Category: Science

Stonehenge

A fascinating account of this English site.

Although I was born in London in 1944, as a result of an affair between my father and mother, my father had two daughters with his wife, Maud, and Rhona and Corinne, for they were their names, took me under their wing. In the 50s Maud, Rhona and Corinne all moved to Devon and I started going regularly to Totnes. When I started driving I usually stopped for a break close by Stonehenge so the site has a special interest to me.

So when I saw this article in The Conversation it had to be shared.

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Stonehenge may have aligned with the Moon as well as the Sun

Stonehenge during winter solstice sunset Chuta Kooanantkul/Shutterstock

Fabio Silva, Bournemouth University; Amanda Chadburn, Bournemouth University, and Erica Ellingson, University of Colorado Boulder

When it comes to its connection to the sky, Stonehenge is best known for its solar alignments. Every midsummer’s night tens of thousands of people gather at Stonehenge to celebrate and witness the rising Sun in alignment with the Heel stone standing outside of the circle. Six months later a smaller crowd congregates around the Heel stone to witness the midwinter Sun setting within the stone circle.

But a hypothesis has been around for 60 years that part of Stonehenge also aligns with moonrise and moonset at what is called a major lunar standstill. Although a correlation between the layout of certain stones and the major lunar standstill has been known about for several decades, no one has systematically observed and recorded the phenomenon at Stonehenge.

This is what we are aiming to do in a project bringing together archaeologists, astronomers and photographers from English Heritage, Oxford, Leicester and Bournemouth universities as well as the Royal Astronomical Society.

There is now an abundance of archaeological evidence that indicates the solar alignment was part of the architectural design of Stonehenge. Around 2500 BC, the people who put up the large stones and dug an avenue into the chalk seemed to want to cement the solstice axis into the architecture of Stonehenge.

Archaeological evidence from nearby Durrington Walls, the place where scientists believe the ancient people who visited Stonehenge stayed, indicates that of the two solstices it was the midwinter one that drew the largest crowd.

But Stonehenge includes other elements, such as 56 pits arranged in a circle, an earthwork bank and ditch, and other smaller features such as the four station stones. These are four sarsen stones, a form of silicified sandstone common in Wiltshire, that were carefully placed to form an almost exact rectangle encompassing the stone circle.

Only two of these stones are still there, and they pale in comparison to their larger counterparts as they are only a few feet high. So what could their purpose be?

Aerial view of Stonehenge
Only two of the station stones are still there. Drone Explorer/Shutterstock

Lunar standstill

The rectangle that they form is not just any rectangle. The shorter sides are parallel to the main axis of the stone circle and this may be a clue as to their purpose. The longer sides of the rectangle skirt the outside of the stone circle.

It is these longer sides that are thought to align with the major lunar standstill. If you marked the position of moonrise (or set) over the course of a month you would see that it moves between two points on the horizon. These southern and northern limits of moonrise (or set) change on a cycle of 18.6 years between a minimum and a maximum range – the so-called minor and major lunar standstills, respectively.

The major lunar standstill is a period of about one and a half to two years when the northernmost and southernmost moonrises (or sets) are furthest apart. When this happens the Moon rises (and sets) outside the range of sunrises and sets, which may have imbued this celestial phenomenon with meaning and significance.

Diagram showing Moonrise positions on a horizon.
The range of Moonrise positions on the horizon during minor and major lunar standstills. Fabio Silva, CC BY-NC

The strongest evidence we have for people marking the major lunar standstill comes from the US southwest. The Great House of Chimney Rock, a multi-level complex built by the ancestral Pueblo people in the San Juan National Forest, Colorado, more than 1,000 years ago.

It lies on a ridge that ends at a natural formation of twin rock pillars – an area that has cultural significance to more than 26 native American tribal nations. From the vantage point of the Great House, the Sun will never rise in the gap between the pillars.

However, during a major standstill the Moon does rise between them in awe-inspiring fashion. Excavations unearthed preserved wood that meant researchers could date to the year episodes of construction of the Great House.

Of six cutting dates, four correspond to major lunar standstill years between the years AD1018 and AD1093, indicating that the site was renewed, maintained or expanded on consecutive major standstills.

Returning to southern England, archaeologists think there is a connection between the major lunar standstill and the earliest construction phase of Stonehenge (3000-2500 BC), before the sarsen stones were brought in.

Several sets of cremated human remains from this phase of construction were found in the southeastern part of the monument in the general direction of the southernmost major standstill moonrise, where three timber posts were also set into the bank. It is possible that there was an early connection between the site of Stonehenge and the Moon, which was later emphasised when the station stone rectangle was built.

The major lunar standstill hypothesis, however, raises more questions than it answers. We don’t know if the lunar alignments of the station stones were symbolic or whether people were meant to observe the Moon through them. Neither do we know which phases of the Moon would be more dramatic to witness.

A search for answers

In our upcoming work, we will be trying to answer the questions the major lunar standstill hypothesis raises. It’s unclear whether the Moon would have been strong enough to cast shadows and how they would have interacted with the other stones. We will also need to check whether the alignments can still be seen today or if they are blocked by woods, traffic and other features.

The Moon will align with the station stone rectangle twice a month from about February 2024 to November 2025, giving us plenty of opportunities to observe this phenomenon in different seasons and phases of the Moon.

To bring our research to life, English Heritage will livestream the southernmost Moonrise in June 2024, and host a series of events throughout the year, including talks, a pop-up planetarium, stargazing and storytelling sessions.

Across the Atlantic, our partners at the US Forest Service are developing educational materials about the major lunar standstill at Chimney Rock National Monument. This collaboration will result in events showcasing and debating the lunar alignments at both Stonehenge and at Chimney Rock.

Fabio Silva, Senior Lecturer in Archaeological Modelling, Bournemouth University; Amanda Chadburn, Member of Kellogg College, University of Oxford and Visiting Fellow in Archaeology, Bournemouth University, and Erica Ellingson, Professor in Astrophysics, Emeritus, University of Colorado Boulder

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Well I learnt something from this, which just goes to show that we are never too old to learn.

To come back to the article, the skills of those ancient peoples were just awe-inspiring.

Picture Parade Four Hundred and Twenty-Nine, not!

It is about Whale songs and is just a fabulous sound!

Last Friday there was an item on the BBC about whale song. It appears I can publish the article for you all. It is my choice over my regular Sunday Picture Parade. I hope you agree! Update: The track just 26 seconds long cannot be reproduced in this post.

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Whale song mystery solved by scientists

21 February 2024, By Helen Briggs and Victoria Gill,Science correspondents, BBC News

Humpback whale breaching near Bering Island, Kamchatka, Russia – Olga Filatova, University of Southern Denmark

Scientists have worked out how some of the largest whales in the ocean produce their haunting and complex songs.

