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Climate change is changing how we keep time – Science News Magazine
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Melting ice sheets are slowing Earth’s rotation speed, complicating global timekeeping
The rapidly accelerating melting of Earth’s polar ice sheets — including ice atop Greenland (shown here) — is slowing the planet’s spin, which affects global timekeeping.
KEREM YUCEL/AFP via Getty Images
By
Climate change may be making it harder to know exactly what time it is.
The rapid melting of the ice sheets atop Greenland and Antarctica, as measured by satellite-based gravitational measurements, is shifting more mass toward Earth’s waistline. And that extra bulge is slowing the planet’s rotation, geophysicist Duncan Agnew reports online March 27 in Nature. That climate change–driven mass shift is throwing a new wrench into international timekeeping standards.
The internationally agreed-upon coordinated universal time, or UTC, is set by atomic clocks, but that time is regularly adjusted to match Earth’s actual spin. Earth’s rotation isn’t always smooth sailing — the speed of the planet’s spin changes depending on a variety of factors, including gravitational drag from the sun and the moon, changes to the rotation speed of Earth’s core, friction between ocean waters and the seafloor, and shifts in the planet’s distribution of mass around its surface. Even earthquakes can affect the spin: The magnitude 9.1 earthquake in Indonesia in 2004, for example, altered the land surface in such a way that it caused Earth to rotate a tiny bit faster, says Agnew, of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif.
But the impact of that quake is much smaller than that of the ice sheets’ melting — a point that Agnew says he finds particularly startling. Humankind “has done something that affects, measurably, the rotation rate of the entire Earth.”
The need for occasional tweaks to the synchronization of atomic clocks and Earth’s rotation gave birth in 1972 to the “leap second,” an extra tick that international timekeepers agreed to add to UTC as needed (SN: 1/19/24). Timekeepers have added 27 leap seconds to the clock since the idea was introduced.
Still, metrologists — measurement scientists — aren’t overly fond of this system. For one thing, it doesn’t happen on a regular schedule, but only whenever it seems to be needed. And financial markets and satellite navigation systems, which rely on precise timing, each have their own methodologies for incorporating a leap second. Those inconsistencies can, counterproductively, make it more challenging to have a universal time. So in 2022, an international consortium of metrologists voted to do away with leap seconds in favor of adding larger chunks of time, perhaps a minute, less frequently. The group resolved to settle those details at its next meeting, in 2026.
That may not come a second too soon. The slightly slower rotation has actually delayed the need for timekeeping adjustments by a few years, Agnew says — in fact, as a result of this change, the last time a leap second was required to be inserted was in 2016. At the moment, in fact, Earth’s rotation and atomic clocks are nearly in sync.
But that’s just a brief respite, Agnew’s calculations show. The biggest changes to Earth’s rotation right now are coming from its heart: slowing rotation of Earth’s core is actually speeding up the spin of the outer layers (SN: 1/23/23). That slowdown will ultimately mean that timekeepers, under the current system, must begin removing leap seconds from the UTC, rather than inserting them, to keep things in sync.
That shift in strategy might have begun as soon as in 2026. But the study suggests that, thanks to climate change, global timekeepers now have an extra two or three years before they need to adjust, notes geophysicist Jerry Mitrovica of Harvard University. But no realistic projections of future melting can forestall the inevitable beyond 2030, Mitrovica adds: One way or another, the world is going to have to start losing time — or international timekeeping guidelines will need to change.
Questions or comments on this article? E-mail us at feedback@sciencenews.org | Reprints FAQ
D. C. Agnew. A global timekeeping problem postponed by global warming. Nature. Published online March 27, 2024. doi: 10.1038/s41586-024-07170-0.
Carolyn Gramling is the earth & climate writer. She has bachelor’s degrees in geology and European history and a Ph.D. in marine geochemistry from MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
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Canada lynx historic range in US likely wider than previously thought – EurekAlert
Washington State University
image:
Using a model validated by historic records, researchers found that in 1900, Canada lynx had more suitable habitat in the U.S. than the few northern corners of the country where they are found currently. The model also helped reveal more potential future habitat for lynx in the future: namely in parts of Utah, central Idaho and the Yellowstone National Park region.
