Smashing together a billion protons a second wasn’t enough for the Large Hadron Collider.
The particle accelerator, located at CERN in Geneva, is getting spiffed up to allow it to carry out collisions at an even faster rate. On June 15, scientists announced the start of construction for an LHC upgrade called the High-Luminosity LHC.
The upgrade will boost the collision rate by at least a factor of five. That increase should beef up the LHC’s ability to search for new particles and to study the Higgs boson, the particle that the LHC detected in 2012.
The first stage of construction involves establishing new buildings, shafts and caverns to house equipment. Eventually, scientists will begin replacing equipment inside the accelerator, including the magnets that focus and steer the beams of particles. The plan is for the HL-LHC to be in business by 2026.
The last 13 years have been terrible for ancient African baobab trees.
Nine of the 13 oldest either lost trunks or died altogether after having lived for longer than a millennium, researchers report June 11 in Nature Plants. But just what the demise means for the iconic species is up for debate.
“Whilst we are saddened about the death and collapse [of the old trees], current evidence does not indicate that this is affecting the whole population,” says plant scientist Sarah Venter, who was not part of the new study. Venter, with the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, does not see an immediate threat to the species as a whole. These trees of extreme age “were probably more vulnerable to dry conditions,” she says. “Tree mortality is complex and can be attributed to many causes, including climate change and droughts.” The Adansonia digitata species of the baobab group is the longest-living kind of flowering tree. With its mass of skinny branches dividing like rootlets over a fat trunk, the species sometimes gets teased as an upside-down tree. Long-stemmed brown fruits also encourage the nickname “dead-rat tree.” Yet people have long cherished the giant baobabs for food, medicine and spiritual value.
Of the 13 oldest known A. digitata, four have died since 2005, says study coauthor Adrian Patrut, who specializes in inorganic and nuclear chemistry at Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. Five others of these ancient trees across the African continent have lost enormous chunks of their multiple trunks, Patrut and his colleagues report. The oldest to die, the Panke tree in Zimbabwe, had lived about 2,500 years before it collapsed over the course of 2010 and 2011. The other three trees that died, including the Chapman tree in Botswana, were just 1,250 to 1,500 years old. Patrut does not think mere old age caused their demise. He worries something more troubling may be going on instead. “There were no signs of an epidemic,” Patrut says. He suspects that a warming trend observed in southern Africa may be playing a role.
As world-famous as baobabs are, much of their drought biology and other basic matters remain mysterious. “Does anyone really know the rooting structure of baobabs?” laments plant ecologist Eugene Moll of the University of the Western Cape in Bellville, South Africa. For understanding Africa’s plants, “philosophies and paradigms that originate north of 40° N do not necessarily apply down here in the Southern Hemisphere,” he says. “We humans like symmetry but nature is certainly not always symmetrical.”
A zippy little particle has been traced back to its cosmic stomping grounds, a flaring galaxy 4 billion light-years away, for the first time solving a cosmic whodunit.
Scientists have long puzzled over the sources of high-energy particles from space, which batter the Earth at energies that can outstrip the world’s most advanced particle accelerators. Now, physicists have identified the source of an energetic, lightweight particle called a neutrino. The intergalactic voyager came from a type of bright galaxy called a blazar located in the direction of the constellation Orion, scientists report online July 12 in Science. “This is super exciting news,” says astrophysicist Angela Olinto of the University of Chicago, who was not involved with the new result. “It’s marking the beginning of what we call neutrino astronomy,” which uses the nearly massless particles to reveal secrets of cosmic oddities like blazars. While there may be additional cosmic sources for high-energy neutrinos, the detection indicates that at least some come from blazars.
The result also suggests that blazars emit other energetic particles known as cosmic rays, which are produced in tandem with neutrinos. The origins of high-energy cosmic rays are poorly understood and until now, “nobody has ever been able to pinpoint a source that produces them,” says astrophysicist Francis Halzen of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, a leader of IceCube, the Antarctic neutrino observatory that detected the particle.
