Andrew Scott

Royal Holloway, University of London | RHUL · Department of Earth Sciences

Fire is a worldwide phenomenon that appears in the geological record soon after the appearance of terrestrial plants. Fire influences global ecosystem patterns and processes, including vegetation distribution and structure, the carbon cycle, and climate. Although humans and fire have always coexisted, our capacity to manage fire remains imperfect a...

Although evidence for land vegetation comes from the Silurian, and maybe even earlier, the first record of fossil charcoal (fusain) is from the late Devonian. For this period there are only one or two isolated records. Not until the Early Carboniferous is there a record of extensive charcoal deposits, mainly preserved in near-shore clastic sediment...

Charcoal, predominantly the product of wildfires, is abundant in many sedimentary rocks deposited in a wide range of environments, from terrestrial to marine. It also occurs in some volcanic rocks. This paper outlines aspects of charcoal formation (both natural and experimental) and briefly considers the taphonomic processes leading to a final asse...

Variations of the Earth's atmospheric oxygen concentration (pO2) are thought to be closely tied to the evolution of life, with strong feedbacks between uni- and multicellular life and oxygen. On the geologic timescale, pO2 is regulated by the burial of organic carbon and sulphur, as well as by weathering. Reconstructions of atmospheric O2 for the p...

By comparing Silurian through end Permian [≈250 million years (Myr)] charcoal abundance with contemporaneous macroecological changes in vegetation and climate we aim to demonstrate that long-term variations in fire occurrence and fire system diversification are related to fluctuations in Late Paleozoic atmospheric oxygen concentration. Charcoal, a...

Until the late 20th century, the idea of identifying wildfires in deep time was not generally accepted. One of the basic problems was the fact that charcoal-like wood fragments, so often found in sedimentary rocks and in coals, were termed fusain and, in addition, many researchers could not envision wildfires in peat-forming systems. The advent of...

Background Premodern medical texts are an invaluable source for scholars from humanities and sciences. However, they are usually not accessible as few scientists with an interest in premodern materia medica are also qualified philologists. Therefore, a balance has to be struck to translate these texts while preserving information on how reliable we...

Ancient and medieval pharmacological and medical texts contain a substantial amount of plant and mineral names. In some cases, the identification is straightforward. But for the majority of the data, we are unable to identify these ingredients with high certainty. In this paper, we discuss a selection of plant and mineral names both from a humaniti...

Ethnopharmacological relevance In recent decades, the study of historical texts has attracted research interest, particularly in ethnopharmacology. All studies of the materia medica cited in ancient and medieval texts share a concern, however, as to the reliability of modern identifications of these substances. Previous studies of European or Medit...

Background Premodern medical texts are an invaluable source for scholars from humanities and sciences. However, they are usually not accessible as few scientists with an interest in premodern materia medica are also qualified philologists. Therefore, a balance has to be struck to translate these texts while preserving information on how reliable we...

A series of publications purport to provide evidence that the Earth was subjected to an extraterrestrial event or events at ~12.9 ka creating an environmental cataclysm and the onset of the Younger Dryas stadial. The varied and sometime conflicting speculations in those publications have become known collectively as the “Younger Dryas Impact Hypoth...

William G. Chaloner, widely known as Bill, was a world leader in the study of plant fossils. He was a pioneer in the development of palaeopalynology and helped integrate studies of macroscopic plant fossils with investigations of fossil pollen and spores. His early work expanded our understanding of Carboniferous coal-forming plants and vegetation...

New data on some fossil charcoal deposits from the British Isles is integrated into previous studies to provide an indication of our current understanding of the role of fire on land in the Pennsylvanian and also provide strategies for obtaining new information in the future. The nature and occurrence of fossil charcoal (often called fusain) in sed...

An organismal concept for the Late Devonian/Mississippian hydrasperman seed fern Tetrastichia bupatides is developed from specimens collected at Oxroad Bay, East Lothian Scotland and Ballyheigue, County Kerry, Ireland. Specimens include interconnected fragments of stems, frond rachides, pinnae, pinnules, roots, pollen organs with enclosed pre-polle...

