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Why is there so much gold in west Africa?

Why is there so much gold in west Africa?

Yahoo21-02-2025
Militaries that have taken power in Africa's Sahel region – notably Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger – have put pressure on western mining firms for a fairer distribution of revenue from the lucrative mining sector.
Gold is one of the resources at the heart of these tensions. West Africa has been a renowned gold mining hub for centuries, dating back to the ancient Ghana empire, which earned its reputation as the 'Land of Gold' because of its abundant reserves and thriving trade networks. The region remains a global leader in gold production. As of 2024, west Africa contributed approximately 10.8% of the world's total gold output.
But why is there so much gold in this region? The Conversation Africa asked geologist Raymond Kazapoe to explain.
The simple answer here is that we are not certain. However, scientists have some ideas.
Gold, like all elements, formed through high energy reactions that occurred in various cosmic and space environments some 13 billion years ago, when the universe started to form.
However, gold deposits – or the concentration of gold in large volumes within rock formations – are believed to occur through various processes, explained by two theories.
The first theory – described by geologist Richard J. Goldfarb – argues that large amounts of gold were deposited in certain areas when continents were expanding and changing shape, around 3 billion years ago. This happened when smaller landmasses, or islands, collided and stuck to larger continents, a process called accretionary tectonics. During these collisions, mineral-rich fluids moved through the Earth's crust, depositing gold in certain areas.
A newer, complementary theory by planetary scientist Andrew Tomkins explains the formation of some much younger gold deposits during the Phanerozoic period (approximately 650 million years ago). It suggests that as the Earth's oceans became richer in oxygen during the Phanerozoic period, gold got trapped within another mineral known as pyrite (often called fool's gold) as microscopic particles. Later, geological processes – like continental growth (accretion) and heat or pressure changes (metamorphism) released this gold – forming deposits that could be mined.
Most gold production and reserves in west Africa are found within the west African craton. This is one of the world's oldest geological formations, consisting of ancient, continental crust that has remained largely unchanged for billions of years.
The craton underlies much of west Africa, spanning parts of Mali, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea, Senegal and Mauritania. In fact, most west African countries that have significant gold deposits have close to 50% of their landmass on the craton. Notably, between 35% and 45% of Ghana, Mali and Côte d'Ivoire's territory sits on it – which is why these areas receive so much attention from gold prospectors.
Gold deposits were formed within west Africa's craton rocks during a major tectonic event, known as the Eburnean Orogeny, 2.2 billion to 2.08 billion years ago. This event was accompanied by the temperature, pressure and tectonic conditions which promote gold mineralisation events. Most of the gold resources in the west African craton are found within ancient geological formations formed by volcanic and tectonic processes about 2.3 billion to 2.05 billion years ago. These are known as the Rhyacian Birimian granitoid-greenstone belts.
These gold-bearing belts in Ghana and Mali are by far the most endowed when compared with other countries in the region. Ghana and Mali currently, cumulatively account for over 57% of the combined past production and resources of the entire west Africa sub-region.
Ghana is thought to be home to 1,000 metric tonnes of gold. The country produces 90 metric tonnes each year – or 7% of global production. Gold production in Mali reached around 67.7 tonnes in 2023. Mali has an estimated 800 tons of gold deposits.
By comparison, the world's two largest gold producers are China (which mined approximately 370 metric tonnes of gold in 2023) and Australia (which had an output of around 310 metric tonnes in 2023).
Gold was traditionally found by panning in riverbeds, where miners swirled sediment in water to separate the heavy gold particles, or by digging shallow pits to extract gold-rich ores. Over time, methods have evolved to include geochemical exploration techniques, advanced geophysical surveys, and chemical extraction techniques, like cyanide leaching.
Geological mapping techniques are always evolving, and at the moment, there is a lot of interest in combining remote sensing data with cutting-edge data analytics methods, like machine learning. By combining these two methods, geologists can get around some of the problems caused by traditional methods, like the reliance on subjective judgement to create reliable maps and the need to spend money prospecting in areas with low chances of success.
In recent years, deep learning computer techniques have made significant progress. They examine various geological data-sets to reduce uncertainty and increase the chances of finding gold mineralisation through advanced artificial intelligence techniques. These methods have proved highly beneficial in identifying specific features and discovering new mineral deposits when applied to remote sensing data.
Another method, which I've researched and which could serve as a complementary gold exploration tool, is the use of stable isotopes. Stable isotopes are elements – like carbon, hydrogen and oxygen – that do not decay over time. Some are responsible for helping to carry gold, in fluids, through rocks to form the deposits. As the gold-bearing fluids interact with the rocks, they transfer the stable isotopes to the rocks, thereby imbuing them with their unique signature. The thinking here is to identify the signature and then use it as a proxy for finding gold, since gold itself is hard to identify directly.
Advancements in analytical techniques have reduced the cost, volume, and time involved. This makes it a viable alternative to geochemical approaches – the most widely used and relatively efficient method.
This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Raymond Kazapoe, University for Development Studies
Read more:
A new report card shows inequality in Australia isn't as bad as in the US – but we're headed in the wrong direction
West Africans have a high risk of kidney disease – new study confirms genetic cause
Ghana's urban strategies neglect the needs of street vendors: policy must catch up with reality
Raymond Kazapoe receives funding from the African Union and Pan African University to carry out some of the research referenced in this article
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Scientists Reconstruct 540 Million Years Of Climate And Sea Level Change
Scientists Reconstruct 540 Million Years Of Climate And Sea Level Change

