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Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Donie's Ireland daily news BLOG update

FF can take ‘some credit’ for rent supplement increase, says Coveney

PROPOSALS TO GIVE FINANCIAL HELP TO THOSE AT RISK OF HOMELESSNESS WELCOMED BY CHARITIES

     

MINISTER FOR HOUSING SIMON COVENEY AND MINISTER FOR SOCIAL PROTECTION LEO VARADKAR ANNOUNCE HIGHER RENT SUPPLEMENT LIMITS TO HELP WITH RISING RENTS.

Fianna Fáil can take “some credit” for increases in rent supplement and housing assistance payments, the Minister for Housing has said.
The Peter McVerry (above centre pic) Trust homeless charity said the new proposals would help keep more people in their homes and out of homelessness.
Simon Coveney denied Fine Gael had argued against such measures in the negotiations with Fianna Fail.
The Cabinet is expected to agree today to increase rent supplement and housing assistance payment with effect from next week.
Mr Coveney said: “That is politics. Fianna Fáil can take credit, they did input into this decision but I think both parties agreed this was the right decision.
“Fianna Fáil can take some credit but we are the Government who have to make sure the numbers add up in terms of the €55 million this will cost.”
The proposals to give extra financial assistance to people at risk of becoming homeless have been welcomed by charities.
Homeless and housing charity The Simon Communities of Ireland welcomed the move but said payment levels must be aligned with market rents.
“Rents have increased by 32.3% since April 2012 while rent limits have remained unchanged since June 2013. Rent supplement spend actually reduced by 40% between 2011 and 2015,” the charity said.
Spokeswoman Niamh Randall said the numbers of people becoming homeless had been growing at alarming levels.
There are currently 6,170 men, women and children in emergency homeless accommodation nationally – some 1,054 families with 2,177 children.
Trauma of homelessness
“Homelessness can and should be prevented; keeping people in their homes is critical to preventing the stress and trauma of homelessness for more people and families,” Ms Randall said.
A study by the Simon Communities suggested 95% of properties available to rent were priced beyond the reach of people, depending on state rent supports for their housing, Ms Randall said.
She expressed concern that the high number of buy-to-let properties in distress had the potential to drive more people into homelessness.
Measures must be put in place to ensure these tenants are protected and that a further reduction in the number of properties in the private rented sector was avoided.
“At the moment, the system is very dependent on the private sector to provide people with homes,” Ms Randall said.
She said it was vital that local authorities and approved housing bodies be given the resources to start to provide social housing.
“A total of over 13,000 social housing units were delivered in 2015 through a range of programmes and schemes with only 28 houses actually being built, meanwhile there are at least 100,000 households on the social housing waiting list. People must have access to decent, affordable housing.”
Chief executive Pat Doyle said the body’s recent submission to the Oireachtas Housing and Homeless Committee recommended an increase in rent supplement of between 28% and 35%.
“The new rates will see an average increase of 29% in Dublin, excluding Fingal, 21% increases in Cork city and Galway city and an increase of 19% in Kildare. Other areas will also see significant increases in the available rates.”
Mr Doyle said Tuesday’s planned announcement would help reduce the number of people who would have otherwise ended up in homeless services, right across the State.
“It will hopefully lessen the acute pressures faced by agencies trying to tackle the problem and will create a breathing space to allow them to respond in other ways.”
He called on the Government to immediately move to bring forward legislation on indexed linked rents.
The Irish Property Owners’ Association said it had been requesting increases for a number of years but said the rent supplement was “not fit for purpose”.
“The rental caps have frequently put landlords and tenants in an untenable position. Rent supplement and housing assistance payment need to be at market rate. The unfair tax treatment of the sector has put severe pressure on landlords and increased the cost of providing rental accommodation at the same time as Rent Supplement was decreased.”
Separately, property consultants Savills Ireland said Wednesday’s CSO figures were likely to see a further increase in Dublin house price inflation.
Director of research Dr John McCartney said that while it had gone largely unnoticed, the annual rate of house price growth had nearly doubled from 2.6% last December to 4.6% in April.

HE SAID THIS PICK-UP WOULD CONTINUE OVER THE SUMMER MONTHS.