Humpbacks and other baleen whales have evolved a specialised “voice box” that enables them to sing underwater. 

The discovery, published in the journal Nature, has also revealed why the noise we make in the ocean is so disruptive for these ocean giants. 

Whale song is restricted to a narrow frequency that overlaps with the noise produced by ships. 
“Sound is absolutely crucial for their survival, because it’s the only way they can find each other to mate in the ocean,” explained Prof Coen Elemans, of the University of Southern Denmark, who led the study. 

Blue whales return to ‘safe’ tropical haven
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Study to measure the oceans’ ‘year of quiet’

“[These are some] of the most enigmatic animals that ever lived on the planet,” he told BBC News. “They are amongst the biggest animals, they’re smart and they’re highly social.”

Humpback whale song (For whatever reason the track cannot be listened to on this blog. That is a great shame as the song is magnificent. So please go to the BBC website for this; the link is https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68358414 )

Baleen whales are a group of 14 species, including the blue, humpback, right, minke and gray whale. Instead of teeth, the animals have plates of what is called baleen, through which they sieve huge mouthfuls of tiny creatures from the water.

Exactly how they produce complex, often haunting songs has been a mystery until now. Prof Elemans said it was “super-exciting” to have figured it out.

A diver descends between three juvenile humpback whales the size of buses – Karim Iliya

He and his colleagues carried out experiments using larynxes, or “voice boxes”, that had been carefully removed from three carcasses of stranded whales – a minke, a humpback and a sei whale. They then blew air through the massive structures to produce the sound. 

In humans, our voices come from vibrations when air passes over structures called vocal folds in our throat. Baleen whales, instead, have a large U-shaped structure with a cushion of fat at the top of the larynx.

This vocal anatomy allows the animals to sing by recycling air, and it prevents water from being inhaled.

Artwork indicating the cartilages of the larynx in a humpback whale – Patricia Jaqueline Matic, Vienna

The researchers produced computer models of the sounds and showed that baleen whale song is restricted to a narrow frequency which overlaps with noise produced by shipping vessels. 

“They cannot simply choose to, for example, sing higher to avoid the noise we make in the ocean,” explained Prof Elemans. 

His study demonstrated how our ocean noise could prevent whales from communicating over long distances. That knowledge could be vital for the conservation of humpbacks, blue whales and other endangered giants of the sea.

It also provides insight into questions that researchers have been asking for decades about these eerie songs, which some sailors used to attribute to ghosts or mythical sea creatures.

Whale communication expert Dr Kate Stafford, from Oregon State University, called the study “groundbreaking”. 

“The production and reception of sound is the most important sense for marine mammals, so any studies that elucidate how they make sounds has the potential to move the field forward,” she told BBC News.

Researchers say evidence of the harm ocean noise pollution can do has been building for decades –
Alamy

The research also paints an evolutionary picture – of how the ancestors of whales returned to the oceans from the land, and the adaptations that made it possible to communicate underwater.

The way so-called toothed whales produce sound is better understood, because the animals are easier to study. These marine mammals, which include dolphins, orcas, sperm whales and porpoises, blow air through a special structure in their nasal passages.

Dr Ellen Garland, from the Sea Mammal Research Unit at the University of St Andrews, said: “I’ve always wondered exactly how baleen whales – especially humpbacks, which my research is focused on – actually produce the variety of sounds they do.

“Studying large whales is extremely challenging at the best of times, but trying to uncover how they produce sound when you may not even be able to see them underwater while vocalising is an added level of difficulty, so these researchers have been very creative.”

Dr Stafford added that the mammals’ ability to make such complex vocal signals was “remarkable” and highlighted “how special these animals are”.

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There! I do hope you all agree that this was very worthwhile. Plus, you all got to listen to those twenty-six seconds of the very beautiful sound.

To state the obvious, it’s in the numbers!

A wonderful, and educational, item on The Conversation.

I was listening to an item on the BBC yesterday morning and counting came up. The need for counting was incredibly early on in our history. Here is a copy of the part of the introduction to The Universal History of Numbers: From Prehistory to the Invention of the Computer.

A riveting history of counting and calculating from the time of the cave dwellers to the late twentieth century, The Universal History of Numbers is the first complete account of the invention and evolution of numbers the world over. As different cultures around the globe struggled with problems of harvests, constructing buildings, educating their citizens, and exploring the wonders of science, each civilization created its own unique and wonderful mathematical system. 

Dubbed the “Indiana Jones of numbers,” Georges Ifrah traveled all over the world for ten years to uncover the little-known details of this amazing story. From India to China, and from Egypt to Chile, Ifrah talked to mathematicians, historians, archaeologists, and philosophers. He deciphered ancient writing on crumbling walls; scrutinized stones, tools, cylinders, and cones; and examined carved bones, elaborately knotted counting strings, and X-rays of the contents of never-opened ancient clay accounting balls. Conveying all the excitement and joy of the process of discovery, Ifrah writes in a delightful storytelling style, recounting a plethora of intriguing and amusing anecdotes along the way.

Now to that article on The Conversation.

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From thousands to millions to billions to trillions to quadrillions and beyond: Do numbers ever end?

The number zero was a relatively recent and crucial addition − it allows numbers to extend in both directions forever. pixel_dreams/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Manil Suri, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com.

Why don’t numbers end? – Reyhane, age 7, Tehran, Iran

Here’s a game: Ask a friend to give you any number and you’ll return one that’s bigger. Just add “1” to whatever number they come up with and you’re sure to win.

The reason is that numbers go on forever. There is no highest number. But why? As a professor of mathematics, I can help you find an answer.

First, you need to understand what numbers are and where they come from. You learned about numbers because they enabled you to count. Early humans had similar needs – whether to count animals killed in a hunt or keep track of how many days had passed. That’s why they invented numbers.

But back then, numbers were quite limited and had a very simple form. Often, the “numbers” were just notches on a bone, going up to a couple hundred at most.

How numbers evolved throughout the centuries.

When numbers got bigger

As time went on, people’s needs grew. Herds of livestock had to be counted, goods and services traded, and measurements made for buildings and navigation. This led to the invention of larger numbers and better ways of representing them.

About 5,000 years ago, the Egyptians began using symbols for various numbers, with a final symbol for one million. Since they didn’t usually encounter bigger quantities, they also used this same final symbol to depict “many.”

The Greeks, starting with Pythagoras, were the first to study numbers for their own sake, rather than viewing them as just counting tools. As someone who’s written a book on the importance of numbers, I can’t emphasize enough how crucial this step was for humanity.

