Science Friday - Utah National Monuments, North Carolina Coal Ash, Asteroids. Sept. 28, 2018, Part 1

Episode Date: September 28, 2018

Back in December, the Trump administration announced reductions to two of Utah’s national monuments: Grand Staircase-Escalante, which runs from the Grand Canyon to Bryce Canyon National Park, and Bears Ears, newly established by the Obama administration just a year before. The reduction opened up nearly 2 million acres of previously protected federal land to fossil fuel and mineral exploitation, angering Native Americans, for whom the land is historically and spiritually significant, as well as environmentalists, archaeologists, and paleontologists.   Then, just this week, it was announced that a group of lawsuits to reverse the cuts would remain in federal court in Washington, D.C., rather than move to Utah, a decision the plaintiffs are celebrating. As the legal process continues, scientists are waiting to see what will happen to the newly excluded acreage, which still contains hundreds of thousands of sites they consider important. Will the Department of the Interior open the land completely to oil and gas extraction? And what specimens—ancient dinosaurs, mammals, fish, and more—could be lost? Two paleontologists and a law professor discuss the implications.  After Hurricane Florence hit North Carolina, historic flooding caused several dam breaches late last week—leading to a coal ash controversy. Now, an ongoing disagreement ensues between environmentalists and industry representatives about the levels of coal ash in the Cape Fear River near Wilmington, North Carolina. Last week, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, also known as JAXA, landed two rovers on the asteroid Ryugu. The Hayabusa2 mission will explore the surface of the asteroid, blast an impactor into it to study the core, and return to Earth with samples. And, Science Friday video producer Luke Groskin talks about his visit to a lab where scientists are mixing up recipes for asteroids here on Earth to help researchers test rovers for future missions. Plus, geologists and archeologists debate a new potential geologic age, starting around 4,200 years ago.  Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Iroflato. Coming up, the endangered fossil treasures of Utah's newly slimmed-down national monuments. We'll talk about the potential loss of important fossils at Grand Staircase and Bears' ears. But first, there are around 100-named ages in geology. You know all those, if you're a geologist, my heart goes out to you to remember all of these. And now a recent proposal wants to add a new one, dating around 4,200 years ago. It has set off a debate between geologists and archaeologists about what the ancient world really was like back then. She's going to mean now to talk about that and other selected short subjects in science.

Is Annalie Newitz. She's science journalist and book author based in San Francisco. She joins us from KQED. Welcome back. Hey, thanks for having me. I know this is one of your favorite subjects, Anna. Right, right? Yes, it is.

So what is this debate about? Who is saying we need a new geological age and why? Tell us in on this. So we actually do have a new geological age. It's called the Megalayan Age. It's named after a state in India. And as you said, it starts about 4,200 years ago, and it goes up into the present. And it's been the source of incredibly bitter debates between geologists and archaeologists,

because the way that geologists decide that there's a new age on Earth is that they have to identify some kind of huge event that's changed the ecosystems of Earth to kind of justify, like, all right, now we're in a new age here. And so some of these events are things like ice ages or, you know, a meteorite hitting the Earth, things that we recognize is kind of catastrophic. So for the Megalayan age, what geologists argue is that there was a global drought that affected the course of human civilization. Because remember, this is a period when we actually have human cities and writing and people are kind of doing their thing. and what archaeologists are saying is, no, actually, we don't really have evidence that there was a drought that was altering civilization. Wow. So it's like the farmers and the cowboys should be friends.

I mean, so what evidence do they advance that there was a global drought? So most of the evidence really does come from archaeological sources. And so in some ways, the debates around this, and there are many debates that I won't even get into here, really boil down to how do the physical sciences and the social sciences talk to each other about data? And so what we see are, there's evidence in the written record that cities were abandoned in the Middle East and in North Africa during this time. We have evidence for a lot of political instability in a lot of these places. And so geologists look at that and they combine it with evidence from the sort of, from Earth science records. and they say, look, this was obviously a civilization-changing event, but archaeologists say no.