Thanks to this discovery, “we will better understand nature of the universe’s immense cosmic accelerators,” France Córdova said in a July 12 news conference in Alexandria, Va. Scientists can’t produce such high-energy particles on Earth, “so we have to turn to the heavens to deepen our understanding of the highest-energy processes,” said Córdova, the director of the National Science Foundation, which funded IceCube. IceCube, which was constructed within a cubic kilometer of ice sheet, uses thousands of embedded sensors to measure light produced when neutrinos slam into the ice. On September 22, 2017, IceCube detected a neutrino with an energy of nearly 300 trillion electron volts. (For comparison, protons in the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva reach energies of 6.5 trillion electron volts.) By tracing the neutrino’s track backward, scientists zeroed in on a region of sky in the direction of the constellation Orion. Astronomers leapt into action, and telescopes around the world scoured the spot for light that could reveal the particle’s source. A flare of gamma rays, a type of high-energy light, was detected by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope coming from a blazar called TXS 0506+056, a brilliant galaxy powered by an enormous black hole that launches a jet of energetic particles in the direction of Earth. A variety of telescopes observed the blazar’s flare in other types of light, including X-rays and radio waves. Coming on the heels of the detection of gravitational waves and light from colliding neutron stars (SN: 11/11/17, p. 6) observed in August 2017, Fermi researcher Regina Caputo thought, “This is crazy, the sky is erupting,” she says. “I almost couldn’t believe it; the universe is revealing itself in ways we have never imagined before,” says Caputo, of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
The detection of high-energy neutrinos with a well-defined incoming direction is rare — IceCube sent astronomers only 10 reports of such detections in the year and a half before this neutrino was found. This was the first time researchers were lucky enough to also spot the source’s light.
“This is really what IceCube was built for, to try to see high-energy neutrinos from these exotic sources,” says neutrino physicist Kate Scholberg of Duke University, who was not involved with the research.
Previously, scientists have identified the birthplaces of neutrinos of much lower energies: an exploding star (SN: 2/18/17, p. 24) and the sun. But high-energy neutrinos have been more elusive. While there have been previous hints of high-energy neutrinos associated with blazar flare-ups (SN Online: 4/7/16), the new detection makes the first solid connection between blazars and high-energy neutrinos.
After unmasking the neutrino’s source, the IceCube researchers went back to their data and looked for additional neutrinos that could have come from the blazar. “There was something interesting happening there,” says IceCube researcher Naoko Kurahashi Neilson of Drexel University in Philadelphia. Over seven months starting in September 2014, IceCube saw a neutrino flare, an excess of high-energy neutrinos from that vicinity, the researchers report in a second paper published in the July 13 Science. Blazars are still poorly understood, including what kinds of particles they blast out. Because high-energy neutrinos can be produced only in combination with protons, the detection reveals that blazars are also a source of cosmic rays, which consist of protons and atomic nuclei. Cosmic rays have been detected on Earth at ultrahigh energies, and it’s been a mystery what kind of cosmic engine could rev particles up to those extremes. “This may be a clue to their origin,” says astrophysicist Floyd Stecker of NASA Goddard. But it’s still not clear whether blazars can accelerate protons to the very highest energies observed, he says.
The highest energy cosmic rays are known to come from outside the Milky Way (SN: 10/14/17, p. 7). But in general, cosmic rays leave few clues of their birthplaces: As they travel through space, their trajectories get twisted by magnetic fields, and therefore don’t reliably point back to their sources.
Neutrinos, on the other hand, are electrically neutral, which means they are unaffected by magnetic fields, traveling in a straight line from their origins to Earth. Since high-energy cosmic rays and neutrinos are produced together, the particles can help scientists understand cosmic rays as well, Olinto says. “What neutrinos gave us is a way through the fog.”
Around 5,300 years ago, the Iceman dined on wild meat and grains before meeting his end in the Italian Alps. His last meal was high in fat and optimal for a high-altitude trek, researchers report July 12 in Current Biology.
Since his mummified remains were discovered in 1991, Ötzi’s life has undergone more scrutiny than many reality TV stars. His cause of death, his fashion, his tattoos, his ax, his cholesterol and his genetic instruction book, or genome, have all made headlines (SN 3/24/12, p.5). And in 2002, DNA analysis of samples from the Iceman’s lower intestine suggested that Ötzi ate red deer, goat and grains before he died. In 2011, radiological scans revealed that the mummy’s stomach contents were still intact (SN 9/24/11, p. 8). Now researchers are back with a more in-depth look inside the mummy’s gastrointestinal tract. Based on ancient DNA, proteins and other molecular data, the new analysis confirms the Iceman’s final menu: mountain goat ( Capra ibex), red deer ( Cervus elaphus ), einkorn wheat ( Triticum monococcum ) and other domesticated grains. Traces of a toxic fern ( Pteridium aquilinum ) also turned up — possibly a home remedy for an upset stomach, but more likely either as part of the meal or as a wrapping for the food. While the meal included protein, carbohydrates and fatty acids, fat makes up roughly 46 percent of the stomach contents. And most of that fat came from the goat meat. Test kitchen experiments suggest that the meat was either consumed fresh or slow-dried with smoke.
