Hamilton Tiger-Cats lose, but there may be polyextremophiles in Ethiopia’s Danakil Depression, if not the Dallol crater itself

Naturally, surrounded as I was by Winnipeg Blue Bombers fans in Thompson, Manitoba yesterday, and my contrarian chosen Hamilton Tiger-Cats already sadly declawed early in the second quarter, before a national television audience no less, the conversation turned to Ethiopian lakes and nearby locales that hold no life. OK, the analogy may not be quite perfect but close enough, and what else is one to do in a roomful of Westerners who think of places like Toronto and Hamilton as “down east”?

Turns out, while the Dallol crater and its so-called Black and Yellow lakes, located in the Ethiopian Danakil Depression, may not support life, other parts of the larger Danakil do. Or not. Take note Ticats fans.

The Danakil Depression is located more than 100 metres below sea level in a volcanic area in northwest Ethiopia, close to the border with Eritrea, aptly named “Afar.” It is part of the East African Rift System, a place where the Earth’s internal forces are currently tearing apart three continental plates, creating new land, and it is arguably the hottest place on the planet, and one of the driest. Researchers in the field contend with sweltering heat, toxic hydrogen sulphide gas, and chlorine vapour that will burn their airways and choke their lungs without gas masks.

Picking up an article from the Madrid-based Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology, the London-based Institute of Physics (IOP) on its physics.org website reported Nov. 22 that “Scientists find a place on Earth where there is no life.” The lede notes: “Living beings, especially micro-organisms, have a surprising ability to adapt to the most extreme environments on Earth, but there are still places where they cannot live. European researchers have confirmed the absence of microbial life in hot, saline, hyper-acid ponds in the Dallol geothermal field in Ethiopia.”

The article goes on to explain the “infernal landscape of Dallol, located in the Ethiopian depression of Danakil, extends over a volcanic crater full of salt, where toxic gases emanate and water boils in the midst of intense hydro-thermal activity. It is one of the most torrid environments on Earth. There, daily temperatures in winter can exceed 45 degrees Celsius and there are abundant hyper-saline and hyper-acid pools with pH values that are even negative” (https://phys.org/news/2019-11-scientists-earth-life.html).

“A recent study, published this year, reports that certain micro-organisms can develop in this multi-extreme environment (simultaneously very hot, saline and acid), which has led its authors to present this place as an example of the limits that life can support, and even to propose it as a terrestrial analogue of early Mars.

“However, a French-Spanish team of scientists led by biologist Purificación Lopez Garcia of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) has now published an article in Nature Ecology & Evolution that concludes otherwise. According to these researchers, there is no life in Dallol’s multi-extreme ponds.”

Lopez Garcia says, “After analyzing many more samples than in previous works, with adequate controls so as not to contaminate them and a well-calibrated methodology, we have verified that there’s no microbial life in these salty, hot and hyper-acid pools or in the adjacent magnesium-rich brine lakes. What does exist is a great diversity of halophilic archaea (a type of primitive salt-loving micro-organism) in the desert and the saline canyons around the hydro-thermal site, but neither is found in the hyper-acid and hyper-saline pools themselves, nor in the so-called Black and Yellow lakes of Dallol, where magnesium abounds. And all this despite the fact that microbial dispersion in this area, due to the wind and to human visitors, is in Thermaltense.”

Jasmin Fox-Skelly, a freelance science writer based in Cardiff, took a somewhat more upbeat approach a couple of years ago, but one based on older data, in her Aug. 4, 2017 piece “In Earth’s hottest place, life has been found in pure acid,” for BBC Future, which describes it website as “something different” in “a complex, fast-paced world of soundbites, knee-jerk opinions and information overload.” BBC Future says it provides a “home for slowing down, delving deep and shifting perspectives” on “almost every topic that matters.”

“In a surreal landscape of colours, dominated by luminescent ponds of yellows and greens, boiling hot water bubbles up like a cauldron, whilst poisonous chlorine and sulphur gases choke the air,” Fox-Skelly’s story opens. “Known as the ‘gateway to hell’, the Danakil Depression in Ethiopia is scorchingly hot and one of the most alien places on Earth. Yet a recent expedition to the region has found it is teeming with life” (https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170803-in-earths-hottest-place-life-has-been-found-in-pure-acid).