They say actually a lot of these written records are poems that were written in the form of lamentations that were just typical of the time. These aren't really people going through a catastrophe. They're just sort of writing poems in ancient Egypt, like in the style of like emo music today. You know, they're just sort of feeling sad. And a lot of these urban abandonments that we see, for example, in the Middle East, weren't really people. abandoning civilization, they were just moving, they were migrating. And so we see civilization transforming, but was it really enough of a catastrophe for us to say that we're living in the Megalayan age now? That's going to continue to be a huge debate, especially when you add in

questions about whether we should be in the Anthropocene, which is a different age where, you know, human civilization has changed enough of the earth that we can say, all right, maybe we're in a new age. So that's a whole other debate. And that kind of gets into this as well. But they're saying that they're across the whole globe, Egypt, other places, we're all in this transition at the same time. So that's what geologists want to argue. And the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which is the group of geologists that controls time by making these names, they're saying that this was all sort of at the same time. Archaeologists are saying actually no, even the written records show that this was really a period of about 200 years.

So we can't really find a causal link between drought and civilizational collapse. It may have just been kind of one of those correlation doesn't equal causation moments that we love in science, where just because you have political instability doesn't mean it's caused by drought or the environment. Something new besides the planet Pluto to argue about this week. Exactly. Nothing better than names for our geological time unit. Speaking of names, in other ancient history news, I know there's new work on Mayan societies.

That's kind of interesting. Yes, this is something that I'm super excited about. It's one of the biggest discoveries around Maya civilization in the past decade. There was just a LIDAR survey done in one of the areas of sort of the greatest, the greatest extent of Maya civilization in northern Guatemala. And so what that means is that scientists flew over. over the top of the trees in that area and used LIDAR, beaming lasers down onto the planet,

to look through the tree cover and see the remains of things like ancient structures, ancient roads. So they found over 6,000 new structures attributed to the Maya during this late classical period, which is about between like the 600s and the 900C.E. And so what that means is that the Maya weren't just building fabulous sites like Tikal, which was actually in this LIDAR survey, these sort of isolated cities that we've heard about from kind of Maya history. They actually were spending a lot of time living in what amounted to suburbs. They were living outside the cities.

And they were engaging in incredibly sophisticated intensive agriculture outside the cities, which were linked by a massive agriculture. outside the cities, which were linked by a massive network of roads that were also uncovered through this LIDAR survey. So now we have a picture of the Maya as not these people who kind of hunkered down in these walled cities, but actually a lot of them lived out in the suburbs and were farming and were not necessarily part of these intensive city states in the way that we once thought. So it's like a modern megalopolis, like Baltimore or Washington, maybe they had their own beltway. Yes, they may have. It was basically a big sprawl. Wow. And you know, we've seen

novels and we've seen people, you know, the city of Z, that kind of stuff where they went looking for giant civilizations because of rumors. Maybe they really existed. Yeah, or maybe they really should have been thinking about where to find the suburbs and where to find these farms. Instead of looking for lost cities, look for lost suburbs in northern Guatemala. And you learn a lot more about the Maya civilization. I'm going to quote you on that, okay? Let's look for a lost suburb. Thank you, Annale. Thank you, Annale, Newitt, Science Journalist, and a book author based in San Francisco. She was joining us from KQED. That's time to check in on the state of science. This is KERNO. St. Louis Public Radio News. Iowa Public Radio News. Local science stories

of national significance. Hurricane Florence and its aftermath brought a widespread flooding to the Carolinas and beyond, and you know all about that. And adding to the heartbreak of all that water was the potential release of wastes, a flood of coal ash into the Cape Fear River was the fear. And the coal ash isn't quite like the harmless white ash from your charcoal grill. It contains elevated levels of arsenic and other heavy metals, and it needs to be contained. Joining me now to talk about this is Jason DeBruin. He's a data reporter at WUNC.

He stationed in Durham, North Carolina. Welcome to the program. Ira, nice to be with you. Hey, nice to have you. So it tells us, what is coal ash? Where is it? What is the story about? Well, you said it at the top.

It's not like the charcoal asht that you might find in your grill, but in fact contains quite toxic, heavy metals, including arsenic. And, you know, of course, we need to burn coal to create electricity. That's one of the great advances over the past maybe half century or so. But we didn't realize that it. came with this quite dangerous byproduct. And so now we're dealing with that. And so what happened in this case?

So we don't know exactly what happened in the Cape Fear yet on a molecular level, but what we do know is that floodwaters from Hurricane Florence basically barraged these two holding ponds that hold back ash and then also sort of a retaining pond that's next to it to protect the ash basin from the Cape Fear River. with all these heavy floodwaters that we got, there was a breach first into that first berm that holds back sort of the cooling water and then later into the second berm

that holds back the waters for the coal ash pond. And so with all of that water running in from the Cape Fear River, you had all the waters mixing together and then, of course, exiting out the bottom end and obviously the fear there is that coal ash then mixed with the lake water and then mixed ultimately with the river water downstream.

