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South Carolina's coastal adaptation debates stir community concerns

In a bid to tackle coastal erosion, South Carolina communities and environmentalists clash over the construction of erosion control structures called groins at Debidue Beach. Daniel Shailer reports for Inside Climate News.In short:Environmental advocates argue that the construction of groins could harm the North Inlet-Winyah Bay reserve by disrupting natural sand movement.Debidue Beach residents advocate for these structures to protect their homes from increasing erosion, highlighting tensions between climate resilience and coastal development.Legal challenges and confusion over state coastal management regulations underscore the difficulties of balancing property protection with environmental conservation.Key quote:"Equity plays a huge part in this. When you look at environmental justice communities throughout the United States, you see an intentional disinvestment in those communities."— Omar Muhammad, executive director of the Lowcountry Alliance for Model CommunitiesWhy this matters:By preserving beaches, groins also support local economies that depend on tourism. On the other hand, groins can have unintended consequences. For instance, while they may accumulate sand on one side, they can also starve areas down drift of sand, leading to increased erosion elsewhere. Disparate state, local, private and federal conservation efforts are failing to protect biodiversity. Connectivity and coordination would help, say agency scientists and conservation leaders.

In a bid to tackle coastal erosion, South Carolina communities and environmentalists clash over the construction of erosion control structures called groins at Debidue Beach. Daniel Shailer reports for Inside Climate News.In short:Environmental advocates argue that the construction of groins could harm the North Inlet-Winyah Bay reserve by disrupting natural sand movement.Debidue Beach residents advocate for these structures to protect their homes from increasing erosion, highlighting tensions between climate resilience and coastal development.Legal challenges and confusion over state coastal management regulations underscore the difficulties of balancing property protection with environmental conservation.Key quote:"Equity plays a huge part in this. When you look at environmental justice communities throughout the United States, you see an intentional disinvestment in those communities."— Omar Muhammad, executive director of the Lowcountry Alliance for Model CommunitiesWhy this matters:By preserving beaches, groins also support local economies that depend on tourism. On the other hand, groins can have unintended consequences. For instance, while they may accumulate sand on one side, they can also starve areas down drift of sand, leading to increased erosion elsewhere. Disparate state, local, private and federal conservation efforts are failing to protect biodiversity. Connectivity and coordination would help, say agency scientists and conservation leaders.

How Rapa Nui Lost a Tree, Only to Have It Sprout Up Elsewhere

Before the toromiro disappeared from the island, at least two men grabbed seeds from the last remaining plant and brought them home

