10.23.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Radio Wized Diary of Science and Nature, your readers.
Kelly Taylor, I'll have some stories related to science and nature,
but first a reminder that Radio Eye is a reading
service intended for people who are blind or have other
disabilities that make it difficult to read printed material. From

(00:21):
Vox magazine, we have this story that is headlined the
humble plant that could save the world or destroy it,
and this is from October seventeenth. The largest herds of
caribou in the world make their homes here. Polar bears
give birth to cubs in dens dug into this soil,

(00:43):
some of them more than two hundred years old, and
birds like the Arctic tern fly north every summer, some
from as far south as Antarctica to breed and lay
their eggs. The Hudson Bay Peatlands in Northern Canada, a
nine hundred million acre areas stretching from northern Manitoba to Quebec,

(01:03):
are a haven for biodiversity, home to more than one
thousand species of plants and one hundred seventy five species
of birds. But the secret of this unique ecosystem lies
below the surface, in a build up of water saturated
mosses called peat. Though it looks like little more than
fibrous dirt, peat has near magical properties, acidic and anaerobic.

(01:29):
It can preserve artifacts, food, and even human remains for
centuries or more, and because the process of decomposition slows
down in such environments, they trap carbon dioxide and keep
it out of the atmosphere, slowing the process of climate change.
The Hudson Bay peat lands in particular, store five times
as much carbon per acre as the Amazon rainforest. Janet Sumner,

(01:54):
executive director of the wild Lands League, a Canadian conservation group,
told me Indigenous nations around Hudson Bay call the area
the breathing lands. It's the most It's the world's temperature regulator.
Said Valerie courtois executive director of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative,

(02:15):
which works on Indigenous led conservation efforts in Canada. It's
like we have a big fridge on top of the
planet that is helping keep everything the way it should be,
but now the fridge is hanging open. Though they cover
only three percent of the Earth's surface, peatlands store nearly
one third of the world's carbon, and these ecosystems around

(02:37):
the world are vulnerable to development and destruction. Today, only
seventeen percent of the world's peatlands fall within a protected area.
According to a recent study by the Wildlife Conservation Society,
the world's peat lands are increasingly at the center of
conflicts over resource extraction, and the stakes couldn't be higher.

(03:00):
In Northern Canada, one of the biggest fears for peat
conservationists is mining for rare earth minerals. Part of the
Hudson Bay peatland sits atop the Ring of Fire, a
mineral deposit containing nickel, chromium, and other metals used in
clean energy technologies like electric vehicle batteries. Some experts see
the minerals there as key to Canada's clean energy transition

(03:26):
and a crucial part of the fight against climate change.
And it's true minerals like the ones found around Hudson
Bay are necessary for solar panels, batteries and other technologies.
We need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, But
in the process of mining them, we may just destroy

(03:47):
a crucial climate regulator. The government of Ontario, where the
Ring of Fire is located, sees mining in the area
as necessary for Canadian energy independence, especially amid present at
Donald Trump's trade wars quote. This is how we make
ourselves less reliant on the United States, says Ontario Premier

(04:08):
Doug Ford. And already the area's peatlands are at risk
for mining expeditions, which experts say have disturbed the ecosystem,
even though no mine shafts have yet been sunk. First
Nations and conservation groups are working to protect the lands
around Hudson Bay, but it's a race against the clock
as mining exploration ramps up with support from the Canadian government.

(04:33):
The carbons stored in the Hudson Bay Peatlands took thousands
of years to build up, said Lawrence Martin, director of
Lands and Resources for the Mushgawak Council, a group representing
several First Nations in the area. If it's released now,
it could take thousands of years to replace, and if
humans want to avoid the worst effects of climate change,

(04:53):
we don't have that kind of time. These are the
lungs of the earth. Martin told me, if you start
tampering with that, you have to be really, really careful.
Pete is a kind of soil that forms whenever organic
matter builds up faster than it can decompose, said Dan Zarin,
Executive director for Forests and Climate Change at the Wildlife

(05:15):
Conservation Society. The bogs of northern Europe, famous resting places
for uncannily preserved bog bodies, are made of peat, but
pete can also be found in the United States, in
the Adirondacks of Upstate New York and the huge Oaky
Finoki Swamp in Georgia. The soil also forms in the tropics,

(05:35):
often in damp forested areas where layers of different plant
species stack on top of one another. In Panama, for example,
pete can form giant domes several meters deep in thousands
of years old. In colder climates like northern Canada, peat
lands are usually created by colonies of Sphagnum moss, a simple,

(05:58):
easily overlooked plant that's also a climate hero. The structure
of Sphagnum moss includes large empty cells that make the
plant into kind of sponge, absorbing up to twenty times
its weight in water. Moss was so well known for
its absorbent properties that First Nations people once used it
for minstrual products and diapers. Courtois said that absorbency helps

(06:22):
create the wet, low oxygen conditions that slow down decomposition
and aid in carbon capture. There's more carbon stored in
peat lands than in all the trees in the world,
or about two thirds of the world's petroleum reserves. Zarin said.
The peat lands in the Congo Basin store the equivalent
of several years worth of carbon emissions for the entire world.