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Using a model validated by historic records, researchers found that in 1900, Canada lynx had more suitable habitat in the U.S. than the few northern corners of the country where they are found currently. The model also helped reveal more potential future habitat for lynx in the future: namely in parts of Utah, central Idaho and the Yellowstone National Park region.
Credit: Washington State University
PULLMAN, Wash. – A broader past could mean a brighter future for Canada lynx in the U.S., according to recent research.
The study, published in the journal Biological Conservation, indicates that lynx might do well in the future in parts of Utah, central Idaho and the Yellowstone National Park region, even considering climate change and the lack of lynx in those areas now.
Using a model validated by historic records, researchers first found that in 1900, Canada lynx had more suitable habitat in the U.S. than the few northern corners of the country where they are found currently. The study showed the elusive big cat likely roamed over a larger area in the Pacific Northwest, Rocky Mountains, Great Lakes region and parts of New England.
“History matters even for wildlife,” said lead author Dan Thornton, a Washington State University wildlife ecologist. “As part of the criteria for species recovery, we have to understand their historic distribution. Otherwise, how can we help recover a species, if we don't know what we’re recovering to?”
Having a more accurate picture of a species’ past can also help avoid an effect known as “shifting baseline syndrome,” Thornton added, which is a gradual change in what people accept as normal for the environment, or specifically in this case, a species’ habitat.
True to their name, Canada lynx are still abundant in Canada, but in the U.S. their numbers have dwindled. Currently, they are only found in limited, northern portions of Washington, Idaho, Montana, Minnesota and Maine. So far, recovery plans for lynx have been based on assumptions that they were never found much beyond these areas in the U.S., although a small population was successfully re-introduced to the Colorado Rockies in 1999.
This study, which has conservation implications for not only lynx but other threatened species, proposes one new way of estimating a species’ historic range, using modelling of suitable habitat validated by historical records.
Thornton and co-author Dennis Murray of Trent University in Canada created the model using factors to determine lynx’s suitable habitat like temperature, precipitation and land use in the last 40 years. They ran that model back in time to 1900 using historic climate and land use data to discover the possible past range, which they validated using records of lynx from museums as well as hunters and trappers who have prized the big cat for its fur.
The researchers then used the model to project suitable habitat into the future of 2050 and 2070. Even when accounting for climate change effects, they found areas that could be good for lynx that fall outside the species’ current range but likely within historically occupied areas: namely in central Idaho, northern Utah and the area in, and around, Yellowstone National Park. Whether or not these areas could support viable lynx populations now or in the future would require additional research, the authors noted.
Conserving lynx as a key predator is important for maintaining the integrity of forest ecosystems, the authors contend, and lynx are an iconic species in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest.
The researchers also hope that this approach to estimating historic range could help inform conservation efforts for other species.
“Thinking about historic range is really important. It’s also quite difficult because we often have limited data on where species were in the past,” Thornton said. “But there are potential ways to go about addressing that, and we wanted to provide one possible approach in this paper.”
This research received support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
Biological Conservation
10.1016/j.biocon.2024.110541
Modeling range dynamics through time to inform conservation planning: Canada lynx in the contiguous United States
28-Mar-2024
Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.
Media Contact
Sara Zaske
Washington State University
sara.zaske@wsu.edu
Office: 509-335-4846
Expert Contact
Daniel Thornton
WSU School of the Environment
daniel.thornton@wsu.edu
Office: 509-335-3713
Washington State University
Copyright © 2024 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Copyright © 2024 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Research Day – Department of Biodiversity, Earth and Environmental Science – Drexel
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Thursday, March 7, 2024
1:00 PM-5:00 PM
Help celebrate student-led discovery at the BEES Research Day on March 7, 2024, in Drexel’s Papadakis Integrated Sciences Building (PISB). This event is free and open to all Drexel students, alumni, faculty and staff. Come out and support graduate and undergraduate students who will present their research posters and give talks about a broad range of topics they are actively exploring as members of the Department of Biodiversity, Earth and Environmental Science (BEES).
