melted

Emirates just melted down 60 million to create Noah’s Ark. And he has given them to those who want to resurrect the mammoth

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We’ve been really into playing God for a few years now. On the one hand, we have Bryan Johnson, a millionaire who lives to rejuvenate -and to sell you oil-. On the other hand, there is Colossal, a company that is doing more serious and interesting things. How far? Until the of chase resurrect the mammoth. At the moment there are more promises than realities, but they have managed to get the United Arab Emirates to give them a check for 60 million dollars. Aim? Create the modern Noah’s Ark. Colossal. This company dedicated to biotechnology has become popular for its objective not only in bring the mammoth back to lifebut also to the dodoto the moa either to the Tasmanian tiger. It does so from well-preserved DNA samples, to the interest of personalities such as Peter Jackson -director of ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and great collector of moa bones– and, evidently, thanks to tremendously generous sums of money. Colossal Biosciences has reached a assessment of more than 10,000 million dollars and, in the latest round, it has been 600 accumulated. Peter Jackson himself collaborated with 25 million for the company to place the moa in its goal list. BioVault. Although there are those who think that What Colossal does is sell the motorcyclethey have achieved some results, like resurrecting the giant wolf. The theory is simple: they take the DNA of the extinct animal, combine it with samples from living relatives and the difficult part comes when they have to filter out the variants to polish the genes and get the animal they want. When they have it ready, they use the belly of a living animal to gestate the extinct creature. UAE does not want them to resurrect anything. At least, that objective has not been made public, but due to Colossal’s activity, they have obtained thousands of DNA samples. And that is what we want to preserve in BioVault. The goal is a capsule in which the DNA of more than 10,000 species is stored, with a special focus at the beginning on the 100 most endangered species today. Which is it? They are in ‘coming soon‘. Museum of the Future. For this, the United Arab Emirates will spend 60 million dollars, and once completed in 2027, this modern Noah’s Ark will be stored in the World Preservation Laboratory, which will be a part of the Museum of the Future from Dubai. Inaugurated in 2022, it is a tremendous building, on par with the pharaonic works built in the Middle East at that time. particular architectural war in which the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are involved. If it is spectacular on the outside, it is even more so on the inside, and precisely its name is due to the fact that it is a museum that does not show antiquity, but rather presents a journey to the future. To 2071, specifically. The museum is outrageous Backup. In the end, this is one of the largest and most important biotech deals. Ben Lamm, co-founder of Colossal, affirms that we are losing species at an alarming rate and the world “urgently needs a network of global BioVaults, a backup plan for life on Earth.” He threw a dart at the financing of other biobanks, ensuring that they are fragmented, underfinanced and do not have a collaborative spirit that allows them to use data in the event of a crisis. In fact, it is estimated that half of the species on Earth will face extinction by 2050, and BioVault will be there to remedy it. The big question is whether it will be worth bringing animals back just because we can when their ecosystems are destroyed. Images | Colossal, روتانا In Xataka | Face transplants always seemed like something out of science fiction. A hospital in Barcelona has made it a reality

500-meter ice dome melted 7,000 years ago and is now melting again

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When we think of Greenlandthe image that automatically comes to mind is that of a terrain with a large amount of snow and very cold. But science has bad news for this country belonging to Denmark: the Greenland ice sheet It is much more fragile than we could think.. And that is a problem. From the terrestrial bottom. This statement is not something that has been extracted on paper, but rather has been ‘seen’ in the depths of the earth. This way, after drilling more than 500 meters of ice at Prudhoe Domeresearchers have found evidence that this gigantic mass completely disappeared just 7,000 years ago and then resurface. And the worst thing is not that it happened thousands of years ago, but that now the temperatures that caused that collapse are the same ones we hope to reach by the year 2100. The GreenDrill project. The researchers recently published in Nature on this project, which has been made possible thanks to a technical feat. To achieve this, the team drilled about 509 meters to reach the sediments that rest beneath the base of Prudhoe Dome, a 2,500 km² ice dome in northwest Greenland. To find out exactly what happened there, scientists used a technique called cell dating. infrared stimulated luminescence. In this way, what is allowed is to see when was the last time that part of this deep ice was exposed to the radiation of sunlight. The results. They were pretty clear: the sediments beneath Prudhoe Dome saw the sun between 6,000 and 8,200 years ago. This can be translated into a very simple sentence: at that time, there was no 500 meters of ice above, so the dome simply did not exist. And that is now a problem. Because? At that time Greenland ended up melting due to the ‘Holocene Thermal Maximum’. During this period, temperatures in the Arctic were between 3 and 5 °C higher than the pre-industrial era. And this is exactly where the data becomes really worrying. Worrying because precisely those temperatures that thousands of years ago erased entire ice domes from the map are the exact range of heating that climate models predict for the end of this century if emissions are not drastically reduced. This is why the ice we see today is not an eternal relic of the Ice Age; It is a structure that has collapsed before under conditions we are about to replicate. The domino effect. Prudhoe Dome is just one piece of the puzzle, but its past disappearance suggests that much of the northwestern sector of the Greenland Ice Sheet was much reduced during the early Holocene. The conclusion to this is quite clear: if history repeats itself and the Greenland ice sheet completely melts, global sea level it would rise about 7.3 meters. But logically it is not something that will happen tomorrow, but rather the process of fusion of the entire island will still take several centuries. Although if the estimates are met, it may go faster than you think. Change the rules of the game. Until now, the central, thickest areas of Greenland were thought to be almost indestructible. This study demonstrates that even massive domes 500 meters thick can fade in geologically short periods. And this is something that has already happened as science points out. Images | Visit Greenland In Xataka | China has turned the Arctic into its own “Panama Canal.” And that explains the US obsession with Greenland