Fire: A Very Short Introduction considers fire’s four-hundred-million-year history, its chemical composition, its role in human development, and its different meanings, from heat and comfort to death and destruction. Fires in buildings regularly make the headlines, and news of wildfires now reaches our computer and smartphone screens. Urban and pas...

Spore walls have inherently low reflectance (although this will rise with increasing rank) and are assigned to the liptinite maceral sporinite using a combination of their reflectance properties and their morphology that reflects their botanical origin. However, when fern and lycopod spores are charred their reflectance increases. Charred spores, t...

Premise of research. Mississippian (Lower Carboniferous) anatomically preserved ovules are pivotal to our present understanding of the Paleozoic primary seed plant radiation, but few are known from the late Viséan stratigraphic interval approximately 330 million years ago. Here, we document an exceptionally well-preserved mesoscopic charcoalified o...

William G. (‘Bill’) Chaloner FRS (1928–2016) was one of the world’s leading palaeobotanists and palynologists. He developed a love of natural science at school which led to a penchant for palaeobotany at university. Bill graduated in 1950 from the University of Reading, and remained there for his PhD, supervised by Tom Harris, on the spores of Carb...

A conglomerate bed from the Tournaisian Ballagan Formation of Scotland preserves a rich array of vertebrate and other nonmarine fossils providing an insight into the wider ecosystem and paleoenvironment that existed during this pivotal stage of Earth history. It challenges hypotheses of a long-lasting post-extinction trough following the end-Devoni...

Sedimentation in Oligocene Lake Enspel was rapidly terminated by a basaltic lava flow. This introduced a preservational barrier while imparting a ‘natural flash pyrolysis’ during which the organic matter in underlying stratigraphic units was subjected to rapid thermal maturation resulting in hydrocarbon generation. Samples from these strata exhibit...

A conglomerate bed from the Tournaisian Ballagan Formation of Scotland preserves a rich array of vertebrate and other non-marine fossils providing an insight into the wider ecosystem and palaeoenvironment that existed during this pivotal stage of Earth history. It challenges hypotheses of a long-lasting post-extinction trough following the end-Devo...

A conglomerate bed from the Tournaisian Ballagan Formation of Scotland preserves a rich array of vertebrate and other non-marine fossils providing an insight into the wider ecosystem and palaeoenvironment that existed during this pivotal stage of Earth history. It challenges hypotheses of a long-lasting post-extinction trough following the end-Devo...

Raging wildfires have devastated vast areas of California and Australia in recent years, and predictions are that we will see more of the same in coming years, as a result of climate change. But this is nothing new. Since the dawn of life on land, large-scale fires have played their part in shaping life on Earth. Andrew Scott tells the whole stor...

The historical and modern importance of crown fires in ponderosa pine and dry mixed-conifer forests of the south-west USA has been much debated. The microscopic reflectance of charcoal in polished blocks under oil shows promise as a semiquantitative proxy for fire severity using charcoal from post-fire landscapes. We measured the reflectance of 33...

An examination of any modern terrestrial ecosystem will reveal a vast array of arthropod (particularly insect) — plant interactions. It has been calculated that there are more than one million extant insect species, more than 400,000 plant species, and that the total number of their interactions exceeds their combined total. Studies of the co-evolu...

Did Nanodiamonds Rain from the Sky as Woolly Mammoths Fell in their Tracks Across North America 12,900 Years Ago? - Volume 23 Issue S1 - T. L. Daulton, S. Amari, A. C. Scott, M. Hardiman, N. Pinter, R. S. Anderson

Schumann et al. (2016) presented a field assessment of late Pleistocene to Holocene fluvial sediments preserved in the valleys of Santa Rosa Island, California. This is a rigorous study, based on stratigraphic descriptions of 54 sections and numerous radiocarbon ages. The paper makes important contributions that we would like to highlight, but othe...

