Widespread glasses generated by cometary fireballs during the late Pleistocene in the Atacama Desert, Chile

Twisted and folded silicate glasses (up to 50 cm across) concentrated in certain areas across the Atacama Desert near Pica (northern Chile) indicate nearly simultaneous (seconds to minutes) intense airbursts close to Earth’s surface near the end of the Pleistocene. The evidence includes mineral decompositions that require ultrahigh temperatures, dynamic modes of emplacement for the glasses, and entrained meteoritic dust. Thousands of identical meteoritic grains trapped in these glasses show compositions and assemblages that resemble those found exclusively in comets and CI group primitive chondrites. Combined with the broad distribution of the glasses, the Pica glasses provide the first clear evidence for a cometary body (or bodies) exploding at a low altitude. This occurred soon after the arrival of proto-Archaic hunter-gatherers and around the time of rapid climate change in the Southern Hemisphere.

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Plant pathogen responses to Late Pleistocene and Holocene climate change in the central Atacama Desert, Chile

Scientific Reports ◽

10.1038/s41598-018-35299-2 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 8 (1) ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Jamie R. Wood ◽

Francisca P. Díaz ◽

Claudio Latorre ◽

Janet M. Wilmshurst ◽

Olivia R. Burge ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Late Pleistocene ◽

Plant Pathogen ◽

Atacama Desert ◽

Holocene Climate ◽

Holocene Climate Change

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The repeated replacement model – Rapid climate change and population dynamics in Late Pleistocene Europe

Quaternary International ◽

10.1016/j.quaint.2010.10.015 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 247 ◽

pp. 38-49 ◽

Cited By ~ 82

Author(s):

Marcel Bradtmöller ◽

Andreas Pastoors ◽

Bernhard Weninger ◽

Gerd-Christian Weniger

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Population Dynamics ◽

Late Pleistocene ◽

Rapid Climate Change ◽

Replacement Model

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Late Pleistocene human occupation of the hyperarid core in the Atacama Desert, northern Chile

Quaternary Science Reviews ◽

10.1016/j.quascirev.2013.06.008 ◽

2013 ◽

Vol 77 ◽

pp. 19-30 ◽

Cited By ~ 60

Author(s):

Claudio Latorre ◽

Calogero M. Santoro ◽

Paula C. Ugalde ◽

Eugenia M. Gayo ◽

Daniela Osorio ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Late Pleistocene ◽

Atacama Desert ◽

Northern Chile ◽

Human Occupation

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Emergence of social complexity among coastal hunter-gatherers in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ◽

10.1073/pnas.1116724109 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 109 (37) ◽

pp. 14754-14760 ◽

Cited By ~ 69

Author(s):

P. A. Marquet ◽

C. M. Santoro ◽

C. Latorre ◽

V. G. Standen ◽

S. R. Abades ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Social Complexity ◽

Atacama Desert ◽

Northern Chile ◽

Hunter Gatherers

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Late Pleistocene–Early Holocene human settlement and environmental dynamics in the southern Atacama Desert highlands (24.0°S–24.5°S, Northern Chile)

Geoarchaeology ◽

10.1002/gea.21849 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Patricio Souza ◽

Isabel Cartajena ◽

Rodrigo Riquelme ◽

Antonio Maldonado ◽

María E. Porras ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Late Pleistocene ◽

Atacama Desert ◽

Early Holocene ◽

Northern Chile ◽

Human Settlement

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Rapid climate change and variability of settlement patterns in Iberia during the Late Pleistocene

Quaternary International ◽

10.1016/j.quaint.2012.01.018 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 274 ◽

pp. 179-204 ◽

Cited By ~ 74

Author(s):

Isabell Schmidt ◽

Marcel Bradtmöller ◽

Martin Kehl ◽

Andreas Pastoors ◽

Yvonne Tafelmaier ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Late Pleistocene ◽

Settlement Patterns ◽

Climate Change And Variability ◽

Rapid Climate Change

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Pleistocene Warming and Extinctions

Ecology of Climate Change ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691148472.003.0002 ◽

2013 ◽

Author(s):

