A total of 14 fragments from the ancient vessel were found hidden in the remains of a 6th century Christian church, inside the previously occupied Roman fort of Vindolanda.

“This is a really exciting find from a poorly understood period in the history of Britain,” said lead author Dr. David Petts, a researcher in the Department of Archaeology at Durham University.

“Its apparent connections with the early Christian church are incredibly important, and this curious vessel is unique in a British context.”

“It is clear that further work on this discovery will tell us much about the development of early Christianity in beginning of the medieval period.”

Each fragment of the ancient chalice was found to be covered by lightly etched symbols, each representing different forms of Christian iconography from the time.

The marks appear to have been added, both to the outside and the inside of this cup, by the same hand or artist and although they are now difficult to see with the naked eye, with the aid of specialist photography, the symbols have been carefully recorded and work has started on a new journey of discovery to unlock their meanings.

The etchings include some well-known symbols from the early church including ships, crosses and chi-rho, fish, a whale, a happy bishop, angels, members of a congregation, letters in Latin, Greek and potentially Ogam.

“We are used to first’s and the wow factor from our impressive Roman remains at Vindolanda with artifacts such as the ink tablets, boxing gloves, boots and shoes, but to have an object like the chalice survive into the post-Roman landscape is just as significant,” said Dr. Andrew Birley, director of excavations and CEO of the Vindolanda Trust.

“Its discovery helps us appreciate how the site of Vindolanda and its community survived beyond the fall of Rome and yet remained connected to a spiritual successor in the form of Christianity which in many ways was just as wide reaching and transformative as what had come before it.”

“I am delighted that we can now start to share our news about this discovery and shed some light on an often-overlooked period of our heritage and past.”

That is equivalent to an additional three million tonnes of water streaming into global oceans every day, or six Olympic pools every second.

Crumbling glaciers and torrents of melt-water slicing through Greenland's ice block—as thick as ten Eiffel Towers end-to-end—were the single biggest source of global sea level rise in 2019 and accounted for 40 percent of the total, researchers reported in the journal Communications Earth & Environment.

Last year's loss of mass was at least 15 percent above the previous record in 2012, but even more alarming are the long-term trends, they said.

"2019 and the four other record-loss years have all occurred in the last decade," lead author Ingo Sasgen, a glaciologist at the Helmholtze Centre for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, told AFP.

The ice sheet is now tracking the worst-case global warming scenario of the UN's climate science advisory panel, the IPCC, noted Andrew Shepherd, director of the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling at the University of Leeds.

"This means we need to prepare for an extra ten centimetres or so of global sea level rise by 2100 from Greenland alone," said Shepherd, who was not involved in the study.

Redraw world's coastlines

If all of Greenland's ice sheet were to melt, it would lift global oceans by seven metres (23 feet).
Even a more modest rise of a couple of metres would redraw the world's coastlines and render land occupied today by hundreds of millions of people uninhabitable.

ntil 2000, Greenland's ice sheet—covering an area three times the size of France—generally accumulated as much mass as it shed.

Runoff, in other words, was compensated by fresh snowfall.

But over the last two decades ago, the gathering pace of global warming has upended this balance.

The gap is widening at both ends, according to the study, which draws from nearly 20 years of satellite data.

Changing weather patterns—also a consequence of climate change—has resulted in less cloud cover, and thus less snow. These high pressure systems have also resulted in more, and warmer, sunny days, accelerating the loss of mass.

In 2019, the ice sheet lost a total of 1.13 trillion tonnes, about 45 percent from glaciers sliding into the sea, and 55 percent from melted ice, said Sasgen. It gained about 600 billion tonnes through precipitation.

A study in the same journal last week concluded that the Greenland's ice sheet has passed a "tipping point", and is now doomed to disintegrate, though on what time scale is unknown.

'Alarm bells ringing'

Sasgen says it is too soon to know if we have reached a point of no return, but agrees that the ice sheet is likely to continue losing mass, even in colder years.

"But that doesn't mean that trying to limit warming doesn't matter," he added.

