Preserving the treasures of French underground cities created during WWI

© Jeffrey Gusky
This horse is about two-thirds life size. Hundreds of troops from New England's Yankee Division lived here underground for about six weeks in 1918. The carving was never completed and is now at risk of vandalism or theft.

    

Many people think of World War I as the trench war, but few realize it went hundreds of feet deeper. As both sides dug in, they found ancient quarries and caves below the bombed-out forests of northeastern France, and they took temporary refuge from the war's horrors there. The offices, kitchens, worship spaces, and artworks they made have rested unchanged for a century in underground cities visited by just a few historians and enthusiasts.

The locations of these quarries and caves remain relatively secret for now, but the entrances are unprotected.

Dr. Jeffrey Gusky, an emergency room physician and professional photographer, has shot these underground cities in eerie detail and published the images extensively in National Geographic, the New York Times, and other periodicals. The BBC, NPR, CBC and other news outlets have interviewed him about it. This exposure brings the caves' culture and beauty to a large audience, but with that fame comes danger for the sites themselves.

Located in a large underground city, now in total darkness, this US Mailbox was carved in 1918 by US National Guard soldiers from New England, part of the famed 26th "Yankee" Division.

    

Now Gusky is on a mission to preserve them. "I believe these are precious artifacts for both military history and human history because they are completely in the state that they were left a hundred years ago, and it's like time has stood still," he said in an interview on Memorial Day weekend, fresh from a trip to France exploring these natural time capsules. "How often is it that we can touch a hundred years ago as if it were yesterday?" He asked us not to reveal these sites' locations, and he's worried time is running out to secure them since some damage has already occurred. Thieves have cut out sections of cave walls, and vandals have harmed some of the century-old art.

© Jeffrey Gusky
French soldiers prayed and then ascended these stairs leading directly to the trenches to fight. Many never returned.

    

A Break from Hell Becomes a Cultural Treasure

In late 1914, the opening maneuvers of the Great War had stalled, and the armies of France, Germany, and their allies dug into trenches to avoid the unexpected power of modern machine guns and artillery. They also found their way into old quarries and natural caves, sometimes hundreds of feet below the surface. They learned to rotate troops from the front lines down to these huge spaces for rest and recuperation. Long stone stairways, known as "stairways to hell," led back up to the mud, gas and roar of artillery.

Between bouts of fighting, troops from all over the world marked the walls in elaborate carvings and drawings. The pencil marks look fresh; the boots and the bunk beds remain. They left behind not just their equipment, wine bottles and underground road signs, but traces of their religion, poetry, masonic affiliations, favorite sports teams and more. Gusky has found spaces for outgoing mail hewn into the rock, as well as a bakery and more than one underground theatre, decorated with thoughts of home and echoes of the war above. The Americans, who joined the war in 1917, turned out to be the most prolific artists during their stay underground for six weeks in early 1918.

© Jeffrey Gusky
French soldier's dining area at Butte de Vauquois. The items on the table were simply placed back on the table after being found by the dedicated volunteers who manage this site. Seven kilometers of tunnels still exist on the French side and 17 kilometers on the German side of this amazing site.

    

Retired Brigadier General Leonid Kondratiuk, former chief historian of the National Guard Bureau, praised Gusky's project. "Jeff has captured one minute or two minutes of their lives below the caves in World War I. All the soldiers are dead, of course, but they left something of themselves in those caves," he said. "In a way, it's an artifact that still lives." Kondratiuk said that while the photos are important, preserving the actual caves and the traces of the people who fought there is essential. "Life and artifacts are so ephemeral that when the soldiers came home most of the stuff they brought home was thrown away over the past hundred years." In the caves, he said, "it feels as if they might come back any moment."

Kondratiuk pointed out that the importance of the Great War and its veterans have often been overshadowed by accidents of circumstance. At each of its major anniversaries, it was pushed aside by more pressing matters. "The World War I veteran never got a thanks from anybody," he said. "They never thanked them because every anniversary period there was another war we were involved in. The 25th anniversary was World War II, the 50th anniversary was the middle of Vietnam, and then these guys started dying by the thousands in the 1960s and 70s."

