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Christina Reed
Christine Reed
The Moon's Last Gasp
GPS Studies: Watching a Sloshing Earth
Mysteries in the Bay of Aboukir
Undersea Earthquake A Blessing in Disguise
The Trouble with Fossils Thieves
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When amateur astronomers 30 years ago trained their telescopes on the Moon and reported seeing eruptive activity, the general consensus from the scientific community was to lump them into the same group of people who believed the "face on Mars" was a sign of intelligent life. To suggest the Moon was anything other than dead did not fit the evidence of the time
But new evidence garnered from orbiting missions during the 1990s is changing that status. Don't write off the Moon as a cold, dead body just yet. It could still be breathing.
At least four small sections of the crust found in different geologic areas around the Imbrium basin on the near side of the Moon may be vents to the deep interior, connected through deep basin faults. The structures show fine-scale features, details normally lost over time from space weathering, and other evidence of young age. They may even be a place of active degassing from the Moon’s interior.
Image data from the Apollo missions of the 1970s revealed unusual structures on the Moon’s surface. But it took the spectral images taken during the Clementine mission of 1994 to reinforce their significance. "Clementine gave us color data and additional information that showed the space weathering of the features was very little," says Carlé Pieters of Brown University. Pieters, along with lead author Peter Schultz, also of Brown, and co-author Mathew Staid of the U.S. Geological Survey, presented findings this week during the spring meeting here of the American Geophysical Union (AGU).
Within the basin lies the Ina structure, also called the D-caldera after its shape, which is one structure that is possibly alive and well, Schultz says. In a moonscape where most of the colors astronauts see are different shades of gray, Ina stands out as a "beacon of blue," Schultz says. Through a light filter, this blue jumps out as young, titanium-rich basalt. As volcanic basalts on the Moon age, they change color and become less blue, as seen through a 0.415-micron wavelength filter in the visible light. Or they become redder.
Most of the volcanic eruptions that occurred on the Moon ended 3 billion years ago, with only some areas on the near side erupting up until 1 billion years ago. In the Ina area, freshly exposed titanium-rich basalts are found as blue halos around impact craters. As asteroids and meteoroids strike the lunar surface, they dig out titanium-rich basalt from underneath.
Ina shows the same titanium-rich basalt, but without any signs of a lunar impact event — an indication that Ina's features originated on the Moon. That does not mean they originated from a volcanic eruption. Rather, "it's a reasonable hypothesis that Ina may have formed by the degassing of the interior of the Moon," says Pieters, who also chaired the session at the Boston meeting. Degassing would expose the basalt even without a smashing impact event digging in to uproot it.
Still, there's room for error. Ina is only 2.9 kilometers in diameter and 30 meters deep. "Something that small does not have much area to accumulate craters that can be easily counted," she says. Counting craters is one way to determine how long an area has been exposed to the space environment, but smaller targets are harder to hit — making it difficult to determine their age.
So, for another age test, the geologists turned to a different filter that looks at iron. Weathering on the Moon’s surface changes the optical properties of various iron-bearing minerals such as pyroxene and olivine. The Clementine filter measures the strength of the absorption band in the one-micron wavelength, just beyond the visible in the near infrared. Ina's strong absorption in the ferrous band in pyroxene indicated its rocks have had little exposure to the pelting of micrometeorites from space, which would weaken its absorption capabilities. "The ferrous band of Ina is as strong as that of a fresh crater in basalt," Pieters says.
But, unlike the craters, Ina also shows different morphological features that are sharp structures, devoid of the rounding that occurs over time. "Whatever formed the feature happened relatively recently," Pieters says. Ina looks younger than the 50 million-year-old North Ray crater but has an appearance comparable to the 2 million-year-old South Ray crater, Schultz says.
The idea that Ina-like features on the Moon could be active vents follows a presentation at the Lunar Planetary Science Conference in March, when scientists reported finding radon gas in data still being analyzed from the Lunar Prospector that circled the Moon for a year and a half beginning in 1998, says Bill Feldman of Los Alamos National Laboratory. Radon gas is a product of iridium decay and is visible for only three to four days before it decays into alpha particles. If the data were correct, radon was actively degassing while the Lunar Prospector passed over the Moon. "It would be interesting to look at the Ina feature to see if it's still venting," Feldman says.
"Is the Moon alive?" asks Schultz. "It's not erupting. But what we are seeing are its last gasps. So in that sense: Yes, it is."
