Hydrogen - Is This the Fuel of the Future?

If you look at the current edition of New Scientist you will find many article about hydrogen exploration. I asked Google Gemini "List recent publications concerning geological exploration for hydrogen" and got THIS VERY INTERESTING ANSWER.

Hydrogen as a fuel is a very good thing - it's combustion leads to energy and water. Up to now the problem has been difficulties in making or finding it, storing and transporting it, and having the engines to use it. The infrastructure of the oil industry already exists and up to now, fulfils the needs of society.

But the advance of electric vehicles suggests that oil might be on the way out. Oil companies are no doubt aware of this. But electricity is not their thing. Finding and moving hazardous materials is. I suspect that they see movement from oil to hydrogen as fitting in with their expertise.

A movement from oil fuel to electricity might be difficult for them. A change from oil to hydrogen - not so much.

 A Dinosaur's Last Meal

A correspondent, who is currently in the area, sent me the link to THIS ARTICLE which concerns the work done on an Upper Cretaceous sauropod (Diamantinasaurus matildae) found near the small town of Winton in the middle of Queensland, Australia.

The dinosaur, called Judy for reasons which need not detain us, is so well preserved that her stomach contents are preserved. This is the first time that we have direct evidence that sauropods were vegetarian. There is lots of indirect evidence that they must have been so but now we can see what they ate.

Also she is the first dinosaur fossil with skin preserved that has been found in Australia.

Small portion of Judy's skin, showing approximately hexagonal scales covered in tiny lumps (termed papillae). Scale bar in centimetres. (Poropat et al., Current Biology, 2025)

Judy's stomach contents confirm what had been thought - sauropods ate from trees high off the ground. But she was not fully grown and so, also ate low growing plants - angiosperms.

The work done on Judy is also discussed in THIS ARTICLE. The source paper for both is THIS ACADEMIC PAPER. The latter covers everything in painstaking detail. I particularly liked "The fossilised bones were exposed using standard digging equipment (e.g., hammers, chisels, screwdrivers, dental probes, paintbrushes)"

 Were There Five Mass Extinctions?

THIS ARTICLE in New Scientist questions whether there were five Mass Extinctions - end of the Ordovician (445 million years ago), the late Devonian (372 million years ago), the end-Permian (252 million years ago), the end-Triassic (201 million years ago) and the end-Cretaceous.

The evidence for mass extinctions is best seen in the marine environment, where fossil preservation is easier. On land preservation is more difficult. And so mass extinction is more difficult to prove. Or is it that mass extinction did not happen on land?

And if it did not happen on land, was it a mass extinction? On land, animals find it easier to move than sea creatures. Plants have seeds which can survive long after the parent dies. Insects, with there rapid regeneration times, seem to avoid extinction. (But have a poor fossil record.)

Much of the argument seems to come down to a matter of definition. Labelling the present day as the Sixth Mass Extinction might make conservation goals more difficult if it comes to arguing about definitions.

 Down to Earth Extra June 2025

The June 2025 edition of Down to Earth Extra has been published. You can download it HERE or you can read it below.

 Land Level Rises - What is the Cause?

A correspondent sent me THIS LINK. It is based on THIS ACADEMIC PAPER. The reason for the papers is the measured rise in land level in South Africa. The rise is not much - 6mm in the period 2012 to 2021. The rise could be measured because of the extensive GPS network in the country.

But what is the cause of the rise? For several years the reason was thought to be the mantle plume beneath the region. But the research described in the papers suggests that the real cause is drought! If you think of the soil as a sponge, taking the water out will cause the sponge to expand. Therefore land level rises.

All very interesting but the research suggests that the GPS system can be used as a means of measuring the severity of drought and planning to mitigate the consequences of predicted water shortages.

 An Unsurprising Discovery

A correspondent sent me THIS LINK. It is based on this ACADEMIC PAPER in Nature. The Nature paper concentrates on the history of the breakup of the ice shelves which fringed the British-Irish Ice Sheet (BIIS). The BBC article concentrates on the scratches the icebergs breaking off from the ice shelves left on the sea floor. 

It has always seemed to me that such scratches would inevitably be found some time; - there was an ice sheet; icebergs would be spawned; icebergs would leave sea bed scratches. So it is nice that there presence has been proved.

The paper in Nature uses the scratches to detail how the BIIS retreated and uses the data to model how the Antarctic Ice Sheet might break up.

Icebergs calved in the Witch Ground Basin would drift eastwards towards the Norwegian Channel before being routed northwards towards the continental shelf edge. The isostatically-corrected bathymetry of the central North Sea at 20 ka is from Bradley et al. 60, with bathymetric depth contours displayed every 25 m. Colored stippled lines represent the modeled ice margins of the last British-Irish (BIIS) and Fennoscandian (FIS) ice sheets at timeslices between 20 ka and 18 ka from Clark et al. 40. NCIS—Norwegian Channel Ice Stream.

 Petrification: Fossils & the Revelation of Deep Time

News has come to me of this free exhibition at the Bath Royal Literary & Scientific Institution and it sounds very interesting. It runs until Saturday 11th October.

========================================

What makes fossils so special? Fossils provide the evidence that there was life on earth before humans and this year Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution is displaying a selection of the best from the depths of our amazing collections. Petrification is BRLSI’s latest exhibition and in it you will discover fossils from across 505 million years of the history of life. The BRLSI’s earliest fossil is a trilobite from the Cambrian geological period!

Our exhibition begins by encouraging visitors to follow a Deep Timeline, starting out at a meteorite which represents the formation of both the Solar System and planet Earth 4.567 billion years ago!

Crossing the gallery, the timeline leads visitors through the Precambrian era, when only single-celled life existed, all the way through to the Cambrian Explosion of life. The final ninth of the timeline, which is depicted in a scale running up the wall of the gallery, is where all the palaeontologic action happens.

This is where visitors get to experience trilobites and corals, dinosaurs, marine reptiles, mammoths and cave bears! Colour-coded exhibits in the room correspond to the timeline so that visitors always know where in Deep Time they are.

And that’s really just the start! Learn more about some of the amazing things you can hope to find in Petrification, and our accompanying activities for families and children here.

Come to BRLSI and discover the beautiful complexity of prehistoric life and Bath’s influential role in the birth of palaeontology.

Please note our opening hours are Monday to Saturday, 10am to 4pm (closed on Sundays).

We are open Good Friday (18 April) and Easter Monday (21 April).

============================