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1. Ancient life and moving fluids

   https://doi.org/10.1111/brv.12649  

   Gibson, Brandt M.; Furbish, David J.; Rahman, Imran A.; Schmeeckle, Mark W.; Laflamme, Marc; Darroch, Simon A. F. (September 2020, Biological Reviews)

   ABSTRACT Over 3.7 billion years of Earth history, life has evolved complex adaptations to help navigate and interact with the fluid environment. Consequently, fluid dynamics has become a powerful tool for studying ancient fossils, providing insights into the palaeobiology and palaeoecology of extinct organisms from across the tree of life. In recent years, this approach has been extended to the Ediacara biota, an enigmatic assemblage of Neoproterozoic soft‐bodied organisms that represent the first major radiation of macroscopic eukaryotes. Reconstructing the ways in which Ediacaran organisms interacted with the fluids provides new insights into how these organisms fed, moved, and interacted within communities. Here, we provide an in‐depth review of fluid physics aimed at palaeobiologists, in which we dispel misconceptions related to the Reynolds number and associated flow conditions, and specify the governing equations of fluid dynamics. We then review recent advances in Ediacaran palaeobiology resulting from the application of computational fluid dynamics (CFD). We provide a worked example and account of best practice in CFD analyses of fossils, including the first large eddy simulation (LES) experiment performed on extinct organisms. Lastly, we identify key questions, barriers, and emerging techniques in fluid dynamics, which will not only allow us to understand the earliest animal ecosystems better, but will also help to develop new palaeobiological tools for studying ancient life. 

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2. Sustainability of Tapping Ancient Groundwater

   https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-111523-101931  

   Ferguson, Grant; McIntosh, Jennifer C (May 2025, Annual Review of Environment and Resources)

   Fossil groundwaters make up a substantial fraction of the Earth's fresh water and are being targeted for water supply wells at increasing rates. These groundwaters were recharged more than 12,000 years ago, often in climate conditions that were much different from those of today. Because of the long renewal times involved, fossil groundwaters have often been classified as nonrenewable. However, groundwater ages provide little insight into how water levels and fluxes will change as the result of pumping. The relationship between groundwater ages and these outcome-based metrics of renewability is not straightforward. Therefore, whether a groundwater is fossil or not may have little to do with its renewability. The hydraulic response of an aquifer system to pumping is not strongly related to groundwater age. The use of both modern and fossil groundwater can be unsustainable. 

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3. Automatic Reconstruction of Ancient Chinese Pronunciations

   https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.325  

   Huang, Zhige; Jin, Haoan; Wu, Mengyue; Zhu, Kenny Q (January 2024, Association for Computational Linguistics)
4. Optimal bounds for ancient caloric functions

   https://doi.org/10.1215/00127094-2021-0015  

   Colding, Tobias Holck; Minicozzi II, William P. (December 2021, Duke Mathematical Journal)
5. DEEPDIVE: Exploration of Ancient Submerged Civilizations

   Palazzolo, T. Lemke (January 2020, Paper presented at the 25th Annual Conference on Cultural Heritage and New Technology, Vienna, Austria)