This week I examine a new climate report show that Canada is heating up at twice the global rate and that the Canadian north is warming at triple the global average. I also look at several dinosaur-related stories, including the biggest T.Rex ever found, the first skin impressions of a T. Rex, and evidence that they hunted in packs. Finally, I examine a fossil site in North Dakota that might have recorded the exact day that an asteroid slammed into the Yucatan peninsula to end the age of the dinosaurs.
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Canada’s New Climate Report
In my last episode, I talked about Glacier National Park in Montana and the ever-increasing rate that its glaciers are disappearing. This week, a new report from Environment and Climate Change Canada has highlighted just how much climate change is currently affecting northern landscapes like Canada.
The paper, titled Canada’s Changing Climate Report paints a stark picture of the changes we’re seeing take place in Canada right now. It makes it very clear that climate change is not something Canadians are leaving for their kids; it’s happening right now.
Despite what some politicians might say, there is no, nada, zilch, zero scientific debate as to what is causing climate change! It’s us! You and me, our parents, their parents, and perhaps one more set of parents before them. Our comfortable lives began in England when rivers were first harnessed by textile manufacturers to mass produce fabric.
If you want to blame someone, blame Englishmen like James Hargreaves, Richard Arkwright, and Samuel Crompton who started these early mills in the late 1700s.
As more and more items began to be made in factories, the industrial revolution spread. Steam engines replaced rivers in powering these manufacturing plants, and coal became a key industrial fuel.
Populations shifted from rural cultures to urban manufacturing societies. Every factory needed coal, and new factories were built as fast as possible. When Henry Ford invented the assembly line, it enabled very complex products to be built very quickly and in huge numbers.
As this mass production became the norm, every lump of coal began to feed an industrial machine that added more and more and more carbon to the atmosphere.
What our forefathers didn’t know so long ago was that burning coal immediately began to change the world’s climate. As carbon was released from burning coal, the Earth began to slowly and at first, imperceptively warm.
In the late 18th century, nobody knew what the greenhouse effect was. Coal fed industry, and industry fed people. These early days of the industrial revolution were like an addict getting their first fix…the first taste is free.
Carbon dioxide is one of several important greenhouse gases. When light from the sun hits Earth, it has a short wavelength. These high energy light waves have little trouble passing through the planet’s atmosphere. They bathe the surface with heat which is absorbed by the soils.
As the Earth’s surface warms, it radiates some of that heat back towards the atmosphere. This warm air has a much longer wavelength than the incoming rays from the sun, and it gets trapped by our atmosphere. This is how the Earth warmed up enough so that plants and animals could colonize it hundreds of millions of years ago.
The greenhouse effect is essential for life on Earth. Without it, the planet would be much too cold to support life. Unfortunately, too much of a good thing can complicate things as well.
The more greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere, the warmer the planet becomes. The problem we face now is that the atmosphere is warming at an increasingly rapid rate as we continue to spew more and more greenhouse gases through the burning of fossil fuels, among other sources.
This new report was released just as Canada was imposing a carbon tax nationally in order to encourage Canadians to reduce their energy use. To those of us that stay on top of climate science, the findings are nothing new. What is new to Canadians is the way it really brings out the unique challenges of being a northern nation at a time of warming climates.
Global warming is not a consistent process. The entire planet doesn’t warm at the same rate. The further north or south of the equator you travel, the higher are the temperature increases being experienced.
Globally, the average annual temperature has increased by 0.8 C in the past 70 years. Canada’s overall annual temperature has risen by more than double the global average – a whopping 1.7 C. If this wasn’t shocking enough, the Canadian Arctic has risen by a staggering 2.3 C, almost triple the global average.
The temperatures during our winters have risen by 3.3 C – more than 4-times the global average. While this winter may make you question these stats, it’s important to remember that this year was an anomaly. There will always be extreme weather events in a world of warming climates, and this polar vortex is easily connected to human-caused climate change.
Regardless of what people do today, the next 20 years of warming have already been set in motion. What happens beyond that 20 year period is what is really up to humanity to decide. Do we continue with the business as usual approach which led us here, or do we as nations look to accelerating our path towards more renewable energies and a fossil fuel free economy?
Climate models offer numerous predictions for temperature increases by the late part of this century, from 2081 to 2100. If aggressive measures are taken to reduce global carbon outputs, temperature increases could be limited to as little as 1.8 C globally.
If nations follow the example now being set in countries like the U.S., which is rolling back most of their environmental protections than the world could see as much as a 6.3 C boost in average annual temperatures.