The tree that goes by toromiro has been a fragile expat for more than a half-century. Little Sophora toromiro, is far from home, no longer present on Rapa Nui, the Pacific island where it evolved. Also known as Easter Island, or Isla de Pascua in Spanish, Rapa Nui is a speck of land in the Pacific, 2,200 miles from the west coast of Chile. The tiny island encompasses just 63 square miles, and it is quite flat, with a maximum elevation of less than 1,700 feet. The last date of the toromiro’s tenure on Rapa Nui is uncertain. Some accounts say it went extinct in the wild in 1960. Others say that it was gone by 1962, when Karl Schanz, a German meteorologist, clambered down to see the tree in the crater where it had last been spotted, and it was gone. Was it removed? Did it die, tip over and return to the earth? We will never know. Although the toromiro is gone from Rapa Nui, it survives elsewhere through luck—and pluck. Over the past century, the intermittent collecting of the toromiro’s seeds and their replanting in mainland locations have given the species purchase elsewhere. Each tree is a member of a small diaspora, with only a handful surviving in about a dozen different public and private botanical gardens around the world. This is a story of survival, persistence and, perhaps in some ways, dumb luck—a tree in decline that was rescued and whose seeds were sent to other places. Mention Easter Island to almost anyone, and if they’ve heard of it, they’ve likely heard of its statues. Imprinted in the popular imagination are its enigmatic, massive stone sculptures, or moai. Curious investigators have speculated for more than two centuries about how more than 900 of these mysterious statues—the largest being more than 30 feet tall and weighing over 80 tons—might have been moved to locations around the island, traveling miles from the site where they were quarried. The toromiro, though, is an invisible tree on the island, its story known to very few, and its existence marked more by its absence than its presence. The tree does have many close relatives. The Sophora genus is speciose, as biologists say—a crowded taxon consisting of some 60 different species, including a dozen closely related oceanic ones scattered across the Pacific. The toromiro is more of a shrub than a tree, and none of its close relatives is large—at least from descriptions recorded over the past century. The northernmost outpost for the Sophora genus is in Hawaiʻi, where Sophora chrysophylla is the primary food source for the palila, a critically endangered honeycreeper. Without S. chrysophylla, known as mamane in Hawaiian, the palila would not have survived the last century as its range dwindled. The subterranean pollen record reveals that the toromiro was abundant across much of Rapa Nui, where many other now-extinct plants also thrived. Paleobotanical evidence shows that the tree’s presence on the island dates back at least 35,000 years. Its seeds are both buoyant and salt-resistant, and they probably first arrived by water, floating onto the island, probably from another Pacific island, and then it did what species do: continued its evolutionary journey in a new place to become the tree we know today. But even before the toromiro disappeared from the island, it had been without a lot of endemic companions. Fewer than 30 indigenous seed-bearing plant species have survived on Rapa Nui to the present day, and weeds, along with naturalized, cultivated shrubs, are now the main plants growing there. The toromiro did not disappear precipitously but experienced a protracted decline. Humans arrived in Rapa Nui around the 12th century, probably not long after Polynesians reached the Hawaiian archipelago. Some hundreds of years after humans’ arrival, the island experienced a painful drop in biodiversity, and its carrying capacity plummeted as the native palm forests disappeared, replaced by grasslands. Food grew scarce, and occupants fled, thinning down to around 100 Rapa Nui at one point in the 19th century. In his deterministic 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond claimed the occupants were lousy land managers. His analysis of why Rapa Nui became denuded of its plant life is now out of date, as later studies have revealed the island’s complexities. To sketch the story of the weakening grip of native plant life on Rapa Nui as a predictable story of human arrogance intersecting with a small, remote and evolutionarily vulnerable spit of land is tempting, but the tale is more nuanced than that. Natives there recorded centuries-old histories of careful but intermittent conservation strategies. Some scholars have asserted that the Little Ice Age stressed resources on the island between the 16th and 19th centuries, leading to the disappearance of palms and other important contributors to the islanders’ activities and well-being. Others have pointed to prolonged droughts, while still others have continued to argue that humans were highly complicit in the island’s declining biodiversity. Were groves of palm trees decimated to create systems for rolling the giant stone carvings from quarry to coastline, where most of them have sat for many hundreds of years? Perhaps. However the palms disappeared, their loss seems to have been a factor in the tumbling downturn of the island’s other trees, including the toromiro. The palms had made up the great majority of Rapa Nui’s tree cover, some 16 million trees that blanketed about 70 percent of the island. Some controversy remains about what particular species of palm flourished, but many believe it was Paschalococos disperta, the Rapa Nui palm. Jaime Espejo, a Chilean botanist who’s written extensively about the toromiro, noted that it probably lived in the undergrowth of the palm, lodged in an ancient ecosystem that no longer exists. Paleobotanists and archaeologists studying the island spotted the widespread loss of the palms in their investigations. At the same time, they found that the number of fish bones found in waste middens around the island dropped as fishing boats could no longer be constructed in large numbers from trees. The loss of access to fish must have been a devastating turn, because the human residents’ main proteins came from the sea. Soil erosion, likely exacerbated by deforestation and agriculture, led to further losses of the tree. Hooved animals, arriving with European explorers in the 18th century, were also certain culprits in the toromiro’s decline and disappearance. In Hawaiʻi, sheep consume that archipelago’s species of Sophora. Another creature implicated in the destruction of much of both Rapa Nui’s and Hawaiʻi’s plant life was the Polynesian rat (Rattus exulans), as well as the bigger ship rat (Rattus rattus) and Norwegian rat (Rattus norvegicus). These rats, landing on new island homes and able to reproduce quickly, found abundant food in the form of native seeds, plants and invertebrates—and no predators. They laid waste to plant life with shocking speed. An aerial view of a toromiro in Barcelona, Spain Daderot via Wikimedia CC0 Early European accounts and pollen records tell us that by about 1600, forests in the island’s craters had disappeared, and, with that, the toromiro declined into long-term scarcity and then extirpation. The New Zealand anthropologist Steven Fischer has noted that the last forest was probably cut for firewood around 1640, making wood the most valuable commodity on the island. Driftwood became precious. So scarce was wood, Fischer observes, that the pan-Polynesian word rakau, meaning “tree,” “timber” or “wood,” came to mean “riches” or “wealth” in the old Rapa Nui language—a meaning not present in any other use of the word elsewhere in Polynesia, including in Tahiti, Tonga, Hawaiʻi and New Zealand. It’s ironic that after the deforestation of the island’s trees, new linguistic meanings sprouted out of the island’s impending botanical doom. Amid these centuries-long difficulties, but long before the toromiro disappeared, a wood-based culture thrived. The Rapa Nui had a particular passion for carving; beyond their giant stone statues, they favored the toromiro for its durable and fine-grained wood and reddish hue. Although primarily used for ritual objects, the toromiro was also serviceable for building material in houses, household utensils, statuettes and paddles. These artifacts survive in museums around the world. Some of them are hundreds of years old, and they might provide unexpected addenda to our understandings of the tree’s deeper history, offered up through dendrochronological analysis. Studying the annual growth rings in the wood could provide details we lack: the pace of growth of the wood, environmental pressures acting on the tree, its ultimate size and many of the other clues revealed through laboratory work with wood specimens. Part of our lack of knowledge about the tree’s wood is because it has always been uncommon on the island, at least since Western contact. Rapa Nui came with inherent geographic disadvantages for plant survival, including few sheltered habitats with steep hillsides or deep ravines in which toromiro could remain hidden away from humans. The three volcanic craters on the island are the only such hiding places. In 1911, the Chilean botanist Francisco Fuentes noted that the toromiro was rare, only to be found in Rano Kau, the largest of the craters. The Swedish botanist Carl Skottsberg, who also worked on Hawaiian flora, visited Rano Kau in 1917 and found only a single specimen. A compelling global exploration of nature and survival as seen through a dozen species of trees. The final contact with the tree on its native soil occurred when the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl collected seeds from the last surviving example. This was likely the same tree that Skottsberg had found in the shelter of Rano Kau. The egg-shaped crater is about a mile across and has its own microclimate, largely out of the winds and weather, and protected from grazing ungulates by a rock formation. Foot traffic remained down in the last century, as little else lives in the crater that can be harvested or cut down. Innumerable swampy pockets of water make the area difficult to traverse. A beautiful, multicolored, shallow lake of open water and floating mats of peat cover much of the bottom of the crater. There, the tiny toromiro held on. Heyerdahl, who had already been traveling around the Pacific Ocean in the 1940s, became famous, or infamous, for floating a radical new theory: that the islands in the Pacific had been populated initially by American Indians from the mainland of South America, rather than by people from Asia or from other Polynesian islands. In 1947, he launched an expedition with a primitive raft named Kon-Tiki and made a 5,000-mile journey, heading west from Peru. What’s often lost in the voluminous writings about Heyerdahl and his oceanfaring obsessions was his interest in Rapa Nui. Björn Aldén, a Swedish botanist with the Gothenburg Botanical Garden, became friends with Heyerdahl and has worked to return the toromiro to its native land. In a letter to Björn, Heyerdahl decried the “tankelöse treskjaerere,” or “thoughtless woodcutters.” He noted how good it felt to have helped to save the species by collecting a handful of seeds that hung from the tree’s sole remaining branch. Heyerdahl couldn’t recount the exact date, or even the year, but thought it was sometime in late 1955 or early 1956. Heyerdahl handed the seeds off to paleobotanist Olaf Selling in Stockholm. They went to Gothenburg from there. Locals have a strain of national pride in Gothenburg for their role in the tree’s cultivation and survival. But recently, researchers in Chile discovered that another botanist preceded Heyerdahl in getting seeds off the island. Efraín Volosky Yadlin, an Argentinian-born immigrant, participated in the first agronomic studies on Rapa Nui. Sent there by the Chilean Ministry of Agriculture in the early 1950s, Volosky Yadlin collected seeds, apparently from the same tree that Heyerdahl would come upon a few years later, and proceeded to carry out his own propagation tests on the toromiro. Now the tree remains far afield, surviving in about a dozen locations around the world, mostly in botanical gardens including in Chile, in London and in southern France. Ultimately, researchers want to return the toromiro to Rapa Nui. But the tree still confronts challenges to surviving on its native ground, including a lack of genetic diversity and degraded soil on Rapa Nui. Past efforts to reestablish the tree have failed, but botanists are doing their best to overcome these hurdles. More studies will help researchers understand just what it will take to help the tree take root back on Rapa Nui and successfully end a long and difficult voyage. Excerpted from Twelve Trees: The Deep Roots of Our Future by Daniel Lewis. Published by Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster. Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. Get the latest Science stories in your inbox. A Note to our Readers Smithsonian magazine participates in affiliate link advertising programs. If you purchase an item through these links, we receive a commission.

