FROM THE FIELD
Geopoetry
Mysterious Demise of an Australian Thunder Bird
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Genyornis newtoni, one of the great “thunder birds” of Australia, went extinct about 50 thousand years ago, for reasons that are still not clear. Image: Ann Musser @ Australian Museum.
Here, mankind and death coincide,
But everyone’s still mystified …
Geologists find
This thunder bird’s kind
Were lost as Australia dried.
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Further reading:
Hydrological transformation coincided with megafaunal extinction in central Australia, Cohen et al. (2015) Geology
Drying lakes linked to extinctions, Nature
This is one in a series of poems written by Katherine Allen, a researcher in geochemistry and paleoclimate at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the Department of Marine and Coastal Sciences at Rutgers University.
We Must Do Better at Managing the Wilderness that Remains
The “Right” Whale to Save
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