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From space, the subtle shifts of Earth’s gravity are normally tracked using a handful of satellites that orbit close to home. Now scientists reporting in the September issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters have found that the higher orbiting satellites of the Global Positioning System (GPS), developed by the U.S. Department of Defense, are also sensitive to the flexing motions of air and water that redistribute Earth’s mass.
The GPS is a constellation of 24 to 26 satellites orbiting 20,000 kilometers overhead. In contrast, the near-earth satellites, such as LAGEOS I and II, orbit below an altitude of 6,000 kilometers. For years, scientists have known these closer satellites changed their orbits slightly due to sloshing motions of the atmosphere, oceans and continental hydrology — snowfall, changes in aquifer and groundwater reservoirs and the depth of lakes and streams — shifting Earth’s gravitational pull. “The effect of air and water is small, but because satellites orbiting Earth are dominantly influenced by Earth’s gravity, these changes in mass distribution alter the satellite orbit in a way that is predictable and observable because the influence accumulates with each orbit,” says Clark Wilson of the University of Texas at Austin.
But few suspected the high-orbiting GPS satellites could feel such nontidal changes. Thomas Johnson, Peter Kammeyer and Jim Ray of the U.S. Naval Observatory’s Earth Orientation Department in Washington tested five years of GPS data to find out.
The team works to solve for Universal Time GPS, or the change in the GPS satellites’ collective orbit. This orbit varies as Earth rotates faster or slower, and this variation needs to be corrected for in the times GPS satellites convey — times used for navigation. As solving for Universal Time GPS has become more refined — they now solve for the variations daily, Johnson says — so has what can be understood from the orbit’s changes. “We’re getting better, the noise is getting smaller, and we’re starting to understand what we see,” he says.
The noise co-author Kammeyer was seeing in his modeling of the satellites’ orbit proved to be evidence of how changes in the oceans, atmosphere and groundwater alter Earth’s rotation. The team matched their data with global atmospheric and ocean models. As water evaporates from the oceans and enters the atmosphere, Earth’s rotation changes, “just as an ice skater spins slower when she puts her arms out,” Johnson says. They also matched their noise with a global record of the amount of moisture in the top layer of Earth’s soil and the depth of its snow cover.
The abundant GPS satellites with their daily updates have an advantage over the few near-earth satellites, which are updated less often. The discovery shows that GPS satellites are a tool for monitoring gravitational field variations.
“The immediate significance is that we now have a way to improve the orbit models for GPS satellites, allowing the GPS constellation to serve as a more stable reference frame for positioning on the Earth,” Wilson says. “The more intriguing long-term significance is that the GPS constellation provides a way to monitor a global feature of the climate.”
At longer periods, the satellites might pick up drought cycles on land, sea-level rise due to melting ice caps, and other effects that are important in changing the gravity field, such as postglacial rebound.
Modelers using the GPS satellites for long-term climate change predictions can now see that some of their variations are not caused by orbit modeling error or solar radiation, “but are caused by the atmosphere, oceans and continental hydrology,” Johnson says. “Researchers down the hall from me work on models and have errors when they look over long periods of time. The stuff they find as noise and error are my signals.”
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About 1,700 years ago an earthquake struck a region in the Mediterranean Sea, creating a tsunami that wiped out the Eastern Port of Alexandria in Egypt and Cleopatra’s Royal Quarters. After finally discovering
the flooded treasure room in 1996, scientists turned their attention to other lost pharaonic cities further east in the Bay of Aboukir.
The scientists announced discovering the cities this summer, but it remains a mystery how Canopus, Menuthis and Herakleion, cities 25 kilometers east of Cleopatra’s sunken royal quarters, also fell prey to a
watery demise. At the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco this month, researchers will be scrutinizing earthquakes as possible culprits.
But, “we have a problem,” says geophysicist Amos Nur of Stanford University. Nur and his colleagues know the ground under the cities subsided by about 5 meters — damage that a magnitude-8.2 earthquake on
a nearby fault could deliver. Only, “we don’t know if such a fault existed in early Alexandria,” he says. This leaves the possibilities for destruction and the geological significance of the area wide open, he says.