Rising temperatures only tell part of the story. We’re also seeing changes in precipitation connected to these changes. Already, areas in Canada that lie north of the 60th parallel, have seen increases in rainfall in excess of 90% in the past 70 years.
On landscapes that have historically been defined by having large amounts of their annual precipitation fall as snow, rather than rain, a change in the ratio of snow vs rain can have huge impacts.
As an example, as I mentioned in last weeks episode, one of the factors that are increasing the rate of melt in the glaciers in the Canadian Rockies, as well as in Montana’s Glacier National Park, has to do with this shift.
Glaciers need snow to exist. Rain just doesn’t cut it. In fact, rain helps to reduce the mass of glaciers by melting more of the snow necessary for replenishing the summer meltwater. Glaciers grow when the amount of snowfall in the winter, exceeds the amount of snow and ice lost during summer melt. When melt exceeds snowfall, they shrink.
As more rain falls, that is moisture that is not contributing to the storage of snow critical to glaciers, but as I’ve already stated, rain will also accelerate snowmelt. Every ecosystem on this continent has been forged by the climatic norms over time. As climates change, so then do the ecosystems.
In episode 73, I talked about how losing our snowpack in the mountains here can have dramatic impacts for animals and birds that are protected by that thick blanket of snow.
Way back in Episode 16, I talked about research showing that hundreds of species are already migrating north to take advantage of warmer climates. You can check out that episode at MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep016.
Everything from insects and spiders, to birds, mammals, and plants are seeing their optimum ranges shift north and many are moving with it. What happens to the species that already occupy the north, or in the mountains, the cold climates of the alpine? They also get pushed north, or in the case of the alpine – up.
I see this in Churchill, Manitoba where red fox are moving into territory that was historically too cold for them, but perfect for arctic fox. More and more, as guides, we see red fox preying on the smaller arctic fox as the reds move in for the long haul.
Polar bears around Churchill can[‘t just migrate further north – it’s already full of other well-established bears. Instead, they are gradually lost from the landscape as the conditions leave them out of luck.
In the mountains, animals like pikas are an alpine specialist. However, trees are beginning to grow higher and higher up the mountains, forcing the alpine to also move higher as well. What happens when pikas run out of mountain to climb? They disappear.
This is already being documented in certain ecosystems in the Andes where a recent report showed that bird species were being forced higher and higher up the mountains as habitats shifted with warming. At least four species have been wiped out locally, simply because they ran out of mountain. The study referred to it as an escalator to extinction. I’ll leave a link to the study in the show notes for this episode at MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep076.
Locally, researchers are always looking to learn more about animals like pikas, marmots, mountain goats, and white-tailed ptarmigan. In episode 003, I talked about the Bow Valley Naturalists supporting a research program called the High Elevation Localized Species study or HELS for short.
Alpine landscapes in the mountains are widely separated by valleys. A pika from Lake Agnes in Lake Louise can’t migrate to Mount Fairview – even though it’s just across Lake Louise. Alpine landscapes are islands. Large animals like mountain goats have the ability to cover more territory but the marmots, pikas, and ptarmigan are limited to the alpine habitat they were born in.
The newly published climate report also predicts more extreme weather events. These include extremes on all ends of the weather spectrum. Extreme heatwaves will become more extreme. Fire seasons will extend both in the spring and fall, and may become a year-round phenomenon.
The risk of floods also increases dramatically as climates warm.
The report states:
“Changes in hot and cold extremes are projected to continue in the future, with the magnitude of the change proportional to the magnitude of the mean temperature change. For example, the annual highest daily temperature that currently occurs once every 20 years, on average, will become a once in 5-year event by mid-century under a low emission scenario (a four-fold increase in frequency) and a once in 2-year event by mid-century under a high emission scenario (a ten-fold increase in frequency).”
Glaciers are the water tower for our future and as we lose the glaciers, we also lose huge reservoirs of fresh water. One of the major findings in this report focus on the fact that in a warmer climate, summers will be longer, spring runoffs will be shorter, and the availability of summer stream flow will likely be reduced dramatically.
Add to that the loss of summer glacial melt as more and more glaciers disappear competely over the latter parts of the century. That will have huge implications for farmers in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba that rely on those summer river flows.
This report is another stark reminder of the importance of Canada taking climate change seriously. The new carbon tax is an important step in helping incentivize Canadians to make conservation a priority.
While election rhetoric is trying to demonize the carbon tax as a tax grab by the liberals, this should really be a non-partisan issue. Canada, as a northern country will be disproportionately impacted as temperatures continue to increase here at rates between two and three times faster than more southerly landscapes.