By 500 BCE, Pythagoras and his disciples had not only realized that the counting numbers – 1, 2, 3 and so on – were endless, but also that they could be used to explain cool stuff like the sounds made when you pluck a taut string.

Zero is a critical number

But there was a problem. Although the Greeks could mentally think of very large numbers, they had difficulty writing them down. This was because they did not know about the number 0.

Think of how important zero is in expressing big numbers. You can start with 1, then add more and more zeroes at the end to quickly get numbers like a million – 1,000,000, or 1 followed by six zeros – or a billion, with nine zeros, or a trillion, 12 zeros.

It was only around 1200 CE that zero, invented centuries earlier in India, came to Europe. This led to the way we write numbers today.

This brief history makes clear that numbers were developed over thousands of years. And though the Egyptians didn’t have much use for a million, we certainly do. Economists will tell you that government expenditures are commonly measured in millions of dollars.

Also, science has taken us to a point where we need even larger numbers. For instance, there are about 100 billion stars in our galaxy – or 100,000,000,000 – and the number of atoms in our universe may be as high as 1 followed by 82 zeros.

Don’t worry if you find it hard to picture such big numbers. It’s fine to just think of them as “many,” much like the Egyptians treated numbers over a million. These examples point to one reason why numbers must continue endlessly. If we had a maximum, some new use or discovery would surely make us exceed it.

The symbols of math include +, -, x and =.

Exceptions to the rule

But under certain circumstances, sometimes numbers do have a maximum because people design them that way for a practical purpose.

A good example is a clock – or clock arithmetic, where we use only the numbers 1 through 12. There is no 13 o’clock, because after 12 o’clock we just go back to 1 o’clock again. If you played the “bigger number” game with a friend in clock arithmetic, you’d lose if they chose the number 12.

Since numbers are a human invention, how do we construct them so they continue without end? Mathematicians started looking at this question starting in the early 1900s. What they came up with was based on two assumptions: that 0 is the starting number, and when you add 1 to any number you always get a new number.

These assumptions immediately give us the list of counting numbers: 0 + 1 = 1, 1 + 1 = 2, 2 + 1 = 3, and so on, a progression that continues without end.

You might wonder why these two rules are assumptions. The reason for the first one is that we don’t really know how to define the number 0. For example: Is “0” the same as “nothing,” and if so, what exactly is meant by “nothing”?

The second might seem even more strange. After all, we can easily show that adding 1 to 2 gives us the new number 3, just like adding 1 to 2002 gives us the new number 2003.

But notice that we’re saying this has to hold for any number. We can’t very well verify this for every single case, since there are going to be an endless number of cases. As humans who can perform only a limited number of steps, we have to be careful anytime we make claims about an endless process. And mathematicians, in particular, refuse to take anything for granted.

Here, then, is the answer to why numbers don’t end: It’s because of the way in which we define them.

Now, the negative numbers

How do the negative numbers -1, -2, -3 and more fit into all this? Historically, people were very suspicious about such numbers, since it’s hard to picture a “minus one” apple or orange. As late as 1796, math textbooks warned against using negatives.

The negatives were created to address a calculation issue. The positive numbers are fine when you’re adding them together. But when you get to subtraction, they can’t handle differences like 1 minus 2, or 2 minus 4. If you want to be able to subtract numbers at will, you need negative numbers too.

A simple way to create negatives is to imagine all the numbers – 0, 1, 2, 3 and the rest – drawn equally spaced on a straight line. Now imagine a mirror placed at 0. Then define -1 to be the reflection of +1 on the line, -2 to be the reflection of +2, and so on. You’ll end up with all the negative numbers this way.

As a bonus, you’ll also know that since there are just as many negatives as there are positives, the negative numbers must also go on without end!

Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to CuriousKidsUS@theconversation.com. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.

And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.

Manil Suri, Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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This article was written for those a great deal younger than I am. But, to be honest, it is a fascinating account of something so utterly basic to humans and human cognition.

Enjoy!

Picture Parade Four Hundred and Twenty-Seven

And it has to be the 2024 Eclipse.

(With thanks to Unsplash.)

April 8th, 2024

Photo by Jeni Holland on Unsplash

Photo by Luis Olmos on Unsplash

Photo by Nikhil Mitra on Unsplash

Photo by Stephen Walker on Unsplash

Photo by Nikhil Mitra on Unsplash

These are just a few of the photographs available on Unsplash. These and the others are just wonderful.

An article on loneliness

A surprising find!

I shall be 80 in November and I find myself thinking about death more often than I did a few years ago. As an example of how my mind has changed, yesterday I was contemplating renewing my subscription to the Free Inquiry magazine and wondering if I should renew it for two or three years? In other words will I still be alive in three years time? Silly but it is the truth. And that is not taking into account that I go to the Club Northwest two days a week and try and bike ride another two or three times a week.

Then let us not get into the topic of whether I will die before Jean or the reverse. That is an enormous subject and, thank goodness, where we live in Oregon one has the choice to die: “Two states, Oregon and Washington, currently have statutes providing a procedure for a terminally ill patient to request medication to end his or her life. These laws are sometimes referred to as “death with dignity” or “physician-assisted suicide” laws.“

All of which is an introduction to a recent article published in The Conversation that I republish below:

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Loneliness can kill, and new research shows middle-aged Americans are particularly vulnerable

The desire to belong is a fundamental human need. Oliver Rossi/Stone via Getty Images

Frank J. Infurna, Arizona State University

Middle-aged Americans are lonelier than their European counterparts. That’s the key finding of my team’s recent study, published in American Psychologist.

Our study identified a trend that has been evolving for multiple generations, and affects both baby boomers and Gen Xers. Middle-aged adults in England and Mediterranean Europe are not that far behind the U.S. In contrast, middle-aged adults in continental and Nordic Europe reported the lowest levels of loneliness and stability over time.

We used survey data drawn from over 53,000 middle-aged adults from the U.S. and 13 European nations from 2002 to 2020. We tracked their reported changes in loneliness every two years across the midlife years of 45 to 65. This span provided us data from the so-called silent generation of people born between 1937 and 1945; baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964; and members of Generation X, born between 1965 and 1974.

Our study makes clear that middle-aged Americans today are experiencing more loneliness than their peers in European nations. This coincides with existing evidence that mortality rates are rising for working-age adults in the U.S.

We focused on middle-aged adults for several reasons. Middle-aged adults form the backbone of society by constituting a majority of the workforce. But they also face increasing challenges today, notably greater demands for support from both their aging parents and their children.