Nur is part of an international team of geologists, historians and specialized divers who have been All of the vestiges were buried beneath the working under the leadership of French archeologist ancient texts and past discoveries, they surveyed the Bay of Aboukir with depth sounders, nuclear Frack Goddio resonance magnetometers, side-scan sonar and a sub-
bottom profiler. The team found the eastern suburb of Canopus, its neighboring city Menuthis and the entire missing city dedicated to Hercules, Herakleion, under 6 to 8 meters of water.
Alexandria fishermen have long been tormented by what was discovered to be the closer coastal city of Menuthis — whose protruding structures catch the fishing nets, Nur says. Under 5 to 6 meters of water, much of Menuthis and Herakleion still lie protected beneath the sediment.
The cities share a peculiar trait besides sitting on subsided land. “Columns and free-standing objects fell west-northwest,” Nur says, indicating structural collapse that may or may not be related to the subsidence.
Built on the marshland of the Nile delta, the cities may have been damaged after an earthquake turned their porous silt foundation into liquified mud. But Nur doubts liquefaction was the cause. Instead, he says, an earthquake or an underwater landslide may have induced the large-scale slumping.
The Izmit earthquake of magnitude 7.4 caused similar destruction to the city of Gölcük, Turkey, on Aug. 17, 1999. “The ground moved laterally and subsided,” says William Lettis, president of William Lettis and Associates, an earth science consulting firm in Walnut Creek, Calif. Some buildings in the earthquake collapsed but many remained intact as they sank beneath the Marmara Sea, he says.
“Wherever a Holocene delta was built out into the water along a fault rupture, we saw evidence of minor to catastrophic coastal subsidence,” Lettis says. The Nile River delta is also composed of recent Holocene material and, despite a lack of evidence for a nearby fault, earthquakes are a known historical hazard.
Documentation of earthquake damage in Alexandria dates back to A.D. 365, when a tsunami wiped out the Eastern Port of Alexandria and the queen’s cache. Ancient writings tell of the harbor emptying out to sea, says Daniel Stanley, a coastal geologist at the Smithsonian Institution and a member of the discovery team. The people in town walked out onto the new beach to collect fish, not realizing the water would return in the form of a giant, devastating wave.
The epicenter of the quake that caused the tsunami is still uncertain. Stanley, who will give a presentation at the AGU meeting, believes the earthquake formed on the opposite seashore, closer to Turkey or Crete, with the wave traveling 800 kilometers across the Mediterranean. He questions the idea that such an earthquake caused the subsidence of the ancient cities in the Bay of Aboukir.
Gold Islamic and Byzantine coins found in the bay point to the legendary cities surviving past the seventh and into the eighth century. Using the Egyptian and Arabic measurements of the height of the Nile River, Stanley zeroed in on A.D. 741-742 as a time of flooding when “something failed.”
Although he has not dismissed an earthquake as the cause, he argues that the Canopic branch of the Nile River was switching back and forth during that time. Flooding in the delta could have just as easily caused the slumping failure of the land with the sediments becoming heavily water-laden and physically unstable, he says. “They really didn’t have much of a foundation. It was an accident waiting to happen.”
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Like their counterparts on land, earthquakes undersea can rattle homes several kilometers away from the epicenter. But when a “big one” hits, undersea creatures living along hydrothermal vents might not know about it for days. The effect one such undersea earthquake had on vent systems off the coast of Washington has shocked and excited oceanographers.
“We thought, ‘something’s not right. Something broke,’” says Paul Johnson of the University of Washington. Equipment sitting on the bottom of the ocean floor last year at a site on the Endeavour segment of the Juan de Fuca Ridge acted as expected for 10 months. It dutifully recorded the ebb and flow of warmer fluid slowly leaking from diffusive vents as a result of the tide overhead.
Unlike black smokers, the chimneys of Earth that gush out fluid with temperatures of 350 to 400 degrees Celsius, diffusive vents are large swaths of oceanic crust. They are areas where fluids from Earth’s interior percolate up through cracks and mix with sea water, cooling anywhere between two and-a-half to 40 degrees Celsius, before peacefully oozing out. They are not areas prone to wild temperature changes.
That’s why Johnson and colleagues were confused when they pulled up the equipment last summer and saw records of sudden, wild fluctuations in temperature from June through mid-July. Then he learned about the earthquake on June 8. He called up NOAA scientists Robert Dziak and Christopher Fox in Newport, Ore., to confirm. It was a big one for that area, they said — 4.5 — and happened right on the Endeavour. A swarm of smaller aftershocks followed for about a week.
