Quirks and Quarks - The environmental costs of nation-building, and more…

Episode Date: November 28, 2025

On this week’s episode: a mini tyrannosaur is a new species, ants redesign to avoid illness, toxic lead gave humans the edge over Neanderthals, invasive fish are evolving to avoid eradication attempts, and how big mining projects — and attempts to hurry them along — can spell bad news for the environment.

If you sold somebody a loaded gun who you knew was in a vulnerable state and they shot themselves. I think it is murder. Just because you're using the internet doesn't mean you get away with murder. I'm Damon Fairless, host of Hunting Warhead. This season, I take you inside the business of suicide, and the places desperate people go when they can't find what they need in the real world. Hunting the Suicide Salesman. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.

This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Bob McDonald. Welcome to Quarks and Quarks. On this week's show, the curious case of smaller Tyrannosaurs. This changes everything we thought we knew about T-Rex. And the environmental price of opening up our northern peatlands for business. When we make any type of alteration to the amount of water in those soils, we have the chance to release that carbon back out into the atmosphere.

Plus, germ-wary ant architects redesign their living space, the evolutionary advantage of lead, and the unexpected outcome of eradicating invasive fish. All this today on Quarks and Quarks. Nobody move a muscle. That's the sound of a Tyrannosaurus rex from Jurassic Park 3, spotting a group of people and then stomping after them. They'd be an easy meal for the T-Rex if they're caught.

It's just so massive, and the humans so pitifully small. The king of the dinosaurs has long been a favorite since the first Tyrannosaurs Rex was discovered in Hell Creek, Montana, over a hundred years ago. But not all Tyrannosaurs dug up in what is now Western North America were as huge as the ones brought to life in Jurassic Park. Some were curiously smaller. And that became a real head scratcher for paleontology. who long wondered, are these smaller specimens simply young teenage T-Rexes, or a new Tyrannosaur species altogether? Well, now, after decades of debate, paleontologists think they've solved it, thanks to a spectacular game-changing fossil called the Dueling Dinosaurs.

Dr. James Napoli is a paleontologist at Stony Brook University in New York and the co-lead author on the new study. Hello and welcome to Quarks and Quarks. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. Dueling dinosaurs? That hints at some kind of drama here. Tell me about this fossil. What's it look like? These fossils are absolutely incredible. They are two of the most beautifully preserved dinosaurs I have ever seen, preserved right next to each other and almost fully articulated. So both skeletons are nearly complete, and they look like they would have looked basically as these animals died. Wow. The Tyrannosaurus preserved on its back with its legs curled up. It's a very little.

very dramatic fossil. And what's the other one? The other one is a triceratops, and the triceratops is preserved more or less on its side. So were they actually dueling at the time, do you think? That's a question we're still trying to answer. We know that these fossils were buried at the same time as one another, but we don't know if they died at the same time. It's possible that they were both killed in some cataclysmic event. It's possible that they were actually fighting each other to the death and happened to die in a place where they could be fossilized. It's possible possible that the triceratops was already dead and it was being eaten by the Tyrannosaur when both of them were buried. We just don't know for sure yet. So why then was this Tyrannosaurus

such a game changer? Well, this Tyrannosaur turned out to be the answer to a decades-long scientific debate, which is whether these fossils are juveniles of Tyrannosaurus rex, everybody's favorite dinosaur, or whether they were members of a completely different species of Tyrannosaur that's been called nanotaranus. Nanotaranus? Yes. Small Tyrannosaur. Exactly, exactly.

And that tells you why we thought these might be juveniles of T-Rex. They're about half the size of T-Rex at maximum. Okay. So I'm trying to picture that. How big would it be if I was to stand beside it? If you were to stand beside this animal, it would be about seven or eight feet tall

when its head was held up very high, and it may have been about 20 feet long. Wow. So I'm sorry, I'm American. I speak in. I speak in feet here. Meters-wise, I think there's two to three meters tall and about four to five meters long. So how did you solve the debate about whether or not it was a teenage T-Rex or a new species?

We used a lot of different kinds of evidence to make that decision. The first thing that we looked at were just the features of its anatomy. We saw that its arms were abnormally long for a Tyrannosaur, much longer than the arms of even the biggest T-Rex specimens we've seen. Its hands in particular were very, very large, and it had a huge hooked claws on a each of its fingers. We also saw that it had a vestigial third finger, unlike T-Rex, which just has two fingers on each hand. In its tail, there were about 10 fewer vertebrae than T-Rex had, and in its skull, we saw many more teeth in its jaws and a bunch of features showing that the cranial nerves and blood vessels and sinuses were in different positions than they are in T-Rex