Following the Great Recession from late 2007 to 2009, middle-aged adults in the U.S. reported poorer mental and physical health compared to same-aged peers in the 1990s. Compared to several European nations, U.S. middle-aged adults currently report more depressive symptoms and higher rates of chronic illness, pain and disability.

Why it matters

The desire to belong is an innate and fundamental need. When this is lacking, it can have downstream consequences.

Loneliness is bad for your health. Researchers have found that loneliness is as dangerous as smoking. Loneliness increases one’s vulnerability to sickness, depression, chronic illness and premature death.

Loneliness is considered a global public health issue. The U.S. surgeon general released an advisory report in 2023 documenting an epidemic of loneliness and a pressing need to increase social connection. Other nations, such as the U.K. and Japan, have appointed ministers of loneliness to ensure relationships and loneliness are considered in policymaking.

You can be lonely even when surrounded by people.

What still isn’t known

Why are middle-aged Americans exceptional when it comes to loneliness and poorer overall mental and physical health?

We did not directly test this in our study, but in the future we hope to zero in on the factors driving these trends. We think that the loneliness Americans are reporting compared to peer nations comes down to limited social safety nets and to cultural norms that prioritize individualism over community.

Individualization carries psychological costs, such as reductions in social connections and support structures, which are correlates of loneliness. Relative to the other nations in our study, Americans have a higher tendency to relocate, which is associated with weak social and community ties.

One of the reasons why we chose countries from across Europe is that they differ dramatically from the U.S. when it comes to social and economic opportunities and social safety nets. Social and economic inequalities likely increase one’s loneliness through undermining one’s ability to meet basic needs. Generous family and work policies likely lessen midlife loneliness through reducing financial pressures and work-family conflict, as well as addressing health and gender inequities.

Our findings on loneliness in conjunction with previous studies on life expectancy, health, well-being and cognition suggest that being middle-aged in America is a risk factor for poor mental and physical health outcomes.

The Research Brief is a short take on interesting academic work.

Frank J. Infurna, Associate Professor of Psychology, Arizona State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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And on yesterday afternoon, the Sunday, I went for a bike ride of 22 miles. I loved the ride especially as I listened to music all the way; I have a portable speaker that clips near the front handlebars and plays tracks from my iPhone.

Then there was an article in March from the University of Bristol: “Happiness can be learnt, but we have to work at it – study finds.“

It reads:

Press release issued: 11 March 2024

We can learn to be happy, but only get lasting benefits if we keep practising, a first-of-its-kind study has revealed.

The team behind the University of Bristol’s ‘Science of Happiness’ course had already discovered that teaching students the latest scientific studies on happiness created a marked improvement in their wellbeing.

But their latest study found that these wellbeing boosts are short-lived unless the evidence-informed habits learnt on the course – such as gratitude, exercise, meditation or journaling – are kept up over the long-term.

Senior author Professor Bruce Hood said: “It’s like going to the gym – we can’t expect to do one class and be fit forever. Just as with physical health, we have to continuously work on our mental health, otherwise the improvements are temporary.”

Launched in 2018, the University of Bristol’s Science of Happiness course was the first of its kind in the UK. It involves no exams or coursework, and teaches students what the latest peer-reviewed studies in psychology and neuroscience say really makes us happy.

Students who took the course reported a 10 to 15% improvement in wellbeing. But only those who continued implementing the course learnings maintained that improved wellbeing when they were surveyed again two years on.

Published in the journal Higher Education, it is the first to track wellbeing of students on a happiness course long after they have left the course.

Professor Hood said: “This study shows that just doing a course – be that at the gym, a meditation retreat or on an evidence-based happiness course like ours – is just the start: you must commit to using what you learn on a regular basis.

“Much of what we teach revolves around positive psychology interventions that divert your attention away from yourself, by helping others, being with friends, gratitude or meditating.

“This is the opposite of the current ‘selfcare’ doctrine, but countless studies have shown that getting out of our own heads helps gets us away from negative ruminations which can be the basis of so many mental health problems.”

Professor Hood has distilled the Science of Happiness course into a new book, out on March 10. ‘The Science of Happiness: Seven Lessons for Living Well’ reveals an evidence-informed roadmap to better wellbeing.

The other paper authors are fellow University of Bristol academics Catherine Hobbs and Sarah Jelbert, and Laurie R Santos, a Yale academic whose course inspired Bristol’s Science of Happiness course.

Paper

‘Long‑term analysis of a psychoeducational course on university students’ mental well‑being‘ by Catherine Hobbs, Sarah Jelbert, Laurie R. Santos and Bruce Hood in Higher Education

Further information
  • Surprising take aways from the Science of Happiness course include:
    • Talking to strangers makes us happier, despite a majority of us shying away from such encounters.
    • Social media is not bad for everyone, but it can be bad for those who focus on their reputation.
    • Loneliness impacts on our health by impairing our immune systems.
    • Optimism increases life expectancy.
    • Giving gifts to others activates the reward centres in our brain – often providing more of a happiness boost than spending money on oneself.
    • Sleep deprivation impacts on how well we are liked by others.
    • Walking in nature deactivates part of the brain related to negative ruminations, which are associated with depression.
    • Kindness and happiness are correlated.

I sincerely hope you find today’s post, a long post, of interest.

Our forests

The challenge in deciding what is best for our forests.

As a great many of you already know, we live in a rural area in Southern Oregon. It is a beautiful place and we look out to the East upon Mount Sexton. But locally a great many houses are built on rural sites with the local forest just yards away.

Thus it was with interest that an article on The Conversation website ‘spoke’ to me.

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Fighting every wildfire ensures the big fires are more extreme, and may harm forests’ ability to adapt to climate change

Extreme fires leave forests struggling to recover in a warming world. Mark Kreider

Mark Kreider, University of Montana

In the U.S., wildland firefighters are able to stop about 98% of all wildfires before the fires have burned even 100 acres. That may seem comforting, but decades of quickly suppressing fires has had unintended consequences.

Fires are a natural part of many landscapes globally. When forests aren’t allowed to burn, they become more dense, and dead branches, leaves and other biomass accumulate, leaving more fuel for the next fire. This buildup leads to more extreme fires that are even harder to put out. That’s why land managers set controlled burns and thin forests to clear out the undergrowth.

However, fuel accumulation isn’t the only consequence of fire suppression.

Fire suppression also disproportionately reduces certain types of fire. In a new study, my colleagues and I show how this effect, known as the suppression bias, compounds the impacts of fuel accumulation and climate change.

What happened to all the low-intensity fires?

Most wildfires are low-intensity. They ignite when conditions aren’t too dry or windy, and they can often be quickly extinguished.

The 2% of fires that escape suppression are those that are more extreme and much harder to fight. They account for about 98% of the burned area in a typical year.