A study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT as it’s more widely known, found that carbon taxes DO work – if they’re done right.
Coincidentally, their research showed that the best scenario was to put a tax on carbon to encourage conservation, coupled with a plan to return the income generated back to the public through rebates.
The study, published this month in the journal Climate Change Economics, partnered with 11 other research groups looking at different proposed carbon-pricing schemes.
They found that in terms of efficiency, putting a price on carbon and returning the money to corporations helped to spur investment and create jobs. They also discovered that it was also the most regressive in terms of taxation, putting the bulk of the impact on lower-income families.
They also found that returning all of the money to the public in equal payments to everyone was less efficient for the economy (emphasis on the economy here).
According to the report:
“combining the basic strategy of providing tax breaks to corporations but adding a rebate to the low-income families most affected by the tax, could virtually eliminate the regressive aspects of the tax at very little cost in overall efficiency, and thus might be the most appealing option. It could have appeal both for conservatives concerned about the costs of such a program, and for liberals concerned about its possible impacts on those at the lower end of the economic spectrum.”
The Canadian plan returns the revenues to Canadians. According to a Globe and Mail study, an average person in Ontario will end up paying an additional $244/year due to the tax. They will then receive a rebate of $300, leaving them with $56 more in their pockets at the end of the year.
Alberta’s carbon tax exceeds the newly imposed federal tax of $20/tonne and currently sits at $30/tonne. That’s an increase of seven cents per litre on a tank of gas. Alberta is then spreading those revenue dollars between investment in energy efficiency projects as well as returning a portion of the revenue to Albertans through quarterly rebates.
An average Albertan will see increased out-of-pocket costs of $286/year, however individuals earning less than $47,500/year will receive rebates of $300 in 2019, more than making up for the extra pain at the pump. If you earn more than $47,500 but less than $103,000, you’ll still see a refund, albeit less than those people earning less.
Money left in the tax pot after rebates are distributed can be used for projects focused on reducing future emissions. These include investments in the transit programs like the Green Line in Calgary and the Valley Line in Edmonton.
The tax doesn’t go to general revenue. It’s spent where it should be. Some goes to you and me to take away the sting of paying it, but the rest goes to help reduce future emissions. Now that’s a tax I’m happy to pay.
Next up, forget trying to out moose Norway, Riders country now has the world’s largest Tyrannosaurus Rex – and it ain’t no statue!
Saskatchewan’s Scotty the T-rex is now officially the biggest ever found
If you’re a long-time listener to this podcast, you’ll know that I’m a sucker for dinosaurs. Alberta has long been known as a stomping ground for fossils. Dinosaur Provincial Park World Heritage Site is the most important fossil bed on the planet for the late period of the dinosaurs. According to it’s UNESCO designation:
“Dinosaur Provincial Park contains some of the most important fossil specimens discovered from the “Age of Dinosaurs” period of Earth’s history. The property is unmatched in terms of the number and variety of high quality specimens which, to date, represent more than 44 species, 34 genera and 10 families of dinosaurs, dating back 75-77 million years. The park contains exceptional riparian habitat features as well as badlands of outstanding aesthetic value.”
This is a magical place that has ruled the dino roost in Canada for more than a century. One thing that I find very exciting though is that more and more research is exploring additional landscapes and unearthing new finds in places not historically seen as fossil hotspots like this unique park.
In episode 30, I share two incredible stories. First, the most well preserved dinosaur ever found was unearthed near Fort McMurray, Alberta. If you haven’t seen a photo of this beauty, don’t cheat yourself. Go immediately to the show notes at MountainNaturePodcast.com/ep030. It looks like it fell asleep yesterday.
Another reason to visit this episode has to do with another fabulous discovery: the Six Peaks Track Site near Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. This is one of the most unique dinosaur trackways ever found.
Have you seen the movie, Jurassic Park? Of course, you have. The T. Rex in that film was portrayed as a villain, that is until the velociraptors escaped. They were small, but intelligent. They hunted in coordinated packs that allowed them to take down much larger prey. In the end, the T. Rex saves the day as he kills the raptors that were hot on the trail of the heroes.
Well, what if T. Rex’s had the same coordination that the raptors had? Now that would be terrifying. This track pathway is the first to show tracks of more than a single T. Rex, but even more terrifyingly, it shows exactly that – three individual T. Rex hunting in a pack. If you visit the show notes for this episode, I’ve embedded a video that helps make sure you’ll never think of T. Rex the same.
Okay, back to our regularly scheduled program. Now I’m going to take that pack hunting, nightmare infusing Tyrannosaurus, and super-size it.
