Good morning, Newdists.
It’s Caturday! Yay!
Diary bird — Southern Carmine Bee-eater:
The Southern Carmine Bee-eater is a large, spectacular, long, slender, carmine-pink and teal-blue bee-eater with a long, pointed tail and black bill and facial mask. Immatures are duller than adults and lack long tail feathers. It is a common non-breeding summer migrant (December–April) to Kruger, where it can gather in large groups and often attends bush fires to feed on fleeing insects.
The “trik-trik-trik” or “ga-gaga” calls, sound more guttural than those of European Bee-eater. Although not a common behaviour, Southern Carmine Bee-eaters have been recorded sitting on the backs of antelopes or Kori Bustards, swooping out and catching insects that are flushed. It specializes in catching large flying insects, including termites, cicadas, dragonflies, butterflies and locusts and regurgitates pellets of indigestible insect remains.
A Big Warm Caturday Welcome to all the Newdists!
Grab a cup of coffee or tea, something to eat, and please join us.
.
.
.
.
All are welcome to join the fun, the silliness, the conversations. If you don’t know...just ask! Some things really do require a bit of explanation.
There will be a few surprises along the way, all good ones, we hope.
We are here to keep building the Daily Kos Community.
We post Mon-Sun at 10:30 a.m. Eastern. On Sunday we go to the C!U!A! posting to show support for all the work being done to promote Democratic candidates/causes. Please to join us there, as well.
Pie fights will be met with outrageous ridicule and insults. Trolls will be incinerated and served at the next group BBQ. As briquettes.
Surreal Landscapes — Part 1
The Danakil Depression
We don’t need to leave this planet to see some unusual landscapes. Neither do we need to resort to CGI to make such scapes. It’s all here for realz, nature made, all on Earth.
The Danakil Depression is in the Afar triangle. The Afar people call this area their home.
The Danakil Depression is the northern part of the Afar Triangle, a geological depression caused by the Afar Triple Junction: a place where three tectonic plates join.
The Depression overlaps the borders of Eritrea, Djibouti and the entire Afar Region of Ethiopia. It is part of the great East African Rift Valley. LINK
The Depression is in a rift between Africa and Arabia, and as the rift opens, the floor of the depression subsides.
The Afar is believed to be the region from where Homo sapiens emerged about some 400,000 years ago. In 2006 there were a series of earthquakes in the Afar region. The lead seismologist at Adis Ababa Univ. asked help from a British team of scientists with access to satellite technology:
When the results came back it seemed as unlikely as birds flying out of the ground. Here in the Afar desert, one of the hottest and driest places on earth, the tribe had witnessed the birth of a new ocean. Images from the European Space Agency's Envisat satellite showed that a huge rift, 37 miles long and up to eight metres (26ft) wide, had opened deep in the Earth's crust. The tear, the largest observed since the advent of satellite monitoring, was created by a violent lateral rush of molten rock, or magma, along the fault line separating the Nubian and Arabian tectonic plates.
SNIP
The new sea is predicted to be formed within about a million years. The separation of the Nubian and Somali plates along the Great Rift Valley could take 10 times as long. But that will be even more dramatic - for then Africa will eventually lose its horn.
"Some people think that extreme natural phenomena happened only in historical times," said Cindy Ebinger, an American geologist leading the research in Afar. "But here we can see them happening right now."
The Depression is one of the hottest, driest and lowest places (about 410 feet below sea level) on the planet.
There are bubbling lava lakes along with volcanoes.There are salt pans which confuse the eyes, and colorful hydrothermal fields.
The Danakil Depression, a hydrothermal system stretching from Dallol Volcano to Lake Assal in Ethiopia, is one of the weirdest and most inhospitable environments on Earth. Rain and seawater, heated by underground magma, bubble to the surface at near-boiling temperatures. It’s laced with an elixir of salts that form lumpy terrain reminiscent of a coral reef steeped in radioactive waste. Chlorine and sulfur-rich vapors produce an acrid fog that smells like farts and can sear the lining off human lungs. LINK
Much of the floor of the Danakil Depression is covered by salt flats. Other areas are covered by basalt flows, shield volcanoes, and cinder cones. Several craters up to a mile across can be seen on the salt flats. These are thought to be maars formed by phreatic eruptions. LINK
Felipe Gómez, of the Centro de Astrobiologia (INTA-CAB) in Madrid, led an expedition to this area in early April 2016.
Felipe Gómez Gómez of the Centro de Astrobiología in Madrid led the team’s first expedition last spring to study Danakil’s extremophiles, microbes that live in extreme conditions. Researchers from Madrid and the University of Bologna and the International Research School of Planetary Sciences, both in Italy, assisted by scientists from the University of Mekelle in Ethiopia, are isolating and identifying the hardy bacteria that thrive in this hostile environment of heat, acidity and salinity.
The aim is “to try to know the limits of life and the possibility of such forms of life in other planets like Mars,” said Dr. Gómez, who is part of the science team of Curiosity, the NASA exploration rover that landed on Mars over four years ago.
He has also studied other extremophiles, such as microbes that thrive in the acidic iron-rich Río Tinto in southwestern Spain. For that research, he and his colleagues exposed an acidophile to simulated Mars conditions, described in a 2010 paper in the journal Icarus. LINK
Knowledge from Danakil could be applied to Mars missions. Studying Danakil’s microbes is “a way to train ourselves to identify different forms of life for astrobiological exploration,” Dr. Gómez said. While Mars today has subfreezing temperatures, its origins are volcanic and might be similar to the early history of Earth.
There is also a broader goal of exploring ways to identify signs of life in extreme environments. “What is life? What are the limits of life? Scientists don’t agree on what is life,” Dr. Gómez said. “If we find life on Mars, would we be able to recognize it? We don’t know.” LINK
New Day Cafe Open Thread.
What do you want to talk about?