The author and colleagues discuss changing wildfire in Montana and Idaho’s Bitterroot Mountains. By Mark Kreider.

In other words, trying to put out all wildfires doesn’t reduce the total amount of fire equally – instead, it limits low-intensity fires while extreme fires still burn. This effect is worsened by climate change.

Too much suppression makes fires more severe

In our study, we used a fire modeling simulation to explore the effects of the fire suppression bias and see how they compared to the effects of global warming and fuel accumulation alone.

Fuel accumulation and global warming both inherently make fires more severe. But over thousands of simulated fires, we found that allowing forests to burn only under the very worst conditions increased fire severity by the same amount as more than a century’s worth of fuel accumulation or 21st-century climate change.

The suppression bias also changes the way plants and animals interact with fire.

By removing low-intensity fires, humans may be changing the course of evolution. Without exposure to low-intensity fires, species can lose traits crucial for surviving and recovering from such events.

After extreme fires, landscapes have fewer seed sources and less shade. New seedlings have a harder time becoming established, and for those that do, the hotter and drier conditions reduce their chance of survival.

In contrast, low-intensity fires free up space and resources for new growth, while still retaining living trees and other biological legacies that support seedlings in their vulnerable initial years.

By quickly putting out low-intensity fires and allowing only extreme fires to burn, conventional suppression reduces the opportunities for climate-adapted plants to establish and help ecosystems adjust to changes like global warming.

Firefighters keep watch for smoke from a fire tower in the Coeur d’Alene National Forest, Idaho, in 1932. Forest Service photo by K. D. Swan

Suppression makes burned area increase faster

As the climate becomes hotter and drier, more area is burning in wildfires. If suppression removes fire, it should help slow this increase, right?

In fact, we found it does just the opposite.

We found that while conventional suppression led to less total area burning, the yearly burned area increased more than three times faster under conventional suppression than under less aggressive suppression efforts. The amount of area burned doubled every 14 years with conventional fire suppression under simulated climate change, instead of every 44 years when low- and moderate-intensity fires were allowed to burn. That raises concerns for how quickly people and ecosystems will have to adapt to extreme fires in the future.

Two charts show fire area increasing faster in a warming climate climate under conventional fire suppression.
With conventional fire suppression, the average fire size will increase faster as the planet warms than it would under a less aggressive approach. Mark Kreider

The fact that the amount of area burned is increasing is undoubtedly driven by climate change. But our study shows that the rate of this increase may also be a result of conventional fire management.

The near total suppression of fires over the last century means that even a little additional fire in a more fire-prone future can create big changes. As climate change continues to fuel more fires, the relative increase in area burned will be much bigger.

This puts more stress on communities as they adapt to increased extreme wildfires, from dealing with more wildfire smoke to even changing where people can live.

A way forward

To address the wildfire crisis, fire managers can be less aggressive in suppressing low- and moderate-intensity fires when it is safe to do so. They can also increase the use of prescribed fire and cultural burning to clear away brush and other fuel for fires.

These low-intensity fires will not only reduce the risk of future extreme fires, but they also will create conditions that favor the establishment of species better suited to the changing climate, thereby helping ecosystems adapt to global warming.

Coexisting with wildfire requires developing technologies and approaches that enable the safe management of wildfires under moderate burning conditions. Our study shows that this may be just as necessary as other interventions, such as reducing the number of fires unintentionally started by human activities and mitigating climate change.

Mark Kreider, Ph.D. Candidate in Forest and Conservation Science, University of Montana

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The article makes a great deal of sense and presents a solution that may not be our first thought. But especially the message is fundamentally important, and please watch the video because it very clearly presents the benefits of the solution.

So we want more low-intensity fires! Please! Or to say it another way, we want more prescribed fires.

Water, water, everywhere, but …

A dramatic article from George Monbiot about water!

I read the latest from George Monbiot yesterday morning and was startled. Startled because I hadn’t thought of it before. Startled because here in Merlin, Southern Oregon we have had so much rain since the beginning of November, 2023 that our acres are swimming in the wet. Startled since that time also our Bummer Creek, which flows across our land, has been at record depths.

But this report is incredibly important and I wanted to share it with you, as I have Geo. Monbiot’s permission for so doing.

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Dry Run

Posted on11th March 2024

The mega-droughts in Spain and the US are a portent of a gathering global water crisis.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 4th March 2024

There’s a flaw in the plan. It’s not a small one: it is an Earth-sized hole in our calculations. To keep pace with the global demand for food, crop production needs to grow by at least 50% by 2050. In principle, if nothing else changes, this is feasible, thanks mostly to improvements in crop breeding and farming techniques. But everything else is going to change.

Even if we set aside all other issues – heat impacts, soil degradation, epidemic plant diseases accelerated by the loss of genetic diversity – there is one which, without help from any other cause, could prevent the world’s people from being fed. Water.

A paper published in 2017 estimated that to match crop production to expected demand, water use for irrigation would have to increase by 146% by the middle of this century. One minor problem. Water is already maxed out.

In general, the dry parts of the world are becoming drier, partly through reduced rainfall; partly through declining river flow as mountain ice and snow retreats; and partly through rising temperatures causing increased evaporation and increased transpiration by plants. Many of the world’s major growing regions are now threatened by “flash droughts”, in which hot and dry weather sucks moisture from the soil at frightening speed. Some places, such as the southwest of the US, now in its 24th year of drought, may have switched permanently to a drier state. Rivers fail to reach the sea, lakes and aquifers are shrinking, species living in freshwater are becoming extinct at roughly five times the rate of species that live on land and major cities are threatened by extreme water stress.

Already, agriculture accounts for 90% of the world’s freshwater use. We have pumped so much out of the ground that we’ve changed the Earth’s spin. The water required to meet growing food demand simply does not exist.

That 2017 paper should have sent everyone scrambling. But as usual, it was ignored by policymakers and the media. Only when the problem arrives in Europe do we acknowledge that there’s a crisis. But while there is understandable panic about the drought in Catalonia and Andalusia, there’s an almost total failure among powerful interests to acknowledge that this is just one instance of a global problem, a problem that should feature at the top of the political agenda.

Though drought measures have triggered protests in Spain, this is far from the most dangerous flashpoint. The catchment of the Indus river is shared by three nuclear powers – India, Pakistan and China – and several highly unstable and divided regions already afflicted by hunger and extreme poverty. Today, 95% of the river’s dry season flow is extracted, mostly for irrigation. But water demand in both Pakistan and India is growing rapidly. Supply – temporarily boosted by the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush – will, before long, peak and then go into decline.