adults. And so all of those things told us that we were probably dealing with a different species, but what clinched it for us is that when we took a section of one of the leg bones and looked at it under a microscope, we were able to look at its growth record. So we could see a complete record of the animal's growth from its early childhood to its eventual demise. And what we saw is that at the moment it died, it was in the process of forming a feature of the bone microstructure that we call an external fundamental system, which just means that the lines of growth, just like the rings in a tree, were spaced very close together, telling us that it was achieving maturity as it died. So this is an animal that died right on the cusp of full maturity at the

cessation of growth. It was not able to keep growing up into a T-Rex not only because of all the differences we saw, but because it was done growing at all. Oh, I see. So it wasn't a teenager. That was as big as it was going to get in its life. Exactly. It wasn't a teenager. Now, in terms of years, it was close. It was about 20 years old when it died. But we've been previously assuming that these were teenagers in terms of their development and that they were far from their adult size. And we don't think that's true anymore. You say it had longer arms and bigger claws and hands than the Tyrannosaurus rex. So what would give this animal an advantage? So the long arms and hands and claws of this animal probably tell us that it was still using its

four limbs in hunting to some degree. Animals like T-Rex were much larger and had much smaller arms, and so we think they had switched over to hunting purely with their head and jaws. Nanotaranis probably was still using its hands to some degree. Nanotaranus also had the longest legs relative to the size of its body of any tyrannosaur. And so we think that this was a tyrannosaur that was more specialized for chasing down fast-moving prey, rather than T-Rex,

which we think may have specialized in hunting slower-moving, more heavily protected prey, like T-Seratops itself. I've heard T-Rex described as a mouth with legs. I think that's a pretty good description. Yeah. Would these two species have lived at the same time? Yes, they would have.

So nanoturanus and Tyrannosaurus rex co-existed in the same ecosystems in Western North America. These are rocks of the Hell Creek formation, as we call it in the States. It's equivalent with a few rock units in Canada, and so we think it's all effectively one ecosystem. And so they were probably, to some degree, competitors in that ecosystem. So does that mean there were even more Tyrannosaurs around than we thought? It does. And in fact, there's a twist that means there were even more than we thought when we were finishing the study. So as we approached the end of our research, we said, okay, we have Tyrannosaurus Rex and we have Nanoturanus. Landcensus is the species name. But we looked again at a famous fossil of nanoturanus that's housed in the Burpee Museum of Natural History in Illinois.

And we found that it had a number of subtle but consistent differences with respect to every other nanotanus. specimen that we'd found. And as we found more and more of these differences, we just said we never would have thought this, but there's actually another species of nanoturanus that's been hiding right under our noses. And so it wasn't just one becoming two, one became three. Boy. It was very exciting, yeah. That's another good reason that humans weren't around at that time, because if the big one didn't get you, a little one would. Indeed. And I think these little guys were much more in the size range where they'd look at humans as a good meal. We're probably too small for T-Rex to bother with too much. But for a nanotaranis, I think we'd be just the right

size. Well, now that you've settled this decades-long debate, what's it mean for our understanding of the Tyrannosaurus that roamed around was now called Western North America? Well, that's a really good question. In short, this changes everything we thought we knew about T-Rex. We had thought for a long time that T-Rex had such abnormal growth with its juveniles looking so different from the adults and staying as juveniles for a long time because the juveniles were doing something completely different in the ecosystem, that they were hunting different kinds of prey to avoid competing with the adults. Now we know that that idea was based on the mistaken identification of these fossils as T-Rex juveniles. And so that's only one of a multitude of scientific hypotheses

that were based on something that we now know isn't true and that need to be revised as future generations of paleontologists continue to question what we thought we knew about everybody's favorite dinosaur. Dr. Napoli, thank you so much for your time and congratulations on solving the puzzle. Thank you so much, Bob. It was a pleasure to talk to you today. Dr. James Napoli is a paleontologist at Stony Brook University in New York. Remember back in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, how we all had to get used to the idea of social distancing and self-isolating to curb the viruses spread? Well, we humans aren't the only animals to alter our social dynamics to put distance between healthy and infected individuals. Back in 2021, we spoke with a scientist about ants

that employ similar strategies to limit their colony's exposure to infection. Well, now in a new study, it turns out that ants take this idea even further by redesigning their living space to protect their colony. Dr. Luke Lecky is a system's biologist at Indiana University in Bloomington who led this research. Hello and welcome to our show. Hello. First of all, describe what the living space in an ant colony is like when all the ants are healthy. The ants dig these nests underground, the intricate, beautiful structures comprised of tunnels

which interconnect different junctions and chambers where the ants store for younger ants, for nurses and larvae, and then entrances, obviously, where they, the nest meets the outside world, may come in and out. Wow. Well, how did you study what happens to the ant colony when they encounter a deadly infection? We had these soil-filled containers, and we introduced the ants to these containers, and we allowed them to dig for about a day, and these were groups of about 180 ants. And then for some of those ant groups, we introduced further group of ants, about 20 ants, which had been exposed to this fungal pathogen, which killed the ants and is quite dangerous to them. So essentially it sticks onto the surface of the ant, and it can transmit between them just by contact,

so if they bump into each other. And generally within a few days, it will kill them. and once it's killed the ant or another insect, then it will kind of sporulate. So, you know, when you see a mushroom, which is producing these spores, it's kind of like that. So on a dead ant, it will produce all these spores. And then if another ant then bumps into this ant, then it can become exposed and the cycle can kind of restart. Wow.