Shedding Light on How We Learned to Be Modern

We overlook World War I at our peril, according to Kondratiuk, because if we want to understand the modern world, we have to study World War I, the hinge point between the era of Victorian chivalry and the industrial speed of the Twentieth Century. "It started off as a Napoleonic war and ended up as the first modern war," he said. "The French army went into combat wearing light blue, long, Napoleonic uniforms, or tunics, with red trousers and these ridiculously long bayonets. Cavalry was still important in the beginning of the war." Europe's leaders discovered the hard way that horses and bayonets wouldn't stand up to machine guns and heavy artillery. Through that crucible, he said, modern war emerged. "You have the airplane, the tank, gas warfare, heavy artillery, submarine warfare. Everything that becomes important in World War II is invented and used to some extent in World War I."

© Jeffrey Gusky
A smoke painting on the ceiling of an underground city. The space was occupied at various times during World War I by French, then German and then American soldiers. Evidence of underground combat can be found near the former telecommunications center here.

    

It's difficult to overstate the shock of this first modern war to the people who volunteered for it expecting cavalry charges on green fields. "These guys saw war in its most brutal form--and I say brutal. I mean standing in trenches, water and mud up to your waist every day for weeks at a time. Artillery trying to kill you, gas coming in, and then having to go on the attack. It's probably the worst war ever to have fought in at any time," Kondratiuk said.

Names like Verdun, the Somme, Ypres and the Marne are used to conjure atrocious images. The ferocity of those names has waned as the sites of the Great War's hell have been covered, wiped away and regrown. Some sites remain marked by signs that present the now antiseptic names and dates in attempts to remember the carnage that changed the world a century ago. In contrast, the underground cities are some of the precious few places where students of the war can find an all-enveloping sense of it.

"These treasures make World War I real," Gusky said, adding that to many people the war "seems like an ancient abstraction. It seems distant and irrelevant in our lives." That's due in part to those antiseptic signs, photographs, monuments and cemeteries. Although these markers are important and sacred, he said, "on a subliminal level, they communicate distance, especially for young people. It makes World War I seem like something that is far in the past, fought by people that they can't relate to. And in fact it was a modern war. The importance of these treasures is that it enables us to make World War I real to ordinary people around the world."

Preserving these sites is important for another reason, according to Gusky. "World War I has a tremendous impact on who we are inside, our inner lives, and we don't know it." The soldiers who wrote and drew on the walls show us something of how they learned to live with both the Twentieth Century's conveniences and its horrific weapons. The writings, drawings and carvings by the first generation of the modern age can offer wisdom for how to handle our own era's threats and possibilities." He said, "It's not about remembering the past. It's about understanding today through a parallel experience of World War I."

© Jeffrey Gusky

    

Embracing a Rare Opportunity

The eerie silence of these caves, the cool air, and the thoughts, carved into the wall, from people long dead bring to mind the much older cave art at places like Lascaux, Chauvet and Altamira. Of the many things written in wonder and appreciation of those sites, one thing stands out as we consider the Great War's underground cities: Those Paleolithic paintings and etchings are a tiny fraction of the earliest European cultures. All the paintings they did aboveground and the vast majority of their carvings and weapons are long gone, to say nothing of their language, songs, hair styles, skin decorations and games.

Thanks to natural caves we have some idea of what Europe's earliest people cared about tens of thousands of years ago. Governments preserve them with extreme care, but that wasn't always so. Lascaux, discovered in 1940, was open to tourists for decades before the wear of visitors' feet and their warm, wet breath forced it to close. Dozens of other, less glorious caves have been vandalized after discovery, their walls tagged or cut apart as souvenirs.

It's a wonderful thing that Chauvet cave, home of some of the most awe inspiring prehistoric paintings in the world, was discovered in 1994 by a group of people who immediately recognized what they had found and took pains to leave it intact. They backed out of the cave carefully and turned it over to historians to secure it and explore those ancient people's traces as gently as possible.

We have the chance, right now, to do the same for the troops who lived in the underground cities. Gusky said, "They are speaking to us, saying, 'I was here. I once was a living, breathing human being.' We need to tell their stories."

For more information on Dr. Jeffrey Gusky's project, go to his site, "The Hidden World of World War I," at: http://jeffgusky.com.