AGENDA
GUEST LECTURER
The BEES Research Day lecture will be presented by Jason Munshi-South, PhD, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences, Fordham University. Munshi-South leads lab projects primarily focused on understanding the evolutionary implications of urbanization for wildlife –such as mouse and rat populations– in the New York City metropolitan area. For these studies, his lab employs complementary approaches from field ecology, population genomics, landscape genomics and computational biology.
Drexel will welcome Munshi-South to the BEES department as its new Betz Chair in September 2024.
Donna Fahres, BEES Department Administrator
bees@drexel.edu
Drexel’s Papadakis Integrated Sciences Building (PISB)
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Philadelphia, PA 19104
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9 Quirky Eco-friendly Homes Built Entirely from Waste Materials – One Green Planet
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Think eco-friendly homes are drab and boring? Prepare to have your mind blown with these ten innovative houses, each constructed entirely from recycled materials. This isn’t just about being kind to the environment; these homes ooze creativity and functionality while shattering misconceptions about sustainable living.
Travel to Cap-Egmont Prince Edward Island in Canada, and you’ll be mesmerized by the Glass Bottle Houses. A testament to the power of repurposing, these structures were built by Édouard T. Arsenault using over 25,000 recycled glass bottles, inspired by a glass castle postcard.
If you’re wondering about the capabilities of waste material in construction, the Eco-friendly Earthship Houses by architect Michael Reynolds will surely amaze you. Built using discarded tires, aluminum cans, and beer bottles, these homes showcase sustainable living at its finest. Plus, they help remove thousands of tires from landfills.
Source: Kirsten Dirksen/YouTube
If sleek modern design is more your style, take a look at the Container Guest House, crafted by Jim Poteet from reclaimed shipping containers. This chic, eco-friendly home boasts an attractive rooftop garden and hardwood floors, proving that sustainability can be stylish too.
Cowboy Boot House, a whimsical 35-foot tall structure built by Dan Phillips, demonstrates the creative possibilities of recycling. Made from donated old junk materials, this house was inspired by the big Hat ‘n’ Boots in Seattle and features a cozy living area in a tin-roofed bungalow attached to its backside. The property is so popular it even rents for $1,200 a month!
Source: ABC13 Houston/YouTube
For aviation enthusiasts, the Aviator’s Villa by New York-based Urban Office Architecture is a real treat. Built for a retired pilot using salvaged airplane components, this home is designed to give the feeling of living in the open air, a nod to the dweller’s flying days.
In England, the local fishermen near the small Lindisfarne Island have shown innovation by turning a disused boat upside down to construct a shed. It’s a brilliant example of creative recycling that blends functionality with aesthetics.
Witness the awe-inspiring Cano’s Castle in Antonito Colorado. Donald “Cano” Espinosa, a Native American Vietnam vet, used soda and beer cans, hubcaps, wooden windows, grills, and various metal shards to build this incredible structure as a tribute to Jesus and “Vitamin Mary Jane,” whom he credits for his survival in the Vietnam War.
Source: Fox21 News/YouTube
Imagine living in a home made of PET plastic waste bottles! The members of the Alfredo Santa Cruz family in Puerto Iguazu, Argentina, made it possible with Casa De Botellas. PET, proven to be more durable than cement, forms the structure of this dream home.
Finally, consider the Recycled Pallet House, an easy-to-assemble, affordable shelter designed by I-Beam Design. Created as transitional shelters for returning refugees in Kosovo, these structures are made from spare wooden pallets and can be assembled for less than $100.
These ten homes are living examples of the exciting future of recycling. Each is a testament to the power of creativity and the immense possibilities that lie in sustainable design. So, why not make your next DIY project a step towards sustainability? Try repurposing some materials around your house, or Support sustainable building practices in your community. It’s time to rethink waste, because clearly, the future of home construction is recycled, and each one of us can play a part in this transformative journey towards sustainability. With a bit of imagination and commitment to the environment, we can all help in building a greener, more sustainable world, one quirky recycled home at a time. Let’s embrace the change, and remember – the future is recycled!