“Firstly a strong base effect is about to kick-in. House price inflation slowed sharply last May and June. Therefore even modest increases this summer will see an uplift in the annual rate of inflation.
“Adding to this, strong demand for residential property has led to the return of genuine inflationary pressures in the market.”
“Giving people more money to compete for a fixed stock of rented properties will just drive rents up further. This will eventually flow into higher house prices as investors are attracted into the market.”

Gardaí and nurses to test Government pay policy

LOSS OF VALUED INCREMENTS COULD BE CATALYST FOR ALARMING INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS DIFFICULTIES

    

THE HADDINGTON ROAD DEAL FORMALLY EXPIRES ON THURSDAY NIGHT, LEAVING EMPLOYER UNIONS AND STAFF ASSOCIATIONS OUTSIDE A COLLECTIVE AGREEMENT.

Gardaí and second-level teachers, like the bulk of public servants, receive regular incremental pay rises as they move along in their careers. And while public service wages were cut following the economic crash, increments continued to be paid, albeit with delays in some cases.
As things stand at present within the next week or so a garda is facing being told that his or her increment for this year is being withheld and that they will not get another one until 2018.
Increments for most teachers are generally not due to be paid until the autumn when the school year recommences.
The imposition of such financial penalties such as the forfeiture of increments will undoubtedly lead to conflict between the Government and the Garda Representative Association and the Association of Secondary Teachers inIreland (ASTI) – a development which could lead to school closures in September and some form of action by gardaí.
For teachers, increments are not the only potential penalty. They may also lose nearly €800 due in supervision and substitution payments in September as well as removal of protection against compulsory redundancy.
The heart of the issue is the rejection by rank-and-file gardaí and ASTImembers of the Lansdowne Road pay deal. The accord which came into effect last January provides for limited pay restoration for those affected by wage cuts during the financial crash. Unions representing about 288,000 civil and public servants have already backed the accord, which is the centrepiece of the Government’s public service pay and industrial relations policy.
The Government considers Lansdowne Road to be an extension of the previous Haddington Road public service agreement under which teachers and officers were obliged respectively to carry out 33 and 30 additional unpaid hours each year.
The Government, for its part under Haddington Road was supposed to arrange for a review of Garda pay to be put in pace. This was due to have been completed in 2014. However this process was delayed and last months its chairman resigned. Consequently, it is unclear when the matter will be finalised.
Rank-and-file gardaí last December ceased carrying out the 30 unpaid hours.
Last month ASTI members voted to withdraw from the 33 additional hours they were carrying out in schools.
Collective agreement
The former Fine Gael-Labour government last autumn introduced new financial emergency legislation which allowed ministers to impose financial penalties such as forfeiture of increments on groups deemed to have repudiated a public service collective agreement.
Gardaí and ASTI members backed the Haddington Road deal but it formally expires on Thursday night, leaving as things stand at present, both groups outside a collective agreement.
The Government in moving to take action against rank-and-file gardaí and ASTI members in schools would be seeking to shore up its central public service pay policy.
Minister for Public Expenditure Paschal Donohoe on Tuesday said that the decision of unions representing nearly 300,000 workers in the public service to back the Lansdowne Road accord also had to be respected by the Government.
In this the Government is conscious of one of the iron laws of public service industrial relations – that every group watches every other group like hawks to ensure they do not secure additional benefits denied to their members.
Unions which accepted unpalatable measures under Lansdowne Road and its predecessors would not be happy, to say the least, if the Government changed arrangements for gardaí and teachers who did not back the accord.
Any move by the Government which reduced or eliminated the requirement for gardaí and teachers to carry out additional unpaid hours would immediately lead to claims for similar arrangements to be put in place for other groups such as nurses and civil servants and could ultimately lead to the unravelling of the Lansdowne Road edifice.
Nearly 40,000 nurses working in the public health service have had to work 1½ additional unpaid hours a week over recent years – a requirement that is deeply resented. Already it is likely that nurses will campaign in the autumn for these to be dropped. Concessions to gardaí or teachers on hours would intensify such a development.
On the other hand any move by the Government to impose financial penalties on nearly 30,000 gardaí and teachers is very likely to lead to significant industrial relations difficulties in the weeks ahead.

