It’s a literary double header in this week’s edition of the journal PNAS, with scientists following in the footsteps of both a giant of Victorian literature and one of America’s most cherished authors.
Thomas Levy and his colleagues may have uncovered ‘King Solomon’s copper mines’, a real world version of the diamond mines from Rider Haggard’s famous novel. Slightly more highbrow literature creeps into Charles Davis’s paper, which analyses the impact of climate change on the pond immortalised by Henry Thoreau in ‘Walden’.
“Some plants around Walden Pond have been quite resilient in the face of climate change, while others have fared far worse,” says Davis, of Harvard University (press release one). “It had been thought that climate change would result in uniform shifts across plant species, but our work shows that plant species do not respond to climate change uniformly or randomly.”
Davis and colleagues looked at data on flowering times of 473 species of plants around Walden pond in Massachusetts, first recorded by Thoreau over 150 years ago (press release two). Species that do not change their flowering times in response to temperature are declining rapidly, they say.
“Thoreau was the earliest person to keep detailed records of when plants flowered in the US, and as a field scientist this is an extremely valuable data set to work from,” says study author Richard Primack, of Boston University (Boston Globe). “… If you came out here looking for the flowers Thoreau saw, you wouldn’t find many of them. It’s a sad message.”
The NY Times has a nice piece on the research, and Wired gets points for quoting from Walden:
The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit — not a fossil earth, but a living earth.
Meanwhile, Levy has been dating copper objects found in Jordan. His paper dates these objects to two centuries earlier than when the current history of the region would place them.
“By pushing the absolute chronology of Edom [southern Jordan] back into 12th through 9th c. BCE, the stratified excavations in the lowlands of Edom provided an objective dating technique that linked this metal production centre with the period of the early Israelite kings and their neighbours mentioned in the HB [Old Testament / Hebrew Bible],” says the paper.
“…Given the unambiguous [carbon] dating evidence presented here for industrial-scale metal production at KEN [Khirbat en-Nahas] during the 10th and 9th c. BCE in ancient Edom, the question of whether King Solomon’s copper mines have been discovered in Faynan returns to scholarly discourse.”
As Levy says “We can’t believe everything ancient writings tell us. But this research represents a confluence between the archaeological and scientific data and the Bible.” (Daily Telegraph, New Scientist.)
Image top: New England aster: “unable to adjust its flowering time to warming temperatures” / K. Cerrudo
Image lower: copper slag mound excavated at KEN / T. E. Levy