Four Billion Years and Counting: Canada’s Geological Heritage

The First Four Billion Years

7 billion and counting.

The world is currently in the midst of the greatest demographic upheaval in human history. Dramatic reductions in mortality, followed (but with a lag) by equally marked reductions in fertility, resulted in a doubling of world population between 1960 and 2000. A further increase of 2 to 4.5 billion is projected for the current half-century, with the increase concentrated in the world's least dev...

A billion seeds and counting

The UK's Millennium Seed Bank, part of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, has collected its billionth seed for safekeeping and conservation. The seed was presented to the British chancellor, Gordon Brown, ahead of an official ceremony at the Seed Bank in southern England late last month to mark World Biodiversity Day. The Millennium Seed Bank (MSB) Project is one of the most ambitious conservation...

Conservation of protein structure over four billion years.

Little is known about the evolution of protein structures and the degree of protein structure conservation over planetary time scales. Here, we report the X-ray crystal structures of seven laboratory resurrections of Precambrian thioredoxins dating up to approximately four billion years ago. Despite considerable sequence differences compared with extant enzymes, the ancestral proteins display t...

Four billion people facing severe water scarcity.

Freshwater scarcity is increasingly perceived as a global systemic risk. Previous global water scarcity assessments, measuring water scarcity annually, have underestimated experienced water scarcity by failing to capture the seasonal fluctuations in water consumption and availability. We assess blue water scarcity globally at a high spatial resolution on a monthly basis. We find that two-thirds...