So much ice has melted in Greenland that the plankton has grown 40%. It is not good news

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The Antarctica and Greenland have become two of the Climate change thermometers. The Ice loss in Greenland It is something that has been monitored for years because not only influences sea level: also in the Sinking of the seabed. It is estimated that Greenland’s glaciers have reached a point of no returnand its implications go beyond sea level. In fact, a recent NASA study He points out that there is a beneficiary of the thaw: the phytoplankton. And it is not good news. Short. A few months ago we commented that Greenland was getting greener. The estimates point out that, during the last 30 years, the region has lost 1.6% of its ice, which may seem little, but it is something equivalent to the Galicia area. The air temperature is about 3 higher Celsius degrees in the period between 2007-2012 than in 1979-2000, and That thaw It is causing a huge increase in fresh water. How much? According to the investigation of San José State University and NASA, of up to 266 million tons per year that are discharged into the sea, especially under the Jakobshavn glacier, the greatest in Greenland. It is the equivalent of 1,200 cubic meters of fresh water that are poured into the sea every second. As is fresh water, it is less dense and lighter than the salty, and what it does is like a whirlpool, dragging nutrients from the seabed to the surface. The study. These nutrients are mainly iron and nitrates, and it is phenomenal to phytoplankton. It is, however, an anomaly, and the researchers wondered to what extent that rapid growth of the plankton could affect the ecosystem. In it studypublished in Nature, detail how with the help of a model developed in the JPL and the MIT and using superoringers to accelerate the calculations, simulated the interaction between the water of the thaw, the nutrients and the phytoplankton. The greatest areas is where an increase in chlorophyll has been seen in recent years They have discovered that the growth of the body in the studied area increases between 15% and 40% in summer, at which time the maximum point of the thaw is given, thanks to those nutrients that the fresh water current sends to the surface. In total, NASA has observed That, between 1998 and 2018, the growth of phytoplankton in argic waters had increased by 57%. Consequences. On the one hand, that increase in phytoplankton can be positive for marine life, since it improves the basis of the ecosystem to be able to feed more animals, and also phytoplankton Atmospheric co -capture (that is not bad for us) To do photosynthesis. However, there is a paste: changes in temperature, chemical composition and water salinity can alter ecosystems. In the study they have not launched predictions about what will happen, but it is evident that it is a substantial modification of the marine properties of that specific area. Its conclusion is that those Changes in the Food Chain They can modify the composition of marine species, from bacteria to fish, affecting both the equilibrium of the ecosystem and fishing activities, which are a key engine for Greenland. Because phytoplankton is tiny, but it is the food of Kril and other small herbivores that, in turn, are the larger animal food baselike fish and whales. Only in Greenland? This study was carried out in a very specific area, that of the Jakobshavn glacier, but the results have similar implications for the more than 250 marine glaciers in the region and, possibly, for other glaciers that end in the sea in other regions of the world. Researchers comment that this simulation method is adaptable to other systems and that, therefore, it is likely that other areas where glaciers are pouring water into the sea They are also living, to a greater or lesser degree, a similar phenomenon, modifying ecosystems and affecting both fauna and fishing activities that are carried out in the area. Therefore, the thaw of glaciers is no longer that it affects only at sea level, but has the potential for alter the ecological balance of the regions in which it occurs. As they say, we were few and the grandmother gave birth. Images | POT In Xataka | 400,000 years ago all Greenland ice melted. The map he drew is not flattering

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