Forbes

time17-07-2025

  • Forbes

Scientists Reconstruct 540 Million Years Of Climate And Sea Level Change

Climate curve and sea level curve Two new studies offer the most detailed glimpse yet of how Earth's climate and sea levels have changed during the Phanerozoic — the latest geologic eon covering the time period from 538.8 million years ago to the present. The first curve reveals that Earth's temperature has varied more than previously thought over much of the Phanerozoic eon and also confirms that Earth's temperature is strongly correlated to carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere. The team from Arizona compiled more than 150,000 published data points, their colleagues at the University of Bristol generated more than 850 model simulations of what Earth's climate could have looked like at different periods based on continental position and atmospheric composition. Using special data assimilation protocolls, the different datasets were combined to create an accurate curve of how Earth's temperature has varied over the past 485 million years. The climate curve reveals that temperature varied more greatly than previously thought. It starts with the Hirnantian, a period of major climatic oscillation lasting from approximately 460 to around 420 million years. The coldest period in the analyzed timescale is the Karoo glaciation, lasting from approximately 360 to 260 million years. But overall, the Phanerozoic was characterized by mild to warm climates, with global mean surface temperatures spanning from 52 to 97 degrees Fahrenheit (or 11 to 36 degrees Celsius). In the warmest periods global temperatures did not drop below 77 degrees Fahrenheit (25 degrees Celsius). In the last 60 million years, after a peak during the "Cretaceous Hothouse," Earth started to cool down. The global average temperature today is about 59 degrees Fahrenheit (15 degrees Celsius). The authors also note that the periods of extreme heat were most often linked to elevated levels of the greenhouse gas carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere. The second curve shows how sea levels correlate both with tectonic activity - closing or opening oceanic basins and shifting continents - and the climate, determining how much water is trapped in ice caps or glaciers. 'Plate tectonics determines the depth of the oceans. If the 'bathtub' becomes shallower, then the water level will rise. Ice caps on continents withhold water from the ocean, but when the ice melts, the 'bath water level' will rise, " explains study lead author Dr. Douwe van der Meer, guest researcher at Utrecht University. To assess sea level changes, the scientists looked at the prevailing sediment type deposited at the time. Claystone typically forms in deeper marine settings, while sandstone is deposited in shallow basins. This preliminary curve was then combined with data derived from fossils and paleogeographic simulations, visualizing the distribution of land and sea during different geological periods. The scientists were also able to estimate the location and volume of continental ice caps based on Earth's changing climate over time and the position of the continents in relation to the poles. Sea levels were relatively low during the first 400 million years, reflecting the cooler climate and low tectonic activity. During the Carboniferous (358-298 million years ago) there were very large sea level variations due to a large ice cap covering a large landmass in — called Gondwana by geologists — the southern hemisphere. During the Cretaceous (145-66 million years ago) the supercontinent of Pangaea started to break up and the hothouse climate caused the poles to be ice free. These two effects resulted in global sea levels being more than 200 meters higher than they are at present. In the last 60 million years Earth started to cool down and around 30 million years ago the first ice sheets started to form on the poles. In the past 2 million years during the last major ice ages sea levels dropped up to 100 meters. The climate study, "A 485-million-year history of Earth's surface temperature," was published in the journal Science and can be found online here. The sea level study, 'Phanerozoic orbital-scale glacio-eustatic variability,' was published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters and can be found online here. Additional material and interviews provided by University of Utrecht.