Alisha Hamel is Executive Director of the nonprofit Historical Outreach Foundation and as a Reservist is a Command Historian for the Center of Military History. For more on the Historical Outreach foundation, go to: http://ift.tt/1drzESX.

Paul X. Rutz is a figurative painter in Portland, Oregon, and a researcher for the Oregon Military Museum. His Ph.D. dissertation focused on combat art from the Iraq war. Find more of his work here: http://paulrutz.com.

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Monsanto's worst fear may be coming true

    

The tide is turning against the globalization of GMO-based agriculture and forced feeding with consumers leading the charge from the bottom up demanding informed consent (e.g. labeling, independent science) and organic alternatives.

The decision of the Chipotle restaurant chain to make its product lines GMO-free is not most people's idea of a world-historic event. Especially since Chipotle, by US standards, is not a huge operation. A clear sign that the move is significant, however, is that Chipotle's decision was met with a tidal-wave of establishment media abuse. Chipotle has been called irresponsible, anti-science, irrational, and much more by the Washington Post, Time Magazine, the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, and many others. A business deciding to give consumers what they want was surely never so contentious.

The media lynching of Chipotle has an explanation that is important to the future of GMOs. The cause of it is that there has long been an incipient crack in the solid public front that the food industry has presented on the GMO issue. The crack originates from the fact that while agribusiness sees GMOs as central to their business future, the brand-oriented and customer-sensitive ends of the food supply chain do not.

The brands who sell to the public, such as Nestle, Coca-Cola, Kraft, etc., are therefore much less committed to GMOs. They have gone along with their use, probably because they wish to maintain good relations with agribusiness, who are their allies and their suppliers. Possibly also they see a potential for novel products in a GMO future.

However, over the last five years, as the reputation of GMOs has come under increasing pressure in the US, the cost to food brands of ignoring the growing consumer demand for GMO-free products has increased. They might not say so in public, but the sellers of top brands have little incentive to take the flack for selling GMOs.

From this perspective, the significance of the Chipotle move becomes clear. If Chipotle can gain market share and prestige, or charge higher prices, from selling non-GMO products and give (especially young) consumers what they want, it puts traditional vendors of fast and processed food products in an invidious position. Kraft and McDonald's, and their traditional rivals can hardly be left on the sidelines selling outmoded products to a shrinking market. They will not last long.

MacDonald's already appears to be in trouble, and it too sees the solution as moving to more up-market and healthier products. For these much bigger players, a race to match Chipotle and get GMOs out of their product lines, is a strong possibility. That may not be so easy, in the short term, but for agribusiness titans who have backed GMOs, like Monsanto, Dupont, Bayer and Syngenta; a race to be GMO-free is the ultimate nightmare scenario.

Until Chipotle's announcement, such considerations were all behind the scenes. But all of a sudden this split has spilled out into the food media. On May 8th, Hain Celestial told The Food Navigator that:

"We sell organic products...gluten-free products and...natural products. [But] where the big, big demand is, is GMO-free."

According to the article, unlike Heinz, Kraft, and many others, Hain Celestial is actively seeking to meet this demand. Within the food industry, important decisions, for and against GMOs, are taking place.

Why the pressure to remove GMOs will grow

The other factor in all this turmoil is that the GMO technology wheel has not stopped turning. New GMO products are coming on stream that will likely make crop biotechnology even less popular than it is now. This will further ramp up the pressure on brands and stores to go GMO-free. There are several contributory factors.

The first issue follows from the recent US approvals of GMO crops resistant to the herbicides 2,4-D and Dicamba. These traits are billed as replacements for Roundup-resistant traits whose effectiveness has declined due to the spread of weeds resistant to Roundup (Glyphosate).

The causes of the problem, however, lie in the technology itself. The introduction of Roundup-resistant traits in corn and soybeans led to increasing Roundup use by farmers (Benbrook 2012). Increasing Roundup use led to weed resistance, which led to further Roundup use, as farmers increased applications and dosages. This translated into escalated ecological damage and increasing residue levels in food. Roundup is now found in GMO soybeans intended for food use at levels that even Monsanto used to call "extreme" (Bøhn et al. 2014).

The two new herbicide-resistance traits are set to recapitulate this same story of increasing agrochemical use. But they will also amplify it significantly.