So do we have any evidence that the ash did get released into the river? So what we know is that Duke Energy has done its tests and has said that its tests are conclusive that there were not elevated levels of arsenic in the water. Now, of course, environmentalists like with the Waterkeeper Alliance have been out on the water and they say that they have seen ash in the water. Now, I actually went out with them on Saturday, and I was in a little boat with them on the river, and also saw what, to my eye, looks to be like coal ash. They've taken water samples, they meaning the waterkeeper, they've taken water samples, but they're still waiting on those results. Don't have those back yet. And, of course, also we're still waiting for state regulators who also took samples. Again, don't have those results back yet, though.

It could have affected any other river, this coal ash? Well, it's interesting that you should ask that because just a few, literally about an hour and a half ago, we got a word from the Waterkeeper Alliance that, in fact, there are elevated levels of arsenic in a different river in the Noose River that's also here in North Carolina and near a little town of Goldsboro. So that is near a different Duke Energy plant. And the similar situation, Duke Energy said that its tests were conclusive that there were not elevated levels of arsenic. but now we do have water tests back from the Waterkeeper Alliance, where they say that, in fact, there are elevated levels of arsenic. In fact, 18 times what is allowable.

Now, there's some discussion about where tests were taken, where tests were, you know, what labs they were studied at. Of course, Duke is throwing water. Well, pardon the pun. Duke is saying that the test from the waterkeeper are biased. Of course, the waterkeeper says the test from Duke are biased. Here again, even though we do have tests from the, from the environmentalists, we don't have tests yet back from state regulators to the Department

of Environmental Quality. Still waiting on those. And, of course, if they were, then Duke might be liable for that action there. And we'll keep watching. Exactly. They potentially could be. Yeah. Jason DeBruin.

Yeah, thanks very much for happening. You're welcome. Data Reporter at Public Radio Station, WUNC. We're going to take a break. We're going to come back. The story is not over for Utah's whittledown national monuments. What paleontologists want to save from potential mining and drilling? in those national monuments

toward some of them myself last week. We'll talk about it after this break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Southern Utah is a treasure trove of fossils. Two national monuments store volumes and volumes. I guess I should really say layers and layers

of the history of life on Earth. Ancient fish mammalian ancestors and the latter days of the dinosaur, much of still untapped by scientists. But much of that treasure is now threatened. After the Trump administration shrank the monuments last December, nearly 2 million acres of rocky land that once belonged to bears' ears and grand staircase Escalante National Monuments,

2 million acres are now once again outside their protections, vulnerable to oil, gas, and uranium drilling, and like pages in a book at risk of being ripped out of the record. That land is in limbo right now, as the Department of the Interior takes comments on draft management plans. Whether the territory is opened entirely to mineral and fuel extraction or protected somewhat from pillaging remains to be seen. But in the meantime, paleontologists like the archaeologists, environmentalists, and Native American tribes, who all have very vested interest in the monuments, everyone, everything, we're all in limbo.

And here to explain the treasure trove of Utah's fossil record and what might be at risk are my guests. Let me introduce them. Dr. David Polly, Professor of Paleontology at the University of Indiana at Bloomington, and President of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks for having me. Dr. Stuart Sumita, Professor of vertebrate paleontology at California State University. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you. And of course, let me shout out to our listeners. Have you been to Grand Staircase or Bear's ears? Our number is 844-7-24-8-255. 844 SciTalker, you can tweet us at SciFRI. Let me ask you, David, give us the paleontologist's eye view of these landmarks.