Most earthquakes that impact hydrothermal vent systems are associated with underground volcanic eruptions and occur along the ridge axis where vents tend to cluster, says Maurise Tivey of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, who did not contribute to the study. This one was different. It hit 7.5 kilometers off axis, away from the vents, and was of tectonic origin, the authors say. And it was the first nonmagmatic, tectonic event recorded to send a shock wave through a hydrothermal system. The tectonic disturbance stirred things up enough to give the researchers a peak into how long it takes hydrothermal fluids to circulate from one spot to another.
About four or five days after the quake, depending on the vent’s location, “bang!” Johnson says, “the output of the vents can go up by a factor of 10.” Of course, as with any flushing of a system, the output can be a little messy. “Once you increase the flow it flushes all this biological material out into the water column. It looks like floating tissue paper.” But, he says, it is actually bacterial mucus and sulfur. “It’s what the bacteria excrete — probably to hang on to the rocks so they’re not swept out by the hydrothermal circulation.” The bacterial mats may play a role in the vents’ mysterious temperature fluctuations.
After jumping in output and temperature increase, the vents showed dramatic oscillations in temperatures that lasted for about a month. “We don’t know what’s causing these,” Johnson says. In their report, the scientists proposed that the abundant flocculent material might plug up the system in different areas while the flow cleans out sub-surface plumbing in other spots. This may be one way biology is influencing the circulation of the vents.
Other hypotheses in the report proposed that newly cracked zones opened below the vents or that fluid convection after the earthquake became unstable. “If it was just a step increase, we would have said ‘All right something happened below the crust.’ But these oscillations were strange,” Johnson says.
He would like to explore the similarities to another oscillation, which is unrelated to temperature. In oil reservoirs, explosions, pumping or natural disturbances can lead to oscillations in the pressure of the flow.
“Now a hydrothermal fluid system is probably a reasonable analog of an oil reservoir,” Johnson says. “Certainly you have porous rock and you have fluid flowing through it.” He plans to calculate the resonant frequencies of the hydrothermal reservoirs while he waits for the next set of data from newly placed equipment on the sea floor.
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Before Charlie Nunn lost his customized Toyota truck to the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department and spent 15 days in jail, he had a habit of stealing fossils. He grew up in southwest Wyoming collecting fossils from the limestone, mudstone and volcanic ash that make up the 50 million-year-old Green River Formation.
At 16 he worked for a local quarry owner, Rick Hebdon, splitting rock layers dotted with two-inch Knightia fish that tourists can buy for $10. “I started working for Rick back in 1987,” he says. “What I did on the side was illegal.” Nunn knew where he could find prized fossils on private land, but he didn’t ask for permission to dig first. Then in 1995, he sold a fossil feather to an undercover officer from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) for $700. But that didn’t land him in jail.
It was later, when Nunn sold a half-ounce of marijuana to an undercover officer working with the local sheriff’s department, that he was arrested. “They were originally after me for the fossils, because they knew I had done it my whole life here. In the end they dropped the two fossil felonies and stuck me with the delivery, the marijuana.”
The drug charges ended Nunn’s secondary career as fossil thief. “Now I’m strictly legal,” he says. “You don’t want to mess around and dig out in this country; you’ll go to jail quick.” Today Nunn runs a successful business doing what he loves. He leases a quarry from a private rancher on the other side of the hill from Hebdon. “This quarry has been here for eight years. I took over from the previous owner three years ago. It’s a private lease from a private rancher. I don’t have to deal with the state and I get to keep everything. So it’s a good set up now,” he says.
Protected by the same laws that failed to convict him, Nunn works in a business where legal loopholes are plentiful. For example, it is illegal to sell anything from BLM land but a collector can take up to 250 pounds of petrified wood for personal use each year. If the state of Wyoming leases a quarry to a fossil hunter who then finds a stingray, gar fish or paddlefish, the finder can sell the fossil but must report the find to the state and pay the state royalties from the sale. If the collector comes across a turtle, crocodile or bat she must turn it over to the state within 30 days for review. The same fossil found on private land, like Nunn’s or Hebdon’s quarries, could end up just as easily in a shopping mall in Japan as in the home of a private collector in Italy without state scientists ever learning about it. Unless a thief is caught in the act of stealing from private or public land, law enforcement officials face a daunting task of matching the matrix surrounding the fossil to its place of origin and evaluating paper trails.
