Yellowstone National Park visitors were sent running and screaming Tuesday when a hydrothermal explosion spewed boiling hot water and rocks into the air. No one was injured, but it has left some wondering: How does this happen and why wasn’t there any warning? 

The Weather Channel’s Stephanie Abrams said explosions like this are caused by underground channels of hot water, which also create Yellowstone’s iconic geysers and hot springs. 

“When the pressure rapidly drops in a localized spot, it actually forces the hot water to quickly turn to steam, triggering a hydrothermal explosion since gas takes up more space than liquid,” Abrams said Wednesday on “CBS Mornings.” “And this explosion can rupture the surface, sending mud and debris thousands of feet up and more than half a mile out in the most extreme cases.” 

Tuesday’s explosion was not that big, Abrams said, “but a massive amount of rocks and dirt buried the Biscuit Basin,” where the explosion occurred.   

A nearby boardwalk was left with a broken fence and was covered in debris. Nearby trees were also killed, with the U.S. Geological Survey saying the plants “can’t stand thermal activity.” 

“Because areas heat up and cool down over time, trees will sometimes die out when an area heats up, regrow as it cools down, but then die again when it heats up,” the agency said on X.

The USGS said it considers this explosion small, and that similar explosions happen in the national park “perhaps a couple times a year.” Often, though, they happen in the backcountry and aren’t noticed.

“It was small compared to what Yellowstone is capable of,” USGS Volcanoes said on X. “That’s not to say it was not dramatic or very hazardous — obviously it was. But the big ones leave craters hundreds of feet across.”

The agency also said that “hydrothermal explosions, “being episodes of water suddenly flashing to steam, are notoriously hard to predict” and “may not give warning signs at all.” It likened the eruptions to a pressure cooker.

While Yellowstone sits on a dormant volcano, officials said the explosion was not related to volcanic activity. 

“This was an isolated incident in the shallow hot-water system beneath Biscuit Basin,” the USGS said. “It was not triggered by any volcanic activity.” 

New Delhi — Scientists say Indian farmers’ eager uptake of a painkiller for their cattle in the 1990s has led to the inadvertent deaths of half of a million people and massive economic losses — not from any harm to the cattle, but from the loss of millions of vultures, scavengers that historically devoured animals’ remains before they could rot and become vectors for disease.

In early 1990s, the patent on a painkiller called diclofenac lifted, making it cheap and widely available for India’s massive agricultural sector. Farmers use it to treat a wide array of conditions in cattle. But even a small amount of the drug is fatal to vultures. Since the beginning of its widespread use in India, the domestic vulture population has dropped from a whopping 50 million to just a few thousand — and according to a study published by the American Economic Association, the impact on humans has been monumental, reflecting the vital role the scavengers play.

Vultures have been a crucial part of India’s ecosystems for centuries. According to the authors of the study, entitled “The Social Costs of Keystone Species Collapse: Evidence From The Decline of Vultures in India,” the large, homely birds are a “keystone species” — one that plays an irreplaceable role in an ecosystem. 

They’re the only scavengers that feed entirely on carcasses, and they do it extremely efficiently, quickly devouring the remains and leaving little behind to spread disease. The study authors say India’s vultures would typically eat at least 50 million animal carcasses every year, before their population was decimated.

In doing so, they prevented the dead farm animals from rotting, and the deadly bacteria and other pathogens that thrive in carcasses from being transmitted into human populations.

“In a country like India with prohibitions on eating beef, most cattle end up turning into carcasses,” Anant Sudarshan, an associate professor of economics at the University of Warwick in England, who co-authored the study, told CBS News. “Vultures provide an incredible disposal service for free. … A group of vultures takes about 45 minutes to turn a cow carcass into bone.”

The vultures’ keen appetite also helped keep the populations of competing scavengers in check, such as feral dogs and rats, which can transmit rabies and a host of other diseases.

In 1994, farmers began giving diclofenac to their cattle and other livestock. The drug causes kidney failure and death in vultures that feed on the carcasses of animals given the painkiller, and the population of the birds shrank from 50 million to just 20,000 over the course of the ensuing decade alone.

Without the vultures around to do the job, farmers started disposing their dead livestock in local bodies of water, which caused water pollution — and another way for pathogens to reach humans.

Sudarshan and study co-author Eyal Frank, an environmental economist at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, examined the impact of the drastically reduced vulture population on human health by mapping vulture habitats with health data from more than 600 districts in India. They said their research shows 100,000 human deaths every year between 2000 and 2005 could be linked with the decreased vulture populations. 

It also shows economic losses they estimated at $69 billion per year, largely associated with premature human deaths due to the collapse of the scavenger population.

These deaths were caused, according to their research, by the spread of diseases that a thriving vulture population would have mitigated. Stray dog populations, and with them, the spread of rabies, also increased during the timeframe, as did the amount of bacteria measured in many local water sources.

“India is now the largest center of rabies in the world, as the feral dog population has grown dramatically,” Sudarshan told CBS News.

Without a major vulture rebound, the study authors said the spread of disease and resulting deaths will only continue in the coming years, as will the costs associated with health care.

India did ban diclofenac for veterinary use in 2006, but Sudarshan said the ban needs to be enforced much more effectively. He and Eyal have called for more conservation funding to boost vulture populations, but they’ve warned that even if the Indian government does mount a major effort, it will take at least a decade for the species to bounce back to the extent required because they’re “slow reproducers.”