Tourism Ireland welcomes 14% increase in overseas visitors

      

TOURISM IRELAND TODAY (28 JUNE) WELCOMED NEWS OF AN ALMOST 14% JUMP IN OVERSEAS VISITORS IN THE PERIOD JANUARY TO MAY 2016.

Commenting on today’s figures from the CSO for overseas visitors to Ireland in the first five months of the year, Niall Gibbons, CEO of Tourism Ireland, said: “Today’s figures represent an excellent performance for overseas tourism to date, with growth of almost +14% for January to May.
We have seen exceptional results from North America for the five-month period of January to May – up over +18% on the same five-month period in 2015. I also welcome the strong increase in British visitors (almost +16%). Mainland Europe has also turned in a superb performance (+11.5%), with important markets like Italy, Spain and the Benelux countries all showing really good growth.”
Gibbons added that the outcome of the recent EU referendum in the UK has given rise to economic uncertainty and currency movements, which have the capacity to hamper growth.
“Tourism Ireland is liaising with our key stakeholders and monitoring developments. We are determined to get the message out that it is business as usual. Britain remains an extremely important market for Irish tourism and Tourism Ireland is undertaking an extensive programme of promotions in Britain, and elsewhere around the world, to ensure this strong performance continues. Our aim is to ensure that 2016 is another record-breaking year for Irish tourism,” he said.

High levels of vitamin D linked to lower birth problems,

CORK COLLEGE STUDY FINDS.

     

STUDY BY UNIVERSITY COLLEGE CORK CALLS FOR GUIDELINES ON NUTRITION FOR PREGNANT WOMEN.

High vitamin D status is associated with lower risk of complications such as pre-eclampsia and small-for-gestational age (SGA) birth
Expecting mothers with high levels of vitamin D are less likely to have serious pregnancy complications, new Irish research indicates.
High vitamin D status is associated with lower risk of complications such as pre-eclampsia and small-for-gestational age (SGA) birth, according to the study by scientists in University College Cork.
The research, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found 17 per cent of pregnant women had a Vitamin D deficiency among almost 1,800 who were surveyed. This compared to 12 per cent among women who were not pregnant.
The researchers say their findings highlight the need for national guidelines on nutritional intake, include Vitamin D levels, or pregnant women.
“The data highlights the need to conduct nutrition research in vulnerable populations, such as pregnancy and breastfeeding women and children, in order to develop life-stage specific recommendations for nutrient intakes,” according to Prof Mairead Kiely.
“Currently in Ireland, there are no pregnancy-specific guidelines for vitamin D intake.”
The study surveyed 1,786 mothers who attended Cork University Maternity Hospital and was designed to explore whether there was a connection between vitamin D status in early pregnancy and any major pregnancy complications.
Vitamin D is produced in the body by exposure of the skin to sunlight. It is also found in oily fish, egg yolks and fortified foods such as milk, breakfast cereals and infant formula.

What can ancient amber-encased bird wings say about flight?

    Fossils
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: A compound microscope images shows interlocking barbs and barbules on the bird’s flight feathers. A view of a feather suspended in amber. A fossilized skin flap shows the follicles where feathers insert into the flesh. the leading edge of one wing, including the tiny claw at the wing-tip.

TWO CHUNKS OF AMBER PRESERVED THE WINGS OF BABY BIRDS 99 MILLION YEARS AGO.

DINOSAURS WERE ROAMING THE EARTH AND FLOWERING PLANTS WERE JUST BEGINNING TO FLOURISH WHEN TWO TINY BABY BIRDS LIVED THEIR SHORT LIVES.