"Every decimal degree you save in terms of warming will save a certain amount of sea level rise, both in magnitude and speed."

At the other end of the world, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet—which holds another six metres worth of sea level rise—is similarly thought to be teetering on a tipping point, with many experts convinced it has already passed it.

Scientists not involved in the research were not surprised by the findings, but expressed concern.

"The ice sheet has lost ice every year for the last 20 years," said Twila Moon, a research scientists at the University of Colorado.
"If everyone's alarm bells were not already ringing, they must be now."

Stuart Cunningham, an oceanographer from the Scottish Association for Marine Science, warned about the potential impact on the North Atlantic circulation, a current that keeps northwestern Europe five to ten degrees Celsius warmer that similar latitudes elsewhere on the globe.

"Climate models show this circulation can be switched off by adding fresh water to the North Atlantic," he said, noting this happened during the end of the last ice age.

"This tipping point in the climate system is one of the potential disasters facing us."
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From 1992 to 2018, Greenland lost about four trillion tonnes of mass, causing the mean sea level to rise by 11 millimetres, according to a December 2019 study in Nature.

#Genomes; #Rhinos; #Extinction; #climateChange

The extinction of prehistoric megafauna like the woolly mammoth, cave lion, and woolly rhinoceros at the end of the last ice age has often been attributed to the spread of early humans across the globe, https://phys.org/news reports said.
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Previous mitochondrial DNA testing of the ancient waste indicated that all of the samples were human in origin, but critics argued that DNA from later occupation of the cave may have washed into lower, older cave sediments and contaminated the samples. “We address issues of potential DNA contamination through fecal lipid biomarker analysis, providing evidence that there likely was DNA moving from younger human occupations into older cave sediments and coprolites, but also confirming that people were camping at the caves as early as 14,200 years ago,” Blong said. In the new analysis, only 13 of the 21 samples were identified as human droppings, while one was linked to a panther and another to a lynx. The researchers are now analyzing the coprolites for clues to what those early campers had eaten. For more on Paisley Caves, go to "America, in the Beginning."

Thanks to the extremely dry environment inside Oregon’s Paisley Caves, University of Oregon archaeologist Dennis Jenkins and his team came across five human droppings that dated to older than 14,000 years over the course of nine years of digging there.

In addition, they also found three points that Jenkins believes belong to what is known as the Western Stemmed tradition. Unlike Clovis points, which have a signature notch at their base so that wooden spears can be attached, these have constricted bases. They have also clearly been struck from smaller pieces of stone than the typical Clovis counterpart. Two human coprolites dated to just over 13,000 years ago were found within eight inches of one of the points. At the very least, this evidence suggests that there was a parallel occupation of the continental United States by both the Clovis people and a second group who made different types of tools.

Evidence of baskets and rope, plant fibers, wooden artifacts, and animal bones were also found at the caves. Pollen and other plant minerals extracted from the coprolites suggest that people came to the site in the spring and early summer. They also provide evidence that the people in the caves ate everything from edible roots to bison, horse, and even animals as big as mastodon.
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Jenkins, for his part, thinks Paisley Caves were not a destination location. “There is very little debitage [residue from production] from stone tools over time,” he explains. “The archaeology suggests this is a place where people are passing by—something, weather or resources nearby, or the time of day, makes you stop in.”

#EarthSciences; #Forests; #GreenhouseGasEmissions; #ClimateInvestment

Utah (US), Jun 18 (Canadian-Media): Given the tremendous ability of forests to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, some governments are counting on planted forests as offsets for greenhouse gas emissions—a sort of climate investment, phys.org/news/2020 reports said.

But as with any investment, it's important to understand the risks. If a forest goes bust, researchers say, much of that stored carbon could go up in smoke.

In a paper published in Science, University of Utah biologist William Anderegg and his colleagues say that forests can be best deployed in the fight against climate change with a proper understanding of the risks to that forest that climate change itself imposes. "As long as this is done wisely and based on the best available science, that's fantastic," Anderegg says. "But there hasn't been adequate attention to the risks of climate change to forests right now."