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How to Address Publication Overload in Environmental Science – Eos
Eos
Science News by AGU
A staggering number of peer-reviewed papers are published each year in environmental science, hydrology, geology, ecology, climatology, companion social sciences, and related fields. The vast majority of these papers represent high-quality contributions to our understanding of the world. Yet they build on bodies of work that are already astonishingly large, making it ever more difficult for established scientists to keep up and for young scientists to get up to speed on foundations and frontiers within their fields.
Considering that the pace of science and scientific publication is unlikely to slow, we need a better approach to synthesizing the wealth of available knowledge.
This publication overload hampers our ability to advance scientific frontiers, address societally important challenges, and support early-career scientists. It can also sometimes lead to researchers duplicating work, rediscovering previously published ideas, or, worse, perpetuating mistakes—inefficient uses of always-limited resources. Furthermore, geographically localized studies, which may be incremental in scope but provide critical context and comparisons for broader or more global studies in applied environmental science, are often missed.
Considering that the pace of science and scientific publication is unlikely to slow, we need a better approach to synthesizing the wealth of available knowledge. We propose that—and describe how—one such approach could involve a human-driven, machine-aided online synthesis tool that evolves over time and seamlessly connects large amounts of related research and information while preserving the richness of detail found in individual peer-reviewed papers.
Today more than 3 million peer-reviewed papers are published each year across all fields—some 500,000 in the United States alone [Jinha, 2010; Johnson et al., 2018; White, 2019]. The number of papers related to critical environmental concerns—drought, fire, and climate change, among others—is especially high. For example, using standard search engines to find academic peer-reviewed literature on “fire or wildfire” in the western United States turns up more than 20,000 papers, of which more than a thousand have been published per year since 2016. These publication rates preclude even within-field experts from staying up to date on all the work being done, which can hamper hypothesis evolution and limit the adoption of new observation and modeling technologies.
The burden of publication overload is often greatest for early-career scientists, who are simultaneously trying to establish their expertise and their careers [Atkins et al., 2020; Thakore et al., 2014]. Becoming an expert requires reading, understanding, and integrating others’ work. But knowing what to read, and in what order, can dramatically improve one’s grasp of key concepts. Without good mentors to help curate information, many early-career scientists are left to wander the halls of our digital libraries—often with the Google search bar their only guide—in the hope that they can identify and understand the key foundational and frontier knowledge they need. A lack of effective mentorship is a notable barrier to academic advancement and success, especially for individuals from underrepresented backgrounds [Deanna et al., 2022].
Publication overload is also a barrier to scientists receiving recognition for their work. This is a community-wide problem, but again, it may be particularly acute for early-career researchers. Even when scientists publish their work, it often goes unrecognized amid the “tide” of other new literature produced. The percentages of papers that are never cited are difficult to measure and vary by discipline, but estimates are often in the double digits.
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Early in their careers, scientists often engage in more incremental research—for example, testing existing hypotheses in new locations or under new conditions, or applying and assessing emerging methodologies in innovative ways. This sort of incremental research is central to the scientific enterprise, but it is often published in discipline-specific journals rather than in higher-profile, multidisciplinary outlets. As a result, this research is often overlooked, especially by readers in other fields and specializations, and thus greatly undervalued.
Scientists have tried to remedy the problem of publication overload with various synthesis products and approaches.