The specifics are worth considering. First, the spraying of 2,4-D and Dicamba on the newer herbicide-resistant crops will not eliminate the need for Roundup, whose use will not decline (see Figure).

© (MORTENSEN ET AL 2012)
PREDICTED HERBICIDE USE TO 2025

    

That is because, unlike Roundup, neither 2,4-D nor Dicamba are broad-spectrum herbicides. They will have to be sprayed together with Roundup, or with each other (or all of them together) to kill all weeds. This vital fact has not been widely appreciated.

Confirmation comes from the companies themselves. Monsanto is stacking (i.e. combining) Dicamba resistance with Roundup resistance in its Xtend crops and Dow is stacking 2,4-D resistance with Roundup resistance in its Enlist range. (Notably, resistance to other herbicides, such as glufosinate, are being stacked in all these GMO crops too.)

The second issue is that the combined spraying of 2,4-D and Dicamba and Roundup, will only temporarily ease the weed resistance issues faced by farmers. In the medium and longer terms, they will compound the problems. That is because new herbicide-resistant weeds will surely evolve. In fact, Dicamba-resistant and 2,4-D-resistant weeds already exist. Their spread, and the evolution of new ones, can be guaranteed (Mortensen et al 2012). This will bring greater profits for herbicide manufacturers, but it will also bring greater PR problems for GMOs and the food industry. GMO soybeans and corn will likely soon have "extreme levels" of at least three different herbicides, all of them with dubious safety records (Schinasi and Leon 2014).

The first time round, Monsanto and Syngenta's PR snow-jobs successfully obscured this, not just from the general public, but even within agronomy. But it is unlikely they will be able to do so a second time. 2,4-D and Dicamba-resistant GMOs are thus a PR disaster waiting to happen.

A pipeline full of problems: risk and perception

The longer term problem for GMOs is that, despite extravagant claims, their product pipeline is not bulging with promising ideas. Mostly, it is more of the same: herbicide resistance and insect resistance.

The most revolutionary and innovative part of that pipeline is a technology and not a trait. Many products in the GMO pipeline are made using RNA interference technologies that rely on double-stranded RNAs (dsRNAs). dsRNA is a technology with two problems. One is that products made with it (such as the "Arctic" Apple, the "Innate" Potato, and Monsanto's "Vistive Gold" Soybeans) are unproven in the field. Like its vanguard, a Brazilian virus-resistant bean, they may never work under actual farming conditions.

But if they do work, there is a clear problem with their safety which is explained in detail here (PDF).

In outline, the problem is this: the long dsRNA molecules needed for RNA interference were rejected long ago as being too hazardous for routine medical use (Anonymous, 1969). The scientific literature even calls them "toxins", as in this paper title from 1969:

Absher M., and Stinebring W. (1969) Toxic properties of a synthetic double-stranded RNA. Nature 223: 715-717. (not online)

As further evidence of this, long dsRNAs are now used in medicine to cause autoimmune disorders in mice, in order to study these disorders (Okada et al 2005).

The Absher and Stinebring paper comes from a body of research built up many years ago, but its essential findings have been confirmed and extended by more modern research. We now know why dsRNAs cause harm. They trigger destructive anti-viral defence pathways in mammals and other vertebrates and there is a field of specialist research devoted to showing precisely how this damages individual cells, whole tissues, and results in auto-immune disease in mice (Karpala et al. 2005).

The conclusion therefore, is that dsRNAs that are apparently indistinguishable from those produced in, for example, the Arctic apple and Monsanto's Vistive Gold Soybean, have strong negative effects on vertebrate animals (but not plants). These vertebrate effects are found even at low doses. Consumers are vertebrate animals. They may not appreciate the thought that their healthy fats and forever apples also contain proven toxins. And on a business front, consumer brands will not relish defending dsRNA technology once they understand the reality. They may not wish to find themselves defending the indefensible.

The bottom line is this. Either dsRNAs will sicken or kill people, or, they will give opponents of biotechnology plenty of ammunition. The scientific evidence, as it currently stands, suggests they will do both. dsRNAs, therefore, are a potentially huge liability.