Well, how did the other ants react when you introduced this infected ant to the colony? There was a number of changes. So as you mentioned in the introduction, we kind of already knew that they changed their social organization in response to these pathogens. But then we also found a number of changes to the actual structure of the nests, which should reduce the disease transmission.

So the nests of the pathogen exposed ants, they had entrances but was spaced further apart. So this kind of should reduce, the rate of interactions between ants as they're coming into and out of the nests, right? Because you can imagine if entrances are close together, then you're likely to interact with another ant as they're coming in and out, and so transmit the disease. And then we found a number of changes to how the kind of network structure of these nests

kind of laid out. So we found that they're repositioning their tunnels in such a way that it takes longer for them to get from different points of the nest. So on average, the travel routes are longer in the pathogen exposed ants. We also found that the nests were more compartmentalized. So you can imagine that there's different kind of compartments in the nest, and it's hard for them to get from one part to the other. And so it's also hard for the disease to get from one part to the other. So you're saying that the ants actually changed the architecture of their nest. the architecture of the tunnels.

Yeah, exactly. And not just the tunnels, we also found some changes to the chambers. This is where they keep their younger ants, which are kind of higher value. You know, they've got their whole lives ahead of them, right? And they could be vulnerable.

And so we found they also place their chambers, so there are less direct connections between them. So you can kind of think of this as, you know, in our societies, when we have airports, if there's a direct flight between two very big airports, it's really easy for disease to travel between them. But if you have to get a couple of direct flights between them,

then it should be much harder for disease to travel between. What can we learn from this ant behavior in dealing with pathogens? I think what's interesting about the societies of ants, if we're comparing them to humans, is that like us, they've also evolved to balance, the optimising, ensuring these kind of efficient flows of information, of food, of resources across their group. But they also want to limit disease transmissions. So these two things are actually in conflict because if you're allowing the fast flow of resources, then you're also

allowing flow of disease as we've seen. So I think it's interesting because they've evolved over millions of years to balance this trade-off. So maybe we can look to them in that respect. Apparently in Canada, they're now building apartment buildings. So there's not one atrium where everyone meets when they're coming in and out, which can focus interactions and you can get disease transmission there. But they're actually having kind of more multiple entrances and exits from a building to kind of reduce this risk.

So that's kind of an index. direct inspiration, I suppose. Dr. Lecky, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Dr. Luke Lecky is a systems biologist at Indiana University in Bloomington. Lead is a soft, silvery gray metal that we use to use in a lot of products, like paint, gasoline, and plumbing. That is, until we discovered how toxic it is and ban most of it.

The World Health Organization says there's no safe limit for this toxic metal. long-term lead exposure can cause cardiovascular issues and kidney damage. Lead can also leach out of the bones into the blood, stunting fetal growth during pregnancy, and lead to permanent damage in children's nervous systems. Well, now it turns out that lead, while toxic, may have given humans an evolutionary advantage that enabled our ancestors to survive when so many other ancient hominage went extinct. Dr. Allison Muotri led the team that made the discovery after studying 51 different hominid fossils. He's a professor of pediatrics at the School of Molecular Medicine at University of California, San Diego.

Hello and welcome back to Quarks and Quarks. Thank you. Thank you for having me. First of all, tell me about the fossils you studied. What were they? Yeah, so these are mostly hominine fossils from different types of humans that exist. and they are no longer living with us. So we analyze about 50 fossil samples. These are tooth from these hominids, and they were all spread out through Asia, Europe, and Africa.

So, yeah, it contained many different species, including closest relatives, such as the Neanderthals, and old homo sapiens. Well, how common was lead exposure in these fossils throughout their lifetimes? Yeah, that was a great question. and totally unexpected. We use a very simple laser ablation.

So this is kind of a perforate the enamel of the tooth and allow us to kind of boil these heavy metals out so we can run through a mass spectrometry and identify the amount of different heavy metals in there. And the level of lead and based on the rings of the enamel allow us to conclude that this was not a... a contamination coming from the external sites of the sites where these samples were found. But rather, the lead contamination was coming from within.