Publication overload is not new. Scientists have tried to remedy the problem with various synthesis products and approaches. For example, review articles such as the Tamm Reviews, which cover research in forest ecology and management, typically distill findings from numerous studies related to a given theme. In addition, there are journals such as Wiley’s WIREs series that focus almost exclusively on review papers. There are also standards for high-quality systematic reviews such as those provided by Collaboration for Environmental Evidence. We have also built synthesis institutes. Good examples include the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, the U.S. Geological Survey’s John Wesley Powell Center for Analysis and Synthesis, and the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center—all of which are increasingly focusing on producing synthesis products like review papers and databases.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has programs like Research Coordination Networks that support groups of investigators as they coordinate and synthesize related research, training, and educational activities. Finally, governmental and nongovernmental organizations produce other synthesis materials and reports, such as California’s Climate Change Assessments and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s reports. Similar in function but decidedly different in approach, there are data provisioning websites like Google Earth that provide data and model outputs relevant to core questions in environmental science.
These existing tools and initiatives clearly contribute to information synthesis, although the array of syntheses and their various products can themselves be overwhelming. Critically, these synthesis products are often static or are limited in scope, meaning users can easily mistake outdated syntheses for up-to-date understanding or misapply generalized findings to specific locations or circumstances where they aren’t relevant.
In addition, subsequent findings may diverge from working hypotheses in preexisting synthesis papers or add specificity to flesh out general principles (e.g., quantifying how warming temperatures relate to earlier snowmelt in a particular location). However, because synthesis papers are rarely revisited, this sort of evolution in the current understanding is easily overlooked or lost.
Synthesis papers and reports also typically focus on specific topics, but links to reviews of related topics are not consistently included, particularly if topics cross disciplines. For example, a review paper discussing the effectiveness of wildfire fuel treatment methods may not mention or link to reviews of relevant science, such as how climate affects fire risk.
If existing human-generated synthesis products cannot save us from publication overload, can artificial intelligence (AI) help? Indeed, it can [Matthews, 2021]. Machine learning–enabled products that automate searches and distill information are already available: Iris.ai, Semantic Scholar, Connected Papers, Open Knowledge Maps, and Local Citation Network, to name a few.
Nonetheless, extracting meaningful searches of publications around specific topics in environmental science remains challenging [Romanelli et al., 2021]. In part, this is because finding literature does not necessarily lead to understanding, particularly if searches yield hundreds of papers. Focusing only on highly cited papers may also be problematic, given that the reasons they are highly cited may not align with the goal of understanding [Romanelli et al., 2021]. For example, high citation counts may simply track topics of current general interest rather than advances in expert knowledge. In some cases, high citation counts may result from scientific disagreements playing out in the literature or where papers serve as oft-cited examples of discredited assumptions.
Similarly, automated mapping of domain knowledge by AI algorithms that cluster papers around semantic terms can highlight topical areas and show how trajectories of publications on particular topics evolve through time (e.g., charting numbers of papers related to dust on snow). But this clustering does not necessarily synthesize ideas about a topic [Borner and Polley, 2014; Franconeri et al., 2021; Lafia et al., 2021]. And highly generalized syntheses (such as what might emerge from ChatGPT) do not readily contribute to the more nuanced, detailed understanding that researchers need to help advance environmental science.
A dynamic online metasynthesis tool that makes finding, understanding, and updating science equitable and efficient would be a transformative solution.
A dynamic online metasynthesis tool that makes finding, understanding, and updating science equitable and efficient would be a transformative solution to address these shortcomings. Such a tool could combine the strengths of human-driven science syntheses with technical advances in visualization and AI. It could also evolve as our knowledge deepens and synthesize research using customizable searches while still preserving and providing the detail and context found in individual peer-reviewed papers when prompted.
Classic review papers organize disparate ideas into conceptual models. They highlight convergence and divergence around core hypotheses. They evaluate the techniques used in observational data collection, data analysis, and modeling. And they place specific papers into conceptual frameworks that guide understanding.
The ideal tool would retain these strengths while more thoroughly connecting review papers and reports across disciplines and topics. By using recent advances in AI, including natural language AI (i.e., ChatGPT) and visualization techniques such as “on the fly” rendering, we can imagine tailored user interfaces involving AI-aided searches with graphics and text that make traversing knowledge landscapes easy and efficient. These interfaces could, for example, guide more novice users to current conceptual models related to general topics (e.g., snow accumulation and melt) as starting points, whereas experts could specify a location- and scale-specific research hypothesis and be directed to related pages. However, active leadership by scientists would be the critical feature. The primary design of the knowledge synthesis (e.g., the conceptual models, hypotheses, and how current techniques can be applied to advance these) would be generated and updated by domain scientists.