How to dig up 55 tons of dinosaur bones from the world's fiercest desert
How to dig up 55 tons of dinosaur bones from the world's fiercest desert

National Geographic

time15-07-2025

  • National Geographic

How to dig up 55 tons of dinosaur bones from the world's fiercest desert

Inside the boldest fossil hunt ever attempted. A team of paleontologists led by National Geographic Explorer Paul Sereno uncovered a trove of dinosaur fossils in the Sahara desert in Niger, including this long-necked herbivore called a sauropod. Working under floodlights after dark relieved the crew from oppressive daytime heat. It also lengthened workdays, permitting excavation, in less than three months, of three different areas separated by forbidding stretches of desert. Photographs by Keith Ladzinski As the Saharan sun rose on my waylaid team, one morning in September 2022, it seemed to burn with particular intensity. For nearly three weeks we'd been holed up in a mud-walled compound in the oasis town of Agadez, in central Niger, stalled because of officials' insistence on assembling for us a large armed escort. Now, as dawn broke, we were finally ready to embark: Nearly a hundred people packed into 15 vehicles, a motley caravan of SUVs, pickups, and one large dump truck, all strapped with sand ladders and spare tires, heading out on an extraordinary desert dinosaur hunt—without question, the most ambitious of my career. Among our number were Tuareg guides and drivers, a film crew, 64 armed guards, and my paleo dream team of 20 students and freshly minted professors, recruited to spend three months venturing across one of the planet's least hospitable landscapes. Our mission was to explore and excavate three distinct sites, spread across hundreds of miles of blazing, roadless desert. The fossils we found we would ship to my University of Chicago Fossil Lab for careful cleaning and study, later returning them for display in Niger, to celebrate the country's stunning ancient heritage. I had crisscrossed Niger's Sahara during 11 previous expeditions going back 32 years. The last two, in 2018 and 2019, had been for reconnaissance, and I'd spotted bone-rich pockets in some of the desert's most remote and sandswept corners, with dinosaur skeletons jutting from the desert floor. But without the team or tools to collect them, I could only log the sites and imagine our return trip. Then a global pandemic shut down the world, and I spent two years drawing up an audacious plan—and fundraising, with little success. That is, until a benefactor, requesting anonymity, agreed to fully fund the quest. My appeal had aimed at our innate human curiosity, a chance to uncover creatures from paleontology's last great frontier. (This incredibly rare burial ground reveals new secrets about the Sahara's lush, green past.) Ancient mud captured the footprint of an unknown species of sauropod. The expedition found fossils from what Sereno says are many newly identified species. Niger is a dino wonderland because of two chance geologic events. The first unfolded 180 million years ago, during the early Jurassic, when the great landmass Gondwana began to break apart, forming a massive depression in the center of what is now the West African nation, then a verdant region teeming with life. For millions of years, the depression took in sediment and the skeletons of dinosaurs and other creatures. The second event happened 20 million years ago, when a volcanic hot spot raised what's known as the Aïr Massif on the edge of this depression, tilting the strata upward and returning to the surface the now fossilized skeletons. Driving across these rock layers today, heading from Agadez into the open desert, is a journey through deep time. Our timeline was ambitious even before the delay in Agadez, and the expedition's success would hinge on benefiting from lessons I'd learned in the past, along with some novel technology we would deploy in the field. Our perseverance would be tested—many of my young colleagues had never set foot in the Sahara, worked under armed guard in 130-degree heat, or gone a month without a shower. Those with me on previous