England declines EU's new water pollution standards

In a move that diverges from the European Union's latest environmental protections, England opts not to implement stricter regulations on water pollution from pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries.Helena Horton and Sandra Laville report for The Guardian.In short:The EU has updated its water treatment rules to include "polluter pays" principles, requiring industries to cover costs for chemical pollution cleanup.This update aims to significantly reduce micropollutants and nutrients in waterways, a measure England is not adopting.Northern Ireland and Scotland are moving towards adopting these or similar regulations, signaling a potential policy divergence within the UK.Key quote:"The UK must urgently mirror EU measures to make polluters pay to remedy the problems they cause, as well as to ban the use of harmful chemicals at source, before they harm our health and pollute our environment."— Chloe Alexander, senior campaigner at the CHEM TrustWhy this matters:Ingredients in medications and personal care products, often referred to as emerging contaminants, are increasingly detected in water bodies around the globe. These substances enter aquatic ecosystems through various pathways, including the discharge of treated and untreated sewage, runoff from agricultural lands and improper disposal of unused medications.A little bit of an anti-depressant makes wild guppies less active, camp out more under plants and freeze up for longer after something scares them, according to a 2017 study.

In a move that diverges from the European Union's latest environmental protections, England opts not to implement stricter regulations on water pollution from pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries.Helena Horton and Sandra Laville report for The Guardian.In short:The EU has updated its water treatment rules to include "polluter pays" principles, requiring industries to cover costs for chemical pollution cleanup.This update aims to significantly reduce micropollutants and nutrients in waterways, a measure England is not adopting.Northern Ireland and Scotland are moving towards adopting these or similar regulations, signaling a potential policy divergence within the UK.Key quote:"The UK must urgently mirror EU measures to make polluters pay to remedy the problems they cause, as well as to ban the use of harmful chemicals at source, before they harm our health and pollute our environment."— Chloe Alexander, senior campaigner at the CHEM TrustWhy this matters:Ingredients in medications and personal care products, often referred to as emerging contaminants, are increasingly detected in water bodies around the globe. These substances enter aquatic ecosystems through various pathways, including the discharge of treated and untreated sewage, runoff from agricultural lands and improper disposal of unused medications.A little bit of an anti-depressant makes wild guppies less active, camp out more under plants and freeze up for longer after something scares them, according to a 2017 study.

Obama, the Protagonist

Vinson Cunningham’s new novel takes the reader back to a time when many thought the nation’s first Black president had an answer for every American ailment.

Like so many others, I first watched him speak on the night of the 2004 Democratic convention, the year John Kerry became the nominee. He was still a state senator then, his face unlined, his head full of dark-brown hair. He humbly told the audience that his presence there was “pretty unlikely.” His Kenyan father had grown up herding goats; his paternal grandfather cooked for a British soldier. In a Baptist cadence, he quoted from the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson’s words are stirring on their own, but when a certain kind of orator gets hold of them, the effect can feel like thunder, or the Spirit. The country had tumbled into a new century after a contested election and the start of a war in Iraq. Barack Obama spun a convincing vision of the nation as “one people,” in which our ethnic, religious, and ideological differences mattered little.When I think about what Obama meant to me at the time, my eyes pool with water. I was fresh out of college, taken by the force of his intellect and the way his ideas seemed to cohere and hum. His ear for language was evident in his oratory and in his prose. Dreams From My Father, his first memoir, drew from a humanist tradition of American autobiography laid down by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin. Toni Morrison’s eulogy of Baldwin in 1987 seemed to foreshadow what many would feel about Obama in 2008: “You made American English honest … You exposed its secrets and reshaped it until it was truly modern dialogic, representative, humane.”And yet, it wasn’t enough; the reverie wouldn’t, couldn’t last. In Great Expectations, Vinson Cunningham’s debut novel, the New Yorker writer and critic assesses the hope and disillusionment of the Obama years in a thinly veiled political satire-cum-bildungsroman featuring an Obama-like junior senator as “the candidate,” as well as a multifarious cast of supporting characters who employ their savvy, money, and connections to get him elected as president. Cunningham takes the reader back to a time when many thought Obama had an answer for every American ailment: He would usher the country into a post-race era, offering white people grace and absolution while assuring Black people that they would hereafter get a fair shake.The novel is a keen look back at the failed promise of those early years, during which the country’s lofty expectations left little room for the candidate’s human fallibility—and obscured the reality of American politics. In this country, progress has usually happened in complicated, nonlinear ways: Hard-won advances are generally followed by forceful backlash and heartbreaking setbacks. Advances in civil rights, economic equality, health-care access, or environmental policy have often triggered reactionary codas; since at least the end of Reconstruction, momentum toward multiracial democracy has inflamed particularly vitriolic responses. Ultimately, Cunningham’s novel reminds the reader that simple solutions—the passage of one just law, the election of a single great leader—are seldom a match for American problems.[Read: The political novel gets very, very specific]The narrator—based on the author himself, who worked on Obama’s 2008 campaign and in his White House—is David Hammond, a 22-year-old single father from uptown Manhattan. Floundering after dropping out of college, he joins the campaign as a fundraising assistant on the recommendation of the well-heeled mother of a teen boy he tutors. As the novel roves from Manhattan to Manchester, New Hampshire; from Los Angeles to Chicago, David, whose true ambition is to be a writer, uses his new role to sharpen his ear and eye. He’s middling at the minutiae of the job but great at interacting with people. He makes friends with his co-workers and stumbles into a tender love affair with another staffer named Regina. Along the way, he loses slivers of his innocence as he sees what lies beneath the campaign’s shimmering exterior: the candidate’s aloofness when he is offstage, the financial improprieties of a few wealthy patrons. Eventually, the blind allegiance of the candidate’s supporters—their belief that the campaign is a “move of God”—begins to feel foreboding.David often invokes the ecstatic mysticism of religious devotion as a metaphor for the candidate’s hold on his supporters. The senator “reminded me of my pastor,” David says early on, his regal posture bringing to mind a “talismanic maneuver meant to send forth subliminal messages about confidence and power.” One night, on the trail in New Hampshire, David tells Regina about a magic trick he’d witnessed as a teenager: While waiting outside of church with his friends, he’d watched as a magician performed a standard sleight of hand, then levitated a few inches off the city pavement. “Everybody screamed. It was mayhem,” David remembers. “Black people love magic,” Regina rejoins, through laughter. It is a detour in a novel of detours and roundabouts, and also a parable that smartly explains how the candidate’s fervent admirers could be so awed by his charisma that they missed the signs of trouble to come.Sometimes David allows himself to get carried away like everyone else. He thinks about how the candidate and his family had begun to embody some kind of national fantasy of a Black Camelot. “Maybe there was the hope that black, that portentous designation, could finally be subsumed into the mainstream in the way that Kennedy had helped Irish to be. That some long passage of travel was almost done,” he thinks at one point. In that same stream of thought, David suggests that the public’s belief in the candidate’s ability to dismantle the racial hierarchy is largely thanks to his symbolic appeal: It was, he observes, “mostly the look” of the candidate and his glamorous family—an elegant wife and two small daughters—that made supporters believe he could overcome racism. Who wouldn’t want to accept them?[Read: Our new postracial myth]Privy to the campaign’s disappointments and its weaknesses, David is clear-eyed where others are credulous. With the benefit of hindsight, the reader knows his skepticism would eventually be validated. In the years since Obama’s election, America has seen the birtherism movement, the rise of the Tea Party, Trump’s presidency, and the dismantling of cornerstone civil-rights victories, including key portions of the Voting Rights Act. Then, of course, there were Obama’s own shortcomings during his presidency, namely his capitulation to forces opposed to his most idealistic visions. He would pass a new health-care bill, but fall short of the goal of universal coverage he campaigned on. He would withdraw troops from Afghanistan but begin a series of what the political scientist Michael J. Boyle called “shadow wars,” which were “fought by Special Forces, proxy armies, drones, and other covert means.” According to the Council on Foreign Relations, drone strikes authorized by President Obama led to the deaths of nearly 4,000 people in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia; more than 300 of them were civilians.When Cunningham’s novel closes on that fateful night in November, the night of the candidate’s victory, it’s an ending for David, a graduation, even. The book implies that he will go on to work for the new president, but unlike everyone else in that ecstatic moment, he looks to the coming years soberly, acknowledging that the campaign had spoken “a language of signs,” wherein the symbolism of the moment overwhelmed all else. Already, he seems to know that the country will see no grand, lasting transformation. For many Americans, who felt on a similar, actual night, that the world seemed on the precipice of change, the lessons would take much longer to learn.

