Mississippi
Ancient Mud in Mississippi Reveals Dramatic Saga of Antarctic Ice
Mud cores drilled in Mississippi hold long-hidden clues about the origins of gigantic Antarctic ice sheets around 34 million years ago, new research shows.
Earth was in the midst of a major transition at the time, shifting from the balmy Eocene Epoch to the cooler Oligocene. The planet had no permanent ice during the Eocene, but by the early Oligocene, it already featured ice sheets 25 percent larger than those we know today.
As those ice sheets grew during the Eocene-Oligocene transition, sea levels also fell by roughly 40 meters (131 feet), exposing swaths of previously submerged land in the wake of receding coastlines.
That dramatic drop in sea levels unleashed a major carbon transfer from coastal sediments into the atmosphere, according to the research team’s analysis of ancient mud from the same time period collected near Jackson, Mississippi.
“We’ve unearthed information from the Mississippi mud to answer a key question about how Antarctic ice massively expanded to continental scale,” says senior author Tom Dunkley Jones, a micropaleontologist and paleoceanographer at the University of Birmingham in the UK.
These Antarctic ice sheets, the study’s authors note, originally formed due to the long-term burial of carbon in sediments, sequestering it away from the atmosphere, where it famously has a heat-trapping effect.
That drop in atmospheric carbon also enabled Earth’s broader transition to the cooler modern climate of the past 34 million years, they add, creating chillier conditions that helped massive ice sheets form in Antarctica, which in turn led to the global decrease in sea levels.
This all happened too quickly for many species to adapt, resulting in a widespread mass extinction as previous research has shown. This turbulent period is also known by the French nickname Grande Coupure, for “great cut.”
“The Eocene-Oligocene transition is probably the planet’s biggest climate cooling event and has had a major impact on the Earth’s history,” Dunkley Jones says.
Amid this overall cooling trend, however, falling sea levels caused by Antarctica’s glaciation also led to another, opposing trend, Dunkley Jones and his colleagues report.
The retreating ocean laid bare large regions of coastal sediments, leaving them vulnerable to extreme erosion. These soft, soggy sediments contained large volumes of plant matter and other organic debris, which were no longer protected by seawater.
As these mangrove-like habitats dried out, their legacy of organic material was exposed to oxygen and became a feast for microbes, which released its sequestered carbon into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.
This surge of CO2 was enough to cause a “transient negative feedback to climate cooling,” the researchers write, briefly undercutting the planet’s transition to an “icehouse” climate.
“As sea levels fell over this transition, we can observe how a temporary brake on atmospheric cooling took place with the release of large amounts of carbon dioxide sequestered in coastal regions around the basin of the Mississippi River,” Dunkley Jones says.
The transfer of carbon from these coastal sediments may not have stopped the planet’s progression into the cooler Oligocene climate, the team notes, but it does reveal an important detail about how this complex system works.
“Our paper gives us a valuable new clue about how Earth’s climate can undergo dramatic shifts and how this is often strongly linked to the biosphere and carbon cycle,” says Kirsty Edgar, a micropaleontologist and paleoceanographer at the University of Birmingham.
The study examined marine clays from about 137 meters deep, comparing data from them with clues about the Eocene-Oligocene transition from elsewhere, especially the Pacific Ocean.
This revealed long-term changes in the accumulation of sediments, the researchers explain, clarifying the timing of sea-level declines that coincided with formation of the ice sheets.
“Understanding these past events gives us a clearer picture of the beauty and complexity of the Earth’s climate and ecology,” says Edgar.
The study was published in Nature Communications.
MISSISSIPPI (WKRG) — It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas on the Gulf Coast and that means Santa Claus will be heading to town for multiple parades around the area.
WKRG has compiled a list of Christmas parades coming to Southeast Mississippi.
Christmas on the Water — Biloxi
- Dec. 7
- 6 p.m.
- Begins at Biloxi Lighthouse and will go past the Golden Nugget
Lucedale Christmas Parade
GULFPORT, Miss. (WLOX) – The Mississippi Aquarium in Gulfport is spreading holiday cheer with a new event, ‘’A Magical Mississippi Christmas.’