Even under the most optimistic climate scenario, runoff from Asian glaciers is expected to peak before mid-century, and glacier mass will shrink by about 46% by 2100. Some analysts see water competition between India and Pakistan as a major cause of the repeated conflicts in Kashmir. But unless a new Indus waters treaty is struck, taking falling supplies into account, this fighting could be a mere prelude for something much worse.

There’s a widespread belief that these problems can be solved simply by enhancing the efficiency of irrigation: huge amounts of water are wasted in agriculture. So let me introduce you to the irrigation efficiency paradox. As better techniques ensure that less water is required to grow a given volume of crops, irrigation becomes cheaper. As a result, it attracts more investment, encourages farmers to grow thirstier, more profitable plants, and expands across a wider area. This is what happened, for instance, in the Guadiana river basin in Spain, where a €600m investment to reduce water use by improving the efficiency of irrigation has instead increased it.

You can overcome the paradox through regulation: laws to limit both total and individual water consumption. But governments prefer to rely on technology alone. Without political and economic measures, it doesn’t work.

Nor are other technofixes likely to solve the problem. Governments are planning massive engineering schemes to pipe water from one place to another. But climate breakdown and rising demand ensure that many of the donor regions are also likely to run dry. Water from desalination plants typically costs five or 10 times as much as water from the ground or the sky, while the process requires masses of energy and generates great volumes of toxic brine.

Above all, we need to change our diets. Those of us with dietary choice (in other words, the richer half of the world’s population) should seek to minimise the water footprint of our food. With apologies for harping on about it, this is yet another reason to switch to an animal-free diet, which reduces both total crop demand and, in most cases, water use. The water demand of certain plant products, especially almonds and pistachios in California, has become a major theme in the culture wars, as rightwing influencers attack plant-based diets. But, excessive as the watering of these crops is, more than twice as much irrigation water is used in California to grow forage plants to feed livestock, especially dairy cows. Dairy milk has much higher water demand even than the worst alternative (almond milk), and is astronomically higher than the best alternatives, such as oat or soya milk.

This is not to give all plant products a free pass: horticulture can make massive demands on water supplies. Even within a plant-based diet, we should be switching from some grains, vegetables and fruit to others. Governments and retailers should help us through a combination of stronger rules and informative labelling.

Instead, they do the opposite. Last month, at the behest of the EU’s agricultural commissioner, Janusz Wojciechowski, the European Commission deleted from its new climate plan the call to incentivise “diversified” (animal-free) protein sources. Regulatory capture is never stronger than in the food and farming sector.

I hate to pile yet more on to you, but some of us have to try to counter the endless bias against relevance in politics and most of the media. This is yet another of those massive neglected issues, any one of which could be fatal to peace and prosperity on a habitable planet. Somehow, we need to recover our focus.

http://www.monbiot.com

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Oh dear, oh dear!

One hates to be alarmist and yet Monbiot is a very smart reporter and this is truly important.

Oh dear, oh dear!

Listening to ancient folk

Returning to climate change.

We think that climate change is a relatively recent phenomenon. Wrong! And I am not going to say any more because this post from The Conversation covers it beautifully.

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What ancient farmers can really teach us about adapting to climate change – and how political power influences success or failure

A farmer paddles to his fields on an artificial island among canals, part of an ancient Aztec system known as chinampas, in 2021. AP Photo /Marco Ugarte

Chelsea Fisher, University of South Carolina

Published February, 26th, 2024

In dozens of archaeological discoveries around the world, from the once-successful reservoirs and canals of Angkor Wat in Cambodia to the deserted Viking colonies of Greenland, new evidence paints pictures of civilizations struggling with unforeseen climate changes and the reality that their farming practices had become unsustainable.

Among these discoveries are also success stories, where ancient farming practices helped civilizations survive the hard times.

Zuni farmers in the southwestern United States made it through long stretches of extremely low rainfall between A.D. 1200 and 1400 by embracing small-scale, decentralized irrigation systems. Farmers in Ghana coped with severe droughts from 1450 to 1650 by planting indigenous African grains, like drought-tolerant pearl millet.

Ancient practices like these are gaining new interest today. As countries face unprecedented heat waves, storms and melting glaciers, some farmers and international development organizations are reaching deep into the agricultural archives to revive these ancient solutions.

A canal running through a mountain side with snowy peaks in the background.
An ancient irrigation method used by the Moors involving water channels is being revisited in Spain. Geography Photos/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Drought-stricken farmers in Spain have reclaimed medieval Moorish irrigation technology. International companies hungry for carbon offsets have paid big money for biochar made using pre-Columbian Amazonian production techniques. Texas ranchers have turned to ancient cover cropping methods to buffer against unpredictable weather patterns.

But grasping for ancient technologies and techniques without paying attention to historical context misses one of the most important lessons ancient farmers can reveal: Agricultural sustainability is as much about power and sovereignty as it is about soil, water and crops.

I’m an archaeologist who studies agricultural sustainability in the past. Discoveries in recent years have shown how the human past is full of people who dealt with climate change in both sustainable and unsustainable ways. Archaeologists are finding that ancient sustainability was tethered closely to politics. However, these dynamics are often forgotten in discussions of sustainability today.

Maya milpa farming: Forest access is essential

In the tropical lowlands of Mexico and Central America, Indigenous Maya farmers have been practicing milpa agriculture for thousands of years. Milpa farmers adapted to drought by gently steering forest ecology through controlled burns and careful woodland conservation.

The knowledge of milpa farming empowered many rural farmers to navigate climate changes during the notorious Maya Collapse – two centuries of political disintegration and urban depopulation between A.D. 800 to 1000. Importantly, later Maya political leaders worked with farmers to keep this flexibility. Their light-handed approach is still legible in the artifacts and settlement patterns of post-Collapse farming communities and preserved in the flexible tribute schedules for Maya farmers documented by 16th century Spanish monks.

Maya farmers and researchers explain milpa farming.

In my book, “Rooting in a Useless Land: Ancient Farmers, Celebrity Chefs, and Environmental Justice in Yucatán,” I trace the deep history of the Maya milpa. Using archaeology, I show how ancient farmers adapted milpa agriculture in response to centuries of drought and political upheaval.

Modern Maya milpa practices began drawing public attention a few years ago as international development organizations partnered with celebrity chefs, like Noma’s René Redzepi, and embraced the concept.

However, these groups condemned the traditional milpa practice of burning new areas of forest as unsustainable. They instead promoted a “no-burn” version to grow certified organic maize for high-end restaurants. Their no-burn version of milpa relies on fertilizers to grow maize in a fixed location, rather than using controlled fire ecology to manage soil fertility across vast forests.

The result restricted the traditional practices Maya farmers have used for centuries. It also fed into a modern political threat to traditional Maya milpa farming: land grabs.