The new discovery in Saskatchewan relates to a fossil first discovered in 1991 near the town of Eastend. It can be found in the southwest corner of the province, southwest of Swift Current.
Like so many fossils before this one, it was collected but never carefully examined, until recently. A new paper published in The Anatomical Record, this week has made an incredible discovery. Scotty, as the fossil has been known, is the biggest T. Rex fossil ever to be discovered.
The new report shows that Scotty was at least 400 kg heavier than the previous record holder, Chicago’s Sue, was a mere 12.3 metres long while Scotty edged her out at 13 metres. Now while the fossil is nicknamed Scotty, it may have also been a Sally. They haven’t been able to determine the gender at this point.
So just how heavy was this dinosaur? It would have weighed in at some 8,800 kilograms. That’s as heavy as many African elephants. It would have been an absolutely terrifying sight.
Surely, a dinosaur of this size had little to fear. He (or she) would have truly been the top dinosaur in their habitat – unless they weren’t. Scotty didn’t have an easy life. He had a jaw infection, showed evidence of broken ribs, and even a portion of his tail may have been lost due to a bite from another T. Rex.
I may never sleep again. First, I find out that T. Rex may have hunted in packs, and then I find out that the biggest Tyrannosaurus ever lucky enough to be fossilized wasn’t even safe from being attacked! Yikes. Even Steven Spielberg couldn’t come up with this stuff.
While Scotty might be the current king or queen of dinosaurs, he wasn’t the cuddliest. After all, nobody has ever been able to pet a T. Rex. In fact, who would even know what they would feel like if you could pet them?
Well this question has been answered through fossil discoveries in Alberta and South Dakota. For the first time, fossil skin impressions of Tyrannosaurus Rex and its relatives including the aptly named Albertasaurus have been found.
The fossils showed they had tiny scales, each just a few millimetres in length. One thing that surprised researchers though, was that the scales showed no evidence of feathers.
More and more modern fossils are showing that the velociraptors from Jurassic Park should have had a fuzzy down of feathers. Paleontologists working on this study speculated that the bigger the dinosaur, the harder it was for them to stay cool. They didn’t need feathers for warmth.
So imagine petting an iguana rather than a feathery bird.
One thing that’s so amazing is that the dino discoveries keep on coming.
Scotty also represents the zenith of the age of dinosaurs. At this point, they had ruled the planet for some 100 million years. Scotty was one of many species of dinosaurs, each one of which paleontologists seems to be learning a little more about every few years.
Then one day, it all ended. The age of dinosaurs was over. Sixty-six million years ago an asteroid smashed into the planet in what today is Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. It sped toward Earth at more than 70,000 kilometres per hour.
In a flash, 100 million years of global ecology ended. According to computer models developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the impact was a true extinction-level event.
According to an article in the New Yorker:
“Within two minutes of slamming into Earth, the asteroid, which was at least six miles wide, had gouged a crater about eighteen miles deep and lofted twenty-five trillion metric tons of debris into the atmosphere. Picture the splash of a pebble falling into pond water, but on a planetary scale. When Earth’s crust rebounded, a peak higher than Mt. Everest briefly rose up. The energy released was more than that of a billion Hiroshima bombs, but the blast looked nothing like a nuclear explosion, with its signature mushroom cloud. Instead, the initial blowout formed a “rooster tail,” a gigantic jet of molten material, which exited the atmosphere, some of it fanning out over North America. Much of the material was several times hotter than the surface of the sun, and it set fire to everything within a thousand miles. In addition, an inverted cone of liquefied, superheated rock rose, spread outward as countless red-hot blobs of glass, called tektites, and blanketed the Western Hemisphere.”
Debris was also even escaped the gravity of Earth and may have travelled as far as the moons of Saturn and Jupiter.
Along with massive amounts of fire, tsunamis also created devastation. Then ash blocked out the sun’s rays and prevented photosynthesis in plants. As phytoplankton in the ocean died, and then plants on land, oxygen levels dropped. Oxygen is produced by plants and phytoplankton converting the sun’s rays to energy.
Before long, there was no food, less oxygen on land and in the oceans. Without plants and phytoplankton, the dominos of life continued to drop. In the end, 99.9999% of all life vanished. Only about 25% of species managed to survive.
This impact also left its mark on the fossil record. Long before paleontologists discovered this catastrophic event, they were aware that right at the moment the dinosaurs disappeared, there was a unique deposit in the fossil record.