(06:45):
That's why peat is so critical to the world's climate future,
and yet, says Zarin, it's not really getting anything near
the attention it deserves. Around the world, ecosystems like tropical
forests and mangroves much more likely to be protected than peatlands,
according to the Wildlife Conservation Society, and nearly a quarter

(07:06):
of peatlands are under heavy pressure from human development. And Indonesia,
for example, forested peatlands are being cleared, drained, and planted
with palms to feed the rapidly growing global demand for
palm oil, a common ingredient in products from toothpaste to
peanut butter. In Patagonia, they're threatened to buy urban development,

(07:29):
says Jorge Hoyos Sanion, a research associate at the Smithsonian
Tropical Research Institute. Around the world, peat is harvested and
sold for use in potting soil. An eight quart bag
retails for less than ten dollars at US hardware stores,
where Americans can purchase it for their berry patches and
flower beds, and now increasingly peatlands are at risk as

(07:53):
governments in private industry seek new sources of the minerals
needed for the batteries and related to technicies that will likely
power the world in the future. Around Hudson Bay, conservation
groups are watching with concern as mining companies begin to
survey fragile wetland ecosystems. People focus on the mining, but

(08:17):
there's a lot of damage that occurs before mining, says
Sumner of the Wildlands League. Mining exploration requires test drilling
and the use of heavy machinery on a sensitive landscape,
which can change its hydrology, causing areas of peatland to
dry out. When peat dries out, its carbon storing superpower

(08:39):
becomes a liability. As water leaves the environment, decomposition starts again,
and the soil begins to release all the carbon it's
stored up over thousands of years. You can think of
it like the burning of fossil fuels. It took a
long time to put that carbon down into the soil
and then you really quickly release it back to the atmosphere,

(09:00):
says Julie Loisel, professor geography at the University of that
Areno drying peat also turns it into a frighteningly powerful
fuel for fires. In fact, communities in Ireland and elsewhere
have long burned peat as an alternative to coal. To day,
peatland fires can be especially insidious because even when they

(09:20):
appear to be extinguished, they can continue to burn underground
for months and re spark a phenomenon known as zombie fire.
Peat Land fires can release a hundred times the carbon
of a wildfire and produce large amounts of noxious smoke.
In Indonesia, the twenty tens peat fires released as much

(09:41):
carbon in a single day as the entire emissions of
the United States. Fires are already burning in the peat
lands of northern Canada, spurred on by climate change, and
experts fear they'll only become more devastating if the landscape
isn't protected. And now research indicates we may have entered
a new age of fire, where massive blazes around the

(10:01):
world will be more frequent and destructive. It's even more
urgent to prevent peatlands from drying out and becoming fuel
for these conflagrations. We want to keep the peatlands doing
what they do, which is breathing for the planet.

Speaker 2 (10:16):
Sumner said.

Speaker 1 (10:19):
But conservation groups say mining in Canada's Ring of Fire
is less important for the clean energy transition than proponents
have claimed. One issue is the remoteness of the area.
The mining sites are currently accessible only by ice road
or floatplane, and a plan to build a major road
to the area could take a decade. Other sites in
Ontario have more critical minerals, are more accessible and are

(10:42):
located in areas that are already environmentally degraded. Mining in
the Ring of Fire feels more like a dream than
it does reality, and it's not going to meet the
need for energy transition in any short timeline, which is
what we need, Sumner said. Meanwhile, First Nations have been
at work for years on their own plans for the
Hudson Bay Lowlands. The mush Cougook Council is leading an

(11:05):
effort to establish an indigenous led conservation project in northern
Ontario that could protect peat lands and other ecosystems as well.
The Kitchen of kusteb Inuit First Nation has also proposed
a protected area including peat lands around the Fawn River
in northern Ontario. What makes an indigenous approach to planning

(11:27):
is that you look at what you need to keep
in those ecosystems as opposed to looking at what you
can take. Courtois of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative said, under
such an approach, Indigenous leaders can also identify less vulnerable
areas where activities like mining could occur.

