Good Science Writing Compared to Bad — an Excellent National Science Foundation Press Release Compared to the Opaque Abstract that it Is Based on — regarding an Ellesmere Island Study of the Permian-Triassic Boundary Extinction

09 February 2012

Scientists often forget who they really should be trying to communicate with

Science is frequently more opaquely communicated than it should be.

I chose the National Science Foundation’s excellent lay synopsis of an Ellesmere Island study of the Permian-Triassic boundary extinction to illustrate the difference between effective and ineffective science writing.

Premise — clarity and public understanding should be the goals of scientific publication

Abstracts that synopsize scientific articles should put (a) the questions that they are addressing and (b) the study’s findings clearly into context, whenever possible.

Most don’t. And most abstracts compound the mistake by using excessively narrow field-specific jargon.

Why communicated clarity is important

When science is opaquely communicated, the lack of clarity does nothing to spread knowledge and little to encourage its funding.

One would think that scientists, and especially the editors of the journals they publish in, would pay more attention to the process of furthering the public’s knowledge base and financial support.

Citation — to the good writing example, the NSF’s outstanding press release

Cheryl Dybas and Greg Hand, Global Extinction: Gradual Doom as Bad as Abrupt — In "The Great Dying" 250 million years ago, the end came slowly, National Science Foundation (03 February 2012)

Citation — to the opaquely written abstract

Thomas Algeo, Charles M. Henderson, Brooks Ellwood, Harry Rowe, Erika Elswick, Steven Bates, Timothy Lyons, James C. Hower, Christina Smith, Barry Maynard, Lindsay E. Hays, Roger E. Summons, James Fulton, and Katherine H. Freeman, Evidence for a diachronous Late Permian marine crisis from the Canadian Arctic region, Geological Society of America Bulletin, doi:10.1130/B30505.1 (pre-issue publication, 06 February 2012)

Explanation of reason for lengthy quotations

Since this is an essay about the specifics of effective communication, I have incorporated longer quotations from the subject paragraphs than I normally would.

It is how the subject sentences are written and what they say (and don’t say) that is the issue.

The abstract — says an admirable lot, but leaves readers to guess the overall questions and context

From the Bulletin abstract — keep in mind this blurb was published in a single dense paragraph:

A high-resolution chemostratigraphic study of a 24-m-thick section at West Blind Fiord on Ellesmere Island (Canadian Arctic) documents stepwise environmental deterioration in the marine Sverdrup Basin during the late Changhsingian (late Late Permian) as a result of volcanic disturbances to surrounding landmasses.

A horizon within the upper Lindström Formation (datum A) is characterized by increased Fe-oxyhydroxide fluxes and weathering intensity as well as modest shifts toward more reducing water-mass conditions and higher marine productivity, recording an initial disturbance that washed soils into the marine environment.

The contact between chert of the Lindström Formation and silty shale of the overlying Blind Fiord Formation, which is 1.6 m higher and ∼50 k.y. younger than datum A, records a large increase in detrital sediment flux, more strongly enhanced marine productivity, and a regional extinction of siliceous sponges, herein termed the “Arctic extinction event.”

The horizon equivalent to the latest Permian mass extinction of Tethyan shallow-marine sections is 5.6 m higher and ∼100 k.y. younger than the Arctic extinction event, demonstrating the diachronous nature of the marine biotic and environmental crisis at a global scale; it is associated with intensified anoxia and possible changes in phytoplankton community composition in the study section.

Marine environmental deterioration in the Sverdrup Basin, probably triggered by terrestrial ecosystem deterioration and elevated detrital sediment fluxes, was under way by the early part of the late Changhsingian, well before the onset of main-stage Siberian Traps flood basalt volcanism.

The event sequence at West Blind Fiord may record the deleterious effects of early-stage explosive silicic eruptions that affected the Boreal region, possibly through deposition of toxic gas and ash within a restricted latitudinal band, while having little impact on marine ecosystems in the peri-equatorial Tethyan region.

© 2012 Thomas Algeo, Charles M. Henderson, Brooks Ellwood, Harry Rowe, Erika Elswick, Steven Bates, Timothy Lyons, James C. Hower, Christina Smith, Barry Maynard, Lindsay E. Hays, Roger E. Summons, James Fulton, and Katherine H. Freeman, Evidence for a diachronous Late Permian marine crisis from the Canadian Arctic region, Geological Society of America Bulletin, doi:10.1130/B30505.1 (pre-issue publication, 06 February 2012) (paragraph split)

Note

“Diachronous” refers to a geologic formation in which apparently similar material is differently aged (Wikipedia).

Or (alternatively explained) a geologic formation that passes through different time planes (Free Dictionary).

Wikipedia explains how this works in three dimensions:

Typically this occurs as a result of a marine transgression or regression, or the progressive development of a delta.

As the shoreline advances or retreats, a succession of continuous deposits representing different environments (for example beach, shallow water, deeper water) may be left behind.

Although each type of deposit (facies) may be continuous over a wide area, its age varies according to the position of the shoreline through time.

Why this abstract is opaque

People with some training in geology and chemistry will recognize the jargon’s individual meanings.

But it is not obvious what questions the authors were trying to answer.