Meeting of minds

In 2019, Anderegg, a recipient of the Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, convened a workshop in Salt Lake City to gather some of the foremost experts on climate change risks to forests. The diverse group represented various disciplines: law, economics, science and public policy, among others. "This was designed to bring some of the people who had thought about this the most together and to start talking and come up with a roadmap," Anderegg says.

This paper, part of that roadmap, calls attention to the risks forests face from myriad consequences of rising global temperatures, including fire, drought, insect damage and human disturbance—a call to action, Anderegg says, to bridge the divide between the data and models produced by scientists and the actions taken by policymakers.

Accumulating risk

Forests absorb a significant amount of the carbon dioxide that's emitted into the atmosphere—just under a third, Anderegg says. "And this sponge for CO2 is incredibly valuable to us."
Because of this, governments in many countries are looking to "forest-based natural climate solutions" that include preventing deforestation, managing natural forests and reforesting. Forests could be some of the more cost-effective climate mitigation strategies, with co-benefits for biodiversity, conservation and local communities.

But built into this strategy is the idea that forests are able to store carbon relatively "permanently", or on the time scales of 50 to 100 years—or longer. Such permanence is not always a given. "There's a very real chance that many of those forest projects could go up in flames or to bugs or drought stress or hurricanes in the coming decades," Anderegg says.
Forests have long been vulnerable to all of those factors, and have been able to recover from them when they are episodic or come one at a time. But the risks connected with climate change, including drought and fire, increase over time. Multiple threats at once, or insufficient time for forests to recover from those threats, can kill the trees, release the carbon, and undermine the entire premise of forest-based natural climate solutions.

"Without good science to tell us what those risks are," Anderegg says, "we're flying blind and not making the best policy decisions."

Mitigating risk
In the paper, Anderegg and his colleagues encourage scientists to focus increased attention on assessing forest climate risks and share the best of their data and predictive models with policymakers so that climate strategies including forests can have the best long-term impact. For example, he says, the climate risk computer models scientists use are detailed and cutting-edge, but aren't widely used outside the scientific community. So, policy decisions can rely on science that may be decades old.

"There are at least two key things you can do with this information," Anderegg says. The first is to optimize investment in forests and minimize risks. "Science can guide and inform where we ought to be investing to achieve different climate aims and avoid risks."

The second, he says, is to mitigate risks through forest management. "If we're worried about fire as a major risk in a certain area, we can start to think about what are the management tools that make a forest more resilient to that disturbance." More research, he says, is needed in this field, and he and his colleagues plan to work toward answering those questions.

"We view this paper as an urgent call to both policymakers and the scientific community," Anderegg says, "to study this more, and improve in sharing tools and information across different groups."

Throughout the crisis of COVID-19 pandemic outbreak around the world, Canada's energy sector has been providing the power needed by Canadians and essential services and ensured the security and reliability of our electricity grid during the pandemic, including protecting against cyber threats. 

Today’s roundtable hosted by IEA Executive Director Dr. Fatih Birol and Kwasi Kwarteng, Minister of State for Business, Energy and Clean Growth in the United Kingdom, focused on mobilizing investments for secure and sustainable power systems.

Canada’s crucial role in its increased electrification to achieve its climate change commitments under the Paris Agreement and its commitment to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, was highlighted by Minister O’Regan.

He also highlighted Canada’s contribution to the North American energy system, importance of electricity systems to modern society, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, measures needed to ensure secure and sustainable industry investments, and the future opportunities for international cooperation and collaboration were discussed by all participants.

During the roundtable, Minister O’Regan emphasized that Canada had ensured no continental electricity disruptions during the pandemic crisis.

Committed to building a clean energy future to support our natural resource sectors through this tough economic time, government of Canada also sees to the growth of its economy and create good jobs. 

“COVID-19 has changed our world, but it hasn’t dampened our resolve. We will get through this. We will build economies that are stronger and more resilient than before. With collaboration between international partners at forums like the IEA, the clean energy transition that is already underway will play a critical role in the global economic recovery,” said O’Regan. ​