The aquarium held a preview Tuesday night.
‘A Magical Mississippi Christmas’ includes a special dolphin presentation, diving elves, and photos with Santa.
The event also includes “A Penguin’s Christmas Wish,” which is a projection map show that follows a penguin through Christmas adventures across Mississippi.
“It’s a really fun event and it’s the first time we really opened up the aquarium at night for the general public, so it’s a chance to come in and see what it’s like in the evening because it’s really spectacular and really beautiful,” said Kurt Allen, Mississippi Aquarium President and CEO.
‘A Magical Mississippi Christmas’ runs from November 29 to December 31.
It will not be open on December 11th, December 24th, and December 25th.
Tickets can be purchased online or at the gate.
The event is made possible by the city of Gulfport and Coca-Cola Bottling Company.
See a spelling or grammar error in this story? Report it to our team HERE.
Copyright 2024 WLOX. All rights reserved.
Mississippi
Mississippi asks for execution date of man convicted in 1993 killing, lawyers plan to appeal case to SCOTUS
Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch, a Republican, is seeking an execution date for a convicted killer who has been on death row for 30 years, but his lawyer argues that the request is premature since the man plans to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Charles Ray Crawford, 58, was sentenced to death in connection with the 1993 kidnapping and killing of 20-year-old community college student Kristy Ray, according to The Associated Press.
During his 1994 trial, jurors pointed to a past rape conviction as an aggravating circumstance when they issued Crawford’s sentence, but his attorneys said Monday that they are appealing that conviction to the Supreme Court after a lower court ruled against them last week.
Crawford was arrested the day after Ray was kidnapped from her parents’ home and stabbed to death in Tippah County. Crawford told officers he had blacked out and did not remember killing her.
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Mississippi death row inmate Charles Ray Crawford, who was convicted and sentenced to death in 1994 in the 1993 kidnapping and killing of a community college student, 20-year-old Kristy Ray. (Mississippi Department of Corrections via AP)
He was arrested just days before his scheduled trial on a charge of assaulting another woman by hitting her over the head with a hammer.
The trial for the assault charge was delayed several months before he was convicted. In a separate trial, Crawford was found guilty in the rape of a 17-year-old girl who was friends with the victim of the hammer attack. The victims were at the same place during the attacks.
Crawford said he also blacked out during those incidents and did not remember committing the hammer assault or the rape.
During the sentencing portion of Crawford’s capital murder trial in Ray’s death, jurors found the rape conviction to be an “aggravating circumstance” and gave him the death sentence, according to court records.
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During the sentencing portion of Crawford’s capital murder trial, jurors found his prior rape conviction to be an “aggravating circumstance” and gave him the death sentence. (iStock)
In his latest federal appeal of the rape case, Crawford claimed his previous lawyers provided unconstitutionally ineffective assistance for an insanity defense. He received a mental evaluation at the state hospital, but the trial judge repeatedly refused to allow a psychiatrist or other mental health professional outside the state’s expert to help in Crawford’s defense, court records show.
On Friday, a majority of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Crawford’s appeal.
But the dissenting judges wrote that he received an “inadequately prepared and presented insanity defense” and that “it took years for a qualified physician to conduct a full evaluation of Crawford.” The dissenting judges quoted Dr. Siddhartha Nadkarni, a neurologist who examined Crawford.
“Charles was laboring under such a defect of reason from his seizure disorder that he did not understand the nature and quality of his acts at the time of the crime,” Nadkarni wrote. “He is a severely brain-injured man (corroborated both by history and his neurological examination) who was essentially not present in any useful sense due to epileptic fits at the time of the crime.”
Photo shows the gurney of an execution chamber. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki, File)
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Crawford’s case has already been appealed multiple times using various arguments, which is common in death penalty cases.
Hours after the federal appeals court denied Crawford’s latest appeal, Fitch filed documents urging the state Supreme Court to set a date for Crawford’s execution by lethal injection, claiming that “he has exhausted all state and federal remedies.”
However, the attorneys representing Crawford in the Mississippi Office of Post-Conviction Counsel filed documents on Monday stating that they plan to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the appeals court’s ruling.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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