(upbeat music) - Coming up next on this special science edition of Arizona Horizon, a conversation with the paleontologist who found Lucy, the remains of one of the oldest human ancestors ever discovered.

Also tonight, what's causing ocean temperatures to rise at an alarming rate?

And we'll hear about the new international Dark Sky Discovery Center under construction in Fountain Hills.

Those stories and more next on this special edition of Arizona Horizon.

- [Announcer] Arizona Horizon is made possible by contributions from the Friends of Arizona PBS, members of your public television station.

(upbeat music) - Good evening and welcome to this special science edition of Arizona Horizon.

I'm Ted Simons.

2024 marks 50 years since the discovery of Lucy, one of the oldest fossil remains of a human ancestor ever found.

Lucy was discovered by paleontologist, Donald Johanson, who joined us in studio to talk about how Lucy was found and the importance of the discovery.

Don Johanson, good to have you here.

Thank you so much for joining us.

- Well, it's a pleasure to be here.

Thank you so much for having me on the show.

- You bet, 50th anniversary of Lucy's discovery.

First of all, who was Lucy?

- Lucy was a human ancestor who lived 3.2 million years ago and was nice enough to die on the edge of a lake and be covered in sand and fossilized for 3.2 million years.

And I came along in 1974 on November 24th, and I glanced over my right shoulder and I saw a piece of her elbow.

And when I kneeled down to look at it, I knew it wasn't from a monkey or an antelope.

It had to be from a human ancestor.

- [Ted] Why'd you think that?

- Because of the anatomy of it.

You know, we spend our days in these labs studying the shape of bones and anatomy and function and so on, and I could tell right away that this had to be a human, but it was so tiny that it was quite surprising.

And as I looked up this little slope, I saw pieces glistening in the sun.

You know, it was 110 degrees or something out there in the deserts of Ethiopia.

And I could see a bit of jaw.

I could see a bit of arm, I could see a bit of leg.

And I realized at that moment this was part of a skeleton of a human ancestor who lived and walked on that landscape 3.2 million years ago.

- Did you know it was a human ancestor that had yet been defined?

- No, I actually didn't know exactly who she was.

You know, we give all of these complicated names to.

- [Ted] Yeah.

- These fossils like Australopithecus, but there were aspects of her teeth, which are changed quite a bit over time.

And I could see that it looked much more ape-like than anything we had found before.

And four years later, she was announced with a real tongue twister of a name, Australopithecus afarensis.

- [Ted] Holy smokes.

- After the Afar region where she was discovered.

- And we'll stick with Lucy, if you don't mind.

- Right.

- That'd make it a lot easier.

Okay, how big, how tall was Lucy?

- Well, that was one of the mysterious things.

Looking at the length of her thigh bone, what we call the femur, it was only about the length of a ruler.

And the question was, was this a child because it was so short?

Well, we looked at the teeth and we saw that the wisdom teeth were erupted.

So she was a full adult, and at full stature, she was only three and a half feet tall.

- Wow!

Now, from what I've read about Lucy, she could walk upright, but had, the bones in the finger suggested she was still kind of a tree dweller.

True?

- Well, no, her hands, they had little curved bones, which may be sort of an evolutionary hangover when her ancestors were hanging around in the trees.

But she was fully upright and walking on two legs just as you and I are.

- Wow, and and how old was she, do you think, when she died?

- Well, the estimates that the people who studied the details of her, the development of the teeth, think that she probably was only about 11 years old.

10 or 11 when she died.

- Interesting, and you said 3.2 million years.

I know it's hard for us to fathom that long ago.

How do you know it was 3.2 million years?

- Well, because there's a volcanic ash layer just near her in the geology, and there are crystals in that volcanic ash that can be dated.

So she's actually 3.29, 3.19 million years, plus or minus like 50,000 years.

- So it's not necessarily the bones themselves, but what is surrounding the bones.

- Yeah, you can't date bones that old.

The carbon 14 that people think of.

- [Ted] Yes.

- Only goes back to about 40, 45,000 years.

- That's all.

Okay, this discovery and the ideas and just theories of human evolution, how did Lucy change those ideas?

- Well, Lucy brought about a really new perspective.

It broke the 3 million year time barrier.

We had other fossils that went back to about 3 million, but very few fossils of human ancestors that lived before 3 million years.

And what she did was she had us redraw the human family tree, the shape of the tree, the geometry of the tree.

And we believed that she was the last common ancestor that led to our own genus, homo, Latin for man, and also a branch of Australopithecus that died out.