Traditional milpa agriculture requires a lot of forested land, since farmers need to relocate their fields every couple of years. But that need for forest is at odds with hotel companies, industrial cattle ranches and green energy developers who want cheap land and see Maya milpa forest management practices as inefficient. No-burn milpa eases this conflict by locking maize agriculture into one small space indefinitely, instead of spreading it out through the forest over generations. But it also changes tradition.

Maya milpa farmers are now fighting to practice their ancient agricultural techniques, not because they’ve forgotten or lost those techniques, but because neocolonial land privatization policies actively undermine farmers’ ability to manage woodlands as their ancestors did.

Milpa farmers are increasingly left to either adopt a rebranded version of their heritage or quit farming all together – as many have done.

Mexico’s fragile artificial islands: Threats from development

When I look to the work of other archaeologists investigating ancient agricultural practices, I see these same entanglements of power and sustainability.

In central Mexico, chinampas are ancient systems of artificial islands and canals. They have enabled farmers to cultivate food in wetlands for centuries.

The continuing existence of chinampas is a legacy of deep ecological knowledge and a resource enabling communities to feed themselves.

Chinampa techniques use canals and artificial islands. This photo shows one in 1912. Karl Weule, Leitfaden der Voelkerkunde via Wikimedia
A well-maintained farming island among canals near Mexico City.
The chinampas of Xochimilco are a UNESCO world heritage site today, but development expanding from Mexico City has put their survival in danger. Sergei Saint via Flickr, CC BY-ND

But archaeology has revealed that generations of sustainable chinampa management could be overturned almost overnight. That happened when the expansionist Aztec Empire decided to re-engineer Lake Xaltocan for salt production in the 14th century and rendered its chinampas unusable.

Today, the future of chinampa agriculture hinges on a pocket of protected fields stewarded by local farmers in the marshy outskirts of Mexico City. These fields are now at risk as demand for housing drives informal settlements into the chinampa zone.

Andean raised fields: A story of labor exploitation

Traditional Andean agriculture in South America incorporates a diverse range of ancient cultivation techniques. One in particular has a complicated history of attracting revival efforts.

In the 1980s, government agencies, archaeologists and development organizations spent a fortune trying to persuade Andean farmers to revive raised field farming. Ancient raised fields had been found around Lake Titicaca, on the border of Peru and Bolivia. These groups became convinced that this relic technology could curb hunger in the Andes by enabling back-to-back potato harvests with no need for fallowing.

But Andean farmers had no connection to the labor-intensive raised fields. The practice had been abandoned even before the rise of Inca civilization in the 13th century. The effort to revive ancient raised field agriculture collapsed.

A view from a plane shows the outlines where fields were raised.
An aerial photograph shows pre-Colombian raised fields in Bolivia. Umberto Lombardo, University of Bern, Switzerland, CC BY-NC

Since then, more archaeological discoveries around Lake Titicaca have suggested that ancient farmers were forced to work the raised fields by the expansionist Tiwanaku empire during its peak between AD 500 and 1100. Far from the politically neutral narrative promoted by development organizations, the raised fields were not there to help farmers feed themselves. They were a technology for exploiting labor and extracting surplus crops from ancient Andean farmers.

Respecting ancient practices’ histories

Reclaiming ancestral farming techniques can be a step toward sustainable food systems, especially when descendant communities lead their reclamation. The world can, and I think should, reach back to recover agricultural practices from our collective past.

But we can’t pretend that those practices are apolitical.

The Maya milpa farmers who continue to practice controlled burns in defiance of land privatizers understand the value of ancient techniques and the threat posed by political power. So do the Mexican chinampa farmers working to restore local food to disenfranchised urban communities. And so do the Andean farmers refusing to participate in once-exploitive raised field rehabilitation projects.

Depending on how they are used, ancient agricultural practices can either reinforce social inequalities or create more equitable food systems. Ancient practices aren’t inherently good – it takes a deeper commitment to just and equitable food systems to make them sustainable.

Chelsea Fisher, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of South Carolina

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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We like to think that the changing climate is a modern phenomenon but this article shows it is not. That sentence by Chelsea Fisher offers a route out of the present situation: “The world can, and I think should, reach back to recover agricultural practices from our collective past.”

The imminent climate change crisis

But a positive TED Talk on the situation.

There have been so many disastrous activities on climate change, and I am not belittling them, but it was amazing to come across a TED Talk last Saturday that I watched. But first the speaker, Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, who was born in Asmara, Eritrea. Her bio (in part):

From WikiPedia:

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Asmeret Asefaw Berhe is a soil biogeochemist and political ecologist who is the current Director of the Office of Science at the US Department of Energy. She was previously the Professor of Soil Biogeochemistry and the Ted and Jan Falasco Chair in Earth Sciences and Geology in the Department of Life and Environmental Sciences; University of California, Merced.[1] Her research group worked to understand how soil helps regulate the Earth’s climate.

Advocacy and global impact work

Berhe’s work at the intersection of soil, climate change, and political ecology lends itself well to a number of global issues. During her graduate career, she was a member of the working group that produced the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, which was called for by the United Nations Secretary Kofi Annan to assess the impact of humans on the environment. She was one of the lead authors on the 2005 report’s chapter on “Drivers of Change in Ecosystem Condition and Services.”[19] The Assessment received the Zayed International Prize for the Environment in 2005.[20]

In 2018, Berhe was selected as part of the inaugural National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine New Voices in Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine cohort, as an early career leader working to advance the conversation around key emerging global issues and communicate the evidence base around those challenges.[21]

An advocate for women in science, Berhe is currently a co-Principal Investigator of ADVANCEGeo, which is working to transform the workplace climate of the geosciences to increase retention of women in the field and develop a sustainable model that can be transferred to other scientific domains. Currently, the Earth Science Women’s Network (ESWN), the Association for Women Geoscientists, and the American Geophysical Union (AGU) have partnered to address the issue of sexual harassment in the earth, space and environmental sciences.[22] The program led by Erika Marín-Spiotta and is run with support from a four-year $1.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation.[23]

She currently serves as an advisory board member of 500 Women Scientists, a grassroots organization working to make science open, inclusive, and accessible, and is on the leadership board of the Earth Science Women’s Network.

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Now from the TED Talk, firstly the description:

Part 3 of the TED Radio Hour episode What Lies Beneath.

Earth’s soil can store vast amounts of carbon. Biogeochemist Asmeret Asefaw Berhe says soil could be a powerful tool for fighting climate change – if only we stopped treating it like dirt.

