extinction, in 2014 the International Union for the Conservation of Nature set up a De-extinction Task Force which produced a set of guiding principles outlining the kind of detailed ecological and financial risk assessments that would be necessary before genetic engineering was applied to endangered or extinct species. In 2019, a subgroup of the Task Force published a positive exploration of the potential impact of genetic technology on conservation. At around the same time, ecologists from the University of California Santa Barbara and Imperial College took a far more cautious view, arguing that any de-extinction program should focus on recently extinct species (their ecology would be more likely to be intact) that could be restored in sufficient numbers to enable the recreation of their lost ecological function. That would rule out the mammoth, or a mammothified elephant.

What looks like a spiffy technofix might provoke excitement and attract funding from the public or mega-rich celebrities but is unlikely to be a solution to extinction for any but a tiny handful of cases. If molecular biology really must be employed, then scientists should try cloning dead members of an endangered species to increase genetic diversity, as has been done in the case of the US black-footed ferret, with funding from the R&R foundation. In 2022, an attempt to recover the genome of the extinct Christmas Island rat, using different extant rat genomes as models, showed that it was impossible to recover around 5 per cent of the genome, with over twenty genes being completely absent. Key genes involved in the sense of smell and the immune system were particularly affected.

De-extinction, if it is ever possible, will not be simple. The primary focus of conservation efforts needs to be on the prevention of species loss, not on de-extinction. In the vast majority of cases, that will involve basic work to prevent habitat degradation and to keep humans away from the endangered organisms. That might be less sexy, but it is a lot more sensible.

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How did humans contribute to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

**Explanation:**
- Sentences 1, 2, and 3 reference possible environmental causes (climate fluctuations and temperature extremes) that contributed to extinction.

According to most recent research, what is the primary cause of wooly mammoth extinction?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

What environmental factors contributed to the wooly mammoth extinction?

- Sentence 5 hints at the role of human hunters in mammoth decline, implying early humans may have targeted mammoths as prey.

How did humans contribute to the wooly mammoth extinction?

What are the causes of the wooly mammoth extinction?

- Sentence 4, while forward-looking, underscores the modern lesson from mammoth extinction events, emphasizing conservation to prevent species loss.


**Key Sentences Based on Importance to Your Information Request (Greenland’s Rare earth minerals, estimated value, location, extraction, interested countries/corporations):**

- "AEX Gold aims to invest in Greenland through its new gold mining project."

- "We have a five-year plan where we want to get into production at Nalunaq and use the cash generated to fund exploration in the wider district."

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- "Mining them also affects the environment, since their ores can be laced with radioactive materials such as thorium and uranium."

- "Refining the minerals can also generate toxic and radioactive waste, which poses environmental and health risks if not properly disposed of."

- "Much of the world’s supply comes from China, which has used them as a geopolitical tool."

- "Other countries have also moved to reduce their reliance on China."

- "Australia is spending millions to develop a rare earths mine and processing plant in its Northern Territory."

- "Rare earth minerals are critical for the global clean energy transition, as they are components of the magnets used in electric vehicles and wind turbines."

- "Take China, with its quasi-monopoly on rare earths and permanent magnets and prices rising by 50-90% in the past year alone."

- "Supply of raw materials has become a real geopolitical tool."

- "Swedish Deputy Prime Minister Ebba Busch said Thursday that Europe’s independence from Russia and China will begin with this mine."

**Note:**
While the provided text confirms corporate interest (AEX Gold) and global strategic dynamics, it does not give specific estimates for Greenland’s rare earth reserves, their precise locations, or assessed values.

It does highlight significant environmental and geopolitical challenges and the involvement of other nations/corporations, namely China, Australia, and Sweden (LKAB), in rare earths extraction and supply chain development.

**Key Sentences Based on Importance to Your Information Request (Greenland’s Rare earth minerals, estimated value, location, extraction, interested countries/corporations):**

- "AEX Gold aims to invest in Greenland through its new gold mining project."