This high-fat diet probably wasn’t great for Ötzi’s genetic predisposition for heart disease, but it was ideal for the harsh mountain environment. “Even though it might not be tasty, up there you have to provide your body with energy, and fat is a really good energy source,” says study coauthor Frank Maixner of Eurac Research’s Institute for Mummy Studies in Bolzano, Italy. The meal could also be a sign of the times, Maixner says: Ötzi’s people were settled farmers, but when faced with colder temperatures, they may have had to fall back on hunter-gatherer ways. It’s just one meal, cautions Katie Manning of King’s College London who was not affiliated with the study. But “if you look at the palaeodietary evidence from Neolithic Europe, it is clear that wild resources continued to play an important role alongside domesticates, so hunting would have been a persistent activity, probably by specialized hunters.”
Now that researchers have a complete snapshot of the Iceman’s last meal, a census of Ötzi’s gut microbiome — the assortment of tiny organisms that made their home in the mummy’s stomach and intestines — could be next. Helicobacter pylori, a common stomach bug, has already been detected in the Iceman’s gut, and with it came hints of other inhabitants (SN: 2/6/16, p. 14). But Maixner wants to dig beyond “this tip of the iceberg.”
Robert Edwards and Richard Gardner of Cambridge University … say they have been able to remove rabbit embryos … then reimplant only the blastocysts destined to develop into the chosen sex. The implications are obvious and enormous. If this procedure could be extended easily to man there might, for instance, be imbalances, even fads, in the selection by parents of one sex of child over another. — Science News, August 3, 1968.
Update Edwards helped pioneer in vitro fertilization, resulting in the first IVF baby in 1978 and a Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 2010. He also foresaw technology’s potential for sex selection. With no sex selection, about 105 males are born for every 100 females worldwide. But in places where sex selection has been encouraged, through IVF and other methods, changes have resulted. In 1995, China’s ratio was 115 boys per 100 girls, according to U.N. estimates. By 2015, men outnumbered women in China by more than 42 million. In 2017, China ended its one-child policy.
Curl the fingers of your left hand over your palm and stick out your thumb like a hitchhiker. Now, you have a rough map of Antarctica — with the inside of your thumb playing the part of the Larsen C ice shelf, says glaciologist Ted Scambos of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo.
About a year ago, a massive iceberg roughly the size of Delaware broke off from that ice shelf, and it hasn’t moved much since (SN: 8/5/17, p. 6). The chunk of ice traveled just about 45 kilometers northeast before getting stuck behind an elevated ice promontory called the Bawden ice rise. Researchers monitoring satellite images of the iceberg say it’s been battering Bawden as winds and ocean currents push against the calved ice. That could be a problem, says Anna Hogg, an earth observation researcher at the University of Leeds in England. The Bawden ice rise acts “almost like scaffolding,” providing structure and stability to Larsen C, Hogg says. If it were destabilized, that could potentially lead to the collapse of the rest of the shelf, which could have implications for sea level rise.
That hasn’t happened yet. The iceberg may still be able to escape if it can twist around the tip of Bawden. “Currents and winds carry most of the icebergs in the same direction” — toward South Georgia Island, where many Antarctic icebergs eventually thin out and melt away, Scambos says.
Scientists are eager to study the seabed that was exposed when the iceberg first broke away. That environment could contain microbes and other tiny critters that have been inaccessible until now (SN Online: 10/13/17). An expedition by biologists to the area ended prematurely in February when thick ice prevented the ship from reaching the area (SN Online: 3/3/18). Another effort, aboard a South African icebreaker vessel, is planned for January 2019, Scambos says.
When a 78-year-old woman went to a hospital in Guangzhou, China, in November 2012 complaining of a headache, drowsiness and a stiff neck, doctors initially were puzzled. The patient had meningitis, but no signs of bacteria or viruses that can cause the illness. Then a cerebrospinal fluid test revealed she had a high number of white blood cells called eosinophils, a clue that she was fighting a parasitic infection. That helped the doctors zero in on a culprit: a thin, swirly-patterned worm called Angiostrongylus cantonensis. The woman was suffering from rat lungworm disease. So was her adult son.