EU's microplastics ban faces industry pushback

The European Union's bold ban on microplastics is now under threat from industry challenges and regulatory backpedaling.Hélène Duguy reports for Euronews.In short:The EU's comprehensive ban on intentionally added microplastics is being challenged by industry stakeholders seeking exemptions.Microplastics, pervasive and persistent, pose significant health risks, including increased chances of heart attacks and strokes.Regulatory backpedaling includes negotiations to potentially narrow the ban's scope, raising concerns about the effectiveness of environmental legislation.Why this matters:One of the primary difficulties in instituting bans or regulations on microplastics is their widespread use across various industries, including cosmetics, clothing and packaging. These particles result from the breakdown of larger plastic items, making it challenging to control their release into the environment.Check out EHN's extensive reporting on the health impacts of microplastics, including how they disrupt our digestion and microbiome and can combine with pollution to become even more toxic.

The European Union's bold ban on microplastics is now under threat from industry challenges and regulatory backpedaling.Hélène Duguy reports for Euronews.In short:The EU's comprehensive ban on intentionally added microplastics is being challenged by industry stakeholders seeking exemptions.Microplastics, pervasive and persistent, pose significant health risks, including increased chances of heart attacks and strokes.Regulatory backpedaling includes negotiations to potentially narrow the ban's scope, raising concerns about the effectiveness of environmental legislation.Why this matters:One of the primary difficulties in instituting bans or regulations on microplastics is their widespread use across various industries, including cosmetics, clothing and packaging. These particles result from the breakdown of larger plastic items, making it challenging to control their release into the environment.Check out EHN's extensive reporting on the health impacts of microplastics, including how they disrupt our digestion and microbiome and can combine with pollution to become even more toxic.

New approach to lithium mining sparks environmental concerns

A lithium mining technique promises environmental benefits but raises concerns over water use and safety in Utah.Wyatt Myskow reports for Inside Climate News.In short:A test well for a new lithium mining process in Green River, Utah, unexpectedly released water and CO2, causing local concerns over water supply impacts.The direct lithium extraction (DLE) method, though potentially less damaging than traditional mining, remains unproven on a large scale in the U.S.Critics question the long-term environmental impact of DLE, especially regarding water consumption in the already arid Southwest.Key quote:"We are not opposed to lithium. We are opposed to unsustainable and dangerous appropriations of water under the false assumptions that this new technology is absolutely harmless."— Kyle Roerink, executive director for the Great Basin Water NetworkWhy this matters:As the global demand for lithium continues to surge with the transition toward greener energy sources, the industry faces the challenge of balancing the need for this critical mineral with the imperative to protect water resources and ensure sustainable practices.In push to mine for minerals, clean energy advocates ask what going green really means.

A lithium mining technique promises environmental benefits but raises concerns over water use and safety in Utah.Wyatt Myskow reports for Inside Climate News.In short:A test well for a new lithium mining process in Green River, Utah, unexpectedly released water and CO2, causing local concerns over water supply impacts.The direct lithium extraction (DLE) method, though potentially less damaging than traditional mining, remains unproven on a large scale in the U.S.Critics question the long-term environmental impact of DLE, especially regarding water consumption in the already arid Southwest.Key quote:"We are not opposed to lithium. We are opposed to unsustainable and dangerous appropriations of water under the false assumptions that this new technology is absolutely harmless."— Kyle Roerink, executive director for the Great Basin Water NetworkWhy this matters:As the global demand for lithium continues to surge with the transition toward greener energy sources, the industry faces the challenge of balancing the need for this critical mineral with the imperative to protect water resources and ensure sustainable practices.In push to mine for minerals, clean energy advocates ask what going green really means.

Germany's solar panel makers face tough competition and policy challenges

In a rapidly evolving energy sector, Germany's solar panel manufacturers are navigating a competitive landscape shaped by low-priced Chinese imports and stringent U.S. trade policies, even as the demand for renewable energy sources surges.Melissa Eddy reports for The New York Times.In short:Germany, once a pioneer in solar energy production, now struggles against China's dominating low-cost production and U.S. protectionist measures.German manufacturers advocate for government incentives to sustain the industry, emphasizing the environmental and reliability benefits of local production.Europe's heavy reliance on imported solar panels has intensified debates about trade protectionism and the future of domestic manufacturing in the renewable energy sector.Key quote:“While other countries such as the United States and China are strongly promoting the establishment and scaling up of solar gigafactories, the German government has yet to take concrete action.”— The German Solar AssociationWhy this matters:On one hand, the availability of inexpensive Chinese solar panels has been a boon for the solar installation sector, contributing to a surge in solar energy adoption by making it more financially accessible to a broader population. However, this pricing disparity has put pressure on American and European manufacturers, who argue that they are at an unfair disadvantage due to China's state-backed subsidies and lower labor costs.With solar leading the way, clean energy capacity growth is helping the planet avoid billions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year.