Branched glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraethers (brGDGTs) are increasingly used to reconstruct mean annual air temperature (MAAT) during the early Paleogene. However, the application of this proxy in coal deposits is limited and brGDGTs have only been detected in immature coals (i.e. lignites). Using samples recovered from Schöningen, Germany (∼48 •...

During the end of the last glacial period in the Northern Hemisphere near 12.9k cal a BP, deglacial warming of the Bølling–Ållerod interstadial ceased abruptly and the climate returned to glacial conditions for an interval of about 1300 years known as the Younger Dryas stadial. The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis proposes that the onset of the Youn...

Fluvial sequences from the late Pleistocene to the Holocene are exposed in Arlington Canyon, Santa Rosa Island, Northern Channel Islands, California, USA, including one outcrop that features centrally in the controversial hypothesis of an extra-terrestrial impact at the onset of the Younger Dryas. The fluvial sequence in Arlington Canyon contains a...

Recent studies have suggested that the first arrival of humans in the Americas during the end of the last Ice Age is associated with marked anthropogenic influences on landscape; in particular, with the use of fire which, would have given even small populations the ability to have broad impacts on the landscape. Understanding the impact of these ea...

Living with fire is a challenge for human communities because they are influenced by socio-economic, political, ecological and climatic processes at various spatial and temporal scales. Over the course of 2 days, the authors discussed how communities could live with fire challenges at local, national and transnational scales. Exploiting our diverse...

Fire has been an important part of the Earth system for over 350 Myr. Humans evolved in this fiery world and are the only animals to have used and controlled fire. The interaction of mankind with fire is a complex one, with both positive and negative aspects. Humans have long used fire for heating, cooking, landscape management and agriculture, as...

Humans use combustion for heating and cooking, managing lands, and, more recently, for fuelling the industrial economy. As a shift to fossil-fuel-based energy occurs, we expect that anthropogenic biomass burning in open landscapes will decline as it becomes less fundamental to energy acquisition and livelihoods. Using global data on both fossil fue...

Kennett et al. (1) apply a Bayesian chronological model in an effort to support the hypothesis of Firestone et al. (2) that “a major cosmic episode of multiple airbursts/impacts occurred at 12,800 ± 300 [B.P.].” Bayesian modeling is a powerful tool because it is intended to incorporate and account for all available evidence. However, Kennett et al....

Fossil charcoal provides direct evidence for fire events that, in turn, have implications for the evolution of both terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere. Most of the ancient charcoal record is known from terrestrial or nearshore environments and indicates the earliest occurrences of fire in the Late Silurian. However, despite the rise in avail...

Analyses of bulk petrographic data indicate that during the Late Paleozoic wildfires were more prevalent than at present. We propose that the development of fire systems through this interval was controlled predominantly by the elevated atmospheric oxygen concentration (p(O2)) that mass balance models predict prevailed. At higher levels of p(O2), i...

Wildfire activity in early Paleogene greenhouse conditions can be used as an analogue to gauge the effect of future warming trends on wildfire in the current climate system. Inertinite (fossil charcoal in coal) from 11 autochthonous early Paleogene lignite seams from the Schöningen mine (Germany) was quantified using macerations, in situ pillars an...

Karstification produces a unique and spatially complex architecture of accommodation space for the accumulation of later sediments. The sedimentary record within caves can act as a repository for stratigraphic and palaeoenvironmental information that has been locally removed by subsequent surface erosion. Caves and karst also allow for the preserva...

The Lower and Middle Coal Measures of Langsettian (Westphalian A) and Duckmantian (Westphalian B) age (together equals Bashkirian in part) in Britain comprise an alternation of clastic sediments and coal deposited on coastal and alluvial plains over a period of 2–3.5 million years, depending on which time scale is accepted. In both the Pennine and...

In our 2011 synthesis (Bowman et al., Journal of Biogeography, 2011, 38, 2223–2236), we argued for a holistic approach to human issues in fire science that we term 'pyrogeography'. Coughlan & Petty (Journal of Biogeography, 2013, 40, 1010–1012) critiqued our paper on the grounds that our 'pyric phase' model was built on outdated views of cultural d...