expeditions, meanwhile, had seen it all: food poisoning, malaria, sandstorms, expedition-ending breakdowns, gun-toting bandits, government coups. And yet I am always eager to go back. Gusty winds make operating drones tricky in the Sahara, but Sereno's team used aerial footage to prospect, map digs, and find campsites. Technology enabled an expedition timeline that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. No one knows the land and its secrets better than those who live on it, and our site nearest to Agadez was a return to a tantalizing find that a local Tuareg nomad had shown us. Years before, he'd led my team by motorbike into the desert, to a spot that the Tuareg call Tchinekankaran (CHIN-kan-KAR-an), or 'place of insects,' for the locusts that swarm after seasonal rains. It's a gravel rise about 10 feet high that stretches for nearly a mile and a half across the acacia-studded Irhazer Plain. Atop the little ridge, a series of large, spool-shaped vertebrae breached the surface. Some digging exposed more of the backbone, which belonged to a 50-foot-long sauropod, the classification given to long-necked, plant-eating dinosaurs. (The desert communities of Algeria make a home in the Sahara sand seas.) For this expedition, my team fanned out over the rise and quickly made a series of stunning discoveries, encountering four more of these massive creatures, including one whose neck ended with the most cherished of paleo prizes: a skull. All four seemingly belonged to the same yet-unnamed species. We nicknamed it Ipod, shorthand for an Irhazer Plain sauropod. The elevated fossil field, meanwhile, became Sauropod Island. From the details of its skeleton, I suspected our Ipod dated to the middle Jurassic, some 160 million years ago. But without an ash bed to date it by, this was only a guess. Finding a seam of volcanic ash near a dig site is every paleontologist's dream, since crystals within it can contain datable radioactive isotopes. I'd had my eyes out for ash beds on previous expeditions, but like every Saharan explorer before me, I'd come up dry. This time, however, I brought along one of the world's great time tellers, MIT research scientist and isotope whiz Jahan Ramezani. Jahan's big discovery came by accident, after a rock punctured a tire on one of our battered Land Rovers not far from Sauropod Island. As a few of us set about the repair, he scrambled up the side of a nearby cliff. Soon, Jahan was calling my name, and I found him poking at a greenish clay—an indicator of ancient volcanism, to his expert eye. Would that clay contain the crystals we'd need to date our fossils? Jahan smiled at me confidently. 'I'll bet my career on this one,' he said. Finding bones at Sauropod Island was the easy part. The challenge was whether we could collect all we saw in the three weeks we could devote to the site. Most of my team doubted it was possible. Thirty years ago it likely wouldn't have been, but our tools have come a long way. Some of what we bring to the Sahara today still resembles the equipment and supplies from my first foray in 1993. We still use plaster, burlap, and wood to cocoon fossils in portable field jackets. Our Land Rovers are trusty survivors of past treks. We still get by on packets of dehydrated food—although these days, adding boiling water to a package labeled 'lasagna' yields something closer to the real deal. (They were seeking a mythical oasis in the Sahara. They found a Stone Age surprise instead.) But new gear and technologies have dramatically transformed both the speed of excavation and the imaging of fossils as they emerge. Drill breakers powered by lithium batteries have largely replaced chisels and rock hammers. Lightweight electric jackhammers have replaced picks. GPS and digital imaging technology have replaced hand-drawn maps, while drones and photogrammetry can generate 3D images in minutes, on scales that range from sprawling dig sites to individual bones. At Sauropod Island, a drone flying overhead captured the entire scene, our tracks weaving between skeletons like ant trails. I wouldn't say modern equipment makes the work easy, but it does make the