The contamination was coming from the body of these samples. Wow. So lead actually gets embedded into the teeth. That's kind of a scary thought. I mean, I know that they didn't have lead pipes and things like that. So where would their lead contamination come from? We don't know for sure, but some of these fossils were found inside caves. So our best hypothesis is that our ancestors were looking for caves to escape from heavy winters or animals or dangers,

and how convenient would be to find cave with running water. It turns out that running water inside these caves contains lead, so most likely they were contaminated by drinking water. Okay, so you've discovered that the... these ancient hominins had lead in their bodies. How did you relate that to how it might have affected their evolution? So we noticed that most of the contamination happens very early on, even like prenatally or early infancy when these were like kids

and persisted throughout life. So that was interesting. So there were always some basal lead contamination going on. And it turns out that there is one specific. gene that affects neuroprogenerator cells upon lead contamination in a gene called Nova 1. So people have noticed that Nova 1 orchestrate a downstream cascade of genes that respond to lead. And interestingly enough, Nova 1 is one of the genes that contains a genetic variant that is specific to modern humans. This means that we have a mutation that no other animal, including the Neanderth,

or Auster Lopithecus or any other hominine contains that same genetic variant. So we are unique genetically by the morphology of Nova 1 during our neurodevelopment. So how did you test how these different versions of Nova 1, the one that we have in our modern bodies and the ancient one, and how that would affect brain development and how it responds to lead poisoning? Fortunately, we have a tool that is based on stem cells that we call a body. brain organoid, and they represent or they mimic neurodevelopment in the lab, in a dish. So what we did was to swap or to replace the modern version of Novo 1 in some of these

neurot tissues by the archaic version that is present in the Neanderthals and all the other hominids. So now we have two different versions of a brain organoid or a mini brain in the lab, one carrying the archaic Nova 1, and the one carrying the monies. version that we all have. And then the experiment was the following. Let's expose these brain tissues to lead and see what happens. And that's when we figured out that both of them respond to lead by activating Oval One as we would expect it. But there is something quite unique that happens in the archaic version of this brain tissue, which is the toxicity observed in neurons that are related to language. This is what we call.

P2 neurons because they express this other gene that is part of a complex with NOVA 1, that it is responsible for a cortical talamic loop allowing us to develop sophisticated language. Okay, so let me just see if I got this right. You expose these organoids, these mini brains, to the two different versions of Nova 1, and that that affected Fox P2 that's related to language development, how did it affect the Neanderthals compared to us? So we speculate that by having a genetic variant that protects the neurons that are responsible for sophisticated language,

that gave us an advantage. Language, as we know, is our superpower. So you can imagine if you are trying to hunt something, And you need to strategize, you need to discuss where each one person of the community would be positioned to actually hunt like a large animal. So the Neanderthals would be in a severe disadvantage compared to modern humans who could use language to strategize and communicate what's happening in real time. Oh, I see. So in other words, Nova 1 protected this Fox P2 so that we could develop language. but in the Neanderthals, it did not protect it. It changed the Foxp2, so they could not develop language like we did.

That's exactly it, yeah. So in a way, we were favored by evolution by having that mutation. But evolution creates mutations all the time. You need the selective pressure to keep that mutation fixed in the pool of genes in our population. And the contamination by lead was exactly that. pressure. So all humans now contains this genetic version of Nova 1, whereas no Neanderthal ever had that before. Now, there have been some critiques of your work that you made with this study. They're saying that you didn't have enough individuals. How could we be sure that everyone was

exposed this way that would affect our evolution like that? Yeah, that's a common shortcomings or common limitation of most of these evolutionary studies. Yeah, it is true. We don't have that many individuals. As I mentioned, we study about 50 fossils. It is hard to conclude many things, but we are building the story here. I see this as a piece of evidence. And again, allow us to formulate these hypotheses, which we have some evidence, but it's far from bring truth. We don't know what is the real truth. Dr. Muotri, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. My pleasure.

Dr. Allison Muotri is a professor of pediatrics at the School of Molecular Medicine at University of California, San Diego. I am an actor, fresh out of theater school with big dreams and an even bigger drug habit. But things are pretty good. That is, until my best friend is set up on a date with David Lee Roth. Yeah, from Van Halen. If you know, you know. From CBC's personally, this is Discount Dave and the Fix. The true-ish story about how a fake rock star led me to a real trial that held up a mirror to me.

And okay, let's just say that not everyone in this story is who you think they are. Personally, Discount Dave and the Fix. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Bob McDonald and you're listening to Quarks and Quarks on CBC Radio One and streaming live on the CBC News app. to the local tab and press play wherever you are. Coming up later in the program, when the best-laid invasive species eradication plans go awry. The smallmouth bass after the electrofishing suppression got underway actually showed much higher growth rates. Here's a riddle for you. What do you

when you try to control an invasive fish by removing a quarter of their population from a lake every year for 25 years. You'd think their numbers would go down, wouldn't you? Well, that's certainly what scientists thought would happen to the smallmouth bass fish that invaded Little Moose Lake in New York State. The fish were out-competing the native trout species. But instead, the scientists found themselves in an unexpected evolutionary arms race that threw a wrench into even the best laid eradication plans. Dr. Liam Zari led this study while he was at Cornell University, he's now a postdoctoral fellow of conservation genetics at Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington, D.C. Hello and welcome to our show. Thank you very much for having me.