Title:

Content: AEX Gold aims to invest in Greenland through its new gold mining project

Traditionally known for its fishing and hunting industries, Greenland is fast becoming the next significant area of exploration for mining businesses. The largest island in the world, Greenland remains one of the least populated areas worldwide with 56,000 citizens, and it has sought to attract local and foreign investment across a number of new projects.

The island’s current position remains complex. A sovereign government, it is positioned under the Danish kingdom who provide grants to support its local economy. To further its independence and bolster its economy to create increased tax revenue, Greenland has embraced the exploration of new mining projects as well as utilising all the renewable and local resources it has to offer.

Rich in rare-earth minerals, gold, iron-ore, uranium, in addition to hydro and wind power, Greenland’s favourable legal framework and robust infrastructure, particularly in South Greenland, have factored into AEX Gold’s vision to explore through its Greenlandic subsidiary, Nalunaq Gold Mine, situated in the Nanortalik Gold belt, Southern Greenland.

Acquiring an existing Exploitation Licence in 2015, the company is at the advanced exploration stage of its Nalunaq property, including the previously operating Nalunaq Gold Mine.   It also holds Exploration Licences at the early exploration stage Vagar and Tartoq properties.

Hosting a high-grade NI 43-101 compliant gold resource estimate of 263k oz (inferred) at 18.7 g/t and a number of regional exploration targets, AEX Gold has undertaken three years of exploration at Nalunaq, developing an updated geological model and an extension of the main vein strike length up to 1km.

“The government is very supportive, so it's about having a sound exploration strategy. We are very much focused on that, as we have an asset package that we think we can grow and create a lot of value,” explains Chief Executive Officer, Eldur Olafsson.

Originating from Iceland, Olafsson has gained extensive experience of the local geography. Focusing on mining projects in Greenland since 2012, he has analysed the country’s potential against the backdrop of environmental responsibilities and associated legalities with partner SRK Exploration Services. Through this process, the business has turned its attentions solely towards gold exploration.

“The known gold deposits in Greenland are in an area where the climate is mild and, given our experience, logistics are relatively easy. Gold opportunities are easier to finance than larger base metals projects and our perception was that we could fully fund projects like these through our support here in Iceland and in the UK market,” he explains.

“We started looking for opportunities in the South Greenland Gold Province and became aware of this historically producing mine. We were attracted by the extremely high-grade potential of the resource and the fact that the project had significant infrastructure in place.  We believed there were significant opportunities to materially improve the mining operation that had been run by previous operators.”

Extensive exploration

Throughout the exploration of high-grade resources, Olafsson is proud to remain hands on and is regularly seen on site. By undertaking various technical studies, AEX has gained the ability to comprehensively analyse similar types of assets with potential.  After acquiring the Nalunaq project in 2015 the company has continued to expand its portfolio. Whilst Nalunaq encompasses the required licence to explore and recommence production at the old gold mine, they own the larger Vagar exploration licence, situated a few kilometres to the west of the mine, where AEX believes the ground is prospective for the discovery of further Nalunaq-type deposits.  In addition, they also own the early stage Tartoq Project to the North West of Nalunaq. Each licence area is at a different stage of exploration which supports AEX’s aim of having a continuous pipeline of projects being brought into production.

“We have a total of 690sqkm of licences in south Greenland and we're the only active listed gold company in Greenland. Previous operators undertook very little forward-looking exploration once the mine was in production.  It's a very under-explored region so we intend to recommence production within the next two years at Nalunaq in order to support our exploration in the larger licences in the next 5-10 years,” he says.

“Iceland is a short distance from Greenland, so logistically it’s good for us. Additionally, in Iceland you need to be really self-sufficient, and the same can be said for those in Greenland. We don't have as many people or the multitude of services that you would have in other countries which encourages you to think creatively,” he adds.

Consequently, the company has sought to maximise efficiency whilst keeping costs down, yet all the time adding increased value across its operations.