Fox-Skelly reported that Barbara Cavalazzi from the University of Bologna in Italy, part of a team conducting scientific expeditions in the area since 2013, found life in the Danakil Depression in March 2017, “after they managed to isolate and extract DNA from bacteria. They found that the bacteria are ‘polyextremophiles,” which means they are adapted to extreme acidity, high temperatures and high salinity all at once. It is the first absolute confirmation of microbial life in the Danakil acidic pools.”

So Spanish research? French research? Or Italian research? Life or no life (or some life) in the Danakil Depression?

You know, the sort of questions Hamilton Tiger-Cats fans were asking in their own ways for their applied football science research in Calgary yesterday, while the results were becoming demonstrably obvious on the field on each series of plays.

Science.

When I observed some of the Hamilton players appeared cold, someone helpfully suggested it was probably because the Ticats offence had been idling on the sidelines for so much of the game, and the Winnipeg defensive squad was likely in a similar predicament, even if not visibly showing it, Prairie stoicism and all.

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Fête nationale: Long live Acadie, long live the Tintamarre

My name likely doesn’t immediately point to my Acadian ancestry. But indeed my birth mother came from a long line of LeBlancs and Cormiers, who settled on both sides of the saltwater Tantramar Marsh straddling the Nova Scotia and New Brunswick provincial boundary at the Missiguash River. This is the soil of Acadie where my Acadian ancestors lived and laboured near Aulac Ridge, a prominent rise running west to east across the Tantramar Marsh on the Isthmus of Chignecto, overlooking the Cumberland Basin of the Bay of Fundy. It also from Acadie that more than two-thirds of the Acadian population was expelled by the British between 1755 and 1764 during Le Grand Dérangement.

My mother, who lived for many years in Southern Ontario, returned to live on the Tantramar Marsh between Sackville, New Brunswick and Amherst, Nova Scotia, on Fort Lawrence Road, in the early 1990s. She spent the last 15 years or so of her life living just a couple of kilometres away from the modest two-storey house she had grown up in at the corner of Cornwall and Cordova streets in Amherst. The home remained in the family for generations until the last family resident, my uncle Harold Cecil Hicks, who spent most of his life living there, died in September 2013.

My mother didn’t talk much about her ancestry, although she acknowledged it in that way Nova Scotians have of accepting something but stopping somewhat short of perhaps fully embracing it, leaving room for lots of ambiguity. My family is big on ambiguity. When I first saw a photograph of my maternal grandmother, Adeline LeBlanc, who I never met, and mentioned to my mother how aboriginal she appeared to be to me, my mother told me she was “part Mi’kmaq.” Somehow that just hadn’t come up before my observation.  The Acadian side of our ancestry didn’t get stressed a whole lot more, truth be told, although my mother seemed to be more conversant in French than I’ve ever been.

People are products of their times. I could hardly expect my mother, who grew up in rural Nova Scotia in the 1940s and 1950s, to be trumpeting her Acadian or Mi’kmaq ancestral heritage.

Still, I saw the momentary anxiety show on her face, quickly followed by a look of pride, when she came home one day and “Nita’s boy” as my Nova Scotia relatives call me, abbreviating her name Juanita, had affixed outside her house the Acadian tricolor of blue, white and red, the gold star Stella Maris at top left, seeking the guidance and protection of the Virgin Mary, patron of the Acadians. It wasn’t lost on my mother, living on a road named Fort Lawrence, that we were standing on some of the most contested land in North America, where New France made its last stand some 250 years earlier against British North America, and even some American colonists from New England came up for a bit of skirmishing from time-to-time. The Acadian pennant flew outside of her house, faded after a few years in the sun and saltwater breeze off Cumberland Basin, for the rest of her life.

All of this comes to mind perhaps because Fête nationale nationale des Acadiens et des Acadiennes will be marked by annual celebrations again Saturday.

After a full two weeks of its own special brand of joie de vivre, marked by the “clangour” or “din” of musical merriment known as the Tintamarre, the 53rd annual Festival acadien de Caraquet on Nouveau-Brunswick’s Péninsule acadienne wraps up Saturday with revelers making as much noise as they can to celebrate Fête nationale, or more formally, nationale des Acadiens et des Acadiennes on 15 Août.

