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Prehistoric Garbage Piles Created "Tree Islands"
sciencehabit writes "Piles of garbage left by humans thousands of years ago may have helped form 'tree islands' in the Florida Everglades--patches of relatively high and dry ground that rise from the wetlands. They stand between 1 and 2 meters higher than the surrounding landscape, can cover 100 acres or more, and host two to three times the number of species living in the surrounding marsh. Besides providing habitat for innumerable birds, the islands offer refuge for animals such as alligators and the Florida panther during flood season. The trash piles—a mix of discarded food, charcoal, shell tools, and broken pottery—would have been slightly higher and drier than the surrounding marsh, offering a foothold for trees, shrubs, and other vegetation."
To be fair, the historic "garbage" was quite different in composition than the garbage we generate today.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
"But officer, it's not littering. I'm building a habitat for endangered species!"
trash of the future?
In Florida, trashy is always in.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
It's not that misleading - it was trash. And while you seem to be getting awfully worked up about the hypothetical political pull of this article, I'd like to note that environmental stressors (including oil, and, yes, even nuclear reactors) have affected the Earth long before our species even existed, and will no doubt continue to do so well after we're gone.
I'm sorry, what I meant to say is that you're a special snowflake and your mere existence will leave an indelible mark on our world.
Oh, the hubris of mankind.
Maybe we can look forward to a new continent in the Pacific where our current floating garbage is.
So because some people are stupid, scientific articles should be forbidden from using totally appropriate and correct terminology (here's a hint: broken pottery and shells are prehistoric garbage). Way to retard forward progress buddy!
I guess we should avoid master-slave hardware paradigms, or the term blackboard due to racial sensitivity too, huh? We need to tailor all our language to appease the ignorant, after all.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
How do we know that the garbage didn't collect because the land was drier so people lived there?
The trash piles—a mix of discarded food, charcoal, shell tools, and broken pottery—would have been slightly higher and drier than the surrounding marsh, offering a foothold for trees, shrubs, and other vegetation.
TFA:
The so-called tree islands of the Everglades are patches of relatively high and dry ground that rise from the wetlands. They stand between 1 and 2 meters higher than the surrounding landscape, can cover 100 acres or more
I can imagine a bunch of pre-historic humans having their lunch in a pool-bar only to discard the bones and other scraps to form those "trash piles", raise the ground and form the islands. And probably doing it for some centuries, in continuous "mad-hatter lunch", to cover 100 acres and more.
Seriously, don't you think the areas should have been already raised above the water level for this to actually happen? And if already raised, does it necessary require humans discarding scraps (or would it be enough any land-living predators to eat their prey on a slightly raised surface of land)?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Apparently; so that was the plan behind the environmentally conscious crowd bullying them into no longer using those easily recyclable styrofoam containers!
I am afraid that you are totally incorrect in thinking a switch to paper increases the volume of waste.
There is a persistent myth that the McDonalds foamed polystyrene containers were more recyclable than their current paper packaging. This myth is used by people to try and show the environmental movement is emotional, rather than pragmatic & forward thinking (typically, there is a condescending "ho-ho-ho, those silly environmentalists have made the environment worse by replacing a recyclable product with a non-recyclable product" attitude).
However, the facts are that:
1) Food contaminated products are not recycled (most McDs food packaging is unsurprisingly contaminated by food)
2) Almost no foamed polystyrene is recycled in any case.
3) Switching to paper reduced McDonald's waste by around 90%
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
True, they didn't have Reality TV back then.
I suspect that since humans despise sleeping in soggy beds, that any place humans inhabited would have been raised above swamp level in the first place, yes. I also suspect that a patch of raised ground of over 100 acres indicates a conscious effort on the behalf of a large number of residents to raise the ground above flood level, not just them chucking their garbage on the floor. In South American they carted in rich, fertile soil from the marshes for agriculture -- why wouldn't Florida natives have done the same?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
It's those RS-232 "Gender Changers" that I find offensive and repugnant! ;-)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
A difference? It's rubbish!
When they scuttle a ship, they usually pick an area that's completely devoid of life. Having dived multiple such sites in various stages of their evolution, I can tell you that it's actually a pretty effective way to build an artificial reef. In parts of the carribbean, you can dive down, and see a completely empty and devoid plane of nothing but sand on the floor of the sea, save for a ship rising up out of the mud, which is home to crustaceans, corals, anemones, fish, and other forms of life that just aren't seen anywhere else in the area.
When a ship sinks by accident, however, they don't have that kind of control.
It seems like they simply found middens with some regularity deep in/on these tree islands.
Therefore one scientist contends that some of the islands may have grown from middens. Isn't it substantially more plausible that primitive humans, who generally tend to want to stand/sit/live on dry ground, would have sought out these relatively isolated (and thus somewhat safer) locations for habitation? That the middens are found deep in the islands only seems to me to mean that this - the value of a secure home - was even obvious to primitive humans?
One comment in the article bothered me: "The authors say the findings show that human disturbance of the environment doesn't always have a negative consequence." That seems...a rather insipid comment.
-Styopa
Without humans having a thing to do with it those islands form all the time. They form to a degree that the state has a machine that goes in and destroys the island. All that happens is that any irregularity that causes a bottom to be slightly shallower in a spot will tend to attract plants which over time build a thicker and thicker mat of cast off materials held in place by the roots of the plants. At a certain point the mat becomes heavy enough to actually press down against the bottom and trees and shrubs flourish making the little islands even more solid.
The device that eats these islands looks like a paddle wheel boat with the paddle wheel in the very front of the boat. That wheel beats into the vegetation and pushes it onto a barge like deck. The operator keeps the wheel chopping at the island until the entire island is loaded on the barge. Sadly large nuimbers of bass and other fish as well as snakes and turtles are also loaded onto the barges.
Tomato/Tom-Ah-My back!
This is hardly news to anyone living in Florida. There are shell middens all over the state... They are almost always by water and nearly all contain broken pottery, oyster and clam shells and broken artifacts. The natives essentially threw hard garbage in a spot, waited until it stopped smelling and then used it to keep above the water line and the mosquitos. Pretty smart really. A lot of roads in florida have the shell middens underneath instead of limestone. It wasn't until the last couple decades that they started protecting them as something of historical/archeological value. God only knows how much history was lost as we paved our way to suburbia in the 50s and 60s.
Get a web developer
By far the highest points in south Florida are its landfills; see, for example, this beauty on Florida's Turnpike in Deerfield Beach. When global warming floods the area in [insert date of your choice here], these landfills will become tree islands in the new Everglades.