job safer and more efficient. Together with good old-fashioned sweat and 15-hour days, it helped our efforts pay off. When we pulled away from Sauropod Island, triumphant and exhilarated, our trucks strained under a load of some 25 tons of fossils. National Geographic Explorer Alexandre Demers-Potvin, then a Ph.D. student, consults a site map that Sereno made by hand upon discovering this skeleton in 2018. The fossil remained covered for years, awaiting the team's return. Even more remote country awaited us at a site called Gadoufaoua, said to mean 'place where camels fear to tread.' It is Africa's most famously fossil-rich area, in the heart of the Sahara's hyperarid Ténéré region, a desert within a desert. Although I've never felt so much as a drop of rain in Gadoufaoua, my team made a fossil discovery there years ago that's a reminder of how much wetter the area once was. It wasn't a dinosaur at all but rather prehistory's largest dinosaur-eating crocodilian, Sarcosuchus. We took to calling it 'SuperCroc,' a nickname that has stuck in the media. We left from Agadez, where we deposited fossils between digs. In front of us, a roadless expanse of rock gave way to a majestic but daunting dunescape, unfolding as far as the eye or drone could see. Experienced local guides are essential in such terrain, where sinkholes of unexpectedly soft sand can mire vehicles driven by even veteran Saharan hands. Our large dump truck, loaded with 1,000-liter tanks of water, was prone to sinking. Digging it out became a familiar routine, extending what could be a single day's journey to Gadoufaoua into three. You know you've arrived at Gadoufaoua when you see the fossil bones, tinged red with iron, scattered in every direction among low rocky ridges. We were looking for species that lived alongside SuperCroc, in the early Cretaceous, some 110 million years ago. Our first target was Ouranosaurus, a 30-foot-long, sail-backed herbivore. My team had encountered one years before and had covered it, to protect it from wind erosion, until we could someday return. We found it again before long, a gorgeous row of planklike bones as tall as a human and arranged in an array, like a peacock's fantail. It was the first intact bony dinosaur sail ever discovered, and studying it will help solve the mystery of what biological purposes these protrusions served. Spanish paleontologist Noelia Sánchez Fontela peers at sediment with a loupe at a site called Gadoufaoua, where exposed rock dates to the early Cretaceous. Labels on fragments of one of a sauropod's trunk (or dorsal) ribs will aid reassembly. Prepping fossils to ship to Sereno's lab in Chicago required diligent logging and packaging. This fossilized ungual, or claw bone, once belonged to a sauropod on the Irhazer Plain. When the dinosaur was alive, in the Jurassic period, a claw as big as this fossil would have protruded from the bone. A logo on one of the team's Land Rovers dates to the first Saharan expedition that Sereno led, in 1993. Fifteen vehicles made up the caravan during the most recent Niger mission. To make up for our initial delay in Agadez, we worked deep into the night excavating Ouranosaurus, relying on generator-powered lamps. Although the work was exhausting, round-the-clock excavation has its perks in the heart of the Sahara. Nighttime temperatures plummeted to half the day's 125-degree high. Insects attracted by our bizarre desert light show retired before midnight. All told, we would pack out two tons of Ouranosaurus fossils in just three days. Gadoufaoua hides its secrets under drifting, shifting sand: You might walk right past a hidden skull one year only to spot it the next. On an earlier visit, we had discovered a patiolike stretch of exposed sandstone that was packed, to a jaw-dropping degree, with the embedded bones of raptors, turtles, fish, and more—what paleontologists call a microsite. As I returned to Gadoufaoua, among the foremost questions on my mind was whether the microsite would be buried under deep sand, and if it wasn't, how we might carve it up and collect it. I held my breath as I neared the spot and saw a towering dune. But