But how were the pair infected? Rat lungworm disease, which gets its name from the fact that the worm eggs hatch in the lungs of rats, is commonly associated with ingesting snails or slugs (SN Online: 7/21/16). Infected rats poop out the worm larvae, which the mollusks can then pick up and pass on to humans if eaten. Yet the patients had eaten no slugs or snails. An investigation of the pair’s diet revealed they had eaten Chinese red-headed centipedes bought at the market. “Centipede is a common traditional Chinese medicine,” usually consumed in a dried powder, says Lingli Lu, a neurologist at Zhujiang Hospital in Guangzhou. The two patients, however, had eaten them raw.
Lu and her colleagues confirmed the source of the infection by testing 20 centipedes they bought from the same market. The team discovered A. cantonensis larvae that could infect humans in seven of the centipedes. The infected worms had an average of 56 larvae each. The case is the first evidence that eating raw centipedes contaminated with worm larvae can transmit rat lungworm disease, the researchers report July 30 in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. The discovery adds to a growing list of hosts that can pass this parasite to humans. While the worm needs snails to complete its life cycle, other animals, called paratenic hosts, can eat the snails and then infect humans. Humans have gotten rat lungworm disease by eating freshwater shrimp, frogs, crabs and monitor lizards. Once inside the human body, the worms migrate to the brain, where they eventually die. While symptoms can be mild, infection can cause damage to the central nervous system, including brain inflammation, paralysis and even death. Infected humans cannot pass the disease to other people.
Rat lungworm is still considered rare (there have been about 3,000 recorded cases around the world), and the disease is most prevalent in tropical and subtropical regions, says Heather Stockdale Walden, a parasitologist at the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine in Gainesville. In the United States, the parasites are endemic in the Hawaiian Islands, and cases of rat lungworm have been reported as far north as Oklahoma.
Most cases in the United States occur from eating snails and slugs, which hide in unwashed produce. People should be aware of this parasite, Walden says, but not alarmed. “As long as you’re cooking your food [and] washing your produce, the likelihood of infection with the parasite is pretty low.”
Heading soccer balls may have high stakes for women’s brains, a study of amateur soccer players suggests.
Among amateur players who headed a similar number of balls, women had more signs of microscopic damage in their brains’ white matter than men, scientists report July 31 in Radiology.
Female athletes are known to have worse symptoms after brain injuries than male athletes, but a clear head-to-head comparison of post-heading brains hadn’t been done until now. From 2013 to 2016, study coauthor Michael Lipton of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in Bronx, N.Y., and colleagues recruited 98 soccer players from amateur teams, including from colleges. The researchers then compared male and female players who headed the ball a similar number of times over the past year. For men, that median estimate was 487 headers. Women had an estimated median of 469 headers.
Despite those similar numbers of head knocks, women’s brains had more spots that showed signs of microscopic damage. A type of magnetic resonance imaging scan called diffusion tensor imaging identified brain regions with changes in white matter, bundles of message-sending fibers. In some cases, those altered spots indicated possible damage to nerve cell axons and myelin, a protective coating that speeds neural signals along. In men, only three brain regions showed potential damage associated with heading frequency. In women, eight regions showed signs of damage with frequent heading. These brain changes weren’t enough to cause symptoms in the amateur soccer players. But repeated blows to the brain can contribute to memory loss and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a disorder found in professional football players, soldiers and others whose brains suffer repetitive trauma (SN: 7/13/13, p. 18).
Researchers don’t know why women’s brains appear more at risk. Anatomical differences in heads and necks may play a role, along with genetics and hormones, the team writes.
Baseball is the best sport in the world for numberphiles. There are so many stats collected that the analysis of them even has its own name: sabermetrics. Like in Moneyball, team managers, coaches and players use these statistics in game strategy, but the mountain of available data can also be put to other uses.
Researchers have now mined baseball’s number hoard to show that climate change caused more than 500 home runs since 2010, with higher air temperatures contributing to the sport’s ongoing home run heyday. The results appear April 7 in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Many factors have led to players hitting it out of the park more often in the last 40 years, from steroid use to the height of the stitches on the ball. Blog posts and news stories have also speculated about whether climate change could be increasing the number of home runs, says Christopher Callahan of Dartmouth College (SN: 3/10/22). “But nobody had quantitatively investigated it.”