Nor is it clear how their findings relate to these questions or even to each other.

By being unnecessarily opaque, the abstract abandons any attempt to stimulate readers’ interest by orienting them to the study’s contextual picture.

Like a lot of people, I am willing to wade through jargon, when I understand why I’m doing it. In this case, I came across the NSF’s review before I read the abstract. In reverse order, I would not have bothered.

Which raises the question, why write an abstract that stimulates disinterest among people who ordinarily would be interested in the subject?

Geologically and biologically, the Permian-Triassic extinction is fascinating. So it takes some effort to produce a communicatively impenetrable overview that makes the event sound boring.

The National Science Foundation press release demonstrates a better way

The NSF’s press release immediately put the study that it is reporting into scientific context.

The research team had been examining evidence surrounding the Permian-Triassic boundary extinction of 252 million years ago:

About 252 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, Earth almost became a lifeless planet.

Around 90 percent of all living species disappeared then, in what scientists have called "The Great Dying."

Algeo and colleagues have spent much of the past decade investigating the chemical evidence buried in rocks formed during this major extinction.

The world revealed by their research is a devastated landscape, barren of vegetation and scarred by erosion from showers of acid rain, huge "dead zones" in the oceans, and runaway greenhouse warming leading to sizzling temperatures.

The evidence that Algeo and his colleagues are looking at points to massive volcanism in Siberia as a factor.

Context makes a difference, even for people already somewhat educated in the topic at hand

Having read what the NSF had to say, readers who are up-to-date with science regarding the Earth’s history will probably recognize the end-Permian context and the potential role Siberian Traps volcanism played in the resulting extinction.

So, now we have the context. And, in having the surrounding circumstances, we can go back and re-read the abstract, recognizing how much of what it says fits together.

But, still, what were the explicit questions the study was trying to answer?

The questions the study was trying to answer were — (i) Did the extinction occur simultaneously in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, and (ii) what is the evidence for a “yes” or “no” answer?

Science’s initial thought had been that the Permian extinction occurred simultaneously in both hemispheres.

Marine deposits in Tethys Ocean of that era (an ancestor of today’s Indian Ocean) and sediments in South China point toward an abrupt extinction. Therefore, scientists had assumed that the Permian extinction had been simultaneous in both hemispheres.

But this now appears to be wrong, according to the study being reviewed. The northern extinction preceded the southern one.

Extinctions’ timing

The NSF release went on to explain what the research team had found, concluding that — (remember, we are comparing the clarity of the NSF article with the researchers’ meaning-laggard abstract):

They discovered a total die-off of siliceous sponges about 100,000 years earlier than the marine mass extinction event recorded at Tethyan sites.

What appears to have happened, according to Algeo and his colleagues, is that the effects of early Siberian volcanic activity, such as toxic gases and ash, were confined to the northern latitudes.

Only after the eruptions were in full swing did the effects reach the tropical latitudes of the Tethys Ocean.

The virtue of providing context — the Big Picture matters to conceptual understanding — an illustrative aside about the Siberian Traps

Science should educate at every turn. Conceptual understanding is Science’s core.

Whatever we can do to orient people to pertinent Big Pictures, we should. That is true, even when writing highly synopsized scientific abstracts.

The Siberian Traps volcanism, and its effect on hemispheric water and air circulations, are the keys to understanding the cause and killing duration of Permian-Triassic boundary extinction.

You probably did not infer this from reading the study’s abstract.

In contrast, the NSF press release capably filled that void by putting end-Permian volcanism into meaningful context.

Specifically, the Siberian Traps were formed by one of the largest volcanic eruptions in the last half-billion years. The eruptions continued for an estimated one million years and chronologically cross the Permian-Triassic boundary. Some of the volcanic deposits in western Siberia are 5 kilometers thick — which implies that a whole lot of greenhouse gases escaped into the atmosphere.

Note

Wikipedia’s article on the Traps has an attached German map showing the areal extent of the flows.

Incidentally, "traps” is derived from a Swedish word for “stairs.” It refers to geomorphological features in the region that look like steps.

A potentially important Big Picture tidbit — burning coal produced a probably large volume of the greenhouse gas, methane

According to the NSF press report, Siberian Traps lava set massive coal deposits in the region on fire.

The inferred methane connection makes a difference in understanding the proposed mechanism underlying the extinction. The research team suspects that greenhouse gases were not simply confined to those contained in the volcanic emissions:

"The eruption released lots of methane when it burned through the coal," Algeo said. "Methane is 30 times more effective as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

"We're not sure how long the greenhouse effect lasted, but it seems to have been tens or hundreds of thousands of years."

Obviously, with a greenhouse gases emission of that length, “bad” things are probably going to happen in both hemispheres

This is so, even when it takes a while for the effects of happenings in one hemisphere to percolate over to the other.

Which is what the paper’s abstract should have said in an orienting sentence of two.

The moral? — Communicating science is a skill that many or most scientists lack

Scientists and their editors need to pay more attention to communicating effectively.

Especially so in our anti-scientific American culture

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Good Science Writing Compared to Bad — an Excellent National Science Foundation Press Release Compared to the Opaque Abstract that it Is Based on — regarding an Ellesmere Island Study of the Permian-Triassic Boundary Extinction