These walnut-brown, toothed hatchlings hadn’t grown larger than today’s hummingbirds when they encountered wads of sticky, goopy tree resin. Perhaps the newborn enantiornithes were taking their first flights, stumbling out of a nest, clambering around the treetops, or maybe they fell into the sticky trap when a wing became ensnared in the resin and the little birds weren’t able to pull it loose.
Now, 99 million years later, that resin has hardened into amber around those tiny wings, preserving them, bones, tissue, feathers and all. And they’re offering scientists a glimpse back in time.
“Enantiornithines, these strange, toothed birds, had plumage that looked a lot like adult bird plumage, even when they were just hatchlings,” says Ryan McKellar, curator of invertebrate paleontology at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum who helped analyze the new fossils for a paper published Tuesdayin the journal Nature Communications.
Looking at the bones of these amber-encased wings, the scientists were able to tell that these birds were quite young. But their adult-like feathers suggested these tiny hatchlings may have been able to fly “right out of the egg, or right out of the nest,” Dr. McKellar tells The Christian Science Monitor in a phone interview.
“They were ready for action as soon as they hatched,” lead author Lida Xing, of China University of Geosciences in Beijing, said in a press release. “These birds did not hang about in the nest waiting to be fed, but set off looking for food, and sadly died perhaps because of their small size and lack of experience.”
When you think of fossils you might picture a compression fossil, in which an animal’s skeleton has been preserved in a layer of sedimentary rock. Occasionally the tissues, fur, or feathers of an animal leaves some sort of imprint in the rock around the bones.
“The problem we face there is that more often than not it’s a sort of tangled mess,” McKellar says. “It’s hard to pick out the finer details of the feathers within this mat, or carbon film.”
That’s where amber fossils come in. As tree resin turns into amber over time, it preserves an organism in place, tissue and all. The resin contains natural preservatives, entomologist George Poinar, known for studying amber fossils, previously explained to the Monitor.
“Amber can be a really valuable supplement to these compression fossils” because it can preserve animals in such lifelike detail, McKellar says.
In life, these little birds had walnut-brown coloring on the upper side of their wings, with a paler band running across their wings. The wings’ underside was very pale, perhaps even white. Two long, ribbon-like tail feathers trailed behind the tiny birds’ bodies. In their beaks, these young enantiornithines had teeth, hinting at their dinosaur ancestry.
“They’re thought to be some of the closest relatives to modern birds,” McKellar says. Today enantiornithines are extinct.
“The fact that well-preserved plumage is now being found in 100-million-year old amber is remarkable, and very cool, but the [new] information in these two specimens is limited,” Luis Chiappe, director of the Dinosaur Institute at the National History Museum of Los Angeles County who was not part of this study, tells the Monitor in an email.
“Fossils that are 25 million years older than these amber pieces (i.e., fossils from 125 million year old rocks in Spain and China) provide the same information about the plumage of enantiornithines: differentiation among the wing feathers (alula, secondaries, primaries, and coverts) as well as details of their color patterns.”
“The authors are correct to highlight the high degree of development of the feathers and how the presence of fully formed flight feathers in hatchlings suggest a high degree of precociality,” the extent to which a young organism shows mature features and behaviors, such as mobility. But “this has already been mentioned, many times, based on the presence of similar feathers in traditional fossils as well as osteological studies correlating bone formation (ossification) with precociality,” Dr. Chiappe says.
McKellar agrees that these fossils confirm previous descriptions of enantiornithines based on compression fossils. But he hopes that this study will encourage scientists to turn to amber fossils more readily to find new insights into ancient organisms.
These chunks of amber are about the size of ping-pong balls, McKellar says. And the wings embedded in this amber are just fragments, a few bones of the tip of the bird’s wing with feathers fanning across them.
“It can be really difficult working with these specimens because a lot of the feathers are overlapping each other,” he says. “In one of the specimens they’re nicely splayed out, but in the other, they’re actually piled on top of each other, so it’s hard to tease out details.”
McKellar, who used strong lighting and magnification to peer into the amber fossils at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum, says, “it’s just sort of a mass of brown in the specimens until you get the right light on them.”     

Tuesday, June 28, 2016

News Ireland daily BLOG by Donie

‘There is no going back on water charges for Ireland’ says the EU

    
Micheal Martin, and Enda Kenny.

THERE IS NO GOING BACK ON WATER CHARGES, THE EU COMMISSION HAS SAID IN ITS CLEAREST STATEMENT ON THE CONTROVERSY TO DATE.