First of all, tell me about the smallmouth bass. How did it get into the lake in the first place? Smallmouth bass are a very popular sport fish, and they've been introduced all across North America and in locations around the globe to provide sport fishing for anglers. Now, we don't, we don't don't know exactly how they got into Little Moose Lake. That being said, we know they are introduced around the 1940s, potentially as part of what we would call a bait bucket introduction. So that's leftover bait at the end of a fishing day. But we do know that by the 1950s, they had come to dominate the local food web in Little Moose Lake. Well, how much of a problem did the smallmouth bass pose for the native species in the lake? Well, they're highly piscivorous, so they're fish-eating fish, and they're very voracious.

So they had eaten through a lot of the native fish food web, as well as much of the native crayfish. Lakes that have smallmouth bass introduced to them, they very commonly come to be taken over. Oh, I see. Is that because they go after the same species, the same prey species as the trout? Lake trout, which are also a very popular game fish and the species that we were trying to manage for, they start off their life by eating small invertebrates on the bottom of the lake and zooplankton in the water column. But they grow very slowly when they're eating these insects. And they only start to grow quickly and reach these enormous sizes that anglers like to fish for, several feet long. if there's abundant fish in the lakes such that the lake trout can switch from eating insects to eating fishes.

But because the small mouth had eaten through a lot of the native fish biomass, minnows and other species, there wasn't ample forage for the lake trout. And so the lake trout essentially became stunted. So what did you do to try to lower the numbers of the bass? So the suppression got underway in the year 2000, and the scientists at the time decided to use a method called boat electrofishing, which essentially is putting a generator on the back of a boat, putting around the edges of the lake, and sending electrical shocks into the water. And what this does is it immobilizes all of the fish that come close to the boat, and this allows us to scoop them up. And they're just temporarily stunned. So if they're native species, then we can take some basic measurements on them and put them into the live well to be released later.

If they're the small mouth bass that we're trying to remove, then they go straight into the cooler. And in this way, this suppression measure of boat electrofishing serves both to remove the small mouth bass, but also gives us an index of how all the native species are doing as well. So how did the bass respond to these eradication attempts? Well, in the first few years, the bass population started to decrease. And we actually saw a quick, positive response in the native food web. So that's native fishes. And we also saw a increase within a few years of lake trout growth rates,

indicating that the lake trout were starting to eat fishes and that our management goal for this lake was achieved. And although the lake. trout growth rates continued to increase through time. After a few years, it became very clear that the smallmouth bass population had actually increased following the initiation of boat electric fishing as opposed to decreasing like we would have expected. Really? Their numbers went up. Even though you were taking them out of the lake every year, their numbers went up. How was that possible? What did you do to find out what was going on? Totally. It was an ecological mystery. And this is why I became interested in studying this for my PhD. Now, there were a few other scientists who looked at

this in the mid-2000s because it's a fascinating ecological phenomenon. And what they identified is that there was essentially what's called ecological overcompensation going on. And that's when you increase the mortality on the population, that that population actually increases in population size. And how that happened with the small mouth bass is we removed many of the large old fish that were the dominant predators in that lake. And that left many more resources for the younger, smaller bass to be able to boom in population size. So we replaced a population of relatively older, larger fish with many, many, many more smaller fish. Ah. So had you actually changed the fish the themselves, or was it just their size? The fish that we saw were primarily younger. We shifted the

population from an older population to a younger population, but the smallmouth bass after the electrofishing suppression got underway actually showed much higher growth rates. So although they were younger, they were growing much more quickly because they had access to more resources. And we also saw a shift in the reproductive investment. That's the percent of a fish's body mass that is its reproductive organs. And what we saw is that through time over the decades since the year 2000, that reproductive investment has increased year after year after year. So what it looks like is that they're actually investing more and more energy into reproducing as early as possible.

Well, what went through your mind when you realize what a curve, ball evolution through this lake. Totally. I mean, it's always amazing in the ways that nature is able to respond to the changes, even dramatic changes, like us removing 25% of the fish from this lake every year. Nature always finds a way. So what's this tell you about efforts to suppress the encroachment of invasive species through eradication? Well, it's been documented for,

quite some time that invasive species suppression efforts and eradication efforts, they commonly don't work. The best way to deal with invasive species is really just not to let them in in the first place before they can do a large degree of ecological damage. But if a suppression or eradication effort is something that does need to take place and making sure that we're collecting data as we go, because without the foresight of scientists in our lake going all the way back to the 1950s, there would have been no way to uncover how this vast population was changing in response to our suppression efforts. Nature always finds a way. Absolutely.

