Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies this week that got ID’d, caught on camera, internally probed, and married off.
First, scientists have confirmed the identities of four sailors who died in a grisly Victorian voyage. Then: the sights and sounds of an Arctic seafloor, a glimpse into the guts of ice giants, and a wedding kiss of death.
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Putting a face, and names, to lost Arctic sailors
Scientists have identified four men who died in Sir John Franklin’s disastrous expedition of 1845, a British mission to chart a passage through the Arctic that ended in misery, starvation, and cannibalism, leaving no survivors.
“Since the late nineteenth century the coast of Erebus Bay on King William Island, Nunavut, has been a focal point for historical and archaeological investigations of the 1845 Franklin Northwest Passage expedition,” said researchers led by Douglas Stenton of the University of Waterloo. “Its significance comes from the nature and volume of materials derived from an extraordinary and ultimately tragic event: the fatal attempt by 105 surviving sailors to escape their icebound ships in the spring of 1848 by walking hundreds of kilometres south to the mainland of North America.”
Using DNA extracted from skeletal remains, a study has confirmed that the 180-year-old bones belong to the able seaman William Orren, the ship’s boy David Young, the officers’ steward John Bridgens, and captain of the foretop Harry Peglar. Orren, Young, and Bridgens served on HMS Erebus, the expedition’s flagship, and their remains ended up in Erebus Bay on Canada’s King William Island.
The remains of Peglar, who served on the secondary vessel HMS Terror, were found nearly 80 miles away from the others and are reported in a separate study led by Stenton. Stenton’s team has previously identified the Erebus engineer John Gregory as well as the Captain of Erebus, James Fitzjames, whose remains were subject to cannibalism.
The researchers matched the DNA of these sailors to samples provided by living descendants or relatives to conclusively confirm their identities. In addition to solving a scientific mystery, this process literally puts a face to one man as the team included a reconstructed portrait of David Young, who was around 20 when he died.
The results also help to piece together key details of the nightmarish fates that befell these sailors as they endured starvation, exposure, disease, and despair.
“For their descendants, the identifications of John Bridgens, David Young, and William Orren reveal that, like John Gregory, they had survived the first three years of the expedition,” the researchers said. “They also unveil the locations where their deaths occurred, and the fact that none of the men were alone when they died.”
Peglar did die alone, however, and he remains the only member of the Terror crew who has been identified. In the study about his farflung remains, the team concludes with a passage Peglar wrote a few days before the survivors abandoned their stuck vessels and embarked on the retreat that would ultimately kill them all.
Peglar noted the need to procure new boots as “we have got some very hard ground to heave.”
In other news…
Scenes from an Arctic seafloor
Though the Arctic has many deadly perils, this region is also home to some of the most amazing lifeforms found anywhere on the planet. Scientists have now captured rare footage and recordings of “a highly turbulent environment” on the seafloor of a glacial fjord in northwest Greenland, according to a study.
Here, at depths of about 850 feet, the songs of narwhals reverberate along the seafloor, crustaceans called copepods move in sudden hops, and “marine snow” made of particulate matter falls in blizzardlike bursts. A snailfish was also caught on tape making a particularly memorable exit.
“One snailfish showed peculiar backward swimming, passively drifting backward with the current,” said researchers led by Evgeny A. Podolskiy of Hokkaido University. “It curled its tail and remained motionless for at least 16 seconds before disappearing from view.”
You’ve heard of the Irish Goodbye and the Minnesota Goodbye, but I’m not sure anything can top the Greenlandic Glacial Fjord Snailfish Goodbye.
The flavorful fillings of ice giants
What’s inside Uranus? Or Neptune, for that matter? Nobody really knows, and we have to rely on models until someone can figure out how to get a direct look inside the guts of these ice giants.
To that end, researchers ran simulations of the possible evolution and composition of the two planets’ interiors based in part on observations of their atmospheres. The results suggest that “the deep interiors of the two planets exhibit distinct compositions” with Neptune having “relatively rock-rich mantles…whereas Uranus is inferred to have more ice-rich mantles,” according to researchers led by Vanesa Ramirez of Leiden University.
“Our results indicate fundamental differences in the internal architectures of Uranus and Neptune, challenging the traditional view of these planets as compositional twins,” the team added.
To put in confectionary terms, Neptune appears to be more of a rocky road, while Uranus may be a refreshing ice slushy. Either way, the study underscores how much there is left to learn about these solar system worlds.
Mob Wives, but it’s science
Catino, Maurizio et al. “Marrying for power: Gendered alliances in mafias.” PLOS One.
In a genuinely gangster new study, scientists took a whack at unraveling the marital power dynamics at work within the ‘Ndrangheta mafia syndicate, an infamous crime ring built around familial ties.
“Interfamily marriages have long been recognized as a strategic resource in mafia organizations,” said researchers led by Maurizio Catino of the University of Milano-Bicocca. “Drawing on judicial records documenting…906 marriages among 623 ’Ndrangheta clans, we analyze how matrimonial ties relate to power and cohesion within the organization.”
While nuptials between the most powerful clans are important for group cohesion, the team found that the marriages among less influential families were the real “load-bearing” relationships in the network. In part, this is because boss families tended to be “associated with redundant, overlapping unions” whereas there is more elasticity in the outer circles.
The study is packed with wild and often disturbing anecdotes—and some that seem directly lifted from a Scorsese flick.
For instance, take the case of Emanuele Mancuso, whose aunt tried to dissuade him from cooperating with law enforcement with this pitch-perfect guilt trip: “How is your mother doing? She’s not well! She knows she no longer has a son, how do you think she feels?”
It’s stressful enough to plan a wedding without the additional pressure of figuring out how you will fit into an international criminal syndicate. You can only hope the union will end in holy (not holey) matrimony.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.