The mid-late Campanian Dinosaur Park Formation outcropping within Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta, Canada, contains multiple dinosaur deposits occurring as bone beds, articulated skeletons, isolated bones and microvertebrate deposits. Due to the abundance of dinosaur deposits, the exposure of Cretaceous sediments, and the presence of charcoal, th...

This chapter reviews the 450-mllion-year history of fire, and shows how it links to the environmental and evolutionary innovations that have led to the diversity of life on our modern planet. In order for a fire to exist it requires three key elements, illustrated by the fire triangle. The fire triangle shows that fire requires an ignition source,...

Fire has been an important element of the Earth system since the Silurian Period, when vascular plants first evolved and spread on land. Our understanding of the fossil record of fire comes from a diversity of fire residues and fire signals including charcoal (both macroscopic and microscopic), soot and black carbon, polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs...

The majority of Quaternary charcoal records covering multi-millennial timescales come from lake or peat bog sequences, mostly with relatively straight forward depositional histories, allowing the use of charcoal statistics such as CHAR. Those records are well suited for global syntheses of charcoal data. Much less attention has been focused on unde...

The biopolymer sporopollenin present in the spore/pollen walls of all land plants is regarded as one of the most recalcitrant biomacromolecules (biopolymers), providing protection against a range of abiotic stresses. This long‐term stability is demonstrated by the near‐ubiquitous presence of pollen and spores in the fossil record with spores provid...

The recent article by Israde-Alcantara et al. (1) outlined a wide array of purported impact proxies from a lacustrine paleo-record in Lake Cuitzeo, Mexico. These findings were used to support the suggestion of a Younger Dryas (YD) impact event/s. Although most of the purported impact proxies have been described in previous publications (2, 3), this...

Israde-Alcantara et al. (1) reported evidence for the Younger Dryas (YD) Impact Hypothesis (YDIH), which proposes that an extraterrestrial impact triggered the YD (2). Although most YDIH research has focused on the impact event itself, YDIH proponents, as in this article, have argued that the ecological consequences included “widespread biomass bur...

The presence of fossil charcoal [inertinite (Scott and Glasspool, 2007)] in coal provides evidence for palaeowildfire event/s. Charcoal distribution has been shown to vary both spatially and temporally in modern wildfires, therefore this needs to be taken into consideration when studying inertinite from palaeowildfires in order to better understand...

Charcoal occurs in the natural environment as either a result of wildfire or volcanic processes. Charcoal is one of a range of pyrolysis products that may be included in the term black carbon. This paper outlines aspects of charcoal formation (both natural and experimental) and briefly considers the taphonomic processes leading to a final assemblag...

Charcoal has been recovered from a range of late Pleistocene sites both in Santa Cruz Island and Santa Rosa Island, belonging to the California Channel Islands. Sediments have been dated using radiocarbon measurements based on wood charcoal, fungal sclerotia, glassy carbon and fecal pellets and are given as calendar years bp. Charcoal assemblages f...

Fire and combustion have been an integral part of the Earth system for over 400 million years (Scott and Glasspool, 2006; Bowman et al, 2009) and are now an integral part of our industrial world (Bowman et al., 2011). Studying fire and fire events has significant practical application yet fire science is a discipline still with many unanswered ques...

Inertinite (charcoal) distributions in two randomly sampled in situ coal pillars (seams 78 and 88) from the Late Permian Kuznetsk Basin, Siberia, were analysed using petrographic techniques to determine palaeowildfire histories (fire occurrence, type and return interval). In situ coal pillars are judged to be essential for this type of research as...

We present arguments and evidence against the hypothesis that a large impact or airburst caused a significant abrupt climate change, extinction event, and termination of the Clovis culture at 12.9 ka. It should be noted that there is not one single Younger Dryas (YD) impact hypothesis but several that conflict with one another regarding many signif...

Humans and their ancestors are unique in being a fire-making species, but ‘natural’ (i.e. independent of humans) fires have an ancient, geological history on Earth. Natural fires have influenced biological evolution and global biogeochemical cycles, making fire integral to the functioning of some biomes. Globally, debate rages about the impact on e...