The last pipeline problem stems from the first two. The agbiotech industry has long held out the prospect of "consumer benefits" from GMOs. Consumer benefits (in the case of food) are most likely to be health benefits (improved nutrition, altered fat composition, etc.). The problem is that the demographic of health-conscious consumers no doubt overlaps significantly with the demographic of those most wary of GMOs. Show a consumer a "healthy GMO" and they are likely to show you an oxymoron. The health market in the US for customers willing to pay more for a GMO has probably evaporated in the last few years as GMOs have become a hot public issue.

The end-game for GMOs?

The traditional chemical industry approach to such a problem is a familiar repertoire of intimidation and public relations. Fifty years ago, the chemical industry outwitted and out-maneuvered environmentalists after the death of Rachel Carson (see the books Toxic Sludge is Good for You and Trust Us We're Experts). But that was before email, open access scientific publication, and the internet. Monsanto and its allies have steadily lost ground in a world of peer-to-peer communication. GMOs have become a liability, despite their best efforts.

The historic situation is this: in any country, public acceptance of GMOs has always been based on lack of awareness of their existence. Once that ignorance evaporates and the scientific and social realities start to be discussed, ignorance cannot be reinstated. From then on the situation moves into a different, and much more difficult phase for the defenders of GMOs.

Nevertheless, in the US, those defenders have not yet given up. Anyone who keeps up with GMOs in the media knows that the public is being subjected to an unrelenting and concerted global blitzkrieg.

Pro-GMO advocates and paid-for journalists, presumably financed by the life-science industry, sometimes fronted by non-profits such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are being given acres of prominent space to make their case. Liberal media outlets such as the New York Times, the National Geographic, The New Yorker, Grist magazine, the Observer newspaper, and any others who will have them (which is most) have been deployed to spread its memes. Cornell University has meanwhile received a $5.6 million grant by the Gates Foundation to "depolarize" negative GMO publicity.

But so far there is little sign that the growth of anti-GMO sentiment in Monsanto's home (US) market can be halted. The decision by Chipotle is certainly not an indication of faith that it can.

For Monsanto and GMOs the situation suddenly looks ominous. Chipotle may well represent the beginnings of a market swing of historic proportions. GMOs may be relegated to cattle-feed status, or even oblivion, in the USA. And if GMOs fail in the US, they are likely to fail elsewhere.

GMO roll-outs in other countries have relied on three things: the deep pockets of agribusinesses based in the United States, their political connections, and the notion that GMOs represent "progress". If those three disappear in the United States, the power to force open foreign markets will disappear too. The GMO era might suddenly be over.

References

Anonymous (1969) Interferon inducers with side effects. Nature 223: 666-667.

Bøhn, T., Cuhra, M., Traavik, T., Sanden, M., Fagan, J. and Primicerio, R. 2014. Compositional differences in soybeans on the market: Glyphosate accumulates in Roundup Ready GM soybeans. Food Chemistry 153: 207-215.

Okada C., Akbar S.M.F., Horiike N., and Onji M. (2005) Early development of primary biliary cirrhosis in female C57BL/6 mice because of poly I:C administration. Liver International 25: 595-603.

Karpala A.J., Doran T.J., and Bean A.G.D. (2005) Immune responses to dsRNA: Implications for gene silencing technologies. Immunology and cell biology 83: 211 - 216.

Mortensen, David A., J. Franklin Egan, Bruce D. Maxwell, Matthew R. Ryan and Richard G. Smith (2012) Navigating a Critical Juncture for Sustainable Weed Management. BioScience 62: 75-84.

Schinasi L and Maria E. Leon ME (2014) Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma and Occupational Exposure to Agricultural Pesticide Chemical Groups and Active Ingredients: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 11: 4449-4527.

About the author

Jonathan Latham is co-founder and Executive Director of the Bioscience Resource Project and also Editor of the Independent Science News website. Dr. Lathamholds a Masters degree in Crop Genetics and a PhD in Virology.

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U.S. partially lifts sanctions to create 'uncontrolled access point' via the exportation of communications software, services

© Sputnik

    

The US Treasury permitted the export of communications software and services to Crimea, in a move similar to its partial lifting of the embargo against Cuba earlier this year.

The US Treasury Department authorized the export of social media and communications software and services to the Russian region of Crimea on Friday.