What makes them so valuable to science? Oh, there's a couple of things, and the two monuments are a little bit different in that. Grand Staircase Escalante has a quite complete sequence of the Mesozoic era, which is commonly called the Age of Dinosaurs, though the oldest part of it is older than the dinosaurs themselves. And it's been studied intensively as part of a national monument for 22 plus years now. And it's completely revolutionized the way we think about the latter part of the era of dinosaurs. Bear's ears is geologically a bit older than that and covers some of the early life on land and then sort of transitions up into the Mesozoic era. And in the

It has not been as intensively studied, partly because it's relatively new as a national monument, but there have been bits and pieces of it studied for a long time and has probably the same potential as Grand Staircase for telling us new things about Earth's History. Let's talk about some of those new things. Dr. Samita, you worked out in the area that was at least for a year, part of Bears'ears National Monument. What have you been digging up? Well, as David said, the kinds of animals that we find there are somewhat older than the dinosaurs,

as the rocks there that we've been exploring range back to as much as 60 million years before the earliest of the early dinosaurs. And those kinds of animals include the first animals that not only got out on the land, but stayed out on the land. Animals came out on the land long before that, but they didn't become independent of the water until about the time period represented in the southern part of bears' years. And this also includes a group called the synapses, which is the lineage that led to mammals like. like you and me. So we have a deep, deep history going down through Grand Staircase all the way down into the Bears years when it comes to our own lineage. I was out there myself last week at just about this time, and I want to know it's also

an incredibly beautiful part. It is a stunning, stunning area. Most people are familiar with the areas just south of that, like Monument Valley. You can literally see Monument Valley from some of the southern edges of the Bears. year's National Monument designation, but those, of course, are tribal lands, belong to the Navajo Nation. David, let's dig in deeper about some of the most important fossils that have come out of these monuments so far and what remains there to be discovered.

It's hard to put your finger on a most important fossil without going on for an hour or two. Some of the original fossils that led to the Grand Staircase being proclaimed a monument are not spectacular to look at, but they too are part of our own deep history as humans because they represent some of the earliest mammals. And some of the finds in what is now Grand Staircase are some of the intervals where mammals were first diversifying into what we now call placentals. and marsupials. And Grand Staircase was the only place in the world

that preserved some of those time intervals with fossils in it. And ironically, some of those sites for which the monument was created have now been excluded from the monument again. And, of course, there was a giant inland ocean there, right? At some point in the history of North America. And might there be fishes and kinds of skeletons of those? Oh, yes.

Yes, one of the extraordinary things about especially that late Cretaceous sequence, the last part of the era of the dinosaurs, is that not only does it preserve a lot of dinosaurs, but it preserves all sorts of animals, fishes, lizards, amphibians, mammals, birds, turtles, crocodiles. It's taught us a lot about how those ecosystems worked. And Stuart, what do we understand differently because of the fossils found in bears' ears? One of the things we're understanding is how some of these changes took place. Fossils that we see in museums are often the most spectacular ones, which is a fine thing to do, of course, and they're often the most complete. But when we bring the entire record together, what it's telling us is not only what was there, but how they adapted to different kinds of changes, how they finished getting out of the water. and staying on the land, how they interacted with their environments. And this is not just anecdotal information. This is how we think about how we're going to be interacting with our environments as we go forward.

It's all a part of a deep history that goes all the way up to today. Let's talk about what was cut, what was divided up. 85% in case of bear's ears got excluded. Is that correct? Tell us about that. The right number. Yeah, Bear's ears was... Do you want to do that, Stuart?

Sure, Bear's ears was originally designated by the name of that particular rock formation that looks like a couple of Bears' ears, but that's just a very, very small part of the entire monument. The monument stretches southward almost to the border between Utah and Arizona, and it was a very exciting time when we realized how much would be protected and preserved. But now, ironically, because it's been unprotected, not only is it not being preserved in the way that we would have hoped, but it's now had attention brought to it by people who didn't know about it and people are going and exploring looking to take advantage of it. It's a sad irony, actually. And what about the Grand Staircase? How has that been divided up? It's been divided in a slightly more complex way.

So what was a single monument, there's now three smaller monuments inside of it, and sort of chunks taken out on the north side and the south side, in some cases in the center. And using your analogy of pages of the book, some of the oldest parts of the Mesozoic history have been cut out almost entirely. some of the intervals in the younger part, in the last part of the age of dinosaurs, have been completely cut out. So, for example, there's one unit there called the Tropic Shale, which is a sort of black shale of the sort that shale gas exploration is done in.

It's one of the few units from, and when I say unit, what I mean is bed of rocks that's from that ancient sea that you mentioned. And it has some really spectacular marine fossils, some of them, the third. things like the Mosasurs, which are sort of the dolphin-like reptiles or lizard-like reptiles that swam in the ancient seas. And it records a really interesting extinction event where the Earth's seas were depleted of oxygen and caused a major extinction of some organisms and sort of arisal of new ones that replace them. So these are very, very important places to be preserved, is what you're saying. Yes. And part that I was told is unprecedented in Grand Stank case is that it was taken actually out, one part of it.