In exhibitions across the country, such as the recent Colorado Mineral and Fossil Show in Denver, rockhounds are selling everything from trilobites to model T-rex skulls. Sometimes it is difficult to delineate what is legal and what is not. It may be easy to spot an illegally exported cave bear from Asia or Russia, or a room full of dinosaur eggs from China, but common fish fossils from North America can also get caught in legal limbo. Landowners and those who lease a quarry on private lands can sell anything they find on their land. But sometimes even conscientious dealers buying and selling fossils may not know a specimen’s true origin. And others simply may not care.
With the different rules on fossil collecting also comes a variety of views on how paleo resources should be managed. Scientists are concerned that rare fossils can be stolen from under their noses. Private collectors grapple with laws because they often believe someone needs to collect the fossils eroding out of the ground before they wash away and are lost to everyone. Law enforcement officers, such as National Park Service rangers, are trying to preserve fossils in their geologic context for future generations and to prevent fossils from theft — while still allowing access for scientists.
Lost To Science
“Things are stolen faster than we can dig them up,” says Jim Kirkland, state paleontologist of Utah. In April, scientists from the College of Eastern Utah (CEU) Prehistoric Museum in Price discovered looters had destroyed, in probably a day’s work, almost a third of a remaining stegosaur skeleton that the scientists had spent years painstakingly excavating. The scientists rely on slow-going equipment — diamond saws, airscribes and brushes. The thieves cut out the bone with quick and clumsy instruments — hammers, chisels and large pry bars — vandalizing and destroying much of the skeleton in the process, says John Bird, dinosaur bone lab manager for the CEU museum.
Plant eaters with small, flat teeth and a brain the size of a walnut, stegosaurs are famous for their ridge of armored plates running down their spines. Scientists know of a handful of complete stegosaur skeletons, and only four partial skeletons have been found in Utah. “It would have been a good comparison specimen, but now we’ll have to wait until somebody finds another one,” Bird says. The thieves struck gold in an isolated area. The museum has over 50 sites, and the stegosaur lies at a site in Emery County that requires a four-wheel-drive vehicle and then good pair of boots to hike over two hills. After assessing the damage, Bird estimated the scientists were only a couple weeks from finishing the job.
But at least the museum still has the contextual knowledge of where the stegosaur was found, along with a few other bones, he says. “Most people who vandalize do it innocently, they don’t know it’s illegal. But they can cause scientific damage if they collect. We lose a lot of information that way.” He believes education of the public is essential. If someone finds a fossil he suggests marking the location on a map and taking pictures. “Don’t pick it up,” he says. Instead, Bird asks people to take the information to a local museum or college. The best way amateurs can help, he says, is by “keeping their eyes open” and volunteering with clubs such as Utah Friends of Paleontology to collect with professionals.
“Still, there is always that one person who wants to make money,” Bird says. On the market even incomplete dinosaur skeletons can sell for thousands, let alone a complete specimen. Sotheby’s sold “Sue,” the T-rex now at the Chicago Field Museum, for $8.4 million in 1997. Forbes reported in June that the small-time collectors of $2 shark teeth and $40 duckbill dinosaur finger bones support a $50 million (annual) business.
Butterfields, an eBay company, sold a 200 million-year-old icarosaur titled “A Unique and Important Flying Reptile Fossil — The Origin of Vertebrate Flight Before Birds!” during its Aug. 27 Natural History Auction for $172,500. Alfred Siefker first found the fossil in 1961 when he was 17 and lent it to the American Museum of Natural History in New York. But 10 years ago he reclaimed the fossil. Now 56 and ill, Siefker put it up for auction to raise money. The buyer, a “friend of the museum,” plans to return the fossil to the American Museum of Natural History. The Butterfields auction also brought in $10,350 for “A Huge Fearsome Claw from the ‘King of Dinosaurs,’” along with $6,325 for an Allosaurus claw, $4,025 for T-rex foot bones and $690 for a T-rex toe.
A Confused Fossil
“This is private ground and this is America,” Rick Hebdon says. He can
sell anything he finds from Warfield Fossil Quarries, one of the three
quarries he leases and manages on private land in the Green River
Formation of Wyoming. “It’s legal to sell stingrays when they’re found
on private ground,” Hebdon says. And he’s right.