Although Crimea already has many Internet users and bloggers who document changes and conditions on the peninsula, the explanatory note states that the new action "is in U.S. national security and foreign policy interests because it helps create a potentially uncontrolled access point." The United States does not consider Crimea to be a part of Russia, but rather a part of Ukraine that it has enacted an embargo against, similar to one previously enacted over Cuba.

"In addition, creating an opportunity for people in the Crimea region of Ukraine to draw attention to these issues may also encourage other countries to join with the United States and other like-minded countries currently imposing sanctions on Russia," the explanatory note to the new act states.

According to the license requirements, the nationality of the Crimea resident will be used to determine what country the product is being exported to. Over 99 percent of Crimea residents became Russian nationals in 2014. Ukrainian law does not permit dual citizenship.

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Clinton e-mails reveal Washington's obsession with overthrowing Qaddafi government in Libya

© RIA Novosti

    

A cache of 296 e-mails to and from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton released by the State Department on Friday reveal US officials working overtime to orchestrate the fall of a foreign government.

On March 27, 2011, Clinton's longtime close adviser Sidney Blumenthal briefed her about allied special forces activities to undermine then Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

"An extremely sensitive source added that the rebels are receiving direct assistance and training from a small number of Egyptian Special Forces units, while French and British Special Operations troops are working out of bases in Egypt, along the Libyan border," Blumenthal wrote to Clinton.

Blumenthal was never hired by the State Department in any office capacity, but he was one of Clinton's closest and most influential advisers, the published e-mails reveal.

"These troops are overseeing the transfer of weapons and supplies to the rebels," he added.

Blumenthal has no specialized expertise or experience covering the Middle East, but he sent Clinton numerous, long-detailed reports on Libya, combining intelligence assessments, political analysis and rumours.

All the e-mails addressed "Sid"[ney Blumenthal] and "Hillary" [Clinton].

Current US policy makers discussed plans to topple then Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych with equal frankness and detail.

In 2014, US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt were recorded as discussing Yanukovych's successor Arseniy Yatsenyuk before Yanukovych was toppled on February 22, 2014 in a violent coup.

The State Department e-mails were part of a cache of 30,000 messages that Clinton received or sent on her personal server, in addition to her official communications within the State Department during her tenure from 2009 to 2013.

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California coast: Unprecedented mass die-offs as the Pacific Ocean turns into a 'desert'

“Ocean’s dying, plankton’s dying… it’s people. Soylent Green is made out of people. They’re making our food out of people. Next thing they’ll be breeding us like cattle for food. You’ve gotta tell them. You’ve gotta tell them!”

    

It was the dying cry of Charlton Heston in the creepy 1973 film ... and it could resemble our desperate near future.

The ocean is dying, by all accounts - and if so, the food supply along with it. The causes are numerous, and overlapping. And massive numbers of wild animal populations are dying as a result of it.

Natural causes in the environment are partly to blame; so too are the corporations of man; the effects of Fukushima, unleashing untold levels of radiation into the ocean and onto Pacific shores; the cumulative effect of modern chemicals and agricultural waste tainting the water and disrupting reproduction.

A startling new report says in no uncertain terms that the Pacific Ocean off the California coast is turning into a desert. Once full of life, it is now becoming barren, and marine mammals, seabirds and fish are starving as a result. According to Ocean Health:

The waters of the Pacific off the coast of California are a clear, shimmering blue today, so transparent it's possible to see the sandy bottom below [...] clear water is a sign that the ocean is turning into a desert, and the chain reaction that causes that bitter clarity is perhaps most obvious on the beaches of the Golden State, where thousands of emaciated sea lion pups are stranded.

[...]

Over the last three years, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has noticed a growing number of strandings on the beaches of California and up into the Pacific north-west. In 2013, 1,171 sea lions were stranded, and 2,700 have already stranded in 2015 - a sign that something is seriously wrong, as pups don't normally wind up on their own until later in the spring and early summer.

"[An unusually large number of sea lions stranding in 2013 was a red flag] there was a food availability problem even before the ocean got warm." Johnson: This has never happened before... It's incredible. It's so unusual, and there's no really good explanation for it. There's also a good chance that the problem will continue, said a NOAA research scientist in climatology, Nate Mantua.