The third part, one third of it has been taken out of the National Park Service? Not the National Park Service per se. All of it's administered by the Bureau of Land Management, which is a separate agency within the Department of Interior. But national monuments, I think probably what you're referring to, national monuments are automatic. included in something called the National Conservation Land System, which is a sort of funding system within Department of Interior, and particularly the Bureau of Land Management, for sort of preserving and developing the resources that are on, that needs special conservation and scientific things are one of those. So any of the parts of the monument that were excluded, presumably in the future, will not be eligible for that kind of money. And that means that a lot less research will be done there. I want to bring on another guest now to talk about a lawsuit and the legal protection of scientific sites.

John Rupel is a professor of natural resources law at the University of Utah. Welcome, Dr. Ruppel. Hi, Ira. I want to just in full disclosure, all three of my guests are, to some degree, involved in the lawsuits to undo the cuts. And we did reach out to Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to join us, but he did not take us up on our request or provide us with a statement. I just want to make sure we are clear about that. John, the lawsuits argue that the president does not have the authority to cut monuments, even though he does have the authority under the Antiquities Act to

create them. Why shouldn't he be able to do both? Well, the argument is fairly straightforward. It's It's essentially that the ability to create a monument is a one-way valve. If we step back and we think about the president's authority, we have to ask where it comes from. And it has two possible sources, either the Constitution or a statute enacted by Congress. When we look at the Constitution, the property clause is very clear. It gives Congress the power over public lands, and there's no comparable grant of authority to the President and the Constitution. So when we look at what Congress has done, we start with the Antiquities Act. It's the statute that allows the President.

to designate these national monuments. And nowhere in the statute nor in the congressional debate leading up to its passage was there a discussion of the ability to reduce or eliminate national monuments. So the question becomes, what does silence mean? Do we read that silence as empowering the president? And there's some problems with that. First of all, the founding father set up a constitutional structure that granted the power over public lands to Congress. And to read an implied power in that essentially upsets that balance is, I think, very, very disturbing to some of us that are concerned about the structure of our government. But when we step back and we look at what the Antiquities Act was designed to do, it was passed in 1906 because archaeological resources

across the Southwest were under threat. They were being looted. They were being damaged. And Congress realized that it simply wasn't nimble enough to identify all of these threatened sites to designate them and come up with management protection, so it allowed the president to step in its shoes and fill that function and to do so fairly quickly. So there was a need for the president to act quickly and unilaterally to protect landscapes. There was no comparable need to act quickly to undo them. So there was no reason for Congress to give up this power. And if we look at what Congress has done on public lands writ large over the years, on multiple occasions they've given the president the power to protect other lands. Often when they do that, they have also given him the power

to revise or undo those designations. They didn't use that language in the Antiquities Act. That choice of language, I think, has to be interpreted as purposeful. The third reason I'd point to is that over the years, Congress has repeatedly taken up legislation that would empower the president to revise National Monument Boundaries. Every time it has, those bills have failed. Now, I think that tells us two things. One, it tells us that Congress was aware that the President lacked these powers, and two, that Congress was very reluctant to cede that authority. And finally, my fourth point is that in 1976, Congress passed Flipma, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, which is really the foundational law for public land management.

enacting that law, Congress repealed about 300 statutes specifically dealt with the president's authority over public land. So it's very clear at that point in time, Congress was trying to reassert its authority and rein in any expressed or implied authority the president may have over public lands. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. We're talking about the National Monuments in Utah, and my guess are all experts on the subject. We have folks on the phone. Let me see if I get a call in there, too, before we go to the break. Let's go to Isaac in Charleston, South Carolina. Hi, Isaac. Hey, thank you for taking my call. This is a really interesting discussion.