Building this tool will require collaboration and partnerships among scientists, visualization experts, database specialists, ontologists (language engineers), and machine learning experts. And, we argue, if this collaborative process is led by and involves scientists at every step, the resulting product will better fit the needs of our community. Although improved private-sector products may emerge, such as a “better” Google Scholar or more detailed ChatGPT, these will not necessarily maintain the strengths of human-driven science syntheses.
What might our proposed tool look like in practice? Overall, we envision linked, web-based pages that present conceptual diagrams and current working hypotheses (and counterhypotheses) related to particular research questions, as well as examples of evidence that confirms or disputes these hypotheses for particular locations and time and space scales. We note that finding exceptions to general rules—or quantifying the magnitudes of effects—in particular settings is often how environmental science advances. This information would all be linked to peer-reviewed papers.
Figures 1 and 2 illustrate potential front-end pages focusing on the question of how changing snowpacks relate to changing vegetation in semiarid, mountainous regions of the U.S. West. A dashboard would allow users to move quickly among pages covering different aspects of this broad research question, and a navigation pane would show connections between the selected question and other related questions, such as how snowpacks, which store water for vegetation, are changing in the region.
Because scientific knowledge is most valuable when it is current, the system would require a robust process by which it could keep up with changes in contemporary understanding.
Because scientific knowledge is most valuable when it is current, the system would require a robust process by which it could keep up with changes in contemporary understanding. This process, more so than its design, would be the system’s key innovation. Developing the details of the updating process—including how often, by whom, and by what criteria it would be updated—would require careful thought and rigorous debate by the scientific community. And the system’s success ultimately would depend on scientists’ willingness to contribute. The more users, and the larger the updating community, the better the end product.
To maintain its credibility while also creating a flexible, dynamic, and accessible system, we envision leveraging existing peer review setups, which provide critical quality control on the science that is published. The design of the conceptual diagrams and hypothesis would require direct science community involvement—working group engagement would be critical here. We anticipate using iterative working group processes such as those used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and leveraging existing community organizations such as AGU to accomplish this task.
Researchers who contribute to curation, conceptual model evolution, hypothesis development, or software development, or who create, contribute to, and maintain the tool, should receive formal recognition.
In developing the proposed tool, creating incentives to motivate participation will be important. For example, researchers who contribute to curation, conceptual model evolution, hypothesis development, or software development, or who create, contribute to, and maintain the tool, should receive formal recognition [Carter et al., 2021]. This push for recognition parallels similar trends in universities and funding agencies such as NSF that are expanding the scope of work they credit to include software and database development and other contributions.
The peer-reviewed paper, a 17th-century invention, has served science well. However, as scientific understanding of all manner of topics and questions evolves, we need a new system to access knowledge that provides expert-driven synthesis across many studies while preserving the hard-won details of individual studies.
As a first step, we suggest that communities of environmental scientists convene working groups to focus on designing a tool similar to what we have proposed here and, importantly, on the rules for how scientists would engage to support the tool’s continual evolution. Concurrently, these groups must partner with artificial intelligence and other specialists to leverage advances in visualization and information updating and searching capabilities. Agencies and organizations such as NSF and AGU should support these efforts by convening and funding these working groups, prototype development, and other community engagement efforts.
With the rapidly rising number of peer-reviewed papers and the proliferation of synthesis tools like ChatGPT, now is the time for these communities to recognize the limitations (and strengths) of current and emerging scientific dissemination and synthesis products, and to play a leadership role in developing new tools. We need a radical solution to publication overload that will help researchers—established and early-career alike—to keep pushing scientific frontiers.
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William Brandt, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego; and Christina Tague (tague@ucsb.edu), University of California, Santa Barbara
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