World Wildlife Fund scientists have just announced the discovery of 11 new animal and plant species in a remote area in central Vietnam. They say this underscores the importance of conservation efforts in the ancient tropical forests of the region.
Gastrodia theana — A very rare leafless orchid discovered in Vietnam.

Within the ancient tropical forests of a region known as Vietnam’s “Green Corridor,” scientists found a snake, five orchids, and two butterflies as well as three other plants new to science and exclusive to the Annamites Mountain Range. Ten other plant species, including four orchids, are still under examination but also appear to be new species.

“Discoveries of so many new species are rare and occur only in very special places like the Green Corridor,” said Dr. Chris Dickinson, WWF’s chief conservation scientist in the Green Corridor. “Several large mammal species were discovered in the 1990s in the same forests so these latest discoveries may be just the tip of the iceberg.”

The rainforests of the Central Annamites likely existed as continuous undisturbed forest cover for thousands of years, and, as a result, offer unique habitats for many species, said WWF experts.

The new snake species, called the white-lipped keelback, prefers living by streams where it catches frogs and other small animals. With a beautiful yellow-white stripe sweeping along its head and red dots covering its body, the white-lipped keelback can reach 31 inches–almost a yard in length.

Three of the new orchid species are entirely leafless, a rarity even among orchids. Containing none of the chlorophyll or green pigment commonly found in plants, these orchids live on decaying matter like many fungal species. The other new plants include an aspidistra which produces a nearly black flower and a newly-discovered species of arum with beautiful yellow flowers. Arum plants have funnel-shaped leaves surrounding the flowers.

The two new butterfly species are among eight discovered in the province since 1996. One is a skipper — a butterfly with quick, darting flight habits–from the genus Zela and the other is a new genus in the subfamily of Satyrinae.

According to WWF experts, all of these species are at risk from illegal logging, hunting, unsustainable extraction of natural resources and conflicting development interests. However, local authorities — in particular the Thua Thien Hue Provincial Forest Protection Department — have committed to conserve and sustainably manage these valuable forests.

“The area is extremely important for conservation and the province wants to protect the forests and their environmental services, as well as contribute to sustainable development,” said Hoang Ngoc Khanh, director of Thua Thien Hue Provincial Forest Protection Department.

Stretching from the mountainous forests of the Annamites to one of the last remaining lowland wet evergreen forests, the Green Corridor supports significant populations of threatened species and includes some of the longest remaining stretches of lowland river with intact forest habitat in Vietnam feeding into the Perfume River.

Recent surveys found 15 reptiles and amphibians and six bird species among the threatened species living there. It is also home to one of the world’s most endangered primates–white-cheeked crested gibbons–and the best location in Vietnam to save the saola–a unique type of wild cattle just discovered by scientists in 1992.

According to WWF experts, the forests of the Annamites are important water catchments, supplying water for thousands of people who depend on the region’s rivers. Local ethnic minority groups earn more than half of their income from the non-timber resources of these same forests.

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A University of Liverpool scientist has discovered a new layer near the Earth’s core, which will enable the internal temperature of the Earth’s mantle to be measured at a much deeper level than previously possible.

Dr Christine Thomas, from the Department of Earth Sciences, has found a previously undetected seismic layer near the Earth’s core-mantle boundary. Her discovery will allow geophysicists to measure variations in the Earth’s internal temperature near the boundary between the rocky mantle and fluid core, about 2,900 km below the Earth’s surface.

Dr Thomas developed a model with colleagues at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), which uses a recently discovered phase change (when atoms are compressed into crystals under high pressure) in the lowest part of the Earth’s mantle. They propose that temperature changes in this area can result in the creation of two seismic layers near the core-mantle boundary, the second of which has been recently discovered by Dr Thomas.

The two seismic layers can provide a sensitive thermometer with which researchers can take the temperature of the Earth’s lowermost mantle. The layers also enable scientists to examine whether cold subducted lithosphere (cold areas beneath a plate which can cause earthquakes) is reaching the core-mantle boundary, and whether hot material rises from the area between the core and mantle.

In the first case, the two seismic layers should be visible in seismic waves that travel through the Earth; the latter case would not show any layers. This would be a strong case for the convection of the whole mantle that is still a highly debated issue in the Earth Sciences.

Dr Thomas said: “Our discovery marks an exciting stage in earth science research as it provides the possibility to test the debated issue of whole mantle convection, the largely unconstrained heat flow from the Earth’s core to the mantle and the fate of subducted lithosphere with seismic data.”

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In 1911 the discovery that the world was billions of years old changed our view of the world for ever.
Imagine trying to understand history without any dates. You know, for example, that the First World War came before the Second World War, but how long before? Was it tens, hundreds or even thousands of years before? In certain situations, before radiometric dating, there was no way of knowing.

By the end of the 19th century, many geologists still believed the age of the Earth to be a few thousand years old, as indicated by the Bible, while others considered it to be around 100 million years old, in line with calculations made by Lord Kelvin, the most prestigious physicist of his day.

Dr Cherry Lewis, University of Bristol, UK, said: “The age of the Earth was hugely important for people like Darwin who needed enormous amounts of time in which evolution could occur. As Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s chief advocate said: ‘Biology takes its time from Geology’.”

In 1898 Marie Curie discovered the phenomenon of radioactivity and by 1904 Ernest Rutherford, a physicist working in Britain, realised that the process of radioactive decay could be harnessed to date rocks.

It was against this background of dramatic and exciting scientific discoveries that a young Arthur Holmes (1890-1964) completed his schooling and won a scholarship to study physics at the Royal College of Science in London. There he developed the technique of dating rocks using the uranium-lead method and from the age of his oldest rock discovered that the Earth was at least 1.6 billion years old (1,600 million).

But geologists were not as happy with the new results as, perhaps, they should have been. As Holmes, writing in Nature in 1913, put it: “the geologist who ten years ago was embarrassed by the shortness of time allowed to him for the evolution of the Earth’s crust, is still more embarrassed with the superabundance with which he is now confronted.” It continued to be hotly debated for decades.

Cherry Lewis commented, “In the 1920s, as the age of the Earth crept up towards 3 billion years, this took it beyond the age of the Universe, then calculated to be only 1.8 billion years old. It was not until the 1950s that the age of the Universe was finally revised and put safely beyond the age of the Earth, which had at last reached its true age of 4.56 billion years. Physicists suddenly gained a new respect for geologists!”

In the 1920s the new theory of continental drift became the great scientific conundrum, and most geologists were unable to accept the concept due to the lack of a mechanism for driving the continents around the globe.

In 1928 Arthur Holmes showed how convection currents in the substratum (now called the mantle) underlying the continents could be this mechanism. This proved to be correct but it was another 40 years before his theories were accepted and the theory of plate tectonics became a reality.

The theory of plate tectonics has proved to be as important as the theory of evolution and the discovery of the structure of the atom, but without the discovery of how to quantify geologic time, confirmation of plate tectonics would not have been possible.

Today, few discussions in geology can occur without reference to geologic time and plate tectonics. They are both integral to our way of thinking about the world. Holmes died in 1964 having lived just long enough to see sea floor spreading confirm his ideas of continental drift.

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