miraculously, just yards away from it, the microsite was exposed. And soon it was surrounded by awestruck paleontologists on their hands and knees, marveling at the sandstone-bound menagerie. We used a rock saw with the largest diamond-covered blade we could find to slice down, about six inches, into the bone patio, hoping to cut it into bricks we could carry out in our usual field jackets. But would the slabs separate cleanly? When the first one did, with little more than the tap of a chisel, my team whooped. I felt like Michelangelo at first, then like Darwin aboard the H.M.S. Beagle, knowing a million bones of unknown species were ours for the collecting. Painstakingly removing rock or sediment from around fossil treasures like these might require years of lab time. But there at Gadoufaoua, one of my team members submerged a block from the microsite in water, and we discovered to our amazement that the sandstone matrix softened instantly—meaning this trove could be freed with minimal effort back at the Fossil Lab. The thrill of that realization helped power us through six long days transforming the bone patio into 10 tons of jacketed slabs. We headed to our final site with only two weeks left in the field, feeling the pressure. Three years before, we'd come to this place, some 120 miles east of Agadez, after investigating a passage I'd read in a 1950s monograph. Its author, French geologist Hugues Faure, described an isolated site where he had found saber-shaped teeth, like those of the T. rex-esque Egyptian predator Carcharodontosaurus. With some effort, we had found his site and, along with it, plenty more teeth, confirming Faure's understanding of the beds as late Cretaceous, some 95 million years old. We might have left with nothing more than teeth if not for a serendipitous visitor to our camp. He wore a black trench coat, cheche head wrap, and sunglasses, with a Tuareg sword slung over his shoulder. His name was Abdul Nasser, and he offered to take us to a bigger bone field. As he led us deep into one of the Sahara's great ergs, or sand seas, over and between dunes, our Land Rover struggled to keep pace with his Honda motorbike. It was feeling like a fool's errand until Abdul pulled up alongside a thigh bone as long as I am tall. It clearly belonged to a skeleton; in every direction, there was more bone. Grace Kinney-Broderick, then a field assistant and a former fossil preparator in Sereno's University of Chicago Fossil Lab, brushes off a sauropod tailbone while members of the team's security detail look on. Truck-mounted guns were a precaution against bandits. With little daylight and fuel, we were able only to note the GPS coordinates of the place, called Jenguebi, and grab a few jaw pieces we assumed were from Carcharodontosaurus. But assembling the jaw back in Chicago, I realized the teeth and tooth sockets were all wrong. They belonged instead to the sail-backed predator Spinosaurus. It was the first record of one of these water-loving beasts found so far inland—and I suspected it was a new species. Our return trip to Jenguebi took us back across the erg. We hopscotched among rocky areas, each smaller than the last, as we traveled deeper into it. We set up camp near where we found the jaw pieces, and we'd been there no more than an hour when my colleague Dan Vidal, a seasoned paleontologist from Spain, came running toward me, eyes gleaming. 'It's here!' he said. 'The skull!' (What dinosaur has 500 teeth? This prehistoric jaw was one-of-a-kind.) I found much of my team gathered around a toothy snout jutting up from the rock. These were the first Spinosaurus skull bones found in place in more than a century. My colleagues stood, mesmerized, as the significance of the find sank in. Some even wept. A few hours later, Dan found me again. This time he held an unfamiliar, boomerang-shaped bone. It was a head crest, we realized, but a strange one, projecting upward to a degree never seen in predatory dinosaurs. And where the crest of an Egyptian Spinosaurus is a ridge, this one was shaped like a scimitar. While team members Jahan Ramezani (at left) and Vincent Reneleau handle lunch