Speaker 2 (11:44):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (11:45):
The more that province has embraced the practice of land
use planning or land relationship planning as we like to
call it, the better the conditions are for the exploration
of potential development, Courtois said. The fate of the conservation
project remains unclear, however, and Martin says the council is
still working to get the Ontario government on board. Now

(12:09):
we'll go to BBC Wildlife. The headline is rising from
the Embers, how fire is helping birds in California's National parks.
This is from October twenty first. Fires in the wild
are generally feared among humans for good reason, but they
are crucial to the functioning of many ecosystems, from prairies
to forests. Now, a new study published in the journal

(12:33):
Fire Ecology finds that some birds benefited from blazes over
a thirty five year period in Yosemite National Park and
Sequoia and King's Canyon National Parks in the Sierra Nevada
region of the USA. Of the forty two Species Study
twenty eight showed increased population densities for several decades in
regions that had burned, and it wasn't only known post

(12:56):
fire specialists that reaped the rewards. Generalists species such as
dark eyed juncos and mountain chickadees benefited too.

Speaker 2 (13:05):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (13:05):
Given the effects of fire on bird habitats in the
long post fire process of vegetative succession, maybe it's not
too surprising that birds are responding to fires for so
long afterwards, says lead author Chris Ray of the Institute
for Bird Populations. Fires damaged large trees, allowing for a
greater range of plants to emerge. These post fire ecosystems

(13:29):
offer birds of varied diet and a wealth of nesting sites.

Speaker 2 (13:34):
Quote. Western tanagers and.

Speaker 1 (13:36):
Hermit warblers were more abundant at points that had experienced
a low severity burn thirty five years ago than at
points that never burned in the previous thirty five years.

Speaker 2 (13:47):
Ads ready About ninety seven and.

Speaker 1 (13:50):
A half percent of the study locations where in areas
that had experienced burns of low to moderate severity, so
the results are likely not applicable to regions that have
seen severe wildfire damage in recent decades, attributed in part
to poor forest management and increasingly extreme weather events. It

(14:11):
underscores the importance of fire regimes. Both managed burns and
natural burns are needed to maintain ecosystems in a human
dominated world. Indigenous peoples once set fires or allowed lightning
strikes to ignite their lands because they reaped the benefits.
Suppressing fire is instinctive and natural too, but as the

(14:31):
abundance of birds in these Sierra Nevada parks indicates, the
terrifying and destructive power of fire is key to the
natural order. And Now from BBC Science Focus, The clearest
sign of alien life on Mars found by NASA. A

(14:53):
detailed study of rocks on the red planet has revealed
intricate patterns resembling leopard spots. Quote the clearest sign of
life we've ever found on Mars, according to NASA's acting
administrator Sean Duffy. The rock, thought to be around three
and a half billion years old, was discovered by NASA's
Perseverance rover in July twenty twenty four. Ever since, planetary

(15:16):
scientists have been investigating possible explanations for what could have
created the markings. While the patterns may have formed through
geological processes, the scientists explained in a recent Nature paper
that ancient Martian microbes are the current leading theory behind
the leopard patterned rocks. In the hope of obtaining a
more definitive answer, Perseverance has taken and stored a fragment

(15:39):
of the rock. If all goes to plan, this sample
will be returned to Earth one day, where it can
be thoroughly examined for signs of past life. Today, Mars
is a dry, dead world, but that hasn't always been
the case. Until around three billion years ago, Mars surface
was covered with flowing rivers in vast lakes of liquid water.

(16:00):
Here on Earth, wherever you find water, you can expect
to find life somewhere nearby. To uncover whether this was
also true on Mars, NASA rovers has spent the last
twenty years hunting for clues to prove whether the red
planet was once habitable or even inhabited. The Perseverance rover
was exploring a region known as Jesio Crater, which was

(16:21):
a lake in Mars distant past. Similar regions on Earth
are havens for microbial life. While exploring an outcrop of
rocks known as the Bright Angel Formation, Perseverance spotted a
rock with a striking pattern resembling leopard spots. We took
just about every possible observation we could of the patterned

(16:41):
rock and the Bright Angel Formation as a whole, says
study lead professor Joel Herowitz from Stony Brook University. In
Perseverance's cameras were able to capture the patterns in minute detail,
while device is known as spectrometers analy as the minerals
they were made of. The rover was even able to

(17:03):
map out the outcrop's structure below the surface using radar.