Dr. Zari, thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. Dr. Liam Zari is a postdoctoral fellow of conservation genetics at Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington, D.C. If you've been watching TV or listening to the radio lately, you may have caught this government of Ontario ad. As Canada faces economic uncertainty, we have a plan to secure our future, and it starts in the Ring of Fire. The Ring of Fire is a vast 5,000 square kilometer crescent-shaped area in Ontario's far north that's rich in the kind of minerals we need for a green energy transition. The region has an estimated $60 billion worth of minerals like nickel, copper, platinum, zinc, gold, and palladium. The Ontario and Canadian governments point to the ring of fire as an integral part of curbing our carbon emissions

to make electric vehicle batteries, solar panels, and wind turbines. But this is just one of many big projects that are part of Prime Minister Mark Carney's new nation-building strategy. to open Canada and our resources up for business in the name of Canadian sovereignty. What the world wants is Canada to be the reliable supplier of critical minerals as the world moves to building a more sustainable economy. Unlocking these resources through projects in the Ring of Fire in Ontario, in Quebec, and Labrador, and right here in the Golden Triangle in northern BC, this will attract hundreds of billions of dollars in new investment and create thousands of high-paying, not just jobs, careers.

Part of the strategy includes a one-project, one-review type of streamlined approach. Ontario Premier Doug Ford also recently announced they'd like to speed up the permitting process. That could mean drastic changes to the way we do environmental assessments for major projects like this. Premier Ford. We need the federal government to end its impact assessment in the range. a fire, which are only duplicating the amazing work of our First Nations partners and slowing down, getting shovels in the ground. So what does this all mean for how we're going to protect the environment, to balance the economic

benefits with environmental sustainability? Well, the team of researchers from Delhousie University in Halifax has been studying the issue of environmental assessments. They just released the first national database tracking these assessments. in Canadian mines and quarries over time. Dr. Alana Westwood led the project. She's an associate professor at the school for Resource and Environmental Studies at Delhousie.

Hello and welcome to our program. Thanks for having me. First of all, what purpose do these environmental impact assessments serve when it comes to mining? Mines in most jurisdictions in Canada have to go through an environmental impact assessment process. And what this means is that the proponent of the mine,

usually a company, submit documents on a timeline that are subject to scrutiny by government regulators by the public and by indigenous communities and organizations. There's prescribed legally required public consultations. These might be town halls, online consultations, mailouts, notifications, and opportunities for people to get involved, have their feedback heard. And then the government regulators review the plans and ensure that the proposed mine is in the public interest before it goes ahead and assigns conditions that the mine needs to meet in order to be approved. So what's changing now with this one project, one process program?

It's still in the process of unfolding. We don't know exactly what it's going to look like. There's a few things. One is more agreement between the feds and the provinces. So we looked at minds that were assessed by more than one regulator for the same project. And we found huge discrepancies in what was reported for project size, project footprint, lifespan. Sometimes the project that was submitted to one regulator was literally twice the size of what was submitted to the other regulator. Are they even assessing the same thing? Which mine gets built? What's the actual project and the actual impact that the public is trying to scrutinize and decide if it's going to be acceptable? So part of the plan, and that's in the works, is more of

these cooperation agreements between the feds and the provinces to get aligned so that They're collecting the same information and doing things together rather than these duplicate processes that have these really odd and concerning discrepancies. So they just want to streamline the process, in other words? That's the idea. There's a difference between efficiency and speed. And we identified in our research, there's a lot of good places to increase efficiency. But increasing efficiency can't come at the cost of rigor and an informed public. So, for example, a lot of these documents submitted to impact assessments.

assessment are hundreds and thousands of pages long with more thousands of pages of appendices. So an individual member of the public, you know, members of First Nations who are reviewing all these projects as they're being consulted, they just don't have time in 15 or 30 days to do a really meaningful review. So that is definitely something that, you know, the governments right now who are trying to do all this streamline need to be thinking about. If you're rushing things, you're not including people properly, there might. be hell to pay after. Well, tell me more about your database.