So she was a terribly important discovery of a new, unique species.

- And there were other, were there not other bones found of other people, species, whatever you wanna call 'em in the same area?

- Oh yes.

The following year in '75, we found a collection of bones that were sealed in a single geological horizon of infants, males, females.

Males were much larger, up to five feet tall.

Young individuals, old individuals.

So we have a pretty good picture of the anatomy of this particular species.

- You mentioned that it was so difficult to find out something at that 3 million barrier.

Why do you think that is?

Was there an ice age?

Was there another volcanic kind of a thing that made for something like the, what the meteorite and the meteor hitting, you know, the whole $65 million dinosaurs going away?

I mean, did something happen along those lines?

- Well, I think that we now can trace the human lineage back to 6 million years, almost twice the age of Lucy.

And that's because we've been looking in older sediments, places like Old Divide Gorge, which is well known to most viewers.

That only took us back to about 1.8 million.

And then there were a few other sites that took us back to maybe two and a half.

But once we got to 3 million, there were very few sites.

And only because a geologist had recognized this site and asked me to join him on an expedition that we made these discoveries.

- And I gotta ask you, why the name Lucy?

- Well, we were celebrating, as you can well imagine, an anthropologist like myself gets pretty excited when something like this is found.

And we were listening to a Beatles tape in camp that night, and "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" was playing on the tape recorder, and someone suggested do you really think it's a female?

I said, anything that's that short has to be a female.

And she said, well, why don't you call her Lucy after "Lucy in the sky with Diamonds?"

- Yeah, that's fantastic.

Last question.

I could ask you so many.

I find this kind of stuff fascinating, but the last question from me is what is, what are the kinds of questions, the most frequent question you are asked about Lucy?

- Well, I think the most frequent questions are, you know, how do we really know how old she was in terms of the geology?

How was she related to other animals that were living at that time?

What kind of world did she live in?

What did she have for her diet?

- [Ted] Yeah.

- What did she eat?

And, you know, who was her ancestor?

And we are now beginning to figure that out at the Institute of Human Origins.

- Yeah, well, fantastic stuff.

Dr. Donald Johanson, again ASU Institute of Human Origins.

She was waiting 3.2 million years for you to find her.

- That's right.

- Congratulations on that.

- Thanks so much.

(upbeat music) - Ocean temperatures continue to increase at record breaking rates.

Indeed, ocean warming is making for new record high temperatures on almost a daily basis.

Why is this happening and what can be done about it?

I got some answers from Peter Schlosser, Vice President and Vice Provost of ASU Global Futures Laboratory.

Good to see you.

Thanks for joining us.

- Thanks for having me.

- Yeah.

Ocean temperature's breaking a record almost every day.

What's going on here?

- Well, they have been increasing since quite a while as do air temperatures.

For example, in 2023, we had a record year in surface temperatures across land and ocean that was close to the critical mark of 1.5 degrees Celsius.

But was what was surprising was that the ocean temperatures almost jumped.

- [Ted] Yeah.

- They, they, and part of it, of course, is due to the fact that the Equatorial Pacific is warming due to El Nino, but not all of it.

- Well, I was gonna ask, doesn't it make a difference when these temperatures are taken?

If it's a La Nina, you got one thing.

If it's El Nino, you got something else, don't you?

- That's right.

So if you're looking at the ocean temperatures during El Nino years, it's warmer.

During La Nina years, it's cooler.

But even with the El Nino conditions that we had in 2023 and that are continuing into this year, this jump of almost one degree Celsius or two Fahrenheit is more than we would have expected from La Nina conditions.

- 90%, correct me if I'm wrong here, 90% of rising global temperatures are in the oceans?

- More than 90% of the excess heat created by global warming are in the ocean.

- My goodness, so if the excess heat is going at a higher rate, it's going in the oceans.

How do you turn that back?

I mean, this sounds like a battleship that would take for a long time to turn around.

- It is not instantaneously turning, we cannot instantaneously turning it back.

But in principle we can.

We do know that we have to cut emissions.

We also know in essence how to do that.

That in itself is not enough.

We also have to take some of the carbon dioxide that we put into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels to satisfy our energy demands, we have to take that back out of the atmosphere.

We know how to do that.

We actually refer to that just briefly in your introduction here.

- [Ted] Yeah.

- And that is the way we can actually stop the warming from getting, you know, moving ahead further.

- If it does, move ahead further.

If it stays where it is, the ramifications of all this.