By acquiring a high-grade deposit, less material is needed to be broken down, lowering AEX Gold’s carbon footprint. Everything taken out of the mine from underground will be processed and shipped out to a different processing facility, or processed on site adhering to the current environmental guidelines. Historically, electricity has been generated through the use of traditional fossil fuels, something which is steadily changing throughout Greenland.

“We're using oil to put in generators or to power mobile mining equipment which is high cost both in monetary and environmental terms.   Greenland currently has five hydroelectric power plants and they are looking at building more in south Greenland,” says Olafsson.

Seeing huge opportunities, he explains that the use of hydropower and wind power would complement AEX Gold’s operations, not only in its existing exploration activities, but with the implementation of an electric mining fleet with electricity being obtained from local renewable resources.

Providing local opportunities

In the future, it will be essential for Greenland to gain further revenue to unlock opportunities and services for its citizens. This is something Olafsson believes that AEX Gold can help with due to its knowledge of Iceland as it has many similarities to Greenland and has been through a period of comparable change.

“Greenland is in a similar position to Iceland not so long ago. Iceland didn't have a high education rate and wasn’t wealthy compared to other European countries, with economic and cultural activities that were very insular. We are now at the highest level of all parameters in terms of education, wealth per family, etc. and this has stemmed from improving the breadth of schooling and creating opportunities for people to grow and develop outside of the traditional areas of agriculture and fisheries.

“Our aim is that the majority of employees will be Greenlandic, but it will take time. Greenland has a large number of people competing for jobs in the fisheries and tourist centres. It is important that Greenlanders are able to access programmes that will allow them to consider other career options. In Iceland we are importing a lot of people to work in different industries in our country because we don't have enough people. This might be the case for Greenlanders as well if the anticipated growth of the Mining Sector materialises but we want to ensure that, where possible, we use local people first before looking elsewhere.

“The Greenlandic Government provides good support for those who seek education.  There are an increasing number of Greenlandic students attending Danish Universities so that now, for example, we are seeing well qualified Greenlandic geologists available for employment.  There has been a Mining School at Sisimiut for the last 10 years which provides local qualified labour who can take advantage of opportunities in the Mining sector.  You need skilled labour and as we own a mine that was in production for 10 years previously, there is a fair bit of local knowledge that we have been able to use during our exploration work and which we are keen to utilise going forward,” he says.

“We are creating revenue for local communities, creating highly skilled jobs, and are providing benefits where local communities can live better lives and grow as individuals. We need to create opportunities for young people.”

Additionally, by working with local businesses as well as those who have been operating in Greenland for some time, AEX has made a conscious effort to hire companies which can support its growth. AEX have therefore acquired a longstanding relationship with Cartwright Drilling, due to the company’s extensive experience in Greenland and subsequent knowledge of the island’s government systems, processes and practices.

Planning to mine high-grade resources using significant infrastructure already in place, AEX Gold holds extensive licences managed by an experienced team. Previous operations produced between 50,000 to 100,000 ounces a year at 15.4 grams/ton produced and this has provided a benchmark for the company, who will utilise this cash flow to explore the wider region in the long-term.

“We have a five-year plan where we want to get into production at Nalunaq and use the cash generated to fund exploration in the wider district.   We envisage investing a significant amount in exploration assets to provide a portfolio of different deposits that we can bring into production. We are creating a company that has a long-term mission in Greenland to build up local know how to support our aim of ramping up to very profitable production across a number of projects,” notes Olafsson.

“It will create a dramatic effect on the local community and hopefully be a springboard for unlocking much larger potential in Greenland. There are plenty of deposits that have been found, but you have to be able to develop them. You can only do that that with support and cooperation from the local people who believe in your vision.”

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Executives
Eldur Olafsson

- "We have a five-year plan where we want to get into production at Nalunaq and use the cash generated to fund exploration in the wider district."

- "There are plenty of deposits that have been found, but you have to be able to develop them."

- "Mining them also affects the environment, since their ores can be laced with radioactive materials such as thorium and uranium."