In a rapidly evolving energy sector, Germany's solar panel manufacturers are navigating a competitive landscape shaped by low-priced Chinese imports and stringent U.S. trade policies, even as the demand for renewable energy sources surges.Melissa Eddy reports for The New York Times.In short:Germany, once a pioneer in solar energy production, now struggles against China's dominating low-cost production and U.S. protectionist measures.German manufacturers advocate for government incentives to sustain the industry, emphasizing the environmental and reliability benefits of local production.Europe's heavy reliance on imported solar panels has intensified debates about trade protectionism and the future of domestic manufacturing in the renewable energy sector.Key quote:“While other countries such as the United States and China are strongly promoting the establishment and scaling up of solar gigafactories, the German government has yet to take concrete action.”— The German Solar AssociationWhy this matters:On one hand, the availability of inexpensive Chinese solar panels has been a boon for the solar installation sector, contributing to a surge in solar energy adoption by making it more financially accessible to a broader population. However, this pricing disparity has put pressure on American and European manufacturers, who argue that they are at an unfair disadvantage due to China's state-backed subsidies and lower labor costs.With solar leading the way, clean energy capacity growth is helping the planet avoid billions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year.

In Texas, ex-oil and gas workers champion geothermal energy as a replacement for fossil-fueled power plants

Texas has become an early hot spot for geothermal energy exploration as scores of former oil industry workers and executives are taking their knowledge to a new energy source.