A climate change researcher and baseball fan, Callahan decided to dig into the sport’s mound of data in his free time to answer the question. After he gave a brief presentation at Dartmouth on the topic, two researchers from different fields joined the project.
That collaboration produced an analysis that is methodologically sound and “does what it says,” says Madeleine Orr, a researcher of the impacts of climate change on sports at Loughborough University London, who was not involved with the study.
The theorized relationship between global warming and home runs stems from fundamental physics — the ideal gas law says as temperature goes up, air density goes down, reducing air resistance. To see if home runs were happening due to warming, Callahan and colleagues took several approaches.
First, the team looked for an effect at the game level. Across more than 100,000 MLB games, the researchers found that a 1-degree Celsius increase in the daily high temperature increased the number of home runs in a game by nearly 2 percent. For example, a game like the one on June 10, 2019, where the Arizona Diamondbacks and Philadelphia Phillies set the record for most home runs in a game, would be expected to have 14 home runs instead of 13 if it were 4 degrees C warmer.
The researchers then ran game-day temperatures through a climate model that controls for greenhouse gas emissions and found that human-caused warming led to an average of 58 more home runs each season from 2010 to 2019. The analysis also showed that the overall trend of more home runs in higher temperatures goes back to the 1960s.
The team followed that analysis with a look at more than 220,000 individual batted balls, made possible by the Statcast system — where high-speed cameras have tracked the trajectory and speed of every ball hit during a game since 2015. The researchers compared balls hit in almost exactly the same way on days with different temperatures, while controlling for other factors like wind speed and humidity. That analysis showed a similar increase in home runs per degree Celsius as the game-level analysis, with only lower air density due to higher temperatures left to explain higher numbers of home runs. While climate change has “not been the dominant effect” causing more home runs, “if we continue to emit greenhouse gases strongly, we could see much more rapid increases in home runs” moving forward, Callahan says.
Some fans feel that the prevalence of home runs has made baseball duller, and it’s at least part of the reason that the MLB unveiled several new rule changes for the 2023 season, Callahan says.
Teams can adapt to rising temperatures by shifting day games to night games and adding domes to stadiums — the researchers found no effect of temperature on home runs for games played under a dome. But according to Orr, climate change may soon cause even more dramatic changes to America’s pastime, even with those adaptations.
Because the sport is susceptible to snow, storms, wildfires, flooding and heat at various points during the season, Orr says, “I don’t think, without substantial change, baseball exists in the current model” within 30 years.
Callahan agrees. “This sport, and all sports, are going to see major changes in ways that we cannot anticipate.”
In pictures from high above, the island of Gardi Sugdub resembles a container shipyard — small, brightly colored dwellings are jammed together cheek to jowl. At ground level, the island, one of more than 350 in the San Blas archipelago off the northern coast of Panama, is hot, flat and crowded. More than 1,000 people occupy the narrow dwellings that cover virtually every bit of the 150-by-400-meter island, which is slowly being swallowed by rising seas driven by climate change.
This year, about 300 families from Gardi Sugdub are expected to begin moving to a new community on the mainland. The resettlement plan was initiated by the residents there more than a decade ago when they could no longer deny that the island couldn’t accommodate the growing population. Rising seas and intense storms are only making the predicament more dire. Many of the older adults will opt to stay put. Some still don’t believe climate change poses a threat, but 70-year-old Pedro Lopez is not among them. Lopez, whose cousin interpreted for him during our Zoom interview, currently shares a small house with 16 family members and the family dog. He doesn’t plan to move. He knows Gardi Sugdub, translated as Crab Island, along with many others in the archipelago, is going underwater, but he believes it won’t happen within his lifetime.
The Indigenous Guna people have occupied these Caribbean islands since around the mid-1800s, when they abandoned the coastal jungle area near what is now the Panama-Colombia border to establish better trade and escape disease-carrying pests. Now, they are among the estimated hundreds of millions of people worldwide who by the end of the century may be forced to flee their land because of rising sea levels (SN: 5/9/20 & 5/23/20, p. 22).
In the Caribbean, sea level rise currently averages around 3 to 4 millimeters per year. As global temperatures continue to rise, it is expected to hit 1 centimeter per year or more by century’s end.