It didn’t matter where you were digging for fossils. You could be in Dinosaur Provincial Park, or Mongolia, China, the same deposit persisted. The deposit became known as the KT boundary. It separated the period before dinosaurs and the one that followed.
For many years, it’s significance eluded paleontologists. In 1980, geologist Walter Alvarez and his father, Luis, a nuclear physicist, discovered that this layer contained high levels of the rare metal iridium. This is something rare on Earth, but more common on asteroids.
They published a paper that year but it was met with ridicule, until another paper by David Kring in 1991 introduced the world to the actual crater site. Walter and Luis Alvarez were vindicated, and the scientific community was introduced to the most terrifying moment in the history of the planet.
In 2013, in the Hell Creek area of North Dakota, an area famous for its bounty of fossils, something unique was uncovered. Now while North Dakota seems like it’s a world away from the Yucatan, when an asteroid as big as the one that struck Earth hits, nowhere is safe.
Researches believe they’ve found a smoking gun; a scene that shows the actual moment that the asteroid impact snuffed out the lives of dinosaurs in the Hell Creek site. Sixty-six million years ago, this would have been a tropical estuary full of dinosaurs of all sizes.
Its constantly moving sediments also meant that some of these animals would leave a record of their demise for future paleontologists to discover.
When the impact occurred, it created a crater 29 km deep and expelled vast amounts of molten rock into the atmosphere. As it cooled, it created tiny glass beads which were deposited over vast territories.
In 2012, a graduate student in paleontology named Robert DePalma came across a site that was like no other. It was an initially unremarkable site where fish fossils were preserved but in an incredibly fragile state. Despite this, they showed incredible levels of preservation but were also very delicate.
When he began to investigate the site though, the sediments contained tiny beads that he realized might be these bits of formerly molten material known as tektites.
The New Yorker article states it best:
“As DePalma carefully excavated the upper layers, he began uncovering an extraordinary array of fossils, exceedingly delicate but marvellously well preserved. “There’s amazing plant material in there, all interlaced and interlocked,” he recalled. “There are logjams of wood, fish pressed against cypress-tree root bundles, tree trunks smeared with amber.” Most fossils end up being squashed flat by the pressure of the overlying stone, but here everything was three-dimensional, including the fish, having been encased in sediment all at once, which acted as a support. “You see skin, you see dorsal fins literally sticking straight up in the sediments, species new to science,” he said. As he dug, the momentousness of what he had come across slowly dawned on him. If the site was what he hoped, he had made the most important paleontological discovery of the new century. “
While scientists had long known about the KT boundary, until this site, no fossils had been found within several metres of it. This site was smack dab in the middle of it.
As De Palma stated:
“We have the whole KT event preserved in these sediments,” DePalma said. “With this deposit, we can chart what happened the day the Cretaceous died.”
This particular site shows vast amounts of these beads, some preserved in amber, and others occurring throughout the sediments.
As DePalma slowly deciphered the site, he became more convinced than ever that this was a site devastated by a global catastrophe. The forests were already ablaze when a massive wave carried the carcasses of fish and other sea creatures to the site and left them to be found 66 million years later.
The fossils also show a mixture of marine and freshwater animals all jumbled together into a single mass of fossils. This suggests that something carried these marine creatures far inland. This site could be the smoking gun paleontologists have long sought, or not.
DePalma has received wide criticism for his work, in particular, its secrecy. As paleontologist Kevin Padian from the University of California, Berkley stated in a National Geographic article:
“It’s the case where extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; the jury should be out until other people look at this.”
Because DePalma is digging in a private location, he has not collaborated with other paleontologists. Also, because it is a private site, the fossils are not destined for museums where they can be studied further, rather many will end up in private collections.
DePalma’s thesis advisor, David Burnham, on the other hand, stated in a New Yorker article:
“Robert’s got so much stuff that’s unheard of. Amber with tektites embedded in it—holy cow! The dinosaur feathers are crazy good, but the burrow makes your head reel.”
The burrow is a fossilized mammal burrow excavated right through the fossil bed. The tiny marsupial-like mammal was still in the burrow.
In the end, until other scientists are able to test, review, and verify his findings, many will remain skeptical. If his findings are confirmed though, it is an incredible find.
And with that, it’s time to wrap this episode up. Don’t forget that Ward Cameron Enterprises is your source for all things Rocky Mountain related. Drop me a line at ward@wardcameron.com if you’re looking for a local expert to show you or your group the magic of the Canadian Rockies. If you’d like to reach out to me personally, you can hit me up on Twitter @wardcameron…and with that said, the sun’s out and it’s time to go hiking. I’ll talk to you next week.