What are you seeing and what are you worried about?

- So there are several effects that we are already seeing.

First of all, if you're warming water, it expands.

So we have sea level rise, and we are watching that.

The other thing that is well known, widely known is that heat waves in the ocean, which is warming, it's like a heat wave, that has an effect on iconic species such as corals.

So they are bleaching the corals.

Corals are in essence dying.

The ice sheets, which are in contact with the water are melting.

That increases the sea level even further.

And we have migration of species who simply cannot take the heat in the areas where they are right now.

So they're moving, migrating to cooler parts of the ocean - On each one of these, we'll start with coral bleaching because that's something that's not necessarily out there in the headlines or such.

When this coral is damaged like this, can it return?

If it does, how long does that take?

- There are still exploratory studies out there.

If we can mix up the species of corals in specific sites to revive the coral reefs that have been damaged, - [Ted] Yes.

- It would take time because these coral species have to be grown in so-called coral nurseries, and then they have to be planted, then they have to grow and have to bloom.

So that's years and years.

- Yeah, and the ice sheets melting that you talked about, these ice sheets, common sense dictates you put a bunch of ice in a bunch of water and it melts, the water's gonna rise and expand.

- That is correct.

And we are seeing that.

We have increased melting around Antarctica.

We also have melting around Greenland and on top of Greenland, and that comes on top of melting of mountain glaciers.

Kilimanjaro in essence has no ice anymore.

So there is a cumulative effect.

For example, if we would melt Greenland, the global sea level rise would be about seven meters, about 20 feet.

- [Ted] Wow.

- So that would wipe out all the port infrastructure.

And we are transporting 90% of the goods globally across the ocean.

- Yeah, yeah, and the species you talked about, I mean, again, are these the kinds of things that would revert back or stop?

I mean, are certain things gone from certain southern latitudes forever?

- Some species could be extinguished, others could migrate, let's say further north in cooler waters.

If the water temperature would cool down in the areas where they reside now, they could migrate back.

So it depends on whether or not we are actually stopping that warming in due course so that they are not extinct.

- And the warming water, I would imagine, correct me if I'm wrong, would add for more moisture, would add for intense rainfall, intense storms?

Is that what we're seeing out there?

- We are seeing some of that.

For example, if you are increasing the ocean temperature, you are offering cyclones, hurricanes, for example, more moisture to be taken up.

So they are mightier in terms of the water they are carrying.

And that of course is rained out over land.

So that leads to more flooding.

And we are seeing that already.

- So last question here, we've got about a minute left here.

We talked about this vacuum in Iceland.

It's, you know, taking all this pollutant outta the air and putting it back there.

I mean, is that realistic?

What realistically can we do?

- That is realistic, and they actually have a working plant that is taking CO2 out of the atmosphere and putting it into basalts where it becomes stone.

- [Ted] Yeah, - We have actually, not far from here, we have a unit on the campus of ASU in Tempe, where we are using a similar method passively.

We just have air blowing over resin, which absorbs it.

So that can be scaled.

We can take 10 giga tons out of the atmosphere by let's say 2050 if we are scaling fast enough.

- Yeah, if we do it a good enough job.

Peter Schlosser, ASU Global Futures Lab.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Good stuff.

- Thanks, thanks for having me.

(upbeat music) - [Ted] In Northwest Arizona, just off state route 95 stands a peculiar monument to the town of Oatman.

Oddly, the marker is 15 miles from the town it honors.

Wedged into the Black Mountains, the mining town of Oatman was established at the turn of the century.

By the 1930s, nearly 2 million ounces of gold had been extracted from the surrounding mines.

The price of gold and World War II forced the closure of the mines in the 40s.

The town was delivered another blow when in 1952, a stretch of Interstate 40 opened, siphoning off Oatman's lifeblood, Route 66 traffic.

It quickly became a ghost town.

(gun fire) Route 66 is again its lifeblood.

Nostalgia for the mother road and the Old West draw tourists from all over the world.

They walk the boardwalks, hang with the local gunfighters and are followed around by Oatman's most famous residents, the burros, descendants of those set free by miners years ago.

Being closer to Nevada than the town itself, Oatman's misplaced Monument is long forgotten, but the town is remembered daily.

(upbeat music) (tribal music) The new International Dark Sky Discovery Center is being built in Fountain Hills.

The 23,000 square foot center will house an observatory, a planetarium, and all sorts of star based theaters and auditoriums.