All of the islands of the San Blas archipelago will eventually be underwater and uninhabitable, says Steven Paton, who directs the Physical Monitoring Program at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. “Some may need to be abandoned very soon while others not for many decades,” he adds. Anthropologist Anthony Oliver-Smith of the University of Florida in Gainesville has studied people who are forced from their homes by disasters for more than 50 years. Around the world, he says, climate change has become a major driver of displacement, with people who have limited resources facing the worst of it.
The impacts of climate change — flooding, rising seas and erosion — are threatening the Tuvaluans in the South Pacific, the Mi’Kmaq of Prince Edward Island in Canada and the Shinnecock Indian Nation of New York. Half of some 1,600 remaining tribe members there still occupy a more than 300-hectare territorial homeland on Long Island surrounded by multimillion-dollar Southampton mansions.
The Guna relocation is being closely watched as a possible template for other threatened communities. What sets the Guna apart from many others is that they have a place to go.
Rising sea levels in Guna Yala More than 30,000 Indigenous Guna inhabit the province now called Guna Yala, which includes the archipelago once known as San Blas and a strip of mainland. Most live on the islands, traveling back to the mainland to get water from the mouth of the river there, and in some cases to tend crops. Some of the islands sit several meters above average sea level, but the vast majority are uninhabited spits of land with palm trees, many only a meter or less above sea level.
So far, only the residents of Gardi Sugdub are included in the relocation plan. The Guna people of the islands are sustained by the biodiversity there. The sea, mangroves and nearby mainland forests provide food, medicine and building materials. The men hunt and fish to provide seafood to the best restaurants in Panama City, and agriculture remains part of the economy. Guna communities elect traditional authorities known as sailas (“chiefs” in Guna) and argars (“chief’s spokesmen”), and they hold regular meetings to address community issues.
In recent decades, the Guna have moved toward an economy based on tourism and providing services to outsiders. They earn money supplying food, souvenirs and cultural artifacts to tourists but allow visitors to the islands only with prior approval from the sailas. Outsiders are not permitted to own property or operate businesses.
Carlos Arenas is an international human rights lawyer and an adviser on social and climate justice issues. When he visited Gardi Sugdub in 2014 as a consultant for Displacement Solutions, a nonprofit initiative focused on housing, land and property rights, he was tasked to assess the nascent relocation plans and provide recommendations. He was shocked to see the visible threat posed by the rising sea. “You cannot see much elevation,” Arenas says. “The level of exposure was extremely high, but they don’t see it necessarily that way. They have been living there for more than 170 years.”
Heliodora Murphy grew up on Gardi Sugdub and has watched the ocean rise higher each year. The 52-year-old grandmother doesn’t understand those who dismiss climate change in light of the growing physical evidence all around. Murphy, also speaking through an interpreter, recalls her father bringing rocks and sand from a river on the mainland to shore up pathways and keep their home dry. Arenas says that some families face a daily struggle against the ocean. They build barriers that are immediately destroyed and have to be built again.
Some of the stopgap measures have been counterproductive, like filling in coral reefs to expand the land area. Reefs are a natural buffer against wave action, storm surges, flooding and erosion. Destroying them has only added to the peril.
Today, Murphy says, storm surges carry water into her small, ground-level home. “It’s very different than in the past,” she says. “The waves are so much higher now.” About two years ago, she decided she’d move with her family. “We can’t stay here.”
A history of autonomy Historically, the Guna have had a level of autonomy rare among Indigenous people. When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in what is now Colombia and Panama, the Guna lived primarily near the Gulf of Urabá on the northern coast of Colombia. The two groups clashed violently, prompting the Guna to abandon the coastal border area and move north into the jungle of Panama near the Caribbean. By the mid-1800s, entire villages had relocated again, this time to the San Blas archipelago.
Panama declared its independence from Spain in 1821 and became a part of Gran Colombia. Throughout the 19th century, the Guna lived independently according to their customs. That changed in 1903 when Panama broke from Colombia. The new nation attempted to assimilate the people living on the archipelago.
But having escaped Spanish rule centuries earlier and avoided Colombian authority as well, the Guna resisted Panama’s acculturation efforts. When the Guna couldn’t achieve détente through other means, they launched an armed attack against the Panamanians in February 1925.