dishes, Sereno finds a patch of elusive shade alongside the kitchen tent. On coals made from kindling, the team's Tuareg guides boiled water for tea in the evenings. Knowledgeable local guides were key to the expedition's success. While the team excavated the skull, Dan, our photogrammetry expert, documented the emerging skeleton with digital photos—a much faster process than in my early career, when we'd have photographed a few key fossils and I'd have stood over others, doing shaded drawings. That evening, on a laptop in the tent, he presented us with a 3D image, made from the stitched-together photos, of the skull of our new tall-crested Spinosaurus. The team was awestruck. It wasn't our last spectacular find at Jenguebi. A few days later, an 11-year-old boy from a Tuareg family camped nearby offered to show us fossils he'd seen while wandering with his goats. Navigating complex terrain he knew by heart, he led us to site after site, some with little more than a lonely bone fragment. At the last site, however, was an impressive set of bones and teeth. The latter's saber-like shape left no doubt we had found Africa's first partial skeleton of a carcharodontosaurid. After cleaning and assembly, it will provide the first detailed look at Africa's line of these colossal predators. We returned to Agadez haggard, dirty, and triumphant, with fossils filling two 40-foot containers. On a truck scale, the results of our efforts weighed in at 55 tons, twice what many of us had estimated. I, meanwhile, was 32 pounds lighter. I was also elated, leaving Niger for Chicago and knowing that, in a matter of months, our fossils would soon make the same trip. Then one last hurdle arose, suddenly and unexpectedly, a few months after our return. A military coup toppled the elected government of Niger, putting the shipment of the fossils on hold. (How a trip through the Sahara reflects Niger's fragile state.) Veteran fossil hunter Agali Bazo, curator of a small natural history museum in the oasis town of Ingall, visits the site that the team nicknamed Sauropod Island. For nearly two years, the fossils from our expedition remained in limbo. Then this spring, I traveled to Niamey, Niger's capital, where I signed an agreement that will at last bring the fossils to Chicago. It also provides for their staged repatriation, and it establishes a blueprint to develop two new Nigerien museums to house them, along with an institute to train the country's next generation of museologists, archaeologists, and paleontologists. These initiatives will be overseen by NigerHeritage, a foundation I established in 2016. I first came to Niger for its fossils, for high adventure, and for the stark beauty of its landscapes and sunsets. But I've returned again and again because of my deeper motivations as a paleontologist—because I know that the significance of my work isn't ultimately measured in new species but by the impact those discoveries can have on the future of a nation. On the eve of our expedition, I had goaded my young team members by telling them this would be their chance to write a new chapter in Earth's history, something they'd have few opportunities to do in a lifetime. We now have troves of images, video, and data from the field, and we have presented findings to conferences and journals, including a paper on the remarkable tall-crested Spinosaurus species. Soon we will have the bones for close study, along with geologic samples to reveal their age. Next will come an outpouring of discoveries related to the Carcharodontosaurus, a dozen new sauropods, a digging raptor, an armorless croc, a giant 'SuperFish,' and other new species. We are poised to write that chapter, introducing others to Africa's lost dinosaur worlds, daring them to imagine what still lies beneath the surface. A version of this story appears in the August 2025 issue of National Geographic magazine. An Explorer since 1983, paleontologist Paul Sereno writes this month about the most ambitious expedition of his career. He is a professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago and runs the university's Fossil Lab, a research and education center.