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news. This is the second of a three-part series on emerging energy sources and Texas' role in developing them. Part one, on hydrogen fuel, published on Monday; part three, on small nuclear reactors, will publish on Wednesday. STARR COUNTY — In 2009, on a plot of shrub-covered cattle land about 45 miles northwest of McAllen, Shell buried and abandoned a well it drilled to look for gas. The well turned out to be a dry hole. Vegetation grew back over the site. In 2021, a Houston-based energy company run by former Shell employees came looking for it. This company wasn’t drilling for oil or gas, though. Its engineers were looking for a place to experiment with their technology for producing geothermal energy, created by Earth’s underground heat. A startup called Sage Geosystems leased the site. The company installed a wellhead and brought in a diesel-powered pump. They used fluid to create cracks in the rock deep below the surface, a technique similar to fracking for oil and gas. One day last March, the crew pumped 20,000 barrels of water into the 2-mile-deep well. Hours later, an operator opened the well from a control room. Pipes above ground shook as the pressurized water gushed back up. The water spun small turbines, generating electricity. The pressurized water, which was pumped underground and later released to the surface through the well on the right, at the Starr County demonstration on March 22, 2023. Credit: Verónica Gabriela Cárdenas for The Texas Tribune Left: Water spins a turbine at the Starr County demonstration site. Right: An operator controls the flow in and out of the well. Credit: Verónica Gabriela Cárdenas for The Texas Tribune Sage and other companies believe geothermal power is key to replacing polluting coal- and gas-fired power plants. Even though solar and wind are proven clean energy sources, they only produce electricity when the sun shines or the wind blows. Geothermal power could provide continuous, emissions-free energy. “Geothermal heat doesn’t have those variable conditions,” University of Texas at Austin clean energy expert Michael Webber said. “If you hit a hot spot below ground — might be thousands of feet down — the heat won’t matter based on whether it’s cloudy or whether it’s summer.” Texas has become an early hot spot for geothermal energy exploration. At least three companies are based in Houston, and scores of former oil industry workers and executives are taking their knowledge of geology, drilling and extraction to a new energy source. “We’ve punched over a million holes in the ground in Texas since Spindletop,” said former Texas oil and gas regulator Barry Smitherman, who has become a geothermal advocate. “So we have a lot of knowledge, and we have a lot of history and skill set.” Hveragerði, a city in Iceland, where 85% of the country's energy is sustainable, either hydroelectric or geothermal. Credit: Raul Moreno/SOPA Images/via REUTERS Heat constantly radiates out from the center of Earth as radioactive elements break down. That energy warms water that bubbles up to or escapes as steam at the surface. Humans have taken advantage of that phenomenon — an early form of geothermal power — for heating, bathing and cooking since ancient times. For more than 100 years, engineers have used that underground hot water or steam to generate electricity. Geothermal power in 2015 fueled 27% of the electricity in Iceland, which sits on one of the world’s most active volcanic zones. In 2022, it generated about 5% of the electricity in California. The United States is the top geothermal electricity producer in the world. Still, the total amount of geothermal electricity produced in America is tiny compared with other sources. It accounted for about 4 gigawatts last year, according to a federal analysis, or enough to power about 800,000 Texas homes. Businesses such as Sage and government researchers say there’s a lot more geothermal power to be had by pumping fluid through hot rock where there is no natural water. With technological advances, a government analysis predicts geothermal power in the U.S. could grow to 90 gigawatts by 2050. That would have been enough to power the entire Texas grid during last summer’s highest-demand day. Companies are racing to develop their technology and techniques to harness this energy source. They vary in how deep they want to drill (from around 7,000 feet, which oil and gas equipment can handle, to 66,000 feet, which it cannot), how they heat the water (in the well or in the rock) and how they bring the heated water back up (in the same well that sent it down or with a second one). Like oil wildcatters, the geothermal industry must figure out the best places to drill. They’ll face the same concerns about triggering earthquakes that have dogged oil and gas fracking operations and previous geothermal efforts. In 2006, a pilot geothermal plant in Switzerland caused a magnitude 3.4 earthquake that damaged buildings and led to the plant’s closure. In 2017, a magnitude 5.5 earthquake linked to a pilot geothermal project in South Korea injured dozens. Companies should follow existing best practices informed by research to monitor seismicity and adjust or pause operations as needed, said William Ellsworth, an emeritus professor at Stanford University. States could also mandate these protocols. “You have to pay attention to what you’re doing,” Ellsworth said. And perhaps most importantly, the geothermal businesses will have to show they can compete with the cost of other power sources, with help from the federal government in the form of Inflation Reduction Act tax credits. The more the technology is deployed, the more the costs might come down, Rice University Associate Professor Daniel Cohan said. Getting the price where the federal government hopes for it to be cost-competitive is “feasible,” Cohan said, “but there’s no guarantee that the industry will get there.” The federal Department of Energy said this month that $20 billion to $25 billion needed to be invested by 2030 to move toward widespread use. “We’re all doing something a little bit different,” Sage CEO Cindy Taff said. “One of us is going to have a breakthrough that really commercializes this stuff.” The daughter of a geophysicist who worked for Mobil, Taff studied mechanical engineering and built a 36-year career at Shell. She worked her way up from production engineer to vice president, managing a team with an annual budget of around $1 billion. Taff explains how Sage Geosystems uses its Starr County well to store energy. Credit: Verónica Gabriela Cárdenas for The Texas Tribune With freckles and curly hair that falls past her shoulders, Taff said she knew the world wanted to pivot to new energy sources. Her daughter, concerned about climate change, urged her mother to get away from the “dark side” of oil and gas. When former colleagues from Shell told Taff they were co-founding Sage and invited her to join them, she got excited. Taff saw that Sage was a nimble company with people she considered some of the smartest in the industry. The geothermal business had a lot of growing to do, like the early days of wind or solar. Her work could have a large impact. “It was exciting to be working with people that I knew had a sense of urgency and made a difference,” Taff said. “And then, it was exciting to be working for yourself in a way that you can push the agenda.” So, in 2020, Taff took the leap. Her daughter joined the company too. Building interest in geothermal  In 1989, the Exxon Valdez oil tanker spilled 11 million gallons of oil off the coast of Alaska, killing some 250,000 seabirds, 2,800 sea otters and 300 harbor seals. In Augusta, Georgia, 10-year-old Jamie Beard was riveted by the news coverage. “I understood things enough to know that that was not something we wanted,” Beard said. That experience pushed Beard into environmental activism, starting the next day, when she took a Kleenex box decorated like the ocean to raise money for coral reefs. She painted murals about environmental rights. In college, at Appalachian State University, she organized an Earth Day festival and tied herself to trees on a West Virginia mountaintop to protest workers scraping them away to mine for coal. Years before Jamie Beard helped launch Sage Geosystems, she was a student at Appalachian State University teaching others how to use solar ovens. Credit: Courtesy of Jamie Beard Beard went on to study environmental law at Boston University. She represented corporations, telling herself she could make change best from the inside. That proved incorrect. She joined a startup working on technology that could be applied to geothermal drilling. That’s when her life changed. Beard read an interview about the huge potential for geothermal power to provide electricity around the world. The interview was with Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Jefferson Tester, who led a team that published a 372-page assessment of the resource for the federal government in 2006. “The technology needed to advance … but it wasn’t like it had to invent a whole new area because it’s so compatible with what we do with hydrocarbon extraction,” Tester said in an interview with the Texas Tribune. “They drill holes in the ground and they pull fluids out of the ground, whether they’re gas or liquids, and they sell it. Well, that’s what you do for geothermal too.” Beard read the report over and over. This is my career, Beard thought. The history of modern geothermal power went back a century: The world’s first full-scale geothermal power plant started operating in 1913 in Italy. In 1960, Pacific Gas and Electric built the first commercial geothermal power plant in the United States at a spot in Northern California known as “The Geysers.” In the 1970s, the federal Department of Energy started researching pulling power from what was referred to as hot, dry rock. The country that decade suffered through Arab countries’ embargo on exporting oil to America, causing oil prices to skyrocket. Still, the technology didn’t get far enough for the concept to take off. The Larderello geothermal power plant, which is the world's oldest, was built in Tuscany, Italy. Credit: Enel Green Power Engineers built geothermal power plants where they could find existing water resources relatively easily, maybe marked by hot springs or fumaroles, which are holes where hot gases and vapors escape from underground, said Lauren Boyd, director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s geothermal technologies office. But building new plants got riskier as prime locations got harder to find. Beard saw opportunity. She knew the oil and gas industry could develop technology quickly. The U.S. ushered in the “shale revolution” as companies drilled horizontally and cracked open rock with hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking, to extract giant amounts of oil and gas. That technology could be used for geothermal. Beard, 45, is the type of person who speaks with an energy that rubs off on you. Her hair is cut into an angular bob; she wears artsy glasses. She made giving a TED talk look easy. Armed with a $1 million Department of Energy grant, Beard moved to the University of Texas at Austin around 2019 to convince people that now was the time to start a geothermal company. She argued that oil and gas experts did not have to be only the villains in the climate change story; they could also be the people who help alleviate it. Jamie Beard speaks at a SXSW panel titled "Geothermal and the Promise of Clean Energy Abundance" on March 9 in Austin. Credit: Courtesy of Jamie Beard “Oil and gas people are a gigantic brain trust,” Beard said. “They are a huge asset.” Beard had a young son. She learned he inherited a rare genetic condition that gave him a life expectancy of 10 or so years. A journalist from Wired who profiled Beard described a woman facing an existential choice: She could let the doom of his fate swallow her, or focus on changing the world. Beard started by reaching out to industry veterans whom she suspected were retired, golfing and bored. Maybe their grandchildren were after them for being part of the fossil fuel industry that contributes to climate change. Beard said she spent months talking with people like Lance Cook, who retired from Shell as a vice president. Beard said the reaction she usually got was “it’ll never work,” followed by a phone call a few weeks later that the person was still thinking about it. But Cook decided to jump in, and he became the chief technology officer for a new company named for Beard’s son, Sage. Chris Anderson, the leader of TED, known for its conferences with TED talks by experts on various topics, invested $16 million through his climate investment fund. Drilling firm Nabors invested $9 million more. Early successes  Beard wasn’t the only person who saw the potential of leveraging expertise from the oil and gas industry to develop geothermal in Texas. Tim Latimer grew up in a city of about 1,000 residents in Central Texas, where he remembers being fascinated by the Discovery Channel show “Build It Bigger” about constructing large projects that impact many lives, such as bridges, tunnels and dams. Latimer studied mechanical engineering at the University of Tulsa. He wanted a job back in Texas to be near family and friends, so when he graduated in 2012 he went to work on drilling sites while the shale revolution was taking off. Latimer considered whether he should be working in fossil fuels in a world confronting climate change. But working on rapidly developing technology alongside smart people excited him. Moving into wind or solar didn’t feel right after years studying drilling. Fervo CEO Tim Latimer at the Fervo Energy office in Houston on March 22. Credit: Mark Felix for the The Texas Tribune Then came the lightbulb moment. He found the same 2006 geothermal report that inspired Beard. He realized that what he was doing, which included drilling into high-temperature rock in South Texas, presented what he called a “huge opportunity for tech transfer” into geothermal. Latimer thought the idea was so obvious he could join a geothermal company already doing it. He found none. What if this could change how the world gets energy and no one tried it? he wondered. Like other startup founders, he’s articulate and dreams big. At a conference where some wore suits, he wore sneakers, a button-down and jeans. Latimer went to Stanford University Graduate School of Business and met a classmate getting a PhD in geothermal research. Together they started Fervo Energy. They headquartered the business in Houston. Their first Houston-based hire had 15 years of experience working for oil and gas companies Hess and BP. Fervo now employs 80 people, about 60% of whom came from oil and gas work. Fervo’s approach is basically to drill vertically, then use fracking technology to create horizontal cracks in the earth. That way, operators can send water down the well, where it can flow through the small cracks in the rock to heat before coming back up another nearby well. Two California energy providers have signed contracts to buy power from Fervo. Google also has a financial agreement with them. Oil and gas company Devon Energy Corporation invested $10 million. Last summer, Fervo ran a 30-day test in 375-degree rock in Nevada. They deemed it a success, and now the company is building a project nearby in Utah, next to where the Department of Energy has sponsored a geothermal field lab. They expect the project will put power mostly onto the California grid in 2026. Drilling deeper Back in Houston, in a beige set of warehouses on the south side of town, another company led by former oil and gas experts is taking a third approach. Henry Phan left a 19-year career in product development at Schlumberger, where his work included designing drilling equipment that could steer sideways, to join a former colleague who launched Quaise Energy. The company focuses on using millimeter waves — which are higher frequency microwaves like the ones used to heat food — to create wells by vaporizing rock. Henry Phan, vice president of engineering for Quaise Energy, stands with a wave guide that the company uses to direct waves from the surface into the hole they are creating, in Houston on Feb. 15, 2024. Credit: Joseph Bui for The Texas Tribune First: Employees of Quaise Energy stand next to a repurposed drilling rig that will hold a wave guide. Last: Vaporized basalt rock from testing at Quaise Energy in Houston. Credit: Joseph Bui for The Texas Tribune Oil and gas equipment begins to fail when temperatures below ground reach around 400 degrees. Drill bits wear down quickly against harder rock and electronics are pushed past their limits. Using millimeter waves would allow operators to “drill” deeper than oil and gas equipment can go — which means reaching hotter rock that could produce more power. The idea interested Phan, and he thought the physics made sense. Plus, he would work on cutting-edge technology that he thought could be a “big step change for humanity.” Quaise had a lot less bureaucracy than at the giant Schlumberger, where money going into product development seemed to be diminishing. In 2020, he signed on as Quaise’s vice president of engineering. He brought more former colleagues with him. Quaise aims to be able to drill into 300 to 500 degree rock by 2026, produce steam that can generate electricity by 2028 and go commercial after that. Their investors include Nabors, climate investors Prelude Ventures and billionaire Vinod Khosla. In early experiments with the technology, they used millimeter waves to “drill” through an eight-foot cylinder of basalt rock, plus samples of 1- to 2-inch-thick basalt. The examples sit on display in their office. “It’s cool to work on a new product,” Phan said, “but the fact that it can make an impact to … our life and our children’s life and their generation and their kids is monumental. So it’s rewarding from the point of view that we’re working on something that is so impactful if we can make this thing work.” Disclosure: Google, Rice University and the University of Texas at Austin have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here. We can’t wait to welcome you to downtown Austin Sept. 5-7 for the 2024 Texas Tribune Festival! Join us at Texas’ breakout politics and policy event as we dig into the 2024 elections, state and national politics, the state of democracy, and so much more. When tickets go on sale this spring, Tribune members will save big. Donate to join or renew today.