Ireland is breaking EU law if the Dáil seeks to abandon charging as is expected after a nine-month consultation period agreed in the Programme for Government.
In reply to a Parliamentary Question from MEP Marian Harkin, the European Commission said Ireland  “made a clear commitment to set up water charges” and there  is no provision “whereby it can revert to any previous practice”.
The statement is the clearest yet on water charges and suggests that Ireland could be left open to significant EU fines unless a billing system is implemented.
The Commission said that Ireland is signed up to Article 9(4) of the Framework Directive which sets down “strict conditions”.
It says that a member state wishing to avail for flexibility under this provision needed to take a decision on what constituted an “established practice”.
“On the contrary, in the said plans, Ireland made a clear commitment to set up water charges to comply with the provisions of Article 9(1).
“Ireland subsequently applied water charges and the Commission considers that the Directive does not provide for a situation whereby it can revert to any previous practice,” the Commission said.
The statement is likely to reignite the war of words over water charges.
Fianna Fáil has claimed that it has legal advice which says that Ireland can legally scrap water charges.
However, Fine Gael continues to say that water charges cannot be reversed and recently Taoiseach Enda Kenny said that despite all the protests people will eventually end up paying for domestic water.
Legislation that allows for the suspension of water charges for nine months is to be debated in the Dáil later this month.
It will allow for the setting up of a Commission which will make recommendations on the future of water charges.

European Union must reprise role of ‘social champion’

SAYS TÁNAISTE FITZGERALD

  

FRANCES FITZGERALD WARNS OF SETBACK IF UK WITHDRAWS FROM EUROPEAN ARREST WARRANT OR EUROPOL.

The Tánaiste Frances Fitzgerald said membership of the EU “led to real changes for women through removal of the working ban for married women and the equal pay directive”.
The European Union must change its focus and be identified again with making people’s lives better, the Tánaiste has told the Dáil.
Frances Fitzgerald said the EU began as a peace project by promoting economic co-operation and it became a “social champion”.
Citing benefits to Ireland, she said membership of the EU “led to real changes for women through removal of the working ban for married women and the equal pay directive”.
During the day-long debate on the UK decision to leave, Ms Fitzgerald said in recent years the union “is seen by too many people as a restricting rather than an enabling force, focused on economic theory rather than social progression. That must change and now is the time to begin.”
She said “the European Union must again be identified with making people’s lives better”.
Echoing Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s view earlier in the debate that it was the Government’s priority to maintain the common travel area between the United Kingdom and Ireland, Ms Fitzgerald said it was also “clear that the UK share our view that it should be preserved”.

SECURITY

The Tánaiste, who is Minister for Justice, said she had spoken on Monday to the UK minister of state for security and immigration. This was “a first step in this process and we agreed to have ongoing contact and further detailed discussions while maintaining our excellent relationship on security issues”.
She said a border normally had significant implications for the movement of people. But “ours will be geographically isolated from the rest of the European Union and in particular it will be outside the Schengen area so the integrity of the border controls of the Schengen area will not be affected in any way”.
Ms Fitzgerald also warned it would be a setback if the UK withdrew from the European Arrest Warrant process or from Europol, the body set up for co-operation among police services across Europe.
The Tánaiste said the arrest warrant system had replaced the traditional extradition process and had proved very successful. Europol had enhanced police co-operation between the member states and “now is a standard part of many investigations with several thousand queries a year going to and from the Garda Síochána and Europol”.

Controlling immune response ‘could ease dying’

     

CONTROLLING THE IMMUNE RESPONSE OF PEOPLE DYING FROM CANCER MIGHT HELP SAVE THEM FROM PAIN, FATIGUE AND LOSS OF APPETITE, ACCORDING TO RESEARCHERS.

Experts hope by using existing drugs to control symptoms, people in their last few weeks of life can have a more comfortable time before they die.
Edinburgh University worked with the European Palliative Care Research Centre.
They studied the progression of cancer in more than 2,500 patients in Europe.
They used blood tests to assess inflammation levels in patients with many different types of cancer, including lung, breast, and bowel cancer.

