For Dr Abdulrahman Bamerni, science is an act of resistance and defiance against the Islamic extremists who once tried to kill him.
Back in 2007, during his undergraduate degree, Bamerni moved from his hometown of Duhok in the mountains of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region to the University of Mosul in the Nineveh Plains. Mosul was still under the Iraqi government’s control at the time, but ISIS militants – who would later conquer the city – had already established sleeper cells. The terrorist group, which is known for targeting students and academics, heard that Bamerni had made friends with female students at the university. “They didn’t like this at all and so I started to get death threats,” he told The Brilliant.
Bamerni shrugged off the intimidations, determined to enjoy his time studying in Mosul before returning home to the mountains. The following year he came back to Mosul, this time to take master’s degree courses. The terrorists heard he was in town again and placed a bomb close to his house, seriously injuring Bamerni.
“I had severe wounds in my abdomen. I needed a colostomy and I had to stay in hospital for around four months,” says Bamerni. He also had to pause his education for over a year to focus on his recovery. “They wanted to stop me from learning and becoming a scientist, but I’m still here. I’m doing research and I think that’s the best revenge,” he says.
On the hunt
Bamerni is now a geologist and lecturer at the University of Duhok. After recovering from the blast and completing his degree, he spent years looking for clues in the rocky countryside of Kurdistan about what happened during the time when dinosaurs went extinct about 66 million years ago.
More specifically, Bamerni was on the hunt for an uninterrupted cross-section of rock layers that stretch in age from the time before the death of the dinosaurs; through the extinction period; and into the time when life rebounded. He found many candidate sites for such a cross-section, but they later failed to stand up to scientific scrutiny.
In 2020, however, he finally found what looked like a promising cross-section – a rock formation almost 30 metres in thickness. With help from his students, he meticulously extracted samples at regular intervals along the cross-section’s length. Those cuttings were washed, dried and then examined. Using a special microscope and a practice known as “biostratigraphy,” Bamerni observed and described the fossilised microorganisms that were embedded within each of the rock samples. This allowed him to gauge the relative age of each layer of rock in the cross-section. “I was tracking the microfossils until I could put my finger on the meteorite’s impact,” he says. “You can actually see its effect in the rock. There are space minerals deposited in it.”
He also X-rayed the samples to determine their mineral content and double check that the rocks are from correct time periods. “The calcium in the samples decreases suddenly at the exact interval where the mass extinction occurred,” he says. That stands to reason because microscopic sea-dwelling animals contain large amounts of calcium carbonate in their bodies and shells; when they die, they deposit the calcium back into the environment. During the mass extinction event, however, this process is slowed down as many of these species vanished. “These organisms died and decreased in number so much that there is no productivity of calcium in the interval of the mass extinction,” says Bamerni. When life starts to rebound again, the calcium levels in the rocks pick up again.
“There are a couple of reasons why this finding excites me,” says Bamerni. “The first is academic because it allows us to chart the extinction of dinosaurs and better understand it and how life restarted afterwards.”
Then and now
The mass extinction event didn’t only bring about the downfall of dinosaurs, it wiped out approximately three quarters of all Earth’s plant and animal species at the time – from the giant to the microscopic. The precise cause of the mass extinction remains open to debate, but ever since a landmark paper was published in 1980, most researchers have agreed that a meteorite played a significant role in proceedings. The study showed that iridium – an element often found in celestial bodies – was deposited across the globe at the around the same time as the extinction event. Then in 1991, experts identified the crash site: a 150-kilometre-wide crater in Mexico.
The force of the impact sent earthquakes and tsunamis reverberating around the globe. This threw up vast quantities of dust into the atmosphere, which didn’t completely block out the sun, but did restrict sunlight enough to seriously reduce plant growth. This had a knock-on effect, causing extinctions up the food chain all the way to apex predators.
That’s only part of the story, however. While there’s an array of evidence to suggest the asteroid deserves the bulk of blame, it might not be the only culprit. The biodiversity of dinosaurs was already in decline with some species dying out before the asteroid had even struck Earth. Widespread volcanic eruptions, occurring over the course of two million years, had been driving extreme climate change.
The more we understand the dinosaur’s demise, through discoveries like Bamerni’s cross-section, the better we might be able to understand and fight similar threats to human existence. That’s why the second reason for Bamerni’s excitement over his finding is more than a little ironic. His work could end up helping the oil companies that dominate the economy of northern Iraq to become more efficient in their drilling practices.
I totally agree that working with oil companies comes with issues related to climate change, which is a huge problem,” he says. “But the reality is that our economy in Iraq is dominated by oil extraction. There isn’t much of a push to reduce that dependence on oil, but we can at least make it less environmentally damaging.”
Iraq has vast underground hydrocarbon reservoirs and the oil companies’ current methods of extraction are inefficient. “They’re more or less drilling blind without knowing where most of the deposits are,” says Bamerni. “There are large accumulations associated with the same geological age that I’m studying. My project could help them know where to drill, which means less drilling and less injecting of materials into the Earth in the process.” In short, he hopes it will make an environmentally damaging industry slightly less so.
Whether or not that happens, Bamerni says the simple fact that he’s able to do research at all – given the challenges he faced during the early stages of his academic career – is the real reward. “I love that I’m doing ground-breaking science,” he says. “Those who tried to kill me didn’t stop me.”
Article by Benjamin Plackett
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