Poor dental health is linked to the heart disease and dementia. So why do we neglect it?

Research has repeatedly linked good oral hygiene with brain and heart health, yet insurance doesn't prioritize it

A new study published in The Journals of Gerontology Series A finds that if you don't take care of your teeth, you are more likely to suffer inflammation, reduced brain size and damage to your heart. At first glance, this may seem like a reach — what do teeth have to do with the brain and heart? But as one of the researchers, Dr. Benjamin Trumble, told Salon, our culture errs when "the way we think about health is that we split the body into two parts," with the mouth in one category and everything else in the other. "Somewhere along the line we lost this understanding when it comes to overall health and dental health." In fact, the health of your mouth profoundly impacts other areas of your body. The scientists behind the recent paper learned this by examining more than 700 sets of teeth — all among members of a little-known South American tribe. The Tsimané, an Indigenous people of lowland Bolivia, lead much simpler lives than the vast majority of humans. While the rest of us flourish/wallow in our world of post-industrial technology, this community leads a traditional lifestyle of foraging and growing their own food. They are not as exposed to the problems of pollution, low physical activity and poor diet that cause epidemic levels of heart and brain disease in industrialized societies. As a result, when researchers drew links between each individual's oral health and their cardiovascular and brain health, they could feel more comfortable that the findings were not confused by unrelated variables. The study found that though this community has generally poor oral hygiene, it also had low rates of dementia and cardiovascular disease. Nevertheless, individuals who had large amounts of damaged teeth possessed higher rates of inflammation, brain tissue loss and aortic valve calcification. By contrast, damaged and lost teeth were not associated with coronary artery calcium or thoracic aortic calcium. "I think that this really highlights the importance of oral health in overall health," Trumble, a professor at Arizona State University's Center for Evolution and Medicine, told Salon by email. Trumble pointed to the famous expression "don't look a gift horse in the mouth" as proof that people have always suspected a connection between health and examining an animal's teeth. Yet humans often culturally fail to apply the same logic to themselves that they do to horses. Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon's weekly newsletter Lab Notes. "We are essentially living outside of the manufacturer's recommended warranty for our bodies." "Somewhere along the line we lost this understanding when it comes to overall health and dental health," Trumble said. "Now we differentiate health insurance from dental insurance, but really they both impact our health and aging." So why do we arbitrarily divide dental into its own separate form of health care, one that isn't covered equally by insurance? Indeed, teeth are often treated as a "cosmetic" problem, despite clear evidence to the contrary. In fact, the website for Covered California, the largest state-based health insurance marketplaces in the U.S., spells it out plainly: "Dental coverage for adults is not considered an essential health benefit, so dental coverage for adults is offered separately from health insurance plans. No financial assistance is available to purchase these dental plans." Yet even before this study, scientists had established strong links between oral health and inflammatory, cardiovascular and brain health. The new paper adds more clarity to that connection, however, by showing that it exists in a population that is free not only from the environmental scourges of industrialism and factory farming, but also its social injustices — particularly those that negatively impact oral health. The Tsimané "have far less of a socioeconomic gradient, and very little access to modern dentistry at all," Trumble said. "This makes it possible to actually examine associations between oral health and chronic disease without confounding social factors" — namely, the fact that industrialized societies like the United States tend to provide inferior dental care to people in lower socioeconomic conditions. "That is what really sets this paper apart — we can assess the association between dental health and cardiovascular and brain health independent of any confounding from socioeconomic status," Trumble said. The new paper also provides useful context to research done into how oral health is connected to other forms of health. A January paper in the journal BMC Oral Health found that dental cavities decrease the cerebral cortical thickness of the BANKSSTS, a region of the brain crucial for language-related functions and the most affected area in Alzheimer's disease. Similarly, a January paper in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology determined that people who use dentures are more likely to have coronary artery disease, strokes, myocardial infarctions, heart failures and type 2 diabetes. And a 2022 paper in the International Journal of Dentistry also determined that people with significant tooth loss and diabetes mellitus, as well as those with just significant tooth loss, were more likely to have elevated levels of serum C-reactive protein (CRP), a liver enzyme that indicates inflammation. It also found that people who regularly floss are more likely to have higher CRP levels. There is plenty we just don't understand about how our mouth and the rest of our health are intertwined. Just last week, researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle reported in Nature that a bacterium that lives in our mouths, known as Fusobacterium nucleatum, is linked to an increase in colorectal tumors. However, much of this previous research exists with the possibility of some outside factor, such as diet or environment, that could explain the link between the mouth and these conditions. Because of Trumble and the extensive research team that joined him — including anthropologists, cardiologists, neurologists, radiologists and dentists — researchers can now look at a study with a large cohort in which post-industrial society simply does not exist. The experience wasn't just educational — Trumble found it inspirational. "It has been one of the great honors of my life to get to work with the Tsimané for the last decade and half," Trumble said. "Modern urban life is evolutionarily novel — we were hunter gatherers for 99% of human history. The sedentary lifestyle we live today is very different from the rest of the human past." Because post-industrial city life is so unusual compared to what our physiology was designed to do, "we are essentially living outside of the manufacturer's recommended warranty for our bodies," Trumble said. "Most of human evolution occurred in traditional subsistence populations, but nearly all health research is done in urban centers, so we really don’t have a great idea of what health was like before electricity, cars and grocery stores." Trumble added, "Getting to work with a population like the Tsimané is an amazing experience, and gives a better idea of the health issues that people had prior to city life." Read more about teeth and health