We learn more about all this from Jeff Esposito, the Discovery Center's Vice President and Project Coordinator.

So good to have you here.

- Thank you.

Great to be here.

- Yeah, gimme a better definition of the International Dark Sky Discovery Center.

- A better definition, oh, it's a, you know, we, okay, let's talk about the mission of what we're trying to accomplish.

- [Ted] Yes.

- So there's four things that we're trying to accomplish.

Number one is education.

We wanna provide STEM education experiences for students.

We wanna inspire them to like the sciences, to maybe choose the sciences as a career.

Secondly, we wanna be a research facility.

So in the metro area, we're gonna have the largest telescope in the Phoenix Metro area, and it's gonna be research ready.

And we're gonna have a full-time astronomer on staff.

So that's gonna make it kind of different.

Our third thing is Dark Sky Preservation.

So we wanna talk about how the dark skies relate to human health, to the wildlife conservation and sustainability.

And finally, we wanna be a revenue generator for the state of Arizona.

- Dark skies relating to human health, talk more about that.

- Sure, so believe it, you know, we live on the circadian rhythms of nighttime and daytime, right, and right now we do a lot of things with our tel, you know, with our phones and television, and we get that all screwed up.

And so, you know, people respond, some people respond negatively to that.

And so actually the AMA and the NIH have also come out with studies that say, hey, you really need to watch your artificial light.

And 'cause it can lead to things like obesity, stress, that type of thing.

- This is being built in Fountain Hills.

Why Fountain Hills?

- Well, Fountain Hills is a designated dark sky community.

We like to say it's a dark sky oasis in the valley of the sun.

And we got that designation in 2018, and it allows us then to see the Milky Way at night.

On certain nights we can see that out there, even though we're very close to the metro area.

And so that's why we decided to put it there.

- Fountain Hills kind of has mountains on all sides, does it not?

- Pretty much.

We're protected.

We have a lot of natural areas to the east and to the south, and to the north, and then to the west we have the McDowell's that shield us from the rest of Phoenix.

- Yeah, pretty nice shield there.

As far as the Night Sky Experience Exhibit Hall, you got theaters, you got auditoriums, you got lecture halls.

So again, this is as much an experience just to look at stars, but to learn about stars.

- Yes, education is our, really our number one focus, you know, and it's not just about stars.

So it's about the whole night sky experience.

So when we walk into that science exhibit center, you're gonna walk in, and you're gonna be treated to what the sky looked like everywhere and how that, how that night sky is shrinking on a daily basis because of light pollution and so on, and just, you know, humankind expanding.

- And again, a non-profit, this is all non-profit.

- [Jeff] Yes, all nonprofit.

- And STEM-based.

- [Jeff] And STEM-based, very much.

- How does, the nonprofit aspect, how does that work?

- Well, we're not in this like Disney, I guess.

- [Ted] Yes.

- In order to make, you know, make a big, make a big dollar.

We're focusing on again, on the sciences.

- [Ted] Philanthropic folks involved here?

- As many as we can entertain, yes.

We are a nonprofit.

So, you know, all of our funding's coming from donations, and, you know, wherever we can get it.

And we're busy doing that today.

- And I know you're involved in the, very much involved in the project and the construction of the project and the pragmatic aspect of getting this done.

- [Jeff] Right.

- As far as the sciences, do you have scientists?

Do you have astronomers?

Who's on board with this?

- Okay, so right now everything's in kind of a developmental stage, but we've had various serious talks, detailed talks with ASU actually, with the School of Earth and Space Exploration and also the School of Life Sciences.

And between those two, we've kind of come to some agreements about things that we'll be able to do.

So right now, ASU does not have an astronomy course.

So with our observatory, research grade telescope, they'll be able to then maybe utilize that as part of their curriculum.

- [Ted] And we can expect this to open next year?

- We're hoping for the fall of 2025.

- Fall of 20, okay, and for those familiar with Fountain Hills, where exactly is this located?

- So in Fountain Hills, or where's Fountain Hills located?

- No, no, where is this in Fountain Hills?

- Okay, so it's, we have kind of a central area by town hall and the community center and the library and a museum.

And there's a little plot of land there.

We're gonna put it right there.

It's gonna be part of Centennial Plaza.

- Centennial, well, boy, fountain Hills has grown up over the years.

My goodness.

- Yes.

- Jeff Esposito, International Dark Sky Discovery Center in Fountain Hills.

Thanks for sharing the story.

We appreciate it.

- Thank you for letting me be here.

- You bet.

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