Conversely, Shirley and Carl Ulrich, owners of Ulrich’s Fossil
Galleries, lease their land in the Green River Formation from the state
of Wyoming. Should they come across a stingray or other rare
specimen, such as turtles or the prized gar fish that can reach five and-a-
half feet, they are required by law to notify the state of their discovery.
The gars and the turtles they must turn over to the state for review, but
the stingrays they can sell without the state collecting the contextual Hebdon knowledge that comes from reviewing the matrix surrounding the points out carefully prepared fossils excavated from his fossil’s original location. Warfield Springs quarry. But the laws on sales do not help a buyer determine whether a fossil came from state, public or private land. Several years ago, Hebdon found a well-preserved stingray in his Warfield Springs quarry, just north of Kemmerer, that he sold unfinished to a fossil dealer from Trieste, Italy, for $1,000. The Italian buyer, Flavio Bacchia, cleaned the fossil and prepared it for sale. He then put the stingray up for consignment with Glenn Rockers, a dealer who took it to the 1996 Tucson Gem and Mineral Show and displayed it for sale at $4,500. An undercover police officer posed as a fossil collector was at the Tucson show on the lookout for stolen fossils. He spotted the stingray and was suspicious of its origins.
The undercover officer was Sgt. Steve Rogers of the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department in Kemmerer. National Geographic Television traveled to the Tucson show with Rogers while he recorded his undercover sting operation using hidden cameras. He was suspicious of the fossil because he recognized it as a species unique to the Green River Formation that he patrols by airplane where public, private and state land crisscross the map. When he asked Rockers the fossil’s origin, the dealer replied: “Comes out of Kemmerer — one of the fish quarries there on state land.” Rogers, who believed he was hot on the trail of a stolen fossil, arranged to meet Rockers later to purchase the fossil. If the fossil had been stolen from public land, it would be Sgt. Steve Rogers inspects his plane before taking off to illegal for Rockers to sell it. And that is where Rogers thought he’d patrol southwest Wyoming from the sky. CR get his man.
Rockers misinformed Rogers when he said that the fossil was collected on state land. It was indeed collected in the state of Wyoming and in Lincoln County, where Rogers patrols. But the state court of Wyoming determined in May 2000 that Rick Hebdon legally quarried the ray at his private quarry. The stingray traveled from Wyoming to Italy and from Italy to Tucson without a hitch. But from there it made its way back to Lincoln County, Wyo., wrapped in red tape.
The ray landed in the evidence vault in the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department while law enforcement officers attempted to determine where it was originally found. To do so, they conducted analyses of the matrix around the ray and compared the data with matrix data from various quarries and other public lands from around the region. Until recently, officials thought the fossil was removed from state land. Following the trail of official documents and receipts that were produced by each successive sale of the ray, the courts were able to trace it back to Hebdon, its original owner. After much difficulty and finger pointing, the ray was returned to Hebdon.
Protecting The Resource
Only miles away from Hebdon’s and Nunn’s quarries, and almost within earshot of the Ulrich quarry, lies Fossil Butte National Monument. The National Park Service established the monument in 1972 to preserve the fossilized remains of Fossil Lake — a shallow, 930-square-mile lake that existed for 2 million years during the Eocene. It was the three-lake system of Fossil, Uinta and Gosiute that produced the fossil-rich sediments that characterize southwest Wyoming.
Fossil Butte is a small national park where visitor counts reach only about 27,000 per year — compared to Yellowstone’s 4 million yearly visitors. Few permits are granted for research and fossils are the park’s most valuable natural resource. The rangers who work at Fossil Butte are looking for ways to stop fossil theft.
Park Ranger and paleontologist Vince Santucci says tourists should have the chance to experience the excitement of discovering a fossil so that they won’t feel compelled to visit other sites and remove specimens unsupervised. Fellow ranger Aarvid Aase, a paleontologist and National Park Service museum technician who is also familiar with commercial quarrying, established and operates a small scientific quarry at Fossil Butte where he takes visitors for supervised “digs.” During the digs visitors do not actually split rocks on their own, they observe as Aase excavates specimens to catalog them in the park’s ongoing inventory of paleontological resources.