Reduce inflammation

They found a person’s level of inflammation appeared to have a direct effect on the way they felt – causing pain, fatigue, loss of appetite and nausea.
The researchers believe this may be the first time such symptoms have been shown to develop as a result of the body’s immune response to cancer, and not simply as a consequence of tumours spreading.
Lead researcher Dr Barry Laird, of the Edinburgh Cancer Research Centre at Edinburgh University, said: “This study challenges the assumption that certain symptoms are an inevitable consequence of advanced cancer, and there is nothing doctors can do to make patients feel better.
“If we can understand what causes symptoms such as pain, fatigue and nausea, we can begin to tackle them.
“We already have drugs that target and reduce inflammation, so using these drugs specifically to treat symptoms may make a real difference to people living with cancer.”
He said clinical trials were now under way to test this.
The research was published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.

Almost a quarter of Irish men admit they’ve probably driven while over legal alcohol limit

  

SURVEY SHOWS THAT DRINK DRIVING EXPERIENCES ARE MORE PREVALENT AMONG MEN.

64% of Irish people say they know somebody who has knowingly driven a car when above the legal alcohol limit in the past five years, a new study has shown.
1,015 adults were interviewed during the Red C survey for Newstalk. It looked at attitudes towards drink driving here in Ireland, as well as personal experiences of drink driving.
More than one in four people stated that they may have been a passenger in a car driven by someone who was over the limit.
Meanwhile, 15% think they themselves may have driven while over the legal limit – a number that rises to 24% among men.
The study also shows that drink driving is perceived to be more of a problem in rural areas than urban ones – with 77% agreeing that people in rural areas are more likely to drive when over the limit.
Meanwhile, more than a quarter of respondents said they believed that the legal drink driving limit is too low.
Tune in to the Pat Kenny Show today and tomorrow for more about Irish attitudes towards drink driving.

Great news for children’s parties and doctors as new helium source discovered

   Ebony Taylor with Senior Radiographer Helen Browne demonstrate the new 3T MRI scanner at Sheffield Children's Hospital which was funded through donations to The Children's Hospital Charity.

DON’T PANIC PARTY-GOERS BECAUSE SCIENTISTS WON’T BE RESTRICTING HELIUM BALLOONS JUST YET AS A NEW DISCOVERY COULD SOLVE A SHORTAGE OF THE GAS.

Reserves of the gas have been running out and doctors a year ago were calling for a ban on its use in party balloons, branding it frivolous.
But scientists have found new helium sources in Tanzania, which could be critical to the role helium plays not only in fun, but in life-threatening medicine.

HELIUM DOES NOT JUST MAKE VOICES GO SQUEAKY, IT’S EXTREMELY LOW BOILING POINT MEANS IT IS USED FOR SUPER-COOLING AND IS CRITICAL IN MRI SCANNERS, NUCLEAR POWER AND LEAK DETECTION.

Until now helium has been found accidentally during drilling for oil and gas.
But a team from Oxford and Durham Universities, working with the Norwegian firm Helium One, applied the expertise used in oil and gas exploration to find how helium was generated underground and where it accumulated.
Their research showed that volcanic activity provides the intense heat necessary to release the gas from ancient, helium-bearing rocks.
Within the Tanzanian East African Rift Valley, volcanoes have released helium from deep rocks and trapped it in shallower gas fields.
Professor Chris Ballentine, of the department of earth sciences at the University of Oxford, said it was estimated there was probably 54 billion cubic feet (BCf) in just one part of the Rift Valley – enough to fill more than 1.2 million medical MRI scanners.
Global consumption was around 8 BCf a year and the US Federal Helium Reserve, the world’s largest supplier, currently held around 24 BCf.
Prof Ballentine said: “This is a game-changer for the future security of society’s helium needs and similar finds in the future may not be far away.”
Professor Jon Gluyas, of the department of earth sciences at Durham University, who collaborated on the project, said the price of helium had gone up 500% in 15 years.
The inert gas escapes gravity and leaks into outer space.
Prof Gluyas said: “We have to keep finding more, it’s not renewable or replaceable.”

Curiosity sees hint of Earth-like atmosphere on ancient Mars planet

    

NASA’S CURIOSITY TOOK THIS SELFIE WHILE CONDUCTING SCIENCE AT THE “WINDJANA” SITE ON MARS, IN APRIL AND MAY OF 2014. ITS INVESTIGATIONS TURNED UP EVIDENCE OF AN OXYGEN-RICH ATMOSPHERE IN MARS’ DISTANT PAST. 