Quasar Conundrum: Brilliant Supermassive Black Hole Defies Expectations

The quasar produces high levels of radiation and powerful jets, but it has less influence on its surroundings than expected. Astronomers have revealed that a...

Astronomers studying the quasar H1821+643 found it less impactful on its environment than expected, challenging typical black hole behavior. Credit: SciTechDaily.comThe quasar produces high levels of radiation and powerful jets, but it has less influence on its surroundings than expected.Astronomers have revealed that a brilliant supermassive black hole is not living up to expectations. Although it is responsible for high levels of radiation and powerful jets, this giant black hole is not as influential on its surroundings as many of its counterparts in other galaxies.A paper describing these results, by a team including W. Niel Brandt, the Eberly Family Chair Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics and professor of physics at Penn State, was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Close-Up on the Closest QuasarThe study, using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, looked at the closest quasar to Earth. Known as H1821+643, this quasar is about 3.4 billion light-years from Earth and sits in a cluster of galaxies. Quasars are a rare and extreme class of supermassive black holes that are furiously pulling material inwards, producing intense radiation and sometimes powerful jets.“I have long desired to investigate this remarkable quasar better with Chandra’s keen eyesight,” Brandt said. “I suspected this quasar’s `bark’ would be worse than its `bite’ — that is, its impressive pyrotechnics do not imply similarly impressive environmental impact. I’m delighted that our dogged determination eventually paid off and confirmed my suspicions!”In the center of this image is the quasar H1821+643, a rapidly growing supermassive black hole that astronomers have found is underachieving, despite producing intense radiation and a jet of particles seen in radio data from the Very Large Array, in red. Located in the middle of a cluster of galaxies, H1821+643 is surrounded by huge quantities of hot gas detected in X-rays by Chandra, in blue. The high temperatures and densities of the hot gas around the quasar shows that the black hole is having a weaker impact on its host galaxy than many of its other counterparts in other galaxy clusters. H1821+643 is the closest quasar to Earth in a cluster of galaxies. It is located 3.4 billion light-years from Earth and the image is about a million light-years across at the distance of the quasar. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Nottingham/H. Russell et al.; Radio: NSF/NRAO/VLA; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/N. WolkQuasar Impact: A Detailed ExaminationMost growing supermassive black holes pull material in less quickly than quasars. Astronomers have studied the impact of these more common black holes by observing ones in the centers of galaxy clusters. Regular outbursts from such black holes prevent the huge amounts of superheated gas they are embedded in from cooling down, which limits how many stars form in their host galaxies and how much fuel gets funneled toward the black hole. Much less is known about how much influence quasars in galaxy clusters have on their surroundings.“We have found that the quasar in our study appears to have relinquished much of the control imposed by more slowly growing black holes,” said Helen Russell of the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, who led the new study. “The black hole’s appetite is not matched by its influence.”Uncovering the Cosmic ParadoxTo reach this conclusion, the team used Chandra to study the hot gas that H1821+643 and its host galaxy are shrouded in. The bright X-rays from the quasar, however, made it difficult to study the weaker X-rays from the hot gas.“We had to carefully remove the X-ray glare to reveal what the black hole’s influence is,” said co-author Paul Nulsen of the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and the Smithsonian. “We could then see that it’s actually having little effect on its surroundings.”Gas Dynamics and Future ImplicationsThe team found that the density of gas near the black hole in the center of the galaxy is much higher, and the gas temperatures much lower, than in regions farther away. Scientists expect the hot gas to behave like this when there are little or no sources of energy — typically outbursts from a black hole — to prevent the hot gas from cooling down and flowing toward the center of the cluster.“The giant black hole is generating a lot less heat than most of the others in the centers of galaxy clusters,” said co-author Lucy Clews of the Open University in the U.K. “This allows the hot gas to rapidly cool down and form new stars, and also act as a fuel source for the black hole.”The researchers determined that hot gas equivalent to about 3,000 times the mass of the sun per year is cooling to the point that it is no longer visible in X-rays. This rapid cooling can easily supply enough material for the 120 solar masses of new stars observed to form in the host galaxy every year, and the 40 solar masses consumed by the black hole each year.The team also examined the possibility that the radiation from the quasar is directly causing the cluster’s hot gas to cool down. This involves photons of light from the quasar colliding with electrons in the hot gas, causing the photons to become more energetic and the electrons to lose energy and cool down. The team’s study showed that this type of cooling is probably occurring in the cluster containing H1821+643 but is much too weak to explain the large amount of gas cooling seen.“While this black hole may be underachieving by not pumping heat into its environment, the current state of affairs will likely not last forever,” said co-author Thomas Braben of the University of Nottingham. “Eventually the rapid fuel intake by the black hole should increase the power of its jets and strongly heat the gas. The growth of the black hole and its galaxy should then drastically slow down.”Reference: “A cooling flow around the low-redshift quasar H1821+643” by H R Russell, P E J Nulsen, A C Fabian, T E Braben, W N Brandt, L Clews, M McDonald, C S Reynolds, J S Sanders and S Veilleux, 27 January 2024, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stae026Brandt’s work on the project was supported by the Penn State Eberly Family Chair in Astronomy and Astrophysics and the Chandra X-ray Center.

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