Go ahead. So I'm a geologist. I've studied extensively throughout the Great Basin Central Nevada and did field studies in southern Utah. I do have a question regarding to the way that these parts were fragmented. It seems to be that, you know, especially the one that was broken into three pieces, it was either very deliberate or it was just kind of like, you know, cut here, cut there. Was it done because the people responsible for drawing the lines knew of what sort of mineral deposits or gas deposits or anything with potential for mining or exploration? out there. And what can we find? I know there's a... Let me get an answer because we're

running out of time. John? Have any insight to that? The short answer is when both President Clinton and President Obama created the original monuments, they withdrew the land within those boundaries from future mineral development. When President Trump cut the boundaries, he opened most of that land

to new applications for oil and gas development or for mineral mining. And there has been a lot of interest in coal within what was formerly the grand staircase, within uranium mining in Bersers, and with oil and gas across that region. If we look at what is happening, if we look at the lawsuits, one of the points the plaintiffs made is that since 2013 oil and gas developers have submitted what are called expressions

of interest on over 105,000 acres within Bersers' ears. If we look back to March, the BLM sold oil and gas leases in southeastern Utah on over 51,000 of land. There's a December lease sale coming up again in southeastern Utah near Berzer's covering another 45,656 acres. So these are lands that are not necessarily within the Berzer's National Monument, but they're very close. And I think they give us an idea of the interest in those lands. And the Washington Post, by the way, has done some excellent reporting on the connection between the oil and gas industry and uranium industry and these reductions. All right, we're going to come back and talk lots more about these.

Our number 844-724-8255 with my guest, David Pauley, Stuart Sumida, and John Rupel. 844-724-8255. You can also tweet us at SciFri. Stay with us. We'll be right back. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're wrapping up our conversation about the future present and extremely distant past of the Grand Staircase

and Bears' Year's National Monuments in Utah after the trumpet. administrations scaled back their size, excluding nearly two million acres of land. That's rich with fossils and which paleontologists say could revolutionize our understanding of life on Earth. I have a couple of paleontologists with me as my guest today, David Polly and Stuart Samita and a law professor, John Rupel, our number 8447248255. You can also tweet us at Cy Fry. Stuart, what is the practical effect for scientists of a National Monument-Deges?

for this kind of land? Well, as David mentioned, different administrations of these kinds of lands then fall under different purviews. So proper scientists always document what they do, and we are always permitted to do what we do.

So even determining who's in charge and whom you ask permission to do your work has an enormous... It's enormously affected by the designation. As David said, there's a difference between the Bureau of Land Management versus the kind of administration you have with National Monument Protection. And it also impacts whether or not we can simply afford to do it. Funding agencies and foundations are to borrow an economic phrase uncertain about what's going to happen.

So they're all a little bit resistant about whether or not they're going to fund activity there because they don't know what's going to come of it. And it also makes getting volunteers to work with you somewhat more difficult. Let me see if I go get a phone call in before we have to leave. Let's go to John in Moab, Utah, right out there where it's happening, right in the room where it's happening, John. Welcome to Science Friday. Hello. Hello, Ira. Yes. Well, my comment is I've been operating bicycle tours and the monuments, both the Grand Staircase and the Bears ears for 20 years.

and originally when the Grand Saircase was designated, there was certainly a lot of concern as far as the economic benefits, that mineral extraction was going to be removed. And over the years, this has been a great boon to the communities of Escalante in Boulder, Utah. And moving forward, the Bears here has somewhat a similar potential. But overall, you know, taking people out there, them to the monument, you know, and, you know, the history, they're awestruck. And this is certainly, in my opinion, as far as the removal and reduction of the size of the monument,

it is about, you know, the mineral extraction and those players, what the influence they have. It's written on the, clearly. David, the people really care about this in Utah, don't they? Yes, they do. and in both directions. There are a lot of people who are around there in Escalante and Boulder and some of the countries are cities close to Grand Staircase, and those cities have really grown from the monument.

And I can say that I know of at least 200 paleontologists who have visited there, and that's just a fraction of the sort of people who visit. And the mineral resources were mentioned, with the exception of the coal, the mineral resources there, especially in Grant Staircase, are fairly marginal. In fact, some of the documents released by the Bureau of Land Management effectively said that. So the value of the land as a wilderness and as science, et cetera, seems to be much greater than its value for other things. John Ruppel, is someone who lives in the area and works there. I'm sure you have your own opinions about the value of your neighborhood. Do you know when any of the drilling might start?

Search for minerals out there. The ability to go out and start drilling for oil or natural gas. There's a long permitting process that must begin. So some of those lands on the borders of bears areas have already been leased. We're seeing some activity in that area, but there's a long process that that operators have to go through before they can begin drilling and producing oil and natural gas. So we'll be watching closely to see if that activity encroaches on the monuments, but it's too early to say when it will happen or exactly what it'll look like. Is there a public comment period, or comment to the, you know, to Secretary Zinke about all of this?