The United States, having occupied the Panama Canal Zone since 1903, had geopolitical interests in the region and threw its support behind the Guna. That support forced the Panamanian government into a negotiated peace that allowed the Guna to continue their way of life. In 1938, the Guna islands and adjacent coastline were recognized as a semiautonomous Indigenous territory, Guna Yala. The Guna have maintained control of that territory since.
The Guna find a new home The Gardi Sugdub residents first broached the idea of relocation in 2010. “They basically ran out of room,” Oliver-Smith says.
He describes the Guna as the Indigenous people in Latin America who have been perhaps most successful in defending their cultural heritage, language and territory. They initiated the plans for resettlement and made arrangements among themselves to set aside 17 hectares of property on the mainland for these purposes. The land, within the Guna Yala territory, is near a school and health center being built by the Panamanian government. When Guna leaders approached the government, the Ministry of Housing initially promised to build 50 houses on the parcel. But it remained just that — a promise — until around 2014, when the Guna began to speak publicly about their situation. News of their predicament caught the attention of Indigenous rights organizations and eventually Displacement Solutions, which turned to Arenas and Oliver-Smith to evaluate the situation and offer recommendations about the best way forward.
Following Displacement Solutions’ first report in 2014, Panama’s Ministry of Housing agreed to build 300 houses, along with the hospital and school. But Arenas, who until the COVID-19 pandemic started had visited Guna Yala every year or so, says progress remained slow, causing the Guna to question Panama’s commitment to the relocation. The Guna leveraged support from international groups and members of the Panamanian government to get the project moving. “They were the originators of the idea of resettlement,” Oliver-Smith says. “And they kept it alive.”
Arenas estimates that roughly 200 of the 300 houses in the new community are complete. The cost for the houses, which are being paid for by the Panamanian government, exceeds $10 million, and the Inter-American Development Bank has invested $800,000 in technical assistance. The new homes will have cement floors, bamboo walls, zinc roofs, running water and full electrification.
Before plans to relocate began, many Guna had already moved to cities including Panama City and Colón for school, work or simply to have more room. Arenas expects that many more people already living in mainland Panama will likely join their families in the new community. People on other Guna Yala islands will likely have to move eventually too.
Murphy has already picked out her two-bedroom home for her small nuclear family of seven. Two daughters moved to Panama City years ago, and she hopes to see them more. But at around 40 square meters, the homes may not accommodate the typical multigenerational, double-digit Guna families. Lopez plans to stay on the island, letting the younger generations live in the family’s new home on the mainland. To ensure that the ethnic and cultural identities they fought to preserve are not lost in the move, the Guna plan to develop programs to teach traditions and culture to the resettled generations. But even on Gardi Sugdub, younger generations seem less inclined to practice the traditional customs — like making and wearing wini (vibrantly colored beads worn around the arms and legs) and molas (intricately designed fabric dresses that have become a symbol of Guna life and resistance to colonialism). Murphy began learning the craft when she was 6 years old. She spends two months constructing each ensemble, which she sells to tourists for $80.
Oliver-Smith is optimistic about the relocation plan but worries that the Panamanian government has repeated some mistakes that have doomed projects elsewhere by treating resettlement solely as a housing issue. “You don’t just pick people up and move them from point A to point B. It is a reconfiguring of a life of a people,” Oliver-Smith says. “It has political, social, economic, environmental, spiritual and cultural dimensions.”
As is often the case when Indigenous and rural communities relocate, Arenas says, the government failed to make the Guna equal participants in the design concept. “The Panamanian government is trying to build a Panama City neighborhood in the middle of a tropical forest,” he says. “They have not tried to save a single tree of this beautiful landscape…. They removed everything. They tried to flatten the land because it’s cheaper…. It’s also extremely hot there, and the building materials are hot.” This increases the risk of failure, he says, because the houses don’t match the environment.
But Murphy hopes everything will be better. The new village promises dry land and more space. And perhaps returning to the mainland the Guna occupied nearly 150 years ago will lead to a stronger connection to Guna historical culture and traditions.
Oliver-Smith says the Guna are facing the challenge of resettlement with an intact culture and language that he hopes will be a basis for maintaining cultural continuity. His time spent with the Guna has convinced him that, as disruptive and devastating as resettlement can be, the Guna relocating as a cohesive group are perhaps best equipped to emerge intact even if not unscathed.
“Carlos [Arenas] and I asked an old, retired saila if he thought resettlement would change the Guna,” he says. “He said, ‘No. Individuals may change out of choice, but our culture is eternal. It will never die.’ ”