What Happens in Sierra Leone's Mpox Outbreak Affects Us All
What Happens in Sierra Leone's Mpox Outbreak Affects Us All

Yahoo

time11-06-2025

  • Yahoo

What Happens in Sierra Leone's Mpox Outbreak Affects Us All

Sentinel scientists collaborating to sequence mpox samples Credit - Kat Kendon—Kendon Photography A dangerous mpox outbreak is unfolding in Sierra Leone. In just the first week of May, cases rose by 61%, and suspected cases surged by 71%. Roughly half of all confirmed mpox cases in Africa now come from this small West African nation. The virus is moving widely, across geographies, genders, and age groups. And the virus is changing. Genomic analysis has revealed a fast-moving new variant of mpox—called G.1—that likely emerged in late November. At first it circulated silently but has since taken hold and quickly began sustained human-to-human transmission. Cases have been doubling every two weeks. Estimates suggest more than 11,000 people in Sierra Leone may already be infected. This is how outbreaks become epidemics, and mpox, as a pandemic, could be brutal. Mpox (formerly known as monkeypox) belongs to the same viral family as smallpox. It causes a disease that can be painful, disfiguring, and debilitating, particularly in children. In Sierra Leone, nearly all patients present with severe rashes, and about a quarter have required hospitalization; in some, the disease has progressed to necrotizing lesions. It's no longer rare, no longer contained to the LGBTQ community, and it has already reached more than 100 countries. Read More: Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus: Global-health architect Sierra Leone has been here before, at the epicenter of a disease outbreak while the world looked away. In 2014, Ebola swept through the West African region. A single mutation supercharged its spread just as it reached Sierra Leone. Tens of thousands died. Health systems collapsed. The global cost soared into the billions. The lesson? Delay is deadly. As infectious disease researchers, we've lived that lesson. For two decades, we've worked alongside colleagues across Africa and around the world to build faster, smarter ways to detect and respond to outbreaks. We were on the ground during Ebola, Zika, the COVID-19 pandemic, and recently Marburg—plus, many outbreaks that never made the news because they were stopped in time. Together, we've built technologies that track viruses in real time and trained thousands of frontline workers to use them. What once took months, we can now do in days. And now, in Sierra Leone, we are putting that progress to the test. This time, Sierra Leone isn't waiting for others to step in to do testing and sequencing—it's leading. Within days of the outbreak's escalation, local public-health teams and scientists under the leadership of Sierra Leone's National Public Health Agency—working with international partners including ourselves—expanded testing, began sequencing the virus, analyzed its evolution, and shared data in real-time. They also launched robust social mobilization and contact tracing that are helping to slow the spread. To stay ahead of the virus, teams in Sierra Leone are using powerful new tools. One is Lookout, our real-time national platform that fuses genomic, diagnostic, clinical, and epidemiological data into a single cloud-based system. As more data come in, Lookout gives health officials a live, evolving map of the outbreak, showing where it's spreading, how it's changing, and where to act next. Lookout is just one example of the infrastructure that teams in the U.S. and Africa have co-created through decades of collaboration. It belongs to a broader system called Sentinel, an outbreak detection and response network we co-lead, launched with support from the Audacious Project, a collaborative funding initiative housed at TED. Sentinel is just one part of a larger movement: scientists, engineers, public health leaders, industry partners, and frontline workers working together to build faster, smarter systems to stop outbreaks before they explode. But even the best systems can't run without support. Earlier this year, the U.S. canceled all funding to Sierra Leone and halted a $120 million initiative by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) aimed at strengthening epidemic preparedness in the country. The Africa CDC, U.S. CDC, World Health Organization (WHO) and other organizations continue to offer vital support, but with far fewer resources than before. Philanthropic and industry partners, including the ELMA Relief Foundation, Danaher, and Illumina, have admirably stepped in, but they cannot fill the gap alone. Today, local teams are doing so much right—with nearly everything stacked against them. The warning signs are flashing. But their resources are running out. Read More: 'This is About Children's Lives': Gavi's CEO Makes the Case for Funding the Global Vaccine Alliance It's tempting to believe this isn't our problem. But thanks to collaborative sequencing efforts, we know the G.1 variant spreading in Sierra Leone has already been detected in at least five patients across multiple U.S. states—Massachusetts, Illinois, and California—and in Europe. It may seem distant—like COVID-19 did at first—but it's not. Yes, vaccines exist, and they are expected to be effective against this new variant. But supply is limited, distribution is deeply inequitable, and the vaccines themselves present challenges—from limited clinical data and uncertain duration of protection to storage requirements—that make large-scale campaigns far from straightforward. West Africa has received only a fraction of the doses it needs. Without both vaccine access and real-time tracking, we're flying blind. Surveillance isn't a luxury. It's our first and best line of defense. Sierra Leone is showing the world what preparedness looks like. But it shouldn't have to stand alone. We can wait—again—until the virus spreads further. Or we can act now, support the leaders in Sierra Leone already responding, and get them the resources they need—like diagnostics, clinical support, vaccines, sequencing reagents, and frontline outbreak response—to save lives and cut this outbreak short. We've seen how the story of viral outbreaks can unfold. This time, with the present mpox epidemic in Sierra Leone, we still have a chance to change the ending. Disclosure: TIME's owners and co-chairs Marc and Lynne Benioff are philanthropic supporters of Sentinel. Contact us at letters@

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