First held in 1955 to commemorate the bicentenary of  Le Grand Dérangement of the Acadians from the Maritime provinces, the Tintamarre takes its inspiration from a medieval French custom during which a crowd makes as much noise as possible in order to mark a sad or a joyful event.

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Soundingsjohnbarker: Blogging by the numbers from Thompson, Manitoba to the European Union to Vatican City

Since starting soundingsjohnbarker last September, WordPress tells me I’ve had readers from 120 of the world’s 196 countries, which seems respectable enough given it is an English-language blog written in Thompson Manitoba, the province’s fourth-largest city of 13,123, according to the most recent revised Statistics Canada census count, and located more or less smack dab in the centre of Manitoba, Canada and North America, for those interested enough to pull out a map.

In that eclectic mix of posts, I’ve made certain observations that have held true from the start. Local stories tend to garner the biggest numbers by a considerable margin and the really big ones take on something like a life of their own, appearing with daily readers months and months after they are first posted, albeit perhaps only a handful some days. Other more esoteric or obscure topics tend to draw a much smaller overall audience, but from a wide range of countries. So while a local story headlined “Lonely Planet, the world-famous travel guide, calls Thompson a town lacking ‘charm’ but ‘a necessary evil for northern itineraries’” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/07/14/lonely-planet-the-world-famous-travel-guide-calls-thompson-a-town-lacking-charm-but-a-necessary-evil-for-northern-itineraries/) had about 650 “views” almost out of the gate, so to speak, when it went online around 9 p.m. CDT July 14, my guess is that none of those first wave of readers (and they do often seem to come in waves) were from the European Union, where I’ve garnered 56 views on https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/ (in a tie at the moment with Ireland).

Today, I had my first reader from Vatican City (as opposed to elsewhere in Italy). Pope Francis perhaps? Probably not, but if it was, I expect he might ring me on the telephone to share his thoughts soon enough.

Some countries are special cases. Take Tanzania in east Africa for instance. I’ve had 89 readers from there, which is quite remarkable when you realize Tanzania is a country where electricity, much less Internet connections, can be spotty and unreliable at times. But it so happens that Bishop Prosper Balthazar Lyimo, the new auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Arusha in Tanzania, was posted here in Thompson as a diocesan priest a few years ago, leading me to write a couple of times about him since last November.

While it is easy enough to figure out why more than 31,000 readers have come from Canada, there are some countries, such as Moldova, Curaçao, the Falkland Islands, Georgia, Réunion Island, a French department in the Indian Ocean, and Qatar, that supply a small number of readers, that I have a harder time figuring out, but am glad to have them.

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Louis Riel: 21st century hero to the Métis of Manitoba; Rogers Hometown Hockey tour set to roll into Thompson, Manitoba’s hockey hotbed

Louis Riel, the Métis leader hanged for high treason on Nov. 16, 1885 at Regina, was the driving force behind Manitoba becoming Canada’s fifth province and is thought of by many as to be the “Father of Manitoba,” the only Canadian province born in blood. Does that history matter today and what legacy has it left Manitobans? “Welcome to Winnipeg: Where Canada’s racism problem is at its worst,” Maclean’s, Canada’s national magazine, headlined its lead story Jan. 22.

Not all Manitobans, of course, share that view of Riel as victim of colonial racism by any means. But history has a way of refining our judgments and dampening or softening excessive passions. Thus, the 19th century’s traitor can be reasonably seen as the 21st century’s hero as we take a longer and more inclusive view of our collective history.

Up here in Thompson we apparently don’t have a race problem, although a regular-season hockey game last Sunday between the Thompson King Miner Midget “AA” and the Norway House North Stars was ended by officials with Thompson leading 4-2 with 8:53 left in the second period when the North Stars, who had already had a player and coach ejected, left the ice following an altercation between their goaltender and a Thompson player at the same time that a scuffle erupted in the stands, soon leading to a parade of RCMP officers in their cruisers escorting players from both teams safely out of the C.A. Nesbitt Arena at the Thompson Regional Community Centre (TRCC), after racial slurs may or may not have been uttered whiles moms and dads scrapped in the stands with their counterparts from the opposing team. Older guys in Thompson remembered decades ago similar incidents where they said they had to be escorted out of places like Norway House or Cross Lake in similar circumstances. Seventeen-year-old King Miner right winger Lucas Hanlon apparently self-identified himself as Métis to the Winnipeg-based Aboriginal People’s Television Network (APTN) in making two points: he didn’t think the Feb, 8 fracas in Thompson was about race, and, in any event, there are a lot of aboriginal players on the Thompson team.