Title:

Content: Sweden's new rare-earth metal find likely big deal for Western consumers

Sweden has discovered what is billed as Europe's biggest deposit of rare earth minerals - a crucial component of electronics and clean energy technology - giving a significant boost to the continent's hunt for trade security.

LKAB, the Swedish state-owned mining company, announced Thursday that it found deposits of more than 1 million tonnes of rare earth metals in the country's far northern Lapland province.

Products ranging from smartphones to electric vehicles and even military jets require these rare earth elements, which are not currently mined in Europe, the company said. Much of the world's supply comes from China, which has used them as a geopolitical tool.

LKAB president Jan Mostrom said in a statement that the find could be a "significant building block" for Europe, which faces a "supply problem." But the company also said that it would take at least a decade before the rare earth minerals discovered hit the market.

READ MORE:
* GM reaches supply deals for electric vehicle motor magnets
* Why rare earths are a Five Eyes hot topic
* The race against China's 'rare earths weapon'
* Rare earth could be common in NZ

Here's what to know about this major discovery and what it means for Western consumers.

What are rare earth minerals and where are they found?

Rare earths are not actually that rare. They are a group of 17 chemical elements, composed of scandium, yttrium and lanthanides, according to the US Geological Survey.

But mining rare earth minerals is complex, as supply is not concentrated in one location. Mining them also affects the environment, since their ores can be laced with radioactive materials such as thorium and uranium. Refining the minerals can generate toxic and radioactive waste, which poses environmental and health risks if not properly disposed of.

China hosts the majority of the world's reserve of rare earth minerals and is the world's leading supplier. (The United States was the largest producer several decades ago.) While Brazil and Vietnam have significant reserves, they lag far behind in mining them.

Access to the minerals became an issue in the trade war with China during the administration of US President Donald Trump. Beijing threatened to cut off exports to the United States in 2019 to retaliate against Trump's measures, pushing prices up and prompting Trump to sign an executive order increasing domestic production. The Biden administration has also pushed for investments in that supply chain.

Other countries have also moved to reduce their reliance on China. Australia is spending millions to develop a rare earths mine and processing plant in its Northern Territory.

What are rare earth minerals used for?

Multiple household goods, including televisions, computers, smartphones and lighting use rare earth minerals. Yttrium and europium, for instance, light up iPhone displays and allow them to vibrate.

They are also key elements of US-made defence systems, including night-vision technology, jets and armoured-vehicle alloys.

Rare earth minerals are critical for the global clean energy transition, as they are components of the magnets used in electric vehicles and wind turbines - although recently some companies have developed motors for electric vehicles that do not require rare earths.

What does Sweden's discovery mean for the climate?

LKAB's find was welcomed in Europe, which has faced energy challenges amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The European Union also has a goal of becoming climate neutral by 2050.

In September, a senior EU official said Europe's climate ambitions were at risk without reliable supply chains. "Take China, with its quasi-monopoly on rare earths and permanent magnets and prices rising by 50-90% in the past year alone," wrote Thierry Breton, an EU commissioner. "Supply of raw materials has become a real geopolitical tool."

The European Raw Materials Alliance notes that while the European Union has a massive electric-motor manufacturing sector, "it is almost fully import dependent" when it comes to rare earth permanent magnets.

Swedish Deputy Prime Minister Ebba Busch said Thursday that Europe's independence from Russia and China would begin with this mine.

Political leadership in the continent, she said, "must give the industry the conditions to switch to green and fossil-free production."

The Washington Post

- "Refining the minerals can also generate toxic and radioactive waste, which poses environmental and health risks if not properly disposed of."

Title:

Content: Democracy Dies in Darkness

Sweden’s new rare-earth metal find likely big deal for Western consumers

Sweden has discovered what is billed as Europe’s biggest deposit of rare earth minerals — a crucial component for electronics and clean energy needs — giving a significant boost to the continent’s hunt for trade security.

LKAB, the Swedish state-owned mining company, announced Thursday that it found deposits of more than 1 million tons of rare earth metals in the country’s far northern Lapland province.