There is for the monument management plan. So both agencies that, I should say, in the case of Bearsers, it's co-managed between U.S. Forest Service and the BLM at Grand Staircase. That's managed by the BLM. Both agencies were directed by President Trump to develop management plans for what's left of these two national monuments. They're going through that process right now. They have provided a draft monument management plan and environmental impact statement, the preferred alternative for both of those monuments,

calls for really minimizing restrictions on development of the land within the boundaries. And that's in addition to reducing the protections on the lands that were cut from the monuments. But you can go online, you can review the draft monument management plans, and you can provide comments. I believe the comment deadline is November 15th for both of those. All right. Thank you very much. That's all the time we have.

John Rupel is a professor of natural resources at the University of Utah. Dr. David Polly, Professor of Paleontology at Indiana State University at Bloomington and President of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. Dr. Stuart Sumita is Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology at California State University. Last week, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, or Jaxa, landed two rovers called Minerva 1A and 1B onto the asteroid Ryugu, the first successful landing on an asteroid ever. However, Hayabusa 2, the spacecraft had carried these rovers, crossed millions of miles during its three-year trip. But for the Jaxa scientists, the journey was much longer than that.

Over a decade ago, the original Hayibusa missed its target asteroid. Hitoshi Kuninaka, who is now the director of the Space Exploration Innovation Hub Center of Jaxa, was an engineer who worked on the ion propulsion systems for both missions. We spoke to him, and he says the problem with the initial mission may have. have been that it was manually controlled by engineers here on Earth. And then so in case of the Hayabusa 2 mission, we changed the operational philosophy from the manual to automation, release of the robotics, fully controlled by onboard computer, instead of the manual operation from the ground. After the long effort and the lot of the

experiments, we are very, very happy. Indeed they are. The Jackson scientists were successful, by learning from their previous mistakes. But Kunayaka says to complete understand asteroid, completely understand asteroid, is going to take a bigger effort. NASA is also executing Osiric's mission to go to the asteroid venue. So, the Jaksa's approach and the NASA's approach and the European approach will make new region of the space science, especially the asteroid science, cooperating each other. Hitoshi Kuninaka, now director of the Space Exploration Innovation Hub Center of Jackson,

who is an engineer on Hayibusa missions. Here to tell us more about Hayabusa, too, and what this means for asteroid science is Bruce Betts. He's chief scientist at the Planetary Society in Pasadena. He's worked on creating instruments for space missions and author of Astronomy for Kids. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks. Good to be here. Nice to have you.

We heard from Dr. Konanaka mentioning the change in philosophy between Hayabusa 2 and the previous mission. What other changes did they make? They improved some of the things that they had issues with on Hayabusa, so their propulsion was more powerful and more reliable. Their antennas were modified. Their attitude control system and navigation systems had upgrades. And then they added in a bunch more things to drop off the spacecraft and do cool stuff from little hoppers to something that shoots the surface and excavates a crater. So this is not like a Mars rover that we put up.

These are little hoppers. Explain what that means. So they've got different sizes, but they range from kind of twice the diameter of a hockey puck but a similar shape, which is what they've deployed two of that are on the surface now. up to about a large shoebox size that's called mascot that's from the German space agency, along with the French. And basically, you've got this really low gravity of the asteroid, so wheels won't get any traction. If they do, you might end up launching yourself off never to come back. So they have things inside the spacecraft, like a turntable inside one of them, that they rotate rapidly, and that causes a torque that flips the hopper up, and then it floats, sort of,

and comes back down in a few minutes in the low gravity up to 15 meters away. It's like what you do when you ride your bike. You get the bike wheel spinning, and it creates torque in a different direction. Exactly. And that's how they're getting around on the asteroid. How many places, you know, how big is it? What do they want to learn there? So the asteroid's about a kilometer, half mile in diameter, and it's what's a so-called C-type asteroid, carbonaceous.

In other words, it's got more carbon-rich than other asteroid types. And we think it's one of the most primitive types of asteroids. So it's really a leftover from solar system formation. So what they want to study, among other things, through sample return and through the landers, is not only what this asteroid's like, but also to extrapolate, particularly regarding the carbon-rich materials, the organic materials, and also water-hydrated minerals, basically to understand what the implications are for the early formation of the solar system of the Earth, including the building blocks of life and how they came to Earth in terms of carbon molecules and water.