Thompson is atop of the midget AA league standings, with a 13-4-3 record for 29 points, the same as the second-place The Pas Huskies, who have played one more game than Thompson. The King Miner’s next scheduled game is tomorrow when they are due to play the Split Lake Eagles in Split Lake.

 “I am a Metis player myself,” Hanlon reportedly told APTN “We have a lot of aboriginal players on our team,” he said. “We have just as many people with aboriginal roots in our community as anywhere else.”

Hanlon said he didn’t hear any racial taunts hurled at the Norway House players. He said the Norway House fans called him “white trash.” He said racial slurs are hurled by both sides during games. “You get kind of used it from playing against those teams for so long. It happens both ways. I personally don’t because I come from both backgrounds,” he said.

A player for the Norway House North Stars team and two parents told APTN National News Feb. 10 that some “Thompson fans hurled racial epitaphs at the Norway House team.” They also said one player was confronted by three Thompson fans, two men and a woman, who used racial slurs, and claimed one Norway House player had his helmet cracked by a slash to the head.

Hanlon told APTN he “didn’t see anyone get slashed in the head with enough force to crack a helmet: that’s reassuring. However, he was very likely on to something – something that really matters to Thompson residents, both aboriginal and non-aboriginal, when Hanlon said many in the “Thompson hockey community are now worried the planned Rogers Hometown Hockey tour stop scheduled for the community on March 7 and 8 may be scuttled because of the bad press stemming from the weekend’s incident.” It was announced last September that Ron MacLean, who has played straight man to Don Cherry on Coach’s Corner for years, will be here in 3½  weeks as part of the Rogers Hometown Hockey Tour, presented by Dodge and Scotiabank, for a weekend of hockey festivities and to host a pre-game show followed by a viewing party for a March 8 Calgary Flames-Ottawa Senators game that will be broadcast across the country.

The tour, which began last Oct. 11-12 in London, Ont., is criss-crossing Canada, stopping in Manitoba three times – it was in Selkirk for its second broadcast and in Brandon last Nov. 30 – before making the late-season trip to Thompson.

Other activities leading up to the weekend-capping broadcast will include meet-and-greet sessions with NHL alumni and local hockey heroes, a Hockey Night in Canada viewing party, a KidZone with hockey-themed activities, skills and drills competitions and live performances by local musicians, as well as ticket and merchandise giveaways.

MacLean will host a half-hour pre-game show live from the Sportsnet Mobile Studio in Thompson prior to the broadcast, and will also make appearances in intermission and post-game shows. Included on the broadcast will be interviews with local guests and grassroots hockey stories.

Should Thompson residents be worried about bad press press from the Thompson King Miner Midget “AA” and Norway House North Stars game Feb. 8 jinxing the arrival of the Rogers Hometown Hockey tour March 7? Probably not, even given the fact there are a couple of inconvenient stories from APTN now circulating on television and online, including, “Manitoba RCMP escorted First Nation hockey team from rink after game took racial turn” at http://aptn.ca/news/2015/02/10/manitoba-rcmp-escorted-first-nation-hockey-team-rink-game-took-racial-turn/ and “Metis player disputes race played role in Manitoba hockey fracas” at http://aptn.ca/news/2015/02/11/metis-player-disputes-race-played-role-thompson-man-hockey-fracas/

But long before APTN broke its two stories, Tuesday, 48 hours after the game was over, there already had been hundreds of comments and a number of photos on the emerging story on social media, mainly Facebook, by Sunday at 7 p.m., just hours after the melee at the hockey game. “Facebook,” as former Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News columnist Donna Wilson, who is now the general manager of Thompson’s Quality Inn & Suites on Moak Crescent, but who also still writes for the paper occasionally, has observed many times since 2010, “is how Thompson gets its news.”