About Asmeret Asefaw Berhe

Asmeret Asefaw Berhe is a soil biogeochemist and President Biden’s nominee to lead the Department of Energy Office of Science. She is a professor of soil biogeochemistry at University of California, Merced. Her research group works to understand how soil helps regulate the earth’s climate.

Berhe’s work exists at the intersection of soil, climate change, and political ecology. During her graduate career, she was a member of the working group that produced the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, which was called for by the United Nations to assess the impact of humans on the environment.

Berhe received a B.Sc. in Soil and Water Conservation at the University of Asmara in Eritrea. She has an M.Sc. in Political Ecology from Michigan State University and a Ph.D. in Biogeochemistry from University of California, Berkeley.

This segment of the TED Radio Hour was produced by Matthew Cloutier and Sylvie Douglis and edited by Rachel Faulkner and Katie Simon. You can follow us on Facebook @TEDRadioHour and email us at TEDRadioHour@npr.org.

Now that positive TED Talk:

We wish Asmeret the very best of fortune in bringing about these changes.

Looking after our dogs in Winter

Erik Oltad has some great advice.

In our case our (remaining) dogs, Oliver and Cleopatra, are able to go outside but still remain on our land. But plenty of dog owners are not in such a privileged position and need to take their dogs on public pavements and the like.

Thus for all you dog owners in that position then Erik’s advice is for you.

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Dog care below freezing − how to keep your pet warm and safe from cold weather, road salt and more this winter

Dogs get cold in the winter too, but there are things pet owners can do to help them feel comfortable. AP Photo/David Duprey

Erik Christian Olstad, University of California, Davis

Time outside with your dog in the spring, summer and fall can be lovely. Visiting your favorite downtown café on a cool spring morning, going to a favorite dog park on a clear summer evening or going on walks along a river when the leaves are changing color are all wonderful when the weather is favorable. But in much of the country, when winter rolls around, previously hospitable conditions can quickly turn chilly and dangerous for people and pups alike.

Winter brings some unique challenges for dog owners, since dogs still need activity and socialization during colder seasons. Studies have shown that dog owners are almost 50% less likely to walk their dogs when the weather gets cold. Knowing the basics of winter safety is critical to maintaining a healthy lifestyle for your dog.

I am an assistant professor at the University of California Davis School of Veterinary Medicine who weathered polar vortexes with my dog while living in Michigan early in my career. While I’ve since moved to sunny California, I’ve seen how quickly frigid temperatures can turn dangerous for pets.

Breed and age differences

Not all dogs have the same abilities to deal with cold weather. A short-coated dog like a Chihuahua is much more susceptible to the dangers of cold weather than a thick-coated husky. When the weather dips below 40 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius), the well-acclimated husky may be comfortable, whereas the Chihuahua would shiver and be at risk of hypothermia.

Additionally, if your dog is used to warm weather, but you decide to move to a colder region, the dog will need time to acclimate to that colder weather, even if they have a thick coat.

Age also affects cold-weather resilience. Puppies and elderly dogs can’t withstand the chill as well as other dogs, but every dog is unique – each may have individual health conditions or physical attributes that make them more or less resilient to cold weather.

When is my dog too cold?

A small dog wearing a thick, fluffy red coat.
Dog jackets can keep pets warm in the cold. AP Photo/David J. Phillip

Pet owners should be able to recognize the symptoms of a dog that is getting too cold. Dogs will shiver, and some may vocalize or whine. Dogs may resist putting their feet down on the cold ground, or burrow, or try to find warmth in their environment when they are uncomfortable.

Just like people, dogs can get frostbite. And just like people, the signs can take days to appear, making it hard to assess them in the moment. The most common sites for frostbite in dogs are their ears and the tips of their tails. Some of the initial signs of frostbite are skin discoloring, turning paler than normal, or purple, gray or even black; red, blistered skin; swelling; pain at the site; or ulceration.

Other serious signs of hypothermia include sluggishness or lethargy, and if you observe them, please visit your veterinarian immediately. A good rule to live by is if it is too cold for you, it is too cold for your dog.

Getting your dog a sweater or jacket and paw covers can provide them with protection from the elements and keep them comfortable. Veterinarians also recommend closely monitoring your dog and limiting their time outside when the temperature nears the freezing point or drops below it.

Road salt dangers

Road salt that treats ice on streets and sidewalks can also harm dogs. When dogs walk on the salt, the sharp, rough edges of the salt crystals can irritate the sensitive skin on their paws.

A fluffy dog sits in the snow wearing two cloth, polka dot paw covers.
Paw covers for dogs can keep their feet warm and protected from road salt. AP Photo/Jim Cole

Dogs will often lick their feet when they’re dirty, wet or irritated, and if they ingest any salt doing that, they may face GI upset, dehydration, kidney failure, seizures or even death. Even small amounts of pure salt can disrupt critical body functions in dogs.

Some companies make pet-safe salt, but in public it can be hard to tell what type of salt is on the ground. After walking your dog, wash off their feet or boots. You can also keep their paw fur trimmed to prevent snow from balling up or salt collecting in the fur. Applying a thin layer of petroleum jelly or paw pad balm to the skin of the paw pads can also help protect your pet’s paws from irritation.

A snowy sidewalk covered in tiny chunks of salt.
Road salt can be harmful to dogs’ sensitive paws. Stolbovsky/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Antifreeze risks

Antifreeze, or ethylene glycol, is in most vehicles to prevent the fluids from freezing when it gets cold out. Some people pour antifreeze into their toilets when away from their home to prevent the water in the toilet from freezing.

Antifreeze is an exceptionally dangerous chemical to dogs and cats, as it tastes sweet but can be deadly when ingested. If a pet ingests even a small amount of antifreeze, the substance causes a chemical cascade in their body that results in severe kidney damage. If left untreated, the pet may have permanent kidney damage or die.

There are safer antifreeze options on the market that use ingredients other than ethylene glycol. If your dog ingests antifreeze, please see your veterinarian immediately for treatment.

When temperatures dip below freezing, the best thing pet owners can do is keep the time spent outside as minimal as possible. Try some indoor activities, like hide-and-seek with low-calorie treats, fetch or even an interactive obstacle course. Food puzzles can also keep your dog mentally engaged during indoor time.

Although winter presents some unique challenges, it can still be an enjoyable and healthy time for you and your canine companion.

Erik Christian Olstad, Health Sciences Assistant Professor of Clinical Veterinary Medicine, University of California, Davis

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Erik’s comments about ethylene glycol (EG), or antifreeze as it more commonly known, and the incredible dangers to dogs EG possesses are vital to understand.

Please, please keep your dogs very safe in Winter! If Erik’s advice helps save even a single dog then me republishing this will have been worthwhile.