Experts blame a lack of food due to unusually warm ocean waters. NOAA declared an El Nino, the weather pattern that warms the Pacific, a few weeks ago. The water is three and a half to six degrees warmer than the average, according to Mantua, because of a lack of north wind on the West Coast. Ordinarily, the north wind drives the current, creating upwelling that brings forth the nutrients that feed the sardines, anchovies and other fish that adult sea lions feed on.

Fox News added:

The warm water is likely pushing prime sea lion foods — market squid, sardines and anchovies — further north, forcing the mothers to abandon their pups for up to eight days at a time in search of sustenance.

The pups, scientists believe, are weaning themselves early out of desperation and setting out on their own despite being underweight and ill-prepared to hunt.

[...]

"These animals are coming in really desperate. They're at the end of life. They're in a crisis ... and not all animals are going to make it," said Keith A. Matassa, executive director at the Pacific Marine Mammal Center, which is currently rehabilitating 115 sea lion pups.

The same is true of seabirds on the Washington State coast:

In the storm debris littering a Washington State shoreline, Bonnie Wood saw something grisly: the mangled bodies of dozens of scraggly young seabirds. Walking half a mile along the beach at Twin Harbors State Park on Wednesday, Wood spotted more than 130 carcasses of juvenile Cassin's auklets—the blue-footed, palm-size victims of what is becoming one of the largest mass die-offs of seabirds ever recorded. "It was so distressing," recalled Wood, a volunteer who patrols Pacific Northwest beaches looking for dead or stranded birds. "They were just everywhere. Every ten yards we'd find another ten bodies of these sweet little things."

"This is just massive, massive, unprecedented," said Julia Parrish, a University of Washington seabird ecologist who oversees the Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team (COASST), a program that has tracked West Coast seabird deaths for almost 20 years. "We may be talking about 50,000 to 100,000 deaths. So far." (source)

100,000 doesn't necessarily sound large, statistically speaking, but precedent in the history of recorded animal deaths suggests that it is, in fact massive. Even National Geographic is noting that these die off events are "unprecedented." Warmer water is indicated for much of the starvation faced by many of the dead animals.

Last year, scientists sounded the alarm over the death of millions of star fish, blamed on warmer waters and 'mystery virus':

Starfish are dying by the millions up and down the West Coast, leading scientists to warn of the possibility of localized extinction of some species. As the disease spreads, researchers may be zeroing in on a link between warming waters and the rising starfish body count. (source)

[...]

[embedded content]

The epidemic, which threatens to reshape the coastal food web and change the makeup of tide pools for years to come, appears to be driven by a previously unidentified virus, a team of more than a dozen researchers from Cornell University, UC Santa Cruz, the Monterey Bay Aquarium and other institutions reported Monday. (source)

Changing temperatures in the Pacific Ocean, driven by the natural cycle of gyres over decades, shifts wildlife populations, decimating the populations of species throughout the food chain, proving how fragile the balance of life in the ocean really is.

Recently, the collapse of the sardine population has created a crisis for fisheries and marine wildlife alike on the West Coast:

Commercial fishing for sardines off of Canada's West Coast is worth an estimated $32 million - but now they are suddenly gone. Back in October, fisherman reported that they came back empty-handed without a single fish after 12 hours of trolling and some $1000 spent on fuel.

Sandy Mazza, for the , reported a similar phenomenon in central California: "[T]he fickle sardines have been so abundant for so many years - sometimes holding court as the most plentiful fish in coastal waters - that it was a shock when he couldn't find one of the shiny silver-blue coastal fish all summer, even though this isn't the first time they've vanished." [emphasis added]

[...]
"Is it El Nino? Pacific Decadal Oscillation? [La] Nina? Long-term climate change? More marine mammals eating sardines? Did they all go to Mexico or farther offshore? We don't know. We're pretty sure the overall population has declined. We manage them pretty conservatively because we don't want to end up with another Cannery Row so, as the population declines, we curb fishing." said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) official Kerry Griffin. (source)

According to a report in the Daily Mail, the worst events have wiped out 90% of animal populations, falling short of extinction, but creating a rupture in food chains and ecosystems.

And environmental factors are known to be a factor, with pollution from chemicals dumped by factories clearly tied to at least 20% of the mass die off events of wildlife populations that have been investigated, and many die offs implicated by a number of overlapping factors. The Daily Mail reported:

Mass die-offs of certain animals has increased in frequency every year for seven decades, according to a new study.