RCMP also seized video of the game from veteran Thompson Shaw TV producer Paul Andersen, who tweeted in his own inimitable style, “19 years of broadcasting hockey games, I have never had my footage become ‘exhibit c’ in the court of law,#norwayhousevsthompson.”

Louis Riel Day falls this year next Monday on Feb. 16. In 2008, the NDP provincial government invited Manitoba schoolchildren to name the province’s newest statutory holiday, commencing on the third Monday in February in 2009, and 114 schools responded with suggestions: of that number a dozen suggested Louis Riel Day or some close variation.

Other suggestions included Neil Young Day, Family Get Together Day, February Fun Day, (The) Polar Pause, Duff Roblin Day (Duff’s Day), Our Parents Need a Break Day and Magical Manitoba Monday.

Riel was born at Red River Settlement on Oct. 22, 1844 and educated at St Boniface. A Roman Catholic, he studied for the priesthood at the Collège de Montréal. In 1865 he studied law with Rodolphe Laflamme, and he is believed to have worked briefly in Chicago and Saint Paul before returning to St Boniface in 1868.

Without re-telling the entire history of the Red River Rebellion, or Red River Resistance, as it is also known, here or the North-West Rebellion in Saskatchewan 15 years later, the abridged version is that in 1869, the federal government, anticipating the transfer of Red River and the North-West from the Hudson’s Bay Company to their jurisdiction, appointed William McDougall as lieutenant-governor of the new territory and sent survey crews to Red River.

The Métis, worried about the implications of the transfer and wary of Anglo-Protestant immigrants from Ontario, organized a “National Committee” of which Riel was secretary. The committee halted the surveys and prevented McDougall from entering Red River. On Nov 2, 1869, Fort Garry was seized by the committee, which invited the people of Red River, however, both English and French- speaking, to appoint delegates.

When armed resistance, led by John Christian Schultz and John Stoughton Dennis followed, the federal government postponed the transfer planned for Dec. 1, 1869. Riel issued a “Declaration of the People of Rupert’s Land and the Northwest” and on Dec. 23, 1869 became head of the “provisional government” of Red River.

Meanwhile, a force of some of those who had escaped from Riel’s men earlier, mustered by Schultz and surveyor Thomas Scott, a Protestant Presbyterian Ontario Orangeman, gathered at Portage la Prairie, but were quickly rounded up by the Métis, who imprisoned them again at Fort Garry. Riel appointed a military tribunal, presided over by his associate, Ambroise Dydine Lépine, of St. Vital, to try Scott for treason. Scott was convicted, sentenced to death and executed by a firing squad in the courtyard of Fort Garry on March 4, 1870.

In Ontario, it was Riel, however, who was widely denounced as Scott’s “murderer” and a reward of $5,000 was offered for his arrest. In Québec he was regarded as a hero, a defender of the Roman Catholic faith and French culture in Manitoba.

Anxious to avoid a volatile political confrontation between Ontario Protestants and Quebec Catholics, never mind Manitoba’s Métis, Conservative Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald tried to persuade Riel, who had gone into voluntary exile in the United States, to remain there, even providing him with funds.

Instead, encouraged by supporters, Riel entered federal politics and won a seat in a byelection in October, 1873 and was re-elected in the general election of February 1874 and re-elected for a third time in the Provencher constituency in a September 1874 byelection. He was expelled from the House of Commons before taking his seat. Riel and Lépine were convicted of murdering Scott in October 1874 and sentenced to death, but Governor General Lord Dufferin commuted the sentences in January 1875 to two years imprisonment. A month later, Prime Minister Alexander Mackenzie’s Liberal government granted amnesty for Riel and Lepine, on the condition that both remain in exile for five years.

Early in 1885, then living in present day Saskatchewan, Riel seized the parish church at Batoche, armed his men, and formed a provisional government and demanded the surrender of Fort Carlton. The North-West Rebellion lasted from March 26 to May 12 before Riel surrendered at the Battle of Batoche and on July 6, 1885, he was charged with high treason.

Riel was convicted, and the federal cabinet, with Macdonald again as prime minister, declined to commute the death sentence imposed by Lt.-Col. Hugh Richardson, a stipendiary magistrate of the Saskatchewan District of the North-West Territories. Riel’s body was sent to St Boniface and interred in the cemetery in front of the cathedral.

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