Eric Post

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Late Pleistocene ◽

Large Scale ◽

Late Quaternary ◽

Species Assemblages ◽

Mass Extinctions ◽

Rapid Climate Change ◽

Main Driver ◽

Compositional Changes ◽

Contemporary Climate

This chapter explores the dynamics of plant and animal species and species assemblages during the Earth's most recent period of rapid warming to garner insights into the potential consequences of future rapid climate change. From the perspective of climate change ecology, the Late Pleistocene and the Pleistocene–Holocene transition are relevant because they represent the end of a prolonged period of climatic fluctuation on multiple temporal scales followed by rapid warming. Not only did Earth's major biomes undergo extensive compositional changes during the late Quaternary and near the termination of the Pleistocene epoch, they also underwent geographically large-scale redistributions, and did so rapidly, in some cases on the scale of decades. If rapid warming during the Pleistocene–Holocene transition contributed to—or even acted as the main driver of—mass extinctions, such a scenario would seem to suggest that contemporary climate change has a similar capacity to precipitate species losses.

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The effects of climate change on the Atacama Desert as a pertinent Mars analog model

10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-3344 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Armando Azua-Bustos ◽

Alberto G. Fairén

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Uv Radiation ◽

Atacama Desert ◽

Chemical Species ◽

Saline Soils ◽

Northern Chile ◽

Analog Model ◽

The Past ◽

Mars Analog ◽

New Instruments

<p>Since 2003 the Atacama Desert in northern Chile is well-known as Mars analog model due to its extreme aridity, high UV radiation and highly saline soils containing highly oxidizing chemical species. Is in this frame that our team and others for the past decades have described a number of sites in the Atacama&#160;and their pertinence as Mars analog. However, since 2015 a number of climatic events never reported before have affected the Atacama, thought to be caused by climate change, with effects yet to be fully understood. Given that new instruments, techniques and rovers are, and will be tested in the Atacama before to be sent to Mars, is critical to be aware of these changes in order to properly plan new explorations and testing missions in this desert. Here we present some of the evidences of the changes brought by these environmental alterations, suggesting also the regions of the Atacama that still may be less or unaffected by them.</p>

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Late Quaternary rapid climate change in northern Chile

Terra Nova ◽

10.1046/j.1365-3121.2000.00265.x ◽

2000 ◽

Vol 12 (1) ◽

pp. 8-13 ◽

Cited By ~ 55

Author(s):

Lamy ◽

Klump ◽

Hebbeln ◽

Wefer

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Late Quaternary ◽

Northern Chile ◽

Rapid Climate Change

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Modelling ecosystem adaptation and dangerous rates of global warming

Emerging Topics in Life Sciences ◽

10.1042/etls20180113 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 3 (2) ◽

pp. 221-231 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Rebecca Millington ◽

Peter M. Cox ◽

Jonathan R. Moore ◽

Gabriel Yvon-Durocher

Keyword(s):

Climate Change ◽

Global Warming ◽

Diffusion Rate ◽

Individual Species ◽

Genetic Evolution ◽

Rates Of Change ◽

Rapid Climate Change ◽

Warming Climate ◽

Intraspecies Competition ◽

High Trait

Abstract We are in a period of relatively rapid climate change. This poses challenges for individual species and threatens the ecosystem services that humanity relies upon. Temperature is a key stressor. In a warming climate, individual organisms may be able to shift their thermal optima through phenotypic plasticity. However, such plasticity is unlikely to be sufficient over the coming centuries. Resilience to warming will also depend on how fast the distribution of traits that define a species can adapt through other methods, in particular through redistribution of the abundance of variants within the population and through genetic evolution. In this paper, we use a simple theoretical ‘trait diffusion’ model to explore how the resilience of a given species to climate change depends on the initial trait diversity (biodiversity), the trait diffusion rate (mutation rate), and the lifetime of the organism. We estimate theoretical dangerous rates of continuous global warming that would exceed the ability of a species to adapt through trait diffusion, and therefore lead to a collapse in the overall productivity of the species. As the rate of adaptation through intraspecies competition and genetic evolution decreases with species lifetime, we find critical rates of change that also depend fundamentally on lifetime. Dangerous rates of warming vary from 1°C per lifetime (at low trait diffusion rate) to 8°C per lifetime (at high trait diffusion rate). We conclude that rapid climate change is liable to favour short-lived organisms (e.g. microbes) rather than longer-lived organisms (e.g. trees).

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