Strontium

• The worrying findings, based on temperature records contained in sea sponge skeletons, suggest global climate change has progressed much further than previously thought.
• Human-caused greenhouse gas emissions drive global warming.
• To date, estimates of upper ocean warming have been mainly based on sea-surface temperature records, however these date back only about 180 years.
• Earth may in fact have already reached at least 1.7°C warming since pre-industrial times – a deeply troubling discovery.

Getting a gauge on ocean heat

• Oceans cover more than 70% of Earth’s surface and absorb an enormous amount of heat and carbon dioxide.
• Global surface temperatures are traditionally calculated by averaging the temperature of water at the sea surface, and the air just above the land surface.
• This makes it more difficult to accurately reconstruct stable baseline ocean temperatures.
• But what if there was a way to precisely gauge ocean temperatures over centuries in the past?

Studying a special sponge

• But they grow at a much slower rate and can live for many hundreds of years.
• This means sclerosponges can provide a detailed diary of sea temperatures, down to a resolution of just 0.1°C.
• We studied the sponge species Ceratoporella nicholsoni.

• We looked at temperatures going back 300 years, to see whether the current time period which defines pre-industrial temperatures was accurate.
• The sponge records showed nearly constant temperatures from 1700 to 1790 and from 1840 to 1860 (with a gap in the middle due to volcanic cooling).

What does this mean for global warming?

• It shows human-caused ocean warming began at least several decades earlier than previously assumed by the IPCC.
• Long-term climate change is commonly measured against the average warming over the 30 years from 1961 to 1990, as well as warming in more recent decades.
• Add to that the average 0.8°C global warming from 1990 to recent years, and the Earth may have warmed on average by at least 1.7°C since pre-industrial times.
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We must act now

Our revised estimates suggest climate change is at a more advanced stage than we thought. This is cause for great concern. It appears that humanity has missed its chance to limit global warming to 1.5°C and has a very challenging task ahead to keep warming below 2°C. This underscores the urgent need to halve global emissions by 2030.
Malcolm McCulloch receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

• Evidence of how it came to be so beautiful and nurturing is locked in the rocks of South Australia’s Flinders Ranges – a site now vying for World Heritage listing.
• Their legacy is the oxygen we breathe and the evolution of the first animals more than 500 million years ago.
• The soft bodies of these animals have been exceptionally preserved at the new Nilpena-Ediacara National Park, which opened in April 2023.

A superbasin on the shores of the Pacific

• The rocks of the Flinders Ranges formed at the same time as the Pacific Ocean basin.
• The plate tectonic “dance of the continents” tore North America away from Australia 800 million years ago.
• Geologists call this the Adelaide Superbasin.

Land of fire and ice

• The planet plunged into an 80-million-year Ice Age, the likes of which has never been seen again.
• The Cryogenian contains a least two global glaciations when the planet became covered in ice - an occurrence earth scientists refer to as “Snowball Earth”.
• Read more:
  Ancient volcanic eruptions disrupted Earth's thermostat, creating a 'Snowball' planet

Part One: Picturing the world before the first animals

• The glaciers ploughed through hills and valleys, planing off the country and leaving behind vast swathes of boulder clay that now forms rocks over much of the Flinders Ranges.
• We used these variations to build a picture of highly saline shallow seas rich in bacterial life, but devoid of much else.

Part Two: Dating Snowball Earth

• Using established methods we can date one of the minerals in the sand (zircon).
• This enabled us to more accurately date the Snowball Earth rocks in the Flinders Ranges called the Sturt Formation.
• It is the first study to directly date sedimentary rocks that formed during the Snowball Earth event.
• So the planet experienced more of a cold period rather than a completely frigid snowball.

The rise of the algae

• The geological processes and their timing helps us understand how the Earth system came to be.
• The frozen world of the Cryogenian stressed the microbial life that dominated the oceans way back then.
• This newcomer was algae, life with cells containing a nucleus.

A place of true world heritage

• Our research into these rocks links the interdependence of Earth systems.
• The stories locked in the hills of the Flinders Ranges undoubtedly give the region a heritage value to the world.
• We eagerly await news of world heritage listing, which is not expected until 2025 at the earliest.

• KANAZAWA, Japan, Aug. 1, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Researchers at Kanazawa University report in Nature Communications how calcium ions can block sodium ion channels located in cell membranes.
• Tetrameric ion channels are prone to 'divalent cation block', the blocking of the channel by ions like calcium (Ca2+).
• Now, Takashi Sumikama from Kanazawa University in collaboration with Katsumasa Irie from Wakayama Medical University and colleagues has discovered the mechanism behind divalent cation block in NavAb, a well-known tetrameric sodium (Na) channel.
• The structural basis of divalent cation block in a tetrameric prokaryotic sodium channel, Nature Communications 14, 4236 (2023).

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