Why did you want to create it to look at all of these assessments? Because of exactly what you're talking about right now, Bob, with this moment of efficiency, streamlining, we thought if we're going to be trying to speed these assessments up, we really need to look to lessons learned from the past. So let's look at all of this 50 years of wealth of environmental assessment that we've been doing. And as we were trying, we just couldn't find these assessments. documents that are supposed to be legally available to the public. And in many cases, we couldn't even find information about projects themselves. So we had to go to the drawing board and we used

access to information requests. We sent hundreds of emails. We scoured online registries where we had to click through 2,000 different links and see if that was a mining project that applied in order to just come up with a list of what mines and quarries had been proposed in Canada. So what kind of trends do you see with these mining? operations over time? So mines are getting bigger. They're getting a lot bigger. We're starting to see in the last 10 years what we call mega mines proposed. And these are on scales that are some of the largest in the world. We're also seeing a trend towards critical minerals and precious minerals and away from coal, thermal coal energy sources. And when we look at the size of recent mines, I just want to

kind of contextualize this. So we've all been watching the Blue Jays play. And, probably seen those Ring of Fire ads while we were doing that. If you think of the size of the Rogers Center, some of these mines are 800 times that size. 800? Holy smoke. Well, what kind of environmental impact would that have? So we know that mines can have impacts for thousands of years. When you look to evidence from mining in Europe, we see ongoing what's called acid rock drainage and other kinds of contamination that have lasted thousands of years. Of course, those were using very different methods than we're mining now. But we do know that tailings, so those are kind of the waste, the waste rock, either what's called wet or dry tailings, are in the order of hundreds of years to reclaim, at least.

So we really need to be thinking about if we're putting these giant holes in the ground, plus all the associated infrastructure like milling facilities and roads and worker camps, we really need a solid long-term plan to make sure that that area is reclaimed and restored in a way that especially, doesn't affect groundwater. Groundwater is one of the biggest concerns in terms of pollution. And then, of course, biodiversity, you know, the area that you are extracting from is going to have all of the habitat removed. So if there's species at risk, if there's sensitive habitats, how are you going to mitigate the effects of that? Well, northern Ontario is boreal forest. Yeah. So all of that forest, you know, will be removed for the mine itself. And there are, we have technologies to, try to minimize and mitigate these impacts. And that's what the purpose of environmental assessment is, is to scrutinize, okay, is the scale of what's proposed to minimize and mitigate these impacts

and then restore after the fact, is it appropriate for the type of mine, for the setting of the mine, for what the local community wants? That's part of it. But part of it is also economic and social impact. So we know mining can lead to boom and bust economies, right? Look at the oil stands in Alberta, coal in Nova Scotia. So part of this is we are at least supposed to be evaluating economic impacts, positive ones, not just for the lifespan of the mind, but can the community survive ongoing? Can we do monitoring that perhaps indigenous guardians or local community are engaged in that monitoring and paid to do that? Because right now most of these mines, which are these huge footprints, lots of material extracted, are only proposed for

lifespans of anywhere from 15 to 30 years. So that's one generation. But wouldn't we like it if something this big with this big of an impact can also support our grandchildren? So these are the kinds of lenses that impact assessment let us think about if it's not rushed through. So in the end, who tends to benefit the most from these mines? In the past, most of the mining that's been happening in Canada goes to multinational conglomerates or non-Canadian enterprises. There is more movement to try to have indigenous co-owned or partly indigenous-owned mining operations, indigenous-led impact assessment. There is more thought going towards kind of how do we support keeping the money in and best. benefiting local communities. And that's the part that I'm a little bit concerned about. I haven't

really seen this connected in these new movements from government. We're seeing legislation federally in different provinces saying, let's get these things built faster. But I'm not seeing the through lines of exactly how does this benefit local communities. How do we ensure sustainability of jobs for generations? Who's going to take care of these minds and clean them up when they're closed. We have over 10,000 orphaned and abandoned mines, mines quarries and wells in Canada that the taxpayers are on the hub floor. How do we make sure that doesn't happen? And also, where are these commodities going? The arguments being made, we need them to make solar panels. We need them to make electric cars. Okay, but who's going to make them and where are they going to be made? And is it going

to be by Canadians? And what are the supply chains? Because I'm not seeing evidence that that exists yet. So where is the parallel effort to make that happen? Dr. Westwood, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Dr. Alana Westwood is an associate professor at the school for resource and environmental studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax. So there are the direct environmental effects from mining and indirect effects to both our shared climate and the critically important peatland ecosystems to consider. And this includes the terrestrial. and northern reaches of many provinces, where many of the mining developments are slated to go.

The Ring of Fire region alone holds about 35 billion tons of carbon in the peat, and the area, though sparsely populated with First Nations communities, is currently inaccessible by road. But that may soon change, as agreements were recently signed to build the first roads to the area that's more than 500 kilometers northeast of Thunder Bay. To get an idea of what the future could hold for undeveloped peatlands like this across our country's north, we don't have to look very far. The vast majority of our southern peatlands have already been disturbed by agriculture, industry, or mining. Dr. Maria Strach studies what these disturbances mean for greenhouse gas emissions and the ecosystems as a whole. She's the Canada Research Chair at the University of Waterloo.

Hello and welcome to our program. Hi, I'm glad to be here. Now, just briefly, can you describe what makes our peatlands unique and important from other ecosystems in Canada? So peatlands are wetland ecosystems, and that wetness really slows down the rate of decomposition. So these peatlands then accumulate organic matter, which is really rich in carbon. But most of that carbon is stored in their soils. So how sensitive are peatlands then, like the ring of fire? to develop it?