Monday, June 27, 2016, 5:51 PM – Did Mars once have an atmosphere rich in oxygen, more akin to what we have here on Earth? That’s what the latest find from NASA’s Curiosity rover is pointing to, but if so, where did this oxygen come from?
As NASA’s 1-ton, nuclear-powered robotic rover trundles across the rocky Martian terrain, it pauses at times to conduct some science – scoop some sand, drill down into rocks or shoot things with a high-powered laser – which has yielded up some truly remarkable discoveries.
One of these discoveries found that Gale Crater, where Curiosity is roving, once held a large lake of fresh water, with just the right conditions that it would actually be drinkable for us.
Now, according to the latest news from NASA, scientists working with data from one of the rover’s science “pauses” have found manganese oxide minerals – a type of mineral that only forms in one of two ways:
1) In the presence of liquid water and high concentrations of oxygen, or
2) From microbial life.
“Now we’re seeing manganese oxides on Mars,” Nina Lanza, a planetary scientist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, said in a NASA statement. “And we’re wondering how the heck these could have formed?”
“These high manganese materials can’t form without lots of liquid water and strongly oxidizing conditions,” Dr. Lanza explained. “Here on Earth, we had lots of water but no widespread deposits of manganese oxides until after the oxygen levels in our atmosphere rose.”
According to NASA, here on Earth, manganese oxide minerals are used as a kind of historical marker, since they only appear in the geological record after the atmosphere became oxygen-rich due to organisms using photosynthesis.
This isn’t even the first time that manganese deposits have been located on Mars. In 2014, “the jelly donut” rock that the Opportunity rover accidentally dislodged turned out to have manganese in it, and more recently, a combination of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Opportunity investigations found high concentrations of manganese on the ridge of Endeavor Crater, where Opportunity has been investigating.
Given that Endeavor Crater and Gale Crater are roughly on opposite sides of the planet from one another, this lends good support to the idea that these minerals are quite wide-spread.
Drill holes made by Curiosity on May 11, 2014. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
The fact that there was oxygen on Mars in the past isn’t the truly remarkable find here. Given the iron oxide dust that gives Mars the nickname The Red Planet, oxygen had to be there in the past. Studies prior to this have even shown that the planet could have had abundant oxygen in its atmosphere long before Earth did.
According to Dr. Lanza, though, manganese oxide minerals require much higher concentrations of oxygen to form than are needed to oxidize iron – higher levels than were ever thought to have existed on Mars.
So, what could be the source of such high concentrations of oxygen?
Although it’s fun to speculate that the high oxygen levels, or even the minerals themselves, may have been produced by ancient Martian microbes, there’s probably a safer and simpler explanation.
Since Mars lacks a strong magnetic field now, even if it was stronger in the past, as it weakened, it would expose Mars’ surface to an increasing bombardment by high energy particles from the Sun and from space. Now, this bombardment apparently sterilizes the surface to some depth, but back in the ancient past, these particles would have plunged into the oceans, splitting apart water molecules into their component atoms.
Mars’ gravity wouldn’t have been strong enough to keep the hydrogen around. Even Earth’s gravity – at 2.5 times stronger than Mars’ – is not particularly good at that, with hydrogen only found in the far upper reaches of our atmosphere. The free oxygen, on the other hand, was heavy enough to be bound to Mars longer, thus being around to produce both the iron oxide dust and these manganese oxide minerals.
One thing to note is an important point made by Dr. Lanza: “It’s hard to confirm whether this scenario for Martian atmospheric oxygen actually occurred. But it’s important to note that this idea represents a departure in our understanding for how planetary atmospheres might become oxygenated.”
This may be a new piece of the puzzle to add to our overall knowledge of how planets and their atmospheres form, or it may actually be a step towards the discovery that life actually existed on the Red Planet at some point in its past.
The next step, according to the Los Alamos National Laboratory, is for the researchers to see if there is any discernible difference between manganese oxides produced through biological processes and those that arise from simple geological processes.