As an alternative to bringing the vultures back, Sudarshan said India could build a network of incinerators around the country, but the estimated cost of that is about $1 billion per year, and they would use a huge amount of energy and create considerable air pollution, which is already a major problem for India. 

“So, it makes more sense to bring back the natural way of dealing with the millions of animal carcasses that India produces each year,” he said.

And he said that work must start urgently, as the “vultures began dying in the 1990s. India has not done anything three decades on.”

The government does spend about $3 million per year to save India’s native tigers. Sudarshan said while vultures may be far less of a tourist attraction, there’s a broader question about “the basis of our conservation policy.”

“Our paper shows that the cost of losing them [vultures] is about $69 billion a year, which is far higher than any benefits the tiger” brings, he said, adding: “We need to think from a cost effectiveness point of view and growth view, how should we pick species to conserve?”

“Understanding the role vultures play in human health underscores the importance of protecting wildlife – and not just the cute and cuddly,” said his co-author, Frank. “They all have a job to do in our ecosystems that impacts our lives.”

The mummy of an ancient Egyptian woman with her mouth wide open in what looks like an anguished shriek may have died “screaming from agony,” researchers say.

The unnamed woman mummy, discovered in a 1935 archeological expedition in Deir el-Bahari near Luxor, was kept in The Cairo Egyptian Museum and referred to as “Screaming Woman Mummy of the store of Kasr al Ainy.”

In an article in the journal Frontiers in Medicine, scientists said they used CT scans and other testing to examine whether the mummy had any pathological abnormalities and assess potential causes of death.

They found that the woman, who was around 48 years old at the time she died, had lost some teeth and lived with mild arthritis of the spine. Her body was embalmed about 3,500 years ago with high quality ingredients.

Ancient Egyptians mummified bodies because they believed preserving them after death secured a worthy existence in the afterlife. Usually, internal organs would be removed during the mummification process, but that did not take place with the “Screaming Woman.”

“In ancient Egypt, the embalmers took care of the dead body so it would look beautiful for the afterlife. That’s why they were keen to close the mouth of the dead by tying the jaw to the head to prevent the normal postmortem jaw drop,” lead researcher in the study, Cairo University radiology professor Sahar Saleem, told the Reuters news agency.

But this had not happened in the case of the “Screaming Woman.”

“This opened the way to other explanations of the widely opened mouth — that the woman died screaming from agony or pain and that the muscles of the face contracted to preserve this appearance at the time of death due to cadaveric spasm,” Saleem told Reuters, adding that, due to all of the unknowns around her history, the cause of her expression can’t be established with certainty.

Saleem told Reuters that cadaveric spasm is a poorly understood condition, where contracted muscles become rigid immediately after death.

Greenland has melted before, and as the climate warms, it will melt again — this time leading to what scientists warn could be 20 to 25 feet of sea-level rise.

During one of the warm periods within the last 1.1 million years, the center, not just the edges, of Greenland’s massive ice sheet melted away, new research has found, giving way to a dry and barren “tundra landscape” that was home to various insects and plant life. The findings were shared in a new paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

When the ice sheet initially melted, there were lower levels of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere than there are today. Now with more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, scientists say Greenland’s ice sheet is more susceptible to melting than previously thought. 

“Greenland has been around for 2.7 million years with its ice,” said Paul Bierman, a scientist at the University of Vermont who co-led the new study. “Now there’s some evidence that this ice sheet is fragile.”

The researchers have been studying materials from beneath the hood of the Greenland ice sheet, the largest in the Northern hemisphere, since 2014. They examined sediment from the bottom of an ice core — dubbed GISP2 — extracted from two miles below the surface at the center of the ice sheet nearly 30 years ago. 

The 1-ounce sample of sediment was filled with clues of Greenland’s past. Tiny little black specks, when put under the microscope, revealed an insect eye, an Arctic poppy seed, parts of an Arctic willow, and tiny bits of soil fungus and spike moss — what Bierman referred to as a “frozen ecosystem underneath the ice.”

According to researchers, the fossils provide “direct confirmation” that 90% of the ice sheet was once gone.

“Finding these fossils in the center of the ice sheet is unambiguous evidence that Greenland’s ice has disappeared [in the past],” said Bierman. “And once you lose the center of the ice sheet, you’ve lost it all.”

    
  
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The findings supports what’s called the “fragile Greenland” hypothesis: that nature, outside of human influence, has caused the ice sheet to melt at least once since it formed, Bierman said. 

At 656,000 square miles, the Greenland ice sheet currently covers around 80% of the island territory. To put that into perspective, it’s about three times the size of Texas.

NASA, which has mapped Greenland’s ice loss, says the sheet has “rapidly declined in the last several years,” prompting the global sea level to rise around 0.03 inches per year. Greenland’s melting ice mass is now the No. 1 driver of sea level rise,  according to Bierman.

“In the early years of the climate warming, it was mountain glaciers that were doing most of the melting and adding water to the ocean,” he said. “Now it’s Greenland.”

While it could be a few thousand years before the entire Greenland mass melts, Bierman said, the consequences would be dire: hundreds of millions of people could lose their homes and businesses. Places we hold near and dear to our hearts would be lost.

“As I like to say when people ask me, why does it matter? I say think about your favorite beach. And then imagine your favorite beach with 25 feet of water on it,” Bierman said.