Speaker 2 (17:08):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (17:08):
Basically, we threw everything but the kitchen sink at these rocks,
said Heroitz. The analysis revealed the patterns were created by
iron rich minerals known as vivianite or greggite on Earth.
Both minerals are often produced by redox reactions, where the
microbes exchange electrons with their surroundings.

Speaker 2 (17:29):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (17:29):
On Earth, redox reactions like these are often driven by
microbes living in sediment, which derive energy from these reactions
to power their metabolic activity. Says Heroiz, The trace is
left behind by these reactions then create distinctive patterns in
the rocks formed from those sediments. That doesn't mean it's
time to start celebrating the discovery of alien life just yet.

(17:52):
There are other ways the leopard spots could have been
created without the influence of life. For instance, heat could
have all so provided the energy needed to drive the
same reactions between mud and organic matter to produce the
new minerals. The team couldn't find any sign that the
rocks had been heated, however, nor did the conditions look

(18:12):
quite right for any other non life based method they investigated,
but Heroitz cautions we can't rule them out completely. One
of the biggest surprises is how relatively young the rocky is,
just three and a half billion years old. This means
that the patterns formed when Mars is already beginning to
dry up. This suggests that the planet may have been

(18:35):
habitable for a lot longer than planetary scientists previously thought. Unfortunately,
Perseverance has an entire planet to explore and has now
moved on to search for life elsewhere.

Speaker 2 (18:47):
Quote.

Speaker 1 (18:47):
If we were to return to Jezro in the future,
there are follow up questions we might look to address
with the rover payloads, says Heroitz. But I suspect that
these follow up measurements wouldn't be able to provide a
more definitive answer to the question of whether these features were.

Speaker 2 (19:02):
Formed by life.

Speaker 1 (19:04):
Ultimately, the determination of whether life is involved will require
analysis in laboratories on Earth. Now we'll go back to
Vox and have an article headlined most animals on this
island nation are found nowhere else on Earth, and now
they're vanishing.

Speaker 2 (19:24):
This is from October twenty first.

Speaker 1 (19:27):
Throughout the Western world, Madagascar is perhaps best known as
a hotspot for wildlife, home to lemurs, chameleons, and other animals,
a reputation popularized by movies like Madagascar and shows like
Planet Earth. And it's true that the country has an
impressive array of creatures and plants that you can't find
anywhere else. Lemurs literally only exist on this island, as

(19:49):
do almost half of the world's chameleon species, and most
of its iconic baobab trees.

Speaker 2 (19:56):
Stout species that are mostly trunk.

Speaker 1 (20:00):
Though Madagascar is one of a kind, it's not exactly
the wildlife haven you might imagine, at least not anymore.
The island has lost around half or possibly more of
its original forests and as much as half of the
lit of the live coral off its coasts. Today, nearly
all lemur species are threatened with extinction, so are half

(20:20):
of the country's chameleons, and several species of ten ric
adorable hedgehog like creatures that live only in Madagascar. Reef
dependent fisheries in some regions, meanwhile, are on the verge
of collapsing. These declines are rooted in scarcity. Madagascar is
one of the poorest and most malnourished countries on the planet.

(20:42):
Last year, eighty percent of the island nation lived in
extreme poverty, earning less daily than what two dollars and
fifteen cents.

Speaker 2 (20:50):
Could buy you in the US.

Speaker 1 (20:51):
In twenty seventeen, nearly forty percent of young children have
stunted growth due to a lack of nutrition. This matters
because throughout much of the country, one of the only
ways to earn money and buy food is by taking
resources from the environment. People cut down forests, for example,
to make and sell charcoal of wood based fuel, or

(21:13):
to clear small parcels of land to grow crops. These
sorts of activities aren't inherently harmful. Humans have always relied
on nature for survival, but when people have no other
way to earn a living, the pressure of extraction can
become too much. There are several complex region reasons why
poverty still grips Madagascar, including political instability and corruption. Just

(21:36):
this month, the Madagascar government was dissolved. The president was
impeached and the military assumed power, following weeks of protests
in the capital of Antenna, Narvao and Tenna Narivo and
Tenna Narivo from people frustrated by power and water outages

(21:56):
and a lack of economic opportunity. Together with climate change,
the lingering effects of colonialism and foreign aid structures, poor
governance has stymied the growth of nonexistent and non extractive industries.
As a result, a large number of people across Madagascar
are highly dependent on the island's ecosystem for their livelihoods

(22:19):
for their survival, and those ecosystems are starting to fail,
partly because of the sheer scale of dependency that makes
conservation here both incredibly challenging and incredibly important. Last month,
I visited Madagascar in search of solutions. I was after
ideas for how to sustain the country's iconic ecosystems and