Abstract: The Younger Dryas (YD) impact hypothesis is a recent theory that suggests that a cometary or meteoritic body or bodies hit and/or exploded over North America 12,900 years ago, causing the YD climate episode, extinction of Pleistocene megafauna, demise of the Clovis archaeological culture, and a range of other effects. Since gaining widesp...

Charcoal is a key component of the Black Carbon (BC) continuum, where BC is characterized as a recalcitrant, fire-derived, polyaromatic material. Charcoal is an important source of palaeoenvironmental data, and of great interest as a potential carbon sink, due to its high apparent environmental stability. However, at least some forms of charcoal ar...

The conventional geochemical view holds that the chitin and structural protein are not preserved in ancient fossils because they are readily degradable through microbial chitinolysis and proteolysis. Here we show a molecular signature of a relict chitin-protein complex preserved in a Pennsylvanian (310 Ma) scorpion cuticle and a Silurian (417 Ma) e...

Wildfires play a crucial role in recent and ancient ecosystem modeling but their detailed history on the Earth is still not well recorded or understood. The co-occurrence of charcoal and pyrolytic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) is used for the recognition of wildfires in geological record that may have implications for the analysis of the...

We suggest that the spread of angiosperms in the Cretaceous was facilitated by novel fire regimes. Angiosperms were capable of high productivity and therefore accumulated flammable biomass ('fuel') more rapidly than their predecessors. They were capable of rapid reproduction, allowing populations to spread despite frequent disturbance. We evaluate...

The term ‘vitrified’ is used to describe the glassy appearance of some charcoals recovered in the archaeological record. It has been generally considered that this phenomenon is a result of wood being subjected to high temperatures similar to the role of temperature in the formation of glass and pottery. Charcoals displaying characteristics of vitr...

The causes of the late Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions in North America, disappearance of Clovis paleoindian lithic technology, and abrupt Younger-Dryas (YD) climate reversal of the last deglacial warming in the Northern Hemisphere remain an enigma. A controversial hypothesis proposes that one or more cometary airbursts/impacts barraged North Am...

The Younger Dryas (YD) Impact Hypothesis proposes that the Late Pleistocene megafauna extinctions, the YD stadial (a period at the end of the last glaciation marked by rapid climate change at its onset), and abrupt continent-wide disappearance of Clovis Paleoindian lithic technology from the sedimentary record were caused by a major cometary or met...

A claim attributes the onset of the Younger Dryas climate interval and a range of other effects ˜12,900 years ago to a comet airburst and/or impact event. One key aspect of this claim centers on the origin of carbonaceous spherules that purportedly formed during intense, impact-ignited wildfires. Samples from Pleistocene-Holocene sedimentary sequen...

Charcoal is a valuable source of archaeological and palaeoenvironmental proxy data. However growing evidence suggests that production conditions can strongly influence post-depositional alteration of charcoal. Consequently, both reconstruction of production temperature and understanding of the potential for diagenetic alteration are of great intere...

During a low sea level stand and wet climate phase at the end of the Mississippian, Lower Palaeozoic limestones at the northern edge of the Illinois Basin were karstified. The caves and fissures that formed were infilled subsequently with clastic sediments of Pennsylvanian age (late Bashkirian–early Moscovian (= Atokan, Duckmantian/Bolsovian, Westp...

Charcoal occurs in the natural environment as either a result of wildfire or volcanic processes. In addition, people may make charcoal, either for domestic or industrial use. Charcoal may be used as a fuel for domestic heating and cooking through a range of industrial uses, such as iron smelting. More recently, the charcoalification process has bee...

One of the most violent and explosive eruptions in historic times was that of the Taupo volcano in New Zealand 1800 years ago. This culminated in emplacement of the Taupo ignimbrite, laid down by a single vent-generated pyroclastic density current that entombed and preserved abundant plant material. The ignimbrite consists of two layers, generated...