How was the Jaxa approach, the Japanese approach, to missions different than the American NASA plans for their missions? They have a lot of similarities, and they're doing a lot of testing and trying to ensure mission success. In this case, and in some cases, the Japanese missions will add some additional experimental technologies. perhaps more than NASA does on average. It varies mission to mission. So having these hoppers, having a deployable mechanism that fires a bullet at two kilometers per second into the asteroid to expose material underneath, having a little free-flying camera that takes a picture of that while the main spacecraft hides behind the asteroid,

all of these are more high risk, but not necessarily mission risk. activities that they've come up with, and they've done it in previous missions where they come up with the basic mission plus fun gizmos to test out. I always like those fun gizmos. This is science speaking of which. This is Science Friday from WNIC Studios. That's terrific to hear about that. Here to tell us more about that. Hyobusa 2.

I want to thank you very much, Bruce, for taking time to explain all this stuff. Oh, my pleasure. Bruce Bats is chief scientist at the Planetary Society. in Pasadena. And Hayabusa, too, is expected to deliver the asteroid samples back to Earth in late to 2020. But for scientists who want to study asteroids before that time, or need more than just a few handfuls of samples, what are they supposed to do?

Well, you can cook up your own asteroid. That's the subject of our latest macroscope video. You can watch the video on our website, ScienceFriiday.com slash cooking asteroids. And Luke Graskin, our video producer is here to tell us the recipe. Hi, Luke. Hi, Ira. Sounds like a very fun video. Yes, it's a little bit somewhere between, you know, asteroid science and cooking.

It's a cooking video. It is. It's a do-it-yourself recipe. What's in your recipe for cooking? Well, Ira, you ever baked an apple pie? One of my favorites. Right. Have you ever baked a $2 billion apple pie?

No, I don't have that budget. Right. Most people don't. But NASA kind of does, well, when you consider that their pie could be an asteroid sampling mission or like Jackson's recent mission. And before you do that, you want to test out all this gear. And in order to do that, you need to make sure that you've got good flour, good crust. In this case, you're dealing with asteroid simulants. So there's a startup in Central Florida called the Deep Space Industries, and they cook up asteroid simulants.

They use basic minerals. They put them in through mixers, and they bake them, kind of exactly like cooking. And they produce simulants that scientists can use to test their equipment. Well, how do they know, we know what our ingredients should be making a pie? How do they know what ingredients to put into this? Well, they don't know for sure because, you know, there hasn't been any missions to these asteroids to get it. But they do have meteorites, and they can look at the consistency, the minerals inside the meteorites. And then they can also use data from NASA and ESA and Jaxa to get an estimate of how much carbon, how much water, how much, how many, how are these asteroids put together?

and then they can bake it up and then have a recipe. So the University of Central Florida actually puts out these recipes, and you can actually see what's in what they think is inside these asteroids. You know, I always ask this question, don't you? You know what's coming up? Oh, yes. Can you do this at home? Well, you could do this at home if you had cement mixers,

if you had several microwaves that you're willing to destroy with hours and hours and hours of microwaving minerals. if you had a drying room a lot of time and in a really, really, really enormous pressure cooker, which they called the cronsetite bomb because they thought it could explode at any given time. It didn't explode, but they cooked up some minerals that were some of the rarest on Earth using the special pressure cooker. So they can use this to test out space mining, for example, right? You're saying this is test. If you want to go to an asteroid and we don't know what it's meant,

made out of, you can make this recipe and fill around with it yourself. The ultimate goal of de-space industries is space mining, is to basically harvest asteroids so that you can make rocket fuel or a nice habit space house or, you know, all sorts of materials that you could use because it's cheaper to space mine than it is to launch all that stuff into space. But before you can do that, you have to know what's in those asteroids. And before you do that, you have to practice. You have to practice.

You know that. Yes, exactly. My mother told me. Exactly. That's how we're getting to Carnegie Hall. Yes. All right. Thank you.

Luke Gresk in our video producer, and you can watch his latest macroscope video on our website at Science Friday.com slash cooking asteroids. Charles Berkowitz is our director, senior producer, Christopher and Taliata. Our producer is our Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, and Katie Haller. Technical Unengineering. Help, of course, always from Rich Kim and Sarah Fishman. We are active all week on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all of social. social media. If you have a smart speaker, yeah, you can ask it to play Science Friday whenever you want. So, you know, every day now is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato in New York.