(22:40):
animals as a means to support human well being. What
I found in the southwest and eastern regions was more
dim than I had expected. I saw clear signs of
core reefs and distress, and fishermen facing hunger. I saw
wildfires approaching one of the last intact stretches of highland Forestsultimately,
and did find what I was after solutions that actually

(23:03):
seemed to work, And though they were small scale, their
significance felt large because, as several experts stole me along
the way, if you can get conservation to work under
these conditions, it'll work anywhere. Scientists are testing a surprising
approach to fighting hunger in one of the poorest places
on earth. Around the world, advanced farming also destroys forests,

(23:27):
but near one nature reserve in southwest Madagascar, it may
be key to saving them and the lemurs that call
them home. And several hours north of Antenna, Narivo, Madagascar's capital,
is a small patch of green and a sea of brown,
a park surrounded by degraded land, and it's full of chameleons,
some of which are endangered. The park's boundaries are well

(23:50):
protected by patrols, but wildfires fueled by climate change threatened
to destroy it. We have an article here from the
Sandford r Cisco Chronicle. Salmon reach headwaters for the first
time in a century after California dam removal. Dated October twentieth,
salmon on the Klamath River have crossed a major threshold

(24:13):
a year after four dams were removed along the California
Oregon border, with fish reaching the river's headwaters for the
first time in more than a century. Oregon Wildlife officials
said Friday that multiple salmon were observed in Upper Klamath
Lake as well as its major tributaries, which confirms the
three hundred mile migration of salmon from the Pacific Ocean

(24:36):
in northern California to their historical spawning grounds in southern Oregon.
The fish had been kept from going upriver by the
now demolished dams since the early nineteen hundreds. Concerns had
persisted that two existing dams farther upstream would continue to
hamper fish passage. However, at least a portion of them.

(25:00):
This year's fall run of Chinook salmon is now known
to have made it past these obstacles. It's a true blessing,
said William Ray, chair of the Klamath Tribes, which detected
salmon along their tribal lands on the Lower Williamson River
near the Oregon community community of Chiliquin in the Upper
Klamath Basin earlier this month. Quote, we haven't had salmon

(25:23):
here since nineteen o nine. It's a time for us
to heal and reflect on our families and leaders who
fought so hard to get them here. The five hundred
million dollars damn removal project on the Klamath River, considered
the largest in US history, was done with the goal
of restoring the vast Kla Klamath Watershed to its natural splendor.

(25:44):
The return of salmon was the benchmark for success. A
handful of tribes in the region, all of which see
salmon as sacred, led the decades long push for the
damn deconstruction. The owner of the hydroelectric facilities, Portland based
Pacific Corp, Agreed to remove the dams because they were
outdated and cost more to maintain than they were worth.

(26:06):
The states of California and Oregon helped underwrite the effort.
The dams and the reservoirs they impounded, three in California
and one in Oregon, did not provide water supplies nor
flood control, They did provide boating and other recreational activities.
Within weeks of completion of the dam removal, last fall,
schnook salmon were observed migrating through the footprints of the

(26:29):
former hydroelectric facilities. Because of the turbid waters temporarily caused
by the demolition and years of declining salmon numbers, it
was unclear how much success the fish would have.

Speaker 2 (26:41):
Moving up river.

Speaker 1 (26:43):
Only last month was a salmon observed getting past the
still existing Keino Dam in Oregon, where questions had remained
about whether fish could climb an old fish ladder there.
On October sixth, another salmon was detected scaling the fish
ladder at Link River Dam. In the following days, salmon
were confirmed pushing across the nearly thirty mile long Upper

(27:06):
Klamath Lake to such tributaries as the Williamson and Sprague Rivers.
What we're seeing now is incredibly encouraging and the result
of strong collaboration among state and federal agencies, tribes, and
conservation partners who have all been working towards this moment
for an incredibly long time, said Mark Herford, Fishery's Reintroduction

(27:28):
project leader for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.
The salmon population in the Klamath Basin is estimated to
be less than a tenth of what it was historically.
The hope is that this new access to ancestral waters
will boost reproduction and ultimately fish numbers. Efforts to restore

(27:49):
the watershed saw setback recently, with the Mid Klamath Watershed
Council announcing several federal grants had been terminated by the
Interior Department. Some of the money would have gone toward
monitoring salmon and improving fish habitat in the basin. Well
that's all for this week's Diary of Science and Nature.
Your reader was Kelly Taylor. Stay tuned now for further

(28:11):
programming on RADIOI