The Fossil Butte program is one of the preventative measures that park rangers can take to stop fossil theft. Santucci realized the importance of the visitor’s personal experience when he was a seasonal park ranger at Badlands National Park in South Dakota. He saw how excited the first-time visitors were when they came upon a fossil for the first time. “They’d look around and crawl around and maybe they’d find a tooth. To them, that is their personal discovery. Their T-rex. They remember that. They photograph it, and I think that a lot of those folks will have that picture in their minds for a long time, that personal experience.” He compares it to the thrill of watching a bald eagle dive down and catch a fish. “That’s yours, that’s your personal encounter. Their personal encounters with these fossils in the field are really valuable. We use that as an inspirational way to let visitors know that this is really cool. That maybe it is worth leaving these fossils here to share with other visitors.”
The freedom to establish new programs to educate visitors and rangers at other national parks is one of the few powers that paleo-aware rangers such as Santucci and Aase have. Their power to prosecute those who violate the NPS laws is limited. Petty thieves, if caught, sometimes get away with little more than a small fine. As government employees, rangers cannot be soapbox advocates for stricter fossil regulations. So they are left to find other ways to prevent the loss of scientifically valuable fossils.
Teaming Up: Geologists and Park Rangers
The NPS has come a long way since 1986 when it first held a conference on the management of paleontological resources in national parks. Since then, it has held five more conferencesand started collecting scientific data on fossil resources in all park lands. Scientific reports may tell paleontologists a lot about the value of fossil resources in a particular location, but they may as well be written in Greek as far as most park rangers are concerned.
Rangers, with many different responsibilities on large tracts of land, have little time for science. To help, rangers like Santucci are teaming up with paleontologists to produce reports that will help park rangers monitor and protect fossil-rich sites with little more geologic knowledge than is required to read a topographic map, which most can already do.
With so much fossil-rich land and so few eyes to patrol it, creating paleo-aware rangers is one of the steps the park service can take to prevent fossil theft, short of exponentially increasing the number of rangers, Santucci says.
Seeing All Sides
Three major camps call out to be heard on who should have the right to fossil collection, sale, research and preservation. On one side are the private collectors, who believe they are acting as the fossils’ heroes by extracting them from the ground before they are eroded away, never to be seen by human eyes. Hebdon says, “If they aren’t preserved then they’re washing out of the ground into the ocean. How are we preserving anything if we just let it rot in the ground?”
Scientists argue that rare specimens are slipping away to dealers and collectors, lost to science. A unique specimen, even when perfectly finished and displayed, is “little more than sculpture when taken out of its geologic context,” Kirkland says.
Then there are law enforcement officers who believe the issue boils down to right and wrong: Public property belongs to no one person. It should be preserved and shared for all. “We need to be monitoring and making sure that fossils are not weathering away on one side, but on the other side, these are public resources,” Santucci says. “No individual has the right to go in and remove them and sell them. They are ripping off science and the public.” As a police officer, Rogers sees the issue as very clear-cut. “If it’s not yours, you have no right to take it,” he says.
Even if the involved parties reach a consensus, the question remains over how to enforce the any one policy. Private collectors who break the law will continue to do so, Santucci says, “It’s too lucrative. It’s too easy.” For both law enforcement agents and scientists, one of the overwhelming problems is that too few eyes are monitoring the millions of acres of fossil-rich public land. As with the case of the stolen stegosaur, it is not that difficult to haul off even the largest specimens without anyone ever knowing when it actually happened, let alone by whom.
Paleo-aware rangers like Santucci hope that educating rangers at all national parks will help previously unaware rangers prevent sites from being looted. But some scientists are less optimistic. “Monitoring the sites is done,” Kirkland says. “We’re going to lose the Mona Lisa trying to get one conviction.” To Kirkland, catching one thief red-handed is not enough. He says the only way to reduce the impetus to steal rare fossils from anywhere is by tightening the regulations on the import, export and sale of fossils. John Bird agrees. “The biggest problem is the sale of dinosaur bones in rock shops,” he says. “If people did not buy the bones the market would dry up. Realistically though, I don’t think that will happen.”
In 1999, Congress mandated that all federal land management agencies compile a comprehensive report on the management of fossils on federal and Native American lands. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt presented that report to Congress in May 2000. In it he implored policy-makers to enact laws similar to those that protect archaeological resources, where penalties are stiffer and research and conservation are deemed valuable for cultural and scientific progress.
The report outlines some of the problems that arise when fossil collectors, scientists and law enforcement officers all grapple with laws that are vague. But the blood that boils over personal disagreements cannot be portrayed in a report to Congress. What the report has tried to illustrate for policy-makers is the need to “move forward and make certain that inattention does not deprive us of the best information we will ever have about our deepest past.”
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