So one of the key things that allows those peatlands to do their job is that they're wet and have very little nutrients. So when we make any type of alteration to the amount of water in those soils, we have the opportunity or the chance to release that carbon back out into the atmosphere. So we're going to disturb the ecosystem and it's not going to be able to function the way it was before. Okay, well, let's take one example. What would happen if we start to build a road through these northerly peatland areas? Yeah, so roads often, as we've seen in other places, for example, in Western Canada, where we've had a lot of development related to oil sands

mining, when roads are placed on top of the peat, they start to act like a bit of a dam. So you have to imagine that you want to build a structure that's going to be able to support the vehicles driving over it. And we do that by placing a lot of mineral fill or basically rocks and then build the road on top of that. All of that then starts to squish that wet soil down and acts like a bit of a dam. So we often see wetting on one side of the road where we get a lot of flooding, maybe those marsh-like conditions you were first picturing, and then drying out on the other side of the road. So what does that do say on the wet side? So on the wet side, if there were trees, if it was a forested peatland, those trees won't be very happy now that they're all flooded, and we often see them dying back.

Those wet conditions, on top of all this really carbon-rich soil, also allows for the production and release of more methane, which is also a potent greenhouse gas. Wow. And what about the dry side? On the dry side, now we'll see that the peat is no longer protected, or the organic matter in the peat is no longer protected by being wet. So we see that the soils dry out. We start to have higher rates of decomposition, and carbon is being emitted as carbon dioxide on that dry side of the road.

Well, is there a way to minimize the impact of roads? Like, can they make lots of culverts and bridges so the water can move from one side to the other? We've done a bit of work on culverts, and we do see that that can minimize some of the impacts locally, but not all. You'd need really a lot of culverts. There are also opportunities to maybe build the roads out of more permeable material that may allow the water to continue to flow, or to build the roads on piles, for example, or, or, or more like a bridge. One of the reasons that's often not done

is that these are very long roads in quite remote areas, and that's going to add a lot of cost to those road building projects. What about fire? Because I know in places like in Ireland, they use Pete as a fuel source. Yeah, that's a great point. So Pete being really rich in carbon also makes it an excellent fuel source. Often, though, peatlands have been relatively well protected from fire because they're very wet.

So it's difficult to burn them. As the climate changes, we're also seeing drying of peatlands across Canada, and this is increasing the risk of fire. But when we think about development, that drying that we can see around infrastructure like roads can make those dry sides more susceptible to fire. But also, when we bring people into an area that was previously remote, we just increase the chance of human-started or human-ignited fires. So what's your greatest concern with the idea of opening these northern undisturbed peatlands up for business? Peatlands are ecosystems that are developing over very long time scales. the carbon that is currently sitting in our northern peatlands has been accumulating for thousands of years.

So one of my biggest concerns is that once we disturbed these ecosystems, once we lose them, we have no way of getting them back. We can restore some of the function to the ecosystem, but we will be losing these beautiful ecosystems that, to me, are, to me, are magic. They're storing a history of thousands of years in their soils, and we will lose that and be unable to get it back. Well, on the other side, developing these areas could generate a lot of money and a lot of jobs. So do you think there's a way to balance the economic benefits of mining in the area, along with environmental stewardship? I think we always need to think about the wise use of the resources that we have.

So we should recognize that the development of these areas brings a lot of opportunities. As you mentioned, it can bring jobs and economic development. It also brings access to remote communities that could be very important for bringing all sorts of resources to those communities, lowering the cost of transportation of goods. So when we develop in a peatland-rich area, we know that this, There will be carbon emissions if we disturb that peat, and those emissions need to be included in our decision-making and accounted for in our national greenhouse gas emissions.

Dr. Strach, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Dr. Maria Strach is the Canada Research Chair at the University of Waterloo. Well, we're getting ever closer to Christmas, and you know what that means? Another holiday listener question show. And we need your science questions. Shirleyne Smith and Ryandale BC sent us a timely question about comets, but we need more.

So dust off your scientific curiosities and send them our way, and we'll see if we can get an answer for you. And that's it for Quirks and Quarks this week. If you'd like to get in touch with us, our email is Quirx at cbc.ca. You can find our webpage at cbc.ca.com slash quirks, where you can read my latest blog or listen to our audio archives. You can also follow our podcast, get us on SiriusXM, or download the CBC Listen app. It's free from the App Store or Google Play. Quarks and Quarks is produced by Rosie Fernandez, Amanda Buckowitz, Livia Diring, and Dan Falk. Our senior producer is Jim Leibons, and our acting senior producer is Sonia Biting.

I'm Bob McDonald. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.