Researchers found that such events, which can kill more than 90 per cent of a population, are increasing among birds, fish and marine invertebrates.

The reasons for the die-offs are diverse, with effects tied to humans such as environmental contamination accounting for about a fifth of them.

Farm runoff from Big Agra introduces high levels of fertilizers and pesticides which create oxygen-starved dead zones which fish and aquatic live is killed off. Also preset in agriculture waste are gender bending chemicals like those found in Atrazine, used in staple crop production, and antibiotics and hormones, used in livestock production, which creates hazardous runoff for fish populations:

Livestock excrete natural hormones - estrogens and testosterones - as well as synthetic ones used to bolster their growth. Depending on concentrations and fish sensitivity, these hormones and hormone mimics might impair wild fish reproduction or skew their sex ratios. (source)

Pharmaceutical contaminants are also to blame for changing the sex of fish and disrupting population numbers, while a study found that the chemicals in Prozac changed the behavior of marine life, and made shrimp many times more likely to "commit suicide" and swim towards the light where they became easy prey.

Fish farms also introduce a large volume of antibiotic and chemical pollution into oceans and waterways:

The close quarters where farmed fish are raised (combined with their unnatural diets) means disease occurs often and can spread quickly. On fish farms, which are basically "CAFOs of the sea," antibiotics are dispersed into the water, and sometimes injected directly into the fish.

Unfortunately, farmed fish are often raised in pens in the ocean, which means not only that pathogens can spread like wildfire and contaminate any wild fish swimming past - but the antibiotics can also spread to wild fish (via aquaculture and wastewater runoff) - and that's exactly what recent research revealed. (source)

Mass die offs of fish on the Brazilian coastline have linked to pollution from the dumping of raw sewage and garbage.

In the last few days it was reported that a massive die off of bottlenose dolphins in the Gulf of Mexico was connected by researchers to BP's Deep Water Horizon oil spill. Evidence was found in a third of the cases of lesions in the adrenal gland, an otherwise rare condition linked with petroleum exposure. More than a fifth of the dolphins also suffered bacterial pneumonia, causing deadly lung infection that is likewise rarely seen in dolphin populations.

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Train derails while crossing bridge in Assam, India

© Ruptly video screenshot

    

A train has derailed in Assam, India, seriously injuring its driver and causing minor injuries to some passengers. The accident occurred as the train was about to cross a bridge.

The accident in Kokrajhar district occurred between Salakati and Basugaon at 5:15 a.m. local time Saturday, according to Northeast Frontier Railway spokesman Jayamta Sarma, as cited by India Today.

Officials said the train was running at a slow speed when the derailment happened, which is why there were not more serious injuries or deaths.

Footage from Ruptly shows the aftermath of the derailment, part of the train hanging from a bridge into the water below. Some passengers are seen walking from the train, one man with a makeshift sling around his right arm. The bridge's metal is also shown bent and destroyed.

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The driver was admitted to the hospital, while some passengers were given first aid, Sarma said.

The train runs from Alipurduar in north Bengal to Guwahati in Assam. Authorities are working to restore rail traffic which has been hit because of the accident.

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John Nash and wife killed in car crash

    

John Forbes Nash Jr., the famed mathematician and inspiration for the film , and his wife died in a car crash Saturday in New Jersey, according to state police.

Nash, 86, and wife Alicia Nash, 82, were riding in a taxi near Monroe Township when the incident occurred, State Police Sgt. 1st Class Gregory Williams said.

They were traveling southbound in the left lane when the taxi went out of control while trying to pass another car, Williams said.

The car crashed into the guard rail, and the couple was ejected from the vehicle. They were pronounced dead at the scene.

The taxi driver, Tarek Girgis, was sent to Robert Wood Johnson hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. A passenger in the other car was transported by ground to Princeton University Hospital complaining of neck pain.

No charges been filed in the accident, which is still under investigation, Williams said.

Nash, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994, struggled for a long time with schizophrenia, according to Princeton University's biography of him. Nash received his Ph. D. from Princeton.

Russell Crowe played a character loosely based on Nash in the Oscar-winning film .

Nash accepted the 2015 Abel Prize in Norway last week for mathematical contributions.

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