Products ranging from smartphones to electric vehicles and even military jets require these rare earth elements which are not currently mined in Europe, the company said. Much of the world’s supply comes from China, which has used them as a geopolitical tool.

LKAB President Jan Mostrom said in a statement that the find could be a “significant building block” for Europe, which faces a “supply problem.” But the company also said that it would take at least a decade before rare earth minerals from the find hit market.

Here’s what to know about this major discovery and what it means for Western consumers.

What are rare earth minerals and where are they found?

Rare earths are not actually that rare. They are a group of 17 chemical elements, composed of scandium, yttrium and lanthanides, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

But mining rare earth minerals is complex, as supply is not concentrated in one location. Mining them also impacts the environment, since their ores can be laced with radioactive materials such as thorium and uranium. Refining the minerals can also generate toxic and radioactive waste, which poses environmental and health risks if not properly disposed of.

China hosts a majority of the world’s reserve of rare earth minerals and is the world’s leading supplier of the product. (The United States was the largest producer several decades ago.) While Brazil and Vietnam have significant reserves, they lag far behind in mining it.

China hints it will choke off U.S. ‘rare earths’ access. But it’s not that easy.

Access to the minerals became an issue during the Trump administration’s trade war with China. Beijing threatened to cut off exports to the United States in 2019 to retaliate against Trump’s measures, pushing prices up, prompting Trump to sign an executive order increasing domestic production. The Biden administration has also pushed for investments in that supply chain.

Other countries have also moved to reduce their reliance on China. Australia is spending millions to develop a rare earths mine and processing plant in its Northern Territory.

What are rare earth minerals used for?

Multiple household goods, including televisions, computers, smartphones, and lighting use rare earth minerals. Yttrium and europium, for instance, light up iPhone displays and allow them to vibrate.

They are also key elements of U.S.-made defense systems, including night vision technology, jets and armored vehicle alloys.

Rare earth minerals are critical for the global clean energy transition, as they are components of the magnets used in electric vehicles and wind turbines. Though recently, some companies have developed motors for electric vehicles that do not require rare earths.

What does Sweden’s discovery mean for the climate?

LKAB’s find was welcomed in Europe, which has faced energy challenges amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The European Union also has a goal of becoming climate neutral by 2050.

In September, a senior E.U. official said that Europe’s climate ambitions were at risk without reliable supply chains. “Take China, with its quasi-monopoly on rare earths and permanent magnets and prices rising by 50-90% in the past year alone,” wrote Thierry Breton, an E.U. commissioner. “Supply of raw materials has become a real geopolitical tool.”

The European Raw Material Alliance notes that while the European Union has a massive electric-motor manufacturing sector, “it is almost fully import dependent” when it came to rare earth permanent magnets.

Swedish Deputy Prime Minister Ebba Busch said Thursday that Europe’s independence from Russia and China will begin with this mine.

Political leadership in the continent, she said, “must give the industry the conditions to switch to green and fossil-free production.”

- "Much of the world’s supply comes from China, which has used them as a geopolitical tool."

- "Other countries have also moved to reduce their reliance on China."

- "Australia is spending millions to develop a rare earths mine and processing plant in its Northern Territory."

What countries are invested in Greenland Minerals corp?

- "Rare earth minerals are critical for the global clean energy transition, as they are components of the magnets used in electric vehicles and wind turbines."

- "Take China, with its quasi-monopoly on rare earths and permanent magnets and prices rising by 50-90% in the past year alone."

- "Supply of raw materials has become a real geopolitical tool."

- "Swedish Deputy Prime Minister Ebba Busch said Thursday that Europe’s independence from Russia and China will begin with this mine."

**Note:**
While the provided text confirms corporate interest (AEX Gold) and global strategic dynamics, it does not give specific estimates for Greenland’s rare earth reserves, their precise locations, or assessed values.

It does highlight significant environmental and geopolitical challenges and the involvement of other nations/corporations, namely China, Australia, and Sweden (LKAB), in rare earths extraction and supply chain development.

What countries are invested in Greenland Minerals corp?